by Geoff Ryman
And this time, at sixteen, Michael recognized the undertow, that pulling, for what it was.
‘So how’s the cross country going, Mike?’
‘They need me. They want me.’ Michael slipped into this new self as if it were a body stocking.
‘Good man!’ His father slapped his knee.
‘So, like I’m in real serious training now.’
‘Sounds good to me.’ His father was being laid back, changing gears like he was playing ping pong.
‘So like, I really need someone to run with and stuff.’
‘Well, I was kinda planning on doing what we were doing the last time you were here.’ His father was looking out the window, at the distant billboards, as if they were passing women. ‘If that’s OK with you.’
‘Do a beach run every day.’
‘If that’ll do the trick. I don’t know.’ Finally Joe Cool looked back around at his son. ‘It depends on what you want to do. We may be looking at getting you some professional coaching.’
Michael was brisk. ‘I’d rather run with you, Dad.’
‘Well maybe. But you gotta consider how far you want to take this thing and how well you want to do it.’
‘Maybe we could do both. I was … uh … kinda thinking…’ Michael seemed to be hurling towards some kind of decision; the sensation was not unlike the acceleration towards orgasm. He suddenly sharply knew what he wanted. He could see it, there was no doubt. A couple of hundred still images flickered in his brain: them in the apartment together, at the beach together, chores together, breakfasts together.
‘I’m thinking I might go to school here, you know, college, and um, work on my running, you know, maybe be on the team while I study.’
This had never been discussed with his mother. Michael had just invented it. He was betraying his mother to talk in this way, to make this offer without her knowledge.
Michael pressed on, like a car careening zigzag across a roadway. ‘I was thinking it could be UC San Diego. Um. I don’t think it would be fair to make Mom pay and all.’
‘No, no, no,’ his father said and seemed to have to stand up in the front seat, like he was having to break hard, in an emergency. Michael was perfectly aware that he was offering his father the thing he most wanted in the world.
‘So. I was kinda thinking I could, like, you know, live with you.’
His father was not looking at billboards any more. His father was looking straight ahead. ‘You’d have to make sure UCSD was good in your subject.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Maybe we could drop into the school now. It’s on our way.’
Michael nodded slowly, surely, as if this were something considered and serious. That would be good.
The Chiclets chewing gum stopped clicking. His father’s jaw clenched, and then he swallowed. ‘I would like that a whole bunch,’ he said, and then he turned and looked at Michael, and nodded, and smiled a strained, tight smile. His eyes were impossible to read behind the mirror shades. All Michael saw in them was his own reflection.
They stopped at UCSD and wasted an hour. Michael’s flight had got in at 3.30 PM, and it was late to show up on a huge campus and expect to find somebody to answer their questions. It took them fifteen minutes to find out where they were supposed to park, and another twenty to find the registrar’s office. A woman behind the counter spent another ten minutes showing them on a map where the Sciences Administration Building was. The office would close at five.
This was not his father’s world. Dad looked like a truck driver, ill at ease and dusty. The woman behind the counter was stylish, black, and thin like the Duchess of Windsor. Her hair was pulled back and her earrings folded into themselves in stylish swirls. ‘And you sir, are you enrolling in a class too?’ she asked.
‘No, that’s my son,’ said the Marine. He had a high-school diploma. He was proud, pleased to be taken for twenty, and insulted all at the same time.
‘Uh huh, OK,’ she said, processing information at high speed as the clock hands spun. She passed Michael booklets and forms.
In the car roaring back to the camp his father asked, ‘What does your mother say about this?’
Michael felt the first uncomfortable lurch. ‘I haven’t really said anything about it. In fact it’s all been kind of a spur-of-the moment thing. In fact, I just decided right now at the airport, when I saw you again. I just knew it was what I wanted to do.’
‘Uh huh.’ His father nodded, and the face gripped itself. Out from under the mirror shades, some water started to creep. ‘Well, you know you gotta talk to your Mom about it.’ His voice was rough and slurred.
