Leaping in Seattle Gary Zebrun’s muddled mystery BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	Someone You Know By Gary Zebrun. Alyson Publications, 232 pages, $13.95.
	The right time After a half-hour of conversation, I finally got the sense that I knew Gary Zebrun a bit when he laughed. He was friendly and relaxed all along, a round-faced guy with a personable nature, but this light laugh was different. He was talking about his debut novel, Someone You Know, and first he said: "The genesis of the book was thinking about the damage that secrecy had on my life. By the time I was 42, there were a lot of wasted years. They pile up, the years." And then he gave that little laugh, not a nervous or self-conscious one, just the kind that usually comes with shaking your head or lifting your eyes to the heavens. Like the stalked protagonist of his murder mystery, Zebrun for most of his life wouldn’t admit his homosexuality to himself, never mind to others. He was speaking in his second-floor apartment, sitting at a window in the streaming light of a sunny Newport afternoon. He lives off lower Thames Street, just down the street from a neighborhood place coincidentally called Gary’s, where every morning, religiously, he has breakfast amidst people he likes. "I was engaged to be married when I was at Brown," he said of the time around 1980 when he was going for his masters in creative writing, in poetry. It was then that he was forced to admit to himself — and to his fiancée — that he had feelings for men. The admission didn’t come easily for him. "I really loved this woman. A lot. "I knew for a long time that I had these feelings, attractions, but I always repressed it," he said. "At the time I was engaged to this woman I knew it. I was open about it to her, but I had never acted on any of it." He was 27. The end of secrecy at age 42 he mentioned — he is now 49 — was when he first started telling close friends that he was gay. Co-workers at the Providence Journal, where he works as a news editor, didn’t learn it from him until about a year ago. You might say that when he knew that the book would be coming out, he figured he’d better do so completely himself. Zebrun grew up in Buffalo, and went to college at Notre Dame. After Brown, he taught poetry at the University of Michigan for two years, then high school for a year. He has gotten residency writing fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, and Breadloaf, and he’s written "a few" other novels, including a memoir about his Russian grandmother’s love of old movies. One was accepted by Harcourt, but a week later his editor had to abashedly withdraw the offer, saying that the financial decision-maker didn’t think it would make any money. In the mid-’80s Zebrun moved permanently to Newport, not just for summers as he’d been doing. He drove a Cozy Cab, was a bartender at the Black Pearl, a part-time copy editor at the ProJo, and taught an English class at Roger Williams — the traditional knockabout author’s life. Someone You Know was kick-started by Andrew Cunanan murdering fashion designer Gianni Versace in 1997. Zebrun got to thinking about how tormented the homosexual killer must have become from denying his sexuality. That psychological dimension was his real interest in writing his book. "I don’t think that it’s that much of a murder mystery," he said. "On the surface it is, but for people who read mysteries it’s probably pretty easy to figure out who the killer is early on." The book has gotten several good notices (go to garyzebrun.com) as well as some mixed reviews and a thumbs-down from Publishers Weekly. That Gary Zebrun took so long to catch up with the rest of society in accepting who he is was brought home a few weeks ago down the hill from where he lives. Newport This Week had just done a piece on him and his book, and word was out among the regulars at his breakfast hangout. "It’s a pretty socially conservative — I think — group, and no one said anything about being gay, but they all said, ‘I didn’t know you wrote this book! I want a copy of the book!’ You know? Nobody mentioned the gay word." The anecdote goes on. "The next day, a Salve Regina student takes his shirt off and his T-shirt comes off by mistake. And one of the waitresses comes over, taps me on the shoulder and says, ‘What do think of this guy?’ It was just great!" Zebrun didn’t give that rueful little laugh again. Thinking about those people he’d thought he knew, he just smiled. — Bill Rodriguez

"Men with secrets tend to be drawn to each other," Don DeLillo has someone say in his novel Libra, "not because they want to share what they know but because they need the company of the like-minded, the fellow afflicted."

In his debut novel, Someone You Know, Gary Zebrun’s closeted gay narrator has an ultimate affliction. No, in this day and age his secret sexuality doesn’t place him in enough jeopardy, so this character has a serial killer pinning murders on him.

What with all the current Bible-thumping fulminations against gay marriage, we can lose sight of the fact that not very long ago, a novelist or playwright could get big mileage out of the love-that-dares-not-speak-its-name secrecy alone.

Zebrun ups the ante. For years, his newspaper columnist Daniel Caruso, 42, has been cruising Providence streets for more than human interest stories. His wife of two decades seems contented and oblivious. He’s especially reluctant to reveal to his cheerful daughter, about to go off to college, that he’s been living a lie.

All that changes in a heartbeat when he goes to Seattle to give a talk at a conference. He makes a decision he’d resisted before because it "would take me to a place where I could never turn back." Not just flirting with and letting himself be picked up by a good-looking guy, a fireman no less. Spending the night.

Things get complicated fast. Heading back from Seattle, at the Chicago airport he notices that someone has slipped the fireman’s AZT into his pocket. Back home with his unsuspecting family, a FedEx containing melting ice arrives, and a grisly surprise all but bobs to the surface like the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Twice he’s interrupted when about to tell his wife he’s gay, but since she’s supposed to be getting along with him whistlingly well — even though they haven’t had sex for years — she might not have heard him anyway.

Just as gay readers have been reading straight writers’ sex scenes ever since Gutenberg opened the flood gates, there’s no reason heterosexual crime-fiction fans shouldn’t be picking up this book. Yet the story line makes this not just a mystery but a gay mystery — the secret Caruso keeps isn’t about someone else’s sexuality, after all. He has had furtive sex with men perhaps four times a year, he estimates. But his experience widens as the killer has him go to an S&M bar, where we get acquainted with the hardware. On his own he goes to a bathhouse, where he and we learn about hanky-panky color codes in bath houses. (Robin-egg blue for fellatio; fuscia for spanking; orange, "like the sunshine," for anything.) Plausibly, Caruso’s Chapter 1 overnight stay, and sexual experimenting then, triggers an obsession. So there are several sex scenes — in a men’s room, in a park, etc. — brief, to the point, propelling the story more than prurient interest. Those curious about the gay lifestyle can take notes, but voyeurs would be better satisfied elsewhere.

The local color isn’t dwelled upon. A felonious former mayor is mentioned in passing. The paper Caruso writes for is called The Record but it sits on Fountain Street, as does the ProJo. Providence isn’t "even a wannabe Mean Streets," his cop friend says to him. The grittiest peek we get is back nearly 20 years, when Caruso was a young reporter on the night police beat, when the notion of a Providence Renaissance was as unlikely as a Medici entering a monastery. The town was "a haven for vagrants and petty hoods. There was lots of troublemaking: a woman screaming at a companion in Kennedy Plaza, someone on Federal Hill looking for open doors of parked cars. Petty thieves, dealers, hookers, addicts and drunks."

That clean, brisk prose style we can live with for a couple of hundred pages. And the first half of the book was a page-turner for me. But then plot manipulations and shaky motivations began accumulating. Since the killer clearly is obsessed with Dan, he is likely to be an acquaintance, and the culprit is an obvious candidate as soon as he’s introduced. A red herring tossed our way near the end — a Starbucks thermos, reminding us of Seattle — is half-hearted misdirection. Someone You Know has its plusses as a tension-packed foray into the psychology of denial, but you won’t walk away whistling the theme to The Third Man.

Gary Zebrun will read from Someone You Know on Saturday, May 15 at 3 p.m. at Borders at Providence Place. Call (401) 270-4801.