Chapter 28 Part 2
(Sorry for the long absence! I'd decided that the rest of Chapter 28, and Chapter 29, should be posted together.)
The fog was gradually thickening, white turning to whitish-gray as daylight retreated; but the hillside city across the water was still visible, with a few twinkles of electric lights appearing here and there. The Lake’s horizon was shrinking with the advancing bank of vapor and Ennis didn’t need a clock or watch to be aware of the gathering darkness behind it. Two large sailboats hurried toward the shoreline and a heavy-bodied laker was barely visible further out, obscured enough by the mist to look like a ghost ship. The temperature was falling too, but Ennis was prepared sit on the beach as long as it took. In a way, it was reassuring that David’s partiality to long stories hadn’t changed.
“But it was good for a long time,” David went on. “Like I told you before, we were buddies during high school, but a little more’n that too. Everybody knew Nathan’s story - how we were born the same day, same hospital and our parents ‘d been friends since then, Nathan’s folks gettin’ killed in that plane crash. That hadn’t been but a few years and it was one of the worst on record back then. Everybody just thought of us as being like brothers, they just took it for granted that we went around together all the time. We did date girls, ‘ve course - this was the Sixties in Georgia, after all, if we hadn’t - well, even if people didn’t connect the dots neither of us would’ve had much of a social life.”
The 1950s and early 1960s were the heyday, especially in the Deep South, of the virginal Nice Girl tease and the social gulf between her and the girl who was a “tramp” or “boy-crazy”. And, too, of young men brought up to know that one girl was to marry and the other was to verify one's sexual prowess with. The difference between the sex lives of nice girls and tramps was, more often than not, little more than a matter of a frustratingly few moments of penetration, with everything else designated as “petting.” The nice girls that David and Nathan dated had been admonished, by the same mothers who'd taught them to undress for bathing or bed without seeing their own naked bodies, that "it's up to the girl to set the limits" with young men. While they expected their dates to make passes to confirm their often counterfeit seductiveness, they tended to speak of both David and Nathan with fondness as boys who respected them.
David and Nathan also frequently double-dated with "boy-crazy girls, and by their junior year had acquired the status of intriguingly wild but ultimately desirable young men, each destined to become the marital reward of a nice girl who was willing to save herself for the Right Boy. They usually ended these dates early and if the girls, flattered at being asked out by the rich boy from Atlanta and his stepbrother, thought the games in the front and back seats of the car were quick and perfunctory, they rarely complained. As often as not they knew that their lack of nice-girl status would prevent them from being taken seriously.
“But that all had to end, people grow up. Off we both went to college, fall o’ 1965. Nathan’s family wasn’t too pleased when we both applied to the University of Georgia. They’d expected he’d go to a more ‘exclusive’ school, that was code for schools that rich white kids went to - or at least to Georgia Tech like his dad. But we hardly ever saw them; I think they kinda looked down their noses at my folks but none of ‘em had wanted to take on raising an extra kid when Tom and Sheila were killed, so they pretty much left well enough alone.
"And college was okay too. That was 1965 and it was simple then: you went to school either to study or party, and some people, like Nathan an’ me, we did both. We both pledged a fraternity the first year and moved to a frat house, but Nathan insisted on our not havin’ the same room. Gotta admit he was right about that - sooner or later we’d ‘ve got careless and there’s no tellin’ what would’ve happened. We went on datin’ girls just like in high school - if you lived in a frat house, it was like you had a built-in dating service - and I met up with Maggie about that time. That was right after her fiancée got killed and she didn’t have many people to talk about it with - it was just a few years before the big protests about Vietnam started up, ‘specially in the South and most people, if they didn’t have anybody over there they didn’t think about it much. That kinda let me off the hook with dating, I’d told her I was gay early on and everybody just assumed she was my steady girl.
"But Nathan just kept datin’ one girl after another, never went out with any of ‘em for long. That was okay with me. It was okay with our frat brothers too, they just thought he was a rich stud who liked a lotta variety in girls. We’d sometimes stay out all night, especially on football nights, and we found our own special places. There was an old abandoned mill on the river, everybody knew about it and everybody knew what it meant if you went there at night and saw another car parked there. But we also get motel rooms sometimes. Not there in Athens near the university, we’d drive out some of the country highways, even up the interstate a few exits.”
