Fire Year Page 2

  “I am not.”

  “And your suit pants are highwaters.”

  I glared at him, insisting he come to the point.

  “No girl is ever going to like you like that,” he finally said.

  Standing on the altar swaying, like a tree blown by the spirit of the Lord—I had meant it. My religious awakening occurred just a few months before, at Mama Leone’s restaurant in New York. It was night three of my eighth-grade trip.

  Night one: hurtling north through darkness on Amtrak’s Silver Star, Tally McPherson slipping across the aisle to sit with Leslie Lee Desbouillons, Sara Bousquet giving up her seat to sit with Chip Spenser, a car full of adolescents as beautiful as their names coupling in the darkness, silent against the noises of the night, the hypnotic chug-a-chut of the wheels, the lonely call of the whistle at the intersections of county roads, the snoring of the chaperones—the landscape of sound that I traveled through, that the lovers surely didn’t notice. Night two: in a grotesque twist, the TV in the room I shared with Aaron Elkins hadn’t been blocked from showing adult movies, and so the entire class, sixty horny kids, piled onto the beds and the carpet watching Confessions of a Window Cleaner. This was the happiest night of Aaron’s life and he wasn’t even watching the movie. Neither was I. The window cleaner was skinny and smooth-skinned and he had a huge dick, but if I looked anywhere in the direction of the screen I was sure the entire class would notice my fascination. That night I lay listening to Aaron’s rubbing against the sheets, his pitiful moans, wondering if these sad exertions would kill him.

  By night three I was, apparently, ready to accept God’s salvation. A plate of veal parmesan was placed before me. Meat and milk in combination was forbidden, I had learned in Hebrew school, though we ate it all the time at home: veal parmesan, cheeseburgers, beef stroganoff . . . The chaperones had selected a five-course meal for us. My choice was whether to eat at all. But it didn’t seem like a conscious decision. It was more like when Pharaoh tested the baby Moses with two piles, one of gold coins and the other of steaming coals, and if he chose the gold, he would be put to death. Naturally, he reached for the coins, but at the last moment an angel averted his hand and he touched a coal. His burnt finger flew up to his mouth, singeing his tongue, permanently impeding his speech. My hand didn’t burn when I pushed the plate away, but after this silent refusal I barely spoke for the rest of the trip.

  Dennis Hornstein sprinted from the far end of the living room to the foyer, then out the front door. He had been running in and out all night and my grandparents were furious, which seemed to me some measure of my party’s success. It was not exactly wild but there had been surprises. All the guys from the loser table in the lunchroom had shown up and so had a few others whom no one could consider losers—Dennis, who was actually going out with someone, was one of them.

  I wasn’t exactly happy but I knew it could be worse. Aaron knew no such thing—he had one measure of success and his count of girls remained at zero. When Dennis showed up on the back porch again, still out of breath, Aaron cornered him and demanded to know where his girlfriend, Karen Karesh, was.

  “She didn’t come,” Dennis said.

  “Duh,” Aaron said. “Why didn’t she come?”

  “Uh, I don’t know.”

  “Did you ask her?”

  “She knew I was coming but she didn’t want to come.”

  “Well, why not?”

  He shook his head.

  “Don’t move,” Aaron said, going into the sunroom. He came back with a phone trailing a cord. “Call her.”

  “He doesn’t have to call,” I pleaded. Did I really want to know why someone wouldn’t come to my party?

  “I already talked to her today,” Dennis said.

  “Give him a break,” I said.

  “Call her and ask her why she isn’t here,” Aaron insisted.

  Dennis shrugged and dialed. Two little moths had gotten onto the porch, and as he waited he watched their little suicide flights into the bulb. I lifted the needle, silencing “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

  “Hey,” Dennis said softly into the receiver.

  “Ask her,” Aaron said.

  “Uh, hey,” Dennis said in a normal voice. “Do you want to come over?” He looked at us as he listened, then looked back at the phone when it was his turn to talk. “Is it fun? Kind of.” He looked at us again, then back at the phone. “Well, why don’t you want to come over?”

  When he hung up he informed us she didn’t think there would be any girls there.

  Aaron made two loose fists and pounded them against his own head.

