"I'm sorry you had a bad experience there," Dr. Matthew said. "No one thinks of domestic abuse as something that happens to men. But we can end this, you and I, right now. Tell me who did this, and we'll call the police."
"I can't. I can't. There are too many people involved."
"Uh-huh. And what good will you be to them if you're dead?"
"It's a chance I'll have to take."
"Would you listen to yourself? You'd rather risk death than expose this monster."
"He's not a monster. He's just like me—someone who wants to be loved but is caught up in a very violent world."
"Well, if that's your story, I can't help you."
"I understand," Quinn said, preparing to leave. "I don't know why I came here. I don't know what I was hoping to change when I don't deserve any better."
"Why?" Dr. Matthew said as he reached the door. "What could you possibly have done that would make you think you deserved this?"
"I don't know."
"Yes, you do. What?"
"I betrayed someone I loved. I cheated on him with someone who hurt him, though I didn't know it at the time."
"Then that part doesn't count. But that's not it. So I ask you again, what was it, Quinn? What did you do that was so terrible that you have condemned yourself to a living death?”
PART II
seventeen
Twelve years earlier
He remembered his aunt helping him with the oxygen mask, holding his hand and praying with him, even as they were in the tuck position. And then he remembered objects flying—drawn here and there as if by some magnetic field gone haywire—and people crying and screaming as the lights went off, the plane went down and water, lots of water, poured in, cold, so cold.
When he emerged, he was a thing remarkable—a boy like Auden's Icarus, fallen from the sky while others plodded on with their unsuspecting lives. But he had no other memory of the experience till that moment in the Alaskan hospital when he woke, unable to move, screaming for his aunt in Bahasa, knowing somehow she was dead, surrounded by strangers trying to soothe him, trying to understand as he thought to himself, I killed her. I killed my aunt.
"Poor baby. What language is that?"
For days, he drifted in and out of consciousness as sensation gradually reclaimed his limbs. The images his fevered brain received had the staccato rhythm of a slide show—here doctors and nurses touching him, talking; there nurses' aides reassuring him as they bathed and bandaged his racked body; and, finally, a woman who looked like Aunt Lena and his mother, only younger, talking with an older woman, salt-and-pepper haired, who didn't.
"Ooh, I don't know, Aunt Josie." She pronounced the name the French way, “Jho ZEE.” "I don't see how we can care for him."
The older woman grabbed the younger by the sleeve of her sweater.
"You listen to me, Sarah Day Novakovic. This is your sister's child. This is blood. And we don't turn our back on blood. We're going to finish what our dear, departed Lena started. This boy washed up on these shores for a reason—to become a real American for the greater glory of God. And we're going to help him do it."
And so Quinn found himself in Misalliance, Missouri, caught somewhere between Jakarta and New York, where he had been and where (he hoped) he was going, what he was and what he wanted to become. At night, he comforted himself with memories of Aunt Lena and their time in Singapore and Hong Kong. It was, she said, their special getting-to-know-you time, and he recalled imagining with excitement that it was what his life in New York would be like with her—lots of shopping, new clothes, dinners with her interesting friends, special treats, visits to museums and historical sites and, mostly, one-on-one time in which they talked about everything.
"Aunt Lena," he called as she took his picture overlooking Singapore Harbor, "if you could be anything else, what would you be?"
She thought for a moment. "A butterfly," she said. "I'd be a butterfly. Remember that. Some day—a long, long time from now—when I'm gone from this earth, I'll come back to you as a butterfly."
Perhaps she had a premonition. The last thing he remembered her saying to him on the flight before they went down was "Don't forget me." Forget her? Would that he could remember only her and forget everything else.
Misalliance was a town of 12,000 with a downtown of one thoroughfare and a few side streets of brick storefronts. There was a hardware store that was a kind of general store, a supermarket, a barbershop, a hair salon, a feed and seed store, a movie theater called the Bijou, and a few other establishments of lesser note. It was a typical American town, Quinn supposed, as he had nothing else to compare it to, save for the moments he was whisked through St. Louis. Even then, he knew St. Louis wasn't as big as Jakarta or as he imagined New York was.
