“You’ll tell me, though, won’t you?” she asked. “When you buy your ticket to leave?”
“Of course.” Her concern was endearing. “Of course I’ll tell you,” I repeated.
“And you’ll say good-bye?”
“Yes, of course; that, too. And you realize I’ll be back before you know it, right?”
I reached for her hand, and she instantly folded her face into my chest. I put an arm around her and attempted to comfort her. She had the fine, thin bones of a bird, too, and her skin was perpetually cool to the touch.
“Don’t you . . .” she said, in a tiny voice, muffled by my shirt,” . . . don’t you want to try it . . . just once, before you go?”
She was talking about being together. I knew this was so, because she talked about being together quite a lot lately. A modest girl and a virgin to boot, she had become inexplicably fixated on the idea that we should make love before I departed for California. I wasn’t sure what to make of this. It struck me as an act of girlish desperation, not that of an adult woman who was full of desire and acting on her own volition.
It worried me. I was worried the timing was wrong. I was worried we wouldn’t be enough for each other. I was worried I would fail her somehow—not in any of those trite physical ways, but worse: in some way neither of us would be able to face or put a name on.
First encounters were bound to be a bit of a letdown, and I didn’t want Janet’s first time to be like mine. I’d lost my virginity not long after my father died. Anxious to get the act over with, I had cast my eye around and wound up going to bed with a neighborhood friend, a big-hipped, bosomy girl named Leota who was three years my senior. Leota was the first woman I’d ever known to wear a “fall,” a sort of false-hair contraption that she daily clipped into her own short hair, which she wore brushed flat to her skull and pinned up in a tiny bun that was—more often than not—only half-concealed by the fall. The resultant effect was something of a perky, cascading ponytail with an odd nub of hair poking out from the top. Like the other neighborhood girls, Leota had always flirted with me in that hollow, benign way, and yet while the other girls skittered away after making their bold offers, Leota gave me the impression she might be willing to take things further, if only to satisfy a bet she had with herself about me.
My overtures were brief; I invited Leota to come over to my family’s apartment one summer day when I knew my mother and Wendell would be out, and bravely slipped a hand under her blouse. I found she was not only willing but enthusiastic about the matter. She was already experienced in the act of love, as girls whose bodies blossom at an early age often are, and I recall the air of absolute practicality she conveyed as she removed her fall from her hair just before we embarked upon our joint endeavor. A short time later, once the act had been completed, she stood before the bureau clipping it back in. Her eyes slid from where she worked the clips into her hair to my face as it was reflected in the mirror, and I sensed she was figuring out something about me in her mind, something she had never directly acknowledged before. At the termination of our lovemaking I had very quickly slipped my undershirt back over my head and tugged my shorts on. But now, as Leota looked at me where I sat with the rumpled sheets caught in the waistband of my shorts, my legs hanging awkwardly over the side of the bed (my socks, in an absurd comical twist, had never left my feet throughout the entire episode), I suddenly felt undressed and exposed. For a fleeting moment she narrowed her eyes at me in the mirror and it was as if she were already trying to review the session of what had just happened between us, trying to recall the phantom shape of my manhood inside her—as if in doing so she might uncover the shape of what was in my heart.
“Huh” was finally all she said, snapping the last clip into place and picking up her purse to go.
After that, Leota seemed to understand something about me, something I’m not certain I even understood about myself at the time. Our interlude was a secret we kept between the two of us, and we remained friends, exchanging relaxed smiles and saying hello whenever we saw each other at school or around the neighborhood. I even danced with her once or twice at the local dance hall, but our interactions were brief and polite; never again did she unclip that fall from her hair in my honor.
I’d had other encounters with women since. Women liked me, were charmed by me, but even when they were willing to go to bed they maintained another kind of distance. None of my escapades translated into anything lasting. Janet was the first woman I’d met with whom I could picture a future. She was bright and wanted to be a schoolteacher. She was sensitive to the world around her; she looked more closely and listened more carefully than most people. And she gracefully accepted the facts of life she could not change, a skill I had never mastered but always coveted. No, I would not disappoint Janet, I thought to myself. Not over a matter that could be remedied with simple patience.
“Darling, you know we have no place to go,” I pointed out. It was true; I didn’t care to repeat the experience I’d had with Leota at my mother’s apartment—nor did I think I could ensure its vacancy these days—and the apartment where Janet lived was packed to the hilt with three adults and four children.
“I know,” she said in a dull voice.
“Let’s have something special to share when I get back,” I said, giving her a reassuring squeeze. “Something to look forward to, something just for you and me.”
“All right, Miles,” she said. “You know best.” She sniffed and stiffened her jaw and moved her face away from my chest. Two little stains from where her eyes had watered up marked my shirt, but when I looked at her, she did not appear to have been crying. Perhaps it was just the wind or the awkward angle of our embrace. Either way, her eyes were dry now and she was looking away again, out over the duck pond.
“I’m looking forward to when you get back,” she said.
“Me, too,” I replied.
I glanced at the park around us. It was beautiful, newly lit up with autumnal color. I remember summer ended that year the way it always did in Manhattan: in an effusion of smoldering oranges and otherworldly yellows that always sent a pang to the heart.
