A Way With Words - Chapter 40 part 2
“We are alone in camp, guarding while the others are on a mission. But we... are distracted. Soldiers come out of the trees, but they don't shoot us. Better if they did.
“They throw us down, pull off our lungis. They cut off the leather string from Eswaran's neck, that has the cyanide glass. They throw it into the jungle. The sun hit it when it's flying through the air and I see where it lands. I can't see them beating Eswaran but I hear it. They are pressing me into the ground, a boot is on my neck. Then I feel burning on my back. I scream, but Eswaran is screaming louder. They burn and burn and they're laughing. Then they pull my hair and lift my head to see him. They take a hot red stick from the fire and put it in him and he scream like an animal.
“I feel more burning, but I stop screaming. My eyes are on the spot where the cyanide fell. They drop my head and the boot kick it. I pretend I am dead. Then they are gone and Eswaran is still screaming. Blood all over him. Smell is like meat cooking. My back is like fire. I crawl into the trees where the cyanide landed. Take me a year to find it. I crawl back to him. When he sees what is in my hand he grabs it, bites down.
“He is gone so fast.”
He'd landed hard on his ass next to the bed, blood streaming from his nose, pain radiating through his head. Kaj had dropped to his knees and gingerly probed Ennis' face with his fingers, whispering sorry sorry sorry. Ennis had angrily knocked his hand away and was about to shove him when he saw Kaj's face, far more than remorse in his expression. He was staring in horror at the smears of blood on his hands. Then Kaj had collapsed back on his haunches against the wall, covered his eyes with the clean hand and begun to choke out the words, three or four at a time, punctuated with sobs.
Ennis' body had jerked involuntarily when he came to the impaling. By the time he registered the final words he was on his hands and knees, crawling toward the bathroom.
Now he felt drained. He reached up, grabbed the edge of the sink and hauled himself upright on rubbery legs. He glanced in the mirror, then ran the tap to rinse the blood from his nose and chin while listening for any sound from the room. He heard only the hum of the air conditioner.
At last he turned his head to look through the open door. He could see Kaj's bare legs on the still-made bed, protruding from the lungi. Not Kaj's own lungi, but the one he'd given to Ennis. He started, feeling the loss, the moving backwards. But… where was the rest of his body? He stepped into the room and saw that Kaj was curled up on the bed with the lungi pulled all the way up and over the top half of him, like a child hiding from monsters. His fists underneath the cloth were bunching the fabric, pulling it tight against his bowed head; he resembled a green, gold and brown comma against the white bedspread.
It was one thing to hear the stories, another to know the body he'd been loving had been beaten and burned, that a heavy boot had kicked the head he'd caressed. The lips he'd kissed had kissed another man's, a man who had been… He shook his head. Focus on Kaj, not the other man.
He walked around the bed and turned off the whirring air conditioner. The quiet settled into the room, and after a moment he eased the window open, letting warm, humid air waft in, pushing back the artificial chill. His finger on the lamp switch summoned the dark. Then he stripped off his clothes and slid quietly onto the mattress. Before he pressed up against Kaj, he lifted the lungi and glided his fingers lightly over the rough skin at his hips. Kaj jerked, but Ennis continued to touch him there until he remained still. How many touches, how many years would it take for either of them to forget what had happened?
Ennis reached up and drew the lungi away from Kaj's head, noting the wet patch. He lay down and pressed against his body, curving his arm around him. He felt his lover settle snugly against him, then take his hand and gently squeeze it.
A distant siren woke him. The sun was not yet up but enough light was coming through the parted curtains for him to see. He was lying on his other side now, close to the edge of the mattress and facing away from Kaj, whose even breathing he could hear behind him. A sheet lay askew over him, leaving his lower legs uncovered, cool morning air brushing over his bare skin. He shuffled his feet, trying to adjust the covers, then saw it wasn't a sheet but the lungi spread over him. He turned over. Kaj was asleep on his back and had pulled the edge of the bedspread up and over his own naked body.
For a few seconds he wondered why they'd fallen asleep on top of the covers and started to reach for Kaj when he remembered everything and flinched. He drew his hand back. For a few seconds he considered quietly dressing and slipping away before Kaj awoke, but people only got away with that in movies. He raised up on one elbow and watched Kaj sleep, sorting through the questions crowding his mind. The one he didn't intend to ask was, Why did you hit me? He had punched a guy in the nose once at a party, and at the time he couldn't have explained why.
