I pretended I hadn’t recognized Grayson and proceeded to the line in front of the check-in desk at the flight gate. But I could feel him behind me even before he put a hand on my shoulder.
I shook it off and stepped away.
“How the hell did you find me? Did you follow me to Biggleswood and back?”
“Biggleswood? Have you been visiting someone named Bilbo Baggins by any chance?” He gave one of his smirks.
“I have a plane to catch. Please stop stalking me.”
“It’s been delayed forty-five minutes.” Grayson pointed at the message board above the desk. “Hey, I just want to talk to you. To say I’m sorry. And I’m not stalking you. I saw your ticket after that Afrikaans bitch stole it, so I knew you were leaving at one PM on TWA today. It was so totally uncool that she ripped you off. I had no idea…”
I so much did not want to deal with this.
“OK, so you’ve apologized. Now go away. Alistair said you were hanging around American Express looking for me. Are you competing for some kind of creepiness prize?”
Grayson’s smile changed from cocky smirk to something bordering on sincere.
“Oh crap, I know how this must look. But I really have to talk to you about something. Let me buy you a coffee?” He gestured toward a nearby snack bar.
The place was open to the passersby and I saw an airport security guard keeping an eye on us, so I shrugged and said I could use a caffeine fix. I guess I was curious about this new aspect of Grayson Bell.
We sat at one of the tiny tables and ordered two coffees. He stuttered a bit and then launched into his spiel.
“I need to apologize for what I said about your uncle. I’ve been feeling crappy about it ever since. I was wasted and I had been for weeks. I have no idea why I told you he was gay.”
“Maybe because he is?”
“Wow. You knew all along?” My simple statement brought a number of remarkable changes to Grayson Bell’s face. First he looked incredulous, then flustered—then full of smiley relief.
“That’s why you’re following me—to apologize for calling my gay uncle gay?”
His smile went sheepish.
“Pretty much. I didn’t want you to tell your Aunt—or make any kind of trouble for Con. He’s a fantastic man. A beautiful man. It’s not his fault he fired me. I was set up.” Sudden tears moistened Grayson’s eyes. “I had a hard time forgiving him—or forgiving the whole damned world, but I loved the bastard. I still do.”
My brain took a moment or two to process this.
“You’re gay? You were involved with Uncle Con? Why did you come on to me?”
“I’m, um, kind of bi. I was having a thing with both those South Africans, but it was getting old. That’s why I thought if we got it on—you and me—maybe we could travel together, you know, and I could get away from those people. I knew things were going to get kinky and they did. I thought your Bryn Mawr friends would have told you—it’s why they threw us out.”
The orgy. Now I understood.
Grayson gave a grim laugh. “After that, things really went downhill. The assholes robbed me—took my travelers checks, credit cards, even my passport. It took me two weeks to get hold of my parents to get some money wired to me, so I’ve been sleeping in parks and panhandling for food. It’s given me a chance to do some head-clearing. That’s when I decided I had to find you.”
Amazing how a few reasonable sentences can turn your mind around 180 degrees. Plus the way Grayson’s face changed and got real. He’d been a creepy heterosexual because he didn’t know how to be one. Like a narc trying to act cool.
“You really loved my Uncle Con? He wasn’t just some old sugar daddy to you?”
Grayson gave a half smile.
“My family has as much money as the Conways. No. He’s… just a sweet, sweet guy. I still don’t know who trashed his office, or how his whiskey found its way to my desk, but I guess I would have been furious too. Con thought I’d betrayed him—that I was some drunk who’d give his secret away. If he only knew how hard I’d worked to keep it.” His eyes teared again.
I took his hand and squeezed it. “Like letting Aunt Livy try to match-make for you at the Christmas Open House?”
He gave a big laugh.
“She’s an amazing lady. And I like Wogs. I like her a lot.”
And now I was getting to like Grayson, too. But he probably wasn’t going to like me. Not after what I was going to tell him. I gathered my courage and launched into the tale of Alistair’s cruel prank with Uncle Con’s Crown Royal. I didn’t tell him how I’d gloated with Alistair about it, just last week. I was too ashamed.
