Robin and Ruby

by K. M. Soehnlein

  “Sorry,” Robin says. “I need to do this. I’ll make it up to you.”

  George falls silent, but he doesn’t turn the car around.

  He drives a two-tone Cadillac Seville, gray with a black roof, a late seventies model with a short, slanted trunk. His parents passed it on to him when he moved to Philadelphia, and it’s already been broken into twice this summer. The hood ornament and the hubcaps have all been stolen, and the passenger side window no longer rolls down. George pulls up to a fire hydrant across the street from the club, hazards flashing. Robin checks out the crowd lined up behind a velvet rope stretched between two classical columns. Everyone’s in some kind of black and white getup, with jagged, asymmetrical haircuts, and heavy black boots. Ruby and Calvin would blend right in. “Are we really in Philadelphia?” Robin asks.

  “Those folks are so pale, we could be in Boston.”

  “That’s just face powder,” Robin says.

  “I wasn’t talking about their makeup.”

  “There are black people in line,” Robin says.

  “And they’ll be waiting out there all night. All four of ’em.”

  “Or they’ll be let in first to make the club more interesting.”

  “I hope they brought more than one form of ID.”

  Maybe this was a bad idea. Robin can usually talk his way into a gay bar, but a trendy place like this? His fake ID might not pass inspection; he hates that at twenty, it’s legal for him to drink in New York, but not in Pennsylvania. The fact that George didn’t bother to dress up won’t help get them past the doorman. He’s wearing aqua blue medical scrubs and a T-shirt that reads EMBARGO SOUTH AFRICA, NOT NICARAGUA, like an undergrad going to breakfast in the dining hall.

  “Tell you what,” Robin says. “I’ll do a lap through the parking lot. If I see Peter’s car, we’ll stay. If not, let’s just go to the package store, and we’ll drown our sorrows at home.”

  “Even if you find him, you’re just going to piss him off.”

  “No, he’ll talk to me. Peter’s a talker.”

  “A bullshitter is what he is.”

  “Wait here for me, OK?”

  Robin gets out of the car and makes his way past the parking lot attendant, who eyes him silently. Robin was right to wear black shoes, black trousers, and a white T-shirt with the sleeves ripped off, the most “new wave” stuff he owns. The sign says parking is four dollars; Peter wouldn’t have paid that much. Robin walks to the far side of the lot, to an alley where cars are parked tightly together. He takes a few steps along the sidewalk, and then he spots Peter’s Honda at the curb.

  Indecision takes hold: Maybe instead of going into the club, he could leave a note. A note on the windshield, so he knows you’re serious about wanting to see him tomorrow, so he doesn’t wake up and think he can blow you off.

  A movement inside the Honda catches his eye. There’s someone in the driver’s seat. And maybe someone on the passenger’s side as well.

  Robin slides stealthily alongside the parked cars, craning his neck for a clear view through the hatch. In the streetlight filtering into the car, he can definitely make out Peter. The other person sits facing Peter, in profile. A younger guy: glowing skin, light-colored hair, sharp cheekbone. The upturned collar of a polo shirt frames the back of his neck. Peter seems to be talking to him. Why does he look so serious?

  Who is this guy reaching out his arm, resting his hand on Peter’s shoulder, halting Peter’s speech in mid-sentence, this guy Peter is suddenly leaning toward, closer, closer?

  This guy who is kissing Peter on the mouth.

  Robin sprints to Peter’s window. He looks down at the back of Peter’s head as he kisses this other guy. And before he knows what he’s doing, Robin is banging on the roof of the car and shouting Peter’s name. The night fills with the sudden thunder of fists on metal.

  Peter breaks out of the kiss. His face is a mask of alarm shifting into recognition. “What are you doing here?” he asks and opens the door.

  “What are you doing here?” Robin repeats, and when Peter stutters the beginning of some kind of explanation, Robin finds himself shoving Peter nearly back into his seat.

  I’m going to hurt him, Robin thinks, as he raises his hand.

  But then there’s some other force upon him, other arms, belonging to this other person, the passenger, who has run around the car and is behind him now, pulling.

