Childish Loves Page 27

  He stank of cigarettes. I don’t know what I expected him to look like, but this is what he was: a short, fortyish Asian man, with close-cut black hair, and a fattening face still a little vague from acne around the mouth and chin. ‘There’s nobody here,’ he said, ‘but we might as well go to my room. That way we won’t be interrupted.’ His accent was finicky, educated and naturally ironic. Mike Scanlon’s phrase came back to me, about the strongest sexual presence etc., a description that seemed to me laughable, though I have to admit I was reluctant to go to his room.

  His bedroom had a view of the garden, which ended in a birch-wood, with a mud track running through it. I asked him where ‘his family’ was.

  ‘Where every respectable American family is, with two girls, on a Saturday afternoon. At soccer.’

  ‘A nice place to live, I would have thought.’

  ‘Very nice, if you like trees.’

  He sat down on the bed and I pulled out the chair underneath his desk and sat on that. Not a large room, and Lee had put nothing on the walls. There was only a row of books on a wide shelf nailed into the plastering. Mostly religious; a Bible. The Good Earth. A paperback, as thick as a textbook, titled God of Healing.

  ‘What’s your relationship with them like?’

  ‘One of gratitude and dependence. If they hadn’t taken me in, I don’t know who would have. But I do what I can for them. I used to babysit sometimes, though Caitlin is old enough to look after herself.’ He smiled at me. ‘I mow the lawn.’

  ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘About five years, off and on.’

  ‘You wrote me that this was temporary.’

  ‘That’s why I say off and on.’

  This is how we talked. He said very little unless I asked him a question, but he answered me happily enough. He sat on his bed with his shoes off and his feet folded underneath him. Not that he stayed still long. It occurred to me that I didn’t like him much, that I had decided not to like him even before we met, and that I had begun the interview with adversarial feelings. Every few minutes we both fell silent, and then I started again on a new line of questions.

  ‘How did you meet the Ogilvies?’

  ‘Gene is pastor at St Mary-in-the-Fields. During one of my stints at rehab, I came out to a place called the Self-Reliance Center, which isn’t in Walden exactly, but isn’t far off. A sort of halfway house. The idea is to get us to fend for ourselves. So we chop wood, and darn socks, and pick berries, that kind of thing. There’s a strong connection between the Center and St Mary’s. Every Sunday afternoon you have to go to church. I told them I was Jewish. You can imagine what they said to that. That’s how I met Gene.’

  ‘How old were the girls when you moved in? Do you pay them any rent?’

  ‘That’s not Gene’s idea of Christian charity.’

  ‘What a wonderful thing to do for someone.’

  ‘Oh, the Ogilvies are all extraordinary. Everybody who knows them says so.’

  ‘But you can’t stay here for ever, I suppose.’

  ‘You seem very concerned. At the moment, I’m applying to law schools. That’s my latest idea.’

  After a minute, I said, ‘I don’t mean this to sound like an interrogation. I feel like I’m asking you all the questions. Is there a reason you got in touch with me?’

  For the first time he hesitated. ‘This is the kind of thing I do,’ he told me. ‘I think too much about everything. You can imagine I’ve got time on my hands.’

  ‘Is there something you wanted to tell me?’

  Downstairs I could hear the maid in the sitting room, shifting furniture, pushing a vacuum cleaner around. For some reason I felt there wasn’t much time. If I wanted to find out anything, I had to find it out before the Ogilvies came home. Also, my wife and daughter were on the beach at Walden, getting hungry and cold. I suddenly thought of Steven Lowenthal’s room at Flushing, my reluctance to sit on his bed, the bowling trophies and VHSs on the shelf above his desk. His father’s voice rising up the stairwell.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe I wanted to talk about Peter.’

  ‘Have you read his books?’

  ‘The first one.’

  ‘And did you like it?’

  ‘It’s more a question of how I found it. I found it upsetting.’

  ‘Why did you find it upsetting?’

  ‘Did you not? I think it’s an upsetting book.’

  ‘Because Polidori kills himself?’