After a few minutes Kaj stirred, yawned and slowly opened his eyes. He blinked at the ceiling and turned his head to one side, away from Ennis, who felt in the little vibration coming through the mattress the moment when his friend remembered. Instantly Kaj whipped his head in the other direction, as if expecting to find the other side of the bed empty. When he saw Ennis, Kaj looked first relieved, then apprehensive.
"What happened next?" Ennis asked.
Kaj stared up at the ceiling and recounted in a monotone the aftermath of the attack. He'd lain next to his dead friend in agonizing pain for the longest hour of his life until the others returned. They'd immediately abandoned the camp, four of them carrying him on a litter to a village, and from there someone drove him to a hospital in Jaffna. He was in the hospital for two weeks, and it was a doctor there who told him the burns formed a word in Sinhala. A bad word, but he wouldn't tell Kaj what it was. Later, Kaj had looked at it using two mirrors, but while he could speak Sinhala he didn't read it well and hadn't recognized this word, which he was sure was slang. He thought he could guess. The meaning didn't matter as much as the fact that it was the enemy’s language. That was shameful enough.
"Didn't anyone in the detention center see it?"
"I never take a shower same time as Ravi or Ragu," Kaj said. He looked at Ennis. "You are the first person to see it since my father."
"Your father… he knew what it said?"
“He can speak and read Sinhala very well. He ask me why they burn this word on me and I say I don't know. Then he said I must leave the country. Things are very bad, my light eyes are already a problem and this will make it worse for me.
"Last weekend when you see the scars and you don't know it is a word… When you kiss my back..." Kaj touched his fingertips to his chest and lifted his hands toward the ceiling while heaving a breath. "I feel like a big black bird fly out of me."
Kaj paused for a moment and closed his eyes. "But still I feel guilty about one thing. When I am looking for the cyanide, I'm thinking we will both use it. Pain is so bad on my back and I believe the soldiers will come back and kill me anyway. But when I see Eswaran die, I change my mind. I don't want to follow him, I want my life."
"Did you… Were you… in love with him?"
"I was not thinking about it like that. Just that finally I have a friend I can… touch the way I want to. "
"When did you know that you… like men?" As he voiced the question, Ennis anticipated that Kaj would ask him the same thing in return. While he’d lain awake he had wondered how he would answer that question himself. But would Kaj really ask? It occurred to him that Kaj had never been as curious about Ennis' life as Ennis was about his.
Kaj sighed. "When I'm a boy, on our plantation, I like to watch the men working. But not because they are working, you know? Because they are men. I was thinking that was normal, to want to know about what you will be.
"But this… wanting to know, it never stopped. When I am sixteen, one time I'm with three of my friends on the beach near Colombo and we are watching the Europeans. We stand in a circle and talk and after a minute we turn the circle and-"
"I know, you told me about that, remember? On Revere Beach?"
"I remember."
They were both silent for a moment, recalling the afternoon lying side by side on the sand, and Kaj putting Ennis' hand on… Now he knew who Kaj had been thinking of when he… He tensed, closed his eyes. He himself couldn't stop thinking about that man and what was done to him. So how could Kaj ever forget him?
"So one time with your friends…?"
"I am wearing sunglasses and when it's my turn to watch the European woman in the sand I look at the men pulling a fishing boat out of the water. I can't control my eyes, they don't want to stay on the almost naked woman. That's when I start to think I have a problem."
Like me working on the beach. There had been men watching him, but also boys. He hadn't thought about them, that he might be sparking something.
Kaj continued to talk. Having a girlfriend - for kissing only - had been an experiment, to see if she could change the way he felt. If she hadn't lost his grandfather's ring on the beach, he fretted, he might have had more patience, made it work. Maybe he gave up too soon. If he'd married, like his parents wanted and expected when he'd finished his studies, he would have stayed away from the Tigers. Eswaran might still be alive.
“He was a quiet guy, little younger than me. He was very poor. His parents are killed by Sinhalese in 1983. Tigers are his only family. We are different, but same.”
He looked at Ennis. "What about you?"
Ennis shivered. He reached back to pull the bedspread over him the way Kaj had done, but he was close to the edge of the mattress so it didn't wrap around him far enough. Without speaking they both got up, pulled down the bedding and crawled underneath. But they remained apart.
