“Don’t worry,” Lucas replied with a smirk, “I’m not going to defile you. I just need to get this goddamn suit off.” He reached for a silk kimono hanging on a hook. Then he poured some Kentucky Tavern into two dirty glasses, and handed one to the lieutenant. It had a bit of dry lipstick on the rim. Probably Caldwell’s, Bovard figured. The druggist had found a tube of red in the nightstand drawer the other night, had it smeared all over himself by the time they tied him to the chair. “Cheers,” Lucas said, as he sank back on the bed.
Bovard sat down on the chair and took a drink. He was beginning to regret his decision to come here tonight. He looked about the room, the wrinkled sheet stained and crusty, the smashed crackers scattered on the rug, the leather whip curled up like a viper in the corner. The smell of a slow, relentless decay hung in the stale air, and he found himself breathing through his mouth as lightly as possible. Silence filled the room and he nervously took another sip. Bovard wondered, for the first time, how Lucas had ended up here in this tomb. He recalled something an uncle had once told him: “Vincent, whenever you find yourself in a situation with nothing to say, just remember that most people love to talk about themselves. A condemned man could probably forestall his execution by fifteen precious minutes just by asking the hangman where he hailed from.” And the truth was, he realized, he actually was curious about how Lucas had become overseer to an endless parade of debauched thespians, shameless comedians, and mediocre songbirds hoping for a big break. “Why don’t you tell me something about yourself?” he finally said.
The theater manager arched an eyebrow at the lieutenant, then looked into his glass, twirled the amber liquid around. “Sounds like we’re getting serious.”
“No, I just wonder how you came to be working here.”
“You mean at the Majestic?” Lucas said.
“Yes,” Bovard said.
Lucas rose up and poured himself another drink. “Well, I grew up in Meade,” he began. His family had been well off, the bulk of the money coming from a brewery and a canning factory that his grandfather had built from scratch. He’d always felt that he was a little different from other boys, but he didn’t realize why until he went skinny-dipping one summer afternoon when he was thirteen with a couple of older cousins. Their nakedness aroused him so much that he cramped up and nearly drowned in three feet of water. Lucky for him, they’d thought his erection was caused by a story one of them told about seeing a neighbor’s housekeeper through the fence one night in the backyard, sitting astraddle a drummer who’d been canvassing their street that day selling magazine subscriptions, pumping up and down on him like a piston while the moon shined on her round, white ass.
“That’s quite a detailed description for something you heard so long ago,” Bovard said.
“Well,” Lucas replied, “it was a memorable day.” Anyway, not knowing what else to do, he’d tried to fit in, even dated a couple of girls from the better families in high school, but it was hopeless. All he could think about whenever he was with them was their brothers. Sometimes the only thing that kept him from killing himself was knowing that someday he’d be leaving, taking his secret with him. “It was the best thing that ever happened to me,” Lucas said, “going off to William and Mary.” On campus, he quickly became acquainted with a shadowy group of his own kind. They were so secretive and paranoid that they didn’t even acknowledge each other’s presence in public, but by the end of his first semester, he’d been to bed with all of them, even a fat one with a clubfoot and an addiction to sweets who lost his mind over the winter break and ended up entering a Trappist monastery in Kentucky. And then, one evening in the library, he happened across a reproduction of Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa and decided he wanted to be an artist. He dropped out of school the next fall, spent the next several years wandering around Europe, supposedly searching for inspiration. “Of course,” he told Bovard, “that didn’t make my old man happy, but he went ahead and paid for everything anyway. I think by that time he had things figured out, and was just relieved he didn’t have to look at me anymore.”
He stopped for a moment and put out his cigarette in an ashtray, then settled back on the bed again. “I was getting ready to board a train for Berlin with an Italian boy I’d fallen in love with, a street cleaner, of all things,” he said wistfully, “when I got a telegram that he was dying.” But by the time he arrived back in Ohio, his father was already in the ground, and Lucas soon discovered that the old patriarch, as sensible and prudent a man as ever lived, had lost almost everything investing in a rubber plantation in Bolivia that, as it turned out, existed only on a sheet of worthless paper. That was over eight years ago.
“He didn’t check it out first?” Bovard said.
“Well, he had lost most of his marbles by that time,” Lucas explained. “Old-timer’s or thick blood or whatever.”
“That must have been quite a blow.”