Home or, The European
/J.M. Parker
When the poor exiles, every pleasure past,
Hung round their bowers, and fondly looked their last
- Oliver Goldsmith, “The Deserted Village”
“I don’t get it,” Nathan said, setting two carefully-balanced beers down between them.
“When people in Paris are interested, they look at you. When they aren’t, they don’t. Here, they all stare, but it doesn’t seem to mean anything.”
“Here? Tonight?” Julia asked. Her hair, under the club’s blue neon, Nathan noticed, was somewhat blonder than a few years earlier.
“Here tonight, at the grocery store. In general.”
“Well, you don’t exactly fit in,” Julia mused.
“I’m making an effort.” Nathan’s chin fell, following Julia’s gaze at his t-shirt and polar fleece, following her gaze toward his jeans and hiking boots. A week earlier, as somewhere below the airport sixty pounds of books, clothes and electronics were pulled toward the carousel, he had come off a plane, a pair of kidskin gloves stuffed in a pocket, overjoyed to see her, not having slept or smoked in fourteen hours, and kissed her on each cheek, something he’d never done before, but which Julia had found pleasantly appropriate. Julia looked back up at his face now. There was nothing remarkable about it, he saw her register. It was reasonably handsome. She had known it since high school. “I even untucked my shirttail,” Nathan said.
“It’s not so much the clothes,” Julia said, fitting places for her words between beats, as the club’s music rose. “It’s more. Hair. Maybe. Posture.”
“What should I do to my hair?” asked Nathan. “It’s normal hair.”
“It isn’t abnormal hair. But look around.” Julia nodded toward the barstools behind him. “There’s a lot you’d have to do. Gain forty pounds, get a buzz cut, some glasses. Even dressed like them, you’d look like yourself in bad clothes, but it wouldn’t change that much.”
“And I still wouldn’t get picked up.”
“I said you’d fit in. They probably just don’t know what to make of you.”
“I’m even growing a beard,” Nathan said, fishing for compliments on his third beer, something he imagined best done by systematically deflecting them.
“That’s not really a beard,” said Julia, on a third beer herself, and humoring him. “It’s more like some kind of Italian five o’clock shadow.”
“But tell me what I’m wearing isn’t completely normal American suburban guy, circa 2000.”
“Yeah. Normal American suburban Calvin Klein model guy. Face it. You could go home with any one of them if you wanted to. You just don’t want to.”
Nathan was silent.
“I don’t blame you. Notice I’m not dating anyone at the moment.”
“There must be cute guys in this town.”
“There are a few.” Julia smiled. “But even if I hooked up with them, I’ve been thinking lately, do I really want to? I mean, if I fell in love and they didn’t want to move, then moving would be hard for me. And I have decided to move,” she said, having likewise moved the subject back to herself. He had changed it on returning from the bar, where the lack of people was frustrating, then further frustrating as he realized the only way to make the experience agreeable was to drink more than he would have liked, for which he was going to have to pay money.
Nathan’s heart sank whenever he thought of money. Its uncontrollable ebb was a morose subject. It had always been something―earned or bought with something else―that came, then seemed to pass through him. Even thinking of it now, in a good humor as the music pounded louder from the bar, Nathan rarely thought of making it, but only of trying to keep it. He prided himself on this earnest familial urge to protect it, but never found himself in a position to staunch its flow. At twenty-nine, both his savings and debts left him equally uncomfortable. “I mean,” Julia was saying, “I do miss talking and sex and restaurants.”
They looked up as a boy at the next table rose with swaying hips, as if unable to resist the music any longer, to dance alone against the club’s back wall―a skinny boy, face invisible. “Why is it gay men feel the need to fulfill this kind of stereotype?” Julia asked.
“I can’t imagine anyone else dancing to this crap, can you?”
“It’s a stage,” Nathan said. “He’s figured out he’s gay, and decided that’s good, so anything ‘gay’ must be good.”
“You never went through that stage.”
“I’m a terrible dancer.” They sat quiet for a minute, fingering their newspapers, then remembering it was too dark to read.
“Do you see Justin like that?” Nathan asked.
“Justin hams it up a little.”
“Ooof,” said Nathan, blowing through his lips with an exasperated and decidedly foreign expression. “It’s better when he’s around.”
