Elizabeth Hand: Black Light

He shoved aside the first book and opened the second. A glossy guide to prehistoric mammals, it had been a Christmas present several years earlier, when Hillary’s passion for saber-toothed tigers had driven me nuts. “Look at this,” he commanded, and pointed at a two-page spread.

Megaloceros: Giant Eurasian Deer of the Pleistocene Era.

Above the legend were realistic illustrations of what looked like pretty ordinary deer, the same kind of deer that leaped across the road in front of the school bus or nibbled apples from the trees in our front yard. Save only this: the deer in the pictures were crowned by absolutely massive mooselike antlers, spreading upward and out like the canopy of an oak, and so huge it seemed impossible that the creatures could have held their heads erect.

“Holy cow.” I whistled and read the rest of the caption.

In a fully mature male, the palmate antlers could span twenty feet and weigh forty pounds. Even after the stag reached its full growth, each year it would continue to produce successively larger and more unwieldy crowns, which may ultimately have contributed to their extinction. With the minor ice age of 10,000 B.C., their numbers were severely depleted, although there is evidence of some having existed within the Black Sea basin as recently as 500 B.C.

I shook my head. “They weren’t extinct twenty thousand years ago—it says here they found some in Europe in 500 B.C. So—”

Hillary rolled his eyes. “So that’s still over two thousand years ago, Lit! Listen—there’s no way anyone ever had an Irish Elk in Kamensic, okay?”

“I’m just telling you what the sign said in the Courthouse Museum.”

“The sign in the Courthouse is wrong. And what the hell would Mrs. Langford know about it, anyway? She believes in Bigfoot.” Hillary collected his books and swept back upstairs, yelling his parting shot. “Your dad just called. You’re supposed to go home.”

Hillary was my best friend and next-door neighbor. His parents were the Fabulous Wellers, Natalie and Edmund: English actors who had made their debuts alongside Laurence Olivier in a 1940s production of Tis Pity She’s a Whore, and gone on to mainstream success in the 1950s and early ’60s with a series of Ealing comedies in which they played Flo and Moe Fleck, divorced private investigators who continued to work together despite past (and continuing) infidelities. In real life, both were homosexual. Natty’s youthful passions were notorious and flamboyant. She had run off with the wife of a Chicago financier and later had a long-term, dish-throwing relationship with a predatory blonde starlet named Ada Morn, before marrying Edmund, whose own lovers tended to be men of his own age and temperament: stable, soft-spoken, quietly humorous.

Now both were in their early fifties. Like my father, Natalie and Edmund were part of the repertory company at the Avalon Shakespeare Theater in Avon, Connecticut, and otherwise spent their time raising bees and restoring old-stock apple trees with names like Foxwhelp and Ten Commandments. Hillary was their only child. He was named for Sir Edmund Hillary, a family friend.

“It was actually quite a sacrifice for them to make,” he remarked once when we were hanging out at Deer Park. “I mean, probably they really wanted to name me Bob, or Stan—”

“Or Butch.”

“Or Butch.” He nodded sagely and took another swig of his beer. “But they stuck to their guns and named me Hillary, damn it. They’re good people, my parents. Good damn people.”

I don’t remember the first time I met Hillary. He was just always there, like the Wellers’ old apple trees and weathered colonial farmhouse that formed the backdrop to my own house. We were the same age and in the same grade at the Kamensic Village School, and, except for a dicey few months in early adolescence when we hated each other, completely inseparable. We roamed freely between our two homes, eating and playing and later sleeping together, companionable as puppies. When my parents were away, rehearsing or performing, I stayed with Hillary. When Natty and Edmund went to England for three months to tape a Flo and Moe reunion, Hillary lived with us. Some people thought we were brother and sister, and there was a superficial resemblance. We were both tall, with shoulder-length hair, though Hillary’s was jet-black and mine a rather dingy dark blonde. And we both had large, oblique eyes. Mine were such a pale gray as to seem luminous; Hillary’s a deep hazel, the color of new moss on old bark. When we were fourteen we began what was to be a long-time pattern of falling in and out of love with each other, alternating between passionate declarations and equally heartfelt platonic discussions of why it was a far far better thing to remain best friends. This didn’t stop us from sleeping together, usually after a night of drinking at Deer Park. Sex with Hillary was fun, the way sex with my other friends was fun: occasionally confusing but never punitive. Our parents were remarkably grown-up about steering us toward various methods of birth control, and so none of us got pregnant. My own couplings were frequent and sunlit, more like swimming than sex; the only mystery about sex was that there was supposed to be a mystery. That troubled me. I would have thought it was all just artistic license, troubadours and rock stars wailing about love when they might just as well have been singing about Constantine Fox’s red convertible.

But then I would get disturbing hints that it was otherwise; like the fading signal half-heard on a radio late at night, the chopped echo of a song that sounds more beautiful than anything you’ve ever heard before, a song you never hear again. Sometimes it was a real song that made me feel that way, like the first time I heard Joel Green do “Cities of Night,” with its offhand, sloping chorus and melancholy saxophone. Sometimes it was just something I heard about—a movie I’d never seen, like Midnight Cowboy ; a book I’d never read, like Venus in Furs. And sometimes it was just the sound of the wind in the leaves at night, lying in bed after having left Hillary in his room, the two of us more feverish after lovemaking than when we’d started.

There were never any recriminations between Hillary and myself. In that we really were like siblings. Our sex was never perfunctory, but neither was it especially passionate—we saved that for our talk, which was endless and endlessly poignant, fueled by the shared conceit that we were soul mates, doomed in this life to never quite connect romantically but otherwise inextricably entwined. Whatever psychic wounds we exacted upon each other, they were clean ones, and healed quickly.

Which was just as well, since we were always cast opposite each other in school plays. Hillary was not an exceptional actor, but by the time we were sixteen he was handsome, with wry comic timing and a pleasant if unremarkable baritone. You could never capture his good looks on film—he was too animated, hands gesturing wildly as he told some ridiculous story about his parents, long hair flying wildly around his lean face. But in high school productions he was Sebastian, and Benedick, and King Arthur in Camelot. People fell in love with Hillary when they saw him onstage. Me, they remembered as the Aunt Abby who fell into the front row during Arsenic and Old Lace.

Oh, I was crazy about it all. Rehearsals, backstage intrigue, the whole tatty-golden hierarchy with its smells of sweat and spirit gum and melting gels, dust burning off the followspots and the reek of marijuana seeping down from the light booth. I would invariably beat out the competition for Rosalind or Viola or ’40s ingénues—not because I was talented, but because I was boyish. I had none of my mother’s aristocratic glamour. Instead, I was a throwback to my father’s ancestors in County Meath—broad freckled cheekbones, wide mouth, ski nose; narrow-hipped and long-legged. I looked good in trousers or vintage suits. I could fence and do cartwheels, knew the steps to a dozen reels and hornpipes, was strong enough to handle a broadsword. In full stage makeup I could even pass for a slightly eccentric romantic lead, bedraggled Helena to my mother’s Titania.