“I CAN’T BELIEVE you didn’t come for me. I waited just like you said. I waited and waited. Finally this nice girl, maybe a stewardess, I don’t know, she came up to me and said, ‘Are you lost?’ and I told her my son was supposed to be there. That he was late or forgot or something.” Eve glared at him. “I waited forever, just like you said.”
They were at an outdoor restaurant in Venice, eating lunch. His mother had told Jim the story twice already, first when he claimed her and then again in the car on their way here. She also told him it was impossible to read on the flight. “You have to stay alert,” she said. “Anyone could be a hijacker. A Shiite Moslem or Libyan terrorist. Who knows? Do you think Klinghoffer, cruising like that on the Mediterranean, expected to be shot and dumped in the sea? You don’t know who to trust.” She’d handed him the paperbacks and cooking magazines, still in the padded shipping envelope he’d sent them in.
Now Jim pointed toward the parade of people that whizzed past them on rollerblades, bicycles, skateboards, and rollerskates. “Look at them,” he told his mother. “See how everyone looks different out here.”
She snorted. “So I noticed,” she said. “Too many of them dye their hair. And they spend too much time in the sun. Don’t they read out here? It’s very dangerous.” She sipped her iced tea and made a face. “This is terrible.”
“I mean they’re more active,” Jim said. “Health conscious. Any day of the week you’ll see people out here like this.”
“Great,” Eve said. “Wonderful.” She looked around until she spotted their waiter, then motioned him over. “What is in this tea?” she said to him.
He was handsome, tanned and blond with a dimple in his chin. He looked first at Jim and smiled, then at Eve. “Fresh mint,” he said. “Isn’t it yummy?”
“If I wanted mint,” she said, “I’d chew gum.”
The waiter looked at Jim again. Jim felt a warm familiar rush in his gut. Sometimes he wondered if the real reason he had moved to L.A. was because he liked these surfer boys so much. He imagined for an instant this waiter naked, no tan lines, a smooth hairless chest.
“Could I just have some water?” Eve was saying.
“You bet,” the waiter said, smiling again. When he left, he brushed against Jim, so lightly it felt like the breeze from the water that lay ahead of them.
Eve studied Jim’s face, hard.
“What?” he said.
She shook her head.
Jim cleared his throat and looked off toward the ocean. He had lived in L.A. for almost three years and this was the first time his mother had come to visit. He’d asked her in the past, tried to lure her here with promised trips to Mann’s Chinese Theatre and Disneyland, places that she’d always heard about and thought she’d never see. Secretly, he was always relieved when she refused to come. She would say, “I’ll see you out here at Christmas anyway. Right?” And he would feel a ballooning in his chest, a fullness that he liked. He would think, Good. It was like buying a few more months of not having to tell her.
Once, she’d said yes, then canceled at the last minute. “There are some things I really don’t want to see,” she’d said as way of an explanation. That had startled Jim. What exactly had that meant? Even now he wondered if she was trying to tell him something, if maybe she knew somehow already. But that seemed impossible. When he’d lived in Chicago, just an hour from her house in the suburbs, he was still pretending, even to himself. He used to date girls who were pretty, former Homecoming queens, girls who dressed in pale colors, who wore soft fuzzy sweaters and pink lipstick. Last Christmas he noticed that his mother still had a picture of him with one of those girls, one she especially liked named Debbie, right on top of the television set. In it, Jim is slightly behind Debbie, so that it is her smiling, heart-shaped face that dominates. It is her locket, her wispy blond bangs and bright pink lips that you noticed. Jim was really in the background, a blur.
“Jim?” his mother said. She reached across the table and squeezed his hand. “Jim,” she said again, “how are you? Are you happy?”
He had decided that if she really came this time, he would tell her. But now he wasn’t so sure. She did not seem ready. Why, even a glass of tea with mint in it threw her into a tizzy! Even the sight of healthy, tanned people upset her! Sometimes, when he was alone, her face floated in front of him, frowning and disappointed, holding all the pain of knowing the truth, of knowing there would never be a big church wedding at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow, or grandchildren, or even him at home for Christmas with his lover beside him. Right now, his mother’s face seemed open, expectant even, as if she were waiting for him to say it. He wondered again if she already knew.
“I . . .” he began. He felt his hand beginning to sweat beneath hers.
“What?” she said. She leaned toward him. “What?”
His throat felt dry, scratchy. “I am,” he said.
The pressure on his hand increased.
“You are what, Jim?” she said.
Her eyes were wet. Maybe from the salt air, Jim thought.