When I finished my sorry tale, Grayson stared at me for a few moments, his face a mask. Finally he drained his cup and breathed a big sigh.
“Here I’ve been feeling so sorry for myself. You’re the one I should pity. You’re still with that asshole?”
“Not, um…not really.”
“You just lived with him for the last month and a half and let him ferry you to the airport in his chauffeured Bentley.”
“It’s not his Bentley. It belongs to…” I stopped when I realized there was no point in defending myself. I had no defense. I’d brought Alistair into Grayson’s world and Alistair had shattered it. And I’d applauded the whole thing. At least after the fact.
Grayson stood and threw a few coins on the table for a tip.
“See you around,” he said.
The day after I arrived in Boston, even before I’d slept off my jet lag, I wrote a letter to Uncle Con telling him what Alistair had done. Then I told him I’d run into Grayson in London—and said Grayson “wanted to be remembered to him.” A polite understatement I hoped would give a more important message and do something to heal the wounds Alistair had inflicted.
I also wrote a letter to Mrs. Poirier in Kennebunkport asking for Jack’s APO address. Maybe I could send him a cheery note—give him a reminder of me that didn’t involve barf. It was painful to think of him maybe dying over there, not knowing how much I liked him.
I was lucky I’d only scheduled three days at home before I took the train back to Bryn Mawr, because my dad’s new wife, Mary Margaret, was going to take some getting used to. She had already moved her things into the house—and she had lots of them: Holy Mother statuettes; praying hands nightlights; throw pillows cross-stitched with Bible verses, and enough crucifixes to start her own cult.
My own room was fairly tchotchke-free, but it was filled with huge boxes—mostly containing toilet rolls and paper towels—which Mary Margaret got wholesale from her brother who owned a janitorial service. There was a path to my bed and if I hopped over things, I could open the closet and a few dresser drawers, but that was it.
But Dad seemed happy, and Mary Margaret was sweet. She was probably only about fifteen years older than me, but she’d obviously had some wear and tear before she got sober. Actually, they were kind of adorable together. If they were happy and he was sober, I didn’t mind if they were using my bedroom for a supply closet.
I wondered if there would ever be a time when I could tell my dad I’d finally recovered my memories of Count Santa Claus and what I’d done. I wished I could tell him I knew now what he must have gone through with my mother—first her infidelity, and then her suicide—probably from grief over the man I killed. No wonder he’d crawled into a bottle. After he’d been sober for a while, maybe we could talk. Not now.
My Bryn Mawr dorm seemed strange without the Brontës, the last of whom had graduated in June. So had everybody else who used to call me “Saint Nick,” which compensated for the loss of my card-playing companions. I was happy not to have anything in my life that reminded me of Count Santa Claus.
There was a new crop of freshmen to be taught Sergeant-Major, plus more Vietnam protests and stirrings about the Watergate mess, so I had a few things to distract me from preparing for comprehensive exams and my senior paper on Virginia Woolf’s pre-suicide novel, Between the Acts.
But the Vietnam news I was hoping for did not come. Mrs. Poirier did send me Jack’s address, and I wrote him a short, newsy letter telling him I’d arrived home safely, thanking him for “the fantastic day in Stratford-upon-Avon”—a hint at the good times, but nothing too romantic. It was mostly to let him know he was on my mind, and how much I’d like to hear from him and know he was safe.
But I didn’t hear. Not one word.
Words from Biggleswood in Bedfordshire, on the other hand, arrived weekly. Alistair sent reams of elegantly phrased missives and bon mots from the world of Delia and Sir Thomas. The notes were newsy, friendly and devoid of passion.
Not that I wanted any postal passion from Alistair, but it was all so odd. I suppose he was keeping up appearances with Delia, writing weekly to his “fiancée.” I wrote back a few lines—usually on a postcard showing a scene of the campus.
