Sam and Ed live the high life, and see no reason to add to their happy twosome. Then 11–year–old Scot's mother dies, and a wine–soaked promise pushes the couple into parenthood. They dutifully make all the usual arrangements, but Scot is far from usual, sporting makeup and enduring bullying at school. Soon Sam and Ed begin to question their parenting, their commitment to each other, and the compromises they've made to live in a straight society. Breakfast with Scot is a humorous, heartwarming novel about the true meaning of family.
One
At the end of his first week in Cambridge, I took Scot across the river to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Scot was eleven, and I figured he would feel at home in Boston’s famous bijou palace. It is jam-packed with Japanese screens, French stained glass, German altars, Persian rugs, Italian paintings, and no end of esteemed bric-a-brac. I didn’t know Scot well, but I knew he liked flea markets and jumble sales, and I am astonished that I am about to tell you that I was embarrassed by Scot’s peculiarly limp limbs and his gooney posture and I was hoping to stand him next to the pre-Renaissance paintings and see his likeness in those charmingly misproportioned saints and angels.
I wanted a new angle on Scot.
I wanted to lose perspective.
We were on the third floor, in the Gothic Room, when Scot started to get sick to his stomach. Vertigo. He was okay if he kept to the center of the shiny cobblestone floor, but he couldn’t stop himself from occasionally glancing through the Islamic arches into the empty air of the central courtyard. He asked the security guard how long a fall down it was to the ground-floor greenery, and when the guy said, “Let’s take a look,” and put a hand on his back, Scot’s knees gave out, and as he collapsed, he squeaked out the words, “Please, stop it, sir.”
The guard backed off, and he raised his hands to prove, I guess, that he wasn’t a molester.
I waved at the guard, a no-harm-done gesture, and I said, “He’s afraid of heights. It’s not your fault.”
But the guard was embarrassed and insulted, an emotional cocktail that Scot serves up to many strangers. He said, “What’s the matter with that kid?” just loud enough to make it hurt. Then he wandered into the next room.
Scot said, “I’m sorry I screamed.”
I pulled him to his feet. “You know those empty spaces I showed you on the walls downstairs? The paintings that were stolen?” It was true. Somebody had walked out of the place with a collection of Dutch masters worth millions. “Everybody’s been in a bad mood around here since then.”
We were only a few feet from my favorite painting in America, a small golden moment made by the Italian genius Giotto six hundred and seventy-five years ago. The Presentation of the Infant Jesus in the Temple is displayed on an easel—an inspired choice by Isabella, who acquired and placed everything in the museum while it was still her home. The Giotto is a genuine masterwork, and the easel makes you mindful of its humble origins. A man mixed up some eggtempera paints and applied them to a small board. That’s the history of art. The easel, unfortunately, is draped in red, a dash too much dash for me, but not for Scot.
Scot didn’t comment on the flabby body of the baby Jesus. Held high on his back in Simeon’s red-robed arms, Jesus steadies himself by clinging to Simeon’s beard with his left hand as he reaches toward his mother’s outstretched arms with his right, and his body becomes a casual crucifix. Something sad shadows this golden moment.
Scot was fascinated by the drapery. “You know, Ed, you could do that with your furniture at home,” he said. “Or a bike.”
Four young women arrived with big pads of paper, and they were followed by two handsome young men who’d obviously shopped for clothes in the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald. One of them had found a pair of white bucks.
Scot instantly recognized the young men as a better version of Sam and me.
The guard came back, none too happy with any of the malingerers in the Gothic Room. He warned each one of the sketchers not to sit in the carved mahogany thrones, torture devices that no American would mistake for chairs.
Scot snapped open the blue leather camera bag slung over his shoulder.
The guard called out, “Sorry. No pictures in here, son.” He looked at me accusingly.
Scot rummaged in his bag and finally fished out a vial of pink lotion. He jiggled a big blob into one palm, rubbed his hands together vigorously, packed and snapped things back into place, and stood up.
The lotion was fragrant beyond reason.
I heard the guard sniff.
I stared at Saint Simeon, the baby’s hand in his beard.
One of the sketchers asked her friend if she smelled something funny.
The man with the bucks said, “That shouldn’t be allowed,” and pulled his linen friend to the next room. This was too outré for them. Draped furniture, yes. Stinky perfume, no.
The guard said, “That’s some strong stuff.”
Scot looked happy. To me, confidentially, he said, “It’s called Pink Gardenia. It was on sale. I also bought the bath splash.” Then he placed his slippery hand in mine, and we headed for the stairs.
