by Paul Russell
“Her name’s Betsy,” she said with a trace of defiance.
He looked up at her; she could see that his face was not one of those faces that registered emotion particularly clearly. Or was that just the young in general? “It really is Betsy, isn’t it?” he said. “Are you Mrs. Tremper?”
“We’ve met before,” she told him. “At the Christmas reception.”
“Maybe,” he said guardedly. “I don’t really remember. I’m terrible with people’s faces. It’s Betsy”—he spoke more to the dog than to her. “I love this dog.”
With some shock she realized that he had almost certainly not laid eyes on Betsy since she was lost. He would only have been told that she’d been found. “Hey, Bets,” he cooed. “Do you remember me?” She felt, vaguely, that his unself-conscious enthusiasm was somehow callow, given all that had happened. A young man’s promising career had been destroyed, and here was the culprit seemingly untouched by it all. And yet, under the circumstances, what should he do but be a boy? It was, after all, exactly what some might argue Tracy Parker had tried to rob him of.
Did he know that she knew? At least he didn’t ask, “Have you heard anything from Mr. Parker?” Though perhaps she wished he had, if for no other reason than the chance to talk about the person who had vanished from both their lives. So young, she thought, and yet already he’d learned what to say and what not to say. Already he held his secrets close to his chest. She considered the moment: here she stood, and there he knelt, a multitude of shared secrets unshared between them. What if they actually dared compare notes? But of course one never did. One went through all one’s life and never did.
Would it change anything at all to know the whole truth, each side of it, every facet and angle? Or would the result just be flat-out contradiction, like the four Gospels’ incompatible accounts of the Crucifixion?
“I wish I had a dog biscuit for you,” Noah told Betsy. He stood up and showed his open palms. “I wish I had a whole handful.” Betsy barked twice. “Sorry,” he said regretfully. Then, without another word, no farewell, not even a look Claire’s way, he and his companion sauntered on as if nothing particularly momentous had occurred.
As Devin Shimabukuro stepped through the door of the narrow café, Tracy rose to greet his old friend. It had been with great nervousness that he had finally summoned the will to call. They had not spoken in nearly six months. But on the phone, at least, Devin had not been fazed. Nothing, it seemed, weighed too heavily on him, a trait that Tracy found, at the moment, rather appealing.
“God, it’s been forever,” said his friend, prolonging their embrace and speaking warmly into Tracy’s ear. “You look great.”
“As do you,” he returned the compliment, which was only the truth, after all. Devin might grow older, but he never seemed to age. Unfathomable that they had fallen into such a silence with each other for so long. Devin was, after all, his oldest friend.
“I’ve never been here,” he said, looking around. “Looks cozy.”
“I love this place,” Tracy told him. “It’s so New York.”
And Devin, he realized with nostalgia, was so New York as well. Despite the day’s opulent warmth, he wore a white turtleneck and trim black jacket. His new haircut gave him the chance, once or so a minute, to flick back, with a toss of his head, the ebony lock that fell over one eye.
“Well,” Devin said once he’d seated himself. “This New Yorker would like a cocktail. What shall we drink?”
“Nothing for me,” Tracy said. “I hardly ever drink anymore.”
“Oh please,” Devin said, tapping him fondly on the wrist. “Country living’s gone to your head. It’s the city. Have some fun.”
Tracy hesitated for a moment, aware he’d let Devin think, over the phone, he was only down for spring break. He was having some difficulty, these days, deciding exactly what his story was supposed to be. “You’re right,” he said with a sigh. “It’s the city. What the hell?”
“Yay,” Devin told him, blithe instigator, as ever, of excess. “I personally have decided it’s time to bring back the three-martini lunch,” he proclaimed. “Who wants to live forever, right?” But having said that, he nonetheless looked at Tracy with a faint flicker of concern. “Oh my God,” he said, as if something had dawned on him. “You’re not taking me out to lunch to tell me you’re sick, are you?”
“Who said I’m taking you out to lunch?” Tracy said. “The fact is, I’m more or less flat broke at the moment.”
