Family Dancing (2 page)

All through his childhood, she had packed only the most nutritious lunches, had served on the PTA, had volunteered at the children’s library and at his school, had organized a successful campaign to ban a racist history textbook. The day after he told her, she located and got in touch with an organization called the Coalition of Parents of Lesbians and Gays. Within a year, she was president of it. On weekends, she and the other mothers drove their station wagons to San Francisco, set up their card tables in front of the Bulldog Baths, the Liberty Baths, passed out literature to men in leather and denim who were loath to admit they even had mothers. These men, who would habitually do violence to each other, were strangely cowed by the suburban ladies with their informational booklets, and bent their heads. Neil was a sophomore in college then, and lived in San Francisco. She brought him pamphlets detailing the dangers of bath-houses and back rooms, enemas and poppers, wordless sex in alleyways. His excursion into that world had been brief and lamentable, and was over. He winced at the thought that she knew all his sexual secrets, and vowed to move to the East Coast to escape her. It was not very different from the days when she had campaigned for a better playground, or tutored the Hispanic children in the audiovisual room. Those days, as well, he had run away from her concern. Even today, perched in front of the co-op, collecting signatures for nuclear disarmament, she was quintessentially a mother. And if the lot of mothers was to expect nothing in return, was the lot of sons to return nothing?

Driving across the Dumbarton Bridge on his way to the airport, Neil thinks, I have returned nothing; I have simply returned. He wonders if she would have given birth to him had she known what he would grow up to be.

Then he berates himself: Why should he assume himself to be the cause of her sorrow? She has told him that her life is full of secrets. She has changed since he left home—grown thinner, more rigid, harder to hug. She has given up baking, taken up tennis; her skin has browned and tightened. She is no longer the woman who hugged him and kissed him, who said, “As long as you’re happy, that’s all that’s important to us.”

The flats spread out around him; the bridge floats on purple and green silt, and spongy bay fill, not water at all. Only ten miles north, a whole city has been built on gunk dredged up from the bay.

He arrives at the airport ten minutes early, to discover that the plane has landed twenty minutes early. His first view of Wayne is from behind, by the baggage belt. Wayne looks as he always looks—slightly windblown—and is wearing the ratty leather jacket he was wearing the night they met. Neil sneaks up on him and puts his hands on his shoulders; when Wayne turns around, he looks relieved to see him.

They hug like brothers; only in the safety of Neil’s mother’s car do they dare to kiss. They recognize each other’s smells, and grow comfortable again. “I never imagined I’d actually see you out here,” Neil says, “but you’re exactly the same here as there.”

“It’s only been a week.”

They kiss again. Neil wants to go to a motel, but Wayne insists on being pragmatic. “We’ll be there soon. Don’t worry.”

“We could go to one of the bathhouses in the city and take a room for a couple of aeons,” Neil says. “Christ, I’m hard up. I don’t even know if we’re going to be in the same bedroom.”

“Well, if we’re not,” Wayne says, “we’ll sneak around. It’ll be romantic.”

They cling to each other for a few more minutes, until they realize that people are looking in the car window. Reluctantly, they pull apart. Neil reminds himself that he loves this man, that there is a reason for him to bring this man home.

He takes the scenic route on the way back. The car careers over foothills, through forests, along white four-lane highways high in the mountains. Wayne tells Neil that he sat next to a woman on the plane who was once Marilyn Monroe’s psychiatrist’s nurse. He slips his foot out of his shoe and nudges Neil’s ankle, pulling Neil’s sock down with his toe.

“I have to drive,” Neil says. “I’m very glad you’re here.”

There is a comfort in the privacy of the car. They have a common fear of walking hand in hand, of publicly showing physical affection, even in the permissive West Seventies of New York—a fear that they have admitted only to one another. They slip through a pass between two hills, and are suddenly in residential Northern California, the land of expensive ranch-style houses.

As they pull into Neil’s mother’s driveway, the dogs run barking toward the car. When Wayne opens the door, they jump and lap at him, and he tries to close it again. “Don’t worry. Abbylucyferny! Get in the house, damn it!”

