My Broadway LP's, though-? Were those bad influences?
"There wouldn't happen to be any more of this, would there?" Luther asked. When I turned, he was tipping the open mouth of his mug toward me. It contained only foamy brown dregs. He'd switched tapes, or maybe the video had run to the previews at the end. I didn't recognize the scene. There was a sling and an X-shaped wooden cross, men in harnesses of chrome and black leather, a preposterously large black dildo. I averted my eyes.
"I don't have any more milk."
Handing me his mug and the remote control, he said, "I should go anyway. You'll clean up that graffiti when the wall dries out?" In the entryway, then, he rocked his feet into his boots. "If you have any questions or problems, call me, tenant. Hear?"
"Sure."
"Are you all right, tenant? You're not mad because I was touching your stuff?"
Now that he mentioned it, it irked me that he'd started the VCR without asking. But I didn't want to quarrel with him. And even in my annoyance and embarrassment I still felt the glow of forgiveness-though by now it was an ember, not a blaze.
"Not at all. I'm-I'm just tired." I forced myself to smile. I glanced toward the television. In a jumpy freeze-frame image two men soul-kissed. One wore a thick, spiked dog collar. "And-and I suppose the homophobic graffiti has put me off a bit."
He chuckled. "I suppose it would. Sorry."
As I turned back to look at Luther, I spotted the small claims papers. They lay where I'd left them, on the floor beside the easy chair.
"There is something else," I said. "Something that's been worrying me."
I showed him the complaint. Frowning, he read. He clucked. "Shameful. They don't have a leg to stand on."
"Maybe so, or-or maybe not-but-. But what do I do? I just don't want to see them, especially not in court."
They would be dressed in their Sunday finery, of course-Rose Hill in a hat and some lavender polyester thing, and Greg Hill in the only suit he'd ever owned, likely also polyester and possibly machine washable. Whether or not they bothered to bring evidence of their claim, each would bring a Bible, and they would watch with glum incredulity as I-godless sinner, corrupter of their son-swore upon the Good Book.
"You have to fill out the answer. Unless you want to just pay them."
I shook my head. "It'd be worth it, just to be done with it, but you know-Christmas and all-. I just went on vacation-. I just don't have the money. Couldn't you-?"
He looked at me.
"Never mind."
Luther stood next to me now, so close that under the sweet scent of his cologne I could smell the innate spice of his skin. "I'll help you figure out what to say in the answer. Better yet, I'll write them a nasty lawyer letter and tell them to knock it off."
"What's your rate for a nasty lawyer letter?"
He waved away the question. "It'll take ten minutes. Have more marshmallows and whole milk next time, and we'll call it even." He raised the packet of court papers. "Can I take these?"
"Of course."
And he stood yet closer, so that I had to tip my head backward to see his face. He put his hand on my shoulder, and for a half-crazed moment I thought he might kiss me. But he said, "Take care. Get some sleep," and was gone. I locked and chained the door behind him.
Punching a button on the remote, I ejected Spike's video from the VCR. It must go. A cardboard box in the bay window held a few volumes from my last spree through Turn the Page-something about the Puritans, a collection of love poetry written by women, a history of sex in advertising-things I'd bought months ago, things I couldn't remember wanting. I left them where they lay and added Go Down on It.
And then Tom's audiocassettes-ABBA, Blondie, the Village People, all the rest, the whole lot, until his vinyl cassette case was empty.
I emptied the bookshelves of all of the books Tom had bought but had rarely, if ever, read. Christopher Bram, Alan Hollinghurst, Andrew Holleran, David Leavitt, Armistead Maupin, Anne Rice's Sleeping Beauty books and Vampire Chronicles, the Men on Men series.
But how far to go? Hart Crane? Oscar Wilde? Tory's collection of Whitman quotes? The excerpts I had cribbed from Whitman and Crane to compile the text of The River? After a moment's reflection, I resolved to spare the poetry. I had bared enough shelf space as it was. On the top shelf, only Tulips and Chimneys remained. On other shelves, books leaned against one another into open spaces two, three, six, seven inches wide.
