Abbie murmured incoherently. Then his eyes focused on her, one-two, the good then the bad, just like the smile. “Excuse me, Isabellisssss . . . issima. I find myself in a state.”
“You’ll be fine,” she said, retreating again into hospital-room banality.
He seemed to sink into the pillows. He lifted and lowered an arm weakly. “God asks it of you,” he said slowly, roughly. “You think you see it. But He doesn’t speak. He doesn’t speak. What if your heart hears only the echo of what He meant to say? What if you hear it wrongly and still, you do as you thought He asked?”
“I don’t believe in God,” Isabel said.
Abbie looked past her, and then he said in a quavering voice that sounded as if it was echoing up out of a well, “Tell your mother hello, Isabel.”
• • •
Abbie, of course, had known since he’d watched her, slowly and quietly and thinking she was alone, rifle through his office on her first night at The Gamelands. She was a lousy sneak. She didn’t realize that a slowly opened door creaks the loudest. She didn’t think that the reading light she’d turned on to read the transcript of that awful, regrettable arbitration turned the window transparent to anyone standing outside it, invisible in the dark, catching a last smoke before toddling off to bed. She even looked like her mother. It startled him to think Cathy had been the same age as her daughter was now when they’d first met. My God.
He’d met her in eighty-four. She was an accountant for a firm that did business with his father-in-law’s practice, a little hard-edged and with a square face. Northern Italian, maybe. He once told her it was alluringly masculine, and she’d surprised him by accepting it as a compliment. He hadn’t necessarily meant it as a compliment, but he pretended he had. It was something about women who were good with numbers. They’d met for lunch. Why had they met for lunch? He could never remember later on. It was some pretext, something to do with a project; something to do with a public bid; something about an audit. It wasn’t her idea, but he remembered it as her idea. Her firm had offices midtown, not far from Bryant Park. Unlike Sarah, she believed him to be a genius, at least for a little while. He drove her up to Connecticut to show her a house he’d designed for some absurd millionaire. It was still under construction. They spent the night there in the little trailer used by some of the workmen during the week. That was before he got fat. Before his back got bad.
Did he love her? Not especially. Did she love him? No. If Sarah’s sophisticated estimation of the actual limits of Abbie’s talent and intelligence were what permitted, and what sustained, her love, then Cathy Giordani’s slightly overawed acquiescence to Abbie’s self-made myth was what prevented her loving him. She thought too highly of him and perhaps not enough of herself. Not that she was swept away or worshipful. She was in the end a practical woman, far more practical than Sarah. She viewed Abbie, in a way, as she viewed the presidents and CEOs of the bigger companies for whom she worked as a CPA—not better than her at all, just of a different scale. Her love affair with Abbie, like her business, was more than anything mutually agreeable, companionable.
He ruined it by getting her pregnant. An accident. As much her fault as his. In fact, she was never entirely certain it was Abbie. He was one of only two possible candidates. But he was the more likely, and rather than turn the whole thing into a circus, he was the one she told. If the kid came out an unlikely blonde or something, she’d admit to the other guy. And when she’d told him—over a charred burger at a diner near Times Square that had the worst food but the cleanest counters and bathrooms in the neighborhood—he’d seemed, at first, almost pleased, as if in hearing it, he’d proven something to himself about himself. She’d more or less expected that and worked it into her calculated decision to tell him. She was an accountant, after all. She balanced the books. He’d told her with some regret that he and Sarah had tried and failed to get pregnant.
He insisted on paying for the doctor, although she had perfectly good insurance. He was an insupportable spendthrift. She let him because this too flattered his silly pride as a man. But he was careless, and Sarah found out. A bill or something. So there they were, back in the same diner, eating the same burgers, although her girlfriend, to whom she’d confided the pregnancy, had told her that she should lay off red meat entirely. Abbie fiddled with his napkin. His burger was half eaten. He ordered a coffee. He appeared to change his mind. “Actually, do you have any Bailey’s?” he asked the waitress.
“We don’t have liquor, sweetie.”
“How about beer?”
“Sure.”
“Bud or Bud Light?”
“Bud.”
“And no coffee?”
“No, bring me that too. We’ll see which way the evening goes.”
