When I finish her letter for the second time, I laugh at the cockeyed notion that
this
—not Mal’s death or my poorly timed debauchery—might finally get me tested. “Life is unpredictable, that’s obvious and not a bad thing,” Mal once said. “What’s insulting is that it has a Wall Street sense of humor.” Tasteless jokes in abundant supply.
THE AFTERNOON FOLLOWING
our arrival on Arran, it had continued to rain on and off, so Mal and I drove the circumference of the island, stopping to smell the sea at a lay-by with a view toward Ireland, taking tea in Lochranza, where a second ferry shuttles passengers north to Kintyre. By dinner, the sky began to clear, and the late sunset was spectacular, rebounding in purples and golds from cloud to departing cloud.
Having Mal with me at Tealing for the past week had been both a trial and a comfort. It became instantly and unspokenly clear that both of my brothers assumed Mal and I were lovers. That we shared my old room—never mind that we had to, never mind the extra bed—underscored that assumption. I wasn’t sure which was worse: my failure to foresee this natural conclusion or the misery I felt at my inability to correct the misunderstanding. I had never come out to my brothers or my father, but I had never actively tried to deceive them and knew they weren’t dolts. (My mother, half a dozen Christmases before, had told me quite bluntly that she knew. We were alone in the kitchen, and I was showing her the American method I’d learned for dressing a turkey, applying it to our annual goose. As we merged the ingredients we had prepared—I the mushrooms sautéed with thyme, she the chopped apples, sausage, and sage—she said, “You know, you needn’t be ashamed about your being gay. With me anyway. I’m a fairly liberated mother, I think you know that.” Mortified but grateful, I agreed fervently; only the most modern of mothers would let her son meddle with the Christmas goose. She laughed, kissed me on the cheek, then gave a stern glance at the bowl of dressing we’d made. “Your grandmum would be scandalized by all these
herbs,
” she said, accentuating the
h
. “‘For shame!’ she would say. ‘Food that is fresh needs na frippery na fuss!’” And then she asked if I’d mind washing the beetroots. The subject never came up again.)
In no way was I ashamed of Mal’s companionship. He was (no surprise) the perfect guest, hearing my father out on thorny political topics, quizzing my brothers earnestly and extensively about their ambitions and interests . . . a challenge when it came to Dennis, whose leading ambition of the day seemed to be smoking as much dope—which he affectedly called ganja—as he could fill his lungs with. He had just started pastry school in Paris, and he said there was nothing so mind-blowing as constructing a mille-feuille napoleon at dawn while thoroughly stoned. Mal listened to such nonsense graciously, as if he were being enlightened.
The comfort in Mal’s presence was the way in which he deflected attention from me, so that I was not held accountable every minute in my family’s presence. Drifting in and out of my dire thirst for Tony, I was certain that were it not for Mal, everyone would notice my distracted, inattentive behavior. I fooled myself into thinking that Mal did not know me well at all and so would not notice this behavior himself.
So under that splendid sunset on Arran, we left the inn after dinner and walked out along the footpaths which hugged the stone walls between heathered fields. Mal’s energy seemed greater than it had been in a while, and we wanted to prolong our day, since we would be leaving the next afternoon. Mal would drop me at Tealing and take the hired car on to London. After his meeting with Miss Norman, he would fly directly home.
We walked for a good stretch of silence, Mal a few strides ahead, as if to prove his endurance. He said suddenly, “My mother says, such an everymotherly thing, that I need country air. This place may just prove her right.”
“She wants you back home?”
“At
her
home. They don’t even live in the house where I grew up. But even if they did.”
“She just wants to take care of you.”
“She wouldn’t have the time!” He laughed, and in the pink light he looked unconditionally happy.
“I have a feeling she’d find it.”
“Yes,” said Mal, “you’re right there. She could have raised thirteen children and she’d still have had time for her marches on Washington, her dinner parties for Dad and his cronies, her coed quilting circle, her book group, and her Prime of Life aerobics class. Do you know, she thinks I should take up weights? ‘Just little ones, à la Jane Fonda!’” Mal stopped and seated himself on a wall, facing the sunset.
