by Paul Monette
"Well, I hope she lives to be a hundred and thirty," I said. "And I hope the old man died screaming in pain."
His mouth crinkled, just as it had when Foo came out with something audacious. "You're so Sicilian," he declared, which I chose to take as a compliment.
We tramped back up the stairs, me still feeling burned and cheated, as if I'd lost an inheritance of my own. It was going to be neck and neck as to who went first, me or Foo and the beach house. Right now I wouldn't bet a sawbuck on any of us seeing next Christmas.
Gray was a step behind me. I could feel him poised to take my elbow if I needed it, just like he did for his aunt, and I didn't like the feeling. Then he hesitated and turned to look down the beach, this being the best vantage before the stairs rose through a cleft in the bluff, cutting off the view. As I watched him drink it in, a muzzy smile on his face, I thought: He's going to lose more than I am.
After all, I would be long gone. This place was his last perk as a Baldwin. Foo would go, and then the beach house, and then he'd just get old, no place to come and putter anymore. Curiously, there was never any question in my mind that Gray was safe from AIDS, though he'd never admitted his antibody status to me. I was sure he'd have a full and natural life, and with his genes that could be forty more years. The nice thing was, it didn't make me bitter. I only felt protective as I stepped up behind him and laid a hand on his shoulder.
"You have to understand, he's been through hell," Gray said thoughtfully, as we watched the break of the waves below. "I've known him since I was a kid. He used to be a surfer—down there." He nodded south to the pipeline of the Trancas Wash. I couldn't figure out who he meant, then realized it was Merle.
"Which hell would that be?" I asked, trying not to sound sarcastic, as if AIDS were the only inferno worthy of the name.
"Drugs." And he shrugged his shoulders beneath my hand, a gesture that felt hopeless.
"Oh. So that's the kind of meeting you meant."
He nodded. "For years he was a dealer, up and down the beach. I didn't have any idea." And I realized the shrug had been mostly about his own stupidity. "He got busted. Six and a half years in Lompoc. Now he's clean."
I don't know what astonished me more, Gray Baldwin talking about dealing and getting busted, or the image of Merle as a surfer. Yet it was possible even now to see behind the Indian's massive barrel shape—fat like a badly aging football jock—the young warrior with the blue-black hair and muscles for days.
"He really does have Malibu blood," continued Gray. "His grandfather used to trace it all back for him, just like the 'begats' in the Bible. Back before the missions came and herded them off their land." More Catholic crimes, I thought, making a mental note for my next Pope show. So I almost missed the throwaway line that followed. "We used to be..." Another shrug, barely a ripple. "...for a while."
No noun there. Its absence felt like a small electric jolt in the pit of my stomach. "You were lovers?" My hand slipped off his shoulder.
"For a minute," he retorted, hearty with self-deprecation. "It was years ago—feels like a hundred." At last he turned with an easy smile. "But I think he's still very possessive. Anyway, that's why he treats you like General Custer. It's probably not even conscious."
I stared at him blankly. "You and Merle?"
"He thought you and I had something going. I told him no, but..."He let it trail off and shrugged yet again, but this time careless, likeWhat're you gonna do?
Then he resumed climbing the stairs, his lanky arms swinging on either side. I scrambled after, stung into silence. It wasn't even Merle that was so flabbergasting. Frankly, I'd never thought of Gray with anybody. I assumed, from all that self-deprecation, that he'd only had the most fleeting encounters. Blow job here and there, falling for guys who wouldn't put out, the usual dog-and-pony show of longing and self-loathing. By contrast, Merle was so fucking real.
I hadn't even reached the top of the steps, my lungs puffing like a leaky bellows, before I scored myself for this one too. It was all my own arrogance that had put Gray down as a man of limited carnal knowledge. My ridiculous worldliness. At least he had an ex still woven in the fabric of his life. My guys, I couldn't track down a single one if you paid me a bounty, for they had all disappeared like thieves in the night.
And here was the oddest thing of all. By the time we reached the landing at the top, I'd completely revised my opinion of Graham Cole Baldwin. Suddenly I found him fascinating and utterly unpredictable. His whole vanilla persona had vanished on the spot.
