by Kyell Gold
So we sit around the living room with wine (red wine, but I don’t say anything) and make uncomfortable small talk. “What brings you up here?” she asks.
“Paying a visit to the old college before I start my job,” I say. It’s a little early to mention Dev, so even though I’m tempted to see how she handles it, I refrain.
Father gives me a grateful look and compliments the house and what Mother’s done to redecorate it. She takes the compliments with a little bit of grace and makes a somewhat snide remark about his own tastes, which causes me to jump in.
“His apartment looks really cool,” I say. “It’s comfy and I really liked it there.”
“Well,” she says, “of course bachelors would love a bachelor pad. Are you seeing anyone?”
This is to Father, who shakes his head, his ears going down. “Are you?”
She shakes her head as well. “There’s someone at church…Mr. Davette. Do you remember him?”
“I think so. The carpenter?”
“Furniture craftsperson.” She sniffs. “He lost his wife to cancer last year and I’d spent some time with him, but I didn’t want to let things go further.” She pulls up and stops the discussion there, but her ears flick toward me. “But recently he…he heard about some of the problems and he’s been very kind. So I was thinking I might go to dinner with him.”
“That’s great,” Father says.
“Were you ashamed of me?” I say, and then take a drink of wine. I shouldn’t have blurted that out.
They both turn to me, and Mother says, “Why would you say that?”
Because she said she didn’t want to let things go further. Then when he heard from somewhere else about her “problem,” which I’m translating as “gay son,” and didn’t shun her, she offered to have dinner. I don’t want to explain that, or sound paranoid about the way her ears flicked toward me, so I just say, “Sorry.”
I do notice that she doesn’t deny it as she goes on to talk about this carpenter guy. He’s a fox, of course, because Mother’s not that experimental. Father keeps his tone neutral, not letting me know what he thinks about either Davette himself or the prospect of Mother dating him. Neither of us is very encouraging, but she goes on. “He keeps track of his whole business himself. He has goals and plans for the future and he’s working toward them. His daughter just graduated from Whitmore. She’s got a degree in architecture and a job with a prestigious Port City firm.”
“That’s great,” I say, echoing Father. It’s not necessarily a dig at me not graduating, of course. It might be an attempt to get me to meet this intelligent, no doubt beautiful, vixen who would make me forget Dev and my love of cock. In fact, I’m tempted to ask, Does she have a penis? Because then she’d be perfect.
But I’m being good, I’m trying to make this work, so I keep my lips shut around my fangs and I smile and nod. At least Mr. Davette doesn’t seem to be a crazy fundamentalist nut job, so he’s a step up from Mother’s previous friends.
Like me, Mother hates being alone. Father’s doing well with his solo apartment, but Mother has to keep talking about the people in her life. When Dev and I were apart for a couple weeks, that was one of the things I thought about a lot. I’ve rarely been alone for any length of time. I got to college and within a month had latched onto Brian. When he left, there was FLAG and then Dev. And that’s my life.
“Oh, the chicken’s ready.” Mother gets up at a shrill alarm and hurries into the kitchen.
Father looks across at me with a smile. “Hang in there,” he says, low enough so his voice won’t carry to the kitchen.
“I dunno.” I keep my voice pitched in kind. “This Violet Davette sounds like the whole package. I should just call Dev and tell him I’m going straight.”
He shakes his head. “Go on, get it all out before dinner.”
I glance toward the kitchen. “I don’t have time to get it all out. Don’t worry, I’ll behave.”
I make the statement with more confidence than I feel. It helps, though, that dinner is good. Whatever else changed about Mother in the years I was growing up and at college, she’s not wasted the time spent in the kitchen. I can vaguely remember complaining once when I was six or seven about a dinner I didn’t like, but rarely since then. And anytime I brought high school friends over for dinner, they raved about it.
