Cleanness

by Garth Greenwell

  There were maybe seven or eight tables in our corner of the room, almost all of them taken by groups of young people, some of them high school students, I thought, two or three couples gathered at each. N. waved to catch our attention, then pointed back to the entrance, nodding to Z. before he left. Z. mouthed something at me but I didn’t understand, the music was too loud, and after he repeated it to no avail he dropped his hands to his crotch and mimed a man pissing, his hand curled as if around an impossibly large cock. I laughed, both because it was funny and because it hid the other thing I felt. I mocked him, first holding my hand up, curled like his, making a doubtful face, and then I dropped both hands to my own crotch, as if holding a cock twice as large, three times, and Z. laughed too, a genuine laugh, I thought, though it wasn’t very funny, and both of us seemed a little embarrassed once the laughter had passed. Then Z. said something else and again I didn’t understand, so he took his phone out of his pocket and typed, holding up the screen for me to read. This is a great night, he had written, and I looked up and said Yes, and we raised our glasses, clinking them before we drank.

  The music changed as we set our glasses down, there was a sudden assault of gaidi, the mountain bagpipes ubiquitous in Balkan folk music, and then a syncopated rush of drums that made both of us grin. It was a song we knew well, one of the big hits of Z.’s senior year, and we lifted our glasses again, toasting each other and the song and the memory of it we had. With the glass still at his lips Z. began to dance, he extended his other arm away from his body and twisted slightly from side to side, and though it was half ironic it made me feel a kind of pang, since it was for me, his dance, I was his only audience, it could only be for me. After a few seconds, he put his glass down, dropping his other arm too, abandoning his performance. But I raised my own arms, awkward and un-American, I shuffled a step toward him and he was in it again. It was like I had given him permission to dance, to be foolish in front of me, since I was so much more foolish, without his beauty or his youth, I was an old man in this place. But he smiled at me and I smiled back and we were dancing with each other, after a fashion, we made a little orbit together, a center of gravity. At one point I reached over and put my hand on his shoulder, a friendly gesture, casual, avuncular maybe, and then I let my hand slide down his arm and, as I felt him flex his bicep, that reflexive preening, I curled my fingers around the muscle there and squeezed, feeling how solid it was. I knew the gesture wasn’t casual anymore, that it showed too much, I was touching him as I had never allowed myself to touch a student before. But he wasn’t my student, I told myself, for one night we could face each other without all that, I could touch his arm and have all of that fall away. Or maybe that’s not what I thought, maybe I’m adding it now, maybe then all I felt was a seam or line drawn taut from my throat to my groin, a circuit that came alive in contact with him. He smiled and bent his arm at the elbow, pumping the muscle, and I let my other hand join the first, linking my fingers around his arm to take in the full span of it. I had stopped dancing, I realized, and I dropped my hands as I felt the embarrassment of admiring him for too long. But he didn’t seem embarrassed, he didn’t stop smiling, though he wasn’t dancing anymore, either; he stopped to slide his hand into the front pocket of his jeans, which were tight, my eyes followed as he worked his fingers in and slid out his phone. His face was studious in the light cast by the screen, and then he held it up and I saw that he had typed in all caps IRON MAN. He expected me to laugh but I didn’t laugh, I looked at him, past the glare of the phone which must have been lighting my face now, letting him read whatever he could see there, I looked and shook my head from right to left in affirmation; Da, I said, though he couldn’t hear me or the tone in which I said it, which was a serious tone, grave, Da. He slid the phone back in his pocket, smiling more broadly, and took a step toward me. He squared himself off, facing me and planting both his feet, like a challenge, and then he balled one of his hands into a fist and struck his own stomach twice, hard, showing off the muscles there, too, before he opened his hand to make a welcoming gesture, jerking his head up in invitation. He wanted me to try, and when I didn’t immediately strike him he reached out and grabbed my wrist, pulling it toward his stomach. I made a fist and let him strike himself with it, he was like iron, I thought, or like something more precious, like marble, and when he gestured for me to hit him again, harder, I did hit him, not very hard but hard enough to satisfy him. I left my hand there, my knuckles flush with his abdomen, and then I opened my hand and laid my palm flat against his stomach, the cotton of his shirt just slightly damp with sweat, and let my fingers trace the muscles there, risen in their rows as he clenched them, I curved the ends of my fingers around them and pressed against them as long as I dared. Then I released my grip and smiled and brushed his stomach quickly up and down with the back of my hand, as if to erase the trace of how I had touched him. I took my glass from the table and with a grimace drank what was left.

