How Long Has This Been Going On (24 page)

But Frank had a bank account, so he tried eating of the lotus for a while. He spent more time in the gym—three or four hours a day, till many in the weight room mistook him for staff. He bought a television. He moved across town. He dated women. He was restless, experimenting but not expanding. When he ran into his former partner John Luke at the movies, John said, "Frank, you were one good hell of a cop. What are you doing off the force?"

There was John and his wife and their two little girls kind of hanging on to their mother, the four of them dressed up as if a movie show were some sort of treat. And there was Frank in his jeans and sweatshirt, because why dress up for a movie, right?

Still, he felt odd in some incomprehensible way.

He thought, then, of moving to San Francisco, of starting over, maybe reorganizing a hauling outfit with Larken. But there was an air of surrender about that, of looking needy. Moving was a good idea, maybe. Los Angeles had kind of dried up for Frank: Like many a gay man and woman, he had become too rich for the place he was accustomed to.

Yet he continued to float, ham-and-egging his way through the days on odd jobs. A Hollywood agent discovered him—in southern California this happens to somebody every twenty seconds—and for a while Frank pursued a movie career, putting out for extra work here and a bit there. Sex-for-casting turned Frank on, especially since it mostly boiled down to Frank doing a performance with himself. It seemed that he liked showing off. Still, these ventures never came together into a career, somehow. In 1957, a certain amount of highly committed greenroom fucking landed him a job as a sailor in
South Pacific
—no lines, but what they call "good screen placement." That led to nothing. Two years later, acting on a tip, Frank reamed and wanked his way through eight people to get to a well-placed producer, who told him, "The show business can't use you—you're too big all over."

Frank floated some more, gymmed, cruised, voted for J.F.K. in memory of his father, who would have wanted it so, and wondered what else there might be in the world for Frank.

One night, for fun, Frank packed a bag. What belonged in it, besides his elemental wardrobe of jeans, T's, and gym shorts?

Look around the room: Nothing belongs. None of this is necessary. Freedom has a catch, then—you lose your ties.

The bag of clothes sat, packed, in Frank's living room for some time. Every now and then he raided it for a clean shirt, which he would replace when he picked up his laundry. It was June of 1961. Frank was thirty-three and floating.

Then his apartment lease and gym membership came up for renewal within a month of each other, and Frank called that a sign. He sold his car and television and took the bag down to the bus station. When the ticket clerk asked, "Where to?," Frank replied, "As far from here as possible."

"Well," said the clerk, unwrapping a stick of gum and looking Frank spang in the eye, "'bout the furthest you'd get from here and still talk American'd be New York City, U.S.A."

Frank said, "I'll take it."

W
HEN MARK VAN Braenninger married Mary Ellen Reid, they were the ideal couple in all respects but one. They had youth and looks; and he was smart and she was loving. As an apportioning of virtues, that's not as common as one might think. Many a man goes through life unseeing, unlearning; many a woman is unfit to nurture children, assume though she may the indicated duties.

But Mark was atheist and Mary Ellen a churchgoer. Moreover, Mark was Jewish and Mary Ellen a Baptist, a true believer. "Sin" was a word she used often and not lightly, and all that was beautiful in Creation, she believed, spilled from the cup of Revealed Religion.

That was the respect in which Mark and Mary Ellen were not the ideal couple. But Mark figured it all out, and while they were engaged he pored over the map of their native state of Minnesota to find a certain kind of place that he had in mind for them to live and raise their family in. It would lie far from the urban centers, with their divisive churches and synagogues. It would stand defended from opinionated relatives. It would be so small and so isolated that it would function entirely on the human scale, whereby each person is judged by his or her personal qualities andnot by the isms that he or she belonged to. Mark was particularly keen on finding a town without a Baptist or Jewish congregation, so that their children could be brought up in what Mark saw as the perfect compromise: no Baptism and no Judaism. No religion whatsoever. No superstition, no hatred of outsiders, no terror, no rules about sex practices. Only children brought up on love and care, children who would therefore rise up hale and well intentioned and full of the world's happiness.

The homeland that Mark chose for his family was Gotburg, far to the west of the state, almost to Big Stone Lake, a town founded by Swedes in 1878, when it was called New Göteborg. Over the years the "New" dropped off and the old-country pronunciation gave way as the children and grandchildren of the founders accustomed themselves to the American style of saying things. Mark and Mary Ellen moved into a Gotburg made of Maple Avenue and Birdsong Lane, a bright, fair little Scandihoovian town where kids came crashing around the street corner, pedaled right up on the lawn, jumped off the bicycle, and let it fall as they hit the ground running to shout, "Hey,
Luke!"

Luke was the only child of Mark and Mary Ellen, Luke de Maupassant Van Bruenninger, the most elaborate name in Gotburg. Mary Ellen had insisted upon the first name, Luke being her favorite book of the Gospel, so Mark had insisted upon the middle name, after the French author. Mark had expected Mary Ellen to withdraw "Luke" from consideration upon confrontation with "de Maupassant." But the lack of a proper church—Mary Ellen occasionally sat in with the Methodists, but all her life she nursed a powerful inference that the religious life of Gotburg was beneath her notice—led Mary Ellen to demand that her son be given, as she put it, "a name in Christ."

"Then," said Mark, "he will also have a name in French literature."

Mary Ellen snapped, "Amen"; and what can you say after that?

