Comfort and Joy

by Jim Grimsley

  Ford started the car and pulled away. For a long time he drove without thinking much about where he went; streets and houses streamed past in a blur. The world beyond the window paled, compared to the world he was still seeing inside his head: he might as well have been in the restaurant still, with Dan in front of him, his face washing white as ice, his knuckles brittle as the stem of the wineglass.

  When he stopped driving and shook himself back to awareness, he had parked in front of the entrance to Stone Mountain. The park had already closed, but in the moonlight the shadow of the mountain loomed overhead, a dome of rock like a turtle's back, or like a gigantic river-smoothed pebble. He opened the windows and sat in the darkness by the gate. After a long time, thinking nothing articulate, he drove home again.

  Near sundown the next day, he headed down North Highland Avenue, looking for the street sign labeled Blue Ridge, his stomach in knots. Parking the car in front of the apartment building, he stared straight ahead, unable to release the steering wheel until he remembered the moment at the table in the restaurant, the hoarse voice, I'm sorry, Ford.

  He locked the car and found the number on a door at the back of the building. Taking a deep breath, he knocked.

  Silence beyond the doorway made him expect Dan had already headed for his rehearsal, or that he refused to answer the door just as he refused to answer the telephone. But Ford knocked again, firmly, and whispered, "Come on. You're here. I know you're here."

  Footfalls approached, the door lock rattled. Dan faced him. Ford said, "I've tried to call you all day. Can I come in?"

  A cat sidled along the wall behind Dan and tried to lunge past his feet. He scooped the cat from the floor, draping it over his shoulder, saying, "I have to get to rehearsal soon."

  In the neat apartment Ford waited for Dan to close the door. He turned from trim bookshelves to tall windows, walls adorned with oil paintings, simple furniture, a stereo and television of basic proportion, other rooms opening off either end. Steam heat rattling pipes. "Sit anywhere." Dan deposited the cat on a chair, where it stretched and watched him adjust the stereo. "I've been trying to get these songs right," Dan said. "One of them is giving me the devil of a time." Then he sat with his arms folded across his chest and looked at Ford.

  The moment grew long. Now Ford must explain why he had come. He spoke simply, as if he dropped by Dan's apartment every afternoon about this time. "I called your office today. They sound a little crazy without you." Leaning back, as the cat perched beside him on the adjacent cushion, "I don't usually just drop in on people. But tomorrow I go on duty for a couple of days and I was afraid if I waited to talk to you it would be too late."

  Dan nodded, expression blank.

  "I've been thinking a lot about last night. Obviously."

  "You were very kind."

  Something about the tone or the words made Ford angry, and he said, "I wasn't being kind." He ran a hand through his hair. "I'm a doctor. I know I can't die from being near you. I can't catch this virus from lying in bed next to you, or touching you, and I probably won't even catch it if I do more than just touch you." A phone began to ring but they both sat still. The phone soon stopped. "I don't know what's happening here. I really don't. But I don't want to give up yet."

  Dan had frozen in the chair, gazing blankly at a pattern in the hardwood floor. The cat lay peacefully in his folded hands. "I'd be so much better off if I could be mean enough to make you go away," he said. "And you would too. But I don't know if I can do that."

  "I don't think I'd be better off. And I don't think you would either."

  "When will you know if you want to give up?"

  In answer, Ford knelt in front of Dan, laying his arms across Dan's lap and leaning his head into the center of Dan's chest. The contact shocked them both. "I could ask you the same thing. When will you know?"

  Ford rushed into his house on the afternoon of New Year's Eve. He had officially gotten off duty at 6:00 A.M. but had been held over at the hospital for clinic, a favor to Dr. Milliken, who found himself shorthanded. He had talked to Dan twice since then, once in person in a hallway outside the public cafeteria and once more on the telephone. Running from one clinic to the auditorium, trying to reach a lecture on head injuries in children under five, he happened on Dan in the corridor near the entrance to the Pediatric Appointment Clinic. They talked in the middle of the hall, lingering in the midst of moving bodies; then Dan stirred to depart. At that moment Ed Harknight appeared down the hall, raising a hand in greeting to Ford. Dan rearranged the papers he was carrying and looked on disinterestedly as Ed said, "Ford, fellow, it's nice to see I'm not the only one who's late to the lecture." Grinning, he looked from Ford to Dan.

