Lone Stars

by Justin Deabler

  “We’re here. Let me buy you a drink. Coffee, latte, whatever you want, you want one of those caramel—”

  “A small coffee’s fine,” Julian said. “Plain black.”

  “That’s how I take it.” Aaron smiled. “With eight sugars.” He went to the counter.

  Julian lifted his tidy Moleskine notebook from his coat pocket. He wrote down names for thank-you notes to send once he was back in Cambridge.

  “Whatcha writing?” Aaron asked, returning with two coffees.

  “A list. People who sent flowers and cards.”

  “Is that a diary?”

  “A journal,” Julian corrected.

  “What do you put in there?”

  “Stuff to do. Stuff that happens. Jot things down and make sense of it later.”

  “Does it?” Aaron asked. “Make sense when you read it later?”

  “Sometimes.”

  They sat quietly a moment until, apropos of nothing, Julian launched into his fabulous life. The Phi Beta Kappa thing, and getting into Columbia Law, and how Philip took an analyst position at Morgan Stanley because his dad’s at Goldman and Philip didn’t want any special treatment, and how much Julian respected him for that, and how Philip’s parents wanted the Central Park Boathouse for their wedding but they weren’t sure. Julian talked and talked like he used to, waiting for Aaron to say something. To tell him the things his boy wasn’t anymore, all the people his boy wasn’t like and never was. Aaron nodded throughout. At a pause late in the monologue, Aaron asked, “Do Philip’s parents—”

  “The Rosenblums.”

  “OK.” Aaron nodded, and kept nodding into an unsettling zone between assent and nervous tic. “Is his being—do they know why Philip turned out to be…”

  “To be what?”

  “Homosexual. Is it the same, or, like how you did?”

  “Huh.” Julian strapped his journal shut. “I think people would like one explanation. Some things are bigger than us, you know?”

  “Is that legal?” Aaron asked. “You two getting married?”

  “It will be. Sooner or later.”

  “Well, that sounds real nice. Congratulations.”

  “Thank you,” Julian said.

  Aaron stared at his coffee. “It’s a damn stupid policy,” he mumbled.

  “Policy?”

  “This Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell business. Perfectly able-bodied homosexuals want to serve their country, but draft-dodging Clinton and now this ‘Air National Guard’ sack of shit Dubya say they can’t. The idiots running our military.” Aaron’s eyes welled up as he studied his son’s face. “But, hey, if it spares you the—” His hand reached across the table and patted Julian’s. Just as fast he pulled it back into his lap, like a crab darting for a hole.

  “How are you?” Julian asked, after a time. “You’re still living in Houston?”

  “Yeah. I got an apartment off I-45, by Greenspoint Mall. I get my medical at the VA. I make out all right. In a couple of years I can take Social Security early.”

  “Oh. You’re—thinking about retiring?”

  “Retire,” Aaron said grimly, and laughed. “Stop working. Checked out. Pick a year. Turns out the corporate thing wasn’t for me. The rat race, the people. Two decades. Not getting those back. I’m working security now.”

  “Like, a security guard?”

  “A manager. At a skyscraper downtown on Fannin. There’s a big law firm there, Vinson & Elkins?” Aaron offered. “See people coming in and out all day long. Talk, say hi.”

  “Good. That’s good. Do you have anybody in your life?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “People,” Julian said. “Like, anybody you see every day?”

  “Yeah. The guys at the VA. I started sticking around there in the fall, after the doctor. We hang out in the lounge. Watch TV. Take trips. The Vietnam memorial.”

  Julian’s mind filled with visions of wheelchairs and amputees, insane screaming people, people lost to the system and their loved ones if they had any. He thought of poor people. How poor his dad looked in his suit. “You have friends,” he said. “At the VA.”

  “Pretty good doctors too,” Aaron said. “This one guy, served in Desert Storm, he got his jaw blown off hunting, but they put it back together and made him custom dentures. He’s eating ribs today.”

  “You had fake teeth, didn’t you?” Julian asked. Aaron stared blankly. “Not like that guy,” Julian continued, “with the jaw, not a whole set. Those four teeth? That retainer? In your underwear drawer, under the picture of you in Vietnam. Remember?”

  “Oh. That, yeah.”

