Fortunate Son

The rent was due, and she was a hundred dollars short. Eric could help her this month, but he wondered how long she could live like that.

“I can’t even be away from you for more than two days, Eric,” she said. “When you stay home on the weekends, sometimes I cry until you’re back again.”

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F o r t u n a t e S o n

“Because you miss me?” he asked.

“Because it hurts,” she said. “It hurts inside me. Sometimes I don’t even like you. I look at you and think how great my life was before we met. I even hate you for not caring about anything. And then you get up just to go to the toilet and I get scared that I might not ever see you again.”

Eric remembered the times when she came into the bathroom while he was taking a piss. She’d come up behind him, shivering against him, and hold his penis while he urinated.

“Do you understand?” she asked.

“Do you love me? Is that it?”

“It’s not that at all. I love Drew. Sometimes I think about him, how sweet he was trying to be tough, trying to be the best at everything. Sometimes when we’d get together, he’d tell me about how scared he was that he wouldn’t get into Yale or that he wouldn’t be able to make it from nothing like his father did. That’s when I loved him the most. I protected him.”

Eric realized that Christie was telling him something that he’d always suspected but never really knew because he found it so hard to understand. He still didn’t completely grasp what it was that people felt about him. But at least Christie opened the door.

“So you don’t love me?” he asked.

“It’s not about that.”

“What do you mean?”

“The first time I saw you I wanted to get down on my knees,” the young woman said with anger and some fear in her voice. “It scared me, and I went home and took a bath.

But that didn’t help. I went to my room and closed the door, and then I started thinking about dying.”

“Dying? Why?”

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Wa l t e r M o s l e y

“That’s how you made me feel.” She was weeping now. “I knew that either I was going to call you or that I’d die.”

“Really die?”

“I don’t know. I think that I might have. But even if I didn’t there would have been something missing from the rest of my life. I tried not to call you. I put down the phone ten times before I dialed the number. But once I talked to you I couldn’t stop myself. I couldn’t.”

“But you love Drew.”

“Every night when you go home I want to call him. I miss his jokes and his trying to show off. I used to help him rewrite his papers. I was better at school than he was.”

“Better than me too,” Eric said. He put a hand on her thigh, but she pulled away.

“But you don’t care. If I told you that I was going to Yale tomorrow you’d just say good-bye. You wouldn’t even miss me.”

Eric had missed Branwyn; he’d missed her terribly. And when Tommy left his heart hurt so bad that he still felt the pain. He had the capacity to feel loss.

“You see?” she said. “You won’t even lie to me.”

Eric would have missed her, but he wasn’t thinking about that. He was trying to understand what Christie was telling him. He felt that she was somehow the mouthpiece of a much greater force, some insubstantial being breaking through to the material world, to him.

“Do you love me, Eric?”

“Yes, I do,” he lied.

He said the words quickly, before he could consider them.

This was an instinctual response. It was only later the next day, when he had time to think about it, that he realized why.

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F o r t u n a t e S o n

Christie wasn’t responsible for what had happened between them. Neither was he for that matter. But their coming together brought out a need in her that she couldn’t control.

Years later he would be able to see it coming, to recognize when women, and men, felt so drawn to him that they were willing to leave everything to see if maybe he could satisfy a yearning in their hearts. Then he would stop the attraction, avoid their lavish offers and intense praise. But with Christie he couldn’t say no. She offered him something that he needed, and so he told her that he loved her because it was the right thing to do.

“You do?”

“Yes. Yes, yes, yes,” and he kissed her. Holding her, he asked, “But what can we do about Drew?”

“That’s why I told him I was with someone,” she said.

“Now he can find somebody else and we can be together.”

“But will you be happy with me?” Eric asked. “You love him.”

“But I need you.”

“Is that good?” Eric asked her. “I mean, it doesn’t sound like you’ll be happy with me.”

Instead of answering him she stroked his cock and bit his nipple through his thin T-shirt.

E ri c ke p t se e i ng Christie even though they didn’t love each other. Her need and his guilt made a bond stronger than any consensual, reasonable, affectionate love.

But Eric also began seeing other girls at school. He’d call them up and ask them out, bring them to his house when no one was there, and have sex in Branwyn’s old room. Patricia 1 3 3

Wa l t e r M o s l e y