  The same song was still playing, only a couple of minutes had passed. As soon as I set my glass down Z. was filling it, gallant again, and then N. was back from the bathroom, lifting his own glass expectantly, so Z. filled it, too, and then his own, and once more we were toasting one another. I glanced around, aware that everything I had felt would have been obvious to anyone watching us, but no one was watching us; in the dim light I could see the other tables and beyond them the crowded floor unchanged. I put my arm around N.’s shoulders, friendly, trying to normalize touch, and he and I danced a little. Another song had come on, one I didn’t know but that didn’t matter, you can always dance to chalga, that’s the whole point of it, its single virtue. I had turned away from Z. to dance with N., who wasn’t a good dancer at all, he didn’t even try to dance well: he made all his movements ironic, self-deprecating, an extension of the persona he had taken on in class, which was endearing but also a product of uncertainty or doubt, a kind of abnegation. I wanted him to grow out of it but now I played along, laughing, dancing in the same way, our motions silly and shuffling, a game that was in a way the opposite of eros and so a relief to me.

  I had only lost track of him for a minute or two, but when I looked over again Z. had disappeared. He must have gone to the bathroom, I thought, and immediately I stopped dancing. I shouted to N. that I was going to piss, at which he nodded, and I left him without a thought for how odd it was, to leave him there alone, how transparent it must have been, I would think of it only later. I moved as quickly as I could, twisting through the crowd, finding openings between the groups of drinkers; I wasn’t so drunk, I thought. I had almost reached an open space near the entrance when I stumbled into a man’s back. He turned quickly, muscular and affronted, but smiled when I held up both hands in apology, Izvinyavaite, pardon me, suzhalyavam, I’m sorry, and he put a large hand on my shoulder and squeezed, friendly and forgiving, welcoming me into the camaraderie of happy drinking. And then in the dimness ahead there was a sudden rectangle of porcelain light as a door opened and I was in a large bright room, tiled and clean. There were three urinals along one wall, and a man was stepping away from one of them, zipping himself up. Z. was still there, I saw with relief, I wasn’t too late, and I stepped up beside him, breaking that distributive propriety of men’s bathrooms, a guard against unchecked glances, against desire. He looked over and saw it was me and smiled, a little blurrily, I thought, he was drunker than I was, or drunker than I felt, and then he faced forward again. I didn’t face forward, though I could have, I could still have seen what I wanted to see. I let my eyes track down his front, following the line of buttons down his shirt, which was ridiculous in the fluorescent light, a kind of garish violet. Even in my excitement I admired the neatness of it, the buttons perfectly aligned, and I thought for the first time in many years of my father dressing me as a boy, teaching me about this line, the gig line, he called it, buttons and buckle forming an order that was more than vanity, that signaled some deeper righteousness. The memory came in a flash before I let myself
look at his cock, pale in his hand and pissing a pale line against the porcelain, nothing extraordinary, not small or particularly large, a handsome cock, and I felt my own stiffen a little when I saw that with his index finger he was rubbing just slightly the underside of the head, where he held the foreskin back, an unconscious gesture, probably, though it must have sent a small current of pleasure alongside the pleasure of pissing. I knew I was acting badly, that I was looking too brazenly and for too long, that I shouldn’t have looked at all. I would be ashamed later but I wasn’t ashamed now, I kept watching as the stream weakened and became intermittent, let him know, I said to myself, he already knows, let him see it. He let go of the head to pull the foreskin all the way back and shake himself before he pinched the base and drew his fingers up the shaft, stretching himself out to his full length and flicking off the drop of urine that hung at the tip. He did this two or three times and then stopped, leaving his cock dangling for a moment, in which I felt my excitement mount and become unbearable, he must be letting me look, I thought, it might be a kind of invitation, before he tucked himself away and drew up his fly.

  Only then did I look up at his face. Our eyes met: he had been watching me or maybe he had only looked over at that instant, I don’t know. He held my gaze without speaking, and I knew that if he gave any sign I would do whatever he wanted, or rather whatever he would let me do, I would go into one of the stalls with him or leave the club, walk out without a word to N., I didn’t care, whatever he wanted I would do. He closed his eyes and swayed slightly before opening them again. Then he leaned toward me, crossing into my space, and said I’m really drunk, nearly shouting it, the music was loud in the bathroom, too. He leaned away again. Let’s listen to the concert and then go home, he said and turned, walking to the sink to run water over his hands before going back into the club. I didn’t follow right away, I stayed at the urinal, waiting for my excitement to settle, until the door opened and another man walked in, a fat man in an expensive suit, who stationed himself at a urinal beside me and with a sigh began to piss.

