by Peg Kerr
As they ate, Sean would go over the possibilities in the paper with him, giving him advice about neighborhoods: “That’s the Puerto Rican section; Loisaida, the people who live there call it. The yuppie developers trying to gentrify call it Alphabet City. It’s still a tough neighborhood, lots of dealers and users. That one’s in Chelsea. Lots of my friends live there, but you’re gonna pay through the nose for rent. Lessee, this one’s on... Ugh, no. Touristy. Great restaurants on the next block, though.”
After doing the dishes, Elias would make some calls. He quickly decided he wouldn’t be able to afford a decent apartment on his own and began concentrating on the roommate ads. The first several contacts he made proved to be fruitless. Two people who made appointments to meet with him failed to show up for the meetings. A third man sounded like he might work out, but was about to leave town for two and a half weeks before he could get together with Elias.
“Don’t get worked up into a froth about it,” Sean said. “You can take the time you need to find the right person.”
“But—” Elias started and then stopped. I don’t want to impose on you anymore was the polite thing to say, but the fact was, he did want to impose. He kept his tiny pile of possessions neatly folded and stacked in the corner of the main room at one end of the couch.
Except he didn’t sleep on the couch anymore.
A day came that he didn’t have to work. “Do you want to go out?” Sean asked absently that morning. “You could explore Little Italy, or some of those secondhand clothing stores on St. Mark’s Place. Can’t come with you, though; I’m up against a deadline for this article, and I gotta finish it today.”
Elias hesitated. “Well, I thought I could run down to the corner store and pick up a few groceries for you. But then ...” He looked out the window.
Sean did, too. A slow rain was starting to make the leaves on the courtyard trees tremble. “Oh, well, you could hang out around here if you like. I just won’t be very good company.”
Elias brightened. “You sure? That’d be okay?”
Sean gave him a measuring look. “Let’s give it a try.”
Not until afterward did Elias realize it had been a test. He brought the groceries back, put them away quietly, and then settled on the couch with the newspaper. Sean sat at the typewriter, engrossed in his work. At noon, Elias made a couple of sandwiches and put one on a plate at Sean’s elbow, along with a glass of milk. He changed the tapes in the cassette player so Sean wouldn’t have to get up to do it. After lunch, he chose a book off the shelf and settled down to read. A drowsy hush settled over the apartment, broken only by the cheerful racket of Sean’s typewriter and the patter of the rain, sloughing slowly down the windowpane.
Sean gave him a curious look at dinner that night. “Where’d you learn to do that?” he asked.
“Do what?”
“The right way to act around a writer.” Sean shook his head. “I haven’t had too much luck writing when tri— when people are around. They usually get bored and start talking to me, distracting me. But you made it easier to work, instead.”
The compliment made Elias duck his head, he was so absurdly pleased. Still... “What were you about to say? You haven’t had much luck writing when ... ?”
The pause stretched, and Sean smiled a little crookedly. “I was going to say tricks, when tricks are around.”
“Oh.” Elias looked down at his plate, toyed with his rice for a moment. “I get paid tomorrow. So I’ll be able to pay you back the money you gave me.”
Sean didn’t seem to hear the slight distancing in his voice at all. “That’s great, Elias. I knew you could do it. You’re really making your own way now, you know?” He pushed back his plate. “Since I finished that article and you’re getting your paycheck, why don’t we go out tonight to celebrate? A friend of mine is having a music party.”
They got back late, and stayed up even later, experimenting yet again with the ways their bodies fit together, feeling the texture of skin touching skin as they lay side by side. “All the lessons are sure paying off,” Sean teased him. “You’ll be ready for Carnegie Hall pretty soon.”
Elias grinned. “You know what they say: practice, practice, practice.”
Sean laughed and they rolled over again. When they finally fell asleep, sweaty and spent, their limbs were still entangled.
