DAVID LEAVITT (1961–) is the author of several story collections, recently brought together as Collected Stories. His novels include The Lost Language of Cranes, While England Sleeps, The Body of Jonah Boyd, and The Indian Clerk. He is a recipient of fellowships from both the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is a professor of English at the University of Florida, where he codirects the creative writing program and edits the journal Subtropics.
Neil’s mother, Mrs. Campbell, sits on her lawn chair behind a card table outside the food co-op. Every few minutes, as the sun shifts, she moves the chair and table several inches back so as to remain in the shade. It is a hundred degrees outside, and bright white. Each time someone goes in or out of the co-op a gust of air-conditioning flies out of the automatic doors, raising dust from the cement.
Neil stands just inside, poised over a water fountain, and watches her. She has on a sun hat, and a sweatshirt over her tennis dress; her legs are bare, and shiny with cocoa butter. In front of her, propped against the table, a sign proclaims: MOTHERS, FIGHT FOR YOUR CHILDREN’S RIGHTS—SUPPORT A NON-NUCLEAR FUTURE. Women dressed exactly like her pass by, notice the sign, listen to her brief spiel, finger pamphlets, sign petitions or don’t sign petitions, never give money. Her weary eyes are masked by dark glasses. In the age of Reagan, she has declared, keeping up the causes of peace and justice is a futile, tiresome, and unrewarding effort; it is therefore an effort fit only for mothers to keep up. The sun bounces off the window glass through which Neil watches her. His own reflection lines up with her profile.
• • •
Later that afternoon, Neil spreads himself out alongside the pool and imagines he is being watched by the shirtless Chicano gardener. But the gardener, concentrating on his pruning, is neither seductive nor seducible. On the lawn, his mother’s large Airedales—Abigail, Lucille, Fern—amble, sniff, urinate. Occasionally, they accost the gardener, who yells at them in Spanish.
After two years’ absence, Neil reasons, he should feel nostalgia, regret, gladness upon returning home. He closes his eyes and tries to muster the proper background music for the cinematic scene of return. His rhapsody, however, is interrupted by the noises of his mother’s trio—the scratchy cello, whining violin, stumbling piano—as she and Lillian Havalard and Charlotte Feder plunge through Mozart. The tune is cheery, in a Germanic sort of way, and utterly inappropriate to what Neil is trying to feel. Yet it is the music of his adolescence; they have played it for years, bent over the notes, their heads bobbing in silent time to the metronome.
It is getting darker. Every few minutes, he must move his towel so as to remain within the narrowing patch of sunlight. In four hours, Wayne, his lover of ten months and the only person he has ever imagined he could spend his life with, will be in this house, where no lover of his has ever set foot. The thought fills him with a sense of grand terror and curiosity. He stretches, tries to feel seductive, desirable. The gardener’s shears whack at the ferns; the music above him rushes to a loud, premature conclusion. The women laugh and applaud themselves as they give up for the day. He hears Charlotte Feder’s full nasal twang, the voice of a fat woman in a pink pants suit—odd, since she is a scrawny, arthritic old bird, rarely clad in anything other than tennis shorts and a blouse. Lillian is the fat woman in the pink pants suit; her voice is thin and warped by too much crying. Drink in hand, she calls out from the porch, “Hot enough!” and waves. He lifts himself up and nods to her.
The women sit on the porch and chatter; their voices blend with the clink of ice in glasses. They belong to a small circle of ladies all of whom, with the exception of Neil’s mother, are widows and divorcées. Lillian’s husband left her twenty-two years ago, and sends her a check every month to live on; Charlotte has been divorced twice as long as she was married, and has a daughter serving a long sentence for terrorist acts committed when she was nineteen. Only Neil’s mother has a husband, a distant sort of husband, away often on business. He is away on business now. All of them feel betrayed—by husbands, by children, by history.
Neil closes his eyes, tries to hear the words only as sounds. Soon, a new noise accosts him: his mother arguing with the gardener in Spanish. He leans on his elbows and watches them; the syllables are loud, heated, and compressed, and seem on the verge of explosion. But the argument ends happily; they shake hands. The gardener collects his check and walks out the gate without so much as looking at Neil.
He does not know the gardener’s name; as his mother has reminded him, he does not know most of what has gone on since he moved away. Her life has gone on, unaffected by his absence. He flinches at his own egoism, the egoism of sons.
“Neil! Did you call the airport to make sure the plane’s coming in on time?”
“Yes,” he shouts to her. “It is.”
“Good. Well, I’ll have dinner ready when you get back.”
“What?” The word comes out in a weary wail that is more of an answer than a question.
“What’s wrong?” he says, forgetting his original question.
