America Was Hard to Find

by Kathleen Alcott

  “The wiring on the chandelier in my room.”

  In under a minute he was up a ladder, electrical tape around his wrist, the screwdriver down his front pocket. He was comfortable here, and he took his time. The view was the fire escape across the way, where two nudist lesbians kept forty plants that disguised them somewhat when they sat there, green on skin on green on skin, and the electric lines of the Muni, leaping when buses approached and sagging in their wake.

  “Try it now,” he said, and Braden moved to the switch, submissive, tame. “Try it again.”

  “Fixed! You did it. My handy dad.”

  As he descended he caught Braden’s eye. It was quickly gone, his sight fallen back down on the floor, but Wright had seen an opening. Braden knew he’d cracked and was shifting a little in frustration, stuck on the far side of the room. When Wright grabbed for his right hand he spun around toward the window, threading Wright’s elbow under his armpit, balletic even in this. For sun-bent seconds Wright loomed in the half embrace, taller, understanding what he was about to do and wondering why, knowing how little it would solve, and then with the other hand he wide-palmed the back of Braden’s head and began to scratch it.

  “You’re fucking insane,” Braden said, but he didn’t move. Wright brought the hand on Braden’s chest down so that it encircled his hips, and then he kissed him, once on the top notch of his spine. When their mouths joined it felt like an expert telling of a story, the time taken on all small and necessary parts. He crouched to meet each hipbone and bite at it once, something he knew Braden liked from confessions he had made as a friend. Wright was using private information in a way it had not been intended, leaping roles to steal back some intimacy that had been lost.

  He knew that the important thing now was to not stop touching him, was for not a beat to register between the admission and the next handful of hair Wright took. What did he have that was not in thanks to Braden? The question was with him like another pulse point, a hammering behind his knees. He thought it like a mantra, what do I have that you didn’t give me, as he reached around to loosen the belt and bring down the zipper. The afternoon stretched the shadows of everything in the room, the tendrils of the plants on ladders showing up as smoky ribbons across the wall where Wright had pinned each of Braden’s hands. The bed in its range of navies looked deep and liquid, and they fell onto it without unplucking the hospital corners, a habit of Braden’s conservative boyhood that had never left him.

  “A condom,” Braden said, “I think there’s one still,” and pointed to a drawer. He stayed the way Wright had arranged him, a knee drawn up by a hip and both wrists above his head.

  It’s as if you need everyone to love you. He moved his hand over the private things kept there, some movie stubs and a jar of Vaseline and a velvet jewelry box.

  “Don’t stop,” Braden said, and for an hour they didn’t.

  12.

  In the days after, the silence between them was different, less animus, more fatigue. Everything you could say to a person, everything you could do, they’d said and done it.

  Something about how he’d been living had fallen away—the thrill of possessions had evaporated. Whether this was evidence of some maturation or regression he couldn’t say. He wanted only whites now, only windows. He’d begun emptying his room of objects he had once loved, a copper diorama of the city found at a flea market, mixtapes made by boys whose names were gone. Through his third-story window he could see people stopping on the street where he’d put his things in boxes, pulling out raglan tees and badly framed watercolors. They asked the opinions of lovers and friends who squinted, imagining a life worse off or better.

  On the television one night there was an old movie starring the president, and he found Braden on the couch in its rapture, a bong between his knees. “Bedtime for Bonzo,” Braden said, exhaling a fat train of smoke as he did, knowing Wright would be unfamiliar. He held the carb between his thumb and index like something valuable, a lucky stone. “Reagan is a professor who socializes a monkey.”

  He was handsome and clean in black and white, the president, speaking to a perplexed blonde, offering answers as though they were things he owned outright. In a bassinet between them a sedate chimpanzee blinked. Why was he doing this, she wanted to know, this simple girl from the country he had hired to help him, bland and pale and open to whichever wish of his. It’s fairly simple. A lot of people think they’re born better than others. I’m trying to prove it’s the way you’re raised that counts. Even a monkey brought up in the right surroundings could learn the meaning of decency and honesty.