  “Aaron,” I said.

  “Aaahhhhhh!” he said, still pounding.

  “Stop it,” I said. “You’re going to hurt yourself.”

  “I hate girls.” He dropped to one knee and rested his elbow on the other one, gently panting. “How can there be any girls if no girls show up?”

  “I think they’re just waiting for someone to go first,” Mark said reasonably.

  Aaron looked at him and stood up. If he hadn’t been such a runt, he would have been right in Mark’s face. I thought Aaron was going to lunge. Instead he said, “What’s your sister doing tonight?”

  “I don’t know,” Mark said. “Nothing.”

  “You don’t know or she’s doing nothing? Which is it?”

  “Sally’s eleven years old,” I said when I realized what Aaron was doing.

  He picked up the phone, which had somehow got set down in the middle of the floor, and said, “Call her.”

  “All right,” Mark replied.

  Sally came over. She was wearing white shorts and a frilly white blouse and I think she’d done something with her eyes—the lashes appeared to have been greased and somehow separated. She sat in the center of the room, under the bulb, on a beach chair with the back frayed into a hole the size of a grapefruit. It was the best of the lot we found stacked against the wall. She sat on this throne without a trace of self-consciousness. There was something uncanny about her. She was an eleven-year-old girl but she sat there with the air of an adult, of her mother specifically, I suppose. She hadn’t been tainted by her brother’s reputation. She crossed her legs and maintained a constant smile and didn’t seem to mind that everyone kept running past or around her and no one even looked her way. We pretended she wasn’t there—but she was the blank space that defined the walls around it, the absence around which everything we wanted was gathered.

  “Would you like something to drink?” I finally asked.

  “I would, thank you kindly.”

  “We have ginger ale and punch.”

  “I believe I’ll try the punch,” she replied, folding her hands in her lap.

  In the sunroom a cherub forming the stem of a lamp listened with his head cocked to a conch shell. A lightbulb rose from his curls and cast a warm puddle of light on the Oriental rug. A two-foot marble reproduction of the David stood on a pedestal in the corner. It was a house full of wonders and flowers and music and light. And adults so intensely engaged with one another, so lost in their merry drunkenness, that by this point in the evening they had stopped opening up their circles, given up congratulating me.

  There were exceptions. Sympathetic souls like my grandmother. I had last seen her scolding Dennis for running through her house, and now, propped against the Knabe baby grand with a tumbler of bourbon in her hand, she smiled at me—she didn’t blame me for the wildness of my friends. My uncle Ben, who was recently divorced and now took me as his date to the symphony, stood by the mahogany radio console, which glowed from its deep polish, and winked at me so discreetly that discretion itself seemed the point of the gesture. He was signaling that we wouldn’t talk or even acknowledge each other—but he wanted me to know he hadn’t forgotten about me. In that house full of people we could share this moment completely unnoticed, no one but us could know the depth of our connection—and it was all right. This seemed to me then to have something to do with becoming an adult.

/>   And yet it wasn’t enough, none of it was enough. What was wrong with me! The crumminess of my party on the porch was clear to me, as was the elegance and warmth of the party in here—but I didn’t belong at either of them. Dennis and Mark raced past me. Where were they going? How did they know where to go? We were no longer children, we didn’t just run around and around for no reason at all. But my friends were always describing some orbit in the house or outside. The adults standing in their circles were also revolving, slowly, so that when I passed back through the sunroom with Sally’s punch, the people whose backs had been to me were now facing me, though still they paid me no mind.

  I stood on the threshold between the house and the back porch. “I Honestly Love You” was playing out there. Under the now-dark bulb Aaron and Sally were holding each other and standing in place, leaning in one direction for a while, then in the other. Aaron was barely taller than she. Their hands were pressed deeply into each other’s backs. Their eyes were closed. The chair had been pushed over to the side. Nobody else was on the porch but them—and me. It had gotten a little cooler and the attic fan seemed less useless, so that instead of a rush of hot air you were standing in a breeze. Now that the light was off, you could make out the camellia and hydrangea bushes beyond the screen. Moonlight silvered the tops of the power lines and from someone’s yard a dog barked.

