Only Murders in the Building
"Watching the Detectives"
Everybody thought Oliver Putnam was gay at first. Charles Hayden-Savage had thought so too that first time they met. This was back when Roberta, Oliver's estranged wife still lived with him at the Arconia. The first time Charles laid eyes on him, with his tiny dog and red patent leather dogleash, in the elevator with his arms full of groceries, hockey puck shaped hummus dip containers sticking out on top, (although Charles would later learn that it was dips all the way down too), in his paisley patterned scarf, (in the middle of May!), ridiculous blondish-brownish dyed hair (at his age!) clear lacquered nails (what straight man did that anymore?) and telltale signs of a recent face peel around his jaw, screamed old broadway queen. His voice and the way he walked—was he really so oblivious?
Yes, apparently he was. What was weirder still was Oliver acted so blithely unaware. At the showbiz parties that Charles hated so much, and Oliver reveled in;, older gay men would subtly and not so subtly hit on Oliver and he would rebuffed them with a "Darling, that's so sweet of you to think, and you know I'm so flattered, but I'm afraid I'm taken. Yes Oliver Putnam is still a married man."
This, even when he hadn't slept in the same room with Roberta for years.
And although he showed an avid interest, (too avid for Charles's taste), in Charles Hayden-Savage's burgeoning lovelife he never seemed remotely interested in anyone for himself, male or female.
Was he still in love with Roberta after all this time? Still hoping against hope that she would come back to him, living in his imagined world where they remained together after so long?
Charles wouldn't put it past him. If there was one thing Oliver was good at, besides telling meandering stories about famous people he knew back in the day, it was living in his own fantasy bubble and not letting the hard world of concrete facts get in his way.
For someone who spent so much time on his physical appearance and on contriving to look younger than his 72 years he seemed astonishingly unconcerned with the impressions of other people. He moved through the world with a supreme self-confidence in his own preposterous being in a way that made Charles think of a little boy at play. He could well imagine Oliver as a child, not much shorter than he was now, playing pretend with the utmost seriousness, directing friends and siblings in his own backyard musical absolutely losing his mind everytime a toddler kept flubbing her lines. The picture of it made Charles smile. There was something so child-like and innocent about Oliver, that he couldn't help but feel oddly protective of. He was so unafraid of looking uncool or seeming foolish. As exasperating as it was at times, sometimes Charles couldn't help but admire him for it.
Other times Charles felt jealous. It seemed he himself couldn't take a breath in public without being hyper-aware of what other people might be thinking about him. Every morning he spent at least an hour analyzing his presentation, making sure there was nothing offensive about him, not a single tell. Spontaneous was not something in his repitoire. He could memorize lines with the best of them, but improv? Fuggedaboutit! as his former acting coach Micheal Shirtleff had told him in his best Brooklynese. There was always a certain stiff uncomfortableness about him.
Even when he thought himself comparatively at ease people commented on it. "Loosen up Brazzos!" It just made him stiffen up even more. Was there another human being in this world cursed with such painful self-awareness of every awkward moment in their awkward human life? Who the hell needed to be this intensely awake to their own existence?
Even in bed, he could feel his external self looking on, commenting, wondering if his pelvic thrusts looked odd, wondering what his partner was thinking, wondering if he'd left the tap on in the bathroom, while he was supposedly in the throws of sexual abandon.
Once he'd went to a therapist, not long after his partner left, someone who'd said something about obsessive compulsive disorder. A disorder that was sometimes about order. Or something like that.
But Charles hadn't gone to a therapist looking for that answer or any answer at all really. Sometimes a person just goes to a therapist because they have no one to talk to. And sometimes they go because they have a secret they want to tell someone, something bursting inside, but they don't have anyone safe to tell it to or worse still, anyone who'd care.
Brazzos had a secret and not the one about his father and Bunny's mother and the painting that had vanished from the Arconia.
He had always been good at playing cops, military men and detectives. People who were naturally stiff, like he was, no good at opening up to others. People who didn't do hugs. Especially between men.
Accept he had done a hug. He'd hugged Oliver. And it had felt right. So right in the way it never had with Jan or any of the other women he'd been with in his 76 years on the planet.
And this was the reason he never hugged men. He knew the reaction his body would have to it, knew what another man would think, especially a man who wasn't gay, despite all appearances to the contrary.
He had become aware, as a teenager in Waco, Texas the way a man who felt that way about other men was perceived, the kind of things other people said about them, what people did to the man who went to the same Baptist church his family did when they found out about his trips to California and what he did with other men there.
Charles had learned, early on that to survive he had to have this sentinel side to himself, always watching, always correcting towards what others were doing, never letting on the depraved instincts he felt inside.
