Let's Get Back to the Party, page 7
“No,” I say.
Sebastian
The names were always the hardest part. Three weeks into the school year and I still didn’t have them down. Confused Stephanie with Jasmine. Steven with Steve. AP Art History Cath with Honors English Kathy. I scrolled through the online student database during lunch, trying to memorize the plain names, the strange names, the trendy names, the foreign names. The unfortunate names, like Andrew Buzzard, a scavenger of a boy already growing bald, staring off into space instead of at the gaunt Rublev Christ looking down on our class in judgment from the smartboard.
One name I had no trouble remembering. Arthur Ayer. Seventeen years old. AP Art History, seventh period. The runt of the classroom litter, a transplant from the Philadelphia suburbs thanks to his father’s new government job, finishing his final year of high school at Mortimer. Short, strange, self-assured, with purple streaks in his brown hair and a messenger bag freckled with pins and patches. A smiley face. A Spartan helmet. A half-eaten hotdog. A rainbow flag.
It felt good to begin the steady rhythm of another school year. My English classes started with vocabulary lessons, with short stories by Hawthorne and Poe. Fridays were devoted to thirty minutes of sustained silent reading, during which students would read at their desks or on the floor from their own books. (No tablets or smartphones, I insisted. Physical books. I told them I wanted to hear the pages turning, I wanted to smell them in the air.) I took the time to read as well, wanting the students to follow my example. Periodically, I’d look up from my biographical study of Caravaggio to make sure the class was using its time wisely. As for my AP Art History unit (forty-five minutes on Mondays, ninety minutes on Wednesdays and Fridays), I considered it sacrosanct. It never got old or boring, the chronological progression from primitive cave art to the chaos of people like Malevich and De Kooning, whose disregard for form and order and meaning made my head hurt. Our class had to keep pace with other classes in the county, in the state, in the country, so we covered at least twenty different works of art each period. An entire history of human expression, distilled in time for the AP exam in late April.
On the last Wednesday in September, our LGBT group met for the first time. I’d dismissed my class for the afternoon and was checking email, thinking no one would show. Then I looked up, saw Arthur still sitting at his desk, phone out. Everything okay, Arthur? Fine, Mr. Mote. Just waiting for the group to start. It is here, right? It is, I said. Welcome. I went over to Arthur and, for no reason, shook his tiny, hot hand. I asked how he was getting along, if he was adjusting to the pace of things here. Oh sure, he said. Not that different from Philly. Over the next few minutes, several other students arrived. I heard them clomping up the outdoor steps, felt the trailer shake with their arrival. It was Arthur who stepped in, who got up to greet the other students, to assure them they were in the right space. There were six of them that first afternoon, Arthur the only senior. All we did was sit and talk. I laid the ground rules for the group, emphasized the safety of these walls, reminded them that, first and foremost, we helped each other here. I told them about my summer, they told me about theirs. Arthur threw ideas out for social media pages, for a charter, for a bake sale. I watched him move effortlessly among the students, listened to him talk as if he’d been at this school his entire life. The uncanny confidence he took in his own body, his own identity, only heightened the awkwardness of the other kids in the room. It brought into relief my own high school days, an adolescence spent hovering below the surface of the social waters, too quiet to be popular—or to be bullied. Of course, I didn’t need peers to bully me at that age. I had myself: a bully I couldn’t escape; a bully I slept with, showered with, ate meals with. A bully who was less a person and more a heavy wool blanket, thick and itchy, suppressing feelings I wanted to feel but also keeping them safe from daylight. Watching Arthur move about the room, watching the others gravitate toward him, I felt a profound sense of loss for my own boyhood. To have been out, to have been comfortable with myself as a teenager, to have talked freely about my identity. God, how that would have changed things! How much more powerful, how much less brooding, I could have been! How much more proud! Only after the meeting ended, as I watched Arthur at the head of the group leaving my trailer, did I realize no one said anything about Thomas Pitt.
