by Greg Kearney
“What a thing to say,” Hazel says. “I don’t hate anyone. I haven’t known very many black ladies in my life — I can only think of Shileen McKean, from when we lived on Myrtle Road, and she could’ve just been a squaw that got some sun; I never found out — but I’m always eager to meet new people, from lots of walks of life.”
“Really, Mom? So you’re saying you’ve never used the N-word?”
“Oh, you do not want to be using the N-word,” Anita snaps. “I don’t even use the N-word, and I’m allowed to!”
“I don’t think I even know what the N-word is,” Hazel says. “I just like making new friends.”
“This is my new friend, Mom. I made this friend on my own. Can’t you just please stay away from her?”
“You’d think I was the fought-over baby in the Book of Kings! Silly women.”
Teresa squirms and sighs like a thwarted toddler. She never gets her way; she has to get her way this time. “Mom, I’d like you to repeat what you said to me in the bathroom just now.”
“I can’t remember. My memory is gone. Anita, I maybe have dementia, and that can sometimes be really hard.”
“In the bathroom you called Anita ‘it,’ and you told me to sit on my purse and watch my coupons. When I was little you and Daddy used to use the N-word all the time at home. All the time. Whenever a black person came on TV. I remember the time Lena Horne came on TV in a fancy gown and you said ‘who did that nigger have to ride to get that dress?’”
“And that is my cue to head on out,” Anita says, struggling to her feet. “I never learn. That is it. I am out.”
“But I’m not calling you a nigger, Anita. I’m exposing my mother. When you leave, she’s going to say something along the lines of ‘there goes a nigger.’”
Anita shakes her head, shifts her weight onto her canes. “I am in — ooh, motherfucker! — terrible pain, and I’m tired of you people. Do you know how close I came to playing on the WTA circuit?”
Anita sees Hazel’s bafflement, which irks her further. “Tennis! I was going to play tennis! Tired of this fucking town; shopping is a nightmare. I’m too nice. I give and give. ‘The crystal palm tree is telling us to move to Canada!’ he says, and I just pick up and follow him like an idiot. To be honest, I don’t think I even saw the crystal palm tree; I was just trying to be supportive. When’s someone going to look after me, for once? Do you know how exhausting it is to perform an exorcism?”
Teresa paws at Anita, who dodges her.
“I’d love to look after you, Anita,” she says pleadingly. “Whatever you need. Let me look after you.”
“Easy for the — ooh, fuck off! — white lady to say when her ass is dying. I don’t need your looking after! I need my life in Iowa back. I need my dignity back.”
She canes her way through the house. Teresa and Hazel follow, imploringly.
“Where are you going?” Hazel whines. “Don’t go. Hey, do you go to nightclubs, where they have, like, the bouncers and the big sparkly ball above the dance floor? I’ve never been to a full on nightclub. Would seniors be welcome at the black nightclub?”
“Anita,” Teresa interjects, pawing at her friend, “why are you being so severe all of a sudden? Please don’t lump me in with my mother. I’m a good person. Please? I know you’re in terrible pain but I need your support. I could — I would even pay you.”
“Teresa Beryl, that is about the most pathetic thing I’ve ever heard. You would pay someone to be your friend? Christ, I’ll be your mother for a hundred bucks a day if you want. Anita, I apologize for my daughter. Can I get a ride with you? I guess — Do you think you’ll be going to a nightclub today?”
“Anita, please don’t go. I can’t do this alone.”
“You’re not alone,” Anita huffs. “You’ve got your mother.” At the door Anita turns around. “I want nothing more to do with you, any of you. I’m sorry. I don’t have any compassion left. I’m sick of talking. I’m sick of — Father God, plug your ears, I cannot help myself — right now I am sick of Jesus.” She canes her way to the driveway and drives off.
Teresa falls back on the wall. Hazel looks around the edges of her daughter.
“Well, that’s that, I guess,” Hazel says, resignedly. “She’s so tall, eh? Looks a bit like a man. Pretty, though. It was nice meeting her. Do you think she’s going straight to the nightclub?”
