The Mt. Monadnock Blues Read online

  “It’s not that simple,” said Tim.

  “It is exactly that simple. You have to be there for Seth.”

  Tim dreaded the memorial service, dreaded the pathos and the self-pity, the justified depression and the labored uplift. And Peter would hound him about getting tested, as he was hounding him now about attending.

  “I’m definitely not coming if anyone sings ‘The Rose.’ Seth hated that song every bit as much as I do.”

  “You wait. It’ll make you cry like a baby.”

  “So would ‘Danny Boy’ but who wants to cry? I don’t want to hear that song and I really don’t want to hear the speech about Going On, how we are all Going On, and this isn’t a funeral it’s a celebration of life.”

  “Stop being such a prima donna, Tim, and remember who you are. It’s Seth you should be thinking of.”

  “You’re right. These things just wear me out.”

  “Fine, then don’t come,” snapped Peter, finished with imploring. But this injured tone of Peter’s invariably ended a discussion in his favor. Tim would have to scramble back.

  He would also need coverage. He could call Judy Heikala, Billy and Cindy’s regular sitter—he should have called her anyway, long since, on general principles. But then Al McManus, appearing at the door as Tim was fishing out Judy’s number, made an easier target.

  Al was an absurdly good neighbor. He said yes to babysitting, and then handed Tim a fresh peach pie. This was the flip side, the A-side, of those wretchedly excessive strings of Christmas bulbs. “Alice says to let it cool at least half an hour.”

  “You bring me homemade pies, you solve my childcare problems. When am I going to see your dark side, Al?”

  “Winter,” said Al.

  “Well it’s no sense wasting good peaches,” said Tim and then, when he saw Al staring at him, “What? What did I say?”

  “Nothing, nothing. Jill would say those exact words in the exact same tone, that’s all. It hits me, when stuff like that happens.”

  Tim drove first to the office, and parked at a meter directly below his window. Had this ever happened? In Copley Square?

  But this was the time of year when Nantucket and the Cape sank under the weight of a quarter million souls demanding their fried clams; conversely, when Boston rose up on its toes. With the herd thinned, Boston was still a pretty vision of sunlight on red brick, closely resembling the city Tim twice had chosen to call home. Before and after San Francisco.

  He and Karl had come back from the west coast together, and then stayed together through the hideous unraveling. It was worse for Karl, who convinced himself Tim was going through a “phase.” (Hell, they all were, it was so insane it had to be temporary…) Karl believed in love. Love was real; it was different, and identifiable.

  Tim tried to identify it, most nearly succeeding with Karl Trickett, where he did feel a difference. That was as close as he could come, though, and it still wasn’t love. Not if it stood in the way. If it constantly imposed upon you.

  The fault was his, he acknowledged. We fall on the leaning side, and to Tim freedom loomed larger than love. Or the illusion of freedom larger than the illusion of love, as he cynically restated the matter upon hearing, upstairs, that Charles was head over heels.

  One could discount Charles. Charles was fun, but it would be out of place to take him too seriously, when Charles had never taken himself seriously at all. Except that now, freshly disengaged, he was madly in love with Cassandra. The half-and-half girl was already ancient history.

  “Cass has the most beautiful neck I have ever seen,” said Charles, not thirty seconds after Tim walked in. Hoping to gain respect by celebrating a non-erogenous zone? No. “The most beautiful breasts as well, mind you—perfect nipple placement—but then this girl even has the most beautiful knees.”

  Tim waited to see if Charles would pan on down to the toes. “Has she brain, Charlie? Or only these nether parts?”

  “As a matter of fact, she’s a Harvard M.B.A.”

  “How did you meet her?”

  “At a club. We danced.”

  Charles’ shrug of besmitment told all. Danced! The rest was far too obvious to bear repeating. One touch, no doubt, of the famous neck and voilà, true love.

  Well, bully for Charles. Bully for Ellie and Karl, too—the lot of them seeking love and finding it, apparently. Why should Tim feel left out when the choice was his? He could be tucking up at that B. & B. with Karl if he were so inclined, if he could believe in love, or feel it. The trouble was he could disbelieve, could fail to feel it, yet still experience a void.

  “I have to stop back after the service,” he said. “To collect my packet.”

  “You may be in luck, old man. I’ve got some photos to pick up. Cassandra in all her glory.”

  “Dynamite,” said Tim, backing towards the door, shaking his head in wonderment.

  Through the handsome arch of divided glass, sunlight flooded the room, spilling across the wide mahogany floorboards. Its progress, displacing shadow, distracted Tim as he tried his best to listen. He heard a lot of it, and he spoke, unearthing his anecdote about Seth stranded on the Pike in Framingham yet reluctant to call AAA because his boa constrictor was in the back seat.

  And, in spite of himself, he cried at ‘The Rose,’ beautifully rendered by a balding tenor he had never seen before. Hired talent? But the stories droned on and his attention slipped back to charting the incoming tide of sunlight, now three floorboards from his toes, now two.… This was nothing against Seth, certainly, and nothing against death, either. Death could hold its terror through a hundred of these fucking memorials, for the fact remained that someone sitting in this room would be next.

  And here once again, among his best friends remaining on earth, Tim felt distinctly apart. This had nothing to do with Jill or the children—his “situation” as they were calling it. Tim remembered who he was. He recognized bits and pieces of himself in everyone present. He was one of them, no question.

  But he was also apart from them. Different from the different, a freak among freaks. Tim weighed the possibility that everyone felt this way, gay and straight, black and white. Maybe it was the famous human condition revisited, as in such clichés as the one reminding us we all die alone. It came in forms as trite as the old high school nightmare—everyone desperate to be included, everyone feeling left behind.

  Included, warmed, sheltered from the intergalactic coldness. Absolutely. Tim understood that his was the unnatural response, for even in high school he embraced aloneness. Noticed that he preferred it. Could not call it loneliness, as he so rarely felt lonely.

  When he tried explaining this to Karl, Karl joked that Tim had missed his calling, that he should have been a poet or a composer. Travel agents were not supposed to be existentialists. So Tim burrowed deeper into solitude, he stopped trying to explain himself, even when he could taste the explanation on his brain. He went abroad twice a year, rarely more and never less, and he always went alone. The Blues of Tim Bannon.

  Tim’s reputation for soured adventure was so ironclad he could predict the stories they would string together at his own memorial, right here at The Meeting House. Peter Clippinger would kick things off. Tim always gathered his maps (Peter would testify) and researched the history. Even studied the language for a month, then went off brimming with enthusiasm. Soon after, all too soon, he would begin sending what Peter called The Postcards of Doom.

  News of the Blues, Karl would chime in, and open with The Budapest Blues. Tim was in Budapest for one night, yet managed to get himself rolled by a gypsy working the Danube River cruise. And in Czechoslovakia (The Moravian Blues, Karl would laugh through tears) his bike had been stolen, but then his bike was always getting stolen.…

  And Carlos would quote him (they would all quote him, in harmony) dismissing it with a grin and a hint of self-parody in the Carolina drawl. “I’m resigned to the blues, man, it’s the least I’m owed.”

  For this was an old routine,
Tim’s rendering of a fellow named Ted Copeland, a black porchfront singer back in Berline. Blind Teddy Copeland, the white kids called him, for authenticity—there was nothing wrong with his vision. But Ted would finish a song and shake his head and say it: “I am resigned to the blues, my man. It’s the least I am owed.”

  Tim took his paper cup of wine out to the courtyard, where Karl was chatting up the bald singer. They were bent over a flower (identifying and classifying it, if Tim knew Karl Trickett) and when their two heads simultaneously turned toward him, Tim realized the singer was not hired talent, he was Jay Collingsworth, Karl’s new beau.

  “Sorry,” said Jay—disarmingly, before hello—“Karl warned me you hate that song.”

  “Generally speaking, I do prefer the blues,” said Tim, going along with his own private joke. Wondering briefly what Ted Copeland would make of “The Rose.”

  “Does he ever,” said Karl, always ready. “Timmy went to this tiny fishing village in Scotland? And they told him it was the first sunny day the Firth of Forth had seen since the fourth of Firth, or something? And Tim came down with the flu.”

  “Pittenweem,” Tim acknowledged. “Three days in bed.”