  His expression flickered uncertainly, as if he sensed their intimacy. He turned to Ford almost for explanation, and at the same time Dan said, "Well I'd better get back to pushing papers, Dr. McKinney."

  "I'll talk to you later, Mr. Crell," Ford said, and Harknight nodded pleasantly to Dan, who nodded pleasantly in return.

  As Dan vanished into the corridor's maze of moving bodies, Harknight turned to Ford with obvious curiosity. Ford flushed slightly. Knowing that Harknight would have thought nothing of Ford's talking to a pretty dietitian or to one of the female nurses. Ford prepared simply to ignore the moment and to proceed to the lecture, but Harknight said, "You better watch out for him, big guy. I hear he's gay."

  "Oh, yeah?" Ford asked, calmly. "From who?"

  "From what I hear, he's pretty public about it. He's an administrator, right? He works in the Nursing Office?"

  "I don't think it's Nursing," Ford said.

  Harknight shrugged. "Wherever. Come on, let's see what old Federson has to say about kiddies with a bump on the noggin."

  He slapped Ford on the back with presumed familiarity. Ford let himself be led to the auditorium, staring resentfully at the back of Harknight's head.

  As if to prove to himself that this public warning had no effect, he called Dan from the cafeteria the next morning, to ask whether Dan could join him for breakfast. Dan thanked him for asking but said it was not a good morning; even so, Ford felt pleased with himself after he hung up the phone.

  He was dressed and ready with time to spare. He made a sandwich and ate it. Thinking how odd it was, on this night of all nights, to be alone until an hour before the New Year began. For a moment, in the dark, he had a feeling this was his mother's house, that through one of these doorways, if he opened the door properly, he would find the Savannah rooms waiting for him. He peered gingerly into some of the doorways, then laughed at himself. He could almost hear his mother's voice. He slipped on a jacket, found his car keys, and drove.

  A winter evening in the Druid Hills neighborhood, the lights of Christmas trees shimmering through Palladian windows. Tasteful wreaths on tasteful doors. On Blue Ridge Avenue he parked behind the old public library and locked his car. He had come early, and waited on the ledge beside the steps to the apartment building, legs dangling. Impatient. One moment wishing he had defied Dan's wishes and attended the show opening, and the next glad of the peace.

  The wait ended more quickly than he had expected. A slim figure appeared among nets of leaves and branches, halting at the brick retaining wall. "You look good, sitting there. You look natural. I like it."

  Ford laughed. "How did it go? The show, I mean."

  "Fine. We had a big crowd. We got a lot of laughs. There was a critic there and he enjoyed himself. At least he said so."

  "I started to come anyway," Ford said. "I couldn't sleep."

  "Thank God you didn't. We'd have been there all night. There's a party. There's always a party. And everybody stands around and talks about their next project."

  In the light from the apartment door, Dan's face revealed its flush. Uncomfortably, fingertips brushing eyebrows, allowing Ford to see. "I haven't taken off all my makeup yet," Dan said.

  Ford simply smiled. His fear dissolved into another feeling at the sight of the face, tra
nsformed by rouge and shadow, lips daubed with red, lashes showing traces of mascara. As if Ford had caught Dan in the act of transformation. Suddenly he knew what his fear had been, earlier: that, at this moment, he would find himself without desire. Now at the presence of this face, he found himself consumed, and his hands rose to that neck, palm over Dan's pulse. Desire ate him. "Do you need to go inside?"

  "I want to wash my face." The hand along Dan's neck held him pinioned, and a charge passed through him; Ford could feel the power shifting between them. As surely as he had understood Dan's power before, he felt his own increasing. In the apartment, Dan's pale body shimmered as he slipped the clean shirt over his torso, nipples lovely and roseate, tender-tipped. A different kind of man from

  Ford, his lean hardness, different from the men with whom Ford had kept company in the past.

  When Dan was ready, they exited, descended stairs, and hurried to Ford's car, where Dan sat erect and carefully controlled, staring straight ahead. Without warning, Dan lay a hand along Ford's, atop the gearshift. Ford felt as if the hand were reaching much deeper inside him; their two skins, colliding, shimmered. So many doors were opening, and until now he had seen only the obvious ones. Dan said, "Happy New Year."

