BEGINNING OF CHAPTER FOUR
“WELL, THIS IS BAD, ISN’T IT?” Sully said.
He and Mason were alone, something that almost never happened and signified either that people had just left, or other people were getting ready to come.
“I don’t know what else to say about it,” he said.
“I think that’s all that can be said,” Mason told him looking up from a pile of clay.
“What is that?” Sully asked him.
It was something like a lion, but with a long head, a head like a bird.
“It’s a griffon. Or griffin, depending upon how you pronounce it. They’re supposed to guard and protect.”
“Maybe it can guard and protect the Balliols,” Sully said. Then, at the look on Mason’s face. “I wasn’t joking.”
Mason gave him a short smile and said, “I didn’t think you were.” He drew out with his fingers what would be the beak.
“You’d think with all that money you’d be protected from everything,” Sully went on jamming his hands in his pocket. “But no.”
Mason was always amazed how the most taciturn people got diarrhea of the mouth the moment you pretended not to be paying too much attention.
“I mean, you can get better doctors and everything, but... I shouldn’t say that,” Sully decided. “They do have the best doctors and there’s no reason they shouldn’t turn this around.”
”Except,” Mason said, “that John Balliol is an old man with advanced cancer.”
“Still, anything’s possible.”
“Possible, but not probable,”
“Why are you saying that?” Sully said, suddenly upset.
“Because,” Mason said, “it’s best not to live in delusion. When some awful monster rears its head, it’s best to face it, not transform it into something more... something softer. A Doberman’s a Doberman no matter how many times you want to make it a dachshund.”
Sully looked at him, tilting his head, and then suddenly he laughed.
He sat down on Mason’s bed.
“Mason, that’s the way I do it. I can’t image that man dead. I can’t imagine Balliol not having a father and.… It’s so awful, and I certainly can’t comfort him if he looks in my face and sees that I think his dad’s a dead man.”
“Maybe you can’t,” Mason said, letting go of his work to dry off his fingers. “But I can. Perhaps that’s the difference between us.”
“Tommy says we’re a lot alike,” Sully told Mason. He always says that.”
“Yes,” Mason told Sully. “He said it to me too. Only...”
“Only what?”
“He said, and I think I can tell you this: ‘Sully’s sad.’ He told me ‘You have a happiness in you, and Sully has a sadness in him. So deep no one can get to it.’ And that’s the difference between us.”
Sully, long faced and sober, looked at Mason for a while.
“I think he’s right. I don’t know how he picked up on it. You’re saying that Mr. Balliol’s a dead man and I’m holding onto the hope that he isn’t, but... I don’t know how to face dark things. They swallow me, you know? Cause there’s so much darkness in me already.”
“Sullivan, I don’t think that’s true,” Mason said seriously.
“People keep telling me I’m better than I am,” Sully said. “I appreciate it, but... there is this... something in me. There is this sadness. I don’t know....” He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“There isn’t anyone in the world who gets away from sadness,” Mason told him. He opened his mouth to go on, but couldn’t think of what should come next.
At last he said, “It’s just closer to the skin on you, I think.”
REGINA SPEKTOR WAS SHOUTING:
I kissed your lips and I tasted blood
nana nana nana
nana nana na!
I asked you what happened and you said there’d
Been a fight!
dada dada dada
dada dada da!
She was shouting:
You said
I’ve been fighting for your honor
But you wouldn’t understand
dada dada dada
dada dada duh!
And they were jumping up and down on the mattress of the empty apartment, shouting back to each other:
So you been fighting for my honor and I wouldn’t understand?
Gargle with peroxide
A steak for your eye
But I’m a vegetarian
So here’s a frozen pizza pie...
Clasping hands laughing, Seth McKenna and Becky Angstrom, feeling innocent, like they hadn’t felt before. Collapsing to the mattress, laughing and breathless while Regina Spektor went on:
A man walks out of his apartment
It is raining
He’s got no umbrella…
He starts running beneath the awnings
Trying to save his his suit
trying to saving his suit
Trying to trying to try to dry
But no good…
They kissed. They kissed with a gentleness and then with a lip bursting urgency. They kissed and caught at each other’s tee shirts, at their shoulders, twisting and turning in her jeans, his brown, baggy slacks. They kissed on the bed until they knelt on the bed, taking each other shirts off, kissing each others torsoes, Seth, unhooking the bra with Becky’s help, his mouth in all places, the two of them slipping out of their clothes, the music playing on and on, Seth reaching a little off the bed to turn it down, to turn down the sheets, to run his hands over her body as she ran her hands over his. To connect, legs and legs, arms over arms, to hold, to brace bodies against bodies, like children holding onto the metal pole as they jumped and jumped to climb it. Climbing, climbing over each other with faces set in a holy greedy. Striving inside of each other, her hands on his back, bringing him in. His face with a frown and a look of rapture as he balanced himself on the flats of his hands and pounded and pounded and pounded.
