John Domini - Talking Heads - 77

“Now, Christopher,” Pete was saying, “you’re not going to pretend you never knew.”

“We all knew, sure. We ah, we knew you knew we knew.”

Once more the aging cowboy may have laughed. “You should have heard Leslie trying to explain that one.”

“Leslie, hoo boy. Lots of luck, Uncle Pete.” And how had Kit’s mother taken it? Composed again following her prayer session, she’d met Pete’s announcement with “that smile she has, you know.” Kit knew: an accepting smile, easeful, yet also neutral, at a remove. Afterwards, she’d said quietly that there was no point getting into the news from Kit’s wife, just now.

“Still playing it close to the vest, our Sister Nina.”

Again the mention of the call left Kit unfazed. “Well, we’ve all done it for years, Uncle Pete.”

“Your Uncle Leslie, wellsir. He said he wouldn’t’ve had so many women around, if he hadn’t’ve known about me.”

“Come on.”

“That’s what he said. Told me he probably would’ve married one of them, if he hadn’t’ve known about me.”

“Aw, he’s just flabbergasted. Just knocked for a loop, like I was. You’re not responsible for him wearing out half the women from there to Mankato.”

“Wellsir. I mean to say, once secrets start coming out, they’re hard to stop.”

“I hear you.” Though Kit had to wonder about his new equanimity. Tonight, after all, he might simply be too hammered to care.

“Uncle Pete,” he said, “what Les said, that just shows what this took, for you. This took courage.”

But that wasn’t what the uncle was getting at. “I mean to say, there’s evil in it.”

Evil? The word didn’t fit the man’s conversational style. He knew it, too: “Your mother now, she’s the one who can tell you about evil. She can give you chapter and verse.

“But I can see what’s the evil here,” Pete went on, more seriously. “I know this brand of evil, here. It’s too many secrets in one place.”

Another silence, on both ends.

“Too many secrets,” Pete said, “it makes people act up.”

“I hear you,” Kit said.

“That’s the evil. All these secrets packed in close. Makes people just about jump out of their skins.”

Which felt like enough for one phone call. Kit changed his tone, murmuring the kind of encouragement he’d brought up earlier for Louie-Louie. Uncle Pete I think you’ve got something there. Uncle Pete that’s great you’re still learning from this. Honest encouragement, but they’d both had enough. The uncle declared, out of nowhere, that he hadn’t eaten lunch yet. Besides, in the outer office Louie-Louie looked like he was going to start climbing the walls. And yet, as Kit went his final congratulations, his promises to call (“Pete, you know I’m good about that”), he suffered less comfortable thoughts. He suffered memories.

Impressions of sharing a house with this man had lain for years under a cover of dust. Tonight however — with this talk of evil and secrets — Pete had blasted pockets of sudden clarity. Kit recalled his uncle’s mysterious long weekends in Minneapolis-St. Paul, “meeting beef reps” way out of season. He remembered that once or twice as a teenager, he’d been alone with Pete, alone with his shirt off on a hot vacation day, and the uncle had startled him with a long, slow, full-hand stroke down his naked back to his belt line. And during the last rounds of labor trouble up in the Mesabi ore fields, the man had taken the family’s Leftie sympathies to extremes Kit had never seen. Pete had started screaming about what the miners were going through. He’d whaled against the fireplace wall with a heavy-headed poker, bending the’ thing almost at a right angle.

It couldn’t have been easy for him. Naturally Kit had been more aware of his mom’s unhappiness, her lack of a place. Nonetheless ever since he’d begun to understand that there were different approaches to loving and its tagalong mysteries, ever since his earliest misunderstandings about “69” or “the Hershey highway,” Kit had glimpsed the miseries of this fussy, unspoken-for cattleman. Now and again he’d felt something of them, those miseries, as sharply and unforgettably as the once-in-a-blue-moon sweeps of the man’s hand down his naked spine. He’d known what Pete was going through even though, whenever Kit’s mom or Uncle Leslie went so far as to indicate they knew the same, they did it by means of sideways glances and words half-spoken. Confirmations that flashed and were gone.

Uncle Pete, unlike Kit’s mom, couldn’t get what he needed from a “church family.” Every day he must have asked himself what he was doing there. Didn’t he belong in a boho downtown studio? But then what about the pleasure he took in the outdoor life, in the clatter of a Coleman stove strapped to the back of a horse? Ever since Kit had known the man was different, he’d heard him asking these questions, or overheard. He couldn’t make out the words, but he’d gotten the point. Still he’d said nothing about it, not even on the expeditions to root for Killebrew and the Twins or the hunting trips up to Leech Lake. He’d observed the same restraint as the others in the house until he was away among the smirking city boys at Exeter and Harvard and the Globe .

As he said his goodbyes tonight, Kit kept bucking up the man, voicing new approvals. “Uncle Pete, it’s for the best.” He understood that this wasn’t about him and the not-so-bad tensions he’d endured growing up. This was about the man on the other end of the line, and about what Bette had called the bright lights of history. A person had every right to cast the kind of shadow he wanted, before those lights. Nonetheless, within his uncle’s new projected shape Kit could see others, less proud. He saw shapes that had him switching the phone’s receiver from ear to ear. Kit’s uncle was old, pushing sixty. How many years had he wasted with talking to himself, whispering questions at the medicine-cabinet mirror? And how many of the people Kit loved had helped keep him there? “Sister Nina,” Uncle Leslie, the growing Kit himself — they’d all kept Pete in there babbling at the medicine cabinet. And in so doing they’d chained themselves in place too, chained themselves to silence and lies and what they believed was good for the boy. That was the home and family Kit saw now, in the bright lights of history, with the receiver sweating in his hand. A prison.

*

Diorama #22—St. Peter in the Hole

The scening depicts blesséd apissle Peter, cornverting by erection both Snigr. Hardnose (see the privys diorama) and San Luigi-Luigi of the Gorillas (who is without diorama, in this museo— donuts of all size are much appenetrated! ).

The enormity of this appissle is here indispootable. Blesséd Peter made cornverts all over the Hell-Clown world. Hardnose and Luigi-Luigi have in their case erected to receive his touch, but this makes Peter’s piece no less a hero.

His two cornverts, we see in their exstasy, have never been entered this way. Their lice have changed places forever.

Kit, kid.

Angry with himself, Kit deliberately called up Leo’s phrase. Stop this, kid. And there was Leo’s name on Kit’s desk, as well, or Leo’s company’s name. The list of Monsod contractors still sat beside the phone where Kit had left it this morning. He studied the page a moment. Once or twice he shook his head, trying to clear away the sensation of something dirty in his ears.

Louie-Louie stood at the door, half in shadow. He tapped the nearest glass wall with a fingertip.

Kit, this isn’t a museo . “That was my uncle,” he said. “He called to tell me he’s gay.”