Night Kites (8 page)

I shut it, and we both sat down. He sat in the big leather Eames chair, and I sat across from him on the couch.

I thought, Here it comes.

I could still feel where her lips had touched mine, and smell her perfume. We could still hear the faint sounds of MTV pumping away in the living room.

I looked from the shag rug to the framed photographs of Pete and me, taken on Pete’s graduation day. (I was in my first suit, standing on tiptoe so I could get my two fingers up behind Pete’s head to make horns.) Finally, I looked over at Dad’s face, which was as grim and stony as I’d ever seen it.

I started mumbling something about being sorry for the lie. I got the idea anything I was going to come up with was going to be shot down in a second.

“Let
me
talk,” Dad said.

I looked down at my Nikes and waited.

“Pete’s sick,” Dad said. “Pete’s very ill.”

I felt that silly sort of relief I used to feel when I was a kid and Pete was getting hell for something I had nothing to do with. Then the words “very ill” began registering.

“How ill?”

“Erick, anything we say has to be between us. I want that understood.”

“All right.”

“You’re not to talk about this with Jack, or Dill, or that other one. You’re not to discuss this with
anyone!
Is that clear?”

“Yes. But what’s Pete got?”

It took him a long time to say it. “AIDS … I think you know what AIDS is?”

I’d heard dozens of jokes about AIDS. (What do the letters GAY stand for? “Got AIDS yet?”… Did you hear about the new disease gay musicians are coming down with? BAND-AIDS … What do you call a faggot in a wheelchair? ROLLAIDS.) I remembered they’d touched on AIDS briefly in health class. Mostly gay men got it. Some drug addicts got it, too.

“How could Pete get
that
?” I said. I remembered something about people getting it from blood transfusions. I remembered Pete always gave blood during the Red Cross drives. But how could you get it
giving
blood?

Dad was taking a gulp of his scotch, putting the glass down, crossing and uncrossing his legs.

“Erick,” Dad said, “we have to think about Pete now.”

“That’s who I am thinking about!”

Dad put his hand up to hush me.

“We just have to think about Pete. We’re not going to judge him. We’re going to support him.”

“Okay,” I said impatiently. “Okay.” But I’d caught the word “judge.”

So I sat there, waiting for Dad to continue.

“Apparently,” Dad began, “your mother is the only one in the family who really knows Pete well.”

“I
GUESS I REALLY
screwed up your weekend,” Pete said as he let me in the door the next morning.

“It was headed in that direction anyway,” I said.

At noon I was meeting Jack, Dill, and Nicki at the Central Park Zoo. Then we were going to walk up Fifth Avenue to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Dill’d heard there was a pool with fountains in there, where we could all have lunch…. I hadn’t even met Nicki’s eyes that morning.

I’d said only that Pete had picked up the virus he’d had in France last summer, that I was going to take him a Sunday
Times
and stay with him for a while.

“You want some coffee, don’t you?” Pete said. He walked into the kitchen to pour us some. “How was the Springsteen concert?”

I left the
Times
on the hall table. I described the mob scene at Madison Square Garden, Springsteen’s raps between numbers, and how he’d finally wound up doing John Fogerty’s “Rockin’ All Over the World” as his last encore…. I told Pete to thank whoever it was in his Great Writers’ Discussion Group for getting us the tickets.

Pete had his back to me. He was getting cream from the refrigerator and sugar from the cupboard. “It’s the
Gay
Writers’ Discussion Group,” Pete said. “Last night Dad said what do you discuss? I said we discuss gay books. Dad said is a gay book a book that sleeps with other books of the same sex?”

Pete laughed, so I did, too.

He looked even thinner than when I’d last seen him. He had on rust-colored corduroys, a white shirt, old Nikes, no socks.

“Dad can’t stand the word ‘gay,’” Pete said. “When he hears it, his face squishes up like a bird dropped something white out of itself down on Dad.”

We were both smiling while we carried the mugs of coffee into the living room and sat down. Pete had The Phil Woods Quartet on. He loved jazz, Charlie Parker, Gerry Mulligan. Anything I knew about jazz I’d learned from Pete.

He crossed his legs and looked over at me with a shake of his head, said, “Well, Ricky, this is sort of a variation on that joke about the gay guy trying to convince his mother he’s really a drug addict. You’ve probably heard it.”

“Or one like it,” I said. The jokes I’d heard were never about “gay guys.” They were always about “fags,” “fruits,” worse.

