If you tell anyone, he says. His breath on mine, wet.
Won’t, I say. I know he doesn’t care, and that I’m lying, and that he knows I’m lying and that I know this. He just wants me to be able to say he said it when I tell about it, later. He wants to be able to believe it for now, also. That boys do things together and it’s a secret. That we are boys and not men dressed like children, surprised by the passage of even a year. And as he kisses me I try to decide, if he likes secrets better than kisses. After, I decide it’s kisses. For the night, he is wild. A storm. His grief at losing Rafe, I see, is a daily one, as for a Sisyphean task. Each day Rafe is at the bottom of the hill, each day, Richard tries to roll him up. No end, barely no solace.
I reach up under his balls, in his jeans, and slip a finger into his anus, where it goes easily. I think about how there is skin here only a few cells thick. Sex is asking someone to touch you where your skin is thinnest. His eyes roll back.
I leave to go upstairs before Rafe gets back. Richard is asleep before I close the door. I have dreams of him, flying through the night sky, his blue-white skin cuts the black.
Some days later. In the café, at the top of the student center, we sit and have coffee together while Richard reads The Magic Mountain and I flip through the course catalog. We say nothing. I can see, in the sunlight, the profile of his penis through his pants, which I watch. I am thinking of how in the light off the street I saw the glint of the red hair around his penis. Eventually we leave. We go to his apartment, and undress. He starts to cut us some lines of coke before I think of whether I want any or not. He cuts the lines on a mirror on his lap, then holds it out to me. He smiles. Please, he says.
I do my line and hand the mirror back to him. I love this drug, he says.
Why, I say, as he slides his coke back and forth on the mirror.
Because I can’t ever cry when I do it, he says. Like there was nothing I couldn’t watch on this drug.
I wish I could be in love with him, I tell Penny, when I tell her about it later.
Don’t be annoying, she says. That’s out of the question. It’s bad enough he’s so ugly. She is reeling anyway. Richard isn’t known for this sort of thing, but he is about to be, when she gets off the phone with me.
He’s not ugly, I say. But I don’t say any more to her. The best of him doesn’t share well, I see now. I regret having said anything, immediately.
18
MY DRAWING TEACHER had asked me to sit for him, and so on an afternoon after the end of reading period but before my exams began I sat naked in his studio. The May Connecticut weather was awful, humid, and despite myself I sweated. My German teacher seemed unaffected. He drew, pulled the paper, drew again. I had had allergies for some time and they were a problem and now I was sure another attack was coming on because I could only sit there and cry. I sat there naked and cried in front of him. He never asked me why I was crying. After an hour I felt that even if I wanted to I couldn’t speak. In the enormous silence he made no conversation, nor did I, only crying there in the studio. I made no effort to wipe my tears for fear of losing the poses and I was after all being paid well and wanted to be able to pose again at another time. And I was sure he was drawing the tears.
Some time later in my room, as I looked out into the longest gray shadow I had ever occasioned to notice, I could breathe again. Some days later I thought back to the incident of the crying and thought to call my doctor, who told me that if my eyes had been itchy then yes the crying was an allergic reaction, but that otherwise it had been an emotional one. The teacher had marked each pose with a careful Polaroid, and the tears that day were my only tiny reminders that the photographs Big Eric had taken of us had never been found. Of everything that had been turned in for evidence, the pictures were not among them. I wondered then if somewhere, pictures of me with him filled a book. Being shown to someone else.
There were more reminders, certainly, to come, and I would not know them, not even when they were happening, and would likely not be able to do anything about them. From somewhere inside me the photos altered me all the time, like a virus that hides in the organs, emerging, from time to time, to kill and reproduce again.
A few days later I went downstairs and did some more coke with Richard, which is when he told me someone had told them we’d slept together, and did I know who I might have told?
I took the envelope and shook some more of the white powder onto the tray. He was right. You couldn’t cry on coke, not in the first fifteen minutes; and those fifteen minutes were lit up, as if the coke burned the seconds in torn strips, each second cut from the other and set on fire. I cut a line, and then another, and divided them both into two short lines, and then finally met his eyes. He had lit a cigarette, and a smile sought out his mouth. A Doris Day song found me there, and I starred to sing it. I’ve counted, a thousand sheep . . .
