Robin and Ruby

by K. M. Soehnlein

  “What does that mean?”

  Robin shrugs. It’s not really clear, is it? “Maybe it would have been easier if she fired me.”

  “You don’t need her, now that you’re going to be a famous actor.”

  “Because actors never have to wait tables?” He’s thinking now not just about rent money he owes to George, but the expensive tickets he plans to buy for next month’s Live Aid concert at JFK Stadium. He had hoped to have them already, a surprise gift for Peter.

  Peter’s eyes look a bit glazed from the drive. Robin wants to drag him back to the apartment as quickly as possible and throw him into bed. Peter will want a shower first. “I can’t get dirty ’til I get clean,” he likes to say, though Robin’s on a campaign to convince him that the smell of sweat during sex is a good thing.

  Behind them, the restaurant’s kitchen door swings open. It’s one of the dishwashers, Cesar, the tall one with the Sacred Heart tattoo on his forearm, the one who tells menacing and vaguely queer stories of reform school in Puerto Rico, where he grew up. He tosses an over-stuffed heavyweight trash bag into the Dumpster, then catches sight of Robin. “Hey, Blanco, got a smoke?”

  Robin nods.

  Cesar struts over, pulls a Parliament from Robin’s pack, and takes the Bic from Robin’s hand. After he lights his own, he holds the flame, and Robin, mesmerized by the way Cesar’s dark eyes lock on to his, pulls out a cigarette for himself, too, and lets Cesar light it. They often smoke together on breaks. But as soon as he inhales, Robin wishes he hadn’t. He senses Peter shuffling around uncomfortably.

  “This is Peter,” Robin says. “This is Cesar.”

  “Hi. Nice to meet you,” Peter says, thrusting out a hand. “I’m a friend of Robin’s.”

  Cesar squints through the smoke. “Another college boy,” he says, taking Peter’s hand and giving him what Robin can see is a crushing grip.

  “I was his T.A.,” Peter says, shaking it out.

  “What’s that, tits and ass?” Cesar laughs, but Peter just looks confused. “This one’s got the ass,” Cesar adds, reaching out to swat Robin on the butt.

  “Cesar!” Robin protests. He hears the edge of flirtation in his own voice, the subterranean longing he knows he feels toward a lot of the rough-looking guys in the kitchen, especially this one. It’s not the first time Cesar’s smacked or pinched or grabbed Robin’s butt, usually with some comment about how much Robin’s got going on back there. “Pretty fresh for a white boy,” Cesar likes to say.

  “Jesus,” Peter grumbles, after Cesar has gone back into the kitchen. “I think he broke my finger.”

  Robin reaches out to take Peter’s hand, to rub the offended spot, but Peter pulls away. “What did he call you?”

  “I’m the only white guy,” Robin says. “So I’m ‘Blanco.’”

  “He was white, too. Hispanics are white.”

  “Puerto Ricans don’t consider themselves white.”

  “Sure, OK,” Peter says, sounding eager to change the subject. “Hungry? I’m buying.”

  “Anything but soul food.” Robin takes another puff of the cigarette. There’s no smoking in Peter’s car, a restriction that he is not yet used to, even after eight months of dating. When you’re raised in a home where your mother smokes, and where she lets you smoke with her, it’s odd to be forbidden your habit. But Peter’s grandmother has emphysema, and he talks often, with pity and condemnation, about this hacking, skeletal woman. Robin knows that smoking is not such a good thing, not for someone who’s only twenty and has been smoking since he was thirteen. A third of your life, he thinks. At twenty-six it’ll be half your life. You’re definitely quitting soon.

  “Put out that cancer stick and get in the car. We need to talk.”

  Peter starts the engine, and the music kicks in again, Latin girls harmonizing, “Takin’ meeeee, to the point of no return, ah-ah-ah.” He flips on the headlights, though it won’t be dark for hours; it’s a habit he grew up with in rural Canada, driving twisty back roads. “Better if they see you coming,” he always says. “You never know who’s out there.” He drives with both hands on the wheel, perfectly placed at 10 and 2.

