Between Men

by Richard Canning

  I had been teaching myself from a book I had found at the library, and had done well producing two large scarves. It was a perfect occupation for my hands while I listened to music, and it being May, I thought, I could have an entire collection of sweaters by next winter, if I could learn ribbing, buttonholes, and more complex stitches. For these complicated operations the book proved useless.

  When I emerged from the park onto Eighth Street, I heard someone call my name. It was Frank.

  “What are you doing out?” he asked, as if I were a naughty puppy.

  “Oh, nothing. I’m in a bit of a rush, though.”

  “Rand, this is Nori,” Frank said, indicating his companion, whom I had not noticed. I looked at this tall Asian man and for the first time in ages was immediately dumbfounded by attraction. I reached for his hand. I might have said hello. His face was solemn and gorgeous—narrow jaw, protruding bottom lip, serene gaze. He bowed slightly as we shook hands—that wonderful Japanese style of greeting, a subtle, respectful bow which I vastly prefer over the messy strength-play of handshaking.

  “Well, we won’t keep you,” Frank said, and they were gone.

  In class I tried to pay attention as the instructor demonstrated the slipped-rib stitch and the seed stitch for the entire class by holding her hands high and exaggeratedly digging the needles and tossing the yarn while her long white braid wagged in reply, but my mind kept returning to Nori. Was he Frank’s new boyfriend?

  At home, I forgot what I learned, returned to my simple knit-one-purl-one scarf and continued to wonder.

  Then, one night in mid-May, I descended into the corridors beneath the porn theater on Third Avenue where I went during my rare moments of boredom and desperation for physical contact. Cruising for sex is one of the most awkward occupations imaginable, and one that ensures failure to those whose appearance betrays this awkwardness. So I found myself moving through the smelly, uncomfortable maze trying to convey the ease of an evening constitutional until the awkwardness won out and I lodged myself in a corner. As usual, I was not bombarded by solicitous leers, but the few glances cast my way carried a hint of worship. Square jawed and shaved bald, I have the type of features that many consider unattractive, even sinister, and some consider strikingly handsome, with no one falling in between. I considered this a luxury.

  Five more minutes, I said to myself finally, shifting from foot to foot, then I’m going home.

  Then, at the far end of a corridor, Nori appeared. He meandered slowly up the hall in my direction and almost ran into a column. Maybe his eyes hadn’t yet adjusted to the dark. In any case, there was no discernible attempt in his tall, somewhat bent form to mask the awkwardness.

  He chose a spot against the wall perhaps ten feet from me and surveyed the hallway. He wore a smile of playful, perhaps drunken, embarrassment. With that smile he transcended all awkwardness and coolness and emerged simply beautiful. Everyone saw it; the men slowed as they passed.

  Here was what I came for. I decided I must approach him or leave. I launched myself from the wall, thinking I would leave, and instead walked over to stand beside him. When our eyes met and he recognized me, I greeted him. He nodded. “Do you remember me?” I asked.

  “You are Frank’s friend,” he said.

  “Yes, Rand.” I didn’t reach for his hand, but gave a slight bow.

  “Nori,” he said and returned my bow.

  “Yes, I remember,” I said. Then I stood waiting for something to say.

  “You want to go in?” he asked, indicating a doorway.

  “Yes!” I said, perhaps too eagerly. I was shocked; nothing in his demeanor had betrayed an attraction.

  I followed him in and we made fumbling attempts at sex that resulted in ejaculations but not much pleasure. Small dark closets can be entertaining for one person, I believe, but two’s a crowd. Nori was someone special; I wanted to hear his hesitant voice and feel his eyes on me as I undressed him.

  I asked for his number, he told it to me, and I immediately committed it to memory.

