Chapter 4

The mockingbirds don’t count; they sing all night. But aside from them, the earliest risers are the hermit thrushes. A little five-note rising, slurring phrase in the half-light—with my preoccupations, I always heard it as the first two lines of “(I can’t get no) Satisfaction”—repeated endlessly, first high, then low.

Liquid. Deliberate. Mischievous. Daybreak in the woods. I decided he was set to sleep all morning.

Well, those were his hours. That was what he did, sleep all morning. Somebody would have to get up eventually. Get up and make coffee. In England it might arrive at his bedside on a tray. Get up and make breakfast.

In other words, get up.

I extricated with the greatest care. He was a nameless lump under the comforter. My bare feet whispered on the dusty wooden floor. I’d gotten as far as the little hall when he hit me from behind. Still quite naked, but he had the comforter with him. He popped it over my head like a sack.

Through the kitchen, the front room and the front door he half-propelled-half-carried me, wiggling, giggling, blind inside the comforter.

———

Thinking, about a campy nineteenth-century poster that used to grace the inside of my bathroom door: the scantly clad shepherd boy and coy cozy shepherdess running from the rain under the billowing protection of his cloak. I used to have a pad and pencil on a string below it for friends’ captions.

Well, that’s how we look, only barer: the comforter flapping and batting around our heads; and there isn’t any rain; only autumn sun and we’re running from it, clear across the meadow, dodging willow clumps, water spraying where we hit the marshy places.

In the aspens’ golden fluttering shade, between plump boulders scattered like hospitable gray granite pillows in the green shag meadow, he spun the comforter out wide.

He spun ourselves out wide on top of it.

“You’ll get it dirty!”

“So I’ll buy a new one!”

Then to be quite fair, there was silence in heaven for the space of half an hour.

But eventually the old wheels began to turn, thinking, how similar being really beautiful was to being super rich. You get one lover dirty, finding fresh ones was trivial as new bedding. They were lined up at Tom’s door. Thinking, how truly odd of providence to have put me in that queue at all: but at the head of it? Wondering about Harlan, how Tom had got him dirty. Hard to accept. Harlan and Tom together were Belshangles. Their music had been my lifeline once. But more than that—I realize he’s looking at me.

“One place on you,” he says, “I haven’t gotten in yet—” (with some alarm, I can’t imagine where). He plants a sleepy finger just between my brows. “—I mean to get in there.”

“Maybe you just think you haven’t.”

“No, no. Oh, I can hear the action going on, like a party happening down the hall, and I wasn’t invited.”

Funny. My feelings about him and Harlan once. They were at a party in each other’s heads; I wouldn’t ever be invited. But Tom had always been the guest of honor at my mind’s party, maybe the only guest. Curled with him in the comforter, below the meadow flowers, I wondered about Harlan’s party, whether all the fun was over.

“Like just now,” he said. “What were you thinking?”

“This moment?”

“This very moment.”

“Just now?”

The lush and weedy meadow stood up all around, leaned above us eager to hear: fragrant white cotton balls, tiny white lace balls, ragged purple star balls, all smiling and dancing on grassy stems, bowing to each other.

“I was remembering,” I said, eyes shut, “the other time when you were here. How we sat that day and talked. And finally I asked you. About Harlan—” (I choked on the name as always) “—And you gave me that long story, how you were nineteen and playing in the street for a living, and after hours in this club, and how this gorgeous person started showing up each night to listen, and got you scared he was a ghost or something you’d dreamed up from being lonely.

“And how, one night afterward he came with a guitar and played this stuff that he’d written to fancy up your pieces, and wound up coming to your room, and you gave him your bed and slept on the floor, and then he just stayed and you were sleeping on the floor, and you were ashamed to touch him.

“And then he was showing you something, playing four-handed guitar one afternoon, and he kissed you. You kissed him back, but he got scared and you had this awful fight, and wound up, and wound up—”

“Look,” he said, “I know how we wound up; you don’t have to—”

“—And you had to go downstairs and play, and when you came back the lights were off. And you were scared he’d split. But he was asleep. And you just got in with him.”

No answer but the birdsong, and the wind. The bass mumble of gigantic striped bees, bending each chosen flower nearly to the ground with the weight of their attentions.

“I was wondering,” I said, “what went on next morning.”

“What for?”

Pausing to check us out for edibility, a dragonfly balanced on cellophane wings.

“Comparison’s sake?”

All around, a flotilla of its kind rowed the breeze, tiny aerial pirate galleys, just above the grasses.

“God! I don’t want to talk to you about—any more than—Well why would you think—”

“You started it.”

“Would I know you’d be thinking about that?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Nothing happened, anyway.”

He’d turned away from me. His breathing steadied, grew long and slow. End of story, I thought. Refuge in sleep. The sky was warm and humid, full of slow clouds. It lay on the blooming meadow like a kind lover. But I was wrong.

“Well, I woke the next morning,” he said to the grass, “and there was his head on my pillow with me. I was looking him in the face. I never saw a girl was half so beautiful.

“All hot and damp from his sleep. Skin like an ivory rose with dew on it. And his beard beginning to come through. Ivory with black glitter on it. To show he wasn’t any girl at all. I must have lain and looked for hours.

