The House of Impossible Beauties

by Joseph Cassara

  Heidi busted out a laugh and stuck out a hand to play with Robert’s earlobe. Robert frowned and stared at his drink.

  “You’re a shady cunt, Paul,” Robert said and Juanito was scandalized that Robert was taking such a tone with the man who employed him. “I’ll get you back one day. When you least expect it.”

  “I somehow doubt that, Robert,” Paul said. “But it’s cute of you to think so.” He blew Robert an air-kiss.

  “Well if you’re gonna be so nasty to me,” Robert said, “can you at least bring Tina out to play to ease the salt wounds?”

  Paul and Heidi laughed.

  “Who the hell is Tina?” Juanito said.

  Everyone laughed again, pero it wasn’t no joke.

  “You really want me to get Tina?” Paul said. Juanito stared at a fly that was buzzing up near the ceiling. He wanted to cup it in his hands and bring it outside so it could fly away.

  Heidi poured a round of shots and Paul came back with the pipe and said, “Are we really about to do shots of gin, honey?”

  “If that’s all you’ve got,” Heidi said, “then yes. Times is dire, boo-boo.”

  They all knocked their heads back and shot the gin. Juanito had to finish his in two swallows even though his shot glass wasn’t that full. He could feel the pine taste opening up his sinuses.

  “I really shouldn’t,” Heidi said, taking the glass pipe. “But you don’t have to ask me twice.”

  “That a girl,” Robert said, slow-clapping like a fem queen at a golf course. “Pass it over here.” He lit the lighter and held it under the end of the glass, which was shaped like a little ball. It was meth, por supuesto. Juanito’s inability to know a slang word when he heard it made him feel like, duh. Tina—like who the fuck did he think was gonna show up? Tina fucking Turner? (As if.) Ay, Dios mío—he wanted to smack himself silly. He wanted to be at home with Daniel, curled in a ball with Daniel’s arm over his body. He wanted to sleep.

  Robert twirled the flame under the glass and sucked the smoke out like a little boy sipping the last drops from a juice cuppie. It sounded like it was bubbling. When Robert was done, he held out the pipe for Juanito to take hold. “No,” Juanito said. Not after Venus. What would Angel say? “I can’t,” he told Robert.

  Robert shrugged and gave him a look like he was a dumbass for passing up what was free. Pero Juanito didn’t care. He didn’t want none of it, free or otherwise.

  “Are you sure, Juanito?” Paul said. “My treat.”

  Juanito got up from the sofa and wiped his hands on his pants to get the sweat off. He told them he was gonna go to the bodega to get M&M’s. As soon as it came out of his mouth, he wanted to take it all back in. M&M’s? Was he fucking joking? They would see right through the lie.

  “God,” Heidi said. She held the smoke in her lungs and then coughed it out. “The thought of food right now makes me want to projectile vomit.”

  Robert rolled his eyes, but Juanito could tell Robert wasn’t interested in anything Juanito was gonna say or do. Robert was just a young case of the benditos who wanted his damn hands on that pipe. Juanito watched as Robert tapped his thumb all frantic against the side of his leg. Robert was eyeing the pipe razor sharp. Paul threw him a key and said, “Don’t get lost on your way back.”

  * * *

  He didn’t want M&M’s. He didn’t want anything to eat, for that matter. He had wanted to bust out of that apartment to get home, but now he had the key. He would have to go back or Paul would be pissed, and a pissed Paul was not what Juanito needed at the moment. Not until he got his raise, saved some money, and had that sofa.

  Fuck, he thought as he walked to the bodega on the corner of Eighth Avenue. The sun was already up and people were doing their morning treks to work. It reminded him of the mornings at the piers, after Daniel and he had been walking all night, bending down to look in car windows to see if the money would flow. They’d finish just about the time when people were going to work—not because they wanted to, but because not nobody was looking to buy a piece of culo at nine in the fucking morning. Johns were sucio motherfuckers, but they also had jobs and families and lives to lead.

  Daniel used to take him to the diner on Tenth Avenue and they’d order breakfast before heading back to the Bronx. Eggs with white toast smeared with mantequilla that looked so yellow, it had to be fake. The waitress would slam the plates down as if her presence were just a favor, and if they had a problem with her attitude, they could go fuck themselves.

