Liz Moore - The Unseen World

“Stop it,” said Ada. She stood up from the bed. She wanted him gone, out of her house; she wanted to sleep for a week. She crossed her arms, wrapped them around herself as far as they would go.

“You don’t know anything,” said Gregory. He backed away from her as she moved forward. “You’re an idiot.”

“Get out,” said Ada, without much force. She pointed weakly out the door, toward the hallway, toward the stairs.

“Or what?” said Gregory.

“This isn’t your house,” said Ada. “Get out.”

He smiled then, meanly. “Oh, yeah?” he said. “Whose is it?”

“It’s David’s,” said Ada, and the invocation of her father’s name made her weak. What would David think of her now? She closed her eyes.

“You don’t even know your own dad,” said Gregory.

“Yes I do,” said Ada.

“Did you know he’s a faggot?” said Gregory quietly. Viciously.

It was a word that was so frequently tossed about the hallways of Queen of Angels that at first it did not shock her. And then, slowly, she registered his accusation. She looked at him.

“He’s a homo,” said Gregory. “Everyone knows but you.” He was not used to saying words like these; he was trying them out. They did not easily come to him. He had turned serious; he looked shocked by himself, slightly afraid of his own power. He stared at her. And then he turned and ran.

She was alone.

She woke up early. The sun had barely risen. Only a faint gray light filtered through the curtains she had drawn the night before. She had fallen asleep sometime in the early hours of the morning and slept fitfully, startling awake several times, dreaming repeatedly of someone opening the door to her room. Dreaming of David.

She did not remember at first what had happened the night before, and when she did, two emotions overtook her. The first was a deep and profound sadness, at the realization that perhaps what Gregory said had been true. She was not sad about the possibility of its truth — in fact, she had considered the idea herself, without knowing exactly what she was considering — but about what it meant if Gregory knew this about her father and she did not. It was another stone on the pile of David’s many half-truths and deceptions. Worse: It meant that David, presumably, had been open with others — with Liston? with everyone at the lab? — but never with her. The gravity of this was too large for her, too overwhelming; she tucked it away.

The second emotion, the more immediate, was a slow, terrible shame. She put her hands to her face. She did not know how she could ever be in the same room as William Liston again. How she could ever look at him. Worst of all, she had no one to tell. Normally, discussions about minor and major romances dominated every lunchtime conversation with Melanie and Theresa and the others. For the first time, she had something to contribute, and she could never tell a soul. Nor could she tell Liston or David, for obvious reasons, and Gregory already knew and probably hated her for it. Only Lisa Grady remained, but good, virginal Lisa Grady — her equal only yesterday — wouldn’t understand it. She would blink severely in Ada’s direction, raise her eyebrows, lower the corners of her mouth. She would think less of her.

Ada would tell no one.

She rose and dressed as quietly as she could. It was 6:00 in the morning on a Sunday. The library would not be open that day. She couldn’t go back to Liston’s. She couldn’t stay at David’s house; it would be the first place Liston would think to look, when she woke up and found Ada missing. She picked up her blue parka from its place on the floor and put it on. It smelled like William had. She closed her eyes tightly against the moments that replayed in her mind: William’s hand, William’s mouth, the places he touched. Her stomach hurt. She clenched it.

In the hallway, she passed David’s room and considered going to St. Andrew’s to see him. But that, too, felt unsafe. She no longer knew who he was. She walked down the stairs and into David’s office, and took down from a shelf a small stack of yellow phone books. She flipped through the largest one until she found the entry she was looking for, and wrote down a telephone number and an address. Then she walked out the kitchen door, locking it behind her.

A frost had settled over everything and made the ground hard and unforgiving. Ada walked toward the Savin Hill bridge, her hands in her pockets. She should have dressed more warmly: thick socks and long underwear. David was a firm believer in long underwear.

She thought again of what Gregory had said, and a series of memories presented themselves to her: the first was David’s fascination with certain men (though, she reasoned, he had also seemed fascinated by women — Liston, for example; Miss Holmes; several of their neighbors over the years). The second was the way he spoke about President Pearse, who himself was gay: always with a sort of reverence, respect, for his long-standing relationship with his partner, Jack Greer, another grave and Brahmin Bostonian, an attorney whose career necessitated, in those days, discretion.

It was true: David had never had a girlfriend, never had anything close to a girlfriend. Also true was the fact that he had used a surrogate for Ada. Why had she never considered the reasons for this before?

And why, if he was gay, had he never said a word to her about it?

In 1985, Ada knew what the word gay meant — the AIDS epidemic was in the first years of its full deadly swing through the community, and she had read enough in the papers to understand its seriousness — but that had seemed an abstract thing to her. At fourteen, she had the cocky sense of indestructibility that all teenagers have; and until the onset of her father’s Alzheimer’s, and his subsequent decline, she had somehow assumed David to be surrounded by the same bubble of immortality. Her brushes with religious feeling had leant her the sense that maybe there was a larger plan for her, and if there was it certainly could not include her own death or the death of the person she loved most in the world. She clung to this belief to ward off the worry that, at certain moments, seemed as if it might overtake her completely, might possess and operate her body like a purgatorial soul.

This denial, then — this inability to fully contemplate what she found unsettling — had prevented her from ever fully confronting the question of David’s sexuality. And now she berated herself for it: for the look of shock that must have crossed her face when Gregory spat those words at her. She wished, now, that she had had a cool and even reply at the ready. Of course I knew that . Or, better, And? A single word: And? As if to imply that she was bored, already, with the subject.

On Sunday mornings, while the rest of the neighborhood was at church, sometimes David and she had gone to breakfast at a neighborhood diner on the other side of the bridge, with a waitress David liked named DeeDee, who knew Liston from the neighborhood as well. To kill time, Ada walked there now. She had ten dollars in the little wallet she carried in the inside pocket of her jacket. Since she’d been living with Liston, she had received the same allowance Liston gave her sons, of five dollars a week—“payment for work completed,” Liston always said, “not allowance”—which she very rarely spent.

The diner was surprisingly crowded. It was warm and close inside, and smelled of fat and bread and coffee, and, below that, cigarette smoke, both stale and fresh.

Ada didn’t recognize the hostess, and DeeDee was not there. She sat at the counter and ordered David’s favorite: the Lumberjack Special, with eggs and bacon and home fries and toast and a short stack of pancakes on the side.