Miles (16 page)

The Rape of Lucrece

I
sat with my bare legs folded over each other, staring at my record collection.
I had just gotten out of the shower.  I was now taking a shower before I
went to bed and another after I had finished jogging in the morning.  It
seemed like I was running further and further with each passing morning, and
stayed in the shower longer and longer.  I was cold, sitting in my tartan
robe, but wouldn't put on any more clothes.

The
Firebird.  Cinderella.  The Magic Flute.  Die Meistersinger von
Nuremburg.  Katerina Ismailova.  A Soldier's Story.  Symphonic
Metamorphosis.  The Water Music.  Samson et Delilah.  Romeo and
Juliet.  The Alpine Symphony.  The London Symphony.  The
Leningrad  Symphony.  The Unfinished Symphony. 
Heligoland.  Billy Budd.  Babi Yar.  Carnival of the
Animals.  Brandenburg Concerti.  Les Nuits d'ete. 
Finlandia.  Spartacus.  The Age of Gold.  Enigma
Variations.  Faust.  Jewish Folk Poetry.  Jeux d'enfants. 
Death and Transfiguration.

Requiem.
  A couple of those.  Requiae? 
Requiea?

*

I
wandered into Dad's bedroom.  The large dimensions seemed even bigger with
the shadows of emptiness hanging over the old-fashioned colonial furniture and
the half-full, half-empty moving crates still cluttering up the floor.

I
wasn't sure Uncle Alex would want the room, even as a painting studio, or
whatever he called the room he did his work in.  I wouldn't.

My
hand slid across the bottom of Dad's sock drawer until it reached the hard
leather holster concealed in the mass of unsorted hose.  I pulled it out
of the drawer and took the vintage .25-calibre Beretta automatic into my right
hand, balanced it in my palm, and slowly held it up, extending my arm fully,
moving the pistol around the dark room until the reflection of the moon on the
edge of the backyard window was in my sights.

I
unchambered the hollow-point round and pushed it back into the small clip,
which I slipped into a side pouch of the holster.  The bullets were
hand-loaded by Salvatore, a maddeningly fastidious tailor who had a small
storefront in town.  The elderly Neapolitan immigrant had evidently once
worked for Beretta itself, and maintained, modified, and crafted ammo for Dad's
little automatic as if it were his own.  I liked the gun.  It fit my
hand perfectly, even though I knew it wasn't all that powerful a gun.

Seven
shots.

Aunt
Dutch.  No jury on earth would convict me.  Aunt Melody.  A
bullet before the gin got to her.  Cousin Julia.  Think of the price
I'd get from her twenty or thirty ex's. Cousin Matt.  Forget a head shot
with his thick skull.  Uncle Albert.  Who could tell the difference
if he had been shot?  That lunatic twelve-year-old cousin just off the
boat that wouldn't leave me alone at the wake.  Veronica.  Save Uncle
Alex a lot of trouble, down the line.

Back
in my bedroom, I began to level the pistol at Felix, who was sound asleep,
curled up facing my side of the bed, but felt another wave coast over me, a
cooler, more penetrating one that made me stop in mid-gesture.  I quietly
put the gun in its holster and stuffed it into my own sock drawer, before
slipping into the covers next to Felix, who stirred as I moved closer to
him. 

I
could see his eyes open slightly from the moonlight that touched the top half of
my bed from outside the frosty bedroom window.  He asked in a whisper,
"Are you okay?"  I nodded my head, but started to cry without
much in the way of sound effects, something I considered an achievement at that
point in my life.

I
let him pull me into his arms and hold me like I was his little brother who had
just gotten roughed up by the bullies down the block.  I didn't realize
until I had finished that Felix's hands were both settled along the waistband
of my underwear, and that he had cried, too, just not as long as I had, and
much more discreetly.

*

 I
woke up the next morning after hearing the front door close behind Felix, as he
left to go back to his apartment "for some clothes", according to the
note.  I watched him walk slowly across my backyard and through the
neighboring small park, both still covered in snow.  The cloud cover was
low and grim.  It would probably snow some more, I thought, crossing my
arms over my chest as I trudged to the bathroom. 

I
tried not to think about Felix when we showered separately, pretending I didn't
really believe he wasn't coming back that night.

Well,
he didn't.  I let Lawrence take me to his house for dinner with his
family, his macabre, intact, happy family, hoping someone would try to call me
that night and not get an answer.

