It was over quickly. He was only able to open his eyes when he turned his face up toward the canopy. New leaves whispering; the sky a patchwork of cloudless, searing blue. He could feel tears on his face. Somehow his fear and shame and remorse were more humiliating than every other nightmarish part of him that lay bare.
He pulled back and sat next to Julian among the dead leaves. Julian didn’t look at him right away. He usually hurried to console Paul if he wept, no matter how trivial or foolish the injury. It was only now that he withheld the comfort that Paul understood the full power Julian held over him.
He couldn’t bear to look at Julian, so he looked. The only other mark Paul had left on his face was the early shine of a bruise at his temple. But from his collarbones down, dark blood flooded beneath his skin. Paul could have pressed his hands to the marks and found their exact shapes outlined underneath.
The scar looked different now. It would never again mean what Paul wanted it to mean. It was no longer the unbreakable seam that held Julian’s body together. Now it looked like a fault line, as if the slightest pressure could shatter him.
For a long while Julian didn’t meet his eyes at all. He absorbed the torrent of pleas and apologies as if he barely heard them. With imperious calm, he buttoned his shirt over the contusions and the lacerations from Paul’s teeth and fingernails; he gazed impassively at his bruised wrists as he refastened his shirt cuffs, then shook the leaves from his sweater before tugging it back over his head.
“Please.” He begged himself to shut up, but he couldn’t. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I was just doing what you wanted.”
From the shallow movements of Julian’s chest Paul could all but feel how much every inhale must ache. “What I told you to do.” Julian plucked his collar straight, still gazing ahead into the trees as if he didn’t particularly care that Paul was there. “Not what I wanted.”
Paul could barely draw breath without sobbing. His throat burned with bile, but he couldn’t make himself throw up, even when he pressed his forearms hard against his stomach. He was fragile, weak, pathetic, every hideous thing he had labored so relentlessly to keep Julian from seeing.
When Julian finally looked at him, there was no malice or resentment in his eyes; nor was there pity. Slowly, gingerly, he put his arm around Paul’s shoulders and pulled him close. Paul only understood how much of the calm was a performance when he felt how violently Julian’s heart was still racing.
“I didn’t want to like it,” Paul said miserably. He felt a flare of hatred toward Julian for kissing his forehead then, as if he were still a human being. “I love you, oh god please promise you’ll forgive me, I’m terrified you’re never going to.”
For a moment Julian seemed to consider giving him that unequivocal forgiveness. Instead he smiled, solemn and unreadable, and told Paul the truth.
“Of course I will, Pablo.”
When they returned to the car, they sat for a while with the radio on, not speaking. Paul stared at his face in the rearview mirror, scrubbing his skin meticulously with his cuff until all the dirt was gone. Julian smoked one-handed, his other hand pressed firmly to the nape of Paul’s neck. His lower lip hadn’t quite stopped bleeding. It left a rust-red impression at the end of his cigarette.
“Thank you for trusting me with this,” said Julian quietly.
All along it had been Paul who was meant to plead for mercy. The real violence was in how gentle Julian was—how near his reassurances came to absolution while stopping just short of granting it.
Part II
1.
Paul’s family was deeply patriotic, in the same way that his father had been a loving parent: their warmth and pride was accompanied by high expectations, and they made it known when their standards weren’t met. As Americans they were disgusted by Watergate—the queasy spectacle of the President and his administration being investigated by the Senate on national television. But as left-wing trade unionists who had loathed Richard Nixon for two decades, they were also enjoying themselves far more than they pretended.
They followed the hearings with enraptured revulsion. Paul’s grandfather listened on the radio at work and hurried home at lunch to watch them on television. The whole extended family took to watching Dick Cavett’s evening discussion panels and then telephoning one another in the morning to debrief. Watergate overtook the weather and the Pirates’ playoff chances as their favorite topic of conversation. For years the news had been a nightmare of assassinations and massacres and Technicolor war crimes—at long last, America had given them a bloodless scandal, and they were so relieved that they turned it into entertainment.
Paul spent most of his working hours alone in the repair garage business office, the scandal reduced to a chitter from his grandfather’s radio outside. Politics couldn’t hold his attention, but few things could nowadays. The work itself certainly didn’t. The previous manager had left behind a snarl of ledgers and faded vendor receipts on carbon paper, and in five years of running the business himself, Paul’s grandfather had never had the time to untangle them. It was a task Paul quickly learned required repetitive precision but almost no brainpower. By lunchtime the nagging crackle of frustration would grow into a directionless, burning anger. Now and then, he would reach down into the file drawer and slam it on his arm until the pain made him see stars.
On their way to his grandparents’ house for lunch, Paul’s grandfather usually stopped at the newsstand to pick up the latest edition of the Washington Post. It was one of the few by-products of their obsession that didn’t irritate Paul, though he didn’t dare let on why. He let them believe that his interest in the paper was the same as theirs. They only had eyes for the news itself, and after he left, they never noticed that the paper’s back pages were missing.
“Was he sweating as badly as it sounded?” his grandfather asked by way of a greeting as he and Paul sidled through the back door into the kitchen.