Tonight, even though I’ve been eating in fancy restaurants with Dev, the dinner is as good as anything I’ve had in the last six months. The roast chicken is moist and sprinkled with rosemary, while the cooked carrots and peas retain some snap, and the light maple glaze (that’s a midwestern trick) adds dimension to their natural flavor. There’s also a square loaf of bread, obviously from a bread machine that Mother must have gotten in the last two years. The meal is delicious, and I make sure to say that several times because it’s true and easier than talking about anything else.
Mother clears the table and Father helps. I offer but there isn’t a lot for me to do, so I wander out to the hallway and put a paw on the banister, looking up the stairs. My paws wore the carpet bare: running down those stairs as a young cub with the eager anticipation of getting to play outside or running up those stairs to the privacy of my room as a moody teen. Mother’s replaced the carpet since then.
Father comes out and stands at the base of the stairs with me. I think about the time I fell down them and he stood here where we are now, picked me up and rubbed my tail where I’d fallen on it, told me I would feel better soon. I remember Mother vacuuming up the stairs, me skipping up ahead of the vacuum and her playfully chasing me with it; later in life, I would be given that responsibility. The vacuuming, not the chasing.
“Your mother will be out soon. I think we should go up together.”
I eye the empty boxes in the hallway above. “Probably right.” I feel uneasy, worried about what I’ll find missing from the room. She wouldn’t have burned any of the things I want: my plush dragon, some of my favorite books, the poster of All That Jazz—no, that’s probably gone, come to think of it. I clench my fists. At least I can get another one of those easily enough.
Most of the things I really value and want I took with me to my apartment in Hilltown when I moved there. What I left behind, largely the things I didn’t take to college or the gay clothing—like my pride jacket—were things I didn’t want to risk wearing in my closeted environment or hadn’t had a use for in college.
“I’m not in a hurry,” I say, and lean against the wall, trying to hide my worry. “It’ll go quickly anyway. There’s only a few things.”
“You’re doing well so far,” he says quietly. “Just remember that this is hard for her, too.”
“How are you doing?” I think to ask him. “The Davette guy doesn’t bother you?”
He tilts his head. “It’s strange, sure. I don’t think it bothers me all that much, though. I’m glad Eileen found someone to be happy with.”
“Do you miss that?”
He smiles at me. “If you meet someone eligible, go ahead and introduce me, but I’m not unhappy to have a little time to myself.”
“I don’t meet many eligible ladies, sadly,” I say. “Dev knows this actress.”
Just then Mother comes out of the kitchen and takes a breath. She smiles at both of us. “Shall we go up?”
We follow her up the stairs and past the empty boxes in the hallway. The lock she put on my door is still there, hanging open. She walks past it and into my room. I follow.
Here, as nowhere else in the house, my scent hits me. A younger, bitterer, more idealistic me sulking on the bed in my pride jacket after being told not to wear it to family gatherings, sitting with the acceptance letters from Forester and Javister College, looking up the gay rights groups at each for the fiftieth time, sitting here with my best friend from high school and pulling out the Abercrombie catalog to point out a parka I hated just to see if he’d comment on the underwear model on the facing page (he didn’t); speaking of that underwear model, all the nights
spent huddled under the blanket with a flashlight staring at him and jerking off into a tissue—now I feel like Mother must certainly have been able to smell that when she changed the sheets on my bed, and my ears go back, but that scent, at least, has faded from the room.
My All That Jazz poster is gone from the wall, as are all of my movie posters. The wall is mostly blank, as a matter of fact, a uniform reddish beige; either the posters weren’t up long enough to leave marks or the wall’s been freshly painted. The bedspread is new: more colorful, more juvenile than the simple sea-blue one I had in high school. I head over to the bookshelf, not saying anything, and check the titles there. It looks more spare than I remember, and as I go through, searching for those titles I want, I notice several of them missing. The thought of books being burned gets my throat tight, especially when I figure out some of the ones that are missing: Oscar Wilde (yes, very gay, even though I picked up that book in ninth grade before I realized what was different about me), and the plays of Berthold Brecht and Molière (not very gay, but theatrical, I suppose, and French), and the Gore Vidal book (okay, he is gay and I didn’t really like him that much anyway), but also my Pynchon and Eggers and even the Harry Potter books? What the hell?
