Was_a novel

by Geoff Ryman

  Downstairs, outside in the silence, he sat so that no one could see him from the street, and he began to feel a sick and creeping fear crawl up over him. He was going to die, and no sunlight and flowers, no songs, no prayer, could save him. He tried to look at his garden.

  He looked at the base of the palm tree. The roots reached down like sinuous worms into the earth. He looked at his ornamental pond and the lilies growing out of a tub under the water. Jonathan remembered. He remembered the party they had held to dig the pond. People had got carried away and dug it so deep it had to be partially refilled.

  What happens to a garden, he wondered, when its owner is gone? Ira had no time for gardening. Would the world, heartless, kill the little blue flowers, the succulent ground cover? Would the dry dead stems haunt Ira, like ghosts? Or would he dig the garden late at night, to keep it going, out of love, for the memory?

  Fear was a chill light sweat on Jonathan’s forehead. Upstairs the telephone began to ring over and over.

  Jonathan remembered the day he had been told he was ill. He had spent an eternal, twisted afternoon waiting for Ira to come home. He had paced the floor, weeping, chewing on his fingers, unable to quell the horrible, quivering animal panic that made him want to run and hide. Then Ira had come, and Jonathan had collapsed against him and told him, and the terror had abated. Ira took the terror away.

  “The first thing,” Ira had said, “is that we both go into counseling. Did they tell you where to go?”

  Jonathan nodded. “They gave me a name. Some hotshot psychiatrist who volunteers.”

  “Did you get in contact with him? Her?”

  Jonathan shook his head. “Not yet. Dr. Podryska had a long talk with me anyway. She gave me some happy pills.”

  “Did you take them?”

  “No. I thought they might be bad for me.”

  “Stress is bad for you. Take the pills.”

  “I’m worried about you too, Ira.”

  Ira sighed and shifted in his smart lawyer working clothes. “It’s not your fault. It’s not anybody’s fault.” Ira was puritanically insistent on good behavior.

  “You’ll have it too.”

  “Probably,” Ira admitted.

  “I’ll be careful around the house and things.” Jonathan meant he would mop up his own blood. He meant they would stop having sex. What he felt was immense relief. Already he knew that Ira was planning to stay with him.

  Ira’s body jerked with rueful, silent laughter. “You mean you’ll eat with a separate knife and fork? Use a different toilet maybe. Maybe I should put some black insulating tape around the handle of your toothbrush. Good thing you have your own electric razor, huh?”

  They both looked at each other. Jonathan knew he was in danger of saying something stupid. Stupidity made Ira cross.

  “It’s a bit late for precautions, Baby,” said Ira.

  Jonathan retaliated with a practicality. “You should take the test,” he said.

  “I’m not taking that test,” said Ira. They had had arguments about it before.

  “Because you said that whatever the result, you had to do the same thing. No casual sex and look after your health. No point taking it, you said, unless you would do something different depending on the result. Well, if you take the test and by any chance you’re negative, then we both will have to be a lot more careful, huh? That’s a good reason for you to take the test.”

  Ira was trapped. “Maybe,” he said, and he shrugged his beefy arms, convulsively, as if trying to break his way out of his business jacket.

  Jonathan knew Ira didn’t want to take the test because it would mean coming out to his doctor. Ira’s doctor did not know he was gay. Ira was a curious mix of decency and misplaced self-respect. He thought the people where he worked had not noticed that the company lawyer was unmarried and living with another man. Jonathan didn’t push any further. He knew that he was right and that Ira would force himself to be logical, force himself to take the test. Talk about the English having a stiff upper lip. Ira forced a set of strictures on himself that were wholly his own.

  They had met at UCLA. At twenty-eight years of age, after eight years of professional acting, Jonathan had gone back to school. He studied history. In some quiet place in his actor’s soul, he found something very mysterious and soothing in studying the past and in recovering it.

