Virginia Lovers (16 page)

Daniel shrugged. He felt only the slightest need to defend the clientele of a place he’d not felt all that comfortable in himself. Especially when he studied his little brother and noticed how distressed he seemed. His expression reminded Daniel of the time they got lost in the woods outside of town. He was nine and Pete was eight. They had hiked out to some old farm and played in an abandoned farmhouse in the middle of a field and thrown rocks at the windows of a shed until it was dark and they could not find their way to the back road. Pete crying, Daniel trying to calm him. After an hour of wandering around in pastures Daniel grew scared himself and he remembered now how overwhelming his fear was, coupled with responsibility for his little brother.

Now the fear came in waves and was not always overwhelming. What was making it easier for him was the idea that he would not have to hide so much anymore.

“Let’s get a room,” Daniel said. “I need a shower.” They found a place finally with affordable rates. Pete immediately went down to a deli on the corner for beer and rolling papers and a
Penthouse
he hid from his brother first underneath his shirt and then in the folds of a thin towel in the bathroom. Pete tripped headfirst into the bed and rolled himself a fat joint, and after they smoked and drank a beer, Daniel headed down the street to fetch steak-and-cheese sandwiches with greasy fries. They ate on the beds while watching
Adam-12
and then a rerun of
The Wild Wild West
until it was dark out and all the beers were gone, at which point Daniel announced he was going out for a walk and Pete nodded as if he knew where his brother was going but didn’t say anything.

In the shower, Daniel wished for a change of clothes, decided he would not wear underwear, which excited him a little and sent his mind off in a pot-fueled fantasy of what might happen tonight. He was stretching out his fantasy when he reached for a towel and the
Penthouse
dropped onto the floor. A previous tenant’s, obviously. He sat down on the toilet naked and leafed through the magazine, comparing the models to the women he’d seen nearly naked in Rick’s the day before. These women of course were shaped perfectly, toned and thin in just the right proportions, full- and high-breasted, undeniably beautiful. And yet he felt very little, nothing more than a stirring at the sight of so much nakedness.

Instead of tucking the magazine back in the towel he left it out on the back of the toilet. Pete could have some fun with it. He felt a little less guilty going out to satisfy his needs now that Pete had some outlet for his own, though in general his little brother did not seem to direct much of his energy into getting laid. Occasionally Daniel would hear that Pete had “got off with” some girl at a party, but there were never second dates and he never heard Pete mention names. Too busy getting high. He thought of what Pete had told him back at the strip club, about his “problem” with booze and drugs, and he felt a guilty stab for buying him beer, for leaving him here with a full bag of dope while he went out to quench his own desire. They weren’t the same thing—wanting men was not an addiction. Daniel knew that, though he had to remind himself of it, often wished there was a cure, confinement in a hospital, a few follow-up meetings in some dank basement church, after which he would be cleared to live a “normal” life. Love women. Have children. Go into a classroom, a restaurant, a church and not feel as if he was visiting from some other planet.

“I’m going,” he said to his brother.

“You’re wearing that?”

Daniel was at once embarrassed by his brother’s attentiveness to his wardrobe and touched by his interest. Obviously Pete was too stoned to be sincere, but on the other hand he often turned surly-sarcastic when high, like the time he stumbled in from some party wrecked out of his gourd and Daniel had all these friends over and he invited Pete to watch James Taylor on
Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert
and Pete treated them all like they were hopeless squares for liking James Taylor.

“Not like I have a choice.”

“You threw up in that shirt, remember?”

“Either this or this.”

“Can I ask you a question about, um, that particular shirt? I mean, now that we’re on the subject and all.”

Here it comes, thought Daniel: The end of their truce. The return of my surly, judgmental little brother.

“I know what you’re going to ask. You want to know why I wear it.”

“I don’t know man, to me it seems …”

“I think it’s funny.”

Pete shook his head. “Yeah, well. I don’t really get the joke.”

“Of course Virginia isn’t for lovers. Of course it’s ridiculous for some state to go around claiming such a thing. But it’s also kind of wonderful, too.”