"I didn't have any real friends when I was a kid. Didn't have one until I went to college." He'd never told anyone this, not even Jay. More words began to trickle out: about his family before and after the accident, listening to Jack Tornado, going to Boston and meeting Joe. Before he knew it he'd been talking non-stop about himself for ten minutes - a record. When he reached the story of the road trip to Kansas with Joe, he paused and turned his head to look at Kaj. He was still on his back, his eyes closed, face slack. Shit, I really bore him.
"Don't stop."
He carried on, about running across the motel parking lot to Joe, the strange dream, the ranting radio preacher. He didn't speak of the two lost weeks bent over the puzzle, but about Joe introducing him to Jay. He stopped abruptly.
"Keep going."
"I'll have to tell her when I go back."
"Why?"
Ennis stared at him in astonishment.
"I know you are not coming here again," Kaj said.
"I still have to tell her."
Kaj didn't reply, letting that "still" sink in.
"I mean," Ennis said, "whatever I do, I will have to tell her… that I'm… that I like men. That I…" He couldn't bring himself to say out loud that he didn't love her.
"Then you are coming back?"
"I don't know." How could there be a future for us? "When will you get married?"
"I don't know."
Ennis jerked awake, terrorized out of sleep by a fragment of a dream: a sharpened stick glowing at the tip, waving in front of his face in the dark and tracing curving orange shapes against the blackness. He and Kaj had remained silent for so long after exchanging their don't knows that he'd dozed off. It was much lighter in the room and now he could hear traffic sounds. Kaj was still on his back but looking at Ennis with concern. His jaw was dark with stubble and his mustache needed trimming. Ennis felt a stab of longing to feel Kaj's chin rasp against his own; he turned on his side to face him, lessening the distance between them.
"If… when you get married, your wife will see your back. Don't you worry about that?"
Kaj looked directly into his eyes for a long moment, then said dully, "It will not be a love marriage."
Ennis pitied the unlucky woman who would look at that handsome face every night. If Kaj had rolled onto his side to face him, Ennis would have pulled him into his arms. But Kaj remained on his back. He is making me choose our path.
"You ever have nightmares about it?" Ennis asked. "Bad dreams about the attack?"
"Not since I leave the detention center. Well…" Kaj took a deep breath and exhaled. "Really, since after I move from that apartment where I was staying with those Tamil guys and one guy's mother. Then I feel free. New place, nobody know me."
"That why you shaved off your mustache that time?" Ennis wanted to reach over and smooth his fingers over it; the thought of doing so brought up a memory of a Halloween party, when Jay had dressed as a mustachioed paparazzo, and when he'd kissed her in the car he'd…
"Who was the first woman you slept with?" Ennis blurted out.
Kaj gave him a puzzled look."My mother, of course."
Ennis laughed softly. "I mean, the first one you had sex with."
"Oh. The widow girl in India. She was happy to teach me a lot of things."
The teenager with the white sari. An image flashed through his mind of Sandy twirling in her white gauzy Halloween dress, and then of him wrestling with it and her long red hair in her bed, and the softness of her, so unlike Jay. He fell onto his back, covered his face with his hands and groaned.
"What?"
"It's just… Nothing. Well, I… realized something." Ennis turned back on his side. "I don't want to go back." I don't want to face her. Or anyone.
"You want to ask for political asylum here? I promise I will visit you in detention center," Kaj said teasingly. "Bring you Madras Mix when you are sick of… what the Canadians give you to eat. What do they eat here? I don't pay attention."
Ennis blinked in surprise at his light tone, and found he was able to smile. "Let's go out to breakfast and find out."
They dressed without showering, took turns shaving, packed and went down to the reception desk together to check out, with no subterfuge. Now they were eating blueberry pancakes with maple syrup and maple-cured bacon in a diner a few streets away. Ennis tried to make sense of the shifts their relationship had undergone in a day and a night. Twenty-four hours earlier they’d been in the grip of sexual passion, unable to keep their hands off one another. Then they'd passed from playfulness to tenderness, melancholy, rage, horror, grief, disgust, resignation and finally come full circle to playful teasing. Ennis’ spirits were strangely lighter than they'd been the previous morning, like a laundered cotton shirt flapping on a line as it dried in the sun. He was convinced he felt relief, not dread, at the prospect of telling Jay the truth.
But had anything been decided? Was he coming back or not? What did Kaj think?
"Now we go to the CN Tower," Kaj declared as he dropped some Canadian dollars on top of the bills Ennis had laid on the table. "I am seeing that thing every day since I get here and lot of people tell me I must go up to the top."
