Jennifer Haigh (18 page)
Authors: Condition
Jane Frayne was different. Loving her might actually save him.
It seemed worth a try.
He waited. The computer was old and slow, the dial-up connection unreliable. He heard a scratching at the door. The dog had followed him downstairs. She approached him, tail wagging, and allowed her ears to be scratched.
"What's the matter?" he asked."Are you lonely?"
Jackie O. whimpered. She was a social creature, spoiled in puppyhood. Penny had acquired her from a neighbor the summer they'd met, and lavished her with so much attention that the dog became slightly neurotic.
Our baby
, Penny called her—not knowing, then, that a real baby was already in the works, that a cluster of cells soon to be known as Sabrina was multiplying and dividing, the early arithmetic ticking away like a stock counter, marking off the last minutes of their youth.
They'd met on a camping trip the spring Scott dropped out of Stirling. He had fled the campus under cover of night, having spent his tuition money on an aging Pontiac Sunbird and a large quantity of marijuana, which his townie friend Magic Dave had packed loosely into a Wonder Bread wrapper and double-bagged for freshness. For three days Scott drove in a straight line westward, that wonderful bag, that bag of Double Wonder, stashed beneath the passenger seat. He slept a night in Buffalo, Wyoming, then drove the last forty miles to Yellowstone, where he planned to meet up with some buddies on spring break. He never found them. The park was as wide as New Hampshire. Scott had spent his whole life in New England; nature was Cape Cod, its cottages and clam shacks; Walden Pond, an oasis in the suburbs. The high empty plains spooked him. The landscape seemed haunted and mournful. He felt, and was, a thousand miles away from the mess he'd left at school—the dean who had it in for him, the irate phone calls from his father, the weepy disappointment of Jane Frayne who, unmoved by his crapulous groveling, vowed never to see him again.
In March the park was virtually deserted. He hiked a day and a half before he saw the smoke of a campfire. By then his feet were blistered, his water supply nearly exhausted. He'd shivered all night in his summer-weight sleeping bag.
He approached the campsite, two dilapidated tents pitched at the top of a hill. A girl crouched before the fire. "Hello!" he called in a friendly tone; alone in the wilderness, she would be scared of strangers.
"Can I borrow your fire?"
The girl stood. She wore blue jeans and a bikini top. Her head was wrapped in a blue bandanna; two yellow braids trailed down her back. Mixed in with the fire smell he caught a whiff of marijuana.
"Sure," she said."Come on up."
He scrambled up the hill, his blistered feet burning. The girl sat on her haunches poking at the fire, the nub of a joint pinched between her fingers. Scott squatted next to her and watched her exhale.
In a moment he understood why she wore so little: the fire gave off a blistering heat. He took his own joint from his pocket and they passed it between them, drawing heroic breaths.
What did they talk about that night? For the life of him, he couldn't recall. He remembered only how slowly she spoke, how relaxed and reflective and content she seemed. How unlike Jane Frayne, who spoke in whole paragraphs and slept five hours a night, yet refused to temper her manic energy by chemical means. Pot made her paranoid, she said, and beer was a waste of calories. To Scott, who got high once or twice a day, this seemed an irreparable defect in their relationship, her unwillingness to follow him into the place where he was most completely himself. That night, staring into the fire next to Penny Cherry, he saw this with utter clarity, and decided he'd been right to leave. There was no turning back.
They squatted by the fire until his thighs ached. He noticed, but did not care, that sweat was running down his back, soaking his cotton turtleneck. Penny noticed too."Take off your shirt," she told him, and he did, a little self-consciously. Three and a half semesters of beer and college food had padded his torso. This girl was lean as a deer, a wild creature. Men's jeans (whose? he wondered) hung low on her hips.
It was full dark when the others arrived. They brought fresh trout for the night's supper—caught out of season, pounds of slippery contraband. Scott watched them in hushed awe, like wildlife glimpsed through his binoculars. They were tanned, handsome people in boots and battered jeans. The females were wide eyed, long haired, unadorned. The largest male had a web of paisley tattoos snaking down his forearms; the others lacked distinctive markings, but appeared fast and strong. Scott looked for mated pairs, but the arithmetic eluded him: three girls, including Penny, and four guys. They assembled the dinner in cooperative fashion, with affectionate touching all around. A squat Mexican kissed each girl's mouth. Scott kept his eyes on Penny, to determine whose she might be.
