The Tricky Part

by Martin Moran

  How many times now have I walked into a park alone, late at night, telling myself with each step to turn around. Get out. A part of me arguing: But there’s sanctity in everything, isn’t there? Even behind a bush in a park with a stranger. There’s something to be learned.

  Once, a guy gripped me by the belt of my just-opened jeans and told me in a suddenly menacing voice that I’d better disappear or I might get hurt. “Give me ten bucks and I’ll get you out of here safe,” he growled. And like a light switching on in a dark and empty room, I saw how stupid, how unconscious, my act. And back on the lighted avenue, ten dollars poorer, it floats through my addled brain that there is something suicidal in what I’m doing. Something angry. My bottomless search is a curse I don’t understand. Why do I do this? What is this fierce longing for a connection that, if stumbled upon, crumbles to nothing?

  11

  I’M LATE, HE’S already in bed.

  The lamp in our room is turned low. Henry’s lying face up on his side of the bed. Eyes closed, perfectly silent. His hands are folded carefully over his chest, one on top of the other, a body laid to rest. His sweet, Slavic head is sunk into the pillow. He looks like a great leader lying in state. Lenin, perhaps, who, like my dear Henry, was bald and brainy. My breath stops as I get a disturbing, momentary glimpse of what he might look like in death. My God, I think, he is too still. But as I stand in the door of our room and stare, I see that a certain, deep quality of life emanates from him. I also see the gray wires that flow from the tiny speakers in his ears to the new CD player and I breathe again. He’s awake, I can tell, and listening, even as he drifts toward sleep.

  I wonder what he’s playing. His tastes are refined and wide. He listens to composers I’ve heard of but whose names I could never spell or pronounce, whose music I rarely recognize. Henry’s played piano since he was a boy. Music is a constant for him, a staple, a passion. I know how important it is for him to simply stop all else and listen. He’s that way with the people he loves too. He listens. He’s lost now, I imagine, in chord progressions, compositional elements that elude me. (Though he insists I’d hear so much more if I stopped . . . “You treat music as if it’s underscoring for all your activities,” he often tells me.) I look at his powerful shoulders under his T-shirt. They’re broad like those of his father, and his Polish grandfather, who was once a wrestler in the circus. I watch his chest, thanks be to God, rise and fall with breath.

  I move gingerly toward the closet to begin hanging up my clothes. I can’t help it, I speak. “What are you listening to?” I watch a ripple move across his tranquil face. I see how my voice has dipped into his world. My voice, which is so much a part of this earth. My voice, which has come, after our years together, to sound like his. I’m sorry for having disturbed his singular space, but I want his attention. I want him to kiss me. To look at me.

  “Janácek,” he says quietly. His voice is soft, floating in ether, floating elsewhere, like him. He seems to me, in moments like this, not of the earth. “Piano works,” he whispers, his eyes still closed. I hear his desire to stay where he is inside the sound and the meaning that comes with it. I hear the echo of patience it takes for him to pop up from within and speak. I can see that he’s receiving something. A message from the composer? Voices from beyond? I wonder what Janácek would think at witnessing such concentration. If the composer walked in I’d say, “Look at that guy on the bed, he’s a brilliant man (whose maternal grandparents were Czech, by the way), and he’s drinking in your work. You are gone from here, but talking to him still. Isn’t that something?”

  So much of Henry is a mystery to me, I think. How deeply he loves certain things, loves me, and how far from me he can seem. And I think how much I love that too.

  I skitter across the room and deposit my backpack near the desk. I put my wallet on the bureau and strip to my underwear. I glance in the bedroom mirror, taking stock again of how my thirties are treating me. The slight, new folds above the hips, the circles under the eyes, the slightly leathery look of the face. I check the curves of my chest to see if the weights I lifted at the Y that afternoon have had any effect. I see how aroused I remain under the cotton of my Calvin Kleins. I think of the phone calls I could make, the mail I should answer. Maybe I’ll stay up a while. I look to my lover, think of being naked with him. Of being wanted. Wanting. The litany of endless desires skating across my brain.

