“Um, don’t worry about that,” I say. “My roommate is kind of…”
“…I’m gonna come, I’m gonna come…oh yeah, oh fuck, yeah.” This time it’s the girl’s voice, and then Jody’s joins in with a frantic “Don’t stop, don’t stop fucking me.”
Doyle raises an eyebrow. “Popular?” he says. He’s nothing if not diplomatic. He reaches into his wallet and takes out another business card. “Here. This guy’s a friend of mine. A genius with damp proofing, and very reasonable.”
“He’ll have to be,” I say, with a weak little laugh as I contemplate yet another thing I can’t afford. And I thought weddings were expensive.
“Hey, for what it’s worth, the foundation looks good to me, from what I saw of it. So long as the foundation’s sound, you can work miracles.”
Just as well. I think I’m going to need one. I thank Doyle and see him out. The noise upstairs has stopped, but when I glance into the living room the light fitting is still swinging very slowly, as if coming to rest after a series of much more violent gyrations. The back of the couch is liberally dusted with plaster, and as I watch another small flake works itself loose from the root of the light fitting and floats on down to earth.
The stairs make foreboding noises as I climb them. In the last month or so I’ve found myself walking on the balls of my feet instead of my heels, testing the ground in front of me and forever listening for the creaks that might presage the next disaster. I knock on the door of the front bedroom and hear scuffling within. “Oh shit,” Jody says.
“Jody? Could I have a word with you?”
“Yeah. One second. I’m just…”
Dawn opens the door. She’s wearing a tiny black kimono dressing gown and the smell of screaming, feral sex wafts out and hits me in the face. I’ve told myself I’m going to be a grown-up about this, but it’s hard when I know Jody is cheerfully offering up his ass for penetration.
“He’ll be out in a minute,” says Dawn, gathering back her recently blue hair. The movement lifts the hem of her tiny dressing down and there’s no missing it – the nine-inch purple strap-on that juts from her hips. And it’s glittery. What a world.
“I don’t fucking think so,” says Jody, and she turns to conceal the plastic dick. The door – which like all the others has a habit of opening on its own – swings wide and I see that he’s still handcuffed to the bed. He rattles a cuff against the bed frame. “Do I look like Harry Houdini?”
“Okay, give me a minute,” says Dawn, and closes the door with her foot.
The tang of his sweat hangs in the air. When I breathe it in it settles like an insinuation in the back of my brain. It’s almost Christmas and I’ve been sleeping in a heap with him every night since Thanksgiving, but there’s something that holds me back, and he’s stopped offering. Perhaps it’s because he knows I’m damaged goods, and God knows I am. I keep telling myself that I’m no longer in love with Sebastian, but he keeps sneaking into my mind at the worst times, planting his knees either side of my head, pushing into my mouth and reminding me that even if I hate him I will never be able to honestly tell myself that he wasn’t the best I’d ever had.
Jody opens the door. He’s as dark and definite as Sebastian is fair and wispy, and I’m so grateful for the contrast that I almost forget I’m here to chew him out.
“What?” he says, for once halfway decent in a ratty old bathrobe. He’s tried to unpick the hotel monogram from it, but I can still see it’s stolen.
“You know what,” I say. “You’re going to have to stop doing that in the house. The carpenter was just here and he had to listen to you giving it the full When Harry Met Sally treatment…”
Jody holds up a finger. “Uh uh,” he said. “I was not.”
“You were. I heard you.”
He shakes his head. “Critical difference, Boo. Meg Ryan was faking it. That was the point of the whole scene. I was not.”
“Whatever. Nobody needs to hear that.”
“Uh, yes they do. It’s porn, Chris. It’s the moaning that makes it. If we wanted unenthusiastic orgasms we’d still be dealing with Leon.”
“Which we are not, thank you very much,” says Dawn, who is now thankfully dickless and fully dressed. She has one eye on her camera as she elbows gently past Jody and out onto the landing.
“Leon?” I say.
“Suck it and it and see,” says Jody.
“Oh. Him.”
