Lawnboy (27 page)

A postcard of an East Village restaurant arrived for me in the mail. Postmarked from Hialeah. I stopped my packing, looked at it for the longest time: a dark cellar with cherry-red upholstery, ceiling strung with a thousand blazing white lights. I projected an ebullient crowd into those rooms: glasses clinked, curries spiced the air. Hector weaved in and out through the cramped tables, brow creased, superior in expression, holding a tray high above his shoulder. Someone was laughing. And just as quickly everyone was gone, their collective absence making a rushing sound like space.

He’d scribbled on the back: a temporary address, then
Forgive me. I miss you.

With the little money I had, I rented a car and drove off for Miami.

My first stop was the airport. A red radar grill spun ominously on a pedestal. Pulpy clouds shredded across the sky. Out where the runways ended I knew of a place where you could watch the jets landing. I’d spent hours there when I was twelve. I’d ride my bike after school, all ten miles up Dixie Highway, in and out through the bus exhaust and the brake lights, timing it so I’d get there in time for four o’clock, when the L1011’s from New York and Philadelphia and Detroit and Chicago landed one after the other in a great continuous chain. All my anxieties—about my parents, school, Peter, my growing yet unnerving interest in my friend Luke Oosterhuis, about whom I’d started to fantasize—all of them seemed to disperse as I lay motionless on my stomach, staring up as the landing gear descended, that massive sound rumbling in my bowels. I stopped the car, got out. The bare flesh of my arms prickled. When I screamed, only a dry noise came out of my throat.

There were other places. I drove past my high school, through Coconut Grove, underneath the dual signs of the Everglades Hotel and the Coppertone girl. I drove past Dadeland, the Woolworth’s, Miamarina, the old Dusty Cartwright Dairy Bar—now shuttered and festooned with graffiti. I drove past the islands—Rivo Alto, Star, and San Marco. I drove down Coral Drive, which only a few short years ago had bisected a drained swamp, an empty prairie, but was now surrounded by vast tracts of Lennar Homes. I should have been troubled or angered, but the truth was the land had already been wrecked, and if it wasn’t this, it was going to be something else: a dog track, a shopping mall. a gambling casino, a jetport, a virtual reality entertainment park.

Welcome. Welcome to South Florida.

My thoughts scrambled. The houses I passed seemed to take on richer colors, yellows and deep blues, until they weren’t houses anymore but complete worlds in which I imagined intricate dramas were being played out. In the first house a second-grader was sitting at the kitchen table with her mother, explaining to her with great kindness and trepidation that she couldn’t bear living with her new stepfather. In the second an oral surgeon was lying atop his wife, whispering in her ear that he loved her more than anyone in the world, even though in two short weeks he’d be charged with fondling a female patient seconds before he extracted her wisdom teeth. In the third a teenager smoked crack for the very first time, curled up on the bed of his childhood, shocked and frightened by how much he liked it, how much it admitted he wanted to be extinguished. In the fourth a young couple knelt before a framed portrait of Jesus, holding hands, their heads bowed, murmuring, petitioning God to return the world to the safe place it once was.

I drove by Kevin St. Ledger’s old house on Avenida Santurce. I thought about my father’s initial explanation for its suddenly emptied rooms. “Kevin blew away.” It wasn’t till I was six or seven that I’d realized he’d said something else entirely, that I’d misheard him: “Kevin
moved
away.” But it wasn’t quite the same. For years after I refused to let it go, the image of the weightless, mysterious boy drifting, scuttling upwards over the neighborhood like a leaf.

***

William’s lawn was as lush as it ever was, washed and pristine, smelling of minerals, fertilizers, hose water. The house had been painted apricot. The sprinkler heads pivoted and locked above the grass line, coughing once, misting. Leaves glistened. A tiny red bird flitted her wings inside the head of a palm, frantic and joyous at once. I slumped further down in my seat, fingered the letters of the steering wheel. A thin dust powdered the radio dials, the stickshift knob, the air-conditioning vents like a coating of sugar. I brought it to my lips and tasted. Was I ready to do this? A quick cramp in my side, a stitch. I slumped even further. Did I need any more grief in my life?

