Lone Stars

by Justin Deabler

  “Have a seat.” Gerald smiled benevolently at Julian and patted the chair beside him. He looked crisp as usual in a navy suit and rich red tie. He ran a hand through his lion’s mane of gray waves, an older version of Phil’s hair. The light caught his cuff links, golden compasses, and Gerald—warm, taciturn, socially subdued—gestured for Ruth to take the stage.

  “Julian,” she began in a confidential tone. She took her mother’s hand and leaned into the half-circle they made at the end of the table. “Bubbe Bergman gave Philip his favorite gift as a boy—his stuffed bear, Coco. He fed Coco, bathed Coco. They were inseparable. Now she has another gift, for both of you.” Her lips puckered with feeling. She slid an envelope across the table. Philip opened an investment statement from Goldman Sachs with a hundred-thousand-dollar balance. “A college fund,” Ruth said, “for your firstborn.”

  “Oh,” Julian exhaled.

  “Mom? Dad?” Philip gushed. “Thank you!”

  “Thank Bubbe,” Ruth said. “Gerald has agreed to manage it until the baby’s eighteen. We all know your sister has expressed ambivalence about marriage and children, but you two—the parents you’ll make!” Ruth reached over and rubbed their hands. “I’ve explained the whole surrogacy thing to Bubbe, and she understands.”

  “What?” Julian blurted. “Surrogacy? What are you talking about?”

  “If you decide to go that route,” Ruth said. “Then you remove the uncertainty, the baby’s yours, you pick the sex, pick whose—”

  “This is—” Julian shot a look at Philip. “We haven’t decided, for sure, if we’re even going to have a—”

  “We talked about adopting once, remember?” Philip volunteered anxiously.

  “And that’s lovely,” Ruth interjected. “Something definitely worth exploring. And then there’s blood. Keeping the line, using Phil’s materials. Yours too, Jay. Have two, three! The more the merrier.”

  “I don’t know why we’re talking materials, anyone’s—” Julian rose from his chair. He couldn’t believe Ruth’s gall. Or the gall of the universe, letting Philip’s grandmother go on living half-dead, while his mom died in her prime, badly needed and missing this day. Instantly he felt ashamed at reducing Sura’s life to his private misery, convinced it was a sign he was unstable, unworthy of marriage, a generally disgusting solo guy. “What gives you the right?” he said to Ruth.

  “Jay?” she cried in surprise. “We’re family. We’re talking.”

  “How is it OK to dangle a check with strings like that today? To tell me what family to invite? How to walk down the aisle at my own wedding?”

  Julian took off for the backyard. The smell of mountain air made his eyes well up at the wish to be happy. He crossed the lawn to the creek at the edge of the property, winding its way to the Housatonic and into something larger. He had an anger he didn’t know where to put. At Ruth, and life not working out. He breathed and tried to calm himself. He knew in his head that she meant well, that no woman made it through a PhD at Harvard in the sixties without being a fighter. Without a cost. But in his heart, it felt like every other time he got too close to Ruth over the last few years—like regret, and a wrenching guilt at the memory of phone calls home to his mom from college. Long calls while he carried on about the Rosenblums, enamored of their lives and Ruth’s many accomplishments. Julian turned away from the creek at the smell of cigarette. Two waiters were smoking by the back door to the kitchen. Through the French doors to the ballroom, he could make out Phil’s silhouette, adjusting centerpieces. He resented that Phil didn’t come find him. He didn’t know what to say to him, or if he wanted to say anything. But he felt less lost at the prospect of bickering with his fiancé than annexed to a random smoke break, so he plodded back to the house.

  “Hey,” Julian called, entering the ballroom. His voice echoed across the two-story space. A wooden staircase led to a mezzanine, where the DJ was setting up. On the far wall, some rich eccentric had painted a mind-boggling floor-to-ceiling mural of a Japanese landscape. Julian had yet to take in all of Philip’s reception prep, the asters and black-eyed Susans exploding out of pumpkins on the tables, but it hit him as he wove between them: after all the planning, they were here. Two twentysomethings, babies in gay years, getting married. “Phil?” he called again.

