Night Kites (15 page)

I got into a panic.

I cut out early. I figured Nicki didn’t even know the state I was in, probably believed me when I said I had to study for the English quiz the next day.

I walked along the highway for a long time in the cold autumn night before I started seriously hitchhiking.

Lots of nights when I got back from KBTS, I went up to see Pete. He’d eventually moved into Mrs. Tompkins’ old apartment over the garage.

Mrs. Tompkins had tried. But the first night Pete had dinner at home, Mrs. Tompkins had served his on a yellow plastic plate from a set we kept in our family picnic basket. She’d said, “Wouldn’t it be better if we kept Peter’s dishes separate?” … And after that Mom found her doing Pete’s sheets and pillowcases by hand in a tub filled with Tide and Clorox, in the basement, wearing rubber gloves. She’d said no matter what the sheet of instructions had said, she didn’t think Pete’s things should be laundered with everyone else’s. It went on and on, and when Mom said we weren’t going to live that way, that we’d take all the necessary precautions but not go overboard, Mrs. Tompkins broke down and admitted that her daughter wanted her to quit, twenty years with us or not! Mrs. Tompkins was terrified, too.

“She told her daughter,” Dad said wearily, “so now it starts.”

“Her daughter lives in Ohio,” Mom said, “and Mrs. Tompkins is going there to live. So nothing starts…. Something ends. Mrs. Tompkins was like one of the family.”

But it launched Dad on another lecture to all of us, about making sure we didn’t confide in
anyone.

“Eventually, we’ve got to figure out how to explain Pete’s being here,” Mom said. “Erick hasn’t even had Jack to the house since Pete’s been here. Or Dill!”

“That hasn’t got anything to do with Pete,” I said. “Jack and I had a fight about something else.”

“About what?” Mom wanted to know.

“Just school stuff, Mom.”

“What are you telling Dill?” Dad asked me.

“Nothing,” I said. “Dill’s so busy with graduation plans and yearbook stuff and all the rest, she doesn’t even know Pete’s here.”

I let it go at that. There were a lot of reasons I didn’t want to fill them in on my life at that point. I didn’t want to admit I’d taken Jack’s girl. I didn’t want Mom nagging me about when she’d meet Nicki, knowing how Nicki felt about family-around-the-table crap. But mostly, I couldn’t bear to tell Pete that a whole new part of my life had started, just as Pete’s was beginning to end.

Although Pete often said casually, in conversation, that he was dying, Dad and Mom and I acted like we hadn’t heard him. Mom would always change the subject, fast.

But none of us could deny what we saw with our own eyes. Pete’s hair was thinning, due to chemotherapy. There were dark circles under his eyes. Sometimes he slept whole afternoons away, he was so weak. There were ugly, purple Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions on parts of his body.

When I got up to his apartment, Pete was in the shower. He hollered out at me that he wouldn’t be long. Pete had become a night owl more and more, getting up after we had dinner, going to bed when we got up.

There was an unfinished short story on his desk, and I shouted in to ask him if it was okay for me to look at it.

“If you want to! It’s not worked out, though!”

It was called “The Sweet Perfume of Good-bye.”

It was about a world where there was no fragrance except an exquisite perfume a dying person exuded a year before it was his time to die. That was the only scent in that world, this incredible and seductive odor…. It was as far as Pete had gotten, but it got me right behind the eyes.

Pete came out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around him, bone skinny, the purple KS lesions showing on his arms and legs.

“I like the story so far,” I managed, and I told myself I wasn’t going to break down, wasn’t going to lay that kind of trip on Pete.

“Making the better of the bitter,” Pete said. “I can’t seem to stick with my Skids, or write anything but short stories.”

“But wouldn’t everybody be busy murdering everybody else, so they could smell that perfume?”

“There’s no murder in that world,” Pete said. “No illness. Death is thought of as the great change, and it comes randomly to people at different times. But a year before the death there’s this perfume, the only one in that world. I’m still working on it.” Pete slipped into some shorts and began pulling on old cords. “
You’re
home early. How’s Dill?”

“She’s the same,” I said.

