Hearing my cue, I jog toward Sheba. In high school, she would peck my cheek, and I would run over to my place, facing the home crowd. But, of course, on this occasion Sheba surprises me with a French kiss that puts her tongue somewhere in the vicinity of my tonsils. So completely has she caught me unaware that I begin gagging and choking, to the high hilarity of my assembled friends. I shoot them all the bird as I stagger to my place.
Then Betty steps forward, also tossing her hair. No one can do sexy like Betty Jefferson as she points downfield to her man and cries out: “I champion Ike, and I feel him draw near—he’ll stand by Leo in this victory cheer.”
Ike jogs to his wife, they share a nice kiss, then Ike comes slowly toward me. After our foreheads touch, he turns to the crowd that disappeared from our lives nineteen years ago. We lock arms together as Fraser steps out, unsure of herself, a better athlete than any of us boys were, but a newcomer to the cheerleaders’ art. She says: “I stand by Niles and I see my man clear; if he’s not worthy, there’ll be no victory cheer.”
Niles runs up and kisses his wife, and they hold the kiss until the rest of us begin wolf whistling and catcalling. Then Niles runs over, and he and I touch foreheads, then he and Ike touch foreheads, and we lock arms together.
Molly begins her chant, “But I champion Chad, and I’ll do it all year—if he will stand with us, then all Renegades cheer. We’re right in the middle of a championship year.”
As I listen to Molly’s voice, I am moved by this collision of events that brings back so many memories—some that I embrace with a tenderness that surprises; others that can bring me to a boiling point of the spirit, the very threshold of agony. In high school, the cheer seemed endless and pointless when I was nervous and chafing for the game to start. Now, at this moment, I wish the cheer could last forever so I can have an excuse to lock arms with these essential men in my life and to watch the sensuous movements of those hair-tossing, pretty women for all time. Their voices seem to call out to me in the lostness of all my days; the nostalgia is close to overwhelming.
I watch Chad jog toward Molly when her cheer ends. It is easy to remember that Chad was all style then and is all style now: he seems to make his way across the yard in slow motion, all comfort in every inch of his aristocratic bones. As he approaches Molly, he puckers his lips in exaggerated fashion and throws the guys a conspiratorial wink at the same time. The mood is good and jocular.
All of us are caught by surprise when Molly Rutledge makes a fist and busts her husband’s nose with a punch that is astonishing in its ferocity and effect. Drops of blood fly through the air, spattering Molly’s face and blouse. The astonished group stands in a frozen, airless tableau. No one speaks until Sheba says, “I guess that’s the end of the pep rally.”
Then Molly explodes with a rage she has long held in quarantine. “You rotten son of a low-life bitch! You dare humiliate me in front of my best friends, my family, the town we grew up in! You conduct an open affair with a nineteen-year-old girl and flaunt it by inviting her to our parties, paying her rent, keeping a room at the Mills-Hyatt house for when you feel like a quickie. I thought I’d married one of the finest men to ever come out of Charleston society, and I find out I married the worst piece of shit instead.”
“This is all a mistake,” Chad says, but he directs his voice at us, not at Molly. “This can all be explained.”
“They all know about it,” Molly screams. “You’ve been so goddamn indiscreet, I bet the seagulls are talking about it. It’s everywhere. Four lawyers in your firm have called, three of their wives. But my best friends—these fine, fine people—haven’t said a word to me. And I’ve been able to tell for a month that they knew something terrible was happening in my life. Real friends would’ve said something. All of you owed me that much … at least.”
Molly turns and runs out of the garden. She takes a right toward East Bay, and disappears from sight.
“She’s imagining things,” Chad says to us. “It’s something mental. I’m going to have her tested next week.”
“Start telling the truth, Chad,” Betty says. “After doing that, you can quit humping that broad in your office.”
“Molly’s having a breakdown,” Chad insists, but it is difficult to take him seriously with his nose bleeding. “I guarantee she’ll call all of you next week to apologize. She’s been having these symptoms for a long time now. I’m going to need the help of all of you.”
“Chad, why don’t you go after Molly and have a serious talk with her?” Fraser suggests, then she goes over to an ice chest and soaks a dinner napkin in the freezing water. With great care, she begins to wash the blood from her brother’s throat and nose. He snatches the napkin from her hand and presses it to his nose. We know from experience that Chad has a temper that is flammable and dangerous when ignited.
