Choir Boy

by Unknown Author

  “Maybe she’s not ready to think of herself as a lesbian,” said Maura.

  Berry jumped out of his seat. “A what?”

  “I tried to warn you,” Maura said. “If you become a girl, then any girl who dates you gets a visa to queerland. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s pretty cool.”

  “Look,” Berry said slowly. “I just showed her my chest. I didn’t say she had to start calling herself a lez! I think she was pissed because my tits were bigger than hers. She said they were. Maybe I should call back and tell her I’m sure hers’ll grow out.”

  Maura squeezed Berry’s arm and didn’t let go. “I don’t think you should bug Lisa right now. She probably just needs some time to figure stuff out. She’s a really smart person.” “But I need to explain—”

  “Later.” Maura held onto Berry’s arm and dragged him back to the couch. “She needs space, girlfriend.”

  “I’m not your girlfriend!” Berry’s raised voice provoked shuddering stumbles from Marco in his bedroom.

  “Look, I know it’s tough to be doing this so young,” Maura said. “But you’ve got a great head start on the rest of us. And you’re going to knock ’em dead.”

  “Whatever.” Berry chewed his thumb—not the nail, the flesh—until he swallowed blood. “Hey. I need your help. Can you turn me into a girl?”

  “Sure. I thought you didn’t want that.”

  “Marsha Joyce wants me to make ‘progress.’ Whatever that means.”

  “Gotcha. So you want to strut into the clinic looking like a monster debutante.”

  “I guess.”

  “No sweat,” Maura said. “You’re already more of a hot-tie than I’ll ever be. Bleach the fuzz on your upper lip, unleash those boobies and you’ll look killer. Maybe a little makeup and some nasty girl gear. Oh, baby.”

  “Uh huh.” Berry did the twist in his seat. Maura still held his arm prisoner while she plotted to make him a hideous beauty.

  “I said it before, you should come to the Booby Hatch. Baptism of fire. Or rather baptism in hot sticky syrup. They’ll eat you up.”

  “I don’t want anybody to eat me up.”

  “Girl, you can’t hide in that shell forever.”

  “How ’bout just the next decade or two?”

  “That’s not what you want. You love being the center of attention. I’ve watched you in your choir, with your prancing and solos. You’re a big supermodel-wannabe.”

  “It’s not the same thing at all.” Berry had started to explain when the door opened. Judy entered, body rigid except for her shoulders, which swung as if she wanted to push someone.

  “Berry,” Judy grunted. “Why aren’t you in bed? Who’s this? Where’s your dad?”

  “This is my friend Maura from, uh, from church. It’s still kind of early for bed and all. And dad . . .”

  Judy took another look at Maura, and it became a stare. Maura still gripped Berry’s arm, but under Judy’s gaze she let go and folded her hands in her mostly naked lap. Judy saw Maura’s outfit and her mouth screwed tight.

  “This is my mom,” Berry said.

  “I thought I was your mom,” Maura said.

  “She met Marco just now,” Berry explained. “He’s in your room, pretty wasted.”

  “Oh.” Judy didn’t seem to respond to Maura’s comment. “Nice to meet you, Maura. I’m afraid it’s Berry’s bedtime.” “Sure,” Maura said. “I oughta get going anyway. Busy social calendar. You know how we do.” Maura kept babbling until the door closed behind her.

  As soon as Maura left, Berry stood up. “Guess I’d better head bedward.”

  “Wait.” Judy’s voice stopped Berry before he reached the hall. Berry returned to the couch and sat again. “We need to talk, obviously,” Judy said. “What has your dad told you about what’s going on with us?”

  Berry spread his hands.

  “Oh.” Judy breathed deeply through her nose. “I don’t know what to tell you. I still hope your dad and I work things out. He seems to have gone into a ’sode. Obviously, the lack of stability at home is having an effect on you.” Judy jerked her head at the door where Maura had just left.

  Judy stood akimbo over Berry. He considered telling her everything. For a moment. “Aw, no. Maura’s fine. I’ve known her for ages. I was just counseling her on cultivating clean living and all, when—”

  “Maybe you should make friends your own age.” “Maura’s only a year or two older. I’m too mature to hang out with people my own age.”

