The Fisher Boy (18 page)

“Do you know who killed Ian?” I asked gently.

“I dunno.”

“Have you any idea why Ian was killed?”

“Got me.”

“Ian had his moments of being a major-league asshole, but he meant a lot to me. We’d grown up together.” Then I risked saying it, just to test it out: “We were like brothers.”

He began gliding a salt shaker in circles around the table, pretending it was a racing car probably. He was a child-man, stunted somehow.

“There are people in the street, runaways, vagrants.”

He kept gliding the salt shaker in circles around the Formica.

“They say they’re from Scandinavia, but I think they’re from some cult, some cult that’s headquartered over in Truro.”

He sighed.

“Do you know who killed Ian?” I asked a second time.

“Why would I?”

“
Because you’re hiding so fucking much!” I bellowed.

“That has nothing to do with Ian!” Edward yelled. Such a strong voice from such a small body. He put the inhaler back into his mouth, pumped it, then took it away. “Ian was a dangerous man.”

“Why? Why do you say that?”

“Just look how he provoked a nice guy like you.”

I ignored his sarcasm. “Why am I in danger? You said I was in danger.”

“I shouldn’t have said that. I feel faint. May I take a cold shower? A quick shower?”

“Of course.” Granting him this small favor might cause him to cooperate, alter the tone of this encounter. After all, I had him alone, away from his keepers, and letting him shower might make up for my hitting him, for my bullying him and acting like…Ian.

He stripped off his shirt with the same practiced grace he’d used at Herring Cove. In a moment, he stood naked, carefully draping his shirt, pants, socks, and jacket over my kitchen chairs. Shedding his clothing seemed to bolster his confidence, just as it had at the beach.

Backing away from me into my bathroom, he smiled. “I’ll only be a minute, I promise,” he said, like a youth from Royall’s turn-of-the-century libido.

I followed him into the bathroom. He was showering like a child, pirouetting slowly in the spray, then pausing to drink from the nozzle. He was like a Victorian slum child who’d never used plumbing. He was reacting with delight to the sensuous play of water streaming and glittering over his body.

My light cotton clothes were saturated with sweat. The spray from the shower—the curtain was bunched to one side—teased my own bare legs and arms. Edward finally saw me watching him, or let me know he’d seen me, and, lathering the bar of soap against his pubic hair, which was brownish not blond, I now noticed, he said, “Come on in, the water’s fine.”

I couldn’t let him seduce me, but I’d have to play along to get him to talk. “Who hurt you?” I asked, recalling what he’d said in the kitchen. When he shifted, revealing his back, I half-expected the drama of welts or scars, but there was nothing but the perfection of his muscles, from his nape to his waist. I remembered his hitchhiking story, about the man raping him in the Province Lands.

He was getting an erection, this choirboy with the equipment of a satyr. My own loins were activating: he knew I was fighting the urge.

“I don’t have much time.” He stepped naked onto the fluffy little bath mat with the
Mayflower
worked in synthetic fibers. “On Wednesday nights, I’ll be at their office. Soliciting contributions.” He helped himself to my towels, patting himself dry. Since I’d rebuffed his advances, he was losing his erection; it had become an inconvenience.

“Have you seen that man who raped you?”

He didn’t answer, just kept drying the soles of his feet.

“Your hair was blond before. You used to dye it. Now you’re letting it grow brown again.”

“Mark, you have to understand. I was raised…in a very rigid system. It’s all I’ve ever known.”

“So that’s the attraction of these…Soldiers?”

“I went with them for my safety!” He sidled past me, cupping his genitals in my towel. In the kitchen, pulling up his pants (he wore no briefs), he repeated, “Ian was a dangerous man.”

“So you’re happy he’s dead. It’s only logical. You and this Golden One you spoke of.”

He kept silent.

I switched tactics, became the good cop: “You’re afraid. I can tell you’re afraid, we all are. Look, perhaps I can help, but only if I know more.”

Just then the rickety stairs outside my back door began to vibrate and Arthur called, “Mark? Mark? Are you okay?”

Arthur scowled at the sight of his former treasure. “Good God in heaven. I hope this little rendezvous wasn’t planned.”

“It wasn’t,” Edward said. “I saw Mark and followed him, after the rally. He let me use his shower. I’d had an asthma attack, I almost passed out.” He kept bungling the knot of his tie. “Nothing happened between us, Arthur, honest.”

