The Sea of Light (59 page)

“How so?”

Because, I told her, not being different in America can lull you, can cripple you—even though it seems desirable to everyone, even though everything in the society pressures you into sameness—it is a handicap in the end. A handicap to live without knowing the struggle of difference—in all of its pain, its fear, its celebration, its compassion.

She thought this through. Gave a skeptical look. Saying Well, maybe, but if that’s true it’s something she herself has never experienced.

“That’s because you don’t have gay friends.”

“I’ve never really felt the need.”

“But I think the need’s there, sweetie, whether you acknowledge it or not. When you don’t have that—a small group or a community of friends—not even
friends,
exactly, but people who
reflect
you, who share in or at least identify with your most intimate reality—you tend to feel utterly isolated, almost as if you’re the last of your species, ill at ease in the world. As if you
belong
less than anyone else. As if you are
worth
less than anyone else, than all the straight people walking around proclaiming their self-righteous view of normality without even
knowing
that that’s what they’re doing—because that kind of careless insensitivity, it’s so deeply, habitually ingrained, that in a way you learn not to expect anything better from them.”

She listened, skepticism still in her eyes. Somehow, though, I am hitting home, and know it. Hallelujah, I thought—and I didn’t stop talking.

“But when you more or less surround yourself by a community of queers”—I watch her silently wince at the word, and I smile—“you create a different universe within that seemingly larger whole, a universe in which
you
are the norm, in which
you
are accepted and acceptable. You relax. You laugh, you love, you can suffer loss and openly grieve. Your passions stop embarrassing you so badly! And you begin to see that, in a very profound way, you can be sustained and have a good life with
out
all those straight people! Because the fact of the matter is that
we really don’t need them.”

“You sound pretty separatist,” she teased. “Like all those phony feminists.”

“Screw the feminists. I’m talking about
lesbians.”

She laughed. “Good.”

“Yes—see? We don’t need the straights! Not
any
of them.”

“I don’t know, Chick. The world’s pretty big. I think maybe we all need each other.” She ran fingers over my shoulder, my neck. There was a tenderness to her, now, that I’d never directly experienced before; and, for a moment, I got the sense that our customary roles had reversed. She seemed much, much older than me. Kinder. Wiser.

“Another thing,” she said quietly. “Not that I want to impede the progress of truth, beauty, or justice, mind you.” She smiled. “But when you talk about creating a world in which you are the norm, you forget that norms can be deadening. Most notable accomplishment—I mean in sport, but also in the rest of life—is highly abnormal. Winning, for instance—it can never be the norm.
Not
winning,
not
exceeding,
not
being special—those are the norms. And do you really want that?”

She’d scored a point. I told her fine, and accurate, and perceptive—but her worldview avoided the whole issue of pride, of self-worth.

“And listen, Bren—don’t you want to be proud of what you are? Don’t you feel you deserve to be?”

“Maybe. But, you know, I’m not that interested in storming around being
proud
all the time. I know about that, I see it in the kids on my team a lot—when you’re that proud of yourself you’re arrogant, and when you’re arrogant it’s because you’re afraid—you’re afraid because you feel like you have something to lose, and whatever that something is, it’s always on the line. You’re always defending it, always more or less defensive. Personally, I say, give me the swimmer with nothing to lose. Pride doesn’t impede her. And she can experience fear, or pain, but it doesn’t stop her—she just throws her guts all out on the table and gets on with things—”

“Win or lose?”

“Win or win. I mean, pride is like talent, Chick—right? It only gets you so far. The rest is work. And acceptance—”

“Of the work?”

“Sure. And of your own little self, doing the work.”

She was right. We both were. But, saying all these things, she had looked quite beautiful. I stopped being proud then, and stopped being afraid. Accepted what I wanted. Accepted
that
I wanted. I pushed her down by the shoulders—firmly, but gently, because the joints were aging now, required surgery, would never be the same, and I treasured every ruined inch of them the way I treasured her, and how she’d accepted the pain of them, and of work, and Kay, and me.

