Halfway Home

by Paul Monette

  By midafternoon a cover of clouds was starting to seep across the sky. Soon the sun was pale, dilute as lemonade. It wasn't clear that a storm was coming, the ambiguity of March leaving it up in the air. But they'd started to argue again in Cora's room, or Susan at least was harping, harping. Once again I couldn't hear the words distinctly. As it happened I was lying on my bed, jeans to my knees and playing with myself. Idly enough, only half-hard, but truly it had been months since I'd fiddled with it at all. I suppose I was testing the waters, for Gray's sake as much as my own. But as soon as I heard that nattering drone I buttoned right up and went downstairs, determined to avoid all domestic incidents.

  Daniel was in the parlor, perched on the sofa and huddled over the coffee table. He looked as if he was studying a map with an X for buried treasure. Tentatively I moved to the doorway, reluctant to intrude. He didn't look up. Now I could see that he had the million pieces of a jigsaw spread out on the surface of the table. He'd already pieced together three or four ragged islands and a foot of border.

  "Hi," he said, then scooted over on the sofa, making room for me. This gesture of accommodation made me flush with unexpected pleasure. I sat beside him, careful not to touch his knee with mine. I bent over the puzzle, which seemed like nothing but a fractured mass of gray. "Are you seven or eight?"

  "Seven and three-quarters," he said, laying in a corner piece.

  "Birthday's in June?" He nodded. "Maybe we'll have a party." He shrugged, not impolitely, but as if to say who knew where they'd be three months from now. He tapped in another piece, bridging two of his islands, all of it gray to me. "What's this supposed to be?" I asked, feeling stupid and aphasic.

  "A statue," Daniel replied, and reached beneath the table for the box. He handed it to me.

  I gaped at the picture on the cover: Michelangelo's David, in three-quarter profile, standing in the rotunda at the Accademia. But all I could see at the moment was his dick. I glanced again at the coffee table, the shrapnel pieces coming together. Now in dismay I could see that one of the islands was David's thigh, another his shoulder and left pec. My eye darted frantically among the jumble of unassembled pieces, trying to find the crotch shot. I excruciated, in a daze of embarrassment, wanting to cover the boy's eyes or drag him bodily away. This stupid bohemian house! Why didn't it have a normal puzzle, a nice barn in Vermont? Inexorably Daniel filled the picture in, piece by methodical piece.

  I realized I was terrified that Brian and Susan might walk in and think this was my idea. And that shocked me back to sanity, because what, after all, was wrong with Michelangelo? Instantly I knew, sitting like a giant beside this little boy, what I was really afraid of. That Daniel would turn out gay, and they would blame me and curse my infected ghost. That's why I shrank from touching him, even my knee.

  Once I saw my own fear of being implicated—of tainting him—I realized how the old self-hatred still had its hooks in me. Because what I really meant was that I didn't want him to be gay, to run that gauntlet of misery and solitude. Where the hell was all my pride that had marched in a hundred parades?

  "Uncle Tom, are you on television?"

  I winced at the family name, feeling at the moment all too worthy of the scathing contempt with which the phrase was freighted. For I had just sold my people down the river, all for the sake of what the Aryan masters call "family values."

  "No," I retorted guiltily. "Who told you that?"

  "Mom said you were an actor."

  "Oh. Well, I'm not really that kind of actor." As if he knew there was any other kind. I was startled to find myself ashamed not to be on a hit series. Me and the Cos, so the kid would have something to brag about in school. Some dim, unsettled place in me wanted to race to my apartment in West Hollywood and grab my box of clippings—show him all my raves in Drama-Logue.

  Yet he didn't seem remotely disappointed, or curious to know what other sort of actor I might be. He accepted me all on my own, a given, because I was his uncle Tom. As I watched him, aching with tenderness now, he fitted two pieces of the puzzle together. Now we could see David's hooded brow and his piercing eyes. I understood that I couldn't keep Daniel from learning the world, of men with men or anything else. Suddenly he looked up at me, the giant towering over him, and smiled wanly. "I like my room," he said, clearly wanting to please me.