While Pete started talking about some Thanksgiving plans Mom was making, I thought of what it must have been like for Pete when he was my age and couldn’t talk about his personal life. I was getting a small taste of that, living in my own private little world, squelching every instinct I had to talk about Nicki, or the breakup between Dill and me, or Jack…. I felt really distanced from everyone, so much so that it took me a while to hear what Pete was telling me. Mom was planning a
surprise
party for Pete on Thanksgiving Day?

“Then how do you know about it?” I said.

“Jim knows I don’t like surprises. He told me so I could stop her if I want to. I want to, but I can’t.” He pulled on a shirt. “She’s invited Jim, Marty and Shawn, his lover, and Stan and Tina Horton.”

“Do you want me to talk to her about it?”

“No. What can you say? She’s trying, Jim’s trying. Everyone’s trying. How the hell can I object to that? … Last night she said she realized how hard it is for me to be separated from Jim. It isn’t that hard. It’s almost a relief, but she wouldn’t understand that.”

“See”—I began sounding like Nicki—“none of us even knows what you feel for him, if you miss him, that kind of junk.”

“He’s a friend,” Pete said. “I don’t feel that way about him, Ricky. I think Jim’s talking himself into feeling that way about me. He doesn’t want to walk out on me now. If I hadn’t come down with AIDS, we’d have just been good buddies after we came back from Europe.”

“Maybe he really does feel something, though,” I said. “What if you’re wrong that he’s just forcing himself to stick by you because you’ve got AIDS?” I kept remembering Jim Stanley’s saying “we” in conversation, how he’d insisted on making the eggnog, the way he’d touched Pete from time to time in the living room, and how he’d said B.P.—Before Pete…. I think I felt a little teed off at Pete, and I know I thought of Dad’s saying Pete never finished things he started.

Pete walked over to the couch where I was sitting. He sat down beside me. “You know how you’re always worrying because you can’t say ‘I love you,’ Ricky?”

“Yeah.” I wished to hell I could tell him all that was over, and all the rest. But I still couldn’t see myself taking up Pete’s time with the little-brother-in-the-throes-of-first-passion bit, while he was trying not to puke after his weekly chemotherapy, writing his will, staffing an AIDS hotline in New York weekends, listening to one horror story after the other.

“I worried about saying those words in a different way,” Pete said. “I’d no sooner say the words than the feeling would fly out the window. I think relationships scared the hell out of me. I guess it was because if one lasted, I’d have to face a lot of shit I didn’t want to. I’d be seen with one guy all the time. How could I explain that to the family, and straight friends, and people from Southworth?”

A new tape by Art Ensemble that Jim’d sent Pete was playing softly in the background.

Pete said, “Even just a few minutes ago, I couldn’t say that I don’t love Jim. I had to say that I don’t feel
that way
about him. I’ve always had a problem being openly gay, or talking with straights about my gay feelings.”

Pete sank back against the cushions. “That’s probably why I couldn’t get used to being with just one person,” he said. “I couldn’t go through all that. I’m not saying that I deliberately set out to sabotage every relationship I ever had, but I think a lot of those feelings were in operation…. So I never stayed with anyone very long.”

“That’s really lousy, isn’t it?” I said.

Pete shrugged. “I never used to think so. I never thought that much about it. I just told myself I was young, I was this
sexy
guy. The more the merrier.”

“Then it wasn’t lousy,” I said, “if you were happy.”

“Now I think about a lot of things I never thought about before. But I don’t look back on my life and say I should have done this, or I shouldn’t have done that, any more than anyone else dying probably does. You don’t die at my age without regrets, or without thinking how you might have done things differently.”

I let out this long sigh, and Pete reached over and squeezed my knee.

“It’s okay,” he said. “We can talk about my dying.”

“Maybe you can,” I said, and my voice broke.

“I hope the two of us can talk about anything, Ricky.”

“Okay,” I said, “but now I’m going to let you finish that story,” and I got up to go. I was too close to blurting out I’m getting laid, I’ve lost Jack, don’t die, I need you, too close to just covering my eyes with my hands and bawling.

Pete said, “You know, Mom worries that you’re handling all this too well.”

“Mom thinks you’re going to enjoy her Thanksgiving surprise, too,” I said.

Pete chuckled. “Well, I’m going to try not to disappoint her.”

When I got back to my room, Nicki called.

“Yes,” she said.

“What does ‘yes’ mean?”

“Yes, I’ll go to the dumb Ring Dance. I even know what I’m going to wear.”