“I forgot. The impoverished life of the teacher. But think of all the other rewards. How are the sweet young things these days? Now that spring has sprung, have they taken off their shirts on the playing fields? Do they lie around half-naked on the lawn?”
“You have such a perverse imagination,” Tracy told him miserably.
“You really have gone all responsible and everything, haven’t you?” Devin diagnosed as their waiter approached. “I feel parched just thinking of your life among the ephebes. Now I really do need that martini. Tanqueray,” he commanded. “And dry. Very dry. With an olive. Et vous, my dear?”
“Oh hi, Trace,” said the waiter. “How’s it going?”
“Great,” Tracy told him. “I’m great.” Charlie of the calm beauty and dimpled smile was perhaps the chief reason he had made this café his haunt. And how odd to be on a first-name basis with the youth who had so stirred him when Arthur had brought him here back in October, back before things had begun to go so wrong. In fact it had been that very weekend—hadn’t it? He still had in his possession, somewhere, that inscribed scroll of toilet paper the troubled boy had given him, a bad-luck token if ever there’d been one, unheeded prophecy of disasters he could not, at the time, have even begun to discern. From the storm’s vast wreckage, it was the only relic he had saved.
“I think I’ll have a glass of red wine,” he told Charlie, remembering Louis’s warning: A man who starts drinking liquor before five is doomed. Yet another bit of the headmaster’s advice he’d smiled at indulgently and then proceeded, despite himself, to absorb.
“Merlot, Beaujolais, or Cabernet Sauvignon?” Charlie said.
“Oh dear. Choices, choices.”
“Have the Cabernet,” Charlie advised in a stage whisper, touching him affectionately, thrillingly, on the shoulder. It was all Tracy could do to resist reaching up and patting that hand in return. One of these days, he promised himself, he just might.
“By the way,” Devin asked, flicking his hair from his eye, “are these ashtrays usable, or just part of the decor?”
“It’s actually a real live ashtray,” Charlie told him.
“I always ask,” Devin said, smiling that winning but artificial smile he reserved for young men who were too good-looking for their own good. Nevertheless, Tracy watched his friend across the table scrutinize Charlie as the young man walked away. He knows I have a crush, he thought, discomfited, as usual, by Devin’s acumen, and expecting some affectionate taunt to that effect. But Devin surprised him. He gazed at Tracy with lustrous eyes. Leaning across the table confidentially, touching Tracy’s hand, a gesture unaccountably disquieting, he said in a low voice, “You didn’t answer my question, sweetie. Is everything okay with you?”
Tracy laughed. He leaned back in his seat and stuck his hands leisurely in the pockets of his khaki trousers. “Is everything okay with me?” he repeated. For months he had lived in unrelieved hell, unable to confide his terror to another living soul. In dreams his father had appeared, telling him cryptically, “You wouldn’t believe how beautiful the mountains are over here.” It rather shamed him how, after picking up his results at the clinic, he had actually closed his eyes for a moment and silently thanked the God he’d stopped believing in the year his dad had died. “My health, actually, is terrific,” he told Devin. “I got tested. I got the results.” Then he added heroically, “I’ll live to be a hundred and twenty.”
“Good,” Devin said. “Thank God. I worry about everybody, you know. All the ti
me. We all have to be so very careful.”
But Tracy had not been careful. He had thrown caution to the winds. He had loved a boy. No, he had fucked a boy he had loved. A boy who, in his brave and avid way, had very much wanted to be fucked. Not love but unlawful sexual activity: that was the crime he stood accused of. But by whom, exactly? Here he sat, entirely free, and with an absurdly clean bill of health as well. At least I taught him to use a condom, he reassured himself. It’s possible I might even have saved his life.
“Rafael and I got tested too,” Devin went on. “A few months back. All’s clear with us, too. You’ll have to meet him the next time you’re down. You’ll love him. He’s only nineteen—going on fourteen, I sometimes think. All dark and Latin. Fabulously passionate.”
“And things are going well?” Tracy asked, startled to realize how many times two old friends had ended up in bed together since their college days. He remembered without rancor how Devin had sprung the fact of fabulously passionate Rafael on him that long-ago night in October, how he had felt a pinprick of jealousy even while holding back on his own secret that had already begun to gnaw at his heart. Had his silence been wariness, or simple self-deception?
