“I’m sorry for you, Roger. I really am, but I’m not sure why you’re telling me all this.”
“After Truman left, I went down a floor to a guy who I get along with and we stayed up for a long time. I think I talked a lot about Truman and what had happened. And when I got back to my dorm, Logan was still awake. I had never been afraid of Logan before, but after what happened, I was. When I came in he just stared at me at first, but after a while he started pacing back and forth in the room. I could tell he’d had a lot to drink or he’d scored some coke, because he was really cranked up. And he wasn’t making much sense except that he said he’d never been so humiliated in all his life. He thought he and Truman were best friends, that they’d shared so much together, and then for Truman to do what he did was unforgivable.”
He stopped and looked at me intensely.
“That’s what he said, Carly: ‘unforgivable.’ At one point I thought he was going to hit me again, but he didn’t, and after a while I realized all his anger was directed toward Truman. I tried to change the subject, but Logan wouldn’t have it. He said some really mean things about Truman, and said some threatening things about him, too. Anyway, I’m telling you this because you are so close to Truman and I think you should talk to him about Logan. You know how Truman is. You know he just shrugs this stuff off as unimportant. He has this attitude like nothing can ever happen to him. Nothing can hurt him, like somehow he’s impervious. I guess it’s one of the things I love about him.”
He stopped and looked around as if someone was watching us or overhearing what he was saying. A chill went up my spine.
“I don’t trust Logan, Carly. I know he has never gotten over what Truman did, and even more, how Truman feels about me. Logan has become really weird since that night. I mean he hasn’t actually made any threats or anything, but he says really ugly things about Truman…things that just aren’t true. And the thing I understand, Carly, is how rich people have a different attitude about the world and of what they can do and get away with. I come from that kind of world and I know.”
“So are you saying Logan is going to hurt Truman?” I felt anger creep in and replace the weirdness I’d felt just before. “Is that what you’re telling me?”
“I’m telling you when I try to talk to Truman about this he won’t listen. He just shrugs it off as Logan being an asshole and spoiled. But, I don’t know. I sense something more than that.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Some dangerous part of Logan. Like I said, he’s different since that night, and not just about me. He’s different about Truman, also.” He looked at me in a pleading way then. “Won’t you please talk to him…reinforce what I’ve already told him? I know you don’t like Logan. I just know you don’t.”
I nodded. “Yeah, you’re right. I don’t.”
I looked at this Roger Claus and then I realized maybe he was right. Maybe Truman was in some kind of danger. My whole life I’d grown up in privilege and I knew that all of us, all of my friends, including Truman, got mostly what we wanted when we wanted it. I also knew Logan Marsh was a dick. He was the epitome of that idea of entitlement, and now a kid who came from the same background was telling me I should warn Truman.
“I don’t know what good it will do,” I said, “but I will tell him what you’ve told me. I will.” And then I did hug him. I felt a kind of weakness in his body, frailness so much different than Truman’s or Tommy’s body, but I felt, then, a real tenderness toward him. He loved Truman and I did, too. I guess I loved him at that moment for loving Truman. I guess I did.
Amy
Fifteen days after Truman’s death
I used to imagine the future for Truman. I used to sit on the carpeted floor with my son, his blond hair still in curl, his brown eyes beginning to take on that intensity that would lend them to black and searing and profound, and I would think of what he would become when he was a young man. I knew it would be remarkable. That I knew. At three he was already plunking on the piano Ethan had bought for him and for me. I’d play those familiar chords I’d learned to play from my piano instructor, Mr. Gibbons.
I used to love sitting beside the man on the seat, his smell of aftershave and some hair tonic, the rise of pink in his cheeks as he listened patiently to my progress-less attempts at the simplest pinching out of tunes. My hands were always shaking at the keys with the consuming desire I had that he would place one of his beautiful hands on my thigh and turn to me and plant a kiss on my lips. He was so handsome, and serious, and reluctant to admonish even though I never had any facility for music or the piano and I never practiced from one session to the next. I would only ever be thinking about him beside me, finally turning to me.
