Getting Off Clean

by Timothy Murphy

  I’m on a strange bus now, full of strangers, staring out the window into the night at a strange highway, passing signs for towns I’ve never heard of. It occurs to me that I’ve never even been this far away from home alone before; in fact, the farthest I’ve been absolutely all by myself is maybe to Boston on a few occasions when Phoebe couldn’t come, and even that felt faintly illicit. Now, I’m getting that half-creepy, half-exhilarated feeling I had that night with him in the motor lodge, coming back from Boston, that feeling that you’ve taken yourself off the grid, that you’ve wiped yourself off the face of the earth: no one back there knows where you are and no one here knows who you are. What if those two guys in the train station called it? I wonder. What if I never came back? And then I think, What the fuck are you thinking? You don’t even know where you’re going.

  My heart jumps when the driver calls the name of the stop I’ve written down. I pull my duffel off the rack and file off with the others, some weary-looking working types, some white, some black. I look around: it’s a random street corner, nine-thirty at night, faintly chilly, in what could be any town in the United States, I guess. I can smell ocean vaguely from here, and I remember what he said about coming from a coastal city. I see a woman who looks a little like Charlie’s mother, Mrs. Metengarten, heading toward her car, and ask her if she knows how I can get to the address in my hand: 1400 Boulevard Aubergine, in a part of town called New Calvary.

  “You wanna get to New Calvary, sweetie?” she says to me, laughing, in a thicker southern accent than I thought people had around here. “That’s all the way across the city. You see that hill up there?” She points westward to what looks like a small black mountain that looms over the rest of the city, an enormous crucifix lighted up at the very top. “That’s why they call it New Calvary, ’cause of that giant cross at the top,” the woman tells me. “It’s been there virtually since electricity came to the city, I hear. Of course, the residents of New Calvary pay the electric bill on it. Lord knows they can afford to.”

  “Is there a bus line up there?” I ask the woman. It’s definitely too far away and too steep to walk.

  She laughs again. “Oh Lord, sweetie, no! New Calvary is like a city unto itself. I’m surprised there aren’t gates up there or something—or guards—to keep poor white trash like us from comin’ up there and tainting the race.”

  “What do you mean?” I laugh.

  “Are the folks you’re going to see up there black folk?” she asks me with startling directness.

  “Um—yeah,” I answer. “As a matter of fact, they are—I mean, he is. He’s a friend from high school.”

  “Well, that figures,” she says, cheerily enough. “Virtually everybody up there’s black. But there’s no way you can make it up there on your own two feet,” she says, reading my mind. “It’s too steep. With that big old bag you got there, you’d topple over and roll all the way down.” Then, apparently amused by that picture, she starts laughing. “Come on, sweetie,” she says. “I’m not in any special hurry to get back to my old man. I’ll give you a ride up.”

  “Thanks.” I pick up my bag and follow her to her car.

  “As a matter of fact, I’m a little excited to see things up there myself. I haven’t been cruising up on New Calvary since I was in high school, when we’d get real plastered and speed race up and down Boulevard Abberginny”—that’s how she pronounces it—“and the old spade daddies would come out of their homes in their robes and slippers screaming they were gonna get their shotguns and chase us back down the hill. But by that point, we were well enough outta there! You gotta excuse my language, too, sweetie. You’re from up North, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah, how’d you guess?”

  “I could just sense it in your voice,” she tells me, airily, starting the car. “And in your demeanor. But you folks from up North gotta understand somethin’, which is that we down here might still say words like ‘spade daddy’ or ‘coon’s eyes’ or just plain old ‘nigger’ from time to time, but we don’t mean nothin’ racist by it. It’s just the way our mamas and daddies talked, it’s in the blood. And the other thing, you know, this part of Virginia isn’t even really the South—it’s too close to Washington for that. You gotta go much deeper than this, boy, if you wanna hear some real southern fried fuck-all!” Now she starts laughing harder than ever—an oddly good-natured laugh—and it seems wise to laugh along with her just a little bit.

  “Why are all the people who live in New Calvary black?” I ask her as we cruise down what seems to be the main commercial street of the town, the dark mountain looming ahead of us.

