Getting Off Clean

by Timothy Murphy

  I glance at him. He’s sitting up straight, biscuit in midair, looking at me, startled. “fe m’excuse, Mr. Fitz.”

  “Fine,” I say. “Just don’t mock me, for one day, okay?”

  He doesn’t say anything, until, “Did you have a hard time getting out today?” Questions like this have become a kind of mantra for us: “Where did you say you were going?” “Where did you say you had been?” “Was it hard to get away?” Sometimes I think what we have most in common is that we’re both always lying about our whereabouts.

  “Not really,” I say. “I told them I was going to this all-day program for prospective Yale people at some alumnus’s house in Weston.”

  “Do they have those for people who haven’t even gotten in yet?”

  “I don’t know. But my parents wouldn’t know if they did or not, anyway, so what does it matter?” I answer, then feel slightly disgusted with myself that I would exploit their ignorance of such matters so brazenly. “How about you?”

  “I had weekend privileges, so I signed out for Boston. Come to think, I hope no one notices I wasn’t on line for the bus.” (He means the bus St. Banner charters to take people into Boston on Saturday; I’ve seen it coming through town before, late on Saturday afternoons, full of preppies with bags from Brooks Brothers and Copley Square.)

  “Why do I feel like we’re on the lam?” I mutter, instantly wishing I hadn’t said it.

  “Oh, please.” He tsks absently, taking my hand off the gear shift and pressing it up to his lips.

  “Come on, they can see us in the other cars. And you’ve got crumbs on your lips,” I say. He wipes his lips in my palm and says, “Not anymore,” laughing.

  We park on a side street in Cambridge and walk to Harvard Square. It’s an excellent morning, bright and warm, and already the Square is running over with the usual assortment of aging tweedsters, skate punks, weekend arty types, students, dirty bums, Rastas, and born-again megaphone nuts. It’s funny, I’m thinking: here’s the first time we’ve ever been together in front of lots of other people, but no one is paying particular attention to us, no one is giving us a problem. I start loosening up—my jaw, which I’ve been grinding ever since I left the house this morning, stops aching—and I think he does, too, because out of nowhere, he starts getting chattier and jokier than ever before, making funny comments about people we pass and about things we see in windows. In Wordsworth Bookstore, he seems to know something about every book on display, and even though I’m impressed, I start getting angry and jealous, wondering where people actually manage to get all the knowledge they get, and why don’t I know where to find it? He ends up buying three theory-type books (I can’t even understand the stuff that goes on the jacket flaps), all by some French guys, as well as the latest copy of some little magazine, Grand Street, and I’m just grateful when he checks out my selection—Best Short Stories of 1986—and chooses not to pass judgment.

  While we’re apart, rummaging, I watch him from the end of an aisle: he’s sitting on the floor, poring over some fat book, with about six others stacked up next to him. I have a thought about him, and it comes back when we’re back outside, and he’s talking more easily than he’s ever talked before, pointing at things, telling me little scraps of information about the architecture of buildings we pass, and about the history of the Abolitionists in Cambridge, and about where the Transcendentalists would hang out when they were all at Harvard together. And the thought is that he’s too big for St. Banner, and definitely for any one place, and probably for me—but it’s that thought that makes me want him like I’ve never wanted anyone before, and makes me desperately want to match him mind-for-mind if it’s the last thing I do, even though I’ll probably never be able to do it.

  For lunch, I take him to Bartley’s Burgers, my favorite place in Cambridge (I’m ridiculously happy to be able to name a place over him, for once), and the whole time we’re there, ordering food, eating it, waiting for the check, we’re kicking each other around under the table, surrounded by all sorts of people, totally pushing our luck, keeping straight faces, which seems to be the best joke of all. Just once, when we’re laughing too shrilly at something, we catch a woman nearby glance at us, then away, mutter something to the man she’s with, who looks, mutters back, and they both look away.

  “Do you think we threaten the social order?” he asks me, gravely.

