The Wide Night Sky

by Matt Dean

  Chapter 19

  Gradually, the discipline of driving calmed him, and he contrived an aim for himself, a near-term goal. On their way into town, he’d seen a grocery store—a Harris Teeter, wasn’t it? He’d go and buy the largest tube of toothpaste he could find, and maybe half the toiletries in the store.

  On second thought, that was absurd and childish and passive-aggressive, and—

  Yes, then. That’s exactly what he’d do. He’d bring back six kinds of toothpaste, dental floss, and a Waterpik.

  He spotted a sign near the shoulder of the road. Adult Books and Novelties. Black letters on a white rectangle, unmistakably plain, but plainly unbelievable. A dirty bookstore? Out here? He blinked and squinted. At the last second he turned into the dirt parking lot.

  Childishness? he thought. Absurdity? Passive-aggressiveness? Yes, yes, and yes—and no half measures.

  The store itself was a dowdy clapboard cube. By the look of it, it had originally been someone’s house. It could still in fact be mistaken for someone’s house, if not for the neon OPEN sign flashing in the front window.

  There were only two cars in the lot, a mud-spattered pickup and some sort of hatchback. Leland parked at the back and sat in his car, staring, numb, trying to think. Unable to think. The windows on this side of the house—three of them—had been filled in. A sloppy job. The siding in the patches didn’t match the original clapboards.

  He should go. This was a shabby place. He had no reason to be here.

  No. That wasn’t exactly true. He had no excuse for being here.

  He got out of the car and walked to the front door. When he opened it, a bell jingled. This particular bell, he presumed, had no connection with an angel getting its wings. Maybe it rang whenever a devil got its pitchfork. He went in. Racks of DVDs on the walls, a sales counter, an arcade at the back. There were signs everywhere—No One Under 21, Interracial, $5 Arcade, Amateur, NO CHECKS, Bi, Lesbian, Kink, ONE PERSON PER BOOTH. Everything was well-worn, dusty in the corners, blackened around the edges.

  A jowly, half-bald woman raised her head above the counter. She was wearing a flowered housecoat. “Help you, sugar?”

  Leland stuffed his hands in his pockets and shook his head. “Just looking,” he said, though the sound might not have made it out of his mouth. He made a show of browsing the racks, all the while edging around the perimeter of the room, trying to get a look at the arcade.

  Once, he’d gone into an adult bookstore in Charleston, and in the back corner there’d been an arcade full of video booths. For every quarter you dropped into the slot, a TV screen lit up with porn for about thirty seconds. It had taken Leland a dollar’s worth to run through the sixty channels and find a video he liked. Skinny boys with dark hair and furry legs. His weakness.

  How long ago? Twenty years?

  More than twenty. Before Ben’s birth. After Anna Grace had left him, well before she’d come back. Just before his dad’s death.

  A quarter of a century ago, then. Half a lifetime.

  Nowadays he could get all the porn he wanted in the privacy of his own study—but his study was four hours away.

  He stepped toward the counter. His mouth had gone dry, but he managed to say, “Arcade. Please.”

  “Sure thing.” The clerk spoke with a cheerfully backwoods accent: Shore thang. “That’ll be five dollars.” Fah dawlers.

  As he reached for his wallet, Leland felt a twinge of worry—was he carrying any cash? He couldn’t pay with a credit card, not here. But of course, he’d filled his wallet with cash. He was on vacation. He might forget toothpaste, and he might not know what a Jogbra looked like, but he would always, always bring cash. Among his ATM-fresh twenties, he found a much-creased fiver. He handed it to the woman and waited.

  She stuffed the bill into the register. After a moment, she looked up at him. “That’s it, sugar. You can go on back.”

  The arcade, as it turned out, hardly deserved the name. A hallway, a row of six closets, that was all. All but one of the doors stood open. Each cubicle contained a wall-mounted television and a folding metal chair. He went down the line. Something different played on each screen. Two women. Two women. Three women. Two women and a man. A woman and a man.

  He went into the second from the end, the male-female couple. He closed and locked the door and sat down. The chair slid sideways and bumped against the wall, or rather against a long block of unfinished lumber held in place with quarter-round molding. He scooted the chair sideways, centering his weight and the width of his back on the crack of the door.

  Slouching, folding his arms across his chest, he watched the video. The woman wore a fishnet bodysuit, a garment of breathtaking impracticality and zero appeal. Her improbably spherical breasts bobbed and collided like moored zeppelins buffeted by high winds. The man was thickset—not exactly plump, not exactly muscular. Except for a rectangle of tidily cropped fur above his cock, his body was completely hairless.

  Leland heard something. Wood scraping wood. He looked around. The block of lumber shimmied between the strips of molding and slipped sideways about half an inch. He’d thought it was a patch, nailed or screwed to the wall. He’d thought the quarter-rounds were adornments or buttresses. But no. The whole contraption was a kind of sliding panel; the quarter-rounds were tracks. He reached for the wood block, touched its splintery edge, yanked his hand away again. Once again, it rattled. In a moment, Leland understood that someone was knocking on the other side, rapping gently to get his attention.