  Philip futzed with flowers before replying. “Hi.”

  “You need help?” Julian asked, navigating toward him.

  “Now you take an interest?”

  “Um.” He waited as Philip moved on. Julian was being avoided. “What are you doing?”

  “Make sure—” Philip sighed and studied the centerpiece. “I want an even distribution of flowers around the circumference of the pumpkins. Can you do that?”

  “Yeah.” Julian followed him, mimicking the way he massaged them. Philip didn’t apologize for Ruth, or the situation, or speak at all. “So,” Julian began. He shivered with loneliness, yet his words came out hot. “Did you know? About the whole—Bubbe’s gift?”

  Philip stopped and shut his eyes. “Of course not.”

  “It felt a little like a sneak attack in there. I didn’t mean to yell, but the—walking down the aisle, pictures, the baby shit?”

  “I didn’t think you meant to,” Philip muttered.

  “What?”

  Philip ran his tongue along his teeth, scratching the stress ulcers he’d been getting all week. “I want a day about us. Not her.”

  “I know.” And he did know, about Phil being her favorite yet always under her thumb. Or how he still hadn’t figured out what he wanted to do with his life after three years at Morgan Stanley, and how this day had become everything. The one thing to look forward to. Julian also knew Philip needed to cut the cord. “So, you’re not mad?” Julian asked.

  Philip shrugged. “Mad? I’m … embarrassed.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s not about her. You really can’t see it. I listen to you,” Philip continued in a slow, practiced tone. “I told you I wished your mom was alive and here with us today. I asked you to get help.”

  “I did! I’ve been seeing Maxine for months. Sorry it’s not the therapist Ruth wanted, so you could pick up your Batphone and get the inside—”

  “Stop it,” Philip snapped. “Stop wasting time. I’ve been kind to you. I’m here too. Not just the times you’re up. The times you’re down. Who are you going to be, Jay? Who do you want to be in this marriage? The future? You’re stuck. Do you want to be the drugs? Escapes? Work, hiding—”

  “Call it off, then!” Julian bellowed. “Send them home. Everyone. If I’m so bad, why do this? Why would you ever want to marry me?”

  Philip glanced up at the mezzanine, where the DJ had stopped unpacking. “Because,” he said quietly, and shrugged. “You know how to say no. To stand up for yourself.”

  “Oh. Like I just did with your mother?”

  Philip sighed. “And all the other reasons I wrote in my vows.”

  Softly Phil cupped the flowers in front of him and looked at Julian. Philip was the kindest person he knew. And as much as Julian circled in darkness around the question of whether he existed at all, there at that moment he stood, he was, in Philip’s eyes. He dropped his head and nodded at how painful it was to be seen by someone else, really seen and known.

  “I don’t have anybody,” Julian mumbled.

  “What do you mean?”

  “People. At the wedding. It’s like a hundred of your family. Mom, dad, sister, aunts, uncles, a grandparent. I supposedly have two uncles in Texas I don’t even know and that’s it.”

  “And a dad.”

  “Please,” Julian said. “Not again.”

  “Knock-knock!” Bonnie stood at the door of the ballroom, beaming in a shiny blue suit that set off her blond dye job. Her skin looked younger than the last time Julian saw her, years ago. She had come out the other end of her divorce OK, or hadn’t given up yet. “Jules! Philip!” She hurried over and hugged them. “Sorry I couldn’t get here till late l
ast night. The family I took in after Katrina, they’ve got a dog and there was a situation with my cat, but I changed my flight and everybody’s snug as a bug in a rug back home with my son there helping out! How y’all doing? You ready?”

  “I think so.” Julian smiled and startled all three of them when he reached out and hugged her again. “It’s good to see you.”

  “Sweetie.” She laid a hand on Julian’s cheek. “Your mama would be so proud of you. Can I do anything? What are y’all up to?”

  “We’re about to put on our tuxes,” Philip said. “Some alone time before the ceremony.”

  “Go on, then,” she smiled. “Jules, you know how to tie your tie?”

  “I do,” he said.

