The Front Runner

by Patricia Nell Warren

  On weekends we worked in the yard. It gave me a good feeling to hear the lawnmower from the back of the house. I had gotten rid of the power mower and hunted up an old-fashioned manual one because I was always afraid Billy might cut some toes off.

  Joe's ex-head gardener had left a fine planting of perennials about the house, and we tried to tidy up the neglected beds a little. We had day lilies, iris, poppies, delphinium, even a few scraggly roses. I can still see Billy down on his hands and knees sniffing a few petered-out hyacinths.

  "Did you know these are the Virgo flower?" he said.

  I got down and sniffed them. They were headily fragrant. "How come you don't smell like that when you run?" I teased him.

  "We ought to plant some more this fall," he said. He pointed at the poppies. "Your poppies look fine, though."

  Behind the house, there was an overgrown plot where the gardener had had his kitchen garden. "Next spring we'll get an early start," said Billy, "and dig it all up and have vegetables. How about that? Fresh lettuce and stuff."

  For now, he just spaded up a small area, working industriously with his shirt off. He put in some tomato plants that he had bought on sale at the Sayville super­market, and staked them with some old bamboo poles that he found in the garage.

  He was like a fragrance in my life, if you can say that stainless steel smells like hyacinths. I had craved nothing more than a lover, but I also got a friend. He was casual and practical, yet unfailingly gentle and considerate. He carried out my training program me­ticulously now, not because he had any more common sense (he didn't) but simply because he loved me.

  When I came down with a bad flu early in June, there wasn't anything that he didn't do to take care of me. He fed me aspirin, made me herb tea, bicycled to the drugstore to get my antibiotics. I was terrified he'd get my flu, but he was fit and taking Vitamin C, so he stayed immune.

  Slowly I learned how fully I could trust him. Sexual he was—he could seduce me with one steady look from his clear eyes. But he was chaste. Never once did I see his eye rove to rate another man's body. Devoted as I was to him, I was sometimes guilty of this—it was mostly habit, I'd been doing it so long. He always noticed it and scolded me possessively, but he always forgave me.

  His love burned with a steady, white heat, slowly melting the last hoarfrost of years off my bones. I sheltered him, raging against the world, yet he was always the stronger one, still and steely when I was ready to crack. His faults—his cold-bloodedness, his pitilessness—were now turned only against those who threatened us. From the day of our marriage, we had no more quarrels.

  This peace, this daily sharing, this accumulative tenderness, was all that any human being asks from life. Yet this was precisely what a number of people wanted to take away from us. We built each day consciously, and in implacable self-defense.

  When the press reported our marriage, we started hearing from long-absent relatives.

  I got a call from my uncle in Philadelphia, who told me that my mother had had a nervous breakdown as a result of the publicity. She was in a hospital. "Isn't it enough that you've brought such shame on the fami­ly?" he shouted in my ear. "Do you have to kill your mother too?"

  "I'm not trying to kill her," I said. "She's killing herself."

  "You must be a communist," said my uncle. "You're trying to destroy the American family."

  And then he had the nerve to tell me that, if my mother didn't now have Medicare, they would have insisted I help with the hospital expenses.

  But the most painful encounter was with Billy's mother.

  Both John and I had wondered if she would show up someday. Children who become famous have a way of luring missing parents out of hiding. About a week after the wedding, Billy received an in­nocent-sounding letter from Leida. She said she was living in San Diego now, and had been thinking of him all these years. Could she possibly see Billy?

  Billy was mildly disturbed, but he said, "I guess I ought to see her."

  One rainy afternoon in the third week of June, Leida came up to Prescott. She sat nervously in our living room, looking at the training schedule posted by the kitchen, and at our two pairs of muddy running shoes by the front door. Through the side window, she could see our shorts, jock straps and T-shirts hanging soaked on the clothesline where Billy had forgotten them.

  Leida was a slender agitated woman not much older than I. She sat clutching her handbag, with spots of feverish color in her pale cheeks. She was dressed as if she was going to church: pink linen suit, a white straw hat and white gloves. She had Billy's blue-gray eyes and cheekbones, and his curly, light brown hair. But on her the cheekbones looked strained, and the eyes hid things.

