The Men from the Boys (17 page)

“Bladder ain't so strong anymore,” I tell him, and I wink.

True, on my way to Boston I'm usually anxious to get home. Some deadline to meet, some party to attend. I'm usually excited to pick up Mr. Tompkins from Melissa and Rose and share a little gossip while I'm there. But driving back to the town where I grew up elicits less of a hurry. Not that it's actually unpleasant at my parents' house. Sure, my mother says very little, and my father and brother sit all day in front of the TV, but Chanel's father has threatened to
kill
her if she ever comes home again. Tommy's parents always start weeping: “Our son, our son.” It's as if he were laid out in a casket in front of them. It's not that way for me. I just pass in and out of the house like some inconspicuous ghost, my life on hold, suspended for the duration.

“I took my mother to tea dance once,” Eduardo told me last night. He had cooked me dinner—salmon with a fine tomato sauce and a fresh Caesar salad with homemade croutons. It was really quite adorable: folded paper napkins and mismatched silverware by candlelight.

“And what was her reaction?”

“A little overwhelmed, but she liked my friends. She even danced with my friend Roxanne.”

“A lesbian?”

Eduardo nodded. “Of course, Roxanne looks like a boy.”

I shook my head. “What a difference a generation makes.”

My mother has never said the word
gay
to me. She pointedly refuses to ask about Lloyd. My father tries, occasionally, although he stumbles on Lloyd's name. Ever since I came out, my mother has not once inquired about my life, not when Lloyd and I moved in together, not when I left my job, not when I told her that Javitz was in the hospital with pneumonia. She responds with silence on the phone when I tell her such things. She changes the subject to one of the cousins, who's having his or her tenth baby or getting married for the third time.

“So challenge her,” Lloyd has urged. “Tell her it pisses you off.”

“What's the point? She's not in my life anymore.” I've just stopped telling her anything.

Once, I was jealous of my father, my brother, my sister—of anyone with whom I might have to share my mother's affection. One night, when I was very little, waking from a dream of flying monkeys and wicked witches, I shrieked for her, over and over. In the next bed, my brother, Kevin, scolded me to be quiet, to go back to sleep. I ignored him and continued to scream, but it was my father's voice I heard above me in the dark. “Jeffy, calm down,” he said, but I only screamed louder. I didn't want
Daddy.
I kicked my feet and pushed at my father's hands.

And then, in the near-dark, I saw a little red glow moving towards me. I stopped crying, with only involuntary, leftover gurgles escaping my throat. My mother sat down next to me on my bed. She removed the cigarette from her lips, the cigarette she always lit as soon as she woke up, even in the middle of the night. I watched as the little red glow made an arc in the blackness. “I'm here, Jeffy,” she said, her words taking shape in the dark. I felt the terror subside like mercury falling on a cold day. Within a few minutes I was back to sleep.

It takes four hours, not five, to get home. I pass Hartford, then head into the rolling hills of industrial Connecticut. It's hardly the image of the state from the movies: no pretty churches, no stately white homes. These are milltowns, built with old red brick and rusting iron. In the town where I grew up, the factories still stand: big old husks of brick and steel and journeymen's ghosts. I stop my car at the crest of a hill and gaze out over the ruined castles below. They have decayed ignobly for decades, many of them since before I was born. I once played among those ruins: a king—more often a queen—a knight, a mad monk, the Hunchback of Notre Dame. “Stay out of those places,” my mother scolded, but what child ever paid his mother any mind when the iron claws of a rusting factory awaited his imagination?

My father, many years before, had worked in one of my castles: as a young man, as a young husband, before he finally moved on to better things, like selling shoes—before the factories themselves moved on, leaving the town behind. “This was once a thriving place,” the old-timers in front of the post office would say, “till the factories shut down.” As a boy I'd listen to them, not comprehending their loss, their melancholy.

For as a boy, what was there to be sorrowful for? For grand adventures in ruined palaces? For long and twisting walks along daisy-dotted railroad tracks, for discovering forgotten tunnels and the occasional overturned caboose?

