Toby's Lie Read online

  “Dad?”

  I was standing before him in their bedroom. He lay wrecked amid a troubled sea of Instamatic snapshots.

  “What is it, Tobe?”

  “I’ve got something to say.”

  “Well then, spill it.”

  “Sleep tight.”

  I kissed him.

  “Sleep tight, kiddaroono.”

  I left. I felt like shit.

  Dad woke me up at six in the morning so I could go to mass with him at St. Patrick’s Catholic Church. It wasn’t enough that I went to a Jesuit school—which was systematically undermining whatever faith I might have had to begin with— Dad insisted I accompany him to morning mass. I would kneel with him. I would sing with him. I would get the words to the Apostle’s Creed wrong with him. It was a Catholic sort of bonding. I liked shaking hands at the Sign of the Cross. It was whack. “Hello there, Dad, peace be with you!” “Well, howdy there, son, and also with you!” When we shook, I’d do funky things with my grip. I’d make a spastic pumping motion like a lonely donor heart. I’d do the Cold Fish and make my hand a soggy dead thing. I’d run my middle finger seductively along his palm and wink like a prostitute and nod at the confessional. Dad ate it up; he was a sucker for irreverence. Morning mass acted on him just like laughing gas. If we were stationed for precaution at the rear of the church, I’d perform all the hymns like Marilyn Monroe, churning my hips and puffing out phantom tits. I’d always suspected Dad knew I was gay; he was easier about it, less uptight than Mom. I’d close the Ave Maria with boop-boop-bee-doop!, and Dad would choke my hand and say, “Jesus, would you stop it?” It wouldn’t be long before I had him in hysterics, cheeks flushing purple, chest hyperventilating. “Last time I take you with me!” he’d mutter through his molars as we knelt down together at the slick communion rail. Once I plucked the Eucharist off my sticky tongue and pressed the pasty wafer to Dad’s fat butt as he waddled down the aisle past appalled communicants. The altar boys died. The pastor called us over after.

  “Mr. Sligh, if y’insist on bringing this boy with yar tuh mass, yar mustn’t parmit ’im t’engage in such sarkrilege!”

  “Hear that, Tobe? Say you’re sorry, asswipe.”

  “I’m sorry, Fr. Tierney.”

  I really was, too.

  I liked mass: I liked the clothes, I liked Jesus, I liked the songs, I liked the incense. I liked the dowdy widows with their impossible blue hair, like they soaked their ancient heads in Ty-D-Bol overnight. I liked the quiet of the church, and the cold smell of marble. I liked the icy water waiting in the baptismal font. What I liked especially was a priest named Fr. Diaz, a yummy young Spaniard straight out of Latin GQ. He played tennis with the best-looking guys in the parish, and I always saw him at the rectory court patting their asses with the head of his racket. I used to get a hard-on talking to him in confession. Fr. Diaz’s words, warm and minty, blew at you through the grate, like a television lover’s flawless morning breath. He wore his Izod shirtsleeves bunched tight against his biceps and always smelled of cigarettes and soap and Aramis. And he’d look at you like he was looking at himself, with the sort of silky bedroom smile that said, “We are adorable.” Too bad morning mass featured awful Fr. Tierney, a flatulent myopic wannabe Celt-poser who spoke with a sham brogue and nose-picked through the homily. Every time Tierney went digging for gold, I used to throw Dad a playful elbow in the ribs: “There he goes, Pop! Pick me out a Cadillac!” And I’d think of Fr. Diaz, in his Calvins, at the rectory, dark arms around a pillow, soaking up his beauty sleep.

  “Peace be with you, Toby,” my father said to me.

  “Peace be with ya, Pops.”

  Our clammy hands unjoined.

  “Is loneliness God’s way of punishing us for doubting His existence?”

