Gay and Lesbian Theme Views and Mechanics Publisher's Note Editor's Note Review of This Is Not For You Review of Potato Queen Crossword (Solution Posted in March. Printable version in pdf format of journal.) Creative Nonfiction Tunis, Forever By John Champagne Bisexuality 101 By Evelyn McFarland Poetry Blackouts By Steve Rydman Self Loathing By Steve Rydman A Boy Reads YM By Steve Rydman I Finally Found Me By Lucretia Randle Acorn Boy Above the Conclave By James Penha Fiction As If In Time Of War (1985) By Christopher T. Leland General Works Creative Nonfiction Stone Musings #5 By Mike Munsil Ascent Into Being By Holly Mitchell Fiction Come Winter By Sandra M. McDow The End of Stories By Sonia Vora Coal Blood By Tom Bennitt About the Contributors © 2006, River Walk Journal and respective authors and artists. All rights reserved. Do not use or reproduce without permission. River Walk Journal, Inc. Board of Directors Chairman - Elizabeth Ross Vice Chairman - Joseph Koch Secretary/Treasurer - Geri Stock-Ross Editorial Director - Patti Kurtz, DA Literacy Director - Bill Mausteller Policy Director - vacant Advisory Board Chairman - Patti Kurtz, DA Asst. Chairman - Dan Lachenman, PhD Samuel Hazo Christopher Leland Edwin Yoder Joseph Bathanti Journal Staff Publisher - Elizabeth Ross Editor-In-Chief - Joseph Koch Sen. Fiction Editor - Patti Kurtz Sen. Poetry Editor - Neeldhara Misra Sen. Creative Nonfiction Editor - Brenda Coxe Contributing Editor - Robert Dittman Publicity Director (PA) - Geri Stock-Ross For information about submissions, visit http://www.riverwalkjournal.org/submission.html. Questions about promotions, subscribers' services, and advertising should be sent to publisher@riverwalkjournal.org. River Walk Journal, Inc. is a non-profit corporation run entirely by volunteers. For information about volunteer opportunities and internships, visit http://www.riverwalkjournal.org/volunteer.html. |
As If In Time Of War (1985) By Christopher T. Leland from Ars Amoris: Love Stories 1941 - 2000 Against the doorframe with her glass of wine, she felt a peaceful laziness that passed over her too seldom in the afternoon. It usually came only at night, when the children were in bed, when, from the deck, she could hear but not see the surf tumbling rhythmically below. She squinted in the sunlight, gazing over the rooftops to the distant beach, beyond it, the shimmering Pacific. For that instant, Lois let herself marvel at her good fortune, having this view, this house. Rare were the specialists in John Ford who could afford it. Nor could she have, but for Eric. She glanced inside. He was kneeling beside the table, tightening its hinges with a tiny screwdriver. As he rolled the shaft with his fingertips, she admired the tracery of bone and vein on the back of his hand, his sinewed forearm, the biceps that, even at rest, strained the sleeves of his T-shirt. She smiled. When they were married, neither of them had paid much attention to biceps. He swayed back on his heels and stood. "You now have a functioning gate-leg table, and I rewired that lamp in Amy's room, which should be okay as long as she and her pals don't swing on the cord." He popped the screwdriver into the tool box and slid it with his foot into the corner. "So, do I get a prize?" "Try the Zinfandel. Or that Australian Chardonnay is nice. And come on out!" she yelled over her shoulder, moving to one of the chairs beneath the awning in the far corner of the terrace. He emerged with a beer. "Still early for anything too potent," he explained, sliding into the place across from her. "Say, is that pastel in the hall downstairs yours?" "No, no. I picked it up at the campus art show last year. I haven't done anything in years." "Thought you might have started again. You really were pretty good, you know." He raised the can. She noticed blood where he had somehow barked his knuckles. "Tchin-tchin." She made an exaggerated grimace as she toasted him back. "Merde." The afternoon was warm, though the sea breeze put the slightest chill in the air. She settled into the cushions and breathed deep. It made her a little dizzy. "Did you look at the VCR?" "Yep." He shook his head. "Some things are just too complicated. You'll have to talk to Rob. I can't figure out what the hell he's done to it." "Oh, I'll just take it in, or get a new one. He certainly doesn't know what's wrong." "I can look again if you like." "No, forget it Eric. You've done enough." She grinned across the table at him. "It's so nice to have a man around the house," she warbled. He smiled wistfully. "Don't I know it." Earlier on, it would have bothered her, back when the children were small and the divorce was a fresh wound. But now, it was easier. They could joke back and forth about it. Eric was hurting anyway, and it made no sense to make it an issue. "Do you think he'll come by?" "No," she said