His teeth began to chatter. Mario pulled him out of the shower, and they toweled each other dry, rubbing harshly, impersonally as they did after a performance. Shivering, Tommy crawled under the clammy sheet. Mario hunted in the bureau for an extra blanket, flung it over Tommy, then climbed in beside him and pulled him close.
“You smell so clean now, Tommy.”
“I feel clean.” He added after a minute, “Funny. A little while ago I was all excited. Now it’s all gone. I just feel sleepy.”
“Go to sleep, then. kid. I just thought it would be nice to be with you—like this—without having to be so damn scared.”
“You bet.” They were silent, bare legs entwined, cheek against cheek. After a time Tommy said, “You’ve had—women? It can be—different than that?”
“Oh, hell, yes.”
“And the girl? Who was—”
“Private property,” Mario said gently, “keep off the grass.”
“Huh?”
“Every grown-up has a few secrets, kid. Mind if I don’t talk about that?”
“Okay.” Tommy was silent again. Mario touched him in a way he knew—an invitation, a question—but Tommy did not move.
“Sore at me?”
“No, I guess not,” Tommy said, thinking about it. “More like sore at myself. It’s like I been trying to prove something to myself. Or you. But I’m not about to do that anymore.”
They held each other gently, not talking. Mario murmured, “We should’ve ditched the bitches and come here first.”
“Yeah.” Tommy chuckled. “They do seem to have taken the edge off. As the egg said to the frying pan . . . .”
“Okay, dammit, I’ll play straight man: What did the egg say to the frying pan?”
“If you get hot before I get hard, remember I’ve just been laid.”
“Shut up,” Mario said, embarrassed. “What a way to talk!”
“Well, I told you it was a fresh egg.”
“Fresh is right. Shame on you!” It was something so new it really embarrassed them a little, being alone and really free from interruption. They fell asleep with their heads on the same pillow. Toward morning Mario woke out of a brief doze to feel Tommy’s lips brush his face.
“Aren’t you asleep, Lucky?”
“I didn’t want to waste time sleeping,” Tommy said in a whisper, “it’s going to be morning so soon.”
His voice, which had begun to change, sounded high in the darkness, and Mario, deeply moved, murmured, “Someday I’ll read you a poem that goes like that. Ah God, ah God, that day should come so soon . . . .”
“Funny. I never think of you knowing about poetry.”
“I don’t, really. I’ve been exposed to it, that’s all, caught a light case. Like the measles. Typical pansy’s interest, you know. Like ballet.” Mario reached up and touched the soft face bent over his. Something wet splashed on his cheek.
“You crying?” he said in horror. “Lucky, come here, come here!” He sat up and cradled the boy against his bare chest, bending to caress the nape of Tommy’s neck with his lips.
“Come on, come on, I don’t want you to cry. You’re such a little tough guy, I forget what a kid you really are. What’s the matter, Lucky?”
“N-nothing. I don’t know. We—we just have to be so—so bottled up and careful all the time, I just sort of come to pieces—”
Mario went on rocking him. His throat hurt. “Listen, kid,” he said at last, and put his hand under Tommy’s chin, turning the boy’s face up to his, “would it make it easier on you to—to cut out all this stuff, the sex stuff, and just be brothers again like we were?” He felt Tommy twitch in his arms, a start of denial, and held him tighter. “Look, Tommy, I’d love you just as much. I know how you feel, but honest to God, kid, you get so worked up it scares me. It scares the living hell out of me to see you all torn up like this. Crying.”
“I’m sorry. I’ll try—I know you hate it—”
“I don’t hate it, kid. It scares me, is all.”
“You think I’ll get all tore up and upset and tell on you or something? What the hell do you think I am?”
Mario stopped him with a hard squeeze. “No, no, kid, that’s not it. I know I can trust you. Hell, I trust you with my life, every day, don’t I? On the rig? It’s not me; it’s what it’s doing to you! The only thing in the world I want is for you to be happy, and when I see you like this— Kid, it’s killing me to think I’m doing this to you!”
