“What’re you doing over here?”
The man came out of nowhere, and Ben didn’t have time to zip. He stood there hyperventilating, his fingers clasping closed the waist of his only pair of churchgoing khakis.
“Go on,” the man said to Elizabeta. “Get out of here.” He leaned his bare forearm against the plastic orb of the geodesic dome, his hand hanging like a butcher’s hook above Ben’s head. “A little ‘I’ll show you mine if you show me yours’?”
Ben nodded.
“Button those pants.” The man turned away. “And at a church picnic,” he laughed. “I wonder what your mother would think.”
“Sir, please don’t tell her.” Ben’s stomach turned to water. “We weren’t doing anything, just looking.”
“Listen,” the man said, “you introduce me to your mother and I’ll keep this between you and me and God.”
Ben’s mother sat on the edge of a cement picnic bench, her face glowing in the sun, a plate of fruit salad balanced on the knob of her knee. When they got close, the man curled his fingers around Ben’s elbow.
“Ms. Wade?”
“Yes,” Ben’s mother said, turning her face toward him, the left side lit up with sun.
“I thought you should know what your son’s been up to,” he said.
“Up to?” she said, standing up now.
“I’m sorry,” the man said, shaking his head as though it killed him to have to tell her. “Maybe we should speak in private.”
The three of them shuffled away from the table and stood in the heat of the midday sun. The man introduced himself. “Will Voorhees,” he said, taking Ben’s mother’s fingers in the palm of his hand.
“Yes,” she said. “I’ve seen you from a distance.”
A crescent of white teeth lit up Voorhees’s face.
“Boys will be boys, of course.” Voorhees let out a long sigh and shook his head once. “But I found your son showing his”—he cleared his throat—“his private parts to this poor girl over here.” He nodded in the direction of Elizabeta, who was sitting next to her father, her eyes saucers of fear.
His mother showered him with a scalding look. Ben wanted to object, wanted to tell his mother about the promise Voorhees had made. He still had a hard-on, though, and he figured that fact alone made whatever he’d say worthless. God knew he had a hard-on.
“I’ve upset you,” Voorhees said. “I should have kept my mouth shut.”
“No, Mr. Voorhees. Obviously, I need to keep a closer eye on my son.”
“I can’t imagine how difficult it is to raise a boy alone.”
Sunlight sparkled on the tears in his mother’s eyes. Will Voorhees touched the bare skin of her upper arm. “Let me get you something to drink,” he said.
At home, his mother made Ben scrub his hands with pumice stone, made him wash his mouth out with soap. “I’m so embarrassed,” she said. “Thank God for Mr. Voorhees.”
A week later it was “Thank God for Mr. Voorhees” when he took them to Balboa Island for an ice cream and a walk among the wealthy. “Thank God for Mr. Voorhees” when he purchased them a new couch and coffee table and then sat on it and drank a sugared cup of coffee. “Thank God for William” when she forced Ben to play catch with him in the completed greenbelt behind the apartment complex. And “Thank God for Will” when, on the edge of eviction from the apartment, he paid their rent.
One night four months later, Ben woke after midnight to the sound of the wind rattling the aluminum windowpane. He needed to pee, so he tiptoed down the hall in his underwear and caught the faint strain of classical music humming from behind his mother’s closed bedroom door. He stopped in the hallway to listen—the bowed tension of violins rising and swelling, the rhythmic sound of breathing, as though two swimmers were sucking oxygen out of the air between strokes. Despite the episode with Elizabeta, Ben knew almost nothing about sex, at least not the specifics of the act, but something in him divined the meaning of the sounds and he stood there listening, the breathing growing heavier, tears slicking his face, knowing that whatever was happening on the other side of that door finally severed him from his father.
It was a quick slide into marriage after that, and that summer they all were moved into Voorhees’s three-bedroom townhouse overlooking the brand-new third hole of University Golf Club. Ben tried to get along with the man; he tried to sit at the dinner table and read passages from the New American Bible. He tried to let the man help him with his geometry homework. But Voorhees’s voice grated Ben’s ears, his aftershave twisted his gut; the man’s fake smile couldn’t camouflage his hostility toward Ben. So Ben pointed to a scalene triangle instead of an isosceles, solved for circumference instead of area, until the man gave up. Then Ben started running away. He escaped into the open fields, where he flushed out rabbits for a falconer and his Harris’s hawk. He rode his bike out to the end of the El Toro runway and let jets swoop over him to a landing. He hiked it up to the ranch’s stables in Bommer Canyon, where Billy James, one of the last cowboys, let him take Comet, retired and swaybacked, for trots into the finger canyons that led to Crystal Cove. There he’d tie up Comet and strip down to his underwear to dive through the kelp into the Coke bottle–green below, imagining the ash of his father floating cilia-like among the sea-palm algae. When his stepfather told him to be home at 5:00, Ben stumbled in at 6:00. When his stepfather told him to go up to his room, Ben went out the sliding glass door and ran through the rough and the sand traps of the golf course. When Voorhees kinked his arm to force him into the car to go to church, Ben ripped his elbow away and hid in the geodesic dome in La Bonita Park, thinking of the day he almost saw Elizabeta’s breasts.
Then one night Voorhees slipped a folded pamphlet across the kitchen table to him—boys smiling on the edge of a pool, boys coiled on diving platforms ready to spring into the water. A boy hanging his head to have a medal hung over his neck. We build character, we build discipline, we build CHAMPIONS! read the caption.
“This will give you structure,” Voorhees said. “Focus.” And then they prayed on it, the three of them clasping hands around the dinner table, their heads bowed.