The Best Kind of People (7 page)

“What should we do?” Jimmy’s voice brought Sadie back to the moment.

She looked at the reporters, and realized she’d rather have the house be engulfed in flames than have to go through the scrum of strangers. A skinny guy with a goatee emerged from a purple pup tent in the ditch and started fiddling with his camera.

Jimmy leaned his head out the window.

“
MOVE
!”

He laid on the horn again and Sadie hunched down in her seat, lifting her arm to press the remote that allowed the gate to open. She half expected the reporters to run in with the car, but they didn’t. She saw her mother’s face peek through the living room curtains and felt relieved at the familiar sight, at knowing Joan was there to protect her, as she had throughout her life.

FOUR

ANDREW SAT, HEAD
in hands, on his childhood bed in the late morning. He pressed his fingers into his cheekbones, massaging the points where he could feel a sinus headache about to bloom. His whole system felt off. He was very tired but couldn’t imagine ever sleeping again. Andrew Woodbury the teenager would have relished the opportunity to lounge in bed, but adult Andrew was a regimented machine. His work, exercise, and even social schedule were precise and unwavering. He woke at 5:30 a.m., an hour before his partner Jared, and was at Cyclefit by 6:00. He went to bed by 11:00 p.m. on weekdays. Tuesdays usually began with a breakfast meeting with Olivia, one of the senior partners. He’d sent a hurried late night text to explain his absence, then stayed up most of the night researching his father’s charges and checking on his mother, whom he’d given a Xanax before bed. When he’d gone to check on her, she was sitting up in bed, arms clutching a pillow to her chest, staring at nothing. He handed her the pill and she’d sighed before putting it into her mouth for a dry swallow and a
sotto
thanks.

He made the bed, pulling the antique farmer’s quilt tight over his pillows, making sure each corner was even and symmetrical. Several of the quilted squares had faded so much that they were ripping along the seams. He selected several safety pins from the night table drawer and placed them around in all the spots that were starting to unravel. He pulled on a pair of boxers and grabbed his old drama club T-shirt from the closet. It was from a senior year production of
Fiddler on the Roof
. His mother had replaced his adolescent posters with framed antique oil paintings, portraits of British Woodburys through the ages that Joan found ugly and wished to hide away in a room largely unseen by guests. The room smelled of dust. Everything needed a wipe-down, a shake-out. He punched down the throw pillows then opened the window, propping it up with a leather-bound Bible.

He unpacked his luggage and tried to smooth out a plain white button-down shirt that he could wear to the arraignment hearing the next day. His mother had kept some of his old clothes, relics of another moment in fashion that was almost back in style, hanging in the closet. He lit a clove candle on the dresser top out of habit, running a finger over the film of dust coating the top of the wax, trying to clear the room of its musty, unused smell. He found a gram of pot in the bedside drawer that he’d left almost a year ago, at Thanksgiving. It was stale but would do the trick. He rolled a joint on the cover of an outdated issue of
InStyle
magazine, crumbling it on top of Drew Barrymore’s face. The candle made the room smell like a pie baking in an aura of neglect. He lit the joint from the candle and then blew it out.

It had been a long time since he’d woken up and felt a heavy presence on his chest. He used to go back to sleep for fear of having to deal with the day. It happened a lot in Avalon Hills, even when nothing out of the ordinary was going on, a sadness that rendered him semi-useless and unproductive. When he woke up in New York, it was as though the city was inside him like a coiled spring when he lifted back the covers, singing to himself, talking back to the radio, stretching up and out. His hometown made him lethargic. His father used to make him get up and go canoeing first thing in the morning when he’d visit on breaks from university. They’d pull their paddles up and float, watching the pinkish-orange glow as the sun barely crested the trees, mostly in silence until his dad told a corny joke. Something like: Why doesn’t a lobster give to charity? Why? Because he’s shellfish! Groan.

Andrew didn’t question why he reacted so strongly and immediately in his father’s defence. It was primarily a feeling of complete and utter implausibility. His father was a man very detached from his body. George also seemed relatively unconcerned with power; he was afforded the carelessness of not having to think about it because he had a lot of it.