  Billy greeted her politely and cooly. He shook hands with her. "Hi, Leida," he said.

  She looked us up and down. I think she was ir­ritated that we hadn't dressed up more to receive her. We had just come back from the Prescotts'. We both had on old T-shirts, shorts and rubber sandals.

  We had some strained chitchat. How was her trip? And so on.

  Finally Leida said, "All these years I have felt very guilty. I had you when I was very young, just 18. I. . ." Her eyes were wide, almost terrified. ". . . wasn't ready for a baby. I had a terrible postpartum depres­sion. Then I left your father when I found out what. .. what he was like. So when I divorced him, I gave him custody of you, because I wasn't ready ..."

  Billy was sitting cross-legged on the Afghan rug, shaggy head a little bent, not looking at her. "You don't have to apologize," he said. "Everything worked out fine."

  "But it was monstrous of me to abandon you," she said.

  Billy raised his. clear terrible eyes to hers. "Why?"

  "Well . . . well, because . . ." The words hung un­spoken. She was sure that, if she'd taken Billy with her, he would have grown up straight.

  "How did your father . . . manage?" Leida asked.

  "Oh, he and Frances managed fine," said Billy.

  "Frances? Did he marry again?"

  Billy's eyes were expressionless, implacable. "He married a transvestite." Thus, brutally, did he give Leida her first lesson in gay sociology. "They raised me."

  Leida sucked in her breath.

  "You don't know how much I regret it," she said to Billy. "If I could do things over again ..."

  "Look," said Billy, getting a little irritated, "I'm happy, so, like . . . there's nothing to regret. Don't make yourself unhappy over nothing."

  There was a silence.

  "I thought of you many times," said Leida. "I thought . . . 'oh, he's grown up by now, maybe he's married to some lovely girl already.' Finally I tried to get in touch with you, but John had moved. I didn't know your whereabouts until I saw the newspapers—"

  She paused. Suddenly she burst out, "But Billy, it's so absurd! You'll never have any children of your own this way. Don't you want a family, children? Every man wants to see his family line go on."

  I was sitting on the edge of one of the wing chairs, looking down at my rubber sandals, my fists clenched.

  I was vowing that I would not get involved in this discussion, that Billy was perfectly capable of handling it.

  Billy smiled a little. "There are too many children anyway," he said. "We're helping the world toward zero population growth."

  His joke simply offended her. She said, "Billy, I'm your mother, I only want what's best for you."

  Suddenly Billy was on his feet, shaking. He was so white that he looked bled. "You're not my mother. Do you understand that?"

  Leida's hands flew to her mouth. They were pale nerveless hands, fine-boned like Billy's but without his strength.

  Billy went on. "Maybe you thought of yourself as my mother. But I was nine months old when you left. As far as I'm concerned, you're a name on my birth certificate and that's all. I'm not sure I have a mother. Maybe I grew in the cabbage patch. If I ever had a mother, it was Frances."

  I knew Billy was not being deliberately cruel, but his truth was as cruel as intentio
n.

  "Frances changed my diapers," said Billy. "He taught me to walk. He picked me up after school. When I skinned my knee, he put a bandaid on it."

  Leida put her shaking hands over her eyes and started to sob.

  "Billy, isn't that enough?" I said in a low voice. I felt a little sorry for Leida.

  "It isn't enough," he said. His eyes never left her. "The whole world is trying to break up Harlan and me. And you come out of the woodwork and help them. You may be a very nice lady, and I don't want to hurt you. But you stay away from me with your big guilt. Don't lay your straight imperialism on me."

  "Billy," I said. I got up and went to him, and put my hand on his shoulder. I had never seen him so agitated.

  My touching his shoulder kindled Leida. She stood up. "I've tried to reason with you," she said to Billy. "Obviously you're brainwashed. You're just a child."

  "He was twenty-two when we met," I said. "He was a man, and no virgin, and capable of deciding how he wants to live."

  "Billy," said Leida, "I'm going to take you home. I think it would be best for you."

  Billy started to laugh hysterically. "Home? This is my home."

