A Scarcity of Condors

by Suanne Laqueur

  He was no longer a fixture in the Tholets’ house and if Jude missed him, it was in a nameless, instinctive manner. A frequent glance to one side or the other, looking for a loving, lawful presence, a tangible weight on his shoulder that wasn’t there. Puzzled why its absence made him wistful. He wondered what might take its place, where something else like it could be. It certainly wasn’t in girls, who were starting to notice him. And he noticed he didn’t much care.

  By the start of high school, he knew a deeper meaning lay in his hidden stash of men’s underwear ads torn from the Sears’ catalog, and teen idol pictures torn from Serena’s magazines. He had a better idea of why he missed the feel of a boy’s head on his shoulder. He knew his obsession with Sting and Bryan Adams and every member of Duran Duran wasn’t entirely musical. Girls kissed him and it felt good, the way a back rub felt good. But when he thought about a boy’s mouth pressed to his, he got light-headed, flustered and horny.

  When the thought first identified itself—I think I’m gay—he didn’t get scared, he got ready. He knew being gay could make his life miserable if anyone found out. Being gay could get him hurt. He had stay one step ahead.

  Jude Tholet was smart. More than smart, Jude was wily. He used all his cunning and intellect to delay his sexual persuasion and pass for straight.

  He had some natural advantages. Looks, for instance, the favored currency of social economy. He was dark and dimpled with bright blue eyes, but the azure gaze was partially obscured by his glasses and his ears stuck out a little, which made him approachable. Height was another blessing. Height was power. But instead of throwing his stature around, Jude cultivated a modest, graceful manner that put people at ease. He wanted a reputation of self-effacing decency to precede him.

  Nothing to see here. Never mind me. Let’s talk about you.

  Jude had always been fearless around girls, because they had nothing he wanted on a sexual plane. He saw through the double-talk and manipulations that infuriated his male classmates, and he became an interpreter, ambassador and matchmaker. If you liked a girl at school, you got Jude Tholet to chat her up, drop your name and report back. If you wanted to approach a chick at a party, you got Jude to cross the room with you and start up a conversation.

  Still, he made damn sure he was seen flirting. He went on dates, in groups when he could and alone when he had to. He pretended girls flustered and frustrated him. Around his buddies, he did a requisite amount of bitching and moaning how hard up he was, what a cold cocktease she was and what a loser she blew him off for. Not enough to be obnoxious. Just enough for the record to reflect straight.

  “It must have been exhausting,” Phil said, listening to tales of Jude’s performance.

  “It’s exhausting in hindsight,” Jude said. “At the time, it was just my life. Maybe because I subconsciously knew the alternative of being out would be a worse kind of exhausting.”

  The straight act did get easier when Hewan Bourjini moved to Vancouver in his sophomore year. They fell in fierce, soulful, best-friend love, then fell into cahoots and become a bearded couple. They went everywhere and did everything together, arm in arm, holding hands, carrying on. Openly hugging and easily kissing in school hallways and weekend parties. Always hanging out and yakking it up and being everyone’s relationship goal before relationship goals were a hashtag.

  “You guys are so sweet.”

  “You’re like best friends.”

  “You’re like an actual couple.”

  When Hewan met boys she wanted to date, she and Jude staged a breakup. Then Jude could play the role of the heartbroken, moody swain licking his wounds. It excused him from the dating game. He was on the rebound. He wasn’t looking for anything serious. He was concentrating on his music and his schoolwork. Love sucked. Girls were trouble. He milked it until Hewan’s relationship ended and she and Jude got back “together.” The convenient cycle repeated at least three times during high school.

  Phil laughed when Jude told him this. “What couple didn’t break up and reconcile at least three times in high school?”

