The Town of Babylon Read online

  Marie clears her nose with a few inhalations and wipes it with a wrist. “Thanks. You were, like, her favorite, you know. She was happy you never came back. ‘What the fuck for?’ she used to say. ‘Leave that boy out there in the world.’ ”

  Marie’s mom surely knew I was gay. She wore eyeliner like a raccoon and poured schnapps into her coffee. She was a suburban drag queen. Certainly, she had gaydar before I knew what gaydar was.

  Marie lives one block from where she grew up, she explains. She moved back from Florida when her mother first got sick a few years ago.

  “Remember this?” she says, and rolls her eyes.

  “MMMBop” plays. Hanson, the blond boy band comprised of science-fearing Christian brothers. Marie’s head moves side to side in rhythm with the song. Her waist, too, shifts complicity. She laughs at herself.

  Marie recently remarried the father of her two kids, both of whom attend the public schools that we all avoided. “It is what it is,” she surmises. Her face contorts into a rictus of underachievement.

  According to my parents and the church’s monthly newsletter, the Tea of Galilee, most of the people I grew up with still baptize their children, but very few send them to Catholic schools. They go instead to catechism classes on the weekends. A mix of fourth-generation white Catholics and the over-achieving children of over worked immigrants fill the parochial seats.

  Marie and I exchange numbers because she gives me no choice. Then she flings her hand in the air toward Janna, who in turn calls over Lizzy, who’s standing in a circle with Vanessa, Adam, and Chris. Monique pops over briefly on the way to the bathroom. Because she’s Black, I want to make a joke about how endangered we non-whites are in this space, but maybe she doesn’t appreciate that sort of camaraderie. She shouts that she’ll be right back. I’m buzzed and less reticent about interacting with everyone than I was thirty minutes ago. With each successive encounter, I am freer. After a dozen conversations, I make my way back to the bar. Steven, Stephen, Megan, and Meghan part, making space for me to join. One of them reaches back to the bar and hands me a beer. It takes everyone a wide-eyed, open-mouthed moment to remember me. “Wow!” and “Holy shit!” are repeated. Over and over. As are the condolences about my brother. Some don’t react much to seeing me, but their eyes narrow into something suspicious. They all tell me about their jobs and children. Everyone has children. Erin has four, LaTeisha three, Monique three, Irene two, Dominic four, Alex four, Greg three. Nicole D. is a nurse, Nicole T. a loan officer, Nicole S. a third-grade teacher and gymnastics instructor, Dina runs a catering business with her sister, Gina makes jewelry, Gino teaches algebra and coaches high school basketball and lacrosse, Jake’s a cop, Reggie’s a cop, Nicole C. is a cop, Michael L. is a cop, Michael R. is a cop, Colleen is a physician’s assistant, and Margaret stays at home with her kids. Some of them see each other regularly, some at events like this one, some at the supermarket, some at church, most only on Facebook.

  Of the more than two hundred students in our class, nearly half are now here. But there is no sign of Simone.

  Simone was that rare adolescent with unabashed confidence, humor, kindness, and athletic abilities, who occupied the overlapping space between best friend and partner in crime. She lived on the Irish side of town and went to public school until sixth grade. Her parents were professors. History, I believe. She and I were in the same homeroom in seventh grade. In eighth grade, we’d go to an all-ages night at a club in the industrial part of town, where each room represented a different genre of music. Simone only ever wanted to be in the dim, exposed-brick space where they played grunge rock and ran a fog machine. She’d spend the entire night whipping through the mosh pit like a boomerang on fire. After my first busted lip, I took to watching the spectacle from the sidelines. In high school, Simone wore hemp necklaces and was in love with Eddie Vedder. During our freshman year, I roped her into my short-lived racket of supplying alcohol for all the cool kids.

  “We just stand outside of 7-Eleven and wait for someone nice to do it for us. The seniors on the volleyball team do it all the time,” Simone explained.

  Over the course of a few weekends, we filled up our backpacks with Olde English forties and clanked our way to wherever everyone was gathered. Since kids from two counties attended St. Ignatius, sometimes Simone and I would have to travel by bus or train while lugging around nearly fifty pounds of glass and malt liquor.