He waited for me on the landing. I usually panted and whined right about now, especially when I had an audience. But suddenly it was important to me to show how energized and invigorated I felt. Hardly pausing for breath, I darted across the lawn and threw myself into a cartwheel. The tilt in my belly spilled out in a squeal of laughter. I landed on my feet, but the centrifugal force wasn't finished. I pitched over into a second wheel, giddier now, catching a glimpse of Gray topsy-turvy. This time I landed on one foot, wobbly, and should have called it a day. But I went for a third and could feel my arms buckle beneath me. Halfway through the wheel I crumpled to the ground in a heap.
I tasted the green of the rain-soaked grass and rolled over onto my back, gasping with laughter now. The dome of blue sky was deliriously bright, the shapes of the trees wavering at the edges of my vision, an afterglow of dizziness. Gray came sauntering up and stood over me, hands on his hips, the sun behind him. I stretched my arms luxuriously over my head, feeling the shirt pull out of my pants, leaving my belly naked. I felt—no other word—sexual. Like I wanted to show off, I who'd decided long since that I had nothing left to show.
"If this boy doesn't calm down, Mrs. Shaheen," drawled Gray, "we're going to have to put him on Ritalin." He held out a hand. "Now come on, before you get all wet."
I could feel the chill of the damp in my shoulders and butt. "Please, sir, I haven't got muddy since I was six. I need regression therapy."
He grunted and grabbed my arm, pulling me to my feet in a single motion, without any yank. Suddenly we were face-to-face, an inch away, and he was grinning. This was more disorienting than all the upheaval of my late acrobatics. "What can I tell you?" I said, working to keep the banter up. "Sometimes I get these urges."
I broke free then, or else I would have kissed him. It seemed perverse even to me, a moment of instant replay from my reckless youth. Now we were ambling comfortably across the terrace, my arms swinging at my sides, mimicking his country gait. Gray appeared to have noticed nothing unseemly about my sprawl in the grass or the bristling proximity of our lips, but then I couldn't be sure anymore what he saw. Or what he wanted.
But I had the sinking feeling, as we reached the french doors, that all the others had got it wrong. Mona, Foo, and Merle—every one of them so convinced he had lost his heart. It was just their own romantic claptrap. Each of us pulled a door wide, and we walked in blinking our eyes from the dazzle of the afternoon. They'd got it all backward. They were protecting the wrong man.
I was the one in trouble here.
The TV screen was the first thing that came into focus—rolling credits, superimposed on a freeze frame of a guy and a girl embracing. He was stripped to the waist, and she was buttoned up in a high-neck Victorian collar—standard procedure on the soaps, where the men did all the tease-and-flash. Then I made out the two figures on the sofa, Mona and Foo. The old lady seemed to be resting her head on Mona's shoulder, but when I came around closer I saw that Foo was slumped against the back cushion, softly snoring. Mona slouched beside her, legs tucked up under the white silk dress, still as a cat.
She winked at me and Gray, pointed a finger at Foo, and mouthed her words at a bare whisper: "She fell asleep in the love scene. Just like Daphne—only Daphne does it in real life."
Gray leaned forward and peered at his sleeping aunt. He reached a hand to her shoulder and seemed about to wake her, but Mona stopped him. "Give her another fifteen minutes. Then I'll make her a cup of tea
."
Gray nodded, content to have a woman's opinion in the matter. Then he said to no one in particular, "I think I'll go find Merle."
As he headed out through the dining room I felt like spitting after him, as if taking my cues from the soap: "I don't care what you do with him!"
When I looked at Mona she tilted her head in a puzzled frown. "What're you scowling about?" she asked, innocently enough.
"Nothing!" I snapped, and she drew a stern finger to her lips, so I wouldn't wake Foo. Mouth slack, folds and wattles expressionless, the old lady looked as if she'd sleep through a nuclear attack. But I moved to Mona's other side, which happened to be the spot where
I'd scrunched through the week of rain. I curled up beside her. She seemed untroubled by my own brief squall, perhaps because she'd ridden more than anyone the hills and curves of my personal roller coaster. She clasped my hand and squeezed it.
