Between Men

by Richard Canning

  Frankie walked up the staircase between them. Expect nothing, he told himself, even as he became aroused. This is a tour of the house. He’s a Realtor, after all. Maybe they’re selling the place. But Pepper led them into the master bedroom, where she turned around and smiled and said to him, “If you’re not comfortable with this, that’s OK. You just tell us. But I thought I’d take off my clothes now.”

  Frankie felt Clark’s hand rest on his shoulder. “Are you selling your house?”

  “God, no,” Clark said. “We love it here.”

  “Do you mind if I take off my clothes?” Pepper asked.

  “No.”

  “Do you want to take off yours?” She asked it in a polite way that really did seem to leave the matter open.

  “OK,” Frankie said.

  “How about you, Clark?”

  “Why not,” Clark said, releasing Frankie’s shoulder. He began to unbutton his shirt.

  They slowly got naked without speaking. Frankie’s hard-on was sticking straight up and flat against his belly as he stood in the middle of the room, wondering what would happen next. He liked Pepper’s body—but as a scientific wonder: the movement of her breasts as she bent to pull back the bedspread; the patch of hair, indented, in the absence of a dick. He looked over at Clark, who had pulled down his briefs and whose dick was half as long as the balls that sagged beneath it. Clark walked over to a leather chair in a corner of the room and sat down.

  “You look nice,” Pepper told Frankie. “Do you want to lie down here with me?”

  “What about Clark?” Frankie asked.

  “I’ll be in this chair,” Clark said.

  Frankie started to walk toward him.

  “No, no,” Pepper said. “Come lie down with me.”

  “But—” Frankie began.

  “Go on, bud,” Clark said. He put his hand on his dick and started tugging.

  Frankie turned and looked at Pepper. She’d climbed onto the bed and was stretched out flat on her back, with her hand extended toward him. “It’s OK,” she said. “This is what we do. Clark likes to watch.”

  “Pretend I’m not here,” Clark said.

  Frankie felt a little dizzy—from the beer, maybe. “I can’t . . . touch you?”

  “Not if I’m not here,” Clark said.

  “But you are here.”

  “I’m not here. You’re doing this, just you and her, and I’m not even in the room.”

  “It’s going to feel so horny to have you lying here with me,” Pepper said.

  Frankie’s feet felt glued to the carpet. He glanced down and saw his hard-on begin to flag.

  “Get up on that bed,” Clark ordered.

  After several long moments of what was starting to feel to Frankie like a standoff, Pepper pushed up onto her elbows and looked at him and asked, “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” Frankie lied.

  “Do you not want to do this?”

  “It’s just that . . . I thought ...”

  Pepper made a little sound as the air left her lungs. “I think I get it,” she said. “You don’t swing but one way, do you?”

  “Right,” Frankie said, relieved.

  “And that’s not my way, is it?”

  “Not really, no.”

  Clark peered at the two of them. “What are you two talking about?”

  “He doesn’t swing my way, Clark.”

  “Sure he does.”

  “I like boys,” Frankie said. “Guys, I mean. Men.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  Pepper folded her arms over her breasts and said, “Jesus, Clark, can’t you do anything right?”

  “How was I supposed to know that?” Clark asked. His hand had stopped pulling and his fingers had opened; his dick looked like a newborn hamster sleeping on his palm.

  “You’re such a screwup,” Pepper snapped. She got out of bed and grabbed her panties and shirt from the floor. “I don’t know why I expect any different.”

  “It’s not my fault if he’s gay,” Clark said.

  Pepper pulled on her panties and sat back down on the bed, buttoning her shirt. “Sweetheart,” she told Frankie, “you swing any way you want. That’s just fine. I’m really sorry about the misunderstanding.” She cut her eyes over to her husband again and said again, “Jesus, Clark.”

  “I’m supposed to be a mind reader now? If he’s a closet case, that’s his problem.”

  “I’m not . . . in the closet,” Frankie said.

  “Well, you could have told me that.”

