by Damon Suede
Trip studied his mouth for a moment, then blinked.
Bull’s-eye.
Silas speared another bite of cheesy goodness. “Now I gotta buy her books and make sure everyone I know does the same.” He dipped his head decisively. “Otherwise we’d never have met, huh?”
“I needed this. That sounds weird, I guess. You seemed so nice.” Trip regarded him, whip-thin and whip-smart. “Thanks for coming on such short notice. I mean it.”
Silas took a risk. “The thing you were upset about before. That guy. From this morning. Is he an ex?”
“Cliff?” Trip snorted. “Hardly. He’s my editor at Big Dog… swiped something I pitched.” Trip swallowed a bite as if it were soot.
“And then you spent most of the day wandering around thinking of shit you should have said.”
“Exactly! The wisdom of the staircase.”
Silas crumpled his napkin and dropped it on the skillet. “What’s that?”
“Y’know when you leave a party and you’re standing on the landing before you finally think of all the stuff you should have said on the spot? The French call it ‘wisdom of the staircase.’ ’S’like my worst habit.” Trip sighed. “That’s what writers do. They can write conversations the way they oughtta happen.”
“Staircase wisdom. I like that.”
“And that is why art is better than life.” Trip folded his napkin into a neat square.
“Know something?” Silas waited for Trip to look up. “Keanu Reeves has bad skin. For real. And most starlets get weaves because their hair’s too thin. Only cartoons have perfect hair. And don’t get me started on the Botox. Actors gotta be as 2-D friendly as possible because cameras flatten everything.”
“C’mon.” A laugh.
“I do makeup for those people. It’s all a front. Nobody is James Bond on their own. Studios pay armies of queens like me to put Humpty Dumpty together for the camera. Right?”
Trip frowned. “You’re not a queen.”
“Well, I know a bunch who’d argue.” Silas burst out laughing. “I wish Kurt could hear you say that. My friend. He gives me shit about being a Beauty School Dropout.”
Trip’s forehead stitched close.
Obviously he’d said something that made Trip uncomfortable. But what?
Trip considered the macaroni again. “I’m pretty, I dunno, crappy at being gay. I never really wrapped my head around what I was supposed to be doing. Like everyone else got a memo I didn’t.”
“It isn’t a secret handshake. I mean, there aren’t rules, no matter what people pretend.” Still, Trip’s twitchiness left Silas off balance.
“We should get going.” Trip rose and stuck an arm into his jacket.
The restaurant had gotten crowded, and predatory diners circled like puffy vultures. Or was Trip just trying to flee?
Are we finished? By the time Silas retrieved his coat, another party had crowded in to claim the table, so Trip had stepped out onto Twelfth Street by the time Silas got free.
Strangest date ever. Not bad, just impossible.
Silas shifted his weight. “You okay?”
“I did this all wrong.” Trip stared toward Second Avenue, as if lost and far from home.
“Whaddayamean?” The Paddy sighting had sucked, but they’d had a great time, right? Silas reached out and took Trip’s gloved hand. “I dig you, huh? Maybe you think I’m okay too.”
Trip nodded and blinked his lemur eyes.
“Look: I’m awful at bushes and beating around ’em.” He put a quick kiss on Trip’s cheek.
Trip’s face froze, and his gaze skated side to side.
“Was that bad?”
“Uh, no. Surprised me. It was great.” Trip touched the invisible lip print. “I was so terrified this was just a hookup.”
“Buster, I couldn’t wait that long to get you shucked and greased.”
Trip looked baffled. “Okay….”
“No.” Silas took a breath. “For a hookup, I’d have had your pants around your ankles in Central Park ten days ago. I got no kinda patience.” Silas didn’t share the fact that he’d happily have done all of the above and still come to dinner tonight, but Trip was a nice guy. He probably didn’t treat men like meat.
Like I do.
“You’re so—” Trip indicated Silas head to toe. “Sexy. And I didn’t know. But no way could I have kept it together. So thank you for… I dunno. Talking to me like a person. Calming me down.”
Silas relaxed. “I try to do something terrifying every day. Keeps my heart on its toes.”
Trip chuckled. “Your heart has toes?”
