Part 12 (1/2)

The orphan pines while the oppressor feeds.

The Rape of Lucrece I sat with my bare legs folded over each other, staring at my record collection. I had just gotten out of the shower. I was now taking a shower before I went to bed and another after I had finished jogging in the morning. It seemed like I was running further and further with each pa.s.sing morning, and stayed in the shower longer and longer. I was cold, sitting in my tartan robe, but wouldn't put on any more clothes.

The Firebird. Cinderella. The Magic Flute. Die Meistersinger von Nuremburg. Katerina Ismailova. A Soldier's Story. Symphonic Metamorphosis. The Water Music. Samson et Delilah. Romeo and Juliet. The Alpine Symphony. The London Symphony. The Leningrad Symphony. The Unfinished Symphony. Heligoland. Billy Budd. Babi Yar. Carnival of the Animals. Brandenburg Concerti. Les Nuits d'ete. Finlandia. Spartacus. The Age of Gold. Enigma Variations. Faust. Jewish Folk Poetry. Jeux d'enfants. Death and Transfiguration.

Requiem. A couple of those. Requiae? Requiea?

I wandered into Dad's bedroom. The large dimensions seemed even bigger with the shadows of emptiness hanging over the old-fas.h.i.+oned colonial furniture and the half-full, half-empty moving crates still cluttering up the floor.

I wasn't sure Uncle Alex would want the room, even as a painting studio, or whatever he called the room he did his work in. I wouldn't.

My hand slid across the bottom of Dad's sock drawer until it reached the hard leather holster concealed in the ma.s.s of unsorted hose. I pulled it out of the drawer and took the vintage .25-calibre Beretta automatic into my right hand, balanced it in my palm, and slowly held it up, extending my arm fully, moving the pistol around the dark room until the reflection of the moon on the edge of the backyard window was in my sights.

I unchambered the hollow-point round and pushed it back into the small clip, which I slipped into a side pouch of the holster. The bullets were hand-loaded by Salvatore, a maddeningly fastidious tailor who had a small storefront in town. The elderly Neapolitan immigrant had evidently once worked for Beretta itself, and maintained, modified, and crafted ammo for Dad's little automatic as if it were his own. I liked the gun. It fit my hand perfectly, even though I knew it wasn't all that powerful a gun.

Seven shots.

Aunt Dutch. No jury on earth would convict me. Aunt Melody. A bullet before the gin got to her. Cousin Julia. Think of the price I'd get from her twenty or thirty ex's. Cousin Matt. Forget a head shot with his thick skull. Uncle Albert. Who could tell the difference if he had been shot? That lunatic twelve-year-old cousin just off the boat that wouldn't leave me alone at the wake. Veronica. Save Uncle Alex a lot of trouble, down the line.

Back in my bedroom, I began to level the pistol at Felix, who was sound asleep, curled up facing my side of the bed, but felt another wave coast over me, a cooler, more penetrating one that made me stop in mid-gesture. I quietly put the gun in its holster and stuffed it into my own sock drawer, before slipping into the covers next to Felix, who stirred as I moved closer to him.

I could see his eyes open slightly from the moonlight that touched the top half of my bed from outside the frosty bedroom window. He asked in a whisper, ”Are you okay?” I nodded my head, but started to cry without much in the way of sound effects, something I considered an achievement at that point in my life.

I let him pull me into his arms and hold me like I was his little brother who had just gotten roughed up by the bullies down the block. I didn't realize until I had finished that Felix's hands were both settled along the waistband of my underwear, and that he had cried, too, just not as long as I had, and much more discreetly.

I woke up the next morning after hearing the front door close behind Felix, as he left to go back to his apartment ”for some clothes”, according to the note. I watched him walk slowly across my backyard and through the neighboring small park, both still covered in snow. The cloud cover was low and grim. It would probably snow some more, I thought, crossing my arms over my chest as I trudged to the bathroom.

I tried not to think about Felix when we showered separately, pretending I didn't really believe he wasn't coming back that night.

Well, he didn't. I let Lawrence take me to his house for dinner with his family, his macabre, intact, happy family, hoping someone would try to call me that night and not get an answer.

The light snowfall pasted itself over my face and in my hair as I walked to the cemetery, in lieu of having a good jog the following day. I had deliberately overslept. I didn't much feel like jogging or getting out of bed. I lay there, leafing through Nicolasha's photo alb.u.m, until almost noon, when I decided to walk off a few of my blues.

Hah.

If the temperature had been seventy-degrees, under a bright, clear sky, with a soft spring breeze blowing in the air, the cemetery, h.e.l.l, any cemetery, would be depressing. A giant field decorated with granite slabs and statues, stuffed with boxes that held the leftovers of people you used to share life with. Christ, I thought, what a concept. The ocean sounded more appealing to me. ”Where is so-and-so buried?”, someone might ask. You would then point outward, to the warm blue Pacific or the cold green Atlantic, and reply, ”out there”.

I began to consider other appropriate burial grounds, vast and forbidding, edge-of-the-world kind of places, like the Alps. I'd take a chopper through the middle of Switzerland and scatter the ashes. ”Where did you bury them?” I'd smile, sweep my arm toward the line of perpetually snowcapped peaks, and respond, ”In there”. Or Baja California. Land or sea would work down there. The Australian Outback. Never been there, I said to myself, but it looked pretty edge-of-the-worldish to me. Or New Mexico.

Winter was much nicer up at the Schloss Unc in Minnesota, I decided. Lake Geneva, too.

