They made out through most of Hiroshima Mon Amour, shifting between kissing and staring transfixed at the black-and-white screen on which alternated images of bodies shredded, gouged, and mutilated, like living zombies, and a man and a woman making love. At one moment, when Joseph and Emery were paused in a kiss, the woman on screen slapped her hand against the man’s shoulder and declared, “I’m very fond of men!” Emery looked at Joseph and they both giggled. The statement, as she said it in French, J’aime bien les garçons, rolled around like a dime in Emery’s head throughout the film.
The postfilm discussion was more animated and emotional than usual. Jenny Pepper started crying as she gave her analysis of why the filmmaker would choose to juxtapose images of love with images of war. Emery wasn’t sure if it was the pot that had inflated the emotions or if it was the film. He didn’t think about it long. He could barely hear what people were saying. The quaint little saying, J’aime bien les garçons, was still circling his head as if it were the only, lonely thought there.
That weekend Joseph invited Emery to a guys’ night party at his friend Chase’s house. Chase was from Villanova, a small country-club-feeling town about fifteen minutes from Haverford. His parents were in Europe until Christmas and the cleaning lady, Diamina, who was living there during their absence, had to visit her ailing cousin in Queens, New York, for the weekend. Chase had promised Diamina he would stay at the house for the weekend, feed the dog, bring in the newspapers and the mail.
Five boys packed into Chase’s convertible VW Rabbit. Joseph was in the front seat. Emery sat in the back between Miguel, the green-eyed exchange student from Barcelona, and Larry, a New Yorker who dressed like a rock star in leather lace-up pants and shiny shirts.
Chase pulled the car into the circular driveway and parked it near the front door. Emery thought Chase looked exactly like his house: WASPy, stony, exclusive. Everyone climbed out and grabbed their duffel bags from the trunk. Inside, they dropped everything on the black-and-white marble floor in the entrance, and the four boys followed their host through the cavernous kitchen, then out the backdoor to the yard where the pool and attached Jacuzzi were covered with a black tarp on which flitted red and brown leaves.
Chase went to work uncovering the Jacuzzi while Joseph left for the kitchen to make drinks. Emery, Miguel, and Larry wandered the house looking into rooms that appeared to be set-decorated: everything colonial, horsey, smelling like furniture polish. When they made it to the backyard again, they found Chase and Joseph naked in the foamy Jacuzzi, each with a giant margarita in his hand. Emery, Miguel, and Larry grabbed the drinks that were waiting for them at the built-in stone bar, undressed, and joined them.
It was all bubbles. The alcohol bubbled up to Emery’s head. The bong that Joseph had brought into the Jacuzzi bubbled. The frothy water bubbled all around them. Chase declared that he, like Joseph, was bisexual. Miguel claimed that he and all his friends in Barcelona were bisexual, that this was how they passed the time in between girls. And then Emery cracked open the piggy bank of his head and finally dropped out the dime that had been clanking in there since Hiroshima Mon Amour.
“J’aime bien les garçons,” Emery said, and Miguel, the only one who understood French, laughed and threw his arm around Emery’s shoulder. Miguel’s skin felt slick and warm. His hands were the size of oven mitts. Emery didn’t want him to ever pull away.
“What the fuck does that mean?” Larry asked Emery.
“It means I’m bi, too,” Emery said.
“Well, fuck,” Larry said, “I’ve never thought about dick before, but I guess if I get fucked up enough I could be bi for the night!”
It started out as a five-way—an octopi soup with elbows, knees, chins, and shoulder knobs bobbing around the roiling broth. Emery wasn’t sure who belonged to what body part, but it didn’t really matter: each thing he encountered was gorgeously slick over a dense, stiff base. It was as if he had been programmed to respond to this exact balance of hard and smooth flesh.
The idea of Anna’s sex and drug addiction dropped in Emery’s thoughts for a moment, but he pushed it away, rationalizing that he wasn’t doing this every night to the detriment of his normal routine. This was one weekend, one moment, one hot tub. Emery got near-perfect grades and was involved in extracurricular activities (intramural soccer, film club, French Club). And other than tonight, he didn’t partake in boozy, marauding partying. In fact, he rarely drank. And when he did drink, Emery always preferred to follow his grandfather’s advice and drink closer to home.
