The Round People - a Novel - 8. IX. Consummation & X. Four o'clock

IX. Consummation

I've always thought it ironic that a man living in extraordinary times often fails to see the potential of that selfsame time; he wrongfully curses the good with the bad without distinction. I guess the reason for this chronic myopia is the simple immediacy of every man to his own petty tendencies, tragedies, and the pitiful everyday injustice of his own existence. And yet each generation, as it enters into fruition, holds up, if at least only momentarily, to the face of their fathers, the promise of a new world. My own was no exception, and yet so extraordinary, for our maturity coincided with opportunities the likes of which mankind rarely sees.

Also, though we might tend to forget, our beginning was auspicious too, for we were born of the Great Society's great gamble, and became the de facto incarnation of those wooly good feeling that closed The Sixties; we are in fact the children of the Flower Children. So with that in mind, when future chroniclers come to name this as yet invisible generation of mine, I think they should go no further than Sesame Street. Why? Because it was we were who were the first watchers, the first batch of guinea pigs who went off the kindergarten able to count from one to ten, to the delight of our teachers, in Spanish as well as in English. And we are those kids in the bright orange turtlenecks who still occasionally make it on-air in the reruns looking dated and naïve.

But why, I wonder, did we who were generated in such optimism, who came of age in such opportunity, get bogged down into the cynical shoes of our fathers. Who can tell me the why and how of those turtlenecked kids growing up to be America's corporate hotshot lawyers; how we grew up to be our grandfather's generation: greedy, pessimistic, and so paralyzed before the admittal of fear's reality.

As I left The Round People, the wind blew me out to the street and left me desolately cold before the building's garbage niche, and the one that also housed Dean's motorcycle. I tried to leave, put one foot before the other on the road that would guide me from here, but it wouldn't comfort to run away. No, neither the idea of gaining distance, nor the concept of passing beyond this place and time offered me any solace. I tried to walk away, tried not to think it would be the last time, but I couldn't go, there seemed that one desperately needed thing pinning me to the spot – that one thing I had still left undone, and it grounded me like an anchor.

To my great surprise, a moment later, Nobuko came running down the stairs, for the elevator is notoriously slow. She took my arm and pulled me to walk with her. Lacking another option, I did. It was either allow myself to be pulled away by her, or wait on the street till something happened, something possibly dreadful.

We walked behind Tokyu Department Store and their huge bicycle parking lot. She held onto my arm and talked of many things. I didn't feel like responding, and she may have sensed it because, between her speeches, strayed long probing silences. In these moments she would slowly nod her head, her lips drawn together and flat, as if she were convincing herself of some unspoken contention. But I understood. I knew the struggle that was going on inside of her, and what it was she wanted to say. First, she wanted me to know that being Gay didn't matter to her, though it might to others, and that made her sad; sad for me as her brother, and sad for humanity that it was so backwards. And in between the trying pauses, and the self-convincing head nods, she told me about the Samurai and their 'special' young men retainers who were the only vassals allowed to touch their master's sword – not even a favored wife was allowed the privileges of the lord's favorite page. She told me about Native American tribes that allowed men and women to marry whomever they liked, one partner accepted into the fold of the community's wives, the other as a warrior of equal valiance. I thanked her. It was kind of her, and I knew all of her actions of affection were just trying to tell me that Gay didn't matter to her, and that it was something special, worthy of its history and a sense of pride. But I, on the other hand, felt down into the chilled marrow of my bones that for all her sympathizing, she could never understand how alone I felt.

We turned the corner of the giant store and there was a view that drew my heart right out of me. Before us the street bent down a slight hill before it crossed the main thoroughfare, and again climbed a slight incline under the roof of an open shopping arcade. On late summer afternoons the sun would set on an almost mystical axis with this street and throw a strong, beautiful orange light far through the arcade and towards the spot where we now stood. When I passed this way on those magical late afternoon days, I perceive the crowd moving in calm abandon as a mass of heads. On those bright summer twilights it would be impossible for me to pass by and not be slapped with the fact I am not one of them, because the sea of heads of hair were all dark, and I amongst them would stand out like a white pebble on a black sand shore. But now, here with Nobuko, the breath caught in my throat, because it was empty. Not a soul moved between the dark and shuttered shops, not a single head bobbed under the glass roof. I had to sigh when I looked at my companion; I had to sigh and try to explain this perfect metaphor. I told her my thoughts, and asked her to consider what it would be like for her to be one among so many different. If she could understand that, if she could feel it, then I told her, that is what it is like be Gay.

