Michael Thomas Ford - Full Circle (58 page)

I arrived here the day of my 40th birthday, moving into a house that I'd bought sight unseen, reassured by the no-nonsense voice of a real estate agent whose thick accent convinced me that I was getting the place for abah-gin . At first I was frightened by the large, empty rooms and the smell of the ocean, so much stronger here than in San Francisco, where the sea's aroma is overpowered by the scent of the eucalyptus trees first planted in 1853 by W.C. Walker of the Golden Gate Nursery from Australian seeds. Where those foreign invaders had quickly made Northern California their home and waged a battle for control of the native landscape, the pine forests of Maine are happy to play second fiddle to the mighty Atlantic, keeping a respectful distance from the lapping waves and confining their redolence to the space beneath their branches.

Soon, though, I filled the house with furniture and came to love the ocean's wildness. As the days passed, I breathed more easily as, bit by bit, I let go of the past. I threw out the last of the cocaine I'd brought with me from San Francisco, pouring it into the sea from the deck of a whale-watching boat while the other passengers were distracted by the appearance of a pair of minke whales, and I began to think about a return to teaching. When I read about an opening at a local school, I applied and was accepted.

In the summer of 1991, I was walking through town and stopped to admire a painting in the window of an art gallery. It was an abstract, bursts of indigo and lemon against a cherry-red background. Curious, I entered the shop and met the artist, who was there delivering some new work. Thayer and I had dinner that evening, and when he moved into the house after a six-month courtship, we hung that painting over our bed.

It was Thayer who encouraged me to return to school, Thayer who applied gentle pressure when progress on my master's thesis stalled, and Thayer who convinced me that, at 45, I was not too old to become the junior instructor in the history department of the University of New England. I owe a great deal of my current happiness to him, although I like to think that I have been equally supportive of his painting.

I fear perhaps Thayer will be angry at me for never telling him the roles Jack and Andy have played in my history. If he is, though, he doesn't show it. He asks only, "You haven't spoken to either of them in fifteen years?"

"Not until yesterday," I tell him. "Jack called."
"After all this time?" says Thayer. "Why?"

This is where I begin to feel the weight of the past pressing down on me. "Andy's dying," I tell Thayer.

"Jack thinks I should see him."
"In New York?" Thayer asks.

"Chicago," I answer. "I guess he moved there a few years ago. Jack really didn't say much, and I didn't ask for details."

Thayer is quiet, drinking his coffee as I look out the window. The rain has slowed, and again I think about finding the ladder and cleaning the gutters. It will be a good way to distract myself from the thoughts in my head.

"You should go," Thayer says, and I look at him. "You should go," he repeats. "It's been too long."

"But—" I begin to argue.
"Ned, they're your family," says Thayer. "Like it or not."
I fold my hands and tap my fingers against the backs of my hands, a habit I don't remember

having when I was younger, but which I find myself engaging in more and more. Thayer puts his hand on top of mine, stilling the wiggling spider of my fingers. I look into his face, and he leans forward, his forehead resting against mine.

"Go," he says.

He makes the calls, arranges the flight while I pack. I will be in Chicago in less than nine hours. Jack has agreed to pick me up at the airport. His voice when I told him I was coming was filled with happiness, but I feel only dread.

When Thayer drops me off, he kisses me and says, "I love you." I don't want to leave him, but he assures me that we will both be fine. "Call me when you're settled in," he says as I take my suitcase from the backseat. When he drives away, I consider hailing a cab and following him. Instead, I face the glass doors and force myself through them.

The flight itself is uneventful. We stop in New York, where I sit in the American Airlines waiting area at LaGuardia and try not to think about the fact that I'm once again moving backwards through my life. Thankfully, the city is far enough away from the airport that I can pretend I am somewhere else—Amsterdam, maybe, or Berlin. When the call to board the next flight crackles from the terminal's intercom, I am relieved that we are going.

On the second and final leg of the journey, I find that the passenger before me has left a paperback tucked into the seat pocket. When I take it out, I am unnerved to discover that I am holding a copy of It , undoubtedly picked up at the last minute by someone desperate for something to read and forced to choose between either Stephen King or Patricia Cornwell, who seem to have a monopoly on airport bookstores. I have not opened the book since Alan's death, and therefore have never gotten beyond page 367.