Then I started up the walk and knocked at the storm door. Prisms sparkled in the arcs of the sprinklers.

“Hello, William,” I said, my head down.

“Evan?
Evan?
”

“The one and only,” I said with a weak smile.

“What on earth are you doing here? Come inside. Come in, you, come in.”

He laughed ruefully, warmly, a relief. I concentrated “authority” into my expression, but it kept falling from my face, my loneliness welling up inside. But he seemed to read my thoughts. Did he feel it too? He put his arm over my shoulder and drew me into the house.

“You’ve lost some weight,” I said. “You’re looking good.”

“Thanks.” He stepped back from me and appraised my new look: the shaved head, the hacked-off sleeves. My forehead went hot above my brows.

“How strange to see you. I was just thinking about you the other day.”

“Really?”

“Someone walking past the college gates. Someone with just your kind of walk, you know, that hard little bounce, that really
guy
walk, and I thought, Evan. That must be him. But when I looked over my shoulder …” He shook his head. “Not nearly as cute,” he said, with a nervous smile. “I like the haircut, by the way.”

Something scratched behind the bedroom door. William hurried down the hall, and soon enough, the Dobermans were crashing toward me, bellies closer to the floor, tongues lolling, eyes crazed with desire. Their muzzles were sprinkled with white.

“Hey, Pedro, Hey, Mrs. Fox. Do you remember me?”

“It’s Evan,” said William. “Say hi to Evan. You certainly remember Evan.”

“They’re getting older,” I said, looking up at his face.

“Like all of us.”

“Not me,” I declared, and then we both laughed.

I squatted, pressed my nose into their dusty scalps, and breathed. They gave me their weight as I gazed over their heads. It bore only a minor resemblance to the house of the past. The dull, tepid rooms were gone. In their place a huge white room with squat, tasteful furniture facing out toward the banks of bougainvillea. The pool looked profoundly blue, almost lunar, a gray-green life ring knocking about its surface. A single spoon glinted on a table.

“It’s so peaceful,” I said. “Orderly. How did you manage it all? It’s barely the same place.”

He pressed his palms together. “You don’t like it.”

“No, no, there’s nothing
not
to like. It’s really beautiful. I like the openness, the light. And the clerestories are pretty. It’s just—” What was I trying to say?

“Well, the original plan was to do it one room at a time. But then I thought, do I want to breathe in sawdust and fiberglass for the next two years? Why not get it over with while things are still fine?”

There were footsteps up the walk. A key jiggling in the lock, and the dogs started barking.

“Hey,” someone said.

“Hey, you. Look who’s here, it’s Evan. You remember hearing me talking about Evan.”

He was a young, wiry sort, mid-twenties, in orange drawstring shorts, with the most forbidding calf muscles I’d ever seen. He leaned over and kissed the dogs on the tops of their heads. He extended his hand up to me and smiled warmly, but with a remote, abstracted expression in his eyes. “Alfred,” he said.

“Hello, Alfred.”

“But my friends call me Laser.”

He stood. Laser folded his arms across his thick chest, smiling, sidling up next to William. If only through their shared gestures (the smiles, the closeness of their stance), I could see that they were clearly a couple, inhabiting their lives with a fluidity and ease. How did any two people do it? How did any two people achieve a life, sharing each other’s time with kindness, respect, and sexiness, without pushing each other away? I was troubled with the urge to say,
Do you fight? Are you in love? Do you still sleep together?

“Excuse me for a minute,” said Laser. “I have to take these two for their walk.” Their eyes brightened at the word. “Walk? Walk? Do you want to go down to the beach for your walk?” Panting, the dogs scampered after him, nails clicking, down the hall.

“You guys are happy?” I said dully.

“You wouldn’t think it would work, but it does, believe it or not. It’s been almost a year and a half.”

“He’s in school?”

“He’s still in school. Med school. A year to go before his internship.”

I tried to compose my face, but I must have looked strange to him. I knew what kind of expression it was: it told anyone who was even halfway perceptive that my outer self, which was trying to maintain decorum at all costs, was at odds with my inner self, which was plunging downward like a kite. What did William’s relationship with Laser have to do with me? I’d moved forward in my life. I’d had all sorts of experiences. I certainly did not want to come back here.
Do not take this in. Do not take this personally. At least give them that.
A thought: I was just as resentful and afraid of abandonment as my brother Peter.

