by William Poe
“Then you know what I’m talking about. And don’t go falling in love with someone like Jerry. I know how you crushed on him.”
“I wasn’t born yesterday,” Thad said, embracing Simon. “When will you settle down and realize how much I love you? I don’t want anyone else. You are my old-fashioned guy.”
The touch of Thad’s hair on Simon’s cheek, the feel of his lips as they kissed, the warmth of their bodies pressing together—Simon believed he had nothing to worry about.
Thad knew he shouldn’t have mentioned Jerry. Scott Mansfield had met Jerry through an organization of gay-film producers that he represented, a group that filed frequent lawsuits against distributors for copyright infringement, all unknown to his boss, Maury Fender, partner in one of the law firms that represented Sun Myung Moon in his appeal of federal charges, a man who frowned on his attorneys moonlighting. Jerry had received an award at an annual ceremony that Scott attended, and Scott had pursued him. Showing up at Scott’s house while Thad was there, Simon had accused him of being in love with Jerry. Thad had denied it, and Jerry feigned ignorance about why Simon would care. Thad eventually moved to San Diego to get away from Simon’s fits of jealousy and relentless pursuit.
Reversing months of personal neglect, Thad ironed his sleek designer jeans and wardrobe of stylish shirts, attire that made him look like a model from the pages of Gentlemen’s Quarterly as he modeled for Simon in a pair of freshly pressed slacks and a soft yellow shirt. The color drained from Simon’s face as the reality hit him—Thad really was going back to California.
“Don’t be afraid, Simon,” Thad consoled, seeing a familiar look of terror look on Simon’s face. “I’m excited about the opportunity, that’s all. Ironing these clothes and all, I realized how down in the dumps I’ve been.” Thad rubbed his chin. “It’s been a week since I shaved, and you never said anything.”
“I kind of liked the soft stubble.” Simon smiled. “You may be in your twenties, but I swear, your beard is peach fuzz.”
Thad blushed. “It’s the blond hair.” He pulled a little square of tissue from his neck. “Every time I use a razor, my neck bleeds.”
“I’m scared,” Simon admitted as Thad draped his freshly pressed shirts over the backs of the chairs.
“Me too, a little, but trust me, Simon, I won’t go back to using, and even though it’s not the big deal to me it is to you, I won’t have sex with anyone. I’m yours.”
“I believe you,” Simon said, lacking conviction.
Simon’s worst day since leaving rehab began the morning he awoke without Thad beside him. Despite his commitment to sobriety, loneliness nearly overwhelmed him. Simon thought he had developed mechanisms to cope, but old patterns felt as strong as ever. When the idea crossed Simon’s mind to get in Vivian’s Pontiac and drive to the Little Rock housing projects where he was sure to make contact with Snake, BT, or one of the other drug dealers he knew from the first months after arriving back in Arkansas, he considered handcuffing himself to the bedposts. Instead, Simon escaped to his studio, where he could stare down his fears in swirling colors as they morphed into images, his brushes and palette knives serving as the weapons of war as surely as crayons had been swords against the bug-eyed monsters from the planet Zenon.
CHAPTER NINE
Before Thad left for Hollywood, he and Simon relaxed in the parlor, reminiscing, wondering what was going on in Hollywood with Scott and Sandra and the crew at the Spotlight. Vivian paid no attention as she watched one of her favorite television programs. Simon picked up a magazine from the table beside his chair and remarked to Thad about an article he had just read in it about a human ancestor recently discovered in the Afar region of Ethiopia.
“We didn’t come from no monkey,” Vivian said, her attention turning abruptly from Murder, She Wrote. She addressed Simon but stared at Thad. “We came from God’s children, Adam and Eve. You don’t think we came from a monkey, do you, Simon?”
“I don’t think humans came from a monkey,” Simon replied.
Satisfied with the response, afraid to pursue the question further, Vivian turned up the volume on the television.
