He and Peter had drifted apart when Trevor married an heiress, but in a short time Trevor was ready to play again. I don’t remember meeting him, but I want to say Peter threw a week’s worth of parties, inviting everyone in town, saving my mother out for the proper rites of droit de seigneur.
Trevor wasn’t remotely interested in entertaining me, but he was fine with me in the room and just as fine when I left. I was curious that he made things, even if I was suspicious of fashion being an actual art form. And if it was art, I’d just seen an artist bullshitting his way into putting his doodles onto gallery walls. I’m pretty sure I said something about that, and I’m pretty sure Trevor told me I was right. Everything in his life was bullshit, but what could he do about that now? He had a career in bullshit. He laughed about it, and the laughter was inviting and a little melancholy.
On the other hand, he brightened when making fun of Peter. “You believe anything that guy says?” he cackled. “Let me tell you about Peter Charming—he got thrown out of high school for jerking off in class. When he asked to borrow the car and his dad said no, Peter poured gasoline over it and set it on fire.” Trevor said Peter was in love with his own mother. Erotically. Had Peter ever mentioned her? No? Of course he hadn’t. What Peter never told anyone was that his dream was to make love to old ladies, ladies with wigs and trusses and face powder.
This was disturbing to hear, and funny, and defiant, a great, vicious puncturing. I liked knowing this. I’m not sure Peter had bargained on Trevor telling stories on him. My mother was delighted, and not just because of those stories. Trevor was one of the great talkers of the century, she said. He was funny and creative and insistent and superstitious and baffling and he knew everyone in New York. He had gone to Studio 54 before anyone else, and had decided it was bullshit before anyone else. He name-dropped, but mostly like this: “You know what, I used to think I had a problem with name-dropping until Andy Warhol told me I didn’t.” Followed by guttural laughter, him looking carefully around the room to see if everyone was laughing, a wince-producing drag on a cigarette, more wine.
If Peter was a chess player, I would say Trevor, who had more the soul of a poet, would have been very good at a game I admired but could never get the hang of, go. With a few catty remarks, he had neutered Peter as a player, ready to sweep the stones off the board. There was a much larger world than Peter Charming, it turned out.
* * *
—
I was at Peter’s house, and Peter was pacing in his office, ranting, laughing, then ranting again, like he couldn’t decide whether to be angry, amused, or impressed.
His friend Max was a big lug of a bear, a physician who lived in Sausalito. Peter kept attributing different specialties to him—neurosurgeon, cardiologist, therapist. Anyway, Max had a patient, a damaged young woman who turned out to be a Joni Mitchell fanatic. Max told her his friend Peter knew Joni well, and the woman was fascinated.
So Max put her on the phone and she asked Peter what Joni Mitchell was like. For ten, maybe fifteen minutes, Peter held forth on their friendship, showboating on how they’d met, how they were always there for each other, no doubt wondering what the woman was being treated for, if she was cute, if she might come over. She was charmed, but not charmed enough, and she said goodbye quietly, and handed the phone back to Max.
Peter said, “And then Max says, ‘You know who that was, right?’ and then ‘click,’ the fucker hangs up on me.”
“Who was it?” I asked. I didn’t know.
He stared at me. “It was Joni Mitchell.”
That made no sense. “But I thought you knew Joni Mitchell.”
“I do,” he said. “Of course I do.”
“Then why didn’t she recognize you?”
“I know her,” he explained. “Of course I know her.”
“But if you know her…”
He didn’t want to talk about it. Something about the story didn’t add up for me. It seemed to go with everything else Trevor was saying about Peter.
* * *
—
Trevor’s time should have been up. There was another party. For Peter, even if he was being an excellent host, the evening couldn’t go fast enough. He was drunk, or he was stoned, or he was feeling insecure, or he misjudged the situation so that he was speaking as if it were a year before and my mother were still discovering herself.
