by R. Cooper
Ty seemed flushed. “I meant your work. I read your stories for class. Then those poems that just came out. Where did those come from? They seem like a complete turnaround from what you’ve done before. The old-fashioned language and everything… it made them seem almost dreamy. Wistful, in addition to being sexy.”
Ally made a distressed face at her plate, but then offered Alex an unhappy smile. Hot or not, he sipped his coffee and smiled back at her. Those poems were the most explicit work he’d ever done, about his sexuality, about his mind and what it felt like to lose it, about death. They were about everything he’d ever wanted, and unlike with his other works, he couldn’t pretend that they were fiction.
He’d known Ally would read them, even if George would claim he didn’t care for poems. It had probably been a shock for her. It was one thing for her to love her son and know he was gay, but it must have taken some adjustments for her and George to accept Alex into their home as well. He would have told her not to read them if he’d thought it would have worked.
“I think they’re just like what Alex has always done,” she pushed out finally, clearing her throat, and Alex blinked. “He has always told the truth. I thought they were lovely.” Her voice was strained, but she gulped down some air and then turned toward Alex as her usual serene expression replaced her anxiety and embarrassment. Alex had a feeling that lovely wasn’t how she would describe them to anyone except someone outside the family. It was her way of closing ranks and being supportive.
Because he was an idiot and something of a masochist, he also wondered if she’d understood what those lines had really been about. Judging from her nervous twitching, he was assuming she had.
“I heard someone bought the rights to one for a song or something,” Robert spoke up as a nice distraction.
“Ah, not quite.” Alex tore his gaze away from Everett’s mother and those kind eyes she shared with her youngest son. “Someone asked for the rights to my story to make a movie.”
“A movie!” Molly was almost out of her chair. Everett stopped what he was doing without looking up. A few of the others made remarks Alex couldn’t distinguish from the general chaos.
“It’s not a big deal. They buy up anything, sometimes without ever producing a film. I haven’t said yes.” The cookies were warm on his tongue, sweet with his coffee. He chewed and kept his eyes down. “I’m not sure if I will. I don’t know if they realize how much of my sex life they would have to put onscreen.” There’d been women here and there, mostly when he’d been younger, but he had a feeling that unless the movie went for the artistic, independent route, there’d be more women onscreen than men, which would not only be inaccurate but insulting. “You know how it goes.”
Molly was voicing indignant outrage on his behalf. “Like it’s even a big deal that he’s gay. How are they planning on avoiding it? There’s no way they could even tell your story without talking about E—”
“Are you sure you want to do that?” Everett interrupted. Alex turned to him, and Everett looked down at his hands and whatever he was making. Ally made a noise, her anxiety obviously still present.
“There are some things I don’t want the world to know.” Alex took in the straight, tense line of Everett’s shoulders and then swung his gaze back to Everett’s mother, then to his father who was now in the doorway behind her and scowling. “But it might help some people out there, to know what it’s like. Some people still think I’m acting, you know. Playing the role of the crazy artist. That I was, am, this way on purpose.”
George’s scowl grew deeper.
“That’s a load of sh—crap!” Ty unexpectedly came to his defense. Alex had forgotten he was there, and stared at him. “You could tell from your books you were… not well.” His aura of discomfort was almost amusing.
“The current popular, technical, term is bipolar, but I prefer manic-depressive. It sounds more interesting and doesn’t get nearly as many frightened stares.” Alex drew out the sarcasm, and then drank some more coffee. Ty straightened up with a frown, only to lean in with even more interest obvious in his expression now.
“When you tried your first medications, weren’t you worried about the side effects? Uh… if that’s not too nosy.”
“He was more worried about ending up dead.” Everett sounded good and pissed off now, and was scowling down at his bread. That fierce expression was what the troubled boys he worked with must see whenever they crossed a line. It made him seem more like his father for a moment, when George had been setting up rules and curfews and punishments for a teenaged Alex to show him what a safe environment looked like, though it hadn’t seemed that way at the time.
Ally reached across the table to grab his hand, and Alex nearly flinched. He’d recovered here in their home, in Everett’s room at his own weak insistence, and every morning on the days he’d come downstairs, Ally had taken his hand, just like that. Then George would cough uncomfortably and order him to his feet, only to take his arm and help him with exhausting decisions like what to wear and what to eat and then drag him from the house on trips to the car parts store, the local library, to get groceries, anything and everything to keep him up and distracted, to keep him moving, to give him something to write to Everett about.
He’d had to write to Everett. It had been his goal, every day, even if only a few words, scattered memories about high school and that convenience store and kneeling on the floor of Everett’s room by his open window.
Everett had his hands on the counter, the skin up to his elbows white with flour and bits of sticky dough. Even across the distance, Alex could see he was shaking.
“Anyway….” Alex deliberately lightened his tone and moved on. “It keeps most of the bats out of my belfry, and despite my fears, I’ve written since then.”
Everyone seemed grateful to make the leap to a slightly more secure subject.
