by Greg Johnson
“Come on, Connie, let’s go,” Warren said. He stood at the door, jingling his keys.
“Well! You guys are party poppers if I ever saw one!” Connie cried.
After everyone had left, Thom and Chip started cleaning up. Chatting idly, they straightened the living and dining rooms, then worked a while in the kitchen, putting things away, rinsing plates and glasses. When Chip started wiping the counter, Thom came up behind him and ran a finger along his neck.
“Hey,” he said. “Enough scullery work for one night.”
Chip turned, and before he could speak Thom kissed him lightly on the mouth.
He said, “Happy Valentine’s Day.”
Chip smiled. “Same to you.”
Thom took his hand and led him back to the bedroom, flipping off lights as he went. Mitzi and Chloe raced ahead: by the time Thom and Chip got to the room, the dogs had hopped into their fleece-lined beds and begun the nightly dachshund ritual of padding slowly in a circle, three or four times. Eyelids drooping and paws tucked under their haunches, they settled and were quiet.
Unbuttoning his shirt, Chip said, “I wish I could get to sleep that easily.”
Several times, Chip had mentioned his insomnia; Thom always fell asleep first, he said. Thorn’s deep, regular breathing helped lull him to sleep, too.
“How about a massage?” Thom suggested. He turned off the bedside lamp and lit a new candle.
Thom always slept nude, but tonight Chip got into bed wearing his briefs. And his glasses. When Thom took his hand, Chip said, “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure,” Thom said.
“Have you—have you ever really trusted somebody? You know, somebody you felt you could tell anything, and it wouldn’t go any further?”
Thom thought a moment, and he supposed Chip expected him to mention Roy, or perhaps Abby, but Thom decided to tell the truth. He wanted to start this relationship fresh and clean, steering clear of all those old bugbears from the past: the small evasions, the untold stories. The outright lies.
“No,” he said.
Chip’s response was unexpected: he hiccuped. Then he laughed and Thom laughed, too.
“Sorry,” Chip said. “Too much champagne.”
Idly, Thom stroked his boyfriend’s thigh. “Why did you ask that?”
Chip took a deep breath. Exhaling, he said in a jocular, almost offhand way, “My work is research, and I’m always looking for the ‘truth,’ because in science that’s the goal. Factual truth. Empirical truth. But where people are concerned, I’m not sure it’s always a good idea.”
Gently, Thom squeezed Chip’s leg and felt his muscle tighten in response. “Really? Why is that?”
“Because people can’t take it,” he said. “Like my parents, for instance, down in Albany. They were both raised on farms, you know, in rural south Georgia in the 1940s. They go to church on Sunday and on Wednesday nights. They hardly ever watch television because the preacher tells them how corrupt it is, and they haven’t gone to a movie since Liz and Dick made Cleopatra. The only things they read are the Bible and Reader’s Digest.”
He stopped, as if he’d answered Thorn’s question.
“So?” Thom said. “A lot of guys in Atlanta have parents like that.”
“My point is they grew up thinking homosexuals were three-headed monsters from hell. They still hear that at church. I’m their only kid, and if they found out I was gay, it would practically kill them.”
Thom thought a moment. “Don’t be too sure. Sometimes people like your parents…they can surprise you. I’m not saying they’d be thrilled, but—”
“It would kill them,” Chip said flatly. He hiccuped.
Thom opened his mouth to speak but he could not. He’d given Chip a selective version of his own coming-out story, that memorable Sunday afternoon when he’d lowered the boom during a Falcons game. Chip knew that Thorn’s mother lived in Philadelphia and that he hadn’t seen her lately, but he didn’t know the details. Nor had he seemed curious.
Thom remembered something Chip had said earlier. Now he asked, “You don’t know any gay men in Athens, really? It might help if you joined the campus gay group or something, you know. It’s important to have support.”
Chip looked over with one side of his mouth raised, almost a snarl.
“Are you serious?” he said. “I’m a graduate student in biology, Thom. If they knew they had a flaming queen alongside them in the lab…my God.” He shook his head.
