Lawnboy (10 page)

“She doesn’t mean what you think,” he said, but his voice faltered.

“How would you know? You’ve never had a real conversation with them.”

“I’ve seen them outside your house. I’ve seen your father fixing your bicycle for you—watching you pedal away, making sure the chain didn’t fall off.” He looked at me. “They love you.”

I blew my nose. “If only as a concept. If they love me it’s only because I’m their mutual creation. I represent a certain lost thing between them. But they haven’t been behaving toward me with anything approaching affection.”

He was silent for a time, breathing. “Aren’t we erudite?” he said finally.

“Don’t make fun of me.”

“Too many thoughts,” he said. “You’re thinking too many thoughts. Calm down now, turn off your mind.”

I rolled my eyes. “I’m hardly a child.”

“Get over here,” he insisted. “
Now.
”

Slowly, methodically, he began rubbing my head. I tried to relax, concentrating on his weighted palms working the contours of my skull, its bumps, gullies, and planes. He got me then. He knew me this well: nothing anyone did could center me like this, could demarcate my borders with such easy precision.

“Feel better?”

I nodded. I glanced over at him through one eye.
What was I doing with him?
So what if I decided to say it?

“Why haven’t you been having sex with me?”

His eyes blinked rapidly. I might have asked him if I could taste his blood.

“We have sex,” he said softly.

“When was the last time? Tell me. Has it been a month, two? You don’t even remember.”

His brow clenched. He seemed truly, deeply flustered, so much so that it was hard not to back down and forget it. “I’ve been busy as hell with my job,” he rasped.

And yet I could answer: two months, eleven days. My eyes watered.
“See?”

He propped himself up, held up a hand like a crossing guard. “Hey, that’s not fair. Just let me off the hook, okay?”

“No one’s putting you on the hook.”

“I don’t need to be accused of something at”—he picked up the alarm clock, held it mere inches from his face—“at three in the morning.”

“That’s not what I’m doing.”

“I don’t believe it,” he said, yanking once at the covers. He turned away from me.

“Are you impotent?” I said quietly.

“No.”

“Are you pushing me away?”

No answer.

“Hel-
lo—”

“No, I’m not pushing you away.”

“Do you have another boyfriend?”

“
No.
Now stop it. I’m not subjecting myself to your interrogation. Just go to sleep.”

I settled back in the bed. “If you gave me an explanation, I’d understand. I could be patient, okay? I want to help. All I need is a little explanation.”

He seemed enwrapped in some tendril of thought. He glanced away. Quietly, he said, “Did it ever occur to you that you’re just too damn horny?”

I laughed out loud. The idea was preposterous. Wasn’t everyone horny? “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“No, let’s shift the light to you. Do you know what it’s like to feel that you’re disappointing somebody every minute of your life?”

My face heated. “What?”

“I’m talking about your neediness. You’re putting too much pressure on me.”

I glanced at the picture of Lorna on the bureau. “Oh, it’s my fault, I get it. Christ.” I shook my head, hard. “You’re a gay man, for God’s sake.” And then I leapt out of bed, walked down the hall, and curled up on the kitchen chair.

I sat there, palming the loose change he’d left on the counter. I loaded it in my pocket—forty-five cents, no big deal, but it was the gesture that shocked me. In the entire realm of his life I meant about as much to him as a chauffeur or a pet. He liked the
idea
of having somebody around, but when it came down to the day-to-day obligations of living with someone, the duty to affection, he came up unbearably short.

No wonder Lorna wanted him to have nothing to do with Poppy.

I walked outside, crept into the garden. The sounds of the night: a plane overhead, blinking, vanishing, then nothing. Shifting circuits on a sprinkler system. I edged closer to the property line. A rustling beside the pool cage. I knew it: red stripe, yellow stripe. Black snout. Coral snake.

But it was only our neighbor. She was sitting in a lawn chair in her backyard, pressing a cup of coffee to her chin. She gazed out at the trees with such intensity that it was hard to watch her. In the one and only time we’d ever talked, she spooned bloodmeal around the roots of her begonias, her personal trick for keeping their colors so vibrant. Now, for whatever reason, I lost my usual sense of shyness and caution. I decided to walk over to her.

“I hope I didn’t startle you.”

She kept staring at her garden wall, and shook her head. “I heard you coming,” she whispered.

A silence between us. Dew dripping from the staghorn ferns. “You couldn’t sleep, either?” I said finally.

