“Can I eat my sandwich first?” I ask as she places it in front of me.
Her tone quickly changes. “Of course, darling. Are you hungry? Why didn’t you say so?”
The phone rings. I take my first bite as my mother rushes to answer it. The caller appears to be some neighbor, for she immediately launches into the account of poor old Mr. Pilarski dropping dead amid his tomato plants. “I know! Right there in the backyard! And Evelyn found him! She’d been calling and when he didn’t come in, she went out to look and there he was…”
I decide to take my sandwich and my ginger ale downstairs. My father, no surprise, is in his recliner, feet up. He’s watching TV as I imagined, but instead of World War II, it appears to be a feature on the Loch Ness monster.
“Hey Dad,” I say.
“Henry.”
I look at the screen. “So do you believe in Nessie?”
He shrugs. “I believe she’s made quite a bit of money for some obscure village in Scotland we otherwise wouldn’t know a damn thing about.”
“This is true.” I sit down just as the show turns to a commercial. “How’ve you been, Dad?”
For forty years, Dad was a claims adjustor for an insurance company. It’s why I went into insurance myself. Every day Dad tied his tie and put on his sports jacket and drove to his office in downtown Springfield, arriving at eight thirty sharp. He did his work, ate his lunch, and was home by five forty-five. About ten months ago, he accepted an early retirement package. Now he’s here in the basement stretched out in his recliner nearly round the clock. Mom usually brings his meals down to him.
“Can’t complain,” Dad says. “Things aren’t bad.”
I notice a stack of DVDs on the table next to his chair. Old Honeymooners reruns. The TV miniseries The Winds of War. And the complete Benny Hill collection.
I smile. “Looks like you won’t run out of viewing choices.”
“Your sister is always bringing me something new. She worries about me down here. Thinks I’m just going to rot away and get Alzheimer’s if I’m not engaging the brain.”
I look around the room. My hideous high school picture sits in a frame on a bookshelf. “You pretty much keep to yourself, huh?”
“Well, your mother comes down with supper and once in a while she’ll sit here with me if there’s something good on the tube.” He shrugs. “But she’s got the upstairs and I’ve got this rec room here. So it works out.”
I sit back in the chair looking over at him. When did the tall, distinguished man who was my father become this old, overweight, gray-haired codger in a recliner? It’s not that his life was ever very broad, but Dad had his friends. He liked a game of cards once in a while with his buddies. Now, according to my mother, ever since his retirement he’s content just to sit down here watching television. Yet he doesn’t seem unhappy.
“Look, you see there,” he says, pointing at the TV screen. The Loch Ness monster documentary has resumed, and it’s showing the famous image of Nessie’s long neck sticking out of the water like a brontosaurus. “They’ve done some kind of, what do you call it, digital enhancement of that picture, and they can see it’s a fake. Some guy cooked it up fifty years ago, and they’re still showing the damn thing.”
I nod, looking from the screen back at him. “Are you happy, Dad?” I ask.
I don’t know where the question comes from. It’s an echo of the question Mom asked me not so long ago, the one that sent me scrambling for an answer. My father looks over at me strangely.
“Happy?” he asks. “What the hell kind of question is that?”
“You’re right. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t start lecturing me like your sister does,” he tells me, returning his gaze to the TV set. “I’m doing just fine.”
“I wasn’t really asking about you,” I admit. “I guess I was thinking about me. You know, what’s ahead for me.”
My father gives me one eye, but keeps the other on Nessie. “Well, I suppose you’re luckier than I was. You don’t have a job that you’ll need to retire from.”
I lift my eyebrows in surprise. “You used to say that was unlucky. That by quitting my job at the insurance firm I was giving up my pension.”
“That’s true.” He’s quiet a moment, apparently engrossed in something the narrator is saying about Nessie. “But on the other hand,” he continues, “whatever you seem to be doing with that guesthouse, you seem to be enjoying it. And doing work that you enjoy, being employed by none but yourself, means you can keep on working right until the day you drop. You might not have any benefits, but you don’t have any boss kicking you out either.”
I nod. “I do enjoy my work,” I say, as much to myself as to him. “But work’s not all there is.”
“What else is there?”
“Well, you had a family by the time you were my age.”
He nods. “Yes, I did.” He turns to face me. “You thinking of adopting a kid, Henry? They had a special on CNN the other night about all these gays adopting kids.”
“No no no,” I say. “I don’t even have a partner.”
“A lot of these gays didn’t either. I don’t think you need two to raise a kid, to be perfectly honest. Your mother did it all on her own.”
“What do you mean? She had you.”
He shakes his head. “I was never around. I was either at the office, or down here watching TV, or at Charlie’s playing poker on a Sunday afternoon. Am I not right?”
I shrug. “Mom was always the disciplinarian.”
