How Long Has This Been Going On (29 page)

"Wow!"
Tom cried, clapping and dancing like a wild man. "I should have
viewed
that! Should have been there with you!"

Luke and Chris shared a look.

Now Tom was shadowboxing. "Who won Cutest Couple?"

"Connie and Sven."

"Yeah," Tom agreed, calming down. "They should. They go so neat together."

Now Tom is pensive, in that advanced stage of drunkenness wherein the mind shakes off all trivia and flattery and is just about to clear. Chris sees that this is the moment when Tom must open up to Luke. She adored that moment when Tom kissed and held her; she would give anything to know how it would feel to be his lover, and everything not to have to know it. She is afraid of his power. Luke is easier, softer. Luke she could handle. Tom would break her.

So Chris tells Luke to take Tom home. Tom does not object. Clearheaded, he sees that the party's over. Luke takes Tom back the long way, along Madison Street, the two boys looking up at the summer sky and kicking stones out of their way and making a pointless and excessive racket because that's how they know they're alive.

"Come on," Luke told Tom, who was lagging. They were cutting through what the town referred to as "the little woods," a stray bit of park that had somehow been left undeveloped during Gotburg's construction boom in the 1950s.

"Tom!" Luke called again.

Tom wasn't moving, and Luke went back to him. In the moonlight, he saw a bottomless sorrow flash across Tom's features before coldness settled there.

"What did you tell Chris about that night?" Tom said.

Luke was silent.

"You had to tell her, didn't you?"

"Tom, your eyes were open."

"Well, I'm really sore at you now, pal."

Luke folded his arms across his chest. "You're not the only one around here with a grievance, you know that? I was going to throw college away for you and what do you do? Cut me off right out of your life!"

"I'm going to beat you up, Luke."

"No, you're not," Luke immediately replied. Then, after a moment: "How would you even
say
that?" And, after another moment: "Why would you... That's just so..."

"Because of that night."

"Tom, I... I did that because I feel so... I
need
you in some terribly painful way that is different from... what is usual. That night, I thought... maybe... you felt that way, too."

"I don't," said Tom, in a voice as mean as a file.

"It would be stupid to fight about that now. Besides, you've been fighting me all summer."

"That wasn't fighting. That was time-out. Now it's fighting,
now,
because it's been eating at me that you... pulled me in along with you."

"Okay," said Luke, angry now, and eye to eye with his friend of forever. "But you know what? I'm not fighting you, Tom. Because you're
drunk!"

"No," said Tom, strangely calm. "I
was
drunk. But now I'm very ready."

"You saphead! You think hitting me is going to change what you are?"

"It's going to show you that you're wrong about what I am," said Tom, his body English squaring off. Luke tried to grab him, but Tom struck out sure and fast at Luke's jaw, and Luke went down.

Tom was shaking his fist in pain. "Get up for more," he said, plain as plain.

Dazed, Luke scrambled up, backing away from Tom.

"I won't let you do this," said Luke, his voice low.

"Come here, now, Luke," said Tom, advancing. "Come to me like this."

Still retreating, Luke suddenly changed direction and plowed straight into Tom with a head butt, and now Tom went down.

This is war, with two sides and swiftly shifting fortunes, as Tom rears back and charges into Luke and Luke whirls to the side and makes a grab.

The boys were really scrapping now, furious and determined. They tried to trip each other up, slam each other down, sock each other silly—all because Tom thought he could kill the thing he hated by hurting what he loved. Oh, he loved Luke, all right. He loved that they were the Twins. He even loved knowing that something in Luke responded to what Tom was as no one else—not even Chris—could comprehend. He just didn't like knowing that something in himself responded to Luke in kind. Comedy is easy:
Love
is hard.

Luke was heavier but Tom had the advantage of height and speed and the added intensity of one who shatters a mirror. By the end of it, he had Luke flat on his back, and Tom was pounding him, and sobbing, and holding him, and petting him, and hating him.

Luke was trying to get away, but Tom wouldn't release him. "Listen," Tom kept saying. "Listen."

"Let me go!" Luke gasped out. "Your eyes were open!"

