Famous Builder (24 page)

“Eat.” And she spoons another helping of greens onto my plate.

***

The tide advances on the town beach outside the gym’s sliding glass windows, foam swirling around the boats’ rusted red hulls. It’s twilight. A northeaster gangs up on the coast; ions rush and tumble through the atmosphere. Yet everything’s safe inside this little corner of the gym: no water seeping under the sill. There’s Polly, leaning on the Roman chair. There’s Hollis, by the window, doing his shoulder shrugs. There’s Tim Callis, who’s just passed a homemade cassette of dance music—“Butt Party”—to S., the woman behind the counter. There’s Jasper, up from New York; there’s Jack Pierson; there’s Scott Frankel; there’s Ryan Landry—all the people I’m fond of, the inimitable combination of souls who give the town its peculiar vitality and panache. Unfortunately, Billy’s stopped coming: I can’t tell whether he isn’t feeling well or whether he’s lost interest.

I’m much more committed to working out than I’d ever expected. On my better days I’m convinced that I’ve actually remade my entire body (look: a blue ropy vein has popped out on my biceps!), and when I tell my friend, Elizabeth, whom I haven’t seen since our time together at Iowa, that she might not recognize me when she comes to town, she’ll kid me mercilessly for years to come. Of course, it probably helps that I’ve shaved off my hair and grown a goatee, which gives me a certain Luciferian quality.

We’re all engaged in our reps and our sets when S., the woman behind the counter, switches off “Butt Party.” She claps her hands like a drill sergeant. “All
right
,” she bellows, “Who in this gym
smells?
”

We’re silent. The room positively vibrates with collective shame. She has tapped into our deepest dread.
It’s me
, each one of us thinks.

Then a few of us start snickering, nervously, quietly, expelling air through our nostrils. Immediately, S. herself seems to realize how extravagant and over-the-top her outburst was, how it expresses some lurid deep phobia. What rage has she kept bottled up inside? It probably makes it worse for her that no one’s willing to back her up; all at once all the shame in the room boomerangs. She crumples down in her seat. We might have stepped onto the set of
A Woman Under the Influence.

The combination of the approaching storm and the complex energy in the room has my hair practically standing on end.
Is it you? Is it you?
Now everyone wanders about the gym, sniffing, laughing. Arms are raised. We smell; we’re smelled back. And all at once we’re creating one of those quintessential Provincetown moments, weirdly intimate, something we’ll remember for the rest of our lives, when people who’ve never spoken before laugh together. All the while S. sits up front, moistening her lips as if she’s on the verge of tears.

On my way out I feel a tapping on my arm. V. smiles, slinging his gym bag over his shoulder.

“Were you here the whole time?” My voice sounds harsher, more authoritative than I’d intended.

“Can you believe her? Maybe she’d like to spray us all down like little piggies in a trough.”

We stand outside in the howling wind, leaves rasping the pavement around our feet. Like me, he, too, is caught up in the spirit of camaraderie and happy feelings. He lifts his head. A door swings open inside me. In the porch light his eyes smile and gleam with just the right hint of wickedness. “Your place?” he says.

I grab for his hand. Where is death tonight? We walk down Pearl Street. The world couldn’t be more achingly beautiful; the sky glows beyond the stark, thrashing trees.

***

And so it starts, the events that conspire to make love, or whatever this is, the center of your life. At first, you don’t even realize how much of your attention it consumes. You still have a life, don’t you? You still get up to brush your teeth and pour your milk on your honey puffed wheat. You still send off your student loan payment on the first of the month. And yet you jump when you hear the phone or a knock at the door—is it him? You keep yourself sexually focused and groomed at all times because you never know when the opportunity will arise. Worse, you don’t leave town when your brother offers you a free plane ticket to Miami for fear that when you come back he’ll have revised his feelings. You don’t even insist on your right to see him because he tells you—quite cheerfully, in fact—the story of Renaldo and Bobby. The single Bobby, who’s having an affair with the coupled Renaldo, has started to make demands, and the way V. sees it, “That’s going to kill things.” The whole thing becomes more precious to you because it’s provisional, forever on the verge of vanishing. You lacquer it the way an oyster lacquers a grain of sand: layer upon layer until it shines.