Gasping, amazement, oh-my-god-ment, the long O, the long unbelievable moan coming from that deepest place, the clasping, the splaying, the spraying, the hot spill lifting them up, up, unbelievably high, high above the ceiling and the city and music.
He starts running beneath the awnings
Trying to save his his suit
trying to saving his suit
Trying to trying to try to dry
But no good…
Lying there in a pile of limbs, eight legged like a spider, exhausted and drowsed like a spider’s prey, overcome, at peace, like two people praying. Their hands in each other’s damp hair.
“You’re beautiful.”
One of them says it to the other. They kiss. The kiss sticks and lingers. Neither one can say who said who was beautiful. When it came out of one’s mouth it came from other’s heart.
Addison was fucking Bonnie hard despite his disappointment. They were in her basement and he was jackhammering her, his hair sticking up, sweat all over his body, his face mottled red and white as she cried out and fucked back.
The tape was hot, but not not like he thought it would be. Seth fucked girls. But here was this gentle lovemaking, Seth’s bare ass in black and white sliding up and down inside of this girl, her legs lifting up. It was hot, but not hot like he thought it would be. Seth started going faster and faster and the girl began to moan like Bonnie was moaning because Addison was going so fast. He was feeling it bubbling up. He couldn’t stop it. He couldn’t stop it without ruining it. He was about to come. Seth was too. Addison came first. As his body was jerking up and down, the semen shooting out of him he watched Seth lift up and come in ecstasy, the girl’s legs wrapped around him, and in the confusion of orgasm Addison thought he was tipping over sideways. He was tipping over sideways. Bonnie whimpered a little. His load still shooting a little, trying to control himself, Addison watched horrified.
Seth had just finished and was kissing this girl up and down.
“Nuhhhh....” Addison began, which was the closest he could come to no.
“I love you,” Seth was telling her again and again. “I love you Becky.”
“Bailey! Balliol is that you? Get over here you bastard!”
Balliol and Swain looked around the store and then suddenly Balliol saw Matt Mercurio coming toward him.
“Damn, you look great!” Matt surprised Balliol by pulling him into a tight embrace.
“And this lovely lady I don’t know?” he gave Swain a little bow and then looked at Balliol with a question in his eye.
“This lovely lady,” Balliol said, “is my cousin Swain.”
“Oh,” Matt went red under his freckles.
“But I can still be lovely,” said Swain.
“Incidentally,” Balliol added, “she’s hooked up with Mason.”
“Not exactly hooked up,” Swain said.
“Not exactly unhooked up either.”
Matt whistled and murmured, “Mason Darrow is a very lucky man.”
“I’ve seen Suzie. You’re not so bad off yourself.”
“Yeah,” Matt rocked back on his heels. “School starts in a few weeks and I’ll be at Holy Savior and she’ll be at Marietta.”
“Marietta?” Swain said. “Who’s going there? I mean, someone else I heard about.”
“Justin Reily is going to Marietta.”
“How did you know where Justin Reily was going?” Matt said.
“I think Sully told me.”
“Sully knows him?”
Balliol thought for a moment and said, “They’re acquainted. Yes.”
“How is Sully? I haven’t seen him since before graduation.”
“Is it true?” Swain interrupted, “that Sully and Chris were boyfriends?”
“Could you be... really REALLY loud?” Balliol asked his cousin.
“Well, hell, they’re not here,” Swain said. “And nobody here knows them. Mason said it was true. Sully already told us all he’s gay.”
“He’s gay now,” Matt said.
“He was gay always,” Balliol said. “I mean he was sleeping with your best friend.”
“Well,” Matt made a face. “I didn’t think of it that way. I don’t… think of Chris as gay. He’s just... my friend. I don’t think about him and Sully doing stuff together.”
Then he said, “I wish they would get back together.”
“Me too,” Swain said.