“Then his eyes came open. It was my part to say something: he was waking up naked in my bed. I couldn’t think of anything right. At last I said, ‘If you were a bottle of champagne, I’d want to drink it all.’”

I managed a whisper, “Was that right?” Somebody’s simple sleepy nakedness had excelled all luxuries.

“I guess it was. It must have been. He cried.”

I was crying too; I wished I hadn’t asked. I would want it forever now: somebody else’s very great praise.

“I don’t know,” he said, “what happened after that. Well I don’t! What d’y’think, I have total recall or something? ‘What happened after that?’ We got on with the rest of our lives, that’s what happened: learning to live together, learning to play the fucking instruments, learning to keep our faces fed—”

Wait! Roll over, sit up. So I’m crying, so what? So is he. I’m naked. So is he. In the middle of someone else’s praise, I think I’ve just heard my thing go by.

“Would you like your face fed?”

I’d hit upon a very potent commonality. We’d had an almond croissant, two cups of coffee, and half a bottle of champagne each since this time yesterday. He’d taken a big breath, but no more words came out. He had tears on his cheek and a startled expression. “You mean—food?” Clearly a dim word from a distant past.

I bundled up the comforter. It wasn’t really damaged. He walked in naked from the meadow as slender and gaudy and shameless as the flowers that brushed his legs.

Tuesday, August 19

Aside from the obvious, this is how he meant to use his time. Have me drive an indicated six miles, and flag the place. Bring the car home. Put on his Walkman with one day’s tape of the hundred-mile jig. Dance his twelve miles worth of music, out to the flag and back. I could jog with him or drive behind. He wanted me close, in case. He’d done the same, he said, every day of the tour that wasn’t concert prep, a concert, or a travel day.

Having learned my lesson, I wondered, but didn’t ask, if Harlan jogged with him. I jogged with him.

But he danced by himself, through future crowds and English afternoons. He knew that whole road in his mind: the factories, villages, grimy housing projects, the woods and heaths and desolate country places. He knew where each band was. You could see him pass from white boy’s rock to black boy’s reggae, and never need to hear the music.

This is what he’d learned to do: run up trees.

He’d be bopping along, and pass a big tree. A sudden acceleration toward it, he’d leap, dig his heel into the bark, take another long stride up the trunk and kick away, arching into a back flip, or straight up, rocket fashion. Far out in the road he’d make a gymnast’s rebound and keep on dancing.

Usually the Walkman stayed on.

“How can you be sure of a tree in just that spot?”

“Rather sure there isn’t,” he shouted back. “It’s a bloody village High Street. Got to do something for distraction.” He did another splendid aerial off a fir tree. This time the Walkman parted company. He let me listen: a kids’ god-awful metal band called Copper Shrift.

“Well, it works on walls if they’re rough,” he said. “Works on cars too, but the paint suffers.”

Sometimes he carried the fiddle on his arm, and played his own tune like an old-time dancing master. When our way was through the clear-cut places, he looked, and thought, but didn’t ask. I guessed he’d learned his lesson too.

After his daily miles, while I was wrestling with his supper, he sat out in the meadow lost in grass, singing and playing to himself. Then the range cattle that graze loose in the forest around Pardee would wander in, bells dinging and donging, and listen in a circle all around him.

———

Discoveries.

Submitting was not, in fact, the only thing I could do to him. There was a seemingly limitless number of other things, and he vastly enjoyed almost all of them.

Everything I was taught in school, almost everything my peers whispered, almost (but not quite) everything I ever fantasized concerning sex was wrong. Almost (but not quite) everything I’d gathered off Tom’s records was real.

The books in that much-hyped sex-ed class said, “If you don’t enjoy it the first time: don’t worry dear, You’re normal.” If you looked in the back of those books, you found they were funded and published by the companies that make sanitary napkins. Sex takes a little stretching out, but so does any other brand of athletics. And I haven’t coveted normalcy since the third grade.

Sex is not mind blowing. We are talking natural function here, pleasant. Pleasant like fine food and long unhurried sleep. Tom was just a very natural, bodily person.

He did it in bed.

He did it in the barn.

He did it in the bathtub.

He did it in the living room.

He did it in the car.

He did it in the meadow.

He did it behind trees.

He did it on top of huge, sunny boulders.

He did it in the road (as in the song, no one watching).

He did it on sleek granite just above the foaming, ice-green runs of Bright’s Creek. And some people came out on the rocky bluff above us. Well, he’d promised me public procreation; why be surprised to find him good as his word? Like: Land of Many Uses! Enjoy your National Forest! And you don’t need spark arresters. I think they went away.

He tried doing it in the creek. That was too cold for even him to get it up. So we dried off, severally danced and jogged the miles back home to Pardee, and started over in the bed. We were each other’s sweet amusement park: we went on all the rides.

Thought: if he goes on so enthusiastically fitting him and his into me and mine, in the end I might contain him all. I would be his outside then, his garment, his cloak of invisibility.

One kind of little birds in Pardee meadow: the male is gaudy and bright orange, and he sings from the tips of willows. The female doesn’t sing a note. What’s more, she’s brown. She watches. But inside their little bodies is one flesh and bone. Their desire is for each other.

Wednesday, August 20

Tom’s birthday.

As the apple tree among the trees of the wood,

so is my beloved among the sons.