  Once, one of the bottles broke, and the liquor leaked all over the train’s vinyl seats, eventually dripping onto the floor and making its way down the aisle.

  “Why are we doing this?” Simone asked, as she rushed to pull the fractured forty out of her backpack, while I used notebook paper to sop up the mess.

  “I promised.”

  “Why?”

  I shrugged, and she shook her head, half forgiving and half exasperated. I’m sure she thought I was a fool, but she never said so.

  When Simone turned sixteen, her parents bought her a used Civic. After that, we were ungovernable, taking secret trips out east, to towns where we were unwelcome but too ignorant and confident to notice. A few times, we drove into the city, parked somewhere downtown, and walked as far north as we could before taking a train back down. But typically, Simone and I would stay nearby, drive to the beach after school, smoke pot.

  Simone was nearly six feet tall at thirteen. Her favorite sport was basketball, but she wouldn’t try out for the high school team because she didn’t like other people’s expectations. “Imagine: a tall Black girl playing basketball. How original.” Instead, she became St. Ignatius’s greatest lacrosse and volleyball player. No one outscored her. During our junior or senior year, she changed her mind, joined the basketball team, and outscored everyone there too. We didn’t hang out as much near the end of high school, but it was always happiness and comfort when we were together. In retrospect, we probably fit so well because we were both queer and closeted. Butterflies trapped under glass. One time, we got real drunk and she told me as much—“We’re gays in the making,” she said. I didn’t know what she meant exactly, but I loved the turn of phrase, even if I hated to hear it. “Shut up,” I responded. Then I laughed as if she were joking and changed the subject. A couple of years later, in college, I came out to her over the phone. All she said was, “Duh, Andy.” There were a few phone calls after that one, but we never saw each other again.

  * * *

  The restaurant couldn’t possibly fit any more people, or their memories. My streak of twenty years of avoidance ends at a clip. I get passed around like a team trophy, and frankly, it feels as alien as it does good. In high school, I was a popular kid, but it was a tireless campaign on my part. Always striving to be in the right place, to make people laugh, to be a good dancer, to throw the best parties, to drink more, to smoke everything being passed around, to drop acid, to befriend the beautiful girls so that I might be mistaken for a ladies’ man, to keep my grades up, to say yes to everyone, always. I don’t know if I was aware of how hard I was trying, but somewhere in me, I sensed that if I ever stopped performing, even for a moment, the audience would leave; so, in a way, I left first. It never occurred to me that they’d remained in their seats.

  4

  NUNS

  If it hadn’t been for Patricia, the neighbor whose husband traveled so often for work that she was effectively raising her children alone, Enrique would have repeated eighth grade—he’d already been held back once. It was Patricia who left messages for Rosario when Enrique didn’t show up at the bus stop. It was Patricia who took to knocking on their door after the bus had left with her children and Andrés. (“I’m going to stay right here until you open up.”) It was Patricia who drove Enrique to school if she found him at home. (“You’re going to make me late for work, honey.”)

  Enrique took to the routine and the camaraderie. Patricia, to him, wasn’t only a neighbor, she was an adult whose concern was unweighted by expectations or consequences—a friend. With her own children, Patrici
a was imperious, but with Enrique she was accommodating, attentive, and cheerful. He’d never been treated this way before by someone who had no reason to be kind. Patricia was like a family member but without any of the accompanying stress.

  Enrique wasn’t disruptive or polemic or vicious. In the eyes of Álvaro and Rosario, his most significant shortcoming was how poorly he fared in school, which everyone (parents, teachers, coaches, Andrés) deduced was the result of laziness. It was quite a surprise, then, when his first report card at St. Ignatius was a column of B-pluses—a marked improvement on every school year that had come before. Even more surprising, he seemed to like high school. He was a quiet boy in class and a pleasure to be around, said the nuns. He even made a few friends. From time to time, Patricia still drove him to school, but only because he’d overslept.

