The River in Winter

by Matt Dean

  "Soon, soon. Are you on the air?"

  "We're on a break. The network feed is live now. Let me put you through to Barbara." When Petra said my mother's name, it sounded like "Bah-blah."

  A few seconds later, Barbara's show voice: "You're up late on a school night."

  "Can I ask you a stupid question?"

  "Don't be silly. You've never asked a stupid question in your whole life."

  "Sweet of you to say, but-."

  After a moment's pause, she said, "Let me put you on hold a second so we can do this-you know, this thing."

  Faintly I heard the Mozart aria she used for her opening theme and as a bumper before and after commercials. One of the Queen of the Night's coloratura pieces from Die Zauberfl?te. It faded after a few bars, and then through a caul of static I heard Barbara's biggest voice: "It's Election Day, San Francisco. Polls are still open for a few more minutes. Get out there and let your voice be heard. The voice you're hearing now is the voice of Barbara Murray, the Queen of the Night, continuing our very special Election Night team coverage. But first we have to do just a little business."

  After a single note of some commercial jingle, the line cleared and Barbara came back. "Now what were we saying?"

  "Are the red states Republican or Democrat?"

  "Usually Democrat, but it varies by network. You know it's already being called for Clinton, don't you? It's not official yet, but he's already very close. And looking at the exit polls, it's pretty clear what's going to happen."

  It was silly, crazy, unexpected: I began to cry. Strange, happy-sad tears. I couldn't quite speak.

  "Jonah?"

  "That's really, really-. That's good news."

  "We all certainly think so out here." I could hear the smile in her voice.

  A series of clicks came across the line, and then Petra again. "Your mother wants to know if you've been drinking."

  I choked back a sob. "A little. Just a couple of beers." My face grew hot. "Shit. Was I on the air just now?"

  "No. I'm sorry. I didn't know you wanted to be."

  "I didn't. I just wanted to hear her voice."

  "I hear music behind you. Are you at home?"

  "At a bar with some friends. This election was kind of a-. It was-." What was it? "Der schwerer gefasster Entschluss? Yes?"

  "Perhaps you should go home now. Get some rest."

  "Maybe you're right."

  * * *

  The neighborhood wit had struck again. Leading up the front walk, a hopscotch grid drawn crudely in pale blue chalk bore, instead of whatever customary markings, a ladder of squared-off letters and numbers in yellow and orange and pink:

  2

  4 6

  8 he's

  1

  queer

  we ?

  2 hate

  Christa and I stood side by side at the grid's baseline.

  "I don't need this right now," I said. "I can't even think of hopscotch until I sober up."

  Tory had been waiting at the car. He stepped up behind us. "Does this happen often?" he asked me.

  I shook my head. "This is the second or third thing. Neighborhood kids, I guess. Can you help me?"

  Together, we three kicked wads of snow onto the chalk outline and rubbed it into obscurity. Every move caused my stomach to churn anew. I felt light-headed and dizzy. I sat on the stoop, supporting myself on the way down with both hands, like a pregnant woman. As Christa blurred the last cross of the last T, with a snow-footed cha-cha-cha, she let go a peal of laughter that, for all its depth and timbre, was the laugh of a wholly pleased little girl.

  * * *

  7 - Polite Conduct

  I lay in bed, exhausted and wakeful.

  As a small child, sleepless on the eve of a new school year, I'd gone to Barbara, had lain beside her in her bed, had listened politely as she'd suggested counting sheep.

  "Why sheep?" I'd asked her. "Why not cows or chickens?"

  "Sheep have the force of tradition."

  I'd crinkled my nose at her. "Speak English," I'd said.

  "Well, why not sheep?"

  "I've never even seen a sheep in real life," I'd said. "I've seen a cow. I've seen chickens."

  "Count cows, then. Count chickens." In a dippy nursery-rhyme voice, she'd said, "Moo, moo, cluck, cluck." Smiling, then laughing, she'd poked my belly after each syllable.

  Now, picturing chickens and cows, I counted backward from one thousand, but my restless thoughts-a jumble of Beethoven and McNamara, Tory and Christa, Spike and Tom, and above all, Clinton and Bush-crippled, then halted, the series of diminishing numbers. I couldn't stop thinking about the famous photograph of Truman holding a newspaper, the headline in enormous type reading, "Dewey Defeats Truman."