I'm tempted to put the novel back, but its appearance seems far too unlikely (the popularity of Stephen King as in-flight reading notwithstanding) to be accidental, and so I open it and begin reading where I left off twenty years before. I'm surprised that after only a few pages I can recall the plot with very few holes in my memory of it. As the story of seven friends who face a monster as children and return twenty-eight years later to do battle with it again unfolds, I can't help but feel a kinship with them. I, too, am returning to my past, to face a monster I believed to be dead and gone until a phone call drew me back. I am sixty pages from the end when the captain's voice announces that we are making our final descent into Chicago. I leave the six surviving characters (one, unable to face his fears again, has killed himself) as they enter the sewers in search of the evil, hoping that King will let them survive. I do not take the book with me when we reach the gate and disembark, feeling it belongs somehow to the world within the plane.

The passengers ahead of me are in no hurry to leave. They take what seems an inordinate amount of time putting on coats and taking down carry-ons from the overhead compartments. They chat easily with one another, and I am growing increasingly impatient. I want them to be quiet and move. I am anxious to be off the aircraft, both because I want to get the reunion with Jack over with and because I badly need to get to the men's room. I have never liked using the bathrooms on airplanes, and my bladder has been demanding release for the past hour. Now that I'm standing, the need to go is urgent, and I shift back and forth like a nervous child.

Finally, we begin to file off. As I clear the doorway and enter the gangway, I step around the woman in front of me, cursing the inventor of roller bags, and walk quickly to the end. I look for Jack, and then remember that in the new age of increased security, he is not allowed to meet me at the gate. Instead, I head for the nearest bathroom. Emerging a few minutes later, I begin the long walk through Terminal 3, passing the Great American Pretzel Company, Cinnabon, and no fewer than three Starbucks before arriving, finally, at the exit. There I join the stream of travelers going out to meet loved ones and limo drivers.

I recognize Jack at once. He is standing apart from the crowd, his hands folded across his chest. When he sees me, he waves and calls my name. For a moment I hesitate, until the force of the people behind me urges me forward and I go to him. When I get there, Jack embraces me and kisses my cheek, as if only a day or two has passed since we last saw one another.

"You look great," he says.

"So do you," I tell him. And he does. His hair is still golden, his face still handsome. He resembles his father now, but with the added grace of his mother's beauty. As we walk to the parking garage, Jack fills me in on Andy's condition. "The heart attack has really weakened him," he tells me. "Normally, a guy his age would be able to recover from it. But his heart is so damaged from all the cocaine that they can't operate. They've loaded him up with medication, but that's all they can do."

"When did it happen?" I ask him.
"Three days ago," says Jack. "A friend found him on the floor of his apartment." "Friend?" I say.

"Just a friend," says Jack, understanding my meaning. "He hasn't had a lover in seven or eight years. Not since the last one died."

"How did he end up in Chicago?"
"Reuben, his last partner, lived here," Jack informs me. "He was an architect. Really nice guy." "Nicer than Jeffrey?" I say.

Jack laughs. "I think Mussolini was nicer than Jeffrey," he replies. "I have to say, I didn't miss him when he died."

We haven't discussed our own lives, and I wonder if Jack is avoiding it on purpose. I told him nothing about my life during our phone call, and asked him nothing about his. We have many years to catch up on, but we seem to be in no hurry to do it. There are many possible reasons why, and I wonder which is closest to the truth.

In the garage, Jack stops at a Ford Explorer and opens the back with the electronic fob. As I place my bag inside, he apologizes for the size of the vehicle. "I never get to drive in New York," he explains as we get in. "I thought I'd see what it's like to be a soccer mom."

The drive from the airport into the city proper is surprisingly long, and finally Jack begins to poke tenderly at the edges of our severed friendship. "Do you have a partner?" he asks me. I tell him about Thayer, speaking more about his art than the man himself. I'm still not comfortable with the situation, and want to be able to retreat with my secrets intact if need be. Jack listens politely, asking questions and congratulating me on my domestic arrangement. When I've said all I can about the subject, I return the favor and inquire about his relationship.

