Night Kites

by M. E. Kerr

  “God, Pete, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s just the tip of the iceberg, I’m afraid. You’ll see soon enough, and I’m sorry as hell I’m bringing this down on the family…. There’s something else. I’m not going to San Francisco with Jim.”

  “Did Dad talk you out of it?”

  “No. Jim’s deal came through for the TV series. It’s not a good time for him to chase off to San Francisco, or for me to go to the coast. I’m going to put myself in Phil Kerin’s hands.”

  “Good, Pete! Dad says he’s the best!”

  “So I’ll be around. Here.”

  “In Seaville?”

  “In Seaville,” Pete said. “‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in.’ Five dollars says you don’t know who wrote that.”

  “Dad?”

  Pete laughed and mussed up my hair. “Come on in and see Jim.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  JIM STANLEY STOOD UP and shook my hand.

  One of the things I’d learned about Nicki was that she was never happy until she figured out what celebrity you looked like. She said I was a curly-haired version of singer Roddy Frame from Aztec Camera, but I’d never seen or even heard of Roddy Frame…. Jim Stanley, Nicki’d say, was a younger Richard Chamberlain. He was one of those really poised guys, with all the right, polite gestures, the type any mother’d love her daughter to bring home and meet the family.

  But Pete had brought him home.

  I don’t know what the guy could have done right under those circumstances. I know I didn’t like him calling me Ricky (only Pete called me that), and Mom looked away every time he gave Pete an affectionate nudge or tap on the knee, and every time he said “we” this and “we” that, which was a lot of times.

  The touching got to me, too. Jim Stanley was a toucher. It looked like the same innocent contact Jack and I had had together back when we were still speaking, but somehow it bothered me. I kept wishing they’d sit farther away from each other on the couch, too.

  For a while we sat around talking about the new series Jim was writing for NBC.

  Mom said, “Erick wants to get into film work, too.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “N.Y.U. has a great film school,” Jim said. “Joel Coen went there. He and his brother did Blood Simple and The XYZ Murders. Great stuff!”

  “I doubt that Dad’s going to approve of film school,” said Pete.

  “Ah, yes,” Jim said, “there’s Himself to contend with.”

  Mom gave him a look. She said, “Mr. Rudd’s always been open to suggestion.”

  “Just like the Pope is.” Pete grinned.

  Both Pete and Jim thought that was pretty funny, but Mom didn’t like it. It was okay for Pete and me to kid about Dad, but Mom didn’t want an outsider joining in on the joke.

  I was remembering when we were kids, and Dad was laying down the law, Pete called him “O Infallible!” I was so much younger than Pete, I didn’t even know how to pronounce “infallible,” much less, what it meant. It came out of my mouth “O Full of Bull.”

  Pete must have read my mind. He looked over at me and said, “O Full of Bull’s pushing hard for Erick to get an M.B.A.”

  “Pete?” Mom said. “Why don’t you get Jim another cup of coffee?”

  She wanted to change the subject, get it off Dad.

  Jim said no thanks, but he thought Pete could use a sandwich.

  Mom was about to get up when Pete said he couldn’t eat anything.

  “An eggnog then,” Jim said. “How about an eggnog?”

  “Nothing. Thanks, anyway.”

  “Pete?” Jim said in a scolding tone.

  Mom looked out the window.

  “I don’t think I can get anything down,” Pete said.

  “I’ll make it the way you like it,” Jim said, “not too sweet, with a jigger of rum. Mrs. Rudd? You have eggs, vanilla, milk, and a little light rum?”

  “Yes, I’ll make it.” Mom started to get up, but Jim was on his feet.

  “I know how he likes it,” Jim said. “Moi, jai pris charge.”

  “Fais ce que tu dots,” Pete said, which only meant “do your duty,” but Mom looked like she’d been insulted. That had always been her little game with Pete, the quips back and forth in French. Her crossed leg was swinging the way an angry cat’s tail flailed the air.

  “I’ll help you find the rum,” Pete said, and he got up and followed Jim toward the kitchen.

  After they’d gone, I said, “How come Pete’s not going to the coast?”

