IN THEIR BONES, many of the teachers at Lawrence Academy had a fatal conviction that adulthood was an isometric mapping of the shoulder-high personalities of middle school, or all but. With fair confidence they picked out the lawyers and the screw-ups.
Sexuality was a more interesting guessing game. No longer a subject too delicate even to think about, bets were only taken in short odds cases like Darius Van Nest. No one wanted to consult openly the handful of teachers one assumed had an eye for those things. After all, who wants to know? Ostentatious shrugs stood for tolerance. Barry and Darius were subject to a bit of speculation. Among fellow students, paradoxically, the couple got only friendly, pro forma attacks such as “You two faggots.” Alone, Darius might have had to toss his head in bullied isolation.
Their friendship wasn’t exactly erotic. They got into an argument about whose scrotum looked more like supermarket chicken skin. The issue had to be settled. Barry treated the comparison as a grave exercise, while Darius smirked. At Barry’s direction off came their pants, and they kneaded their balls, pulling the skin over their knuckles like cling wrap. Barry’s scrotum was bumpier and more chicken-like, they decided, holding them side by side under the bathroom light. Stiffening penises got knocked out of the way, dumb-seeming as puppies on Christmas morning. Wryly, Barry strangled his with one hand and knocked against Darius’s in a meditative rhythm. The boys gradually lost both smiles and gravity, and they ended up just observing, or even just counting the beat, so inexpressive were their lowered faces.
A few days after their trip to the beach they’d gotten filthy setting up an “animatronic” (not really, but still Disney-inspired) zombie experience behind Barry’s garage. Jeanette ordered them to shower. Barry sat on the edge of the tub examining his foot. For almost a week he’d carefully preserved the flirty dressing the teenaged girls had given his foot in Bel-Mar. Now, finally, he tugged off the zombie bandages. He picked curiously at the ring-straked gauze underneath, red, brown and yellow. “Hey!” he said crossly, noticing Darius. Darius had turned shyly toward the corner of the bathroom to peel off his underwear. “Don’t do that,” Barry said. He really seemed angry. “We should just strip down and jump in the shower. I think that’s more normal, if you’re buddies.” For some reason Barry was offended by Darius’s shyness. Maybe it made them seem less close. Or he was concerned for his friend: maybe he hated seeing Darius give in to unhealthy habits of mind.
Once, they were sitting together on Darius’s bed. Barry was losing a game of Stratego through sheer indifference. Darius didn’t want to go outdoors, so he tried to keep interest alive by talking. The bedroom’s antiquated gray fan was making lop-sided white noise. The strands of the bamboo curtain swayed and pecked.
Seeing it through the eyes of the guest he was hoping to entertain, Darius was aware of something dreary and prison-like about his bedroom. He couldn’t love it as he usually did. Hypnotized by the boredom of the ticking bamboo and the beating fan he self-consciously stopped talking in the middle of a sentence. His mouth hung open. He felt the rigid panic that occasionally overcame him when he would focus on the fact that none of his relationships was quite real. He was adopted. All connections, from the very first, were based on words not reality. Even this one with his blood brother was unreal. Children may be more subject to these unnamable key changes of consciousness than grownups. Darius went from chattering to faint in an instant. “You ever worry we don’t really exist, Bare?”
“No,” Barry said.
With uncharacteristic boldness Darius then asked, “Do you ever like getting stuff stuck up your butt? ‘Cause I actually do sometimes. Like when I was a kid I knew I was supposed to hate wedgies but I kind of liked them.” It felt odd to be sitting there after saying this. He listened to the fan and gently pressed the fanged general token against his knee.
Barry seemed to stop what he was doing, though he’d been perfectly still. His smile looked a little like pleasure, a little like mocking cruelty withheld. “Hadn’t really thought about it,” he shrugged finally.
“Oh.” Darius jerked his shoulders, which made Colin Vail’s loose-jointed old spool bed creak for a surprisingly long time. “It’s weird, I guess.”
One weekend morning the two boys had been on the phone for what felt like hours. It got to the point where they were just breathing to each other and going about their business. Barry was particularly bored, which made him cranky. He threw out, “You know, Jeanette told me Ms. B is a chimo.” He’d started calling his mother by her first name, and Darius was imitating him with Oliver.
