Freddy Fox is in the kitchen with me. He has just washed and dried an avocado seed I don’t want, and he is leaning against the wall, rolling a joint. In five minutes, I will not be able to count on him. However: he started late in the day, and he has already brought in wood for the fire, gone to the store down the road for matches, and set the table. “You mean you’d know this stuff was Limoges even if you didn’t turn the plate over?” he called from the dining room. He pretended to be about to throw one of the plates into the kitchen, like a Frisbee. Sam, the dog, believed him and shot up, kicking the rug out behind him and skidding forward before he realized his error; it was like the Road Runner tricking Wile E. Coyote into going over the cliff for the millionth time. His jowls sank in disappointment.
“I see there’s a full moon,” Freddy says. “There’s just nothing that can hold a candle to nature. The moon and the stars, the tides and the sunshine—and we just don’t stop for long enough to wonder at it all. We’re so engrossed in ourselves.” He takes a very long drag on the joint. “We stand and stir the sauce in the pot instead of going to the window and gazing at the moon.”
“You don’t mean anything personal by that, I assume.”
“I love the way you pour cream in a pan. I like to come up behind you and watch the sauce bubble.”
“No, thank you,” I say. “You’re starting late in the day.”
“My responsibilities have ended. You don’t trust me to help with the cooking, and I’ve already brought in firewood and run an errand, and this very morning I exhausted myself by taking Mr. Sam jogging with me, down at Putnam Park. You’re sure you won’t?”
“No, thanks,” I say. “Not now, anyway.”
“I love it when you stand over the steam coming out of a pan and the hairs around your forehead curl into damp little curls.”
My husband, Frank Wayne, is Freddy’s half brother. Frank is an accountant. Freddy is closer to me than to Frank. Since Frank talks to Freddy more than he talks to me, however, and since Freddy is totally loyal, Freddy always knows more than I know. It pleases me that he does not know how to stir sauce; he will start talking, his mind will drift, and when next you look the sauce will be lumpy, or boiling away.
Freddy’s criticism of Frank is only implied. “What a gracious gesture to entertain his friends on the weekend,” he says.
“Male friends,” I say.
“I didn’t mean that you’re the sort of lady who doesn’t draw the line. I most certainly did not mean that,” Freddy says. “I would even have been surprised if you had taken a toke of this deadly stuff while you were at the stove.”
“O.K.,” I say, and take the joint from him. Half of it is left when I take it. Half an inch is left after I’ve taken two drags and given it back.
“More surprised still if you’d shaken the ashes into the saucepan.”
“You’d tell people I’d done it when they’d finished eating, and I’d be embarrassed. You can do it, though. I wouldn’t be embarrassed if it was a story you told on yourself.”
“You really understand me,” Freddy says. “It’s moon-madness, but I have to shake just this little bit in the sauce. I have to do it.”
He does it.
Frank and Tucker are in the living room. Just a few minutes ago, Frank returned from getting Tucker at the train. Tucker loves to visit. To him, Fairfield County is as mysterious as Alaska. He brought with him from New York a crock of mustard, a jeroboam of champagne, cocktail napkins with a picture of a plane flying over a building on them, twenty egret feathers (“You cannot get them anymore—strictly illegal,” Tucker whispered to me), and, under his black cowboy hat with the rhinestone-studded chin strap, a toy frog that hopped when wound. Tucker owns a gallery in SoHo, and Frank keeps his books. Tucker is now stretched out in the living room, visiting with Frank, and Freddy and I are both listening.
“… so everything I’ve been told indicates that he lives a purely Jekyll-and-Hyde existence. He’s twenty years old, and I can see that since he’s still living at home he might not want to flaunt his gayness. When he came into the gallery, he had his hair slicked back—just with water, I got close enough to sniff—and his mother was all but holding his hand. So fresh-scrubbed. The stories I’d heard. Anyway, when I called, his father started looking for the number where he could be reached on the Vineyard—very irritated, because I didn’t know James, and if I’d just phoned James I could have found him in a flash. He’s talking to himself, looking for the number, and I say, ‘Oh, did he go to visit friends or—’ and his father interrupts and says, ‘He was going to a gay pig roast. He’s been gone since Monday.’ Just like that.”