  “I always wondered how—did you lose them in combat?”

  “Combat?” Aaron frowned. “The teeth? That wasn’t the war. Football, back at UT.”

  “Oh.” Julian sat up straight. “I must have—never mind.”

  “Those teeth.” Aaron grinned. “They sure gave your mom the creeps.”

  “Are you seeing anybody? Besides your friends, like, dating?”

  “I am officially off the market.” Aaron shook his head and chuckled. “One marriage was plenty trouble for one lifetime. Sure as hell not doing that again.”

  Anger flared once more inside Julian. But almost as quickly as it came it died down. Aaron sat across the table, folding empty sugar packets, and it was as if Julian could see him for the first time. Past the things his dad never did, the failures that cluttered Julian’s mind, to the things Aaron managed to do, that took up all his energy, taking care of himself. Remembering his pills. Eking by at the supermarket register. Forgetting himself at a double feature, some day when the ticket lady wasn’t watching for folks jumping theaters. The way he taught his son to do years ago. Julian groped inside for the hatred as familiar as an old pair of jeans, but it had faded at the sight of his dad. How much he needed and how little he had.

  “Why’d you leave?” Julian asked. “Why did you leave us?”

  Aaron watched his son as though he had whole chapters to share behind his eyes, if he felt like it. Or Julian was imagining things. “You’re better off,” Aaron said. “I promise.”

  Julian flushed, ashamed that he went there. “I should go.”

  “When’s your graduation?” Aaron asked as they were leaving.

  “The first weekend in June.”

  “Right around the corner. Maybe I can make it up.”

  “Oh,” Julian said. “OK.”

  “Keep in touch.”

  “OK. Keep that email address.”

  “Yup,” Aaron nodded. “That’s my email.”

  “I mean, it’s the only thing I found for you in Mom’s stuff. To reach you.”

  Aaron hugged him, finishing with a quick pat on the back. “You got good in you,” Aaron mumbled, looking away. “Like your mom. Take care, Jules.” He got in the old Taurus with its low-hanging muffler. Julian waited beside his mom’s minivan. He waved, but his dad didn’t see him as he pulled out of the parking lot.

  Julian drove back to Bonnie’s house. She was waiting in the foyer when he came inside. Guests milled around chatting and laughing in the den behind her. He pushed the door shut and leaned against it. Slowly she approached Julian and rubbed his shoulder like she knew a thing or two, and in her soft, bendy drawl asked, “How’s your daddy doing?”

  III.

  A Baby

  11

  Stuffed

  Through the leaded glass window, Julian looked out at the postcard view of Stockbridge. The October colors were otherworldly. They got the double Berkshire blessing for their wedding day—a good leaf season and sunny skies. From the parlor of the B and B, past the other mansions set back from Main Street, Julian could see the sprawling white outline of the Red Lion Inn and the start of the commercial district, where Norman Rockwell painted America. Over their long engagement, the wedding was going to be in a lot of places. Houston, when his mom got sick, but Julian planned her memorial instead. New York for a minute. In the end they settled on Massachuset
ts because that righteous colony stepped into the future and legalized them. And because Gerald and Ruth had a farm in Lenox—the gut-renovated kind with a red barn and no animals—and when Ruth Rosenblum had a preference it was well-known.

  But mostly because it felt right. For a year Julian and Philip watched President Dubya campaign for reelection on their backs and win, twanging about God’s plan and constitutional amendments, giving beady-eyed cover to statehouses across the nation to do violence to gay people—which they did. Every week a new bill demonized love. Hate was in the air. They kept their heads screwed on straight through the madness, never conceding it was too much to ask to be able to open the Times at breakfast and not feel assaulted by their own leaders. So when the Bay State swam against the tide and did the right thing, Julian and Philip agreed about where to have the big day.

  That piece of the American Dream, for so long incomprehensible and then out of reach, would be theirs. And aesthetically speaking, Philip went all in. He had an artist paint them as American Gothic for the wedding invitation, a tiny replica with Julian and Philip as farmers, pitchfork, gabled roof, the works. The drawing room, where the ceremony would be, was forested with purple and yellow mums, pumpkins, and what Philip called rustic-chic squash. Deer heads hung above the fireplaces on wood-paneled walls. Programs nestled in a red wagon by the front door. Here Julian sat in a movie set of a house, at his perfectly appointed wedding that was really legally happening. Yet he was down. Not about Philip. Of all the sadnesses and regrets the day dredged up, none were about Phil. He was sad about death, and the permanence of things. Stupid, he knew, when he could just look at leaves and mansions and be happy.

