Z.A. Maxfield

Happy Endings

© Z.A. Maxfield, All Rights Reserved

The morning fog over the San Francisco Bay was thick as cheese, allowing only the faintest glimmer of the outline of the Golden Gate Bridge from where Sandra stood.  She heard, rather than saw, gulls wheeling overhead as the water lapped at the dock.  Finding a comfortable place to sit on the deck of her son’s boat ‘The Christy’s Minstrel”, she tasted that familiar tang of brine and fish and decay on the air.

“Mom?” Jim called out.  The mist was so thick he couldn’t see her.

“Over here, Jim-Jam.  On the bow.”

“There you are.”  He walked toward her, making a comical face.  “Are you smoking?”

“Guilty as charged, baby.”  She took a sip of her coffee.  “You’re up early.”

He ducked his head.  “Jeff was restless…”

“I’ll bet.”  She handed her coffee to him.

“You just surprised us, is all.”  He grimaced when she blew out a cloud of smoke.  “I’ve known you for twenty three-years and you never smoked.  Or had coffee for that matter.  What the hell is up with you?”

“Now, I know I didn’t teach you to talk to your mother like that,” she smiled.  “How’s it going, baby?  You still happy?”  She patted the deck next to her, but in his obstinate way, the way he’d had forever, he sat with his back braced against hers, facing away.  He picked up her pack of cigarettes and got himself one.

“I’m happy.”  He lit it.  “It’s all good, Mama.  Is that why you came here at four o’clock in the morning, clomping around and scaring the hell out of us?  You sitting on my boat smoking because I’m happy?  Cause Jeff’s going to have a heart attack and die and then I won’t be happy anymore.  Why’d you come?  Did something happen?”

“Everything’s fine, Jim.  Your man’s a little melodramatic.  One surprise visit and he keels?”  She rolled her eyes.  “He should have had my mother-in-law.”  She took her time lighting another cigarette from the first, a sure sign that old habits don’t die at all, ever.  She’d always preferred the busy business of smoking to the act itself.   “You know I’ve got your back, right?  I’m good with all this?”

“Sure.”  He leaned against her.  She was larger, fleshier, and he rested his blonde head back on her shoulder.  “Jeff knows too.  He was just surprised and a little alarmed when you showed up here.”  He blew out a smoke cloud, blue in the early morning light.  “This is nasty mom, who taught you to smoke menthol?”

Sandra smiled.  Hadn’t she come to start telling her secrets?  As it had all night, her throat closed against a burning ball of tears.  “I finally watched that fricking movie.”

“What?” asked Jim.  “What movie?”

“You know.  The cowboy one.  Brokeback Mountain.”

“Ah.”  He smiled a little.  “Not one of your HEA’s is it?  Your ‘happily ever afters’?”

“Nope.”

“I cried when I saw that.”  He sipped her coffee, and then handed it back to her.  “I thought you made a vow never to see it.”

“I did, but when Heath Ledger died… And did I tell you?  I’m working on that cowboy novel… I just… I don’t know.  I watched it.”  She gave a shuddering sigh and he turned, alarmed to find her crying again.

“Mama?  It’s a movie.”

“I know. I know that.”  She tossed her cigarette butt overboard.

“Okay, if you’re littering it’s time for an intervention.”  He knocked on the deck, hard, with his knuckles and called out.  “Jeff!  Come on up.  Mom’s having an episode.”   Moments later Jeff emerged onto the deck, large and handsome in his cargo shorts and squall jacket.  His boat shoes squelched as he neared them and dropped into a cross-legged sitting position next to Jim, who leaned into him, unconsciously.  Sandra smiled.

“Well, goddamn it,” he said, she was sure, just to piss her off.

Sandra said nothing, but Jim slapped his arm.  “One stinking thing.  She asked one stinking thing of you, and you still won’t do it.  I’m telling you:  do not take the Lord’s name in vain or you will have to fish yourself out of the bay.”

Sandra chuckled.  “Down, baby.”

