Halfway Home Read Free

in his first new car, surrounded by his mick buddies, leaving me in the driveway eating their exhaust. Not even the really painful stuff, the punishment and the hatred, and still I want to let out a primal scream, as if I know I have to die before all of this is really put to rest.
    Then we hear a knocking on the screen door in the kitchen. And the really strange thing is this: suddenly Mona looks terrified. As I clamber off the sofa to go and answer, her face is ashen, the hand on my arm beseeching, as if I am about to let a monster in.
    I know who it is. I zap Mona with a perplexed frown—what's she on—as I amble into the kitchen. "Coming!"
    Gray stands resolutely on the back stoop, a bag of groceries in either arm, which was why he couldn't let himself in. The beach house is never locked, unlike the compounds on either side, which have laser rays and aerial surveillance. "Did I say I needed anything?" I ask as I bang the door wide.
    "Just a few staples," he says, trooping by me to set the bags on the zinc table. Then turns and searches my face. "How you feeling?"
    Earnest Gray, in drab and rumpled Brooks Brothers mufti, his wispy vanishing hair somehow making him look younger than his fifty-one years. But then WASPs on the high end age in an absentminded fashion, like the old shoes they never throw away. In addition to which, Gray has been effectively retired his whole life. He is also the least vain man I have ever known.
    "I had heart failure coming up from the beach, but otherwise I'm dandy. How much was all this?" I grab my jacket from behind the door to pull out my wallet, but Gray, who is already unloading muffins and ginger ale, waves vaguely, as if money is something vulgar that gentlemen don't discuss. "Gray, you can't keep buying me groceries."
    And I wave twenty dollars by his shoulder, but he has that maddening WASP habit of pretending things aren't happening. "I thought I'd barbecue tonight," he says with boyish enthusiasm, and I lay the twenty on the table, in no-man's-land.
    The irony is, Gray doesn't have a lot to spare, despite being the last of one of the nine families that owned California. There's a trust, of course, and coupons to clip, and the beach house is his for life, as well as the gardener's cottage on the ranch where he's lived for twenty-five years. But none of this amounts to very much actual cash, because the old man poured almost everything into his wacko foundation, funding white supremacist day camps and fag-bash seminars, that sort of thing. Still, with all those connections no one ever expected Gray to grow up to be a loser, unable to make his own harvest in the Reagan fields of money. On the contrary, he's spent most of his life giving away his share, as a sort of patron saint of the avant-garde.
    "That one he injected looks smaller to me," observes Gray, slapping a couple of steaks on the counter. He's talking about the eggplant-purple lesion on my right cheek, the size of a dime. This is the only public sign of my leprous state, and on my last visit the doctor gave it a direct hit of chemo. It doesn't look any different to me. Gray is the only one who ever mentions my lesion. Everyone else steps around it, like a turd on the carpet. "And look, we'll make some guacamole," he says, triumphantly producing three dented avocadoes.
    Then Mona is standing in the doorway, giving a hopeless impersonation of demure. Gray spots her and instantly wilts. "Oh I'm sorry," he murmurs fretfully, unable to meet our eyes, gazing with dismay at all the groceries he's unpacked, as if he's come to the wrong place.
    "Listen, I was just leaving, you guys go ahead," declares Mona magnanimously.
    "Don't be silly, there's plenty," I say, perversely enjoying their twin discomfort. They don't exactly dislike each other, but they're like in-laws from different marriages, unrelated except by bad shit. "You make the margaritas," I command Mona with a bony finger.
    And because I am the sick boy, what can they do?