Denial (13 page)

My attention is immediately drawn to the sound from a printer in the corner, which is spitting out blueprints. I ask him what the plans are for. “It's a blueprint for a very large building. We do
everything on CAD [computer-aided design] now,” he tells me.

I am relieved that there is something being designed and produced here. There is something for my mind to catch hold of. Details of other people's lives always tether me. To have one's attention held—to be fully engaged in anything—relieves this floaty feeling, which is painfully annoying. It is like being stuck between earth and heaven, not quite alive but also not dead, accessible to neither people nor angels.

Simon answers my questions about how long he's been in business and who his clients are, and asks if I know a government-office building in Central Square where he has a new contract requiring his staff to acquire security clearances.

Eventually we turn to the business at hand. He has heard from my research assistant that I am writing a book about victims and perpetrators that is partly about Brian Beat.

Without being asked, he tells me right away, “I don't believe Beat raped anyone. I'm quite certain of it,” he adds.

“Why are you so certain?” I ask.

“I don't want to go into all the details,” he says, apparently imagining that the intimate details of his life or the life of his dead friend would be boring to a stranger. I want to urge him on; I am never bored by people's life stories, or by the stories they tell themselves. But I restrain myself, confining myself to one question.

“Was Brian Beat gay?” I ask, puzzled by Simon's caginess.

“No, I'm sure he wasn't gay.” Again, Simon doesn't hesitate.

“Well—I can't speak for what happened when he was in prison. But he wasn't gay when I knew him,” Simon adds, unnecessarily.

Once again, I am aware of the strong planes of Simon's face, as if an architect had a hand in designing his features. The planes have softened with age, and there is that whiff of sensuality about his mouth, apparently renounced in favor of propriety. In this altered state, which I've been in before, I can feel my
way—as if my mind had fingers, as if his features were a form of braille—into what I imagine is my interlocutor's character.

Oddly enough, when I am in this altered state, my interlocutors bare their souls. The communication between us is a life raft in a wild river, as if both of us would drown if we didn't speak. My job is to ask, their job to tell. It feels to me, in interviews like this one, that if I don't ask (with or without words), if they don't answer, we will drag each other down in a sea of fear. I cannot control whether I enter this altered state, but it almost always happens when I'm interviewing terrorists.

Here I see propriety softened by the sadness of unmet expectations. In place of those expectations I sense kindness, acceptance. There is a hint of shame in the corners of his mouth, which you might not notice right away, distracted by the handsome planes of his cheeks. I note these fleeting observations, and I place them aside. Even though I've been through this before, at some level I know that these judgments might reflect my own prejudices. I will let Simon's story unfold in his words, at his pace.

“I was living out of state at the time he was accused. But I have a hard time imagining…We dated the same girls. A lot of them. It was the period of, you know, sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Not necessarily in that order.

“I've had no contact with him to speak of since I was twenty-one,” he tells me, “other than seeing him on the street.”

“You mean when he was a street person?” I ask.

“Yes,” he confirms, his eyes looking out now at some horizon, some sad memory.

“You never met Brian?” he asks.

“No,” I say.

In this moment I have fully inhabited his sadness, the sadness of observing a close friend throw his life away.

A minute later I am shocked to realize what I have done: I just lied. Worse still, I fully believed the lie in the moment I ut
tered it. I am a reporter here, not a victim of rape, certainly not the victim of this Brian we're discussing. Now I begin to watch myself more closely, wanting to avoid inadvertently lying again, wanting to avoid inadvertently revealing more than I intend. I will correct this lie, I tell myself, at the first opportunity.

“How old were you when you met him?” I ask.

“We moved to Milbridge when I was in third grade. We were very good friends from the time we were eight years old. We went to school together until high school. I went to Milbridge High. He went to high school in Worcester, to an agricultural school. A surprising choice for him. He was extremely bright, extremely entrepreneurial,” Simon explains.

“What do you mean by entrepreneurial?” I ask.