What makes you think you’re any more direct than anyone else?

“What’s all this?” I said, indicating the orange plastic pill bottles on the kitchen counter. I picked up one and shook it gently beside my ear. It made a kind, pleasant sound like maracas.

His eyes fixed on the coffee pot beside him.

“Something wrong?”

“Evan—”

“Is Laser okay?”

He raised his face to me.

I said, “Why are you staring at me like that? Why so serious?”

“Have you been tested?” William said finally.

My attention still snared on those bottles, the miraculous capsules inside.

“I think you might want to get tested,” he said, graver now, looking directly in my eyes.

I grimaced. “Are you—?”

I held myself still for a few seconds. Then I felt myself falling off a building, the ground close, closer, advancing like a bull’s-eye, then
slump.

I was still shaking after William came up to hold me.

Ash dusting now, sticking in our throats, the world colder, meaner, more ragged than before. I saw myself walking through jags of ice—dark, dark world, steam rising from my mouth.

“I know we’ve talked about this before. Frankly, it’s not like it’s a total surprise.”

“Oh
God.
”

“I
feel
fine, though. I can’t quite explain it. I haven’t felt this optimistic and energetic in years.” And I saw what I’d overlooked before: the flat, puttied color of his skin, the waxy hollows beneath his cheekbones. He stepped toward the window, not quite so confident on his left leg. “But I just talked to my doctor yesterday. My T-cell counts aren’t good. They’re on, as the professionals like to say, a downward trend.”

“Oh,” I said.

“But he says better drugs are on the way. Well, as far as I’m concerned, the sooner the better. We need them now. Right now.”

I looked down at my fingers curling on my lap. I thought of my stomach—emptied, translucent, the ghost of a stomach—floating somewhere in the room, then out the window, floating on and upward through the palms like a soul.
I am twenty years old,
I thought.
I am twenty years old and I am going to die.

“It’s not like you have much to worry about,” he offered. “I mean, it’s not like we weren’t using rubbers or anything. We were very careful together. You should be fine. Assuming you’ve been watching out for yourself.” He raised his brows, tears filming his eyes.

But had I? I thought about my hands—nicks, cuts, abrasions, little openings. I thought about my teeth, brushing and flossing only seconds before sex. And of course there were those occasions on which we’d slipped. Had he forgotten all about them, purged them from his memory?

“And what about Laser?” I asked.

He nodded. “He’s positive too, but his health is good, excellent actually. He’s going to beat this thing. We have high hopes he’s going to outlive the best of us.”

The world torn in pieces, scattered on the ground like marble, broken bridges. I tried to think of William and Laser, of the difficulties that lay ahead for them, the infections and the doctors, how one would die before the other, leaving the survivor to spend his last months—years?—in loneliness, in a hospice, in pain, surrounded by doctors and strangers, but I couldn’t. I could only think about myself, how I was going to die before I even had the chance to live.

I wasn’t as generous as I should have been.

He came up behind me and massaged out the knot where my neck met my shoulder. For some reason that made me cry.

“I know it’s a lot to take in at once. Are you okay? Let me get you something to drink—some tea, some coffee? Or how about something to eat?”

I shook my head hard.

“I’m sorry,” he said plainly. “I’d hate to think I’d …”

“Don’t—”

“I’m sorry, I’m very sorry. I feel awful about what happened between us. This stuff’s been on my mind for a long, long time. I think I must have known I was sick on some deep level, and I wasn’t ready to acknowledge it yet. And then I didn’t have any choice. One night I woke up, and all the sheets were drenched with my sweat.”

He leaned backward into the woodwork and sighed, said
ahh.
Drops of moisture glistened on the tip of a fig leaf, holding on for as long as they possibly could before they fell to the floor. The ceiling fan clicking. A dog—a St. Bernard, I decided—barked somewhere in the distance, solemn, calling for his dinner. The sky over the trees went gray, the absence of color. Then everything in the room, the smallest details, seemed to glitter fiercer, brighter, until I thought they would pop: the bulbs in the chandelier, the violet irises in the clear glass vase on the table.