  “I don’t know exactly, sweets. You don’t mind if I light up, do you?” she asks me, shaking a long slender cigarette (it reminds me of Brenda, who seems as far away as another planet right now) out of a golden box.

  “Of course not. It’s your car.”

  “I suppose it is,” she laughs, cracking the window and lighting the cigarette. “Now, why is that so, you ask. I think it’s ’cause—say, back in the twenties or thirties or so, when black folk starting moving into the city from the country, some from West Virginia—I mean, I was just a little thing, then—well, obviously white folk in town didn’t want them comin’ into their neighborhoods. I mean, this is back when the Klan was still ridin’ high, you know.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So, what happened was, all the poor black folk moved into the slummy part of town on the west bank of the river”—I have no idea what river she’s talking about—“but…” She exhales grandly. “But, well, there also happened to be some of ’em with money—doctors and lawyers and morticians and such, there’s bound to be a handful, you know. And no way were these uppity black folk living in those slums. So they settled the mountain”—she points ahead—“and named it New Calvary and built that big electrified cross. Until then, the mountain was kind of unpopulated except for a little bit of trash livin’ in caves or somethin’, and these uppity Negroes come on in and—well, kinda colonized it, like Pilgrims or something.”

  “Hm” is all I can think to say. It sounds fantastic, but reasonably in keeping with everything he’s told me about his aunt, and I’m surprised again that he presumably wasn’t overstating himself.

  “And built some mighty fine homes, as you’re about to see. Now I hope my goddamned four-wheel-drive comes through for us,” she says. Pretty soon, she’s pulling off the main road and onto a narrow dark street virtually hidden in the overhanging boughs of trees lush with spring. Through the crack of her window, despite the cigarette smoke, I can still make out the overpowering scent of lilacs mingling with sea air. Pretty soon, we’re just crawling up the steepest of inclines—she’s right; there’s no way I would have been able to walk this with my bag—and through the screen of trees I begin to make out the suggestion of grand houses set back from the street, swathed in darkness—a pitched roof here, what I guess would be called a veranda there, the glint of expensive cars in driveways, mailboxes nestled in shrubbery.

  “This is steep,” I say, my head flat back against the seat of the car.

  “That’s how they like it, I suppose,” she says. “Keeps fools like me from making a habit of this.”

  We keep climbing, climbing, the car straining against the incline, until finally we level off and the street splits in two and wraps around a dark, velvety village green upon which sits the electrified cross of Calvary, bathing the entire lawn in an eerie white light, and absolutely monstrous, stadium-sized, from where we idle just a hundred yards away.

  “Oh my God,” I gasp when I see it.

  “I expect that’s what they want you to say when you see it. Keeps us all in our place, huh? Look back behind you.”

  I twist around in the seat. We’re at the very top of the mount, and the view is staggering, what seems like miles of inky, undulating tree-tops giving way to the thousands of lights of the town, leagues below, and beyond that the sea, a glittering plane of jet and diamond, wrapping around the mainland
in a jagged crescent.

  “That’s amazing.”

  “I’ll say,” the woman says. “I’d forgotten how pretty it is. Some people live well, huh?” I nod absently, still caught between the twin spectacles. “What number Abberginny did you say your friend was?”

  I tell her, and she drives around the left flank of the village green until we’re on a wide avenue with a flower-drenched divider in the middle and houses on either side that seem to grow grander and grander as we pass. They’re like no houses I’ve ever seen, certainly not the staid black-and-white Federal-style boxes that pass for estates in West Mendhem; instead, each one seems to have come out of its own separate fable, each one a different configuration of sprawling, candy-colored turrets, porches, widow’s walks, and gables set against wide cool lawns broken up by histrionically arched willows or tiny, gnarled dwarf trees that look like they were grown in Japan, uprooted, and replanted here, to effects no more fantastic than the houses they stand before.

  “Well, here you go, sir,” the woman says. “What’s your name, anyway?”

  “Eric,” I say. I’m staring at a little blue-and-white cottage of a home that reminds me faintly of a Swiss chalet.

  “I’m Charlotte,” she says, offering her hand. “Nice to meet you. This is your stop. Fourteen hundred.”