  N. and Z. were standing at the table, not dancing anymore, with full glasses in front of them, and as I joined them Z. refilled my glass, too. He was smiling, there wasn’t any sign of what had happened as we knocked glasses, holding each other’s eyes to say Nazdrave, I looked for some special message from him but there was none. While we were drinking, the music abruptly tapered and cut off, leaving a kind of roaring in its wake. And then over the speakers a man’s voice, loud and deep, theatrical, said Dami i gospoda, ladies and gentlemen, and in a burst of quick syllables I couldn’t quite follow announced Andrea, the singer we had come to see. With a single beat on a drum the lights snapped out, and with another drumbeat a stage I hadn’t noticed was suddenly bathed in white light. It was against the opposite wall, on the other side of the bar, though we could see just fine, it wasn’t as large a space as I had thought. A roar went up when the music started, the intro of Andrea’s most popular song, “Haide opa,” and another when a door in the wall opened and she stepped out onto the stage, followed by four other women. They wore skimpy two-piece outfits that exposed their midriffs, the four dancers almost identical, Andrea set off by what looked like a fur vest, plush and white, hanging open around her breasts, and by her hair, which wasn’t gathered back like the others’ but teased into a blond mane. It was a small stage, they could hardly move, they lifted their arms and spun, sometimes bending their knees deeply, everything exaggeratedly sexual. We had moved from our spots around the table and were standing in front of it, Z. in the middle, dancing so that we knocked into each other, our shoulders and hips, and then Z. put his arms around our shoulders and drew us tight, hugging us. When I looked over he was smiling, watching Andrea, smiling more when he turned his head and looked at me, and I smiled back, happy, pressing against him, reaching around him to squeeze N.’s shoulder, and he smiled at me too.

  The women onstage struck a pose as the song ended, and then the music shifted, became even more frenetic, a song I didn’t know, though there was another shout of recognition from the crowd. N. and Z. had always claimed they didn’t like chalga but they shouted too, a little hurrah, and started to dance with more enthusiasm, lifting their arms in the air. I stepped away to give Z. more room, but he hooked one of his arms around my shoulder and pulled me close again, making me dance alongside him, his flank hot against mine, his arm hot against my back, and I felt myself swept by a wave of happiness, my face stretched stupidly in a grin. I must look foolish, I thought, but there was so much pleasure in being a fool, why had I spent so much of my life guarding against it? I looked at Z. and N. and saw my feeling mirrored back at me, their faces shone in the dark, or that’s how I remember it, as though they were caught in the flare of a camera’s flash. But no one was taking pictures, it’s only my imagination that casts such light on them. On the stage, Andrea was pacing back and forth, like a cat in a cage. And then Z. stumbled beside me, he lost his footing and fell, or almost fell, gripping my shoulder so I was pulled forward with him, and I reached around with my other arm to catch him around the waist. Whoa, I said, struggling to hold him up as just for a second he was a dead weight in my arms. Then he found his footing, and as he unfolded himself to stand up again I saw that my hand had fallen to his crotch. I don’t think I willed it, not exactly, I think it was almost an accident but I didn’t remove it either, I looked at it as if it were something disconnected from me, with its own impulses and acts, its own culpability, and though it wasn’t groping him or moving at all it was culpable, it was a violation, I knew this even as I looked at it in a kind of shock. I glanced at Z.’s face and saw he was looking too, not with any response I could read, and then he looked up, not at me or at the stage but straight ahead, his face clouded with an expression not of anger or dismay but of bewilderment, I thought, and coming to myself suddenly I snatched away my hand. I looked over at N., who seemed not to have noticed anything, he was still dancing, watching the show, absorbed in the music or in Andrea. Z. stood motionless beside me, his arm around my shoulder, his face not clouded anymore but blank. I looked away from him back to the stage, feeling a heat in my gut that I recognized as shame, but it wasn’t sharp yet, it was distant or dulled, and though I knew in the next days I would be miserable with it I turned away from it now. Tomorrow you will feel it, I said to myself, feel it then, don’t feel it now. I started dancing again, and when I moved Z. began to move too, he let his arm fall from my shoulder but began shifting side to side with the music, and soon he was smiling again. Maybe he thinks it was an accident, I thought, maybe it was an accident, maybe there’s no need for shame, even though I knew that wasn’t the case, or maybe he was so drunk he would forget it and then the only shame would be a private shame, the shame I was accustomed to, the shame that felt like home.

