Robin and Ruby (34 page)

The wallpaper makes him cringe now: a busy pattern of strong vertical lines blooming into shells, flowers, butterfly wings that makes the walls look they are leaning inward, threatening to collapse. He’d picked it out during a brief, intense phase when he became obsessed by everything Art Deco. Living in Manhattan had attuned his eye not only to the majestic Chrysler Building but also to other buildings done in that style, sturdy banks and elegant apartment houses, and the decorative details that popped up everywhere, like on the sidewalks around Rockefeller Center, where the trees grew out of pewter grilles shaped like crescent moons. He saw himself in those earliest New York days as a refugee from the suburbs, from the rituals and routines of boys he didn’t like and didn’t understand. This was his dandified, Oscar Wilde period, when he addressed his friends as “darling” and wore velvet pants he’d begged his mother to buy him from Macy’s. Transporting this aesthetic back to his weekend bedroom in Greenlawn was a way to extend the vision he’d created for himself as a young urbanite, a student of theater, finally living in a suitable place, awash in grand style and sharp decor.

New York proved to be grimier and harder-edged than he’d first let himself see. The city was still recovering from financial bankruptcy, was famous for potholes and gridlock, was under the weight of constant crime no longer confined to “bad neighborhoods” but potentially waiting around any corner. His feminine getups, which gave him a certain luster among the other drama students at Washington Irving, also attracted the very same insults he thought he was leaving behind in New Jersey, and he soon enough switched gears and began wearing olive drab bought in Army & Navy stores and Converse high-tops with argyle socks. Now the wallpaper seems not to point to New York’s lost grandeur, but to his own tarnished vision of the fabulous life he’d expected. And it’s also wildly out of place in this old house, like a silver buckle on a broken-in work boot.

He can see now that there was something remarkable about his father letting him choose this paper. When they had stood side by side, slopping the paste on the back, then hanging and smoothing it together, Robin was aware of it only as work, not as a gift, which it surely was. Clark was letting him have his little bit of glamour, even if it was a folly. It must have been difficult for his father to hold his tongue. He wonders if he ever thanked him.

Next to his bed is a nightstand that was also part of the redecoration, with a bit of Deco flair: curved corners and sculpted feet. It has a little locked cabinet in it. Robin reaches his hand around the back of the nightstand, where the key hangs on a hook. He knows what he’ll find inside the cabinet: a pile of diaries that he kept during high school. He used to fill them up, and then bring them to New Jersey and keep them hidden here, away from the prying eyes of his mother, who would read them, he was sure, if she had the chance.

He scans across pages of his cursive handwriting, fatter and loopier than the way he writes today. The words are large and spread out on the page, as if his every thought deserved headline treatment. There are details about his classes, arguments with his mother about his curfew and his chores, breathless accounts of shows he’d seen:
Children of a Lesser God, 42nd Street, Baryshnikov on Broadway.
But this isn’t what he wants to read.

He wants to read about falling in love. He wants to read about Alton.

Eleventh grade, Washington Irving High School. He thought at the time that he’d found a “soul mate” in Alton.
I finally told him about the stuff I’ve done with other guys. I told him about my piano “lessons.” I figured I’d shock him, but he didn’t say much.
His silence at the time seemed like acceptance; now Robin can see how quietly freaked out Alton had been, in part because he was so intrigued.
He said we should be totally open with each other. And he said “I would only do that with someone if it was love.
” He flips ahead, looking for the entry about the weekend spent at Alton’s family vacation home in the Hamptons. The night Alton climbed into bed with him, and after months of flirtation, and teasing, and circular conversations about beauty and bisexuality, they finally had sex.

And then weeks of worry and pining:
He’s been so busy we haven’t had any time together…. We’re not in the same workshop this quarter so we don’t have much to talk about…. He said he’s “resetting hispriorities” whatever that’s supposed to mean…. I asked what I did wrong and he didn’t answer…. He said he has a lot of pressure on him.
No more trips to the West Village, no more weekends in the Hamptons, no more tagging along on dates with Carolyn, no more special nicknames. He remembers all of it clearly, remembers how he’d keep himself awake at night, crying under his pillow. The surprise is this: between the first diary entry and the last, only six months went by. The great obsession of his high school years flourished and died in half a year. That’s less time than he spent with Peter, though it somehow has the weight of something longer.