  “Jim shares an apartment with a friend. The friend doesn’t want Pete there.”

  “Because of AIDS?”

  “That’s probably why, yes.”

  “Is Pete upset about it?”

  “Stop asking me how Pete feels, Erick. I haven’t a clue. Jim tells me more than Pete does—more than I want to know, too. About everything.”

  “Like what?”

  “Pete’s had things before. Hepatitis.”

  “A lot of people get hepatitis.”

  “Other things. Worse things. Things he’s never told us about.”

  “What’d you expect, Mom? That he’d announce to you and Dad he’d picked up clap or something? I wouldn’t either, unless I had to.”

  “And Jim said Pete hadn’t really had many relationships. Jim said not what you could call relationships—until Jim came along.”

  “Pete got around. He told me he did.”

  “Oh, Pete got around all right. I asked Jim why Pete was so prone to those things … infections … and Jim said Pete didn’t ever stay with one person very long. Jim said there are some gay men who can’t, because they grew up hiding what they were, never learning to socialize with each other, except in bars … at baths. It’s all so sordid!”

  “Then don’t ask Jim stuff.”

  “Maybe Pete wouldn’t be in this mess if I’d asked Pete some questions a long time ago.”

  “Have another heaping teaspoon of guilt,” I said.

  “Jim just comes out with these statements: Some gay men have been with more than they could count … more than they could count.”

  “Well, if Pete’d been with more girls than he could count, if it was more girls than he could count—”

  “It wasn’t, though,” Mom said bitterly.

  “But what if it was? Then it’d be okay. Dad’s always telling Pete and me to sow our wild oats, right? Marriage is forever, right? So do a lot of playing around.”

  “Your father was talking about men and women and marriage.”

  “But he’s always telling us to play around a lot!”

  “I don’t want to continue with this conversation…. I miss Oscar so much, I could cry.”

  “I miss him too.”

  “Jim took me aside and told me Pete was really upset about Oscar, that Oscar was a symbol of a whole part of Pete’s life that was ending. He said Pete was putting up a front for me, but Pete was devastated, so they weren’t going to stay for dinner, because he wanted to get Pete home. I said Pete is home.”

  “Jim’s in a no-win situation here,” I said.

  “Moi, j’ai pris charge,” Mom said icily. “His French accent leaves a lot to be desired, too…. Am I being bitchy?”

  “Yeah, very bitchy…. I’m not going to be here for dinner, Mom.”

  “I have a rehearsal, anyway. Are you going over to Dill’s?”

  “Not tonight.”

  “Is everything all right between you and Jack? I haven’t seen him around lately.”

  “Everything’s fine,” I said. I wasn’t going to lay my problems on her, on top of everything else.

  “Honey? I don’t want to keep talking about this thing, but I’ve left a sheet of instructions up on your bureau. With Pete coming back to live with us, there are some precautions we all have to take.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll read it. When’s Pete moving back in?”

  “As soon as Jim goes back to the coast,
” Mom said. “I just can’t think of them as a couple, can you?”

  “No, not really.”

  “It’s something wrong in us that we can’t, isn’t it?” Mom said.

  I said, “Just stop thinking about what’s wrong in you, Mom. You’re doing your best to handle it.”

  “You’re handling it too well,” Mom said. “It worries me.”

  When Pete and Jim came back from the kitchen, Pete said he felt a lot better. Jim said, “See?”

  We stood around for a while saying good-bye.

  Mom offered to drive in her station wagon when Pete was ready to move his stuff out to Seaville.

  “I’m giving Pete my SAAB while I’m on the coast,” Jim told her. “He doesn’t have any furniture to move, thank God. He can probably get everything into the SAAB.”

  “I hope you know what you’re doing, the way Pete drives.”

  “I know what I’m doing, Mrs. Rudd,” Jim said.

  “Good luck with your new series, Jim!” I said.

  “I’m trying to talk Pete into shelving The Skids for a while, to help me with some scripts. I never thought I’d collaborate B. P.”

  “B. P.?” I had to ask.

  “Before Pete,” Jim said.

