The Coming Storm

by Paul Russell

  “Surely, though, you’re at least interested in someone?” Arthur pursued.

  “You know,” Tracy said brutally, “I don’t know if I’ve ever been all that interested in anybody, to tell you the truth.”

  Arthur was above being wounded. “Now, now,” he consoled. “You always say these extreme things, even when you’re not under duress. Or are you under duress? There are five gazillion gay men your age out there casting about for husbands right now. It’s a seller’s market, as far as I can tell. Don’t you think,” he asked their waiter grandly as a whole trout, smothered in bacon, was set before him, “that this gorgeous man sitting across from me is extremely eligible?”

  “Of course,” said the waiter without blinking an eye. “And would you like for me to debone your fish?”

  “Anytime, anywhere,” Arthur told him, and sat back in his chair to allow the young man room for that delicate procedure.

  Tracy waited in silence, studying the waiter’s beautiful wrists, his hairless forearms, the fingernails that were bitten to the quick.

  “You do that very well,” Arthur complimented when the task was complete.

  “And it’s not even my greatest talent,” the waiter told him.

  Now there was somebody you could fall in love with. Though the young fellow didn’t seem particularly interested in anything except doing his job. Besides, Tracy had been through all that before. He’d dated beautiful waiters, and they were all the same. Why were the beautiful ones always so vacant? What did beauty matter, anyway? As the beautiful vacant waiter bore away the bones on a saucer, and Tracy and Arthur both followed him longingly with their eyes, Tracy complained, “Does everybody always have to be on the prowl for love?”

  “Well, as a matter of fact, yes,” Arthur said with great certainty. “Everybody does have to either be in love or be on the prowl for it. It’s a rule. I, for example, think I am absolutely in love with this trout. Don’t you want even a taste?”

  Tracy the vegetarian wasn’t, after all, above consuming a bit of fish—or even, God forbid, bacon—now and again, as Arthur knew all too well.

  But Tracy shook his head. Suddenly his hangover, which had mercifully been lying low, welled up in him. Feeling not the least bit hungry, he stared at his orange pancakes, so prettily and fatuously decorated on their blue plate with slivers of orange, strawberry, pineapple. “I don’t think any of that’s for me anymore. I’m not talking about eating meat. I’m talking about other kinds of hunger. Desire. I want to get clear of it all. Maybe it’s just the times we live in.”

  “You mean AIDS?”

  “Not just AIDS. This whole gay thing,” he said. “Or not even that. This whole relationship thing. The need to be involved with someone else, like you’re not complete unless you are. Isn’t that a great word, involved? Makes me think of puppets with their strings all tangled up together. Sometimes I almost find myself wishing, I don’t know, that I’d never gotten into any of it. That I’d stayed on the sidelines and just watched it all.”

  “What an odd thing to say,” Arthur remarked coolly. “You haven’t gone and tested positive, have you?”

  Tracy’s chest constricted in familiar panic. “No, no,” he said hastily. “Nothing like that. I’m completely healthy. I’m probably too healthy.”

  Arthur was still watching him closely. “Meaning what?” he said.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know why I said any of that.”

  “I see,” Arthur told him.

  “Meaning, I don’t even know what I’m talking about.” Tracy drummed his fingertips restlessly on the tabletop. “I’m just totally confused about myself right now.”

  He needed, he felt obscurely, to show Arthur how unhappy he was, even if that unhappiness wasn’t exactly true. He needed, more than anything else, for Arthur simply to ask, “Do you regret having had sex with me?” He needed to erase the simple fact that, despite his best intentions, he and Devin had fucked last night, that he’d allowed it to happen when for the past two months he’d been celebrating his clean break from the city, the entanglements it had come to stand for. That he’d enjoyed it immensely.

  Was it possible Arthur knew him well enough to guess all that? Spearing a last piece of trout, he studied it for a moment on the end of his fork. “So you’re going to stay out of trouble for a while. Well, good luck with all that. As for me, I’m going to stay where I belong, which is smack dab in the middle of trouble. It’s the only place that’s halfway interesting.”

