All Stories Are Love Stories (5 page)

“It was the silliest thing, really.” Franklin's voice sounded tinny and far away, as though he were calling through a tunnel. “Muppet just went completely off her rocker. Did you walk her last night?” They both knew he had. “It's the rain. She hates it when her bows get wet.”

“She tripped you?”

“She didn't
trip
me, Genie,” Franklin huffed. “She's not a seventh grader.”

Gene tried to stay calm. “So you tripped yourself?” He was clenching his fist so hard that the whites of his knuckles shone through.

“No one tripped anyone. There's no one to blame. She was yanking the leash from the moment I snapped it on her, and she just got away from me. Under me. Oh, I don't know.” Franklin suddenly sounded tired. Gene bit his tongue. They both knew that a few successful days on a medication didn't mean that Franklin had any business walking the dog alone. “I just fell, OK?” A beat. “But I want to talk about you!” His voice teetered on the edge of pleading, eager to refocus. “Such news! Start from the beginning. And go slow.”

Gene pictured Franklin sitting at his desk overlooking Union Street and the church across the park, worrying over the books because the staff would have kicked him out of
the inn's kitchen, rubbing their dog in that spot between her silky ears. He wanted to cry out in frustration and residual fear. “How bad is it?”

“It's nothing! Just a mild sprain.”

He had been happy. Franklin wanted him to be happy, to be happy himself. Gene
was
happy; he'd be happy again in a minute. But he was still sick with that initial rush of fear. The news—while not the worst—was just the sort he feared the most.

“What were you doing walking the dog by yourself, anyway?” He knew he sounded like a scold, but he couldn't help himself. “Where was Esmerelda?”

“The woman is entitled to a coffee break,” Franklin shot back, “and Muffin had to
go.
There's no reason why I can't handle a few stairs, especially if the welfare of my Turkish carpets is at stake.”

Gene stifled a sigh, gathering that Franklin had orchestrated an unscheduled furlough as cleverly as usual.

“Stop fussing over me!” Franklin continued, his voice growing more insistent. Like a ripple going through the coat of a dog, the ground shuddered lightly. Muppet, low to the ground and the unlucky recipient of ominous, invisible vibrations that all but the dullest of creatures know too well, leapt from her master's lap and began yapping, annoying them both.

“Did you hear that truck go by? Jesus, it shook the entire house!”

“I don't think it was a truck,” Gene observed. He'd felt something, too. At least they were connected on some level.

“Muppet!” Franklin had covered the phone to yell at her, as if they both weren't familiar with the everyday ways in which the other lost his cool with the dog, or was unsteady on his feet, or worried too much. “Jesus! That dog. God! It's been such a weird day. Hey, did you hear about the sea lions?”

“What?”

“They're on the move. Migrating, apparently, down Third Street.”

Gene didn't answer. He was standing under a dripping overhang, realizing how cold he suddenly was. Tired, too.

“I can come home.”

“Don't come home. Smelsmerelda's here until five. She promised not to leave my side for a minute,” he grumbled.

Gene tried to smile but couldn't. Poor Esmerelda. Franklin had objected to her sight unseen, and he'd practically preened with self-righteous indignation when she turned out to be even worse than he'd thought. Weighing in at a hundred pounds more than Franklin's Queen Anne chairs could safely take, Esmerelda Duchamp had materialized in November shortly after his diagnosis and their insurance company's noxious and formidable response to their need for part-time home support, at least until the doctors found the right cocktail of meds to keep Franklin from overly aggressive relapses. He could complain all he wanted about letting the “obsequious, entirely too fresh-faced” Ernie manage the inn while he was stuck upstairs in his “sulfurous reality” with the “unfortunate spawn of a French-Mexican union”—though, to be fair, Franklin was generally disgusted by any hint of heterosexual passion. Still, despite Franklin's
misgivings, Esmerelda won Gene's heart her second day on the job, when Franklin decided he'd sneak downstairs to the kitchen while she was in the bathroom. He made it all the way to the first-floor landing, only to lose his balance and fall down the last six steps. She carried a squawking Franklin back upstairs, cleaned him up, closed the gash on his forehead with Steri-Strips, and called the paramedics and Gene. Gene rushed home to a grudgingly beatific Franklin resting in bed, his caretaker as unruffled as she had been when she rolled in that morning with coffee and croissants for the two of them. Gene could have kissed her on the mouth, her Gallic taste for raw garlic and her equally Gallic insistence that she have it every day for lunch be damned.

