Let's Get Back to the Party, page 4
“Be well,” he says. “Stay in touch.”
With a final wave, I turn and leave. I don’t look back to see if Sean’s watching me go. What’s the use? Eyes forward, Oscar. Eyes forward.
I take the stairs down past the dull thump of music on the second floor, past a sloppy make-out session on the landing, past an equally sloppy breakup on the front stoop. Rolled up in my front pocket, Sean’s copy of Ecce Homo—my copy now—rests against my hip like some proud Tom of Finland tumor.
The cramps are back. My stomach goes through cycles of clenching, like a fist trying to produce a vein. I get up and go outside, hoping the night air will calm things down.
I’m never eating shrimp again.
Sitting in an old plastic chair, I open up Cruze and see the familiar grid: the faces, eyes, and torsos; the abdomens both firm and plump, the flash of a cotton-swaddled bulge resting against a hairy inner thigh. I think about all the early-morning assignations happening right now throughout the city, of gays at play, and feel the biting sting of envy. A. is nowhere to be found. I debate leaving him some kind of snarky message, a teachable moment for the budding young gay, but sitting here outside, several hours before dawn, it just doesn’t seem worth it.
Below me, a stretch of Fourteenth Street rises for a block before being cut off by the corner of a postwar co-op building housing the elderly and infirm. (Every morning, it seems, I leave my apartment for work and watch an ambulance outside the building give birth to a sheeted gurney.) Across the street, in clear sight from my ninth-floor perch, is an empty plot paddocked with fencing whose deep blue tarp flaps and cracks on windy nights, keeping me awake. A banner wrapping one side of the fence proclaims the promise of ultra-modern urban living. Blown-up images celebrate the projected future of the Echo with beautiful men in various states of domestic play: cooking dinner with school-age children over stainless-steel appliances; lounging on duvet covers with basset hounds in light-filled bedrooms; entertaining out-of-town family with holiday cocktails in living rooms ringed with exposed brick. One of the photoshopped revelers has a sharp part in his hair, left to right, just like Sebastian.
Sebastian.
Has it really been a decade since I last saw him? The boy I lived near as a kid, the grown man I saw for one brief evening in college. A man whose mystery is all the more palpable for the fact that he doesn’t exist on social media (I checked in the car ride back from the wedding). May as well be a ghost. Still handsome, I suppose, if a bit fleshy. Those hooded eyes, that eternally parted black hair. It comes back to me now, that hair. I remember those frequent weekend trips to the community pool, remember how, even plastered wet with pool water, that smooth, clean part would stay there. I’d often reach over to disturb it, which would make Sebastian so angry so easily. He never understood that was how I said thank you for rescuing me from the quiet monotony of life with my father, Harrison Burnham.
Should I text him? Hey, good running into you at the wedding. So my hookup never showed, but guess who I met instead?
The knot in my gut strains tighter.
Maybe later.
I get up and start pacing, hoping that the longer I move, the quieter my insides will get. I see, on the small table by my front door, the curled copy of Ecce Homo. I take the book and pore over Sean’s signature and email address as if they hold some secret knowledge. I walk from one side of my apartment to the other, holding the book like a club. I try to stop thinking about my spiteful guts and think, instead, as I always do, about men. The one I didn’t meet. The one I just met. The one I met again.
Two
A Boyhood
Sebastian
If my students could rebuild their lives every school year, surely I could, too. And to start rebuilding, you had to tear everything down. Look closely at the foundation. If the foundation wasn’t stable, the structure wouldn’t be either. Principle of architecture, from Phidias to Philip Johnson.
It would start, I decided, with my classroom. On a Sunday morning in late August, I took several large plastic tubs of books and papers and posters out to my car and drove to Mortimer Secondary School. I’d be teaching in a trailer this year. Possibly next year as well. In response to an influx of new students, renovations had started on the school two days after graduation. First would come expanded hallways, then work to replace the school’s early-Eighties exterior, a carapace of brick and concrete. It would be a facelift for the twenty-first century. Construction was starting on the western edge of the school and moving east, which meant my classroom for the last three years was one of the first to go. I and several other teachers had been unceremoniously reassigned to trailers parked like placid cows along the school’s blacktop. Siberia, we called it.
The sky that morning was cloudless, nothing to give it weight save for several distant airplanes unzipping the day with their white contrails. Two miles before the turnoff to Douglas Mortimer Road, traffic stalled. What should have been a simple, ten-minute drive became a forty-minute crawl. Idling past the scene of the accident, I saw a horse trailer, detached from a nearby truck and upside down in the small ditch that ran parallel to the road. Off in the grass, where the lawn ended in a tangle of underbrush, a giant shape lay blanketed in a blue tarp. Two women stood next to it, arms folded, crying and gesturing to a police officer. I found myself, like everyone else, stopping to stare. I thought about dogs. I thought about my mother. Then, urged by two irate honks behind me, I continued on my way to school.