  Z. stumbled again, this time falling toward N., who caught him and kept him on his feet. N. looked at me and laughed as Z. stood up again, closing his eyes and swaying; both of us put our hands on his shoulders to keep him upright. I looked at N. and tilted my head toward the entrance. We should go, I shouted, and he weaved his head from left to right. We each took one of Z.’s arms. We had to walk sideways and single file to make it through the crowd, though people tried to make room for us, smiling and moving out of our way as best they could. We must have been a familiar sight, two friends helping a third, and again I had the feeling of belonging with them, which was warm and present and drowned out my premonition of shame. We climbed the stairs and pushed out into the night, nodding at the two bouncers who didn’t acknowledge us, and I sucked in great breaths as if I had been starving for air. Z. stumbled again, leaning hard against me, and we sat on the stairs to wait for the cab N. had called. Z. bent forward, his elbows propped on his knees, and moaned, and N. and I laughed at him. Mnogo si slab, be, I said, you’re very weak, I expected better, and I gripped his shoulder to pull him to me. But then he slipped or lost his balance and fell across my lap, and a single fluent st
ream of vomit struck the pavement beside my shoes. He stayed in that position, draped across my lap, and I bent over him, as if to shield him from something, and rubbed his back, the fabric of his shirt damp with sweat. Ne se chuvstvam dobre, he said, pushing himself upright, I don’t feel well, and N. told him not to worry, they were going home, he would sleep it off. They would go to Z.’s apartment, which was somewhere nearby, the studio his family kept and that Z. had claimed as his own, a place to take girls and have small gatherings, it was only big enough for five or six people, he had told me. He was still slumped against me, I could feel his heat against my side. When the cab came we stood, N. and I pulling Z. up and leading him to the car. Will you be okay, I asked as Z. pulled his legs in, half lying across N.’s lap. But you’re coming, N. said, don’t you want to come with us, we can hang out at Z.’s place, and Z. echoed him, saying Yes, come, Gospodine, his voice slurred with drink. I stood with my hand on the car, hesitating, wanting to join them and imagining what might still happen, the possibilities of privacy with Z., I was tempted to try them. But I stepped back instead. No, I said, I have to go home, it’s too late already. But thank you for tonight, I said, I had so much fun, thank you. It was a great night, Z. said, letting his head fall as I swung the door shut.

  I didn’t have to wait long for another taxi to appear, one pulled up almost right away, letting a couple out in front of the club. On the ride to Mladost I felt myself sinking into drunkenness, or felt drunkenness rise around me; even as I responded to the driver’s small talk I closed my eyes and could feel my head roll to the side before I yanked it up again. I waved to the guards in their booth at the American College as the cab pulled away, and then I was beyond the glare of the floodlamps, on the dark road that led to the school. For years I had walked this path every day, morning and afternoon, with the weight of the day before me or with the relief of casting it off, and even now that I lived on campus I walked it often, to the store or the gym, to cabs waiting at the gates. I walked slowly now, feeling how easily I could stumble, taking a step or two to one side before I brought myself back to line. So this is what that is, I thought, remembering the drunks I had seen weaving in this way, imagining what I must look like to the guards in their booth, how maybe they had turned to watch me, people often watch drunks stumbling around, it amuses them, I don’t know why. In me it has often aroused a darker feeling, pity or sometimes disdain; it wasn’t funny at all, I would think, there was nothing innocent in it, it was a kind of willful abnegation of judgment, of responsibility. What have I done, I thought suddenly, what have I done. I turned onto the path between buildings, on the right the asphalt of the basketball court, where boys played soccer in the mornings, and on the left the row of academic buildings, in the most stately of which I had taught all my students, classes coming and going, Z. and N. coming twice, still boys in tenth grade and, two years later, something closer to men. It’s a kind of performance, of course, all teaching is pretending; I had stood before them as a kind of poem of myself, an ideal image, when for a few hours every day I had been able to hide or mostly hide the disorder of my life, and if I hadn’t succeeded entirely with Z. I had mostly succeeded, if he had seen glimpses of what I was he had never until tonight seen me fully. I had leered at him, I had touched him, I had been a caricature of myself, I thought, but that isn’t true; I had been myself without impediment, maybe that’s the way to say it.