The Fisher Boy (10 page)

Chapter Twelve

After that, my apartment seemed contaminated by my encounter with Sergeant Almeida and his detective, and by that towel hidden beneath my bureau.

Or was it love that made me move? I guess it was love. A love that began when I saw Roberto, fresh from the sea, like the youth in
The Fisher Boy.
Love and a gentle desperation. That was there too—a hollowness expanding inside of me when I thought of my mother’s deceptions and of Ian’s bleeding wounds on the breakwater. Wounds that had yet to be avenged.

So I moved into his attic at the White Gull, and we decided to stay in Provincetown for the summer, to try our luck together doing improv or standup in the clubs.

In May, Roberto had left work as a courier, left pedaling his bicycle through Boston traffic, a sort of Mercury in Spandex, always carrying a package that was the corporate equivalent of the president’s nuclear black box. He’d left in good weather, when the ice ruts, road salt, and sleet were long gone, so, he reasoned, he’d better have a good excuse for quitting Provincetown without giving show business his best shot.

My new quarters were as hot as my old apartment, hot as Timbuktu, in the attic of the White Gull, under splintery eaves studded with vacant wasps’ nests. Roberto shared this space with another houseboy, Tim, who was at Cape Cod Hospital with an especially bad case of poison ivy, the result of safe sex in dangerous foliage. While he recuperated, I was welcome to use Tim’s bed, a futon thin as a paperback book.

Roberto’s day began each morning at five, when he was charged with baking dozens of cranberry muffins for the guests’ breakfast at nine. There was always wash to do, sheets, blankets, pillowcases, and towels, which Roberto handled using translucent disposable gloves. The White Gull parking lot was even smaller than its lawn, so all day Roberto moved cars like Rubik’s cube pieces as guests came and went. Through all this, he never tired. He was thrilled to be “in the middle of so much material.”

He studied the guests and staff: their walks, how they carried their luggage, their method of applying tanning butter or sunscreen. He developed a theory of personality based on the strength of sunscreen guests applied and whether they were “random smearers,” “thorough strokers,” or “total body-immersion people.” He’d say, “That couple, Tom and Pete? They’re going to break up by Labor Day because Tom is a random smearer who uses SP15, but Pete is a total body-immersion person who is substance-abusing SP29, if not 35.”

In his precious spare moments, Roberto rented videos of comedy programs to watch in the guest house lounge. He loved the television of our parents’ youth: Sid Caesar and Jackie Gleason and Lucy and Ethel committing industrial sabotage, screwing up the candy factory. Roberto didn’t just watch these tapes, he was an active participant in every show, talking to the actors, miming their gestures, praising or upbraiding their timing. He could pick out familiar voices from laugh tracks on
I Love Lucy.
Sometimes, transfixed by mimicking Bill Dana or Topo Gigio from old Ed Sullivan tapes, he’d forget his work and let the muffins burn or the sheets in the dryer all but scorch, but, most of the time during our early days at the guest house, he was focused, energetic, and up. No one was better company.

Nights, we seldom went out. Roberto was exhausted and I was afraid. In the dark, in the heat, we’d lie on our mattresses like brothers in their bedroom. The windows in the attic were small, with wooden louvers that censored the wind, so that the heat from the roof persisted late into the morning. On nights we couldn’t sleep, we traded lives, told our stories. You can tell almost anything in the dark.

Roberto spoke of growing up in Puerto Rico, of the stucco house in old San Juan the color of pistachio ice cream, of his street with iron cobblestones that gleamed like minerals in black light, gleamed sapphire like the carapace of some jungle insect, a beetle from the rain forest, El Yunge. He spoke of his first sex, on the beach in Ocean Park, outside a gay guest house, late one Saturday in the shelter of some sea grape bushes. His partner was a soldier from a base on the island. Roberto wasn’t good at differentiating uniforms, but he remembered the soldier’s broad chest and shiny shoes. He was fifteen at the time, and the sex felt wondrous, as though the soldier had restored some part of himself he wasn’t aware was missing.

