To Come Home To
Henry Alley
I get to leave, Garrett decided, as he looked out the morning window, and hearing Ethan stirring naked in their bed. Outside, the birds flew in toward the feeder in sprints of color, red, yellow, gray, and a chic gay mauve. Garrett had packed his bags the night before, and although the forecast had said March rain for the next five days, here was sunlight flying in like the birds, brightening the grass, grown lush in all the wet Oregon spring, with the rose bushes rising up all around their house, with curves of red coming out of the green canes.
From March until this January, Garrett had come to see his own life as one long overcast day, with dots of rain. But this was a change now. For he was getting dots of sun at the moment—and unforecast, too.
Which Garrett could see, as he peeked into the bedroom, where Ethan was lying with his naked chest, a strong one, in full view, in a dash of sun, with the covers thrown off. He was no doubt spent from yesterday’s (Sunday’s) double performances. Garrett had no intention of waking him. They had agreed the night before, he would leave without saying goodbye if Ethan didn’t wake up. Garrett had said he would just be gone a week—“possibly two”—to help his stepbrother paint interiors in his forthcoming Bed and Breakfast up on the Olympic Peninsula. “Oh, those breathtaking views,” Ethan had said, affirming that he, too, had been to Port Townsend, and, typically, outlining what Garrett’s impressions were likely to be, even though Garrett had had more experience himself with what Ethan was talking about.
“Yes,” Garrett had answered. “I’ve seen them. I’ve been there before.”
“But have you seen them in early spring?” Ethan asked. “The way you’ll be seeing them now? There’s a huge cloud which comes right over the Strait of Juan de Fuca. It just hangs there while you’re looking at it through rain, and even in your rain, it turns gold!”
“Is that right?” Garrett answered, play-acting surprise, because he was too tired to say he’d witnessed that experience many times before.
Often, standing in the midst of Ethan’s expansiveness, Garrett, slender man, would forget who he was. He would forget, sometimes, that Port Townsend was going to be his, not Ethan’s, vacation, and that he was on his way, if his plans went right, to ending this with Ethan.
A house painter temporarily off season, Garrett had been with Ethan for over seven years, with Ethan always the talker, the social secretary, the original owner of the house, the icebreaker, with Garrett almost mute behind him—particularly at parties. Then, a year ago, Ethan, ironically a psychologist and researcher, had been stricken with depression, started drinking, and then lost his job, taking Garrett with him on that long overcast day. But since auditioning and winning a part in the local Full Monty, Ethan had started climbing out of his pit, particularly after the performances had begun, to regional rave reviews. Which meant that for Garrett the long overcast day was over, too. It was a promising morning like this one—and he was getting away! His first time out of this cage in twelve months, because Ethan was finally stable enough to be on his own.
Garrett, finished with his coffee, was startled by the birds again. Looking over toward the corner of the fence, he saw that the stone St. Joseph and Child had fallen face down in the mud. And the birds were becoming clamorous.
“Leaving now, Dear?” Garrett could hear from the bedroom. Somehow, he felt caught.
He went in and Ethan drew Garrett’s small, well-made body towards him. The man was a mound of warmth. Garrett could smell the cabaret on him from the night before.
“How did the performance go?” Garrett asked. “I don’t even remember you coming in.”
“Last night the ladies threw money on the stage. The man who played the big stripper Keno must have made fifty dollars.”
The character Ethan played was actually named “Ethan” as well and so he was known as “Ethan as Ethan,” affectionately in the press (which was more than familiar with him over the years) and on the boards. He was loved, and the women (and presumably, secretly some of the men) in the audience enjoyed seeing him take off all his clothes in the final number, for he definitely had a great body for his age of fifty-something years.
“And you?” Garrett said, smoothing the almost seamless Aquiline face. “Did you get a lot of bills?”
“The dollars were gone before I could even bend down. All the other guys are younger than I am.” His hands were in Garrett’s hair, caressing his mustache. The moment he felt the fingers, Garrett wanted to get away. Ethan became intuitive when the touching arrived. But, nevertheless, here it was—“You will come back, Garrett, won’t you?”
“What do you expect me to do?” Garrett asked. “Start painting Victorian houses full-time in Port Townsend? That’s hardly my style.”
The complete failure of this came back to Garrett immediately.
It wasn’t a surprise, then, when, as he still lay on the pillow, with hands around his partner, Ethan blinked with a few rising tears. “I mean, you won’t leave,” he said.
“It’s going to be hard enough to go on to the big time” (the show was moving from the downtown cabaret to two weeks at the arts proscenium built for the county—called the Coliseum) “without having you to come home to.”