“Let me guess—you swear it on a stack of Bibles,” Arthur said.

“I’ve caused you a lot of trouble, and I apologize,” Edward said. He’d put everything on again, even his suit jacket, ripped silver lining and all.

Arthur clamped his big hand around Edward’s wrist. “You’re a very troubled young man,” he said.

“I know that,” Edward whispered.

Arthur held his wrist for an instant, then released it. Edward retrieved his inhaler from the kitchen table, then made the swift, offended exit of the boy kept late after class.

Chapter Twenty-five

The flip side of Arthur’s benevolence, his “shadow,” as Miriam would say, was his love of gossip. He spread gossip the way day care centers spread colds: relentlessly, efficiently, and without conscious malice. So he waited all of twelve hours to tell Roberto about finding me with Edward.

I knew something was wrong. Roberto was redolent with Drakka Noir, simmering the entire afternoon, full of the menace of anger or creativity, as if ruminating about a skit in rehearsal. The Big Fight happened Tuesday, July 29th, at 11:19 in our room in the attic of the White Gull. Undressing, Roberto was silent, handsome and unapproachable, folding his briefs instead of slinging them over a chair. He kicked one of his joke shop toys, the walking dentures, across the floor.

Then a hornet began buzzing along the ceiling, buzzing as loud as hedge clippers, knocking against the rafters as it sought escape. The attic felt steaming. I was about to turn on our big electric fan.

“Kill the wasp first,” Roberto commanded.

It was an intriguing slip of the tongue. “It’s a hornet.” I had seen its yellow markings.

He detonated: “I don’t need a fucking Audubon lecture, just kill the godamn bug so I can sleep!”

“I” not “we.”

I tugged the case from my pillow and began throwing it, always hitting the wood just beside the seemingly psychic insect. “Your timing is as bad as onstage,” Roberto snapped, snatching my pillow and pressing it against the hornet until the bug fell to the floor, sputtering like a downed power line. A smack of Roberto’s Teva sandal killed it.

“Arthur told me everything. About finding you and Little Mr. Wonderful in his birthday suit. Is that why you kept the apartment? So you could plow little Edward on the side? Arthur says he’s hung like a horse.”

I told him the truth, how Edward had followed me there after noticing me listening to the evangelist. I told him about Edward’s seductive shower, how I’d challenged him, hit him, demanded he tell me what he knew about Ian and all the catastrophes of the summer.

“This isn’t working,” Roberto said.

I felt nauseous, felt that heaviness at the back of my tongue.

“This living and working together, it isn’t working.” He lay down on the futon I’d used before we’d become lovers.

Why was I surprised? He’d been so calm the other week by Provincetown Harbor, telling me I’d have to leave because the other houseboy was returning. He’d been distancing himself emotionally more and more, spending his free time watching videotapes of
The Honeymooners
instead of swimming at Race Point with me. I thought of telling him all my secrets, about Ian being my brother, about the trauma of finding his body after our sex in the dunes, about my visit to Truro and meeting that giant and those spooky girls materializing from the woods.

But I didn’t, I held back. Still, I needed the best acting of my career to say one word: “Fine.”

Roberto telephoned his father, then got Roger Morton’s permission to spend some time with his family at the house they were renting in Owl Island, Maine. It was true that his sister Elana was “recovering from surgery,” but it was minor, orthodontic, not the emergency Roberto described. Now he was literally distancing himself, so I decided to do the same, to take on all Roberto’s duties at the White Gull but to abandon our attic quarters, with its mattress full of memories. I’d sleep at my grungy apartment, haunted though it was by the theft of the bloody towel and the subtle shuffling of the furniture.

I was unable to visit Edward at the Christian Soldiers’ office that Wednesday, unable even to phone him. On duty at the White Gull, I had no privacy, I was frantic without Roberto’s help, quoting rates, taking reservations, moving guests’ cars in the parking lot. I discovered that Roberto had let a number of ongoing chores slide, like cleaning the oven and fertilizing the plants and buying staples for the kitchen. I ran out of muffin mix and detergent for the wash. Roberto was spoiled, I decided, immature even for his younger age. And his immaturity wasn’t confined to the guest house, it leached over onto the stage. He was always jealous of other actors’ applause, critical of everyone, of my mime skills and rapport with the audience, even critical of my using an electric razor.