  Henry’s repose is stillness itself.

  I sit on the edge of the bed, ready to ask him about his day. To insist. But he looks so calm.

  I go to wash my face, take a final pee.

  I come back. He’s still there, still. I crawl in next to him and one of his hands levitates, moves over, and rests on my chest for a moment. After a while, he turns and pulls the headphones out of the stereo and piano music floods the room. His hands have returned gracefully to his chest.

  “Beautiful playing,” I say. “Who’s the pianist?”

  “Firkusny,” he whispers.

  I press my little toe against his and tap along in rhythm to what must be, I think, Firkusny’s left hand.

  “Did you buy soy milk?” I ask.

  “Yeah. I got two.”

  “Thanks . . . any messages?”

  “Just Michael. He got us tickets to his show Sunday night.”

  “Oh. Good.”

  There’s more I could ask but I remain silent. I listen. I scooch my hip over so that it touches his, tucks into the curve there like perfect sense. Bones, continents, linked.

  “What’s this piece called?”

  “ ‘Auf verwachsenem Pfade’. . . ‘On the Overgrown Path’ . . . I think.”

  “Sounds sad,” I say, and give Henry a quick, light peck on the cheek. He responds, his eyes still closed, by puckering his lips and offering a delicate kiss to the air. I know it’s meant for me, this bubble of him coming up from the deep. I feel how it’s linked to the countless kisses of so many kinds we’ve shared before. I know he’s glad. I’m where he wants me. Close. We listen to the delicate piano for a time, toe to toe, hip to hip.

  Henry says, “Oh, I got this today. Listen. . . .” He reaches for the remote, the fancy clicker that goes with the new player. The one I got him for his birthday. He loves it because he can stay still and choose exactly what he wants, three CDs at a time. It’s a big success, this present. A happy gift coming from happy, steady gigs: me in another musical, Henry performing in another Shakespeare in the Park. “Listen . . . to this adagio section,” he says. “Ravel. Concerto in G Major. Listen.”

  I do. I listen and it is unspeakably beautiful. From the very first gentle notes of piano to the entrance of strings and clarinet, I am lifted and caressed. I am floating home, at first, to Denver, over the mountains. The places I walked as a boy. And then, suddenly, I’m thinking of my Great Aunt Virginia, who just died at ninety-five. She loved music with a passion similar to Henry’s. “It saves my life, it does,” she used to say. “Makes me right with the world when nothing else can.” She lived alone in London and told me how walking along the Thames toward the Royal Symphony Hall and stopping for tea before a concert, how this was heaven on earth for her. She must have known this piece, this gorgeous Ravel. How did he compose a thing of such beauty? It’s as if his very soul is soaring through our little apartment. Henry’s toe presses against mine and my eyes well up and I promise myself to remember this—the depth of my gratefulness. To remember living this moment of contentment. When the noise, the galaxy of desires, skittering across my day, calmed to this very one: to be with Henry as he offers a piece of music to me. To lie, to listen with Henry, as we hold our separate thoughts is, for now, completely, utterly, enough.

  He taps me on the shoulder twice. That’s code for me to turn on my side so we can spoon. I sink into the warm, music-filled sweetness of him. The adagio ends.

  “Wow,” I whisper.

  “I knew you’d like this. It’s sweet. Like you.”

  “Oh God, I’m not . . .”


  “Shhhhhh.” He switches off the music. I press close, as close as I can, and we drift into our separate sleeps.

  12

  AND WHAT WOULD I tell him if I was able? That sometimes I wake in the morning with such madness in my heart, with nothing else on my mind but where, how, I can sneak off and find some kind of fix. A thrill I can only get elsewhere, not here in our sweet bedroom with the clean flannel sheets, under his favorite portrait of Buster Keaton. Not in the warmth of us, of our home, but in the wilderness of some other place, some stranger.

  This would be, this is, the hardest thing to speak of. It terrifies me. To speak would change everything, I think. He would see me for what I am and leave. And I would not blame him.

