Nick Nolan

by Double Bound (Sequel To Strings)

  "Well, I work pretty hard," Arthur countered. "And I support myself."

  "I supported myself and my parents when I was your age," his father boasted.

  "But things cost more now," Arthur said. "My rent is seven hundred dollars. Do you know how hard it is to pay that when you're making what I make and paying for school--books and parking and tuition?"

  "Maybe you should get a second job," his mother suggested as she picked up her dinner roll.

  "What about that fairy roommate of yours?" his father asked. "He doesn't help out?"

  "Frank." She glared at him.

  "Peter moved in with his... friend, so now I'm paying all the rent until I can find someone else."

  The older man chuckled, shaking his head. "Nice to have people you can depend on."

  "You made the decision to move out," she reminded Arthur while pushing a knife full of margarine into her roll. "We told you if you did, we wouldn't help you with your school--and even still you insisted on doing that."

  "I had to," Arthur said with his mouth full. "You kept giving me Bibles and Playboys."

  She sighed as she sliced her meat. "Someday you'll understand that we are the only people who truly care about you, and that's why we'll never accept this terrible decision you've made."

  "It's not a decision, Mom. I was born this way." He put down his fork. "If I was born with no arms or legs, would you be shoving Bibles and Sports Illustrated at me, telling me if I just prayed hard enough Jesus would grow me some hands and feet?"

  "No arms or legs is on the outside," she huffed. "You can't change the way your body was made, but surely you can change the way you think."

  "There's a guy at work that used to have your problem," his father cut in. "And now he's got a wife and two kids. no desires that way at all."

  Arthur laughed. "How 'bout if I go give him a little test?"

  She made a face. "God doesn't make people that way, Artie; if he did, then mankind would've become extinct long ago. You're that way because you had the sort of relationship with your father that you had." She threw another glare at her husband. "Father O'Brien says this is your way of trying to get affection from men that you never got from him."

  "So his perversion's my fault?" his father growled, glancing over at the television.

  "It's nobody's fault," Arthur stated. "And it's not a perversion."

  "Of course it is," she countered, her voice droopy with exasperation. "At first it was ours for not seeing it early enough to get you help--I admit that--but now it's yours for not accepting it. Didn't you read those booklets I sent you from the Catholic Medical Association? At least tell me you read those. They gave me such hope."

  "Used 'em as toilet paper," Arthur mumbled as he reached for the green canister of Parmesan. "Did you know that they have a ridiculous long-term 'success rate,' and most of those priests, after teaching their 'Change Ministry' classes, are out trolling the skate parks for thirteen year-old boys?"

  "Can we not talk about this right now?" asked his father. "We need to resolve this,"

  his mother said.

  "Not at the table, we don't," his father grumbled, and then took a swig of his Coors.

  "It is resolved," Arthur stated imperiously. "I'm gay. Always have been, always will be. And the sooner this family accepts it, the better we'll all be."

  "We'll never accept this about you," his mother told him. "Never."

  "You just better never let Gwen find out about it," his father warned.

  "Morgana's OK with it," Arthur said, and then shot him a look. "She said she's always known about me. And my relationship with Gwen has nothing to do with you."

  The man shot him a threatening look. "Like I said, you better never let her find out about your perversion."

  "She's old enough and smart enough that she's gonna start asking questions, Dad.

  And if she ever asks me, I'm not gonna lie."

  "You'd better lie about it," his father threatened. "How's she gonna feel knowing her big brother's a fairy? Maybe she's gonna think she needs to be a slut, too."

  "She'll just deal with it, like Morgana already did and you two should." He pushed his meal away. "You can't make me lie to her."

  "You'd better lie!"

  Arthur stared him down. "or what? "

  "If you ever tell your sister...you won't have to let AIDS finish you off, buster,

  'cause I'll kill you!"

  His mother stopped chewing.

  "You did not just say that." Arthur's head was spinning from the man's vulgarity.

  "You heard me," his father said, his voice low and vicious.

