by Damon Suede
Jillian pinched her husband. “That’s not what I meant and you know it. How is he gonna be alive if he grows up on a couch and doesn’t take risks?”
“You’re awful.” Max smiled and kissed his mother.
She kissed him back. “Well, lucky for me you’re not.”
“Nuts.” Max sighed and gave Trip a fist bump. “G’night, Trip. Night, Dad.” Max submitted to a squeeze from Ben and a kiss from his mom before clomping upstairs.
Trip watched him go. “Boy, did you two luck out.”
Ben had already dragged the sketchbook closer and started flipping silently and slowly through the incubus sketches.
Jillian leaned over and whispered in her keeping-a-secret voice, “Having a kid is like having your heart walking around outside your body for the rest of your life.”
Lonely thought. Trip would never have a kid, even if he managed to find a partner. With his neuroses, he could never take responsibility for another human’s well-being. He couldn’t even handle a pet. Or a plant, for that matter. Of course, if he said that out loud, Jillian would squawk things about surrogates and adoptions and all kinds of complicated shit, but the bottom line was: no one he’d ever love would have the equipment to make a baby without the involvement of other folks. Somehow, not being able to confess his inadequacy to his best friend left him even lonelier, as if his kidlessness and his careful silence on the subject amplified each other.
When Trip looked up, both Stones stared at him as if reading his eyes and his thoughts written there. He tried to smile. Ben slowly pawed through the Horny Bastard studies.
Before Trip could make any excuses or explanations, the phone rang and Jillian went to the kitchen to answer.
“Trip. These are….” Ben gawped at Trip as if staggered. “Genius.”
“The character’s still really rough.”
Ben nodded sagely. “Big mojo, my man.”
Trip shrugged. “Dirty, mainly.”
“Nope. Wrong. And mongo dong.”
“And insane.”
“Gate of Horn, I’m telling you.” Ben was a fanatic mythology buff in college. In the Odyssey, Homer described a gate built of ivory, where all the fake dreams came from, and then another gate, one built of horn, that let out true visions, like prophecies and inspiration. He ranked everything as ivory or horn.
“I’m still fiddling.” Trip paged through the pencils and charcoals slowly.
“Horn.” Ben wrinkled his nose rapidly in a convincing impression of a wine-tasting rabbit. “Big shiny horn, man. I can smell it.”
“Eww.” Trip fake-retched. “Can we not be so Freudian?”
“Totally a Gate of Horn idea. Can’t you feel it?” Ben didn’t have a creative bone in his body, but he loved being around artists. So whenever Trip had an authentic idea of his own, Ben was quick to give it the stamp of mythological approval and ladle encouragement over it. Hero High had never been anything but ivory, and they all knew it.
Jillian came back from the kitchen, and Ben pulled her into his lap. She fluttered her fingers around her husband’s smiling face and spoke with a thick Slavic accent. “Listen to the Benjamin. The Stone knows.”
Ben prodded his wife. “Young Master Spector has concocted a demon without trousers or undergarments.”
“Indeed? I surmised as much.”
Trip loved seeing them happy together but looked at the floor. “We’ll see.”
“And his dates were successful.” Jillian held up her index finger. “With extra barbarian flavoring.”
Ben scratched his head. “This is the….”
“Zombie.” Ben, Trip, and Jillian intoned the word together, as a question, statement, and accusation respectively.
Trip pulled his legs up to his chest. “He’s not a zombie.”
“Barbarian.” Ben flipped another incubus page.
“He-Man, not Conan.” Jillian patted her husband’s thigh. “Sorry.”
“He was… I can’t explain. Funny. Weird. Smart. Relaxing.” Trip took a sip of scotch. “He said that what we’re good at is chutzpah. Americans.”
Jillian spun and goggled. “He said chutzpah?”
“No, but he meant it. I thought he was gonna be a buff bohunk with a bubble butt, but then he opens up and out pops this whole theory about pop culture and cultural imperialism.”
“Say what?” Ben looked aghast.
Jillian looked aghaster.
“But not in a wacky, tacky way. He’s hilarious and he listens. Really easy to talk to. He’s—” Trip scrubbed his teeth with his lips trying to find the right word for everything the date had been. “Unforgettable. We got into this bizarre discussion about capes and comparative folklore. He’s way brainier than I thought.”
