Fire Year Read online

  “This isn’t a health clinic,” he said, frowning. “And yes, we do have a family membership. But the point is she’s the first Jewish person. And now, I mean, one thing can lead to another and—”

  I waited. He flicked the little foil packet back and forth, the way we used to do with paper footballs when we were kids.

  “This thing, this thing,” he said. “I mean, it’s gone on for too long.”

  Whatever it was he was talking about, he kept saying “this thing” and I kept looking at the crumpled foil, and the association between foil and thing was soon complete in my mind. I wanted to know what was inside, and if there was nothing, I wanted to unfold its thousand surfaces and flatten it into legibility.

  “I mean,” he went on, “there are no gay members of the Boat Club. Come on now, the time has come!”

  And so the thing had a specific meaning, it wasn’t just the mystery of the past.

  “I doubt there aren’t any gay members of the Boat Club,” I said.

  “Really?” he asked, leaning in with a do-tell look.

  “Oh, my God,” I said. “You want to sponsor me to join the Boat Club.”

  “Do it, man, do it. You love it as an idea, I can tell.”

  “Yes, it’s absolute genius. I live hundreds of miles away and I don’t own a boat, so nobody would ever have to run into me in the lockerroom or anywhere else for that matter.”

  He frowned. “It’s actually super-competitive to get in, you know. We know people that’ve been asking us for, like, generations to sponsor them. I can’t believe you aren’t interested.”

  It was a relief from the strange normalcy of our conversation, glimpsing the entitled prince peeking out from behind his welcoming mask.

  “You really can’t believe that I personally am not interested?”

  “Well, I guess I can.”

  I smiled at him meaningfully. “You’re very nice to ask. Thank you.”

  “Okay.” He finished off his second martini. “So are you looking forward to the reunion tomorrow night?”

  He had accepted my refusal so easily, I felt wounded. Wasn’t he even going to beg a little?

  He was not. We ate and drank some more and talked about what we had been doing over the last twenty-five years. High school barely came up, as if we had no history and were meeting here for the first time.

  Outside, the warm breeze blowing across the river felt good. There’s a little fishing community on the bluff, where the river curves under the first bridge from the mainland, and from across the marsh you could see the shrimpboats, strung for some reason with white lights.

  “Want to drive to the beach?” he asked. “We’re already halfway there.”

  We took his car, a green Jaguar sportscar. He also had a more practical four-door Mercedes and a Lexus SUV that they used for chauffeuring the kids. (The Kingsleys’ eco-friendliness apparently had its limits.) Tag rattled off alphanumeric names of models that meant nothing to me, and as I tried to associate these codes with words I knew—door, backseat—I wondered why he was reciting this inventory to me, a carless New Yorker. Cars were the family business but they weren’t his business, and when I stopped trying to follow what he was saying I realized he was a little nervous.

  I was too. Our dinner had been downright businesslike—he proposed, I declined, no hard feelings, let’s have another drink. We were two adults, older and wiser than we had been, the noxiousness of the past mostly gone. But now that I was driving out to the beach with him for no stated reason, a little air started to leak in around the edges of the me who was filling the space of my body, the confident new me I was presenting to Tag. He smelled faintly herbal, a little spicy, like arugula or eucalyptus, and although I had never gotten this close to him, his smell somehow made me aware that I wasn’t here with Winson but with Tag, Tag Kingsley, the satyr king toward whom I had shown such deference.

  “I used to come out here as a kid,” I said, feeling tipsy as we sped across the dark marsh.

  “It’s nice. I mean, our summer place was in Hilton Head, but it’s nice out here too. We used to come here to go parking.”

  I had gone parking twice with Ollie Byrd, both times total disasters.

  Where the main road curved right, running along the ocean side of the island, Tag turned left, toward the river side. No one went to the beach here. The currents were treacherous, and every few years the river spewed raw sewage into the ocean. This part of the island was unfamiliar to me. I couldn’t see anything through the trees lining the road, I couldn’t even tell if we were driving along the ocean or the river. But soon it felt as if we had gone too far to turn back. Or as if turning back made no sense—only if we kept on could we get back where we started.

