Night Kites (18 page)

“Amitié, doux repos de l’âme,”
Pete said. “Friendship, sweet resting place of the soul … I love you all.”

Monday morning in the hall outside homeroom, Nicki returned my ring with a note.

Now, don’t try to start up something again when it’s all over, Eri. Please. Let me alone. N.

It was the same morning the S. A.T. scores came in, mine lower than the earlier ones.

So I told myself I would let her alone until she couldn’t stand it anymore. I wouldn’t make the first move.

I stayed close to home, following bursts of studying with long daydreams of her up in my room, my mind torturing me with all the old snapshot memories of us. I played R.E.O. Speedwagon’s “Can’t Fight This Feeling” over and over, and thought of making love in Dream Within A Dream, High Horse on its side on the rug, Scatter watching us cross-eyed from the bureau. I saw us riding Kevin Cronin in the pool with the daffy New York skyscrapers lit up around the walls, rock music blasting in City By The Sea. I remembered her coming toward me in the halls of Seaville High in her fishnet stockings with the porkpie hat tipped over one eye, while my blood jumped, and I could hear the husky voice start a sentence, “See,” … and I could remember helping her out of that crazy jacket with the traffic accident on the back, a moment before she turned around and put her arms up behind my shoulders. Through it all, there was the scent of First, enveloping the memories like a sweet fog moving in to wrap us in our own cocoon.

Several times I’d see her ahead of me at school, and once, impulsively, I made a move, walked fast, and heard her tell me “No!” over her shoulders. And there were all the notes I wrote and never sent, one fifteen pages long. She must have known, too, that the calls she got, when no one spoke, but only listened to her say, “Hello? Hello? Hel-
lo,
” were all from me.

Times I saw Dill and Jack, neither of them looked into my eyes.

I grew accustomed to being the loner, going home at noon for lunch, making no attempts to hang out before or after school.

In all my talks with Pete I never brought up Nicki, told him only that the thing with Dill had run its course.

“Where’s Jack?” he asked me once.

“I think that’s run its course too. We’re not getting along.”

“Is it because of me?”

“Not at all, Pete. It’s school stuff.”

“Does he know about me yet?”

“No.” I didn’t know who at school knew, or if anyone besides Nicki did. I didn’t know who outside school knew either. Mom and Dad said that it was just a matter of time before all Seaville would hear the news.

“Maybe you should tell Jack,” Pete suggested. “Maybe whatever’s going down between you two really
does
have something to do with me. Did you ever think about that?”

“Next thing you’ll say is Mom says I’m handling all this too well,” I teased him.

“I just hope we’re
all
strong enough for whatever comes, when it comes, Ricky,” Pete said.

“Well, we’re going to hang together,” I said. “Family is first.”

“Why the hell do all of Dad’s old chestnuts suddenly sound good to me?” Pete said.

“I hope you’re not going to join The Hadefield Club,” I told him. “I hope you’re not going to start telling corny jokes.”

“Maybe this thing’s affecting my brain.” Pete laughed.

Then one morning at the beginning of Christmas week, I saw her look up as I was passing her in the hall. She was opening her locker, dressed in some sort of very long white coat, with white boots on, and a white scarf around her neck.

She was smoking, getting ready to drop the cigarette and step on it, something I’d seen her do so many times, and then she’d pick up the butt, with the smoke still streaming out of her nose, and she’d stick it into a Kleenex, to throw away.

I said, “No smoking, lady, you’re on school property.”

“Are you going to tell on me?” It was the first thing she’d said to me in weeks, and she was smiling, with one eyebrow raised.

“Maybe,” I said. My heart was pounding. I kept on going, though, and she called after me, “Don’t tell everything, though, Eri!” I heard the old, familiar laughter, triggering all the things I still felt, making my blood rush again the old way. I was smiling, walking off the ground, high, climbing.

It was all I needed.

I couldn’t find her in the crowd after school. I figured she’d gotten out of there fast, the way she always did, and I knew where I was going, even though I was due at the bookstore. It was a Tuesday.

I thumbed a ride out to Kingdom By The Sea.

