The Summer We Fell Apart Read online

  When he couldn’t stand it anymore, he called Amy and told her what he’d done.

  “You’re using Mom to get laid?” she asked incredulously.

  “I’m already getting laid,” George snapped.

  “Then why?”

  And George answered, “Because I’m crazy for this guy and I want the kid to like me,” even though he knew Amy was going to ream him for it. Which she did. He’d hung up the phone feeling even more certain that his relationship with Sam was doomed and he had no one to blame but himself.

  It was only nine o’clock and his eyes were already at half-mast as he struggled to reread Shelley’s Frankenstein for his ninth-grade seminar class when he heard the click of the key as it turned in the lock. He opened his eyes to see Sam step into the room. He shed his paint-spattered coat, kicked off his sneakers, and dropped into the spot beside George.

  Sam slipped the book out of George’s hand and looked at the cover. “Ah. What man isn’t a monster?” He laughed. “The tale of old lovers?”

  George smiled, thrilled and scared to see him. “You’re here early.”

  “Asa’s studying at a friend’s place near the school and spending the night,” Sam announced, as if he and George had won the lottery.

  “Really?” George said. “Why didn’t you tell me earlier? We could have done something.” A weeknight where they actually could have had dinner together, maybe even caught a movie, seemed foreign and exciting compared to what they normally did.

  Sam smiled again and clasped George’s hand in his. “But this is what I want to do.”

  “Okay, then let’s party,” George joked as he rolled away from Sam and got them each a beer from the mini-fridge. He brought them back over to the bed and Sam took his beer and drank half in one long swallow. Instead of resuming his previous position, George sat back down by Sam’s feet and sipped his beer. Sissy sips, he thought, in comparison to Sam’s enthusiastic guzzle.

  Sam put his feet in George’s lap and rubbed them lightly over his crotch. George leaned back against the pillows, enjoying the sensation. He looked down at Sam’s feet. A deeper brown than the rest of his honey-colored body, his toes were long and elegant, and the nails closely trimmed half-moons of alabaster and mauve. He put his beer down on the floor and took Sam’s foot into his hands.

  “Ah,” Sam said and laughed. “Cold hands.”

  “Sorry,” George said as he rubbed his thumb under Sam’s arch. Sam didn’t even squirm. “Not ticklish?” George asked.

  “Not there,” Sam replied. He was relaxed and totally different from the Sam of the night before. He filled George in on his work that day, how the painting was going, how excited he was that his idea was becoming something else on the canvas.

  As he spoke, George realized that Sam obviously knew nothing of George’s plan with Asa and he wondered, uneasily, why Asa hadn’t said anything. All of a sudden he felt suffocated. He needed fresh air. He needed to get out onto the street among other people who surely were as duplicitous as he.

  “Want to go for a walk?” George asked.

  “Really?” Sam teased. “In your condition?” He curled his toes against George’s dick and giggled when he let go and it sprang back against George’s stomach.

  George glanced down at the straining material of his sweat pants. His own body had betrayed him. “I guess not,” he said, taking the beer out of Sam’s hand and putting it down on the floor next to his own.

  They made love slowly. Sam liked to talk as they touched and George was just now getting used to his erotic narration. At first, this made George feel shy, he wasn’t used to someone annotating his body parts. But now he yearned for Sam’s voice and his lightly accented whispers in his ear and he was surprised by how quickly it had become an important part of their foreplay. The only problem was that sometimes, when he spoke with Sam on the phone, Sam’s voice had that same seductive quality in his ear, and it nearly drove George crazy and made him just a little bit fearful of his body’s reaction when he was in a public place. It was like he was thirteen again and prone to a boner as easy as the wind blew.