Michael felt the second uncomfortable lurch. He didn’t want it to mean this much to his Dad; his Dad was supposed to be unapproachable, like a fortress.
His father coughed to clear his throat. He started to talk exactly as if he were running, short of breath, gasping. ‘And, we’ll need to get you a driver’s licence. And you know, find out about a qual … oh, shit.’
His father flicked the black stick and the car made a bink, bink, bink noise and it eased over to the side, his father carefully looking behind. It went onto the paved shoulder and stopped. His father jerked on the handbrake, and rested his head against the steering wheel.
‘Sorry, son, sorry.’ His father’s voice sounded like it was glued with drying saliva.
‘Dad? Dad?’ Michael was worried.
‘I’m sorry I fucked up your life. I’m sorry I left your Mom, she’s a great lady, and she sure as hell deserved better than me. I did the best I could. But I messed up.’ He sighed and gathered breath and turned. ‘And look at you. You’re big and smart, you grew up so well, and it’s nothing to do with me. But I’m going to make sure that you’re not disappointed in me.’
‘Disappointed? In you?’ Michael was incredulous.
‘Ah, what the hell.’ His father suddenly sounded normal. He took off the mirror shades. The action made him look older and more fragile, like the skin around his eyes was crêpe paper and could tear. He wiped it with the heels of his hands. ‘What say we go get ourselves a burger at the 101?’
‘Right on!’ said Michael. And they slapped hands.
The brute fact was that Michael had fallen in love with his father. It was a romantic and sexual attachment. Michael wanted to marry him.
There is only one word for love and it blurs many dividing lines. There was nothing in his father’s manner that could signal to someone who was in the first full flood of love that he did not want the same thing. His father’s face softened and went tender as they planned when Michael would move in with him. He evidently, despite everything he said, wanted Michael to be with him as quickly as possible. He offered to move closer to USCD, to buy a house instead of a condo, asked Michael if he wanted a separate place with a face haunted and shadowy and sad. His father’s face opened up like a sunflower when Michael said, no, no, the whole point was to live together.
‘You’ll need a car. We could let you have this one. What do I need a car for? Or would you rather have the Jeep? Your choice.’
Dad got excited planning joint trips. ‘I never took you to Aspen. I can’t believe that. I took all those bimbos, and I never took you! Yosemite, Alaska. There’s the John Muir Trail.’ As long as the length of the trail would be with Louis Blasco, Michael wouldn’t mind.
‘That’ll be fabulous!’ said Michael.
His father laughed. ‘We’ll take a tent, get in the Jeep and just take off!’ His father’s hand soared like an aeroplane. ‘Or, there’s the Sacramento Delta. Man, it’s the size of the Mississippi and nobody goes there. Get us a houseboat? Just the two of us?’ His father’s eyes shone with love.
Michael could understand it now. Now he knew that his father had needed tenderness. You can train your mind to kill if a silhouette of a soldier flips up out of the corner of your eye. You can become adept at breaking the spirit of kids who are only a few years older than your broken-spirited son. You can do that, and it wi
ll only make the need for tenderness worse.
You drive home alone from Camp Pendleton every Thanksgiving and Christmas to be with a big established Latin family who all went to university except you. You have no one of your own to love except your son, who is gone for two years at a time. You don’t have a grey suit; you don’t talk like your lawyer brother. When you are out of uniform people think you are an illegal immigrant, which is why certain white women fuck you. You drive home through Oceanside, California, which is full of floozies. There are sixteen-year-old drug-addicted whores who hang out in the back of gas stations just off the I-5. There are clubs with neon signs that look like they’re from the 1950s, with cartoons of women dressed in swimsuits with tails and cat ears, all in pink. You can buy some women, or seduce others because you are Latin, smoother than most and built like a tank. And that’s what they want you for. Either that or the 50, or 90 or 100 bucks.
