He takes off his shoes, stacks the two pillows and stretches out on top of the covers with his chin jammed into his breast-bone. Solid comfort. He looks up Dennis’s office number just to make sure, punches it in and gets the voicemail, then waits for the tone and tells Dennis he’s probably surprised to hear from him but he just has a question. Then, thinking how that must sound, says, “Nothing heavy.” If Dennis calls back, he’ll think up a question. Mark’s name for Dennis was “Miss Monica,” because of his dark hair and smooth cheeks and what he pretended to imagine were Dennis’s preferences. Mark’s snottiness about him was part of the attraction. But so was Dennis’s sheer good looks. Mark wasn’t exactly the Adonis of the Western world. Neither is Billy.
He creeps in, in stocking feet, to check on Deke. Sound asleep. When he hits STOP in the middle of the Waltz in A minor, he can hear the dryer humming in the basement. He hits REWIND, to get set for tomorrow night. Back in his bedroom, he locks the door and pulls out the magazine he keeps under the mattress and resorts to a couple of nights a week. He finishes off, cleans up, knocks back the Macallan, then goes down and gets the clothes out of the dryer. He’s folding Deke’s narrow blue jeans when it strikes him that he’s insane to run such a risk. If I should die before I wake. Well, not so much that. But if one of these days Deke, who’s into everything, should be exploring around and find Fuckbuddies—or, worse yet, if Deke and his friend should find it on their playdate. No, thank you. He could sneak it out of the house in the morning, folded in the Times. But what if he should die before he wakes?
He carries the laundry upstairs and looks in again: Deke’s on his side, mouth slack, his outbreaths roaring in the silent house. Then he creeps into his own room, slips Fuckbuddies into the sports section of the Times, carries it out to the breezeway, still in his stocking feet, and sticks it in with the garbage. He pours yet another finger of Macallan, gets into bed and opens The Interpretation of Dreams, his current go-to-sleep book: in The Western Canon, his previous go-to-sleep book, Harold Bloom did such a good job of selling Freud as imaginative literature that Billy’s giving it another try. He begins “The Dream of the Botanical Monograph,” which sounds like a Sherlock Holmes title, or Borges maybe, but quickly becomes impenetrable. Behind “artichokes” lay, on the one hand, my thoughts about Italy and, on the other, a scene from my childhood which was the opening of what have since become my intimate relations with books. Do tell. He pages around and stumbles across the part about staircase dreams, which he’d always heard were supposedly sexual. So that was why? Because you mount higher and higher and pant as you reach the top? What incredibly silly shit.
He realizes after a while that he’s been cruising along with his eyes closed, following some parallel story about painting over wallpaper with a roller; this is not, technically, reading. He reaches over and puts out the light, then instantly comes wide awake, worrying what question he could ask if Dennis should call. The only question he can think of is Did you ever fly when you were a little boy? Because he’s imagining Deke in a Diamond Dogs uniform, soaring around the bases six feet above the ground, making smart right-angle turns like Casper the Friendly Ghost. So maybe he’s asleep and doesn’t know it.
The light wakes Billy up too early Saturday morning: those flower-print curtains of his mother’s just don’t cut it. He reads until he hears Deke calling, then delivers a clean outfit, goes to the kitchen to start coffee and puts on the Shostakovich, skipping right to the zippy second movement. Before breakfast they play three games of Old Maid. Billy’s caught with the Old Maid each time, in scary defiance of the law of averages; but even if this meant something, it would simply mean what he already knows. He gets out bowls, milk, spoons and Product 19. No TV, no sugared cereals, no throwaway pop music — someday Deke will hold all this against him. Assuming Deke just stays on and on, which Billy shouldn’t be assuming.
“So I thought today we better make a pumpkin run,” he says. Halloween’s a week away. Make it through that and they’ve got Thanksgiving. And then Christmas.
“What’s a pumpkin run?”
“Maybe five dollars. That was a joke.”
“I don’t get it.” Deke’s eating with his face down in the bowl, holding his spoon overhand. Must this be corrected, or do kids grow out of it automatically?
“Don’t worry, it wasn’t funny. What I meant was, we should go out and get a pumpkin. You ever make a jack-o-lantern?”
“I don’t know. Can we read first?”
“Sure. We got the whole day.” Though in fact Billy would like to get the hell out of here before Dennis calls back. “What did you have in mind?”
“I don’t know.” But of course it turns out to be The Runaway Bunny.
“Heck of a story,” Billy says when he’s finished reading the thing. “Now, would you go get your shoes, please?”
“Thank you,” Deke says. A reflex triggered by the please? Or is Deke actually thanking him?
“You’re welcome.” Billy decides to break the rule. “Tell me something. Are you missing your mom today?”
“Not really. Can we call her?”
“We can’t call her, but she’ll probably call us later on.”
“Can we wait?”
This requires a lie. “The last time I talked to her, she said she probably wouldn’t be calling till tonight.” Mistake: this invention is checkable. “Or that’s what I thought she said. So we have lots of time. Shoes?”
They drive up to Troy, then cut east toward Bennington. It’s a flawless autumn day, the blue of the sky either absolutely deep or absolutely without depth. Billy’s put on The Magnificent Gigli, and at least Deke’s not complaining. They take a side road north, past barns and tractors, through intermittent odors of manure. Billy passes on his tractor lore: red for Farmall, green for John Deere, gray for Ford, orange for Case, Allis-Chalmers and Massey-Harris. And they make up a tractor game: Deke gets a point for every red one, Billy for every green, and points for gray and orange go to whoever spots them first. Deke’s ahead four to two when they stop at a field with a beach umbrella, an aluminum chair and a PUMKINS sign.
There’s nobody here, just rows of pumpkins ranked by size and a tackle box with a three-by-five card reading HONOR SYSTEM: LG $5, MED $3, SM $1.
“Can we get a big one?”
“But of course,” Billy says in his French accent.
“But I feel sorry for the little ones.”
“So we’ll get some little ones too, for decoration. The little ones are the ones they make pies out of.”
“Can we make a pie?”
“We can think about it.”
“But can we?”
“Yeah, why not? I guess we could figure it out.” One of his mother’s cookbooks must have a recipe, though they’re probably all based on canned pumpkin. Which must be more condensed, so therefore … something. Whether Deke’s budding housewifeliness ought to be encouraged is a whole other question. But here’s Billy encouraging it.