“Your mom knows why I do it.”  He gathered Jim close.  His dark hair against Jim’s made them look like Raphael’s angels.

“Yeah, baby, I do.”  Sandra had come here to throw caution to the wind.  “It’s cause he’s afraid to piss on you in front of the family.”

Jeff’s deep booming laughter crossed the water like a foghorn.  “Who are you and what have you done with my mother-in-law.”

“She watched “Brokeback,” Jim told him.

“Oh,” said Jeff.  He was silent for a while.  “It’s nicer in your books, isn’t it?  When the pretty cowboys live happily ever after.  When they don’t spend years in silent misery and get beaten by haters and drown in their own blood.”

Sandra dissolved before his eyes.  He looked away.

“Jeff, you are such a turd sometimes.”  Sandra felt Jim grip her hand; watched him try to hold onto Jeff’s too.  Today, it hurt her to see him struggle with that.  It was a small kind of sadness, but it was sad.

“Come on, Jim, she writes those romance novels where men who weren’t gay suddenly fall in love with their fairy god-bosses and get married and move to the burbs.”

“I never, ever…” she began, but Jim interrupted.

“You bet she does,” he snapped.  “And who are you to criticize.  You own a gay bookstore; call her and bitch when you finish your novel.”

A silence developed that was defined and amplified by the fog.  Sandra’s hands were trembling as she drew on the cigarette, but she became impatient, and threw it into the water.

“Mama!”

“You were right, those thing were nasty.”  She dragged her tiny backpack to her and rumbled around in it, removing keys and phones and finally coming up with a small black and gold box.  She put the other things back and zipped her bag.

“Did I ever tell you that I smoked before you kids were born?”  She rubbed her fingers over the case, to shine it.  “You know, you can’t be so hard on Jeff, baby.  I know what he means when he says what he does about my books.”  She teared up again.  “It’s not like I care.  I was writing them years before his holiness father Guido Goddamnit here showed up.  I know what I am.”

“Mama!” said Jim, but Jeff stroked his arm to soothe him.  They’d said it all anyway, thought Sandra.  And she’d bet if he had to, like if he knew he only had three minutes to live or something, Jeff would admit he liked her and respected her.

She opened her case to pull out an unfiltered cigarette.  Jeff’s eyes widened.  “Gauloise?” he asked.

“Gitanes.”  She tapped it on the back of her hand to pack it, and then lit it, picking the tobacco off her tongue before she spoke.  “They don’t even make them in France anymore.  It’s such a pretentious bit of nonsense really.”  She handed him the case, and as Jeff looked at it, held it in his hands and read it, she watched her boy.  Jim was smiling now, watching his lover.  They fascinated her, these two, for their differences and their unlikely devotion to one another.

“There’s an inscription?” Jeff asked, holding it in the light and away, because even though he’d never admit it he already showed signs of needing reading glasses.  “Toujours mon couer indompté, Nadie Veil.  Nadie Veil?”

“Forever my wild heart?” asked Jim.  “Untamed?”  Sandra nodded.

“Nadie Veil?”  Jeff looked at her closely.  Sandra let him swim to that particular shore on his own.  “Where did you get a cigarette case of Nadie Veil’s?”

Sandra didn’t think much of Jeff as a swimmer.  “She gave it to me.”

“Who is Nadie Veil?” asked Jim.  They both looked at him.  It was, after all, one of the million-dollar questions, thought Sandra.

“Nadie Veil was a writer in the mid seventies and early eighties,” replied Jeff,  “who was known as much for her politics and her outrageous and unapologetic lesbian lifestyle as she was for her work.”

“Really?” said Jim, as if he were verifying a fact in a bedtime story.  Did the boy really swallow the sea?

“Well besides being the world’s most egregious oversimplification?” she smiled pretty for Jeff.  “Yes.  She died in a car accident in 1984.”  Years of patient practice taught her to keep her face impassive as she said this.  She took another drag on her cigarette; the rich, bitter smoke filled her lungs.  As her brain cells died one by one she felt again that flushing rush of nicotine, dragging her down.  She smiled and offered one to Jeff.  She knew he’d take it, because he’d romanticized it at one point in his life, as she had.