  “Did you know,” Philip said, poking his head in the parlor door, “the big one with the pillars—across the street—is a nuthouse?”

  “Huh?”

  “What are you doing in here by yourself? That one, see?” Philip laid a hand on Julian’s shoulder and pointed out the window. “The Austen Riggs Center for the Study and Treatment of the Psychoneuroses. Mom said all the biggies came through. Anna Freud, Erikson, Bollas. Some messed-up people over there. I think we’re in the right house.” He smiled, waiting, and frowned. “Jay, are you OK?”

  “Yeah.” Julian rose swiftly. “What’s up?”

  “Everyone’s here for the final-final run-through. Ready?”

  Julian followed him into the drawing room. “Hey, people?” Philip began as they turned the corner. They spotted Ruth. She wore a plum-colored suit and cream blouse, her salt-and-pepper hair disheveled in a style she hit with precision, at once suggesting hard-core thinking, carelessness, and an expensive curl specialist. She was at the chuppah, talking alone with the middle-aged lesbian rabbi/spiritualist Philip had chosen after much vetting.

  “Mom, what are you doing?” he asked, rushing to them. Julian waved at their parties—Phil’s sister, friends from Harvard and Columbia—but the place was packed with uninvited family of Gerald’s and Ruth’s. It was the same scene as the rehearsal dinner the night before, a crasher situation Philip treated as normal. He and Ruth carried on in hushed tones about some entrance for the ceremony, gesturing their discord. The constructive suggestion was the story of their wedding. Ruth’s good boy tended to share their plans, big and small, which Ruth always found wonderful and always knew how to make more wonderful. One night Philip passed along a message from her about how healthy it would be for Julian to invite his dad, Aaron—a fresh choice, letting go of the reenactments, a choice worthy of Julian—and would he reflect on it?

  “No,” Philip said audibly, smiling at Ruth, and turned from the chuppah. He clapped his hands and addressed the room. “People? Thanks for coming early for one last truly final—look, if the parties get their cues right this try, we’ll be out of here in no time. Ready?”

  They did a speed-through of the ceremony: entrances to Glass, Plato’s Symposium, Torah, Gilgamesh, Chopin interlude, a sermon on Saints Serge and Bacchus, vows, circle each other, break a glass, recess to Purcell. Done. The extra rehearsal left Philip chewing his lip, but he grudgingly released the group. Ruth immediately descended on him, touching his arm in the same incorporating way her son did when he wanted something. He shook his head and kept walking. Julian saw her canvassing the room with her eyes and tried to duck out.

  “Jay!” she called. He flinched at her bright smile weaving through bodies, and waved, fortifying himself for her arrival. Ruth was all-around intense. Intensely loving and warm. Intense with her opinions, about a place setting or the BDS movement, and with the confidence she exuded, of knowing exactly how to order the world if she had the chance. Scarier still was what Julian had witnessed for years at dinner parties and gatherings: the boundlessness of Ruth’s analytic mind, the sense that nothing—not her marriage, or Phil’s adolescent nonsexuality—was shameful or off-limits for group discussion.

  “My son,” she said solemnly when she reached him, lightly gripping his elbows. “Here we are. The big day. Can you believe it?” Julian smiled. “I was chatting with Phil earlier, about care and support. The joining of peoples, not just grooms. You have us, the Rosenblums and Bergmans, all of us. You know that, right?”

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “So why don’t we walk down the aisle together—you, Phil, Gerald, and me?”

  “Ruth.” Julian sighed. They were back to this, the one opinion she couldn’t let go.

  “Gerald and I can give you both away,” she said, nodding at the obviousness of it.

  “We went over this,” Julian said to Philip with a tense smile as he approached.

  “Mom, we’re on a tight schedule.”

