The Tricky Part

by Martin Moran

  He’s at the very back, past the damp, concrete room where you can wash the sand from your feet or sit on a wooden bench and change in and out of your trunks. He stands still under his curly brown hair, staring straight ahead at the sloppily painted brick. A slice of sunlight falls across his cheek. I take a position two away and open the fly of my baggy swimsuit. I study the walls, gray with countless coats of paint and etched everywhere with graffiti: The Tigers Suck, Yor Motha farts to. The disembodied laughter of children echoes through the room.

  I play serious at the business of peeing as I feel him look up at me. Over to me. He’s giving off something I know. An admission, an admixture of desire and fear that clings to him even as it radiates toward me. I know then that, in a certain way, we are the same. I feel sure his heart is pounding like mine, his knees shaking. He’s got the madness; that unrest that sends you searching off-limits where your mother or friends could not in their wildest imaginings think you’d be—pulsing with want in front of a public toilet, your bike, your car, perched near for quick escape. You should be at school or work or meeting a friend, should be more careful, but you’re not. You’re here alone at the edge of your world . . . hunting.

  I think I know this about the green-eyed boy: he’s longing. I glance over. He looks me square in the face, God bless him. His eyes are bright, pleading. His brow furrowed with the look of a tenth grader awaiting his report card. A delicate gold chain with the Star of David glimmers at the V-neck of his white T-shirt. His glasses, slightly damaged—bent—are barely clinging to the bridge of his elegant nose. Everything about him seems fragile. He’s been knocked down, I imagine. Teased. Perhaps for the soft look in his eyes or the tenor of his voice. He’s been slapped, I think, so that his glasses tumbled to the tarmac where the other guys shoot hoops. My heart breaks for him and I say with my steady gaze—I understand. I hated recess, too. I would never slap you down.

  I’m looking at the green-eyed boy, at the smattering of picked-at pimples on his whiskerless chin. At his hair, cut in the perfect, silly shape of a bowl. I watch his gaze drop toward my hands as I shake away the last drips of pee. Then his eyes rise to my face; proposition electrifies the air.

  I nod toward the three stalls to our left. He’s anticipated this. Instantly, he scurries, chooses the last one and leaves the door ajar. Heart hammering, I follow him toward the metal closet where piss and ammonia sour the air. I step in and close the latch, the click of it like confessionals I’ve entered before—closing a door, drawing a curtain to expose secrets, ask forgiveness. But here there’s no somber velvet, no red light that snaps on when you kneel to begin, Bless me father, for I have sinned, and my back is pressed against the stall. My God, what am I doing? He faces me and with not a trace of hesitation he reaches for my swimsuit. His fingers tremble as he pulls at the drawstrings and slides my trunks down. He takes me then, gently, into his hands.

  I’m stunned by his quickness, his will, his intent to touch what he wants. His eyes feast with the madness of a starved child who’s found the answer to his craving. As if this zone of flesh, this piece of me, is his subsistence and he’s blind to any other appetite. His smooth face speaks of worship too. There is something holy in his touch and I understand. I allow. I’m drunk with being wanted. My God, where, I wonder, from whom did he learn such things? So soon?

  Thirty seconds, a minute, perhaps, has elapsed. I swivel and sit on the toilet. I draw him toward me, fumble at the buttons of his cutoffs. Who is this boy? What is his name? I pull down his shorts. Where is his school? What language does he speak? He places a hand on my head. I feel it tremble. Is his family large, his father alive? I take him to me. I’m terrified. I can’t believe I’m doing it. And a thought rises from just beyond the veil of consciousness, from somewhere deep in my body, that this is somehow familiar. This is very like what he did with me when I was small and he sat on the bucket in the barn. Just as he did when the door was closed and all the other campers were at the lake. I flash on it, how I looked down at the sunburned crown of Bob’s head, like the red eye of a storm, moving back and forth, wisps of his brown hair spiraling clockwise. How I closed my eyes, so grateful for the relief, for the five seconds of . . . Oh, God. . . .

  “Ohhh,” the boy sighs. I’m startled, pierced by this first hint of his voice—high pitched. I glance up to see his eyes clenched, as if he’s hurting. His glasses have slipped; they’re ready to fall from the tip of his nose. His hands rest with a timid grip on my shoulders. He throws back his head. I can’t see his face now. Just this new-sprung triangle of hair, the smooth arch of his torso, the glimmer of his necklace. He’s breathing shallow and fast and then, and then, my God! A sound. A click. A step. An intruder.