  ‘Yes, because Polidori kills himself and because many years later Peter killed himself.’

  ‘Did he show you any part of the book when you were in high school?’

  He thought about this, and then said, ‘My response to his writing is not what he was interested in.’

  ‘What was he interested in?’

  But Lee only smiled, and we began again. ‘What drugs?’ I suddenly asked him.

  ‘I started with alcohol when I was fifteen or sixteen, and I kept that up even when I let some of my other addictions slide. Well into my thirties. I smoked marijuana in college though I didn’t much like being stoned. A little cocaine. After college I began to experiment with heroin and crystal meth. Crystal meth was a problem. I really liked crystal meth, though I found I could stay off crystal meth as long as I was sober. But I wasn’t very good at being sober.’

  ‘How did you pay for these habits?’

  ‘The usual way. I stole money from my parents. But then my mother divorced and remarried and her second husband refused to let me in the house. My father went bankrupt and was almost as broke as me. I worked shifts at a 7-Eleven. I shoplifted. I did a little dealing on the side. Sometimes people paid me to have sex with them, and then I used the money to get high, and when I was high I didn’t mind who fucked me, and so the habit more or less paid for itself.’

  ‘How long have you been clean?’

  ‘Six years.’

  ‘I’m sorry for asking these questions. You seem uncomfortable.’

  ‘It’s not that,’ he said sweetly. ‘It’s just that I’m dying for a cigarette, and Gene doesn’t like me smoking in the house.’

  ‘Do you want to go outside?’

  ‘Maybe we could go for a walk,’ he said. ‘Do you have any other shoes?’

  ‘I’ve got boots in the car.’

  In the sun-porch, where the shoes and coats were kept, he sat down on a deckchair and pulled on a pair of Wellingtons. Then he took a leather jacket from the hook. ‘The first time this year it’s been warm enough,’ he said. I got my boots from the car, and we walked through the garden to the lane running into the woods. Lee lit a cigarette and blew out smoke. In the sunshine the day was pleasant enough, but in the shade of the trees the air was like the air of a cellar you get to by going down stone steps. Lee found a bag of mini-chocolates in the pocket of his leather jacket (‘from Halloween, I suppose’) and began to eat them, smoking and eating as he walked.

  ‘I hope my daughter isn’t cold,’ I said.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I left my wife and daughter on the beach at Walden. I hope they’re not getting cold.’

  The path was rutted and the ruts were full of water. Patches of snow under the trees had turned to ice, and the ice dripped. But the woods themselves were beautiful and ghostly; and sunlight in the leaves overhead caught the dust off the leaves and glinted.

  ‘This doesn’t look to me like your kind of scene.’

  ‘I wonder what you mean by that,’ Lee said.

  ‘Six years seems like a long time.’

  ‘I get through years very quickly. I got through my twenties in no time at all.’

  We walked on another hundred yards and opened a gate in the lane, which was fixed by rope to a wooden post in the ground. You had to lift it to pull it over the mud. Lee waited while I let him through. A few minutes later, I said to him, ‘What happened in your twenties.’

  ‘I dropped out of Brown after sophomore year and moved to New York. I told people I was a p
hotographer and waited tables between relationships. It’s one of my curses that there have always been people willing to pay for my style of life. When I was twenty-eight I met a movie producer with a house in Hollywood, an apartment on Columbus Circle, another apartment in Monaco and a hunting lodge in Scotland. For three years I followed him around; we did a lot of drugs together. I had a very good time. I got used to Egyptian cotton and heated bathroom floors, sea-views, first-class cabins, Pol Roger and guns. When he decided to get clean, he kicked me out and I began to go downhill. I moved back to New York for a while, then followed someone to Chicago and someone else to Boston and ended up, after several forgettable and mostly forgotten years, at the Walden clinic. Then I met Gene.’

  ‘Can I ask you another question?’ I said. ‘I don’t understand why a man with two young girls would take you into his house.’

  ‘There’s a very simple answer to that question, but you won’t believe it. The answer is that he believes in Christ.’

  ‘I don’t know that I do believe it.’

  ‘You think he has another reason for wanting me around.’

