Little Reef and Other Stories

by Michael Carroll

  “What did she do?” I said, thinking of my mother at parties around younger men. (Once my mother had to said to me, “Want to know a powerful man, talk to his wife.”) I said, “What?”

  In my head I heard Mom cackle and wished she’d excuse herself from the party. She was embarrassing me. I came back to now, to our hostess, whom I envied and wanted to know more.

  “At the beginning of the summer she drives to Walmart in my car without my say-so and applies for a fucking job. At fucking Walmart! Just to spite me, I’m still miserably convinced.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, wanting another designated-driver-forbidden beer but resisting. People our age never grew up, but talked as though we were still in high school. “And you said no?”

  “Are you kidding? I’m not that kind of mom. But what did I ever do to deserve this?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said with a beery grin, “and so she’s been working there all summer?”

  “All summer, and says she loves it. Her best friend Rupert has mental retardation.”

  I nodded, wanting to say that I knew the name-tagged Rupert as a very efficient cashier.

  I said, “Where I come from, Walmart’s fine. You probably think I’m a sold-out redneck.”

  “He’s actually totally cool and sweet, Rupert. Lives over in Bucksport with his mom, and she’s great. Totally working-class. Dances in a titty bar in Bangor, but can you imagine? Me?”

  I was more of a cut-out background guest in a party scene in her husband’s future biopic, maybe her future biopic, and I nodded and said, “Maybe she’ll become a great labor champion.”

  “Court’s decided to be a brain surgeon. If that happens then great, but I love all my kids.”

  When she’d gone off to tend to her other guests, I felt a gnawing loss I hadn’t expected.

  More on the avenging angel: Chad was a vegetarian, but as a goat farmer, not vegan—and even so, apologized for not eating what I’d brought. He said he knew the passion it took to make food. He talked passion and he apologized a great deal. He said his mom was Congregationalist. I didn’t know where this was going but he said he’d heard from others that my chili was nice and that chili was one of his favorite kid dishes—he’d had a passion for his mom’s version—and that he was only sorry he couldn’t have somehow tasted mine before deciding to convert, as he said.

  “The veiled mysteries of the time-space continuum,” I said. “The tyranny of gravity.”

  “Ha ha, and mass, don’t forget mass,” he said, smiling killingly.

  He had his arm around Perry, who’d hung his cane on the step of a side staircase.

  Which is how it began, though I hadn’t a clue at the time. He accused me of thinking I knew everything, then apologized. I said no apologies were necessary, but he was wrong. The greatest writer of my generation had it wrong in the couple of characters he’d created out of the two of us, my fiancé and me, in a later book. Minor characters. At least he didn’t stereotype us, make us lisp or, more impossibly yet, be gross caricatures of dominant top and recessive femme. The evening was also the beginning of my becoming comfortable with the designation fiancé.

  Perry said, “Chad has his own cheese.” His speech had straightened out and cleaned up. For a moment there was no slush or clutter in it. “He wants to take me out on his motorcycle.”

  I laughed dimly at this idea. But then I wanted him to have fun but worried about Perry’s poor balance. He teetered, and leaving a chair or clothes or shoes behind set up future obstacles for himself, and I’d fuss. Sometimes getting into a car, low-slung or not, could be a trial for him.

  “Motorcycle,” I said, nodding and breathing, careful not to roll my eyes.

  But Chad anticipated my objection, watching me, seducing me with his charm—and sex was good for the body and soul. I looked at Perry, who wore an unforgettably hapless grin. He needed this, and I needed to let him have it, was the implication. I knew I’d let him have it, just to have Chad the artisanal cheese maker and goatherd smile at me seductively another moment.

  “I have two helmets. I’m an experienced rider. I’ve been riding for fifteen years.”

  “Have you been drinking?”

  “Not a drop. I only touch the stuff when I’m in the barn tasting my incredible chèvre.”

  I pictured myself in bed with Chad, my way of approving of Perry going to bed with him. And how odd the gay world was. It was my only mode of vengeance against others’ disapproval, more grounds for disapproval, and I said, “Oh, what the fuck,” and Chad looked triumphant.

