The Mt. Monadnock Blues

by Larry Duberstein

  “Timmy, you are a wild man.”

  Earl moved closer, to tower, and possibly to lay hands on the plague-infested shoulders. Had Tim been heterosexual and a potential buyer, the hands were there for sure. Tim drove him back by swatting frenetically at insects real and imagined, laying about him on all sides.

  “I’m serious,” he said, turning back to the house. “What do you know about those two human beings beyond their names? I’ll give you a blank Post-It page two inches square, and you see if you can fill it up.”

  “Why play games, Timmy? It’s not about your little quizzes. A court will surely know that.”

  “And what is it about, in your mind?”

  Tim went up the steps first, but Earl was so close behind him that Tim felt the breath which carried his reply.

  “Values. It’s about values and morality, bro. Nobody requires a Post-It note to tell the right from the wrong.”

  Boston was somehow warmer than South Carolina, and twice as humid. Tim got into a taxicab at Logan and sat dripping in the back seat. The driver, who was Haitian, said he loved this heat.

  Not a lick of wind, and no cold beer at journey’s end. The larder was bare. Tim took a swig of flat ginger ale and stood under the shower (dialled to cold, then gradually lukewarmer) before putting on shorts and a sleeveless tee-shirt. Now what?

  The apartment needed rearranging. He would have to give the kids his room, and carve himself a nest somewhere. There was major grocery shopping to do, but that seemed way too grim a proposition. The Star Market on Saturday night? That place could bring you down on a Thursday.

  Truly, he could use some company. A friend, a decent meal, time off for good behavior. In the morning he would be behaving well again, fetching the kids, and that was fine. Being alone was fine too, for Tim was a loner at heart, dyed-in-the-wool loner by choice; still, he was not immune to bouts of loneliness.

  He did not want Dolly’s, or Colours, he did not think of Karl, or Joe, or Artie. He thought of Jill. A sister or a brother was what your parents gave you precisely so you would never be lonely. Jill had helped him so many times, could not help him now. Ashes to ashes, the preacher had said, a readymade figure of speech. It was possible to not really hear a phrase that familiar, yet it hit Tim as a naked and shocking reality. Ashes. He was sure he would never get over the distance between the sister he had loved so long and the small mound of ash they interred.

  He hated this crippling sadness, desperately craved relief from it. Maybe Ellie. His surrogate sister, no less. Whenever she joked that she and Tim should “do it, just once, for fun, as a weird intriguing experiment,” he used the incest excuse. They were sister and brother, and while weirdness and intrigue were good, surely incest was bad.

  Plus, he and Ellie had rescued one another from loneliness on many a Saturday. They knew the drill.

  “Hey, Ell, I just got in. You have plans?”

  “I do. But I have time to hear what happened.”

  “Time for a wee dram at Culpepper’s? Meetcha halfway?”

  “Not enough time for that.”

  “Yeah. I should have guessed you’d be booked. Saturday night.”

  “Right. Like I always am.”

  “I’m glad you’re booked,” he rallied; lied. “The victor, I presume?”

  “Yes.”

  “No need to blush.”

  “I am not blushing.”

  “Eleanor, you are definitely blushing. Isn’t it time you brought this man home to meet the family?”

  “Are you ever going to tell me what happened? Come on.”

  “But I’m psyched. I like Ike, but I pick Vic.”

  Tim was trying to be psyched, or at least to sound psyched, but mostly he was hanging on to her. In truth he had a twinge—it could not be jealousy?—about Victor. Were his options being foreclosed here? Should he consider tossing his hat in the ring while there was still time?

  When Ellie would kid about “doing it” once, for kicks, or playing strip poker with help from Jose Cuervo.…Kicks?—or her way of transforming them into a couple through the alchemy of games and potions? Dilute me with enough booze and I become a flaming heterosexual? “Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it,” she would gently chide.

  Tim hadn’t tried it in over twenty years, yet maybe he should try it now. They could get a big place (pay one rent, save a bundle) and fill it with Billy and Cindy, dogs and gerbils. They already knew how to share space. They already had a kind of love.