Tom's videotapes, though-. I would save none. I went to the bedroom and fetched the whole stack and dumped them all into the box.
* * *
At group Tigger had hinted that he wanted another crack at Hope and Healing, but since he'd read it and I hadn't, Eliot had given it to me.
The next day, Friday, I left the book in the back seat of my car.
On Saturday, I took the book with me into the Spin Cycle, thinking I might read it while I waited. Instead, I left it at the bottom of my laundry bag while I went across the street to the Rainbow Foods for a sandwich. No dryers were free when I returned, and-forgetting that the Stinson book was there-I set the laundry bag in a basket and piled my wet clothes on top of it. My damp shirts and jeans soaked the bottom edges of the front cover and the first hundred pages.
On Sunday I left the book propped against a radiator to dry.
Although I knew my Monday to be filled with meetings-three forums with DFL staff and a debriefing session with Martin-I carried the book with me as I left for work. Again, I left it on the seat of the car. There it stayed until the end of Thursday's workday.
To Eliot's I carried it, puffy but whole, under my arm. I arrived early. Only Eliot, Fred, and Jeremy were there. While Eliot busied himself in the kitchen, Fred and Jeremy bent their heads together, whispering. I opened the book. The pages parted at a chapter entitled "Why You're Homosexual."
There were bullet points. "Abandonment," one read. "Reinforcement," read another. "Defiance." "Narcissism."
Narcissism? I closed the book.
"What do you think of the book?" Jeremy asked. The puffy place under his left eye had faded to greenish-yellow. He moved his hand through the air, his fingers rippling like pennants. "Isn't it just divine?"
Eliot saved me from answering. He backed through the kitchen door carrying the lacquer tray. On it, the two carafes and the silver bowls and a half dozen mugs rattled softly.
Half-standing, I said, "Do you need a hand?"
"You could get the cookies from the kitchen."
"There are two kinds of people in this world," Jeremy said. He giggled. "To satisfy both, I made chocolate chip and oatmeal raisin."
Fred gaped at him as if he'd just said some uncommonly naughty thing.
I fetched the cookies. The oatmeal raisin cookies were larger by half than the chocolate chip and there were twice as many of them. Clearly, Jeremy was one of the oatmeal raisin people.
Charlie had arrived. He shook off his overcoat and draped it over a chair. He said, "What have we here? Jeremy's thousand-dollar chocolate chip cookies?"
"It's two hundred and fifty," Jeremy said. "Two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar cookies."
Charlie took a cookie, nibbled. "Mm," he said.
I sat in one of the armchairs. Charlie sat on the sofa, on the end nearest me. I opened the Stinson book and began reading the "Narcissism" passage.
For some the same-sex desire is at the core a desire for the self, a diseased form of selfishness and self-centeredness, an erotic and infantile fixation on the self in both physical and emotional forms.
"What are you looking for?" Fred said. "I know the book almost by heart."
"Nothing. I was just glancing ahead."
"What do you think of the book? How far did you get?" Jeremy asked me. He couldn't seem to keep his hands still. "In a week's time I could just read and read and read."
Just then Tigger and Rob came in together, hugging themselves and stomping their feet. Mason arrived not long after. After a time of chatty crowding
around the coffee and cookies, everyone found a seat. Mason pulled one of the ladder-backed chairs into the circle.
"What did you think of the book?" Eliot asked me. "Did you finish it?"
The way I held the book-with both arms, flat against my chest, as if it were a cherished object-earned beatific smiles from everyone. But after a moment of stammering, I had to say, "I haven't really started it. I meant to, but I just didn't get to it."
The saintly smiles turned glassy. Everyone looked at the floor. Everyone but Eliot. He said, "You didn't even read the foreword?"
"I skimmed some chapter titles last week during the session. And-. And then, just now-."
"Is there a reason?"
Rob said, "Didn't we make it clear that this book is the bedrock of this program?"
