Halfway Home

by Paul Monette

  Tears are pouring down my face, silent and futile, without any reason. Crybaby. Finally I think I will sleep. I stand, creaking the chair again, and I'm superconscious of every broken thing in my body. My eight lesions, my old man's bladder, my nerve-warped knee. I wrap my arms about myself, huddling in my smallness. I take a last long look at Brian, and on impulse I lean above him, hover over his face, and brush my lips against his cheek, just where my own cheek bears the mark. I've never kissed my brother before. He doesn't flinch, he doesn't notice. Then I turn and stumble back to my room, pleading the gods to be rid of him.

  SOME MORNINGS YOU WAKE UP WHOLE. YOU OPEN YOUR eyes, and the ceiling is swirling with light reflected off the ocean. The bright air pours through the balcony doors like tonic. It's not that you forget even for a moment that you're sick. But if you're not in pain, the sheer ballast of being alive simply astonishes. I fling off the comforter, filling the air with feathers like confetti. I rise and caper across the threadbare carpet in my Jockey shorts. I slip through the french doors, the first sight of the limitless blue never failing to catch my heart. I straddle the stucco balustrade like a pony and drink it all in. The smell of sea pine and eucalyptus wafts around me. I don't want anything else but this.

  Except I don't really know if that fits Gray's plans. When he offered the place to me—Why don't you stay at the beach for a while—I don't think he figured to have me all winter. We weren't such very close friends to begin with. He was a regular patron angel of AGORA, five hundred bucks a year, and a big fan of Miss Jesus. We'd known each other in passing for years, plastic cups of Almaden at everybody's opening, but Gray was so buttoned-up and -down, so WASP-geeky, we never seemed to get very far.

  Then it was funerals we'd see each other at. Gradually he began to seem like an angel for real, taking care of mortuary etiquette, comforting mothers and lovers. He'd always provided for artists to sojourn at the beach house, three- or four-week stints, a sort of one-man colony. But here I am two months later, my welcome long overstayed, not budging an inch.

  I catch sight of a pair of birds sailing the updraft at the lip of the bluff. They're white like herons but fat as wild geese, with bands of gray at the head and neck. One of them lights on the post at the top of the beach stairs, and the other cavorts in circles, dipping close to the swords of the cactus. I can't say what they are. I don't know the names in nature, except what Gray has pointed out, patient as a ranger. I never learned anything growing up, the leaves and feathers of life, because I was too busy running from micks. The beach house is my second chance at a little natural history. Whatever they're called, the white birds are gorgeous. Alighting here as they migrate north, a moment for me and no one else. Whatever time is left, I have had these birds.

  And then they explode in flight, flapping away in tandem as if somebody fired a gun. I reach out to them as they disappear north, wishing them well, wishing to fly in their wake, so buoyant am I. Then Brian appears at the top of the steps, coming up from the beach. Now I know why the birds fled. He is wearing a Speedo of mine, green and black stripes, and toweling dry his hair. Of course he looks extraordinary, sleek as a sea god. It's his desert island right now, no question about it. He is a man to match the vibrancy, the aliveness of the morning and the place. He turns his warrior's head to look down the coast. He hasn't seen me yet.

  It's not that I'd forgotten he was here. But none of that had started churning yet, and in my mind he was still asleep. I was staking the day for myself. I didn't think he would slip so easily out and find the secret places. I call from my perch: "The blue hump's Catalina."

  Brian turns with a grin. "Good morning! Jesus, is that water cold!"

  "It's winter."

  He strides across the grass, squinting up at me. "I didn't swim far, I'll tell you that. My nuts shriveled up like raisins. I think we have time for breakfast."

  "We've got to get you down to the Chevron station."

  Brian laughs. "I've been there already. The car's all charged. You just put on some pants and get down here."

  He stretches a shoulder muscle as he speaks, turning it in a circle, like he's warming up for a game. I see him for one more moment nearly naked in the morning sun, almost gleaming, before he ducks through the arch below me and into the house. I retreat to the bedroom, rattled, glancing at the clock—9:40. I'm exhausted by Brian's energy. A two-mile jog to Chevron, and still he wanted a swim in the ocean. Myself, I haven't been in the water once since I got here, not including my toes. Sullenly I grab my jeans, dogged again by the gap between what Brian can do and I can't.