  “This?” I say, pointing to the blue-and-white chalet.

  She laughs. “Hardly, sweetie. That!” And she points to the house at the very end of the boulevard, and I have to catch my breath. Set back on what seems a half-mile of lawn from the street sits, ponderous and dark except for one faint pinkly lighted window on an upper floor, a mausoleum—a massive square of spectral white granite, broken by nothing but a rotunda at the top, five rows of dark curtained windows and an immense portico, at the base of which is a flagstone walk that scrolls its way down to the street. There are trees towering behind the house, but none in the front, suggesting a boxy white ship anchored in the middle of a placid black pool. At the end of the walkway, there is a bronze mailbox on a marble pedestal, and as Charlotte pulls up directly in front of the house, I can make out the inscription:

  Florentina Jefferson

  1400 Boulevard Aubergine

  Florentina is Fleurie, I think, and she’s dead now. And then all I can think is, This is his now? And it occurs to me that when he told me he was filthy rich, he really wasn’t kidding.

  “So your friend lives here, huh?” Charlotte asks, glancing first at the house, then me, then back at the house. I can’t tell if she’s impressed or suspicious.

  “I guess so,” I say, not wanting to compound her suspicion about my right to be here, even though my own is growing by the second.

  “Don’t really look like anybody’s home,” she says, “except for that itty-bitty light way up in that window.”

  “Oh, my friend said he’d definitely be here,” I lie quickly. “He also told me where to find the key if he stepped out for a minute. I’ll be all right. Thanks a lot for driving me up here. It’s a long haul.”

  “That’s okay,” she says, distracted, still staring up at the house. “Say, what do your friend’s folks do for a living, anyhow? Are they entertainers or something?”

  “Real estate, I think,” I say, remembering what he told me once about Fleurie’s big land coup.

  “A helluva lot of it too, I suppose,” she says, looking back to the house one more time before turning to me and smiling. “All right, Eric, I wish you the very best up here among the gods. You have a lovely stay in our little town. You’ll find we Rebels ain’t so bad.”

  “You don’t seem so bad at all,” I say, taking my duffel bag, smiling but thinking, What the hell am I supposed to do now? One thing is certain: after coming this far, I’m not turning back.

  “Take care, sweetie,” Charlotte says, before gunning the car and pulling a U-turn around the divider, back down Boulevard Aubergine. In a moment, the car is out of sight and the silence, not to mention the smell of lilacs, is overpowering. I think about what she said about the spade daddies running out of their fancy homes with shotguns—oh, dear—and look back up at the glowing white monster of a house. My watch says it’s ten o’clock now. There is only one place for me to go.

  My bag over my shoulder, I start the long walk up the pathway toward the house, my sneakers maddeningly noisy on the flagstones in the middle of the otherwise silent neighborhood. Worse yet, underneath the portico, my footfalls echo as if I’m at the bottom of a cavern. My heart jumps when I see two relatively unweathered cigarette butts on the black welcome mat, then jumps twice when I bend down, pick one up, and see that it’s actually his brand, Camel filters. I press the bell and hear it echo through the rooms of what seems to be an abandoned house. If an old black woman who fits Fleurie’s description answers the door, I tell myself, I’ll scream and run away—this seems just like the sort of house to be haunted. If a stranger answers it, I’ll just say I’m a friend of Brooks from St. Banner and he once said I could drop by anytime, so I happened to be in Virginia, and so on. And if it’s him—if it’s him, well, I don’t know what I’ll say.

  But no one does answer the door. I wait a full minute, then ring again—twice, those chimes flying around a darkened house—then wait another full minute. Nothing. Finally, feeling like this whole scenario is so Gothic it couldn’t actually be happening to me, I reach up for the enormous brass knocker—and it happens. Without a hitch, with hardly an ounce of pressure from me, the front door gives way, opens up. It could hardly have been closed, let alone locked, at all.