“Nothing’s wrong,” she declares in a tone that indicates that everything is wrong. “The dogs have to be fed, dinner has to be made, and I’ve got people here. Nothing’s wrong.”
“I hope things will be as comfortable as possible when Wayne gets here.”
“Is that a request or a threat?”
“Mom—”
Behind her sunglasses, her eyes are inscrutable. “I’m tired,” she says. “It’s been a long day. I . . . I’m anxious to meet Wayne. I’m sure he’ll be wonderful, and we’ll all have a wonderful, wonderful time. I’m sorry. I’m just tired.”
She heads up the stairs. He suddenly feels an urge to cover himself; his body embarrasses him, as it has in her presence since the day she saw him shirtless and said with delight, “Neil! You’re growing hair under your arms!”
Before he can get up, the dogs gather round him and begin to sniff and lick at him. He wriggles to get away from them, but Abigail, the largest and stupidest, straddles his stomach and nuzzles his mouth. He splutters and, laughing, throws her off. “Get away from me, you goddamn dogs,” he shouts, and swats at them. They are new dogs, not the dog of his childhood, not dogs he trusts.
He stands, and the dogs circle him, looking up at his face expectantly. He feels renewed terror at the thought that Wayne will be here so soon: Will they sleep in the same room? Will they make love? He has never had sex in his parents’ house. How can he be expected to be a lover here, in this place of his childhood, of his earliest shame, in this household of mothers and dogs?
“Dinnertime! Abbylucyferny, Abbylucyferny, dinnertime!” His mother’s litany disperses the dogs, and they run for the door.
“Do you realize,” he shouts to her, “that no matter how much those dogs love you they’d probably kill you for the leg of lamb in the freezer?”
• • •
Neil was twelve the first time he recognized in himself something like sexuality. He was lying outside, on the grass, when Rasputin—the dog, long dead, of his childhood—began licking his face. He felt a tingle he did not recognize, pulled off his shirt to give the dog access to more of him. Rasputin’s tongue tickled coolly. A wet nose started to sniff down his body, toward his bathing suit. What he felt frightened him, but he couldn’t bring himself to push the dog away. Then his mother called out, “Dinner,” and Rasputin was gone, more interested in food than in him.
It was the day after Rasputin was put to sleep, years later, that Neil finally stood in the kitchen, his back turned to his parents, and said, with unexpected ease, “I’m a homosexual.” The words seemed insufficient, reductive. For years, he had believed his sexuality to be detachable from the essential him, but now he realized that it was part of him. He had the sudden, despairing sensation that though the words had been easy to say, the fact of their having been aired was incurably damning. Only then, for the first time, did he admit that they were true, and he shook and wept in regret for what he would not be for his mother, for having failed her. His father hung back, silent; he was absent for that moment as he was mostly absent—a strong absence. Neil always thought of him sitting on the edge of the bed in his underwear, captivated by something on television. He said, “It’s O.K., Neil.” But his mother was resolute; her lower lip didn’t quaver. She had enormous reserves of strength to which she only gained access at moments like this one. She hugged him from behind, wrapped him in the childhood smells of perfume and brownies, and whispered, “It’s O.K., honey.” For once, her words seemed as inadequate as his. Neil felt himself shrunk to an embarrassed adolescent, hating her sympathy, not wanting her to touch him. It was the way he would feel from then on whenever he was in her presence—even now, at twenty-three, bringing home his lover to meet her.
All through his childhood, she had packed only the most nutritious lunches, had served on the PTA, had volunteered at the children’s library and at his school, had organized a successful campaign to ban a racist history textbook. The day after he told her, she located and got in touch with an organization called the Coalition of Parents of Lesbians and Gays. Within a year, she was president of it. On weekends, she and the other mothers drove their station wagons to San Francisco, set up their card tables in front of the Bulldog Baths, the Liberty Baths, passed out literature to men in leather and denim who were loath to admit they even had mothers. These men, who would habitually do violence to each other, were strangely cowed by the suburban ladies with their informational booklets, and bent their heads. Neil was a sophomore in college then, and lived in San Francisco. She brought him pamphlets detailing the dangers of bathhouses and back rooms, enemas and poppers, wordless sex in alleyways. His excursion into that world had been brief and lamentable, and was over. He winced at the thought that she knew all his sexual secrets, and vowed to move to the East Coast to escape her. It was not very different from the days when she had campaigned for a better playground, or tutored the Hispanic children in the audiovisual room. Those days, as well, he had run away from her concern. Even today, perched in front of the co-op, collecting signatures for nuclear disarmament, she was quintessentially a mother. And if the lot of mothers was to expect nothing in return, was the lot of sons to return nothing?
