The day of my retirement, Padi surprises me with a party at our home, sneaking her guests into the basement, their cars parked a street over so I am clueless. When I walk through the door and call for her, she yells that she’s downstairs and could I give her a hand, and when I reach the bottom step the crowd screams out Surprise, and my two dark-haired, skinny sons clap me on the back and wrap me in loose hugs, Padi kisses me on the cheek and lips, and then, in the biggest surprise of them all, the gathered friends part, and I’m faced with Cameron Riggs-Pergucelli for the first time in over twenty years.
It would sound right if I said that I hardly recognize him at first, that decades of aging have changed us both, shoving us into lumpier shapes, the contours of our cusp-of-thirty bodies remolded by those years that dragged us into (late?) middle age, but Cameron is ageless as always, his hair perhaps on the verge of balding—it had begun to thin the last time I saw him, but Propecia or Rogaine or a follicular transplant or some other Hans Wiemann procedure has treated him well—body tan and lithe and lean, the basketball player of his heyday still shining through, and I know it’s him immediately. He, too, seems unshocked by my appearance, my body kept somewhat slim—if a bit stoop-shouldered—and despite my lurching gait, years of knee surgeries having finally taken their toll.
We have hardly talked, Cameron and I, since his husband Allen died of an aggressive, malignant brain tumor, and I flew down to St. Louis to see his father and Cameron immediately after. Padi had offered to join me, but we had talked deep into the night, getting to sleep only hours before I needed to trundle off to Capital Regional Airport, and she agreed, finally, that because no one else was coming—not even Marcie, his elder sister, who was stuck on a business trip to Indonesia at the time—that it would be best for her to stay behind. She had, in any case, hardly known Cameron after all, and I knew that her presence would create a disturbed equilibrium. She accepted my case, then listened to me tell her all about Allen—things she surely already knew, from Marcie, I assumed—until the pre-dawn grayish-pinkish light of the breaking sunrise poked into our bedroom window.
For a split second I worry Cameron and I will have nothing to say to one another, that the silence that echoed between us for years after Allen’s death will slam a door, cutting us off from one another. But without missing a beat, Cameron wraps me up in a hug, his muscles still sinewy and taut, and he says, into my shoulder, that it’s great to see me.
The party proceeds without incident or real excitement: canapés, mixed drinks, soft jazz music from my son Denny’s iPod stationed in a small speaker that manages to burble out saxophone and trumpet notes at the perfect, subtle volume. Now-former co-workers offer me slaps of congratulations on the arm and back, toasting me by clinking their beer bottles against my own. Others inquire as to how I’ll fill my time, and I explain that Padi and I are going to travel around Europe at the end of the summer when the boys return to school in Indiana (Denny) and California (Victor) for their sophomore and senior years.
Most of the guests drift away after a few hours, bellies filled with capers and bruschetta and cheap beer that leaves their gaits wobbly and tested as they climb the stairs and clomp through the foyer, and by the time nine p.m. rolls around the last handful are heading out the door, and the basement is suddenly empty, the only people left myself, Padi, our sons. And Cameron.
“I invited him to stay with us instead of a hotel,” she whispers to me as he plucks up a room temperature buffalo slider and two yellowing celery stalks. He chomps on one, the signature snap of vegetable fiber noticeably missing.
We move upstairs, the boys flicking on a Tigers game that’s entrenched in the bottom of the fourth, a blowout already, Detroit down seven to Boston. They settle on opposite ends of the long leather couch that sits at a right angle to the television while Padi busies herself in the kitchen, rinsing off dishes, cinching up a bag of trash for one of the boys to drag out to the garage before bed.
“How about a nightcap?” I ask Cameron. He nods in assent, and I pull a bottle of Glenfiddich from among the liquor bottles stationed atop the hutch in the dining room.
We settle in the study, a second-floor room above the garage that we intended to use as a guest room but, when we had no visitors in the first three years of our life here, chose to convert to an office, replete with built-in bookshelves, soothing green walls, a rolltop desk shoved in a corner, a reading nook constituting two wingbacked leather chairs with a glass table in between where I keep a stack of Allen’s books.