So Luke grew up with a weird middle name, as an only child with a best friend in the house next door, Tom Uhlisson, exactly Luke's age and also an only child with a weird middle name (Gösta). The two boys became inseparable so early on that they were known townwide as "the Twins." And, you know, they somewhat resembled each other. For by the early-middle 1960s, when they were in high school, both Luke and Tom were tall, lively, wide-shouldered kids with bouncy dark hair and heavy jaws, popular joking boys with a lot of energy, and stars in team sports. They were distinguishable: Tom was broody, given to outrageous ethnic jokes, and easy to anger; Luke was vivacious and soft. Who would come up to you humming some old tune? Luke. Who scandalized the town by wearing hip-hugger bell-bottoms to school? Luke—and shaded glasses, too, be it said, like that country singer Roy Orbison. Well, looks count and grades don't.

The girls were annoyed, because you never dated Luke or Tom: you dated the Twins, in the company of another girl. These boys studied together, showered together, bunked together. When they—so seldom—got into trouble, they were punished together. In fall, they were cheered for their pass combinations; in spring, they excelled in double play. Come summer, they went to fishing camp in the Lake of the Woods region and cast their rods as a unit. Over Christmas vacation, they co-captained the (invariably) victorious side in the annual War of the Ice Forts in Lindbergh Park. They were the Twins.

The Van Bruenningers lived at 124 Wild Rice Street and the Uhlissons at 126. At 128 lived the Lundquists, whose youngest daughter, Christine, had been nursing a crush on the Twins ever since Trudy Eckerstrom's fifth birthday party, when the ice cream fell out of Chris's cone and Luke and Tom sorrowfully and simultaneously offered her theirs. A few months later they were all in kindergarten, right there spang in a room, day after day, and by then Chris was hopelessly in love. You may wonder which of the two boys she preferred; but could one choose? There were those in Gotburg who said that Luke was on the nutty side, or that Tom could be grudging. Well, Chris had no favorite. It was the splendor of the two boys' bond that fascinated her more than the boys themselves. The perfection of their marriage awed her—the ease with which they communicated, and the respect with which they treated each other.

They are surrounded by themselves, she thought. Who else can get in?

The Twins made room for Chris, more and more as the years passed and the three entered high school as leaders of their class. Chris headed the bohemian set, the ones who smoked and shared pints of booze at parties and knew who Allen Ginsberg was and got terribly involved in the Class Play. The Twins were the jock senators, smoothing over the volatile relations between the athletes and the rest of the world and helping the class hold together as a unit.

By tenth grade, they were ubiquitously a trio. They even attended the Junior Prom that way, and, in a small midwestern town in the late-middle 1960s, two boys taking one girl to a dance was enough to set off a controversy, with the authorities Taking Steps and various parent groups furiously debating our Ancient Liberties and exactly where kids fit into them. But the Twins were so well liked, and so trusted, that but for a few murmurs here and there, their threesome became the prize of the prom. Youknow what Alice Thorsten—head of the Decorations Committee—said? "Our crepe-paper garlands are
nothing
next to those three!" Look, if some people are so outlandish that they make a terror of everything they do, others can, by the very command of their nature, make aberrant acts tolerable, even basic. So it was with Chris and the Twins.

The Twins did not normally date Chris. They seemed to favor dumb girls, pretty things concerned with charm bracelets and eau. Sometimes Chris wondered what it might be like to date, even marry, one of them. But she knew them too well for that. Didn't she? Imagine dating your brothers. Splashing around in Connie Dawson's parents' pool with them, going to lunch with them at Wendy's, playing championship Sorry with them in the basement (it was known as "the rec") at Tom's, then finishing off the afternoon with them in the tree house that Luke's father had built the year that Luke was born, Chris thought that never in a million could she possibly consider being physically involved with Luke or Tom, and that never in a million was she likely to meet a boy as handsome, bright, and kind. This suggested that Chris's romantic life was going to run downhill from here on, and she hadn't even had sex yet.

Luke and Tom were napping, stretched out side by side in the late-August sun that beamed in through the tree house's one great window.

Chris was taking little bites out of a slightly unripe peach, extra-hard. She hated the juicy ripe ones that leak on your clothes.

Tom exhaled, shivered a little, and turned over. Luke did the same. They were both still asleep.

Chris opened up a paperback of
Pride and Prejudice,
the last of her vacation books. Each summer, every student returning to high school had to read three novels, of the student's free choice, then report on them viva voce in English class. "
Pride and Prejudice,"
Chris saw herself saying, "is about getting past the art of a person to reach his soul."

Tom was shivering again. His free arm suddenly thrust out, came to rest upon Luke, then bent to Luke's form, holding him by the waist.

Chris put down her book, fretting about the burdens of being born midwestern in a country that makes its history on its seacoasts. Born to be uprooted, is how Chris saw herself. It wasn't an unpleasing notion, and, applying another coat of 6-12, so the blackflies wouldn't eat her for summer, she ceased to fret.

Tom stirred again and drew closer to Luke, both arms around his friend now; and the two still slept.

Chris watched them, thinking, in awe, They even breathe as one. And I'll be famous one day, one of those actresses who play the daring roles—
Of Human Bondage
in some new adaptation for the stage, seething so persuasively that the audience will become distressed. It will be said that there are walkouts during the scene in which I destroy the paintings, because of the intense satisfaction with which I go about it. Oh, yes. The New York interviewer will ask me, "Who did you love?," and I'll reply, with my secretive half smile, "The Twins." And the interviewer will say, "Ah, but where are they now?"

Hunching her shoulders up in delight, Chris returned to her book.

I wish I could tell you how it is to spend one's youth in a small town where half the families are related to the other half. The kind of town that has somehow managed to evade the plagues of business depression and natural disasters such as floods and dust. The kind that has two thousand bicycles and no bicycle locks, the kind where everyone has somewhere to go on Thanksgiving. Yes, there is the rigid winter and the greasy, bug-infested summer. Nevertheless, it is privileged to grow up in such a place, for there are no worries besides making the team or figuring out how dating works: pure childhood.