gently. "It's a phase, but a longish one." It had been a year since Rob had seen his father. The break occured out of the blue when he turned fourteen. He seemed to have adjusted to the notion. Both he and Amy visited Eric in Marin regularly; both of them had liked Mark. And then, from one day to the next, the boy balked, and had been balking ever since. He had sent all his fifteenth birthday presents back to the Bay Area unopened. He was spending the weekend with friends. "I guess you're right. I probably wouldn't have dealt with it very well if it had been my dad when I was his age." He laughed softly. "I really thought times had changed." "Uh-huh." When they met, she reflected, time had been changing very quickly indeed, or so it seemed, and her interest in 'Tis Pity She's a Whore and Renaissance iconography vaguely embarrassed her when she sat with Eric and his law school friends as they discussed the Court, the applications of the Voting Rights Act, the defenses for civil disobedience. All her passions seemed musty and more than a little suspect. That was why she worked so hard on her drawing, producing elaborate, artful posters for the grape boycott and the Anti-C.I.A. Coalition and Students Against Racism. This gave her certain credentials in Eric's circle. It was also how she first got him to bed, by offering to sketch him nude. From pose to a variety of positions had not taken long. In all the time since, she had never found a more inventive lover. "Have you heard much out of Mark?" "I ran into him at a fundraiser in the City. He's got a new flame, I guess," he said neutrally, then added smirking, "A good five years older than me at least." "That's what you get for staying young." It was right to be complimentary. She had noticed earlier, when he was checking the fan belts for her, that his severely styled hair was, indeed, beginning to thin, just as he'd told her. She played with the stem of her goblet. "I know you'd've said something, but there isn't anybody new?" He took a long suck on his beer. "Nope. Not yet." "You're being... careful?" He smiled. "Yes, Mommy. Are you?" It had been nearly a year since she had slept with anyone. The affair with Donald had been uninspiring, and she had called it off with little regret. Aside from a brief flurry right after the divorce, she had never played the field much, and that sporting, she knew now, was largely anger. "Well? Are you?" "Oh, Eric," she sighed. "It's been so long, my clitoris is learning shorthand." "Now, now. A marketable skill. Lots of openings in the service sector." He gestured with his beer carn. "But seriously, you can never be sure when opportunity'll knock. Don't go out without your rubbers. I'll leave you some when I go." She did not entirely like the irony. Her ex-husband checking up, leaving her the condoms that, in another time, another place, he would have tucked into that now estranged son's pocket. "I don't know, hon. They can always break or come off. It happened to us, remember?" For a week after, she had taken DES or something. She still wondered if that seven day's of precaution would give her cancer. "You're not screwing around too much up there, are you?" she asked tentatively. "Not much," he offered. "Not at all, really. Screwing, I mean." He took another slug of beer. "I've been getting into S&M." "S&M!" She made an appalled face. "Eric, that is perverse." "Don't be a prude, Lois," he tut-tutted. "No exchange of body fluids. It's very erotic really, if you take it slow. The pain disappears and then you just slip into some other space." His voice and eyes had turned dreamy. "Besides, there's something wonderfully subversive about taking rituals of oppression and making them the rituals of love." She shook her head. That was one of the things that had drawn her to him, of course, that barely restrained extremity. Something Jacobean, Caroline: an excessiveness that could not be bridled, and sent him now plunging across new erotic heavens like some aging Icarus. "You're a crazy man," she said to him. "You always were." "That's right. 'Still crazy after all these years,'" he crooned. "What time's Amy back?" "Five-thirty." "Want to hit the beach?" It had been forever since she had been. It really was too late in the day. By the time they got there, it would be cold. She narrowed her eyes against the glare off the distant water. "Sure," she said. In the old days, in summer, trapped in the inland smog, they had lived for the beach. It had meant a thirty mile drive in her car, a battle-scarred Pontiac, or his, an endlessly reconditioned VW van, but it seemed a small price for waves, fresh air, a respite from the consuming seriousness of their lives on campus. It was not that they did not party: dance, drink wine, drop acid. But they studied hard and, more than that, approached what was happening in the world in a way she