"I'm still not sure," she whispered, "but if I had to bet the farm I'd say no." I looked at her, bewildered. Did we all talk to one another like this, finishing sentences hours later, picking up strings of conversation no one could possibly follow? "Foo," said Mona impatiently. "She doesn't appear to be a daughter of the mother goddess. If you catch my drift." Got it: not a dyke. "I gave her lots of openings—talked about all the bad girls I've been through. Now I didn't come straight out and ask, but it looks as if she might be just a spinster after all. A fabulous one, however."
The tube had done its schizophrenic shudder through nine commercials and settled on the news. An overcoiffed anchor was reading his TelePrompter like holy writ. Someone had invaded a bleary country, and a senator was ranting. Due to the convex black-and-white screen, it seemed like news from the fifties.
"You want today's scoop?" I asked Mona out of the side of my mouth. "Gray and Merle used to be a thing."
"The Indian?" A brief pause, while she processed this. "Well, I'll be damned."
"It's worse than you think. I've decided I like him."
"The Indian?"
"No—Gray. And he's not nearly as smitten with me as you suppose. Which I hardly blame him, because that would be practically necrophilia."
There was a miniscreen above and to the right of the anchor's head, on which now flashed a man's face, pudgy and surly. I knew this man but couldn't quite place him. Mona began to speak, always ready to play Miss Lonelyhearts, and I dug a finger into her arm to silence her.
"In Hartford, Connecticut, today," the anchor intoned, "a grand jury investigation of racketeering in the construction business had a major setback. The inquiry into the billion-dollar ripoff of federal housing funds by builder Gerald Curran"—My Jerry Curran! The demon meanie of Chester was going to get his at last!—"had scheduled a star witness for today's session. But this morning a bomb went off in the Southport home of Curran's partner, Brian Shaheen, killing Shaheen, his wife, and son. Without Shaheen's testimony, the trail of Curran's money—through savings and loans in eleven states—will be very hard to trace."
And he went right on to the next item, the tragic death of a Thoroughbred who'd won the Triple Crown. For a moment I thought Mona hadn't picked up on the name, she was so quiet beside me. I had an instant's fleeting hope that I could slip away upstairs without anybody knowing. Then I felt her fingers close about my arm, wanting to be there for me. I didn't exactly take it wrong, but couldn't bear the thought that I would be required to have a reaction.
Horror is not the same as grief. That's what I learned in the long surreal minutes that followed. Grief I'm a pro at—been through it three different times in the last two years. Rivers of tears at the drop of a hat. This was terribly dry instead, as if my eyes, my very blood, were shriveling in a heat like radiation. No feeling seemed to work. But I don't mean numb either. The pain was like revulsion, rejecting the world the way a body rejects a transplant, preferring death to invasion. Mona held on, her grip as firm and unequivocal as Foo's had been when my own death was announced. She made it clear it was my move.
I wonder how long we would have sat there motionless, watching the weather and sports like zombies. But then I heard the bang of the kitchen door, and my heart started racing again—had it stopped entirely? A moment later Gray came walking in, and the breeziness of his stride hurt like a physical pain, as if he had only come in to mock my sudden paralysis. And something in me recalled, like a desperate reach across a chasm, the luxury of my roll on the grass—was it ten minutes ago? All gone. Nothing but death surrounded me.
"I put the kettle on," said Gray, and at last a feeling surfaced, gulping for air. White rage. So how's your buddy Merle? I wanted to sneer, as he leaned toward his slumbering aunt. "Hey, Foo," he said softly, "how 'bout a nice cup of bouillon?"
"His brother got killed," said Mona, the words sounding brittle and foolish, like a joke that died.
I turned to look at his face, the puzzled frown of unbelief, his eyes darting from Mona to me and back, the wrench of pain. As Mona haltingly filled in the details, a grim parody of broadcast news, I felt a sharp and guilty pang of relief that the two of them were here. As if I had somehow outwitted the deepest pain by having this family instead, and not those far-off blood strangers who'd just been obliterated. This spasm of coldness only lasted a moment as well. But I remember thinking, as Mona and Gray tossed the horror back and forth, that they would come up with something for me to feel, if I just stayed dumb and motionless.
Then Foo woke up. She made a couple of beeping sounds and flailed the air in front of her face, wiping the cobwebs away. Her great blue eyes swept the room like radar, then lighted on Gray. I don't know how he looked to her, but she said, "What's wrong? Am I sick?"