  “The Pittenweem Blues. Then last year he was off to Ravenglass—”

  “All right, Karl, enough.”

  “Sorry, Timmy. Don’t be sore.”

  “I’m not. Not at all. But the thing is I’d better get going. The Mt. Monadnock Blues, you know. Time to hit the road.”

  “Well, I’m glad I finally met you,” said Jay.

  “Likewise. And though it is an awful song, you sang it like the angels.”

  That was that. Tim wasted no time bolting back through the room, or tomb—that gorgeously appointed portal to death. In that room, inevitably, you made two mental lists (the ones who had died and the ones still breathing) and you left, invariably, with at least a trace of imagined fever, a definite moistness at the temples.

  He tried to leave it all behind as he descended (fled) down Mt. Vernon to Charles Street, where he was startled to see spaces between the parked cars. Parking spaces, on Charles Street! Was Boston trying to lure him back?

  There were distinct signs of autumn in the Garden: an outbreak of red leaves, squirrels madly stuffing their cheeks with acorns. Humid as the day remained, he felt September closing in on him. September would come, and Tim would not be in Donegal, as planned. Ideally, he would be in New Hampshire.

  Ideally? What it boiled down to was this: the time was fast approaching for Tim to go out and get The Donegal Blues, but Tim would not be free to get them. It was a joke, the Blues, yet the animus behind it had served as his substitute for love. A rich solitude over any bleak partnership, that was the crux of Tim’s choice. Now he would need to turn up a substitute for the Blues.

  Could it really be his true-life sitcom, The Unk Knows Nothing Show? In tonight’s episode, Unk shops and cooks! And be sure and tune in next week for an all-new one-hour special in which Unk goes plastic at The Pants Man, then drinks himself to bloody blue ruin! Whatever it looked like in fact, Donegal had never looked so good to Tim Bannon.

  By now he was eager to see Charles again, and how bad were things when you craved a restorative dose of the white teeth, the gleaming black hair? But Tim was certain Charles could help him. Because Charles had joy. For all the wrong reasons, perhaps, and yet who needed reasons, right or wrong? What you needed was the joyfulness; you had it or you didn’t, and Charlie had it, through the sheer dumb luck of personality.

  “My new honey,” he said, extending an envelope toward Tim and then retracting it. Teasing! Was Charlie in such transports he had lost track entirely of Tim’s sexual preference, not to mention the fact that Tim was just coming back from a funeral?

  “What? You’re charging money to show them?”

  “They are nudes.”

  “I am gay.”

  “Shit, there go the profits,” said Charles, forking over the envelope. Most of the photographs were chaste Victorian portraits featuring the young lady’s long blonde tresses. Only a few were nudes.

  “I love this one,” said Tim. Cassandra had covered her face with both hands in a lovely comic statement of reserve, given that the gesture left her entire torso exposed.

  “Those are the breasts,” Charles elucidated.

  “I understood that.”

  It struck Tim that these photos were Charlie’s way of explaining himself, excusing his behavior in dumping cindycrawford. With such compelling evidence as this in hand, even a gay man would get it.

  “The breasts, I mean. Best of Boston, 1990.”

  “So then these must be the knees.”

  “Stick around, Tim, you may get to see her in the flesh.”

  This was a bizarre outburst of pride, yet it was also generosity. Charles was sufficiently solipsistic to believe he could lift Tim’s spirits with these pictures, and in a way he was right. Tim did not stick around, though. He organized his work packet and stepped back into the heat and humidity.

  The Fleet Bank clock was flashing 4 o’clock and 95 degrees, round numbers. Nearing Greenwich Park, Tim saw that Harriet, on a bench in the shade, had removed her fur coat. She had plenty more layers to safeguard her modesty, but Tim had never seen her without the coat. He gave her a quarter and pretended to admire the Miss Maine snapshot, as clearly this was a day for cheesecake. When he bumped into his neighbor Bill Mastronarde, Tim half expected him to flourish some shots of Connie.

  “What have you been up to?” asked Bill, harmlessly.

  “Good question,” said Tim, not answering it. He had left a cardboard carton in the foyer, which his mailman had filled with unwanted mail order catalogues. These he transferred directly into the recycling bin. The telephone, ringing inside, was likely another commercial invasion, but Tim grabbed for it just in case.