“Okay,” says Dawn. “I’m gonna get this home and start editing. I’ll see you tomorrow?”
“Sure. Have fun.”
I go to see Dawn to the door, but she shakes her head. “It’s cool,” she says. “I can see myself out. Besides, I’m not sure your staircase can take the weight of two people at once. You should probably get that looked at.”
Yeah, no shit, Dawn. I follow Jody back into the front bedroom. It’s a mess. There are clothes and condom wrappers everywhere and I don’t know where to put my eyes, because wherever I look I keep stumbling across something plastic and knobbly that has almost certainly been in a butthole at some point.
“What?” says Jody, scooping up a sweatshirt to reveal a full set of anal beads beneath it. “What’s going on? What’s that look on your face? You got some moral issue now?”
“No,” I say. “It’s really more…structural, actually. Just now? You were making it rain in the living room, and I’m not talking about the usual way. There were chunks of plaster falling down from the ceiling.”
He hangs the sweatshirt on the end of the bed. “Oh. Shit,” he says, looking chastised. “Really?”
“Yes, really. So maybe don’t do…whatever it is you do in this bed, because…”
Nope. I’ve said the wrong thing again, which is a thing that seems to be happening a lot lately. Jody’s eyebrow goes up like the flag on a mailbox. “‘Whatever it is you do?’” he echoes, dripping sarcasm.
“Oh my God.” I’m exhausted already and the fight has barely begun. “Will you stop being so defensive?”
He folds his arms. “I don’t know. Will you stop being so judgy?”
“I am not being judgy. If you want to get fucked in the ass with a strap-on and upload it to the Internet then go ahead. I don’t care. It’s your body and it’s your butthole, but half of this bedroom floor belongs to me and I’m kind of concerned about its structural integrity.”
Jody sighs. “Fine,” he says, and returns to picking things up. “Point taken. What did the carpenter say?”
I almost sit down on the bed, but think better of it at the last minute. Luckily he doesn’t see the brief ‘ew, no’ expression that I know just skittered across my face. “He says the basement is too damp to make replacing the joists worthwhile just yet,” I say. “But he know a guy who does damp proofing. The good news is that he says the foundation looks fairly solid.”
“Yay,” Jody deadpans, and I feel my heart sink. Over the last month and a half it’s been his endless, puppy-like optimism that’s kept me sane. If this place has finally broken him then we really are boned.
“Look,” I say. “I know it feels like the place is falling apart around our ears right now…”
“Feels like? No, I’m pretty sure it is, Chris. Like that time I almost got Jack Dawsoned by the dining room floor, remember?”
“Come on. There’s no need to get bitchy. I don’t like this any more than you do, you know. I’ve lost sleep wondering if it really would be that bad if it did burn down. I mean, at least there’d be insur—”
“—no, no, no…” He holds up both hands. “Don’t you dare say that.”
“Why not?”
“Because arson investigators are really good at their jobs. And don’t ask me how I know this, because I am not in the fucking mood—”
“—oh, when are you in the mood lately? You’ve been whining up a goddamn storm these last few weeks. And the screaming when that possum ran out of the servants’ staircase—”
“—it startled me.” says Jody, tossing a
pair of jeans onto the bed. “I was totally naked and that thing was a) mad as all hell, and b) had more teeth than the fucking Bee Gees.”
“Well, have you maybe considered not being naked at every possible opportunity?”
“I don’t know. Have you considered not turning into a Baptist church lady every time a raw penis wafts into the room?”
“That thing does not waft,” I say. “It swings. And dangles. And the other morning it was almost in my eggs.”
“Noted,” he says, red faced and yelling right back at me. “I’ll put on a fucking condom next time I serve you breakfast. God knows I wouldn’t want to get you pregnant—”
“—no, because then we’d be even more stuck together than we already are, in this rotting fucking house that we hate.”
He lets out a high, incredulous laugh and stares at me across the bed and the small mountain of laundry he’s piled up on top of it. “Hate?”
