Flashback

LaVieEnRose

I remember the first time I ever came to New York.

I was sixteen. Dad had won some money at the track, said it was time Brian and I got some fucking culture, for God's sake. We drove, and he cursed at the traffic. Mom wore gloves and Brian complained that he was carsick and Dad complained about Brian, and I sat there behind Daddy and looked out the window and imagined the millions of other lives happening in this city, all these tiny windows holding families with different stories.

All the other things I could have been.

Mom and Dad took us to one museum and one dinner and then had a drunk fight back at the hotel room, and when the first vase flew across the room I took Brian out and we stopped in some alleway and shared a joint he'd gotten from one of his no-good eighth-grade friends. He held his breath for longer than I could, and while he let it out, he told me he was gay. He'd just turned eleven.

**

The last Saturday in April of 2013 was my first time coming back here since. I had the address I'd gotten from my mother's funeral registry and nothing else, not even a change of clothes, which I couldn't imagine I'd need anyway, since I doubted Brian would be offering to let me stay the night.

I gave a taxi driver the address of the building and fiddled with my hands as he weaved through traffic. I remembered my mother's gloves.

Brian's building was on this beautiful, tree-lined block close to the park, with a view of the water on the other side. I told the doorman I was Brian Kinney's sister, and he nodded towards the elevator and said, “Remember to use the doorbell.” I didn't know what to make of that, but there was a small, framed sign on their door that said Please ring the bell. So I did.

There was no answer for a while, but just as I was about to leave, the door opened, and there was Justin, and I realized I had no idea why I'd just rung the bell when my brother's partner is Deaf.

I'd met Justin officially, such as it was, at Mother's funeral, but I'd been familiar with him beforehand. He and Brian had been together for a long time, after all, and he'd been involved in that whole...regrettable affair with John. I'd looked him up on occasion and seen articles about him taking the New York art scene by storm. Interviews where he'd talked about his partner, and about losing his hearing.

I didn't know any sign language. I didn't even know if he'd recognize me.

But he did, I could tell right away. He narrowed his eyes at me and pointed behind him and shook his head.

I said, “I'm sorry, I didn't mean to...”

He watched my mouth carefully, then held out a finger for me to wait and took his phone out of his pocket. He typed something on it and handed it to me: Brian's not here.

“Oh. I'm sorry, I...” I had no idea where to go. I hadn't even considered this. Jesus, Claire. “I'll come back.”

I started to walk away, but he sighed and put his hand on my arm, then reached into his pocket and took out his wallet.

It took me a second to realize what he was doing. “No, no, stop. Jesus. I don't want your money.” God, he looked half my age. The entire thing was so humiliating, and I couldn't believe I'd come here, and all I wanted in the world was to get out of that hallway as quickly as possible and pretend this had never happened.

But for some reason I didn't keep walking, and Justin kept studying me, and after a minute he stepped sideways out of the doorway, nodded to the apartment.

“Are you sure?” I said. “I don't want to...”

He shrugged and went inside, leaving the door open, and I...had nowhere else to go. I followed and shut the door behind me and looked around a surprisingly bright entryway into a surprisingly massive apartment. It was like of those places you see in shows about New York and everyone goes off about how the apartments aren't actually that big...well, here this one was. It was bigger than Brian's place back in Pittsburgh, and the furniture looked just as expensive but besides that it couldn't have been more different.

Everything was colorful, from the bright red front door to the yellow accent wall in the living room to the art hanging just about everywhere, presumably Justin's. There were photos on the refrigerator of people I recognized from Pittsburgh—and Michael, of course I knew Michael—and a couple I didn't know but thought I'd seen at Mother's funeral. There were a few photos spread out on the kitchen counter that looked like they were from somewhere in Europe. There was one of Brian. He looked happy.

It was messier than I'd expected; Brian's always been fastidious. There were dirty plates in the sink and laundry basket sitting on a chair in the living room and a collection of empty glasses on the coffee table along with a box of tissues, an inhaler, and a small stuffed animal. And a baby monitor.

A baby?

He must have been sitting. Aside from the stuffed animal, nothing here said baby, and even though of course I knew Brian had a son—I rarely saw him, but I sent him a Christmas present every year—I couldn't imagine him actually raising a kid.

But then again, I couldn't have imagined him living in a place with primary colors, photographs, and a boyfriend, either.

Justin lightly knocked on the wall, and I looked at him. He made a cup with his hand and raised it to his mouth, eyebrows raised.

“Oh, sure, um...”