"Listen!" Tom insisted, but then he tore himself away and staggered up a little hill. At the crest he turned and watched Luke carefully get to his feet. The two boys looked at each other for a moment.

Tom said, "I know, you'll never forgive me for this. Well, that's fine, anyhow. Because in point of fact I want you to leave me alone."

"I will leave you alone, Tom," said Luke.

They lived next door to each other. Yet Tom went off in one direction and Luke took himself home in another.

See you in September.

"He has to be drunk to love me and drunk to hate me," Luke told Chris the next day. He wasn't badly hurt—physically—but he was vastly bruised, and he had to invent some story about some stranger in a ski mask attacking him in the woods. Some stranger.

"Probably one of the sophomore jocks," Luke told his father. "They're always trying to prove something."

His father and mother were both greatly aggrieved, and it took all of Luke's strong young sense of independence to persuade them not to call the police.

"If you do, I'll say I fell down a ravine somewhere," Luke told them. "I'll swear to it."

Luke's mother was simply bewildered, but Luke's father, remember, was smart, and he knew that people sometimes have solid reasons for making apparently airy decisions. He may even have been wise enough to figure out more or less what had happened, or at least who was involved. In the end, it came down to ailing joints and black-and-blues for a week or so, then Luke was free of it, except in his heart; and now when he and Chris shared a look, their eyes were a bit older and clearer; and Tom was virtually never around.

It was not till much later that they learned that Tom had actually been called up for his Army physical. He got off somehow, and came back on the bus from Fort Johnson so high on relief that he was seen passing out dimes to the little kids hanging around the President Street Amusement Palace, for the playing of Pokerino and Mini-Bowling and the taking of eccentric photographs, four for a quarter. When anyone asked Tom
how
he'd gotten out of the draft, he just said, "Flat feet," and grinned.

I will apprise you of what really happened: Tom told the Army doctor that he was a homosexual. Amazing? But Tom's reasoning was irreproachable. He didn't want to chance Vietnam and he couldn't see himself living in Canada. There was no alternative but this big little lie, one that many young men of the day were considering and, almost all, rejecting out of masculine pride—including many who really were homosexual.

Yeah, it's a lie, Tom told himself. It's a moment in your life. Some guidance counselor would wave you away from it, saying, It's going to be on your record forever. But what's your
record,
huh? Consider this: It's a file somewhere amid miles and miles of cabinets no one ever goes into. So I won't be president. I'll live.

Tom was not much of a student, but he was no fool. He remembered Bill Hedstrom's older brother Ken's experience at trying to dodge the war in just this way, and Tom learned from Ken's mistake. For when the Army doctor asked Ken if he also had sex with girls, Ken saw a chance to restore his mortified self-esteem and replied enthusiastically in the affirmative.

This was what the doctor was waiting for. "That proves you're not homosexual," said he, smiling as he signed Ken's death warrant—for Ken blew up with a Vietcong mine after being In Country two days.

I can't say that Tom got the same doctor, or even that this doctor was smiling. But he did quiz Tom on his sexual habits, and Tom, who had had the whole of Ken's saga from Bill, was prepared.

"I like girls well enough personally," Tom told the doctor, "but not at all physically."

The doctor went "Mmm" in a kind of tune that lay low, then suddenly jumped for a high note. "But where do you find partners for your..."

"Habits?"

"Mmm."
Very
low this time, with a tight, almost wailing high tone at the end. A real Aida, thought Tom, tense at the immensity of fate that he was trying to buy off but pleased at the way things were going.

"There are some guys in town," said Tom. "They know what to do."

The doctor got creative. "Are you the aggressor in bed, or are you..."

"In the kitchen."

"... the..."

"Kitchen, that's where. Beds are out. Kitchens are the place. Because of all those appliances."

"Mmm,"
all low notes down in the brass section, and short, stifled. Something Beethoven might have liked.

"Now, you take the toaster oven," said Tom, as the doctor stared at him in consternation. Make the nine yards, Tom was thinking; so he winked at the doctor.

The doctor did a little pencil work, and Tom was free.

I lied, he kept thinking; it's in a good cause. Maybe I should have gotten into college and Luke should have gone to the physical, because he wouldn't have had to lie to get out.