Two
Sam and I first met Scot when he was two and his hair was thin and pinkish, a condition optimistically referred to as strawberry blond. He spent most of that weekend under an oak table playing with everyone’s shoelaces. I didn’t think much about it at the time, but it is true that Scot treated every movable object as a hat. He tried on upholstered pillows, stray socks, notepads, and even a roasted chicken leg. His mother, Julie, had just moved in with Sam’s only brother, Billy, who had a handsome old apartment in a Baltimore brownstone. Julie cooked too much food for every meal, which endeared her to me. She wanted Sam and me to have a false impression of her.
Billy is two years older than Sam, several inches shorter, and something happened to him at college that made him fall in love with Latin America. He’d always had dark hair and black eyes, but he was not always magnetic. He wears shabby dark suits, a thin dark tie, black boots, and spectacularly expensive white shirts. (This, he told me, was a tip from his Uncle Arthur, a quiet man who had a mustache Billy admired as a kid and a girlfriend who had always just dropped in when Sam and Billy happened to visit.) Billy also became a reader in college, and his fervor can transform any printed material into erotica. He often walks away from a dinner table midsentence and returns with his white sleeves jumbled up around his elbows, an open book balanced in his palm. He reads long passages and slaps himself on the head and groans as if the words are too fucking much and Jesus Christ Almighty can you believe this was just sitting on the shelf in my office and none of us knew a goddamned thing about it before this minute?
The second time Sam and I saw Scot, he was four. His hair was red, his eyes were gray, and he washed his toys after he played with them. Billy had spent the last eighteen months in Colombia. I’d sent Julie a few postcards and the name of a friend of mine who’d opened a gallery in D.C. Julie was a painter who hadn’t had much luck. Billy told me how much it meant to him that I had called Julie every month and that I’d got her connected to so many art types. This further endeared Julie to me. She wanted Billy to have a false impression of me. Billy said he wanted to take us all out to dinner on the U.S. government, and Julie wore pearls. We all ordered exotic fish, and we drank Chilean wine, but after dinner the conversation turned hypothetical and tragic. Billy convinced us that he was important enough to be assassinated, and Julie looked proud when her fate got tangled up in his misfortunes and she ended up in an exploding car or blindfolded in a supply closet at the Miami airport. “Or it could be much more ignominious,” Billy said. “We could die in a plane crash.”
Julie sounded a little drunk when she said, “Who are you kidding? We never go anywhere together.”
Billy said, “I’m just saying there could be an accident.”
Julie said, “You don’t believe in accidents.”
Billy said, “I’m just saying,” and his black eyes gave us no hint of what he wasn’t saying.
“Me, too,” said Julie, who had taken off her pearl necklace and coiled it around Billy’s hand.
Billy held his hand over Julie’s plate, and the pearls ticked down around her picked-over fish.
Julie was impressed and a little amused and somehow she was even drunker. “The point is Billy dies in a plane crash, and I end up drinking myself to death. Right?”
Billy said, “Whatever it takes,” very quietly, and filled Julie’s glass, and the fun drained right out of the evening.
Sam poured himself more wine so Julie wouldn’t have to die alone, but Julie ignored the gesture and yelled to the waiter, “Another bottle of a better red, something decent,” and Billy nixed the order, and I said nobody is going to die, and Sam said nobody is going to die, and Billy said, “If we do die, we just want you to take care of Scot, that’s all.”
Julie said, “Just Scot, that’s all. Just my son, that’s all.”
I said, “Well, of course, we love Scot,” which was not true. We thought he was a sad kid, and we pitied him, but the whole evening had a spirit of exaggeration.
Sam said, “Are you sure?”
I thought he was talking to me, and Julie thought she was supposed to answer, so we said “Of course” at the same time, which saved me a moment’s embarrassment and sealed Scot’s fate.
The third time we saw Scot, he was almost seven and someone—Julie couldn’t remember who—had sent him a feather boa, which Scot used as a wig. A beehive in the morning, a ponytail that afternoon. And Billy asked me if I thought Julie’s paintings were any good. They were not. She was never trained, and she wasn’t naive, so her attempts at abstraction were achingly artistic, and her figurative paintings were filled with unconvincing objects apologetically placed off-center. You could hear Julie saying, Let me get this tree out of your way, and just ignore those sort of bird things in the sky.
Billy poked at my silence. “Is she terrible? I mean, embarrassing?”
“I’m embarrassed about this conversation, Billy.”
He said, “This is serious.”
I said, “Then maybe you oughta talk to a serious art critic.”
“But you don’t think she’s great.”
I said I didn’t think she was great.
I’d confirmed something for him. And years later, I wonder if I should have surprised him. Would Billy have loved Julie if I’d given him a false impression of her talent?
