Halfway Home

by Paul Monette

  He's got the new latch in place, bright steel, biting a screw into the jamb. He grunts with satisfaction. "But doesn't it change, once you grow up?"

  "Ah, but I didn't grow up, so there you are."

  He's finished. He takes a midget whiskbroom from the toolbox and sweeps up the shavings. The job is perfect. Gray should be in charge of the MX missile. He stands with his box in hand, eyeballs his workmanship one more time, and steps outside. I follow in his wake.

  As we head up the grassy slope to the sycamore grove, I'm surprised at how much taller Gray is than I, three inches at least. His rounded shoulders and pulled-in neck make him look much shorter. He never wears sunglasses, so the squint lines around his eyes are deep troughs. Skin very weatherbeaten too, since he wouldn't dream of moisturizing. Still, his face has a craggy noble form, set off by the fine slope of his patrician nose. He reeks of old money.

  The sycamores are mostly bare, though the dead leaves cling in clumps on several branches, holding on to the old year. They're budded but won't come into leaf for another month, the closest thing to Connecticut here. We slog through piles of unraked leaves to the evergreen hedge beyond. Nobody's clipped these bushes lately either, so the arched entrance is nearly overgrown. Gray passes through first, holding the branches so they won't switch back in my face. Then we are in the green room.

  The hedge, maybe ten feet high, encloses a rectangle of ground on the high end of the bluff, perhaps twenty by forty. In the center is a rectangular pool edged with a coping of granite. The water is black, as if it goes down for miles, with two distinct clusters of water lilies at either end. From one of these springs a yellow flower wide as a man's hand.

  Gray kneels on the granite lip and peers in the water under the lilies. Then he reaches in and digs around and pulls out a ghastly clump of root and tendril, covered with brown scum. Gently he pulls it away, detaching it from the lilies. I move closer to see and nearly gasp with delight. For his churning and weeding—he's plunged in again—have sent the fishes racing. Orange and spotted, some two feet long, they whip and circle about in the midnight depths of the pool.

  Nobody knows how many there are, but I count eight. A couple have been replaced, but Gray says most have been here since the place was built. Which is why I call this the Chinese garden, because it's all mixed in my head with wizened old philosophers contemplating fish as old as the Ming dynasty. A white-flecked goldfish breaks the surface, showing a flash of tail.

  "They won't grow by the ocean, that's what everybody said. And that's why Nonny planted 'em." Gray's voice is mordant as he deposits another load of slop on the pile beside him.

  Honestly, it's like watching Mr. Wizard, or an eighth-grade science project: stuff you can find in mud. Gray is completely undaunted as he pokes and fiddles with things. Needless to say, it's a Sisyphean task, keeping up with the breakage and wearing-out of an old house, the overgrown flora of five acres. I don't quite understand why the Baldwin Foundation, the titular owner, doesn't pay for regular upkeep, just to protect the property value. But then I have never figured out the queer adversary relations between Gray and that pile of money. Gray doesn't seem to mind at all being handyman and underwoodsman. I can also see that he likes the company when I trail around after him.

  The nasty job is done. There's a grisly pile of roots and muck on either side of him now, and he grumbles that he'll wait for it to dry out before he shovels it up. "Haul it over to the compost," he says, making a mental note for later. He stands, retrieves his toolbox, and we head out of the Chinese garden.

  Because I have slept the day away, the sun is already winking at the horizon. As we tramp down the slope from the sycamore grove, I say, "Come down to the beach with me, will you? In case I have another heart attack."

  "Well, I gotta wash," he replies, holding up his bare arm, slick with muck from the fish pool. Then he laughs. "Hell, I can wash in the ocean."

  We make for the beach stairs. Gray leaves his toolbox under a cactus, and we head down, me first. Behind me Gray asks, "You think he came because you're sick?"

  I feel a startled relief that the subject hasn't been dropped. "No, he didn't know that till Mona told him. I don't know why. The Irish get sloppy sentimental sometimes." We're clopping down the stairs at a fair clip. It's easier to talk about this in motion, my back turned. "I didn't really let him talk," I admit, sheepish for me. "I think he wanted to."

  "Well, next time," Gray declares briskly.

  "Oh no, there won't be any next time. That's all she wrote."

