“I FEEL LIKE YOU’RE KEEPING something from me,” Balliol said flatly.
Sully turned to him.
“If you are that’s your affair,” Balliol said. “Maybe you need to keep it to yourself. Maybe it’s someplace deep inside of you, and you can’t talk about it yet. I don’t have to know everything.”
They were at Sully’s house, a rarity. Tina was still at work and Sully had actually scheduled out this whole day for he and his friend. Justin had called in the morning. It hadn’t even hurt the littlest bit to turn him down for a day with Balliol.
“But,” Balliol said, at last, “if the reason you’re keeping quiet is because... you think I can’t bear it, or you’re ashamed or... I mean if it’s not just that you’re keeping things to yourself, if it turns out that you’re hiding something... You don’t have to hide anything from me. I know in the past you felt you had to, and you probably were right, but you don’t have to hide anything from me now.”
Sully couldn’t dissemble anymore. He just turned to Balliol and said, “How did you know?”
“Maybe I know you,” Balliol said. It wasn’t sarcastic. It was a suggestion.
“I’m seeing someone,” Sullivan said, euphemistically.
“Oh?” said Balliol. “That’s the secret?”
“It’s Justin Reily.”
“Justin Reily?” Balliol sat up. A look came over Balliol’s face and since he realized Sully had seen the look he just continued and said, “Well, now, you can’t just be seeing Justin Reily, can you, Sully? I mean... that’s not it, is it?”
“I have been having sex with him since May.”
Balliol gave the famous Balliol, “Oh.” Short, simple, nonplussed.
Sully nodded, not looking at Balliol and said, “It feels good to tell you that.”
“It feels shitty to hear it,” Balliol said before he could stop himself. Then he said, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I mean, you must love him then?”
Sully didn’t answer.
“I mean,” Balliol went on in the closest thing he ever had to an uncertain murmur, “you... like him.”
“I like having sex with him. I like the stuff we do. I like how there aren’t any strings attached. I like his body. I like that much. And... I can’t disassociate Justin from having sex with Justin so, as far as that goes, yes, I like him.”
“But as a person.”
“Bailey, don’t do this.”
Balliol caught his breath. Sully put his hand down on the table and said, “Listen, Bailey. Are you listening?”
Balliol nodded. Sully realized for once, I’m older than him. I always make him lead me, protect me. He’s younger.
“It’s sex, Bailey. That’s all it is. I know that disappoints you. I know that’s not the kind of person I’m supposed to be. But there isn’t any love. It’s just... this is what I need right now, okay? Chris... hurt me. He hurt me bad. I... this is how I get over it.
“Please,” he said, again not looking at Balliol. “Don’t take this away from me.”
“I can’t take anything away from you,” Balliol said. “I don’t have that kind of power. What are you talking about?”
“Yes you do,” Sully told him. “You do. I... I’m not strong like you. I can’t not care what my friends think about me. A funny look from you and it’s all over. I couldn’t take it, Bailey. All right?”
Even though Sully wasn’t looking at him, Balliol nodded.
“Wait a minute?” Sully lifted a finger, still not looking at Balliol, and getting up to run to his room.
When he came down it was with sheets of paper. Poems. He handed them to Balliol
“When I see you—” Balliol began.
“Don’t read them,” Sully said quickly. “Not in front of me. Not here, Bailey. It’s just... I don’t tell you everything, but it’s not because of you. It’s me. I’m a poet. I’m a writer. I write stuff down. I don’t say it so good. Especially when it’s here,” Sully’s long hand touched his sternum.
“Especially,” he added, “when it’s deep in my heart, so deep I can’t get it out in words and I’m saying it to...” well he was at one of those unspeakable places again… He smiled quickly at his best friend and said, “saying it to someone who’s...” he touched his heart and ducked his head.
SULLIVAN REARDON
And when I see you
hallelu
hallelujah!
What do I believe in?
You never let me believe
I can only have faith in what I can touch
touching you
I’m amazed by you
hallelujah
inside of you
inside of me
hands and lips
knees to knees
sighs
what lies beneath the covers
gently rippling
i can’t tell this to a soul
i don’t know how to say it
hardly know how to do it
hardly know what I’m doing
doing
screwing
to a glory
and a hallelujah
there was nothing pure in me
until all of me was touched by you
halelu
halelujah
Amen
—Sullivan Reardon
(about his Chris)
when you look at me
what you see
must be something i never suspected was there
i see you seeing me
i see the one you’re looking at
and he is tall and strong and beautiful
and you are saying that is me
i must look the same way
my eyes must look the same way your eyes look when they are looking at me.
is it possible you don’t see what i see?
What i see is blue blue eyes, like the sky trapped in water
like jewels like the stone that changes lead to gold
changes me to gold
you are changing me to gold.
