* * *
—
Gavin woke to the sound of the television crackling with static. It had been a long night of talking—mostly about the dumb pride Jay now felt about Gavin—and it occurred to Gavin often since only one day of pulling that child up and out of the water that he should feel proud too; or, if not proud, exactly, something good. He should feel he had saved something, because he had, after all. But it registered differently for Gavin, as if he’d only let something slip, like he had sealed his fate as someone who would inevitably be exposed for who he truly was.
“Guess who made the news?” Jay said, sitting down at the foot of the bed.
Gavin leaned over Jay’s shoulder, resting his head on the hard bone, a move that felt pathetic though he intended it to seem romantic. There was a short, looping clip of the boy, Brady, that must have been shot after Gavin and Jay had left, because he was smiling, shivering in his pink towel. The reporter announced the boy’s status as all right despite the close call. Gavin felt those words shoot back at him, as if it was really his close call, and was quietly pleased he had accidentally struck Jay, kept him from seeing anything.
Gavin hoped there was no footage of the rescue at risk of surfacing. At any moment, he feared he’d see it. He had the embarrassed words “Oh God” ready to force out, were the broadcast to zoom in on him thrashing out there on the water like a child. The superhero quality they’d given Gavin would be ruined by the sight of him diving idiotically into what was essentially a shallow swamp. That Jay had so adamantly claimed Gavin as his “partner” on that small beach, a moment Gavin remembered in vivid color, and was not identified as such in the segment, came off to Gavin as at best passively homophobic.
“They don’t say you’re my partner,” Gavin said, lying back down. The pillow gave a deflating sigh as he rested his head on it.
“I didn’t even notice,” Jay said, which was the wrong response. And then, after a pause, thank God—“Maybe they thought it was obvious.”
Gavin considered who might call him on the lie as he tried to fall back asleep. It was inevitable, he thought—someone would. The most sport he played in his early twenties was a brief stint as a beginning tap dancer, a hobby he gave up after not being the immediate best in a room full of aspiring dancers at his university. The benefit to moving far away from his home and life in Iowa to follow Jay to Massachusetts was that Gavin knew no one, which he found refreshing and freeing. But this, he began to consider, was its own illusion. Through the entire broadcast, he could see his reflection like a vision on the glass, there only when he focused on it.
* * *
—
After a while, a few of the things Gavin had said began to reveal themselves as true. Chad in the eighth grade made early junior varsity soccer at the high school, and Anna did get the lead in the school musical. It didn’t matter that these things were expected, a notion that dawned on Gavin often, or that just as many of his peers had nothing come to fruition. The air around him began to feel vaguely dangerous, the ground beneath him slippery.
He held a kind of power, he thought, but it was false. But then, he sometimes wondered—was it?
* * *
—
The boat outing was meant to be a celebration, a thank-you, held by Brady’s parents. The two had come over several nights after the rescue—that was what they’d called it, “rescue”—and offered Gavin, among other things, money. Lou and Louise, a stockbroker and an art teacher at a private high school, bled apology and gratitude in a way that unsettled Gavin. Then as they all sat down to a dinner of homemade pasta, Lou and Louise explained the boat party—all the details were planned, and that it was meant to be a surprise for him but Jay hadn’t been sure when Gavin would have to be at work again—so they came out with it now. Gavin felt briefly locked in to something, then soothed himself with the reminder he would not have to swim. The boat party was a kind, benign gesture. He thanked them and said they were looking forward to it, that lone word a nod toward their now-labeled partnership.
“We weren’t even sure where he’d gone,” Lou said after a while, slapping a spoonful of sauce on his plate. “If it weren’t for you—” His eyes met Louise’s. Did they care about each other this much—was this ultraromantic eye contact real? Gavin wondered. Lou had said these words, or words like them (If it weren’t for you! How cartoonish.), dozens of times in the, what, twenty minutes the four had been eating, and Gavin could sense it affecting him. Why couldn’t everyone just move on? he thought before remembering he’d saved a child’s life. He wanted to pawn off what he’d done, though, pass it like a bowl to the person next to him. To refuse the credit. If it weren’t for him, he told himself, Brady would have been fine. He could almost see the child splashing up, unharmed, near the long reeds. Perfectly unharmed.