  There was a great weight of things that had been lost. Pioneers made houses out of earth and withstood plagues of locusts. The ancient Assyrians left behind them treasure troves of family letters baked in clay. Jonathan’s family name was in the Domesday Book. The name meant Dweller by Low Water. They had been a marsh people, farming for their master and hunting birds in the reeds in what was now the county of Hampshire in England.

  Ira’s people had been Russian Jews. Jonathan met Ira in one of his history tutorials. Ira was huge and jovial and bound for law school after an improving degree in history. When Ira suddenly invited him to lunch, Jonathan was pleased. It was not always easy to meet people at UCLA. Jonathan was pleased when Ira invited him to play a game of tennis. Jonathan had always found sports easy, though he made no effort at them. Ira beamed back at him, hot, sweaty, his tummy bulging over his immaculate white shorts. What a decent fellow, thought Jonathan. Ira, it turned out, lived at home. His parents seemed to want to protect him from corruption. He was a strange mix of the deeply worldly—he talked about stocks and shares, and the details of Democratic Party politics—and bestilled innocence. At age twenty, Ira lived in the world of a bright seventeen-year-old.

  Ira invited Jonathan to an evening of Israeli folk dancing. It did not occur to Jonathan that Ira was doing all the work. Jonathan was amused. Someone else had thought he was Jewish. People usually did. Maybe it was his mother’s side of the family, his Cornish ancestors with their black curly hair and Mediterranean complexion.

  The folk dances were held in a hall near UCLA. Jonathan had learned all kinds of dancing as part of his training as an actor. He danced with real flair, feet crossing each other, arms outstretched. He danced, his arms around Ira’s shoulders. There were bands of muscle from shoulder to shoulder, across the back of Ira’s neck. Ira asked Jonathan if he had ever been to Israel.

  “No,” said Jonathan. “I wish, but I’ve never really been abroad. My folks live in Canada, so if I have any money, I always end up spending it to go and see them.”

  “Funny. You don’t look Canadian,” said Ira. Jonathan did not understand.

  “What do Canadians look like?” asked Jonathan.

  Ira looked about him in mock secrecy. “They don’t know it,” he said, “but they look Jewish.”

  Jonathan was taken aback. Ira touched an area of tension with a joke, to relieve it. Jonathan began to sense a powerful personality in Ira, somewhat obscured by youth and inexperience. There was an imbalance of personal power between them. If they had both been the same age, the imbalance would have destroyed the friendship.

  But it was easy for a twenty-eight-year-old actor to appear somewhat exotic to a sturdily conventional undergraduate. Jonathan got Ira into one of his plays for free. The play was a joky rewrite of stories from the Old Testament. The author had written it for children. When she couldn’t get it produced, she added a few satiric references and pretended that it had always been for adults. She sat in the tiny audience every night and laughed long and hard at the same jokes, her own jokes.

  Jonathan played Adam. Adam made his entrance holding a bath towel around his middle. The serpent was played by a dotty lady wearing a huge red bow tie. Her tongue flickered beautifully. Ira got to meet them all afterward. His cheeks were bright red, his smile wide, his eyes gleaming. He was impressed. That did not stop him from insulting the author.

  “Oh, that was you laughing at all the jokes!” Ira exclaimed. “You really sounded like you thought th
ey were funny!” Then he said, still smiling, “You should be an actress.” Her smile went thin and tense before she moved on to someone else.

  Going home in the car afterward, Ira said, “Hey, you know, that was a really good play.” Jonathan wasn’t sure to what degree he was being sarcastic. Neither was Ira.

  Ira invited him to the sauna that was meant only for teaching staff. They pretended to be staff and sat in the tiny box, naked under towels. They had seen each other naked, and they sat, knees touching, the air thick with some kind of tension. Ira kept wiping his face and shifting and avoiding Jonathan’s eyes. It was Jonathan’s turn, now, to be innocent.

  Then Ira invited him to his synagogue in West Hollywood. He looked awfully solemn as he asked Jonathan, his arms folded. Jonathan began to tease him. “No engraved invitation?” Jonathan asked. And Ira scowled with confusion.

