A home at the end of the world (20 page)

“Don’t be. This is just for fun. This is just because I like you. There’s nothing in this world for you to be nervous about.” I unbuttoned his shirt, and helped him slide it off his shoulders. His shoulders were damp and ticklish with hair.

“I’m not, you know, in very good shape,” he said, though by then I’d seen his bare chest a hundred times.

“I think you’re lovely,” I said. I took off my blouse and dropped it on the floor. I never wore a bra. I put his hand on my left breast.

“These are below par, to tell you the truth,” I said. “You’ll be with other women who have a lot more going on here.”

“I don’t think about other women,” he said.

“You’re too much, you know that?”

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“Nothing. Not a thing. Come on now, get undressed. Old Clare’s going to show you a few tricks.”

We took the rest of our clothes off quickly, as if the real tenants might get home at any moment and find us using their apartment. When we were naked I took him in my arms again and kissed him, with more concern than passion. His breath was hot and a little strong but not foul. It was carnivore’s breath.

“Don’t be afraid,” I said. “This is the most natural thing in the world. You might even like it.”

“I do like it,” he said. “I think I do.”

I guided him to the bed, and had him lie down. I’d never before been so completely in charge. If this was part of the aging process, I didn’t mind it. There was something agreeably frightening about running a fuck.

Bobby lay naked across my bed. His cock slumped softly against his thigh—a purplish one, circumcised, large but not enormous. He had a surprisingly sparse little muddle of pubic hair. I could hear the sound of his breathing.

“Everything’s okay, sweetheart,” I said. “Just relax, I’ll take care of everything.”

I knelt on the mattress beside him, and massaged his chest and belly. He looked up at me uncertainly. “Shh,” I said. “Don’t do anything, don’t think about anything. Your big sister’s gonna manage fine, just close your eyes.”

He closed his eyes. I bent over and flicked at his nipples with my tongue. I’d never done anything like this before. He was so big and inert. My sexual career had generally involved forceful people who wanted me, who went after me with obscure imperatives of their own. I did what I could to feign an older woman’s serene competence. As subtly as possible, I checked his cock for signs of arousal.

“Clare,” he said. “Clare, I don’t know if—”

“Shh. Hush. I’ll tell you when it’s time to speak.”

I kissed my way down his stomach, took his limp cock in my hand. It was like a rubber toy. I had to stay mindful of its sensitive humanness. I put it in my mouth and worked it around slowly, lapping the underside with my tongue. I took plenty of time. I tickled and stroked with my fingertips, ran my tongue around his scrotum, and nipped gently at his thighs. I forced myself not to hurry. Other men had had wishes, ways they liked things done. Helene had instructed me on every move. No one had ever abandoned himself to my care like this before. I mouthed his cock and thought of myself as a whore in a movie. A smart triumphant whore who always puts on a good show. I pulled at his pubic hair with my teeth, licked the violet tip of his cock. And finally it began to stiffen.

Then I let myself work harder. I took him into my mouth again and worked him up and down, up and down until my neck started to ache. I played my hands along his rib cage and gently pinched his nipples. I could feel his breathing quicken. I heard him softly moan, a fretful little cry like a dove’s. I myself was aroused. Not intensely, but with the ticklish queasiness I remembered as a girl, when I’d first started thinking of large, powerful bodies that wanted control and resisted it.

When I thought he was ready, I got up and straddled him. The look on his face surprised me. He was flushed and panicky, not pleased as I’d expected him to be. Still, I smiled reassuringly. I knew this was no time to lose our momentum. I said, “Ready?” Without waiting for an answer, I worked myself into position and slid his cock in.

Something wasn’t right. His face was so raw and terrified. Still, I kept up. There was no backing out now. I didn’t think of my own pleasure. I rose and fell, rose and fell. I whispered to him, “Sweetheart, you’re doing fine. Oh, yes. You’re doing wonderfully.” It wasn’t exactly what I wanted to say. It was what I heard myself saying. I stroked his chest. His face was shiny with sweat. I reached over and smoothed away a bit of hair that had gotten plastered to his forehead.

And suddenly, unexpectedly, he came. I felt the spasm. When he came he let out a wail of such agony. He might have been stabbed in the gut. It was an awful sound; inconsolable. I forgot what I was supposed to be doing and crouched with my knees pressed in against his rib cage, waiting for the wail to stop. There was a span of thick, echoing silence. Then he started weeping, openly and extravagantly as a baby.