  This was the question a visiting Jesuit had put before the student body that morning at Convocation. Except for me—who had been flogging spiritually dead horses since the tightened sphincter muscles of the early, early morning—we all sat slumped in the chapel half asleep, suffering in our Action Slacks, struggling with our starched collars, silent-but-deadlies wafting with redolent abandon up from squeaky pews to a sun-bedizened altar. The priest was a tall, alarmingly gaunt fellow with a Louisiana accent and a wasted constitution. I had never seen him before, and I didn’t catch his name when our principal—the Rev. Anthony McDuffy, S.J.—introduced him. But from the way several teachers sat up at attention when, with assistance, he ascended the pulpit, I knew he must have been a familiar face to some. Even Ian, my boyfriend, the swimmer I planned to accompany to the senior prom, straightened himself and cocked his ear like a puppy, as if beyond the grave Barbara Woodhouse tooted whistles. I felt a flush of envy: Ian had never cocked his pretty ear before like that for me or, for that matter, anybody. And he looked really gorgeous sitting there at attention: his carotids pulsing against his laundered Oxford, his just-moussed crew-cut Olympic-trial hair aimed in aimless arrows at a frieze of St. Sebastian, his rheumy glass eye angled thankfully away. Ian was bright, the brightest boy in our class, one of these freaks with genius coded in their genes. And he came across as husky and indelibly straight; he excelled in nearly everything but sexual expression. I, shameless trop moderne hussy that I was, had been attempting, with some success, to coax him out of his shell and, not without his shellshocked consent, into mine. We’d been friends ever since his arrival from New Orleans and had fooled around, well, you know, more than just a little. And we really loved each other, though nobody would have guessed it. We played it cool at school: all high-fives and hardy jock talk. The only thing we didn’t blow for each other was our cover.

  “Does God confront us with human isolation as a terrorist tactic to spur our flagging faith?”

  It was a nifty theory, this loneliness one. I’d never thought of God in such pathetic terms before. In fact, I’d never thought of God that much at all. I was Jesus-fixated; I assumed God was. And the way this Jesuit put his argument across—his starved face pleading in a pained, sustained way, not gloating in the usual pseudo-intellectual splendor of the polished and pedantic Jesuitical wanker—made you want to listen, made you want to take it in. He was one of those scary, charismatic fathers—seductive, hypnotic, alluring, all-consuming. A cross between the Reverend Billy Graham and Billy Idol. And apart from the fact that his body was collapsing, that he looked like a scarecrow whose pegs were coming loose and who would tumble any moment from his ramshackle cross, he had the careworn beauty of anything dying.

  “Boys your age are too young to know the meaning of the word ‘loneliness,’ ” he continued, looking more emaciated with each relinquished breath. “But a time will arrive in your complicated lives in which loneliness, with its endless corridor of empty rooms, will inhabit your hearts, will become reality. Will you wander the desolated mansion of your days as errantly, as despondently as God wanders His when He beholds a people that has turned its back on Him? Will you realize, as Jesus came to realize in the desert, that isolation teaches us to measure our true selves? To know loneliness, boys, is to know one’s soul; and to know one’s soul is to know one’s God. Isolation may appear to be a trial at first, but through it we endure His most blessed, abiding test. Through it we commune with the Spirit who created us, who longs for our reunion, who suffers in our absence.’’

  A far cry, indeed, from Tierney’s crack-o’-dawn special about “Sinatra’s famous ant” and the rubber tree plant: “Just what gives that parky little varmint such spirit?” I wished Dad were there so I could dig him in the ribcage and dolly-talk like Marilyn, all google-eyes and giggles: “Golly, Fr. Tierney! Wubber twee plants? I never knew prophylactics gwew on twees!” But I sat there, alone, God resounding in my head like a smooth pebble dropped from an impossible height into a pool of water too dark and too shallow.

  Lectures that morning went by in slow motion; it was the last week of classes, and we were slouching toward the finish line. On this side of the tape were our teachers and ourselves, as familia
r to one another as old shoes or married couples; on the other side lay college, independence, liberation—all of the illusions that the future always holds. And in between our routine and the prospect of our freedom was the celebrated prom, an intoxicated island where we would drink and dance and fuck and swear eternal friendships that wouldn’t last the summer. By tradition our school held the prom on a Monday—this was sort of meant to have a sobering effect. But the figure of the Jesuit who spoke at convocation had already cast a pall across the prospect of our freedom, and I couldn’t shake his image, or the words that he had said. So after morning classes, before I went to see my counselor, I tried to find Ian to talk about God. But he wasn’t anywhere.