Anybody's, he decided. But after the fish was eaten, a bottle of whiskey and then another joint passed, it was Scott's hand she'd taken, Scott she had led, silently, deep into the woods.
She was a California girl, born in North Hollywood—a dump back then, she said, but an easy drive to Burbank, where her father, Whizzer Dooley, worked as a TV stuntman. He appeared mainly in a detective series called
Vegas Jack
, but he had done movies too. (Penny rattled off a list of titles:
Death Rangers, Rage on Wheels, The San Antonio Outlaws—
but only one,
The French Connection
, was familiar to Scott.)
Whizzer had doubled for Robert Wagner, James Garner, and once—famously—for Steve McQueen, whom people said he resembled.
Penny's mother, a former Miss Fresno County, had been Whizzer's high school sweetheart. They'd come to Hollywood in the late sixties, when Penny's older sister was just a baby—to the scorn of both their families, who called Whizzer a dreamer and a deadbeat and his wife a ninny who was throwing her life away with both hands. Whizzer proved them wrong by finding work immediately, on the set of
Ve
gas Jack
. The director loved Whizzer, who was not merely fearless but young and good looking. His resemblance to the show's star made shooting a breeze. Whizzer enhanced the effect by bleaching his hair and growing a handlebar mustache. "Vegas Jack!" a little boy once cried, pointing to him in the street.
Penny was seven when Whizzer left, for what she called "the usual reasons": somebody had screwed somebody, or was thought to have done so. She was the last in the family to see him alive. She was walking home from the school bus stop when she saw his lemon yellow Chevelle pull out of the driveway. The windows were down, AM radio blasting. Whizzer seemed not to see her as he threw the car into gear. "Hi, Daddy!" she called, holding aloft her lunch box in a clumsy wave.
The car rolled past her—then, abruptly, squealed to a stop.
Whizzer stepped out and ambled toward her, his hair wild, his face red.
He wore a pink plaid shirt that was Penny's favorite, with pearly snaps down the front. These details she would remember forever. They were hers and hers alone, like the velvet-lined box of rhinestone jewelry she kept under her bed, a plastic ballerina twirling inside.
"Hey, baby," he said, a little breathless, and scooped her into his arms. He had not shaved; his rough neck was warm and tangy, the beery smell she loved. Over his shoulder she saw the car packed full with boxes, his guitar case, and what looked like ( but couldn't be, oh no) the family Ping-Pong table folded in half. The gaping trunk was secured with rope.
Where are you going?
she didn't ask.
I'm leaving you forever
, he did not answer.
I will call you once, next year on Christmas, and give your mother a phone number that will soon be disconnected. I will race cars and live with a dancer in Nevada who, after I drive into a wall at a hundred twenty miles an hour, will send you a box of worthless crap that will tell you nothing about why I left, nothing at all.
"You're so pretty," he said instead."Never cut your hair."
She watched him get into the car. The door didn't close the first time; he reopened it and slammed it harder. Driving away, he stretched his left arm out the open window, as if he meant to pull her along behind him. He turned at the corner and was gone.
There were stepfathers. Henry Cherry was a widower with five blond sons. He had come to town on business; Penny's mother met him at the steak house where she'd been hired for her looks. Soon they moved into Cherry's sprawling ranch house on the outskirts of Boise, a lowslung place on six flat acres of grass. Penny and her sister had their own bedrooms; the five blond boys slept in bunk beds in a single large room down the hall. (Years later, Penny's mother told her the reason: to prevent them from touching themselves. A boy with his own room would have his hands down there all the time.)
In Idaho they heard services, and did chores. Penny picked vegetables from the garden, fed chickens, and gathered eggs. In North Hollywood her mother had been a casual housekeeper: toast crumbs on the counter, blue toothpaste misfires in the sink. Now, at Relief Society meetings, she learned pickling and preserving. Cherry's first wife had amassed a large collection of canning equipment, Ball jars boiled dull and smooth.
To Penny, who had recently eaten crackers for dinner, the transformation was alarming. She retreated to the hills behind the Cherry house with Benji, the youngest of her blond stepbrothers, a boy who scarcely spoke but could climb like a goat. Benji had been left back in school and was called slow, but he knew the names of trees and flowers, the scat of deer, antelope, and moose. Benji could identify bear tracks, start a fire without matches. He saw the shapes of constellations, the warriors and goddesses hidden in the stars.
Benji?
The name reminded Scott of a movie he'd seen as a child, the misadventures of a scruffy little dog.
