“Of course I feel qualms about it,” I insist. “Of course I don’t want us to hurt Jeff.”
“Bullshit, Henry. You want to drive that stake right through Jeff’s heart.” He laughs derisively at me. “And you’re even more fucked up if you think Lloyd’s in love with you. You’ve said it to me a million times: Jeff and Lloyd are joined at the hip.”
I stiffen. “That was before what happened between me and Lloyd.”
“Well, bully for you, Bella Donna. But let me tell you something. I’m so pleased that you’ve finally figured out how to make a relationship work. I’m so thrilled that Lloyd taught you all you needed to know. But maybe you ought to try opening your eyes and looking around. Sometimes there are relationships going on right under your own nose that you don’t even see.”
I know he means himself. Him and me. Us. I let out a long sigh. “Shane, of course I value our friendship—”
“Listen, Henry,” he says, cutting me off. “I need to apologize to you. Because I broke a promise we made to each other. That very first day, remember? In Grand Central Station in New York. We said we’d never lie to each other. That we’d always speak the truth. Remember?”
I say nothing, just look up into his big, wide blue eyes. He’s crying.
“Well, I haven’t always told you the truth,” he says, his voice thick with emotion. “I’ve pretended it didn’t hurt when you’d spend all night trying to find a husband and then settle for me when nobody else showed up. Nobody better. I’ve made believe that I didn’t care when you’d make plans with me only to ditch them so you could spend time with Jeff, or your clients, or now Lloyd. I’ve tried to tell myself that I didn’t need anything in return from you except your occasional presence, even after it was me who was there, night after night, when you were alone, or depressed about Brent, about your job, about the escorting. I tried to tell myself that so long as I was aware of the realities of the situation, so long as I knew what was going on, I’d be all right. That I wouldn’t want more.”
His eyes freeze on me.
“But I was wrong. I was lying to both you and to myself, Henry. I wasn’t being honest, and for that, I’m sorry!”
He starts to sob. He puts his hands over his face and just bawls his eyes out. Maybe the chemicals spur him on, but it feels as if the dam has been cracking for a while and now the flood just can’t be contained.
Have I really been so unaware? How could I not know about the depth of his feelings for me? How could I not have seen?
But I did. I did see it. I did know. That’s the realization I have standing here. I knew all along. I knew that Shane cared about me, and that knowledge was sustaining. I had come to take Shane’s feelings for granted; to acknowledge their truth would have been to risk losing them.
It strikes me just how similar to Jeff I’ve been, after all.
I try to put my arms around Shane, but he pulls away. “I came here to dance,” he says, sniffling, wiping his eyes. “I haven’t even brought out my laser guns yet. You go do what you want, Henry, but I’m gonna dance!”
He rushes off. But instead of heading back to the dance floor, he just finds a spot on the deck and begins moving on his own, a strange little ballet. He flashes his lasers, drawing attention to himself. He begins to sing, even as the tears are still dropping down his face. It’s a little ditty to the tune of “My Favorite Things”:
“Bullets and bumpers and yellow sunglasses,
doormen and barbacks with tight little asses,
tattoos and Diesels on ev-er-y queen,
these are all part of the gay circuit scene!”
A crowd begins forming around him. They hoot, laugh. Shane gets into it, spinning like a dervish with all eyes upon him, his voice getting louder and louder.
“Dealers and bouncers and homely fag-haggies,
uppers and downers in clear plastic baggies,
hot shorts and cock rings and all things obscene,
these are all part of the gay circuit scene!”
“You go, girl!” somebody yells.
He’s at the top of his voice now, tapping each boy on the chest in rhythm with his song.
“Glow sticks and blow pops and loud metal whistles,
tearing your skin on unshaven back bristles,
K-holes and ODs becoming routine,
these are all part of the gay circuit scene!”
Shane flies dramatically from face to face, a crazy Maria Von Trapp on Ecstasy as she reaches the refrain.