That weekend, when I woke on Sunday, Sam and Julie were making plans to cook breakfast. Scot had painted a pair of kneesocks on his legs. Billy and I went out to get the Post and the Times and to examine a photograph of a still life by Julie. Billy had pulled into a half-full church parking lot. He put the picture on the dashboard and said, “How much could you get for this? Tops.”
I asked him how big the original was. I hoped it was small. It was a genuine clunker. On a golden background, Julie had drawn an apple and an orange. The apple was painted orange, and the orange was splotchy red and green, somewhat like an apple.
“Julie sold this the last time I was away. She always makes a couple of big sales when I’m away. She’s been using again.
Unless you tell me this is worth four thousand dollars, I’m taking that posting in Santiago. I’m not the kid’s father, and I’m not funding any more of this arts and crafts shit. And I gotta get a blood test. Me. And wouldn’t that be ironic?”
“What?” I was thinking about art. Scot’s painted kneesocks, for instance.
Billy said, “Ironic if it’s me instead of Sam who ends up with AIDS.” He got out of the car. “You wanna come in and say a prayer for me before the blood test? I’m not staying for the whole deal or anything.”
I waited in the car with the photograph of Julie’s painting. Apples and oranges. Get it?
Julie and Billy. They shared a sense of irony.
Release Date: November 16, 2007
Release Time: 95 minutes
Director: Laurie Lynd
Cast:
Tom Cavanagh as Eric McNally
Ben Shenkman as Sam
Noah Bernett as Scot
Jeananne Goossen as Nula
Benz Antoine as Greg Graham
Shauna MacDonald as Joan
Graham Greene as Bud Wilson
Vanessa Thompson as Carla
Alexander Franks as Joey Morita
Dylan Everett as Ryan Burlington
Colin Cunningham as Billy
Anna Silk as Mia
Megan Follows as Barbara Warren
Robin Brûlé as Ms. Paul
Cameron Ansell as Finn O'Brien
William Cuddy as Young Maple Leafs Fan
Fiona Reid as Mildred Monterossos
Sheila McCarthy as Miss Patterson
Jay Anderson as Toronto Head Coach
From Obituary in The Boston Globe, February 10, 2021:
Michael Downing of Cambridge, MA died from cancer on February 9, 2021. He was 62. Michael was a passionate author, teacher, friend, and mentor. He grew up in Pittsfield, MA, the youngest child in a large family. He graduated from Harvard College, where he studied English, and was a Harvard-Shrewsbury fellow in Shropshire, England. Michael was the author of nine books, including the national bestseller Perfect Agreement, named one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by Amazon.com and Newsday, and Breakfast with Scot, a comedy about two gay men who inadvertently become parents. Breakfast with Scot was adapted as a feature film with the cooperation of the National Hockey League and the Toronto Maple Leafs—the first gay-themed movie to be endorsed by a major-league sports authority. Michael's encyclopedic reading and wide-ranging interests were reflected in his other novels, which featured Giotto's frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel and New England's Shaker communities, and in non-fiction works examining Zen Buddhism and the history of daylight saving time. He also wrote a memoir tracing the aftershocks of his father's death when Michael was three to his own experience as an adult at the frontiers of modern medicine. In addition to his books, Michael wrote two plays, premiered by the Triangle Theater of Boston and San Francisco's New Conservatory Theatre. He worked as a contributing editor for the Italian art monthly FMR, the science journal Oceanus, and Harvard Magazine. In his latest novel, Still in Love, he returned to the main character of Perfect Agreement, a professor of writing at a Boston area university. For 30 years, Michael taught writing to college students, first as an assistant professor at Wheelock College and for 20 years as an instructor of creative writing at Tufts University. Michael also was an instructor for many years at Teachers as Scholars (TAS), a professional development collaboration between college faculty and public and private school teachers. Devoted to his students, Michael told an interviewer in 2019, "I think of the classroom as an incredibly important cultural space and personal space, and one that's increasingly undervalued and under threat." He added: "The creative writing classroom is a place to develop the habit of wanting our original work to change. That to me is the project of a life—to change, and to be changed by the people you encounter." Michael changed the lives of many students, colleagues and friends, who over years sought out his wisdom, company and cooking, which he shared in generous, equal portions of brilliance and humility. A lifelong resident of Massachusetts, he divided his time between Cambridge and Ipswich. He leaves his partner of 39 years, Peter Bryant; brothers, Jack Downing and his wife Mary of Pittsfield, MA and Joseph Downing of Westborough, MA; and many extended family members and friends who loved him deeply. Michael was predeceased by his parents, John F. and Gertrude (Martin) Downing; and his siblings, Mary Ann Matthews, Margaret Downing, and Gerard Downing.
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