  Feño, in the meantime, was a foot soldier in the army of an alpha male named Juan-Mateo Díaz. El Cóndor. His athletic machine ran on testosterone and machismo, rolling like tanks over the battlefield of high school. They could be carelessly cruel to girls—arbitrarily destroying reputations by choosing who was madonna and who was whore. They could be vicious to boys, particularly any male who showed the slightest degree of effeminacy. Or even boys like Jude, who had steady girlfriends but were suspiciously artistic and musical. Boys who played instruments and sang and knew the lyrics to show tunes. Boys who actually danced at school dances. Boys who put a little too much time into their appearance and spent a little too much time with girls a little too effortlessly.

  Feño moved on the fringes of this gang of egos. Careless cruelty was not in his nature and Jude guessed Feño’s enviable athleticism gave him a certain amount of leeway with the Condor. Feño made his bones and showed his loyalty on the field, so he didn’t have to do it in the cafeteria.

  When Jude passed by El Cóndor’s clique, he and Feño caught eyes and jerked their chins—Hey, I see you, I know you—but said nothing. They were on duty, with roles to play. If they ran into each other alone, they stopped and took the time. They caught up, laughing and joking around. Then they moved on, but not before Feño said “Adiós” and with a funny little smile, poked a finger in the ball of Jude’s shoulder. As if silently adding, I’ll be back. Hold my spot.

  The idea it was a flirtatious gesture never entered Jude’s mind. Feño was straight like the sky was blue. As far as Jude was concerned, he was the only gay boy in the entire school. He had a wall between himself and his male classmates and he stayed the fuck on his side. He crushed on untouchable men in the movies and on TV. He changed pronouns in song lyrics and fantasized to his hidden stash of magazine pages. This was his life and he imagined, even counted on it being his life until he went to college. Exactly what would happen then he wasn’t quite sure, but he believed he’d be among people who’d outgrown high school nonsense. Open-eyed, worldly intellectuals who lived and let live. It would be different. It would be better. He just had to get through these last couple years of bullshit.

  Then one day, Jude bumped into El Cóndor in a crowded hallway.

  “Mira por donde vas, maricón,” Juan-Mateo said.

  Watch where you’re going, faggot.

  The word rolled off Jude’s back. He knew by some unspoken law, Juan-Mateo was required to say this. So toxic was his brand of machismo, he had no concept of accidental touch. If a female inadvertently brushed him in passing, she was a whore who wanted him. If a male did it, he was obviously gay.

  Mira por donde vas, maricón.

  Homophobic slurs had their own hierarchy. Maricón meant fag, yes, but any guy who bumped into you was maricón. A friend you were pissed off at was maricón. A friend you were giving good-natured shit to, a car that wouldn’t start, a lost object, lousy weather, a bad situation. Maricón was a Swiss Army knife slur, just like hueón ran a useful gamut from buddy to asshole.

  The epithet cabro carried a little more provocative weight. Same with coligüe, which came from the Mapuche language. If El Cóndor said “Mira por donde vas, cola,” then Jude was in deep shit. If you called a guy cola, you were alluding not only to his deviant sexuality, but all the culturally approved discrimination that came with it. That guy is gay, I denounce him and declare open season on his ass. Have at it. He deserves everything he has coming.

  Feño Paloma laughed. “Maricón? Him?” He whacked El Cóndor’s arm. (It was permissible to slug, smack and punch your male friends.) “El Pianista gets more pussy than all of us.”

  Now Juan-Mateo had to save face on two fronts. “Yeah, he gets it with your mother.”

  This was a mistake. Mothers and sisters were fair game in trash talk, except if they had b
een detained, tortured or disappeared back in Chile. Survivors of Pinochet’s terror were off limits. Even the white boys knew that.

  Feño Paloma’s older sister was disappeared and his mother was a shattered woman who’d suffered unspeakable things. El Cóndor had violated the code. As he and Feño stared each other down, his men exchanged troubled glances. It seemed equally unlikely Feño would throw a punch or Juan-Mateo would apologize. The phalanx quietly broke up, mumbling excuses of one kind or another, and made off in different directions. Feño, silent all this time, was slow to take his gaze off Juan-Mateo, a corner of his upper lip twitching.

  “Vámonos, Tholet,” he said. “It stinks in here.”