  We both jump and instantly hike up our shorts. I’m seized with terror, with utter disbelief at my transgression. Still sitting, I retract my legs, stick my feet in the air, and balance like a clumsy frog on the edge of the toilet. They mustn’t see four feet, I’m thinking. Mustn’t count four legs. And at this moment, holding on to the toilet-paper dispenser, legs in the air, heart racing, I know who they are, all lined up just outside the stall: Sister Christine, my parents, a phalanx of police, all of them with handcuffs, JUG, humiliation, at the ready. They’re out for vice and I’m it. Moral questions zing through the fetid air. I confess. I’m lost. How did it come to this, to toilets, to me in a men’s room with a boy? This cannot happen. Give me jail. Excommunication. Shit.

  The young man stands still. He’s much calmer than I. Perhaps because the word minor! isn’t shrieking around his brain. From my precarious perch I launch into a round of charades: Button up, I point. Tuck in. You. You go. Me . . . I’ll follow. My arms flap instructions. I finish with a single finger to my lips: Shhhhhh.

  He surprises me again with his sureness, self-possession. He even manages to toss me a crooked grin as he snaps the last button of his fly. Then he gently unlatches the squeaking metal door and slips away. I hear the brisk patter of his sandals across the concrete as I rise to close the latch. Beads of sweat fall from my brow, splatter across the floor. I stand perfectly still. I listen intently for any sounds of trouble beyond the pounding of my criminal heart.

  Nothing. No one.

  I walk, then, out into the glare of sun, into the blaze of noon. The boardwalk is busy with bodies. I watch a shirtless, potbellied dad pass by, pushing a stroller. I send my gaze far down the beach to the tall, rickety roller coaster rising up, hazy in the distance, like a lost and ancient city. The one called Coney Island. I look around for the green-eyed boy and spot him. He’s draped over the fence along the concrete path that leads from the men’s room back toward the Atlantic. His arms dangle over the top railing, his fingers stretch toward the sand as if searching for heat—a lonely, loose-limbed boy on a summer afternoon. I walk toward him. I want to say something kind. I want to tell him to please take care, be well. I’m not a foot, a word, away from stopping when he turns his head and looks right at me.

  I pretend not to see.

  I step across the scorching sand, regretting my silence, regretting everything. I make my way back to the folks I’m visiting, old Colorado friends who are helping me find my way in the big new city. I kneel down and resume the building of castles with their youngest son.

  “Hi, Christopher,” I say.

  He smiles, so glad to see me—Uncle Nice. He takes my hand and with sweetest trust, leads me right to the edge of the patient water.

  6

  I GIVE UP Sunday afternoons now and again. A family duty, a welcome break from Manhattan. I take the train. Metro North. About an hour up the Hudson River to Maryknoll. Often, the train seems to be filled with women and children on their way to visit the men inside Sing Sing—Ossining’s other major institution. At the station you hear the gypsy cabs organizing: “Prison here, Maryknoll this way.” On my first trip, when the taxi approached the hill where the Mother House and the priest’s residence are situated, I was astonished at the sight. The Maryknoll compound rise
s like a vision of Asia on a Westchester hill. It’s much grander and bigger than I’d imagined. The main building (the one for the men) is palatial, and with its enormous red-sloped roof and oriental architecture looks as if it’s been transported directly from Imperial China. The cabby asked, “You want the guys or the gals?”

  “The Cloister, please.”

  “That’s up here on the right.”

  Sister Rachel, the portress, greets me at the chapel door and leads me down a long hall smelling of snuffed candles. We pass crucifixes and statuary sculpted of wood and bone, works from the Maryknoll missions throughout Africa and Asia. Sister Rachel deposits me in a small, simply furnished parlor. A table is set for lunch. Marion will arrive through a door that leads to the interior of the cloister. On the ceiling I can see the rust marks left from the grate, the mesh of metal that in days past completely separated visitors from the contemplatives.

  “Sister Theo will be right with you.”

  She arrives now in a wheelchair. Her face is calm, beams the warmth of a woman happily wedded to her way of life. We speak in the same quiet way we did when I was twelve. She listens. She is always curious about my progress, my thoughts. I tell her about the loft in SoHo, my three ambitious Broommates, my various crazy jobs. She’s concerned, I sense, but careful not to ask too much about my personal life. “You’ve got to keep your heart and mind clear in that city. Do you get to Mass?” I hate to lie but I nod vaguely. She doesn’t press, doesn’t ask which parish.