  “I don’t feel very satisfied with how I’ve managed to express myself here,” Tracy said.

  Contentedly, Arthur pushed his empty plate to one side. “Don’t worry. You schoolteachers always have a way with words. I personally think it’s been good for us to have this chat. In fact, I would go so far as to say that, these days at least, I think good conversation is really the best form of sex. And we haven’t had conversation in so long, you and I. One of those proverbial blue moons. Can I confess something terrible? For a while, before you moved away, I had the misguided impression you were avoiding me. Now wasn’t that just plain silly of me?”

  “Completely,” Tracy lied. “I was incredibly busy with stuff. You know how it is.”

  “And can I confess something else while I’m at it? Maybe it was for the best if you were avoiding me, because, see, I have this suspicion that you, of all people, have no idea that I, of all people, graduated from the Forge. Isn’t that a hoot? Now don’t look so shocked. It was years ago, fourteen to be exact.”

  For a second time in their conversation Tracy felt that tightness around his heart. He wasn’t the least bit superstitious. Still, an itch prickled along both his legs, an icy finger ran down his spine.

  “You’ve hardly touched your pancakes,” Arthur noted.

  “I’m really sorry I didn’t call,” Tracy told him.

  “It wasn’t like I had anything really to tell you about the Forge. It’s not a bad place, really it’s not. What does Quentin Compson say to that peachy roommate of his? I don’t hate the South, I don’t hate it. But tell me”—Arthur’s voice grew reflective—“is Louis Tremper still there?”

  Once, years before, as he was about to step into an elevator he had the strange premonition that the elevator was going to get stuck, and that he shouldn’t get on. But that was ridiculous, and he’d gotten on anyway, and the elevator did in fact get stuck. He was trapped there alone, in the stifling dark, with no way out, for nearly an hour. Tracy spoke with some care. “Actually, Louis is headmaster there now.”

  “Too bad,” said Arthur. “For him, I mean. I was so hoping he’d moved on. But then why should I be surprised? I mean, once Herr Professor Doktor Gestapo von Emmerich got his claws into you, that was it. Kaput. Trust me, I should know.”

  Tracy felt the elevator begin to move. “I think Dr. Emmerich died,” he said. “I’m not really all that clear on the details, but I get the impression that Louis became headmaster all of a sudden—you know, unexpectedly. I haven’t really talked to him about it. I do know that he thought extremely highly of Dr. Emmerich.”

  “Yes,” Arthur said, “Louis did think highly of Dr. Emmerich, unfortunately, and so, at a certain point, did I, and yes, Dr. Emmerich did die, and I personally hope it was a gruesome death. Pardon my compassion, but that man terrorized poor Louis. Had him under the heel of his jackboot from the word go. There are other things I could tell you, but frankly, my dear, I won’t. They’d depress me too much. But anyway, you should say hello to Louis from me. I’ve completely lost touch with him over the years, but I’m sure he remembers me all too well. He was a very important presence in my life there for a couple of years.”

  How Louis and Arthur might have managed to get along Tracy couldn’t even imagine, though all at once, before his eyes, he saw Arthur as he might have been at fifteen or sixteen, however old he’d been when Louis was his teacher, and what he felt was a longing, a loss. Louis had known Arthur when he was still just a kid. Though Louis, on the other h
and, would have been exactly the same dapper fugitive lurking behind his sunglasses.

  Smiling at some secret thought, Arthur leaned close. “Maybe you should invite me up for a visit sometime,” he said. “I wouldn’t mind seeing Louis again, after all these years.”

  The thought made Tracy somehow uneasy, though he found himself telling Arthur that a visit was certainly not out of the question. “Not next week, or anything like that, but sometime, sure, that would be fun. I should have the Trempers over for dinner anyway. God knows I’ve been over there often enough.”

  “Louis’s famous evenings. Let me guess. After dessert he makes you listen to classical music. See? Nothing changes. I’m glad he still does that. I remember when I was a sophomore, he played me Pachelbel’s Canon. It was before that delicious little piece got turned into such a cliché. We sat in the dark and just let the music do its thing. I have to say, it was a beautiful moment. We never had any music like that in south Texas.”