  I took the cane, a midcentury model of chrome handled and plugged with gray orthopedic rubber, and suffered them to leave alone together. I opened another beer and listened for the roar of engine on Chad’s crotch-rocket. My father had had one and had always called them that. If I had to wait another twenty minutes, lagging behind, whatever. But I felt my sand running out.

  I caught sight of the writer, who was suddenly alone and standing at the foot of the stairs, at the other end of the kitchen from the back door I was about to escape through. He lifted a beer at me—and how I would have wished to be invited to join him for just one. His sentences that said so much about me, about us, and could have made an ancient epic of this evening if only my life were his—just for a few minutes … Weakly I saluted him. He saluted me, but with this firm, tight smile I was sure meant he did remember me, and I danced an exit out the door with the cane like a vaudeville showman pumping it side to side, my ham’s holy crozier. I didn’t look back.

  At home, only the master bedroom’s lights were on, and I didn’t try to muffle my steps. I hung the cane over a coat hook in the entrance and went to the kitchen humming, giddy. My last Pata Negra had been removed from the fridge (“spirited,” I thought)—the bottle half-emptied and left next to the sink, where I’d washed the day’s dishes and left them to dry in the Buddhists’ handmade wooden rack. It was a sour wine, a red I had indulged myself just for nostalgia’s sake, but as I lay in the cabin it felt sweet melting and spreading into my thoughts. It wasn’t like what the greatest writer of my generation would end up imagining in that scene of his in that excellent and puzzlingly breathless novel about everything, called Pharaoh’s Vipers. Every novel, I thought ruefully and with some degree of self-mortification, had to be about everything in a way. Right?

  It wasn’t like death tonight, though I was pleasantly, and even Buddhistically, morbid. It was more of a steady sinking, a slow, comfortable drowning, my head going smeary. I had been to the party, had been invited to the party. I stumbled out for a smoke. Across the inlet and away from the direction of the bedroom where Perry lay with undoubtedly one of the most comely and appealing angels anyone could ever get lucky with, someone might be talking about me. I might be spoken of in terms either damning or reservedly approving. And beyond the inlets and fingers the vessels at sea were sailing or at anchor. Their lonely crews began to dream of mermaids, and flat-screen TVs. They dreamed of those women leading them to the ones they had loved forever.

  unsticking

  He was chilly and had to pee. He should get up. He was in the tropics (actually the subtropics) and he was alone in the rental. The light was bright so it had to be ten a.m. already. Scott went alone to breakfast with the easy self-assuredness of a poet. In New York, he knew a lot of poets, more poets than office workers although many were both. Mentally he saw them in their cubicles, from which they social-networked and posted their screeds of outrage against the rest of the world. If they were president, or less humbly king or emperor, least modestly dictator, first thing they’d do they’d give each poet a living wage, they asserted. Next and almost as noble were the visual artists, and last their novelist friends, even following the filmmakers and dancers, who came after the musicians and the composers. He was glad he hadn’t chosen poetry but what he’d chosen was nearly as silly. Whenever people asked, Scott coolly said he was a hausfrau.

  One who was more or less happily married. His lover Perry had stopped com
ing down to Key West so often, needing sex to be within easy reach. In New York, all those Latinos in search of a half-hour daddy. Perry was twenty-five years older than Scott, but with a bottomless libido.

  The night before, Scott’s trick had said, “So wait, how can you be here a whole month? I mean, what do you do for a living? You some kind of world traveler, rich bitch, financier?”

  Sometime in the middle of the night Scott thought his liver belched. Couldn’t be good.

  Scott really had to stop sleeping around. He’d never been very good at it, and sometimes he knew he was lousy, and inexplicably they’d want to meet up again. He’d buy a lot of drinks, give away a five here or there, try to wrap up the deal or to get it over with, close the book on that little mistake, just make the impending exit—or he’d wake up next to some guy less with regrets than a gloomy amazement. For a few minutes he’d tell himself he still had it. The feeling passed when the conversation got perfunctory. It felt better waking up alone, on his own good time.