  But Ellie went, and the simple truth returned: Tim was just terribly lonely. The loneliness felt like a lump of raw dough in his belly. Then, happily, the telephone rang back. She would do that sometimes, when she sensed an unfulfilled need in him.

  “Trips, Incorporated,” he said, joking with her. “What can we do for you today?”

  “Well!” said a strange voice. “What are the possibilities?”

  Not Ellie, no one he knew, and yet Tim rambled ahead with the silly setpiece joke he had begun.

  “Whatever you require, sir. Reservations, accomodations—”

  “What if I require a good blow job?”

  Blam.

  Tim had been so eager to connect with someone, anyone, that he completely missed the nasty undertone. This man was not playing a nice game. Earl Sanderson? It could be Earl, or some henchman of Earl’s, inaugurating a program of harassment.

  “Who is this?” he demanded, shaking with anger and fear.

  “Joe Average is my name, you slut. Don’t you remember me?”

  Tim was trembling when he hung up the phone; his scalp was electrified when it sounded again like a fire drill. He let the machine field it, listening with morbid fascination.

  “Average,” said the voice, “Joe Average”—in the cadence of the ‘Bond, James Bond’ routine. That was all.

  For now. Because this did not strike Tim as a one-shot deal. It felt too personal to be a random crank call. There was Earl, no question about that, but the phrase sounded familiar. Joe Average. He had come across it somewhere recently. Yes: he had used it, by chance, in that asinine “interview” across from the BPL, when he got himself cornered as the man in the street. He had blurted out something about Joe Average and gay-bashing, some throwaway remark that only the reporter, and the cameraman, would have heard.

  Unless they had put it on the air, in which case this could be anyone he knew, a friend pulling his chain.… But no, a friend would have revealed himself in the end. Nor did this man sound friendly.

  Next time it rang he fled. Up and out, shoes in hand, before the nasty voice could find him. He was on the move, without the wisp of a plan.

  It was still broiling. The sun, lower in the sky, buttered the high brick façades and came flowing down alleyways, spattering the fences and vines. From force of habit, Tim launched himself on the southwest corridor, then found himself—blank and slightly numb—in Copley Square, where the heat had banished humankind. There were so few people in sight that you could count them.

  The pigeon man was there. An elderly tourist was posing his wife beneath the Trinity Church arches. A second couple emerged from the foyer of the Ritz and folded themselves into a taxi.

  Tim crossed Boylston and went up to the office. He pushed his message button and ploughed through, clicking everything directly to Save until he heard what he was bound to hear. No surprise this time. “Hello there, Timmy Tripster, this is your buddy Joe. Joe Average. Buzz you back later.”

  There were three more. The guy had been checking in every day since Wednesday and now he was calling both numbers, back and forth, a creepy pingpong game. Tim’s life had become a Hitchcock movie, in which he was the Cary Grant while outside his darkening windows the bad one (the Richard Widmark?) was watching. Maniacal, eager, high on the happy prospect of torture. Yes it was early, but his mood was altered; a glass at Colours might be in order after all.…

  Tim had never been as close to Jill’s kids as in the days before Camp Keokuk; never as distant as he was now
, heading north to pick them up. Two weeks, and he had lost the thread. He had time to regain it—and that was the plan, to bear down—but he wasted the time rehashing Barry.

  Why had there been such humiliation? Barry’s was a harmless remark, intended as a compliment. Why had the whole business gone so sour? The Romper Room at Colours, the man named Barry who said he was a stockbroker. Why had Tim disbelieved him? Because Barry did not look like a stockbroker? Who looked like anything but meat in the Romper Room strobes? Nor did Tim care whether he was a stockbroker or a stock clerk at Gem Auto Parts.

  “I can’t explain it, I just tend to gravitate to older men.”

  Gravitate, do you, thought Tim. “Oh?” he said, feigning interest. He had not connected himself to Barry’s statement. Older men?

  “I like that they’ve been part of the history. The early demonstrations? Stonewall?”

  “Ancient history.”

  “Were you there? I mean, were you lucky enough to be a part of all that?”

