The Coming Storm

by Paul Russell

  Sprawled on the sofa watching a football game, his brother-in-law barely glanced up. Jim Durning worked as a computer software consultant—though what, exactly, that line of work entailed was something Tracy had never managed to glean from him. But if the new house, the new cars, the general air of luxury were any indication, his services did not come cheap. Tracy had known a dozen Jims in college, fellows of great certitude and confidence, big men, not so much in stature as in presence, in specific gravity, men who amiably blustered their way through the welcoming world, never needing, like Tracy and his kind, to scan the horizon constantly for trouble. The Universal Man, Lynn approvingly dubbed her husband. He was good with car engines, leaky faucets, chain saws. He was building a sailboat in the garage.

  From the kitchen came Edison, the two-year-old, his hands excitedly grasping the air in front of him. The sight of Tracy stopped him in his tracks. Suddenly shy and uncertain, he grabbed anxiously, through his diapers, at his little penis. Tracy squatted to confront his nephew on more equal terms. Edison shook his head and wrinkled his nose as if to sneeze, but then said, carefully, hopefully, “Did you bring me a surprise?”

  “Oh,” Tracy said, showing two empty hands. He’d intended to pick something up at one of the stores in Merchants’ Square, really he had, but the episode with Clay had left him tingling and distracted; he’d gone straight to his car without a second thought.

  “Don’t bother your uncle,” Jim said without looking up. As if on cue, Edison began a well-practiced whine. He stomped his little bare foot.

  “Edison,” Lynn warned firmly, appearing from the kitchen with a frown. “What have I told you?”

  Edison looked at the floor and clenched his fists. He stamped his foot again, but more tentatively.

  “What have I told you?” Lynn repeated. Edison said nothing, though a fitful cry quivered in the back of his throat.

  “Nobody hears you when you whine,” his mother told him firmly.

  “I wanted,” Edison said.

  “Nobody hears you,” Lynn repeated, though she looked at Tracy with what seemed, if not reproach, then disappointment.

  “Sorry,” he said, rising and showing once again his empty hands. “I was going to get something. I got busy.”

  Was he overreacting, or did his sister’s look seem to say, as the wail of the six-month-old drifted in from the kitchen to join his older brother’s, “You were busy?” It was true. His own life, during the last week of holiday idleness, had sometimes seemed very small, nearly worthless in fact; the things he spent his days consumed with, meaningless. Take Noah. How to explain about him? There was not a person in this house who would comprehend, even for an instant; it would be as if he were speaking an unintelligible language. My whole being, he thought in a flare of self-pity, the very heart and soul of my life, makes no sense to them.

  Beneath the baby’s piercing cry came another sound from the kitchen, at once unidentifiable and strangely familiar. It hissed and clattered malevolently. “What’s going on in there?” he asked.

  A sudden weariness seemed to overtake his sister. She put her hand on Edison’s head as he clutched needily at her leg. “Pressure cooker,” she said, and suddenly the sound sorted itself out. “She wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

  From the sofa Jim observed darkly, “That racket is going to drive me bonkers.”

  “Don’t even go there,” Lynn warned her husband. The pressure cooker, all shiny and imposing, had been unwrapped with some bewilderment on Christmas morning, but Betty Parker had explained her gift with conviction. “Raising a family,” she’d told Lynn and Jim, “there was no kitchen appliance I appreciated more.”

  Was there anything quite so painful, so fraught with the possibilities of hurt, as gift giving within a family? The cooker’s hiss and clatter took him back to Sunday dinners after church, gray midafternoons of winter in their house in the immaculate suburbs. In retrospect, it seemed, everything had been perfect—but could that really have been the case, given how easily they had faltered and lost their way as a family after his dad had died? Soon enough there’d seemed little reason to come home, and after his mother sold the house in Connecticut and moved to a beach condo in Florida, there’d no longer been any home to come home to anyway.