“That was tragic.  Off Mulholland, in Los Angeles, right?” he asked.  “Dead man’s curve?”

“Myths persevere, I guess.  No, she died on Pacific Coast Highway, in Malibu.”

“Really, I read-”

“Seriously, Jeff.  I ought to know.  I was in the car.”  She waited for that to trickle in.  “My sister was driving, Nadie was in the passenger seat, and my nephew John and I were in the back.”   Sandra held her hand out for the coffee, which was almost gone.  “Libby and Nadie died almost instantly.”  Almost.  What a lousy fricking non-descript word.  “John and I were banged up, but wearing our seatbelts.  We fared a little better.”

No one said anything for a long time, and then Sandra felt Jim take her hand.  He got up and pulled her to the galley where he began to make coffee.  Sandra sipped the final, gritty dregs of hers and threw the cup in the trash.

“John was my only nephew.  He was a good kid.  After Libby died he came to live with Mom.  That was about… two years before your dad and I bought the condo in San Luis Obispo.”

To Jeff, Jim remarked, “Dad calls that the nest.  That’s when mom’s biological clock started ticking and then just went off like a grenade.”  Jim sat a mug of steaming coffee on the tiny table in front of her.  She could hear the seagulls crying and the engines of the trawlers going out to fish.  The gentle movement of the boat soothed her as the smell of coffee and teak wood filled her nostrils.

“John was about seventeen then, I think.  Libby was living in one of those apartments in Orange County by Disneyland with the fake boulder and stream landscaping.  Kind of upscale business singles living.  Furnished apartments, lots of turnover.  Sometimes Patrick and I would come down to visit friends and take John out.  Or I’d come with Nadie.  One day, we were visiting Phillip Post, remember him?”

“Oh, Uncle Phil?”  He put his hand to his face.   “An impossible, fussy queen.  He swore no one ever knew he was gay, but he was like the road show of La Cage Aux Folles.  I still write to him, you know.”

“I’m sure he loves that.  I think he’s doing okay.  He’s in Cleveland now, taking care of a friend.”  Sandra’s throat tightened.  So many friends.  “Anyway.  John used to come to LA with us, and we’d tool around, getting international newspapers and pretentious cigarettes.  Phil would make jokes about the good old days, when a good-looking boy from Arkansas could come into town in the morning and be chauffeured around in a limousine by dusk.  It seemed like such a harmless thing, you know.  Nostalgia for the earlier days.  Before the Christian Conservative Meltdown of this country, before AIDS…  Sex, drugs, and rock and roll.”

Jim turned to Jeff.  “Okay, now I know she’s not my mother.”

Jeff snorted.  “Now you know what a hypocrite she is.”

“You should talk, señor $200 Boat Shoes.  Baby, listen, this is important.”  She waved Jeff away.   “We’re all just nesting dolls, with each person we ever were seated inside the person we are now, both whole and complete and at the same time integrated.”  She watched to see if he comprehended her.

“Um, yeah.  I remember you said that at church once and they brought a lot of casseroles to our house afterwards.  They thought you’d snapped.”

“Well.  I hadn’t.  I make no guarantees about now, though.”  She reached over and got a napkin from a plastic basket.  “Menopause, man.  All the hormones; none of the fun.  It’s like being sucked backwards through a straw like a tapioca ball.”

Jim and Jeff were now seated next to one another, staring at her with careful eyes.  Sandra wouldn’t have been surprised to find that Jim was holding his cell phone in his pocket to call his dad.  As if she were an unexploded bomb.

“Anyway, we used to take John to Los Angeles, and he kind of got stars in his eyes.  He liked the big houses, the fancy cars.  He liked the lifestyle… liked watching the dealmakers.  Sometimes we saw famous people.

“One time, after we got back, Phil took me aside and warned me.  He thought…” she swallowed hard.  “He thought John might be taking it seriously, you know?  That he could just be arm candy and someone would want him.  Set him up.”

