“What happened?”
“Oh, you know. Everything, and then nothing. And here I am, still thinking about it.” He set the laptop on the table and started it up. “I still want to help you, though. I mean, you can find people. I’m living proof, although I found out that sometimes people don’t want to be found.”
“Are you going to tell me what happened, or not?” Dori watched the computer screen come up; the backdrop was from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. A humorless looking woman in a bodysuit, with pointed ears. Dori thought she recognized her, from years of passively watching Jason’s TV shows.
“I will, but first you have to know something. And this is why we had to leave. I mean, why my mother couldn’t hear.”
“Ok, what?”
“Are you like, super conservative or something?”
“What do you mean, like politically? No. Not really.” Dori had not in fact voted in any election in at least eight years; she’d moved a few times, generating voter registration paperwork, more hassles that collected in an unopened stack of mail by the door in the Portland apartment.
“I’m gay,” he said. She stared. “Are you surprised?”
“Kind of,” she admitted. “But not because I really care or anything. I just, I guess I don’t really have gaydar or whatever they call it.”
“Gaydar is a complete myth.”
“OK, there you have it, then.”
“Anyway, I’ve always known. Like, since I was six. I fell in love with someone when I was seventeen.” Dori sat up; this story seemed to be going somewhere familiar. “I was in this summer program, for kids with reading difficulties, I guess, I’d flunked English in my junior year. And there was another guy there, Paul Austen. He was a bully, I guess you could call it. He used to call me Lard Ass, I mean, during the regular school year. But in summer school, we were kind of partners. And it was summer, and things are different in the summer.” Dori had no way of knowing whether things were different in the summer. She’d actually dreaded that last day of classes Freshman year, and prayed for some sort of serendipity to carry the hinted possibility of a relationship with Jay over into June, even going so far as to writing her phone number in his year book, but that had been the end of it: he’d never called. All summer, she’d lay in her bedroom, staring up at the popcorn ceilings of the old rental house on Turner, with the rotary phone up there next to her on the bed. Every day.
“He followed me home a couple of days. Like, he’d walk behind me, and call me Lard Ass, and throw rocks at my shoes. But I knew. I mean, no one pays that kind of attention to you, with no one else around, unless there’s something more behind it. That much I know,” said Theo, finishing his Coke.
“So what happened?” Nevaeh suddenly slumped sideways; Theo pushed her back upright again.
“He followed me all the way to my house one day,” he said. “He said he had to use the phone. I was scared but I was kind of fascinated with him. I mean, I liked the attention, secretly. It was kind of thrilling. I felt like I knew something about Paul that he himself didn’t yet know, and it felt kind of like power.”
“What did he do, in the house?”
“Well, my mother wasn’t there. My dad was long gone by that point, of course. Before mom retired she worked in a pet store, and tended to work late afternoons. So it was just me and Paul there in the house.”
“Did he use the phone?”
“No,” said Theo. He shook his head, sadly. The waitress came to refill his Coke. “He shoved me against the fridge and said, ‘fat boy, if you tell anyone about this, I’ll stick a knife into your guts.’ Except that he was crying. I’d never seen a guy cry before. I didn’t even really have a lot of guy friends, to tell you the truth.”
“What did he do?”
“He kissed me.” Theo chewed on the ice in his Coke, a distant look on his face. “And it was great. God, it was so great. He wouldn’t even look at me all the next day.”
“But he followed you home again,” Dori said.
“Right. He said things. I mean, later on he said all of it was lies, but I was there when he said those things. I remember all of it.”
“I know,” said Dori. She nodded. She understood him completely. “So what happened?”
“Well, the semester ended. And then I tried to talk to him the first week of senior year. And he beat me up in front of his friends.”
“So that was the end of it?”
“But,” said Theo. “You don’t just stop being gay. I always told myself that. He could do what he wanted to impress his friends, but he’d whispered things to me. He’d done things to me. He couldn’t take any of it back.” Dori wondered if he’d ever had any other relationship since then, and guessed not, because that’s the first thing you learn, after you go through it more than once: not only can people take everything back, they can leave with more than they showed up with in the first place.
“You found him,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said. “Years ago. Like, when the internet was first around. In ’94.”
“Where was he?”
“Duluth. He was married. He worked for an insurance agency.”
“So what did you do? Did you call him?”
