by Meg Wolitzer
“I just moved east,” the man told him. “It used to be great to say I was from L.A. It meant something. Now I have to say Providence and I immediately have an inferiority complex. Even though moving was actually a good thing for me. And it’s a nice city; I like it there. You’d like it.”
He talked about City Councilman Robert Wyman, what a terrific man he was, so brainy and direct, lacking the slimy snake-oil quality you sometimes saw in the GOP, which put off a lot of potential swing voters, particularly suburban women. And Dashiell told Tom about his speechwriting jobs, how he was often hired at the last minute to punch up someone else’s terrible speech, how he’d often crossed party lines if his services were needed and the pay was good enough.
Tom Amlin observed him for a moment, looking displeased. “You’re a mercenary, then,” he said, and though Dashiell said no, no, that wasn’t the case at all, Amlin patiently walked him through a kind of concentrated Republican manifesto, a long, teacherly but amazingly not boring narrative that aimed to remind Dashiell of what being a Republican stood for, and being a Democrat did not. “Small government,” was repeated frequently. “Even smaller government. Fiscal independence. Growth. Wealth. And that’s compassion, that’s taking care of our nation’s people, not some leftover, failed Carterian plan.”
“Carterian? What? You mean Cartesian?” Dashiell asked.
“No. Like Jimmy Carter.”
Dashiell blinked. “That’s a real word?”
“Nah. I just made it up,” said Tom Amlin.
That night, after sitting beside Tom at a prime-rib dinner with superstars of the GOP shoulder to shoulder on the dais and lots of table-pounding (the Harvard Weenies pounded hardest and did that fist-in-the-air woofing that seemed to Dashiell one step away from brown shirts and jackboots) and a bid by one of the trannies for the LCRs to embrace “inclusiveness,” and then a few unexpectedly moving and personal political speeches, the evening broke up and a large group of them ended up at a club called Speed on West 18th Street that had been recommended in their welcome handout.
The music at Speed was bad but sufficiently loud, and Tom and Dashiell pulled off their jackets and ties and scream-talked at each other, pressed very close together by necessity. Finally, when it seemed pointless to continue this nondialogue, Tom Amlin, this superior man, this man who reminded Dashiell in a way of his brother Michael—elite, older, dark, educated, and so fucking smart—sat back on a bar stool, his legs open slightly, and pulled Dashiell toward him. Neither of them was drunk; it was disturbing sometimes, the first time, if you weren’t drunk and you had to confront the purity of your own desire.
Something about the gesture was so exciting that it was sickening, too. Tom Amlin braced a big hand against Dashiell’s back, and Dashiell thought of the white dress shirts they both wore, the accommodation to male conservatism, the Brooks Brothers crispness and order they shared, as though the two of them were in fact the Brooks Brothers—an incestuous, identical pair. In the GOP dream, though, order happened naturally, not through watching and governing but through rights, and without the embarrassing, cry-on-my shoulder of preferential treatment.
You were on your own here in America, but it wasn’t a wilderness anymore, it was a great country, and you were free to live as you wanted, to make money, to pull yourself up. You were free, in a bar called Speed, to press yourself upon a man you had just met and kiss him with an open mouth. In a strange way, if you really thought about it, this was what being a Republican stood for.
Asleep, now, in the bed they shared, six years having passed since the Log Cabin convention and the awakening of an inordinately mutual love, Tom Amlin and Dashiell Mellow had begun to resemble each other. Dashiell no longer looked perennially young or entirely fawnlike, nor Tom like an older teacher to this precocious student. Their crispness had dissipated. Dashiell had been aged by the usual wear and tear of life, and, more recently, by his illness. A couple of weeks of chemotherapy and radiation had taken him for all he was worth. He felt as if he’d been knocked against the side of a building. His mouth now had scattered sores; his eyes were recessed from dehydration; his hair had started to fall out and so he’d quickly gone to the barber and had gotten one of those shaved homo-heads that he’d never liked, for they reminded him of the kind of people who beat up homosexuals.