  “Us?” I ask, amused. “I don’t think so.” “Threaten the social order” is a phrase that makes me think of serial killers, or those animal-rights terrorist groups that bomb cosmetic companies because they test on rabbits, or child molesters who dress up as clowns.

  “But wouldn’t it be fun to be a kind of modern-day Leopold and Loeb?” he asks me.

  “Who’s that?” I ask back (I’m used to it now), and when he tells me, I tell him no, that wouldn’t be fun at all. He says I’m priggy and Catholic, and don’t I know that there are no fixed morals, that morality is relative? And I say there have to be morals, or otherwise there’d be chaos, and you can’t just go around killing people just to see what it feels like. And all he says, lighting up a cigarette, is: “Oh, please.” Of course I know he’s joking, which makes it okay.

  Later in the afternoon, we drive into Boston and park the car near the Public Gardens. We roam around the Boston Public Library, him scrutinizing the marble and the molding and grabbing my coat sleeve and saying over and over again, “Weren’t McKim, Mead, White brilliant?” and me just thinking that the whole place smells peculiar. When we come outside, it’s getting dark, and colder (we button up our coats), and even oddly barren-seeming for the middle of Boston at four o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, but we walk the entire length of Newbury Street anyway, until we’ve walked all the way to the Christian Science building, which looks particularly forbidding in the gathering dusk. He says he wants to smoke a cigarette, and we sit down on a bench, but before he goes ahead and lights it, he puts his arm around me, and I look around one hundred and eighty degrees, but we seem to be pretty much alone, and I put mine around his, and we both just sit there looking across the plaza at that stone behemoth.

  I pull in tighter toward him and put my gloved hand on the back of his head. “Today was really nice,” I say, thinking that pretty soon we’ll have to get back in my mother’s hatchback and drive back to town and go back to meeting in that stupid, freezing barn.

  “Wouldn’t you like to do it every day?” he asks.

  “Where?” I laugh. “Here?”

  “No, not here. Paris.”

  I laugh again. “Hello?”

  “You wanna come spend the summer in Paris with me? Open invitation.”

  I laugh again, a little hysterically, but he doesn’t. “Brooks—come on. I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because! Because I have to make money for school, for one thing. I’m gonna get a job during the day and keep working at the sub shop at night. I can’t afford to go to Paris.”

  “I’ll pay your way, fool, and I’ll get us a place. And I’ll get you a job in a café or something, and you can pocket the money. The exchange rate’s going to favor America this summer. I checked it out.”

  Now I’m getting antsy. “What would I tell my family? That I’m going to Paris to live with some guy they don’t even know?”

  “No,” he says, rolling his eyes. “Use the brain God gave you. Tell them you applied for some exchange program—”

  “I can’t do that!”

  “You applied for some exchange program, and you’re going to be living with a nice Catholic family. I’ll make up all the documents. I’ll even pretend to be the family and I’ll send you fake photos and letters in that funny squiggly French handwriting. We’ll pull off the perfect hoax.”

  “Brooks, come on—”

  He turns around full on the bench and looks at me. “And do you even know how much in heaven you will be? Do you even know what Paris is like in the summertime? We’ll go to the top of Montmartre at night, where th
e basilica is, and we’ll bring a bottle of wine, and we’ll look down on the whole city. And on weekends, we’ll rent a car and we’ll drive out to Normandy and visit these extraordinary old châteaux. We’ll go to Monet’s house, Giverny, it’s a tourist trap, but you’ve never seen it, and—”

  “Brooks, would you cut it out? I can’t go and you know it.”

  He catches his breath, pulls out a cigarette, lights it, exhales. “Eric, listen to me. Just one more time, okay? At the end of the school year, I am leaving St. Banner, going back to Virginia, selling my auntie’s house for as much money as I can get, leaving the country, and never coming back. Now, I am very very kindly extending to you the opportunity to come with me, gratis, even if it’s only for one pathetic little summer. This is it. Last chance. Now, I’d advise that you think about the opportunities for travel that you’re realistically going to have in your life, and—”

  I’m feeling faintly panicky now, glancing around to see if anyone is watching. “Look, Brooks, couldn’t you come back up here and get a place in—in Cambridge or something, and I could come in on weekends—”

  “No!” he explodes, scaring the shit out of me. “I’m not living like some secret faggot waiting for my secret faggot white boyfriend to come down from the suburbs every weekend to fuck around in secret all weekend and go back into hiding for the rest of the week. Not in this country. Never. My mother knows what the fuck she’s talking about.”

