In the City by the Lake

by Taylor Saracen

  “What was sickening?” Yekaterina questioned, suddenly inserting herself into the conversation. If the apple truly didn’t fall far from the tree, Maks would lay at my Aunt’s roots. They were similar in all the right ways, although Maks could have stood to shut his trap more, channeling some of his mother’s mystery.

  “They were mostly homosexuals over there,” Sally stated. “Men dressing as women, rubbing against other men, kissing and worse. My stomach churns just thinking about it.”

  I wanted to say I had the same reaction to her food, but it wasn’t worth the trouble it would cause to tell her off. Instead, I focused on the foot that was gently tapping against my shin, grounding me. I shifted my eyes to Maks, who was speaking sentences with a look. It felt as though he was attempting to calm me down, like he knew Sally’s statements about Towertown had the capacity to push me over the edge. Sometimes I wondered if Maks understood more about me than I had been willing to share, if he knew me well enough to know it all.

  “I spent a good amount of time there and they were alright,” I answered. “Good to me.”

  “See, my son can see past things I could never to bear to look at if it means he’s getting clams,” my dad said, as if it was an attribute I should be proud of.

  I tried not to focus on his descriptors. They were confirmation of what I had always known but hearing it every so often really drove the point home. I said nothing, downing my third drink instead.

  By the time dessert was served I was three sheets to the wind, ready to get on with my night. I wiped the chocolate pie off my lips and stood to say my farewells.

  “You’re leaving so soon,” Sally tsked, wrapping me in a hug I didn’t want. “It’s not even ten.”

  “I’m sure he has a lady to take out,” my father said, shaking my hand.

  “You should have brought her here. I told your father to tell you that you were invited with a date,” Sally said, shooting a look to kill at her husband.

  “I told him,” my dad promised. “He’s never brought a dame around. He likes to keep it casual.”

  “I can’t deny that,” I stated, shaking Igor’s hand. The comment garnered leers from the ladies, who evidently believed I should be treating broads better.

  Having had my fill of all of it, I bundled up in my jacket and scarf, beginning to walk to the spot Cal and I had agreed upon. Rosie had somehow hooked himself a man who was in town for a business trip and planned to spend the week with him in his hotel. Though we had the apartment to ourselves, we’d decided to get out on New Year’s and arranged to meet at Navy Pier.

  The Pier was packed but it was easy for me to find Cal below it. I had spent years with nameless nobodies in the same spot, but everything was the opposite of fleeting when it came to my Cal. He leaned against a support beam as the high tide nearly engulfed the entirety of the beach save for the stretch of sand he stood on. The moon illuminated his form as speckled reflections of the twinkling lights that had filtered through the slats of wood above him danced on the lake spread at his feet.

  Though I hadn’t wanted to, I jogged to Cal, not able to get to him quickly enough. As soon as I reached him, I crashed our lips together, pressing my palms into the nape of his neck. The farther I felt from him, the closer I wanted to be. I hated that he hadn’t come to dinner and hated even more how I knew it was an unrealistic fantasy to think he’d ever integrate with my family in any capacity. I didn’t need them like I needed him, but they were planets apart and I was left floating between them. When all was said and done, it would always be Cal who grounded me, my gravity.

  “It’s cold out here,” I confessed into his mouth, listening to the icicle-laced waves lap against the shore. “We could be at home in the warmth.”

  “But then we wouldn’t be here,” he said, cradling my head. “You were on your knees when this started.”

  “Do you want me to get on my knees now?” I asked, unsure of where he was going with the trip down memory lane.

  “I told you I would care about you even if you couldn’t care for yourself,” Cal continued, ignoring my offer.

  “You did.” I remembered the moment vividly, how his presence had enchanted me, how I had found myself begging for him before I knew I was in need.

  As the lake glistened with silver streaks from the waning crescent, Cal looked more gorgeous than any sunrise I had ever seen. From the warm tone of his hair to the star-like dusting of freckles forming constellations over his skin, he was celestial. I had spent the last several years staring at the sun, and I knew I would never be able to see anybody else again. Still, I couldn’t look away.

  “People say you can never love anyone until you love yourself,” he began, resting his forehead against mine. “Can you love me?”

  “I love you enough to try,” I breathed, barely able to believe the words had escaped my lips. To love myself was a stretch but to love him was a given.

  Cal held me closer, as if I were a boy rather than a man, so vulnerable in his arms, “I love you enough for both of us,” he promised, the sadness of the statement not lost on me. Was I too callous to find forgiveness for a child who should have never been blamed? Too terrorized by the beginning of my life to see beyond my pain? Perhaps through Cal, I would finally be able to exonerate myself from the crimes I had never intended to commit.

  As the world spun above us, all mayhem and motion, we stood at its base, solid and still. Two entities who had been divided by space, pulled toward each other by a force stronger than both of us—love.