The doors of the elevator were made of glass and passengers could look out over Toronto and Lake Ontario as they rose up the concrete spire to the donut-shaped observation deck. There were plenty of tourists, though not mobs of them as there must have been during the summer. The lake dominated the view, and they could see a long, narrow curving island not far off shore opposite the city center. Ennis heard a man near them telling two children with him that there was a park on the island and that on another weekend they would take a boat there. We could do that, too, he thought automatically, and was about to suggest it to Kaj but stopped himself.
They moved down to the lowest level, to the Glass Floor. The spaces between the steel grid were very thick glass that the other visitors were gingerly walking across. Ennis caught his breath and his stomach lurched as he looked down to the ground more than 1500 feet directly below. He stepped back, his heart pounding. Kaj was beside him, staring down and not moving. Gone was the lightness he'd felt since breakfast, replaced by anxiety and dread. Gripping tightly the straps of his duffel bag, he slowly walked out onto the glass, but didn't look down. After a few seconds, Kaj followed.
When they were back on solid ground and had arrived at the subway entrance, Ennis grasped Kaj's elbow and stopped him at the head of the stairs.
"Don't come with me to the airport," he said. He released Kaj's arm, turned away and jogged down the steps. At the bottom he glanced back up, which was a mistake. When he turned away the after-image of a stunned, frozen figure silhouetted against the light clouded his sight. It eventually faded from his vision, but not from his mind's eye.
He almost called in sick on Monday morning, he felt so bad. The prospect of never touching Kaj again… well, that made him think about all the touching that had gone on over two weekends and soon he was coming into his own hand. He got up and took a shower, cursing the fact that the soap in the bathroom smelled of sandalwood. The framed enlargement on the living room wall, of him and Jay next to Andy Warhol, was a reminder that soon he would have to tell her the truth. Better to go in to work.
It seemed that he'd missed a lot at the office during the days between the weekends in Toronto. Don carried on about Randy moving in with him at the end of the year as though it were common knowledge. She was going to sublet her apartment in Chelsea and move into Don's house in Roslindale, beginning in January.
Dana and one of her friends had paid a visit to the Tremont Tea Room downtown recently to have their tea leaves read and her report had inspired the women from advertising to go there on their lunch hour to try it out. The little café on Winter Street was apparently where psychics hung out; if you wanted your fortune told, that was the place to go.
But the most surprising news came from Tina. Ennis had left for lunch at the dot of twelve and intended to stay away until two o'clock, in case Kaj called during his lunch hour. Though he had no appetite, he bought a sandwich and walked over to the park a couple blocks away. Tina was sitting in the grass; when she spotted him she waved him over, and he was glad of the company. She was eating a takeaway Thai curry and offered him a forkful. The heat of the chilies and the coconut flavor made him tear up. He realized he wouldn't be able to eat a curry again for a long time.
"I thought you could manage hot food now, Ennis!" Tina teased him.
"I… I think I bit into a chili pepper," he croaked out, reaching for his can of soda.
"Don't drink anything! Eat some rice, that will help. Hey, guess what," Tina went on, "Lureen is talking about leaving. Well, she's told only me, so don't go blabbing." She grinned at him. "Guess the secret's safe with you.
"When she came back from the Tremont Tea Room on Friday, I asked her how it went. She said the guy told her she was going to have important business dealings with a man and that his name began with a J. She actually seemed impressed by that prediction. Well, come on! Lureen does business with men every single day, and more male names start with J than any other letter!
"But she told me she's been dating a guy who wants to go into real estate development and she might join him. And that his name starts with J." She took a bite of her curry and chewed thoughtfully. "Telling me his actual name would be over-sharing, of course. Still, that's the most personal information I've heard from her in a long time."
Ennis seized on this bit of news with relief - a mystery to mull over would take his mind off Kaj. Since he'd left Toronto he'd been aching inside and out. He wondered if Jack knew about Lureen's plans. Jack. The last time they'd talked, in that bar in Harvard Square, he'd been fortifying his resolve to tell Jay… about himself. He'd felt so comfortable with Jack that day that he'd been tempted to tell him first. He had no idea when Jay would be back; she'd left no message on the answering machine. She might just show up suddenly. All at once he felt a desperate need to confide in someone.
"Ennis, aren't you going to eat your sandwich? Are you alright?"
He looked up from the grass at Tina, taking in her dyed black hair and her multiple earrings and the stud in her nose. He couldn't help smiling a tiny bit - she reminded him of an earlier, even more confused time in his life. If she weren't a co-worker he'd tell her right then.
