chapter ten: SEX conclusion
“No,” Sully said. “I don’t. I’m gay, and you’re gay—”
“Don’t say that,” Chris was flustered. “It’s... Look, I’m going to college in a few months, and you’re going to be a senior and we have to move on. I’ve been hearing that a lot of people fall into this at this time of life. You have to understand that—”
“You’re nuts.”
‘No, I’m not.”
“I love you.”
“Not really,” Chris tried to explain.
“Yes,” Sully said. “Really. I love you.”
“Don’t say that.”
“I love you.”
“Don’t tell me you love me.”
“I love you.”
And then, just like that, Chris punched Sully in the jaw. He did it so hard, Sully’s jaw was numb, and he stood there, his jaw ringing with the numbness while Chris said, “You don’t understand. You don’t believe in God. You don’t care about stuff like that. It’s different for me. I know what’s right and what’s wrong.
He added while Sully rubbed his cheek, “I don’t think... I don’t think we can be friends. I wanted us to be just friends, but ... I don’t think it’s a possibility anymore. I think you should leave.”
Sullivan Reardon just stood there, his jaw still aching.
And then Chris’s hands were on him, in his chest, pushing him toward the door, turning him around telling him, “You gotta go, Sully. You gotta get out. You gotta go.”
And just like that the door was locking behind Sully and he was outside, as if he’d never come in.
He almost wasn’t sure if it had actually happened, but then his jaw still hurt, and his eyes ached, so he knew that it had.
“NO, THAT’S WHAT WE’RE NOT WATCHING,” Balliol said when they were all in his room.
“I thought you said we were watching ‘Guess Who?’” Tommy accused.
“We are watching,” Balliol picked up the DVD, “ ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?’ a classic with the master Sidney Portier and the great Katherine Hepburn as well as Spencer Tracy that hits head on controversial issues of the its day.”
“ ‘Guess Who,’ ” Mason said reaching over Addison for a cigarette, “is a stupid ass comedy with Bernie Mac and that gays ass Ashton Kutcher about a Black girl who brings home a white dude, a situation that by now has been done so many times we shouldn’t even bat an eyelash at it.”
“You know what I’m tired of?” Addison said.
“People talking through the movie?” Balliol said as he hit the pause button.
“Ha ha,” Addison said. “What I’m tired of is movies and TV shows where all the issues people talk about are things that haven’t been issues for forty years. Oooh a Black girl marries a white guy! Wackiness ensues. Whatever happened to looking at real stuff? I mean, we have a lot of real issues and no one ever does movies about them. Who writes books about...?”
“Saint Vitus getting shot up,” said Tommy.
“Yeah,” said Addison. “Or...How I’m white and my family has a little money but... I don’t feel rich. Because we’re not really rich, cause everything we have is bought on credit cards and I don’t know where I’ll go for college. It’s like the real America isn’t anything like the America we live in. I keep on hearing about this all powerful white guy,” Addison said. “And I’ve never met him.”
The phone rang, and Balliol got up and said, “Hello? Yeah... Yeah, come on over. You want one of us to come and get you?”
“Who is it?” Mason mouthed.
“I’ll go,” Tommy hopped off the bed before even finding out who it was.
“Are you okay? You sound...” Balliol went on. At last he said, “All right. We’ll be there in a moment.”
“Who is it?” Tommy said, swinging his keys around a finger.
“Sully,” Balliol said. “He sounds kind of low. We better get him.”
“It’ll be you and me,” Tommy said. “Mason and Addison can’t get in too. He lives on Jury, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Let’s go,” Tommy said.
“We’ll make the popcorn,” Addison said.
Mason added, “If we can find the kitchen.”
As soon as Tommy’s truck pulled up to the little colonial on Jury, the light in Sully’s room went out, and a few seconds later he was coming down the walk.
“Thanks, Tommy,” he said as soon as he slid in. “I didn’t mean to be an imposition.”
Tommy turned off the radio station.
“You’re not,” Tommy said, smiling.
“I always am,” Sully said as the truck went down the street. “You can turn the radio back on.”
“It’s nothing important.”
“It was his Christian radio station,” Balliol explained.
“Oh,” Sully said cautiously.
“Like I said,” Tommy said, picking up on his tone. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It’s just,” Sully explained, “I don’t know how I feel about God. Not to offend. You’re good,” Sully told him. “But I’m pretty sure I’m not—”
“You shouldn’t say that,” Tommy said.
“And,” Sully continued, “some people... when they get God, they turn really mean. They...” Sully’s voice clipped off and then he said, “They do things.”
Balliol turned to him, his eyebrows raised. He touched Sully’s hand.
Sully shook his head and smiled.
“Well, those people are wrong,” Tommy said, stopping at the red light. “Christians aren’t supposed to hurt people. They’re supposed to love them.”