  “Lynn,” his mother said. She stood in the doorway, holding the unhappy-looking Nathan. “Can you help me set the table? Dinner’ll be ready in no time, and I’ve got to change this little fellow. Oh hello, Tracy,” she said, noticing him in that distracted way she had adopted, as if she ran the risk, in looking at him too closely, of seeing things she could not bear. While in Japan, lulled, somehow, by distance into thinking the news of little import, he had made the mistake of telling her, in a letter, that he was gay. Since his return, there had been two or three ridiculous scenes between them, devolving into a tense and wary truce. “Did you have a nice afternoon?” she asked politely.

  “It was okay,” he told her, wondering what she’d think were she to know the real reason he’d gone, and what he had done with himself once he was there. “An old friend of mine died recently,” he made himself continue. “I went to school with him. So I just walked around campus and thought about him. He was a very close friend.”

  He could sense his mother stiffen. Any reference to his personal life made her nervous, as if the smallest detail might open the wound all over again. He realized he would never be able to say what, for a dangerous moment, he had been on the verge of saying: Holden wasn’t just a friend, Mom, he was a lover. I swallowed his come. He died of AIDS, you know. Which means I probably have the virus inside of me. And I’m scared to death, Mom. I’m so scared I don’t know what to do.

  He wouldn’t subject her to that. His fears were his alone, middle-of-the-night companions he had to make the best of on his own. Perhaps that was why, mysteriously, he needed Arthur these days: sadly, distressingly, there was no one else among the living with whom he could be honest anymore. Only with the condemned, the walking dead, did he feel safe.

  Jumpy and morose, he went upstairs to the guest bedroom his sister had installed him in. For ten minutes he sat on his bed and stared at the cool beige carpet at his feet. The room felt like a guest bedroom: unlived in, pristine, soulless. But then the whole house felt that way. He wanted to shout angrily; his afternoon had had that effect on him. But shout at whom?

  Where was Noah? he wondered. What was he up to in the lull between Christmas and New Year’s? Did he stay with his terrible father, or had his mother, with all her complicated needs, lured him out to Long Island? It upset him, vaguely, to think of his student living whatever life he lived when he was apart from Tracy. But why should that upset him all of a sudden? With a pang, he tried to quell the spasm of jealousy he suddenly found himself ambushed by, only to discover, in place of that pang, a dull emptiness. Deliberately, responsibly, he had banished Noah from his thoughts these last few weeks—and now, unbidden, here he was all over again.

  “Traaacy,” his sister called up to him. “Dinner’s ready.”

  For an instant he considered feigning illness, or exhaustion. He did, in a sense, feel both; but then, wearily, he rose and descended the stairs to join the rest of the family.

  The dining room table was set with his sister’s coolly elegant wedding china. There were moments, he had to admit, when her taste was actually fairly superb. Candles flickered, the chandelier’s dimmer switch had been turned down low. “I went ahead and put Edison and Nathan to bed,” Lynn told him. “They were being impossible. I thought we adults deserved to dine in peace for once.”

  “Mnn,” Tracy said noncommittally, as his mother sailed in from the kitchen, gloved in insulating mitts fashioned like sharks and holding before her a large steaming platter. He didn’t like to admit it, but the children, irritating as they might be, at least enabled the adults to get through their meals without much danger of any real conversation.

  “Careful,” his mother warned them all as she placed the platter triump
hantly in the center of the table, “this is hot hot hot.” Potatoes, carrots, and onions surrounded a luscious, juice-oozing pot roast of the kind he hadn’t laid eyes on in years.

  Though technically—and certainly philosophically—a vegetarian, Tracy could be accommodating when he had to. He’d eaten turkey on Christmas Day, catfish at Captain Jack’s Seafood Shack, a chicken breast or two. And his sister, he was satisfied, had met him halfway, even concocting for his benefit a pasta and vegetable dish she served not once but twice. But he drew the line at beef.

  “Jim,” Betty invited, apparently oblivious to her affront, “would you do us the honor of carving?”

  Tracy looked at his sister; she only shook her head as if to say, I had nothing to do with this.

