The Child

by Sarah Schulman

  In the old days, when an AIDS diagnosis meant death, as soon as someone actually got sick, many of their friends began to flee. It was inevitable. The friends shook out. Others came in closer. There were always people who were more comfortable with dying friends than with living ones. They preferred the quiet closeness of precious moments to the coexistence that so many relationships are trapped in.

  But now that Hockey was better, the most religious bedside relationships became burdened with consequences. Loss was so familiar; for many veterans of the crisis it was the only relationship they could count on. Hockey himself knew the feeling of fearing the living. The living have claws and fangs. They kiss and tell. The dying can’t help you get ahead, but they can’t stop you anymore, either. They have no currency. The dying can offer the opportunity to exchange little private kindnesses and truths that never leave the hospital room. There is no record, no witness, no backlash.

  Sometimes in a hospital bed, or at home, infusing, Hockey wanted to know every detail of the outside world. Who was fucking who. What Carrie Fisher wore. All the internecine warfare. At other times he was so jealous, he wanted no knowledge of it. He wanted the world to end with him. Now, back in the world, he had to be more generous. He had to not want it to end. He had to forget why and how he’d ever felt that way.

  Light tap on the glass.

  Hockey looked up from his pillbox. It wasn’t raining. Someone was knocking on the door.

  “Hockey?”

  He pressed the buzzer and watched an actual human walk into his life.

  “Who is that?”

  “Hockey, you know me.”

  “Is that Thor?”

  “You remembered, silly-billy.”

  Thor entered, smiling, an old man in good shape. He’d done calisthenics every day of his life, and now he was the last surviving authentic leather daddy. Leather skin included. Behind him followed a younger guy, already over the hill. A young, sad man.

  “I told you, Joe. Hockey is my pal. He won’t let us down.”

  Thor flipped on the light. That helped. Now Hockey realized why it was getting hard to tell the pills apart. Evening had come.

  At sixty, Thor still had that cavalier stride. He still had that shoulder-length blond hair, now obviously dyed, and the telltale thick clone moustache of his notorious youth. He still wore flannel shirts and jeans, the sight of which shook Hockey’s memory uncontrollably back to the days he had long put to rest.

  There once was a time when Hockey, too, had looked that way. Everyone they knew had those moustaches back then, those flannel shirts, that rough-and-ready masculinity that did not yet wear spandex bicycle shorts. Thor stood there beaming, the Jolly Green Giant, and Hockey was dizzy with sudden memories of many, many dead faces. Corpses behind moustaches who had died so long ago now. Himself like that so long ago. People whose existence he had obliterated, whose details had fallen off the shelf.

  “See, Joe. I told you he would help us.”

  Joe lingered in the background while the old man went to work. Thor pulled up a chair energetically and then pushed the piles of used newspapers to the floor. He put his jackboots on the desk.

  They still make those, Hockey thought, glancing down at his own sneakers, the kind he’d gotten used to as the peripheral neuropathy had swelled his feet and legs. Now he wore them out of habit. For a while at least. A little while longer.

  “Come here, Joe.” Thor pushed old magazines off of the other folding chair. “Have a seat.” But Joe just took one baby step away from the wall. He needed it. “Now Hockey,” Thor thundered. “How are ya doing?”

  “A lot better.”

  “Good, I’m glad to hear it.” He reached over to give Hockey a kiss on the lips. Suddenly Hockey remembered that one time in 1979 when he and Thor had tricked at the baths. He couldn’t recall any details, though. Only the long blond hair dripping in the steam.

  Joe released a huge sigh, and Hockey remembered the poor guy was still lurking back there, wanting something.

  “Joe is in trouble, Hockey, and we’ve got to help him.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Tell him, Joe.”

  “My boyfriend and I got arrested on pedophilia charges.”

  Hockey looked up. Joe seemed to be a bland man. But then he caught those amazing baby blues. Pale, hand-blown glass. All color, no clarity.

  “Dave is a second offender and they’ve got him locked up, no bail. I got out on fifty thousand dollars. Clean record.”