Two months later, Roberto met a boy his own age, at El Morro, the old Spanish fortress. They met in the field, watching boys playing Frisbee. They’d flirted, following one another along the eroding, yellowish walls, ending up in one of the circular pillboxes vagrants occasionally used as toilets. The pillbox reeked, so all they did was quickly grope, rumple each other’s clothing, and kiss. The boy’s kiss, Roberto remembered, tasted of cinnamon, from gum he’d been chewing.

Many Jews on the island had emigrated from Cuba, but Roberto’s parents had both come as small children from South Africa. Growing up gay and Jewish in Puerto Rico was being “the Other within the Other.” It was estranging being Jewish on that Catholic island, with its convents, their huge doors and locks requiring keys a foot long; its cathedrals with altars busy with golden ornaments and saints with stiff skirts Roberto longed to touch. The bones of Ponce de Leon, the crosses you saw everywhere—on churches, on rosaries dangling from rearview mirrors in cabs, gleaming with whitewash in cemeteries—all these fed his sense of “otherness” so that it grew tangled and strong, like lianas around his soul.

Daily, Roberto struggled with this, but his parents were not especially religious. His mother kept Shabbat once in a blue moon and sporadically attended the conservative temple in San Juan, one of only two on the island. But his father, then associated with the big observatory at Arecibo, thought of the universe as being a great cold space filled with asteroids and stars made from luminous gasses, all governed by the beauty, by the perfection, of the laws of physics. The prophets of ancient Israel were myth, he believed, no more real than the lost gods of the Taino, the indigenous tribes of Puerto Rico. “There is no valid archaeological evidence
whatsoever
for the existence of Moses,” Dr. Schreiber would state proudly.

It was a kind of spiritual defiance that made Roberto wear a
kipah
in college—for two short weeks, until it blew from his head into a puddle, “a divine sign.” He’d eaten kosher for a full month before defiling himself with a plate of Cajun crawfish. There were many kinds of Jews in college, orthodox, conservative, reformed, so that this embarrassment of riches overwhelmed him, exacerbated his otherness of being gay. “I think getting religion is like getting inoculations. It’s best to get it early so it can take,” Roberto believed.

“But at least you have a name,” I said.

“What do you mean?” he asked in the dark.

So I told him my tale, my mother’s, really—about my unknown father, about growing up in Gloucester, first in our apartment above the garage at my grandmother’s, then in the gatehouse, with the spruce trees brushing against our windows, and, winters toasting marshmallows with my mother in our fieldstone fireplace, with the owl andirons.

“In Europe, Jews’ surnames were often randomly assigned. During the Middle Ages, way back,” Roberto said. “Names weren’t important, being alive was.” He gestured at the wasps’ nests, the gray of the withered cardboard of egg cartons. “I’ll bet those wasps thought they’d live forever. So did Ian, probably.”

I felt weak at that moment, weak with fear and loneliness. Provincetown heightens the potency of loneliness, like liquor heightens the potency of barbiturates. Naked, I felt all skin. No bones, no arteries, just skin, with a hollowness inside.

“Don’t you sometimes feel like ‘the other’ here?” I asked. “In Provincetown? If you’re single, I mean?”

I thought about something I’d read in a magazine, about our human need for loving skin contact. I’d read babies could die, “failure-to-thrive babies.” You could feed them and change them and keep them quiet and warm, but without skin-to-skin contact with someone who loved them, they’d shut down, stop growing, and die. “People need skin contact,” I said, as we lay in the dark, naked, the heat pressing down upon us.

I almost told him, then, that night. I almost told him about Ian, how I’d yearned for his body, for the companionship of his skin, so I’d had sex with him in the dunes the day he’d died. I was the last person to see him alive, I almost said—except that wasn’t true: I wasn’t the person who’d killed him.

Roberto asked was my futon comfortable and I admitted it was thin. “That’s surprising? For a mattress from a country where they make rice paper walls?”

We both laughed.

He could laugh at anything. I envied that, I said.

“I’d like to write a new show,” Roberto said, “a two-man standup show.” Then he asked, “Are you interested?” He said it again, but it wasn’t about the show, or a gig, or the summer. “Are you interested?” he repeated, in a whisper.

“Sure.” Meaning everything he was suggesting. I turned on my side so that I could see him—brown and muscular in the moonlight.

