by Mary McCoy
I hesitate because I don’t feel like catching up, or driving to the Memphis airport, and because the last time we had a conversation, he walked out in the middle of it.
He can tell I’m about to turn him down because he quickly adds, “You can bring your recorder if you like. You can ask me anything you want to.”
Greg gives me his practiced LA smile. I wonder who he uses it on in California. Probably movie producers and maître d’s and the millionaires who buy his art. I think about Harold’s untucked shirts and my dad’s bushy hair and plaid pajama pants. Greg’s clothes look like a grown-up’s clothes. They look like they were purchased in a store, not haphazardly acquired at rock shows and rummage sales. When we used to go on family vacations to Destin or Gulf Shores—about as far away from Memphis as my dad could be dragged—he would pack everything in a black canvas duffel bag. Greg has a royal-blue hard-shell suitcase with the iridescent sheen of a bowling ball. If I ever traveled anywhere, I’d want one just like it.
“Where’d you get your suitcase?” I ask.
“Italy,” he says. “It’s easy to find on a luggage carousel.”
His tan, Italian-luggage-owning face annoys the shit out of me, and yet, I can’t help considering the possibility that he might be my biological dad and that I might never get another chance to talk to him again, on the record, or at all. One side of me says, Well, then fine, maybe you don’t get to know.
But the artist side of me says, Do it. Talk to him. Follow this story where it leads, because it’s yours, and if you don’t get to the bottom of it, who will?
“I’ll drive you,” I say.
Greg flashes his whitened teeth at me again. “Great!”
I pop the trunk for him and he loads his expensive suitcase among the garbage bags full of stuff we meant to take to Goodwill but haven’t yet, the bag of potting soil, my mom’s bike helmet and running shoes.
“All right, let’s do this,” Greg says, slamming the trunk closed. I can’t tell whether he means the drive or the questions I’m going to ask him, but that seems like a good place to start.
I press record as we pull out of the driveway.
“Why did you come?” I ask. “You always say you will, and then you never do.”
“I wanted to be there for your folks,” he answers.
“You saw my mom when you were in New Orleans, didn’t you?” I ask. “That’s why you weren’t on the flight to Memphis.”
Greg nods sheepishly. I could tell him how I stood at the luggage carousel, waiting for thirty minutes, but somehow the apology I’d get from him doesn’t seem worth the effort.
“So how was my mom when you saw her?” I ask.
“Sad,” he says. “She misses you. She’s worried about you. You should call her.”
I want to tell Greg to mind his own business, that he’s not my dad and he doesn’t get to tell me what to do. Instead I try another approach.
“I saw a video of you and my parents at your literary salon. The one right before they got married. You gave a very bleak toast.”
“Did I?” he asks like he doesn’t already know what I’m talking about.
We pull up to a stoplight, and I turn to look at him.
“You did some other stuff too,” I say.
I keep staring at him, even after the light turns green. I don’t move until I see it in his eyes, him admitting that he remembers, and he knows what I’m talking about, and he knows what he did.
The little shops and houses of Midtown fall away on the road to the airport, and soon it barely seems like we’re in a city at all. The streetlights begin to thin out. It’s a long expanse of nothing—billboards, factories, warehouses, and graveyards. Nothing that would make a person want to stay.
“Why’d you ask her to come with you?” I ask. “Why then?”
Greg thinks for a minute, then says, “Maybe I was jealous.”
Greg takes a black pen and Moleskine notebook from his shoulder bag and begins to draw while he talks to me. Having something else to focus on seems to make him less guarded. And he doesn’t have to look at me.
“Jealous of my dad?”
“I couldn’t love your mom enough to hold on to her. He could.”
“Not forever, though.”
“No, I guess not.”
“Greg, did you ever figure out what love was?”
He takes his time answering me. He pulls out his phone and props it up in the crook of his elbow, turns on the flashlight to illuminate what he’s working on.
“Not really,” he says once he’s gone back to sketching. “I think that’s why I came this time. I was looking for some kind of sign.”
“You mean if my mom was standing in a terminal at the New Orleans airport holding a picture of me that looked just like you and said, ‘I’m still in love with you?’ ”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see Greg cringe in mortification. If I haven’t landed directly on the truth of his feelings, I’m pretty sure they’re in the same zip code. I keep my eyes on the road, and he keeps his eyes on his sketch. More importantly, he keeps talking.
“At certain points in your life, Lee, you hit a wall. And you realize that everything that’s gotten you through this far, all the tricks that used to work for you, don’t work anymore.”
“What do you do when that happens?”
“You fly to New Orleans and try to convince your ex to get back together with you,” he says. “Or you find some other way to be happy.”
We drive into the departures terminal at the Memphis International Airport, and as I pull over to the curb by the Delta sign, it occurs to me that I may never see him again.
“Let me open the trunk for you,” I say. We go around to the back of the car and he gets his iridescent-bowling-ball luggage out, then hands me the picture he’s been drawing on the way to the airport.