  "I'm sorry about your dogs."

  He frowned, and his shoulders moved in a barely perceptible shrug. "Yeah, they were great," he said, shifting his gaze to the puzzle again. So stoic. Such a fatalist. Me.

  I stayed a while longer, even attempting to lay in a couple of pieces myself. But I've always been lousy at close work, and found myself trying to jam together shapes that were not cut out to be. I scanned the field of shards a final time, still hoping I could palm the piece with David's dick, so the assembled whole would sport a fig-leaf of negative space. But the fucker eluded me.

  I stood up to leave and didn't touch Daniel, who for his part seemed philosophical as to whether I stayed or went. No words required about seeing each other later, since we just would. And I walked away with such an overwhelming sense of him, his concentration and his cool, I couldn't any longer distance him by calling him a mere shadow-image of me. For once in my life I'd met a kid as real as the one I left behind in Chester. If anything, I was the shadow of him now, not the other way around. Was this how parents put away their childhood, the vaporous image evaporating in such bright light?

  I napped that day like a stone at the bottom of a well. When I woke, the breeze had blown the balcony door open. Still the air and the milky sky had the tease of rain. The prestorm in California sometimes goes on for days, leaden skies with mackerel swirls, swelling till you think they'll burst, and then they clear off without so much as a drop. A sort of stratospheric coitus interruptus. Now I longed for another five-day Alaska blow, like the one that turned things upside down last week, leaving me half in love with Gray. I wanted it for Brian and his family, to cabin us together safe and sound, the eye of the storm. I wanted to show Daniel pelicans on the lawn.

  I brushed my hair in the mirror, a scowl of irritation at the KS spot on my cheek. I didn't have room for AIDS right now. I had just shut the door behind me, moving toward the stairs, when Susan stepped out of Cora's room. She shied like a deer the instant she saw me, her instinct to run back in and hide. But the Catholic girl won out, too proper to be so rude, and she nodded a pained hello.

  I was shocked by the change a day had wrought. It wasn't just that she'd been crying, welts of red that narrowed her eyes, or the rumpled lilac sweat suit, no other clothes to wear. She looked lost—almost amnesiac. As if a cry was roaring in her head—Where am I, where am I?—insistent as the surf against the bluff. Her sunlit hair, pulled back in a bun, was dull as straw. It seemed she hadn't washed.

  "You want me to put on a pot of tea?" I asked, sweet-tempered as Emma.

  At first she acted like she hadn't heard. Her face was taut with racing thoughts. Then she stepped to the railing, the well of the stairs between us. "I'm sorry, but—" She swallowed. One hand rubbed the hip of her sweat pants. "We don't approve of your life-style."

  I think I just blinked a few times, as if I could change the channel. Her words were even more sententious here, echoing in the stair hall. "Yeah?" I said, but not pugnaciously. It was almost as if I wanted her to elaborate, play out all the twisted reasoning.

  "We wouldn't be here if we had any choice," said my sister-in-law.

  I don't know why I didn't feel rage, maybe because she looked so fallen. It all seemed like such a pathetic joke, her clinging with white knuckles to her bigotry. If anything made me want to sneer in her face, it was that "we." Didn't sound to me, given the shrill of bitter words coming out of their room, as if "we" were going to pull through. And I might have added, where was she getting off with her high-and-mighty, now that her husband was wanted in eleven states?

  But what I said was, "I don't really care. I'm doing this for my brother." I even hoped
it didn't sound unkind. "I think you've got enough to worry about, don't you? I'm nothing." I started down the stairs.

  She leaned out over the banister. "For years," she declared, "I didn't even know you existed." And this time she wasn't being unkind, just amazed. No response seemed necessary. For years I didn't know if I existed either, lady. But it was as if she couldn't let me go, even though I was of the devil's party. "He keeps things in, and then it's too late. I didn't find out about this whole..." She groped in frustration. No noun was awful enough. "...till the FBI came to my house."

  She'd blurted much more than she wanted, especially to the likes of me. It must have killed her to have no phone. She needed to talk to her sister, her suburban mommy friends, so she could shake the air with how cheated she felt. "Well, that's between you and him," I said evenly, looking up into her hunted eyes. "You should really try to get outside. Take a walk down to the beach."

