‘I don’t have AIDS. I used my own needle.’
His mouth was scornful in a way I had never seen. ‘Your own needle. Christ.’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t share.
‘You don’t know what you did.’
I was seven or eight or perhaps nine years old. Let’s just say, to be fair, even, moderate, that I was in the middle—that I was eight and he, Raymond, being six years older than me, was fourteen. Perhaps I was naive, untutored, ill advised. But all I felt was a vague surprise, a curiosity, Raymond standing beside my bunk in the boat, pulling back my sheet.
My parents were in the foredeck, Eric in the cabin bunk. Raymond touched me the way a doctor might—clinically, coolly looking at me as if at a scratch, a bruise, a bite on the inside of the ankle. ‘You need to keep clean in there,’ he said, so quiet, so calm, I don’t recall saying anything to this, or doing anything. I only recall the sheet, the raised nightgown, his fingers as he touched me.
Then my father came back into the cabin and Raymond stepped away from the bunk.
‘What are you doing?’ my father asked.
‘Nothing,’ Raymond said, and nothing was the same again.
I felt the steam of the shower water soft on my bare chest. I felt the wind at my ankles and inside my skirt. I felt Raymond coming toward me, the way you feel the end of day. I closed my eyes in my bedroom, the sound of rain dripping from the pipes. I lay down beside the water, under the bamboo, in the boathouse.
‘I don’t like spiders and snakes,’ Raymond sang, sidling along the side of the house, ‘but that ain’t what it takes to love me—’
‘I don’t want to hurt you.’ If he hurt me I would bleed.
How to say how much I hated him? How to say how much I hated myself, there in the dark waiting for him.
I went home and I thought Wayne would follow me, but he didn’t. Instead, Ray called from across the street, at the telephone by the plastic buckets of cut flowers outside the Korean deli.
Everything comes out eventually—at three and four and five in the morning, shooting coke and heroin with your brother. I told Raymond about Wayne and he told me that Wayne and my mother had been sleeping together for years.
‘Didn’t you know?’ Dr. Keats asks.
‘No.’
‘You never guessed?’
‘Why would I?’
Raymond was six the year I was born, the same year Wayne buried his first wife and first flew to Antigua. Maybe it was then that Ray saw how easy it could be: Wayne dropping his hand surreptitiously from the thigh to the inside of the thigh.
My mother was not cold. My mother liked men. She was the great prize in town, at least for my father when he saw her, thirteen to his seventeen. And for Wayne at Pigeon Point, their bodies side by side in the noon sun, perspiration on the back of the neck. In the evenings, they took showers, waiting for Edward to come home, for the candles to be lit, fish to be seared, wine poured.
‘But you don’t know,’ I said to Raymond. ‘Not for certain.’
‘I know.’
‘Is it even our business?’
‘I’m just saying what I saw.’
‘But we’re grown now.’
‘They were grown then,’ Ray said, cleaning his clear plastic syringe.
John McCaney stands outside Dining Hall—tall, blond, a tennis player from Wilton, Connecticut. He is here for cocaine. Also, he is on probation for ‘womanizing.’ Still, I let him talk to me, him with his arms crossed in his white polo shirt, his silver Rolex and buffed white fingernails. I stand in my white shorts on the curb by the lawn, pushing at the grass with my sneaker, taking a cigarette from his shirt pocket.
In August, a heat wave comes to Fairley. Kenneth drives me to the doctors’ office in the Lincoln. Only two pounds to gain and I’ll be off car restriction. I don’t know why they act as if I’m going to race around the grounds like the anorexic girls do, but they cover their bases.
Keats is out of breath, his thin blue shirt damp. I sit in a skirt and T-shirt, in my beige sandals, flat with straps. I hate girls who wear high-heeled sandals—especially in mental hospitals.
As Keats cools down, he breaks into a sweat.
Are you all right?’ I ask.
‘Yes.’ He wipes his forehead with a white handkerchief. ‘I can come back.’