I grab a bunch of books and throw them into a pile, not really caring what they are, just desperate to get them all out of there. Next I check the closet, but there’s nothing there I really want: I spot an old hooded sweatshirt and remember the comforting warmth the hood made around my ears, so even though I don’t really want the old thing, I grab it. Then there’s Hothead, the old, worn plush dragon my father bought for me back in middle school, before I liked football. He’s sitting on the neatly made bed in the center, and I reach for him, but then stop.
Mother’s not watching; she’s gone back out in the hall with Father. They’re talking in low voices I choose not to hear. I stand there and look at the dragon.
The placement on the center of the bed means something. The room is staged, a display about the early years of Wiley Farrel, and Hothead there is one of the key pieces of that, the only plush toy I kept through high school.
I sit on the bed next to him. I’ve got a new one that Father got me when we couldn’t retrieve this one, and that one goes along with my new life. Do I want this one that badly? Couldn’t I leave him here as part of Mother’s museum exhibit, so she can come in and look at the memories of when she had a cub who didn’t bring scary gay tigers into her life?
Ah, shit. I reach out and rub Hothead between the horns. “You going to be okay here?” I ask. “I think you’ll be happier here. I mean, I’m going to Yerba, and remember how they beat us in ’94? You wouldn’t want to be thinking about that all the time. Just hang out here and think about ’89.”
Father pokes his head around the door, holding a box. “You okay, Wiley?”
I slide off the bed. “Yeah. Just got…” I point at the books and sweatshirt. Taking them won’t disturb the neat order of the room. “A few things.”
He looks around the room, his eyes lingering on the blank spaces on the wall, then on Hothead sitting on the bed. “Not bringing him?”
“I’ll hold on to the one you got me.” I force a smile and pick up the pile of books. He holds out the box. “Thanks.”
All the books I want to take and the sweatshirt and a couple other odds and ends barely take up half the box. Father looks down, then up at me. “You sure that’s all?”
I take another long survey of the room. It’s been over a year since I set foot in it, and though it had seemed important to me a couple months ago to get in and get my things, now the room doesn’t even feel like mine anymore.
I’d like to be angry at Mother again, to feel that clean, consuming rage at the lacquer preservative she’s placed over her idea of my childhood, but when I see her in the hallway, she’s looking down the stairs and her ears are down, her tail curled around her legs, and she’s rubbing her paws together aimlessly. She looks lost in her own house, and it strikes me that as uncomfortable as I feel walking into a room I no longer recognize, I get to leave in a few minutes. She’s trapped here alone in this house that she can never really remove the past from.
But no, she doesn’t want to remove the past. She wants to return to it. And she can’t do that, either.
I don’t have much to say to her. She looks up as I carry the box into the hallway, and glances into it. Her ears lift slightly. “That’s all you’re taking?” she asks quietly.
Maybe she was expecting I would take more of her museum exhibit. She seems relieved, whatever the reason, and I don’t want to press. “Yeah. Thanks,” I say.
And then we stand there awkwardly until I say that I promised to meet some people at Forester around nine, and as it’s eight-thirty, we should probably be going.
Mother nods and says, “The streets will be getting icy.” Four years ago, she would’ve asked who I was meeting, whether I’d be getting my work done, and so on. Now she just follows us down the stairs and stands while we slip into our coats.
“It was nice to see you,” she says as I heft the box again.
I don’t know what I can say to that that’s truthful, not right now, so I say, “Yeah,” as Father embraces her, a dry, chilly version of the kisses I’ve seen them share in the past.
And then we’re outside, and the cold bites at my ears and nose. I walk down the steps, and all the times I’ve walked down them are faint echoes behind me. My feet now are real, the gritty stone is cold but not slippery; Mother’s too careful for that. Father’s car is the same as it’s been for years, but I’m different, sitting in the passenger seat rather than in back.