Julia’s silence gave Nathan the impression the conversation he wanted to pursue wouldn’t be easily broached without more alcohol, so he let Julia move it back to herself: her reimmersion in Southern manners, her eagerness to get back to a city where a woman could speak more bluntly to waiters and hail a taxi. Julia’s mother’s horrified reaction to a brusque riposte she’d offered a waiter the week after her return had marked her and now, making efforts, she found cordiality a creeping habit. Perhaps, she worried, she’d overcompensated by becoming overly polite.
Nathan drove her home. “Should I come up?” he asked outside her building.
“If you want to.”
“That was a no. You’re overcompensating.”
Julia laughed, pushing open the car door. “I should probably get some sleep. You’ve got the key if you need somewhere quiet to study this week.”
Climbing up from the curb, she opened the building’s door. In a charming pocket of modestly-successful urban renewal, Julia’s apartment approximated her college dorm room, though somewhat more neat and with real furniture unearthed from her mother’s garage. It felt either cramped or expansive, depending on the city one had just come from or the relatives’ homes one had been squatting on return. By her own standards it was cavernous. Nights alone, she tended to shelter in a corner of the sofa by her stepfather’s fake Tiffany reading lamp. Pouring a wheatgrass shot from the refrigerator, she pulled out the local gay newspaper she’d stuck in her purse at the bar, turning its pages out of blank curiosity―there were a scanty six. Frowning to swallow her juice, she pored over its classified ads: headless barrel-chested figures flexed in newsprint. Her first thought had been to look for Justin. But there was no one here for Justin. There was no one here for Nathan. Taking the paper to the bedroom, she announced herself to her bed sheets, leaving its pages to drop to the nightstand.
The main thing he’d learned in two weeks of repatriation, Nathan told himself, driving toward his parents’ suburb, was that coming home was dangerous to home itself. In the first week back, things had resonated deeply here among the scenery of his childhood. Buildings, parks, trees appeared, as if on an otherwise regular line of text, someone had run a highlighter pen over them, or circled them in black, looming like objects in Munch paintings, not things or places but characters, alive with personality and presence. That week in the theater.
At the theater he’d wanted them to marvel that the barber shop across the street hadn’t changed. As soon as he’d said it, it all flattened out in the wake of his words, his own feelings understatements once put into language, each one a stage prop. It’s easy to revisit a place―to replace―with the eyes of childhood for a single afternoon.
Harder to keep one’s eyes fixed for a month. Look too close, too often, verbalize your sensations, and your own childhood gets flattened.
He didn’t like flattening things, but Nathan detested feeling sentimental. With sensations like strange volumes in his mouth, he walked carefully. If they became too strong or sentimental, he flattened them, letting them slide on the tip of his tongue. Buildings, rooms, views, bridges, church steeples weren’t the same, flattened. He reassured himself, imagining it might make them more mobile and portable. Like Orthodox icons packable in a suitcase. In this way, everything in America began to feel smaller, more fragile. It was a fair trade: When he thought of Paris now, he had flattened feelings, stripped of any logic they’d had in proximity to places and people attached to them.
Living with his parents was a benign, constant irritation. His brother’s Labrador, senile and spoiled in five years’ absence, left early morning jogs around the pond solitary. The family library had lost its charm. From the kitchen phone he called Paris, and the European asked, “Where are you?”
“At my parents’.”
“I thought you were with your friend Joolee-ah.”
“It’s comfortable here. I have my bed.”
“You like comfort, you bourgeois.”
“I have my brother’s room, too.”
“So a room for studying and another for throwing your clothes in. But when do you come back?” he asked.
Whatever the answer, the truth was that Nathan spent most of his time at Julia’s, or like tonight, driving along the same roads he’d cruised in high school.
Justin’s apartment was down the hall from Julia’s. The week before, standing in Julia’s kitchen, Justin had asked if he could kiss him.
Nathan had pretended not to hear. Surprisingly, Justin, like people here, tended to live by a rote series of blind circumstances. This displeased him. Europeans lived in a world where lucky chances came less often than to Americans.
