Getting Off Clean

by Timothy Murphy

  “The same fun crowd that gathered on the village green that night to watch you betray me? I loved them! Those local frauen were so sweet to me the minute they found out I wasn’t your average street nigger, but a real boy-made-good from St. Banner Academy.”

  “Brooks, please.”

  “Eric, come on! You’ll see Phoebe there!” my mother calls from the hallway.

  He laughs softly. “Oh, please, Eric. I’m not going to force you into a repeat performance. I just want to watch you graduate before I leave the country. You won’t even know I’m there.”

  “Brooks—” My voice has faded away to a little rasp by this point.

  “Eric, don’t worry about it. We’re eternally devoted to each other, remember? Now go knock ’em dead!”

  And with that, he hangs up, leaving me shaking with the dead receiver in my hand. “Let’s go,” I say, chalky, in the hallway, zipping up my crimson gown and pulling on my mortarboard; then we file out the door.

  “He’s nervous about his speech,” I hear my mother tell my father under her breath as I stalk ahead of them to the cars.

  When we get to the high school, they all see me off with hugs and good luck wishes, then file away to find seats in the bleachers of the adjoining field house. I wait until they’re well away, then stand there, shielding my eyes with my hand, looking for a patch of black in the gathering congregation of flushed high-noon faces. I look and look, expecting at every moment to light upon his Cheshire grin glowing back at me, damning me to hell, but I don’t see it anywhere, even as the field house grows hotter, more crowded, so I walk outside, twisting my tie under my gown, until I come to the spot where the graduating class of 1987 is milling about in a sweaty tangle of crimson and red, soap bubbles and tacky neon sunglasses. All of a sudden, kids who only used to sneer at me or ignore me completely are coming up to me, shaking my hand, giving me hugs, asking me if I’m all excited about Yale and everything. And even though my first impulse is to say, “Why are you treating me like a human being now?,” I don’t. I just hug them back, shake their hands back, and wonder if I’m exuding so much paranoia that it actually looks like self-possession.

  Phoebe wends her way through the crowd of crimson, smirking at the spectacle of herself swallowed up in gown and mortarboard.

  “Can you believe this?” she says, giving me a hug. “It’s like, I know I’m supposed to sneer at this, and be all cynical and everything, but I keep going up to people I’ve always hated and hugging them and saying, ‘Oh, let’s keep in touch!’ and I feel like any minute I’m gonna start crying.”

  “It’s just because you’re secretly ecstatic you’re never gonna have to see them again,” I say, adjusting her mortarboard distractedly. I can’t keep my eyes fixed on her; my eyes are darting all over the place, and I’m wondering if he’d ever just walk right up to me in the middle of this crowd.

  “Oh, c’mon, Eric,” she says. “This is the last hurrah. Can’t you just get into it a little? You are giving the big send-off, after all.”

  “All right!” I protest. “I’m into it, okay?”

  “Good. You’re going to Wendy Lemieux’s party with us after, right? Charlie got some really good weed.”

  “Of course I’m going. We’re going together. I told you I’d go, right?”

  “Okay, chill out. I was just checking.”

  Charlie comes over to us, hairy legs and Converse high-tops sticking out under his gown. His mortarboard is pushed way back on his head and he’s wearing little round mirrored sunglasses. “My children,” he greets us, and starts to sing: “Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey hey—good-bye!”

  “I can’t believe you’re wearing those things,” I say, staring at my twin reflection in his glasses. I decide I look like an idiot in my mortarboard.

  “I’m going incognito to my own graduation,” he says.

  “So am I.” Phoebe pulls out her matching pair. They bought them together on a trip to Boston, back when they were still giving each other the vibe.

  “You two look like John and Yoko,” I say.

  “That’s ’cause we are,” Charlie says, and they both crack up laughing.

  In a few minutes, the teachers come outside to line us up. I’m already in my place, standing next to some track star girl who got an athletic scholarship to Holy Cross, when I feel someone tug on the sleeve on my gown, and turn around. It’s Mrs. Bradstreet.

  “I’ll look for you in the future, in the pages of the better periodicals,” she says gravely.

  “Thanks,” I say, laughing. I’m still uneasy around her.

