Virginia Lovers

by Michael Parker

  “Yeah,” he said. “They will.”

  “It’s going to be so hard on Danny,” said Caroline.

  What do you expect me to do about it?

  “He doesn’t have much choice here,” said Thomas.

  “Not now,” she said, stirring her untouched coffee. “Not anymore.”

  “What is it Caroline? What did I do?”

  “No, Thomas. Not you, we. That scholarship.”

  “We never told him—”

  “We never discouraged him either, did we? I know I didn’t.”

  “I don’t see the good of having this conversation now. The last thing I’m thinking about is that scholarship.”

  “You don’t understand it, then. How important it is.”

  “Was. Was, Caroline, and yeah, I do. I see now how much his wanting to be different, to be someone he was not, hurt him. I see how it led him to make some really awful choices, like not going to the police, and running away to Washington. But he’s not the one on trial, and if he was on trial he would not be on trial for trying to win a prestigious scholarship.”

  He paused for a minute, held his breath for her response. When she did not speak he said, “This whole situation is just too goddamn big.”

  Still she was silent, and he was grateful for that silence, took it for agreement: Yes, you’re right, too goddamn big.

  “Think of the Pierces,” he said. “And even the Tysinger boy’s parents. He’ll likely get life.”

  “I can’t think of anyone else,” she said, and then after a few moments, finally, “I don’t see how you can either.”

  Was he wrong for trying to think of someone else? Was that what she meant? Or did she doubt his ability to sympathize with the other victims? Sometimes when he wrote a particularly strong editorial she would not comment on it directly in a way that let him know that she found it an agreeably felicitous piece of writing, deftly semi-coloned, cogently argued, and finally a lie. He feared the views he expressed were not completely his own, he worried that he sometimes stole ideas from other, better columnists, and, worse yet, that he was as guilty as the next man of cheapening a stance with sentimentality. He worried that there was a part of his character so skilled in lies that the other, scrupulous side was not even able to recognize the truth. Lately he wondered if it was all a lie, his entire crusading life. And if Caroline was the first to see through him.

  But as much as Thomas feared Caroline’s judgment, he also welcomed it, for he could not count on anyone else to know him as well as she did. Yet now her judgment infuriated him. There was nothing to say, no way to make this better. Caroline seemed lost to him. Her defection seemed the largest injustice of all.

  “You really want to go through this alone?” he said, hoping not to sound surly.

  “As opposed to how else?”

  “A couple? A married couple? As parents?”

  “Thomas,” she said, and her tone said it all: that he was naive to think that there could be any way to go through this except alone.

  “I refuse to accept this,” he said, tossing his napkin onto the table. “The way you act, we never had a family at all. Just you and me and Danny and Pete living in the same house, sharing the same meals every once in a while.”

  “That’s pretty close to the truth,” she said. “Except it was less than every once in a while.”

  Her honesty rankled but did not shock. He’d rather go maudlin than admit to such a thing.

  “You can’t be serious, Caroline. You’re grieving, I’m grieving, we’re both hurting, but you can’t revise everything according to now. We were more than just bodies coming and going.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” she said after a silence. “Maybe everything’s colored by regret. I’m trying to figure out what happened and it seems to me now that all this started a long time ago and we both knew it but didn’t want to know it and we could have stopped it somehow, we could have taken more time to be together and we could have talked more and listened more and—”

  “You want to blame yourself, fine,” he said. “We’ve got a trial to face. Danny needs at least one of us to be there for him, and if you stay up all night mulling over every goddamn thing you did or didn’t do since the boys were wearing diapers, you’re not going to be much help to anyone.”

  He stood then and carried his dishes to the sink.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To the office.”

  “Of course,” she said. “Where else.”

