“Ha, what was that?” I say, reeling from what I’m almost positive I heard Joe call me. Realizing how harsh it sounds as soon as I say it, I put a hand on his knee, trying to repair the damage. Taking a swig of drugstore wine to soften the blow, he looks up quickly, embarrassed.
Joe and I are seated cross-legged on the creek bank behind the Tischman house, a jumbo-sized bottle between us, plastic party cups in our hands. All he’d said was, “Do you want another glass of wine, love?” Probably brought on by the vino, it was over very fast.
“Sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean—”
“Didn’t mean what?” Joe says, immediately incensed. Jumping up, he walks to the edge of the thicket. “Do you have a problem with us?” he says, turning back around, making an imaginary line between the two of us with his index finger.
“What?” I’m still wondering if there’s any way I can backtrack, say I meant something other than what it sounded like I meant. “No.”
“Then why did you just—”
“It’s not a big deal,” I say, attempting to move on. “It just sounded like something my grandmother would have said to my grandfather, that’s all.”
He laughs, not the isn’t that funny laugh, but the screw you laugh.
“You’re serious. I mean, have you ever even been with another person? I mean, in any intimate way whatsoever?”
“Joe, I really think you’re making a big thing out of nothing.”
“Noooo, mister. You are the one making a big thing out of nothing.” He stumbles about the bank, not because he’s drunk, but because he’s deflated, his buzz kicked in the teeth by my feeble insecurities.
He backs away toward the thicket, eager to get as far away from the assault as possible. “God, now I’m embarrassed, even though it was this subconscious, insignificant thing. I just thought that since, you know, there’s a little something else going on here besides backslapping and basketball…shit almighty, I cannot believe I am having to justify myself here. I’m sorry I said it! I’m damned sorry I said something that was so unbelievably girly, nice and familiar.”
“Don’t be sorry,” I say as quietly as possible.
Joe paces and shakes his head.
“Don’t be sorry, okay?”
He goes deeper into the brush, the long shadows of a nearby stand of cattails masking his face from view. “Hey, you there?” I say, soft, uneasy.
Jumping to my feet, I sit on a fallen log next to Joe. “I am an idiot.”
Joe turns around, tosses his empty cup into the bushes, runs his fingers through his hair, and shakes his head.
“There is probably evidence somewhere that proves I have a fair amount of issues,” I say, laughing self-consciously as we finally make eye contact.
“No shit,” Joe says flatly. “Bring forth some of this evidence. Something that will better help me understand whatever crazy-assed shit just went down here.”
I’m thinking that’s like the pot calling the kettle black, if the rumor Sis heard was true. But what I also realize is that whatever crazy Joe is or isn’t or was, it doesn’t hold a candle to the crazy I get when I consider showing up for someone for the rest of eternity, no matter how attractive the prospect is. I was also never any good at letting a moment be. I always had to pick at it and louse up any chance of redemption.
“I was in a bar with Frances for some benefit thing,” I hear myself saying. “There were these two guys in Western gear, you know, the hats, the boots, the whole nine yards, dancing to ‘Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch.’ Actually singing it to each other. And I thought that was ridiculous.”
“And this means what, exactly? That you’re a homophobe?”
“No, that’s not it at all. But the Stalworths go back and forth, see? They ruin people’s lives. They can’t be trusted!”
Joe is laughing. “What in the hell are you talking about?”
“Where the fuck is the wine?” I ask, fumbling over and under the log for my discarded cup.
Joe shoves a cup in my hand and pours.
“My mother told us—”
“Told who?”
“Sis and me. When we were kids. That the Stalworths don’t go one way or the other. They mix it up. Get divorced, get back together, leave children. They can’t ever make up their minds. You know how gay guys can’t even stand the thought of eating pussy?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I love it. I could do it all day long.”
“Good for you,” Joe says. “So what?”
“So, I love what I do with you just as much. Maybe more than with anyone I’ve ever been with. And that’s not allowed.”
“By who?”
“The sex police, whoever.”