  * * *

  Julian found a lot of old objects the week he went home to clear out his mom’s house. Some he had seen going through boxes before she died, report cards or macaroni collages, while others triggered new memories. In the back of a closet he found a faded poster—WELCOME HOME JULES! with shapes of Texas and crimson Hs—that his mom held at the airport the first time he came home from Harvard. She wore jeans that day, he remembered, which she never did because they didn’t make them for fat women, or not nice ones she said. But she had slimmed down. It wasn’t until years later, while moving his mom’s life into trash bags, that it occurred to him that maybe she fit into jeans on that visit because she missed him.

  In the rush to throw things out, Julian almost tossed the gift. He was working on her bedroom, dumping stacks of old National Geographic from a basket by her nightstand, when he noticed a shallow box mixed in with the magazines. The wrapping paper was pale blue and silver, folded tight at the corners but without his mom’s usual curly ribbons on top. He lifted a paper square and saw her handwriting:

  To Julian, on his Wedding Day.

  He brought the present back to New York and hid it in his closet, in an empty Yahtzee box. He never told Philip. He wanted something of his mom that was just his. Something he could hold close and private, a wedding dance they’d never have. He took it out some nights when he was drunk and alone in the apartment, shook it, speculated on its contents. They shifted end to end solidly, a book maybe, or a last picture album. Many times he thought of opening it before the wedding but resisted, returning the box to the closet. Until two days ago, when he packed his suitcase for the wedding.

  He sat alone with it in his lap now, in their bedroom upstairs at the B and B. Its once glossy paper looked faded against the shiny slacks of his tuxedo. Philip had decamped with clothes and toiletries to another bedroom, to make sure they didn’t cross paths in the run-up to the ceremony. Julian was almost ready. He had twisted his hair into the short messy points he liked and put on his clothes. There was only his bow tie left, and the gift his mom had left him.

  His fingers fumbled as he tore the wrapping from the plain white box. Inside he waded through blue tissue and found not a book or album, but papers. He unfolded printouts of search results from Ancestry.com, thirty-odd pages of links to birth certificates for dozens of Maria Elena’s in Laredo, Texas, and a bunch of Mexican towns he never heard of, gathered over several years, he could tell by the print lines. Below them, tied with a ribbon, was a bundle of letters his dad wrote his mom at UT, from a military base in Vietnam. And at the bottom of the box, or maybe the top, was a letter from his mom written on yellow lined pages. Julian recognized the paper, from the same pad on his mom’s nightstand where she wrote the instructions for her memorial service years ago.

  Julian—

  Happy wedding day. I would’ve made you a gift like I did for Philip for Christmas, but you didn’t tell me you were getting married until right before you came home. The Rosenblums probably bought you some overpriced blender or latte machine. I don’t know when we’ll say goodbye, but if you’re reading this I’m gone and this is what you’re getting.

  I’ve been rereading Tolkien on nights I can’t sleep, the trilogy and Silmarillion. There was a time you loved Tolkien, too. Aragorn was a Ranger of the North, you may recall, a remnant of the Dúnedain of Arnor. They were split from their ancestors to the south in Gondor, three thousand years ago, and their numbers dwindled until they were just a wandering pack of men without people or land. All they had was a history inside them. Your dad and I had problems, but you were made in love. You can see it in these letters we wrote, helping each other through hard times. That’s where you come from. I never knew your dad’s family, and you only met my mom once. It was for the best. She was Mexican and didn’t want to be. A man came to our house once from Mexico when I was a girl, a relative, but she turned him away. In the closet, you could say. I always wanted to find her family. I looked for her on one of those family tree websites but didn’t get far. It probably doesn’t feel like it now, but you have people somewhere. Not all those who wander are lost.

  Remember Valinor, the Undying Lands where the immortal Elves returned to live? And took Bilbo and Frodo to spend their last days in peace and beauty? Can you imagine it? Nothing about our world is fair. It’s a cruel sick place most of the time. And when you’re different it’s worse. The world wants you invisible. But you never really could hide and you never did. Don’t let it happen, Jules. The Elves were warriors, with good aim. Do what’s right for the invisible people. Raise hell. Never shut up. It’s all over before you know it.