  "Billy," said Leida firmly, "there are laws—"

  "Listen," said Billy, furious now, his voice breaking strangely, the way he had been when I slapped him that time, "don't give me any crap about the law. My father is a lawyer. I know what the law is. Don't you read the papers? The Supreme Court did away with all those laws."

  "The police—" said Leida.

  "You try it." Billy was the animal now, trying to stay in front. "You don't have a leg to stand on. I'm not a minor, and I wasn't a minor when I met Harlan. You officially gave custody of me to my father. All those years you didn't use your visiting privileges. You showed no interest in my morals. So don't come crying around now. The police and the courts won't give you the time of day."

  "Parents have a legal right to kidnap their children, if it's for their own good," said Leida. She must have been reading about parents who kidnap their kids back from the Jesus freaks.

  "You try it," said Billy. "I'll file assault charges against you."

  "God will punish you both," cried Leida.

  Billy took two strides to the door and opened it. Outside it was drizzling sweetly. "Get out," he said.

  Silently Leida picked up her handbag and gloves, and walked out without looking at Billy.

  Leida must have checked into Billy's legal ob­servations, because we heard no more from her. But she had struck into our lives, and left her pain.

  There were many other pains like that.

  Joe and Marian had a married daughter who lived in Chicago. The last two weeks in June, she sent her three small children to visit the Prescotts. They were two boys and a girl, ranging from five to eight—the sweetest liveliest little things you could imagine, all of them with blond ringlets.

  They all latched onto Billy, with good reason. He had his childish moments, and knew how to play with them. They were shyer with me, but still friendly. The sunny afternoons at the Prescotts' pool were full of shrieks, splashes and laughter as we all played with inner tubes and big plastic animal floats. I can still see Billy trying to get up on the big duck, and pretending he couldn't, and falling back into the water, while the three children screamed with laughter.

  Joe and Marian would sit in deck chairs, grinning, benevolent.

  When we were at the track, the three of them came running across the field to watch. The other summer-faculty children often came to watch too, so sometimes there were ten or fifteen kids there. They all knew they weren't supposed to yell too much, or get in Billy's and Vince's way. But they had their own little meet, run­ning dashes up and down on the outside. The little girl, Julie, would run madly, her little legs pumping, her curls glinting in the sunlight, trying to keep up with Billy as he scorched past at a 4-minute pace. It took about ten of her strides to fill one of his.

  When the workout was over and the boys were warmed down, the three would run up to them, screaming, "Bii-eeee! Bill-eeeee!" I can still hear their clear, high voices, like birds in the woods. One by one, he and Vince would grab them and toss them in the air. They would scream hysterically with delight, and beg the boys to do it again and again. Billy would prance around with the little girl on his shoulders, like a horse, and she would hang onto his hair. Then we'd all troop home across the meadow, the smell of hot sweet grass in our nostrils.

  "Don't ask me why," said Billy, "but I love that little girl."

  "Sure you know why," I said.

  "Let's steal her," he said.

  But when Joe's daughter came to join the children, she was scandalized that her parents had allowed the children to hang around us. She was not nearly as liberal as her parents. Joe and Marian tried to reason with her, but she was firm. "It's best for the children," she said.

  After that, whenever she saw us, she would gather the children and shoo them out of sight. The three little ones didn't understand, they cried.

  "We sometimes forget," said Vince bitterly, "that we're lepers."

  During those sunny weeks, Leida's words often haunted me. She was right. I had children, but Billy's superior genes would be lost. As it turned out, they had haunted Billy too, and we ended up discussing gay paternity. The subject was brought up when we received an anonymous phone call that was more vicious than usual.

  To calm ourselves down, we went for a walk up along the trail where we always ran. It was a cloudy afternoon, with thunder rumbling softly in the distance and a feel of rain coming. We walked slowly along. The marks of our spikes were still plain in the earth from that morning.

  "It's something that bothers me a lot," I said. "When we die, there will be nothing left. When other couples die, there are children left. Even an inheri­tance. Even a name that is passed down. Even just a marriage certificate on file somewhere. For us, nothing."

  "I'll make a will," said Billy, "and I'll leave you my brown velvet suit and all my old track shoes." He wasn't joking, though.