  After they roared off, Mom began rearranging the living room furniture. She always did that when she was unhappy and anxious. I went upstairs and got into the shower. When I got out, I reached under the bathroom cabinet for Mom’s hair drier. I don’t know why I didn’t want her to hear me using it, but I didn’t, so I turned on the tub water.

  I watched myself in the mirror while I blew my hair dry.

  I remembered Nicki’s voice purring, “Do you like yourself now? Are you going to get stuck up now?

  I tried not to think about the sheet of instructions Mom had left on my bureau, beginning 1. Kitchen and bathroom facilities may be shared with others, but not toothbrushes or bars of soap, or …

  I didn’t let myself get into it, but turned my thoughts around to Nicki, and the way she made me feel, and the best things about her: her nerve. Her great war against them. The way she let me know she wanted me, too, so that I never felt like some horny high school kid out to get his rocks off. How easy it was for me to say I love you.

  It was not saying it that was hard. I said it and said it.

  Once she asked me, “When did you know you loved me?”

  I couldn’t think when it was. I said, “Last Sunday afternoon.”

  “Not until then?”

  “When did you know?”

  “At your brother’s place, when we talked, while they were in the kitchen. I thought, Oh no! I’m with the wrong guy.”

  “Why did you love me?”

  “See, I don’t think you can ever know why. I don’t think it’s because you’re redheaded and cute and I can talk to you. I think its karma. My mother said everything was fate. Karma. Or it’s chemistry. I could smell a dozen different closets full of clothes and pick yours out. You smell good to me.”

  “I want to give you the world!” I said. Things like that came out of my mouth all week. I guess the clichés about love got to be clichés because there was no other way to act or feel. You just expanded, said things you never did before, made all kinds of new moves as easily as if all your life you’d been at it. It was like coming into money suddenly or being discovered by some talent scout and becoming an overnight star.

  That afternoon on my way home from school, I’d seen a little white china horse in the window of Seaville Antiques. I’d remembered she’d wished for a white horse once and never gotten it. I’d bought it for her. Across a card I’d written: Nicki, You shall have music wherever you go. Love, Eri. That was the name she’d come to call me. I liked it that she called me something as new as she was to me. … I realized I’d never bought a gift for Dill unless there was an occasion for it. We’d never given each other special names.

  On my way out of the house, I overheard Mom in the kitchen talking with Mrs. Tompkins. I heard her say Pete was sick with AIDS. Did Mrs. Tompkins know what AIDS was?

  “Of course I know what that is. But not Peter. Peter’s not … Peter’s not …”

  I let myself out the front door and headed off to Kingdom By The Sea.

  Chapter Sixteen

  BY THE TIME PETE moved back to Seaville, Kingdom By The Sea was my second home. Nicki worked in Annabel’s Resale Shop afternoons when I worked at the bookstore, but other afternoons we spent together in Dream Within A Dream, or walking down on the dunes, or swimming at City By The Sea. I’d go home for dinner, and then go back there until ten or eleven at night. Nicki never wanted to go anywhere. She said going places changed her the same way alcohol did certain people. She said once she got away from Kingdom By The Sea, she became different.

  “Anyway, we don’t need other people,” she said. “Do we need them, do you think, or are we perfect as we are?”

  “Perfect as we are,” I’d answer, but sometimes I’d wish I could show her off, go places and be seen with her, talk about her to someone And sometimes I missed Jack so much, I felt like bawling.

  I found a ten-foot green vinyl float shaped like a crocodile, with black spots and big white teeth, at The Seaville Beach Shop. Nicki loved that thing. We’d ride it together in the pool, with songs like R.E.O. Speedwagon’s “Can’t Fight This Feeling” blasting over the speakers. She named the crocodile after Kevin Cronin, who’d written that song. “It’s our song, Eri,” she said, and she’d found a little gold crocodile that’d come into the resale shop with some estate jewelry, and fixed it on a gold chain for me to wear around my neck.

  One early November night we were hanging on to Kevin Cronin down near the shallow end of the pool, while a wine salesman who was staying at KBTS did swan dives at the deep end. Nicki was fooling around, taking the crocodile around my neck into her mouth, and I finally began the conversation I’d been working up to all day.