  Now, he stood there at the counter of the bodega and decided he wanted a coffee.

  “You want sugar, sugar?” the man asked with a smirk. The man was feo in a sad way, Juanito thought. He imagined him as the type of guy whose bathroom was covered in wet pelitos and grime. Juanito envisioned a three-story walk-up with no windows and moldy wallpaper. He wasn’t judging. It just made him feel sad.

  “Not today,” Juanito said. “No milk, no sugar.”

  “You sure?”

  “Positive,” Juanito said. “Just black.”

  Maybe a couple of years ago he would’ve gone to the bodega’s backroom and sucked the poor dude off for a twenty and the thrill of it. Maybe he would’ve tried that pipe and his face would flush red just like Heidi’s and Robert’s and Paul’s and he’d ramble on and on about whatever the fuck came to mind. But not today. Not this year. He was in love, damn it. He deserved better than that fucked-up shit.

  * * *

  “I came back to give you the key,” Juanito said, hovering near the door.

  Paul was walking around the sala, rearranging the picture frames he had on all the side tables, like they were girasoles that couldn’t bend toward the sunlight on their own. “I thought you bounced out for good,” Paul said. Heidi and Robert had already left. In the one frame Paul was holding onto, there was a woman in a graduation cap. Her smile was ear to ear. “No M&M’s?” Paul said.

  “I changed my mind,” Juanito said. He held up the coffee cup higher as proof. “Why’d they leave already?”

  Paul said that Robert had a studio class to go to in the morning. “I can’t even fathom it,” Paul said. “I would just explode if I had to go to a class like that at nine with my mind jumping around like this.”

  And Heidi? Paul said he didn’t know. She left when Robert left. “Maybe they’re fucking,” Paul said.

  “Ay, por favor,” Juanito said. “Robert is gay.”

  “And Elton John was married,” Paul said, “to a woman, no less.” He moved the stained-glass Tiffany lamp from one side table to la otra. Juanito loved the tiny purple circles on the lamp. They looked like grapes crowned in the surrounding yellow glass bits.

  Paul moved the lamp back to the original table but he stared back at the other table, as if maybe that was actually where it belonged. “Fuck, I’m just not sure what feels right,” Paul said. “The lamp clearly needs to feel like it’s on the right table. I just need to figure out which one is the right table.”

  “I don’t know,” Juanito said. “But also, back to that other point. Elton John is gay. And Robert is also gay, so—”

  “Okay, you’re right. They’re probably not fucking,” Paul said. “I’ve already moved on from that theory.”

  “Right,” Juanito said. “I should maybe go home now.”

  “Oh, don’t go yet.” Paul was staring at the lamp as if it had grown a set of tetas. “Where do you think it belongs, kid?”

  Juanito sighed. He tried to control his face so that he didn’t give a side-eye or a glare. “Does it really matter?” he said.

  “Of course it fucking matters,” Paul said. “I need the feng shui to be in balance.”

  “The what?”

  “Feng shui. Ever hear of it?” Paul said. “I swear, Juanito. Sometimes you’re just like a child.”

  Juanito took a sip of coffee and it burned the back of his throat. He regretted not getting the sugar. The flavor was too damn amargo for his liking. But ordering coffee black was in the same field as ordering
a drink on the rocks in his mind. He didn’t like either, but the sound of the order sounded classy and maduro.

  “Do you think I should move the sofa so it’s facing that wall?” Paul said. “I should really move it so it’s facing the wall. Shouldn’t I? I just don’t know.”

  “You know, Paul,” he said. “I fucking hate it when you call me a kid. I’m not some dumbass kid. I’m nineteen, so talk to me like I’m a grown-ass adult.”

  Paul took his hands off the lamp and looked at Juanito’s face. His eyes moved down to Juanito’s chest, and Juanito did nothing but stare back at Paul, who was either chewing a piece of gum or just moving his tongue around his mouth like a spin cycle. It dawned on him: Paul was still really, really high.

  “But you are a kid,” Paul said. “Look at me, I’m forty-two. Okay, fuck. I’m forty-six. But that’s not the point. The point is that everyone is a damn kid to me. You and Robert are both children.”

