Getting Off Clean

by Timothy Murphy

  As I’m walking to class, Miss Laski’s zombielike voice comes on the loudspeaker. “Your attention, please, for a special announcement from the principal’s office. Senior Eric Fitzpatrick has placed first in the Boston Globe’s statewide essay contest with his informative essay “What I Cherish in America.” His essay will be featured in the paper a week from this Sunday. This is a special honor not only for Eric, but for West Mendhem High School. Please be sure to congratulate Eric on this notable achievement. Thank you for your attention.”

  I pass a group of kids in my class, some guys on the hockey team and their girlfriends. “Congratulations, big guy,” they say to me, pounding me on the back and mussing my hair. “Eric, congratulations, that’s so exciting, you’re so smart!” their girlfriends squawk at me, big-eyed, gasping.

  “Thanks,” I say, dazed from the pummeling. We go our separate ways. When they turn the corner, I hear them all burst out laughing.

  Seven

  It feels strange to be driving out to St. Banner at this time of day. I haven’t done it in nearly a month, and it’s much colder now, the middle of December, and even though it’s only three in the afternoon, the light already seems to be bleeding out of the sky, the color of wet undyed wool. Taking Route 136 outcountry, I pass several old white houses that already have Christmas lights in their windows and strung around their bushes and trees. I feel like I am fleeing civilization, fleeing festivity, on this, the first afternoon of my celebrity. But as I turn into the familiar pathway near the far outskirts of St. Banner and park the car off the gravel, half in the woods, the old thump in my chest starts up again, and the funny tingle in my stomach, perhaps stronger, because I haven’t made this trip in a month.

  Soccer season is over and the fields are deserted. Now, stripped of greenery and athletes, St. Banner looks lonelier than ever, more like an old, out-of-the-way sanatorium than a school, and I feel minuscule and paranoid as I trudge across the hard-packed earth of the field sidelines, bent forward into the wind, walking toward the horizon below which unfold the buildings and the immense lake. The old barn looks the same, but when I pull back the colossal wooden door it lets out a ghastly shriek that I don’t remember it ever having made before.

  I close it behind me. It’s slightly warmer in here than it is outside, but not much, and the darkness disconcerts me; the tiny windows high above took in more light back in the fall. Inside it’s completely silent.

  I stand in the middle of the barn and squint up toward the loft. “Hey!” I shout-whisper sharply. No answer.

  “Brooks?”

  Again, no answer. I look at my watch. It’s only seven past three; he mustn’t be here yet. I take the old ladder, careful to lean forward as I climb so the weight of my laden backpack doesn’t throw me back down. At the top, I stare into the dark recesses of the loft.

  “Hello.”

  “Shit!” I almost topple back down, I’m so startled by his voice. Now I can make him out: he’s sitting Indian-style in a far corner of the loft, absolutely still, like someone practicing meditation, or something, lost inside the biggest, bulkiest knitted sweater I’ve ever seen, jeans, and knee-high rubber waders. He’s got some sort of open shoe box in front of him, and, in his hand what look like photographs and scraps of things.

  “Didn’t you hear me from down there?” I ask, climbing into the loft, pulling off my backpack and standing over him awkwardly. It’s funny: we haven’t seen each other for some time; I’m reabsorbing his face, his posture, his voice, everything about him. He looks—I don’t know—gaunter than the last time I saw him, but maybe that’s just because he’s swallowed up in his ridiculously huge clothes, like someone pressed at the last minute into playing an old New England salt and hurried into the garments of someone twice his size.

  All he does is look up at me slowly and nod, like a kid who’s just been clocked, and then finally, in a voice that’s hardly there, he says, “I did.”

  “Well, then, why didn’t you call back?”

  “I’m sorry?” Looking blanker still.

  “Why didn’t you call back when you heard me call?”

  He looks down at the pictures in his hand. “Because I didn’t hear you.”

  “What? Brooks, you just said you did!”