  The roast, when sliced, was red and succulent inside. Pooled in the serving platter, blood-juice saturated the vegetables. Tracy knew his mother too well. If she could just get him to eat red meat once again, that would be a beginning. Slowly he’d see that it wasn’t bad to be like everyone else. Before long, he’d give up entirely on his foolish notion about being gay.

  “Pass your plates around,” Jim told them. “I’ll serve. Ladies first.”

  “Tracy, your plate,” urged his mother, after hers and her daughter’s had been heaped high.

  “Mom,” he said, as delicately as he could, “you know I don’t eat red meat.”

  She tried to look surprised. “Oh,” she said, not daring to meet his eyes. “Oh dear. I wasn’t even thinking. I was trying to fix something nice. You used to like pot roast so much when you were little.”

  “That’s okay,” he told her. “I’m not all that hungry. I’ll have some bread and some salad. I think I’ve gained about five pounds this week.”

  “You’re very thin these days,” his mother countered. “And I don’t understand why you’re suddenly on this vegetarian kick.”

  “Mom,” Lynn warned, “you’re picking on him.”

  All Tracy could do was smile and shake his head. “Mom,” he said, “I’ve been on this vegetarian kick, as you call it, for about five years. It’s no big deal. I just don’t eat meat, is all.”

  “Sometimes I don’t understand what happened,” his mother observed plaintively. “You were such a normal, happy child growing up.”

  “What do you mean, ‘What happened’?” Tracy asked. “I’m perfectly happy. Anyway, who says it’s normal to eat the flesh of other animals?”

  “You’re misinterpreting me,” his mother told him. “You always do that.” She looked as if she were about to burst into tears, and Tracy felt a strange surge of pity. Florida—or perhaps it was grief, loneliness—had changed her. He could barely imagine her life these days; indeed, was afraid to try too hard. It seemed possible, after all, that he’d not been a good son to her. That he had callously abandoned her for his own pleasures in her hour of direst need.

  A skirmish with his mother was the last thing he wanted. “Sorry,” he apologized with bemusement. “All I meant was, there’s nothing wrong with not eating meat.”

  With a clatter that startled them all, Jim laid his knife and fork across his plate. “Actually, Tracy,” he weighed in, “that’s where you’re dead wrong.” A strange exasperation filled his voice. “Like it or not, human beings are at the top of the food chain. Simple as that. It’s our perogative to eat meat.”

  Tracy considered, for a moment, pointing out the mispronunciation, but then thought better of it. This was hardly the time to play the fussy English teacher. The gauntlet he’d been half waiting for all week had been thrown down, and he realized, without a bit of regret, that he too had been spoiling for a fight.

  “Not only is it our perogative,” Jim went on grandly, “I’d even say it’s our duty. Our biological responsibility to nature.”

  “I have no idea what nature even is,” Tracy challenged.

  “See?” Jim said with triumph. “That’s exactly the problem. People think they can just go and forget our evolutionary role, do anything they want. But life’s not a game. There’s harsh reality out there.”

  If Tracy wasn’t exactly sure he knew what Jim was talking about, he nonetheless thought he could recognize code words when he heard them. Arthur, bless his ACT-UP heart, had seen to that.

  “What are you talking about?” he asked.

  “AIDS, for example,” Jim said.

  Of the four of them, only Betty had begun to eat. Head down, the sorcerer’s startled apprentice, she seemed to want to pretend she’d played no part at all in getting all this started. Was she embarrassed to have unleashed more than she’d planned?

  “You go against nature,” Jim went on, “you’re asking for trouble. Simple as that. Surely I don’t have to point that out to somebody with your credentials.”

  Tracy had to wonder what, exactly, the Universal Man understood. He’d always assumed Lynn had told her husband, at some point or other, “There’s something about my brother you should know.” He’d always assumed, likewise, a certain degree of tolerance there.

  With calm fury he asked, “And what, exactly, are my credentials?”

  “Haven’t we had enough of this conversation?” Lynn wondered mildly, smarter, perhaps, than anyone gave her credit for.

