How Long Has This Been Going On (82 page)

Alone with Peter, Lois said, "Let's get our stories straight."

"Hey, there's a dog in there."

"Were they after you or what? Were you in fear of bodily harm?"

"Yeah, they were after me. I don't know if they were going to do anything. I mean, don't get a boy wrong, I'm really glad you—"

"If
they were going to do anything, huh? What, do they have to lug a cannon around for you to get the picture? It always starts with nothing. Walking behind you and calling out things. But it ends with killing you. And how about looking at me when I—"

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

"Like that guy in Maine a few years back. Not much older than you, and it started like nothing with him. High-schoolers doing a little bullying. Suddenly, he's screaming that he can't swim but they're throwing him in the river. Why, Peter? For sport!
We die for their fun!"
Had she been literary, she might have added, " As flies to wanton boys.'" Of course, then she wouldn't have been my Lois.

She was scarcely Peter's, at that. He had never heard her yell before, never seen her furious. In the car, he stared at her. They weren't talking.

Because Lois was deep in thought. No, it's not sport, is it? It's serious business. Because it's always started by the big secret gay. He's so crazed to convince the world that he's hetero that it's not enough to
appear
straight. He's got to organize defensive expeditions. So when he's a teen, he's leading his friends in jump-the-faggot assaults. When he's older, he's heading up Parents With Christian Values groups. Because, let's face it, the real straights are busy running car pools and coaching Little League and making love. The fake straight is the one obsessed with getting the gays.

"Your father," Lois said suddenly. "Did he ever seem gay to you?"

"He... Did he what?"

"Okay, I don't mean gay like belonging to our kind of life. But did you ever notice him... looking at another man? Trying not to cruise? Maybe getting all alert when one of those hunk-in-the-shower soap commercials comes on television?"

Peter thought it over. "I can't say I ever did. You think it's funny that he's so gung ho about hetness?"

"Everyone else in the country is worried about the economy. He's worried about who's having sex with who else where no one can even see it. I think it's funny, yeah."

"So who's the dog in the backseat?"

"Rock Hudson."

"Oh, that's no name! He looks like a Winston to me."

"Winston?" Lois echoed, laughing.

"Hey, Winston." Peter extended his hand, and the dog nosed shyly forward. "Here, boy. Winston, dog. Yeah, that's the way." Peter petted the dog. "Good boy. Good dog." To Lois, he said, "He knows who he is."

After dropping Peter off, Lois brought Winston home and announced that she was starting right in on building a doghouse. Walt wanted to help, as long as he didn't have to get too close to the power saw, and Elaine and the Kid went upstairs to schmooze in his favorite part of the house, a semifinished attic room with a great sunny dormer window that had been fixed up with a bench running along its length. There the Kid and Elaine ensconced themselves and watched Lois and Walt starting Winston's doghouse.

"Isn't she amazing?" said Elaine. "Who else would have the lumber and tools right where she wants them—not to mention knowing how to do it in the first place?"

"Do you ever... stray?"

"Oh, Johnny!"

"Well..."

"What woman would stray from Lois? She's my goddess, my secret, my red Delicious apple. She's everything."

"But do you never see some young creature with the dear velvet skin and full-blooming breasts and think..."

"Well... hmm. Last year. During our annual New York visit for, la!, Gay Pride. I did see this youngish blond woman hurrying up Third Avenue. She had one of those new haircuts where it's thick atop with a brush cut along the brow and very thin around the ears, and she was walking with such a heavy tread—and her eyes! Glowing with comment and judgments. I thought, That's the new young Lois. Twenty-three, twenty-four, and, oh, so dishy! But did I follow her? Surely never."

"You're content."

"Lois and my books, that's it for me. And some socializing work. Some reason to feel that I have done something for someone before I depart."

"That's your writing."

"No, the only way to do something is to
do something.
There's a little boy in this town who may have... Well, some ill condition. And he's so scared and so unknowing and so unloved. Can I do something for him? For the blind? For the lame, the dispossessed? I've had a successful life, excellent love and work. I owe—surely I owe—sharing something of that with those who haven't what I have."

"No, you're crying! Jesus..."