  “I’m sorry,” he says, not looking up. I’m still standing over him, wondering what to say, when I notice that the pictures are shaking in his hand. (They’re old photos, I notice absurdly now, making out dim figures in black and white.) Pretty soon his whole body is shaking, and in a moment I hear a horrible racking sob come out of his chest. Then he drops them back into the box and throws his head into both his hands. Suddenly he’s just weeping, his whole body shaking and rocking, sounding like he’s never sounded before, and, terrified, I get down on my knees beside him. I think I can smell marijuana on him, but I don’t think to ask about it.

  “Hey. Brooks, come on. What’s wrong?” I put my cold hand on his shoulder; I can feel it shaking through the scratchy huge sweater.

  “Brooks. Come on. Talk to me,” I say. I begin to wonder what I was thinking when I said today I would come; I begin to think I’ve wandered into something too deep for me to handle. But when he just crumples further into himself, all I can do is move the shoe box from between us and put my arms around him, and think Just let him ride it out. That’s what he did for me once. It’s only decency. At first he stays as he was; then he extricates his arms from under me and puts them around me and, still crying, lets his head fall onto my chest and then into my lap. He keeps on crying and I stroke his head, sitting awkwardly on my knees and staring into the darkness of the loft, aware of the cold, and we stay that way a long time. And then he stops crying, and we’re both absolutely silent and still, and he finally looks up at me from my lap. I wipe the wet off his face, and then we both just look at each other, blankly, until he says, “Eric.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Come here.”

  And I lie down beside him on the freezing loft floor, my backpack and his shoe box somewhere down below our feet, and we both just start running our hands over each other’s faces, still staring at each other, and I’m beginning to feel very old, but in a grimly content way, like an adult, and I’m wondering to myself: Is this what it feels like to have thoughts too grave and tender to express, so grave and tender that it feels wrong to express them? Is this what responsibility feels like—or am I fooling myself? But before I can really worry about it, he pulls my head close to his (his hands are curiously warm on the back of my neck) and pretty soon we’re sucking face for I don’t know how long, maybe nearly half an hour, but I don’t really know because I’m not keeping time. It’s as if everything that’s happened since the last time we did this falls away, as if it all was just a prologue to this happening again, a series of exquisite points on a time line, and I’m wondering how we’ve gone so long without, why I thought it was best to go without, or how I thought I would, or how anyone possibly could, especially through this long approaching winter.

  “Hey,” he says.

  “What?”

  “Feel this.” And he puts my hand over his pants, and I go, “Oh,” and in a moment I’m pulling his stiff thing out of his jeans and he’s in my pants pulling out mine with his warm hand. Then we’re sucking face again, furiously, and we both stop a moment to slobber all over our own hands and smear the spit over the top and shaft of each other’s things, and I’m thinking I’d pass up a million stupid essay prizes just to be able to do this with him every day—no, not even every day, every week, maybe, every month. We’ve each got our other hand down underneath each other’s shirts, and we’re kind of holding each other up and staring down at ourselves (our right arms making an X) and then back up at each other, with our legs sticking straight out and our pants down around our knees, butts freezing on the loft floor. And suddenly I feel myself hit the top of the hill; I go completely stiff and hold my breath and pretty soon I’m spewing in festive white ribbons onto my bare legs, all over
my shirt, and onto the floor.

  “Oh, my God, beautiful,” he says, still completely stiff, and I sit him up, facing forward between my legs and I pull off his sweater and shirt, lock my ankles over his, throw my left arm around his chest, run my right hand across the spew on my legs, place it back on his cock, and start jerking him off, faster and more aggressively than before. And now that I’m over the hump myself, so to speak, I can’t get over how incredible it is just observing him go through the same arc of pleasure, hitting the top of the same hill, and, exclaiming, “Ex—traor—dinary!” stiffen his back against my chest and send his own white ribbons out before us, straight out, four shots plus, in as clear and unequivocal a trajectory as my own.

  Then I lean back, and so does he, and we just lie there for a few minutes, breathing hard, not saying anything, and then finally he puts his hand on my cheek, and he whispers, “I missed you.”

