Stranger, Father, Beloved (22 page)

At that moment he saw a figure crossing the lawn toward them, a horrible blur to Michael's right. Moving like an inevitable tide, the polka-dotted dress whooshed through the night. “Alex?” she asked in their direction.

Wearily Alex responded, “I'm in here, honey.” She stood before the steps of the gazebo and eyed Michael with clear disdain but said nothing to him.

“I'll be back in a little while, honey.”

“I drove over, Nancy said you might have wandered over here . . . I didn't know where you went.”

“Sorry, honey. Go on back, and I'll join you in a while. Michael and I need to catch up.” Surprisingly, she obeyed, and, giving the dark space where Michael was standing one last look, she turned on her white heels and clipped across the grass as gracefully as she was able to with her heels sinking into the dirt.

Michael sat back down beside Alex, desperate, as their time together was drawing to a close. He felt a feverish desire, confusing for his system to process.

“Alex—”

“I know.”

Michael reached out and placed his hand on Alex's strong arm. The sensation was like stretching out on hot sand after a cool swim—perfect heat.

“We can't,” Alex said and rose. “I don't know if we ever could, but we are too old now, that's for sure.” He placed a hand on Michael's shoulder, a resigned hand, and smiled his soft smile. He was clearly very drunk, and he stumbled a bit. Then he made his way down the steps and strode across the grass away from Michael.

“Alex, can you find your way back? Do you know the way back?” Michael called out to him before he disappeared.

“I remember, Michael. I can find my way back. I'm sorry. I loved talking to you tonight. I loved talking to you . . .” he said as he disappeared around the side of the house.

Michael sat in the gazebo for more than thirty minutes. He could not bring himself to return to the party. He went inside and called Will to say he had had a wonderful time and had too much to drink, so sorry! Then he wandered out his back door with a bottle of gin, down to the old pond he and Ryan used to walk to. He sat on the sandy bank in the dark, taking swigs of gin, then took his shoes and socks off and walked barefoot and fully clothed into the lukewarm water. With the water up to his shoulders, he held the bottle to his chest possessively with the bottom half of it submerged and the bottleneck exposed to the air so he could take occasional small swigs and look around, keeping watch on the surface of the water and the brush around it.

Things could have turned out differently if Alex had never met Meg. Alex would not have gotten married, or would at least have put it off until he was settled as a professor. Yes, they would have been
poor, but poor and beloved. And they would have had each other's company for all these years as they watched the students come and go from the university together—youth entering, while they slowly aged on the beautiful campus. Michael would have published in the academic world, and Alex would have helped him edit his pieces before Michael sent them off. Perhaps they could have moved next door to each other or, if the house was large enough, have shared a house. Michael could have taken the upstairs and Alex the downstairs, and before bed they might have read together in the living room before a roaring fire. Complete peace would have been the makeup of that house.

Nancy wouldn't find him out here, and if she did, he would just sink below the surface. The little fox emerged, walked to the side of the pond, and stuck its tongue into the water, lapping up a few little gulps. It sensed him there, floating in the middle, and raised its head, looking squarely at him. Michael looked back, happy for this nonhuman company. He hoped it would stay. He tried to compel it to stay with the intensity of his gaze. The fox stared back, unable to make sense of what Michael was doing in the middle of the pond at night; this was usually his terrain for nighttime drinking. Then he quickly turned and scampered off, out of sight.

When Michael walked into his house through the back around midnight in his wet clothes, still partly drunk, he was surprised to see Ryan in the kitchen making tea, having just gotten home herself. She looked at his wet clothes and concern washed over her face.

Utterly defeated, Michael dropped his normally stern countenance and just stood there.

“Is everything okay?” Ryan looked again at his wet clothes and the mud on his knees. “Dad, I'm sorry I hit you.”

“Ryan, I'm sorry for everything. I'm so sorry for everything.”

“Is everything okay?” she asked again, her face softening.