One time he wrote a more personal letter, which was full of flattery about my looks and “unstudied charm.” It was kind of nice, so I composed a couple of pages thanking him for all the lovely times we’d had. I also told him he was the most honest fraud I’d ever met because his phoniness was right there on the surface—the whole Savile Row, Gatsby thing, which I told him was charming. I guess it was. I had been charmed by it once.
But mostly his world seemed distant and phony and trivial—and after my encounter with Grayson—just a little sinister. I was kind of relieved when the frequency of the letters petered out as the semester wore on.
But I kept hoping for something from Jack, so I haunted the dorm mailboxes, getting more and more worried that the worst had happened. I wasn’t sure if Mrs. Poirier would tell me if she got horrible news. I asked Aunt Livy if she’d heard anything, but I couldn’t count on her to notice the doings of the hoi polloi.
One afternoon in November, Lois walked by as I stared at my empty mailbox. We both had single rooms now, and I didn’t see much of her.
“Waiting for a letter from England?” I didn’t remember telling her about my reconnection with Alistair, but I suppose word had got around. “Is that guy still claiming to have gone to Princeton?”
I shook my head, feeling defensive.
“No. I’m looking for a letter from Vietnam. An old friend. He was supposed to ship out over a month ago, but I haven’t heard a thing.”
“I’m not surprised. Since you used to date one of those anti-war crazies. He probably finds it hard to relate.”
Her words hit a painful place in my soul. Billy Bradford. What if Jack had found out about Billy? Maybe that’s why he hadn’t written—it didn’t mean something awful had happened. I’d dated a Weatherman. I guess that could seem even more off-putting to a soldier than barfing in his shoes.
As Christmas approached, I still hadn’t heard from Jack. But one blustery December day, Wogs and Judy breezed into the dorm. Judy’s leg was pretty much healed, although she had a bit of a limp. They announced they were over the San Francisco thing and were on their way to buy some farmland in Vermont. I was ecstatic to see them. There was so much I wanted to talk to Wogs about—all the Count Santa Claus stuff and her dad and Grayson and of course Jack—stuff I didn’t feel quite right just throwing into a letter. But they had old professors to visit and friends to party with and somehow we never got any time alone.
Christmas was something of a chore, because Dad and I were required to visit all of Mary-Margaret’s relatives in South Boston—there had to be twelve separate households. We ate Christmas dinner itself at her mother’s house, where no fewer than twenty-nine of us sat on folding chairs around amassed card tables, stuffing ourselves with Butterball turkey and green bean casserole. Being female, I was expected to assist in the kitchen at most of these events, and I drifted like a ghost among all the talkative Irishwomen. But I didn’t mind spreading pimento cheese on the celery sticks or impaling black olives with toothpicks. There was not a marzipan pig to be seen, and all the noise and bustle kept me from thinking too much about that horrible Christmas so long ago.
Mary Margaret had a lifetime supply of Christmas cards she’d bought at a going-out-of-business sale. She kindly offered me some to send to my “Christian friends.” I found one with a red-nosed reindeer on it and sent it to Jack’s APO box.
But I didn’t hear a word back.
During the second semester, as graduation loomed, I had to face the awful prospect of living in the real world. I felt like a stupid child compared to Lois, who not only had been planning her July wedding for a year, but already had a job lined up at a dentist’s office so she could support Leonard while he went to med school at NYU.
Wogs invited me to join the commune with her and Judy, but when I contemplated a future of milking goats, cleaning latrines, and listening to consciousness- raising speeches, graduate school started to look pretty good. Maybe I could teach. Although it was past the deadline, my dad managed to pull some strings so I’d be able take a few graduate courses at Harvard in the fall. He even said he’d try to get me a job shelving books at Weidner library for the summer. It was kind of amazing for him to be parenting me for a change. I started to feel OK about the future.
Until that night in April when I came back from the library and found the freshmen playing Sergeant Major with a strange man. It only took a moment for me to recognize that lazy Cary Grant voice—and that suit.
My whole body went cold.
Alistair Milbourne was back at Bryn Mawr. And back in my life.