He suddenly couldn't wait to be home.
Even red-roofed buildings and manicured courtyards look gloomy in this weather
, Gene thought, watching dripping undergraduates run by and thinking of the inn and the rain running off its gables; the woodsy, sweet smell that permeated it ever since the day he'd walked in there almost a decade ago. Especially on cooler afternoons, when the heat was on and maybe one of the guests had a fire going. It was hard to get warm when it was cold in California. But the inn was draft free, full of blankets and inviting landings. Sometimes Gene wondered if he'd fallen in love first with the man or the beautiful house he'd created. Franklin would have fresh flowers there as he did every day, thanks to a twenty-year business friendship with the florist across the street, and the sight of them would relieve Gene's anxiety in a way no reassurances over the phone possibly could.

“Tell me about the sea lions.”

“Well . . .” Franklin launched eagerly into a long and muddled news story he'd been following about weird sea lion behavior and relocation, which told Gene that he'd been feeling bad enough not to go out all day and was stuck watching local news on a loop. “The last time they left Pier 39 was in '89, right around the time of the quake. Hey, we should go see them! Do you think they're proceeding one by one, or in pairs?”

“Definitely in pairs.”

Franklin laughed. “Always the scientist, ready with a hypothesis.”

Gene felt himself smiling. “True.” There was a pause. “Are you really OK?”

“I'm fine,” Franklin insisted too quickly. “How are
you
? What was that ‘Call me now!' voicemail all about?”

“I'll tell you later. Right now I'm worried.”

“Stop it. Tell me. We could both use some good news.”

“I'll be home after my next class.”

Franklin swore at no one in particular. “It's just a sprained wrist, for Christ's sake. Nothing's broken.” But his resistance was waning, meaning he really was badly shaken. Gene wished he could go immediately. He wracked his brain for the right thing to say. There must be some kind of comfort he could offer.

“You tell that little rat that she's in for it when I get home,” he said, picking up the ball Franklin had tried so hard to put into play and lobbing it lightly back. “Tell her I'm stopping at the muzzle store on the way.” He kept himself from urging
Franklin not to worry about the special dinner he was all set to prepare in the painfully narrow galley that passed as their upstairs kitchen—it would ruin Franklin's day if he did. Still. “And I wanted to surprise you, but I got us reservations at that new place on Green, Chez Turtleneck or whatever it is.”

He could hear the delight in Franklin's voice. “How could you possibly?”

Well, he hadn't. But he would, even if it cost him a few hundred dollars in bribe money. It was worth it. “News of my greatness has reached even the farthest corners of the city.”

Franklin laughed again, enjoying it this time.

They chatted excitedly about the restaurant and the tease of good news until, a few minutes later, Gene could bear to end the call.

He ducked into the CoHo for a quick lunch, though he wasn't all that hungry. Franklin wanted so badly to feel normal, to not live his disease. Although Gene felt the devastation of it as keenly as if it were in his own body, it wasn't. It was Franklin's body and Franklin's sickness, and Franklin's choices and desires directed how they dealt with it—at least when they were together. Alone, Gene supposed he was free to react as he wished. But there was only so much crying in very public university bathrooms that a lecturer hoping for a more permanent job could do.

The café was warm and smelled comforting, despite the press of young bodies in dampened layers. He smiled at the girl who took his order at the counter and tucked a bill and change into her tip jar before spotting an empty seat against the wall. He wedged himself into it with his mug of
hot soup and baguette. He was never going to get through his afternoon class. He took a swig of the steaming liquid and burned his mouth.

He was no good at this.

Franklin was the caretaker, the sensitive one, the one who tended to every manner of guest from every corner of the world and found the one little detail that would make each of them feel comfortable enough to sleep away from home. Gene was the cerebral one: the distracted, obsessive scholar who for months at a time came home only to fall asleep over his books or papers, his coffee always in close proximity, half-drunk and cold.

