Lawnboy (32 page)

He turned me over on my back.

“Why are you crying?” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said, and then I held him close to me.

***

It wasn’t something I’d expected. I walked into the nursery one morning, spilling coffee on myself, rushed as usual, to find Bob sitting in his chair, eyes opened, a glassy, bemused smile on his face. I wouldn’t have known as we weren’t in the habit of exchanging greetings, and he’d always said hello the first thing in his gruff, kind voice. I had no idea how long he’d been like that, but I stayed with him, so calm I surprised myself, holding his hand until the medics arrived with the ambulance. Two days later, I helped with his funeral. A motley crowd showed up at the Methodist church, comprised of police officials, our regular customers, and Dorothy’s twin sisters, Muriel and Lu, both of whom had flown in from Las Vegas. The floral arrangements were the most screwy and peculiar I’d ever seen—canistel, tamarind, sapodilla, ginger lilies, firebushes, coral vines, Brazilian plumes—most of which were trucked in directly from our nursery. A silver banner draped across his closed casket—HICKORY BOB, in the darkest blue letters.

One rainy morning, a few months later, the phone rang. A lawyer identifying himself as Sam DeSears called at 8 a.m. to tell me I owned a nursery. I listened intently, quietly astonished, barely mumbling a reply, as he read off the clause from the will.

I told everyone I knew. I told Perry, whom I’d moved in with only a few months before. I told my friends Zack, Nan, and Jane. I went through the whole list of people, everyone I ever knew—Hector, William, Ursula, even minor customers—with the curious exception of a single person.

When I called the King Cole, a recording told me that the number had been disconnected. I called two more times, if only to make sure I hadn’t dialed wrong. It took a while for me to admit that Peter had left, and that the resort had finally closed its doors.

I thought of him often, late at night, lying in bed with Perry. He might have been anywhere, but no one knew, not my mother, not Holly, who’d called me once or twice. I made a place for him inside my head. I put him somewhere in the Yucatán, close to the shoreline, in an aqua house with butterfly chairs out front. He had parrots, cats, mice, and a mule, and a large garden in which he grew plantains. He was utterly alone. He swam in the sea every day, after four, only after the last tourists had left. He watched the sunset—a gaudy, overblown event—from his kitchen window nightly. He even shaved off his hair and taught himself Spanish, giving things he’d made to his neighbors on the street: bread, enchiladas, cups of coffee rich as the blackest loam.

Or maybe he didn’t.

***

I picked up my test results one morning without intending to. The receptionist, a pretty red-haired woman with a cast in her eye, smiled faintly as she returned from the lab, and told me I could leave. I stood in stillness for a moment. The sunflowers blurred before me in their vase. Then I walked miles and miles through the buzzing city, grateful and melancholy all at once.

***

We stood upon the beach at Biscayne National Park, a deserted preserve, barefoot and parched, while forest fires ransacked the Everglades. A flamingo straggled on the mud flats. Oyster shells clung to the roots of the mangroves. Earlier, we’d driven across the county, inspecting hurricane damage, seeking out the gardens and plants that interested us. At one point, I took Perry to the concrete pipe in which I’d spent so much of my childhood. The ditch that passed through it was filled with thick, sludgy water, clogged with melaleuca roots, and it was hard to imagine how anyone, man, woman, or child, would fit into that cramped cylinder without drowning.

“That’s it,” I’d cried, pulling hard on his sleeve. “That’s the pipe I told you about.”

Perry looked more than a little perplexed. “You hid out in
there?
”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I did. But it was safe. That concrete pipe got me through my childhood.”

He looked even more perplexed. He made a face now.

“What’s the matter?”

“You know what I think?”

“What?”

He mumbled, “My boyfriend’s a lunatic.”

“Shithead,” I said, and socked him in the arm.

We continued up the beach, rested, though half the world was burning down. The smoke spun higher in the distance. I stared hard at the horizon, picturing everyone I’d ever lost scorching, coalescing in that pyre, their spirits melding, turning yellow, green, copper, red. Was it too much to bear? It was hard to say no. For all I knew the worst would still happen: Perry would get sick, my mother would wither, Peter, my father, William, Hector, Laser, Jane, Arden, Holly, Ory, Stan Laskin, Todd, Douglass Freeman—all of us leaching white until there was nothing left but alkali, little crumbs of salt blowing up into the void like sand. Or maybe not. Maybe we’d all pass through the door, ruined, yet wiser. The ocean murmured. The kingbirds glided above the mangroves. The flames were still distant, rumbling, not quite advancing. At least the two of us were here, together, the sky over our heads ferocious, harsh, beautiful.