Fee, he said.
But it wouldn’t be make-believe, if you believed in me. Cause without, your love, it’s a honky-tonk parade. Without, your love, it’s a . . .
Fee. Don’t do that.
Everyone saw us leave together, I said. Rumors start. Et cetera. I took the rolled dollar from him, did the lines, and passed the mirror.
He didn’t believe me, but it didn’t matter, either, he saw that, in the tray I handed to him. He saw it in the way I stayed there, waiting for him to finish, and the way, when he was done, I had the sense to leave, as he put it, without his asking. I wanted to leave, too. When you draw, you learn first that sunlight is the true judge, of color, of texture. Neither of us wanted to see each other that way, in the first light of waking.
19
THE SECOND TIME I try to die. Sunset in my apartment. I fall asleep in a gold chimney of light, perhaps the first to ever find its way into my apartment. I’d been up for two days on coke to finish some drawings I supposedly had been doing all semester and then I passed out, and I wake up to Richard standing next to the bed. His fly is open, his dick hanging out. When my eyes open he smiles.
You have a choice, he says, which you want first. He shakes it near me. I watch the pink head move up and down, the unmistakable bounce of a penis. It has its usual appeal, and yet.
Coffee, I say.
Sluts don’t get coffee. Come on. Choose.
Coffee, I say, again. And then I roll over. I hear him in my kitchen. It occurs to me I have no idea how he got in. How did you get in, I ask.
I can pick a lock, he says. Boarding school. I’ll show you sometime. He lights a cigarette. I’m sad my stupid porno-flick manners didn’t work.
Uh huh, I say. Me too.
You know what I hate, he says. I hate it when people make like they are going to knock themselves off and they leave a note and everything and then arrange to be found. What is that? I mean, I’m sort of glad Sylvia Plath died. The bitch was playing at it.
The lamp on my desk lights only the lower half of him. His shadow head says all of this. The cigarette is a pale orange, like a firefly on its last burn. I’d been wondering why I had him in my life, and then suddenly I know why. And I am so happy. What’s the other choice, I say. Knowing.
Coke, he says. But this time we freebase. He stands up and comes back with coffee, which he sets down on my bedside table. We both look at the spoon handle in the mug, like it’s a compass needle.
Sluts get coke, I say, and he smiles again.
Coke cooking as you smoke it smells like burning carpet. A house on fire. What time is it, I say.
Who cares.
I thought I’d care more about it, but this adds nothing but an opportunity. Needles, knives, thugs in the dark, thugs in the light. There’s the whole world waiting to do you in if you get the chance. For instance, almost everything in my kitchen can be used to kill me. The hour that comes next arrives sheathed in a white fire that burns cold along all my nerves. While Richard fucks me I feel like a god. Like I can set things on fire with a touch, leap into the sky and not come back. Like I can cook my own
dose, an extra one, while Richard goes down to get cigarettes at five in the morning.
I send myself shooting out into that gathering 5 A.M. light. And not crying the whole time. Everything is already moving so very fast, but you need a great deal more speed than this to escape the earth’s gravitational pull. Seven miles per second. More fuel, please.
The white fire meets the black hammer. Come apart. I fall down but by the time I fall down, I am already not there. Immeasurable dark, I float into it, I feel my body tumble far from me. No note. Richard will understand.
20
RICHARD CALLED AN ambulance. When he came back to the room, the curtains were on fire, but he put those out quickly. It turns out he’s good in emergencies. He didn’t know until now. No one knows how the fire started. It’s assumed I was smoking a cigarette but I do not remember having the cigarette. We were out. It was the reason he went downstairs.
Before I open my eyes I know I am back. I fully expect to be burned but of course in the mirror opposite my hospital bed I just look bad, like someone beat me up. I’ll find out later that Richard did indeed slap me quite a bit when first finding me. Someone did beat me up. But he did CPR. High as a kite on freebase. The bruises will stay for months.
Coe is beside me. In the chair next to my bed, he sits reading and looks up. The sunlight behind him scrapes my eyes.
You’re trying to kill me, he says.