  When I get downstairs he's dressed, tie and the whole bit. The dining room table is set for breakfast, melon and bowls of Cheerios and the muffins Gray brought last night. Brian ducks his head in from the kitchen. "Coffee or tea?"

  "Tea." I sit down quietly at my place. Something I haven't thought about in sixteen years: my brother used to put breakfast out for all of us every morning. Half a grapefruit and oatmeal, milk for us and coffee for them. He might torture me all the rest of the day, till I was black and blue and curled in a fetal crouch, but he served me breakfast fair and square. The old man would usually be hung and bleary, my mother making birdtalk to cover his silence.

  Brian appears with a pair of mugs and sets one down in front of me. "I would've made you some french toast—that's what I make for Daniel—but you didn't have any eggs."

  We eat. I am sorry now I didn't wear a shirt. Not because I'm cold but because I did it to show off my lesions. Pure spite, to get back at him for the little Olympian swim show he just put on. I can feel him looking at the nasty one on my shoulder. The casement window behind his head is open, the wet Speedo hanging from the latch and dripping into the courtyard.

  "I wrote down our address and phone number on the pad in the kitchen," says Brian, buttering his muffin. "In case—"

  "—I die. Don't worry, I'll have somebody get hold of you."

  "That's not what I meant. We should stay in touch."

  "Okay." It's not worth the ugliness to tell him that this is the end, right here. I eat my Cheerios stolidly, vowing neither to be unpleasant nor to lose my temper. It's just another half hour.

  "So what kind of plays do you do? Your own? I always thought you'd end up being a writer instead of an actor."

  "We don't exactly do plays," I reply with infinite precision. Brian is recalling my thespian days at UConn, where I ran with a crowd of earnest misfits, putting on Shaw and, Albee. Then summer stock in Williamstown, doing walk-ons and touching the hems of minor stars, and sucking them off late at night. I don't remember Brian ever coming to see me in a play, those being the years when he first recoiled from the horror of my gayness. Yet he seems to know I was a lousy actor, all too true. So over-the-top I practically ate the scenery.

  "Yeah, what I saw yesterday, it was more like stand-up." He says this tentatively, taking a slurp of tea. If it was stand-up, he seems to wonder, then how come it wasn't funny?

  "Performance is kind of a hybrid," I reply, and then I can't bear the PBS professorial bullshit in my voice. I can't be nice a moment longer or I'll scream. "Actually, I was pretty notorious there for a while. I used to do a thing called 'Miss Jesus.' " He looks at me blankly. "You know, Christ as a raging queen. Getting it on with Peter and Judas. Kind of a pain junkie." I'm amazed how proud I sound, and how confrontational. Of course it was the nature of the piece to stick it in people's faces.

  Brian stares abstractedly at the hollow rind of his cantaloupe. "I don't get it."

  "Well, it started with a chubby little pederast priest, Father O'Hanion, who liked his bottle and dicking twelve-year-olds. But that was too easy. Then I did the Pope in this silk organza gown, 'cause he was going to the Vatican prom. That was very interesting, but after a while it seemed like one big Polack joke. See, I wasn't trying to be funny." I deliver this truncated resume with maximum cool. Brian's discomfort is visible. He neither eats nor drinks, and his hands grip the edge of the table as if he will lif
t it off the floor. "Then I thought, go for the big boy. It took a while to evolve, and it's always changing. Plus I adjust for the season—a Christmas pageant, and an Easter piece that's all in leather."

  Ravenous now, I spoon a great dollop of jam on my muffin, eating as if I've just come in from swimming the Catalina Channel. Brian is slowly shaking his head. "How do you live like that, so pissed off all the time? What does it get you?"

  I shrug. "It's a job. Somebody's gotta do it."

  "Can't you stop being flip for just one minute? So you had a shitty childhood. So the church isn't perfect. So let it go."