‘I don’t want you to come back.’
I hardly know anything about Dr. Keats. I know he is married because he wears a wedding band. I know he is from Virginia, because he told me. I know he drives a glossy black compact car, that his first rounds are at seven a.m. and his last at six p.m., and that when he is stressed, he writes lists. The day he told me this—about his lists—I felt so far away from him, I could hardly stand it. He was so different from me: his healthy skin, his quiet voice.
‘Let’s talk about Raymond,’ he says now.
‘ Thy brother came with subtlety. That Raymond?’
‘Is that how you feel about him?’
‘Pretty much.’
‘Can you say it in your own words?’
‘My own words.’ On the grass is a yellow flower, small and in the shape of phlox.
Keats’s hands shake when he drinks water from his Dixie cup. ‘Are you on medication?’ I ask.
He laughs. ‘No.’
‘It’s okay if you are.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Beck was about Ray. Frank was about Ray. Probably Wayne was about Ray.’
’You’re still holding on.’
‘To whom?’
‘To Raymond.’
‘Not to Raymond,’ I said.
‘To the way you felt about him.’
‘Do you know that poem by Anne Sexton, “Wanting to Die”? It’s in the library.’
‘Probably not.’
‘Since you ask, most days I cannot remember… Then the almost unnamable lust returns.’
‘Is that how you felt?’
‘Pretty much.’
‘You were in conflict.’
‘About the lust.’
‘About making promises to yourself—and then not keeping them.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Maybe that’s what you need to work on.’
‘Promises?’
‘The way you put yourself in conflict.’
I smile, but I look away again—at the shimmering, burning trees in the heat wave. ‘Do you know John McCaney?’
‘Yes.’
I shake my head. ‘It’s sad.’
‘What is?’ Keats asks.
I don’t tell him, though. He is smart enough to guess. He should guess if he knows me at all.
‘Once,’ I say ‘just before Ray came back from Antigua, I was in Central Park on a bench by Sheep’s Meadow. I guess it was during the week, because cars were going through, and I saw a silver Mercedes, like Frank’s car. I remember feeling sick, suddenly that it wasn’t over.’
‘What wasn’t? Frank?’
‘Not just Frank—me, my wanting to be with Frank, or people like Frank. I started crying. It was like looking into the future and feeling sorry for yourself before anything has even happened. I went to my father. I told him I didn’t want to come to the airport to meet Ray, I didn’t want to go to dinner.’
‘And what did he say?’
‘He said, Why?’
Wayne didn’t call me. I called him, from my bed, as Raymond stood at the stove. He wasn’t there, though. Ray and I mixed cocaine and heroin, which is known as a speedball, and then it was three a.m. and then four and then five a.m. Then Wayne was at the door.
‘It’s me. Open up.’
Ray picked up our kit, cleaned off the table, and took everything into the bathroom.
I opened the door and stepped outside.
‘Jesus Christ, Betsy.’
‘Ray’s here.’
‘I can tell that.’ He took hold of my wrist. ‘Come on,’ he pulled at me. ‘We’re leaving.’
‘We’re what?’
‘I told Ida.’
‘You did?’
‘Yes. We need to leave, right now.’
He didn’t look so good.
‘Okay. Hold on.’
I made him wait in the hallway. I made Ray give me a vial of cocaine. Wayne took my hand and I followed him down to his car. It was raining, a hard heavy rain.
‘You look terrible,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘We need a few days. I need a few days.’ His car smelled of cigarettes. I opened the window as he pulled out onto Ninth Avenue. We went west, to a parkway where the blossom trees were heavy from the rain, tulips black and purple in the grass.
‘Look at that,’ I marveled.
‘What?’
‘The green.’
Wayne took my hand. ‘We’re going to go away,’ he said, ‘for a week or two.’
‘All right.’
He took my hand. ‘You’re cold.’
‘Could we stop at a gas station?’
‘What for?’
‘To use the bathroom.’
‘You have drugs on you, don’t you?’
