Shelley sat across from the fully grown man on the white couch in the media room and she could hardly believe this was her eldest son. She took a heavy swig of her Chardonnay and he had a swig of his, which still seemed wrong to her somehow. But was something she would have to get used to. Like him voting, registering for Selective Service, and all the rest. The noisy celebration continued in the formal dining room without them. She wished for perfect silence for this conversation, but knew it did not exist. It never did in this big old house in the Hills with its six bedrooms and eight bathrooms. And especially on her eldest son’s 21st birthday, with those rooms stuffed with family and friends, etc. And way too many of them performers of one kind or the other.
This conversation. This promise. The promise that had been made before he was born, made when he was conceived, but had never been spoken about. But was always there, between them. Waiting for this moment. Waiting for this reveal, as the screenwriters say.
“Your father …” She faltered and he reached over and took her hand. She squeezed it as hard as she could. Everything she’d prepared in her head to say was gone. “Your father’s name is Will. He lives in Texas.”
Tuck laughed. “Texas? Is he a redneck?”
She flinched. “No, of course not. He lives in Austin and he’s a musician. Struggling …”
“So what, he’s a hipster?”
“No, not really.” She tried to focus. What else? “And he’s just a little bit older than I …” Then she knew it would all come flooding out and she would tell him everything. “And we first met while I was still at Vassar …”
She did not regret having only boys, not for one minute. Would she always be competing with a daughter? Or just combative? No, boys were low maintenance in comparison – even if she and Tuck did lock horns on occasion – predictable in most ways. Sons that would hopefully carry on her genetic inheritance (though she’d never admit it because Ray would just laugh). She did not believe in God per se, but knew that there must be some kind of divine plan and that she played a big meaty role in it.
Shelley fixed a smile on her face and walked into the dining room. She leaned over and whispered in Ray’s ear, still smiling. “Don’t make a big deal of it, but can you come with me into the kitchen? Don’t rush, but right now …”
When Ray walked into the kitchen, Shelley was almost hysterical. “Oh my god! That was awful!”
Ray smiled and asked Carmen to leave the clean-up and go and have a piece of birthday cake with everybody else. Once Carmen was gone, Ray took Shelley in her arms. “What happened? How did it go?”
“It was terrible.” She broke down. “He just ran out. Said he was … wait, did he take the Honda?”
“What? Try and calm down. Tell me what happened.”
Shelley went to the kitchen window and looked down into the driveway. “Shit! It’s gone. And he’s been drinking.”
Ray laughed. “He had a glass of wine. I was watching. You were watching. We were all watching …”
Were they uptight/paranoid about alcohol, about diet, like everybody else in this town? People shriveling up all over Southern California because of a lack of body fat. Everyone an addict in some way or other. Shelley would never say it, but she thought alcoholics were a bit like Elizabeth Montgomery in Bewitched. They had to foreswear this magic/magical substance just to survive in the normal world. Just to not die. She remembered once seeing an old book on Fran Lebowitz’s groaning bookshelves titled, Liquor: The Servant of Man and to her at least that seemed just about right. And when they were little she would let the boys have a little sip if they were curious, just to try it out and see what it tastes like. Like making them watch a bit of The 700 Club so they were inoculated against fundamentalism in later life.
Ray took Shelley’s face in her hands. “Now breathe …”
“What? But Tuck …”
She brushed a finger gently across Shelley’s lips, which were pulled even tighter than usual with anxiety. “Remember what Holy Mother says. About the cooling breath?”
Shelley closed her eyes. “Right …”
They both inhaled the cool, conditioned air and exhaled the warm. Taking in all the good and expelling the bad. And then again. Shelley opened her eyes and Ray said gently, “Now tell me what happened.”
“He just freaked and ran out …” She didn’t know what they should do. Should they take off in pursuit in the Beemer? Check all his favorite haunts. Or would it better to go out separately? She’d been meaning to take the old Volkswagen out of mothballs for months now. “Should we call the police?”
Ray laughed. “Why not call The National Enquirer directly and cut out the middleman? ‘STAR HAS STALKER’S CHILD’ Yeah, I’d impulse-buy that issue at the check-out any day.”
“Ray …” Shelley slumped, at least as far as the Alexander Technique permitted. “You’re right …”
Ray rubbed Shelley’s arms. “Wait a minute here, I’m just going to check his room …” She came back a moment later. “The guitar is gone but all his clothes are still there.”
“Fuck! And how completely typical.” Shelley’s phone went. “Thank god, it’s him!” She picked up. “Tuck, where are you?”
She remembered how patient and gentle her own mother had been. How she didn’t even erupt when Shelley and P.J. blew off the call-back for The Krofft Supershow, took a bus to Griffith Park, and got stoned instead. That was the day P.J. told her the story about how she and her mother showed up at the studio in the station wagon one August and the security guard wouldn’t let them in. Just laughed and said, “Your television family don’t live here no more!” Pathetically, P.J. thought at first that maybe they might have switched networks. But no, the series had been cancelled and no-one had bothered to tell her. Shelley didn’t want her kids living in a world like that, though she always would. She wanted them to have some kind of … tenure. Professional, emotional, spiritual, etc. Which was something – however many laurels they placed on her head or money in her bank account – she could never afford. Yes, she wanted her kids to have tenure in their lives but also agency, and that did not mean William Morris.
Tuck spoke over the car radio on the speaker phone. “I’m on the freeway …”
“What? Where are you going?”
There was a pause, a beat so perfectly timed it was almost professional. “Austin.”
“Austin? But why?”
“To see my father. The stalker. The assassin …”
“Assassin?”
