Halfway Home (6 page)

He breathes heavily in the silence that follows, cooling down. There's no more point to breakfast. "Yeah, well I'm sure life sucks all over the place," I declare with a certain numb reserve, "but I don't have room for anyone else's. I'm better off by myself."

We don't move for a moment. It's exactly the same deadlock as last night, when he left the first time. My brother can't help me. There's too much blood under the bridge. And yet I can feel an uneasy flutter in my gut that somehow I've missed the key, or blinked when the answer flashed onscreen. Something about that un-perfect life and the business that got too big too fast. I don't really mean, even now with all the walls up, that he can't unburden himself. Of course I'd listen. Yet I know that's not going to happen now. We've tried this reunion twice, and it's crashed and burned. Only a fool or a pain junkie would try it again.

Brian stands but doesn't clear the table. That's my chore, today as it was a lifetime ago. He strides through the kitchen and out the back door, not waiting this time for me to walk in tandem. I have to bolt to catch up with him in the yard, where he's striding in the sunlight to his car. It's only at the last moment, before he gets in, that he relents and turns to face me. The anger still darkens his Irish cheeks, or is it a kind of torment? Then a rueful smile plays at the corners of his mouth as he speaks.

"You're still my brother, even if you hate me."

It startles me, the sentiment is so twisted. The perfect Irish bottom line. I'm standing with my hands dug in my pockets, and Brian reaches up and swipes at the hair on my forehead, as if he's trying to tame a cowlick. I realize it is a gesture from his life with Daniel, and I understand in that moment that he's a good father, better than ours.

Then he is climbing once again into his car to leave. But this time I am torn, feeling I ought to give him something back. The engine bursts into life, stoked by the morning's charge. He rolls it into a slow reverse, pulling it back from the cypresses. The front wheels crunch on the gravel as he points them out to the coast road. He looks at me one last time.

And I say, "I'll be sticking around for a while." Taking back all I have said about death, its imminence and its stranglehold. I shrug, terribly aware of my spotted torso, but shrugging that part off. "I'm here."

Brian nods. The big Chevy boat goes lumbering down the drive between two rows of oleander. He stops at the road's edge, and I see him crane forward to check for cars. It's clear. A last vague wave in the rearview mirror, and I fling my own hand at the sky. Then he turns and is gone.

Is it relief? Immediately I feel so weirdly light-headed, gliding back over the grass to the house. I know that I've held my own, and for once have given as good as I've gotten. That's the first feeling: a kind of swagger, like I've just walked away from a TKO. I come into the kitchen, and the first thing I see is the pad on the counter, the scribbled address. Pequod Lane in Southport. I'm watching myself for any pangs of loss, but I just seem glad that it's over.

Then into the dining room, and my eyes go right to the Speedo hooked over the window latch, no longer dripping. Here there's a tug in my chest, as if the pouch of the suit still holds the shape of Brian's basket. Again it isn't the thing itself, but the memory of all those jocks and sweat pants tumbled on the floor of the closet in Chester. Still I manage to sail right through, letting it all roll off me. I mount the stairs, delirious with the need to nap, knowing only that I have survived intact. With every hour that goes by, I can feel it, more and more of me will come back. No matter how quick I die, I will live long enough to be an only child again. It's a matter of will, and I am willful if nothing else.

I reach the door to Foo's room, and I'm gazing across the stairwell. I think as I cross over that I'm being a good housekeeper, checking the guest room. The bed is aswirl with the slept-in sheet, the pillow dented and askew. My lips purse, as if I mean to punish that boy for not making his bed. Then I float—there's no other word—drawn and yet strangely dispassionate. I tumble onto the bed, rolling into the sheet, muzzy with sleep already. My face in the pillow can smell Brian, but it's the least sexual thing imaginable. I can't even say the smell transports me back. All I can say is someone else has slept here first, another man. And there is no pain and no regret, not the slightest sense of loss. I sleep a hundred fathoms deep.

For hours.Dreamless and utterly still. It's the downside of the afternoon before I even start flopping about, turning side to side to grope the last pockets of slumber. Most of this is AIDS, of course. You go three or four days at a pretty normal clip, and then the virus requires a minor coma. I wake up dazed as Goldilocks, disoriented by the new room, and vaguely aware that the bears are due back any minute. Guilty; I'm not sure why.