Andrew took a second hit from the joint and coughed. He rarely smoked anymore because he was too busy at work. Plus, it seemed like a childish habit, best reserved for the holidays. He’d rolled this one too tightly and could barely get anything from it. He associated getting high with Avalon Hills, with getting through the grind of family visits. He wondered if Jared would like his vintage collection of Hardy Boys books. He took a photo with his phone and messaged him,
Do you want these?

Jared responded immediately.
Are u ok? I’ve been waiting to hear from u. I’m going crazy.

Jared was a one-man master class in the art of being self-aware, and did not indulge in
WASP
denial. He tired Andrew sometimes, as much as he knew that being in touch with one’s emotions was a better way to be in the world. Andrew operated in a kind of cut-off and highly functional fog, rarely knowing how to answer the question “How are you?” with any kind of certainty.

ANDREW HAD BEEN
in the middle of watching
The Great British Bake Off
with Jared when he got the call from his aunt Clara. “You have to go home. Your father has been arrested.”

“Arrested?! For what?” He jumped up from the couch and muted the
TV
.

“I’m coming to get you right now,” she said.

“What do you mean? What on earth for?”

“One count of attempted rape, sexual misconduct with several minors.”

“Are you serious?!”

Are you serious?
might be the dumbest thing people say, as a way to buy time to let very serious things sink in.

Jared got up and helped Andrew pack. He’d texted Andrew several times throughout the night and early morning.

I’m here for you, Andrew. Anything you want to talk about. I’m here. You want to take a vacation this weekend? I’ll arrange it.

Jared thought a vacation would cure any and all stress, even though Andrew often found the process of vacationing to be stressful in itself — the planning, the potential chaos of airports and delays, then all that insistence that you relax after months of constant mental and physical activity. He felt the same way about holidays — like they were a kind of work with associated stress.

Jared and Andrew had recently begun to be more
intentional
about their relationship. Jared had been taking mindfulness classes on his lunch hour and was full of ideas on how to reconnect with the world, and with each other. He’d been teaching Andrew about a type of tapping therapy, where you tap on certain spots of your body and repeat positive sentences about whatever is stressing you out. Andrew would watch him in the living room, tapping at his forehead and saying, “Even though I want that cream cheese muffin, I will make a healthy choice not to eat it
.
” He tried not to laugh. Jared’s hopefulness and his desire to be a better person were actually among the things he loved most intensely about him.

When they’d met, they were both recently single and heartbroken. Neither was eager to jump right into something new. But the physical attraction was undeniable, and no amount of pretending they didn’t also like each other and want to spend time together could change it. They’d recently celebrated their three-year anniversary, the longest consistent relationship for Andrew. Most of the time he felt solid with Jared, as though they shared a home base and a core connection too strong to be broken. Occasionally things came up that made him wonder if he was actually settling for less than he wanted. Did all relationships feel that way after a while? He had no real point of comparison. His parents were one of the few couples he knew who had actually stayed together. He often held them up as the ideal, espousing to others that gay men gave up on each other too quickly, that commitment was a lost art.

His parents were very affectionate, but Andrew would never say they were outwardly sexual. As a teenager he was aware of the way most men stared at women, because it seemed to be an automatic impulse that God had not granted him. It gave him some comfort to note that his father also seemed to lack this impulse. He eventually learned that gay men are granted a free pass, in certain geographical areas and using certain coded behaviours, to be overtly sexual amongst themselves without having to know one another. Once Andrew emerged from closeted suburbia, and had access to the ways in which sexuality was communicated through quick looks, gestures, and open admiration, he noticed when it wasn’t present. When you first discover sex and falling in love, for a while it’s all you can see. Coming home from college after months of cruising and gay bars, and burning through the syllabus of his Queer Literature course, he felt as though he saw the subtleties of sex everywhere.

His father was a stark reminder of an old school puritanism, yes, but he also seemed too nerdy and book-bound to be a person with an acknowledged body, let alone a sexual person. He was often described as a floating head or absent-minded professor, never caring much about anything beyond the brain.