Freddy helps me carry the food out to the table. When we are all at the table, I mention the young artist Tucker was talking about. “Frank says his paintings are really incredible,” I say to Tucker.
“Makes Estes look like an Abstract Expressionist,” Tucker says. “I want that boy. I really want that boy.”
“You’ll get him,” Frank says. “You get everybody you go after.”
Tucker cuts a small piece of meat. He cuts it small so that he can talk while chewing. “Do I?” he says.
Freddy is smoking at the table, gazing dazedly at the moon centered in the window. “After dinner,” he says, putting the back of his hand against his forehead when he sees that I am looking at him, “we must all go to the lighthouse.”
“If only you painted,” Tucker says. “I’d want you.”
“You couldn’t have me,” Freddy snaps. He reconsiders. “That sounded halfhearted, didn’t it? Anybody who wants me can have me. This is the only place I can be on Saturday night where somebody isn’t hustling me.”
“Wear looser pants,” Frank says to Freddy.
“This is so much better than some bar that stinks of cigarette smoke and leather. Why do I do it?” Freddy says. “Seriously—do you think I’ll ever stop?”
“Let’s not be serious,” Tucker says.
“I keep thinking of this table as a big boat, with dishes and glasses rocking on it,” Freddy says.
He takes the bone from his plate and walks out to the kitchen, dripping sauce on the floor. He walks as though he’s on the deck of a wave-tossed ship. “Mr. Sam!” he calls, and the dog springs up from the living-room floor, where he had been sleeping; his toenails on the bare wood floor sound like a wheel spinning in gravel. “You don’t have to beg,” Freddy says. “Jesus, Sammy—I’m just giving it to you.”
“I hope there’s a bone involved,” Tucker says, rolling his eyes to Frank. He cuts another tiny piece of meat. “I hope your brother does understand why I couldn’t keep him on. He was good at what he did, but he also might say just anything to a customer. You have to believe me that if I hadn’t been extremely embarrassed more than once I never would have let him go.”
“He should have finished school,” Frank says, sopping up sauce on his bread. “He’ll knock around a while longer, then get tired of it and settle down to something.”
“You think I died out here?” Freddy calls. “You think I can’t hear you?”
“I’m not saying anything I wouldn’t say to your face,” Frank says.
“I’ll tell you what I wouldn’t say to your face,” Freddy says. “You’ve got a swell wife and kid and dog, and you’re a snob, and you take it all for granted.”
Frank puts down his fork, completely exasperated. He looks at me.
“He came to work once this stoned,” Tucker says. “Comprenez-vous?”
“You like me because you feel sorry for me,” Freddy says.
He is sitting on the concrete bench outdoors, in the area that’s a garden in the springtime. It is early April now—not quite spring. It’s very foggy out. It rained while we were eating, and now it has turned mild. I’m leaning against a tree, across from him, glad it’s so dark and misty that I can’t look down and see the damage the mud is doing to my boots.
“Who’s his girlfriend?” Freddy says.
“If I told you her name, you’d tell him I told you.”
“Slow down. What?”
“I won’t tell you, because you’ll tell him that I know.”
“He knows you know.”
“I don’t think so.”
“How did you find out?”
“He talked about her. I kept hearing her name for months, and then we went to a party at Garner’s, and she was there, and when I said something about her later he said, ‘Natalie who?’ It was much too obvious. It gave the whole thing away.”
He sighs. “I just did something very optimistic,” he says. “I came out here with Mr. Sam and he dug up a rock and I put the avocado seed in the hole and packed dirt on top of it. Don’t say it—I know: can’t grow outside, we’ll still have another snow, even if it grew, the next year’s frost would kill it.”
“He’s embarrassed,” I say. “When he’s home, he avoids me. But it’s rotten to avoid Mark, too. Six years old, and he calls up his friend Neal to hint that he wants to go over there. He doesn’t do that when we’re here alone.”
