If I Must Lane

by Amy Lane

  Instead, he cleaned up the cat tins, helped Ian into the shower, and then pulled out a T-shirt and some jockeys for the guy. When Ian was dressed, Joel made absolutely sure he lay down in bed. He slept for sixteen hours, and Joel thought he’d probably been up for the seventy-two before that. He woke up apologetic and sheepish and more than ready to accept any crap that Joel wanted to ladle out for him being (his words) a manky arse, but Joel didn’t want to bring up the incident again.

  “Just do me a favor, Ee. Feed yourself, okay?”

  “Right, mate!” And then, to make it a promise, “If I must.”

  Chapter Three

  Joel and Melody actually fell asleep on the couch, probably in the pause between “Ian stories,” but Joel couldn’t be sure.

  They staggered to their own beds in the wee hours of the morning and slept late, which was what you got to do over your Thanksgiving break, wasn’t it? But Joel didn’t sleep too late. As soon as he was awake enough, he snagged his cell phone from the end table and remembered to call Ian.

  “Hey, Ee.” Oh geez did he sound like he just woke up? Did he sound like he was calling from bed? Suddenly the inappropriateness of calling from bed hit him, and he swung his legs over the side of the mattress and sat up so he would feel less self-conscious.

  “Joel, you having a good time?” Ian sounded happy to hear from him, and just hearing his voice on the other end of the line eased an ache Joel hadn’t known he’d harbored in his chest.

  “Yeah, mom’s trying to make me fat, and me and Mel are catching up. You staying sober?”

  Ian laughed. “I should be. You left enough food in the freezer for a horde of wild barbarians. I even went out and bought vegetables. Aren’t you proud?”

  Joel thought about his sweet, brilliant roommate, who would probably go down in history as the guy who… well, whatever it was Ian knew that the rest of mankind didn’t, he’d go down in history as the guy who figured it out.

  “I’m always proud of you, Ee,” he said sincerely. “I just miss you is all.” Oh God. That must have sounded…. In his mother’s little house in the Denver suburb, Joel fought the urge to tuck his head under his pillow in embarrassment.

  But if he sounded like a weepy asshole, Ian didn’t seem to notice. “Miss you too, mate. Here, I’ll call you after I get home, how’s that?”

  Joel doubted he’d remember, but it sounded promising. They spoke a few more moments and then rang off, and Joel showered and prepared to face his family. He couldn’t think of why, but he thought he should be embarrassed to say good morning to Mel. Had he really talked all night about Ian? What an asshole! This morning he needed to ask her about her job. Mel being Mel, there would probably be a quiz later.

  But Mel being Mel didn’t want to talk about work. As their mother bustled about in her flowered housedress and apron, pouring coffee and cleaning up the last of the breakfast dishes (corn pancakes—Mommy was definitely trying to send them both home fat!) Mel made it perfectly clear that what she wanted to talk more about was Ian.

  “Ian?” Mommy asked, sitting down to drink her coffee with them. “Isn’t that the man you share a house with?”

  “More like an apartment, Mommy,” Joel said, telling them about the vast top floor of the Victorian that dominated the block.

  “His roommate is a real character,” Mel said, looking over her coffee at Joel. “Seems like he couldn’t find his ass with both hands if Joel didn’t hand it to him all labeled and neat, you know?”

  Lucia Martinez nodded. “That’s Joel—even as a niño, he kept neat—you remember his room? He used to save his shoeboxes to keep his toys straight.”

  “I liked knowing where to find them,” Joel said with dignity, and then, because he couldn’t stand that his sister thought badly of Ian, “and Ian’s brilliant.” Lost, but… “Don’t let me give you the wrong impression. He’s just eccentric.”

  “Eccentric?” Mel had what Joel always thought of as her “evil” look now. She was teasing him, trying to get him to say something that she could get him with later. “You told me the guy once forgot his own birthday!”

  Joel regretted telling that story. It was a fun, glib story you could use to get someone to laugh, but now it felt wrong. Now it felt like Mel was getting to know Ian, and Joel wanted his big sister to like the guy.