“Come here,” Roberto said. “I don’t want to shout.” He squirmed to one side of the generous mattress, which was set on the floor on its box springs. “There’s room.”

I lay beside him, our shoulders almost flush. I could feel the heat from his body. He was on his back; I was on mine.

He edged closer, so that the hairs of our legs touched the other’s flesh. “I think we just need a new strategy, we just need to adapt our Provincetown material and write a bit more and we’ll be fine.”

The heat pressed down onto our flesh.

Roberto continued speaking, about his plans for the new show, about writing material appealing to women because more lesbians were vacationing in Provincetown, about making our comedy “less Bostonian” for people from outside New England.

He turned his head, his eyes large and deep with what I hoped was yearning. “Are you game?”

I nodded.

He rose to hug me closer, then, with delicate gestures, tickled the nape of my neck with his fingers. “You’re so tense,” he said, holding both my hands.

He kissed my face, from my forehead to my mouth—the lids of my shut eyes, my cheekbones, the tip of my nose. “Don’t be afraid,” he kept saying, “don’t be afraid.”

Later, we lay together in the dark, on the chaotic sheets, until we fell asleep, skin-to-skin, healed, one.

Chapter Thirteen

The last day of June, I took everything that was mine from that shabby apartment above the leather shop: I brought my books, my radio, my clothes, even my favorite beach stones to our stifling garret at the White Gull. Of course this move was temporary, I knew. Tim, the absent houseboy, had been discharged from Cape Cod Hospital, his poison ivy abating but he’d flown to Virginia for a couple of weeks. So, while retaining the lease on the apartment, I started working as a houseboy at the White Gull, in lieu of rent. Roberto siphoned off a few chores to me, like some of the laundry and waking up nights to water the small lawn, to violate the ban just imposed due to our now-serious drought.

Roberto was writing in his precious spare time, even while watching his favorite Ernie Kovacs videos. He wrote in his khaki shorts and those fashionable sandals with the Velcro straps and hieroglyphics. “The show is coming along fabulously,” he’d say, scribbling onto one of his wire-coil notebooks. Sometimes he’d stay awake entire nights, writing and reading dialogue softly to himself, testing the voices of characters he was creating.

We made love mornings, once the muffins were cooling and before we shaved and showered. Roberto enjoyed shaving me, scorning my electric razor, saying, “Those are for girls,” and applying clouds of slightly burning lather to my face, then obliterating my whiskers with his dangerous straight razor.

He filled our attic with all sorts of kitsch: a lava lamp and rubber chickens, glow-in-the-dark yo-yos and those false teeth you wind up to walk, a backscratcher shaped like Frankenstein’s hand with long, emerald-green fingernails. “I hate good taste!” he’d sometimes say. “It’s the first sign of encroaching middle age.”

He’d get irritated by the menus in Provincetown, by the pretensions about garlic mashed potatoes and cod baked in blue corn tortilla chips: “I want some real American food! American food for Americans. I want food cooked by somebody who can’t spell ‘aioli.’”

We found a hamburger stand dispensing plastic mermaids in conjunction with an animated film. “This has Chloe’s name written all over it!” he said, waving the toy. We were joining Chloe and Miriam to help Arthur weed his garden, which had gotten out of hand while he’d been secluded with his treasure.

“This is for you!” Roberto said to the thrilled little girl.

She clutched the mermaid, moving its fragile arms, then began circling us and giggling while tickling our bare legs.

“Most men don’t give her a second look,” said Miriam.

It wasn’t a reprimand, but it felt like one. Especially to me. A tingle of shame rode lightly along my nerves as I realized that she was right, that Chloe had been left fatherless—the price, I’d always assumed, of Miriam’s using a sperm bank. As her way of thanking Roberto, Chloe clasped his legs, rubbing her face against them, like a kitten marking its territory. “Thank you, that tickles,” Roberto laughed, his experience gained from having sisters serving him well.

Then we dispersed throughout Arthur’s garden to help him weed. He’d neglected this duty since that awful party, so all sorts of unwelcome growth was literally having a field day. It was hot, sparrows were quarrelling in the bird feeders, scattering the seed, and the sky was blue and hard and dazzling, the kind that should shine on the great sandstone buttes of Arizona. Working close to the earth, I thought of Ian buried beneath it. “I can’t stop thinking of Ian,” I told them.