Later, both my mother and Peter would tell me the story of what he’d said, each of them for their own reasons. Peter had taken my mother aside and whispered: She and he both knew Trevor was only a fling, right? He’d be back, they could have a seasonal thing, she could even visit him sometimes, but she understood it wasn’t real. Right?
I can imagine her going glassy-eyed, nodding once, taking up the drawbridge, turning off all the outside lights, quietly putting boards over windows, turning the locks on doors. I imagine she stayed that way until the party ended.
I don’t know when she and Trevor came home, because I could no longer hear the front door from my room. I was living in the basement by then. When my mother and I had moved in, the room she had put me into shared a common wall with hers, but then we saw The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, about a kid my age who listens to his mother having sex and then kills her boyfriend. Shortly after that, she moved me downstairs.
This meant I was living in the basement, near the malevolent force that hovered by the woodpile. Of course I was fine. I still had insomnia, the same thing I’d fought with since I was about six years old. Mornings were tough but I got myself together and brought my tuna sandwich and diet lemon-lime soda to school. My mom drove Trevor to the airport that morning.
I don’t remember what happened at school that day. Some outrage among other outrages, something about bullies that bored me to get through. During my last class, a couple of minutes before three o’clock, I was told I had a phone call.
This caused my classmates to sing a long, melismatic “Oooh” that traveled up and down its pubescent chromatic scale. There was nothing good that came of such phone calls, and the kids wanted to make sure I knew to feel ashamed.
The phone was in a side room by the lobby, down some stairs, a storage area. When I picked it up, my mom was on the other end and I wondered how she’d known to call today. I wanted to tell her the bullying situation—whatever it was—was okay.
“Hello?” she said. I could hear her smiling. Sometimes my mother spoke as if reporters were listening in. “Guess what? Mommy’s in New York,” she said.
It took me a moment to catch on. “What?”
She was excited. It had been the craziest thing—she’d taken Trevor to the airport, and she’d been saying goodbye at the gate, and it was almost like a dare, she just impulsively got on the plane with him. She was in New York. She knew it was crazy, but there was money hidden in her office in the house, I had things for dinner, she’d probably just be in New York overnight, I shouldn’t worry, lots of love, it was an adventure, maybe a day or two, I could handle it, wasn’t this amazing? There was something about our lives that was so brilliant and exciting, she could follow her heart that way. She had never felt so light or free.
As I listened, I can’t say I was paying close attention. I remember she made me promise I wouldn’t call Peter. He was trying to control her. She told me lots of love, she didn’t have a number yet for where she was staying, goodbye.
The receiver was ancient, black, industrial, heavy as a hammer, the type of thing that would have glowed for hours had I been able to throw it in a fire. I was already charting my way through an evening that had no guide rails. I was going to have a house without rules, which was a dream.
And I had this pang in my throat. It wasn’t fear, or sadness. The literal motions I was making were shifting my books, shuffling up the stairs, pushing open the door that led out of school and to the street. But in my mind I was shaking off wet
sand and kelp, improbably trying to catch my reflection in the surf, looking for scars and bruises, feeling my muscles for tenderness. I was so excited.
I bought candy bars and the latest Howard the Duck and I went home. There wasn’t adventure to the evening—it wasn’t much different than any night my mother would be home after I fell asleep.
When she called the next morning, she said she was probably coming home the following day, but there was a possibility, a slight one, that it might be a little longer, just a little, because she was learning about a situation. Trevor needed guidance with something, so she was going to stay another day or two at the most. The money I had should hold, and she could send me more if necessary, and I was okay with this, wasn’t I? Of course I was.
Two days went by. It wasn’t bad. I had a routine. I went to school. Three days. Four. Afternoons, I put some orange juice in a metal cup in the freezer for two hours and while it cooled I watched Fractured Flickers on the television and listened to NPR at the same time. When the theme for All Things Considered came on, the juice was the perfect consistency, harder than slush but not like a block of ice, and I would carve into it with the head of a spoon.