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We crossed Kichijoji Avenue, and walked the arcade. She took me to the famous 'Coffeehouse Cat' who lives in a wooden house before a little café. This cat was a stray who had habituated himself to handouts from the people sitting outside and eating. For the winter, the owner of the shop had draped a fading blanket bedecked with bouquets of extravagant roses over the cat's house. It kept the wind out, and I guess the cat was happy. Nobuko squatted down and pulled the blanket slowly up from the entrance, all the time a low, pitiful little mew passing over her lips. She told me it was so we wouldn’t startle the cat awake, and that that particularly baleful measure was how cats said hello. She said it was a kind of complaint on how hard life is; it was something that strikes a cord of affinity in all felines.

I squatted down next to her and peered in. The worn yellow tabby turned very sleepy eyes on us, and sure enough, he let out a sound so sad in sympathy for Nobuko's plight, that even I could follow the conversation. She reached in and pulled long strokes over his side, and the little plywood house reverberated with purrs like a snare drum humming with the comfort that one being can offer to another.

We left the cat to his slumbers and continued on our restless trek, walking all the way over to Inokashira Park. There a large lake supports a myriad community of ducks and carp, who on Sundays vie for the breadcrumbs tossed by the hands of children from the rails of the lake's bridges. On one side of the water we sat down on a bench in the plaza before the boathouse. Our seat looked east, across the placid and chilled water. Nobuko was saying no more. An uneasy, but exhausted silence was born along by not knowing what else to say. So we sat with our hands in our coat pockets, absorbed in the night, made real in the immediacy of the winter's coldness.

When I first came to Japan it was winter, and even now when it's bright and clear, I can seem to come closest in contact with the freedom I felt after I had first arrived. Even the fear was comforting then. And like the cold itself, memories are made of feelings more than of recollections. For me, one of the strongest first impressions was made on a blustery day by a Zen priest daring his own concentration. He had gone to Asakusa on a Sunday, when there would be a mass of people doing what they do on Sundays, making noise, eating, talking about this and that, and most importantly, be all in a hurry to get somewhere else. And this pilgrim among them, moved with his head held perfectly erect, a great basket of a hat shading his eyes while he strode the center crack from start to finish of a quarter-mile long shopping arcade. One step, one ring of a bell held in his left hand; one step, thirty seconds of inner meditation, and a ring of the bell, while all around him the world pressed and washed the shores of his isle of peace. That is the image of Japan that means the most to me; the new, the old, life, and one man among them, Alive. That is the kind of concentration I associate with winter, the kind I pass in and out of, and desire to have always.

Over Inokashira's water, in the eastern sky, was a huge star. I pointed to it, asking if she knew which one it was. She told me it was Ake no myojo, which, it took me a minute, but I realized the exact translation of could only be the 'Morning Star.'

It looked all remote and glorious in the ceiling of the sphere arching weightless over our heads, while all the lesser lights of the east faded to charcoal soup near the horizon. There was no light yet from the approaching sun we may have felt, but could not see evidence of. It was still as dark as midnight, but perhaps through the sheer force of willing it so, the unseen portion of the sky seemed to project the murky promise of a new day. Nobuko asked me what we call it in English. I told her 'the Morning Star,' but also that it has a name few people know, 'Lucifer.' She told me Lucifer was the devil. I told her the Christian devil perhaps, but for the Greeks, Lucifer was the messenger of the morn; the rising star of the new day, the rising star of hope. She told me the people at the bar had just been shocked; that I still had friends there. But I knew I could never return to those people, that I was no longer one of them. The star, I told her, is also the Evening Star, the Greeks thinking they were different, gave them differing names. The Evening they called Hesperus; the Morning, Lucifer. But both of them are in reality Venus, both are Love.

Why did our chances of a new world slip past us into the worn rut of selfishness? What happened to that moment of promise, which that spring, if at least for one year, held us together in the amazement of what we could do when we tried. But it will come again, the springtime where no belief is in need, where just the ability to feel one's own heart beats in every chest, there, just lodged beyond the crushing grasp of suspicion and the doubt of a 'thinking mind.' That's where we will find our 'New World Order,' in that place where we don't have to criticize, or hate what we don't understand; but where we can love on a basis commiserate with ability to love.

My generation is probably past the point of making 'that' newness a tangible part of humanity, but like the unseen sun beyond the horizon, I know – No, more than know – I feel that a time for man is coming where we won’t let love down, and there, and from nowhere else, will the potentiality of all of our petty lives, of all of our petty wants and sufferings, be transmuted into what mankind can be.

