by Mel Bossa
I was merely stacking. Not washing.
“Come help me here,” said Johan. “Explain to my son that it isn’t possible for the Québec government to—”
“Dad, if you think that the liberals have done anything remotely important for the Franco—”
“I am saying, that whatever your separatists, fascist—”
“Fascist? Okay. What government actually moved people out—”
They never get to hear the end of a sentence.
“Are you enjoying this as much as I am?” asked Kenya, leaning in.
I laughed. “Do they even know what they’re arguing about?”
“This is not arguing, dear. This is talking. When they argue, they never interrupt. That’s when you know things are going to get ugly.” She bent to my ear. “So, you and Nicolai, is it as serious as it looks?”
I glanced over at the bay window, to the back porch, catching sight of my lover.
My wild, divine lover.
Nick puffed on his cigar, and his blue eyes seemed to be searching the evening sky.
Excitement raced through my veins. “I think so,” I whispered, my eyes still roaming over Nick’s regal profile.
Kenya’s fingers skimmed my hand. “It’s been a long road for him, Derek.”
“Yes, it has.”
“But Nicolai is home now.”
“Yes.”
“And so are you, child.”
Chapter Eleven
I was at Nick’s this afternoon.
I sat at the kitchen island (a piece of counter drilled into the middle of the kitchen area) watching Nick work his magic. His back was to me, and my eyes moved over his broad shoulders, his narrow hips, his tight, maddening ass. He swayed his hips as he tossed, chopped, and stirred. In the background, Elvis’s reverberating voice swung me back and forth between that night, so very long ago, when Nick had spun me around the living room, and today, where Nick is still dancing me around.
Though he doesn’t know it.
“Taste this.” He pushed a spoon full of the most marvelous-looking sauce to my parted lips. “Tell me what you think.”
He had been cooking all day, trying out his various spring recipes, with me playing the role of the very willing taster.
I gathered the sauce with my tongue, let it sit in my mouth for a moment, then swallowed the decadent thing. “Wow,” was all I found to say.
Another success. He smiled, leaning back on the sink’s edge. “Not missing anything? Sure?”
It’s all there.
All of it.
“Escoffier, come here, boy.” The dog lolled his head and shuffled to Nick. “Here.” Nick dropped a piece of bone marrow into the dog’s jaw. “Enjoy.”
I smiled. “Is that how you get rid of your competitors?”
Nick laughed, throwing his head back, and my soul soared.
“So,” he said, more seriously, “you like the new job? Must be exciting to plug in digits all day.”
I plucked another Guinness out of the fridge. “Jealous?”
His eyes flickered on my lips, and my body quivered with desire.
“No, O’Reilly. Just been thinking, that’s all.”
My fingers froze on the can.
I waited.
“I mean, I don’t know.” He picked up some dirty plates off the mountain of soiled dishes and sunk them into the soapy water. “Maybe, we could figure out a more productive situation.”
Yes my love.
Productive.
Whatever.
Ask me.
Say it.
“How much is a guy like you worth on today’s market?” He grinned. “I mean, an accountant. O’Reilly. What’s your going rate? Like for instance, if you were, let’s say, keeping track of inventory, schedules, payroll, menu costing, suppliers, bar transfers… Could you do all that for forty-two grand a year?”
Could I?
“Look, I’m in over my head down there. You’ve seen my office. I need a numbers guy, someone with a good head on his shoulders.” He stared into my eyes. “But most of all, I need someone I can trust. And there’s Spence. When he’s here, I might need you to—”
“Do you-you mean—”
“You wanna a job with Split? Look, it ain’t the RBC, but I’d—”
“Yes.”
“Yeah?” His breath caressed my lips. “Sure? ’Cause, I don’t know, but I heard the chef is a real ball breaker. A bit of a control freak too.”
I laughed. “Yes.”