  This was respect, absolutely, but post-coital respect was simply not the right note to strike. What was? There among the garish cushions and plastic shrubs, the dark room suffused with strains of Sophie Tucker; what was the correct response? There was none, of course. In truth, they were finished responding, and now were left to escape a spent moment.

  Nor did Barry, puffy and slack about the gills, spongy from deskwork and drink, look so very youthful himself. Twenty-six? Tim had not believed that, either. Surely Barry looked older than Tim—or was he kidding himself? In any case, who cared?

  Or why? Why did Tim care so much? Why was he as fucked up about age as a crumbling movie queen turning sixty in her whiteface pancake? To be so vain; that was the true humiliation.

  Tim was a teenager when Stonewall happened, nor was he aware that it happened. He wasn’t even aware he was gay. His own ancient history, placed on the big continuum, made a fairly short arc through time. Oh there had been a great coming-out, no question, when every day held glorious adventure and all sex seemed a sort of love. Life was out ahead of them all, to be reaped from rich fields extending as far as the mind could see.…

  Which, as things turned out, was not far. The epidemic had aged them fast, for sure, and yet the process did not take long in any case. At twenty-eight you were a stripling, poised at the starting line—you had barely begun to live—but by thirty-eight you were past your prime, your best years receding with your hairline.

  Physically, this was undeniable. No thirty-eight-year-old is winning gold medals at the Olympics; no thirty-four-year-old. Biologically, your body begins to die before that. So the prime of life, when you are free and able and finally aware, is a mere ten-year proposition. Gather your rosebuds while ye may!

  Not that you are dead. There is life after life, so to speak. There are new lessons, new goals, like garnering compliments from the Barrys of this world. There is achieving respect.

  And regret. Regret never entered the picture in 1980, or 1985. Now it was always with him. There would be Barry and there would be regretting Barry, a sort of sad, inevitable, two-step waltz.

  Steering onto the gravel lane, Tim followed the blazed arrowheads TO KEOKUK TERRITORY. All the picking-up parents had left their cars in a hot open field, orderly rows of gleaming Asian station wagons. Tim angled the Honda between a Toyota and a Subaru, then took the grassy path up to the bunks.

  Billy, fresh from lifesaving class, was as bronzed as a sturdy little Indian brave. Cindy had a shine to her cheeks and eyes, even though—Monty’s child—she had avoided the sun. They were energized and eager to hear the “plan.”

  “Well, this week we’ll have to be in Boston.”

  “How come?”

  “I have to work, sweetheart. Ellie has been sort of doing my job for me.”

  “Good deal,” said Billy, ironic and sophisticated on the burdens of working. He did seem the picture of health, and balance.

  “Yeah but,” said Tim, “I owe her big time. Anyway, I found these day camps in Boston—”

  “I’d rather stay here,” said Billy. “I mean, if we go to camp, I like this one.”

  Keokuk had treated Billy well. He had small goldplated trophies for soccer and softball, iron-on cloth patches for running and swimming. Both as symbols and as objects, these were meaningful to him.

  “This would be day camp,” Tim explained. “There’s one that’s all sports, and another for arts and crafts. But the idea is we’d be home together every night. Eat dinner, talk, watch TV.”

  “There’s room in the next session. Ronny checked it out for me.”

  “Ronny’s his counselor,” said Cindy.

  “I know,” said Tim, who had thanked Ronny, tipped him twenty bucks, and admired the lad’s pretty dimples.

  “I don’t want to go to art camp if Billy’s somewhere else.”

  “Fine. And no one has to go to any camp. I just hated the idea of you guys getting stuck indoors in the summertime.”

  Getting them launched, extricating them, took forever. Two dozen goodbyes, too much small talk with the other parents, last-minute duffelstuffing. Back in the flattened hayfield, the Honda had become too hot to touch.

  Billy kept pressing for more details about the future. Each night from Berline, Tim assured them he was working on it, yet the only plan in place was treading water. He had already done some serious treading—in Jaffrey, Provincetown, Berline, and Boston—but what else could he do? Tim could be treading for the next ten years, if he lived so long.

