The Mt. Monadnock Blues

by Larry Duberstein

  “Nubie is bigger than I remembered,” said Tim. “Looks like tough going for a canoe.”

  “No worries, Unk, there’s three of us. Besides, look at that guy. He’s zooming, and he’s alone.”

  “He’s in a sea kayak, Bill. And he’s probably a professional.”

  “A professional sea kayaker?” This in Billy’s tone of particular ridicule, each syllable freighted with heavy irony.

  “That guy? I’m pretty sure he was in the Olympics.”

  “Right, Unk. An Olympic sea kayaker.”

  They were working now, a halting progress as the canoe bucked and turned with the waves. Halfway across, they knew they would make it, so long as they continued to paddle full bore. Billy Hergesheimer was unacquainted with physical doubt (if there was a building to lift, he would fully expect to lift it) yet even he was exhausted when they hit the Spoonwood portage.

  There, at the rocky neck of land linking Nubanusit Lake to the tranquil, sheltered Spoonwood Lake beyond, they tied off the canoe and hauled gear up the dirt path to a promontory. They spread a blanket in the sun and Cindy, using one towel for a pillow and another for a cover, was instantly curled into sleep. Tim and Billy stepped onto the broken concrete dam to survey both lakes.

  “Wind should be with us going back,” said Tim—his way of informing the boy they would not be going on across Spoonwood. For once, Billy was happy to hear it.

  “It could shift,” he said, playing the grownup, “but no problem for Camp White Sneaker.”

  “Right. Camp Keokuk might struggle, but White Sneaker can’t be stopped.”

  “Camp starts Tuesday, you know,” said Billy, saving Tim the effort; it was to be his next sentence. “Real camp.”

  “I do know. But I heard you were against going.”

  “Heard from who?”

  “From whom,” said Tim, in deference to Jill and her grammatical imperative. “From your Mom is whom.”

  Tim waited for the sky to fall.

  “When?”

  “Weeks ago. Maybe three weeks ago?”

  “Oh, yeah, that. I didn’t want to miss playing in the all-star game.”

  “You missed a game yesterday,” Tim pointed out, but Billy shrugged it off. Not the all-star game.

  “If we didn’t go—to Keokuk?—would we be in Boston?”

  “I’m not sure. But wherever we were, that would be Camp White Sneaker. Like a portable camp.”

  Tim’s sidebar reference to Jill still lingered in Billy’s eyes, where a glaze of tears had pooled and stayed though the boy pawed at them. And he began to shiver, though it was warm in the sun. Tim’s own tears were coming by the time Cindy, suddenly bawling, ran to them on the ledge.

  “We won’t ever see Mommy again,” she said, the words bursting through a mouth bubble after one of those sound delays you get with an injured baby.

  Tim dearly wished he could argue the point. To let it be the truth was too stark, too cruel. Enveloping her in his arms felt absurdly inadequate: he had no clue what to tell her, could barely speak at all, most definitely could not swallow. Where was Goldsmith when you needed her? What was the magic bullet for a real and bottomless sadness?

  “We can see her on the tapes,” said Billy.

  He had never meant to let himself cry; had restored himself to poise and bravery. He truly believed it was his assignment, his job, to be brave and to bolster his little sister.

  “Is that what the lady told you?”

  “She said we’re lucky we have tapes of Mom and Dad.”

  “You are lucky,” said Tim, hardly convinced. Grasping, as they were, at straws.

  “Her dad died when she was little,” Billy explained. “And it was so long ago they didn’t have tapes.”

  “I don’t want tapes, Unk, I want Mommy and Daddy.”

  “I know, sweetheart”—rocking her—“I know.” (More, Goldsmith, we’ll need more than that.)

  “Uncle Tim?”

  “What is it, Bill?” The boy looked so composed and manly now that the Marine Corps would have taken him on his twelfth birthday. So composed that Tim’s swallow went through on the strength of it.

  “Camp is good by me.”

  “Keokuk, you mean?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What about the all-star game?”

  Billy shrugged it off.

  “Cindy?”

  “I want Mommy. And that’s not my name. My name is Cynthia.”

  “Did you like the camp last summer?”

  “Don’t remember,” she said, then started flipping her head back and forth sideways like a rag doll mishandled.