  Robin wriggles sideways, frees himself, and gets a look at this guy: skinny, tiny waist, bony arms. Blond hair the color of Robin’s and blue eyes much like his, too. A puffy lower lip and a soft chin. A smooth, hairless face.

  Now all three of them are standing in a tense, triangular face-off. “Calm down, Robin,” Peter says. “Just calm down.”

  “Ohhhh,” the kid says. “You’re Robin.”

  “And who the fuck are you?”

  Peter answers for him. “Douglas is, was, one of my students.”

  “Hi, Douglas,” Robin says, his voice calm for a split second before he’s shouting, “What the fuck are you doing making out with my boyfriend?”

  “Ex-boyfriend,” Douglas says.

  Robin swings his arm and lunges, ready to smack this boy on the mouth, the mouth that Peter just kissed, but Douglas blocks the blow, grabs Robin’s fingers, and twists. There’s a struggle for a moment, the two of them intertwined, and then Robin turns the momentum around, getting Douglas’s arm in his grip, yanking it behind him. “Ow!” Douglas shouts.

  Peter yells, “Stop it, Robin, stop it!”

  With a rush of force he didn’t know he had, Robin pushes Douglas into the street. He watches as Douglas stumbles and falls to the pavement.

  There’s a sudden glow of headlights, a car approaching from the end of the alley, the sound of tires on asphalt.

  Peter rushes to Douglas and pulls him out of the way. The approaching car stops, blinding them with light, not the elevating light of the stage but the overpowering light of interrogation. Robin backs away, but Peter is suddenly on him, spinning him around, shoving him toward the Honda, pinning him facedown against the door. Robin smells the dry dust on the window and the mechanical odors of the engine. The will to struggle seeps away, replaced by the sensation, the vision, of lying in bed on his stomach with Peter on top of him; Peter has just finished fucking him, the heat still lingering, their bodies compacted and trembling.

  Then there’s another voice shouting, “Let him go.” It’s George, silhouetted in the headlights. It was George’s Cadillac that came down the alley. “Get off him, Peter.”

  “George. Hey…” Peter loosens his hold, but Robin remains against the car, depleted.

  George has something in his hands, brandished like a club—it is a club, it’s The Club, the weighty, metal steering-wheel lock that everyone uses these days.

  “Oh, my God,” Douglas says.

  George looks over at Douglas, then back at Robin. “Are you all right?”

  Robin nods.

  “He’s not all right, he’s crazy,” Peter says. “You owe us an apology.”

  “Us?” Robin asks.

  “I’m calling the police,” says Douglas, standing behind Peter and sucking up snot, wild-eyed, defiant. He’s shaking his injured hand. Robin wants to charge at him all over again, land a powerful blow on that pure, pale skin. He feels the strength he is capable of, the harm he could cause. This knowledge of his capacity for violence is old and powerful; it runs through him in a line straighter than a sword. But he stops himself, because he sees the look on Peter’s face: mortified, disappointed, maybe even disgusted.

  “Why were you kissing him?” Robin asks.

  “Why are you even here?” Peter snarls.

  “He’s obviously stalking you,” Douglas says.

  Douglas, you’re scrawny and annoying, you have empty eyes and a weak chin. Peter will use you for as long as he wants, he’ll fuck you without a condom and blame you for it, then he’ll leave you for someone younger who looks just like you. He doesn’
t say any of this. The words stay trapped in his throat.

  “George, do me a favor, talk some sense into him,” Peter says.

  “No one’s doing you any favors,” George says. Firmly, he takes Robin by the arm and says, “I don’t want to be here if the cops show up.”

  Robin nods. He understands.

  Driving away, Robin feels like they’re escaping the scene of a crime, like he’s in some movie where you yell to the taxi driver, “Just go!” without any sense of where to. They pass through a neighborhood Robin doesn’t know: unpopulated, vaguely industrial, marked by chain-link fences, heavy machinery, rubbish at the side of the road. He stares out the window into a desolate, inert night marked by the eerie glow of a rising full moon.

  “Did I just make an ass of myself?” Robin asks.

  “Now you know what kind of person Peter really is.”

  “But what if he wasn’t cheating on me, what if he just ran into this kid at the club and the kiss was some spontaneous—”

  “They were in his car,” George says. “They were at it.”