I reached over and touched his face. His cock was still inside me. I knew we were lost to one another in some permanent, irremediable way. Now he was a mystery. I lay down beside him and told him it was all right. I told him everything was all right. He stroked my hair with heavy, flat-handed swipes. He said, “I never. I never thought I would.”

“You did,” I whispered.

He pressed his chest against mine. I could feel the heat of his tears. He didn’t say anything else. He fell asleep in my bed and I let him stay there, though I couldn’t get to sleep myself. I lay beside him for quite a while, inhaling his large sweaty essence and asking myself what exactly I had gone and done now.

JONATHAN

T
HE NIGHT
of the day Arthur the theater critic went to the hospital, I traded histories with Erich. We had never talked about our pasts, beyond the broadest details of place and family temperament. When we were together, memory dragged behind consciousness on a shortened rope and any event more than a day or two old fell away into prenatal darkness. We’d spoken to one another from a continual present, in which profundity, despair, and old romantic aspirations did not exist; in which the ordinary vicissitudes of working life took on Wagnerian dimensions, and the periods between a boss’s insane demands or a cab driver’s hostility were pockets of utter unremarkable calm.

Now we sat in Erich’s apartment with a bottle of Merlot, tallying up. He’d put John Coltrane on the stereo.

“I know this is difficult,” I said. I was to be the apologist, because I was the one who’d insisted on broaching the subject in the first place.

“A little,” Erich said. “It is a little, yes. I’m not very…forthcoming about these things. I saw my therapist for over a year before I got around to telling her I was gay.”

“You don’t have to tell me anything you haven’t told your therapist,” I said. “I just want us to have, well, an idea about the scope of one another’s pasts. To put it delicately.”

Erich flushed, and emitted one of the sharp, painful-sounding laughs that social discomfort could produce in him. He was still unformed in some way. The monstrous imitation-leather sofa on which we sat had been a gift from his parents in celebration of his admission into law school in Michigan. His parents had evidently assumed him to be embarking on a twelve-room, wainscoted life, but after less than a year he’d left law school for the hope of an acting career in New York. Now his parents didn’t speak to him and the sofa sat wall-to-wall in his apartment, like a cabin cruiser berthed in a swimming pool.

“Just an idea,” I added. “No humiliating confessions required.”

“I know,” he said. “I don’t honestly know why I’m so hesitant about things like this. I don’t know why. I’ve always been more the type to, you know, listen to people. I guess it’s a habit you get into from tending bar.”

“I’ll start,” I said. And for almost an hour we called in all our old stray business, the affairs both good and bad, which we’d thought had receded too far into the past to impinge in any way on what we were now making of ourselves.

We both fell, it seemed, somewhere toward the middle of the risk spectrum. We had not, either of us, ever been rapacious. We had not worked the back rooms. We’d never made love to ten different strangers in a single bathhouse night, or paid by the hour for tough slim-hipped boys in the West Forties. But between us, we’d gone home with a full platoon of strangers. We’d both met men in bars or at parties; we’d slept with the friends of friends visiting from San Francisco or Vancouver or Laguna Beach. We’d hoped vaguely to fall in love but hadn’t worried much about it, because we’d thought we had all the time in the world. Love had seemed so final, and so dull—love was what ruined our parents. Love had delivered them to a life of mortgage payments and household repairs; to unglamorous jobs and the fluorescent aisles of a supermarket at two in the afternoon. We’d hoped for love of a different kind, love that knew and forgave our human frailty but did not miniaturize our grander ideas of ourselves. It sounded possible. If we didn’t rush or grab, if we didn’t panic, a love both challenging and nurturing might appear. If the person was imaginable, then the person could exist. And in the meantime, we’d had sex. We’d thought we lived at the beginning of an orgiastic new age, in which men and women could answer without hesitation to harmless inclinations of the flesh. It had been with a sense of my own unlimited choices that I’d made love to a simpleminded flute-playing boy I met in Washington Square Park, to an old Frenchman in a purple cashmere jacket I’d met riding the uptown IRT, and to a pair of kindly doctors who sweetened their union by taking on an occasional third party. In my late teens and early twenties I’d seen myself as a Puckish figure, smart and quick-limbed, incorrigible. I’d imagined the prim houses and barren days of Ohio falling farther away with each new adventure.