“So do you wear it because it’s ridiculous or because it’s kind of wonderful?”

There was a silence while Daniel considered the question with much more gravity than it was due. He thought of the one hand, the other hand. He thought of the torture of making false claims to the world, and of how this T-shirt, with its extravagantly happy message, meant something else to him—the worn feel of its stretched, soft cotton, the sloppiness of it compared to the usual buttoned-down Oxford or striped rugby shirt. Its charm, to him, had nothing to do with what it proclaimed. Therefore, he was wrong to think he was wearing it ironically. Or literally. He was wearing it because he liked the feel of it against his skin, a feeling which made him long to feel comfortable inside his body.

“I wear it because it’s comfortable,” he said, a little frustrated that he could not explain himself to Pete, since they seemed so close now.

“I can dig that,” said Pete, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a wad of bills. “Be good.”

“No way.”

“Then be good at it,” said his little brother.

Daniel thought of telling him not to wait up, that he would be gone awhile, but he did not want Pete to worry. He knew why Pete was here, why he had boarded that train behind him in Charlottesville: because he was scared. He’d never been away on his own; despite his affected cool he was a small-town boy. No, Daniel would be better off not alluding to the chance that he might find what he was after and come strolling in tomorrow afternoon, after a champagne brunch at some swanky restaurant where he and his new friend would lounge at a sidewalk table, the city and all its possibilities churning around him.

Outside the city thrummed with traffic at an hour when the only people out in Trent would be the police. At a newstand Daniel picked up a copy of a free local paper he’d noticed on the bar earlier that afternoon, in the back of which was listed the places he was looking for. With some of the Galaxy money he hailed his first-ever cab, thinking as he waved his hand slightly that he was hailing it. “Hail Caesar,” he said and laughed as he slid into the crinkly vinyl of the back seat and gave the address to the driver and immediately fell into a pocket of bottomless gloom and fear, remembering what he’d done and how he had let everyone down. He remembered his father once pulling him aside and saying,
Look, I know you and Pete have gone your separate ways, but Pete needs you, he really respects you, and he’s fallen in with some boys who, frankly, I would call them hoodlums,
and Daniel smirked in a way that let his father know he was not interested in what was expected of him.

Don’t you think you have a certain responsibility to take care of him?
his father had said.
If not, what’s the point of family?

“Here we are,” said the driver. He named his fare, looked at Daniel with disgust. Daniel was glad to be distracted from thoughts of the meaning of family. He counted out the cash, slid out onto the street.

Inside was all glowing lights. Strobes, twinkling prisms, the planets.
Math and shit,
Daniel chanted, smiling as he nudged his way through the crowd, which was 95 percent male and swaying to David Bowie’s “Fame.” There were three levels, a huge dance floor crowded with sweating, shirtless men in jeans and some in bikini briefs and one in a jockstrap, a black muscled god in nothing at all.

Daniel felt his body grow warm. He threaded his way to the bar for a drink and caught the eyes of every man who looked his way. What he imagined with a sudden piercing pride as he crossed the bar was his little brother’s blessing, but he did not hold this thought for long as suddenly a slim, preppy, blond guy was beside him and after yelling at each other over the thumping bass the blond guy asked him if he wanted to dance, and then he was dancing so glad for the pot, which erased any self-consciousness he might have felt and allowed him to move with a fluidity unavailable to him when straight and lead him, this pot for which he had his little brother to thank, to a couch in the corner where the blond preppy guy whose name he did not even catch sidled close.

While Pete read a
Penthouse
letter involving nurses who revived the victims of fender benders with their tongues.

He had his pants off halfway through the first letter and had come into a handtowel twice by the time he finished it.

And afterwards he lay there spent, imagining what he would say to his brother when he showed up later.

Well?
he’d say when Daniel walked cocky and somehow altered through the door, and his brother would say,
Fuck you, none of your beeswax.
And after a silence, passing a joint back and forth, Pete would ask,
When did you knows
and Daniel would say,
Know what?
even though he knew perfectly well. Pete would say,
You know what.

Forever, I’ve known it forever.