  We've reached the bottom, coming off the steps onto the smooth and trackless sand. The tide is inching out, about ten feet away. Gray shucks his Top-siders and rolls his khaki pants to the knee. Without preamble he struts into the shallows, bending down and splashing water up his arms. You can practically see the gooseflesh.

  "How cold is it?"

  "Nippy," says Gray, cupping his hands and splashing his face. "Foo used to say there's an iceberg off the point."

  He turns with a grin, happily wet, then his eyes go wide. For I am already half-undressed, my sweat shirt on the sand, shinnying out of my jeans. I drop my eyes as I drop my shorts, for Gray has never seen me naked. As I trot toward him I can see he wants to tell me not to, but holds his tongue. I'm hollering at the cold when it's still just at my ankles. I take a long stride past him and dive headfirst.

  It's unbelievably arctic, a thousand knives. I roar up and out like a whale breaching, my arms flailing the surface. A numbness locks the joints of my bad knee. But I'm not planning to swim anyway, not a stroke. I totter to my feet, fighting the surge of the undertow. I turn and face Gray, about hip deep, and slap my hands over my head like a seal, whooping. Gray still frowns with concern, but he's glad, too. I head in, scrambling through sand that sinks and shifts. I'm chattering with the cold, I can't wait to get out, but I'm delirious from the shock. The sand gets firmer, and I feel like I'm dancing. Panting and roaring with pleasure, I drop to my knees on firm ground.

  "I would've brought a towel," Gray says fretfully, but with no reproach.

  I can't believe how upside down I feel, reeling still from the zero cold, every inch of my skin slapped. A pang of victory rises in me like a shout, though I am jerked by shivers. The sensation is very specific: it's the first time my body has not been crawling in months. I'm washed clean. I sit back on my haunches, hair stiff, eyes stinging, and Gray is already holding out my clothes.

  "Now don't get chilled," he admonishes me.

  I clamber to my feet, shaking off like a dog. I don't feel shy being naked now. My nuts have seized just like Brian's did, and yet I feel the most insistent cockiness. It's the first time I've done anything in so long—I'm practically a man again. I hunch and let Gray pull my sweat shirt on me, feel him rubbing my shoulders and arms, bringing the blood back up. In that moment he seems like my coach, and I stand in the sunset, simple as a jock. I grab my pants but don't put them on, tucking them with my Reeboks under my arm. I start up the stairs, butt-naked and laughing. Fastidious Gray stops to bat the sand from his feet and put on his shoes clean.

  Of course the eighty steps do what they always do—put me in my place. Twenty steps up and I'm wheezing, favoring the banister. Yet I'm remarkably undaunted. I set my pace and count off as I go. Gray has caught up behind me, but makes no move to mother. It becomes a point of pride that I don't stop to catch my breath. I can feel myself pushing and winning, countering all that useless sleep. The last ten steps my chest is stabbing with every breath, but I'm in no danger of a coronary, not today. The terns are wheeling at the top of the bluff as we come up, their dance to the death of the sun. I am with them for once, my heart careening.

  "You go get into the shower," says Gray, a light hand between my shoulders. Still my coach. "I'll make us something hot."

  I trot bareass across the terrace, the feeling of being a naughty boy not dissipating at all. It only seems to get stronger as I stand under the pounding spray, lathering myself. I actually pump
my dick for a bit, and it even lifts its head a little. But I have another secret building, much more exciting than a half-mast hard-on. I can hardly dare to put it into words, even to myself. But the feeling of having broken my leper status in the iceberg cold of a sunset swim—that holds. Toweling off, I can still see all my dalmatian spots, but they don't assault me. I'm enough of a realist to know it won't last, this existential vacation, yet I'm ready to work it for all it's worth.

  When I come down Gray has put out bowls of stew, heated out of a can. With hunks of coarse bread and mugs of milk, it looks like a true peasant's supper. "That felt great!" I enthuse as I sit at my place, tearing into the bread. Gray lays aside the old picture album, something I've never seen him look at. Gray never needs the old snapshots, since he carries the whole movie around in his head. "I'm going to jump in the water every day," I announce brazenly.

  He smiles approval, but he's pensive. After the next bite he says, "I need to ask you a favor."

  So WASP formal. I feel a thrill of panic low in my gut, because I think he's about to ask me to leave. "Sure, anything."

