I'm Still Your Fag

  ***

  For a few weeks that winter everything was suspended in a kind of animated bliss. Looking out my bedroom window at a snowstorm, I wondered if I hadn’t in fact died in the earthquake, and was enduring some kind of expanded moment of chemically constructed existence before my body gave way to darkness. Maybe that’s what Cammie’s common purpose was: we were there to help each other along, we had all died but weren’t ready to give up the world yet. Whatever it was, I knew there would be no real solution to these feelings—none that could be revealed, no, they would just have to be slowly, grudgingly endured.

  Then, everything changed.

  “I’ve got something to tell you,” said Tamar. “I got a job in the city. At the Jewish Community Center. I’m going to commute for a little, but then I’m going to move as soon as possible. I can’t stay here anymore.”

  “Okay.”

  “You can come, you know.”

  “Where, with you?”

  “Yeah. I can’t see you if you’re going to stay here. I want you to move on too. I’ve got to be ruthless about this. Don’t ask me why, I just do.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think I’m ready.”

  I might not have been ready—envisioning myself as eternally young, sipping martinis as Ben’s house—but she was, and it took her no time at all. She found a little apartment in a gentrifying Polish section of Bucktown and was gone by the weekend. She declined my offer to drive her down. It didn’t take more than few days without her to come to a decision. I phoned her and within a week I too had my few possessions packed up.

  “Don’t leave,” Claxton said. We were in the Cadillac, having just burned our final tree. My mother would be driving me into the city the next day. “Everybody thinks you’re being a real drag. Tamar, we expected it from. But you’re one of us. Come on.” It was the first time I’d ever heard Claxton plead.

  “I’ve got to go. I can’t stay here. I . . . I’ll miss you, but I can’t stay.”

  “You’ll miss me?”

  “Of course. You’re like a brother.”

  “That’s touching.”

  I looked away. I felt like I’d been slapped. “You know she hit on me, before you got back from LA. That little blown up bitch hit on me. I just want you to know that, bro.”

  “Fuck you,” I said, though I knew it was true. It was the last thing I’d say to Claxton Morvern.