Fraser says in the softest, most sisterly of voices, “Just go home, Chad. You can make everything okay. It’s not too late. Molly wouldn’t be so crazy if she didn’t love you so much.”
“Shut up, Fraser. For once in your life, just shut up,” he snarls like a treed bobcat. “You’ve always taken Molly’s side in everything.”
“I’m just trying to help,” she says. “I love you as much as she does.”
“Then show it. Start believing me. Take me at my word,” he shouts at her, then makes a tactical error by adding, “piano legs.”
If Ike and I had not both lunged for Niles at the same time, I think Chad would have suffered grievous physical damage far greater. Though Ike and I are heavier men than Niles, he is taller and rangier and more menacing when aroused. I slow Niles’s headlong charge toward his brother-in-law by catching hold of his belt, allowing Ike to grab him in a bear hug.
“If I get my hands on you,” Niles says to Chad, “I’ll bite your nose off. I swear I’ll bite it right off your face.”
Fraser runs between her brother and Niles, shielding Chad from Niles’s charge.
“Should I get the cuffs for Niles?” Betty asks Ike, her voice professional and take-charge.
Ike answers, “Naw, honey. Niles’ll be fine. Get my nightstick out of the truck and break both of Chad’s knees instead.”
“My pleasure.” Betty walks without haste toward their vehicle.
“Chad,” Ike says, “you don’t seem to be in the mood for advice tonight, but I’ve got some for you.”
“Bad time for advice, Officer,” Chad snaps. The word Officer has never been uttered with such contempt.
“Advice is this: Run, you son of a bitch. Run your ass off. I don’t think me and Leo are strong enough to hold Niles much longer.”
With those observant words, Niles bursts free from my grip. Ike falls to his knees as Niles tries to kick away from his grip. Niles makes one sprinting gallop across the yard before Ike and I bring him down with an open-field tackle from behind. We tumble to the earth, but it takes us ten long seconds to pacify our formidable pal. By then, Chad has ingested the wisdom of Ike’s advice, and he runs to his Porsche, the bloody rag still pressed to his nose. His car roars to life, and he screeches off in dramatic fashion. We are expecting Chad to take a left on Church Street, following Molly, but he hits second gear, takes a right at Meeting Street, then guns it past Tradd at a speed too reckless for Charleston.
Betty says it first. “After all that, he’s still going to see his girlfriend.”
“Tell you what,” Sheba says, a woman who discovers her greatest joy in the center of the most uncontrollable chaos. “You Southerners really know how to give a party.”
CHAPTER 13 Sheba Asks a Favor
At first, the conversation after dinner is directionless. It wanders from subject to subject as Sheba plays the piano, the show tunes she and her brother introduced to us when they appeared in the dead center of our lives. Then the dancing starts and I pour a glass of Cognac and lean against the baby grand. It is hard to believe that Sheba is only the second best piano player in her family, and that her skill is amateurish comp
ared to her brother’s simple mastery. But her voice is a lovely thing.
When the dancing is over, we sit on the welcoming, overstuffed furniture beneath the tiers of books that go floor to ceiling on three sides of the room. Niles is solicitous in bringing glasses of port and snifters of Cognac, the candlelight tossing a jeweled pallor on the room as the evening starts to wind down. The couples sit on couches holding hands with a naturalness I envy. Sheba and I sit on chairs across from each other. She is about to say something to me, but I see her choke back the words.
“There’s something poison about me,” Sheba says finally, and the room becomes still. “Always has been. I do this to every room I enter. I can never leave my unhappiness behind me. It follows me, tracks me down—it was waiting for me here tonight.”
“Nonsense,” I say. “Molly and Chad are fully capable of screwing up their own lives. We were all pulled into it tonight. It doesn’t change the fact that we’ve all missed you, darling.”
“You haven’t missed a thing,” she says. “I haven’t been worth knowing for the past ten years. True confession time. I’m not just bragging.” She laughs, but it is too loud and of the mirthless variety that soon turns to something darker. Then she begins crying softly. The women in the room move as one to surround, comfort, and caress her. As men, we sit paralyzed in our seats, undone by the ninjalike power of a few tears from the eyes of a woman we have cared about since we were boys. Sheba regains a small measure of her composure as Betty hands her a handkerchief from her large purse. “I’m so sorry. So sorry,” Sheba sobs.
“You never have to apologize to us,” Fraser says. “That’s the kind of friends we are. Or that’s the kind we’d like to think we are.”
