Halfway Home

by Paul Monette

  "It's fine, Foo. I'm fine."

  "He just needs quiet," Gray persisted. "And no visitors. Next week you can come and have lunch."

  She peered at him now, her goggle eyes brimming with self-possession. "And who was that?" she asked, one hand pointing vaguely toward the house. "Another artist in residence? A painter of the Picasso school, perhaps."

  "No, he's just a lawyer. I'm sorry he was rude to you, Auntie. He's from Beverly Hills."

  The old lady took this in with imperial indifference. On the table beside her were two cans of beef broth. Merle was nowhere to be seen, which was more nervewracking than usual. I had a vision of him skulking about like a Malibu shaman and getting blown away by one of the agents. Foo looked back and forth between us, very parental all of a sudden. "Hisbrothers lawyer, you mean," she replied, with the deepest satisfaction.

  So she knew. Gray passed a weary hand across his eyes, indicating it wasn't he who'd spilled my brother's hideout. Foo's goggle eyes were fixed on me, triumphant. I shrugged.

  "Mona told me," she explained, "because I told her I'm an old dustrag nobody ever listens to, so who would I tell? I knew something was going on down here, because this one got very queer." She pointed at her nephew, then winked at me. "Something besides the two of you, I mean. That's been as plain as the Baldwin nose on his face since the day you moved in here."

  "Okay, Miss Marple," drawled her nephew, "so you got it all figured. But this isn't the cocktail hour. The FBI's in there, and they don't like surprises."

  "Exactly why I came," she declared, even if the logic was lost on us. "What if they tried to arrest you boys? I thought you might need me." When Gray looked at her blankly, almost stupefied, she added, "After all, Graham, I am the head of the family. And I believe the Baldwin name still has a certain influence, even in Washington."

  "Yeah, with President Harding," came the retort. He patted her hand, which she must have found insufferably patronizing. "Foo honey, don't call us, we'll call you. Now where the hell did Merle go?" Abruptly he jumped to his feet and headed around the side of the house.

  Foo turned her full attention to me, one hand cupping the back of my head, the way a healer might have touched it, except she was so secular and powerless. "I just wanted to see you."

  "I'm fine."

  "How was the hospital?" I squinched my face with distaste, the way Daniel had about Minneapolis. "I've never even been in one, except to visit." It was Foo's turn to squinch, as if there was something obscene about this bald fact. Still that ache of injustice, that she should be home free while the castles of pain were full to bursting.

  "At least I fell in love," I said—then bit my tongue, in case she thought I meant to one-up her century of spinsterhood.

  But she countered instantly: "Indeed! And what about him? Fifty years he walks around with that moony look on him, like he's lost his best friend. Wasn't my place. All I'd say every now and then was, 'Don't you ever get sick of art?'" The last word came out sharp as the crack of a rifle, and we both laughed. "Now he walks on air and forgets to tie his sneakers. First time he's ever been a little boy."

  She beamed at me, the palimpsest of her face aglow with vicarious pleasure. I looked away, suddenly embarrassed. "Yes but—it's not going to last."

  "Let me tell you something, Tom. Lasting's the least of it. Lasting is all I've done for fifteen years." She puffed out her lips with contempt, making a sound like pish. She looked out at the water, whose shifting sapphire had been hers longer than anybody's. "Not that I don't have nice days, mind you," she added judiciously. And I realized it was just what I'd said to Daniel, the same provisional wisdom. Happy was for birthdays.

  Her eyes were on the horizon, dancing on the peaks of Catalina. "I've seen too much," said Foo, which coming from her just then seemed the opposite of a cliche. Then she looked at me again, exquisitely calm in her lounging posture, ancient but not old. "So, if you can walk on air and be boys for a while... well, that's the secret, isn't it?"

  "Come on, Auntie, let's go," called Gray, and we turned to see him and Merle striding down the hill from the sycamore grove. "I'll follow you guys to the ranch and make you a nice cup of bouillon."

  "Bullshot," replied the lady succinctly, in a tone that brooked no contradiction.

  He grinned at her defiance and turned to me. "Everything falls apart when Gray's away. Merle says the furnace is acting ornery, and two of the horses are missing. Besides, I need clean clothes and—" He gave a helpless shrug, too many bases to cover.