  For a moment he was quiet; they were both quiet. “I’ve never forgotten it,” he said. Then, after another pause in which Tracy tried to fit together the various, faintly troubling pieces of puzzle whose overall shape he wasn’t in the least sure of, “Here you’ve gone and put me in a mood. So Louis is still married to that dyke, is he?”

  “Arthur!” Tracy had to protest. “Claire’s been very kind to me.”

  “Oh, she’s very kind to all Louis’s young men. Believe me. They’re a very devoted couple.”

  Tracy remembered the day he’d had to wonder, afterwards, for the briefest of moments before dismissing the thought as ludicrous, whether the headmaster’s wife intended to try to have an affair with him. “When I was in Japan,” he said, perhaps a little testily, “the rumor went around that I was a monk. I mean, they thought I lived in a monastery back in the States. Slept in my coffin and everything. Took a vow of silence. Students get strange ideas. You can’t trust everything you hear.”

  Arthur stared at him intently. “You’re not out to anybody at the Forge, are you? Not even to Louis.”

  “It’s never come up,” Tracy defended. The circumstances under which such a subject might come up, especially with someone like Louis, weren’t immediately apparent to him. “I mean, I’ve only been there a few weeks. It’s not like I wear a sign around my neck. When the time comes, I’m sure the right people will know.”

  “I think,” Arthur observed, “this is part of what’s got you worried. The teacher’s a fag. You hadn’t thought about that beforehand, had you? It was different in Japan. Now you’ve got all these yummy American boys on your hands. I’d say you’re in a bit of a delicate situation.”

  “No.” Tracy was adamant. “I can assure you that that’s not it at all.”

  All the Metro North cars had names: John Cheever, Thomas E. Dewey, James Fenimore Cooper. Maria Mitchell, whoever she was. He boarded the Washington Irving.

  Coming out of the long tunnel from Grand Central into the sun, he felt a pang of loss so keen it took him by surprise. Forget Tokyo. No matter how you felt about it, Manhattan was still the center of the world.

  Around the edges, though, it was fraying. The train glided through a noman’s-land of looted automobiles, mounds of rubble, whole streets of abandoned buildings, their windows boarded over with sky-blue plywood. At the base of bleak apartment towers sycamores struggled in bare earth, their limbs draped in shredded plastic bags tossed from the stories above. And then in an asphalted lot, five shirtless Puerto Rican beauties were playing basketball in the mild October sun.

  There was no denying it. Boys grabbed him. Their loveliness tore him apart. The world was a wonder after all.

  For a while he tried to sleep, but that was no good. His brain seethed with the weekend’s sensory overload: the spent condom lying on the floor next to Devin’s bed the morning after, Arthur’s cheerful enumeration of his various symptoms, the array of pills he was taking. In the seat behind him, a man and woman talked back and forth to one another with dull, mechanical constancy. Their voices weren’t loud, but as if having haplessly discovered the frequency of their broadcast, Tracy couldn’t seem to tune them out. He hated couples who’d been married so long their lives had settled into what amounted to little more than a stupor. Did anything mean half as much to them as a momentary glimpse of boys without shirts playing basketball meant to him? What would they make of his razor-sharp ecstasies—or, for that matter, the terrible anxieties a twenty-five-year-old gay man these days had to fight down every minute of his existence? All the probabilities were that he’d be dead at half their age.

  For a moment he was on the verge of remembering something important, but then the couple behind him resumed their dreary exchange of nothings, and the memory, whatever it had been, went behind a cloud. Desperate to sever himself from their voices, Tracy rummaged in his bag and pulled out A Separate Peace. He was surprised anybody still taught it, but there it was on the syllabus Louis had given him at the beginning of the term for English II. He could barely remember a thing about it. A prep-school kid with a crush on his best friend. Kind of suspicious, really. But it might prove interesting to teach—the challenge being, of course, to get his students to think about all that without seeming to steer them too intently. Arthur had been at least partially right: the last thing Tracy wanted, at this early point before he’d sufficiently settled in, was for his class to be able to write their teacher off as a fag.