  “He doesn’t have to tell you,” Pepper said. “You could . . . intuit. You know? You could learn for once in your life how to gauge people. Maybe you’d get somewhere.” She turned to Frankie. “Get dressed, sweetheart. And please don’t tell anyone about this.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean, ‘get somewhere’?” Clark asked.

  “In your marriage,” Pepper told him. “In your life.”

  “I’m somewhere,” Clark protested.

  “No, you’re not. You’re not even here, remember?” She rolled her eyes.

  Clark shifted his gaze from Pepper to Frankie and just stared at him for a moment, as if trying to make sense of him. “Guess it’s time for you to go, bud,” he said.

  “I didn’t mean to—”

  Clark cut him off: “No big deal.”

  “Well, I’m . . . I’m sorry.”

  “There’s nothing to be sorry about,” Clark all but snapped. “It’s just time for you to go. The evening’s over.”

  Frankie gathered his clothes from the floor and carried them out to the hall. He dressed there, listening as Pepper chastised Clark some more and Clark told her to shut up. She didn’t, and they continued to argue as Frankie descended the stairs.

  On his way out of the house, he paused in the dining room.

  “There’s no end to the sickness and depravity of the human spirit,” Diana said upon hearing the story before lunch the following Monday, on the bench in the commons. “Maybe that’s the good news.”

  “I guess,” Frankie said.

  “I wonder if people like that would go for a chubby girl like me.”

  “He’s not nice. She is, but not him. You think he’ll come after me?” He had his backpack open on the ground between his sneakers and was holding the moon rock, turning it in his hands.

  Diana gazed at the rock. “Did you ever give him your phone number?”

  “No.”

  “Does he know where you live?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll bet it’s fake. Aldrin probably thought Evans was a big loser and had a laugh with his buddies, handing over a chunk of concrete. Anyway, you’re a minor and they tried to have sex with you. And they gave you alcohol. You could go public and expose them as extreme and dangerous molesters.”

  “I don’t feel molested.”

  “I know, but it means you get to keep the rock.”

  Frankie brought the rock up to his nose and sniffed it. It smelled like gunpowder. He held the rock an inch from his eye and peered at its knobby surface.

  “He actually told you to pretend he wasn’t there?”

  “That’s what he said. ‘Pretend I’m not here.’”

  “I’ll probably be telling somebody that, one day.”

  Frankie thought about it. “I’ll probably be telling them the opposite.”

  “Sickness,” Diana said. “Depravity.” She gazed out over the commons and sighed. “I’m starving. Let’s eat.”

  A Joint and a Nice Piece of Ass

  Mack Friedman

  I met Jake when he was sixteen, at a volunteer recognition dinner hosted by an HIV service unit I worked for, the Central Region AIDS Project. I didn’t recognize anyone. The dinners (like the organization itself) were parodies of function, marked as they were by inedible catering, incoherent speakers, and the absurd resurfacing of volunteers who hadn’t done anything for the place in years. This annual commingling always made me think of parties thrown b
y high-ranking Nazis to honor the rank and file, but maybe I’d just talked to one too many menopausal “buddies” who loved their collies, hated their husbands, and aspired to appear philanthropic with their time. The cream of the crop hosted AIDS garden parties that made the local “Seen” column every spring. I called these well-intentioned women the Opportunistic Infections: for them, the fun didn’t start until one of their buddies was losing an eye. The theme of this particular dinner was “I Volunteer Because People Are Still Dying.” People were still dying? Well, glory be, and there before the grace of God were we.

  My friend Natty the fund-raiser (whose days at our agency were numbered: he was sane) came up, said “Hi.” We filled plastic glasses with Chardonnay and transformed cheap hors d’oeuvres into dinner. No sooner had I slipped some sweaty Swiss onto Ritz Bits than a short, pale, and winsome lad materialized by Natty’s side. I’d seen this kid once at work the week before; we’d traded a quick molten stare from opposite sides of the bulletproof glass that had been installed in the receptionist’s office as soon as the board realized African Americans were infected, too. I elbowed Natty and he introduced us. “Meet Jake,” he told me. “Jake’s been doing some volunteering for Development.” I asked Jake what college he went to. He laughed nervously and said he was a high school junior. As I debated whether to ply him with wine from a cardboard box, our volunteer coordinator, Carnie, who resembled an oversize beach ball with a tassel of deep purple hair, harrumphed, and Jake and Natty ambled to the last two chairs.

