These Violent Delights

by Micah Nemerever

  But more than anything else, he noticed Julian. The way he jumped when people spoke to him. The way he laughed at jokes a little too quickly, the slight overearnest edge to his smile. How he would dart out onto the deck to smoke, backed into the corner of the railing as if someone might creep up behind him and push him over. How he rubbed at his exhaustion-heavy eyes and chewed his cuticles; the way he always kept one eye on the door.

  “If I don’t get to ask, you don’t either,” said Julian, when Paul inevitably let his concern overpower him. He was trying for a playful tone, but the results didn’t convince either of them. “I’m just tired, Pablo. You can’t know what it was like, watching you sleep like the dead—I had to keep checking to see if you were still breathing.”

  Paul might have thought Julian was angry if he hadn’t hung so close. He refused to be left alone. As Paul made his obligatory loop through each cluster of relatives, Julian hung half a step behind and rolled his disposable cup between his hands. If Paul so much as retreated to the washroom, Julian leaned against the wall outside and waited for him. But Julian barely spoke, even to him. He answered Paul’s questions in monosyllables, not meeting his eyes.

  His cousin Debbie, ever the showman, waited until the toasts at dinner to announce she was expecting her first baby. It was Audrey who took the brunt of it, the Oh isn’t that nice for them and Aren’t you looking forward to having your own someday. She didn’t even pretend to absorb it gracefully, which gave Paul a reluctant measure of comfort. (“Listen, I could go out and get pregnant right now,” she told their grandmother with her eyebrows raised, “but I wouldn’t enjoy that any more than you would.”) In years past, Paul might have been pulled into it. They would have teased him about nonexistent girlfriends and assured him that some ill-defined it would happen for him, someday, when he was a doctor. But today they addressed him with a silence too pointed to ignore. Another layer of calm stripped away. What remained was so translucent now that Paul had to remind himself it was still there.

  Past the gaps in the curtains, the rain turned into snow. They were hard little flakes, cold enough they might stick. Beside him, Julian was rolling a green bean back and forth across his plate, which he’d filled very lightly, then barely touched. The exhaustion had left him brittle and diminished; he smiled when he met Paul’s eyes, but he didn’t grow any less pale.

  Being out among others already was a mistake; compared to subjecting themselves to this acid bath, the need for an alibi felt frivolous. He brushed his hand against Julian’s under the table. Julian tensed and remained that way for a while, before he finally took Paul’s hand and seemed (almost, not quite) to relax.

  Paul wanted the snow to thicken, to continue without pause until he and Julian were stranded together somewhere far from here. He pushed the temperature lower and summoned a blizzard. Snow would cover the roads and the driveways and the parking lots. It would cling to Julian’s apartment windows and keep them warm inside. They would have a few days of stillness, and the calm would return, even as the slush along the banks of the Monongahela slowly congealed into a translucent sheet of ice. Then there was the soft thump, the dark thick shape, of something buoyed against the ice by the currents underneath.

  Suddenly nobody was speaking. There was a near-inaudible ring in the air, the echo of his fork slipping from his hand and clattering onto his plate. Every face turned toward him. The meal in his stomach was a dense wet weight.

  “All right, Paulie?” his grandfather asked. Paul hated the way his voice sounded, as if he’d been waiting for this moment all along.

  “I’m fine.” Paul didn’t dare look at Julian. He rose as slowly as he could and forced himself to smile. “Just a little tired.”

  He hid in his aunt’s bedroom and curled up in the corner of the window seat. He tried to push the image away, but it wouldn’t leave. It became another new part of him, undetectable in the shadow of his reflection in the glass.

  He started at the sound of the door, but he didn’t turn around. He didn’t want Julian to look at him until he remembered how to be serene and untouchable. He didn’t want him to see how little he had really changed.

  The door shut slowly. Julian touched his shoulder, then pushed his fingers through Paul’s hair. Paul expected his fingers to draw tight and pull. He wanted Julian to strike him across the face; he imagined the icy tone his voice would take when he told Paul to pull himself together, and how reflexive and natural it would be to obey.