“Look, if you want to call it all off—” Tommy began, but his voice caught in his throat and he began to cry again, with a weary hopelessness.
“I could try to keep my hands off you, if that would help,” Mario said, “but it’s too late for that, and anyway it wouldn’t change the way I feel. The only way to call it off now would be to quit the circus, and I swear I’ve wondered if that isn’t the only decent thing to do before I louse up your life for keeps!”
“I think I’d die if you did,” Tommy said, his voice shaking. “And it’s not going to make me feel any better if you throw me over and go around screwing girls right under my nose!”
“I said I was sorry about that, Tommy,” Mario said, exhausted. “Is there anything I can do—anything at all—that will make you feel better about that? Lucky, you’re chilled through, lying there like that. Come under the covers, let me warm you up.”
He wrapped Tommy in his arms. Tommy lay silent against him, limp and still. It was not the good drowsiness they both understood but, rather, a sort of hopeless quiet, a despair so total it approached complete calm. Finally he said, “Do you think we can just go on the way we are, then?”
“Do you want to, Tommy?”
“You were the one who taught me there’s a big difference between what we want and what we can have. I’m sick of you asking me what I want. I’m asking what we can have.”
“Fair enough.” He had armored the kid with toughness himself, why should it hurt so much? Mario had to wait, disciplining his voice, before he could speak. “All I can give you to hang on to is this: Next winter, if you still feel the same way, it’s going to be easier. You’ll be older. They won’t watch you so close.”
“Next winter seems like a million years off,” Tommy said, and lay quiet, staring at the white shape of the pillow. “Like last winter. I never thought things would turn out this way.”
“Me, neither. I wanted you, sure—right from the first time we worked together—”
“Did you?” Tommy stared at him in amazement.
“Oh, sure. I thought you knew. But I knew that even if I never laid a hand on you, we meant something special to each other, we’d had each other in a funny kind of way—”
Tommy said, with a child’s literalness, “You mean that time at the house, when you came in my room and—and pretended, afterward, nothing happened?”
“No,” Mario said, too involved in what he was saying even to be embarrassed, “not that. I mean the way we are together, flying, in our duo routines—there was that between us, anyhow. And that was almost a kind of lovemaking.”
“Awfully public lovemaking,” Tommy said, trying to be flippant.
“I didn’t mean it that way.” His seriousness made Tommy’s smile slide away. “But dancing is sexual, you know. Like the flight patterns of birds.” Mario raised himself on his elbow. “One of my ballet teachers once—when he was talking about levitation, adagio dancing—he got into talking about flight dreams. And then he turned to me and said, ‘Matt Gardner knows what I’m talking about, because the flying trapeze has the same kind of appeal: It’s the acting out of flight dreams. Which are sex dreams.’”
“Angelo said something like that. The night we were all looking at Lucia’s scrapbook.”
“Funny it should be Angelo. A lot of the finest aerial work is sexual—symbolic, anyhow—and trapeze work especially. It seems to me that a lot of it is sublimated homosexuality brought up to a fine art. But if you said that to Angelo, he’d laugh his head off, and if
you convinced him, you’d ruin a fine flyer, because he’d get self-conscious about it. With him what there is of it—and I think there’s a lot, though if I said that to his face he’d either laugh himself sick or kick my teeth down my throat—it all goes into the flying he does, and the conscious part of him—well, hell, you know Angelo. And I never met a female flyer who was all girl.”
“Oh, come on, your own mother had four kids!”
“Yeah. That’s what I mean. The family had Lu married off before she was old enough to think it out for herself, and being Catholic, she probably had four kids because it never occurred to her that there was anything she could do about it. But stop and think. You know Lucia. Do you think any self-respecting SPCA would give Lucia a kitten to raise? I wouldn’t. Sure, living at home, she puts on a good act, pretending that all she cares about is whether the spaghetti’s going to burn. You didn’t know her, you weren’t around, when I was a kid. Oh, hell, how did we get off on that? Anyhow, like I said, with Angelo it’s all instinct—he never thinks it out—and maybe that’s the way it ought to be. Maybe I shouldn’t stop and reason it all out like this. I don’t mean it’s all necessarily sex. Any more than dancing is all sex. I mean they all come from the same place in your guts, the thing that makes sex work. Your insides, your feelings. I think that’s why you and I are so good together, and why, when we’re working hard, we don’t have much left over even for—even for this stuff,” he said, touching Tommy gently.