  “He remembered his birthday,” Joel corrected seriously. “He just forgot how old he was!”

  “Well, it must be nice to get so wrapped up in your work you can’t remember you’s getting wrinkles, eh papi?”

  Joel shivered, and the mood at the kitchen table grew inexplicably sober. “No,” he said quietly. “No. No. Nothing nice about it at all.”

  On the days Joel didn’t bike to work, he dragged Ian to the gym. Ian usually went willingly, but, if left to his own devices, he forgot how long it had been since last he went. On this day, Joel got home a little early and breezed through the living room shouting, “I’m gonna get my stuff, Ee, are you ready?”

  “Ready? For what?”

  Ian stuck his head out of his room and turned that lost-Siamese-cat gaze toward the calendar on the wall. “What are we doing again?”

  Joel came out of his room wearing only his work khakis. “The gym? Working out? It’s Wednesday, remember?”

  “Wednesday? Wednesday the what?”

  “Wednesday, September twenty-fourth,” Joel told him patiently. He was unprepared for Ian to stand up off his rolling chair and peer at the calendar closely as though the damned thing had lied.

  “Really? The twenty-fourth?”

  “What’s the matter, Ee? You miss a lecture?” Joel didn’t think so. Since that one phone call from Ian’s supervising professor, Joel had put all of Ian’s guest lectures on the calendar and taken to giving him one reminder the night before and one reminder as he left the house. Florence Kohl had sent him a case of really good wine, but mostly, Joel did it so Ian wouldn’t have to look lost and miserable the way he had the last time he’d been caught unaware.

  “No, I just….” Ian turned around and squinted at Joel in that way that told Joel he hadn’t looked away from his computer in a while. “I think today’s my birthday.”

  Joel’s face split into a grin. “Well, awesome! Fuck the gym, let’s go out!” Ian had treated Joel to a gigantic steak and a nice bottle of wine in Old Town when Joel turned twenty-seven. The least Joel could do was get him out of the house.

  “How old are you, anyway?”

  He was unprepared for the dismay this question seemed to cause.

  “I- I don’t know,” Ian murmured. “Twenty-five? No. Maybe? Twenty-six?” He looked up at Joel in a panic. “Oh God, what if I’m thirty?”

  “Ian.” Joel should have been used to this feeling by now, this jarring, violent make-fit between Ian’s world and the real world, but it never seemed to get any easier.

  “I don’t remember.” Ian held out his hands and started counting on them. “Let’s see, I was fourteen when I left the orphanage and went to University…”

  Oh God, Joel had known he was an orphan. He’d even known he was a genius, but he was unprepared for the idea of a fourteen-year-old Ian, turned loose on college life.

  “… and I must have been twenty or so when I got my doctorate, and then I came over here. How long have I been here? I renewed my visa last year… or was it the year before? Or do I have to do that every year?”

  Ian’s gaze went from inward to outward, and he looked up at Joel with open palms. “I don’t know. I- you need to have people to tell you that’s important, don’t you? I- I guess I don’t have any people? How old am I? Jesus.”

  There was a certain panic to Ian’s voice, and Joel felt it, right in his gut, how adrift this man could be without a person in his life to care for him. He could live, yeah, but what a vague surfing of the years, without any markers like birthdays or holidays, without any solid, real moments to anchor him to the here and now.

  Joel took Ian’s hands in his own, feeling ca
lluses from weightlifting and the softness from not doing much else, and made sure Ian had his attention.

  “Don’t worry, Ian,” he murmured. And then, grinning a little bit self-consciously, he leaned forward and reached around Ian toward his back pocket, making a little whiffle of disgust as he did so. “Christ, Ian, when’s the last time you showered? You smell like monkey ass!”

  Ian laughed, which was the point, because in reality he smelled a little sweaty but very human, and not bad at all. “Yeah, I’m a little ripe, mate. What do you have there?”

  Joel held out Ian’s wallet and grinned triumphantly. “Your wallet, genius. You’ve got your driver’s license in here.”