  Carnie wasted no time starting a call-and-response: “Why are we here?” she barked. “Because people are still dying!” I couldn’t sit and couldn’t talk and wasn’t about to listen to that crap, so instead I skipped out the door into the cold rain and rode my rusty bike over God’s green hills where people were still dying, home.

  Ever since, my meetings with Jake have always been rendezvous; and that very word, even in this most mundane place, a steely river-front mill town plopped down in a sooty valley, infused an exotic extract into our earliest and most banal meetings. Our next conversation occurred at the Project, in front of several witnesses. Wandering around after testing clinic rounds, I noticed Jake making sex packets (two condoms and a lubricant, stuffed into a dime bag) in the library with some girls his age. He told me of an upcoming Boston trip, and I gave him my friend Emilia’s number there. Carnie waddled in and surveyed us all balefully, no doubt confused that her volunteers were actually doing something besides making a hash of confidentiality law. I asked the room if anyone would be driving to my neighborhood later, I’d popped a flat and lost my patch kit.

  I waited a beat and began to leave. Jake piped up, stuttered, cracked, said he could give me a ride, and blushed blood red. I didn’t even let him drop me off at home, only blocks away so he wouldn’t get lost or come stalk me. The next day I was called in for a special session convened by the board of directors. They were a wizened bunch of local television personalities and bathhouse owners who’d once spent six months coming up with a mellifluous alternative to “Center City HIV Taskforce” and had fixed on something with the acronym CRAP. “He’s sixteen,” noted the corporate, gray, happily married executive director. “We might have to investigate this.” I told them to go ahead, ’cuz I had more important things to concentrate on. After all, people were still dying. They decided it was better not to fuck with Jake. (His dad, it turned out, was a lawyer.) That afternoon Jake sent an e-mail to my work account about his favorite bands. I can’t remember what they were or how he got the address. It was the only thing he sent me that I ever lost.

  Astrid had been my girlfriend and boyfriend for the last sixteen months. (She liked to strap it on—she named her strap-on Ralph—but when I suck cock I like a hole in the head.) That night I confessed: I was in love with someone else. Even though I couldn’t have him it wouldn’t be right to keep seeing her. She’d been idly explaining how easy it would be to pierce my scrotum when I broke the news, and she was sharp and steady about the whole thing. She talked me down, and we kept seeing each other, but it was never the same after Jake. Or only once: together in the fall at a goat farm just out of town, in a rickety old bed-and-breakfast attic reading Warhol’s diaries, cedar joints squeaking, knotted boards squealing, kids bleating out on the lawn. Fucking so hard and so true . . . and I’d seen Jake clandestinely when his summer internship ended. He and I had walked around a local campus on a warm late August night and had coffee. Mostly he’d talked, about everything he liked or didn’t. Yes to opera, track stars, capri pants, and his dad. No on homework, the Central Region AIDS Project, his mom. Still forming an opinion about guys, coming out, his younger brother, Judaism, and why his parents divorced. On a bridge over the hollow, I lifted my shirt to wipe my nose, and Jacob stopped chattering for an entire minute. I wondered what it would take for him to shut up for an hour, and knew someday I had to find out.

  Just being in Jake’s presence changed this town for me—removing the toxins, turning its rivers from sludge into silt. In the fall, when he was seventeen, he drove me back from a needle-exchange retreat. Astrid was staying the weekend, but she had gone to the lake with her best friend, a glorious sprite of a girl. I invited him in, and my kitchen seemed suddenly alien to me. Was this really my folks’ old table, its porcelain so white, with edges so deep blue? Was the linoleum really this filthy? Was the cabinet really sloping off the wall? Typically I found my rented place large and drafty, but on this cool afternoon, with the light fading and the mulberries drooping against the window in the latest chill, it was confined and almost too warm. Jake held out a UCLA brochure, but turned it toward himself so that I had to stand behind him in order to read it. I wanted to reach out for comfort. Touch his shoulder. Palm his flat ass. Instead, I convinced myself I was home, here in this land of restraint.

