by David Gates
“I guess Uncle can take it from here,” Billy says. He opens the hall closet, hangs up his jacket and gets out Mrs. Bishop’s coat. Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry? But Mrs. Bishop used to baby-sit Billy and Cassie when they were little—she seemed old then, is old now—and this arrangement would be even more bizarre if the boundaries got blurred. Mrs. Bishop’s all right, just boring and religious. As far as Billy can tell, she simply regards him as a “bachelor,” maybe not even “confirmed”: she’s been keeping him up to date on her semi-bohemian granddaughter, now divorced and living in Saratoga. “Thanks again,” he says, and holds up her coat as she backs into it. “Oh. By the way. Your honorarium.” He hands her an envelope with a hundred and fifty dollars in cash. “So we’ll see you Monday?”
“Lord willing,” she says. It sounds to Billy like some old ballad. Lord Willing rode home on his snow-white steed/And spake to his servants three/O something something something something/And all for the love of thee. Billy’s a tad overeducated for all this—and of course fatherhood had not been in the cards—but he’s doing it.
He listens for Mrs. Bishop’s car to start up, then says, “So it’s you and me, partner. Got a whole big weekend ahead of us. And tonight’s a bath night.” Billy’s funning: every night’s a bath night. Cassie had him using the shower—when she thought of it—but Billy’s theory is that a bath is not just relaxing but primal, a ritual no kid should be done out of. So it’s play a quick game of something, put together a dinner while Billy’s in the bath, then right into p.j.’s, eat dinner, brush teeth, read and safe in bed by eight o’clock.
Since Deke’s already into the marble game, that’ll be tonight’s amusement. Billy chooses a clear marble with red boomerang shapes inside—God, he remembers this very marble—and sets it at the topmost point, then lets it go. Zoop plop, zoop plop, zoop plop. “Kewel,” he says in his mindless-hippie voice.
“Kewel,” says Deke. He’s good at mindless hippie. “Can Caleb come over for a playdate?”
“This is somebody in your class?”
“Kind of. He’s in my reading group.”
“Does he want to come over?”
“I don’t know.”
“Oh. So I guess step one is for you to ask him, and then I can call his parents. What’s his last name?”
“Jacobson.”
“Really. I wonder if—I think I might know his dad. So what do you want for dinner tonight? We’ve got pasta or spaghetti. Which would you rather?”
Deke gives Billy his faux-disgusted look.
“Okay, pasta it is. To tell you the truth, I hate spaghetti.”
“It’s the same thing.”
“Oh,” Billy says. “Well, in that case.” He goes into the kitchen and runs water into the big Revereware saucepan. They’ve had pasta the last three nights. Deke would eat it indefinitely, and Billy doesn’t care. If they want variety, they can always get a different Paul Newman sauce. Deke has come in to watch. “Today the marinara, tomorrow the world,” Billy tells him. Deke laughs; he seems to like stuff that’s over his head. If he’s going to be with Billy, he might just as well.
This is supposed to be a temporary arrangement, while Cassie—as Billy explains it to Deke—is “getting better.” But he doesn’t see why they can’t just keep going. After her thirty days in the hospital, she moved into a halfway house and went back to work, but nobody involved with her treatment—Cassie included—seems in any hurry about reuniting her with her son. And Billy isn’t pushing it.
After high school, Cassie had gone to Boston to study piano and composition at Berklee. Billy thought she had the true gift. How many eighteen-year-old girls—especially in Menands, New York—aspired to play like Red Garland? But she also had the other thing, which he guessed went with the gift, and she lasted less than a year. Selling her baby grand, she later told him, had bought only two months’ worth of dope, but it was two months to die for. Then she’d done her scary turnaround: stopped using, cut off the down-to-her-ass hair, bullshitted her way into a job with Shawmut Bank, married Vic, got pregnant, divorced Vic, had the kid. By the time she crashed and burned this fall, she was making a hundred thousand dollars a year, living in a co-op apartment tower with a view of Boston Harbor—and, it turned out, using big-time and sleeping about one night in four. Ever since Berklee, she’s refused to touch a piano, even last Christmas when their dying mother bullied them into singing carols. Billy finally had to back them up, picking out the chords with aching pauses in between as he tried to get his fingers on the right keys.
