Getting Off Clean

by Timothy Murphy

  Silently, I replaced the receiver. Then I stared at the phone a long time, thought of calling back, explaining myself and my reluctance to speak, and then starting all over again. But I didn’t. Instead, I went into the living room, lay down on the sofa, and stared at the darkened Christmas tree, glistening blackly with tinsel, until I fell asleep, and dreamed of an unmarked southern funeral—decorous, genial, and gray with warm rain.

  January 1987

  Nine

  It’s about four in the afternoon, that last corridor of light in the dead center of the winter when the sky goes a charcoal color, and a few fat, solitary flakes of snow are falling out of it and onto the windshield of my mother’s hatchback as I gun the motor out of the high school lot and onto the little network of slender old farmers’ roads that eventually spill into Great Lake Drive. I usually feel numb this time of year, mid-January, but I’m keen and alert today, having fled school right after the last bell, telling Phoebe I had to go take care of my grandmother and would she please make excuses for me at the literary magazine meeting.

  Well, that was a lie. Grandma is staying with Auntie Reenie for the week because my mother is burnt out, and right now, this very minute, I’m driving in the middle of a threatening snowstorm toward St. Banner, to meet him in the old familiar place, this being my first visit since way back in December, since before his auntie died and he went home for winter break, since before the Boston Globe dubbed me the Voice of Youth—since before a lot of things. But he’s held over, strangely; it doesn’t feel as if his face, his voice, his crummy attitude, and snide remarks have blunted at all in my mind. In an odd way, it’s like he’s been with me the whole time, like a mean, funny little imaginary friend, constantly commenting into my right ear on everyone around me, nearly provoking me to laugh—or sneer—aloud, in the presence of others. When I called him last night, when he told me he had just gotten back, he hadn’t even opened his bags (valises, he actually called them), when he said he had forgotten since Exeter how absolutely gloriously suicidal New England Januarys made him, I heard the old sneer, sneer, sneer. And I felt like I had to apologize for the state of the weather in Massachusetts in January, that it was a reflection on my stock, my lineage, my non-upwardly mobile tribe.

  I park the car in the usual hidden spot off the road and gather up my scarf and gloves; it’s going to be frigid in that barn. My heart is pounding as I make the old sprint across the soccer field, now completely iced over and looking like the remote Alaskan tundra (or what I imagine that would look like), and for one split second I wonder if it’s smart that I’m starting this up again, now with all these good developments going on—fame and all—and then I remember that in the middle of all this, there’s only been one person I’ve been wanting to talk about it to for the last month, and just before I slip inside the barn, I think: Okay. I’ll play it by ear.

  Someone stored old crew shells in here over the winter break; they’re lying right side up along the far wall, and for some reason, they remind me of a picture of Egyptian mummies’ tombs I remember seeing when I was a kid, and that freaks me out a little. It’s silent in here and I take my usual position underneath the loft.

  “Hey there,” I call up, audibly, but scared as usual to be too loud. Nothing. I wonder if, for once, I’ve beaten him to the meeting place.

  I call up again, a little louder. “Are you up—Shit!” Something comes hurtling down from the loft, something square, and it hits me on the forehead, knocking me back a bit, then falls on the ground in front of my wet boots.

  “What the fuck?” I say aloud. It’s a package, wrapped in fake Victorian Christmas paper, topped by an enormous, ridiculous-looking bow. Then I hear it—hyena laughing from the recesses of the loft—and I’m pissed off, and my stomach flips over, delicately, with a thrill.

  He sticks his head over the edge of the loft, looking down at me, still laughing his brains out, he thinks it’s so funny.

  “Did I clock you? I didn’t mean to. That’s my Christmas present to you. Airmail,” and he starts laughing all over again.

  “You got a haircut,” I say, stupidly. I should cuss him out for being immature, for throwing gifts out in midair, not knowing whom they’re going to hit. I should ask him if he’s ringing in the new year by getting stoned again every afternoon. But I’m so happy to see him, it’s as if my only, my secret happiness has been restored, and all I notice is that he got a haircut, very close to his scalp (it was getting bushy before he left, because he wouldn’t trust it to the “cretin” elderly white barber in downtown West Mendhem), and he looks so intelligent and evil-minded and handsome, like nobody else I know.