“No, it's not, but it has nothing to do with you. You're my special girl, Ryan, you always will be.” He found he was close to tears. “I want the best for you.” Embarrassed by his sudden emotion, he quickly went up the stairs and locked himself in the guest bath for a shower.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Packed to the brim with sleepy, distracted bodies, the car headed west on Interstate 20. It passed dunes topped with dried-out weeds, and the sun flashed brilliantly, reflecting off everything—off the windows of other cars and the restaurants they passed, off the pavement, and off the ocean that glittered in stunning blasts when it appeared around a bend. Ryan and Max sat in the backseat, Ryan looking less miserable than she had in days past. Nancy and Michael had gotten her to come along only after Nancy had threatened to take away her weekly allowance if she didn't, something that would have forced her to find part-time work for spending money. She had one condition that they had granted: she wanted to bring her friend Dari along.

During the drive, Michael thought about the dinner party he had attended a week ago, and he wondered if going had been a mistake.

Alex had still been the most poised of anyone in the room, but his elegance had faded, like an old painting too long neglected. Meg had become more grotesque, a cartoonish bleached-blond nightmare. Michael had never before been so repulsed by another human being, although he had disguised it well for the sake of the party. Meg was the most unnerving, most gut-wrenchingly soul-killing woman he had ever
encountered. Recalling her jokes made him wince with pain; remembering the sound of her voice made him want to split the earth apart.

Michael pondered all of that as he drove the car to the retreat center. Whenever he recalled his questions to Alex, asked with a vulnerability that he didn't know he possessed, and remembered the responses, his stomach turned and then tightened, as if an internal fist were keeping a stranglehold on him, a grip on his spine, lest he collapse and spill all over the world. Images were hitting him in a series now: Alex's lips saying “I don't know,” Meg crossing the lawn in a blur of white and black polka dots, Alex looking like an ordinary man when placed beside Meg.

Michael had been up all night, and his hands were full-on shaking, though he was able to drive. He kept pouring more coffee down his throat and wiping the sweat from his brow. Everyone in the car kept talking, their voices disrupting his thoughts. His family was packed into the family van, and John was following in his own car. Michael had spoken little, and he could tell that every once in a while, his family members and the girl would steal a worried glance at him. Michael couldn't bring himself to utter a single word, and he drove clutching the wheel tightly.

When the car arrived at the center, the place was even more basic than Michael remembered. The pine cabin he would be sharing with his family and John had four bedrooms, but each of the rooms had only bunk beds, and he was shaken with embarrassment, for this was all his idea.

There was afternoon prayer in the Solstice Chapel, and the group made their way over to it. They sat in a pew, all in one long row, and Michael realized that there were no other families in the chapel with
them. It was the middle of the day, and it was just their family with the landscaper and Dari. Every once in a while, everyone looked at Michael, waiting. No one talked, and Ryan and Dari appeared to be smirking at each other. Ryan's little mouse of a friend hadn't said much to Michael but seemed to have become best friends with his daughter overnight.

Max leaned forward and turned to look at Michael, and his eyes looked slightly frightened. Even Nancy, ill at ease, was sitting very upright, and it was clear to Michael for the first time that everyone present thought he had lost his mind. Nancy did not seem to be enjoying herself, although she was trying for everyone else's sake, and John was especially quiet. This was supposed to be the kind of thing that would light Nancy up—she had been waiting years for something like this, or so Michael had thought. The skin on the back of his neck began to itch. When the owners of the retreat center, Joy and Bill Dover, came out and began talking only to their row, as they were the only ones present, the group bristled and stiffened under their kind gaze. Michael felt that if he did not remove himself from the room immediately, he would indeed lose his grasp on keeping the lid firmly pressed down.

“It is so good to have John back with us again. And he's found new friends. It is amazing to see such a large and beautiful family—two beautiful sisters, and the little boy and a couple here to reconnect away from the hectic world, get back to ‘the stuff of the earth,' as we like to say.” Bill held his hands together in front of his rather large belly, drawing everyone's attention to it while he spoke. He turned to his wife, who smiled and began to speak.