Jillian’s eyes bulged like a sci-fi virgin tied to a doomsday device. “Your movie-magic muscle-Mary said this? During a—” She glanced at the ceiling where they heard her son creaking around. “—sex date?”
“No. We weren’t…. Nothing like that.”
“The huh?” She glared at him as though Trip had activated said doomsday device.
“Con-ver-sation….” Ben stroked his imaginary beard and peered at Jillian again, telegraphing something.
Trip shut his eyes and sighed. “There has been no full-on hankying or pankying. We saw a movie and I walked him home, that’s all.” Which was true-ish.
Ben gave him two thumbs up. “Ballsy play. I smell a winner.” In classic hetero “it’s perfect, you’re both gay” logic, he always thought any guy who was polite to Trip would become the love of his life.
Jillian rubbed Ben’s leg affectionately. “Ben was like a gold-medal dater. I’m telling you: I gave up showbiz because of his ninja dating skills.”
Ben put on his paternal voice. “Is he a mensch?” As in, an all-around nice guy who does the right thing. When it came to type, mensches tended toward more noble “salt of the earth” than “spank me, yank me.”
“I have no idea.” Trip shrugged. Lie. Silas was a total mensch.
“Trip Spector.” Jillian nudged him with her sockfoot. “I keep saying you need a nice mensch-y boyfriend instead of some cocksink. And if he’s hot and a mensch, don’t waste any time. A sexy mensch is a rare beast. Like a purple unicorn.” Jillian swatted his arm. “And you said yes.”
“Gross. I don’t want to talk about my sex life with you.”
Ben grinned. “Why not?”
“Not that.” She glowered at him. “I mean when he asked you out again. Did you say yes?”
Trip frowned. “How do you know he asked me out again?”
She looked at Ben and then back. “Bitch, any man who discusses superhero sociology and talks you off a ledge on a sex date has intentions. Like, Jane Austen intentions.”
Trip chewed on that. Did Silas have intentions? Well, they’d… waited, after all. Well, sort of. He’d screwed that up with the doorway-jism deal. At least it hadn’t been a no-names hookup.
Ben patted his stomach, less firm and formed than the high school edition, but Jillian didn’t seem to mind. Yet again Trip thought about how much easier it was to be a straight guy. “Full.” Ben poured himself a short glass of seltzer and shook the last drops out of the bottle. “So you like him.”
“Well, yeah. Sure. I guess.” Trip thought of Silas’s cocky grin, his scarred hands, and the golden stubble on his jaw. “I mean, it’s like we’re both wondering if it’s friendly or serious.”
“That’s dating.” Ben considered him quizzically. “If anybody wants to shack up before they know shit about you, run.”
Jillian grumbled. “Spoken like a man.”
“Spoken like a grown-up, Jilly-bean.” Ben grinned.
She poked Trip. “This guy’s in showbiz. You should take him to a black-tie thing.”
“I don’t need to wear a tux with Silas.”
Ben pointed upstairs. “You could wear mine.”
“No! What is it with that goddamn tux?” Trip smacked him. “He’s dating other p
eople too.”
“He told you that?” Ben seemed surprised.
Trip rubbed his itchy eyes. “No. Not flat out told-told. Standard gay date rules. Silas is too handsome to not be dating people. He has a lotta exes.”
Ben pulled an apologetic face. “Schmucko, people date. I mean, other people date, and that means they have romantic histories.”
“But not romantic meat lockers. We keep running into them.”
“So… he’s auditioning for Mr. Right.” Ben squeezed his shoulder.
Jillian scoffed, “You might have more exes if you’d actually, y’know, dated.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Ohhh-kay.” She favored Trip with a faint smile, as if humoring a supervillain dressed in lunchmeat. Captain Baloney! “The Unboyfriend has blocked your view. That’s all. He’s a shitty coping mechanism.”
“Dad.” Max stood at the foot of the stairs. “I’m ready to read to you.” Every night Max read to Ben before bed. Family tradition.
Ben cocked his fingers and shot Trip with an imaginary bullet. “Back shortly. I wanna hear.” He rose and pecked his wife, then followed his little boy upstairs.