Freddy picks up a stick and pokes around in the mud with it. “I’ll bet Tucker’s after that painter personally, not because he’s the hottest thing since pancakes. That expression of his—it’s always the same. Maybe Nixon really loved his mother, but with that expression who could believe him? It’s a curse to have a face that won’t express what you mean.”
“Amy!” Tucker calls. “Telephone.”
Freddy waves goodbye to me with the muddy stick. “ ‘I am not a crook,’ ” Freddy says. “Jesus Christ.”
Sam bounds halfway toward the house with me, then turns and goes back to Freddy.
It’s Marilyn, Neal’s mother, on the phone.
“Hi,” Marilyn says. “He’s afraid to spend the night.”
“Oh, no,” I say. “He said he wouldn’t be.”
She lowers her voice. “We can try it out, but I think he’ll start crying.”
“I’ll come get him.”
“I can bring him home. You’re having a dinner party, aren’t you?”
I lower my voice. “Some party. Tucker’s here. J.D. never showed up.”
“Well,” she says. “I’m sure that what you cooked was good.”
“It’s so foggy out, Marilyn. I’ll come get Mark.”
“He can stay. I’ll be a martyr,” she says, and hangs up before I can object.
Freddy comes into the house, tracking in mud. Sam lies in the kitchen, waiting for his paws to be cleaned. “Come on,” Freddy says, hitting his hand against his thigh, having no idea what Sam is doing. Sam gets up and runs after him. They go into the small downstairs bathroom together. Sam loves to watch people urinate. Sometimes he sings, to harmonize with the sound of the urine going into the water. There are footprints and pawprints everywhere. Tucker is shrieking with laughter in the living room. “… he says, he says to the other one, ‘Then, dearie, have you ever played spin the bottle?’ ” Frank’s and Tucker’s laughter drowns out the sound of Freddy peeing in the bathroom. I turn on the water in the kitchen sink, and it drowns out all the noise. I begin to scrape the dishes. Tucker is telling another story when I turn off the water: “… that it was Onassis in the Anvil, and nothing would talk him out of it. They told him Onassis was dead, and he thought they were trying to make him think he was crazy. There was nothing to do but go along with him, but, God—he was trying to goad this poor old fag into fighting about Stavros Niarchos. You know—Onassis’s enemy. He thought it was Onassis. In the Anvil.” There is a sound of a glass breaking. Frank or Tucker puts John Coltrane Live in Seattle on the stereo and turns the volume down low. The bathroom door opens. Sam runs into the kitchen and begins to lap water from his dish. Freddy takes his little silver case and his rolling papers out of his shirt pocket. He puts a piece of paper on the kitchen table and is about to sprinkle grass on it, but realizes just in time that the paper has absorbed water from a puddle. He balls it up with his thumb, flicks it to the floor, puts a piece of rolling paper where the table’s dry and shakes a line of grass down it. “You smoke this,” he says to me. “I’ll do the dishes.”
“We’ll both smoke it. I’ll wash and you can wipe.”
“I forgot to tell them I put ashes in the sauce,” he says.
“I wouldn’t interrupt.”
“At least he pays Frank ten times what any other accountant for an art gallery would make,” Freddy says.
Tucker is beating his hand on the arm of the sofa as he talks, stomping his feet. “… so he’s trying to feel him out, to see if this old guy with the dyed hair knew Maria Callas. Jesus! And he’s so out of it he’s trying to think what opera singers are called, and instead of coming up with ‘diva’ he comes up with ‘duenna.’ At this point, Larry Betwell went up to him and tried to calm him down, and he breaks into song—some aria or something that Maria Callas was famous for. Larry told him he was going to lose his teeth if he didn’t get it together, and …”
“He spends a lot of time in gay hangouts, for not being gay,” Freddy says.
I scream and jump back from the sink, hitting the glass I’m rinsing against the faucet, shattering green glass everywhere.
“What?” Freddy says. “Jesus Christ, what is it?”
Too late, I realize what it must have been that I saw: J.D. in a goat mask, the puckered pink plastic lips against the window by the kitchen sink.
“I’m sorry,” J.D. says, coming through the door and nearly colliding with Frank, who has rushed into the kitchen. Tucker is right behind him.
