Chapter Seven #2
They went on double dates now and then, sometimes took a meal together in the dining hall.
Went their separate ways early in the morning, most days, and didn’t see each other again until they were back in the room at night, where they stayed up late studying and playing cards and lying on their beds, talking.
They talked about their families, their high schools.
Their dogs. Movies they liked. They’d both seen Wings several times when it came out.
They’d both been sixteen when Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic, and it was all any kid could talk about for a while, remember?
They talked about golf and gymnastics—the two most recent additions to the university’s sports roster.
Later, in the dark, they talked about girls.
Sometimes they ended up sitting on the same bed while they talked.
When that happened, they turned out the light and kept talking, and scooted down until they were lying on their backs, shoulder to shoulder on the narrow mattress, both of them stiff as boards, and after they’d been talking for a while, a hand would cross paths with a hand in the dark, and find its way across the other’s stomach and into his pajama bottoms. Fingers trembling, warm, suddenly slick. They never talked about it.
Of course, the argument they got into was over a girl.
Tess Martin, who’d gone on dates with both of them and had decided she only wanted to date Gil—and for some reason Gil got a little soused before he delivered this news to Felix, and when he did he was full of braggadocio and said things like, “She picked me over the leatherhead, how about that?” Kidding around but not in a good-natured way, and he said it a few more times with his pipe wagging in his teeth, until Felix said he didn’t care, not one goddamn bit; if Tess was so into guys from Marietta, she could screw Gil on the roof of Kolbe Hall.
Felix hoped they did. He hoped they fell off.
He stood from his desk to leave the room, and Gil, half-tanked and even lankier than usual because of it, got in his way and yanked the pipe out of his mouth to say, “Listen here, Salt—” A minute later, Felix was down to his socks and Gil was down to his glasses.
They went further then, did more than they’d done in the past. They didn’t really know what they were doing, but, clearly, they did it right. Afterward, Gil crawled into his bed with his back to Felix and stayed there for the rest of the night.
The next day, Gil left early. He started going to Mass again, having not been since high school. He put in a request and within a few weeks got himself transferred to a different room with a different roommate, on a whole different floor.
The mentions of Felix in The Buchtelite stopped.
The two of them cut each other a wide berth on campus.
On graduation day, Felix spotted Gil across a shifting field of mortarboards and wanted to call out, have one last exchange, even if it was to say Have a good life, but he didn’t, worried that if he got Gil’s attention, Gil would turn away from him, and that would be their last exchange.
The mortarboards wavered; the moment passed.
In dreams, though, he didn’t freeze up. In dreams, he was determined to get Gil’s attention, and that was what made the dreams so frustrating.
He tried to wave his cap but found it was too heavy for him to wave.
He tried to shout, but all the volume was gone from his voice.
Not unlike the dreams where he was trying to dial a telephone and couldn’t get his fingers to work.
Failure dreams, he thought of them. Objective never reached.
—
Awake, he had to stay on the ball and had his work cut out for him.
Every situation, every interaction was a proving ground.
When he was in high school, he’d been in the backyard stacking cords of wood with the curly-haired teenaged boy who delivered them, and, after exchanging with the boy a look he both did and didn’t understand, Felix followed him around back of the toolshed.
The boy wasted no time, got down on his knees and opened Felix’s pants.
Somehow, not a minute later (perhaps he’d been watching from the kitchen window), Russ Salt happened upon them.
In the same instant, he said, “Ah, then,” and turned away.
Walked back into the house. The curly-haired boy fled.
There was no mention of the incident then or any time soon.
Six years later, however, Felix was just out of college, living in Akron and looking for a job when his father called from Cincinnati late one night, very much in his cups.
Speaking in the burdened voice of an emerging elder statesman, he said he had an opportunity to call in a favor with a metal foundry that did their banking where he worked.
A foundry with a facility in Akron. Good salary, he said.
Good company, solid future. Felix asked who he should contact.
Not so fast, Russ Salt said. The position wouldn’t open up for a couple of months, so there was time. Time for what? Felix asked.
Russ said he was getting to that.
He cleared his throat, waffling his phlegm against the receiver.
He said he couldn’t help noticing that Felix had dated very few girls in college, and didn’t seem to be dating any now.
He said he couldn’t stop thinking about that business with Felix and that little fairy boy behind the shed—as if it had happened last week, instead of six years ago.
Here was his question, before he cashed in a favor with a valued colleague and put his reputation on the line: was Felix a fairy?
Felix hated his father in that moment, but he’d hated him before this call, and he would go on hating him after it. Consider it an early lesson that would help him navigate life: good opportunities sometimes come wrapped in garbage. He wasn’t a fairy, he said; he was particular about who he dated.
Russ was relieved to hear that but said he’d like Felix to provide evidence. When Felix, bewildered, asked how he was supposed to do that, Russ said he was confident his son could figure something out.
Enter Helen Greene: a friend of Felix’s from the Booster Club.
Lively, blond, a head-turner. Helen roomed with a girl named Mabel, brunette, also a head-turner, and after college the two of them got an apartment together and both worked for the water department.
When Felix sat down with them and explained the situation—without getting into specifics, and without ever asking them if they were a couple—they understood and went along.
The engagement helped out all three of them, since they all had families with raised brows, wondering.
Felix wrote to his parents about Helen and sent them her picture.
Helen wrote to the Salts saying that she looked forward to meeting them, and she wrote to her own parents and included a picture of Felix.
Mabel even mentioned Helen’s engagement in her letters home.
Alas, the romance between Helen Greene and Felix Salt did not pan out, but it lasted long enough for Felix to become firmly installed at Tuck & Sons.
In their breakup period, Helen and Felix joked, with Mabel, about how they were splitting the house and the kids right down the middle, King Solomon–style—their lightheartedness a kind of salve because each of them presumed, with apprehension, that a traditional marriage lay in their future.
—
Felix threw himself into his work. He made the right jokes, ingratiated himself to the right people.
There was, he discovered, a mold for a successful businessman—for a successful man—and it was right there in front of him.
Now and then he was invited home with the executives to have dinner with their families.
Sometimes, at these tables, there was a grown sister or cousin present, and Felix would wonder if that had been the reason for his invitation.
At the end of these nights he would drive himself home or, depending on how far away he lived, walk, admiring the sloped lawns and big houses as he wended his way out of their neighborhoods.
The look—the same one he’d first seen in the eyes of the boy who’d delivered the firewood—didn’t happen very often, but over time he learned that it could happen anywhere.
Waiting in line at the bank. Sitting at a red light.
Walking across a parking lot. The first look meant nothing, maybe.
The second look opened a door that might slam shut again, but it was there, however briefly, between the two of you.
Felix was walking home after having dinner at one of these executives’ homes when he happened upon a man at the foot of his driveway, taking his mail from his mailbox.
The man looked to be in his midthirties and had an appealing Buster Crabbe quality.
He wore a smoking jacket and slippers. “Good evening,” he said brightly to Felix. “Fine night, isn’t it?”
Felix was twenty-four, figuring things out. The look. The door. “It is,” he said. “A fine night.”
And it was.
—
Sex with men was rare, he enjoyed it every time he was lucky enough to find it, and every time he told himself it would never happen again.
Not because of any moral quandary but because such activity (that was how he thought of it afterward, activity, as if it were a sport) didn’t fit the mold. Or wouldn’t, down the line.