found difficult, now, to explain to her own students. That commitment, that fine and righteous intoxication of belief, so heady and yet such a burden, and ever more so as the 'sixties faded and the 'seventies made them sorrowful, cramped, besieged. Perhaps it was the weight of that commitment that had enraged her more than anything when Eric took off for the Bay Area with his new law firm and his newly discovered orientation, leaving her behind with kids and car and her thesis half-done. They had never really talked about it, and likely he did not become the disco-bunny and bath-house barracuda she imagined those nights when Amy was still a baby. But, as she wrestled with Perkin Warbeck into the wee hours, a picture of him snorting poppers and shimmying under the strobe lights would muscle suddenly into her battle with the text, like one of those caped promoters always interrupting the rigged matches Rob watched worshipfully on Saturday afternoons. Her jaw would clench and her eyes would mist at the thought of the free-wheeling youth she never had. There before wheeling free was dangerous. She turned over on her stomach and watched him now, playing at the ocean's edge. He still looked good at forty, having filled out in the years since he left her. Scrawniness had been the style back then. The one thing she still could not adjust to was his hair above his ears. She had loved to play with those locks that brushed his shoulders; fell in an aureole like spun sunlight around his head while he slept. For years, she had kept the studies of him she had done in charcoal one summer, until the mildew ruined them. He had gotten shorn after a month in San Francisco. She always wished she had snipped a ringlet once as a memento. "Whew!" He raced up out of the waves--glistening, boyish--and whumped down beside her, spattering her with cold brine icier for the sun on her skin. She sat up with a jerk. "Shame on you!" "Aw, come on, old lady, don't be a gremmie or whatever the hell it was." He stood and pulled her to her feet and then along behind him. "Once more into the beach, dear friends!" She was laughing so hard when they hit the water, she got a mouthful of foam. As she fell into the surf, she dragged him along with her, and they both went under. They splashed and dunked each other in the waves, breathless from giggles and the chilling sea. In that moment, from a distance, they might have been mistaken for two sweethearts, a man and a woman only just blossomed, teetering on the brink of potential. Though she was really a bit old for it, before Amy want to bed, Eric read to her. Lois rarely had time for such things, and she resented it a little, much as it warmed her when on her way from the study to the coffee pot, she heard his sonorous voice lilting through the house. It was a fine mid-range tenor, the amber of dry sack she had imagined once as she listened to him at one of those endless political meeting, explaining yet another time some fine point of strategy. Now, as its gentle timbres wrapped around the archaisms of some fairy tale or other, as she stood in the dark kitchen, she could briefly wish things had worked out, or that it were way back when, in a moment when a little girl and her father together on the sofa would be unremarkable. Was it so much easier before, with people staying together come hell or high water, till death did them part, for the sake of the children? Was that odd serenity she remembered her parents possessing worth envying, or was it merely a kind of shellshock, the mask of desire in shrouds? After the last Shakespeare essay was marked, she made two gin and tonics and took them to the living room. Eric was hunched over the coffee table, one of the smoke alarms gutted before him. She paused for an instant to watch him as he toyed with the wires and jiggled the battery. "Be careful. If that thing goes off, Amy'll have a stroke." She sat down across from him, and handed him his drink. "I think it's shot. It's the one from the hall by Rob's room. We can get a new one tomorrow morning on the way to the airport." He pushed the jumble aside. "So, any budding Kittredges in this crop?" "Afraid not. Just the usual: Macbeth as hen-pecked husband; Hamlet as indecisive wimp; the unsullied passion of Romeo and Juliet versus the filthy lust of Anthony and Cleopatra." She took a swallow from her glass. "Undergraduates are so imperial about sex. If it doesn't happen between sixteen and twenty-five, it's repulsive." "I recall that stage," Eric said. "Someone told me when I was a sophomore that my German professor was having an affair with a graduate student. I found the idea that Fraulein Barrett had any inclinations in that direction unspeakably twisted." He settled back on the sofa and put his feet up. "Rob called while you were in the shower," she said. "Double-checking my flight time?" She