  On his way to the office, Thomas found himself driving straight through town, caught up in the nightly parade of teenagers ticking away their adolescence with repetitive loops. Same route every half hour, for this was how long it took Thomas to complete the circle from downtown out to the Little Pep on the bypass and back down the boulevard to the Glam-O-Rama. The parking lot of the Laundromat was mobbed as usual. He swung through the lot behind the other cars in the parade, surveyed the parked cars and knots of smoking kids for Pete’s friends, for he knew no friend of Danny’s would waste a week night idling in the parking lot of the Glam. They would be finishing up their after-school jobs or studying advanced placement chemistry or writing papers on whatever novels high-schoolers read these days. Thomas drifted behind a souped-up Grenada, back out onto the boulevard, pulled along by a magnetism not at all his own, a rhythm as dull and desperate as it was steady and predictable. So different from his usual frenzied and purposeful accounting of every waking moment. Not his rhythm, but whose? Pete’s? Coasting along the boulevard, Thomas felt without consciously trying what his youngest son must have felt all those nights when he did not return home until hours after the agreed-upon hour.

  What he felt was this: anxiety and torpor. Anxious to discover something, to happen upon someplace or someone new and mysterious. And at the same time the stifling boredom, or resignation that this orbit would produce no new discoveries, uncover no new provinces, lead him to no one new or interesting. Driving along with his windows open, the brash sounds of Top-40 radio and staticky 8-track guitar rock spilling from the cars of fellow orbiters, Thomas understood why Pete numbed himself nightly with pot and beer and God knows what else. He saw too why Danny would do anything to escape this perpetual circle. At home, studying in the library rehearsing for a play or practicing for a football game, the boy had been sentenced to his own monotonous cycle. Thomas understood now what happened that morning his two sons drove off together in the Galaxy: they’d joined together in an attempt to break this cycle, and their journey had to do with other things besides that Pierce boy’s death or the part they had played in it, at least on the deepest level, the bedrock desire that fuels all journeys, physical and spiritual. Thomas remembered how the boys used to wake on Saturdays when they were in grade school, climb on their bikes, and disappear into the weekend. How easy it had been for them to find something that fascinated them, for even the woods behind the house were limitless and inexhaustible.

  What happened to their ability to transform their surroundings into a place of possibility and mystery? Why were they not able to dream their endless journeys through town in images of victory and romance instead of sighing at the cartoonish backdrop of sewing-machine repair shops, used-car lots, feed-and-seed stores?

  Poking along in the panel truck, the lone adult in a river of teenagers, Thomas mourned the loss of his own vision. To a newspaperman like himself—not a journalist, not a writer, but a smalltown editor—imagination could be a hindrance. At least he’d let himself believe so. Who what when where how. The facts, the truth. Now these facts, this truth, appeared as mundane and familiar as the route he’d been blindly following for the last forty-five minutes.

  Behind him a gargantuan-tired pickup blared its horn as he whipped without a signal into the dusty parking lot of Cantrell’s Lumber, swung the van around, headed against the stream to his office. Already the words were coming, quick and effortless, Pete dictating from the grave.

  Adolescence is less a time of unruly hormo
nes than of burgeoning perception.

  Safely in his office, seated in front of the typewriter, Thomas considered his audience, as he had been trained to do. To hell with selling papers to damn fools. Yet the most egregious sin in small-town newspapering, aside from spelling someone’s name wrong, was to write preciously, bombastically. Well, it was a sin to him; Thomas wasn’t so sure his editorials were read closely enough for, say, Hoot McCallister and his cronies around the breakfast table down at Dawson’s to criticize the pretentiousness of his prose.

  So if you’re not sure anyone’s going to read them, he heard Danny say, why do you care how it’s written? Why not write it however you want? Danny, the constant voice of reason, logic, courage: he stood up for people, the maligned, the disenfranchised, the discriminated against. Thomas remembered a time when Danny had taken Pete’s side after Thomas had warned his youngest son not to hang around Anthony McRae; both boys had accused him of being racist, and it had infuriated him at the time, but now it struck him how quickly Danny rose to the defense of his brother’s friend, even though it was clear that he got along with neither party. And he was nice to that Pierce boy when the rest of the town mocked him with limp wrists and exaggerated falsettos. He was brave when it came to the lives of others, at least.