  I know it was patronizing, but that's all I had. She'd let me in by the wrong door. I continued down the stairs, light on my feet. Though I felt no rage for my sake, Daniel was another matter. I bristled to think of him being guided by this defeated woman. I thought of Foo and her ramrod strength, fierce with no illusions. Then my mother, futile and helpless, ironing and vacuuming, desperate to make some order before the old man came careening home. The wrong people had all the babies.

  So what do you want? I asked myself as I swung around the newel post at the bottom.Custody?

  I laughed out loud at the absurdity of that, trundling through the dining room. When I came in the kitchen, Brian and Gray were perched on the stools, leaning toward each other across the zinc table. Their faces were so close they might have been about to kiss. I stopped dead, forgetting they'd ever met. As Gray looked up to greet me with a smile, I saw they were bent over a scribbled page of calculations. Jesus, but things moved fast around here.

  "Brian says we can fix the stairs ourselves," Gray announced proudly.

  "You better get a couple extra drill bits," said my brother, all absorbed in the list he was making. "And we want a good waterproof sealer."

  The connection didn't surprise me: two men so good with their hands, and both so restless. It only surprised me they'd made it so quick. Very deliberately I crossed to Gray's left side, making as if to peer at their calculations. But when I leaned down I nuzzled Gray's temple with my cheek, planting a soft kiss on his forehead. Then I draped an arm around his shoulder as I crouched in earnest and studied the specs. This whole maneuver was out of bounds, of course. Gray didn't exactly startle, but I could feel him grow very still under the weight of my arm. Public display, male to male, was miles down the line for him. As for Brian, for whose sake I was making the point, he affected a fine indifference, but that didn't mean I hadn't scored.

  "We'll get it all done tomorrow," said Brian, "before the storm. Piece o' cake."

  On the page in front of him was a crude rendering of the stairway joint, a new design to reinforce the pinning where the steps had broken loose. Beside it, a list of materials and tools. My brother the builder, who'd flung up subdivisions overnight and poured whole interstates, was manic with excitement. He started to talk about how they would pulley the wood down the face of the bluff, when I butted in: "You're busy tomorrow."

  "I'll be back before noon," he retorted cavalierly, brushing me off, and I wanted to tell him coldly, to damp the fire of his eagerness, Go take care of your wife.

  Then Gray piped in. "I'll bring Merle. He's an ox."

  And before I could catch my breath the meeting was over. The two men stood, Gray easing out of my arm, and they exchanged a sort of grunt-and-nod, like some mystical butch code between two workmen. They seemed to like each other, but more, seemed to be sharing a bond from which I was excluded. Not meanly, not out to hurt me. Yet suddenly I was back in Chester, the last one picked for every game. Please—if you don't think being a sensitive plant isn't a full-time job.

  So I found myself half trotting beside Gray across the back lawn, as he strode toward the pickup. And I said, "You can't keep leaving like this."

  He laughed. "I'll be back tomorrow. I've got to get all this stuff." And he waved the list.

  He was already gripping the door handle. I pushed his shoulder and turned him toward me. "I want some time alone," I said, more stubborn than I meant to be, almost an ultimatum. I leaned up and kissed him openmouthed. He didn't back off, but it jarred him, I could tell. This was fine with me, who was feeling the need of a shake-up. I let my lips linger a moment, grazing his more softly, and when at last I pulled away, he turned his head like a reflex toward the house.

  "You think somebody's going to punish us for kissing?"

  "No," he said slowly, his gaze moving off the house and into the trees, the long branches of the eucalyptus swaying in the breeze. "But maybe we shouldn't rub their noses in it."

  Consider my buttons pushed. "Are you comparing my love to a pile of shit?" I inquired with nuclear irony.

  "No. I just don't think—"

  "I heard you the first time." A wave of cold fury had me in its grip. "I've spent enough of my life hiding and being ashamed, thank you. They should be grateful to see a little romance. They're kind of running on empty themselves."

