An Exaltation of Larks

by Suanne Laqueur

  “Vamos a sobrepasarlo,” she said.

  The nudge of his cheek against her breast as he smiled. His lashes looked damp around his eyes. Her beating heart swelled beneath his head. Her breath lifted him up and down. She caressed his face, wondering how in hell she’d lived this long without touching him this way.

  My heart beats with yours. Wake up to hear my heart one day. This day. Every day.

  Sobrepasarlo.

  Civil Court of the City of Poughkeepsie

  County of Dutchess

  PETITION FOR INDIVIDUAL ADULT CHANGE OF NAME

  In the Matter of the Application of

  Alejandro Gabriel Eduardo Penda Vilaró

  for Leave to Change His Name to

  Alejandro Gabriel Eduardo Lark-Penda

  By this petition, I allege:

  I am twenty-eight (28) years old. I was born December 8, 1962

  at Clínica Santa María, Santiago, Chile

  My present residence is 14 Tulip Street, Guelisten, New York.

  I have not been convicted of a crime.

  I have not been adjudicated as bankrupt.

  There are no judgments or liens of record against me.

  There are no actions or proceedings pending to which I am a party.

  I have one (1) minor child: Deane Vilaró Lark-Penda.

  I have no obligations for child support.

  I have not made a previous application to change my name

  in this or any other Court.

  The reasons for this application is

  to join my surname with that of my wife, Valerie Meredith Lark.

  WHEREFORE, your petitioner respectfully requests that an order be granted permitting this change of name.

  Alejandro G.E. Penda Vilaró

  (Signature of petitioner)

  August 1, 1991

  2001

  New York City

  Hello,

  A friend directed me to your website. She’s used you before. Ugh, that sounds terrible. She’s hired you before. That also sounds terrible. I’m sorry, I’ve never done anything like this. But I’m newly divorced, I feel like shit (sorry) and I’d like to learn more about having a date with you. I can be reached at this email. Sorry this is so disjointed.

  Thank you.

  —Susan (not my real name)

  Jav’s smile was sad. Half his email inquiries started or ended with the woman apologizing.

  Hi Susan,

  I’m so glad you got in touch. I can tell you’re feeling bad, please don’t be sorry for anything. I’d be glad to meet you somewhere public for a cup of coffee. No fee, no strings, no pressure. A half-hour to see how your heart feels about it. If you do hire me, it’s simply for my time. What happens during that time is entirely up to you. No have to. Only want to. It goes where you wish and stops whenever you want. If it stops at coffee, I won’t be offended. If it stops after this email, I completely understand.

  Please hang in there. I know it hurts.

  Best,

  —Javier (my real name)

  Standard operational reply. Acknowledge the emotion in the inquiry. Make her feel comfortable. Lay out a simple, non-threatening plan, stressing how she’d be in control at all times. Give an exit strategy. Sign off by showing you’d listened.

  He hit send knowing he had her at least for coffee. Six inquiries usually turned into four meets. Four meets typically yielded two dates. Ah, here was one of his coffee clinches:

  Javier,

  Thanks for meeting me yesterday. I thought it over and I’d like to have a date. Are you available later this week, or early next? Dinner?

  Let me know.

  Eileen

  Hi Eileen,

  I’d love to. I’m free this Thursday or next Tuesday. Tell me which works and we’ll go from there. Really looking forward to it.

  —Javier

  At least one of his new dates would want a second, as the next email in his inbox confirmed:

  Hi Javier,

  I had such a good time last night. You made an old lady happy, ha ha. Seriously, I feel so good about everything today and wanted to let you know.

  I’d love to see you again soon.

  —Natasha

  Hi Natasha,

  I had an amazing time last night. The work you’re doing for your dissertation is incredible, and I admire how you’re reinventing yourself with this dream you’ve put off for so long. Not a lot of people have the courage to step out of the comfort zone the way you are. It’s a thrill to watch. And “old” my ass—other women can only wish they looked like you at 48.

  Me, I look forward to seeing you again soon, too. You know where to find me.

