The Men from the Boys (46 page)

“Dysfunctional?” Lloyd offers.

“Yeah, that's it. One of those dysfunctional families just because it's the thing you're supposed to do.”

I smile. “I'm proud of you, Ma.”

“Yeah, well,” she says, “your brother's not. Says she should be married. Says that child should have a father.”

“He's got uncles,” Ann Marie says in her defense. She hands the baby to Lloyd, whose face drops into the child's own.

“So is there any place we can have lunch around here?” my mother asks. “Like a Friendly's or a Wendy's or something like that?”

“There's a nice cafe right on Tremont Street,” I suggest.

“I don't want any of those fancy city places. Just a grilled cheese or a tuna salad will be fine.”

I laugh. “Mother, I'm sure we can find you something.”

We end up piling into the car and heading out to the Big Boy. My mother's delighted to leave the city. “This is more like it,” she says. “A place where you can actually park your car.”

She carries a large shopping bag into the restaurant. I can see there are a couple of books inside. I'm not sure what they are. I don't ask, either. I imagine that's what she plans on giving me. I don't know what books my father owned. Maybe a Bible.

Little Jeffrey Michael sleeps contentedly in his seat between Ann Marie and me. “He looks like all you kids did,” my mother says. “Bald and fat.”

“I'm doomed to symmetry,” I say, ordering a grilled-chicken sandwich, no skin, no cheese, hold the fries.

“I'll take his fries,” says my mother, who just orders a bowl of soup. “Lloyd, how about if you and I split them?” Lloyd nods. What else could he do?

After we eat, my mother hauls out the books. “These are for you. I figured you should have them. Your father kept them for the last few years.”

I look over at Ann Marie quizzically. She smiles. “Open them up, Jeff.”

I do. They're scrapbooks. On the first page is a newspaper article pasted down, its corners frayed, the glue showing through the corners. I recognize it, but I'm not sure from where at first. Then I realize: I wrote this article. Five years ago. For an obscure newspaper in Michigan. A gay newspaper. It was one of the first pieces I did after I went freelance.

“How did he ... ? How could he possibly ... ?”

Lloyd has come around the table to stand over my shoulder and look. “Cat,” he says, flipping ahead through the pages, “this is all your work. All of it.”

I look up at my mother. “How did he find all this stuff?”

She shrugs. “You know your father. He had his ways. Didn't talk much about them. But what he set his mind to do, he did. Oh, he never got us a bigger house or got a job that lasted more than a couple years at a time. But he had his ways.”

“Daddy could be very resourceful.” Ann Marie tickles Jeffrey Michael's nose. “He had a lot of friends.”

And he did, too. The house had been filled with them. Gray-haired men and women, all of whom said over and over again what a great guy old Jeff was. “He was a good man,” as if to convince me. I'm struck with that idea now: what a good man my father was. I look like him. I walk like him. I have his name. But am I a good man? Will my friends someday say about me, “He was a good man”?

How had those friends of his reacted when they discovered he had a son who was queer? This scrapbook—had they helped him with it? Might one of them have had access to a library? Might one or two of them—surprise, surprise—have been gay themselves?

“It's all here,” I say in wonderment. “Everything. From the littlest book review to my piece in the Globe's Sunday magazine—it's all here.” Even, I note, with some flushing of my skin, the pieces on public sex and whether HIV can be spread through sucking cock or nicks on the skin.

“That's incredible, Cat,” Lloyd says.

I don't know what to say. Except “Thank you,” of course, which I do tell my mother, who nods silently, self-contentedly. I'm not very present for the rest of the meal or on the ride back to the city. I'm thinking about my father, and how much I could've had with him, what a great, passionate friendship there might have been. If he was reading my stuff, damn it, why didn't he ever say anything? Like “Good job, Jeffy,” or “Don't understand this rimming stuff, can you fill me in?” I'd have blushed ferociously, I'm sure, and stammered and stuttered. But we would've talked, goddamnit. We would've talked.

Lloyd helps Ann Marie strap the baby into the car as they prepare to leave. I walk my mother down the steps of our house. “Thank you for coming,” I tell her. “It means an awful lot.”