  I think sometimes of my first-ever boyfriend back at acting school in San Francisco. An ardent, elegant boy named Bill. We were crazy for each other, and one night when he found out that I’d gone off to a bathhouse with our ballet teacher, he confronted me, slapped me across the face, and yelled: “You are nothing but an anxiety-ridden slut!” My cheek stung for days. My heart for months. Stung with anger and with what I felt was the truth of it. Stings still when I recall my inability to, at the very least, speak honestly. When I think of how fearful and confused I am around matters sexual. It seems to me that I have no integrity, that I simply own the kind of desire that sullies.

  The thing to give up here, to sacrifice, is the secrets.

  To converse, to draw close. To make sacred. This is what I want to do. But I am terrified to speak. How will Henry and I ever make it? I wonder. Survive me?

  13

  I WAS SITTING at a piano, sharing the bench with Ricky. We were in a cozy old apartment in Philadelphia. It was an autumn morning in the early 1990s. Ricky was the composer of a new musical in which I was performing, an ambitious saga about the birth of the United States. He was teaching me a love song hot off his press, and during a break, as will happen, the subject of sex came up. He talked of an early experience, how painfully shy he’d been in high school and college. At one point, surprising myself because I seldom thought and had only rarely spoken of it, I tossed off what felt to be a bit of a joke. “Well, hell, I had an affair with an older guy when I was twelve. It went on for nearly three years. One of those Catholic stories, you know?”

  “You’re kidding,” Ricky said.

  “No.”

  “That’s kind of major. Don’t you think? I mean, that’s like . . . abuse.”

  “Nah,” I said, swiping a hand toward Ricky’s furrowed face. “No.”

  My no came out rather more sharply than I’d meant. I was aware of how much I hated, how defensive I felt about, that word: abuse. How it was necessarily and frighteningly tethered to words like crime and perpetrator and, worst of all, victim. God, I wanted nothing to do with that. I didn’t want to be anywhere near that loser word, that kind of sad-sack story.

  “I mean, the guy wasn’t violent or evil,” I told Ricky. “And . . . ya know . . . I got over it. It happened. No big deal.”

  I spoke these words, I remember, with simple conviction. Ricky cocked his head and fiddled with his glasses. “I think you don’t realize how major that is. I mean, Marty, you were twelve. Maybe you’ve convinced yourself it’s nothing, but I think it matters in ways you don’t even know.”

  “Ricky, look, I struggle with things. I have hang-ups, probably, around sex. I mean, God knows . . . I was raised Catholic. But look. I’m OK.”

  “But this is more than that. You were a kid.”

  I dismissed his words, but his eyes, I remember, slammed into my gut, and somewhere at the bottom of my diaphragm a portal popped open. I felt how I wanted to kick it closed, this little trapdoor, but something was in the way, the tip of an iceberg, the foot of someone wanting to sell me on the past. On how much it matters. But I didn’t want to waste one nickel, one bit of the now on what was then. I sat up and snatched my sheet music, suggesting we get back to work, back to singing.

  That night, I was onstage playing an eighteenth-century Scotsman who had traveled alone to the New World to search out a place, the means of survival, for his beloved wife and children back home. In the play he sang his epistles to his faraway love, and each one began: My dearest life. Ricky had set these words to the most haunting and beautiful melody. During that evening’s preview performance, I kept choking up whenever I sang them. When I got back to the apartment afterward, I telephoned Henry. When he answered, I said, “My dearest life.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A tune in the play.”

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Had a teary show. Miss you.”

  “You’re cute.”

  “You’re cuter.”

  After I hung up and hit the pillow, Henry’s voice wouldn’t leave me. Nor would the song. I kept humming the notes. The interval between my and dear was a sixth. And then life landed on the fifth of the chord, pure and simple and restful. Perfect harmony. It suited wonderfully the character of John, the strong and loyal Scotsman. A man of such integrity. Perfect for Henry, too, I thought.

  My dearest life.

  It matters, he’d said. What does that mean? Ricky’s music, his stubborn words, wouldn’t leave me. A sad and sour feeling came over me. I was thinking of the pack of scribbled pages I’d stuck in a drawer. The ones with the circled C. And I was wondering about the ugly, persistent depressions. And all the stuff that was hidden.