Still, Nathan found himself slipping into this world of circumstance, convincing himself things were the result of his own schemes. Disliking circumstance, as Justin woke up the next morning, Nathan’s first reaction to Justin’s sleepy surprise (watching his own presence dawn over Justin, eyes still shut, a smile gradually creeping over his face) was to imagine he (or even Julia) had planned this. But no one had.
He was trying to decide what to do. He had a certain (Calvinistic, he chastised himself) belief that everything was always for the best if you made it so. Waking up in Justin’s bed, watching slow dawning surprise fall across Justin’s half-sleeping face, Nathan had hesitated. Up for an hour already, grateful the corner gas station took credit cards for hot chocolate, Nathan had come back to bed to describe the sun in the park, the station clerk and the kids in the parking lot. Justin stretched, taking a sip of the chocolate with the embarrassed, delighted smile of people watched with adoration.
It had been a pleasant evening, as far as Nathan remembered. No reason to make the morning after anything less than pleasant.
“You’re ninety-five percent evil,” Justin said, an eye flickering open.
“How so?” Nathan asked.
“You do everything just the way you would if you wanted to keep me in bed all day.”
“I’ll work on the other five percent.”
“It looks like a nice day,” Justin said, sunlight glint on Justin’s nape, peeking round Nathan at the window.
“It’s awful out there,” Nathan answered, closing the blinds.
Over breakfast, Justin had described his boyfriend (a framed photo, face-down the night before, now graced Justin’s nightstand upright). Nathan listened politely, forgetting how to function without a cultural barrier, a foil without which he wasn’t himself anymore, trying to convince himself Justin’s behavior was less calculated than a misunderstanding of manners. If naïve, that might itself be endearing. Uninterested in Justin’s boyfriend, whoever he was, wherever he lived, Nathan assumed Justin, like himself, was used to having his fingers kissed, ears fondled, yet was still curious to see it happening. Verbal flattery fell flat in English. He tried not to look into Justin’s eyes.
“How long are you staying in America?” Justin asked, and Nathan smoothed Justin’s forehead, asking him not to rumple it before he saw him again.
Not far from the front door, across the park’s shrubbery, hung an auditorium where Nathan had seen plays as a child. Its Greek portico was only a short drive up the hill. From Julia’s and Justin’s lawn, he thought of going up there. The little lawn around its front, its view through the oaks receding down the hill toward the park, Doric columns to lean against, the city’s skyline laid out below. From across the park, the building looked like all his memories of it encapsulated, iconic. But up close the auditorium would seem a dollhouse. He imagined flattening it, going to sit on its steps. Not flattening it was a conscious act of pity. Dishonest, too. To preserve a place so grand in his mind. When a moment on its steps might wash it away. Childhood’s monuments had enjoyed a long respite, not from Nathan’s thoughts (they remained, always, points of navigation, wherever he went), but from being probed at close physical proximity. Never quite retro-fitted to the insights of his early twenties, they sat―he saw they should―as beacons of indescribable but certain meaning, dried for preservation, on which any future rested. Pressed between the pages of a book, frail as new buds.
In the car, Nathan took the street’s upward curve with a burst of speed, the hill a familiar contour in his stomach, rising toward it, veering softly downhill, gravity and the engine’s thrum, equal forces before the brake pulls them to unison at the hill’s base, where his father, for so many mornings, had dropped him off at school. Level road pulled evenly on again, around another bend to the street that led, though a series of stoplights, home. In some French magazine, he’d read that after the age of forty, people have to choose between keeping their face or their figure. The simplicity of the formula was chilling. The idea of becoming faceless charmed, then haunted him by turns.
A roll of wrapping paper drooped across the Vanity Fairs on Julia’s coffee table. The local paper spread across an aging New Yorker. Nathan lay outstretched, legs crossed, listening to Julia’s voice from behind the bathroom door. “He’s confused enough as it is,” she was saying.
“You said he liked lovers who live miles away.”
“There is that.” Julia popped her head around the door with a toothbrush for a moment before returning to the bathroom mirror. “He’s confused over someone three states away. All he needs is you coming waltzing in from Paris and leaving him to pine away.”
“Pining over one, he could just as well pine over two,” Nathan suggested.
“And that would be one more person I’d hear him moaning about for the next six months,” Julia’s voice rang. “Not to mention the fact that I’m going to miss you, too.” She smiled, coming back into the bedroom.