They've boarded up the factories now. Even from way up here I can see the signs posted to keep out. Those who dare to enter are no longer boys or imagined queens, but rather hard-eyed addicts with the map of the world etched upon their faces—men who, like my father, may have once worked in these ruined places in days gone by. Today, children do not venture into the crumbling fortresses of my youth; the moat has gone dry and the drawbridge has rotted to pulp. The sadness is now—even to the children, I suspect—palpable.

The street on which I grew up is called Juniper Lane, but there never were any juniper trees. Maples, a few old oaks, a scattering of sick elms, but no junipers. The houses are all the same, built in batches in the late 1950s, starter homes on neatly subdivided half-acre lots. “We'll get a bigger house someday,” my father always promised, but it was never to be. How did we manage all those years, three children, two adults, one bathroom, no dining room?

I pull into the driveway and sit a few seconds, breathing, before I open the door, lock it out of force of habit, then head up the cracking cement walk and step inside.

“Mother,” I say, and she pulls me to her, the palms of her hands against my shoulders.

My father embraces me roundly. “Jeff, it's good to see you,” he says.

Everyone's there: Kevin and his wife and children, my five-month-pregnant sister, Ann Marie, and her boyfriend. My mother returns to the kitchen. She's baking a ham. Good thing I gave up my experiment with vegetarianism. Once during that period I came by for dinner. My refusal to eat pork chops seemed to offend her far more than my predilection for sucking dick. “What—are you going to eat
lettuce
all your life?” she asked.

But before anyone else, I greet my old cat. He's sprawled on his back on the floral print couch we bought from Sears when I was in the tenth grade. He lifts his paws in the air to welcome me. “Aw, Junebug,” I say, nuzzling my face on his stomach. I hear his old motor kick into gear, the rattling purr that was once as smooth as a hummingbird's song. He's twenty-four years old, an amazingly ancient age in cat years—like being thirty-one (almost thirty-two) in gay years. “My old friend,” I whisper, feeling the tears well behind my eyes.

“They're coming to take his picture for the newspaper,” Ann Marie tells me. “They said he's the oldest cat in town.”

Junebug—named for the month Ann Marie and I found him, a shaky little kitten dropped out of a car by a heartless human—is the one I miss most from this place. My parents hadn't wanted him; Ann Marie and I had begged to keep him. All those nights, under the covers of my bed, reading Gordon Merrick novels, and all those days, hanging out with Stick, smoking pot, pulling on our puds—Junebug had been there, watching us with those yellow feline eyes, never judging, always understanding, always accepting. And now I was gone and he was still here: my old friend with my old family. “I miss you, Bug,” I tell him, just before my sister-in-law, Danielle, pulls me away to kiss the air to the right of my face.

“Happy birthday, Jeff,” she says, echoed by Ann Marie and the kids.

“I've still got three weeks to go,” I say, but they know I won't come home then, that there are others (faceless, nameless others) with whom I will choose to spend my real birthday.

“Well, here's a cake anyway,” my mother says, her voice quick and efficient, producing the cake from the refrigerator. It's a Duncan Hines yellow cake with canned chocolate frosting, topped with a kaleidoscope of M&M's.

“I put the candy on,” my oldest niece tells me, her eager face so like her father's, like mine. I tousle her hair.

That's it for now. They all go back to what they were doing: watching TV, yelling at the kids, talking about people I do not know or no longer remember. No one asks me anything about Lloyd, about Javitz, about my work, about how I manage to pay my bills without having a “real” job. After my father registered his disapproval when I left the newspaper, he never said another word about it, except to thrust a twenty-dollar bill at me whenever I come home. My brother speaks the least of all, choosing instead to sit in the living room and watch whatever sport happens to be playing on ESPN. Ann Marie tries, best that she can. For someone who dropped out of school when she was sixteen, she's surprisingly accepting. “How's Lloyd?” she whispers. “Good,” I tell her. “Thanks for asking.”

Maybe it's because Ann Marie knows what it's like to have disappointed the family too. High-school dropout, arrested for selling coke, shacking up with a couple of boyfriends, at least one abortion that she told us about. Now she's pregnant, and she wants this baby, desperately. She'll be
thirty
next year; my baby sister, the one I walked to kindergarten on her first day, telling her not to cry, will be thirty. I realize I don't even know her boyfriend's last name.