He sighed and rolled his shoulders. "I think I'm coming down with something. I ache all over."
She told him he should go home, and that's what he did. He went to bed, slept all afternoon and all his dreams were about Kaj. That evening Ennis called Jack's number several times, but an answering machine picked up, though it played a generic message in a stranger’s voice. He returned to work on Tuesday and tried Jack again that night. Ennis didn't leave a message, but by Wednesday he was anxious enough to do so. He could have faxed Jack, or called him at work, but he didn't like the idea of other people in the background when he communicated with him.
There were no calls or messages from Jay. Each night he watched the evening news to see how Dukakis was doing. It didn’t look good for him. Riding around in that tank looking like a jack-in-the-box while wearing a ridiculous helmet had been a disaster. Ennis empathized with him, though. You never really knew for sure how people were going to perceive you, no matter what you did. After the news he lay on the couch and listened to the Boney M album through headphones.
Jack returned his call Thursday night; he sounded at once eager and wary when Ennis proposed they meet up.
"Which sport did you have in mind this time?" he asked, and Ennis couldn't quite tell whether he was being sarcastic. "Or we could just go have a beer."
"OK, a beer. Meet you in an hour at the Casablanca?" Now that he'd finally reached Jack he wanted to get this over with, before the weekend.
"I can't tonight. Tomorrow?"
"Why, what're you doing?" Ennis blurted out. "Sorry, I mean… well, I really need to talk to somebody. To you, I mean. Soon. Tomorrow night, well, it might be too late."
"Is this about Ravi?"
Ravi. God, he'd forgotten all about him. "No, no… not directly anyway. Why, isn't he okay?"
"He's fine, Ennis. What about breakfast tomorrow at Leo's place?"
Breakfast? "Who… who's Leo?"
"You know, Leo's Diner in Harvard Square. It's on the way to work for both of us, right?"
He'd imagined confiding to Jack in a dark corner with the help of alcohol, not in broad daylight with dishes clattering and caffeine racing through his bloodstream. But time was running out.
"OK. I know where that is. What time?"
Ennis walked into the diner at 7:30 the next morning and was relieved to see that Jack hadn't arrived yet. He'd passed by the place many times but had never eaten there, not seeing the point of eating diner food a mile from home when there were so many other choices. The place was small, with cheerful yellow counters lining two of the walls, including one at the front window, and a few plain tables in the middle. The last food he'd had was the bite of Tina's curry in the park, and even though he was starving he couldn't face eating. He hoped that after saying... what he needed to say, he'd be ravenous.
None of the places at the window counter were taken, so he slid onto a stool to wait for Jack. He had spent half the night preparing a speech in his mind. A story, really. Across the street he could see the guy in the bagel place on the corner making delicate stirring motions with a long wooden paddle in a vat of boiling water. He remembered how surprised he'd been to learn that bagels were boiled before they were baked. He'd been walking with Jay past that place just after they’d moved to Cambridge and when he’d stared through the bakery window she'd explained that the rings of dough floating in the big kettle were going to be bagels. He wondered if Joe knew about that step in the process.
The very moment he thought of Joe, Ennis saw him walk by the window, just three feet away, and his heart lurched. But no, it was Jack, with a different haircut and clean-shaven, and now he was opening the door.
Thinking of Jay, Joe and now Jack in the space of ten seconds left him flustered. Jack's smile of greeting came and went very quickly as he sat down on the stool next to Ennis.
"You look like shit," Jack said. "You need some coffee? Want a muffin? A bagel?"
"Just coffee. Black." That story, what was it again? He stared at the traffic and the pedestrians walking in front of the cars and tried to arrange the words in his mind but they remained stubbornly scrambled. He smelled coffee; the mug was in front of him. He wrapped his hands around the warmth and clenched his teeth to stop them chattering.
"What did you want to talk to me about, Ennis?" Jack asked softly.
He heaved a shaky breath and pressed the warmed heels of his hands to his pricking eyes to keep tears from escaping. "I'm gay."
When the silence next to him went on so long that it was no longer comforting, Ennis slid his palms toward his temples to wipe his eyes. Across the street he saw Joe disappearing around the corner. He slowly turned his head. The stool was empty.
Chapter 40b >>
A tour of the CN Tower:
Leo's Place diner in Harvard Square:
I will be having a lot of visitors, going on vacation and one of my betas is moving to a new city, so 40b won't be up before September.