Trust Exercise(25)
There’s a narrow little staircase at the end of the hall, uncarpeted and steep, as if it’s recently grown up from being a ladder. She climbs it, directly into a room with sloped walls she realizes was made from an attic, now beautifully finished and furnished with a round braided rug and a bed and a sort of tall cabinet with a full-length mirror on the inside of one of its doors, before which Manuel stands, tucking in a blue shirt. “Do you live here?” she exclaims.
“No,” he says, badly startled, one palm flat in his waistband, and then with surprising aggression, “Why are you here, always hanging around?”
“Hanging around? It’s a party.”
“There’s no party up here.”
“Then why are you here?”
“I’m changing my shirt, if you’d leave me alone,” he says, closing the door to the cabinet, but not before she’s seen several more expensive-looking bright-colored shirts, the same ones she’s noticed him wearing at school.
“Did he give you those?” she asks.
“They’re mine.”
“Why are you keeping them here at his house?”
“Why don’t you go somewhere else? Maybe the music room hallway? I hear you put on good shows there.”
She almost falls back down the steep narrow stairs.
In the kitchen, trying to get out the back door, she runs into Pammie. She has to leave, her determination to leave is so total it leaves room for no other thought. She’ll walk, never mind that her apartment is more than a half hour’s drive. She’ll walk all night, straight to the bakery for her six a.m. shift, seven hours has to be enough time to walk there. “Come with us!” Pammie cries eagerly. Julietta is with her; Sarah cannot even open her mouth to object before they’ve borne her off like happy thugs, each of them holding an elbow. The yard has emptied out substantially, the drinkers and smokers have said their goodbyes to their host before getting too drunk or too high. David is nowhere to be seen, perhaps never was here. Greg Veltin is waiting in the backyard gazebo, he’s especially asked to speak with them. “We brought Sarah,” Pammie says breathlessly. “Is that okay?”
“Of course,” Greg effuses. It’s perfect they’ve also brought Sarah. It’s perfect she’s here. He wants them to hold hands with him, is that too strange? Sarah looks across the murk of the gazebo, its ocean-floor light, at Pammie’s rapt face. In Greg Veltin’s presence, it shines like the moon. They are sitting in a circle on the gazebo’s slightly splintery floor. Greg reaches out and takes Pammie’s hand, and with his other hand takes Julietta’s, and Julietta reaches her spare hand to Sarah, and Sarah reaches hers to Pammie, in a trance of surrender, not having the slightest idea what they’re doing. Greg Veltin resembles Jesus—a clean-cut and freckled and auburn-haired Jesus—sitting cross-legged, holding the hands of these sophomore virgins who love him so much they would happily share him in marriage (they’ve discussed this at length, although with each other, not him). “I cherish your friendship,” Greg tells them. “I feel so lucky to have friends like you, and I want you to know that I love you, and that, if things were different—God, I’d be so in love with you girls I wouldn’t know how to choose! But luckily”—and he squeezes Pammie’s hand and Julietta’s hand with such a surfeit of feeling the two pairs of hands jump—“luckily,” he repeats, “I’m gay, and so I don’t have to choose, and I can cherish all of you forever.”
“Oh my God!” Pammie cries, both her hands flying up to her mouth.
“You’re the first friends from school I’ve told,” Greg continues, incredibly—this adored, handsome Senior who can dance like Astaire and who is so clearly, inevitably, no-other-possibility gay that Sarah cannot believe she never realized—but that was fifteen in a nutshell, she’ll think when she’s twice, and then three times, that age. The obvious and the oblivious sharing the same mental space.
Julietta has burst into tears. “I’m so honored,” she sobs. “I’m so honored you told us.”
“I am too,” Pammie says ardently, for in the instant, she also knows she has already known, and is also amazed by the gift of Greg’s trust, a far greater intimacy than she’d dreamed of before.
The three of them have fallen into a joyous group hug. “Sarah, Sarah!” they laugh and cry helplessly, trying to extend their arms to her, too clumsy in their happiness to keep her from slipping away.
* * *
THEY KNOW SO much about each other, yet so little.
They know that William’s mother makes William and his two younger sisters keep their toothbrushes and toothpaste and combs and whatever other personal items they use in zippered travel cases, which they must carry to the bathroom and back to their bedrooms every morning and night, and that if William’s mother finds toiletry items left behind in the bathroom—the bathroom that only William and his sisters ever use, because his mother has her own bathroom off her bedroom—she will throw them away. She will throw away, as punishment for their failure to abide by her rule, a forgotten toothbrush or stray comb. They, William’s classmates, know this, but they don’t know William’s mother’s first name, or where William’s father might be, or whether he’s even alive.