Tommy thought about that. Then he said, “I thought the reason we were so good together was because—well, you taught me to fly, you sort of are flying where I’m concerned, and when I’m thinking about flying I’m thinking about you—”
“Then why aren’t Angelo and I one of those perfect teams?” Mario demanded.
Tommy thought, You sort of are, on the triple, but he did not say it aloud as Mario went on:
“Angelo damn near raised me. He taught me everything I know. Don’t get me wrong, I love Angelo a whole lot—it’s like he was my own real father. He’s a wonderful catcher, and patient—my God, do you have any idea what it’s like to catch anybody my size and weight on a triple? But we never really lit up together the way you and I did right from the first. Right at the start, Papa Tony saw it: You and I together make something more than the sum of the parts. Papa said once, Tommy, that you were going to be something very, very special. And I’m afraid—oh, God, Tommy, I’m so afraid—I’m scared to death,” he said, burying his face in the pillow.
“Scared? Scared of what, Mario?”
“Scared of wrecking what’s so special about you. Scared of getting you so hung up you can’t work with anybody but me.”
Tommy put his arms around Mario, pressing his whole body against him. “I wouldn’t want to.”
Mario turned over and pulled Tommy against him, hard.
“Oh, Jesus, Lucky,” he said, “that’s what I was scared of, and if it’s like that, if it’s already happened—” Tommy heard him swallow, his voice too thick to speak. Finally he said, “Listen, Lucky. We’ll probably go on just the way we always have. We’re a great team, even if—because of the way we feel about each other. But this is the rest of it. These lousy fights we keep having, and—and having to be like this—the way we are together—” He couldn’t go on. He wasn’t crying, but he couldn’t make his voice do what he wanted it to.
Tommy said fiercely, “Listen, we promised each other something. Remember? We promised we’d keep it off the platform, we’d never let it get into our work.”
Mario got control of his voice again. “Yeah, I know. And you’re better at it than I am. You’re just a kid, but do you think I don’t know that? But here’s one other thing we could do. Now that we know about it, we could try and—and use it. Build it into our work, try and make ourselves so good together nobody’s ever going to want to break us up. It could be dangerous. We might get so we couldn’t work with anyone else, and then we might have to break up; one of us could get hurt or—or killed, we might have an awful fight, we might change, come to hate each other and we’d still be tied to each other by this—this—by whatever it is between us.”
“I want that,” Tommy whispered. His eyes overflowed again, but he didn’t care. “Because then they could never break us up—”
Mario held him against the pillow, kissing him again and again, blindly. “Here’s how much I want that. If we ever have to, Lucky, I’ll quit flying and catch for you. If it’s the only way we can stay together!”
“I wouldn’t let you do that, Mario.”
“Let’s hope it never comes to that But it’s the only thing I can see ahead for us. To make ourselves into a team so perfect that nobody will ever dare break us up because they won’t dare destroy the thing we are—”
Tommy choked. “Can I say—something awful?”
“Anything you want to, kid. Anything, right now.”
“I hate you,” Tommy said into his pillow. “I hate you sometimes. I wish I didn’t love you, but I can’t—can’t stop—and it’s all mixed up with how I feel about flying. I don’t know—I wish—I wish—Damn it,” he burst out, gasping, “I wish I was a girl, then it wouldn’t matter if I—I loved you—”
Mario’s face twisted and contorted; he caught Tommy to him, anguished. “No,” he said, gasping, “no, no, no, Lucky, no—” He held him tight, cradling him, trying to shield them both from this unendurable knowledge. “No, no you don’t— I know what you mean, Lucky, I swear I do. It would be easier, maybe, but you’ve just got to face it, ragazzo. We are what we are. I know it’s rough on you—we’re just going it blind, making up all our own rules for being the way we are. We can’t do things other people can. But we’ve just got to work out what’s right for us, I’ll try, Lucky. I know I’m rotten to you. But if we love each other enough, and if—if we can keep from hating each other too much, then maybe —maybe we can make it, some way or another.”