"It's that boy and his fear. What I saw. No, I'm all right. Look...."

Elaine indicated the window, through which the Kid saw Lois measuring two-by-fours with a T square while Walt gamboled with Winston.

"Natural people," said Elaine.

"Not Walt. He created himself, just like me—but there're a few kinks in his system. He built the maze, yet he doesn't know the way home."

Elaine was gazing out the window.

"He's joyful," she noted. "Innocent. There is so little of that. Do you know, I'm now phone pals with my old editor? Johnna Roberts? Gloomy and jaded—yet somehow I sense that that is New York's version of joyful and innocent. It's the things you are when you're feeling good. Oh. No, not good. Sensible. Profound. The average American's idea of a good time is a six-pack, no speeding ticket, and some girl gets fucked. The New Yorker's idea of a good time is Israel retaliates for a terrorist attack."

"I could use that line in the Act."

"Anyway, Johnna Roberts. Nowadays she's very into novels by uncompromising young women. She tells me, 'How did I ever let you go?'"

"How did she?"

"She wasn't ready then. I don't even know how it happened that / was. Oh... I think of writing about how it feels to be a dyke the way I felt about Lois the day I met her:
This has to occur.
That's it, Johnny. That's all there is."

The Kid, too, gazed out the window. Lois had defined her doghouse framework and was starting to fill out the sides. Walt, who had painted (red) what structure there was, was now painting the spare two-by-fours, just in case, while playing ball with Winston.

"Such wonderful people I've known," said Elaine. "Such lovely, caring, lovely people. If a fairy had come and said, 'Go straight and I'll grant you a million dollars,' I'd have turned it down. Wouldn't you?"

"Well... A million I'd have to think about."

* * *

Lois had a buy scheduled for that evening, way up in Contoocook. But she was so busy that day that she didn't take off till after nine o'clock, and it was nearly midnight that she got back to Lenapee. Still, she decided to head straight for the store and unload then and there.

Wonder how much it costs me keeping these lights on all night?, she was wondering, though of course by now Elaine was earning enough for them both to live in the most heedless luxury, had either wanted to. Lois always paid her own way, covered her share; it wouldn't even have occurred to her not to do so. Elaine's money was Elaine's. She gave some of it to good, solid charities like Lambda Legal Defense Fund and frittered some of it away on froufrou like that English book club with the fancy editions: Agatha Christie bound as tasty as Shakespeare, when Elaine had Lois's own collection of Christie paperbacks to choose from. But, if it made Elaine happy, it was good.

How easy to find happiness, Lois mused. Whatever else they toss at you, it's there, just ask for it. Oh, there's a line? So line up. It's waiting, it happens. Lois's parents had no trouble hooking up. They lived quietly and joyfully together, never a tough word in a month of Sundays. And when one died, the other died, too. And think of me, now. I saw Elaine and her flat tire and I just... stopped.

Going to have to take this display of baseball bats downstairs, make room for the new stuff: a shelf of Oz books in early editions with color plates and such to sting the collectors right in the quick, a pile of song sheets in the pre—World War I king size, a series of British royalty mugs, an antique German Monopoly set, a silver business-card caddy, maps, prints, sporting equipment... I must be the queen of what's irrelevant.

Lois's eye fell on the bear trap, and she impulsively decided to open it. Fit it up for the kill. Maybe she had spent one hour or so too long with maps and prints, not to mention moire fans. Maybe she was fascinated, as some are, by
WET PAINT
or
DO NOT ENTER
. Anyway, Lois carefully set the jaws of the trap apart and ready to spring, then stood back and stared at it.

Shoot, what a hefty piece, she thought.

The dog breeder had likened it to a self-administered test. He said, "Everyone has to face their own particular trap—set it out and bait it themselves. Then they have to conquer it. You know? We make our own traps."

"What if you don't know what your trap is?" Lois asked.

"Ma'am, that would be as bad as falling into it."

