Trust Exercise(4)

He produced a racquet from the back of his closet. He even produced a towel. These dangled limply from his hands when he arrived at Sarah’s door. The actual distance from the club, across the boulevard, to Sarah’s door had been vastly greater than suggested by the many continuities. The walk—without the benefit of sidewalks or crossing signals, for their city wasn’t built for pedestrians—from the JCC parking lot to the southern gate of Sarah’s complex had taken close to twenty minutes, in the heat of the damned, along a median planted with scorched rhododendron but not any trees, during which several separate motorists had pulled over to ask if he needed assistance. In their city only the poorest of the poor, or fresh victims of crimes, ever walked. Once inside Sarah’s sprawling and mazelike complex, David reeled—it was enormous, a city of its own, without signs. Sarah and her mother had moved there when Sarah was twelve, their fifth move in four years but the first Sarah’s father had nothing to do with. Sarah and her mother only stopped getting lost in the maze of carports when they put a chalk X on the bleached wooden gate separating their assigned parking space from their back patio. July in their city: an average daytime temperature of ninety-seven degrees. From the sole clue David held, her apartment number, he could never have guessed that she lived on the far, western side from the club, near the opposite entrance. Sarah had given him directions from the western entrance which he’d disregarded, knowing he wouldn’t be coming that way. He had been too ashamed to explain this to her, his plan involving a ride to the club, too ashamed of not having a car of his own, though neither of them had a car of their own, being only fifteen and not legal to drive for a year. It didn’t cross his mind that she felt it as keenly, the utter dispossession of not being licensed to drive in that city of cars. It was part of the excruciating in-betweenness of no longer being children, yet lacking those powers enjoyed by adults. The “streets” within the complex weren’t real streets at all but a tirelessly branching metastasis of walkway, or driveway, the former distinguished by borders of dying impatiens, the latter by bordering spaces to park. It took David over an hour to find Sarah’s apartment. He might have walked two or three miles. David had imagined he would take her in his arms as he’d done on that day in the dark, but he only stood, glued to her threshold, with his sun-boiled blood spreading stains in his eyes. He thought he might vomit or faint. Then the shared air of their childhood touched him: that particular air of their city, mustily buried and cool, from its unending journey through air-conditioning ducts that the sun never reached. No matter if one lived in a mansion or a little brick box, that air smelled just the same. David stepped toward it blindly. “I need a shower,” he managed to say.

For his ruse he’d been forced to wear shorts, knee-high socks, infantile white sneakers, a sporty T-shirt. The outfit embarrassed Sarah. He looked alien to her, unhandsome, though this quibble peeped faintly at her from beneath the hard weight of her lust. The lust in its turn was eclipsed by another and unprecedented emotion, an onrush of sad tenderness, as if the man he would be, full of unguessed-at darkness and weakness, had for a brief instant shown through the boy. The boy pushed his way past her and locked himself in her bathroom. Her mother worked long days somewhere; mother and daughter shared the small, dowdy bathroom, so different from each of the four bathrooms in David’s own home. In this strange realm he showered with a smooth brick of Ivory soap, passing it between his legs, firmly lathering every square inch, meticulous and patient because truly frightened; he’d never had sex with a girl he loved. He’d had sex with two girls before this, both of whom now dissolved in his mind. His mind, slowly dilating as his blood temperature came off the dangerous boil. He’d made the shower water cool, almost cold. He stepped cautiously out of her bathroom, a towel circling his waist. She was waiting for him in her bed.



* * *



MR. KINGSLEY, THEIR teacher, lived with a man he called his husband; he twinkled at them provocatively when he said this. This was 1982, far from New York. None of them, except for Sarah, had ever known a man who might call another man his husband while twinkling provocatively. None of them had ever known a man who had lived many years in New York, who had been a member of the original Broadway cast of Cabaret, who referred to Joel Grey, when reminiscing on these times, as “Joel.” None of them, again except Sarah, had ever known a man on whose office wall might hang, among other fascinating and risqué memorabilia, a photograph of an exuberant and barely clad woman, heavily made up, flinging her arms wide and high, who somehow despite zero resemblance was strangely reminiscent of Mr. Kingsley himself, and who was rumored to be Mr. Kingsley, though no one believed it. Sarah’s first cousin, her mother’s sister’s son, was a “leather queen,” Sarah said calmly to platter-eyed classmates; this cousin lived in San Francisco, often wore women’s clothes to sing torch songs, and in general gave Sarah a key to Mr. Kingsley’s esoterica that her peers wholly lacked. This was how David had first noticed Sarah: her aura of knowledge. He sometimes saw her laughing with Mr. Kingsley, and their laughter seemed shared, on the same remote plane. David envied this, as did everyone else, and he wanted to annex that plane for himself.

In 1982, none of them, except Sarah, had ever known a gay person. And equally, in 1982, none of them viewed Mr. Kingsley’s gayness as anything but another aspect of his wholesale superiority to all other adults in their world. Mr. Kingsley was impossibly witty and sometimes impossibly cutting; the prospect of talking with him was terrifying and galvanizing; one longed to live up to his brilliance and equally feared that it couldn’t be done. Of course Mr. Kingsley was gay. They lacked the word for it, but intuition supplied the frisson: Mr. Kingsley was not just gay but an iconoclast, the first such they’d ever encountered. This was what they longed to be themselves, little though they could put it in words. They were all children who had previously failed to fit in, or had failed, to the point of acute misery, to feel satisfied, and they had seized on creative impulse in the hope of salvation.