“This is Theo,” Tommy said as he watched his brother from behind the striped sofa. “And he’s doing it wrong. Theo, you have to use the B button when you move left or right.”
“I am using the B button,” the little boy screamed. “Dad showed me last night. But I can’t get through the door.”
“Dad,” Tommy hissed. He climbed over the sofa, knocked his brother aside with his knee, and mutinied the controller. “Dad can’t walk through a door in this world successfully. How the hell do you expect him to do it in a game?”
Mills glanced around the darkened den. Boat wheels hung on floral wallpaper. Circular armies of family photographs gathered on circular tabletops. Teak baskets cradled magazines and remote controls. Throw pillows softened the sharp ligaments of armchairs. Children’s board games towered in a corner under a pile of college catalogs. High above the television set, the head of a deer stared tenderly down at the suburban mire, its stomach the flat screen where an animated man now accomplished the act of walking through a door.
“Stop,” Theo wailed, his hands reaching for the controller. Tommy let him have it and watched as Theo immediately drove the man into the nearest wall. Tommy waved his hands in resignation. Theo quit the game and loaded a new one, clearly a favorite he’d already mastered, where laser beams anatomically violated the random materialization of a criminal caste—aliens, black men, crying white babies with automatic rifles.
Mills stepped backward into the sunlight by the front door. On the hallway table, a copy of the SUNY Buffalo freshman orientation calendar caught his eye, yellow highlighter circled three times around “November 2–4, Parents Weekend!!!” Tommy seemed to have forgotten the reason for Mills’s visit. He stood in front of the television and helped himself to a bowl of popcorn. Mills unwrapped the towel to examine the wound. Bits of towel fluff stuck to the drying blood.
“I think I just need a Band-Aid and I’m good to go.”
“Sorry,” Tommy said, hopping over the sofa and beckoning him toward the stairs. Mills followed him up the carpeted steps, half-barricaded by laundry baskets. The wall along the stairs had been painted lime green in that antic 1990s decor trick of supplying a splash of invigorating color—probably the last time the Muldoons had found the time or energy to consider their interior something more than a utility container for children. Upstairs, Tommy guided Mills toward his bedroom door.
If Mills had expected to discover the vulnerable heart of Tommy Muldoon by entering his most personal space, he was sadly disappointed. Tommy’s bedroom contained a sagging twin mattress and a few laminated shelves, crammed with science-fiction books and rocks collected from a beach. “Hold on a minute,” Tommy said before retreating into the hallway to gather the first aid supplies. The tart aroma of unwashed clothes and inexpensive cologne permeated the room, admittedly a striking revolt against a house that otherwise reeked of lemon disinfectant.
Two of Tommy’s four walls were painted black. The other two were plastered with posters of black hip-hop artists, black NBA players, and black Corvettes, each degree of blackness yellowed from rounds of sunlight through the window. As Mills suspected, it was Tommy’s window that was emblazoned with decals of circled As, small cries of anarchy reaching any seat-belted minivan driver whose eye happened to drift to the second floor. The bedroom aligned so faithfully with the cosmology of white male teenagers’ bedrooms everywhere that Mills was encouraged by the one staple it lacked: pictures of bikini-clad women. Maybe Tommy Muldoon would yet prove an unordinary creature hiding in the decorative fog of the Orient suburbs.
“Let’s pour alcohol on it,” Tommy proposed, more in the tone of science experimenter than nurse. He carried in a bottle of rubbing alcohol and a box of bandages. Mills took a seat on the bed and felt the soft corrugation of an eggshell foam pad beneath the galaxy-patterned sheet, as if suggesting a more delicate being than the boy who thumbtacked ghettos over his walls. Mills rested his elbow on his knee and allowed Tommy to hold the underside of his hand.
“This might sting,” Tommy warned as he lifted the bottle over the cut.
“Shouldn’t we do this over the sink?”
“I don’t care if we make a little mess.” It did sting as the alcohol ran over his palm, and drops of blood leaked onto the carpet. Blood on Pam Muldoon’s towel downstairs, blood on the beige carpet in her son’s bedroom—Mills felt like a wounded animal secretly taken in. “Don’t worry. I like the smell of chemicals,” Tommy said. “Do you think if you sniffed this you’d get high?”
Mills decided not to say yes. “Are your parents home?”