And then there’s this, the final entry in this diary, dated June 25, 1981, almost four years ago to the week:

At first, he doesn’t remember writing this, though with every sentence the moment comes into focus. George had come into the city that day, and the two of them rode the subway downtown. They paid the quarter for the Staten Island Ferry, traveled there and back in the salty harbor air, and then went up to the observation deck at the World Trade Center, which was the closest he’d ever been to the top of the world. They stayed there through sunset, watching the lights come on all over the city, and were the last to get kicked out by the guards. While Robin confessed about Alton, George looked him in the eyes and listened, and that made it easier to speak.

When they parted earlier, he wanted to say more to George, wanted to blurt out, “Let’s be lovers.” But somehow he couldn’t. When Peter dumped him in the restaurant, he didn’t speak in his own defense. When his father, just a little while ago, wouldn’t assure him, I won’t abandon you if you get sick, Robin kept quiet again. He often thinks of himself as a open book, all his feelings on the surface, but now he sees that over and over, where his heart is concerned, he has failed to speak his truth. It’s there on these pages about Alton. It was there even when he lived in this house, when his friendship with Scott Schatz became sexual at the same time his crush on Todd Spicer became sexual, too, and each of them, in their own way, stifled his affection, chastising, “Why do you always have to
talk
about everything? You’re acting like a girl.” The message is clear: Don’t tell another guy what you feel, if you don’t want your feelings hurt. Don’t ask for more than he’s willing to give you, because then he’ll give you nothing at all. If your heart is aching, keep it to yourself. It’s your problem, not his. Alton’s vision of Robin as a
heartbreaker
is exactly backward: It’s his own heart that’s been injured, again and again, sometimes cleaved by rejection, sometimes smothered by silence.

He looks up from the old diary, to the opposite side of the room, and he is overtaken by a jolt from the past: suddenly the Deco paper is not yet up, Jackson’s trophies have not yet been cleared, and Jackson’s death is new and fresh and staggering. Robin is fourteen, and feverish, lying right here, reading the copy of
Franny and Zooey
he got for Christmas. He looks up from the book to the other bed, and he understands that it will never be host to his brother again, but at the same time the bed doesn’t seem exactly empty, either; and then he looks out the window, across the back yard to the Spicers’ house, where a light is on in Todd’s bedroom, a shadow moving across the window. The last time he’d seen Todd, he’d been humiliated in front of all his friends, Todd had actually spit beer on him and threatened to beat him up. And in that moment he couldn’t tell: was his brother gone and Todd still around, but out of reach, or was Todd gone and Jackson lingering here like a ghost? What has been lost, and why, and what part of it is his fault? It is a moment of infinite disorientation: There is pain that he thinks he has caused, and pain that he thinks was thrust upon him, but he can’t tell one from the other.

And now, here, today, coming back from this slide into the past, he sees that there is a difference between these various losses, these multiple pains. That for all his confusion as a fourteen-year-old, there always was. He can’t bring his brother back. He can’t ever undo that day on the slide in the playground. He can’t change the ways he has been misunderstood, even used, by boys he has been drawn to.

But it must still be possible to love and be loved back in equal measure. It has to be. Because why else is that love put in your heart, if not to find expression? And why else do we carry on, if not to try again?

He thinks of the moment at the graveside when George took his hand.

And he wants to bow his head again, because what he wishes for, hopes for, even prays for, if that’s what this is, is not forgiveness, not for the past, but courage, for what comes next.

O
K, here it goes. Mother-daughter hour in her childhood bedroom. Another scolding from a member of the MacKenzie family. Ruby has already tried to beg for some time to take a nap, but Dorothy insisted on talking right now, said she’d been in Greenlawn long enough and wanted to get back to Manhattan. They could talk there or here, but they were going to talk. “OK, talk,” Ruby told her. “But I’m expecting a call.”