“How’s Dad taking this?” Pete asked me. “I couldn’t really tell.”

“He’s worried about your health. I am, too.”

“I don’t mean my health.”

“I think he’s hurt.”

“Because I told Mom I’m gay but not him, hmmm?”

“Yeah.”

“And you, pal? I was planning to tell you.”

“When I grew up, or what?”

“I don’t blame you for being pissed off, Ricky. I was waiting for the right time.”

“You act like you had a crime to confess or something. I’m not Dad, Pete. I told Dad last night: It’s just another way of being. It’s not a crime. It’s not anything to be ashamed about.”

Pete got up to play the other side of the tape. “I thought you sort of knew anyway.”

“How would I sort of know?” I said. “You sort of know about someone like Charlie Gilhooley, but how would I sort of know about you?”

Pete went back and sat down. “I never brought any women home. I never talked about any women. I’m twenty-seven years old.”

“You talked about going out to discos, dancing all night.”

“Yeah, I guess I did. I didn’t say they were gay discos.”

“What about Belle Michelle?”

“That was ten or eleven years ago,” Pete said. “Michelle always knew about me. I never tried to fool
her.
I didn’t want her to think the reason I didn’t make any passes had anything to do with her.”

“We always thought she was your big love. Dad thought she threw you over and you never got over it.”

“Michelle and I were just great pals, at a time when we both needed pals. She was in her wheelchair, and I was in my closet.” Pete smiled. “Michelle said as long as I stayed in my closet, she’d understand perfectly if I parked my car in a handicapped space, too.”

“So when did you tell Mom?”

“Right before I went to Europe last summer.”

“Dad made it sound like she’d always known.”

“Maybe she did, deep down—I don’t know … Getting up the courage to tell Mom was the hardest thing I ever had to do,” Pete said. “How many times have you heard Mom say we were the perfect family? She and Dad never played around on each other, never even had a fight that lasted overnight … and while all their friends’ kids were raising every kind of hell, we were the good boys. We didn’t do drugs, or drink, or cheat in school, or wrap the family car around trees.”

“You came close,” I said.

“I got a few speeding tickets.”

“I know what you mean, though,” I said. “Mom always thought we were the Waltons, or the Lawrences on
Family.
”

“My God, the Lawrences!” Pete winced. “I forgot how Mom loved to watch the Lawrences: Buddy and Willy and Kate and Jim, et cetera, happy ever after in that big blue house, wrapping up every problem from adultery to abortion in sixty minutes flat, with time out for commercials.”

“She still watches the reruns,” I said. “Yeah, I always thought
I
was going to be the one to blot the family record.”

Pete chuckled. “Not your big brother, hmmm?”

“I didn’t mean that you’re blotting the family record, Pete.”

“I know you didn’t,” Pete said, “but I’m not exactly enhancing it…. So I kept thinking, why do Mom and Dad have to know? I managed to grow up without opening that boil. Why start all the guilt/blame machinery going now? I was never crazy about self-revelation, either. I always hated people who got on the tube and confessed they were alcoholics or anorexics or Jesus freaks or some other damn thing!”

I said, “When I’d watch gays on talk shows, I’d wonder why they’d announce it. Dad said they were exhibitionists.”

“I thought they were, too,” Pete said. “I used to sit watching those things hoping to God they’d look as straight as possible. I used to hate seeing any Charlie Gilhooley’s coming out of the closet.”

“Poor Charlie just got beat up at the Kingdom By The Sea bar,” I said.

“I’m sorry, but I’m not surprised,” Pete said. “I used to stay as far away from Charlie Gilhooley as possible. Sometimes, when I was a kid,
I
felt like beating him up. I’d tell myself I might be gay, but I’m not a Charlie Gilhooley fairy!”

“Well, you’re not,” I said.

“So what?” said Pete. “Do I get extra points for not looking it? … I used to think I did.”

“Then what changed you?” I said. “What made you tell Mom?”

Pete took a fast gulp of coffee, and it sloshed down the side of his mug to the tabletop. “Jim Stanley went to work on me,” he said.

He started to get up, for something to wipe up the coffee.

“I’ll get it,” I said.

I went into the kitchen for a sponge. I was trying to remember Jim Stanley. I’d met him only once. He wrote science-fiction stories and screenplays as J. J. Stanley, and called himself “bicoastal” because he traveled back and forth from New York to Beverly Hills. Pete had gone to Europe with him last summer.