  ‘There are a lot of other people he could have helped.’

  ‘Oh, but I’m very good at being helped. I need it so much.’

  ‘Is that what happened with Peter? That he tried to help you?’

  ‘You have a funny idea of helping. But maybe you’re right.’ The lane opened out ahead of us into the road, and he stopped and caught his breath, but instead of walking on, he said, ‘The other boys had decided I was gay long before I decided I was gay, but it was Peter who broke it to me. I used to come by his office just to sit there. I told him I was homesick and he let me sit there while he worked. But I wasn’t homesick. I hated home. He could see I was unhappy and tried to explain it to me. Do you know why the other boys don’t like you? It isn’t your fault. They’re just suspicious, that’s all. I can’t remember exactly what he said, but I can imagine it. He found my unhappiness exciting, though that wasn’t the word he used. He said it made him think of everything he went through when he was my age, that it reminded him of what it meant to be sixteen years old. He wanted me to understand that everything I felt he felt, too. What did you expect me to do? My favorite teacher and the only adult I had any kind of trusting relationship with wanted me to touch his penis. So I touched his penis. At the time I didn’t mind that he wanted to touch my penis, too. Up until that point my penis had never made me very happy. What he wanted to do to it didn’t seem any worse than the other things people were doing to me, mostly my parents. It was almost a relief, when I got to college and could live like I wanted to live for the first time, to dump all the blame on him. Peter got my parents off my back. But it took me a while to realize that maybe he did do something to me. If nothing else, he turned me into a pretty secretive kid. Gene says I have to stop blaming myself, but that’s not what you care about. That’s not what you came here to talk to me about.’

  ‘How did you know he wanted you to –’

  ‘Oh for God’s sake, he put my hand on his crotch and said, Look at me! Look at me!’

  We walked on in silence. The road wasn’t particularly busy, but sometimes we had to step onto the verge together while a car went by. One of the cars was the Ogilvies’ station wagon. First they honked, and then they pulled over thirty yards ahead of us. The girls in the back had their kneepads and cleats still on. Two blonde girls with the flat pointy faces of adolescence: all bones and eyes. Mrs Ogilvy leaned out the window and Lee introduced me to her. A skinny, anxious, friendly, fair-haired woman. She told me to come for lunch, but I said that I’d left my family on the beach at Walden Pond.

  ‘I think I’m already in trouble,’ I said.

  Her husband, who was leaning over his wife, stretching the seat belt, smiled. The man from the photograph; he had a moustache and a red cheerful face. Lee had opened the backseat door and was talking to the girls.

  ‘Did you win?’ he said, in a different voice. ‘You both look too clean to me.’

  Then they left us, with another honk, and we followed them into the road. A few minutes later the house came into sight, and I said to Lee, ‘I met one of your old friends recently. Mike Scanlon, from the Boston Globe. He said that you sent him a letter. Something to do with AA. And I’ve been wondering if you ever got in touch with Peter.’

  We walked up the drive together, and he stopped by my car and took out another cigarette. ‘Yes,’ he said, after lighting it. ‘I saw Peter again.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Around the same time. Maybe five years ago. Shortly after I moved in here.’

  ‘Did he stay long?’

  ‘No. He met Gene and the girls, and Mary told him to stay for supper. Maybe they’re not your kind of people but they believe in forgiveness. Peter declined.’

  ‘How did he look?’

  ‘I think I was more worried at the time about how I looked to him. I was very nervous.’

  ‘How do you think you looked to him?’

  He sat on this question for a while. ‘Oh, I can imagine,’ he said at last. ‘What’s the word people like you like to use. Pretty depressing.’