“Oooh,” Tucker says, feigning disappointment, “I thought Freddy smooched her.”
“I’m sorry,” J.D. says again. “I thought you’d know it was me.
The rain must have started again, because J.D. is soaking wet. He has turned the mask around so that the goat’s head stares out from the back of his head. “I got lost,” J.D. says. He has a farmhouse upstate. “I missed the turn. I went miles. I missed the whole dinner, didn’t I?”
“What did you do wrong?” Frank asks.
“I didn’t turn left onto 58. I don’t know why I didn’t realize my mistake, but I went miles. It was raining so hard I couldn’t go over twenty-five miles an hour. Your driveway is all mud. You’re going to have to push me out.”
“There’s some roast left over. And salad, if you want it,” I say.
“Bring it in the living room,” Frank says to J.D. Freddy is holding out a plate to him. J.D. reaches for the plate. Freddy pulls it back. J.D. reaches again, and Freddy is so stoned that he isn’t quick enough this time—J.D. grabs it.
“I thought you’d know it was me,” J.D. says. “I apologize.” He dishes salad onto the plate. “You’ll be rid of me for six months, in the morning.”
“Where does your plane leave from?” Freddy says.
“Kennedy.”
“Come in here!” Tucker calls. “I’ve got a story for you about Perry Dwyer down at the Anvil last week, when he thought he saw Aristotle Onassis.”
“Who’s Perry Dwyer?” J.D. says.
“That is not the point of the story, dear man. And when you’re in Cassis, I want you to look up an American painter over there. Will you? He doesn’t have a phone. Anyway—I’ve been tracking him, and I know where he is now, and I am very interested, if you would stress that with him, to do a show in June that will be only him. He doesn’t answer my letters.”
“Your hand is cut,” J.D. says to me.
“Forget it,” I say. “Go ahead.”
“I’m sorry,” he says. “Did I make you do that?”
“Yes, you did.”
“Don’t keep your finger under the water. Put pressure on it to stop the bleeding.”
He puts the plate on the table. Freddy is leaning against the counter, staring at the blood swirling in the sink, and smoking the joint all by himself. I can feel the little curls on my forehead that Freddy was talking about. They feel heavy on my skin. I hate to see my own blood. I’m sweating. I let J.D. do what he does; he turns off the water and wraps his hand around my second finger, squeezing. Water runs down our wrists.
Freddy jumps to answer the phone when it rings, as though a siren just went off behind him. He calls me to the phone, but J.D. steps in front of me, shakes his head no, and takes the dish towel and wraps it around my hand before he lets me go.
“Well,” Marilyn says. “I had the best of intentions, but my battery’s dead.”
J.D. is standing behind me, with his hand on my shoulder.
“I’ll be right over,” I say. “He’s not upset now, is he?”
“No, but he’s dropped enough hints that he doesn’t think he can make it through the night.”
“O.K.,” I say. “I’m sorry about all of this.”
“Six years old,” Marilyn says. “Wait till he grows up and gets that feeling.”
I hang up.
“Let me see your hand,” J.D. says.
“I don’t want to look at it. Just go get me a Band-Aid, please.”
He turns and goes upstairs. I unwrap the towel and look at it. It’s pretty deep, but no glass is in my finger. I feel funny; the outlines of things are turning yellow. I sit in the chair by the phone. Sam comes and lies beside me, and I stare at his black-and-yellow tail, beating. I reach down with my good hand and pat him, breathing deeply in time with every second pat.
“Rothko?” Tucker says bitterly, in the living room. “Nothing is great that can appear on greeting cards. Wyeth is that way. Would ‘Christina’s World’ look bad on a cocktail napkin? You know it wouldn’t.”
I jump as the phone rings again. “Hello?” I say, wedging the phone against my shoulder with my ear, wrapping the dish towel tighter around my hand.
“Tell them it’s a crank call. Tell them anything,” Johnny says. “I miss you. How’s Saturday night at your house?”
“All right,” I say. I catch my breath.
“Everything’s all right here, too. Yes indeed. Roast rack of lamb. Friend of Nicole’s who’s going to Key West tomorrow had too much to drink and got depressed because he thought it was raining in Key West, and I said I’d go in my study and call the National Weather Service. Hello, Weather Service. How are you?”