The place Cassie’s in has a no-number pay phone in the front hall; they can make one call a day and are allowed no incoming calls at all. She phones every other night and talks first to Deke (whose end of the conversation is mostly No and Yeah), then to Billy. She often says she’s glad Deke’s “in good hands.” Which always makes Billy think of that Sherwood Anderson story.
But he secretly thinks that Cassie secretly knows Deke is in better hands. Back when Deke was born, it was Billy who talked her out of naming him Duke, in honor of Duke Ellington; did she really want to give her kid a name like a German shepherd? Billy’s enrolled Deke in school here, the school where he and Cassie used to go. He drops him in the morning on the way to work, Mrs. Bishop’s there when he gets off the bus in the afternoon, Billy’s back by six, then it’s two hours to bedtime. All do-able. Dinners had seemed daunting, but pasta’s just a matter of putting on water and heating up sauce; in another pan he steams vegetables with his mother’s vegetable steamer, a thing that looks like a Bucky Fuller dome on little legs. Once a week, he has Mrs. Bishop put a chicken in the oven. He’s bought age-appropriate CD-ROMs: The Magic School Bus Explores in the Age of Dinosaurs and The Magic School Bus Explores the Solar System, each described as “A Fun-Filled, Fact-Packed Science Adventure.” (He passed on The Magic School Bus Explores the Human Body.) He reads Deke bedtime stories, and he’s gotten good at doing the characters’ voices, even in crap like Bugs Bunny and the Carrot Machine, where he has to do the proto-faggot Elmer Fudd. He’s made Deke a go-to-sleep tape of Horowitz playing a sequence of sweet, unjumpy pieces: the quieter sections of Kinderszenen, a couple of gentler Chopin waltzes. And he’s considered teaching Deke the first couplet of “Now I Lay Me,” without the die-before-I-wake part.
This playdate thing, though. He can see it all now: him with little boys in the house, villagers converging with pitchforks. This Caleb must be Andy Jacobson’s son; Andy stayed here in town after graduation, married Angie somebody, two classes behind them, and went into his father’s fuel-oil business. Definitely not one of the guys Billy came out to back in high school. Around here, Billy’s thing has always been not to be not out but not to make an issue of it—when he was living in New York, it was a whole other story—and he’s sometimes more cagey than the situation requires. He introduced Deke to Mrs. Krupa next door as “my sister’s boy” rather than “my nephew” because it sounded more folksy, and because nephew seemed like a euphemism for catamite.
But a playdate crisis was bound to come sooner or later. You can’t lock a kid up and never let him make any friends—which in fact would look more suspicious than anything. So maybe they could go to Caleb’s house. Or come here, with Mrs. Bishop as duenna.
Billy thought at first that Deke might need psychiatric care and feeding. (Maybe Cassie’s sticking him in his room in front of the TV hadn’t been such a bad idea, considering what he might otherwise have seen.) But he seems fine—if Billy’s any judge of what’s fine—simply having a routine and getting some attention. He doesn’t even appear to suffer from TV withdrawal, and asked only once if he could watch The X-Files. Billy said it wasn’t on until after his bedtime, so why didn’t they play Candyland instead. And Deke was fine with it. Billy’s rule is, if Deke brings something up, they talk. If and only if.
A couple of days after he got here, Deke asked when he was going to see Mommy, and even Billy recognized this as a cue. “You must miss her,” he said. H
ey, no shit.
“I don’t know,” Deke said. “Sometimes.”
“Well, it’s going to be a while longer,” Billy said. “But I called her at the hospital this morning, and she said be sure and tell you she misses you, too.”
Deke frowned. Billy could guess what he was thinking: if he missed her and she missed him, then what the hell was going on? But he didn’t ask any more questions.
Billy had talked to Cassie that morning; that much was true. She’d warned him not to trust Deke because he was a “star baby.” She meant a changeling left by aliens; the real Deke was on some star being dissected alive.
“A star?” Billy had stupidly said. “Or a planet?”
“Oh,” she’d said. “The stickler. You stick it in your boyfriends’ asses, and then they stick it in you. And you call it the life of Riley.”
