by Jay Quinn
“Oh, I have no doubt about that, you’ve always traded your ass for the good things in life,” he spat at me. “What’s this guy giving you? Free fish? You’ve found your level haven’t you? You’re right back in with the redneck, white trash you came out of. I bet you’re happy as a bitch in heat.”
“Fuck you, Zack.”
The sound of thick truck tires in my drive drowned out his reply. We just glared at each other while a noisy engine shut down and a door slammed. “Chris?” Steve called.
“Up here, Steve,” I said. “Come on up and meet my ex. He was just leaving.”
After a few seconds of solid thumping on the wooden tread of the stairs, Steve appeared on the deck—shirtless, sweaty, and barefoot. Without missing a step, he walked straight over to Zack and thrust out his hand. Zack flinched a little, but he stood and took Steve’s hand. “I’m Steve Willis. It’s good to meet you,” Steve said. “Now I’ve met all of Chris’s family in one weekend.”
“Zack Ronan. Nice to meet you,” Zack replied. They appraised one another for a moment until Zack took back his hand. “Well, Chris was right. I was just leaving. I need to get back to my wife and baby.”
Steve stepped back, but Zack still had to step sideways to get past him. Once he had, Steve moved to my side, draped one arm over my shoulders, and kissed the top of my head. “I’m a little early,” he said.
“Nope. You’re right on time,” I replied. I smiled up at him and then nodded to Zack, who’d made it to the edge of the steps. “Zack, take care,” I said evenly, “nice to get caught up.”
“Will I see you at Schooner’s graduation in a couple of weeks?” he asked.
“My baby’s college graduation? I wouldn’t miss starting him off on a new life for anything in the world.”
Zack started to say something, then just nodded and took off down the stairs. Steve turned and watched him until he got in his car, started up its purring engine, and pulled out of the drive.
“You have the timing of a superhero,” I said, finally turning to watch Zack drive off down the beach road.
“I don’t know about all that, Chris,” he said. All the adrenaline in the anger I had not completely vented on Zack was making me shake. Steve hugged me a little tighter. “Then again,” he said, “maybe I do.”
CHAPTER SIX,
SUMMER
Since the beginning of summer I had taken to spending most of my nights at Steve’s house. I was rarely home with Schooner and Frank. Whether I came home very early in the morning or late in the afternoon, I never caught the house dirty. It was never draped in soggy towels or festooned with empty Corona bottles. Dirty dishes never were waiting for me in the sink, nor did I ever detect the ripe-boy stench I’d come to know over the years lingering in the bedrooms, the baths, and stealing out into the rest of the house where dirty sneakers, socks, or stinking T-shirts could usually be caught grinning and guilty. Schooner and Frank scrupulously kept their promises made when I offered to let them stay with me for the summer while they job-hunted.
Nuala found her full water bowl in the kitchen and began to lap at it in earnest. I had time to register the low hum of the clothes dryer before Frank appeared in the hall, striding toward me in a pair of old-fashioned gym shorts he must have had since middle school. He was taller than me, but not by much. A half summer’s worth of sun had turned his cornflakes-and-cream complexion into something more mango-colored all over. At least where I cared to see.
“Good morning, Chris,” he said, “can I get you some coffee?”
“No, son. I’m all coffee’d out. I’ve been up since 5:30. Steve likes a ‘fisherman’s breakfast’ as he calls it. He wants the full works before he goes out to pull crab traps all day. I don’t want coffee or food again for the rest of the day.”
“There’s real orange juice in the fridge,” Frank offered.
“What’s the vodka level?” I asked.
“I bought an el-cheapo half gallon yesterday.”
“Good boy,” I said. “Are you ready to lie in the sun and be fucked-up before 10?”
“I’ve been looking forward to it all week,” he replied with a grin.
“Well, put a towel on my lounge chair, I’ll be out in a minute.”
“Would you like Nuala in or out?”