“Can I ask about their meaning? Those poems, how you grouped them together. Why you didn’t title them.” Hearing it from Robert, who had always been more comfortable with numbers than words, startled Alex into looking over. “There were these images you kept repeating. Distance and death and sticky hands, always holding on, or trying to….”
Other people had titled the collection the Butterscotch Series because the first poem had contained a few lines about a wax paper-wrapped disc of mellow butterscotch. Alex himself hadn’t titled them because there was only one title that would do, and it had seemed too personal. He supposed that was foolish, considering everything else those poems revealed. His publisher had not been very happy about it either.
“I’ve wondered too,” Rachel chimed in. Molly snorted, like she thought her siblings were slow. Maybe they were. She’d been younger and in the house more with the two of them. She must have seen a lot.
“Screw that,” Ty butted back in, now that the subject was open. “I want to know what everyone else in the world wants to know. Who those poems were about, or to, anyway. They were clearly for someone. I mean look at the next line after, If (when) I live to be old, will I confuse dreams… whatever it was again.”
Ally made another noise, but said nothing. Alex had never adored her more, not that he could look at her. There was nowhere he could look, really, not with so many pairs of eyes on him. Only two looked elsewhere. Molly watched her brother pick the dough from his hands.
Ty could not stop, though his eyes were wide, and he slapped a hand over his mouth once the words were out. “You know, due to the years gone by hinted at in a lot of the lines, like that, like everything was all far in the past, a lot of people say that it was someone you went to college with, like Strauss McKinney.” He paused and then attempted to regain his composure. “You know, the painter.”
“I know who he is,” Alex murmured.
“You fuc—dated him in college?” Molly spun around to gape at him. “Wow.”
Alex waited a few moments, then cleared his throat. “If I’d intended for the world to know everything, I would have
written everything.”
“So there is someone?” Ty was young. Alex reminded himself of that when his fingers curled into his palms and his vision went bright.
“That’s enough, Ty.” Molly was suddenly serious. “If Alex told off real interviewers, what makes you think he would tell you?”
Robert snorted a laugh.
“Maybe the mystery is the brand. Why it sells,” he added in the next second, and Alex had the vague feeling that Robert was trying to take some of the pressure off, though he didn’t know why. Though he had graduated by then and hadn’t been in school with them, he had once been on their high school football team and had never had much in common with Alex except for a willingness to physically defend Everett whenever necessary.
“Mystery. That kept getting repeated too. Like it was really all about secrets.” Ty seemed to be ready to write his thesis on the topic. Alex didn’t feel especially flattered. He did not know how Everett felt. Everett turned away, working perhaps, but Alex now knew the lines of him and how they looked under his clothes, with his eyes if not his hands. He pictured the muscles of his back, the tension in his shoulders, and the jut of his shoulder blades.
Ally stretched to take his hand again and perhaps to draw his attention, and Alex’s throat tightened. He couldn’t have answered Ty if he’d wanted to, not in that moment. He thought, wildly, frozen, that if Everett was his, he would have him naked every moment of the day, every moment that was theirs, so nothing would be hidden from him ever again.
Then he thought Everett had never hidden anything well, and if he had wanted to know, he should just have asked.
“I can’t always track the way my mind works.” Alex dismissed the subject once he could talk again, and took another cookie though his mouth was dry. “You liked the poems, I take it?” He raised his eyebrows. “Our dear Everett didn’t.” Everyone looked at Everett, which Alex hadn’t meant to happen, but as Everett wasn’t the only tricky one here, he was quick to take advantage of it. “He’s never said a word about them, at least not to me.”
Everett raised his head and turned back. His frown was for Alex.
“I liked them, Alex. They were….” He paused as though his chest hurt and he couldn’t draw breath. He turned to the side and went back to working with strips of dough. “They were beautiful. I’ve read them many times.”
That was somehow worse than Everett’s silent rejection, Everett rereading them to reason them out yet afraid to speak to Alex about them, Everett afraid. But Everett didn’t give him a chance to reflect, though Alex’s body was pounding with tension.
“But they are… they’re too… sad.” From his hesitation, Alex could tell Everett was altering what he’d been about to say. Then he shook his head and said it anyway. “They’re without hope.”
“Melancholy is the term preferred in academic circles,” Alex informed him slowly. He meant it to lighten the mood, but the words echoed in all the empty space between them. Everett lifted his head. Alex stared back at him.
“Sweet seconds but stolen,” Molly exhaled, bringing Alex’s attention to her, bringing everyone’s attention to her. Everett straightened with a jerk, and Alex closed his eyes, just for a moment, at hearing those words.
“Of course they were sad,” she went on. “They’re about despair, how it’s wanting what you can’t have, or think you can’t have, or don’t deserve.” Molly was superior. English majors often were. Alex should know, he taught enough of them. “They’re about love, obviously. Well, and desire… pressed against the wound / into you long beneath me / inches waiting to be crossed by the span of my hands pull me down / I am blind to stars / you beg to see constellations….”
Alex lifted his head and stared until his eyes burned at the side of Everett’s face.
