All the Old Haunts (5 page)

There is a brief clatter outside the door as she scampers away.

“So, tell me,” Phil says, the last of the smoke rolling up over his top lip, over his face.

“No.”

He stubs out the roach in his palm. “’Scuse?”

“You gotta go,” Curtis says. He rolls from his side to his back, pauses, struggles to his feet. He wobbles. “I can’t talk to you, Phil, you gotta go now.”

Curtis is gently tugging Phil by the hand, up off the bed. Phil doesn’t resist, but when he is up he gets up close in Curtis’s face.

“What are you doing? You had me race over here … You smoked up all my dope.”

Curtis is shaking his head. “I can’t. I just can’t. Tell you what, you call me. Right? Go home, get on the phone, call me. When you’re not here, I can tell you.”

“You crazy, Curt? That what you wanted to tell me, that you’ve gone completely, bedbug, nuts?”

Phil is being ushered out the door as Curtis speaks. “Just, go and call me … or you wait there by the phone, and I’ll call you. Right. There you go, Phil, I’ll call you. Thanks again.”

Phil is standing out in the hallway now, with Ma looking nervously over his shoulder. “No way,” Phil says, “I’m calling you, the second I get home.”

“Great,” Curtis says, slamming the door shut and locking it. “Great, great, you call me. I’ll be here.”

He hits the floor, crawls on his belly like a scene from Guadalcanal, until he reaches his bed, reaches under his bed, reaches his collection.

He pulls out one magazine. No, not that one, the other one. Yes. And that one, that one, that one.

They are spread out on the floor in front of him, and he is spread out on the floor in front of them.

He is investigating the scenes. His beloved scenes. The girl scenes, the girl-girl scenes. The guy-girl scenes. The guy scenes.

He is investigating himself, assessing himself, bits of himself pressed against the carpeted floor.

“Oh my sweet Jesus,” he says, flopping over, climbing to his feet, pulling on clothes.

He goes to the door. He barely touches the knob.

“Everything all right in there, Son?” Ma calls.

He stalls, spins, makes for the window.

He wobbles in the window frame, lurches, reaches the telephone pole. He carefully makes his way down the spike ladder.

“What are you doing here? And what are you doing stoned so early in the morning? And you got any more?”

Curtis smiles warmly at Lisa, despite her flat tone. “Ah, you know me so well. Don’t ya, Lis? I can always count on you, huh? To know me.”

“No. My
mother
told me you were high when she came to get me. Said I shouldn’t even let you come up. I told her not to worry because you were even more harmless this way.”

“What you say that for? I am
not
harmless. This way or any other way. I’m not harmless at
all,
Lisa.”

Lisa closes the door behind them and walks to her bed. She is still in her shorty nightgown, and she does a little slide move as she hits the forest green satin bedspread.

“Of course you are,” she says. “Totally harmless. But that’s not a bad thing. That’s why you were allowed in the house, for one thing.”

He stands there, a little bleary-eyed, a little weavy. He points, about to make his stand.

But he is distracted by the fish.

He goes over to the very large fishbowl Lisa keeps as a sort of centerpiece to the room, resting like a great bubbling head, an Apollo moon helmet on a plinth. He gets his face up close, and stares in.

“Curtis,” Lisa says sternly. “Curtis? If you knock over my fish …”

“I am not,” he says.

“I
said,
if you knock over—”

“Harmless. I am in no way harmless. Don’t I look like that scene, from that crap movie you were watching? Where DiCaprio is looking at what’s her name through the fish tank? Don’t you think I look like that?”

She sighs, an irritated sigh. “Not. You look more like one of the fish, actually. Especially the eye. And the lips. Sleep on your face last night or what?”

Curtis goes on anyway, staring close up at the two fish in the bowl. One is a plump, bug-eyed goldfish with gentle feathery winglike fins that flutter lightly as he floats and swoops, comes to the surface for a noisy small bloop of air, then cruises down again, through the stone archway, brushing past the fake green sprig of foliage. He stares for a while at this, further and further disappearing into the water world of it, even making the same poppy poppy mouth moves as the goldfish.