  Arthur knew that, at this point, there were no rational synapses firing in the man's thick head. And he knew all too well when he'd start swinging, so he jumped up and headed for the living room, snatched his backpack from the floor, then made for the door. "I don't have to take this!" he shouted as the screen door slammed behind him. Then he trotted across the yard looking over his shoulder, hoping he wouldn't have to outrun the brute. Again.

  But when he turned back he saw, through the dining room curtains, the silhouette of his father leaning back in his chair, while his mother sat across from him with her head in her hands.

  I'm not even worth chasing.

  He jogged to his van, started the engine and pulled away from the curb with as much force as the tiny engine could muster. As the distance grew between him and that horrible little house, he felt tears begin to build behind his eyes.

  Two stop signs later, he was bawling.

  Don't cry or I'll give you somethin' to cry about.

  But he couldn't help it. He sobbed now as he drove, with his face screwed up like he'd sucked on a lemon and his mind playing his father's words over and over. And for his mother to just sit by! But then, no one knew his father's wrath as well as she.

  He hated them both.

  Because they made him hate himself.

  As he motored down Pacific Coast Highway, some realizations bloomed: I've got nothing to lose.

  I've done what I could, but it'll never be good enough for them.

  I've got nothing, really, to live for.

  What's the point of going on?

  He wiped his eyes and focused on his driving, and then realized that he was speeding and slowed down--not because he was afraid of getting pulled over, but because there was no one waiting at his crappy little apartment for him.

  Just those off-white walls. And the stained carpet. And the stinking, worn-out furniture.

  I'll always be alone.

  And he believed, just as he'd been so efficiently trained to believe, that he deserved to be.

  * * *

  That night he lay in bed, feeling his heart pump its bitter sludge. How would he do it?

  How can I really, really fuck them up?

  Then it came to him: He would take his porno magazines and tear out the pages, line some up on the dashboard of his van and tape the rest to the insides of the windows.

  He would get behind the steering wheel, then strip off his clothes. No seat belt--

  He'd start from the top of the hill above their house. He'd floor the accelerator.

  First gear--

  Second gear--

  Third--

  And just as he shifted into fourth he'd steer directly into that old Chinese elm in their front yard--the one they made him prune every spring, when he'd climb up inside the branches and use a garden hose as a safety harness.

  The explosion of metal and glass would be heard for blocks. His parents would run outside and find his naked corpse squished between the driver's seat and the tree trunk--maybe his head would've exploded like a watermelon dropped from a rooftop--while photos of naked guys fucking and sucking and jacking and cumming fluttered down onto their perfectly manicured, guts-splattered lawn.

  Some neighbors would gather, while some might only pull back their drapes.

  And his mother would shriek while his father collapsed from a heart attack--or better
yet, a massive stroke.

  They'll be so, so, so fucking sorry.

  And I'll be with Jonathan again.

  Chapter 5

  In the morning his outlook was no less morose, so he decided to skip school--after all, why should he sit through yet another mind-numbing political science class if he was going to kill himself? I'll go for a drive instead.

  After slipping on some jeans and his favorite sweatshirt--it was oversized and navy blue--he tied on his filthy Adidas, then went out to where he'd parked his van.

  He headed north from his apartment in Culver City, fighting the morning's rush-hour swarm as he struggled up Pacific Coast Highway in his feebly powered steel box. Eventually, the traffic thinned as he neared his destination, with the road having narrowed from four to three lanes in each direction, and then finally down to two.

  His turnoff loomed, so he pulled into the center meridian and stopped.

  Finally, a break in the opposing traffic appeared. So he wheeled a U-turn, and then pulled up next to the wall of boulders the county had amassed to keep the winter's waves from obliterating the roadway. He pulled the hand brake tight, threw open the door and stepped out, slammed the door and then picked his way down to the shoreline. Once his feet hit the sand, he turned north toward the wealthy enclave atop the cliffs beyond Boulder Creek, which was the trickle of water that meandered down from the hillsides and served as Ballena Beach's unofficial No Trespassing sign.

