Golden States

by Michael Cunningham

  Here it was. David’s face burned, and he heard himself say, “Uh-huh.”

  Rob’s expression did not change, his tight smile held steady. “Did you really?” he asked.

  David nodded. He was afraid his eyes would begin to tear if he spoke. He tensed as for a blow.

  “Well, it’s all right,” Rob said, and laughed like it was a good joke, a normal funny thing to have done. “I won’t tell.”

  “Oh,” David said.

  “I’ve told a few myself,” Rob said. “Matter of fact, that’s one of the things lawyers are paid to do.”

  “Uh-huh,” David said. For a sharp, thrilling moment he loved Rob. He looked at Rob’s shirtfront with moist eyes, wishing more than anything to butt his head gently into the snowy cotton. After a moment he asked, “Can I have a sip of your drink?”

  “I guess a sip won’t hurt you,” Rob said. “Don’t tell.”

  “I won’t.” David took the glass from Rob’s hand and drew a practiced draught, nowhere near big enough to be risky.

  “Glad to see you can appreciate the right stuff, David my man,” he said, and David loved him all the more even though he knew there was mockery in his voice. How could he have been so wrong about Rob?

  Janet came back, and David handed the whiskey glass to Rob. “Don’t let him con you into getting him drunk,” she said.

  “David’s not conning me about anything,” Rob smiled. “How are things in the kitchen?”

  “Fine, if you like ketchup on your salad. Pretend you like it, or there’ll be a scene that’ll curl your hair.”

  “She gets away with an awful lot, doesn’t she?” Rob said. David thought gratefully, At last. Someone besides him realized the truth about Lizzie.

  “Please don’t draw conclusions about what you don’t understand,” Janet said. “Let’s just say she was dealt with a little harshly when she was a baby. She and some other people too. Are you ready for dinner?”

  “Starving,” Rob said, and he gave her the smile. David imagined Rob smiling at him that way.

  Everybody seemed to have a good time at dinner. Mom began to relax, and by dessert she was telling jokes, including a long one David lost track of halfway through. Something about Moses and a talking dog. David laughed along with the others, for appearance sake, and then Rob told a simpler one about two Polacks who go skydiving. He looked at David as he told it, and David could hardly hold still from nervousness and laughter. He thought the joke was really funny.

  Janet didn’t laugh much. She sat smiling with her head cocked, and when the others quit laughing she said, “Did one of the men at the firm tell you that one?”

  “I guess so,” Rob said. “Why do you ask?”

  “Because it just doesn’t sound like the kind of joke you’d tell, is all. You used to tell a different kind of joke.”

  “People change,” he told her.

  “You’re telling me.”

  “Anybody want more coffee?” Mom said. “Rob? More tea?” “Please,” Rob said.

  “No thanks,” Janet said. She rested her palm on her coffee cup and looked at Rob.

  “Something funny about my face?” he asked.

  “I’m just trying to remember you,” she said.

  “I’m sitting right here.”

  Lizzie said, “Rob, do you know how to play crazy eights?” “No, but I bet I could learn.”

  “Don’t let Lizzie teach you,” David said, “She’ll leave out half the rules until you start playing. I’ll teach you how.”

  “I will,” Lizzie said.

  “I will.”

  “I will.”

  “I’m going to put gags on both of you in about two minutes,” Mom said. She went into the kitchen for the tea.

  “Maybe you can both teach me,” Rob said.

  “I’ll tell you all the things Lizzie leaves out,” David said.

  Lizzie thrust her lower lip at him and he turned away, cringing, as if she was too ugly to look at. When he turned his head he noticed that Janet was watching Rob with a sad smile on her face, her hand still covering her empty cup.

  They all played crazy eights at the dinner table. David, remembering his promise to himself, managed not to fight with Lizzie even though he knew she was cheating. As they played David noticed Rob’s wrists, which were thinner than you’d expect, covered with fine reddish hairs that curled slightly in a uniform sickle shape. Rob’s fingers picking up the cards were long and graceful, with tufts of paler hair at the knuckles. David’s own hands were pink and stubby. Whenever anybody said something funny David smiled hugely, with his upper lip raised, showing his gums.