What i see is that smile that always becomes wider for me, the light in your hair and eyes and hand and skin beside me
i am beside myself with love
i love to trace your body with my hand
the body of this man
this man like a child, like a baby asleep here
dear
so dear, I would hold you and protect you.
giving you my strength makes me so strong
and you say that all along
you see the same thing when you see me
i can’t believe
i can
t believe
when i see you
i see god
Sully
to his Chris
I have chosen the blissful—”
conscience forgive me
i have chosen the blissful
body forgive me for i know not what i do
i know that i’ll do it again
let it be done to me again
I have chosen the blissful
in a hot shower at four in the afternoon
in the steam
hot and anonymous
just the way i never dreamed of
my dreams never caught up to my reality
i have chosen the blissful
i was just a sixteen year old virgin
now i’m seventeen and two guys have been inside me
i have chosen
i have chosen
i don’t
know what i’m
full of
full of a little terror
full of this longing, this hot need that terrifies me
I need to have his hands on me again
i need him to be touching me
i need to be touching
to be doing it again
i need the blissful
i lay in my bed thinking about it four a.m.
i have chosen the blissful
in your bed
i have chosen the blissful
our bodies
that
in my head
is the blissful
the portrait of our legs and arms entwined
the blissful
the sweet,
the hot
i am not who everyone thought i was
no one thought anything of me
i was just a little breath
a mist
i’m
in a sirocco now
i’m a tornado now
watch me
i am about to blow
watch my spill
watch me fill you
the blissful
i have chosen the blissful
S. Reardon
—when he needed to write about his first major time with J.R.
This one is wholly and totally for you
there are no tricks in these lines
i wish i could speak as plainly as i write
but this is what i am
i want to tell you that i love you
i want to tell you that it hurts like hell
to keep secrets from you
i want to tell you every time i’m near you
i want to open up to you about me
that when you’re not around i think of you
that i’m afraid of your gaze.
just your look
could totally burn me up, melt me down, make me ashamed when i don’t want to be a shamed
make me question what i don’t want to question
i think of saying all these things to you
so i write them to you
because i love you so much,
and then it’s put away in the drawer like i put this away in my heart
because—as you know—i’m chickenshit
—Sullivan Reardon to his best friend
who is and always will be
Lincoln Alexander Balliol
When Sully heard his mother crying he knew it was a bad sign. He couldn’t think of anything traumatic that might have happened. What else could happen? She cried when his father left, but that was a long time ago. There wasn’t another man in her life? Had she lost her job? Was she unemployed now?
Or does she know about Chris and Justin?
How could she know? Had he left some poems lying around? Did she have a dirty journal passage? Had Balliol’s mother found the poems and called...? That idea was such a stretch that even in his panic Sully had to laugh. But when he came downstairs all laughter left him.
Tina Reardon was splayed out across the kitchen table, her purse upright in the middle of it, bawling.
Sully waited a while before calling her.
“Ma?”
Tina kept crying.
“Mom,” Sully said again. He came close to her. It was awkward trying to comfort his mother. They were awkward comforting each other. She was just not really very there for him and he found it hard to be there for her.
“I’m so sorry,” she bawled, looking up at him.
“What?”
“I’m so sorry, Sully.”
Now he was getting sick of her. Why all this crying? Why not just say something and be done with it? Take the consequences later. Fuck the preamble.
“I tried,” she continued crying. “I went to the school today. They said... We can’t pay. We can’t pay. You can’t go back.”
“What?”
“I’m sorry—”
“Knock that shit off!” Sully snapped. “Look at me.”
Tina knocked that shit off and looked at him.
“What are you talking about? Stop crying and tell me.”
With difficulty and through sniffs, she began, more or less clearly.
“They called me, at Saint Vitus, and said you can’t—bring him to back because... I can’t afford it. I don’t have the money for this year.”
This wasn’t possible. The whole matter was drifting about Sully’s head as someone else’s misfortune. While it spun around above him he could still work with it. Before the cloud settled.
“Can’t you... talk to them. Explain that we’re having problems.”
Tina shook her head and began to cry again.
“No—” Sully said. “You’re not allowed to do that. Not right now.”
“Sully—!” her voice broke.
“You don’t get to cry,” he told her. “I get to cry. It’s me who should be crying right now.”
“I know.”
“Then why are you the one who’s bawling all over the place? Now. Why won’t talking to the school help?”
“Because I haven’t even paid them from last year.”
The wind went completely out of Sully. He couldn’t believe this.
“Oh... fuck!”
He didn’t care that his mother was in the room.
“I’m sorry. You’ll have to go to Cartimandua this fall.”
“I can’t talk about this right now,” Sully said pacing around the kitchen, taking his large hands over his face, through his blond hair.
“Sullivan—”
“God, Mom, I can’t talk about this right now!” He shook out his face like he’d be able to shake away all of this crap.
“I’m going out.” He went to the kitchen door.
“Are you going to see Chris?”
“What?”
“Talk to him? Your friend.”
“What the—” he looked at her, angry. Her face and eyes were red, washed out, done in and weak. But he had no pity for her. Pity him! How could the bitch be so stupid?
“Chris isn’t my friend. You know that. He never comes here.”
