Lawnboy (20 page)

He considered the offer. Outside a group of preschoolers trotted by, reciting their ABCs in both Spanish and English. “Of course.”

We made plans to see Resnais’
Last Year at Marienbad,
a film about which I couldn’t have cared less, but it was playing at the university, and I was certain that he’d like it. It occurred to me that this was the first time I’d ever asked anybody out on a date. I pushed past the pedestrians, knowing that my days of loneliness and emotional aridity were forever over, that I’d soon have all the sex I wanted, and more. That night, I not only cleaned out my room from head to toe, but talked to Sid and Ursula with interest and civility. I was embarking on my new life. I was in love. Soon enough, we’d devote ourselves to making each other happy, and we’d give each other back rubs, and talk back and forth, and
listen,
and once we grew a little older, we’d trim each other’s sideburns, shave each other’s shoulders.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the sheer sonic loveliness of the name Arden. How it tripped off my tongue: a ballad, a prayer.

The day of the date, my stomach tightened as if injected with helium. I isolated myself in my bedroom, trying to relax my hunching shoulders. Only when I couldn’t stand it any longer did I call Jane, asking about the appropriateness of my outfit.

“It’s seven-thirty in the morning,” she said. “What do you want from me, dear?”

She suggested a few pieces, a loud corduroy sport coat and a buffalo-plaid shirt, neither of which sounded particularly attractive. It occurred to me that she was more interested in seeing the endeavor fail, though she’d never admit to that.

“You know, Evan—”

“Yes?”

She yelled at Sugar Pop, her dwarf Pomeranian, to shut up. “You won’t want to hear this,” she said, more softly now.

“What.”
I aspirated the H in what. My voice took on an impatience I found myself using only with her.

“Be careful of getting your hopes up. You’re not marrying him. It’s only a date.”

“I know that.”

“I mean, you don’t even know if you
like
him.”

Of course I like him, I wanted to say. I’m in
love
with him. Then it occurred to me that she was just plain resentful. She wanted me to be available to her every second of the day, to go to the beach, to get her car inspected with her—all the minor, irritating tasks that she hated to do herself. The truth was she hadn’t gone out on a date since her folks had forced her to break up with DeMarco, unless you could count her midnight rendezvous with Levon (aka her own private dildo). I could sympathize with her on those grounds, but what really vexed me was her unspoken belief that my attraction to other boys was a phase, that once I passed out of it, I’d come to my senses and fall deeply in love with her.
Hogwash,
I thought.
Bullshit.

Hours later I met Arden outside the red-carpeted lobby of the campus film forum. He was wearing a checkered red shirt and a pair of overalls, the bottoms ragged and dragging. He might have been a farm boy fresh off the milking machines. A look of quiet expectation shone across his face, and all my fears were allayed.

Once seated he gazed up at the screen, awestruck, drinking in the images: the baroque hotel, the trimmed, geometric gardens, the feathered gowns of A, Delphine Seyrig, who looked as if she were listening to a ticking bomb inside her. He seemed to be so involved that I thought it best not to disrupt him, though I wanted to fuck him silly right then and there. Something twinged the root of my dick. Occasionally, his stomach would squeal, and a little belch would issue forth, but I relished this subtle indication of his humanity, relieved he felt comfortable enough to share it with me. Put simply, he was as nervous as I was.

We strolled down the storm-wet streets. The neon tubes trembled, clinging to the last of their currents. The branches were blowing. Out over the ocean, lightning pulsed twice, golden, subtropical.

“What did you think?” I asked.

“Lavish,” he answered. “I never expected it to be so lavish. Those voices, those gowns.”

His enthusiasm was more than I could stand. “
Tell
me,” I agreed.

I had so much to say that I couldn’t begin. He walked just slightly ahead of me, with only the slightest urgency, a beatific look on his face like the young St. John of the Cross. The world seemed unbearably benevolent all at once, the lightning flashing soundlessly in the distance, the palms above our heads watching, blessing us.

We stopped at a crosswalk. His smile was shy, eroding. Knowing that he wanted exactly what I wanted from him, I reached for the back of his neck and pulled him toward me—reckless, I admit—shoving into his mouth as much of my tongue as was humanly possible. His own tongue was soft, impossibly smooth, a sweet clam in a bath of brine. His whiskers sandpapered my chin. It was the most profound kiss in which I’d ever taken part.