Erich and I didn’t go case by case. We were not so clinical as that. We offered the highlights, but dwelt more explicitly—more happily—on the pleasures we’d denied ourselves. Cupping the bell of his wineglass in his long fingers, Erich frowned and said, “I never cared all that much for totally anonymous sex. That was never for me. I’ve met sort of a lot of men working in bars, and I, you know, went home with some of them, but I never really did the whole scene. I tried going to the baths, but it just scared me. I just took a sauna and went home.” After a pause he added, “To masturbate,” and smiled in agony, his forehead turning nearly purple.

Although we sat together on that gargantuan sofa, we did not touch. We occupied different pools of lamplight. This reticence was standard for us, neither more nor less pronounced as we talked about the loves we prayed would not prove fatal. In the conduct of our ordinary affairs, we always maintained a cordial remove. Anyone seeing us in the street together might have assumed we were former college roommates losing our grip on our old intimacy but unwilling to formally declare it dead. Only at home, naked, did we jump out of our separate skins. On the stereo, Coltrane played “A Love Supreme.”

“The funny thing is,” I said, “I used to feel guilty for not being
more
adventuresome. I’d hear other men talking about how they’d turned four tricks in a night and think, ‘I’m the most repressed gay man who ever lived.’ I mean, most of the guys I went with, I knew I’d probably never see again. But I always had to feel like maybe I’d
want
to see them again, like in some way it was remotely possible that we might fall in love. Even though we never did.” Erich looked into his wine and said something inaudible.

“Hmm?”

He said, “Well, do you think we’re, you know, falling in love?”

I had never seen anyone so embarrassed. His whole head glowed crimson, and the wine in his glass quivered.

I believed I knew what he wanted. He wanted to collapse into love. Life was too frightening. Renown was withheld despite his constant efforts, and the future we’d all counted on could be revoked with a nagging cough, a violet bloom on a shin.

“No,” I said. “I care about you. But no.”

He nodded. He didn’t speak.

“Are you in love with me?” I asked, though I knew the answer. He wanted desperately to be in love with someone. I fulfilled the fundamental age, height, and weight requirements. But his desire didn’t attach directly to me. It was not quite personal.

He shook his head. We sat for a while in silence, and then I reached over and took his hand. I had to be tender with him because I hated him; because I had it in me to scream at him for being ordinary, for failing to change my life. I was frightened, too; I, too, wanted to fall in love. I stroked Erich’s hand. The turntable, set to repeat, started the Coltrane album again. Erich tried out a laugh, but swallowed it along with a deep draught of wine.

I could have murdered him, though his only crimes were lack of focus and dearth of wit. I could have skewered his heart with a kitchen fork because he was a peripheral character promoted by circumstances to a role he was ill equipped to play. I can’t deny this: I thought I deserved better.

Without speaking, we stood up and went to bed. It was our single incidence of psychic accord—ordinarily we explained our simplest acts in lavish detail. But that night we took our wineglasses and went without speaking to his bed, undressed, and lay down in one another’s arms.

“These are scary times,” I said.

“Yes. Yes, they are.”

We lay for a while without discussing the last remaining event in our sensual histories—the fact that we had not exercised bodily precautions together. Now it was too late to protect ourselves from one another. There was no rational accounting, beyond the fact that even four years ago, when we’d met, the disease had still seemed the province of another kind of man. Of course we’d known about it. Of course we’d been scared. But no one we knew personally had gotten sick. We’d believed—with a certain effort of will—that it befell men whose blood was thinned by too many drugs, who had sex with a dozen people every night. Erich had had a good record collection, and framed photographs of skinny brothers and sisters posing by a lake, in a wallpapered living room, and beside a glossy red Camaro. He talked about going to auditions, and about finding a better job. He had seemed too busy to be available to early death. I couldn’t say how he’d worked out the equation in his own head, because this did not seem to be a conversation we were capable of holding. We let a lengthy, silent embrace stand in for it. Then, with a new gravity, we made love as the Coltrane record played itself over and over and over again.

Several days later, Bobby told me about himself and Clare. I had been to see Arthur in the hospital. His pneumonia was clearing—he’d expressed optimism about the future, and a conviction that the cessation of alcohol and the adoption of a macrobiotic diet would improve his health a hundred percent. Although there was still important work to do at the office, I hadn’t the heart for it. I went home instead, to spend the evening with Bobby and Clare.