Nathan, outstretched on the bed, had been tossing Julia’s childhood teddy bear back and forth between his arms. As the bear went flying over the footboard, in an outburst of explicatives, Nathan soared to the foot of the bed, swooping the bear up, staring at its face in disbelief. “Jesus, I hope I remember my CPR.” He flung the bear on the bedspread, pumping it rhythmically with his fists.
“Is he going to be all right?”
“Oh, god, Ben, you’ve got to pull through.” Twisting its head sideways, mimicking gasps, Nathan jerked the bear while making progressively violent vomiting noises. “It’s probably just a concussion. I think he’s going to survive.”
“Oh my god.”
“You all right, buddy?”
“Looks like he’s breathing again,” Julia said distractedly, turning to the closet.
“Ben has a big booger hanging out of his nose,” Nathan said, holding the bear up, inspecting it suspiciously.
“That’s not a booger,” said Julia. “It’s part of his lips that’s coming off.”
“What do you call that part of a bear’s lips?”
“I don’t know.”
“He’s hare-lipped.”
“My bear is not hare-lipped. And you’d better not pull his mouth off.” She’d gone back to the bathroom mirror.
“Would he die?” Nathan asked.
“Probably not right away,” Julia called.
“You could sew it back on.”
“That would be a pain. Plus it would hurt him terribly.”
“He wouldn’t feel it. Stuffed bears don’t feel anything.”
“I thought we were already anthropomorphizing this bear to a certain extent.”
“Not to that extent.” Nathan smiled a smile, a recent innovation still needing work, suggesting more sweetness and more guile than he actually possessed, a smile learned while bargaining for things in places where he didn’t speak the language. “If I can get Justin to stop talking about this guy in Ohio, do I have your permission to continue?”
“You won’t.”
“But if I can?”
“He’s already in love with someone on the other side of the country. The last thing he needs is someone on the other side of an ocean.”
“He could consolidate.”
“Emotional consolidation? Is that what this is to you?”
“It would make everything simpler for everyone.”
From the bathroom, Julia’s voice took on a high, slightly false pitch, losing interest in the argument, taking a more moralistic tone than she intended, simply to end it. “You’re not good for him. Justin needs someone who lives in the same city. For once in his life.”
“Come on. I’m making a bet.”
“Is there no emotion in this whole scenario for you?”
“Oh, so I’m some heartless monster who’s out to seduce your harmless neighbor. I could fall in love, too. He started it, after all.”
Julia stepped back into the bedroom, holding a necklace above her chest. “This one?”
“A big gold one.”
“I like this one, but I don’t think it’s going to do.”
“Wear your Christmas necklace.” Nathan leaned back into the pillows.
“I’m saving it for Christmas.”
Taking the bear from Nathan’s arms, she tucked it carefully in beside him. “You try and get some rest, buddy,” Nathan cooed next to him.
“He isn’t going to think much of you if you keep getting him drunk and sleeping with him.”
“That’s not a problem. He gets drunk himself. I probably ought to spend more time on conversation. Unfortunately he’s one of those people who likes getting out of bed in the morning.”
“Fancy that,” said Julia. “I have a bet. I bet you can’t get yourself to fall in love with him.”
“Now there’s a challenge.” Nathan thought for a minute. “Not that there’s anything not to like about him.”
“Your theory about blue sheets does work,” she said, looking down. “Your eyes are very blue.”
It was a stroke of genius, Nathan admitted. “My mother and I searched three department stores to find the perfect shade for my own pied-à-terre. Imagine the looks you get―from sales clerks and from your mother―asking for a mirror in the bedding section of house wares.”
“But your eyes are always blue.”
“With the right bedspread I can make them green. But someone likes blue.”
“Are you coming shopping?”
“I need a nap,” Nathan said. “My great-aunt just got in. You remember my energetic Aunt Polly from Scarsdale.”
“Will you be around tonight?” Julia was in the hall, shuffling with her purse.
“Much as I would love to hang Christmas ornaments with your beloved step-siblings, I must go home and be entertaining for once. And need a nap.”
“My stepfather still makes those eggnogs strong, if you want to stop by later.”
