The Worst Best Luck (6 page)

“Peter?”  The big woman at the door asked.  Man, she was big.  Round.

“Yes?”

She extended her hand.  Powerful, too.  “I’m Millie.  I’m from the service.”

“The what?”

“Respite care.  To help take care of your mother.”

“We can’t afford to…”

“I know.  It’s taken care of.”

He should have said no, thank you, we don’t need charity, blah blah.  But he’d already made the connection: the librarians, the theater group, the opportunity that this sudden access to time, the incredible luxury of
free time
, was going to give him. 

And it was selfish, so selfish of him, and he took it like a lifeline, cried and thanked her and Millie held him and let him cry, and he knew it was okay because the door was shut and nobody would see and Mom was sleeping and wouldn’t know and Millie would never tell anyone that at long last, he’d broken.

It was still hard, signing up for the theater club – the guilt, that was what got him.  It would mean that he would be spending more and more afternoons after school in the theater, but Mom was adamant.

“You’ve got to have a life, Peter.  You’re a senior in high school now, you need to enjoy it.  Millie takes good care of me when you’re not here.”  Mom smiled.  “And don’t take this the wrong way, but sometimes she’s better company than you. 
She’ll
watch Lifetime movies with me.”

Peter laughed, relieved.  “Yeah, you and me watching ‘Mother, May I Sleep With Danger’ is not gonna happen, Mom.”

The plays the theater group put on were all inoffensive stuff, revivals of “Brigadoon” or drawing room comedies, but it wasn’t the content that fascinated Peter.  It was the production, the big picture, how the whole thing got pulled off. 

There was
so much
to be done, and he learned to do it all – sets had to be built, often from scratch, and he even got a little handy with a saw and a paint bucket.  He learned how to run the lighting board, and how to use light shifts to subtly enhance the emotional impact of what was happening onstage.  Costumes had to be chosen, within a very tight budget, which involved lobbying local thrift and antique shops for gifts and loans in exchange for publicity. 

And the actors – talk about having to give the squeaky wheel the grease.  Take high-strung teenagers, expose them to legends about great but difficult actors (because you can’t be great, it seemed, without being difficult), impose tight schedules and apply peer pressure, and watch them run off the rails. 

A piece of theater was a giant clockwork device that needed tending here, there, everywhere, in all its parts, the physical, the logistical, the human.  And Peter became the producer, second only to the teacher, who relied on him more and more as he got better and better at it. 

Peter was the mechanic, the one who made it run, who fixed what got broken – soothed the anxious ingénue, duct taped a torn backdrop, got on a perilous ladder and, against all school policies and common sense, replaced a spotlight when the facilities crew was long gone for the day. 

There was only one thing he didn’t do.  Wouldn’t do.  And that was get onstage and act.  He couldn’t do it, tried to do it, but his stage fright was pathological.  Especially after the teacher filmed him attempting a two-person scene – he was trying to show Peter that he was fine, he did well, maybe he wouldn’t win an Oscar but he wasn’t incompetent. 

But it backfired.  Peter watched the footage with horror, and only saw a scrawny little guy with thin lips and mousy hair, a million miles from what an actor was supposed to look like.

What Jordan looked like, for instance.  There’s always one in every troupe – the best-looking guy, the one everyone wants, burns for, the one with “it,” “stage presence,” “charisma.”  If you’re lucky, he can act, too, but no matter if not. 

Jordan had blue eyes, black hair, pale skin, slim waist and strong shoulders, a swimmer’s build.  Jordan rolled out of bed every morning ready for the runway, with no effort on his part.  Every time Jordan went into Manhattan, a strange man would give him his card and tell him to make an appointment with the “modeling agency” he worked for, and the damn thing was, most of the time it was legit.

And for the first time in his life, Peter burned.  He’d always known he was gay, as an abstraction, seeing guys on TV, in movies, in school, and nodding to himself, yeah, that’s what I want.  But he’d never
desired
anyone until he met Jordan.  Jordan was talented, gorgeous, and worst of all, Jordan was a decent guy.  Peter had no choice but to fall hopelessly, miserably in love.