I sat down under his shadow with great delight,

and his fruit was sweet to my taste

He brought me to the banqueting house,

and his banner over me was love—

(Thus far the Song of Songs.)

Thursday, August 21

Learning was about the shape of it: to live together, to play the instruments, to keep our faces fed. Shyly going through each other’s stuff. His suitcase said a lot about him. The clothes were neat, even the well-worn ones, as things bought new from the store.

The man lived in a pair of Levi’s. I never would have guessed. Split across the knees seam to seam, and across both thighs in back. I remember sexy shameless guys at school who used to wear the butt-split jeans. You’d see the pockets hanging down inside, never any underwear. That’s why they did it, so you’d sit and puzzle if they wore any. Always that nice expanse of sinewy male thigh, discreetly furry. Tom had very little body hair, but the back of his thigh was a downy Hawaiian sunset. And the rips were just right for a lover’s hand to slide in when he kissed them. Didn’t he know.

But the Levis were clean to the point of sterile. So were the two pair of super-expensive marathoner’s shoes he alternated for his jig, the white briefs, white socks, white cotton sweats, and white Lycra running tights.

Under the clothes was the music for the hundred-mile jig. Eighteen tapes, two a day: three songs from each band, one for his approach, which they’d play until cued that he’d come in range, then the song he’d chosen for his pass-by, and a third for his retreat. I listened to nearly half. Some were famous bands (as he said), some splendid songs I’d known for years. And some were just sweet kids, earnestly awful.

Underneath the music were the pillboxes. A rainbow of pills: red, blue, yellow, green. Clear gold gelatin footballs, two-tones, lots of different whites. No way to tell what any one was for, parceled out in daily dose containers.

What could they all be? Health supplements, vitamins, that kind of thing? Stuff to keep him off drugs? Medications? Was he sick and lying to me? He was dosing himself up like a heart transplant.

Maybe they were drugs, and he was lying to me. One item in the neat utility of his suitcase, a flat white plastic jug, still wore its prescription under tape. Three pieces of significant info: the name of a London chemist, Tom’s name, and PABA. He caught me looking.

“Came back the time before all-over freckles. Old Harlan didn’t like that.” I got the quick apologetic bob that went with Harlan’s name. Getting quicker (and less apologetic) every time. “Well, I can’t take the sun. Back when we were playing in the street, I’d go all red. He made me get this stuff. Never gone without it since, except for that one time.” Now it was the old shy-grin-and-flaming-blush trick. It made my heart swell up and pop, as ever.

“Prescription sunscreen?”

“Unscented.”

“You don’t like perfume?”

(My observation: most men don’t. It’s the women who mythologize their body parts with perfume; and guys at best ignore the stuff. At worst they’re like Papa, who’ll come into some perfumed presence with an enormous rhino sniff, and the query,“What stinks?”)

Tom said, “Like to choose the ones I live with, anyway.”

His shampoo was a botanical with hardly any scent. His soap was Turkish: it smelled like sunny green-gold virgin olive oil in the bath, and on his skin like nothing.

But the sunscreen made fascinating business. He wanted it frequently, all over (“Sun comes through cloth, y’know,”), and he wanted help smoothing it on. Helping him was risky.

Times were, we never made it out into the sun at all.

It occurred to me to wonder whether Harlan wore it too.

Friday, August 22

He hadn’t ever said how long he meant to stay. A week would give us till next Monday. I’d hoped somehow it might be forever. But he began to look restless.

“What else is around here?”

“Just more of the same.”

He wasn’t a big eater, that’s for sure. Most of the steak stayed frozen. Some of the salad drooped. What he did like: fried egg sandwiches with bacon and lots of Dijon mustard. He also drank me out of milk. The closest place to buy more was the “lodge,” at the far side of the dam.

I took him to the lodge. Dusty little place: flat spots for trailers, a boat launch, and a log cabin store with flush toilets, video games, a telephone, a coin-op laundry, and a hair salon. All the domestic female-type comforts.

Some weekends in summer, a local western band gigs on the front steps. Izzy and me and friends would have fished and gone swimming on our side of the lake. When evening fell and the bats came out, we’d float the dark waters in a rubber boat and listen to the night-music, the whump-bumpa thumpa-bump electric bass and twangy country voices drifting over from the lodge.

———

Always lots of kids around the lodge.

Tom stood at the counter with my eggs and milk; the girls behind him had a raft of diet sodas. The woman rang Tom up; he handed her a hundred-dollar bill.

“Nothing smaller than this on ya?”

“Not that I go flashing around.”

It was the way he said it. One six-pack of sodas hit the floor. Tom got his wad of change, and turned. Girls ringed him, silent as a pack of wolves. Tank tops and tube tops, French cut T-shirts saying, “Where the hell is Panther Creek Reservoir?” Wide open mouths, wide open eyes. Levis and feathered hair. Another six-pack dropped.

He didn’t quite run, just a long flat lope. I ran. I barely cleared the door ahead of them; he was at the car. Now I had it started. They were massed outside his window.

I banged it into reverse. “Lock your door!” I flung it backwards, past their toes. “Roll up your window!” I saw the mischief flash across his face, and thought about fireworks on a summer night. He rolled his window down.

“Actually,” he said, “I’m not a thing like him.”

I could see them in the rear-view mirror, pelting along in our dust till I turned the bend onto the dam.