  “You noticed,” he says, saccharine and phony-flattered, running his hand over the top of his head. “It’s terribly military, isn’t it. But I couldn’t look like a Black Panther–in–training for my auntie’s funeral, could I? Nor would I want to, I suppose.” He runs his hand over it again. “It’s severe to the touch. Il faut que tu le touches.”

  I laugh. “I’ll come up,” I say, picking up the package, as about a thousand other things in my life seem to evaporate behind me, somewhere outside, away.

  “No, wait,” he says. “I’ll come down. I want to stretch.” He comes bounding down the ladder, about ten times more herky-jerk than usual. It’s like he’s lost his old wary, measured, I’ll-never-move-too-fast quality; he’s behaving like a little kid—hyper.

  “He-llo,” he chimes, hopping directly in front of me.

  “You’re chipper.”

  “It’s 1987. New year, new frontiers. And I am now a very, very wealthy colored boy. My wealth engulfs me.”

  I laugh again, but my feelings sharpen. “Lucky you,” I say, shrugging.

  “Oh, lucky for both of us,” he says, and he grabs the waist of my overcoat. “Well, Seigneur Fitzpatrick?” And I blush and say, “Well, I don’t know,” and then we start making out, more aggressively than ever before because I’m trying to make up for a month of not even touching him, and I put both my hands up on his head and clamp them there, over his stark skull.

  “It is severe,” I say, and, blown into my mouth, he says, “Severe times call for severity.” More fooling around, then: “Aren’t you going to open your package?”

  “I guess I owe you a Christmas present,” I say, pulling off the ridiculous bow, not knowing what to do with it, depositing it gingerly in my coat pocket.

  “Nonsense. From now on, you are merely going to accept my gifts and edify yourself.”

  I don’t know what he means by that, but I’m not sure I want to, so I go on opening it up. “Did you wrap this?” I ask him.

  “Della did,” he says.

  “Della?”

  “Fleurie’s housekeeper. It was one of the last things she did before she packed her bags after thirteen years of service and moved back to her sister’s. Weeping the whole way, of course. For Fleurie.”

  “It’s very rococo,” I say of the package, trying out a new word.

  “Della was very rococo.”

  Inside, it’s a copy of A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway, the old kind of hardback, with woven covers, fraying a little around the edges. The pages are yellow, smelling like cedar, and inside, fading, someone’s written in a spidery, calligraphic hand: “April 1961. To lovely Vi. He hath made every moment a ‘feast’ in your life. Give thanks!!! XXOO F.”

  “Fleurie gave that to my mother when she went off to school. It made my mother go to Paris the summer after her freshman year. That started the trouble with her. She never wanted to come back.”

  “I haven’t read it,” I say, keeping it to myself that I hate Hemingway.

  “Of course I loathe Hem,” he says—as though he knew exactly what I was thinking—picking up my backpack for me, slinging it around his shoulder, marching us back up the ladder, into the loft. “Disgusting creature. Everyone in Paris, Gerald and Sara Murphy, Gertrude, F. Scott and Zelda—oh, Lord, poor Zelda—they all wasted their time on him, because he convinced them
he was a genius. When he really was a huge fraud.”

  “I totally agree,” I say, even though his whole assessment goes rather beyond the amount of thought I’ve given to Hemingway.

  “However,” he says, shaking out the old army quilt for us to sit on. “If you haven’t been to Paris—”

  “I haven’t,” I say sourly, before he can say something condescending.

  “I know, and that’s just fine. If you haven’t, you must read it for that reason alone. If you want to know what it was like to have been part of a particular crowd at a particular time and place.”

  I like the sound of that: a particular crowd at a particular time and place. It doesn’t just seem to mean particular as in specific, but as in particular—discriminating, like all these people had certain qualities in common, and if you didn’t have those qualities, they didn’t let you in. “I don’t feel like I’ve ever been part of a particular crowd at a particular time and place,” I say. “I’ve never really had a crowd.”

  “Neither have I,” he says airily, pulling out his cigarettes, lighting one, offering a drag to me. (I take it, uneasily.) “Then again.” He exhales.