Misalliance stood outside St. Louis, and the house stood outside Misalliance—a large faded pink and green Victorian with scalloped clapboards, gables, gingerbread trim, fluted columns and a wraparound porch. It was partly shuttered, though not for want of money. The Dudevants—for that was the family name of Uncle Artur; Aunt Marie-Josephine, called Josie; and their late sister, Azielle, mother of Aunts Lena and Sarah and his own mother—were actually comfortable enough. But Uncle Artur and Aunt Josie, especially Aunt Josie, children of the Great Depression and World War II, lived in fear of a poverty-stricken old age, and so they deprived themselves of many small luxuries—a freshly painted room, a landscaped garden, dinner in St. Louis—to save money. That they imposed on themselves the very austerity they had striven to avoid was an irony that would've been lost on Aunt Josie, Quinn thought, a woman serious to the point of literal-mindedness. But the irony was not lost on Quinn, nor was the realization that Aunt Josie's circumspection balanced Aunt Sarah's wantonness.
"That girl is a storm blowing through," Aunt Josie would say, "and I am powerless to stop it."
The more Aunt Sarah spent money and flaunted her "ripe womanliness," as Aunt Josie put it, the more Aunt Josie determined that Quinn, on the cusp of puberty, would not succumb to unbridled ways. That was clear when he arrived in Misalliance after months in an Alaskan hospital and rehab facility and several international phone calls in which Quinn's mother made it plain that she didn't want him back anymore than he wanted to go back to her.
"Do you know your catechism?" Aunt Josie grilled Quinn. "What about your saints?"
"Yes'm," Quinn lied, making a mental note to try to bone up on these at the local library that became one of the few sanctioned pleasures, where Aunt Josie's stern portrait hung in the foyer to honor the librarian emerita.
If Aunt Josie saw herself locked in combat with Islamic Indonesia for Quinn's immortal soul, she also considered herself fighting on two fronts for the integrity of his body.
Uncle Artur, who had lost a leg in the Korean War—yet another subject for library research, Quinn figured—spent most of his time rutting with the various nurses aides, poor, desperate, young immigrant women from Haiti and Nigeria who came and went, as if the urgency of the carnal act would make him whole again and ensure their future in America. The more Aunt Josie tried to hire battle-axes or, God forbid, male aides to care for him as a number of ailments had mostly confined him to a wheelchair, the more he countered with women whose nubile lushness could not be denied no matter how pedestrian the nurse's aide uniform.
"What do you think, Paris?" he said to his latest "paramour," as Aunt Josie disapprovingly called her, appraising Quinn. "Soon this one will be ready for you. Do you have hair on your balls yet, boy?"
When Aunt Sarah repeated the story to Aunt Josie with a giggle that only deepened Quinn's red-cheeked mortification, Aunt Josie issued another of her famous edicts.
"Quinnie Day, under no circumstances are you to venture near the nursing suite," as she called Uncle Artur's rooms.
"Yes'm," Quinn promised, "yes'm" being the operative response to anything Aunt Josie said, he had decided.
Besides, he had once glimpsed Uncle Artur's prosthetic leg hanging on the cl
oset door of his rose-papered bedroom, the memory of which was enough to make Quinn scurry past the suite every time he set foot on the second-floor landing.
But not even that unnerving sight could block out the sounds of Uncle Artur and Paris' lovemaking, nor another sight that Quinn witnessed one night as he made his way to the lilac-papered and scented bathroom, that of an open door and Paris—naked, her dark skin glistening, her full breasts with their dark nipples hanging like ripe eggplants—and Uncle Artur—paunchy, pasty, hairy, sweaty, and naked in his wheelchair—wriggling rhythmically, pleasurably. She rode him as he clasped her buttocks to move her up and down as if she were a carousel horse, their bloated faces like puffer fish fixated on each other.
In bed, the covers pulled tight around him, Quinn shut his eyes and ears, but the experience was burned into his memory. As was the sight of Aunt Sarah and one of her obnoxious beaus—who looked upon her little, brown-skinned chaperone with contempt—pawing each other in the backseat of her old Mercedes or the balcony of the Bijou.