  Braden was asleep soon after, a hand high up his cheek, but Wright couldn’t leave the room until it was over. He was trying to chart the distance between performances, the man on the screen now and the one who was asleep in Washington, the one who would not say AIDS. He saw only the ways they were the same, a firm gaze that seemed earnest and reassuring until you understood it as calcified and blinkered. When he finally stood and turned the television off, Braden woke up. It was as though, even asleep, he were made of and guarded by pop culture, and could not furnish himself with the permission to be alone.

  Sometimes they kissed in the kitchen, in those weeks, afterthoughts by the refrigerator, tiny agreements. They said good night through the French doors that separated their bedrooms, they listened to each other sleep and wake up.

  WRIGHT WAS POLISHING WINEGLASSES WHEN the letter came, or he was eating stale rolls of sourdough standing on one foot, or he was trying to keep Judy away from the new guy, whose name she was saying too often, every time he crossed the floor. It didn’t matter, but for some reason it was this he thought of when the call came, from Braden, from home—where had he been when the note in its thirds appeared in their mailbox?

  It had been a year since he had stopped writing, and he remembered the pages he’d sent with some embarrassment, hideous confessions so long unanswered he had come to believe they were as private as thoughts in the dark.

  “Are you sure,” he said.

  “K-a-h-n,” Braden spelled.

  The lunch rush was blooming around him, wrists shaking out napkins, water glasses filling with light.

  13.

  The envelope was too thin. Wright turned the letter over without opening it, feeling it for some valence, and then he set it against a browning bunch of bananas on the kitchen counter, thinking he should eat something first, having skipped the meal after his shift. He had woken that day with an unusual happiness, a feeling like having a friend in town, someone whose joy would come in observing routines, the idiosyncrasies of a bad lock, the beautiful broken idioms of the man at the corner store. Everything—weather, the walk to work—had transpired alongside some witty commentary upon it, but the feeling was gone the moment the call came, erased. Stoplights were invisible on the walk home. Other people were cardboard cutouts.

  He chose a record in no hurry, he diced an onion with his back turned to the envelope. When it had pearled in the skillet he turned off the flame and wiped down the counter and began to bark, stuffing the side of his palm in his mouth as he bent weeping over the sink. It had been the wrong thing to ever write, he thought, a vote against his easier future.

  As he attacked the envelope the leftmost third ripped, and so reading it he had to hold the two pieces together. There was a bus passing he could hear and he wanted to be on it, there was clean air outside and he needed to be in it. Vincent Kahn’s letter was brief, all capitals, all right angles.

  DEAR MR. FERN,

  HELLO.

  THANK YOU FOR WRITING.

  YOUR MOTHER WAS A VERY INTERESTING PERSON.

  I DID NOT KNOW HER FOR LONG.

  IF YOU ARE EVER IN OHIO WE CAN MEET FOR LUNCH.

  —VK

  HE TOLD BRADEN THE LIE first, thinking in doing so he was making it something else, a decision not contingent on a brief letter from a famous man. A drive to New York, he said, maybe a move, he wasn’t sure. They were sitting in the living
room passing a smoldering roach back and forth, holding it by a glittery bobby pin of unknown provenance. In the corner of the room their Christmas tree remained, strung with popcorn and cranberries they’d threaded on a little coke on a Tuesday, tucked into it some cardboard New Year’s glasses that read 1986.

  “You’re joking,” Braden said. “You worked so hard for your life here.”

  “It’s too small a city. If I wanted to know everybody’s business, I’d move to the suburbs and read all the classifieds. I want to meet someone who doesn’t know anything about who I am.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Stop it.”

  “I mean it,” he said. “What is it about who you are that’s keeping you from staying here?”

  “Don’t you think taking this personally would be beneath you? I’m not saying permanent, I’m saying I’d peek my head in, and besides I’d stop in Ohio on the way. California’s not the only place. California’s a lie we tell ourselves to feel better.”