  "Well"—he laughs dryly—"this is completely out of the blue. But Foo's decided she wants to come spend a day at the beach."

  For a second I think he's lost it, like my father after the first stroke, mixing the seventies and the forties. Gray is smiling at me, shrugging. "Your aunt Foo?" He nods. "She's still alive?"

  "Oh sure.Ninety-one and sharp as a tack. But she hasn't left the ranch in at least five years, and there's hardly anything left of her. We're afraid she'll break her hip just getting into the car."

  These Baldwins are something else. Even as I listen—round-the-clock nurses, still in her own room at the ranch where she once slept with a nanny—I'm utterly buoyed by the old girl's indomitability. I thought the whole lot of them had been dead twenty years. In my head there even appears to be a relationship between my dunk in the ocean and Foo's return, as if the shock of connection has opened a hole in time.

  "So what's the favor? It's her house. Of course she can come."

  "No, but it's yours right now," he insists, one finger touching my wrist on the table. "And she understands that. When an artist's in residence here..." He opens his palms and lets the phrase hang, as if the ellipsis could lead anywhere, a symphony or the Great American Novel.

  "But I'm not doing anything. I'd be honored to have her here. We'll have lunch on the terrace. Unless—" Now I get flustered. "Maybe she'd like to have it all to herself. Look, I can split—"

  "No, no, we'll all spend the afternoon together. Perhaps Mona would like to meet her."

  It's still not quite believable, the ancient world returning like this. I consider the bitter irony that a woman who lived here in 1912 might still live longer than I. Which sets me frowning. "You think she'll be scared of my... you know, my cooties?"

  "Foo doesn't know from AIDS," Gray reassures me, grinning. "She's not exactly up on current events. She's still arguing about whether Picasso's a fraud. That gigolo from Barcelona!' "

  Sounds like we'll have an iconoclast's ball. I'm bursting now with the news of my own return, prodigal and improbable. The restlessness of old Foo seems like the perfect omen. "Look, you don't have any plans tonight, do you?"

  "Me? No." He looks at me, puzzled but game.

  "Will you drive me down to Venice?"

  A startled pause. I can see his mind running ahead, but not daring to hope. By way of answer, one last throb of caution, he says, "You're not too tired?"

  "Let's go."

  We leave the dishes where they are and head out through the kitchen. I grab my ratty parka, which Mona says makes me look homeless. Night has already fallen fast, the March sky pulsing with stars, even despite the pouring moon. The Big Dipper stands on the tip of its handle, just above the Trancas hills. Gray apologizes that he's brought the pickup instead of his car, a Volvo pushing ninety thou. We climb inside, laconic as a couple of cowboys, and Gray pulls out, the gravel spitting beneath us as we head to the end of the drive.

  The stream of Sunday traffic is pretty steady. They're shooting by at fifty, fifty-five. Gray has to choose his point of entry on pure adrenaline. Suddenly there's a space of five or six car lengths, so he guns and peels out. And now we're in the flow, the great California beach migration. I flip the radio on, right to country: Reba McEntire, who's lost her man to a lady bartender. I put my feet up on the beat-up dash and roll the window down. The night air's sweet and briny. To the left the hills are remarkably bare, with only the random lights of a few chateaux. The seething boom of construction hasn't reached this far, not quite. Even on the bluff side there's empty fields between some of the houses.

  I look over at Gray, who hunkers at the steering wheel, squinting into the oncoming lights. "You know, you spoil me rotten." He smiles softly. "I don't think I tell you enough what a wonderful man you are."

  He can't stand compliments. His shoulders lift in a slow shrug, like an animal shying. Who knows what deep Presbyterian springs prohibit him from being stroked? "I'm just glad you're around," he says, ignoring the encomium. "Gives the place some life."

  "Wait, I think you've got it backwards. I'm a dying man." But I say so with perfect jauntiness, and we both laugh. I don't feel dying at all right now.

  Still, Gray isn't sure what's happening here and hesitates to ask. He knows we're going to AGORA, but why is up in the air. We could just be dropping by for the Sunday potluck showcase, when the marginal types come in to try out work-in-progress, usually deadly. But since I am half the proprietor, it's not so odd that I'd want to sniff around. I haven't given the slightest hint that I might want to perform myself, except my level of nervous energy. I'm double-juiced, and Gray knows it.