  Two children doing well in school made the everyday inhumanity seem almost logical and, possibly, necessary for Álvaro and Rosario—the commutes, the long hours, the condescension, the pay, the knowledge that there was no room for improvement in their lives. Álvaro and Rosario believed that if Enrique and Andrés could keep their grades up, they would have no problems, or at least problems different from their own. There was nowhere for their children to go but up. In this country, there were no bombs or checkpoints or young revolutionaries in blond wigs and prosthetic noses or handfuls of Europeans who owned every parcel of land and all of the industries or kidnappings or drug cartels or CIA-trained militias roaming or impermeable class divisions or feral dogs or drunk survivors on every corner or, most importantly, limits. Álvaro and Rosario were guests, and guests owed their hosts deference, but their children owed nothing and could do as they pleased. Certainly, they couldn’t fare worse. In fact, Enrique and Andrés were doubly blessed. They held the vantage of outsiders: a bird’s-eye view of this country’s virtues and iniquities. This was a place with opportunities and inefficiencies; Enrique and Andrés were trained to seize the former and game the latter. They were doing well, and they would continue to do well, Rosario and Álvaro believed. Even so, the warnings rarely abated: Never end up like us. Look at us. Never be us.

  * * *

  Enrique and Andrés walked quickly up the sleepy street with no sidewalks, each with a backpack slung over a shoulder of blue wool. It was 7:30 A.M. A humid early-September morning, and they were already sweating through their T-shirts, their white oxford button-downs, their red rayon ties, and their thin, stiff gray slacks. The bus would reach their stop in a couple of minutes.

  “Enri—”

  “Don’t fucking call me that. Everyone at school calls me Henry.”

  “Henry?”

  “That’s my name. Don’t wear it out.”

  “No. Enrique in English is exactly the same in Spanish. Proper nouns are—”

  “Fuck your proper nouns, shit stain. My name is Henry. You wanna show up to school with your underwear up your ass?”

  “Okay, whatever.”

  “Not whatever. This is my school. And you didn’t have to come here. You could have gone to St. Francis or Holy Family. I don’t know why you had to follow me here.”

  St. Ignatius wasn’t the best school—that was St. Francis—but it wasn’t the worst either—that was Holy Family. Andrés had chosen St. Ignatius because it was the high school where most of his friends were going. He hadn’t given any thought to Enrique when he’d made the decision, and now it was too late to go elsewhere.

  Andrés wiped his brow with the back of his tie, surreptitiously swallowing whatever was coating his throat. He and Henry had always had a rocky relationship—worsened by adolescence—but Andrés hadn’t imagined that Henry hated him this much.

  Henry’s words slighted Andrés, but they intrigued him too. In fact, he was impressed. Henry had never before evinced anything that signaled a complicated or layered emotion. Whereas Andrés lived perpetually inside of his own mind, obsessively analyzing the minutiae of life, worrying, doubting, full of anger and fear, Henry had maintained the air of someone less troubled, someone incapable of harboring anything against anyone, of cultivating or incubating complex thoughts. Whenever they’d fight, their hatred for one another was as visceral and exaggerated as it was incidental and evanescent. Theirs were the minor emotional scuffles typical of two animals forced into one cage and left unattended.

  Henry meant what he’d said, but he hadn’t intended to say it. And yet, for a moment afterward, he felt powerful. Until he slid into his seat near the back of the bus and pressed his head against the window. That’s when the guilt took hold. And then that, too, vanished.

  The high school was big enough for the brothers’ paths to seldom cross. Henry didn’t go so far as to ignore Andrés, but he kept his greetings small: waves, head nods, heys. At first, Andrés maintained a distance, so as not to upset Henry, but as time went on, he came to see that there were no benefits to being associated with his brother, who didn’t provide any of the cachet that some of the other older siblings seemed to, namely access—entry into the upper echelons of the school’s hierarchy. Henry wasn’t studious enough to be in a club or honor society; he wasn’t committed enough to be on a sports team; he wasn’t tall, tough, or quirky enough to be part of a clique.