A day will come when we won’t let love down, when we will let it lift us, and let it show us the way to be real human beings.

I told Nobuko I was tired, and that I was going home, and to bed. She asked me if I was all right. I lied, telling her I was. She offered to spend the night with me, if I thought I needed the company, but I told her I wanted to be by myself for a while. She reluctantly gave over to the idea, and as I watched her walk away, she threw up her hands saying, "I'll call you in the morning. We can have coffee at Donatello's." I waved back at her in response, but whispered under my breath: "It is morning."

Suddenly Nobuko came running back. She stood before me looking as a mother does to her grieving child. Her eyes behind her round glasses glinted, dull and moist with too much life experience, and too little comfort to offer to an unbeknownst pain. She told me:

"I'm sorry I couldn't be your hero tonight." She looked at the ground. "Then, after you said it, I should have stood up for you."

I took her head in my hands, raising her cheeks and crying eyes to me. "Thanks," I said feebly, brushing her tears with my thumbs, "but I can stand on my own."

"But we all need others to hang onto, to defend us – at least sometimes."

I smiled. "I'm hanging onto you now, and that's more than I expected to have."

"But we all need a hero sometimes."

I laughed to comfort my comforter. "And sometimes nobody can be our hero, but ourselves."

I urged Nobuko to go. I expected that Mark was waiting for her, and she confessed that he was.

"Then go to him. He loves you; I can tell. But – what I don’t understand is – why'd you want to keep it a secret? You guys could be 'out' if you wanted to, no consequences…"

"It's just – it's nobody's business. What we have is ours, so it's not a secret, but it is ours."

"But you advised me to tell the truth…"

Nobuko looked profoundly sad for me, like she had to lecture a child, again. "You needed to tell the truth, not for others, dear brother, but for yourself."

And with that, with a final hug in which I heard my back crack in a couple of places from the palpable force of her affection for me, we parted, and I was alone.

Yes, she was right. Although she hadn't said it, I still had one thing left undone, and where will I find the courage to live it out – if it remains unwritten, unspoken – if it doesn't find life and breath here. There's one more thing I need to do.

X. Four o'clock

The bar was empty, and deathly quiet. At three-thirty Dean had asked for last orders, and at four, had ushered the final patrons out. He still had a lot of work to do, for Mark had left, and so had Benedict. He stood over the sink washing glasses by himself. Dean considered if he really was as happy with himself as he led him and the outside world to believe. Did he truly exist as many saw him, perhaps as he saw him too; a minion in terms of his job, and of his relation to Pearl? Some in The Round People seemed to care about the Dean that roved the free world outside the club. Nobuko was one, Jonathan another – and he liked them. And he liked his job. It gave him the opportunity to meet the kinds of people, like her and like him, that Dean would never have the courage to speak to if he saw them on the train or sitting in a café. 'Feelings,' he thought. 'Are something meant to be felt, not pushed away.'

The glass-washing machine worked noisily under him, leaving him alone inside with the events of the night hovering quietly like phantoms. He was sad. Why hadn't he stood up for Jon? Why hadn't he gone over and done something: punch Benedict out, or more likely, told him he didn't speak for everyone; he was not the decider of who belonged to The Round People, and who did not. Dean regretted watching Jonathan leave as he did, alone. He replayed the scene as it should have happened – Dean, dish towel flung on the floor, stormed over to Jon, all the stunned and hateful eyes questioning his actions, but then he picked up Jonathan's hand and led him out the door; they'd be done with this place that seemed to afford no room for honesty.

Dean didn't hear the door open; he didn't look up to see Jonathan standing on the dance floor.

"I wanted to come back and say something to you."

Dean started, nearly dropping a glass into the scrubbing apparatus. Hurriedly he switched it off, fumbling with the soap-dripping glass. He came out and stopped on the far edge of the floor. He stood there, his head down, introspective, his legs locked, his wallet chain paused in the last dying moment of the moving momentum that had brought Dean to this quiet stance. He looked up, Dean's mouth drawing back in an almost pained expression; it looked like he could muster an honest tear in a moment, but he felt very relieved too.

"I came back to tell you something."

Dean heard Jon repeat this, noticing how his own hands dripped soapy water on the floor. He pawed at them the way a bluffing boy chews gum for courage the moment before a fight.

