The City of Rossford

When Layla walked into the house, the first thing she said was: “This has been the strangest morning. You won’t believe what happened to me.”

“Will came and visited you?” Milo guessed, taking off her coat.

She stared daggers at him and Dena said, “Don’t ask me how he knew that. It’s true?”

“It’s true,” Layla said.

“You need a cigarette, girl.”

“Damn shame neither one of you smokes,” Milo said, reaching for his.

“I need a drink. And I need Saturday to come so this whole thing can be…”

“Over?” Milo said.

“That’s not what I was going to say.”

“You know,” Dena Affren began, “it sort of seemed like it’s exactly what you were about to say.”

“And, of course,” Milo chimed in, moving Layla to her chair, “the marriage won’t be over on Saturday. It’ll just be starting.”

“I don’t want the marriage to be over,” Layla said. “I want the wedding to be over. I want all this… How did you know Will was coming?”

“We were all together last night. Brendan suggested it…. I may have agreed to the suggestion.”

“Milo!”

“Well, what’s the harm, right? If you’re in love with this Kevin.”

But this time it was Dena who hit Milo with a pillow.

“Milo!”

“I am in love with this Kevin,” Layla insisted.

“Then how come he doesn’t hang around with us? How come we don’t see him?”

“Uh, excuse me,” Layla reminded him. “But he’s not marrying you.”

“Milo just feels that he should be an organic part of the whole,” Dena explained.

“Does Milo feel that way, or do you feel that way?”

“Milo, honey, go check on the food for dinner.”

“All you made was cheesecake and potato salad, and you finished that yesterday.”

“Milo.”

Milo got up, crushing his cigarette and said, “Why don’t I go check that food.”

“Thank you, baby,” Dena said.

She waited until Milo had circled their makeshift coffee table and old sofa and gone down the hall to the kitchen before saying:

“But how did it feel? To be with Will again?”

Layla looked at Dena strangely.

“Look,” Dena said, “Bren’s a guy. True. But Bren is a guy who sleeps with guys and… he knows a thing or two about what it’s like to want a man. He and Kenny broke up twice. But… you know, they realized they really want each other, and I think Bren knew what he was doing when he sent Will to you. Just to see the guy you want…”

“I don’t want Will.”

“Well, hell, to see the one you used to love.”

Layla shook her head.

“Just tell me; how was it?” Dena said, grabbing her hand. “Just tell me what it was like to see him again.”

“It was… nice.”

“See!”

“And… I do think I would have wondered…. If I had never seen him again.”

“Exactly.”

“And… when I dropped the coffee creamer he bent over.”

“Yes?”

“And I noticed that over the last few years, Will’s gotten a pretty nice ass.”

When Brendan had graduated a year after Kenny, he came back to Rossford. Kenny had already set him up for the disappointing realities of life after college, and told him his best bet was graduate school. The truth was that Brendan didn’t particularly want to go to any school of any sort. He didn’t want anything. Except maybe to rest. With the characteristic powers of objective observation belonging to someone who spent the bulk of his life not having children, Fenn Houghton and Todd Meradan saw what Brendan’s parents had not.

“He needs to get away from them,” Todd said, simply.

When they had become rich, which the two had to admit they were, it had never occurred to them to move out of the house on Versailles Street. They hadn’t even added anything on. Now their thoughts turned to Layla and Dena and all of their “little friends” as Fenn called them, who were coming out of college, and Todd said, “Dylan’s got the extra room. We could add another one on, though. You know?”

Fenn thought about this and then said, “But if I were young and swinging, I wouldn’t want a room. I’d want a place.”

“I hadn’t thought about that.”

“When you got out of college my place was your place,” Fenn reminded him.

“And then the army. Then I came back here. What about the basement?”

Fenn listened.

“That basement, which has held dead bodies, and Tom’s sperm. And all sorts of things. That huge basement. Seal it off and turn it into a little apartment. Put a new lock on it. Make it sturdy. We’re in business.”

Fenn kissed Todd on the cheek.

“That’s why I love you.”

They didn’t talk about it to anyone, though everyone who came by knew something was happening to the house. Contractors came in and out, and they did things more or less on time. Brendan had been at Martin’s one day, ringing up groceries and reflecting that he never thought he’d be a cashier again when Layla showed up.

“Hey, Lay. What can I get you?”

“A new boyfriend. Me and Aidan might be quits.”

“Shit.” Then Brendan covered his mouth. “I mean, I’m sorry.”

He gave her a small smile. “We have boyfriends in the discount aisle. However you need to shake them up first and check the expiration date.”

