The Tricky Part

by Martin Moran

  “Hello.”

  Fatigued, nasal, cavalier. The sound of him is astonishing. Something within me thrashes, leaps through my skin, as if a particular vibration had been trapped and waiting in my body for years, waiting for just the right frequency to erupt: That’s him!

  “Hello,” I say. “You may not remember me. It’s been twenty years. I’m Marty Moran. I knew you when I was a boy.”

  “Of course I remember you. I remember you well.” He sounds very calm and it occurs to me, instantly, that this is the tone of someone I would know now to avoid. Unctuous, that’s the word. He sounds unctuous. “You were a great kid,” he says. “Sure, I remember you.” The mountain, the myth I’ve made of him is shrinking to the size of my inner ear. A lonely hum, a little man.

  “Where are you?” I ask.

  “A small town in California . . . a nowhere kind of place. I’m glad you caught me. I’ve been away for a long time in the hospital with a back injury. You know . . . the kind of work I do has always been very physical and, well, my body isn’t what it used to be. I’m fallen apart.”

  Oh, he’s smooth, I think. He jabbers as if I’m an old friend, chats like the con man he’s always been. “Where are you?” he asks.

  “I live in New York.”

  “What do you do there?”

  “I’m an actor.”

  “I always knew you were special. Such a talented kid.”

  “You say that to all the boys?”

  I can’t believe I’ve said this. That I’ve made this stab at something real and dangerous and I can feel us both waiting now to see where this is headed. The pause continues and then he simply says,

  “No.”

  He’s been through this before. I can feel it. I can almost sense the chorus of kids-become-men who’ve called him. I don’t rush to fill the silence. I feel myself reaching down for strength, for directness, and I say, “That was quite a time in my life, you know? A lot happened when I knew you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Bob. We had sex.”

  “Sex wasn’t the only part of our relationship.”

  “Do you have any idea how much I think of you? Of what happened?”

  “It does no good to dwell on the past. I’ve made my peace with God. I hope you do too.”

  I can feel the door closing. No remorse there, nothing to talk about. My stomach is tied in knots. I want to say just the thing, explode with a genuine anger that might pry things open, lead us to a heart-to-heart or some kind of all-out fight. But I’m stunned by his sureness, his self-righteousness. I can think of nothing to say. After more silence he says, “Write to me if you can. I’d sure like to know about your life, how and what you’re doing. Here’s my address.”

  Obedient boy, I scribble it under his phone number and stick the card in my wallet. When I hang up the phone I feel, at first, some strange glimmer of relief. A kind of triumph. I walk around the house thinking, At least I did it. I called the bastard, I heard his voice, I whittled the whole thing down to size. The size of a tired old laborer in a ramshackle house. Write him? He’s not worth it, I’ll never write him. Forget it. The end. Ever after, amen.

  I walk to the kitchen and look out the window, past the mountain ash. The tree is thick, four times the size it was when I was a kid. As I stare toward the orange disk of the late-afternoon sun, whatever flicker of relief I feel gets swallowed into a wave of dread. My body, source of endless trouble, screams, Go! Get Some! My knees are practically shaking with it. And that’s it. I’m off, a madman. I get into the car and drive straight to a place I know on Colfax Avenue, where I can touch a stranger until I am senseless with it.

  16

  I’M LATE. HE’S already in bed.

  The lamp is turned low. Henry is lying faceup, his hands folded carefully over his chest. Eyes closed. I see the gray wires flowing from the speakers in his ears. He’s awake and listening. I watch his chest rise and fall with his breath.

  I put down my pack, place my wallet on the bureau.

  “What you listening to?” I ask.

  “Mozart.”

  I move to the closet to hang up my clothes, go to wash my face, brush my teeth. I come back and crawl in next to him. One of his hands moves over and rests on my stomach. He scoots over so that our hips touch. “How was your audition?” he asks.

  “It went OK. I think I might get a callback.”

  “If they’re smart.”

  “Did you hear anything about the movie?” I ask.

  “Just that I’m still up for it.”

  “The air conditioner folks come tomorrow, between eleven and one.”