Still, Aunt Josie needn't have worried. Quinn quickly realized that his nascent passions didn't tend that way, that what excited him about women wasn't their bodies but their position as love objects of men. And he recognized another thing, too—that Aunt Josie's fears enabled him to enjoy his preferences without suspicion. His interest in the ancient Greeks, sporting magazines and art history books were all deemed acceptable pursuits to the woman who saw herself as the doyenne of Misalliance culture.
As she comforted herself with Jane Austen or "Jane Eyre" at night, and Uncle Artur lost himself in Paris, Quinn would hide under the covers with Achilles or some modern athletic equivalent and, stroking himself, imagine a scenario similar to the steamy goings-on he had glimpsed in Uncle Artur's room.
He was both proud of the quality of his come and ashamed of it. He knew it was wrong, or at least he had been taught it was wrong. And he didn't like deceiving Aunt Josie or anyone else. But he knew, too, his was a family of secrets. No one was allowed to bring up Grandma Azielle or "that brutal bounder"—as Aunt Josie described him—that was Grandpa, both long dead.
Quinn rationalized his secret pleasures as his reward for making contributions to the Dudevant household. As soon as he was able to acquire a secondhand laptop—something that practically required creating a PowerPoint presentation for Aunt Josie—he guilted Sydney and Chandler into increasing the amount of room and board they sent her for his care.
"Since you dumped me here, the least you can do is help out Aunt Josie financially," he texted, making things sound worse than they were.
Quinn then persuaded Aunt Josie to use part of the money to improve the house and property by promising to do much of the work himself—a promise he made good on. He had heard the whispers in town—the strange, threadbare Dudevants with their wild Cajun and Black Irish blood and oversexed Croat relations and now the grandnephew of dubious parentage. He'd be damned if they'd laugh at them, at him. To him, it was like laughing at the memory of Aunt Lena. The only way to counter ridicule, he figured, was through self-improvement—at home and at the all-boys St. Gabriel's Academy, where he excelled at academics and athletics with such a degree of humility that he could not help but be popular with the teachers and the other students.
St. Gabe's ended with eighth grade. When it came time for Quinn to enter Misalliance High, Aunt Josie manifested a worldliness that took Quinn by surprise. It appeared when Coach Jim Redfield came calling to express his desire to have Quinn try out for the Wildcats football team.
"Miz Josephine, I know you are a woman of faith," Coach Redfield said over tea served from Aunt Josie's good blue-and-cream set. "But what you may not know is that football is next to godliness, too. He who plays prays twice."
"Actually, Mr. Redfield," Aunt Josie said as she handed him and Quinn matching plates with thick slices of her delicious pumpkin bread, "it was St. Augustine who said that he who sings prays twice, something I always tell the other members of St. Gabriel's Choir. But I am inclined to believe that life itself, including athletics, is a prayer. And so I will grant permission for Quinnie Day here to try out on several conditions: 1. He must truly want this. 2. Academics must come first. 3. Any unnecessary roughness will signal an end.
"And last but certainly not least, I have read what has gone on between coaches and the students entrusted to their care in the locker rooms and showers of our nation's schools, and I must say I am shocked, shocked. So I will be watching you and your staff at every practice and every game. And if I so much as surmise anything improper, I will rain down on you like a Louisiana hurricane."
Quinn would be playing baseball, too, his real love. But Coach Redfield, a man with his eye on a state championship, had glimpsed something in Quinn beyond the speed of Mercury and a laser for a left arm. He had seen the future.
"Baseball, son, is a great game, but it's part of our pastoral past," he said on the field, putting an arm on Quinn's shoulder and looking over his at Aunt Josie, hawkeyed in the stands. "Whereas football is our glorious present and future."
Quinn would play baseball and basketball at Misalliance High and caddy to make extra money, but Coach Redfield made sure that he knew football was number one. He needn't have bothered. There were plenty of reminders everywhere he looked. Friday nights Misalliance came alive in a way it didn't during the workweek or even on Sundays, its spanking new athletic field beckoning like a glittering oasis to the faithful, who swelled the town's numbers to such an extent that you could hear the shouts, laughter, cheers, and clapping echoing all the way to the Dudevant house. The ball field—with its blue and yellow stands, the school colors—was such that whenever there was a local or national crisis, people gathered there rather than at town hall or the United megachurch, the largest of the seven houses of worship in town. It was only fitting, Quinn thought, for that field was Misalliance's true cathedral and football, its real religion. Coach Redfield always seemed to have scouts from the St. Louis Arches, the New Orleans Gators and the Atlanta Rebels checking out the prospects. These football scouts were personal friends of the coach, who was also visited by baseball and basketball scouting friends. He seemed to spend less time with them, though.