  Ira was still tense and anxious as they arrived. He sat stiffly on the bench, his cheeks puffed out, not looking at Jonathan, and Jonathan very slowly realized that all the couples were of the same sex. He began to take in what some of the notices on the wall were saying.

  It was a gay synagogue. Beefy, thick-necked Ira was gay. This was the only way he could think of to tell Jonathan.

  Outside, in the dark, after the service, Ira stopped and turned around. “So,” he said. “Now you know.” His eyes had been looking at the ground. Now they looked up at Jonathan, waiting for an answer.

  “Yup,” was all that Jonathan said. Jonathan was touched when Ira began to look worried. Jonathan found it endearing. Jonathan prolonged the suspense.

  Ira’s arms made a sudden convulsive movement, the involuntary shrug. “My parents keep asking why I don’t go to their synagogue in Burbank,” he said.

  “I guess they do,” said Jonathan.

  Ira suddenly smiled, but his lips were turned inward, taut, and he very lightly hit Jonathan on the shoulder. “Well?” he demanded.

  “Well what?” Jonathan made himself look innocent.

  “What do you think!” bellowed Ira.

  “I think it’s very nice that you’re so religious,” replied Jonathan.

  “What else?”

  “Are you asking about my religious beliefs?”

  “I’m asking about you,” said Ira, grinning, aggressive, voice low.

  Jonathan decided it was time to be serious. He found it was difficult for him to talk straightforwardly. “I’m . . . I’m kind of hazy about all of that,” he said.

  “Hazy. What does that mean?”

  “It means I don’t know. Either way.” Jonathan made an embarrassed wiggle with his hand. “I guess I’m waiting.” He sighed. “Waiting to be persuaded.”

  There was a blankness in his sexuality. In a society that valued sexual athleticism, he felt himself at a disadvantage. He had a putative girlfriend, and they saw each other once a weekend for a cuddle and a cultural event. She was a well-known performance artist. She swallowed canned peaches whole while gargling the theme song from Dr. Zhivago. She looked like a librarian, which was perhaps one of the reasons people laughed. She was serious.

  “Do you realize,” she had said once, to Jonathan, “that there are more artists living in Los Angeles now than did in all the rest of history?”

  Jonathan didn’t. “It might depend on what you call an artist,” he answered her.

  What the girl made of their affair, Jonathan did not know. It was part of the blankness. Maybe she was waiting too. It suddenly didn’t seem fair to make her wait any longer.

  “Are you going to invite me home?” Ira asked. Virginity hung heavy and embarrassing like something around his neck, to be discarded. Ira lived at home and had nowhere to go. Jonathan began to understand the weight that the boy carried with him.

  Ira had taken so many risks. He was frightened of himself and of Jonathan—Jonathan might have been shocked or angry or answered with his fists. Ira’s eyes were round, watching, hopeful, sad.

  It was time for Jonathan to take charge.

  “If I said no, just for tonight, would you stop asking me?” Jonathan asked, and quickly added, “Because I don’t want you to stop asking.”

  Ira said nothing. He looked very young, very disappointed.

  Jonathan sighed. “It’s just that if we did anything now, I’d feel slightly railroaded.”

  “You’re a nice boy and don’t do it on the first date,” Ira murmured miserably.

  “Something like that.”

  “If you mean no, just say no.”

  “I don’t mean no.”

  “I’m supposed to show up with my car on Friday nights with a bunch of flowers?”

  “That would be nice. Only no flowers. The neighbors might think I was queer or something.”

  Ira looked so dismayed that Jonathan felt compelled to kiss him, on the cheek, under streetlights. “Bring chocolates instead.”

  Ira broke into a terrible sweat. It trickled down his forehead and soaked in patches through his shirt. His conventionality had been taxed to its limits. “Well,” he said. “I guess I always did believe in long engagements.”