Life as a
boutiquière.
Lois phoned Elaine to say she was going to be home late, did the receipts, priced some of the new stuff, and decided to carry all but one of the bats downstairs herself and set up some of the new merchandise. In a cash-down industry like this, delays of a day or two could send business to your competitors—like that sneaky Penny Koster in Goffstown, with her Penny's From Heaven (which Elaine referred to as "Doilies From Hell"). Lois loved getting a new buy priced and on the shelves within a day.

As she was about to come upstairs, she heard something, a noise from outside, maybe a car. Quickly, silently, Lois mounted the stairs and paused in the doorway. More noises—car doors? No, a trunk. Someone grunting—carrying something heavy? The sounds were coming from the back, so there was no window to look out of.

Place is all lit up, and I'm downstairs, so it looked deserted. And someone's here to make trouble. Okay, let's do the camera. Lois grabbed the Polaroid, listened, heard nothing, then pulled the back door open.

There in the night was Peter Smith's father, huffing around with a big rough stained can of something; and Lois snapped his shot.

"One more," she told him. "Say 'cheese.'"

He didn't seem startled. "Well, there's the lezbin, I see," he said, putting down the can. "Didn't notice you in the light of the store."

"Went downstairs," said Lois, taking him from another angle. "What's in the drum?"

"Gasoline."

Another photo. "Nice of you to do the store and spare the house."

"The house is next." He laughed. "Now, here it's so late I thought you'd left the car overnight. Guess I shoulda known, but that is not gonna matter. You and me, we're gonna settle up now and here, see." And he came forward, with the gasoline, into the store.

"If you have to talk in clichés, it's
here and now,"
said Lois, snapping away and passing the pictures from the camera to the counter quite, quite calmly, thinking, There's the Stan Musial bat and the open bear trap. He's so slow and stupid, he probably isn't armed, but if he moves for a piece, I push him into the trap. Fact, I'd kind of like to.

"Ayuh, clichés you say" was the response of Peter's father.

The lug. Thinks he's got me just by his bulk and his manner. By his testosterone. The helpless granny shaking away here. Christ, what a jackass! Doesn't even take a look around, maybe warn himself about the jaws of death just behind him. Smirking at me. Enjoying himself.

"Oh, clichés," he sang out. "But you'll be Fainting Fanny when I get done." His face hardened, all wrapped up in itself. "You can't have children the Christian way, so you witch our sons to your cult."

I could lunge forward. One good push and he'd fall straight back into the trap. The world would be a better place for everyone with scum like this out of the picture. And how many times am I supposed to repel this invader? The house is next? Oh, the
house
is
next,
huh?

Simple as dough, Peter's father pulls up on the lid of the gasoline can, grins at Lois, and tips the can over, to let the liquid saturate the wooden floor.

"Place'll go up like a fifty-year-old
Guardian,"
says Peter's father.

"Thing is," says Lois, ready to move the instant he reaches for a match, "people like you aren't just dangerous to gays. You're dangerous to everyone. Because there isn't a thing you don't hate except yourself, and I've had it clear to Herkimer with the likes of you!" Staring at him, she takes one step back. "All my life," she says, "I've been ignoring you." One more step back. "And that was my dumb mistake." One more step. She's even with the bat. She grabs it, moves forward. "Well, no more," and now he's reaching for something in his pocket, but Lois feints left, then hefts the bat up, right, and solid, smashing down on his shins with a crack you could hear in western Vermont. Peter's father goes down screaming, missing the bear trap by a foot and a half.

Fuck, I got the angle wrong.

Lois gives Peter's father another taste of the bat, right in the crotch. "One to grow on," she tells him, as he goes into a wild gasping thing, like
Hgnuuuuuuh.

"The house is next?"
she asks him, delivering one more blow to his genitals. I mean, why fool around, you know?

Lois calls the police. Then she calls Elaine to say she'll be home even later than she thought with a really interesting story. As the cops pull up, she tosses another Souvenir of New Hampshire miniature tray at the trap, which springs closed momentously.

Peter visited the next day, clearly worshipful of these brazen, bracing New Yorkers. And, lo, one of them turned out to be Jerrett Troy!

"You're famous!" cried Peter, first thing. "Just like Elaine. And my father's in jail and I'm this more or less wild gay boy who's eager to learn and anxious to please. I'm sort of cute, by the way."