Simon had not lied to Vivian, reminding himself that all primates, including humans and monkeys, descended from a common ancestor, facts he’d learned when taking classes in anthropology, a field that remained one of Simon’s interests, sparked during his first attempt at college shortly after high school. That education had ended when he joined the Unification Church, but he’d continued to nourish his fascination with anthropology during his ten years in the church, when he would stop by libraries to read scholarly journals—no matter that the reading conflicted with beliefs more aligned with Vivian’s idea about Adam and Eve than speciation through the process of natural selection. Simon remembered a day at school when he’d held the plaster cast of a Homo habilis skull and pondered how anyone could doubt Darwin’s explanation of human origins.
Thad cared little for religion or science and tried to change the subject whenever Simon strayed into scholarly musings. Growing up, Thad had never heard his parents mention God except to deride people’s beliefs as utter nonsense. Thad readily accepted that humans were a species of brainy ape and didn’t see any need to look into it further.
With time on his hands and a little money in the bank from the sales of Wally’s videos, Simon investigated the possibility of returning to college, taking a trip one afternoon into Little Rock to visit the registration office. Simon always told people he’d left college with a four-point average, but that wasn’t the case; he had forgotten about the final exam in physical anthropology, taken shortly after accepting the Divine Principle and becoming a follower of Sun Myung Moon. Simon had not answered the essay questions with arguments based on science, producing a rambling justification of spontaneous generation instead.
Simon’s incoherent paper earned him a failing grade with a note of extreme disappointment from Professor Hardeman, who became so concerned about the abrupt change in Simon’s personality that she attended Divine Principle lectures to discover for herself what had enthralled him so. Professor Hardeman had hoped to debate the ideas, to bring Simon to his senses, not understanding that Simon’s reasons for joining had little to do with the teachings and far more to do with his sense of being doomed to a life of loneliness as a gay man, strengthened by his sadness at being estranged from Lenny and emphasized by bitter heartache after rejection by his first love.
Professor Hardeman eventually recognized that Simon would have to reach his own conclusions but still insisted that he call her anytime he wanted to talk. Simon had never taken advantage of her offer, but he always remembered their final conversation.
“If nothing else,” Professor Hardeman had advised, “look at the next few years as fieldwork. You’re a natural scholar, Simon. You’ll collect a dissertation’s worth of information.”
Simon found his anthropology exam in the dusty admissions folder handed to him by the university’s registrar, and he cringed as he perused it. Also enclosed was an essay written for his psychology class. Simon barely remembered the cold-blooded professor who’d espoused the behaviorist teachings of B. F. Skinner—that humans are little more than programmable automatons. Horrified by the lectures, Simon had taken it upon himself to explore alternative theories, and in his essay, which referenced the importance of self-actualization, apex of human motivation in Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, he wove a justification of humanity’s significance that became nearly religious in its assertions.
“You’ll need to replace your high school transcript and ACT scores,” the registrar explained after reviewing the materials in Simon’s folder. “After that, you can re-enroll. Our administration prides itself on encouraging nontraditional students.”
Simon smiled at the thought of being nontraditional.
The day after visiting the university admissions office, Simon went to Sibley High School to retrieve his records. The teachers that Simon remembered had move
d to other districts, except in the case of his gay art teacher, Darsey Faber, who’d switched professions to become a florist before getting caught having sex with students. Simon had not reported Darsey after Simon’s first love broke his heart and Darsey seduced him.
“I’m here to get a copy of my transcripts and my ACT scores,” Simon said to the woman who greeted him at the counter in the principal’s office.
“And your last name?”
When Simon responded, “Powell, Simon Powell,” the woman looked puzzled for a moment, and then her face brightened. “Oh my word, that’s yours over there, isn’t it?”
The woman pointed toward a sixteen-by-twenty-inch canvas in a simple black frame hanging by the door of the principal’s office. Simon had always mourned having burned his early works, forgetting about the ones that remained with friends or their parents, gifts the church deemed exempt from his Isaac sacrifice. The portrait, rendered in the Mannerist style of Modigliani but without his somber tones, this work glistening with bright reds and blue-green hues, took on a ghostly presence as Simon recalled the circumstance of its painting.