  “You’re sounding like Marco.” Judy finally got tired of standing in judgment. She perched on the coffee table facing the sofa, a drained look on her face. “Do you have any friends your own age?”

  “The choir,” Berry said.

  “Do you see people from the choir outside of choir stuff?” Berry shrugged. “Sometimes.”

  “Maybe you should spend some more time with them.” “Okay.” Berry got up to rinse his robes out and go to bed. This time, Judy didn’t hold him up.

  Berry sleepwalked through school and thanked his angels nobody messed with him. But he watched his back anyway, and when school ended he sprinted away.

  After school on Friday, Berry reached the cathedral early. He found Mr. Allen in no mood to talk music theory. In rehearsal, Mr. Allen had it in for the choir from warm-ups on. His blue dinner plate eyes seemed to watch each boy at once. Berry didn’t understand what had upset Mr. Allen until he mentioned “the record” in passing.

  “The record!” Teddy said.

  Nobody had said anything about a record since the boys had lost George.

  “We kind of let the idea of putting you guys on a disc slide a while ago—when our lineup changed,” Mr. Allen said. “But now we’ve got an honest-to-God record company interested.” Choral Fugue State 2, a British import, had made bank in the States. So the record company behind both Choral Fugue States CDs wanted to record an American men-and-boys choir in the Euro tradition. A couple execs had visited the previous Sunday’s service, featuring Berry’s solo and his dousing of Canon Moosehead with wine, and had liked what they’d heard.

  “Not a done deal yet,” said Mr. Allen. “But we’re going to cut a demo and see how it plays. If everything goes right—we could be the next Tallis Scholars or Chanticleer.”

  Mr. Allen might as well have said “the next Rolling Stones.” And Berry’s solo had helped launch them. Playing the Benjamin Clinic’s dress-up doll seemed a dirt-cheap price.

  “Hey stud,” Marc whispered. “Heard your girlfriend dumped you.”

  Hunting for the next piece of music, Berry wasn’t sure he’d heard Marc right. “Huh?” He found the score and got it to the front of his folder just in time. He sang through “I Give You a New Commandment” with most of his mind on what Marc had just said. He managed okay with the notes, but when he saw Mr. Allen wave at him frantically he realized he was blasting forte on the piano passages. He shushed and Mr. Allen nodded.

  “What are you talking about?” Berry whispered as soon as the piece was done.

  “Lisa was telling everybody at her school you weren’t her boyfriend, she doesn’t have a boyfriend, and she’d kill whoever mentioned you.”

  “Oh.”

  The men showed up for the last forty-five minutes before the dinner break. Berry watched George, now a bass, palling with Maurice. George never looked at the boys.

  For once, Mr. Allen whaled harder on the men than on the boys. The men were supposed to learn their parts in advance and to be experienced singers. Tonight, they were all over the map musically and their dead-muffler vibrato clashed with the boys’ clean sound. Worse, they didn’t seem to care.

  Berry would have died if Mr. Allen had roared at him the way he was doing at the men, and the other boys would have treated him like a traitor. The men looked bored. Berry thought the worst part of being a choirman instead of a choirboy must be losing that awe of Mr. Allen. When your heroes are the same size as you, it makes you smaller.

  Mr. Allen st
opped yelling. He shut the piano and looked up at the men’s section. “I can do with fewer of you.” It was almost too quiet to hear. Then he let the choir go to dinner.

  Berry pined for Lisa to show up at the choir dinner, where some choirgirls came to flirt and smirk at alto fashion disasters. But she wasn’t there.

  A bunch of the older boys sat together, including Wilson and Berry. Wilson didn’t talk to Berry and barely glanced at him. The other boys were mostly too busy basking in the potential record deal and stardom to say much about Lisa punting Berry’s ass to the curb. In line to get some barely identifiable stew, Teddy did say it was “too bad, but that’s the pimpin’ life.”

  “Ain’t sharing a dressing room with the rest of you losers,” said Marc. “I want my own. Wet bar and leopard fur walls.” “Get real,” said Teddy. “Nobody’s getting a dressing room, even if we do lay some tracks. We’re talking Tallis Scholars, not Boyzone.”

  “And anyway,” Wilson spoke up, “we’ll all be men by the time any CD ever comes out. Maybe still in the choir, maybe not.” He looked into his stew again.