The plea did not touch Garrett, who would have stayed on only if he had had someone to nurse. Garrett had been making secret plans to move out for some time, and only absolute obligation would keep him here. He’d known since Ethan’s depression that it was over between them, and pledged to himself that when Ethan was well enough to get on his feet, he would rent his old place once more and take his things with him. His former landlord had told him the apartment above the photography studio would be vacant again in May. He loved that special alcove. It had those bookcases right by the window looking down into busy Willamette Street. Ethan was well enough now to be featured in a hit show which eclipsed everything going on not only in Ethan’s life but Garrett’s as well. That was sign enough Ethan could go out on his own. Three weeks ago, on opening night, Garrett had sat in the cabaret audience, waiting for Ethan to strip, and heard Ethan sing, “Did I capture your imagination?” with the women in the audience yelling back, “Oh yes you did!” and decided, I’ll give Ethan until closing night, and then that’s it. As he sat on the bed now, with his arms around Ethan, Garrett could only say, “I’ll be back. I promise.”
“Back in time for the cast party? It’ll be a week from Sunday.”
“I’ll try,” Garrett answered. He kissed him lightly. “Now go back to sleep. I know you were up late.”
“And Garrett,” Ethan called, now that Garrett was out with his bags in the living room, “I promise I’ll look for work once the show is over. I really will.”
“Yep,” Garrett said.
Hoping Ethan was soothed now—for the nurse inside him really wanted Ethan to sleep—he took his red, very Spartan-looking backpack out to his glistening Ford pickup. Dangling from the top of his rearview mirror, a spangled necklace of crystal sent out what Garrett called “the pretty colors” of the rainbow, refracted everywhere. Garrett felt the whole promise of the seven-hour drive—the great potential of March—at the center of his forty-year-old body, the one that was so well articulated on ladders of tremendous height and which crouched so gingerly when he had to pull away rain pipes or do carpentry on very difficult spots. Coming back in for his sack lunch, he moved cat-like to the back door, and went out to the far corner of the fence, where, beneath the leafing apple tree, the stone St. Joseph and child still lay in the mud, also in a spotlight of sun. The grass was silvery with coldness and the birds, frightened from the feeder, answered in sharp calls. He righted the saint and hosed him off, until his body and his child’s shone white again. The visage of the patriarch seemed to regain the smile he had lost on his whimsical bearded face.
Inside once more to get the mud off his hands, Garrett saw to his relief that Ethan was sleeping again. He pulled away from the house feeling he had left it in as good a condition as possible, had left Ethan, hopefully, in a settled mood. He couldn’t wait to get off I-5 at Olympia and on to 101, with its marvelous views of the oyster coves along Lilliwop and Potlatch, and of fifties motels with painted pink lawn chairs lying out in the intermittent rain, off season, waiting to be made use of again. Then his favorite—the old green power plant, coming out of nowhere with its huge arched windows. Pedro, his Mexican stepbrother, would be waiting for him in Port Townsend.
* * *
Garrett would always remember that he had been up on a ladder when he had seen Ethan through the triangular window coming up the Port Townsend street in a strange car. Garrett was in his white painter’s overalls and brushing carefully around the corners of the glass—a light seafoam green. Pedro was right below.
So this was it, Garrett considered, seeing Ethan get out of the car in front of the Victorian house—soon to be open to the public and blooming with wistaria.
“A man is here,” Pedro said. He was standing up from painting around a heat vent.
Garrett didn’t answer.
“I said a man is here.”
“I heard you,” Garrett said at last, coming down the ladder.
He touched Pedro’s arm. “Listen, this is my partner, Ethan. All I can say is try to be patient.” Pedro knew his stepbrother was gay, but traditionally Garrett did not share the details of this private life with family. Pedro only knew vaguely of “partner.”
Pedro looked tired. “I’m patient! I’m patient!”
Carolina, Pedro’s wife, young, wiry, and sharp-witted, opened the door before Ethan could knock. On the porch, Ethan smiled, charming. “I’m glad you people are the only new bed-and-breakfast in town,” he said. “All I had to do was ask down at the garden store.” He seemed too shy to kiss Garrett, and Garrett felt the same.
Garrett made introductions.
“Well,” Ethan said, laughing a little, “I hope all of you don’t mind the interruption but I wondered if I could talk with Garrett here for a few minutes. I’m actually on a tight timetable. I need to be back in Eugene by 7 p.m.”
The wind was bouncing clouds swiftly over the town. The shadows flew in through the triangular window. For a second the faces of the group were patched with light and darkness. Garrett thought of the necklace, hanging from his rearview mirror.