“Remarkable it still exists,” Simon marveled. “It’s a portrait of Mrs. Jenkins. Her son, Jake, and I attended school here.”
“I’m Melissa Jenkins-Woodley,” the woman explained. “Jake was my nephew. I’m his father’s sister.”
Her use of past tense gave Simon a chill. “Is Jake all right?”
“I’m so sorry,” Mrs. Woodley replied. “I would have thought you’d heard.”
“My life took me far from Sibley.”
“I hate to bear sad news, but Jake and his family were driving on Stagecoach Road when a drunk driver collided with them, head on, about ten at night. It gets very dark along that section of the road, you know.”
Simon grasped the counter to steady himself. Throughout junior high and much of high school, Jake had been Simon’s close friend, a friendship that had deepened after graduation when Simon renewed his friendship with Jake and his girlfriend, Jewell, along with a crew of hippies who lived communally and with whom Simon resided briefly when he lost hope after being scorned by his first boyfriend and betrayed by his art teacher. For a time, before joining Sun Myung Moon’s group, Jake’s mother, Dorothy, a free-spirited, one-time beatnik, had encouraged Simon to pursue his art as a career. She’d hung several of his paintings in her house, including the one by the principal’s office, Dorothy Jenkins’s portrait, titled Dot with Dotted Eye, referencing Dorothy’s nickname as well as the fact that, instead of the typical crosshatch over one eye favored by Modigliani, Simon had applied dots similar to the benday pattern used by printers.
“How long ago was the accident?”
Mrs. Woodley by that time had come around the counter to stand beside Simon. “Nearly eight years ago,” she said, touching his Simon’s arm in a consoling gesture. “I’m so sorry you didn’t know.”
“The whole family?”
“Dot was driving. Jake and his father were visiting from Alaska. The other boys were in the back seat. Death came instantly. Jake’s cousins inherited most of Dot’s books and all those record albums she collected from the 1940s and 1950s.”
“I remember that. Dot introduced me to Edith Piaf and Josephine Baker.”
“No one claimed the paintings, so I took them. I have three others at home. My children have a few of your sketches. You signed them with a dedication to Dorothy.”
“I remember each one.”
“Do you want them back?”
It took a moment for Simon to realize what Mrs. Woodley was offering. “I could never do that. I gave them to her because she was such a great and positive influence. Please keep them in your family.”
“We get a lot of comments on that painting,” Mrs. Woodley said, pointing to Dot with Dotted Eye. “People recognize Dorothy.”
“I can think of no better tribute to Jake and his parents, or to my time here at Sibley High, than having it displayed so prominently.”
Mrs. Woodley led Simon behind the counter for a closer look at the painting. The work sparked other memories. Jake and Jewell and the rest of the communal gang had infiltrated a speech by Sun Myung Moon when he came to Little Rock while Simon still lived at the local church center. The band of friends waited until Sun Myung Moon took the stage, then stood on their chairs, threw their arms forward in a Nazi salute, and shouted, “Heil, Moon.” Guards swiftly escorted the cadre from the building. Simon’s friends recognized what Simon refused to admit: that the man to whom he had dedicated his life was little more than a self-deluded charismatic craving adulation from a horde of worshippers and, in the case of his public speaking, the general population.
“What are those boxes?” Simon asked, breaking out of his reverie and noticing a stack of cardboard crates marked with the year of his graduation.
“It’s an amazing coincidence you showed up today,” Mrs. Woodley remarked. “These boxes are headed for county storage. This pile is scheduled for shipment tomorrow.” Mrs. Woodley ran her finger over the labels. “Here it is, N through P,” she said as she shuffled the boxes to get to N–P. Lifting the dusty cover, she retrieved a manila envelope, unwound its clasp, and checked inside. “Yes, this is it: Powell, Simon.”
The envelope contained everything the university needed: the transcripts, including many classes in art and journalism, and the ACT scores, sufficient at the time to qualify for scholarships. If only Lenny had not convinced Simon to remain near home by attending the university in Little Rock, telling Simon Vivian might need him if Lenny’s upcoming heart surgery did not go well. It was a request Simon had honored—the last nail in the coffin of his dreams.