Aunt Josie treated all of them skeptically, as she did anything or anyone who might interfere with Quinn's intellectual or moral development. That included the adorable cheerleaders who were always flitting about him. With Uncle Artur a sexual minefield for any female visitor between eighteen and dead and Aunt Sarah something of a town joke, Aunt Josie had laid down the law to Quinn: She would tolerate nothing less than respectability from him, and that meant guarding his virginity.
It wasn't as hard as Aunt Josie or others might've imagined, given his developing attraction to the sculpted, fair-haired ancient Greek heroes—including Alexander, Achilles' great descendant—he grew up reading about under the guise of acquiring a traditional, classical, Catholic-approved education. Unwittingly, Aunt Josie and the straitlaced Christianity that threaded Misalliance had given him the perfect cover for his secret life and he felt like a heel—an Achilles' heel?—for using them. Of course, he was far from the only hypocrite in town.
"No one needs to know what we're doing, and we don't have to go all the way doing it to have fun," Abigail purred.
She was the head cheerleader, one who saw the inevitability of the star quarterback that Quinn soon became and the head cheerleader getting it on as a prelude to marriage and having kids.
The petite Abigail was one of the few girls in Misalliance to be Aunt Josied and to have survived the test, afternoon tea at the homestead, followed by a dinner a few weeks later. There, Abigail—elegantly dressed in a maroon sheath and pink pearls, her pale lips and brown hair glistening, her makeup painstakingly applied to suggest no makeup at all and emphasize her cow eyes—was able to hold her own on a variety of subjects. Plus, she was from one of Misalliance's leading families, devout Roman Catholics in a town where Catholics were a minority.
&n
bsp; "She's perfect," Aunt Josie said to him as Abigail made a graceful exit after dinner—staying just long enough. Little did Aunt Josie know. Abigail may have been a lady in the Dudevants' salmon, gold and cream parlor, but she was a tigress in the back seat of her car—just as gracefully casting off her pink sweater and bra, unbuttoning Quinn's shirt, bordered by the Greek key pattern, and palming his crotch while guiding his hand to the seam between the legs of her tight jeans, orchestrating their simultaneous orgasms.
As he caressed her well-shaped breasts, he wondered if he was bisexual, incredibly horny, or just a teenager, though he had been imagining Paris—the philandering Trojan shepherd who hung in the Musée des beaux-arts du Canada, not the city or Uncle Artur's put-upon aide—all the while.
Perhaps that's where his deception really began, he would later think. As he held her afterward, he recognized that like Aunt Josie's edict of abstinence, Abigail was part of the perfect cover: She was a girl who had, like him, agreed to wait. But he also realized that whether he was gay, straight or bi, Abigail was not part of his future. What he loved was football—not as he loved baseball, nor as the town and America loved it, as an end in itself—but as a means to an end. Football would be his ticket out of Misalliance to vindication—for himself, his family and, in a sense, for the aunt who had been torn from him with such seeming random violence.
No longer could the town sneer at the crazy Dudevants, nor could Aunt Sarah's thuggish beaus try to intimidate him. Tall, chiseled and, many said, beautiful, with a 4.0 average and scholarship offers from colleges around the country, Quinn was like those Greek heroes whom the gods loved and, in the end he knew, destroyed.
eighteen
Quinn thought he'd be delighted to leave behind the provincialism of Misalliance. He thought he'd revel in the freedom of university life, particularly as lived on the so-called Left Coast. But what he discovered when he arrived at Stanford was that Aunt Josie, who barely allowed him to kiss her goodbye, had done her job too well. Rather than burst forth from the cocoon she had woven, he found himself knitting it more tightly around himself. Not that there was any time for him to explore and experiment. It was football and studies, studies and football as he was determined to keep up his 4.0 average in an environment in which the learning curve was much steeper—on and off the field.
The Penalty for Holding Page 12