  Similarly, Andrés was of no measurable use to Henry.

  “He’s a dickwad.”

  “Honey, don’t talk like that. He’s your brother. The only one you have.” Patricia sank into the worn, gray seat of her royal-blue Mustang GT hatchback, a car she had bought with her share of the inheritance her father had left to her and her four sisters after selling his bakery—Giacamo’s, the place where locals went for their cannoli, torrone, cheesecakes, and when they didn’t want to prepare their own zeppoli for the feasts of St. Joseph or San Gennaro, Three Kings Day, Christmas, New Year’s, or Saturdays. The car had a rear spoiler that, to Henry, made it seem as if it might at any second take flight. It was in this car that he’d learned to drive: after-school lessons from Jason, Patricia’s husband, whenever he was in town. Andrés, too, was learning to drive in that car. As were Jason and Patricia’s daughter, Monica, a bookish kid who wore thick eyeglasses and fleece leggings to school every day, and their son, Vincent, a chubby video gamer who sucked his thumb when no one was looking.

  It was the constancy of Patricia’s simple advice that comforted Henry, who was drawn to the attention—any attention that wasn’t cast primarily as recrimination or retribution or that he wasn’t required to split with Andrés.

  Patricia had come from a large family where it had been customary to interfere and be interfered with. She was a friend to Henry, but she was a support for everyone else too: complimenting Rosario’s “fancy” work clothes, praising Andrés always for his grades and popularity; showing up whenever Álvaro and Rosario’s car stalled; driving the brood to the train station, the supermarket, little league, karate class, urgent care, school, the mechanic; reminding the family about picture days, parent-teacher conferences, registration deadlines.

  With time, Patricia also became a confidante for Rosario, who, on the one hand, bristled at her neighbor’s familiarity and the subtle requirements of friendship, but who was also grateful for a loyal, innocuous presence after nearly twenty years of steeling her perimeter. Rosario resisted the friendship initially out of guilt, suspicion, and spite. Why did her son need attention from someone else? Why was this stranger always willing to help us? Why is she here at all? Rosario came to begrudgingly accept the help that in a previous life and in another place would have been expected and welcome but now felt like an admission of failure.

  “I wouldn’t worry about the boys,” Patricia said, drunk but sturdy, as they said goodbye outside of Rosario’s house. Sharing a bottle of prosecco had become a Friday evening ritual once their kids were in high school. “My sister was always jealous of me, but I think it motivated her. She lives out east. Huge house. A pool.” Patricia’s gum smacked between her molars; her hand rested on the roof of her car. She folded herself to peer into the
side-view mirror. “Do I look drunk?”

  “No,” responded Rosario, distracted, suddenly aware of all the places where the wood was splintering along the chest-high brown-picket fence. “Why? Is Jason home?”

  “Gawd no! Not till next week.”

  At nineteen, Patricia had married someone she’d met on a beach vacation, a barrel-chested man with big teeth. That Jason was Chicano initially estranged her from her family, which in turn led to depression and tremendous weight gain, but when the children turned out white, her family warmed up—the weight, however, remained. Jason sold encyclopedias, after a brief spell with vacuum cleaners, and was gone more often than not, which neither he nor Patricia minded, even if she missed the warmth and possibilities of another body.

  “Enrique’s not young anymore,” Rosario said. “Next year, he has to apply to colleges. I don’t think he has the grades to go anywhere.” Rosario truly didn’t know. She had little understanding of what it took to get into a university. “For the last two years, Cs and Ds. That can’t be good enough for a good college.”

  Rosario was as inebriated after one drink as she was after three. It was this intolerance, and only this, that emboldened her to speak freely about her children’s shortcomings.

  “Better still. You’ll save a ton,” continued Patricia. “He can do a couple of years of community college and transfer when he’s ready. My cousin’s a good tax lawyer, and he went to community college for two years before going to a state school.”

  “I hope so. Nothing gets through to him.” Rosario raised a hand to her mouth and hiccupped. “He doesn’t care at all about his future.”

  “It’ll click eventually, Rosie. We just have to keep encouraging them.”