• • •
Driving across the Dumbarton Bridge on his way to the airport, Neil thinks, I have returned nothing; I have simply returned. He wonders if she would have given birth to him had she known what he would grow up to be.
Then he berates himself: Why should he assume himself to be the cause of her sorrow? She has told him that her life is full of secrets. She has changed since he left home—grown thinner, more rigid, harder to hug. She has given up baking, taken up tennis; her skin has browned and tightened. She is no longer the woman who hugged him and kissed him, who said, “As long as you’re happy, that’s all that’s important to us.”
The flats spread out around him; the bridge floats on purple and green silt, and spongy bay fill, not water at all. Only ten miles north, a whole city has been built on gunk dredged up from the bay.
He arrives at the airport ten minutes early, to discover that the plane has landed twenty minutes early. His first view of Wayne is from behind, by the baggage belt. Wayne looks as he always looks—slightly windblown—and is wearing the ratty leather jacket he was wearing the night they met. Neil sneaks up on him and puts his hands on his shoulders; when Wayne turns around, he looks relieved to see him.
They hug like brothers; only in the safety of Neil’s mother’s car do they dare to kiss. They recognize each other’s smells, and grow comfortable again. “I never imagined I’d actually see you out here,” Neil says, “but you’re exactly the same here as there.”
“It’s only been a week.”
They kiss again. Neil wants to go to a motel, but Wayne insists on being pragmatic. “We’ll be there soon. Don’t worry.”
“We could go to one of the bathhouses in the city and take a room for a couple of aeons,” Neil says. “Christ, I’m hard up. I don’t even know if we’re going to be in the same bedroom.”
“Well, if we’re not,” Wayne says, “we’ll sneak around. It’ll be romantic.”
They cling to each other for a few more minutes, until they realize that people are looking in the car window. Reluctantly, they pull apart. Neil reminds himself that he loves this man, that there is a reason for him to bring this man home.
He takes the scenic route on the way back. The car careers over foothills, through forests, along white four-lane highways high in the mountains. Wayne tells Neil that he sat next to a woman on the plane who was once Marilyn Monroe’s psychiatrist’s nurse. He slips his foot out of his shoe and nudges Neil’s ankle, pulling Neil’s sock down with his toe.
“I have to drive,” Neil says. “I’m very glad you’re here.”
There is a comfort in the privacy of the car. They have a common fear of walking hand in hand, of publicly showing physical affection, even in the permissive West Seventies of New York—a fear that they have admitted only to one another. They slip through a pass between two hills, and are suddenly in residential Northern California, the land of expensive ranch-style houses.
As they pull into Neil’s mother’s driveway, the dogs run barking toward the car. When Wayne opens the door, they jump and lap at him, and he tries to close it again. “Don’t worry. Abbylucyferny! Get in the house, damn it!”
His mother descends from the porch. She has changed into a blue flower-print dress, which Neil doesn’t recognize. He gets out of the car and halfheartedly chastises the dogs. Crickets chirp in the trees. His mother looks radiant, even beautiful, illuminated by the headlights, surrounded by the now quiet dogs, like a Circe with her slaves. When she walks over to Wayne, offering her hand, and says, “Wayne, I’m Barbara,” Neil forgets that she is his mother.
“Good to meet you, Barbara,” Wayne says, and reaches out his hand. Craftier than she, he whirls her around to kiss her cheek.
Barbara! He is calling his mother Barbara! Then he remembers that Wayne is five years older than he is. They chat by the open car door, and Neil shrinks back—the embarrassed adolescent, uncomfortable, unwanted.
So the dreaded moment passes and he might as well not have been there. At dinner, Wayne keeps the conversation smooth, like a captivated courtier seeking Neil’s mother’s hand. A faggot son’s sodomist—such words spit into Neil’s head. She has prepared tiny meatballs with fresh coriander, fettucine with pesto. Wayne talks about the street people in New York; El Salvador is a tragedy; if only Sadat had lived; Phyllis Schlafly—what can you do?
“It’s a losing battle,” she tells him. “Every day I’m out there with my card table, me and the other mothers, but I tell you, Wayne, it’s a losing battle. Sometimes I think us old ladies are the only ones with enough patience to fight.”
Occasionally, Neil says something, but his comments seem stupid and clumsy. Wayne continues to call her Barbara. No one under forty has ever called her Barbara as long as Neil can remember. They drink wine; he does not.