ANDREW TAPPED AT
his forehead the way Jared had suggested he do in moments of crisis.
This is a stressful moment, but I can get through it if I remember to breathe and be in my body
,
he thought. When Jared told him about the forehead tapping theory, Andrew had made fun of him, but he felt desperate for any strategy at this point, staring at the old dusty computer monitor that his mother had covered in a ridiculous cotton doily for when guests stayed over. It would probably feel better to take the computer outside and bash it with a bat, just like the printer in his favourite scene in the movie
Office Space
.

He stubbed out the joint in the ashtray he’d made twenty years ago in shop class. He remembered trying to make it look shitty so that his classmates wouldn’t think he was artistic.

My father is in a
jail
cell
right now. He grappled with that thought. He clutched at his chest, his fingers coated in sweat. The joint wasn’t helping. He didn’t feel stoned really, just more sad, helpless, as if a film were covering his skin.

He opened the drawer beside his bed and pulled out a cigar box. Inside was a hollowed-out Bible filled with envelopes. Letters from Stuart, Andrew’s first boyfriend, who was also his coach in high school. His aunt Clara was the only one who knew about Stuart, and she hadn’t really approved because he was older, and because he chose to live in Avalon Hills and was therefore either dumb or “self-loathing,” a term Andrew didn’t understand at the time. But she understood that he wasn’t being harmed, and that their feelings for each other were real.

Andrew hadn’t spoken to Stuart since his second year of college, when their phone conversations included a lot of long pauses while Andrew tried to think of excuses to hang up. Andrew had been surprised to realize that once he left Avalon Hills, and ceased to be the only gay guy he knew, he and Stuart actually had very different interests, and weren’t very compatible at all. Andrew broke up with him over the telephone one night in his dorm room after he drank too many beers with his best friend, Lindy, who convinced him to let her give him a blow job that he felt guilty about the next day when she wouldn’t speak to him.

Stuart showed up at his dorm room two days later, drunk and begging him to reconcile. Andrew had reacted with cruelty, although cruelty when you’re that young and newly free from your parents feels like your right. Andrew opened the door and handed him the sweater Stuart had given him as a going-away present. He shook his head and said, “Please go home, Stuart.” He shut the door, whispering another unconvincing “Sorry,”
and waited until he heard security escorting him out. They hadn’t spoken since.

Months later he felt terrible about that moment, though he knew it had been the right decision.

Andrew hadn’t thought about Stuart for years, and really only mentioned him when anyone asked him for his “coming out” story, which rarely happened anymore. Younger guys didn’t seem to have that ritual of exchanging stories of revelation, denial, acceptance, estrangement. These days they seemed to say
,
“What? I’ve always been gay. Here I am in day care in my
Glad to Be Gay!
onesie. What are you harping about, old guy?”

He’d never run into Stuart on visits to his parents over the years, probably because he rarely left Woodbury Lake when he came home. He preferred to lounge on the dock, sequestered in silence.

Andrew put on a pair of his old jeans. They were too loose for him now. He wrote
buy a belt
on his phone’s notepad. He left his room and peered down the hallway towards the master bedroom. He heard his mother’s shower running. Downstairs he discovered a pot of coffee, still warm, and poured himself a cup. He looked out the back window and saw Sadie and her boyfriend running down to the lake wrapped in old swim towels. How could they act as though nothing was happening? He felt a twinge of annoyance that Sadie wasn’t helping take care of their mother. He took a sip and knew where he had to go.

When he drove past the Coffee Hut by the beach, Pat was outside watering the petunias. The newspaper box had a photo of his father on the front. He lifted one hand from the wheel in a partial wave, and Pat offered a tepid nod in return.

He continued to drive too fast, the way he had as a teenager, through the bucolic Avalon Hills Main Street with its carefully tended foliage, passing every store where he could potentially buy a belt. He turned right at the public library, going up the Mason Street hill, feeling both repelled by and drawn to the nostalgia he felt when he approached the school, which was set back from the road in a shroud of trees. He pulled in by a side lane, into the staff parking lot, and was waved through by a security guard who noted the staff parking sticker on his parents’ Volvo. He watched a student leave through a side door, loosening his school tie and throwing off his blazer, jumping on a bike he’d stashed by the cedar bushes that encircled the janitor’s house.