“You’re not a flaming queen,” Thom said. The comment was inane, but he couldn’t help adding, “You’re not.”
When he’d first gotten into bed, Thom had felt the familiar stirring fullness in his groin, his automatic response to Chip’s body. His anticipation of their lovemaking was no less keen than it had been on their first night together. But now he felt chilled, shriveled; his hand had retreated from Chip’s leg, and Chip had raised to a sitting position, arms folded across his chest.
“What about that alcoholic English teacher?” Thom said. “What happened to him?”
“Oh, he’s still there. He’s one of those losers who take a decade to finish their dissertation. He’s probably still banging his undergraduates.”
“I thought you didn’t know any gay guys in Athens,” Thom said.
Chip laughed shortly. “See what I mean? You can’t trust a thing I say.”
“That’s not what I—”
“I didn’t think of him,” Chip said. “Haven’t talked to him in a long, long time.”
For several minutes, neither of them spoke. Thom had propped a pillow behind his head, and both he and Chip stared out into the room’s shadowy, shifting darkness, the illumination from their one candle now seeming less romantic than menacing, forbidding. Thom lay engulfed in a memory from his and Roy’s last vacation before Roy became ill: they’d gone to Provincetown and then Boston, where Roy wanted to visit some old friends from his Harvard days. Thom had never visited Boston, and he’d picked up a “gay guide” at the bookstore. They’d read descriptions of Boston’s gay coffee shops, the dance clubs, a bathhouse described as “wonderfully seedy.”
“Oooh, the baths—that’s where we should go, Thom,” Roy had said, poking him in the side.
“Ha ha,” Thom had said.
Their second day in Boston, over lunch, Roy had said he wanted to visit some of the local gardens—his grand passion was landscaping, and at home he usually puttered out in the yard from the minute he got home until the last shreds of daylight were gone.
“But you don’t care about visiting gardens, do you, hon?” he’d asked. “You want to go shopping or something, while I do that?”
This had been the last afternoon of an eight-day trip, and Thom was exhausted.
“I may just stay in the room and read, write some cards,” he said.
After Roy left, Thom had gotten in the shower and simply let the hot water run over him, glad he’d decided to take a break from their relentless sightseeing. (For Roy, vacations were always rigidly scheduled, every hour of the day accounted for; downtime had been an alien concept to him.) Thom remembered the exact moment the truth had struck him: his head had been tilted back as he rinsed shampoo from his hair. He saw Roy walking out the door of their room, a map of the gardens he’d gotten from the hotel clerk in his hand, along with the gay guide.
You didn’t need a gay guide to visit the gardens, did you?
Calmly, methodically, he’d shaved, gotten dressed, and decided what he would do. It was 5:15, and Roy had said he’d be back around six, when they’d decide where to go for dinner. Thom looked up the address of the bathhouse in the phone book, called for directions, found it was a ten-minute walk. Half a block down there was a small cafe, and Thom sat there with a Diet Coke, remembering that today Roy had worn a brightly flowered shirt Thom had bought him the year before on their trip to Maui. He sat sipping the Coke and glancing every few minutes at his watch. It was 5:30. It was 5:35. He decided that at 5:50 he would leave
, hoping he’d find Roy back in the room, happily clutching brochures from the gardens and maybe a little souvenir for Thom. That didn’t happen. At 5:47 the bathhouse door opened, and there was damp-haired Roy in his flowered shirt—the shirt Thom had bought him, an extra twist of the knife—and Thom merely watched as Roy, disoriented for a moment, looked down at his map, then took off down the sidewalk in the direction of their hotel.
Thom left the cafe and caught up to Roy in the next block.
“Hey there,” he’d said.
Roy looked around, startled. He gave his handsome, tilted grin. “Guess what. I’ve managed to get lost.”
“Are the gardens around here?” Thom asked.
“Well, yeah,” Roy said, stammering, pointing vaguely down the street, “but I—somehow I took a wrong turn, I guess.”
Thom was tempted to play out the charade: ask how the gardens were, were they crowded, what had he liked best, endless questions leading his lover into a forest of lies. But he didn’t have the heart for that.