A few weeks later, Dani joined me on one of my regular after-school walks around Lake Mortimer. At one point, she turned to me and, wind whipping her black hair in my face, asked if I was ready to start dating again. I asked her if she knew anything about Arthur Ayer. Had him for geometry for a week, she said. Then he transferred up to trig. He’s pretty astute. Scholarly. He’s going to go places. He’s been coming to our LGBT group meetings, I said. Pretty much taking it over from me. I just sit there now and listen to him lead. I laughed to make it seem like this didn’t bother me at all, like it had been my idea from the start. For several minutes, Dani and I played soccer with a pinecone. He’s just so comfortable with it, I said. With what? Himself. I mean, he practically advertises it on his messenger bag. Can you imagine seeing someone when we were in high school, walking around with pink triangles and rainbow flags and interlocked male symbols? Can you imagine what people would have done to a kid like that? What they still could do, Dani said, nodding toward the water. We made another lap around the lake in silence. Also, I said, he looks so familiar to me for some reason. But he’s new this year, Dani said. I know, I said. Isn’t that strange. Well, Dani said, I’m just glad you’ve found someone to connect with out there in Siberia.
The following Friday, during an afternoon of silent reading in my last English period of the day, my phone clucked with an incoming text. Several students looked up, disturbed from already dwindling levels of concentration. I forbade them from using their phones after class began, kept a drawer in my desk for such infractions. In the drawer, Mr. Mote, Alexander said. (Yes. Alexander. Not to be confused with Andy, that other steer of a boy.) Right, I said. In it goes. I put down my Caravaggio biography and moved to open the drawer. I looked at the screen. It was Oscar Burnham. Sebastian, SO SORRY for the slow response. Been SUPER busy. Let me know when you plan on coming to the city again. This in response to a voicemail I’d left over a month ago. But I had no reason to be surprised. I thought of all the times in our childhood he’d been late: coming in from recess, arriving for sleepovers at my house, on tests, showing up to games of flashlight tag. Back then I’d always given him the benefit of the doubt, however reluctantly. I had inklings the chronic tardiness had some connection with his home life. But Oscar was a grown man. What was his excuse now? Busy like everyone in D.C. was, with their swollen social lives, their double- and triple-booked evenings that staved off the terror of being alone. Forget you, Oscar. I dropped my phone in the drawer, slammed it shut. The students looked up at me, perplexed. See, I said to them with a grin, even I have to follow the rules.
I spent the second Saturday in October, sharp with chill, working in my father’s backyard as best I could while negotiating with the looseness in my right shoulder. When he’d left, he’d given me permission to fix up anything I thought needed fixing. It was a mess of a house, one he’d purchased simply because he needed somewhere to live after my mother’s death and couldn’t stand being in our old home. Do whatever, he told me. It could use something different. So far, all I’d done was tear up the obnoxious shrubs on either side of the front door and hire someone to cut down a large pine on the left side of the driveway, opening the front yard to more eastern light. As for the interior, I wasn’t sure where to begin. Or even if I should. Jake and I had discussed redoing the living room in vibrant colors, something to add life to the off-white walls of what Jake called, with a malice I’d only caught on to after he’d left, a scholar’s bachelor pad. I was content to keep my renovations outside for now, while the weather was still cooperative. My plan that day included mowing the lawn and mulching the flower beds around the front stoop and back deck. Wearing my father’s sweatpants stained with grass and motor oil, I attacked the first of the six bags of mulch lying on the driveway like beached seals, disemboweling them with a shovel, thinking again of Oscar’s indifference to my offer of connecting. I tossed handfuls of mulch around squares of lamb’s ear, thinking what a fool I was to have even called in the first place. You just can’t let go, can you, Sebastian?
At the after-school meeting last week, Arthur had told the others (apropos of what, I couldn’t say) that he’d been out since he was a toddler. Probably, even, while still in utero. My mom said she’d always wanted a gay son, he told us. She had gay friends growing up. She named me after one of them who died. She says she knew I was gay before I did. There was this boy in my class I had a crush on. I said I wanted to marry him one day. My mom said, Maybe you will. The story still stung. How easy Arthur made it seem. A simple, unexceptional declaration.
