These Things Happen (24 page)

   Wesley's bruises glow; his stitches swell; his eye looks as if it might pop its socket. "Well, what?"

   "So," George says, bowing to what he sees approaching him or, better, maybe, the vehicle he finds himself on. "So I'd take the train."

   "The
train
?" Wesley gets up, and he feels it, too, the same odd listing of the roof. "George? I'm going?" he says; he doesn't know where. "And I really sort of need my backpack?" He hears himself, how his voice shimmies up the ropes of question marks, which he usually makes sure it never does; he and Theo regard this as a sign of idiocy, even though most of their teachers do it now, too, as if embarrassed by the smallness, the rusted, dead information they are still obliged to impart. "All my Innocence stuff is in it, and T
he
Grapes of Wrath
, and part of a sandwich, and some
change.
I need that stuff. I can come for it tomorrow, if you'll bring it down to the restaurant—"

   
"Listen to me,"
George says.
"This matters."
He has never said that to anyone before, and he's not sure why he's said it now; the words crack and spark around him, like a sweater too long in the dryer. He's unsure what, if anything, will follow; all he's got is a train, the train he'd take to the city ( thirty-six minutes; never more, never less) on occasional Wednesdays, when he would slip, thrillingly and for free, into the first half hour of a matinee's second act, at risk every moment of being caught, which never happened, but always could, which was what made it worth the risk. And then there was the thrill of wondering if he'd make it back to the train to be home in time to tell his equally thrilling Wednesday lie. Wesley, in his months of Mondays-through-Thursdays, has taken pleasure in hearing George's (carefully edited) history, but George has only brought out the goodies from Volume II, the hundred and one tales that begin with the time of the tours, the Toms; the tales that reliably
delight
; George is such
fun
in them; George is so
George.
And those tales don't matter.

   
This does; this matters.

   "George—" Wesley says, trying to step around him, to leave the roof. He stumbles; George catches him, easily, like an envelope dropped from a window into his street-level waiting arms; Wesley's frame feels perfect and tiny, like a squab's. For a moment George has him dipped in his arms, like a lover or, at the least, a tango dancer. He hoists Wesley up, settles and balances him, lets him go.

   "You okay?"

   "I'm fi
ne,
" Wesley says. "You
caught
me."

   George notices that Wesley is just about eye to eye with him; when did that happen? Since they've been up here, tonight? "That's right," he says.

   "So would you let me pass,
please
?"

   He starts to swing around George, but George, with just a quick touch of his finger to his sleeve, stops him; even as he does, even as the small
zap!
happens and has its effect, he hears voices, in chorus, calling out the same familiar whispered warnings, from open windows, all around the town:
Do not touch, restrain, instruct, go near
. He has always obeyed.

   But he doesn't now; he presses on. "I'd take the train," he says, "and I'd come into the city. Cutting school, of course. Every couple of weeks; I couldn't do it too often."

   "You're hurting me," says Wesley, but he does nothing to set himself free. He has never seen George like this, or any adult in his life, for that matter; one gone w
ordless
, applying to him for patience, letting him know he has value as a
listener
, not simply as someone
expected
to listen and, quickly, start the journey to be a Better Person.

   And George sees a picture, taken on this train. The aisles are wet, from tracked-in snow; no one knows, as the train works its way through the Long Island towns, that the snow will continue, through the day, the state, through most of the night to land, triumphantly, in the record books. On the train a man and a boy sit facing each other, their knees almost touching. The man, George knows, even as he's pictured from behind, is himself, as he is now, pretty much, maybe less tired-looking, lighter by two or three pounds. As for the boy, furtive, bright, that's George, too, as he was at Wesley's age, a few months either way. It's a Wednesday, carefully selected (Mom meeting Dad in city, shopping before, pot roast with carrots and potatoes left in a low oven, a check-in promised but maybe not; they trust him; he is, after all, a sober little citizen, with
opinions
, more likely to be locked in his room listening to
Coward Sings Himself
than Springsteen or Van Halen). It's just before noon; the boy has walked out of school, calm, colorless, like a man in a crowd who knows he's about to commit a crime, which in his case is to flee the country, even for a couple of hours, and come home with a secret, any secret, although he knows that the list of areas he'd like that secret to be taken from grows shorter, and more thrilling, by the hour, producing in him a scent cut and balanced by the scent of fear. As for the list, sex
is
the list; what else would it be? George sniffs for himself, for the scent that stops when the secrets of your life die off, like a species, when you no longer properly protect them because they don't matter anymore.

   As the train starts they look out the window to see, through the snow, a series of billboards for
A Chorus Line
; the top hats, the spangles, the strivers with all their hopelessness and gleaming canes. George folds his
Times
using the commuter's origami, as his father taught him to do. The George-boy watches; he is desperate to be taught things by men, rather than to intuit, on his own, what should be hidden from them; hasn't been; will be, soon enough; will be today, in fact, but he doesn't know that yet.
Go!
George said to Kenny.
Oh, but I can't
, Kenny told him. Y
ou know I can't.
George knows this, though. It's the teen on the train;
Go back to him.
This is where he'll be able to keep his promise.

   "George?" Something has scared Wesley. Not George's hand on his arm, or what will happen to him, or where, in the next hour, he'll go. He doesn't know what it is, but suspects it might, again, have something to do with having a wordless adult in front of him, even as he can see George won't be wordless for long. And maybe that's it. Or not. "I don't need to know," Wesley says. "But, I do really want to go in—"

   Ah, well; too late. Wesley, without knowing it, is with George in the sudden tunnel that the train enters twenty-six minutes after the trip has begun. He is with him as he comes out into the air and walks, nobly, to the theater district, right where they are now.

