Thirty-six

I had told Gene I wanted to leave right away, but I delayed. I kept busy enough to tell myself I was too busy to leave just yet. Cary and I went to see the play. I wrote my mother (finally). I went around to all my teachers and made arrangements to take my exams by mail. Totie Golden insisted on taking me out to lunch one day. What did I tell her? The same thing I told them all, even Drew. As little as possible. Mostly the old habit of secrecy, but also the whole complicated thing of saying, Look, you thought my parents were dead, but it was all a crock. Actually …

But what I spent the most time on was wondering what I ought to do. Stay with Gene? Go to my mother? As if the question still existed.

My mother writes.

A hasty note just to say that Matt and Emily are waiting impatiently to meet you. But that’s nothing compared to how I feel! I’m getting to know some of the women here and they are all happy for me that you’re coming. I’m trying not to worry about the future right now. We’ll talk about it all, but at the moment what I want is to know you’re near me again.

I put the letter on my bureau. Every morning I read it. And, then, as I lace up my sneakers, as I go down the stairs, as I pour a glass of milk and smear jelly on bread, as if it were a story I’m telling myself, I imagine possible endings to this part of my life.

I wait up for Gene to come home from the theater. “Gene,” I say, as soon as he walks in, “I’m staying. This is my real life. Maybe I didn’t know it before, but now I do. You’ve been father, mother, and uncle to me. I go to school here. I have Cary here, and Martha, my room, you, especially you—I know I’ve never said it before, I didn’t say it that day at the theater, but Gene, I love you too.”

We’re all at the airport, waiting for my flight to be called. At my feet is a small suitcase. My mother needs me. She needs my support, my encouragement, my love. The flight is announced. Gene and I shake hands and I say, “I’ll come back. I promise you that.” “I know,” Gene says. “You’ll visit me. Once a year, you’ll visit me.” I want to say, “Please understand! Don’t you see how it is?” I don’t say it. We shake hands again. Martha kisses me. Cary and I hug. I go on the plane. I look back and see them all at the window, waving.

Fantasy immobilizes me. I must go. I have to stay. My mother is waiting. I’m going to hurt Gene too much … what a seesaw! I’m seasick, my thoughts pitch and rock and I can’t make a move.

One day I dig the scraps from the manila envelope out of my wastebasket and spend hours piecing and Scotch-taping them together. Some I get back almost whole, some remain fragments.

“Pete,” Gene says at breakfast one morning, “would it make it easier if I drove you?”

“Drove me?”

“Sure, we’ll have a nice trip in the Volvo.”

“I can take the bus.”

“It’s a ten hour trip. Forget it. We can afford a plane ticket. Anyway, that’s not what I meant.” He hesitates. “Last week, when you came to see me in the theater? I was unfair to you. I put the pressure on. Consider it off. I want you to do what’s right for you.”

“I don’t know what’s right for me!” I say miserably.

“You’ve missed Laura.”

“Yes. And … no. I mean I have, but I keep wondering who it is I missed. I don’t know her, Gene. Part of me doesn’t even believe she’s back. Anyway, she’s someone different, and so am I. Yeah, I want to see her, but—” I push aside my plate. “Damn it! Damn it, Gene. Do you think it’s easy just going?”

“No, I don’t think that. You have friends here, Cary—”

“And you? I guess you think that part is easy for me.”

“I’m not sure. I don’t know what to think.”

“Well, we never—we don’t say things to each other, but—” My throat thickens. “You know what you said to me?” I put out my hand. “I say it back to you. Gene, I love you.”

The night after the play closes, Gene takes Martha and me out to dinner. “A farewell dinner for you, Pete.”

“My name is Pax.” I didn’t know I was going to say it. I don’t know if I mean it. Why is my name Pax any more than Pete? I have to think about this. Pax Martin Gandhi Connors—that’s a whole lot of name. That’s a whole lot of responsibility. I kind of like it, when I step aside and think about it. But I want to be sure that I don’t carry those names around lightly. I pretty much believe in what Gandhi and Martin Luther King believed in—nonviolence, not hurting other people. I believe it, but I don’t know if I’m up to living that way. Maybe I’m just an ordinary Pete after all.

Gene drinks a lot of wine at the dinner. “I don’t know what I’m going to do without him,” he says, putting his arm around me. He doesn’t use my name all evening. “Martha!” he cries. “I want a kid, I want a child.”

“Is that a proposal, sir?”

“Okay,” Gene says, “okay, let’s talk about it.” No one laughs.

“Cary, hi, I’m going tomorrow.”

“We have to write each other.”

“I will if you will.”

“I will, Pete. And I’m going to come visit you, don’t forget that.”

“I thought I was supposed to visit you.”

“I’m not going to wait for you, friend. What if you forget?”

“I definitely won’t.”

“Good-bye, Pete.”

“Cary—”

“No, I’m going to hang up right now. You too.”

In the car with Gene, we drive east into the sunrise. With each hour, I’m miles closer to my mother. Why do I feel numb? Feel nothing? Sleep so much and, even when awake, feel that I’m dreaming? For all these years, above all else, I waited for this moment to arrive. This happy moment. This happy ending.

We stay overnight in a motel stuck between two highways. All night the trucks roar past and the man in the room next door coughs. “No, I slept all right,” Gene says as we eat breakfast in a diner, but there are heavy lines under his eyes. We drive again. I say I wish I had my license. Gene agrees with me. We talk about school, college, Cary, Martha. Everything, in fact, but my mother.

“New York City ahead,” Gene says, throwing money into the toll basket.

I look out the window. Soon I’ll see her. It’s true. I’ll see my mother. A great wave of happiness blows over me. “Gene!” I turn to him to tell him, to share the moment. He looks at me and smiles. And then I want to cry, I want to say, Don’t take me there, Gene. Take me home!

Home? Where’s that? Home to my mother? Home to Gene? At that moment, I finally understand that there is no ending for my story … no perfect ending … no little-Pax-happy-at-last ending.