Halfway Home

by Paul Monette

  And I bent once more and touched the head with my tongue, but no thought now of the full maneuver. I didn't feel annoyed that he'd interrupted the flow. On the contrary, the whole occasion seemed to go just the way it was meant to, and felt no less that we were making love. My lips lingered a moment longer, nothing urgent here, nothing to prove. We'd do a better job of it in a bed, I thought. But I wasn't sorry the scene in the cave had veered from carnal to intimate. We needed to go by degrees—next time, let him undress me. Let it go back and forth, so no one got lost in the shuffle.

  Was it a flash of color that made me turn my head? I certainly wasn't startled—just lazily swiveled my head to look out, my lips still grazing the tip, even as the muscle relaxed. I saw Susan an instant before she saw us. She was moving past the mouth of the hollow toward the stairs, bundled up in a motheaten cardigan she'd borrowed from Cora's closet. Her blond hair blew about her head, lavishly sensual for once. She turned her face from the wind and looked directly in my eyes.

  And froze, her cheeks blazing up with a mix of horror and embarrassment. She was hardly five feet away. Truly I must be shameless, for my first impulse was to laugh at her rotten luck—but I swear, it wouldn't have been a cruel laugh. The next instant she was out of there, before I had even raised my head, moving around to the foot of the steps and hurrying up.

  I realized Gray hadn't seen her, stretched out as he was toward the back of the hollow, and the roar of the surf drowning out her footsteps. The laughter spilled out of me, helpless, to think I had just set back the evolution of Susan's tolerance by at least a decade. That look in her face, as if she had stared into the bowels of hell.

  And we weren't even having sex! It was all too twisted, requiring the convening of Vatican III. Gasping at the absurdity, I squirmed up next to Gray in the sand.

  I think he thought I was crying even then, for he threw his arms about me and held me close. I don't know what tipped it, frankly, maybe just the swift unqualified protection of his embrace, but now I was crying for real. No noise, and not even much in the way of tears, like the rain out there that would not stick. I suppose I was crying for Daniel's sake, so many years to go before he could escape the bad deal of his blasted family. Crying for Gray and me, starting out already scared, no handle on time. Crying mostly with relief, because I didn't have to come up with a reason. Gray was going to hold me, no matter what.

  In a minute the squall had passed, and I snuffled and ducked my face against his shoulder to dry my eyes. Only then did I realize I wasn't going to tell him about Susan's late appearance, because I wished to protect his modesty. Once more he smoothed my hair back from my forehead. "You think I can put on my pants again?" he asked playfully, as if the mood had never shifted down.

  "Please—before you freeze your nuts." And while he put himself back together, tucking his shirt in all the way around, I added: "What if I fall in love with you very hard?"

  He did up the buttons of his fly, tongue between his lips. Then the belt. Then he looked over, and the cave had grown so dark I could hardly see his eyes. "Don't worry," he said, "I can keep up with you."

  I've never been much for declarations. It's been my experience that telling a man you love him is like a trapdoor in the middle of your living room floor. They disappear that fast. This casual openness of Gray's—to follow my heart wherever it led—was thus no less than a revelation. And I certainly wasn't going to jinx it now with further demands and codicils. Agreeing to love in principle, fair and equal as the laws of a just republic, was something I'd been waiting for all my life. Say no more.

  I scrambled out of the shadows and knelt at the lip of the hollow, letting the wind buffet me. At the western rim, the day was guttering out in a swirl of mercury, the rest of the sky iron gray. It was drizzling now, though the shelter of the rocks above still kept us dry. I was mad with exhilaration as Gray moved up behind me and squeezed me in a bear hug, head on my shoulder. We watched the break of the waves in silence, the last white glow of force before the stormy night took all the power to itself. I think I could have stripped down and gone in even then, rolling in the shallows like a seal, because I was in the mood to dare the planet.

  But I contented myself with shouting "Now!"

  And the two of us, single-minded, leaped from the cave and chased around to the stairs. We ran up laughing, past the new construction, and I flashed on Susan, even now probably trudging into the house, chilled to the bone. Would she tell my brother what she saw? Oh, not that it mattered at all. I was so far past shame and discretion, tilting against my lover as we dashed around the midpoint landing, trying not to laugh so I'd save my breath.