  Traffic slows to a crawl as we pass the Colony, Malibu proper. Straddling the hills on the left is Pepperdine University, right-wing nuts in caps and gowns, white rich straight kids being drilled in the politics of oppression. We pass through the town center, a Hughes Market and a lone movie house and fourteen realtors, but as for the Colony itself you can only see the gatehouse on the right, Checkpoint Charlie. Beyond is the land of the hit series, minitalent vulgarians who are pulling down eighty grand an episode, and thus own a parcel of Eden. Graffiti swoops and zigzags along the walls on either side of the gatehouse, proving the grave assertions of reams of Sunday supplement pieces, that the problems of the city have reached the beach.

  "You can tell there's something gnawing at him," I say, as we pass a gaggle of surf bunnies milling in front of Domino's Pizza. I'm back to my brother, and there's no reason Gray should have followed the segue, except he nods. "Maybe his life was so happy growing up, it all tastes flat now, like dead ginger ale. Maybe that's a good argument for having a tortured youth."

  It's only half a question. We're silent as we ride on, the traffic clearing again. From here south to the pier the coast road rides at sea level, snaking between a crumbling set of hills and the barest strip of beachfront. The houses are cheek by jowl along that strip all the way to Santa Monica, perched on tiptoe above the tide, waiting—almost yearning—for the Big One.

  "I don't think I had a youth at all, tortured or otherwise," Gray remarks, more wistful than I've ever heard him. "I turned thirty-five before I was ten."

  "Yeah, I've seen the pictures. All these picnics and everyone laughing, except this one little serious guy with a book in his lap. You should have glasses an inch thick by now."

  "I read books instead of living." He says this matter-of-factly, without any whine or regret.

  I'm about to protest that reading was the very thing that brought him to that outre world of beats and jazzmen, a far bohemian cry from the ranch or the Cheez-Whiz mainstream of the fifties, but I hold my tongue. This is the most he has ever said about how it used to feel, being a lonely kid. Somehow I don't want to gloss it over. "Did you know you were gay?"

  He shakes his head. "I wasn't anything."

  "So when did you come out?"

  "Assumi
ng I ever did," he replies dryly, "I guess when I was thirty."

  Nineteen-seventy, same as me, for I was starting to rattle the knob on the closet door when I was thirteen or fourteen. I assume Gray is being very precise here, that he had nobody to speak of between the onset of the carnal itch and almost twenty years later. I feel an immense and loyal sadness for the youth he missed, and even think it may have been worse than mine, despite the fraternal abuse and my exile among the piss-blooded micks of Chester.

  We're coming into Santa Monica, and traffic seizes again, the Sunday night thrombosis. Gray goes left and leaves the coast road, ducking up an alley behind the stores on Chatauqua. He's got shortcuts forty years old. We scoot down another steep alley and cross up Santa Monica Canyon, coming around to Ocean Avenue through a neighborhood of perfect thirties bungalows. You half expect to see those exiles, Thomas Mann and Brecht, walking their Weimaraners. Then the Palisades are on our right, and we're high above the beach, with the pier like a paving of diamonds on the water.

  "But I feel gay now," Gray declares with an unmistakable puff of pride, turning up Colorado.

  "Yeah? Well, now that you mention it, you're looking a little lavender around the edges. Do you feel an irresistible desire to listen to Judy at Carnegie Hall?"

  We shriek with delight. It's already the most we've ever said to each other. I almost wish we weren't going anywhere, that we could just ride around like this all night. Through the winter Gray and I have grown tighter, like roommates except we live in different Baldwin houses. Yet there's always been a line we never cross, the no-man's-land where you walk on eggs. I usually chalk it up to my illness, or to Gray's unfailing reserve and discretion. Tonight there's no line. We're easy and antic, tooling around in a pickup.

  This is what a brother is, I think, lolling my head out the window to let the wind blast my hair.

  AGORA's not exactly in the middle of Venice, but more on the interface with Ocean Park. It's still in the senseless crime district, but being as the neighborhood is more industrial, it's not quite so High Noon, crack on every corner. We head up a street that's leased to Hughes Aircraft, great hulking warehouses on either side painted puke-green, World War III being assembled within. At the end is a cul-de-sac that forms a sort of low-rent industrial park, four modest factories not much bigger than bloated garages, sprawled around a parking square.