  I hated everything about these decisions. Jake wasn’t saying a word. Until I was sure he’d turned eighteen, I avoided every subsequent meeting. Nothing I was doing was right. Astrid moved in on Thanksgiving and we broke up on Christmas Day. I was taking a crap. She came in to brush her teeth.

  “I’m leaving you for a younger man,” she grinned, twirling her labret with her tongue. “Isn’t that ironic?” She pinched her nostrils and frothed through the hole in her chin.

  She’d met him at the teen drug rehab center she worked for. “Do you see an ethical problem here?” I asked her, wiping gingerly; Ralph had played rough the night before, and I wasn’t sure she knew.

  “Fuck you,” she spat into the sink. “He’s sixteen. A joint and a nice piece of ass will keep him off crack any day of the week.” I flushed, conceding the point, and walked into the bedroom to roll her a few. What the hell, it was for a good cause.

  In the new spring, on his birthday, I wrote Jake a message. “I want what we started to happen.” He wrote back asking, “What did you think the likelihood was that I would respond?” You cocky little shit, I felt like saying. Some things you just know all along.

  After the next overdose-prevention brainstorming session we went out for an Italian ice (mango for him, lemon for me) and I led him down a hill near a subterranean park. The blackberry bushes welcomed us, thorny strangers you passed in the night on the way home from work now smiling and saying hello, come inside, pick me, take a bite.

  “Where are you taking me?” he asked, vibrating slightly, then trying to sound mature and controlled.

  “Into the cemetery.”

  I stopped my hand from reaching out to his. But when we got to a stone bench I needed to touch him. I moved to kiss him on the cheek and he turned his lips to mine. The dogs and their owners were not in this plane and they left us alone. He pleaded with me to come over again. I begged off. I wanted to savor the expectation. I wanted our plane to be delayed so I could hang around the airport and know that I was leaving, really know it: not yet, so soon.

  He slipped a phone from his shorts and flipped it open. “Hey, Dad,” he said. “Yeah. I’m coming home soon. I’m w
ith Becky. Yeah, on her houseboat. . . . I’ll be back before that. OK. Bye.”

  “Why did you lie to him?” I asked, and a torpid southern breeze lazed through the graves.

  “My dad? I don’t know. He just wanted to know I was OK. I really didn’t feel like having a conversation.”

  We set a date for the weekend at the double iron gates.

  Later, he canceled by phone—“What if I fall in love with you?” he asked, panicked, or joking.

  “What if I want you to fall in love with me?”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” he said. “Shit, who the hell is calling me? I’ll call you back,” he said, and didn’t.

  And that, I thought, was it: another brilliant mistake, another little death. A gaggle of boys his age started testing positive in my clinic, and I spent the fall giving them their hard-earned results and riding fast through the cemetery, trying to lift love from the dead with the wind from my spokes like the dust I raised from the paths.

  There is a certain ritual to taking blood. Lift the arm. Place the latex tourniquet under the triceps, wrap it below itself in a quarter knot. Pal-pate the inner elbow, feeling for the antecubital vein, a small straight section of coursing plumpness. Wipe a circle on the skin with an alcohol swab, snap on gloves, wave the area dry. Screw the butterfly needle to a small plastic barrel, which has its own needle inside to puncture the rubbery red tube top. Then say something like, “You’re going to feel a stick,” or, “Small pinch now,” or, if I really don’t like the client, “Big prick here.” Then a forty-five-degree angle, a quick smooth stroke, the red flush vacuuming into the tubule, and we’re in. Jam the tube into the barrel’s needle and listen to the miniature waterfall splashing glass walls.

  You can trace this ritual to the antiquarian practice of bloodletting, venous punctures made by clerics to let sickness out of the body. The condition of my modern subjects was just as purgatorial. The invasion and blood loss was a symbol of their flaw; the blood released symbolized the expurgation of this failure; the bottling of the blood alluded to the worldly containment of such sin. Vial, vile, evil. My subjects knew I held evil in my hand.