“Well, there’s the whole Kinsey scale—”
“I know,” I say, “but no one pays any attention to that. I have to make up my mind or else I’ll be just like one of the rest of ’em. Just another Stalworth who can’t pick a side.”
“Phillip. Look at me.”
“And I’m too old to be having this discussion anyway, right? I’m too old for so many things.”
“Phillip, stop,” Joe says. “Look at me.”
I take another slug of cheap wine and squint in his direction.
“Why do you care?”
“Huh?”
“Why do you care what anyone else thinks? How much pussy you should or shouldn’t eat or if you dream you’re climbing a forty-foot dick when you sleep or if you’re too old to have a career or go to the moon. Why do you care?”
The question hits me square between the ears, for whatever reason. I’m figuring it’s because I care so deeply for the person who’s asking it. I take another sip of wine and stand, walking the length of the log before I stop and turn back around to face Joe.
“I adore you.” There. I’d said it. And I wasn’t even aware it was coming. But I knew I wasn’t just saying it. I knew it was true. So I just let it lay there like a cat who’d spit up lunch and hoped no one noticed.
“Okay,” Joe says, sucking on a frond he’s plucked from a cattail.
“Hey,” I say, hoping for some sort of inspiration to break the mood of insanity that, strangely enough, originated from me.
“Hey,” he says, like a grunt.
Willing to sell my firstborn to change course, I find myself jumping up and down on the log, the picture of anxious buoyancy, slapping my hands together, holding both out to him, an energized minor league catcher at the top of the first. “Hey, look. Here I come.”
Joe looks at me like I’ve gone completely around the bend, which, of course, I have.
“Catch me.” And with that minimal ounce of forewarning, I jump on the guy and he seizes me, having no other choice but to hold me like a big, fussy infant. “See?” I say, looking down on my bewildered, handsome Jewish boy with a giggle. “Now this is far more ridiculous than anything I’ve seen in a leather bar.” The ice officially broken, I wrap my legs tightly around Joe’s waist, checking his demeanor with a raised eyebrow.
Stifling a laugh, he gamely plays along, hoisting me an inch higher for his comfort. “You won’t do, boy” he says. “Dude—slick—cap’n,” he mocks, carrying me up the path toward the dark house on the hill. “Crazy-assed motherfucker.”
* * *
Justin and Marsala said a discharge would begin when Tina would begin releasing the cancer from her lungs, and it did. She expelled buckets of thick, copious mucus from her throat every morning like clockwork. Tina would sit on the edge of the bed, her focus on a tiny framed picture of a beaming Christ on the dresser, a smile of victory on her face as she spat ream after ream of paste-like gloop into a trash can between her knees.
We were told a macrobiotic diet causes drastic weight loss in most people, and more so in people with cancer. This is supposedly a good thing since cancer cells live in fat. When I have to pull up the waistline of my jeans while putting away the breakfast dishes, I realize I’ve lost almost as much weight as everyone else in the family.
Garrett and Sis have lost twenty-odd pounds apiece, and Tina has lost thirty-five, something she had previously concealed from her medical staff by placing weights in her sweatpants before appointments. Checking my reflection in the stainless steel wok, the only surviving relic I’d somehow neglected to send to the electrical appliance boneyard, my blurry gaunt face stares back at me.
While Fanny and I are scrubbing pans from a broccoli tempura lunch, I glance through the window at an energized Tina pacing purposefully on the front porch, her face stuck in the pages of a tiny paperback.
“What’s up with her, Fanny?”
“I think that’s some of your voodoo.”
Per my directive, Tina is reading a book written by a Santa Monica psychologist about the triumphs of a handful of her patients who, upon receiving the news of their cancer, took control of their lives and figured out the exact point when they gave up their personal power and chose cancer as a way of getting out of their misery.
Tina slams the book shut, thrusts an arm of victory in the air, and makes a beeline from the porch into the kitchen. Leaning against the pantry door, she holds up the treatise. “Thank you for this. You were right, it’s incredible. I mean, a shrink who might actually know something, who’d’a thunk it?”