“Yes. I found his phone number on the insurance agency’s web site.” Dori suddenly didn’t want to know what he said, because she already knew. What if Jay treated her with indifference, or contempt? What if he didn’t remember any of it, the things they’d said about We, the things they’d said about Abbey Road and Music for the Masses? What if she had wasted decades of her life on idiotic reveries that had completely ceased to resonate in his memory in any way? “He told me he didn’t remember who I was, and that if I tried to call him again, that he would fucking kill me. That’s what he said. ‘I’ll fucking kill you,’ is what he said. But he didn’t say it as mean as it sounds. I mean, it was almost like a code, I think.”
“A code?” Dori wondered if he knew how delusional he sounded.
“I think what he was telling me is that, he would always love me. He’d said he loved me, you know. Twice, on my bedroom floor. He’d said it. And he still knew, you could tell by the tone of his voice that day, the way he whispered into the phone, that he remembered saying it.”
“But—he was married. Right?”
“Right. It said that in his bio, on the insurance site. But no one stops being gay. If you’re gay, you’re always gay.”
“Probably true Theo, but it sounds like this guy was pretty much in the closet, to me.”
“So what,” said Theo. “Everyone lives in some kind of closet, in a way. Don’t they?” Dori thought about Rick. And in some ways, herself. Yes, she conceded. This might be true.
“So that’s what happened,” she said.
“Yes. You can’t tell Gale, because she’ll just tell my mom.”
“I won’t,” said Dori. “Trust me, I don’t tell her anything. She still thinks I’m married, pretty much.”
“My mother doesn’t know,” said Theo. “She’d kick me out. She wants that room for Cleo anyway, she always wanted a girl, but she hates driving, and that is why she lets me stay. But listen, the reason I’m telling you this is that I can help you.”
“How?”
“I can help you find this guy. I mean, it’s easy. You’re going to be amazed when you find out how easy it is.”
“Christ Theo, I’m not sure I want to, after what you just told me. I mean, what if Jay tells me he wants to fucking kill me?” Theo laughed. He’d finished the entire basket of fries himself. Dori noticed just then, save for the one that he’d given to Nevaeh.
“You have it easy,” he said. “No man is going to say that, to a woman. You just have it so much easier. You have no idea. My God. What’s his last name?”
“Collins.”
‘What else about him? Tell me something else about him.”
“He was a carnie. Or maybe is. He lives in an RV.”
“Sounds like a winner. Where does he live?”
“I have no idea. His mom said that the last she heard from him was, he was in Dallas.”
“There’s a site that would just scare the shit out of you, that posts people’s full names and mailing addresses, and phone numbers, things they cull off of mailing lists for catalogs, and government records, and that kind of thing. The shit is just out there. I mean, no one anywhere has any privacy anymore, which works for our purposes here but is really pretty scary if you think about it.” Theo was typing madly into his browser when the waitress approached their table.
“Uh, we’re about to close up.” she said. You have five minutes to pay the bill.”
“Oh, uh. Right. Hang on.” Theo reached into his pants pocket, fishing for his wallet.
“I’ve got it,” said Dori. She didn’t have it, not really, but she still had an ATM card on which she assumed a few dollars remained, and she put her card down in the plastic tray.
“Shit,” said Theo. “We only have dial-up at home, and I can only access it in my room, the line in the kitchen is wired into the wall…”
“That’s OK,” said Dori. “We’ll keep looking tomorrow.”
They carried the dolls back out to the car. “Dori, I wanted to say thanks. I mean, I haven’t told anyone about Paul except for people on the internet.”
“Oh, well, no problem. I mean, I’ll tell you about Jay, later I guess, although it’s kind of the same story except not gay, and minus the violence, and oh yeah, he never kissed me either.” While she said this, Theo handed her Guenevere. He sort of tossed the doll a little ways, since Dori had already started to walk around to the passenger seat. Dori failed to turn exactly in time to catch it; her arms came out awkwardly and the doll thumped against her chest, then slipped out of her grasp toward the pavement.
“Fumble!” Shouted Theo. He laughed, but Dori watched in horror as Gueneverestruck the ground head-first, with that same sharp, hollow pottery sound that Nevaeh had made that day when her head hit the car jack. When Dori reached down to pick the doll up off the asphalt, something rolled away from the doll. It was a blue glass eye.
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