Layla laughed, then she said, “Actually, Mr. Miller, the reason I’m here is because my uncle and Todd have summoned you.”

“Fenn and Todd?” Brendan said. That sounded thrilling. It could only be good news. But what?

Layla didn’t say. As she left she didn’t even say ‘Happy Birthday’.

But that night, when Brendan arrived at the house after work, wondering what could possibly be in store for him, the party was there. No one shouted surprise because Fenn said that was annoying. Dena was there. Milo was there. Layla, of course, was there. Will came from out of town, and though he said he wouldn’t be able to make it, and they had recently broken up, Kenny was there. It was happy and quiet and Fenn and Todd chose to “stay out of the way” for the most part.

But as the night wound down, Fenn rolled open the doors of the little library, came out and said, “Brendan, I would like to show you something.”

They went out of the house through the kitchen, and it was then that Brendan noticed what he thought he had seen before, that the place where the door to the basement used to be was gone. They walked around the front of the house. Slowly a car passed, and from Dorr Road he could hear late night traffic. They reached the old basement door, redone, and Fenn handed Brendan a key.

“What’s this?”

“Open it.”

“A present?” Brendan said. “Is there a present in there?”

“You might say that,” Fenn told him.

Brendan opened it. He turned on the light. He went down the little flight of steps.

“I like what you’ve done with it. And the windows! I bet this place can get some great light. Say… But… Fenn, maybe I’m stupid, but I don’t see the present.”

“Then you really are stupid,” Fenn said.

“What?” Bren began. And then, “No… I mean…”

“I know what it’s like to have to live with your parents and watch them watch you, waiting for something to happen. You need your own space to figure things out.”

Brendan stood there open mouthed.

Finally he said, “I can’t accept it.”

“You know you can. And you know in the end you will. After we’ve gone through all this trouble, don’t make us go through the added trouble of begging you to keep something that’s yours.”

“But… I mean… Have you considered that…? I might not figure shit out tomorrow. Or… Anytime I mean. And rent.”

“Stop,” Fenn said. “Shut up. You know me. After twenty years you know me, and you are one of the few people who know Todd and I will never worry about rent or mortgages or money again. You know that. A gift is a gift.”

Finally, Brendan shut up, and he hung his head in amazement.

“So,” Fenn said. “Just say the one thing you should say.”

“Thank you,” Brendan said.

And Fenn nodded. Then he went upstairs.

And so that was how Brendan came to live on Versailles Street, or underneath it. He stammered to Fenn about various complications, about what his parents would say. Fenn told him to lie, to tell them, if he wanted, that he was paying rent. To tell them he got a nice new job clerking. Fenn also suggested that he quit being a cashier. Brendan walked around in a daze, cognizant of the fact that he was one of the blessed few that actually was allowed to live as he wished. What he wanted was to find out what he should be doing. He spent a lot of time upstairs and once he’d asked why there was no longer a basement door in the kitchen.

“Firstly, cause you’d eat up all my shit, and secondly, because if you are fucking someone then we all get privacy.”

This made Brendan turn red. Adults, and he still didn’t feel totally part of the adult world, did not say things like that.

“I’m broken up with Kenny now,” was all he told Fenn.

“Well,” Fenn shrugged. “It ain’t over till it’s over. And it’s never over till you’re dead. And there are other men besides Kenneth McGrath.”

There were indeed other men beside Kenny McGrath, but Brendan was not good at meeting them. He went to an online dating site and it was only looking back years later, that he realized not only were there other men, many of them were actually probably better than Kenny. But Kenny was what he loved and what he knew, so his attempts at meeting others were half assed at best. Before this he had pushed his mind into his work. Now he had no work, so he thought of Kenny a lot. He also realized he had nothing in the way of skills. Todd made films, Fenn acted, and since he had gone up to Chicago with Paul Anderson for a time, years ago, he occasionally acted in films. Brendan didn’t have an artistic bone in his body. He wasn’t musical like Milo. In the end he decided he should be like Will. Will had gotten up and gone to school, realized halfway through his masters he hated his program, gotten out and was getting another undergraduate degree. Will didn’t get tired of learning, and he more or less knew what he wanted to do. Brendan had been a good student, but not a stellar one.

“I am not a man of deep, deep passions,” he said simply. “I’ll have to get an MBA or something.”

“You really want to work in a company?” Will demanded. “You really want to do business?”

“Not really,” Brendan had admitted.

But the truth, and there it was, is he didn’t have much of a passion for anything that had letters after it.

“You don’t have to be a philosopher or anything like that,” Will said. And this was the period when he had begun growing his hair out and looked a bit like a philosopher himself. “Say, why don’t you…. Go to law school?”