He was scary and desirable at the same time. At bars, overeager guys would get shot down in front of me but, in the end, I was the one who was envied. He was what I wanted. Now, here he was again—fifty feet away. I was staring at him when he turned his head and looked in my direction. In that second I did what I had to do. I turned away. I turned away because I didn’t want him to see me. I turned away because I wanted to forget him and all of it. But I turned away, mostly, because I couldn’t care about him anymore. I had to save myself.
I raced back inside, frantically pulled my clothes out of the dryer, shoved the balled-up mess that’s my life into a plastic laundry basket and fled out the back door.
ROMANCING OF THE HANDS
Raymond Luczak
The twinkle in his eyes shone in the picture above his online profile. More clicked pictures revealed a tall and fit man with a graying, trimmed beard standing astride his bicycle, smiling next to his children, and smooching a close woman friend. Hmm.
I had long been used to getting a lack of responses to my emails expressing interest, so I thought, What the heck!
I sent him an email with a link to my profile that indicated my deafness and my feelings about the bar scene (usually too dark to lip-read and too loud to hear anyone even with my residual hearing). Within minutes we were chatting online. We talked about our lives. He had raised three children and lived with two of them, who were nearing the end of their high school years. I had moved to Minneapolis the year before after having lived in New York for seventeen years. He was happily divorced. I had been in a fifteen-year relationship that ended amicably. He shared his Jungian perspective on life. I was intrigued, more so because he knew American Sign Language (ASL) and understood Deaf culture. It was an odd yet thrilling experience to find a hearing person teasing me about being Deaf; he was respectful with his inside knowledge.
Our first date a few days later in an Italian gourmet comfort café was awkward at best. We were both guarded, unsure about each other, even as our voiceless hands conveyed volumes about ourselves. Yet our weight of unspoken expectations seemed to color the Wednesday lunch atmosphere gray as if to complement the overcast clouds. We walked around my neighborhood and talked housing prices. He was in the market to buy a house after years of living in rented apartments and houses and taking care of his children. He was looking forward to having his own freedom back once his kids left the nest.
When we arrived at his car, he seemed to tower over me as he stroked my arm almost without warning, right there on Hennepin Avenue. He was two inches taller than I was, and I could not help but look up into his gray eyes. He gave me a smile so gentle and unexpected. I was quite taken aback by the tenderness in his hands as he touched me good-bye. Without dwelling on how awkwardly we had spent time together, I agreed to meet him again.
Two days later we biked around Cedar Lake. But first we went to a food co-op, bought ourselves lunch and loaded the picnic food up on his bike. As I watched him coast down the paved path winding around the lake, I was taken by the smooth beauty and shape of his shirtless back. He was justifiably proud of his chest. The more we wheeled, the more he began to flirt. He wriggled his ass at me, and made some sly comments about my body, as he would suddenly sail by. He knew that most hearing people wouldn’t know what he said in ASL so it was like a secret language that no one knew.
The flirtations were intoxicating. Here I was, already forty years old, and it hit me that no one had ever tried to flirt with me so incessantly, and quite so openly. It seemed that dates consisted of two events (meeting and having sex), but here I was, in the limbo-land between meeting and conjugating. Sometimes we stopped and ate part of our picnic food before we moved on to the next lake. All told, we ended up going around three lakes and learning more about each other than we ever could have, had we stayed in restaurants each time we met. It was a joy to truly understand everything he said because he knew so well the language that I had been deprived of all my life, until I first came to Gallaudet University—the world’s only liberal arts college for the Deaf—when I was eighteen.
Then we biked past Lake Calhoun, which often boasted an ongoing parade of lookers and onlookers usually wearing the ubiquitous white iPod headphones, on foot, rollerblades, and bikes.
Up the hill we climbed toward Lake Harriet. I saw how the unexpected sun cast a glint of glare in the rivulets of sweat winding down his back. Then down and around the lake we wove under the hanging trees until we stopped at the bandstand.