“What if the love isn’t like... People tell you love is supposed to be?” Sully said. “What if the love is wrong?”
Tommy, who was paying attention to the road and couldn’t spare a glance to Sully, looked grave and shook his head. “Love is never wrong. Not when... it just wants to give. Not when... Love is never wrong. People are afraid of love,” he said. “And that’s what’s wrong. And anyone who makes you think you’re bad, Sully,” Tommy added, he felt the need to add it because obviously something bad had happened to the other boy, “They’re wrong, because you’re a really good person.”
She pretty much ceased believing in God the day of her First Communion. All that preparation, the classes, the wedding gown, even the day Father Blitzer brought in the unconsecrated host so that the kids could taste it and find out what the Communion really was. And then, on her first Communion, despite all the pomp and the circumstance it had been the same wafer as tasteless consecrated as it was unblessed, the wine, which was bitter, which she generally rejected. Nothing amazing had happened. It was a lot of ado about a very little.
After that she never believed anything she was told in Catholic school. All the preparation for Confirmation seemed more hype than anything and it was. Nothing happened then either.
Now imagine if next time she took Communion, Jesus Christ Himself had shown up blazing on the altar, long after she’d ceased to believe in him.
That was how it was now, a little. Or maybe a lot.
That was how it was because, see, sex was another one of those things that had promised untold delights. She’d doubted it and her initial experience had confirmed her doubt. And then everything had been so botched up. After the steel she’d let inside of her in late December tore at her insides she’d closed up completely.
This has happened by accident. It had happened the day of the shoot out in a rush, quickly, because she had been at Saint Vitus where he went to school, and he had taken her home and then it had happened. It had been all a surprise. The lazy fumblings, the casual taking down of the guard from a fortress she didn’t much care to protect anymore. One thing leading to another. She didn’t care. She couldn’t care anymore about anything. Only, he had to use a condom. He had to. Only one time not using it and she could be back through that whole mess again. She couldn’t go through that again.
She cried out. From him? Or from the memory? When she let him inside he touched her in that place no one else had reached. The inside of her was a deep, terrible place scarred with every single wound life had given her, and the tip of his dick touched them all and lit them up, caused her pain and made her walls water with life, sent her shuddering, sent her pulling him in, making him swell. Her legs pulled him down, her hands made for his back and then his shoulders, his face. It was a pretty face almost like a girl’s face. He was completely naked. His hair, his beautiful, lovely hair. Gold brown, good God. Shit, fuck, goddamn, goddamn. She put her hands to Seth’s face.
The noise he made when he came, when his backbone arched and he twisted out of her it was like sobbing, like singing. He was this angel. He pulled the condom off and then, heaving, he lay beside her.
He was the first to speak.
“I love you. You know that. I....” He turned away, just for a second. “I swear, I never loved anyone before. I never... I do love you.”
“Seth, if you’re going to tell me how we can’t ever do this again, you’ve said it a few times already.”
“Becky, this time I’m serious,” he told her. “It’s not right.”
“What is?” Becky Angstrom demanded. “Tell me, what the hell is right? Everything’s wrong. Everything’s awful in this world, and you tell me about what’s right or what’s fair?”
“You’re Addison’s ex girlfriend. Addison’s my best friend.”
“Then he should be happy for you,” Becky said bitterly, and laughed.
“Becky,” Seth began, turning on his side to stroke her.
“Seth, tell me this. Tell me you’ll stay tonight. Tell me that you won’t go away until tomorrow morning.”
“All right,” he told her. “You know I don’t want to go away at all. Things are so...complicated. If your parents found us—”
“They’d kill us,” Becky finished for him. “I’m sick of parents. I don’t want to hear about parents and principles. They think life is so... No, they don’t,” she interrupted herself turning to him quickly. “They want to think it’s easy for us. They can’t bear to be real and know the shit we go through everyday. Life is hell.”
Seth, touched her quickly, right on her left shoulder.
He shook his head, his mouth open, looking a little scared. He leaned over and kissed her.
“I’m here,” he told her, and they lay back down in bed.
They didn’t hold each other. They just lay side by side.
“Seth, turn off the light, please?”
Seth turned off the little desk lamp and they lay together in Becky’s bed.
“I got pregnant by Addison,” she told Seth.
Seth said nothing.
“But the day after Christmas I went to Ogden with a friend and had an abortion.”
Seth still didn’t say anything. It was almost like he wasn’t there. Why was she telling him all of this?
“Seth—”
Suddenly Seth’s hand was in hers, holding it tightly.
Becky let out a deep sigh.
When Tommy Dwyer woke to the unmistakable sounds of suffering, he lay on the cot thinking how he shouldn’t say “I told you so,” shouldn’t say, “This really wasn’t wise.” He resolved to just lay in bed and pretend he didn’t hear it, and then when it got worse, he was sure he had to get up, be of some help. Who was it in the bathroom? Mason? Addison? Balliol? Was it Sullivan? He hadn’t drank that much.