  As they turn onto South Street, Robin glances one last time through the restaurant’s plate-glass windows and catches sight of George, gliding through the dining room, looking surprisingly adult from this distance, filling out his white shirt like a grown man. He’s not the skinny, dorky teenager Robin befriended in New Jersey all those years ago. They’ve already said a hurried good-bye, with plans to hang out tonight, as they do every night, though it seems unlikely that they’ll spend much time together, with Peter here now. George doesn’t like Peter. They’ve only met a couple times. After the first visit, George was evasive. The second time, Robin pushed for an opinion, and George admitted, “He doesn’t seem right for you. Kinda uptight.” Robin tried to defend Peter: yes, he could be a little stiff, but that was a sign of maturity, stability, trustworthiness. George was unconvinced. “You’re just seeing what you want to see.”

  Peter had had his own strong reaction to George: “He sees me as his competition.” Robin told him he was being ridiculous.

  George is working the post-lunch bridge-shift, the first wave of dinner guests responding to Rosellen’s “Black Plate Special,” a couple hours of a fixed-price menu. The customers now are mostly people from the neighborhood: African American seniors and young mothers with kids in booster seats. Half the tables are empty. After sunset, the next wave of yuppies will start their advance, already fueled by cocktails imbibed elsewhere. Many of these people are only a couple years older than Robin, but they’ve already staked out their upwardly mobile careers. The women travel in track shoes and switch to high-heeled pumps on the sidewalk. The men put styling mousse in their expensive haircuts, which look shiny as helmets, making them look like slick warriors for Big Business.

  Robin is amazed by how robust and healthy these people seem, almost robotically fit, because the other phenomenon he was all too aware of these days was the exact opposite: all those men, gay men, getting sick and frail. He hadn’t been so aware of them in Pittsburgh, but Philadelphia was a different story: the hairdressers and antique dealers who used to spend their weekends at bathhouses were now staying home and growing full beards to hide the purple lesions on their faces. OK, it’s not just bathhouse queens, he admits, it’s lots of guys, which is even scarier. Robin thinks uneasily of Donovan, living one floor up from his mother in Manhattan. He isn’t some creature of the night, doesn’t seem like a West Village leatherman; he’s just a boring guy with a 9-to-5 city job, and now, not even thirty years old, he’s sick with it. Robin used to enjoy their passing flirtations in the elevator, but last time he visited his mom, he saw what was happening to Donovan, and he actually began taking the stairs so that he wouldn’t have to face him. He checks his own skin now all the time, fretting over every blotch and zit, constantly feeling his neck and his armpits for swollen glands.

  Peter wears a white T-shirt tight enough to show that he keeps himself in shape, but not so tight to read as flaming, the word he uses to talk about gay guys he thinks are “too obvious.” His pale blue tennis shorts hug perfectly the meat of his thighs. His arms are smooth except at the wrist; his legs are wildly hairy from his ankles to his cock, a swirling, black pattern. Peter Savas, my hunky Greek graduate student, Robin thinks, glad again that fate threw them together last semester, when Peter was leading Robin’s section of Renaissance Art, an elective Robin had enrolled in at the last minute; glad, too, that Peter broke the rules and had sex with him, keeping it quiet until the semester ended. He’s never had a real boyfriend until Peter; never left half his clothes and a toothbrush at a guy’s apartment; never gotten to know a lover down to his daily habits: Peter puts honey in his coffee, hangs his shirts in the closet according to color, speaks Greek on the phone with his ailing grandmother during regular Sunday calls.

  But “need to talk,” is still in the air, buzzing like a gnat. “Talk abo
ut what?”

  “Oh, you know,” Peter says lightly. “Us.”

  “You’re mad that I made you come here.”

  “You didn’t make me,” Peter says, which sends Robin into an anxious consideration of a frayed patch on the cuff of his shirt. He tugs at the cottony tendrils while silently adding up the reasons Peter most definitely is mad at him:

  I left Pittsburgh instead of staying with him this summer.

  I took this job to make money, now I complain I don’t make enough.

  I call all the time, whining about how I miss him.

  I smoke cigarettes and let bisexual dishwashers feel my ass.