It’s my mom and me. We’re standing side by side on the bluffs by the Mississippi River, the Hernando de Soto Bridge behind us. He’s drawn us with our hands on our hips, the wind blowing our hair, and it looks like something that might be stamped on the front of a coin, or used as a recruitment poster for some kind of artist army.
I give him an awkward hug goodbye and say, “Hey, Greg, what if you’re really my dad?”
He takes a step back, jarred that I’ve said it so directly. But after a moment or two, he regains his composure and puts his hand on my shoulder.
“If you ever want to find out for real, I’ll take the test. And if you ever need anything financially, I’d help you. But at this point, you’re fully formed, you’re already you, and I can’t take any credit for it.”
I give him another awkward hug, because what else would I say? Don’t worry about it because I already have a great dad?
I guess I potentially also have this whole other parallel-universe life, one where my mom moves to LA with Greg, and I grow up there, and instead of the problems we have now, we all have an entirely different set of problems.
But I’m in this universe.
“Have a safe flight, Greg.”
In this universe, that’s all I have to say to him.
CHAPTER 27 Imp of the Perverse
Max is sitting on the front steps when I pull into the driveway, headphones in his ears and playing with a lighter. By his side, there’s a paper sack from the Circle K with a beef jerky stick hanging out of it.
Traitor, I think, even though I know that’s not fair, and I’m just jealous that he got to see Risa when she won’t even text me back.
I lock the car, then sit down on the step next to him.
“Where have you been?” he asks, taking out the earbuds. “It’s late.”
“Taking Greg to the airport. What’s up with the lighter?”
Max gives me a look that I’ve started to think of as his Imp of the Perverse face. It’s the face that talks you into ordering an extra basket of fried pickles, or showing up at the coffee house you’re banned from. He rolls his thumb over the wheel, and the
flame shoots up from the hood.
“Did you and Greg talk some more?” he asks.
I play him the audio I recorded on the way to the airport. When it’s done playing, he asks, “Are you going to get the DNA test?”
“I don’t think so,” I say.
“Why not know? Why not be entitled to that famous artist money?”
“I’d rather keep things the way they are. He can be Schrödinger’s Dad.”
“You should give that one to Harold. It can be the name of his next band.”
I don’t want to talk about Greg or Harold or who my dad is, though. Right now, there is a more pressing undiscussed matter.
“So, you and Risa ended up hanging out?” I ask, angling toward him so I can read every bit of his body language.
Max laughs in a way I wouldn’t exactly call friendly, and says, “Remember how you left in the middle of a pretty heavy conversation we were having?”
“You were right, by the way,” I say. “It was a mistake to go.”
To his credit, Max doesn’t gloat, even though I deserve it.
“I felt like talking some more,” Max says, “so I texted Risa to see if she was free. We hung out over at her place.”
“Oh, cool,” I say, like I’m just casually interested in this and not bursting at the seams to ask, Did you talk about me? What did she say? Tell me, tell me, tell me…
“Do you still want to know what’s up with the lighter?”
I mean, no, not right now, is what I’m thinking, but I smile politely at Max.
“Because before, you asked me what was up with the lighter. I thought you might still want to know.”
“I suppose I moved on in the conversation,” I say. “To the part where you tell me what you and Risa talked about.”
“I just thought you’d be curious,” Max says. “Maybe I’m planning to take up smoking. Maybe I’m planning an arson spree.”
I giggle and roll my eyes at him.
“Would you like to tell me, Max, or would it be more fun for you to keep jerking me around?”
“You make it very easy when you’re this transparently self-absorbed,” he says, cracking up. He reaches into the Circle K sack and pulls out a pack of sparklers.
“It’s not Fourth of July yet,” I say.
“It’s Fourth of July adjacent. Besides, I always liked doing these with you.”
He opens the pack and takes out one for each of us and lights them. We hold them over our shoes and let the sparks fall onto the porch steps and the sidewalk. It’s not very exciting, but it does keep the mosquitos away.
“She played me some of her songs,” Max says at last, giving me the information I’m desperate to have. “She’s a cool girl. I see why you’re so into her.”
I shake my head and look down at the concrete step. “I don’t even know if she wants to see me again.”
“Oh, I think you’ll find that she does,” Max says. “She was very disappointed I didn’t bring you with me. She wanted to know where you were.”
And now I panic. “What did you tell her?”
“That you went over to your ex-boyfriend’s house.”
“Max! What the fuck?”
With a shrug, he gives me the Imp of the Perverse grin again and lights each of us another sparkler. This time he stands up with his, and I follow him into the yard.
“I was feeling spiteful,” he says. “You ditched me in the middle of a very intense conversation, and besides, it was true.”
“Was she upset?”
“You’d have to ask her. But no, she didn’t act upset. She was more, like, ‘Oh, I see. Cool.’ ”
He writes out the word COOL with the tip of his sparkler. Each stroke leaves a trail of light behind before it disappears.
“That sounds upset.”
“Maybe in a nineteenth-century English manor house.”
“Fuck. Well, then, did she happen to say why she hasn’t texted me?”
Max sticks out his tongue at me. “Actually, we didn’t talk about you that much.”