“Maybe. It runs around enough.” Silas touched Trip’s shoulder blade casually, brushing away imaginary dust.
Trip shrugged. “I’m way better company than this, I promise. I don’t even know you, and I’ve been acting like a total dick.”
“You made time to see me. If this is you acting like a total dick, then I definitely want to go out again.”
A hopeful smile. “Seriously?”
“I’m being serious. Speaking from vast dick experience, that’s a pretty manageable dickiness as dicks go.” Silas raised his arm to hail a taxi up the block.
Trip opened his mouth to say something, closed it, and opened it again. “So… still counts as a date.”
“I sure thought so.”
“Truth?” Trip shivered. “This is gonna come out wrong… but you’re like every gorgeous jock meathead I ever wanted in school.” A glance at the street. “I know you’re not a meathead. You’re just a lot to take in. Funny and sweet and smart—”
Silas kissed him. He couldn’t think of what else to do to stop the strange spiral of anxiety, so he just stepped forward and planted a chaste peck directly on Trip’s lips.
Trip froze and then softened.
Silas stepped back. “Sorry. You left me no choice.”
“I’m sorry.” Trip still looked anxious.
“What you are—” Grin. “—is charming.” Silas kept his hands to himself, just barely. “I gotta take sips of you. What may seem like me being standoffish is me trying not to throw you over my shoulder and haul you back to my greasy Batcave.”
Trip gulped but said nothing. The taxi slowed to a halt.
“I think you had a shit day. And I’m honored that you trust me enough to come here and spend time. I wanna see you again. And not as some kind of Superfriends social work. That sound okay?”
Trip didn’t—or couldn’t—answer.
“Unless you don’t. But just so we’re clear, I think you’re fucking adorable, and I would like to see you again and find out what happens next. Okay?” Silas, full gentleman-mode, opened the cab door. “No pressure.”
Trip laughed at that. It had to be some kind of private joke. He laughed long enough that Silas laughed too. All the fight-or-flight seemed to drain out of Trip’s body, until Silas could make out the real person.
“Okay?”
Trip seemed to weigh the matter and scratched his forearm hard enough to raise pinks lines. “Okay.”
Silas resisted the urge to steal another kiss from the lush mouth, because this spark deserved patience. His watch showed nearly ten, and he planned to be a good boy with Mr. Spector. Plus, he needed to finish his sculpts for tomorrow’s strip club shoot. “Okay you will or okay you’ll remember?”
“Both.” Trip smiled and slid into the cab. “I think.”
Silas smiled and closed the door gently. He patted the cold glass and watched Trip watch him as the yellow car pulled away and headed toward a moon as bright as a flipped nickel.
4
THE next day, Rina helped him come up with an outrageous artistic revenge for the Unboyfriend’s betrayal, assault-and-batteries not included.
He’d buzzed her in, poured her a Fresca, and dropped his bomb. He expected scorn, rage, pity even.
“Congratulations, honey.” She gave a serene Madonna smile. Vatican, not “Vogue.”
“I know—” His mouth stayed
open, startled. “What?”
“Trip, you taught him to do this. You give Cliff a face that says welcome, and he wiped his feet again.” She sipped her pale soda.
“No-no-no. You’re not hearing me. Cliff stole my pitch. Well, he paid for it and then gave my professional parachute out of this pastel spandex gulag to some chick born after cell phones were invented.”
“Imagine! An Unboyfriend who’s uncertain and unsupportive.” Rina faked a sad face.
He had always felt guilty hearing the nickname, but Jillian and Rina were right. Cliff sucked.
That morning, he’d finally gathered up the entire Campus Champions proposal, all seventy-one pages, and stuffed it into an old briefcase under his bed so he wouldn’t keep poring over it, trying to work out what he could’ve done better or straighter. At least Silas had offered to give him another shot. He hadn’t called, but then again, maybe he was working.
“This is exactly what you wanted.”
“It most certainly is not.” Trip’s voice rose.
Finally, her anger flared. “Then it’s a fucking radioactive Bat-Signal.” She put her Fresca on the coffee table.
He fought the impulse to put a coaster under the glass.