J.D. comes down from upstairs with two Band-Aids and stands beside me, unwrapping one. I want to say to Johnny, “I’m cut. I’m bleeding. It’s no joke.”
It’s all right to talk in front of J.D., but I don’t know who else might overhear me.
“I’d say they made the delivery about four this afternoon,” I say.
“This is the church, this is the steeple. Open the door, and see all the people,” Johnny says. “Take care of yourself. I’ll hang up and find out if it’s raining in Key West.”
“Late in the afternoon,” I say. “Everything is fine.”
“Nothing is fine,” Johnny says. “Take care of yourself.”
He hangs up. I put the phone down, and realize that I’m still having trouble focusing, the sight of my cut finger made me so light-headed. I don’t look at the finger again as J.D. undoes the towel and wraps the Band-Aids around my finger.
“What’s going on in here?” Frank says, coming into the dining room.
“I cut my finger,” I say. “It’s O.K.”
“You did?” he says. He looks woozy—a little drunk. “Who keeps calling?”
“Marilyn. Mark changed his mind about staying all night. She was going to bring him home, but her battery’s dead. You’ll have to get him. Or I will.”
“Who called the second time?” he says.
“The oil company. They wanted to know if we got our delivery today.”
He nods. “I’ll go get him, if you want,” he says. He lowers his voice. “Tucker’s probably going to whirl himself into a tornado for an encore,” he says, nodding toward the living room. “I’ll take him with me.”
“Do you want me to go get him?” J.D. says.
“I don’t mind getting some air,” Frank says. “Thanks, though. Why don’t you go in the living room and eat your dinner?”
“You forgive me?” J.D. says.
“Sure,” I say. “It wasn’t your fault. Where did you get that mask?”
“I found it on top of a Goodwill box in Manchester. There was also a beautiful old birdcage—solid brass.”
The phone rings again. I pick it up. “Wouldn’t I love to be in Key West with you,” Johnny says. He makes a sound as though he’s kissing me and hangs up.
“Wrong number,” I say.
Frank feels in his pants pocket for the car keys.
J.D. knows about Johnny. He introduced me, in the faculty lounge, where J.D. and I had gone to get a cup of coffee after I registered for classes. After being gone for nearly two years, J.D. still gets mail at the department—he said he had to stop by for the mail anyway, so he’d drive me to campus and point me toward the registrar’s. J.D. taught English; now he does nothing. J.D. is glad that I’ve gone back to college to study art again, now that Mark is in school. I’m six credits away from an M.A. in art history. He wants me to think about myself, instead of thinking about Mark all the time. He talks as though I could roll Mark out on a string and let him fly off, high above me. J.D.’s wife and son died in a car crash. His son was Mark’s age. “I wasn’t prepared,” J.D. said when we were driving over that day. He always says this when he talks about it. “How could you be prepared for such a thing?” I asked him. “I am now,” he said. Then, realizing he was acting very hardboiled, made fun of himself. “Go on,” he said, “punch me in the stomach. Hit me as hard as you can.” We both knew he wasn’t prepared for anything. When he couldn’t find a parking place that day, his hands were wrapped around the wheel so tightly that his knuckles turned white.
Johnny came in as we were drinking coffee. J.D. was looking at his junk mail—publishers wanting him to order anthologies, ways to get free dictionaries.
“You are so lucky to be out of it,” Johnny said, by way of greeting. “What do you do when you’ve spent two weeks on Hamlet and the student writes about Hamlet’s good friend Horchow?”
He threw a blue book into J.D.’s lap. J.D. sailed it back.
“Johnny,” he said, “this is Amy.”
“Hi, Amy,” Johnny said.
“You remember when Frank Wayne was in graduate school here? Amy’s Frank’s wife.”
“Hi, Amy,” Johnny said.
J.D. told me he knew it the instant Johnny walked into the room—he knew that second that he should introduce me as somebody’s wife. He could have predicted it all from the way Johnny looked at me.