34
If I was indeed going to make the trip to California, it meant I had to give Mister Gus my notice. I was dreading this task, for I knew he would consider it an act of betrayal. I offered to give him a full month if he liked, during which I could recommend another messenger-boy who might appreciate the extra work.
“Hmph,” he said, and muttered something under his breath to the effect of “Serves me right for overpaying you.” He refused to allow me to help him arrange for my replacement, and told me to merely finish out the week.
As my final day approached, he grew more and more quiet, and looked off into the distance more than was typically his custom. Every so often his lips would twitch and he would draw in breath as though to speak, but no words followed. He seemed perpetually on the verge of saying something, if only he could remember what it was.
Finally, on my penultimate day, a front-page headline in the Post gave him his opportunity. I remember it was one of those overcast, warm autumn days in Manhattan when sunny skies suddenly fill with lightning, rain, and mosquitoes. The city smelled of wet leaves, clouds pressing low overhead like a flat gray ceiling. That morning I retrieved the papers as normal and set about dusting and tidying his bedroom as he sifted through them. He was in a cantankerous mood, and he mostly ignored me at first, grumbling about the papers being wet even though I had taken care to keep them dry and had tucked them under my raincoat on my walk back from the newsstand.
He asked for a towel, which I brought to him, and as he made his way through the stack of newspapers he pretended to sponge imaginary water from the pages of each one. When he got to the Post, he put down the towel, clucked his tongue, and harrumphed loudly. This was not a complaint about the paper being damp. I knew from a quick perusal on my way back from the n
ewsstand that he was looking at a front-page story about two men who had been found murdered near the Ramble in Central Park. It was a sensational, violent story. The men had been beaten to death, and the killer—or killers, as it appeared to have been a group—were still at large. The paper implied the two men had been found in an indecent state, but did not name the details—I can only assume to avoid a libel suit.
“Hmph,” Mister Gus grunted. He shook the newspaper to snap more stiffness back into the folded pages. “Did you see this, boy?”
I nodded.
“Well?”
“Well, sir?”
“Well, what do you think?”
“I suppose it’s a shame,” I said. I did not want to discuss the headline, but Mister Gus had clenched his jaw and I knew this meant the course of conversation was set. He would not be dissuaded.
“And exactly which part would you say is shameful?” he pressed. I knew I needed to proceed carefully. When it came to questions of morality, Mister Gus could be very severe. He was the type of person who needed others to agree with him, and took it as a personal affront when they did not. At the same time, I had my suspicions about Mister Gus, but he was very secretive about his past, and nothing concrete had surfaced to absolutely tip my final judgment one way or another. “Which part would you say is shameful?” he repeated.
“All of it, I suppose,” I said, hoping this was diplomatic enough to satisfy him. “It’s a shame.” Unfortunately, now I had his full attention. Mister Gus lowered the paper to his lap, cocked his head to the side, and narrowed his eyes at me.
“And do you believe the police will apprehend the men who committed this murder?”
“I suppose they’ll try,” I said.
“Oh yes,” said Mister Gus, “they’ll try. But will they make an arrest?”
“I don’t know.”
He lifted the paper again. “It says here there’s reason to believe the victims were engaged in deviant behavior at the time of their beating, and had communist sympathies. What do you think of that?”
I shrugged.
“It would be rather difficult, don’t you think, for the authorities to know what these two men were doing at the time of their beating? Unless they were omniscient—which I assure you, most policemen are not—or are speculating, or else had talked to the thugs who beat these two men to death.”
I didn’t answer. Instead, I turned to open the curtains and proceeded to fluff the pillows on the divan positioned beneath the giant windowsill. I was aware we were hurdling towards some sort of intersection I had hoped to avoid. Looking back now, I always knew the truth about Mister Gus’s life and about the source of his bitterness.
“Central Park,” he said, “has a funny history. Especially the Ramble. Have you ever ventured into that part of the park around evening time, boy?”
“Not on purpose,” I said, a little too quickly. He gave me a long, assessing, disappointed look. I could tell he thought—mistakenly, I might add—that I was lying.
“So you’ve seen what goes on in that tunnel in the park, eh?”
I nodded. He rolled his eyes at the coffered ceiling and chuckled.
“Perhaps it’s a rite of passage; after all, we know as far as shepherds go, the Good Lord quite enjoys playing the occasional practical joke on his flock.” As he turned to me the bitter pinch of his smile turned my stomach. “I saw the same thing, too, back when I was still a boy,” he continued. “Happened upon a couple of young men in the throes of it while out taking a walk with my father. You can’t begin to imagine my embarrassment.” His milky eyes focused on some invisible object upon the far wall of the bedroom. “My father . . . my father was disgusted. ‘Nothing for it,’ he said to me. ‘Sodomites will always find one another in every city. You can’t keep them apart; it’s part of their wretched nature.’” He paused. “He was right, you know. We will always find one another, because—like all animals prowling this earth—we cannot bear to believe we are the only ones of our kind.”