“He loved you, Jeffy,” she says to me. “That's why I brought you those scrapbooks. He loved you very much.”

My eyes start to sting. “Then why didn't he ever say anything, Ma? I'm glad he kept those books. I'm glad you gave them to me. But in some ways, they make me feel worse. They make me think about what's too late to have.”

“It wasn't just him that wasn't saying anything, Jeffy. It was you, too. You had a hand in creating this. You had a hand in what happened.”

I look at her. If she didn't pencil them, she'd have no eyebrows. When she was young, it hadn't mattered. She was blond and blue-eyed, voted Most Beautiful in her senior class. “Dear angel,” the fellas had written near her photo in the high-school yearbook. I remember that photo, that girl with the soft face who became my mother, that girl I'd stare at for hours, trying to imagine what she was like. I look down at her now, standing here in front of me, hunched over, gray and wrinkled. I look at her still soft face, and I feel endlessly sad that she doesn't have any eyebrows. She'd started penciling them in after she got married, when her hair started turning brown. I remember watching her put on her makeup when I was a boy, watching her face come to life, watching her transform herself from a tired mother into the most beautiful woman in the world. How I loved her then. How beautiful she was to me. Once I took her eyebrow pencil to draw pictures with, and she smiled, telling me that it was Mommy's and not to touch. I remember taking it again, when I was fifteen, using it to darken my very first mustache, the hairs of which, like her eyebrows, were too blond to see.

I realize standing here that I am still that boy in so many ways, still that fifteen-year-old boy with the adolescent mustache. At heart, I am still just that boy from Juniper Lane, and therein lies the reason for most of what I do and say and feel.

“You're right, Ma,” I tell her. “It was me, too. My own fear, I guess. Fear that he'd stop—
you'd
stop—loving me.”

Now her eyes must sting her, for she blinks them several times. “We haven't been trying very hard, you and I,” she says. “It's been easier just to be, not to question how things are.” She looks at me, and smiles the way she once did, after she'd put on her makeup and looked to me for my reaction. “But Jeffy, he would never have stopped loving you. No matter what. And neither will I.”

She hugs me. My mother hugs me. All is not right between us, and maybe will never be. But this day, on the front step of the home I share with my lover, Lloyd, my mother hugs me. And that is all that matters right now.

Provincetown, May 1995

I once promised Mr. Tompkins that I would never leave him. I know he's just a cat, and maybe a slightly unbalanced one at that. But he's mine. Lloyd and I picked him out together, chose him from among all the others, brought him home, made him a part of our family.

He's always been a very frightened cat. He's always pounced on Javitz from countertops or nipped at the hands that fed him, but it's been merely a charade, an elaborate game of bully's bluff. It's as if his whole life had to be lived raging against a world determined to prevent him from eating, to keep him from comfort, to throw him back onto the dark, oil-slicked streets from which he came. That's where they found him, those stalwart crusaders at the Humane Society. Covered in grime in a garbage bin, abandoned by his mother, two dead brothers and a flea-infested sister mewling at his side.

In his first weeks with us, Mr. Tompkins followed me around everywhere. I'd be sitting on the toilet and he'd crouch down in front of me, a tiny fluff of a creature, two big round kitten eyes staring up at me. He began his neck trick early, pawing on my throat to wake me up in the morning. “He thinks you're his mother,” Lloyd said often. “He thinks he can suckle.”

“Don't be so scared all the time,” I tried to comfort him. “I'm not going to leave you.”

Of course, sitting here with Javitz now, I realize I left him often: dropping him with Melissa and Rose every time I wanted to come here and trick, every time I wanted a week or more of the Provincetown scene, my boots, my shorts, my boys. “He'd always cry like a child,” I tell Javitz. “Every time he saw that traveling case.”

“Stop it,” Javitz says. “In the morning you can call Lloyd. If you need to go up to Boston, you will.”

“He can't have died,” I say. “He can't have died without me there.”