“Which is why they’re so popular, I suppose.” Molly thankfully chose not to finish the poem and spared them all countless lines of yearning for a trace more breath, the taste of sweat at a swallowing throat, the stabs of pleasure at a brave hand sliding over denim, and made a rude sound in her throat. “That and who hasn’t wanted something they haven’t gotten? Those poems are full of all the reasons why he wants what he wants, which are also the reasons why he shouldn’t have it,” she added.
“Shut up, Molly.” Everett’s voice went up before the silence could grow anymore strained.
“You can’t tell me to shut up, just because you’re the great Everett who gets to do whatever he wants,” Molly started in, doubtlessly giving Everett a hard stare. It lasted until her mother told her to be quiet too. Then she turned back to gasp at her mother. “Of course you take his side.”
“Molly.” Robert broke in, giving her a significant look, and then oddly, an eye roll. “There’s no use fighting it, just be quiet.” Molly made a sound, not really amused, more frustrated, but Alex moved his gaze and his thoughts away from her and returned to Everett.
He was looking, but Everett would not look back as he went on. “Don’t be fooled, not all of that is his brain chemistry or his tragic, romantic genius. He will revel in his unworthiness if you let him, brooding alone across the divide.”
The divide. An almost poetic way to describe the break in him, the cracked edge over a rift that Alex had never defined. But it was there, an empty valley separating him from the other half of his mind, from this happiness around him, from Everett. It was real and ever present, if waiting to be crossed. He could feel it, like the wet pain of an open wound.
“It’s my unhappiness, Everett. I’ve earned the right to dwell in it from time to time,” Alex snapped back, a true idiot, because he hated the black thoughts that kept him apart, but they were his, and without them he wouldn’t be who he was.
Everett opened his mouth, and then suddenly George was between them and ordering Alex to his feet.
“How about a walk down to the park with the kids to burn off some of that energy?” It was a question, but he wasn’t asking. Alex got to his feet, though he was vibrating with tension, and the cookies and coffee weren’t sitting easy in his stomach. He looked at his trembling hands in something like shock and then over at Everett in complete fear. Everett seemed far away, Robert at his side distracting him by stealing bits of dough.
Alex tried to form an apology and then realized he didn’t want to, not with George staring him down. Wasn’t it enough that he’d written into every page, every poem, the words Everett wouldn’t let him say?
Forgive me.
“Playing with rambunctious children in the bitter cold, that’s just how I wanted to spend my day,” he remarked quietly instead, but knew his sarcasm would be ignored or overruled. George took his arm.
“There’s some work I can find after that if you’re still feeling feisty,” he continued as he steered him from the room. Alex looked back. Everett was braiding bread into an intricate ring. His lips were a thin line. He didn’t look up as they passed.
Alex was back in just over an hour, freezing his balls off even with his coat and gloves on, and humiliatingly aware that all the kids and George were still merrily frolicking down at the park, squealing their way down metal slides that had to burn, they’d been so cold.
He walked to the kitchen door, though the front door would have been faster, and had only opened it a fraction when he paused at the yeasty smell of rising dough and the quick flurry of words coming from inside.
It was a strange feeling that stopped him, not exactly the childhood fear that he couldn’t possibly be welcome inside, but something similar. The Faraday house was his idea of home, but as a boy he had never let himself fully forget that it was someone else’s home and any moment he might be refused permission to cross their threshold for any number of crimes. It wasn’t anything they had done. In fact, they had gone out of their way to treat him as family from almost the beginning, which meant giving him chores and involving him in disputes and the conspiracy to get George to quit smoking a few years ago.
Perhaps that was why the tension coming from the
kitchen now held him back. He had a sense, however irrational it may have been, that those inside had waited for him to be gone to give them freedom to talk. He also had a feeling, far less irrational, that it was a conversation they had had before; perhaps it was the exhausted frustration in Everett’s voice with every answer.
Leaving them for so long, not driving down for parties or Thanksgiving, suddenly seemed like an unforgiveable mistake, though he’d had his reasons.
It had been a year since he’d last driven down here. Many things must have taken place that he didn’t know about. But the sound of voices in the kitchen, conversations happening without his knowledge, made him go utterly still.
He was breathing too hard for the short walk back from the park and shook his head at his own stupidity. Of course life went on without him, and people spoke even when he wasn’t there. Of course Everett and his mother would have things to say they would not say with him around.
But a noise slipped from him despite his clenched jaw, and he pressed closer to the door, on the outside listening in for any scrap of Everett’s secrets.
“Where did you put my vanilla, Everett?” Ally stopped in the middle of whatever she had been saying to ask the question. Alex inhaled and thought he smelled chocolate, as though she was making cocoa. She probably was. The children had said something about it waiting for them when they returned from the park.
Everett must have responded silently, because she dropped the question and went inexorably back to the subject that had left Alex frozen on her doorstep.
“You aren’t getting any younger, Everett.” He’d never heard her use that tone, at least never on Everett.
“I know that.” Everett’s voice held a thread of irritation, or maybe embarrassment. Alex thought of Everett at his birthday again, and his face over the warm glow of so many candles, and the faint sensation that Everett was counting more than candles when he’d looked at him.
