FOUR
THEY ALWAYS CAME TO HIM, STUART’S GIRLS. LATE AT NIGHT, ON FOOT, THEY appeared like magic in the window.
“Hey,” Stuart said, a long pulled-out syllable that dipped deep down to a voice he didn’t possess with his family.
The girl’s words were quieter: “Whatcha doin’?” or “Come out and play, sleepyhead.” Sometimes all Peter could hear were the soft taps of her tongue in her mouth as she whispered.
Her face hung in the window as Stuart dressed. They were always pretty, prettier than any girls at Peter’s school. They were goddesses (he’d studied Greek mythology last year): Athena, Artemis, or Aphrodite nearly every night through a pane of glass.
The front yard, the driveway, and (with the plump one) the station wagon were Stuart’s midnight court. He never made a phone call or went on a date. They came to him. He never brought them inside, even when a covering of snow lay rumpled on the grass. Instead they each trod in it, not seeming to notice the frozen footprints of the night before.
The first one Peter saw was small and giggly, with twenty bracelets on each arm. From his perch on Stuart’s bed, he watched them frolic like ponies on the lawn. The next one had pale eyes and painted lips and with her Stuart sat soberly on the bottom step of the porch (Peter pressed his cheek hard against the window to see so far to the left), kicking the ground with his boot. With the third, Stuart didn’t seem to talk at all. When she came, he lifted the window and the screen in one quick motion and they began kissing right there, the cold air blowing in over his bare torso across the room to Peter, who squinted his eyes open to watch. This one, the one with the thick curves and butterscotch skin, he brought straight to the station wagon, and all Peter could see were their heads before they pushed the backseat down flat. Unlike in the movies, the car didn’t bounce or shake. No one could tell that two people were lying down in it, taking off their clothes.
Nights that there wasn’t a girl, he and Stuart talked. Around Vida and Tom, Stuart struggled for the fewest words possible, but in his room he had a lot to say. He was a philosopher, a mystic. Peter had never met anyone like him. He had answers to all the questions Peter had only begun to formulate.
“Are you a popular guy at school, Pete?”
No one had ever called him Pete before. He liked it. He saw that Stuart knew the truth about him so he didn’t dare lie. “No.”
“Good. If others like you, you are weakening your true being.” He was sitting cross-legged on the bed, and for a long time he didn’t speak, just breathed noisily with his eyes shut. Then he said, “Chuang Tzu says that if you are mourned at your funeral, you’ve forgotten the gift God gave you. And if you grieve over someone’s death you’re a fool.”
“Why?”
“Because death is unimportant.”
Peter wished he could see it that way.
“Death,” Stuart continued, “is simply movement from one form to another. But what you want to achieve is formlessness, so that ultimately you don’t know — or care — whether you’re dead or alive.”
“How do you achieve that, formlessness?”
“Here.” Without untangling his legs, he reached down into the stack of library books by his bed. “Let me read you a little something.” He flipped through a paperback with cracked-off corners. “‘His body is dry like an old legbone. His mind is dead as dead ashes. His knowledge is solid. His wisdom is true! In the deep dark night he wanders free without aim and without design. Who can compare with this toothless man?’”
That night Peter dreamed he was losing teeth; he dreamed Stuart was a dry twig on the pillow in the morning.
Another book was about Eastern surgical practices. It had pictures, hundreds of pictures. Stuart showed Peter some of his favorites. “They’ve taken out this guy’s entire GI tract,” he said. “No anesthesia to knock him out, just a few needles there and there.”
Peter looked at the man — he was smiling at the camera, with his stomach on the table beside him.
“Surgery,” Stuart explained, “is their last resort, whereas here they hardly consider anything else. It’s all about using the knife. In Asia they have a one-in-three-hundred rate of cancer, and we have a one-in-seven. And for every eighty people they cure, we cure one.” To Peter’s relief he shut the book and lay back on his bed. “I told him to take her to Taiwan but he refused. He wouldn’t even bring her to this acupuncturist I found in Bristol. People would rather let people die than change their cramped little view.” He put his open hands up to the far sides of his eyes, then turned them in, as if he wanted to play peekaboo. He didn’t uncover his eyes for the longest time and when he finally did, his palms had pushed all the blood out of his cheeks. Peter watched how it flooded back in.
“You don’t like your dad very much, do you?”
Stuart looked at him with suspicion, as if he were working for the other side. “He’s okay. He just dreams the dreams of suburbia. If you asked him what he wants most for his son Stuart, his hair-trigger response would be, ‘College.’ ‘But’”—Stuart’s voice became stiff and graveled—“‘how do you think the boy is doing since his mother’s death?’ ‘College.’ ‘Do you love him?’ ‘College.’”
Peter had heard Tom on this topic, but he didn’t want to reveal that. He pretended to be putting together the pieces himself. “Is it because he was the first to go in his family?”
“Thomas Marnelli Belou. Rhode Island School of Design. Class of 1952.” Stuart managed to protrude the ledge of his eyebrows to become Tom. The voice and accent were surprisingly accurate. “My father’s family came down from Shitsville, Canada, and spent three generations in a paper mill. Sixty years they stunk up their houses with their rotten-egg smell before they figured out how to sew and make the money for you, Stuart May Belou, to perch up in an ivory tower and laugh at your pitiful, smelly ancestors.”
Stuart lay in bed in the dark, though Peter didn’t think he ever slept. Peter tried to keep up with him but by midnight his body, like a child who wants to go home, pulled him unwillingly away from consciousness. When he woke up in the morning, Stuart was always gone.
“What about your mom’s side?” Peter asked the next night. “Did they go to college?” He liked to slip in questions about her. It made him feel closer to the Belous, knowing things about her. It made her feel less dead. Just saying “your mom” brought her so much closer to the surface of life.
“Same sort of thing as my dad’s,” he said without any attempt to recreate her voice. “She didn’t even go to college herself. She got married instead.”
Peter knew if he was quiet long enough he’d go on.
“She took me to look at colleges last spring — no, two springs ago. When I was in eleventh grade.”
“Where’d you go?”
“California. I had this idea I wanted to go to Berkeley. So we saw that and Stanford and UCLA.” The light was still on. Stuart was propped up with a pillow that loomed high over his head and bobbed when he spoke. It made him look a little like Marie Antoinette, and Peter kept wanting to laugh.
“It was a pretty weird place, California. The ocean’s a completely different color, like it’s been injected with some sort of dye. Mom loved it. She kept saying that if I went to school out there they’d all move. She came back really excited about that plan, but my father shot it down. Then she got sick and that was that.” With two hands he shoved the tall pillow under his head. He didn’t speak for several minutes, then he said, “Talk about mourning at a funeral. She was too well-liked. She wasted too many words and tears on others when she should have been looking inward.”