He held three fingers to his chin.

“I don't...”

He crossed to the refrigerator and opened it and held up a pitcher of water.

“Oh. Sure, thank you.”

He nodded and filled two glasses, and I noticed his hand shook as he lifted the pitcher, and I wondered if I was making him nervous. I gave him a little space and looked around the living room, touching the spines of the books on their shelves—mystery novels, mostly, and art books, fashion retrospectives, tons of essay collections—and drifting over to this turquoise and gold painting hanging next to it. I heard Justin come out of the kitchen, and he handed me a glass when I turned around.

“Is this yours?” I asked him.

He flattened his palm on his chest, eyebrows up.

“Yeah.”

He nodded.

“It's beautiful.”

He smiled and mouthed, “Thank you,” then gestured towards the couch. I sat down, feeling impossibly awkward.

I said. “I'm sorry, do you know...when Brian will be home?”

He watched me, but I could tell from the almost wince on his face that he didn't understand.

“Brian?” I said again.

Justin nodded.

“Back.” I pointed around us. “Here.”

Justin nodded and went over to the clock on the wall and pointed to the three. A little under an hour. Okay. I could do this. Anyone can be in an impossibly awkward situation for an hour. But before either of us had to come up with some way to fill the silence, a baby started crying somewhere behind me.

Justin, of course, didn't react, but I said, “Oh, there's—” and he frowned, but then the baby monitor on the coffee table started flashing, and he pointed to his ear, then behind me, and nodded with a small smile before he disappeared to go check on the baby. I picked up the baby monitor and looked at it. I had no idea they made things like this. That must have been how he knew the doorbell rang, I realized. Still a Deaf babysitter seemed like a strange choice. What was he going to do in an emergency?

He came out a minute later holding a very small baby, couldn't have been older than a month, still screaming her lungs out. He smiled at me kind of sheepishly while he bounced her. She had a ton of hair for such a little thing, a little blonde curl sticking to her forehead, and she kicked her feet in frustration.

“Well, look at this,” I said, without even meaning to. “Hi there. Aren't you beautiful? Mad, but beautiful.”

Justin pointed to his ear and scrunched up his face.

“Loud?” I said. “Yeah, she's loud.”

He grinned, then poked her chest a little and did a thumbs-up.

“Good lungs? I would say so.”

He kissed her forehead a few times, signed something to her with his hand to his forehead, not that she was watching, then brought her into the kitchen and I saw him trying to juggle her and the refrigerator door, so I got up and followed. He pointed to a bottle sitting in the door, and I nodded and took it out to microwave it.

And for some reason I just started talking. Maybe because the baby was screaming so loudly that he wouldn't have been able to hear me anyway, maybe just because I felt so goddamn awkward and I that's when I tend to babble or maybe...I don't know. There's something about looking at a baby. “I remember when Brian was a baby, we didn't have a microwave. Had to heat milk up on the stove. Took forever, and he would scream and scream...” I looked at him. “I don't know if your mother would have had one. I'm not sure how old you are. You can't be as young as you look.”

He just watched me, bouncing the baby.

“Sorry,” I said.

He shrugged a little.

“Do you have...” I said, and I mimed writing, and he pointed to the counter, where I found a pad of paper and a pen. He followed me over, and I was distracted for a minute by the photographs on here. Flamenco dancers. A cathedral. Justin kissing Brian's cheek while Brian held the camera and made a face.

I wrote, How old is she?

He held up five fingers.

“Five weeks?”

He nodded.

Do you take care of her a lot? I wrote.

He shook his head and shifted her onto his shoulder. When her parents go back to work I will, he wrote. Right now they're staying home with her. He paused. This is actually my first time having her alone. I used to take care of my sister, but that was a long time ago. And I was nine, so they didn't really expect me to do much.

I remembered being six years old, my mother shoving a squirming, screaming bundle in my arms— just for a minute, Claire, can you please contribute to this family for one minute, I just need to lie down.

The microwave beeped, and I got the bottle out of the microwave and handed it to him. He tested the temperature on the inside of his wrist and immediately rinsed it off in the sink, and I noticed a few small red spots on different parts of his arm. He saw me looking and just shrugged a little.

He sat down with the baby in one of the kitchen chairs and tried to feed her, but she was still fussing and kicking and not cooperating, and Justin kept trying to aim the bottle at her mouth but she kept squirming away. He put the bottle down and stroked her hair a little, and caught one of her tiny hands in his and kissed it, but she didn't calm down.