That’s absolutely what I was up to, I say. My voice sounds oddly alive. And I see now that I’ve been strapped to the bed with restraints. Huh, I say.
Well, I mean. I mean clearly you were trying to kill yourself, he says. And he takes my hand in his. I told them I thought you were trying to kill yourself.
I nod, this being an ancient form of agreement, and we sit there with this for some time.
Richard, of course, never forgives me, but it hardly matters. Coe graduates with me. I leave to go home for the summer, to San Francisco afterward. He heads off for Bangkok, a job working for Citibank.
Richard deserves his own place in my heart, a shrine where a fire burns and blossoms are tossed into it for fragrance. Apple wood would burn there. But he is too late, for now. A famine has left the people weak and they pray to a god who will not answer them. They lay boys at the altar, a sacrifice.
I wanted to tell him, you see, I am lost in someone else. You are too. We kept company in each other’s reminiscences for the nights we spent together. There’s nothing more for this.
21
I MEET THE David brothers when I go as my mother’s date to a fund-raiser for the Gulf-of-Maine Aquarium. The party is on a yacht tied to a slip on Central Wharf, in Portland, the parking lot shining, full of Mercedes and Saabs and new Volvos. I see the brothers right away when I come in, the two of them so beautiful side by side, shining like the cars outside, in this crowd. If you waved a wand and turned them into dogs they’d be golden Labradors. They are more beautiful together and safer, I decide, because then you can take turns looking at them. My mom knows their mom, and soon we are shaking hands, Hello, My son Fee, this is Kathy, her sons Matthew and Lebow. Around us cocktails float by on trays and people offer hot tiny foods, spiked by colored picks, and I am looking at these two, with their dark straight hair and dark eyes. We raise our eyebrows as our eyes sweep together toward the same corner and we shrug upstairs, without a word, all agreement, where we get Heinekens and pull out cigarettes. Matt lights mine, bowing his head, courtly.
We’re having a party on the Fourth, says Matt. You’ve got to come.
You do, says Lebow. There’s a half pound of shrooms at home, and we don’t know anyone. Our folks just moved to the Cape and there’s only so many trips we can take on this bag.
Matt is the younger, my age, Lebow three years older, just graduated, from Grinnell, where Matt still schools. Lebow is starting to look like a real man, thicker, where Matt is still thin like a boy, his lips dark like rose hips. A sharp scar, pale pink, a puckered line, runs just under the cheekbone, an inch long. We talk most of the night, the three of us, and when Matt announces the impending arrival of the mothers, we toss, all at once, our cigarettes into the sand bucket, ready to leave as they emerge from the stairs. I am somewhat thrown by the ease with which we all silently move in agreement about how to greet our moms. I am unused to this sort of brotherliness, but I like it.
I’m so glad you boys got a chance to meet, Matt’s mom says.
When I get to their house a few days later, in the sunny part of the afternoon, we pick up where we left off, sitting around drinking beers on their deck while Lebow makes the shroom punch, grinding the fungi in a blender with ginger ale and sherbet. Slowly, girls arrive, it would seem, almost exclusively, a four-to-one ratio, and Lebow and Matt grin, waving, the girls coming in with the familiarity of visiting family, picking up beers from an ice-filled garbage can, shaking them gently to lose the wet, jumping back at the foam spray. The David house is a big stone house on the ocean, on a spit of land far from the road, protected by birch-pine forest, with a separate pool house, where an indoor pool, glass-enclosed, occupies a stand of trees. Within a few hours it is completely occupied by ponytailed girls glossy from lavender lip shine, buff manicures, bathing-suit tans, and shaved legs. The boys seem invisible, the opposite of the way it is with birds, the male of the species here more inclined to vanish into the background while the girls flick hair back from their shoulders and smoke skinny white cigarettes that they stub out before moving on in a kind of rotation.
There isn’t anyone who doesn’t take some of the punch, and Matt and I throw down a fast two Dixie cups’ worth, the strange chalky hallucinogenic fungus going down smooth. Grinnell College recipe, Lebow says, as we three toast in the kitchen. Who are these people, Lebow asks, and we laugh.
In a half hour, it won’t matter, Matt says.
