The Life I Lead: A Novel - Hardcover

Banner, Keith

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375403760 ISBN 13: 9780375403767

Verlag: Random House USA Inc, 1999

Inhaltsangabe

Dave Brewer's perfect life with a loving wife and young daughter in a small town in Indiana is turned upside down by an encounter with Nathan, a young loner--in whom he recognizes himself--with whom his growing compassion is gradually transformed into a spiritual and physical obsession. A first novel. 25,000 first printing.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Keith Banner received his M.F.A. in creative writing from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. His stories have appeared in The Kenyon Review and other literary magazines. He lives in Cincinnati, where he is a social worker for the mentally handicapped. <b>The Life I Lead</b> is his first novel.

Aus dem Klappentext

ebut novel about obsessional passion and a morally ambiguous love, about an upstanding family man in an Indiana town who finds himself caught in the grip of desire for a young boy.<br><br>Dave Brewer, married to Tara--they have an eighteen-month-old daughter--is a meter reader for Indiana Gas. He helps his ailing father. He drives a bus for the Norris Road Baptist Church. He enjoys a good round of golf. He has everything he wants: family, community, a steady job. Until one day at a public pool, he sees a boy, a quiet loner, in whom he sees himself. <br><br>The boy, Nathan, has cut his foot at the pool. Something in his scared, innocent eyes awakens a powerful compassion in Dave that gradually emerges as something more: an obsession both physical and spiritual ("I feel what I feel for him in the back of my mouth, in the muscles in my hands"). <br><br>As his interest in Nathan evolves from sympathy to love, Dave can no longer deny the complexity of his feelings--he desires Na

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Dave

Mom, Dad, and Troy are cleaning the living room carpet in our old house. I'm in one of my dad's old T-shirts, what I wear to sleep in, standing up on the couch, watching. Dad is mad because the carpet-cleaning machine they rented down at the store is making too much foam. White foam spews all over the yellow-green shag, and my mom and Troy, the neighbor's son who was going to help Dad move the furniture, are laughing, both of them, out of nervousness. Still in his work clothes, my dad gets angrier and angrier, a short, skinny guy sweating with a cigarette in his mouth as he holds on to the machine's hose.        

        He looks up at me. Looks right at me, clicking the machine off.

        "What is he doing outta bed?" Dad asks.

        Mom and Troy stop laughing. Mom's got that playful, after-laugh voice. "You said he could stay up, Paul."

        "Shut up," Dad says, still looking at me.

        I feel like I've been caught doing something, but also all I'm doing is standing on the couch in my dad's T-shirt and my socks. I was just watching the way the white foam keeps coming out, like a soft-serve pump at Dairy Queen, only bigger.

        Dad comes up to me.

        "Get your goddamned feet off my goddamned couch," he says.

        But if I jump down, I'll get into the foam. He knows that. He's watching me. Even at six, I get it, that he wants me to jump into that foam so he can bust my hind-end for getting on the carpet he is trying to clean. It's a setup, my six-year-old brain says, and I look over at Troy. He is coming to the other side of the big couch where there's no foam. Troy motions for me to go over to him, and I do. He lifts me up. He's not that big, but he can lift me. I smell the sweat in his black hair and see the moles on his neck.

        Dad says, "That's right. Take him in there to bed."

        But I look up and I see Dad is looking at Mom, and he goes, "What? What? Why ain't you laughing now?"


        I look at Dad's face while he flicks the stupid machine back on. He looks like he just got beat, but I don't feel like this is a victory by any means.

        Troy takes me to my bedroom, gives me a tongue-kiss right after shutting the door. He does not smile. I go sit on my bed, being quiet, and he sits on his knees in front of me, kissing me again.

        Then he says, "He put too much soap in that thing."

        He rubs both my arms.

        "You just put a little soap in that thing."

        I lay back in my bed. Still on his knees, he stoops over and kisses me lightly, the way a dad might do on a TV show. Like, you know, I am being "tucked in." He stands then, skinny and a little taller than Dad, although he's only sixteen. On Sunday mornings when the old guy comes and picks us up on the church bus, it's me and Troy the first ones on there. We sit together up front, and Troy has his Bible, the one he won at Vacation Bible School for memorizing seventy-three verses, and he has combed his hair back with shiny stuff like a kid evangelist.

        Now he says, "He won't ever get all that stupid foam up."

        Troy covers me with a sheet. I stare up at him, feeling dumb, thinking about what we've been doing. In the garage by his house, on one cot, in silence, we lay together, and he holds me tight, like we are falling out of an airplane. Tight like he won't let go until we hit the ground splattering like a cartoon. He tells me over and over he loves me but if I say anything to anybody he'll have to kill me and then himself. He touches me, and I touch him, and there's this bird's nest I watch in the garage's rafters when we touch. It's like somebody has put it there for me only to see, made out of twigs, pieces of plastic, grass, colored yarn. The birds that made it have disappeared.

        "Well, I better get back out there," Troy says, after kissing me one more time.

        I know he loves me, but his love is like that bird's nest, something I can only look
at, way up high, and his love being so high and out of reach makes me think that I don't deserve it. But I am glad that he has decided to let me in on it. I know he is crazy, even at six, I sense it in him, and part of me wants to keep him happy so he won't go completely crazy and hurt himself, or me, or somebody else.

        Troy waves, flicking off the light switch. When he opens the door, I can hear my dad still out there with the machine, and my mom yelling above the sound, "Let's take it back to the store, Paul. Come on. Give up."
What happens sometimes now is that I don't know what I am doing at work, which could be considered dangerous, as I work as a meter-reader for Indiana Gas. I mean I go out and check on people's gas usage by observing the little numbers on the robot-looking meters out behind their homes. So I do this, and all day sometimes I feel this pressure. All the numbers blur. I go out and buy a little bottle of vodka and mix it with some OJ and sit in my truck and drink. Almost ready to go crazy.

        I could blame Troy if I wanted. Sure. But he's gone. Might be dead. I could blame my mom or my dad. But she remarried and he's got stomach troubles. I could blame a lot of people. But mostly it's not about blame or nothing of the sort. I know that. It is about this sick feeling around noon on a Friday when I am sipping my screwdriver out of an old Wendy's cup that was laying in my truck, and I start remembering Troy one summer, me and Troy, going down a slide together at Meadowbrook Park and me between his legs, him holding on to me while we went down this curlicue slide hot from the sun, my legs burning off. Then we are bouncing in together at the bottom. Me laughing, but also knowing.

        Vodka and OJ burns all the way down into my stomach. The CB in the truck goes off, the crackling dispatcher's voice. All these houses, I think, parked in the middle of a nice neighborhood, sun shining through trees, off clean windows. I turn down the radio, almost go to sleep. The fear gets loose after a few sips and gets elastic and forms itself into caulking that lines the little cracks in my skull. Shake it off, Dave, I keep telling myself, shake it off.

        I think about the boy at church and I think about the one in the bathroom at Wal-Mart and I think about the one in the baseball dugout at Shadyside Park, the one with the long eye-lashes and when I said I loved him he said, "Why?"

        And I didn't know what to say.

        I stop drinking, throw what's left out onto the pavement. I get back to work, forging some numbers, doing some actual...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Random House USA Inc
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1999
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0375403760
• ISBN 13: 9780375403767
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 261
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Knopf; https://knopfdoubleday.com; ; 3 Queen Caroline Street Hammersmith; London; W6 9PE; Vereinigtes Königreich
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar