Remembering Christmas (10 page)

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Authors: Drew Ferguson

BOOK: Remembering Christmas
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“James Hoffmann, I swear. You get better looking every Christmas,” the matron in the ancient, full-length beaver coat insisted as he opened the door. “Doesn't he, Roy? Doesn't he get better looking every year?”
Roy Powers stood behind his mother Evelyn, smiling and rolling his eyes.
“Sure he does, Mama. He just gets better looking every year. I'm liking the silver fox look, Jimmy.”
“Get your butts in here before Adele accuses me of letting you freeze to death on the front porch,” James laughed, embracing the old woman and shaking the hand of her son. Funny world, he thought. In New York, he was forever kissing and hugging men he didn't even like, but here, on the threshold of his mother's home, etiquette demanded nothing more intimate than a formal handshake with the first man he had ever loved.
“Oh, Adele, just look at that beautiful tree,” Evelyn declared as James helped her out of her coat. “Why I just can't believe they can make them so lifelike these days. I can practically smell the pinecones, I swear. Roy, next year we're going to get us one just like it and not bother with all the fuss and mess.”
Adele wasn't quite certain she wasn't being insulted for not taking the time and effort to put up a real tree and decided, just in case, to defend herself with a show of bravado.
“Why thank you, Evelyn. I have to admit I just love my tree. It comes with the lights already on it. You know what you ought to do since you admire it? You should run down to Walmart tomorrow and buy this same tree half price now that Christmas is over.”
Evelyn plopped her ample ass on the sofa, in easy reach of the cheese board, and helped herself to a generous serving of cheddar.
“One Dubonnet coming right up,” James announced.
“James, you are so sweet to remember my beverage.”
The only reason his mother kept a bottle of that nasty stuff in a kitchen cupboard was to be able to offer her closest friend her favorite drink whenever she dropped by for a visit.
“Roy?”
“Whatever you're having, so long as it's strong.”
Roy smiled, his green eyes twinkling, and James was startled to see a striking resemblance to a certain young man in Pennsylvania. No, he decided on closer consideration. There was the obvious difference in their ages for one thing, and they looked nothing alike except for the color of their eyes and maybe the way they both threw back their heads, chins pointing to the sky, whenever they laughed.
Adele sat down beside her friend, and the Hoffmanns and their guests raised their glasses and offered a toast, wishing each other a very Merry Christmas and a healthy and happy New Year.
“Now, Jimmy. I want to hear all about the rich and famous people you've met since last Christmas,” Evelyn announced.
She was confused by the identity of the Senator, mistaking him for the congressman who ran off with his mistress while his wife was on her deathbed with cancer. She nodded her head appreciatively when he mentioned meeting the cable news anchor during his summer vacation. But she saved her real enthusiasm for the news of the dinner he'd shared with Archie Duncan just several nights ago.
“I just loved that show of his. I wish they'd bring it back. I saw last week in
People
magazine he's dating that actress from
Everybody Loves Raymond.
”
“The one who plays the mother?” he asked, sounding perfectly innocent.
James would have to severely reprimand Archie Duncan the next time their paths crossed for keeping this important information a secret.
“No, not the one who plays the mother. The other one. Oh, Jimmy, you are just too much,” she roared, almost choking on her Dubonnet.
Roy smiled and sipped his Scotch, as usual not saying much.
“Oh, good Lord,” Adele said, jumping off the sofa, preoccupied with fears of an impending culinary disaster. “I better get that roast out of the oven before it's burnt to a crisp!”
Times change. Fashions come and go. Tastes are fickle. The only loyalty was to the pursuit of the new, the novel, the yet to be discovered. In Manhattan the hot spot of the moment was likely to be shuttered the following week. But in Parkersburg, West Virginia, Scandals Lounge was eternal.
James sat in a time warp, nursing a beer. Aloysius, the bartender, had been serving drinks to the gay underworld of that small city on the Ohio River since long before Roy and James had first walked through the door, shaking with nerves as they presented their unconvincing fake IDs. He had told the boys they could stay only if they promised to hide in the basement in the event of a random police raid by members of Parkersburg's finest seeking to supplement their meager wages with a thick envelope stuffed with cash.
A frighteningly tall drag queen, a Kabuki Whitney Houston, was now engaged in a screaming match with a pair of young toughs from Marietta who were shouting racial epithets during her act. James was in a strange and unsettled mood, hoping to witness a fistfight, and jumped in his seat when a pair of beefy paws grabbed him by the shoulders.
“Sorry to keep you waiting. She had one Dubonnet too many, and I had to help her get undressed for bed.”
All these years later, and James still both loved and hated Roy for his fierce devotion to his parents. He'd gotten a degree in pharmacy at WVU, a transportable skill, but had returned to his hometown where he made a very good living managing the retail pharmacies for a regional supermarket chain. He'd cared for his father while he was dying of prostate cancer and was a live-in companion to his dithering, demanding mother. James, on his most charitable days, thought Roy was noble. The rest of the time he thought he was a fool.
“I don't know why I let you talk me into this,” James complained.
“You had better plans tonight?”
“Not really. I watched
It's a Wonderful Life
twice last night, and the only other DVD in my mother's house is the first season of
Touched by an Angel
