The Tricky Part: One Boy's Fall from Trespass into Grace (32 page)

It appears.

It’s the same size, the same black print as every other name on the page, but it seems to be lit from within. To shimmer.

It’s his parents, not him. I recognize the address. I’d been there once or twice with Bob when we were on our way to the mountains. My index finger rests there under the letters.
So they’re alive
, I think.
Or one of them is, anyway. Mother? Father?
I’m astonished that they’re actually listed. Wouldn’t they opt to hide, to be out of print? Don’t they know that they have a son who went to jail for molesting children? It strikes me as rather brave, or perhaps as a kind of defiance . . . or denial?

C
—. A Germanic-sounding name. Or, maybe, Russian? Who knows? I never asked about his family. So many things I never knew about him. Where did he grow up? What sort of childhood did he have? What happened to him? Did he ever live at this address?

I place a hand on my chest.
Calm down. Just looking
, I think, even as my eyes, my arm, act on their own. Dialing. Four digits, then hanging up. Pause. Five numbers, then hanging up.
Crazy, this is crazy
. I walk out of Mom’s room, down the hall, and into the kitchen. Drink a glass of water, gaze out at the quiet street. The old ash tree is in bloom. Sunny. Everyone at work, at school. I walk back and dial again. It rings. My God—a voice.

“Hello?”

His mother
.

In the silence before she repeats her greeting, her face comes back to me instantly. Pale, wrinkled skin, ivory-colored glasses, a bun of white hair—a grandmotherly mother. “Hello?” she says again. It’s a kind, tremulous voice, just as I remember.

“Yes, hi. Hello . . . you probably don’t remember me. My name is Marty Moran and I lived in Denver years ago and your son was a . . . a close friend of mine and I moved away a long time ago and lost track of him. I always wondered what happened to him. He had such an influence on my life.” I feel myself playing the part, good boy, all snake oil and charm. But what I’ve said feels as full of truth as it does deceit. “He was a good friend and I always wanted to get back in touch.”
Back in touch . . . Christ, does she get a lot of these calls? Maybe she’s about to tell me he’s dead or, at least, dead to her
. There’s a long pause. She’s about to hang up, I think, and I ask, “Is he around town still? Might I reach him?”

She asks me to repeat my name.

“Well . . . Marty, how good of you to try and contact Bob. Where do you live now?”

“New York.”

“Oh, far from the West. What brought you all the way out there, may I ask?”

“The theater. I ended up becoming an actor.”

“Oh, that must make for an interesting life.”

“Sometimes, yes.”

“I think I do remember you, you were in the spelling bee weren’t you? All those years ago? You did very well.”

“Yes, that’s me.”

“Yes . . . I remember. Bob was proud of you.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yes. . . . well . . . he cared. He tried to do good for a lot of people.”

Fuck, he’s dead
, I think, realizing that I harbor a belief he’s someone who would have been gravely ill. Or murdered. Then she says,

“You know, he’s had a rather rough time of it. Some hard years. But I think things are better for him now. More positive.
(He’s alive!)
That’s the thing, you know, we’ve got to try and see things positively.”

“I find that, too.”

“You know, I’ve become a member of a wonderful church that helped me see things in a brighter light. Do you have a church you go to in New York?”

“Not formally, no. Not at the moment.”

“It’s amazing the way a bit of faith can go a long way in opening our eyes to the wonder of being.”

“Do you have an address for Bob?”

I picture the space between us going red, somehow, with her suspicion. It’s as if I have a fish on the line and I have to make just the right tug to hook it.

“Well,” she finally says, “I think I could give you his phone number.”

I find it interesting that she doesn’t want to give me his location. As if she’s promised him she won’t do that. Is she afraid I’ll hunt him down? Or send someone to get him? She reads out the number. I don’t recognize the area code. I scribble it on the back of a housepainter’s business card that’s sitting on my mother’s nightstand.

“Thanks.”

“Good luck, all blessings to you in New York. Goodbye.”

“Bye.”

I stare at the ten figures for a long time. I can’t believe it. A series of numbers, a map that could lead back to him. Finally, after several attempts, I manage to dial. My heart is furious, hoping for an answering machine.