And
sad.
That is the oddest part. I get up and pad out to the balcony, the sun on the water like molten flame, and I want to cry out with loneliness. But I swear it's not Brian. He may have been the catalyst, him and his perfect isosceles of family niceness, yet this one is all my own. For I've never loved anyone all the way through—or maybe it's no one has ever loved me back. You'd think I'd get the direction right, considering this is what scalds the most. I can handle being alone, even dying alone. It's not that I'm desperate for somebody now, or maybe I'm too proud to want it anymore. But the fact that I never really had it, never touched life that deep, I carry around like chronic pain, what they call in the disability biz a preexisting condition.

Till now I have managed to put it out of mind entirely during my two months at the beach. Somehow I gave it a rest, with no one to whine at and no one to pine for. But now I feel like I'm reaching for an actual physical man I can't have, just like I reached for those birds. He is always a foot from my grasp, or standing below on the terrace where Brian stood this morning. I admit I have mixed them up, Brian and the man I have never had.

I don't really mean to see him in icon terms, all buffed like the airhead beauties you pass in Boys' Town, wincing at their blondness. It's not the body I'm aching for anyway. I want to be known. The quirks and the edges, the bumps and the hollows—I want somebody to see it all whole. And I want to have had years of that, even if it has to be over now. And I haven't. All I have had is two months here, six months there, wrestling with men who never quite fit. It's strange, I don't have such a bottomless well of self-pity about my illness, but about the man who never was, the hole in my heart goes all the way to China.

Anyway, I'm perched on Cora's balcony like a gargoyle, feeling sorry. The sun hurts. I don't know what else to do except take it an hour at a time, letting the loneliness leach out till I am simply alone again. I'm staring down at Brian's spot on the terrace, fixed on his absence, because somehow this is the symbol for what I've missed. And suddenly there is a shadow and then a figure, as if my longing has materialized a man. The light's in my eyes, I can't quite see.

"Hullo," says Gray, one arm up to block the sun. "I decided that screen shouldn't wait till Monday."

I laugh. The sheer ordinariness of the remark just about knocks me over. The netherworld of lost men that's seized me in its operatic grip vanishes on the spot. "Let me grab a shirt. I'll be right down."

I spiral down the stairs, yanking on an oversize sweat shirt. Gray is already crouched by one of the parlor windows, his trusty toolbox beside him. He's replacing a rusty latch, pulling the old screws out and filling them with wood glue. He works at all chores with fanatic neatness and marvelous patience. I lean in the archway just behind him, watching. Nothing ever got fixed in my father's house in Chester, unless he could throw a beer bottle at it.

"I have to weed the goldfish pond," says Gray, always making a list in his head. "Brother get off all right?"

"Finally," I reply. "His car wouldn't start. He had to spend the night."

"Nice-looking man." Gray doesn't overstep, any more than he'd ever admit he showed up here today for purposes of gauging the fallout. "I always wished I had an older brother."

"Yes, well they're very overrated. I know they're supposed to tell you all about girls and keep bullies from stealing your marbles. In my case he was too busy pounding my head in the dirt."

He's got the new latch in place, bright steel, biting a screw into the jamb. He grunts with satisfaction. "But doesn't it change, once you grow up?"

"Ah, but I didn't grow up, so there you are."

He's finished. He takes a midget whiskbroom from the toolbox and sweeps up the shavings. The job is perfect. Gray should be in charge of the MX missile. He stands with his box in hand, eyeballs his workmanship one more time, and steps outside. I follow in his wake.

As we head up the grassy slope to the sycamore grove, I'm surprised at how much taller Gray is than I, three inches at least. His rounded shoulders and pulled-in neck make him look much shorter. He never wears sunglasses, so the squint lines around his eyes are deep troughs. Skin very weatherbeaten too, since he wouldn't dream of moisturizing. Still, his face has a craggy noble form, set off by the fine slope of his patrician nose. He reeks of old money.

The sycamores are mostly bare, though the dead leaves cling in clumps on several branches, holding on to the old year. They're budded but won't come into leaf for another month, the closest thing to Connecticut here. We slog through piles of unraked leaves to the evergreen hedge beyond. Nobody's clipped these bushes lately either, so the arched entrance is nearly overgrown. Gray passes through first, holding the branches so they won't switch back in my face. Then we are in the green room.