"I wanted to say – " Jonathan drew in a long draught of air, and offered up a lie, "I'm sorry for not telling you before – you know, before everybody knew." He tried to smile, but his face muscles were stiff in their frowns. "I was going to tell you I was Gay. It's not a secret." Jon almost pleaded, because that was the truth, "It's just a hard topic to bring up out of the blue. I just can't walk in here saying 'Hey Dean, give me a beer, and by the way, you know I'm Queer?'" His awkward glance came to rest on the boy before him, and was he not prepared to see something like guilt there.

Dean scanned the water drops on the floor. Finally he gulped in courage from the stale cigarette air of the bar and held his head up. "I have to say sorry too. You have just as much right to stay here as anybody – I, all of us, should have kicked Benedict out – he was the bad guy; we were the bad guys – not you. But, you suffered alone because of our cowardness. I'm sorry, Jonathan."

Jon was touched, but the night seemed heavier than ever, and he doubted he could find the will to say what he told himself he must, even if it damned him and this moment of connection with the one person, the only person, he ever wanted to connect to.

Jonathan pinched his eyes shut; he didn't think he could go on. His hands came up pressing his palms into his sockets. The cold night felt good on them. His arms came down looking like a shrug. "I'm sorry. I just wanted to say – I'm sorry." He turned to go, there were only a few paces to the front door, a few steps before this part of his life could be over; out the door, and he could be in some way free. He started to walk.

"Why – " Dean asked, his voice choking. "Why did you want to tell me?"

Jonathan didn't turn around, he couldn't.

"I am sorry, Dean." He sounded defeated. "I thought you wouldn't mind – No, that's not true…" Jonathan put his hand on the dull brass pull; now he didn't want to leave. If Dean had said nothing, he could have gone out the door intact, but now he feared having to say the truth, feared that a piece of truth would generate its own painful incarnation before he could get away; it couldn't live in the air of the spoken world without a portion of him dying in the saying. "Goodbye, Dean."

"Why?!" demanded Dean.

There was a pause. Jonathan opened the door. Outside the morning had come with a colorless gray in the sky. He felt the cold air bite his face, and with it he felt the force of Nobuko's words that loneliness is just a form of self-contempt. "Because…" he whispered without energy, without hope, "…I love you." The truth of it was free, and Jonathan felt a little deader for the liberation.

There was no sound, there was no sound of movement, only Jonathan caught between the life he would start with the sunrise; a new life with new places to go and friends, and the room at his back that had rejected him. Over his head he felt the power of Dean's painting – the pulling, the forcing, the ripping apart of those not wanting to separate, and their long and treacherous road to find and reconnect. He thought of those couples who had already suffered and re-combined under this image tonight as they left the bar. Pearl and Hiro – lost in a pure shot renewed with second chances; Andrew and Ichiko, so alike despite all outward appearances; Mark and Nobuko, relishing a secret that had no consequence for either, unlike that which he had carried; Pat and Seth, who found a chance in each other despite what others choose to try and enforce upon them – Pat is beautiful, and more so than for just her pain, and Seth, handsome for his gentleness – and though unseen by Jonathan, he could imagine the way Benedict and Emmy had passed beneath the same image of the round people – he could see Benedict's hope resting on the girl with the broken heart, and he could feel for them. Ultimately, he wished them the best, because that's what he wished for himself.

He walked. His first step weak, as appropriate to anyone's first into a new world, but Dean caught him before he could take another.

Jonathan drowsily became aware that Dean's arms were slowly slipping a path under his own. The boy's hands rose on either side into a gentle lock on his shoulders. He thought he felt a person's head and upper chest gradually come to rest on the top of his back and shoulders. Jon thought he was hallucinating, and with stayed movements lifted a hand to touch that which gripped onto his chest. The hand he touched was wet. He rubbed two fingertips together; they were slick and soapy, and the hands on him were as real as his own.

He broke their grip suddenly, turning to see Dean; to see if the rest of him was just as real.

Dean looked like he could muster an honest tear in a moment, and very relieved too. He smiled an anxious, awkward gesture that betrayed his youth. Soundlessly this smile broken open upon the words: "And I love you too."

The bar was empty. It had regained that utter meditative state it had when the night now passed had started. The somber ménage of artistically rendered humanity looked down on the two young men, and imposed no limiting pronouncements. For now, in the quiet time of a new morning barely begun, there was no more pulling away, or splitting; no more cross purposes, or fear. Far from judging, they calmly celebrated what should have been all along, and looked on with the promise of what all people could become in the light of honesty and love.

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Jonathan and Dean stood in the center of the silent dance floor, their sleepy eyes looking at each other like one saw in the other a mirror image. By slow degrees their heads came together, and very wearily, they kissed.

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