Thor sank back into his chair and Eva was stunned. She wanted to think about her own problems, but she felt too guilty. Her problems were nothing compared to Stew’s. So her mind was blank. Hockey, however, seemed energized by the absurd turn of events.
“God, Bethany is a genius,” he said, chomping on his kelp. “What great TV. Look at that backdrop. Small-town New Jersey red brick school, white steeple, pseudo-Protestant aesthetic for working-class Catholics.”
“What are you talking about?” Eva breathed. “Are you out of your mind?”
“Just look at that big hair on Bethany.” He pressed the Mute button.
“Hockey, Stew just murdered a little boy.”
“And David is going to pay for it.” Thor’s voice was apocalyptically matter-of-fact.
“It’s very smart.” Hockey was almost laughing. There was a strange glowing enthusiasm. “Big hair on TV conveys small-town parochialism. This helps the rest of the country’s sense of this as a monstrous crime. Homosexual crimes, when committed in sophisticated places, are entirely different than when imposed on a bunch of hicks. Hicks are victims of homosexuals, but they’re also aesthetically offensive to straight people in big cities. That’s why their teeth have to be Photoshopped.”
“Are you for real?”
“What’s the matter?”
“You sound like a brief.” Eva went over to the phone and pressed Redial. Then she left a message on the machine. “We’re talking about real people here. It’s not a game.”
“No, it’s true.” Hockey was bouncing. “In Newsweek they ran a cover photo of some white-trash woman who had seven babies at once, and they Photoshopped her teeth so she would look middle-class.”
“She wasn’t white trash,” Eva said, remembering. “She was just white.”
“Poor David and Joe,” Thor said. “If only the cops had just left that kid alone.”
“Well, you’re right about one thing,” Hockey said expansively, like Sleeping Beauty waking up to a beautiful day. “We’re in deep doo-doo, but we can get out of it. Stew got screwed, that’s clear. But the state isn’t going to take the blame; our client is, unless we’re really strategic. All of those state officials they’re suing are going to put the blame right back on us.”
Thor rolled a cigarette, kept his voice flat. “He’s such a kid.”
“It’s about time you noticed.” Hockey laughed again.
“What was so funny?” Thor was talking very slowly.
Eva could see him thinking, trying to come up with a way to help Stew. She knew she should be doing the same, but she didn’t know how. They looked at each other. Hockey was oblivious, smiling. Watching the TV.
Eva turned her back on the tempting existence of the telephone and sat down at the computer. “How can we save him?”
“Who?” Hockey tore into his protein bar.
“Stew.”
“Bubelah,” Hockey said, so carefree he balled up the wrapper and shot it into the wastebasket. “Stew is not our client.”
“Okay,” Eva said, absolutely lost. “Okay.”
29
All is lost, because absence is found.
“So you grew up in this room, huh?”
“Yeah,” Mary growled, feeling sultry and sleek. “I used to bring girls home when I was in high school.”
“How did you seduce them?”
Wendy giggled. It was a fun fuck, and Mary could feel the girl’s excitement, like she was having one of those life-changing sex experiences. Maybe it was her first one-night stand. Maybe the first one that worked. Wendy was as seasoned a homosexual as a girl her age could be, but Mary was just so much older and so fucking hot. She knew how to show her a really good time.
“I would say ‘Take me to the movies and you pay. When we’re there, you can touch me any way you want to.’ I liked how it was in front of everybody. Those poor girls would sweat.”
It was three a.m. Her mother would never wake up. She was dead drunk.
“Wow.”
“Hey,” Mary said as she absentmindedly touched the girl’s nipples. She knew they were sore. “You know the fastest way to get a woman into bed, don’t you?”
“I think so. Tell her she’s intelligent?”
“Yeah.” Mary gave her the point. “And listen. Listening works, too.”
They were covered in sweat and cum, every orifice satiated.
“You know,” Wendy said shyly. “Some girls spend years trying to find someone they can talk to. I’m not that way. I want to have sex. If it’s good, there’s always something to say. You’re sexy. It’s fun talking to you.” She looked around the bedroom. Now it was used for storage. “How do you like being home?”