  Through quiet residential neighborhoods Ford drove, avoiding thoroughfares, avenues, selecting tree-lined streets overlooking murky ravines, where the large houses peered down at them from the crests of hills, the occasional yard lined with cars, describing the New Year's parties within.

  "I'm glad I'm not in any of these places," Dan said. "They look so smug." Soon enough, they turned onto the dark twists of the street where Ford lived, Clifton Heights, and Ford braked the car to a halt at the beginning of the driveway, near the large brick mailbox stenciled with the clear, silvered "McKinney." The headlights washed the broad porch at the front of the house. "Does this look smug?" Ford asked.

  Dan studied the facade and answered, so quickly Ford was taken aback, "No. Just satisfied. But I like that." He gazed straight up at the sky, obscured by interlaced pecan and oak; he took Ford's elbow, the lightest touch, and guided him away from the house into the yard.

  In silence they rambled through the cold winter night, first beneath the broad limbs of the pecan that dominated the nearer part of the yard, then under the more distant oak. They stopped at a swing in which Ford himself had never sat, except briefly when the real estate agent showed him the house. Dan sat and beckoned. Ford joined him and, so naturally it seemed as if he had done so a hundred times, opened an arm around this stranger who had become suddenly so familiar.

  Close to midnight, they went inside. Dan hung their coats in the closet while Ford listened to the muted chime of coat hangers, the rustle of fabric and leather, Dan's soft humming. Ford felt something unnameable was changing in the house. Not simply when Dan entered tonight, but when the thought of him had begun. The emptiness had receded. Ford no longer heard clocks ticking, water dripping, silence. A man moved, and his motion made sounds.

  "It's five minutes to midnight. Do you want to turn on a TV or anything?"

  "I'm fine," Dan said. "This is good. I like your house. Your furniture has stories, doesn't it?"

  "What makes you think that?"

  "Either you've been collecting this stuff for years or you've had some help."

  "My mother picked out most of it. Part of it is from my grandmother, and part from an aunt's house, and some of it Mother bought."

  "It's lovely." Dan spoke with a hint of coldness.

  They wandered to the room his mother called the library. He knelt in front of the fireplace and set to work. But they had lingered too long in the yard; his watch finally gave off its alarm before he had the fire lit. "I'm too slow," he said, lifting his glass. "It's midnight. Happy New Year."

  Dan knelt close to him and kissed his eyelids gently. "For luck," Dan whispered, and kissed his lips.

  After a moment, trembling, Ford kissed him back for the first time.

  The sensation spread fear through his whole body, the touch of that male mouth, full and ripe, against his own, Dan tasting of champagne. They remained side by side near the hearth, Ford finding reasons to brush his arms against Dan's shoulders, and Dan leaning into the touch. The small room filled with firelight, dancing on the inner surfaces of windows. Embers cracked and spit, flames coursing round the wood. Dan's head eased against Ford's shoulder. Ford leaned against dark curls. He had pictured the gesture as simple, but as the weight and texture of Dan became real, his body responded. Dan lay a hesitant hand on Ford's chest, and the touch penetrated deep into the bone. Ford moved toward Dan, reaching to draw the face of the man nearer, closing his eyes.

  From outside, distant, the sound of fireworks penetrated the walls. Dan leaned up, and heat played over Ford's back as he lay the tip of his tongue on the pink of Dan's chest, the eye of the nipple. Fear washed away. They pressed and pulled and laughed softly into each other's mouths.

  On the floor in front of the fire, flickering shadow dancing against their different flesh, Dan slid Ford's socks off his feet, the jeans down his thighs, shyly caressing the fine hair. Ford drank the sight of Dan's fresh nakedness as deeply as he drank Dan's admiration for his own, tracing the line of neck and shoulder with his mouth. The two overcame the awkward flatness of their bodies, the clumsy joining of erections, the tedious friction; forging passion and joy.

  Finally Dan rose over Ford, drawing Ford to a hardness, painful and sweet, that seemed to last forever. Till Ford came.