  “No,” Hockey said.

  “Just listen,” Thor smiled. “There’s’ an injustice that’s been done here.”

  “The kid is fifteen,” Joe said, stepping toward him. Moving in.

  Hockey could see it all before him, twirling and twisting in the sea of unpopular causes and gray zones, ambiguous moralities that most people don’t want to understand, and essential human contradictions. All he wanted was a couple of condo closings and a few wills. That was enough for him.

  “The kid is fifteen,” Joe said again. “He’s a gay kid. We met on the Internet. No deception. He’s been over a few times to have sex, a real frisky guy. The parents are a nightmare, and the kids at school hate him. Now they’ve got Dave, my boyfriend, in jail on child abuse charges, but the kid is not a child.”

  Joe was right on the edge of Hockey’s desk, looming over him, inevitably.

  “Not that that would stop you,” Hockey scolded, feebly, while Thor’s smile became a reflecting pool.

  “Fifteen-year-old boys have the right to get laid,” Thor shimmered. “That shouldn’t be up to someone’s idiot parents and a tightassed cop.”

  “I need your help,” Joe said.

  “I told him what a great lawyer you are.” Thor reached out to rub Hockey’s neck. It felt really good. “They’re going to make scapegoats out of Joe and Dave with everyone going crazy about ‘child abuse this’ and ‘child abuse that.’” He mimicked Joe’s Canadian twang. “This is not abuse, and Stew is not a child.”

  Hockey felt faint. This was going to happen and he couldn’t stop it.

  “David is facing twenty-five years, Hockey. You’ve got to help us.”

  Joe seemed to be a nice guy. He seemed authentically upset.

  “Who is going to pay for this?” Hockey knew he was defeated. He was staring at an endless, stigmatized, no-win cause. Another one. Another drain of money and energy with weird, soon-to-befeuding parties, in an environment of social repression and legal corruption.

  “CLACDF.”

  “What’s CLACDF?”

  “Committee to Lower the Age of Consent Defense Fund.”

  Hockey trembled.

  “We’re not asking for any handouts here. We’ve got to build a good case and get a good legal team and plan a strategy, right, Hockey? And I have a couple of ideas in that direction.”

  “No kidding.”

  Hockey looked over at Joe. Joe didn’t have to stand by his lover. He could worm his way out of his unpleasant responsibilities like most people try to do. But he didn’t. He had integrity. Hockey could see that Joe was loyal. He was trying to do the right thing. Just the way Hockey had stood up for Jose, and the way Jose would have stood up for Hockey if he had lived.

  “What attorney in their right mind would ever take this case?” Hockey whined, letting fate carry him into his own future. Who ever thought there would be a future, and that it would get programmed so passively?

  “We don’t have one,” Thor said. “You have to help us find one. Someone who can make us look good.”

  “What in the world would ever make you look good?”

  “A woman,” Thor said.

  “A woman?” Hockey rolled it over in his mind, landing on one familiar feminine face. “You’re right. That’s what we need.”

  7

  Mary and Eva were at home on a lazy Sunday morning. The happy hum of a shared life. This is the highest privilege–another person’s presence–masquerading falsely as the mundane.
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  Eva sat on the floor trying to fix her bicycle. Mary was at the computer, both listening to a well-worn copy of Dusty in Memphis. The immeasurable pleasure of the morning chat, that constant conversation between two mutually interested people that means true love.

  “I don’t get it,” Eva asked casually. “Why did he turn you down?”

  Mary’s naturally soft angelic look was so deeply pleasurable to Eva that it transcended everything harsh she might do or say. She was a visceral, visual delight. If the words were painful, Eva could just watch. Many hundreds of mornings Eva looked over at her sleeping lover, her sustained loveliness, and thought, You are so beautiful, and I love you so much. Watching her chest rise.

  “I’ve explained this before,” Mary said calmly.

  “You have explained it. But I still don’t get it. I thought he loved your play.”