She has already tried the motel—glad to get a woman at the front desk instead of that patronizing man. Very kindly this woman told her that Chris had checked out. Yes, she was quite sure he’d gone. The maid had already turned the room. Ruby hung up the phone and stared out her window into the night sky, pitch black, except for a single star, or was it a planet, she can never be sure what she’s seeing up there. The moon wasn’t yet visible—that’s not a sign, she tells herself, though it’s hard to avoid thinking that way.

The mood is fraught—it seems like one of them will speak, and then the other, but all that comes out is a series of sighs. Ruby huddles near the headboard. Dorothy sits on the other end of the bed. Under a bright overhead light, the wear and tear of the years strain her face. People sometimes tell Ruby that she resembles Dorothy, but she hates that. She’ll never be a woman like her mother, whose every worry, attitude, and opinion is so transparent. A woman marked by a failed marriage, the mess of divorce, children gone or out of reach. No way.

It occurs to her to deal with this the way Wendy did with her mother—to just take whatever is coming, and leave it at that. Not to put up a fight, because everything eventually blows over. Laugh it off. And yet, when it comes to Dorothy, she doesn’t feel very forgiving, doesn’t feel it in her to cut that much slack.

Dorothy says, “Tell me about this boy,” and Ruby immediately wants to explode.

“It’s none of your business.” She can hardly keep her voice down.

“I would like to know.”

“I’m entitled to privacy.”

“I wish you’d confide in me.”

“Been there, done that. It didn’t do me any good.”

“What on earth are you referring to?”

“You know.”

“I’m not clairvoyant, dear.”

“When you told me to pretend I was still a virgin.
After
I had sex!”

Dorothy adjusts herself uncomfortably. “You were traumatized, Ruby. I was trying to help.”

“You told me to
forget
about it.”

“I wanted you to move on.”

“You wanted me to lie.”

In the hall she hears footsteps—Robin must be out there. He seems to pause, but then his door is opening and closing. He’s blocking himself off from this. She can’t blame him.

Dorothy says, “
You
didn’t want anyone to know, Ruby. You were upset that Robin found out.”

“Found out? You told him!”

“He knew something had happened.”

“You could have
helped
me.”

“I did help you, Ruby.” She lowers her voice. “I went to that boy’s, to Brandon’s, high school and filed a complaint. I remember it very well. I was told by the counselors that his parents were called in, and that they would discipline him. I followed up, and they told me they’d keep him away from you.”

Ruby hugs her pillow. This is new information—is it even true? If it was, wouldn’t she have known about it by now? It’s true that she never saw Brandon again at any of the school mixers. She’d thought that was a matter of luck. She was sixteen when all that happened, though it seems forever ago. If it hadn’t been for Chris this weekend, Brandon would have remained buried.

Dorothy is staring at her. “Dear, I’m concerned about what you said downstairs. About last night.”

“I couldn’t stay a virgin forever.”

Dorothy rubs her face wearily, and Ruby almost feels bad about the sarcasm.

“I don’t want to be lectured, Mom.”

“Yes, you’ve made it clear. You’re not taking advice from divorcées—” She offers a tight smile. “But if you’d tell me even a little something about Chris—”

“Why should I?”

“—I’ll listen.”

“You never do—”

“Give me a chance! For God’s sake, give me a goddamn chance.” Dorothy shouts these words, and the surprise of this—because she never raises her voice, she relies on measured condescension to do the job—has its effect. Ruby takes a deep breath. Feels herself retreat from the argument. She’s aware all over again of her ongoing physical discomfort—her stomach, her sunburn, a new, bloated feeling that she imagines for a wild moment to be some early warning of pregnancy—and then she does what she can to banish all this irritation, to concentrate.

“I don’t know,” she mumbles.

“Please,” Dorothy says. “I don’t want your life to be a mystery to me.”