“I’ve been afraid to ask you something,” says Sheba. “And it’s what I came back to ask you.”
“Ask,” says Niles.
“Anything,” Ike seconds.
“When’s the last time any of you heard from Trevor?” she asks. Her crying begins again, but this time there is an opening up, a spillage out, and several moments pass before she can collect herself.
We all look at one another as Sheba puts her face in her hands. Niles is the first to speak.
“He called here collect about a year ago.”
“Did you accept the charges?” Sheba asks.
Niles nods. “Of course I accepted the charges. It was Trevor. But he was so drunk I couldn’t make out what he was saying, so I put Fraser on the phone.”
Fraser says, “It was mostly liquor talk. You know the kind: ‘I love you’ slurred in a hundred different ways. ‘I miss all of you’ slurred in a hundred others. Classic Trevor. If he’d been born straight, he’d have married me or Molly. If he’d been born a girl, he’d’ve married Leo. It was drunk talk sure enough, but pure Trevor. I tried to call him the next day at his flat on Union Street, but his phone was disconnected. I wrote him a letter, but it came back with address unknown. So I figured he’d moved.”
Sheba says, “He was evicted for not paying rent.”
“Why didn’t he call us?” Betty asks.
“The question is this,” Sheba says: “Why didn’t he call his famous sister?”
“Can you answer that?” I ask her. “We can’t.”
“Trevor’s hated me for a long time,” she says. “Remember my first gig in Las Vegas? I had to beg him to come and play the piano for that. The only reason he came was because of the chance to see all of you. He wrote me off his list of favorites a long time ago.”
“But why, Sheba?” Fraser asks. “You were so close. I’ve never seen a brother and sister as close as you two. Maybe Niles and Starla at one time. Chad always acted like I was created in Frankenstein’s lab. But you and Trevor were devoted.”
“Trevor resented me for lots of reasons. Start with my success, go to my self-destructive behavior. He said he couldn’t stand to watch me slowly killing myself. And I wasn’t very nice to Trevor. Or anyone else, even you guys. The one thing I can do well is be a perfect shit. Trevor got on my nerves when I was strung out on coke. I said some things I shouldn’t have said. One of my husbands beat him up and almost killed him.”
“Blair Upton?” Betty guesses.
“Yep, that guy. I knew he was the most famous actor I was ever going to get to meet me at the altar, and I wasn’t going to give him up for my fairy princess of a brother.”
I said, “Trevor called me a year ago; he sounded scared. Of course, then he told me if I’d been gay, he’d never have needed another boyfriend. I would’ve satisfied his most lascivious needs. I haven’t heard from him since.”
“Where did you send the check?” Sheba asks.
“It was a money order. A P.O. box on Polk Street.”
“I put a private eye on the case,” she says. “I heard some bad rumors: Trevor’s dying of AIDS.”
“Have you called his friends?” I ask. “They’ll help us find him.”
Now it is time for Sheba to fish around in her commodious purse. Some tubes of lipstick and jars of cosmetics spill out, as does a sandwich bag full of marijuana.
“Oregano,” she says to the officers of the law. “I’ve developed a passion for Italian food.” Ike shuts his eyes and Betty rolls hers and motions to Niles to refill her glass.
Finally, Sheba pulls a photograph out of a side pocket and hands it to me. In a picture taken in 1980, there I stand in Trevor’s dining room with my arm flung around him and his lover at the time, Tom Ball. Twelve other gay men mug for the camera, and I remember that ecstatic evening as one of the best in my life. I flew into the city with enough shrimp, fish, crabs, tomatoes, and corn to feed all the true believers and the hangers-on at the Sermon on the Mount, and Trevor and I fixed a Low Country feast for all of his best friends in San Francisco. Trevor was at his magical best that night, and the conversation was brilliant, hilarious, and over the top. After dinner, Trevor played the piano for hours. Every man there had a passable singing voice except me, and some had the loveliest voices in that part of the world.
“I’ll start calling those guys tomorrow,” I say. “I bet they don’t even know that Trevor’s in trouble.”
“I’ve tried to call all of them,” Sheba tells me.
“Had they heard from him? Any of them?” Ike asks.
“Worse than that, Ike: every one of them is dead. Every single one of them.”
“Where do you think Trevor is, Sheba?” Niles asks, walking over and sitting on the arm of her chair.
“I think he’s like a sick cat and has gone off to the woods to die. I don’t know what else to think. A producer I know is lending me his house in Pacific Heights. I’m here to ask you all something I’ve no right to ask. I’d love it if one or two of you would help me find him.”