And you are strong and you are physical and you are sensual and you are loving, and what you see is what you get – a woman with liquor on her breath. You want a nice girl. But you don’t want a Catholic-ridden, uneducated, old-fashioned Mexican girl, and you don’t want a slut of an Anglo, and you won’t get the kind of girls your brothers marry. Their wives came from good homes, spoke Spanish with an American accent, cooked chicken in chocolate sauce, and went on to higher degrees.
The English girl from Sheffield had seemed a perfect way out. She had red hair, and a kind, long, fragile face that was ordinary and kinda classy at the same time. She was all agog with Louis for all the wrong reasons. He was a way out for her too.
God, the things Michael’s mother gave away without realizing. She really didn’t understand that a Marine Sergeant would not have a lot of money. The upholstering of American life is very difficult for a Brit to read. An American can have a house in some exotic-sounding California town and it can have a swimming pool, but that does not mean he is rich. His brother may be a lawyer, but that does not mean, as it assuredly does in Britain, that he is likely to be from the top social drawer.
His mother’s sexuality had betrayed her spirited but fearful self. She married for love, but she didn’t really want to live as someone with a Spanish surname five thousand miles away. If she had been braver and less tough, if she had moved to Southern California with her handsome husband, she might have been happy.
Instead, she insisted her husband stay in England. It was not her way to clean house and pretend to be all glamorous. She relaxed into being a housewife and began to look dowdy. There was no way he was going to quit the Marines, and in any event, what was he supposed to do in England? He had no hold on English culture, English life, English power. So he went back and she did not.
In a curious way, a woman with a child does not need love as badly as a man who has no wife and not much social standing. A man like that might need love more. Maybe a man from a big, loving Latin family would inherit a great and unused capacity for love.
And suddenly there is his son, his English son, a bit stuck-up, a bit weedy, kind of a bookworm, but you know? That kind of makes his old man proud of him. It makes his old man think: I can help make somebody who turns out that different from me. And I can tell my own mother, hey Mom, I didn’t let you down. I didn’t become no lawyer like my brother, and I got divorced, but I did one good thing in my life. I made my Michael. And you know Mom, my Michael wants to live with me. This guy could go to Oxford, he could talk with the children of aristocrats, hey, he doesn’t even like Southern California. But my son wants to live with me.
* * *
All that summer, Michael and Louis made their plans.
Michael would pass his GCSEs in June the next year, and then spend six months studying to take the SAT test. Then Michael would apply for a dual passport. He began to sign his full name: Michael Louis Oliveira Blasco.
Using his Latin name made Michael feel wobbly inside, as if he had changed his name to join his father, as if indeed they had in some way merged identities. It felt as if he were going public, as if he were promising someone never to love anyone else. He would repeat that new name to himself over and over in a whisper.
Thoughts of his father drove out thoughts of anyone else. The beaches of California are not short of handsome men wearing little clothing. They had no power to turn Michael Louis Oliveira Blasco’s head or heart. The magic of naming echoed what had happened in biological fact. Michael’s ego had melted down and merged with someone else’s. He had married his father.
Mi macho, cómo te amo.
There was nothing else in Michael’s life for over a month. Love made him numb. He and his Dad came back from a movie and a slightly beery dinner. It was eleven at night – eight in the morning in England. Michael rang home and finally told his mother of his decision, and then took everything one step further.
His father had drunk a bit too much. He couldn’t handle drink that well. He was a bit woozy and his black eyes swam with love. Michael wanted to kiss him. Instead, he took his hand and said, ‘Dad. I’ve decided. I’m not going to go back to England.’
His father’s eyes dimmed. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m going to stay here. At the end of this summer? I’ll finish high school in Oceanside.’
‘Oh man.’ His father let Michael’s hand drop. He covered his head with both hands. ‘Man, oh man.’ He swayed as if under a burden. ‘You can’t treat your mother like that, Mike. You’re too old to give in to emotion like that. You got to do the right thing.’ The words were laboured, like he was remembering lines from a John Wayne script. ‘You got to go back home to your mother and we’ll do this thing the right way.’