  We drove past the lighthouse, the one you saw when you were crossing over the bridge to the island. Tag pulled over under an oak tree. We got out and he grabbed a big beach towel from the trunk.

  A streetlight marked a little wooden bridge over the dunes, and once we were out of the light’s reach it was the moon lighting our way. The waves seemed random and furious, as they always do at night.

  Tag laid the towel down on the sand and anchored two corners with his shoes.

  Then he started taking off his clothes.

  “We aren’t going swimming, are we?” I shouted over the wind.

  “No, something else.” As his pants came off, the little packet of foil came out and he set it down on the towel. “Now, hurry up, I can’t stay out all night.”

  The foil had a condom and a sample-size tube of personal lubricant in it. He handed me the condom. He got down on the towel and squirted some goo into his palm, then he handed the tube to me. How long had he been planning this? A week, twenty-five years? He lay there on his stomach, incredibly still, as if he had gone to sleep or passed out. As if he were dead. My eyes traveled the length of his body, from his toes to the crown of his head. He had a beautiful back, broad but not too muscular, free of moles and stray hairs. His ass was surprisingly smooth, as was what I had seen of his chest, and I wondered if his wife, curled up against him in sleep, dreamed of making love to an animal or a man.

  His legs under mine felt soft and a little springy, like moss, and I had the sense of plunging into the warmth and the damp of the earth. I smiled at him in appreciation, though he couldn’t see me. His head was turned to the side but his eyes were shut tight. If he could have buried his face in the sand, I sensed, he would have. I myself wasn’t going to waste a second of this by blinking.

  I pressed my palms down to steady myself. The sand was at once hard and unstable. I made fists and tried to balance on my knuckles, but it didn’t help. The towel itself was a joke—it became instantly heavy with sand and the two unanchored ends got trapped somewhere beneath us. Sand blew into my face and everywhere else, and my skin puckered in goose-bumps. But none of this was much of a distraction. Everything was proof that this was really happening to me.

  Tag seemed to be gritting his teeth. He was making a conscious effort to breathe, and for once in his life he wasn’t saying a word. The skin around his eyes was bunched up so tight, even his lashes seemed swallowed up in it.

  Pornographic expletives, inspired with sweet new life, tried to force their way past my lips, which I pressed together to avoid freaking Tag out. I leaned down to kiss him but he sensed my approach. The tickle of my breath along his ear and cheek must have repelled him. His head jerked away, and now he was facing straight down. It would have felt good to nose around in his hair—but I let it go.

  Then for the first time that night, my eyes closed. I cried out, then rolled over to his side.

  “Well, that answers a question,” he said.

  “Don’t tell me,” I said, trying to catch my breath.

  A scratchy scrim of cloud passed across the moon. The crashing waves sounded far away, for the beach was very wide here, this beach that nobody ever used.

  Tag jumped up and began gathering his stuff. We made only the most perfuncto
ry efforts to clean up before running back. Stuffed into his tiny car, we seemed bigger than we had been before, or at least to have more limbs.

  He started up the engine. “No, I’m not gay. That’s what I needed to find out. Thank you.”

  I had been joking when I told him not to say what I knew he was going to say. In fact I felt a surprising relief. I didn’t need him to be gay and his wife certainly didn’t need him to be gay and even the homo-deprived Boat Club didn’t need him to be gay.

  We drove back across the marsh in silence. Tag was staring straight ahead as the oleanders lining the road rushed past. I studied his handsome profile in the underwater glow of the car’s interior, knowing I would never get this close to him again.

  As we pulled in to the Boat Club parking lot, I thought of my brother. “Hey, Tag,” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  “I didn’t notice on the menu, but do they have an appetizer in the restaurant that’s oysters two ways or something?”

  He turned to me with a smirk. “Oysters two ways, huh. Where’d you hear that?”