  Outside, the Polish landscapers’ leaf blower went into full whir across the shady deck.

  This island was small—and even though it was only for a month a year, before long these little establishments he frequented were exhausted to him. It was a pond, and he was just a trout making its way back to the tributary that had fed him to the stagnant system. Two or three nights a week he’d stay home in this rented cottage and read Kipling, or Saki, or Stevenson. It was not just the feeling of being fucked-out, it might be the weather. Pirate nights here, the moon behind a gauze of ragged clouds, a nor’easter insinuating itself, rain hitting with the force of a monsoon.

  He was trying to quit smoking, and lying in bed reading a Penguin classic made him cozy and he wasn’t tempted by tobacco. The cessation drug gave him long, tangible dreams involving old friends he hadn’t seen in a while or else famous people he’d once met. He was doing the cast members of the dream a service, preparing them meals they enjoyed or hauling their laundry, and the conversations were amusing and frank. Still, by early afternoon he wanted his first cigarette.

  The boy and two girls were down from New York, a hen party in southward motion, and at first they didn’t seem to notice him. They were laughing and drinking and choogling in place on top of plastic-covered stools. Their voices serrated the bar’s air, nasal and whining, near hysterical.

  The boy was talking about his roommate in Hell’s Kitchen, jubilantly proud, but in a kind of appalled-sounding way. They were all happy to have made it to New York, all of them in their twenties somewhere, and it was exhilarating to them, obviously, to be talking so grown-up. They seemed hardly to have noticed they were on-island, in fact; and the boy said about his roommate, “He’s the most chill kid I know, he’s Long Island. He’s a sculptor teaching at FIT, with a gallery already, and he’s my age!” The boy sipped a pink-slush cocktail and waggled his eyebrows with further mortal astonishment. “He’s beautiful, y’all’d be impressed. The kid’s serious mad-hot.”

  Boys called girls guys, and everybody of that generation, it seemed, called each other kid.

  Once the boy slipped talking about the roommate back in the city and referred to him as a “sculpture.” The girls hadn’t noticed or were too polite to say something. Really, they all looked like they could still be in high school, but no one ever carded in Key West and there were a lot of runaway-looking teens passing through—real kids, scared but at the same time capable of asking Scott for immorally small sums of money in exchange for whatever sexual favors he might want. He’d talk to them and sometimes take them up on their offers, and next year they’d be gone forever. He hoped that the five dollars he’d handed them while listening to their childhood stories had bought them the cocktail that inspired them to pick up and leave finally, yet from personal experience he knew that’s not how it worked. He nodded into their anecdotes of growing-up hell—traumas he had never personally gone through as a boy. They’d order cheap scotch on his dime, laughing at who knew what, something in the backs of their minds they were putting through a compare-and-contrast processing chip, the fishing-boat rape one mentioned, the mother who’d made them into their boyfriend’s boy-whore. They’d wink at him, reach over, stroke him down there or pinch his nipple or lift his shirt and bite it and tell him he was one of the nicest guys ever—then for twenty dollars take him to the dark back room and let him go down. Immeasurably unfathomably sordid pasts, truly badly scripted porn material. But it was happening, and he wasn’t trying to stop it.

  “Is this not the most amazing bar on the planet?” the first girl said. “I ask you, is it not?”

  The doors and barred windows of the bar were open to the bright sidewalk that was busy with the cruise-ship daytrippers, the rednecks stopping and looking in and grinning at what they saw, forming the words already to explain it to the folks back home. Every once in a while they entered, dragged by their wives, who announced to the drunks hunched around the rectangle of the front bar they loved it, it made them feel at home, the more outrageous the better, just like in Alabama before they got hitched when they still knew how to have fun for crying out loud. The drag queens came downstairs handing out flyers for the nine and eleven o’clock shows, as tall as Las Vegas showgirls, but with mouths on them, their moth-wing lashes fluttering at these balding and ovoid men and shooting the shit for a moment with the women: “Your man can do what?”