"I'm still with Todd," he says. "Can you believe it? Twenty years. We're like the poster boys for long-term gay relationships in our circle."

"What about work?" I ask.
"Hope House closed in ninety-two," he tells me. "It turns out the executive director was skimming money to pay for his condo. I worked for a couple of different agencies for a year, then Todd convinced me to open my own practice again. I've been doing that ever since."

"Do you still like New York?" I say.

"You know how it is," he answers. "The longer you stay there, the harder it is to get out. Sometimes we talk about moving somewhere else, though. Todd thinks we should go to Toronto so we can get married. We flew to San Francisco and did it when Gavin Newsom made it legal for all of ten minutes, but it would be nice to do it for real."

"Listen to us," I say. "We sound like old married people."

 

"We are old married people," says Jack. "And there's nothing wrong with that." He looks over at me. "I was sorry to hear about your mom," he says.

 

I nod. "She went fast," I say. "How are your parents?"

"Dad died two years ago," he tells me. "Mom is still there. A couple of gay guys bought your old house a few years back, and she spends a lot of time helping them with their garden. They're like her best friends. All she talks about is how Sean and Christopher throw the best dinner parties, and how they take her to the ballet and go shopping with her. She loves Todd, but I think she still wishes you and I were a couple and living next door to her."

I laugh at the image of Patricia Grace as a fag hag. It's easy to picture, and I'm glad she has people in her life now that my mother and her husband are gone. But she's also the last of our parents alive, which reminds me that Jack and I are the last of our generation as well. We have no siblings, no children to continue our lines. I have never much cared about the extension of my family name, but faced with the fact of its eventual demise, I can't help but be a little wistful.

"We're staying at Andy's apartment," Jack says as we exit the freeway and head downtown. It's been a long time since I've been in such a large city, and although Chicago's streets are wider than most, for a moment I feel claustrophobic. The buildings rising up on either side of us create high walls, like the sides of a maze. As Jack turns the Explorer right, then left, then right again, I feel like we're searching for a way out, trying to find our way to the lump of cheese at the end. I close my eyes and focus on my breathing, a trick Thayer claims works for him in times of stress. I count to a hundred, slowly, and when I open my eyes, I am indeed more relaxed. Either Thayer's exercise has worked, or I've simply tapped into the remnants of the urbanite in me, the one who learned to live penned up like a barnyard animal whose grassy field had been replaced by acres of concrete. Although the busy-ness around me is distracting—the lights and horns and people crossing the street in front of us—I can feel myself adapting. Living in Maine, it seems, hasn't quite killed the city dweller in me.

Jack pulls into the garage of a modern, glass-fronted building, navigating the Explorer into a spot marked RESERVED . We get out and walk to an elevator, which at the turn of a key inserted by Jack takes us to the penthouse and opens directly into a living room whose windows provide a panoramic view of Chicago.

"Here we are," Jack says.
"Leave it to Andy," I remark as I look around at the beautiful room.

"That's just what Reuben did," says Jack, tossing his jacket onto a leather couch that looks as if it cost more than the entire contents of my house. "Do you want a drink?"
"Just water," I tell him, not adding that it's been more than eight years since I last tasted alcohol. I'd held on to drinking for a while after giving up coke, but eventually I'd realized that I needed to abandon it as well. Luckily, I'd also found that I didn't miss it, and the transition to tea, water, and fruit juice had been fairly painless.

Jack goes somewhere, presumably into the kitchen, and returns with two bottles of water. He hands me one and sits on the couch. I sit in a chair across from him, the two of us separated by a glass-top coffee table on which an orchid sits in a beautiful glazed pot.

"We can see Andy in the morning," Jack says. "Visiting hours are over for tonight." "Okay," I say, drinking some water and relishing its cool touch on my dry throat.

"Are you hungry?" Jack asks. He looks at his watch. "I think we can find someplace open late. There's not much here. I've mostly been eating at the hospital."