“I think ol’ Nuala’s wanting her morning nap.” I whistled sharply, and Nuala bounded past us, heading straight for her kennel. “I’ll be right out, I just need to get changed.”
“I’ll have you a screwdriver waiting,” Frank said.
I gave him a quick head rub, enjoying the feel of his ruddy crew cut under my hand as I followed Nuala to my bedroom. Frank didn’t have every Saturday off, but when he did I enjoyed lying in the sun on the deck with him, each of us in his own lounge chair. He was good company in a harmless way. Even if I hadn’t been so thoroughly sexually satisfied by Steve, I never would have been turned-on by his near naked form stretched out near me.
In my room, I closed my door and looked longingly at my bed. The room was chilly from the air-conditioning and the blinds were still closed against the morning light. I wanted to lie down in the cool dimness and put off the day a while longer. I was feeling my age in the aftermath of Steve’s continued hunger for my body in his late-ending nights and early-starting days. Over the long days and weeks of summer, my body had grown brown from the sun and taut under the ministrations of Steve’s work-hardened hands, but it hummed always as if the string were drawn too tight. I wasn’t complaining by any means—I just looked at my bed, nearly identical to the one I’d risen from three hours before—knowing it’d be all the more welcoming when I did find it again in the early afternoon, drunk more from the sun than the series of screwdrivers longer on juice than on vodka.
I stripped and found a pair of Steve’s boxers to wear in lieu of a bathing suit. I’d bought him several new pairs from a cool store I’d found on a visit to Wade Lee in Norfolk. The shopping had been more successful than the visit. Wade Lee had liked the idea of Steve much more than the reality of him. Steve, in turn, had been bewildered and put off by Wade’s high-fag world of fine china, antiques, and Old South manners. Neither of them could relax enough to match worn sailcloth to silk brocade. It was regrettable, but not unexpected.
Nuala licked my fingers as I settled the latch of her kennel and turned to sink into a morning nap with a contented sigh. She enjoyed the company of her family when I took her with me to Steve’s, but—true to the nature she’d displayed the first time I saw her—she much preferred to be the only dog in my house and she liked her time alone. I left her to her dreams and stepped into my bathroom.
I slathered on lotion with sunscreen, enjoying the texture of my skin. I saw its slight crepe when I rubbed it this way or that. There was no denying I was a few days from my 49th birthday. Because I was staying trim and lean, I saw no seriously sagging places in my mirror, but I still caught glimpses of my mother as I’d remembered her as a child. When she was my age, I was only seven years old. I’d loved to kiss the creases at the edges of her eyes, when she had allowed me to be so affectionate. Now those creases showed on my own face. My brow had begun to slacken and rest more heavily over my eyes. The color of my lashes and eyebrows had been lightened by the sun to fair-frost, but there was a silvery quality there that betrayed the 48 summers I’d seen.
I found a hint of a bruise on the base of my neck where Steve had lingered too long and too hard in quenching his thirst for me. There were shadowy smudges under my tan where he’d gripped my shoulders in joining me from behind before he turned me so he could read on my face the pleasure of his filling me. That was what he always wanted, near the climax: to witness. I wondered what he read there. I wondered what he saw in me when he was driving all thought of anything but his body from my mind.
I had never seen anything remarkable in my own face. These days, I saw only a map of all the terrain that had gone past it. There were mysterious aspects—a stranger’s expression in my own eyes—that m
ust have come from a father I’d never seen, not once. There was nothing beautiful about me, as far as I was concerned, but I had been told I was beautiful, both casually and intimately. All I saw was a pair of eyes set in a face gently etched by memory.
Others—Steve especially—saw love looking back at them from my eyes, I hoped. Older now, and aging well, hopefully, I was still nothing special. Love was the one thing I had to give from a rather unremarkable and aging package.