  Jonathan drove him home. “Ease up, guy,” Jonathan said, temporarily sounding American. Somewhere on the San Diego Freeway, Ira suddenly understood that he had won.

  Ira became boisterous and bounced up and down on the car seat in time to the radio. He began to sing. He looked younger than ever. From the front porch of his parents’ house, he turned and gave Jonathan a wave. For some reason, it was that wave that made Jonathan finally decide. Jonathan could still see Ira, ten years ago, standing and waving and smiling. Ira was history, too.

  Jonathan woke up in his garden. It was bleary with sunlight. Oz, he reminded himself. I’m supposed to be in Oz. And he awoke and seemed to hear laughter, high childish giggles of something hidden under leaves. Or was it only the last of the telephone, fading away?

  His mother was there.

  She was wearing her mink stole and narrow tartan trousers, blue and green, and little elfin bootees. She also wore sunglasses and was surrounded by a blaze of sunlight.

  When had she last dressed like that?

  “Mom?” he asked, sitting up. He was horrified. How long was she going to stay? How long was he going to have to pretend to be well? Already, with actorish skills, he was firming up his eyes and straightening his back. He stood up, with a spring in his step. It was like watching a very aged actor trying to be sprightly. Jonathan could see himself move, very plainly, though his limbs were weighted to the chair.

  His mother backed away from him. “I’m all right. You keep sitting,” she said. Vapor wreathed out of her mouth, like steam. She found her way to another garden chair, uncertainly, nervously.

  At first Jonathan thought it was cigarette smoke coming out of her mouth. But then he saw that she was sitting in a field of snow. Sparkles of sunlight blasted back up from it, like sand in his eyes. It was cold, where his mother was.

  She leaned forward, uncertain how to begin. This was not the confident businesswoman that his mother had become. Now in her sixties, Jonathan’s mother had lost all sense of fear and, because of that, all sense of style.

  This was his young and insecure mother, who had no assurances how well her life would turn out, who wanted everything to be new and modern, who threw out anything old, who was a model but who still did not believe she was beautiful. This was his mother when she was younger than he was now. Poor ghost.

  Are you a good witch or a bad witch?

  “Did you ever notice,” she began, hesitantly, “how in biographies they never tell you much about the adult’s relationship with his parents?”

  “Yes,” said Jonathan. Indeed he had, being interested in history. The words flowed out of his mouth slowly and messily like molasses.

  “It’s because pe
ople are embarrassed by it,” said his mother. There were no creases in her cheeks, no patches of scaly skin on her wrists. Her lipstick was ruby red and her hair black.

  “It’s embarrassing for everyone. Embarrassing for the child who needs to become independent. How can you be independent when there is someone who still calls you their child? For the parents, it’s a constant reminder how old they are and how strange life is. They look at the face of a forty-year-old man and say, I gave birth to him. I held his hand as a baby.”

  Jonathan couldn’t see what was happening behind the snow-blind sunglasses.

  “When you were first born,” his mother said, “I took you out into a field of snow, like this one.” She held out her hands and showed him the Canadian field. “I held you up against my cheek and it was as though I were launching you into the future. It seemed to me you were like a branch, that would grow into the year 2000.”

  Somehow they were back in Los Angeles.

  “You won’t see the year 2000, will you?” his mother said.

  “No,” whispered Jonathan.

  “I used to think there was some compensation,” his mother said. “When you were a baby, and I realized there was something wrong with you, when you rocked and wouldn’t speak, when you tore things up, I asked everyone what I had done wrong. Then I saw. You could draw. You could make those heads out of clay. And I thought: There always is some compensation. When you quit university the first time, and I saw you act at Stratford, I thought: There’s the compensation. Even when you left me, left all of us and came here to do whatever it was you did in all those bars, I thought: He’s got to be there to make it. He’s got to be there for his profession.”

  She looked around at his garden, at the L.A. sun. “But there’s no compensation, Jonathan. There’s no one to pass anything on to. You’ll die, and the future will be only silence. You’ll die and there won’t be anything left.”