“I met him a long time ago,” Ruby begins. “Do you remember Crossroads?” She talks, haltingly at first, about the retreat weekend, about the phone calls that followed and then ended without warning. “I kind of made myself forget him,” she says. “But I never really did, you know?” She says it was a surprise that he was there at the party, that he recognized her first. She tells her that she thinks he’s good looking, that she likes his style, that she already feels things for him she never felt for Calvin. Dorothy seems to be holding up her part of this—staying quiet, receptive—so Ruby says something she’s never said aloud before—that Chris is the first person to understand all the confusion in her head about God. She doesn’t mention cocaine or suicide or condoms slipping off—this is obviously not what you tell your mother, no matter how much she wants to be close to you—and anyway, these things don’t seem important compared to the overwhelming sense of fate and certainty that her feelings for Chris are wrapped in.

“Was he respectful?” Dorothy asks. “Of your sexuality?”

“Yeah.”

“And you did actually have sexual intercourse with him?”

“Yeah.”

“And?”

“It was major.”

“Major?”

Even though Dorothy keeps pressing on, Ruby senses that she’s nearing the limit of what she can tell her mother, what her mother can hear. She says, “I think it’s what people mean when they say ‘making love,’ instead of ‘having sex.’”

Dorothy brushes her hand lightly along Ruby’s hair. “Well, dear, that sounds like passion. That’s the word for what you’re describing.”

Ruby wrinkles her nose. “That’s something out of a romance novel. I mean—he gave me an orgasm.”

“I see.”

So that was the point where she went over the edge—she can see it in Dorothy’s face, in her body language, the way she’s rubbing her hands together now, as if smoothing in lotion. “Sorry, Mom.”

“No. Don’t be. Passion is physical. Romance is all the trappings, which you can whip up without real passion. You know, Clark was very romantic when we were first together, a million years ago. But when I look back on it, I don’t think that we ever felt passionate about each other.”

“But you married him.”

“I didn’t have much of a choice, dear. You know that.”

“You could have gotten an abortion.”

Dorothy blinks, an almost bewildered look on her face. “You can’t imagine how frightening an idea that was.”

“Right,” Ruby says. “The coat-hanger days. But if you really wanted to—we learned all about these women’s collectives in the sixties that were doing almost like an Underground Railroad for pregnant women.”

“Just because you learned it in school,” Dorothy says, and then swallows hard. Something passes over her face. Dorothy rubs her hands on her thighs and then stands. Ruby senses that the limit has been reached. Of course. There’s always a limit.

Dorothy says, “I’d like to get on the road before it’s too late. Perhaps we can continue this conversation in the car?’

“I’m not coming with you.”

“Why not?” Dorothy blurts.

“I told you, I gave him this number. I need to wait for this phone call now.”

“If that’s what you want,” she says, her voice cool—the same old Dorothy again.

“I can get back to the city by bus.”

As they hug good-bye—wrapping stiff arms around each other, their cheeks brushing—the familiar smell of her mother’s powdery-spicy perfume is suddenly everywhere, and Ruby almost changes her mind. It would be easy to get in the car and go back to Manhattan and sleep in her real bedroom tonight. It would be nice to imagine that the drive home would allow them to keep talking things through, and that this would be a watershed moment. They’d end the night huddled over the
New York Times
crossword puzzle, something that had once been part of their Sunday ritual. They’d eat the food Dorothy had cooked, and even sip a little wine, something Dorothy only does in moderation now. It would feel like a special occasion, and tomorrow she’d wake up refreshed, ready to start her life over again, free of Calvin, and move ahead with Chris.

But Dorothy’s embrace is brief, and the awkwardness magnifies as they pull apart with nothing more to say.

The door shuts behind Dorothy and Ruby is left staring at its blank back side—wood painted white, gone dingy, full of tiny pushpin holes and scraps of Scotch tape, remnants from the teen-magazine posters that used to hang there. She’s newly aware of the bloated feeling in her gut, the way her abdominal muscles ache, and above all her desire to sleep.