  —Javier

  He hit send and took a sip of coffee. Tell the lady what she wants to hear, guys, he thought. It’s not difficult.

  Sometimes he had to deliver bad news. Which wasn’t difficult either.

  Hey Trevor,

  Thanks for getting in touch. Of course I remember you—that Boston Marathon story was crazy. Unfortunately, I have to decline your offer as I only take female clients. I have a colleague you might like to meet, though. I’d be happy to pass along his info if you’re interested.

  Take care and good luck with the Iron Man. I bow down to that kind of feat.

  —J

  Rosemary,

  Great to hear from you. I enjoyed meeting you in Montauk and talking with you and Dan that day on the boat. I’m flattered you approached me and I’m so sorry to have to decline. I don’t work with couples—it’s my personal preference and nothing to do with the invitation. I have a contact I could put you in touch with. I know you’d enjoy meeting him, and vice-versa.

  I hope the summer’s going well. Congrats on your son graduating Syracuse. A fantastic accomplishment for both you and him.

  Cheers,

  —Javier

  He dealt with his regulars next—women who had their specific days and standing dates. His longtime, high-end clients, the women who wanted him for weekends or business trips, he handled by phone. They’d earned special attention.

  “Our flight is at ten,” Samantha said. “You’ll meet me at JFK?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “Will you wear the Armani?”

  “Is there anything else?”

  Her laugh caressed his ear. “Are you a member of the Mile-High Club?”

  “Yes,” he said. “And it’s highly overrated. Trust me, we don’t have to leave our seats to have a good time.”

  “You think?”

  “Don’t wear underwear.”

  “Do I ever?” she said.

  “No,” he said. “One of the many reasons I like you.”

  Sam’s voice became a skeptical purr. “Do you like me?”

  “Passionately.”

  “I’ll see you at the airport.”

  “Can’t wait.”

  Escort matters taken care of, he poured a second cup of coffee, switched computers and switched hats. No longer Javier Soto but J.G. deSoto.

  As the sex trade business moved online in the 1990s, Jav was quick to jump onboard. Most male escorts quit the business by their thirties but Jav had the looks, talent and reputation to stay even with his younger competition.

  Plus he liked it.

  He hired a designer named Russel Fitzroy to build a personal website. Russ had a brilliant eye for design but his copy was shit. Jav wrote it all himself, easily, and soon after, Russ began funneling jobs his way.

  Over time, Jav learned the ins and outs of web design and search engine optimization, but the task he loved best was getting clients to think about not what they did, but why they did it. And then making the website tell that story.

  “I don’t know how you do it, man,” Russ said. “But I love watching you in the flow.”

  “Flow?”

  “The perfect zone of challenge and passion. Say the word and I’ll draw up a partnership agreement.”

  “Nah. I dig you too much to get in bed with you.”


  “I’m not even touching that.”

  After lying dormant so many years, Jav was a tree in early spring, the creative sap high in his veins. Mining people’s stories made him want to go digging for his own. He started fictionalizing amusing anecdotes from his escorting career. Followed by some of the less amusing ones.

  When he was thirty-four, his longtime client Lucy, who had hired him to hold her through chemo and radiation, finally lost her battle with breast cancer. Full of genuine grief, he wrote a short story about his relationship with her and called it “Bald.”

  Gloria pressed him to submit it to the New Yorker, which he did, but under the pen name Gil Rafael. It was published in their fiction issue, which won them the National Magazine Award. “Bald” was then nominated for an O. Henry award but didn’t win—it missed third place, beaten by a little tale by Annie Proulx called “Brokeback Mountain.”

  Gloria was philosophical about it: “Between a cancer ordeal or gay cowboys, I’m afraid gay cowboys always win.”

  “Duly noted,” Jav said. “Next time I’ll write a dying ranch hand who turns tricks to pay for chemo.”

  When Universal Pictures called, Jav hung up, figuring Russ was fucking with him. They called back, used to such reactions, and asked if Jav had an agent.

  “Do I have an agent?” Jav said, deftly juggling Gloria on another line.

