Gideon - 05 - Blind Judgement (26 page)

College hasn’t made her a better housekeeper.

Though I can tell she has matured in the last couple of years, she comes home and sometimes regresses into an adolescent who might not make it out of junior high.

In the living room Sarah is sitting on the couch with a guy who is much too old for her. Though not bad looking in the face, this man even has a receding hairline and looks kind of flashy in a sports jacket that reminds me of the coat the Masters golf champion is presented after he wins.

“Hi, Dad!” Sarah says brightly.

“This is my friend Larry. He’s down here for a meeting for his company and I invited him to come by.”

The AIDS patient! He jumps to his feet and offers his hand.

“Larry Burdette, Mr. Page,” he says, giving me a firm grip and looking me straight in the eye like every other salesman I’ve known.

“Your daughter talks about you all the time. It’s a pleasure to meet

you.”

“Nice to meet you,” I murmur, noticing he looks pretty good for someone on his last legs.

Though I know all the literature says you can’t get AIDS except by sexual contact or through contact with their blood, I feel uneasy. A plastic glass full of water sits on the table by his chair. I need to try to remember to wash it thoroughly. I wonder if the guy has used the bathroom.

“Dad, you want a beer?” Sarah asks, her voice too loud, since she is standing right beside me. I feel in a daze. I wasn’t expecting this guy.

“Yeah,” I manage.

“That’d be good.” I need something.

“Have a seat,” I say to Larry, who is appraising me coolly. I watch Sarah disappear into the kitchen and wish she had warned me about this visit.

When he sits back down, I take the chair opposite him.

“Sarah says you sell computers. I can hardly turn one on, much less do anything with it. A friend of mine down the hall has one, but it just sits on his desk like a pet rock.”

He crosses his legs.

“In ten years they’ll be as simple to learn as driving a car.”

“Given some of the drivers I see around here,” I say, “I don’t know if that’ll help much.” He doesn’t even look gay to me.

He smiles as my daughter walks into the room and hands me a Miller Lite.

“Would you like one?” I ask, wondering if Sarah has already offered.

“I haven’t had a drink in five years,” he says, moving back his legs to let Sarah by.

“I’m in AA.”

Damn. AIDS. An alcoholic. If I were this guy, I’d be climbing the walls, but he seems pretty laid back. Maybe he’s on drugs.

“After a couple of drinks,” I say, watching Sarah’s face, “alcohol has never done me any favors.”

“Or solved a single one of my problems,” he responds amiably.

“Which are not inconsiderable, Sarah tells me,” I say, taking a long swallow.

“Dad!” Sarah shrieks. I wonder if she was expecting him to come by.

She is wearing old baggy jeans and a faded Razorback sweatshirt.

“Larry is the guy you’ve been writing me about, isn’t he?” I ask

innocently.

“It’s okay, Sarah,” Larry says.

“I don’t expect to live in a vacuum. The more people get to know us, the less afraid they’ll be.”

Out of politeness I nod, but I wonder if the reverse is true. I’ve been nervous ever since I found out who he was.

“How long since you’ve been diagnosed?” I ask, not really wanting to talk about this, but morbidly curious.

“Two years,” he says.

“It’s been quite an adjustment, but the support people like Sarah have given me has made all the difference in the world. You’ve got some daughter.”

For an instant I feel as if I am going to cry. This poor sucker is dying, and he credits my child with helping him want to live.

“I couldn’t agree with you more,” I say, watching Sarah blush.

“Has she told you about her personal odyssey the last few years? She’s quite the seeker.” “No,” he says, turning to Sarah.

“I’m afraid I’ve done most of the talking.”

Sarah gives me a look but answers, “Oh, I just went through a period in

high school when I was real religious and went to a fundamentalist church, and then last semester I got kind of caught up in a feminist movement on campus.”

Larry runs his arm down the back of the sofa.

“So I’m part of the quest, huh?” he asks, gently.

“No!” Sarah says, her face suddenly agonized.

“I just got involved with RAIN because it seemed the right thing to do.

Everybody in school is so self-centered. All they talk about is themselves and parties and dating and the Razorbacks. It feels good to be a part of something more important than who got drunk last week at the Sigma Nu house.”

