Everyday People

by Stewart O'Nan

  The thought shocked him so much that it didn’t seem true, as if it had come from someone else. There were years when nothing else had mattered, so many wild nights cruising and being cruised, playing the game. He wasn’t young like that anymore. He wasn’t beautiful like Michel—or only when he was with Harold.

  He toweled off and caught himself in the mirror. He hadn’t been to the gym in months, and his chest had lost the definition he’d built this spring. No pecs, no sex, Michel always joked, lavishing attention on them. In the mirror, Andre bit a nail and then stopped himself; he’d chewed them down to the nubs, something he hated. Lately it seemed he hated everything—himself, his apartment, this city.

  “Stop,” he said, because he knew where it all led back to.

  He went into the bedroom and got dressed, spending far too long trying to look nonchalant, like he’d just thrown something on. God, he looked awful. He really did need his sleep. He’d been waking up at three and four in the morning and then couldn’t get comfortable again. At work he drank coffee all morning so by lunchtime he didn’t feel like eating, and then when he got home he had crippling headaches and the damn dog downstairs barked every time he crossed the room.

  It was just love, he thought, digging Michel’s key out of a tray full of change. He would have to be hard on himself for a while, concentrate on small pleasures the same way he had when he lost Michel.

  But he hadn’t really lost Michel, he could still have him whenever Michel summoned him. With Harold it was different, all or nothing. He knew it appealed to the romantic in him. His love needed to be abject, devastating, operatic. He was never good at hiding his neediness; he’d cry after making love with all his heart, clutch at his lover like someone drowning. It always frightened Michel. Maybe he’d scared Harold off the same way.

  He left only the light over the stove on. Miss Payne’s dog yapped at him as he came down the stairs and across the porch. His Eclipse was untouched beneath the streetlight; the locks clicked when he punched the remote. The night was chilly and clear, the steering wheel cold even through his gloves. He purposely hadn’t brought a change of clothes, but now, pulling out, he was unsure. If he stayed he’d have to wake up early and come back to change.

  He shouldn’t even be doing this, he thought, already guilty. He put on Julie London to empty his head. It was a gift from Michel, a German import, all torch songs.

  It’s quarter to three, Julie sang, breathy and smoky and boozy, and Andre sang along, just as crushed. There’s no one in the place, except you and me.

  It was quicker to go down Spofford, but then he’d have to drive by Harold’s building, and he’d promised himself he wouldn’t do that anymore. At the corner he was tempted to look down the block and see if there were any lights on on the third floor, but kept his head straight, a Marine at attention.

  Harold would be watching TV, his wife still at work. Jackie, her name was, and the few times Harold said anything about her, Andre stored the information away, tried, once Harold had gone back to her, to build a woman from the pieces. It was like fighting a ghost. None of what Harold said made sense. She worked nights but was essentially lazy. She was dirty yet she lectured him about keeping a clean house. She didn’t respect him, she didn’t excite him anymore, she was fat and dull and unhappy, and still he chose her over Andre. Was it just guilt, duty to his sons? The one was old enough to take care of himself; the other was in a wheelchair. It was the only reason Andre could see, but he never brought it up, and Harold never mentioned him.

  “Go home to your wife and kids.” That’s what they said in the movies, all those showy heroines, the good ones. Tough, drinking women like Julie London. Cigarette smokers, dames. The weak ones said, “Don’t go.” They grabbed at their man’s pantlegs as he made for the door, and once he’d kicked free of them and slammed it, they lay on the carpet, sobbing in their slips, the unmade bed behind them. Oh, thought Andre, please don’t let me be one of those.

  “Honey,” he said, “you already are,” and turned onto Penn Circle. Nobody on the sidewalk, just the blank windows of the boarded-up Kroger’s. It reminded him of Bridgeport, the strip leading up to his father’s gas station. The malls had killed the other shops on the block; only the interstate kept his father in business. At night the street was desolate, and during a robbery a clerk had been shot. The security cameras caught the whole thing, but the man had a mask on and no one was ever arrested. The next week his father had twenty applications for the job. Pittsburgh was like that, and there wasn’t a day that Andre didn’t ask exactly what he thought he was doing here.