  Mary was willing to go over this one more time, even though she had long ago come to understand that there were essential facts about her world that Eva could never grok. The Theater was not orderly like the law. Eva was logical to a fault. Since the theater was entirely illogical, Eva would never understand, really, why all that cruel and lovely artifice mattered so very, very much. Why it drove people mad.

  “I’ll explain it to you again.”

  “I know you’ve explained it before–I’m sorry. But I want to get it.”

  “Okay.” Mary was willing.

  Repetition had worked in the past. It had taken Eva about three moons of explanations to finally understand that Mary really cared about Christmas and that Eva had to get her a present every year. Then Mary persuaded her that ham sandwiches on white bread with mayonnaise were delicious comfort food and nothing to be made fun of.

  Eva had to learn that most people in most places say prayers before eating when they are with their parents. Witnessing it should not be considered an anthropological experience to be relayed to aesthetic friends at dinner parties. Mary spent years convincing her that it is normal to fly an American flag. That Mary’s family members are regular, not “blue-collar white Protestants,” as Eva habitually described them. Just normal. That most people do not think it is “fun” to argue at the dinner table. That when you ask someone where they are from, the typical answer is Michigan. Not The Pale of Settlement.

  Of course, Mary, too, had had to adjust very rapidly to the way Eva saw life. Anyone wanting to make it in New York had to catch on quickly. There was a hysterical kind of ambitious socialist loyalty that Eva, and the other people who dominated New York culture, had in tow. They would wish death on their opponents while inviting gross, dislocated, poor people home for dinner. What was the point? Eva should just take care of her own business and let other people fend for themselves.

  Mary could. Mary was robust, she worked three jobs, wrote plays, she did all of this without handouts or scheming. Mary understood Eva’s way, but Eva had a hard time figuring out how the other ninety-nine percent lived. After all, Mary realized quickly, her girlfriend was the really provincial one. Eva had never lived anywhere but here. She’d never had any job but lawyer and now teacher. She’d never had a real job, where it is incredibly boring but you can’t do anything about it. And most important, Eva–who had no artistic impulse, and had never even made one drawing in her entire life–Eva had no idea of what the theater world was really like.

  “Well, he’s one of those producers who wants to know whose play it is.”

  “But it’s yours. Throw me that rag, with you?”

  “No, which character. They think that a play can only belong to one character. So they walk around saying, ‘Whose play is this?’”

  “That’s dumb.”

  “Yeah, it is dumb. It’s a limited way of looking at what theater can be.” Mary got up and poured them both more coffee. Nonfat milk for Eva; she had cystic breasts. Mary, on the other hand, could eat anything. She never gained weight and never got sick. American. Her people settled the West. “But all the guys who run the theaters arbitrarily agreed one day that a commercial play had to be about one character. They don’t have enough empathy to care about someone they don’t identify with. It’s a combination of pathology and privilege. They don’t realize that the world belongs to everyone at the same time. When you sit on a park bench and look out, the world you observe is not about one person. Life is the protagonist. Human failing. Desire.”

  “So why does he only want one?” Eva wasn’t getting it.

  “Because.…” Mary wanted to be patient. She took out four Mallomars. Eva wouldn’t want any. Mary could eat them all. Eva didn’t like junk food. She was afraid of it. “He thinks if the audience can’t tell from the start who in the play they’re supposed to care about the most, they’ll get mad. But I don’t think that way. I refuse to be back-story, but I know I’m not the only story. Do they?”

  That sounded good. She’d made her point clearly–if anyone was smart enough to get it. Mary stuffed a whole cookie into her mouth, thereby freeing her hands for the more pressing task of typing out that phrase on her keyboard. She’d savor the next Mallomar. This one had been a martyr to the larger cause.

  “I’m totally fucking up this bicycle.”

  “Lift the chain, Eva. You’re gonna get greasy, it’s unavoidable. There’s no other way to fix it.”

  “You’re always so sure,” Eva said admiringly, lifting the chain. She got greasy and fixed the bicycle. “It works. I’m like the audience–I get nervous. I just watch and wait, wondering what I’m supposed to feel, supposed to do.”

  “But it’s your life.”

  “But it feels like it’s taking place in their world.”