snorted. "Don't be paranoid. I took it as a good sign. It could have been you who answered the phone." "I guess." Eric shrugged. "Was I asked after?" "Indirectly. He wanted to know if the VCR was fixed." "Little prick," he muttered ruefully, and scratched at the scab on his knuckles. She winced, then concentrated on her glass. It was not a question she ought to ask, but she knew she wanted to; had thought about it off and on all day. She was afraid he would read it wrong, that he would take offense, or worse, start to talk to her about disability coverage, the benefits arranged for the kids, his will, all with the notion that the reason she cared was the checks he had sent religiously every month since he had left her. "Eric." She hated the way her voice sounded. Ponderous. Parental. "Eric, have you had that test?" Midway through a sip, he stopped; set his drink down. He cocked his head, curious. She knew he understood what she meant. "No." He put his hands behind his head and stretched. "No. I've thought about it. A lot. I have to act as if it were positive. But I don't have to know." He lowered his eyes to meet hers. "Have you?" "Have I what?" "Had the test?" She leaned forward, snorting in frustration, "Eric. No, no I haven't. It's you who have to worry." "For the present." "Yes. Yes. For the present. I don't mean to make it sound like us versus them..." "Or you versus me." Lois slumped. "Eric, don't. I just..." He smiled, kindly, and sat straight. "I know, Lo. I know." He lowered his feet, stood, walked to the open screen. It was a few minutes before she followed him to the terrace. He was leaning over the railing, smoking dope. She slipped alongside him. "Eric, really!" she piped half-seriously. "What would the kids think?" "I don't know about Amy. Rob would probably be pissed at missing out. Here." He passed her the joint. Below, the sea pounded anonymous in the distance, infinitely black, the hill leading up to them touched only with the faintest glow of streetlights and televisions. They toked back and forth, unspeaking. The muzziness of marijuana wafted through her head, and her body hummed with an old familiar warmth. Eric puffed rapidly on the roach. It flared bright, suffusing his face in a warm gold. Then it was dark again. "The lamps are going out all over loveland," he whispered. "We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime." He rolled the dead cinder in his fingers, then popped it in his mouth. His hand floated away from his face, out before him in a gesture that embraced all the sleeping world below. "Our poor babies." Her cheeks were wet. A sudden, deep sadness rose through her, through the cozy shimmer of the dope. "Goddamn it, Eric. It's so unfair." "What?" She snuffled loudly. "I don't know. Everything. Life. It's no good. Things didn't used to be like this. Shit!" She dabbed her eyes with the back of her hand. He laid his arm gently on her shoulder and stroked her cheek. "Don't cry, Lo. Don't cry." "Why did it get so complicated? Everything's too complicated." "Oh, I don't know. I think it's always been complicated. It just seems harder when you're living it." He looked out toward the invisible sea. His voice was very soft. "Sammy, Mark's little brother--you met him once--Sammy died about six months ago. He was twenty-four. We took his ashes out on a boat, out past the Golden Gate. Only six of us could make the trip. It was just a little motorboat. The rest of the people at the funeral had to stay on the dock. And as we sailed away, I looked back, and I flashed on a story my dad told me once, about when he shipped out during World War Two, looking back at the pier where all the parents and wives and lovers and friends were, standing there, waving good-bye. And then they all scattered back across the country in trains and cars and buses, not knowing who on those boats was going to live and who was going to die." His voice vanished thinly in the darkness. He cleared his throat. "Maybe someday I'll have a chance to tell Robbie that story. And Amy, too. And then, years and years from now, when something else hopelessly unfair happens, they'll remember." Past midnight, they went inside. He kissed her cheek and headed for the guest room "Eric." He stopped on the third stair, and turned. "Eric. I want you to know, if..." But did it need be said, after all? "Eric. I... I..." She saw him again as that first time, at the demonstration on the steps of the university chancellor's house: serious, vulnerable, unflustered. Brave. But the world now was such a different, different place. "Before you go tomorrow, can I... can I sketch you?" He looked at her quizzically. "You can keep your clothes on." He smiled. "Sure," he said. Then he raised his arm slightly, and, though it seemed to take him an instant to remember how, he formed two fingers into a V. "Peace, Lo." he said. "Peace." |