  He started walking. Jude shrugged a cool shoulder at the disgraced general and followed. Years later, he would wonder if, watching the two of them walk away, a seed of an idea was planted in El Cóndor’s mind and watered with a trickle of revenge. But that was later. This was now. And things were about to change.

  “Sick of his bullshit,” Feño said. “A lot of us are.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Fucker saying shit like that when he wasn’t even born in Chile? He needs to watch his step. Anyway, what’s up, hueón, haven’t seen you in a while…”

  They walked along, threading through clumps of students, squeezing by in stairwells, talking and catching up the way they always did. Laughing and joking as usual. Feño paused outside the locker room door and gave his customary adiós. His finger reached and poked Jude’s shoulder. Then it held still. A single beam of pointed energy pinning Jude to the cinderblock wall.

  And something was different.

  “Want to hang out tonight?” Feño said.

  Then everything was different.

  Jude swallowed and it sounded like a tidal wave in his ears. Above the thud of his heart he heard his voice answer, “Sure.”

  Sure, Jude wanted to hang out.

  All at once, he wanted many, many things.

  He’s beautiful, he thought. When did that happen?

  “Can we hang at your house?” Feño said. “I need to get away from mine.”

  If he’d asked Jude to set his house on fire, Jude would’ve obliged. As Feño disappeared through the locker room door, the lingering touch of his fingertip held Jude frozen to the wall, staring after, flooded with wanting.

  “Well, this is a revolting development,” he said softly.

  Penny orchestrated the Tholets’ flight from Chile, but it was Cleon who scythed a path out of Canada. At the time of Jude’s attack, the University of Washington had been courting Cleon for years, to teach at the Jackson School of International Studies. The offer was attractive, but Cleon had a strong aversion to pulling up roots and an even stronger antagonism toward America: it was Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger who engineered the coup in Chile and put Pinochet in power.

  “Kissinger can eat shit,” Cleon famously said, which impressed Jude because “eat shit” was a phrase his father did not suffer gladly. Cleon had a colorful vocabulary and could swear in three languages. Neither he nor Penny minded their kids cursing in the house. Gross epithets, F-bombs, bullshit, horseshit, ratshit and batshit were bandied about with impunity. But once, in a heated argument with Serena, Jude told his sister to eat shit and Cleon hit him. Not an admonishing swat on the arm but a full blown slap across Jude’s mouth.

  “Don’t ever let me hear you say that again,” he said, with a finger in Jude’s pounding chest and an iron tone that would brook neither discussion nor disobedience. Stunned speechless—his father had never hit him before—and more than a little afraid, Jude filed the rule under Weird Papi Quirks and without question, never uttered the words again.

  After the incident with the blood on the car windshield, Cleon decided he could forgive America without forgetting Kissinger’s deeds, and he accepted the job opportunity at Jackson as reparations. He took the university’s relocation assistance, took everything offered and took his family out of Canada.

  The Tholets spent their first month in Seattle living on top of each other in temporary housing. When Penny went to open houses and viewings, she took Jude with her. He wasn’t a willing companion. Given his way, he’d hole up in the room he shared with Aiden, plug into his Walkman and pine. But Penny was having none of it. She pushed him into the driver’s seat and made him explore the city with her. He grunted and moped through house after house and, much later, marveled his mother didn’t throw him off one of Seattle’s many bridges.

  When the realtor led them over the threshold of a contemporary dwelling on SW Rose Street, Jude’s pissy mood did a double-take and let out a startled, Whoa.

  “Wow,” Penny said, walking into the living room. One side was all windows, looking over the Sound. “Look at that view.”

  But Jude only had eyes for the baby grand piano. Its curved, matte black box was angled toward the fireplace, the bench kitty-corner to the sectional couch. A Wittner 813M metronome perched on the deck like a little pyramid. Sheet music for Chopin’s Nocturne in A-Minor open on the stand.

  Hello, hello, hello, it said. You’re here. I’ve been waiting. Come sit. Stay a while.

  “The owners are willing to negotiate the piano into the price,” the realtor said. “Between us, you’d be doing them a favor keeping it. I don’t suppose you play?”