Penny was not amused.
He saved me
, she swore with surprising vehemence. It was Benji who'd kept her company until her mother's marriage collapsed—for reasons Penny didn't know, but could guess.
She told Scott this—all this!—in their first night together. At the time it had fascinated him, the twists and turns of the story, its exotic locales. Soon, though, there was a burden in so much knowing. This strange girl confiding her heartbreaks, her childhood terrors, believing him the first man who would not fail her.
He was nineteen years old.
That summer they rented an apartment at the beach in La Jolla, where Penny found a job in a surf shop. They bought a VCR and rented a copy of
The French Connection
, a film she had never seen. Together they watched the credits scroll past, the names of stuntmen long retired or, like her father, violently killed. Twice, three times Penny rewound the tape, but no Whizzer Dooley was listed in the credits.
About that, about everything, her father had lied.
Scott stared at his computer screen. Lycos had returned half a dozen hits for Jane Frayne, including the Web site of her production company, Plain Jane Films, located in Brooklyn, New York.
What was a production company, exactly? He wasn't entirely sure. Still, he was impressed.
At that moment he heard a sudden commotion overhead: a rumble of footfalls, a sudden thud.
Mom, Ian's in the way!
His own chaotic life asserting itself.
"Scott!" Penny called. "Can you get up here? I only have two hands."
After eleven years he could still be amazed by his wife's voice, which cut like a buzz saw through the flimsy walls and floors. He got up wearily from his chair.
You got one chance in this life, he reflected, one precious chance.
He had blown his years ago, on the tree-shaded campus of Stirling College, too dense to understand that every door in life was open to him.
He had made his choices. Now he was thirty years old, and all the doors were closed.
chapter 3
Tom and Richard served sushi for dinner. The delicate bundles of rice and fish were stacked in pyramids on lacquered trays. The dinner was served buffet style in the large living room; the men filled their square plates and repaired to the dining room, where calligraphed place cards were set. Billy McKotch examined his closely, impressed by its delicacy. He knew Tom's usual handwriting, the cramped block printing typical of architects. That these graceful letters had come from the same hand seemed a small miracle.
"Aren't they precious? Tom was feeling
Oriental
," Richard drawled. He'd come to New York from Alabama thirty years ago, and had become more Southern with each passing year. His partner Tom Kim had taken a sushi-making class at the New School; he'd spent the afternoon chopping cucumbers into matchstick-size pieces, rolling dried seaweed on bamboo mats. Richard had shopped for the sake, the jasmine-scented tea, the coconut sorbet for dessert.
Among Billy's friends, Tom and Richard entertained most often.
They lived on Park Avenue in a classic four/five owned by Richard's old boyfriend Harry, who'd died back in the eighties. Harry had inherited the place from his stepmother, a friend of Brooke Astor; he'd sold it to Richard on his deathbed for the price of fifty dollars—a matter of convenience, simpler than making a will.
The men arranged themselves around the antique table, also from Harry's estate. (Welcome
to Tom, Dick, and Harry's
, Richard sang when opening the door to guests.) Billy wondered how Tom could stand it, his life furnished with his predecessor's treasures.
It would make me crazy
, he confided to Srikanth. To which Sri responded:
Tom is an architect
.
He appreciates beautiful things.
Of the four couples, three lived on the Upper East Side. The fourth, Oscar and Eddie, had a loft in the west thirties, a cavernous space that doubled as Oscar's photography studio. The composition of the group had changed over the years, as the men coupled and uncoupled. Before Eddie, Oscar had lived with a cartoonist named Raj, known to Srikanth by some mysterious Dosco connection. It was Raj who'd brought Sri and Billy into the group. Raj had since moved to San Francisco, but Sri and Billy remained regulars at the dinner parties. To Billy these men were closer than family. They were his dearest friends.
"That's all you're eating?" Nathan asked, eyeing Billy's plate of sushi."Didn't you run fifty miles today?"
"Nope," Billy said. "I don't start training for Boston until January. I've been sleeping late and eating like a pig." He'd finished the New York Marathon in three hours and two minutes, a personal best.
Except for easy jogs through Battery Park at lunchtime, he hadn't run since the race.
Nathan's eyes narrowed."Do I believe you?"
Billy grinned. He knew that Nathan and Jeremy considered his training schedule compulsive.
Don't take it personally
, Sri would tell him later.
They're just practicing their profession.
"I'm fine, Nathan," said Billy. "Hey, take it easy on that coconut.