“You know, he was, the poor dear,” his grandmother answered from the living room, gleefully and without pity.
Against their every stated principle, his grandparents had lately taken to eating lunch in front of their television. His grandmother was already done eating, but she’d left two lunches in the refrigerator for them—bottles of ginger ale, twin hard-boiled eggs and liverwurst sandwiches under pink plastic wrap. Paul’s grandfather took his plate into the living room to join her, leaving the Post on the kitchen table. Paul took a cursory glance at the headlines, just in case his grandparents quizzed him later. Then, once he was sure they were both settled, he opened the paper to the classifieds.
He hadn’t answered Julian’s latest letter. The Frommes had returned to Maryland from France, which should have meant Julian’s letters would grow more frequent, but they hadn’t. Paul was lucky to receive one letter for each of his two—and they were far shorter than Paul’s, written in an odd breezy tone that he couldn’t square with the dread Julian had shown before he left. This latest letter mentioned his father, but only in the context of Julian’s take on Watergate (Daddy’s still waiting by the phone for a subpoena like a virgin on prom night—I think it’s hurt his feelings terribly that nobody invited him to the conspiracy). Even this small acknowledgment of one of his parents was a departure for Julian, who generally only mentioned them in passing. His specific grievances with his family were mostly directed at his brothers, and even those were only included for humor. His parents flitted in the background like moths too quick and erratic to identify, and the elision was so consistent that it made Paul nervous.
Much of the letter, just like its predecessors, had the impersonal dashed-off quality of a postcard. Paul could imagine Julian copying entire paragraphs verbatim and sending them to all his rich childhood friends, the Greenwoods and Desjardins and Lockhart-Schmidts whose offerings had filled his dormitory mailbox. The indications that the letter was meant for Paul in particular were small enough that anyone else might have missed them. There was a chess notation in a post
script, Julian’s next move for their correspondence game; the salutation was addressed to “Pablo,” and the closing claimed to miss him terribly.
And beside the final paragraph—the only one that replied to Paul’s letter directly—Julian had drawn a little caricature of him. Compulsive working-class hero that you are, it shouldn’t surprise me that you’re keeping busy. The drawing wasn’t half bad, and if it had portrayed anyone else, Paul would have thought it a charming likeness. The figure was curly-haired and round-shouldered, gangly as a heron, laboriously dragging a cartoonish five-hundred-pound anvil. I hope you’ll relax at some point, if only as a personal favor.
Paul was indeed keeping busy—forcing himself to do so, for fear that he would seize up like a torn muscle if he held still. He ran every morning, swam at the community center every night, ruthlessly filled his time with work and volunteering and constructive reading projects. For the first few weeks of summer Paul had written extensively to Julian about what he was doing and what he hoped to achieve by doing it, as evidence of his commitment to reshaping himself into something worthy. Sometimes he transcribed entire pages from the beginning, trying to make his handwriting look more ambitious and self-assured. But when Julian noticed his efforts at all he treated them as a novelty, or worse, a joke. In retrospect, Paul saw that these were actually an unwitting confession to the crime of mediocrity—a plea, pathetic and damning, for an approval he didn’t deserve.
Concierge, nights. Paul didn’t dare circle any of the listings until he was alone in his room, so he memorized where they were on the page so he could return to them later. File clerk. Dishwasher, room to advance.
“Do you have anything fun planned for this afternoon, Paulie?”
Paul quickly flipped back to the news pages, but his grandfather wasn’t looking at him—he reached into the fridge for the pickle jar, big hands creased black with stubborn remnants of motor oil.
“I don’t know,” Paul said, gazing unseeingly at the paper to avoid eye contact. “I have got some books I should finish before they come due.”
“Uh-huh.” At the periphery of his vision, his grandfather shut the refrigerator; Paul could tell he was being watched, but pretended not to feel it. “Not going to the woods much this summer, are you?”
Paul was silent for a moment. For weeks now he’d been afraid to do anything he loved; he avoided hiking, just as he avoided painting, because he was terrified to discover he could no longer enjoy it. He had tried just once—the same loaner car, the same West Virginia forest preserve. The woods were lush with summer, silvery dime-sized azures darting through the grass along the roadside. Paul had sat for a while in the gravel lot, waiting for himself to get up and walk the path, before he finally gave up and left. His hands never left the steering wheel.
“There’s not a ton of local species left on my checklist,” he said with a shrug. “I’m at the point where I have to start traveling if I want anything new.”
“You’re getting withdrawn again.” When his grandfather’s hand settled on his shoulder, Paul had to steel himself to avoid shrugging it off. “It’s good to have a work ethic, and you’ve been such a help getting the garage under control—but you need to do things for fun sometimes, too.”
Paul summoned all his energy to look up at his grandfather and smile. It wasn’t safe to let his unhappiness become so conspicuous; if his family could see it, they could source it too.
“Stuck in school mode, I guess.” He tried to sound cheerful, but to his ear his voice was childishly cloying.
“Well, knock it off.” His grandfather gave his shoulder a shake before letting go. “Go to the movies, chat up a few girls, maybe paint some rude words on the side of a train. Be a kid while you still can.”