  “I’ve got yoga.”

  “I’ll be here. If they even come. They’re so screwy. God, I’m anxious.”

  Henry switches off the music, turns and wraps his arms around me.

  “What about?” he asks.

  “Everything. Work, money . . . you know. Me.”

  His lips find mine. I understand his kiss with every nerve in my body. I reach over and switch off the light.

  “I love you,” he whispers.

  “I’m so glad you do.”

  We kiss again. It’s like picking up on a conversation we’ve been having for a very long time. And tonight, suddenly, there’s a need to speak of everything and I will not disappear. I’m right here, I tell him, with every inch of my skin. We press close and closer. Desire and safety, all at once. That’s what hits me, each time it happens. Hits me so hard. This much desire wrapped inside this much sanctuary. And it’s unspeakably sweet to move across this sanctum. The one I know so well.

  When all is said and done, I sink into the music-filled sweetness of him. And we drift, together, toward our separate sleeps.

  Grace.

  It is the word that comes to me as I lay there with him.

  I’m never sure exactly what it means, but I try to think of all the ways it’s defined.

  Mercy.

  Divine assistance.

  Charm, courtesy, and kindness.

  A reprieve.

  God, yes, a reprieve, that’s right. His arms around me, a reprieve.

  The Catholics, of whom I suppose I will always be one, speak of grace as something God gives us to become partakers of the divine nature of eternal life.

  It’s a prayer before a meal.

  It’s a musical trill.

  Well, that’s it. I’m in the arms of music. A passport to the infinite, as Winnie used to say. Can a person be that for us?

  This one thing I know. I am at rest where I belong.

  Lucky.

  17

  THIRTY-SIX AND a half years old and one spring evening a man ten years my junior slid in under the radar.

  The lousy word, cheating, always makes me think of my French teacher, Ms. Palmer, the one and only lady amid all the Jesuits back at Regis High. She caught me one desperate day with irregular verbs written on a card underneath my shoe and with her jet-black eyes suddenly towering over me said, “Looking for answers in all the wrong places, aren’t you Mr. Moran?” I felt I might die for shame. She didn’t send me to JUG. Said she was sure it was a rare indiscretion.

  Now the rules, the promises I’d broken, were my own.

  I paced the living room, out of breath, telling Henry there was a terrible puzzle. A twisted riddle in my chest. That my body was plunging down a dark chute. “What are you talking about?” he asked. “You’re making no sense.”

  “I’m seeing this boy,” I said. “I’m losing my marbles.”

  He turned to me with the simple force that is his integrity, the part of him I’m convinced is rooted right to the center of the earth, and with nothing but a look nearly knocked me to the floor. “Stop,” he said. “Enough. “I thought my chest would cave in.

  It wasn’t any kind of bliss or new love, this affair. That, I suppose, would have been a conversation of another order. No, this had all the familiar numbing qualities of my age-old compulsion. But worse was that it came after a long period of relati
ve calm and that it wasn’t my usual MO—the quick, anonymous fix. One encounter with this guy turned into a few. And that morphed into a month and then another marked with secret trysts. It was obsession of a new intensity. My anxiety screamed, Shame, it screamed, Who do you think you are? It shrieked, You don’t deserve a good life.

  With Henry’s help and some health insurance, I got myself back into therapy. Recommended by our good friend Brooks, she was the first female shrink I’d ever gone to. I call her Carolyn now, all these years later, but when I first walked into her West Side office in the fall of 1996, I called her simply Doctor, and prayed it would be over quick.

  She sat in a comfy swivel chair. I chose the blue couch near the window. Her hair was beautifully coifed. Blond. She had gold earrings, a smart black pantsuit. A New York gal. I stared out at tugboats on the Hudson, wanting to be anywhere but sitting in the middle, once again, of my own sorry-assed trouble. I told her the only thing I knew was that my life had got away again. That whatever was good about it had to do with Henry and I was fucking it up. I struggle with addiction, I remember telling her, but I wonder what it is I’m actually addicted to. Chaos? Sometimes I think it’s the adrenaline of chaos. I rambled for a session or two about passion. That maybe that’s what was at the bottom of this affair. That I wanted to feel twenty again, you know, one of those midlife crises. What is passion? I kept asking. How does any couple keep it alive?

