by Amy Bloom
My client said, That boy touched Gavin. She reached out a finger to show me.
There were a couple of other fights.
Frank and I didn’t spend time together during those weeks. Late one afternoon, I stuck my head into his office. How can you claim he isn’t angry? I said. I couldn’t begin to say whether I was asking a legitimate professional question, trying to find out the status of my participation in the conference, arguing with him, or looking for a way to go to bed with him.
Oh, that’s part of the story, Frank said.
He didn’t ask me to sit down but I took the client’s chair. He was at his desk. Backsliding, he said, but accepting appropriate punishment—it makes it more convincing. He’s lost some privileges—he gets that. You worry too much.
That was all, and I soon left. Embarrassed to be caught worrying again, I bought my ticket. Frank had explained that we’d be reimbursed after the conference. But the next time we talked—outside the facility, a week or so later, as we headed to our cars—he said Gavin was refusing to go to the conference. No videos, no trip, he said. The little shit.
Oh! I said. I stopped, clutching my tote bag full of reports. Frank, I said. I was uncomfortably aware of all the fantasies of this trip I’d been allowing myself. And the ticket was expensive.
Not a big deal, he said. I’ll reason with him. But I can’t until he calms down.
What if he doesn’t calm down? I said.
He will. He sounded stern. I wanted him to be right so we could go to the conference—but also because I wanted his theories to be true, so as to prove that my doubts were unfair: I wanted my lover to be the distinguished psychologist I had thought was seducing me, not a smooth-talking fake.
I think he misread my expression—or maybe he read it too well. Look, I know what I’m doing! he said with real anger. For the first time, there was uncertainty—desperation—in his eyes, and he didn’t look as if he knew what he was doing. It was a hot, sunny afternoon in September, and we were standing on a cracked sidewalk two doors down from the residence, which had a parking lot so small we often couldn’t use it. His car was parked at the curb where we stood; mine was half a block away. Brown leaves were accumulating, though the leaves on the trees were still green.
I tensed. I didn’t want him angry with me. I said, No, no, of course he’ll calm down. Of course you know what you’re doing! My foot played with a piece of broken sidewalk.
But he stared at me, his eyebrows too dignified for failure. His blue shirt seemed to be sticking to him. I turned protective. If you can’t talk about Gavin, I said, aren’t there others?
He shrugged and turned away, opened his car door, and got in.
It will work out! I called lamely.
* * *
I didn’t hear from him after that. At work we barely spoke.
One Friday—maybe two weeks after that conversation and a week or so before the picnic—the day was chilly, so I wore a jacket to work. When I left that evening, Frank’s door was open and I called, Goodnight! as I passed, but he didn’t answer. I went downstairs, left the building, and was almost at my car when I remembered the jacket. I had left it in my office. I would want it over the weekend. I turned back.
Now Frank’s door was closed, and I heard voices as I neared it. The sound of crying. In a rough, sarcastic voice, Frank was saying something I couldn’t quite make out. It sounded like break. Break, sure, the break, of course, the break! It was the tone that stopped me, a kind of wild rage. I didn’t know what he actually said—still don’t. Then I heard something more clearly. I guess the crying was quieter. You really are worthless, Frank said. I don’t care what happens to you.
I didn’t decide to open the door and walk in, I just walked in. Gavin was crying but standing up, his arms tensed, ready to strike; Frank was sitting at his desk. Gavin was small for his age, I realized, but he moved like a man as he faced Frank.
Frank looked up, startled. You don’t believe in knocking?
You scared me, I said.
So knocking isn’t required when you’re scared? His voice was heavy with sarcasm. Sorry, I didn’t know about that rule!
Gavin turned and dropped his arms. He looked embarrassed.
Gavin, I said, do you want to come with me?
He glanced from one of us to the other. No.
We can go now and tell Diane what just happened. Dr. Frank shouldn’t talk to you that way. She could assign you to a different therapist.
No, Gavin said.
I think you should mind your fucking business, Frank said. You have no idea what’s going on in here.
I know it’s not all right, I said.
Frank said, Gavin has made it clear that he doesn’t need your help. Right, Gavin?