Hopelessly, of course. 
Peter Rabbit, who would have you when he could have anyone?
  He would squeeze his pillow at night, Jordan o Jordan, but it was just a pillow, wasn’t it.  He would chide himself,
A pillow is all you get, so get used to it.

Then he found the solution for his pain.  Jordan was straight, right?  Sure, he was, everyone knew he fucked the cheerleaders, plural, he was like, half the squad’s time share lover.  Maybe the worst part was that Jordan was always nice to Peter, even though he could, had to, totally see the longing, the desperate hunger, in Peter’s eyes. 

But there was nothing reflected there other than polite disinterest. 
Look, it’s not you he’s not interested in, he’s not interested in guys!  It’s nothing personal!
  The sun came out for Peter then, his days got easier, the wild mood swings of adolescence working in his favor for once.

Until the night he was the last one in the theater, or thought he was anyway, and he walked past the big closet that passed for a dressing room.  Out of the corner of his eye he saw movement, so he turned to look, and saw Jordan locked in a hungry, no, ravenous kiss with Scott Brady.  Scott, the flirty little queen!  Scott, with his little bee-stung lips and too-tight pants.  He froze in the hallway, unseen, unable to look away, to walk away. 

Then Jordan raised his arms above his head and Scott pulled Jordan’s shirt off, and Peter saw the unattainable magnificence that was Jordan’s torso, surely the most beautiful body in the world… And when Scott went to his knees, and Jordan put his hands behind his own head and closed his eyes, then and only then did Peter run away, careful not to sob until he was out of earshot.

Like an eminent Victorian, repressing his sexuality but having to put all that crazy
somewhere,
Peter channeled it into work.  Even the rigors of the landscaping job were welcome, because he would come home exhausted, too tired to pine or sigh or do anything but eat, and lay down on the bed with Mom. 

He’d come home on a Saturday evening and get on top of the covers, with Mom underneath the pile of blankets.  They’d watch X Factor or Idol or whatever they’d taped during the week on the old VHS recorder.  And that way, when a Jordan type came onscreen, fresh faced and talented, Peter was too beat to get upset.

He would stay with Mom till she fell asleep, before quietly turning off the TV and going to bed.  Some nights that was nine o’clock, but most nights it was 11, 12, 1, and Peter was the only one who slept.  Mom’s chemotherapy was laden with drugs that wore her out but wired her up, robbed her of the rest she needed to actually get better. 

They didn’t talk about her getting better.  Peter would ask her, “Are you feeling better today?”  Today was the keyword, there was only today.

“Yeah,” she’d say.  “It’s a decent day.”  Or, some days she’d say, “Might as well make me a shit sandwich for lunch.”  Peter had inherited his mother’s cold, clear-eyed view of the world, so of course neither of them said stupid shit like “you’ll be fine, you’ll get better, it’s going to be okay.”

One night they were on the bed, watching TV, and Mom said, out of the blue, “So Millie picked up your emancipation papers today.”

“My what?”

“We need to get those in to the court, so that when I die, you don’t go to foster care, what with you still being underage.  She’s got a house, there’s a free-standing garage in the back with an apartment over it, and that’s where you’ll live while you go to college.”

“Mom…”

“Don’t argue with me.”

“I can’t afford…”

“Student loans.  Community college.  There’s a job open at the library at the college.  Twenty hours a week.  You have bookstore experience, which they agreed is close enough to library experience at your age, so it’s settled.”

Peter smiled.  “You just planned my life without asking me, you know.”

“Yep.  If you’re going to have a life in the theater, it’s about time I became a stage mother.”

They didn’t speak of it again in the following month.  Peter stopped asking her how she felt, too, because every day was a shit sandwich now.  Then one night Peter fell asleep on the bed next to her, and woke up in the morning just knowing that Mom was dead, the sudden absence of heat coming from the body next to him. 