Now is the time for drastic action. He contemplates taking Wayne’s hand, then checks himself. He has never done anything in her presence to indicate that the sexuality he confessed to five years ago was a reality and not an invention. Even now, he and Wayne might as well be friends, college roommates. Then Wayne, his savior, with a single, sweeping gesture, reaches for his hand, and clasps it, in the midst of a joke he is telling about Saudi Arabians. By the time he is laughing, their hands are joined. Neil’s throat contracts; his heart begins to beat violently. He notices his mother’s eyes flicker, glance downward; she never breaks the stride of her sentence. The dinner goes on, and every taboo nurtured since childhood falls quietly away.
She removes the dishes. Their hands grow sticky; he cannot tell which fingers are his and which Wayne’s. She clears the rest of the table and rounds up the dogs.
“Well, boys, I’m very tired, and I’ve got a long day ahead of me tomorrow, so I think I’ll hit the sack. There are extra towels for you in Neil’s bathroom, Wayne. Sleep well.”
“Good night, Barbara,” Wayne calls out. “It’s been wonderful meeting you.”
They are alone. Now they can disentangle their hands.
“No problem about where we sleep, is there?”
“No,” Neil says. “I just can’t imagine sleeping with someone in this house.”
His leg shakes violently. Wayne takes Neil’s hand in a firm grasp and hauls him up.
• • •
Later that night, they lie outside, under redwood trees, listening to the hysteria of the crickets, the hum of the pool cleaning itself. Redwood leaves prick their skin. They fell in love in bars and apartments, and this is the first time that they have made love outdoors. Neil is not sure he has enjoyed the experience. He kept sensing eyes, imagined that the neighborhood cats were staring at them from behind a fence of brambles. He remembers he once hid in this spot when he and some of the children from the neighborhood were playing sardines, remembers the intoxication of small bodies packed together, the warm breath of suppressed laughter on his neck. “The loser had to go through the spanking machine,” he tells Wayne.
“Did you lose often?”
“Most of the time. The spanking machine never really hurt—just a whirl of hands. If you moved fast enough, no one could actually get you. Sometimes, though, late in the afternoon, we’d get naughty. We’d chase each other and pull each other’s pants down. That was all. Boys and girls together!”
“Listen to the insects,” Wayne says, and closes his eyes.
Neil turns to examine Wayne’s face, notices a single, small pimple. Their lovemaking usually begins in a wrestle, a struggle for dominance, and ends with a somewhat confusing loss of identity—as now, when Neil sees a foot on the grass, resting against his leg, and tries to determine if it is his own or Wayne’s.
From inside the house, the dogs begin to bark. Their yelps grow into alarmed falsettos. Neil lifts himself up. “I wonder if they smell something,” he says.
“Probably just us,” says Wayne.
“My mother will wake up. She hates getting waked up.”
Lights go on in the house; the door to the porch opens.
“What’s wrong, Abby? What’s wrong?” his mother’s voice calls softly.
Wayne clamps his hand over Neil’s mouth. “Don’t say anything,” he whispers.
“I can’t just—” Neil begins to say, but Wayne’s hand closes over his mouth again. He bites it, and Wayne starts laughing.
“What was that?” Her voice projects into the garden. “Hello?” she says.
The dogs yelp louder. “Abbylucyferny, it’s O.K., it’s O.K.” Her voice is soft and panicked. “Is anyone there?” she asks loudly.
The brambles shake. She takes a flashlight, shines it around the garden. Wayne and Neil duck down; the light lands on them and hovers for a few seconds. Then it clicks off and they are in the dark—a new dark, a darker dark, which their eyes must readjust to.
“Let’s go to bed, Abbylucyferny,” she says gently. Neil and Wayne hear her pad into the house. The dogs whimper as they follow her, and the lights go off.
• • •
Once before, Neil and his mother had stared at each other in the glare of bright lights. Four years ago, they stood in the arena created by the headlights of her car, waiting for the train. He was on his way back to San Francisco, where he was marching in a Gay Pride Parade the next day. The train station was next door to the food co-op and shared its parking lot. The co-op, familiar and boring by day, took on a certain mystery in the night. Neil recognized the spot where he had skidded on his bicycle and broken his leg. Through the glass doors, the brightly lit interior of the store glowed, its rows and rows of cans and boxes forming their own horizon, each can illuminated so that even from outside Neil could read the labels. All that was missing was the ladies in tennis dresses and sweatshirts, pushing their carts past bins of nuts and dried fruits.
“Your train is late,” his mother said. Her hair fell loosely on her shoulders, and her legs were tanned. Neil looked at her and tried to imagine her in labor with him—bucking and struggling with his birth. He felt then the strange, sexless love for women which through his whole adolescence he had mistaken for heterosexual desire.
A single bright light approached them; it preceded the low, haunting sound of the whistle. Neil kissed his mother, and waved goodbye as he ran to meet the train. It was an old train, with windows tinted a sort of horrible lemon-lime. It stopped only long enough for him to hoist himself on board, and then it was moving again. He hurried to a window, hoping to see her drive off, but the tint of the window made it possible for him to make out only vague patches of light—street lamps, cars, the co-op.