  Love,

  Lacy Adams Warner

  Julian stared at the pages. It was the intensity pulsing through her words, the heat, that was unfamiliar. Things his mom apparently couldn’t say in person, or all the ways he hadn’t been listening when she was alive. He wondered about the anger that burned in him, that drove him and sometimes kept him apart—had it been passed along like some inheritance?

  “Julian?” A knock came at the door. “It’s Ruth. Are you dressed?”

  “Yeah.”

  She poked her head in. “Do you have a minute?”

  “Sure,” he said, tucking the box under a pillow.

  Ruth puttered to the walnut sleigh bed and settled at the foot of it. Julian watched her, recalling the first time he and Philip hosted the Rosenblums at their apartment uptown. The grief of losing his mom was still raw, and Julian channeled it into an elaborate dinner—beef bourguignon and a chocolate soufflé. Ruth barely touched her food, and when he offered her more salad—the one thing she deigned to eat—she smiled grandly and said she was stuffed. And years later, their relationship had never really moved past that night.

  Julian fiddled with the tie undone around his neck. “I’m glad you came by.”

  “I tried Phil’s room first,” Ruth started briskly, “but he wouldn’t let me in. I haven’t seen you in months! Congrats on the new job. We donate to the ACLU, and I happen to know they don’t hire much right out of law school.”

  “I got my own funding”—he smiled—“so I’m free.”

  “Julian.” She adjusted her glasses and sat up straight. Her floral perfume wafted lightly toward him. “At the rehearsal earlier, and with my mother, I upset you. It was not my intention, but it was the effect of my actions. Try as we may, we’re all Freudians. The gift is excrement. I’m sorry.”

  He had never heard Ruth apologize. They hadn’t had many one-on-one conversations over the years. Julian tended to avoid them like any potential ambush, mindful that analyzing him was one of Philip and Ruth’s favorite pastimes.

  “I got carried away,” she continued, talking into her lap. “I think—you adjust to things, in life. Phil came out, OK, I love my child, so he won’t marry a Jewish girl, he’ll marry a—and then he met you. The One. What does it even mean, to keep a line going? I don’t know. But. Around the time Bubbe stopped making sense, she asked me every day when she was going home. To Berlin, I think she meant. After decades, and what happened.” She looked at Julian. “Phil’s my baby. Take care of him. And go run your own lives. You’ll do the best job of it.”

  “I’m sorry too, Ruth.”

  She pressed her hands together
. “Gerald and I will walk our son down the aisle, and give him away. We’ll walk you down as well, if it feels right. But I—I kept asking because you’re precious and deserve to be given away. That’s what I meant to say. Because you are loved. Nobody turns out like you did unless he was loved very much.”

  It occurred to Julian that for all of her controlling ways, and the totemic shadow she cast across Philip’s childhood, Ruth was sometimes just trying to be nice. “Did you and Gerald have fun?” he asked. “At your wedding?”

  “I think so. Memory fades. You lose things.” Ruth looked out the window, studying a brilliant red treetop. “And gain. Much holds us together. Family. History. Our daughter. You boys.” She smiled. “Grandkids someday. I digress.” She scrutinized him, but in a way that wasn’t unwelcome. “I wish I could have met your mother,” she said. “What kind of amazing woman was there at the beginning, to shape you into this? The stories she could tell.”

  The light shifted in the window, and suddenly Julian remembered the sun falling through the curtains in the breakfast nook one morning, when he was a boy. It was during a lesson at the kitchen table, the day his mom told him he would go to school and have other teachers. “Ruth?” he said. “I think I’ll have Miss Bonnie walk me down the aisle.”

  “Wonderful.” She put a hand on Julian’s shoulder and smiled warmly, and with the other smoothed out the points he had carefully twisted in his hair. “Shall I find her and let her know?”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  Ruth got up and turned to the door. “Oh!” she cried at the sight of the deer head over the fireplace. “We are not alone.” She took a few curious steps toward it and raised her fingertips to tease the fur on its lower neck. “Funny,” she mused. “The ways we hold on to things.” She smiled at Julian. “See you downstairs.”