No Safeguards (26 page)

“You remember how it all ended?”

Paul nodded. “They found her body tangled up in one of the fishermen's seines. One morning she untied herself, sneaked out of the house, and threw herself into the sea. By then her eyes were like balls of tumeric. The shoppers said it was the devil's fire. Grama told them it was liver damage.”

“
Benighted.
I have news for Grama. Those superstitions are everywhere. One day I was at Jonathan's house, and we heard his aunt screaming on the downstairs balcony, and ran to see what had happened. We met her frozen against the wall. When she could speak, she said a black cat had come onto the balcony and meowed at her. She was convinced that the cat was the devil who'd come to take possession of her soul.”

Paul laughed.

“Jay, you're sure you want to return to live here?”

“Sure. If I'm offered a teaching job, I'd come back. It's home. Remember, you never wanted to leave, and at the beginning you wanted Ma to send you back.”

“And when Mrs. Mehta told Ma to send me back I said no. You all thought it was because I belonged to a gang.”

I waited for him to go on, but he said nothing more.

A gust of wind showered the porch with dust. Paul coughed and used his puffer. We moved to the back porch. Five white egrets feasting on the mealy bugs on the hibiscus hedge eyed us nervously then flew a short distance away onto the beach. To their left, up the hill to where our property bordered the new road at the top of the escarpment, the white cedars, glossy green among the fruit trees, were covered in pale lilac, bell-shaped blossoms — defiant of the drought. The lone cottonwood near the top was shedding fleece, which the breeze dislodged each time it gusted. The sun wasn't high enough yet to swamp the porch with light. The beach road behind the fence was deserted; the beach too. The fishing canoes were out, looking like whales with their humps above the water. The waves, like long rolls of white lace unwinding and rewinding, formed a feathery line at the shore, their breaking no louder than the backwash from a canoe. The sky a cloudless azure; the sea a lolite plain, out of which leaping flying fish created momentary silver flashes against the blue of the sky. A flock of plovers glided like miniature white airplanes above the water and occasionally dived into it. Except for the fronds of the royal palms flapping against each other when the breeze gusted and the gentle roll of the surf, all was silent. I adjusted a lounge chair to the reclining position and lay on it.

Paul remained standing, his stomach pressed against the porch railing. We were waiting for an appraiser to come to assess the property and put it on the market.

Staring out to sea, Paul asked: “Jay, do you sometimes feel lost?”

“Depends on what you mean by lost.”

“Sort of like — you don't know where you're going and you feel disconnected from everyone.” He glanced at me sideways. “Someone to keep you company as you travel . . .” He waited for me to respond.

I didn't.

“The day before I left for Guatemala I sat in Simón Bolívar Park in San Jose thinking about it, and saw life as a labyrinth in which we're trapped. Trapped terribly if we're condemned to be there alone.”

A crow flew onto one of the royal palms and croaked. Soon about 20 flitted about on the royal palms, some of them croaking, all of them eyeing Paul and me. They took turns flying down to the hibiscus hedge to eat the mealy bugs there. The egrets hadn't come back.

“Yes, life can be like a labyrinth,” I said. “But I suspect that even when our hands are clasped in someone else's we might still be thrashing about alone. Sometimes I think imagination is our only salvation, the only place where there's freedom and choice . . . What do you do when the hand you hold is pulling away? Daddy became a drunk when Ma left him. We're not sure what the relationship between Grama and Aunt Mercy was, but now Aunt Mercy is alone and demented and we had to put her in a nursing home. Look at our neighbour Mr. Morris. When you and I came to live with Grama, he and Mrs. Morris were together. You were too young to remember. He taught here in Havre, and she taught over the hill, in Esperance. One noon when I came in for lunch, I met him sitting on the sofa dabbing his eyes with a handkerchief. Mrs. Morris had left him and returned to live with her mother, and all he begged her to she wouldn't come back. She told him marriage was stifling her. Soon after she went to England to study and came back with a degree in maths and was my teacher at Kingstown Secondary. She never remarried and neither did he.”

Silence.

“Now here's Mr. Morris, a paraplegic, three years after he retired. Paul, defying loneliness, avoiding hurting others, and being self-sufficient as is humanly possible — if we can do that and still have a hand to hold, it's all we can ask for. Almost all else is beyond our control . . . Trouble is, that hand can bring crippling burdens. It's the story of our parents' marriage.”