  At least you’re not cheating on him! You’re spending all your time at the restaurant, or hanging out with George at the apartment, having a totally uneventful summer. You haven’t been breaking out your fake I.D. to go dancing with the queens at Equus and Key West, or hanging around the Steteler Hall men’s room at Penn, where everyone knows you can get a blow job; you haven’t been putting yourself in the way of temptation; you haven’t been risking infection…. Robin remembers their last argument, when Peter visited three weeks ago. The fight had been about Robin not having a driver’s license, about the burden Peter said that put on him. It did no good to remind Peter that driver’s ed wasn’t even offered at the arts high school Robin attended. What was the word Peter threw at him? Unexamined. As in, “A lot of your behavior goes unexamined.” It seemed like such a ridiculous charge, because Robin feels like he examines every thought, emotion, and action until he drives himself crazy.

  “I was serious when I said you should come to London with me,” Robin says.

  Peter smiles indulgently. “Yeah, well, my dissertation…”

  “You can study the Renaissance in London.”

  “The Italian Renaissance?”

  “Italy, England,” Robin says, with an exaggerated flap of his hand.

  “Philadelphia, Pittsburgh,” Peter says coolly.

  “Look, I’m really sorry,” Robin says. “I’m calmer now. Yesterday I felt really anxious about everything. At least now we get to spend the weekend together.”

  “It’s not London,” Peter says. “It’s not your phone call.” Then, with a contemplative tilt of his head, he adds, “It is and it isn’t.”

  Robin falls silent, scolding himself. Why are you so bad at this? When emotions get messy, he never quite understands what he’s supposed to do. In bed it’s different. He can take charge. He can push Peter to try new things. Peter’s only been out and sexual for a couple of years. Sex for Robin is something else he’s been doing since he was thirteen, since those first boys he messed around with in Greenlawn, and it only got more intense once he moved to Manhattan.

  Robin runs his hand along Peter’s thigh, lets his fingers creep under his shorts. “You believe that I’ve been missing you, right? I know I said it a million times on the phone, but I’m not sure you really believe it.” His fingers move higher, and Robin can see the effect he’s having on Peter. He thinks about going down on him right here, as they move through traffic on Broad Street, an exciting image bound up in all the sex-in-car scenes he’s read in books—the teenager in Peyton Place, distracted by the suddenly exposed breast of the bad girl in his passenger seat, driving headlong into an oncoming tractor trailer…or the philanderer in The World According to Garp, getting a blow job that turns into a dismemberment when another car rear-ends theirs and the woman sucking bites down hard. Sex in cars ends badly. But doing the things he shouldn’t has always made his dick throb.

  Peter says, “You’re going to get us killed,” and pushes his hand away.

  Robin’s face warms up in shame. He hates that Peter seems so distant, but it’s important to listen. That’s what George always says, that Robin doesn’t really hear what people are trying to tell him.

  They drive through the narrow, brick-lined streets of Center City. The softly burning light on the old buildings is both soothing and unsettling. Like so many things, it seems too beautiful to trust. A couple years ago, visiting George at Penn, where he’s majoring in premed, Robin decided he wanted to live in Philly one day. In part, it was the appearance of the charming, history-bound architecture at golden, late-day moments like this. And in part it was simply that this wasn’t New York. He needed space from New York, the city that has owned him for so long, which is why he went to college in Pittsburgh, why he moved in with George this summer, why he set his sights on London. He needed space from his mother in her Manhattan apartment; she is too much the shaper of his life and has been for years. And he needed space from his past, all that sexual adventure that now seems to have marked him, along with every other guy having sex with guys, as endangered.

  Peter has chosen an old-fashioned Greek restaurant in the midst of the gay neighborhood. “How do you know about this place?” Robin asks, and Peter mentions his ex-girlfriend Diana, who goes to college at Temple. Robin met her a few weeks ago: a high-strung, curvy girl who seemed to have the same dubious response to him that George had to Peter. What was that about, this doubt among friends?

  Inside, the hostess, a woman with big, pretty eyes and big, shapely breasts who looks like a more Mediterranean version of Diana, leads them to a corner table. She might be as much as ten years older than him, or she might be a very mature teenager. Girls are like that; they look like women much earlier than boys look like men. Case in point: his own sister. For years he called Ruby “peanut,” and then he turned around, and she was nineteen, in college, this imposing young woman with a tough attitude who wore only black.