  Daaamn. He had just lumped him in the same category as Robert. Ay, Dios mío, this man was tripping balls. Could he even imagine. There he was, forty-six years old, loaded on Tina, dressed in a kimono with a lamp in his hand at god knows what hour. “What about Heidi?” Juanito said.

  “Oh, she’s a woman,” Paul said, shooing his hand in the air. “She’s irrelevant.” Paul laughed, but Juanito walked into the cocina to dump out the coffee. He didn’t want it anymore. He just wanted to go home.

  “I feel younger when I’m around you,” he heard Paul say from the other room. Juanito lifted his foot off the basura and the metal lid clanged down on the empty garbage.

  “I really need to get home,” Juanito said as he walked back into the sala. “Daniel’s probably up and wondering where I am.”

  Paul was lighting the pipe again. He squinted as he held the smoke in. Head back, he blew the smoke up toward the ceiling. “You’re gonna tell me that you aren’t a kid, but you won’t even try some Tina, like you’re part of some gym assembly, antidrug campaign?”

  “Ouch, Paul,” Juanito said. “Would you fucking quit it.”

  Paul dropped the pipe down on the carpet and walked over to Juanito. His hands felt like hielo to the touch. He brought Juanito’s fingers up to his chest. “Squeeze them,” he told Juanito. “Squeeze my nipples.”

  “Paul—”

  “Shh,” Paul said, his voice down to a whisper.

  Juanito had a choice to make. He was scared that if he walked out the door, Paul would fire him or say no to the raise. He wanted that sofa for Daniel. He closed his eyes and pinched Paul’s nipples. He shouldn’t’ve come to the party. He shouldn’t’ve returned to drop off the key. He just should’ve gotten the M&M’s, something sweet. Paul said harder, so Juanito clamped down harder, so hard that he was afraid that he would rip them off of Paul’s body. Paul moaned. “God,” he said. “You have no idea how good it feels.”

  * * *

  The pipe was on the coffee table when Paul went to the bathroom and Juanito thought, Maybe. What could one hit do? Heidi and Robert did it. They all seemed perfectly fine. Okay, maybe they had their hot mess moments, but they still led normal lives. He wanted to know what that kind of feeling would do to him.

  He picked it up with both hands because he was worried that he would drop it and the glass would shatter. He put his lips to the end of the pipe and lit the little rock in the glass bowl at the end. He flicked the lighter on and the flame danced under the glass and the rock sizzled a little. The tube filled with smoke and he inhaled it like he was taking a little sippy of weed.

  It didn’t take long to hit him. Then he was vibrating to a rhythm that felt like it always existed outside of himself, and that he was finally tapping into now. He had to stand up. He took another hit and kept it in. Paul was in the bathroom, and he had to stand up, so he stood. He needed to find Paul. He needed Paul to fuck him. That’s all he could feel that he wanted. The world felt like harmony, and this harmony was buzzing inside him. A rush of horniness was grabbing at him. If he didn’t have a cock inside him, he’d explode.

  He undressed, took another hit, and lay on the sofa. He squiggled back and forth like a worm and started jerking himself off.

  “What the fuck is happening right now?” Paul said. He was standing in the door frame of the bathroom. Because Juanito’s head leaned off the edge of the couch, everything looked upside down.

  “I took three hits,” he said. “This shit is amazing.”

  “Three hits just now?” Paul said. “Oh, my god, you must be in a different dimension.”

  Juanito stood up and put his hand on Paul’s bulge and felt it growing, pulsing. Paul closed his eyes. He told Paul that he needed to get fucked. Right now.

  Paul pushed him on the sofa, unzipped his pants, took out a condom, and fucked him so hard, the sofa moved up against the wall.

  He closed his eyes and imagined he could get fucked for the rest of time. He clenched his ass cheeks as Paul fucked him. He could feel Paul’s pubes hitting up against him with each thrust. When Paul sped up, he knew the cum shot was coming and then it would be over. Paul held him down by his neck and moaned.

  When Paul was done, he collapsed onto Juanito’s back. He could feel Paul’s sweat. “I can’t believe we just did that,” Paul said.

  “Shh,” Juanito said. He shifted his body so that he could face Paul. He put his finger up to Paul’s lips. “Now I need you to promise me something.”

  “What is it?”

  “I said shh,” Juanito said. “I need you to promise me that you’re going to get me that sofa, okay?”