“How come you changed your mind?”

“How come you gave me a real nothing kiss when you left here tonight? You were bummed because of all the pictures of Ski and me together…. You want to hear what I’m going to wear, Eri? You know those white dogs with the black spots?”

“Dalmatians?”

“I’ve got these Dalmatian-dotted stockings brand-new someone dropped off at the shop today. I’m going to wear
them.”

“I’ve got a ring you’re going to wear.”

“I just wish I didn’t have to go to that cattle call to get it. See, I’m not into being a cow, Eri, or a sheep.”

I did my Martin Short imitation. “It will surely be a delight. Because, like, it’s a very decent thing to have this tradition, I must say. I’m going mental just thinking about it, and I’m doomed as doomed can be if you say no, no question about that. Showing you off at such a decent occasion, give me a break, I’m ecstatic!”

“ZZZZZZZZZZZ,” she said.

T
HANKSGIVING EVE, PETE SAID,
“Never mind trying to get Dad’s car now. You’ll be late. Take Jim’s SAAB to the dance.”

We could hear Mom and Dad shouting at each other, all the way down in the kitchen.

“I don’t give a damn if they
don’t
!” Mom said.

“They’re
my family
!” Dad said.

“What’s Pete?” Mom yelled back.

“What are they fighting about?” I asked Pete.

“You mean this time?” Pete sighed. “Dad finally told Grandpa Rudd I have AIDS, and Grandpa Rudd says he and Grandma won’t come for Christmas.

“Good!” I said. “We’ll actually have a Christmas where Grandpa Rudd isn’t on Dad’s back about everything!”

Pete didn’t answer me. He was busy cleaning up his room for Jim’s arrival later that night. Marty and Shawn were staying at some motel. Stan and Tina Horton were driving out from New York for Thanksgiving dinner, then going back the same day.

I knew how depressed Pete seemed lately. I tried to leave on a light note, tried to make a joke about the battle going on under us. “I don’t feel right about borrowing Jim’s SAAB,” I said, “but I’ll make the big sacrifice, since I don’t want to interrupt our parents’ marvelous dialogue.”

Pete only said, “I don’t feel right about using Jim’s car, either,” gnawing on his own guilty bone, tossing me the keys, “but he’d want you to take it, Ricky.”

I caught the keys and gave Pete a wave, running down the stairs, to the garage, out the side door to the driveway where the SAAB was parked.

I thought about other nights I’d gone to something at school, how I’d always waited for Jack to honk, how we’d always doubled for those things, and talked on our way to get our dates and after we’d dropped them off.

Sometimes when I was with Nicki in bed, I’d feel this strange sadness when I remembered the old days when Jack would say things like “When that happens, it means a girl’s excited, right? So how does
she
get over it, if we stop in the middle of everything?”

Now, when I had all the answers, Jack wasn’t there with the questions. There wasn’t anyone anywhere with questions: just Nicki and me in our own cocoon.

I passed Reverend Snore chugging up our street in his old Chevy that all the parishioners, including Dad, complained gave St. Luke’s a tacky image, on his way for a backgammon game with Pete.

Snore’s visits were a sore point with Dad.

Once Dad said that was a great idea Mom had to tell Snore, just like her, just like her!

“
I
told Snore!” Pete said.

“Don’t cover up for your mother!” Dad insisted.

“If Mom
had
told Snore, why would it be just like her?” I wanted to know.

“Just like her to involve the community in our private affairs!” Dad said. “Just like her now, to let you and Pete lie for her!”

We couldn’t seem to convince Dad she hadn’t lied, so I finally just tossed in, “Well, we’re all a little mendacious lately, aren’t we?” (I’d been reading
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
for English. I’d gotten “mendacious” from Big Daddy’s speeches in that play. I’d liked the sound of the word.)

I’d said that mendacity was our way of life, lately.

Dad had given me a crack across the head. First time ever.

I just sat there, trying to stop the tears from coming, while Mom rushed to put her arms around me.

“We have a full-blown crisis here!” Dad shouted. “I won’t take his mouth!”

Mom said, “You never understood survival humor, never, Arthur!”

“Another of my failings!” Dad said. “I’ll add it to the list, along with your judgment that my parents are middle-class ignoramuses, and the only reason I made The Hadefield Club is because
your
parents got me in!”