Neither of us lived up to the shining example of Kevin, a high-school history teacher, a baseball coach, a Knight of Columbus like my father, married in a Catholic church, the father of three children, all born within wedlock, the first child arriving exactly ten months after her parents' marriage. But Lloyd and I have been together for as long as Kevin and Danielle—longer, I think, by a couple of months. I told that to my mother once, and she went silent on me, again.

“Hey, Ma,” I say to her now, looking out the kitchen window into the backyard. “I thought you were going to plant your rock garden again this year.”

She's stirring something at the stove, her back to me. “Not enough time. It takes a lot, buying all those bulbs, planting them, weeding.”

“I miss your rock garden,” I say.

She shrugs, still not turning around to look at me.

We're alone in the kitchen. The kids are outside with their mother and Ann Marie. My father and brother and Ann Marie's boyfriend are in the living room watching the game. Just as it's always been: the segregation of the sexes, with me in the middle. I sit down at the table, snitching a pickle. I hear the men shout all at once at the TV in the other room.

“Hey,” my niece says, coming in from outside, her cheeks flushed from running. “It's Uncle Jeff's birthday and he's sitting all by himself at the table!”

I blush. My mother turns sharply at her. “It's Uncle Jeff's choice, honey. He likes to sit by himself.”

My niece shrugs and heads for the bathroom. I finish my pickle, sitting there for a few minutes, letting the angry sounds of the men in the living room rush past me. Then I stand. I walk up behind my mother, who's still stirring with that goddamned spoon. Nothing in the world needs to be stirred that much. I put my hands on her shoulders and she jumps a little. I place my lips beside her ear. “No, Mother,” I whisper. “I
don't
like to sit by myself.”

My father spies us. He probably thinks he's just interrupted a tender scene of filial love. But he's hardly in the mood to care even if that were the case. The Yankees are losing, and he's furious. He grabs a pickle, bites it in half.

“It's five and oh,” he snarls to my mother. “Don't you want to come watch the game?”

Once, my mother hated baseball. In the old days, when my father and Kevin would shout themselves hoarse at the television set, she and I would sit and talk about Aunt Loretta's most recent trip to Florida or Las Vegas, or else we'd be out weeding in her rock garden. But now, alone with my father, she's become his companion in the living room, cheering on those Yanks. My move to Boston was just one more sign of my treachery: “You'd better never become a Red Sox fan,” my father has said. Nothing to worry about there.

Now my mother turns carefully, not wanting me in her face. I've moved off a bit, leaning up against the sink. “I'll join you in a minute,” she tells my father. “And don't get so worked up. That vein is popping out on your forehead again.”

She sets down her spoon, goes to him. As I've seen a hundred times before, she smooths out the vein on my father's temple, gently massaging his forehead until he closes his eyes and breathes. Ever since he had a minor heart attack twelve years ago, he's been told to watch his blood pressure. My mother has counted his cholesterol, broiled instead of fried his hamburgers, and smoothed out the veins that pop in his head. “There,” she says gently, in a voice I remember from long ago, from the days when she would touch me with the same concern with which she touches my father now, the days when she would hold my head as I puked my guts into the toilet, retching with the flu, calming me, soothing me, comforting me.

My father smiles at her. Grateful. Their eyes hold like young lovers' in the spring, the way they must have first looked at each other some forty years ago. That, finally, is their legacy to me: their enduring love for one another, despite the disappointments of their children.

For all of my talk about recreating family, have I managed even this? My parents will be together until the day one of them dies, and it won't be because of obligation or responsibility. It will be because they have loved each other, loved each other with a constancy that seems reserved only for themselves, forsaking all others. Oh, sure they love us, they'd bend over in the proverbial backward stretch for any one of us. At least, they would have before. But the commitment is first and foremost to each other—and that's what I want, what I've
always
wanted, in my relationships. First with Javitz and then with Lloyd, I have wanted precisely what my parents have. But when the minimum expectation is this, have I merely set myself up for the inevitable disappointment? One hears a great deal about the effects of broken families on children, how psyches are damaged when parents do not love each other. Well, what about
us—those
kids cursed with parents who adore one another, who have made commitment seem so attainable, as easy as smoothing away a vein?