Gray crouched down beside her. "No, Auntie. Tom just found out his brother died."
The old lady's hands fluttered in her lap. Then her blue eyes, vast as the winter sea, came to rest on my face. "But"—she hated to get her facts wrong—"I thought he was an only child."
And there the unreality broke. I came to my shaky feet and staggered forward, snapping the TV off. I turned and faced my made-up family, every one of them helpless. How would I ever protect them? I held out my arms, and Gray rose up to meet me, cradling me close. I could feel my weight let go as I slumped against him, neither brother nor lover. And then I cried.
FINALLY I CALLED MY MOTHER, BECAUSE I COULDN'T THINK of anyone else. All the cousins and uncles and neighbors of my childhood had disappeared—not so much as a Christmas card in the nine years since my father died. The past had taken Brian's side against me, ever since our brawl at the old man's funeral. Well, to be fair, I guess I cut the whole lot of them as much as they cut me. But here I was now, with no ally close to the tragedy, no one to throw an Irish arm around my shoulders and tell me life was a bitch. I must have cried nonstop for a couple of hours, but some of that I think was just the old feeling of being left out.
I don't even remember saying good-bye to Foo. It was decided in the kitchen that Merle would take her home, and Gray and Mona would stay with me. By then I was wrapped in the afghan, curled in a ball on the sofa. Mona put a mug of tea and a box of Kleenex on the coffee table, and when the afternoon shadows began to lengthen, Gray laid a fire. I had fallen away from sobbing—barely ten minutes of that—into a sort of exhausted blubber, like something on the stove at a low boil.
I couldn't exactly see in my mind the blasted house in Southport. It was more like a loop of war footage, bodies blown limb from limb by land mines, naked children running on fire with napalm. Then all my own deaths came back, Bruce and Tim and Mike Manihan, thin as Auschwitz and racked in their final comas. Somehow I couldn't make myself focus on Brian. As for Susan and Daniel, I'd never seen so much as a picture of them. So I more or less blubbered instead for the whole frail world, with a liberal dose of self-pity into the bargain.
It was dark by the time the crying stopped. I realized I was staring blankly into the fire, and that Mona was sitting beside me, stroking my leg. Gray was hunched in the easy chair, elbows on hi
s knees. "I guess it was Jerry Curran who did it," I said in a toneless voice. I tried to imagine this and failed, unable to see around the adolescent image of my brother and his sidekick, joined at the hip as they rollicked through high school. I slapped the arm of the sofa beside me, turning my two friends' heads. "But we don't really know anything."
Mona pushed her glasses up, tight on the bridge of her nose. "Remember Leslie?" Yes—the twisted affair before Daphne, a grad student at UCLA. Miss Bulimia. "Well, she teaches at Yale now. I called her and had her read me everything in the New Haven papers."
She's so hands-on, that Mona. Briskly she picked up a spiral notepad beside her, consulting a scribble of notes as she filled me in. Apparently the Curran investigation had been a big story for a couple of months, with allegations of a huge skimming operation involving federal highway funds. Obscurely I remembered Brian talking about repaving I-91, new bridges and cloverleaf interchanges. I leaned forward expectantly, suddenly ravenous for details, as if the filling-in would soften the explosion.
Jerry was already under indictment for the highway fraud, out on bail and crowing he was innocent. Meanwhile the grand jury had turned up another whole can of worms. While probing Mob control of the unions in Connecticut, they uncovered another ocean of diverted funds, this time in low-cost subsidized housing. Curran Construction was the builder of record in almost every case, a network that spread over eleven states. Thousands of units at a hundred grand a throw, paid for and never built. And when they followed the gush of that hemorrhage of cash, it all disappeared in the laundry, surfacing in squeaky-clean vaults in Zurich, untraceable.
"Your brother's been giving depositions all along," said Mona. "He and Curran have stuck to the same line since the beginning—that the Mob set them up. But then about two weeks ago, something changed. Brian made a secret deal with the prosecutors. He'd settle for a perjury rap, in exchange for which he'd connect all the dots around Jerry Curran. Today he was supposed to testify behind closed doors. Except somebody let out the secret."