Sticky Kisses
Page 42
Valerie thrust her pert head forward, eyes alight. “What about the turban story? Did he tell you all the turban story?”
Martin Luttrell threw her a startled glance but Valerie paid no attention.
“Yes, we’ve all heard that one,” James laughed.
Alex and Randy exchanged glances and said in unison, “We didn’t. Tell us!”
Reginald said, zestfully, “He’d met this hunk at the Armory, a real macho guy—six foot four, I think, in jeans and a leather vest. No shirt. Three days’ growth of beard and cowboy boots. You guys remember, Connie could go for rough trade on occasion.”
Thom said, smiling despite himself, “I remember this.”
“Connie was so hilarious when he told this story,” Valerie said. “He and this man—”
“The two of them went to the guy’s place,” Alex interrupted, “I think it was a little condo out in Decatur, and they decide to have some fun in the shower. By the time the hot water ran out, Connie is sure he’s found his soul mate, and they’re about to proceed to the bedroom. But after this macho guy dries himself off, he bends over and wraps the towel around his head! A flawless turban on the first try!”
Again, Alex mimicked Connie’s high-pitched cry of horror: “Just like my mother used to do! God, I lost my erection in five seconds! Suddenly, this virile hunk had turned into Carmen Miranda!”
Laughing, Pace said, “I think they had some quick, obligatory sex and spent the rest of the night swapping tips on moisturizers.”
Smiling vaguely, Thom looked toward the platform where a microphone, podium, and a couple of folding chairs had been set up. He wished the minister would get things started: it was twenty minutes past four. He caught sight of Abby, standing near the platform alongside their mother, who was talking earnestly with a short-statured man whose back faced Thom. Then, as if obeying Thorn’s mental summons, the man turned and Thom recognized Connie’s father. He had the same look of defensive self-containment Thom had noticed the other night, almost as if he were one of those anonymous participants who hadn’t really known Connie. He seemed to be listening appreciatively to Lucille, nodding, standing close beside her; clearly, she was pleased to have his attention. A cool shiver of apprehension passed through Thom.
He hadn’t yet decided what to believe about Connie and his father. The man did not seem like a drinker, nor did he seem like a man who could lose his temper easily, much less indulge in the abusive tirades Connie had reported. At the same time, Thom could not imagine even Connie indulging himself with such extravagant, self-pitying lies. The truth lay somewhere in between, Thom surmised, dissatisfied with this idea but not knowing what else to think. Perhaps Connie’s father had simply been jerked back to reality by the prolonged death of his wife, the sudden loss of his only child. Thom could not know; he would never know.
Every family, he thought, retreating from speculation, has its secrets. No end to them. Better to let them lie.
Abby had caught his miserable glance and now, having spoken a word to her mother—who scarcely paused in her involved conversation with Mr. Lefcourt—hurried over to Thom.
“Are you OK?” she asked, taking his arm. Lately she’d used this gesture more often, clinging to his arm affectionately, even possessively, at random moments. “You look so…”
She waited as if for Thom to complete the sentence.
He tried to smile. “I have no idea how I look.”
She gazed at him. “So…bereft.” She was whispering, so the busily chattering group could not hear. Thom was aware that one of the organizers had approached them and was handing out balloons. The minister (a woman Connie had not liked, Thom recalled) at last had ascended the podium.
Thom said, “I guess that’s accurate enough.”
Abby stood on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. His sweet, wounded sister, there to comfort him. He felt a constriction in his throat, but he turned aside and pretended to cough; the moment of intense, knotted emotion quickly passed.
“Thanks, honey,” he told Abby. He turned his shoulders slightly, a signal they should join the group, shouldn’t stand apart from the other mourners, and just then someone approached Thom, offering him a balloon. But instead of the ordinary white balloon everyone else was holding, this one was larger: a blaring, metallic turquoise. And instead of the organizer, who had left the group and begun distributing the white ones elsewhere in the park, the man who handed him the turquoise balloon was Warren.
“I—I just slipped over to the helium pump and filled this one—for you,” Warren said. “This was his color, and he idolized you, Thom. Would you take it?”