When they came back, we’d all had dinner together, at a restaurant in SoHo, in lower New York. Pete and Jim had just come from having drinks at Stan and Tina Horton’s loft down there. Jim was Pete’s age, tall, sandy-haired. I remembered he’d talked a lot about Rachter, this program that rigged a computer to write novels. He was working on an idea for a TV series about a Rachterlike character in an office, who told stories about the employees I couldn’t remember anything else about him.

While I wiped up the coffee, Pete said, “Jim’s a political gay. I used to hate gay activists! I used to think they were a bunch of self-pitying sissies who blamed everything on the fact they were homosexuals. I used to tell Jim that what I did in bed was my own private business. Jim said that was right: What I did in bed
was,
but what about life out of bed? What about lying to everyone, trying to pass for straight, never letting family or friends know what was going on in my life? … He convinced me the only way to get past that kind of self-hatred was to come out of hiding. He said anyone who loved me wouldn’t love me any less if I came out, and I’d like myself a lot more. So I started with Mom. You were next on my list.”

I tossed the sponge at the sink, missed, left it on the kitchen floor. “What’d Mom say when you told her?”

“She said she wasn’t surprised. She said she was glad I told her. And she said she used to worry that I was too much of a loner.”

“That’s what I always thought you were, too,” I said. “A loner.” I sat down.

“I was. A busy loner.”

“What’s a busy loner?”

“Active, but not really attached,” Pete said. “Too busy…. That’s why I never did anything about finishing
The Skids
—or finishing my Ph.D.”

“Oh,
that
,” I said a little contemptuously, as though Dad was in the room with us.

“Dad was right about that,” Pete said. “I should have gone to Columbia, or N.Y.U., and finished it. I should have worked on my book, too,” Pete said. “But when I landed here right out of Princeton, I couldn’t believe the gay scene. It was still the seventies. There’ll never be another time like it. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. I wasn’t out at Princeton, naturally. When I saw all the gay bars and discos here, I just wanted to dance and drink and play.”

I couldn’t imagine Pete dancing with another guy.

I said, “When I get out of college, if I ever get into college, I’ll probably want to dance and drink and play, too.”

Pete shook his head. “No. You’re having your party right now. My adolescence was on hold…. I could hardly take Tim Lathrop to the Seaville High Prom, or Marty to the P-Party. We sneaked around like guilty thieves. Tim spent half his time at confession, and Marty was seeing if a shrink could make him straight…. That’s when I became the world’s foremost authority on gay books.” Pete laughed. “Migod! I don’t think there’s a book that even remotely touched on the subject that I didn’t read. I spent hours in the library looking under H in the card catalog!”

I was remembering Tim Lathrop as Pete talked. Tim had been a lifeguard on Main Beach when Pete was. He was this blond hunk who was at our house a lot when Pete was in his teens, one of the star tennis players at Holy Family High…. Marty Olivetti was still one of Pete’s closest friends. He was from Tulsa, Oklahoma. He’d come from Princeton with Pete for weekends years ago, and they’d spent most of their time out on the boat. When Dad first met him, I remembered Dad’d imitate Marty’s thick Oklahoma accent, and tease, “What kind of an Italian says ‘far’ for ‘fire’ and ‘pank’ for ‘pink’?”

Pete got up to get himself another cup of coffee. A minute later he zapped me with the soggy sponge I’d left on the kitchen floor, calling me
“Cochan!”

I threw it back at him, and for a while we were feinting punches at each other, and ducking, horsing around in the old familiar way.

But Pete looked beat. When I said I ought to be leaving soon, Pete didn’t protest. He said he probably shouldn’t have any more coffee—it’d only give him the trots.

Pete said he needed a nap, too, that Stan and Tina were coming by later, and Jim was flying in from the coast that night. He said he’d try to bring Jim out to Seaville for dinner one night next week.

“Does Jim know you have this thing?” I asked him.

“Say AIDS, Ricky,” Pete said. “Mom and Dad are calling it a thing, a bug, everything but AIDS…. Yes, Jim knows. We were both sick all through Europe. I kept telling myself I had what he had, some kind of dysentery. But my lymph nodes were swollen, and I had these little red spots on my ankles. I had all these explanations to myself for what they were. But I couldn’t ever get my strength back, and there were more spots. I began to really panic by the time I came out to Seaville last time. Mom wanted me to go see Doctor Rapp there. By then I had this big purple bruise under my arm. When I saw that, I began to face the fact I could have AIDS. I figured old Rapp would broadcast it all over The Hadefield Club. Dad would like that a lot!”