Lying in bed, she runs through everything she just told her mother and sees the conversation for what it is—a surprising level of honesty wrapped in a lot of avoidance. Selective details. A lack of trust in her mother’s ability to respond. Dorothy isn’t going to warm up to Chris, assuming she ever meets him, which is something Ruby would actually like to put off for as long as possible. And Chris might be in danger, and she couldn’t tell her mother about it. So what does that say about fantasies of being
close
?

She hears Dorothy across the hall, saying good-bye to Robin, their voices muffled and conspiratorial, intimate in tone. There’s a bit of light laughter between them. That’s just the way it is. It’s always seemed unfair that Robin has always been, will always be, the favorite. Now it strikes Ruby as a relief. A kind of freedom. She can do what she wants, and if her mother doesn’t like it, well, too bad, because her influence can only go so far. If there’s anything that’s been made perfectly clear this weekend, it is this: no one is ready for her to grow up, to be a woman, and make her own choices. No one except Ruby herself. She is done waiting for their permission.

After a while she knocks on Robin’s door. He calls her in, and there, amid all that loud wallpaper, he lies on his bed. He’s flipping through a notebook—one of those speckled composition books, black-and-white, like something from middle school—but as she comes into the room, he closes it quickly and turns it facedown. She says, “I’m not going back to the city with Dorothy.”

“So I heard.”

“Was she pissed?”

“You know Mom. She takes everything personally.”

She points to his notebook. “What’s that?”

“An old diary. From high school. I used to get myself quite worked up.”

“Used to?”

He smiles. He really does have a great smile—she thinks for the millionth time how Robin’s life has gone the way it has because people have wanted to get closer to that face of his. If she didn’t love him, she would probably hate him.

He says, “There are things in here I sort of forgot about.”

“I never keep a diary. What if someone else reads it?”

“Apparently, I’m an exhibitionist.” He thrusts out an arm theatrically. “When I die a famous actor, you can sell these to the tabloids. I promise to leave a beautiful corpse.”

He means it as a joke, but hearing his words is like being forced to swallow more alcohol. Her stomach flips. There’s just too much talk about death this weekend. It’s gotten under her skin. Maybe there’s no avoiding it, given what day it is. But with Chris still missing she feels the sourness of the very thought—she feels a sudden resolve.

“OK,” she begins. “I guess I’m on some kind of honesty kick tonight, so—it was nice of you to come and find me, because you thought something bad had happened. I do
get
that.”

“But?”

“But I’m worried that you ruined my chance to be with Chris. You came too soon.”

“I’m suspicious of him, Ruby. When I met him, he was kind of in a state.”

“He’s just emotional.”

Robin nods reluctantly.
Emotional
he seems to understand.

“I
like
him. A lot. I
care
about him. With Calvin—I always thought Calvin was cool and unique, but I never felt, you know,
passion.
” She can’t stop the word from coming out. Score one for Dorothy. “You understand.”

“I guess.”

“I want a real
lover
.”

“Only one? Having just one is so passé—”

“Be serious, you queen.”

This makes him smile again, and then he sits up, adjusting his posture, and announces, still smiling, though it now seems a little forced, that Peter broke off their relationship. And there’s more to it than that, he starts to explain—which is when Ruby flashes to the car ride up the Parkway, and then to the cemetery, and she knows what he’s going to tell her. “Does this have to do with George?”

“Yes.” He grabs the notebook and reads, “
Too bad George isn’t my boyfriend.
That’s from high school, before I even knew he was gay.” He begins to tell her about his weekend. She listens with a kind of amazement about a near fistfight in an alley, about hiding from the cops, about the two of them going back to their apartment and having sex for the first time. It’s not the details that surprise her—nothing that happens to her brother really comes as a surprise, given all that she knows about who he is and what he’s capable of—but rather it’s the fact that their lives seem, for the first time ever, to be made up of the same material. Maybe separate from each other, but at least parallel, which is something. He tells her that it’s not just the sexual connection that has been the revelation with George, but the fact that he actually possesses all the qualities Robin wanted Peter to have: stability, trustworthiness, sexual safety. He asks, “Do you think that’s weird?”