  “Have them call me.”

  “Isn’t that a conflict of interest?”

  “Javier, don’t argue when you have a producer on hold.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Universal Pictures bought the movie rights to “Bald” and Jav started publishing regular stories and articles in Esquire and GQ. Always as Gil Rafael. His experience as a sex worker was a bottomless well of material and it wouldn’t do for his best clients to see his name next to the copy.

  In 1999, “Bald” was published with five of Jav’s other short stories. He often paused at his work and glanced up at the small shelf over his desk. The slim book with its emerald-and-black cover nodded back at him: Client Privilege.

  He wrote as Gil Rafael. He escorted as Javier Soto. He did web design as J.G. deSoto. To his friends he was Jav, and he kept his gallery of buddies small and carefully-curated.

  Sometimes he met a guy he liked. A guy who made him stop and remember a rooftop night in Queens, and the feel of Nesto hard in his hand. Jav would think it over, play with the imagery, admit it might possibly be something he could consider wanting to hypothetically do again. And then he did nothing.

  Occasionally he met a woman he liked. Passionately. But these relationships never lasted long, possibly because he guarded his privacy so jealously, possibly because he was forthright in saying he’d never be sexually faithful.

  “Never?” Russ asked, one summer evening in 2001. He and Jav were taking the subway up to a bar in the Bronx.

  “I doubt it,” Jav said. “Not everyone’s wired for monogamy, you know.”

  Russ’s fingers drummed on the guitar case he had propped between his feet. “I don’t know anyone as down on love as you are.”

  “Not everyone’s as lucky in love as you.”

  Russ was a hopeless dope for his girlfriend, Tina, and she thought the sun rose and set in his dreadlocks. Jav got a kick out of their romance, while both of them regarded Jav’s escorting with a mixture of fascination and horror.

  “At the risk of sounding like Grace Slick,” Russ said, “don’t you want somebody to love?”

  “Plenty of people love me,” Jav said.

  “Name one.”

  “You.”

  At the top of the subway stairs, Russ checked the address he’d written down. “Bar should be along this way.”

  “How do you know this band again?”

  “It’s a buddy of mine from high school with his cousins. They invited me to jam.”

  Savanna-la-Mar served Jamaican fare and boasted an outdoor courtyard with a small wooden stage. The band was called Trueblood Cay and Jav dubbed their music techno reggae rap. Four guys—five with Russ sitting in—made up the ensemble, and Jav’s attention kept getting drawn to the drummer, a black man perhaps in his late twenties. Or early thirties. Fit arms in a white T-shirt coaxing magic out of his kit. His chin was tucked down toward one shoulder, his expression pulled intensely inward, listening to a message within the rhythm. Jav recognized a man in the zone. One with the flow, at the intersection of challenge and passion.

  The drummer’s head swiveled in Jav’s direction, ducked down again as if an entirely different message could be heard with the other ear.

  His face could launch ships, Jav thought.

  No.

  His face could sail ships.

  Jav’s fingers itched to write but he had neither pen nor paper, nor a place to sit and jot things down. As he stared over his beer bottle, pinning impressions and feeling into the bulletin board of his brain, his body moved in time to the music. Purposefully. Attaching gross motor movement to an idea helped him remember it.

  It was a mariner’s proud face, he thought. Set atop a neck stretched from long years looking out to sea, floating above shoulders broadened by rigging.

  Broadened by rigging, what the hell did that even mean? Jav tapped his foot, collecting ideas about arm strength and rope and rigging and boxing them up for later.

  His hair was shaved close from the temples down, a corona of tiny dreadlocks above, like the mane of a young lion. His long brows curved high above his eyes, the ends nearly touching prominent cheekbones…

  His veins crackled with a need to tell a story. It was a captain behind the drum kit. No. A pirate king. An island king.

  Then the drummer lifted his chin and smiled. And it wasn’t a king, but a prince. Not the captain, but perhaps the second-in-command. The beloved, trusted lieutenant. The navigator who steered past the shoals because he knew how to read the ocean. The sea was in his blood.