*

The
light snowfall pasted itself over my face and in my hair as I walked to the
cemetery, in lieu of having a good jog the following day.  I had
deliberately overslept.  I didn't much feel like jogging or getting out of
bed.  I lay there, leafing through Nicolasha's photo album, until almost
noon, when I decided to walk off a few of my blues.

Hah.

If
the temperature had been seventy-degrees, under a bright, clear sky, with a
soft spring breeze blowing in the air, the cemetery, hell,
any
cemetery,
would be depressing.  A giant field decorated with granite slabs and
statues, stuffed with boxes that held the leftovers of people you used to share
life with.  Christ, I thought, what a concept.  The ocean sounded
more appealing to me.  "Where is so-and-so buried?", someone
might ask.  You would then point outward, to the warm blue Pacific or the
cold green Atlantic, and reply, "out there". 

I
began to consider other appropriate burial grounds, vast and forbidding,
edge-of-the-world kind of places, like the Alps.  I'd take a chopper
through the middle of Switzerland and scatter the ashes.  "Where did
you bury them?"  I'd smile, sweep my arm toward the line of
perpetually snowcapped peaks, and respond, "In there".  Or Baja
California.  Land
or
sea would work down there.  The
Australian Outback.  Never been there, I said to myself, but it looked
pretty edge-of-the-worldish to me.  Or New Mexico.

Winter
was much nicer up at the Schloss Unc in Minnesota, I decided.  Lake
Geneva, too.

I
knelt over the pair of red stone burial markers and brushed the falling snow
from the lettering.  I didn't bring flowers.  They would be covered
in snow in an hour.  It was cold again, and gloomy.  The streets were
swimming in dark grey slush and pulverized road salt.  All the cars that
passed me were filthy.  The cold wasn't a fresh cold, but, rather, an
unformulated, damp, smoggy, clammy sort of cold.  And why not?  It
was New Year's Eve.  After tomorrow, the holidays were over.  No more
ornaments.  Take the lights down.  Put away the presents.  Burn
the tree. 

I
was certainly going to burn that awful, white-flocked artificial tree of
ours. 

From
Thanksgiving to New Year's Day, the cold and the snow and the wind chill are
all a perversely romantic addendum to the Chicagoan's holiday season.  On
January second, they're just cold and snow and wind chill, officially a pain in
the ass and something to despise until winter finally went away, which, in
Chicago, could be as early as Easter Sunday, or as late as Mother's Day.

As
I walked through the snow-covered graveyard back towards our empty and unlit
house, I felt alone, absolutely, terribly, completely alone.

It
didn't matter if Uncle Alex loved me, or Aunt Hilly and Cousin Lawrence were
there, or that they all cared.  It made no difference that my teacher
Nicolas was a friend, or lover, or whatever I was supposed to call him, and
that he would be there if I ever called.  It was irrelevant that Felix and
his entire family shared my grief as unselfishly as they shared their love for
me, and trivial to mention the depth and sincerity of what had grown between
Felix and me.

None
of it mattered.  There were people in my life, and love came from those
people, it was true, a gleaming treasure trove of love, freely given, received,
and sometimes reciprocated.  But it didn't matter, because I
felt
alone.  I may not have been, but that's how it
felt
, deep inside my
heart, and my soul.  Alone.

My
God, I kept whispering out loud to myself, like a broken record skipping over a
piece of ice from the empty winter around me.  Alone.  

* * *

Richard III

When
I first saw someone waiting for me at our front door, I thought it might be
Felix.  Or hoped it would be, I don't know.  As I got closer, I could
see they were too tall to be my best friend buddy ol' pal from school, whoever
it was.

Brennan
DeVere was about six foot, the same height as me.  His shoulders weren't
as broad as mine, and his chest and waist were slightly thinner, which made him
seem lankier than he was when he wore his school baseball outfit.  His
fingers and feet were long and, well, elegant, as was his long blond hair,
which was thrown back from his ears and hung well below his shoulders.  He
was too good of a pitcher to harass, so our coaches left Brennan and his hair
alone.  He stuffed it into his baseball cap when he played.  Everyone
gave him hell when he put it into a pony tail.  He had bright green eyes
that sparkled when he grinned or laughed, both of which he did a lot, because
he was always telling jokes and playing with people, at least when I was
around.  His lips, eyebrows, nose, and ears were also thin, complementing
the sharp lines of his cheek bones and chin, a handsome, almost adult face that
was determined on the pitcher's mound and would have been equally snobby and
arrogant in prewar Europe.

