All they talked about was the weather. They hadn’t spoken in eleven years, and after the initial confusions of voices that didn’t sound the same, they settled into the most inane small talk possible.
They were both cold – it was early February – but he was in the City where it hadn’t reached 50 all day, and she was in the Town where it may have gotten up to 60. There had been reports of fog, but it had cleared before either of them was awake, and neither of them had been outside yet.
And now it was nighttime. He had been thinking about her all day. He had seen her in the mirror first thing that morning. He had never before seen his mother in his features, but there she was, scowling back at him in that way she had always done. The absurdity of it made him laugh, and he saw her in that, too. He decided not to look again. But he could feel her all day long, her face just behind his, looking at the four walls around him, curious and disapproving.
He thought he would ask her again about his father. Had she recalled anything about him in the years that had passed? Did his father have red hair? Did he have a sense of humor? Did he have a fucking name?
It was a Thursday, which had always been her day off. She didn’t like change and he couldn’t imagine she would have changed that. He figured it would be a good day to call. But the day mostly got away from him. He turned on the television that evening and the primetime programs were likely the ones she would be watching, propped up in the middle of her sofa bed in the front room of the trailer home he grew up in, chain-smoking, eating leftover fast food from the night before, wearing an oversized t-shirt that swallowed her and nothing else; four spindly legs and a wiry head sticking out, like some kind of a critter.
He thought he would tell her about his life in the City. Maybe he would leave out most of the details. He imagined telling her about the flu he’d had at the end of the previous year, the one that found him in the hospital for a couple of days, the one that delivered the death sentence he had always suspected was waiting in the wings for him: hiv.
But that would open the floodgates for so many other things. Or maybe just one. Maybe just the one thing that had never been talked about. Sexuality. As if she would care about such a thing. As if she would even get it. Maybe she already knew. Maybe that was the thing they were avoiding by talking about the weather. Yesterday it had been a little cooler; the previous summer had been particularly hot.
Two years earlier a hurricane passed through the Town and did all kinds of damage but just barely missed taking the whole goddamn trailerpark out. Everybody considered it some kind of miracle. Two years later and it was still the thing they were talking about. Things didn’t change very much in her world.
It hadn’t been two months since he’d gotten the fatal results, and everything had changed. But he couldn’t talk about it. All he could do was follow the conversation wherever she took it, which was mostly about the Town that still connected them to one another.
He caught her between Cheers and Seinfeld. She told him she didn’t mind missing Jerry, but she would have to go before L.A. Law came on. That was her show. He was relieved that a time limit on their reunion had been put into place. He was also thankful for her cough, which slowed the conversation to a snail’s pace, giving him lots of time to consider his words, plenty of time to bend over the ceramic tile on the coffee table and snort a couple lines of courage into his nostrils.
He didn’t think he would bring up the cough. She had always had it; it was probably worse now, but he really couldn’t remember. Her voice had definitely deepened and had a rasp to it that a carton of cigarettes a week would surely give you.
She brought up Jerry again, but not Seinfeld. She was reminded of an episode of Jerry Springer she had seen that very afternoon. A lot of screaming niggers and queers, in her review, but she seemed to enjoy it. That was her world, filmed in his very own nieghborhood.
He didn’t call her out on it; he didn’t want to invite the confrontation. It was all too apparent that she didn’t care for black people or homosexuals, two subjects he knew a thing or two about. He held his tongue and wondered why he had ever thought anything he said would elicit a response from this woman that resembled compassion. She was an old dog, untrained; her parlor tricks were the same-old same-old that he had seen performed over and over in the first chunk of his life.
So he asked her about the neighbor, her best friend; he asked her about the trailerpark, the Inn where she worked, the Town. She answered the inquiries briefly but kept coming back around to the tv show she had seen, the niggers and the queers. Especially the queers. She seemed inspired.
She didn’t ask him anything outright, just offered a warning: Queers have aids. She spoke of the subject as if she had more knowledge than what she had learned on Jerry Springer, as if she had gone to the library and done research. There was an edge to her voice, like she knew something. Or at the very least, like she suspected it.
And so he threw it back in her face. The cocaine made him believe it was what she wanted to hear. The cocaine kept him from slowing down, considering his words, perhaps editing them before they escaped his lips. He told her that she was talking about him. That is me, were the words he used. That is me.
It stopped the conversation dead in its tracks. The silence hung over them like the eleven years that were wedged between them.
Eventually, the silence was cut, hacked, chopped into tiny little pieces by another coughing fit; it crackled and popped and sounded like it hurt.
He felt a small amount of pride welling up in him. His words hadn’t come out as eloquently as he’d planned them, but the information was there, everything was out in the open, he was out in the open. And his words had wounded her. He smiled at the thought. In some twisted way, it showed that she cared about him at least a little bit. His sickness, his queerness stirred up the hateful rot deep inside her, brought it up into her throat and sent her into this fit she was having. Well done, he told himself.
After that, all she could say was that she didn’t really want to be having this conversation anymore. She spoke in a controlled manner, but he sensed the anger that was just under the surface. He knew the embarrassment, the disappointment, the fear she was feeling because he had felt it too, had been feeling it all that day as her.
When they said their goodbyes, he added a final jab, told her to take care of that cough. He couldn’t be sure she felt it as the jab he intended it to be, but it was to him – and, honestly, that was all he was concerned about anymore.
He set the phone in its cradle, snorted another line and headed out into the cold night to give some stranger a blowjob, hopefully a black man.
For her part, she climbed onto the exercise bicycle next to her sofa bed, lit a cigarette and started pedaling. She had discovered recently that it helped her get a little better drag. She used to say that exercise would kill you – or maybe that was a memory he made up. It was definitely the kind of thing she would say, anyway.
Late that night, her best friend dropped by when she pulled up from work and saw the lights still on. She was halfway on the toppled exercise bike, halfway on the sofa bed, a black circle on the mattress where her last cigarette had tried to catch fire but gave up. She was cold as a stone, like always, but more so because she was dead.