Gavin nodded. I didn’t know what to do. I went downstairs, but Diane had gone for the day. I left the building, again without my jacket, and drove home. All weekend I tried to decide what to do. Finally I phoned Frank. I’m sorry I walked in on you, I said.
No, he said. I’m the one who should apologize. I understand why you did. I sounded insane. But I wasn’t—truthfully, I wasn’t.
Can we get coffee? I said. What he’d told me was a relief. I wanted to hear his explanation. I wanted to get back to what we’d had before. Somehow. I wanted what had happened to go away, and maybe he could tell me why I didn’t have to keep thinking about it, why I didn’t have to act on it.
I pointed out to myself that I had no way of knowing what went on between Frank and his patients. Maybe this was some kind of role-play, some kind of exercise. I knew it was harmful, but surely, I told myself, it would be better to persuade Frank that what he had done was not appropriate than it would be to tell Diane what I’d heard. He’d lose his job. Anyway, I’d heard clearly only part of what he said.
We met at a coffee shop. I suppose he knew that whatever else I wanted, I still wished to go to bed with him. When he came in, he leaned over to kiss me on the lips, then bought himself coffee and pulled his chair around to the side of the table, so we were shoulder to shoulder.
Who have you told? he asked.
Nobody.
I knew it! he said. You’re too smart to get upset about something you don’t understand. You trusted me, on some level. I was right to sign you up for the conference—we think alike, Jen. We’ve got a good future.
Is the conference still on?
Well, Gavin didn’t want to go downstairs and tell Diane I was yelling at him, did he?
I said slowly, He was too scared of you to be honest with me.
No, Frank said. I think I understand Gavin. Anger is ordinary to him. He knows I’ll scream at him when I’m angry—he gets that. I respect him enough to tell him candidly what I think.
That he’s worthless?
At that moment, when he was saying no to me? Yes, that’s what I thought. I don’t always think that. He knows I don’t always think that.
I let myself believe him. Coffee turned into dinner and dinner turned into bed. I’m glad we’re colleagues, Frank said as we headed into my apartment. I’m glad we’re lovers, don’t get me wrong—but I’m even gladder that we’re colleagues. Which of course was the most romantic thing he could have said to me.
* * *
I phoned Frank twice in the hours after the picnic, when he and Gavin didn’t return. Leaving for the day, I stopped at Diane’s office. Her eyes were heavy and she seemed small and rumpled behind her desk. She said, I don’t even know his cell.
I gave her Frank’s number and she called him, but he didn’t pick up. She left a message asking him to phone her, as I had.
I didn’t tell Diane I intended to drive back to the park. It was still raining. There was traffic on the Q-Bridge and then it took me a long time to drive through the neighborhood that bordered the Sound. Everything seemed deserted when I parked in the lot where the bus had been. It wasn’t dark yet. Frank’s truck remained in the other parking lot, the trailer behind it, still without the boat.
&
nbsp; I pulled up the hood of my windbreaker and set off toward the pavilion, the lighthouse, and the shore. The rain obscured the buildings across the harbor. The wind was stronger than before. As I approached the top of the slope above the water, I saw the boat rocking in the same place. I took out my phone and called Frank again, and while it was ringing, I caught sight of him. He was on the shore, at a distance, head down, in a raincoat I didn’t remember. It must have been in the truck. He made slow progress. He was dragging something—something heavy—and then he bent as if to lift it. He laid it on the ground and stopped, bending his knees in a way he sometimes did; he said it relieved the pressure in his back. I didn’t leave a voice mail. Instead I hung up, then used my phone to take a picture of him. But he was too far from me; nothing would show. I stepped back from the edge of the hill.
He had been struggling forward, I saw, for a long time. I didn’t know if the burden he dragged was Gavin. If it was Gavin, I didn’t think Frank would have shot him. Maybe he’d stuffed pills down Gavin’s throat, without water, as he stuffed them down his own, and Gavin was unconscious. Was it that hard to subdue him? And why was Frank walking on the shore, not toward his truck? He stopped again to rest, then dragged whatever it was a few more feet. He was heading toward his boat.