“Duty before pleasure, I fear.” Leaning into a pillow, Nathan tried to bring to mind the lyrics of a song, fretting vaguely at his French, chanting mindless Franco-pop, enjoying the sound of his own voice. He’d smoked cigarettes, and it was low and husky. He heard the door latch behind her.
“You’re not in love,” Julia said that week. “I don’t think you know what love means.”
They were leaving the mall. On the way out Nathan had ordered new glasses. “I’ve never seen anyone pick out a pair of glasses so fast,” she said in the car. “But maybe I’ve just never shopped for glasses with a boy.”
“Did you like them?”
“The color was off. I liked them from a distance, but not up close.”
“Well,” Nathan said, leaning toward her with a mock whisper, “I’ll take them off when I get up close.”
“Ooh baby.” She smiled, starting the car. “You just think everyone ought to fall in love with you, and Justin’s spoiling your theory of how the world runs itself.”
“That’s a reasonable assessment. Want to get some coffee?”
“Yeah.”
The café was big, but they couldn’t find a table that suited them both. The smoking section was at the barista’s counter. The barista himself was in an armchair with two young women on his knees. The entrance was too crowded. The barista was speaking to the two young women. “How old are you, Destiny?” He paused to guess. “Nineteen.”
Destiny stared at him as if just realizing he was raving mad. “I’ll be twenty-one on Saturday.”
“On Christmas,” nodded Destiny’s sister.
Nathan hadn’t gone out all week. His great-aunt had accidentally filled a car with diesel when he hadn’t gone with her to the gas station, and the house had been drained him to a semi-stupor for several days. Julia flipped through a magazine.
“Everyone is so young here,” he said.
“It’s three in the afternoon. The rest of them work. Unlike yourself,” she murmured. Though unsure to what the definition of “sabbatical” might technically extend, she harbored vague notions it didn’t involve Nathan’s teaching English at an upscale Parisian unemployment center.
“It’s freelance,” he said. “Most teachers take off July or August. I’m taking December, January and February.”
Teapots steamed on the table as their read their papers. Julia finished the horoscopes. The rest of the paper was comics, five pages of editorials, and personal ads, from which she read aloud the most humorous.
“I’m obsessed with him,” Nathan said at length. “Is it getting tiresome?”
Julia pulled her paper toward her face. “It is.”
“I know.”
“You just expect,” she said, pulling her tea behind the paper, “People want to have a relationship with you, and if they don’t, you act shocked. People sometimes have perfectly good reasons for not wanting to be in relationships.”
“Like what? I’ve never wanted not to be in one.”
“Well, I’ve told you why I wouldn’t want a relationship now. I’d be a wreck. But then you’ve had more experience than I have . . . changing tracks.”
“Don’t say that.”
Destiny dismounted and the barista rose. Nathan ordered two glasses of wine.
“Do you really want wine at three in the afternoon?”
“It’s after three.” He left his glass alone until she had finished hers. Then said, “What exactly did you tell him about me?”
“With him, he asks about you,” Julia said. “With you, you ask what I told him about you.” He slid the wine toward her with a nervous tap. “I used to actually have real conversations with each of you. Now it’s always all this.”
“I know.”
“Can we leave the subject for a week?”
“But he has this misplaced impression I’m insincere.”
“He doesn’t think that. He doesn’t want to start something with someone who lives on another continent.”
“If I said I was staying, I’d have to stop being sincere. Where do I lose more points?” Southerners, like Europeans, in his experience, were swayed by words, even their own words, especially their own, and once a thing was spoken, their hearts were like the air between a harp’s strings: empty, perhaps, but tremoring. Midwesterners, unused to plucking their own heartstrings, were less likely to have them plucked.
The rest of the conversation revealed Justin’s boyfriend had plans to come down from Ohio after Christmas.
“Why are you so intent on this boy?” she asked Nathan.
“Maybe I’m looking for a reason to stay here,” he said.
“If that’s true, it’s sad. Sad for you, and sad for whoever you’re seeing over there.”
“So,” Nathan said. “I’ll give him up.”
Julia smiled at him from across the newspaper. “That would be wise.” Finishing her wine, she smiled. “He likes you. I didn’t tell him anything too terrible.” On their way out the door she noticed Nathan hadn’t touched his own glass.