Then Sully added—because he didn’t give a goddamn right now. “We broke up.”
“What?”
Sully gave a short, nasty smile, opened the door and said, “Chris was my boyfriend, Mom. I’m gay.”
And then he walked out the door, unlocked his bike from around the water meter and pedaled down Jury Street.
He was so angry and so confused. He didn’t want to be comforted by his friends right now. He didn’t want them to know they wouldn’t be finishing school together. This was so unfair. This was a bitch. His whole life he’d been out of the loop and for the first time in his life he had friends and they wouldn’t be together this year. He’d be at some horrible ghetto school in the middle of town. He couldn’t go to Cartimandua. He couldn’t. God wouldn’t let that happen. Yes, apparently he did believe in God.
I just told my mom I was gay.
Twenty minutes later, worn out, exhausted, he found himself in front of the only place it made sense to be at a time like this. He locked his bike around the street sign and walked down the street of old two stories until he came up the brick walk to a familiar house and rang the doorbell.
An outrageous faggot answered the door. It was Moses Duckworth who had just graduated. Back in K though eight he’d dressed like Cher for Christmas, talent shows and, yes, the annual passion play. Now he was standing there looking vapid with a rainbow scarf around his neck.
“Justin!” he called in a faux British accent. “It’s for you. I think I’d better go.”
He sauntered out of the house and Justin threw his arms around Sully crying: “You smell so manly!”
“I smell like sweat because I’ve been riding for the last twenty minutes.”
Why was he here? This was stupid.
“Are you upset?” Justin put a hand to his forehead.
“Yes.”
“I’m upset too. Moses just came here to tell me he got accepted into Emerson, and I didn’t. I have to go to Marietta now. Well, I’ll have to tell my parents so we can decide what to pack and everything. It’s weeks away. I’m so upset.”
Justin was talking to himself now, scared and afraid, not the usual dramatic stage chatter.
They had shifted just that quickly and Sully said, uncertainly:
“Do you want to talk about it?”
Justin looked up at him, apparently also surprised in this shift in their usual dealings with each other.
“Yes,” he said.
This was what Sully really did need at the moment. He didn’t need to talk about his own horrible shit. He needed to hear someone else’s.
Justin reached up and patted Sullivan Reardon’s cheek.
“You’re really sweet,” he said. “You don’t know that. But you are.”
Contrary to what one might expect, the Balliols didn’t have a butler. Ruth Balliol had grown up poor in Manchester and was perfectly capable of doing her own cooking. A cleaning service came in once every two weeks. A house this big made that necessary, but otherwise the Balliols and Swain cleaned for themselves.
There was a beautiful old dining room with high walls and portraits hung with the family ancestors. A great teardrop chandelier hung twinkling from the center of it and beneath it stretched a long, polished wooden table surrounded by stuffed, high backed chairs. A candelabra sat in the middle, large as the great menorah in a synagogue. It was splendid and lit every night.
But the Balliols did not use this room.
Whenever they ate together, which was a rarity, they used the solarium that had a big screen plasma TV in it. This was one of the nights they were all eating carry out pizza in sweat pants and when there was a ring at the door, Balliol swore, put his plate down and got up to answer it.
It was not a short walk to the front door when you lived in a mansion. The first John Balliol, the dispossessed royalty who had come to America in order to strike it rich, had built this place in honor of a departed glory, but one of his sons, the one whom Lincoln Balliol was descended from, had gone back to Scotland. In the end the fortune had come through his line, to Balliol’s father, the last surviving relative of the steel magnate Lucius Balliol, and this house had come with it. As Balliol made it to the front door, mildly exhausted, he thought he could live without it.
“Sullivan,” he panted. “Come in.”
Sully stepped in and Balliol said, “We’re eating. Join us.”
“No… I won’t disturb you. I should go home. I just came to see you for a sec.”
“What’s up?”
“I can’t go back to school next year. Ma fucked everything up. We’re like in debt because she didn’t even pay for last year. She told me this afternoon. She was crying and everything. It was awful. I told her I was gay.”
“What?”
“I was so mad, Bailey. When I left the house she asked if I was going to see Chris. Can you believe it? I told her we don’t even talk. I told her Chris had been my boyfriend, then I just stormed out.”
“Oh,” Balliol said. “Well, then you better stay here tonight.”
Balliol closed the huge door behind his friend and they walked back through the large foyer. The darkening sky cast light through the great skylight.
“Shit, this place is huge,” Sully said.
“I went over to Justin’s house. I was feeling down.”
“Oh,” Balliol said in a tone that attempted neutrality.
“Relax,” Sully said, catching up with him. “Nothing happened. He was just really down too, so I listened to his problems and everything. It was weird. I... have never actually treated him like a person. It’s funny, but I felt really shitty the whole time I was listening to him. I’m supposed to be this sensitive writer and shit and it seriously never occurred to me that Justin’s a real person. I don’t even know if we can do what we’ve been doing again. I don’t know if it would work.”