  “She liked it a lot,” said Billy. “You did, Simp. You remember Tess. And Katy McSweeney?”

  “I want to eat the cake now,” she said. She was whining softly, but her grief sounded a shade less present.

  “Cake?”

  Tim, of course, was inclined to stand on the proper sequence: the sandwiches, the carrots, and then the cake—with milk. But this was idiotic, not “right” but wrong. Let them eat cake. What the hell, let them eat five hundred doughnuts or a thousand hot-pink Hostess Sno-Balls. Their parents just died, for God’s sake, and they are trying to live through it.

  “We’ll eat the cake, but listen to my idea. This would be a new White Sneaker pact. Whenever we feel like crying, we cry. And then right away we all jump in the water—to rinse the salt off our cheeks.”

  “And the pepper!” Cindy exclaimed, suddenly light as a balloon. Floating to her feet.

  “So here we go!”

  “Wait, Unk,” said Billy. “Not till we cry.”

  “We are crying, you goofball. Come on.”

  A moment later, in water to his waist, Tim confided that this entire lake had been formed in 1616 from the tears of Chief Nubanusit at the time his pet snake Chester vanished. He wagered a nickel that Billy could not spell kayak backwards, then told them about palindromes: they proceeded from kayak to Bob to boob to Madam I’m Adam. And they laughed.

  They simply could not help laughing with each dash into the rocky shallows; soon they were laughing before they ran. They would float awhile, splashing and joking until Cindy called for cake again or Billy craved his Gatorade. The cry-and-swim covenant, which they took very seriously, took literally, proved more than a bit useful. They got so much good exercise they would all sleep that night like the glacial erratics surrounding the shore.

  And they had cleared some high hurdles. They had faced the subject of Jill and Monty, and they had decided the question of summer camp. Short-term, Tim was all set. He could be in P-Town on Wednesday.

  The kids were still sleeping like boulders when Tim kept a telephone appointment with Olivia Goldsmith next morning, to vet the camp decision. “Either way seems wrong to me,” he confessed.

  “Exactly. So it’s also right either way. And since they said yes, go with yes—even if they backtrack into doubt, or one of them does.”

  “Go with the choice they made, you’re saying.”

  “Yes, but speak with the camp directors, speak frequently with their counsellors, be sure they have access—”

  “Slow down, I’m writing.”

  “No need for that, this is still just common sense. Be sure they have access to one another and access to you. Call, and go to them on the weekend. Be prepared to go sooner, if necessary.”

  “Got it.”

  “And, Mr. Bannon, don’t neglect yourself in this. You might do well to see someone for a while.”

  Tim’s therapy, so far as he was concerned, was already in place: he had ten days in Provincetown. But he was exhausted when he got there, from all that had gone on and then two days of mostly driving. And though he sat with Karl on a deck overlooking the green waves of Cape Cod Bay, Tim found that Camp Keokuk was still squarely in his sights. On his mind. He had been here only 48 hours and already the future had invaded P-Town.

  Not September. That he could keep at arm’s length. But tomorrow? Even for Tim, tomorrow was in sight
.

  “Are you really going up there, Timmy? To Camp Cockatoo?”

  “Keokuk. Yes. I have to.”

  “But on a Saturday? With the rental?”

  “It can’t be helped, Karl. Goldsmith has spoken.”

  “God has spoken, you mean.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m afraid of, that I’m finally being punished.”

  “For indiscretions at the bath! Sinners in the hands of an angry homophobic God! But then why just you?”

  Once again this year they had taken an obscenely lavish house fifty yards from the water. It was not this ballroom-sized cedar deck or the $400 Möen faucets that compelled Tim and his friends to spring for the steep fortnight, it was—what else?—location. Of course you could pay almost as much for a shanty. P-Town in July was not an economy, but it was a necessity. It was life’s reward, at any cost.

  Though Tim was not quite so sure about that anymore. Even last July, when he was nobody’s parentis, he had experienced a new weariness with the whole scene. This might have been sour grapes, for the cast of characters was younger every year—or Tim and his friends were older and being eased out to their own self-contained pasture. As he danced with a handsome young doctor from Providence, it was clear to Tim that the guy barely registered his presence, that he was going through the motions impatiently.

