Lawnboy (9 page)

My relationship, as I knew it, was about to end.

I had to tell him. There was no other way. I pictured sitting down with him one evening, placing a hand on his shoulder. “You have an STD,” I’d say simply, in absolute calm, with authority.

A puzzled look would capture his face. “What do you mean? How could that be?”

“You have an STD. There’s absolutely nothing to be afraid of.”

He’d frown. “That doesn’t make sense. I haven’t had sex with anyone but you.”

I’d nod, waiting for him to piece it together. He’d look at me in a kind of vacant, childish wonderment. Then his face would crumble and he’d bury his forehead in his palms.

I stayed up the entire night, trying to calm down, convincing myself that the announcement wouldn’t be as bad as I feared. He wouldn’t raise his voice or beat me; he wouldn’t kick me out of the house. He was a rational, reasonable man. After all, we’d never declared monogamy, and though it hadn’t come up as an issue, he wouldn’t have been completely surprised, given the state of our sex life. Right? And yet I wasn’t convinced he’d take to it lightly.

Was it possible to live with an untreated venereal infection? What about Flaubert, Maupassant, Jules de Goncourt? George Washington, for God’s sake? I went to the library and read through every medical reference text, pored through every online database, until my eyes were scratchy and sore. According to the facts, it was indeed possible to live with the disease for years; if untreated, sufficient defenses would develop to produce a resistance to reinfection, even though these very defenses would fail to eradicate the existing infection, leading to lesions involving bones, skin, and viscera; heart disease; a variety of ocular syndromes; and the weakening of the central nervous system. In worst-case scenarios: tissue destruction. I pictured us sitting together at the dinner table, chewing on the softest foods, watching our incisors wobbling out, then coughing once, spitting them discreetly into our napkins.

If only I’d had a two-week supply of penicillin.

I checked myself daily. To my amazement the blemish wouldn’t go away.

I buckled down finally. I went to a local specialist, Dr. Maltman, who informed me in no uncertain terms that I was fine, that I had a pimple. It was hard not to feel foolish, cheated. But he’d given me back my life, and the story of our daily unraveling.

It was on a hot, swampy morning, after dropping William off at Channel 7 Studios, that I saw my mother shopping at the Town and Country Publix. My initial impulse was to leave the store or hide. What was she doing so far from home in an emporium that catered primarily to wealthy retirees? Once I got a hold of myself, I took to following her through the crowded aisles. How lonely, ponderous, and insignificant she looked as she tilted her head upward to examine the scribbled shopping list, which undoubtedly contained the same staple items we’d consumed for the past twenty years: chow mein, frozen peas, watermelon. Etcetera.

I realized at once that I loved her more than anyone.

“Hello, Mom.”

“Evan?”

She tilted her head, her eyes fiery and alarmed, their slight almond shape enhanced with liner. Gone were the sweat-shirts and the oversized glasses of the past, replaced with contacts and a deep blue Merino wool skirt. She looked healthier, actually, prettier and in better shape. Had her makeover been triggered by my absence from the house?

“You look beautiful,” I said, releasing her from my hug.

“I do?”

“Yeah. I never remember you looking so good.”

“That’s nice.” She sipped from a Styrofoam cup of coffee, a vile, watery concoction provided by the supermarket to pep up the customers. She grimaced down at the lipstick mark on the rim. “I’d come to the point in my life where I realized I had two choices. I could either shoot myself in the temple or reinvent myself. Needless to say, I went with the latter option.”

My mouth fell open. “You were going to shoot yourself?”

She winced. “For Christ’s sake, no. Don’t be so literal.”

She told me about what she’d been up to. She’d been working on the garden, uprooting the liriope to replace them with spreading junipers. She’d been attending a flamenco dance class at Miami-Dade Community College, where she startled the others with her quiet proficiency. She was even writing, she’d said, a good six pages a day.

I asked her what on earth she was writing.

“Journal stuff. Stuff about my life. It wouldn’t be of interest to anyone.”