My trailer, T-5, sat in the shadow of two basketball hoops. Its thin door creaked open onto a room with threadbare gray carpeting. The overhead lights did little to improve the gloom. As I walked around the space, I noticed how tender the ground underneath was, imagined at some point during the school year a student dropping thigh-deep through the floor. I put my boxes on the empty teacher’s desk (my computer was scheduled to arrive next week) and began to rearrange the scattered tables and stacked chairs so they faced me and, behind me, the whiteboard. I thought of my own school days: the dated clack of rotating slides in my own AP Art History class, a Gothic church or Botticelli fantasia sometimes appearing upside down to titters from those students still awake. Now I pulled everything up on a computer screen; a slideshow I could build and edit right from my desk. Still. I couldn’t give up the laminated exhibit posters I’d picked up at thrift stores or the paintings I’d printed on stock paper my first year of teaching, inspired by a high school teacher who’d collaged his entire classroom with writing from students who’d long since graduated (some of whom could very well have already been dead). I wondered if the thin defenses of this roughshod kingdom could handle so many prints and posters, was surprised the television suspended from the ceiling hadn’t already brought about the trailer’s collapse.
And the books. I always saved the books for last. Art books and exhibit catalogs—my own, my father’s—collected over the years from secondhand shops, from museum discount piles and library sales. Books on Renoir, Degas, Cassatt, Picasso, Hiroshige, O’Keefe, Trumbull, Turner, Monet. Special exhibits on Goya and Remington, on illuminated manuscripts, on printmaking, on the Ashcan School. Academic studies of Raphael and Gauguin, of Egyptian deities and Byzantine angels. A paperback of Vasari’s The Lives. Poems by Michelangelo, letters by Van Gogh, essays by Ruskin. Multiple editions of textbooks by Janson and Stokstad warping the straight edge of an entire shelf. These I unpacked ceremonially, one by one, to the sound of jackhammers and the beep of reversing construction vehicles from outside. I sat in my desk chair, flipping through the glossy pages, thinking back on childhood days when I used some of these very same art catalogs and monographs to explore (always in secret, always in shame) their nude male bodies in marble, in oil, in charcoal and pen. Those dumb, silly days when I was naïve enough to believe I was the only person in the world who lived with the deep dread of dreaming about other boys’ penises, lips, stomachs, buttocks. At sleepovers with friends (the small group I’d managed to cobble together after Oscar disappeared the summer before seventh grade), while other guys crept into computer rooms and waited impatiently in the dark for nude women to appear line by pixelated line, I’d long to be back home, in my bedroom, staring into the soft face of the young Joseph Mallord William Turner in his self-portrait from 1799. The enormous eyes, the dark bubble of his lower lip, the handsome Roman nose, the parted forelocks. Imagine: an entire gallery crammed like some nineteenth-century European museum with Turner’s self-portrait and countless other works curated over the years, below each an ekphrasis with which the marginally curious could piece together the boyhood of a late-twentieth-century suburban homosexual named Sebastian Allan Mote.
Watson and the Shark. John Singleton Copley. 1788. I’m on a field trip with my third-grade class to the National Gallery of Art. My mother is a chaperone, keeping up the rear behind a group of eight kids who follow the docent through the galleries. We find ourselves in front of an enormous oil painting. That doesn’t look like a shark, someone says. That’s because it was invented by Mr. Copley, the docent explains. Someone asks: Why is that man naked? I think it’s a girl, someone else says. Look at her long hair. A new kid, Oscar Burnham, asks: Did he die? No, the docent says. The young man was rescued. He lived a long, happy life. Later, during lunch on the grass outside the museum, I see the new kid sitting alone. He looks lonely, my mother says. Go over and talk to him. I take my lunch and sit next to the new kid, the two of us at a slight remove from the rest of the group. You just moved near my house, I say. I know, the new kid says. I see you playing outside from my bedroom. Come out next time, I say. The new kid just has carrots with his ham sandwich, so I share my grape fruit rollups. We spend the rest of lunch pressing small squares of dried fruit into the roofs of our mouths. We attach small strips to our tongues and pretend we’re lizard people.