For an instant, I remembered his straight razor, and I pictured him on the breakwater, seizing Ian and opening his throat, so that Ian’s reactionary voice was forever stilled. Silence Equals Death indeed. But that was spite, not logic.

My mother claims I have “People Issues.” She’d cite the Lisa Incident, from work, as an example. “Just talk things out,” she’d always say. “Don’t write people off right off the bat.” But when you’ve lived with rumors all your life, about your parentage and everything. I enjoyed advertising for five years, then a kind of rot set in. So, sometimes, during breaks, I’d sneak up onto the roof of our building and sit there on the gravel with just the pigeons and the skyline, and smoke a joint. There was a kid from the mailroom who’d do the same thing, and he became my dealer, more or less. We’d smoke afternoons, mostly Fridays when the weather was decent. Everything was fine until Lisa found out.

Socially she was my saboteur. Technically, she was my administrative assistant. “And not your personal slave,” she’d be sure to add. She had a pug face and silver fingernails and a battalion of yarn animals thumb-tacked along the rim of her cubicle. She’d go on about her diet, trips to Aruba, and tickets to the Barry Manilow concert. She was the niece of a city counselor, a night student at law school, and a self-appointed guardian of virtue.

She was put out in the extreme if you asked her to do anything after three-thirty. “If you concentrated afternoons, you wouldn’t give me all this last-minute work,” she’d say, with a slight collapse of her shoulders. And this was long before I’d begun hitting the roof.

I know what turned her against me. It was about Reza, the Iranian intern. It was something that had happened on Halloween, when our whole office went to Sligo, the pub at Quincy Market. Lisa kept drinking her “yard-long” glass of Guinness and giving me the evil eye because, by coincidence, I was seated next to Reza, and he was actually enjoying himself, which was due more to his intake of Long Island iced tea than to anything related to me. And, by coincidence, we left Sligo simultaneously. Then something in the Middle East—a coup or a wedding—resulted in Reza leaving the office and America the following week, leaving Lisa convinced I had seduced or defiled Reza, transforming me into The Reason Her Man Got Away.

Then she found the “evidence” on the roof, some roaches or a few bits of grass; the mailroom kid was getting careless. Suddenly, the door to the roof was locked.

I heard Lisa had mentioned the dope to my manager, who became distant, circumspect, dropping hints about our excellent Employee Assistance Plan, the counseling they offered for stress…and substance abuse. Then came my scrap with our big software client—and I quit to do improv in P-town.

“People are fallible, darling,” my mother had always said. “Colleagues, lovers, everybody. They’re fallible. It’s human nature.”

Roberto was fallible. I kept playing and re-playing our quarrel in my mind. During my scant free time, I roamed Commercial Street, seeing the same jaded residents and trolleys of sun-weary tourists. Miriam was helping Arthur plan his Swim for Scholars benefit, so I sometimes took Chloe on my excursions.

She seemed shy at first, then became delighted to see me. She would express this delight by circling me in a brief dance of joy, then she’d tickle the crook of my elbow and giggle. She seemed terribly small in the summer throngs, a world of knees for her. Fearful of losing her, I clutched her hand with a protective ferocity that once made her howl. I had to adjust my speed, too. She took tiny steps and often stopped, fascinated by things on the ground: pennies, Popsicle sticks, glitter in the gutter, a Yorkshire terrier like a walking toupée.

We built a sandcastle on the beach near MacMillan Wharf. Some psychologists claim that boys build pointed things, subconsciously honoring the phallus, while young girls dig burrows, expressing the wombs swimming through their psyches. If so, Chloe defied these stereotypes by patting together a castle that bristled with battlements and towers. She decorated it with shells and pebbles and gull feathers, a skate egg sack serving as a flag. She was beaming, but desperate to show her handiwork to her mother, so I suggested we buy a disposable camera.

Luck was with us, the castle was safe upon our return. No bully had kicked it apart and the tide was just easing in. So Chloe posed next to her castle, joy radiating from her features.

To celebrate, we went for ice cream at the stand at MacMillan Wharf. “What flavor do you want?” I asked and she looked terribly somber, wide-eyed, with one wrinkle, a zigzag of concern, marking her forehead. “Would you like chocolate or vanilla or black raspberry?” Again, the wide eyes and worried forehead.

She stood there, in her purple sun dress and sandals of clear purple plastic, like grape candy. “They have bubblegum and pistachio and maple walnut and ginger.” Gently, I removed her from the path of some French-Canadian tourists concentrating on their guidebook instead of watching where they were going. “I’d like piña colada,” she finally decided, and the man serving us laughed.