The hedge, maybe ten feet high, encloses a rectangle of ground on the high end of the bluff, perhaps twenty by forty. In the center is a rectangular pool edged with a coping of granite. The water is black, as if it goes down for miles, with two distinct clusters of water lilies at either end. From one of these springs a yellow flower wide as a man's hand.

Gray kneels on the granite lip and peers in the water under the lilies. Then he reaches in and digs around and pulls out a ghastly clump of root and tendril, covered with brown scum. Gently he pulls it away, detaching it from the lilies. I move closer to see and nearly gasp with delight. For his churning and weeding—he's plunged in again—have sent the fishes racing. Orange and spotted, some two feet long, they whip and circle about in the midnight depths of the pool.

Nobody knows how many there are, but I count eight. A couple have been replaced, but Gray says most have been here since the place was built. Which is why I call this the Chinese garden, because it's all mixed in my head with wizened old philosophers contemplating fish as old as the Ming dynasty. A white-flecked goldfish breaks the surface, showing a flash of tail.

"They won't grow by the ocean, that's what everybody said. And that's why Nonny planted 'em." Gray's voice is mordant as he deposits another load of slop on the pile beside him.

Honestly, it's like watching Mr. Wizard, or an eighth-grade science project: stuff you can find in mud. Gray is completely undaunted as he pokes and fiddles with things. Needless to say, it's a Sisyphean task, keeping up with the breakage and wearing-out of an old house, the overgrown flora of five acres. I don't quite understand why the Baldwin Foundation, the titular owner, doesn't pay for regular upkeep, just to protect the property value. But then I have never figured out the queer adversary relations between Gray and that pile of money. Gray doesn't seem to mind at all being handyman and underwoodsman. I can also see that he likes the company when I trail around after him.

The nasty job is done. There's a grisly pile of roots and muck on either side of him now, and he grumbles that he'll wait for it to dry out before he shovels it up. "Haul it over to the compost," he says, making a mental note for later. He stands, retrieves his toolbox, and we head out of the Chinese garden.

Because I have slept the day away, the sun is already winking at the horizon. As we tramp down the slope from the sycamore grove, I say, "Come down to the beach with me, will you? In case I have another heart attack."

"Well, I gotta wash," he replies, holding up his bare arm, slick with muck from the fish pool. Then he laughs. "Hell, I can wash in the ocean."

We make for the beach stairs. Gray leaves his toolbox under a cactus, and we head down, me first. Behind me Gray asks, "You think he came because you're sick?"

I feel a startled relief that the subject hasn't been dropped. "No, he didn't know that till Mona told him. I don't know why. The Irish get sloppy sentimental sometimes." We're clopping down the stairs at a fair clip. It's easier to talk about this in motion, my back turned. "I didn't really let him talk," I admit, sheepish for me. "I think he wanted to."

"Well, next time," Gray declares briskly.

"Oh no, there won't be any next time. That's all she wrote."

We've reached the bottom, coming off the steps onto the smooth and trackless sand. The tide is inching out, about ten feet away. Gray shucks his Top-siders and rolls his khaki pants to the knee. Without preamble he struts into the shallows, bending down and splashing water up his arms. You can practically see the gooseflesh.

"How cold is it?"

"Nippy," says Gray, cupping his hands and splashing his face. "Foo used to say there's an iceberg off the point."

He turns with a grin, happily wet, then his eyes go wide. For I am already half-undressed, my sweat shirt on the sand, shinnying out of my jeans. I drop my eyes as I drop my shorts, for Gray has never seen me naked. As I trot toward him I can see he wants to tell me not to, but holds his tongue. I'm hollering at the cold when it's still just at my ankles. I take a long stride past him and dive headfirst.

It's unbelievably arctic, a thousand knives. I roar up and out like a whale breaching, my arms flailing the surface. A numbness locks the joints of my bad knee. But I'm not planning to swim anyway, not a stroke. I totter to my feet, fighting the surge of the undertow. I turn and face Gray, about hip deep, and slap my hands over my head like a seal, whooping. Gray still frowns with concern, but he's glad, too. I head in, scrambling through sand that sinks and shifts. I'm chattering with the cold, I can't wait to get out, but I'm delirious from the shock. The sand gets firmer, and I feel like I'm dancing. Panting and roaring with pleasure, I drop to my knees on firm ground.