Those were some of the best nights: speeding down the narrow country highway, sometimes velvet darkness outside, sometimes shafts and scallops of silhouetted trees, here and there an eyewink of light from a far-off farmhouse, windows open to the wisps of fragrance from pine trees, iron-rich red soil, a tarry smell from the stored-up heat of the day rising from asphalt. And later on the interstate, watching the mile marker numbers get smaller and the tension in the car becoming an elastic bond in the space between driver and passenger that threatened to snap at any second, in contrast to the boatlike glide of the car, a gait exclusive to expensive automobiles. It was a regular object lesson in anticipation being the brewing pot that made passion more intense and for David, after all these years, driving at night was still a powerful aphrodisiac.
“I had to leave school in the summer of ‘68, right after my junior year, and that’s when things started to change. My daddy died, it was a stroke, real sudden, and he’d left me the hardware store. I was majoring in business and it just didn’t make sense to keep studyin’ business when I had one and pretty much knew how to run it. Besides, the business was supporting my mom and I figured it was gonna be supporting Dean too; didn’t seem likely he was ever gonna go out on his own. So there I was, 20 years old and with a family to support.
"Nathan stayed in school. He did visit a few times that year and of course he was there for my daddy’s funeral. But after he graduated he moved to Atlanta, got a job at a graphic arts agency. And I guess that’s when it all started to change. That’s when I started pretending it hadn’t.”
David was silent for a few moments, staring absently out at the steadily shrinking horizon where it was hard to tell where the water ended and the slow-churning fog began. Sitting next to David and looking toward him, what Ennis saw was a view of the hill and the city; but he knew that by the time David finished, the fog would thicken and spread out enough that they would both be looking at the same impenetrable grayness.
He also knew that the memories he’d heard up to this point, both today and in David’s other reminiscences, were nostalgia: a fragment of an old song, a photograph with colors distorted by time, or the faintest fragrance of wood smoke in the fall, all bringing a time long past almost close enough to touch but forever out of reach. David was about to step beyond that into territory that was, like some memories of his own, a road solidly paved with broken glass in some stretches.
“At first, I was busy with the store, getting a place to live in Macon. Of course, he came to the funeral and he’d come back down to Macon for holidays. I went to see him in Atlanta after he’d got settled. We went out to get a drink - not a gay bar, I knew better than that already, even though there were some in Atlanta and I knew where they were. I remember he kept lookin’ around at people, never did seem really relaxed and I knew what that meant but I told myself he’d get over it. After all, you see guys drinkin’ together, hangin’ out together all the time and nobody in the bar was payin’ any attention to us. But if they did - nobody there knew either of us, they wouldn’t ‘ve thought of us as stepbrothers.”
“Like you ‘n me bein’ cousins,” Ennis ventured.
To his surprise, David smiled a little. “There ya go. It comes in handy, we both know that.” He sat a few moments, arms resting on his drawn-up knees, before he went on.
“Sure, I knew as well as Nathan how careful we’d hafta be if we lived together. This was the Deep South, y’know, no different from Wyoming when it came to that I’m sure. Except there were more big cities around, places where we could set up together and blend into the crowd.
“I’d first brought it up when we were in college. Told him I’d be willing to keep it quiet if that’s how he wanted it. By the time we’d been outta school a few years there were neighborhoods in Atlanta, a few, where you could be out. I knew he wouldn’t want to live in one of ‘em, but I wouldn’t ‘ve cared where we lived. Hell, I even brought up just livin’ near each other as a permanent thing. But anytime I brought it up, he’d insist he wasn’t ‘that way’, as he put it. So I just kept comin’ up to Atlanta weekends, told myself he’d come around, I could wait. Nine years later, I was still waiting.
“For a couple of years I just came up to Atlanta when I could get away, get a motel for a few days. But later on a friend of mine from college hooked me up with Michael, he was about 40 then, lived in Midtown. That was a city neighborhood that was shapin’ up to be a gay neighborhood by that time. Michael was an engineer, specialized in industrial pumps - you know, big hotels, skyscrapers, places like that. He was the one who put me in touch with Vic after I moved here. Michael did inspections so he traveled around a lot and made an agreement - I paid him a hundred bucks a month he let me use his place when he was away. It was a good setup, nice private street and the parking and entrance were in the back.”