  As I backed into the road, he stayed in the garden finishing his cigarette. And I remembered something I had all but forgotten, I remembered coming back with Peter to the high-school cafeteria, after one of our walks, and finding the faculty canteen full of parents. Once a year the middle school had a parents’ day and since their canteen wasn’t big enough or grand enough to host them, they took over ours. Fifty-odd fathers in suit and tie; a hundred mothers making noise. On one side of the canteen, on a few cafeteria tables, teachers had laid out the school photographs. Most of the parents were crowding around them trying to find the envelope with their kid’s name on it. Then they had to work out which pictures they wanted to keep before paying the middle-school secretary, who had a table to herself in another corner of the room. Peter hated all contact with parents and resented having to eat his lunch with the students. But the photographs amused him, the touched-up smiles of the kids, the cooing of the adults. As if we were running some kind of modeling agency. ‘Innocence porn,’ he called it, standing next to me and muttering in my ear. Driving back to Walden, I thought, you son of a bitch.

  ***

  A few days later I found an email in my Radcliffe inbox from one of Peter’s old students. One of my old students, too, she reminded me. I taught her freshman year at Horatio Alger and vaguely remembered a long-haired girl who nodded too violently to show she agreed with her teachers and never talked much to the other kids. She was working her way through grad school, she told me. An Internet service had alerted her to my lecture, which she was sorry to miss. ‘I’m another one of these Romanticists,’ she confessed. Partly because of Peter. (‘Isn’t it funny? I can’t stop thinking of him as Mr. Pattieson.’) This was really the point of her email. She wanted to tell me what she had never dared to say to Peter’s face: that he was an inspirational teacher. He didn’t play up to the boys in class, and since he had a passion for ‘minor’ writers, he was particularly good on women. Mary Shelley, of course, but Radcliffe and Inchbald, too. He could quote Felicia Hemans at length, and not just ‘The boy stood on the burning deck.’ Laetitia Barbauld.

  ‘I wouldn’t be doing what I am doing if it wasn’t for him,’ she wrote. ‘Probably even you could tell I wasn’t very happy at school. But then you come across a teacher like Peter, and you think, Ah, grown-ups! There’s a whole world of people like you. You can’t imagine what that means to a weird teenage girl. But of course there isn’t – I mean, anyone like him. At least I haven’t come across anyone yet. He supervised my senior essay on Frankenstein. Once every two weeks we met in that little office for an hour during lunch. He treated me like a colleague, he asked me questions. I used to look forward to that hour from the minute I woke up in the morning. I worried about what to wear, what to say, the whole thing made me nervous, until I stepped in that room and realized I had
nothing at all to be embarrassed about. It was okay, I could talk as much as I wanted about books.’

  Maybe it was this exchange that made me go back to Gerschon. I had almost washed my hands of Peter. But something had occurred to me on the drive back from Walden, and I wanted another look at the manuscript pages. Gerschon said he was knocking off early on Friday afternoon and offered to give me the run of his office. I spent the rest of the week re-reading Peter’s last story and checking up on the facts.

  ‘Behold Him Freshman!’ follows more or less on the heels of ‘Fair Seed-Time.’ ‘A Soldier’s Grave’ skips ahead almost two decades – a period that includes the years of Byron’s fame, his marriage and the separation that pushed him into exile. When the story opens, he’s living in Genoa with Teresa Guiccioli, the young wife of an old count from Ravenna. He has spent the past four years with her, ‘confined to the strictest adultery.’ The Pope won’t give her a divorce, and the scandal of their relationship, besides a few other more political scandals, has forced Byron to take up residence in Genoa, where the government doesn’t much mind them. Teresa has brought her brother Pietro and her father (another count) along. The whole family is living together at the Casa Saluzzo, though Byron has his own apartment.

  By this point Shelley has been dead for a year. He drowned in a storm in the Bay of Lerici while sailing with a friend. Byron had kept up sporadically intense relations with Shelley since they spent the summer together near Lake Geneva in 1816. (The summer of the ghost stories, when Mary wrote Frankenstein.) Before he died, Shelley persuaded him to contribute to a new journal, The Liberal, to be edited and published by the Hunt brothers. Byron even invited Leigh Hunt – and his endless family – to Italy to talk over the details; and when Shelley drowned he had to deal with them, and pay for their upkeep, by himself. When Peter’s story begins the Hunts have established themselves, at Byron’s expense, a few minutes’ ride from the Casa Saluzzo. Mary is living with them.