  “How long does it take after recording to put out a CD?” Berry asked.

  “Who knows?” Teddy said. “Gotta be six months or so. Mr. Allen must be shitting himself. If we record this thing with this lineup and then half a dozen of us ‘graduate’ before it comes out—-he’d never replace us.”

  Berry shrugged and didn’t say anything more.

  After dinner, Mr. Allen repeated to the men what he’d told the boys about recording the choir. That made an impression on the men. They seemed to have woken up since dinner and left out some of the gravel and potholes. One of the pieces Mr. Allen started them on after dinner was Handel’s “Dixit Dominus,” a chattering masterpiece with an ornate treble solo. Berry coveted it like a purse snatcher who spies Prada. This piece was sure to go on the record, if it happened, and there was no way Berry wouldn’t shine on it. Mr. Allen said he’d do auditions to choose the “Dixit” soloist. For now it rotated.

  On his turn, Berry pleaded for love, or at least freedom from abuse. He made the same demand in every solo he sang. Just love me, or treat me gently enough to let me preChoir Boy 148 tend you love me, Berry sang to nobody in particular. The exposed treble voice flowed into the knife-dance of voices answering each other in Latin.

  11.

  Pentecost ripened. It flooded the cathedral with melancholy, the sense of seasons without change. The only way to tell late spring from early fall was sequence, the air turning colder or warmer. Pentecost swallowed both times of year and kept swallowing. It spelled moody anthems that reminded Berry of Wilson in his morbidest space.

  “I want to be buried in my choir blazer, if it still fits.” Wilson put a sports drink nipple to his lips. Green drops leaked on his chin. He sat on the front steps of the cathedral looking across the street at the Sunday-becalmed office buildings. He did look sharp in his choir blazer and bright red tie, tawny hair parted on one side.

  “I thought you weren’t talking to me,” Berry said. He didn’t sit next to Wilson. He studied the latest church leaflet in a holder next to the front door. It didn’t mention Canon Moosehead.

  “I’m not,” Wilson said. “You’re a faggot.”

  “I thought you were mad because I kissed Lisa.”

  “A fag can date girls to trick people.”

  “I guess.” The leaflet had the choir doing two pieces it could sing in its sleep, “Wash Me Thoroughly” by S.S. Wesley and Palestrina’s “Sicut Cervus,” which the boys called “Seek out her cervix.” The big October concert was Wednesday, and Mr. Allen wanted to use every rehearsal to run drills for it.

  Berry had his robes in a big shopping bag, pinker than the others after the bathtub laundry. He hoped nobody would notice.

  “Do you think we’re going to pull off this record?” Wilson asked, suddenly friendly again.

  Berry shrugged. “The choir’s never sounded so good. But you never know when another of us is going to open his mouth and let out a Jimi Hendrix solo.”

  Wilson nudged Berry’s leg. “Except you.”

  Berry twitched. “We’ll see.”

  “You know, you got the rest of your life to think about, even if you make this last another year or two,” said Wilson.

  “Two years is a long time,” said Berry. “You’re supposed to be dead in four, right?”

  Berry felt less and less sure of his choices lately. The costs seemed higher than he expected, and the better he sang, the scarier it all went. All of a sudden, his voice was a public concern. Teddy brought water and asked him how the pipes were holding up. Randy and Marc let the Geese know that bullies could do what they wanted to Berry and he was under nobody’s protection, but if anyone made him scream or damaged his singing ability, they’d suffer. This made life easier for Berry in some ways, but it also made him seem more delicate and a prime fucking-with target.

  Berry missed Lisa. His bandages chafed under his armpits and around his rib cage, and his crotch still stung sometimes. Every time Berry went to the locker room or crashed into someone in the hallway, he cringed at the fear they’d learn the truth. The moment where he put on his washed-out robes and lined up with the others still made it all worthwhile.

  Maura and Lisa sat apart in the congregation. Lisa sat with her mom, who was grim in a drab suit and tight-but-large hairdo. Lisa wore a long, navy blue dress. Maura sat alone among the most distinguished parishioners, laughing with one hand over her mouth. The young man in a suit next to her laughed too, hand over mouth and eyes askance.