Tommy shook his head. “My dad’s out hunting, and my mom’s at one of her charity meetings. You’ll hear if she comes in. She sets the alarm whenever she enters. She’s lucky my dad owns a security business. She’s obsessed with an alarm on every window and door lately. I have to unset it every time I want to go outside. I keep telling her, no one wants your painted egg collection. No one wants Aunt Tilda’s wedding china.” Tommy wrinkled his nose at the idiocy of home safety precautions. “But she says, ‘It’s not the china I’m protecting, it’s you.’ Me.” He pointed to his chest, as if inviting Mills to imagine a burglar stealing him. Mills started to worry that he’d soon hear the beeps of an alarm being set, locking him into the house and into another encounter with Pam Muldoon.
Tommy screwed the lid back on and reached up to place the bottle on the highest shelf. As he stretched, the bottom of his sweatshirt lifted, and Mills glimpsed the pale, white-pimpled skin of his waist, a blond zipper of hair tracking up from the elastic of his underwear, two blue artery veins swelling against his pelvic bone. Mills averted his eyes before Tommy could notice.
Tommy picked the largest bandage in the box, stretching its adhesive strips over Mills’s palm. He pressed the cotton square on the cut and looked up with a smile of accomplishment.
“So is he gay or isn’t he?” Tommy asked, as if intuiting the very question circling Mills’s mind. Mills swallowed and remained breathing.
“Who is?”
“Paul Benchley. Is he gay or not?”
“He’s not,” Mills blurted with a brusqueness that surprised even him. Was he overcompensating to protect his own identity? Yes. Or perhaps he simply didn’t want Tommy to misinterpret his arrangement with Paul. “I think he has some woman he’s quiet about. Eleanor’s her name. Do you know her?”
“Nope.” Tommy sat on the bed next to him. He leaned back, bolstered on his elbows, spreading his torso and legs out, almost offering the flat thoroughfare of his body for inspection. Tommy dropped his neck back and smiled, revealing a slight overlap of his front teeth that wasn’t evident when Mills looked at him directly. Hairs almost white from the window light fuzzed around his chin.
Tommy must have known he was handsome. He was two years past the age when men first get a glimpse of how their features take hold in the world. He must have understood how every line of his face conspired to lead a looker toward the depth of his eyes. His forehead sloped down to his blond brows. His beaklike nose ascended toward the inner arcs of his sockets. Even a small, white scar on his upper lip, curled like a fishhook, pointed upward. And once the looker found himself in those ice-blue cul-de-sacs, there wasn’t so much as a flicker of engagement. Tommy’s eyes were blank and withdrawn, disloyal custodians to the welcoming smile spread under them.
“Eleanor, huh. That surprises me,” Tommy said. “I thought I had Paul Benchley pegged. I thought he had nobody. It’s pretty easy to peg everyone out here. They all have secrets, you know. Some worse than others, although the worst ones are my specialty. You must have discovered something interesting about Paul. I won’t use it against him if you tell me.”
Mills didn’t want to admit how little he knew of Paul. Nor did he want to betray his host simply to score a few points with Tommy Muldoon. Sensing that Tommy was just testing his ability to keep a secret, he shook his head and opened his bandaged hand.
“Sorry.”
“Paul h
it a tree in his car last June,” Tommy said with a smile that didn’t fit the information he was disclosing. Tommy clearly liked accidents, what they did to people, the sounds they made. “Just a few blocks from here on Main Road. The police were called. I think he had to go to the hospital.”
That explained Paul’s limp and the pain medication on his bureau. Paul seemed like such a cautious driver on their way out from the city; perhaps he was overcautious, aware of what it meant to lose control.
“Yeah, he limps a bit. That’s probably why he has me out here, to carry the heavier stuff to the trash. He’s got five broken microwaves but not a single television set. Isn’t that weird?”
Tommy didn’t seem to be listening. He tipped forward with his left arm extended, his thumb and pointer nearing Mills’s face. Mills felt two fingertips pinch his earlobe, and his blood quickened only to stall in his cheeks. Tommy pressed on the earring, pushing the lobe against the metal clasp.