He was silent for the rest of the ride.

I switched it off. We sat there in the car, at the top of the path that leads down to the cabin, as close as you can get and miss the sand.

“Sorry,” he said.

“Don’t need to be.”

“Try to understand, your place here means health to me. There’ve been some black times when it was all the health I could remember. I wanted to come back; see that I hadn’t imagined it.” I looked at him sitting there. He was still holding the eggs and milk. “It’s just that, like—this—” he indicated Pardee Camp, meadow, cabin, barn, with one long finger, “—would be your fancy private clinic. But I’m half well. Patient can’t take the clinic home with him.”

“Ah, vhat you vant, Herr Rhymer, is outpatient health.”

He giggled in spite of himself. “Let me tell you,” he said, “about Real Life. Place I quite dread to take you. One hotel room’s like another if you keep the shade drawn. Dressing rooms are all alike. Same things go on in the back of this limo as did in the last one. And the airplanes, and the stages, they all look alike. The kids all look alike. Those girls back there are a big part of my life. I knew them faster than they knew me. And if I’m to make you part of my life, I must go home, and fit you in among the other pieces.” He shook his head sadly. “Y’know, it’s not going to be easy.”

“I didn’t think it would.”

“If you want me—” he said.

“I want you.”

“—Please take me home.”

“Okay.”

He grinned at me. “Amador County.”

“Right.”

“I do remember some things.”

“Yeah.”

So we did it in the front seat of the bus.

———

Amazing how “unlike” a treasure in the hand can look from one approaching, a kind of psychological Doppler Shift. Imagine being on a quest, a lifetime struggle, years and years, to reach that pinnacle where Dulcinea holds the magic treasure, the Grail of Love—whatever—in keeping.

And you make it. Sure enough you do. But when you get there, Dulcinea is changed before your eyes into a sweet human lover stuck on his own unlikely quest. That pinnacle was a slight rise in the ground. Its only treasure is this view: another wide, empty valley, and the real heights dimly visible beyond. On the road again. Moving right along. Only this time, Dulcinea’s going with me.

———

Highway 88. Waterloo. The cheapo gas station got torn down a year ago, and with it the Holy Phone Booth where Tom once called to see if Harlan was alive. An incredibly garish McDonald’s stands in its place.

The new phone hangs in a little plastic hood outside; no privacy of any kind. Tom had his arms around me; we could feel my heart hammering. It’s my call this time.

Mama answered.

“Hey.”

Silence.

“Andy?”

“That’s my name.”

“Are you all right?”

“Relax. I’ll be right home.”

“Wait. Before you say anything, listen.”

“Okay.”

“Your father has ideas that are—what’s the word—”

“Set-in-cement?”

Tom choked quietly.

“—About certain things: such as liability—”

“Okay,” I said. “Go on.”

“As soon as you left, it occurred to him, if you were taking a girlfriend on a long drive, you’d probably share the driving—” (It would never have occurred to me. I love to drive; I hate to ride. I fear for my life. I also get carsick.) “So, to make it short, he called Sam Lyttle—” (Be advised: that splattering sound you hear is, without a doubt, the shit hitting the fan.) “—You’ll be relieved to know, Kaye’s lavishly insured whatever she drives, their car, our car. She’s also a summer assistant at a free vet’s clinic in Cabo San Lucas.”

“Now you just wait; don’t jump to conclusions—”

Click. The other extension coming off the hook.

“Hello?”

I felt Tom stir against me.

“Listen, Papa, I’m not in any trouble.”

“Doesn’t sound too likely. Why don’t you start at the beginning?” About that time Ma Bell required more money for her services. Papa said “Operator? Can you switch this to a collect call?” They dickered for a while. I took the simplest out, hung up and called him back collect. “Never mind the beginning. Start anywhere.”

“I have been to the cabin.”

“Okay.”

“I’ve also been to Nevada and gotten married.”

A long silence. Tom listened intently. I could fairly plot Papa’s mental course past all the teenage guys I’d ever brought home to the family table for inspection. Most unlikely, any of ’em. Some of ’em downright bizarre.

Finally he said, “Anyone we know?”

“Tommi Rhymer.”

“This is no joke!”

“I’m not joking! You were always the one who told me to ‘form my own conscience’ and ‘keep my own counsel.’ Well this is what you get! A close-mouthed self-directed kid!”

Gently, Tom removed the phone from my hand. “Professor Falconer, sir. Tom Rhymer here.” Minutes buzzed by like cars on the highway. “I don’t know about that,” he said. “She could hardly mount my head for a trophy on her wall, could she, if she’d enlisted your aid bagging it. Well, yeah. Not sporting. You got it.” He listened.

“Three problems? Which three, sir? Aside from what you call your ‘credibility factor,’ which our arriving there in person should—”

“But I do. Sunday’s our flight to London. We’re to be married at Westminster Cathedral, that’s the Roman Cathedral of London—Ah, you know—Saturday, September 27 at 11:00 in the morning—”

Wait a minute. What if I’d never showed up at his hotel? So what if I hadn’t asked him to get married? Was he going to ask me? What if I’d said no?

“Oh God,” he said suddenly. “What is this? How many hours? Eight? Eight weeks? Marriage Preparation Seminar. From the Diocese of San Jose. Approval of the bride’s diocese. God. Well, what are my options?” He listened.