  In the cab home, I again wondered about the extent of Frank’s involvement with Nori. I had brought up the subject casually during a phone call the day after I ran into them on the street. Frank had said they weren’t dating, but offered no further information. I didn’t know if they had been or would be, or if there was any other reason I should consider Nori off-limits. If there was, I wouldn’t phone Nori. I would bury my attraction and quietly mourn. But if there wasn’t—and I tipped the cabbie extra in this hope—I would pursue. I hadn’t pursued anyone for a very long time.

  At Tenderwood Academy I loved Tony Cole, the soccer star a year my senior who I always assumed was too handsome and athletic to have eyes for a goon like me. But then one hot afternoon near the end of my sophomore year, he found me away from a group of swimmers (swimming legally, in bathing suits, under the sun) in a bushy nook of the pond. I had been emptying my lungs to sink and sit lotus-style in the mud. He invited me to race him out to the island and, aware that I’d lose, hiding my eagerness to do so, I accepted the challenge.

  Halfway there, it was obvious I’d never catch up. The race must have lost its thrill for Tony because he turned and swam back to me.

  “You win, Tony.”

  “You lose, Rand,” he said, not with pride or malice but with bone-dry boredom.

  Then, for some reason, he shook his wet head, rose in the water, exposing his shoulders and those hairs that fanned out from the center of his chest, held his breath, and plunged down. He swam beneath me, thrust his head between my legs, and clutched the meat of my thighs. Confused and delighted, I rose as he rose and was sent into a sideways dive that painfully clapped my body against the surface of the water. I resurfaced and we treaded water together, laughed and panted and waited for what would come next.

  Then some boys called Tony’s name and we swam reluctantly toward them.

  For the rest of that warm month, I wished again and again that he would come recklessly groping toward me (how little I shunned physical contact back then!), maybe on one of those nights of illegal swimming, naked, under the moon. He never did.

  The next year I loved my roommate, Richard Victor, who, as heir to a Pennsylvania smelting dynasty, might have been the richest boy of all.

  Nearly all the Tenderwood boys were rich. Some made embarrassing attempts at acting like real teenagers, others showed their shame: they wore Birkenstocks and Greenpeace T-shirts, although their fathers were executives at Exxon. Still others were aware and haughty. Richard was one of these. He would walk into a classroom like a house cat, never rushed even when he was five minutes late. Then, in his wonderfully deep, faggy voice he would make purposely obscure comments and leave it to the teacher to justify them to the text because—Richard’s arched brows seemed to suggest—he (Richard) was paying him (teacher) to do so.

  One evening in October Richard pulled his trunk out from under his bed, dug under his winter sweaters, and pulled out a small collection of gay porno magazines—gifts, he explained, from his uncle in San Francisco. Although this was in, what . . . 1987? these men were from the seventies—hairy chested, thick mustached, their big, lolling cocks basted with baby oil. San Franciscans, I remember thinking. Ten o’clock came, lights out, but we pulled out our flashlights and continued flipping the pages frantically until it was too much for us and our trembling hands abandoned scenes of firemen fucking and redassed leathermen receiving spankings to find each other.

  That year we became something like boyfriends. But, more than Richard, more than anyone else at Tenderwood Academy, I loved Mr. Drake.

  Mr. Drake. That name conveys the longing, the schoolboy crush that colored one little corner of our relationship (but I loved that corner as I did every part of what we had) more than the name I called him in private—Will. Mr. Drake was an artist in residence at Tenderwood, a painter. Mr. Drake’s residency began after winter recess my junior year and ended in November of my senior year.

  “He lo
oks like a young Montgomery Clift!” I said to Richard Victor after the assembly when Mr. Drake was introduced.

  “Montgomery Clift after the accident, more like,” answered the jealous Richard.

  Part of Mr. Drake’s residency requirement was that he hold informal hourlong painting lessons in the late afternoons while most boys were playing sports. I swallowed my pride, put aside my fear, and started attending every lesson he taught.