When Trip looked back, he discovered Jillian staring at him.
“Cliff will always fuck you.” She pulled a cushion into her lap. “But he is never gonna fuck you, y’know?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he lied.
“Hey, guys fuck. And straight guys are never as straight as they pretend. Duh.” The naughty smile on her face made him self-conscious. “I spent too many years in musical theater not to know what’s what.”
“Sure.” He hugged himself, rested his glass on his bloated and rumbly stomach.
“No, listen. I’m not saying Ben would screw a dude, but I’m sure he’s had his homo moments. Fucking is complicated. We aren’t bugs.”
“A few of us aren’t.”
“Touché.” Another sip. “But some part of you believes that one day, Cliff’s going to look up and see you and want you and love you and carry you away to his Tower of Power where he will—” She craned toward the stairs to make sure Max wasn’t spying and lowered her voice to a whisper. “—hork your dork and watch Smallville reruns with you for the rest of time.”
“Untrue.” Trip popped another Benadryl, his second in as many hours, which was bad with the booze, but his itchy skin had begun to actually make him scratch.
“You do hope.”
Trip scowled. “Fuck hope. Hope is a four-letter word. Cliff just signs my checks. He shot me down on the graphic novel.” He waved a hand at her. “But Hero High pays for me to live my filthy, degenerate, homo-tastic life.” Trip snorted and choked on the alcohol. “Cliff’s just confused, I guess. Maybe he has issues. I have issues.”
“Okay, you have an issue or two, but he’s a fucking magazine. You ever think you might be misreading things?”
“Nah.” He took another nip and savored the warmth that trickled into his gut. “One of these days the partnership could be more.”
“I say this with love: nobody is a superhero. Okay?” She proceeded as if clipping wires on a bomb. “Listen. The night I met Ben, I was about to go on this tour. I mean, I met him at a Halloween party. We were all dressed as Japanese movie monsters.” She tapped her own chest. “Mothra, obviously. We made out for all of fifteen minutes, and then pow! I’m in motels all over the Midwest.” Jillian had sung in musicals back then.
“I didn’t know that.” He knew they’d met as monsters, but not about her tour.
“I ignored everybody. Friends. My family. Professors. My own gut. Because I could be in a real show with a live audience that might make it to Broadway someday. Could. Might.” Again she tasted the words like rancid oysters.
“Pursuing your dream.”
“Thanks, Dr. Phil. What a crock! I knew I should marry him. That first night I knew. I was so into Ben and vice versa, but I was twenty and I needed a gig and it was the lead. I had the chance to star as Dorothy in a nonunion musical version of The Wizard of Oz. Bus and truck tour of the flyover states.”
He patted her knees in belated congratulations. “You never told me.”
“I didn’t.” She took a swig of booze. “Because it was a fucking shanda: a complete shameful fraud. Nonunion, right? I mean, they paid me and it was a real tour, with buses and costumes, and I had curtain calls, but it wasn’t based on the MGM movie at all because the sleazebag producers did it on the cheap. Whole cast was washups and nimrods who didn’t know better with terminal egomania. Like yours truly.” Jillian plopped into the brown velvet armchair she preferred.
“How did they get around lawsuits or whatever?” Trip squirmed into the sofa cushions, happily warm, buzzed, and with his best friend, hearing a humiliating anecdote. Schadenfreude for the win!
“By fudging the songs and the script. Original novel is public domain. They hired some lazy shnook to slop together a bunch of half-ass numbers to remind you of Judy Garland without landing them in court. They built the sets with duct tape and actual cardboard. I wore my own shoes onstage.”
“I don’t get it. He….” What did The Wizard of Oz have to do with Cliff being straight? “You were getting paid. You got to sing ‘Over the Rainbow’ right out of school, right?”
“That’s my point. That’s the deal right there!” She snorted. “The lyrics to my starring-role, no-budget, nonunion big ballad number went….” Her face lit up with vinyl perkiness. “Some-where…”—her crisp soprano fizzed out of her throat, Julie Andrews in steel-toed boots—“…there’s a land of lollipops and rainbows….”
“Lollipops and rainbows?”
“Like you would not fucking believe.” She took a thirsty swig of hooch.
