The Doorposts of Your House and on Your Gates
Page 32
“I can’t believe your mom found your porn,” Travis said. He was drinking something simultaneously effervescent and fluorescent. “I would like literally die.”
“Isn’t your mom dead?”
“Yes, girl. And if she wasn’t, it would literally kill her.”
“It’s worse because I’m in it, I guess.”
“Yes. Why didn’t you ever tell me? I would’ve watched you!”
“That’s why.”
“Shut it down. I wouldn’t have jacked off or anything! I’m not into twinks. Although you do have a fan over there.” Travis dropped his voice and indicated a man at the other end of the bar, a thin guy with a tight face, in his mid-forties, sitting behind a half-drunk beer and an empty shot glass, slumping at the shoulders as if neither was his first.
“Oh my god. He looks like a washed up porn star, speaking of. Look at that mustache! I’m going to need another drink.”
“Me too. I may step outside, in a minute. If you’re interested.”
“I’m interested. What am I going to say to her? What if she tells Abbie?”
“I thought you said they were cool.”
“They’re not that cool.”
“He’s really staring.”
“God. Fuck this. Let’s get high.”
They went out into the lot behind the bar and sat on the hood of Travis’s Cavalier and took key bumps out of a little glassine sachet. Isaac felt the bolt behind his eyes and the immediate dull ache that accompanied extreme awareness in his brain. He had no particular affection for stimulants, except insofar as they allowed him to drink more, but there really was something about meth that all the others lacked, something visceral and terrible, as if some infinitely vaster being than himself had been crammed inside of him, as if he could feel, for the flickering hours before it faded, what it must feel like to be a whole soul crammed into a tiny body during its brief, sinful, necessary transit through the living world.
“I sometimes think,” Isaac said, “when I do meth, that this must be what it feels like to be a whole soul crammed into a little human body during its time as a living being.”
“That’s some deep shit, girl.”
“Fuck you. I’m serious. Can I have a little more?”
“You can. You should smoke this shit. I don’t know why you don’t. I don’t know about any fucking souls, but it does make you want to fuck.”
A human figure reeled out of the darkness, and a slurred, nearly lisping, nasal voice snarled, “All right, who’s using all the foul language?”
It was the man who’d been staring at them across the bar. He was an odd figure in the dim light of the gravel lot, more gaunt than he’d appeared inside and unsteady on his feet. He was wearing a colorful sweater, stiff jeans, and brand-less white tennis shoes. He repeated the question.
“Who the fuck are you?” Travis asked.
“What did I just tell you about the language?”
“You didn’t tell us anything,” Isaac said. “You asked.”
“Oh, are you gonna get smart with me?” He wove as he turned his gaze on Isaac.
“I mean, I guess I am,” Isaac said.
“Well, it’s called your ass! Smart-ass!”
Travis and Isaac weren’t able to keep themselves from laughing. The man got angrier. He got louder. “You think this is funny?”
“What the fuck, man.” Isaac slid off the hood of the car. “Fuck off.”
“It all starts with the bullshit.”
Travis was giggling. “That’s so true.”
“It all starts with the bullshit.”
“Look,” Isaac said. “We’re going to go back inside. You have a nice night.”
“You boys aren’t going anywhere.” He straightened himself up and attempted a menacing look. It came off as constipated.
“Um, yes we are.”
He raised his arm and angled his head toward his armpit. He spoke into it. “Base,” he said, “Come back. This is Officer Rittenhauer requesting backup.”
“Is he talking to his armpit?” Travis asked.
“I think he is,” Isaac said. He grinned at the guy. “You got a mic in there, Officer?”
“Request immediate backup.”
“Okay,” said Isaac. “See ya.” He took a step back toward the bar, but Rittenhauer interdicted him and pushed him back with one hand. “Whoa!” Isaac threw up his hands. “What the fuck, man?”
“I warned you about that language! Now you aren’t going nowhere!”
“I’ll go wherever the fuck I want.” Maybe, Isaac reflected, he shouldn’t have done that meth. He would have ordinarily found this all much funnier. He pledged, in his mind, only to smoke weed and drink from then on. But now he was angry. He stepped forward again. “What are you going to do about it, faggot?” he said.
The man gave him a level gaze. “Strike,” he said quietly. “And I’ll show you self-defense.”
So Isaac took a swing at this wavering drunk. He’d never done that before. It was the first, and the last, time he’d ever attempt to throw a punch. In retrospect, he realized, he hadn’t the slightest idea how to do it. Not that it would have mattered if he had; he’d still have found himself prostrate in the gravel, a knee in the small of his back, his hands pinned behind him. Travis, that queen, had squeaked and run off with his drugs. The gravel dug into Isaac’s cheek. He squirmed but couldn’t get free. And that was how Isaac stayed until Officer Rittenhauer’s backup arrived.
Imlak found the despondent boy in a holding cell with three large but harmless drunks, two of them snoring on benches that seemed ill-designed to support creatures of that size, one of them leaning against a wall and emitting a sort of whale song. Isaac was sitting in the corner with his head between his legs. “Come on, son,” Arthur said. “Stop crying. Let’s get you home.” The boy looked up. Yes, Arthur thought. He’d occasionally teased himself that Sarah was lying about the boy’s provenance. But she wasn’t.
