Halfway Home

by Paul Monette

  The green surfboard keychain glows on the kitchen counter, the last thing we'll ever lose. It puts me in mind of my nephew as I drive stop-and-go in Sunday madness. The inlanders blare their horns and cuss out their windows, hauling their freeway etiquette here to the water's edge. I am a fountain of Zen calm by comparison, fingers tapping the neon surfboard as it dangles from the ignition.

  The parking lot at the Chevron is jammed with Valley teenmobiles. Beach trollops in postage-stamp bikinis slouch and jiggle by the phone booth, nuzzling Diet Cokes. I feel as old as Foo as I thread my way to the minimart. Inside there's a chill like tundra from the air-conditioning, but it's also nearly empty because bare feet and loiterers are vigorously discouraged.

  I grab up an armload of cleaning supplies, various prepacked toxic wastes, including even a bunch of submarine devices that turn a toilet's water Mai-Tai blue. Ghastly to be sure, but we're talking Donna Reed clean here. On impulse as I pass the freezer I reach in for a chocolate death bar, the same as Daniel and I pigged out on.

  Miss Kitty is at the register, a hard-bitten brassy blonde in a Zody's muumuu, of the type whose screen career never even reached the cutting-room floor. Yet there's a certain star presence about her, a tragic grandeur in the purple-lidded eyes, as if she has fallen from very high up. I plunk my groceries down with hardly a nod, since neither of us is the chatty type. What they call frontier reserve. I tear at the wrapper to bare my ice cream as she starts toting up. I'm midbite, teeth frozen, when she lobs it to me underhand.

  "You're the kid up the Baldwin place," she says, statement not a question.

  "Uh—yes I am." If I'm blushing, it's from being called kid. I scramble for something nice to pay her back—

  "We got a message for you. Somewhere."

  Miss Kitty rustles a pile of papers by the register, then squints at the bulletin board above. She's impatient but not irritable. Apparently I have enough standing in the neighborhood for this favor I never asked. Who would leave me a message here? Now she's plucked the pushpins out and laid the paper on the counter before me. She goes back to the ringing up.

  "Brian," it says in a big scrawl. "4165552484 April 30 10 oclock his time." No punctuation at all. Whose time?

  "I don't understand."

  "Fella took it down the other night. He was just sittin' out there in his car, and the phone starts ringin' in the booth, so he picks it up." She taps the paper with a lilac fingernail. "This is your brother."

  "Yes, of course," I reply with a ruffle of dignity. "He wants me to call him."

  "Eleven oh four," she declares flatly, shaking open a paper sack and beginning to bag me up. I peel a ten and two ones from the anemic roll in my pocket, and Miss Kitty pops the cash drawer to make my change. My hand is sweaty as it clutches Brian's message, nothing compared to the turmoil in my heart. "And ninety-six cents," she announces, a pool of coins in the palm of her hand. "Your Dove Bar's dripping."

  I look down in time to see a slab of chocolate slide onto my wrist, and the next several seconds are frantic as I slather my tongue around the disintegrating sweet, consuming it to the bare stick. Then I swipe the counter with a napkin to clean up the drips. All one-handed, Brian's message still clasped in the other, like a dispatch I have to deliver through enemy lines.

  Miss Kitty is already busy with the next customer as I turn to go, but she breaks her concentration to call after me, "Hey—your groceries!"

  I retrieve my sack and thank her profusely, floating out once more to the heat of the day and the nubile clan of beach delinquents. Yet it strikes me with a sudden force of gratitude that one of these very teens might have taken the precious call from Tulsa. Maybe the coffee-colored boy in the booth right now, bare as a Fiji islander and muscled like the jigsaw David. I silently bless his whole beach tribe as I climb back into the pickup and smooth out the coded message on the hub of the steering wheel.

  An hour's time difference between here and Tulsa, which means I better be here at nine, in case the his refers to Brian. Doesn't say A.M. or P.M., but night is the way I first proposed it. The hard part of course is that there's no backup if something goes awry, no second date for safety's sake. And in any case it's seventeen days away, so the biggest challenge is to Shaheen's First Law of the rest of my life, only to live today. Wild horses etc. couldn't keep me from the rendezvous, but a stroke sure would. I have no choice, despite the leaping joy in my breast, but to fold up the message and pocket it, placing no bets on the outcome.