There was a pause as Jay poured wine, an expensive bottle Louise had handed him when they walked in. In the past, Gavin had been wary of Jay’s drinking. It was true that Jay once had a “drinking problem,” which was how Jay described it, something he had told Gavin after several dates. Gavin had never seen anything concerning, no behavior to suggest the problem, though he often found himself looking for vestiges, proof of it. He appreciated that Jay was forthcoming even as he envied the ability to be so open. Loathed it, actually.
Louise moved her napkin to her lap. “How far down did you dive?”
“It wasn’t that far,” Gavin said.
“He told me Brady was a ways down,” Jay said, coiling the pasta around his fork. “I thought you said that?”
“It was kind of far, hard to remember,” Gavin said. He felt the authority of fact slipping away from him and added, “Maybe a few yards.”
But he remembered as he took a sip of the wine, nodding across the table at Lou, who held his wife’s hand tenderly, that it was barely a couple of feet. He could see himself transported—back inside that screen—to that exact moment, his breathing labored, the tickle of stirred-up weeds on his neck, warmth rushing to his chin, where a few drops of blood had collected from scraping the bottom of the lake, and that shock of blond hair waving gently under the almost alien algae-green water, sinking into darkness.
* * *
—
Secure from his small fortunes coming to light in his classmates, Gavin figured out that he could choose to see far into the future without repercussion. Amy would get into a top college for acting; Brad would drop out of high school but for something much better—Gavin couldn’t see what yet, something to do with cars? Pit crew, NASCAR? (He had seen a racing magazine in Brad’s backpack days before when he’d opened it to retrieve homework during class.) Gavin began to favor the phrase “years from now” and see that, in fact, people were wearing their futures on their sleeves, or even someplace more obvious—it just took looking at people the right way. He felt unsettled, though, walking through the cold halls of the school, feeling the exerted pressure of their futures around him, tightening the air. Sometimes when he was certain he would be revealed to be a fake, a total liar, he asked himself why he had ever bothered entertaining the lie to begin with.
One morning, Rafe, a freshman boy with a snaggletooth who was new to the school and generally unnoticed came to Gavin crying. Gavin was walking up a flight of stairs when he heard those soft sobs behind him, and turned to see the boy’s small eyes watering with tears, and he had stopped even though it disrupted the flow of other students.
“You were right,” Rafe said.
Gavin didn’t even remember what he’d told Rafe, but he leaned in for a hug, assuming the worst.
“I know,” Gavin said, then turned and disappeared into the crowd.
* * *
—
It was a large boat, cream with golden lines circling the hull, adorned by an enormous white sail waving slowly in the breeze. Gavin regarded it from a distance, pinched with excitement, as Jay followed. H
e considered reaching to hold Jay by the waist but decided not to, focusing instead on the hot summer day around him, the sweet smell of salt chalking the air, the gulls moving in slow orbit overhead.
“It’s a friend’s boat, to be honest,” Lou said. He was dressed in bright red shorts, a beige button-down short-sleeve shirt, and sunglasses—an overthought outfit, Gavin thought.
“It’s great,” Gavin heard Jay say from behind.
“How far out are we going?” Gavin asked, walking up the wooden ramp.
“We’re thinking of docking on the Vineyard,” Louise said. She had already boarded and looked elegant, relaxed, up there in her wide hat. She leaned against the railing, and Gavin saw Lou watching her, so obviously, publicly smitten. “Some great swimming,” she added, “if you’re up for it.”