  Write it however you want. Couldn’t he write it to Danny? He certainly could not talk to him these days; couldn’t talk to Caroline, either. He could put it all into his editorial, his recognition of how it was for his boys, the fear and boredom they felt, those things that had overcome him as he’d swept along in the benumbed orbit that was adolescence itself. A metaphor he would certainly use.

  Adolescence is too often dismissed by those of us who have managed to survive it as a time of surging hormones and sullen rebellion. We look to our teenagers not for surprises—for burgeoning perceptions, that is—but to confirm the clichés we have consigned them to.

  And these clichés abound. We see our sons and daughters in light of their selfishness, their vanity. We complain about phone lines tied up for hours, unavailable bathrooms. We criticize their clothes, their music, the very words they use to express themselves.

  From the moment they pass from childhood until they leave home forever, we unthinkingly transform them into figures from some generic cartoon.

  Perhaps it is our parental way of coping with what is an inarguably tense time. Raging hormones do make for mercurial emotions, and talking back to one’s parents is as much a part of growing up as is learning to walk.

  Yet too often we fail to find other ways to deal with our teenagers besides treating them like characters in a hackneyed cartoon strip.

  Recent local events involving young minds and bodies forever destroyed by a night of unsupervised celebration should lead us to reexamine the way we think of adolescence and, more important, the way we treat our teenage children. What happened here was no parent’s fault—if they want to throw a party, kids will find the means and the venue, as a half-dozen bottle-strewn parking lots around town every Sunday morning will attest.

  No one in particular is to blame, but perhaps we are all a bit at fault here—those of us who are parents to teenagers, those of us who come into contact with them through our work, or church, or neighborhoods. Maybe the recent tragic events were caused in part by our blinding lack of imagination where our teenagers are concerned. Maybe our unwillingness to be surprised by our adolescent’s ability to act unpredictably (which is boundaryless, if rarely noted), to color outside the lines we have so severely drawn, is as much at fault as the specific circumstances of the tragedy.

  One of our own is dead, and another of our own stands trial for this death. Several young lives have been irrevocably altered by this tragedy and yet the truth is not confined to the objective reportage printed in the pages of this newspaper. Those facts need stating, and we are all curious about their unfolding—rightly so, for it is the job of this newspaper to provide the community with the simple facts of the case.

  Yet a deeper truth—one in which we all might somehow share some responsibility—goes unreported here. The risk for us is that, by letting it go, by treating our adolescents without respect and imagination, in rote and narrow reactions to the very real issues of growing up, we set the stage for similar tragedies to come.

  Great editorial, he imagined hearing as he cleaned it up and dropped it in the box to be typeset. He imagined Caroline coming wordlessly, physically back to him, moved by a few column inches. He saw Danny reading it on the couch before supper, saw the ice break in his heart, heard the crack and shatter of that ice as Danny acknowledged with a glance his deep thanks and love.

  For the rest of the week, Thomas actually felt hopeful. He recalled the earliest days of reporting, when his whole body had swelled at the sight of his byline. He wasn’t gloating—his son was dead, and that fact never left him. But there was a difference in the weight of his sadness, as if this editorial was ballast, cast off to lift them all above an earth turned intolerable. It was his secret, as yet unrevealed; concealed from everyone, known only to him, it grew more powerful until, ferrying the plates over to Mt. Sinai, Thomas fantasized receiving a Pulitzer.

  Rick Hampton was the first to comment.

  “Good editorial,” he said. Exactly the words Thomas desired, yet why did they sound so inadequate? He told himself he did not really care what Rick Hampton thought, yet he couldn’t resist a nudge.

  “You liked it?”

  “Hell, they need somewhere to go, those kids. We got the same problem over here. Hanging out in the parking lots at night, drinking and carrying on.”