  By trying to force myself awake, I thought, I might be able to trick myself into sleeping. I kept my eyes open and stared at the light fixture in the center of the ceiling. The glass shade glimmered in the pink light of streetlamps coming through a chink in the curtains. The bed seemed to rock from side to side, a raft afloat in a gentle surf.

  At last I arranged pillows against the headboard and sat up. In the dark I groped for the television remote, aimed, brushed the power button with my thumb. The TV crackled to life. Cold blue light twitched around me, tinting the walls in trembling sheets and tendrils. Standing before the columns of some government building-the state capitol in Little Rock? the governor's mansion?-Clinton addressed a crowd of people shivering in the glare of bright lights. The television's volume was set low; the roaring crowd buzzed like faint static.

  I fat-fingered some buttons on the remote. I raised the volume, but also managed to engage the VCR. A synthesizer and drum machine chirped and twittered. Spike's young, clean-shaven face, upturned, filled the screen. For a moment he wore the anguished expression of a man in the throes of either passion or torment, and then his face relaxed into smiling bliss. The camera panned abruptly and shakily away, stopping on a potted palm. Fade out.

  I rewound to the title card, "John and Pete," and then there he was again. Spike, amid a flutter of grayish electronic snow. Spike, naked but for a pair of striped tube socks. Spike, improbably young, badly lit, enthusiastically erect. He virtually devoured his partner; I imagined he'd lusted after the fellow for some time, that the camera had captured the enactment of a cherished fantasy. By contrast, the other man was barely more avid than a damp tree stump.

  * * *

  Porn had always been Tom's thing, never mine. Soon after my twenty-first birthday, I'd worked up the nerve to enter the Main Street Video in Partridge Lake, and then to rent an adult video, Powertool, with two Jeffs-Stryker and Converse. I'd had no idea that the camera would record the act of sex in such graphic detail, that lights and lenses would venture so close to a cock splitting an ass-and what a cock it was, and what an ass!

  At first I felt an impossibly erotic voyeuristic rush. Soon, though, the video's flaws ruined the thrill. The music was too chattery and cheesy to suit me, too synthetic, as if it had been pulled, all of a piece, from a jar or can. The lighting was bad, either too dim or too bright. The acting-well, the men recited lines, but it could hardly be called "acting." The plot, sketchy as it was, eventually came to seem illogical, unsettling, odd. To enjoy a pornographic video, I would have to-and yet could not-overlook its many defects.

  For Tom, the gimcrackery was a virtue, not a detriment. Once, as we lay in bed watching plucked and overbuilt men fucking robotically on a shabby mauve couch, I began to complain about the tawdry music, the generic 'eighties d?cor, the lackluster sexual chemistry, the rote prattle of dirty talk.

  Tom shushed me. He said, rather grandly, "These things are artistically as well as sexually transgressive. Porn is a degenerate art form."

  Ugliness, like beauty, was in the eye of beholder, he said. Degeneracy could be a badge of honor, under certain circumstances. I thought of Stravinsky and Chagall running afoul of the Nazis.

  I started to say, "The enemy of my enemy is m
y friend," but Tom cut me off.

  "It's an act of rebellion, making one of these things," he said. Wagging his erection at me, he smiled, looked at me sidelong. "Besides. Admit it. You like that big dick, don'tcha?"

  * * *

  The more I thought about it, the more astonishing it seemed that for months, perhaps for years, one of the many videos sitting in a stack in my bedroom contained the image of a man I was destined to meet. One video of the many-or more?

  I rewound to the beginning of the video, to the credits. The title, Streets of Los Angeles, filled the screen, rugged red letters on a field of flinty gray. The title spun away into space, the gray dissolved to flickering black. A list of names scrolled up the screen in a smallish and plain white font. John Peterson was not among the names. Of course not. He would have used a pseudonym. I remembered Spike saying, or implying, that he was John-the other guy was Pete. There were two Johns, John Bambrick and John Clancy.