  My dearest life.

  I picked up the novel I was reading. The bookmark was blue and ragged. It came from an old store called the Book Barn. I stared for a long time at the etching of the barn, the little window drawn over the hayloft. Christ, I thought, if you start digging into this, you’ll never get to the bottom.

  Several weeks later when I was back in New York, Ricky phoned. He wanted to tell me about a men’s group run by a pair of doctors at St. Luke’s Hospital. An eight-week course based on Mike Lew’s groundbreaking book. Victims No Longer: Men Recovering from Incest and Other Sexual Child Abuse.

  “Thanks,” I said to Ricky. Jesus, no way, I whispered to myself as I hung up the phone.

  We met, seven guys and two mellow doctors, for eight consecutive Thursday nights. We sat in a circle under fluorescent lights. An easel with poster paper and colored markers stood at the front of the class.

  Loss of Childhood.

  Men and Feelings.

  Incest.

  Survival Strategies.

  I could barely look at the lingo on the board. Mostly I kept my eyes on the red carpet, on the ring of snowy boots that were jiggling on the feet of seven young men. The docs’ voices gently dovetailed. They were good at this stuff, but mostly what I heard was my own voice telling me how my case was different.

  By the end of the third meeting I couldn’t avoid it any longer. It was my turn to say something about my “story.” I’d listened to the others through the noise of my squirming brain. There’d been a drunk uncle, a violent father, a coach, a neighbor. Harrowing. My heart went out to them, poor guys. Now I leaned forward, my hands clasped between my knees, and tried to explain the basics about a Catholic summer camp and a counselor. About three years of furtive encounters. “And, look. I’m the one,” I blurted. “I went back, I partook. He was a kind of a . . . I don’t know. Like a friend. It wasn’t destructive. I don’t think. It happened. Life goes on.”

  The doctors nodded calmly. OK. No judgment here.

  One of them, the younger, shorter one, began to discuss the particular difficulty men have at revealing experiences of abuse. The sense of threat to one’s masculinity, the struggle with sexual identity. The shame of feeling complicit. The denial. I stared at the carpet.

  The taller, dark-haired doctor chimed in. “I understand what you’ve said. That you don’t see what went on in your early adolescence as necessarily harmful. But, can you consider for a moment the particular violence, the trauma, inherent in a sexual act between an adult and a child. That inequality of power. Cons
ider what it is for the natural bond of trust between a boy and an authority figure—a camp counselor, for instance—to be suddenly broken.”

  I began to say that, yes, I could see that, I could consider it, but that violence seemed such an extreme word. And then, trying to explain what Bob and I were to each other, I fell silent.

  “Consider,” the doctor went on, “the capability of a twelve-year-old to partake. The brain of a boy that age is not fully developed. By a long shot.” I felt an odd lift in my chest. Like something, someone, being let off a hook. “And certainly not capable of absorbing the enormity of a sexual violation—in your case, a chronic violation that, as Mike Lew points out so clearly, is traumatizing.”

  At the end of the meeting that night, after I’d put on my parka and folded my chair away, I stepped over to say goodnight to the doctors. The younger one said, “You know, Marty, it’s the job of a kid to fall in love. And it’s the job of the adult to have boundaries.” Simple enough.

  I walked across the Columbia campus that night to get to the Number 1 train. I stopped to sit on the steps of the library, next to the statue of Alma Mater. Soul Mother with her bronze arms outstretched as if welcoming one and all to crawl up into her cold lap. Ten at night might as well have been noon. Students rushing everywhere. They looked twelve, for God’s sake. A young Asian woman loaded with books passed me on the steps. She had on a red plaid skirt, very Catholic-school.

  An image took hold of me:

  A boy, a little kid, balancing on the rear axle of a tractor.

  Staring at the back of the head of the man driving.

  A rubber band is there, attached to the man’s glasses.

  It cuts into the skull, across the tangled, greasy hair.