  He trudged for the better part of an hour before rounding a bend and seeing it: the familiar clay-tiled roofs of the Tyler compound. Then a few paces later he spotted the wooden gazebo perched atop the precipice, and the decrepit wooden staircase that zigzagged down through the dull, green cactus to the calendar-perfect beach below.

  Looking up at it, barely two years later, he could hardly believe he'd ever been granted access to that castle. He gazed awestruck now as he craned his neck, while recalling the layouts of the expansive rooms inside, with names like the sunroom and the conservatory and the rumpus room and the drawing room. He was still able to visualize the stately sofas and prissy French antiques and gloomy paintings and shimmering crystal displayed in each color-coordinated vignette; he'd never before been exposed to that level of wealth and was certain he wouldn't be again, so he'd memorized each extravagant detail in between those sexual rumbles with his boy.

  And if he closed his eyes he could still feel the terrible silence of the rooms--a silence, he imagined, that might feel like being locked in a museum at night, all alone.

  But he was never alone there.

  He was always with him.

  Jonathan Tyler. Equal parts valedictorian and rebel. Shipped to Ballena Beach after his father was killed in Vietnam and his mother overdosed on sleeping pills and Southern Comfort. Groomed by his controlling aunt, Katharine Tyler, and her creepy husband, Bill Mortson, to assume eventual control of the family's yacht-building and real-estate enterprises. The kid with the face of a dark angel and the body of a young Olympian, whose lust for expensive toys was rivaled only by his craving for Arthur's varsity-honed body.

  Jonathan had charged all of that stuffy grandeur up there with an irreverent energy; his presence had been like a sudden thunderstorm on a stifling, stagnant summer night. And Arthur had been that storm's lightning rod--or so he'd considered himself at the time.

  But that was before Tiffany--and the baby.

  And the accident.

  He trudged across the sand to Lay-Z-Boy Rock, so named by Jonathan for its prehistoric lounge-chair proportions, then sat and scanned the flat, gray horizon for some answers.

  Did he really want to end it all? Yes...and no. But suicide was something he'd considered since his early teens, upon realizing his attraction to guys was heavier than any gravity girls possessed. But it wasn't just that--he really did struggle with long bouts of depression. He recalled those three black months at seventeen when he'd barely been able to rise each morning, but then somehow made it through his high school classes only to return home, sequester himself in his room until dinner-

  -endured slumped before his plate, eating sullenly--and then do his evening chores before retiring to his waiting pile of homework.

  After two months of this gloom-fest he'd actually set a date, which he wrote in his journal, along with the declaration:

  Feb. 15, 1986

  If I'm not happy in one month, I'm going to kill myself.

  The acuity of that particular stretch of depression had to do with Jonathan, who'd become his best friend at Ballena Beach High even though Arthur was a senior and Jonathan was a sophomore. He had fallen completely for the boy, and his pining for him became the maraschino cherry in a suicidal cocktail mixed from his sexual despondency, his monstrous home life and his pervasive hopelessness.

  And so one night, just a week before his "deadline," he and Jonathan had gone for a walk on this very beach. They'd sat in the sand, shoulder to shoulder, sharing how they hated school and their teachers and their lives at home. Then Arthur, in a moment of bravery that still amazed him even now, decided that if he had only a week to live, he might as well be honest with his buddy--at this point, he had absolutely nothing to lose.

  Nothing. Just like now.

  They'd been talking about girls, and Arthur had been doing his best to keep up with Jonathan's enthusiastic ruminations about some of the more popular females at school: the flag girls and the cheerleaders and some of the hot stoner chicks, et cetera.

  "Krystal Loomis is beautiful, you know?" Jonathan remarked as his eyes tracked a low-swooping pelican. "I mean, she's not all fake looking like Stephanie Corran with that fried blonde hair, or Whitney Snyder-- man, she wears too much makeup.

  She's naturally hot, I think. She looks twenty-five, huh?"