  He crossed the busway and passed along the bottom of the park, the hills silhouettes. Back in the overgrown formal gardens, in the shadows, men knelt on the cold, imported marble and took strangers into their mouths. When he’d first broken up with Michel he found himself on the stone benches one night, the stars burning down through a trellis of white roses while a Japanese grad student bobbed in his lap. “You make me now?” the boy said, and Andre didn’t have the heart to snub him. He’d brought a newspaper to cushion his knees. The boy was so new he actually thanked Andre, shook his hand as if they’d settled a contract, as if they might really see each other again. Oh my brothers, Andre thought, why are we all so lonely?

  Now he passed between the two huge churches on Walnut, like medieval gates to Shadyside. Here the sidewalks were deceptively empty. That tall man in the leather jacket walking a beagle wasn’t just watering his dog. Neither was the blonde in the next block with the dalmatian. It was what he loved about the neighborhood when he’d lived there—the sudden meeting of eyes as you walked to the bakery for croissants or the hardware for a bracket. Even in winter Shadyside was cruisy, full of students and professional men with the occasional ditzy art-patron widow thrown in for local color. You went out to buy diet soda and ended up in someone’s beautiful apartment with a view of the street so the next time you walked by you’d look up at the window and think of yourself looking down, half dressed and satisfied. The only trouble was the money. He would have never exiled himself to East Liberty if Shadyside wasn’t so expensive.

  And the parking’s awful, he thought, searching for a space. Come on and, cry me a river, Julie sang in some imaginary nightclub, cry me a river. “You tell it,” he said, stepping back and letting her do it solo. He had time, so he circled the block, inching along in second, but after trying it twice, he went up to Kentucky and found one easily.

  How he knew these streets. Here was where the violinist named Gregory with the handlebar mustache lived—dead now, like so many of his friends. Gregory liked to open his windows and practice; one day while he was playing a Mozart sonata, a neighbor on the other side of Kentucky with a piano suddenly began accompanying him. But that wasn’t the end: As in all of Gregory’s stories, they wound up in bed. The neighbor was a Russian music student at CMU with gigantic hands. “Well?” Michel asked, because Gregory dropped into a delicious pause. Gregory rolled his eyes like Phyllis Diller. “Let’s just say his piano wasn’t terribly grand.”

  And here was Lucien’s—dead also, the year before Gregory, with the help of his hospice nurse.

  David Holtzman’s, positive but still healthy (and having unprotected sex, it was said).

  Rick Gary’s place, where Michel broke the mixer trying to chop ice for daiquiris. Rick was God knows where, San Francisco or maybe Florida. He always hated how small the scene was in Pittsburgh. “The only new people you meet are students,” he’d say, “and I’m sorry, but I am too old to get excited about Foucault.”

  Maybe I should leave, Andre thought. Find some other place, forget all this. Try to live simply, with some dignity.

  Like you’re doing now, right?

  He shook his head to get rid of it. All I want tonight is to be loved. To love someone.

  He pictured Harold at home, though he’d never seen the inside of his place. He’d be watching TV, drinking a beer, no glass, his long fingers wrapped around the brown bottle,
raising it to his lips. Jackie was at work, the older boy doing something at church, just Harold and the son in the wheelchair sitting there. He tried to imagine what they’d say to each other, what the son would think if he knew his father liked Andre on the bottom, facing him, his ankles over his shoulders; if he knew his father was shy afterward, as if by loving him he’d admitted some terrible secret that Andre had to keep.

  He turned into Howe, the street even more densely populated with the dead, the lost worlds of studio apartments and condos, two-room walk-ups and rooftop patios. He’d only lived in this city seven years, yet he contained the history of so many men. A year or so ago he’d lost the will to attend the circuit of parties celebrating the dead, fussy brunches arranged to commemorate friends “the way they’d want to be remembered.” It wasn’t that he’d lost the ability to feel; he’d just run out of grief. More and more those days he felt he was operating on sheer nerves, every day burning another bundle to get through the bad news. He’d given up on the possibility not just of love but of life. Then Harold came along and everything was new again, fresh.