I stepped back slightly, dazed, chilled and sweating at once.

He pulled in his lips as if I’d tasted of mercurochrome.

“I’m straight,” he cried.

The trees shook. My ears were humming.

“I’m straight,” he cried again, as if to convince himself. Then he started running, fast as he could, down the length of the street.

***

They’d been arguing off and on in Hector’s room for more than two hours before I’d finally decided to climb out of bed. My guts burned. There was no point in trying to sleep. The moment I’d close my eyes, convincing myself that their silence was lasting this time, that they’d come to some peace, they’d start all over again, words volleying even louder than before. It was hard not to wonder whether it had been spurred on by something I’d done—or not done, as the case may be. It was hard not to feel trammeled by it all. I might have been sitting in the bedroom of my childhood, scratching my name into the headboard, bending back the balsa wings of a model plane as Sid and Ursula fought through the night in the next room.

Something was bothering him about me. Was it his perception that I’d been under Hector’s influence? I sensed it, just by the passing grimace on his face as we’d walked in the door, dressed in our skirts and wigs, from the Laundromat. In that one unsettling moment, any sense that I was multiple, that I could be anything other than what he perceived me to be, shrank to near nothing.

Did I have to watch out for my brother?

He really wasn’t a bad guy.

I walked out across the dark parking lot and stared down into the pool. The floodlamps burned beneath the heated water, pitching golden waves of light onto the palms, the courtyard. A cord chimed once against the flagpole. Feet thumped across the walk, and there was Hector, climbing up the steps of the pool deck in nothing but his black jockey shorts. His face was dazzled and agitated, the muscles tensing in his legs. We looked at each other for several seconds, surprised into speechlessness.

“Is my brother mad at me?” I said finally.

His expression dulled. “What are you talking about?”

“Forget it,” I said. “Good of you to get dressed.”

“I want to know what you’re talking about.”

I pulled in a breath through my mouth. “Well, it was pretty hard not to hear you two guys fighting.”

His brow clenched. He seemed apprehensive and appalled all at once. “You were listening to us?”

Was he kidding? He knew as much as I how little privacy there was. Anyone walking down those halls could hear anything: burps, farts, little cries in the night.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

He wagged his head back and forth.

“All right,” I said, and stood up. “Sorry I asked. I’ll be out on the dock if you should find yourself deigning to talk.”

He slumped down onto a lounge. The bottoms of his feet were dirty, spattered with drops of aqua paint. “It’s like he convinces himself it’s all about money.”

“What?”

“He’ll talk this way and that way about how he can’t pay the bills, how it’s time to start targeting a different market, cranking up the ads, but he hasn’t done jackshit. He’d rather complain about it, put it off. Do you know what I’m saying?”

“He’ll hear,” I whispered. I pointed up toward his dark apartment.

“He actually implied that I was responsible for that tour falling apart. I mean, you know that’s not true. And this is after he’s been pounding my back the whole day.”

A mole cricket drifted on the surface before a pool lamp. My eyes felt dry, stitchy. My throat was sore. It was minutes past 3 a.m. Suddenly I imagined this going on the entire night.

“Why don’t you just get some sleep,” I mumbled.

He lay back on the pink-webbed lounge. “It can all be reduced to one single problem.” His voice was oddly cheery, without malice. “A single problem is all it amounts to.”

“What’s that?”

“The problem’s that he still wants to be a good little boy. He never got the affection he needed as a kid, and that’s what’s messing him up now.”

I looked at him skeptically. “Yes, Doctor Freud.”

“I’m serious. What do you think he’s doing with a girlfriend anyway?”

“You’re out of your mind.”

“He’s just afraid. He’s afraid to admit to himself he’s a dirty little faggot like the rest of us.”

“Oh, please.”

“I’m telling you.”

“And you know this for sure.”

“Listen.” He stood, poking a fingertip into my chest. “I know what I’m talking about. He’s twenty-eight years old, and he’s still talking about his parents all the time. ‘Sid this, Sid that. Ursula this, Ursula that.’ My God, you might think they were sitting in the next room.”