Over the last few weeks, Paul’s appetite had ebbed away to nearly nothing. As his grandfather retreated, Paul pushed away his plate and returned to the classifieds. There were neighborhoods where minimum wage was enough for a living, if he didn’t care about adding to his savings. And he would be far from his family and from the soot-stained city, far enough that the curvature of the earth would blot out the shadow his father’s absence had left behind.
When Paul included Julian in these fantasies, he did so hesitantly and shamefaced, as if Julian were only an afterthought and not the nucleus around which the entire impulse had formed. He knew very little about DC; beyond its landmarks, he could only imagine it as a blur, in whose hazy streets Julian stood alone as the only solid and tangible thing.
Paul took the classified pages home with him, tucked into the cover of one of the Western-canon landmarks he was forcing himself to read. He was building a stack of classifieds under his bed, a collection of futures circled in red. A payroll assistant at the Museum of Natural History, going home to a furnished efficiency in the attic of a town house; a night clerk at the Georgetown law library, with blackout curtains in his studio apartment so that he could sleep during the day. Unglamorous work in illustrious places—and Julian, always Julian, the promise of him so bright that Paul didn’t dare look directly.
He didn’t give himself a chance to think better of it. He unspooled his reasoning thoroughly but haphazardly, as if he were answering an essay question with one eye on the clock. He needed to try living somewhere besides fucking Pittsburgh; Washington was the capital of the free world, rich with culture, and history was writing itself there before their eyes. And anyway, maybe Julian would enjoy having a friend so close, a safe haven and a sympathetic ear when his family became (Paul chose these words carefully) too tediously bourgeois to bear. He knew Julian hadn’t liked his previous proposals for seeing each other before the end of summer, but this one was better, easier to conceal from Julian’s parents. It was just an idea, and he might be missing some key detail—but that was why he was writing to his cleverest and most knowledgeable friend, who could turn Paul’s half-formed impulse into a plan.
It was stamped and in the mail before panic caught up with him, but he was excited enough that he managed to swallow the fear. Julian was taking several days to reply to his letters; Paul forbade himself from compulsively checking the mailbox, telling himself that the reply would be worth the wait. In the meantime he thought of the plan whenever he was obliged to summon a smile, or when he needed a reason not to succumb to frustration at work. The dream was painful, but he preferred it to everything else that pained him. If nothing else, it gave the bruises on his forearm a chance to fade.
Julian’s reply caught him off guard. It arrived very quickly, as if he’d composed his answer to the letter the day he received it. Paul came home from a volunteer shift at the botanical gardens and found the envelope waiting on his bed. It was the same stationery Julian had apologized for in his first letter—a gift from his mother, dove-gray, each page decorated along one edge with a motif of nautilus shells.
His hands shook so hard that he almost couldn’t open envelope. The letter itself was brief; he propped it up on his pillow and tucked his arms tightly around his body as he leaned down to read it.
Pablo—
If Washington were your introduction to the world outside of Pittsburgh, I fear you might never be persuaded to move anywhere else. Please be advised that the damn thing is built on a swamp (“air you can wear,” as my preternaturally witty eldest sibling likes to say). Not a good swamp, I hasten to add, because I know you have an unfathomable fondness for the muddy and mosquito-plagued. The odious creatures known as civil servants which shamble through its streets would not be at all out of place in such an environment. It’s abysmal, and if I allowed you to inflict it on yourself I could scarcely call myself your friend. Sorry—I know this isn’t what you wanted to hear. But you can’t have failed to catch on that it’s my dearest ambition in life to leave.
As I write this I am kicked back in an Adirondack deck chair, wearing my fucking tennis whites and drinking a Horse’s Neck, which I’m afraid means I might have finally left the pupa and become a real WASP. They’re having a crab boil,
“just a little get-together for a few close friends,” which means a lot of radiantly white and very distinguished legs are currently being exposed to the air for the first time since August. The weather is absolutely foul, the dragonflies aren’t pulling their weight as regards the mosquito population, and I would love nothing more than (and am thus not allowed) to hide away inside with the fans until the nightmare is over. One of the guests brought a dog, at least. She’s a nice dog, a little black spaniel; pity the owner is a cryptofascist. (You’d recognize his name, though sadly not from any impending indictments.)
This is about all I can get away with writing when I’m supposed to be advancing the charm offensive, so I’ll sign off for now. Best to everyone, and chin up—now you’re free to daydream about running away to a real city, instead of the worst goddamn company town on earth.
Thank you for writing to me so diligently. I do mean that.
As always, your faithful servant—
—J.
The fantasy lingered a second longer than it should have, before curdling his yearning into self-disgust.
He couldn’t bring himself to destroy the letter, as much as he wanted to. Instead he crumpled it into a ball and shoved it to the back of a dresser drawer. But when he went out for his swim that night he took his collection of classifieds with him, and burned them, page by page, on a footbridge over the creek in Schenley Park. He wanted to forget he’d ever yielded to the weakness of wanting anything. He wanted to scrub away any evidence that he existed outside his own head at all—that he was a visible object that anyone else could see and mock and judge.
These Violent Delights Page 12