“He tried to kill the …”
“I know but it’s not as if he was a trained sniper or marksman or …” Shelley took a breath as Ray nodded her head. “Tuck, you can’t drive all the way to …”
“I don’t intend to. I’m going to LAX. There’s this thing called Jet Blue.”
“But what about money?”
“I’ve got the gift card Ray gave me.”
Shelley cradled her phone to her neck and turned to Ray. “How much did you put on it?”
Tuck hearing this, laughed. “Enough!”
Shelley pressed the phone back to her ear. “Look, come back and we can discuss this.”
Tuck laughed again. Another perfect prompt. He knew his mother must be completely distraught to leave herself open like this. He said, “Discuss what? …” and then hung up.
Shelley’s younger son Matthew stood in the kitchen doorway, his face flushed and wet. “This is SO unfair! I have to wait another four years to find out who MY dad is when half the world already knows?!”
Shelley lay on a lounger by the pool in the darkness, the evening’s third (and hopefully final) glass of Chardonnay in her hand, balanced on her stomach.
Ray stuck her head through the sliding glass doors. “They’ve all left … or passed out.”
“What did you tell them?”
“Oh, now that he’s free, Caucasian, and 21 he’s gone out to get laid!”
“Ray … sometimes.”
“I’m sure he’ll be fine. I’m going to bed. Do you want the pool lights turned on?”
“Yes.” The color of the illuminated water was so tranquil, so soothing. Was it indigo? Ultramarine? Why did Hockney always paint his swimming pools in broad daylight, when the color was so jarring, that awful turquoise? But then why did he always paint people’s faces that lurid pink? You couldn’t even call it ‘flesh tone’. It was the color of that strange toothpaste from England, which was supposed to match your gums but was much closer to Bazooka Bubble Gum.
She must have drifted off. A half-dream where she was throwing hailstones the size of baseballs at a giant anaconda stuck up in a tree of heaven, who just kept swallowing them. Her phone buzzed and jarred her awake. “Tuck?”
“My whole life, it’s been one more secret, one more half-lie, one after the other …”
She sat up in the lounger. “Tuck? Where are you?”
“In my room.”
Shelley swung her feet round onto the patio and into her sandals.
“Just stay right where you are. I don’t want to see you … but I want to talk to you.”
She sat back into the lounger, kicked off the sandals. “Okay.”
“Anyway, it’s all been one great big cover-up.”
“That’s not true.”
“Up until I started Kindergarten you had me believe you worked as a civil engineer.”
“No, I just didn’t correct your …”
“You drove off each morning to the studio wearing a yellow hard hat. What was that about?”
“It was a gift from a grip.”
“I had to learn your true identity through the Disney Channel!”
She had to smile. “That was a gentle enough way, wasn’t it?”
“Then when I’m ten and I ask you the meaning of the word ‘lesbian’ you answer ‘normal’!”
“Look, I’m not on trial! I’m not going to mount some terrific defense … in my defense. You guys figured it all out in the end.”
“Not all of it, obviously …”
Ray always found their fights humorous. How Shelley and Tuck would wind each other up until their hormones were off the chart and then they would break apart, strangely satisfied. Almost like lovers. Ray was glad that she was not the boys’ mother or father, or even stepmother or stepfather. They were her two best friends. And of course Shelley was the other, but who would always insist, both to Ray and to the boys, “I’m not your friend!”
“Of all the people in the world, you choose him to be the father of your children? The lone gunman? Your number one fan … with a bullet?”
“Yes.”
“For fuck’s sake, why?”
Shelley sighed. “Because I knew that no other man on Earth would love me as much as he did. For what it was worth.”
“Oh my god. That is so sick … and you? You were attracted to him?”
“Yes. Eventually.”
“What could you possibly …?”
“His anger.”
“His anger?”
“His righteous anger.” She laughed. “At everything! How did he put it? ‘At the garbage coursing through our minds and our bodies …’ That sort of thing.” There was silence at the other end. “This was in the 80s and I think in that poem he was specifically referring to cable television, but it could equally apply to the World Wide Web.”
“Oh my god, you are so old!” Another pause. “You know his poetry by heart?”
“Well, that one was kind of hard to forget.”
“I just can’t believe you were ever in contact with this guy.”
She said very quietly, “Well, we became pen pals and then …”
“It’s like some form of Stockholm syndrome, perpetrated through the United States Postal Service.” He paused. “And you’re telling me that this creep is now at large?
“No, I am telling you that he has recently been released from the psychiatric …”
“He’s a psycho?”
“Well, obviously not if he’s been released.”
Tuck laughed. “Ray is right. You can be incredibly naïve at times.” He couldn’t help himself and yawned. He was completely exhausted. “Well. A psycho assassin stalker struggling singer-songwriter on day release. Can hardly wait for his next in-store appearance and that signed CD …” He laughed again. “Wow. Even Mel Gibson is starting to sound good now.”
“Gross! Never. However much I love the guy.”
Another huge yawn. “One last question and then we’ll call it a day.”
“Yes?”
“Did you ever … actually, physically, have to sleep with this guy?”
“No! Of course not. What do you take me for?”
Will shut down his lap-top and picked up his guitar and started tuning it. He was working on a song that was kind of a rebuttal to “Dear God”. Maybe rebuttal was the wrong word. He wanted it to like one of those Country and Western answer songs. So the working title was “Dear XTC”. He just wanted to craft some kind of cogent response to the snotty simple-mindedness of the original lyrics, so typical of the English group. He didn’t believe in God per se, but knew that there was some kind of divine plan, and that he played a small but meaningful role in it.
James Dufficy is an Irish and American citizen living in London and working as a sub-editor on a medical journal. Recent poems have appeared in Blackbox Manifold (UK) and The Gay & Lesbian Review (US).