Sections of this book have appeared in
A&U, Blithe House Quarterly
(
www.blithe.com
),
Cosmos, Global City Review, Provincetown Arts,
and in the anthologies
Best American Gay Fiction 2
(Little, Brown, 1997) and
Men on Men 6
(Plume, Penguin, 1996).

***

I’d like to thank my good friends Stephen Briscoe, Polly Burnell, Michael Carter, Denise Gess, Elizabeth McCracken, and Katrina Roberts for their careful, wise feedback. I’d also like to thank David Bergman, Brian Bouldrey, Karen Brennan, Chris Busa, Patricia Chao, Bernard Cooper, Michael Cunningham, Robert Jones, and Ann Patchett for their encouragement. Thank you to Ruth Greenstein for her astute editorial suggestions. Thanks, too, to Jonathan Rabinowitz and Turtle Point Press for kind, immeasurable support. Thank you and love to my parents and brothers—Anton, Anne, Robert, and Michael Lisicky—for their generosity, patience, and good spirit.

I’m grateful to the National Endowment for the Arts, James Michener and the Copernicus Society, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Corporation of Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and the Ragdale Foundation for much needed assistance.

And finally, deepest thanks to Mark Doty.

***

The new edition of this book invites me to thank the incomparable staff at Graywolf Press: Fiona McCrae, Anne Czarniecki, Janna Rademacher, Katie Dublinski, Mary Matze, and Jeff Shotts. And thanks to Kyle Hunter for the brilliant cover.

—
P.L., New York City, December 2005

Your book expresses an ambivalent attitude toward Florida. How is the setting central to the book?

PL: I think of the South Florida of the book as a kind of a stage set. It’s a Florida of the imagination, even if it makes reference to real cities and streets. I’m interested in the tension between nature and artifice. I think of the seagrape hedges of Palm Beach, surgically clipped to look like stone walls. Or plants that look like hats or wigs. You can convince yourself that the man-made has the upper hand in a place like that, but we all know that South Florida is a hurricane or drought away from being done in. I think of Elizabeth Bishop’s great poem “Florida,” in which nature is just lying in wait, ready to swallow up the whole grand scheme. She calls Florida the “poorest postcard of itself.”

So the tensions within that landscape mirror Evan’s imagination. I’m reluctant to pin down the metaphor, but I’d say that Evan’s perception of that setting—his simultaneous love and resistance—is crucial to understanding him.

What were the special challenges in writing a book with a gay narrator?

PL: I wanted him to be both a representative character and completely himself at once. The struggle of trying to balance those two desires pulses behind every scene. If he was too much of a representative, he’d be dull and washed out, too externally conceived, a type. If he was too peculiar, he’d put off readers. It often put me in a quandary. For instance, I didn’t know if I could get away with a sentence like: “How I wanted to lift the bowl in his moment of peace and kill him.” All the same, I wasn’t interested in writing a role model. I thought it was important for him to be fallible, wrong, even stupid at times. But he’s also smart, sensitive, loyal to a fault, and capable of a huge, beguiling sweetness.

How are style and self-presentation important to the book?

PL: Evan’s sense of himself as endlessly mutable worries him at first. At one point he wonders whether he’s merely the sum total of “everyone who’d passed through [his] life” and nothing more. Hector teaches him, if only through example, that it’s not necessarily awful to be one thing one day and something else the next. You can give form to that mutable self through your clothing, through how you make yourself up every morning.

I think we too easily conflate style with consumerism these days, but they’re two different things in the world of the book. Style is constructed in the face of despair. It defies death and loss; it’s an emblem of persistence, of faith in the world. And it’s even better when it involves some act of reclamation. I’m thinking of Hector’s thrift-store clothes, or Peter’s doomed attempt to fix up the King Cole.

What is the significance of all the ruined buildings and places in the novel?