  I was not then, never had been before, and never will be an artist. Although I love art, music, poetry, etc., I haven’t the slightest interest in producing the stuff. The paintings I made were ugly. I would hide them, sneak them back to my room, look at them one more time just to feel the disgust, then destroy them. You can imagine the humiliation of standing at an easel during an outdoor class with the man for whom I felt an all-consuming passion looking over my shoulder, giving me suggestions on how to capture landscape in watercolor. I would pretend to take the suggestions, pretend to care about the hateful thing, just in the hope that he might, in his instruction, lay his warm hand on my shoulder.

  It became too painful to attend the lessons. I abruptly quit, and two days later slid a note under the door of Mr. Drake’s apartment. “Mr. Drake,” I told him, “I am completely blissfully painfully in love with you. I cannot bear to take your lessons anymore. I must know if you love me, too. Late tonight, I’m going to come here and tap on your door three times. I can’t tell you what time it will be, as that depends on when I can sneak out of my dormitory. If you love me, open the door.” (I think I was reading Jane Austen at the time.)

  So late that night, I snuck across the wet lawn and up the darkened back stairwell to stand trembling before his door. I gave three light, measured taps, and almost immediately he pulled me in.

  “Did anyone see you?” he whispered hoarsely.

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?” He thrust his head out the door to check the hall, then closed and locked it.

  Although I was trembling, I was conscious of exuding a confidence, the confidence that comes with true love, and this began to infect Mr. Drake’s troubled expression. We both broke into a laughter of disbelief and joy. Then he kissed me and held me tight and we laughed again. Then he made love to me in an intense, beseeching way that I had never experienced. We were silent, both out of necessity and in order to witness more clearly the dramatic arc of the act. Then we lay naked together and Mr. Drake told me to return to my dormitory, which I did, happier than I’d ever been before or have been since.

  I was soon in the middle of an affair with the resident artist. We actually spent relatively few nights together, he was so afraid we’d be caught. But those blissful nights, the recollection of whose every detail stole the sleep from subsequent nights, became my one and only objective. My studies, which were never a priority, were jettisoned completely in favor of imagining our next night together, and all those nights to come when we would be free from Tenderwood.

  Needless to say, I never went to his lessons again. It was imperative that we seem completely unaware of each other. I watched him teaching from the woods, though, just as I watched him eating in the mess hall at the long table with the other instructors, whose drabness so contrasted with his brilliance it was hard to imagine them the same species, much less the same occupation. He shouldn’t eat with them! was my angry and somewhat deranged conclusion. He should eat only with me, out of doors, on hillsides. But, of course, that was impossible. I felt that conflicted pride—he was beautiful, he was mine, but no one knew it.

  No one except Richard, and this terrified Mr. Drake. But how could I keep him from knowing? He was my roommate! I continued to screw Richard, just to keep him from getting too jealous and snitching.

  Mr. Drake asked me if I thought the other instructors suspected anything. I told him I didn’t, and to further ease his mind I related rumors and truths of other faculty-student contact I had heard over the years. These stories, like every other word we had spoken since our last art lesson, were whispered. Nothing calmed his fears, though, and he broke it off. I cried, left him crazy letters, tossed in my sleep. His mood darkened and he left his post a month early.

  Was it during this period of longing, hopelessly, for Mr. Drake that my sleep became so torturous and I flailed my arms so violently that I finally devised my first system of self-restraint? I took a towel, tied the ends, and laid it across my bed. Then I lay down on it and put my hands through the loops created on either side, and felt somehow comforted. Was that the first time? That would make sense. And I try to make sense.

  Unlike most people, I turned from a child into a man in a matter of weeks. I graduated and, four days later, turned eighteen and received my first check from my trust fund. I defied my parents’ command to go to Dartmouth, where I had been accepted (it seemed too much another Tenderwood), and moved to New York City. On my one-month anniversary of living there, I decided it was time. After three brief conversations with other William Drakes in Manhattan, his unmistakable voice answered. To this day, I still remember the phone number.

  “Hello?”

  “Will? It’s Rand. I’m here in New York.”

  “Rand? Where are you?”

  “I’m here. I live here now.”