Come here, I said.

I am here, she said.

It was true. Then I kissed her with my lips and tongue, as long and as fully as I could, and I wanted to pour myself all over her, wanted to give her every good, blissful feeling in the world.

Now, lady, I told her, let’s see just how good we can make you feel.

Oh, she whispered, closed her eyes, opened them. Well, okay.

She pulled me down to cover her like a blanket. I could see a dark fireplace, lamplight, could see a dog tail flick. I kissed her mouth again. She liked it. I told her she was much more than a friend. I told her that I loved her, that I had loved her all my life.

Angelita

Babe called tonight from the Emergency Room. Rough day, she said, worse evening. Patient saturation. She was putting in the overtime because of this last-minute crisis: post-traumatic stress victims, just a bunch of kids really, survivors of a bad, bad boating accident near the Bay that had left two drowned, one in serious condition, the others emotionally comatose—runaways, it looked like, who had stolen a boat. There’d been cameras and reporters crawling all over the paramedic crew, and if I wanted to I’d probably catch it on the eleven o’clock news.

But the real reason she was calling, after all, was to apologize, and complain. She loved me. She was sorry to miss dinner. She was too, too tired, sick of taking care of everyone but herself. But would I tell Kenny that she’d come in later to kiss him goodnight?

I love you, too, I told her. It’s okay about dinner—I burned it anyway, you know me—so Kenny and I ordered pizza. And I’m sorry you’re so tired. When you come home, we will hold you.

I didn’t tell her the rest. I figured I’d do
that later, when things were safe and warm. She did catch something in my voice, though, and asked Is there anything wrong, Ellie? No, I lied, just twilight blues. Stay sane, Doc. Get your rear end home safely.

* * *

Kenny and I make a mess. Pizza sauce and cheese and hot Italian peppers all over the counter, the table, the rug, his shirt. TV blares cartoons. Mobile toys turn our hallways into traffic hazards.

Learning to walk put him immediately into Search and Destroy mode. There are protective cases over everything: outlets, phone jacks, extension cords. He’s big, like his mother, toppling whatever he does not like, racing clumsily to embrace and slurp over whatever he approves of, gnawing things apart with his full, expressive lips and hands.

My relationship with him is strange—a bizarre combination of substitute mother, big sister, and partner in crime—but, nevertheless, it’s affectionate and workable. Often, like tonight, I’m the indulgent baby-sitter; crawling on the floor too, bouncing on sofa cushions, ramming my head into chair edges and crying, placating myself and him with ice cream and sweets. An evening together leaves us mutually stained with tomato paste, licorice, diaper slime. We keep each other company in front of cable TV. Finish up a third dessert. Play horsey and airplane. Trip over bright plastic objects on our way to the bath.

Finally, among miniature bobbing beach balls, floating ships, baby shampoo and white bubbles, he splashes me contentedly and consents to become clean from the strong toe ends of his ample, pudgy feet to the thick, dark, curling hair that crowns him. When the tub drains he cries, suddenly passionate about the water; then stops for a towel-down, tears forgotten.

I read him to sleep in his own bright and busy room. There are brilliantly colored posters on the walls here, advertising events and exhibits concerning things African, Cuban, Hispanic, Jewish, gay. He doesn’t understand the book words yet, but likes their sounds, and the deep-colored pop-out pictures that go with them. I have read this particular one at least a thousand times. Something about a cat and a rat. I don’t even listen to it myself, but—next to Babe, and baths, and me—it is the great, great passion of his life.

When he dozes off I cover him to the chest, leave two nightlights on. I shove mobile hazards against the hallway walls to clear a path, turn off the TV, dump dishes into the sink, sponge down all besmudged surfaces. I can hear him if he moves, or cries. I can hear a sound outside—a car, or footsteps—and, in the silence, I can anticipate, work, stay vigilant.

Still, confronted with my own presence now, alone, I must face the nighttime differently. Kenny, Babe, eating, bathing—all have been great buffers between myself and this loss. A little afraid, plenty weary, I sit on the couch with just myself and Chick’s letter. Open it again, and read through.