I couldn’t help looking at his wrists as they rested on his knees—all those bones so achingly pronounced. I was tempted to say that maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea, moving to Vermont. I told myself that if he were another kind of writer, if his work did not depend on a life in the city, I would.
“I don’t know how my mother managed always to seem so present when she had to be absent so often, making political waves. I mean, there she was, her picture or her name in the paper every other day, it seemed—to our absolute mortification—when there she was making our sandwiches for school. Mark of a control freak, I suppose.”
“That’s not very kind,” I said, feeling an odd loyalty toward Lucinda.
“No and yes. But that’s not my point. My point is that I realized, just recently, that her marriage to my father is probably just like that. I used to think they must have a dismal marriage, because when were they ever together? That their separate busyness was the only kind of peace they could have. But I think it’s an illusion, their apartness. Their apartness is only a surface.” Mal stood and continued on the path we’d chosen.
I had never given my parents’ marriage much thought, perhaps because I never wanted one of my own. I had seen them disagree but rarely really argue, so I took for granted that they were happy and took it for granted themselves. “We haven’t been married, so we can’t exactly judge, can we?”
“You certainly haven’t been, have you,” said Mal.
“So, you have?”
He shook his head. “No, but I was courted.”
We walked silently again for several paces. We were heading steadily downhill, and I began to worry about our return trip, whether Mal could make it. With a loosened shoelace as an excuse, I stopped and sat to retie it. Mal faced me and said, “You saw the pictures of Armand.”
I did not look up from my shoe.
“I found two of them under the rug when I swept the floor that week. Did you know him at all?”
“I went into his shop sometimes. That’s all. He seemed pleasant.”
“He was sweet.” Mal laughed. “Why not, around all that sugar?” I wished he would sit, because I wanted him to rest and because I did not like being face-to-face just then. This was not the sort of conversation we had (not the sort I had with anyone), and I didn’t want that to change.
I said, “He made this remarkable coconut cake,” and was immediately sorry when Mal frowned at me as if I had told a bad joke or confessed to a lie.
But then his face softened again. “The very first week, Armand told me that he wanted to end his life a married man. I thought it was the stupidest, bravest thing I’d heard anyone say in a long time. I hadn’t told him that I was newly plagued as well; in fact, I never told him. I had no symptoms, just a prophylactic drug or two, just the results of that test I so responsibly—so gullibly—let my doctor give me. I did plan to tell him . . . sometime, but then time, as it stretched out and made him the honest one, the fragile one, made a permanent liar of me. Ever seen
Sabrina?
He was almost the Audrey Hepburn to my William Holden. Except I wasn’t so dashing. Or so carefree. And there wasn’t a solid square older brother, no Bogart to elope with. . . . You know, he had a stroke, isn’t that strange? I’ve come to envy him that far more than I used to envy him his sweetness.”
I wanted to suggest that we start back to the inn, but it would have seemed rude. Mal looked at the sky above us, where stars had begun to prick through the gathering blue, like lights on a city skyline. “So are we roaming in the gloaming—or is that dawn?” he said.
“Aye, the gloaming it is,” I said. I rose and started uphill. I was thankful when he followed without comment.
He rested on the wall one more time, and after he’d caught his breath, it was here that Mal got to the point I suppose he had been aiming for all along. “I’ve decided I do not want to die in a hospital, and I’m sorry if it’s a burden, but I’m asking you to take this seriously,” he said. “I just went to visit a friend at Saint Anthony’s. He was wholly conscious, not even delirious, but every orifice, every
pore,
was grossly distended by a hose of some sort. He looked like a still. And I actually took him flowers. Trivial-minded ass.”
From the wall, he picked up a small gray stone and held it for a moment against his cheek, his eyes briefly closed. “My mother is a big fan of hospice. My God, what an awful word! Ah, hospice with the mospice. Come right in, so glad to see you! Help yourself to a Hospice Twinkie! . . . Chatty rounds of gin rummy with people whose breath already reeks of formaldehyde. No. Fuck, no.” He threw the stone far off into the field. There was still a red mark on his cheek, his weary blood slow to recede from the smallest threat.
“She brought it up?” I asked. I was surprised, because as clearheaded as Lucinda seemed, how could she foresee her son’s death? Why should she be different from any other mother?