“I like it,” Mary said, and knew immediately that it was true. “I’m never going back to New York.” She’d torn up her airplane ticket that morning. “I know I have to tell my ex-girlfriend, but I don’t want to.”
“That’s cold.”
“Whatever. I don’t want to help her…. What do you do?”
“I’m a cop.”
This little dyke? “In Del Sol? There can’t be much business.”
“I’m from Freemont,” she said. “Three of us got sent here for a seminar.”
The garden chimes sang through the window in the night breeze.
“How do you like Southern California?”
“It’s so conservative.” Wendy shrugged. “Even the criminals are Republicans. You really need to deal with your girlfriend. Just try.”
Every afternoon, Mary sat in her grieving mother’s garden in Del Sol, California, watching her mother’s bitterness, her arthritic hands, old face, lifeless hair. Delilah’s will intact, but motivated only by resentment. There was nothing else, after all. Her daughter had not charmed her and her man was dead. All in Mary’s life was revealed to have been a false diversion from her mother’s disappointment. Mary’s girlfriend, her plays, her wish for professional mercy. None of this was real. Only disappointment was real.
There was no reason to ever go back to New York. As Mary had buried her mother’s lover, served the drinks, washed glasses, sat endlessly, watched the TV, she had had so many revelations, none of which she wished to retain.
Eva’s pain. Her struggles, commitments, opinions, beauty, friends, and defeats meant nothing. All they ever did was make Mary feel inadequate, lost in her own failings. If Eva failed, Mary had to sympathize. She didn’t want to. There was nothing in it for her. There was no point, because it never stopped. Something new always went wrong, and neither Eva’s success nor Eva’s failure would erase Mary’s failure. So what good was it? It was a time waster. Mary had failed herself, and Eva hadn’t done anything to stop it. In fact, she had encouraged her to go down a dead-end street.
If Mary had had a stupendous success, one trumpeted in more than newspapers, it would have to be mentioned on television shows that her mother actually watched. Unavoidably in the right magazines at the dentist’s office. If Mary could have bought a huge place and a car with her success, then her open homosexuality would have paid off. But she had failed at that, so disappointment was the result. Her mother—widowed, no-hearted—looked at her like she was a broken blender or a stained shirt.
Eva had never really believed that Mary could be an overnight sensation, so Mary didn’t want her anymore. Now this cancer thing was coming up. Just like when the legal clinic was defunded. Just like the fucking baby shower. Just like Hockey having AIDS forever. It was always something. Eva would be upset and want help. Mary would have to worry about her and think about it night and day. Maybe even bedpans. Forget it. No way. There was only one bedpan she’d ever want to clean, and that was the one of her needy, vulnerable, futurely incontinent mother, so that her mother would finally know how important Mary truly was. That she was the difference between shit and propriety.
“You need to try.”
“No.” Mary brought her face to the girl’s breast. Apple-blossom beauty. “Trying is humiliating. It points o
ut that I have something to try. I’d rather just stay here. I mean, no one but Eva even cares. My mother is thrilled. She thinks I finally got away from that dyke.”
“Yeah, that’s pretty funny.”
A Mexican man came every other Saturday and earned five dollars an hour to take care of the block, but no one thought this was wrong. No one her mother came into contact with condemned this. It was natural. There was a freedom in that—just to be white, without other people’s histories.
That was the irony here. The women at the checkout counters looked just like Mary. They weren’t accented, fucked-over immigrants or candidates for workfare filled with resentment and secret languages, their own exotic makeup tips. If Mary had just stayed home where she belonged and gone to a job, she would have been recognized by everyone around her as worthy. As good enough. Her mother wasn’t asking for very much. But because Mary tried to be great and spent all those years with Eva, she didn’t have anything now. If Mary had stayed closeted, her silence would have protected her from this punishment, the pain of coming out. It wasn’t worth it.