  Afterward, they dressed and went for the walk George had proposed earlier. Only Sam wanted to take George down to his studio to show him the preliminary sketches for the new painting. Sam was excited about his new project and when he talked, he did so with his entire body. The studio was far below Canal Street, in a building that had been taken over by squatters and the landlord didn’t seem to care. Or, depending upon the story you believed, the landlord was among them, gathering material for a project of his own, his “tenants” unwitting participants. At least that was the rumor when Sam moved into the back half of the second floor. The idea of the place made George nervous. He didn’t understand how Sam could accept on faith that someone wouldn’t break into his space and steal his paintings or worse. But Sam seemed fine with everything.

  As they made their way through the bowels of Chinatown, every single part of Sam was animated and involved in the moment. The faster he talked the faster he walked, and George practically had to jog to keep up with him. He was just like he’d been earlier tonight in bed and George was envious of his passion and maybe even a little angry that he felt so much for something besides George.

  Sam took a flashlight from his pocket and shined the light on the broken staircase so George could see. Nimbly, Sam took the darkened stairs two at a time, but George was more cautious and he thought, in that moment, that the way they approached the stairs could be a metaphor for their relationship. It would probably be accurate except that George had actually skipped up three or more stairs by inviting Asa to meet his mother and then keeping it a secret from Sam.

  Sam undid the padlock on the door and went around, turning on the spotlights that hung by nails on the exposed lathe of the crumbling plaster walls. George stood in one place until he could see. When there was enough light, George was touched to see tacked to the wall above Sam’s workbench (strewn with rolled tubes of paints, tools smeared with colors, tins of nails, pads of paper, and jars of thick charcoal sticks and pencils of varying leads) a shot Sam had taken the day he’d been photographing graffiti. George was leaning against a chain-link fence festooned with garbage caught in the metal diamonds. Plastic bags, ribbons, dead balloons, shredded paper, vines, and skeletal leaves. And George. Looking grumpy and out of sorts because they had been fighting about Asa moments before. There was a smudge of blue paint to the right of George’s head, where Sam’s finger must have slipped off the thumbtack when he had adhered it to the wall.

  Sam smiled when he noticed George looking at the photograph. George said, “I look like shit.”

  “You look like you, baby,” Sam said.

  “So I always look like that?”

  “Like shit? No. You are so fucking gorgeous.” Sam grinned widely and his entire face changed. “Maybe soon you’ll let me paint you?”

  George stammered, “Why would you want to do that?”

  “Because I love you,” Sam stated matter-of-factly.

  Something in George’s chest squeezed when he heard Sam say the word love. How did it come so easily for Sam? And right then, as he considered what to say next, over Sam’s left shoulder George noticed a photo of Asa, probably taken a few years ago, his face still had the softness of childhood. He looked more like his mother, in another picture that George had seen, in a photo album, on the only night he had spent in Sam’s bed. After they had made love, they had sat up in bed, parceling out their pasts beneath the amber glow of the lamp, when George had spied the album on a shelf across the room. Curious to know everything there was about Sam, he got the album and brought it back to bed. It had wide pages and a ring binder and they had spread it out across both of their laps. While Sam narrated, George turned the pages. He remembered how Sam’s hand shook when he pointed to the picture of himself, barely recognizable with short hair, his arm tossed awkwardly around the shoulders of his wife as they squinted into the camera.

  From
the very first time in the restaurant when Sam had told him about his ex-wife, how she’d abandoned Asa at three and yet was making overtures again, noises that she wanted to all of a sudden be a part of her son’s life, Sam had been looking over his shoulder, waiting for her to show up, but so far she had not made an appearance.

  Now George couldn’t take his eyes off the photo of Asa. This would be the perfect time to tell Sam he had gone behind his back. And then he looked into Sam’s open, expectant face and thought: Oh shit. He used the word love and I’ve fucked it up again.