“Was he gay?” asked Jeff.  He lowered his brows, and looked at Jim, who seemed to look back with just as many questions.  “Did you also advise him that he was fine the way he was as long as he didn’t have sex?”

“I didn’t know if he was gay.  Geez!”  She closed her eyes.  “I didn’t think so.  I wasn’t worried at any rate, because after the accident he was living with my mother.  By then she was a member of the church, he was attending Sunday block, going to young men’s.  I didn’t think he was gay.  He talked about a girl back in Orange County, someone he wrote to at his old apartment complex.

“I started having you kids a year after that…  John went to college at CSU Long Beach.  He got into trouble with drugs, dropped out… Bought a motorcycle and took off.  Skipped out on the loan.  My mom ended up paying it off.”  She found a spot on the bulkhead to stare at.  This was hard enough without looking at Jim’s bewildered face or Jeff’s contemptuous one.

“One day, when Suzu was about… seven I guess… I get a call.  He’s in New York, happy, in love, but his lover tested positive and it’s progressing fast.  He’s going to see his lover through hospice, and then be set for life.  His lover set it all up.  They have a house, a business.  The lover’s family stepped in.  They didn’t even let him see the man in the end.  It was damned cruel.  They just did it because they could.  Because he had no rights.  They didn’t let him attend the funeral.  It was heartbreaking.”  Sandra started to cry again.

“It happened two more times.  The lover, the family steps in, and then he’s homeless, sick, and alone.  He got in touch with the Church in Kansas, I think, and they helped him for a while, but he skipped out on that, and disappeared.  Started tweaking.  I never even heard when he died, but I looked it up, using his social security number.  He’s been gone a while,” she wiped her eyes.  “I don’t think he’s buried anywhere.  I wanted to find out.  Put all the pieces together.”  She raised her hands, palms up.  Empty.

She picked up her coffee again.  She couldn’t look at her boy.  Not after that.  Not after telling him she’d let her own nephew die alone.  Not after she told him that she didn’t even know where his body was, had never claimed him, could never claim him.  Not that she didn’t want to, but that it was just too late.

“It wasn’t right.  What I did,” she said.  “It just wasn’t right.”

“You didn’t want him around your kids?” asked Jeff.  “Afraid of the disease?”

“No, it wasn’t that, I swear it.”  She swallowed hard.  “He visited when your sister Suzu was little just before you were born.  Not later. I was scared of what I’d see.  Scared of what he’d look like.  Scared to face him.”  In a small voice she added.  “I’m not exactly proud of that

“You blame yourself,” said Jim, her boy, who knew her so well.  “You think you made it sound easy.  You think you sold it to him.”  Sandra hid her face in the napkin.  Oh, this beautiful boy who looked nothing like her would be the death of her.  Blue eyes gazed placidly at her until she met them with her own brown ones.  “You know better, right?” he asked, just as she had asked him a thousand times while he was growing up.   “The universe does not revolve around you?  You don’t get all the glory or all the blame, Mama.”

His eyes were patient.  How she loved him.

“Yes.”

“It revolves around Jeff,” he continued, taking a sip of his coffee.  “In case you were wondering.”

Jeff pursed his lips.  “Sandra, despite your lack of compassion, it isn’t your fault.  Sometimes shit happens.”

Jim punched Jeff’s arm, hard.  “Now you know why he sells books and doesn’t write them”.

“What I still don’t understand,” said Jeff, “and maybe I’m even more confused now, is why you joined the world’s most homophobic church and then started to write gay romance novels.  Using a man’s name.  Like a fraud.”

She reached for her cigarette case again, going through the business, giving herself time to think.  “Before I placed you in the womb I knew you’.”

“I know that, I learned it in seminary. “  Jim looked at Jeff.   “But damned if I can remember the book it’s in.”

She knew she had about two minutes before her resolve crumpled like a burning ball of paper and she wanted to get it out.  Hormones.  What were you going to do?  “From the minute I laid eyes on you Jim-Jam…  but especially later whenever I looked at you with the other kids, I could hear that Sesame Street song in my head.  One of these things is not like the other.”