When Elias came back from work the next night, he discovered that the small pile of clothes he had kept folded by the couch was gone. Sean had put them away in a drawer in his room. Elias’s toothbrush lay next to Sean’s on the bathroom sink. When Elias pulled out the newspapers again over dinner, Sean no longer limited his comments to advice about the neighborhoods: “Nope, not that one. He picks his teeth and clips his toenails and nose hairs at the dinner table. And this guy eats in his room and stashes all the used plates under his bed. You won’t know it for a week, until there’s not a single dish in the cupboard, and his bedroom smells of garbage. Besides, his ass is flabby. Oh god, please, not that one!
That one voted for Reagan!”
Elias laughed, and Sean grabbed the papers away and stuffed them into the kitchen garbage. Elias lunged for them and Sean wrestled him to the floor. Laughing, they scuffled until Sean rolled over on top.
“Oof—lemme up, you bastard!”
“What, and give up the home court advantage?” Sean dug his knuckles into Elias’s side and Elias doubled over sideways on the floor, roaring with laughter.
Sean’s face lit up with fiendish delight. “Elias—you’re ticklish!”
“No!”
“Yes, you are! Wait, let’s try here under the knee....”
Elias writhed, trying to buck Sean off while still keeping a straight face. Finally, he collapsed into a state of total hysteria. What with one thing and another, he never got the newspaper back, either. But the fact was, Elias never asked whether he could move in permanently. And Sean never asked if he would stay.
It just happened.
September passed, and with October the leaves began lazily drifting off the trees in Central Park, but Elias barely noticed the creeping foray of winter into the city. He felt something inside himself, like an ember slowly being fanned into life, making it impossible for him to feel the cold. Sean took him on the bus to Chinatown one Sunday morning. At a dim sum restaurant featuring headless roast ducks hanging in the windows, they stuffed themselves on steamed dumplings and noodles, piling up the small china plates in front of themselves like greasy poker chips. Afterward, they spent most of the afternoon browsing through the crowded shops. They wandered into one emporium that smelled pleasantly of ginger, dust, and oolong tea, where Sean bought an extravagant embroidered tablecloth and Elias a black cotton robe.
“Very fetching,” Sean assured him. “I like how easily it can be unbelted, too. With one hand.”
They got on the bus with their packages and settled in a seat for the ride back to Tenth Street. “I bought the tablecloth for Thanksgiving,” Sean said as the bus lurched away from the curb. “It’s my turn to host this year.”
Elias felt an equivalent lurch in the pit of his stomach. “Your family, you mean?”
“Good god, no,” Sean answered, surprised into laughter. “That is ... I suppose I’d be willing to have Thanksgiving dinner with them, but they live in Boston. My dad and, um, his second wife. I guess I could take the train, but” —he frowned—“I just never have. Not since college.”
“You have sisters?” Elias asked. “Brothers?”
“No.” Sean lifted an eyebrow, and his voice took on an ironic tone. “Once I came along, my parents must have decided they didn’t need any other brats like me. Anyway, I get together with this group each Thanksgiving; they’re my family, really. You met Jerry and Rafe on the Island, and Nick and Amy at the music party. And there’s Gordy and Ian, and Minta and Ruth. I think Leo and Philip’ll make it, unless they decide to leave early for that gig Leo has in Chicago that weekend.” After a pause, he said gently,
“Did your family make a big deal out of Thanksgiving?”
“Yeah. We’d get together with my grandmother when she was alive. Turkey with all the trimmings, of course. Funny thing, though: what I always looked forward to the most was the pumpkin bread. That was the only time of the year Mother made it. I really love that stuff.”
“Maybe you could bake some next week.”
Elias turned his face away and watched his own reflection in the window. “Yeah, maybe. Except I don’t have any idea what recipe she used.” And I can’t call her to ask hung unspoken in the air. Sean cleared his throat. “Tell you what. If I can’t find a recipe in one of my cookbooks, I’ll give you Ruth’s number and you can call her. She has more cookbooks than anybody I know. And she’s a soft touch. If you’re lucky and sound helpless enough, she might even offer to make it herself.”
Preparing for the holiday turned out to be a lot of work. On Thanksgiving morning Elias chopped celery, apricots, and pecans for the stuffing as he eyed the decapitated turkey corpse lounging in the roasting pan. The wary apprehension his mother harbored toward Thanksgiving preparations every year seemed to make perfect sense.