I walked across the drawbridge under a sky as blue as I’d ever seen one, with lush, white, cottony clouds and the sun inching over to change to red and set.

I didn’t care if Cap saw me coming, or if Toledo did, and I wasn’t surprised when no one seemed to be around as I went through the front door, because I had an idea it was the right time for this move.

I went up the spiral staircase, thrilled to be back, and down the carpeted hall I knew like I knew the back of my hand, headed straight for Dream Within A Dream….
All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream.

Scatter was curled up on the bed with Nine, and Nicki’s closet door was open, with all her sky-high heels hanging there in bags, the crazy clothes on hangers, the hat boxes stacked on the floor…. I drank it all in, remembering the Sunday afternoon we’d run in there wet, shivering, new from making love, leaping under the covers. (It’s so late…. It’s gotten so dark out…. Have you got a phone I can use? … Erick, not yet … not yet.)

I walked across to the window and looked out.

I saw her. In the distance, on the dunes.

She was all in white, and he was in black, that same long black overcoat he’d worn to the Ring Dance. I watched her take the black cane from his hand, put it up behind his shoulders, then with both hands pull him toward her.

She said something to him before she stood on tiptoe and moved her mouth up to his.

I remembered the time before we’d kissed, she’d said to me, “It’s funny, because I never thought you liked me.”

And I remembered how she’d said once, “See, that sleazeball doesn’t like me.”

When I got home, Pete asked me why
I
wasn’t at the bookstore. He was in the kitchen, making himself an eggnog.

“I felt like being with you,” I said.

I did.

“I actually finished something today, Ricky,” he said.

“I just finished something, too,” I said. I finally knew it, and I knew that finally I was completely on my own. “What did
you
just finish?” I asked Pete.

“Remember ‘The Sweet Perfume of Goodbye’? The world where there’s no fragrance whatsoever until someone starts dying?”

I nodded, wishing I could put my arms around my brother, realizing he was on his own, too, and always had been, even when he was younger than I was.

“Can I read it?” I said.

Pete said he wished I would. “I think there’s still something wrong with the opening paragraph. Do you want some of this eggnog?”

“No. Thanks.”

I followed him up to his apartment. He looked so little to me. I thought of all the times when I was a kid I’d walked behind him, and worried that I’d never be that big or that good.

“Why don’t I read it to you?” Pete said, grabbing the manuscript from his desk and sitting down on the couch.

He said, “Remember, you were the first one I ever tried ‘The Skids’ out on, too? You said it gave you the creeps.” Pete chuckled. “I never forgot that.”

“I liked it, though. I just couldn’t figure out how you’d think up something like that.”

“Mom used to rearrange the furniture when she was unhappy. I’d be upstairs at my typewriter rearranging the world.”

I sat across from him while he began reading.

“‘When I woke up this morning, there was a faint fragrance in my room, so subtle and exquisite, I marvel at it. And I know its meaning, but not its pain yet. That will come, for I am changing.’” Pete stopped and looked up at me. “That’s not quite right. It should probably read, ‘That will come, for I am bound to change.’”

“He isn’t really changed yet,” I agreed. “He only sees the change coming.”

“Exactly,” Pete said. “There’s the sweetness first … and later on, the end.”

My real name is Marijane Meaker.

When I first came to New York City from the University of Missouri, I wanted to be a writer. To be a writer back then, one needed to have an agent. I sent stories out to a long list of agents, but no one wanted to represent me. So, I decided to buy some expensive stationery and become my own agent. All of my clients were me with made-up names and backgrounds. “Vin Packer” was a male writer of mystery and suspense. “Edgar and Mamie Stone” were an elderly couple from Maine who wrote confession stories. (They lived far away, so editors would not invite them for lunch.) “Laura Winston” wrote short stories for magazines like
Ladies’ Home Journal
. “Mary James” wrote only for Scholastic. Her bestseller is
Shoebag
, a book about a cockroach who turns into a little boy.

My most successful writer was Vin Packer. I wrote twenty-one paperback suspense novels as Packer. When I wanted to take credit for these books, my editor told me I could not, because Vin Packer was the bestselling author—not Marijane Meaker.

