Adam Haslett - You Are Not a Stranger Here

“I will.”

Robert Wagner is on the elevator with Natalie Wood but they’ve aged badly and one doesn’t take to them anymore.

She chews gum and appears uncomfortable in tight clothing.

His turtlenecks have become worn. But I figure they know things, they’ve been here a long time. So I say to him,

“Excuse me, you wouldn’t know where I might call for a girl or two, would you? Actually what we need is a girl and a young man, my son here’s gay.”

“Dad!” Graham shouts. “I’m sorry,” he says to the couple, now backed against the wall as though I were a gangster in one of their lousy B movies. “He’s just had a lot to drink.”

“The hell I have. You got a problem with my son being gay?”

The elevator door opens and they scurry onto the carpet like bugs. For a man who watched thousands starve and did jackshit about it, the Hoover Suite is aptly named. There are baskets of fruit, a stocked refrigerator, a full bar, faux rococo paintings over the beds, overstuffed chairs, and rugs that demand bare feet for the sheer pleasure of the touch.

“We can’t stay here,” Graham says as I flip my shoes across the room.

His voice is disconsolate. He seems to have lost his animation of a moment ago, something I don’t think I can afford to do right now: the eviction notices in Baltimore, the collection agencies, the smell of the apartment. “We’re just getting started,” I say quickly.

Graham’s sitting in an armchair across the room and as he bows his head I imagine he’s praying that when he raises it again, things will be different. As a child he used to bring me presents in my study on the days I was leaving for a trip and he’d ask me not to go. They were books he’d found on the shelf and wrapped in Christmas paper.

I pick up the phone on the bedside table and get the front desk. “This is the Hoover Suite calling. I want the number of an agency that will provide us with a young man, someone intelligent and attractive—”

Graham rips the phone from my hand.

“What is it?” I say. His mother was always encouraging me to ask him questions. “What’s it like to be gay, Graham? Why have you never told me?”

He stares at me dumbfounded.

“What? What?” I say.

“How can you ask me that after all this time?”

“I want to understand. Are you in love with this Eric fellow?”

“I thought you were dead! Do you even begin to realize? I thought my own father was dead. You didn’t call for four years but I couldn’t bear to find out, I couldn’t bear to go and find you dead, and so it was like I was a child again and I just hoped there was an excuse. Four years, Dad, and now you just appear and you want to know what it’s like to be gay?”

I run to the refrigerator, where among other things there is a decent Chardonnay, and with the help of a corkscrew I find by the sink I pour us two glasses. Graham doesn’t seem to want his but I set it down beside him anyway.

“Oh, Graham. The phone company in Baltimore’s awful.”

He starts to cry. He looks so young as he weeps, as he did in the driveway of the old house on the afternoon I taught him to ride a bicycle, the dust from the drive settling on his wetted cheek and damp eyelashes later to be rinsed in the warm water of the bath as dusk settled over the field and we listened together to the sound of his mother in the kitchen running water, the murmur of the radio and the stillness of evening in the country, how he seemed to understand it as well as I.

“You know, Graham, they’re constantly overcharging me and then once they take a line out it’s like getting the Red Sea to part to have it reinstalled but in a couple of weeks when the bicycle patent comes through that’ll be behind us, you and Linda and Ernie and I, we’ll all go to London and stay at the Connaught and I’ll show you Regent’s Park where your mother and I rowed a boat on our honeymoon circling the little island there where the ducks all congregate and which was actually a little dirty come to think of it though you don’t really think of ducks as dirty, they look so graceful on the water but in fact—” All of a sudden I don’t believe it myself and I can hear my own voice in the room, hear its dry pitch, and I’ve lost my train of thought and I can’t stop picturing the yard where Graham used to play with his friends by the purple lilac and the apple tree whose knotted branches held the planks of the fort which I was so happy for him to enjoy never having had one myself. He knew me then even in my bravest moments when his mother and siblings were afraid of what they didn’t understand; he would sit on the stool in the crumbling barn watching me cover the chalkboard propped on the fender of the broken Studebaker, diagramming a world of possible objects, the solar vehicles and collapsible homes, our era distilled into its necessary devices, and in the evenings, sprawled on the floor of his room, he’d trace with delicate hands what he remembered of my design.

I see those same hands now spread on his thighs, nails bitten down, cuticles torn. I don’t know how to say good-bye.

In the village of Saint-Sever an old woman nursed my dying friend through the night. At dawn I kissed his cold forehead and kept marching.

In the yard of the old house the apple tree still rustles in the evening breeze.

“Graham.”

“You want to know what it’s like?” he says. “I’ll tell you. It’s worrying all the time that one day he’s going to leave me.

And you want to know why that is? It’s got nothing to do with being gay. It’s because I know Mom left you. I tell you it’s selfish not to take the pills because I know. Because I take them. You understand, Dad? It’s in me too. I don’t want Eric to find me in a parking lot in the middle of the night in my pajamas talking to a stranger like Mom did. I don’t want him to find me hanged. I used to cast fire from the tips of my fingers some weeks and burn everything in my path and it was all progress and it was all incredibly, incredibly beautiful.

And some weeks I couldn’t brush my hair. But I take the pills now, and I haven’t bankrupted us yet, and I don’t want to kill myself just now. I take them and I think of Eric. That’s what it’s like.”

“But the fire, Graham? What about the fire?”

In his eyes, there is sadness enough to kill us both.

“Do you remember how you used to watch me do my sketches in the barn?”

Tears run down his cheeks as he nods.

“Let me show you something,” I say. Across the room in the drawer of the desk I find a marker. It makes sense to me now, he can see what I see, he’s always been able to.

Maybe it doesn’t have to end. I unhook a painting from the wall and set it on the floor. On the yellow wallpaper I draw the outline of a door, full-size, seven by three and a half.

“You see, Graham, there’ll be four knobs. The lines between them will form a cross. And each knob will be connected to a set of wheels inside the door itself, and there will be four sets of hinges, one along each side but fixed only to the door, not to the frame.” I shade these in. Graham cries.

“A person will use the knob that will allow them to open the door in the direction they want—left or right, at their feet or above their heads. When a knob is turned it’ll push the screws from the door into the hinges. People can open doors near windows without blocking morning or evening light, they’ll carry furniture in and out with the door over their heads, never scraping its paint, and when they want to see the sky they can open it just a fraction at the top.” On the wal I draw smal er diagrams of the door’s different positions until the felt nib of the pen tatters. “It’s a present to you, this door.