“Outside of joining another church. Now wait, Professor Falconer, they don’t want the likes of me in their little public classes. I assure you they don’t. Isn’t there some way y’could explain the matter?” He listened. “I would be most everlastingly grateful. Now you spoke of a third—”

He listened, and silently handed me the phone.

Papa said, “Unless you’ve been a whole lot swifter than I know, you don’t have a passport.”

“ .”

“All right, granted, you’ve obviously been swifter than I know, but do you have a passport?”

“ .”

“You can get one in 24 hours, that includes weekends, I think, if you demonstrate need. But the passport office is in San Francisco, the foot of Market, Market and Second, something like that. They’re open weekdays, nine to five.”

“Yeah.”

“This means they close at five o’clock.”

“Yeah.”

“They open again at nine o’clock, Monday morning.”

“In other words, I’m not going to London Sunday unless I get my ass in gear.”

“You got it. I trust we’ll be seeing you soon.”

“Very.”

“’Bye.”

“’Bye.”

We climbed back into the car. As we were hurtling around the cloverleaf to southbound 99 he said, “Some family.”

“Yeah. Mine.”

———

My stomach writhed sourly and sickeningly upward, arriving, a dead-heat photo finish with the elevator, on the thirty-second floor.

Gotta lie down. Gonna be sick if I don’t lie down. Tom’s understanding was perfect. He ran me down the empty hall (no guards), had a key in his hand before we reached the door, rushed and cuddled me across the room (nobody there) into a dim bedroom and a clean fresh enormous hotel bed.

“Aspirin.”

“Right.”

———

I drove and drove and drove, seventy-five in the fast lane, eyes fried by the sun, switching lanes, wriggling between enormous trucks, failure pop-riveted to the back of my neck. Three thirty. Three forty-five. Four o’clock. Four fifteen. A lane closed somewhere up ahead. Crawling traffic, Smog, sun, exhaustion. The VW thumped like a cripple over buckled pavement. Four-thirty. Four forty-five. Four-fifty.

“Vitamin C. Tums.”

“What?”

“Antacid.”

“Afraid I haven’t any.”

“In my purse. Decongestant—sinus pills—pink jobs in foil. In the purse. Two of each. Water.”

“Right.”

Four fifty-five. The first signs for the Bay Bridge toll plaza. Five o’clock. Five after five. Five ten.

He brought it all. I sat up long enough to gulp and swallow. My eyes squirmed in my head.

———

Somebody said, “I got tickets to Bora Bora!”

Altogether weird: unattached to anything. I felt around for Tom; no Tom. And the dimness of the room wasn’t thick drapes anymore; it was night.

“Well y’can bloody cancel ’em!”

That was Tom. The bedroom was dark but the door was open; light and noise wandered from the living room. Assessment of my condition. Meds have done the best they can. All I need now is the front of Tom’s shirt, and it is involved in a fight down the hall.

“I’m takin’ a guest!” That was the man with tickets.

“Bugger your guest!”

“He intends to, love,” said somebody else, “in a little grass shack on the beach in Bora Bora.”

A thud, knuckles on flesh. And a woman’s voice, really screaming: “Tom, she’s got a family, for God’s sake—”

Tom, screaming back, “—First-time married for less than a week, and you’re asking me to pack her back to mother, is that what y’want?”

She could yell right along with him. “What about us? How long did it take us to get the boys into that school? You think they’ll hold a place for trampy music-gypsies’ kids if we don’t show? They’ve got a waiting list as long as—”

“—She is going to stay here at this fucking hotel, on my fucking money, and one or more of you are fucking staying with her!”

There was a lull. Somebody else said, “Well you got pussy-whipped in a hurry, didn’t you?”

All hell broke loose. A good heavy crash, breaking glass, a lot of swearing and demands that various people cut out various activities.

I loved Tom. I loved his band. I didn’t know if they fought all the time, but fighting over me was bottom-line unacceptable. God help me. I got to the bedroom door. I got to the end of the hall. Tom was straddling a hassock on one side of the room, everybody else was on the other.

I couldn’t bear to see him like that: slight and lost, no breeding, no education, off his balance, past his youth, and down to his fists as a last defense. I liked the man he was. I wanted to cover him, comfort him, give him back his glamour and his airs. He needed them and so did I.

I stumbled toward him, head thumping like a drum machine, over the furniture and people’s feet, found the front of his shirt, and burrowed into it. If I was really flesh of his flesh, he could button his jacket over me and nobody would notice. Better than “seen and not heard”; not heard and not seen either. He wrapped his arms around me.

Somebody said, “I’ll stay with her.”

Silence. God. Maybe everyone was staring at me. Tommi Rhymer’s married this unknown chick, and there’s an enormous row, and she comes staggering out with a blind headache, looking like a refugee and curls up on his front.

“What?”

“I said I’d stay with her.”

Real silence. Total. Tom’s heart beating, nothing else.

I must be going back to sleep. Perhaps I’d never waked. His shirtfront smelled like cold sweat and other people’s cigarettes. This was a lousy dream. A wash and bed was what he needed. I was supposed to be his medicine, not part of the sickness. Medicine needs its eyes open. I opened my eyes.