“When my week bites,
when my life sucks,
when I feel so saaad
I simply retreat to the gay circuit scene,
and then I don’t feeeeeeel …”
He pauses. He speaks rather than sings the last word.
“Anything.”
Everybody cheers. Shane doesn’t acknowledge them. He just slumps off toward the dance floor without making eye contact with anyone. He manages to squeeze his way back into the crowd, where he dances in one spot, without conviction, without imagination, his energy depleted.
I follow him. I say not a word. I simply begin dancing by his side.
A Few Days Later, A Café in Hartford, Connecticut
Jeff
“I always thought the American public wouldn’t stand for it,” Cynthia Cassell is saying, sipping her espresso across the table from me. “The candidate who received the majority of the popular vote being denied the presidency. I know that’s the way the Constitution works, but still I thought people would be royally pissed off.”
I have to agree I’m mystified by the lack of widespread outrage over the Supreme Court’s declaration of George W. Bush the winner of the presidential election. “And all those uncounted votes,” I say. “And the ballots that led people to vote for Buchanan. The polling places that disenfranchished hundreds of African-American voters. It’s clear that Gore is the true, moral winner, but what’s truth and morality got to do with politics?”
She laughs bitterly. “Sad but true.” She leans back in her chair to look at me. “It wasn’t always that way, you know. I’m old enough to remember a time when we actually thought politics could change the world. That we could make a difference using the ballot box.”
“So what happened?” I ask, glancing down at my tape recorder to make sure it’s still running.
“Oh, I’m not sure. Watergate. Reagan. And then the disappointments of Clinton.” She smiles ruefully. “But I’m already missing that old adulterer. I think history will show he did an awful lot of good for us, though not much through any actual legislation or policy.”
She’s a wise old bird. Tall, thin, with frameless glasses and dyed-red hair down to her shoulders. She’s run this café for years, and it’s served as a kind of unofficial headquarters for the state’s gay activism for almost three decades. Cynthia doesn’t take to the streets or to the state capitol as often as she once did, but she still has her finger on the pulse. She knows what’s real, what matters. I liked her immediately when we met, and was grateful she consented to be interviewed about the Robert Riley case.
“Riley’s death was the shot in the arm we needed at the time,” she says plainly. “Remember, we were still living in the age of Reagan and the first Bushwhacker. And AIDS had us all shell-shocked. The Catholic Church was being really assaultive at this time, with people like O’Connor down in New York and our own bishop here. There was a lot of fear, a lot of oppression. You had people really living very deep in their closets.”
“The Riley case changed that?”
“You bet your watoosie it did. Some guy’s bludgeoned to death in his own home, and the killers are kids from a Catholic school, and all these church leaders come out to say what good boys these two really are, with no mention of the dead fag. Well, that just rubbed a lot of us the wrong way.”
“I can understand.”
She sighs. “Of course, a lot of us said that if Robbie Riley had been some black drag queen from the North End of Hartford or s
ome dyke on a motorcycle, nobody would’ve gotten quite so up in arms. But Riley was an upper-class white boy, and so we mobilized the upper-class white boys. That’s where the power is—the clout—sad to say.” She takes another sip of her espresso. “But you can’t deny that when the white boys started coming out of their closets and attending rallies, writing and calling their legislators, opening up their wallets, things started to change. That’s politics for you.”
She smiles, leaning in over the table and lowering her voice. “Not to be disrespectful or anything, but Riley’s death was the best thing that could’ve happened for gay politics in this state. Within a couple years we passed a gay rights bill, then a hate-crimes bill, then all sorts of AIDS bills. Now we’re even talking marriage rights like they did up in Vermont.”
I smile. “Let’s hear it for my old home state.”
“You got it, kiddo. We don’t fool around here.” She laughs out loud, waving over at someone across the room. “Of course, we weren’t all that successful last year, but that’s probably what you want to ask me about anyway, isn’t it?”
I don’t know what she means, but she goes right on talking before I can interject.