  Bewildered, he slid the panel away. Behind it there was a smooth-edged hole, large enough to get a fist through, with a dark and long-lashed eye hovering near it. Leland shrank back, then moved closer for a better look.

  The eye belonged to a man. No surprise there. He must be young—no older than Ben, judging by the fitful black scruff on his cheeks. His eyebrow and lip were pierced, each with a tiny silver ring. “Hey,” he said in a whisper. “You want some company?” With the tip of his tongue, he nudged the jewelry at the corner of his mouth. He tipped his chin up, beckoning. Leland caught a glimpse of his pale chest. Shadows gathered in the hollows of his clavicle. “Door’s open.”

  What was the boy offering, exactly? A circle jerk? Could you call it a circle with only two men doing the jerking?

  On the other end of the store, the bell rang. Another devil, another pitchfork. Leland turned his ear toward the door. The clerk’s voice and the voice of the newcomer were baffled by intervening walls, their words obscured, but the particular, familiar cadence of their shared accent was plain enough. Leland kept thinking he could almost make out what they were saying, but the sounds never coalesced into meaning.

  “Psst,” the boy said. “Don’t worry about Sue. She don’t care what goes on back here.”

  Leland shook his head in confusion, but the boy seemed to take it as a refusal. “Suit yourself, Daddy,” he said genially. His face receded from the hole. His chair creaked.

  Leland sat back, too, and his chair uttered a matching creak. Daddy? he thought. Guten Tag, Herr Doktor Freud.

  On the TV screen, the porn actors labored inexorably at their sex, like oiled robots. The woman squealed with every thrust, as if the machinery might need a spritz of WD-40. The man was so silent, so bland of affect and appearance, that he could’ve been replaced by almost anyone. He played his part with all the enthusiasm of the leather couch or the silver lamp or any other element of the set dressing.

  Leland felt his erection wilting. He hadn’t been aware, exactly, that he’d had an erection. The boy next door had given him a hard-on, and the golems on the screen were taking it away. Leaning forward again, he peered sidelong through the opening in the wall. Leland’s movie cast a beige light, the color of a UV-bed tan, but whatever the boy was watching on the other side of the hole, it filled the space with a clean pink luster. It gave his face an almost saintly glow, as if he sat before the rose-colored windows of a chapel.

  The boy had taken off his shirt and
shoved his jeans down to his ankles. His legs weren’t hairy—a scarce patch of dark fluff on each shin, that was all—but he was skinny. His hands—big hands, puppyish paws—lay on his thighs. In his scuffed round-toed boots, his feet looked enormous. Although he made no sign of having seen Leland’s eye at the hole, it was clear that he had: He began a subtle but overt kind of stagecraft, a dumbshow of desire, hefting and squeezing his cock, tugging one pierced nipple, sucking in and puffing out a breath of air.

  What—again, what—was on offer here? Leland felt as if he’d gotten all the way to the end of a mystery, only to find the last chapter missing. He’d never watched pornography in the presence of another human, and he had some trouble thinking of it as a communal activity—especially here, in the land of One Person Per Booth, where the on-screen sex was so boring that he barely wanted to watch it by himself.

  He’d glanced up again at the robots, and when he turned back, the boy was crouched before the hole, two fingers tapping the lower rim. Just like that, at last, it all came clear. Leland slid the little panel back in place, so that it covered the hole. It would be senseless and embarrassing to masturbate in the presence of another man, any man, but touching was cheating. Wasn’t it?

  He owed it to Anna Grace to—

  Well, what? What did he owe her?

  Fidelity? Sexual faithfulness presumed the existence of sex.

  Honesty? He could be exactly as truthful about his visit to this arcade as she was about her wine bottles, and in the end she wouldn’t know a thing.

  Kindness? Yes, he owed her that. Hadn’t he striven, in his own fumbling way, to be kind to her?

  In another second, he’d be telling himself his wife just didn’t understand him. They were more like roommates. No. If he meant to cross this particular threshold, he couldn’t do it by accident. He’d have to admit to himself that he wanted it, and then he’d have to pretend he wouldn’t regret it later. No big deal. He’d already spent half his life stuffing his desires into one tiny box and his regrets into another.

  He slid open the wooden panel and put his eye to the hole. The boy was still there, still naked, still hard. As before, he made a show of touching himself. No hard feelings, then—so to speak.

  Closing the hatch, Leland stood and wiped his sweaty palms on the legs of his jeans. He lifted his chair and moved it away from the door: It seemed important now to make as little noise as possible.

  Mindful of his squeaking soles, he went out into the narrow hallway. The voice of the clerk came back to him—coarser than before, rattling with smoker’s phlegm. She was wound up about something. Leland paused, eavesdropping. Obama. Of course. She was on a rant about Obama, whose policies meant the end of America.

  It wasn’t safe here. It couldn’t be safe. Leland stared at the closed door of the boy’s cubicle, at the pink light spilling out underneath. It could not be safe to go in there and be with that boy—not here, not in a place this rural and seedy. He bounced on the balls of his feet, ready to take flight, but before he could, the door opened, and the black-haired boy welcomed him in.