“If you boys think I won't use this, just turn around and count all the bullet holes in that wall,” he said without raising his voice, taking aim over James's shoulder.
The two thugs, nasty little assholes with sexy jarhead buzz cuts, grumbled, mumbling vague threats as they shambled out the front door. The floor show resumed to appreciative catcalls and applause.
“You still get raided, Aloysius?” James asked, as the bartender poured a shot of Sambuca to reward himself for his cool head and steady aim.
“Naw,” he said. “No one really gives a shit anymore. I miss them old days, don't you?”
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Them old days didn't seem so different than these new days, at least during a light snowfall at one-thirty in the morning, the deserted streets of downtown Parkersburg illuminated by strings of Christmas lights. At high noon on a bright, sunny day, it was impossible to ignore that bail bondsmen and auto tag shops now leased the storefronts that had once been occupied by dress shops and bakeries and drugstores with soda fountain service. Commerce had moved out near the interstate exits where strip malls anchored by huge box stores offered acres of free parking. James flipped on the radio in the car, feeling lonely and wanting a bit of companionship. The AM band was wall-to-wall religious musicâwarbling gospel singers and treacly choirs and, worst of all, some abomination called Christian rock. The FM stations were solid classic rock, “Walk This Way” and Electric Light Orchestra. He slipped a disc in the player and drove home listening to Bach arranged for guitar.
Damn, he thought, cursing himself for his earlier brief lapse of judgment. What the hell had gotten into him, agreeing to make the trip to Pittsburgh International tomorrow night? The drive north would be torture. He would be a prisoner, forced to listen to candy-colored tales of Roy and Anh Vu shopping together for the perfect leather sofa, snuggling up on a Saturday night to watch
Four Weddings and a Funeral
on DVD, and planning their weekend escapes to the District of Columbia to see k.d. lang and Sarah Brightman in concert. The long ride home would be even worse, with James consigned to the backseat so that the reunited lovers, having been separated by an interminable seven days, could hold hands and rekindle the flame.
James pulled into his mother's driveway and sat in the heated car, turning up the volume and wallowing in self-pity and the sweet music of Jason's guitar. The house was dark except for the porch lamp and the brightly lit corner window on the second story, the bedroom that had been his sanctuary throughout his childhood. The room where, one rainy November afternoon, his mother and sister having gone to Charleston for an Ice Capades matinee, he and Roy, both just thirteen, had wrestled on his narrow mattress, their pants twisted around their ankles, grinding and moaning, caught unawares by a strange and remarkable pleasure. The same room where, many years later, on that first Thanksgiving after moving to New York, he had explained to Roy he wouldn't be coming home for Christmas, that he was going to Germany with his friend Ernst.
Roy's words still stung as if they had spoken only an hour ago.
“I'd change if I thought that would make you love me again.”
Only now it was someone else's voice he recalled, from a different time and a different world, but laced with the same sad longing.
I wanted to tell you what I did so you would know from the beginning, just in case you might think you could like me.
It was after two when he finally poured a nightcap and settled into an easy chair, staring at his cell phone and resisting the temptation to call Pennsylvania under the pretense of thanking the Prevics for their hospitality. Good God, Adele, he chuckled, appalled by the huge, plastic pine tree that seemed to swallow an entire corner of the living room and remembering the seven-foot, fresh-cut blue spruces that had graced the house in his childhood, magnificent in memory, blazing with cheerful, enamel lights, branches bowed with bright glass ornaments and draped with silver tinsel. And the model railroad platform, with its trestle bridges and papier-mâché tunnels . . .
Damn!
he thought, jumping up from the chair, his knees wobbly, stricken by divine inspiration.