  “You really are a whore,” Paul said.

  “What did you just say?”

  “Nothing,” Paul said.

  Juanito put his hand up to the side of Paul’s face. He played with Paul’s earlobe and leaned in to whisper. “If we keep doing this,” he said, “there’s no emotion involved. Don’t you ever tell me that you love me.”

  DANIEL

  He tried to trace the events of their lives together to find the point in time when things turned—when he could say, at this point in time, en este momento, Juanito turned to drugs. But when he thought about it, he realized that he couldn’t find any one moment, and the idea that maybe Juanito’s progression was slow and gradual was something that pained him more.

  Maybe it was Daniel’s fault. Maybe it was all of the horror movies. Maybe it was the fact that they hadn’t actually talked about Angel and Venus and the Xtravaganzas since they left. Was Juanito holding it against him that they hadn’t said goodbye to Angel? It wasn’t that Daniel didn’t want to talk about the past—or rather, their past together in that house—but now that things were on the up-turn in the grand, fucked-up montaña rusa that was their life, he preferred to treat the past like it was a quilt: they would add on squares for each momentito in their life, and then they could fold it up neatly and place it into a box, and then put that box under their bed. What he didn’t realize, and was rather learning in the moment, was that those types of quilts couldn’t be boxed away. They’d keep on growing until they needed to be cut.

  Over the course of the next two weeks, Daniel convinced himself that the pipe and the blowtorch didn’t actually belong to Juanito, that it must have been some kind of mistake, or Juanito was holding them for a friend at work. He knew how the club scene could get, and maybe Juanito was helping a coworker hooked on roca. It was just easier to think of it in these terms, and easy felt safer. And, as if to prove this thought process absolutely correct, when Daniel walked in from work one evening, Juanito was sitting on a couch in the sala with a cupcake in his hand. “Surprise!” Juanito said. There was a candle stabbed in the icing.

  “What kinda jodienda is this?” he said. He had no possible clue how Juanito could get a sofa and buy drugs at the same time. He looked at the candlelight bouncing orange shades off Juanito’s face and he wanted to say: Mira, my love, what is happening to your face? You’re so thin, I could cut myself on your cheekbones.

  Juanito lit the candl
e and began singing a made-up song called “I Bought a Couch For You” to the tune of “Happy Birthday.” When Juanito was done, he looked at Daniel with eyes that were so big with expectation that it made Daniel’s heart want to break.

  “What is it?” Juanito said. “Don’t you want to blow it out?”

  In one quick puff, he blew out the candle and the orange light was gone.

  When he flicked on the lights, he could see that the couch was white, like the Maurice Villency, except for the very obvious fact that it wasn’t the Maurice Villency. But it was still beautiful and cómodo. “The only thing,” Juanito said, “is that it’s not leather.”

  “I love it,” Daniel said, guiding his hand over the cloth. “It feels like jersey. We’re going to take the best fucking naps on this thing.”

  He didn’t understand why Juanito had done this, had gone through the trouble. Yes, they needed a couch, but he didn’t need the surprise. He didn’t need the secret.

  “That ain’t all we gonna do on it,” Juanito said.

  “Ay, babe,” Daniel said. “You’re so bad, I don’t even know what you’re thinking.”

  So maybe that was it. Maybe Juanito wasn’t hitting la roca, or the manteca, or whatever it was that those pipes were for. Juanito was functional, he was working, he had saved up enough money to buy that couch—coño! But for the rest of the week, the nightmares continued.

  A week later, when Daniel got home from work, Juanito didn’t greet him at the door. Daniel shut the door with care not to be too loud or make a scene. He saw the telephone cord slithering its way under the bathroom door. He went up to the door and pressed his ear up to it. “Yeah?”—Daniel heard Juanito’s voice—“Whatchoo gonna do with that thing, bad boy?”

  It was enough. He didn’t need to hear any more. He went to the sofa and pressed the side of his face to the cloth—how soft it was—and closed his eyes to sleep. He had learned long ago how to force back a cry, during a playground game that involved his classmate Marco slapping him across the face until he could feel his cheeks throbbing in the places where the fingers had marked him like fire. The slaps had hurt him so bad, he imagined that the stinging could take on its own life.