I thought for a moment. There was certainly some truth to that, but only some. Wasn’t Peter the one who couldn’t wait to leave home, who never wanted to see them again?
I’m happy, but you’re not.

“But he hasn’t spoken to them in months.”

“It doesn’t matter.” He gestured at the first floor of the motel. A single lamp trembled on in the window, a robed figure drifting behind the curtain. “It’s like this whole thing is for them. It’s like he’s preparing for this hypothetical time, this perfect time, when he’s gotten everything down just right, so he can say, ‘Look, Mom. Look, Dad. I’m not the fucked-up puppy you thought I was.’”

I didn’t know what to make of it. It all sounded too cheap and easy. And believe it or not, I resented the running down of my parents, especially knowing he hadn’t met them. They could be awful, the most unbearable combination of clinging and secretive, but what parents didn’t cause some damage, regardless of their intentions? They cared about us in their own miserable, stunted way. How much easier it would have been to be Hector, whose own mother was a dyke, who was completely at ease with his life, who called once every week to ask his advice about her latest girlfriends. No wonder the world was much less complicated in his eyes.

Insects thrummed in the trees. Behind the clouds, the moon swelled, an amber smear of light.

“Did it ever occur to you that he could be bisexual?”

“Knock it off.”

“I’m serious.”

“Bisexual?” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t believe that. That’s horseshit. He doesn’t know what the hell he wants, so instead of talking about the
real
issue, he’s blowing up about everything else.”

Hector squatted beside the pool, dipping his hand before the jet. Chlorine tanged the air. I walked closer to him and smelled something like gin on his breath. Was that it? Could he have been drinking and had that set Peter off?

“So do you two have sex?” I ventured.

“Sex,” he laughed darkly. “What the hell’s that?”

“Whoa,” I said.

He looked up at me. His eyes were calm, impassive, barely concealing what he thought. He moistened the corner of his mouth with his tongue. He mumbled, “That’s none of your business, okay?”

“I didn’t—”

His face flushed. “I ought to beat you to a pulp.”

“Hey,” I said, holding up a hand. “Calm down, I—”

Tiny particles charged the air. Suddenly Hector was bending toward me. I froze, startled. Carefully, in small arcs, he started rubbing his whiskered jaw against my chin, humming something nameless. I pressed my fist into his stomach, pushing him backward. What was happening here? Then the minute I was sure that Peter had certainly seen us, Hector pulled away, grinned as if gauging my reaction, then walked toward the head of the pool.

My head was pounding. Then all the outlines colored in: the shambles of the grounds, the biting quiet between them. No wonder this place had felt so much like home.

***

Before the night was over I’d told him everything about my time with William. I told him about the many nights spent lying awake on the living-room carpet, while William slept soundlessly up on the sofa beside me. I told him about the times I’d gathered the will to make love to him when he made it patently clear he didn’t share my interest any longer, lying still, silent, refusing to respond. I told him about the sex party to which he’d taken me a few nights before I’d left, his ill-founded notion that that would pacify me. I even told him that despite our infrequency, our lovemaking was good, so unbearably good that it always meant more than it was supposed to, that soon after we’d finished, I was inevitably filled with the most numbing sense of loss, the quietest loneliness and grief, wondering why it had to be so complicated between us.

“It’s funny how someone like that can screw you up for the longest time.”

Hector nodded. He sat in the lounge chair across from me, wrapped in a towel. He looked off toward the umbrella pines, the broken gas lamp.

“I mean, I can’t talk about this without getting all riled up. It’s been months now. Aren’t I supposed to be over it?”

Hector raised his brows. His mind seemed to be elsewhere. “So what finally got you to leave?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t really plan for it.”

“No?”

“I think if I’d actually planned for it I never would have left. I’d still be there today. It’s not like I had any money, or any place to go. You know the story.”

We passed back and forth a single cigarette. We’d found a box of Camels on the table and smoked through the whole pack. I hadn’t smoked much since my outings with Jane. My throat might have been sanded, scoured. Hector took the last drag, then tossed it off into the pool, orange ember hissing on the surface.