In recent months, he'd learned to make a decent breakfast for two—a developmental milestone, Franklin called it—change sheets, help Franklin to bed. But while Franklin allowed that it was high time someone waited on
him
for a change, without his usual bustling rhythms to energize him he'd grown pale and petulant, irritated all the more when Gene tried to distract him. It used to be that Franklin would wake nearly buzzing with anticipation for his day, chatting with a dozing Gene about who was staying with them and from where and why before going downstairs to lord over his domain. These days, Franklin slept through his alarm more often than not, and if he lasted through breakfast with guests, he'd be crawling up the stairs before lunch, facing an afternoon of total exhaustion.
If only
, Gene thought, and not for the first time,
I'd turned out more like my mother
, a woman who turned her keen intuition and patience into a career as a highly skilled nurse. Unfortunately, he was his father's child
through and through: inward and inflexible. Gene gulped down more scalding soup, so lost in thought that he felt rather than tasted the hot liquid go down. His father had regretted how much his son resembled him, too.

Hans Strauss—or Harry, as he insisted his American neighbors call him—had fled his native Bavaria to avoid the sort of social stigmas he found intolerable. Hans rarely spoke of the home he'd left, but from what Gene could gather, his father had been the older of two sons born to traditional Bavarian Catholic parents in a traditional Bavarian Catholic home. Hans was the typical older brother: straitlaced, hyper-responsible, and orderly to a fault. His younger brother, Georg, had been everything Hans was not. And, after a lifetime of taking advantage of their meek father and his minor fortune, Georg had squandered the last of the family funds in a final drunken frenzy that ended in his drowning in the pond behind their parents' home. Instead of enabling his family to bury the shame associated with Georg, along with the man himself, his death seemed only to seal off any chance he might have had to redeem himself. Very quickly, the family's sense of disgrace over his life became inescapable. As Gene's father put it, “There are certain acceptable ways to live”—meaning, of course, that there were also certain unacceptable ways to live—“and a soul who does not adhere to them is damned forever.” His father was one of the only people Gene had ever met who truly believed that a person could will himself to lead another life, if he just tried hard enough.

So Hans fled his homeland and disconsolate parents for
the kind of dream of perfection one can only hatch from afar. He landed on American soil with a student visa to study engineering at Kansas State, and from that moment turned his back on anything and everyone who reminded him of the self-indulgent, irresponsible brother whose actions hung over Hans like a ghostly malediction. He met Gene's mother, Anna Linder, while they were both still in school, and it wasn't long before he had a family to suit the life he created: a good wife and a smart son. There was no alcohol in their home, no hidden pornography. Every night for the seventeen years they lived together, Gene watched his father walk in from his job as a quality engineer at All American Autoparts by six o'clock every night, and, until she died of ovarian cancer when Gene was thirteen, give his wife a single, somber kiss on the cheek by way of greeting. Every meal was planned ahead of time and included a modest amount of meat, microwaved vegetables, and boiled potatoes or sliced bread. The soul-soaring joy of Gene's favorite dessert—chocolate layer cake with fine crumb and inches of frosting—was something he rarely got to enjoy. Gene's mother usually served canned fruit or made fruit-sweetened apple pies, the bottom crusts drenched in their own unabsorbed juices. His father ate them methodically and cleared his plate, as he did with anything his wife served, and in his spare time he joined the Knights of Columbus and taught woodworking classes at the local hardware store. Until Gene hit puberty, the three of them lived like dolls in a house whose front wall had never been built, their perfect American family always readied for inspection. It seemed that his father had achieved the
impossible: left his worst secrets behind him on another continent, as if they were physical things that could not travel.

When his mother died, Gene watched, devastated and fascinated, as his father went back to work the Monday after her funeral. He held down the same job, returned home every night at the same time, and managed to keep the shell of his former life intact. On the night Gene left home for college, scheduled to be on a 9 p.m. flight to Northwestern University by way of Chicago, his father had still come in at six, hung up his coat, ate his dinner, and changed his shoes before driving his son to the airport. Four years later, when Gene related the news that he would be going to UC Berkeley for graduate school instead of returning home, Hans had simply asked if he needed any money. Gene hadn't. He'd been on full scholarship since his freshman year, and his doctoral work would be subsidized. Hans had seemed relieved. Not because he didn't have any money to offer, but because his parental obligations seemed, finally, to be over.