  “What?” I say, fighting back the dizzies.

  “That’s not to say we couldn’t start one. You know, start our own particular crowd. Members only, of course.”

  “Where?” I scoff. “Here?”

  “Oh, please. I don’t mean here. I’d never bother. I meant more—” He looks away from me, examining the burning end of his cigarette. Then he says in a big, grandiose voice: “I meant, we could become to the Paris of the eighties what F. Scott and Zelda and Gert and the brute Hemingway were to the Paris of the twenties. What you do, my dear boy, is you go there and you just plant yourself in front of a café and you wait for other disaffected Americans to walk by—and you say to them, ‘Bonjour, mes Américains? Did you find the motherland as dispiriting as we did? Would you like to drink and debauch yourselves into oblivion for the rest of your life here with us? You would? Très bien.’ And that’s it.” He snaps his fingers. “You have yourself a bona fide expatriate scene.”

  “I didn’t know there was a formula for it.”

  “Of course,” he says, as though I’d ever think to doubt him. “It’s that simple. And we could set it in motion. We could be the pioneers. You and I, Eric,” he says, all mock-poignant, grabbing my hands in his and holding them aloft.

  “New frontiers, right?” I say.

  “Precisely.”

  “I think I’d better get out of West Mendhem and see America before—”

  “Why?” he cuts me off. “It’s all the same piece of shit.”

  “Oh, I know,” I say, trying to keep it funny. “But I’m sure to a hick like me, even—I don’t know, even New Haven would seem exotic.”

  He looks at me, looks away, starts to extinguish his cigarette elaborately, in a neat drilling motion, on the rotten loft floorboard. “Maybe so,” he says, indifferently, putting an end to the conversation, a closer approximation to the sullen version of himself I remember from last year, and I wonder where this whole exchange went awry.

  “Well,” I say. “Thanks for the book. I can’t wait to read it.”

  “Don’t mention it,” he says, engrossed in trying to tear a loose thread out of the seam of his wool pants.

  “It was really your mother’s, huh?”

  “You read the inscription yourself,” he says sulkily.

  “I know. I just mean—you don’t want to keep it for yourself?”

  “I have more books of my mother’s in storage at Fleurie’s house than I know what to do with. They’re just sitting there growing mold, along with everything else until I decide with Godfrey what to do with it.”

  “Who’s Godfrey?”

  “My trustee,” he says, and I say, “Oh,” remembering suddenly the time I called for him at Goolsbee House right after his aunt died, and he thought I was Godfrey calling. “He’s watching over the house right now.”

  “What do you think you’re going to do with it?”

  Then, in the most casual tones possible, he tells me he’s trying to decide whether he should sell it (what Godfrey recommends), or go back down to Virginia after he leaves St. Banner to live in it, renting it out until then—he would sustain “the family seat,” he says, scoffing. Then he tells me that, under his aunt’s will, Godfrey won’t give him his own whopping inheritance until he turns twenty-one or graduates from college, whatever comes first—but that in the meantime, he’s stashed away enough of his personal allowance in the West Mendhem bank to live very well, “outside of indentured schooling,” for quite some time, thank you. And as for “le grand sum,” he has goods on Godfrey that could free up the money sooner than Godfrey thinks. He tells me all this in the meanest, most cryptic and suddenly indifferent way possible, leaving me completely unwilling to prod further. Besides, the whole financial side of his life seems so complicated to me, attached to so many strings, that I don’t think I can truly fathom it. I’m wondering whether next week’s B.J.’s check is going to be enough to cover the fees on my remaining college applications.

  “So, those are my options,” he concludes, smugly, fiddling with another cigarette he’s yet to light. “A brilliant array, wouldn’t you say?”

  “You are going to finish out the year here, right?” I venture.

  He laughs. “Just for the sake of appearances, so Godfrey can get me off his goddamned mind. Then I’ll slip away someplace very lovely and very remote this summer, before Godfrey even knows I’m gone. Then”—he pauses, lighting—“I’ll play it by ear. To use a rotten cliché.”

  “Where do you think you’ll go?”