But all went smoothly. Sean, Elias was relieved to discover, had done this before. The turkey meekly submitted to his ministrations, no doubt recognizing a master at work. Elias painstakingly spread out the new tablecloth and began setting out the silverware. “I sure hope no one spills gravy on this.”
“That’s what dry cleaners are for, if worse comes to worst.”
Soon, the aroma of roasting turkey, mingled with sage and onions, began to fill the apartment, renewing itself with warm blasts whenever Sean opened the oven to baste the bird. “Is the Macy’s parade still going on?” he asked as he banged the oven door shut again. “Turn it on, will ya? I always love seeing those dopey balloons.”
The buzzer finally rang just as the potatoes went onto the stove to boil. Sean went downstairs to answer it.
Soon enough Elias heard voices coming up the stairs and then coming through the apartment door. “... wonder you’re in such fabulous shape, Sean, with all these stairs to climb—oh, yum, yum, smell the turkey. Divine! Happy Thanksgiving by the way, darling, if I haven’t said it yet.”
“Happy Thanksgiving, Gordy,” Sean said. “Come on in, Ian. Here, let me take your coats.”
As Sean retreated to the bedroom with the coats, a man’s head poked around the corner of the small entry hallway. He was short and rather plump, with a luxuriant white mustache under an unabashed beak of a nose. He radiated the sort of personality that could probably carry it off. “Hallo! Elias, right? Sean told us you’d be joining us.”
Elias put down a pot and stripped off the oven mitt. “Yes, um...”
“Gordy White.” The man beamed and came into the kitchen to shake Elias’s hand. “Splendid to meet you. Yoo-hoo, Ian,” he said over his shoulder. “Come and meet Elias.”
Ian appeared and put a paper bag down on the counter. He had crooked teeth and a warm smile and smelled of pipe tobacco. “Elias? Ian Marshall.” He stepped forward to shake Elias’s hand. “Do you have room in the fridge for this salad?”
A knock sounded on the apartment door. “Let me, let me,” Gordy exclaimed, and hurried to answer it. “Eewww! Who let you two in?” his voice said.
“Some bozo held the front door of the building open for us,” a woman’s voice answered. “Just like you’re doing now, Gordy.”
“Well, I can always slam it in your face, honey,” Gordy’s voice replied.
“If you do, you won’t get any of this nice artichoke dip,” a second woman’s voice answered.
“Ooo, artichoke dip! Here, let me take that.” Gordy came around the corner. “Elias, this is Minta and Ruth.”
The two women smiled at Elias as they unwound scarves. Minta was the taller of the two, with a model’s carriage, a mobile lip, and a glint in her eye that suggested an active sense of humor. As she took off her coat, Gordy exclaimed, “Where’d you get that skirt, Minta?”
“D’ye like it? A souvenir of my trip to Ecuador.”
“It’s utterly gorgeous; turn around and let me see.”
Obligingly, Minta pirouetted, and the fabric flared out around her calves. The skirt certainly caught the eye: a riot of bright colors, it was sewn all over with little mirrors.
“Oh, splendid,” Gordy caroled. “You simply must let me borrow it.”
“You couldn’t possibly wear it, Gordy,” the other woman, Ruth, said, grinning. A button on her coat read “We Don’t Care How They Do It in New York.” She pulled off her hat, unleashing a wildly curly mass of prematurely white hair; she looked about forty. “It’s too small for you.”
Gordy pouted as he placed the covered hors d’oeuvres platter on the counter. “Couldn’t you have gotten it with an elasticized waistband?”
“Ha,” said Minta. “Finance your own wardrobe, cheapskate.”
Ruth took a foil-wrapped package out of her capacious pocket as she relinquished her coat to Sean. She handed it to Elias. “Pumpkin bread.”
Philip and Leo arrived next, cradling pecan and pumpkin pies in big, blunt hands, and then Nick and Amy, bringing wine. “We brought our instruments, too,” Nick said, nodding toward a pile of black cases left by the door, “in case anybody wants some music later on. Unless—will the neighbors complain?”