Tom, with his silvery hair a little whiter, looked healthy but very weary now. He used to be a runner, jogging every day past the gates of Brown University and down College Hill, then back up again, but he was too busy managing Robert Wyman’s campaign and taking care of Dashiell, and so his own body had begun to show signs of slack.
They slept facing each other, and when Dashiell opened his eyes and saw that it was only 7 A.M., and realized that he was nauseated from the drugs and might have to vomit, he tried to suppress the feeling, pressing on his thumb pad, as a nurse who had a side interest in holistic medicine at Rhode Island Hospital had taught him, digging deep into the flesh and finding the acupressure trigger that would quiet the churning. Amazingly, it seemed to help. The nausea calmed down, lost interest in pursuing him. Dashiell was feeling proud of himself for outfoxing it when the telephone rang, and caller ID indicated that it was his mother on the line.
Don’t take it. That’s what Tom would have said, if he’d woken up in time to offer an opinion. For ever since Dashiell had gotten sick a few weeks ago, his family had been making their presence known all the time. His father and Michael called continuously, chiming in from separate telephone extensions and interrupting each other. Michael, throughout his life an overly serious, measured person, here sounded hyper, his voice coming out in a rush.
“Hey, I can come up, Dash, I can leave Dad and come right up,” Michael said. “Or wait, no, Dad can come with me. Whatever you want.”
“I don’t want anything, thanks,” Dashiell said. “I’m fine. I’ve got Tom.” He paused a moment. “Are you okay, Michael?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know,” Dashiell said. “You’re still down in Florida. And you sound sort of . . . speedy or something.”
“I’m fine,” Michael said abruptly. So both brothers were fine.
Their father sounded the same as always: warm, thoughtful, slightly melancholic. “You know I’m there for you,” Paul Mellow said, and Dashiell felt stirred by this because it was who his father was: “You know I’m there for you.” And though it rarely translated into anything tangible anymore, the sentence seemed to represent a kind of shared father-son dream of intimacy.
Claudia had called several times too since the diagnosis, and she was sometimes tearful on the phone and Dashiell felt compelled to make her feel better, because she was the youngest of all of them and had always been a little fragile. She was the only one who still had no real career, who’d never lived with anyone, who was still alone. She’d been having a flurry of emails with some man she’d met recently at the house in Wontauket, of all places, and Dashiell told her he was glad about that, but in truth he didn’t know what to think, if anything. This was similar to how he felt about her foray into film school: Until it materialized into something tangible, it was almost as though he didn’t believe her, as though she were spinning a life, or a story of a life, out of air. Dashiell felt the impulse to protect Claudia, but he never really pitied her; she was too good for that.
During these phone calls there would occasionally be moments of phlegmy crying, which would drive Dashiell crazy, causing him to say, “Claudia, get a grip. Claudia. Now, listen to me, Claudia. I am going to be fine. Really. Fine.”
When she stopped crying, she was specific in her offers of help: “So if you want me to come and sit with you while you’re throwing up or whatever,” she said, “I’m happy to do it. I’ve just been making this stupid student film about my teachers, and believe me, the world can wait to see it.”
Holly, who apparently had been contacted by Claudia, had telephoned Dashiell once from her outpost in Los Angeles, saying s
he was sorry he was sick, and did he know anything about the wheat gluten–cancer connection? “Because, you know, it might have caused it,” she said. He stiffly told her no, as far as he knew it wasn’t linked to diet. She said she’d send him a book about it, which had never arrived, surprise surprise, and which he wouldn’t have read anyway, so it was just as well. He hadn’t heard from her again, and probably wouldn’t for months or even years. You never knew, with Holly. Once she’d been such a brooding presence, but it was as though she’d used up all her authority, burning through it when she was young and then simply wandering off, having lost interest.
It was Dashiell’s mother who had now become difficult to manage. Her constant calls unnerved him. She wanted to see him, she wanted to go with him when he went for his treatment, she probably wanted to throw herself in front of the pinpoint of radiation and say, “Take me instead.” He’d always felt constrained around her; he didn’t want her to know him deeply, he’d once realized.