  Gray and I don't sleep in Foo's room Sunday night, for the mattress is slumped on the balcony rail, hauled out by Merle for a night's airing. It's the same in Cora's room, a bare iron bedspring. So we're banished to the tower by default, which goes to show that its attic status is as fluid as everything else about summer. And those windows, which seemed so extraneous to wash, they're as diamond clear tonight as the lens of a telescope. We lie in each other's arms in sweet exhaustion, the night so wrapped around us we might as well be camping out. All our chores accomplished, for just at dusk we came to the bottom of Cora's list.

  "So tomorrow's the first day of summer," Gray murmurs into my hair. "That's an official Baldwin proclamation."

  "No, Tuesday," I correct him gently, knowing it will have to wait till after the performance tomorrow night, Miss Jesus being my last promise to anyone else but me.

  We make love for a while, glancing and dreamy, nobody poking too hard. There's nothing to prove by getting off, no urgency—the whole summer lies before us, stretching its tawny body like a cat. So we hold back, the pulsing ache of a half measure more satisfying than going over the top. Gray's lingering good-night kiss is a stir of anticipation, and time is on its side.

  In the next breath he's asleep, his lips still grazing mine. I feel not loss or separation but only a vivid sense of drawing us out like golden wire, so easy have all our transitions become. The night sky is suddenly mine, and for a minute I want to lie there bolt awake till morning, tracing the warrior constellations as I cradle my love in my arms. Nothing is perfect of course. Even as I hold him fast I can see the stricken look in his eyes when I flinched at the scatter of spiders. I can't make his fear go away because he needs it to learn about grief.

  Poor Gray, I think as I brush my cheek across his forehead, just where the hair is beginning to retreat.

  Fortunately I'm dog tired, so the melancholy can't get a grip. Then like a shooting star the scrap of Brian's message streaks across my vision, light out of dark, and the pang of hope releases me to sleep. AIDS-less sleep, without any night sweats or dreams with doors. Most perverse of all, such length and depth—for the tower catches the crack of dawn, its circle of windows offering nothing in the way of shade. It's like a lighthouse turned in on itself, blinding bright by seven.

  No wonder Nonny was always the first one up, clanging the bell for breakfast. Yet I sleep straight through till eleven, the sun full on my face. I see the gold dazzle of summer before I even open my eyes.

  Gray has already been down to the Chevron twice, to check in with Sister Kathleen and Mona. Nineteen I-and-A girls have signed up for the field trip. Mona's got calls out to twenty-five angels, but on such short notice she swears we'll be lucky to pull in half. I feel no spurt of jitters at news of the house count, nor any pregame wistfulness at the prospect of my last home run. I'm so far past it already, no need to top myself. Performance is for younger types than I. Time to rest on my laurels, to be wheeled out every now and then for roasts and tributes.

  I wander my shipshape acreage in a pair of cutoffs, eating Mona's peaches. Gray leaves me to my own devices for most of the afternoon, running up to the ranch to putter. He thinks I need the solitude to prepare Miss Jesus, not realizing I'm going the other way, disengaging, deconstructing. I stand at the top of the beach stairs and suck the peach juice from my fingers, batting away the random bee who thinks I'm sweeter than the cactus flowers.

  And I face the curious question of my borderline career. Would I have clamped so hard on t
he church, my jaws locked like a pit bull, if I'd been this happy before? Was it all just a tantrum?

  I don't know. I can't conceive my life anymore without Gray and Brian. As to the rage I'll feel at the end for how briefly I possessed them, I'd rather face that when I get there. Otherwise, if a happy man is a lousy comic, then I'll be a bust tonight. Oh well, they're all being comped, and you get what you pay for. Miss Jesus always had more fun with this thing than I did. Even at my most notorious, I never stopped feeling a loser. I needed the act more than it needed me, and now I don't.

  I certainly don't owe anybody a piece of my sudden change of heart, as if to be happy now were a sort of deathbed conversion. My values are intact. I still hate the Hitler Pope and all his brocaded minions. I still believe in Nothing. Well, not quite: this life of the dawning summer is inexpressibly green and balanced, sufficient to engage a pagan's faith. The gods are Apollo and Dionysus, not Big G—enough higher power to qualify me for almost any twelve-step program, but also enough to consign me to the Catholic hell, where the party is.