Ennis had moved a little closer to David, noticing that the fog now looked less like thin gauze than a solid sheet. The soggy, opaque air had dotted both their faces with saltless tears.
“It got to be a routine,” David went on. “Sometimes when it looked like I could get away, mostly on weekdays I’d call Nathan; sometimes he’d call me. Once in awhile Michael was in town so I’d get a motel room, but we never spent time at his place. Most often, he’d come ‘n’ see me. That went on for years, a regular thing but we never went out together ‘cept to grab a late breakfast a few times. Maggie was livin’ in Midtown for a few years before she moved back up here and sometimes the three of us ‘d go out together. That was before she married Mark - it only lasted about 8 months before he got killed and they fought like cats and dogs outside o’ bed.
“Once in awhile we’d go out for drinks with the people from the agency, they were okay people. He’d introduce me as his ‘stepbrother’, o’ course. I think some of ‘em knew - I mean, a lot of guys in that business are gay, but I guess they knew Nathan better than to say anything. But by ’75 he’d had got into the club scene and the people he ran with - I wouldn’t call ‘em friends exactly - that was another story.
“I was always paired up with one of the women, to go with the one he was seeing at the moment - not much different from high school and college, except that then, we both knew it was just window-dressing. But now I kept getting’ the impression that Nathan was trying to believe his own publicity. And maybe he did believe it.
”He never stayed involved with any of the women for long, but they didn’t mind really. Coke whores most of ‘em, the men were too - ‘s long as you let ‘em hang out, made the scene in all the fun places and brought out the nose candy regular, they were satisfied. And he could afford it.”
David looked up in time to see the half-quizzical look on Ennis’ face. “That whole club scene in the ‘70s, Atlanta and everywhere else, it was a regular drug buffet. Lotsa college kids were into pot smoking my last year of college, but that was kid stuff at the bars and discos - both the straight ones and the gay ones. For awhile poppers were the thing - that’s amyl nitrate, it was meant for people havin’ angina attacks. Later on it was pills, some to speed you up, some to slow you down, all of ‘em got from doctors. Not all doctors o’ course, but it only took a few and their waiting rooms were always crowded. Nathan tried ‘em all - he knew all the right places to get ‘em from - and by the late 70s everyone on that scene was into cocaine, too.
“Nathan’d always been a drinker, even back in high school, whenever we could get any beer. And in Atlanta, he got into coke real quick. I didn’t do it much on my own; too expensive - there was a joke goin’ around back then: cocaine is God’s way of tellin’ you you’re makin’ too much money. But Nathan could always talk me into at least a line or two on those weekends; everyone once in awhile he’d bring more’n a few and we’d make a night of it. And it wasn’t hard to see how it hooked him.”
There was no forgetting the body’s response to just a pinch or two of the white powder. It started with your chest feeling like it had expanded into a wind tunnel washed with a cool, refreshing breeze and the powder’s bitter taste was soon forgotten when your perception of the world opened up in a similar way, with everything explainable and nothing you couldn’t control.
At first,” David went on, “it makes you act like you could act if you were really at home in your own skin and on top o’ things all the time. That’s what Nathan’d spent his life tryin’ to do, or at least make people think he was doing. It does less and less of that as time goes on and you keep takin’ it, but you never forget that little taste of what you might be like. So you keep takin’ more, tryin’ to make that feeling come back, even after all it’ll do for ya is make you feel normal for awhile. And there wasn’t any way I could compete with that. People who’re heavy into drugs, they often go off alone to turn on, and sometimes people think that’s because they’re ashamed of bein’ addicted. But that isn’t it at all. They want to be alone with their lover. Not that things didn’t get real hot between us whenever I made that trip up to Atlanta.”
Whether their reunions took place in the Midtown apartment or in a motel, they were spiced with a sexualized frenzy, driven by half-conscious frustration and of Nathan’s favored combination of Quaaludes followed by the seductive white powder. Sometimes, stoked with a coke appetizer, he’d kick the door shut with his foot as soon as he was over the threshold, pinning David against the nearest wall or door frame while he popped shirt buttons and occasionally broke jean zippers in his impatience to get to bare skin.