For a long time J.D. gloated that he had been prepared for what happened next—that Johnny and I were going to get together. It took me to disturb his pleasure in himself—me, crying hysterically on the phone last month, not knowing what to do, what move to make next.
“Don’t do anything for a while. I guess that’s my advice,” J.D. said. “But you probably shouldn’t listen to me. All I can do myself is run away, hide out. I’m not the learned professor. You know what I believe. I believe all that wicked fairy-tale crap: your heart will break, your house will burn.”
Tonight, because he doesn’t have a garage at his farm, J.D. has come to leave his car in the empty half of our two-car garage while he’s in France. I look out the window and see his old Saab, glowing in the moonlight. J.D. has brought his favorite book, A Vision, to read on the plane. He says his suitcase contains only a spare pair of jeans, cigarettes, and underwear. He is going to buy a leather jacket in France, at a store where he almost bought a leather jacket two years ago.
In our bedroom there are about twenty small glass prisms hung with fishing line from one of the exposed beams; they catch the morning light, and we stare at them like a cat eyeing catnip held above its head. Just now, it is 2 A.M. At six-thirty, they will be filled with dazzling color. At four or five, Mark will come into the bedroom and get in bed with us. Sam will wake up, stretch, and shake, and the tags on his collar will clink, and he will yawn and shake again and go downstairs, where J.D. is asleep in his sleeping bag and Tucker is asleep on the sofa, and get a drink of water from his dish. Mark has been coming into our bedroom for about a year. He gets onto the bed by climbing up on a footstool that horrified me when I first saw it—a gift from Frank’s mother: a footstool that says “Today Is the First Day of the Rest of Your Life” in needlepoint. I kept it in a closet for years, but it occurred to me that it would help Mark get up onto the bed, so he would not have to make a little leap and possibly skin his shin again. Now Mark does not disturb us when he comes into the bedroom, except that it bothers me that he has reverted to sucking his thumb. Sometimes he lies in bed with his cold feet against my leg. Sometimes, small as he is, he snores.
Somebody is playing a record downstairs. It’s the Velvet Underground—Lou Reed, in a dream or swoon, singing “Sunday Morning.” I can barely hear the whispering and tinkling of the record. I can only follow it because I’ve heard it a hundred times.
I am lying in bed, waiting for Frank to get out of the bathroom. My cut finger throbs. Things are going on in the house even though I have gone to bed; water runs, the record plays. Sam is still downstairs, so there must be some action.
I have known everybody in the house for years, and as time goes by I know them all less and less. J.D. was Frank’s adviser in college. Frank was his best student, and they started to see each other outside of class. They played handball. J.D. and his family came to dinner. We went there. That summer—the summer Frank decided to go to graduate school in business instead of English—J.D.’s wife and son deserted him in a more horrible way, in that car crash. J.D. has quit his job. He has been to Las Vegas, to Colorado, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Paris twice; he tapes post cards to the walls of his living room. A lot of the time, on the weekends, he shows up at our house with his sleeping bag. Sometimes he brings a girl. Lately, not. Years ago, Tucker was in Frank’s therapy group in New York, and ended up hiring Frank to work as the accountant for his gallery. Tucker was in therapy at the time because he was obsessed with foreigners. Now he is also obsessed with homosexuals. He gives fashionable parties to which he invites many foreigners and homosexuals. Before the parties he does TM and yoga, and during the parties he does Seconals and isometrics. When I first met him, he was living for the summer in his sister’s house in Vermont while she was in Europe, and he called us one night, in New York, in a real panic because there were wasps all over. They were “hatching,” he said—big, sleepy wasps that were everywhere. We said we’d come; we drove all through the night to get to Brattleboro. It was true: there were wasps on the undersides of plates, in the plants, in the folds of curtains. Tucker was so upset that he was out behind the house, in the cold Vermont morning, wrapped like an Indian in a blanket, with only his pajamas on underneath. He was sitting in a lawn chair, hiding behind a bush, waiting for us to come.