Instead he asked, “How were the baths?”
On their way back to the hotel, they’d had the worst argument of their lives. On public streets. In lowered, hissing voices.
“You fucking lied to me. Looked me right in the face and lied.”
Roy was walking fast, head ducked. “Sometimes that’s easier,” he said. “What did you do, follow me? Stalk me?”
“I didn’t have to follow you. Do you think I’m stupid? I knew you were trying to get rid of me earlier—suggesting I wouldn’t enjoy the gardens. How considerate!”
“You know, this isn’t the first time you’ve been really intrusive,” Roy said. “Sometimes you really intrude into my life.”
“You’re trying to make me into the bad guy? You just fucked your brains out in a bathhouse, and I’m the bad guy?”
“Look, sometimes I need a quick release like that—I did invite you, and you just laughed.”
“You fucking liar! That wasn’t an invitation—you wouldn’t have taken me there in a million years.”
Roy walked faster. “I’m really pissed that you followed me.”
“No, you’re really pissed that you got caught. If you’d just told me where you were going and why, I could have dealt with that. It’s your streak of dishonesty that drives me up the wall.”
“What you did was worse. You followed me all the way here, just to embarrass me.”
“You’ve been prancing around nude in a bathhouse. I don’t think you’re that easily embarrassed.”
And so on. Yes, by far the worst argument of their four-year relationship, but although things had been strained for a while, and they hadn’t really talked out the matter to Thorn’s satisfaction (a few days later, Roy had sent a card apologizing for the “dishonesty incident,” saying he hoped it hadn’t ruined the trip for Thom) their relationship had not only survived, it had thrived. Somehow their ability to have a no-holds-barred verbal fight and stay together had strengthened their rapport, and in the months afterward, and especially after Roy fell ill, Thom had never felt closer to him.
Yet he’d had to answer Chip’s question truthfully and say no, there was no one in whom he could place full, unquestioning trust. Chip said nothing.
Finally, Thom broke their silence. “I still don’t understand why you asked me that.”
“Oh, I was just curious.”
Thom turned on his side and reached out. Brushed his fingertips along Chip’s bare stomach.
“Are you OK?” Thom asked.
“Sure,” Chip said. Now he did remove his glasses, carefully placing them on the bedside table. He moved away from Thom and closed his eyes.
“I’m really bushed,” he said. “Too much food and liquor. Sleep tight, OK?”
Thom lay there, stunned. Again they would sleep together without making love. Recovering, he said, “OK. Good night.” He leaned over and gave Chip the same peck he’d given earlier to his sister.
Chip kissed him back, then pulled the sheet up to his shoulder and turned his back to Thom. Thom raised on one elbow to blow out the candle, then paused. His eye had caught on the old newspaper clipping that had fallen out of the yearbook. He’d dropped the clipping in the nightstand drawer, and now the drawer was partway open, as if taunting him. He remembered vaguely that the article had something to do with the Atlanta child murders in the early 1980s, but he couldn’t remember the details. He wondered why he’d saved it, and why his stomach churned with anxiety at the mere sight of the yellowed clipping, so neatly folded into squares almost twenty years ago by his teenage hands. Probably he shouldn’t touch the clipping; it would be like unfolding the past. The present was difficult enough, wasn’t it, without going back, remembering?
He hesitated, waffled, changed his mind. After all, he had nothing better to do.
When Thom had turned sixteen and gotten his license, he’d gone with his father to pick up the ‘74 Ford Torino he bought with his life savings, literally, of $2,450.
From the sidewalk, his mother had watched their homecoming, Thorn’s father inching his year-old gray Chrysler up the street as though proudly escorting his son, who’d been delirious with joy throughout this first solo drive in his first car. The trip home had been marred only by frustration at his father’s stubborn adherence to the speed limit. Thorn’s fingers itched to swerve the wheel and pass the Chrysler, his foot itched to floor the pedal and drive off by himself, get onto some back road and do eighty, a hundred, all the windows down and the clean May wind riffling his hair in an ecstatic frenzy. But they’d promised his mother they’d come directly home, and she’d promised to be waiting outside with her camera to snap a picture of her handsome son in his handsome new car.