Mrs. Woodley made copies of the file and again consoled Simon about Jake and his family, asking, “Did you know my brother, Jake’s father?”
“I only met him once,” Simon recalled, “but Jake often spoke of him. I knew that Jake went to Alaska to visit his father, but I didn’t know he stayed there. I’m sorry we lost touch.”
Simon departed from his old school before other ghosts could appear. If his demons were allowed to surface, Simon would blame himself for what had happened to Jake and his family, the consequence of his abandoning discipleship to Christ’s second coming. In Moon’s theology, sin demanded a price—the greater the sin, the heavier the burden. If Jesus’s death atoned for the sin of Adam and Eve, Simon’s transgression, denying the blessing of marriage bestowed on him by the third Adam, Sun Myung Moon, was a crime that reached out to everyone who knew him, even damning his ancestors. Were Simon to allow those old ideas to resurface, he would view the deaths of Jake and his family as Satan claiming those he loved as payment, as if an individual’s actions influenced the workings of the universe. Still, the self-important religious mind-set held a grip on Simon’s fears.
“How can you harbor such thoughts!” Simon uttered aloud as he sat in the Pontiac and stared at the school. A response rumbled forward from deep within his psyche: You should be dead, not Jake and Dot.
Simon drove to the mansion and had just parked under the sweet gum when he noticed Connie’s car had pulled close to the side entrance.
Vivian and Connie sat at the dinette table adjacent to the kitchen as Simon entered through the back door, but not before consoling Cicero, who had been let out and needed to do his business but who became so excited upon seeing Simon that he pranced around him for attention. Connie had just finished sipping coffee, resting her cup on its saucer and taking a paper napkin to wipe a lipstick smudge from the rim before standing up to give Simon a hug.
“Jesus will find a way into your heart,” Connie said, pulling away and looking dolefully into his eyes.
“Okay, Connie, I’m stumped. What causes you to bring up Jesus all of a sudden?”
Connie looked at Vivian, who stared back intently. Then she sat down and reached across the table to take Vivian’s hand. “It was nice of Thad to bring Simon’s things from Hollywood,” Connie said, ignoring Simon’s question,
“but he shouldn’t have made your home a den of iniquity.” Connie picked up her coffee cup with a gleam in her eye and a curl on her lip.
Confused, wondering what Connie had been saying to Vivian before he entered, Simon decided that Connie would have to hear what he had to say—no more tiptoeing. The news about Jake and Dot was tormenting enough, and he was in no mood for obfuscation. “What exactly does Jesus have to do with anything, Connie?”
Connie went to the window and gazed toward the barn. “I don’t think you understand how much Jesus has looked out for you. My prayers have always been that you would leave that group. But then, instead of opening your heart to Jesus, you invited Thad.”
Vivian looked at Simon with a plea in her eyes.
A significant lesson Simon had taken from rehab, though difficult to realize in practice, was to let people have their opinions. One could not control the actions of others, only of oneself.
Connie continued, “Jesus found a way to remove Thad; now you have a chance to let him into your heart.”
So Jesus sent Thad to provide sound effects for a pornographer? Simon thought. Listening to Connie, he wondered if Thad’s desire to leave Sibley had something to do with the times he’d watched soaps with Connie. Thad had never mentioned that Connie had tried to convert him, but now Simon couldn’t imagine her not trying. He laughed thinking how miserably frustrated she must have become. Simon had once asked Thad if he believed in God, and Thad had responded that he hadn’t thought much about it. If anyone else had said that, Simon would have thought them evasive, but Thad was Dionysus to Simon’s Apollo, accepting the obvious if it felt right without the need for the intellectual arguments that Simon demanded.
“Think what you like, Connie. Thad is the best thing that ever happened to me.”
The wan smile on Vivian’s face told Simon that he was right to temper his response. Vivian dreaded conflict.