“We tried to protest, but it’s like the Bush thing, you know? You just can’t seem to get anybody outraged these days. We put together maybe fifty people to stand outside the courthouse with placards, but it did no good. Hey, no one from Riley’s family showed up to say anything against it, so there wasn’t much else we could do.”
Gloria Santacroce’s words are suddenly in my ears: “I know the state prosecutor’s office contacted us last year about something to do with the case. But of course, Mrs. Riley wasn’t able to talk to him.”
I look across the table intently at Cynthia Cassell. I ask her carefully, “What exactly were you protesting against at the courthouse?”
She looks at me askance. “You mean you don’t know? You said you wanted to talk to me about the Riley case. I thought it was about the kid getting parole!”
“Parole?” I ask, feeling like a total dumb-ass.
Cynthia laughs, shaking a finger at me. “You call yourself a reporter?”
“I might be a little rusty,” I admit.
She lifts her eyebrows. “Well, in your defense, it’s not like the papers covered it all that much. Not like they did when the case was going on. Anyway, the judge let one of Riley’s killers out on parole.”
I can barely contain my surprise. “Brian Murphy?”
“Yeah, Murphy. The white kid. The high school quarterback. Of course they’d give him preferential treatment over Ortiz.”
“But I thought his sentence wasn’t up for another few years.”
She looks at me with dripping sarcasm. “Oh, but he’d been such a model prisoner! Remember, he’d gotten off with a much lighter sentence because he made some deal to talk. The charge against him was dropped from first-degree murder to manslaughter. That brought it down from a Class A felony to a Class B, which means his maximum sentence would be twenty years. The judge gave him fifteen, and he was eligible for parole after serving eighty-five percent of that. Well, guess what? That percentage was reached last year. They let him out the very day he became eligible.”
Brian Murphy … free.
“Oh, he had them snookered right from the start,” Cynthia’s saying. “I remember how he cried in court, kept saying how sorry he was. And the judge believed him.”
I look at her. “But you didn’t?”
She shrugs. “He was sorry he got caught, sorry he was going to jail. You read his confession. These boys knew what they were doing. They came back to hit Riley again to make sure he was dead!”
I attempt some fast calculations in my mind. “How old would Brian be now?”
“Thirty-something, I imagine.” She looks at me with deliberate eyes. “Maybe just thirty, actually. You must try to interview him. I’m very curious what he has to say after all this time.”
“Any idea where he is?” I ask, not sure of the feeling that’s taking hold of me.
“Nope. But his mother is still here in Hartford. She must know.”
I have her address. I glance down at my notes. Mrs. Astrid Murphy. Brown Street, in the working-class South End of Hartford, one of the last white holdouts in a city becoming increasingly Puerto Rican and African-American. I look up again at Cynthia Cassell.
“You’ve been a tremendous help,” I tell her.
“Just write a good piece. Say something new. We’ve heard it all before, you know. Tell us something we haven’t heard already.”
I promise I’ll try.
Outside, the sky has darkened, threatening rain. It’s cold and there’s ice in the air. I dread the idea of winter. Summer seemed so fleeting this year that I hardly remember it. I get into my car and head through the city, past the gleaming skyscrapers of the Insurance Capital of the World. I know those buildings are deserted soon after five P.M., that downtown Hartford becomes a ghost town. The insurance workers all return to their safe, quiet suburbs, and only a few—Robert Riley once among them—ever venture back into the city after dark.
The only life that remains in Hartford is found in its outlying blue-collar neighborhoods, where, along Maple Avenue for instance, a few Italian ristorantes and bakeries still flourish. It’s on a side street here that I locate Astrid Murphy’s house, a two-family dwelling of red brick, its small, tidy yard enclosed by a chain-link fence.
What am I going to say to her? What am I hoping to find?
I park across the street and look up at the house. There’s a car in the driveway, an old Chevy Nova. Surely not the same? It’s parked under a frayed basketball net, where I imagine Brian Murphy once shot hoops. In an upstairs bedroom window there’s an old Tot Finder decal, a guide for firefighters in the case of a blaze. I wonder if it had been Brian’s room as a little boy.