Teresa slaps a hand to her forehead. This has never happened before. She has never grabbed at a person and begged them not to leave her. This is not how things should go, at a time like this.
“What do you want me to do with supper,” Hazel asks Teresa on the floor.
“Why did you do that, Mom? Why?”
“Do what?”
“Why did you try to steal Anita away from me?”
“What? You’re goofy — I was just being nice. I like meeting new people sometimes. She was — Once I got over the shock of all the black, she was nice and interesting. You kind of get all swept away when she’s talking, eh? I hope she finds her husband. What should I do about supper?”
Teresa thinks on dinner: the countless dinners she has thrown together, distracted, resentful of her loved ones, annoyed by the necessity of food; the dinners that remain, and her annihilated taste buds.
“Just throw it out,” she says.
25
JOEL IS ADMITTEDLY GIDDY, AND the way he rushed the first grade class through the museum — making them run from display to display, summing up each one in a few words — was simply an expression of his happiness. The kids had a great time. But Donald is livid. He yanks Joel behind the stuffed moose and the three-hundred-year-old nightie.
“What did I say about our — interlude, right before our interlude began?” Donald demands, wagging a finger.
“Oh, I know, I know. I’m sorry, Donald. I’m just feeling really, like, sprightly and happy, and I can’t keep it in.”
“That’s your challenge as my employee, then, isn’t it? Keeping it in. Part of being a grown man involves concealing your emotions at all times.” He softens a little. “And part of being a quote unquote gay man is acting like you’re bored even when you’re not. Yes? I think so.”
“Right. But I don’t want to be like that.”
Donald draws breath to speak, but stops. He lets his long hand come up and cup Joel’s full, flushed face. Joel leans into his touch, the delight of a man’s hand, any man’s hand, on his face. Donald sees Joel’s delight and takes his hand away. The museum’s still open. Nobody ever just pops in to the museum, but it could happen. Donald tells Joel to start with the invitations to the button opening, sticking the address stickers to the envelopes.
Seven hundred and fifty invitations. Every white collar family in town, a few benevolent eccentrics. Donald is hoping at least 100 will show. Joel starts sticking the stickers. Donald was so thoughtful when they made love, after the stacks fell. Joel warned him of his smallish penis before they disrobed; when Donald saw it he said, “How sweet. If only they were all like that,” and, taking it in hand, went on to lament the cult of the big cock. Dan the Fisherman also had a small endowment, and the big cocks Donald encountered after him he found frightening. An enormous, erect penis, Donald said, fondling Joel’s small balls, always struck him as silly, inconvenient, out of place, like a garden gnome in the middle of one’s bathtub. Donald’s own body is what Joel expected it to be: white, slack, flabby in places, sunken in other places. His penis is, naturally, much larger than Joel’s, but certainly not silly or out of place, nestled as it is in greying, weedy pubic hair. His knees are quite nice, in Joel’s opinion. His knees and his feet, although his toenails, like his fingernails, could do with a good trim.
They ground their bodies against each other. Joel moved to suck Donald’s cock; Donald stopped him and said that oral sex wasn’t necessary. Joel continued, pressing his face into Donald’s only slightly
sour-smelling crotch. He set about performing a blow job as he best understood it — up and down, relentlessly. After a few minutes of Joel’s up-and-down, Donald thanked him for the attention and asked that they move on to other things.
They kissed! Joel assumed that Donald would turn away from a kiss, but Donald initiated it. The soaring sensation it caused in Joel’s chest! It didn’t matter that Donald’s halitosis made his eyes water or even that Donald insisted on darting his tongue about like a startled wasp. Joel is now among the frequently kissed.
Neither of them came. They touched and kissed for an appropriate length of time, then contentedly withdrew to either side of Donald’s bumpy double bed. Donald remarked on Joel’s relative ease of being in bed; he’s not all hunched and stiff or limp and dead like the other young men Donald has been with.
Since then Joel has been allowed to sleep on a mildewed air mattress on the floor beside Donald’s bed. He listens to Donald sleep. Sometimes he’ll say things while he’s sleeping, little bits of nonsense murmured in a childlike voice. Joel finds this adorable. Confirmation of Donald’s tender, evergreen interior.
