Halfway Home (26 page)

Now he was way ahead of me. For all my own recollection stopped on the dime of the agony—my arm dangling like a broken wing, my long scream for relief in a house where no one knew me. I didn't remember the E.R., or my mother and Brian, or mending in a cast. I would have stood there blankly, groping the past and coming up empty, if Gray hadn't moved to take charge.

"Tom, you're shivering. Let's go in." And so we did, Brian following awkwardly, Gray moving right to the fire to stoke it. "Take those clothes off," he ordered over his shoulder.

I began to unbutton my soggy flannel shirt, aware of my brother standing off to the side. I stripped the shirt and dropped it on the hearth in a wet heap, as the fire blazed up. "See, it all gets passed down," I said, hearing at last the chattering of my teeth. "He hurt me, and then thirty years later you hurt Daniel." If it made him squirm to hear it, nevertheless he stood his ground. I kicked off my shoes, then started undoing my pants.

"But it's not going any further," I declared—tough being a new taste, like metal on my tongue. "Because you're going to work it out before you leave this house, all of you. All of
us.
It stops here."

I kicked off my pants, drenched and clinging, sloughing them like a snakeskin. Now I stood bareass before my brother and my lover. I stepped up close to the fire and bent and shook my hair. "I'll get you a robe," said Gray, slipping the afghan around my shoulders. He headed for the stairs, to do his own undressing in private. I turned to Brian. I don't suppose I'd ever faced him naked before, no hiding the man I was.

"I'd never hurt Daniel," he said.

"Uh-huh. And you probably think you never hurt me. Well, you're wrong." Then silence for a moment. The fire was white-hot up and down my back, practically singeing the hair on my legs.

"I know I should have stopped him, Tommy." Meaning our father. "Sometimes I tried. But he just seemed to hate you." He shook his head and hung it at the same time, overwhelmed by the craziness.

"You're tearing each other apart, you and Susan. There's someone I want you to talk to." He nodded. I almost would've said he was relieved to hear me taking charge. "I've been through a couple of programs myself. Children of lunatics, that kind of thing. It helps."

He looked at me, and I swear his eyes glanced down at my crotch. "You still hate me?"

"No. I love you—in spite of myself, believe me. And that's why I won't let you turn into him. If your life's going to start all over, you might as well be a
really
new man. Without weapons."

He nodded again. Gray was coming down the stairs in a robe, carrying another over his arm. Brian took this as his natural cue, and they passed each other with a shy smile, painfully aware of not wanting to intrude. They looked like brothers themselves—the nice sort. And I turned and stared into the flames with the queerest thrill of dread, heart pounding, realizing for the first time that I was the head of the family.

S
USAN REFUSED, CATEGORICALLY.

I heard them arguing deep into the night. Even through the double bathroom door, and with the rain growing steadier by the hour, I could pick out certain phrases as she railed at him. The very idea of
counseling
! How dare it even be suggested—as if she disdained the whole field of the talking cure as gibberish, another sort of witchcraft. And that I should have been the one to propose it, invert and blasphemer that I was. I couldn't actually make out the specific words of my damnation, but got the picture.

I can't stay here,
she told him again and again. Or else what? She'd go mad. No, worse: her very soul was threatened now.

I don't know if she told him about seeing Gray and me on the beach. I dozed in and out, curled as I was in the arms of my fellow blasphemer. I didn't care anymore, so far was she from being able to hurt us. And all her shrewing and lashing out didn't compromise for a moment the lulling safety of the rain, or keep me from the deepest fathom of that first night with Gray. Nor the morning after, surfacing into passion, loving before we were fully conscious. The drone of Susan and Brian through the walls, raw and numb with misery—had it gone on all night?—was no more than distant gunfire, a civil war in another country.