  Jude looked over, his breath tight in his chest. “Yes,” he said, in the most pleasant voice he’d used all day. “I play.”

  His eyes finally took in the view outside the windows. Crisp white woodwork framed a dripping, gray and green vista. The moody weather, which until now had depressed him, felt romantic and full of longing drama, begging to be filled with music. He looked back at the room, noticing it was simultaneously spacious and cozy. The stacked stone hearth was dark and empty, but a fiery scenario kindled in Jude’s mind. He saw Penny on the couch, absorbed in a book. Serena flipped through a magazine, a strand of hair coiled around her index finger. Aiden sprawled on his stomach on the rug, socked feet kicked up behind as he made his endless lists and calculations. Cleon in the handsome leather recliner, taking a little siesta. While Jude sat at the piano and played and the rain fell down the windows, washing everything cool and clean outside, warm and content inside.

  “Where are the closest middle and high school?” Penny asked.

  “You’re five minutes from the Denny-Sealth campus and it’s a twenty-minute drive to the University.” The realtor’s gaze turned on Jude, sly and expert. “Chief Sealth High School has an outstanding music program.”

  Oh please, Mami, Jude thought, a lumbering, angry teenager reduced to toddler negotiations. Pretty please. I be nice. We stay here.

  He engineered a massive attitude adjustment, bribing fate like a child in the weeks before Christmas. He wanted that house and wanted that piano and wanted that view and if it took slapping a cheerful face on all his brooding rage to get it, he’d be Little Mary Fucking Sunshine.

  Two decades later, Jude was again bribing fate with good behavior: I be nice. You send someone.

  He invested in his side of the bargain by hitting the gym every night, hauling out his closet and indulging in some much-needed retail therapy. A good haircut, some trendy new glasses, contact lenses to switch it up. He still wanted to present as decent and self-effacing, but instead of nothing to see here, he tried to project something to see here.

  Here it is. It’s not all that, it’s got a lot of weird quirks, but give it a look-see.

  Fate threw him some softballs pitches. For years, he’d given free piano lessons at the Boys and Girls Club of Seattle. One of the volunteers asked him out for a beer. They went and had a beer. Jude had another long-standing gig playing piano at the Hilton’s Sunday brunch. A new bartender asked him out. They went out. He had dinner with a librarian at the Music Hall. Caught a movie with the cute file clerk at his dentist’s office. When Pacific Northwest Ballet did an
assembly at a local elementary school, Jude left with an art teacher’s phone number in his pocket.

  He served up a positive attitude on the dates. An I want someone attitude. None of the dates were electric, but none sucked. Nice guys, all of them.

  But no someones.

  Jude had suffered from White Coat Syndrome since he was a child, when merely entering the pediatrician’s office made him teeter on the edge of tears. His intense aversion to doctors worsened when his leg was broken and followed him into adulthood. While he’d outgrown the anxious crying, the nurses at his practice knew not to take Jude’s blood pressure at the start of an exam, but rather wait until the end when he’d calmed down.

  Clinical settings made him nervous but his loathing of hospitals could only be described in psychological terms. He was proud of his track record in staying out of the ER. No more broken bones, no stitches, no freak accidents or illnesses.

  Until tonight.

  With a rattle of ball bearings, the curtain surrounding Jude’s bed drew back and Hewan Bourjini put her head around. “Shmoopy, you broke your streak.”

  “Hey.” He tilted a sullen cheek toward her kiss. “Thanks for coming.”

  “You all right?”

  “I’m just annoyed. And my phone’s dead so I’m bored out of my mind. Did you bring a charger?”

  “Mmhm. You know, I’m kind of loving this look you got going.”

  “Stop.” He was still in his zoot suit costume for Elite Syncopations and feeling like a complete moron.

  “Let me see you with the hat,” Hewan said, picking it up off the rolling side table.

  “Do not put the hat on me. I will kill you.”

  She put it on her own head and inspected his left foot, propped up and packed in ice. “Is it broken?”