I was friends with Louise Fitzhugh—author of
Harriet the Spy
—who lived near me in New York City. We often took time away from our writing to have lunch, and we would gripe about writing being such hard work. Louise would claim that writing suspense novels was easier than writing for children because you could rob and murder and include other “fun things.” I’d answer that children’s writing seemed much easier; describing adults from a kid’s eye, writing about school and siblings—there was endless material.

I asked Louise what children’s book she would recommend, and she said I’d probably like Paul Zindel’s
The Pigman
, a book for children slightly older than her audience. I did like it, a lot, and I decided my next book would be a teenage one (at the time, we didn’t use the term “YA” to describe that genre). I knew I would need yet another pseudonym for this venture, so I invented one, a take-off on my last name, Meaker: M. E. Kerr. (Louise, on the other hand, never tried to write for adults. She was a very good artist, and her internal quarrel was whether to be a writer or a painter.)

Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack!
was my first Kerr novel. The story of an overweight and sassy fifteen-year-old girl from Brooklyn, New York,
Dinky
was an immediate success. Between 1972 and 2009, thirty-six editions were published in five languages.

Gentlehands
, a novel as successful as
Dinky
but without the humor, is a romance between a small-town boy and a rich, sophisticated Hamptons summer girl. The nickname of the boy’s grandfather is Gentlehands, but he is anything but gentle. An escaped Holocaust concentration camp guard, he once took pleasure in torturing the female prisoners. His American family does not know about his past until the authorities track him down. Harrowing as the story is, the
New York Times
called it “important and useful as an introduction to the grotesque character of the Nazi period.”

One of the hardest books for me to write was
Little Little
, my book about dwarfs. I kept worrying that I wouldn’t get my little heroine’s voice right. How would someone like that feel, a child so unlike others? After a while, I finally realized we had a lot in common. As a gay youngster, with no one I knew who was gay, I had no peers, no one like me to befriend—just like my teenage dwarf. She finally goes to a meeting of little people and finds friends, just as years later I finally met others like me in New York City.

I also used my experience being gay in a Kerr novel called
Deliver Us from Evie
. I set the story in Missouri, where I had studied journalism at the state university. I had been a tomboy, so I made my lead character, Evie, a butch lesbian. She is skillful at farm chores few females would be interested in, dresses boyishly, and has little interest in the one neighborhood boy who is attracted to her. I didn’t want to feminize her to make her more acceptable, and I worried a bit that she wouild be too much for the critics. Fortunately, my readers liked Evie and her younger brother, Parr, who doesn’t want to take over the family farm when he grows up. The book is now in two thousand libraries worldwide.

When I write for kids, I often draw on experiences I had when I was a teenager living in Auburn, New York—a prison city. All of us were fascinated by the large stone building in the center of town, with gun-carrying guards walking around its stone wall. Called Cayuga Prison (Auburn is in Cayuga County), it appears in several of my books. One of these books is called
Your Eyes in Stars
.

Growing up, I was friends with a boy whose family was in the funeral business. As the only male, he was expected to take over the business when he grew up. Can you imagine looking forward to that in your future? Neither could Jack, who inspired
I’ll Love You When You’re More Like Me
.

My book
Night Kites
is about AIDS. To my knowledge, it was the first print book that featured two gay men who have contracted AIDS, rather than having the illness come about because of a blood transfusion. When we first learned of AIDS in 1981, everyone grew afraid of old friends who were gay males. There was a cruel joke that “gay” stood for “got AIDS yet?” But soon we realized AIDS was not just a gay problem. The book is set in the Hamptons, though much of the action takes place on a Missouri farm.

I have also written a teenage autobiography, called
Me Me Me Me M
e, which deals with my years growing up in upstate New York during the thirties and forties. My older brother, Ellis, was a fighter pilot in the naval air force, seeing action over Japan. After World War II, he fought in Vietnam for our secret airline Air America, and later in Korea. He was my favorite relative until Vietnam. We had a major falling-out over the war when he called me a “peacenik.” We never felt the same about each other after that, up until his death in the nineties. My much younger brother has lived with his family most of his life in Arizona. We don’t see as much of each other as we’d like because of the distance between our homes.