* * *
—
When Gavin went to college away from home, in Pennsylvania, he had quietly resolved to become truthful. But the simple question Where are you from? was met with compulsive duplicity: Arizona. A small town in Kentucky. Just down the street, actually, he once said, and hated himself for it.
Even as he felt a fresh shame, the fear he had not yet come to realize as fear was laid bare before him: It didn’t matter where he was; it didn’t matter what he wanted. He couldn’t stop.
Sometimes, when he needed to get away from his roommate, Gavin would walk to the observation deck of the gym pool. He liked the string of colorful flags over the water, the view of the diving boards, and often took homework there, made the space his secret. Once, he had shown up during a meet and decided to stay, among those families, and watched men with abs visible from that distance, faces half masked by goggles, in competition that Gavin thought looked more like beautiful synchronicity. A kind of dance.
One of the moms turned to Gavin and asked him who he was there supporting. He instinctively chose the hottest man out on his block, pointing at him, ascribing him an intimacy: “close friend.” After Gavin left, a chill ran up his spine, imagining if that woman had come to “support” his “friend.” He felt queasy about it until he ate, then forgot about it, and sometimes remembered when he was back alone in that space, wondering what he’d look like in the water from that distance, and who might be there, cheering him on. He couldn’t think of a single person who would. Fifteen minutes before closing, the lights in the observation deck would click off, his reflection in the dark glass startled back at him, his long, thin legs. Once he wore a hat, and the light from the pool cut half his face in darkness. He thought it made him look as if he were wearing goggles, waiting for the sharp whistle in his ear.
* * *
—
They stopped near the tip of a dock that stretched nearly a half mile out. The rest of the boats sat lazily in the bay, jazz music playing off the bow of one in the distance, the ferry gone, the whole beach vacant except for a few small dinghies tipped on their sides. The water reflected the sun in a harsh white shimmer, and every few minutes a long, full breeze swept across the water.
The small talk from the Cape had been in turns enjoyable and unbearable for Gavin. The heat irritated him as Lou had poured them glasses of red wine and relaxed, talking about the weather, plans for the holidays. Gavin wanted for Jay to say something, to prove his forethought aloud, but Jay only sat and occasionally sipped from his glass, the wine staining his upper lip a line of dark purple. The silence seemed polite to Gavin, and an instant later, it struck him as rude. Then it changed back. He couldn’t figure out which was true.
“It’s a beautiful spot, isn’t it?” Louise said.
“It’s very nice,” Lou added, taking off his shirt. A sweaty fuzz of gray hair slicked his back, and Gavin flinched at the sight. But then there was the splash and mist of Lou jumping in, and Louise preparing to go in after him. The amount of fun they were having seemed, to Gavin, to border on caricature.
Gavin moved closer to Jay, sitting so close next to him that he could see the slight raised bump above his eye, tan concealer over the purple, in a way he felt would force Jay to either take his hand or acknowledge an active decision not to. But Jay only looked forward, past him, at the island rippled with trees swaying in the calm breeze, the warm day.
“This is so nice,” Jay said. The moment felt avoided to Gavin. He felt the tart wine in his stomach, the warm air made invincibly calm around him. He wanted to prove something to Jay, to seal his lie into truth while he still could. He stood and walked to the side of the boat. Louise and Lou were treading water, their arms moving in wide, practiced arcs. Gavin lifted his shirt over his head, making a point not to turn toward Jay.
It was true he had lied about being a professional diver in order to level what he had then considered a physical difference he couldn’t reconcile—how, he often thought, could a guy like that like a guy like him? He had this thought even despite the beautiful moments they’d shared, the proof he had lived that Jay really did like him and (despite frequent skepticism) really might love him. But Gavin had made that monster lurk under them both, a shark tearing through deep water at the trace of blood, the rows of teeth they could not escape.
Gavin wasn’t out of shape, but his chest sagged slightly. When he thought of his body, he thought of the moment when he emerged from the shower, turning away from his reflection in the steamed mirror.