Tina had an extremely low opinion of shrinks. The one who’d overseen her treatment years ago, Dr. Robert Watkins, had slept through most of her sessions. In later years he became the go-to witness on many high-profile sanity hearings, which she found wildly unsettling.
Tina tosses the book on the counter. “The fact that some emotional event, or even a lifetime of spiritual neglect—that’s what she calls it—can—I mean, shit—I can’t even talk about it yet.” She blows through the back door like a human tornado. “I’m going for a walk. A long, long walk.”
Hanging up the dish towel, I call after her in disbelief. “Did you say shit?”
* * *
Sis was in town for her high school reunion. Little did she know the real blowout would be at home. Within minutes of her arrival, she, Garrett, and I are seated against the flood wall of the patio like a jailhouse lineup, Tina pacing back and forth in front of us like an aggravated warden. “I’ve been doing some thinking, and if I’m going to get well, then I have to remember who I am. I always painted—when I was a kid, when I was in high school, and I was good at it. People loved me,” she says, stopping in front of my father. “But then I met you, Garrett Stalworth, and I bore your spawn.”
Sis and I freeze in unison. This is going to get worse.
Tina paces some more, her eyes still glued on Garrett. “And when I wanted to study in Mexico that summer with the children, you said, ‘What will it look like, your going off to God knows where to do God knows what? What will people think?’ Oh, and I listened, and I heeded. And when I went to work at the Center when the kids were in high school, you refused to do the dishes because you said you made more money than me.”
Tina had worked for a year at a day home for mentally challenged adults, and she had loved it. At some point she became a mentor to the mother of one of the clients, attempting to empower the woman to leave an abusive marriage. Shortly thereafter, Tina had another nervous breakdown and resigned.
“And I started to cave, ashamed at my selfishness in wanting you to help out around the house,” she says. She stops again in front of Garrett, really starting to lose it. “Feeling like I didn’t even deserve to be an integral part of the working world.” She leans in inches from his slack-jawed face for effect. “But I was making a difference in the world, which is more than I can say for a pharmaceutical executive, in my opinion,” she hisses, turning to face me. “How am I doing, Bo Skeet? How am I doing, Sis?” she shrieks, her voice a decibel higher than I even thought possible. “No cough, last time I checked. NO COUGH, GARRETT, SEEEEEEEEEEEEE?”
Tina throws a scarf around her neck like Eleanora Duse finishing a great scene and heads into the house, slamming the door behind her. Garrett crosses one leg over the other one and says “Hmm” to no one in particular.
That night, she chanted her name at the top of her lungs from behind her locked bedroom door till the wee hours: Tina, Tina, Tina, Tina. Sis and I read in the sunroom until it was over, and Garrett fell asleep in his La-Z-Boy. He was still there the next morning.
* * *
Joe had invited me up to his place to barbecue to celebrate our two years of dating. He never called it an anniversary—probably because he thought I’d go ten different kinds of insane.
The felled cedar beneath the creek infuses the night air with the fleeting whiff of Christmas. Having wrapped up dinner an hour earlier than I’d planned, I decide to head out. Walking across the backyard of the Tischman place, I stop to watch a quartet of foxes playing underneath the security light behind the garage. Each of the foxes holds his own place in a formation resembling a small baseball diamond. As one of the foxes runs to the fox on the next base, the tagged fox sprints to the next, and on it goes. To this day, it’s the most astonishing thing I’ve ever seen in the animal world. And I’ve never told a soul about it. I must have been watching the game for five minutes when I hear something from inside the house. At first, it sounds like Joe’s laughter. Must be on the phone. But in the next outburst, I detect a clear note of distress in his voice and I realize he’s crying.
Thinking I should move furtively to avoid breaking up the foxes’ game, I begin curving up to the house. But when I hear another outburst, I make a beeline to the nearby sundeck. As I head up the steps, I can see the tails of the foxes scatter to the bushes on the other side of their makeshift diamond.