She nodded, sniffed. She wiped at her nose with a balled Kleenex in her fist.

“Your begonias look beautiful,” I said.

She glanced over to them. “They are,” she said quietly, satisfied. “Aren’t they? Thank you. Thank you for noticing.”

She turned to me then for the first time. Her chin glistened in the dark. I wanted to step back, embarrassed. “Are you okay?”

She started crying again. I stood beside her, looking down at the sparkling grass.

“I’m sorry,” she said through a low sob.

“How’s your husband?” I asked, glancing over at the single light in the window.

“Drunk,” she said. “A basket case.”

The dew felt icy on my forehead. A warm breeze rattled the coconut palms. “If you ever need help,” I said, “with your garden …”

“You would?” she said, her eyes brightening slightly.

“I’ll water your begonias,” I offered. “I’d love to feed them.”

“I’d appreciate that. What a nice gesture. Thank you—”

“Evan,” I said, and extended my hand.

“Mrs. Stendhal,” she said. “Virginia Stendhal. Thank you very much.”

“Have a good night now.”

I walked back into the house, down the hall to our room. The door was half closed; I stopped. Already I heard the snoring of Pedro, the Doberman, a full sawing throttle that could make us laugh when our moods were right. I didn’t expect that now. I pushed open the door, reluctant. Had I harmed him beyond imagining, underestimating my own capacity to hurt?

He sprawled on the bed, motioning me toward him. His eyes, though sad, glimmered in invitation.

“What?”

“Be quiet,” he said with tenderness.

My gratitude was boundless, large as a country. Why was I crying? He took hold of my arm, pinned me to the bed, and to my bafflement and surprise began to make love to me.

I had to know things. I had to take apart everything I saw, even as a kid: lamps, toys, hairdryers, toasters. The world was a flurry of blues, oranges, and golds, unbearable in their vibrancy. Sid and Ursula tried their best to calm me down, but I skated away from their grasp, agitated, voracious. I had to ask, where is this going, how is this put together, why are we so shy, so brittle? There was Beau Roberts’s mouse. I wriggled it in my cupped palm, on its back, eyes red, astonished. I fumbled for the toy knife, gently nicking its fur, wanting more than anything to peel back that white, exposing the pulsing wet bead inside, before Beau’s mother caught me in the act. Our phone rang later that evening. I tried to tell my parents I only loved the mouse, but my words fractured in my mouth. They sat across the kitchen table, fingers latched, gazing at me with their wet, dazzled eyes.

***

The morning air was sluggish and sweet, yellowing the surfaces with pollen. We lounged inside the pool cage, reading through the
Herald
and eating carambola. On such mornings it was easy to convince myself that there was indeed something between us, that, together, we were actually immersed in the moment. We felt a pleasure in our silence, a camaraderie and a comfort, a mutual respect for the distance between us.

The week had been a good one. On Tuesday, William had surprised me by taking me to the Channel 7 Studios (at last breaking his pact to keep me hidden from his coworkers), where he introduced me to Dinah Strang, aka Dusty Cartwright, host of
Casper’s Corners,
my favorite childhood TV show. She’d been out of work, in hiding for years, after the FCC crackdown on the endorsement of products by the hosts of such programs—in this case Dinah’s own Dusty Cartwright Dairy Bar. A host of rumors had swirled around her disappearance—one, that she’d lost her leg to gangrene; another, that she was living on the streets of Newcastle, Delaware, a sometime prostitute, after draining her bank accounts and turning over the funds to the SPCA. It was hard to believe any of it now, as she stood before the flying-fish sculptures outside the studio, preparing for her local comeback program, which already gave off the queasy scent of failure. I wasn’t giving up on her, though. She held me close—a big blowsy grandma in a fringed white cowboy suit—as William snapped the picture. “A big smoocheroony for your Aunt Dusty,” she cried, and I kissed her then, unfazed by her pancake makeup, her whiskied breath. She looked at me, confused, stricken, as if I were some demanding child.

William flapped the newspaper once on his lap. In Virginia’s trees next door: a riot of orchids. “Did you know a Todd Bemus?” he said offhandedly.

I moved to the edge of the patio chair and leaned toward him. “Yeah, I went to school with him.”

He raised his brows. The headline of his page read OBITUARIES.

“He died?”