  Dan spent himself against Ford nearly at the same moment, helplessly pressing as if trying to find some point of entrance into his flesh. At the last moment, he tried to pull away from Ford, but Ford sensed the withdrawal and held him close. Wet lips in Dan's wet hair. Naked, moist, collapsed, they lay quiet in the library amid the wreckage of their clothing.

  "I should have worn a condom," Dan said.

  "Hush," Ford said. "Let me worry about that. Okay?"

  "I can't help it."

  "Yes, you can. We haven't done anything to worry about yet." Pulling the man close, he laughed softly. "We'll get to that part in the bedroom. Where there's some cushion."

  Dan laughed too, relaxing. Ford closed his eyes and allowed elation to fill him. In such safety he could even admit the little fear kenneled in his brain, the minute dread of the sticky wetness on his thigh. Dan's gift of danger. I can beat you, he thought. You can't stop this. You can't.

  Dan rose and headed to the bathroom. Ford leaned up on one curled arm and watched, amazed, the naked body walking in his house. Dan came back with towels. He cleaned Ford's thigh and his own and sipped lukewarm champagne.

  "I don't have to take you home tonight, do I?"

  "I think I'm all right where I am."

  In the morning, soon after dawn, Ford woke with his limbs twined round Dan, the thick taste of champagne in his mouth. They had stumbled here toward morning, drunk and exhausted, leaving clothes and ash in the library.

  Now Ford studied Dan's feline sleep. Not only had he made love to Dan Crell but now they rested together in Ford's bed. When Ford stood to find the bathroom, he was careful to be quiet. He returned to the bedside and stood there, watching Dan, curled like a geisha in the folds of sheets and blankets, a flower in Ford's bed. Someone with a heartbeat, waiting for Ford.

  Familiar pines alerted Dan to the fact that Ford and he were approaching Forrester County. Gaunt, stunted branches swayed atop shaggy trunks, ragged against a pale sky. Silent, he fought apprehension, as across the front seat Ford waited and watched.

  Whenever Dan returned to this country, he carried with him the conviction that the land would swallow him. Through the early part of the ride, from the Raleigh-Durham airport to the wastelands surrounding Smithfield, Princeton, and Goldsboro, his dread manifested itself as a tautness across his chest. He watched the procession of devastated landscape, ruined farms, and collapsing shanties, wrecks of unpainted carpentry from which, nevertheless, smoke rose through chimneys into a
cloudless sky. Pastel mobile homes perched on cinderblock feet in bleak squares of grass. Red-cheeked plastic Santas waved gaily from the bland roofs of ranch-style bungalows. Wrecked automobiles clustered as if in herds, overgrown with ropes of kudzu vine. The images, the courses of the roads, struck him as familiar but oddly changed. Scoured in white light.

  For a while he would forget Ford, then glimpse him. The landscape absorbed Dan, and he studied the line of ragged trees, the swoop and rise of the high-tension wire, the slant of an untended road sign; and suddenly, turning his head, he would find Ford driving the car.

  Highway 70 gave way to the less-traveled Highway 58 beyond Kinston. The roads forked at a clapboard service station over which soared a sign bearing a blue neon bird, wings flapping at the same electronic interval as when Dan first remembered seeing it, years ago, Dan small and quiet, peering over the backseat of his father's car.

  Soon the car crossed into Forrester County, and he read the first road signs for Somersville and Potter's Lake.

  Along these roads stretched a chain of houses in which Dan had lived during his childhood. The thought of the houses, and of Ford seeing the houses, filled him with quiet apprehension. The first appeared beyond Potter's Lake, a white, tiled cottage nestled on a low rise, impossibly tiny, porch fallen to ruins. Dan had intended to point out the house to Ford but at the last moment his arm collapsed to his side and no words emerged from anywhere. The house seemed so small and shabby, even he could hardly believe he had once lived there.

  The next was worse, a heap of boards sitting neglected in high grass behind a broad fig bush. Empty windows. Barns tumbling to wreckage behind. The yard had dwindled to a small tangle of weeds surrounded by old farm equipment. I lived here once. He turned to Ford and imagined the words. Impossible.

  Silence soon began to choke him, and he stared fixedly at the road. Ford must have felt the change, because he asked, "Did you live around here?"