  He’s the heart of the band, Jav thought.

  The other members turned around frequently to look at the drummer, and his expression changed for each musician. Steady encouragement for Russ, who was a guest here: You’re doing great, good to have you. Relax. I’m enjoying this. For the second percussionist, the drummer’s face was wreathed in pure collaborative joy. His smile stretched to fill his face, white teeth flashing in his dark skin, eyes squinting, nose wrinkling. They traded riffs like jokes, building layers of rhythm like setting up for a punch line.

  Whenever the bassist turned back, the drummer gave a single, solemn nod, wearing a look of pure blood-love, reminding Jav the band was made up of cousins.

  The set list was mostly original work, interspersed with covers of Bob Marley and UB40. Reggae’s indolent heartbeat invited you to dance—to plant your feet in the earth and let your upper body sway like a sunflower. On the floor in front of the stage, the crowd shifted and morphed, shoulders and heads synchronized to the hypnotic offbeat.

  A lithe redhead emerged from the crush, her shoulders making slow figure eights. She held out a hand to Jav. Caught on the wave of the mariner’s drumbeat, he took it, let himself be swept up in the music and the atmosphere. The crowd swarmed lazily around him. Men moved in and out of his space, women moved through his hands. The sweet smell of pot hung like a cloud overhead. Fingers reached up, grabbing handfuls of the night.

  The band took a break and hopped down from the stage. Sweaty and grinning, they pressed through the people, shaking hands, hugging, laughing and pointing. A flustered shyness hid behind Jav’s back as Russ approached, an arm around the drummer.

  “Jav, baby,” Russ called. “What do you think?”

  “Fucking incredible, man.”

  “This is Philip Trueblood.”

  Trueblood, Jav thought.

  The drummer extended a hand, the wrist thick with beaded bracelets. “My friends call me Flip.”

  Trueblood. Jav saw it painted on the side of a ship. He heard men shout it as the ship came into port. He heard a woman sigh
it in the velvet dark of the ship’s cabin.

  Trueblood.

  “You enjoying yourself?” Flip said. He had a silver hoop in one ear.

  “I’m loving it,” Jav said.

  “What else do you love?”

  “Pardon?”

  Russ laughed. “I had a feeling you two would get along,” he said. “Jav never asks ‘What do you do?’ He asks, ‘Why do you do it?’ And Flip always asks, ‘What do you love?’”

  “It’s a better question,” Flip and Jav said at the same time. Then caught gazes and laughed.

  “I gotta take a leak,” Russ said. “Be right back.”

  “Known Russ long?” Flip asked, taking a pull of his beer. A dragonfly was tattooed on his forearm.

  “Couple years. You guys were in high school together?”

  “That’s right. And I dated his sister a while. That kind of thing.”

  Jav crossed his arms. Uncrossed them and put his hands in his pockets. Took them out and crossed his arms again. He was acting like a client on her first date, what the hell was wrong with him?

  “Are you named for the band or is the band named for you?” Jav asked.

  “We’re all Truebloods,” Flip said. “The bass player, he’s my brother. The other two are our cousins. Old Jamaican family. There’s a bump of coral reef off the coast of my father’s hometown, called Trueblood Cay.”

  Flip pointed out his brother, Talin, and the cousins, Simeon and Smoky. The Truebloods all lived in the same apartment building in the Wakefield section of the Bronx. Flip and Talin’s mother died a few years before and their father went back to Jamaica shortly afterward.

  “To Trueblood Cay?” Jav asked. The name felt good in his mouth and he wanted to write it down.

  Flip laughed. “It’s the size of the stage, you couldn’t pitch a tent on Trueblood Cay.”

  The letters painted on the side of a ship morphed into letters on a book cover.

  The Adventures of Trueblood Cay.

  No.

  The Voyages of Trueblood Cay.

  “What do you love?” Flip said.

  “Stories.”

  “Reading them? Writing? Listening? Telling?”

  “All of those. Careful what you say and do around me, I’ll put it in a book.”

  “Be sure to change my name.”