.”
Roy sat down beside him and ordered a round.
“What's the matter, Jimmy? You seem even sadder than usual.”
James took umbrage at the comment, suspecting it was an unintended insult. “Ernst has pancreatic cancer.”
“That's not good.”
“No, it's not.”
“Well, I'm very sorry to hear that.”
It was ironic that the only note of sympathy and concern for the dying old man came from someone whose intelligence Ernst had insulted on his first trip to New York, attributing the shy manner and reticence of a young visitor from West Virginia, who was clearly intimidated by unfamiliar and overwhelming surroundings, to a mild form of autism.
“How are you dealing with it?” Roy asked.
James cringed at Roy's sincere solicitation, remembering how callously he'd broken his big, sweet heart all those many years ago. From the first awkward fumblings on boyhood sleepovers through the rushed, guilt-ridden ruttings in high school and on to the long, cramped nights on the narrow twin mattresses of college dormitory rooms, Roy had never considered a world without James, while James had dreamed of a different life, the stuff of books and movies, in the great city of New York.
James had departed for Manhattan after graduating and had been grateful to find a subsistence salary position typing correspondence and licking envelopes for a senior editor at Doubleday, earning barely enough to afford a tiny room in a struggling chorus boy's fourth-floor Ninth Avenue walk-up. By the time he had finally persuaded Roy to see Manhattan before making his final decision to sit for his pharmacy license in West Virginia and not New York, James had been seduced by expensive meals in restaurants he could never have afforded on his own and the open invitation to stay the weekend at his generous new friend's magical cabin on Fire Island. He had already regretted insisting on the visit as he greeted Roy at the airport gate, his cheap blue suitcase advertising the arrival of yet another bumpkin from the sticks. The clothes that had never bothered James in Morgantown or Charlottesville—the Ban-Lon shirt, the out-of-season corduroy trousers, the Hush Puppies desert boots and white sweat socks—embarrassed him in the West Village, blinding him to the appreciative glances the broad-shouldered, blond country boy received from the men cruising the available wares on Christopher Street. He had squirmed and resisted Roy's attempts to make love to him and sneered at his loud guffaws at Mickey Rooney's antics in
Sugar Babies,
rolling his eyes at Ernst, who smiled contentedly in the next seat, knowing the battle for James was over, the war had been won. James had cried all night after putting Roy in a cab for LaGuardia, regretting his bad behavior and the sad, confused look on Roy's face as they said good-bye, but relieved to be free at last of old obligations, finally able to truly begin his brand new life.
“I wish I'd never gone to New York, Roy. I should've stayed here in Parkersburg with you,” he confessed, expecting Roy would wrap him in a bear hug and welcome him home, only to be surprised, and frankly a little pissed, when Roy laughed in his face.
“How many drinks did you have before I got here?”
“I hate you,” James hissed, indignant over this unexpected rejection.
“Like hell you do,” Roy said, amused by the sophisticated city boy's sentimental relapse. “I don't think you'd have many opportunities to have dinner with Archie Duncan in Parkersburg, and I can't picture you teaching the Romantic poets to high school kids destined for the Charleston State Correctional Institute.”
“I'm moving back here, I swear. I should never have left. I was a stupid kid. I'm lonely and you're lonely, and it's all my fault that we're forty-six years old and both alone.”
Aloysius, who had witnessed countless romantic epiphanies and moments of truth in his many years behind the bar, set up another round, this one on the house.
“I'm not lonely, Jimmy,” Roy said, emphatically.
“Don't be ashamed to admit it, Roy. It's not a sin to be lonely.”
“But I'm not.”
James was growing irritated, remembering how obstinate and headstrong Roy could be.
“Roy, living with your mother is not a substitute for intimacy. Now admit it. You're lonely.”
Roy sighed and threw his wallet on the bar, flipping it open to show him a photograph.
“This is Anh Vu. He's in Fresno spending Christmas with his parents. I'm picking him up at Pittsburgh International tomorrow night. Why don't you drive up with me?”
The young man was dressed for a formal portrait, in a jacket and tie, his serious grimace adding a year or two to his boyish face.
“I hired him out of pharmacy school to work in the Cairo store. He's working as the night manager in a Walgreen's branch in Vienna now because of the company's nepotism policy. Evelyn loves him. He takes better care of her than I do.”
“Jesus Christ,” James gasped, astonished by this unexpected revelation. “How old is he? Fourteen?”
“Very funny. He's twenty-six.”
“And you'll be forty-seven on your next birthday.”
“So?”
James struggled to find the right words to express his contempt without inflicting permanent damage to their friendship.
“You'll look ridiculous.”
Roy tossed back a shot of Wild Turkey and ordered another round.
“You know, this isn't exactly the reaction I would have expected from a jaded and sophisticated man of the world like Jimmy, excuse me, James, Hoffmann.”
“These things never work out in the end. You're going to get hurt,” James insisted, his argument grounded as much in envy as in concern. “It can't last.”
“Nothing lasts forever, Jimmy,” Roy said, his green eyes brimming with kindness. “That doesn't mean we shouldn't appreciate what we have while we have it.”
The altercation between the entertainment and her hecklers had reached a fever pitch. Punches were being thrown, and a microphone stand was being brandished as a lethal weapon. Aloysius calmly reached under the bar and retrieved a pistol, blowing on a whistle to make sure he had the entire room's undivided attention.

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