The next time he stopped, I phoned him again, and this time he answered. Frank, I said, what’s going on?
I can’t find him, Frank said. I don’t know why I was so sure. I feel terrible.
I took a few steps back. Should I call the police?
There’s one more place I want to look, Frank said. After that, if I don’t find him, I’ll call the police. You’re at home?
Yes, I said, glancing left and right. I’m at home.
Diane is leaving me voice mails, he said. Call her and tell her what I told you. Tell her not to call the cops.
Okay, I said. I ended the call. Then I dialed 911. I wasn’t coherent but they listened.
* * *
I couldn’t have said clearly what I was starting to think. Frank would row out, I guessed. A motor might be heard. He would slide Gavin into the water, and call the police after rowing back to shore. The book Frank would write—Gavin lost forever, just as his doctor’s theories had begun to help him—would be devastating, with details no one could deny about moments in Frank’s office. Throughout the book there would be difficult moments, like the scene I’d witnessed, and the therapist would bravely confront his own limitations. It would end with a sad chapter about the psychologist’s fruitless search, his new understanding—as days passed and the boy was not found: not in the park, not in the surrounding city, nowhere—that life for kids like Gavin is even harder and more unpredictable than he had imagined. A much more exciting book than one about Gavin’s resistance and Frank’s anger.
I hurried toward the park entrance. The rain was heavier now, and I was soaked through, freezing—but I wished I were even more uncomfortable, so as to have something simple to think about, something that could be remedied. The police car came quickly, but it felt as if I waited for a long time. I pointed the way down the gravel drive toward the water.
Spring Break
by John Crowley
Yale University
So the last proj I did junior year at Spectrum Cumulus College was with my bud Seymour Chin, who was in Singapore—I was in Podunk, OH. It was a proj in Equality Engineering, required, tough but not so. We picked Toiletry and had scads fun and then did the CGIs, and we thought if the world had these johns and janes it would be equal more, definitely. Remembering now the probs we thought up. “Transgen women can’t go in the women’s jane, hey,” Seymour said. “They’re men actually, they might abuse.”
“Nah,” I said. “They got no interest, yah? What you got to do is keep the lesbians out. They could abuse. They got an interest.”
“Obvi.”
“Ident,” I said. “Run a kit. Ten thousand self-ID’d lesbians amalgamed in half-length pix. Surveillance cams can scan and match in .9 seconds. Match, they get sent to the john.”
“Harsh.”
“Gentle it. Just a few words.” I flashed him words: Please use the adjoining facility.
“I see a problem.”
“Yah?”
“Yah. No one in the john knows you’re a les.”
I pondered. “So if they go in the john men could abuse.”
“Yah.”
So all that was actually utter dumb and from old, but I was on propranolol and Seymour was drooping, four a.m. Singapore, which is five p.m. mytime the day before. Next meet we switched the thinking to unigender, made progress. Can’t remember how we scaled it, but we got PASS on it and that’s what counts.
Then: Spring Break! My first Spring Break, because costs. Fam decided this time to go in on it for me, because PASS. Max lucks!
All over the world, Spring Break time.
Received welcome package in gmail, unzipped it. Nice oldtime fonts. Heyjoe! Great year, yah? Now’s for rest-n-rec, yah? As a fulltime student of Spectrum Cumulus you hereby receive a special invitation to Spring Break at our Grandparent College, “Yale”!
Went on a bit about Yale, this place, the oldness, the motto—Luxe y Vanitas, same as ours—and the many years that SCU.edu/sg and Yale had worked together, and-cetera. Pix and vids, leafy, stony, grassy. This was to be so fun.
Then Seymour Chin checked in. Seymour hates-hates to type like words, so what I got back was a string of emojoes to express. I got the meaning right away.
“Heyjoe, we not on?” I flash.
Seymour has affluenza—nose running, coughing, sick like a dog. (Do dogs get specially sick? Don’t know. Never had one.) Not going to make it, not on day one anyway.
I’m on my own at Yale.
