He poured some champagne for me, picked up his glass and clinked mine. “Chin-chin,” he said, his eyes narrowing in the semi-dark of the hotel bar. He sighed. “So I said, ‘Gentlemen, I’m embarrassed to say I don’t have a home. I’m not an American citizen. I’m a man without a country.’” He smiled. “So somebody calls somebody, just like you did, and then somebody invites me to the Home Office, and documents are prepared, and in just the time it takes to place a bet on a horse I become a British subject, swearing loyalty to the king, and a few people I know from the RAF come by and say, ‘Allen, old chum, is there anything you’d like to do now you’ve no Jerries to shoot down?’ So I told them what my old profession was, and they said, ‘Jolly good, we’ll back you. Least we can do and all that.’ And they did, and here I am.”
There were two questions on my mind. Sloane was beaming. I went for the first. “EZ’s lady, the one you were fucking better than him.”
He smiled. “Left me when I joined the RAF.”
“She wasn’t much of a lady then,” I said.
“You’re right about that.” He turned, facing me directly. “I was a little hard on you, back in L.A.”
“Hard on me?”
“Calling you a queer.”
“Well, it’s accurate,” I said. “At least you didn’t call me a nigger.”
“That would have been just as bad,” he said. “Considering.”
“Considering?”
“You really don’t know? EZ never said?”
“I never mentioned you.”
Sloane stood, took off his bespoke jacket, folded it neatly on the maroon leather banquette so that its bright magenta lining shone in the dim room, then sat back down again. A tiny ridge of moisture appeared on his brow. “That was no lady,” he said. “That was…”
The waiter appeared, poured out more champagne, then disappeared.
“That was…?”
“A guy.”
It took a moment. I picked up my champagne — really good champagne, but I would have been happy for kerosene — and drained the glass. “You’re telling me…”
“It was just something that happened. I never knew I was like that, like you, and it’s not something that happens a lot now. I mean, I like ladies, but in that particular case I happened to fall in love with a… guy. A very feminine guy. A colored guy, actually. Not very colored, much lighter than you. Almost lighter than me. When we met I thought he was a woman. What did I know? From the outside you couldn’t tell.”
“This guy was EZ’s lady? You’re telling me that EZ is queer?”
“I don’t know,” Sloane said. “He was married to a lez, and he never had kids, but it could be he was in my situation. Suddenly he met someone — this was a beautiful person, physically, and kind of mysterious — and maybe the same thing happened to him that happened to me. Hey, I didn’t know I was going to be an RAF officer, or an Englishman — it just happened. Things happen.” He smiled. “Well, Larry, you made it happen, and for that I’ll always be grateful.”
“But I didn’t make you…”
“A queer?”
“A queer.”
“But I’m not, not really. Hey, sometimes it happens, but it’s more like I’m everything. To tell you the truth, remember that horse we switched?”
“Of course.”
“I would’ve fucked him, too. That was one beautiful horse. A champion. You had to love that horse. I loved him the first minute I saw him, and he was wild, not even saddle-broke. I’m not even embarrassed to say this. I knew he could run, but it was more than that. I loved him. So what does that make me, queer for animals? Okay, then I’m queer for animals. I also like good clothes and nice cars. I guess I’m a mental case, right?”
“No more than any of us,” I said, thinking of EZ Shelupsky with a colored queer, in love with a colored queer, and then of Allen Sloane stealing him away. Well, I thought, there’s a story that will never be a movie. “And the horse?”
“What about him?”
“What happened to the horse?”
“He stayed with EZ. I mean, you can’t swap a horse back.”
“So you got EZ’s… lady, and he got…”
“My horse,” Sloane said. “I never looked at it like that. If you do, maybe EZ got the better deal. All I got was a broken heart. I should have kept the horse.”
“Then you wouldn’t have ended up here.”
“Yeah, I would’ve ended up in Panama. I guess we both came out of it okay, EZ Shelupsky and me. But I’ll tell you, that was one hell of a horse. A guy in New Mexico calls me, says he has a horse — a guy I’d been doing business with. Frankly this is not the first time I switched a horse. Of course, with lip-tattooing you can’t do it anymore, not here either, not even in Ireland, though it still happens in France. So I go out to look and… this is some horse. Turns out to be one of those wild horses the Indians had, but in looks, in everything horse, this was like a throwback to the Spanish horses, a pure small thoroughbred. Nobody could tell it wasn’t a thoroughbred. It must have been descended from those horses the Spanish brought over. What they call the Izquierda Line.”
I turned away. Someone was playing a piano in the far corner, and I tried to concentrate on listening to the notes. It was Over the Rainbow, a jazzed up version that would not have been recognizable when the movie came out in 1939, but now seemed right. It was as if I were hearing it for the first time, and hearing it I was back for a moment when Allen and Fritz and EZ had all crowded together into my young life. When I looked back, Allen was pulling on his jacket.
“Really good to see you again, Larry,” he said. “Anything I can ever do for you, you let me know. You know what Fritz used to say?”
“No, what?”
“Tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis.”
“The times change…”
“The times are changed, and we are changed in them. One hell of a smart guy, Fritz.”
“Yes,” I said. “You hear from him?”
“Fritz? Nah, nobody hears from him. He’s not a regular person. I don’t have to tell you. You know what else he said?”
“Tell me.”
“Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.”
“Anything said in Latin…”
Sloane waved to the waiter, then took my hand in his, squeezing it in farewell. “Anything said in Latin,” he said, “sounds profound.” He winked, and — like the confident clarity of my own youthful promise — was gone.
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