  But Susan—my bursting heart wanted to tell her how beautiful she looked, with the wind wild in her hair. And that she had so much to love, a man and a boy of her own, it couldn't help but turn out fine. They had all the time in the world. And right now I didn't begrudge them.

  "Stop!" I gasped, panting with surrender as I slumped against the railing. Four steps ahead Gray spun about with a grin, his own breath heaving. For once there wasn't that ominous crease of worry between his eyes. My reeling from the sprint upstairs had nothing to do with AIDS, or at least we played it so.

  "You look like Heathcliff," Gray observed, gliding down the railing toward me, face glistening.

  I threw back my head in abandon, a very queenly Olivier, and bellowed at the lowering sky, "Cathy! Cathy!"

  Gray reached a hand, and I clasped it, letting him draw me to him. We were really getting soaked now. He shook his head, as if hardly believing his eyes. "Every minute I'm with you," he said, "I'm making up for lost time. But it all goes awfully fast." He shrugged. Nothing to be done about it. "My life used to be so slow you couldn't even see it move."

  I nodded, accepting the compliment, but suddenly needing to unburden me as well. "Gray, sometimes I have these—they're like blank spots. And I realize I've lost the last five minutes." Why was I telling this now, at the very moment we were free? Not surprising, the crease came furrowing down between his eyebrows. "It's like my brain's taking a station break."

  "Now?"

  "No. But yesterday, after you left. A few times. I suppose it's the virus." I had to look away from the aching intensity of his eyes, down the vertiginous slope of the bluff. "That's what I mean, about falling too hard. It's all very Dark Victory."

  Again he pulled me close, so that my mouth fell against his neck. It wouldn't take much, I realized, to become the boy who cried "Wolf!" around here, if you could always count on a hug like this. "Let's just keep living now," he declared, as if he'd thought it all through long since. "And we'll fall as far as we fall."

  Is that a prince? Another prolonged embrace, as I arched him backward against the railing and smothered his mouth with mine. The seascape staggered beneath us, yielding up in that one moment of winter dusk—the gaudy expressionist angles of cliff and water, desolate, unrelenting—all the process shots of the wilder shores of passion. Sometimes nothing is wanting, no matter how long you've wanted it. Who noticed the cold and the wet, for the sheer quick of being dead center in love? Like Susan declaring the law of her Motherhood, written in stone, I seared it into my brain: You will not forget this kiss.

  Yet we pulled away from it as casual as ever, for we also knew how to keep it light, being men on whom no irony was lost. Darting across the landing and up the last flight, I announced with fierce insistence, "You're staying over. I don't care what the Catholics think."

  "Stop choreographing," Gray protested.

  "I have to. And now we have to get out of these clothes and drink hot chocolate. And a roaring fire."

  We reached the top together, walking shoulder to shoulder. Now the night had fallen complete, but the way was clear through the cactus, shiny in the rain. As we reached the lawn, Gray dropped in a runner's crouch to tie his shoe. I stood and waited, watching the house—lights in the parlor and up in Cora's room. Then I saw Brian at the edge of the pergola, light streaming out from the parlo
r doors behind him. He was shaking something. His hand was waving. He was—

  I started to run before I really saw it. I think I screamed "No," but maybe it wasn't out loud, for my brother didn't turn till I was almost on him. He held Daniel captive by one wrist, hoisting him up so the boy dangled a few inches above the ground. His pants were down to his knees, and Brian slapped at his bare butt. As I dashed toward them in the rain, a fury as old as the ocean roaring in my head, I heard the sharp crack of my brother's sick power, scoring the flesh of his child. Then I barreled in like a fullback, and Brian looked up in shock.

  I smashed into his chest, reeling him back against a column. He dropped Daniel. His livid face, with its stupid Irish anger, couldn't quite seem to place me. I was flailing blows, pummeling at his shoulder, and for a moment he took it like a dazed bear. He was all armor. No way was I hurting him. But now I found my voice again, and it shrilled the air like a war cry.

  "You want to break his arm? Is that what you're trying to do, bigshot? Just like your dad?"

