The Wild Swans

by Peg Kerr

  He lowered his voice. “I really loved him. How can I want to just wipe him out of my life? That would be like wiping out the part of me that he changed. And when I realize that, when I’m remembering him too much, I can hardly stand being at work.”

  “Do you really think you’d lose your job if the firm knew you’re gay?”

  Jerry shrugged. “I... don’t know exactly what it was I was afraid of. I still don’t. I just told Rafe I had to keep us a secret. He never liked it. We fought a lot about it before I accepted the job. But I told him it was a small price for us to pay for everything the job could give us—travel, a nice apartment, a house on the Island. And now guess what? I’ve got all those things, thanks to this great job. All I’m missing is Rafe.”

  Elias thought back to the morning in the photo shop. It had been a bad day; every job inevitably had days like that. What would it be like to have to deal with mistakes and annoyances and hassles while trying to keep secret the fact that your life was falling apart because the person you loved most in the world was dying?

  “Did you have any idea he was so sick?” he asked.

  Jerry spread his hands helplessly. “I don’t know, I... What do you do? You look back on everything, and you second-guess yourself. What if I’d come home earlier? What if I’d paid attention to how run down he was the last couple of months? I don’t know. Those last couple of weeks, there were times when I’d be at the office, working on some damn brief or something. And I’d be thinking of him, stuck on that respirator at the hospital, that damn machine breathing for him. I’d want so bad to tell the partners screw you, blow out of there, and cab over to the hospital. But like an idiot I’d stay at the office until seven o’clock, just like always. And do you know why? It was because I honestly never thought he could die. It just never crossed my mind he would.”

  Elias sat silently, unsure of what to say.

  “There’s something else.” Jerry gave up all pretense of eating and put down his fork. He leaned over his plate and clasped his hands together, massaging them. “Something I didn’t tell anybody at the funeral. See, Rate’s pneumonia was this weird, rare kind. They usually only see it in people who’ve had their immune system shot to hell. Like if they’re taking drugs to keep a transplanted organ from being rejected. Or if they’ve got leukemia. Have you been following all that stuff in the New York Native about gay cancer?”

  “Not really.” Elias frowned. “Wait a minute—Rafe didn’t have leukemia, did he?”

  “No. He got pneumonia because his immune system shut down. It’s the same thing: you get pneumonia, cancer, whatever, because your body can’t fight anything off. The doctors are starting to call it GRID, for Gay-Related Immune Deficiency.” Jerry licked his lips. “They’re trying to decide whether it’s infectious.”

  “What do they think causes it?” Elias asked, appalled.

  “Nobody knows. Rafe’s doctors asked all kinds of questions about diet, lifestyle, our sex lives. Said they were trying to coordinate information with the Centers for Disease Control.” He paused. “They also said maybe it’s poppers. Rafe used them a lot on the Island. I didn’t so much.”

  Another silence fell, thick with unspoken fear and uncertainty, until Elias glanced at his watch and reluctantly reached for his wallet. “I have to get back.”

  Jerry batted at Elias’s hand and reached for his own wallet. “Let me pick this up.”

  “Well...”

  “Please.” He forced a smile. “It helps some to talk.”

  “Um ... only if you let Sean and me take you out to dinner next week. Deal?”

  Jerry nodded. “Yeah, deal.” He pulled out a credit card and placed it across the lunch bill. “Really, everyone’s been great,” he said, his voice husky. “I don’t know what I’d do without my friends.”

  When Elias got home that night, he found Sean sitting on the couch in the dark, staring pensively out into the courtyard. His guitar lay on the floor at his feet.

  “Hey there,” Elias said softly, coming over and kissing the top of his head. He sat beside him on the couch arm.

  “Hi,” Sean said without looking at him. When Elias placed his hands on Sean’s shoulders, he could feel tension coiled there.

  “I stopped by Jerry’s office today, went out to lunch with him.”

  Sean tilted his head to show he was listening, without looking up at Elias. “How’s he doing?”

  “It’s been rocky. I told him we’d take him out to dinner next week.”