“Well goddamn it,” said Jeff.  “Are you trying to say you thought Jim was gay all along?”

She paid no attention to Jeff.  “It was so wrong, baby.  John was like this dumb kid; like a plug looking for an outlet. His mother was dead and mine was old.  I was just starting down the baby trail, and you know I didn’t do that in a small way.  Four kids in five years doesn’t make for a lot of free time.”  She exhaled a shuddering, smoky sigh.  “All he wanted from the moment he figured himself out was to be cherished by some man.  And what was so wrong with that?  Why couldn’t someone cherish him?  Why did it always have to be sneaking and users and tragedy?  Why didn’t anyone treat him like he deserved better?   Why couldn’t he express his love in the open?  Geez.  Nadie was so right.  Things didn’t change fast enough.  So I wrote his damned happy ending.  And I wrote yours as well, Jim, if you want to know the truth.  I’ve been writing your happy ending since the day you were born.”

Jim pressed a hand to his mouth.  His eyes glittered with tears.  Jeff automatically enfolded him in strong arms that, she could see, cherished him.  She closed her eyes and breathed a prayer of thanks.

“I can’t sew.  Every one of those books has been a quilt square for John.  Every one, another attempt to give John, and Nadie, and Uncle Phillip the happy ending they deserve.  I don’t know, probably they are what they are, what they seem to be, on the surface.  Just trash.  But every book is my way of saying that I cherish the people in my life.  People who have come and gone, and I… I have a fire lit in me to prove they were all more than the sum of their parts.”  Sandra found her cigarette case and slipped it into the pocket of her jacket.

“Now,” she said.  “If you’ll excuse me, the goddess of estrogen and I are going up topside to have a hot flash and an emotional meltdown, and another dialogue about why I’m opting out of hormone replacement therapy.”  She went to the stairs.  She turned to smile.  “Lucky bastards.  I love you both; you know that.”

Sandra saw Jim’s hand clamp down hard on Jeff’s arm.  They nodded.  She spent a little time back on the bow, sitting criss-cross-applesauce and watching the sun trying to melt the mist, but it held on like a viscous boiling grey soup and eventually she lowered her expectations.  She felt someone come up behind her and was surprised to find it was Jeff, not Jim.

“Hey there, Mamacita,” he said, sitting exactly the way Jim did, with his back to hers, warm and reassuring in the way that she required herself to be for Jim.   It was refreshing.

“What’s up,” she said, accepting another mug of coffee.  “This is all some kind of conspiracy to get me to make peace with that nasty little pump toilet isn’t it?

“There’s a bathroom on the docks, and a shower.  If you want, you can use those.  If you’re staying.  If you can stand to stay.”

“How enticing,” she said dryly.  “What is that, me staying here?  Right after ‘contract Ebola virus’ on your wish list?”

She could feel him laugh, but it didn’t pass his lips.  “You seriously knew?  About Jim?  What, didn’t he play enough sports for you?  Didn’t he get his Eagle?”

“Shut up, Jeff.  You couldn’t begin to understand me.  I’m complicated.”  She was tired.  She’d come to have her say and she would.  “I always knew.  From day one.  Not what, exactly, but that something was different.  When he was a baby, I was worried about how different he was a lot.  None of my kids were that aloof.  It was hard to get him to interact even for feeding.  I used to do baby massage and I think it helped.  He started to trust me.  Heaven knows I never wanted to do anything to mess up that trust.  I didn’t know what made him different.  I didn’t know how he was different, but I knew.  I had to woo him into this life.  Had to bring him into our family and open him up and find a place for him, but when I did… Oh, my.  Then he just… became Jim.  He is who he is, and he’s good.  You know that.  Solid.  True.  He’s richly blessed.  He deserves to be cherished, as do we all.”

Jeff was silent, but caught at her hand.  After a while he said, “Him more than most, I think.”

“I’m counting on you to be strong where I’m weak,” she said.  “I’m counting on you to keep him strong in a way I couldn’t, even if I wanted to.”