He sank into the hard, green seat. The train was almost entirely empty; the only other passenger was a dark-skinned man wearing bluejeans and a leather jacket. He sat directly across the aisle from Neil, next to the window. He had rough skin and a thick mustache. Neil discovered that by pretending to look out the window he could study the man’s reflection in the lemon-lime glass. It was only slightly hazy—the quality of a bad photograph. Neil felt his mouth open, felt sleep closing in on him. Hazy red and gold flashes through the glass pulsed in the face of the man in the window, giving the curious impression of muscle spasms. It took Neil a few minutes to realize that the man was staring at him, or, rather, staring at the back of his head—staring at his staring. The man smiled as though to say, I know exactly what you’re staring at, and Neil felt the sickening sensation of desire rise in his throat.
Right before they reached the city, the man stood up and sat down in the seat next to Neil’s. The man’s thigh brushed deliberately against his own. Neil’s eyes were watering; he felt sick to his stomach. Taking Neil’s hand, the man said, “Why so nervous, honey? Relax.”
Neil woke up the next morning with the taste of ashes in his mouth. He was lying on the floor, without blankets or sheets or pillows. Instinctively, he reached for his pants, and as he pulled them on came face to face with the man from the train. His name was Luis; he turned out to be a dog groomer. His apartment smelled of dog.
“Why such a hurry?” Luis said.
“The parade. The Gay Pride Parade. I’m meeting some friends to march.”
“I’ll come with you,” Luis said. “I think I’m too old for these things, but why not?”
Neil did not want Luis to come with him, but he found it impossible to say so. Luis looked older by day, more likely to carry diseases. He dressed again in a torn T-shirt, leather jacket, bluejeans. “It’s my everyday apparel,” he said, and laughed. Neil buttoned his pants, aware that they had been washed by his mother the day before. Luis possessed the peculiar combination of hypermasculinity and effeminacy which exemplifies faggotry. Neil wanted to be rid of him, but Luis’s mark was on him, he could see that much. They would become lovers whether Neil liked it or not.
They joined the parade midway. Neil hoped he wouldn’t meet anyone he knew; he did not want to have to explain Luis, who clung to him. The parade was full of shirtless men with oiled, muscular shoulders. Neil’s back ached. There were floats carrying garishly dressed prom queens and cheerleaders, some with beards, some actually looking like women. Luis said, “It makes me proud, makes me glad to be what I am.” Neil supposed that by darting into the crowd ahead of him he might be able to lose Luis forever, but he found it difficult to let him go; the prospect of being alone seemed unbearable.
Neil was startled to see his mother watching the parade, holding up a sign. She was with the Coalition of Parents of Lesbians and Gays; they had posted a huge banner on the wall behind them proclaiming: OUR SONS AND DAUGHTERS, WE ARE PROUD OF YOU. She spotted him; she waved, and jumped up and down.
“Who’s that woman?” Luis asked.
“My mother. I should go say hello to her.”
“O.K.,” Luis said. He followed Neil to the side of the parade. Neil kissed his mother. Luis took off his shirt, wiped his face with it, smiled.
“I’m glad you came,” Neil said.
“I wouldn’t have missed it, Neil. I wanted to show you I cared.”
He smiled, and kissed her again. He showed no intention of introducing Luis, so Luis introduced himself.
“Hello, Luis,” Mrs. Campbell said. Neil looked away. Luis shook her hand, and Neil wanted to warn his mother to wash it, warned himself to check with a V.D. clinic first thing Monday.
“Neil, this is Carmen Bologna, another one of the mothers,” Mrs. Campbell said. She introduced him to a fat Italian woman with flushed cheeks, and hair arranged in the shape of a clamshell.
“Good to meet you, Neil, good to meet you,” said Carmen Bologna. “You know my son, Michael? I’m so proud of Michael! He’s doing so well now. I’m proud of him, proud to be his mother I am, and your mother’s proud, too!”
The woman smiled at him, and Neil could think of nothing to say but “Thank you.” He looked uncomfortably toward his mother, who stood listening to Luis. It occurred to him that the worst period of his life was probably about to begin and he had no way to stop it.
A group of drag queens ambled over to where the mothers were standing. “Michael! Michael!” shouted Carmen Bologna, and embraced a sticklike man wrapped in green satin. Michael’s eyes were heavily dosed with green eyeshadow, and his lips were painted pink.
