She continues: “Are you listening? Mom didn’t let him. She told him that if he so much as looked at you wrong she’d divorce him and tell both you and Alice why she was leaving. So he kept his mouth shut, and so did Mom, and they went on like that until he died, just so you could be protected from the truth.”
There’s a second brief silence, and the door opens again: crickets dissect the night, and on the other side of the house the cello moans.
“So how about that,” Eloise says. “The woman you’ve spent three years torturing is the same one who saved your life.”
Ollie thinks: Fuck.
Paul
July 10
His sister’s lying. She must be. His father had been his ally, a source of certainty amid what was otherwise a jumble of female ambivalence. He didn’t miss a single one of Paul’s high school soccer games, and when Paul played in college and his team had a match somewhere in the Midwest, Bill would often drive five, six, seven hours to watch Paul take the field. He cried when Paul graduated, and tried to convince him, in his own stoic way, not to move to New York.
“Why do you want to go all the way out there?” he’d said. “You’ve got everything you need right here.”
How would they keep up their tradition of going to Pete’s for a full rack of ribs on Saturday afternoons if Paul were living a thousand miles east? How would they go on one of their long, itinerant drives, those nomadic wanderings past suburbs and strip malls and into the belly of Illinois’s heartland? Still, Paul left. He had to. He had to find a place where he could start the process of unknowing the person he’d been pretending to be. When his dad dropped him off at O’Hare, Paul promised that he’d call twice a week, and it was a promise that he kept, right up until the Saturday morning in April when he phoned to tell them he was gay.
It wasn’t a big deal—those were the first words out of his mother’s mouth, and he believed her. It wasn’t even a deal, at all. Christ, they probably already knew and were just waiting for him to tell them on his own terms. That’s what his friends in New York told him, at least. Parents always know. His father had been more or less silent as Paul blubbered through the confession, but that in itself wasn’t all that surprising: Bill was a quiet kind of guy. He’d just wanted to give Paul room to talk, room to explain himself.
But then: oh, the insidious sting of truth as it crawls into the light. Because now, as he weaves together memories of his father, discrepancies arise that had previously gone unnoticed: Bill declining Paul’s invitation for ribs when he was visiting for Christmas, claiming some unmemorable excuse—high blood pressure. Bill standing up from his blue La-Z-Boy and leaving the living room whenever Mark phoned during the holidays. Bill returning every other call, then every third, then every fourth. Bill losing interest, fading away.
The moon throws shadows that splice up the field in pieces. Paul presses the heels of his palms to his eyes.
How could he have ignored all this so willfully? How could the truth be so arbitrary as to subject itself to the whims of his own idealizations? Is knowing what people think of you really such a deceptive negotiation of self, a bartering between the knowledge that you have and the knowledge you choose to accept? Because now he wants to know what his father said about him during those last deceptive years—he wants it all laid bare and gruesome before him, like a corpse, decayed and dissected. Bill belonged to a club—not the best one, he couldn’t afford that, but a fine one, filled with like-minded men. Paul wants to know what Bill told them, how his dad talked about him after he knew. How many times was he called a disappointment, he wonders; how many times had Bill received the sympathy of others, simply because Paul existed? He wants to dig his dad up from his grave, tie him down, and ask him every question he’s thinking at once. But then—no. He doesn’t. Not really, anyway, because the answers that he’s looking for don’t exist. They rarely ever do.
“Hey, Paul.”
Ollie stands over him, his broad silhouette blocking out the moon. Paul scoops up a handful of gravel from the house’s driveway and transfers it from one hand to the other.
“Hey,” he says.
Ollie shoves his hands in his pockets.
“Everything all right, then?”
“Just getting some air,” he says, and looks back across the field.
“Right. Can get, uh, ha, can get a bit stuffy back in there. That kitchen’s pretty tight.”
“Have you got a cigarette?”
“What’s that?”
“A cigarette.”
Ollie nods, as if he’s suddenly understood the language Paul’s speaking.
“A smoke! Right. Yeah, hold on.” He digs in his pockets and pulls out a bent Camel Straight, which Paul takes, and a matchbook, with which Paul lights up.
“Your sister’ll kill me if she knows I’m smoking, but, ha, hey. Last night of freedom or something, right?”
“Thanks,” he says, and exhales. “Shouldn’t you be getting back to your guests or something?”
An airplane passes overhead, its lights upstaging the stars, and Ollie rubs his head.
“Yeah, probably,” he says, but doesn’t move.
Paul holds the cigarette in front of him and watches it burn. It’s stale—he wonders how long it’s been stashed away in Ollie’s pocket—but all he can think is that he hopes it lasts forever, because when it’s over he has to go back to worrying about the mess he’s made.
“How long were you standing in the kitchen?” he asks.
“Oh, me? Not long. Just came in to see how the gougères were shaping up and saw you and Eloise talking. Probably about five seconds.”
He’s lying, which means he heard everything, Paul thinks. Suddenly, he wants Ollie to stay.
“You coming back in?”
Paul watches smoke drift skyward. “Not for a while, I don’t think.”
He feels a tap on his shoulder. When he turns, he sees Ollie is holding out a five-pound note.
“There’s a pub about two kilometers down the road. I’ll go inside and call you a cab,” he says. Then: “And, Paul, she means well. I know sometimes it doesn’t seem like it, but I swear to God she does.”
*
The Thirsty Lion is a forgettable, prosaic place, which suits Paul’s mood. Exposed wood beams and dank green walls. A long wood bar and a rectangular dining room with mismatched vinyl chairs. Above the cashier, a casual coat of arms. The smell of beer and Lysol—an army of cleaning solutions fighting an uphill battle. Peter Gabriel’s “Solsbury Hill” warbling on the room’s single speaker. He orders a whiskey.