I watched him struggle until I couldn't stand it anymore. I pulled up a chair in front of them, then touched Justin's arm and nodded towards the baby, “Can I...?”

He looked confused. I held out my hands.

He hesitated, for a second, but he handed me the baby.

God, I couldn't remember when I'd last held one, but it felt like coming home, have a little one squirming around in my arms. “Okay, see?” I said to Justin, and I brushed the baby's cheek with the bottle nipple and waited for her to turn her mouth right to it. “Just like that.”

Justin took her foot and shook it gently while she drank. The baby looked up at me, and she had the most beautiful blue eyes I'd ever seen, and I looked up at Justin and he was looking at me too and...well. Of course I knew. She didn't actually look much like him—she had his coloring, but the shape of her face was different, her chin and her nose—but those eyes were unmistakable.

“She's yours, isn't she?” I said.

He tilted his head, looking at me, and I remembered what he'd done earlier when I asked him if the painting was his, that flat hand on his chest. I pointed to the baby, then held my hand out to him the same way.

He smiled and nodded.

“What's her name?” I asked.

Justin got up and got the paper and pencil from the counter. I tucked the baby into my arm while she drank. He sat down next to me, but the pencil skittered on the page, and he stopped and tucked his hand into his pocket. I thought maybe he didn't understand me, so I picked up the pencil to write the question down, but he shook his head and stopped me and held up a finger on his left hand. After a minute he took his hand out of his pocket, stretched it, and wrote, Janie, his handwriting a little worse than it had been before.

“Janie.” I said. I petted her hair while she drank. “Hi, Janie. You're beautiful.”

Justin looked like he was about to write something, but he just played with her foot instead.

But she doesn't live here? I wrote down. Janie finished her bottle, and I said, “Uh, do you have a cloth, or...”

He squinted at me for a second, then snapped his fingers with this jubilant sort of expression, and...okay. I got it, right there. It was a good smile. He got up and got a washcloth and handed it to me, and I turned Janie over my shoulder to burp her. He sat down and reached for a little, but I said, “No, it's fine, I don't think you need more of those hives.” I don't think he got it, but he settled back in his chair anyway.

She lives with her moms, Justin wrote. I don't have custody or anything like that. Like Brian with Gus.

I stared at the word moms for a long time, keeping my face as neutral as I could, but when I looked up at Justin I knew he knew what I was thinking, and he was just waiting to see if I was going to say it.

But I can't help it. I was holding this beautiful baby, and it was heartbreaking that she was starting out life already with something so untraditional. That her father was going to be a guy who couldn't figure out how to feed her when she was over a month old, and she was going to have to live her whole life explaining her life to people, and that her first example of a great love was going to be...

Justin was still waiting.

I said, “I'm sorry, I just...” and he tapped his finger on the paper, which gave me a minute to think about what I wanted to say. And I'm glad it did.

I know I'm disappointing to you, I wrote.

Justin studied the paper for a long moment, and I finished burping Janie and brought her back down into my arms.

And then Justin cleared his throat, which startled the hell out of me, but not as much as when he said, “You know, I'm a lot more patient than Brian is.”

It would be hard not to be, I wrote, and he smiled at me.

**

“So this is where we stayed,” Justin said. We were sitting on the floor of the living room, Janie on her back on a blanket. Justin passed me a photograph. “They're called paradores, and it's like hotels but some of them are inside castles or in palaces or other old places, so instead of just staying in some building you're built into the cities. So it meant we could travel around to all these different places and really see all of them.” He showed me another picture of this amazing view off the side of a cliff. “We had to drive on all these tiny roads on these cliffs like this, and every time Brian took his hands off the wheel to sign I would scream at him.”

It was still hard for me to imagine Brian signing, even though I'd seen a bit of it at the funeral. Was learning sign language hard? I wrote down on the piece of paper we were rapidly filling up.

“Yeah,” he said simply. He showed me another picture. “Here, Brian with Janie the day after she was born. That's our...my sister with him.”

Brian was sitting in an arm chair at the hospital looking down at the newborn's face, and he looked absolutely mesmerized. I remembered feeling that way when my sons were born. Thinking of all the opportunities that were still out there for them. All the different people they could grow up to be.

And Brian. I remembered being six years old, holding that baby in the kitchen, telling him it was going to get better.

I wish I'd had a piece of paper and a minute to pause back in this same city all those years ago, because when he told me he was gay, the first thing I said was, “Don't ever say that to anyone again.”

I was trying to protect him. I swear I think I was.