  Instead, he said nothing and they went home and got into bed. Sam picked up the copy of Frankenstein George had been reading earlier and came to bed with the book and wearing a pair of thick, heavy-rimmed reading glasses on the tip of his nose and nothing else. George flipped through an old issue of The New Yorker and wondered for the thousandth time why he bothered to subscribe. It only made him feel inadequate that he could never catch up and the pile of magazines haunted him. But even as he groused, the magic of the moment wasn’t lost on him: he and Sam in bed, reading, like a regular old couple.

  If only Asa accepted George as Sam’s lover, then they could live like this all the time. Every night and every morning could be even better than this. Maybe reaching out to Asa on his own hadn’t been such a bad idea. If it worked, wouldn’t Sam forgive him if this were the payoff?

  In the morning, while George still slept, Sam made him breakfast. They ate eggs and toast and coffee and followed that with a pretty heavy make-out session in George’s tiny shower that made George dangerously late for school—enough to forgo the subway for a cab. But the money spent was worth it. They’d had an extraordinary night followed by an equally wonderful morning, and for the first time in a long time George hadn’t brought up Asa’s name (because he was scared to) and Sam was relaxed because he didn’t have to rouse himself from bed and rush home in the chilly predawn hours.

  His hair was still wet, curled against his collar, and he was sure everyone knew what he’d been up to this morning as he rushed into first period. But nothing out of the ordinary happened. As it turned out, sleeping all night made a huge difference in his day, and before George knew it, the time had passed quickly and he was leaving the building when Asa fell into step beside him.

  “Did you really mean what you said yesterday?” he asked.

  George blinked. Had it really been only yesterday? “Of course,” he answered.

  “So, like, when?”

  “When?” George echoed.

  Asa abruptly stopped walking and so did George. A guy behind him kicked the back of his legs and shouted, “Dude, you need to move your ass out of the way,” only to scurry off with an apology when he realized that George was a teacher.

  “Yeah,” Asa challenged. “When?”

  “I’ll call my mother tonight and find out,” George answered.

  “Cool,” Asa said as he bounded away from George and out the door.

  “Cool,” George repeated to no one in particular, in an effort to convince himself that it really was going to be okay.

  That evening, when George finally reached his mother with news of a young fan that wanted to meet her, he could tell she was flattered, but she wanted more information. Particularly why George was so involved. Was the child sick? Because she knew about the foundation that granted sick children wishes—perhaps it would be better for George to go through them?

  George stumbled through the sentence that established Asa as the son of his lover.

  His mother sighed, but George could tell she was thrilled to be in the loop of his love life. They agreed to meet at her apartment on West 91st Street at four the following day before she and Saul flew out to Paris that night. Saul was the man behind the Dead, Again franchise. He had been the one to pluck their mother out of the actors’ graveyard and he was also her lover. Although she had not formally introduced him to George or any of his siblings in that capacity, they all knew it. Saul was a sincere guy and way too interested in them to just be their mother’s producer/director. And even though the trip to Europe was due to the wildly popular video release of Dead, Again 3, it had the air of a romantic getaway.

  Before they hung up, his mother said, “You care about him a lot, George?”

  When he didn’t answer right away, because he was trying to figure out how to tell his mother he was head-over-heels in love, she laughed and said, “That’s all I needed to know.”

  George squeezed his eyes shut tight. In a panic he called Amy and told her that he was bringing Asa to meet their mother the next day.

  Amy was so quiet George thought she’d hung up the phone and he called her name three times before she finally answered.

  “What about me and Owen?”

  “What about you and Owen?”

  “When do we get to meet Sam and Asa?”

  George rubbed his forehead. Amy with Owen had become more social than she had ever been in her life. Where before she walked a narrow path of work-school-home, now her world included Owen and his social circle and beyond. Or maybe it was just a response to their father’s death. Amy had done most of the hospital duty while the old guy manipulated her from his bed until his last breath. It was something Kate would never give Amy credit for and Finn was too out of it to realize. But George did. His voice could barely hold back his anguish at the thought of losing Sam as he cried, “Aren’t you getting ahead of yourself? After tomorrow there might not be a Sam to worry about meeting.”