“You never met him…,” he says. And I interject. “Actually, I did. I completely forgot about it. I met him, very briefly, a long time ago.”

On a track of his own, he lets this go by, as if it didn't matter. Or maybe he already knows the actual source of my curiosity about his childhood friend. Perhaps it is easier to imagine that I didn't know Brian. In any case, I didn't know the Brian he is describing.

He continues. “One summer we bought root beer and sold it on the street. We each made around a thousand dollars. Another time we bought several hundred ears of corn, and we walked door to door to sell it. We made a hundred to two hundred dollars per week.

“He was a risk taker. Very curious. Always wanting to try something new. He would often get into quote/unquote ‘trouble.' There was a river near our houses. We trapped muskrats to sell the fur. When the ice starting breaking up, we would use icebergs as a boats, travel down the river that way.”

“Do you think he might have been sexually abused by a priest?” I ask.

Simon doesn't seem surprised by the question, and he has a ready answer.

“No. It's the sort of thing he would have told me about. I'm sure he would have told me if he were,” he says.

I wonder to myself, How can he be so confident?

“And anyway, he went to church in grammar school and middle school, but he stopped going by the time he got to high school. His mother wanted him to go, but he always found a way out of it.”

“It might have happened when he was really young,” I suggest. “When he was at that Catholic elementary school. And it isn't the sort of thing that kids necessarily talked about back then. You would have had to be really close. Were you really that close?” I ask.

I have a slightly heady feeling—as if we have switched to a different atmospheric plane, where the normal social rules don't apply. The way you might ask impertinent but crucial questions when you are speaking to someone who is about to die. Will he be annoyed?

He seems surprised rather than annoyed, as if he had never thought about this, but also persuaded. “I guess you're right,” he says. “But I still think I would have known if the priest at Saint Roch's was abusing boys. Everyone in the neighborhood was Catholic. And I used to see the priest at social functions, at dances.”

I don't bother telling him how many of the priests at Saint Roch's were kicked out for preying on young children, or the rumors about sexual abuse at Brian's school.

Time to change the topic.

“People keep telling me that he changed when he realized he was adopted. Did you notice that?” I ask.

He agrees. “What he told me was that his biological mother had an affair when she was in high school. His biological mother gave him to her older sister to raise. He would have been approaching
sixty today; he was born in '47. In those days it was unheard-of for a woman to raise a child on her own. He was a pretty happy-go-lucky kid—and then he discovered that his cousin was actually his sister, his aunt was actually his mother.”

“Did his biological mother ever marry?” I ask.

“No. Filomena was a little nutty. She had a long-term boyfriend. But twice a year she would break up with him, and she would take up with two or three other men. Then she would get back together with her boyfriend. It was very strange for us, to see Brian's aunt, who was actually his mother, showing up at his house with different men. We lived in a stable neighborhood. Everything was very hush-hush. So this was pretty shocking.”

“How old was Brian's birth mother when she had the daughter she kept?” I ask.

“Carla was two years younger than Brian. Only two years younger,” he repeats, as if for the first time noticing how painful it must have been for Brian to learn that his birth mother felt able to raise his sister on her own, but not able to raise him, even though she still wasn't married when she gave birth to his younger sister two years after she gave him up for adoption.

“I saw Filomena's daughter at Brian's funeral. Carla. I liked Carla,” he says.

“Were Carla and Brian close?” I ask.

“They were quite close when they thought they were cousins. And they stayed close when they learned they were brother and sister. We saw a lot of them. Filomena came by around twice a month. I liked Carla,” he repeats.

“I heard that there was a group of you that hung around together. Brian, you, Abby, John. Is that right?”

“Yes,” he confirms. “And Carla,” he adds.

“Did you hear that John Henry had died?” I ask.

“It wouldn't surprise me. He took a lot of drugs. We all did back then, but Brian and John—they didn't stop.

“Brian and I went to jail together because of drugs,” he offers.

Some painful truths are fair game, it seems.