His face looked blue-white and blotchy.
‘It’s what I want to do.’
Isn’t that what you want?
His father sniffed and moved away from him, took a swig from the bottle and as if he had heard Michael’s unspoken question, shook his head, no.
Michael went to bed a bit drunk, and slept well enough until about 5 AM, when he suddenly was awake, wide awake, with the truth as clear as if it were squatting on his chest.
I love my own father like I should be loving someone my own age.
Michael, Michael, what do you think you’re doing? There is no one else in the world doing this, there isn’t even any name for what you are doing. You are out there, man, you are way, way out there.
What are you doing to your mother? She’s the one who’s actually been there all your life, she’s the one who’s done all the paying. Now, just when you’re growing up and she’s getting old, you want to take off and leave her.
And you want … there really was almost no way to say it. You want your father. You want to settle in with your Dad and you want …
Though he’s a Catholic he was born semi-circumcised so the head of his dick always shows and it’s always clean and before I sleep and when I wake up I think of the head of that cock in my mouth. It’s all I want.
You have to stop it, Michael. This is crazy. Go on home at the end of summer and get over it. That’s all he wants. Go home and let the whole idea of living with him in America dissolve.
What are you going to tell him? Are you going to say, Dad I’m a faggot and I’m in love with you and I want to live with you like a pair of hairdressers? No, you’re not going say that, so what the fuck are you going to say?
You’re going to say, Dad, I’ve changed my mind, I don’t want to live with a dumb Marine. I’ll say I’ve decided that English universities are better.
He’ll pretend that’s OK, OK with him, and he’ll cough to clear his throat instead of crying, and he’ll put on those mirror shades so I can’t see his eyes, and when he drives he’ll thump the steering wheel hard for no reason.
Real great, Michael. Superb. Either way, you’re going to hurt him. Aw shit, what have you done?
It was a long time to stay in bed, staring at the ceiling. Michael was not strong. He slipped back into reverie. He imagined that Louis was not his fat
her at all, and that they had gone backpacking in the wilds, washing in lakes, and holding each other at night. He imagined them making love, imagining trailing his face down his father’s body. He masturbated, imagining making love to him, and mopped up with the tissues he now kept by the bed. He fooled himself with imaginings. He went to sleep and woke up, lulled and soothed, with the feeling that it would all be OK somehow.
Michael walked out to the kitchen later, in his Y-fronts with a morning hard-on.
‘Man, you look like I feel,’ said Dad, a remark open to interpretation. He reached for the coffee-pot. ‘You’re like me, you can’t wake up without caffeine.’
Flawless, unchanging California sunshine came through the windows. It would be another beautiful day, with Oceanside ten degrees cooler than anywhere else.
Michael couldn’t even remember why he had been so concerned.
His Dad went to work, and Michael lay on the bed and masturbated again, dreaming of him. The dream this time was more direct: they were still father and son, but no one knew anything. They lived together as partners, they slept in the same bed and Michael swung his bag of books into the car every morning and drove off to UC San Diego. It took people years to realize what was going on. They were shocked at first, Mom, Michael’s uncles, but when they saw it was love, they got used to it. They grew to understand. It was the image of sleeping all night, his face cushioned on his father’s breast, that made Michael come.
Then he got up and looked at the curriculum covered by the SAT test, and made a list of American textbooks and thought of joining summer school. And after that there would be nothing to do except loll on the beach all day dreaming of his father. And he would go to the camp, and see his father in the nude, and run with his father and dream with his father of the life they both wanted to build together.
Driven mad by the imperatives of love, Michael became sure his father wanted the same thing.
As they started the run, Dad slapped Michael’s butt. He looked at Michael in the shower and said, ‘Man, what do you call that thing? Is that a dick? It looks like it belongs on a horse, man!’ His father walked on the pier with an arm on Michael’s shoulder. He hugged him as they watched television on the sofa.