Adele was a hoarder; it was inconceivable any blessed artifacts would have been tossed in the trash. Downstairs in the basement, in storage boxes, that's where he would find what he was looking for. He carefully made his way down the steps, conceding he was slightly inebriated. Behind an old headboard and a cardboard wardrobe crammed with mothballed overcoats, he discovered three large boxes marked XMAS in bold black letters. The first box was stuffed with the dried and cracked wires of ancient Christmas lights and a set of old, tissue-wrapped, five-anddime Nativity figures that hadn't seen the light of day in many yearsâa shepherd missing an arm, a headless magi, the Baby Jesus without a left hand. The treasure he was seeking was in the second carton: a Lionel locomotive, three Pennsylvania Railroad Vista Dome Passenger Cars with intricate skylights and the silhouettes of the passengers painted on the windows, and the matching baggage car, all in their original boxes.
The plan was brilliant, completely innocent seeming, nothing more than a kind gesture to thank a pair of model railroaders for a memorable holiday in their lovely home. He would take the train to Federal Express in the morning and ship it to Kay's Kozy Korner, then wait for Jason to write a short thank-you, maybe even call. He applauded himself for his ingenuity, the subtlety of his maneuver, for encouraging the boy's interest without making any commitment of reciprocation. His heart fluttered when he opened his laptop to search for the restaurant's address and found an unexpected message in his mailbox, a short note from Jason, wishing him a Happy New Year and saying he hoped he could call when he arrived in New York next summer. Three photos were attached. One was Jason's sweet face, grinning at the digital camera he held an arm's length away. The second was his thick, erect penis, and the third was an awkward shot, taken one-handed, of his bare ass.
I really, really like you,
he signed off.
Â
James arose early to break the news to his mother that he had to cut the West Virginia visit short, pleading a preposterous little white lie, saying the Senator had sent him a message saying he would be announcing his presidential ambitions in the first news cycle of the new year and needed an emergency editorial conference. He got a hundred-dollar ticket for speeding near Hancock, Maryland, and stopped only for gas and coffee and to empty his bladder. Aunt Wendy was the first to spot him as he walked through the door of the Kozy Korner. She whispered something to Kay, who tried to suppress a cautious smile as he approached her son's broad back.
Nothing lasts forever, Jimmy. That doesn't mean we shouldn't appreciate what we have while we have it,
he thought as he tapped Jason on the shoulder, remembering an angry, resigned face when he had announced he needed to be around people his own age, too much of a coward to admit what Ernst already suspected, that he was involved with the young Armenian editorial assistant in his office whose ass didn't sag and who didn't need forty minutes to get an erection.
It snowed off and on that entire holiday week, no more blizzards, just enough to keep the white blanket covering the countryside fresh and clean. Wendy was pleased with the peace offering of a classic Lionel, though she did complain that the faulty wiring of one of the Pennsylvania Railroad Passenger Cars caused the Vista Dome light to flicker off and on. Jason insisted on planning daytime adventures, trips across the mountains to visit Fallingwater and to hear the grand organ in a Somerset church; he fretted that James was bored and about to announce his imminent departure for New York, too young and insecure to recognize that his guest was perfectly content simply riding in his truck, drinking lousy coffee in a paper cup. Come evening, James sat at the bar, nowhere else in the world he would rather be, reading Stephen King paperbacks he borrowed from Kay while Jason poured drinks and bantered with the customers. James slept soundly at night, Jason lying naked in his arms, with the thermostat turned low, relying on body heat for warmth, the curtains thrown open and the bright light of the full moon outside the window flooding the motel room.
He rose early on the morning of the last day of the year to drive back to New York, expecting Jason to be heartbroken at being abandoned on New Year's Eve with no one to toast but the drunks at the Kozy Korner as the ball dropped in Times Square. But Jason surprised him by not protesting and promising to call when the clock struck twelve. James knew that Kay and Jason were driving Wendy to Erie on New Year's Day to see her son and grandchildren, but he was still disappointed, and a little miffed, to be allowed to depart so easily, without an argument to try to persuade him to change his mind. Jason looked puzzled and hurt when James wouldn't linger after they kissed good-bye; he was too trusting to believe he was being punished because James had spent the past few days allowing himself to indulge in a silly fantasy that he and Jason could be falling in love.