“Yes. Hate. We may as well just say it, since we’re getting all this shit out in the open.”
“I don’t hate this house,” he says.
“You do, too.”
“Do not,” he says. “I love this house. Okay, so it has house cancer, but if you just ditched someone who has cancer then you’d be…” He trails off, because he knows he just went too far.
“What?” I say, determined to keep on prodding. “You’d be me? Is that what you were going to say?”
Jody gives me an insufferably smug look. “Actually,” he says, dropping a pair of balled up socks on top of the laundry pile. “I was going say ‘Newt Gingrich.’”
I don’t have time to respond, because something is happening beneath my feet. Thankfully six weeks of unstable floors have taught me what this means, and when he sees my eyes widen he knows, too. “Get back,” I say, and Jody retreats against the opposite wall as the floor gives a loud, grinding groan and then the ghost. The bed plunges down into the living room below.
The crash shakes the entire house. I have visions of the foundation – that one thing that might be sound – cracking and bringing the whole place down on top of us. When the dust begins to settle I see Jody clinging for dear life to a bookshelf. The boards beneath his bare feet have broken, and they’re starting to give way.
“Help,” he says.
I can’t reach him. There’s no way I can get around the edge of the hole; I’ve got at least thirty pounds on him. And it’s a ten-foot drop down into the living room.
“Where the fuck are you going?” he wails, as I hurry downstairs, the steps protesting the whole way.
Oh God. It’s carnage. The leg of the bed has torn part of the living room wall on the way down, baring the lathe beneath. The couch is squashed beneath the bed and I can’t get to it, which immediately puts paid to my plan to push it underneath Jody to break his fall. I watch in horror as the boards give beneath him; he looks like he’s miles above me.
“Hold on,” I say, tossing splintered floorboards from the bed. I can’t drag the whole thing across on my own, but I can move the mattress. It’s huge and heavy and refuses to budge from the frame at first, but I scream at it and give it an extra hard yank that I know I’m going to feel in the back of my shoulder later. I hear a board crack and Jody cries out. He’s now hanging on to a baseboard that I can hear slowly tearing from the wall under his weight.
“Okay, I got you,” I say, dragging the mattress across the mess. I haul it under him. His legs are flailing wildly and his dressing gown has come undone, and I can’t help but think how it’s totally Jody’s style to fall through a ceiling while nude.
“I got the mattress underneath you. I’ll break your fall.” I have him behind the knees now, but that only seems to worsen his panic.
“Let me go! Are you fucking nuts?”
“No, I’ve got you. Let go.”
The baseboard makes a dying, ripping sound. Jody howls in terror and slides down, his bare thigh on my shoulder. “Let go,” I say, half strangled between his legs. “Jody, let go. Trust me.”
“I can’t. I can’t.”
“You have to. Your ball sac is on my face.”
Jody whimpers. I brace, which turns out to be the worst idea I’ve had since getting engaged. Pain whips across my back and we topple like bad acrobats. He lands on his back on the mattress, and I end up on top of him, barely having time to stick my hands out to break my fall. I feel the air leave his lungs in a ‘whuff’ as I land.
“Oh God, are you okay?” I ask, quickly shifting my weight.
He scrunches up his nose. “Ow.”
“Yeah. I know the feeling.”
I’m so pleased to see him in one piece that I could kiss him, and it’s as if he has the exact same thought, because I suddenly feel the moment shift gears. We’re scared and sore and shaking, but we’re full of adrenaline and he’s naked underneath me, and there’s a flicker of something fierce and tender in his black eyes. He wraps his legs around me and I bury my face in the side of his neck, allowing myself this, just for a moment. He smells of sweat and plaster and lube and all at once I’m dying at the thought of how soft he might still be, how easily I might reach down, push a finger inside him and – just to satisfy my curiosity, you understand – feel what he’s like in there. And maybe find that well-pounded spot within him. Press it gently. Listen to him moan and whisper the ways he wants me into my ear.
I run my hands over his body. He makes a low, lovely sound and rises to meet my touch, but then as he moves I move and something grinds and locks in my spine.