When he was twenty-two and went to L.A. to try his hand at show business his father said to him, "There are only two reasons a Texas boy goes to Los Angeles—one to work construction and two, to suck dick for rich Jews and I know you ain't never worked a day in construction in your life!"
It had hit Charles like a slap in the face then, how much his father really hated him, but even worse, how much his father could see through the masks even his mother who doted on him could not.
Charles had decided then and there to prove his father wrong about everything and not to return home until he could make the man eat his own words. But secretly, as he boarded the bus that day with his suitcase banging at his ankles as he adjusted his sweaty grip in the Texas heat he wondered if his father was really right.
And so Charles arrived in Los Angeles and was pleased to discover his father and the rest of the idiots at the church were wrong about almost everything.
For a start—Jewish people. Yes, there were a lot of them in Los Angeles, and Italians, Blacks and Latinos and every other kind of person that the church people warned you against associating with, but most that Charles met were not rich at all—struggling actors from New York who sold Star Maps on the Boulevard, waiting for their big break or worked Disneyland on the weekends making balloon animals for children and spent the weekdays going from one audition to another, trying to make hay while the vogue for vaguely ethnic looking east coast actors like Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Deniro who didn't bother to change their last names was still in full force.
People like that took him under their wing and he felt a part of something at last—part of this great collective of actors trying to make it just like him. He was proud the day he finally scored a speaking role in a film and got his S.A.G. card to get him into the union. And yes the acronym for the Screen Actors Guild was completely absurd in a town where face-lifts and boob jobs were derigeur, but maybe that was part of the charm.
And yes, he had even worked construction for a while to make ends meet, hammering nails alongside Harrison Ford making gazebos and cabin extensions for the fancy folk in the canyons.
And he never, despite the occasional offers from friends in San Fernando Valley who made "art films" in the freewheeling 70s, sucked a single dick to get where he was in the end, the star of his own cop show—the kind of law and order program his father loved to watch in prime time after one of his bloody steak dinners.
And by the time he went off to New York to do theatre, after Brazzos was put on indefinite hiatus by the network, his father was gone and his mother and sister were living together quite happily a few hours away in a fancy condo in San Deigo that he was pleased to pay for with his Brazzos money. But then it was the 1980s and AIDS was draining the film and theatre world of New York of its colour more with every day. He went to a lot of funerals in that decade of men who were far too young to die and it scared and saddened him.
And now here he was in his 70s and who was he still keeping up the pretense for?
For Jan, in prison who'd tried to murder him? For teenaged Lucy, his sort-of-daugther who called herself pansexual, whatever that was, and who, like others of her generation, didn't bat an eye at people changing genders and pronouns with aplomb. For Mabel, who'd just laugh at him probably with that knowing, old woman in a young woman's body, been there, seen everything kind of look.
For Oliver? Because Oliver was the closest thing to a friend he'd had in decades and he didn't want to lose him.
And being intimate with a person for Charles always meant he'd lose them. No one stayed in the end.
So was it better? Never letting on to Oliver how he felt? Never taking a chance to get something more than what he currently got?
But if he said anything and Oliver turned away from, if he made Oliver uncomfortable, if Oliver stopped being his friend—the podcast would end, he would lose his best friend, this fleeting sense of purpose he'd gained since starting the true crime podcast, the companionship which he realized now, meant more to him than anything else had in the world.
And yet, and yet… this was Oliver he was thinking about? Oliver who was never uncomfortable about anything! Oliver the shameless self-promoter who told other people how Gut Milk helped his bowl movements. Oliver who spent money like water on frivolous things and forgot to pay his Netflix bill every month until he called Charles and Mabel to complain that "the TV isn't working" and he needed to watch some show his son told him about.
If he told Oliver and Oliver wasn't for it, did he really think Oliver would back away like a terrified deer and shut down the podcast?
Would Oliver who told him in blow-by-blow detail stories of multi-sexual backstage drug fueled orgies during the 1976 production of Godspell involving people still dressed as the New Testament biblical figures they were playing, who savoured the weird and salacious details of everything really be disgusted by Charles admitting, in his own awkward school-marmish way that he might be a touch gay and just a touch in love with a certain retired theatre producer who wore ridiculous scarves even in the summer?
An old acting teacher at the Stella Adler school in LA had once told him that there was something to be learned from every person you had a romantic relationship with, even one that didn't end happily.
Every person, in fact, had things to teach you if you could only just listen with more than your ears.
At the time he'd thought it ridiculous new age twattle, but now he thought he understood, all these years later.
And Oliver Putnam, who could be so foolish and loveable at the same time did have something to teach him—
And it was that there is a time and place to get over yourself and just BE.