Then there is the other one, the blunt, myopic-looking creature, dashing past and catching Curtis’s lazy eye. He is an altogether different creature, flattish, with stubbier fins and an allover silver flesh that is so thin you can see the workings of his body inside. And the workings are not working so well. He seems to have a collapsed lung, or broken flotation device of some sort, because all he is able to do is lie for periods among the smooth green stones on the bottom, catching his strength, then suddenly bursting in a line to the top, to gulp air or steal a fish flake, before sinking again, bouncing off the glass, coming to rest once more on the bottom.

Where he appears to lock Curtis in a penetrating, knowing stare.

“Hello,” Lisa says from the other side of the glass.

He is momentarily stunned to see her, as if he had come to think he was alone with the fish.

But as his eyes focus in on the big-eyed smiling Lisa magnified by the glass and water, he becomes well reminded of why he is here.

“Nice nightie,” he says.

She looks down at herself, giving him a view of the top of her head, magnifying the crooked part through her honey-colored hair.

“Thanks,” she says. “You want to borrow it?”

“No,” Curtis snaps, “that’s not what I meant at all.”

Lisa remains calm, if a little irritated with him. “Hello, Homer, I think I know that. I was offering you my nightie, but not for you to
wear
it.”

The slowness of Curtis’s uptake is exaggerated by the fact that they’re having the conversation through the fishbowl.

“Oh,” he says, as both fish cross his view, going opposite ways. He goes momentarily cross-eyed. “Sorry, Lis. I’m just, a little weird and stupid right now.”

“That’s what makes ya great, Curt,” Lisa says brightly, pulling her nightdress over her head and offering him a CinemaScope view of her bare breasts.

Curtis, still crouched on the opposite side of the water, studies her for a while. The fish keep buzzing past, breaking his concentration.

“So?” Lisa says.

He straightens up, looking her in the face now. “Ya?”

“Ya,” she says.

“Cool,” he says.

“But,” Lisa says as Curtis follows her smooth naked bottom to the bed, “I’m going to put the movie on,
Romeo and J
—”

“No,
no,”
he barks.

“It was the smoke.”

Curtis is not talking.

“Would you please stop worrying about it? Studies show dope’ll make you that way. Plays hell with your sexual function. If you hadn’t smoked before you came over you would have done fine.”

He is sitting upright, has his arms folded across his chest, the covers pulled up tight to his belly. The movie is back on.

“What, are you mad at
me
now?” Lisa asks.

“No. Of course I’m not … could you turn
him
off, please?”

She snaps off the video, sits up in position right next to Curtis, leaning heavily shoulder-to-shoulder with him.

“So what’s the big deal?” she asks.

“The big deal? The big
deal,
Lisa? The big deal, is that I’m
gay.
All right? That deal big enough for you? Happy now? Well, you asked for it, and there you are. I’m gay. You happy?”

Lisa remains in position. If anything, she is leaning a little bit heavier into Curtis. There is a thunderous nothingness in the room at first, followed by a burst of noise out of the fish as they careen around the tank, knocking things over, possibly cracking the glass, making audible gasping noises as they breach the surface. An air force jet buzzes the house.

“Hmm,” she says.

“Hmm?” he says. “
Hmmm,
Lisa?”

She clicks the film back on. “You’re not gay, Curt.”

“Stop that,” he says, grabbing the remote and shutting it down again. “Don’t contradict me. I’m telling you, I’m gay. Did you see me there? I didn’t make it, and what’s more I didn’t even come close. I
knew
I wasn’t going to make it before I even started. I had as much chance of satisfying the
fish
as I did of satisfying you.”

She slides back down into recline position. “You weren’t gay last Sunday, if I recall,” she says coolly.

“That’s right, I wasn’t. It happened last night.”

One hand flies to cover her mouth, then two. When that’s not enough to cover up the bursting humor all over her face, Lisa disappears under the covers.

Curtis sits stoically for a bit, watching the covers tremble, listening to murmurs of giggles.

“All right, all right,” he says. “Cut it out. You’re not helping me any.”

She whips down the covers. “You don’t need my help, you need a psychiatrist. You need a whole team of them, ya goon.”

“I know,” he says, “I was thinking that myself.”

Lisa crawls from beneath the covers, crouches naked in front of Curtis, and gives him a loud slap on the forehead.

“Dodo,” she says. “I meant, you’re crazy for thinking that you
went
gay just like that, overnight.”