  "Hey, I'm on your side, pardner." A tight smile froze his lower face. "I'm just a little more discreet than you are."

  "I don't want to be discreet." What was I defying so, in this runaway train of my heart?

  "Then maybe you don't want me."

  The worst was, he didn't say it with any sort of nastiness or threat. Rueful more than anything, with an undertow of unbearable self-denial. He lifted a finger and touched my lips, as if he'd already reached the stage of mournful recollection. Then he turned and climbed into the truck. And I was stung into silence, not trusting myself to say anything right. I smiled bravely and fluttered my hand in a hopeless wave, like somebody drowning, but somehow trying at last to be discreet. He gave me back a look of wounded tenderness, reversing with a lurch, then rumbling away up the drive.

  I stood there till he was out of sight, not wanting him to miss me if he looked in the rearview mirror. The pewter sky above the Trancas hills was dull as a dead fish. I realized I had loaded Gray with all the baggage I'd felt around Daniel, my own wrong-headed leeriness. Devastated, remorseful, hands balled into fists, I understood I might have lost this thing with Gray before it even got started.

  But I think I must've lost some time in there as well. I don't remember going in, or anything till I came to myself, sitting at the kitchen table staring at the sketch of the beach stairs. It was dusk outside. The house was deathly quiet. My knee was throbbing, like an old man's barometer. I studied the sketch in the failing light, as if it could tell me where I'd fucked up and how I could mend the break.

  I'm not sure how long I sat there hurting. Nothing broke the stillness all around me, till my head perked up at the sound of feet outside the kitchen door. Too much to hope it was Gray, even as I recalled his passionate impulse yesterday, roaring down from the hills because he didn't want me to be alone. Then I heard the mumble of voices as the door opened. Mona stepped in, a taller figure behind her. It was really rather dark by now.

  Mona flailed at the wall, and the overhead light went on. "Hello," I said.

  She jumped. The other person was Daphne. "What are you doing sitting in the dark?" asked Mona, rattled and faintly accusatory. But just as quick she seemed to regret it, hurrying over and taking the stool beside me. She clasped my hand on the table and looked searchingly into my eyes. I was acutely aware of Dr. Daphne watching from the sidelines, making her little Freudian mental notes. I pointedly didn't say hello to her, thus giving her volumes for her next report on the war of attrition between lesbians and the world of men.

  "Tom," said Mona, "we have something to tell you." The look in her spectacled eyes was witheringly intense. What were they doing, getting married? Perhaps they wanted a sperm donation, but surely not from me. "Tom," she repeate
d, lowering her voice to a smoldering hush worthy of Dietrich herself. "Your brother's not dead."

  "Oy," I murmured low in my throat, shutting my eyes.

  But she must have heard "Oh," for she started to chafe my hand and purred, "I know, I know."

  Of course I trusted Mona's loyalty implicitly, despite her having linked on my whereabouts to Brian—was it just ten days ago? But Daphne was something else entirely, truculent and arch, in addition to which she hated me. Who knew if she'd keep my brother's hideout a secret? I brought my free hand to my face, covering my eyes as if I was reeling, but really just stalling for time.

  "Don't be afraid to feel," said Daphne, in a distinctly oracular tune. Now I understood that she'd been brought along as a sort of shock consultant. I peeked through my fingers at her, willowy and tail, with a tumble of auburn hair to her shoulders. She carried herself on the balls of her feet, lithe as a dancer. I never said she wasn't beautiful, just an arrogant bitch.

  "They all survived," Mona went on gently, filling in the details beamed by Leslie from Yale.

  All I had to do was let her finish the update, then declare I needed to be alone. "To process," I'd say to Daphne, soulfully earnest, then get them out of there. "He may try to contact you," said Mona, and I thought, Five minutes and they'll be gone.

  But once you've got a houseful, nothing goes quite the way you planned. Too many variables. The variable in question came pattering in from the dining room, and Mona and Daphne stared. Utterly single-minded, Daniel went straight to the fridge. He opened it, ducked his head inside, and emerged a moment later with an apple. I had about a millisecond to think, as the two women's eyes came back to me.