Fortunate Son: A Novel (11 page)

“Where were you, boy?”

“I went to play at Bruno’s house.”

“I don’t want you seein’ that fat boy no mo’. Hear me?”

Thomas nodded, but he didn’t worry. Elton had other things on his mind. He wasn’t concerned about Thomas unless he was late for dinner.

The next day, Thomas had a conversation with his mother.

“Why’s Daddy so mad at me, Mama?” Thomas asked in his normal voice.

Then in a deeper, more musical register he replied, “Because when he was a boy he didn’t have anybody to be nice to him.”

“Like you are to me?”

“That’s right, honey,” Branwyn said. “And now you have to be nice to him and let him be mad. Don’t worry, I won’t let him hurt you.”

“Do you mind it that I don’t go to school, Mama?”

“You know I want you to be in school and to get smart like your brother and Dr. Nolan.”

“But I hate it, an’ it hurts my eyes.”

“Sometimes we have to do things we don’t like, Tommy.”

“I know. But I go to Bruno’s house after school sometimes and on Saturdays, and we do his homework together a little bit.”

“Well, okay,” Branwyn replied after a meditative silence. “For now. But later on you have to go back to school.”

“I promise.”

THOMAS WORKED HARD
to clean up his alley paradise. Along the edges of the fence, he’d come upon small patches of wild strawberry plants. He loved eating them with the peanut butter sandwiches he’d make when he’d sneak into his father’s house in the middle of the day for lunch and other supplies.

When he wasn’t talking to his mother, he’d go to the oak tree and call to No Man. He’d put bread crumbs on the ground at his feet, and after some days the parrot would fly up and eat, croaking “no man” now and again. After a while the parrot would follow Thomas around looking for food and maybe, Thomas thought, a little company.

One late morning when going up to the house, Thomas found May sitting on the porch with her head on her knees, crying.

“Hi, May,” Thomas said.

When she looked up Thomas could see the ruined makeup running down her dark face.

“Hi, baby. What you doin’ here? Ain’t you supposed to be in school?”

“They let me come home for lunch,” he lied. “Why you cryin’?”

“Because I’m so stupid,” she said, sobbing. “Because I had to go play around and get your father mad at me. Now I’m miserable, and he changed the locks and his phone numbah. An’ I need to tell him that I’m sorry.”

The tears flowed down, and Thomas felt her pain. He reached out to touch her wet face.

“I could let you in,” Thomas offered. “But . . .”

“But what?”

“You can’t tell Daddy that I come home sometimes. He don’t know I do that, an’ he’d get mad.”

May wiped her eyes and she was beautiful again. Her smile warmed little Thomas, who had been chilled from picking up dirty, wet tin cans all morning.

“How long you gonna be here?” May asked.

“About a hour, I guess.”

“I’ma run to the store an’ get food to make for dinner.”

She ran down the porch stairs, and Thomas went up into the house. Since May had been gone neither Elton nor Thomas had even picked a pair of socks up off the floor. There were beer cans and dirty dishes scattered everywhere, with roaches sifting in and out of the debris. There were unopened letters and bills strewn across the coffee table, and the kitchen was a total mess. The sink was piled with dishes soaking in cold, gray water. There were clothes all down the hallway, and even May’s sewing room was turned upside down from Elton going in there now and then to look for a pair of scissors or some papers he needed.

The only room that hadn’t suffered was Thomas’s back porch. Elton had offered Thomas May’s room, but the boy demurred. He said he liked his room.

Sour Elton said, “Suit yourself, fool.”

May came back with three bags of groceries, and Thomas let her in.

“What is that smell?” she asked as soon as she walked in the door.

Thomas hadn’t noticed it.

“You just go on to school,” she said. “And when you get home I will have a good meal for you.”

THOMAS WENT UP
to the roof of his abandoned clubhouse because it was a cloudy day and he wanted to hear the school bell so that he could get home and into his room before Elton returned.

He unlatched the roof door and pushed it open. He’d been up there a few times to look out over the neighborhood, but he usually stayed inside where he could be sure that nobody would see him.

But that day he found another surprise. Sitting at the edge of the roof smoking a cigarette was an olive-skinned, wavy-haired teenager. Thomas froze when he saw the boy, but it was already too late to run.