  “But Brooks, what about my family—”

  “Fuck your family! Don’t you get it? I’m giving you the chance to get away from your family—just once—so you know what it’s like to maybe live your life without running around hiding from your family all the time. Don’t you hate it? Or does some perverse masquerading part of you get off on it?”

  “Shut up, you know I hate it. It’s just—they need me. My mother needs me. And my sisters. I mean, my sister’s having a baby. And they’d freak out if they ever knew about this.”

  “They already do,” he says, looking away.

  “What?”

  “They already know. I sent them a letter. I told them everything.”

  “Fuck you! You did not!” He just looks at me, one eyebrow cocked. “Brooks,” I say, feeling ill, trying to sound threatening. “You’d better be kidding.”

  “I’m not,” he murmurs. “I posted it Thursday. They should have received it today—while you were at the Yale brunch.”

  “Fuck you!” I scream at him now, standing up, my head spinning. “How the fuck could you do that? How could you destroy my life? Where the fuck—”

  “Oh, shut up and sit down.” He scowls at me. “Do you really think I’d go to the bother to destroy your life? I didn’t send any letter, so stop flattering yourself.”

  I’m relieved, but I don’t sit down; I’m not going to be his puppet. “You can find your own way home,” I say, wrapping my scarf around my neck. “You can take the fucking St. Banner bus with all your friends. I’m going back.” I start walking across the plaza back toward Newbury Street: one step, two, three, half a dozen, waiting for him to call back.

  “Of course, I always could send it,” he shouts.

  I turn. It’s not because I’m afraid of him, I swear; it’s because I just want to look at this fucked-up mutant of a human being—and he just sits there and stares at me. And I stare back at him, and he does the same, for what seems to be the longest time, we just look at each other, until I start to feel like I’m part of a surreal tableau: it’s like, I don’t feel myself anymore, and this plaza in Boston could be as far away as Moscow or Beijing, and this isn’t my own life anymore, but someone else’s—another person’s fucked-up story. And when he doesn’t move, just keeps staring, I finally walk toward him, and when I’m standing over him, I pull him up by the lapel of his overcoat and put my arms around him and sink my face underneath his scarf, in his neck. And he holds me back, underneath my coat, and I’m thinking, Okay, I give up.

  I don’t know how long we stay like that, but when we stop, it’s completely dark outside, and frigid, and we start walking back along Newbury Street like we’re in a kind of vacuum. Dimly, I know there are people around us—yuppies on their way to fancy dinners, punk kids loitering in front of the record stores—but it’s like they’re on one side of a glass, and on the other, it’s just us, silent, but totally wrapped up in some new shared knowledge, some revelation I can’t even name.

  Back in the car, on the highway, flying over the Tobin Bridge with the lights and towers of the city receding behind us, everyone everywhere else part of the noisy celebration of a Saturday night, this silent pact doesn’t end. It’s the strangest feeling, like we’re sinking together into some vortex, almost like we’re underwater, like we decided to take some wordless trip together. My instinct is to get off the road, to turn in somewhere, and when I see an exit for Burlington, I take it, unaccompanied by a word from either of us. We’re on a commercial strip now, and it rises up—a Day’s Inn, glowing orange sign in the foreground, and behind, the low-slung chalet—without a search or a summons, like we willed it without even trying. I pull into the parking lot and turn off the engine. Two kids run in front of the hatchback, screaming, and behind them, their loping parents, dragging luggage, but again, they seem murky and muffled on the other side of a glass. My head is filled with the sound of my heart thundering; I’m shaking so hard I wonder if I’ll be able to walk, and when I finally look at him, he’s staring straight ahead out the window. It’s dinnertime at home, I’m thinking, but the thought and the image that attends it flash across my mind so fast they’re like a passing wave of tremens.

