Hard Love (5 page)

“Sounds good. What does the butler do?” I stuck a breadboard under the cheese and handed Brian a knife,
then found some crackers and rummaged in the fridge for something to drink. Not much. Enough orange juice to stretch with fizzy water.

“I’m in two scenes, and I have four lines. I mostly take people’s coats on and off.”

“Great! So you got in it! Is what’s-her-name in it?” My good nature is severely limited, I know.

“
Violet
, for God’s sake. Of course she’s in it. She’s
Maria
.” He slid the knife through his thumb and the cheese simultaneously. The cheese pinked up before I could pull it out of the way. Brian started whirling around in a circle holding his injured digit up in the air with his other hand.

“Jesus! Stick it under the water!” I yelled. I never know what to do in an emergency, but I like to give the impression I’m in complete control. “All you have to do is say that girl’s name and you’re a bumbling nitwit,” I complained.

“Ow, ow, ow,” Brian sang as the water cleaned out the cut and bloodied the sink. Finally he held it up at eye level to inspect the damage.

“It’s not that deep,” I decided, based on nothing. I took out the Band-Aid box Mom kept above the stove.

“Like you would know,” Brian said, self-pity thickening his voice.

I peeled back the plastic and handed him a sticky beige strip. I certainly didn’t intend to touch the wound myself.

While he wrapped himself up, I tried to fix the cheese, but it refused to come clean. I had to amputate.

“She’s got a boyfriend,” Brian told his thumb.

“What?”

“She’s got a
boyfriend
,” he repeated so I could hear too.

“Violet, you mean?”

“Who else would I mean?”

“Well, fine. I mean, is this a total shock to you? I thought she went with some guy all last year.”

“I thought you hardly knew who she was.” The guy was in a really pissy mood, you could tell.

“You talk about her all the time. It’s hard to avoid a certain amount of knowledge!” I said.

Old Brian slumped back into a chair. “It’s not like I expected a miracle to happen to me. It’s just that I didn’t expect a miracle to happen to Vincent Brazwell either.”

“Vincent Brazwell? She’s going with
him
?” This
was
a pathetic story.

“He got tall. And he
sings
.”

“Who cares if he sings?”

“Obviously Violet cares. He’s playing the male lead. The captain guy. They get to proclaim their love in front of the whole audience. In front of the stupid butler.”

I took another look in the fridge. Too bad I couldn’t let Brian have one of Mom’s beers. She’d have a fit. But there wasn’t much else I could do for the guy. I refilled his glass with orange-flavored water. Yum.

“Look, you’ve got to stop thinking about Violet Neville. She’s not the only girl in the world.”

“She’s the only decent one in Darlington.”

“I doubt that.”

“Name me one other.”

“Brian, I don’t really pay any attention. I mean, Rapunzel
could be sitting in front of me, and I probably wouldn’t notice. Girls aren’t my thing.”

Brian shook his head. “You’re so weird. No wonder you hang around with me.”

“You’re just figuring that out?”

He brightened. “I know! Next weekend let me go into Boston with you. I can look on Newbury Street!”

Whoa. Here was a real bad idea. “What’s the use of that? Even if you see somebody, you’ll never see her again. You’re not going to pick up some babe in Boston and ship her out here to Darlington to go to the movies on Saturday night.”

“But it makes me feel good to look at them.
Please!
”

Damn it. “The thing is … I can’t, really.”

“Why not? I haven’t come in with you for months. Your dad doesn’t care.”

“Well, actually we’ve been sort of … doing things together. I mean, you know, spending more time … doing things.” I swear to God I had the feeling Marisol was looking over my shoulder, listening to me lie.

“You and your dad? He’s too busy to do things with you.”

“Well, we’re trying, you know. I just don’t think right now is a good time for you to come. Maybe in a few weeks or something. I’ll let you know.”

Brian glared at his taped-up finger like it was a crystal ball. “Meanwhile I’m stuck here in hell. Where my only friend thinks my life is a big joke, and the girl of my dreams is in love with a tenor.”

My eyebrows peaked. Not bad, Brian, old man. Not bad at all.

*   *   *

Friday night: Bertucci’s again. If I get my choice, which I usually do, I always choose Bertucci’s. Best pizza, in my opinion. Dad always orders some pasta dish. (Did you ever notice there’s no such thing as “spaghetti” anymore? It’s all “pasta” now, or some fancy Italian name that ends in
chini
or
tini
or
lini.
) Pizza is way too juvenile for a guy like Dad. What if he was chowing down on a big tomatoey triangle and there were stringy mozzarella hammocks swinging in the breeze when one of those famous authors he publishes came walking over to him? Famous authors, I imagine, don’t eat pizza either, at least not in public. Only takeout. Poor schmucks.

I couldn’t figure out why Dad kept clearing his throat. He wasn’t even eating the tortellini, just picking out the little broccoli trees. Then finally he got around to his subject.

“So I ran into Peter Otto the other day!” Hearty smile.

“Who?”

“Peter Otto. They used to come to dinner once in a while. Your mother works with his wife, Jane. Jane Otto. They have a little girl. …”

“Yeah. I remember.” Vaguely. Little girl wouldn’t stay home with a baby-sitter. I had to watch television with her to keep her out of the grown-ups’ hair. I think I made her cry.

“… Bitsy or Pinky or some such name.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Anyway, Mr. Otto told me your mother is thinking of … probably will be … getting married again.” A look of gravity came onto his face, just in case I hadn’t been aware that we were now discussing something
important
.

I thought it over while I teased a big wad of caramelized onions off a cheesy slice and stuck it into my mouth. Wouldn’t Mom be pleased to know her personal business had been discussed by her ex-husband and some guy she once made a pork roast for? Probably over a pale ale at some brew pub or something. The news interspersed with a few slightly nasty, man-to-man type jokes.