“What’s a chimo?”
“Child molester.”
“Yeah?” Darius had taken the phone into a remote attic storage room to rummage through the contents of a junked mahogany sideboard. Inside, the shelves were heaped with countless pouches of soft silver cloth which made gong-like whispers when disturbed. Most of the old silver in the bags was tarnished iridescent black. Under the heap of bags were bundles of ancient family letters, some containing disturbing, beribboned curls of hair. Darius thought his friend was saying that Jane Brzostovsky was a child beater. He made himself sound supremely skeptical. “Yeah, I don’t think so.” He remembered her slap but couldn’t call that abuse exactly.
“She asked me if I woke up sticky yet.”
“What? Sticky?”
“Right, and then she laughs like she was only being funny. Weird-funny.”
“What does that mean?”
“I told Jeanette, and she said, ‘That bitch sounds like a fucking chimo!’”
“Barry! Shh!” Darius was shocked. “Don’t say that.” He opened a manila envelope full of old travel guides and spilled them onto his lap. Dresden decked out with swastikas. “Oh man! You won’t believe what I just found. Hitler stuff! Bare?”
“Yeah?”
“You doing anything? I had this idea earlier. You want to come over and help me with it?”
Actually, Darius had had the idea a long time ago. The travel folders just reminded him. After leafing through an old guidebook to Ravenna once, he had conceived of a life-sized portrait of Barry, a dazzling, gold-encrusted mosaic with soulful brown eyes. His plan had been to create this portrait on the wall of his closet alongside Peace and Love. In addition to the mosaic portrait, the closet would eventually be embellished with a dome and a skylight, a far-fetched renovation which meant the whole project had stalled in the world of fantasy.
The return of this vision energized Darius. As soon as he got off the phone with Barry he started hunting for materials for the portrait. Under the rose-threaded chain in the closet Darius laid out colored felt highlighters and Elmer’s glue. Downstairs, he found a huge carton of beads belonging to his father.
Beading was a recent fad of Oliver’s. With a rich man’s lightning enthusiasm, Oliver had ordered huge quantities of beads from a catalogue. Many of them were gold-filled according to the packages, and Darius figured they might work as tesserae for his mosaic.
He drew a rough outline of Barry wearing a Byzantine tunic on a bare patch of wall in the closet. Impatiently he smeared glue at the wrist of the garment and began pressing beads against the wall. They fell, danced like millet and were lost under a dresser. At best they slid out of position. He used more glue, set a number of beads in place and pressed his palm over them.
He was standing like this, waiting for the glue to dry, when David Caperini made a meek noise of greeting from the bedroom door. “In here,” Darius called.
Pulling bamboo strands apart with two forefingers, David poked his head in the closet. “Eh bien, tu es là. Tu t’amuse bien?” Darius looked like he was just standing there, leaning against the wall. David’s gaze roamed over the glue, the markers, and the drawn-on wall, pausing at the big carton. A few tattered copies of Bead and Button were tucked in amongst the plastic boxes and glassine bags.
“Yes? Bahnjheur Daveed,” Darius drawled indifferently. “Cahnmahn-tallay-voo? Moi—OK.”
The bamboo curtain chattered when David shivered for no reason. “Très bien merci. Alors, qu’est-ce qu’on fabrique ici?”
Darius rolled his eyes. At random he tried, “Mmm—Je pense—le gâteau—”
“Mais tu fais pas de la cuisine dans le dressing?”
Darius frowned. Hearing only David’s cute surprise, he said, “Non! Je suis NOT—what you think I am!”
“Mais j’ai rien dit!”
“Oui—Moi—”
“Écoute, tu fais ce qui te plaît. Á mon avis, t’es garçon adorable. Je ne dirais jamais que ça.”
“OK. OK. Shut up.”
“Darius, I—I wasn’t saying you were anything. I was only asking what you were up to.”
“Oh. I’m working on this thing.” With a squint of pain for drama’s sake, Darius gingerly lifted his hand from the wall. Surprisingly, the beads held. But they were dull with smeared glue and disappointingly unlike his mosaic vision.