  “So you don’t think I overreacted?”

  “You were in shock. That can make it difficult to control your impulses.”

  “Maybe.” But it doesn’t feel like shock as much as its opposite: not something unexpected, but something long dreaded, coming to pass. Earlier, at the Greek restaurant, Peter made it sound like he wanted to be with someone his own age. Robin knows why Peter lied, and this knowledge is the tip of something sharp poking his skin, jabbing and jabbing, drawing pinpricks of blood that Robin licks away but can not stanch. The rage that surfaced was bigger than simple anger at Peter and his boy toy. It was the fury Robin holds in check all the time, and has for years and years. He lets some out every now and then, throws something across the room, slams a door hard enough to jiggle the hinges. But not in public, not with his fists.

  George says, “The only other time I saw you lose it like that was a long time ago. After your brother died, after the funeral.”

  Robin looks at him. “Jackson’s funeral? You were there?”

  “Yeah, I was there!”

  “I don’t remember that day too well.”

  “I was hanging out with Ruby and some kids from school. We all saw it: You got in a fight with your cousin. You looked like you were gonna asphyxiate him.”

  Memories of Jackson’s funeral exist in fragments: a Catholic mass, a limousine ride to the cemetery, their house full of people, all those neighborhood women carrying covered dishes, his mother in an expensive black dress. And then, yes, fighting with obnoxious Cousin Larry on the roof outside Robin’s bedroom window. How did they wind up on the roof? How did Robin’s fingers wind up squeezing Larry’s neck? Or was it the other way around? Had it been Larry who was choking him? Robin holds some sensation in his body: his own breathing is too short, too shallow, his head is burning up…. For days after the funeral, Robin lay in bed with a fever that spiked so high it nearly put him in the hospital. The illness had the effect of erasing what happened, so that images of that day now rise up and veer off without warning, like bits of a dream, impossible to grasp. He can’t at all picture George there, though of course he would have been. A lot of kids from school came. It was a big deal in Greenlawn: a local kid in an accident, in a coma, dead at age ten. “Coma Boy,” that’s what they used to whisper about Jackson in the halls of Greenlawn High. Robin was Coma Boy’s Brother.

  Remembering this, his heart races. His throat goes dry. The idea of Jackson’s birthday looming tomorrow dredges up pain from deep inside, not the pain of grief or loss but the pain of blame, of responsibility. He was there when it happened, the accident that started everything. They were fighting on the playground slide, Robin and Ruby and Larry and Jackson, a confusing scuffle that ended with Jackson tumbling to the pavement and landing on his head.

  He says, “It’s like I was some other person.” George reaches over and ruffles the back of Robin’s hair, rubs his neck, grips the tendons.

  Robin breathes into the force, banishing the image of Jackson’s fall, as he always eventually does. “I’m sorry you had to see that. With Peter.”

  George allows himself a smile. “I’m glad I did.”

  Robin sees admiration on George’s face, and there’s more to it than just George’s loathing of Peter. It’s like yesterday at the restaurant, George smiling while Robin opened that wine bottle on the floor. It’s a little bit dangerous, being appreciated for being wild, for the ways you break the rules. With a start, Robin realizes how far they’ve come from their early days of talking current events in study hall and riding the subway to Grandma Lincoln’s. Nor is George’s reaction here some methodical, unemotional response, like after Robin first came out to him. He’s changed; they’ve changed each other. Peter is back there somewhere, turning into the past, and George is right here at his side, as he’s been all along.

  Robin realizes he needs to say something more. “Hey, I’m sorry for before, when you came back from your date? You were feeling bad, and I tried to make a joke. And then I tricked you into bringing me to that club.”

  George nods, and Robin can see him taking this in. Then he seems to get an idea, and a faint smile appears at the corners of his mouth. “How about this: I take you for a ride, without telling you where we’re going.”

  Robin laughs. “Should I be worried?”

  “Just a little,” George says, and now he really seems amused. He says, “It’ll be a good distraction. For both of us.”