The teenager turned and said, “Hey, bro,” with a sing to his voice. “What you doin’?”

Thomas was shocked by the boy’s eyes. They were bright, light gray, like Thomas’s mother’s eyes.

“Nuthin’,” Thomas said. “What you doin’ here?”

“Run away from the foster home they had me in.” The boy slapped the beat-up brown suitcase that sat at his feet. “I climbed up the fire escape. You got the key to that door?”

“It’s just a latch on the inside,” Thomas said. “This is my clubhouse.”

“You think you could let me stay in your club awhile, little man?”

Thomas realized that the sing in the boy’s voice was close to the accent that he heard when Mexicans spoke to him in English.

“What’s your name?” Thomas asked.

“Pedro.”

“Why you look like that?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know.”

“My mother’s a beaner,” Pedro said then. “And my father’s a spook. I don’t know where I got the eyes though. All I know is that the kids beat me up an’ down the street.”

“What’s a foster home?” Thomas asked.

“It’s where they put you when you ain’t got no mother and father.”

“But you have.”

“Not no more,” Pedro said. He took a long drag on his cigarette. “My mom died, and my dad live down on Figueroa. He sells smack and some coke down there, and he don’t wanna know about me.”

“If you stay here,” Thomas said, “you can’t tell anybody else, okay?”

“Sure, man. I ain’t gonna stay too long anyway. I got a sister up in Seattle. I’ma go up an’ live with her just as soon as I get the thirty-five dollars for a Greyhound.”

Thomas brought Pedro down into the building and gave him candles that he’d taken from his father’s house.

“There rats in here?” Pedro asked, looking around suspiciously at the shadowy corners.

“Naw,” said Thomas. “There’s nuthin’ for rats to eat in here. As long as you don’t have any food there’s no rats or roaches. Just some spiders and moths and stuff.”

They settled in, and Pedro told Thomas about his sad life. His mother’s family, who didn’t like his father, and his father, who was a good guy when he wasn’t high. And all the people who hated Pedro because he was a half-breed.

Thomas felt akin to the boy. He gave him a peanut butter sandwich that he’d made in his house. They talked for hours, until the school bell rang and Thomas had to go.

“When you coming back, Lucky?” Pedro asked his host.

“Not till tomorrow morning.” And he was off.

WHEN THOMAS GOT
home, his house smelled of cooking.

“I’m makin’ chicken an’ dumplin’s,” May told him. “That’s your father’s favorite.”

The kitchen was spotless, and so were the living room and the hallway, Elton’s bedroom and May’s room too. She had picked up, swept, vacuumed, and scrubbed the whole house in the time Thomas was gone.

The cleanliness somehow elated the boy. He laughed and capered.

Later on May gave him string cheese and black cherry jam on dense pumpernickel bread. Then she made some not-too-sweet hot chocolate, and they sat at the table in the kitchen with her apologizing to him for the night she and Elton fought.

“You should never blame your father for that,” she said. “It was all my fault. A man can’t bear to hear about his woman bein’ off with another man. He got to do somethin’. He got to get mad.”

Thomas was sitting on May’s lap when she told him this.

Then the front door could be heard banging open, followed by a man’s voice saying, “What the hell?”

Thomas leaped from May’s lap and ran to the back porch. He jumped in the bed and hid his head under the pillow so as not to hear the yelling and crashing. He counted up to fifteen, and then he counted again. When he reached thirty and hadn’t heard a thing, he became even more anxious. He remembered his mother dying there next to him without even a sound to warn him. Maybe May was dying somehow, he thought. And so he climbed out of the bed and crawled to the door.

He pushed the door open and saw that Elton had May on the kitchen table again. But this time they were kissing. Elton had his hand up under May’s dress again. But she was holding his head and smiling when he wasn’t kissing her.

“The boy,” May said wistfully.

“What about him?” Elton said in a husky voice.

“He’s right back there, Elton.”

“He got to learn sometime. Anyway, he probably just a little faggot.”

“No, baby. Let’s go to our room.”

Elton picked May up off the table and stumbled out of the room, straining under the weight.