“Staplegun fucks you over ’cause you gave him permission.” Rina flapped a hand at him. “Listen to me. What did you say when I fired my first agent? Peed my pants at Balthazar. Stopped eating.”
She’d lost fifteen pounds in a month and almost ended up in the hospital in kidney failure. “He was a schnorrer.”
“Best thing coulda happened. He hated paranormal. He wasn’t a bridge to anywhere: he was a fucking wall between me and my future. I woulda ended up as one of those bitter hacks who look like pimento loaf stretched over a knee bone. He only seemed like a bridge because I wasn’t crossing it and I never could.”
Trip groaned in irritation. “Rina, it took three days to feel like I was walking around the city and not some kind of hellish despair-scape. I went on a date, which I almost ruined, but then Silas was so cool that he actually pulled me out of it….”
“Silas?” Rina put a hand on his arm. “Tsk! You gambled.” A nod. She seemed pleased, for some inscrutable reason.
“Rina, I unleashed Fagnarok.” He grimaced. “That poor guy. I mean, we had fun when I wasn’t acting like a complete maniac.” He closed his eyes to keep the shame and pain inside his head.
“Duh.” Rina sat back. “You’d just gotten hosed by Captain Cocktease.”
“Silas spent the whole time flirting like Cliff, which means he thought I was a head case.”
“These are not problems; they are invitations.”
He pulled a pillow over his face. “With all due respect, fuck off.” He tossed it away.
“Okay. Well, okay.” She nodded, then wiped her mouth on a paper napkin, which left a taupe smear of lipstick behind.
Rina twisted to scan the big framed Justice League poster over the couch, “D’you know? Wonder Woman is the reason I write.” She tapped the Amazon placed front and center by Alex Ross.
Trip would never confess it to Rina, but he didn’t like Wonder Woman comics. He had gone through a brief period of Wonder Woman infatuation as a teenager; he loved the mythic backstory, and all those butch guys getting roped and rescued didn’t hurt either. Even now they flirted with a campy bondage-y quality. Truth was, he owned all of the old Lynda Carter series on DVD because Lyle Waggoner was so fucking shaggy-seventies sexy. But because she was female, the academics and the suits always self-consciously screwed her up to match trends: in the sixties she was a vampy vixen, in the nineties she’d been a kickass grrl-power fem-bot… so she felt more fake to him than other superheroes.
Déjà vu. When had he thought that before?
“She sort of taught me how to be a lady. Because my family couldn’t.” Rina pored over the Alex Ross painting, which made the Amazon princess look butch and cold. “She isn’t the most famous… the most loved. She isn’t the hippest or the smartest, but she is my heroine and I’m addicted. It’s the comic book I’d write if I ever wrote comics.”
Trip held up a hand as if weighing the idea. “There are comics that I’ve loved that way.”
“Not one, though.” Rina stood and paced in a spiral, which she did whenever she had something brewing that hadn’t formed fully. When she worked, she stirred and stirred the room like a giant cauldron until magic came out of it. “You might like individual storylines, and you like parts of the different characters. But they aren’t your hero.”
“Huh.” He’d never thought of it that way.
“With Wonder Woman, I literally stop and think to myself… what would she do here? How would she react? What’s the Wonder Woman solution to this problem?” Rina pressed a hand to her heart. “Not ’cause I’m crazy, but ’cause she resonates inside me like a bell. We’re tuned in the same key.”
When had he last felt like that with a character he drew?
“What I mean is: when I write a book, I’m in the book. Every page. It isn’t memoir, but my Rina-ness needs to live in the words, or why the hell am I putting my name on it? Your sleazy Unboyfriend pays you to grind out that white-bread goop you despise. That’s why you complain so much and live in this stuffy box. I mean, some other artist loves Hero High, but you don’t. That’s why you itch and sneeze. You’re allergic to phoniness.”
“Tell that to my asthma.”
“Your monkey brain pops out to right wrongs.” She jabbed him with a finger. “I swear: a real project and a good night’s sleep skin to skin against the right person, all that itching and scratching would go away.”
“Abracadabra,” he scoffed.
Rina sank to her knees with a kind of self-conscious melodrama, like a doomed pulp virgin summoning a big nasty from beyond.