  “I also wish you the best of luck next year. Maybe at some point you’ll find a moment to drop by here, or to write me a little note, and tell me about your studies and what you’re reading, and keep me abreast of all the new scholarship. And what exciting new friends you’ve made.”

  “I’ll try,” I say.

  “Then again, maybe you won’t have the time after all.”

  I look at her. She’s smiling, the same old spooky smile, but for the first time, I’m not freaked out by her. I think of her when she was seventeen, graduating from Emma Willard, or wherever she went, and where she thought she might be at the age she is now, whether she thought she’d be married to a man who would make her the heiress to half a town she never expected to live in, let alone inherit.

  “Don’t worry,” I say. “I’ll have the time. You can tell me how you’re doing, too.”

  She nods. “Fair enough.” Then she hands me a little box wrapped in ethnic-looking paper, along with a card. “Here’s a talisman for you,” she says. “You can decide whether you need it or not. And by the way, Mr. McGregor says that after you’ve received your diploma, you can slip outside for some air if you want to look over your speech one last time.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  And she nods again, and walks off, listing slightly to one side.

  I unwrap the box and open it. Inside there’s a little carved-wood, Third World–looking mask thing on a piece of rope. It’s smiling and it’s got sunlike rays emanating out of its head. I open the card: “June 1987. Think clear. Do much. Love hard. Virginia Brace Bradstreet.”

  “What’s that?” the track star girl asks me.

  “It’s a talisman,” I say.

  “She’s a weird one,” Track Star Girl says, nodding toward Mrs. Bradstreet.

  “She is.” I shrug and put the charm over my head and around my neck, then under my gown.

  The marching band starts in with “Pomp and Circumstance”—they play it at a dirgelike tempo, filled with clinkers—and we file into the field house, through the chain-link fence and into rows and rows of folding chairs in a ragged rendition of the two-step march we learned at rehearsal the day before. The selectmen are seated on their guests-of-honor riser, alongside Mr. McGregor and Mr. Fazzi. The faculty and staff sit behind them, and the bleachers opposite us are full of the gleaming faces of family and friends, what seems like the entire population of West Mendhem herded into one sweltering room. And even though the moment I’ve taken my seat, my eyes are weeding through every bleacher, I can’t, for my life, see him anywhere. I ease up on the tie underneath my robe: maybe it was all a joke, I tell myself; it certainly wouldn’t be the first time he’d threatened something he didn’t carry out. Yet under that half relief, I’m thinking: If he’s not here, but if he’s in West Mendhem, then where is he? Will I see him? And what if I don’t? Now we’re all seated, and the band completes what must be the twenty-seventh round of “Pomp and Circumstance,” and I realize for the first time that my hair is drenched with sweat under my mortarboard, that sweat is running in rivulets down my neck and into my shirt collar, that I’ve never been so hot in all my life.

  The proceedings begin: an invocation by the pastor of St. Matthew’s Church; a short, hugely well received send-off from Mr. McGregor (“Let’s have a big round of applause for a class that knows how to work hard, knows how to come together in a crisis, and, for better or worse
, knows how to party!”); the first annual Kerrie Lanouette Memorial Scholarship, presented amidst protracted applause by Kerrie’s steely-voiced mother to a girl who hobbled through her entire senior year on crutches after a soccer team casualty; a pitch from the head of the Booster Club for more donations if West Mendhem expects to keep its stellar football record alive in ’87–’88; a few remarks from one of the selectmen on the need to conserve the town water supply; and three unplanned warnings from Mr. Fazzi that if people don’t stop blowing bubbles and tossing around beach balls in the graduates’ section, they’ll cut the ceremony short and mail everyone their diploma. (The beach balls stop, the bubbles don’t, and the ceremony goes on.) Then Doreen Prose, the chairwoman of the School Committee, steps up to the podium to hand out the diplomas, alphabetically, accompanied by the band’s turgid rendition of the recessional from Star Wars. Hours seem to pass as we shuffle along, but she finally slouches her way into the F’s, calling out my name over the microphone. I finally locate my family when I hear a concentrated burst of applause rise up from the lower left end of the bleachers. Doreen Prose and I smile and shake each other’s sweaty hands, then, remembering my special dispensation from Mr. McGregor, I step down off the platform and slip quietly out of the field house into the hallway.