Neil turned and saw his mother staring, her mouth open. He marched over to where Luis was standing, and they moved back into the parade. He turned and waved to her. She waved back; he saw pain in her face, and then, briefly, regret. That day, he felt she would have traded him for any other son. Later, she said to him, “Carmen Bologna really was proud, and, speaking as a mother, let me tell you, you have to be brave to feel such pride.”
Neil was never proud. It took him a year to dump Luis, another year to leave California. The sick taste of ashes was still in his mouth. On the plane, he envisioned his mother sitting alone in the dark, smoking. She did not leave his mind until he was circling New York, staring down at the dawn rising over Queens. The song playing in his earphones would remain hovering on the edges of his memory, always associated with her absence. After collecting his baggage, he took a bus into the city. Boys were selling newspapers in the middle of highways, through the windows of stopped cars. It was seven in the morning when he reached Manhattan. He stood for ten minutes on East Thirty-fourth Street, breathed the cold air, and felt bubbles rising in his blood.
Neil got a job as a paralegal—a temporary job, he told himself. When he met Wayne a year later, the sensations of that first morning returned to him. They’d been up all night, and at six they walked across the park to Wayne’s apartment with the nervous, deliberate gait of people aching to make love for the first time. Joggers ran by with their dogs. None of them knew what Wayne and he were about to do, and the secrecy excited him. His mother came to mind, and the song, and the whirling vision of Queens coming alive below him. His breath solidified into clouds, and he felt happier than he had ever felt before in his life.
• • •
The second day of Wayne’s visit, he and Neil go with Mrs. Campbell to pick up the dogs at the dog parlor. The grooming establishment is decorated with pink ribbons and photographs of the owner’s champion pit bulls. A fat, middle-aged woman appears from the back, leading the newly trimmed and fluffed Abigail, Lucille, and Fern by three leashes. The dogs struggle frantically when they see Neil’s mother, tangling the woman up in their leashes. “Ladies, behave!” Mrs. Campbell commands, and collects the dogs. She gives Fern to Neil and Abigail to Wayne. In the car on the way back, Abigail begins pawing to get on Wayne’s lap.
“Just push her off,” Mrs. Campbell says. “She knows she’s not supposed to do that.”
“You never groomed Rasputin,” Neil complains.
“Rasputin was a mutt.”
“Rasputin was a beautiful dog, even if he did smell.”
“Do you remember when you were a little kid, Neil, you used to make Rasputin dance with you? Once you tried to dress him up in one of my blouses.”
“I don’t remember that,” Neil says.
“Yes. I remember,” says Mrs. Campbell. “Then you tried to organize a dog beauty contest in the neighborhood. You wanted to have runners-up—everything.”
“A dog beauty contest?” Wayne says.
“Mother, do we have to—”
“I think it’s a mother’s privilege to embarrass her son,” Mrs. Campbell says, and smiles.
When they are about to pull into the driveway, Wayne starts screaming, and pushes Abigail off his lap. “Oh, my God!” he says. “The dog just pissed all over me.”
Neil turns around and sees a puddle seeping into Wayne’s slacks. He suppresses his laughter, and Mrs. Campbell hands him a rag.
“I’m sorry, Wayne,” she says. “It goes with the territory.”
“This is really disgusting,” Wayne says, swatting at himself with the rag.
Neil keeps his eyes on his own reflection in the rearview mirror and smiles.
At home, while Wayne cleans himself in the bathroom, Neil watches his mother cook lunch—Japanese noodles in soup. “When you went off to college,” she says, “I went to the grocery store. I was going to buy you ramen noodles, and I suddenly realized you weren’t going to be around to eat them. I started crying right then, blubbering like an idiot.”
Neil clenches his fists inside his pockets. She has a way of telling him little sad stories when he doesn’t want to hear them—stories of dolls broken by her brothers, lunches stolen by neighborhood boys on the way to school. Now he has joined the ranks of male children who have made her cry.
“Mama, I’m sorry,” he says.
She is bent over the noodles, which steam in her face. “I didn’t want to say anything in front of Wayne, but I wish you had answered me last night. I was very frightened—and worried.”
“I’m sorry,” he says, but it’s not convincing. His fingers prickle. He senses a great sorrow about to be born.
“I lead a quiet life,” she says. “I don’t want to be a disciplinarian. I just don’t have the energy for these—shenanigans. Please don’t frighten me that way again.”
“If you were so upset, why didn’t you say something?”
“I’d rather not discuss it. I lead a quiet life. I’m not used to getting woken up late at night. I’m not used—”
“To my having a lover?”
“No, I’m not used to having other people around, that’s all. Wayne is charming. A wonderful young man.”
“He likes you, too.”
“I’m sure we’ll get along fine.”