  "I'll be fine." I kissed him square on the mouth, right in front of his closest kin, and he didn't bat an eye. Merle had already stooped and gathered Foo in his arms. Gray and I walked behind as far as the pergola, lingering a moment. I called good-bye to Foo, who waved gallantly over the Indian's shoulder.

  Gray poked a finger at my chest, touching it right above the heart. "But I mean it, you go rest. I'll be back tonight."

  "Yessir." I didn't mind being left alone. I was glad he felt free to go take care of his stuff, and distinctly didn't wish to be constantly watched, in case I fell over in my soup. He trotted after the others, frisky as a boy, just like she said. And I had to admit, for all that I loved him, a little frisson of relief. We didn't need every minute together, no matter how loud the clock ticked.

  I ducked through the french doors into the parlor, eager to get back to the brawl of my brother's testimony. Right off I saw the dining room was empty, but figured they must be getting coffee. Then, coming up to the table itself, I saw it was stripped bare—tape equipment gone, as well as the ponyskin briefcase. I reeled for a second, horrified they'd already barreled him out of there. No, he never would've let them—unless they tricked him. Maybe the only way to exile a man was to rip him away with no good-byes.

  I raced for the stairs, and my head went into another hammer-lock, doubling me over. I held my skull and counted ten, but the jolt of pain only made me more frantic. I stumbled up, a step at a time, cursing the spinal. When I reached the top, my cranium still shooting stars like a planetarium on acid, I staggered around the stairwell. Reached for the door to Cora's room, prepared to scream if my brother was gone. Then I turned my head sharp, for the very wail that was struggling to break from me was coming out of the tower.

  I lurched that way, fingers pressed to my temples as if I were moving by telepathy, through the doorway arch and up into light. Brian was perched on the narrow bed, hands hanging heavy between his knees, a broken player benched for the season. The sound he made was more of a moan than tears, a sort of toneless keening. But the moment he saw me, that all changed. It was like he'd been waiting.

  "Tommy," he pleaded, and though he was drowning in anguish, I could hear the same relief in him that I'd felt a moment since, when Gray left. I went and sat beside him, just as the flood broke. He seized me to him the way he seized Daniel the day of the rain. His torso shook with the sobbing, quaking like I did as I crawled up out of the grave of my stroke. I thought with a certain dark pride how much better he was at crying than the first time.

  But that was my last objective thought, for then the mirror of his grief broke in me, a thousand pieces. I'd lied out there on the terrace, over and over: I wasn't fine at all. Until I came to this solitary room with Brian, I couldn't begin to let it out. And so we fell apart, clinging to each other in that sunstruck place, weeping our different sorrows, though the passion was equally matched. He was a wrestler, and I was a diver.

  This outcry of ours—so much lost, so much yet to be taken—was something a man could only raise with his own blood. Beyond what the fathers couldn't tell us, beyond desire, we made a common noise at last, high above the blank indifferent sea. Brian would leave, and I would die—all of this would happen. This crying in each other's arms was something we'd won the right to, by reason of pain and fear of time. We wept to be men—my brother the same as I, and I the same as my brother.

  WE ARE SPRAWLED ON A PAIR OF LOUNGE CHAIRS ON the terrace, Brian and I, soaking up
the last gold burnish of the sinking sun. The bluff is windless, no trace of the storm except the swooning smell of green rising off the lawn. I'm turned on my side with drowsing eyes, my cheek cupped in the hollow of my hand. I study my brother a few feet away. His shirtless torso glistens with a fine film of sweat, like an athlete oiled for an ancient game in a stadium. His red hair flames in the naked light. He's drinking a green bottle of beer, three empties on the grass beside the chaise.

  I can't be certain how drunk he is, if at all, but he stares unblinking into the west, mesmerized by the phosphorous sheen of the sun on the water. Anyone else would surely be blinded by now. Brian endures the dazzle, a test of wills between him and the powers of the air. Yet it's myself who's most in danger here. For the sun knocks out my T-cells with withering precision, nuzzling my checkered flesh with kisses of melanoma. Robison has long insisted on a sunblock of SP-30 or better and shrouds of clothing besides, so vulnerable am I to the glare of day. But here I lie regardless, naked to the waist and aping my brother, caution flung to the winds.