Mortimer’s LGBT social group started not with me but with a fourteen-year-old boy named Thomas Pitt. On April 26, two days after Jake and I brought the first of our boxes into my father’s vacant house (when I first began to suspect bringing Jake out here was a mistake, that I wouldn’t be able to fit him into the domestic plans I had for my future), Thomas Pitt asked his World History teacher for a bathroom pass. He walked down the main hallway, past the bathroom, out the front doors, through the crowded faculty parking lot, and around the side of the building, where a small footpath cut through the tree line separating the school grounds from Lake Mortimer Road. He followed the asphalt path along the road for a quarter mile, turned right, and walked down a steep incline until the path flattened out again around a small lake ringed with townhomes. He stopped by one of the recycled plastic benches and unlaced his sneakers. He tugged off his shoes and socks, his shirt, his jeans. He typed the word GOODBYE into his phone and put it, screen-up, on the bench. He walked into the water.
The Shaft Scene. Unknown. 17,000 B.C.E. I’m ten years old, in my father’s basement with Oscar. I’m sitting in an old wingback chair, flipping through an enormous book on the history of Western art, trying to stay busy while waiting for my turn on my Game Boy. I toss the thick pages, working my way to the end of the book and back to the beginning. I think the more I concentrate, the more I absorb in my mind what’s directly in front of me, the faster time will pass until our agreed-upon, ten-minute rotation. I come across reproductions of primitive paintings on the rock walls of some old French cave. I stare at the galloping herds, trace the curve of a cow’s brown back with a finger. I turn the page and see a crude illustration of a bull knocking over what looks like a man. It reminds me of drawings on the blacktop at Cardinal Elementary: the flowers and suns and salamanders in colored chalk, the cuss words and boobs and boners in black magic marker. There’s a slash above the man’s stick-figure legs that looks like a dick. Below the image is a caption: “Photograph of Walls in the Shaft of the Dead Man at Lascaux Cave.” I look up at the back of Oscar’s head, the neck poking out from his sweater, the hair like the fuzz on my father’s tomato plants. I ask, Is it my turn yet? No, Oscar says. I haven’t died. Possessed by an uncanny, inexplicable compulsion (the same one, perhaps, that must have propelled these ancient cave people to decorate their ancient cave walls), I want to reach over and place my hand on Oscar’s neck, to touch each individual hair, to feel that secret warmth. I want to fall in Oscar’s lap and curl up, kittenlike, in those long arms. Considering how much time we spend together, how often Oscar’s at my house on weeknights and weekends, it makes a strange sort of sense to me. I’m going to piss, I say. Whatever, Oscar says. I rise from my father’s chair, then pretend to trip on the hassock. I drop the art book on the carpet and throw myself, awkwardly, onto Oscar’s back. Shit, Sebastian, he says. My game. I know I can’t stay here for long. It’s dangerous. This isn’t what two boys are supposed to do. Maybe brothers. Certainly not friends. Pushing up against Oscar’s shoulder blades, I brush my lips against the back of Oscar’s neck, feel the tickle of near-invisible hair. Oscar stiffens, then he shoves me off. Stop that, he says. Then: Weirdo. He reaches for the Game Boy and resumes playing. We spend the rest of the afternoon in silence. Oscar’s ten minutes on my Game Boy are up, but I let him keep playing, hoping my generosity will make him forget what just happened. I sit in the chair with the art book and think how stupid and strange I am. Will he tell his parents, or someone in class? Sebastian tried to kiss me. Blech. Then I think of how often Oscar tells me he doesn’t like his parents, doesn’t like the other kids at school, and I feel a little relief. Think what you like, Sebastian, but keep it to yourself. Don’t ever do that again. Looking at Oscar hunched over the Game Boy, I daydream of empty caves and echoing wind, of holding someone close by primal firelight. Then my father calls us up for dinner.
For months, apparently, someone had been slipping folded sheets of paper into the metal gills of Thomas Pitt’s locker. Typed notes. Crude illustrations. It could have been anyone. It could have been everyone. The school closed for a day. There were emergency meetings with faculty and staff, with district administrators and grief counselors, that extended into the weekend. While Jake spent the following Saturday and Sunday in D.C. with his friends, I spent those days in little theaters and conference rooms and administrative offices. Statements were prepared and shared with students and parents. Ideas were thrown out for a memorial fund, for a mathematics scholarship in Thomas’s memory. Someone suggested a club for LGBT students, to keep them connected, to keep them safe. Principal Jones sat down with some of us, asked if anyone was interested in sponsoring the group. The other teachers stared into the middle distance. I looked at each of them in turn. I thought of Thomas Pitt floating like driftwood in his underwear. I thought about myself after college, on a family cruise and contemplating the possibility of my own death by water. I thought about how a group like this might have changed my youth, made me stronger, made me more confident, made a little more bearable the bloodless violence of my high school hallways. I raised my hand. I’ll do it, I said. I came home that evening and told Jake about my day. I told him this could be my great moment of activism. Leaving the city, joining the massive human herd—this was the true front line of the struggle. This was where rainbow flags could still be a political statement, not just a decoration. This is where, maybe, I could make a difference. Then a dangerous sentence: It might be good practice for raising our own kids one day. Jake scoffed, propped his feet on an unopened box, went back to his phone.