“Listen, O’Reilly, if we’re gonna be doing this, we gotta lay down some kind of rules. Don’t wanna be messing up a good thing, right? I mean, what we have is good, right?”
The insecurity in his voice caught me off guard.
“Listen, I know I’m not easy, but if you want, we could make a go at it. You and me. The whole deal. I’m ready for it, if you are.”
I set the can down on the counter before it had a chance to slip out of my limp fingers.
He pulled me into his arms. “You’re smooth, O’Reilly. Real smooth. You slow everything down around me. Always have.”
Once, I had a small window overlooking a yard.
A yard with a sprinkler.
And sometimes, big blue eyes would appear at that window, calling my name.
Calling me back to the world.
In those days, I understood nothing but the color blue. One shade in particular. An icy shade of a northern sky. And each time my own eyes would meet that shade of blue, something false chipped away from me.
Yes, I was a boy in love with another.
But I was also a sorcerer, casting my own quiet spells.
I fell into Nick, feeling his heart thump against mine, and leaned my head against his chest. “I used to watch the night, hoping you’d come back.”
“When?”
“When you left, Nick. After that night, after that night we dan-danced. You left. Never said good-bye—”
“O’Reilly.”
“I hurt so much-much. So much, Nick. I was so lonely—”
“O’Reilly.”
“I had-had no one. You were my world, my drea-dream—”
“O’Reilly.”
“I’ve waited all my life for—”
“Hey.” Nick’s whisper warmed my neck. “Stille.”
I pushed my face into his shoulder.
“O’Reilly. Look at me.”
“No.”
“I’m sorry, baby.” His fingers crawled over my face as he lifted my chin. “I didn’t know. I was young. I was angry. I had so many fucking demons working me…I’m sorry. I never meant to hurt you.”
“Nick, I lo—”
“No.” Nick’s blue eyes shone like a skating rink under a cold winter moon again. “Don’t you get it yet? Baby, you have to let me say it first.”
And the past, like a mere cloud of gray dust, blew away at the corner of my eye.
“Derek.” He smiled at the sound of my name out of his lips. “I love you.”
*
As we made our way through the Notre Dame des Neiges cemetery, the lemon sun dripped down on our heads.
“Here it is.”
At a distance, a blue jay fitted across the summer sky.
“Do you need a minute?” Nick unfastened Spencer from his stroller.
I nodded. “Thank you.”
I watched them walk away.
These two blond deities that have challenged the silence around me.
I let my eyes roam over Aunt Fran’s picture. “Hello,” I whispered. “It’s me, Red.”
The sound of Spencer’s giggle rippled back to me.
“I just came by to—” I let out a determined breath. I had promised myself I was going to be strong. “I came by to say thank you. For everything. Every word. Every laugh.”
I ran my fingers along her modest plot. “I miss you, Aunt Frannie.”
I set the bouquet of fresh flowers on the trimmed grass. “But I’ll see you around.”
I found Nick and Spencer
waiting by the van.
Nick’s gaze scanned my teary eyes. “Okay?”
“Yes. Okay.”
Spencer tugged on my shirt. “Dwek! Birthday!”
“Yes, Spence. We’re going to Grandpa and Grandma’s right now. They have a big cake waiting for you.”
“The biggest,” Nick stressed.
Spencer clapped his hands, then, like an arrow of youth, shot for Aunt Frannie’s grave.
Nick and I followed.
“What is it, Spence?”
Spencer knelt by the flowers, pressing his tiny fingers into them. “Purple.”
“Yes. That’s right. Purple.”
“Let’s go, guys.” Nick was already on the move.
On to the next best thing.
“That cake isn’t gonna decorate itself, you know.”
Yes, my love.
My Nicolai.
My Nordic King.
My blue-eyed bum.
Let’s go, you and I.
Let’s go until we cannot go anymore.
*
Dear Bump,
Johan and Helga have asked Officer Di Paglio for help.
They’ve printed pictures of Nick and plastered them everywhere around the neighborhood.