  24

  February 1936

  I never considered myself to be a scholar of world history. Though I had always found the study interesting, I wasn’t as well-versed in the challenges nations faced during their inceptions, and the actions which led them to their present dispositions, as I would have liked to have been. In school, we were given a survey education at best, and though I craved a greater knowledge, I much preferred to read fiction in my spare time rather than non. Still, there were patterns I recognized, even with my cursory knowledge, like how often governments used the press to control their people. There was a thin line between news and propaganda, and once a regime ran the press that line dissipated entirely.

  Though America had flaws, I never considered she would subscribe to the fear tactics that authoritarian governments were so fluent in, but as I read another horrible headline proclaiming the improprieties of the queer community on the front page of the Chicago Tribune, I was convinced otherwise.

  It had been a year since Towertown had shut down, and it seemed the news stories painting homosexuals as predators increased by the month. There were depraved people of all proclivities, but I found it difficult to buy into the sudden spike in pansy crime the papers were selling. Unfortunately, I was in the minority. The general public was gobbling the reports up, relieved to have a place to channel their frustration and unrest. The boom in coverage had naturally led to a rash of arrests that would not have occurred years before. Pansies were getting popped left and right for living the lives they had been leading for nearly a decade. Queens who wore dresses were arrested for lewd conduct, and working boys were tossed in the big house for solicitation. The unluckiest of the bunch bypassed prison completely and ended up in the nut house, an increasingly popular sentence for those who varied from the Victorian values America had recently readopted.

  Historically, struggling nations looked for ways to shift the blame. It was easier to say the economy was broken because of a certain scapegoated group rather than admitting there were issues in the way the government functioned. Hitler had been purporting the narrative for years that Jews were the cause of Germany’s former financial problems and in a similar vein, America was lashing back at the liberal values of the twenties, claiming it was indecency that harkened the crash. It was transparent, but it was effective, the same upper crust dames who had danced the night away at The Gallery on State in years prior now dubbing homosexual activity as disgraceful. Hypocrites.
/>   I thought I would be relieved when Cal finally saw the writing on the wall, but his awakening proved to be more disheartening than I could have imagined. Maybe I hadn’t considered he would ever come out of his trance of positivity, so the fact that he had was jarring. No matter how frustrating I found his optimism at times, Cal had balanced me, stopped me from spiraling into the pit of darkness I so often found myself residing in. Lucky for me, though Cal had come to realize things in Chicago weren’t as good for us as he’d once believed, he hadn’t gone down the perpetual path of pessimism I often traveled.

  “It’s all reactionary,” he’d assured me as he waved his hand in the air. “When things begin to improve for the country, they’ll get better for us too.”

  “And until then?” I challenged.

  “That’s the more interesting discussion,” he replied with a smile.

  It wasn’t long before he proposed the move to San Francisco, explaining how the lifestyle there was similar to how Towertown had been in its heyday. Cal spoke of the city like it was a Mecca for marjories, a promised land for pansies where the streets were paved with sequins and it never snowed. I had thought he was joking about leaving Chicago until I realized he wasn’t at all.

  It shouldn’t have surprised me that Cal was ready to abandon his life in Illinois to head west. He’d moved from Douglas to New Orleans, from André to Abraham and eventually, he’d move on from me. Some people ranted and raved about their problems while doing nothing to assuage them, but Cal wasn’t idle. Untethered by convention, he followed a path he believed would lead to happiness rather than remaining on the paved roads of pragmatism.

  Though Cal had made it clear he didn’t want to leave me or Rosie behind, I couldn’t rationalize picking up and leaving everything I had grown to know. It was a romantic notion to think the decision was as simple as packing a bag and hoping the light of our love would somehow guide our way, but my heart was quieted by a mind that didn’t allow it to have its say. Loving Cal had enriched my life, but it hadn’t eradicated countless years of mourning the move from a country I had never understood to one I related to even less. I doubted I would ever be a person so free to push past the fucked-up pieces that made me.

  “I won’t go without you,” Cal said crossly. As if his declaration had the power to distinguish my doubt. I wanted to, more than anything I wanted to be a person who could pick up and go in any which way the wind blew.

  “I don’t want you to,” I admitted, wanting to keep him for as long as I could.

  “California is supposed to be incredible,” he tsked, as though my statement was a grave disappointment. “Gorgeous weather, the ocean, liberal thought.”

  “Earthquakes,” I added. “We wouldn’t only feel as though the bottom was falling out from underneath us, it actually would be.”

  He rolled his eyes, though I could see amusement beyond the aggravation. “I’ll dream of it then. Live there in my fantasies.”

  Holding onto Cal was harnessing the sea, his force constantly threatening to break away from me

  “You’ll resent me won’t you, if you don’t go?” I muttered days later, burying my face into the soft skin at the base of his neck. “And then what?”

  “Then we’ll be like any other couple who has loved each other for a long time,” he teased, kissing the top of my head.

  I closed my eyes, wondering if people could identify their last moment of happiness before it passed them by. There must be a moment before one dies where their thoughts fade to fear as they slip into an uncharted abyss. Maybe we all leave the Earth as we entered it—afraid. When I died, I wanted to hold on to every happy time with him, wrap myself in their warmth as I faced the cold uncertainty beyond the given. His first step out of my life would be the beginning of my demise. While I would continue to breathe, I would cease to live. Any joy I’d found in Cal would follow him on the freeway as he traveled away from me. Pathetically, I would’ve preferred to have Cal resent me as the barnacle I had become rather than allow him to rid himself of me. I wanted him to stay even if he wanted to go.