  All these faces are suddenly crowding his mind: Ruby, Diana, this waitress who looks like Diana. It’s as though he’s erecting a protective female wall between himself and Peter’s air of masculine control.

  Robin looks up from the menu and sees that Peter is staring at him with an admiration so unexpected and intense it looks almost mournful. “You’re so handsome,” Peter says. “When you space out, and your face relaxes, you’re like an angel.”

  “OK, something’s wrong,” Robin says.

  Peter sighs. “I’ll order for us first.”

  Robin digs his cigarettes from his pocket.

  “Don’t,” Peter says, even though there’s an ashtray on the table, white and royal blue and etched with an image of the Parthenon.

  Robin fingers his cigarette, wondering how long he can hold it without lighting it. The clock on the wall says 6:32.

  “I’m glad you called me,” Peter says.

  “You are?”

  “Sure. I had the whole ride to think.”

  “About us.”

  “It’s really about me.” Robin can hear the wind-up in Peter’s voice, and then he’s on a roll, reciting something like an autobiography of his twenty-eight years on the planet: raised with a drive for material success inherited from his father, an importer of Greek foods who wanted Peter to carry on the family business. Scarred by the overwhelming repression of his Orthodox family. Wasting too many years with a girlfriend he barely touched. It took so long to discover himself! Only in grad school, when he began to study great gay artists like Michelangelo and Leonardo, was he able to break free and to live in a more examined way.

  Robin waits for Peter to get to the moment when he entered his life, toward their time together. These eight months have been so substantial to Robin, but now, placed in this chronology, they shrink to some kind of footnote, one brief stop along a larger, more essential path that Peter is traveling. And, really, they haven’t even shared eight full months. There was the furtive beginning, student and teacher sneaking extracurricular sex. There was a lengthy separation during Christmas break. Then at last came four months when they lived as boyfriends, spending nearly every night in Peter’s off-campus apartment. But that was cut off by Robin’s move to Philly at the end of May, and since then, there have been just a couple of visits. Why didn’t you just stay in Pittsburgh with him, you fool?

  “Meeting you has been so special to
me,” Peter is saying. “You’re this interesting, handsome, younger guy, but you’ve had so many experiences, living in New York, and growing up in a such a troubled family. You’re sort of exotic to me, you feel very modern. It’s been amazing to have gotten close to you—”

  “Do you ever think,” Robin interrupts, “how weird it is that we met at a school in Pittsburgh? Neither of us is from there, which makes it seem like we were meant to find each other.” He’s riffing now, scrambling, because he can feel where Peter’s monologue is leading.

  And sure enough, Peter says, “It’s just not the right time in my life to be in this relationship,” and then, “What we’ve had has been important to me, but I can’t really commit to it,” and then, “I hope we can move on to some other kind of friendship without the pressure to try and make a sexual relationship work.”

  Peter is saying the words and Robin is hearing them, they’re accumulating weight and solidity. “Given everything I just outlined, the only conclusion that I can reach is that we should break up.”

  He feels it like a physical impact.

  This is actually happening.

  You’re being dumped.

  “I hope you understand,” Peter says, and Robin shakes his head no.

  The waitress appears and sets down a platter of various mushy substances, shaded beige to gray, and a basket of pita cut into long strips and fried into crispness. Quick upon her heels is a doughy busboy, who refills Peter’s water glass with a messy splash. The sound of the ice being jostled by the water becomes for Robin the very sound of his relationship being dismantled, and before he knows it he has lighted the cigarette in his hand.

  He looks at the time. 6:39. Over the course of seven minutes, his relationship has ended.

  The inhaling and exhaling of smoke seems to organize his ability to speak. “I’ll give you credit,” he says calmly. “You drove all this way. You could have said this over the phone.”

  Peter smiles shyly and drops his gaze downward, happy to take the compliment. Robin tells himself, Beg for a second chance. Let the tears flow. Show him how you feel. No, fuck that. You should say the meanest thing you can think of and then throw your ice water in his fucking face.