  It’s blessedly cool, dark, and quiet here after the bright, noisy heat of the field house, and for the first time since arriving at the ceremony, my body slackens, my head stops spinning and I begin to feel the sweat soaking my entire body dry up, cold and prickly, underneath my clothes. I rub my eyes, adjusting to the gloom, and pad down to the water fountain at the far end of the empty hallway, Doreen Prose’s amplified, monotone litany of names and the colossal murmur of hundreds of voices fading off behind me. I bend over the fountain, draw a dozen gulps of water from it, catch some water in my hands and run it over my face, dry my hands as well as I can on my nylon robe, then pull my speech out of my coat pocket and begin scanning it in the half-light.

  “Four score and seven years ago, the world was not yet blessed with moi,” comes a voice from the opposite end of the hallway.

  I turn on my heels, looking helplessly down the dark passage. At the end of it, silhouetted against the afternoon light shining in from the far glass doors, is a figure: standing erect in the middle of the corridor, arms crossed over chest, loafered feet planted apart, leading up to skinny dark legs in shorts, ramrod-straight back in a luminous white tank top, and a face, head fully shaven, a more wickedly clean profile than ever before, obscured all but for the smile—wide and vicious and full of glee—and eyes masked behind the twin glints of horn-rimmed glasses.

  I don’t say anything. I don’t move—but he does, in slow, measured, inevitable steps, the metrical clack of loafers on freshly waxed floor coming closer and closer, the ceramic smile unmoved, until he stops, not six feet away, face to face with me.

  From within the fieldhouse, Doreen Prose’s affectless nomenclature: “Feanni Gregorian. Patrick Grogan.”

  I just stare and stare. I can’t speak, but I can’t look away. The last time we stood or lay close to each other, the last time we so much as regarded each other, unmediated by public appraisal or personal concealment, was in an earth-toned, anonymous hotel room in the seized-up middle of January. Here it is, months later, heat crowding the distance between us, and the torched fever rush of a lost autumn is flooding back upon me now—all the things he said, all the things we did, recapitulated in this moment. I’m so dizzy I can’t talk; the earth is breaking away in huge, ungainly plates just beyond the realm of us, and I’m wondering how I’ve gone so long without the earthly matter of him within my grasp—the face and limbs, the cedar smell and contemptuous tone, all the brittle, glittering atoms of him that encircled me in my terror and confusion and helpless, covetous rage. Did I encircle him? I wonder. Did I ever engulf him? Even now, in this moment, I don’t know.

  “Heather Ianucci. Dick Inskeep.”

  “You really did come,” I finally manage to say, and my voice sounds small and faraway.

  “I told you I’d come.” The smile falls away. His voice sounds deeper, graver, than it did before—or is it that I’ve heard it hardly at all in so many months, that the voice of his I’ve taken to bed every night has transmuted in my head into something not what it ever was, the voice I wanted to hear? “What did you think, that I called just to fuck with you?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, honestly. “It wouldn’t be the first time.”

  He laughs, conceding. “Well, I’m through fucking with you, Eric.”

  My speech, which I’ve been clutching in my hand, has become drenched and smudged in sweat. I stuff it in my pocket. “So, then, why’d you come?”

  “What did I tell you on the phone?” He’s speaking so softly now, without his familiar sardonic mania, that it sends a chill creeping up my back under my robe. “I wanted to see you graduate. It’s your big day, your grand culmination. And I thought I might get to say good-bye. It looks like I’m having my chance, n’est-ce pas?”

  “To say good-bye? Why? Where are you going?”

  “To Montreal, briefly, for a party some friends from New York invited me to. Then, next week, to Barcelona, to join my mother for the summer. She finally had the good sense to dump that little gnome René and now she’s taken her hostessing gig on the road. She wants me to join her as her sidekick.”

  “To do what?”

  “To play the washboard in a jug band or something.” He laughs, dismissing himself. “I honestly don’t know. Just to keep her company, I guess. To get reacquainted. The good people of St. Banner dispatched me to her when they finally decided I was beyond their sphere of influence. She took one look at me and said she wanted me out of America. For the rest of my reckless youth, if not for good.”