  “You wanna?” I finally manage to say, and my voice sounds tiny to me, a thousand miles away.

  He doesn’t speak, he just nods, and when he puts his hand over the door handle to open it, I catch it shaking like a madman’s. Stepping out of the car, he trips, scraping the knee of his pants on the pavement, and when, off-center myself, I ask, “Are you okay?” he doesn’t answer again, just nods and weaves ahead of me toward the restaurant and the adjoining lobby.

  Inside, in the empty lobby, there’s a girl behind the desk—high school age, college age, I don’t know because I won’t look her in the face. I stand there, examining the fringe on my scarf, while he murmurs something to her and passes her his credit card, and the minutes that she takes to process the card and return with it and a key, that he takes to sign his name (once, then twice in another place) are bloated and excruciating, like going down under anesthesia. Finally, he turns to me—“Okay,” he says—and we’re stalking down a long, rust-colored corridor, into an elevator, up three flights—“Three sixty-two,” he says, and I nod—then up a long, rust-colored corridor until a door marked 3-6-2. Key in the lock, turn on the light, close the door behind, coats on the bed the size of a small island. Over the bed, there’s a piece of art: a lake, a boy feeding fish from a silver pail to a spaniel standing on his hind legs—an enormous paint-by-numbers.

  “Art for art’s sake,” he says, nodding toward it, sitting on the edge of the bed, unlacing his hunting boots. I start to do the same, but stop halfway to pull the blinds on the window. Outside, there are tiny lights strung along the highways and semi-industrial hills of Burlington, each light denoting a household in mid-supper. It’s dinnertime in Burlington, in the state of Massachusetts, in America, and I have never felt so beyond the common fold of the living, so keenly and irreversibly an outlaw, as I do right now.

  I pull off my boots, my sweater and shirt, my trousers, pelting them in a heap on the rust-colored easy chair. I’m almost completely naked now, and so is he, and it occurs to me that although we’ve been naked together before, we’ve never before been so in a realm of so much space, so much light—so much opportunity just to examine each other with whole yards between us, and to consider what it would take to traverse the space in between.

  “I never thought it would get to this point, did you?” I ask.

  He’s sitting on the edge of
the bed in his underwear, looking down, twisting at his undoffed sock. “I can’t say in good faith that I didn’t ever once entertain the thought,” he says, standing up, snapping off the light, and stumbling toward me, stumbling toward him, in the sudden dark.

  * * *

  It’s just after midnight when we check out, hair wet, clothes disheveled, and another excruciating tenure with the lank-haired girl at the desk, who is as terrified of looking up at us as I am of her. Going out to the car, walking fast, businesslike, not talking because it seems to be the craziest redundancy at this point, I’m wondering dumbly how not to file this away, how not to stuff it in a chamber at the back of the mind, wondering how to keep alive in the deadening tide of the schooldays and schooldays to follow—wondering if it’s possible at all to do that without losing your mind.

  “I’m screwed, probably, when I get home” is all I say pulling out of the parking lot.

  “What’s new?” he says, thumbing back into shape a cigarette that crushed in his pocket.

  “That was funny,” I venture, wondering what’s the grammar for this kind of talk. “It’s like it wasn’t you, sort of. Do you know what I mean?”

  He laughs, and I think it sounds sort of mean, but maybe I’m misinterpreting. “Well, did you feel like you?”

  “Sometimes,” I say. “But not the whole time.”

  “Well, you didn’t feel like you to me.”

  “Is that a compliment?” I ask.

  “I guess you can read it that way if you want to.”

  “Oh, thanks.”

  “Oh, s’il vous plaît. It’s a compliment.”

  I pull off the highway fifteen minutes before home and take the back roads through Boxford to St. Banner. Pulling up by the side of the road, it’s the idling of the engine of the hatchback that tells us to move it along, which relieves me, because I don’t know the special protocol of this moment.

  “Well—good night,” I say, taking a few of his fingers in my hand awkwardly.