Martin and John (12 page)

BARCLAY DIED TODAY. Martin calls and says, “He was done up like a French whore.” “What finally did it?” I ask.
He’d seemed on a rebound when I left. “Was it the pneumonia?” “No,” Martin says, and I can’t tell if his voice is leering or saddened over the telephone. “It was the rat poison you bought.” He starts to ask me about moving in again, but I cut him off. “Listen to me, Martin, listen to me for just a second.” Martin tries to say something, but I cut him off again, keep talking. “Barclay used to bathe me. Do you see what I’m saying, Martin? He used to wash the smell of them off me. He’d fill the tub with water that was almost boiling—he’d spike it with pots of water he’d cooked on the stove to get it that hot. He used to steal the best soaps and shampoos and stuff, for me, he never used them on himself, only on me. He even had a little brush that he used under my fingernails, and when he finished washing me, he had clean clothes for me, and he put them on me and combed my hair and sent me out again. And I always knew I was done for the night when instead of clothes he’d wrap me in this robe he’d got somewhere, probably stole it too, this beautiful silk robe that was too small for me. Fits you like a miniskirt, Barclay’d say, and he’d put this on me just to walk me ten feet from the tub to the bed and take it off me and tuck me in, and then, after I was asleep, he’d get in bed too and wake me up with his kisses, and with him I never had to do anything but I always wanted to no matter how many, what kind I’d done that night. Something Barclay did always had me wanting him. After we were finished he washed me again, this would be my fourth or fifth bath of the night and I’d tell him it was okay, let’s just sleep,
but he always insisted, he said, Honey, if you don’t know it by now, then let me set you straight: this girl ain’t no better than the rest of ’em.” I stop then, not because that’s all there is but because I know I’ve said too much and because Martin is crying on the other end of the line. My own cheeks are dry. “Martin?” I say. His voice snuffles out, wet and angry, “But he was sick, John, sick, don’t you see that?” At first I think he means AIDS, and then, when I realize he doesn’t, I hang up. I want to say something, just one thing that will sum it all up—I want to tell Martin he’s wrong, and I want to tell him he’s right too—but I realize that saying what’s right and what’s wrong isn’t enough in this case. And it’s not important either, now. Barclay’s dead. There’s only one thing, really, that I still want to tell Martin. The rat poison, I’ll say some time: I bought it for the rats.

MY FATHER TAKES me to dinner again. We go to the same Italian restaurant and order the same food, and over dinner it seems he re-explains the situation to me using the same words as last time. As we drive back to his girlfriend’s house in the climate-controlled shell of his Lincoln, he says, “One thing you have to remember, John, before you judge me, is that I love her. I’ll always love her.” Who does he mean? I wonder, because there are three candidates here. I’m about to ask, when he stops at a red light. In the car next to us two high school girls with wild hair and tan breasts bursting from their
bikinis stare at my father’s car, either in admiration or because they are preening, using his tinted windows as a mirror. My father stares at them behind the safety of his one-way glass wall. What would he do, I think, if I suddenly pressed the button that unrolls the window? Even as I make my move, the light turns green and he floors it, blowing the Toyota off the road—again, Barclay’s phrase—and the force of his acceleration knocks my hand away from the button, so I never get the chance to expose him. Looking at my hand, I feel relieved that I was prevented from acting rashly. It would only have led to trouble. Beside me, my father raises his eyebrows in a minute, whimsical gesture, and surprises me by murmuring, “Ah, the beauty that does not belong to me.”