  She nodded, sipped from her bottle of Poland Spring. “There’s all kinds of passion,” she said. “Intellectual. Artistic.”

  “Sex is at the top of my list.”

  “It is certainly a kind of passion to choose to be together, to choose one another continually for over a decade, as you and Henry have done.”

  I veered into lengthy complaints about my unreachable theater agent, my frustrating career, another fight I’d had with Henry about my chronic lateness or his cranky depressions. She’d cross her legs, sip her water, nod. All patience, all ears, and I kept thinking, I’m some kind of a broken record spinning in a miserable groove, paying someone to listen. Stop. And I did. I shut up. I began sitting for long periods of uncomfortable silence. I couldn’t think of one useful thing to say, I told her, couldn’t think what any of this yakking had to do with getting healthier. She nodded, tried breathing exercises, meditation bells. On the day I came in to quit, I simply blurted out, “What I can’t stand is when I wake up with it. I open my eyes and it’s already there.”

  “What?”

  “Anxiety. The anxiety. It rules my life.” She suggested drugs and I told her that frightened me but I’d think about it. “You know those stories?” I asked her, “about the witch hunts? How they’d pile rocks on someone until they admitted knowing the devil or whatever? I wake up and it’s as if there are stones on my chest and I’m supposed to admit something but I’m not sure what, beyond the fact that I’m a shit. I can’t breathe, it’s as if the day has already gotten away, I’m behind on everything and I could never accomplish enough to make up for the crushing thing I’ve done wrong. Maybe it’s just the old original sin.”

  “Are the Catholic voices still that strong in your head?”

  “I swallowed that stuff whole.”

  “You’re in charge of your life now.”

  “But I’m not in charge. Look what brought me here.”

  I looked out the window. There was a boat with an M pulling a barge upstream. I knew it stood for Moran, the name of the tug company, and it looked to be hauling garbage. I couldn’t help but smile at the obvious metaphor.

  “What’s funny?” Carolyn asked.

  “I am some kind of bore.”

  “It’s your life we’re talking about. What makes the anxiety so bad some days?”

  “Shame.”

  We sat in silence. I hated the silence. The waste of money, the crazy white noise in my noggin. She was as calm as could be, made a note in my folder. And then, on this day I was meant to quit, I decided to tell her about a stupid, as I thought of it, recurring dream. She nodded when I’d asked, “That’s a classic therapy thing to try, right?”

  So I proceeded to describe the dream I’d never before put into words, of a murder, in my old neighborhood. A little girl down the street has been killed. Maybe it’s a little girl. I’m not sure, but I’m involved, somehow. The corpse has been hidden for some time, buried in our backyard or, sometimes, near Cherry Creek. But there’s blood bubbling up through the weeds now and the police are on their way. I am absolutely terrified. I didn’t pull the trigger on—or stab?—the dead person, but I helped hide the body and the FBI dogs are circling and the whole time I’m trying to figure out, remember, who the victim is. We are all—the neighbors, the detectives—about to see the face, and I know then they’ll come get me but just before they unearth the body, I wake up. I wake up sure that the story is real. I mean really, in real life. And I lie in bed trying to grasp it, to convince myself I didn’t murder somebody along the way. I get up and try to do the usual things. Make coffee. Kiss Henry. I try to hang on to the relief that it was just a dream, but there is this nasty anxiety. I mean the fierce kind that has no nameable cause. And I feel like I’ve got to get out of my skin, that the day is lost to angst. I end up swimming a million laps or acting out or scribbling for hours in my notebook.

  I noticed that Carolyn was making notes inside my folder. I thought I must be on to something.

  “What do you think it means?” I asked.

  She looked back at me, her brown eyes the picture of calm. “What do you think?”

  “Well, tell me what the textbook might say.”

  “No textbook here.”

  “Give me some Jung or something.”