The waitress rolled her eyes at Cathy in a gesture of commiseration before walking away.
He’d already told Cathy that Sarah had found out. She’d gone on eating her burger. You didn’t drag your lover’s fight with his wife out of him. You just had to wait.
“She said she wants me to take care of it,” Abbie said at last.
“Take care of it?” Cathy put down the last bite. She sipped her water through a straw. “Like what, Don Corleone putting out a hit?”
“That’s what I said!”
“No way, Abbie. I don’t serve your wife. I’m not interested in what she wants.”
“What about what I want?”
“Fuck you, Abbie. What you want? If you wanted to take care of it, you should’ve told me a month ago. It’s too late. I’m committed. Sunk costs. This project is in the pipeline.”
“Such a romantic.”
“I’m a CPA.”
“Be that as it may.”
“Be that as it may nothing. This is my kid, Abbie. It’s either yours or it isn’t yours, but that’s up to you.”
“It’s ours,” he said. But when the waitress brought their drinks, he picked the beer.
• • •
A little later in the day, the nurses kicked Isabel out of Abbie’s room, insisting that only Isaac and Sarah—family—could stay. She’d waited for Abbie to say something, to protest her exclusion from the category, but he was who he was, after all. You could only expect so much. Isaac followed her briefly out of the room and thanked her, with unlikely sincerity, for coming. She asked him if he was going to be okay. “Of course I am. Jake’s staying over. Anyway, it’s not like he’s dead.” He flashed a goofy grin. “We’re not going to be rid of him that easily.” And indeed, Isaac proved perhaps a more adept, if mundane, prophet than his father, who recovered, though he never lost a limp and a slight downward tug at the left side of his face, and lived for many more years.
Eli walked her down the hospital’s long beige halls toward the elevators. “You should come over tonight,” she told him. “I got fired. Plus all this. I’m feeling needy.”
“I should stay. They might need me.” He stopped in the middle of the hall.
“Not especially.”
“Not especially. But it won’t be much longer. We should get married, Isabel.”
“Married?” She laughed, too loud. A passing doctor gave her an admonishing look.
“Yes,” Eli said. “Why not?”
“How long have we even been a couple?”
“Who cares? We’re going to be forty.”
“Speak for yourself. I’m thirty-eight.”
“You’re thirty-nine. You just think I don’t know when your birthday is.” This, she had to admit, was true.
Several years later, when Veronica, her mobility now a little impaired by bad hips but still remarkably fit for a woman of almost ninety, had flown out to Vancouver with a group of adventurous and equally well-knit old ladies, Isabel had met her for a long lunch and told her this story, or most of this story, judiciously edited. Veronica, as ever, had insisted on a bottle of wine.
“Such a romantic,” she said of Eli.
“I wasn’t much better,” Isabel said. “I mean, af
ter I thought about it a little, I just said, sure.”
Veronica smiled. “And he hauled you off to the far end of the continent.”
“That was part of the deal. Part of the proposal. He said we had to have babies. Lots of babies. Canadian babies. Enough to survive the end of the world.” She laughed. She nearly said, “He isn’t entirely unlike your brother.” But she caught herself.
“That’s a tall order.”
“Two down. But I’m not getting younger. We’re thinking four.”
Veronica laughed. “Enjoy the wine while you can, then.”
Isabel invited her to visit them. “It’s only about an hour from the city. Eli’s friends with a seaplane pilot. We could get you a flight over to the island.”
Veronica thanked her and said she couldn’t. “Our cruise leaves tomorrow.” The ladies were heading off on a National Geographic tour up along the Pacific Canadian coast and through the Inner Passage of Alaska.
“On the way back, then,” Isabel offered.
“Perhaps,” Veronica said. And then Isabel never heard from her again. Isabel had flown back to the island and picked up the Jeep. She drove through the long summer evening from Nanaimo over the mountains, past Cowichan Lake and down the Pacific Marine Road to Port Renfrew, then up to the wooded acres and the house that Eli had built. He’d put the kids to bed. “How was work?” she asked. He’d got a job with an organization that tried to preserve the forests on the islands, aided by his sister and some judicious exaggeration of his past employment in the field of landscape architecture. She worked for them part time as well, telecommuting with the office in Vancouver and visiting in person a few days a month. He didn’t answer, but kissed her. It was almost dark.