  I mean Ian, that is.

  When I opened my hand and found my boyfriend’s dick in it was the answer I had given to Mr. Kickliter, the high school counselor’s opening question: “When did you first realize you were gay?”

  “That’s not what I meant, Dr. Sligh,” K. resumed, stabbing out his cigarette and firing up a new one.

  Kickliter, smarmy slice of butt cheese that he was, always called me Dr. Sligh and grimaced at my humor in that endlessly patient, patently dismissive, underpaid and oversensitive high school counselor’s way of his. You might confess to steamrolling a parade route of Shriners and he’d greet it with a shrug and a fresh cigarette.

  “It’s a stupid question, K.,” I said, kicking back. “It’s like asking me when I realized I had thumbs.”

  “Mine are double-jointed,” Kickliter offered. He showed me. He wanted to Lighten Things Up.

  “The point is,” I resumed. “I fully intend to accompany my boyfriend—”

  “And who might that be?”

  “To next week’s senior prom. And I want your estimation of the academic repercussions of any such so-called ill-advised action.”

  “First off,” K. evaded, “the whole issue’s moot. You haven’t even completed your community service hours.”

  Every senior, as part of his commitment to the lofty if laborious Jesuit ideal, had to perform fifty hours of community service before being permitted to attend the senior prom. This was our reward for serving the community. Failure to serve the community, however, came with its penalty: no graduation. Neither Ian nor I had undertaken our hours, and as we would be valedictorian and salutatorian, respectively, at the graduation ceremony the Friday after prom, we were facing a far less pleasantly sticky situation than coitus interruptus in the backseat of a limo.

  “I’ll complete my hours,” I addressed the air.

  “And neither has Ian Lamb,” K. added, significantly, “if the little blue graph on my wall is correct.”

  “This has absolutely nothing to do with Ian Lamb,” I protested, too vocally. “This concerns me.”

  “ ‘Me, me, me’ … Ahhh, the middle word in life!”

  K. was going under in a swamp of cigarette smoke; he coughed, then he surfaced, grin first, like a gator.

  “Have you thought about a nunnery?” Kickliter suggested, twiddling his double-jointed digits with abandon and nigger-lipping the butt of his Kool something awful.

  “K., my man, you haven’t answered my question .”

  “Uh, Dr. Sligh?” Kickliter pursued, making a cigar of his cigarette, a la Groucho. “Is the door locked?”

  “Yes.”

  He got up and double-checked it.

  “Classified material. These walls have ears.”

  K. sat back and crossed his legs like a producer, flicked ashes on the floor: Who cared about the carpet? This was bottom-line stuff. This was seriously heavy. The baring of one human soul to another. Kickliter, to his credit, always kept things confidential. You had to give him that much. He was as Catholic as the pope.

  “Your ass,” K. said, exquisitely inhaling, “will be grass,” K. concluded, exhaling brilliantly.

  “Any reasons?”

  “Just the usual medieval nonsense: intolerance, hypocrisy, fear of the unknown. Of course, it’s your decision. Do your parents know you’re gay?”

  “I guess. I don’t know. I think so.”

  “Pretty dodgy. Will they freak?”

  “Will they what?”

  “Will they freak, Dr. Sligh? Are you prepared to deal with, like, Major League Rejection? Rejection from your school, rejection from your family, rejection from your peers?”

  “I think I’m in love.”

  “Love, well, yeah” The word made people nervous. “Love, well, love, yeah, love, um … love”

  K. stood up and came around the chair behind me. He massaged my knotty shoulders. “Tension buster,” he proclaimed. It was nice. It was kind. I was Jell-0 underneath him. And he had fantastic hands. And I wondered, “Is he gay?”

  “Dr. Sligh, I like you. You think for yourself. You’re one of the last of the truthful, so to say. But think a bit about it. ’Bout the things you’ve got to lose. Unconditional acceptance at a reputable college. Scholarship money.” He paused. “Your parents rich?”