  “I missed you, too,” I say. And I startle myself because I can’t believe how much I mean it.

  He sits up and wipes himself off with his shirt, although even by now, in the cold, everything’s mostly crusted up, and he pulls his jeans, shirt, and colossal sweater back on haphazardly, and I do the same. Then he pulls over the shoe box and settles the two of us into a corner and grabs the old army blanket that he brought up here some time ago, and drapes it over our laps and knees.

  “I brought this up here to show you,” he says, placing the box on his lap, actually looking kind of shy.

  “What’s in it?” I ask—gently, trying to encourage him.

  “It’s photos and clips and things that I took from my auntie’s house when I came away. She’s been saving this stuff all these years, even though there’s no love lost between her and my mother, or my father, for that matter. I don’t know if she ever intended on giving this stuff to me—maybe as a graduation present or something—so before I came up here I slipped away with it. The purloined shoe box.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Here’s my mother.” He hands me a page from some fashion magazine dating back to the late sixties. “She used to be a model before she married Francis. Her name’s Viola, but everyone called her Vi.” He pronounces it “Vee,” like the letter.

  It’s a striking, almost intimidating photograph of a lithe, beautiful black woman in a crazy flowing pink pantsuit, legs pitched wide and perched on tiny heels, arms thrown out, askew, above her head, and long hands (like his) flung out, Catwoman-style. Her hair is pulled back tightly on her head, like a sleek black cap, and I try to look beyond the spidery false eyelashes and Cleopatra makeup to see in her eyes if I detect a resemblance to him. I do; it’s a dueling look, a look that says, “Just try to best me, because you won’t.”

  “She’s beautiful,” I say, handing it back. “Why did she quit?”

  “She got knocked up. With me. She was supposed to go back to Virginia and become a schoolteacher when she graduated from Spelman, but then her mother died and she freaked out. She didn’t want to live with Auntie Fleurie, so she packed her things and moved to New York, and waited tables and lived in the YWCA. She walked into a fashion magazine for colored ladies one day, looking for a job, and they asked her if she wanted to pose for a shoot. And that was that. The whole ‘Black is beautiful,’ the whole exotic thing, was starting up, and she got plenty of work.”

  “I can see why,” I say.

  “Then she met Francis at a party—he was just starting up his own little outfit at the time—and they started seeing each other, and he knocked her up. Then they got married. I was born, and for a while, we all lived happily ever after in a walk-up on West Ninety-sixth Street. He started traveling down to the Caribbean on business, and she’d take me into the park every afternoon. She became friends with all the Negro nannies, so all these little white East Side babies were my first friends. Then my father didn’t come back from a trip; he sent a letter instead saying that the more he went away the more terrified he became of coming back. And that this time, his terror finally had gotten the better of him. And that we would be provided for. So my mother packed us up and we moved back down to Virginia to live with Fleurie.”

  “Did your mother go crazy when your father left?” I ask.

  He purses his lips. “I don’t really remember. I was too young, and when I was growing up, the name Francis Tremont was spoken in a poisonous whisper, if at all. All I remember is one thing, really: my father left behind all of his ties in New York, dozens of them—gorgeous ties, too, designer ones, Yves St. Laurent, Pierre Cardin. My mother would get them for him for free because of modeling, because he was starting his own business and couldn’t afford to buy good ties himself. And my mother brought all those ties back to Virginia with her, and over the years, Auntie Fleurie ended up sewing them all into quilts. Some of the quilts she’d sell at church fairs, but a fair amount ended up around the house. Growing up, that was how I knew that Francis Tremont had indeed actually existed, because his ties were everywhere.”

  “Shit,” I say. “That’s eerie.” I’m trying to take it all in: beautiful mother, New York City, the Caribbean, a globe-trotting father in exquisite ties secured for free. It’s almost more than I can process.

  “Rather.” He hands me another photo, the kind that comes in a cardboard frame you can prop up on a bureau. “This is him, Francis, right after graduating from Cornell.”

  “Wow. Cornell?”