   "I was fifteen, almost sixteen." Wesley thinks, W
ell, that's my
age.
But George doesn't; if there's an overview to be had, he doesn't have it; he has nothing but the steps, syncopated, marching into the day itself. "It was matinee day. And what I'd do is get a half-price seat to something, anything, it didn't matter. Then, on this one day—" The famous storm sends him forth, now as it did then, with the three birthday twenties in his pocket from the theater-loving great-aunt, twisted with arthritis, the one he could tell the truth to if he could ever tell the truth. He crosses Forty-second, heads up Seventh Avenue, slowed by the snow and ice and sure this secret journey will yield nothing, that he'll have to turn around and go back, to the pot roast in the low oven, to
Coward Sings Himself.
But that's not how it was.
"It happens,"
George says.

   "What does?"

   He laughs, as if all Wesley needs is a little reminding, as if he's told him about this day dozens of times when, of course, he's never told anyone about it; no one; not even, since that day, himself. "I finally get into—
A Chorus Line."

   "What is that?"

   "A show."

   "Oh, God!" Wesley says. "Is this why I'm up here? To hear about
show business
? And
shows
? I
hate
shows!" George loosens his grip, yet Wesley remains in place. He's cold, and hungry, he hurts in the places he was smashed, and kicked; but even so he knows he is being honored, in being answered, that this man who he insists owes him nothing is giving him something, moment by moment; this gift.

   "I walked up at the last minute, and everyone had gone into all the theaters. So the street was empty, for a second. And then I saw this tiny old man, under the marquee."

   "You mean like he was a hobbit, or something?" Wesley says; it is his turn now to think,
I wish I hadn't said that.
But maybe it doesn't matter; George, clearly, doesn't seem to have even heard it; he never gets Wesley's references, as Wesley never gets his.

   "And it's the last possible minute. Everyone else has gone inside. The doors are closing and the ushers are saying, 'Curtain time.' And the tiny man reaches into his pocket and pulls out a
ticket
, which he holds in the air."

   "And that's how you knew you were gay." Again he wonders,
Why did I say that?
And again, perhaps luckily, George doesn't seem to have even heard.

   "It was for standing room. The ushers were closing the doors. I offered him some money but he shook his head; he wouldn't take it. He presses the ticket in my hand and points me to the last open door." George isn't aware, although Wesley might be, that he has moved from the past tense into the present.

   "So you go in."

   "And it's begun. There they all are, holding their pictures in front of their faces. And there's this guy." He stops, not because this is a reliable tale and he knows where the pauses go, but because small lost
sections
of the boy beside him, a bit older, probably, but not much, offer themselves to be sorted, arranged, made into an image. Winter coats, gloves, scarves on the ledge where they both rest their arms. "He's standing next to me. Around my age; he'd probably ditched school that day just like I did. The show starts, I'm loving it, then I notice something."

   " Really? What?" Wesley whispers these questions, as if trying somehow not to wrest George out of this moment from twenty-five years ago.

   "This guy's sort of looking at me. So I look at him. And then he whispers, 'Are you gay?' And at first I don't understand him. He says it again: 'Are you gay?' And I say, 'Yes.' And I also say, ' Thank you.' "

   "You remember that?"

   "I seem to," George says. "I
think
I do."

   Then, for a moment, the crisped pictures, predigital, in the album fade. George questions them all; the tiny man, the open door, the crimson ledge on which they rested their arms.
I haven't thought
of this since then, or felt like this
, George thinks. This is the revival of a moment, like a play brought back years later, with a different cast. What has time changed? It's not that time heals everything, George knows; it heals what's convenient, what's easy to heal. Someone once said that to George, someone before Kenny, long ago. Time can afford to be lazy because it has nothing but time. Well, George doesn't. He has only now.

   "Can I ask a question about that?" Wesley says.

   "Of course."

   "Why do you think you said ' Thank you' to that guy?"

   "I don't know," George tells him. "I don't think I've ever

thought about it. Maybe because it made it real? Or made
me
real, anyway."

   "Well, that's a thing to say thank you for."

   "You think?"

   "Definitely. So is it all right for me to tell Theo that?"

   "Sure," George says. "If it helps."

   The night shifts a little, and sighs, gently trotting in a dream like a dog in its bed.

   "And you got home," Wesley says, "and told a lie. Because you'd never say what had
really
happened, or where you'd
really
been." He laughs. "Not that I'm judging it! Because I lie, too, sometimes, which you shouldn't know, probably. Not because I'm such a liar, although I am, but more as this kind of moral/existential/epistemological test, in a way. Which I know is a lot of tests, but the question of what is truth is a fairly large one, one might say! Me and Theo feel, personally— this is the kind of stuff we talk about— that lying is most interesting as an
action
when you don't actually have the
need
to lie. Does that make any sense? Because it allows you to find out what truth, personally, is for
you.
Because there have to be more categories, quite frankly, than
truth
or
untruth.
Which is to say:
lies. T
heo says everyone needs to choose their own cherry tree. By which I refer to truth, not fruit. Or he does. Not that you asked." He pounds his palm against his forehead. "I even bore myself. How can you listen to me? Promise me you'll never like secretly record me, okay?"

   "I can't do that, Wes."

   "Why not?"

   "Because I don't know what's going to happen."

   "No," says Wesley. "Right. You don't." Someone across the street,

on the fourth floor, opens a window. His tv volume is up high.
"Hello, Jerry,"
they hear. Then
"Hello, Newman,"
which Wesley recites with the tv; he and Ben love
Seinfeld
, and have seen every episode. Then, just as fast, the set is turned off.

   "Can I ask one final, fi
nal
question?" Wesley says. " Which you totally do
not
have to answer?"