  Ian’s smile was brilliant, blinding, as excited as a child’s. “Excellent! So, don’t keep me in suspense. How old am I?”

  Joel looked at the date on the driver’s license and grimaced. God, Ian really had been young when he’d been cut loose on an unsuspecting world, hadn’t he?

  “You’re twenty-three, boy, which makes you four years younger than me and seven years younger than thirty. Congratulations and happy birthday!”

  “Outstanding!” Ian crowed, practically knocking Joel over with the force of his hug. He held the hug for a moment, crushing Joel’s face up against his bare chest, and Joel had to wonder that his heart seemed to be speeding up and that Ian’s scent was seeming less and less a liability with every passing second.

  Joel pulled back with difficulty and kept his smile bright. “So, you ready to shower and go out?”

  Ian made a little strutting motion with his shoulders and his head, his whole rangy, lean, man’s body showing a child’s happiness. “If I must, mate—if I must!”

  “Oh, papacito!” Joel’s mom still used the endearments she’d used when they were children. “It’s so nice you finally found someone!”

  Joel stared at his mother as though she had two heads. “Mommy, he’s my roommate. I’m not gay.”

  “Oh honey,” Lucia Martinez smiled sweetly, “of course you are. You just remember to wear your rubbers, you know?”

  Well, maybe growing another head would have been an improvement. “Mommy, he’s my friend!”

  And now Melody laughed, throwing her head back and letting the coffee-rich sound roll from her stomach. “Oh right. He’s your friend and I’m a virgin!”

  “Mel!” Because even their mother knew that wasn’t true. “Have I said anything that would—”

  Mel shook her head. “Joey, pappi, it’s not what you’ve said. It’s how much you’ve said it! Three days, you been here three days. In five minutes you told me about work, your boss who’s okay, and the receptionist who had the world’s cutest baby. The rest of the three days? It’s been Ian Cooper. I know more about that man than I know about your last three girlfriends, including the fact that I think I like him better already.”

  “You liked Penny—”

  “I liked to shop with her. I didn’t want her in my family.”

  Joel hadn’t thought he could blush anymore than he already had, Shows how much he knew! “Melody, he’s a friend! I’m not… you know… I can’t be….”

  His mother stopped his stuttering with a quiet pat to the hand. “I know, baby. Poppa would have told you, Mexicans, they can’t go all gay. But Poppa was an asshole, and we all know that.”

  Joel wondered if he’d eaten something poisonous and then gone to sleep on it. His stomach was starting to hurt, that was for damned sure.

  “Mommy!” he objected, and Melody took pity on him.

  “Mommy, we’re starting to freak him out. You need to leave for a minute, so we can talk, okay?”

  Lucia rolled her eyes. “You kids. You think we don’t know anything. Gay was a thing in the eighties too, you know!”

  “I’m gonna throw up,” Joel muttered to himself, and he hid his face in his crossed arms.

  “Why, Joey?” Melody asked him softly. Just like she’d done when they were kids, she crossed her arms too and looked at him from about six inches away, eye level.

  “You think I’m gay, Mom says Pops was an asshole—”

  “What’s so wrong about being gay, pappi?” Melody asked seriously, and Joel grimaced.

  “I don’t know. You know, Pops used to—”

  “He used to say faggots should be burnt at the stake. I know. He also used to say sending a girl to college was like teaching a dog to read, and you know what? I said fuck him. I know he’s dead, and you want to think the man was perfect, but he wasn’t. He loved us, but fuck him. I do what Pops said, I be a mommy for real now, and I wouldn’t be any good at that, pappi, I really wouldn’t.”

  “You’d be great at it, Mel,” Joel said softly. “You took good care of me when Mommy was at work.”

  Melody’s hand came out and ruffled his hair. “You were the best kid in the world, Joey. In fact, you were too good. Nothing get you riled. Nothing make you too mad. Nothing make you cry. I worried ’bout you. I thought, ‘He’s a good kid, but he got no passion’, you know? And I still think that. You go get your degree in computers because that’s what you’re good at. But it’s not what you love. No, I stand by it. You do what you got to in your heart to make it right, because this Ian, you got more passion in your voice for him than you got in your life for anything.”