  “That’d be good.” Together, they stared out at the blackened bones of trees, outlined against the city glow in the sky. Elias was just wondering whether he should offer to start dinner, when Sean said abruptly, “Gordy called. Ian’s got cancer.”

  “What?”

  “Just found out today.”

  Shocked, Elias wrapped his arms around Sean’s shoulders, but instead of leaning into the embrace, Sean remained stiff and still. After a moment, puzzled, Elias pulled away.

  “Let’s go to the baths,” Sean said.

  Elias pulled his hands away. “What?”

  “The baths—oh, look, I’m sorry. Forget I said anything.” He got up off the couch like a spring uncoiling.

  Elias sat up straight and blinked as Sean turned on the light. “Go? You mean, go now?” Elias felt a small bubble of panic weiring up.

  “We said something, once or twice, about going together sometime, but...”

  “I’ve never been to the baths before,” Elias said, his voice carefully neutral.

  “I know that. Look, I shouldn’t have brought it up.” Sean went over to the refrigerator and began foraging inside. “I think there’s some Chinese left over from last night. We can finish that up.” He pulled out several white cartons, setting them on the counter, and then began digging in a drawer for spoons. Are you tired of me? Elias wanted to ask. Do you want me to move out? But he couldn’t say that, and so he looked at his feet and instead mumbled, “I just want to be with you.”

  “I want to be with you, too. But try to understand ... I have to get out. I want... I need... I just want to forget about this for a while.”

  He sounded so forlorn, so wistful, that Elias said, surprising them both, “Well, let’s give it a try, then.”

  “Really?” Sean turned around, brightening. “You’d come along with me?”

  “Um...” Oh, god. What have I gone and said?

  Sean must have seen some of his thoughts in his expression. “Does the idea scare you?”

  “Well... yeah, it does,” Elias said sheepishly. “A little.”

  Sean came over and sat down beside him. “Don’t let it. It’s like ...” He groped for an explanation.

  “It’s like the Island. Remember what it was like growing up, starting to figure out you were different and being afraid there was no one else like you in the world? That there was something wrong with you?”

  After a moment, Elias nodded.

  “And when I took you to the Island, remember how it felt? You said it was the first place you’d found where you felt safe, and you could really be yourself. Well, it’s the same with the baths. There’s a whole community out there, Elias, and you deserve the chance to explore it, experiment a little. I don’t want you to think I’m the only fish in the sea. Do you understand?”

  Elias didn’t. But Sean was looking at him so earnestly that he nodded, reluctantly. He wanted to understand. Wasn’t that enough for now?

  “So you’ll try it? You’ll come along with me?”

  He really wants to go, Elias realized with a touch of coldness. I’m not the only fish in the sea, either.

  “Yeah.”

  A line of men inched their way forward toward the booth window. Elias felt as though they were in line for a movie.

  As Sean shoved a twenty under the thick glass, into the attendant’s hand, Elias had a sudden wild urge to ask whether there were any seats left for The Empire Strikes Back. He bit back a hysterical giggle as the attendant licked a
thumb and counted out Sean’s change from a crumpled wad of bills. Sean scribbled his name with a flourish on the clipboard and shoved it toward Elias. When Elias had signed, too, the attendant buzzed them in. “I paid for a couple lockers,” Sean said. “Downstairs.”

  White double lockers lined the narrow changing room. The air smelled of sweat and Pine Sol. Sean handed him a towel and sarong wrap with the bath emblem on it and began unbuttoning his own shirt. Two lockers down, a mustached man stripping off his pants eyed them covertly. Elias turned his back, took off his shoes and socks, his shirt, and then with an inward gulp, dropped his jeans and shorts. Quickly, he wrapped the sarong around his waist and knotted it as securely as he could. When he turned around again, Sean was dressed only in a sarong, too. He looked perfectly at ease.

  “Kind of quiet in here tonight,” Sean said cheerfully as they closed their lockers and put their key straps on their wrists. “But I’ll bet the back rooms are busy. And you should see it on a Saturday night.”

  Now Mustache was staring at Sean’s crotch.