Sitting there in the car, I recall Cynthia Cassell’s words: “You call yourself a reporter?” I smile ruefully to myself. Lloyd has said to me he feels he should have recognized warning signs of Eva’s mental illness earlier than he did. After all, he’s a psychologist, and a good one. I understand his pique at himself: I’m one more professional not playing at the top of his game, too blinded by the proverbial forest to see the trees. I should have looked further in the indexes. A really good reporter would have. If I’d researched as thoroughly as I should have—looking up Robert Riley in each successive year right up to the present—I would’ve learned long ago that Brian Murphy had been released.
There are no coincidences, someone once told me. No coincidences. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to find out about Murphy until now. Maybe Lloyd wasn’t supposed to diagnose Eva earlier. If we had, what would be different? What might we have missed?
I pick up my folder from the passenger seat and flip through to the newspaper account of the sentencing. Cynthia Cassell was right: Brian Murphy did indeed receive mercy from the court, and his lawyers were quoted as saying they were “satisfied.” Not so, gay activists, who complained that “Robert Riley is dead, while Brian Murphy will walk free while still a young man.” There’s a photograph of protesters outside the courthouse holding a banner. NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE, it reads.
Above it is a picture of Murphy, his head down, his shoulders hunched, his hands shackled behind his back.
My eyes scan the article for mention of his mother. I remember something about her speaking at the sentencing. Yes, here it is: “Please, Your Honor,” she begged, “give my son a chance. I’ve had my problems. I turned to alcohol when I couldn’t face them. I love my son; I tried very hard, but I guess I didn’t do the job I should have. I wish I could take his punishment.”
Dear God, how can I go up and ring this woman’s doorbell?
But I know that the answer I seek is inside that house.
A dog begins barking from behind the door as soon as I walk up onto the front porch. There’s a pumpkin on the steps, starting to rot, left over from Halloween a month ago. Cigarette b
utts are scattered here and there. A hanging plant is dried out and brown.
“Who are you?”
I turn. A woman has come around from the side of the yard. She’s hauling a heavy trash barrel.
“My name’s Jeff O’Brien.” I pause. “I’m a reporter.”
“Go away.” Her voice is low and scarred, the result of decades of tobacco. She turns and drops the trash at the sidewalk.
The dog in the house is barking louder. I walk down the steps and approach the woman in the yard. “I’m very sorry to bother you. Are you Mrs. Murphy?”
She’s light-skinned and fair, no eyebrows at all at first glance. Even her eyelashes are blond. Her hair is tied back in a short ponytail. The only makeup she wears is a slight pink lipstick. She’s a small woman, with crystal blue eyes and an incredible mass of wrinkles. She looks to be seventy, but I don’t think she’s that old.
“Yes, I’m Astrid Murphy,” she says. “But I don’t want to talk to you.”
She tries to walk past me toward the house, but I call after her. “Can you at least tell me how to get in touch with your son Brian?”
Astrid Murphy stops in her tracks. Without turning around she says, “You’ve got a better chance of finding him than me. After all, you’re looking for him.” She looks back at me over her shoulder. “I’m not.”
“Mrs. Murphy,” I plead, “I want to write an article that’s fair.” Cynthia Cassell’s words suddenly come back to me. “Something new. Something we haven’t heard already.”
She turns to face me. She’s wearing acid-washed blue jeans and a heavy black wool sweater that’s starting to unravel around the neck.
“Something new?” she asks, taking a few steps in my direction. “Well, how about saying that we all got problems, that nobody got off from this thing with a good deal?”
“I believe that,” I assure her.
She withdraws a lighter and a pack of Newports from her jeans pocket and lights up. Taking a deep drag, she lets the smoke out over her head. “Whaddya want to know?” she asks.
“When was the last time you saw Brian?”
Where the Boys Are Page 45