The Tricky Part: One Boy's Fall from Trespass into Grace (33 page)

She nodded, sipped from her bottle of Poland Spring. “There’s all kinds of passion,” she said. “Intellectual. Artistic.”

“Sex is at the top of my list.”

“It is certainly a kind of passion to choose to be together, to choose one another continually for over a decade, as you and Henry have done.”

I veered into lengthy complaints about my unreachable theater agent, my frustrating career, another fight I’d had with Henry about my chronic lateness or his cranky depressions. She’d cross her legs, sip her water, nod. All patience, all ears, and I kept thinking,
I’m some kind of a broken record spinning in a miserable groove, paying someone to listen. Stop
. And I did. I shut up. I began sitting for long periods of uncomfortable silence. I couldn’t think of one useful thing to say, I told her, couldn’t think what any of this yakking had to do with getting healthier. She nodded, tried breathing exercises, meditation bells. On the day I came in to quit, I simply blurted out, “What I can’t stand is when I wake up with it. I open my eyes and it’s already there.”

“What?”

“Anxiety. The anxiety. It rules my life.” She suggested drugs and I told her that frightened me but I’d think about it. “You know those stories?” I asked her, “about the witch hunts? How they’d pile rocks on someone until they admitted knowing the devil or whatever? I wake up and it’s as if there are stones on my chest and I’m supposed to admit something but I’m not sure what, beyond the fact that I’m a shit. I can’t breathe, it’s as if the day has already gotten away, I’m behind on everything and I could never accomplish enough to make up for the crushing thing I’ve done wrong. Maybe it’s just the old original sin.”

“Are the Catholic voices still that strong in your head?”

“I swallowed that stuff whole.”

“You’re in charge of your life now.”

“But I’m not in charge. Look what brought me here.”

I looked out the window. There was a boat with an
M
pulling a barge upstream. I knew it stood for Moran, the name of the tug company, and it looked to be hauling garbage. I couldn’t help but smile at the obvious metaphor.

“What’s funny?” Carolyn asked.

“I am some kind of bore.”

“It’s your life we’re talking about. What makes the anxiety so bad some days?”

“Shame.”

We sat in silence. I hated the silence. The waste of money, the crazy white noise in my noggin. She was as calm as could be, made a note in my folder. And then, on this day I was meant to quit, I decided to tell her about a stupid, as I thought of it, recurring dream. She nodded when I’d asked, “That’s a classic therapy thing to try, right?”

So I proceeded to describe the dream I’d never before put into words, of a murder, in my old neighborhood. A little girl down the street has been killed. Maybe it’s a little girl. I’m not sure, but I’m involved, somehow. The corpse has been hidden for some time, buried in our backyard or, sometimes, near Cherry Creek. But there’s blood bubbling up through the weeds now and the police are on their way. I am absolutely terrified. I didn’t pull the trigger on—or stab?—the dead person, but I helped hide the body and the FBI dogs are circling and the whole time I’m trying to figure out, remember, who the victim is. We are all—the neighbors, the detectives—about to see the face, and I know then they’ll come get me but just before they unearth the body, I wake up. I wake up sure that the story is real. I mean
really
, in real life. And I lie in bed trying to grasp it, to convince myself I didn’t murder somebody along the way. I get up and try to do the usual things. Make coffee. Kiss Henry. I try to hang on to the relief that it was just a dream, but there is this nasty anxiety. I mean the fierce kind that has no nameable cause. And I feel like I’ve got to get out of my skin, that the day is lost to angst. I end up swimming a million laps or acting out or scribbling for hours in my notebook.

I noticed that Carolyn was making notes inside my folder. I thought I must be on to something.

“What do you think it means?” I asked.

She looked back at me, her brown eyes the picture of calm. “What do you think?”

“Well, tell me what the textbook might say.”

“No textbook here.”

“Give me some Jung or something.”

She smiled. She waited. And I told her that I once heard that every character in a dream is actually you. Yourself. She asked me to venture a guess. Could I be the faceless corpse? And for the hell of it I said, “Yes, it’s me.” And when I said it, heat rose instantly in my chest.

“Who’s the murderer?” she asked.

I took another stab.

“Me.”