Later on Thomas heard her hollering from their bedroom. He worried that maybe they were fighting again and that the police would come and that he’d be put in a cell with some man taking out his thing.

But the screaming stopped and the police never came.

Later still May came and got him, and they all ate a late-night dinner of chicken and dumplings in the clean-smelling house.

9

Y
EARS AFTER
Thomas was gone from May and Elton’s home, Eric skipped the eleventh grade. He had done the core course work over the summer, spending the evenings with Christie. She got an apartment near the beach in Santa Monica, where he spent most afternoons doing his homework, surfing, and making love to her.

At first Drew called every day. He’d leave long, tearful messages asking Christie to come back East. She told him again and again that she couldn’t, that she needed time to think about things.

One day, while Eric waxed his surfboard on the couch across from her, Christie answered the phone, frowned, and said, “Oh, hi, Drew.”

He had called to tell her that he’d made the decision to come home midyear and go to UCLA.

“But you wanted to graduate from Yale,” she said.

“I want you.”

“I’ve met another man,” she said in a clear, emotionless voice. “And I love him.”

Eric could hear Drew crying.

“You can come back, but I’m with him now.”

She listened to him cry and tried to make him feel better. But there was no caring in her voice, no love left over for him.

When she hung up the phone, she said to Eric, “Come fuck me.”

Eric’s embarrassment for Drew, combined with his admiration for Christie’s brazen request, caused him to become very excited. They went at it so powerfully that Eric broke the condom when he came.

“It’s okay,” she told him. “I just finished my period yesterday.”

And so they made love again, and again, without protection.

Eric called Ahn and told her that he was spending the night in Santa Monica.

“Be careful,” Ahn told him.

Christie cried and then they made love. She laughed and they made love.

“I dropped him,” she said, surprised at her own resolve.

“You didn’t love him,” Eric explained.

“I do love him. I want to marry him. I want to go to school in the East and be with him every weekend.”

“Then why don’t you?” Eric asked.

“I tried, but I can’t go.”

“Why not?”

They were sitting side by side in Christie’s single bed. She’d been fired from her father’s company when he found out that she was spending all her time with a fifteen-year-old boy. Now she worked for a design agency that had offices in the Third Street Mall. Her father took back the company car and disowned her.

The rent was due, and she was a hundred dollars short. Eric could help her this month, but he wondered how long she could live like that.

“I can’t even be away from you for more than two days, Eric,” she said. “When you stay home on the weekends, sometimes I cry until you’re back again.”

“Because you miss me?” he asked.

“Because it hurts,” she said. “It hurts inside me. Sometimes I don’t even like you. I look at you and think how great my life was before we met. I even hate you for not caring about anything. And then you get up just to go to the toilet and I get scared that I might not ever see you again.”

Eric remembered the times when she came into the bathroom while he was taking a piss. She’d come up behind him, shivering against him, and hold his penis while he urinated.

“Do you understand?” she asked.

“Do you love me? Is that it?”

“It’s not that at all. I love Drew. Sometimes I think about him, how sweet he was trying to be tough, trying to be the best at everything. Sometimes when we’d get together, he’d tell me about how scared he was that he wouldn’t get into Yale or that he wouldn’t be able to make it from nothing like his father did. That’s when I loved him the most. I protected him.”

Eric realized that Christie was telling him something that he’d always suspected but never really knew because he found it so hard to understand. He still didn’t completely grasp what it was that people felt about him. But at least Christie opened the door.

“So you don’t love me?” he asked.

“It’s not about that.”

“What do you mean?”

“The first time I saw you I wanted to get down on my knees,” the young woman said with anger and some fear in her voice. “It scared me, and I went home and took a bath. But that didn’t help. I went to my room and closed the door, and then I started thinking about dying.”

“Dying? Why?”

“That’s how you made me feel.” She was weeping now. “I knew that either I was going to call you or that I’d die.”

“Really die?”

“I don’t know. I think that I might have. But even if I didn’t there would have been something missing from the rest of my life. I tried not to call you. I put down the phone ten times before I dialed the number. But once I talked to you I couldn’t stop myself. I couldn’t.”

“But you love Drew.”