  There was a long pause, then three sentences: “I can’t talk. I’m not alone. Don’t call here.” I stood frozen, unable to put down the phone. Nine words in three sentences, the last I would ever hear him speak: statement, statement, command; whispered, of course.

  I wandered New York for some time chilled to the bone, then slowly embarked on the series of disappointments adults call “dating.” Where were all the men I had assumed would be waiting in every café and gay bar? (I was never denied entrance to any bar, gay or otherwise, having always seemed older than my years.) I started to discover that in this city that seemed to be so crowded, one still had to go out in search of people. And in this adult market the currency was no longer just kisses and body fluids; safety, diversion, status, the future—things such as these were on the block, and every transaction left me feeling either guiltily indebted or, more often, robbed.

  The next time I saw Frank, I told him. “Remember that guy Nori you introduced me to?” I said. “I met him again.”

  “Yeah? Where?” he said.

  “At that porn theater on Third Avenue.”

  “I didn’t know you went to porn theaters.” Again, the naughty-puppy treatment.

  “Well,” I continued, “we fooled around there at the theater, and he gave me his number. I want to call him, but I thought I should ask you first. Do you mind? You said you weren’t seeing him, right?”

  For a moment it was as if Frank had turned to stone. His face drained of color and I could see the gin blossoms at the tip of his nose. Then he shook it off.

  “Um, sure, Rand. Do whatever you want.”

  “You seem unsure,” I said.

  “No, it’s fine. Do what you want.”

  It was clear to me that something very sad had passed between Frank and Nori, and it was only my own selfish desire that kept me from investigating it further. I asked no more questions, and called Nori. We had a short, friendly conversation. It seemed he was busy working on a project (he was in civil engineering at NYU) but would complete it and present it the following Thursday, which happened to be the eve of a three-day weekend. He suggested we get together then, and I was flattered that he postponed our meeting until a time of leisure.

  Then it very impetuously and prematurely occurred to me to invite Nori on a weekend road trip to Montreal.

  I had had a lovely time there with Connie a year and a half before. We had spent the days together exploring the city, then after dinner our paths would part—Connie’s to theaters and lesbian bars, mine to gay bars, jazz clubs, and saunas. The city was chilly and magical, populated with beautiful, scrawny, dark-eyed, French-speaking men. Ever since, I had thought that if I ever found a worthwhile boyfriend, I would take him there.

  Not t
hat I presumed to consider Nori even a proto-boyfriend, but he was certainly worthwhile, and at this moment in life when I had decided that a companion would not distract me from my search, that was enough.

  I arranged to meet him for breakfast Friday morning, explaining that I was going to leave town. I reserved a car and hotel rooms with king-size beds, making sure everything could be canceled with minimal penalties.

  Over breakfast, Nori proved to be as bright and charming as I had sensed, and at a perfect moment near the end he asked, “You are leaving town? Where are you going?”

  “Well,” I said, “I’m going to Montreal, just for a relaxing weekend. Have you ever been there?”

  “No, but people say it is nice.”

  “Yes, it’s very nice. I like it very much. Would you like to come with me?” I was sure the answer would be no, in which case I would politely finish breakfast, then flee, never to call him again.

  “Um,” said Nori, cocking his head and looking down at the corner of his place mat, which his fingers were repeatedly dog-earing and smoothing, “this is so nice. But I do not have lots of money, so I cannot.”

  “Oh—well, everything’s paid for already—the hotels and things,” I said. “I mean, I’m going with or without company. So it wouldn’t take any money really, I mean. Things are cheap there.”

  “You don’t mind?” he said tentatively.

  “Oh, no, in fact I’d really love the company.” S-A-Y Y-E-S, said my hand under the table.

  “All right,” Nori said, and he laughed.

  He told me it would take just an hour for him to pack. I gave him my address and told him to meet me as soon as he was ready.

  Again, I was surprised at his willingness, and wondered if I should consider it a warning sign. But, I said to myself, a sign warning what?