  Newly invisible, devalued, Tim’s impulse was to flee. It had always been a sin to be fat, or dull, or dirty; now it was a sin to be over thirty. Better to be back at the house reading his Dawn Powell novel—though he had kept this to himself at the time. Imagine it, he confessed to Karl exactly one year later: rather be reading!

  “This too shall pass,” Karl told him. “We aren’t immune to the infamous mid-life crisis, you know.”

  “We the gay?”

  “Yes. And there’s nothing wrong with reading, or with sitting here watching this expensive surf, either.”

  Karl Trickett was the nicest man Tim had ever known. He was the only one who would fetch you from the airport at rush hour. Who would feed your fish. Everyone took advantage of him; it was impossible not to. Even his mother did, saving up crossword puzzles for their Wednesday nights, though she knew he was bored silly by them.

  Which made it hard to disagree with Karl—for everyone except Tim. Argument, or a steady stream of lightweight contention between them, served to connect the two men. “Karl, this is serious, I am losing interest in sex.”

  “Good. Maybe there’s hope for us yet.”

  “Let’s not.”

  “When sex is everything, there’s nothing after sex. Except tristesse.”

  “Great. That’s the consolation?”

  “Well no, there’s also friendship. I’m being serious now.”

  “Oh so am I.”

  “We’ll all help out. That’s what I mean. We’ll be Tim Bannon’s Queer Army of the Republic. Those two children will be raised by a virtual kibbutz.”

  “A cabal, more like.”

  “A queer kibbutz. Eight gay men and a baby.”

  “I just wonder where the other seven gay men will be on parade days, when I need coverage.”

  Leave P-Town on the first Saturday of the rental? Unthinkable, to be sure. Yet Tim had no choice, he was going and so—in a way—he was already gone.

  Suddenly Tim shot to his feet, a powerful reflex. It was as though a wasp had stung him, or his chair was burning. “Let’s get out of here,” he snapped.

  “What? What did I say?”

  “Nothing, Karl. I just need to get moving is all. I need to walk, right now.”

  “What hit you, though?” said Karl, hurrying to catch up. “Tell me.” But Tim said nothing more as they walked up the lane to Commercial Street. Every now and then he would sigh, and Karl was convinced he had no idea he was sighing.

  Karl steered them down the strip (mackerel-crowded with young men binging, blithely sailing their summer days) to the relative quiet of the Zephyr courtyard and ordered a half-carafe of chilled Chardonnay.

  “Wine, Karl? Isn’t it more like tea time?”

  “They have tea, if that’s what you want,” said Karl, then took a long draught of wine, as though it were cold water answering a desperate desert thirst. It had not been an easy two days. In truth, it had been hopeless: Tim was often a shade outside the mix, but now he was really in the gloaming. “He’s no fun,” said Jack Sauer bluntly, and both Jack and Arthur (their housemates here) had abdicated. Karl persisted. Not that he disagreed with the assessment; he persisted in the face of it.

  So he was refilling his glass while Tim’s sat untouched. Faces glided by, and bodies: tan limbs in muscle shirts and short shorts. Pale blue was this year’s color. Then someone was veering toward them and they saw it was Eric, Tim’s blind date on the night Jill died. Eric grasped the back of an empty chair and loomed over the table without speaking or smiling.

  Tim found he was not particularly pleased to see Eric—he recalled that silent smirk—yet he was never comfortable with a social silence and so began jabbering nonsense. “I’ve been true to you, Eric, since that night.”

  “Oh really. McTrickett here told me you were a fickle boy.”

  “Compared to him I am. Compared to you I doubt it.”

  “Comparisons are invidious,” said Karl.

  “Hey, I was faithful too, until the next day when I had no choice. I was cruised by a homeless disabled Hispanic trans-gender and I couldn’t afford to get sued for discrimination.”

  “Clearly unavoidable,” said Karl. “But don’t take Tim for granted.”

  “Hey, I don’t take my next breath for granted,” said this newly loquacious version of Eric. Tim was cringing at Karl’s earnest intervention. One just never copped to jealousy. Envy could be fun; envy could be spoken. But jealousy only served to complicate matters.