“Who’s the authority that wants to punish you?”

I realized that my heart was racing.

“Me,” I said, and I felt something shift beneath my sternum. As if two bones were trading places and suddenly I was afraid I might cry.

“Why do you want to punish yourself?”

“This is all so simplistic, ridiculous.”

“Look, we’re just exploring.” She took a deep, deliberate breath. Exhaled slowly. I understood that she was encouraging me to do the same.

I came back the next week. We kept talking. I told her I’d gone back into meetings. How much I hated that this stuff still plagued me. “I’ve read all the literature,” I told her. “I’ve let go and let God, what the hell is wrong with me?”

“It takes time.”

“I sexualize everything, everyone, I guess. But that’s true for a lot of men, isn’t it? Especially with gay guys, don’t you think?”

“Not necessarily . . . no. I take it from what you’ve relayed that that’s not necessarily true for Henry, for instance.”

I stared out the window, at the ice forming on the edges of the Hudson.

“I’ve been at this a long time.”

“At what?” she asks.

“Sex that’s hidden, fraught. Christ, I’ve been at it since I was twelve.”

“What happened when you were twelve?”

Reluctantly, I give her a thumbnail sketch. I’m surprised that all these weeks have gone by without my actually talking of it specifically. I tell her I feel like a walking cliché, “another altar boy diddled, blah, blah, blah.”

“Do you have a picture of yourself around that time that you could bring in?”

That sounds silly, I tell her. Absolutely maudlin.

“Will you bring a picture of you as a boy next week?”

Utterly embarrassed, I toted my kid picture to her office the next week. I kept thinking of any number of people, my father, folks at work, who’d scoff at this. The way
I
was scoffing. I was dreading that she would ask me to talk to it or hold it or some stupid thing. The photo I grabbed was one that had followed me around for years. A picture of me standing in a kayak at the edge of a pond. It had been stuck in the bottom of drawers at my various apartments. Tucked in manila folders or between album covers as I moved around California and on to New York. It had come out of hiding one day not long after Henry and I met. I gave it to him as a gift because he’d seen it and thought it cute. He framed it and hung it up. I don’t recall telling him much of anything about it but that it was at camp in the mountains when I was twelve.

Carolyn asked me to put it down and talk about the time at which it was taken and, strangely, the shift was almost instant. I don’t know if it was the photo or being fed up but it was as though a switch got flipped and my body just gave up the ghost. The reversal was powerful, as if the mechanism, the energy, dedicated to burying swapped suddenly to unearthing. My constant reluctance to speak of it, to seriously consider the connection between then and now, lifted. I began to talk forthrightly, for what felt like the first time in my life, about the paper route and George, the troubled parents and, more than anything, about the counselor. The words tumbled.

After a few weeks of this I blurted out, “I think I’ll lose my mind if I say or hear his name one more fucking time. Bob, Bob, blah, blah. I’m wasting time on him. I don’t want him in this room or in my life!”

“There’s a reason you’re talking so much about it, trust your intuition.”

“But why do I come back again to this man?”

“You circle around a story, you come back to it at different points in your life and each time you’ve spiraled deeper. You’re coming at it with more experience, more reflection, till you get nearer the bottom of it.”

“But what’s the bottom?”

Carolyn tilted her head, smiled.

“There is no bottom, right? Why don’t I want to kill him? When I think about the time before I met him, I remember feeling, at the most interior part of myself, really alone and really frightened. About being different, I guess. Being a gay boy, probably. I felt such a sense of doom in that culture. He exploited that and, at the same time, opened something up to me. It was chaos because he was sad and sick. Confused. But he was also a clue somehow. I was drowning in some ways and he was . . . a life preserver.”

I looked up at her and repeated
life preserver
. She nodded. She looked at me as though what I’d said was perfectly reasonable. “After all of this, I just called him a preserver,” I said.

“It’s the paradox. He was destructive. He was a life force. And you reached for that force. In that way he was a life preserver.”

“But he was a criminal.”

“Yes.”

“What he did was wrong.”

“Yes.”

“In a way I loved him.”

