by Jay Quinn
“Go home, Chris. You’re a trip.”
“Promise me you’ll do the same pretty quickly?”
Cathy nodded in reply, then lifted her chin and shifted her eyes to show me I should look to my right. Sierra was curled up and reading contentedly in the dog bed I kept for Nuala under the window. Having made both the child and her mother happy, I shouldered my knapsack and left the office.
Making a left turn against the incoming traffic was annoying, but I made it across and onto the bridge and got to the church quickly. I parked in the near-empty parking lot and made the short walk to the chapel, enjoying the spring warmth and the pleasant slap of my new leather flip-flops. Pulling open the heavy wooden door, I left the bright, slanting afternoon light for the semidarkness of the chapel. After placing the tip of my middle finger into the font and making the sign of the cross, I signed in for my hour of Adoration before the Blessed Sacrament. That done to please Father Fintan, I walked up the aisle to my favorite spot: a pew near the back, opposite a stained glass window picturing the Blessed Mother and Mary Magdalene meeting Christ on his way to Golgotha.
In the aisle at the edge of my pew, I knelt, crossed myself, and bowed low, remaining in my obeisance as I recited, “Oh Sacrament most holy / Oh Sacrament Divine / All praise and all thanksgiving / Be forever thine.” I rose, made my way down the pew to sit near the window, kneeled again, and pulled my rosary from my pocket. I held it lightly, made the sign of the cross, and began my informal conversation with God.
Satisfied that God had heard my rambling and disjointed litany of requests, I crossed myself and began reciting the decades of the rosary. My special intentions were not complex. I prayed on behalf of my little family—soon to be expanded by one—my community, and the world. That finished, I simply sat and enjoyed being bathed in the light from the stained glass window at my side. It colored my world in pure primary colors, as I hoped my raw prayers would bathe myself and my world in a kind of benediction I believed in.
Then I stood, made my way to the end of the pew, made my obeisance once more to my God, and left to return to my world. I truly believed it would be a better place for my prayers.
Stepping from the dimness of the chapel into the sunshine outside, I thought of how easy it was to step back into the mundane from the divine. I laughed, struck by the two aspects of my nature and of the mystery of faith, and headed back over the bridge to the grocery store and home.
When I got back to my house, Steve was asleep in one of the Adirondack chairs on my deck, his feet propped on his duffel bag, I put my two handfuls of heavy plastic grocery bags by the door and walked quietly up behind him. His hair had grown from a dark bristly crew cut into sun-bleached curls. I gently ran my fingers through them until he stirred awake, looked up drowsily, and smiled. “You’re early,” I said.
He nodded, leaned forward from my touch, and rubbed his eyes. “I caught a ride in from the airport with a guy I crewed with.” He yawned mightily and stretched. “He was heading to Morehead City and I had him drop me off here.”
“I wondered where your truck was. Would you like some coffee?”
Steve stood and turned to face me. “What I want is a hot shower. I smell like bait, a dock shower, and three different airplanes.” He smiled at me. “Mind if I get the shower first and the coffee after?”
“How about dinner after that?”
“Sounds good, as long as it’s not fish, sandwiches, or limp salads. I’ve eaten enough of that onboard crap to last me awhile,” he said.
“I had planned on cooking you dinner tomorrow night anyway. I just bought two steaks and I can have baked potatoes done in the microwave by the time the steaks are ready.”
Steve grinned. “Then I’ll carry your groceries in for you.”
“Why don’t you grab your duffel bag instead?”
“It’s full of dirty clothes—you might like me better if it stayed outside.”
“I got a washing machine and a dryer.”
“I don’t want you doing my dirty laundry.”
“Oh shut up, Steve,” I said amicably. “Just go get a shower, okay?”
I opened the door to Nuala’s sharp barks. She’d been in her crate all day and was ready for a walk, dinner, and company, in pretty short order. I put the groceries on the counter and was stowing the things that needed to go in the refrigerator when she appeared in the kitchen, a toy in her mouth and Steve just behind her.