By the expression on her face I know Sarah is mad at me. So be it. I am not particularly pleased with her for having set this visit up without talking to me first. I suggest that we invite Larry to go out to eat with us, and though he says he needs to work for a while, Sarah easily persuades him to come with us. At my suggestion we drive out to the Breadbox in western Blackwell County for Mexican food. I have eaten out here with Amy, and not only is it cheap, I am not likely to run into anybody I know. It is not that I think this guy will suddenly start bleeding on the dishes, but I feel uncomfortable with him. Yet, for all I know, half the staff at the Breadbox has AIDS.

Larry proves to be an entertaining dinner date.

Open and talkative, it is easy to see why Sarah responds to him.

“I had no clear understanding something was different about me,” he says over bread pudding and coffee after polishing off a full chicken enchilada dinner, “until I was in junior high. And then I spent the rest of high school and college trying to pretend I was normal and feeling incredibly lonely. I was like a bad magician telling a ridiculous joke while doing sleight-of-hand tricks, hoping nobody would notice what was actually going on.”

His parents had been stalwarts of a nondenominational Bible church in Texarkana, and the minister ranked homosexuality with mass murder on the top ten sin chart. Not to fear, however.

Homosexuals could be saved through prayer and rigorous counseling. When I ask whether he let them try, he responded quickly, “I wouldn’t have confessed to being gay in that church if they had put me on the rack.”

As he talks, I think of old Mr. Carpenter and resolve to go by to see him when I return to Bear Creek. He has asked me every time I have seen him.

“What was scary was that by the time I was seventeen I had gone from simple loneliness to thinking I might be some kind of monster. The day I graduated from high school I took off for San Francisco. I’ve never been back home for more than a couple of weeks.”

His brave talk earlier of educating people that AIDS victims are just plain folks has disappeared.

Yet who does not regress to childhood in front of their parents?

“How’d you wind up in Fayetteville?” I ask, curious. There are gay hangouts up there, but it’s hardly San Francisco.

While he explains that it was cheaper to go to school in Arkansas and pay in-state tuition, I glance at my daughter’s face. She has doubtlessly heard this story before, but she is hanging on his every word. Her mother was the same way. She was a sucker for victims. Yet, to this guy’s credit, he isn’t whining. This was how his life was.

Over a final cup of coffee, he brings up his alcoholism and says that it has nothing to do with him being gay.

“Like most people, I’ve got a hundred excuses, and none of them has ever stopped me from opening a bottle. The only thing that’s ever helped me is the twelve-step program. I’m a big believer in it. I go to an AA meeting once a week.”

Damn. This guy lets it all hang out. These recovery groups are all the rage. The paper is full of them. Hi, I’m Gideon. I’m a human being.

Still, if they work, who can knock them? If they work. Dan went to an overeaters anonymous group and said a couple of the guys stood out on the steps of the church during a break and ate a box of Snickers, proof that you can lie to yourself anywhere. I’ve done it every place but in the kitchen sink. I wonder if I am lying to myself about what things were like in Bear Creek. I have begun to have the feeling that my memories don’t jibe with what other people remember. The other night John looked at me as if I were making things up about the way the

Taylors had treated my family. Yet the problem with Angela and John is that they have lived in Bear Creek so long that they probably have come to accept the Paul Taylors of this world as normal.

Back at the house Larry declines Sarah’s invitation to come in and says he needs to get back to his hotel. I wonder if he is going out to one of Blackwell County’s drag shows. Sarah would probably like to go check it out with him, but he doesn’t ask. Probably she has already been to something similar in Fayetteville with him and wants to spare my feelings. I’m all for that.

Inside, I putter around the house, straightening up a bit. I am not used to having Sarah home, and her habit of not taking anything back to the kitchen is already getting on my nerves. She gets the hint and folds up the pages of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette she has spread out all over the kitchen table.

“Dad,” she says, watching me load the dishwasher, “Larry made you nervous while he was in the house, didn’t he?”

I turn on the hot water and wash the glass he used by hand.