  I saw how the words knifed home, and I wanted to dance. Even as he snatched my wrist midair, and I only had one fist left to drum it in. "Easy, Tommy, easy," he grimaced, but he wasn't in charge and he knew it.

  "You got a problem, babe," I sneered at him, shoving the heel of my hand against his shoulder and then again, taunting him like a bully. "You like to hurt people, don't you? Well, we don't allow that dirty little secret anymore. They take kids away from guys like you—"

  Then Gray was grabbing me from behind, dragging me off him. A red heat flushed the cords of Brian's bull neck as his fury rose to meet my own, that I should dare to rob him of his son. But now I was twisting and yelling at Gray. "You hear what my old man did? He pulled my arm right out of the socket—just yanking me around one night. Remember that, Brian? Remember me screaming?" A ghoul's laugh erupted from me, as if I'd just gotten some cosmic joke. "No wonder I can't throw a fucking ball."

  Gray held me tight around, but with no pressure to censor me. Brian slumped against the column, looking aghast and vaguely disgusted. Then my eyes lighted on Daniel, huddling back in the shadows, pants still around his knees. For his sake I swallowed my raving on the spot. But nobody spoke. The floor was still mine. My impulse was to reach out and hug him, help him get dressed, but that would only force him into taking sides, and I was not the solution here.

  I still didn't know where the memory of my father came from, so buried was it until the trigger of the scene under the pergola. I only knew I hadn't dreamed it. A twinge in my shoulder had never quite forgotten. But if this much pain was blocked inside me—unremembered, shut like a final closet—there must be more. For the violent nights of my father were grim as clockwork.

  "Daniel," I said gently, "put your pants on, and go on upstairs. Your father and I won't hurt each other, I promise."

  The boy looked back at me gratefully, but shifted his eyes to his father, no move possible without a go from the top. My gaze held on my nephew, so I didn't know if Brian nodded yes or looked away in shame. Daniel hitched up his pint-sized Jockeys, then his jeans. He didn't appear embarrassed or even very interested in the charged air that crackled among the grown-ups. But then, I knew better than anyone how quick these things got buried. Kids like me and Daniel carried our own shovels.

  Once he'd walked into the house, Gray released his grip. I looked at my brother, hands hanging heavy at his sides. There was definite shame here, the Catholic kind, wild for absolution. "Yes, I remember," he said with an odd dignity. "Mom and I took you to the emergency room." "Oh."

  Now he was way ahead of me. For all my own recollection stopped on the dime of the agony—my arm dangling like a broken wing, my long scream for relief in a house where no one knew me. I didn't remember the E.R., or my mother and Brian, or mending in a cast. I would have stood there blankly, groping the past and coming up empty, if Gray hadn't moved to take charge.

  "Tom, you're shivering. Let's go in." And so we did, Brian following awkwardly, Gray moving right to the fire to stoke it. "Take those clothes off," he ordered over his shoulder.

  I began to unbutton my soggy flannel shirt, aware of my brother standing off to the side. I stripped the shirt and dropped it on the hearth in a wet heap, as the fire blazed up. "See, it all gets passed down," I said, hearing at last the chattering of my teeth. "He hurt me, and then thirty years later you hurt Daniel." If it made him squirm to hear it, nevertheless he stood his ground. I kicked off my shoes, then started undoing my pants.

  "But it's not going any further," I declared—tough being a new taste, like metal on my tongue. "Because you're going to work it out before you leave this house, all of you. All of us. It stops here."

  I kicked off my pants, drenched and clinging, sloughing them like a snakeskin. Now I stood bareass before my brother and my lover. I stepped up close to the fire and bent and shook my hair. "I'll get you a robe," said Gray, slipping the afghan around my shoulders. He headed for the stairs, to do his own undressing in private. I turned to Brian. I don't suppose I'd ever faced him naked before, no hiding the man I was.

  "I'd never hurt Daniel," he said.

  "Uh-huh. And you probably think you never hurt me. Well, you're wrong." Then silence for a moment. The fire was white-hot up and down my back, practically singeing the hair on my legs.

  "I know I should have stopped him, Tommy." Meaning our father. "Sometimes I tried. But he just seemed to hate you." He shook his head and hung it at the same time, overwhelmed by the craziness.