  “That’s right. He was from the North, upstate New York, very solidly bourgeois. His father owned some kind of glue factory, I think, and his mother was a nurse. He was confident; I remember that about him, he was fierce—and big. He played football for Cornell. He was also Phi Beta So-and-So, but he still couldn’t get a job with any New York City finance outfit. My mother told Auntie Fleurie it was discrimination, but Auntie Fleurie said, ‘No, child, that isn’t discrimination, it’s Francis being too cocky for his own good.’ Auntie Fleurie never liked Francis; she thought he was one of those uppity, squawk-talking integrated Northern niggers.”

  The word hits me like a slap, and I look at him, surprised, but he just shrugs. I open up the frame: there’s a formal black-and-white photograph of a seated man in a thin-lapeled black suit, hands folded over one crossed knee. Brooks is right, he is big: squared-off, not attenuated like his son, and he isn’t so much handsome as capable-looking. He’s smiling decorously in the photo, but in his eyes, behind the horn-rimmed glasses, I think he looks a little stunned, like he’s there more in body than mind.

  “He looks imposing,” I say, handing it back.

  He puts the picture back in the box and closes the lid. “I suppose so. I don’t remember.” And he slides down and drops his head into my lap and looks up at me blankly.

  “Is that who you were thinking about when I came in?” I ask, running my hand over the top of his head.

  “Huh?”

  “Your father? Your mother?”

  “Sort of. But it’s hard to think of Francis in anything but the abstract, since I haven’t heard from him in about twelve years. I guess it would be nice to see the lovely Vi, but she’s becoming more and more of an abstraction in my head, too. I wonder if she’ll come back for Fleurie’s funeral, which should be any day now. She’s got to, I suppose.”

  “Brooks?” I venture. “What are you going to do when your auntie dies?”

  “I don’t know. Meet with the executor of her will, I guess. I suppose you want to know where an old black lady in the South got all her money, hunh?”

  It seems like he wants to tell me—it seems like he wants to tell me a lot of things tonight—so I say I guess it’s crossed my mind.

  “You know how in those romantic, lying movies about the Old South, Ole Massa’s on his deathbed, delirious, and he gives over all his land to Big Sam, or Jiminy, or whichever good darky didn’t desert the farm with all the other no-good niggers when the Yankees came through?”

  “I guess so,” I say, although I can’t actually remember any movies where this occurs.

&nb
sp; “Well—believe it or not—that’s actually what happened on Fleurie’s side of the family, although I suppose it wasn’t quite as simple as that. Somehow the land came down to Fleurie and she lived on it for a while, but she got tired of the White Lords of the Magnolia, or whatever the fuck they called themselves, coming around and burning the crops down. So she finally sold it, for a fraction of what it was worth, but a goodly sum nonetheless, and she built herself a fine house in the city. And she educated herself and she became a lady of standing in the community. So there.”

  I don’t know whether he’s mocking his aunt or not—I don’t even know what parts of the story to believe—so all I say is “Wow. That’s impressive.”

  “It is impressive, isn’t it?” he says, mocking me now with his saccharine golly-gee voice. “And a few years ago Fleurie got herself a nice sympathetic white law firm to execute her estate when she popped off. So they’re the fine fellows I’ll have to meet with—imminently.”

  “And then what?” I ask.

  “And then since they’re my custodians, I’ll have to convince them to let me take the money and run.”

  “Run to where?”

  “What have I said before? To Paris, city of eternal light.”

  “Aren’t you ever going to go to college?”

  “Not if I can help it,” he says, reaching down under the blanket into his pocket, where he withdraws two cigarettes and lights them simultaneously. “Here,” he says, handing one to me.

  “You know I don’t really smoke.”

  “Oh, for Chrissakes, just take it. You look sexy with a cigarette. I can pretend you’re Holden Caulfield. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, you little prep-schooler manqué?”

  “What does that make you, then?” I ask, lipping the cigarette tentatively.

  “A lost cause,” he says, exhaling.

  “Would you shut up with that again?” I say, annoyed. “I’ve told you a million times, you’ve got everything going for you. First of all, you’re—”