‘No.’
‘Don’t lie to me.’
‘Okay.’
‘Give them to me.’
‘Wayne—‘
He held out his hand. His face looked old and I felt sorry for him, suddenly. I gave him the vial and he slipped it in his pocket.
‘It’s all right. I’ll get you something.’
In Scarsdale, we stopped on the main street. The sky was pale gray, no sun showing. He wrote me prescriptions for Valium and Librium. He gave me money and waited outside the pharmacy.
‘I want us to go away. Can you go to Miami?’
‘Miami?’
He was serious. I was glad he was. Still, it gave me a shiver, somehow, realizing it.
‘We need to be alone.’ He sounded resigned, as if this were an aftermath.
‘All right.’
He booked us two seats for twelve-ten p.m.
‘Are we running away?’ I asked. ‘No.’
‘It feels like it.’
‘We’re starting over. We’re also getting you off drugs.’
He talked like a father, like someone who had never even done drugs, which maybe he hadn’t. ‘We’re also getting AIDS tests.’
He changed his shirt, white for white, and his gray slacks for a pair of jeans. He looked different in jeans, innocuous, his back bent.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing.’
We had a suite on the ocean at the Bal Harbor Sheraton. We ordered up wine and Scotch and tuna steaks that we hardly touched. We couldn’t sleep, either of us, opening the windows for the warm air, closing them to run the air conditioner. Wayne counted the ribs in my chest. He took his wedding band from his finger. ‘What do I do with this?’
‘I don’t know.’
He put it in my hand. ‘Throw it away will you?’
I went to the bathroom, thinking I could flush it down the toilet. I couldn’t do it, though. I opened the window and put the ring on the ledge, where he couldn’t see it.
We went to the Bal Harbor mall and Wayne bought me a bathing suit, sandals, pants and T-shirts and dresses.
‘What will my parents say?’
‘We’ll deal with that.’
But we never did, deal with that.
I left a message for Raymond that I was in Miami. Then I didn’t care anymore—about anything but Wayne. ‘You’re really doing it?’ I asked, touching the side of his mouth.
‘I am.’
He couldn’t sleep. I woke in the night and he was staring at the ceiling. ‘Wayne,’ I touched his shoulder. But he didn’t want to talk. He didn’t want to make love either.
‘It will be bad.’ He looked at the drawn blinds. ‘For a while. It will take a lot for both of us to do this.’
‘You don’t have to.’
‘I know.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Yes.’ He finally turned to look at me. ‘I’m sure.’
I started to cry then, not from sadness or grief or even fear—but from relief, because I believed him. Wayne gave me another Valium and took one himself, so he could sleep.
It didn’t help much. I kept opening my eyes to see him nursing his Scotch, looking at me or at the low lying clouds beginning to lighten in the dawn, the sun coming up in a bright pink ball. Wayne liked to walk in the mornings, on the beach when it was quiet. I watched him swim, his head bobbing down the shoreline. I watched him walk back to me, shaking water from his hair.
We had breakfast outside: eggs and bacon and potatoes, or sometimes just coffee and cigarettes, coffee and cantaloupe, coffee and Wayne’s silence. We took cabs to South Beach and Miami Beach, and back to Bal Harbor. ‘You will marry me, won’t you?’ Wayne said, standing on the beach.
‘If you leave Ida.’
‘I have left Ida.’
Afternoons, we lay inside on the air-conditioned sheets. We started drinking and Wayne said we needed to make a plan.
‘About Ida?’
‘About us.’
I rolled off his chest, sipping from a glass of wine. ‘You know,’ I said, as the ocean rose and fell, ‘Ray told me about you and my mother.’
‘That was a long time ago.’
‘Ray couldn’t understand how Dad let you in the house.’
‘Betsy.’
‘What?’
He settled his eyes on me. ‘Are you with me to get back at your parents?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course I am.’
‘That’s what it sounds like.’