He’d golfed earlier that day. He was terrible at the sport, and he should have given it up. He’d shot 105 on the not very difficult course. But the game fascinated him; it was something he felt he ought to be good at, and he tortured himself by continually going back for more. He’d still been at the club when Sarah called him. She’d been very drunk, and he’d had a few cocktails himself. It had taken several minutes of circuitous interrogation to discover that Isaac was in jail, having been picked up—that is, arrested—with a known drug dealer, although this latter character had seemingly got away, behind some kind of queer club, by Jerry Rittenhauer no less, remember him? Who knew Uniontown even had such a cosmopolitan amenity? Arthur made a note to check it out at his earliest opportunity. When he was in Florida, he got the best coke from a kid who played records in a gay club in Ybor. “Where’s Abbie?” he’d asked Sarah.
“He snot ansring.”
“He’s not answering?”
“No. No. No.”
“All right. Christ. Sarah, drink some coffee.”
“He’s doing pornography.”
“What? Who?” For the briefest moment, Imlak imagined she meant Abbie. He pictured his erstwhile rival and almost-partner with some kind of sturdily sensualist Uniontown swinger housewife in a wood-paneled basement. There would be an old-fashioned camcorder whirring away on a tripod across the room, and Imlak nearly laughed out loud. But, of course, he knew what she was really saying. He sighed. It was the sort of thing that Abbie would take either very well or very badly, with no possible intermediate reaction and no predicting which way he’d blow. Imlak tipped out the bartender, made calls to Mayor Pattaglia and Chief Chislett, then drove down to the jail behind the courthouse and picked up his skinny, inconsolable boy.
Imlak took Isaac back to his ugly farmhouse and told the boy to take a shower and change his clothes. “I’m not as skinny as you, but I’m sure I have a pair of sweats around here somewhere. I’ll leave them in the guest room. Go on. I’ll call your mother and tell her I’ve got you.”
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br /> “Don’t. God.”
“Don’t argue, son. Hit the showers.”
Imlak waited until the water was running, and then he called Sarah and said that he’d got him. No, no one was going to press any charges. It was all a big misunderstanding.
“How’d you work that out?” Sarah asked him. Icily, he thought, for the favor he’d just done.
“I implied that Chief Chislett would find no stronger financial supporter should he ever choose to run against Bill Pattaglia.”
“You men and your money.”
“Oh, please. How’s Abbie?”
“He just came home. He’s upset. I told him about the pornography.”
“Was that wise, Sarah?”
“We don’t lie to each other, Arthur. That’s not part of the deal.”
“Don’t you?” Imlak thought it was extremely unlikely. “Maybe you ought to.”
“No.”
“Christ.” Imlak glanced down the hall toward the bathroom. “Sarah, we all have our indiscretions. Abbie’s no angel either, needless to say.”
“Arthur, he’s just a boy.”
“He’s not a boy. Or, he is a boy, but he’s seventeen, almost eighteen. But what do the categories matter, really? Was it necessary? Your husband is a maniac.”
“He’s his father.”
“Sarah.”
“No, Arthur. We agreed. You and I. We agreed. Abbie will get over it. Isaac gets arrested at a gay bar for fighting a police officer. He’s livid, and he has every right to be. We’ve spoiled him. But we’ll all get over it.”
“I’ll bring him home tomorrow. It’s late. He can sleep here.”
“No, Abbie wants to get him.”
“I’ll ask him. He can decide.”
“He’s my son, Arthur.”
“Be that as it may.”
But when Isaac was out of the shower and Imlak did ask him, Isaac said he’d go home. “I may as well get it over with.”
“Your mother seems to believe that you’re involved in some, shall we say, sexual indiscretion, young man.”
“I guess.”
“She believes that Abbie is taking it rather badly.”
“Fuck Abbie.”
“Yes, well. I happen to know that your . . . father has a bit of a nasty streak in him, although he likes to pretend that the bad news that follows him around only ever arises from the tragic misunderstanding of other parties to the various conflicts. I think it might be wise to let him cool off.”
“You think it’ll be any better if I’m here? You know he thinks you’re fucking my mom. Speaking of sexual indiscretions.” Isaac looked preposterous in a gray sweatsuit three sizes too big, but he managed a very hateful look nevertheless.
Other men would have avoided the subject, changed it, talked around it, but Imlak only folded his hands in his lap and nodded and said, “Yes, your mom and I were involved.”
Isaac never stopped being grateful to Arthur for that. It was all he wanted, really: for an adult to treat him as an adult, not as some precious and infinitely fragile thing, not as some beautiful miracle of creation. He said, “Did Abbie know?”
“Yes, I imagine.”
“You stopped?”
“We did.”
“Why?”
“For no particular reason.”
“Did you love her, though?”
“I suppose I did.”
“Did she love you?”
“Possibly. I never asked, and she never volunteered the information. Probably not. She loves your father.”
“Ha.”
“You’ll find these things are more complex than you’d imagine. Also simpler.”
“It’s weird. God. She’s so old!”