Tom (like nearly all the rest) was staring, not at me, but at an arm, a neat white sleeve, and a hand raised, orderly schoolboy fashion, on the far side of the room.

“You were going home with me,” said Tom.

“Why?” The hand was Harlan Parr’s. “I’ve nothing at all to do with the planning for your jig, until we play you off the steps at Norwich City Hall three weeks from tomorrow. I can play any set you want on twenty minutes’ call.”

“You really mean it?”

“Of course.” Harlan sat up out of the couch. “My pleasure.” He took his shades off and stuck them into a pocket. “I’ll catch up on my writing.”

A warm spot started under my nose, in the middle of Tom’s shirt. I felt it grow and grow, routing the fear smells and exhaustion smells, till it filled his chest and flooded down his arms. “Thanks, old man.” He said it so softly, I could barely hear him.

Sudden cheers. Hampers of turkey sandwiches had made the scene from room service. I ate half of one and nearly heaved. Tom ate my other half. People oohed and aahed over me. I heard a lot of names and remembered few. The woman with kids was the tall blonde in the “Love is Blind” shirt. Not a groupie after all, but Shan McInery, Rollo’s wife of ten years. Sim Garfein had the tickets to Bora Bora. Nicki Cavanaugh had a fat lip where Tom slugged him one. He was filling his face with sandwiches and beer, perfectly placid. Everybody’s problem seemed to have blown away except mine.

My last sight of the tribe, as Tom led his dried tears and my green flourishing headache off to bath and bed: Rollo McInery cackling and elbowing Harlan in the ribs. Harlan, grinning, elbowed back.

Saturday, August 23

The Diocese of San Jose did not want Tommi Rhymer in its Marriage Preparation Seminar. Papa explained it to them all right. Scared to know just what he said, I didn’t ask. Things seemed to be out of my hands.

After noon, Tom had me climb back into the old VW and drive him south. He slid his nice warm hand between my leg and the seat. I wore the white cotton knit mini. Most of the cabin floor had shaken off it. The rest of the band and hangers-on followed, pulling onto the shady rear of the Stanford campus, filling the end of Salvatierra Street, a royal progress in three limousines.

My brother opened the door. My brother weighs all of fifty pounds. Opening the door and coming face to face with Tommi Rhymer, and being always one for subtlety, he hollered, “Chee-ee-eez Lou-ee-ze!” and ran.

Papa’s turn. Papa is a well-built man; he was stocky facing Tom. Stocky and speechless. His glasses mirrored. His beard stuck out. Who Tom was was so unquestionable, I felt with a pang, my own identity might be the only thing in doubt. At last he shook his head.

“I don’t know what I could possibly say.”

Tom gave him the shy, sideways grin. His red hair fell in his eyes. “‘Well hello, son,’ might cover it.”

He was in like a burglar.

Mama was too dressed up, and was running around making too much food. All he had to do was hug her.

Izzy was there too, my sister Isabel the pre-vet major, all sun-bleached, freckled, and strong-armed from wrestling stud horses around the vet school barns at Davis.

And Russell of course, her Aggie boyfriend, the rancher’s kid from Likely, California, who says almost nothing and sees almost everything with quick brown eyes. Those two are into ’fifties movies, and le Jazz Hot.

And Skye Milligan. Where the carrion is, there will the eagles be gathered. Still bitter as hell she had to help me kidnap Tommi Rhymer, and worse yet, had to keep her mouth shut afterwards. She’s taking feminist journalism or equivalent at Mills, dressing for success, and is, at present, a Laurie Anderson fanatic.

I’m the only one who’s stayed where I was. Same place. Arrested development. In love with the same frayed and torn man and his sweet loud music since I was twelve.

The house is full, the yard is full, I’m wandering around. The dining room. Papa’s talking to Tom. “—Got somebody, Monsignor Shanty Irish, on the phone: he said what the Diocese usually counsels, you know, where the kids have run off and had a civil ceremony, is that they wait a year before they even consider marriage in the Church—”

“Meaning,” says Tom slowly, “if it’s a bad business they can still get out of it?”

“Affirmative. Garbage in, garbage out.”

“This is the Roman Diocese?”

“Affirmative.”

“God. And what’d y’say to that?”

My room. Mama’s in there, looking with new eyes. “Okay,” I said. “All right, the signatures on the posters and photos are all real, done in pen, take a look. That red fly swish thing on the wall behind the door, with the end bound in silk thread and sealing wax? When Tom cut the long part of his hair for Drake, I was where he sent it—”

She said: “Why couldn’t you have told us?”

When she was halfway down the hall I said, “I guess because, if I’d been you, I’d never have let me do it—”

I’ve got no place to land in my own house, doomed to keep moving, like the Flying Dutchman.

Papa still. “—Every other rock personality I read of getting married makes this spectacle of bashing cameras, shouting ‘I am a very private person!’ You seem to be operating in a different mode—”

Tom grinned at him. “Ever seen those T-shirts that say ‘Life’s not a cabaret—’”

So they were getting along. Wasn’t that all I wanted?

“Right. ‘—It’s a fucking circus.’”

I moved on fast, but Tom’s voice carried: “You’re looking at the Singing Ringmaster. If there’s any part of me is private, it’s so private that I haven’t found it yet.”

