Red White and Black and Blue

Chapter Twenty

The flight to Burlington took over four hours in our tricycle with a surfboard across it, and my breakfast cinnamon bun was restless in the bumpy air. I asked Walt to wait at the airport; I had tracked Randy Spong down at home with a cell number Bud Giannopolous had come up with, and Spong had agreed to see me if I promised to leave his apartment by four forty-five. I had told him I was investigating the circumstances surrounding Greg Stiver's suicide, including Kenyon Louderbush's possible involvement. This honesty seemed like the approach that would work best with him, and also I wasn't sure I could come up with any more appalling bald-faced lies that day-though in a pinch, for a higher cause, I of course could have.

Spong lived not far from the UVM campus in an apartment on the second floor of the carriage house behind a pretty old Victorian mansion that seemed to have gone either gay or Mexican: a yellow exterior with lavender trim. Either way, it was a beauty.

I climbed the outside wooden steps to the apartment, and I saw right away why Spong wanted me out of there by a quarter to five. The elfin young man was bruised and swollen, and five o'clock was probably when

his abusive boyfriend came home from work. Spong was stringily muscular, but all his strength was in his arms. His eyes showed no durability at all. He was barefoot in shorts and a T-shirt that said I HEART TRANSYLVANIA.

He had an angular face with a Roman nose and big brown eyes that would have been sexy if they hadn't been black and blue.

I said, "Thanks for talking to me about Greg. It looks as if you and he had something in common."

"You mean we were both economists?"

"Not just that."

He smiled weakly. "You're so perceptive."

He shoved some books and papers aside on the couch and sat down, and I sat in one of the old easy chairs in the room, though not the one that directly faced the TV set, which gave off a distinct aura of territoriality. The bookshelves on one wall were stuffed to overflowing, and the art posters on the walls were Franz Kline, Escher, and Lucy and Charlie and the football.

I said, "But you're not going to end up like Greg, I hope."

He shrugged. "Not really. If I really hated my life as much as you must think I do, I wouldn't end it. I would change it.

And eventually I think I will. Just not yet."

"So you get some kind of satisfaction out of being abused by your boyfriend?"

"I wouldn't use the word satisfaction. It's more complicated than that. And I like complicated emotions. But, no, I'm not completely detached from reality. I know this is basically unhealthy. For me and for Serge."

"Serge. What is he, some kind of Russian bear? You could really get hurt, you know."

Another little smile. "Serge isn't Russian. He's Swiss. He's older than I am, and he's not much bigger than I am. I could strangle him if I needed to. But strangling Serge is not what I need. What I need is what you see."

"How do you explain it at work? The bruising and so on."

"I don't. People can think what they want to think. I'm very good in the classroom, so my position is secure.

Occasionally a well-meaning colleague tiptoes up to the elephant in the room and asks me if they can help or if they can direct me to someone. I just say no thank you."

"I take it that in your personal history this all goes way back."

"Of course."

"You don't want to be free of that?"

"No, not yet."

I checked my watch. We had another hour.

I said, "Suppose Serge came back while I was here? How would he react?"

"Well, we're not going to test that supposition. But it wouldn't be pretty."

"Is he jealous?"

"You could put it that way. The other person in any of those situations is safe, however. You wouldn't have to be carrying a revolver in that bag you brought in in order to protect yourself. I would be the one who bore the brunt after you left."

"And that's what you want."

"I do need to take a day off sometimes. I've learned how to pace myself and stay out of the ERs. We don't want that."

"Did Kenyon Louderbush beat you?"

"Of course."

"He was your abusive lover?"

"For a year. Then Greg came along."

"So Louderbush trolled for boyfriends in SUNY econ classes? That's where you met him?"

"Kenyon never came to class, no. He was never that subtle. He cruised the men's room in the Performing Arts Center every week or so. I suppose that's where he met Greg, too."

"Did you resent Greg's replacing you in Louderbush's…is affections the word I want?"

"For a while. But it was time for me to move on anyway.

And I knew Greg and wished him well."

"Were you in Albany when Greg died?"

"No, I'd moved up here in January. I heard about it from friends. I cried. Which I don't do very often. I learned a long time ago how not to."

"Some people who knew Greg think Louderbush somehow drove him to suicide."

A little sigh. "It doesn't work that way. Greg was a grown-up."

"But pretty unhappy, according to two neighbors of his. He was more ambivalent about the abusive relationship he was in than you are about yours."

"You think I'm not ambivalent?"

"I was getting the impression you find it fulfilling."

"Yes and no. That's called ambivalence, I believe."

"Okay."

"Anyway, Greg was not the type to commit suicide."

"There's a type?"

"I mean only that he had quite a muscular ego. He believed in his ideas and he believed in himself. The need to be abused was an important part of Greg's makeup-I assume it had to do with his home life growing up, though I really know nothing about that-but being kicked and hit was not central to his spiritual existence. There was plenty else about him that was sturdy in a conventional way. I really thought he would go on to be successful as a conservative writer and teacher-probably show up on Fox and maybe write speeches for people like Kenyon. That he would just throw all that away seemed so out of character. Greg was somebody who saw a future with him in it. But, as I say, I wasn't all that close to Greg, so maybe there were other demons I never knew about."

"What do you think of Louderbush's candidacy for governor?"

"I wish him Godspeed. Maybe he'll win and break the Senate Democratic leadership's nose. They've had it coming for years."

"I'm working for the Shy McCloskey campaign. We want to expose Louderbush as a closeted gay man who beats up his gay lovers and isn't fit to hold public office."

An eyebrow went up, though only just perceptibly. "I thought that might be what you were up to."

"Would you be willing to sign a statement describing your relationship with Louderbush, including the abuse?"

"Of course not."

"You don't see this history of his as a character flaw so serious that it precludes his being in charge of, say, state mental health programs?"

"What do you think a Governor Louderbush would do?

Subsidize gay guys beating up their boyfriends? I wouldn't worry about that. Kenyon is a libertarian. He thinks government should mind its own business. And maybe you should, too."

"Did Louderbush have other gay lovers he abused besides you and Greg?"

"I believe so. He referred to someone occasionally out in his district. Some hot number he liked to get drunk and pound on. I'm sure there had been others. But even if I knew who these men were, I wouldn't provide you with their names. That would be presumptuous on my part."

I went round and round with Spong for another fifteen minutes-we both kept a close eye on our watches-but I finally had to accept the near certainty that he would be no help at all in exposing Louderbush. He had some highly theoretical idea in his head as to what it would be like to live normally, but it was so far outside his experience that he simply had no objection to anybody else's making intimate human connections primarily through violence.

At a quarter to five, I said, "You're looking apprehensive. I guess I had better get going."

"Thank you, yes. My pulse rate is up. I can actually feel my heart pounding in my chest. In a way, I wish you'd stick around. This is getting exciting. The dread is palpable."

There was no point to my telling him there were programs and yada yada. He knew all that. I thanked him and wished him well.

As I pulled out of the driveway in my rental car, an old Chevy Caprice drove by me, and in the mirror I saw it park in the spot I had just vacated in front of the carriage house. I kept on going.