When Billy left New York, his teaching job, his lover and the cats, the forsythias were starting. Now the trees are bare again; out in the country, orange pumpkins litter the brown fields. This morning, while shaving, he noticed there’s only a speck on his earlobe where his earring used to be.
He sleeps in his parents’ bedroom: bizarre, but less so than it would’ve been to move back into his own little room across the hall and leave the big bedroom empty. They probably conceived him in this bed, but it’s like the time his father took the family to Gettysburg: long ago something happened on this spot, but now so what? He’s put Deke in his old room, which his father cleaned out and repainted as soon as he went off to Brown. Cassie’s room still has her single bed with the dust ruffle, her big old teddy bear Weezer, her books from Pippi Longstocking through Lady Sings the Blues. Deke will stay in there for hours, going through drawers, exploring the closetful of toys. Once, while outside raking leaves, Billy watched him through the window. He’d hauled out this old game of Cassie’s called Operation, where you touch different body parts with this penlike thing and tiny bulbs light up. He’d knelt on the floor, touching this spot and that—Billy couldn’t see what—and moving his lips: a healing ceremony for his mother? When Billy moved closer to the window, he could hear that Deke was singing “The Ants Go Marching One by One.”
Last Christmas they were all in this house, in their former configurations. Mom was still alive, still well enough to get the stepladder out of the garage and string the colored lights on the twin spruces flanking the front walk. (She never took them down, and Billy’s of two minds about whether to plug them in come December.) Cassie and Deke had driven out from Boston, and Billy and Mark had taken the train up from the city after throwing their own Christmas party, at which Mark—who called himself “a prolapsed Catholic”—had given everybody those WWJD bracelets, explaining that they stood for “Who Would Jesus Do?” What happens this Christmas, Billy can’t imagine.
His mother died at the end of February. His father had died nine years before, the quintessential family man’s death: heart attack after shoveling snow. That was in February, too; Billy flirted with seeing it as noncoincidental, but the dates (the seventh and the twenty-third) didn’t resonate. Mark saw Billy through the vigil at the hospital and the funeral, then, two weeks later, made his announcement. Two weeks to the day. They could, and should, still share the apartment, but Mark had decided to make the thing he was having with Garrett—which he’d been calling a “friendship”—be his real thing. In fairness, Billy had to admit (to himself) that he had a “friendship,” too. For the past few months he’d been thinking up nighttime errands—he’d turned super-responsible about the cats’ litter—and calling Dennis, who always worked late, from pay phones. Dennis was living with Giuliano—who Dennis suspected was seeing somebody else. And they all more or less knew one another. It was like some daisy-chain soap opera out of the Age of Disco, with a certain “I Love Lucy” quality, if you stepped back far enough. Billy, finally, stepped way, way back.
During spring break he went to Key West: sat in the sun, drank gin and tonic. And after a couple of days, he called and added a connecting flight from LaGuardia to Albany to his return ticket. There was an empty, mortgage-free house where he could live for the cost of the property taxes and utility bills. He could take the train down twice a week to finish out the semester, and meanwhile look for a used car and a job. A job a regular person might have. The day he mailed in his students’ grades, he bought a ’95 Honda Civic with forty-three thousand miles on it; two weeks later he started work at a company that did tech support under contract to Microsoft. Billy liked computers, and he was a quick study; he had no experience, but neither did half the employees. He’d worked up a little song-and-dance for the interview to explain a career change at thirty-two: he grew up here, liked the area, was burned out on New York City. If that didn’t play in Albany, he didn’t know Albany. But he never got to say his piece. They were hiring: end of story. If he didn’t work out, somebody else would.
Cassie had worked on him about moving to Boston, but that would’ve been settling for the merely second-rate. Choosing the suburbs of Albany and your own childhood home had a perverse grandeur, like an episode in the lives of the great Proustian-Jamesian queer recluses. (Mark’s name for Albany was “Ulan Bator.”) And taking a job in tech support seemed, to Billy, a little like Rimbaud giving up poetry for gunrunning or whatever it was. A very little.