“Hello.”

Fatigued, nasal, cavalier. The sound of him is astonishing. Something within me thrashes, leaps through my skin, as if a particular vibration had been trapped and waiting in my body for years, waiting for just the right frequency to erupt:
That’s him!

“Hello,” I say. “You may not remember me. It’s been twenty years. I’m Marty Moran. I knew you when I was a boy.”

“Of course I remember you. I remember you well.” He sounds very calm and it occurs to me, instantly, that this is the tone of someone I would know now to avoid. Unctuous, that’s the word. He sounds unctuous. “You were a great kid,” he says. “Sure, I remember you.” The mountain, the myth I’ve made of him is shrinking to the size of my inner ear. A lonely hum, a little man.

“Where are you?” I ask.

“A small town in California . . . a nowhere kind of place. I’m glad you caught me. I’ve been away for a long time in the hospital with a back injury. You know . . . the kind of work I do has always been very physical and, well, my body isn’t what it used to be. I’m fallen apart.”

Oh, he’s smooth
, I think. He jabbers as if I’m an old friend, chats like the con man he’s always been. “Where are you?” he asks.

“I live in New York.”

“What do you do there?”

“I’m an actor.”

“I always knew you were special. Such a talented kid.”

“You say that to all the boys?”

I can’t believe I’ve said this. That I’ve made this stab at something
real
and dangerous and I can feel us both waiting now to see where this is headed. The pause continues and then he simply says,

“No.”

He’s been through this before. I can feel it. I can almost sense the chorus of kids-become-men who’ve called him. I don’t rush to fill the silence. I feel myself reaching down for strength, for directness, and I say, “That was quite a time in my life, you know? A lot happened when I knew you.”

“Yes.”

“Bob. We had sex.”

“Sex wasn’t the only part of our relationship.”

“Do you have any idea how much I think of you? Of what happened?”

“It does no good to dwell on the past. I’ve made my peace with God. I hope you do too.”

I can feel the door closing. No remorse there, nothing to talk about. My stomach is tied in knots. I want to say just the thing, explode with a genuine anger that might pry things open, lead us to a heart-to-heart or some kind of all-out fight. But I’m stunned by his sureness, his self-righteousness. I can think of nothing to say. After more silence he says, “Write to me if you can. I’d sure like to know about your life, how and what you’re doing. Here’s my address.”

Obedient boy, I scribble it under his phone number and stick the card in my wallet. When I hang up the phone I feel, at first, some strange glimmer of relief. A kind of triumph. I walk around the house thinking,
At least I did it. I called the bastard, I heard his voice, I whittled the whole thing down to size. The size of a tired old laborer in a ramshackle house. Write him? He’s not worth it, I’ll never write him. Forget it. The end. Ever after, amen
.

I walk to the kitchen and look out the window, past the mountain ash. The tree is thick, four times the size it was when I was a kid. As I stare toward the orange disk of the late-afternoon sun, whatever flicker of relief I feel gets swallowed into a wave of dread. My body, source of endless trouble, screams,
Go! Get Some!
My knees are practically shaking with it. And that’s it. I’m off, a madman. I get into the car and drive straight to a place I know on Colfax Avenue, where I can touch a stranger until I am senseless with it.

I’
M LATE
. H
E’S
already in bed.

The lamp is turned low. Henry is lying faceup, his hands folded carefully over his chest. Eyes closed. I see the gray wires flowing from the speakers in his ears. He’s awake and listening. I watch his chest rise and fall with his breath.

I put down my pack, place my wallet on the bureau.

“What you listening to?” I ask.

“Mozart.”

I move to the closet to hang up my clothes, go to wash my face, brush my teeth. I come back and crawl in next to him. One of his hands moves over and rests on my stomach. He scoots over so that our hips touch. “How was your audition?” he asks.

“It went OK. I think I might get a callback.”

“If they’re smart.”

“Did you hear anything about the movie?” I ask.

“Just that I’m still up for it.”

“The air conditioner folks come tomorrow, between eleven and one.”

“I’ve got yoga.”

“I’ll be here. If they even come. They’re so screwy. God, I’m anxious.”