  “Mmmmmm.” He deliberates a minute, burlesquing, his head cocked. Then he looks me straight in the face. “Bimini.” And he explodes laughing.

  “That sounds nice,” I say, faintly, because I’ve never heard of the place before—it sounds generally Polynesian, but I don’t know for sure—and for the first time, his smart little esoteric responses to everything I ask him are beginning to annoy rather than intimidate me.

  Eventually he stops laughing and muses over his cigarette, with this galling self-reflective half-smile that seems to say, “Isn’t it a shame, Brooks, that we’ve got to enjoy all our own jokes, because he’s not equipped to understand?” “So, I’ve become quite the celebrity,” I say, finally, to change the subject.

  “I know,” he says. “I found your essay in a back issue of the paper in the library here.”

  “You did?” I ask, suddenly sick with the thought that he’s read it. “How did you find it?”

  “Do you really want to know?”

  “I mean, how did you come across it?”

  “You told me to look for it, back before the holiday, remember?”

  “Oh—I guess so. Well … what did you think about it?”

  “It’s very lyrical,” he says.

  “You think so?”

  “Certainly. Too bad it’s not about anything. It’s like a Victorian strolling garden. All arabesques and ornamentation”—he flails his arms about over his head—“and no real sequence. No arc.”

  “It does, too, have an arc!” I say, offended, because ever since the night I read the piece at the awards ceremony, it has had a private meaning to me. It’s about him—I’m not exactly sure how—but that’s what it’s come to mean to me, even if I’m not about to say as much.

  “Well, what the hell is it? I sure as hell didn’t see one.”

  “It’s pretty obvious, I think.”

  “Well, I don’t think so,” he says calmly, dragging on the cigarette. (How can anyone smoke so much? I think, then, absurdly, it strikes me that he and Brenda would at least have their chain-smoking in common.) “So what’s it about?”

  “It’s about racial harmony,” I say, haughtily. “Is that so hard to see?”

  He lets out a long “Mmmmmmm,” pretending he’s just been enlightened. “You know, now that you mention it, I complete
ly see that. It’s completely clear to me now. Clear as day.”

  He’s being an asshole, and I decide not to press. “I certainly hope so,” I say, still trying to sound suitably miffed.

  “It completely slipped my mind that you are Mendhem’s—”

  “West Mendhem’s,” I correct him.

  “West Mendhem’s, of course. That you are, after all, West Mendhem’s premier authority on matters racial. You even have your own rich trove of personal miscegenation experience to draw from.”

  He thinks I don’t know what that word means, but I do. “Shut the fuck up,” I say.

  He spits a mouthful of smoke out into my face. “No, Mr. Fitzpatrick, why don’t you shut the fuck up? That stupid fucking essay wasn’t about racial harmony and you know it. It was you showing off your flashy, unctuous public high school vocabulary.”

  “Fuck you!” I stand up, grabbing my backpack. “I don’t have to take this from you.” I’m screaming now, I realize—and even more startlingly, for the first time, he’s screaming at me.

  “Why don’t you sit the fuck down and take it anyway? Maybe it’d be good for you. You never have to take anything, do you, Eric? You just cut out. You just cry—and go home.”

  I want to stay indignant, and I’m trying, really trying. “What right do you have to say that to me?” I flip back at him after only a moment’s pause. He looks composed again, sitting there Indian-style, looking up at me. Then I notice the cigarette between his fingers and I see that he can hardly hold it still. Then I look at the very edge of his head, where the thin film of stubble scrolls over his scalp, and it’s shaking, too, and something in me gives way. “What did I ever do to you to deserve that kind of talk, Brooks?” I say, dropping my backpack, sitting back down.

  He doesn’t move, just stares at me, perplexed; then he looks down through the space between his khakis. “I just think you need to learn to take some things.”

  For a second, I want to press him; I want to tell him that I don’t even know what he’s talking about; I want to ask him what he means specifically, specifically, because I think there’s a lot of stuff I “take” in my life—if I’m interpreting him the right way—a lot of stuff he could never even know about, Mr. Rich Jet Set Jefferson Tremont. But I don’t. I just sit there, looking at him in the crowding darkness of the loft, wondering how I got so wrapped up in such a freakish scenario.