  The smoke in the room made the conversation feel more casual than it was, an extension of any of the thousand they’d started but not finished, the time they’d travel to given the choice, half-recalled history lessons, an argument about the pretensions of Jacques Rivette or the sex appeal of Michael Keaton.

  “Don’t you think ‘taking it personally’ is a term invented by sociopaths to shame everyone else for having very normal feelings? When has my personhood not been affected by the world’s action upon it? When did you become such an ice cube?”

  “There’s nothing I’m ashamed of that’s keeping me from staying. But aren’t you tired of walking into a room and having everybody know exactly how you became what you are? Don’t you like the idea of getting to present yourself?”

  “Traveling is a fool’s paradise, et cetera.” Braden waved some smoke from his face.

  “I don’t really think Emerson applies here. It’s easy to feel superior about your identity when you’re sitting in a caned chair alone on a pond. It’s easy to say that changing the environment is a superficial fix, but also, no transcendentalist I’m aware of ever ironed out his sexuality for an audience over the course of years.”

  “He’s going to let you down.”

  This Braden said quietly, a part of his exhale on the last possible drag.

  “What?”

  His feet crossed on the table, Braden wouldn’t repeat it and he wouldn’t say anything else.

  “There’s nothing I expect,” Wright said. “So how could he?”

  Braden shook his head and set the bobby pin on the rim of the ashtray. He was testing him with silence, a dare Wright always lost. His voice sounded like Randy’s, and he thought his body felt as Randy’s must have, nothing about it liquid—all springs, all metal. He remembered Texas, he remembered gravel. The heat map of the body the day after a fight.

  “No response at all? You’ll just leave me with that hopeful message?”

  Rubbing a hand on his locked jaw, Braden stood and left. In his bed that night through the French doors Wright heard him in the next room, a two-part cough that seemed to correct itself on the throatier downbeat. Wright heard him sleep but never got there himself, and at five he gave up and made coffee, took his book and the French press down to the filthy stoop. He watched a man pulling a shopping cart of possessions uphill, stopping twice to rearrange the system of tarp and bungee cords, each time losing a few inches to the slickness of fog on the sidewalk.

  At six thirty he stood by the wall-mounted phone in the kitchen, the letter in his left hand, his mother’s ring dull on the pinky of his right as he pecked out the numbers, thinking he could hear more of his body than you were supposed to, the breath but also the blood. The seventh digit, the ninth. There was something he was owed, or there was something he’d forgotten. When it rang he put the phone back on the cradle, then picked it up and pressed redial, glad to hear the sequence relayed evenly, the space between all parts the same.

  “This is Vincent,” the voice said, a greeting that stunned him in how it answered the first question he’d prepared.

  “This is Wright.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Wright.”

  “I’m sorry, what is? This is Vincent. To whom am I speaking?”

  “This is Wright. Fern. This is Fay Fern’s son, Wright.”

  The pause felt like the time spent trapped in a rotating door, the air that felt pressurized, the silence that held you hostage.

  “Of course. What time is it where you are?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “What time zone?”

  “California.”

  “Pacific Standard, you mean.”

  “Yes.”

  “Weather there okay?”

  “What, it’s—well, you can’t see anything until the fog burns off, and that’s about noon. It’s forty now.”

  They were speaking about the temperature, he thought, and he ground the heel of his hand into a closed eye until he saw splintering reds. A second passed, three, time he didn’t pass through but that hung from him. In a strange coincidence I’m going to be passing through Ohio, he understood he was saying, a lie that landed flat-footed. The call became a gas station atlas, routes that connected and didn’t, are you writing this down he asked and Wright lied again. At the close of a phone call that was over in three minutes, Vincent Kahn spoke the name of an Irish pub franchise and a day and a time and then they repeated it to each other, the first thing on which they could agree.