“Do you feel that in your ear all the time?” he asked with a grin that was either flirtatious or malicious, Mills couldn’t tell which. Perhaps it was just another of Tommy’s psychological tests. He had nothing to lose with a stranger like Mills; he could assume any personality at his whim, and what he offered could be snatched away at the first hint of reciprocation. Mills had played this game too many times in his youth to come up on the losing end, but his inability to read Tommy irritated him. He jerked his head to the side to free his ear from Tommy’s fingers.
“I was just looking at it,” he said, laughing. “I’ve been thinking about getting one. Why are you blushing?”
Draw a line between youth and maturity however you want. But for Mills that line was a rope in the water, swaying back and forth in the tides, a frail cord that, at nineteen, he could swim under and back as he wished. Right now, he had to remind himself that he was the older one, two years older, not a high-school student like Tommy, and by that slight advantage he should feel less intimidated in his company. Only Mills’s brain didn’t seem to understand the merits of seniority, just as his body couldn’t register the KEEP OUT signs of Tommy’s eyes.
Mills’s hand trembled a few inches from the nylon belt around Tommy’s waist, which fastened in the center with a plastic clip. What if he reached over and unclipped the belt? What if he settled his fingers on that hair-lined stomach for a split second? What if something he wanted could actually happen on the starched galaxy sheets of Tommy’s bed? His resolve faded like radioactive fallout across the six-inch gulf between them. The problem was that Mills had never played the seducer before. He was pitifully incapable of making a move that wasn’t reactive. In desperation, he jumped off the bed and spun around to land in Tommy’s mesh-upholstered desk chair. Tommy remained leaning on his elbow with a humorous look on his face.
“So tell me some of the secrets you know,” Mills said to change the topic.
Tommy rose slowly, pulling himself up with his stomach muscles, and leaned down toward a small black safe on the floor. An orange label on its side marked it as fire resistant. A bumper sticker on its door notified visitors that THE DAYS OF OPTIMISM ARE OVER. Tommy spun the combination lock and opened its iron door.
“My dad gave me this safe from his company. I keep all of my secrets in here. Do you want a cigarette?” He pulled out a pack of Marlboros. “A shot of whiskey?” Out came a silver hip flask and a decorative Giants shot glass. “How about some weed? My friend got it for me from a dealer in Riverhead. When I visit my sister at college this winter, I’m going to buy some more. Lisa promised she’d take me partying.” Tommy said “partying” the way his mother probably said “Christmas” and the way Mills had once said “New York.” A plastic Baggie of green, leafy powder flashed in Tommy’s hand. Mills couldn’t resist a pitying smile for the teenager, forced to conceal his contraband in a fireproof security safe as if his secrets were rare and combustible, in danger of confiscation by anyone other than his mom. The days of Pam Muldoon’s optimism about her son may have been numbered, but Tommy’s days weren’t. Those were just beginning.
“So you want a hit or what?”
Mills did want weed, just enough to kill the pain in his hand, but he shook his head, remembering his promise to Paul. No drugs. Tommy carefully pinched some of the marijuana from the Baggie, packed it into the tip of an already hollowed-out Marlboro, and opened the anarchy window.
“Those are your secrets?” Mills couldn’t resist a tone of disappointment. But he did resist saying, You realize I’ve sat in rooms with people our age with belts tourniqueted around their arms and you’re worried about smoking a Marlboro Light mixed with a little potent oregano out the window of your childhood bedroom? The rush of experience finally put him on even ground.
Tommy lit the cigarette and took a deep drag. He feigned contemplation as he volcanoed smoke from his lips.
“Those are my secrets. I have others,” he said as he tapped the safe with his foot. “But you don’t know any of the people in Orient, so they wouldn’t interest you. They’re mostly about money.”
“Money?”
“Yeah. Or love too, I guess. What people own and how desperate they are to get more of it. It always comes down to that, you know. It’s all a fucking trap, owning things, places, people. The way I see it, we don’t own things. We get owned. Even the new people who moved out here from New York—they’re just as bad as the ones who’ve been in Orient for eternity. They’re just losers with cooler cars.”
“What’s the worst you’ve got on somebody?” Mills asked.
Tommy shook his head. Mills rubbed the bandage on his palm. The pain throbbed into his wrist; just one lungful of pot would have helped to relieve it. “What about your parents then? What do you have on them?”
Tommy squinted, as if gauging whether Mills could be trusted. Tendrils of smoke grew around him, flowering in the window light like time-lapse film of blossoming plants.