“Does he know about you and Nadie?”

“He didn’t know I smoked.  What do you think?”

“Do you write happy endings for yourself as well?”

“No, actually…  No.”  She lit another cigarette, shoot, she was going to smoke all of these and then probably barf up a lung and repent for a year.  “I have my happy ending.  Nadie… You know, I think I loved her so much I just wanted to swallow her whole, books and all.  It was a kind of insanity, back in a time when there was nothing but passion and the night and the next rush.  She was so…amazing.  Smart and funny and sexy.  Dead tragic.  I loved that about her.  I loved everything about her.  And if you’re wondering where my husband, Patrick, was during that whole episode he was right there.  It was quite a little bohemian ménage.”  She flicked an ash.  “Past imperfect.”

“Mamacita.  Are you living a lie?” Jeff turned around and lifted a brow at her, the little shit.  Trying to find a scarred place to dig for a little pain.

“I know who I am, you pisher.  I’m someone on the vast and ever-evolving continuum.”  She leaned toward him.  “Objects may be closer than they appear.”

“Wow.”  He took her case again and read it.  She wanted to smile.  To him it was an artifact, like an exhibit in Homosexual Archeology 101.  It was just a cigarette case.  Smoking is bad for you.  “Were you Nadie’s happy ending, do you think?”

“Oh, hell no.”  She snorted.  “Nadie couldn’t have had a happy ending or she’d have felt she lived in vain.”

“Vein, goddamn it.”  He sighed.  “That’s funny.”  He turned his head when Jim joined them.

“Okay, I’m going to ask you one more time to stop taking the lord’s name in vain, Jeff,” said Jim, coming up from the galley with two more cups of coffee.  “I find it offensive, and you’ve already pissed on me, so to speak, and my mother knows to whom I belong.”

“Crap, all right.  I only do it to bug her anyway.”  Jeff took the coffee and a kiss from his lover.  They smiled into each other’s lips.  Her cue to go.

“Well, I hate to cathart and dash, but I have a reservation at The Hotel Kabuki, formerly Miyako, and I will just have enough time to check in before my full body exfoliation and massage at the spa.  I’ll book you guys a couples massage if you want.  On me, what do you say?”

“Hell yes,” said Jim, holding out his hands.  “I want, gimme.”

“I’ll call your cell with the time then, tomorrow night?”

“I’m free, what about you, Jeff?”

“You had me at massage.”  He looked away, awkward.

“Good.  Maybe we can snag dinner if you’re not too boneless afterwards.  I’m thinking of the wine snob restaurant, ‘First Crush’.  It’ll drive them crazy if we go there and don’t order wine.”

“Good thinking.  We’ll see you then.  Quit smoking mom.  Dad will kill you and then he’ll make me help him hide the body.”

“I will.  I don’t know why I picked them up in the first place.  Maybe just because I could.”  Sandra said, past the ache in her throat.  “Because they’re still here and so much else is not.”  She gathered up her purse.

“Bye Mamacita,” Jeff said, taking her in his arms, giving her an extra gentle kiss on the cheek, lingering in the hug a little longer than he ever had.  Before he let her go, he whispered something that sounded like, “One of the good guys,” into her hair.

“Love you.”  She fisted her jacket over her heart.  “Rock solid, Jim -Jam.”

“Me too.”  He kissed her, and she made her way down the slippery gangplank.  She turned to see them waving.  Precious on their tiny boat; wrapped in their love.  No one knew what she’d do to protect that, not even she knew, but she felt a fierce rush of something primitive and shocking in the face of any kind of threat to what they had.

“Sun better come out,” she said as she made her way along the docks, listening to her feet clop-clopping in their clogs until she was finally on the black top, in the parking lot walking to her car.  “Soon.”  She gave one last long look at the little boat and got into her car, keying the ignition.  The sound system automatically began to cycle through her CDs.  The Mormon Tabernacle Choir, was singing ‘High On a Mountaintop’.    She put her car in drive and left the foggy beach behind.