“You need to be back in Eugene by 7 p.m., Sir?” Pedro asked, looking at his watch. “You hardly have time to do that now.”
“Don’t send him off before he has had a chance to sit down,” Carolina said.
“I didn’t mean that,” Pedro answered—and almost stepped towards Ethan to touch him. “I meant—”
Garrett felt himself in the midst of a very familiar position where everything that was happening was his business, but even so he had nothing to say, or at least, was at a loss for words. So everyone else was taking over for him. At last he said, “Ethan and I can go for a walk. Just let me wash up and get out of my monkey suit.”
In the one bedroom where they all changed their clothes, Garrett could hear Ethan ask if he could use their facilities, and while he was gone, he overheard Carolina say to Pedro, “Hey, you’ve got to be nice to this man.”
“I was nice to this man.”
“Well, then, don’t try to strong-arm him out the door,” she replied. “He’s the boyfriend of the man who raised you.”
“I know that, I know that.” Pedro waited. “You know I love Garrett. But him being a pato and then we’ve got another pato and we’re in trouble. People in Port Townsend will start thinking we cater to nothing but these guys even before we open.”
“Just be polite and let them talk it out. They’re grown adults.”
“Si, si, senora.”
“And invite him to lunch,” Carolina insisted.
“Yes, if you make it,” Pedro said.
“Oh, go to hell,” she answered playfully.
When Garrett came back out, he met up with Ethan, just emerging from the newly remodeled bathroom. He felt unsettled from the conversation he had secretly heard, yet proud that even Carolina acknowledged he had raised Pedro.
“That’s some tile you have in there,” Ethan said, ingratiatingly. “This is an impressive place.” He looked at the high ceiling, presumably in awe. “When do you expect to open?”
“In one month,” Pedro said. “We’re not far.”
“Good luck.”
“Good luck to you,” Pedro answered as the two of them went out the door.
* * *
Garrett steered them in the direction of Chetzemoka Park. From there they could walk along the beach. He remembered someone at the coffee shop speaking of there being a low tide this morning.
“What are you doing with a weird car?” Garrett asked, trying to start off on a commanding note.
Ethan seemed surprised by the tone. “Do you know where we’re going? I don’t remember the park being this way.”
“Yes, it’s this way,” Garrett said. He could see the high pines which preluded the park, and which gave him his sense of compass in other parts of this neighborhood.
“Oh, yes, now I see. I’ve been here before.”
“Yes, yes, many times you’ve told me that,” Garrett said, exasperated.
The energy behind Garrett’s voice gave Ethan pause. Garrett knew it was coming from the genie inside him, which had been fully released on the drive up here.
They began descending the slope of the park. Hyacinths, white and pink and blue and even near-red made curving rows eastward, in the direction of the sea and Whidbey Island. Their perfume was overwhelming.
“I came in a weird car,” Ethan said at last, “because I partly flew up here. It was the fastest I could come. I did Sea-Tac, and then I rented a car. I had to do it quickly, because I have rehearsal tonight. We, in fact, have rehearsal all week until the first performance on Friday.”
They were among the picnic tables, and below them, there was a bower of roses, spent from last year and all vines with emerging red leaves. It led to a more steeply descending path. They went beneath the arch, and for a while were silent, because the passage was too narrow for two.
When they came to the beach, which was quiet and glimmering, Ethan said more confidingly, “I just had to come. I didn’t have your phone number.”
“Well, there is no phone, not yet.”
“And I needed to talk to you. I wish you believed in cell phones.” Ethan touched his arm, as the smell of salt, in the wake of the hyacinth, overwhelmed them. It was like Neptune routing out some wood nymphs.
Garrett, frightened, propped his foot on a log and stared at him. “Okay.”
“I need you to come home by Friday night. Which would mean you packing on Thursday.”
“And why Friday?” Garrett asked. “Everything’s planned for me to leave on Sunday.”
“Because the director is on my case about me not screwing up. I screwed up big time two nights ago by forgetting to rotate the set, and I screwed up again last night—not as big, but I still did. Alex savaged my whole ‘You Walk with Me’ number in front of everybody. If I knew you were going to be there for every performance—and I’ll pay for the tickets—I just feel sure I could make it. This is big for me because it’s the first time I’ve been out of the depression.”
Garrett sat down on the log and stared down at the kelp and pebbles as though searching for agates. “Why is it so important? Why? Every performance? Are you kidding? I like the Full Monty but I’ll be nuts myself if I have to go through three more shows.”
He regretted saying “nuts myself,” as if Ethan was nuts. Which, in fact, he was.
“Just this once,” Ethan said. “This is my first project since I was sick. I need a success in my life as a new beginning. After opening night at the cabaret and looking at you, you were my success.”
