by Michael Nava
Hugh lived in a nineteenth century cottage on a sketchy street deep in Hayes Valley. Late Victorian, Queen Anne style; wide wooden plank porch and intricate, extraneous wooden carvings and lattices, all of them in an advanced state of decay. I learned about local architecture from a trick who restored Victorians and whose idea of pillow talk was pulling out a pile of blueprints and showing me the differences between Gothic Revival and Eastlake and Italianate and Richardsonian Romanesque—Queen Anne was somewhere in there. I was standing at the uncurtained window watching the fog lurk in the street and half-listening for the howl of the Hound of the Baskervilles. This kind of wet, cold, spooky summer night was everything I disliked about the city. Out of the fog emerged a figure, male, I thought, standing across the street. I couldn’t make out much more than his shape, tall and built. He didn’t move. Was he watching the house? I saw the bright, brief flare of a match and then he moved on. He’d paused to light a cigarette, that was all, and yet I remained unsettled.
Hugh was in bed, sleeping it off. The rusting pipes gurgled as they digested the bucket of his puke I’d poured down the toilet. At the ER he swore that evening was the first time he’d used in nine months, as if that was supposed to make me feel better. The fact he’d been clean that long meant his usual fix could have been lethal. Fortunately for Hugh, the guy who’d wandered into his cubicle at Liberty Baths and found him passed out with his lips turning blue was a doctor. Otherwise, he’d be dead. As soon as I got him into bed, I searched the house for his stash and came up empty-handed, so maybe he had been telling the truth about this being his first slip.
“You little fuck,” I said softly, but what I felt more than anger, more than anxiety, was sadness and confusion. This thing happening between us is what Hugh had called it. Me, I hadn’t called it anything, even to myself, but there was at least a recognition. Yes, that was a good way to think about it; a recognition. But what did we recognize in each other? I was an out-of-work, maybe washed up lawyer, with too much time on his hands and too many unanswerable questions on his mind and Hugh was—well, what did he call himself—a wastrel? Old fashioned word. I thought of another old fashioned phrase for a fuck-up: remittance man; someone paid to stay away from his family. Hugh was a remittance man who had wandered home where no one was waiting for him. Maybe all we had recognized was that we were each superfluous. Or was it loneliness? Isolation? Anyway, one thing was certain. He had warned me not to trust him, and now he had demonstrated why I shouldn’t. I told myself that as soon as I was certain he was going to be okay, I would leave, but I already knew I wouldn’t. I just didn’t know why.
I turned away from the window. In the kitchen I poured myself a glass of brandy. The slow, smooth burn of expensive alcohol on my tongue failed to quiet the damning self-assessment rattling around in my head. Was it just my imagination or had booze begun to lose its sedative quality? I finished the glass in a single belt, poured another and drank half of it. This time the slow warmth spread its tendrils in my brain and turned down the racket so I could breathe. I wandered back into the living room and took stock of the odds and ends of furniture—couch, chair, a coffee table, a couple of floor lamps. Not nearly enough to furnish the big, oddly-shaped space, just enough to suggest transience. The walls were covered with a muted but quite ugly floral wallpaper, curling at the edges. Dark squares and circles and rectangles indicated where pictures had once been hung and furniture had been pushed against the wall. The varnish had worn away on much of the wooden floor and the exposed wood was splintering.
A built-in bookshelf that held a couple of dozen books. Old, worn-out paperbacks, Tolkien, Hermann Hesse, Howl—a college sophomore’s library. The Joy of Gay Sex looked to be the newest addition. Next to it was a worn-out copy of The Little Prince, the pages almost in tatters. A solitary, skinny volume lay face down on the bottom shelf. I picked it up: Whirligig: Selected Poems by Katherine Paris. Hugh’s mother? I scanned the table of contents and turned to a poem called “The Lost Child.”
When they cleaned you and gave you to me,
long legs and fingers, red glow
rising from creased flesh,
eyes already awake, gaze steady,
I shook for three days
in my knot of hospital sheets.