“How was Veronica?”
“Spry,” Isabel said.
It was only a month later that she received a rare email from Isaac telling her that Veronica had been so taken with Alaska that she’d disembarked at Juneau, caught a flight up to Anchorage, and from there joined a small tour headed to Denali National Park where, hiking with a group of men half her age, she’d lost her footing on a loose section of trail, fallen fifty feet down a steep slope, and died. Isaac insisted that she was smiling when the guides recovered her body, although what evidence there was of that, or how it could be true, he never mentioned.
15
In his junior year in high school Isaac was arrested for the first time. There would be others, later, in college, for better reasons: for protesting at the Republican National Convention, then again for protesting at the Democratic National Convention; for refusing to leave the Mellon Bank Plaza after the city decided it had had enough of an Occupy protest. But there’s a difference in being arrested alone than getting hauled off in a group. He’d spent the day on his bike, a long, hilly, forty-five-mile loop that took him from The Gamelands out to Dunbar along Jumonville Road and then up over the mountain to Ohiopyle and back again via some old and steep state roads. It was August, although it had been unusually cool that week, the highs barely touching seventy. In two weeks, he’d be a senior. There was already an autumnal quality in the air, and it hinted at something about his life, that it was to pass into a period of bright colors and long nights that would only ever be a glamorous disguise for a kind of chilly retrenchment. He’d hung his bike on the rack in the carport, noting that one of his father’s cars was gone. One of his father’s cars was always gone. Abbie, Isaac thought, was at loose ends—he had been for years—and it was making him crazier by the hour. The other day he’d wandered past the door of his office and found the old man talking to himself. He was unintelligible. Isaac banged his foot against the door when he turned to slip away. He was graceful when he rode but clumsy when he walked. Abbie turned and caught him grasping at his stubbed toe. Their eyes met. “My son,” Abbie said. He’d lately got into the habit of making this weird, nominative pronouncement every time he caught sight of Isaac. It was creepy.
Isaac went into his house and peeled off his kit and took a long shower. He thought about turning on his cam, but he wasn’t in the mood. He jerked off quickly and just for himself. He threw on jeans and a tee-shirt and went to get something to eat. His own kitchen was empty but for a couple of bottles of beer that he kept in the fridge. He walked to the main house and found his mother sitting at the dining room table and crying.
He was never shocked to see his parents cry. They both did frequently, his father freely weeping, often at something silly, at an opera he was listening to or at the conclusion of a sad story about children in poverty or some animal near extinction on NPR, his mother quietly, always sitting up straight, rarely at anything in particular, and if you asked her why she was crying, she always said, “I’m not.”
So this time he didn’t even bother to ask. He found some breakfast bars in the pantry and took two of them. He found a bottle of sparkling water in the fridge and got that as well. He stood at the island and unwrapped a bar. While he chewed, he noticed that his mother had a laptop open on the kitchen table. He saw what she was looking at.
Isaac’s interest in amateur pornography would later develop into something more tongue-in-cheek, a carefully curated porn blog, sufferingintherear.tumblr.com, which featured a rather lovely collection of photos, some pornographic, others only vaguely erotic, all of them featuring boys—in various states of undress—and their bikes. Isaac didn’t take them himself, of course; he would have said that he was only a curator, the site a museum of his own interest. The fact that there already existed so many images made for such impossibly singular tastes and niches of human interest was both a wonder and a shock, even for a kid like Isaac who’d grown up entirely online, always knowing that anyone could find on the internet a sheer, extraordinary volume of material for the most outrageously peculiar interests and fetishes. Suffering in the rear, by the way, was an expression from road racing—a cyclist having a terrible day, mashing on, revolution after revolution, at the back of the peloton as it rolled across some European countryside. It was the kind of silly in-joke that Isaac found funnier than it was. At that time, though, still in high school, before Tumblrs, before Twitter, when he still had, of all things, a Myspace page, Isaac’s interests in the male form were less curatorially ironic and more distinctly personal. He posted jerk-off videos on a number of sites; they featured him in various states of cyclist’s dress, or undress. Several had achieved more than 100,000 views.