  But Julian leaned against the window seat and gently lifted Paul’s chin. There was only the dim glow of the streetlights outside, but Paul could see that he was close to smiling.

  “There’s the Pablo I know.” He brushed Paul’s hair back from his face. “I was worried I’d lost you.”

  He wasn’t sure what made him collapse—whether it was the accusation of weakness or the realization that he was too exhausted and overwhelmed to prove it wrong. The world was too loud again, and he felt pathetic and small, and the shame was more than his body could hold.

  “You’re okay.” Julian held him close and pressed a soft kiss to his hair. It was the first time all day he’d been calm. “You can trust me now. You’re safe, I’ll take care of you. I don’t need you to be brave.”

  3.

  Julian still wasn’t sleeping—that much was clear. He was glassy-eyed and inattentive, his movements as jittery as a bird’s, and he smoked so relentlessly that his new carton of cigarettes was already crushed and slack. Paul was deliberately incurious about what was wrong, but a memory lingered in his head even when he refused to see why it was important. How Julian had looked at the wounded fox, as if it forced him to remember something he wanted to forget. Julian’s squeamishness was a quality that Paul had always considered rather childish; today it infuriated him, even if he couldn’t currently see any evidence of it.

  They’d met at the delicatessen for a lunch neither wanted to eat. Yesterday’s snow hadn’t lasted long, and the rain sloughed far too loudly against the window and through the gutters. The amber glass shades on the overhead lights, the faded cartoon of a whale printed on the side of the salt carton—this place was too familiar, too comfortable, a relic of his life before. Being here made him feel young and useless.

  “It’s strange not having to go Christmas shopping,” Julian mused. “Except for Joy, I guess. Do people give presents for Hanukkah?”

  “Just little ones. It isn’t worth wasting your money.”

  “You’re as much of a mother hen as your Ma,” said Julian. It stung like a slap, but it wasn’t cruel enough that Paul could treat it like one.

  He watched Julian sugar the last of the coffee into a slurry. For only the second time since they met, Julian was in the process of losing at chess. Paul could hardly count it as a win, because Julian barely paid attention to the game—he was hemorrhaging material and blundering into simple traps, though for the moment he still clung jealously to the black queen. Everything about Julian was fractured by exhaustion, and knowing how unkind he was being only added to Paul’s annoyance. He yearned for an excuse to pick a fight, but Julian was in one of his strange gentle moods and refused to give it to him.

  “So how much is your grandfather paying you, anyway?” Julian asked, as if it were a subject they’d already been in the middle of discussing. He was doing a careful impression of being bored by the question, but the cracks in the veneer were visible even if Paul couldn’t quite see what was behind them. It instantly put him on the defensive.

  “About fifteen dollars a week,” he said flatly. “I don’t see why that matters.”

  “Just curious.” If Julian heard the edge in his voice, he was pretending not to notice. He made a move so nakedly wrongheaded that Paul suspected he was losing on purpose.

  “I’ve just been thinking,” he added carelessly, “it might be easier to keep the money thing under control if I didn’t live alone.”

  It took a moment for his meaning to click into place, and when it did, Paul wis
hed it hadn’t. His reflexive, cowardly reaction was to imagine how this idea would be received, how ruthlessly his family would decide to be hurt by it, how his grandfather might even hire someone else in Paul’s place rather than bankroll the arrangement.

  When he forced himself to bury this fear, the suspicion that replaced it wasn’t much better. The offering felt the same as the set of oil paints had, overly generous and tailored to overwhelm him, as if it were supposed to remind Paul of how weak he was for wanting it.

  Julian crushed his cigarette in the ashtray; before he retreated, his fingertips came to rest, just briefly, on Paul’s wrist. Paul smiled to hide his dismay. He reminded himself that they trusted each other now, even as he looked at Julian’s shadowed eyes and poorly combed hair and wondered with senseless spite whether that was a mistake.