  “I know, but, Jay?” she implored. “Somebody should give you away, don’t you think?” She watched him through her gold wire-rims, as guests chatted and laughed around them. He was surrounded by people on a joyous day of union. And he felt alone. The way he had traveled the world for years, even with Philip by his side—like a baby in a basket, floating downstream, the clouds above his only company.

  * * *

  Life had been looking backward since Julian’s mom died. It didn’t appear that way on the surface of things. To the outside world, Julian moved relentlessly forward. He finished college early, sorting out his mom’s affairs from Cambridge between finals and his thesis defense. In one tight week after graduation, he enlisted Bonnie’s help to sell his childhood home, put stuff in storage, and get him back to New York in time for an internship at the ACLU. He worked long hours that summer, commuting downtown from the walk-up he and Phil rented near Columbia, far from the Rosenblums’ West Village town house. Julian started law school and crushed it. He dominated moot court, edited the law review, surprised his professors when he turned down a clerkship to get scrapping as a civil rights lawyer. His passion was written everywhere: on his résumé and cover letters, in his eyes if you were looking for it.

  But flowing under all of this, like a dark river, was the life on the inside. The Julian who knew the rat race was a distraction, to hide from the truth that nothing mattered. The Julian only Philip saw. That Julian brought his mom’s pain pills back from Texas—two ninety-count bottles of Dilaudid some doctor had incongruously prescribed—and for months, every moment he wasn’t studying or changing the world he was high on the couch, incoherent, while Phil babysat the man-child fiancé. When they had a scene over the holidays, Julian’s first year of law school, the pills got flushed and he found other numbing agents to keep his head above water: wine, weed, bareback porn. At some point each semester, in a chemical oblivion, Julian imagined throwing it all away, every pointless success of his life, which he would have traded in a heartbeat for another day with his mom. To hug her and talk about what happened.

  When he graduated from Columbia and they started the wedding planning in earnest, Philip demanded Julian see a therapist. Julian found an older woman unconnected to Ruth, who in a recent session shared that the grief of losing her own mother stayed with her until the birth of her first child.
Great, Julian thought. Because the problem he couldn’t solve, three years later, was how to find meaning anywhere when his life’s purpose was to be a good son. Therapy dug up memories, not answers—like the childhood lessons at the kitchen table, how his mom framed their life as the Grand Mystery of Julian and what he’d become, every day put to him as a question. Only after she was gone did it occur to him that the drive that got him out of Texas, to the Ivy League and beyond, was fueled by something simple. Not ego or glory. Just the wish to please her. That was over now, and the world seemed empty. The future a lie.

  This was the cloud Julian lived under, that followed him and hovered over his wedding day, when Ruth suggested she and Gerald walk him down the aisle. He faked a cough as she stared at him, waiting for him to bless her idea, and then mumbled he needed water and took off. When he returned from the kitchen, a few minutes later, he walked into a surprise photo op. Ruth had commandeered their photographer and arranged a tableau of Rosenblums and Bergmans around the dining room table. Phil smiled wearily at Julian, from his spot next to Gerald, while Ruth reviewed digital stills.

  “Jay, there you are!” She beamed and waved him over to look.

  “Ruth,” Julian replied, carefully screwing his water bottle shut. “We’re not doing photos until right before the ceremony, when we’re dressed.”

  “Yes, three thirty.” She sucked on the Fresca that was her constant companion. “We took some quick family shots. It’s so rare we’re in the same place anymore, all the generations. We waited in position—will you join a few?” Julian stared. “No? OK. Thanks, folks!” Ruth called to the room. “Oh, Jay?” she said, turning back to him. “Could you stay a minute? Bubbe Bergman has something she wants to give you and Philip.”

  She motioned to her frail, white-haired mother, stationed in a wheelchair at the end of the table. Julian never really knew Philip’s only surviving grandparent. By the time they met at Harvard, Sura Bergman had already sunk into the soft dementia that left her smiling and quiet, emitting “oh yes” and “oh no” in accordance with no particular logic. Julian thought of that Joan Baez song “Hello in There” whenever he saw her, the blank face with the intense biography—escaping Berlin as a girl before the war and making it to Brooklyn, a life of work from the time she was a teenager, moving with her husband to a row house on Church Avenue, the lap of luxury in her day, raising her little joy Ruth. All of this narrated heroically to Julian by her daughter, as Sura’s intentions had been for years.