Full of saturated fat." When Sri chastised him later, he would protest:
I was only practicing mine.
"This is so civilized," Eddie said, sipping his tea."God, I wish
we
had a dining room."
Billy glanced across the table at Sri, who wore a sly smile. They would laugh about it later, how their friends talked of nothing but apartments. For a long time Billy had found these conversations fascinating, the myriad ways people—gay people—lived in the city. Tonight, though, the conversation depressed him: rent control, condo fees, the impossibility of finding an honest contractor. The dialogue unchanging, year after year. His friends were not vacuous people. They were well read and well traveled; they did interesting work. Richard was a literary agent, Nathan and Jeremy psychotherapists, Eddie a classics professor at Hunter. Yet when the group convened, they spoke mainly of real estate, as though the rooms they lived in mattered as much as—perhaps more than—what transpired inside them.
It was Srikanth who'd opened this world to Billy, with his vast network of friends and acquaintances and, Billy suspected, past lovers.
He didn't ask whether this was true, and Sri never volunteered the information; such revelations didn't suit his oblique style. As Sri's boyfriend, Billy was invited to gay brunches and housewarmings, seders and Easter buffets. He saw the insides of gay brownstones, medicine chests with his-and-his razors, the elegant bedrooms where men slept side by side. He was touched, profoundly, by the everydayness, the intimate banality of these shared lives. At the same time he sensed unspoken reproach. Of all their friends, he and Sri were the only couple who did not cohabit. Though he spent every night at Billy's, Sri had kept his apartment on Riverside Drive. A matter of convenience, Billy told anyone who asked. To which Sri, the presumptive beneficiary of this convenience—Sri who each morning schlepped ninety-eight blocks across town to Columbia, who spent twenty grand a year renting an apartment he never used—simply smiled.
That smile was an invitation to discussion, one Billy chose to decline. There were certain conversations he didn't wish to have. These included, but were not limited to, religion, past sexual partners, and the price of anything. (He'd been raised to consider such discussions crude.) And, of course, his family. Above all, he disliked talking about the future. He had only just gotten comfortable in the present.
"Billy?"Tom was speaking, smiling quizzically, and Billy realized he'd been asked a question.
"Tom invited us for Christmas Eve," Sri murmured.
"Oh. Sorry." Billy colored. "That sounds great, but I'll be at my mother's in Boston."
A sudden silence.
"Well, I'm free," said Srikanth."I'd love to come."
Glances were exchanged around the table, or maybe they weren't; Billy was aware of his tendency toward paranoia. He knew that he and Sri, their separate holidays and apartments, were a topic of much speculation; that his friends considered him
closeted
, a term he found silly, antiquated, and, in this case, wholly inaccurate. In the past week, he and Sri had attended a wedding and two holiday parties; to their friends and colleagues they were a very public couple. When it came to family, Billy simply opted for privacy. That he'd never met Sri's parents—his mother was dead, his father aged and senile and in a nursing home in London—provided additional justification: the relationship was perfectly symmetrical. Billy suspected that many couples, given the choice, would prefer a life without in-laws. In this way he and Sri were luckier than most.
He had developed, over the years, a way of managing his family, a protocol he thought of, privately, as the System. He phoned his mother twice a week. For Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Mother's Day he traveled to Concord; each October Paulette spent a weekend with him in New York. The System prevented surprises, which Billy detested; it kept Paulette's expectations—and his own guilt—in check. The rest of his family demanded less attention. He spoke with Gwen every other weekend; Scott, approximately never. For years his brother had been unreachable, with California addresses that changed every few months, phone numbers disconnected faster than Billy could write them down. Thus his System had evolved without taking Scott into account.
For most of Billy's life, his father had required no management whatsoever; Frank had spent Billy's childhood and adolescence sequestered in the lab. But lately the old man had made friendly overtures—phone calls, invitations to lunch—which Billy found distressing. Unlike Paulette, Frank didn't shrink from asking personal questions. More conversations Billy didn't wish to have.
Of his family, only Gwen knew about Srikanth. Billy had not told her; she'd found out due to circumstances beyond his control.
Two years ago, driving back to New York from a Pearse class reunion, he'd fallen asleep at the wheel and totaled his car on I-95, a week before the Boston Marathon (this fact was more devastating than his broken ribs). A card in his wallet had listed Gwen's name and phone number; she'd flown in immediately from Pittsburgh to make sure he was okay. He'd been asleep, zonked on painkillers, when she rushed to his hospital room and found Sri at his bedside. Billy wondered, often, what the two had said to each other. He'd never worked up the nerve to ask.