I thought about doing homework before dark but I didn’t. There were comedies to watch on TV, and detective shows, and comics to reread. I made frozen macaroni and cheese. There was the news, which was important to catch up on, then I started doing my homework. When I got tired, around three, I decided to sleep until six, and I set my alarm. I was late to school most days because I tried to finish my assignments while walking. But otherwise I was handling this just fine.
Mom called to explain why she wasn’t home yet. Trevor’s business was in trouble. It had nothing to do with him or his potential, but something else, and if I get the specifics confused, the reasons will become clear. She might have told me Trevor had a business partner who had done some shady accounting, and he was trying to get back on his feet by reorganizing. He had an avalanche of ideas and materials and a clientele thundering for his next collection, if only he could get this financial hardship sorted out. My mother was going to turn his ship around. She was sure this would only take a few more days.
She said helping Trevor was about investing in our future. I understood. Fashion designers made a lot of money.
A week after my mother left, I was in her office at night, ordering a pizza. I was going to use the same voice on the phone I did when ordering a pizza from Peter’s house, the voice of someone who would tip well. While I was dialing, somewhere in the house, a door closed.
I was alone in the house. This chill came up my back, a chill so deep it froze my arms to my sides and my shoulders jumped up. The sound had come from downstairs, the basement.
I thought about calling the police. I thought that was silly. Then I thought people in horror films always said calling the cops was silly. If I called the cops the first question would be: Where was my mother? I didn’t know what would happen after that.
The front door was locked. The doors downstairs were always locked from the inside. A child left alone by his mother hears a strange noise in the house, I thought, proving he is in fact only twelve years old. That made me mad. That wasn’t who I was. I walked to the stairwell, and leaned down and saw the band of light from a Pong machine rolling across the ceiling. But there was something else, a rustling noise that when I listened closely became voices. Something in the basement was whispering.
I shut the door to the stairwell and went back to my mother’s office. I closed the door. I am not frightened, I said to myself, even though I was shivering so thoroughly I would still be twitching even after whatever was in the basement had eaten the heart out of my chest. I knew there was nothing in the basement. I knew that no one had been killed by ghosts.
A child who was pathetic would be frightened. I was going to open the door, have dinner, watch TV, have a regular night. I wasn’t going to fail.
A few seconds later, something was scratching against a door frame or a wall. I could hear it. Something insistent, like a fingernail.
I dialed Peter’s number. When Sue answered, I started apologizing for calling, but I couldn’t talk. Like they had come from somewhere outside of my body, I was overcome with sobs. A stupid, frail, shivering boy was lousy with terror. I wanted to apologize for crying, but I couldn’t.
* * *
—
I was at Peter’s house within the hour. There was pizza on the way. He was already on the phone to New York. He told my mom what a terrible mother she was, listing all the bad things that could have happened to me. She didn’t want to hear it. She got on the phone with me and told me I was being manipulative. Trevor needed her. I was fine, she said, I was resourceful and should have been able to handle the house on my own. She didn’t believe for a second there were noises or that I was scared—I was smarter than that. This should be an adventure for me.
Peter took the phone back. He shouted at her, and he slammed the receiver down. I was eating pizza. He and I shared a look. I knew exactly what was going on—he was going to play unfair. He was checking to see if I was on board. Without saying a word, I let him know I was. He had Sue call Town School and tell them I would be out for the rest of the week.
The next day, the three of us went shopping for comic books. I was perfectly aware, as he said to me, “This is one of those popcorn and candy days—let’s be bad,” that I was his hostage. He could count on me to get my mom back from Trevor.
I was out of school for a couple of days. We flew a kite. Sue and I went to galleries and looked at ceramics. We had brunch at a diner in Half Moon Bay and watched the ocean waves afterward. On the way back, “Wake Up Little Susie” came on the radio, and Peter, inspired to deliver a monologue about having been a teenager, pulled into a high school parking lot and started doing donuts. He looked over at me to see if I was thrilled or scared. But I don’t think there was an expression on my face. When I see myself, it’s like I have a soot-singed blanket over my shoulders and I’m sipping hot tea.