On
a good day, I might get a single off of him.

His
mom and dad were unrepentant hippies, cheerful dropouts who kept the better
part of the sixties alive and well and living in their Volkswagen minibus,
mature stoners that owned a small nursery on the edge of town, the edge that
bordered the unfashionably working-class (and integrated) suburb to our east,
flower children whose only little boy did all of his pre-high school growing up
in communes and collective farms somewhere in the Pacific Northwest.  All
of their money went to political groups that they called progressive, we called
liberal, and the rest of my family called communist, so Brennan didn't expect
to have a car of his own until after college, and bought all his clothes at the
dingy Army / Navy surplus store he worked at all every evening to pay his own
tuition at the Catholic high school he chose to attend.

The
DeVeres lived in a grey brick Cape Cod house on a side road near the
nursery.  Their backyard blended into a small corner of Cook County Forest
Preserve land, so it seemed like there was a miniature forest just outside
their back door.  The living room, family room, all three bedrooms, and
the basement each had a separate stereo system equipped with an 8-track tape
player, as did their minibus. I had only visited Brennan at home once, and that
was with the rest of the guys, but I loved his basement, which was lined with
psychedelic posters, many of which were lined with black felt and glowed in the
black-light mounted on the ceiling.  Brennan had one of those sound boxes,
a molded plastic box the size of a stereo speaker that flashed different
colored lights in a wild pattern, lights activated by talk or the music from
their late-'50's style juke box.  The room was filled up by a full-sized
pool table with real leather side pouches and genuine ivory balls that Brennan
was banned from using.  The fabulous antique looked out of place,
surrounded as it was by cheap head shop posters.  They even had a strobe
light, too.

And
all I could do was hang a stupid grin on my face, I was so happy to see him, to
see anyone, waiting for me to come home.

"Is
there a good reason why you haven't opened my Christmas card?" 
Brennan waved the yellow envelope under my nose.  The mailbox was stuffed
with unopened mail.  I felt like an ass.  He slapped the side of my
cheek with the card and smiled into my eyes.  "At least you didn't
throw it out."

I
paused awkwardly.  I didn't know whether I should have held out my hand or
moved closer to hug him.  I wasn't sure if our only other hug was just a
hug to cheer me up, or the first in a long line of them.  There was a lot
about our walk home from the church that I wasn't sure about.  Why had I
felt so comfortable in telling him about what was hurting me so much, instead
of holding it in and crying, like I had so often with Felix?  Brennan
grinned at my indecision before putting the card in my gloved hands. 
"Read my card, first."

It
was the cheapest, tackiest drug store Christmas card I had ever seen, with a
bad Japanese cartoon-like drawing of Santa Claus falling down a chimney into a
lit fireplace.  Wow.  It cost a whole thirty-five cents!  Kind
of a step down from the gilt nutcrackers and village people at play.  I
opened the small card, read the inscription quickly, and looked up at a Brennan
DeVere I had never seen before.

"Aren't
you going to read it out loud?"

I
smiled.  "Why would I do that?"

"That's
the least you can do, considering you didn't send me one, and left mine out in
the cold for a week."

"A
day or two," I corrected him. 

Brennan
leaned sideways against one of the house's front picture-windows, looking
wistfully at our Christmas tree inside the house.  "Dad says, when
you write something down, it becomes real, but when you read something written
down, it becomes forever."

That
sounded like something his dad might say.  Shyness overcame Brennan as I
made him wait for a few more seconds.  "Okay, okay."  I
cleared my throat as if I were about to recite from Shakespeare. 

To
my friend,

Have
a merry Christmas - get lots of cool presents - and a happy New Year - hit lots
of home runs, just not off of me!

We've
played ball together for years, but never played friends like we did after
meeting in church.  You opened up to me with honesty I didn't think I
earned, or deserved. 

Thanks
for that, and letting me be your friend that night, now, and for a long time to
come, I hope. 

I
need you too.

Love,
Brennan...oooo.

The
impact of what Brennan had written, intended or otherwise, began to sink in
after I had read it aloud.  The words were alive, deep inside of me. 
We looked at each other carefully, beguiled by our shared hesitation, but
neither of us moved to close the three-foot gap between us.  Our little
stalemate was broken by the sudden flash of blinking and twinkling Christmas
lights hanging in the front windows and the trees lining the driveway.  I
had forgotten about the timer I hooked up the night before.