  “Nope,” I conceded. We were colorfully poor.

  “You do this thing, escort your boyfriend to the prom, you’ll be a sort of hero… . But you’ll give your life away.” “Like Jesus?”

  I was always dragging Christ into things.

  “Guy’s a lie,” K. responded.

  “Just like me,” I said, and left.

  After my informative tête-à-tête with K. I came across Ian sitting by the swimming pool. His pants were rolled up and his feet were in the water. He dangled them gently up and down, like a kid. I didn’t go to him; I just watched him for a while. He was staring at the pool as if it were full of jewels, as if the glittering map of its surface separated him from sunken treasure only he could see. For a while Ian sat there with his head between his knees, the sunlight in the water splashing him with coins of light, and every now and then he’d dip his fingers in the deep end and baptize himself and shiver in the awful heat. When I called over to him Ian came without running. His body, lithe and graceful, looked pavement-bound and clumsy as he shuffled dully over and said, not looking up, “Hey, Toby.”

  “Hey, Ian … I talked to Kickliter.”

  “ ’Bout what?”

  “ ’Bout the prom.”

  “Oh, yeah … the senior prom.”

  “And I brought you a flower.”

  I handed it to Ian. It was pink. It was hiding in a brown paper bag.

  I’d swiped it off a rosebush out back behind the Residence where the Society of Jesus lived and breathed and didn’t breed. When I plucked it, I turned and thought I saw a pallid face disappear behind a curtain torn and blooming in a window. I found a paper bag and, like a robber, dropped it in it. And as I gave the bag to Ian I felt like Eve awry in Eden—righteous and romantic and profoundly paranoid: if Ian was my Adam, this was someone else’s garden.

  “What kind of flower is it?”

  “Guess,” I said and smiled.

  Ian brought the bag up to his artificial eye.

  “It’s a rose,” Ian said. “And it’s pink” Ian added.

  “And you’re right,” Toby said. “And it’s yours,” Toby added.

  Ian had arrived from New Orleans that year like God’s gift to Sacred Heart and Jesus’ gift to me. He was a moneyed All-American with a 4.0 average and National Merit standing and spiked hair and perfect teeth. I’d have been valedictorian if not for his arrival, but I couldn’t have cared less. I was happy to be ruined. Something had happened to Ian in New Orleans and he’d lost his left eye, but he wouldn’t talk about it. Like so many other things it only added to his charm: it cloaked him in the mantle of a living mystery. Ian wore his handicap like a badge of heroism and mopped the mucus from it with self-deprecating flair. And he had a constant playful-dolphin energy about him, a grace in thought and movement other students emulated. But when Ian’s mind was heavy, he seemed bedded to the ocean. You had to sound as deeply just to make him rise again. “Everything OK?” I asked him in a whisper.

  “Uh-huh.” He
just nodded; Ian’s head was somewhere else. And his words were all imploding, like explosives in a Coke can. “That Jesuit this morning—”

  “He was something,” I began. “What he said about—”

  “God. Uh-huh. What he said.”

  I was on Ian’s left, peering into his glass eye, so I couldn’t really read him: I could only read his voice.

  “You believe in God, Toby?”

  “Never really thought about it.”

  “That’s a lie, Toby Sligh,” Ian said, and frowned a little. “God love you for a liar,” Ian said, and dashed ahead.

  When I caught up to him he was studying my flower. Ian held it, and he smelled it, and he dropped it in the bag.

  “You gave me a bag. You said it was a flower. You told me to guess what kind of flower it was. I pictured a rose. A pink rose, Toby. I opened the bag. I was right. I was lucky. That’s God, Toby. That’s what your God is.”

  “And you’re welcome for the flower.”

  We were headed for the library.

  On our way we came across a chlorinated pod of swimmers pitching quarters in a corner cordoned off against the heat. They hailed their sullen idol, and Ian gave them audience, and we squatted there awhile, losing money, talking crap. When we left, we high-fived, and we belched, and all that bullshit, and the music of their laughter hustled our footsteps away.