A half hour later finds Matt and me on the lawn, watching girls play Frisbee as the sun starts to go down. A stereo system has been set outside and music plays as the shiny girls toss shiny discs. God, they’re beautiful, it’s so beautiful here, Matt says, and the girls do seem like goddesses, like everything there is here is only to gild them a little more. Matt wrestles off his shirt and lies down on it, to reveal that he is shiny also, shiny brown with nipples as big as eyes and a smooth belly puckered by an outie belly button. I restrain myself from bending over to put my mouth on it, but it looks like the place you would begin inflating him by, if he were a gas-filled balloon.
Instead I take my shirt off also, and Matt says, God, you’re built, and he says, Feel this, and he curls his biceps, hiking himself up so I can reach, because for some reason I can’t move, and I touch the muscle, like a fist under his skin, and as my hand drops away I can feel how his nipple gives off heat like a lamp. The shiny girls watch, toss their Frisbee some more, and one of them yells, Arm wrestle, and it does seem like a command from the goddesses, so we face off, lying down, hands curled together, and as we struggle, I start to feel like we’re both vanishing, and the girls sit around us, watching, and we’re vanishing because the ground is swallowing us. We’re evenly matched, but also, I don’t particularly want to win, I never have, and so when Lebow walks over and grabs our hands and presses mine down over Matt’s, Matt rolls with him, bringing him down on top of us so that we make a pile, and I am wedged against Matt’s shoulder as Lebow grabs his brother’s head and forces a big wet kiss on his lips that smacks like gum snapping. He jumps up laughing as Matt tosses me off him to wipe his mouth and spit. All of us pause, me and the shiny girls, as Matt barks to his brother, Shithead, and Lebow just keeps laughing, shrill and repetitive. Gratified, the goddesses return inside, looking after another beer, leaving their cigarette-filled empties on the counters of the kitchen.
By now I can tell this is the identifiable trip, the thing, and I stand in amazement, looking at it all: the whirling world of blue sky and sunshine and pretty white girls with expensive cars, the whirling from the heat I can feel where the parts of me that were
pressed to Matt feel irradiated, like they should glow bright enough for me to read by, the way I can hear each tree breathe. Trees breathe, I say to Matt, an amount of time later that I am unable to quantify, except by knowing it is still not yet sundown, and he says, It all breathes. Feel the world take a breath all at once. And we go quiet together.
We head down to the pool house where the beer-drinking Frisbee goddesses have not yet arrived, and Matt flicks on underwater dome lights that spread a green-gold glow from below, and he strips out of his shorts, naked quickly. C’mon, he says, and I do, in awe, of him transformed into a baby Neptune. He fumbles open a jar and dips his hand in, and spreads a thick paint stripe across the forearm that glows blue as it starts to dry, and he hands me another paint jar. I open it and test it on my stomach, to see orange come up. I look up and see Matt has painted bars on his face, and he smiles as he runs his fingers flat down my face, painting it. His hand pauses under my chin, and he pulls me in by it, for a phosphorescent, dry-lipped, teeth-knocking kiss.
He laughs and dives in. The glow from underneath scatters light and dark across him, the blue glows darker, his white smile like an elbow of lightning. In the water he looks like a storm I once saw from above, inside a plane, and that’s about how far up I feel when he soaks me with a splash. Stop looking and start swimming, he says.
I dive in, and when I surface, I see the beer goddesses by the side of the pool, removing, slowly, their clothes, their white breasts flash like whale bellies, and behind them the sky finally goes dark. They find the paints and start decorating each other. Music starts and I realize it isn’t in my head but that there are speakers, in the walls of the pool house, and then there’s Lebow, who drops his shorts, and starts laughing as the goddesses paint him, one taking his chest, the other his face. I hear the water on the deck behind them for a moment just before Matt knocks them all in the water, and kicks their clothes in behind them. Soon the pool is littered with bikini tops and cutoffs, and the laughing beer goddesses jump into the glowing pool, screaming and laughing, grabbing for their clothes, and Lebow swears at his brother, but the two goddesses with him restrain him, they aren’t interested in what he wants from his brother. I pluck my shorts and Matt’s from the water’s surface, and head off in search of a towel.
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