Eventually Larry hoisted his tall, skinny body out of the Jacuzzi and stumbled away into the house alone. Joseph and Chase went off to the rope hammock that was hanging between two giant elms on the other side of the pool. Emery thought they looked like they knew what they were doing, or perhaps they’d done this together many times before.
This left Emery alone with Miguel. That was okay with Emery. When they kissed, Emery felt like there was silver in his veins. His skin was electrified, his head was exploding with fire and light. The idea of love floated in front of him.
Being bisexual was like having the E ticket at Disneyland—it allowed you on any ride in the park. Emery told Anaïs about his fling with Miguel. He explained his newly blossomed bisexuality while convincing her that Miguel wasn’t a replacement for her, but rather an addition—the mashed potatoes next to the turkey at Thanksgiving. Anaïs agreed to this arrangement. She was feeling a little bi herself and wanted to explore things with Leslie, the girl with whom she had made a short film for her Women’s Studies class. The movie was about the tyranny of shaving, how women and girls senselessly abused themselves to appear childlike and smooth for the male aesthetic. When they were making the film, Anaïs told Emery, she and Leslie each undressed and showed each other all their hair in the various tucks and folds of their bodies. Emery wanted to cringe and shut his eyes as she spoke. Like the sexist tyrants Anaïs spoke of, he, too, found her abundant goatlike fur slightly repugnant (although he would never have let this be known). Miguel had less hair than Anaïs. He was like a beautiful piece of ocean-polished driftwood.
Within a couple of weeks Anaïs broke up with Emery to be with Leslie. This left Emery free to dispense all his emotional energy onto Miguel. They declared their love for each other without ever mentioning a future. Miguel would go back to Spain at the end of the school year and probably, he told Emery, go back to women. Emery agreed that he’d go back to women, too. But he wasn’t sure it was true.
Still, it was easier somehow to just be in transition. Less to hide when he spoke to his family on the phone, or saw his sisters with their probing tentacles of questions. He never mentioned Miguel, but Anna and Portia knew the story of Anaïs—how she left him for a woman who wrapped her breasts in an ace bandage so as to appear flat-chested and more masculine.
When Miguel returned to Barcelona in May after his last final exam, Emery took to his bed for three days. It was his first heartbreak, although it didn’t feel like a break. It felt more like a mutilation. Emery saw his heart like the bodies of those blown apart in Hiroshima: raw, bloody, unrecognizable. When he finally emerged from his room, he was officially gay. But it was a quiet gay, a gay that appeared only in the confines of campus. A gay that Emery didn’t feel he had to carry home to California.
Chapter 21
Day Ten
On Day Ten, Louise is deemed strong enough for surgery. She seems almost normal when everyone arrives in the morning, although she is still attached to wires and tubes as if she’d float away were she untethered.
“You know, I woke up this morning,” Louise says, “and I had this song stuck in my head that my father taught me after he came home from the war.”
“Yeah?” Anna says. Emery can tell she isn’t listening. There’s a magazine in one hand and two pieces of red licorice in the other.
“What’s the song, Mom?” Emery asks. He’s at the chair closest to Louise’s head. Buzzy is on her other side near her hi
p. Anna is sitting near the curtain door, and Alejandro and Portia are both standing up at the foot of the bed. There are never enough chairs and someone, usually Portia, always ends up sitting on the bed.
“Shut that curtain and I’ll sing it,” Louise says.
Alejandro walks to the curtain and drags it shut.
“Okay,” Louise says, and she sits up straighter. Louise is smiling as she begins: “There’s a monkey in the grass, with a bullet in his ass, pull it out, pull it out, pull it out, pull it out!”
Everyone applauds except Anna, who is engrossed in The New Yorker.
“How old were you when your father taught you that?” Alejandro asks.
“I guess it was about 1945, so I would have been six.”
“You were allowed to say ASS?” Portia asks.