  Berry took all this in while singing the first hymn. When he got to the choirstalls at the front, he noticed Canon Moosehead wasn’t there.

  The service went smoothly for once. Mr. Allen conducted from the organ bench by jerking his head in his mirror. Dean Jackson gave a sermon about the end of the world. He said humanity still schemed to erase itself, but in any case worlds ended all the time and we should see these “mini-apocalypses” for the moments of truth they were or the real end of days would catch us flat-assed. Berry shot Wilson a glance. Wilson yawned dramatically.

  After church, Wilson didn’t want to talk to Maura, who loitered out front. Berry didn’t mind talking to Maura, but he really wanted to catch Lisa. He and Wilson both found Lisa studying the church bulletin board as if bingo or Hungry Souls revved her pulse. “My mom’s just gone to the ladies,” she told Berry and Wilson.

  “Haven’t seen you lately,” said Wilson.

  “Been kinda grounded,” Lisa said. “Long story.” She kept her eyes on the bulletin.

  “Sorry,” said Berry.

  “Not your fault,” said Lisa.

  “So. End of the world,” said Wilson.

  “Did that make any sense to you?” asked Lisa.

  “Sort of. You’ve got a religion based on an apocalypse that refuses to happen,” said Wilson. “So you have to redefine your terms. Maybe the end already happened a bunch of times and nobody noticed.”

  Berry really wanted to talk to Lisa alone. But Wilson wasn’t about to leave. “We’re going to record the choir,” Berry told Lisa. “Big high-pressure make-or-break star-is-born event.”

  A clot of churchgoers further down the hall broke up to let a burst of sequins, rayon, and nylon pass. One member of the Downtown Association stayed against the wall long after Maura passed, as if afraid she’d come back. He glanced at his friends, as if mourning the fact that Canon Moosehead hadn’t kept his noodles long enough to save the cathedral from riffraff. Maura ignored the glares and kissed Berry on both cheeks.

  “Oh great,” said Lisa. “The ’shroom queen.”

  “Hey,” Maura said, as if she hadn’t heard Lisa. “How you guys doing?”

  “Not bad,” said Berry. He thought of something his mom had said: Why does someone so much older want to hang with you? Isn’t that weird or sad? He thought about all the times Maura had hung around the clinic waiting for his appointment to end, or showed up for church.
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br />   “I’d better find my mom,” Lisa said.

  “What’s with her?” Maura asked after Lisa left.

  “The whole being stranded in the overgrown slum garden thing,” said Berry. “She’s having a hard time putting it behind her.”

  “I’d better steal cookies,” said Wilson. He left too. Maura leaned against the wall next to Berry, taking her weight off her high heels. “Haven’t seen you.”

  Berry pulled away from her. “My mom told me not to hang with you. I’m trying not to piss her off. Things are all Girl, Interrupted at home. Anyway, don’t you have any friends your own age?” Berry demanded.

  “Sweetie, I have friends of all ages,” Maura said. “You’ve met some of them. But this is different.”

  “Why?”

  “Let’s take a walk,” Maura said. “Don’t worry. We won’t go far, you won’t get lost, and I’ll have you home for milk and cookies.”

  Berry saw few other people. Even on the main drag where restaurants slept, shops locked and dark in the afternoon sun. Berry pulled up the collar of his choir blazer to keep the wind off his neck.

  “You have to understand,” Maura said. “I went through six years of Hell before I started hormones. I ran the whole teen obstacle course as a boy. My body changed and kept changing. All for the worse. Hair where I didn’t want it, big arms and shoulders and hands, big ugly feet. Every spurt, my body said ‘fuck off and die.’ Meanwhile, I suffered adolescence in a boy’s body. We brawled, we yelled, we sported, we jostled for girls. I had to act like a maniac to survive. Changes happened that I can never undo.” Maura held her hands, knuckles out, in Berry’s face. “Show me how to shrink these.”

  “I don’t know,” Berry said. “They’re not so big.”

  “I can’t imagine living for decades as a man before making the change,” Maura said. “Six years was eternity enough. Baby, you have no clue what’s coming. The worst you’ve endured so far is squat. Fucking nothing. If I can save you from some of that. . . help you go all the way and become a girl ... I promised myself to save others if I could.”