  Arthur, in the meantime, had been scrutinizing some frothing water some distance out, wondering whether it was a whale disturbing the calm, or some dolphins. "So why don't you ask her out?" he asked, feigning encouragement.

  Jonathan nodded but didn't say anything at first. "Yeah, maybe I will. But maybe you should instead," he suggested with a playful nudge to his shoulder. "You haven't gone out with anyone this year, huh?"

  "I'm considering the priesthood."

  " What? "

  "Kidding." He shook his head, managing a weak chuckle. "Actually, Krystal's not really my...uh...type."

  A barrage of waves, one pushing behind the last, encompassed the beach with sudden, fumping thunder.

  "So what exactly is your type?" Jonathan nearly shouted.

  Their eyes met and Arthur was struck again by Jonathan's beauty-- those huge, flashing brown eyes with their impossibly long eyelashes, his ruler-straight nose, the trapezoidal planes of his cheeks, his pouty lips, the way the sea breeze tousled that hair down crazily over his eyebrows. The cleft of his chin.

  Arthur looked away, appearing to wait for the waves to calm.

  Finally, it was quiet again. "I guess my type is kind of changing," he muttered to the sand between his knees. Please don't ask me anything more--I'm sick of lying and I want to kiss you so badly.

  "So, like, what?" Jonathan whispered. "Who keeps you up at night?"

  Fear punched him in the gut, and he swallowed hard. To say what was in his heart was too dangerous--but then just yesterday he'd grabbed the Winchester with its dusty box of bullets, and he'd unzipped the weapon from its orange nylon case and looked down the shadowy barrel.

  Try it on for size, a quiet voice had suggested, so he'd held the weapon in front of his mouth.

  And now for the ultimate blow job, mocked that same voice as his lips closed around the hollow end, and the tang of burnished metal and spent gunpowder pinched his tongue.

  "Artie?" came Jonathan's voice. "Hey, what's wrong?" He'd seen that his eyes were somewhere else, somewhere bad.

  One squeeze and it'll all go away.

  Arthur shook his head. The waves were too noisy again--he had to wait for them to get quieter; if he said anything now, he'd hav
e to shout, and guys just do not shout about this. He looked up and saw that a big range of waves was heaving toward the beach, and then they fell onto the sand, and then more just kept coming. He shook his head and shook his head again, and held his knees, and his heart said, Just tell him.

  If the waves get quiet, I will. Please, just make it quiet.

  And as if Poseidon himself had heard his prayer, there was a long fizz, followed by sudden quiet.

  Now or never, old buddy. "You," he managed at last. "You. You're who."

  They sat together in silence, for how long Arthur could not tell.

  It could've been ten seconds. It could've been an hour.

  And then a burst of courage made him look over at his friend, and he saw that he was staring back at him in a sideways squint, with his head faced out to sea.

  He looked away.

  "Artie?"

  A hand pressed his shoulder, and he flinched. He turned and their eyes locked. Fear gripped him again, but the memory of the gun in his mouth gave him strength. He closed his eyes. "You, Jonathan," he said again. "I have feelings for you. And I don't know what to do--they aren't, um, going away."

  "Me, too," Jonathan told him at last. "For you, I mean. I just never said anything because I thought you'd...you know."

  "Yeah, I know."

  "Do you...feel this way about other guys, too?"

  "Not really."

  "Me, neither," he said. "We're just really close, you and me."

  "Yeah."

  "Yeah."

  That night Arthur had his first thrilling kiss, when they embraced on the moonlit sand with the tide swirling around their ankles. And then, two nights later, after Katharine and Bill had gone out to a fund-raiser for Children's Hospital, they'd thrown open all the mansion's French doors and chased each other naked through the windswept rooms, and then fallen into Jonathan's immense, luxurious bed, where they kissed and coaxed and stroked each other and took each other's seed into their bodies. And if he thought that he was in love before, he discovered now how such a love, when reciprocated, can flourish into obsession.

  Jonathan became his sun. And he, in turn, did his best to be Jonathan's planets, moons, asteroids and comets.