Henry switches off the music, turns and wraps his arms around me.

“What about?” he asks.

“Everything. Work, money . . . you know.
Me
.”

His lips find mine. I understand his kiss with every nerve in my body. I reach over and switch off the light.

“I love you,” he whispers.

“I’m so glad you do.”

We kiss again. It’s like picking up on a conversation we’ve been having for a very long time. And tonight, suddenly, there’s a need to speak of everything and I will not disappear.
I’m right here
, I tell him, with every inch of my skin. We press close and closer. Desire and safety, all at once. That’s what hits me, each time it happens. Hits me so hard. This much desire wrapped inside this much sanctuary. And it’s unspeakably sweet to move across this sanctum. The one I know so well.

When all is said and done, I sink into the music-filled sweetness of him. And we drift, together, toward our separate sleeps.

Grace
.

It is the word that comes to me as I lay there with him.

I’m never sure exactly what it means, but I try to think of all the ways it’s defined.

Mercy.

Divine assistance.

Charm, courtesy, and kindness.

A reprieve.

God, yes, a reprieve, that’s right. His arms around me, a reprieve.

The Catholics, of whom I suppose I will always be one, speak of grace as something God gives us to become partakers of the divine nature of eternal life.

It’s a prayer before a meal.

It’s a musical trill.

Well, that’s it. I’m in the arms of music. A passport to the infinite, as Winnie used to say. Can a person be that for us?

This one thing I know. I am at rest where I belong.

Lucky.

T
HIRTY-SIX AND
a half years old and one spring evening a man ten years my junior slid in under the radar.

The lousy word,
cheating
, always makes me think of my French teacher, Ms. Palmer, the one and only lady amid all the Jesuits back at Regis High. She caught me one desperate day with irregular verbs written on a card underneath my shoe and with her jet-black eyes suddenly towering over me said, “Looking for answers in all the wrong places, aren’t you Mr. Moran?” I felt I might die for shame. She didn’t send me to JUG. Said she was sure it was a rare indiscretion.

Now the rules, the promises I’d broken, were my own.

I paced the living room, out of breath, telling Henry there was a terrible puzzle. A twisted riddle in my chest. That my body was plunging down a dark chute. “What are you talking about?” he asked. “You’re making no sense.”

“I’m
seeing
this boy,” I said. “I’m losing my marbles.”

He turned to me with the simple force that is his integrity, the part of him I’m convinced is rooted right to the center of the earth, and with nothing but a look nearly knocked me to the floor. “Stop,” he said. “
Enough
. “I thought my chest would cave in.

It wasn’t any kind of bliss or new love, this affair. That, I suppose, would have been a conversation of another order. No, this had all the familiar numbing qualities of my age-old compulsion. But worse was that it came after a long period of relative calm and that it wasn’t my usual MO—the quick, anonymous fix. One encounter with this guy turned into a few. And that morphed into a month and then another marked with secret trysts. It was obsession of a new intensity. My anxiety screamed,
Shame
, it screamed,
Who do you think you are?
It shrieked,
You don’t deserve a good life
.

With Henry’s help and some health insurance, I got myself back into therapy. Recommended by our good friend Brooks, she was the first female shrink I’d ever gone to. I call her Carolyn now, all these years later, but when I first walked into her West Side office in the fall of 1996, I called her simply Doctor, and prayed it would be over quick.

She sat in a comfy swivel chair. I chose the blue couch near the window. Her hair was beautifully coifed. Blond. She had gold earrings, a smart black pantsuit. A New York gal. I stared out at tugboats on the Hudson, wanting to be anywhere but sitting in the middle, once again, of my own sorry-assed trouble. I told her the only thing I knew was that my life had got away again. That whatever was good about it had to do with Henry and I was fucking it up. I struggle with addiction, I remember telling her, but I wonder what it is I’m actually addicted to. Chaos? Sometimes I think it’s the adrenaline of chaos. I rambled for a session or two about passion. That maybe that’s what was at the bottom of this affair. That I wanted to feel twenty again, you know, one of those midlife crises. What is passion? I kept asking. How does any couple keep it alive?