  I don't know how long we wept, clinging in the tower, but it felt like hours. First and last of course I cried about AIDS, and the cheating of all our lives. Then for Daniel and his exile, this part standing in for me and the childhood I never stop mourning. But somewhere in there, my face buried against my brother's neck, I sobbed for the lost promise of West Hill Road—the four of us trapped without a clue, the prison of our common blood. Even a tear for my father, his dead heart and his strangled fury, no self-knowledge from cradle to grave. It wasn't the same as forgiveness, but for once I pitied him. And just to hate him a little less was like having a knife pulled out.

  The tears were wordless start to finish, more exact than words. When at last it began to abate, the two of us gasping to breathe again, we pulled away from our brothers' embrace. Yet there was no fear or shame in our touching anymore. We lingered on Daniel's narrow bed, cross-legged like a pair of kids on a raft, and recovered our equilibrium, knees grazing. The last wall of our alienhood, men from opposite planets, had tumbled down with the knowledge that we were both equally robbed. As for being shit on by life, it was something of a draw.

  Thus the whole long battle between us—gay against straight, the surly pride and xenophobic curses—yielded at last to a treaty. We might have been two old men who couldn't even remember the country below the waist, except for a dull ache in the prostate. Our dicks were the least of it now.

  So it isn't with any desire that I gaze across at him sleepily, drinking his beer. It's this brotherly feeling, all the dots connected, and I'm basking in it. I understand that Gray has made it possible, by overturning the hitherto immutable law of my separateness. Part of my languid mood is being out of the hospital, the relief of we-can't-find-anything having caught up with me and left me in a heap. Yet I'm bound by a most peculiar secret at the moment, something I dare not share with Brian.

  Being happy.

  My blubbering grief in the tower was real enough, but it's over. Brian's isn't. Perhaps because I've been miserable so much longer than he has, and now with the other shoe of my sickness always waiting to drop—time enough for all of that again tomorrow. But if the rest of the day is what I've got with my brother, I'm damned if I'll throw it away wishing it were more. This is without a doubt the most half-full the cup has ever looked to me. Maybe it's the dementia starting, turning me maudlin as an Irish tenor. At this rate I may go out grinning like Donna Reed myself.

  "She's not a real nun, is she?" Brian asks abruptly. Not a word has passed between us since the first beer.

  "Ex," I reply succinctly.

  "I thought she seemed too smart," he says with a grunt of satisfaction. Not drunk, but definitely a small buzz. As far as I know he has never taken after our father in that regard, but the drunk gene is in both of us, an incubus of riot. "Who still buys all that crap anyway?"

  The question hangs rhetorical. It takes me several seconds before I realize he's talking about Catholics. "Your wife, for one," I answer carefully, eliciting from Brian an even harsher grunt. "And pardon me, but aren't you a Prince of the Church yourself?"

  He laughs. "That's just good PR, Tommy. Worked with the brothers at Saint Augie's. Works just fine in Hartford—where you still got a lotta micks in the legislature."

  I'm bolt awake now, the muzziness shocked out of me like a plunge in the winter surf. "You mean—you don't believe—" I can't even think how to ask it, the territory is so vast. The virgin birth? The miracles? The nuns in grammar school hammering at us day after day that all non-Catholics would burn in hell? What had been the last straw for him?

  He turns to face me, his eyes unsullied as an Eagle Scout's. "I believe in God, Tommy. I just don't believe in churches."

  I nod dumbly. "We thought you were going to become a priest," I observe. Meaning my mother, who used to browbeat me with the specter of Brian's purity. I think she'd decided my father wouldn't be beating me senseless all the time if I was as lily-white as my brother.

  Brian's still laughing. "Soon as I discovered my dick, I knew the priests and I were playing different sports," he declares, this man who used to cop the piety Oscar at Saint Augustine's, year after year. "But hey, I'm a born con man. I knew how to push their buttons and win for Jesus."

  My turn to crack up. "Oh, you have no idea. The Brothers would swoon with desire when you were in uniform." Brian lifts his eyebrows in mild surprise, and I wonder how naive he can possibly be about all of this. "The monsignor must've needed a fan in the booth, for all those steamy confessions. Every Brother in the order burning to sit on Brian Shaheen's pole!"

  "I doubt that," he scoffs dryly, tipping the bottle and draining the last of the beer. He lobs the bottle beside the others in the grass. "I swear, you think everyone's gay."