“You’ve never even seen them together,” Balliol said.
“But I’ve seen them apart. I like both of them, so they’d probably be nice together.”
“Yes,” Matt said enthusiastically. “You know what I’m going to do?” he shook Balliol’s shoulder. “I’m going to talk to Chris. What do you think about that? I know you didn’t like Chris before, but a year ago you didn’t like me either.”
“Who says I like you now?” Balliol turned him a half smile.
Matt raised an eyebrow and said, “I’ll ignore that because deep inside I know you love me.”
“If the truth must be known,” Balliol said, fingering a shirt on the rack, “I think the best thing for Sully would be Chris. I don’t know how I feel about this, but the truth is Chris is probably the best thing that ever happened to him.”
“And vice versa,” Matt noted.
“Well then it’s settled,” Swain clapped her hands together, “We’re going to get Chris and Sully together again.”
“Can I just say something, and if you want to you can say ‘Shut up Mercurio.’”
“Shut up, Mercurio.”
“I haven’t even gotten it out of my mouth yet.”
“Yeah, but whenever you start something off like that,” Chris told him, “it’s generally something I want you to shut up about.”
He closed the register.
“Off for the day.”
“How many days you got left?”
“I’m working until the Friday before Dad drives me up to McCleiss.”
“You’re not taking your car?”
“Freshmen aren’t allowed to have cars, but I’m going to find a way to put mine someplace,” Chris said. “That’s just stupid. Dad’ll bring it up later or something.” he shrugged.
“And now what were you about to say?” he said as they came out into the mall with the music of the merry-go-round and the shrill talking gumball machine.
“What?”
“You were going to say something?”
“Yeah, but you told me to shut up about it.”
“Well,” Chris said, shrugging, “you knew I was going to break down and ask you what it was.”
“So you’re breaking down now?”
“Yes,” said Chris. “I’m breaking down.”
“I want you to go see Sully before you go.”
“What? No. It’s over,” Chris said.
“It’s over cause you ended it. I told you from the start I thought you and Sully were cool. I don’t understand all that stuff. But, you all were happy together Chris, and you don’t get to be happy with someone all the time. You need to go talk to him. In fact...”
“What?”
“I was getting out of place,” Matt said.
“You always do that. You always stop and make me ask you stuff. Just say it.”
“I was going to say that you might even want to apologize to him.”
“I did,” Chris said.
“What?”
“What kind of a heel do you think I am? Don’t answer that. I did apologize to him. I told him how I felt. I told him everything. This time he threw me out.”
Matt was nonplussed. He said, “Oh.”
“Yeah,” Chris repeated as they came into the JC Penneys and threaded though the store.
“I mean, I understand,” Chris said. “I hurt him. And he told me he wanted space. So I’ve left it to him. Actually, he told me to go away. I choose to interpret it as he needs space.”
“But do you hope that something’ll happen?”
“You mean that we’ll be good again?” Chris said in a whisper, looking around. “Yeah. Yes, I’d like to think that maybe one day things’ll be good again.”
“I heard,” Matt said, grunting as he looked around the store for the exit, “that these stores are actually built in such a way so that you can’t see the way out and have to walk around looking at things.”
“Sort of like a mercantile labyrinth.”
“Mercantile labyrinth. Yeah, I like that,” Matt grinned. “All those AP classes did pay off.
“You know, even Balliol says you were the best thing that ever happened to Sully.”
“You talked to Balliol about... me and Sully?”
“It’s not like he didn’t know. He always knew. Even before Sully told him. And he sort of gave his blessing.”
“I can’t believe—”
“We didn’t start out talking about you guys. Things just sort of went to that.”
“I was going to say that I can’t believe that Balliol found time to discuss me and Sully with all the crap he’s got going on.”
“Crap?” Matt looked at him, and then said, “Well, shit man! There’s the door out. Promised Land!”
Chris trotted after Matt and Matt said, pushing the door open for a woman with a stroller, “Okay, what’s this about Balliol’s shit?”
“His dad,” Chris said. “His dad’s got cancer.”
“What?” Matt almost let the door go.
“Yeah.”
“Is it serious? I mean I guess all cancer’s serious, but...”
“Mason told me about it. He said Balliol’s dad has throat cancer and that it’s advanced. And when you say advanced.”
“It means you’re sick,” Matt murmured, frowning, feeling a little sick himself.
Chris shook his head.
“It means you’re dead.”