You’re walking down Commercial Street. You think you see the back of his shaved head in a group of people standing outside Café Express and your steps quicken. He’s happy to see you, and you him, but when you talk you can feel a tension, the possibility of sex beating beneath everything: Should we do it? Are all the conditions right? In public, you carry on something resembling a friendship, but you wonder whether the others know what’s going on between you. You
hope
they can see it in both your eyes, for at the very least it will prove to you that there’s something real between you, that it’s more than just sex, which is what V. thinks it is. Or so he says.

You look at his unchanging gaze sometimes. Is he hiding something? How could he not be as torn-up as you are?

But in spite of the fact that the terms aren’t equal here (he’s unavailable a certain portion of the time; you’re
always
available), you must admit that it’s incredibly intoxicating. Life has never seemed as dense and as rich: a fancy Italian cake. You love the way he makes fun of you. You love his warmth and his wit, his sweeping assessments of the pretentious and the absurd. He takes particular pleasure in exposing the true essences of people who present themselves one way and are actually something else. One man, who’s known as sensitive and sweet by many of the available straight women in town, is branded a “cunthound.” Truth be told, he’s hard on everyone. The fact that he approves of your character makes you feel like a million bucks.

Now if only you could sit at your desk for more than five minutes at a stretch. Your new novel has come to naught. You stare out the window, then get up to pee. You stare again. You wonder whether you have Adult Attention Deficit Disorder.

You’re standing outside the First Old Store one night when his boyfriend bikes toward you. A valve in your heart flutters. Too late to run. You know you should probably be feeling guilty and contrite about what you’ve been doing (once is one thing; again and again is another), but you know he’s probably doing the same things himself with somebody else. And besides, you must confess that you feel some warmth toward the fellow. You talk about Alicia Henry’s show of new paintings at the Work Center, which both of you happen to like very much. You both complain about the music at the A-House. You look in his Nordic blue eyes. You can see the edge of asperity in them. He knows; of course he does. You are breaking up the relationship. Still, this doesn’t stop you from wanting to tear the flashing red light from his handlebars and throw it against a building.

***

Danella offers me a cup of Earl Grey as I sink into her sofa. Over in the barn there’s a party still going on for a visiting writer. Things have been getting a little wild around the compound. Is it just the cold, the fact that there’s nothing much else to do out here on the edge of the world besides our work, and we need to blow off some steam, in a manner of speaking? Or is it simply that we trust each other? Within the last couple of weeks we’ve heard rumors of all sorts of couplings: lesbians with straight boys, black girls with white boys, straight boys with gay boys—every possible combination you can imagine. Only last week, as part of a collaborative art project, Itty poured an assortment of canned foods from her cupboard over my naked body and photographed the results—something that we both found amusing, compelling, and a little kinky.

Sometimes, though, one needs to take refuge. Through the window I can hear the strains of Public Enemy drifting out across the parking lot.

“We haven’t gotten together since last month,” I say to Danella. “Do you think something’s the matter?”

She tosses carrots into her juicer, a thoughtful, sleepy expression on her face.

“I mean, if things were really great between them, this wouldn’t be happening. I can tell what he thinks when he sees me. It’s just too much for him to take in right now.”

The sleek machine makes a grinding noise before she switches it off. She will not proffer the easy answer, though she knows that’s what I want from her. “Then why are you so worried?” she says finally.

“What?”

She pushes the dreadlocks off her forehead and presses her hand against the small of her back. She sips from the carrot juice, which leaves a pale, Creamsicle-colored mustache on her upper lip before she wipes it off. “If he’s the one, he’ll come to you.”

“You mean I shouldn’t try to bring this up?”

“Sit tight for now.” She walks over to the sink and rinses out her stained glass. “Just trust me.”

“But what if this is it?”

“It’s not over, sweetheart.”

I lift the cup. The tea burns the tip of my tongue.

***

A burst. I’ve been writing since dinnertime, and now it’s half past three in the morning. I’ve accumulated two chapters, fifteen more pages of my novel. I think they’re good, but who can tell such things when you’re in the storm and fire of it? Whatever’s transpired, though, I’ve had a conceptual breakthrough: my protagonist till now hasn’t been active enough. He simply hasn’t taken charge of his daily affairs; everything’s been done
to
the poor guy: a baffled, inert observer. I want to shake him; I want to whack him upside the jaw. As soon as I make him choose, the stalled narrative takes off. He comes alive. The story sings for the moment, one unexpected event leading to the next.

Is my book trying to tell me something about myself?