  "You were right the first time, Brian—you don't get it." We're locked eye to glittering eye now. It's a little like arm wrestling. "I'm glad I came from a fucked dysfunctional family. And growing up Catholic was perfect, like an advanced degree in ruined lives. 'Cause it's helped me a lot with my work. Otherwise I might be just another middle-class troll, dead from the neck up and eating lies like peanuts."

  "They had hard lives," he hisses back in my face. "They did the best they could."

  "For you. And your life turned out perfect. So you keep the shrine, okay?"

  He explodes. "My life is not perfect!" It's almost a scream, so violent it backs me against my chair. He raises a hand as if to cuff me, then slams it down on the table, rattling the dishes like a 4.5. "I'm sorry you're dying, kiddo, but everyone has it hard. Nobody has it easy." The bitterness in his voice takes my breath away. His face is beet-red with the violence he can't unleash on a sick boy. He hasn't called me "kiddo" in twenty years either. It used to be half a taunt, half a sneer, accompanied by a body check.

  He breathes heavily in the silence that follows, cooling down. There's no more point to breakfast. "Yeah, well I'm sure life sucks all over the place," I declare with a certain numb reserve, "but I don't have room for anyone else's. I'm better off by myself."

  We don't move for a moment. It's exactly the same deadlock as last night, when he left the first time. My brother can't help me. There's too much blood under the bridge. And yet I can feel an uneasy flutter in my gut that somehow I've missed the key, or blinked when the answer flashed onscreen. Something about that un-perfect life and the business that got too big too fast. I don't really mean, even now with all the walls up, that he can't unburden himself. Of course I'd listen. Yet I know that's not going to happen now. We've tried this reunion twice, and it's crashed and burned. Only a fool or a pain junkie would try it again.

  Brian stands but doesn't clear the table. That's my chore, today as it was a lifetime ago. He strides through the kitchen and out the back door, not waiting this time for me to walk in tandem. I have to bolt to catch up with him in the yard, where he's striding in the sunlight to his car. It's only at the last moment, before he gets in, that he relents and turns to face me. The anger still darkens his Irish cheeks, or is it a kind of torment? Then a rueful smile plays at the corners of his mouth as he speaks.

  "You're still my brother, even if you hate me."

  It startles me, the sentiment is so twisted. The perfect Irish bottom line. I'm standing with my hands dug in my pockets, and Brian reaches up and swipes at the hair on my forehead, as if he's trying to tame a cowlick. I realize it is a gesture from his life with Daniel, and I understand in that moment that he's a good father, better than ours.

  Then he is climbing once again into his car to leave. But this time I am torn, feeling I ought to give him something back. The engine bursts into life, stoked by the morning's charge. He rolls it into a slow reverse, pulling it back from the cypresses. The front wheels crunch on the gravel as he points them out to the coast road. He looks at me one last time.

  And I say, "I'll be sticking around for a while." Taking back all I have said about death, its imminence and its stranglehold. I shrug, terribly aware of my spotted torso, but shrugging that part off. "I'm here."

  Brian nods. The big Chevy boat goes lumbering down the drive between two rows of oleander. He stops at the road's edge, and I see him crane forward to check for cars. It's clear. A last vague wave in the rearview mirror, and I fling my own hand at the sky. Then he turns and is gone.

  Is it relief? Immediately I feel so weirdly light-headed, gliding back over the grass to the house. I know that I've held my own, and for once have given as good as I've gotten. That's the first feeling: a kind of swagger, like I've just walked away from a TKO. I come into the kitchen, and the first thing I see is the pad on the counter, the scribbled address. Pequod Lane in Southport. I'm watching myself for any pangs of loss, but I just seem glad that it's over.

  Then into the dining room, and my eyes go right to the Speedo hooked over the window latch, no longer dripping. Here there's a tug in my chest, as if the pouch of the suit still holds the shape of Brian's basket. Again it isn't the thing itself, but the memory of all those jocks and sweat pants tumbled on the floor of the closet in Chester. Still I manage to sail right through, letting it all roll off me. I mount the stairs, delirious with the need to nap, knowing only that I have survived intact. With every hour that goes by, I can feel it, more and more of me will come back. No matter how quick I die, I will live long enough to be an only child again. It's a matter of will, and I am willful if nothing else.