  “It’s you, in person,” said Joe Average. “You haven’t been answering.”

  “Gee, I don’t suppose you could guess why.”

  “I know, I know, and it’s true. I may owe you an apology.”

  Here was the kinder, gentler Joe Average whom Tim had been hearing for weeks. Joe’s latest messages were flat hopeless entreaties. They were pointless, really, for what was the point of a harassing phone call that neglected to harass. And now he was apologizing?

  “I’ve done some reading. About the gay gene?”

  “You have got to be kidding me.”

  “Not at all. This whole gay thing may be no different than a person having brown eyes. Or strong teeth.”

  “Joe, that’s a very new theory. No one has even tried to prove it.”

  “It’s incredibly honest of you to say that.”

  Whoa. The guy was so turned around he sounded like one of the clones; his voice blended with all the clone voices at Seth’s service. Joe Average might yet prove to be one-of-us!

  “I thought I could buy you a drink. Let bygones be bygones.”

  “Bad idea.”

  “I would tell you my real name.”

  “No! I don’t want to know your real name.”

  “I don’t mean now. I meant if we—”

  “Why not now?” Tim fired back, blithely contradicting himself. The reflex of logic. He was chopping logic with Joe Average.

  “Okay then, now. It’s Ed. Just Ed.”

  “Just Ed. As in you have only one name, like Cher or Liberace?”

  “No, no. As in it’s not colorful. It’s a Joe Average sort of name.”

  “Look, Ed. You sound a lot nicer than you did—”

  “I am sorry about that, as I said.”

  “Okay, but we shouldn’t get together. I can’t help you. I’ve got these two kids to care for—”

  “Yeah, right. You’re a—”

  “A homo, yes. But I really do have these children and I’m putting all my good work into them. If you see what I mean.”

  “I don’t see, no.”

  “Never mind. You know what I do, when I want to feel better?
”

  “Don’t patronize me, Tim.”

  “I talk with my therapist, that’s what I do, and I come back feeling tons better.”

  “You bastard, you better cut this patronizing bullshit.”

  “And if therapy doesn’t help?” said Tim, who had no therapist and had not spoken with one since freshman year, “there are some bars I can tell you about.”

  If Just Ed was in the closet, if this was his desperate attempt to squeeze out into the room, either Colours would work for him or it would scare him shitless. Let fate decide that. Tim simply wanted the calls to stop without any gunfire starting up. He wanted this call to end peacefully.

  Meanwhile it had. Just Ed, on whom Tim was well advised to hang up (on whom he had hung up, a dozen times), had just hung up on him. Which took a moment to register.

  The only new message was from Ben Fisher. A high school music teacher who looked like a high school student. Twenty-eight, though, or so he said. Played the cello. They had exchanged numbers at a party on West Springfield, talked about setting up a dinner thing. That was months ago and now here was Ben, shyly inquiring. In Ben’s voice, Tim heard the sweetness he had found so appealing.

  He could manage this—he did have coverage—but it was too early, hours until dinnertime, and the tricky phone tussle with Just Ed had spooked him. Ed could be anyone. He could be someone Tim knew, even someone with whom he had shared fluids, anonymously, in ancient times. For that matter, he could be Ben Fisher.

  Tim did not believe any of it, he was simply spooked. Beating a retreat. For now he felt safer in New Hampshire. He knew what to do there, how to behave, perhaps in the limited yet comforting way you understand a job. His own world had gone temporarily out of focus.

  He grabbed a cotton sweater and a light jacket (September was coming), replaced the cardboard carton in the foyer, and split. He made incredible time—or maybe it seemed that way because he was so zoned out in the transition. But back in Jaffrey well before the sunset, he was astonished to think he had left here just this morning. That it was still the same day.

  To reclaim the kids, he had to absorb a bowl of Alice’s leek and potato soup. Then it was time for Jeopardy, the game show which grimly enough had become part of Tim’s normalcy thing and which Billy always dominated. The young were simply better at thinking backwards, the same way they had an edge with electronic gizmos. They were born to it and besides, their minds were still nimble.