Her words stung, though I know she didn’t intend it. She kept talking and talking, mindless things that had nothing to do with us. I saw the apprehension on her face. And then the veil went up: I almost watched it: a thin, filigreed thing through which she wouldn’t let me in. I heard the thoughts working behind her starched, fiery eyes:
I am not going to let him hurt me again. I cannot bear any more loss. I can go on without him.

We might have been two longtime friends who’d had a falling out, still shaken, resentful, not knowing what was to become of us. She spoke with the slightest edge. But I believed it was possible to renew. I thought of all the times I’d had reunions with Jane. It was always tentative at first, as if we were both dreading and expecting the first signs of conflict. And then the path would clear, opening up, and we’d relax, remembering what we’d once been for each other.

“So what have you been up to?” she said in an overly cheery voice.

I walked with her side by side, up and down the crowded store aisles. I knew better than to talk about William: this was not what she’d wanted to hear. I might have been eight years old, helping her fetch Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks—once my favorite childhood food—from the steaming caves of the freezer. I might have been basking in the drab, comforting days when Peter was away at school, before anything complicated like puberty and desire had gotten hold of me.

But once I erased William from the picture, I had nothing to say for myself. For some reason I thought of the mole on his left wrist, the moist pink skin of his hot fleshy neck.

“Mom,” I said, surprising myself. “Would it be okay if I stayed with you and Daddy for a few days?”

She inhaled, pretending to examine the ingredients on the back of a cake mix.

“Mom?”

Her head pivoted back to me. “Sweetheart,” she said with a wounded smile.

“I don’t understand.” I’d only wanted to get away; if only I could talk to her about William.

“Your father—”

“Yes?”

She glanced to the floor, sniffed, and cleared her throat.

“You mean to tell me that he doesn’t want me at home?”

Her eyes filmed. “Of course not. He’s not like that. Don’t talk about your father like that.”

I shook my head back and forth. I decided to let her have it. “So you’re saying he’s abandoned me, then?”

Her face hardened. Deep lines bracketed her mouth. “You’re the last one to—”

“What?”

“Who’s abandoned whom?”

I felt myself getting smaller, a pinpoint, a particle, an atom. I fixed all my attentions on the teenager in the big jeans, the big sneakers, on his tiptoes, helping his grandmother—great-grandmother?—pick out a bagful of orange lentils. He placed them in the child seat of the cart, and she smiled dimly at him through her warped glasses, welcoming his presence.

“Listen,” she said, more gently now. She touched my arm. “Let’s save this for another time.”

I glanced down at her fingers resting on my arm, the wedding band, the abrasion beneath the knuckle. It might have been the hand of somebody foreign.

She exhaled once, noisily. “I’d love to have you back. I’d love to have you home more than anything. It’s just—”

“What?”

“If you promise never to see him again …”

“Fine,” I mumbled, though I was prone to say,
Fuck it. I don’t need your kindness. I don’t need your mercy.

“Keep in touch,” she said. “We want to know how you are.”

“You do?” I said.

She nodded and walked ahead. “Be good now.”

I watched her threading down the aisle, maneuvering the cart in and out through the stalled shoppers. It was hard to keep from walking after her, from prolonging the discussion, from saying, “I’m sorry. I love you. Don’t you know how much I love you?” Anything to keep her from leaving the store.

“
Wait,
” I said at once.

She turned just slightly to her left, as if she were hiding her face from me.

“How’s Peter? Have you heard from him?”

She shook her head, looking with some urgency toward the checkout.

“What’s he up to?”

“Naples,” she said, and shrugged her left shoulder. Once again her shoulders slumped.

And then I watched her leave. This was rupture. The longer we were apart the more damage we created. Was it ever possible to move back and forth across that bridge, that bridge between the two fenced-in countries?

***

Younger, I could have watched them forever. My mother with her peat-rimmed cuticles, trimming the flame vine beneath the rain spout. My father with his flasks and his beakers, mixing up some fizzing compound. My own puzzles and toys often bored me in five seconds, but the study of my parents within the laboratory of their household afforded me the richest pleasure. Nestled between them in the secluded valley of their king-sized bed, I knew that life was never meant to be so sweet.