“Ow. Fuck.”
“What?”
“My back. Oh God. Ow, ow, ow…” I crawl off him and painfully stretch out on the mattress beside him, the moment well and truly destroyed.
“Can you move okay?” He sits up and pulls his bathrobe closed, all business again. “Can you feel your feet? Don’t move your neck.”
“My neck is fine,” I say. “It’s my back. I braced myself when you fell. Shoulda gone limp. It’s okay – it’s going off now. I think I just twisted it.”
He looks down at me and sighs. “You know we’re going to have to talk about this at some point, right?” he says, and I know he’s not talking about the floor.
“So not the time, Jody. So not the time.”
*
That evening my dad calls, which catches me by surprise. So far all he’s done is the obligatory ‘call me if you need anything’ thing, which I know really means ‘please don’t call me, because I have no idea what to say.’
“How are you doing?” he says. “You holding up okay?”
“Yeah.” I am. Just. The floors aren’t, but you can’t have everything.
“Listen, I need to talk to you.”
“Oh?” This is new.
“Chris, I ran into Sebastian at the bookstore the other day.”
Really new. “Uh huh? What was he buying? Copy of Into Thin Air, by any chance?”
“No. Actually I think it was Omar Khayyam.”
“Good for him,” I say, closing the spare bedroom door. We’re rapidly running out of opportunities for privacy in this house. Everything has a goddamn hole in it. “I didn’t realize there was a pop-up edition.”
“Christopher, he’s miserable.”
“Good. Did Jo tell you that this wasn’t the first time he cheated on me?” Trust Dad to get around to this eventually. Growing up I always had the impression that he – like most shrinks – would love to get elbow deep into my relationships, but that he’d always considered himself too heterosexual to truly understand gay men. I suppose it was only a matter of time before his intellectual curiosity – or arrogance – eroded his fear of looking ignorant.
“She told me,” he says. “But you have to understand that some men have profound problems with fidelity.”
“Like you?” It pops out before I can stop myself. Mine and Jody’s yelling match has left me far too prone to saying what I think.
“Yes. Like me.” He takes a beat and I know there’s more to come.
“But I want you to know that it’s not an insurmountable obstacle.”
Did he tell you that I need an HIV test thanks to him? How’s that for an insurmountable obstacle? “Right,” I say.
“I referred him to a colleague of mine, who specializes in these problems. It can be symptomatic of a number of things, including depression, ADHD—”
“—an inability to keep your dick in your pants?”
He sighs. “You know, you can be very judgmental sometimes.”
“So I’m told. I’m working on it.” I perch on the window seat and look out at the cold, winter backyard. The peeing cherub’s ivy coat has got bigger, and now he looks like he’s huddled up in a big fur like a character from Doctor Zhivago. “Look, Dad – it’s not that I don’t appreciate it, but you have to understand I have no intention of taking him back. I’m done. I’m broken. I can’t take any more of his lies and his bullshit…” And all the times he was so sweet and so tender and so perfectly loving. Were they all because he was feeling guilty?
“Okay,” says Dad. “As long as you’re all right. I know you. You’ve got a bad habit of getting into these avoidant spirals, and I heard Amy Zetterlund was getting worried about you. Said you hadn’t checked in with work for a while…”
Work. The term has taken on a whole new meaning since I took on this house. I look back at my old job and marvel that I ever got paid for something so pointless. “Yeah, I was thinking of going freelance anyway,” I say, but Dad’s on a roll.
“Chris, it’s not healthy. I know you’ve had a tough time, but you can’t just disappear into the woods like a sasquatch or Hillary Clinton.”
“I’m fine, Dad. I’m just…getting my Walden on or something. It’s…pastoral.” It’s anything but, but I’m not telling him that.
“Son, it’s been a while since I read Walden, but I don’t remember the part where Thoreau holed up with his late aunt's gardener.”
“Leave him alone. He has as much right to be here as I do. Possibly more. He did a lot for Aunt Becky.”
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