“I let her out,” Steve said. “Do you want me to take her outside?”
“No, she’ll keep a minute more until I can get some coffee started. You get in the shower, you look beat. There’s clean towels in the bathroom closet.”
Steve gave me a grateful look and headed back down the hall. My old ability to manage several things simultaneously came back to me from years gone by. I played a quick game of toss and fetch with Nuala while I got coffee started, set out a couple of mugs with two spoons by the coffee machine, and made the sugar bowl apparent. Then I got Nuala leashed and took off toward the beach.
The street from my house to the beach was still relatively quiet. Throughout the winter, I’d been the only full-time resident. I met my neighbors in the house at the end of the street over Christmas and asked their permission to cross the side of their lot to go straight to the beach. They were very gracious—they even gave me their home phone number in Kinston so I could call them if I noticed anything awry with their house or property. Since then I’d been vigilant about keeping an eye out for leaking or burst pipes and hints of vandalism or burglary. Thankfully, I’d never needed to call them. I was grateful for the right of passage, which kept me from having to walk two blocks away to the public beach access point.
Nuala was grateful too; she could never get to the beach fast enough. Now 4 months old, she was getting to the more difficult parts of her training, including coming when she was called and staying when she was told to stay. That was difficult with all the distractions of the shore. Like most hunting dogs, she was absolutely entranced by the wealth of scents on the beach, particularly those gruesome things that either had died there or washed ashore dead. I asked her to sit and unclicked her leash. As badly as I wanted to run through her essentials quickly, I still needed to dispense with the full gamut of training I’d started her on. Consistency was the key. If I was going to allow her off the leash on the beach, she had to be thoroughly trained.
Nuala was a happy but reserved dog. While she wasn’t likely to run up to strangers and maul them with friendliness, she did have a lot of curiosity. There was little human activity to claim her attention—the beach was still as deserted as my street. Even the late-afternoon troops of retired beachcombers were few and far between. Nuala did her training paces with great enthusiasm, then just as determinedly let me know she was ready to go home. She knew dinner was waiting, and I chose to believe she knew Steve was waiting as well.
Dogs have a sense for people, just as some people have a sense for dogs. Steve was the first human she’d ever known. When he’d gone into my room to let her out of her kennel, she didn’t bark. When he’d followed her into the kitchen, she just milled around and circled his legs with her ears and tail perched happily high and alert. It was as if she thought, Okay—so you’re back! Great!
Many years before, I’d asked my vet back in Raleigh if Beau missed me when I dropped him off for boarding. The dog always seemed so happy to see me when I came to pick him up that I had guilty visions of him moping for the duration of his stay. The vet laughed and said, “He misses you for about 10 minutes, then he checks out his kennel. Dogs are great survivors. They aren’t as sentimental as people suppose. Once you’re out of sight, he’s more concerned with making sure he can look after himself in a new place.”
I’d not wanted to believe that, but I did see the great sense in it. In many ways, I’d reacted the same way over the past year and more since Zack had left. Then I thought of the weeks I’d just spent waiting for Steve to come back. I’d survived just fine
, but Steve’s actual return brought new kinds of excitement and reservation. I wondered just how well he’d done on his own while he was away. We’d not talked in depth about our sexual histories, and the de rigueur chat about our respective HIV exposure hadn’t taken place yet.
One frightened visit to the health clinic at the start of my relationship with Zack had proven me negative, and him as well. In any case, Zack had a predisposition to urethritis, so he always wore a condom. With Heath, there was no discussion. He came with his own and he used them as a matter of course. With Steve naked in my shower back home and no clean clothes to put on— not to mention my own eagerness that was telling me I’d waited long enough—I knew the discussion was bound to come up pretty soon. I wasn’t sure how to handle it. Steve had come on strong from the very first time we were together. If that was his real style—despite his telling me I didn’t really know him at all—I was planning on erring on the side of caution. Like I told Andrea over Christmas, I had no intention of risking my future on a hot fuck.