“And the cook, and the chauffeur, and the bedtime storyteller.”
“You were the breadwinner.”
“Okay. So I did that. My point is, Henry, if you want a kid and you don’t have a special someone in your life, you should still get the kid.”
“I don’t want a kid.” I pause. “I want a special someone.”
My father looks over at me. With a deep breath he lifts the remote control from the table beside him and snaps off the television set. The sudden quiet startles me, as it always does.
“You ever had a special someone, Henry?” my father asks. “Not sure I’ve ever heard you speak of one.”
“You met Joey briefly last year,” I remind him. “But, looking back, I suppose he doesn’t really qualify as a special someone. I used to think he did, but not anymore.”
Dad sighs. “They’re hard to find.”
“You found Mom.”
“Yes, I did,” he agrees. “And do you have any idea how much I loved your mother when I first met her?”
I shake my head.
“I thought about her day and night,” he tells me. “I couldn’t wait to be in her presence. When she agreed to marry me, I got down on my knees—literally—and thanked God.”
It’s an odd image. My parents have never been affectionate. In my memories, they’re mostly apart. Mom at the stove, Dad down here. In the few family photos that include all of us, Mom and Dad are always at opposite ends of the picture, their kids between them. They’ve never really argued, at least not that I ever saw, but they’ve never really joked either, or shared a kiss or a squeeze. But still. Forty-one years together.
“So that’s why it’s lasted,” I say. “You were deeply in love.”
“No.” He shakes his head forcefully. “The key to a successful marriage is to fall out of love.”
“What?”
He winks at me. “When I was twenty, I couldn’t leave your mother alone for an instant. Now it’s forty years later, and sometimes we go days without seeing each other. She’ll call down and ask if I want a sandwich and I’ll tell her I can make one down here.” He gestures to a small refrigerator on the far wall. “So long as she keeps that stocked with turkey, cheese, and strawberry ice cream, I’m fine.”
I laugh. “All the creature comforts.”
“Absolutely. So sometimes it’s literally days that we don’t see each other. And that’s okay. She’s got her interests, I’ve got mine. She talks on that phone
nonstop with all her old lady friends. She goes into town to get her hair done. She goes out to play canasta. I stay here and watch my shows. So we’re both happy.”
“No offense, Dad,” I tell him, “but I don’t think that’s how I want it to go with my special someone.”
“That’s the way it goes with all special someones, Henry. Gay, straight, in-between.”
I fold my arms across my chest. “I don’t want to become that cynical, Dad.”
“It’s not being cynical. It’s being practical. I’ve seen some husbands and wives who are always bitching at each other. She’s telling him to turn off the TV set and he’s yelling at her to stop her nagging. Your mother and I never have a cross word. We live here in perfect harmony.”
Almost as if on cue, my mother is calling down the stairs. “Herbert, send Henry up. I want to show him the pictures of the twins.”
“Yes, dear,” my father calls back, gesturing for me to do as she bids.
I stand. Above us, I can hear the sound of my mother’s footsteps crossing the linoleum kitchen floor. I look down at my father in his chair.
“But tell me one thing, Dad.” I point up at the ceiling with my thumb. “That’s a good sound, isn’t it? Sitting down here, knowing she’s upstairs, knowing you’re not alone.”
He shrugs.
“You’d miss those footsteps if they suddenly stopped,” I tell him.
He sighs. “I suppose I would.”
“Deep down, you love her as much as you did when you were twenty.”
He flicks the television back on. “More,” he says.
I smile. I head up the stairs with my dishes to look at pictures of my sister’s girls.
That night, I lie awake a long time in my childhood bed. On the bureau against the wall stands the trophy I won in third grade for the school science fair. On the wall, a poster of Kurt Cobain, frayed at the edges, still hangs, affixed by red thumbtacks. How many hours did I sit in this room, my headphones clamped over my ears, listening to my music and trying to imagine what my future outside this house would be like? How many dreams did I have in this bed, dreams of a life I could barely imagine but wanted so much to someday make real?
I knew I was gay at a young age. I’d lie here, staring at this very same ceiling, and imagine myself as an adult, living openly as a gay man, walking with my lover, refusing to hide—the way my old friend Jack had done. Jack—who had gone off as a teenager to find a life as a gay man, something I’d have to wait many years to find.
But still, I knew it was out there, waiting for me. I’d read the accounts in Time and Newsweek about gays “coming out of their closets.” I also read about men who would marry and have children and live a lie. I knew I could never live a lie. I was determined to fall in love, to find my Prince Charming and live happily ever after. I’d scrunch my pillow to my face, the way I’m doing now, visualizing my soulmate beside me. In my mind, he was a handsome man with a cleft chin who looked something like Richard Gere, except that I still always called him “Jack.” I’d fall asleep with Jack breathing in my ear beside me.