"I don't think you did," I said. The sharp corners of the book's cover dug into my forearms. "I just thought it was a helpful book you were passing around." I tucked the book between my leg and the arm of the chair. I leaned forward, elbows on knees, and glanced at Mason. His eyes met mine. I looked away. "Besides, Eliot said-."
Eliot had said that I was free to take this at my own pace, one step at a time. Now, his face was inscrutable. He said, "Did you read anything at all this week?"
"Outside of stuff for work? I read some-. Well, some, yes, I did some reading this week."
"What?"
"Beethoven," I said. "McNamara." I'd struggled through the latter chapters of The Seventeen Quartets to the end, and then I'd returned to the start. "A book about Beethoven's string quartets."
"Beethoven. You had time for Beethoven, but not for this." Eliot nodded toward the Stinson book. "Why is that?"
Sitting back, I set Hope and Healing squarely on my lap. I smoothed the glossy cover with both hands. Gray scuff marks marred the embossed letters of the title. With the tip of my index finger I traced the H of Healing. "I have a hard time with Sam Stinson," I said. "We talked about it a long time ago."
Frowning, Eliot said, "I remember." He might have said, "Why do you insist upon speaking Esperanto?"
"When I was a child, my parents studied one of his books in Sunday School, and my father took it too much to heart."
Eliot said, "And your mother took you away from your father?"
I shook my head. "The other way around. She told me-. When I was in San Francisco, I found out-she told me-it was the other way around. He left us."
Eliot nodded. He said, "Tell us about that."
My explanation rambled back and forth through time, taking in Love and Discipline, and Barbara's anti-Biblical tirade, and what she'd told me about her marriage, and the mysterious photos of the foster children. When I'd finished, each of the men sat at the edge of his seat, itching to speak.
Eliot said, "You really need to read Hope and Healing, Jonah. I think you'll see yourself in it."
Tigger said, "You were separated from your father at an early age. That's abandonment." He looked at Eliot. He seemed to expect some kind of prize. A gold star, perhaps.
"Abandonment," Eliot said to me, "is the idea that when a child isn't allowed to bond sufficiently with the parent of the same sex, it creates a hunger for same-sex bonding in other forms."
"And I think there is some reinforcement going on with that Barbara woman," Fred said. "Big time. Sounds like she did everything but require you to be gay."
"Barbara's always been unconditionally supportive of me," I said. "I thought that made her a good mother."
Eliot shook his head. "Reinforcement, in most cases, is an omission. Parents sometimes guess that their gay kids are gay, but purposely ignore the signs. They don't know what to do, so they do nothing, and the children take it for implicit approval. That's in most cases."
The men around the circle were nodding. Jeremy tucked his chin into his chest.
Eliot said, "In your case, it sounds like your mother was, and is, so 'supportive'"-he spat the word-"that she all but pushed you to be gay."
"And don't forget," Rob said. "Don't forget defiance. I think your mother contributed some to that too."
"That's true," Eliot said to Rob. To me he said, "Defiance is the idea that there's a perceived benefit in being unusual, in resisting the classical definitions of right and wrong. You just got done telling us your mother has a strong resistance to religion and traditional morality. And now-. Now. Just look at your reluctance to read Sam Stinson." He nodded toward the book. "If that's not defiance, I don't know what is."
"Surely no one's to blame," I said. "Surely I can't blame my mother for making me gay."
Charlie said, "It's not all her fault. She created the conditions, but you made the choice."
"When? When did I choose this?" I glanced round the circle at stony faces. "Do any of you remember choosing?"
Their silence was icy. Charlie said, "It's not an all-at-once choice. It's done in increments over years, until the habits form and become ingrained. It's in the book. It's in the chapter called 'Why You're Homosexual.'"
Narcissism. No one had said anything about it. I flipped pages again, toward the front where I'd seen the word. Now I couldn't find it. I closed the book and set it on its spine between my legs. My right leg quivered, my heel knocking the floor.
Eliot said, "Whether your mother left your father, or your father left your mother, it seems to me that she started running away from things when you were very young, and that you've been running from things ever since. You want to leave right now, don't you?"
Nodding all around. Was it that obvious? "I suppose I do."