His mother descends from the porch. She has changed into a blue flower-print dress, which Neil doesn’t recognize. He gets out of the car and halfheartedly chastises the dogs. Crickets chirp in the trees. His mother looks radiant, even beautiful, illuminated by the headlights, surrounded by the now quiet dogs, like Circe with her slaves. When she walks over to Wayne, offering her hand, and says, “Wayne, I’m Barbara,” Neil forgets that she is his mother.

“Good to meet you, Barbara,” Wayne says, and reaches out his hand. Craftier than she, he whirls her around to kiss her cheek.

Barbara!
He is calling his mother Barbara! Then he remembers that Wayne is five years older than he is. They chat by the open car door, and Neil shrinks back—the embarrassed adolescent, uncomfortable, unwanted.

So the dreaded moment passes and he might as well not have been there. At dinner, Wayne keeps the conversation smooth, like a captivated courtier seeking Neil’s mother’s hand. A faggot son’s sodomist—such words spit into Neil’s head. She has prepared tiny meatballs with fresh coriander, fettucine with pesto. Wayne talks about the street people in New York; El Salvador is a tragedy; if only Sadat had lived; Phyllis Schlafly—what can you do?

“It’s a losing battle,” she tells him. “Every day I’m out there with my card table, me and the other mothers, but I tell you, Wayne, it’s a losing battle. Sometimes I think us old ladies are the only ones with enough patience to fight.”

Occasionally, Neil says something, but his comments seem stupid and clumsy. Wayne continues to call her Barbara. No one under forty has ever called her Barbara as long as Neil can remember. They drink wine; he does not.

Now is the time for drastic action. He contemplates taking Wayne’s hand, then checks himself. He has never done anything in her presence to indicate that the sexuality he confessed to five years ago was a reality and not an invention. Even now, he and Wayne might as well be friends, college roommates. Then Wayne, his savior, with a single, sweeping gesture, reaches for his hand, and clasps it, in the midst of a joke he is telling about Saudi Arabians. By the time he is laughing, their hands are joined. Neil’s throat contracts; his heart begins to beat violently. He notices his mother’s eyes flicker, glance downward; she never breaks the stride of her sentence. The dinner goes on, and every taboo nurtured since childhood falls quietly away.

She removes the dishes. Their hands grow sticky; he cannot tell which fingers are his and which Wayne’s. She clears the rest of the table and rounds up the dogs.

“Well, boys, I’m very tired, and I’ve got a long day ahead of me tomorrow, so I think I’ll hit the sack. There are extra towels for you in Neil’s bathroom, Wayne. Sleep well.”

“Good night, Barbara,” Wayne calls out. “It’s been wonderful meeting you.”

They are alone. Now they can disentangle their hands.

“No problem about where we sleep, is there?”

“No,” Neil says. “I just can’t imagine sleeping with someone in this house.”

His leg shakes violently. Wayne takes Neil’s hand in a firm grasp and hauls him up.

Later that night, they lie outside, under redwood trees, listening to the hysteria of the crickets, the hum of the pool cleaning itself. Redwood leaves prick their skin. They fell in love in bars and apartments, and this is the first time that they have made love outdoors. Neil is not sure he has enjoyed the experience. He kept sensing eyes, imagined that the neighborhood cats were staring at them from behind a fence of brambles. He remembers he once hid in this spot when he and some of the children from the neighborhood were playing sardines, remembers the intoxication of small bodies packed together, the warm breath of suppressed laughter on his neck. “The loser had to go through the spanking machine,” he tells Wayne.

“Did you lose often?”

“Most of the time. The spanking machine never really hurt—just a whirl of hands. If you moved fast enough, no one could actually get you. Sometimes, though, late in the afternoon, we’d get naughty. We’d chase each other and pull each other’s pants down. That was all. Boys and girls together!”

“Listen to the insects,” Wayne says, and closes his eyes.