Tom continued to make himself scarce and avoid his comrades. Not once the entire summer did he enter the Dawsons' pool or put in an appearance at Sorenson's Lotta-Burger (known to the kids as the "Not-a-Burger" or the "Lotta-Nothing"). He was early off to work and late back, having added a part-time assignment helping Mr. Kjellin renovating Victorians in Caledon's up-and-coming West End.

Sometimes Tom would phone Chris out of the blue and talk about nothing for a bit, then abruptly get off. There were three topics he never mentioned: college, his work, and Luke.

So the summer passed for our friends, and so their forever was put on ice.

"It's over," Tom told Chris on the phone one night. "Summer's over now."

"That's not all that's over," she told him, getting a bit exasperated at having to broker this increasingly strange relationship from the middle position.

"Yeah," Tom said, drawing it out, and adding "well" as slow as it goes. "That's how the pigskin bounces."

"I'll tell you something, Tom," she said. "Hang up on me if you need to. Lounging around at the Dawsons' pool is over, yes. Football and the drama club are over. But you and Luke are not over, Tom. Not by a long haul to Racine."

"Never in a million," Tom laughingly said, hanging up.

Tom, that night, was in his room packing for Berkeley, as his mother came in and out with Things: Things Maybe to Take, on one hand, and Things That Could I Please Throw Out After All These Years? on the other. Every third trip up to Luke's room, his mother was weeping, but she was so happy for him that the tears felt like a rain of candy.

"I remember when you were about to make your first visit to Grandma Compton's in Middlefort," said Luke's mother, Mary Ellen Reid Van Bruenninger, "and how intrigued you were about visiting another town. You thought everything was going to be the opposite of Gotburg."

She was sewing elbow patches onto Luke's corduroy jacket, because—she said—that was the new sophisticated look in the cities.

"Remember, Luke? You kept bringing us your storybooks and your magic-show tricks and asking us if Middlefort was going to be like that."

"Golly, Mom, I was four years old."

"Then when it was time to leave for Middlefort you locked yourself in the cellar. Remember?"

Luke, trying to decide whether to pack his old book bag or invest in something native when he hit the Berkeley campus, said, "I did that?"

"Uh-huh.
There."

Luke's mother proudly held up the jacket.

"Mom, I don't know if they wear a lot of jackets at Berkeley. It's pretty nonconformological there."

"'Look well to date well' is how they put it when I was your age, young man. Mark me, women always go for a dressy fellow. I've probably told you a thousand times how your father swept me into his heart in that black pin-striped suit of his—the only one of its kind, I'm certain, in all Saint Cloud. With the red-and-gray tie and the gray handkerchief falling out of his pocket."

"You
have
told me a thousand times."

"Well, the more you tell it, the truer it gets."

"Time for the men to talk," said Luke's father, coming in.

"Mark?" Luke's mother asked Luke's father, holding the patched jacket against her son.

"Whatever he wants," said Luke's father.

"Luke?" she asked.

"It's fine, Mom. Don't make a big scene."

"Needless to say," she replied, weeping again. "One day they're locking themselves in the basement because they're afraid of Grandma Compton and the next day or so they're going to California, and all they can tell you about that is, Don't make a scene."

"I'm still afraid of Grandma Compton," said Luke.

"Me, too," said his father. "What does it for you, Luke? Her whiskers, or the gigantic biting teeth of doom?"

"I can take the patches off, Luke, if you so wish."

"They're
fine.
Just stop
doing
stuff, please?"

"Food," said Luke's mother, raising a forefinger to demonstrate the wisdom and efficiency of the motherly arts. "Sandwiches and snacks for the bus."

"Mom, it's a three-and-a-half-hour ride."

"Yes, but you're making an early start, and you won't eat before, and there's the plane, and suddenly..." Now she was really crying, and she turned to Luke's father, who held her with a sadly wry smile. He winked at Luke, but he was somewhat broken up about this, too, for, as all upper-middle-class parents know, they belong to you till ten or eleven, and they share themselves with you till seventeen or so; but when they leave for college, you lose them absolutely.