Night Kites

by M. E. Kerr

  “Poor Charlie just got beat up at the Kingdom By The Sea bar,” I said.

  “I’m sorry, but I’m not surprised,” Pete said. “I used to stay as far away from Charlie Gilhooley as possible. Sometimes, when I was a kid, I felt like beating him up. I’d tell myself I might be gay, but I’m not a Charlie Gilhooley fairy!”

  “Well, you’re not,” I said.

  “So what?” said Pete. “Do I get extra points for not looking it? … I used to think I did.”

  “Then what changed you?” I said. “What made you tell Mom?”

  Pete took a fast gulp of coffee, and it sloshed down the side of his mug to the tabletop. “Jim Stanley went to work on me,” he said.

  He started to get up, for something to wipe up the coffee.

  “I’ll get it,” I said.

  I went into the kitchen for a sponge. I was trying to remember Jim Stanley. I’d met him only once. He wrote science-fiction stories and screenplays as J. J. Stanley, and called himself “bicoastal” because he traveled back and forth from New York to Beverly Hills. Pete had gone to Europe with him last summer.

  When they came back, we’d all had dinner together, at a restaurant in SoHo, in lower New York. Pete and Jim had just come from having drinks at Stan and Tina Horton’s loft down there. Jim was Pete’s age, tall, sandy-haired. I remembered he’d talked a lot about Rachter, this program that rigged a computer to write novels. He was working on an idea for a TV series about a Rachterlike character in an office, who told stories about the employees I couldn’t remember anything else about him.

  While I wiped up the coffee, Pete said, “Jim’s a political gay. I used to hate gay activists! I used to think they were a bunch of self-pitying sissies who blamed everything on the fact they were homosexuals. I used to tell Jim that what I did in bed was my own private business. Jim said that was right: What I did in bed was, but what about life out of bed? What about lying to everyone, trying to pass for straight, never letting family or friends know what was going on in my life? … He convinced me the only way to get past that kind of self-hatred was to come out of hiding. He said anyone who loved me wouldn’t love me any less if I came out, and I’d like myself a lot more. So I started with Mom. You were next on my list.”

  I tossed the sponge at the sink, missed, left it on the kitchen floor. “What’d Mom say when you told her?”

  “She said she wasn’t surprised. She said she was glad I told her. And she said she used to worry that I was too much of a loner.”

  “That’s what I always thought you were, too,” I said. “A loner.” I sat down.

  “I was. A busy loner.”

  “What’s a busy loner?”

  “Active, but not really attached,” Pete said. “Too busy…. That’s why I never did anything about finishing The Skids—or finishing my Ph.D.”

  “Oh, that,” I said a little contemptuously, as though Dad was in the room with us.

  “Dad was right about that,” Pete said. “I should have gone to Columbia, or N.Y.U., and finished it. I should have worked on my book, too,” Pete said. “But when I landed here right out of Princeton, I couldn’t believe the gay scene. It was still the seventies. There’ll never be another time like it. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. I wasn’t out at Princeton, naturally. When I saw all the gay bars and discos here, I just wanted to dance and drink and play.”

  I couldn’t imagine Pete dancing with another guy.

  I said, “When I get out of college, if I ever get into college, I’ll probably want to dance and drink and play, too.”

  Pete shook his head. “No. You’re having your party right now. My adolescence was on hold…. I could hardly take Tim Lathrop to the Seaville High Prom, or Marty to the P-Party. We sneaked around like guilty thieves. Tim spent half his time at confession, and Marty was seeing if a shrink could make him straight…. That’s when I became the world’s foremost authority on gay books.” Pete laughed. “Migod! I don’t think there’s a book that even remotely touched on the subject that I didn’t read. I spent hours in the library looking under H in the card catalog!”

  I was remembering Tim Lathrop as Pete talked. Tim had been a lifeguard on Main Beach when Pete was. He was this blond hunk who was at our house a lot when Pete was in his teens, one of the star tennis players at Holy Family High…. Marty Olivetti was still one of Pete’s closest friends. He was from Tulsa, Oklahoma. He’d come from Princeton with Pete for weekends years ago, and they’d spent most of their time out on the boat. When Dad first met him, I remembered Dad’d imitate Marty’s thick Oklahoma accent, and tease, “What kind of an Italian says ‘far’ for ‘fire’ and ‘pank’ for ‘pink’?”