“Every night when you go home I want to call him. I miss his jokes and his trying to show off. I used to help him rewrite his papers. I was better at school than he was.”

“Better than me too,” Eric said. He put a hand on her thigh, but she pulled away.

“But you don’t care. If I told you that I was going to Yale tomorrow you’d just say good-bye. You wouldn’t even miss me.”

Eric had missed Branwyn; he’d missed her terribly. And when Tommy left his heart hurt so bad that he still felt the pain. He had the capacity to feel loss.

“You see?” she said. “You won’t even lie to me.”

Eric would have missed her, but he wasn’t thinking about that. He was trying to understand what Christie was telling him. He felt that she was somehow the mouthpiece of a much greater force, some insubstantial being breaking through to the material world, to him.

“Do you love me, Eric?”

“Yes, I do,” he lied.

He said the words quickly, before he could consider them. This was an instinctual response. It was only later the next day, when he had time to think about it, that he realized why. Christie wasn’t responsible for what had happened between them. Neither was he for that matter. But their coming together brought out a need in her that she couldn’t control. Years later he would be able to see it coming, to recognize when women, and men, felt so drawn to him that they were willing to leave everything to see if maybe he could satisfy a yearning in their hearts. Then he would stop the attraction, avoid their lavish offers and intense praise. But with Christie he couldn’t say no. She offered him something that he needed, and so he told her that he loved her because it was the right thing to do.

“You do?”

“Yes. Yes, yes, yes,” and he kissed her. Holding her, he asked, “But what can we do about Drew?”

“That’s why I told him I was with someone,” she said. “Now he can find somebody else and we can be together.”

“But will you be happy with me?” Eric asked. “You love him.”

“But I need you.”

“Is that good?” Eric asked her. “I mean, it doesn’t sound like you’ll be happy with me.”

Instead of answering him she stroked his cock and bit his nipple through his thin T-shirt.

ERIC KEPT SEEING
Christie even though they didn’t love each other. Her need and his guilt made a bond stronger than any consensual, reasonable, affectionate love.

But Eric also began seeing other girls at school. He’d call them up and ask them out, bring them to his house when no one was there, and have sex in Branwyn’s old room. Patricia Leonard and Kai Lin, Gina Maxim and Star Bennet and Vivian Bright, Estrella Alvarez and BobbiAnne Getz. Some of the girls had steady boyfriends, others did not. But they all gave in to his attentions—all of them, every one. And whenever Christie got wind of one of his affairs, she yelled and threw pots at him. But when he’d walk out the door, she’d always run after and grab on to him and not let go.

In the meanwhile Eric’s grades were perfect. He joined the California Junior Tennis League and won nearly every game. Colleges began to woo him.

“You have a charmed life,” Mrs. McCabe, the art teacher, told him one day after class.

She’d asked him to stay behind to talk to him about a drawing he’d done. It was supposed to be a self-portrait to be drawn at home on the previous weekend. All of the other students had drawn fairly realistic pictures of themselves. Most of these were of their faces; one or two included the rest of the body with some interesting clothes. Star Bennet had done a nude self-portrait, which she later gave to Eric.

But Eric’s attempt was different. His painting was him, face forward with his eyes hollow and his forehead a cave. In his left eye was a drawing of Branwyn’s profile, and in the right was a drawing of Thomas, as well as he could remember him. In the cave he’d rendered a scene of a man standing in a fire, with naked men and women dancing in a circle around him. The dancers moved in wild abandon. The man in the fire stood taller, head and shoulders above all the rest.

“What is this, Eric?” Mrs. McCabe asked.

“Me.”

“Who are these people in your eyes?”

“My mother and brother.”

“Why are they black?”

“Because they are.”

“And this tableau in your head?”

“The man in the fire is me,” he said. “The dancers are everybody else.”

“What does it mean?”

“Nothing,” the teenager replied.

“I find it hard to understand,” Mrs. McCabe said. “You’ve led a charmed life, but this painting makes you seem so unhappy.”