“Contradiction is part of the legacy of this. It’s part of what grips so tightly. What he did was violent, no question. But that does not erase the fact that he had qualities that you instinctively knew you needed. Wanted. Reached for. Learned from.”

We sat in silence.

“Why do you think you’re crying?” she asked.

“Because this is it, the first moment it feels like the rocks are lifting from my chest. Talking about it this way is just a . . . huge relief. A light. I’m the most rabid judge of myself. Punishing myself for going back, for being with him, for admitting my desire. It’s almost as if it’s the punishment I’m attached to, addicted to. The sense of condemning myself, that kid with the oar, for wanting the attention, the touch, and now I just want to give the kid a fucking break. It’s life! He was living his life. He was smart and good and doing his best. He wasn’t a bad little shit.” I leaned forward on the couch, put my head between my knees. “God, the grip of this is unbelievable.”

“What happens when you’re a child grips your nervous system.”

“What exactly is the grip? Am I trying to re-create the jolt of what happened then? The mother of all orgasms?” I sat back up. “Why do I repeat certain behavior? Why am I talking about it?”

“To get to the other side of it.”

“What’s the other side? Understanding? Freedom? I’ve been writing about it like a crazy person. It’s the only thing that eases the anxiety. To write and write.”

“You once said that your anxiety is like fuel.”

“The push, yes. The drive. I feel I have to tell about this. Tell the truth. That I’m
supposed
to. That that’s what’s meant to be.”

“Perhaps it’s part of what you’re called to do.”

“My Great Aunt Marion used to say that. She talked about having a calling. God, if she could see me now in this fucking mess.”

“I imagine she’d be very proud.”

And I saw Marion’s wrinkled face. Saw her countless letters stacked in my drawer. I put my head in my hands. I couldn’t stop the tears.

S
PRING
; 1997. M
OM
called. She’d finally done it, she said. She’d sold the house. Our old house on Glencoe. Moving to New Mexico. Life is change, I told her. Good luck.

I hung up and couldn’t stop thinking about it. The rooms, the basement, the backyard. Nostalgia. Forget it. But I realized I wanted to see the old place before it changed hands. I suddenly thought of our house as an archaeological site about to be closed. The cigarette burns on the porcelain sink in Dad’s old bathroom. The four-o’clocks under the master-bedroom window. I wanted one more look. And what I wanted to see more than anything, I realized, was the hole in the banister of the basement steps. In all these years I’d never looked for it. Never thought to.
Did that actually happen?
I wondered.
Did I pull down a .22 rifle and try to put a bullet in my head in the months after Bob?
I’d spent so long forgetting, I began to doubt what was truth and what wasn’t.

Henry and I were performing together in a long-running musical that spring—
Titanic
, sinking eight times a week. Mondays were the day off and, on the one day, I flew from New York to Denver and back again. Mom thought me crazy but agreed to pick me up at the airport. I helped her and my little sister pack a few boxes. When they went out to run errands I wandered the site. I touched the burn marks on the sink, sat on the back porch. I walked the basement stairs, toward my old bedroom. I ran my hands along the banister until my fingers came across the hole, splintered and hidden, cutting clean through the bottom half of the wood. I supposed no one had ever noticed it. Or the gouge in the wall made by the same bullet. I sat down on the steps and reached up again to touch the splintered wood. Proof.

On my way back to New York, I pulled the old housepainter’s business card out of my wallet. The one I’d hidden away years before. The one that managed to stay stuck from wallet to wallet. It was wrinkled and frayed, but still legible on the back was his address and the California phone number.

“I woke up early from a dream this morning,” I told Carolyn. “It punched me in the stomach.”

“What was it?” she asked.

I remembered it vividly as I told it to her. I still do, though I had the dream but this one time. In it, I was riding in the truck. Bob’s truck. We came to a stop in the middle of a meadow to watch the elk bend their necks and pull grass from the ground. There were hundreds of them, wild and beautiful, surrounded by purple-colored peaks. Bob went to put his hand on my nape. I could see, as you do in dreams, his callused palm reach over my head and toward my back. But there was an arm tucked snugly around my shoulder. The steady arm of a quiet man gazing out over the clearing. It was my father. He was sitting in the truck and he’d been there all along. And Bob put his hand away and none of it ever happened.