Just like Junebug. I turned my back on him too, leaving him with my parents when they hadn't even wanted him. “Why don't you take this damn cat?” my father said, many times. “He was
yours.”

I don't sleep. How could I? Eduardo's scent lingers on my skin. I long for him, long for his arms around me, holding me the way he did the night Junebug died. This morning I had begun to feel more resolved, more accepting, of whatever path I found myself upon. But tonight I wrestle with my sheets. It's too hot to sleep, too horrible.

At five-thirty, as soon as the sun edges the dunes, I call Lloyd. No, Mr. Tompkins has not yet died. He's still at the vet's. His back legs appear to be paralyzed. I tell him I'll be there in under two hours.

I pass the rest stop. Even at this early hour, there are cars—a couple I think I recognize. I think fleetingly of the games, the deceits—same there as anywhere else, despite what I once had thought. It starts to rain.

I'm the reason Mr. Tompkins is so fat. He ate for security, for comfort, because I didn't keep my word. I wasn't always there for him. I came and went as I pleased. So he ate and ate and ate, because that was his only constant, and who knew when even that would be taken away as well?

I meet Lloyd at Naomi's. Naomi's made breakfast for us—scrambled eggs and muffins—but I can't eat. “Let's go,” I say. “I want to see him.”

“The vet's office isn't even open yet,” Lloyd says.

I pick at a blueberry muffin. I look down the hallway, notice Lloyd's Rollerblades and helmet, the shoulders of his sport coats hanging in the closet. I notice too that his hair has begun growing back in, and he's shaved the goatee. He just sits there, across the table, staring at me with those damn green eyes of his.

I insist we leave. The vet's office is just a couple of blocks to the east. I'm about two steps ahead of Lloyd the whole way.

Dr. Hanley is expecting us. “He's in here,” she says gently.

We pass through a door and enter a room lined with cages. I recoil.
He's in
a cage? Several cats rush to the front of their pens, push their fuzzy noses through the grating at us. One old torn utters a deep, guttural moan. The smell in the room is foul, thick with cat piss. Somewhere from another room several dogs start barking, all at once.

Dr. Hanley opens a cage at the far end of the room. She reaches in and extracts Mr. Tompkins, all twenty-plus pounds of him. Immediately I see something is wrong: his back legs fall limply below him. His eyes look glassy.

“Let me have him,” I say, putting out my arms.

She gently settles him with me. All his rage seems gone, replaced by a deadened acceptance of fate. His eyes seem to know me, but I can't be sure. Dr. Hanley strokes his head. “He's regained some use of his right leg,” she tells me. “That's a good sign.”

“Regained some use ... ?” I lift my head, suddenly filled with hope. “Does that mean ... ?”

“It's far too early to tell,” she says, continuing to stroke his head. “But this might reverse itself. I've seen it happen before. We've got him on medication now. The likelihood is that he won't recover. You need to understand that. But I'd advise against making any decision until we see how things develop.”

Mr. Tompkins looks up at me. Yes, yes, I'm certain now that he knows me.

“Why don't you take him in there?” Dr. Hanley says, pointing to a private room. “Talk to him. He needs those who love him more than any medicine right now.”

It's a small room, two chairs, nothing on the walls. A metal examining table, reflecting distorted images of myself and the cat in my arms. Lloyd appears over my shoulder, brushing his lips against Mr. Tompkins's fur.

“Maybe he's going to pull out of this,” he says.

I look down at Mr. Tompkins. Come on, you little monster. Come on, let me see that old spirit. Bite my hand.

“Jeff,” Lloyd asks, “did you open my card?”

Mr. Tompkins nuzzles my hand in front of his face. I actually feel his tongue, like warm, damp sandpaper. He's licking me. I don't think he's ever licked me before in his life.

“It was very sweet,” I say, looking up at Lloyd.

He pulls close to us. “I had a nightmare on the night Mr. Tompkins had the stroke,” he says. “It was awful. I was trapped in a house on the edge of a cliff, and there was an earthquake, and the house was shaking. It was going to fall right off the cliff....” He pauses. “I woke up petrified. I reached over for you, but you weren't there.”