We came belly to belly, Gray on top of me, his sweet heaviness like an anchor in the harbor. This was the oldest act of love, our two dicks rubbing as we kissed, innocent as boys at camp. Reaching the top, I groaned with a near roar of delight, which surely carried into Cora's room. Gray was as silent as I was noisy, gulping in air as he let go, then strangling out a soft delicious whimper. We lay still for several minutes, catching our breath, no words, all lost time accounted for at last.

Then I watched as he got up and fetched a towel to clean us off, darting in and out of the bathroom, not wanting to encounter the heteros. But the squalling had stopped in Cora's room. Doubtless my little crow of ecstasy had hustled them down to breakfast. Gray smiled as he tenderly wiped my belly, then moved to the chaise to pull on his yesterday's clothes. I couldn't stop studying his tough and lanky body, still so new to me. No extra fat, and the sleek form of an ocean swimmer. His being fifty had no downside; he was simply a full-grown man. And lying there lazily under the comforter, I took the most wanton joy in being the younger one.

"Doesn't sound like she's crazy about the idea," Gray declared as he shrugged on his workshirt. It was the first I realized he'd heard the din from the other room. I always thought WASPs had an extra sleep gene that helped them ignore such things entirely.

"I'll talk to her," I said, but as if I didn't stand a chance. "Some people don't really believe there's a way out. You get to be an abuse junkie."

"I still haven't even met her." He sat on the bed beside me to put on his shoes. "She laid out the lunch for us yesterday and then ran upstairs. I don't think she'd know me if I met her out there in the hall."

She'd know your dick, I thought, suppressing a smutty grin. "Are you running off again?"

He narrowed a look at me to see if I was pouting. Satisfied I wasn't, he gave a rueful shrug. "I better go check on Foo and Merle. They didn't know I'd be out all night."

"They know where you were," I remarked dryly.

But I was just teasing. I could feel the pull of the ranch, and all his responsibilities there, even as he lightly stroked my cheek with the tips of his fingers. I could only guess how ingrained were their habits up there, who put out the Wheaties, who fetched the mail. Yet I felt no jealousy whatsoever, and only wished that he not be stuck taking care of too many of us. I turned my face into the palm of his hand and kissed it softly, to let him know it was all fine. Completely fine.

Then I scrambled out of the bed, and he said, "You don't have to get up."

"Oh, is that so? You mean I can lie here all day and eat bonbons and play with my winkie?" I faced him naked with a hand on my out-slung hip, cocky as a Donatello bronze. His eyes swept me up and down, brimming with delight, rendering all my spots invisible. "Please—I have to see if they've killed each other."

I pulled on a pair of sweat pants, nothing underneath, deliciously aware of him watching every move. It was like a striptease in reverse, slipping on a tight white T-shirt, then a lumberjack's wool shirt over it, giddy with eros. As we moved to leave we glanced against each other, and grabbed another kiss, his hand running down my spine and cupping my butt. Then we were out the door in the stair hall, and instantly I felt the slightest drawing away, as Gray struggled manfully with the specter of Discretion.

But now I only wanted to make it easy. I darted down the stairs, laughing, so we wouldn't make our entrance like a couple of love-drunk satyrs.

Brian and Daniel sat at the kitchen table, plowing through stacks of french toast. It was a tribute to our intimacy that they barely nodded good morning, so intertwined had we become in the dailiness of things. Even so, as I groped for the coffee, I felt an eerie shiver that they should be sitting so peaceably, as if nothing were out of control. Just an echo, probably. I'd sat through too many mornings after, the stink of stale Seagram's like an aura around my bleary old man, my body throbbing from the previous night's assault.

Then Gray walked in, and this time Daniel looked up with a bright smile of welcome. "Hi," he said cheerfully, managing to convey his pleasure that Gray had stayed the night. I handed Gray a mug of coffee.

"Susan went out," said my brother, flustered, not even sure himself why he sounded so apologetic. "To call her sister."