  “You know what I’d like to give you?”

  “I know what you’d like to give me.” She laughed.

  “Be serious…. Senior rings come in next week.”

  At Seaville High we got our rings in November, so we’d have a longer time to wear them before school was out. We celebrated getting them at a dance on Thanksgiving Eve. Some seniors exchanged rings at that dance. That dance was a bigger event than the Senior Prom at Seaville High. It was THE affair of the year.

  “You know what I’d never wear? A senior ring,” Nicki said. “I didn’t even order one. I think it looks moronic to wear your high school ring once you’re out of high school.”

  “What about wearing mine while you’re in high school?”

  “Oh, no, here it comes!” she said.

  “Here what comes?” I said, but I knew there was no fooling her.

  “Eri, what do you want? To go to that Ring Dance?”

  “Maybe I just want you to wear my ring.”

  “You want me to go to that thing with you, don’t you?”

  “Okay,” I said. “But not really go to it, just drop in at it.”

  “Just get all dressed up and get in that line of Noah’s Ark nerds who go two by two into that big plastic ring! What would I give you?”

  “You don’t have to give me anything. I’d give you my ring.”

  “Jack will be at that thing. Jack and Dill and all of them!”

  “Not Jack,” I said. “Not Jack at a dance if he can help it!”

  “Everybody else, though. Baaaa! Baaaaaa! Baaaaaaaa!”

  I grabbed her and ducked her, and when I let her up, I said, “You going with me?”

  “Pas du tout.” She shook her head no. “That’s French,” she said, putting her arms around my neck, her mouth coming toward mine. “So’s this.”

  One night, out at Kingdom By The Sea, we were watching home movies, which was a passion of Cap’s, I found out. He loved staring up at the old days in the dark bar, wiping his eyes unashamedly, saying things to Nicki like, “Remember that summer, honey? We g
ot Scatter that summer, and your mommy had that séance and got in touch with Uncle Dave through Scatter?”

  “I never really believed she got in touch with Uncle Dave,” said Nicki, and she said in an aside to me, “Uncle Dave was killed in Vietnam.”

  “Oh, it was Dave talking through her all right,” Cap said. “She couldn’t have made up all that stuff herself. All the details of the fighting over in Nam? Your mommy didn’t know diddly-damn about war!”

  They’d go on about things like that, and I’d sit with Scatter on my lap. She’d taken a liking to me, although every chance she got, she took her paw and swatted the little white horse I’d given to Nicki off the bureau in Nicki’s room. Nicki’d named it High Horse. It was on its side on the rug more than it was on the bureau, and Nicki’d say, “Scatter’s jealous of High Horse, I think.”

  This night we were all watching the home movies. I saw Cap when he was much younger, and I saw Nicki’s mother, Annabel, who looked much younger than Cap. There were all sorts of shots of them there at Kingdom By The Sea, when it was first built and not yet gone to pot.

  They were such a good-looking couple. I watched them feeding each other watermelon slices at a picnic on the dunes, then chasing each other through waves at the edge of the ocean, and playing badminton in shorts in the courtyard, two tanned, happy-looking young people, Annabel not much older than Nicki and me.

  Finally little Nicole came into the pictures. There were Cap and Annabel holding her up so she could put a penny into the fountain. Then there they were with her walking between them, suddenly holding her while she swung from their hands, her tiny legs off the ground, laughing, with her hair golden in the sunlight, blue skies above, everything going for the three of them … and they looked it.

  I held Nicki’s hand while we watched her life spin by in the dark bar, another night of almost no customers. Toledo working crossword puzzles at the desk outside, Cap sipping draft Bud and bumming Merits from Nicki. Their cigarette smoke curled up above us in a blue haze, as Nicki grew up before my eyes, while beside me she’d say things like, “I loved that little bike! I thought I was SOMETHING on that thing! I’d run right over rocks and let the tires lift off the ground like it was a dirt bike? And remember the time the tire just blew up, Daddy?”