He picked up the ringing phone; it was what you had to do when you were a son. “Hey, Mom,” he said.
“Dash, did I wake you?”
“Nope.”
“Are you all right?”
“Not great.”
“Can I please come up there? I won’t drive you crazy. I won’t even stay with you and Tom. I’ll stay at the Biltmore. They have good rates.”
“There’s no need, Mom, really,” he said. “I would feel like I had to entertain you or something.”
“But you wouldn’t!” she said. “You know you wouldn’t.”
“I know,” he said, “but I’d still feel like I did. It’s the way I am. And look, Mom, I’ve got everything I need here with Tom.”
There was silence, and an intake of breath, and he realized that this remark had hurt her. The self-contained gay son was a force to reckon with. Sometimes he needed nothing from you. Never, really, had Dashiell wanted much of anything from his mother. She’d always made him uncomfortable, watching over him all the time. He remembered when he was a little boy and his frequent nosebleeds had created a need for weekly visits to Dr. Enzelman. He could still feel the agony of those car rides, with his mother’s lectures about picking his nose and what it might do to his life if he kept it up. The essence of her argument seemed to be that no one would love him. But really, wasn’t picking your nose just another way of touching yourself, of pleasuring yourself, in a sense? And what was wrong with that? Nothing, she would have had to say; pleasuring yourself is more than fine, it’s wonderful, it’s a necessity, everyone should do it.
But he hadn’t been able to confront her back then; she was an unassailable figure, so maternal and giving and pretty, and he knew that his father would come rushing to her defense if Dashiell dared to criticize her. “Your mother tries so hard,” he would have said. “Just look at her.” Together they would have had to look at Roz, seeing her vulnerable nobility, her blue eyes already watering, and Dashiell would have backed down. She cried a lot, and Claudia cried a lot too. Why did women cry so much? What were you supposed to do? There was no way to respond, and he wished they were more like him. Private, interior, closed corporations.
Secretiveness had always been Dashiell’s primary mode in life. After the four Mellow children had first read through Pleasuring, Dashiell had gone back to the book again and again. He was certain the others did, too, but he never saw any of them do it. Sometimes he would creep into the den when no one was around. He’d pull the book down, along with a couple of other oversize books from the shelf, particularly the one with all the photographs of golden retrievers, which was so large it could quickly swallow up Pleasuring within its covers if someone wandered in and said, Hey, what’s that you’re reading, Dash?
He learned a great deal from Pleasuring over the years, and eventually, when he got to be old enough, he was distraught by what he learned. The only mention of homosexual love came in a brief section on anal sex, which Dashiell had read again and again. According to his parents, there was a hierarchy of human orifices, and the anus was at the bottom, literally and figuratively, a stingy bit player, used once in a while for variety, but mostly unloved:
Though the gays by default do go gaga over this decidedly tricky way of expressing sexual desire, we’re a wee bit puzzled when we hear singing accolades from our own camp. Sure, an intense sexual experience can be had this way, as we well know. But it almost seems to us that there’s a sadomasochistic component here. Why go to such lengths more than once in a blue moon when the real thing is just around the corner? If you and your partner are adventurers, however, and do wish to try a Lewis & Clark–style exploration (or should we say Louisa & Clark?) by pleasuring each other in this more difficult and potentially injurious way, then be sure to have the appropriate lubrication handy. We recommend . . .
(Pleasuring, p. 183)
“The gays”! “A wee bit puzzled”! “Our own camp”! The tone here, unlike almost anywhere else in the book, was hostile and preening. “We’re not afraid of the human body,” his mother had said in a 1975 television interview on Ken London’s Night Owl, and the suave young interviewer with the wide lapels and Prince Valiant haircut had nodded and replied, “Obviously.”
But my homo human body, Dashiell had felt certain when he first read this passage for real meaning, is something that they can’t deal with. He didn’t have the nerve to bring it up or to criticize them openly, though. He was fourteen then, alive with something that wasn’t just anger and boyish irritation. Ham Kleeman, the older brother of a boy at school named Nick, had recently stopped him in the cafeteria and said, “You’re Nick’s friend, right? You were over at our house.”