James expected the spell would be broken as he crossed the Hudson. He'd had every intention of canceling his plans with Archie Duncan, but kept finding excuses all week to delay making the call, finally deciding the wise and mature decision was to hedge his bets. This thing with Jason, lovely as it had been, was a folly, and the boy's capricious whims guaranteed an unhappy ending, with the foolish older lover wondering why he had been spurned. Archie was as good as his word, arriving to pick him up at 7:55 on New Year's Eve, carrying a ten-dollar bouquet of cut flowers he had bought from the Korean green grocer on the corner of James's block. He suggested a quiet evening, just the two of them, away from the noisy crowds, after a quick, obligatory stop at the New Year's celebration the production's Mama Rose was throwing for her supporting cast. Dispensation to leave wasn't granted until after two and, when they woke in the morning, they both knew it was over before it had begun, their single night of passion thwarted by the effects of alcohol consumption on the middle age libido and, truth be told, by James's nagging thoughts of lying on a lumpy sofa in a farmhouse in the mountains of Pennsylvania. He'd no sooner closed the door on Archie Duncan, sending him into the bright sunlight, when his telephone rang.
“I called you at midnight but you didn't answer,” Jason said, trying, unsuccessfully, not to sound hurt. “I guess you were busy. I understand.”
James knew he'd caused the boy a restless night, full of lurid fantasies of his faithless lover. This hadn't even started yet, this young romance, and he had already made his first mistake.
“I forgot to charge the phone in the car and the battery was dead. I should have sent you an e-mail, but it was a long drive back to New York and I was sound asleep by eleven.”
“I thought that's what must have happened,” Jason said, his voice brightening, refusing to suspect that James was capable of deceit and lies. His young heart was a fragile thing, capable of being easily bruised, and James understood it was time to choose between walking away or handling it with care.
Jason arrived in June, taking James up on the offer of a crash pad on the fashionable Upper East Side until he saved enough for a deposit on a hovel in Williamsburg or Jersey City. He stayed for seven years, until the inevitable conflicts between an excitable boy not yet thirty and a man in his fifties, settled in his ways, led to the fissures and tension that threatened to harden into intractable anger and resentment, and James knew it was time to set him free.
The cottage in Woodstock stands as a monument to their time together. Jason, forever the country boy, skilled with a hammer and saw, mentored James through its careful restoration. It's a home they still share, spending many weekends together, sleeping in separate bedrooms now, most often alone, sometimes with new companions who come and go, fresh audiences for oft-told dinner-table tales of their adventures reclaiming the old house from the ravages of time and weather. The memoir James published about their first two summers in the cottage won a literary prize and continues to sell, its readers inevitably disappointed to learn that the mismatched but happy couple are no longer together.
Their relationship has changed, but continues, and Jason never strays too far, always needing a safe place to retreat when his still vulnerable heart suffers yet another disappointment. Jason nitpicks, criticizing every quirk and each imperfection of James's new paramours; James bites his tongue, suffering silently through each declaration that Jason has found enduring love. Time is a precious commodity. James is busier than ever, and Jason's career has begun to take off. James is his biggest fan, never missing a performance, watching proudly as Jason's reputation as a musician and songwriter grows. Last summer was bittersweet, and James was often lonely in the cottage in Woodstock, even when the rooms were full with weekend guests, as Jason was off on tour, opening for Jackson Browne on the outdoor music festival circuit. Sometimes they're apart for weeks, occasionally for months, and James misses Jason's loud voice, the sound of his guitar in another room, the floorboards creaking under his heavy footsteps. They're always excited to see each other again, eager to hear all the news and updates, comfortable and secure in each other's presence. Jason's leery each time he returns, asking unsubtle questions, needing to be reassured another young man isn't lurking in the background, waiting to take his place. And every year, on Christmas Eve, he throws his bag in the trunk and tucks his guitar in the backseat of James's car and, together, they head west through New Jersey, and dip south through Pennsylvania, where they spend the night together in a farmhouse outside the Town of Motels before James pushes on in the morning, making the long drive to West Virginia alone.