Lying here now, the sounds of my childhood both comfort and unsettle me. There’s the familiar sound of the clock on my bureau, the sound of the dehumidifier clicking on every fifteen minutes in the hallway. Outside my window a certain night bird hoots, a sound I’ve never heard anywhere else but in West Springfield.
I don’t belong here anymore, if I ever really did. Right now I miss Lloyd and Jeff and Ann Marie and J. R. something fierce. I miss Provincetown, where the only sounds at night are the faraway calls of the foghorn—except on summer nights, when horny gay boys are always on the street. That’s my home. That’s where I belong. That’s where I should be, not here in my bed of childhood dreams, which only makes me feel as if I’ve come full circle, without having gotten anywhere at all.
But still, I think I needed to come here tonight. I needed to come back to this place. It’s been a reminder that I do have a family—and as much as I love Mom and Dad, it’s not them. My family—my real family—are not the people in this house. I might not have a lover, but I do have a family that loves me.
I know Lloyd would never have let himself be seduced by Luke if he’d realized I’d slept with the kid the night before. He’d have gently turned Luke down out of consideration to me. Not that he would have been obligated to do so, but I know Lloyd well enough to know he would never knowingly hurt my feelings. Neither would Jeff, not really, for all his occasional insensitivity.
So maybe it’s time Henry Weiner stopped being quite so sensitive himself.
I think of my father down in the basement. Apparently, my sister worries about him; I’m not so sure I do. Certainly he’s content with his lot, and really, it’s not such a bad life. He’s at the stage when he doesn’t need another person to wrap up his happiness and hand it to him like a birthday present. He’s learned how to make himself happy, with his TV programs and private refrigerator stocked with ice cream. I smile. The more I think about it, the more I realize how much my Dad and I are alike.
Lloyd’s voice is in my head: You should be complete by yourself. And then Shane: You won’t be able to really love anyone until you learn to love yourself.
My smile broadens as I imagine Shane in drag, doing Whitney Houston, warbling about “The Greatest Love of All.”
That’s when I hear a light tap at my door.
“Henry?”
It’s my mother.
“What is it?” I call.
She opens the door a crack. “Just making sure you’re comfortable.”
“I’m fine, Mom.”
“Well, I’m going to bed now, darling,” she says. “You sure you don’t need anything?”
I sigh. “Thanks, Mom. I’m really fine.”
She makes that sound in her throat. Tiptoeing over to the bed, she plants a kiss on my forehead.
“Henry,” she asks, “are you happy?”
For once, I don’t hear the question as an accusation.
“I’m getting there, Mom,” I assure her. “I’m getting there.”
18
DREAMLAND, AGAIN
Here is what I dream this night in my childhood bed.
I’m sitting in a graveyard watching Luke dig up a grave.
No, I don’t like this. I need to change the channel. I’m good at doing that in dreams. I’m usually conscious enough to change my dreams, to turn them around, to change direction if I don’t like the way they’re heading.
If only I could do that awake, too. But only asleep do I seem to have that power.
Slowly I make Luke, his shovel and the graveyard disappear. But I sense the kid is still following me. I’m hurrying, rushing somewhere. Behind me I hear Luke’s footsteps, and they’re gaining on me.
We’re running across the breakwater, which doesn’t seem to end. Instead of terminating on the sandy shores of Long Point, the rocks continue out across the water, leading into infinity. I’m running faster and faster, jumping from rock to rock, terrified of falling in between, getting stuck—because then Luke would catch up with me. He’d be on me. He’d get me. And I’d be—
I’d be what?
Why am I so frightened of Luke?
He’s just a kid.
I stop running. I turn to look behind me. Luke is some distance away but he’s approaching fast. I stand my ground. I wait for him. But as he nears, I see it’s not Luke at all. It’s someone I don’t know, a haggard looking man, wasted from illness. He runs right past me, not even stopping to look.
“That was Darryl,” comes a voice behind me.
Luke has magically appeared at my side. I don’t question how it happened. It’s a dream after all.
“Why is he running?” I ask.
“Because you don’t think he’s real.”
I look at him closely. “Is he?”
Luke laughs. “Henry, you just saw him!”
“No, I only read about him.”
“You think I’m a brillian
t writer, don’t you?”
“I think you’re a messed-up kid,” I tell him. “But I want to help you.”
“You do? Really? Even after all that’s happened?”
I grip him by the shoulders.
“I think you’re Darryl,” I tell him. “I think Darryl is you.”
All at once Luke’s soft features begin to dissolve. They seem to melt, as if all the flesh behind his skin dries up. Suddenly, instead of a beautiful young boy, there’s a wasted cadaver standing in front of me. I pull back, letting out a sharp cry.
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