  Pete got up to get himself another cup of coffee. A minute later he zapped me with the soggy sponge I’d left on the kitchen floor, calling me “Cochan!”

  I threw it back at him, and for a while we were feinting punches at each other, and ducking, horsing around in the old familiar way.

  But Pete looked beat. When I said I ought to be leaving soon, Pete didn’t protest. He said he probably shouldn’t have any more coffee—it’d only give him the trots.

  Pete said he needed a nap, too, that Stan and Tina were coming by later, and Jim was flying in from the coast that night. He said he’d try to bring Jim out to Seaville for dinner one night next week.

  “Does Jim know you have this thing?” I asked him.

  “Say AIDS, Ricky,” Pete said. “Mom and Dad are calling it a thing, a bug, everything but AIDS…. Yes, Jim knows. We were both sick all through Europe. I kept telling myself I had what he had, some kind of dysentery. But my lymph nodes were swollen, and I had these little red spots on my ankles. I had all these explanations to myself for what they were. But I couldn’t ever get my strength back, and there were more spots. I began to really panic by the time I came out to Seaville last time. Mom wanted me to go see Doctor Rapp there. By then I had this big purple bruise under my arm. When I saw that, I began to face the fact I could have AIDS. I figured old Rapp would broadcast it all over The Hadefield Club. Dad would like that a lot!”

  “Stop worrying about Dad,” I said, as Pete helped me get on my blazer.

  “I worry about him the most,” Pete said. “I think this is going to be hardest on Dad. Most of the time he spent here last night, he was on the phone to Phil Kerin. Do you remember Doctor Kerin? One of Dad’s old golf cronies?”

  “Dad told me he called him.”

  “Dad must have said ‘This is confidential’ a dozen times during the conversation…. I could have gone from the hospital to Dad’s place last night, but Dad was afraid to let you kids stay here. He said if it ever got out that I have AIDS, and he’d known you kids were here, he’d be responsible for putting you at risk.”

  “I don’t get that,” I said. “Dad told me there was no way you could catch it casually.”

  “He’s worried that other people don’t know that.”

  “Dad makes everything hard!”

  “No, Ricky. This time it’s just hard. It’s not Dad.”

  We stood there facing each other a minute.

  I said, “I just want you to get well.”

  “You’ve made me feel better, pal. Thanks,” Pete said. He slung his arm around my shoulder. “The last thing Dad said to me last night was ‘Whoever got the bright idea to come up with the name ‘gay’?’” Pete was doing a good imitation of Dad at his darkest. “‘It doesn’t sound like a very gay life to me!’”

  Pete began walking me down the hall. “I told him it has its moments…. Who was it that said moments are all anyone gets, anyway? Thoreau? Or was it Oscar Wilde? … Speaking of Oscar, Ricky, Dad keeps reminding me something has to be done for Oscar.”

  We stood by the door talking about me taking Oscar to the vet. Pete said we should get the vet’s opinion first. If the vet thought it was time, Pete would come out and hold Oscar while he got the injection.

  While we discussed it, I remembered in English class, in eighth grade once, w
e’d read “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” by Oscar Wilde. During the discussion afterward, Roman Knight got everyone in the back of the classroom laughing, and Miss Rix said, “If you have anything to add to this discussion, Roman, stand up and tell the whole class.”

  Roman got up, performed a curtsy, and said in this high falsetto: “Geth why Othger Wilde went to prithin?”

  Right before I opened Pete’s door, I said, “Oscar isn’t named after Oscar Wilde, is he?”

  “That’s who he’s named after,” Pete said.

  “You named him that when you were thirteen?”

  “Yeah, and you were what? Three? Four?” Pete leaned against the wall. “I was always precocious. Ricky.”

  “You were also probably the only one in the family who ever knew Oscar’s last name,” I said.