“Bill and I have been here for over twenty years, and we've seen a lot of families come and go. People come because at home there's always the television, there's always something to pull you away from the people you love the most. People feel weak these days, weaker and weaker
as they have too many obligations, too many movies, video games, laundry lists, school papers . . . I could go on and on. That's why my husband and I came here and started this retreat center. Our marriage was in a rough patch, and we didn't know if we were going to make it through. But we did, and we're here, and our family is the stronger for it.”

Both had on matching lime-green T-shirts and stood under the stained-glass windows in dazed serenity. Had John told these people of his troubled marriage? Had they tailored their speech to fit what they felt was a troubled dysfunctional family? Michael had no idea whether or not John had told the Dovers anything about his family's problems. He remembered his sister, Sarah's, awful grin in the photo she had sent of herself and her gaggle of children. It was a grotesque, hearty grin, one that seemed to show either transcendence of the problems of the earth or utter disregard for them and rapture for her own private world.

“Bill will read a welcome passage, adapted from the Bible, and then we'll have a period of silence.” Michael thought of Alex as he had seen him at the party; there was a lost wildness, something crucial had been rubbed away—a slow killing. The way he held a cup of coffee was different, the way he sat in a chair was different. But in their time in the gazebo, Michael had seen the hidden beauty of his character emerge, and it had taken his breath away. The moment was beautiful, but to have Meg march across and snatch it away filled Michael with anger, and to see Alex leave with Meg, once again an ordinary, uninteresting man, made their exchange in the gazebo seem to be a fantasy. Meg got to lie down with him every night in bed and hold him. What had she ever done to earn his hand? Michael wished above all wishes that he had never gone to the stupid dinner so that he could instead remember Alex as he had been in college: fresh, innocent, respectful, lanky, intense.

Every time Alex made love to his wife, she took another part of him for herself, she stole a bit of his preciousness and pulled it into her feverish vagina for her own purposes. She was the most horrible person he would ever encounter in his life—Michael knew it. And if it had been medieval times, he would have enjoyed nothing more than to kill her. But he would never be able to put an end to her. The thought that she could outlast him made him physically ill, that she might live to see him reduced to nothing but a pile of ashes would be a horrible fate. Alex was gone; it was blasphemy, and no one saw it but himself. He was the only one who had really known Alex and seen him for what he truly had been—a perfect human being, his beloved.

Through sheer force of will, Michael made it through the rest of the meeting in the church, back to the cabin, and set out his toiletries in the modest bathroom.

They went into the cafeteria for dinner. Some hippie boys working at the retreat center kitchen eyed Ryan and Dari with interest. They were probably fresh out of high school and had come here on the work exchange program that was advertised on a flyer on the board in the registration building. They might have driven down from a state like Vermont to escape drug-addicted parents and attempt to clean up their lives. Pea-green plastic tables filled the room, and the family sat on orange plastic chairs.

There was an evening bonfire and everyone went, including a new couple that had arrived shortly after Michael and his family. The three scrawny cook boys were there, and the Dovers, of course, ever present, unstoppable in their gladness. They all sat on wooden benches with wooden backs, and when Michael stretched back, he suddenly found himself very relaxed in the night air with the fire burning and
crackling before them. Joy Dover told a sad Native American story about a man who had been killed protecting his lover from the bad intentions of other men, and in her sorrow after his death, his lover had stood high up on that rock ledge—Joy pointed to the one on the mountain behind her—and she had jumped to her death. It was said that she had become an eagle that flew around the mountains and forests looking for the other eagle. The sad story quieted everyone, and a serene, introspective mood lay heavily on the group. Joy and Bill went on to sing a Native American song, and then they told stories from the Song of Solomon. Michael's eyes were closing. With his head nodding forward, he slept.

When he woke up he was alone, and the first thing he saw was the campfire, still burning before him but smaller in size. The stars filled the sky above him, and Michael found he was wrapped in a blanket. He had been lying on his side on the bench, passed out asleep. It might have been the deepest sleep of his life. He heard the hoot of an owl, and the fire crackled every few seconds. He forgot where he was, and he pulled the Native American blanket more tightly around him and dozed off again. It seemed his systems wouldn't allow him to stay awake. He actually tried to wake himself at one point and open his eyes fully, but they kept shutting. He could hear the fire, feel its heat, and hear the wind moving through the trees, the side of his face surrendered against the wooden plank, but he could not keep his eyes open.