HE AWOKE AT
three the next morning remembering the conversation. He had started the drawing in a straightforward fashion at first. It was just a sketch of his face. But as he looked at the eyes, he thought that they should be a reflection of what he saw. What was he looking at? Why, himself, of course. But then the idea of the mind’s eye came to him. In his mind he often visualized Branwyn and Tommy. After expanding and rendering his internal visions, Eric looked at the forehead as a kind of blank screen. What was going on in there? The image came quickly with little or no deliberation. He was being burned up by the love of the world; his eyes saw lost love, and his mind was hollow and on fire, like the first man set upon by Prometheus and his promise of wisdom.

The cell phone on his nightstand sighed a sad rag tune a moment after he opened his eyes. Eric wondered if it was his phone that had awakened him from his sleeping thought or if it was just a coincidence that it rang.

“Hello?” he said sleepily.

She tried to speak, but all she could do was sob and gasp.

“Christie?”

Again the unintelligible moaning and cries, with only a few words shot through.

“What is it, honey?”

“I, I, I didn’t want to call you,” she cried. “I didn’t. I wasn’t going to. Really, I wasn’t ever going to tell you.”

“What?”

“I, I can’t,” she said, and then the connection was broken.

In the dark of the room Eric wondered what to do. Should he call her back or just wait until morning? Should he tell her that she’d be better off with Drew, whom she loved and who both loved and needed her?

The cell phone moaned again.

“Hello.”

“I’m pregnant,” she said in a controlled voice. “I told the doctor that I’d only had unprotected sex a day after my period, and he said that sometimes healthy sperm lives on for a week or more waiting for ovulation.”

“Why wouldn’t you tell me?” he asked, biding for time.

“I called Drew. I asked him what I should do.”

“What did he say?”

“He said to come out to Connecticut, that we could get married and he’d raise the baby as his.” She wailed then, crying so loudly that Eric had to hold the phone away from his ear.

It was nine months from Eric’s sixteenth birthday. He would graduate from high school before then. And he would soon be a father. The graduation, his child’s birth—he imagined both of these scenes in the hollow skull of his drawing.

“Eric?”

“Will your baby need you to love its father?” he asked.

“What?”

“A baby needs love, right?” Eric said. “He needs his mother to love him and his father, and he needs his mother and father to love each other.”

“I’ll die if you leave me, Eric.”

“Then why did you call Drew?”

“I’m scared,” she said. “I’m scared and that’s something you don’t understand. I can’t explain it to you because you’re never afraid. Drew understands because he always is.”

Eric realized that the emotion he felt the most often with Christie was shame. He was ashamed because she was like a used textbook for him, something to learn from but not to keep. She studied him so closely that she saw things in him that he never considered. And she shared her knowledge without holding back. She was selfless and transparent, almost invisible to him.

Like air,
he thought.

“What are you afraid of?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she moaned. “Having a baby with no money and no husband. Loving Drew and needing you so deep inside. Do you want me to give the baby up?”

“For adoption?”

“Abortion.”

Eric remembered what Branwyn had said about Elton, Tommy’s father:
Elton had the choice to be with me or not and Tommy didn’t. I couldn’t ask Tommy if he minded if I didn’t have him and if he didn’t have a life to live. No sunshine or sandy beaches. Tommy didn’t even know what a sandy beach was.

“No,” Eric said. “You shouldn’t do that. I mean, the baby needs a life, and Drew wants to love both you and the baby.”

“What about you?” Christie asked.

“I don’t know.”

“I want to have this baby with you,” she said.

“Then we’ll have our baby and raise him to be a man.”

“Or a woman,” Christie added. Her voice was now bright and filled with hope.

Eric wondered what Drew would think when he realized that he was the backup just in case Eric said no.

“Go to sleep, Christie,” Eric said. “I’ll come over in the morning.”

“When?”

“At nine.”

“What about school?”

“I’ll skip it for one day. We can go to the doctor together. And talk about having our baby.”

“I love you,” she said.

“And I love both of you.”

BY THAT TIME
Minas Nolan was leaving for work at ten to seven every morning. He rarely made it home before eleven. He was sleeping four hours a night and did not take vacations or even weekends off. The only time that he and Eric saw each other was between six and ten to seven, when they’d have breakfast together and share the
New York Times.
It was a day-old paper, but they didn’t mind. Reading together was their ritual; the news had little to do with it.