  In the back seat, duly buckled in, the Hergies ate too much chocolate (“before it melts”) and sang the Keokuk song of friendship too many times. Eventually, Cindy slept, with her neck so extremely cocked it looked broken. Billy pushed her upright once or twice before he too slumped lower. He had sung to drown out thought—and to dislodge pictures of his parents that stole too close. He replaced them with the drone of the song and then with images from soccer games, instant replays he framed on TV screens in his mind. And with images of Judy Simon.

  She had kissed him at the dance—right on the mouth—and she had stroked his cheek with the back of her hand. Billy had gone bright with embarrassment and he could feel embarrassed by it still. Judy was not the prettiest girl, or even the nicest, yet her soft touch persisted. He could rub his cheek and feel it there now, as he drifted through Cindy and soccer and Judy to sleep.

  Enrollment closed back in May. Did Mr. Bannon not believe in planning ahead? Mr. Bannon did not believe in it, no, but he did understand the inadvisability of saying so this morning. Soon enough the truth was out: a few slots remained open for the non-planners.

  But there were forms to fill out, waivers to sign, and mug shots, so half the morning was gone by the time he hugged the kids goodbye. Then the desk jockey reminded him about lunch; lunch could not be waived. So he rushed to a 7-11 for pre-fabricated sandwiches they would not eat and cartons of milk they would not drink, plus little bags of corn chips and granola bars laced with chocolate. It was after ten when he got to the office.

  Almost sheepishly he confessed he had to leave in an hour to eat lunch. “I’ll work late,” he swore to Charles and Ellie, explaining that Karl had cancelled a client for him, that it was not pleasure but legal business. “I’ll stay till midnight.”

  “What about the kids?”

  “Oh shit, I can’t stay late. But I’ll come back, after dinner. I’ll bring them with me.”

  “It’s not necessary,” said Charles. “But Tim? We will be keeping score.”

  The city air was lighter finally, less oppressive, as they sat on the bricks outside Au Bon Pain. Karl with his soup and salad, Tim a sandwich and coffee.

  “Let’s start with the worst case scenario,” said Karl. “Just to cover all the bases.”

  “Hit me with your best shot, barrister.”

  “They can go for a Temporary Guardianship. Get a court order that simply supersedes the terms of the will.”

  “They can do that? Supersede?”<
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  “This would be a motion brought to the ex parte session—meaning with no notice to you. If they persuade a judge to grant it, they come with a sheriff and cart the kids away.”

  “Nifty, Karl. This is your justice system? Some judge simply fucks me?”

  “Up the tunnel of love, old boy. But it’s highly unlikely, and Erica’s lawyer will advise against it. So relax.”

  “I’m relaxing. Tell me what Erica’s lawyer will advise.”

  “Petition the court for a Temporary Guardianship, but with proper notice and a hearing three weeks from now.”

  “And the will? What my sister wanted for her children doesn’t count for anything?”

  “You’re not relaxing, Tim. You haven’t eaten a bite.”

  “It’s hard enough to keep my napkin from blowing in your soup.”

  “The will counts, of course it counts. But as with every matter before the probate court, it is subject to challenge.”

  “You mean, the way some bitter distant cousin can tie up a rich estate, hoping they hand him a fat check to go away?”

  “Not exactly, because they do have a case. They could win, you could win. Are you sure about what you even want?”

  “I want control. And time, to figure this thing out.”

  “Hell, in that case you might still be needing time when your niece and nephew are in law school.”

  “Keep humoring me, Karl. Say they do what you expect, a hearing in three weeks. What do I do?”

  “The right question to ask. You hunker down with those children and start making some footprints in the sand. Clear prints, that a judge can follow. You begin to carve a trail of trust through the jungle—”

  “Easy now, you’re starting to lift off.”

  “Hey, I’m getting into the case.”

  “Great. I just haven’t heard you lift off like that in a while. But these footprints, and tracks and trails—are what, exactly?”

  “Patterns. Daily rituals. What really counts in any custody case is continuity.”

  “And three weeks makes for continuity?”

  “Well, you have the last three and the next three, plus you have the precedent of solid relationships with the children going back to their birth. Then you have the paperwork, naming you. That’s your case.”