When I arrived they were in the kitchen together, making dinner. Our kitchen accommodated two people about as generously as a phone booth would, but they had managed somehow to wedge themselves in. From the living room I heard Clare’s laughter. Bobby said, “You’ve got to, like, move your butt another inch or I can’t get this out of the oven.”

I called, “Hello, dears.”

“Jonathan,” Clare said in a high, humorous voice. “Oh my Lord, he’s home.”

They must have tried to leave the kitchen at the same time, and gotten stuck. I heard more laughter, and a grunt from Bobby. Clare came into the living room first. She wore a yellow bowling shirt with a strand of red glass beads. Bobby followed, in his T-shirt and black jeans.

“Hi, honey,” Clare said. “What a surprise. Did the paper burn down?”

“No, I just missed you both. I’m taking the night off. Want to go bowling or something?”

Clare kissed my cheek, and Bobby did, too. “We were making, like, chicken and biscuits,” he said.

“Like none of our mothers actually made,” Clare added. “I don’t know about you, but where I come from, home cooking was a Hungry Man Salisbury-steak TV dinner. Chicken with cream gravy seems so exotic and foreign.”

“Jon’s mother was a great cook,” Bobby told her. “She never bought anything, you know, frozen. Or canned.”

“Right,” Clare said. “And she dove for her own pearls and trapped her own minks. Jonathan, dear, would you like a cocktail?”

“Love one,” I said. “What if we made a pitcher of martinis?”

We had taken to drinking martinis. We’d bought three stemmed glasses, and kept jars of green olives in the refrigerator.

“Great,” Bobby said. “We can, um, drink a toast.”

“You know me. I’ll drink to anything. Isn’t this Guy Fawkes Day, or something?”

“Well,” Bobby said. He grinned with cordial embarrassment.

“Is there something more specific to toast?” I said.

“I’m going to make those martinis,” Clare said. “You two wait right here.”

She went back to the kitchen. “What’s up, sport?” I asked Bobby when we were alone.

He kept on grinning, and looked at the floor as if he saw secrets printed on the carpet. Bobby had no capacity for subterfuge. He could fail to answer a question but could not answer it falsely. Whether it was morality or simple lack of imagination, I couldn’t say. Sometimes the two are so closely related as to be indistinguishable.

“Jonny,” he said. “Clare and I—”

“Clare and you what?”

“We’ve started, that is we’ve fallen. You know.”

“No. I don’t know.”

“Yeah. You do.”

“You mean you’re sleeping together?” I said.

He lifted his gaze from the floor, but couldn’t meet my eyes. He was smiling and wincing at once, with a sense of barely contained hilarity, as if he was waiting for me to realize I’d forgotten to put my pants on.

“Well,” he said after a moment. “Aw, Jonny. We’re, like, in love. Isn’t it amazing?”

“It is. It’s truly amazing.”

I hadn’t expected my own voice to sound so cold and peevish. I had meant to respond in a firm but kindly voice—to cut through the romantic nonsense. At the tone in my voice, Bobby looked uncertainly at me, his smile frozen.

“Jon,” he said. “Now we’re, like, really a family.”

“What?”

“The three of us. Man, don’t you see how great it is? I mean, it’s like, now all three of us are in love.”

Clare came out with martinis on the tray that had become part of our cocktail ritual. The tray was a battered old souvenir of Southern California, featuring oranges the color of manila envelopes and black-lipped, skirted beauties lolling with aloof, disappointed expressions on a pale turquoise beach.

“I told him,” Bobby said proudly.

“Just like you said you would.” She looked at me with an expression of mingled irony and apology. “Here, Jonathan. Have a drink.”

“Is it true?” I asked her.

“About Bobby and me? Yes. I guess we’re making our formal announcement.”

Bobby took a glass from the tray and raised it. “Here’s to the family,” he said.

“Oh, really, Bobby,” Clare said. “For Christ’s sake. You and I are sleeping together.” She turned to me and said, “He and I are sleeping together.”

I took a swallow of my martini. I knew how I was supposed to feel: gleeful at love’s old habit of turning up unexpectedly to throw its transforming light onto the daily business. Instead, I felt dry and empty, like sand falling into a hole of sand. I worked to simulate the required gaiety. I thought I could catch up with it if I performed it convincingly enough.

“It’s incredible,” I said. “How long has this been going on? That’s a song title, right? One of the troubles with love is, you can’t talk about it without feeling like you keep cueing old songs.”