  Meanwhile, a fresh half-carafe arrived, along with a third glass, as a shadow made its way down the courtyard. Behind Eric’s chinese-red headband, on a high wooden fence, Tim saw where the shadow stopped—saw the precise boundary of the sunlight’s cast, highlighting every waver in the row of nails.

  “Are you in town alone?” said Karl.

  “I came alone. Trusting to fate.”

  “Never do that,” said Tim, refocusing, “or you might find yourself the father of twins tomorrow.”

  Eric did not get the joke, of course, and at first he looked puzzled; then irritated; finally amused. His smile, heretofore withheld, revealed a chipped front tooth.

  “Hey, or triplets,” he said, tossing down his wine with a flourish. He still did not get the joke, but he was ready to move on to greener pastures. “Nice to see you girls,” he said, and leaned back to give them the James Dean wave.

  “Disappointed?” said Karl, when they were alone again.

  “Hardly. We can do better than that, if we just—”

  “Trust to fate?”

  “Keep drinking, I was going to say.”

  This they did willy-nilly as the sun, whose warmth remained, gave way entirely to shadow. Eventually they were joined by Arthur Justus and by the Peters, Peter Weissberg and Peter Clippinger, with a fine young thing named Leonard in tow.

  Tim rallied. The game was not fate, it was more like musical chairs. You had a feeling each time the music started up, a feeling Tim did not get with Eric but did now with Leonard. He and Karl exchanged a glance at this parody of physical perfection: the lank sandy hair, the rich tan, the white bather’s leotard, and a faint accent, possibly German?

  The glance meant other things as well. There was their shared silent chuckle at how the Peters, who were famously monogamous, liked to shepherd a third wheel, perhaps a wild card for inspiration. And there was the question of fishing rights. For Tim, on the verge of his departure for Vermont, this was a simple equation with an elegant proof: he would get his shot at Leonard tonight, as Karl could take his shot tomorrow.

  So there were six of them and soon enough eight, as tables were slid together and afternoon wi
ne segued into supper. Leonard turned out to be Lennart, Swedish not German, and with the speed of light (or wine) Tim was right there with him in Malmo and Trelleborg. Also (Bingo!) on Bornholm Isle, where the lad’s dad owned a summer place not far from the cottage colony Tim sometimes booked for clients, even if he had never experienced personally the Bornholm Isle Blues.

  “You slut,” Karl whispered. “And I paid for the wine.”

  It went well for a while. Then, whether due to age or nationality (or such intangibles as the fact that Lennart was a degree candidate in Hairstyling), Tim and the Swede did not quite mesh. “We are against the promiscuity,” Lennart finally confided, at a point in the evening when only the promiscuity held any promise.

  “We?”

  “My friends. Our little circle at home, you know.”

  Win some, lose some—as ever. But that chaste goodnight kiss jostled Tim’s sleep and colored his waking disposition. Plus it was raining. You could not see the bay a plane-length away. As he made coffee for the still-sleeping household, as he shaved and dressed and hit Route 6 in the foredawn, though, Tim found he was glad to be leaving P-Town. Glad, at any rate, to be zipping away so briskly, motoring alone (on Route 6 in July!), for there was no question he had been spoiled by the Monadnocks.

  Driving relaxed him, or this kind of driving did, and he could use the time to get some serious worrying done. There was his mother, for starters. Tim had labored so hard to keep Anne calm and now he was troubled by his success, by the extent to which she was calm. She had been concentrating fiercely on the trivial: the ceremony, the burial, the invitations. She fretted about having the right dress. Was this calm, or was it the quiet leading edge of hysteria?

  Tim hesitated to trust his ears, of course, allowing that he could sound calm too. Probably it was like a moment at war when abruptly your trenchmate’s head flew off. Deeply you cared, deeply you were shocked, yet you had to press on before your own head flew off.

  He did not worry long about work, or money, because such superficial concerns gave way to more powerful (if unwelcome) anxieties about his health. Tim never planned to worry about AIDS (nor was it on the syllabus for today) yet he was always apt to interpret every shift in his pulse as the beginning of the end. Were his kidneys failing, or was it only back pain from sitting cramped under the steering wheel? He kept no thermometer in the house for fear he might give in some night—sweat was never far from his temples—and take his own temperature. So he had never had a fever in much the same way he was not HIV Positive: there was no documentation of either condition.