He didn’t bring much from 75th Street besides his clothes, his tapes and CDs, his books—most of them are still in boxes—and his computer. He spread his one decent kilim on the wall-to-wall carpeting in the living room, but the colors clashed; after a week he rolled it up and stuck it in the hall closet. He’s learned to live with wallpaper, and while he took down the intolerable shorescape (lighthouse, dunes, gull on post of jetty) in the master bedroom, he left the snow scene (covered bridge, icy brook, hemlocks) as a tip of the hat to the old man. He also left the denim-and-gingham square dancers in the kitchen, painted on varnished plywood in a Chuck Jones-meets-Thomas Hart Benton manner.
Deke’s been here since Labor Day weekend. That Sunday morning, Cassie’s Porsche-driving druggie boyfriend called in a panic—looking for Mom, actually, forgetting she was dead. If he’d ever known. He said they’d gone to his beach house in Wellfleet, where Cassie, already up for three days on coke and crank, made the mistake of eating these ’shrooms they’d been saving for the right occasion. He’d taken her to the hospital—he was sure Billy would see he’d had no choice—but what was he supposed to do with her kid? The social worker at the hospital was going to put him in foster care, but—
“Where’s Deke now?” Billy said. “Okay, listen, stay right there.”
He woke up Labor Day morning, fried from driving to the Cape and back the day before, and with no more idea than the boyfriend of what to do with a seven-year-old kid. Deke was already up. Billy found him in Cassie’s old room, playing with her Barbies, and decided to take him to a ball game. The Albany-Colonie Diamond Dogs were playing the Adirondack Lumberjacks for the Northeast League championship that afternoon. Billy’s father used to take him to games back when Albany still had a Yankee farm team; Billy found it heartening that these upstarts should be named after a David Bowie song.
Deke was really too young to follow the game—the Diamond Dogs hit two home runs in the bottom of the first, and he missed them both—but he seemed to like the crowd, the bright green grass and the bursts of music and sound effects from the loudspeakers. The Dogs’ cleanup hitter popped a foul ball into the aisle between the grandstand and the bleachers (sound effect of breaking glass), and a crowd of boys ran to chase it down. Deke leaped up, then looked at Billy. “Can I?”
“Just make sure I can see you,” Billy said.
Deke was still scrambling down into the aisle when one of the kids held the ball up as little hands grabbed for it and the crowd applauded. Deke ran halfway over, then turned back to Billy with a stagy shrug and a genuine smile.
By the seventh inning, the Dogs were up eleven to nothing. Billy told Deke about the seventh-inning stretch,
and Deke made him sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” in his ear to prep him; he claimed he’d never heard it. The Dogs went down one-two-three in the bottom of the eighth, and Billy, wanting to beat the crowd, asked Deke if he’d had enough. No: he wanted to chase more foul balls.
To get out of the parking lot took them all three movements of Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto, but Billy had no plan for what to do next anyway. Deke said he was hungry, so that settled that: they went to McDonald’s. On the way home they listened to the Barney tape Deke had carried with him from Boston to Cape Cod and from Cape Cod to here. Predictably namby-pamby—amazing that Cassie, of all people, would give it houseroom—but not without its fascinations. Like that song “The Old Brass Wagon”: was it really a wagon made of brass, like some warrior’s brazen chariot, or just a wagon to haul scrap metal? It seemed folkloristic. The Golden Bough. The Old Brass Wagon. The dying god hauled to his funeral pyre. A harvest thing. The sun was going down on Labor Day. Summer was over.
Billy does the dishes while Deke takes his bath, but he keeps coming in to check, imagining the worst: Deke standing up, slipping, cracking his head, drowning. He’s relieved that he hasn’t found the boy’s narrow nates and teensy penis at all arousing. At the same time, he’s irked with himself for being relieved. Does he assume that straight men reflexively slaver over girl children in their care?
After he’s dried Deke’s soft hair with the hair dryer, they snuggle on the sofa and Billy reads him his nightly trilogy. Tonight Deke chose The Tale of Peter Rabbit, The Runaway Bunny and the loathly Bugs Bunny and the Carrot Machine. An all-rabbit program. Billy marvels at how Deke has devised it: a calming, ritualistic opener, then the emotionally heavy stuff—the mother who’ll always come after you and take care of you—and then a farce as the end piece.