Nick’s face stares back at me every time I walk to school.
Mrs. Lund stopped doing hair.
Mom says she sits by the window a lot, watching the street. The last time I saw Mrs. Lund, she wasn’t wearing any lipstick.
Boone says, “My brother’s gonna come back when summer gets here. Nico likes to swim, and I bet there isn’t a pool where he’s at.”
Spring is coming.
Mom’s been opening the windows in the afternoons, trying to air the apartment out.
Her hair has grown back in. “My beautiful Red,” she sometimes says, running her slim fingers through my hair, “I’m glad you’re here.”
Where else would I be?
Officer Di Paglio thinks Nick has gone south. Maybe New York. “That’s where all the teenagers go. They all want a piece of the action, you know, a chunk of the apple.”
He and Aunt Frannie still see each other, but Aunt Frannie hasn’t changed her mind yet. “He can piss and moan all he wants, but I’m not gonna be counting minutes by windows for the rest of my life.”
I get to see Aunt Frannie often.
Mom lets me ride the bus there, on account of the maturity I’ve shown in the last month.
I was there yesterday.
Aunt Frannie made her famous meat pie. Again.
We sat in her tiny kitchen and had cranberry juice.
“So,” she said, piling another piece on top of the one I hadn’t even touched yet, “too bad you and Boone didn’t go to the Valentine’s dance. I’m sure it was a lot of fun.” She took a bite, then washed it down with some juice. “You’re telling me there isn’t a single girl in that whole school worth dancing with?”
I picked at the pie, chewing on my lip.
“I bet Lene’s going to be a knockout in a few years, and she likes you a whole lot. Maybe you’ll be taking her to the prom.”
I glanced up.
“No?” Aunt Frannie smiled and wiped her lips with a napkin. “Not your type, huh?” She set the napkin down gently and leaned back into her chair. Her eyes moved all over my face. “You miss him, don’t you?”
I shut my eyes.
“And it’s okay. Nothing wrong with missing him.”
My heart accelerated, and I dared a glance her way.
“Tell me about it,” she whispered. “Tell me how you feel about Nicolai Lund.”
“No.”
“No?”
She laughed a little and poured herself another glass of juice. “Well, then, it’s worse than I thought.”
I frowned. “I think I nuh-nuh-know where he-he is—”
“Yeah?”
I nodded.
She winked. “And now, my little sorcerer, where could that be?”
I thought of that night Nick and I had danced in the living room.
“You know, O’Reilly, one day I’m gonna split.”
And I smiled.
“A place cuh-cuh-called Blue Dreams.”
About the Author
Mel Bossa is the daughter of an Italian immigrant father and French Canadian mother. She studied language and literature in hopes of reconciling the francophone and anglophone worlds she struggled to fit into. Shortly after the Quebec Referendum, Mel left Quebec for New Orleans and then later, San Diego. She eventually returned to her hometown of Montreal and graduated from culinary school. After a short but intense relationship with the food industry, Mel decided to hang up the white jacket and go back to her first love: telling stories. Split is her first novel.
Looking Glass Lives
Stories within stories, secrets buried for generations, and the ghostly presence of a tragic figure from Civil War times haunts a seaside Rhode Island town and the lives of sexually precocious cousins Roger and Chas Lynch. When grown up Roger returns to live in the town's "haunted house" with his new wife, he discovers its cruel story. And the cousins' love triangle plays out eternal cycles of passion, jealousy, and perhaps also redemption. Reprint.
Looking Glass Lives
© 1997 By Felice Picano. All Rights Reserved.
ISBN 13: 978-1-60282-450-8
This Electronic Book is published by
Bold Strokes Books, Inc.