  I switched on the light. Tucked away, deep in the stack of videotapes, I found an old catalog. It listed hundreds of titles, each with a strange grayscale image of its box cover. John Clancy appeared in only one title, Streets of Los Angeles. Six others featured John Bambrick; I found half of those in Tom's collection. I took the three tapes into the living room, where the air was cooler, the television larger. I watched them all, fast-forwarding until I saw the black hair, the uncanny blue eyes of John Bambrick, also known as John Peterson, also known as Spike. Often, in close-up, his expression was almost foolish in the rawness of sexual need. I noticed, I could not help noticing, that in all his scenes, he was the bottom.

  * * *

  Even as Eliot and I sank into his leather armchairs, he said, "Have you had a chance to think about what I suggested on Monday?"

  I rubbed my hands together to warm them. That morning, in a narcoleptic stupor, I'd forgotten my gloves. "I think you'll have to be more specific."

  "Confronting Tom's parents."

  I shook my head. "I don't see it happening. I barely even met them, and it's just not the kind of thing I'd ever do."

  "It's up to you." He raised his hands, his fingers spread, as if surrendering. "Have you been having an easier time of it since we talked?"

  "Up and down."

  "How so? In what way?"

  "I haven't been sleeping well."

  "This is a new problem?"

  I shook my head. "Not so new. Since-. Since Tom-."

  He nodded. "Understandable."

  "Comprehensible," I said. "Not a bit reprehensible."

  He squinted at me. "I beg your pardon?"

  "From Chicago. It's nothing. Never mind." I cupped my hands together, blew warm air against my fingers and palms. "Last night I ended up going out for a few drinks with some friends. Well, a friend and her new-. Her new whatever-he-is."

  Eliot studied his fingernails. Today, they were all clean. "It sounds like there's a story behind that."

  "Not an interesting one. Eventually, after a couple of beers, I even tried to call Spike, and I found out he gave me his pager number, which freaked me out. And then-."

  "Spike? Who's Spike? Your friend's new whatever-he-is?"

  After a mostly sleepless night, my brain was hopelessly fogged. Many long moments passed before I fully understood how Eliot had gotten from Spike to Tory. He might as well have mistaken Bush for Clinton. I said, "Spike is a guy I met a few days ago. Kind of a-. We-. It turns out-." I sighed. I tucked my hands under my knees. "It's a long story."

  "You had sex with him."

  I laughed. "I guess when you put it like that, it's a short story, after all. There isn't much more to tell than that."

  He raised his hands again, the gesture of surrender. "What else has been going on?"

  I'd spent the entire day struggling through Onslaught. Stinson's diatribe concerning gender neutrality in statutes had been uncomfortable enough to read, but what followed was far more difficult. "There's this thing I have to read for work," I told Eliot. "This book by Sam Stinson. Today what I read was all about the Saint Paul human rights ordinance, adding sexual orientation to it."

  The middle third of the book comprised a venomous Philippic, a splenetic rant against the city of Saint Paul-mainly the City Council, but also its benighted citizenry. In the 'seventies the good people of the city had sensibly beaten back a cancerously dumb attempt to codify amorality into law. But then, over the course of barely ten years, the forces of evil had changed the city for the worse. Saint Paul had embraced the idiot cause of our time, "diversity"-in my mind's ear I could hear Stinson spit the word, as if it were the foulest kind of curse-and had consented to permanent debasement in the form of a human rights ordinance guaranteeing the right to be sinful.

  As I remembered Stinson's words streaming across the page, blurring before my eyes, a cold hand squeezed my stomach. To Eliot I explained some of this, the few hints and highlights that I could stand to utter aloud.

  "I would never read this book if I didn't have to," I said.

  "You don't agree with him, I take it."

  I stared at him. His face was the very image of clinical detachment. "Like anything else, political correctness can be taken to an extreme, to the point where it isn't safe to speak the truth. But that's not the intention of it, as far as I can see."

  "And what is the intention of it?"

  "Being kind to each other. Saying something kind when you could otherwise say something hurtful. The Golden Rule. That's all it is, as far as I'm concerned. The Golden Rule. Polite conduct."

  Eliot cocked his head, as if listening for muffled voices in an adjacent room. "But you say yourself, it's been taken to an extreme."

  "It can be. Some people have, obviously. But Stinson doesn't even see the good intentions behind it. And his opposition is more extreme than what he's opposing."

  "Do you-?" He cleared his throat, shifted his weight in his chair. "Do you have issues with Stinson personally?"