Tears came later—cries, fears, fierce holding.
The ways you’d shake me off.
Your well of rage. Over and over
you bloomed in your separate knowledge.
Your well of rage. I turned the phrase over in my mind. The phrase was apt from what Hugh had told me about himself; neglected, abused, self-destructive. There was a cauldron of anger boiling in him that he calmed by sticking needles in his arm. What had set him off this time?
“Is that my mother’s book?” His voice was flat.
He wore baggy sweatpants, thick wool socks and an old black cable-knit sweater over a black turtleneck. His pale skin was the texture of a parchment or a blown narcissus petal. The blue eyes were still like the sky, but the sky at twilight, the upper reaches fading into black. He had never looked more fragile or more desolate or more beautiful. I wanted to fold him into my arms but instead I handed him the book, still open to the poem I’d been reading.
“The Lost Child. She didn’t lose me, she gave me away.” He pointed with the book to my glass. “Can I have some of that?”
We traded. I turned the book over to the dust jacket photo of the author. She had been airbrushed to an indeterminate age and, because the photo was black and white, her hair could have been blonde or silver. Her face was as symmetrical as Hugh’s but the effect was statuary.
He went on a coughing jag. I put the book in the shelf, went over, took the glass before he dropped it and then went into the kitchen and brought him water.
“Drink this,” I said.
He put his hand up, coughed a little more, then took the water and sipped it.
“Are you all right?” I asked him.
He slumped into the couch. “You asked me something like that at the jail,” he said. “It was a stupid question then and it’s a stupid question now.”
I stared at him. “So I guess that means you’re fine. In that case, I’ll be on my way.”
“No, please,” he said. “I’m sorry. Please. Please don’t leave me.”
I sat down beside him. He drank his water. I sipped my brandy.
“What the fuck were you thinking, Hugh?” I asked softly.
“I was thinking I was strong enough to do what I had to do. I was wrong.”
I waited.
“I went to see my dad,” he said.
I was confused. “Your dad’s dead.”
“That was a lie,” he said. “Half-lie. He might as well be dead. He’s in an institution, Henry. He’s a schizophrenic.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but why didn’t you tell me? Why lie?”
He shook his head. “Because I’m afraid I might be like him.”
I moved an inch closer to him. “Why would you think that?”
“They say schizophrenia’s genetic. Sometimes, I wonder if some of the things I think I remember aren’t just delusions, like my dad’s. Like maybe my grandfather didn’t rape me.”
“You think you imagined that?”
“A shrink told me it might be, what was the word, a confabulation.” He sprang to his feet and went to the same window where I had stood. “That someone did rape me when I was a kid, but it wasn’t my grandfather. That I was blaming him because when my dad went into the hospital and my mom left and I went to live with my grandparents, I was too young to understand and I thought he had taken me away from them.” He turned from the window and looked at me, pleadingly. “Do you think that’s possible? That I made it up.”
“You said you were ten years old when it started,” I said. “Old enough to remember. You tell me, was it him?”
He nodded. “Yes. I remember when he shoved his dick into my mouth it tasted like piss and I started to vomit. He pulled my h
ead back and told me if I threw up on him, he’d hurt me. I remember the smell of the cream he used when he fucked me. One of my grandmother’s creams. After that, every time I smelled it on her, I felt sick. I remember the next day there was blood on my underwear and I washed it out so no one would see it and ask me what had happened. Fuck, can you believe that? I protected him!”
“Come over here,” I said. He came back to the couch and curled up beside me. I put my arm around him. “Your shrink was a quack. You’re not making this up. What he did to you was horrible, unforgiveable. It would be easier to believe it hadn’t happened than to face that it did. Maybe that’s why you doubt your memories.”
“You’re so sane, Henry,” he said.
“You’d be surprised,” I said. “What happened when you went to see your dad?”