  I intended to get to the reunion as late as possible, stay for an hour, and leave. Going late would recall the trauma of holding your lunchtray while everyone watched you looking for a place to sit, but at least the evening would be over quickly. And this strategy gave me an excuse to turn Ray down when he asked whether I wanted to go with him and the band.

  The main hall—which still served as administrative building, lunchroom, lounge, auditorium, and dance space—had been decorated to look fancy. Silver balloons were strung here and there, and the tables had white tablecloths and flowers and candles. I arrived just after dark, and from the walkway I could see through the glass walls how pretty everything looked. I had the idea that if I left now, it was this warm glow of a memory I could cherish for the rest of my life.

  But I went in anyway, because I wasn’t going to let Ray have the satisfaction of knowing I was afraid to attend my high school reunion. As I walked through the doorway I heard him singing backup vocals to “Nowhere Man,” his voice confirming my feeling that my reunion was all about him. But a woman’s voice was singing the melody and she sounded good. There was an unmanned table with a couple of nametags on it, and as I took mine—it would aid in my fantasy of being unrecognizably buff without it—I peered across the dark pit of the dance-floor at the band. The floor was full of bodies that hadn’t yet resolved into particular people, and so as I moved along the upper level of the lunchroom, it was easy to ignore the dancers and just head for that voice, sweet and breathy and incongruously coming from a mountain of a girl who, I now saw, was the one from yesterday’s karate tournament. She stood behind a microphone and sang, “He’s a real nowhere man. . . .” Her short dark hair was slicked back and held in place with a silver barrette.

  My brother stood slightly behind her on the bass, and behind him, on the drums, was Ramirez! And on the other side of the singer was the black guy on lead guitar! I took a good look at all the speakers, half expecting to find the infant towhead dancing on one of them, shaking a tambourine. It was strange seeing these people here. For one thing they weren’t wearing their pajamalike uniforms. For another, they looked nothing like their audience, who were, as a quick survey confirmed, all white, and dressed like bankers. I stopped moving, staring with wonder at this band of misfits showering light upon this room full of privilege, illuminating nothing less than the dark corners of history itself. Someone handed me a beer, and I caught my brother’s attention and for the first time in my life toasted him ungrudgingly. In return he nodded and, I believed, even allowed his lips to curl slightly upward.

  “They’re good,” said a voice in my ear. “Your brother kind of filled out, didn’t he?”

  It was Tag, looking gorgeous in a dark suit and an open-collared white button-down.

  Before thinking better of it I threw my arms around him and he hugged me back.

  “I was going to ignore you,” I said into his ear.

  He let go and frowned. “Why?”

  “I don’t know, I didn’t want it to be weird for you or anything.”

  “Nothing’s ever too weird for me,” he said. “Come on, I want you to meet my wife. She’s going to wonder where your motorcycle is, in that getup.”

  Things were getting either stranger or more normal. More normal because this was what I imagined one did at these events—meet the spouses of the people who ignored you in high school. Tag seemed downright giddy at the prospect of this encounter, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had extended a hand to lead me to it. I nodded goodbye to my brother and followed Tag through the darkness to one of the candlelit tables.

  “This is my sugarpie,” he said, kissing a small dark woman on top of her head.

  “Hi, I’m Susan,” she said, extending a hand.

  “My Jewish sugarpie.” He kissed her on the cheek. “Isn’t she beautiful?”

  She was pretty but not of the leggy blond cheerleader variety he had once favored. She looked me in the eye. She was from Atlanta, which practically counted as the North down here, and she seemed like someone I might be friends with in New York. I appreciated how suspiciously she was eyeing me.

  Tag sat with us for a couple of minutes, but he kept jumping up to say hello to people, at one point whispering in the ear of a person I believed to be Cathy Perkins, his high school girlfriend. She had gotten heavy.

  “Okay, y’all,” he finally said, putting down his empty beer bottle and standing up. “I’ll be right back. Dance with my wife, will you, Edward? I’m sure you know how to dance by now.”