No one sat on the stage so we did, and ate ice cream, and melded our hands. I told him more than I’d told most people, and he told me more than I’d expected to hear. Family dynamics in our pasts had shaped us differently for different reasons, but I understood his frustrations. I was surprised when he opened my legs on the edge of the stage and pulled me closer to him for a kiss.
I was surprised by his need, and I still hadn’t finished my bowl of ice cream!
I was used to being discreet with my desire for another in public, especially now that I was no longer living in the more gay-friendly Manhattan. I was floored by his flattery.
By the time we parted, six hours had passed. I felt giddy when I saw him leave with his bike hitched to the back of his car. What had I missed from all those years when I was single and dating? A giggly light-headedness that I didn’t think was quite possible. I was forty years old, for god’s sake!
A few days later he showed up at my apartment for dinner. We didn’t say a word as he crossed the threshold into my arms. We embraced for a few minutes, and in that fleeting moment I closed my eyes and inhaled the scent of his cologne-free neck. I felt his heart throb slightly against my chin and the smooth inclines of his back. I thought of nothing but the sweet musk of his smell wafting into the deep seat of my brain and down into my groin.
As much as I didn’t want to, I finally broke away. The logistics of cooking my first meal for him had encroached on my mind. I hadn’t yet heated up the electric stove top or taken out the pair of tuna steaks upon which I would toss a few drops of toasted sesame oil and some beef broth for a pan sauce, adding some pimentos and capers. Simple, perhaps, but incredibly effective as a quick dinner.
He said, “That was a really good hug. You didn’t hold back anything. Let’s do it again.”
We hugged, this time for a longer time. I’ve hugged all my boyfriends and partners, but never as long as I did with him while standing and so we felt still as time itself. I felt bathed in that warm light emanating from the kitchen table. The world was full of shadow but there he stood like a beacon in my arms. I looked up at him, and we kissed. Simply and lightly.
We smiled quietly at each other. There was absolutely no pressure to do more than leave a lingering mark on each other’s lips.
He kicked off his sandals and walked barefoot across the carpet to my leather love seat.
I brought out a small bowl containing kalamata olives heated in two quick turns in my microwave oven and an empty ramekin for the pits. I placed them on the coffee table in front of my love seat.
He sat down on one end as I placed a warm olive into his mouth. His lips pursed around my fingertips as he looked up into my eyes. His eyes widened at the burst of unexpectedly strong olive flavors on his tongue, and then he grinned. I held the ramekin in front of him where he let the pit drop from his mouth. He beckoned for another olive from me and as he took it with his teeth, his tongue suddenly darted out to lick my fingertips. His eyes never strayed from mine as his tender taste buds curled around the pistils of my hands opening up like a flower.
I leaned down and kissed him.
He lathered my tongue with olives grown in Spain and imported to a local shop near my home, the kind of place that had made such miracles of being all over the world at once and yet not far beyond the confines of my kitchen possible. His tongue was a foreign country with unfamiliar scents, quite different from the waft of his neck earlier.
He broke the kiss, spit out the pit and brought a
fresh olive up to my lips. This I took with my teeth, and I expertly bit its purple flesh off the stone pit. I let it fall out of my mouth into the ramekin, and then our tongues danced a tango as our arms melded around each other’s bodies on the sofa. Once the olive was finally consumed, I rested lightly atop his chest and closed my eyes. I imagined that I was outside somewhere under an olive tree—even though I’d yet to see one in my life. His hands slid slowly around the contours of my back and I sensed his sighing.
The reality of how cramped we were on the love seat finally broke our spell.
I guided myself off him and realized that I’d forgotten to do one other thing. I plugged in the white Christmas lights that I’d hung all around my four windows. He took off his shirt without any ado and lay there, his face softly lit and his eyes almost as bright. I fed him another olive, and while we signed to each other, we took turns feeding each other the ever-cooling olives still seeped in their juices.