  At the bluff s edge I fling out my arms to embrace the whole ocean, dancing on the balls of my feet, and I crow. Loud and long. I startle a pair of terns on the ledge below, and they flap away northward, bound for a summer of their own. My holler is otherwise lost in the wind that blows offshore. It turns no ships away from foundering on the rocks, and it raises no shades of the Malibu chiefs. It's just my personal siren cry, for nobody else. A cheer whose echo will ring for months, till the last mote of summer. I'm here and I'm ready. Start the clock.

  It's not quite dusk when we climb in the pickup to leave for AGORA, but Gray flips on the lights at Carbon Canyon, where the fog is eddying in. We don't talk much—no reason. He hasn't said a word about my imminent swan song, even to wish me luck. I have a feeling he doesn't need it any more than I, not like he did the last time, the journey home from which sealed our fate.

  Even as I recall it my hand reaches over to graze his thigh. Then we are coming through the narrows by the Colony, and the traffic slows to a waltz of pulsing taillights. As if on cue I tip over slowly, slumping prone on the seat so my head pillows on Gray's thigh. The milky green of the dashboard glows with dials and gauges, comfortingly nonmedical. I feel the same muscle playing under my head as

  Gray's foot shifts from brake to gas. The difference is how far we've traveled in between, till his slightest movement feels like one of my own.

  I'm about to reach up and click the radio on, feeling the need for a little country, when he says in a soft voice, "We got a sliver of a moon tonight. Oughta be full by the thirtieth."

  That's how I know he's seen the message tucked in the corner of the mirror. I grin in silent pleasure, my cheek swelling against his thigh, for the secret was no fun till there were two of us in it. I snap the radio dial. Instantly Dolly and Linda and Emmylou are singing in perfect sync, lush as a Methodist choir. Farther along well know all about it, they croon in their First Communion whites, not a hairline doubt among them. God is at least a hit single.

  Cheer up my brother, live in the sunshine,

  We'll understand it all by and by.

  My sentiments precisely, brother and sunshine both. I'm feeling positively ecumenical as the harmony enfolds us. Before the final chorus I'm dozing, hardly the mark of a one-man show getting juiced, let alone one whose star is the Antichrist. At some point Gray takes a hand from the wheel and strokes my head in his lap, setting me to purring. Later I feel the pull to the left as he takes the turn one-handed up Chatauqua. I don't even have to think about where we're going. He'll get us there.

  If I have any conscious thought at all, it's that I'd gladly die right now, the moment is so complete. Only another way of saying I'd like it to go on forever, just like this. The contradiction seems entirely apt, and thus not contradictory at all.

  The reason I know I've fallen asleep is the sound that wakes me: "Uh-oh."

  Even as he utters it he pumps the brake to stop us short. I sit up sharp, shaking the grog, and see in our headlights the dusty stand of royal palms in the parking square. Cars are all around us, for once outnumbering the dumpsters in the industrial barrens of Ocean Park. I peer across at the theater entrance, the squiggle of sputtering blue neon tracing the rim of the awning—our postmod marquee. Beneath it a mob of people is swarming around the doors, some with placards waving.

  "Oh Jesus, who told them?" I groan, picking out the heft of Mrs. Beaudry, her bovine goose-step unmistakable at fifty feet, leading her picketing troops.

  "You didn't think you'd get away with it twice, did you?" Gray noses the pickup into a free space by the loading dock. "Family Values has a special SWAT team, just keeping track of you and Miss J."

  I can read the placards now. BLASPHEMY IS CRUCIFIXION, red on white, a professional print job, several of those, SAVE JESUS, proclaims another, this one scrawled in longhand. My favorite is DEATH TO THE CHRIST KILLERS, waved aloft by an Aryan thug in a clerical collar. Many of the protesters are younger than I, some barely out of their teens. They all have a Disney polyester sheen, and are easily distinguishable from the wincing patrons who make their hunched way through the gauntlet into the theater.

  The protesters are seasoned enough to know not to block the entrance completely, or else we can have them arrested. They content themselves with snarling and spewing hate in the theatergoers' faces, as if AGORA were an abortion clinic.

  Gray gives my hand a squeeze as we move to get out on either side of the pickup. The melee is only twenty feet away, but nobody recognizes me out of costume. Gray steps in front of me heading up the ramp, parting the waters of the crowd with a low WASP murmur of courtesy: "'Scuse me. Coming through." I follow tight behind him, reeling from the memory of the previous skirmish two years ago—when I was young and strong.