I decide to sit tight. Outside my bedroom window the entire compound’s dark, with the exception of Jim and Jane’s window, in which a little lamp burns. I lie down on my spongy, narrow mattress. I think about what Danella told me, but her words don’t stick. What’s the worst that can happen? Am I only going to make an ass of myself? Or am I going to find out that he really doesn’t care about me, that I simply don’t have that much meaning for him? Well, if that’s the case, then screw it.

I down cup after cup of coffee. I must have courage. I must keep hold of my convictions. I throw on my leather jacket, my scuffed Doc Martens, and a pair of torn 501s. I am walking down the stairs, walking out the door. The town couldn’t be more beautiful this mild December night. A loose clapboard bangs softly against a building. A white star fires, fizzling out over Long Point. The breadth and depth of the landscape. I shudder inside. And I couldn’t be more pleased with myself, for I’m thinking: This is what it means to be an adult. This is what it means to throw off the yoke of childhood uncertainty and be able to ask for what you want.

The lights are on in V.’s bedroom window. I creep up the driveway, careful not to make too much noise on the gravel. Music plays inside: Is it Joni? “The Same Situation”:
Still I send up my prayer / wondering where it had to go / with heaven full of astronauts / and the Lord on death row.
I take a step further, sidle up against the car, and stop at the foot of the stairs. Voices. Not two inches from my shoes a skunk ambles by, white tail flaring. My mouth opens. My arms move about frantically as he wobbles away down the hedgerow, as scared of me as I am of him. Luckily, he keeps his scent to himself. I prop myself against the sideview mirror, practically falling to my knees. Then another step. Voices again. And this time I see them—V. sits in the hot tub, his arms wrapped around his boyfriend from behind. Steam hovers over the deck; the water bubbles. I think I should be angry, but it only feels like I’ve been hit by a bicycle and I can’t feel anything. Their backs are pale and broad in the moonlight. V. nuzzles the bluish hollows behind his lover’s shoulder blade; the leaves shiver, and that’s enough. I see it all: the heft of their time together, their successes and missed opportunities, and suddenly I know why they’re up this late. They’ve been talking about me, them, how they’re going to move onward from here. Their eyes are closed. They’re too caught up in the moment to notice the intruder standing on the deck.

I turn back down the steps. I wait till I’m far enough away from the house. I glance back over my shoulder, and this time I really do fall down on my knees. I stay there until it hurts, the gravel digging into my skin.

***

I shouldn’t be surprised when V. tells me that he and his boyfriend have broken up. He tells me in the calmest, most workaday fashion, two years after I happened upon them in the pool. I’ve been involved with someone else, Eric, fresh from India by way of Montreal, and my attentions are too much turned toward him to feel anything like surprise. I suppose I’m still a little in love with V., but I’ve tossed that love aside, turned it inside out and lost it like a sock beneath a bureau. All over town, seemingly in-it-for-the-long-haul relationships are falling apart. And much, much worse, people are dying. How many friends have we all lost over the last couple of years? It’s 1993, the height of the Epidemic. Billy, Lon, Richard, David, Chico: even if they haven’t yet died, they’re getting sick. The medicine is lousy, the doctors have thrown up their hands, and we all know it’s only a matter of time. And now Wally—I’ve been looking in on him while Mark’s away teaching at Sarah Lawrence—isn’t doing so well. One night I walk by their house to see a clear-glass votive burning in the living-room window.

A couple of days later, Eric and I attend Wally’s memorial service inside the white clapboard Unitarian church. I’m reasonably composed throughout. I reach for Eric’s warm, broad hand, and think of that scene back in Gallerani’s, which seems like so many lives ago, when I first saw Mark reach for Wally across the candle-lit table. Shyly, I walk up to Mark after the final hymn. He says, “Thank you for being in Wally’s life.” And he says it so plainly, with such simple austere truth, that I burrow my eyes into the soft part of his shoulder. The world falls silent. The church empties out. Too much at once: Wally’s death (I should have stopped by more often in those last, difficult weeks); Mark’s efforts to hold himself together; Eric’s protracted indecision—whether to go back to Canada, or move on, or …
what?
Death after death after death in town. And V.—what about him? The fractured globe turns, the cold clear lights of its core burning through the rift in its surface, but there isn’t any globe in the sanctuary, just time going round and round inside our heads, and Mark holds me tighter before letting go, and lets me know that I shouldn’t be sorry for losing my composure.