“Your father called,” Aunt Amy says. She puts her fork down and dabs at her mouth with an embroidered napkin.
I take a long pull from the glass of milk Aunt Amy makes sure is there breakfast, lunch, and dinner like I’m twelve.
“I think you should talk to him,” she says, giving me a sidelong glance. “He just didn’t seem like himself.”
“Good,” I mutter, rolling a potato around on my plate with the fork. Like I’m twelve.
“It’ll be good for you two to talk.” She takes another bite and drinks her wine. “Just talk, Paulie. That’s all you have to do.”
I stare at her. She looks like my dad, but not in a good way. She’s a mannish kind of woman, and my grandmother used to tell her so every day of her life. She has my dad’s thick jawline and brow. She tries to disguise both with makeup and distract with false lashes, and the reddest of red lips. She curls her hair in a way that softens her features, but she’s still broad and tall. If I think about it for a while, I feel sorry for her, being left behind like this. No man to love or cherish her. Sometimes I think of her like Fantine. InLes Mis, Fantine was left all alone and sent her daughter, Cosette, to be cared for by the Thènardiers. She sold her hair, sold her teeth, and became a prostitute. I wince at the thought of that happening to Aunt Amy.
She’s still my father’s sister, though; she has his pushiness and his attitude when I don’t eat everything on my plate. It’s like she’s forgotten I’m nineteen andnot twelve.
“Maybe…around nine o’clock?” She tilts her head at me. “You can use the phone in the parlor. For privacy.”
I don’t know why she calls it a parlor. Her house isn’t big enough for something so fancy. I look down at my half-empty plate, suddenly full. “Not tonight.”
“Tomorrow.”
“No.”
“Paul.”
She reaches across the table for my hands, so I put them in my lap. She clears her throat and withdraws her hand. She dabs at her lips again with the napkin, leaving red marks.
“You know, Paul,” she takes her plate, goes over to the sink, “the only way someone can apologize to you is if you let them.”
I look out the sliding glass doors at the dusk. There’s a light on in Blue’s window. The kind of brash white light they put in apartment kitchens, a string you pull over the sink. I think he eats his supper at the same time we do. I expect it’s something manly, like roast beef or ham. More beer and cigarettes. Maybe he listens to the radio or the television. I imagine him at a tiny kitchen table, off-white with cigarette burns, a metal mismatching chair, waiting to hear the score from the game. Any game.
I decide I should see if Aunt Amy has any encyclopedias on her bookshelf so I can learn about baseball or something with a ball. The one time I had to in school, I broke my glasses sliding into second base. No one cared, and I couldn’t see the rest of the day.
“I think I’m going to go read,” I say, standing up from the table.
“You don’t want cake?” Aunt Amy says, scraping leftovers in the sink.
“Maybe later.”
I’m at the kitchen door when she stops me. I turn and she puts her hands on my shoulders, her big man-hands, and I’m surprised to feel tears sting my eyes. I wait for her to say it, because I know she wants to say it:He didn’t mean it, Paul. He’s so sorry, Paul. Just forgive him. He swears he’ll never do it again.
For once, I just want someone to be on my side. My defender.
She looks at me for a long while, then lets me go. She turns back to the sink. “Enjoy your reading then.”
I take off like a bullet to my room, her guest room, and flop down on the quilt. I take off my glasses and bury my wet face in the pillow until it’s too dark to see anything.
It’s nearly six and Blue’s had about three cigarettes and it’s just the one beer.
I twist blades of grass together between my thumb and forefinger as I gaze up at him. He could be a king surveying his lands.TheKing. Elvis, gyrating his hips and caressing and crooning into a microphone. And I don’t know why Elvis is a king anyway. I think they just call him that because of his last picture, which I never saw and I don’t plan to. He’s never really caught my attention anyway.
Not like Blue. Not like the way Blue smokes his cigarette, holding it between his thumb and pointer finger as he takes a drag and exhales through his nose. It reminds me of a Rudolph Valentino movie I saw once. And then again. And another time. And then another.
I found my mother’s Valentino collection when I was a freshman. She was at the hospital again, no one was home, and I had nothing better to do. I don’t know what it was. His eyes, maybe, like he could see all my secrets and know me through and through, all memorialized in sepia. It was unnerving in a way I hadn’t experienced before. Then the community theater showed all his old films one summer. I watchedA Sainted Deviland couldn’t catch my breath. I went home in flames. All the way home and into my bedroom, where I locked the door, and touched myself, not for the first time, but it was perhaps the most desperate time, heated and panting, until I came all over my pants and my hand. And looking at it, thick and milky-white on my skin and clothes, I suppose that just cemented it in fact, made it real: I’m different, a strange one, and I can’t ever tell a soul.
I hear a noise and glance up to see Blue lighting another cigarette. This is the fourth one. That’s a little unusual. I tuck my thumb over my palm and hold out four fingers so I can remember to keep count.
The thing is, I got obsessed with men who I thought might be like me, mostly fictional. I think Javert was like me. What was it with his obsession with Valjean? It couldn’t simply have been that Valjean was a criminal or that he changed his identity. It was more, I think. It’s easy to hate someone you’re not supposed to love, and let their mercy kill you at last.
So, I have to wonder which one Blue is and which one I am. Right now, I’m a bit like Javert, I think. Obsessive and watchful.
