It couldn’t have been easy for him. Naturally Kit had been more aware of his mom’s unhappiness, her lack of a place. Nonetheless ever since he’d begun to understand that there were different approaches to loving and its tagalong mysteries, ever since his earliest misunderstandings about “69” or “the Hershey highway,” Kit had glimpsed the miseries of this fussy, unspoken-for cattleman. Now and again he’d felt something of them, those miseries, as sharply and unforgettably as the once-in-a-blue-moon sweeps of the man’s hand down his naked spine. He’d known what Pete was going through even though, whenever Kit’s mom or Uncle Leslie went so far as to indicate they knew the same, they did it by means of sideways glances and words half-spoken. Confirmations that flashed and were gone.
Uncle Pete, unlike Kit’s mom, couldn’t get what he needed from a “church family.” Every day he must have asked himself what he was doing there. Didn’t he belong in a boho downtown studio? But then what about the pleasure he took in the outdoor life, in the clatter of a Coleman stove strapped to the back of a horse? Ever since Kit had known the man was different, he’d heard him asking these questions, or overheard. He couldn’t make out the words, but he’d gotten the point. Still he’d said nothing about it, not even on the expeditions to root for Killebrew and the Twins or the hunting trips up to Leech Lake. He’d observed the same restraint as the others in the house until he was away among the smirking city boys at Exeter and Harvard and the Globe.
As he said his goodbyes tonight, Kit kept bucking up the man, voicing new approvals. “Uncle Pete, it’s for the best.” He understood that this wasn’t about him and the not-so-bad tensions he’d endured growing up. This was about the man on the other end of the line, and about what Bette had called the bright lights of history. A person had every right to cast the kind of shadow he wanted, before those lights. Nonetheless, within his uncle’s new projected shape Kit could see others, less proud. He saw shapes that had him switching the phone’s receiver from ear to ear. Kit’s uncle was old, pushing sixty. How many years had he wasted with talking to himself, whispering questions at the medicine-cabinet mirror? And how many of the people Kit loved had helped keep him there? “Sister Nina,” Uncle Leslie, the growing Kit himself — they’d all kept Pete in there babbling at the medicine cabinet. And in so doing they’d chained themselves in place too, chained themselves to silence and lies and what they believed was good for the boy. That was the home and family Kit saw now, in the bright lights of history, with the receiver sweating in his hand. A prison.
*
Diorama #22—St. Peter in the Hole
The scening depicts blesséd apissle Peter, cornverting by erection both Snigr. Hardnose (see the privys diorama) and San Luigi-Luigi of the Gorillas (who is without diorama, in this museo—donuts of all size are much appenetrated! ).
The enormity of this appissle is here indispootable. Blesséd Peter made cornverts all over the Hell-Clown world. Hardnose and Luigi-Luigi have in their case erected to receive his touch, but this makes Peter’s piece no less a hero.
His two cornverts, we see in their exstasy, have never been entered this way. Their lice have changed places forever.
Kit, kid.
Angry with himself, Kit deliberately called up Leo’s phrase. Stop this, kid. And there was Leo’s name on Kit’s desk, as well, or Leo’s company’s name. The list of Monsod contractors still sat beside the phone where Kit had left it this morning. He studied the page a moment. Once or twice he shook his head, trying to clear away the sensation of something dirty in his ears.
Louie-Louie stood at the door, half in shadow. He tapped the nearest glass wall with a fingertip.
Kit, this isn’t a museo. “That was my uncle,” he said. “He called to tell me he’s gay.”
“I heard, I heard.” Louie-Louie had a hand in his beard. “Some heavy shit there. I’m sorry, man.”
Kit shrugged. “I could’ve been more discreet myself. It’s not like I didn’t know you were here.”
“Yeah but, it’s not like I didn’t know it was family.”
With that — the word family—Kit had another idea.
“You know about my brother, right?” Louie-Louie was asking. “You know he was kind of that way too.”
Kit nodded vaguely, his eyes once more on the handwritten list beside the phone.
“Kind of, huh. Tell you, man — one way I know my Mama’s in trouble is the way she won’t admit that Junior was a homo. Just fucking doesn’t want to see it.”
Kit pulled the list towards him, the words blurring as it moved. “Louie-Louie,” he asked, “you’re at Sears now, right?”
The brother let go of his beard. What did Sears & Roebuck have to do with anything?
“You came here for help, right?” Kit had to get out of the chair. He was such a cliché, in the grip of a new idea: he actually had to get up and pace. “You reduced your load at Sears, you did what you could, but it only made things worse. Even your paycheck’s worse.”
“My paycheck’s diddly, man.”
“And finally you came here. So, Louie-Louie — suppose you had a second income? Something more flexible than Sears?”
“Say what?”
Kit made an effort to come across as though he’d thought about this a long time. With both of them in the office he didn’t really have room to pace, so he set himself at a kind of parade rest in the center of the room, one hand on a knob at the top of his tall chair. Suppose, he asked, Louie-Louie had a job where he could learn a few new skills? More importantly, suppose he had something better to do with his spare time than wander around with a gun in his pocket?
“Say what?” But after a moment the brother’s tone relaxed. “You’re talking about here, ain’t you? Talking about, I could work for your paper here.”
“A temporary assignment, yeah.”
“Man.” Louie-Louie picked at his tight shirtfront. “You got some beans, Viddich. Some beans, you know?”
Kit changed his grip on the chair’s knob. He brought up Mrs. Rebes, the way she’d feel if the brother worked for Sea Level. “She might stop calling you a baby, Louie-Louie.” Then, waiting till the big adolescent met his look: “And you might stop thinking of doing something crazy to change her mind.”
“Hey.” The brother extended a warning finger. “Back off.”
“Back off? You came to me, Louie-Louie.”
Were they going to have a fight? A fight, here between the frail antique glass? For a chair-squeezing moment that’s what it felt like. Kit remembered his lousy social skills. More than that, he realized his new plan for the brother had come on so swiftly, so ringingly, that he’d never considered what might be — think about it — a whole range of possible bad outcomes. And Louie-Louie looked like a man at the end of his rope. He was still only halfway under the fluorescents of Kit’s office, his pointing finger in the light, his scowling face in shadow. He had Kit thinking of Uncle Pete again, Pete in his half-worlds, and the thousand half-baked ideas by which his family had kept him there. Yes, the worm was on Kit’s back now. Doubts were creeping up every side of his bright new idea.
But Louie-Louie drew in his finger, dropped his arm. Meekly he stepped into Kit’s space.
“You got that kind of money?” he asked.
Exhale, Viddich. “I’ve got it, Louie-Louie.”
“From what I see”—the brother was smiling, he wanted to make this work—“doesn’t look like you’ve got two nickels to rub together.”