Nathan tried to keep places in memory. For him, moving was intrinsic to growing up. Hehadn’t thought of himself as having been an adult until he had left home, gauging changes in his life by moves made from there. Moving induced change, a matter of debate how much of it was real change, and how much simply seeing yourself against a new background. But it felt like change, and acted like change. That fall, he’d gone with a friend to unload some last remnants from the basement of the friend’s own childhood apartment, now up for sale, leaving the apartment empty. “Here,” the friend had said at the window, rubbing the sill, “the shutters on the windows were wood, real wood, lacquered. They were real wood shutters―” They’d found boxes of toy cars in the basement, tiny American matchbox cars. Nathan had picked up and held the matchbox cars.
Taking daily routes through Paris, by foot or bus or train, Nathan had passed the same buildings, streets, passed them over and over, across months of different recurring thoughts, provoked by, corresponding to, or simply in sync with the buildings passing by. Chains of thought linked to places stable as the facades, like fossils, a petrified support for his own traces.
New places should inspire new trains of thought. Familiar places should trigger familiar ones. Now he found himself remodeling a familiar landscape with new thoughts. Like a kind of undermining of himself.
Julia, coming home one evening after New Year, found NPR playing on the radio. A half-dozen cups of half-drunk coffee punctuated piles of books sprawled across her kitchen table. She flipped off the radio. The back door hung open to a mild January’s slow sunset. From the balcony, she saw Justin’s truck in the lot below, freshly washed, the garden hose sprawled along the grass and sudsy puddles pooling across the patio. Nathan and Justin sat on the garden wall below it. “Well hey,” she said, going down to them, crossing the brick walk for a hug.
“He’s famous for standing people up,” Julia said later that week.
“I’m famous for standing people up,” said Nathan.
“You do sort of begin to remind people of each other that way. His boyfriend is going to show up any day now.”
“He says.”
“Rumor has it.”
“Rumor has it.”
Wednesday and Thursday passed. Friday they had dinner with Julia’s office mates. Saturday there was a gallery hop downtown. Nathan had an unfamiliar sensation of nothing seeming to matter. They watched films at Julia’s. During silences, they could hear Justin moving furniture in the room next door. At midnight, Nathan paused in the stairwell, hesitating to knock at Justin’s before going downstairs. A sudden stark silence fell behind the door as he did. He went down the stairs. As the thick thud of the car door sounded behind him and he started the engine, a window opened wide upstairs in the house. Then a hand at the open upper window, waving frenetically, his face, mouth open, static, a voice in the chill air, muted by the car’s frosted glass.
Nathan found Justin cooking chicken soup the next day, the apartment taking on a salty, homey smell Nathan hated. To avoid it, he stood very still, nose to the window panes, where a cushion of cold outside air vibrated close at the glass. Leaves lay piled along the sidewalk. A taxi paused, letting out a boy in a dark coat, pulling a huge brown duffel bag from the car seat after him.
“That’s him,” Justin called from the kitchen, where he, too, had been standing to watch from a window.
As Justin’s phrase took sense, the room’s sounds flattened like leaves crushed in a flower press. A static panic padded the room. Each corner and piece of furniture seemed frozen for a moment. Whether this came from Justin or from himself, Nathan couldn’t have said―it had no visible effect beyond the window panes, where the figure on the sidewalk, hoisting his bag to his shoulder, placidly climbed the steps toward the house between the fallen leaves.
Moving to the door, Nathan pulled it open. Stepping out to the stairwell landing, he pressed his back to the door. Its latch let out a soft, full, reassuring tock from the wood’s inner workings behind him, echoing on the landing, resonating so richly in the stairwell that he felt its vibration not only through his fingertips on the door, but in his own mouth, voluminous as his tongue.
J.M. Parker’s fiction has appeared in Chelsea Station, Foglifter, Frank, Gertrude, ISLE, SAND, and Segue, among other journals, been reprinted in Best Gay Stories 2015, and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His first novel, A Budget Traveler’s Guide to the Museums of Europe, was published in 2017, and his volume of translated poetry, Blossoms in Snow: Austrian Refugee Poets in Manhattan, is just out with the University of New Orleans Press. His second novel Seattle or, In the Meantime was recently published by Beautiful Dreamer Press. He lives in Salzburg, Austria, where he teaches creative writing and American studies.