With a faraway look Paul nodded slowly. “There was this guy in Spanish class with me. Hans. From Munich. A philosophy student. We talked a lot and shared the odd joint. He lent me his copy of Camus'
Myth of Sisyphus.
I'd already studied
L'Etranger
in Mme Loubier's class. The senseless cruelty of his character Merseault chilled me. But Sisyphus — Camus didn't invent him, the Greeks did — threw me for a curve . . . I thought about Sisyphus for weeks until I realized that I had long felt that life was meaningless; I'd even tried to put it in words. I'd have told you so that morning when I begged you to let me into your secrets so I could share mine with you too. That way if you tried to embarrass me, I could embarrass you too . . . In the end I linked Sisyphus and Matthew Arnold's ‘Dover Beach,' which I'd studied with Mrs. Mehta. I've gone over that poem so many times, I know it by heart.” He stopped talking for a long while and resumed staring out to sea. He turned, look at me with a cynical smile. “So why don't you clasp someone's hand?”

I stared at the coconut palms lining the beach to his far right.

Paul continued: “You never answered my question about whether you're gay.”

“You should talk. Your Maria saga is fiction.”

“You don't know that.”

“I know when you're lying. You don't have to tell me anything you're uncomfortable revealing.”

“That way you won't feel obliged to reveal anything yourself.”

Silence.

***

On the plane back to Montreal, I asked Paul how he felt about selling the property.

“Grama's no longer there. I don't know. Not sure I want to talk about it. How about you?”

I looked away, into the aisle, and remained silent. I felt like a tree one of whose main branches had just been chopped off.

S
IX WEEKS AGO
, on the Friday of the Victoria Day weekend, Paul said: “Let's go dancing on Sunday night.”

“I have wooden legs.”

“Mine are of cast iron.”

“Where will we go?”

“You'll see.”

We left home around 10 pm. At the Beaudry metro station, Paul said it was our stop. We exited into the Gay Village. I affected nonchalance. In July 2006, during the Out Games, Jonathan and I had wound our way through the throngs of people down there. Before that, on a couple of Thursday evenings, Jonathan's usual down time, he'd taken me to a bar in the area.

Now Paul and I walked east along Saint Catherine Street. After about a minute, Paul crossed to the south side and pointed out a sauna. “I tried to get in there once.”

I said nothing.

“The desk clerk said I looked underage and asked me for ID. I was a couple months short of 18. When I got back onto the sidewalk, I saw the Jacques-Cartier Bridge on my left and thought: there's my answer, but I couldn't bring myself to do it.”

“Paul, what's all this about?”

“Stop pretending to be naïve. Maria is Carlos' sister alright, but she's married and has her own home. Carlos is the real deal. Now it's your turn to come clean with me about Jonathan.”

“We're not boyfriends. I'm bisexual. I'm sure I've already told you so.”

“Never had sex with Jonathan?”

“No.”

“That girl you used to date . . .”

“Tamara.”

“She was the female part. How about the guy part?”

“I tried sleeping with a Haitian guy after that but lost interest when I got to his place.”

“Bisexual, 27, and never had sex with a guy! You've
a lot
of catching up to do, Bro. You must begin tonight.”

In a café near Plessis, we had coffee, served by an anorexic-looking fellow. One hemisphere of his hair was dyed turquoise, the other purple. The things people do to get noticed. While sipping my coffee, I recalled the Saturday morning when Paul abused Anna and me and later cried in his bedroom and threatened to commit suicide. ‘
If you let me into your secret rooms I'll let you into mine.'
So that was it. And there was a joke that Paul related a few weeks before he left for Central America. He said he'd read it in a book of Black American folklore. I thought he'd told it to upset Anna.

There were these cops on the beat in Central Park, New York, and they saw these men coming out of the bushes one by one and got suspicious, so they started questioning them. “What yall doing in there?” they asked the first one.

“Blowing bubbles,” he said.

They asked the next one who came out. He said the same thing.

“Blowing bubbles! Grown men blowing bubbles! And at this time o' night!” They were sure it was some sort o' code.

“Don't tell me,' they said to the next man who came out, “that you've been blowing bubbles, too?”

“I am Bubbles,” he replied.

“Jay, for years I tried. Jay, I tried to tell you. Remember I even told Ma one time to mind her own business when she was poking her nose into you and Jonathan's business. If you'd said thanks, I might have told you then. Once I even wrote it in a note to give to you but I tore it up. How could you not suspect? Why do you think I asked you about Grama and Aunt Mercy? Why I brought up the story about Jack and Brady? Jay, I mentioned the word gay every day, and
you
didn't pick up that I was trying to tell you something?” He shook his head with incredulity.

“I see that now. You're right. It was probably because of
how
you mentioned it.”

My mind turned to Anna, the guilt she died with, the fear she had that leaving us behind in St. Vincent might have made us gay.

Around midnight Paul suggested we go to Parking, but there was a $65 cover charge. We headed down to Extasis. It was too crowded. In the end we went to Sky
.
On one of the dance floors, where the majority of the dancers looked like CEGEP and high-school students, we heard a voice calling: “Well, hello, Meatman.”