  "You're tearing each other apart, you and Susan. There's someone I want you to talk to." He nodded. I almost would've said he was relieved to hear me taking charge. "I've been through a couple of programs myself. Children of lunatics, that kind of thing. It helps."

  He looked at me, and I swear his eyes glanced down at my crotch. "You still hate me?"

  "No. I love you—in spite of myself, believe me. And that's why I won't let you turn into him. If your life's going to start all over, you might as well be a really new man. Without weapons."

  He nodded again. Gray was coming down the stairs in a robe, carrying another over his arm. Brian took this as his natural cue, and they passed each other with a shy smile, painfully aware of not wanting to intrude. They looked like brothers themselves—the nice sort. And I turned and stared into the flames with the queerest thrill of dread, heart pounding, realizing for the first time that I was the head of the family.

  SUSAN REFUSED, CATEGORICALLY.

  I heard them arguing deep into the night. Even through the double bathroom door, and with the rain growing steadier by the hour, I could pick out certain phrases as she railed at him. The very idea of counseling! How dare it even be suggested—as if she disdained the whole field of the talking cure as gibberish, another sort of witchcraft. And that I should have been the one to propose it, invert and blasphemer that I was. I couldn't actually make out the specific words of my damnation, but got the picture.

  I can't stay here, she told him again and again. Or else what? She'd go mad. No, worse: her very soul was threatened now.

  I don't know if she told him about seeing Gray and me on the beach. I dozed in and out, curled as I was in the arms of my fellow blasphemer. I didn't care anymore, so far was she from being able to hurt us. And all her shrewing and lashing out didn't compromise for a moment the lulling safety of the rain, or keep me from the deepest fathom of that first night with Gray. Nor the morning after, surfacing into passion, loving before we were fully conscious. The drone of Susan and Brian through the walls, raw and numb with misery—had it gone on all night?—was no more than distant gunfire, a civil war in another country.

  We came belly to belly, Gray on top of me, his sweet heaviness like an anchor in the harbor. This was the oldest act of love, our two dicks rubbing as we kissed, innocent as boys at camp. Reaching the top, I groaned with a near roar of delight, which surely carried into Cora's room. Gray was as silent as I was noisy, gulping in air as he let go, then strangling ou
t a soft delicious whimper. We lay still for several minutes, catching our breath, no words, all lost time accounted for at last.

  Then I watched as he got up and fetched a towel to clean us off, darting in and out of the bathroom, not wanting to encounter the heteros. But the squalling had stopped in Cora's room. Doubtless my little crow of ecstasy had hustled them down to breakfast. Gray smiled as he tenderly wiped my belly, then moved to the chaise to pull on his yesterday's clothes. I couldn't stop studying his tough and lanky body, still so new to me. No extra fat, and the sleek form of an ocean swimmer. His being fifty had no downside; he was simply a full-grown man. And lying there lazily under the comforter, I took the most wanton joy in being the younger one.

  "Doesn't sound like she's crazy about the idea," Gray declared as he shrugged on his workshirt. It was the first I realized he'd heard the din from the other room. I always thought WASPs had an extra sleep gene that helped them ignore such things entirely.

  "I'll talk to her," I said, but as if I didn't stand a chance. "Some people don't really believe there's a way out. You get to be an abuse junkie."

  "I still haven't even met her." He sat on the bed beside me to put on his shoes. "She laid out the lunch for us yesterday and then ran upstairs. I don't think she'd know me if I met her out there in the hall."

  She'd know your dick, I thought, suppressing a smutty grin. "Are you running off again?"

  He narrowed a look at me to see if I was pouting. Satisfied I wasn't, he gave a rueful shrug. "I better go check on Foo and Merle. They didn't know I'd be out all night."

  "They know where you were," I remarked dryly.

  But I was just teasing. I could feel the pull of the ranch, and all his responsibilities there, even as he lightly stroked my cheek with the tips of his fingers. I could only guess how ingrained were their habits up there, who put out the Wheaties, who fetched the mail. Yet I felt no jealousy whatsoever, and only wished that he not be stuck taking care of too many of us. I turned my face into the palm of his hand and kissed it softly, to let him know it was all fine. Completely fine.