Tommy turned up his face and kissed Mario, like a trusting child, but then they were clinging together, in a kind of helpless, anguished need. For Tommy it was not really sexual, not now, just a kind of frenzy to come closer and closer, to merge not only his body but his very substance, his whole being, with Mario.
“Lucky—Lucky—fanciullo—caro, caro—don’t cry—”
“I can’t ever get close enough to you, Mario—if I can’t get closer to you I’ll die—”
“There, there, then—here, baby, like this—here, feel my heart beating, feel this—is this close enough, fanciullo? There, there, don’t cry, don’t—okay? Okay.”
He felt the sobbing slowly subside. Confused, exhausted, they lay in each other’s arms, as if despair had blended into some kind of desperate sacrament that must bind them for all time. Tommy whispered, “I don’t ever want to let you go. Don’t let me go—”
Mario choked on his answer: “I never will, Lucky. I never could. Whatever happens, whatever we do to each other, we’re part of each other now.”
CHAPTER 19
September slipped away, and Tommy felt nearly desperate as the season drew to a close. After the brutal honesty of that night in the motel, Mario had withdrawn again, and Tommy, helplessly aware that the whole roots of his emotional life were committed to the whim of a difficult, high-strung, and temperamental man, could not find or create conditions to reveal his anxiety. He had been mauled into stoicism; now he took angry pride in matching Mario’s taut control.
They had one more bitter, flaring quarrel, a stupid business about a sweater of Mario’s that Tommy had worn without permission. Mario, who usually overlooked or even encouraged such liberties, had for some reason chosen to flare up about it. On the day of the last performance, they were barely on speaking terms. Tommy spent the interval between shows in the rigging truck, grimly packing the costumes into labeled cartons. While he was tying slippers into pairs by their colored strings, rolling worn-out tights so that the holes showed uppermost, he found himself cherishing a dimming hope that Mario would see
k him out here, take advantage of the unfamiliar solitude. Not till the early-falling October dusk heralded the approach of the night show did he give up and go to his family’s trailer, late for supper.
After the show, he lingered at the board they used for a dressing table, gathering up his personal oddments: comb and brush, a roll of tape, a half-used tube of sunburn cream. He put them into a shoebox. Papa Tony stopped behind him and said, “I talked this afternoon with your father, Tommy. Your pay for the season is banked for you; he has the details. Here is something extra from all of us, a little present for you, just for being such a good boy, nice to have with us. Buy yourself something nice with it.” He tucked a bill in Tommy’s shirt pocket. “We will see you on the first of January.”
Tommy said shy thanks. Angelo came and clasped his shoulders between his two hands. “Get a good rest this fall, you rascal—I’m going to work the britches off you this spring. Don’t you let them talk you into playing football; you want to do anything to keep in shape, take up running or track.” He stopped and looked around. “Listen, Tom, I know Matt gave you a rough time this summer. He’s not an easy guy to get along with. I want you to know we all appreciate the way you go out of your way to get along with him. You know—” He stopped, as if unsure what he ought to say or how he ought to say it. “For a while I was afraid he’d be a bad influence on you. He was a wild kid, you know. Did you know he had a police record?”
Tommy said, scrupulously truthful, “He told me he’d been in jail.”
“Yeah. I shouldn’t kick, it kept him out of the Army, but still—well, anyhow, having you to look after, I think it steadied him down some. I want you to know we appreciate it.” Angelo hugged him, kissed him roughly on the cheek. “You be good, kid. Take care of yourself, now. See you this winter. Everything all set in here? Okay, let’s lock up,” he said. “We’re pulling out sometime tonight.” He tucked his makeup case under his arm and walked away, whistling.
The Catch Trap Page 34