  For the longest time, I just stand in the doorway and stare inside into the dark hallway. It could be the front hall on Dynasty or some such show—a colossal oak staircase that seems to go up and up and up, landing after landing; polished marble floors; arched entryways that open seductively on room after vaulted room—except that everything, everything, is packed and ready to leave. There are pale white squares on the walls where I suppose pictures once hung; furniture is covered in drop-cloths; and besides that, it’s just a chaos of trunks, crates, and cartons. It looks like an entire house, dismantled, packed up, anonymous, readied for evacuation—and it fills me with creepy panic.

  “Hello?” I call out feebly into the hallway, and hear nothing but the echo of my own voice, which doesn’t sound like me at all. Then, louder, more boldly: “Brooks?” I wait. Again, nothing.

  I step inside, close the front door silently behind me, leaving it just slightly unlatched, the way I found it, and walk across the marble floor to the foot of the stairs. For what must be another minute, I just stand there, immobile, frozen by the silence and the shadows; then I start climbing, each scuff of my sneakers on the marble giving me a little chill. At the first landing, I call his name again, but the sound of my own voice rattling up the flights alarms me too much, so I keep climbing in silence—to the second landing, then the third, feeling like I’ve gone completely insane, like I don’t know the meaning anymore of the idea of limits.

  It’s at the top of the fourth that I rediscover the light I saw from outside, falling in a loose pale shaft from an open doorway at the end of an empty hallway. I brace myself, call out his name one more time, then, when I get no response, proceed down the otherwise darkened hallway to the shaft of light at its end. Finally, when I get there, I swallow hard, readying myself for anything—a dead body, a pool of blood, a vampire, God knows what—and poke my head inside.

  No one is there, but I notice immediately that someone has been, only a short while ago. It’s a mess: there’s a half-eaten pizza lying in an open box on the bed next to a dented pack of Camel filters, an uncapped bottle of gin upright on the floor, a dirty water-filled two-foot bong beside it, and a frenzied array of books, newspapers, magazines, tapes, soiled socks and underwear, shirts and trousers absolutely everywhere. It’s unmistakably his room; not only do the gin and the bong give it away, not only do I recognize some of the twisted clothes, their Brooks Brothers tags plainly in view, but it smells just like
him—that confused mix of cigarettes, pot and cedar chips, that odd combination of dissolution and gentility that threw me into a wonderful panic every time I inhaled it. All of a sudden, I’m just so happy—happy that’s he still obviously alive and in the same country, happy that I’ve tracked him down of my own will, happy that in probably no time we’ll be together, regardless of what I’m going to say to him, together in this room, his real room in his real house, just the two of us, about a thousand thoughts away from anybody else. I’m so happy that I just throw down my bag and pick up one of his smelly Brooks Brothers shirts and wrap it around my neck and sit down on his bed next to the congealing remains of the pizza. And I sit there and start thinking about all the things I’m going to tell him—how I wanted to run back to the medics and claim him as mine but they took him away too quickly, and about how I’ve been thinking of nothing but him for three months now. I think about how he’ll be so happy to see me that he’ll forgive me for betraying him, and how we’ll start making plans right now for meeting this summer, in Paris or anywhere else, whatever it takes. And I get so caught up in my thoughts that I lose all track of time, and I feel completely at home in this strange house that I’ve virtually broken into on this strange mountain with the strange, God-sized electric crucifix glowing at the top of it.

  I don’t know how long I just sit there, drinking him in, until the sound of an engine gunning, then coming to a full stop far down below on the street, snaps me back to life. I run to the window—the lone lighted window I saw from the front yard—duck down, then peek out: I can see it now, a sorry-looking gold Maverick that’s pulled up clear in front of the house. It just sits there, silent, until the passenger door opens. I squint hard, but I don’t have to squint for that long: it’s him, not even a shadow of doubt, taking one final drag on a cigarette, then stubbing it out by the curb. Then the driver’s side opens, and who the hell is this? It’s some tall, skinny white boy with a white-blond crew cut, lanky and slack-looking in a ratty T-shirt, cutoffs, and sandals, with his own cigarette. Hardly a moment goes by before Brooks virtually sprints up the flagstone walkway, the skinny white boy tailing him indifferently, at his own pace. In a moment, the boom of the great oak door closing behind them hurtles up four flights of stairs, straight through the stairwell, along with what sounds like his laughter.