  "Every time I see Sam Stinson's name, or that damned slogan he stole from Mary Tyler Moore, or his people, I feel anxious. Out of sorts. Cranky. It doesn't have to be Sam Stinson. It could be Billy Graham, or Jimmy Swaggart, or Bill McCartney. Or Anders Thorstensen."

  "Why do you think that is?"

  "Because I'm gay." He flinched, as though my answer startled him. "Did you think it would take more thought?"

  "I expected you to say something different."

  "What?"

  "We may still get there. Tell me what you mean."

  "There are-what?-dozens of denominations?"

  "A couple thousand," he said.

  "A couple thousand?" For a moment I stared blindly at the shelves behind Eliot's desk, at the souvenir bat in its black cradle.

  "Yes? What about the denominations?"

  I shook off my stupor. "They can't agree on how often to have communion or even what communion means, but when it comes to hating me, none of them can wait to pinch a penny-that is to say, pitch a penny in the hat."

  "You think they hate you, personally?"

  Blood rushed in my ears. Was he making fun of me? "As a group, most Christian types-like Sam Stinson, like Billy Graham, like Jimmy Swaggart, like Anders Thorstensen-hate gay people, as a group." My throat felt clotted, spasmodic. I coughed and swallowed. "Without bothering to know any of the people they're so busy hating." My voice had risen in volume and pitch. I paused, took a breath. "As individuals, most of these people's followers would likely hate me if they knew me to be gay."

  "How does that make you feel?" He smiled-effortfully, I thought, as if following a stage direction in a script. "Sorry for the counselor question."

  "It makes me angry." With the palm of my hand I raked back my hair. It moved in stiff waves between my fingers. I needed a haircut. "It scares me."

  "Why?"

  "Why? Why not? I don't want people to hate me."

  "But what does it matter if Sam Stinson hates people like you? What would it matter if Sam Stinson hated you personally?"


  "I don't understand the question. How could it not matter? Hatred is a bad thing, isn't it?"

  "Have you never hated anyone?"

  Like bile, the name of Anders Thorstensen boiled to the top of my throat. I said, "Of course."

  "Did you have good reason?"

  "Of course."

  "Think of one person for whom you've felt hatred. One person you knew and talked to and hated." He waited a moment, reading my face. With his eyes on me, I felt how the corners of my mouth were pulled down, how my teeth were clenched. "You already have someone in mind." I nodded. "Now tell me this. What did your hatred do to that person? How did he-? He?" I nodded again. "How did he react to your hatred?"

  "If he even knows about it," I told Eliot, "if he even recognizes it, I doubt he cares much about it."

  Letting his head fall back, Eliot ran his hand up the length of his neck. A little fringe of black hairs he had missed in shaving circled his Adam's apple. Gazing at a point on the ceiling, he said, "Why do you suppose he cares so little?"

  "Why should he? What am I to him?"

  Glinting, pupils narrowed to pinpoints, his eyes met mine. "What is Sam Stinson to you?"

  I had nothing to say to that. I looked away.

  "What is Billy Graham to you? Jimmy Swaggart? Anders Thorstensen?"

  My eyes found his again. "Anders Thorstensen very likely has the power and means to put me out of a job."

  "And the rest? What reason is there to give them that much power over your life?"

  With my mouth already open to protest, I remembered crumpling the gap-toothed kid's leaflet. And taking the time to make confetti of the second leaflet, the one I'd found on my car. And skulking away from the Stinson people in the State Office Building. I felt again the mixture of thumping rage and quavering fear I'd felt in each case. I breathed deeply, pressed my hands together, calmed myself. To Eliot I said, "I guess a little more equanimity would be good."

  "You said something earlier. Something about communion. Where did that come from? Is your family religious?"

  "Not at all."

  "Not at all? Never?"

  "A long, long time ago, when I was a little kid."

  "Tell me about that."

  "I don't remember, really."

  But that wasn't strictly true. I remembered sunlight streaming through an open window. An airy white room with braided rugs on a linoleum floor. An ancient, enormous upright piano nearly filling one narrow wall. A younger Barbara sitting on the claw-footed piano bench, a book perched on her arm, open to a sunny drawing of giraffes and antelopes parading up the broad gangway of Noah's ark.