Now she could wait for the lemons to ripen on the tree. She’d shop at the pastel mall, the only colors in this panoply being peach, sea foam green, egg yolk yellow, robin’s egg blue, and sand. Drive to the mall, drive to the gay bar. Get in the car and freak out. Out of the car is in public. Prepare each time for the human encounter and then return to the Mazda. In New York, once she left her apartment it was all out in the open. People showed one another everything. Del Sol was more sedate, private and civilized. Who wants to know? Get over it.
Other people’s problems were not fascinating. Del Sol offered tempered intercourse, moderate weather, and casual but clean attire. The choice was this or back to the New York of dark people who move too quickly, think too quickly, and decide the things that Mary never wanted to decide. The others waited for her to decide, and then they decided and she didn’t. They liked the responsibility of deciding. She hated it.
Mary could get a job in Del Sol, or the neighboring town of Mesa, for a pittance. Then every night she’d drive her ten-year-old car into her mother’s driveway and sit in the garden behind the house like all the neighbors. The street was deserted with flat beige squares of concrete in front of each garage. All the hidden neighbors were sitting quietly behind their own houses, privately. That’s what she wanted–privacy–so no one could see her inadequacies or evaluate them. No one measuring her failure. No competition with people she can’t beat. Eva had supported her every step on the way to failure.
The night before, they were watching TV. Mary, her mom, and some friends. Someone on the Jay Leno show had said the word “consequences,” and Mary ran into the bathroom, shaking. She hated that word. It was a symptom of false sociality. In New York, when she snapped at someone with that American twang, the way every one of her relatives had always snapped at her, the way her grandfather snapped at her father when they worked together on the Ford line in Michigan, the way her father snapped at her mother when she forgot to stop by the package store. This reflex made New Yorkers cringe. They are so weak—they require low tones, false politeness, and explicit reasons for every critique. If she snapped at them, they called her a bitch. Not a Euro-trash unruly one, but a white trash one, and New Yorkers don’t even know what white trash is. They think any non-rich white Protestant is white trash. They’re so ignorant that blue collar is sexy to them, only if it’s rugged but not if it twangs. White blue collar isn’t white trash, so how come they don’t know the difference?
“Be nice,” Eva would whisper whenever Mary got bristly in public. But it was impossible. Do your job, expect nothing, and mind your own business. Delilah suffers in silence here at the end of the continent, sips vodka. Here people have a few drinks and shut up. New Yorkers drink to get livelier. More ideas, more plans. It never stops. Ideas. Plans. Ideas. Plans. They don’t even care if they never come true, but they try to make them come true. Why try if it’s not going to happen? They just like planning, so Mary, too, had learned to hope and plan, to gesture pathetically toward strategy. She mimicked them, imitated them falsely, became a cheaper version of them, one that could never succeed at their tricks. They loved planning and she hated it. There is nothing wrong with working hard just to stay in place.
Wendy kissed her again. She wanted one more round.
“In a minute … let’s have a smoke.”
“Okay, but I only have menthol.”
“That’s fine.”
They lit up a Kool.
“Don’t give up on your dreams,” Wendy said, sharing the cig. “I’ve achieved my dreams. About work, I mean.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-three.”
“Yeah, well, it’s a little more complicated than that. You’re young, and you’re very pretty. You’ll be okay.”
Every day at four Mary walked with her mother, slowly, along the beach. It was so gorgeous. The Pacific Coast, a vacuum of beauty, no way to participate. Not like going to a play in New York, where all evening she’d churn and yearn to jump in, be a part of it. You can’t envy the ocean. So no disappointment, no agony of exclusion. There’s the sea; you can’t do anything about it.
This part of Southern California was the true Aryan Nation. Having blonde hair and blue eyes meant nothing here. No butt of jokes or desire. No one knew what melanin even means. The subdivision was populated principally by bicepped Barbie dolls. Even the yoga class she tried was too advanced. The gym hadn’t offered introductory courses in years, only Advanced Step 2 and Cardio 4. Mary was tall and slim-hipped, lanky, great legs. She could be in shape in no time. Those Jewish, Italian, Puerto Rican bodies can never look that way. They just bulk up. If not, they look false. They look overdone and pretentious, out of place being healthy. Deliberate.