Cameron moves straight to the books, picking up the topmost—No One is Here But Me, the poetry collection Allen wrote while he was dying—and flips through, balancing the spine in one hand, his scotch nestled in the crook of his arm.
“I never read these,” Cameron says. “People think I’m lying when I say that, but I really never did.”
I nod and sit in one of the chairs. Cameron follows suit. “I imagine they would have been hard to read.”
“I’m not just talking about the poems,” Cameron says, setting the book on top of the stack. The cover is a dense pink with lighter shades ruffling across like a child’s rendering of ocean waves. I’ve never understood most book covers, not the least Allen’s: always modern-esque pseudo-art, abstract and completely unrelated to the books’ plots. He told me once that writers have little say in the book covers, that they’re about appeal and sellability, not linkage to the art within.
“I never read his books,” Cameron says. “Any of them.” He taps the stack, six books tall.
“Why not?”
Cameron sips deeply, releases a little shudder as the scotch courses into him. “I’ve never been able to settle on all of the reasons.”
“Give me just one, then.”
“I guess,” he says, “that I like knowing that there’s always something of Allen still out there for me to know if I want to. The mystery is still there.”
“Do you think you’ll ever read them?” I point toward the books with my tumbler, the ice clinking against the tempered, stylized glass.
“I don’t know. Probably not. It’s a bit like a security blanket, knowing that the books are there, that his secrets are hovering just at the edges.”
“You think of them as secrets?”
“I think I’m just not sure what else to call them.”
I slurp on my drink, holding the scotch in my mouth before swallowing, letting the tart, woody taste seep into my cheeks and tongue before swallowing.
“Did I ever tell you about the bears?”
“What bears?”
“One time when Allen and I went camping.”
“You two? Camping?”
I set down my drink on the table, next to Allen’s books, the titles wavery through the muted brown liquid, cross my fingers together, and take a deep breath.
Babler State Park was only a thirty minute drive or so, and until we made the turn off of MO-109, we never really felt like we’d left the St. Louis suburbs; clapboard houses still lined the state highway periodically, and gunky gas stations with old-fashioned signs using actual plastic numbers to show the shifting prices of gasoline pocked the two-lane road. While it felt like we’d moved into the past, sure, civilization never seemed to fall away until the last moment, when the park appeared and the road became choked with trees on either side and the speed limit dropped to twenty miles an hour.
That’s the thing about camping: even if you haven’t trudged into secluded woods or nestled yourself high in a mountain range, it only takes a minute or two to immerse yourself in nature and feel cut off from the world around you. Especially if you did things like my dad: although Babler had fancy camping stations for RVs, replete with pre-made fire pits and picnic tables and even generator hookups, he passed all of these over, opting for something more old-fashioned, a simple clearing where he parked his rusting Ford pickup and ordered me and Allen, with a warm, boyish lilt in his voice, to unload the supplies. We would slip from our crowded line in the single bench row—me stuffed between my father and Allen, trying to avoid getting groinally friendly with the gear shift—and pluck out the three-man tent, our fishing rods, the sleeping bags, the ingredients for chili. Hell, the most modern contrivance we brought with us was the can opener, and my father gently mocked us for trudging up to a line of porta-potties half a mile away when we needed to shit; he just rustled into the woods and found a place to squat, wiping himself the old-fashioned way with the biggest non-ivy fronds he could find nearby.
Dad took us up there maybe once every four months, more often during the spring and summer, and especially more frequently when we were younger, from the time Allen and I were twelve years old. It was one of those traditions, you know, that start off strong. You think you’ll do it forever, keep things up like clockwork. You imagine yourself repeating this great, fun thing for the rest of your life, growing into adulthood, your father’s hair turning salt-and-pepper and then grey and then white and then disappearing. But, of course, it went like all grand family traditions that eventually peter out. Life tangles things up, other stuff gets in the way. You start falling in love with girls—or boys, as the case may be—or get distracted by the other passions that crop up over time, football, books, television, you know. You pack up the truck less and less until your parents eventually downsize and there’s no longer a truck to pack but a sedan that can hardly fit a perfectly-folded tent in the trunk and can’t really manage the terrain of backwoods camping either.