  Susan didn’t seem to mind or even notice Tag’s fidgetiness and sudden disappearance.

  “You didn’t know how to dance in high school?” she asked, trying to decode her husband’s last remark. “You’ve taken classes since then?”

  “I’m gay.” I made little disco gestures with my hands. “That’s what he meant. You know, Studio 54, gay bars, and all that?”

  She laughed reluctantly.

  “I’ve heard it before,” I said.

  “You know, I’m trying to think if he’s ever mentioned your name.”

  “I doubt it. We weren’t really that close.”

  She looked perplexed but I had no explanation to give her.

  “So you’re an architect?” I asked.

  “I am.”

  “Tag too? I just assumed—”

  She laughed more freely now. “No, Winson’s the one who goes out and gets the clients. It’s so sunny here, but it would never occur to anyone to put up solar panels if my husband didn’t badger them about it at the Club.”

  “He’s good at charming people.”

  “He tells me he took you there last night,” she said.

  A sick feeling spewed in my stomach. But why shouldn’t he have told her he took me to the Club? What was wrong with that?

  “He did. He thought I would want to join.”

  She seemed to find this hilarious. “Did he tell you about the challah?”

  “Yes,” I said, more easily. “And the lobsters.”

  “That’s one of the great things about Winson. He has no idea why that’s funny.”

  There was, apparently, a reunion going on around us. Some people were dancing, others were sitting at tables talking and drinking. Was food coming? Had people already eaten? Was there going to be some kind of speech? What I really wanted was to listen to my brother’s band, whose name, I realized, I didn’t even know. I was a terrible brother, absolutely the worst. I refilled Susan’s glass and my own. Besides the music and the fact that Ollie Byrd wasn’t in my class, the one undeniably nice thing about this reunion was the bottle of Maker’s Mark on each table.

  “Should we dance?” I asked.

  “Why not?” she replied.

  Now the band was playing “Rolling on the River.” The big girl wasn’t trying to be Tina Turner, but her version was spicier than the Creedence Clearwater Revival version they were still playing on th
e radio down here. Ray was taking it pretty fast, thereby sparing me the awkwardness of slow-dancing with Tag’s wife. We were moving about, a little randomly but not without animation. Nobody cut in, but every now and then someone would touch me on the back or say something in my ear. I was vague about who some of these people were and I couldn’t hear a word of what they were saying. It was a partial but not unpleasant experience of the world, like being in a dream.

  And then a rumbling went through the crowd, heads turned, and there, emerging from the shadows to the right of the stage, were Cathy Perkins and Donna Showalter, wearing their Peter Pan blouses and checked cheerleading skirts. Donna wasn’t as fat as Cathy, but these were still two large women and in their uniforms they looked, well, awful. I had always thought their confidence came from their looks, but I was wrong. The friends they had grown up with started to clap and my brother cued the band to stop. It didn’t seem as though anyone had let him in on this.

  Halfway down the length of the pit, still on the upper level, the women came to a stop and turned to face us.

  “Be aggressive!” they shouted, shaking pompoms they pulled from behind their backs. Someone turned on the lights. “Be all aggressive! Y’all, be aggressive, be all aggressive! Y’all, be aggressive, be all aggressive!”

  They weren’t doing splits but they were bending and high-kicking in a game approximation of their old moves, and everyone hooted appreciatively.

  Then they shook their pompoms in the direction of the music room, where out of the shadows emerged Tag, barelegged, in his famous wraparound skirt and espadrilles.

  “Be aggressive!” the women shouted. “Be all aggressive!”

  But they were the only ones making a sound. The crowd was staring at Tag. He was wearing the same blouse as the women, but he’d tied it into a knot at the bottom, exposing his soft belly, going for, I guess, a trailer park kind of look. The legs themselves were thicker, and thickness was the overall impression he gave. That and vanished youth.

  Was this funny? Did anyone want to see this husband and father do this? Tag, my beautiful Tag, what have you done now?