“No!” Louise says. “Otto sang it to me, and I was allowed to laugh at it. But I had to sing it in private. So I used to sing when I was walking to school. I also used to scrape black gum off the sidewalk and eat it because Billie never let us have gum.”
“Who’s the monkey now!” Buzzy says, and he whoops a little and pokes Louise in the side like she’s a kid.
“What’s the song?” Anna finally looks up from the magazine. Emery thinks she’s interested now only because everyone else seems interested.
“Did you really eat old sidewalk gum?” Emery asks.
“Yeah! I’d sing the song, chew some black gum, sing some more. Sometimes I’d stop at this old woman’s house along the way—she had a trough of water in her front yard with a tin dipper, and I’d get a drink.”
“The olden days, Mom,” Portia says.
“Sing the song again,” Anna says. “I wasn’t listening the first time.”
“Mom, I can’t believe you didn’t get sick from eating black sidewalk gum!” Emery says. He tries to imagine his mother as a six-year-old. He can’t even imagine his sisters when they were sixteen. All these people have always been older than him, hovering above him in the same way that the sky has always hovered above him.
“Let Mom sing the song!” Anna says.
“Order in the court! Order in the court—” Portia recites. Anna and Emery join in. “The monkey wants to speak! The monkey wants to speak! Let the monkey speak! Let the monkey speak!”
“What is that?!” Alejandro asks.
“No idea,” Emery says. “My sisters used to say it sometimes.”
“It started in Ann Arbor,” Anna says.
“So let the monkey speak,” Buzzy says, and he looks at Louise.
“Oh, the song, right?”
“Yes, Mom! Sing the fucking song! Let the monkey speak!” Anna says.
Louise begins: “There’s a monkey in the grass, with a bullet in his ass, pull it out, pull it out, pull it out, pull it out.”
And then they all start singing: “There’s a monkey in the grass, with a bullet in his ass, pull it out, pull it out, pull it out, pull it out. There’s a monkey in the grass . . .”
Alejandro takes Portia’s hand and they do a half-disco, half-tango dance. Buzzy begins drumming on his leg. Anna swings her arms as if she’s marching. Emery holds his mother’s hand, singing, with Louise doing harmony. He feels almost like a baby again, like he is connected to her. Or maybe, he thinks, as their voices vibrate together, it’s that he’s reconnected to her. Whatever she did—give him away to her sisters, never show up at his soccer games—it’s finished now. It’s all pure again. Solid. He is his mother’s son.
They sing the monkey song over and over and over again, getting a little louder every time. Alejandro and Portia are now spinning around the room, like Cinderella at her ball, belting it out with the rest of the family.
And then the curtain rolls open, making the sound of distant thunder, and the doctor steps in. Everyone freezes. The doctor has a crooked Charlie Brown smile on his face.
“Why are we always getting busted for something at this hospital?” Anna asks, and they crack up. Nothing, it seems, could be funnier. And Emery knows it’s weird and odd and strange and funny that they were singing, and that the doctor walked in on them. But he also knows that the reason they are laughing so hard is because Louise seems fine. She is here. She is alive. And it doesn’t appear that that will soon change.
The doctor wants to talk to Louise about the surgery she will have tomorrow morning. She will be taken to another floor where the doctor will snake a tube through her thigh and toward her heart, clearing out her arteries as if they were clogged plumbing. It is a simple and common surgery, the doctor explains. The bigger risk is simply being put under anesthesia, and that’s hardly a risk. Following the surgery, Louise will be returned to her bed in the cardio-care unit. The doctor is expecting a full recovery. Louise will be released to Casa del Viento Fuerte within the next three days.
Anna, Portia, and Emery each spend part of the evening on the phone with the airlines arranging for flights out of Santa Barbara. Emery knows Louise won’t want them here when she gets home. If they stay, Louise will feel crowded, claustrophobic with their noise and their bodies and their things strewn about. And although none of them would ever ask her for anything, or make an emotional demand upon her, the simple fact that they are so needless floats in the center of the family like a sore that won’t heal. This is why Louise seems to prefer the animals, Emery thinks: they don’t make her feel guilty when she puts them out of the house. When you ignore an animal, it doesn’t seem to notice. The animals have nothing to forgive.
