Trust Exercise(36)
“I didn’t know they were having a party.”
“Is this a lager you like? We should get one of these big—boxes—Martin loves big American things—”
She understood for the first time that they were buying alcohol. “Do you have an ID? That proves that you’re over eighteen?”
“You think they’ll ask me to prove that I’m over eighteen?” Liam giggled again, perhaps at the thought of being mistaken for a minor—yet he had come here, with Martin’s troupe, as a sort of honorary high school student. Didn’t he think he resembled one? But he didn’t, Sarah realized. Beneath the unforgiving grocery store lights, his skin was slightly worn, the corners of his eyes slightly creased. Or perhaps it was not the store’s fluorescence, but the absence of Martin as a point of comparison, that made Liam’s age abruptly visible. Either way, Liam said, as if he knew her thoughts, “It doesn’t matter. Martin will pay, and there’s no mistaking him for a kid.”
“How old is he?” Of course she knew he was older—the teacher’s imprecisely superior age—but how much older she’d never been able to guess. She could not match him, agewise, to the other adults in her life.
“How old is Martin? He’s bloody forty, isn’t he? Old wanker.” This was said with fondness. To cover her surprise Sarah wheeled the cart into a reckless U-turn now that it was heavy with Miller High Life and Bartles & Jaymes. Forty was much older than she’d thought, though she wasn’t sure what she had thought, nor how this contradiction of what she had thought made her feel.
At the register Martin paid for the beer, wine, potato chips, and pretzels while Sarah, Karen, and Liam slunk out of the store as if they didn’t know him. Barks of laughter—Martin’s—and an unintelligible volubility—the cashier’s—followed them through the automatic doors, which slid shut and then jerked open again for Martin, pushing the juddering cart. “Is everyone in this country a ponce?” he asked as he plowed the cart across the lot toward Karen’s car. “I’ve never met so many poofters in my life. Teaching at your school, waiting tables at that burger restaurant, ringing me up at the grocer’s—”
“It’s the neighborhood.” Sarah cut him off. Something in Martin’s comment provoked a warning sharpness in her own reply, but as soon as she heard it, she faltered. “This is the gay neighborhood,” she clarified, and now she sounded apologetic. “I mean, not just gay—it’s the arts neighborhood, but it’s where lots of gay people live. It’s the fourth-largest gay neighborhood in the country,” she unaccountably added, “after New York, San Francisco, and—I’m not sure of the third.”
“Buggering Batman, Liam. Sarah here seems to specialize in Sodomitica. How did you know, Sarah, that sort of thing’s right up his alley?”
“My cousin’s gay. He used to live in this neighborhood,” Sarah said, uncomprehending and unheard, as Liam, having leaped on Martin’s back and snatched off his glasses, howled and waved the glasses in the air while Martin spun himself and Liam like a top, hugely waving his arms to emphasize his vision impairment. Unassisted, Karen unloaded the grocery cart into the VW’s under-hood trunk.
“Did your mummies know your school’s in America’s fourth-largest gayborhood? Mind my specs, Liam, you’re going to break them.”
“Did you know, Martin? I’ll bet you did. And you told me I wouldn’t need my arse helmet.”
All the way to Mr. Kingsley’s they kept it up, though neither could entirely out-shout the VW’s plosively stuttering engine. It brought a din as of German invasion to the crepuscular, secretive streets of Mr. Kingsley’s neighborhood, the strangely underwater world into which one passed instantly upon turning off the garishly lit boulevard. It was a noiseless foreign world of boundless lawns upholstered in shadow on which globes of live oak and azalea floated like ships. Karen’s unmufflered vehicle tore through it contemptuously, and Sarah could already see Mr. Kingsley standing at the hem of his own velvet lawn, eyeing their approach with his fists on his hips and that expression Sarah most feared, of unsurprised distaste, on his face. But as they came around the bend that revealed his house there was no Mr. Kingsley, only several familiar cars at the curb. One was Joelle’s. One was David’s. Karen parked her car in front of David’s.
As she stood out of the driver’s seat, Karen looked directly at Sarah for the first time all night. Not in friendship, but in cold inquiry. Sarah knew Karen wanted to see David’s car inflicting on Sarah whatever soft violence an unmoving car can inflict. “Aren’t you coming in?” Karen said. Martin and Liam hastily routed the booze and snacks from the under-hood trunk and disappeared around the side of the house toward the enchanted forest of Mr. Kingsley’s backyard, with its deck and pergola and fairy lights. Sarah gazed forward yet she could see David’s car through the back of her head, could see the ghosts of David and herself entwined like snakes in its dusky interior.
“Are you dating him or something?” Sarah asked about Martin, as much to banish her own thoughts as to deflect Karen’s question.
Karen stepped away from the car and slammed the door, which left Sarah having to lever the driver’s seat forward and reopen the door for herself, or climb out the open top. Either option would make her look like a clumsy fool and so she stayed in the car and returned Karen’s unfriendly gaze.