  She tells me more about how their day is structured around contemplation, communal meetings. She tells me that the entire community offers constant prayers that I might be able to quit the restaurant business for work as an actor. I’m grateful. I’m surprised to realize how much I want, how easily I believe, that their prayers have real power. We eat tofu or soy cakes and salad and sip decaf coffee.

  After lunch and midday prayers the other sisters carry folding chairs into the parlor and we make a circle to discuss current events. They have dwindled to thirteen, mostly old. It is an exhausted vocation in some ways but these women are all vigor. I feel awkward with them at first, boy caught in the ladies room, but after a few visits, I get used to it. Enjoy it. I’m the special Sunday visitor, the guy center stage.

  “Tell us, Marty, what do you do all day? How do you look for work in the theater?” asks Sister Grace.

  “When I’m not working in the restaurant, I go to as many auditions as I can find.”

  “What do you do at auditions?”

  “Whatever they want . . . usually I sing or read from a script.”

  “Is Times Square as busy as ever?”

  “What does it mean to you to be an artist?”

  “What do you think of Cardinal O’Connor?”

  The questions keep coming. They really want to know. I try to be frank. They inspire frankness. Comes a moment Marion throws a smile my way. “Marty, won’t you sing us a song?”

  I do. I have an uptune and a ballad prepared.

  Who will buy this wonderful morning, such a sky you never did see!

  I throw in a pirouette, once, a back handspring. The sisters all gasp and laugh like crazy. Things loosen up and Marion recites a poem by Longfellow, beautifully and by heart. The sisters tell me what’s really going on in Guatemala, the Sudan, El Salvador. They’ve lived there, they know the people of the mountains and the deserts. Speak their languages, pray for them and for Mr. Reagan whose policies, they say, have caused countless deaths. “Imagine, Marty,” says Sister Theresa, a serious woman with an unwimpled pixie-gray hairdo. “Maryknoll made the CIA list of organizations most hostile to the Reagan administration.”

  “Our phones have been tapped,” adds Sister Madelaine.

  “We’re not sure of that,” says Theresa.

  “Yes we are,” says Madelaine. They all nod. “Imagine, that in this world, teaching someone to read is rendered subversive. When someone is starving you don’t ask what faction they belong to.”

  Sometimes I return to the same question . . . what’s it like here? How can you live this life?

  Marion answers most pointedly. “I desire to go all the way for God. Life is only for love, Marty, and sacrifice is the language of love.”

  “And sacrifice isn’t necessarily deprivation, or suffering,” Sister Grace adds. “It’s an offering. It is a way of drawing close to what we respect and love.” I am amazed at the deep hum of comfort I feel in their presence. These are messages I want to hear. This is kinship that echoes my boyhood.

  I glance, again, at a beautiful drawing on the wall of a young John the Baptist. A long-haired man with a handsome and melancholy face. I experience a familiar twinge of warmth, of want, each time I look up at him.

  Sister Theresa says, “In a world that has lost the sense of God, our lives serve as witness, as a reminder, of the supernatural.” The circled sisters nod.

  “Who drew that?” I finally ask one day, pointing to the gorgeous man on the wall.

  “Your Great Uncle Augustus Tack. He was a famous artist, a painter like your sister, Chris.” Marion tells me to be sure to visit the Paulist Church at the corner of Sixtieth Street and Ninth Avenue. “Across from Fordham, where your Great Uncle Ted served as a Jesuit. There is a mural there painted by your Uncle Gus. A superb composition that includes some beautiful text.”

  (One afternoon, I heeded her advice and visited the church—and still often do. Deep into the nave, on the left side, is a painting of the funeral procession of Saint Theresa, the Little Flower. There is a quiet place to kneel and, in the dim light, study the colorful work. The text Marion spoke of is stenciled in gold on the wall next to the fresco. It says, in part, Love will consume us only in the measure of our self surrender. Somehow I feel sure that this is the very thing Marion hoped I would read.)

  The sisters always stuff my backpack with homemade bread and cookies. When I hug Marion goodbye she says, “It’s so good of you to give up your time to come visit. It means so much to me. And the other sisters.”

  “I’m glad to come,” I tell her.

  She whispers into my ear, “Keep writing. Let me know how you are and what you’re thinking. I’ll do the same.” On my way out the door, she slips me a five (her allowance for a month). “For that awfully expensive train, dear.”