“Gina! Really! Meet my brother, Jay.”

“Yeah. Right. Usually you all say cousin.”

“Seriously. Seriously.”

“There's a couple o' people over here who know you.” She held on to Paul's sleeve and threaded her way through the crowd and over to the bar. I followed.

“
!Emilia! ¡Qué sorpresa! ¿Qué haces aquí? ¡Gúicho también! ¡No es posible!
You guys like want to give me a heart attack or what.”

“If Said had come tonight . . .”

“Said!”

Emilia nodded and grinned.

“Yeah, Bégin. Man, that pedophile was a whole lot smarter than we gave him credit for,” Gúicho said. “But Said isn't gettable.” He rolled his eyes and smacked his lips.

“Slut!” Gina said.

Gúicho licked his lips, half turned, slapped his flat bottom, and wiggled his hips. Barely five feet. Belly already a bundle.

Gina shook her head. “I've given up trying to reform this child.”

“So,” Paul said, “you guys ran into one another in the Village?”

All three shook their heads slowly, exchanged glances, and guffawed.

“We came out to each other since high school,” Gina said.

“Not Said,” Gúicho said. “We met him here.”

“He suspected you,” Gina said looking at Paul and pointing to Gúicho. “We talked one time about testing you, and have you cover up for Emilia, the way Gúicho covered up for me.” She stared straight into Paul's eyes and nodded. “Milford poopooed the idea. He did.” She nodded slowly, looking at Paul's surprised face. “He and his boyfriend John, yeah, they knew about us. Respected our wish to stay closeted. And Doc knew. This boy” — she wagged a finger at Gúicho — “tried to make him one time. This boy's dangerous . . .” Gúicho twirled his tongue at her. “Doc threatened to out him. He came close to shitting his pants, and spilled the beans about all of us. And you know what this slut said when we found out: ‘He's so fucking handsome, why should I just abandon him to women?' Those times when Doc flirted with me, he'd give me this knowing wink, his signal that our secret was safe with him.”

Paul said nothing.

“Remember?” Gina grinned. “‘Gúicho, life ain't fair. You alone getting all the va in Gina?' That was code — Doc privately making fun of Gúicho and reassuring us, sort of, that he wouldn't out us. Cool guy, that Doc.” She pulled Emilia to her and kissed her and put an arm around Gúicho.

Paul turned to face me. “See what I mean? Characters in a Maupin novel.”

“So, Meatman,” Gúicho said, his eyes on Jay, “Where you found this Adonis? Can I borrow him for one night?”

“Sorry. Gúicho, my brother Jay.”

“
Le mon oncle
!” His hand went to his mouth.

“Gúicho!” Gina and Emilia shouted.

“Well,” Gúicho said, his eyes roving up and down my body, “some uncle, this one. I can drop my drawers for him — right here, this minute.” He winked at Gina. With that he pulled Paul toward the dance floor. Gina and Emilia followed them. It was Paul's hip-hop sort of music. I leaned against the bar counter and awaited their return.

When Paul came back, he whispered into my ear: “Gúicho sure wants to savour what's in your pants.”

“Tell him I already have a boyfriend.”

“Can't. l told him you're single. Tonight you'll give it up, Bro. Besides, let's face it: brothers who sin together bond better.”

By now Gúicho was standing in front of us and staring at Paul, who nodded. Paul moved away. Emilia and Gina were still on the dance floor.

“So you want to bed me?” I said.

“I'd love to.” Gúicho grinned, and his right hand came forward and began to caress my chest. “I like a man that's direct. Are you a bottom or a top?”

“I'm a vampire.”

Guícho's hand dropped, he moved backwards a step. “I'll wear the toothmarks proudly,” his voice keening.

“If you live.”

Guícho lowered his head, looked nervously right, left, hesitated a second, then slinked away.

About five minutes later Paul returned. “Jay, what's wrong with you? Why'd you tell him you're a vampire? His mouth flaps like a torn sail. Tomorrow morning all of Montreal will be thinking you're into weird shit.”

“And if you're his friend, tell him if he keeps offering his body to everyone like that, one day he'll meet a true vampire or worse. Ma had a co-worker whose brother's body was found covered with cigarette burns in a parking lot.”

***

There were lots of blanks to fill in that Victoria Day. We'd taken a cab home around two and slept until ten. I awoke and smelled coffee brewing and heard Paul moving about in the kitchen. He always gets up early. Needs a lot less sleep than I. At 3 pm we were still sitting at the table catching up on each other's secret lives, Paul's mostly.