  Once, after losing three hands in a row, Lizzie said to him, “Why are you smiling like a monkey?”

  “Why do you smell like a fish?” he asked her, and decided the truce had been a stupid idea. You couldn’t be nice to someone like Lizzie.

  After they got tired of playing cards they went into the living room to watch TV. Lizzie was told she could stay up until the end of “Dynasty” and no longer. She plopped poutily down on the sofa next to Rob, not daring to press the issue because “Dynasty” already ran a half hour later than her usual bedtime. David slotted himself in quickly on Rob’s other side, and noticed for the first time a deeper smell of Rob’s, under his cologne, something like pencil shavings when you empty the sharpener.

  Janet and Mom sat in the two orange chairs. Janet had brought out the last of her dinner wine, and Rob was drinking another Old Bushmill’s. Occasionally he passed it over to David in silence, as if they had a private understanding, and David took big, chancy sips. Everything felt so solid and fine; he was so happy just to be sitting on the sofa taking swallows of Rob’s drink.

  After the program ended, Lizzie was maneuvered upstairs into bed. David thought she would kiss Rob good-night but she was humiliated at being the first to go and didn’t speak to him at all. She just trudged noisily upstairs. David knew so well the regret she felt afterward he could almost feel it, dripping through the ceiling like a leak.

  He himself didn’t have to go to bed for another hour, and he sat luxuriating in his one undeniable, irrevokable privilege. He was older than Lizzie, and always would be. There was nothing she could do to catch up. He accepted another sip of Rob’s drink as the news woman, the one whose hair came to a single perfect hook on one side of her head, appeared on the screen and said in her urgent, honest voice, “Good evening. President Reagan announced at a press conference today that he would seek to increase the defense department budget by ten billion dollars in 1985. More on this and other stories at eleven.”

  “Asshole,” Janet said.

  “You mean Reagan, or that woman?” Mom asked.

  “Oh, both of them. I don’t think the world has ever had so many assholes in it as it does right now.”

  The newswoman had been replaced by a commercial, the old ladies who liked to squeeze the toilet paper. Rob said, “There have always been plenty of assholes. You’re just learning to spot them better.”

  “I’ve always known how to spot them,” Janet said.

  “I don’t know,” Mom said. “It seems like the older you get,the harder it is. I’ve voted for a new asshole every four years since, oh, Kennedy. But he was one too, in a way.”

  “Everybody has their reasons,” Rob said.

  The toilet paper commercial dissolved into another one, for coffee, with a husband wrinkling his nose over his cup as if it had a rat turd floating in it. This struck David as funny. He tried to hold it in, though, because the talk around him was turning serious.

  “But when did we all get so damn reasonable?” Janet said. “At what point exactly did we sort of shrug our shoulders and say, ‘What the hell, you can’t fight it, everybody’s got their reasons?’ ”

  “It’s always been like that,” Rob said.

  David took Rob’s glass from his hand and helped himself to another sip, and another. The husband liked the new coffee better. He closed his eyes and smacked his lips like
it was the most delicious thing he’d ever tasted. A sputtering laugh escaped from the side of David’s clamped mouth like air from a balloon. He had an alternate version of the commercial in his mind: the wife says, “Honey, what’s wrong with my coffee?” and the husband says, “Well, it’s got a rat turd in it.” He couldn’t not think about it.

  “That sounds like revised history to me,” Janet said. David looked at her with bug-eyed seriousness, thinking, Hmmm, like a professor. This was funny too. A glow had come over him, a good warm haziness that started in his blood and tingled his skin from the inside. Everything was so fine, and so completely itself. As the others talked David sat appreciating the sofa, the comforting familiar scratch of its stiff gray fabric. It was a perfect version of a sofa, and it was his. His sofa, the one out of all possible sofas.

  Rob was saying something about Indian reservations, how the Indians never wanted a lot of white kids there helping them in the first place, it was all a big joke to the Indians. Davidlooked over at Mom, who was following the conversation with her eyes like she was watching a tennis match but a more serious kind of tennis match, one in which the ball might blow up at any second and kill whoever had it on his side of the net. She was so fine. And she was his. His own perfect mother. He thought hard about the fact so he wouldn’t forget it.