‘How do I know that’s not what you’re doing?’ I asked. ‘Running off with me to get back at them.’
‘Because I’m not.’
‘Well then.’
‘But you’re asking me for answers.’
‘I’m just telling you that Raymond didn’t understand why Dad—you know—let you in the house.’
‘Don’t make trouble.’
I laughed.
‘That’s what you’re doing.’
He kissed the side of my mouth.
‘Am I?’ I asked, kissing him back.
‘Yes.’
‘I’m sorry.’
It was AIDS or it was Ida, but he could’t make love. Once, early in the morning, he woke and pulled me onto him. Even then, he stopped suddenly.
‘What will you do,’ I asked one afternoon, ‘if I do go to medical school?’
Wayne smiled and took my hands, both of us naked on the bed. ‘ When you go to medical school, I’ll hang out my shingle.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’
‘Wherever you went, you could do that?’
‘Pretty much.’
‘In Maryland?’
‘Yes.’
‘New Hampshire?’
‘Probably.’
‘Connecticut?’
He nodded.
I hate Connecticut.
They give shock treatments at Fairley, though not to me. Shock makes you forget. Mary gets shock and she forgets everything. She is an English teacher, but she can’t remember what she has read. She carries a notepad so she can write down what happens to her.
Most of the books around here aren’t so good, anyway: just abandoned crime novels, mysteries, and field guides to New England trees and flowers. In Dobson House, though, I found The Crack-Up by E Scott Fitzgerald. It didn’t seem like the kind of book they should have around here at all. But I read it, and it was really good.
The phone rang on the fifth day. It rang at six a.m., and at six-thirty as we left our room. ‘Don’t answer it,’ Wayne said. He should have, though, I thought. He should have just answered it.
‘Why not?”
He pulled the door shut behind us.
‘What did you tell Ray?’ he asked, as we walked to the ocean.
‘Just that I was in
Miami.’
‘With me?’
‘No.’
The sand was damp near the shore. ‘Your father knows where I stay down here.’
‘You think he’d call?’
‘Him or your mother.’
We stayed on the beach until noon, until the sand was blistering white, the ocean pale blue and green. Wayne watched me walk to the water, my knees and elbows and limbs all sharp. As I swam, he lit a cigarette, sitting cross-legged in his new trunks, not as skinny as I was, but lean, long, with beautiful hands and feet. I came back and lay beside him, dropping my cold wet hand on his hot forearm.
‘You’re worried,’ I said.
‘A little.’
I wished he had answered the phone.
Down the beach, a group of high school students came down to the water.
‘Because of the phone call?’
‘Yes. Also the AIDS.’
‘We didn’t share.’
‘Betsy—‘
‘Why didn’t you answer the phone?’
‘We need time, that’s all.’
‘Have you changed your mind?’
‘No.’
He wouldn’t look at me, though. I sat up and combed my hair and he still didn’t look at me.
Back at the hotel, we took showers. Wayne was on the bed, wrapped in a towel from the waist, when the phone rang again.
‘Betsy,’ my mother said when I picked up.
‘Mum.’
Her voice was level, not angry or cold or too warm. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Not much.’
‘Is Wayne there?’
‘Wayne?’ He shook his head at me. ‘No.’
She paused then. ‘Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine.’
The silence sounded like swimming, like the silence under water.
‘You’re sure?’
‘Yes.’
Wayne had his head in his hands.
‘Tell Wayne to call Ida.’ My mother hung up.
I hung up. ‘Mum says call Ida.’
His face was so white it hurt.
‘Oh, God,’ he said.
‘Wayne.’
He started crying and put his head in his hands again.
‘Wayne.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
I sat beside him. I tried to touch him.
‘Don’t,’ he said, and pushed me away.
I had known this would happen. Still I wished it wouldn’t. Still I wished I could stop him, crying until he was sobbing, sobbing until his sobbing was a sound I would never get over. It was the kind of sobbing you do at a death—only worse, because I was not dead.
Since You Ask Page 14