Standing back to judge his work, Darius pensively looped the steel chain around his shoulders. He wrapped the end around his neck a second time, dislodging a plastic rose. The chain was cold, but the weight felt good. Darius noticed David’s eyes boring into him and asked in a sassy tone, “Uh—yes?”
“Oh, it’s a—uh—what?—a sort of mosaïque?”
“Yes, it’s supposed to be a mose-eye-eek. But it’s actually crappy for now.”
David’s head disappeared. Letting the chain fall with a tinkling thud and more dropped roses, Darius followed him out of the closet.
David perched on the creaky spool bed and, using both hands, seemed to start squeezing something out of one thigh.
Darius wrinkled his nose. “Are you trying to talk to me? What are you doing up here?”
“No, not at all,” David said. Both his hands batted the air dismissively, then rushed back to his thigh.
“You wanted to tell me my parents have screwed me up, right?”
“God, no. No.” David tried to laugh.
Darius frowned and picked at a whorled skin of dried glue on his palm. Unlike some children—Barry, for example—Darius didn’t believe adults knew things children didn’t. He was the egotistical cat convinced its owners are also cats.
David had slipped his hand under his collar placket to massage his neck. “You know, I wasn’t always the happiest kid in the world my—myself—”
Playing it for comedy, Darius sniffled. “At least I have my pills. Bummer for you, though.”
“I had to lie on my back in bed for a year!” When Darius didn’t respond with anything more than a frown, David made a dotty pshew! of laughter and pretended to shoot himself in the head.
“What are you talking about?”
David patted the bed next to him. It was an invitation for Darius to sit. The bed creaked. When the boy didn’t budge, David pretended he was brushing at the comforter.
“On est fort sadique,” he whispered mysteriously. “Where’s your friend?”
“Oui, oui-oui-oui!” Darius interrupted. “Non, non-non-non! What are you talking about? Are you talking about Barry? He’s coming over in a minute.”
Smiling bleakly, David reached out to massage Darius’s shoulder.
Darius squinched his face, “Uh—David. This might be a little bit—uh, chimo—child abuse.” He was joking, but the earnest look that had crossed David’s face disturbed him.
David released his grip, leaned back and slapped his thighs. Blandly hysterical laughter trailed off in absurd grown-up artificiality. “Oh-ho-ho-ho-ho!”
Darius raised his eyebrows. The way their two gazes met, neither had the remotest idea what the other was thinking. The not knowing was, on David’s side, fascinating, heartbreaking.
With a head-clearing twitch, David announced, “Really, I came—Your father needs his—he was looking for his beading things.” He nodded toward the closet.
“Why didn’t you tell me? Is he mad?”
“Pas de tout, I don’t think.”
“Pas de tout. Oui, oui-oui-oui,” Darius mocked in irritation. He immediately dragged the big box from the closet, the bamboo strands trailing over it. Still angry at David, who was hanging his head wearily, he lashed out. “You know, I saw you put those big folder things in your car. From our basement! And all that stuff down there is supposed to be mine.” He wasn’t expecting the cartoonish look of horror that appeared on David’s face. Colin Vail’s bed started creaking. “Sorry!” Darius piped airily. “I’m only teasing. It’s not a big deal.” David stuttered something.
Darius manhandled the heavy box of beads down five flights of stairs. He kicked it noisily across each carpeted landing and through the front hall. His father wasn’t, after all, angry. He sat on a petit point footstool in the sprawling front drawing room.
A new silk dressing gown with the Barney’s tag still attached by a plastic loop hung open, showing a wrinkled chest like softening cream paint. Oliver held a cigarette and a threaded needle aloft with surgical fastidiousness. He crooked his leg and pulled a plastic beading tray across the carpet toward him with a yellow-callused toe. The beading tray was indented with looping troughs, and the troughs were marked off in numbered segments. He said, “Oh, here we are,” and nodded for Darius to push the carton of beads next to the tray. He looked back at Sohaila. He said, “I don’t know.” Sohaila was modeling one of his necklaces, a jade spider web bedewed with gold. “Does it swoop too low here? Or is it just the neckline of that thing you’ve got on?”