But, anyway, when we did go, we loved it. I know that must seem surprising, someone like Allen, pale and sticky and always thin despite his attempts at push-up regimens and crunches and protein shakes to try to keep up with your athleticism, but it’s true: he loved it, being out in the woods, hiking through the brush to a little stream we managed to find every time as if we’d had the directions programmed straight into our brains. The first time we discovered it, when we were thirteen, Allen was leading the way, saying nothing, and I swear to you he couldn’t have possibly had any idea where he was going, but as he marched through the woods, shoving thick tree branches out of the way, skirting around poison oak and ignoring the potential threat of ticks and rabid raccoons—I had an overly-active imagination about these things early on, believe it or not—he really seemed to know exactly what he was after, pulled to the water by some invisible magnetism. I kept asking him where we were going; before puberty smacked me in the face with acne and wet dreams and ill-timed erections—and thank God for the musculature and cheekbones that got me laid early and often enough to not worry about those—I had a whiny, pitchy voice, and if I had been him I would have probably turned around and punched me in the face to get me to stop bitching. But he ignored me, laser-focused, and when we pushed through a final bit of underbrush, scraping our legs on a final thorny branch that left my calves itchy, we were suddenly there.
The stream was wide, almost a river, but the water slurped through its bed rather than having any kind of crashing roar. No rapids, no leaping fish. The water was greenish, tinged with algae and mud, and no more than a few feet deep, maybe thigh-high at the center. But the stream was wide, probably ten or fifteen feet. It shouldn’t have been breathtaking in any way. I’d seen rivers before, of course. My parents took me to Myrtle Beach when I was eight and I’d crowed at the ocean simply because of its salty mass, its endless and torrid blueness. But something about this was stunning for its simplicity, its minimalism.
But really, it’s probably Allen that I have to thank for that. As soon as we found the water he sat down, just clomped onto his ass on the dirt and grass without a care or concern for cleanliness—you know how he got sometimes, not wanting grime and grease to blemish his clothing—and he said nothing, just stared out at the water, legs pulled up toward his chest, forearms balanced on his knee caps. He let out a sigh and stared, and so eventually I sat down next to him, cross-legged, and tore at a bit of grass and stared too. We didn’t speak for a long time, and I could tell that Allen had no plans to say a word, no explanation for why we’d come here, what he wanted to do next. Allen was, as you know, always so comfortable in complete silences, unlike most people, who balk at the idea of being in the presence of another person and falling into quiet. I think we mostly worry about the lack of noise. We’re creatures of sound, we want to use our voices, as if not constantly talking may cost us.
We sat like that for God knows how long. I began to wonder if my father would come screaming after us, worried that we’d fallen into a pit or been bitten by rattlesnakes or something. Every time I thought Allen might be prepared to haul himself up and return to our campsite, he seemed to only relax into the ground further, like the grass and dirt and twigs and dead leaves were a comfortable bed that he was sinking into for sleep. He actually laid down on his back at one point, stretching his arms over his head.
I think we might have stayed there forever if not for the bear. The sound was unfamiliar, a jostling in the brush on the other side of the stream, and at first when I heard it I thought it was just the rustling of trees, but when I realized there was no breeze to speak of I perked up, expecting to see another pair of hikers emerging on the other side of the water. But instead of peach skin, clopping boots, stuffed rucksacks, out through the brush came a bear, small and brown, its fur matted, paws the size of baseball gloves.
The thing looked young, as far as I could tell. I was thirteen, after all, and didn’t know anything about bear physiology or aging. Not that I do now. But it became immediately clear that it was a baby, because its parents weren’t far behind: two more rumblings, the brush quivering as their massive bodies jammed out from the woods on the opposite bank. Each bear was a good six feet tall, and their smell: almost antiseptic, tangy and pungent with a hint of excrement.