“Eesh.”
“Just enough words to remind you. Just enough overlap that the audience got the gist. Just enough that we couldn’t get sued and the cast felt like assholes every time. Standing in my own fucking shoes.” She drained the glass and shook her head, frowning and blinking her wet eyes. “Ben snuck out to Cleveland to see me anyways, because I was the lead and he couldn’t stay away. But I couldn’t even invite my parents.”
“Sorry.” He squeezed her hand. Marco! She squeezed back. Polo!
“So one night, this little girl comes backstage and asks if I’d forgotten the words. Six years old, maybe, but she loves the movie. I shake my head no and she starts singing ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ in her perfect little voice, and I almost died of shame.” She gave a chuff of nonlaughter and fake-shuddered. “I gave notice the next day. And Ben and I got married seven months later.”
They sat silently for a few seconds and listened to the creak of Max’s and Ben’s footsteps overhead. The clock on the wall and the TiVo showed different times.
Trip broke the silence. “I don’t get it. Cliff isn’t a made-up person.”
“Honey.” She put a hand on his forearm and kept it there. “Cliff Stapleton the Third is the imitation of the real deal, and you know it. You’ve drawn yourself into a corner. Between your allergies and your art, you live in an airtight box.”
A cold tickle of doubt wormed its way under Trip’s ribs. Maybe he’d overreacted about the new book. Maybe they should trust each other because they were partners. Cliff was just focused. His dumb sex comic hadn’t changed anything yet. Nothing was ruined. Every comic book needed a hero, a villain, and a secret identity.
Just don’t make me a sidekick.
“You pray you’re wrong and I’m wrong, but you know we’re not.” Jillian patted him firmly, like a horse. “Some corners you can’t cut. Some days come once.” She pointed at him. “And some night a six-year-old is gonna come in and remind you that anything that can be faked isn’t worth faking.”
Trip didn’t say anything. He kept waiting for her to break or crack a joke. Nothing doing.
“I say this as your happy married friend. I am terrible at being alone. And for all the practice you have had, you are even worse at bein
g alone.” Quick shrug. “We both know plenty of people who will spend the next twenty years fucking around and making a wreck of their lives, but you are not built to hack that.”
Was he? “Okay.” Trip squeezed her hand.
Crick-crickkk-crick. Ben entered in his socks carrying a bottle of seltzer and tried to sit on Jillian’s lap.
“Hey!” She shoved him onto the empty end of the couch and then pulled his socked feet onto her thighs.
“What’d I miss?” Ben leaned back into the cushions.
“Casual.” Jillian jerked her head at Trip’s disbelieving face. Again some kind of uncanny marital telegraph flickered between husband and wife, much to Trip’s annoyance and awe.
“Yeah?” Ben stretched. “Huh.”
Trip groaned. “Will you both stop the X-Men telepathy routine?”
Ben looked between them. The seltzer cap gave a slow hiss as he eased it open. “What lies are you telling him?”
“That I’ve sold out to a selfish prick tease.” Trip scooted back to let him pass.
“Staplegun?” Ben crossed his arms. “Duh!”
“See?” Although Trip didn’t know what he was asking them to look at.
Ben turned to Jillian, a smile roaming his face. “Anything good?”
She paused for effect and used her tongue to unfurl the word like a poisonous scarf. “Lollipops…” She spoke the word as a blessing. She closed her eyes and nodded like a Buddha. “And rainbows.”
“Gahhh.” Ben gurgled in apparent terror. He wrenched his lips into a fish mouth and his eyes bulged. “Agh! Oh man, you can’t imagine. That was—I still have nightmares ’bout that shit twelve years later.” He shuddered.
“Benjy, I wasn’t that bad.” Jillian shoved him with her foot.
“You? Pfft.” He shook his head firmly. “You were the hottest bitch in a pinafore ever came outta Kansas.” He raised a hand to let it help tell the story. “No, I mean that song. It was so….” He swiveled to Trip. “Weird! Freaky, like I cannot explain. Cardboard Oz. All these farting church ladies in the dark. And Jilly-bean would start singing about lollipops, and then little by little they’d start rustling and shuffling and they’d know they were suckers. Y’know?”