He hates me, I wrote down.

“He doesn't hate you,” Justin said.

He wanted me to shake off everything we were taught right away, I wrote. He wouldn't give me any time.

Justin carefully picked up Janie and lay her down on her stomach. “The thing is,” he said. “That we have to be patient with people every single day. That's what being gay is. Holding straight people's hands about it. And Brian...isn't much for handholding.”

What about you?

He shrugged. “Well, gay people can have different personalities. Plus I'm so used to it, I mean.” He pointed to his ears. “I have to reassure the normal people a lot.”

I was about to ask him something, God knows what, I guess if it ever got easier, if he wishes he were different, was there anything anyone could have done back then to make it better, when I heard the front door open, and the lights flicked off and on in the entryway. Justin gave me a here goes nothing look and the two of us stood up.

Brian walked in, loosening his tie, and he looked, I swear, more relaxed than I'd seen him in my entire life, for about a fraction of a second until his eyes landed on me, and then his expression hardened immediately and he crossed the room and cupped Justin's face in his hand. Justin started signing quickly, and it was so hard to believe that Brian, the boy I grew up with, the boy I used to know, could possibly understand this whole language I didn't know a word, but he started signing back to Justin, somehow faster, and the two of them were overlapping and interrupting each other, and Brian kept watching him and kept signing as he came over and picked Janie off the floor and into his arms, his eyes never leaving what Justin was saying. He bounced her a little and seemed to calm down through whatever Justin was saying, but when he was done he signed something short to Justin, who came over and took the baby into the kitchen.

Brian turned me to me. “What are you doing here?”

“I needed to talk to you.”

“You can't just surprise him like that.”

“I thought you'd be here, it's a Saturday afternoon.”

“Have you heard of phones?”

“I just...”

He pinched his nose. “How much?”

“What?”

“How much money do you need?”

“I didn't come for your money, Brian.”

He bent down and picked up the pictures Justin had left on the floor and started stacking the glasses on the table. “Come home to a fucking pig sty...”

I glanced at the kitchen. “Was he...is he upset? That I'm here?”

“No, he's fine, I'm upset that you're here. He doesn't...people fuck up his schedule, he gets freaked out, I have to deal with it.”

“Is he freaked out?”

Brian clenched his jaw. “No.”

“So...okay.”

There was a crash in the kitchen, a pot or something falling, and Justin called, “Sorry!” and Brian bit his lip and laughed a little, and that did a lot for the tension. I kind of wondered if Justin maybe did that on purpose.

“So what's going on?” he said. “What do you need?”

“I don't need anything, I...”

He waited, arms crossed.

“My son, my little one,” I said. “He told me last week that he's...”

Brian waited. “Starts with a g.”

“Okay, okay.”

“So what, you want to know if I've seen him go-go dancing at our sodomite clubs? Can't say I have. Can't say I'm sure I'd fucking recognize him.”

“I just wanted to ask if he could talk to you,” I said.

Brian watched me steadily. “Talk to me.”

“I thought maybe you'd have...I don't know. Some advice or something.”

“So what, you're not going to try to scare him straight?”

“Jesus, Brian, I'm uncomfortable, I'm not a monster. Is that really what you think of me?”

He looked away and didn't say anything, and I watched Justin bounce the baby in the kitchen and thought about how very small my little brother used to be. How I used to promise him I would keep him safe from everything in the world.

You can say a lot about me but I swear to God I tried.

How old was Daddy when he learned to feed Brian? I had no memories of him doing it. Not one.

I said, “Anyway, I think...I think maybe I'll ask Justin if he'll talk to him instead.”

Brian nodded slowly, and the look his eyes...well, if I didn't know better I'd say I saw a bit of respect. “Justin's a good listener.”

“I know.”

Brian turned to the kitchen and signed something to Justin, who glanced at me and then nodded, and Brian took a business card out of his pocket and wrote down a phone number on it, handed it to me. “Your son can text him.”

I took a deep breath. “Okay.”

Brian walked me to the door, and before I left I said. “Brian, your daughter's lovely.”

“She's not...” He sighed, then looked into the kitchen at Justin and the baby. His face softened into something like a smirk and he turned to me and shrugged. “Thank you.”

I turned to go, and as I shut the door behind me I saw Brian go into the kitchen and take Janie from Justin. He signed something quick to Justin, his tongue in his cheek, and then Justin raised himself up on his feet and Brian kissed the side of his nose.

And I thought...if this is the first example of a great love this baby is going to see, maybe she could do a lot worse.