Out of the corner of my eye I observe a new awkwardness in his demeanor, a look of distaste, as if the proper side of Simon were half disgusted with the more sensual side he left behind. The proper side was still in control, but was prepared to allow the hungrier side to unburden itself of some shame, to seek absolution.

“We were in Bridgewater State together for a couple of months. Then in Worcester. After that I was done with that life. No more drugs.

“And I was finished with Brian, in fact,” he says, as if washing his hands of Brian yet again.

“Sex, drugs, and rock and roll,” he repeats. “I'm not at all proud of it. It was a time of experimentation. We all experimented. But jail hit me pretty hard. It wasn't just a slap on the wrist.

“I've never told my son about this,” he confides. “He knows I didn't go to college, but he has no idea why.”

I am intensely interested in this topic—the secrets that don't get told, that become malignant in the not-telling. But I stop myself from asking more. Brian is the story here.

“Did Brian get raped in jail?” I ask.

“No. He didn't,” Simon says. Too quickly. I wonder to myself, once again, why he is so certain, why he is so sure he would have known, but I let the subject drop.

“Abby says that Brian was very good-looking. Is that true?” I ask. “What did he look like?”

“He was very good-looking. Same physical size as me. He had good features. Blond hair—a Beach Boy look.”

“Abby says that she was really in love with him. Do you think that is true?” I ask.

“We both had girlfriends…. You were of the moment back then. She was infatuated with him. She was in love with him
as much as a sixteen-year-old is capable of being in love. But it wasn't reciprocated, I can tell you that. She was available. And other girls were also available.”

“Did you ever see any signs of instability in Brian?” I ask.

“No. He was pretty rational.”

“Apparently he was obsessed with poetry. Did you ever notice that?”

“I was not aware of any obsession,” he says. “But he wrote me a couple of letters from prison that had some poetry in them.” He lost the letters, he tells me, when he got divorced and moved.

“When we were in high school, Brian and I were on Highland Street, and some kids from Cambridge came by. We went to a party with them. We ended up doing acid with Timothy Leary,” he says.

“Were you part of an experiment?” I ask.

“No! It was just a party. His use of acid was not strictly academic.” He corrects me, somewhat prissily. I imagine he is nursing a judgment against academics—their naïveté, their veinless pedantry, so removed from real lives and real passions.

“What was he like?” I ask.

“I don't know. I was stoned out of my mind. I didn't realize who he was until later, when I read about him in a magazine.

“You never knew where we'd end up. Friday or Saturday night, someone would say, There's a party over there, in whatever town, and we'd go.

“Brian was the one with a car. Filomena gave him a car at one point. When he was sixteen. For his birthday, or maybe it was Christmas. She gave him what seemed to us very extravagant gifts.”

“What kind of car was it?” I ask.

“A Studebaker. They don't make them anymore. A green Studebaker.

“It wasn't new,” he adds. “But still it seemed an extravagant gift to us at the time.”

“Did he seem tortured?” I ask, wanting to avoid an extended discussion on the topic of cars.

“No. Maybe about his father,” he reconsiders. “He felt really bad that his father gave him up, didn't want him.”

“What about his adoptive father?” I ask. “What was he like?”

“Ken was fairly strict. But Ken and Ellen—they cared for him a lot. Until the drugs kicked in. Then they really didn't know how to handle him. They would try being strict. They would ground him. But he would sneak out of the house after they went to bed. Then they tried being lenient, but that didn't work either.

“He might have had signs of—what do you call that?—OCD,” he says, apparently reconsidering his earlier position.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“He would insist on listening to the Beach Boys twenty-four/seven.”

The 1990s expression is jarring. I'm feeling the mood of the 1960s—before hard work and commercialism became so fashionable. I have entered this story and entered Simon's mood; a habit I learned trying to get terrorists to talk to me, a style of conversation that comes naturally to me now when I'm trying to understand something that terrifies me. But as Simon continues, I'm pulled right back in.