  “Ach, you’ve done stupider things than this, Georgie.”

  “Maybe, maybe not, but Sam is different.”

  “Who isn’t?” she snapped. “Oh, get over yourself. If you two are still together come over Friday night and we’ll make pizza. If you’re not, come anyway and we’ll get crazy. Deal?”

  “Deal,” George agreed as he hung up the phone and retrieved Asa’s paper from his messenger bag. He might as well read it tonight so that he and Asa had something to talk about tomorrow if conversation veered off on an awkward path. He settled down onto the bed and snorted out loud. How many things could you avoid saying to each other when your teacher was sleeping with your father?

  At five the following morning, George sent Sam home with a Judas kiss. He knew he was being dramatic, but now it was complicated by Asa, who, for mysterious reasons of his own, had not shared anything with Sam about meeting George’s mother. And if he had and Sam was just playing along to see if George was going to come clean? Well, he couldn’t even go there. Sam might be older and wiser by ten years but there were more times than not when George felt the weight of the world rested on his shoulders while Sam acted blissfully unaware. Or maybe Sam’s bliss was on purpose so that he could sidestep reality. Sam purposely sought not to go down the dark path where George hid. Instead, he spent all of his time trying to coax George into the light while George resisted.

  For instance, he had been thrilled by the invitation for pizza with George’s sister and her boyfriend, and for a moment George was happy until he remembered that by the end of the week he might have sabotaged the best thing that had happened to him in forever. And while he could probably get out if it, he wouldn’t dare cancel with Asa for fear the boy would hate him even more.

  And look where he was now.

  On the uptown 1 train, George held on to the bar above where Asa sat plugged into his iPod. At first George was mildly offended, until he realized that it let him off the conversational hook. Asa had barely made eye contact with him, so he was surprised that when an elderly man got onto the train, Asa got up and offered the man his seat. George stepped aside and gave Asa hand-room on the bar and said nothing about his gesture because he didn’t want to embarrass him, but he was as proud of Asa in that moment as any father, and equally proud of Sam for instilling his son with such manners. He’d seen men his own age and older refuse to give up their seats. Now this act only made him feel worse that he was encouraging Asa to do something that his father didn’t know about and that Ge
orge hadn’t trusted enough in Sam’s parenting to abide by the request that he leave Asa to come around on his own.

  At his mother’s apartment, her suitcases packed and ready for the European trip took over most of the available floor space in the studio. She was gracious and welcoming with Asa and gave him an autographed publicity still along with a DVD and a T-shirt, leaving George to wonder at times like these, when he saw his mother in action, who she had been all those years ago when George was a little boy.

  He’d never met this woman who was asking Asa about school and what he did for fun and how he liked living in New York. George had zoned out so it was a little late before he realized she was grilling Asa about Sam. What he did, where they lived, how they had come to be in New York.

  And then George heard her ask, “How do you like having George for a teacher?”

  “He’s great,” Asa said. “No matter how dull the book he always seems to relate it to today, you know?” He avoided looking at George when he said, “Everyone likes him.”

  George’s mother laughed. “Everyone has always liked him. George is just that kind of guy, don’t you think?”

  Unless he’s sleeping with your father, George thought miserably as Asa gave a vague nod of agreement and asked to use the bathroom.

  As soon as he was out of earshot, George hissed, “Mom, stop the interrogation.”

  “What?” she asked innocently as she smoothed down her pants. “I just wanted to know a little about him. He obviously knows a lot about me.”

  “He knows the psycho character you play, not you.” He paused. “There’s a difference, right?”

  “You would think,” she said, “but then I’ve met a few weirdos.”

  “Asa’s not weird.” He offered the story of how Asa gave up his seat on the train as if she needed proof that he had been raised well, which in turn would mean that George had chosen well.

  “I never meant Asa, George,” she said with a slight smile. “You sound like a parent, by the way.”