Slathering a last bit of lotion over my right shin and foot, I looked up to the mirror quickly to try to catch the thing that others might see in me—what Steve, especially, might see in me. All I found was me—as ever—nothing special to look at. I straightened up, enjoying the smell of coconut oil and the promise of warmth in the sun. I still felt energized and totally alive. There was nothing I could do but laugh in amazement at how I’d found myself at this moment, in this place. Improbably, I had a great lover, grown children, and a mother lode of second chances. Snapping the elastic band of Steve’s boxer shorts, I shook my head and went outside to join Frank on the deck.
When I got outside, Frank had his boom box playing an old Elvis Costello CD from about 1983. “My God, baby, that song is older than you are,” I said.
Frank turned from his belly and raised the back of his lounge chair to sit upright. “My mom used to play a tape of this album when I was little. Somehow, it makes me think of being on the beach back home. I love ‘Everyday I Write the Book.’ “
“Your mom is a very cool lady,” I said. “Have you spoken with her recently?”
Frank nodded and reached over his head to grasp the back of his lounge chair, exposing the pale underside of his arms. “There’s a job coming open with the parks and recreation department in Mount Pleasant.”
“That’s just across the river from Charleston, isn’t it? Are you going to apply?”
Frank closed his eyes and stretched his chin up toward the morning sun. “Schooner and I both are going to apply. It’s the best thing we’ve heard about since we got out of school.”
“But only one of you might get the job. What’s the other going to do?”
Frank shrugged. “We’ve decided that we’ll worry about that if we have to. The great thing about both of us applying for the same job is, it doubles our chances to be together. We don’t want to get separated. Either way, no matter what job one of us gets, we’ll adjust.”
I thought about this and took a sip of the screwdriver Frank had made for me. I struggled to decide if I was pleased at their devotion to each other or disturbed that Schooner might end up working a less desirable job just to be with Frank. I’d agreed to let them live at my house over the summer so they could have an idyllic time together—Frank was working as a floating-shift lifeguard, and Schooner had gotten a job doing golf course maintenance on the mainland. But I had made it very clear to Schooner that his main job over the summer was to find a permanent, full-time job.
“We’re thinking seriously about driving up to Massachusetts to get married,” Frank said casually. “We have two days off together in July. If we leave after we get off work on Sunday, and drive straight through, we’ll get there in time to get married Monday afternoon. We’ll have to push it, but we can drive back in time to be back at work again on Wednesday.”
I was stunned. I reminded Frank my birthday coincided with one of the days they had off.
“Schooner and I both think that it would be cool to have our wedding anniversary on your birthday,” Frank replied apologetically. “You know how much he loves you. You’ve been so good to me, and I love you too. I hope you know that, Chris.”
“Thanks, Frank. I love you back,” I said distractedly.
“Don’t you think it’s so excellent that we can actually get married?” he said. “I mean, legally? We know that there’s no reciprocity right now in either North or South Carolina, but that can’t last forever.”
Many thoughts fought for dominance in my mind. All around me the landscape receded sharply, as the sun-weathered beach houses and storm-tested scrub oaks and holly all vanished in the white hot summer morning’s hazy light. All I could really focus on was my baby getting married. Whether it was to Frank or to anybody else was immaterial.
“I mean, it’s such a cynical play to the radical religious right in an election year. The whole Bush team is holding up the gay marriage thing like something shiny to distract the American people,” Frank burbled along happily. “They’re all going like: ‘Look, shiny, shiny. Gay people getting married! Don’t look at the war, don’t look at us raping the environment, don’t look at the Patriot Act fucking the Bill of Rights. Gay people want to get married … ooh, scary!’ I mean really, do you think the American people—”
“Frank, sugar,” I said, “would you please shut up a minute?”
Frank stopped his political rant and gave me a hurt look.
“I’m sorry, Frank. It’s just I’m kind of in shock a little. You said you and Schooner are going to get married, didn’t you?”
Frank gave me a happy look. “Yes! I love him and he loves me. After this summer, here with you, I don’t ever want to be apart from him. I don’t care where either of us gets a job—I’m going to be with Schooner. He feels the same way about me. It’s what we want.”