“Anybody home?” I ask, opening the door an inch or two. The inside of the house is dark, except for the stove light in the kitchen. Torn between wanting Joe to know I heard him and pretending I didn’t, I call out again. “Joe? You here?”
A few seconds pass before Joe materializes in the hallway entrance. “You’re early,” he says.
“I know, sorry,” I say, startled at his disheveled appearance.
“It’s all right,” he says, camouflaging his emotional state with a yawn. He rubs his eyes like a kid after a nap. “Come on in. Let’s put some lights on and get this barbecue thing on the road, shall we?”
“You bet,” I say, still standing in the back door, afraid to disturb the air in the sorrowful place.
* * *
“I’m sorry,” Joe says, placing his half-eaten veggie burger on the wooden patio table. “I’m afraid I’m not good company tonight.” He props his feet on one of the wooden benches built into the sides of the deck.
I hold up the bottle of wine over his glass.
“No, thanks,” he says. “I don’t think I should.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Well, you can ask,” Joe says, “but I can’t guarantee I’ll have an answer.”
For a second, I consider making something up, scrapping my intention to probe the situation. But before I can back out, I’m already forging ahead.
“I heard you earlier tonight. You sounded very upset. And I’m sorry I heard you. I had no business coming here early. Maybe I should have gone home. But I’m here. And I want to know if there’s anything I can do.”
Joe sucks his teeth once, twice, like he’s figuring a math problem.
“Do you want me to go?” I ask. Listening to his soft, rhythmic breathing, I watch his chest rise and fall. He still hasn’t looked at me. “Hey,” I say, placing a hand on his forearm, golden brown from all the days working outdoors. “What’s going on? Joe. Tell me.”
He doesn’t answer.
The minutes tick by, but I still can’t manage to make myself leave.
“Several of us, we were acclimating before we took Manaslu,” he says, “with some high-priced guide from London.” He reaches for the wine bottle and pours.
He doesn’t say anything else for a good while longer.
Then he downs the cup in one gulp.
“That glacier, man, that was the most beautiful thing I ever saw. Like some big, dodgy bowl of sugar and diamonds. The whole thing could have gone at any minute.”
I can tell from the recurring silence that this next part is going to be hard for him.
“And Kyle, he got skittish. You could see it in his eyes. He wanted to go through with it, but he couldn’t. Said he had a feeling. So he stayed behind…”
Joe’s voice becomes harder to understand. It’s like he’s talking to me from another planet.
“And we went ahead…with the rest. And he…he never made it back to camp. It was almost worse than actually seeing him go, you know?”
Joe is now speaking over his shoulder in my direction. I breathe a tiny sigh of relief, grateful he’s finally including me.
“He just wasn’t there. Like smoke, there was something in the air. It seems uncommon, I guess, to hear of someone dying that way, but if you climb, you know a lot of people who…”
Joe holds up five fingers. “Five people died on the mountain that year. He was one of ’em.”
For a long time, neither of us says anything. There are no tears from Joe—all cried out, I guess. My tears are another story. Getting up from my chair, I walk directly behind him and dry mine on the sleeve of my shirt. Not once during the story was I ever thinking this was what sent him over the edge. In fact, I was so shaken by the harrowing tale, the thought wouldn’t cross my mind for another day.
I put my hands on either side of his head, tilt it back, and kiss him on the lips.
“Would you do something for me?” Joe says.
“Anything.”
“Hand me the other half of my burger?”
I grab the plate and sit in his lap. He groans like I’m too heavy, but I ignore him.
“Here,” I say, pulling off a bite of the burger. “I’m going to feed you this burger like you’re a fucking ancient Egyptian king.”
“Ha. I will not let you feed me like I’m an ancient Egyptian king.” He takes a slug of wine. “Okay, maybe I will.”
“Sire,” I say, holding a piece of burger in front of his mouth. As he takes it and chews with a weak, closed-mouth grin, I know better than to think the joviality of the last couple of minutes has scared away the spirit of a long-lost love. But at least we both know he’s there.