School made a difference. I trudged to the bus stop through rough games of tag, coins aimed at the bulb of my skull. Immediately I felt indifferent toward anyone my own age. I wanted to be with my parents. I wanted to be encompassed by their routines and manners, their dignified, high-minded chatter. School might have been a zoo. I might have been caged up with monkeys, their golden shit still fresh between their teeth. All day long I gazed at the droning clock, lonesome and yearning, pretending to be immersed in the swirls of my finger paintings, counting down the hours when I could be safe with my parents again.

It wasn’t that they were flawless. Even before they started drifting apart, they had had their tensions, which they occasionally took out on us. A bitter word, a slap out of nowhere. But these were the occasion rather than the rule. The money was racking up in the bank; Sid was still ascending the mighty ladder of the chemistry department, and there was the sense of dizzy optimism about it all, the belief that they could still redeem every disappointment in their respective pasts.

So it wasn’t without sense that I felt an enormous loss when I thought of them now, that the combination of their absence and proximity—their house within (I’d counted it) 1,260 feet of William’s—unearthed me as it did. For years, I’d lived with the naive assumption that nothing would rattle their deep links to me. I could rob a bank, could pass nuclear secrets, and still they’d love me. Had I been wrong? My eighteenth birthday, July 12th, passed without a note. My card congratulating my father on his promotion to full professor—something I’d heard from Wendy Park, his former student—remained unanswered. They knew where I lived. It was as if they’d moved. I imagined sometimes that they’d fulfilled their lifelong ambition to buy a sailboat and negotiate it through the locks of the Panama Canal. Sometimes in the middle of the night I’d sneak out through William’s garage and wheel my bike past the water tower, taking the jogger’s path behind Country Club Plaza. I’d spot the house, then taste it, the flavor of fear, a rubbery dank taste like sucking on an inner tube. Something would have been different: a new set of gray trash cans, a sapling Norfolk Island pine, and I’d think, Goddamn it, goddamn them, they’ve gone somewhere without me. But then I’d see some touches that could only be theirs: the copper wind chimes, the old weather vane glinting on the roof, my broken ten-speed leaning against the fence. Relief.

They’d never do something as terrible as that.

Wasn’t it time I stopped thinking about them so much?

I didn’t expect kindness or wisdom or solidarity overnight. And yet they weren’t making the slightest of efforts on my part. Did they actually believe that every decision and gesture I executed was simply to spite them? Some people wanted to be boneheads, some people didn’t want to feel good about their circumstances. The truth was that my parents, Mr. and Mrs. Sid Sarshik, wanted to think that they’d failed somehow in their raising of me.

Well, fuck that.

***

Nights later, lying in bed, with William at my side and the Dobermans at my feet, I was still thinking about my parents. Was my mother so fearful of aggravating my father that she’d do anything to avoid a conflict in which she’d eventually side against him? Did she feel so awful about her compliance, her lack of nerve, that she couldn’t stand the sight of herself, the sound of her own voice? Or did she, on the deepest level, share my father’s point of view?

My feet were freezing. “I can’t sleep,” I said out loud, if only to myself.

William turned on his side. He punched softly at the pillow behind him, then offered a low moaning sound. Seconds later, he turned on the lamp beside the bed. “What’s wrong?”

“I ran into my mother in the store a few nights ago.”

He sounded dehydrated. All week he’d been working on an expose about the nuclear plants of South Florida, a project which involved hours of overtime. His face said:
Do you know how hard I’ve been working?

“And how was that?”

“Strange. I asked her if I could stay at their place for a couple of days. She more or less said no.”

“Mmmmm.” He stared upward at a fissure in the ceiling.

I felt emboldened and exposed at once. “What are you thinking?” I asked him.

“You’re not happy here?” he said, curious. His eyes worked to seem bright, anything but startled and hurt. Up to that point I hadn’t indicated that things had been anything but cheery between us.

“No, it has nothing to do with us. Don’t you ever miss Poppy?”

He looked at the trim on the blanket, withholding his response. It happened that Lorna had forbidden him from seeing Poppy in the wake of their divorce, even though the agreement was far from legal. To make up for his silence, William wired 500-dollar deposits into Poppy’s Winter Park checking account 4 times a year.