  She wheels herself into her sanctum and I exit, into the world, onto the noisy train, into the roaring city.

  Sacrifice is the language of love. I keep hearing the phrase as I gaze at the Palisades during my melancholy ride along the Hudson. I hear it as something true and beautiful, as something to live up to. Then I hear it as something stern and old and oppressively Catholic. When I get home after that first Ossining visit, I go to the dictionary.

  Sacrifice.

  Sacrificium: Sacer–sacred; facere–to make, to do.

  Sacrifice. To make sacred.

  7

  THE NUNS’ PRAYERS? Perseverance? I begin to find work. Real work. A summer at Williamstown Theater Festival, a stint in Maine doing Shakespeare, a short-lived Broadway revival of Oliver!, an Equity card, a quick tour of the musical Doonesbury, during which I get to hang out in various bars with the brilliant Garry Trudeau. Life is a blast, it’s suddenly full of signs that I just might actually make it. Make a life in the theater. I’m being paid, making good friends. I even book a television commercial (a “Japanese buyout,” they tell me) for Nescafé, in which I play a dancing coffee bean. I leap as high as I can in the bulky costume, sweat like crazy; deposit the check. Here it is, the professional life Winnie spoke of.

  I fall for a formidable colleague named Alexa. A supersmart girl with a large and embracing Philadelphia family. I want it to work. Our relationship makes me think again about the possibility of being a husband, perhaps a father—Sacrifice is the language of love. But it’s so much confusion and subterfuge. I can’t stop, don’t want to stop, looking for men. It ends painfully and as we part I vow I will be alone for the rest of my life. Just give me work. Work.r />
  It’s the beginning of my third year in New York, January of 1985, and I land my first off-Broadway play. It’s an experimental music-theater piece. An opera based on a Gertrude Stein novel, to be directed by a young woman named Anne Bogart. “She’s a big deal, very avant-guard,” a friend-in-the-know tells me. “Look, her picture’s in the Village Voice this week. She’s doing some wild production of a Wedekind play at NYU.” Though I find the Stein script bizarre and completely inscrutable, I’m thrilled to be one of the eight performers cast. To be working in New York with this up and coming woman director whose photo is in the Voice.

  There’s an actor in the piece. He’s got cool leather boots—some kind of funky Asian design. Sleek black jeans. Bald head with long hair on the sides, which billows wildly out over his ears as though he’s standing in some great and constant storm. I keep watching him. “He’s from Juilliard,” the other actors tell me. I learn that he’s performed at the Guthrie, Arena Stage, and with Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater. He’s a real actor. His presence, his originality in rehearsals, is astonishing. He’s ceaselessly inventive, everything he does physically, an elegant surprise. His ideas, his sudden bursts of genuine emotion, are inspired and startle me. Seem to startle everyone. He’s like the furnace in the room, the one you go to to warm your hands, your mind. Who is this man? Thirty, bald, beautiful.

  Henry.

  The rehearsal room is electric, happy. Everyone is doing strong work. We believe—Anne inspires it somehow—that we are creating the most beautiful and important piece of theater in the history of the universe. The hymn of repetition . . . Life is the hymn of repetition. We belt out the Steinian verses, repeat the exacting choreography we’ve invented together. I sing and move with the budding sense that I am an artist among artists. I am bursting with the happiness of work.

  It’s the end of the second week of rehearsal. We are in the midst of a physical improvisation in which we are moving rapidly around the rehearsal space on a gridlike pattern. Suddenly Anne screams, “Do something this second that you’re totally terrified to do!” And instantly, I’m tackled. I’m taken straight (and somehow gently) to the floor by this man called Henry. We are nose to nose, my back pressed to the slats of oak, his eyes burning into mine. Laser-beam scary. I have the most distinct feeling that, until now, no one in this world has ever really looked at me. It’s as though his being enters in, circles my heart, my liver, lassos all vital organs and declares: Here I am. You’ve found your match. The moment is over as fast as it began and we’re on to the next exercise. When the stage manager calls a break some minutes later, I go out into the hallway of the huge, dusty rehearsal loft and find a private corner in which to cry. I’m utterly baffled. I very seldom weep and don’t know why these tears come, except that something about the encounter with him has shaken me. Shaken something loose. Ten minutes later we’re back in rehearsal and move on with the staging of Stein.