  From Rameses they came, from Succoth, from Etham, from Marah. They came from Elim, from the Red Sea, from the wilderness of Sin. They came from Dophkah, from Alush, from waterless Rephidim. From the Sinai wilderness, from Rimmon-perez, from Libnah they came. From Rissah, from Kehelath, from Mount Shepher, from Haradah. They started in Egypt and stopped in dozens of places lacking everything but a name. Every destination also a place of departure, every from also a to—but only provisionally. They were always leaving. It is the final destination alone that matters, the encampments along the way dutifully recorded but usually without a syllable of description, nothing to impede the way to Canaan, every place a stone in a desert riprap over which the human stream can swiftly pour—but also a piece of a caravan fixed in place in the sacred text, with one end in Egypt and the other always in the Holy Land.

  And then the people stop moving. Sitting on the wrong bank of the Jordan, they listen to Moses tell them what God has in store for them, what they are commanded to do and what they are forbidden. And this is where the reading ends.

  A cliffhanger. But everyone knows what happens. They get where they’re going. They fulfill their destiny.

  It had not been so long since my Mama Leone’s conversion. Just enough time for me to learn the Torah portion. I had read the translation maybe once. I hardly knew what I was saying but I didn’t care—it was an ecstatic experience I was after, I wanted to lose myself quite literally. And yet somehow up there, reading the chain of untranslatable place names, things made a kind of sense to me. Sense—I tried to get it to go away. The words rose from the parchment and I would not let them settle, I poured myself into the letters, confined myself in their shapes. It didn’t work. Chanting the place names, I identified with the Hebrews on their journey, I was on the journey myself. My adolescent egotism disgusted me; it was banal, foreclosing ecstasy, trapping me in myself. In my department-store suit I was there in Rephidim, in Kehelath, in Tahath, in Terah—and I wondered how I could possibly believe I was going anywhere, much less making progress to a land of milk and honey. Just because some guy who had conversations with God said so? I was fleeing slavery but into what? How could I believe I would ever escape that endless chain of bumfuck towns—the Vidalia and Valdosta of the desert, the Elabelle, Eulolia, Cordelia, Waycross. Savannah. The towns were bad enough—were they even towns, or just bunches of palms in the desert?—but how to have faith on the shores of the Red Sea or in the middle of barren wilderness? Endless pineforest and marsh surrounded Savannah on three sides, the ocean on the other—but why resort to analogies when it was the wilderness of myself from which there was no escape?

  I was thinking about all this as I stood there in the darkness watching Aaron and Sally dance. Something had to happen, didn’t it?

  The song ended. They didn’t pull apart. The string to the bulb hung behind Sally’s back and I went over and snapped the light on. Aaron opened his eyes and smiled at me over her shoulder. I smiled miserably back. His forearms were crossed on her back, his palms pressed into her. He didn’t let go. The bottoms of his hands remained firmly planted. But the tops of them inclined slowly away from her, his hands swiveled on his wrists, his thumbs flexed. He was giving me a double thumbs-up.

  He would be dead in three years. He must have known it. He reached over and pulled the string, he squeezed her to his chest and they swayed to a music you could almost hear.

  Reunion

  Sing to me, Muse, of why anyone would attend their high school reunion. I’m not talking about those people who liked high school, who peaked in their senior year. What about the rest of us, the queers, the dykes, the pansies, the fags, the fruits, the freaks, the punks, the goths, the dreamers, the losers, the tortured, the confused, the spazzes, the nerds, the dorks, the fatties, the brains, the potheads, the poets, the painfully shy—there are more of us than there were of them. Reunion. Break it down into its parts, watch how it decomposes into nonsense phones: ree-YOON-yun. The punchline of a Borscht Belt joke at the expense of the Chinese. A reunion, to reune, to reunite—why, we were never united to begin with, we comrades in sorrow. We’ve kept in touch with those of our fellow misfits we’ve wanted to keep in touch with, and besides, they wouldn’t go to the reunion either.

  And so when Zora, my best friend from those days, asked me if I was going to our twenty-fifth high school reunion, I laughed into the phone.

  “We’ll show up together in black leather, looking fabulous,” she envisioned.

  “We can just do that somewhere downtown,” I pointed out.