And he didn’t cry.  Made the calls, signed the papers, called Millie to help him get rid of all the medical shit around the house they no longer needed.  It was okay, he told himself, because he’d seen the pain ramping up, the pain she wouldn’t medicate as much as she should have, so that they could have this time together, watching TV, storing up memories, just…being a family for the last time. 

And under that, though he wasn’t old enough to understand it or process it, was the relief, the awful half-compassionate, half-guilty relief of the “survived by,” when the long painful process is over.  Or you think it is, anyway.

Grief’s a blur.  He moved into the little studio over Millie’s garage, graduated from high school, worked the landscape job through the summer, read a million books, had dinner with Millie and her family three times a week, and turned eighteen. 

He had no idea how lonely it was to live alone when you never had before.  It wasn’t in his nature to want it, or to like it.  He didn’t even think twice about hugging the pillow tight every night as he went to sleep, to hold something, anything, that resembled a body.

The community college had a decent theater program, even had a real theater, not a “multipurpose room.”  He made friends, but that was it.  There were all kinds of young gay men in school with him, expressing their gayness about as expressively as they could, but none of them appealed to him. 

College was across the Iron Curtain from high school, another world beyond the oppressive idiocracy of K-12.  The gay boys had left behind their worst tormentors, the most lunkheaded lunks, none of whom were going to be doin’ more schoolin’ than the law could make them do. 

But it wasn’t the great sexual awakening for Peter that it was for them – he kept a low profile, kept his head down, had coffee with his new friends and went to their parties and went to movies with them. 

Then one night in late September, a Tuesday around eight, he was walking outside the student union and saw a young man standing there, smoking a cigarette near a group of adults much older than himself. 

A guy who made Jordan look like a humpback whale.  Dark hair cut in the latest style, buzzed on the sides and longer on top, crisply folded with gel to hang just so over his forehead.  Huge eyes, deep and dark, a strong nose, but flattened like a boxer’s, brutally sensuous lips, a body, oh shit, a body in a tight white t-shirt that was clad in muscle, but so lean, so athletic. 

Peter had to walk past the guy to get to the door and meet his study group, and he stared at the young god, couldn’t stop staring. 

Like an animal the guy sensed it, looked up, locked his eyes on Peter.  And it was like the eagle’s eyes on the rabbit’s, hypnotizing it, the rabbit barely able to make a little squeak of terror as the predator swept down and grabbed him in his talons.

Peter looked away because he had to, a lifetime of fear of being “caught looking” breaking the hold.  Not the old fashioned fear that he’d be caught being gay, so much as fear that…what? 
That he’ll laugh at you, you miserable little prick, for daring to even think that…

“Hey,” he said as Peter passed, forcing him to stop, look again.  The street lamp outside showed his features to best effect, his sharp right cheekbone casting a faint shadow on the smooth perfect skin of his cheek, the angle of his jawline just off balance above the long graceful cords in his neck.  “You gotta light?”

Peter had to laugh at the absurdity.  “You’ve got a lit cigarette.”

He shrugged, eyes down, eyebrow up, lips turned.  “I tried.”

“Tried?”

“To hit on you.”

Peter laughed again, nervously this time.  “I wasn’t…”

The guy wiped a fleck of tobacco from his mouth with the back of his hand, unnecessarily, knowing how he looked doing it, his eyes still locked on Peter.  “Yeah you were.  Why you gotta hide it?”

“I…”  Peter was baffled.  This was some kind of joke.

He flicked his cigarette away with thumb and forefinger.  “Let’s go.”

“Wha?”

“You gotta place?”

“Aren’t you…”  He looked at the group filing back inside.  “Aren’t you on break from class?”

“Heh,” he laughed at a private joke.  “Yeah, on break from class.  They won’t miss me.”  He walked away and Peter had no choice, did he, but to follow?