I, of course, freaked out, imagining the great speed with which these ursine monsters could easily ford the river and flay us alive. If I’d had my faculties I would have implored Allen to allow us to escape, to turn and high-tail it through the woods from whence we’d come. But when I looked at him he was staring peacefully at the bears, who had somehow failed to notice our presence. I don’t know the power of a brown bear’s sense of smell, but surely it must be better than human olfactory strength, and if we could smell their natural woodsy funk from across the stream, surely they were getting ample whiffs of our factory-made soapy body odor, the gummy rubber smell of our shoes, our polycotton blend T-shirts. But they seemed oblivious, the mother bear leaning down to give the child a few pushy swipes with her pink tongue that looked like a massive slug in her mouth, while the papa bear poked his nose at the water. The entire time, Allen sat still and serene, staring at them.
And then like that, the bears marched back into the trees, the sounds of their thrashing, lumbering bodies fading out like the echo of a rushing car.
We sat very still for another long stretch. A bird cawed somewhere in a tree and I could hear the scrabble of a chipmunk or squirrel. A woodpecker drilled against an oak tree.
Eventually Allen broke the silence, harrumphing as he hauled himself up, saying that he supposed we ought to be getting back. When he stood he stared down at his hands, palms streaked with green and brown with a look of near-surprise on his face, as if he couldn’t comprehend how his skin had been stained. He picked at his hands, digging his fingernails into the tramlines of his palms, scratching away at the grime for the next several hours even as we heated chili over the fire my father had built and snapped twigs from trees for roasting s’mores.
Allen led the way back, assured and positive about the trail that would guide us to our campsite, for which I was grateful because I was entirely lost. The sun was percolating on the horizon into a pink slithering glob bubbling against the tree line, and in the falling dusk everything looked different, and I recognized not a single landmark pointing the way to the camp. For a moment I believed Allen was leading us nowhere, unwilling to admit he had no idea where we were going, and I began picturing our deaths by hunger and thirst, one of us forced to make the decision to bash the other in the brain with a rock and then eat the other to survive.
But of course our campsite emerged through the trees, my father waving at us and asking if we’d found anything exciting on our hike. Allen shrugged out a “Not really” before I could say anything.
We never spoke of the bears, not to anyone else and not to each other. But every year we went to the stream first, and Allen sat and stared across to the opposite bank, a look of heady concentration on his face so taut that sweat started to bead in his hair. Silence every time, until the year after you two started up. That time, one of the last trips we would take, he sat down on the grass, cross-legged, his shorts straining up past his bottle cap knees, and he looked straight ahead and said, “I think I’m in love with him, Jolly.”
“Yes, you,” I say. “We talked about you a lot.”
Cameron nods.
“You were his world. From the moment he knew that you cared about him the way he cared about you.”
He takes a final sip from his glass and stares down at it, hooked in his palm, as though it’s some new foreign object whose purpose he doesn’t understand.
Cameron sways and swings himself up, declaring that he’s tired and thinks it’s time to hit the sack. I nod and wish him a good night’s sleep, that if he needs anything to just go rooting around for it. The hall bath is stocked full of towels and Advil, and he has free reign over the kitchen; what’s ours is his.
When he is gone, I pick up the poetry collection and thumb through. Like Cameron, I have never really read it, savoring the idea of one final bit of Allen that remains forever untouched. I’ve tried to sit down with it a number of times; I’ve read the first poem, the title poem, “No One is Here But Me,” more than once, but every time I finish it I can’t bring myself to turn the page, to carry on forward. The voice on the page is too strangled and strange: foreign and familiar at once, the version of Allen that was soupy with medication, his body tempered and throttled by cancer and exhaustion. While his prose was so fluid and witty, the poetry is almost stilted, unsure, managing to both ramble and wallow at once. If it wasn’t the dying art of Allen Pergucelli, modern master, I can’t imagine that it would have ever been published. I set the book down.
I’m not sure why I made up the story about the bears. He must have known it was bullshit. Are there even brown bears in that part of Missouri? Who knows. I don’t.