“I assume she’s discussed this with you, John.”

“None of my business, really,” I said, freeing another slice from its brethren.

“Well, it’s certainly of
interest
to you. I mean, you’ve
met
the man, I take it?”

“I know him,” I admitted.

“And do you approve of him? Does he seem … appropriate?”

What the hell was he talking about? This was putting a crimp in my chewing. “What do you care? You’re not
her
father.”

“John, I’m trying to speak to you man-to-man here. I thought you were old enough to engage in this conversation. But if it’s too painful for you …”

It was like a great energy, the anger that blew up out of my chest and exploded from my mouth. I hadn’t seen it coming, didn’t even know it was in there. “Old enough?” I screamed so loud he dropped a forkful of vegetables and
a little piece of tomato splatted on his tie. “Since when did it matter how old I was? You expected me to understand you when I was ten years old! One minute you were bossing me around like your miniature slave, and the next minute you wanted to dish the dirt with me, discuss your manly problems, how my mother had let you down. I was ten! I don’t think I was
quite
old enough to listen to that bullshit.”

I hadn’t let him get to me that way in years. I tried to cool down. What the hell did I care about any of them? It was ancient history. But I couldn’t seem to cap the geyser. “It’s not the least bit painful for me to see my mother finally act a little bit happy, after watching her sit around in the dark for five years. I don’t care who the hell she marries. So what if I’m not in love with the guy? Her taste in husbands never was too terrific.”

That felt so good. I’ve been places before when somebody’s throwing a tantrum and you feel like you shouldn’t stare at them, like they’re embarrassed enough already that they blew up in public. But I wasn’t embarrassed at all. I was glad there was a roomful of people there to sneak peeks at my father, whose blotchy face was surely an admission of guilt.

He was a pro though. Probably he’d had a few temperamental writers holler at him in public before. He motioned to the waiter, who came hopping over like the White Rabbit. Signed the credit card slip and got the food in take-out boxes before you could say “public humiliation.”

I walked ahead of him the six blocks back to his place
on Marlborough Street, but I had to wait for him at the door because I’d left my key inside.

Without looking at me, he clicked open the door. “I’m going out,” he said, handing me the greasy boxes. “I’ll be late.”

“Thank you,” was the only response I could come up with.

Chapter Four

Dad usually slept late on Saturday mornings, but just in case he decided to get up to deliver a comeback to my Bertucci’s outburst, I figured I ought to disappear as early as possible. Since I had several hours to kill before I had to meet Marisol, I took along the second issue of
Escape Velocity
, which I’d already read several times, and the copy of
No Regrets
I’d picked up last Saturday and skimmed while waiting at Tower Records. And of course the copy of
Factsheet 5
I’d gone back for at Marisol’s insistence. (I’d read it already, picked up a few tips, and sent a copy of
Bananafish
to the reviewer, but in case I needed brownie points with Marisol, I could always pull it out to show how obedient I am.) These, a notebook and pen, and Berryman’s
77 Dream Songs
I put into a small backpack, planning to stay gone as long as possible.

There was a bagel place a few blocks away from Dad’s town house, usually full of Emerson College students displaying multitudinous piercings and tattoos, but it was relatively empty at 8:30 on a Saturday morning. I figured they wouldn’t mind if I sat in a corner for a couple of hours as long as I nibbled an onion bagel and nursed a cup of tea. The first thing I did was reread Marisol’s best new piece.

I suppose there are people who grow up with no wish to escape, but they aren’t people I know. Is this a legacy passed on to me by my father, an escapee from Cuba who’s now thoroughly entangled in the kudzu of American life? Or from my white mother, who felt she had to rip herself away from her aristocratic background and marry a refugee with an accent in order to be taken seriously as a social worker for the needy poor, but who now counsels mostly the needy rich in her carpeted offices in Cambridge? Or does it come from my birth parents, about whom I know only that they were Puerto Rican, and that they escaped from me?

And now I have to run too. To escape from them, of course, as all children have to do, to escape from their understanding, their always tolerant love. I have to test myself against the world without the buffer, and I have to give them a break from dealing with their outlandish lesbian daughter. When I opened the closet door my mother assured me I could always count on her support, but she cried for days with the bathroom door locked. She was mourning expectations, I think: dresses and a wedding, boyfriends and babies, things she was looking forward to. (One of those things even I had been looking forward to. I still am.)

My father didn’t say anything to me for several days, but I heard the two of them talking at night in their bedroom. She was trying to convince him that it would be all right, that it was not perverse, that I was still their beloved child. It’s been more than a year now, and my father has never discussed my lesbianism with me, but he speaks to me again and pretends nothing has changed.

My mother, within a week, had joined PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) and announced to me that the two of us would march together in the Gay Pride parade. I know this makes me lucky. I know there are parents who would rage and scream and throw their children out of the house after an admission like mine. And still I resent them. One denies and one embraces. My father wears a blindfold, and my mother wants to out-gay me! I barely know what it means to be homosexual myself, and she’s racing ahead of me, reading all the literature, consulting experts, wanting to “explore my feelings.” I don’t want to explore lesbianism with my mother, at least not now.

I need to figure out what it all means by myself. I need to have a world that is not open to my mother. I need to cross barriers by myself, not holding her hand. I am not her baby anymore. I am not her best friend. I want to be her daughter, but later, after I’ve figured out who Marisol is by herself. After I’ve escaped.

I kept thinking, how could anybody know so much about themselves? And about their parents! (And I wondered which of those four things she was still looking forward to.)