  “That sounds like asshole talk to me,” Janet said.

  Here, honey, try this coffee. Mmm, that’s the way I like it, with no rat turds.

  David held the laugh until he thought his head would explode. Then in a moment of blissful giving-in it shot out his nose. He snorted, and the sound of his own snorting was funny. He laughed so hard he lost his breath, and Rob’s drink, which he was still holding, splashed onto his shirt.

  “Hey, what’s so funny?” Rob asked.

  “Wait a minute, he’s drunk,” Mom said.

  “David?” Janet looked at him questioningly. “Shit, you are, aren’t you?”

  The idea appealed to him. Drunk, he was drunk. He had crossed over into another country, one he’d been wanting to visit for a long time. This was it. A warm floating feeling like your whole being is in your head, and everything around you small and funny. Funny. He just couldn’t stop laughing.

  “Whoa,” Rob said, pulling the glass from his hand. “God, I had no idea.”

  David wanted to say to them, “Wait, I’m still here,” because they were treating him like he’d been completely transformed when in fact all he was was himself pushed up a little bit higher, better able to see the hilarity of things. But he was giggling too hard to speak.

  “Bed,” Mom said. “Somebody get on the other side, he’s too heavy for me.”

  Rob hoisted him up with difficulty (Rob wasn’t so strong!) and though David felt sure he could walk perfectly well on his own, he gave in to the occasion of his drunkenness and lethimself be half carried, half dragged between Mom and Rob. His laughter was solidifying into something else, a hard ball that stuck in the back of his throat, but he kept laughing for fear of having to know what to say if he stopped. As Mom and Rob guided him upstairs he laughed until the laughter took on its own unraveling force, until it became a thing that lived outside him and hung in the air over all their heads, a ghost. By the time they reached the top step (the stairs were both impossibly long and brief, a huge journey over in an instant), the hard ball had slithered down into his stomach, which bucked and trembled. The first heave came so fast he had only a moment to stop laughing, poised silent at the top of the stairs, held by firm hands—he had that one clear moment in which he saw himself, his own exact size and shape, his position in the world—and then he bent forward and vomited, a flecked brown streak that flashed raggedly across the carpet. He heard Mom say, “Bathroom,” in her dead-calm voice.

  He was carried to the bathroom and managed to hold down the second wave of vomiting until they reached it. A thick thread of saliva dangled from his chin. Mom held his shoulders as he bent over the white, gleaming toilet bowl. He retched and retched but the ball wouldn’t dislodge itself from his belly. Faintly, he heard Rob’s voice from above, saying, “I’m sorry, God, I had no idea.” Mom’s voice replied, “It’s all right, he’s been trying to get drunk since he was nine. Now he knows what it’s like.”

  When he was finished throwing up, when the sickness had settled into a solid immovable thing in his gut, Mom stripped his shirt off and washed his face and chest at the sink. He saw his face in the mirror and was surprised by it. His eyes looked back at him like somebody else’s. He saw that they were brown with spots of gold in them. His skin in the hard white light seemed to have turned gray. After Mom had rubbed him clean with a washcloth, which left red blossomings on his bare chest, she steered him out into the hallway toward his room. Janetand Rob were in the hall, standing close together, and when David negotiated the first few uncertain steps in their direction Janet came and smoothed his hair, saying, “Well, I guess tonight you’re a man.”

  He smiled weakly and glanced at Rob, who stood with his hands in his pockets, looking apologetic. David’s mind leaped up out of his body and he thought with a pang of Rob turned away, sent home to San Francisco. He had to go. Janet didn’t love him enough. But it was all so sad. As David was led down the hall he said in a voice that came out deeper than his voice ever had before, “I’m sorry, Rob,” and Rob said, “Forget it. It was my fault.”

  David slept without dreaming and woke in the dark, his mouth parched and his stomach queasy. He wanted water but lay still for a long while, thinking vaguely that sickness inhabited the air of his room, and if he moved it would sense him and attack.