I’m being self-absorbed again, I think. The whole reason he went over there was because I bailed on him.
SORRY, I write with the tip of my sparkler, and then I say it too.
“What did you talk about?”
“Some more of my stuff. With my family and everything. My horrible, exciting new sexual fluidity. My fucking summer. I don’t have a lot of people in Chicago I can talk to about it. When I broke up with Niko, most of our friends took his side. I should probably feel more upset about it, but the people I really miss are Xochitl and her friends. I hadn’t known them as long, but they got me and saw me, and I felt good around them. It was the first time I’d gotten a sense of what it might be like to have people in my life who were queer and brown—”
“And not your mom,” I say.
“Exactly,” Max says, emphasizing the point with the tip of his barely flickering sparkler. “Anyhow, talking to Risa made me realize how much I need that kind of community in my life again. She’s good to talk to.”
He says this with a hint of accusation at the end, like he’s suggesting I’m not good to talk to. Maybe he also notices, because he quickly says, “You’ve been great too, Lee. It’s just sometimes, it can be hard talking to you about certain things. Your life is a fairy tale.”
“No it’s not.”
He rolls his eyes. “Worst-case scenario, you get to have two dads, one who loves you, one who can give you money. Do you know anything about my dad, Lee Swan?”
Usually, I like it when Max calls me by my full name, but not right now.
“No.”
“Yeah, me neither.”
Up until he was eight, it was just Max and his mom, living in Chicago where the rest of Maggie’s family lived. Maggie was never happy staying in one place. That was how my mom always talked about it. To Maggie, settling down was something to rebel against, so first it was Memphis, then Berlin.
When Max’s mom died from a pulmonary embolism, nobody expected Maggie to do anything about it. Everyone assumed she’d stay in Europe, writing her doorstopper novels and living like a bohemian. Everyone assumed Maggie’s parents would raise Max. But Maggie got on the first plane back to Chicago, talked to her parents, and got them to agree that she should have custody of Max.
You don’t have to be old to die, and you can’t promise a little kid that they’ll never lose someone they love again. But Maggie looked at her aging parents and little eight-year-old Max and thought, You will never be alone in this world. I can promise you that.
That was how I’d always heard my parents talk about it, sitting at the kitchen table when I was supposed to be in bed.
“You do have family, though,” I say.
“That’s what Risa said.”
“Who love you.”
“That’s what makes it worse,” Max says. “Because I expected better from them. I know they still love me. It’s just that I know they used to like me better when I was their sweet little Love, Simon adorable baby gay.”
“Instead of an untidy queer.”
“Exactly.”
My second sparkler burns out, so I go back to the porch steps and light two more, hand one to Max. This time we run around the yard with them, spinning like we’re trying to bind ourselves in a circle of sparks and flame.
“So, what do you do?” I ask, sitting down in the grass dizzily. Max plops down next to me, lays the spent wire on the sidewalk like we were taught when we were kids so we didn’t accidentally set the lawn on fire.
“In a couple of months, I’ll be moving two hours away. I won’t see them every day, and eventually, it won’t bother me so much.”
I think about the way Maggie and Sage were the first few times they brought Max to visit us in Memphis. They were sort of awkward and showy about their parenting then. They made a lot of bad jokes and talked to Max like he was a small adult they were trying to impress. But they always listened to every word he said. They took him s
eriously. They paid attention to how he was feeling. And they got better at the other parenting stuff. Once, I left a bunch of my toys out on the living room floor when they were visiting, and when Maggie yelled, “Lee Carrington Swan, get in here and pick up your LEGOs before I step on another one,” I thought it was my own mom.
“I get it,” I say. “I just wish it could be some other way.”
Max nods. “It’s not what I want, but I don’t know what else I can do.”
“What do you want?”
“I want them to apologize for making me feel like who I am is somehow disappointing or gross to them. I want them to say they accept me, and I want it to be the truth.”
“I think you should ask for what you want,” I say.
“I didn’t ask what you thought.”
It stings when Max does this, lets me into his life most of the way, and then slams the door shut on me, like he wants to take it back, like he wishes he’d never let me in.
“And my life isn’t a fairy tale,” I say. I can slam doors too.
Only Max doesn’t flinch at my words. He falls into the grass, throws back his head, and cackles.
“Are you kidding me? Mysterious artifacts. Long-buried secrets. Your true parentage revealed, and what ho! You are potentially of noble birth. You even have Prince Vincent and Princess Risa fighting to win your heart.”
I should like the idea of being the heroine of a story like that, but I don’t. I don’t want to be that person. I don’t want that kind of story.
“It’s my heart,” I blurt out. “It belongs to me. I don’t want anyone fighting to win it.”
“So, what do you want?” Max asks, using my own words against me.
I fall back on the ground next to him and look up at the patches of night sky visible through the trees.
“I want to find a way to ask for the things I want.”
“See, it’s not so easy, is it?”
I roll over onto my side in the grass, and Max does too. It’s like we’re kids having a sleepover, whispering secrets in our sleeping bags after everybody else in the neighborhood is asleep.