I knelt over the pair of red stone burial markers and brushed the falling snow from the lettering. I didn't bring flowers. They would be covered in snow in an hour. It was cold again, and gloomy. The streets were swimming in dark grey slush and pulverized road salt. All the cars that pa.s.sed me were filthy. The cold wasn't a fresh cold, but, rather, an unformulated, damp, smoggy, clammy sort of cold. And why not? It was New Year's Eve. After tomorrow, the holidays were over. No more ornaments. Take the lights down. Put away the presents. Burn the tree.

I was certainly going to burn that awful, white-flocked artificial tree of ours.

From Thanksgiving to New Year's Day, the cold and the snow and the wind chill are all a perversely romantic addendum to the Chicagoan's holiday season. On January second, they're just cold and snow and wind chill, officially a pain in the a.s.s and something to despise until winter finally went away, which, in Chicago, could be as early as Easter Sunday, or as late as Mother's Day.

As I walked through the snow-covered graveyard back towards our empty and unlit house, I felt alone, absolutely, terribly, completely alone.

It didn't matter if Uncle Alex loved me, or Aunt Hilly and Cousin Lawrence were there, or that they all cared. It made no difference that my teacher Nicolas was a friend, or lover, or whatever I was supposed to call him, and that he would be there if I ever called. It was irrelevant that Felix and his entire family shared my grief as unselfishly as they shared their love for me, and trivial to mention the depth and sincerity of what had grown between Felix and me.

None of it mattered. There were people in my life, and love came from those people, it was true, a gleaming treasure trove of love, freely given, received, and sometimes reciprocated. But it didn't matter, because I felt alone. I may not have been, but that's how it felt, deep inside my heart, and my soul. Alone.

My G.o.d, I kept whispering out loud to myself, like a broken record skipping over a piece of ice from the empty winter around me. Alone.

X V I.

By his face straight shall you know his heart.

Richard III When I first saw someone waiting for me at our front door, I thought it might be Felix. Or hoped it would be, I don't know. As I got closer, I could see they were too tall to be my best friend buddy ol' pal from school, whoever it was.

Brennan DeVere was about six foot, the same height as me. His shoulders weren't as broad as mine, and his chest and waist were slightly thinner, which made him seem lankier than he was when he wore his school baseball outfit. His fingers and feet were long and, well, elegant, as was his long blond hair, which was thrown back from his ears and hung well below his shoulders. He was too good of a pitcher to hara.s.s, so our coaches left Brennan and his hair alone. He stuffed it into his baseball cap when he played. Everyone gave him h.e.l.l when he put it into a pony tail. He had bright green eyes that sparkled when he grinned or laughed, both of which he did a lot, because he was always telling jokes and playing with people, at least when I was around. His lips, eyebrows, nose, and ears were also thin, complementing the sharp lines of his cheek bones and chin, a handsome, almost adult face that was determined on the pitcher's mound and would have been equally sn.o.bby and arrogant in prewar Europe.

On a good day, I might get a single off of him.

His mom and dad were unrepentant hippies, cheerful dropouts who kept the better part of the sixties alive and well and living in their Volkswagen minibus, mature stoners that owned a small nursery on the edge of town, the edge that bordered the unfas.h.i.+onably working-cla.s.s (and integrated) suburb to our east, flower children whose only little boy did all of his pre-high school growing up in communes and collective farms somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. All of their money went to political groups that they called progressive, we called liberal, and the rest of my family called communist, so Brennan didn't expect to have a car of his own until after college, and bought all his clothes at the dingy Army / Navy surplus store he worked at all every evening to pay his own tuition at the Catholic high school he chose to attend.

The DeVeres lived in a grey brick Cape Cod house on a side road near the nursery. Their backyard blended into a small corner of Cook County Forest Preserve land, so it seemed like there was a miniature forest just outside their back door. The living room, family room, all three bedrooms, and the bas.e.m.e.nt each had a separate stereo system equipped with an 8-track tape player, as did their minibus. I had only visited Brennan at home once, and that was with the rest of the guys, but I loved his bas.e.m.e.nt, which was lined with psychedelic posters, many of which were lined with black felt and glowed in the black-light mounted on the ceiling. Brennan had one of those sound boxes, a molded plastic box the size of a stereo speaker that flashed different colored lights in a wild pattern, lights activated by talk or the music from their late-'50's style juke box. The room was filled up by a full-sized pool table with real leather side pouches and genuine ivory b.a.l.l.s that Brennan was banned from using. The fabulous antique looked out of place, surrounded as it was by cheap head shop posters. They even had a strobe light, too.

And all I could do was hang a stupid grin on my face, I was so happy to see him, to see anyone, waiting for me to come home.

”Is there a good reason why you haven't opened my Christmas card?” Brennan waved the yellow envelope under my nose. The mailbox was stuffed with unopened mail. I felt like an a.s.s. He slapped the side of my cheek with the card and smiled into my eyes. ”At least you didn't throw it out.”

I paused awkwardly. I didn't know whether I should have held out my hand or moved closer to hug him. I wasn't sure if our only other hug was just a hug to cheer me up, or the first in a long line of them. There was a lot about our walk home from the church that I wasn't sure about. Why had I felt so comfortable in telling him about what was hurting me so much, instead of holding it in and crying, like I had so often with Felix? Brennan grinned at my indecision before putting the card in my gloved hands. ”Read my card, first.”

It was the cheapest, tackiest drug store Christmas card I had ever seen, with a bad j.a.panese cartoon-like drawing of Santa Claus falling down a chimney into a lit fireplace. Wow. It cost a whole thirty-five cents! Kind of a step down from the gilt nutcrackers and village people at play. I opened the small card, read the inscription quickly, and looked up at a Brennan DeVere I had never seen before.

”Aren't you going to read it out loud?”

I smiled. ”Why would I do that?”