He handed the paper to me. I pulled in a breath and held it. Over his name I saw Todd’s yearbook photo, his white hair—“bleach out,” we called it—his pink, dangerous lips. Already he looked like he knew so much more than the others, his eyes bitter, yet willful. He might have been someplace far ahead in the future. I passed over the announcement:
Todd Bemus of Coral Gables, Florida, died Thursday of complications due to AIDS in San Francisco, California. He was 20 years old and is survived by his mother, Cherry, his sisters, Heather, of Port St. Lucie, and Tabitha, of Nags Head, North Carolina.

“He was a friend?” William asked.

I kept shaking my head. “We were in gym together for two years.”

“Twenty,” William said.
“Shit.”

I clenched my right hand tightly, rubbing a knuckle with my thumb. My throat filled quickly with tears. Still, it didn’t seem quite real to me, not only because I’d been out of touch with Todd for two years, but because the event seemed like something he’d have staged, watching it take place from afar, then obnoxiously showing up at his own funeral—
“ta da”
—laughing at everybody, then apologizing for all the grief he’d caused. Dead. How could Todd, of all people, be dead?

William rested his arm on my shoulder. I must have looked sadder than I knew.

“Wasn’t he too young?” I said. “I mean, I thought it took ten years to come down with symptoms.”

He raised his eyebrows again. “Not always. Sometimes—” His voice trailed off.

We sat still, reading about the impending water shortage and the proliferation of hi-tech firms in Boca Raton, pretending that it was just another humid South Florida morning, that something of consequence hadn’t split open the day. A sluggishness settled in my arms, the tips of my fingers. I wasn’t used to seeing my friends die. There was June Pulte, of course, whose car had sledded off a storm-slick road into a cypress stand after leaving Disney World, and Mark McNitt, who’d OD’d on a lethal cocktail of speed, Valium, butane, and vodka, but neither of these had been close friends of mine, and these incidents were mere accidents, quick dealings of fate that hadn’t mucked with the deepest part of their identities. It was happening all around us, I knew it, though it was sometimes hard to believe. William, for one, had lost nearly all of his friends: Thomas and Mark, David and Larry, Tony and Richard. But it was something that happened to older men, men in their thirties and forties, not to people like me.

William took the Dobermans for a walk, and I squatted beside the pool, testing the water chemistry with the little kit, waiting for the PH to go pink. I strained out some leaves from the surface. Poor Todd. I thought about how he’d tried to get closer to me, how he’d called me one day out of the blue to watch videos with him. He’d gotten a hold of the whole Pam Grier “ouevre,” he called it—
Coffy
and
Foxy Brown
among them—and he’d wanted to watch them with me because he thought only
I
would appreciate them, and then I promised to get back to him. I knew what a big deal it was for him to call, how he’d probably worried about it all day, and yet I completely and totally blew him off.

Secretly, I believed he had a crush on me. True or not, this was the real reason I kept my distance from him. I preferred to spend time with him in public, at Dadeland, at Haulover Park—any place where he couldn’t jump me, for every time I was alone with him I felt a tremendous pressure, even if it was only communicated through the weight of his gaze and the way he sat so close to me. It was too bad that I didn’t feel the slightest bit of attraction to him.

Still, I believed he was the funniest guy in the world. He could make me fall down the stairs in stitches, mimicking friends or second-rate celebrities like Joan Van Ark or Tori Spelling, though he also embarrassed me with his airy-thin voice, his occasional cackle, his broad, overreaching gestures. More than once I’d slipped into an empty classroom when I saw him walking toward me down the hall, clutching to his chest his three-ring binder—decoupaged with sunflowers, smiley faces, Day-Glo peace signs—as if he were shielding his breasts.

Once he’d worn makeup to school. Some of the boys had finally had enough, and he’d probably called one a name, and he was going to get throttled. I could hear him now:
Hey straight boy, hey pencildick. Want to get fucked? Straight boy loves to get fucked.
He was too much for them. His very presence mocked, and they couldn’t stand it, couldn’t stand it at all. Eric Woodworth went first. He tugged Todd’s earring, and snagged it once, ripping it right through his lobe. A dark drop of blood pearled on Todd’s ear. “You’ll get AIDS,” Convey cried, looking at the red on Woodworth’s palm. “Drop it, you fool. You’ll get AIDS!” Still, Todd walked ahead, a determined look on his face as if he were telling himself that nothing could harm him.