Robbie was seated on a wicker couch with his right leg extended out to a footstool. His leg had cramped up as he swam laps. Tom sat on another footstool and rubbed Robbie’s upper leg to release the tension.
“Nerves,” Tom said, massaging the leg. “You’re carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders.”
Robbie liked his swim coach. He was the only teacher he really could relate to and the only sports coach he could even stomach. Tom was not like the full-time phys ed instructors—they were all macho guys with locker-room humor that most of the boys liked and Robbie hated and dreaded because he was often the butt of the rough humor. Tom was different, more intellectual, more worldly than the dumb-jock coaches. Robbie figured it was because the swim-coaching job wasn’t a full-time one. Most of his school duties was teaching history.
“Did you ever read The Catcher in the Rye?” Robbie asked.
“Of course I did, everybody has to read it in high school or college, it would be un-American not to.”
“Really?”
“That’s a joke. You are uptight, aren’t you?”
Tom’s wife, Cathy, came through the door from their family room with a pitcher and two glasses. “Lemonade. Do we have an injury?”
“Robbie cramped up during practice. Painful, but we probably won’t have to amputate till later.”
“Good, I hate the bloody messes you make when you cut off the legs of your students. I’m running over to my mother’s with the kids. I’ll be back in a couple hours.”
She gave her husband a peck on the forehead and left.
“What about The Catcher in the Rye?” Tom asked.
“Sometimes I feel like Holden Caulfield, like I’m stuck in a phony adult world and I have to keep running from place to place to find the truth.”
“I think all boys and maybe even girls feel like Holden Caulfield. You young people see the hypocrisy of the people who run the world. That’s one of the great charms of being young—until you grow up and become a hypocrite like the rest of us, you have the innocence of the little boy who saw that the emperor’s new clothes were a fraud.”
“What did you mean, when you said you can never tell what goes on in the bedroom between a married couple?”
The coach shrugged. “Exactly that. Married people don’t act all the same. It’s different strokes for different folks. I imagine my minister and his wife sleep in bedclothes and have sex with the lights off. There’s a couple two doors down that are into wife-swapping. They’ve invited me and Cathy to a party where house keys get thrown into a hat and you go home with the person who drew your key.”
“No way. Did you do it, too?”
“Of course not, but the point is, husbands and wives don’t live by a single set of universal rules. Sometimes a man even abuses a woman.”
“And she lets him get away with it. That’s what’s driving my sister nuts. She can accept the fact that he’s a bully and gets off hitting our mom. But it drives her crazy that my mother doesn’t do anything about it.”
Tom shrugged again. “Maybe they feed off each other, maybe she’s afraid, there’s a lot of other maybes. Whatever it is, it’s nothing you can control. It’s between your mother and father. You’ll find out when you get married that you and your wife may not have the same bedroom habits as what you imagined they would be like.
“What your sister did embarrassed your mother. It was her bedroom secret and your sister brought it out into the open, exposing your mother’s humiliation. That’s why she exploded at Marlowe. Your sister had inadvertently made matters worse by trying to help.”
As Tom talked, he guided his hand up and down the boy’s leg.
Robbie started to say something and then hesitated. Finally he got it out. “What if I didn’t get married? Ever.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Just what if? What if I just didn’t want to, you know? Does everybody have to get married and have kids? Can’t some people have a different sort of life?”
“What sort of life do you want?”
Robbie shook his head. “I don’t know, I just don’t know. I’m so confused. That’s why sometimes I feel like the guy in The Catcher in the Rye. He thought about killing himself. Sometimes I think it would be a relief just to do it, like kill myself so I wouldn’t have to deal with all this crap.”
“I don’t think it’s unusual for someone your age to wonder about suicide. I did, too, and I wondered about marriage, too.”
“You did? Did you ever consider not getting married?”
“In our society, it’s what men do. They get a wife, a family, a house, a car, and a job.”
“What if … what if a person, a guy, just wasn’t attracted to, you know, married life?”
“You mean not attracted to women.”
Robbie nodded. “Yeah, I mean that, too.”
As his coach’s hands gently caressed his upper leg, gliding up closer and closer to the crotch of his bathing suit, Robbie had the urge to grab the man’s hand and push it hard against his groin. It wasn’t the first time that he felt aroused being near him.
“I don’t think it’s unnatural not to be attracted to women. Not all of us are.”
“You are,” Robbie said. “You have a pretty wife, two kids.”
Tom Crowell smiled a little sadly. “I told you that you can never tell what goes on in the bedroom with a married couple. I love my wife and my children, but that’s not my entire life. There’s another part of me, a piece of me that I’ve never been able to share with my wife, that she would never understand if she found out.”
As he spoke, the coach’s hand slipped up Robbie’s leg and in under his bathing suit. He grasped the boy’s throbbing penis.
“We are a lot alike, Robbie. More than you probably realize.”
21
Marlowe was in her English literature class when she was called out by the school principal’s secretary. She was seventeen, going on eighteen. She basically hated school—it was February and she had less than four months to go to graduate. When she did, she knew she was getting out of Modesto. She had been treading water, carrying a C-plus average, just getting by until she could bail out of hell—Modesto High School—and move to San Francisco.