He sighed. “The last time I saw him, I was nine years old. He went off in a black car without even saying goodbye. No one told me anything except that he had to go to the hospital. I knew something was wrong with him. Half the time he didn’t make sense and he had a bizarre fear of Chinese people.”
“Really? Do you know why?”
He shook his head. “I asked my mother but she wouldn’t tell me. My family’s like that, a bottomless pit of secrets. All that matters to them are appearances. Only my dad was different. He was my playmate. Even when I was a baby I remember crawling all over him on the floor, both of us laughing. We’d empty my toy box and play with each toy. When he put me to bed, he would ask me to tell him five words and he would turn them into a story.” He paused to keep from breaking down. “In that cold family, he was a warm hug, a goodnight kiss. He called me his—”
“Little prince?”
“How did you know?”
“The book on your shelf,” I said. “You must have looked like the boy in book, blonde and blue-eyed.”
“That book and my watch are all I have left of him.”
“What happened yesterday?”
He closed his eyes for a moment. “I drove to Napa where they’ve locked him up in a place that looks like Tara from the outside. Appearances, right? Inside? It’s just another hospital. Railings along the walls, disinfectant in the air. Reminded me of the jail where we met,” he said, smiling a little. “Except it was really, really quiet. Too quiet.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve made the rounds of institutions myself,” he said. “Jails, rehab, hospitals. They’re not quiet places. In that place, you could’ve heard a pin drop. I figured out why when they brought my dad to me in a wheelchair. He was bloated and lethargic and his hands and face were twitching. I asked the nurse what was wrong with him and he told me it was the side effects of the drugs he was on. They must have the whole place drugged into oblivion.”
I nodded. “I’ve had clients on some of those meds. Haldol, Thorazine. They’re like chemotherapy. The treatment is almost as bad as the disease.”
“He didn’t know who I was,” Hugh said. “I tried to jog his memory but he sat there and stared at me and there was nothing in his eyes.”
I pulled him closer. “I’m sorry.”
“As long as I thought he was alive somewhere, I didn’t feel completely alone. But he’s gone, Henry.”
I held him and let him cry.
“You could have called me,” I said quietly.
He sat up, wiped his nose on his sleeve. “I’m not used to having anyone to call. That’s funny, isn’t it? They’re all here now, what’s left of my family. Uncle John, my grandfather. Even my mother is coming.”
“Coming from where?”
He shook his head. “She lives in Boston but she’s going to be at the university this semester. Some kind of writer in residence thing. I haven’t seen her since I got out of rehab the last time. I was planning on seeing her. Now, I don’t know. Part of me wants to run away from my family for good.”
“Maybe that’s not such a bad idea,” I said. “I ran away from mine.”
“And you never think about them?” he asked skeptically. “About your dad who hated you?”
“Okay,” I said. “Point taken. What do you want from them?”
“I want them to be different people,” he said. “I want to have a different life.”
“You can,” I said, “starting now. But you can’t change them or the past.”
He slumped against me and grabbed my hand.
“Hugh,” I said, “This story you told me about your grandfather killing people to get his hands on the family money? That isn’t true, is it?”
“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “I can’t prove it and without proof, who’s going to believe me? You don’t. No, you don’t have to say anything. I didn’t mean to drag you into it in the first place.”
“Do you believe he’s out to hurt you?”
He shrugged. “I do a pretty good job of hurting myself. I don’t want to talk about my grandfather anymore. Everything seemed so clear when I left New York. Now I don’t know what’s true anymore.” He added a miserable, “Henry, I’m sorry I used.”
I pulled him back into my arms. “You could have killed yourself, baby.”
“I wanted to get out of my head.”
I kissed his forehead. “We’re both tired, Hugh. Let’s get some sleep.”
His head was buried in my chest. I heard a muffled, “You’re not leaving?”
“No, I’m not leaving. Come on, let’s go to bed.”
Over his bed was a poster, a black and white photograph of Billie Holiday, head tipped back, mouth forming a perfect O, the famous gardenia in her glossy hair.