“I’m due some time off,” I say. “But I can’t go till after the Fourth of July weekend.”
“We were going to take the kids to Disney World,” Ike says to Betty.
She suggests, “Your parents would love to take them. They actually like Disney World.”
“Niles, we can do it, can’t we, baby?” Fraser asks. “We can do that for Trevor.”
“Couldn’t come at a better time for me,” Niles says. He’s the athletic director for Porter-Gaud, and the school year will have just ended. “I’ll get tickets tomorrow.”
“We can find Trevor and bring him home. Bring him to Charleston,” I say.
“We can be around him when he dies,” Fraser says. “We can help him die.”
“I’ve got a plane,” Sheba says. “A Learjet. Another gift from the producer.”
“Just what’re you doing for this producer?” Betty asks.
“Enough to get a house in Pacific Heights,” Sheba says. “Enough to have a Learjet waiting for us at the Charleston airport.”
“The first weekend after July Fourth,” I say. “Does that work for everybody?”
“Yeah,” everyone agrees. When our words rise in the air like white papal smoke, Sheba bursts into tears again.
Fraser hugs her from one side, Niles takes care of the other, and Sheba rocks forward as she weeps.
Ike says, “Why’re you crying, girl?”
“Because I knew that all of you would say yes,” Sheba says. “I just knew it. And I’ve been a perfect shit to every one of you.”
I walk over to the Battery instead of going straight home. Whenever I want to think hard, I need a river to help me lighten the load. The return of Sheba has set something loose inside me, and I have to fight through the barricades and impasses and dead ends I’ve erected as defenses to the overwhelming solitude I accept as an orderly way of life. As I walk south along the Battery’s wall, I notice the crescent moon, sparking the trellises of a nervous tide. As a Charlestonian, I am a connoisseur of tides, and can almost tell you how high or low the seawalls of the harbor are at any given moment. The deep heat of the day has surrendered to a cooling wind from the Atlantic. The air gives off the scents of honeysuckle, turmeric, and salt. My head clears and I make an attempt to figure out what all the events of the night signify. I also take an honest inventory of my own life, and do not like the results.
My marriage to Starla Whitehead has been both a joke and a hoax from the very beginning. Going into that hasty and ill-planned marriage, I knew everything about Starla’s fragility and volatile nature. What I misjudged was the extent of her madness and the strength of those interior demons that made her nighttimes sleepless and the daylight hours a time of exhaustion and despair. When I am honest with myself—and I can be honest with the Cooper River surging back toward the sea to my left and the governess-like serenity of the mansions along East Bay Street on my right—the thoughts come out true and hot to the touch. I once thought I married Starla for love, but now I am looking at it with a harsher lens, and consider that love came to me in a diffused and scattershot form: I had trouble with the whole concept because I never fully learned the art of loving myself. For most of my life, the way I loved was another form that awkwardness took in me. My attraction to women has always depended on the amount of damage I could detect on the surface, how much scar tissue I could uncover when I started to finger my way through the ruins. I mistook Starla’s instability as the most fascinating aspect of her personality. Her madness I translated into a kind of genius. Though I heard my friends lament the fact that they had found out too late that they had married carbon copies of their mothers or fathers, I was even more fearful that I had married my childhood, the one that found me in straitjackets during the years following my brother’s suicide. That was also my darkest fear about Starla—that I had married my brother, Steve, because I could never condone my appalling failure to give my parents a reasonable facsimile of their lost son when I knew they wanted that from me more than anything. When I became aware of Starla’s great lassitude of spirit, and the flimsiness of her hold on sanity, my greatest fear became that she would take her own life and send me staggering off into the infernal country where I once earned citizenship after Steve’s funeral. But the river is beside me and saltwater has always fed my soul like a truth serum. I can say to myself, with the river’s full acquiescence and support, that I would love to live with a wife who loved me, who shared my house and bed with me, who would look at me the way Fraser looks at Niles, who would treasure my company and our house together the way Ike and Betty do with such ease. And yes, I’d love to have a child—a boy, a girl—one of them or five of them; I want to be a father and take out photos of my kids and pass them around the office the way the other daddies do at the paper. I turn and look out toward Fort Sumter, Mount Pleasant, and James Island. The air comes to me in drafts of hothouse roses, and the harbor is trafficless, the stars as pale as moths.