  The blonde with the dalmatian sauntered up the walk, stopping to let the dog sniff a sycamore. The man was Andre’s age, but short and somewhat heavy, wearing a pretty cardigan. Marc Antony haircut, fifties hipster goatee. As he came closer, Andre could see he was interested—his eyes searching Andre’s for a spark—but instead of the charge that used to thrill him, Andre felt nothing but disgust, and cut him dead, then immediately regretted being cruel. I wish I could help, he should have said, but I have a lot going on. As if that would be any less crushing.

  All the man wanted was seven minutes in heaven. Since when did you get so proper?

  I may not be proper, he thought, but I’m not common.

  He knew it was foolish to argue with himself, to punish himself for the past. His was no more sordid than anyone else’s with a healthy libido and a sense of adventure. He didn’t understand how time changed that taste for the world into shame, left him hating his own favorite moments, questioning his most intimate judgments. But it did. What he’d thought was daring was stupidity, what was fun seemed sordid, his desires infantile. He wasn’t so unsure of himself as to accept it, but often now he found himself yearning for purity. He liked to think celibacy was an option, that he could be that strong, when of course it wasn’t true. Look at him now—a phone call and he was on his way.

  Michel had stopped the mail, but there were flyers clogging his box, a whole bouquet limp with yesterday’s rain. When Andre used to live here there was a garbage can in the vestibule for this kind of shit; it had disappeared, in its place a wrinkled pile of the same flyers. He picked them up, making a face at the fungal smell of wet newsprint. How did people live like this?

  Inside, the hallway stank of cooking oil, and the rug was matted, tracked with dirt. He ignored it and headed upstairs, his arms full of garbage.

  The first thing he saw in Michel’s apartment was the Steuben vase he’d given him on a table in the front hall, holding two dried, dead irises. The lights were on a timer, so the whole apartment was bright. Everything was from the Far East—low and simple, uncluttered. He hadn’t thought he missed the tatami mats and the paper screens with their stylized landscapes, the teak table they ate supper from. He had so little in his own place, just secondhand stuff he’d leave when he fled this city. It seemed unfair, as if he’d gotten the raw end of a divorce. He took the flyers into the kitchen and shoved them in the can under the sink, then washed his hands.

  The champagne was Moët White Star, good but nothing expensive. He put it in the freezer just to piss Michel off. The fridge was empty—some old juice, a bottle of chiligarlic sauce, a tired head of lettuce—and he remembered the milk. “Damn,” he said, then went on cataloguing. There was still time to run out.

  Michel’s tastes hadn’t changed. Here was the Dewar’s, the Beefeater, the Absolut—all quality, yet with no intention of impressing anyone. The crystal was Finnish; they’d picked it out together. He chose a tumbler and poured a finger of scotch, turned on the stereo to DUQ for some cool jazz, then went back and cleared out the fridge, put away the clean dishes, all the while sipping.

  He threw away the irises and rinsed and dried the vase, set it back on the table in the front hall. The whole place needed to be dusted, so he took the feather wand out of the closet and briskly went over the lampshades and bookshelves, the table in the center of the living room. He’d just started on the mantel above the fireplace when he saw the picture.

  It was a shot of Michel and another man on a blinding white beach. It was probably the Caribbean, he thought, because the water was that swimming-pool blue, and the man was darker than Andre, muscle-bound, a red bandanna rolled about his neck like a gaucho. Andre held the picture up so he could look at it more closely, and he realized the silver frame was another present. He’d given it to Michel one Valentine’s Day. The picture he’d cut to fit in it was the two of them at Disney World during Gay Week, one of those twenty-dollar black-and-white stills they tempted everyone with after you got off Space Mountain. It was their second time on the ride, and like so many couples that day, they’d timed the final drop so the camera caught them in a deep, soulful kiss. He wondered what Michel had done with it.

  It wasn’t his business anymore.

  Oh, wasn’t it?

  He drank off the rest of the scotch in one hot swallow and looked at the glass as if it had done something to him, then set the picture facedown on the mantel and went into the kitchen. He put the duster away and stood there, at a loss. It was past eleven. He had to get the milk.