“Lady Day,” he said. “The queen of junkies.”
We stripped to our underwear and crawled into bed, holding each other as much for warmth as anything else. We kissed a little, with more tenderness than passion. I looked into his eyes and saw what it was I had recognized the first time I looked into them, and what he had recognized in mine: courage.
We two boys . . . the phrase came into my head with a memory trace of a summer day at the university sitting on the lawn outside the student center with a book on my lap. I didn’t realize I had spoken the words aloud until Hugh repeated them.
He said, “ ‘We two boys.’ What does that mean, Henry?”
“It’s from a Walt Whitman poem. ‘We two boys forever clinging, one the other never leaving . . .’ I don’t remember the rest. I’ll find it for you.”
“A love poem?”
“Yes,” I said.
He pressed himself against me. “I’ve never been in love with anyone before.”
“Me, either,” I said, and we left it there.
The next morning I found Hugh in the living room in faded red sweatpants, kneeling in a patch of sunlight. He extended his forearms to the floor, then slowly lifted his legs straight up before curving them over his head with slow, deep breaths. His torso quivered as he inhaled, bringing his chest and abdominal muscles into sharp relief. When he exhaled his skin darkened as the blood rushed in a torrent beneath it. He held the pose for ten breaths before he released it and sat on a floor with his back to me.
“What was that?” I asked.
He stood up. “A yoga pose called bhuja,” he said. “I started yoga in rehab. It really helped calm me down but I haven’t been keeping up.”
“That looked pretty advanced for someone who’s out of practice.”
“I danced in college so I was kind of a yoga natural,” he said. “I’m freezing.”
He stepped into my arms and jammed his hands down the back of my briefs. “Cold hands,” I complained. “You look good this morning. How are you feeling?”
“I’m good,” he said.
We pressed against each other, getting warm.
“Did you go to Linden University for college?” I asked.
“I need some coffee for that conversation,” he said.
In the kitchen, he measured coffee and water into a sleek coffee maker with an Italian name and pressed the on switch.
“I barely graduated from prep school,” he said. “Uncle John said he’d get me into Linden, but I didn’t want to come home. He found a college in New York, a couple of hours north of the city, that was basically a dumping ground for rich fuck-ups. No mandatory courses, no grades, big emphasis on creativity.” The last word was accompanied by air quotation marks. “There were drugs everywhere and everyone was fucking everyone. Students, teachers. I was pretty aimless but I had this friend, a girl, who was a dance major and, I don’t know, almost on a dare, she got me to take a beginning dance class.” The coffee was ready. He took two mugs from the cupboard and filled them, pushing the sugar bowl across the counter toward me. “There are spoons in the drawer behind you. Anyway, it turned out, I could dance. My body had a kind of physical intelligence that had nothing to do with this.” He touched his head. “If someone showed me the steps I could mimic them almost perfectly, but if they tried to explain them, I got bogged down in thinking. There are never enough guy dancers, so I danced. ” He sipped his coffee. “When I wasn’t getting high, or wandering around Manhattan, I mean.”
“Did you try to do anything with dance after you graduated?”
He put his cup down and spread his hands behind him on the counter. “I dropped out without graduating,” he said. “Moved to the city. Got it into my head to audition for the Joffrey Ballet School. They laughed me off the stage. That was the end of that.”
I sipped the coffee. “Was there anything else you wanted to do?”
“Get high, get fucked, in that order.” He put his arm around my waist. “I told you I was a wastrel.”
“You’re bright and athletic and you can write,” I said, thinking about the letter he had written to me. “All the parts are there, they must add up to something.”
“I wouldn’t know,” he said. “The difference between us is that no one ever told me I had to be anything.”
“What did you tell yourself?”
“Honestly, I haven’t had that conversation yet,” he said. He frowned. “Does that bother you?”
“No, it just isn’t something I understand. You’re right about me. I’ve always had a plan.”