  Community. Right.

  “Come on,” Sean said.

  They went past the showers and mosaic pool. The first door led into a brightly lit TV room. Several men lounged here, sipping Cokes and watching Hill Street Blues. Another attendant perched on a tall bar stool, arms crossed across his chest, watching the scene impassively. No one seemed to be having a wild orgy on the floor or anything. Elias paused to look around nervously, but Sean continued walking toward a second door across the room.

  “Um, should we just hang around here for a while?” Elias asked.

  Sean winked at him over his shoulder. “The lights are lower in the next room.”

  Elias followed him, with the sensation that he was deliberately stepping over a cliff. Sean was right; the lights were lower here. Elias’s toes sank into thick carpeting. He froze and blinked, reluctant to begin walking until his eyes had adjusted to the gloom—and then he jumped as he felt a hand snake under the fold of the wrap around his waist. He almost yelled, but by the time he had spun around to see who was goosing him, whoever it was had already brushed past him and wafted around a corner, presumably in search of other prey. Two doorways stood in front of him; which one had he just stepped out of? Sean chuckled, low, in his ear.

  “This is the Maze,” he whispered. “You never know what you might find around the corner here.”

  “Don’t leave me,” Elias whispered back, disoriented and suddenly terrified. He closed his eyes, ashamed of how lost he sounded. Sean’s hand, warm and strong, reached out to knead his shoulder. Elias barely restrained himself from clutching at it. He could feel his own heartbeat thundering in his ears.

  “Relax, Elias. It’s supposed to be fun.”

  He gently pushed Elias’s shoulder, and they began walking into the gloom, following the twists and turns of the Maze. Sensations came in bits and pieces. Here and there a dim spotlight illuminated a shoulder, a flash of curling hair, a ghostly face, upturned, with eyes closed, breathing heavily. Without even meaning to, Elias kept pressing up against flesh: an arm, slippery with sweat, a hairy potbelly, somebody’s rump, muscles rhythmically tensing and relaxing. He shrank back, not wanting to discover what might be found on the other side of that rump, and held onto Sean’s elbow for dear life. Someone moaned softly not far from him, a low, urgent sound of impending climax, with slurping sounds as a counterpoint. It made the hairs stir on the back of his neck. Hands reached out from all directions to grope at him: dry and warm, sweaty, thick-fingered, calloused, demanding, tentative. One patted his cheek just below his eye, lightly, as if it approved of him.

  A change in the flow of air on his skin made him sense they were moving through a doorway into a larger room. Faint light glimmered up ahead; he could see a press of shifting bodies silhouetted against it. Then, blocked by the crowd, they stopped. “Sean?” Elias whispered tentatively after a moment, but there was no reply, only a low, breathless chuckle and a whispered, “Yeah, yeah, do it....” Sean? Someone else?

  Then the crowd parted in front of them, and Elias gasped in heart-thudding astonishment. They had reached the heart of the Maze, the orgy room. A small spotlight trained on the enormous central bed dimly illuminated a mass of undulating bodies, surrounded by watching, silent men. How many watchers?

  Seventy-five? A hundred? The heap of bodies on the bed heaved, re-formed, reconfigured. Nipples, cocks, mouths, hands, buttocks moved and grasped and thrust and engulfed. The only noises were a few soft moans, some sucking sounds, heavy breathing. How could so many men be so utterly silent?

  Someone stepped up behind Elias, like a dancer taking a position on the mark. A pair of hands slid around his ribs from behind, and the touch of fingers against his nipples made him start violently. He felt a mouth press hungrily against his neck and begin working its way down his back toward the sarong at his waist. Staring at the figures on the bed, he felt at once paralyzed and horrified and incredibly aroused. What was that mouth going to do?

  And then Sean was moving again, and Elias wrenched himself free of the hands and mouth to follow. He could still feel their tracks on his skin, tingling almost painfully at the touch of the air. “Sean? Sean!” he hissed.

  “What?”

  “Get me out of here.”

  “What is it?” Sean asked, instantly concerned.

  “Just get me out,” he insisted, trying to control the shaking radiating from his gut.