  The first girl lifted her cosmo in its martini glass and took in the vintage disco, certifiably trashed. She shuddered and a giggle tickled her then she lost her balance and toppled backwards off the stool, landing on her back with a whomp! No crunch, but her friends fell apart laughing.

  The boy and the other girl turned realizing, covering their mouths, and helped her up.

  A few minutes later, when Scott came out of the restroom, all three of the kids were gone.

  He’d wasted his twenties, attending useless graduate seminars and applying to even more academic programs he’d never had any intentions of entering—doing hard, useless, arcane work.

  Scott had never been very realistic. He’d let too many of his years with Perry pass, when he could have made better use of them helping support his lover, waiting tables, doing something out of his lowly, servile skill set, the one that had put bread on the table when he was poor—anything so the uncomplaining Perry could retire at seventy. It seemed the least Scott could do for him. It was the minimum an overworked guy like Perry could ask of a stealthy freeloader from Dixie.

  Then again, Perry had indulged him. No one wanted to be lonely. Only the strongest and most determined lived alone, and that’s how they died as well. Happier, maybe, but alone.

  In Key West, even when he wasn’t here, being horny, Perry was with Scott always.

  What did you see?” said Perry, and Scott said he hadn’t seen much, only the usual tonight. He never wanted to leave when he got started in Key West. It was Shangri-la, Scott’s second youth.

  After five beers Scott was walking home past palm tree and palm tree. He’d grown up in Florida and the style of some of these houses— concrete-block, flat-roofed—reminded him of the summer evenings when he didn’t want to go back inside, and yet it was usually too hot to decide. Sometimes he’d be scamming on another neighborhood kid who wanted sex, too, but sex just did that to you. Perry was talking about the sex he had just had with one Omero. Over the phone, it didn’t sound so interesting or all that enticing. It sounded comedy-of-manners, with a computer-dating odor of profile-overload desperation. Over the phone, Scott could smell the silicone gel.

  “Omero, Homer see, came from the D.R. The Napoleon of sodomy, his profile said. His family are related to Spanish royalty and continental aristocrats,” said Perry with a ghastly snort.

  It gave Scott peace, that Perry was sexually contented. Perry could never be quite filled-up erotically. He’d come from a time more abject than Scott’s, and in Scott’s time you still were not supposed to have relations with the same sex. Now it was almost de rigu
eur even for straight people, a little experimentation before the storm of marriage. “Relations” sounded Biblical. One day the Bible would have no effect on Scott at all. But not yet. Hipsters and young don’t-label-me’s were still hearing quoted Romans and Corinthians. That night Scott dreamed about a friend from his master’s program and his wife. He was serving them a baked salmon with fresh ginger, the secret being to add the ginger toward the end mixed with bottled Asian fish sauce, despite the sodium. In midlife you needed to worry about having a stroke. Those little fuckers were waiting to pounce. Thought you were young but age had been creeping up on you—just ask Perry. He’d just had his first stroke. The fact of the stroke was there in the dream, too, but not Perry. Woody Allen was there, too, saying just before he had sex with Diane Keaton, “I’ll get the soy sauce.”

  The wife, still young and beautiful, still the same as during grad school, was on the other side of the table, not eating but staring across at Scott and, as he deduced in his clean sleep (since dreams imparted the exposition real life couldn’t), she reached between her legs playing with her pussy. Meanwhile, the old colleague, still looking good, still stroke-unafflicted, was praising the “Great Williams” of postmodern American literature with his old schoolboy reverence—Gaddis, Gass, and Goyen. Always taking himself too seriously. Then this friend was on his feet in his old black Chuck Taylor sneakers and tight Levi’s 501 jeans, gesticulating wildly, singing “Seventy-Six Trombones” like Robert Preston in Music Man. Did this mean Scott could have had sex with them way back then? What had he missed about those evenings with them? Or that he was in an eternal-return scenario of never-expired desire, having always wanted to sleep with a boy and his girl, dark and light, giver and taker, himself moving back and forth between both poles?

  “Seventy-six trombones!”

  No, all it meant was that he wanted a cigarette, and he got up and went to the bathroom in the blue-gray shadows and peed then went out onto the deck in the delicious night and smoked.