And me? In the weeks after my mother died, hiding in back-corner study carrels during the day, I’d think of how desperately she’d wanted to go on a cross-country drive, all three of us. For as long as I could remember, she struggled to convince my father and me what fun it would be; my father, who despised long drives and depressing roadside motels, and me, who despised any sort of disruption in the normal order of my summer days. Her strange longing for several weeks on the road, for roundabout visits to places she’d hear about on television or read about in the Post, were something of a running family joke. I want to visit that old house in Winchester shaped like a hiking boot, she’d say. (Probably smells like toe jam, my father said.) I want to try the pancake challenge at that diner in Denver, how many could you eat, Sebastian? (I don’t know, I said. Five?) I want to see bear cubs crossing a trail in the Smoky Mountains. (Sara, they’ll eat you alive, my father said while burrowing his beard into her forearm.) I want to stop halfway and camp in a tent for a couple nights, wouldn’t that be fun, Malcolm? (My father hated camping. So did I.) She’d whine, she’d plead—but always with a smile. She’d act like it wasn’t a big deal, but after she died I started to think maybe it had been. Sometimes, she’d tell us on the way to work or to run errands that she’d decided to take herself on the drive, asked my father if he would be fine eating two weeks of frozen dinners, asked me where I’d like a postcard sent from. But she never did it. She always came back to her dogs. She always came back to us. Until she didn’t. Then I’d start to dream of her body, not neatly arranged inside its coffin but cracked and mangled and flung halfway out the driver’s-side door. I’d lie awake at night and think, That could have been me. One day, it will be me. Several months after the funeral, I drove home to see how my father was doing. I’m thinking about moving, he said. Someplace a little farther out, a little smaller, a little quieter. It hurts to be here by myself, you know? We spent breakfast trying not to acknowledge the empty chair at the kitchen table. Then I blurted out that tortured two-word sentence. My father looked up at me. You know, he said through a mouthful of toast, if you were in your mother’s village and you’d just told that to her father, he’d have taken you into the backyard and slaughtered you like a lamb. It took a moment to realize this was a joke, my father’s way of saying whatever, he understood, it was fine, it wasn’t his place to tell me otherwise. Or maybe he just felt he’d already lost his wife and couldn’t bear to lose his son, too. We shared a quiet laugh, but I went to sleep that night thinking not of my mother’s body but of my own, of the knife at my throat, the catch of serrated steel on my esophagus, my open neck pulled back by hands I’d never seen to let my dirty blood drain into the earth.
He’s an Arab, Dani said. Yemeni. God, I told myself I never would and here I am, falling for a member of my own tribe. Fifth date, tomorrow afternoon. Sorry you’re not the only Arab in my life anymore, Sebastian. The remains of the meal I’d cooked for us—a crockpot beef stew, a haphazard salad, baguettes, a store-bought apple tart—sat on the counter. We were on my father’s couch, halfway through the second of the two bottles of red Dani had brought over. You always say that, I said. I’m just half-Arab. If that. And I meant it. Aside from my skin, my hair, what claims could I make to that community? My mother had wanted nothing to do with those old ways. She’d refused to teach me Arabic, refused to give me a name that suggested my heritage. Sebastian Allan Mote. What kind of Arab was that? I’d dated several men in the past who, intrigued by my exotic looks, ended up disappointed by how unexotic I really was. I’d been scrubbed, deliberately, of all that. My mother wanted me to be anonymous, to belong to no group or tribe. I’d like to meet him someday, I said. Maybe he can teach me how to be a better Arab. Hey, Dani said, fiddling with the stem of her wine glass. Emma told me she tried to set you up with a cousin of hers in Reston. Anything come of that? I thought of an email address to which I hadn’t written, a phone number I hadn’t texted. I shook my head, took a guilty gulp of wine. Surely you get lonely here, Dani said. In your dad’s house, spending all your time moping. I told Dani I wasn’t moping anymore, that things weren’t as bleak as they’d been earlier this summer, that I’d been thinking less and less about Jake. (I didn’t say I’d been thinking more and more about Arthur Ayer.) I’m trying to rebuild myself, I said. It’s going to take time. I just think meeting people, just to meet them, would do you good, Dani said. Restorative, you know? I have my students, I said. Dani reached a hand across the sofa as if mine were there instead of in my lap. That’s not the same, she said.
Another school week. Vocabulary lessons. The development of perspective. Act one of Hamlet. Emails, meetings. Another Monday, Wednesday, and Friday with Arthur, wondering where I’d seen him before, who he reminded me of. Another week of watching him live a boyhood I didn’t. Interim grades, a fall pep rally. Roman copies of Greek sculptures.