Nuala strained at the leash the closer we got to the house. I looked up and saw Steve waiting at the corner of my deck, coffee cup in hand, dressed in boxer shorts I recognized as a particularly loud pair Schooner had left behind. He’d certainly made himself at home: Those boxers were in my underwear drawer. My irritation was quickly displaced by the thought that he was watching for us— waiting for me. I unclicked Nuala’s leash and she took off, bounding toward Steve and home.
I kept my pace, watching Nuala as she made straight for the stairs and then for Steve, who danced round in circles as she circled with him, barking with delight to have found him once again. I climbed the stairs to the sounds of her claws clicking on the wood above then racing to the top of the stairs to noisily let me know who she’d found.
“Looks like this Nuala dog has taken up well with you,” Steve said.
“I think she recognizes you.”
“Probably. I hope you don’t let a lot of guys leave their drawers at your house.”
“They’re my son’s,” I said. “They got mixed in with the laundry when he was here last.”
“He must be a big boy. I couldn’t even get a leg in your little ol’ boxers.”
I refused to become exasperated. For some reason, Steve liked to refer to me as something child-size. At 5 foot 9 and 138, I wasn’t exactly vertically challenged or exceptionally small. It was teasing, I was sure, but underlying it all was a not so subtle domination play—not unlike dogs placing their neck over the neck of another dog. Seeing it for what it was, I figured it was no big deal to play along. “No-o-o, I’m not a big ol’ mack daddy like you, for sure.”
Steve grinned.
“Nuala’s wanting her supper,” I said. “Are you hungry too?”
“Not as hungry as I’m going to be later, or as tired either.” His grin was definitely more than friendly.
“Then let me get the dog fed at least. Mind if I have some coffee first?”
Steve opened the door and scratched his head, striving to be endearingly ingratiating. “Well okay, I guess.”
He succeeded. Walking past him, I pinched his ass hard. When he and Nuala followed me in, Steve closed the door and looked around. “Do you keep any music in the house?”
I walked into the kitchen and pointed to the CD player radio in the bookcase. “The CDs are on the shelves.”
He whistled: “A Bose Wave. Are these things really as good as the magazine ads say they are?”
“Try it out and you tell me. It seemed like a good value, rather than spend a fortune on stereo components.”
“Ah, here’s something good.”
“What did you find?” He didn’t answer, so I made my coffee and waited to hear what he chose. In a moment, Steely Dan’s Aja began to fill the space from the living room to the kitchen. I picked up my coffee and walked into the living room. Steve was stretched out on the sofa with his hands behind his head. Only two small ovoid stretches of skin under his arms weren’t tanned. His chest was wide and flat, tanned, and smooth, tapering to a waist that belied his age. I sat on the floor by his chest between the sofa and the coffee table. “Nice choice.”
Steve reached out and smoothed back my hair. “It’s a little mellow, a little cynical, with a hard-nosed bite, like someone I know.”
“So I’m not light and sweet anymore, right?”
“Jesus, do you remember everything I say?”
I nestled my cheek into his palm, resting for a moment, then moved away to light a cigarette. “I’ve had a few weeks to keep only a little bit of knowing you in my mind.”
“Let me have one of those, will ya? Mine are in the pocket of my jeans on the floor in your bathroom.”
I handed him my lit cigarette, then lit another one for myself.
Steve took a long drag and exhaled. “Did you get my postcards?”
Nuala finished her dinner, noisily banging her stainless steel bowl against the kickboard of the kitchen cabinets. After a moment, I heard her scratch at the prayer rug by the kitchen table and not so much lie as fall prone on her side with a long satisfied sigh. “If there were six, I have every one of them and your picture with the big marlin taped on the wall over my desk at work.”
Steve turned to his side, bunched a cushion behind his head, and reached for the ashtray. “Then I guess you noticed I was thinking about you a lot.”
“I did, Steve. It made me very happy and I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t thinking about you the whole time you were gone. But …”
“But what,” he said, gently.
