Five Tuesdays in Winter(18)

I felt so uneasy with all this interrogation, but I liked it, too. And yet I had no answer. Nothing made my heart sing. Even Becca Salinero didn’t make my heart sing. She made it hurt.

“Nothing? Nothing makes your heart sing?” Ed swung his head to Grant at the stove. “What makes your heart sing?”

“Chicken noodle casserole. The full moon and the really thin moon. Sunday mornings if the New York Times isn’t sold out. My nieces and nephews. My blue bicycle. Yeats. And Hermann Hesse sometimes.”

“Hermann Hesse. Le pire!”

“Narcissus and Goldmund,” Grant said.

“Oh, c’mon. If you have to read a German, read Mann, not that lightweight.”

“Four hundred pages about a guy wrapped in a camel hair blanket? No thanks.”

“What makes your heart sing, Ed?” I ventured.

“The venerable state of Maine.”

“So why aren’t you there now?”

“Oh, God,” said Grant.

“It’s Disneyland in the summer. Unrecognizable. Hollywood. Hate it.”

“Well, that was impressively concise.” Grant handed me the peas and said sotto voce and yet for Ed’s benefit, “Sometimes that topic can go on into the night.”

“Well, I didn’t want to scare our boy here right out of the gate.”

We ate. The food, though familiar, tasted better than when my mother made it. I listened to them talk about the part-time jobs they had just started. Grant worked the lunch shift at a diner out on the highway, and Ed paved people’s driveways. Grant said he dreaded going to sleep because he was always dreaming about gravy, pouring it into people’s coffee cups, serving it in shoes. Ed said his lungs would be paved by the end of the summer.

Grant had heated up a Sara Lee pie, blueberry. We gathered round it when he pulled it out. He started to cut into it and Ed said, “I know how you’re going to do this, a miserly wedge at a time when you know for a fact we’re going to eat the whole thing. Gimme that.”

Ed took the knife from him and cut the pie into thirds and put a mound of ice cream on each of the enormous pieces. We ate on the porch. It was a warm, humid night and the hot pie and the cold ice cream were perfect together. Our lawn looked blue in the near dark. We could hear the sounds of a cocktail party down the street, the rumble of male conversation and a woman’s laughing voice cutting through, saying, “No, no, don’t tell them!”

“No, no, don’t tell them,” Ed said in falsetto. “Don’t tell them, Harold, about our large animal fetish!”

Everything he said felt like the funniest thing I’d ever heard.

Ed finished his pie way before Grant or me. He set his plate on the porch boards next to him and put the fork carefully at four o’clock. “It’s very civilized, being rich,” he said. “Very mellow.”

I’d always been told we were middle class. Rich was something else. Yachts and private jets. I remembered my parents and their plane flight. They would be over the ocean by now. I didn’t know what a nervous breakdown was, though I knew that’s what kept happening to my father.

From far off there was a splash. Then Ed started to laugh. “I heard that person dive into a pool and I thought, lucky bastard, and then I remembered we have a fucking pool.” He lifted off his T-shirt. “Fancy a swim?”

I never swam in the pool at night. It was too scary to be the only one in there, my limbs white as an octopus. Even with Grant and Ed that first night I was a little scared, and embarrassed. They took off all their clothes but I couldn’t. I changed into the suit that was hanging in the pool house. I thought they’d make fun of me for this but they didn’t. They didn’t say a word. I had never been naked in front of anyone since I was a baby and even then I wasn’t sure. All my life my mother had been handing me things through a closed door, just her arm reaching in with a towel or soap or whatever I needed. One time when I was eight or nine I slipped getting out of the tub and she had to call my father to come get me. I remember how rough his wool jacket felt against my wet skin.

With the big underwater bulb on in the deep end, everything was lime green. Our splashes looked phosphorescent. I was aware of their bodies, fascinated by their bodies. Ed was smaller and more compact than Grant, with taut bulbs at the backs of his calves and a stomach with small bands of muscle. He had a thick head of hair but his chest was hairless, smooth as rubber. Grant was tall and lean but loose, strangely fleshy for a person who in clothes appeared so thin. Two small pools of skin hung at his narrow hips, as if used to drooping there above an elastic band. He had thin brown hair on his head, a sparse coating of it on his chest, and yet around his penis the hair was quite red.

Ed found me in the shallow end, staring at Grant hanging from the diving board. “Do you think he dyes it?”

“I heard that,” Grant called to us.

“Well, do you?” Ed called back.

Grant dropped down into the water and skimmed the bottom toward us, his long legs doing all the work, his ass tight then loose, tight then loose, square and soft.

Grant crashed through the surface and took Ed in a half nelson and they struggled and threw each other down into the water and I swear I could hear my mother at the side of the pool saying, No roughhousing in the pool you could drown each other. Though when she ever said that I didn’t know. Perhaps when my brother was a young boy and I was watching from her lap. I had a hard time thinking of my brother—Frank was his name—as my brother. He was thirteen years older than I was, more like a friend of my parents’ who stopped in occasionally for a drink. It seemed to me he was always wearing a tie, even on Saturdays. He lived in the city and my mother lamented how little he came to visit, how much he worked. He likes it, my father often said. Worse things than working too hard. Frank rarely spoke to me directly, though I think he spoke a lot about me, for I was aware of a hum of talk, like crickets at night, that when I came closer receded and when I left the room resumed. I thought it was about me, though perhaps it was about something else.