  “He’s a friend,” Joel insisted, but his argument was weak, even to his own ears.

  “You always love your boyfriends more’n your girlfriends, you know that? In grade school it was one thing, but in high school and college? Joel, pappi, why you got to lie to yourself?”

  Joel didn’t have any answer to that. As much as he didn’t want to think about it, it was probably true.

  Melody sighed and continued to stroke his hair. “I taught you that stuff you know.”

  “What stuff?”

  “That putting the calendar on the fridge, making lists, how to do laundry.”

  Joel managed a pale grin. “You done good, mammi, it come in handy.”

  “Yeah, well, I tell you. I could have done it all pissed off and all. You were my little brother. I had better things to do, that what you think when you young, you know?”

  Joel frowned thoughtfully. “You didn’t. You were a good teacher.”

  “Yeah, Joey, ’cause that’s the sort of thing you do for family.”

  Joel closed his eyes tightly and fought a very real temptation to cry. “I- I never let myself think about it, you know?” he admitted at last.

  “I know, Joey. You got Pops in your head, telling you it’s wrong. We seen it, Mommy and me. We seen you—every time you set your sights on a girl, it was like watching you wage brain warfare in your own head. I want you to do something for me, can you do that?”

  Joel closed his eyes and ignored the stiff hair of his goatee getting slick with salt water. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Think about him in the dark, pappi. When no one’s looking, close your eyes and hear his voice in your head, see his face. You don’t got to tell no one what happens next, but you think about him in the dark and see what happens. Then you forget all about things like being Mexican and being gay, and you tell me what you want more than anything, yeah?”

  Joel managed a weak nod. “Yeah,” he mumbled, too tired to even object to what she was suggesting. “Yeah.”

  “I’ll leave you alone now. Me and Mommy, we won’t talk about it none, it make you feel bad. But you already know we love you, so you don’t worry ’bout that, ’kay?”

  Joel managed to pull himself up straight like a real man and look at his big sister with watery eyes. “I love you, Mel.”

  She bent and kissed him on the cheek. “Love you too, little brother.” And then she moved gracefully out of the kitchen, like she was dancing.

  * * *

  Think of him in the dark.

  There was a story that Joel hadn’t dared tell anybody, not even Melody. That night, he lay in the narrow twin bed from his childhood, looking at the walls painted beige with navy trim, and allowed himself t
o remember the sound of Ian’s voice, the look in his eyes, the smell of his skin, on Halloween.

  Their Victorian was in a nice residential area, and everybody decorated for Halloween. Joel bought a bunch of spooky purple and orange face lights, and he strung them around the window facing the landing. He bought plastic pumpkins and a carving kit and made Ian leave his computer to carve the faces and put the flashlights in. He even bought eight pounds of chocolate in spite of the fact that only the really brave would trundle up a three-story walk-up in search of candy, and together they strung spider webs and one of those funky-scary motion-activated ghost things on the front porch.

  It was hot that day. Sacramento sometimes gave fall a complete miss and went straight into winter sometime around November, so they opened their door for the ventilation, turned off their lights, and sat and watched Poltergeist while they waited for their ghost to go off so they could give out candy.

  They got a surprising amount of traffic for being so high up, and one of their last groups of kids had a little girl of no more than three with dark hair, dark eyes, and a little witch costume with a pointy hat and a broom. When Joel gave her an extra big handful, she thanked him in rapid patter Spanish, and Joel returned with his own greeting.

  He left the doorway and came and sat down on the far side of the couch, stretching his legs out as far as he could without kicking Ian. He was just about to press play on the remote when he realized Ian was looking at him in the dark.

  “What?” he asked, puzzled.

  “You speak Spanish.” Ian’s voice was as full of wonder as though he’d said, “You glow in the dark!”

  Joel shrugged. “Yeah? Lots of people in California speak Spanish.”

  “But you’re from Colorado.”

  Joel scrubbed his hand across his face and smoothed down his close-cropped goatee. “Yeah, they got- have- there are Mexicans in Colorado.”