He was lying. There was always the thing he didn’t mention, Tommi Rhymer was a fictional address. Of course it wasn’t private, nobody really lived there. Tom’s heart beat invulnerable in Harlan’s chest, a private place indeed.

I went out into the yard.

Izzy’s holding forth on horse breeding, as usual, and ignores me: “—Nobody wants their million-dollar stud all gashed up by some twitchy filly, so they’ve got these, like, sex surrogate stallions they call ‘teasers.’ Can be anything, pony studs are hornier ’n hell, and they cut ’em some way so they can’t do anything really, but not enough so they won’t be sexy, and let them work the fillies over till they get all warm and runny; then they bring the real stud in, and his job’s easy.”

Skye says “Hey, I know some real studs use rock singers for the same thing.” They all three pulled these big, wry “OhmyGod I didn’say that” faces.

I just walked away. It occurs to me for the first time, looking at them, lined up shoulder to shoulder on the wall under the pear tree: I may very well have done the unpardonable. I’ve made fantasy flesh, and dwelt among it. A voice of pure fantasy rises in song from the kitchen. Rude as old stone, sinuous as wind across the hillside.

A sailor courted

a farmer’s daughter

Who lived contagious

to the Isle of Mann,

Wi’ warblin’ melodies he

did besought her

To marry him

before she should marryanyothersortofaman!

That brings a whoop of raw delight from Mama: a scholar’s infatuation for a newfound species. Well I wanted her to be delighted, didn’t I? She has a doctorate in the legendary ballads of the British Isles. Tom’s grandfather was a famous singer; the name of Thomas Rhymer figures in her sources more than once.

I round the corner. Tom’s sitting at her table, eyes closed, hand cupped behind his ear, a spirit medium giving substance to a dead man’s voice.

The farmer’s daughter

had grand possessions,

a silver teapot

an’ two-pound-ten in gold—

Harlan was there too, competent and witty in the kitchen, quietly helping Mama with the coffee, the white wine, the little quiches, little meatballs, lemonade, and cookies—I wanted to rush in shrieking, “No! Don’t let him! He’s contaminated!” which wasn’t true, and, “How does he get off being so damn domestic?” which wasn’t kind, and left holding a lemonade instead.

Some colleague had given Papa this set of tumblers with the Seven Deadly Sins etched on in Churchy Gothic letters. Cute. Only old sins come in sets of seven; glassware comes in eights. We were wondering, as he unwrapped, what minor vice they’d elevated to the list with Pride, Lust, Envy etc. It was the one I’ve got, VIII: Choosing the Wrong Side.

My all-time favorite.

The garage. Papa’s out there now, enlightening the McInerys about the lack of rust on California vehicles. “—This is where your British collectors come to buy old British cars—” Somebody’s under the gray Porsche on the mechanic’s creeper, making first-hand acquaintance of its rust-free pan. I recognized the shoes and left. Harlan is a black magician. Harlan has the power of bilocation. Harlan is all over my house, like a swarm of bees.

I put on my own running shoes. Nobody saw me go. I jogged the whole circuit of Campus Drive in the hot still Saturday afternoon. Quail in the thickets by the Stanford tomb. Lovers on the grass. Oak moths fluttering. Girls playing radios. Guys playing Frisbee. I didn’t get home until the limousines were leaving.

Only Tom remained, with his sterile little suitcase, slender and battered as he was. Papa put Tom in his old Porsche—before he could shut the door I jumped in like a dog—and drove him out where Redwood Priory perches secretively on a canyon side among the dark trunks of its namesakes. I huddled against Tom’s seat back, arms around his shoulders, indulging myself while I could. He held my hands down warm against his chest.

Father Malachi taught me catechism. He’s agreed to spend twenty-four hours with Tom and vouch we’ve both had marriage preparation. Irregular. But acceptable.

Father Malachi is a Hungarian refugee. Papa defines a Hungarian as a man who goes in the revolving door behind you and comes out ahead. All the older monks at Redwood are revolving-door Hungarians. Father Malachi’s taught boys all his life. I’ve suspected sometimes that he thought I was one, and that was why we got along. He also counseled at Juvy Hall. I was never able to shock him.

Up till now.

What about now?

Sunday, August 24

Ring. That’s how it would start, the late-night phone call. Not Tom, not Father ’Chi, not for me. The Prior. For Papa. “We cannot sign this paper; we will not be made accessory; we see impediments to this marriage.” A term I never contemplated, embedded now in one of my more painful sectors like a broadhead arrow.

Morning.

The last thing Papa said when he put Tom out of the car was, “You might take a look at those guys’ chapel floor; there’s a crack you can put your foot in, and the whole back end is sliding down the gully.”

“Right,” said Tom.

My own father.

On the way home he said “How long is it since he’s been to church?” Twenty years, maybe. “You know they’ll ask him for a lifetime confession.”

Maybe the Priory’s phones are down. Temptation to ring out there myself, hang up if anyone answers. So I’ll know. Some younger monk drove in to sing the High Mass at Saint Ann’s. In place of Father ’Chi. He wasn’t very good at it.

Try to come in through the narrow door. Many, I tell you, will try to enter and be unable. When once the master of the house has risen to lock the door and you stand outside knocking and saying, ‘Sir, open for us,’ he will say in reply, ‘I do not know where you come from.’ This is the Gospel of the Lord.