Emery is heating milk in the microwave for coffee, while Portia is on hold on the kitchen phone (she sings along with a Captain & Tennille song). Maggie Bucks jumps out of the cupboard, leaps onto the table, and stares at Portia with misdirected eyes.
“Guess what,” Portia says to the cat. “Smoker Lady is coming home soon.”
“Then you leave!” she answers in Maggie Buck’s Siamese accent. “Smoker Lady no want you! Smoker Lady like only cat and dog!”
“Oh, yeah,” Portia says, in her own voice. “Well, fuck you.”
The microwave dings; Emery pours the milk into his coffee.
“You talking to the cat?” Anna has walked into the kitchen and is standing at the open refrigerator door. Jasmine, the dog, approaches Anna; she stomps her foot to shoo the dog away.
“Scram!” she yells, when Jasmine doesn’t budge.
“Bet they’ll be glad to have Smoker Lady back,” Emery says.
“Nah,” Anna says, “deep inside, they’ll really miss us. They probably even love us.”
“Just like Mom,” Portia says.
“Yeah, just like Mom,” Emery says. Then his sister sings aloud with the phone again, crooning about the gluey and eternal nature of love.
Chapter 22
1990
Three years after Portia and Anna were each married, a year after Emery graduated from college, Buzzy and Louise rented a rambling shingled house on Fire Island in New York. The house was three homes in from the Atlantic ocean and seven homes in from the Long Island Sound (Fire Island is just that narrow—viewed from overhead, it looks like a baguette floating off the coast of New York). Ten cruiser bikes came with the house, each with a basket to carry back groceries from the markets, as there were no cars allowed on the island. Since Anna and Portia were already situated on the East Coast and Emery had accepted a job with a TV station in Manhattan, Buzzy and Louise thought it would be nice if there were a place not too far from all their children where they could meet up some weekends and for at least one week all together in the house. Also, Anna had recently had a baby boy, named Blue, and she and Portia entertained some fantasy of Blue belonging to all of them within the realm of the house. Portia was excited about spending time with her nephew, whom she’d seen only once, the week after he was born. Babies, pregnancy, and childbearing were all interesting to her. She was pregnant with her first child, due to deliver the end of August.
Of course it was much harder than they had imagined for everyone to get to Fire Island a
t the same time. So it wasn’t until the end of July when Portia, Anna, and Emery could each spend a full week at the house. Patrick was in the middle of a big case and had to stay in Greenwich, and Anna’s husband, Brian, needed to stay in Vermont to mind the flower store. So it was going to be what Portia thought of as “the Real Family,” plus Blue.
Within seconds of boarding the standing-room-only train to Islip, New York, three people stood to offer Portia their seat. She was clearly expecting, as fat a toad, having gained weight from the tip of her chin down to her belly in one fell swoop. (Patrick told her she looked like a completely different person, a fact he claimed to enjoy because when they had sex it was like he was having an affair.) Anna and Blue had already flown down, arriving the day before Portia. Emery took the train from Manhattan and met his sister at the ferry station and they, and her protruding belly (which felt like luggage you could never check), took the ferry to the island together.
Within the first hour at the house, Anna and Emery went off to change into their suits. Portia hadn’t seen Buzzy yet and Louise had barely looked up from her crossword puzzle to say hello. Portia held her four-month old nephew turned out from herself and walked him around the house, telling him what everything was called as if he were a foreigner (which he was, in a way) just learning English (which he also was).
“This is the laundry room,” she said. “Where your mother, who does more laundry than anyone in the family, will do your laundry. And my laundry. And probably your uncle’s laundry, too.” Portia walked up the stairs to the main living area.
“This is the living room.” She rotated the boy, one hand under his bottom, one on his back.
“Couch.” Portia leaned him toward the nubby, orange, L-shaped couch.
“Coffee table.” Flat, low, covered with magazines that Portia assumed had been placed there before Buzzy and Louise moved in: Island Life and Us Weekly.
Drinking Closer to Home Page 26