  "Not you," I correct him swiftly, matter-of-fact and without a second thought. "But didn't you ever think you might be cockteasing those coaches of yours? Not consciously, but how could you miss the way they looked at you? All sweaty in their collars and chanting rosaries in the locker room." I'm starting to sound a little lawyerly, though I try to keep it light and teasing. I grip the arm of the lounge chair like a trapeze as I lean toward him expectantly.

  Finally he shrugs, with a slight flush of something like embarrassment in his cheeks. "I guess a little," he drawls in reply.

  Point won. I shiver with impatience, a thousand more questions to ask. The most intense discussion of high theology I've had since catechism class. "Brian, if I'd had your looks and your pitching arm, I would've whipped those priest queens up to a frenzy. But then I'm a shameless exhibitionist. And not one of 'em ever made a pass?"

  Brian stretches an arm above his head, rolling the shoulder in the socket, always in training to pitch his lightning curve. His forehead crinkles with concentration. "Well, maybe a couple of times they'd massage a muscle a little too long. And Father Dan—JV hoop—was always wanting to check us for hernias. 'Not a job for the school nurse, men.' " The gelatinous brogue is pitch-perfect.

  "Ick," I remark with distaste, imagining the bald and leering priest, round as a basketball himself, juggling the boys' gonads while they coughed. "No wonder straight guys get so creeped. Thank you once again, dear Lord, for the blessings of the closet."

  "Mm," he murmurs, his mind somewhere else.

  It's beyond ironic, to think I became such a bloody anti-Catholic, pugnacious to the point of unemployability, and all because my brother was an Irish saint. Now it turns out he's as damned as I am. I draw my knees up, hugging them with my arms, exhilarated by this whole exchange. Feel like a boy again, or perhaps for the first time, never having connected before to the give-and-take of buddies. No more hours in the hayloft reading.

  Now that I have the opening, I want to know what it was like to grow up as a god. But before I can formulate the question, I hear him whisper beside me. I turn with a questioning look, and his eyes fall to the ground as he repeats himself. "What about us?"

  I bli
nk, smiling hopefully. "What about us?"

  He pauses the length of a held breath, like a kid passing a graveyard. We lock eyes. "The fooling around."

  I can feel the burn in my cheeks. Then I lift my shoulders in a deep shrug, except it comes across more like a squirm. My lips are pressed tightly together, not the easiest way to talk unless you're planning a career in ventriloquism.

  Brian leans his torso forward off the chaise, his back making a sucking sound as it comes away from the plastic pad. "Tommy? You know what I'm talking about, don't you?" His voice is tense with apprehension, as if he fears to be left all alone with it, that my stroke has erased the memory.

  "Sure," I mumble at last. But I have to swallow a snarl of petulant rage, furious that he's brought it up.

  "I don't know if I made you do it, or if it was your idea."

  My shoulders haven't dropped from the previous shrug. "Little of both," I say. "It doesn't matter." But his anxious eyes don't leave my face, searching for psychic scars, till it forces me to answer the question direct. "Don't worry, I wanted it."

  The "it" we are trying to talk about is the spring of his junior year, after Janice Mulroney gave up Brian's dick for Lent and came back from an Easter retreat sporting Norman Spires's class ring. She was instantly branded a two-bit whore by Brian's crowd, but meanwhile the league's star pitcher was left high and dry at the top of the season. So many vast forces at work cannot help but lead to strange bedfellows.

  "I knew that," Brian says gravely, hunched on the edge of the chaise, combing a nervous hand through his hair. "I knew I could use you. It was all because I was pissed at this girl..."

  "Janice Mulroney," I pipe in helpfully, always a whiz at the tawdry details. "Look, Brian, it's no big deal. Please—it was practically the only action I had between twelve and twenty."

  Brian stares at his hands. He's not in sync with my flippant tone, still groping his way in the dark. What are we talking about here? Maybe twenty-five blow jobs between March and June, figure twice a week, and always the Friday night before the league game. After lights out, though we could still hear the old man downstairs clinking among the Seagram's bottles. The first time admittedly had been a little rough, Brian pinning me, shoving my head and slamming in till I gagged. But after that—well, I thought I took to pleasuring with quickening expertise.