BARRY CALLAGHAN
man of letters
MEDIA: WRITER
THE BLACK QUEEN
HUGHES AND McCRAE WERE FASTIDIOUS MEN who took pride in their old colonial house, the clean simple lines and stucco walls and the painted pale blue picket fence. They were surrounded by houses converted into small warehouses, trucking yards where houses had been torn down, and along the street, a school filled with foreign children, but they didn’t mind. It gave them an embattled sense of holding on to something important, a tattered remnant of good taste in an area of waste overrun by rootless olive-skinned children.
McCrae wore his hair a little too long now that he was going grey, and while Hughes with his clipped moustache seemed to be a serious man intent only on his work, which was costume design, McCrae wore Cuban heels and lacquered his nails. When they’d met ten years ago Hughes had said, “You keep walking around like that and you’ll need a body to keep you from getting poked in the eye.” McCrae did all the cooking and drove the car.
But they were not getting along these days. Hughes blamed his bursitis but they were both silently unsettled by
how old they had suddenly become, how loose in the thighs, and their feet, when they were showering in the morning, seemed bonier, the toes longer, the nails yellow and hard, and what they wanted was tenderness, to be able to yield almost tearfully, fully of a pity for themselves that would not be belittled or laughed at, and when they stood alone in their separate bedrooms they wanted that tenderness from each other, but when they were having their bedtime tea in the kitchen, as they had done for years using lovely green and white Limoges cups, if one touched the other’s hand then suddenly they both withdrew into an unspoken, smiling aloofness, as if some line of privacy had been crossed. Neither could bear their thinning wrists and the little pouches of darkening flesh under the chin. They spoke of being with younger people and even joked slyly about bring a young man home, but that seemed such a betrayal of everything that they had believed had set them apart from others, everything they believed had kept them together, that they sulked and netted away at each other, and though nothing had apparently changed in their lives, they were always on edge, Hughes more than McCrae.
One of their pleasures was collecting stamps, rare and mint-perfect, with no creases or smudges on the gum. Their collection, carefully mounted in a leatherbound blue book with seven little plastic windows per page, was worth several thousand dollars. They had passed many pleasant evenings together on the Directoire settee arranging the old ochre- and carmine-coloured stamps. They agreed there was something almost sensual about holding a perfectly preserved piece of the past, unsullied, as if everything
didn’t have to change, didn’t have to end up swamped by decline and decay. They disapproved of the new stamps and dismissed them as crude and wouldn’t have them in their book. The pages for the recent years remained empty and they liked that; the emptiness was their statement about themselves and their values, and Hughes, holding a stamp up into the light between his tweezers, would say, “None of that trade for us.”
One afternoon they went down to the philatelic shops around Adelaide and Richmond streets and saw a stamp they had been after for a long time, a large and elegant black stamp of Queen Victoria in her widow’s weeds. It was rare and expensive, a dead-letter stamp from the turn of the century. They stood side by side over the glass counter-case, admiring it, their hands spread on the glass, but when McCrae, the overhead fluorescent light catching his lacquered nails, said, “Well, I certainly would like that little black sweetheart,” the owner, who had sold stamps to them for several years, looked up and smirked, and Hughes suddenly snorted, “You old queen, I mean why don’t you just quit wearing those goddamn Cuban heels, eh? I mean why not?” He walked out leaving McCrae embarrassed and hurt and when the owner said, “So what was wrong?” McCrae cried, “Screw you,” and strutted out.
Through the rest of the week they were deferential around the house, offering each other every consideration, trying to avoid any squabble before Mother’s Day at the end of the week when they were going to hold their annual supper for friends, three other male couples. Over the years it had always been an elegant, slightly mocking
evening that often ended bitter-sweetly and left them feeling close, comforting each other.
McCrae, wearing a white linen shirt with starch in the cuffs and mother-of-pearl cuff links, worked all Sunday afternoon in the kitchen and through the window he could see the crab-apple tree in bloom and he thought how in previous years he would have begun planning to put down some jelly in the old pressed glass jars they kept in the cellar, but instead, head down, he went on stuffing and tying the pork loin roast. Then in the early evening he heard Hughes at the door, and there was laughter from the front room and someone cried out, “What do you do with an elephant who has three balls on him . . . you don’t know, silly, well you walk him and pitch to the giraffe,” and there were howls of laughter and the clinking of glasses. It had been the same every year, eight men sitting down to a fine supper with expensive wines, the table set with their best silver under the antique carved wooden candelabra.
Having prepared all the raw vegetables, the cauliflower and carrots, the avocados and finger-sized miniature corns-on-the-cob, and placed porcelain bowls of homemade dip in the centre of a pewter tray, McCrae stared at his reflection for a moment in the window over the kitchen sink and then he took a plastic slipcase out of the knives-and-forks drawer. The case contained the dead-letter stamp. He liked it all over and pasted it on his forehead and then slipped on the jacket of his charcoal-brown crushed velvet suit, took hold of the tray, and stepped out into the front room.
The other men, sitting in the circle around the coffee table, looked up and one of them giggled. Hughes cried, “Oh my God.” McCrae, as if nothing were the matter, said, “My dears, time for the crudités.” He was in his silk stocking feet, and as he passed the tray he winked at Hughes who sat starting at the black Queen.