She scoops the steaming noodles into ceramic bowls. Wayne returns, wearing shorts. His white, hairy legs are a shocking contrast to hers, which are brown and sleek.
“I’ll wash those pants, Wayne,” Mrs. Campbell says. “I have a special detergent that’ll take out the stain.”
She gives Neil a look to indicate that the subject should be dropped. He looks at Wayne, looks at his mother; his initial embarrassment gives way to a fierce pride—the arrogance of mastery. He is glad his mother knows that he is desired, glad it makes her flinch.
Later, he steps into the backyard; the gardener is back, whacking at the bushes with his shears. Neil walks by him in his bathing suit, imagining he is on parade.
• • •
That afternoon, he finds his mother’s daily list on the kitchen table:
TUESDAY
7:00—breakfast
Take dogs to groomer
Groceries (?)
Campaign against Draft—4–7
Buy underwear
Trios—2:00
Spaghetti
Asparagus if sale
Peanuts
Milk
Doctor’s Appointment (make)
Write Cranston/Hayakawa
re disarmament
Handi-Wraps
Mozart
Abigail
Top Ramen
Pedro
Her desk and trash can are full of such lists; he remembers them from the earliest days of his childhood. He had learned to read from them. In his own life, too, there have been endless lists—covered with check marks and arrows, at least one item always spilling over onto the next day’s agenda. From September to November, “Buy plane ticket for Christmas” floated from list to list to list.
The last item puzzles him: Pedro. Pedro must be the gardener. He observes the accretion of names, the arbitrary specifics that give a sense of his mother’s life. He could make a list of his own selves: the child, the adolescent, the promiscuous faggot son, and finally the good son, settled, relatively successful. But the divisions wouldn’t work; he is today and will always be the child being licked by the dog, the boy on the floor with Luis; he will still be everything he is ashamed of. The other lists—the lists of things done and undone—tell their own truth: that his life is measured more properly in objects than in stages. He knows himself as “jump rope,” “book,” “sunglasses,” “underwear.”
“Tell me about your family, Wayne,” Mrs. Campbell says that night, as they drive toward town. They are going to see an Esther Williams movie at the local revival house: an underwater musical, populated by mermaids, underwater Rockettes.
“My father was a lawyer,” Wayne says. “He had an office in Queens, with a neon sign. I think he’s probably the only lawyer in the world who had a neon sign. Anyway, he died when I was ten. My mother never remarried. She lives in Queens. Her great claim to fame is that when she was twenty-two she went on ‘The $64,000 Question.’ Her category was mystery novels. She made it to sixteen thousand before she got tripped up.”
“When I was about ten, I wanted you to go on ‘Jeopardy,’ ” Neil says to his mother. “You really should have, you know. You would have won.”
“You certainly loved ‘Jeopardy,’ ” Mrs. Campbell says. “You used to watch it during dinner. Wayne, does your mother work?”
“No,” he says. “She lives off investments.”
“You’re both only children,” Mrs. Campbell says. Neil wonders if she is ruminating on the possible connection between that coincidence and their “alternative life style.”
The movie theater is nearly empty. Neil sits between Wayne and his mother. There are pillows on the floor at the front of the theater, and a cat is prowling over them. It casts a monstrous shadow every now and then on the screen, disturbing the sedative effect of water ballet. Like a teenager, Neil cautiously reaches his arm around Wayne’s shoulder. Wayne takes his hand immediately. Next to them, Neil’s mother breathes in, out, in, out. Neil timorously moves his other arm and lifts it behind his mother’s neck. He does not look at her, but he can tell from her breathing that she senses what he is doing. Slowly, carefully, he lets his hand drop on her shoulder; it twitches spasmodically, and he jumps, as if he had received an electric shock. His mother’s quiet breathing is broken by a gasp; even Wayne notices. A sudden brightness on the screen illuminates the panic in her eyes, Neil’s arm frozen above her, about to fall again. Slowly, he lowers his arm until his fingertips touch her skin, the fabric of her dress. He has gone too far to go back now; they are all too far.
Wayne and Mrs. Campbell sink into their seats, but Neil remains stiff, holding up his arms, which rest on nothing. The movie ends, and they go on sitting just like that.
“I’m old,” Mrs. Campbell says later, as they drive back home. “I remember when those films were new. Your father and I went to one on our first date. I loved them, because I could pretend that those women underwater were flying—they were so graceful. They really took advantage of Technicolor in those days. Color was something to appreciate. You can’t know what it was like to see a color movie for the first time, after years of black-and-white. It’s like trying to explain the surprise of snow to an East Coaster. Very little is new anymore, I fear.”
Neil would like to tell her about his own nostalgia, but how can he explain that all of it revolves around her? The idea of her life before he was born pleases him. “Tell Wayne how you used to look like Esther Williams,” he asks her.