"He sometimes had a kind of hangover the next day, at least that’s what it seemed like. He’d wanta leave right away, and a few times he said we shouldn’t ‘meet like this anymore’, that was how he put it. Once he asked me wasn’t I lookin’ to settle down and I said yeah, are you interested? He got upset, said we shoulda grown out of all that, and we would’ve if we hadn’t always been together so much. We went over that more ‘n once, but all it really meant was that I’d better be ready for another roller-coaster ride the next time I saw him.”
The temperature was dropping steeply as the sun went down, and Ennis felt the cold creeping from the sand into his feet soaking from the sand into his feet and up to his ankles.
Life lived in a half-disguise in one place; fully revealed but in bits and fragments in another. Hope deferred again and again and time slipping away quietly enough that its exit was barely noticed. Words left unspoken because of what they might release that could not be recaptured. He couldn’t guess at what more David had to tell him but he had a bone-deep awareness that he was hearing his, and Jack’s slow inexorable slide off the mountain retold in a language only slightly different from his own.
“I just went on with that for a long time, and it was okay at first. Actually, it was more’n that, it was a real turn-on during the week. Goin’ to work, havin’ dinner once a week or so with my mom and Dean, doin’ all that everyday stuff with nobody knowin’ what I did on weekends. I was a sorta cloak-and-dagger thing, a double life. I was still young enough that it was exciting. And young enough, too, to think there was plenty of time for things to change, that everything was gonna work out.
“And I didn’t spend all my time in Atlanta just waitin’ around for Nathan. Midtown got to be a gay neighborhood during those years - something that didn’t even exist when we were growin’ up. I had about a half-dozen neighbors in the building where Michael’s apartment was and I made some friends. And Maggie’d moved to Atlanta not long after I’d left school; lived there in Midtown for a couple of years. She got in with some strange New Age-type people for awhile; we’d meet sometimes in this all-night café in Midtown that was supposed to be a hangout for witches, spend half the night people-watchin’. So I started makin’ a life for myself but I wasn’t really livin’ it with Nathan and that was all I really wanted. And Nathan….. he never got what he wanted, and there was no way I could give it to him.”
Ennis half-wondered if David had forgotten part of his story. “Well…. uh, what was it he wanted?”
“Like I told ya awhile back, Nathan always thought he had to be perfect. No, that’s not quite it. He had to think he was perfect. That’s how Nathan was to start with, and by the time his folks died they’d pretty much turned that up full throttle. And even now, let alone when we were all growin’ up - well, that didn’t include likin’ other men. Nathan mighta got his drinkin’, his weakness for drugs from his granddaddy, but he was from a rich old Southern family and that’s kind of a tradition. Gamblin’, chasin’ women, even bein’ a bit funny in the head, people woulda just said ‘well, that runs in their family you know.’ But bein’ gay….” He didn’t go on but it didn’t matter. Ennis already knew the end of the sentence.
(chapter concludes at Part 3!)
Index to chapters:
Chapter 1: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/392.html
Chapter 2: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/523.html
Chapter 3: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/1066.html
Chapter 4: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/1485.html
Chapter 5: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/1704.html
Chapter 6: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/2038.html
Chapter 7: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/2358.html
Chapter 8: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/2635.html
Chapter 9: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/2947.html
Chapter 10: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/3130.html
Chapter 11: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/3356.html
Chapter 12: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/3655.html
Chapter 13: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/3934.html
Chapter 14: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/4154.html
Chapter 15: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/4591.html
Chapter 16: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/4685.html
Chapter 17: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/5094.html
Chapter 18: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/5140.html
Chapter 19: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/5546.html
Chapter 20: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/6249.html
Chapter 21: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/6434.html
Chapter 22: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/6843.html
Chapter 23: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/7306.html
Chapter 24: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/7646.html
Chapter 25: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/7723.html
Summary, Chapters 1-25: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/8106.html
Chapter 26 Part 1: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/8417.html
Chapter 26 Part 2: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/8634.html
Chapter 27: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/8869.html
Chapter 28 Part 1: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/9090.html