“I just have to wonder why you’re so attracted to me so quickly. And worse, why I’m so attracted to you just as suddenly.”
Steve took a last hit off his cigarette, stubbed it out in the ashtray, then lightly took the back of my neck in his broad palm and kneaded it gently. “Chris, I talk a lot of shit just to get a rise out of people … guys I meet, usually just to scare them away. I came on so strong to you because I thought you were cute. Like I always do, I thought I’d just run you off and then I wouldn’t be disappointed. Just cut to the end, you know? Then you came back to pick up your puppy and we talked … hell, I don’t know. I just think you might be somebody who might stick around. I don’t want to run you off—believe me. If I’m still coming on too strong, I’m sorry. It’s just my nature, see?”
I did see. Steve might be gay, but he was too much himself to want to change his life very much just for someone superficial who couldn’t accept him as he was. I said, “You must have either been hurt a great deal over and over, or just really bad once.”
Steve was quiet for a minute, but he kept stroking my neck. “I don’t talk much about stuff like this,” he said, “but I think you got me down cold. I guess what I’m asking you is … well, what kind of guy are you? I’m laying here on a $5,000 sofa, listening to a $500 boom box, and I’m wondering if I’m just a piece of trade, just some dirty dream, you’re going to fuck around with until some big-shot lawyer or doctor comes around to hold your attention. That’s the question you need to answer for me.”
I took the last drag off my cigarette and stubbed it out. Shifting to rise and rest on my knees to face him, I put one arm over his waist and held him gently with my palm flat against his side. “Here’s the kind of guy I am: You’re laying on a seven thousand dollar sofa and listening to a such-and-such boom box because the man I lived with and loved for 22 years took our life, balled it up, and threw it in the trash. I got paid off and I took the money and spent it on things that made me happy for the two minutes I spent waiting for the charge to go through. I moved down here to start my life over, burned and bummed because something I thought was going to see me through to the end of my life turned out to be nothing more than a pretty dream.”
“But—” Steve started, shifting himself into a sitting position.
“But nothing,” I interrupted. “I’m the marrying kind Steve. To be honest with you, as bad as I hate to admit it, that’s what I am. I
spent nearly half my life raising another man’s kids and running his house and washing his fucking dirty clothes. It’s what I’ve always done. Now I’m learning to live a new kind of life, and there’s a hell of a lot of room in it for you, if you want to be in it. But I’m not looking to dump somebody for a better model, like that asshole Zack did to me! Don’t you, for one goddamn minute, think I’m some high-class whore looking around for a better offer—”
“Hold on—” Steve said sharply.
“Wait a minute, let me finish. I started out my life living in the fucking projects. I put all my trust in one man and you know what? He fucked up bad. Now, do I think every man is a bastard? No, I don’t. And I don’t think you’re a bastard either. But Steve, I can’t give up everything I’m starting to build a new life on and I don’t want to trust anybody but me not to fuck it up. I’m my responsibility now. I want to be with you, Steve. And I ain’t going nowhere, for nobody else. But if you want me to tell you I’ll give my life up for you, I won’t. But I’m loyal, and I’m kind and I’m a good friend, in or out of bed. You see what I’m saying?”
“You’re hurting me, let go,” he demanded.
“What? What?” I asked sharp as a razor and mad as hell.
Gently Steve took my hand at his side and squirmed away from it. I had gotten him in a death grasp. There was a dark red imprint on his tanned side that would surely turn into a bruise. With my wrist still in his grasp he said, “C’mere.” He tugged me up to sit beside him on the couch’s edge.
“Don’t pull at me,” I said, but my own vehemence was spent, and I didn’t snatch away.
As best he could, sitting beside me, he wrapped his arms around me and rocked me a little. “I guess you just got hurt real bad one time, huh?”
“No, twice … but the first time was too far back to count.”
Steve sighed. “They all count, Chris. Every one of them.”
I rested my head against his shoulder. I was tired. I had no idea I had so much anger held back inside. “So what kind of guy are you, Steve?”