  “Or that he even had one,” said Pete.

  Chapter Ten

  THE NEXT SATURDAY, RIGHT after Seaville’s game with Greenport, Dill was driving to Massachusetts with her family to see the Wheaton campus.

  “That’s like Dill, to wait until after the game,” Jack said. “Dill loves being a pom-pom girl. She’s easy—not like Nicki. Nicki probably won’t even show up to see me play.”

  We were heading toward school early, so Jack could suit up. I always drove Jack to games in his Mustang. He claimed he got too nervous to concentrate on the road.

  “Nicki’s changed since we went to New York,” Jack said.

  I let him talk. All week I’d gone out of my way to avoid Nicki.

  “She’s got something on her mind,” Jack said.

  “Maybe she’s worried about all the trouble Toledo started,” I said. Charlie Gilhooley’d refused to press charges, but a gay organization had championed his cause, and the local paper’d joined in and said Kingdom By The Sea should clean up its act, not only in their attitude toward customers they refused service, but in their tawdry, honky-tonk ambiance and appearance.

  “It’s not that,” Jack said. “She’s cooling off with me.”

  I’d seen Charlie Gilhooley walking around with both arms in slings. I could go a year without ever noticing Charlie, but that week it seemed like I saw him mincing past me every time I turned a corner…. I heard differently that week, too. Once I whirled around in the kitchen, where Mrs. Tompkins was listening to the radio while she was getting dinner. I could have sworn the announcer said that homosexuals were at half price.

  “What’s at half price? What’d that guy just say?”

  Mrs. Tompkins said, “Diamonds is having their fall sale on home essentials. Everything’s half price.”

  Jack was chewing on a Milky Way. “Sometimes I think Dill makes Nicki feel inferior. Dill. Jeannie Gaelen—those girls get to her. She claims she couldn’t care less about them, but they’re all she talks about. She knows Dill hates her.”

  “Dill doesn’t hate her. She doesn’t know how to relate to her.”

  “We shouldn’t have gone on that weekend. That did it.”

  “You didn’t do it? The weekend did it?”

  “I shouldn’t have passed out on the rug. Did I snore?”

  “You snored. Your fly was open.”

  “Sure, and I suppose I farted, too.”

  “What do you want to hear? That you were beautiful? Why don’t you just stop drinking around her?”

  “Why don’t you stop growing chin pimples? … You don’t even listen to what I’m telling you anymore. I’m changing. I want to be somebody now.”

  “Maybe you could be a cartoon character in one of America’s theme parks.”

  “That’s what I mean. You’ve got a million zingers, but not one word of advice.”

  “Jack,” I said, “what in hell am I supposed to say?”

  “Help me figure this girl out! You’ve been around more than I have. You just keep saying not to pounce. I know damn well she was probably in the sack with Ski on the first date!”

  “Forget about Ski. Don’t try to compete with Ski. But let her talk about him if she wants to…. Talk with her, Jack”

  “About what?”

  “About anything she wants to talk about.”

  “Yeah. I’m not a big talker, but she’s one.”

  “You’re not going to be able to compete with Ski, so go the other way. Pretend you’re fascinated by her mind.”

  “I sort of am.”

  “Good. Then you don’t have to pretend.”

  “But I’m more fascinated by her body. I get so hot around her, it’s embarrassing.”

  “Try to forget her body for tonight.”

  “How do I do that?”

  Good question. “Just do it,” I said. “Just tell yourself you’re not going to treat her like riffraff. She claims you’re the first one who didn’t treat her like riffraff. Be affectionate. With words, not your hands.”

  “I told her I love her.”

  “You said I love you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I love you? I. Love. You?”

  “I. Love. You. Yeah.”

  “Well, good. Good.”

  “What’ll we do after the movie?”

  “Take her to Sweet Mouth.”

  “Not to Montauk Point?”

  “Not tonight.”

  “Maybe I’m scared shitless to have sex with her! Maybe I should get some experience first.”

  “Where are you going to get experience? What is she supposed to do while you’re getting experience?”

  “I’m just going to take her out to Montauk Point after the movie,” Jack said. “I’ll talk with her out there.”