P.O. Box 249
Valley Falls, New York 12185
First Bold Strokes Printing August 2009
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Credits
Production Design: Stacia Seaman
Cover Design By Sheri ([email protected])
By the Author
A House on the Ocean, a House on the Bay
Dryland’s End
Like People in History
The New Joy of Gay Sex (with Charles Silverstein)
Men Who Loved Me
To the Seventh Power
Ambidextrous, the Secret Lives of Children
House of Cards
Slashed to Ribbons in Defense of Love and other Stories
An Asian Minor
A True Likeness: Lesbian and Gay Writing Today
The Lure
The Deformity Lover and Other Poems
The Mesmerist
Eyes
Smart as the Devil
Dedication
To Will Meyerhofer
A Constant Reader and a Friend in Good Times and Bad Times
Prologue
The well is repaired. Amity Pritchard’s well. My well.
Two men came this morning from Scituate to repair it. No one from this town would come, even though Burt Wayland promised to do it months ago. I wasn’t surprised he never showed up.
No one from Nansquett will ever come onto this property again. At least, not while I’m alive. Probably not after I’m dead either. The last time I ordered from Millicent’s by telephone, the delivery boy left my order way down at the entrance to the road, off Atwood Avenue. He wouldn’t dare step foot on the property. If I hadn’t been wandering down at that end, I would never have seen the three wild cats—thrown out of houses in town—trying to get into the loosely closed cardboard boxes he’d left there.
At the end of the property; just as in Amity’s time. How the circle is closing in on her and me, making us one. I’m often down there, all around the property now that the weather is milder, trying to come closer to her, trying to bring us even more together. How little remains to keep us from being the same entity! Very little now. Especially since Amity’s well has been repaired and is ready to be used again. The last act of the drama r
eady to be repeated. Closing in. Like a snake biting its own tail—that Gnostic sign of infinity, that abolition of time and space, as Reverend Pritchard understood so well, that containment of all there is. And soon the two spirals of our lives will be joined, and we will be one: I, Roger Lynch, and she, Amity Pritchard—two no more.
All this has taken a long time to understand.
The affinity between us has been present a long time—more than half my life, since that summer years ago with Grandpa and Chas. Especially with Chas. He too had a role. As did my wife, Karen. And Amity. And her sister, Constance. And Captain Eugene V. Calder of the Union Army. All of us—Chas, Karen, and I—in it for years before we even suspected. I think only I ever really knew for certain. Did Chas? Even if only in that split second when so much is supposed to be made clear, before his life was smashed out of him? Karen should have known then. That afternoon before they left me, I as much as told her we were living in the grip of the past, not only our own past but something that didn’t really concern us, something that could be altered. Did she understand me? I thought she did. The way she looked at me, so sadly, her intelligent agate eyes roving around the breakfast room as they tended to do whenever she understood and wished not to. But no. She would never have left me if she had understood what was going to happen to her and Chas. Or would she? So in love with him—despite him, despite herself…so in the grip of this thing we were all in, that time no longer mattered. The past and present and future were always fairly inconsequential in Karen anyway. That’s what I loved about her first—how out of time she seemed.
They were never important at all to Chas. So little was important to him. Which was what I loved about him: his ability to enter into fantasies so quickly, so intensely, they became more important than reality. How, fifteen years later he came by, just as Karen and I had moved here, into the old Pritchard house we’d bought to restore, and how he just started in again, as though no time at all had intervened between my going and our coming back. As if back then, that summer I came to Nansquett for the first time, first came to feel Chas’s power—and Amity’s, always Amity’s too—had never ended. As though it were not merely a dress rehearsal as I came to think of it, but one continuous chunk of action, despite the length of years that had to pass before it could all be played out. As I have only recently come to understand that this—my coming time—is to be the continuation of a time even earlier than fifteen years ago: of Amity’s own time and Constance’s and Captain Calder’s. And the act that is to be repeated, will be repeated as though it had not occurred once already. That’s why I had to have the well repaired. It alone needed to be mended. Only the well could possibly set the scene for the final act of the drama. Amity’s drama. Mine, now.