“That was my ex-boyfriend’s favorite flavor…I’ll take a medium piña colada and a medium black raspberry cone.”

We had just licked our ice cream to a manageable size when Chloe asked, “Can we go back?”

“Back where? Back home?”

“To make sure the sandcastle is safe.”

So we returned to the beach and finished our cones there.

***

I must have missed Roberto or missed the idea of having a boyfriend, the emotional convenience, because I became lonely enough to telephone my mother. She’d obviously been drinking, as she was only semi-coherent, talking about painting a mural across the back of the gatehouse, telling me to “forget everything” she’d said about Duncan Drummond while never denying that it was true.

Just for the hell of it, I asked her about
The Golden One.
Had she heard of such a painting or heard the phrase in any context? She focused enough to say no, then went back to describing the mural: “It’ll be a jazz funeral, see, in New Orleans…”

***

Then I saw him again, when returning from Miriam’s after dropping off Chloe. I saw the African American who’d been at Ian’s funeral—and on Commercial Street, the day of the museum stabbing. Dressed in a shirt with lime pinstripes, khaki pants with creases so sharp they could cut you, and woven-leather Mexican sandals, he was carrying a cardboard tray of clinking jars.

Of course. When I’d noticed him from the deck of the vegetarian restaurant, he’d ducked into a shop specializing in local products: I knew its name, but my mind had misfiled it. Pretending to tie my shoe, I paused to observe where he was going.

He had a jaunty, confident walk, almost a bounce, and his noble head was like a bronze cast from some lost culture from the Bight of Benin. He was used to being stared at, what with his dreadlocks and his beauty, so he probably hadn’t noticed my fascination, here or at Ian’s funeral.

He went into a shop on the right-hand side of the street, almost opposite the vegetarian restaurant. Scents of Being, yes, just like before.

I trailed him. I figured he might know something, and he’d seemed so out of place at Ian’s funeral. Scents of Being wasn’t air-conditioned. It was stocked with potpourri kept in the heavy glass jars I associated with Victorian stores selling horehound drops and molasses candy. The odors of the potpourri were at war with each other: lavender, then lilac, then something like mown hay. There were other fragrances too, of bath salts and oatmeal soap and wreathes woven from dried herbs.

Unfortunately, the shop was all but empty, so I couldn’t casually spy on my quarry in the anonymity of a crowd. He was counting out jars of strawberry preserves for the small, dark woman at the cash register.

“That’s all?” the woman said. “I thought you promised us
three
dozen. Jason, don’t do this to me, please!”

Jason. I had heard that name before—in the woods in Truro, from that little girl. She’d asked me, “Do you work with Jason?”

He was extraordinarily handsome, his only flaw being a gap separating his two front teeth. On his wrist, he wore a gold watch with an onyx face.

When he’d finished his transaction, I approached him in the street outside the shop. “Excuse me,” I said. His manner was Wall Street-whiz-meets-power-at-the-ashram. “What can I do you for?” he asked, rolling a perfect cigarette using paper and tobacco from a pouch from the pocket of his baggy trousers. He lit the cigarette with a gold lighter, and, when exhaling, let the smoke leak from the corner of his mouth as he talked.

I told him the most bold-faced series of lies imaginable, that I’d loved his preserves, like everyone else, and was considering starting a small business of my own, an artists’ cooperative. There was so much mass-market junk here in Provincetown, it was discouraging; so little was really New England. I was making this up, sentence by sentence as I spoke, sure he was aware this was a ruse. To temper the lies, I spiced them with bits of the truth. “I’ve been in improv a while, I’m getting restless.”

I convinced him, surprisingly easily, to have a drink at the Café Blasé. It was my idea to come here, but I was nervous about my choice because my apartment was just across the street. I didn’t want him visiting me by surprise.

“So what brought you to Provincetown?” He added something none of my friends would think necessary: “Be honest now.”

“I was at loose ends.” Our improv group was having growing pains, we were moderately successful, earning $900 per gig, but that was divided by seven, and we were having trouble with varying levels of commitment; actors were missing rehearsals, skipping shows, being diverted by day jobs and backstage scraps.

“The usual
maya.
”

“Excuse me?”

“Yearning for more, but getting less. Seeking the truth while living a lie.”