  She smiled. She waited. And I told her that I once heard that every character in a dream is actually you. Yourself. She asked me to venture a guess. Could I be the faceless corpse? And for the hell of it I said, “Yes, it’s me.” And when I said it, heat rose instantly in my chest.

  “Who’s the murderer?” she asked.

  I took another stab.

  “Me.”

  “Who’s the authority that wants to punish you?”

  I realized that my heart was racing.

  “Me,” I said, and I felt something shift beneath my sternum. As if two bones were trading places and suddenly I was afraid I might cry.

  “Why do you want to punish yourself?”

  “This is all so simplistic, ridiculous.”

  “Look, we’re just exploring.” She took a deep, deliberate breath. Exhaled slowly. I understood that she was encouraging me to do the same.

  I came back the next week. We kept talking. I told her I’d gone back into meetings. How much I hated that this stuff still plagued me. “I’ve read all the literature,” I told her. “I’ve let go and let God, what the hell is wrong with me?”

  “It takes time.”

  “I sexualize everything, everyone, I guess. But that’s true for a lot of men, isn’t it? Especially with gay guys, don’t you think?”

  “Not necessarily . . . no. I take it from what you’ve relayed that that’s not necessarily true for Henry, for instance.”

  I stared out the window, at the ice forming on the edges of the Hudson.

  “I’ve been at this a long time.”

  “At what?” she asks.

  “Sex that’s hidden, fraught. Christ, I’ve been at it since I was twelve.”

  “What happened when you were twelve?”

  Reluctantly, I give her a thumbnail sketch. I’m surprised that all these weeks have gone by without my actually talking of it specifically. I tell her I feel like a walking cliché, “another altar boy diddled, blah, blah, blah.”

  “Do you have a picture of yourself around that time that you could bring in?”

  That sounds silly, I tell her. Absolutely maudlin.

  “Will you bring a picture of you as a boy next week?”

  Utterly embarrassed, I toted my kid picture to her office the next week. I kept thi
nking of any number of people, my father, folks at work, who’d scoff at this. The way I was scoffing. I was dreading that she would ask me to talk to it or hold it or some stupid thing. The photo I grabbed was one that had followed me around for years. A picture of me standing in a kayak at the edge of a pond. It had been stuck in the bottom of drawers at my various apartments. Tucked in manila folders or between album covers as I moved around California and on to New York. It had come out of hiding one day not long after Henry and I met. I gave it to him as a gift because he’d seen it and thought it cute. He framed it and hung it up. I don’t recall telling him much of anything about it but that it was at camp in the mountains when I was twelve.

  Carolyn asked me to put it down and talk about the time at which it was taken and, strangely, the shift was almost instant. I don’t know if it was the photo or being fed up but it was as though a switch got flipped and my body just gave up the ghost. The reversal was powerful, as if the mechanism, the energy, dedicated to burying swapped suddenly to unearthing. My constant reluctance to speak of it, to seriously consider the connection between then and now, lifted. I began to talk forthrightly, for what felt like the first time in my life, about the paper route and George, the troubled parents and, more than anything, about the counselor. The words tumbled.

  After a few weeks of this I blurted out, “I think I’ll lose my mind if I say or hear his name one more fucking time. Bob, Bob, blah, blah. I’m wasting time on him. I don’t want him in this room or in my life!”

  “There’s a reason you’re talking so much about it, trust your intuition.”

  “But why do I come back again to this man?”

  “You circle around a story, you come back to it at different points in your life and each time you’ve spiraled deeper. You’re coming at it with more experience, more reflection, till you get nearer the bottom of it.”

  “But what’s the bottom?”

  Carolyn tilted her head, smiled.

  “There is no bottom, right? Why don’t I want to kill him? When I think about the time before I met him, I remember feeling, at the most interior part of myself, really alone and really frightened. About being different, I guess. Being a gay boy, probably. I felt such a sense of doom in that culture. He exploited that and, at the same time, opened something up to me. It was chaos because he was sad and sick. Confused. But he was also a clue somehow. I was drowning in some ways and he was . . . a life preserver.”