PL: They’re all over the place: Golden Gate Estates, the ghost city of Boca Bay, Douglass Freeman’s house and neighborhood … all cases of dashed hope, failed optimism. All originally conceived as points of pleasure. You could say that all this ruin stands for the fortunes of Evan, Peter, and Hector, who are all struggling against disillusionment and fear. And then again I hope that my metaphors resist easy explanation. You want them to be wilder than any attempt to cage and tame them.

In what ways is
Lawnboy
a novel about the age of AIDS?

PL: The dread of AIDS—and the stigma associated with the disease—is everywhere in the book. The body out of control, a limited sense of time, imminent loss—all these things haunt Evan, even though he hasn’t tested positive. He has such a compromised sense of the future that even the prospect of going to the dentist seems futile. Hence, his urge to find someone
now
because he might not be around in three days. Every wish is intensified to the burning point. Life ablaze on the precipice.

What do you say to those who read the ending as happy?

PL: Sure, it’s happy. Just as Evan tells himself that he’s better off on his own, he gets the relationship he’s wanted all along. But Evan’s happiness lives with his knowledge that relationships are fragile. Even if he and Perry manage to make a long life together, Evan knows that he might outlive his new partner. The book closes with suggestions of terrorism and environmental collapse—“towers crumbling,” “forests burning down.” So any personal joy is cut through with melancholy and loss—my usual ambivalence rearing its head again!

Lawnboy
is set in the early 1990s. How would Evan’s story be different if you were a young man now?

PL: It’s almost too obvious to say it, but we’re the products of our time. Protease inhibitors, cell phones, September 11th, “The War on Terror,” our disastrous president and his cronies, the Internet, online cruising, crystal meth, Friendster, MySpace, blogs, the widening gap between rich and poor: none of these was a factor in the early 1990s, and every last one—good, bad, or both—shapes daily experience in ways vast and small.

I’d like to think that Evan would feel less isolated, a little less afraid of dying before his time. But even the most openminded parents don’t raise their children to be homosexual, and the process by which gay kids come into their own is still traumatic. They often learn to efface themselves out of simple self-protection. What young kid wants to be called “gay,” which still stands for “freak” or” loser,” on the schoolyard? I think that any young man of Evan’s intensity—his loyalty to his family and his contradictory pull toward a life of desire—would have a hard time of it. We’re living in an era that’s hostile to originality, to those who make their own path. There’s a tremendous pressure to conform, no matter how you understand yourself.

Still, it’s sort of fun to imagine him standing in line to see
Brokeback Mountain
for the tenth time, listening to the Hidden Cameras on his iPod.

1. Evan senses “a wall between himself and the world,” and describes a “low-grade fear and rage burning” beneath all his decisions. He is torn by contradictory impulses and sometimes experiences himself as “a puppet” or only a compilation of people he has known. How much of these feelings have to do with his age and how much with simply trying to live in contemporary society?
   
2. Landscapes and settings play a tremendous part in the story. How does the King Cole reflect both the inner life and the desires of Evan’s brother Peter? How are the brothers alike? How are they different? Why does Evan feel a need to visit the hurricane-ravaged home where Douglass Freeman once lived? Finally, what is the significance of Evan’s love of plants and what they become for him at the end of the novel?
   
3. After Evan moves out of his parents’ home and in with William, he runs into his mother one day and tells her that she’s never looked so good. She replies, “I’d come to the point in my life where I realized I had two choices. I could either shoot myself in the temple or reinvent myself.” In what way is her life a continual act of self-invention? A continual coming of age?
   
4. In her letter to Evan at the beginning of
   Chapter 10
   , Ursula Sarshik demands that Evan choose between William and his parents. She remains staunch in her decision not to let Evan come home for just a few days. She accuses Evan of turning his back on his parents. Is Ursula justified in her demand? Or have she and Evan’s father turned their backs on their son? Does the Sarshik family strike you as typical or unique?
   
5. In Evan’s childhood recollection of taunting the gay man, Stan Laskin, the hardware storeowner, Stan asks the boys, “Why are you so hateful? All of you, I don’t get it. Tell me how you live with yourselves?” Are people meaner today? Are children meaner? Why? At the other end of the spectrum is the notion that sometimes difficulty makes people larger, better … Is this the case with Perry at the end of the book? Do you think that his kindness and thirst for life have to do with the loss of his partner, Andrew?