And Freddy—“Reddy Fox,” when Frank is feeling affectionate toward him. When we first met, I taught him to ice-skate and he taught me to waltz; in the summer, at Atlantic City, he’d go with me on a roller coaster that curved high over the waves. I was the one—not Frank—who would get out of bed in the middle of the night and meet him at an all-night deli and put my arm around his shoulders, the way he put his arm around my shoulders on the roller coaster, and talk quietly to him until he got over his latest anxiety attack. Now he tests me, and I retreat: this man he picked up, this man who picked him up, how it feels to have forgotten somebody’s name when your hand is in the back pocket of his jeans and you’re not even halfway to your apartment. Reddy Fox—admiring my new red silk blouse, stroking his fingertips down the front, and my eyes wide, because I could feel his fingers on my chest, even though I was holding the blouse in front of me on a hanger to be admired. All those moments, and all they meant was that I was fooled into thinking I knew these people because I knew the small things, the personal things.
Freddy will always be more stoned than I am, because he feels comfortable getting stoned with me, and I’ll always be reminded that he’s more lost. Tucker knows he can come to the house and be the center of attention; he can tell all the stories he knows, and we’ll never tell the story we know about him hiding in the bushes like a frightened dog. J.D. comes back from his trips with boxes full of post cards, and I look at all of them as though they’re photographs taken by him, and I know, and he knows, that what he likes about them is their flatness—the unreality of them, the unreality of what he does.
Last summer, I read The Metamorphosis and said to J.D., “Why did Gregor Samsa wake up a cockroach?” His answer (which he would have toyed over with his students forever) was “Because that’s what people expected of him.”
They make the illogical logical. I don’t do anything, because I’m waiting, I’m on hold (J.D.); I stay stoned because I know it’s better to be out of it (Freddy); I love art because I myself am a work of art (Tucker).
Frank is harder to understand. One night a week or so ago, I thought we were really attuned to each other, communicating by telepathic waves, and as I lay in bed about to speak I realized that the vibrations really existed: they were him, snoring.
Now he’s coming into the bedroom, and I’m trying again to think what to say. Or ask. Or do.
“Be glad you’re not in Key West,” he says. He climbs into bed.
I raise myself up on one elbow and stare at him.
“There’s a hurricane about to hit,” he says.
“What?” I say. “Where did you hear that?”
“When Reddy Fox and I were putting the dishes away. We had the radio on.” He doubles up his pillow, pushes it under his neck. “Boom goes everything,” he says. “Bam. Crash. Poof.” He looks at me. “You look shocked.” He closes his eyes. Then, after a minute or two, he murmurs, “Hurricanes upset you? I’ll try to think of something nice.”
He is quiet for so long that I think he has fallen asleep. Then he says, “Cars that run on water. A field of flowers, none alike. A shooting star that goes slow enough for you to watch. Your life to do over again.” He has been whispering in my ear, and when he takes his mouth away I shiver. He slides lower in the bed for sleep. “I’ll tell you something really amazing,” he says. “Tucker told me he went into a travel agency on Park Avenue last week and asked the travel agent where he should go to pan for gold, and she told him.”
“Where did she tell him to go?”
“I think somewhere in Peru. The banks of some river in Peru.”
“Did you decide what you’re going to do after Mark’s birthday?” I say.
He doesn’t answer me. I touch him on the side, finally.
“It’s two o’clock in the morning. Let’s talk about it another time.
“You picked the house, Frank. They’re your friends downstairs. I used to be what you wanted me to be.”
“They’re your friends, too,” he says. “Don’t be paranoid.”
“I want to know if you’re staying or going.”
He takes a deep breath, lets it out, and continues to lie very still.
“Everything you’ve done is commendable,” he says. “You did the right thing to go back to school. You tried to do the right thing by finding yourself a normal friend like Marilyn. But your whole life you’ve made one mistake—you’ve surrounded yourself with men. Let me tell you something. All men—if they’re crazy, like Tucker, if they’re gay as the Queen of the May, like Reddy Fox, even if they’re just six years old—I’m going to tell you something about them. Men think they’re Spider-Man and Buck Rogers and Superman. You know what we all feel inside that you don’t feel? That we’re going to the stars.”
He takes my hand. “I’m looking down on all of this from space,” he whispers. “I’m already gone.”