The trees above him were tall, and they swayed gently and bowed their green tops judiciously over him, making friends with the mild wind. At one point he heard the sound of a little animal moving under the platform below him—a mouse, chipmunk, or some other ground animal. It did not startle him, and his eyes remained glued shut, listening. It seemed an enchanted forest. He felt as if he were having the sleep denied him for forty years. He was the wood. He was the
fire and wind. There weren't any dreams, only the quiet world of the deepest levels of his mind, the world of shapes and primordial sounds and movements. His bone marrow was having a “conversation” with the elements, and more essence was being negotiated.

At dawn, Alex's original young face appeared in his mind and Michael's body began groaning awake. The face was expressionless, then that smile, enough to begin the familiar twisting pain around his heart. Michael's eyes snapped open, and his body began to tense once again.

A memory emerged from somewhere deep within him. It was from that drunken night in college, when he had gone to the party, found his arms around somebody, heard laughter, awoke remembering nothing, and walked around the campus ashamed afterward for the rest of his college career and, in fact, the rest of his life. The memory was about five seconds long, but it was the key. Before he blacked out, Michael remembered, his arms had been around the strong torso of a crew boy, the captain, Skip Brenner, the great rower for the university team. Skip was over six foot three and had bright short blond hair. Skip was looking down at him with disapproval and seemed to be moving around with the parasite Michael attached to him, perhaps as part of a joke since Michael would not let go. Michael remembered enjoying the ride of clinging to this man, and then he suddenly reached up, trying to climb up Skip to reach the handsome face. His mouth made it as far as Skip's neck, and he pressed his lips firmly down. He heard noise, shouting, and he was hit hard in the face, and then blackness. He remembered nothing else until he woke up alone on the lawn the next day.

No wonder he had put such a memory out of his mind. It was the truth of a desperate man. The day after that terrible party, and all the days thereafter, Michael felt a growing dread at the thought of staying at the university to get his PhD to teach. Instead he had a desire to
get away. He began taking business classes and knew that upon graduation he would go for his graduate business degree at another school in another city. He had gone to the party in the first place because Alex had had his second date with Meg that night, and she had very quickly become his steady. It all fell into place as one gigantic debacle that had reached its tentacles across his life this far.

He had clung to Skip as a lowly barnacle clings to a ship. He had wrapped himself around the body of a man, ridiculed by all around him, exposed for the lunatic he really was. The party guests must have all laughed and pointed at Michael for a good while, until the joke got tiresome and Skip got really fed up and shook him loose. But no, Michael had come after him again, a predatory, primitive version of himself hell-bent on getting what he wanted, contact. Until he had been punched in the face and dropped onto the lawn, ultimately harmless, a nuisance no more. A man. To do that to a man! How could he have forgotten the details of that night?

He remembered being so disappointed that Alex could not accompany him to the party, as he usually did, because he had a date with Meg. Michael remembered drinking and laughing with the crew team, but he had somehow completely repressed the rest of the night, his embarrassing lack of control, his parasitic desire to be close to Skip, the tall, impressive form of a man. He did vaguely remember his sore jaw when he woke up on the lawn and ran back to his dorm, utterly ashamed before others saw him, but even then he did not know why he was so ashamed, that even then, so close to the events, the memory was gone.

His shame at recalling this memory now was so large that it silenced him, and he walked along the retreat's lake in that silence, letting the memory slip back to its dark place in his heart. He was washed out, drained of all feeling, drained of all desire. His anxiety
was on hiatus, and a sense of hopelessness took its place. He remembered the men who had stood in his father's court for conducting illicit activities in a men's bathroom on the outskirts of town. His father had dealt with them with the same even-keeled approach he gave to all his criminals, but once home, over dinner, Michael's mother had asked him how his day had gone and he had mumbled, “Faggot perverts.”