LITMIR.BIZ

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window and shouted, “Lou!”

      We heard the voices of the French Canadians, mocking. “Lou!” they called, and hooted. “Lou!”

      From somewhere out of the circumstances of that night came a plan, the suggestion that from now on when I came I should bring a friend. And there was no friend to bring but one.

      I would like to say that there was nothing devious in my inviting Andrew, though of course there was, it wasn’t accidental at all. I convinced myself that my father had made a mistake. Why shouldn’t the adult world be capable of gross self-deception? He had believed that a life spent in a room with Bob Painter could somehow sustain him. The house, my mother, me: it had all been too much, and he’d run away. But he’d been wrong, anyone could see that now. If the voice of a woman on the street was enough to call him back, if all he needed was a nudge everyone else was too cowardly to make, I thought there were ways that I might help things along.

      At first it seemed to work, too. My father’s initial sight of Andrew caused his mouth to close in on itself, his lips to thin with uncertainty. We had had to get off the bus to go to Andrew’s house to fetch him that first Friday night. From there it was an easy enough walk to the rooming house. Andrew was waiting for us on the front steps of his house, holding a large shoe box on his lap. He did not want to have his mother take any part in this, I knew that about him, knew how he came at things sideways, crab-walked through life so as not to seem committed to anything, while all the while settled and certain about selected things in a way that made me envious. When I had invited him to spend the weekend with my father and me, he’d sifted the invitation through some recessed part of his brain, taken a long time answering. I had almost given up when I heard the words “I suppose” come out of him.

      Now he came toward us, his loping, sidelong walk that was—I had learned from other boys to form the words, though they applied only to Andrew, never to my father—a faggot’s walk. My father saw, and I watched my father seeing, which is why it is stupid and dishonest for me to say I didn’t know what I was doing.

      Nor did Andrew finally escape his mother. She came out after we had started off. Andrew turned around, as if expecting this from her, and I did, too. She had come out to get a look at my father. She called to him. “Thank you for doing this!”

      And my father shouted: “No problem!”

      She said, “I hope he’s no trouble.”

      “I’m sure he won’t be. We’ll have him back tomorrow.”

      “Your father lives where?” she had asked me, when Andrew had first presented the invitation to her. The arrangement, the course of my weekends, had fascinated her. But now they stood waving to one another, like any suburban parents, as if beyond the waving and the calling out of questions, they each connected to lives so ordinary and conventional as not to bear pondering.

      Bob and my father both immediately knew Andrew. Their eyes went directly to the long and girlish swoop of his hair, his odd walk, and also to the fact that his eyes did not meet theirs when he reached his hand out to shake. There was a subtle kind of recognition in all this. Chastened by the events of the night when he’d taken a ride home from Wellsie, Bob made sure now he took the regular ride, the one from Ed Kennedy, so he was waiting for us in the room when Andrew Weston arrived. Things seemed to be settling dangerously, between my father and Bob, into a more conventional domestic routine.

      Bob still drank, of course. When we got to the room, there was a line of empty Schlitz cans on the table, and my father eyed them, silently counting.

      “Well,” Bob said, at his first sight of Andrew. Then he glanced at me as if there was something he did not understand, something he was mad at me for. And then something, oddly enough, that he pitied me for.

      That night it was Birdman of Alcatraz at the Embassy. First, though, was the diner, the awkward series of questions that Andrew deflected with the same swift expertness with which he dressed after gym. None of us was ever to see Andrew’s naked skin again after the incident with the hard-on (he had been excused from having to shower, allowed into the locker room to change ten minutes before the rest of us), and my father and Bob were not to see any of Andrew either: he seemed to dodge through the empty spaces of the meal like a man dodging rain. I was not helpful. I volunteered only that we had worked together on a school project, a project about Athens. For Bob, this was an opening. “Oh, Athens,” he said. “My daughter Maureen would be able to give you an interesting discussion about that. She’s a smart one, too.”

      I caught my father staring at me across the table more than once that night, with a kind of grimness riding just in back of his eyes, as if the notion of my becoming like Andrew Weston—or like him—was more than he could bear.

      “Did you bring your glove?” he asked me, with quiet seriousness.

      “What?”

      “For a catch.”

      “No.”

      He stared at me a moment, not unkindly, but allusive in a way he could be. “I told you to bring it. Remember?”

      I ate my meat loaf.

      “Do you play? Andrew?”

      “Hmm?”

      “Ball?”

      “Oh. No.”

      We must have driven him crazy.

      I had seen sometimes, in brief moments, how vested my father had been in my perfection, how even something so small as my ability to play ball well had been enough once to rip all the leave-taking energy out of him. Somehow he’d expected, no matter what he’d done, that certain things in me would stay the same. So I knew, or sensed, that the way to get back at him was to fall from perfection, to fall as far as I could.

      At the end of the meal, when my father was in the men’s room and Bob Painter had stepped outside, to stand on the curb with a toothpick in his mouth, Andrew and I had a moment, the two of us at loose ends within the diner. My father had handed me a bunch of change to leave on the table for a tip, and after I’d done that, I stared down the line of booths at Andrew. He was waiting at the door, looking at me as though he was trying to probe—it had become habitual by now—who I might be. It wasn’t the sort of moment that I expected or wanted very much. It made things between us briefly, uncomfortably real. I wanted to make a joke then, to remind him of the things we liked to laugh about in his room—diarrhea, pustules—but I knew that wouldn’t work right here and now. Andrew had a way of shrugging with his eyes, and that was what he did then. But I had a moment of believing it was all wrong, that I had stepped into something I wasn’t going to get away from unscathed. Andrew was storing things up in a way I could only guess at.

      Nor did the evening turn jolly after that. During Birdman of Alcatraz, Bob Painter kept falling asleep, and snoring. My father would nudge him, and Bob, awakened, would watch the movie as though it pained him, somehow, to try to comprehend the life of Robert Stroud, the convicted killer, who remained, for the movie’s nearly three hours, unredeemed, and unrelieved of the burden of loneliness. Even his birds were taken away from him, midway through, and all that was left was the sweaty faces of the other prisoners and the guards, and the white sunless air of the cells. Under the lights of Main Street, afterward, and on the bus returning to the rooming house, we seemed not to be able to shake the movie’s unsettling truth, that it was possible, unlike Uncle John and perhaps even my father and Bob believed, that life didn’t finally yield toward goodness and forgiveness and the triumph of the human spirit, but, instead, might very well end as it had for Burt Lancaster, in the transference of the human body from one solitude to another.

      I caught a certain look that night between Bob and my father. They were sitting on opposite sides of the bus, my father and Andrew on one side, me next to Bob on the other. Both men seemed thoughtful, and both were, for a moment, idly staring into space. Then Bob looked up and gazed into my father’s face with a look I was growing used to, a look of longing and helplessness, eloquent and deeply private at once. My father returned Bob’s look. I cannot say exactly what his face did, but ice

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