“But you did that for three weeks running. I wasn’t there every night.”
“But this is different—this is five hundred people staring down at me.”
Garrett held up his hand. “Look, Ethan, there’s something I need to tell you. I can’t just up and leave Pedro the way I would a passing acquaintance. He’s like a son I promised to help out. And he’s been harassed by the government at times. Because of his connections to Cuba. His family of origin is rather renegade. He needs to get this work done if he and Carolina are going to make it.”
Ethan stared at him. “You never told me Pedro was this important to you. Is he more important than I am?”
Garrett got up, afraid of what he would say. “I don’t know. And I think maybe we should go back.”
They returned through the park in silence, Garrett still uncharacteristically leading the way. The rose bower made Garrett think of weddings, ironically. The clouds continued to flicker over the trees of the park, some of them already vibrant white and pink, as if flourishing in the sea air.
“I want you to come back,” Ethan said at last, “because I want you back. To be in house. It isn’t just having you in the audience for security. I feel like you’re checking out on me, and I want you to come home to.”
Garrett was in an orange dress shirt. He looked particularly sexy and shapely at that moment, with the gnarled sea-ridden apple trees of the neighborhood behind him. “I am checking out, Ethan. It’s been clear it hasn’t been working ever since you got well.”
“Think again,” Ethan said.
* * *
The cast party was tinkling, rattling, unsettled. A full two weeks at the Coliseum and now the show was over. The show had been so successful, it had been moved there from the cabaret. Five times the seating. The party was at the home of one of the actors rather than at the director’s. The director, in fact, had been so tired from the final matinee and the striking of the set, he had gone home early. Still the time change had just arrived so as to give them an extra hour of evening light, and the pre-Easter weather was kind to the patio. People rushed by Ethan with the alcohol he was forbidden to touch. A rose bush was leafing out just over his shoulder, as he sat up against the brick wall, with a perfect view of the street through the parting in the hedge. He didn’t much mind not being able to drink—he only wished Garrett would come as promised so the man could see that he had gotten by without him.
This whole last week had been filled with March rain. He’d seen it as an omen. Ethan had watched the birds bathing in it on the lawn while he had been waiting for emails and letters and phone calls to come in. He was looking for a job once more. Nothing arrived, including Garrett, who had insisted on staying on the additional week anyway. A promise to Pedro was a promise. So Ethan had that phrase in his head. So he had lived with the rain and the second week of lonely nights of rehearsals and performances down here in Eugene. By day, it was water city, rain city, and an indifferent voiceless dazzling landscape of white spirea and weeping Oriental pink plum and naked coral maple. His pink camellia bush, now opened with blooms just outside his living room window, was his companion, as this rose bush was now. A promise was a promise. And then Garrett had told him it was over.
People at the party were smiling at him. He had not blown the performances as he thought he would, even though Garrett had not been there to come home to. He had done all right. Nevertheless, he was aware he was an amateur actor in his fifties who had to carry a few idiot prompt cards, one of them a small three by five which listed his steps for the “Cha-Cha” number, where, doubling as an extra, he had to dance with Vera, a lovely twenty-two-year-old with emerald eyes, natural red hair, and a bosom large enough to intimidate even a gay man. The other idiot prompt, also designed by himself, told him where he had to be on stage at any given moment, what clothes he should be wearing, where backstage they should be hanging, and what lines cued him to be out in front of the audience again. He was getting old and starting to lose his actor’s muscle memory. Fortunately, the backstage was lit like an alleyway with small, widely spaced lights, and he could lean beneath a “lamp post” and look. However, when the show shifted to the larger theatre, he discovered more difficulties—three different black layers to the backstage, in whose maze he struggled to get to the proper stations at the proper times and glance at his notes. Plus at the end of the booking, he had to double as Tony Giordano, the strip club owner in The Full Monty, since the original player, as old as himself, had fallen off the stage during rehearsal at the cabaret the final week there, and there was no one else, in terms of the massive body type which the director envisioned, to fill in.
Still, the director had proven pleased with everyone, including him, in this local staging. Ethan had not been brilliant—that was evident. He never could do harmony on “You Walk with Me,” guilty as he was of what his voice coach termed “codependent singing”—being overpowered into the vocal line of his partner. Not like the men who had played the other major parts. He had overheard Alex the Director inviting them to audition for Evita, which was coming up next, and he had been distinctly not included. He had in fact been so mediocre the final week, he wondered if he would even receive an email about the next tryouts of any kind.