“We’ve been looking for an apartment to share,” Devin told him. “If that’s not serious, then I don’t know what is. And how about yourself? Any upstate cuties to brag about?”
Charlie set their drinks before them, then brandished his check pad. My whole life is before me, Tracy reminded himself sternly as Devin scanned the menu—and as if to reassure himself of that miraculous fact, he studied Charlie Morse’s shapely hands, his well-tended nails, the thin wrist that disappeared into the cuff of his white shirt.
“How’s our friend Arthurina?” the beautiful youth asked after taking down their order. “I haven’t seen her for a while.”
“She has her ups and downs,” Tracy told him. “You know how it is.”
“Give her my best,” Charlie said. “I do miss her these days.”
“I will, most definitely.”
“Sounds like you get down here quite a lot,” Devin observed when Charlie had left them.
Tracy took a deep breath. “Actually,” he admitted, suddenly relieved to be telling the truth, “I’m down here all the time. I left my job up in Middle Forge. Things just weren’t working out. So I’m staying with Arthur Branson right now. I know you two never got along.”
“A question of style,” Devin said generously.
“I know. A piece of work. But frankly, for me, he’s been a saint. He’s got this tiny, tiny apartment”—Tracy pinched together forefinger and thumb—“but he welcomed me with open arms.”
Devin sipped his martini peaceably. “I always sensed you never quite got over him,” he said.
It caught Tracy off guard. Recently he’d been thinking much the same thing. “You’re probably right,” he agreed. “I guess, in a way, I never have gotten over him.” But then he had never really gotten over any of them: not Arthur Branson, not Devin Shimabukuro, not Holden Chance IV. Not Eric whose last name he did not remember. Certainly not Noah Lathrop.
“I’m very worried about Arthur,” he confessed to Devin. “He’s not doing so well. He keeps losing weight, even though we’ve got him eating five meals a day. Meat and more meat. Who’d have thought a rabid vegetarian like me would end up specializing in pork roasts? And he never goes out anymore; he’s got a modem, so he just works from bed. He says his feet are killing him. His doctor can’t find any reason; but it just keeps getting worse. I have this bad feeling everything’s getting worse with him and there’s no stopping it.”
Charlie was back with their plates: a cheeseburger for Devin, kale and white bean soup for Tracy. That Devin seemed unruffled by their waiter’s astonishing beauty must bode well, Tracy decided with a touch of envy, for his future with Rafael.
“Are you sure it’s a good situation for you to be in?” Devin asked. “I mean, taking care of somebody who’s so sick.”
“It’s what I need to do,” Tracy said, aware that he perhaps sounded more stoic than he actually felt these days.
Devin picked up his cheeseburger and inspected it. “More meat,” he said. “You’ve always been so pure. I admire that about you. But I want to ask something. You didn’t give up your teaching job because of Arthur, did you? You seemed to like it so much. It seemed so perfect for you.”
“I didn’t exactly give up my job,” Tracy told him.
Devin looked, actually, quite shocked. “You mean you got fired? Impossible. You, of all people?”
“Let’s just say I had to leave. It’s a very long story. I fell in love with one of my students.”
“Oh my God,” Devin exclaimed.
“We joked about that. Remember?” He tried not to sound bitter. He knew he didn’t feel bitter, but what it was he felt, exactly, he couldn’t begin to say.
“But you actually…I mean—what happened? Was it wonderful?”
“Wonderful,” Tracy said, turning the word round and round in his mind. “I suppose you could say, in a certain sense, it was wonderful. It was also the stupidest thing I ever did.”
“Tell me everything. Was he hot? How young are we talking here?”
Tracy found he could say nothing at all.
“Did you fuck him?” Devin went on. “I don’t know why I find all this so fantastic.”
“You weren’t there,” Tracy told his friend wearily. “That’s why.”
Something in his tone brought Devin to heel. He narrowed his eyes and said, “I’m sorry. This is all very serious, isn’t? And here I’m being such a reckless queen about it. I’m so shallow sometimes.”