  “This way.” They pushed through the hypnotized men watching the bed, and stumbled out of the orgy room into another corridor. There was a bit more light here. Elias leaned against the wall, dizzy with relief.

  “You all right, Elias?” Sean asked, sounding concerned. “What is it—claustrophobia or something?”

  Elias didn’t answer for a moment. He wrapped his arms around his chest, still shivering. “Or something,” he replied finally.

  “It was crowded in there.” Sean hugged him, and Elias felt tears sting the corners of his eyes in relief at the familiar touch of Sean’s arms around him.

  After a moment, Sean pulled away and brushed a strand of hair out of Elias’s eyes. “This section has smaller rooms—more private. We can look and see what kinds of tricks are waiting there.”

  Elias stared at Sean, and seeing the anticipation, the exhilaration in Sean’s expression, he felt something crack and shrivel inside himself. Why are we doing this? I don’t want this. He closed his eyes and shivered, thinking of the orgy room. Okay, be honest. It makes me scared and sick, but dammit, it makes me incredibly hot, too.

  But that wasn’t enough. He didn’t want a bunch of anonymous partners. He wanted Sean. But if Sean needed to trick with others, and if he wanted to do it without feeling guilty about Elias ...

  “Look at that guy,” Sean whispered. “He’s checking you out.”

  Elias looked. It was true. Tall, washboard abdominals, leonine eyes ... the man jerked his head toward the doorway of one of the cubicles lining the corridor and lifted an eyebrow in inquiry. At Sean’s nod, he ducked inside.

  “He’s in great shape.” Sean pushed Elias forward to the doorway.

  “And here’s someone for you,” Elias replied, his mouth dry. He stepped back against the cubicle door frame as a shadow moved toward Sean, bent, and murmured something into his ear. Sean laughed. “Sounds good,” he said. He cocked his head at Elias as the other man draped an arm familiarly over his shoulder. “So ... have fun, okay?”

  “Sure.” Elias watched the two of them walk down the corridor to another open room. Sean’s sarong was off before they went inside.

  From the darkness inside the cubicle behind Elias, a voice spoke softly: “So. What do ya want?

  Anything your heart desires...”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Begin to weave and God will give the thread.

  —GERMAN PROVERB

  After leaving their rock the following morning, Eliza and the swans continued their journey in stages, flying from
Iceland to the southern tip of Greenland, and from there to the northern wilds of the New World. Finally, shortly before sunset several days after leaving England, they touched down on a shallow bay protected by a lushly wooded promontory. A small chattering stream spilled into the bay, giving them a source of fresh water. Eliza splashed her way to shore, plunged her hands into the rivulet, and drank gratefully. The coldness of the water shocked her, making her throat ache as it went down. She sat on a pile of stones heaped at the water’s edge, wringing out her skirt as she watched the swans swimming quietly in the shallows. They stretched their wings, shaking out the feathers, and then folded them wearily on their backs. Several plunged their heads below the water, dredging up water weeds to eat. One swan, Benjamin, clambered up on shore and stood for a moment on the narrow sandy spit. He extended each black foot, one after the other, out behind himself, fastidiously flicking off water drops. And then he came to her, hopping up onto the rock where she sat. “Hello,” she murmured, edging back to give him room, a little taken aback. He stared at her with eyes like obsidian chips and then abruptly settled himself down next to her. Cautiously, she reached out to gently stroke the soft feathers at the base of his neck. “Are you Benjamin?” she whispered.

  He arched his neck, twining his head around her hand.

  They remained together so until sunset, when the other swans came up on shore. Benjamin hopped down again to join them, and as the sun sank below the horizon, they regained their rightful forms. As they gathered around Eliza to offer her their evening greetings, she caught the remnants of a strained, grave expression in their eyes.

  But they spoke to her cheerfully enough. “ ‘Tis a promising-looking place, is it not?” James said.

  “Aye, it is very beautiful.”

  “We are all growing weary of travel. Rest yourself here, Eliza, and we will look about to see if it might suit us to bide here awhile.”