“My history teacher, Monsieur Gaugin. Remember him? Guadeloupéen. A fitness nut. Streamlined body, V-torso, six pack, powerful thighs, the works, and a grin that could make you come. I couldn't look at him. Gave me a hard-on. He was one sweet mother. Sweeter than sweet.”

I shook my head and smiled at Paul's lingo.

“One afternoon, man — around the time I turned 14 — he kept me in to punish me for an incomplete assignment. Jay, I did everything in my power not to walk up to his desk and kiss him. When he told me the detention was over, I couldn't get up right away; I was fantasizing that he and I were having sex.” He laughed. “Desire, man. I came home, wrote a story in which he and I had sex, and . . .”

We were silent for a few seconds.

“There's more — lot's more. Listen to this.” He put his hand on his forehead, closed his eyes, and recited:

Harriet Mole is a horny soul.

And a horny soul is she.

Gaugin she longs for,

And Gaugin she grunts for

And Gaugin it won't be.

Ugly Marie

Looks like a bowl:

A full bowl is she.

Dip in your hand.

It will come

Out full of candy.

“Cool. Right? You see, Bro, when reality doesn't meet your needs, there's always fantasy.”

“Paul, you confuse me. That was when? The year after that showdown with Mrs. Bensemana?”

“No. The same year. Later. She was in February, and he was in November.”

“At least you didn't send him your limericks.” I imagined his doing so, Gaugin reporting it to the office, Paul suspended, and Anna in Bégin's office hearing that Paul had attempted to seduce a male teacher. I chuckled. In February it was a woman, in November a man. I chuckled again, until it dawned on me that she would have believed she'd caused it. “There's something in all this that I don't get. Explain yourself, Paul.”

“What's there to explain?” He clasped his hands and put both thumbs under his chin, his elbows on the table. “In Mrs. Bensemana's case, I wanted to like throw those guys off my scent, and get some acclaim for it. I don't think I calculated it as precisely, not the acclaim part. But the rest: definitely.”

“And with Gaugin?”

He unclasped his hands, put them on his thighs, and made a couple of ironing movements. “It was a fantasy. He wasn't into guys. In class, his eyes turned molten when the girls flirted with him. Bégin —
he
loved guys. Brown meat. Muscle. Beefcake. Those Hispanics used to tease the hell out of Said — we mentioned him last night — a Pakistani chap” —

“South Asian?”

“South Asian chap, a body-builder. Bégin loved to clap him on the shoulder, his pedophile eyes flaming blue, his cheeks pink. And you should see Said: stiff with embarrassment.”

“And if you'd thought Gaugin was into guys?”

“Moot point. He wasn't.”

“So you sublimated your lust for Gaugin into love for his subject?”

“He never hurt my eyes; that's for sure. But that's not why I did well in history. He cared enough to push me to do my work, and I appreciated it. Take Mrs. Loubier. She looked like a light bulb on stilts. Her looks didn't affect my performance.”

I recalled his references to homosexuality: “
Call the exterminators, Ma; there's vermin in the house
”
;
his numerous speculative crude and cruel remarks made in connection with Jonathan.

“Jay, you remember how I hung around with that gay-bashing group ADDA? Looking back now, I can say those guys like frighten me. You remember when Mrs. Mehta told Ma to send me back to St. Vincent and I said no? Well, the real reason was that I knew men turned me on, and St. Vincent was the last place I wanted to be . . . because of what had happened to Jack and Brady. Seriously, Jay, how could you not have suspected? Remember that exchange we had about condoms?”

“We were trading insults, Paul.”

“Oh. I thought you'd finally understood. Bill urged me to tell you. And it was one of the things I wanted to tell you the night before I left home. But you were such an asshole. Best favour you ever did me: taking me to Bill's place. That humungous cock in ebony. A dead giveaway.”

We both laughed. Paul coughed.

“The things he said in those discussions you-all had impressed me: justice for the poor, trying to see things from another person's perspective, resisting materialism, penetrating to the core of our being, defining ourselves, being truthful to ourselves and others. Not sure about that one. Honestly, I was surprised that he was gay and decent.”

“Be serious!”

“You didn't go to high school here. You won't know. The stuff those Black and Latino guys said about gays — in English, in French, in Spanish, in Creole. If it was just name calling alone: chi-chi man, battybwoy, faggot, bullerman,
ma sissy, ma comère, fiffy, tapette, folle, pédé
,
maricón
, woman-man, fruit, antipympym,
hueco
,
güicoy
— it wouldn't be half as bad. They'd speculate about what they'd do if a gay guy were to approach them. They were certain gays want to sleep with every man they lay eyes on. They all claimed to have had an uncle or a cousin who'd beaten up — in some cases killed — a gay pedophile. And there was the way they treated Milford and his boyfriend John, these two Black out-gay guys in school.”