And there she was. Easing into the driveway behind his father, Thom saw that she looked worried, fretful. She stood wringing her hands, and there was no camera in sight.
“I was just watching the news!” she called out the instant they emerged from their cars. “Another boy disappeared. Only fourteen, poor thing, and he’s the seventh one—imagine that, the seventh!”
It was 6:30 P.M., May 18, 1980. If you believed the police and an increasingly hysterical media, there was a serial killer loose in Atlanta. Since the previous summer, a series of bodies—all black, all children or teenagers, and all boys except for one twelve-year-old named Angel—had been found shot, bludgeoned, or stabbed to death. The girl had been tied to a tree, sexually molested, and strangled with an electric cord; a pair of panties had been stuffed down her throat. Television and newspaper reports insisted that Atlanta’s black population now lived in a “vise of terror.” There was speculation that the killings were being systematically planned and carried out by the Ku Klux Klan; or by a radical black group trying to fuel hatred toward Atlanta’s white minority in the hope of starting a race war; or by some lunatic pedophile, a Southern version of John Wayne Gacy. Whenever there was a new murder, Thorn’s mother suffered throes of anxiety, worrying aloud that Thom could be snatched off his bicycle, or kidnapped from the high school grounds. She’d even complained to Thorn’s father that they ought to leave Atlanta and move to Philadelphia, where she’d grown up and where some of her relatives still lived. Philadelphia was the city of brotherly love, she insisted, while Atlanta had become the murder capital of the U.S., a place where innocent kids were no longer safe.
Half-listening, Thom and his father would point out, yet another time, that all the victims were black, all the killings in black neighborhoods; the situation was horrible, of course, but neither Thom nor Abby was in any personal danger, and it was the kind of thing that could happen anywhere. You couldn’t blame Atlanta.
After Thom had returned home with his car, his mother spent the rest of the evening begging him not to drive it. What if the killer spotted Thom driving alone and decided to follow him, and attack him the moment he opened the door! What if Thom was stopped at a red light and the killer simply pulled alongside and shot him, right through the window! What if—
In his quiet but decisive way, Thorn’s father put an end to his wife’s overblown speculations. He held up one hand (the family was eating dinner, Thom and Abby chewing busily on their fried chicken and corn on the cob in an effort to ignore their mother) and said, “Lucille, enough. That killer isn’t interested in a goddamned white boy.”
Thom looked over, startled. He could count on one hand the times he’d heard his father swear. Even Lucille glanced sideways at her husband, abashed.
“All right, then,” she said to Thom. Her voice had lowered to a stubborn whine that abraded Thorn’s nerves far more than her usual shrillness. “But promise me, honey, that you’ll drive with the doors locked? And you’ll look around you before you leave the car?”
Thom nodded, eager to break the tension. “Sure, no problem. I’ll just be going to school and back, mainly. And I’ll be giving Andrew Jeter a ride every morning, remember? So there’ll be two of us.”
“There you go, Mom,” Abby said, smiling. “No psychopath in his right mind is going to approach two overgrown kids like Thom and Andrew.”
Thom laughed. He and his sister shared a droll, irreverent sense of humor, but usually Abby was more circumspect than he was.
“No psychopath in his right mind—very funny, Abigail,” their mother said. She gave a droopy smile that tugged at Thorn’s sympathy; she looked so bedraggled, her wispy reddish hair plastered along her temples after her sweaty work in the kitchen. She turned to Thom. “That does relieve my mind a little, honey. But don’t forget, the first two bodies were found together—”
“Lucille?” Thorn’s father said. He was picking among the platter of chicken pieces. “Is there any more white meat?”
His wife stared. One hand flew to her mouth as she exclaimed there had been two platters, but she’d been so upset and distracted that she’d brought out only one. Muttering crossly to herself, she jumped up and hurried back to the kitchen. There was no more talk of the Atlanta child murders for the rest of that evening.