“It just seemed weird,” I say, irritably.

“Nobody understands the disease. How can you be too careful?”

Sarah stacks the paper on top of the refrigerator.

She can’t fold up a newspaper any better than I can.

“I know how you feel,” she says.

“I felt funny around him at first, but less and less as time goes on.

With all his problems, he’s still a neat guy. I think he thought you were okay.”

“I liked him,” I admit.

“I don’t see how he’s sane, but he seems as normal as I do.” I have noticed that since she has been home, Sarah has been less obsessed with her own personal problems, and as a consequence, she has been in my face less. I had expected an entire lecture from her and was ready to give as good as I got. Yet the old confrontational Sarah has disappeared, or at least didn’t make the trip. Maybe she is growing up.

“How is Amy?” she asks when we sit down in the living room.

“You haven’t mentioned her since you told me Jessie was going to stay with her while you worked on the case in Bear Creek.”

I lean back in the chair and listen as my stomach tries in vain to digest my dinner. I shouldn’t have tried to fit in the bread pudding.

I realize I haven’t mentioned Amy because I feel guilty about her, and so I haven’t said anything about Angela either. Sarah has always accused me of using the women I have been involved with to help me on my cases.

“You’ll be happy to know it looks as if Amy and I are probably history,” I say, thinking of the best spin I can put on this.

“You always complained she was too young for me, anyway.”

Sarah tucks her legs up beneath her on the couch.

“I liked her because I know how much she cared about you. That made up for the age difference.”

I don’t want to think about Amy.

“Well, I’m dating a woman exactly my own age, and one I’ve known for over thirty years.”

“Dad!” Sarah exclaims.

“Who is she?”

I feel a mild explosion in my stomach. I need to quit eating so much at night. I had enough chips and cheese dip before they brought out the food to feed an army.

“My first girlfriend,” I say, and tell her the story of how I met Angela at the library in Bear Creek.

She is entranced and quizzes me for the better part of thirty minutes.

I omit a few things, including how we first made love in my mother’s Fairlane and recently in her brother-in-law’s bed.

Nor do I tell her how much desire I feel when I am around Angela. I

suspect that one of the reasons my daughter does not want me to date younger women is that she, understandably, does not want to be confronted with my sexuality, nor do I have any desire to be confronted by hers. I’m all for Sarah’s getting to know me as adult to adult, but there is a limit to how far I want us to be pals. Maybe when I’m old and less of a sexual being we’ll sit around in our bathrobes and tell war stories, but not quite yet.

“She’s been through a lot,” I tell Sarah, wondering whether they’ll like each other, “but at one time she had more influence on me than anyone I’ve ever met.” “She sounds neat. Dad,” Sarah says.

“I hope it works out if that’s what you want.”

Do I? I pick up a dog hair from the arm of the chair, a legacy of Jessie’s that seems perpetual, and drop it into the trash can beside me.

“We’ve really gone out only a couple of times,” I demur.

“She’s still got a lot of grieving to do.” As I say this, I wonder.

Angela, I’m coming to realize, is more of a mystery than I like to admit.

The phone rings. Naturally, it is for Sarah, who tells me moments later her old friend Donna Redding is coming by to pick her up at ten and she needs to change clothes. They are going “out.” I am strangely comforted by this act of normalcy. I know better than to ask where but do anyway.

“I don’t know,” she says, standing up.

“Dad, have you been by to see Dade’s grandmother?”

I find another hair and realize it is one of Woogie not Jessie’s. Damn.

I miss Woogie, exiled to my sister’s over a year ago after an alleged kitten-eating episode. Have we ever cleaned anything in this house? I knew this question was coming. It was at Sarah’s insistence that we drove over to Bear Creek to try to confirm the story that my grandfather had fathered a child by a black woman.

“Dad, she might appreciate it if you went by.”

“Well, I might,” I say, “I just haven’t had time.”

Sarah leans back against the wall. For once she doesn’t argue with me.

“I’m proud of you for representing a black man over there,” Sarah says.

“I bet you’re getting some criticism for doing it.”

I realize that Sarah has no idea, despite our visit, what my old hometown is like.