  In the days that were left he slipped a check for rent under a magnet on the fridge and rode his bicycle farther than he ever had, out to the seaside remains of the public baths that had burned in the sixties, and he walked the lines of the old foundations like a kid, hands out to either side. His last morning he spent seated at the foot of Braden’s bed, already dressed and showered, reading the headlines aloud and the corresponding article if a thumbs-up appeared from under the comforter. It had been their ritual for years, the Morning News, they called it.

  WINNIE MANDELA CRITICIZES REAGAN. REAGAN HOLDS FIRM ON TAXES. By nine the light had turned milky and he stood up.

  “Go back to sleep,” he said.

  14.

  AMARILLO, TEXAS, 1986

  He watched the Challenger explosion naked, the motel towel loose around his hips where he sat on the edge of the bed. Fourteen years since and just the sight of the bleachers, the way people held their cameras up, was enough to frighten him. At least it was the daytime, at least the colors of the Kennedy center were slightly different, given that. For thirty minutes he only got up to get an ashtray, only moved a finger to find the channel playing the footage again. He had twenty hours until he’d see Vincent Kahn, too few for anything to change about his life, to make it one he might explain easily across the table at a chain restaurant. At first the way the smoke branched looked fallopian, tunnels driven from a meaningful center.

  In the American movie theaters where they spent their lives alone, they had been taught to love a blast, and so, at the sound of the explosion, seven people becoming sky, the audience in Florida had clapped.

  Captions pointed out the silver-haired parents of a certain astronaut, a woman, a schoolteacher. The mother wore white wool and a white fur collar, the father’s insignia of the mission sewn onto his jacket. In the moments after the boom, the grin he’d put on at the outset stayed—warping a little, the last to get the news—while the rest of his face collapsed. The smoke in the sky thinned and streamed down in feeble cords.

  His hair fat at the tips with water, Wright watched the stands empty the way they must have the night of the launch, some of the Americans lingering in the chance the show would redeem itself, looking over their shoulders as they went. He pressed mute and saw he’d smoked five cigarettes and mentally cataloged his life. He owned three shirts and he had rotated two throughout the drive from California, leaving one for the day of, not considering the question of laundry once he arrived. He had kept it, navy and heavy flanne
l, separate from all else in his duffel, in a brown paper lunch sack with a little sachet of lavender, a habit of his mother’s that had found its way back to him. She had worked to make their lives recognizable to them even once their days had deteriorated into strange cars and bacterial infections and potato chip dinners, she had believed in the permanence of scent. Cones of piñon she bought in bulk and burned wherever they went, the backs of dark vans, in houses where there was no heat. She had insisted, whenever possible, on fork and knife, on correct posture.

  On another channel, the president. We’ve never had a tragedy like this.

  He picked up the phone and punched in the number he knew.

  “I knew you would fucking call,” Braden said.

  “Are you watching this and crying?”

  “I’m on the damn floor. Jean is on his way. The dad.”

  “I know, the dad.”

  “Meet yours yet? Calling from a new life? Camping? Conversion therapy? Fun combination of the two?”

  “Some motel. Amarillo, Texas. Listening to the president?”

  “Yes, yes. And it’s bad, but you know, I thought, maybe what we dying faggots really need to get Reagan to pay attention to us—”

  “Is a spaceship. If we could just add some more explosions to the fatal epidemic.”

  “AIDS: where are the explosions? This whole time we thought they were bigots, but it turned out they were just bored. Nuance is not for everybody, you know.”

  “AIDS: coming soon in 3-D. Coming right to middle America, sooner than you’d think.”

  “We are going to throw beautiful parties in hell, girl, don’t you think?”

  “Extremes in temperature are equalizing,” Wright said. “Nobody ever made an interesting mistake in full air-conditioning. Guest list?”

  “Mussolini can’t come but his team can design the gazebo.”

  “Fascist gazebo!”

  “Obviously Marilyn, who I guess is there, if hell is real and follows the rules, so long as it was a suicide, which we agree it was.”