Because here, by myself, I can cry.

I do.

*

Later, I move to the office. It’s next door to Kenny’s room, across the hall from ours. Shelves are packed with books and magazines; the walls with framed photographs and article headings and book jackets, a bulletin board on which memos and scrawled phone numbers are tacked amid a hanging clutter of age-group and collegiate swimming medals. There are stuffed file cabinets. A hand-held cassette recorder. Two typewriters, one of which works. A computer. A. printer.

I turn on specially developed lights—a combination of soft yellow-white and fluorescent that is guaranteed to relieve both writer’s block and competitive stress—and sit in a special lumbar-supporting swivel chair at the computer, pressing buttons. Electronic lights beep and blink. I think about Babe’s post-trauma kids in ER, and Kenny, and the letter. The day floods through me. I start to write:

Rescue helicopters hovered over the water like great metal dragonflies. Below bobbed fragments of the 747 that had gone down more than two days ago, filled to capacity and carrying with it all the members of Southern University’s top-ranked NCAA Division I swim team. No one expected survivors.

It had been one of the worst storms to hit the Triangle in years. Winds gusted to 150 miles an hour and more, swells rose higher than eighty feet, the ocean turned a savage gray color. Meteorologists dubbed the storm Angelita
—
Little Angel.

Now, though, turquoise swells rippled mildly below, capped with white froth. It was as if this bright calm covered the entire surface of the earth, as if green-blue ocean had always spread everywhere like an undulating mirror of tranquility and always would. Sun seared the tropical sky unbroken by a single cloud. It was hard to believe in Angelita today.

There wasn’t much left of the airliner: a few decimated wing parts, some salt-ravaged chunks of material that appeared to be seat cushions.

U.S. Patrol ships cruised the area in their own search. Sometimes they’d launch an inflatable. Navy frogmen went off the sides backwards, hands gripping face masks, lead weights circling their waists. If there’d been survivors after the crash, chances were they wouldn’t have lasted an hour in the clutches of Angelita, with or without a flotation device.

But the airliner’s demise had made headlines for two nights running, and, back on the mainland, scores of relatives clung to a hope that wouldn’t die.

“Gringo to Chico. Over.”

In his hovering bubble of glass and metal, Alonzo sighed. “What is it, Stu?”

“I got news for them down there.” The voice crackled harshly from the instrument panel. “No fins, no bodies. Those Navy boys are a bunch of bozos. They say hammerheads got brains the size of a pea. But how much you want to bet, a hammerhead at least knows where to look? Listen, you want to hear a story? Over.”

Alonzo’s eyes searched the blue swells. “Not really,” he muttered, but audio never picked it up. Something tugged at his insides. Nausea, maybe, mingled with an odd sense of expectation. Overtired, he told himself. Too many searches futile, too many end in failure, a bad storm at sea is indeed death’s little angel
—
no more, no less
—
but lately this thought had pierced his logical armor, led him through increasingly frequent moments of black nothingness. These moments had gone unnamed until a recent night when he’d woken in a bath of his own sweat, suddenly knowing the name. Now he scanned the waters below, hot with useless hope.

“Ever hear the Chinaman’s advice to beginning divers, Chico? Over.”

“No, Stu. I never did.”

“Confucius say, always dive with buddy and always carry knife. If you see shark, take out knife. Stab buddy. And beat it the hell out of there. That’s an old proverb,
señor.
You can tell that to your mama-san. Over.”

Sunlight streaked the water a shimmering platinum. It burned Alonzo’s eyes and he nosed the chopper down by instinct. One of the inflatables had edged close to something. A piece of material, discolored beyond recognition
—
one of those flotational seat cushions
—
he was surprised it had lasted so long. No, it wasn’t a seat cushion after all but something that resembled a bloated mannequin, stiff and crusted white with salt. The divers had gone crazy, surrounding it. They’d even sent in a couple of guys with electric prods to buzz off the man-o’-wars.