  “You’ll screw it up out there is what you’ll do.”

  “I’m not going to listen to you,” Jack said. “It’s like the blind leading the blind!”

  “Do what you want to do!” I snapped at him. “I’ve got my own problems!”

  “I know you have,” Jack said.

  “What do you mean you know I have?”

  “I know what’s bugging you, buddy. Don’t you think I know you by now?”

  I waited.

  “Dill’s going to get into Wheaton,” Jack said, “and where does that leave you? Right?”

  He got out near the gym. I drove the Mustang down to the parking lot behind school.

  I turned off the motor, turned the key back in the ignition, and sat there listening to the radio for a while. I listened to songs by Glenn Frey, Wham!, DeBarge, and Survivor. They were all about love: losing it, getting it, wanting it, leaving it.

  I finally got out. I started walking toward the stadium.

  It was real football weather: blue skies and sun, but cold.

  People were trooping along in coats and scarves, and the wind was shaking what autumn leaves were left off the trees.

  I saw her right away.

  I think she saw me see her. She was with Cap. He had on sunglasses and that hat he always wore tilted over his eyes, his arm around some girl who didn’t look much older than Nicki.

  I changed direction.

  I headed down the bleachers toward the field, where the pom-pom girls were warming up in their maroon skirts and white sweaters.

  Dill ran toward me, hugging herself against the cold. She wanted to know what the doctor said about Oscar. She knew I’d taken him to the vet’s that morning.

  “It’s definitely time,” I told Dill. I’d told Pete the same thing on the telephone. Pete said he’d try to get out next week. He said there were a lot of things keeping him in New York, and that Jim was having daily meetings at NBC about the new series he was writing.

  Dill said all the things you say, what a long happy life Oscar’d had and how lucky we were we could help pets out of their misery, that it was too bad human beings couldn’t do the same for people they loved. I said yes, right, I know it, and Dill asked me if I was okay.

  “Fine!”

  “I have to get back!” Dill said. “We’re working on our new jump-and-turn cheer. … What are you going to do tonight?”

  “Think of
you,” automatically.

  “Besides that?”

  “No plans.” Mom and Dad were both driving back from New York sometime that night. Mom in her car, Dad in his. Mom had driven in Thursday night to have dinner with Pete and Jim Stanley. The one thing we hadn’t done all week was talk about it. If I wasn’t working, Mom was at play rehearsals. Evenings at dinner, Mrs. Tompkins was right nearby in the kitchen.

  Dill said, “We’re leaving right after the game, so I want a kiss now. You know Daddy. He’d hate it if he had to wait while I tried to find you after the game.”

  While I was kissing her, the Greenport High School band came marching out on the field playing “Alouette.”

  I could see myself when I was a little kid, patting myself on the head while Pete sang “Je te plumerai la tête, Et la tête, et la tête,” then we’d both chorus “Alouette! Alouette!”

  “I’ll be in some tacky New England motel watching Saturday Night Live tonight, thinking of you watching it, too,” Dill said. “You’re going to watch it, aren’t you?”

  I did an imitation of Martin Short playing Ed Grimley, with his pomaded hair coming to a point on the top of his head. I did his little kooky skip and said what he’d have said, “It’s an awfully decent show, I must say.”

  The team came running out on the field. The pom-pom girls began shouting, “Kick ’em in the shins! Kick ’em in the knees! We get higher S. A. T.s!”

  I went up in the bleachers and talked with Dill’s folks for a while. Dill’s father asked me how my college plans were coming. I never talked with him when he didn’t ask me that. I said things were in the works, and he had that same slanted smile Dill had as he said you’re always saying that, what things are in the works?

  “Don’t interrogate him, Bertie!” Dill’s mother said. I thought of the sampler his sister had on her wall, with the words “Give fate a good fight, anyway.”

  “I’m not interrogating him,” Mr. Dilberto said. “I’m asking him what things are in the works?”

  “I’m trying to decide between Harvard and Yale,” I said.

  Mr. Dilberto said, “You’re a real wiseass, aren’t you?”