There had been a time when moving to San Francisco had the lure of a mecca, but that had been when Robbie lived there. He was no longer in San Francisco. He had been there for about a year, fleeing the valley as soon as he graduated from high school, but he had come back to his hometown in a box hauled by Giovanni Brothers Mortuary.
Poor Robbie.
Overdose, had been the diagnosis.
He had made a quantum leap from smoking grass to shooting heroin without stopping in between. Fresh from small-town Americana, he had arrived green in Baghdad-by-the-Bay and got into a clique of bright young men, most of whom had fled small-town Americana and come to the Bay Area to experience “a different way of life.”
But Robbie had not found love in the arms of another man. The love that he had been actually searching for was love of himself. He tried to fill the hollowness within him with drugs.
Robbie’s death had splintered the James household. Marlowe blamed her parents for her brother’s death, her father for being insensitive—and even cruel—when Robbie wanted to march to a different drummer, and her mother for not being strong enough to deal with the fact that her son had chosen a controversial lifestyle.
They hadn’t been there for Robbie. They had abandoned him emotionally when he found himself confused about his sexuality. Marlowe had accepted his decision to go to San Francisco and find his place in life. But she had been unforgiving toward her parents since the day a San Francisco police officer called to tell her parents their son had overdosed and flatlined from heroin.
She remained in the house, but got a job at the beginning of her last year of high school, soon after Robbie’s body had arrived back to be buried in the town he had fled. She worked part-time at a Foster Freeze, saving every c
ent she made. She had a game plan—she felt that she had to finish something. For Robbie’s sake, she had to get out of Modesto and make it in San Francisco.
“There’s been an accident,” Mrs. Gomez, the principal’s secretary, said. “You—you need to get to the hospital.”
“An accident?”
“It’s your mother.”
“Is she okay?”
“I don’t know. I’ll drive you to the hospital.”
She was lying, Marlowe knew it immediately, there was something in her tone of voice. But Marlowe didn’t want to push it, didn’t want to know. It would take fifteen minutes to get to the hospital. She could wait. The phrase “no news is good news” flew through her mind.
As they walked to the car, Marlowe could tell by the woman’s body language that it was bad. Really bad. The woman kept giving her sideway glances and seemed about to say something, then would close her mouth and stare straight ahead. “The doctor will tell you,” the woman said. The woman wanted to tell her, wanted to blurt out the tragedy and share the moment of traumatic drama with her.
Marlowe didn’t insist on an answer—she didn’t want to know.
It had been hard to concentrate at school for the past couple months. Nothing had seemed real to her. But Robbie’s death was real. She saw his face in the coffin. And his death stayed in the house, his ghost a depressing element. Her mother had taken it the worst, talking little since Robbie died. “It’s my fault,” her mother had said. “I killed him.” Her father had started berating her mother for taking the blame, but Marlowe had gotten in between and shouted at him, “Touch her, you bastard, and I’ll call the cops!”
Since that time her mother had grown thinner, paler, her face a mask of depression. Marlowe tried to be supportive, but didn’t have her heart in it. Where was her mother when it counted?
Marlowe was about to ask the woman driving her to the hospital whether she could smoke, but instead just lit up without saying a word. No objection came from the woman.
That’s when Marlowe really understood her mother was dead.
* * *
HER MOTHER HAD BEEN killed in a one-car accident, hitting a concrete freeway buttress at high speed. Her father wanted Marlowe to believe she went out of control after she was cut off by another car.
“She killed herself,” Marlowe told him.
In a six-month period, Marlowe had been to two funerals. She was seventeen and a half years old and only a dozen weeks from graduating from high school. But she couldn’t stay in the house or the town any longer—there were too many bad memories, too many ghosts. And too many tears.
She stood in her bedroom and looked around. It had been her bedroom her entire life. But she couldn’t stand it anymore, or anything else in the house. She left the bedroom and paused in the kitchen by the open door to the two-car garage that was her father’s shop. He was at the lathe making a wooden duck.
As she watched him, she suddenly realized what had antagonized Robbie about her father’s hobby of making wood ducks.
Wood ducks were decoys used to lure real ducks to be killed.
It was a cruel thing to do.
She didn’t say good-bye.
22
Marlowe had $612 in her purse when she arrived in San Francisco and bought a newspaper to hunt for an apartment and a job. The first shock she got from reading the classifieds was that she had a significant amount of money for Modesto, where she could rent a one-bedroom apartment for $100 a month—but in the city it was more than twice that for a studio apartment and it would take much of her nest egg to pay first, last, and security deposit. The manager at the first building she went to gave her more bad news. “You have no job, no credit history, no one is going to rent you an apartment. It’s supply and demand, hon, people beg for apartments in this town.”
She checked into the YWCA and spoke to a counselor about getting a job and apartment. One problem she didn’t share with the counselor—she was still nearly three months short of eighteen. She would have to lie about her age to get a job and hope she wasn’t asked for ID. And what kind of job could she get? She had no training, no vocational skills from school. She was supposed to have developed secretarial skills, but had dropped out of shorthand the first day and could hardly even type—she had long fingernails in her junior year when she took the class and had barely passed.