And Pete said out loud now to his brother who was not there, “You can’t give up on school because of this, we got to go back, we’ll just tell the truth. Fuck Lee Tysinger, he deserves to go to jail for this, they’ll understand, we’ll just tell them we were scared of him.”
I’m not scared of him I’m scared of me that’s who I’m scared of,
Daniel answered, and Pete would feel queasy because he was scared, too, of his brother and of himself, and he said, because he was scared, “You can’t give up.”

He imagined his brother’s voice growing high-pitched, bitter.
Fuck it, let them have it,
Daniel might say.
You have no idea what I had to go through to get their stupid scholarship. Sit on that bench night after night and after every practice, hear idiots like your buddy Lee whisper fag jokes behind my back and the whole time
he’s
the one getting blown by Brandon.

Pete said to the empty room, the slightly mussed bed next to his, the
Penthouse
open to a pictorial of a couple exploring each other in the overgrown gardens of some Southern California mansion, “So we’ll turn him in and they’ll send him off for life. That doesn’t mean you can’t get that scholarship still, you’ve worked your ass off.”

You don’t get it, little brother.
He was back, thanks to Pete, who had wished him back, retrieved him from the vast city night. All those times he’d rolled his eyes and sneered his brother’s way erased now by this overwhelming desire to have him back.
That scholarship isn’t for people like me,
said Daniel, and Pete said, “Bullshit, Danny, people like you are who the thing is for,” and Daniel laughed and said,
Fags make good students,
and Pete, because he was scared said, “Some of the smartest people in history were queer,” and Daniel said,
What about you, you’re smart and you’re not queer,
and Pete said, “I ain’t that smart, I’m a fuckup,” and Daniel said,
Why is it not okay for me to give up but fine for you to waste your life?
and Pete said, “Because, man, I already fucking blew it,” and Daniel said,
Bullshit you’re only seventeen.

Credits were rolling by the time Pete finished his conversation with Daniel in his head and returned to the empty room and the movie. The eleven o’clock news flashed on the screen, brash and dramatic. As some slick-haired weatherman charted a cold front on the screen, Pete drifted off to sleep in the blue buzz of the TV, went down thinking of lusty nurses but woke terrified from a dream in which he was hanging with a loose fist from the runner of a helicopter high above our nation’s capital. Sweat-soaked, terrified to be alone, he looked at the clock. 3:32. Where the hell was he? Pete lay in until the clock flashed 4:00 and finally he rose and struggled into his jeans and tossed the soiled handtowel into a trash can and rolled a joint and rode the elevator down to the lobby and headed for that bar they visited earlier.

He remembered it being located on the same street as the hotel, only six or seven blocks east, and was thrilled to find it exactly where he thought.

But it was closed. Pete rattled the door, rapped on the glass. Stood frozen there as if someone would hear and come running, as if someone cared that he needed his brother now. He did not want to go back to the hotel room. The freedom he’d first felt after checking in and flipping through all the channels and switching on the heat for the hell of it and even jumping childishly on the bed lasted only until Daniel left, when the night-long city noises floated up from the street and his brother did not call and did not come home.

He decided to wait there, by the bar, for Daniel. His brother would return there and the two of them could walk home together. Meanwhile, it seemed time to get high, and he retreated into an alley alongside the bar, pushed himself deep into shadows so that he could see the street but not be seen by passersby A street sweeper inched by as he sucked on the spliff, and he fixated on the brushes polishing the filthy pavement, sending clouds of debris and dust up the alley in a slow-motion billow.

When he was down to burned paper and stem, Pete flicked the roach and took up his perch by the door of the bar. Any minute now his brother would bounce up the sidewalk.
Let’s motivate,
Pete would say,
I’m bushed.
He would not ask his brother where he’d been, with whom. He thought, as he often did when high, of his own cowardice, of the weakness he tried so hard to hide. The world was a secret he’d not been let in on. Everyone knew intimately his desperation and fear. Especially his family, who was too kind to allude to it. They preferred to think he’d come out of his troubles on his own, with no help from any of them.