The truth is, we did go camping every year, but we stuck mostly to the campsite, and Allen’s neuroses about the natural world were always running on high (he was deathly afraid of spiders and spent almost all of his energy scouring every inch of our tent, making sure none had infiltrated), and although we did once find a small stream, the water was snotty and stagnant, worth little more than a singular poke with a long branch. We did return to the stream from time to time, but there were no peace-filled layabouts on the banks.
But he did tell me, when we were seventeen, that he was falling in love with Cameron Riggs. That part was true.
So why the rest? It felt like something Cameron deserved. After Allen died when we were all barely in our thirties, he never found anyone else, became a priest in all but name (and, I suppose, religious dogma), disappearing from our lives into some shadowy place, and his emergence at my retirement party felt like an invitation to bring something back. Seeing him again flooded me with memory, of a time and place and life not quite as laden with rheumatism and hypertension and daily sloughings of medications of all sizes. When I knew Cameron, I didn’t have to worry about the signs of prostate cancer, potential strokes, and adult-onset diabetes. I could still perform deadlifts at the gym.
Age turns you into a new man; biologically-speaking, we transform every seven years or so, not a single cell that swirls through our makeup the same. Although we carry the same wounds and scars, the flesh that makes them is fresh. Maybe this is why we feel the urge, the urgency, to turn back the clock in whatever way we can. And when we were teenagers, I was the gatekeeper, the key to the kingdom of Allen Pergucelli for Cameron Riggs, the one who knew his secrets and tics, the one Cameron came to when he wanted so desperately to peel back Allen’s layers and understand him.
But beyond that, perhaps I simply wanted to give Cameron a missing piece, real or otherwise. I don’t know what there was to take away from my fiction: what did it matter if Allen and I saw a trio of bears across a shitty little river? What could that possibly tell Cameron about the dead love of his life that he didn’t already know? Nothing that could possibly be put into words, nothing he could cling to, claw through, slurp down and be sated by.
Perhaps, though, even the intangible is enough.
I sway into the dark kitchen and set my glass in the sink. When I look at the buzzy green digits on the mounted microwave, I’m shocked at the lateness; I haven’t been up at this hour in nearly two decades, not since Denny went through a bout of horrendous colic (my children, as teenagers, were either well-behaved and came home early or were sneaky and silent, never waking me or Padi from the depths of our middle-aged snoring). The sky outside is that deep bruised blue, a color that Allen and I did relish on our camping trips. We would always outlast my father, who would turn in, lumbering into his single-occupant tent, always reminding us to make sure the fire was out and the food secure before we conked out. We’d sit on opposite sides of the pit, staring into the flames or looking up at the sky, where the air was clear often enough that we could make guesses at the constellations. We only ever knew the basics, and we still struggled to find the Little Dipper.
On the occasion he told me he was falling in love with Cameron, he sighed three times. I ignored him the first two and then finally acquiesced on the third and asked what he was thinking.
“Just about Cameron,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m sure you don’t want to hear about it.”
“You’re my best friend, Allen,” I said. “Of course I do.”
And so he went on for twenty minutes, explaining all the things he loved about Cameron: how he listened, how he smelled, the shape of his lips, his soft voice, his willingness to read if only because Allen loved to. In that twenty minutes, Allen was more animated than I ever saw him the rest of his life.
I know I should have told Cameron that story, that truth. But there was something about that night: the way the campfire smelled of oak and ash, the warm breezes that shoved their way through the trees and ruffled the skin on the back of my neck, the brazen excitement poised on Allen’s tongue. Even though nothing he said was about me, he stared at me from across the fire, eyes glossy with the reflected flames, working to convey his sense of love as clearly as he could. Love: that thing that makes us human, that scratchy and painful and irrational and unimaginable feeling we all understand but can never express. But I saw it. I knew it. I understood, for just a moment, the purest of romantic devotion one could experience, and it came from Allen Pergucelli.
But I didn’t tell Cameron that story. Some truths we want to keep, want to hide for ourselves. We want to bury them deep, carry them with us to the end of our days.