Technically, she was a runaway, but she knew her father wouldn’t report her missing or even come looking for her. There had been no angry words, no recriminations. Instead a silent indifference had settled between them. They had barely exchanged words since her mother had died. She rode to the funeral with a neighbor rather than be in the same car with him. After the funeral, when he had stopped by the open door to her room and saw her filling a suitcase on the bed, he left without saying a word and went to the garage to make decoys.
She recently heard a Jewish expression in a movie that fit her feelings about her father: “I’ve said kaddish for him,” the actress had said about a husband she was divorcing. She didn’t know exactly what the word meant, but she realized the woman was erasing the man from her life. And that was how she felt about her father. She didn’t love him or hate him, he just didn’t exist anymore.
The counselor told her, “You might be able to rent a room and get kitchen privileges, but the only places available will be in neighborhoods you won’t want to live in. The only jobs available will be minimum wage. Your best bet is to get a live-in job taking care of a working mother or couple’s children. You’ll get room and board and can save whatever you’re paid.”
The counselor gave her a list of three people who wanted live-ins. “Be careful of the men, some of them expect more than cleaning and changing diapers.”
The first man she spoke to had that kind of expectation. “My wife travels with her job,” he told her. “Our son’s six and pretty much takes care of himself. You’ll have very light duties.”
The house was a pigpen, the kid was a snotty-nosed little shit, and the man gave her a once-over—from bustline to butt line—and offered her the job.
She told him she’d think about it.
“I can sweeten the offer,” he said.
“I’d rather stick a needle in my eye,” she said to herself when she was a block away.
She liked the next house much better. “Cool,” she said when she got off the bus and trampled up Nob Hill to a building that reminded her of the Manhattan brownstones she’d seen in movies.
Dr. Sean Williams and Dr. Valerie Gilbert were the first interracial couple she had ever met. She couldn’t remember seeing a mixed-marriage couple in Modesto and had only seen one other such couple during the three days she’d been in San Francisco. A tall, slender man with short-cropped hair, large dark brown eyes, and smooth ebony skin, Dr. Williams—“Call me Sean,” he said—taught psychology. He wore a heavy gold necklace and had a tiny gold earring in his left ear. Dr. Gilbert—Val—was of medium build, about the same as Marlowe’s five-six and 128 pounds. She had pale white skin, faint freckles, red hair, and green eyes. She was also a psychologist, a family and marriage counselor with a private practice.
Marlowe had not encountered many female professionals and the Gilbert-Williams couple was the first she’d met who used their separate names.
It was all mind-blowing to a girl from Modesto. Everything about the couple was gold in Marlowe’s eyes.
Their apartment was a cultural—and counterculture—showplace, two stories decorated with artsy pieces from Africa and Asia, some of them risqué—a wood statue of an African warrior had an elephant-trunk penis.
Sean and Val were friendly and hip, and their son, Adam, was easy to care for because he was only six months old. Their previous nanny had married and moved to Seattle.
“We have a woman who comes once a week to do heavy cleaning,” Val told her. “You will be expected only to do straightening up, no cooking except for breakfast and lunch for yourself and Adam, mostly your weekends will be
free. We’ll pay you extra when we need you to babysit Saturday nights.”
Perhaps the best thing of all was that the couple were worldly and sophisticated. Marlowe felt like a country bumpkin in comparison to them. She was a quick study when something interested her. She wanted to peel off her small-town cornhusk skin, and hanging around the Gilbert-Williams couple would be a perfect orientation to the world of intelligent chic. Marlowe felt as if she had died and gone to heaven.
She moved into a room on the first floor. The couple had a few friends over the first night. The mystic sound of South American flutes and the smell of high-quality cannabis came from the living room as Marlowe lay on her bed and read a fashion magazine. She had smoked pot once before, just a couple puffs off a joint that was passed among a group of kids hanging out back of the school gym during a dance, but it didn’t have any effect on her. After she bragged to Robbie about it, he told her the kids were so stupid, they probably were smoking alfalfa instead of marijuana.
The door to her room was at one end of the living room, next to the stairs that went up to the second floor. The guest bathroom, which was the one she used, was next to her room.
The baby had a crib in Marlowe’s room and also one in a room at the top of the stairs.
She got a glimpse of the two guests in the living room as she came down from replenishing her supply of diapers in the baby’s room upstairs. Like her employers, they were thirtyish, university types, dressed hip, both the man and woman wearing stylish jewelry. But she did a double-take when the woman opened her blouse to show the others her naked breasts. From the gist of their conversation, Marlowe picked up that the woman had just recently gotten breast enhancements.
What Marlowe found even more unusual was that Val had reached over and felt each breast. Nothing wrong with that, Marlowe thought. She’d heard that breasts felt different after they’ve been augmented, harder or firmer. And it was just a woman feeling another woman. That wouldn’t be proper in Modesto, but she was in Frisco now, Baghdad-by-the-Bay, these people were cool and hip, they weren’t constrained by all that hypocritical, puritan bullshit people in the valley mouthed all the time.
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