  The coyotes were far away tonight, their howls faint as bird calls in the hills. At a good enough distance they sounded like loons. David listened to them and thought with wonder of how he had beer)’drunk. Drunk. He had thrown up in front of everybody, too, and had had to be washed afterward by Mom. He could not decide whether he was a good interesting criminal or a fool, or both. At least Lizzie hadn’t seen him.

  He heard footsteps on the stairs. Whoever it was stepped soundly onto the fifth tread, which squeaked. David sat up into a renewed wave of nausea. When his head cleared the footsteps had topped the stairs. He jumped out of bed and ran to the door.

  Rob was walking slowly down the dark hall, his shoulders tensed against the blackness, his right hand raised before him to ward off obstacles. He had on his pants but no shirt. If he saw David he made no sign and for a long second David stoodin his own doorway with the big dark man coming toward him, hair and broad shoulders edged in the weak, icy light that shone in through the single window at the far end. David thought Rob saw him and would come make a joke or two about getting drunk. He and Rob would sit in the dark together, telling drunk jokes. He tried to think of one in advance.

  Rob stopped at Janet’s door and waited there, ready to knock but not knocking. David said Rob’s name, softly, to tell him he had the wrong room. Rob turned his large indistinguishable face in David’s direction. His voice hissed, “Get back in your room.”

  David obeyed instantly, unthinking as a mouse popping down its hole. He stood inside his room, behind the closed door, the pulse jumping in his neck. He heard Rob open Janet’s door.

  After a silence the murmur of their voices came through the wall. First Rob’s, then Janet’s—low and high, an alternating current of sounds too different to be like music. Rob’s growl stretched on, Janet’s answering whispers were shorter. David moved from the door to the common wall and walked back and forth in front of it, seeking the spot at which the sound was strongest. He could not make out a single word. His blood raced, and he circled before the wall like a gpnned animal, searching and searching for a way out, unable to imagine that there might be none at all, checking the same places over and over again.

  The rhythm of the voices picked up, though they didn’t get any louder. They took on a faster, more urgent pace. Davjd, having decided that the most audible point was toward the far corner, between his dresser and t
he outside wall, wedged himself into the narrow space and put his ear to the wallpaper. He worried they would sense his presence. It didn’t seem possible that he could be so aware of them and they completely ignorant of him. Their voices alternated rapidly now, Rob Janet Rob Janet Rob. David thought they must be fighting. He couldn’timagine what to do. He worked himself against the wall as if he hoped to squeeze through it.

  The voices stopped. The noise on the other side of the wall went dead, and after a moment David heard the sound of Janet’s door opening and closing. He feared they might have gone out together, but no, the bedsprings creaked in Janet’s room, she was still there. Rob had gone alone. David went to his door and listened there, holding his breath. The fifth tread squeaked. Rob was back downstairs.

  It had never occurred to him that Rob would invade the house like that. Upstairs was where the Starks’ most private lives went on, where Mom walked in her bra and girdle. David lay down on his bed and the bed, full of its warmth and its unmistakable odor, seemed to have been touched by Rob. He waited, ready, for the sound of Rob’s return. If Rob came upstairs again David would be ready. He wouldn’t let himself be flicked out of the way.

  He didn’t fall asleep for over an hour and when he did, it was against his will. He fought to keep his eyes open but his mind kept drifting into vivid realms of its own, until even the simple thought, Stay awake, flowered into a giddy sensation of flight, of wind and gray sky and a stone building he thought he had seen once, with turrets and a spiked iron gate. His dreams deepened, and when he woke again all he knew was that he had had another monster dream, something about a blackness that dragged itself over the rotten leaves of a forest floor, all hungry attention, watching for lights.

  In the morning all that remained of Rob was a pile of folded blankets and sheets and a pillow, neatly stacked on one end of the sofa. Mom made breakfast for David and Lizzie; Janet stayed in bed. “I don’t know what time Rob left,” Mom said as she scrambled the eggs. “I didn’t hear him, did either of you?”