Young Vera, all emerald eyes, came up. She had a photo of the two of them together, which she wanted him to sign. For some reason, he wrote, “To my favorite dance partner, Vera. Love, Ethan.” After weeks of being in rehearsals and her being indifferent towards him, she had actually stared at last into his eyes as he had stood waiting with her on opening night, their clasped hands held out in freeze position just before the stage lit up and they went on for the Cha Cha number. “To my favorite partner,” she read aloud now, and kissed him.
He got up at last to do a little last mixing at the party, but just at that moment, he heard talk of everybody watching a DVD of this afternoon’s final performance in the host’s living room. Vera came back up and said as much.
“I’ll only watch it if you hold my hand, all the way through,” he told her.
Her pink skin brightened. She smiled through her make-up. “Sorry, but my boyfriend’s here.”
He smiled back, wondering how long he should wait for Garrett, with that DVD going on in the next room. He remembered where he had been a year ago last March, sitting on the sofa in his major clinical depression, looking out the window on the watch for Garrett’s pick-up, trying to guess where Garrett would take him that night, because he, Ethan, was too immobilized and panicked in his depressive self-pity to drive or even know what he should do from one minute to the next. He had realized even then that his funk had been accentuated by his letting Garrett take care of him—doing the house, the chores, and carrying the financial load by being the one to have the job. Then the truck would appear like a red star on the crest of the hill, and Ethan would feel saved. It had been the same on opening night back at the cabaret. One look at Garrett’s profoundly smiling eyes as the man sat alone at one of the remoter tables, the candlelight flickering on his strong house painter’s wrists, and Ethan knew he could sing “You Walk with Me” with his musical boyfriend Malcolm, even coming in on an “F” (although without harmony) which for him was like a leap over the World Trade Center, even so. Thinking of all of this, still he inwardly conceded to Ethan the split was inevitable. If this was what had kept them together, nothing was worth saving. As a matter of fact, truth to tell, he’d been planning to bail on Garrett just before the depression had come. He’d wanted to sow some wild oats, get some freedom dating around, but then he’d gone under, and all he could do was cling to this capable, handy, sensitive, and caring man, who was ultimately sexy in his own way.
He could hear the DVD going on in the next room, could even hear some notes he was singing, but he didn’t want to endure another critique of his performance, with everyone laughing and drunk to boot.
He looked above the slope of the rose bush, and there was Garrett, getting out of his truck. He could see from the ladders and paintbrushes, as well as from the tools for gardening, that he had come direct from Port Townsend. His own heart was up.
Garrett was at the door smiling. Ethan met him at the threshold. “You look like everything went all right this weekend,” Garrett said. “This weekend and last.” They hadn’t communicated since Ethan’s sudden visit.
“It was fine,” Ethan answered. But it wasn’t, not really.
“And you’re not drinking?” Garrett asked.
“Not drinking.”
“And taking your medication?”
“And taking my medication,” Ethan said, opening his arms for a hug. It was clear in the embrace how inevitable it was they talk like this. Inevitable, even though the focus on him was the last thing, now, he wanted. Whereas he had always demanded it before, made Garrett his groupie and ward.
“And you?” Ethan asked at last. They had hugged so long, even the drunker members of the cast were staring. “How was your trip?
Garrett looked surprised that Ethan would even ask. “It was good. And we got all the work done. Pedro and his wife will be able to open their place on time.”
“Congratulations,” Ethan said. “And it was good to meet your brother, who seemed so much like a son and—your ‘daughter-in-law’?—”
Garrett nodded. “Yes, that’s about what they are. Sort of. And it felt good to be needed, really needed, although I think this is going to be it. They really do seem ready to launch out on their own.”
The word “partner” now flew around the cast, as he led Garrett toward the food. “Partner! So this is Ethan’s partner.” The more militantly gay members were particularly pleased.
“I’m glad we’ll have a few days to be home together,” Ethan said.
Garrett nodded.
“And you’re still sure about moving out?”
“I am. I’ve taken even more time to think about it,” Garrett said.
Showing Garrett the heavily laden table, Ethan considered how he would be getting all the solitary views of rain again, along with the statue of St. Joseph and child. The pressure of the empty house would be more than enough to move him toward finding a job, and a job it would have to be, because now he’d have to carry all the mortgage himself once again. And he suddenly felt as if he was leaving home and entering the world for the first time.
___________
Henry Alley is a Professor Emeritus of Literature in the Honors College at the University of Oregon. He has four novels, Through Glass (1979), The Lattice (1986), Umbrella of Glass (1988), and Precincts of Light (2010), which explores the Measure Nine crisis in Oregon, when gay and lesbian people were threatened with being made silent. His stories have appeared in journals over the past forty years.