In his other hand Warren held a white balloon, like everyone else. Before Thom could protest (of course, it should be Warren himself who released this one) Warren had stepped away, leaving Thom with this extravagant bobbing turquoise globe on a string. Several others in the group—Reginald, Valerie Patten—had glanced at the balloon and then at him, seeming puzzled. Thom stared at the balloon himself, unable to think of anything but Connie’s bright blue-green eyes, his lush turquoise sweaters, his scalding laugh, his impish and impulsive soul that even now seemed here among them.
So Thorn’s thoughts ran. Abby tiptoed again to whisper in his ear.
“Poor Warren, he’s so sweet,” she said. Before he could answer, the minister began speaking through the microphone, welcoming them to this memorial service for “their beloved friend.” Everyone turned to face her, all the eighty or a hundred people holding balloons like children temporarily quieted during a party; all looking wistful, subdued; all, it must be admitted, looking a bit ridiculous as they held fast to the string in one hand, their white balloons bobbing in the mild spring air.
The minister’s remarks were brief, and only three of Connie’s friends—all of them lesbians whom Connie had liked but to whom he hadn’t felt close—made the usual attempts at poignancy blended with humor as they offered their memories, their consolations. Connie’s closest friends were too bereaved to speak, a typical situation at services like this. The women did mention Thom, and Warren, and Pace, and even Abby in their remarks, and the dozens of others scattered around the park often glanced in Thom and Abby’s direction. At one point, Thom himself glanced around, missing Warren, and noticed him sitting by himself on a park bench, separated from the crowd, the only person in the park who was not standing and paying attention to the speaker. Warren had tied his balloon to the bench’s arm railing and sat with his arms on his knees, gazing down into the grass. Thorn’s heart convulsed in sympathy. Abby was looking at Warren, too. Her grip on Thorn’s arm had tightened.
“Poor Warren,” she whispered. There was nothing else to say.
When the last speaker had finished, the minister came back to the podium and mumbled some words about “releasing Connie’s spirit,” though none of them would ever “release him from their memories,” along with some other mumbo jumbo Thom didn’t bother to hear.
Abby poked him in the side, gently. “Pay attention,” she said, in a mock-scolding tone. “We’ve got to do this right.”
Thom looked toward the podium and saw the minister holding her own white balloon aloft. Now everyone in the group, like obedient children, lifted their balloons in the same way, and Thom did, too. On the woman’s cue, “Goodbye, Connie,” everyone released them, Thom and Abby opening their hands at the same moment as everyone else. They all craned their necks, watching the swift ascent of the dozens of pale bobbing globes through the postcard-blue sky. They seemed a mass of white, a great silent cloud, but then as the balloons ascended they began to separate, tossed here and there by darting breezes, and it seemed only a few seconds before they were drifting off to the east, like small white bubbles arising from the brilliant spring afternoon.
Several people had pointed at the turquoise one Thom had released. “That one’s Connie,” someone said loudly. “Always had to be different!” A general tittering passed through the crowd.
Thom felt himself staring at the turq
uoise balloon, hard, as though willing it not to float out of sight. At first it seemed slow and contrary, taking its time, but finally it wafted upward, too, and in fact took a prominent position, the star of the show, rising into the middle distance and surrounded by the white balloons on all sides as though following an inevitable choreography. Thom thought for the first time that Warren’s idea had been inspired, for the turquoise balloon drew everyone’s eye, of course; it focused everyone’s emotion. Already Thom could hear the muffled sobs here and there, and in the small sea of upturned faces he glimpsed a few people daubing their eyes with tissues, with the backs of their hands. Yet they refused to look away, keeping their gaze trained on the balloon that had grown so small, so distant, as it rushed upward among the others into the blue dome of sky. Beside him Thom could hear his sister’s gentle sobbing, but even for Abby he didn’t look away, not until the moment the speck of dazzling turquoise was lost amid the blizzard of white balloons.
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Portions of this book previously appeared in Ontarior Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Humanities Review, TriQuarterly, and Men on Men 7: Best New Gay Fiction
Copyright © 2001 by Greg Johnson
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