  “It would have to be after my birthday,” he said, and looked down at their hands so he wouldn’t have to see the relief in Julian’s face. “Just so there’s no . . . I don’t know, so no one can do anything to stop me.”

  Julian didn’t argue the point, though for the first time all day he seemed to want to. He pulled the impatience beneath the surface so quickly that Paul barely had time to recognize it.

  “Poor Pablo,” he said kindly. “Ruminating, as always.”

  They didn’t finish their game. On their way out Julian pocketed the black queen, as if it belonged to him as much as his wallet and keys. He rolled it between his fingers as Paul drove, too overtired and fretful to get behind the wheel himself. The rain had grown heavier, thick with fragments of snow; Paul switched on the radio to drown out the drum of it on the roof.

  “Pull over here,” said Julian suddenly.

  They were cutting through a lightly traveled stretch of the park, empty under the heavy skies. Paul expected Julian to kiss him, and he tried to believe this would steady him. But Julian only lifted his chin and studied him.

  “I’ve always loved this place right here,” said Julian, and he touched Paul’s face just beneath the outer corner of his eye. “Something about the slope from your eyelids to your cheekbone, the way the skin here catches the light. It makes your eyes look so dark and serious.”

  Feeling this visible put Paul in such agony that he knew he couldn’t speak without snapping. Instead he shut his eyes and forced himself not to flinch.

  “It always makes me a little sad when you laugh,” Julian went on. “The way it sort of takes you by surprise. I love it, it has that sweet sincerity that’s the best part of you, but it still kills me how you never seem to expect it. All I want to do is make you happy, and you’re the unhappiest person I’ve ever met.”

  “Stop.” He was relieved when he heard the anger in his own voice because it was less humiliating than pain. “Please stop—”

  “Everything hurts you.” It wasn’t an accusation, but it should have been. “You just keep hating yourself, no matter how much I try to show you that you shouldn’t. I just want you to trust me, I want you to believe me when I tell you—”

  “Shut up, Julian.”

  Julian recoiled as if Paul had hit him. Paul grasped the steering wheel and pushed his shoulders hard against the back of his seat. He could feel his heartbeat in the space behind his eyes.

  “I don’t need you to talk like that,” he said wretchedly. “I’m not some pathetic—I don’t need you to coddle me, okay? Just stop, I don’t want it, I want you to believe I have self-respect and instead it’s like you think I need some kind of a reward for good behavior so I don’t go to pieces.”

  If they were going to fall backward into the roles they’d played before, the least Julian could do was snap at him. He’d always been so quick to put Paul in his place, to remind him with devastating mercy how little his emotions actually mattered. But the long sleepless hours had sanded the sharpness from Julian’s teeth. You scare the hell out of me. The look Julian gave him made Paul wonder for the first time if it might be true.

  “I love you,” said Julian—uneasy, distant, as if he were reminding himself. “By now you ought to be able to let me fucking tell you.”

  He didn’t expect it, except in the sense that bracing himself for the possibility felt all but identical to expectation. The fact that it wasn’t inevitable only made the dread worse—it could have followed him every day of his life, the chill of fear when he opened the morning paper and the slow climb back into functional uncertainty.

  When it happened, it didn’t surprise him. The only feeling he could name was a perverse, shattering relief, even as he had to brace his hand on the key table to keep himself from collapsing. His insides had felt loose and unmoored, as if the interstices weren’t strong enough to hold his organs in place. But now his body had something to anchor it—evidence, however hideous, that Paul still existed outside his own head.

  The headline came on Saturday, while the family was preparing to leave for services. Front page, just above the fold, holding its own amid the turmoil in Greece and the screaming panic over the price of oil. He’d gone all day yesterday without knowing it was already true. Early morning, before he’d even left for his run; some unfortunate stranger he hoped never to meet, out for a walk along the riverfront with her dog.

  “Identity has not been disclosed,” the article said. Not “unidentified.” They already knew who he was.

  “Any good indictments today?”