“It’s always pretty gross down there.”
“You gotta be shitting me.” Rina did a double take at him. “This place is cleaner than my dishes.” Without warning, she lay back on the floor and stared at the ceiling.
Trip lived in a second-floor studio apartment above the dive bar that owned the building. The ample paychecks from Hero High let him afford a Village address as long as he wasn’t picky. The holes in the floor meant he basically heard drunks hooking up downstairs unless he wore earphones to bed, but the swiss-cheesy hardwood also lowered the rent to a thousand bucks a month… about a third of the going rate in Manhattan. Sure, he had to step over frozen vomit on his stoop in the winter and crying co-eds in the summer, but he had a big open alcove studio with lots of light: a must for a working artist.
The housekeeper had been in the day before. Dust and pollen got unholy this close to the street. His eyes watered in sympathy. “Dusty, then. Mold. The radiator leaks.” Seeing her down there quickened Trip’s nerves.
“I don’t have your allergies, pa. Frankly, neither do you. My cat is onto you.”
“She’s a supervillain.” Rina had a psychic tortoiseshell cat named Abigail who served as Trip’s bullshit excuse for never visiting or house-sitting for her. The cat predicted Amazon rankings, gobbled any kind of living plant, and apparently did life-coaching on the side. Terrific.
“Just riff with me. If you had all the time in the world and no bills to pay? Pretend you’re not just some doodlebug in the crap-factory.” She reached the edge of his kitchenette and then reversed and coiled back toward him.
“I dunno.” Trip didn’t feel like playing.
Rina rocked her head back and forth on the hardwood planks. She excelled at this kinda stuff, spinning gold out of cobwebs. “Okay, I’ll start. Day or night.”
Trip spoke without thinking. “Night.”
“Duh. You like spooky stuff. Okay, good.” She chewed on her hair absently. “But not violent.”
“Spooky? What, like Scooby-Doo?” Truthfully, Trip had a soft spot for Fred.
Rina squinted at the rays of light sneaking through his blinds. “No. Well, yeah, but no. I mean shadows. Maybe some occult woo-woo. Not lik
e Buffy or Harry Potter. More like…. Hammer Films: pentagrams and candles. Blood and skin. A little dry ice. Titties but not silicone.”
She had him cold.
“God….” Trip winced. “I feel so cheap.”
“Bellaco.” Rina giggled and patted his arm. “You gotta stop thinking that what you love is some kinda race you can win.”
No harm in talking. “I’d wanna to do a real hero. No capes. No radiation.” He sensed the hazy outline of a real idea: a pale, muscular chest, a peaked eyebrow, horns in moonlight.
Horns?
Rina tapped her mouth with a mauve fingernail. “Warlocks? Vampires?”
“Ugh. No. Not dead people. There has to be intimacy in this. Skin and spit. Some humanity. Subtlety. It’s for grown-ups.” The character floated just beyond sight in deep water… the murky ocean of notions he’d avoided for so long.
Tap-a-tap. His chewed pencil had left a little spatter of dots on the paper. He erased them without looking down.
“You’d want a character that fans can dream about. Hmmph. I like the seduction scenario. A sexy beast who won’t take no.” Trip shut his mouth. Embarrassing.
“Uh-huh.” She crowed. “Male. Obviously.”
“Fuck you.” Trip shot her a look. “I draw great women.”
“Did I say you didn’t?”
“And most of my favorite books are about chicks. Vampirella. Promethea.”
“Yeah, because you grew up in the ’90s and male action heroes aren’t allowed to be vulnerable or sexy unless they’re suffering.” She had a point. “What do editors pay you for? What do you doodle? What do you dream about and whack off to? Macho men in peril.”
“I’m not that gay.”
“Trip, you’re gay. Okay? I’m just saying you dig the menfolk, and you make ’em beautiful when you chill the fuck—”
“Hot guys. Okay. Fine. Yes. Great.” Trip rubbed his eyes. “This is humiliating. Why don’t we just drag out all my porn and childhood diaries while we’re at it?” But it felt good to fish for an idea, even if he had no bait. “I cannot draw a triple-X comic.”