“She’s known for a long time. I told her after Armand died. It was far too late at night and I had this rare moment of conscience. Maybe she deserved to know, she was my mother, maybe I owed her time to get used to the probability that I could drop dead anytime, just like Armand. I reasoned, Would I go off to war without telling her? My mother’s an insomniac, like me—vice versa if it’s genetic. That’s part of why she gets so much done. I can remember hearing the sound of her sewing machine, when I was little, at three o’clock in the morning. I liked it. It was like the noise of a beehive; it made our house sound like a productive, orderly place. Then, when I was an adolescent, I figured it proved my parents were miserable and, thank God, had no sex life. This must be how she worked out her rage at being oppressed by The Senator.
“I’ve always had this private joke about my insomnia. What most people call the hour of the wolf I call the hour of the quilt. I love to think of every bed in my parents’ enormous house covered with some gorgeous multicolored thing made by my mother while everyone around her slept—probably every bed in her shelter for knocked-up Polyannas, too. Just think: whole houses full of people snoring away beneath my mother’s sleeplessness. . . . So the night of my urge to confess, I figured, well of course she’d be up, if not sewing then making signs for a protest or petitions for a county fair. She’s never gone in for confronting the clinics, you know. She thinks it’s counterproductive, and she’s right. . . . Anyway, that night, wouldn’t you know it, I woke her. Of course it didn’t matter, she was hyperconscious in an instant. She made herself tea while I told her, and she didn’t cry, or if she did, she was careful not to let me hear. She just listened for a while. I told her right away that if I had to die, I wasn’t planning to be Catholic about it. Because I’d already thought about what I feared most. Dying by inches. I may immerse myself in opera, but intubation, I bet that puts a crimp in your aria.”
Mal did not raise his voice during this speech, but it grew hoarse. He began to sound almost like Mum had sounded, just the day before in her hospital bed. “So it was entirely my fault, entirely, that my mother got a head start on her defenses,” he said, nearly whispering now. “Did I really think I would overrule her faith? Ah ye of bloated ego. . . . And then, when I had made my case, after she had told me how much she loved me, she started to talk about my
sins,
oh so gently of course, and how she worried about me because she knew I no longer prayed. And I thought, The fucking
nerve
of her. And when I got off the phone, I lost it. I just lost it. I thought I would have a stroke of my own out of sheer rage, join Armand then and there.”
At last, Mal stood up. I held out my arm, thinking that he needed my help for the last bit of hill, the steepest part, but he laughed.
“Really,” he said, and started ahead of me again. “I hate it when my little tirades make you feel even more guilty about your superior health. Unless that’s an illusion and you’re keeping another truth close to your chest. Well, smart move if you are. Don’t say a thing. I mean it.”
When we made it to the top of the hill, Mal said, “You haven’t called home about Felicity, not once.”
“Wasn’t it you who said animals aren’t children?” I said, though I was glad for the change in subject.
“I’m thinking, God knows why, about your pal Ralph. It’s merely considerate.”
So in the foyer, I stopped to use the public telephone. I caught Ralph at the shop. In the background, Felicity sang her jubilant scales.
“So it’s raining,” I said.
“There too?” said Ralph, missing the joke.
“Oh no, it’s clear right now. The stars are incredible.”
“Well don’t rub it in, darling. Nights here are smoggy as ever. The humidity’s astronomical, and our AC tab will follow suit.”
Ralph asked about my mother, I told him she was doing well, and then he reassured me that, August doldrums aside, everything was running smoothly. Felicity appeared to have forgotten my existence but would no doubt punish me when I came home. “If you called to confirm you’re extraneous, well there you are,” said Ralph, sounding old and snippish. I realized he was the closest thing I’d ever had to a spouse and rang off feeling thoroughly depressed.
The parlor was empty. While my back was turned, Mal had made his way quietly up to his room. On the other side of the wall, I lay awake in my narrow bed thinking of Mal’s mother next to mine, the two alike in their forcefulness yet otherwise wildly different. Then I remembered the one other thing they shared: a china pattern. And then, just before I drifted, it occurred to me that I now knew just how those plates—Lucinda’s—had been smashed.