Who knows how Sarah ever came across them? It was absurd to imagine that she spent her unoccupied days trolling through gay porn online. (Was it, though? Perhaps it was exactly what she did with her unoccupied days, at once titillated and terrified that she might encounter some image of her own son, whose activities were less secret than he imagined.) She’d snooped around just enough to formulate a vague but persistent suspicion that something was going on without imagining quite what it could be. To her credit, Sarah wasn’t the sort of woman, not the sort of mother, who would, in the abstract, necessarily collapse into tears at the idea of her own son masturbating for a bunch of pervs on the other end of some anonymous network. That’s not to say that she would approve, only that she was a person with a broader view of human sexuality; she would have admitted some interest in the pornographic into the normal panoply of human erotic life. But abstraction makes moral tolerance easy, and seeing your only child orgasm into a pair of light blue spandex shorts would surely, regardless of any prior and deeply held beliefs in your own essential openness, trouble a mother.
Isaac, likewise, would have said that he was proud of his body, comfortable with his sexuality, unconcerned with who saw him, proud even to be seen. But seeing his mother sitting at the kitchen table watching his own dick bounce around a laptop screen, he flushed, nearly dropped his bottle of water, and hurried out of the room without saying a word. He took the keys to one of the lesser cars, a cranky Oldsmobile that his father had bought for him at the estate sale after an erstwhile colleague of Sherri Larimer’s had gone to jail for check kiting and Sher
ri had hastily and cheaply liquidated the estate. He drove down the mountain, willing himself not to cry, because unlike his parents, he found his own tears absurd.
Club Illusion was on North Pittsburgh Street in a low, windowless building that had once been a tire shop, then a biker bar. It was owned by Bill Pattaglia’s brother-in-law, who was married to Sherri Larimer’s cousin, and who operated a variety of bars, nuisance and otherwise, in Uniontown, Connellsville, Masontown, and on a dark stretch of road outside of Republic. He had read an article in USA Today about several once-charming, then peeling, now charming again New England towns that had been revitalized, in some degree, by catering to flocks of fantastically bourgie gay tourists from New York and thereabouts. Ironically, the bar he chose to transform into a fag bar had been, in its final prior incarnation, called The Two-Stroke. The joke was lost on Bill. It had become the county’s premier—and that is to say, only—gay bar. Uniontown was just then undertaking an effort to advertise itself as a tourist destination for the sort of folks who enjoyed whitewater rafting in the mountains and fall foliage and Frank Lloyd Wright (Fallingwater was nearby). In any event, business at The Two-Stroke had never been much more than a break-even affair, with half the terrifying clientele drinking for free on account of various past and future services to the Larimer family. It seemed to its owner that fags were less likely to shoot each other or run each other over with their cars. This may or may not have been true, and the regulars were finally, thoroughly local. Still, it turned out that there were plenty of gays in Fayette County who didn’t really want to drive all the way to Pittsburgh to drink with their own kind. Both of the Ls in the sign were neon high heels. He’d thought of that himself.
It was a weeknight and the bar wasn’t crowded. Isaac was drinking with his half-a-friend, Travis Pistella. Because of its ownership, Illusions had few concerns with any strict construction of legality, and the Pattaglias were anyway actually related to the regional head of enforcement for the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board. Isaac had been drinking there since he was fifteen. Travis was a skinny twenty-five-year-old white boy from New Eagle who did weird drag down in Morgantown under the name Stella Travesty. As a woman, he had a style of science-fictional haute couture, as if Klaus Nomi were to have made a cameo in David Lynch’s adaptation of Dune, but as a man, he’d never grown out of the candy-boy raver look that had marked his own teenage years: wide, torn jeans and tiny tight tee-shirts, a lot of bracelets and spiky hair badly frosted at the tips. Isaac found him slightly appalling to look at. Travis did a lot of meth and also had a desiccated look about him, but he was a sweetie. Also, although Isaac would never smoke the stuff, he didn’t mind doing a toot or two of speed in the parking lot, and Travis was free with his supply.
The Doorposts of Your House and on Your Gates Page 31