And so Ethan had bought a Steinway for us, never listening to what I really said, wondering why I very seldom raised the lid of the piano and played the music he’d expected to hear. He’d surprised me one day by leading me into the living room and announcing, “This is for you, Amy. For you and Truman so you can play. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before, why I didn’t buy you one years ago. But now you can have the time to practice whenever you like, and you, or someone else, when Truman finally pops out, can teach him to play as beautifully as you do.”
Because Ethan only heard what he wanted to hear instead of the fact that I’d only taken the lessons because of Mr. Gibbons—Patrick, I’d learned later on. I didn’t stop until my desire for the instructor was overridden by my embarrassment at his growing frustration as I persisted in showing absolutely no improvement. I was almost relieved when he finally suggested that a few years away from the piano might heighten my longing to advance.
Longing
was the word he used, which made me love him even more, because I’d always fallen in love with boys, men, who had passion—and Ethan had passion, too, in his own ineffable way—and so to him my inability to get better was only a matter of marshaling the adequate amount of passion. Then I would at least become proficient, even if mastery wasn’t a prospect for my musical future. And unlike me I knew Truman could have become an accomplished pianist, but I also could see almost immediately that practice was not part of him; if he didn’t get something immediately, he quickly lost interest in it. And I would hear the plink of keys and there would be some string of coherence to the sound, but it was all Truman’s and he never once was interested in the sheet music he was supposed to learn.
I would watch him on that bench and think to myself,
What is my boy going to do when he becomes an adult?
Doctor, lawyer, architect, diplomat, professor? But none of those seemed to fit Truman as I watched him, his blond hair and brown eyes looking out at the world with complete wonder, his dimpled elbows and lovely, chubby neck, his shoulders already like Ethan’s, his beautiful long hands and fingers gliding across the piano, his feet not able to reach the floor or the pedals.
I could have watched him for hours if he’d stayed positioned on that black bench, the sheet music in front of him, but, in Truman style, he never even looked at the sheet. He just kept pounding away on the keys as if they were the very sound that would define his future. Truman. Truman. Truman. Truman. With all your talent and brilliance, I knew you would shake the world, whatever it was you did.
At first he wanted to be an interior designer, rearranging his room weekly, wanting a couch, vases with flowers, printed wallpaper, always rearranging, almost every week, so that I would finally just give in and roll up my sleeves to help. The couch here, the bed there, the bureaus along that wall, the trim on the windows and doors salmon, green, blue, white, beige. Ethan would lean against the jamb of the door with a martini or glass of wine in his hand at the end of the day and smile, luxuriate in our industry, Truman pointing and rearranging and coaxing and demanding.
Then a landscape designer, having the patience to wait for Ethan and the weekend before box hedges were planted, patios redesigned, trellises erected, painted, rosebushes planted, flower beds moved or established, Ethan smiling the whole time because it was Truman, anything for Truman, our Truman.
He hated school. He couldn’t stand being teased for his uniqueness, his demanding character, his Truman-ness. One aggressive older boy teased him on the bus daily, so one evening Ethan took Truman down into the basement and taught him how to box.
“What are you doing, Ethan? I don’t want him to be a bully,” I said.
“He won’t be. I don’t want him being bullied. There’s only one way to treat a bully. They’re cowards. They only need to be reminded of that fact.”
Truman hit the boy the next day, splitting his lip, and, just as Ethan predicted, the boy never bothered him again. But Truman didn’t capitalize on that. He didn’t go around with this newfound power and abuse it. He was sick for a week thinking about the split lip, the frightened look on the boy’s face.
“He would’ve never stopped, Truman,” Ethan reasoned. “You’re the one who came home crying and tormented every day.”
But it was like Ethan had unearthed a part of human beings Truman hadn’t known about, and was ill equipped to deal with. The world out there was not like our home, where brilliance and kindness and family were enough. The world beyond our doors was full of people from all walks of life, some of whom didn’t give a whit about life’s panoramic possibilities, and would never accept people in possession of talent ranging beyond the sheet music in front of them.