Sean considered. “Well, I think Dick-the-dick’s out of town, so it’ll probably be okay.”
“Who’s Dick-the-dick?” Elias asked.
Sean gave him a look. “Our landlord. You haven’t been here long enough to know why he’s called that, but trust me, you’ll find out.”
Leo looked from Sean to Elias. “Our landlord?” he said archly.
The corner of Elias’s mouth quirked, a nervous twitch. “Yeah. For the time being.”
As he turned away to pull napkins from the drawer, he wondered suddenly for the first time whether Sean had ever slept with any of these people.
In short order, everyone had settled on the couch or the folding chairs Sean had scrounged out of the closet for the occasion. Sean poured drinks as the guests fell on the hors d’oeuvres like ravening locusts. Elias accepted a Coke and looked around warily. So ... Leo maybe? Or Nick? How could he possibly tell? Sean placed his hand on Nick’s shoulder, smiling at him as he leaned over to hand a drink to Philip. Elias watched, and wondered.
“So how did you all meet each other?” he asked the group at large.
“Oh, Leo and Sean hooked up playing music,” said Philip. “It was at the Rathskeller, right, Sean?”
“Mmm. I think so—oh, no. It might have been one of Nick’s parties.”
“And we introduced Ruth and Minta to everybody,” Philip went on. “Simple blatant self-interest. Ruth’s been doing our taxes for years; we figure if we ply her with a good meal every once in a while, she’ll refrain from blabbing all about our fabulous wealth to the IRS.”
“You wish,” Ruth said agreeably, tucking her feet underneath herself on the couch.
“Ruth and I are the tokens,” Minta said, wrinkling her nose at Philip, and then flashing a smile at Elias.
“Token what?” Elias asked before he could stop himself.
“The token dykes,” Ruth said, dabbing at a dribble of dip oozing from the corner of her mouth.
“The token lesbians,” Ian added, lisping the words with relish, his eyes dancing as they met Minta’s. Minta groaned and threw a pillow at him.
Gordy laughed. “You mean the token women.”
“Ahem,” said Amy. “What am I, chopped liver?”
“It’s different for you, Amy,” Gordon told her cheerfully. “You’re not here as a token woman; you and Nick are the token hets.”
Elias let out a breath. Not Nick then, probably.
Amy rolled her eyes. “So how long have you and Ruth been eating turkey with these turkeys again?”
she asked Minta.
“Mmm.” Minta considered. “Four years? Maybe l
onger.”
Elias nodded, and looked at Gordy and Ian. “How about you?”
“I met Minta when my company hired her to work on an ad campaign,” said Gordy. “I do sales,” he added as an afterthought. “Vitamins. Anyway, we were working together late one night on some ad copy. Somehow we got on the subject of how dreary the holidays can be if you’re stuck celebrating them with the wrong people. We kept talking. Eventually I met Ruth and Minta met Ian. I guess she decided we were the right sort of people, because she arranged to have Leo invite Ian and me the next Thanksgiving.”
“Yeah,” Ian put in, “and Gordy cleverly brought his apricot mousse for dessert, to make sure we’d be invited back.”
“That’s right, you do photo ad layout, don’t you?” Sean said to Minta. He jerked a thumb toward Elias. “Elias just got a job at a photo shop.”
“Really?” said Minta, her face lighting up with interest.
“Well, yeah, but I’m only starting out.”
“That’s how I started out, too, in a photo shop.” The conversation wended its way from there to commercial photography to art photography to gallery work, until the timer rang to remind Elias about the potatoes.
He took the pot off the stove, drained the potatoes at the sink, and dug around in the utensil drawer for the masher. “Isn’t the turkey about done by now?” he asked.
“Oops, right,” Sean said, hastily going over and opening the oven door.
“C’mon, Ian,” Gordy said, shoving another cracker into his mouth. “Let’s take care of getting drinks on the table. Everyone want wine?”
“You get the glasses, I’ll pour,” Ian replied. “Hand me the corkscrew.”
“You forgot to say the magic word, honey,” Gordy trilled in falsetto.
“Hand me the corkscrew ... bitch,” Ian mock-growled.