OUT OF BED early one morning and I feel like my old self again, though which self that is I don’t know. It’s rained while I slept and the pale water sluicing down the windowpanes mixes with sunlight to form transparent shadows on the floor. I pull on a pair of shorts and wander outside. My stepmother works in the yard with a pair of garden shears in her ungloved hands. I watch her and see that she’s cutting dandelions. They’ve finally bloomed, thanks to the rain, and thousands of bright gold suns litter the lawn, and they’re vaguely beautiful, though Bea has always abhorred them. I set up a lawn chair and watch her attack the dandelions with the shears all morning and afternoon, cutting and cutting, reminding me of the
mother of Dinesen’s “Sorrow-Acre.” By evening, somehow, she has finished the entire lawn, and rakes the wet dandelions in a huge pile. Today was cooler than days past, overcast, but the sun’s invisible rays, amplified by the rain-laden clouds, have burned both our skins. Now my stepmother stands at the pile, and its dimensions dwarf hers for the moment; now she douses it with gasoline from a can; now it’s alight, spewing dank smoke, and the flames seem to magnify the gold of the dandelion heads before consuming them. I walk over to her with the hose. “Don’t you want this, just in case?” “No,” she says, holding her stiff-fingered hands away from her body. “Let it burn itself out.” She turns to me. “And I don’t care if it takes everything with it.” The look in her eyes frightens me; they challenge me to a reply that I can’t offer. “Besides,” she says, thrusting out her hands, “I couldn’t hold the hose anyway.” In the light from the flames I can see her palms are covered with blisters, most of them ripped open. She turns back to the pyre, face glowing and rapturous, and says, “We’re selling the house. Go back to your man. You don’t really want to be here.” I barely hear her, staring at her hands, which seem to be letting go of something, setting it down, and pushing it far away. Water from the hose dribbles to the ground and soaks my feet. I reach for what she’s setting down, reach and reach—my hands grip the hose so tightly—but I can’t find it. Eventually I abandon the effort, turn the water off. Just as the fire burns out, Bea says, “I didn’t get them by the roots, you know. They’ll be back next year.” She speaks as
though we’ll still be here, but then I think, The roots she speaks of, they stretch far beyond the borders of this house.

MARTIN CALLS ME and demands an answer. Here is his story: I’ve known you for over a year, John, and all you ever let me do is kiss you on the lips with a closed mouth. You cook me overspiced food and I buy you new books that you refuse to read. I tell you what plays are worth seeing, but you take me to the beach instead and don’t go in the water. I tell you I love you, and I have to wring a response from you, but you always say you love me too. You won’t take anything from me, and you won’t give me anything; you beg me not to leave, but you offer me no reason to stay. You call when you wake up sweating in the middle of the night, and I listen to you cry on the phone and wish I could hold you and wipe the dampness from your skin. I buy the magazines and videos that still have you in them, and I use them to get off, and then I burn them. You tell me all about Barclay, and I tell you nothing about Henry, save that he exists. Over a year and your dinners have become incredibly elaborate, hours-long productions and your bookshelves are overflowing and Barclay is dead. You didn’t even make his funeral. I made Henry move out. This doesn’t mean things have changed, really, just that they could. Change. Just know that I’m not afraid of it, John, whatever it is, okay?

So there’s that.

Henry is Martin’s lover, but I am the one Martin loves. I sleep with no one but I care for Barclay. Years ago, when I was fourteen and newly run away from home—from school, really, where Eric Johnson’s slashed face probably still bled—Barclay dressed me in a child’s tuxedo and top hat and presented me at the first of many Harvest Balls, “where the fruit is you.” He watched and hummed Judy as I gave it to an aging drag queen named Anisette, “like the drink, darling.” Barclay’s hot hand clapped me on the shoulder when I’d finished; I sweated but felt dried out. “That was so marvelous, dear, for your first time, but now let me show you how it’s really done.” He upended me, and Anisette sat on my chest while he did it, sipping a cocktail, her Scarlett O’Hara gown pulled above her hairy waist and choking me with its dusty ruffles. I’ve been thirsty ever since. Anisette still straddled me when she handed Barclay several crumpled bills from her purse, and I remember growing confused then: behind the dry mountain of her body my inner thighs still twitched with pleasure, but in front of her bulk I sucked in vain for the air and water that poured, without my control, from my mouth and eyes and nose, forced out by Anisette’s unbearable weight on my chest. And I must tell you: this is the hollow center of my being, the one thing in my life I don’t understand, and from it I’ve learned not to trust my instincts, not to act, because I know that I have no control over the consequences of those actions. “Oh, baby,” Barclay had leaned close and whispered to me: “Don’t cry. I love you, I really do. I’ll love you till the day I die.” And
then, laughing, he walked away. And it’s not that Barclay could joke about his own death that bothered me, not then, when death was a new thing, nor later, when his ice-cold skeletal hand clutched mine through three bouts of pneumonia and he still laughed when he could summon the breath. It’s just that when he placed his hands on my body, squeezing in all the places that used to belong to him, and kissed me with his cracked tongue, it seemed he laughed at mine as well. “No,” I told him, “it’s not the old days anymore.” “Don’t act like a little boy,” he said. “There never were any old days. There’s no difference between then and now.”