“My parents,” he whispered hoarsely. “What an advertisement for marriage. Is that what marriage is, to be lonely with someone at the end of your life?”
Mills could offer no wisdom on the subject of marriage. Still, some bit of reassurance seemed in order. “I’m sure it’s not so bad,” he said. “They’re probably just used to each other. No one walks around holding hands forever. Why? Is their marriage in trouble?”
Tommy stared at his bedroom door, as if a portal to a different dimension began to swirl there, a stoner portal where time ticked backward. “I feel sorry for my father. Fucking hypocrite, trying to teach me the value of family and treasuring every second together.” Tommy broke from his reverie. “Oh, never mind,” he groaned. Clearly he wasn’t going to tell Mills any specifics. Tommy must have learned that sharing secrets jeopardized their value. He was a collector, not a giver. “It’s fine. What do you expect from a man who parades around the house naked? He’s one of those dads who feels no obligation to wear a towel on his way to the shower. I mean, he’s obviously hungry for attention, right?” Mills didn’t realize those kinds of dads existed. He imagined the houses in Orient hiding naked, sagging fathers who strutted past their storm windows to the horror of their families. “Can you picture mothers doing that? God, that’d be fucking hilarious.” Tommy licked his fingers and rolled the tip of the cigarette. “Lisa would always yell at him about it before she left for college. She said she couldn’t invite friends over because she never knew when Dad would be walking around with his penis dangling out. I love how scandalized Lisa gets. She’s my hero. But I get it. Dad’s just getting old. He wants someone to appreciate his body. Anybody. Even his own family. How pathetic is that?”
“People are lonely.”
“Yeah, lone-ly. A lot of people are lonely out here. That’s one thing you’ll learn. You’d be surprised how lonely some of these upstanding neighbors get. You ever heard of the Seaview Motel?”
“Yes,” Mills said. He imagined voluptuous, easily placated Eleanor waiting by a curtained window for Paul’s Mercedes to roll into t
he lot.
“That’s loneliness right there on the side of the road. I’m never getting married. I can promise you that.”
Tommy’s eyelids were leaden, and his lips smacked loosely together. He sat amid thick, driftless smoke as if a shotgun had been fired under his legs. But his eyes fixed intently on Mills, just then, for the first time that morning.
“Have you ever done anything for money?”
Mills flinched. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. Anything.”
“No.” The question shouldn’t have hurt him but it did. Tommy had taken him for some kind of street hustler, with his earring and his city background and his trip out here under the charitable wing of an upstanding neighbor like Paul Benchley. It wasn’t just the embarrassment of the question. It was the embarrassment of knowing that it wasn’t such an illogical conclusion to draw. He shifted angrily in his seat.
“I didn’t mean to suggest you had,” Tommy said, his eyes almost sincere as they watered from a drag. “I haven’t either. But I would. I would do almost anything for money. Try anything. I’m serious. One day, when I get out of here, I just might.”
Was there anything as innocent as willful self-destruction? Mills wondered if, when Tommy did finally get out of Orient, he’d lose his brutal act, if there would be a short window in his life when his coldness subsided and he’d be capable of opening and softening for someone else, before it all slammed shut and Tommy Muldoon became the hard, reckless man he seemed intent to become. Mills felt sorry for the person who climbed through that window in Tommy’s future and hoped that person managed to climb back out before getting trapped in there alone.
“So what do you want out of your life then?” Tommy asked, his hand gripping the air.
Mills decided to answer honestly. “To be happy, I guess.”
“Happy?” Tommy’s lips cringed. “Jesus, that’s a horrible answer. That’s the reason stupid people stay out here. You know what I want?” He didn’t wait for Mills to say yes. “To try everything. All sorts of trials and errors. Do as much as any person can. I don’t care if I fail. Failing is just as good as succeeding half the time. A few scars, some demons to run away from, blood on the highway—” Mills assumed that last bit came from some song lyric. “That means you’ve really lived.” It was the kind of existential monologue only recited by the eagerly stoned, and Mills endured it with his hands clutching the armrests. He had shifted into that other role gay men were expected to perform in this world: patient listeners. “I want to sleep with people, steal, get run out of town, leave my fingerprints on every scene. We have a name for it, our generation. It’s our Baghdad.”
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