Now, sitting around the dinner table with his friends, he sensed, and resented, the unspoken censure. He was a failure as a gay man, a traitor to the tribe. He could redeem himself only by surrendering his dignity in grand fashion, confiding the most intimate details of his life to all who knew him, whether or not they cared. A vulgar confessional, cheesy and narcissistic; such a display, Billy felt, would be demeaning to all concerned. Self-revelation was not the Drew way. It was a lesson he'd absorbed from his maiden aunt Martine, about whom he'd always harbored suspicions. Martine shared a house in Taos with two other aspiring Georgia O'Keefes, yet felt no need to explain herself. Billy had never met anyone more self-involved than his father and Scott, more uptight than his mother and Gwen. He saw no reason to burden them with information they certainly didn't want to hear.
That summer, at a birthday party, he'd been tag-teamed by Nathan and Jeremy, the two psychotherapists, who'd suggested a few sessions of family counseling for Billy and his parents. His first response was laughter—the mental image tickled him. A moment later he was furious. Nathan had chalked this up to arrogance—
Typical physician!
You refuse to think beyond the medical model.
But Billy's objections ran deeper. Heterosexuals were allowed their privacy: if he'd had a girlfriend, no one would care whether he introduced her to his parents.
But because Billy was gay, Nathan's arguments had a moralistic tone, as though simple discretion were a betrayal of homosexuals everywhere.
Billy found this idea ludicrous.
Thousands of gay men have come out to their families
, he told Nathan,
and it hasn't done a thing for me.
I see
, Nathan said dryly.
So it's every fag for himself.
Exactly
, Billy said. He'd spent his childhood in a state of unease, forced to play on sports teams; the experience had taught him that he wasn't a joiner. He had registered to vote as an Independent (another fact his friends found shocking). He didn't feel, or want to feel, solidarity with anyone.
Gwen phoned the week before Christmas—a Sunday morning at eleven thirty, her usual time to call. They'd settled into this habit long ago, before Billy's car accident had outed him to his sister.
He'd been unattached then, his social life more complicated, and late morning was a discreet hour: it allowed them both to avoid asking, or answering, indelicate questions about what each had done, or not done, the night before.
Billy imagined Gwen in her sunny kitchen, the windows so crowded with plants that from the street, the apartment resembled a greenhouse. The one time he'd visited her—four years ago? five?—he'd found all those plants a little creepy, their broad leaves pressed against the glass like splayed hands, pleading for rescue. He could picture her now, drinking her tea in striped pajamas that looked, and perhaps were, made for a little boy. Billy himself lay sprawled on the sofa, the Sunday
Times
spread out before him, the remains of breakfast—flaky croissants from a new bakery Srikanth had discovered—littering the coffee table.
"I'm flying out Wednesday," Gwen explained."Dad's meeting me at the airport."
"I thought you were renting a car." Billy moved to clear the table—he hated a mess—but Sri beat him to it. He brushed the crumbs onto a tray and carried the jam-sticky plates to the kitchen.
"I am," Gwen said."But there's all that road construction in Boston. The Big Dig."
"It's not finished?"
"Next year, I guess. Anyway, Dad wants me to follow him back to Cambridge. He's afraid I'll get lost again." The year before, mystified by endless detours, Gwen had spent two hours circling the city. Finally, in desperation, she'd called Frank from a rest area on the Mass Pike.
When Billy heard of her misadventure, he'd been livid. It was just like their father to let Gwen wander a labyrinthine city—reduced now to a massive construction site—at rush hour, among the most aggressive drivers in the world. In Billy's view, New York cabbies were courtly by comparison.
"That's not a bad idea," Billy said grudgingly. For once the old man was thinking of someone besides himself.
"Hey, why don't you meet me there?" Gwen said this with elaborate casualness, as though the idea had just occurred to her. More likely she'd pondered it for weeks."Dad's dying to see you."
"I doubt that," he said sourly, though he knew she was right.
Their father had always favored him. It was one of many failings Billy held against him.
"Oh, come on. Just for a day. A day and a night. Then we can drive to Mom's."
"I don't think so."
"I already told him you were coming," said Gwen.
"You did what?"
Sri returned from the kitchen, fished the crossword from the pile of newspaper. Billy made room for him on the couch.