“Thank you for handling that maturely,” Father says as we drive off.
“I mostly just feel sorry for her.” I don’t look to either side as we leave my old neighborhood.
He exhales with the faintest puff of white—the car is warming up quickly. “I guess that’s a good change from being angry.”
At least I’ve proven I can change, which Mother would prefer to forget, and she can change too, if not as much as I’d like to see. She’d love to have 1999-Wiley permanently there in the house, or maybe 1996-Wiley if she wants to be more motherly, but at least she’s recognizing that there’s something of him in me. And if I can sit through a dinner with her and not get annoyed at her talking about her new boyfriend and his perfect daughter (who is definitely not gay), then I’m still changing, still growing, and maybe somewhere down the line, she and I will find that our changes bring us back closer together.
Of course, I’m sitting here thinking about changing as I’m going back three years in time to a FLAG meeting. But I’m attending as an alumnus, and I don’t expect to see most of my old friends there. Salim said he’d try to make it, and…ha, do I think Brian will show up? Only then do I remember Chuck saying that he’d sent out an e-mail to all the alumni. I guess I ought to brace myself for Brian’s inevitable appearance, then. Pity he can’t change. In Salim’s catalog of the three kinds of people in the world, there’s no question which one Brian is.
Are Dev and I also unable to change? Come football season, of course, Dev’s focus will go back to the game, and rightly so. Brian will probably go back to hectoring him. What about me? Will I push him during the season again? Will I worry about being a distraction? I’ll have a job, and the likelihood of all the crazy shit that went on this fall happening again next fall—or anytime in our lives, really—is pretty slim. But if it does, or if something else happens…that’s what’s been worrying me. I don’t know if I’ll go back to the same old behaviors, threaten the relationship again.
So am I trapping myself at a point in the past? Am I unwilling to let go of 2008-Lee? Since I came here last December and had to be dragged out of the house, yelling, I cut ties with Brian and my activism career for the good of my relationship, walked out on my relationship for the good of my boyfriend, and got myself a job in the field I want to work in.
If I can sit through dinner
with Mother and not yell at her, then maybe I have the strength to change how I handle my relationship with Dev, too. If it’s something I want badly enough—and apparently I do—then why am I shutting myself off from it? Shouldn’t I be open to change in myself? Isn’t that exactly what I’ve been upset about Mother not recognizing? Maybe I’m not one of those people who can’t or won’t move after all; maybe it took an evening with someone standing still for me to see my own movement.
Father’s saying something about shipping the box to me in Yerba, and I say, “Yeah, hold onto it until then,” absently, because my paws and tail are uncurled and relaxed and I think I’m ready to talk to Dev.
27
Talking It Out (Dev)
I end up at P.J.’s mostly because Lee would never go back there. I get broccoli cheese soup and a big steak with non-fancy vegetables and a side of potatoes with cheese and the meal fills me up nicely. I spend the broccoli soup worrying about Damian and then in between courses, I decide that I’ll talk to Lee and we’ll figure it out together, and by the time the steak arrives, I’m not worried anymore. I shift my attention to the FLAG meeting where I’m supposed to show up and…I’m not sure what. Talk? Just smile and wave?
The chirpy vixen in the red and white striped apron comes back with the credit card slip and then hovers at the table, and I know that hover. It’s the “now I know who you are and I want to ask for an autograph but I don’t want to be rude” posture. So I smile, sign the check, and keep my pen out. “Is there something else?” I ask.
She pulls out a blank paper. She only realized who I was when she saw the credit card, her boyfriend is a big football fan and went to Chikewa State to see us in the playoff game his freshman year, and could she get an autograph for him please?
I sign the paper and add the “#57” before I wonder if he’d prefer I write in my Forester number, but by then it’s too late, and anyway, I’m fifty-seven now. She doesn’t care, just takes the paper and stares at it, then thanks me profusely. A few of my neighbors look curious, so I get up and walk out before more people start asking.