Neil turns to examine Wayne’s face, notices a single, small pimple. Their lovemaking usually begins in a wrestle, a struggle for dominance, and ends with a somewhat confusing loss of identity—as now, when Neil sees a foot on the grass, resting against his leg, and tries to determine if it is his own or Wayne’s.

From inside the house, the dogs begin to bark. Their yelps grow into alarmed falsettos. Neil lifts himself up. “I wonder if they smell something,” he says.

“Probably just us,” says Wayne.

“My mother will wake up. She hates getting waked up.”

Lights go on in the house; the door to the porch opens.

“What’s wrong, Abby? What’s wrong?” his mother’s voice calls softly.

Wayne clamps his hand over Neil’s mouth. “Don’t say anything,” he whispers.

“I can’t just—” Neil begins to say, but Wayne’s hand closes over his mouth again. He bites it, and Wayne starts laughing.

“What was that?” Her voice projects into the garden. “Hello?” she says.

The dogs yelp louder. “Abbylucyferny, it’s O.K., it’s O.K.” Her voice is soft and panicked. “Is anyone there?” she asks loudly.

The brambles shake. She takes a flashlight, shines it around the garden. Wayne and Neil duck down; the light lands on them and hovers for a few seconds. Then it clicks off and they are in the dark—a new dark, a darker dark, which their eyes must readjust to.

“Let’s go to bed, Abbylucyferny,” she says gently. Neil and Wayne hear her pad into the house. The dogs whimper as they follow her, and the lights go off.

Once before, Neil and his mother had stared at each other in the glare of bright lights. Four years ago, they stood in the arena created by the headlights of her car, waiting for the train. He was on his way back to San Francisco, where he was marching in a Gay Pride Parade the next day. The train station was next door to the food co-op and shared its parking lot. The co-op, familiar and boring by day, took on a certain mystery in the night. Neil recognized the spot where he had skidded on his bicycle and broken his leg. Through the glass doors, the brightly lit interior of the store glowed, its rows and rows of cans and boxes forming their own horizon, each can illuminated so that even from outside Neil could read the labels. All that was missing was the ladies in tennis dresses and sweatshirts, pushing their carts past bins of nuts and dried fruits.

“Your train is late,” his mother said. Her hair fell loosely on her shoulders, and her legs were tanned. Neil looked at her and tried to imagine her in labor with him—bucking and struggling with his birth. He felt then the strange, sexless love for women which through his whole adolescence he had mistaken for heterosexual desire.

A single bright light approached them; it preceded the low, haunting sound of the whistle. Neil kissed his mother, and waved goodbye as he ran to meet the train. It was an old train, with windows tinted a sort of horrible lemon-lime. It stopped only long enough for him to hoist himself on board, and then it was moving again. He hurried to a window, hoping to see her drive off, but the tint of the window made it possible for him to make out only vague patches of light—street lamps, cars, the co-op.

He sank into the hard, green seat. The train was almost entirely empty; the only other passenger was a dark-skinned man wearing bluejeans and a leather jacket. He sat directly across the aisle from Neil, next to the window. He had rough skin and a thick mustache. Neil discovered that by pretending to look out the window he could study the man’s reflection in the lemon-lime glass. It was only slightly hazy—the quality of a bad photograph. Neil felt his mouth open, felt sleep closing in on him. Hazy red and gold flashes through the glass pulsed in the face of the man in the window, giving the curious impression of muscle spasms. It took Neil a few minutes to realize that the man was staring at him, or, rather, staring at the back of his head—staring at his staring. The man smiled as though to say, I know exactly what you’re staring at, and Neil felt the sickening sensation of desire rise in his throat.

Right before they reached the city, the man stood up and sat down in the seat next to Neil’s. The man’s thigh brushed deliberately against his own. Neil’s eyes were watering; he felt sick to his stomach. Taking Neil’s hand, the man said, “Why so nervous, honey? Relax.”

Neil woke up the next morning with the taste of ashes in his mouth. He was lying on the floor, without blankets or sheets or pillows. Instinctively, he reached for his pants, and as he pulled them on came face to face with the man from the train. His name was Luis; he turned out to be a dog groomer. His apartment smelled of dog.