  He figured that if he got in his car, he’d probably take off, so he walked down to the convenience mart on Walnut, fending off a parade of eyes. How easy it would be to go with one of them and leave the Moët to explode, or retreat to his apartment and wait for Harold to show up and take him in his arms and make love to him. Or, better, drive right up to Harold’s building and ring the bell till he came out, then kiss him hard in front of his wife and children, the whole neighborhood, rightfully claim him for his own.

  What would Julie London do?

  Oh, no question.

  The aisles of the convenience mart were blazing with men, a war zone. They peeked over the neat displays, lingered by the freezer, obvious in their thin Tshirts and ripped gym physiques. Please, Andre thought, I am beyond this. The cashier—strangely, an obese woman in a hideous print muumuu, a poster child for her entire gender—seemed to take forever with his change, and when he was finally out on the dark sidewalk again, he laughed at his panic. Last night he would have given in to one of them simply to rid himself of Harold for a few minutes.

  It would have been awful, he thought, and he was glad he hadn’t. That was the whole problem—all his solutions were short-term.

  And what was this with Michel?

  He never said it was a solution.

  It could be. Clearly things with Harold weren’t going anywhere. That left Michel or someone new, and right now he couldn’t deal with someone new.

  The man in the picture was just some rough island traffic, a cabana boy, high-priced sport for the tourists, nothing more. He and Michel would have a laugh over him.

  Ahead, he saw the blonde still walking his dalmatian, looking forlorn. Oh God, shoot me if I get like that, he thought.

  Was he any less desperate, running errands for his ex just for some Moët and a welcome-home fuck?

  It was this city, he thought. It had run out of fun. He had to get out of here, go to Savannah and do the party circuit, maybe take a sublet in Charleston, New Orleans.

  The blonde saw him and turned around, yanking the dalmatian away from someone’s steps. Christ, Andre thought, now I’ve hurt his feelings. Sometimes he actually wished he could pass for straight. For seventeen years he had, more or less, but lately he seemed to have lost the knack of playing the Menacing Young Black Man. Living in Shadyside did that to you.

  He walked past Gregory’
s and Lucien’s and David Holtzman’s and Rick Gary’s old place, past Brendan the bouncer at the Raspberry Rhino’s (yes, dead) and Alan who used to play tennis with them before he got beat up rollerblading in the park and moved to St. Paul. It had taken years, but it seemed to Andre that he’d woken up one day and everyone had left, the town emptied out. No wonder he was mooning over a married man; all the real catches were gone.

  A spot had opened up in front of their building, and he was tempted to move his car, but immediately a van noticed it and signaled. He ducked inside before the driver could get out and proposition him, then on the stairs laughed at his paranoia. Below, the outside door squeaked closed. He told himself he wouldn’t wait for it to click shut, but when it didn’t, he stopped and cocked his head toward the lack of noise.

  “Help me,” someone said matter-of-factly. “Goddammit,” the voice said with effort, “don’t just walk away,” and he realized it was Michel.

  He was struggling with his luggage, propping the door open with it. He still had his uniform on, the jacket with the gold stripes on the cuffs that made him look like a pilot. He’d gotten some color, his hair longer, tinted auburn at the ends, and Andre didn’t know which annoyed him more, the fact that he’d been lying around on some beach in Thailand or just how very beautiful he was.

  “You’re early,” Andre said.

  “Don’t act so happy to see me.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize,” Michel scolded, “just help me.”

  Andre put the milk down and grabbed a rollaway suitcase. There were only three, but they each weighed a ton, and Michel was tired.

  “Didn’t you see me?” he asked when Andre brought the last one up.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Stop saying that.”

  “I must have been spacing out. It’s been a long day.”

  “Don’t I get a kiss?”

  He was standing by the mantel, and as they kissed, Andre noticed he’d replaced the picture. Turned the music off too. Michel surprised him with his tongue. Andre tried to respond honestly, then closed his eyes and thought of Harold, how over the months even his noxious cigars became endearing, a part of him.