“It’s a deep shallowness,” Tracy said. “That’s what I love about you. Anyway, it’s all nothing now. It’s just something that happened, and now we all move on.”
“Who’s we?”
“The people whose trust I betrayed. The ones I let down. The ones I didn’t love enough.”
“Oh,” Devin said somberly. “Does this mean you’re in trouble? I’m not going to be reading about you in the newspaper, am I?”
“I could’ve gone to jail for a long time,” he said—he who had been given the chance to burn brightly, to defy the world with the blessed madness of love. Not an hour went by when he didn’t understand, with a clarity so sharp it bit, what he had let slip from his grasp. He regretted everything and nothing; his punishment was to have to relinquish it all. “They could’ve thrown me to the wolves,” he went on. “But they didn’t. They let me slink away with my hide intact.” But he knew it wasn’t they. It was Noah, who’d been hurt and said nothing; it was Louis, who’d known everything and said nothing. It still left him stunned and slightly disbelieving. He still half expected the police to knock on Arthur’s door one day. For the rest of his life he would be waiting for the knock on the door.
No one knew where he was, he comforted himself. His break with the Forge—all of it, every last, loved aspect of its life—was absolute. About him everywhere lay his future. It gleamed in the sunlight washing the busy streets beyond the café’s plate-glass window. It burnished the bar from behind which Charlie, lazily stifling a good-natured yawn, sent a friendly look his way. Pushing his empty plate to one side, Devin felt in the pocket of his jacket for his cigarettes.
“Do you mind?” he said.
Tracy shook his head. At this very moment Claire might be walking Betsy, and Louis might be skirmishing futilely with Reid, and Noah…but with an ache of vast regret Tracy Parker could not even imagine what Noah—strange, lovely, brilliant, wounded Noah—might be up to on a splendid April day like today.
“That was so weird,” Noah said, looking back over his shoulder, watching the two old women and their frisky beagle disappear around a bend in the path.
“It was his dog, wasn’t it?” Chris said. “The one that got lost.”
“Betsy didn’t get lost,” Noah corrected him. “I lost her. It’s like seeing a ghost. I mean, I knew she got found, b
ut…” He hesitated. How to say that the whole episode now seemed as unreal as a dream? Not just his flight to New York, his losing Betsy, but everything that had happened since New Year’s. Like a bubble, its surface an intricate wonder of iridescence one moment and totally gone the next.
“You mean, you thought she might still be lost and they were just telling you she got found,” Chris suggested.
“Something like that,” Noah told him. It was just as well he couldn’t find the words. Everyone seemed to want to forget that anything had happened, and he gathered that he was meant to forget as well. But he would not forget. He had made love to a man who had loved him. His body had been penetrated. He would never again be the same experience-hungry boy he’d once been, and he held close to his heart the triumphant knowledge he had won.
And yet, every day, a little more escaped. He no longer thought about Tracy Parker every waking minute, no longer yearned in mute frustration for things somehow to reconfigure themselves into the world as he wished it. He no longer felt the constant presence within himself of the rage that had burned so fiercely—against his dad, Dr. Tremper, the universe of school and rules. Against Tracy Parker as well, Tracy who’d shown himself to be a coward rather than the brilliant rebel he liked to pretend he was, who in the end cared more about what other people thought than about the terrific adventure they’d set out to share.
Lately, it seemed, without actively desiring to, without any conscious choice on his part, he’d moved on.
And now here was Betsy bringing that other world back with her, the way Saint Bernards carry brandy flasks for climbers lost in the mountains to remember civilization by. It amazed him, a little, that Tracy had given Betsy up after all that had happened. But then Tracy had given Noah up as well. Were they all expendable, then? Was that how life was?
The lake’s expanse glittered silver in the warm sun. A flock of mallards floated near the shore; five or six Canada geese tore at the grass of the lawn. “I think you should probably get tested,” Chris had said to him one day. Why did he remember that just now? It had clearly been something the Fatwa was waiting for the right time to say—maybe working up his courage. And then he’d just said it. “I’ll go with you,” he’d offered. “We’ll go down to the city.”