  Audrey zipped her jacket as she approached. When Paul didn’t answer, she took the paper from his hands and inspected every headline except the one that mattered.

  “This new paperboy, I swear to god,” she said to no one in particular. “This whole edge is papier-mâché, he always leaves it sticking out into the rain.”

  Paul retreated to the living room just long enough to hide his shoes under the couch. He sidled past Audrey and hovered in the kitchen doorway; his mother had set her purse in one of the chairs and was rifling through it for a throat lozenge.

  “I’m thinking of sitting it out today.” His calm sounded so tinny and false that he didn’t dare believe it was convincing. “I’ve got an article I need to finish reading for journal club.”

  “Don’t you want to hear how Bobby Koenig is doing at William and Mary?” called Audrey from the hallway. Beside her, Laurie quickly turned away to hide her smirk.

  His mother straightened; the lozenge clicked against her teeth and gave a glimmering smell of false cherry. She lifted his face, frowning, and leaned up to feel his forehead.

  “You look a little pale,” she said, in her familiar tone of faint accusation. “Are you sure you’re not coming down with that bug?”

  “I’m fine,” said Paul, but it was convenient for her not to believe him.

  He forced himself to wait, long after the trio of black umbrellas had bobbed out of sight at the far end of the street. His hands wore a greasy sheen of newspaper ink; even after he washed them, he thought he could see traces of it etched into his fingerprints. He left a note telling them he was going to the library, and he took his bicycle out into the cold.

  He’d forgotten his gloves, but when he noticed, he didn’t turn back. A bitter wind picked up, and when he coasted downhill the cold air snapped through his clothes. The rain pilled on his glasses and snaked through his hair until the thrum of his heartbeat made his whole body tremble. He endured it to punish himself, and to prove to himself that he could; those were the only two reasons he ever chose to do anything worthwhile.

  It was weeks too soon. He repeated the protest in his head, though he knew it was every bit as useless and self-damning as “It isn’t fair.” Every moment of doubt he’d felt in the aftermath, every bodily betrayal and senseless lash of temper, every weakness—it all made sense now that he knew he must already have felt the mistake. Some unconscious part of him must have pushed around with its tongue and found it there, like the knot of a new tooth beneath the gums.

  He should have seen it; it should have been part of the plan. But he found it buried in the third or fourth conti
ngency, amid the frenzy of the fallback position they were never supposed to need. He’d read in a book that drowned bodies, real ones, would almost always sink. Four liters of water in their chests weighed more than enough to pull them down, and only decay eventually brought them back to the surface. The subject was supposed to follow them out onto the bridge in a haze of his own obedience. Filling his pockets with stones would have been an added complication, a chance for things to go awry, so Paul hadn’t even suggested it. It was inelegant and unnecessary—provided the subject entered the river with his lungs still desperate to breathe.

  There was no bike rack at Julian’s apartment building. Paul walked his bicycle up the steep dead-end road and chained it to the front railing. The tobacco-brown bricks were slick and dark, broken gutter coughing filthy water into the street. Inside the vestibule the light was flickering; the chessboard grid of the linoleum was smeared with mud, as if someone had dragged something inside.

  He let himself into Julian’s apartment as quietly as he could, in case he was finally sleeping. It was so stiflingly warm that the water on his glasses turned to steam. Paul lingered in the kitchen to peel off a layer of clothes. A bowl sat in the sink, full of tepid milk and bloated kernels of uneaten cereal.

  Julian was indeed fast asleep. One slack arm hung over the edge of the mattress; Paul recognized the olive-green sleeve as one of his own cardigans, left behind back in October and then forgotten after every visit since.

  Paul intended to curl up in one of the papasan chairs and wait, but when he draped his wet clothes over the radiator, Julian jolted awake.

  “It’s just me,” he said. “Go back to sleep.”

  For another moment Julian stared at him in alarm, as if he hadn’t quite finished dreaming. Then he sighed, rubbed his eyes, and lifted the edge of the blanket.

  He already knew. Neither of them acknowledged it; there was no need, and it wouldn’t change anything.