Statue of a Bearded Hercules. Unknown. 68–98 C.E. The first butt I feel other than my own is made of stone. I’m six years old, following my parents through the cavernous belly of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The vast space, the way it carries voices, makes me uneasy. We wander among Greek and Roman statues and sarcophagi. I think: All these statues are broken. Why doesn’t someone fix them? Still, I’m captivated by the pale, cold flesh on display: the smooth muscles and powerful poses, the stubby penises with their testicles like figs. My mother draws my attention to a tall, imposing man whose head is being swallowed by a lion. That’s Hercules, she says. He was an ancient hero. He killed that lion and is wearing its skin. See the paws. I stand and look with her. Then she moves on to follow my father toward a giant stone column (also broken). I walk around the statue of the ancient hero, embarrassed and entranced by marble buttocks as big as my head. I see a huge dimple in the left one, as if someone had punched it. Without another thought, I step onto the small dais where the man of marble stands and, stretching on my toes, place a hand against the concavity. I feel a shock of cold, then a growing warmth. (Whether it’s my hand or the statue that’s warming, I can’t decide.) The museum guard barks. My father hisses. Sebastian, my mother cries, rushing over and pulling me away from the statue. No touching! Never touch! Later that night, back in our hotel, my parents already lost to sleep, I think about the marble statue of Hercules in the dark and quiet of the museum, stuck in his eternal stance, grateful for a brief moment of contact with a human hand not wielding a chisel.
I couldn’t sleep, so I closed my Caravaggio biography and went out onto the back porch. I sat at the top of the stairs leading down to the lawn, beyond which stood a modest screen of slowly reddening trees. Was my sleep anxiety returning? As a child, I’d had a terror of closing my eyes at night. I’d lie in bed, staring at the ceiling, listening to the occasional car pass by or one of the dogs padding around downstairs. I’d get up, creep down to the kitchen, and stare out the window above the sink at the backs of the other houses in the neighborhood, finding comfort in whatever lights were still on, in the belief that someone else out there in the black night was awake with me. Every time Oscar came over to spend the night, he’d be the first to fall asleep, and I’d sit up on the couch and watch him, curled into a ball in his sleeping bag (which was really mine), breathing deeply, once in a while smacking his lips as if tasting something delicious in his dreams, more comfortable and calm than I’d ever seen him during the day. For a while after he moved away, I’d think of Oscar in a strange new bedroom in Ohio, sleeping just as soundly as he did here, and imagine shaking him awake and screaming for him to call or write. Now, as I sat outside an entirely different house looking upon an entirely different landscape, devoid of lights, it occurred to me that maybe all those neighbors had been asleep the whole time. Maybe they’d just forgotten to turn the lights off before bed, or left them on for security’s sake. Maybe there had been no one there to give me comfort after all. Was it the people awake who mattered, or the lights? The reality of companionship, or the illusion of it?
Halfway to the sun-splashed kitchen, thinking about what needed to be done today (the grading, the lesson planning, the laundry), I realized it. Arthur. Where I’d seen him before. Not a face from last year or the year before. A face from centuries past. The random synaptic connection propelled me back into the bedroom, to the paperback biography of Caravaggio in the nightstand drawer. I sat on the edge of the bed and flipped through the glossy pages of major paintings. The saints, cupids, and martyrs. Where was it? The fortune-tellers, the giant slayers, the boys with baskets of fruit. Then I found it. Arthur Ayer, rendered in oils, staring at me from over the shoulders of a young man tuning a lute. The same half-circle eyebrows, the same thick head of brown hair (without its purple streaks), the same full lips, half-open as if prepared to interject, the same round face, the same small nose. Chin and cheeks lightly bearded with shadow. Looking at me as if I’d just yelled his name.
On Monday, before first period, I added a printout of Caravaggio’s The Musicians to the gallery wall I’d created along one side of my trailer. When Arthur came to class that afternoon, I looked up. Yes. I was absolutely right. It was the same face and, were the body not obscured by the lute player and the male soprano, it would undoubtedly be the same body. The short legs, the small paunch of someone who spent his afternoons and evenings hunched over books instead of sprinting across sports fields. Hi, Mr. Mote, Arthur said. He dropped his messenger bag into the wire basket under his chair, stretched his legs. I saw gravel caught in the treads of his white sneakers. I was about to ask him how his weekend went, but he’d already pulled out his phone.