  Thomas chewed his cigar stub to keep from talking. Still he heard his words: you missed the point, that editorial was about perception, about a compassionate vision.

  “And those keg parties …” Hamp was saying, “… half of ’em smoking pot…”

  Thomas was off his stool before Hamp could finish his sentence.

  “Running late,” he called out as he left the grill, careful not to look back over his shoulder, reveal his reddening face, the anger and disappointment he knew showed in his eyes.

  Hell, it’s only Hamp, he told himself on the ride home. What could he expect from someone who padded his paper with wire-service fluff? But it’s only Hamp turned out to be, literally, the truth; only Hamp mentioned the editorial. Nothing at all from Caroline, not a word from Danny. Strickland, well—when he didn’t say anything, Thomas made excuses for him: Strickland was a businessman, he wasn’t saying anything because it was over his head, he didn’t know what to say.

  Still, Thomas’s disappointment festered, and by the next day, Thursday, he’d turned sullen. A Thursday was the worst day of the week for a coddled resentment, for it was the one day of the week when he could not legitimately claim work to do. He’d not played golf since well before the funeral, and given the way the boys had always felt about his belonging to the country club, he’d already decided to let his membership lapse, or give it to Strickland.

  He lay abed so late in the morning that Caroline came to check on him.

  “Are you okay?”

  He could not answer this question, so he posed one to her.

  “Did you take Danny to school?”

  “It’s after nine,” she said. He felt the mattress sink with her weight, and for a second he imagined the sound of snaps, zippers, the rustle of fabric leaving skin. He imagined her body suddenly and warmly next to his own. There seemed to him in that moment no better cure for his hurt.

  But there was only the sound of her breathing, and then her words.

  “I don’t want to go through this trial,” she said.

  “No,” he said.

  “I don’t feel ready. It’s two weeks away and I don’t know how I’m supposed to get ready.”

  He knew exactly what she meant by “get ready,” and yet he stopped himself from saying the very opposite. He knew what he needed her to say then, and he knew how badly he needed to say it, and yet he said nothing b
ut “Yes,” which wasn’t enough. No, yes—even words these simple and unambiguous took a tremendous effort, and he lay paralyzed, exhausted from speaking and anxious over not being able to give Caroline what she needed.

  A few seconds later Caroline rose and stood above him.

  “I have some errands to run,” she said. “I should be back by noon. There’s nothing to eat for lunch, but if you can wait—”

  “I’ll get something downtown,” he told her.

  An hour or two later, still in bed, he realized he had not laid eyes on her at all that morning. He remembered how many times he’d had cross words with one of his sons in the morning—well, with Pete—and it was this thought that finally got him out of bed, dressed, and out the door to his office.

  Which was empty, thank God. Of course, it was Thursday afternoon, there was no reason for his staff to be there, no reason for him to be there either; he should be home with his family, doing something with his sons. Son. Children. Wife and child.

  He could take them out to eat tonight. He imagined the three of them cramming into a corner banquette out at Dawson’s, tucking into the special, talking about their day. He owed it to Pete not to let things slide back to the way they were. Yet he wondered how he would ever be able to be there—wherever there was—with the two who remained, Caroline and Danny. He worried that he’d never be able to engage. How do you learn such a thing so late in life? He feared that he was meant to remain inside his cocoon forever, that the next stage—that place where you lose yourself enough to join together with other people—was not available to him.

  It had served him well professionally, this distance, for how else would he have been able to commit himself so vigilantly to the truth? Seated at his desk, his typewriter armed with paper, he studied the awards hanging on the walls of his office, certificates from the Press Association honoring his rigorous reporting. He’d lived for these awards, taken so seriously the scrupulousness they honored. Yet what had he changed with his articles investigating the execrable conditions of migrant work camps? Thomas considered that his son—his only living child—had been having sex with a man while his brother was murdered in an alley. This was the type of detail that would sell papers to damn fools. He would have felt a charge discovering it, an even bigger charge printing it, for it was the kind of truth that people hid, that was his job to expose.