"You ran from my office once when I started talking about God." He nodded once, emphatically, as if what he'd just said proved everything. "Don't run from this, Jonah. Read the book. It will help."
Looking at the floor, holding the book between the palms of my hands, I nodded. "I will. Shouldn't someone else get a chance to talk?" I said. "This has all been about me since we started."
Charlie put his hand on my knee. "That's another kind of running away, Jonah. We're all here for each other."
Eliot said, "Do you know what precipitated the break? The break between your parents?"
I shook my head. "I know what I thought it was. But I don't know what it actually was."
"What did you think it was?"
"My father hit me with a belt."
"Do you remember why?"
"I said a bad word. I was just repeating something I'd heard on the playground. I asked if it was a bad word, because I didn't believe it could be."
"'Fuck,'" Charlie said.
Mason shuffled his feet, shifted his weight in a way that made his chair creak.
Charlie said, "That had to be the word, am I right? I made up rhyming games. Duck, stuck, truck, muck, luck, buck."
"That was the word," I said. "And I made up the rhymes, too. Fuck, fuck, goose."
Tigger laughed, nodding. "My mother made me get a switch."
I looked at Tigger. "A switch?"
"Do you remember this?" Eliot said. I looked at him. He was talking to me. "Do you have a first-hand recollection of this incident?"
"I remember the punishment, not the crime."
"Then how do you know what happened?"
"Barbara told me."
"Do you think she told you the whole story?"
"Why wouldn't she?"
"Maybe because they had a big fight over it, and that's why he left. Or maybe at the time she also felt that punishment was justified."
I said, "What could I have done at four years old that would deserve a beating with the buckle end of a belt? Repeating a word I didn't know?"
Charlie put his hand on my knee again. "My father once broke my little finger because I misquoted a Bible verse. He bent it back until it snapped."
The pinky finger of his right hand-that must be it. Where it lay on my leg, it bent sideways a few painful-looking degrees. Charlie took his hand away.
"You win," I said. I set the Stinson book on the side table. To Eliot I said, "I
s this where we implant a false memory?"
"I understand your hostility," Eliot said. "I understand that you feel some loyalty to your mother. But you have to wonder why a caring, Christian father would exact such a terrifying punishment for such a small offense." He spoke quickly. "Parents often go too far in the heat of anger and because of fear. Do you have any good memories of him? Did he ever hold you?"
"I don't remember him touching me except in anger."
"But he left when you were very young."
I nodded. "Six or eight, I think. There seems to be a lot of stuff I don't remember."
"Can you remember anything except the belt?"
I shook my head, then shrugged. "Not a lot."
"How would you know of anything that happened before that?"
"Barbara would have to tell me about it."
"Was it in her best interests to say anything kind about him, if by doing so she risked turning you against her?"
I leaned forward. I rubbed my temples. Looking up, I said, "It's not like she could turn me against her by saying he hugged me once."
"But if she could make you believe that you were better off without him, then-."
"I can't believe anything else, because I don't know anything but what she told me," I said. Soon after she'd told me the truth, I'd thought much the same thing.
Eliot said, "And do you suppose she told you everything? She misled you, didn't she? You thought she left your father, but he left her."
"True," I said. "That's entirely true." I looked at him. Still, he was inscrutable. "Barbara and I-. When I was growing up we relied on each other for everything. When I turned out to be gay, what was she supposed to do? Disown me?"
"Of course not," Eliot said. "Of course it's natural and healthy that a mother and son should be close. To a point. Your mother took a course of action that almost ensured you'd turn out homosexual." He rushed the word. He barely allowed it three syllables. "In that situation, I could hardly expect her to object to any great degree when you in fact did turn out to be homosexual." Again, he rushed the word, as if it were a profanity he could not avoid using.
"You're saying my mother set out to make me gay? Why would anyone do that?"
Fred said, "Your mother is Barbara Murray, right? I remember listening to her radio show fifteen years ago and hearing her talk about AIDS and gay rights and gay people. That's her audience. That's why she went to San Francisco, and she said as much before she left."