She blushes. “I was told I looked like Esther Williams, but really more like Gene Tierney,” she says. “Not beautiful, but interesting. I like to think I had a certain magnetism.”
“You still do,” Wayne says, and instantly recognizes the wrongness of his comment. Silence and a nervous laugh indicate that he has not yet mastered the family vocabulary.
When they get home, the night is once again full of the sound of crickets. Mrs. Campbell picks up a flashlight and calls the dogs. “Abbylucyferny, Abbylucyferny,” she shouts, and the dogs amble from their various corners. She pushes them out the door to the backyard and follows them. Neil follows her. Wayne follows Neil, but hovers on the porch. Neil walks behind her as she tramps through the garden. She holds out her flashlight, and snails slide from behind bushes, from under rocks, to where she stands. When the snails become visible, she crushes them underfoot. They make a wet, cracking noise, like eggs being broken.
“Nights like this,” she says, “I think of children without pants on, in hot South American countries. I have nightmares about tanks rolling down our street.”
“The weather’s never like this in New York,” Neil says. “When it’s hot, it’s humid and sticky. You don’t want to go outdoors.”
“I could never live anywhere else but here. I think I’d die. I’m too used to the climate.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“No, I mean it,” she says. “I have adjusted too well to the weather.”
The dogs bark and howl by the fence. “A cat, I suspect,” she says. She aims her flashlight at a rock, and more snails emerge—uncountable numbers, too stupid to have learned not to trust light.
“I know what you were doing at the movie,” she says.
“What?”
“I know what you were doing.”
“What? I put my arm around you.”
“I’m sorry, Neil,” she says. “I can only take so much. Just so much.”
“What do you mean?” he says. “I was only trying to show affection.”
“Oh, affection—I know about affection.”
He looks up at the porch, sees Wayne moving toward the door, trying not to listen.
“What do you mean?” Neil says to her.
She puts down the flashlight and wraps her arms around herself. “I remember when you were a little boy,” she says. “I remember, and I have to stop remembering. I wanted you to grow up happy. And I’m very tolerant, very understanding. But I can only take so much.”
His heart seems to have risen into his throat. “Mother,” he says, “I think you know my life isn’t your fault. But for God’s sake, don’t say that your life is my fault.”
“It’s not a question of fault,” she says. She extracts a Kleenex from her pocket and blows her nose. “I’m sorry, Neil. I guess I’m just an old woman with too much on her mind and not enough to do.” She laughs halfheartedly. “Don’t worry. Don’t say anything,” she says. “Abbylucyferny, Abbylucyferny, time for bed!”
He watches her as she walks toward the porch, silent and regal. There is the pad of feet, the clinking of dog tags as the dogs run for the house.
• • •
He was twelve the first time she saw him march in a parade. He played the tuba, and as his elementary-school band lumbered down the streets of their then small town she stood on the sidelines and waved. Afterward, she had taken him out for ice cream. He spilled some on his red uniform, and she swiped at it with a napkin. She had been there for him that day, as well as years later, at that more memorable parade; she had been there for him every day.
Somewhere over Iowa, a week later, Neil remembers this scene, remembers other days, when he would find her sitting in the dark, crying. She had to take time out of her own private sorrow to appease his anxiety. “It was part of it,” she told him later. “Part of being a mother.”
“The scariest thing in the world is the thought that you could unknowingly ruin someone’s life,” Neil tells Wayne. “Or even change someone’s life. I hate the thought of having such control. I’d make a rotten mother.”
“You’re crazy,” Wayne says. “You have this great mother, and all you do is complain. I know people whose mothers have disowned them.”
“Guilt goes with the territory,” Neil says.
“Why?” Wayne asks, perfectly seriously.
Neil doesn’t answer. He lies back in his seat, closes his eyes, imagines he grew up in a house in the mountains of Colorado, surrounded by snow—endless white snow on hills. No flat places, and no trees; just white hills. Every time he has flown away, she has come into his mind, usually sitting alone in the dark, smoking. Today she is outside at dusk, skimming leaves from the pool.
“I want to get a dog,” Neil says.
Wayne laughs. “In the city? It’d suffocate.”
The hum of the airplane is druglike, dazing. “I want to stay with you a long time,” Neil says.
“I know.” Imperceptibly, Wayne takes his hand.
“It’s very hot there in the summer, too. You know, I’m not thinking about my mother now.”
“It’s O.K.”
For a moment, Neil wonders what the stewardess or the old woman on the way to the bathroom will think, but then he laughs and relaxes.
Later, the plane makes a slow circle over New York City, and on it two men hold hands, eyes closed, and breathe in unison.