When Sullivan had arrived, feeling out of sorts, Addison had said that they needed liquor.
“To watch a movie?” Tommy said.
“Why not?”
‘We’re underage.”
“What’s so magical about twenty-one,” Addison demanded, “that we can’t drink now?”
“We’re not—”
“I think it’s a good idea,” Balliol said.
“Let’s get up and go to the liquor store,” Addison said. “I bet I could have Seth run in for us.”
“Seth is underage too,” Tommy said.
But Seth does that kind of stuff all the time, and he looks twenty-one.” “No he doesn’t,” Tommy said.
“Some people think he does.”
“Well he still doesn’t,” Tommy’s voice was sullen.
“Well it doesn’t matter.” This time Balliol was speaking. “There are two bottles of wine chilling downstairs in the kitchen.”
“Your parents will miss them.”
Balliol got up and said, “I’ll replace them with stock from the wine cellar.”
Tommy was the only one who wouldn’t drink. He said it was on principle. It was Mason who said, “I don’t understand what your principle is supposed to stand for.”
“We’re under—”
Mason put up a hand and poured another glass while Isabel Sanford barged into Sidney Portier’s room.
“You’re the same song,” Mason quote Katherine Hepburn, “dull as Plainsong. La la la! La la la!”
“The Lion In Winter?” Sully said, suddenly.
“You’ve seen Lion in Winter?”
“I love Lion in Winter,” Sully said, lighting up for the first time that night. He hadn’t really been drinking yet. “Fill my glass, Bailey,” he ordered. He told Mason, “The Lion In Winter was made the same year as Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. I think Hepburn was nominated best actress for both.”
“Don’t get him started on old movies.”
“I love old movies,” Sully said earnestly. Then, “Could I get a cigarette?”
“You don’t smoke,” Balliol reprimanded him. But Addison was already handing him one.
“I do tonight,” Sully told him him.
So now, Tommy reasoned, whoever was in the bathroom must have been barfing. They’d brought in a bed and a cot from some other rooms so that everyone had a bed to sleep on because no one would be going home. Tommy, being the only truly sober one, had called around to the parents’ houses.
“Did you tell your mom you wouldn’t be home tonight?” Mason asked.
Tommy shrugged.
“It won’t matter.”
He got up now and thought of tapping on the bathroom door, but then it’s hard to say come in when you’re barfing. Tommy opened it, and was surprised to see Sullivan sitting on the toilet seat fully clothed, with his face in his hands.
Sully Reardon was crying. He was sobbing hard, but trying to keep it in, trying to keep it quiet. Tommy closed the door behind him and stood for a very long time.
Finally he spoke.
“I know that what I’m supposed to do is turn around and leave you to yourself. I know that. We’re guys,” Tommy told him. “We’re supposed to have our dignity and everything. I should just let you alone... But I can’t do that,” he said. “It’s not in me. I can’t just leave you like this, Sully.”
He sat down on the edge of the bathtub across from Sullivan who, after this speech, set off even more, great, hard heaving cries. They came out of his chest. It was worse when guys cried. All the grief came out of some terrible terrible place. More terrible than the place it came out of in girls except for when they turned into mothers. Whenever a mother’s pain came that was awful too. He remembered his mother weeping. When his father left her pain had been so great that, though Tommy had held her, he’d flown far from his body and turned off his mind while he said, “It’s all right, Mama. It’s all right.”
Listening to Sully, when he looked at Sully he remembered... himself. He only saw himself. Tommy in the room where no one goes, these same tears coming out of him. They feel so bad, they rip him up form the inside. No one’s around. Later he tells Mason about it, but he can’t have Mason around while it happens. He shouldn’t be around for this. Why has God brought him here for this? Why can’t he leave?
When his father left he felt alone, no one was here but God, no one could touch him. He wished someone would hear him and then...
He put his arms around Sully.
“I’m sorry for doing this,” Tommy told him, holding him. “I’m sorry. It’s just that no one was there to do it for me when I wanted someone. I’m sorry. I look at you and I can only see me... So... it’s like hugging myself. It’s like me... It’s all right, Sully... Whatever it is it’s all right.”
A very distant part of Sullivan Reardon knew that he would have to thank Tommy when this was all over, that something was happening here. But right now he could only be held by someone he didn’t really know, who has being so good to him tonight.
Maybe he’s so good because he doesn’t really know me.
Tommy pulled back from Sully. Tommy’s face was wet, but with Sully’s tears? Maybe. He blinked back, dark eyed, dark haired, unlike Sully’s blond hair and blue eyes, round faced unlike Sully’s long, sharp features.
Quietly, Tommy stood back from Sullivan Reardon and rejoiced in a sudden discovery:
“I do know you. You are me.”