Joel has asked Donald if he could consider himself Donald’s boyfriend. Donald said that Joel could consider himself any way he’d like, but to Donald Joel would only ever be an employee, and besides, sixty-one-year-old men do not have boyfriends or anything else breezy; they have enlarged prostates and gnawing anxiety over the ramifications of early retirement. They were standing in Donald’s kitchen. Joel said that a sixty-one-year-old man could have it all: all the anxiety and prostate problems and a boyfriend. Donald told Joel to go stand around out of sight. Joel went and stood in the bathroom. He wasn’t hurt by Donald’s request that he stand out of sight. He just filed it under “Donald’s baffling but adorable little ways,” and tried to think of something nice to get him for Christmas.
Now Joel stands in the museum’s back office, sticking stickers. He recognizes some of the names on the address labels, old teachers he never thought would show up on Donald Tait’s mailing list. Like Mr. Cotton from grade five; could it be that he’s gay? Mr. Cotton once told Joel that he was “seriously awry” because of the frantic, squealing way he played badminton in gym class. Mr. Cotton couldn’t be gay. Likely he has a wife who forced him to donate to the museum once.
He’s almost done the Fs when Donald pokes his head in.
“Your father — well, he says he’s your father — is here.”
Joel has a sticker on each of the fingers of his right hand. He moves, still stickered, toward the door, then goes back to pick off the stickers and tab them to the table’s edge.
Hugh is thin, his pompadour wilted. He sees his son and lifts a corner of his mouth by way of greeting.
“How ya makin’ out?” he asks, looking at the case of children’s moccasins for sale.
“Awful. Otherwise good. I’m surprised the monster let you out of the house.”
“Yeah, I guess I’m in her bad books ’cuz I missed supper with that goofy praying couple the other day. But Dallas and them are comin’ down for a visit. You should drop by.”
“But I’ve been banished from the household. I can’t just drop by.”
Hugh chuckles the chuckle he chuckles when he doesn’t know what to say and wants to change the subject.
“That mother of yours is sure something else. How ya makin’ out?”
“You asked me that already. How is she? Is she much worse?”
Hugh chuckles the chuckle. “Oh, you know your mom. That hellraiser. She’ll outlive us all.”
Donald creeps in between them. Joel introduces Hugh to Donald. Hugh extends his hand. Donald touches his palm to Hugh’s then withdraws.
“I’m very sorry, but could I get the two of you to stand off to the side so you don’t block foot traffic?”
Hugh immediately moves off to the side, while Joel observes that there is no traffic in the museum, ever. Then he moves off to the side. Donald, assured that the coast is clear, recedes again.
“How are you doing, Dad? You don’t look that great.”
“Yeah. I haven’t been sleeping good. I think I need a new pillow. The one I have now has gotten all thin and lumpy all of a sudden. I don’t know. And the shift work is getting harder and harder. I don’t know. And when I got days off it’s like I forget what I used to do on my days off before, so I just end up driving around town, or sittin’ at the legion.”
Hugh pulls his wallet from a back pants pocket. He picks out three fifties, slides them across the moccasin case for Joel. Tells him not to spend it on crap.
“I should skedaddle. Your mom’ll scalp me if I don’t do the groceries. Dallas and them will be here Friday. You drop by this weekend. They said the homecare should start comin’ to the house, but if you can’t wash your own goddamn wife there’s something wrong with you. I’m sure your mom’ll be glad to see yous. I don’t know if you should bring that queer with yous. He seems to think his shit don’t stink.”
Joel and Hugh hug in the awkward stickman way they always hug. Joel watches his father get into his blue Pontiac across the road. He goes back to stickering. He thinks of his father’s compromised pompadour, his big, bony hands. He writes Hugh’s name and the home address on a museum envelope. He’d never come to a do at the museum, but Joel wants his father to know that he is loved. Or at least that he is regarded way more fondly than when Joel was fifteen and hated his father’s guts.
Donald silently approaches and stands behind him.