  “Where have you been since you left?” I ask.

  “Phil Kozinski. Wendy Lemieux.” Doreen Prose’s recitation proceeds dimly, but the rest of the world seems to have broken off from us. It’s as though we’re floating away on a piece of ground all our own, and for once, I don’t really care if I ever come back.

  “Mostly in New York. New York is really quite extraordinary these days. It’s sort of like Berlin during Weimar. There’s nothing that money can’t buy.” He unfolds his arms and slips his hands into his pockets.

  “What are you doing there?”

  “Oh, you know,” he says airily. “Just running around. Staying with friends.”

  “I didn’t know you had any.”

  He rolls his eyes. “That’s because, Miz Laura, you never axed.”

  I stare blankly.

  “Haven’t you ever seen Imitation of Life?”

  “No,” I say. “Why?”

  “Oh, skip it. Anyway, I’ve made some,” he replies. “They’re really a wonderful bunch. All shapes. All sizes. All colors. All sexes. I wonder how you’d find them.” Then he laughs. “Oh, Lord! Maybe I don’t want to know!”

  “Maybe you don’t,” I say, hurt.

  “So that’s where I’ve been,” he continues brightly. “There, and Virginia for a while, settling Fleurie’s house—but of course you know as much, anyway, don’t you, you little housebreaker?” He’s smiling now, amused.

  “I came down to find you,” I say, point-blank. Everything now seems rather absurdly beyond the point of saving face.

  He shakes his head. “I absolutely can’t believe that! How in hell did you ever find Calvary Hill? It’s the most out-of-the-way place in the world.”

  “Some woman gave me a ride up. A white woman.”

  “Pray tell, the natives didn’t take potshots at you, did they? They’re known to do that, you know.”

  “That’s what she said. But no. We came up at night.”

  “Well, that’s certainly no protection around here,” he says breezily. “Even if you blend in with the night.”

  I wince—I don’t even know how to bring up the matter of that night on the common—but he rushes past it. “Tell me
. You weren’t in the house when I was there with a friend, were you?”

  “With Brickhouse?” I ask. “Yeah. I was there. I was under the bed.”

  “My good man!” He looks fairly stunned, which pleases me. “I didn’t know you were quite so fearless”—which makes me look away. Then, “Well, Brickhouse is no intrigue. He’s just an old boyhood friend. Southern comfort, that’s all. I’ll probably never see that poor boy again.”

  “That’s a shame,” I say sourly.

  “No, not really. Did you hear us say anything incriminating?”

  “I don’t really remember,” I lie.

  “Oh. Well, that’s good, I suppose.”

  “Margie McCannell. Amanda McCarthy. James McCarthy. William McCarthy. Debbie Messina.”

  “So you’re leaving?” I say helplessly. I can’t think of anything else to say, or do, for that matter. It’s like water, or blood, running between my fingers, and I can’t contain it, and in seconds, it will be gone and there will be nothing left but the wet, or the stain, on my hands.

  “On y va,” he says, shrugging. “And off to Yale University for you, young man, if I presume correctly.”

  I nod blankly.

  “Well, good for you,” he says. “You deserve it.”

  “I have to go make this speech,” I say dully.

  “Indeed, you do.”

  It’s at that moment I see it: the faint trace of a scar on his forehead, a jagged line of pink just below his shorn hairline. “That’s from that night,” I say, and I reach out to touch it.

  “Get the fuck away from me!” he screams, and he slaps back my hand with a crack that pinballs off the walls of the empty hallway.

  That’s it—that’s the living end. I lurch toward him, throwing my arms around his neck, holding on to him like a madman. “Brooks. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I hate myself. You gotta know that. I hate myself. Oh my God, Brooks, I’m so sorry.”

  “You should be sorry! You should hate yourself!” he screams at me, hoarse, with his hands wrapped around my head.

  He’s bawling now, too, and the two of us are locked here, clutching each other, pushing each other away. “Fucking monsters beat the living shit out of me, like I was some fucking animal, and you said you didn’t know me! In front of all those people. Oh my God. Oh my fucking God. You fucked me—and you said you didn’t know me! You fucking, fucking coward!”