  We get to within ten feet of the door. I can see Mona checking tickets, a Latino security guard beside her armed with only a nightstick, and looking vaguely frightened himself. Gray waves a finger to try to catch Mona's attention, and then Mrs. Beaudry pounces from the right. "Here he is," she revels, pushing her blazing face into mine. Donna Reed on crack.

  I grin, pulling my tits together. "Mrs. Beaudry, how've you been?" I greet the lady cheerily. "Hon, you've cut your hair. The bangs are heaven." All around me I can feel the troops gather in a circle, grim as witches at Stonehenge. Gray's shoulder brushes mine. "Honest, you look ten years younger," I continue giddily, hyperaware of the silence as the protesters defer to Mrs. B. "Is it just clean living, or did you get yourself a lift? Isn't that a little tuck up there?"

  I raise a hand to gesture at her temple, and she recoils with a hiss. "Don't touch me with your disease!"

  And the spell of silence breaks. The troops erupt in catcalls, rattling their placards. "Blasphemer" is the nicest thing they call me, quaint as The Scarlet Letter, though I happen to stare point-blank at a young man waving a sign that says PORNOGRAPHERS TO HELL! He's as blond and finely chiseled as my Fiji surfer, and he barks directly at me: "You fuckin' dirtbag."

  I raise two fingers above my head, very popish. "Bless you all for coming," I call out over the din. Gray is tugging my arm now. "I know how busy you are, fellating your sons and ravishing your daughters."

  Funny, I never used to provoke. I'd march through, shoulders back and haughty as Garbo. The din becomes a roar as I let myself be pulled along by Gray. The guard has meanwhile stepped into the fray, opening us a channel. I bat my eyes at Mrs. Beaudry and point to Gray.

  "Hey, did you meet my husband?" I hold my hands a foot apart and give her a bawdy wink. "The human kielbasa."

  Somebody spits in my face. And though I flinch I feel exultant. I raise no sleeve to wipe my cheek but wear it like a badge. The Aryan priest appears to be the spitter, bellowing next to my ear that I'm a godless communist. I swear, these fundies are all over the board with their agenda, nailing me for a thousand crimes, and the only curious thing tonight is that nobody calls me a fag. Mona beckons impatiently fro
m the door, sweeping Gray past her into the vestibule. The Latino guard is beside me, arms raised to deflect any further abuse. Mona grips my hand.

  But I hesitate crossing the threshold, perverse as ever, reluctant to leave the field. "Juiced" doesn't even begin to describe it. Here's where I want to perform. I toss my head back leering, to give them a parting shot. And there in the midst, being buffeted, a terrified look on her face, is a woman of indeterminate years, blue-haired and sporting a navy suit. Very uptown.

  "Please—I'm on the press list," she protests, struggling to get past the mad-dog priest.

  "Let her through!" The boom in my voice is Old Testament, shaking the very ground. The protesters balk, realizing they're out of line. The impeccable woman walks gratefully toward me. I fling out an arm to gather her in. "Welcome to the theater of the damned," I toss off with a gallant nod, ushering Nancy Marlowe in before me.

  For it is unmistakably she, the white-glove critic from the Times, previously known to me only in theater-party group shots in the paper. She expels a wilted sigh and declares, "Thanks—I thought I was going to be trampled."

  Outside, the noise of Mrs. Beaudry's goons has dimmed considerably, deflated now that I've gotten past them. Mona whips over to cluck a hasty apology, eager to steer Ms. Marlowe to her seat, while I reflect on what a spiffy review I'm likely to get after saving the critic of record from the jaws of a mob.

  I go straight to the office, cutting behind the bleachers, and don't need a head count to know that Mona's got us nearly full to capacity. I was promised forty-five, fifty max, but the body heat and the bleachers' squeaking tell me we're double that. In addition to which, the Marlowe reference to a "press list" makes it clear what a busy girl Mona's been.

  In the office Sister Kathleen perches on an orange crate by the water cooler, the latter a bone-dry relic of the pen factory. Gray's behind the desk, the mountain of grant applications before him no closer to being filed. The two of them eye me warily, trying to leave me some room to react. The sideshow has left them both deeply unamused, but mostly anxious for me.