  I reach the door to Foo's room, and I'm gazing across the stairwell. I think as I cross over that I'm being a good housekeeper, checking the guest room. The bed is aswirl with the slept-in sheet, the pillow dented and askew. My lips purse, as if I mean to punish that boy for not making his bed. Then I float—there's no other word—drawn and yet strangely dispassionate. I tumble onto the bed, rolling into the sheet, muzzy with sleep already. My face in the pillow can smell Brian, but it's the least sexual thing imaginable. I can't even say the smell transports me back. All I can say is someone else has slept here first, another man. And there is no pain and no regret, not the slightest sense of loss. I sleep a hundred fathoms deep.

  For hours.Dreamless and utterly still. It's the downside of the afternoon before I even start flopping about, turning side to side to grope the last pockets of slumber. Most of this is AIDS, of course. You go three or four days at a pretty normal clip, and then the virus requires a minor coma. I wake up dazed as Goldilocks, disoriented by the new room, and vaguely aware that the bears are due back any minute. Guilty; I'm not sure why.

  And sad. That is the oddest part. I get up and pad out to the balcony, the sun on the water like molten flame, and I want to cry out with loneliness. But I swear it's not Brian. He may have been the catalyst, him and his perfect isosceles of family niceness, yet this one is all my own. For I've never loved anyone all the way through—or maybe it's no one has ever loved me back. You'd think I'd get the direction right, considering this is what scalds the most. I can handle being alone, even dying alone. It's not that I'm desperate for somebody now, or maybe I'm too proud to want it anymore. But the fact that I never really had it, never touched life that deep, I carry around like chronic pain, what they call in the disability biz a preexisting condition.

  Till now I have managed to put it out of mind entirely during my two months at the beach. Somehow I gave it a rest, with no one to whine at and no one to pine for. But now I feel like I'm reaching for an actual physical man I can't have, just like I reached for those birds. He is always a foot from my grasp, or standing below on the terrace where Brian stood this morning. I admit I have mixed them up, Brian and the man I have never had.

  I don't really mean to see him in icon terms, all buffed like the airhead beauties you pass in Boys' Town, wincing at their blondness. It's not the body I'm aching for anyway. I want to be known. The quirks and the edges, the bumps and the hollows—I want somebody to see it all whole. And I want to have had years of that, even if it has to be over now. And I haven't. All I have had is two months here, six months there, wrestling with men who never quite fit. It's strange, I don't have such a bottomless well of self-pity about my illness, but about the man who never was, the hole in my heart goes all the way to China.


  Anyway, I'm perched on Cora's balcony like a gargoyle, feeling sorry. The sun hurts. I don't know what else to do except take it an hour at a time, letting the loneliness leach out till I am simply alone again. I'm staring down at Brian's spot on the terrace, fixed on his absence, because somehow this is the symbol for what I've missed. And suddenly there is a shadow and then a figure, as if my longing has materialized a man. The light's in my eyes, I can't quite see.

  "Hullo," says Gray, one arm up to block the sun. "I decided that screen shouldn't wait till Monday."

  I laugh. The sheer ordinariness of the remark just about knocks me over. The netherworld of lost men that's seized me in its operatic grip vanishes on the spot. "Let me grab a shirt. I'll be right down."

  I spiral down the stairs, yanking on an oversize sweat shirt. Gray is already crouched by one of the parlor windows, his trusty toolbox beside him. He's replacing a rusty latch, pulling the old screws out and filling them with wood glue. He works at all chores with fanatic neatness and marvelous patience. I lean in the archway just behind him, watching. Nothing ever got fixed in my father's house in Chester, unless he could throw a beer bottle at it.

  "I have to weed the goldfish pond," says Gray, always making a list in his head. "Brother get off all right?"

  "Finally," I reply. "His car wouldn't start. He had to spend the night."

  "Nice-looking man." Gray doesn't overstep, any more than he'd ever admit he showed up here today for purposes of gauging the fallout. "I always wished I had an older brother."

  "Yes, well they're very overrated. I know they're supposed to tell you all about girls and keep bullies from stealing your marbles. In my case he was too busy pounding my head in the dirt."