He points at her. “Exactly. Overnight. I had these dreams, Lisa … oh, awful stuff … all night … like I was in a gay porn film … like I was the
star …
doing stuff … stuff, I don’t even know where I
learned
it, I swear …”

She puts a hand on his chest to slow him down. “My god,” she says, “feel you. You are going to have a heart attack.”

“Good,” he says. “I want a heart attack.”

“Stop it. Listen, ya tightass—”

“Not anymore—”

“Shut up. Listen, Mr. Freakish pent-up. Everybody dreams.”

“Not like this.”

“Ya, probably, just like this.”

“Well I don’t think so. But anyway, even if they did … the dreams would, like, y’know,
stop
when they woke up.”

Slowly like a naughty dog, Curtis allows his head to hang. He is staring down into his folded hands.

She raises his chin with two fingers.

“And yours … aren’t going away.”

He shakes his head, Lisa’s fingers sticking to him as if they are glued. He tries to look down again, but she forces him back up, forces his eyes to hers.

She speaks in a super-sweet voice. “And you’ve been playing with yourself over it too, haven’t you, honey?”

Curtis makes his move now. He squeezes his eyes shut.

She pulls him by the hair, and kisses him.

“It’s all right, Curtis.” She is grinning, near to laughing, when he opens his eyes. “It’s perfectly all right.”

“No it’s not,” he insists. “I don’t like that stuff. I don’t think I should even be thinking about it. I don’t think
anybody
should be thinking about it. It’s wrong. I’m sorry, but it’s wrong.”

She scoots away from him a couple of inches, breaks all contact with him.

“Now
that’s
your damn problem, Curt. Not that you’re gay, but that you’re a jackass.”

The phone next to the bed rings, and Lisa answers it, the sour look still hard on her face.

“Ya,” she says, “so what do
you
want with him?”

In a few seconds, she takes the phone from her ear and covers the mouthpiece. “You don’t want to talk to your moron cousin right now, do you? That would be the
worst
thing you could—”

“Damn,” he says. “Damn.”

The small but mighty voice calls from the receiver, “Get on this goddamn phone.”

Curtis takes the receiver while Lisa shakes her head and mouths, “Do not tell Phil.”

“First,” Phil barks halfway through Curt’s hello, “you send for me. Then, you smoke my dope. Then, you kick me out. Then, you lie to me and tell me you’ll call me. Then, you scare your mother shitless by disappearing out the friggin’ window. What the hell is wrong with you?” I’m gay.

The pause is like six normal phone calls long.

“What? I mean, what?”

Curtis pulls the phone from his ear as Phil shouts. Lisa nods I-told-you-so and turns her film back on. Curtis turns away, refusing to see.

“You heard me, Phil.”

“Shut up, you’re not gay.”

“Shut up, I am. I’m telling you, I’m totally gay. I wasn’t yesterday, but I damn well am now. I had dreams, Phil, like you wouldn’t believe.”

“Because you had dreams? Jeez, boy, just get over it. We’ll forget you ever said anything.”

Curtis covers his eyes before the next bit, as if a powerful spotlight is being trained on him. “I haven’t been able to stop the thoughts all day. It’s happening still … right now even … and Lisa won’t stop putting on that
movie…
. And, there’s worse. Phil … Now listen, right … You were in my dreams, Phil.”

Lisa instantly snaps off the set. Rolls over toward Curtis as if he were now the show.

“Me,” Phil says, in a slow cold growl. “Me? Doing … what
you
were doing?”

“Doing it
with
me,” Curt says, a sort of death-rattle crackle interspersed with the words.

There is a long deathly silence from both phone parties.

Lisa has to muffle herself in the pillow.

“I—? I’m gonna kick your ass, boy,” Phil says. “You hear me? I’m gonna give you the
cure.
I’m gonna give you
such
a beating—”

“Don’t bother,” Curtis says dejectedly, “I’ll probably just
like
it.”

He climbs over Lisa and hangs up the phone. She reaches instantly and unplugs it. Then she inches closer again to Curtis and the two of them lie flattened, motionless but for very shallow breathing and heavy heart beating. Her head is on his bare chest. His arm is around her.

“He’s right,” Curtis says.

“He’s wrong,” she says.

“It’s wrong,” he says. “I hate that stuff.”

“It’s normal,” she says.

They lay in silence. After too much of it, she reaches for the remote. He grabs her hand to stop her.