“I’m so old. And it was years ago. We weren’t quite as old then. Old enough, though.”
“How long ago?”
“Seventeen, eighteen years.”
“Oh.” He considered this. He appeared to come to a private decision.
“Are you sure you want to go back now?” Arthur asked.
“Yes. No, but I will.”
“Well, my advice is you should keep it to yourself.”
“Keep what?”
Imlak stood and permitted himself to kiss the boy on the top of his head. He didn’t answer. Instead, he said “When you’re as old as me, you’ll understand that despite what you’ve been told all your life, the truth, in and of itself, is very rarely its own excuse.”
• • •
Imlak didn’t invite Abbie in, but the men shook hands at Imlak’s front door and had a quiet conversation. Isaac strained to hear, but he couldn’t. It felt as if he were being bargained for. He hated it. Arthur came and got him and guided him to his father, a firm hand on the small of Isaac’s back. Abbie put a big hand on Isaac’s shoulder, then briefly touched the boy’s still-wet hair. Isaac flinched away. Abbie sighed.
They got in the car, a long old Mercedes that looked like it ought to have been hustling a foreign dignitary in from the airport. They went down the drive and turned toward Morgantown Road. There, Abbie went left, heading for the bypass.
“Shouldn’t we get my car?” Isaac asked.
“Your car?” Abbie’s hands tightened on the wheel.
“Whatever. The car.”
“Forget the car. We’ll take care of it.”
“Fine.”
“Right. Fine.”
The big car swayed onto the bypass. Abbie gunned the engine. They wheeled around the wide curve of the highway toward the foot of the mountain. He was a reckless driver; his driving frightened Isaac in the best of times; it terrified him now. He finally put on his seatbelt. They drove in silence. No radio, only the distant sound of the tires on the road transmitted through the soft suspension and the muted sound of the big V8. The bypass reconnected with Route 40 and angled uphill. Abbie downshifted. The engine revved and whined at a higher pitch. Isaac had climbed the road on his bike and knew the ramps by heart. Twelve percent here for the first five hundred meters, then ten percent through the first curve. The last houses dropped away. The trees closed in on either side of the road. It was almost dark. Trucks coming in the other direction, lowest gear in their rightmost lane, flashed lights as they bounced out of the curve.
Abbie sighed, his prelude to saying something. Isaac almost asked him what, but thought perhaps if he didn’t ask, Abbie would lose the courage to say anything or, more likely, just lose the thread of whatever he’d been thinking he ought to say.
He was unlucky. Abbie didn’t forget.
“What’s going on, Isaac?”
At least, Isaac thought, Abbie was going to keep it vague. He hoped that was the case. “Nothing,” he said.
Abbie sighed again. He shifted again. The engine whined again and settled. They approached the first curve; the pitch diminished; the car shot forward a little. “Nothing,” he repeated.
“Nothing,” Isaac said again.
“You don’t go to jail over nothing.”
Isaac composed his most disgusted teenage face, though Abbie was watching the road and wouldn’t see him. “Of course you do. That cop was drunk.”
“What were you doing in a bar?”
“What do you think?” Isaac spat back.
Abbie’s right arm tightened and flexed, and Isaac cringed away, fearing for a moment that Abbie would hit him. He had before. Only once, and afterward he’d entered a period of unabashed contrition that even Isaac, who was only eight at the time, had found embarrassing. He couldn’t even remember why—some insistent, childish misbehavior that Abbie’s yelling only encouraged until he slapped Isaac once across the face—but he remembered the weight of the hand and remembered whirling and falling to the ground. Had it even hurt? He didn’t remember it hurting.
But Abbie breathed deeply. He relaxed his arm. They exited the curve. Fourteen percent now as they banked right into the next long turn. “I don’t care if you’re gay, Isaac. But.” The but had no antecedent. It hung horribly.
Isaac flushed red, pale face turning sickly pink. “I’m not gay!” He didn’t know why he said it. It wasn’t a denial. He was; his parents knew; he knew they knew. If it remained unspoken, it was only because they all imagined themselves too advanced to ever have some dowdy conversation about teenaged sexuality. But here was Abbie, trying to do exactly that, and Isaac, seventeen, almost eighteen, was appalled. “I’m not,” he repeated.
“Isaac,” Abbie said.
“Fuck you.”
“Isaac.”
“Leave me alone.”
Abbie, for his part, felt the muffled drumming of rage behind his eyes. He kept them on the road. If less articulate than he’d hoped to be when he’d planned the conversation on the way down the mountain to get his son, then nevertheless he thought he’d evinced a true, a convincing sympathy. And yet no one ever seemed to return his care in kind.
“Whatever you are,” he began, then stopped abruptly again. What an awful way to phrase it. He rolled his eyes briefly heavenward.
“God,” Isaac muttered, full of disgust or shame or both.
“My point,” Abbie tried again. “My point is your mother and I are worried. Worried, Isaac. About school. You’re not doing anything at school. About your friends. Or you don’t seem to have many friends.”
“Jake is my friend.”
“Is that all? And that boy—”
“Fuck you.”
“Careful with that mouth, Isaac.”
“Oh, please.”