  Though maybe, he thought, he should give them exactly that chance. Maybe it would do them some good. They were so terrified of being little faggots themselves that they were afraid even to touch one another for fear of their motives being mistaken. That was one of the things that had surprised him about the Forge. Told that he’d need to supervise some athletics, and remembering his own high school days, he’d looked forward to the innocent pleasure—well, maybe not so innocent—of the locker room, only to discover that virtually none of the boys would even set foot in there. After the period was over, they hightailed it back to the privacy of their dorm rooms to shower and change.

  Suddenly the memory that had failed him earlier returned at full wattage. Funny what difficulties the mind, left to its own devices, could hedge on. For most of the weekend he’d managed to put Noah’s so-called gift almost completely out of mind.

  “Something to entertain you on the train,” the boy had said, presenting him on his way out the door with what seemed to be a partial roll of toilet paper wrapped loosely around an unsharpened pencil whose eraser end was capped by a rubber jack-o’-lantern’s head. “And Happy Halloween,” he’d continued awkwardly.

  Seeing there was writing on the toilet paper, Tracy had started to unroll it; but Noah grabbed his wrist. “It’s for the train,” he admonished with a nervous, inadvertent laugh. “No fair peeking.”

  He had an unhumorous way of smiling. His eyes would narrow to slits, the corners of his mouth pull back tensely. He looked more grim than amused, and it worried Tracy about him. He knew so little about this boy, his inadequacies, both academic and emotional, the various troubles that dogged him. What he did know, or at least had come, during the last month, to sense with some certainty, was that Noah represented a special kind of challenge. But the nature of that challenge, and whether he would prove at all adequate to it, completely eluded him. Certainly his Japanese students, those well-behaved and inviolable girls, all giggles and at the same time possessed of a really sublime earnestness, had been straightforward compared to this American boy who offered him toilet paper and a pencil.

  He hadn’t waited till the train. Deposited some half hour early by the taxi—Louis had warned him they were highly unreliable—he’d sat on a bench in the bleak Metro North waiting room and unscrolled his present. On the individual sheets of toilet paper, one sentence per sheet, Noah had written in felt-tipped pen that bled almost illegibly:

  i wonder what he look like when he’s asleep

  i wonder what he’d look like with a beard

  i wonder i
f he likes it here

  i wonder what he was like in high school

  i wonder if he likes us

  i wonder if he lets anybody get to him

  i wonder if he ever gets depressed

  i wonder what he’ll be doing in ten years

  i wonder what he thinks he’s doing now

  Following was a crude caricature of an alarmed face—wide eyes, open mouth, hair on end—along with the cryptic caption, as if he’d been reading ahead in his assignments (though that seemed rather uncharacteristic of him):

  help me finny i’m drowning

  Out over the river, rippled, shale-gray clouds were moving in from the west. The surrounding hills grew somber, the waters darker. He would not think anymore about Noah. Though he had this sudden, distressing feeling. The word floated in his head: subcutaneous. It was so sudden, so unexpected. How had he let someone get under his skin like that? Devin had been almost too right: there was something moving about a fifteen-year-old boy. Not so much the individual boy himself, but rather some quality that attached itself to him, the simple fact of his youth, the territory he was passing through. Some light that shone about him that made him, for a moment, crazily special. How strange that you could fall so hard for that trick of light. And what, when you fell, did you want from it?

  Idle thoughts. There wasn’t anything he wanted from Noah, unless—and this was the startling thought that occurred to him as he watched the sullen plain of the river out the window—what he wanted was not to be seen through. He paused, testing that discovery, its plausibility, i wonder what he thinks he’s doing now, Noah had written with sly aggression. Was it true that that was precisely what he feared, some threat by Noah to see through him? To catch him unawares at something he himself was too dense to see. To unnerve him. From the very first his casual glance had said, almost contemptuously, I know you. And he had been attracted to that. Yet what did it mean, to be known? And why on earth should he care?