Boogie boarding and jogging and drives to the mall belonged on bodies and faces like Mary’s. That’s what those activities were for. She never wanted to hear them put down again. Beach culture was not a waste of time. That is what time is for. She wanted a Vietnamese woman to wax her legs, a Mexican to clean the garden, and she didn’t want to feel guilty about any of it. Her family worked for a living since 1670. They were still working. Everyone else made it on their backs. They had built his country. They weren’t liberals. Del Sol is a hotbed of social rest. And Mary was tired. She wasn’t going anywhere.
Mary got up to get a glass of water. The stars were her stars, and she could hear the ocean. There was a terrible sadness suddenly, and then she drank the water. She got over it.
“Hey,” she said, bringing the glass to Wendy’s lips. “Have you ever seen a play?”
“Yes, it was good.”
“Well then you know that in a play the hero’s fate has to be made clear before the curtain comes down. Will he be liberated or condemned? The lovers have to have a confrontation or reunite. But there’s a big difference between the way people really act and the way they act in plays. This is real life, so I don’t ever have to pick up that phone. You know what I like about Del Sol?” Mary lit another Kool.
“The weather?”
“Yeah, I like the weather. I like to sit in gardens with people who work as clerks, in banks or malls, or in software. To get in bed with a cop. No one needing to be recognized by an authority larger than their family. The women at the checkout counter look just like me. They don’t try to pass.”
“Pass for what?”
“Middle-class.”
“So what are you going to do, get a job cashiering?”
“Maybe.”
“You’re just mad. Soon you’ll call your girlfriend. You’re not going to stay here.”
“I’m from here,” Mary said. “Car culture is my culture. She’s not my girlfriend. Whatever.”
30
“Aw, Hockey, get off it. Jeez.” Thor was back on his feet now, trying to regain his charm. “Look what they’ve done to him.”
“The kid is a murderer, Thor. He murdered a little boy
. And no smoking in my office–I have AIDS.”
“He’s fifteen.” Eva took one of Thor’s cigarettes, opened a window, sat on the ledge, and lit it. Immediately she realized that doing so was a passive form of resistance to Hockey’s authority, and that scared her.
“So what? I knew better than to murder a little boy when I was fifteen.”
“They’re charging him as an adult.’
“He is an adult.”
“Then,” Eva said, throwing the cigarette out the window after one puff, “how can they charge his lover with child molestation? Either he’s a man, who should not be brought under court supervision for having a boyfriend. Or he’s a child and should be charged in juvenile court.” She went back to her computer.
That was what it boiled down to, after all. The hypocrisy. Eva felt trapped, like Stew. No matter where he turned, he faced a brick wall.
“Stew is a murderer,” Hockey said, making notes. “Nothing worse happened to him than what happened to us. In fact, it’s easier to be a gay kid now than it was when we were little.”
“Are you jealous?”
“No.” Hockey seemed unsure for one moment. He put his hands in his pockets. “But nowadays they have clubs and things. Look, Bethany’s back.”
He turned up the volume on the Headline Highlights, drowning out any further conversation. Relieved, they all shut up and watched the same clip again.
“Look, Hockey,” Eva heard herself beg. “Stew went through police, courts, and social workers, and no one did anything about that crazy homophobic family.”
“Is that what you’re going to argue in court?” He postured theatrically. “Blame the family? You’ve got to be kidding. Plea bargain. Wait, here’s a new shot of Bethany.”
They watched her cross the lawn, wiggle her ass, and walk over to a kind of normal-looking couple, standing by a normal-looking car.
“What bargain?” Eva said, taking notes; it was time to be systematic. “They’re not going to bargain. We’ve got to go to trial and tell them the truth. Stew’s relationship with Dave was the happiest thing in his life. His family didn’t want him. He’s gay. Other gay people are his family. Stew is our child.”
The Child Page 16