Home at one o’clock, I locked my own door, pulled the covers up, prayed sad prayers (my passport), and dreamed bad dreams (Tom’s lifetime confession: I pictured it about the size of the Congressional Record) until seven o’clock. As our usual crew was showing up for Sunday dinner, Tom’s empty rented limo came.

I rode out to Redwood in it. Father ’Chi was waiting on the steps below the monastery, in the green shadow. He has this whinnying laugh, the greeting of a friendly horse. “Your husband has told me much about you that I do not know—He is a very beautiful young man.” That’s all. He started back up to get him.

I called after him, “You don’t think he’s too old for me?” and meant something much scarier than that.

“Maybe you’re too old for him! He is like your posters, yes?”

Surprise, surprise. What could Tom possibly have told him? What did he tell him about Harlan? Certainly not the stuff he’s dragged out of his heart with me.

Or?

Maybe it isn’t so bizarre a situation; maybe half the guys Father ’Chi comforted all those years at Juvy Hall were just like Tom inside. Just not as pretty outside. The griefs were all the same; only the gifts were different. And nobody paid anybody off, there were no hypocrites and liars, the truth itself was not unmentionable, and the priest had heard it all and worse a hundred times. The Church could love Tom as he stood. Maybe.

There is Tom, talking to Father ’Chi. Suddenly I see him kneel on the gravel walk and hide his face against the old priest’s habit. How easy it would be to laugh and turn away. Who kneels to anybody, after all, these days?

But Father motions, so I run up the stairs instead and kneel beside him, embarrassment suspended in a cool black woolen evening. Father put one skeletal fine brown hand on Tom’s red head and one on mine and blessed us—with all the real old stuff too, my being like vines on the sides of his house and his seeing his children’s children to the third generation—until both of us cried.

The Church is a clone to the Federal Government in so many ways, you really have to think the Holy Spirit bears with it as advertised, or, like Papa says, the whole mess should have crashed and burned a thousand years ago. The Church has said an awful lot of stuff beside its prayers.

But how to image that indwelling? Is it, as they’d like you to suppose, hard-ass human folly at the bottom, and a trickle down of Spirit? Spiritual Reaganomics?

Or insidious Spirit infesting high and low, subtle as a virus spliced into the gene code of its host? Surviving in the same illusive habitat the Psalmist says His Mercy does, “—from generation to generation of those who fear Him?”

Undetectable, indestructible, incorrigible Mercy.

Thank God I’m never likely to know everything.

———

Knowing more might be a help sometimes.

Sight isn’t always hooked to understanding.

Airport security blocked off a waiting area for Belshangles. We were in it. Tom had been kissing me goodbye, peaceful, as if no one else existed in the world and well in advance so his public would be sure to notice. No great mob of fans beyond the barriers, but the favored few had cameras. I asked him if he wanted to do it in the middle of the airport concourse. He whispered “Better house at Heathrow.”

Tom left me and went to Harlan by the windows. The plane flashed in the dark outside. The interminable fuel and luggage was all on. Tom said something to him, ashamed, I thought, apologetic. For what? Saddling him with me?

Harlan’s reply was steady-eyed and much too glib.

I saw Tom wince. Fear moved in like San Francisco fog. I hadn’t wanted to stay with Harlan when he and Tom were on the best of terms. Tom tried again. Harlan glanced carefully both ways along the concourse, and made one brief suggestion.

I thought Tom was going to hit him.

Instead he wheeled off, angry, nervous, striding up and down. Harlan at his elbow matching words as quiet as shared thoughts, shared hurt that clings like acid in the face, and if you try to wipe it, transfers to your hands and burns in two places. A movie camera might have caught the body language. Still snapshots would only show their smooth, hard public faces. That pair could die in public and make it pass for part of the act.

Tom left him and kissed me again. I felt, rather than saw, a percussion accompaniment of flashbulbs. Then an airline person came, wings on uniformed chest, to usher Belshangles onboard discreetly, even before the handicapped and travelers with small children.

Another detained Harlan, murmured, “This way, please.” Taking my elbow, she steered us down the gray metal, gray plastic, gray indoor-outdoor carpet ramp after the rest. Wild surmise for a moment. We were going too. Fame and money could buy anything.

We reached the curved door of the plane. I could see into the First Class, see Tom at the far end laughing with Nicki. But there beside us was another door, and a metal stairway down to asphalt, flashing lights, diesel stink, and screaming turbine roar. We picked our way down, leaning on wet wind. A ground level door took us back through baggage areas, straight to the escalators for the parking lot.

No fans followed. We hiked the length of the indoor parking. Harlan had a rented car, a blue Nissan Sentra, as are all rented cars. It wouldn’t start. He popped its hood, swearing with quiet interest in what, from total otherness, I fancied must be Arabic.

I watched his coattails and narrow little rear. The rest of him was under the hood. How tempting. Up with his silly Italian shoes, pitch him into the engine, and slam the hood. And run. Yeah.

He convinced the rent-a-Sentra with regrettable ease. His hobby was sports car racing, after all. We drove from airport garage to hotel garage in silence, rode the freight elevator in silence, walked to the suite and our separate rooms in silence. I recognized the landscape: what Tom called “Real Life.” Only Tom wasn’t in it. There was fresh cold hotel linen on the bed. It didn’t smell like Tom’s love anymore.