They all nodded or sighed. Arthur mentioned speaking with friends from the gay business guild. The Christian Soldiers were picketing some guest houses, harassing others with phone calls, tying up the lines, making bogus reservations. Luckily, we’d had none of this at the White Gull. “It’s one of them,” Arthur said, bitterly. “One of them butchered poor Ian.” There was no escaping the fear; it flourished beneath the surface of life, like crabgrass germinating throughout a lawn.

“But we have to live our lives,” Miriam said. “Are you getting out at all, Arthur? You’re not becoming housebound, I hope.”

He was tearing out a vine as long and tough as an extension cord. “These things take time,” he said. “By the way, I gave Sergeant Almeida a complete description of Edward. Bad Man Babineaux, as I call him. He left drugs in my bathroom, you know. A bag of white powder I’m sure was cocaine.”

“Really?” I said. This surprised me. An asthma sufferer using a drug you’d inhale?

Edward had stashed it in the bathroom, along with a paperback about gay love signs. And I’d imagined him appearing with just the clothes on his back.

“Well, since he’s gone, I guess it’s okay to mention this…” So I told them Edward’s hitchhiking saga, about the man who’d picked him up at the Orleans traffic circle then taken him deep into the Province Lands. “…He dragged him into the woods, at knifepoint,” I was saying. Unfortunately, all four of them were listening, including Chloe, who’d stopped dipping her mermaid into Arthur’s fishpond and was eagerly awaiting the conclusion of my story, as though it were a cartoon.

“Darling,” said Miriam, “look at the nice bug.” She indicated a damp spot in the soil where a wood louse was trundling through the debris. “Look at the bug, Chloe!” Miriam suggested, but the little girl’s attention was focused solely on me. “Then what happened?” she asked.

“Yes, then what happened?” Arthur demanded.

Chloe began dancing her doll in circles around the wood louse.

“Edward was…” I spelled it: “R-A-P-E-D.”

Sitting the mermaid squarely atop the bug, Chloe asked her mother, “What does that mean, what he said?”

“It means Edward became a little sick,” Miriam answered.

“Did he get better?” Chloe’s voice was soft with worry.

“Better enough to run far away,” Arthur said.

Chloe removed the mermaid, distressed because the wood louse was now still. “I wish you’d told me this earlier!” Arthur snapped at me. “That thug in the van could’ve traced Edward to this house. He could’ve harmed me, he could be responsible for that dead dog!”

I’d never thought of that—that the dead dog could have been meant for Edward. “You were in seclusion,” I said. “Edward was screening all your calls. I wasn’t even sure the story was true. He almost seemed proud when he told it.”

“That must explain his abhorrence at being touched. Perhaps it wasn’t me
per se
he was rejecting,” Arthur sighed. What he said next put my heart on hold: “Almeida said Ian’s killer left something behind. He wouldn’t say what it was.” Then Arthur began talking eagerly. His meds must have kicked in. The police had searched the area around the breakwater. They’d found nothing that could qualify as the murder weapon, just a fishing knife so corroded it had obviously been submerged for years.

“Almeida visited me too,” I said.

“I was there,” Roberto said. “At Mark’s. When Almeida came.”

“He was very tight-lipped, as far as theories, as far as suspects.” Or was he just tight-lipped around me?

Chloe was manipulating the mermaid, inching the doll up the trunk of the silver maple, as though imitating the movements woodpeckers use shopping for food.

“I don’t believe it was a random hate crime. Most people are killed by someone they know. And Ian made enemies easily, even among his ‘friends.’ Besides, the breakwater is a bizarre place to be mugged.”

“Actually, it’s ideal,” Roberto countered. “There’s nowhere to run, nowhere you can run
.
It’s a ready-made obstacle course. An obstacle course at sea, at high tide.”

“You haven’t mentioned those late-night calls. Those hang-up calls,” Miriam said to Arthur.

“They’ve stopped,” Arthur said. “They stopped while Edward was still here. He told them off. So he wasn’t exactly good for nothing, he was good for something—a little something.”

Just then, Chloe began crying. She’d snapped an arm from her mermaid doll.