Frank seemed so impossibly young just then. He seemed so fresh and fearless. And I flashed on the memory of my baby, determinedly looking at me across a stretch of hardwood floor, making a brave decision, and taking off toward my waiting arms.
When I had heard this announcement twice before, I’d had been all smiles and easy laughter and congratulations. But those times I was sending a young man and a young woman into a world geared for their success. This time, I saw a baby I loved, toddling off into a world that was going to greet him with bared teeth and brutal disdain.
“Please tell me you’re happy for us, Chris,” Frank said. “What you think means a great deal to me.”
I looked at the boy stretched out beside me squinting in the harsh July morning sun. In some ways, I knew this boy better than my own son.
The house was always clean—and because Frank cleaned it. My son always had clean underwear because Frank did the laundry—I’d found him folding Schooner’s clothes on more than one occasion. My son had a casual, possessive grin on his face in this freckled sprite’s presence because Frank gave him unfettered access to his mind, body, and soul. Yes, I knew Frank very well. I knew him as well as I knew the cares that had bitten lines, after a lifetime of love, deep into the edges of my own eyes.
“Frank,” I said, “it’s because I do love you that I have to ask you something.”
He shifted in his lounge chair to face me. I knew the hot gray wood of the deck was burning the soles of his feet. I saw the trickle of sweat that collected in the hollow of his neck and slid between the square planes of his chest. Oh I knew this boy all right.
“Ask me anything, Chris,” he said. His earnest face shone in the sunlight.
“If you love Schooner—if you love him enough to marry him—will you still be okay if he ever walks away from you?”
Frank looked at me wide-eyed. “I can’t ever imagine that, Chris. I can’t even imagine living without him.”
I sighed. How could I break his heart and tell him life threw you curves and you goddamn better well be ready to swerve? Would I have believed that at his age? Could I have imagined Zack turning into the bitter stranger who now filled every space he’d once occupied with such easy, loving familiarity? I reached for my drink and took a long swallow, welcoming the cold, sour certainty of it. “Frank, what I have to say, I’m going to tell you because you’re like me. You love too deep and you love a Ronan man.”
Frank said nothing, and watched my face warily, fearful I might know some fact he didn’t. I did, but it wasn’t the kind of information that worried him. I knew of no other love in Schooner’s life, no hidden girlfriend, no dirty secrets that could wound or destroy trust. I only knew what was pos
sible.
“Frank, I want you to keep some love back for yourself. My baby is a good man. I raised him to be everything you see in him that you love. But the world and time has a way of changing people. You’ll change, he’ll change. But there’s one thing in you that I know like I know the back of my own hand. You love him without any reservations. I’m pleased my baby has found someone like that. But … because I love you like I love my self … I want you to know life’s a bitch sometimes and I want you to never stop staying strong for you. Okay?”
Frank looked confused, and I couldn’t blame him. What I knew now was informed by experience and ingrained by pure instinct. “So, it’s okay?” he asked.
“Yes, it’s okay. Oh my baby—I’m so happy for you both. There’s no one in this world I’d rather see my Schooner with than you.”
I watched Frank’s beautiful grin light up his face and bring the landscape of the summer morning back into focus. A loud radio played down the street, a car door slammed, and on the beach children cried out to each other with glee. Time and life moved on, and I took my place in its tide. Sighing once again, I closed my eyes against the harsh sun and the harsher world they both were walking into.
During Mass, I was keenly aware of Schooner’s every movement as he sat, knelt, and rose next to me. It was just my baby and me— the other people who mattered to me at that moment weren’t there. Steve was on a boat pulling crab traps and Frank was in a lifeguard stand ready and watching for trouble. Sitting next to me, Schooner exuded happiness even the strangers around us seemed to notice and respond to. The psalm reading was the 69th. We read:
I pray to you, O Lord
For the time of your great favor, O God!