  “Yes, but back home we’ll look so much better—relatively.”

  “Look, I don’t want to go.”

  “But it’ll be fun, love.”

  “Actually, it won’t be. It’ll be a trial.”

  “Maybe,” she conceded. “But sometimes people are tried. That’s life. That’s history. It isn’t always nice.”

  “How about I take you out for an expensive lunch?”

  “Because I want you to come with me to our reunion.”

  “Okay,” I said, giving in.

  In fact I would have done anything for her, because on our senior prom night she had done me a favor. I had a girlfriend, from the class below us, whom I had been trying to get rid of for months. She wanted what I couldn’t give and yet she remained deaf to my coded entreaty, “It’s not you, really it’s not!” It was the best I could do at the time but it wasn’t working. Zora didn’t have a date to the prom. This was the cruel fate of a foreign-born girl with razor-sharp cheekbones and the yearbook quote “Of all that I love, I love most that which has been written in blood.” She showed up near the end of the evening and the three of us left together. Ollie Byrd was red-cheeked and slight and Zora dispatched her in a two-step drinking contest: tequila shots at a Mexican place on Hartley Extension, notorious for serving the underaged, followed by ramekins of maple-flavored corn syrup at our local 24-hour Christian diner. I laid Ollie Byrd out on the backseat and touched two fingers to her neck. Then we drove to the beach, where Zora and I sat smoking on the hood of the car and watched the sun rise and glimpsed the possibility of a less pathetic life.

  Since then Zora’s homeland had ceased to exist and she herself had mostly disappeared, somewhere on the Lower East Side. I moved to New York too, to Chelsea, where I had a group of friends, got laid regularly, held a steady job, and enjoyed the sort of nice life that Zora apparently scorned. Whenever I ran into her we promised to set a date to meet—but we never did. And now that she had called me, my beloved Zora, this was what she wanted to propose?

  I bought a ticket to the reunion. I bought a nonrefundable fligh
t. I notified my family. The weekend before, I called Zora to confirm and plan outfits. It turned out she was getting back together with her man and she didn’t want to leave town at such a delicate point in their relationship. Besides, he was insanely jealous, even of her gay friend. I understood, didn’t I?

  “You’re sending me down there by myself,” I said.

  “I’m sorry!” she said, a little desperately. “I didn’t plan it this way. I wouldn’t want to go down there by myself either!”

  She wanted me to understand that she sympathized with me and that this decision of hers wasn’t premeditated—that I wasn’t, in short, the Ollie Byrd of this situation. But somehow this failed to console.

  In the following week I got two emails. The first was from someone named Winson Kingsley. He identified himself as Tag from our high school class and wrote, “Hey, Edward, wanna get together when you’re in town for Reunion?” He didn’t explain how he had gone from Tag to Winson or why he was asking to get together, and so familiarly too. We had gone through middle school and high school together without exchanging a single word.

  Tag was a rich kid who played football and baseball, he may have been the captain of one or both teams, he wore a jacket with a letter on it, he was a terrible student. But unlike your typical jock, he was chatty, at least with his friends. From a distance I could see the verve with which he expressed himself; he talked with his face and his hands, his entire body. He acted in school plays, he sang, and sometimes, I heard, he went to the woods at the edge of campus to smoke.

  But Tag’s place in the class’s imagination owed less to these standard biographical facts than to an unusual one: the hirsuteness of his legs. They were so nice and hairy that they inspired a corresponding admiration among the other boys in the class. Rumors flew: Some short-skirted girl from a rival school had come simply by sitting in his lap. The legs were the sign of a virility so great that he himself could come several times in a night, even after drinking a jug of Boone’s Farm strawberry wine. I was so tortured by shame and confusion—I wasn’t certain I even knew what it meant to come—that I didn’t dare give in to these fantasies, and in fact the only time I ever took a good look at those legs was when everyone else was looking at them too. It was a pep rally, and from the safety of the bleachers I watched Tag come out in his girlfriend’s wraparound skirt, his fur-tufted hooves stuffed into her pink espadrilles. Everyone sure pepped up at that, everyone but me. Struck by this display of manly beauty in a female setting—I believe he might even have sashayed—I sat there as still as a corpse.