Portrait of Henry VIII. Hans Holbein the Younger. 1536–1537. It’s one of the rare nights I’m at Oscar’s house. The family eats dinner with the television on. Oscar’s father, full-figured, lordly, sits at the head of the glass table through which I can see our pairs of crossed legs. Pass those potatoes, Oscar’s father says in his tyrannical voice. The roast bleeds on its platter. Oscar swings his feet and eats in silence. Upstairs in his small bedroom or out in his side yard, we can’t stop talking. We reflect, in excruciating detail, on the smell of Nick’s retainer every time he takes it out of his mouth in class. We debate whether the metal in Wolverine’s claws is pronounced “adamantium” or “anatidium.” We recite bawdy lines and reenact bawdy scenes from Ren and Stimpy episodes. We create a new lexicon of sounds with our action figures: badapang, screesh, schmoof. We take bets on which of my mother’s dogs is going to die first. We imagine what we’d do to Michael’s face with our fists if we could get away with it. At the Burnham dinner table, however, we’re always silent. I hate these meals. I wish Oscar and I could take our plates and eat somewhere else. Sometimes, seeing him around his parents, he reminds me of one of my mother’s blind dogs, disoriented in a potentially dangerous environment. It’s okay, Oscar, I think. I’m your friend. I’ll take care of you. With every bite of red meat, every sip of soda, I look up at Oscar’s father, watch the brute’s powerful jaw muscles masticate under a heavy beard, watch the kitchen light bounce off his forehead. A baby’s forehead, I think. On the evening news, a reporter interviews a man about palliative care for AIDS patients. Faggots, Oscar’s father says. He shakes his head. It’ll be another five years before I begin to associate that word with myself, or rather with someone inside myself, living in my skin and operating my brain and body. Oscar’s mother looks up from her dinner. Harry, she says. Please. I look over at Oscar, see him shrink in his seat.
The student body quickly adapted to the loss of one of its own, like a school of fish instinctively filling in the gap left behind by a lost comrade and pushing onward in glittery revolutions through the sea. A tiny death soon forgotten, even by the queer students who continued to walk the halls of Mortimer, many of whom arrived in seventh grade with their sexualities already discovered, who were taking same-sex dates to homecoming dances, to proms. Who were living the adolescent life I never did, a life without shame. Nevertheless, I threw myself into the work. I adapted the idea from the same social group I’d joined my final year at Jefferson, from similar initiatives in neighboring, more forward-thinking school districts. (It didn’t surprise me that Mortimer was behind the times. The school was named for a Confederate general, and most of us on staff figured it was just a matter of time before the name had to go.) There would be posters put up during the opening week of school with the slogan I’d devised: we help each other here. There would be email blasts to parents and teachers. There would be elections for a president, a secretary, an entire micro-bureaucracy. As uncertain as I was about the plan, the project kept me busy through July. It kept my mind off Jake. The legacy of a failed three-year relationship replaced by the legacy of a fourteen-year-old’s suicide. And here I was, having never even planned to become a high school teacher. I’d studied art history because I’d been taught by my mother—the lapsed Muslim, the guardian of elderly canines—that there was no shame in obsessing over something you loved. I graduated from Jefferson with a double major in art history and English literature, then (because what other real choice did I have if I wanted to make a living?) took an additional year for an accreditation in education. I moved up to D.C. and taught English at charter schools for the next six years while working some evenings and weekends at an independent bookstore in upper Northwest. It was there I met Jake. He’d come in and asked for my help. I just joined a gay book club, he said. I’m looking for A Boyhood by Sean Stokes. Staring intently into my eyes. I can help you, I said. Together, we scoured the Literature section, then the Gay and Lesbian section, until we finally found the book on the discount tables in the back. I remember the cover: a sepia-toned photograph of a young boy who couldn’t have been more than fifteen, crouched in the grass of some flat Midwestern lawn in imitation of a football player preparing to charge. There, against the parti-colored rows of books, Jake goaded me into more conversation. No, I said, I’d never read the book or anything else by Sean Stokes. I hadn’t done much dating in recent years, so I was particularly baffled. People still met this way? In bookstores, searching for books? Ringing up Jake’s purchase, I agreed to meet him in an hour for coffee downstairs. A week later, we were spending nights at one another’s apartment. Several months after that, I followed up on a colleague’s email about a job posting fifty miles south of the city. A school district was looking for an English teacher who would also be required to take on a unit of AP Art History. It felt fated. A month before the start of the school year, I got the job. Two years later, exhausted by my commute, ready for something different, I finally convinced Jake to move out to Virginia with me.