Dashiell had been startled, for it was unheard of for a twelfth grader to talk to a ninth grader, or for one even to have been aware of the members of his own brother’s social circle. So what if he’d been to the Kleemans’ house; what kind of older brother noticed such a thing? It was only younger brothers who paid attention to their older brothers’ lives, watching each move as though trying to be a quick study, to pick up everything they could. It hadn’t been fun keeping an eye on Michael, though, for he and his friends, back when they were in high school, were as square-headed and straight-up as they came: Model UN without actually being Model UN. They were an intense knot of boys who were either Westinghouse Science Award semifinalists or oboists dragooned to perform in local productions of Peter and the Wolf. They were brainy, sarcastic, and unsexy with their acrylic sweaters and har-har sarcastic laughter, their fried foods and correspondent patches of acne. Only Michael stood out among them, was attractive in a way that his little brother could not see at the time, because the built-in sun shield against incestuous desire was working.
But Dashiell’s friend Nick’s outgoing older brother Ham was something entirely different. Everyone knew him; he was nicknamed Ham because over the years he had played the lead in virtually every play put on at Felice P. Bolander Elementary, then at East Street Junior High School, and finally at Wontauket High. Ham had, appropriately, once played Hamlet at a drama camp he attended in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, but most of the parts he was given were genial singing leads. The Music Man suited him fine; his Harold Hill, according to the Wontauket Ledger, was “masterful,” which was pretty much the same thing they said about his Nathan Detroit and his King of Siam.
But when Ham Kleeman approached Dashiell Mellow in the cafeteria and asked when he was coming to the house again, he took on another persona entirely; he seemed in that moment predatory, dominant—interesting. So Dashiell made sure to hang around Nick a little more that week at school, even though Nick was deeply into an unrelenting Dungeons & Dragons phase. On Friday afternoon, the three boys were all at the Kleeman house alone, and after it was ascertained that Nick was lost in a babbling ether of blackguards, dwarven defenders, loremasters, and shadow-dancers, Dashiell crept up to the attic room, where Ham had his lair. Indian curtains draped the windows, posters of sports figures hung on the slanted wall, and on a d
ay bed in the corner of the gloom lay Ham himself, absently playing a harmonica. He looked not at all surprised to see his brother’s friend.
“Come over here,” he said, and Dashiell walked to the bed. Ham’s mouth was slightly swollen and ridged from the harmonica, which he tossed onto the bed. His blond hair was wavy and soft, and he looked at Dashiell and then said, “Take down your pants.”
Dashiell was unsurprised; Ham was the one who seemed surprised when Dashiell obeyed so quickly, unbuckling his belt and dropping his jeans and then his Hanes briefs to reveal his big, springing penis, a marvel for a fourteen year old, by anyone’s standard.
“Would you fuckin’ look at that? Big things come in small packages,” said Ham Kleeman, pleased with his own wit, and he scooted forward and grabbed Dashiell lightly by it, pulling him toward the bed. The tug didn’t hurt at all. It was as though Dashiell had been waiting forever for an older boy to pull him like this, to grab hold of his dick like he was uprooting a carrot from the earth. The Carrot Seed was a book Dashiell’s mother had read to him when he was little. “It won’t come up, it won’t come up,” the large-headed little boy in the book had complained, waiting for his carrot to sprout up from the dark and boring earth.
Then one day it came up.
So when he fully understood his long-separated parents, who would both be accepting and no-nonsense when Dashiell officially came out in college, had clearly disdained gay people back in their book, which claimed to be the sex manual for everyman and every woman, he subtly turned from them further. Annoyance with his mother became something worse: a secret dislike. His father was mostly spared. It was difficult to remain angry at Paul because he was so level and gentle, and for some reason Dashiell needed his father to pay attention to him. But he resisted giving in; he held fast, kept to himself, kept his secrets, and, over a long arc of time, he turned away from his parents.