* * *
So it used to be I guess that Spring Break was in the you know spring, like March. Everybody left Campus and went to crazy-hot places to party—not like now. But who wants to go to New Haven in March? If not snow, rain, ice, and-cetera. So they do it in June, which was when back then a student would get their diploma. And since there’s nothing else going on there then these days, good time. But they still call it “Spring” Break. Know what? You can actually get a train ride (take a train, they say) from New York up to New Haven, get off. There’s a Shuffle that meets this train and takes you to Campus. Town is wastrel, but then you drive through this stone portal—like in a fantasy RPG—and there you like are.
Wow. The place is old. The buildings look like castles. Old corroding I guess granite. Pointy windows. Pointy tops. Pointy everything. And what happened just as we drove in and down this avenue? Bells started ringing. They were playing songs, but with bells, somewhere up in a tower. Ancient songs I remember from as a kid. I sort of teared up a little it was so amazing.
We were led through another portal into this big square of lawn, a quad it was called—four sides, get it?—where there were long tables and these young guys and women were waiting to hand us stuff, all of them waving and saying Welcome and Hi and Get in Any Line. The spring-breakers were some of them zonkered with sleeplessness, come from around the world like Seymour Chin did or actually didn’t, others up for it and giving high fives and whatnot. The woman I came up to checked my name/pic on their pad, and started piling things in front of me, calling out the names as they did it. Sheets and stuff! Orientation materials! One six-pack beer! One swechirt (with huge white Y on it)! Goodie bag! Hat!
It was a blue flat cap—blue for Yale, Old Blue—and it had a number on the front, 2017. “What’s that?” I asked them.
“What’s what?” they said.
“The number.”
“Heyjoe, that’s your class!” They took it and put it on my head and tugged it down, laughing, really white teeth. “Class of twenty-seventeen!” they said, and shook my hand. “Welcome to Yale, Yalie!”
So the hat and the number were for the old-time scenics too. I laughed with them—they were sort of actually quite hot. “2017!” I told them. “That
’s like my dad’s year!”
“Yeah!” they said.
Actually my dad didn’t go. Because army. But if he had.
I loaded all this stuff up plus my kit and started off. A whole bunch were headed for the dorm we were assigned, only it wasn’t called a dorm, it was called a college, which they said in this special way, a College. Why a college in a college? Who knew. My orientation pack explained, probs. And it was a castle too. It had a fucking coat of arms over the archway. All of us pouring in through the iron gate yelling, like overthrowing peasants, minus torches.
I have seen actually a lot of dorms, the boys and women in their little rooms, bunk beds, the stuff that happens. Squeeing and flaming on, the micro cutoffs and docked Ts, pizza boxes, selfies. Actually, now I think of, a lot of that was in porn. Vintage porn, but it gave you the scenics. The room I actually got was not like a dorm room. It was more fantasy RPG. The monk’s lair or hmmever. A marble fireplace. Like wood walls made of oak. Dropped my stuff and sat down on a futon couch and felt a little—you know—I don’t know.
But you know what? The john/jane was also like from another age. Urinals? Yes. Had to try one. Everything we designed out in our Toiletry proj. Flashed Seymour Chin but no emojoes in response. Then seven guys and a woman came in and it was sorting out the rooms and the beds (the wood room with the vampire-castle fireplace was just to hang in) and we cracked the comp six-packs and the night began. Hoo-hooting and woo-wooing from all around the quad.
I put on my droops and the gimme swechirt and 2017 cap, went out with my class into the quad. There was plenty of light there but most of the buildings, classrooms, and such were all dark inside. Way up far-off on a hill was a regular-type building, part of the Science Center I think we got told, lit up normally but looking so far away. These old parts had been left behind years ago.
I’m not that great in crowds—always have this impulse to say things, right, like actual things and not just tags. The Meaning of Life. Sometimes I guess I put people off. Anyway thinking like this I got away from the quads where the spring-breakers were. Thinking of all these buildings being full long ago, now when it’s all collabs across the world, actually better for sure, but still there was a kind of sadness to feel, just wondering what it would have been to go to classes in those buildings and throng around the quad all day hugging books, talking to professors like f2f. Maybe I was born too late.