He aligned his toes against the edge of the boat, steadied his breathing, and briefly imagined himself as Jay saw him. The thought pushed him forward and up, arcing down slow into the bright water. Unlike that day he had dived without thinking, he put great effort into what he imagined was excellent diving technique. But as his face hit the surface, he had taken in a breath, accidentally—pressure pinched the bridge of his nose, and the water tickled his throat, he coughed, and then there was the cold water in his mouth, and he was choking. He couldn’t control his arms, and through his panic it occurred to him how strange he must have looked.
What Gavin remembered next: Jay’s hands over his ribs, his legs finally working to tread water, unable to breathe without coughing, the terrified, childish look on Lou’s face, which bobbed on the surface feet away, Jay’s warm body suddenly pressed up behind him, and Louise asking from what seemed like a great distance, “Is he all right? Is he okay?”
* * *
—
Gavin’s future would surprise him: after leaving Jay and moving to another state, he would fall in love with a polite and quiet biology teacher, and later settle in a small town in upstate New York, where he would walk daily to a pond a half mile from their home. He would go there early in the morning, when the fog lifted off the water with an ethereal shine, and the years would melt around him to reveal the memory of that moment at Black Lake: the sun slanting down in a single cutting ray, the thud of his labored breathing in that boat, the silver whistle swinging from the lifeguard’s neck, the held breath of everything as Brady choked out that first living sound. The pond would be the only body of water for miles, which Gavin would enjoy. Some spring mornings the fog would come down from the mountains to meet the mist at the water’s edge, and when it did, it gave Gavin the impression of entering a dream—or, he sometimes thought, of finally waking from one.
SIGNS
When I arrive at the cliffs, they’ve been cordoned off, dotted with small orange cones. Someone tried to climb them and fell. “Wet moss,” a construction worker tells me. “No one believes the signs.”
Everyone believes the signs, I almost say, except the few who don’t. I also almost ask if they’ve found the body. I am decidedly too interested, but being a tourist does that to you. Everything becomes a riddle to crack.
“What’s that?” he asks. He points to the small blue jar of my friend’s ashes, glinting with sunlight in my left hand.
“Nothing,” I say.
We discuss the weather, and I tell him that I’m headed to Amsterdam. The day could not be more beautiful, all smiling stran
gers. Pink flowers nodding in the tall grass. His words are low and light, easily dismissed.
RORSCHACH
There’s never been a line at the Boston Opera House in the morning, not for the seven years I’ve been turning on the lights, but today people are lined down the block, huddled in small groups, their breath white in the frozen air. It’s opening night for the Crucifixion. Nobody wants a bad seat.
New York and Chicago have already started their Crucifixions, and people are flying in from all over the country to see them. No two shows are alike! the posters read, a black fingerprint behind the text, but that’s not exactly true. The whole thing is scripted, except for the nailing itself—no one’s sure how that will play out, though we got the regulation hammer and spikes last week. The past few days, I could hear Tuck and Andy—the guys cast as the Roman guards—outside my door, knocking the dull tips of the spikes into the wood, practicing.
At first, the Crucifixions weren’t that popular. People were hesitant to see this sort of thing, and many would leave at intermission. But it didn’t take long for the interview series to start, for criminals to say they preferred this to the electric chair. It’s all volunteer, but there doesn’t seem to be any shortage of Jesuses in the high-security prisons. Our show’s run ends when we stop making money, or whenever I say so—the benefit of producing.
I unlock the theater door, a thick gold lock that reminds me, in its beauty, what a great job I have, and close the doors behind me. I walk down the left aisle like I always do, checking to make sure there’s no trash in the seats. In a few hours, the cast will arrive, followed by the crew, then the night’s star, Alix Hoffman, forty-six, of Worcester, who pleaded guilty to first-degree murder two years ago. But for now, the air is still and thin, quiet. The ghost light in the proscenium has taken a different shine this morning, its faint glow some terrible omen.
I Know You Know Who I Am Page 10