  Tossing the day’s Tribune onto the coffee table, I fell back on the couch, staring at the cracked paint on the ceiling above me. Cal had gone to buy supplies, and while I thought Rosie was out trying to get some business from the lunch bunch, I was wrong.

  “Are you feeling okay?” he asked as he perched on the end of the sofa arm. He looked like a little crane with his skinny legs, knobby knees and delicate neck. The sudden urge to kick him off to see if he would fly came over me, but I stopped myself, tucking my toes into the fabric beneath me.

  “Yeah. Just sick of seeing the same shit every day,” I answered, gesturing toward the paper.

  “Sexual psychopath laws,” Rosie read in his signature sad tone. “And the psychopaths are …?”

  “Look in the mirror,” I replied, noticing how the statement seemed to smack him in his face, “or at me I guess.”

  “Cal was telling me the crackdowns are increasing, so I’m assuming it’s getting bad? For him to say something makes me believe it has.”

  “It’s not great. You should be careful not to get caught doing whatever it is you do with guys in the alleys. If you do, they’ll haul you off somewhere awful.”

  “I’m tired of every place being horrible,” he sighed, apologizing when I looked away. “I shouldn’t complain. I’m grateful you guys keep me around when you don’t have to. The last thing you need to do is listen to me.”

  “It’s alright,” I said, shifting uncomfortably. I hated when I was alone in the apartment with Rosie. Every one of his movements made me nervous, if only because he was so goddamn skittish himself.

  “If it’s okay, can I say something else?” Rosie ventured, tentative to speak out of turn.

  “It’s still a moderately free country,” I answered, leaning over to grab my cigarettes off the table. Noticing my matches were too far away for my arms to reach, I held my hand up for Rosie to toss them to me, glad when he made quick work of doing so. Lighting the fag, I awaited whatever the bird was going to say, hoping he kept it brief.

  “He’ll leave, you know,” Rosie began, his words as foreboding as they were sure. “I see it more and more by the day, the way his face goes grey when you talk about the stuff in the paper. He hates what’s happened to the city he once loved. He can’t bear to be here.”

  I gnawed on the inside of my cheek, trying to hold back the hot prickle of tears threatening to spring from my eyes. The thought that I was the cause of keeping Cal in any sort of misery was difficult to handle, but the sentence of living a life without him was much worse. “If he can’t bear to be here he would have already gone.”

  “He only stays because of you,” Rosie said softly.

  “And would you go with him to California if he decided to go?”

  “I would follow him anywhere,” Rosie answered simply. It wasn’t as pointed as it felt, but I hated his guts for saying it.

  “So you blame me, then?” I bristled. “For the sadness he feels here?”

  “I blame them,” Rosie corrected, gesturing to the paper. “I don’t understand why they’re doing this to us.”

  I shrugged, not wanting to hear another word from his rosebud mouth.

  He must have felt the chill between us because he stood quickly and muttered, “I’ve said too much,” scurrying toward the door, where I assumed he put on his coat. As he turned the knob he turned and said, “I’m sorry I made a mess.”

  Picking my head up from the cushion, I glanced around the room, looking for evidence of the mess he’d referenced. I saw nothing but Cal’s usual piles of whatever it was he’d become invested in at the time. Realizing Rosie was speaking figuratively, I settled back into the sofa and tried to purge his words and face from my mind. I needed to remember to avoid being in the apartment alone with him at any length. Though it would be ideal to tell him he needed to find a new place to live rather than tiptoeing around my home, I knew it would not go over well
with Cal. To take his dreams of San Francisco and his best friend away from him would be too much. Everyone had their breaking point and I didn’t want to push my lover to his. Although, if Rosie was right, Cal may have already been cracking.

  25

  April 1936

  I hadn’t considered asking Cal to come with me to opening day when maybe I should have. We’d gone to a good amount of games together before, so it wasn’t out of left field that he wanted to go. The problem was, I had already made plans with Maks. Studying Cal’s face when I told him, I felt like the shittiest person to walk the face of the Earth. Fuck, he’d looked sad. Hurting him was painful for me, my gashes on his cheeks, and I did it far more often than I wanted to. I ignored the subject until late one night when we were lost in the throes of passion.

  “I want you to come,” I whispered into the darkness of our bedroom as he snaked his hand behind my head and rocked inside of me.

  “I’m close,” Cal promised, increasing his vigor.

  “No, no.” I laughed when he slowed down. “Keep going,” I urged, “I meant to the game. I want you to come to the game.”

  “What?” he breathed, taken aback by the suggestion. “With Maks?”

  “Don’t say his name when you’re inside me,” I groaned, pulling a pillow over my face. “Yes.”

  “As what?” Cal attempted to clarify, stopping completely.

  I wished I had waited to bring up the topic, chiding myself for getting him off-kilter.

  “My friend.”

  “Do you think he’ll suspect something?”