When we were back at his house and I cried again, Peter called my mother as fast as possible and held the phone up to me. She was aggravated. Was I jealous of Trevor? Was that the issue? He had done nothing to me—why did I have to try to manipulate her?
I felt terrible for being manipulative. I wasn’t a thirty-six-year-old midget. I wasn’t even mature for a twelve year old. That Peter and Trevor and my mother were negotiating didn’t matter to me. I just felt embarrassed. I didn’t want my mother, I was already grasping the sensible nature of not wanting—but on a chemical level, with as little control of myself as a wolf pup, I needed my mother back.
Ten days after she left for New York, my mother returned to San Francisco. She was tremendously upset with me. She made it clear she wasn’t staying—she was only going to organize things so she could leave again. Trevor’s business was in a critical stage and he needed her.
She interviewed live-in help. She hired Bob and Sally, a couple of hippies, to look after me. Then she gave me strict instructions to have no contact with Peter again. She returned to New York.
Bob and Sally both looked like Art Garfunkel. I don’t remember them exactly acing the interview process, but they were adequate for my mom’s needs. In the first days, they made a lot of brown rice, smoked dope, and fucked with their bedroom door open. I think they were striking a blow for the revolution, or whatever the revolution still looked like in 1976, by living in Pacific Heights. I was a rich kid so they made fun of me. Sally in particular was fond of listening to whatever problem I was trying to explain, then tousling my hair and laughing at me.
Within a week, Bob and Sally left, writing down a number to call if I got into trouble. I’m not sure where they went, but they did show up to call my mother and tell her everything was fine. Otherwise, I was alone.
When my father learned I was living by myself, he phoned me to ask i
f I wanted to come live with him and Ann. I told him no. I was fine. He didn’t press the issue.
I went to school. I was teased no more and no less than before. A few afternoons on the school steps, I faintly wondered whether I could hear the squeal of brakes as a limousine finally kidnapped my bullies. It wasn’t really wondering—it was more the discovery of a new private cynicism.
When I walked home, I made up stories about Marvel Comics’ chief spy, Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., who was grizzled and had an eyepatch. I thought about him so hard the walk from school to home felt impressionist, pointillist, leaving me dimly aware of passing sidewalks and breaks in the curb. On some days, a pair of kids I’d never seen before, two guys riding bikes, took to circling me and spitting on me until they got bored. They didn’t even go to my school. I’m not sure how kids I hadn’t even met knew they could do that to me.
My mom came back from New York for a few more days. She gave up on Bob and Sally, telling me an old boyfriend of hers would move in instead. He was a handsome guy with thick sideburns and I had no opinion of him one way or the other. I looked forward to making fun of him, even if at this point my heart wouldn’t be in it. I was nervously hoping he would be nice. His name was Glenn, and as much as I distrusted it when someone burdened my name with an extra N, I wanted us to be friends. I worried that neediness might leak out from me.
After my mom left again, Glenn was physically supported into the house by a couple of friends, as he had pneumonia. They carried him into my old bedroom, leaving him there with what they explained was a good supply of homeopathic remedies, since he was a vegetarian. He didn’t wake up for the whole weekend. When I came back from school on Monday, he was gone, leaving a note thanking me. He was going for a bike ride for a few days at least. He didn’t actually come back.
So the deal was that I would take care of myself. I shopped for groceries. I drank a glass of Carnation Instant Breakfast every morning, with Breakfast Squares. I packed school lunches of tuna fish sandwiches and diet lemon-lime soda, and, every night, cooked a tub of Morton’s macaroni and cheese dinner, watching Star Trek while I ate a dessert of chocolate Zingers. One night, I bit into a Zinger and came away with a mouthful of hair. I ate it anyway.
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