And that’s why Carly was so important to Truman. She was in love with him, I knew, from the moment they began to play together, their heads huddled together on the floor of one room or another, sharing the secrets children share away from adults, the secrets that help, eventually, to make them adults themselves. Carly made Truman happy, happier than he’d ever been before. It was the human contact, perhaps, with someone other than his two parents, who’d held him and kissed him and watched him as if he were a museum piece of such rare quality he couldn’t go unnoticed for a second.
And people, of course, would suggest that all that pampering had made him “queer.” I’m sure they whispered that behind our backs. But then there was Carly who adored him also, wanted nothing more than to be with him every day, and no, not like brother and sister, but like young lovers, the fledgling stages of a love affair. Finally, after their early years, finally leading to the room over the garage where they began to learn about each other. I never told Ethan. I knew Truman and Carly would want it to be their secret. They had a right to create their own world and I don’t think I ever knew Truman happier after he was no longer a baby, no longer just with Ethan and me but with Carly, too.
But when he began school, with all the boys who wanted to tease and push and pinch and punch, he immediately drew the contrast. He came into the kitchen one day when he was nine and said:
“I want to marry Carly, Mom.”
“You’re a little too young,” I said distractedly. I was preparing dinner or cleaning dishes. I don’t remember now.
“I know,” he said, the severity in his voice cautioning me I wasn’t to take what he said lightly. “I’m not talking about now.”
I turned and looked at him and I suddenly knew he’d been thinking about it for a long time. I wanted to be careful. I wanted to take it seriously, and I know that sounds so ridiculous, a nine-year-old boy making a statement like that. But even then I was walking a tightrope of caution with Truman. I knew he was different, never wanting to play with trucks or throw the baseball with Ethan (yes, he would be out there and I would watch from the sunroom, but I could tell even then that Truman was not really interested in baseball, only in why his father thought it was important) or play with other boys. I would invite other boys over to play with Truman, but it never was successful, really. Yes, he had sleepovers, and roller-skating birthday parties, and the like, but somehow every kid went home disappointed, their parents’ faces full of disapproval and some knowledge Ethan and I didn’t have and couldn’t see because we were so madly in love with our son.
But what was it that we couldn’t see? What child knows at seventeen if he is gay or not gay? And especially a child as complex as my Truman, telling me at nine he wanted to get married to Carly. Not like most kids at nine, who say that and the next week are on to loving the pet dog or cat or wanting an Etch A Sketch or whatever those things were when Truman was that age—or was it my age when that was popular?—but I don’t really know because Truman was never interested in toys, never pulled at my skirt when we were out shopping saying, like other kids, “Mommy I want that.”
And it wasn’t long after Truman told me he wanted to marry Carly that he stopped calling me “Mommy.” It just ended. I became “Mom.” Ethan was still called “Daddy” sometimes. But if Truman was serious, it was “Dad.” I felt as if something had been taken from me when he no longer called me “Mommy.”
“Marriage is a long way away, Tru,” I said. He was standing looking at me with his plaid shirt and brown corduroy pants and his one hand resting on the back of a chair, his hair only neatly in place because it was kept short—he hated taking the time to comb his hair back then, though later it would be a priority.
“Of course I know I can’t marry her now. Where would we live? Not here, I can promise you.”
At nine years old. And what had he meant by that?
Not here, I can promise you.
I laughed at the time, couldn’t wait for Ethan to get home so I could pour him a glass of wine and we could smile over such a precocious thing to say at that age. Our Truman. It wasn’t until later that I saw there was more to it than that. It was like the rock you see in the yard and you decide to dig it out, smoothed by ages of wear, and you keep digging and realize it’s huge and must have been pushed there during an ice age and it wasn’t going to come out just like that. And you couldn’t tell when you only saw the edge of it. You didn’t realize until you started unearthing it.