  George drives them to the Schuylkill River, to an unlit stretch of city park wedged between the riverbank and a row of gloomy warehouses. Tonight, the full moon, so bright it looks blue, casts a glow on the water that shatters the liquid surface into a black-and-white checkerboard. On the far shore, tiny pairs of headlights whoosh along an elevated section of the Schuylkill Expressway.

  They walk toward the river down a slope covered in trampled grass, but Robin stops before they get too far. “Where are we?”

  “Well,” George says. “Have you ever heard of Judy Garland Park?”

  Robin laughs nervously. “Judy Garland wouldn’t last a minute here.”

  “Yeah, but you know the expression, a friend of Dorothy?”

  Now Robin gets it, and as his eyes adjust he can see that, yes, there are men standing at intervals along the riverside fence going north toward the Walnut Street overpass, and figures moving around the perimeter, toward some railroad tracks that snake from one of the warehouses into a dark thicket of trees. A freight train sits like a monster waiting in the dark, silently watching them.

  He’s been to the cruising grounds in Central Park, a series of overgrown trails called the Ramble. Once he even backed himself up against a tree trunk while an older guy, who looked like a father of three from Spanish Harlem, with flecks of gray in his mustache, sucked his dick; but Robin got nervous quickly and zipped up before it went very far. But that was in the daylight.

  “Come on,” George says, and leads him down to the fence. Robin wonders how he should stand: facing the river with his back toward the park? That feels sort of vulnerable, like someone could sneak up on them from behind. But looking outward puts them on display, inviting action. Is that what George wants? Is he hoping to hook up tonight? Robin faces sideways, leaning on his hip.

  “So you come here for sex?” Robin asks him.

  George clears his throat. “Mostly, I watch.”

  “I didn’t know you were a Peeping Tom.”

  “I’m not creepy about it. I just like to be around it. I guess you could classify me as a bit of a voyeur. Everyone’s either a voyeur or an exhibitionist.” He adds, “You are an exhibitionist.”

  “I’m a thespian,” Robin says, deliberately using a word he finds ridiculous. “It goes with the territory.”

  George pulls his wallet from his pocket. From the billfold he fishes out a flattened joint. “Gimme your lighter.”

  Robin’s never seen George with pot before. �
��You’re full of surprises tonight.”

  “Blame it on the full moon.”

  “Oh really?”

  “Yes, really. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the moon can influence our circulation, like it does with tides. Our bodies are mostly water.”

  “I’m glad there’s a scientific explanation.”

  “There almost always is.”

  George leans forward, matching paper tip to flame; a moment later, he erupts into coughing, smoke swirling furiously around him. “I’m still new at this,” he says.

  Robin takes one deep hit, and right away feels himself melting. He leans back into the fence for support, as a wave takes hold like a warm embrace. It’s so seductive: Hey there, remember me? Remember this feeling? Yeah, I remember, Robin thinks. He smoked so much of this stuff in high school, in New Jersey, when all you had to do was walk into the courtyard between classes and someone would get you high. George never did; he wasn’t part of that scene. Robin never buys it anymore; he doesn’t hold, as they used to say. He can’t get anything done when he’s stoned, though he can get into plenty of trouble.

  “Since when do you buy pot?”

  “Cesar gave it to me. He told me to share it with you.” A faint smile curls George’s lips; behind his glasses, his eyes are already glazed and goofy. He makes a stab at Cesar’s accent. “Tell Blanco, he smoke a little of this, he be less uptight.”

  “Uptight! Is that what they say about me?” Robin thinks of himself as friendly and talkative with the customers, eager to hang out at the bar with the waitstaff after closing, cool with being singled out as “Blanco.” But then of course he gets frazzled a lot, and walks on eggshells when Rosellen is near, and when he’s in the weeds he knows he can get bitchy with the busboys and dishwashers. He says, “I am not long for that job.”

  George says, “He keeps talking about my ass.”

  “He does that with me, too!”

  “Me and you and Blanco, we should all party together.”

  “Do you think,” Robin asks, “that he’s totally trying to engineer a three-way?”

  He can’t quite make out George’s reaction, but Robin feels himself thrust into a pornographic dream: the two of them, himself and George, bent over, Cesar naked and erect behind them, taking turns and barking out dirty names in Español.