Lights.

"What
do the zeroes mean after your name?"

"Come
on!"  Brennan shook his head with a pursed grin.  "You really
don't know what they mean?"

"Nope." 
I shrugged my shoulders.  I honestly didn't.

My
baseball buddy and friend glanced down at his cheap and wet Converse All-Star
gym shoes, silly looking red things, if you asked me.  "
X
's
and
O
's?!  I
know
you know!"  He looked back up at
me and smiled.  "They're hugs."

With
a blush, I asked, "Then what does an
X
stand for?"

Brennan
blushed back.  "A kiss."

Hugs
and kisses?  I looked at the card again and felt myself shiver as a rare
and welcome tide of warmth poured across me inside of Dad's greatcoat.

"Haven't
you ever written anyone a card or letter?"  Actually, I hadn't. 
Silly poetry and worse stories, yeah, but none of that.  Until the last
couple of months, who would I have written to, anyway?  "You're just
making me say it all out loud."

"What?" 
I tapped the top of Brennan's head with the card, yellow envelope and all.

"I
want to give you a hug."

Camera.

I
began to laugh, but stopped when Brennan seemed hurt.  He didn't look
away, however.  I ignored the distant sound of a ringing phone inside of
the house.  I wanted to hold him, too.  "Me, too."

The
time and the place didn't seem important.  I don't remember if it was
still snowing, or how cold it was, or felt.  I'm not even sure what kind of
look I had on my face, but I can remember every detail on Brennan's: his long,
blond hair, slicked back over his head and over his ears, dark from the
moisture of the falling snow, the reddish tint on his ears and nose from the
wind, the slight quivering of his bottom lip, the small wagon train of freckles
at the top of his cheeks, and the wide open pair of bright green books that
left themselves open for me to see, books that watched me read them with
indulgence and a touch of desperation.

He
was beautiful.

"Remember
what you talked about?  You know, after Confession?"  I nodded,
at once admiring and resenting how calm Brennan appeared as he looked into my
eyes when he spoke.  I felt like the little boy with the violin I had
written about, the one in the courtyard, turning to stone as an angel carried
me in their arms and music swirled up in the background, except that the music
now was the invisible bridge connecting my eyes, and heart, with
Brennan's.  He started pointing his thumb at both of us.  "So am
I."  His voice suddenly disappeared into a whisper.  "Me,
too."

I
closed my eyes for a moment and lifted my head toward the heavens I was pretty
sure were hiding behind all those winter clouds.  Brennan stepped forward,
put his arms around me, and pressed us softly together.

Action.

It
wasn't like our first, hurried, awkward hug.  It was weird the way one of
his arms went across the top of my shoulders and neck, and the other went under
my arm and around my back, weird like that was the correct way to hug and we’d
been doing it for years, not seconds.  The sides of our faces rubbed
together like chilled fleshy pieces of jigsaw.  He slid one of his legs in
between mine under the open greatcoat.  Our bodies, despite our winter
layers of coats and shirts and t-shirts and long underwear, fitted around each
other perfectly.  We stood in each other's arms, closer than even
Nicolasha and I had, longer than I ever hugged anyone before.

It
had to be the best hug anyone ever got, and it came from someone I had only known
as a nice smile and a fearsome split-finger pitch, someone, I then realized in
a second warm flash deep in my heart, I was going to be friends with for, yes,
"a long time to come."

"I'm
sorry I couldn't get here sooner," Brennan softly told me in my ear.

"That's
okay," I murmured from his neck.  "You're here now.  I
couldn't ask for anything else."  Well...maybe just one other thing.

We
reluctantly pulled away from each other.  Brennan reached up and
straightened my scarf under the collar of the greatcoat he looked over with
envy.  "It's, uh, really been a rough end of the year for
you."  Yes, I nodded with a blank, almost stoic look on my face, it
kind of had.  "Well, tomorrow's a new year."  He wrapped an
arm over my shoulders and shook me gently, smiling his way through my mock
stoicism.  "And we're new friends, right?"

I
nodded again, holding open the front door for my new friend to enter. 
Warmth from the house poured over us as we shut out the cold and snow behind
the closed door and headed into the family room to start a fire, which would
soon include that damned flocked tree.

Flash.

* * *