“He seemed like a nice man,” he says.
“I’ve never seen him so fucked up. It’s almost like he has Alzheimer’s. He’s never that … chatty.”
“That’s chatty? I thought it was remote.”
Joel leans back slightly into Donald.
“Is it okay that I’m sort of leaning back on you like this?”
Donald sighs. “It’s not exactly comfortable, but if you feel compelled.”
“I do feel compelled, I really do. I’m at a loss, Donald. I love you. I totally love you.”
Donald swats Joel on the back of the head. “Why must you say such idiotic things? This isn’t a film. We’re two unfortunate men passing time. Get that straight.”
Joel apologizes, but continues to lean on Donald. Donald lets him.
26
“WHERE’S MY KILLER TOP?” BINNY brays umpteen times a day, ever more insistent. Edmund has thus far failed to deliver. Binny has been fucked a lot — one guy pounded him with such perfect rhythm that Binny started humming along to the sticky beat of pelvis on ass — but he is unbruised, unwounded, woefully well. Edmund has sifted through his tattered address book again and again, looking for hot possibles in between the bricks of black marker that cover the names and numbers of dead people. All the hot possibles are dead. Just now, though, winnowing his fingers into the tiny vinyl pouch on the inside of the back cover, he found several business cards. And one of them is Jim the shrink’s.
Big Jim, once so brawny and ebullient, a psychiatrist who somehow managed to maintain empathy and keep burnout at bay, a notoriously kinky fucker with a donkey dick: a major, major catch, a great lay, expert procurer of the roughest, most closeted men. His practice, on the second floor of his sixbedroom house, was at first a bastion to muddled, upper class housewives, fast-lane gay men with arid inner lives, and several professional athletes paralyzed by performance anxiety. Then, when the plague drifted in, his homely waiting room became populated with gaunt, coughing young men, and the housewives and quarterbacks fell away almost instantly.
Jim helped many men contend with the throttling shock of certain death where, just recently, there was only effortless, perfect health. He was a community hero. Then his own lover died, and Jim imploded. Closed up shop and dropped out of sight.
Edmund calls Jim, who answers, with that unmistakable overnight DJ bass voice of his. Turns out Jim is
partying a bit right this moment. Come on over, Jim says, the more, the merrier.
His house is oppressively hot; he has the heat cranked, on this warm fall day, and all the windows weep with condensation. Jim is wearing a red flannel nightshirt.
“Welcome!” Jim says, with a bottle of Lemon Pledge and a rag in his hand. “There was a really hot guy here a minute ago, but his wife came by to pick him up — I don’t know and I don’t want to know! He left his paw prints everywhere, and I keep spraying and dusting but they won’t go away. So. I’m sorry about the construction going on next door; the noise is outrageous, it’s 24/7. I didn’t know you could get a permit for round-the-clock construction.”
Apart from Carly Simon’s “Let the River Run” playing on repeat, Edmund and Binny don’t hear a thing. But they know where’s he’s coming from; they’ve all heard imagined construction noise at one time or another.
“How you guys? You guys good? Help yourself,” he says, pointing at the pipe and the tiny baggie on the coffee table. Binny helps himself.
“It’s been a long time, Ed. Last time was at that ACT art auction thing in — gosh, ’93?”
“Quite possibly, although my memory is awful. I’m doing great though, Jim. I really am.”
“Oh, me, too. It’s unbelievable. I never thought I’d be this great again.”
They both stand there, grinning their greatness. It’s something of a stand-off. Edmund doesn’t know what to say next.
“I need cock like, five minutes ago,” says Binny through the smoke.
“I promised Binny a good working-over by a mean top, and I instantly thought of you.”
“Ha! That’s so sweet. I don’t fuck anymore. I’m a bottom now.”
“Another Toronto bottom, hoo-ray!” Binny says resentfully. “Another nasty old hole, trying to steal the cock supply away from the fresh young hole.”
“He’s lippy, isn’t he? I can see why you’d want to see him get roughed up.”
“Well, I also recall that you’ve got great connections in the kink community, so …”