AND PERHAPS HE’S right, because when I return to my school the woman still hobbles the hallways in her gray skirt and sweater and garish pumps. She looks at me and smiles quickly; her hands flutter to touch her dyed hair, and she asks me what I’m doing here. “I’d like to take you for coffee,” I say, and she glances around to see if anyone else has heard my offer. She protests for a moment—“Well, I don’t know, I hardly know you”—but soon says yes. In a small bright café we drink coffee and she tells me her name is Mrs. Enniger. I let her talk for an hour, and then, walking at her snail’s pace toward her house, we pass a shoe store. “Shoes,” I say. “I want to buy you shoes.” “What?” she says as I whisk her inside. I point to her pumps and say, “If you keep wearing those, you’ll be on a cane in five years.” She says, “No, no, I’m
fine,” but when I ease her shoes off she sighs audibly; her feet are swollen and misshapen, and it takes several minutes before they appear normal. I slip a pair of rubber-soled, orthopedic shoes on her. “Try these,” I say. She stands, takes a few tentative steps. “I feel funny,” she says. “I’ve been walking on stilts for too long. But these are so comfortable!” She smiles at me, sits down, looks at her feet, says, “But they’re old lady’s shoes.” Look, look, look in the mirror, I want to say: You’re not old. Mrs. Derkman was old, Barclay was old. But I only say, “I won’t force them on you.” “Are they expensive?” she asks. “They cost me nothing.” She wears them home. At her house, old habits send me walking in behind her, a hand on her waist slipping lower. I stop before she really notices, but one hand flutters to her hip where mine had been. She jokes, “You’ve changed my life,” and perhaps I have, but mine, I realize, is still the same.

THE SMELL OF tempura and soy sauce fills Martin’s apartment one evening. Boxes labeled John’s Things flood the floor. Toy pistols and pots and pans mix like childhood and adulthood all around me. They are the legacy of both my parents: though my father bought everything, it was my stepmother who saved each item. If it was just this one thing and nothing more—just these boxes—then I would puzzle it through until I understood it. But it’s not: it’s this and it’s everything. Henry found his own place in no time, and I
planted a few flowers on Barclay’s grave, thinking that my mother’s lies untended somewhere in Kansas. When I fed him, I ask myself now, did I really want to keep him alive, or just some memory of my past? My stepmother has moved to the West Coast with a boyfriend and my father has gone alone to Colorado. They’ll call me, I imagine, or I’ll call them: it’s inevitable. Here is Martin, his arms on my body, saying, I love you, make love to me. Bring me a glass of water, I say; I was going to drink it but then I dip my fingers in the glass like a young shoot and trace patterns on Martin’s body with my water fingers, and it’s okay, because he hasn’t seen the movie where I did it first, following a script, watched by a camera, burned under sun-bright lamps, having sex with a man who would be dead in six months. Behind me now, Martin says he’ll take care of me no matter what, and I say, but not to him, “No.”

Because there was nothing left of me, I went with him. The world accumulated history as each second passed, but I sloughed it off as though my body were coated in wax. I wanted to remember nothing, foresee nothing, there was nothing I wanted to know about myself. But him: a scar ringed his left eye, a white circle with red edges, and a drop of blood floated in his blue iris. “My father,” he said wearily. “A broken Coke bottle.” That was enough for me—almost too much—and I followed him from Port Authority to a taxi without further questions.

I had run away, arrived here only hours before; in a month I’d be sixteen. I’d abandoned my past, poured it from my life like liquid from a bottle. I ignored what I already knew—that a bottle is never as important as what fills it—and I also tried to ignore the details that began to pile up in me like separate ingredients waiting to be mixed together. Outside the car, grime covered everything, blurring edges like a soporific; X’s flashed on marquees, announcing something that I
knew to be at the center of my situation. Inside, the boy from Port Authority shivered, sweated, crossed his arms over his stomach. “God, I need a fix,” he said. Though I didn’t know what he meant, I didn’t ask. I just said, “Me too.” He looked at me then, and I returned his stare. His eyes mocked me, told me I’d messed up, forced me to look down. That’s when I saw his hands. Red lumps deformed every knuckle, and at the center of each lump was a tiny brown scab; a few oozed pus. History was revealed there, a process of decay that had happened one bump at a time. Revolted and fascinated, I stared until he lifted his shirt and folded his hands into the concave shell of his stomach. Looking up, I saw he’d turned to the window. His eye was hidden, but I could see part of the scar that ringed it. It didn’t seem so horrific compared to his hands. Even under cloth, they made me want to shudder. And then I realized he’d hidden them under his shirt: he was ashamed of these wounds, and I suddenly knew that, unlike his eye, they were self-inflicted. It was something I’d never thought before: that people might hurt themselves on purpose.