  Jim glared at his wife for a moment, then said sharply, “You’re right. Let’s not get into this.”

  But as far as Tracy was concerned, they already were into it. “I have friends who are dying of this disease,” he told Jim.

  “I’m very sorry about that,” Jim said. “I was trying to make a philosophical point.”

  Tracy had had it with philosophical points. He remembered how Louis Tremper had gone out of his way, these past few weeks, to avoid the contagion of a gay colleague. Wounded by the memory—he’d actually thought for a while that Louis was his friend—Tracy found himself saying, in a voice more hysterical than he might have wished, “I don’t have to listen to your philosophical points. If anything, gay men are saints because they’re not reproducing themselves like rabbits. That’s what’s killing the planet—straight people who think they have some God-given right to just keep pumping out more and more children.”

  The whole room seemed to hold its breath. In that moment of great clarity he glared at Jim and Jim glared back. If for no other reason than to defend the memory of Holden Chance, who had left barely a mark on the world, Tracy suddenly saw he had no choice but to hold his ground.

  “I’m going to ask you to take that back,” Jim said with ominous calm. “You’re not getting away with talk like that in my house.”

  “Then let me say it again.” Tracy spoke icily though shakily. “It’s not gay people who are the problem. It’s heterosexuals who go on breeding like there’s no fucking tomorrow, which there won’t be if you keep it up. As far as I’m concerned, anybody who’s bringing children into the world these days is committing war crimes against the planet.”

  His mother slammed down her fork. “Tracy, shame on you,” she said angrily.

  “I can’t stand this,” Lynn said, and got up from the table.

  “I should fucking bash your face in,” Jim said with surprising calm.

  Tracy couldn’t manage quite the same. His voice was trembling, and he felt close to tears. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” he accused. “You’ve been waiting to bash the faggot ever since you met me.”

  “Tracy, stop it,” his mother said.

  “Because that’s what I am,” he told her. “A despicable, inconvenient faggot. So you’d better get used to it.”

  He knew he was irrationally, even dangerously, angry. He knew there was no purpose to this argument except the need on both his part and Jim’s to have it out with each other, to do damage. And maybe he’d gone and proved Jim’s point after all: here they were, two dogs needing to draw blood in order to establish once and for all who was going to be the alpha male in this pack. It was Jim’s den, of course, Jim’s brood. Of course he had the advantage. He always would. Nature, after all, was on hi
s side. Nature, and reality, and no doubt God Himself.

  “Get out of my house,” Jim told him.

  “Fine,” Tracy said. “I’m going. I’m leaving right now.”

  “The sooner the better,” Jim told him.

  “Tracy, you’re acting like a spoiled child,” his mother accused.

  He was precariously close to shouting. “I’m not acting like a spoiled anything,” he said. “I’m being demeaned by this homophobe, and you’re sitting here letting it happen. He’s only saying what you’ve been thinking ever since I came out. Well I don’t have to take it. I don’t care who you are.”

  Rising abruptly, face flushed with rage, he pushed back his chair and stalked out of the room.

  “I’m your mother,” he heard as he mounted the stairs. “That’s who I am. I’m your mother and I love you.”

  At the top of the stairs, Lynn was waiting for him. She held Nathan, who’d fallen peacefully asleep despite being awakened, momentarily, by all the clamor. Hard to believe such an innocent creature was a planet destroyer. Nonetheless, Tracy thought angrily, he’d meant what he’d said.

  “You’re way overreacting,” his sister told him. “Jim wasn’t trying to insult you.”

  “Don’t give me that,” Tracy lashed out. “God, I didn’t know you were married to such a Neanderthal.”

  “You’re being ridiculous, Tracy.”

  “I refuse to be an issue,” Tracy said. “I’m a person, not an issue.”

  Shifting Nathan in her arms, Lynn stared at him with what looked remarkably like sadness. “Maybe some people think you’ve gone and turned yourself into an issue,” she said quietly.