  We kept walking. The woods were almost obscene­ly green. A fine mist was beginning to come down, and it cooled our faces and skins.

  "Maybe you're going to laugh at this," I said, "but I wish we both had children."

  "I've been thinking about that," said Billy. "I'm not laughing."

  "Having kids was the least unpleasant part of being married," I said. "Of course they could be a pain in the ass, but it had its rewards too. You come home at night, and they run to you and say Daddy, Daddy."

  We came to a little stream that was rushing, foaming full. It boiled around the rocks past us. We jumped over it, and kept on.

  I always used to think that living in your children was an illusion," said Billy. "But I changed my mind. Like with little Julie. Supposing she was yours. If something happened to you, that would be all I'd have left of you. It'd be something. I wouldn't be alone, I could do things for her. And if she were mine, you could feel that way ... It isn't you that lives on, it's the other person."

  We were both trying to contain ourselves, not looking at each other much. We weren't even holding hands or anything. Billy sauntered along, hands in pockets, kicking at small stones, reaching up to pull leaves from the trees.

  "I don't suppose an adoption agency would give us the time of day," I said.

  "Not a chance. Dad handled two lesbian cases and one case of a gay. All three of them wanted to adopt. The agencies said no and the courts said no. The idea is that you have a right to be brought up straight."

  "Anyway," I said, "it would be better to have our own."

  "Sure," said Billy. "But if there was some little gay kid out there somewhere, abandoned like me, and they would give him to me, I'd take him. And I'd have my own too, if I could."

  "Look, are you serious?" I said.

  "Of course I'm serious," he said. "I have a very positive image about being a father. I really think I'd like it. You and I would both be good fathers."

  "Well
, I've been looking into it a little," I said. "That gloomy conversation we had out on Fire Island started me thinking. We can, for instance, buy a child on the black market."

  "Darling, what would we buy him with?" said Billy, grinning. "We'd have to hock all my trophies, and I'd lose my amateur status."

  I smiled too. I had a lump in my throat, so it was hard.

  "Then there's something that some couples do who have infertility problems," I said. "Like, say the wife is sterile or something. They find a female donor, and the. husband impregnates her, and then she agrees to turn the child over to them."

  Billy stopped and looked at me. "That's not a bad idea. One catch, though," he said.

  "What?" I said.

  "I'm not getting into bed with any foxes. Not even to have children."

  "Artificial insemination," I said.

  Billy smiled slowly. His hair was iridescent with the fine mist coming down. "Weird," he said. "Sooner or later you end up making deals with women. It's an injustice, really." We walked on. "But . . . what're you going to do?" He kicked another rock. "How do we find one of these brood mares?"

  "How do I know? Run some kind of blind ad in the papers, maybe. Screen the applicants. Pick some broad who is typey and intelligent. Make her sign the papers before she's inseminated, so she can't walk off with the baby."

  "That sounds complicated. Shell want money."

  "Yeah, we'd have to pay all her hospital expenses too."

  Billy ran his fingers through his hair and shook his head. "It sounds like the kind of thing we can't do until after the Olympics. Assuming I get there."

  "Something else too. Supposing we find out, after it's too late, that babies need mothers too?"

  Billy shook his head. We were coming to another little stream, and stepped across on some broad flat rocks. Billy slipped and got one shoe wet. He walked on with his shoe squishing. We were coming toward the fork where the side trail branched off, the one we had taken on that first spring morning a year ago.

  "That doesn't worry me too much," he said. "Dad and I talked a lot about that. His theory is that the important thing is a lot of attention and cuddling and touching. He doesn't think it much matters who does it. When my mother left, he was stuck with look­ing after me and he said he was afraid even to pick me up. He had a babysitter during the day, but she wasn't paying much attention to me. He said that I got kind of funny for a while there. I didn't notice things, and I was like a little retarded. I didn't walk till late." Finally he got over being nervous, and he started paying a lot of attention to me. He'd get up early in the morning, and spend all evening with me if he could. He said finally I snapped out of it. Then when Frances came everything was fine. He was convinced it was just the loving. Maybe that's why love and being touched means so much to me, because of those few months when I didn't get any ..."