“It feels a little low,” Sohaila whispered. “The color is good for me, though. What do I have—? Autumn—winter coloring? I don’t remember.”
Oliver stood up. Moving behind her, he shortened the strand at the nape of her neck and cocked his head.
Sohaila smiled at Darius. “Do you remember what you were?”
“Same as you,” he said, though he didn’t remember. “Can I ever use some of those, Dad?”
Oliver didn’t answer. Sohaila asked, “What were you doing, darling?”
“Just this art thing.”
“He’s an indoor boy,” Oliver observed. His tone was objective, more narrator than father. “I hate it,” he concluded mildly about the necklace. “Somehow the overall shape is wrong for you. I thought big would work.” As if reconsidering, he tugged a bit more at the necklace. “Ah, well!” he sighed. “Thanks for trying it on.”
Sohaila smiled thinly, looking somewhere far off, as Oliver kissed her cheek with extreme primness. Oliver posed his hand on her shoulder for this dainty embrace, and as he did so he slyly pressed the needle still in his right hand into her shoulder.
Sohaila spun out of his arms with a cry of pain. “Oliver!” Her body shuddered and she tossed her hair in rage. After a moment, she shook her head again like a tormented animal. She massaged the pricked shoulder. She repeated her inarticulate cry several times as surprise burned off. Auch! Auch! Auch! She leveled a vengeful stare at Oliver. But something about her rapid recovery suggested Oliver’s behavior wasn’t totally unexpected. The extravagant, practiced frown Darius forced onto his brow made it look like he too had witnessed this sort of thing before.
“Sorry! I didn’t—” Oliver blustered with the flimsiest air of innocence.
Sohaila’s lips moved a moment before she said anything. “Oliver, really—!” she began with utter contempt. She took her hand from the hurt shoulder. A drop of blood had formed a streak, an angry red accent grave. She touched it with her fingertip. She examined her palm. “You’re exactly like—”
“Like what?” Oliver whimpered.
“I don’t know!” she shouted, though not very loudly. “Like a torturer—Savak! Really, you are. Like a—a goon.”
“That’s outrageous!” Oliver roared with a perverse sort of amusement.
“You’re a torturer. You’re like Savak.”
Oliver turned to Darius with a comical madman’s expression. Then, all reasonableness, he mused, “If I converted, I think I’d have the right to multiple wives. Four, to be precise. That would be nice. Wouldn’t you like four mothers?”
“Oh, Oliver,” Sohaila said with disgust.
“As long as I’m equitable and can afford to take care of them, which, of course, I can.”
“Please, take all the wives you like. You’ve become a freak.” She glanced at Darius and stopped herself. “You’re not the person I married.”
Darius echoed his mother’s contempt. “What are you talking about, Oliver?”
Oliver suddenly growled and lunged at Darius in play. Darius flinched but held his ground. Full of dignity, he said, “Barry’s coming over.”
Eyeing her shoulder with teary, glittering concern Sohaila hurried from the room. Darius turned his back on his father and started to walk out, too. But slowly. He took only tiny, five-inch steps as a pure provocation. Given the size of the room this exit took a long time. He was still walking out long after Sohaila had washed her hand and shoulder, long after Oliver, with peculiar sighing groans, took his seat on the petit point stool again and started digging through the carton of beads.
Oliver spoke up at last. “You’re not going to get very far at that rate.” Darius took six more meticulous baby steps, and Oliver went on briskly, “I am sorry, Darius, but there’re a lot of things going on you don’t understand. I certainly have not left your mother high and dry. Foreigners—something you might want to watch out for—sometimes revert to being foreigners even after years living—” Darius started humming to drown out his father’s words. He kept making baby steps.
He still hadn’t made it out of the room when Tina shepherded Barry into the front hall. “Dare, honey, your friend’s called for you.”
Darius ended his enraged baby-stepping with full strides. There was no way to hide that his eyes were as glittery as Sohaila’s had been. He turned it into drama. He raised his face to a huge cast iron lantern hanging from the hall’s ribbed ceiling. He flung out an arm like a child Cicero and cried, “Barry, thank God! Jeez. What a day! You wouldn’t believe the day I’ve been having. This place is a madhouse.”