"Hey, I could've given her a ride," retorted Gray, and Brian murmured that was okay, she felt like taking a walk. I pictured Susan trotting down the coast road to the Chevron, whose phone booth had become a sort of annex and index of the jumble of our lives. I imagined her desperation, stumbling along in the wrong shoes, wondering over and over how she'd ended up so lost and far from home.

"Look," said Brian, "this isn't right, us eating your food like this. I just want you to know I'm keeping track."

He was talking to Gray, who protested briskly, and I looked at Daniel. He stared at his plate guiltily, then laid down his fork, as if resolved to starve from here on in. The wave of rage I felt just then for Brian—
Not in front of the kid, for Chrissakes
—only showed how powerless I was. Like my mother wringing her hands and whining
Not his head.

Then Gray drained his mug, never one to linger, and was heading for the door. I bolted after, sloshing coffee over my wrist as I slipped outside, flinging the rest of it onto the camellias by the steps so I could keep up. "Call Miss Mona," I instructed, half running beside him. It was drizzling and blustery, but a lull in the larger storm. "Make sure she tells Kathleen the wife won't budge.
Now
what am I gonna do? I thought they could have a nice little session of family therapy, just the three of them—"

My mind was racing faster than my voice, already breathless. And as if that wasn't enough, I felt this crazy desolation because Gray was about to leave. Honestly, when was it ever going to be enough, so I didn't think it was all about to vanish, every time he got into that truck?

Then he was pulling me under the eaves of the garage, holding me by the shoulders, steadying me with his eyes. I come from people who always looked away. In the whole of central Connecticut, no one ever looked you in the eye—or me they didn't anyway. "Just be with your brother," he said. "Mona and I will brainstorm. And Miss Balanchine? Remember what they taught us at the Kirov. Less choreography is more." He drew me close and buried his face in my hair, breathing me in, not seeming to care who might be watching.

"When are you coming back?"

"Tonight," he said, as if he couldn't have been more certain, and even better, as if the answer would be the same tomorrow.

So I let him go—slouching seductively under the eaves, Donatello again, instead of that needy creep of abandonment. As I turned back to the house, I let the idea play in my head that I had it for real this time, a man who would know me to the bone. For the space of a held breath I seemed to float over the wet grass, the mist in my face like the worst cliche, dew on the fucking roses. Happy—was this what happy was? Because if it was, I had most definitely never felt it before.

And it only took me the fifty feet between the garage and the kitchen door to learn the most obvious thing in the world, the canker in the rose: I could not bear to lose it now. My chest seized with a pain that wasn't physical but worse, such that my heart attack two weeks ago seemed like a sissy bout of hypochondria. Even AIDS. Dying was nothing to losing. I felt like the last person on earth to learn it, as if I'd been absent the day they taught it in nursery school.

I tramped into the kitchen, shaking the wet like a dog, wondering if I could stand how sad at the bottom happy was. My brother sat at the table where we'd left him. Daniel was gone. I had a selfish urge to rush right through and up to my room, so I could hoard and savor the lifetime of cheap emotions suddenly restored to me. Brian stared at his empty plate, lost like me in one of my blanks. He'd rather be alone anyway, I thought, clamping my mind against Gray's advice,
Just he with him.
I took a tentative step toward the dining room, and the movement seemed to jar him from his trance.

"She wants to leave me," he said, more to the plate than to me. "She'll take Daniel to her sister's. Minneapolis." He smiled wanly at the final word, as if geography were the only thing he could put his finger on in all of this.

"Just till you get resettled," I said, so firm it almost sounded like an order.

"No, she's had it. She wants me out of her life."

"But—" I wanted to whimper with exasperation. "That's why you have to
talk
to somebody. You can't make decisions like this."

Finally he looked at me. He seemed fascinated by my insistence, but also untouchable, alone out there on the pitcher's mound. "You don't understand," he replied, not unkindly. "I don't blame her. It disgusts her, what I did. Thou shalt not steal." The last bit spoken completely straight, Charlton Heston on the Mount.