  “Eva, art creates worlds.” Mary reached for the chocolate milk. “It makes everything possible. If what I’m offering the audience is truly transforming, the rules should not matter.”

  “Perfect. You were so right. Want to go biking?”

  “No way. You almost get killed three times a day on that bike. I can’t bicycle in New York City. I’d never survive. Bikes are for the country.”

  “But, honey,” Eva absentmindedly rubbed the grease all over her clothes, “when are we ever in the country? You just have to watch out for car doors opening.”

  “I don’t want to,” Mary said. “I don’t want to think about car doors when I’m riding a bike.”

  “Mary, you’re dropping cookie crumbs on your keyboard.”

  “Oh shit.”

  “Dreamer.” Eva smiled as she went out for a ride. No helmet. Wrong way down a one-way street. Riding on the sidewalk.

  Like she had her whole life.

  8

  Daniel Wisotscky, Certified Social Worker, aged sixty-six, had been logged on to his computer for three solid days exploring America Online. He was still angry about having to learn the computer, but the Mulcahey family’s case made it finally essential. What Wisotscky found on the Internet shocked him, in spite of forty years as a mental health professional and twenty years as County Family Counselor for Van Buren Township.

  The first truly upsetting thing that Wisotscky uncovered was the Hairy Chest Page. This was a site for homosexual men, and, presumably, heterosexual women, with advanced fetish compulsion toward men with hairy chests. Wisotscky had previously been aware of a wide range of sexual fetishes, such as “pregnancy pornography,” featuring pregnant models. He’d also discovered online images of naked women shaving their pubic hair and ones of women being rained on. However, there was a strange ironic stance to the Hairy Chest Page that he found particularly grating: it had no shame. It was like making a fetish out of a Bic pen.

  Wisotscky found this idea to be terribly disturbing. Not only did the site show full-frontal nudes of hairy men that any child could download, but the designer of the Web page also made available a fifteen-thousand-example annotated listing of all the moments in American and European cinema in which an actor bared a hairy chest. It was insane.

  Wisotscky noted that there was a new arrogance behind deviant sexual beha
vior in the computer age. There was a flagrant ingenuity; almost a smirk. The next site he went to was dominated by the image of a young male child orally sodomizing an adult. It was more old-fashioned and made clear to him that the electronic light field of the computer was hypnotic. This, combined with the easily accessible lurid imagery, could convince any child to participate, unwittingly, in the complex trappings laid by a pederast.

  “Mr. Wisotscky, the Mulcaheys are here to see you.”

  In stumbled a bedraggled working-class couple from the township, their overly seductive adult daughter–typically named Carole–and their alienated, adolescent son. The husband was standard from these parts. Late forties, looked sixty. Never took care of himself. Bad food, bad shampoo. The mother was inappropriately girlish. She was flirtatious and overfeminized in a manner that was unbecoming. Infantilized. The son, predictably sullen, was quite small for his age. The sister was underclad.

  “Mr. Mulcahey, Stew.” He looked at the chart. “Carole. You’re the married sister. Mrs. Mulcahey.” Another glance. “Brigid. Please have a seat, all of you. There, on the couch, or I also have these two chairs. Please sit down. Good.”

  He noted that the boy gave up the best chair to his mother. Good, everything would have a happy ending.

  “What else do you know about us?”

  “Can I call you Marty? I am Daniel Wisotscky, County Family Counselor for Van Buren Township. I see that you were referred by Officer Bart, that you’re trying to make some tough decisions about your family.”

  “I don’t understand why we have to talk to you about our decisions.” Marty was putting on a show for his daughter. “It’s our family, we’ll do what we want.”

  Wisotscky said nothing, so of course there was an awkward silence. He had long wished for the day when these blue-collar families would come into therapy as naturally as they took their cars in for lube jobs. But, unfortunately, these people would rather buy some self-help book or watch a daytime talk show than put their lives into the trained hands of a professional who could make a difference. It was the submission that was important, the capitulation to experience that signaled a real effort to change. What the alcoholics called “helpless.”