He’d used the word we, and I felt a cold shock go through me as I picked up on this brazen admission. He sat up and leaned forward over the bed, away from his nest of pillows. I could see the tendons straining in his neck to hold him up where his muscles failed. His beady blue-gray eyes grew very round, and his voice suddenly became a loud, pleading hiss.
“I say this to you: Choose it, boy! Choose it before it chooses you. Because it will. You think there’s a way it won’t, that somehow there’s a way to live your life so you won’t ever catch its eye, but it will and you can’t. So choose. Choose while you’re young and you can believe in someone and can make it last a little while. That little while is the only eternity any of us mortals ever get to have. Don’t let fate do the choosing for you; don’t wait until you’re old and desperate—and wretched, as my father declared, for he wasn’t wrong—and you’re left to fumble in terrible places and it’s only your body . . . yes, only your body trying to prove to the soul that it’s not alone, and failing time and time again.”
I looked at him; his bottom lip was trembling, and I understood there was love in his plea. Not for me but for someone else, someone from his past or—even likelier still—for some younger, earlier, as-yet-unspoiled version of himself. I was touched by the strength of his plea, and for a moment that seemingly bottomless wellspring of knee-jerk repulsion within me ceased to flow over. I thought, for a moment, to admit to understanding what he was talking about. I even thought, in a fleeting impulse of optimism, to promise him I would heed his words and try to do as he said.
But less than twenty seconds ticked by before my thoughts automatically and reactively shifted to my mother. My mother, who had lost first Marcus, the brave son, and then my father, the soldier she’d married in dress uniform. In my role as second son I had always attempted to fill the vacancies left behind by these two men, at times trying to be the role model to Cob I am certain Marcus would have been to me, at other times trying to hold my mother’s hand when Wendell was too drunk or absent or bitter to prop her up, and ultimately proving myself a piss-poor replacement on both fronts. Now I stared into Mister Gus’s eyes, thinking of my mother and of Cob, and a door within me very firmly closed.
“You’ll have to forgive me, Mister Gus,” I said. “I’m not as educated as you are in the ways of the world; I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about.”
He sat there for a moment, blinking, the intelligent light that had burned so fiercely during his speech slowly dying from his eyes.
“I see,” he said finally.
During the rest of the day he left me alone to complete my minor chores in silence. He stared out the window and watched the rain falling. When it came time to bring in his supper for the evening, he gave the tray a weary glance and pushed it to the side altogether.
“Sir? You’ve been quiet. Are you all right?” I asked.
“Go home, Mr. Tillman,” he said. It was the first time he had called me anything other than “boy,” and it caught me off guard.
“But you’ll need someone to take away the dishes. And also . . . there’s still . . . your bath.”
“I said GO HOME!” he yelled. His volume was surprising; I hadn’t thought him capable of shouting so loudly.
We locked eyes, and in that moment we understood each other perfectly. “As you wish, sir,” I said finally. I put down the napkin I’d been holding out to him and moved in the direction of the door, then hesitated.
“I’m sure you’ll be glad when you have a new boy to assist you,” I said. I was trying to be cheerful; it was a peace offering, but I could tell he took it the wrong way. I attempted to smile but was brought up short by the expression on Mister Gus’s face. He had always looked old, but now he looked older than I’d ever seen him look; his countenance was nothing short of a death-mask. It was an expression beyond sadness, as though he’d been hollowed out. I recognized
him for what he was: a dying animal, helpless and full of pathos, but one that could only lash out if I got any closer.
I regarded him for a moment, then turned and walked out. We did not speak after that. On my last day, we spent the entire day in silence. On my way out the door, I found an envelope with my name scrawled on the outside and a one-hundred-dollar bill inside.
EDEN
35
All at once, Cliff had a breakthrough. I didn’t know what set him off, but something had. He’d been suffering with a terrible bout of writer’s block, until one day I came home from the office to find him writing furiously, sheaves of paper strewn around him as though a tiny bomb had gone off. It was like a scene out of a play or a movie: The frustrated artist suddenly finds inspiration and, looking half-mad, begins to churn out his vision as quickly as possible. I gasped and clapped my hands together.
“Shall we celebrate?” I asked.
“I’ll go for it,” he said, meaning the bottle of wine. “I want to see as much of this in type as soon as possible. Do you mind?”
“Oh.” I hesitated, comprehending. “Sure. Here.” I pulled a five-dollar bill out of my pocketbook and handed it to him, hoping he wouldn’t spend it all. He dashed out to go around the corner to the liquor store and I did my best to gather the pages strewn about the floor and put them in order. By the time he came back I’d gotten the Smith Corona set up on the card table, all ready to go.
“Is it—”
“A novel? You’re goddamned right it is,” Cliff said, grinning. “I knew it was just a matter of time before I started one, and here we are!” Standing over by the kitchenette, he struggled a bit with the bottle he’d bought and a loud POP! sounded as a champagne cork flew up and ricocheted off the ceiling, nearly putting the sole overhead lightbulb out. He poured a generous dose of the golden bubbly liquid into a mug and I reached a hand out, assuming this was for me.
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