Sips from our glasses of ice-laden water refreshed our mood as we chatted between bites of a chopped green pepper, which I had wanted to use up—it wouldn’t belong in the salad I was to make. The sudden crunchiness of cool pepper was a contrast to the warm tanginess of olive. As I sat there admiring his lazy chest, I found his hand holding my left as I signed with my right. Even though ASL usually requires both hands for unencumbered communication, context often enables the other person to fill in mentally the other half of the two-hand signs used when one hand is occupied with something else: he understood me perfectly.
A dream had come true, hadn’t it? A handsome hearing man could understand me perfectly without the need for me to use my voice, and he was so fluent in ASL that I didn’t need to use both hands to be understood! There weren’t many of those out there.
As I chopped up shallots and whirred a blend of olive oil and balsamic vinegar in a mini food processor to create the salad dressing in the kitchen, he took my salad spinner and spun its wet greens so much that each leaf bounced to the bottom of the colander with springiness. I showed him where he could mix the greens and other ingredients before he poured the dressing.
He knew how much I couldn’t get enough of his naked chest so he took every opportunity to rub his pectorals across my back or display himself, leaning against the cupboard above the sink, watching me sear the sashimi-quality tuna steaks quickly into a pastel brown with quite pink centers. His half-naked body distracted me but I managed to not scorch the pan sauce and poured it over both of our plates when he sat down at the table. I felt secretly proud of not having made a cooking mistake thus far and having been able to put together a decent meal—even on a first dinner date. As we ate, we held hands across the narrow table: a single lamp shone on our food and lent a soft glow to both our faces.
No one asked to take an instant photograph of us.
No one offered us roses for sale.
No one sang an Italian aria before our table.
All that silence was quite all right with us.
As we ate, we signed and smiled and stared into each other’s eyes. The world—however small it had been in our hands that moment—was fleetingly ours that night, that gem-like transcendence of memory forever mine. That night our hands spoke louder than words.
THE GREAT MASTURBATOR
Daniel M. Jaffe
Before I met The Great Masturbator at the circus, I used to wonder if I’d ever know romance. In this age of quickie Internet hookups, how did you find a man for whom “body contact” was more than a contact sport? For whom affection was not an STD? I longed to stare into another man’s eyes and watch his essence overlap my reflection for hours. To slip my tongue between his lips, to taste him, his saliva mixing with mine, each of us swallowing us both together. To feel that initial heart-skip percolation burble with the potential to boil into love after a lengthy simmer. Where was my fantasy man? Had love-seekers been killed off by climate change?
I’ll never forget the Saturday night we met six months ago, The Great Masturbator and I. I’d finished yet another eight-hour day ringing up underwear sales at Old Navy. Haggard mothers swatting whiney children in line. Oh-so-clever, shaved-head gangbanger shoplifters paying for one marked-down T-shirt while thinking I wouldn’t notice the other one stuffed down their pants—I admire big baskets as much as anyone but… To make the day extra special, my manager had threatened to fire me after I returned fifteen minutes late from lunch. True, I’d been engrossed in stories about the traveling Folsom Circus, but who could resist reading about THE CIRCUS OF THE LOST, as the Southern California tabloids dubbed it?
Supposedly, wherever the traveling Folsom Circus performed, some local man disappeared. Headline after headline told the tale: I LOST MY PARTNER TO THE FOLSOM CIRCUS! (A superior court judge in Ventura left the county courthouse on his Harley one evening, drove to the circus, but never returned to his chambers or home. His Harley went missing, too.) GONE WITH THE TRAVELING CIRCUS WIND! (In San Diego one breezy day, a churro vendor took his little girls to the Folsom Circus and left them watching a magic show while he went off to see “some other act.” He never picked his daughters up, nor was he seen anywhere again.) THE GREATEST VANISHING ACT ON EARTH! (In Palm Springs, police investigated the disappearance of an elderly couple—wrinkly owners of a clothing-optional, men-only resort—last seen hobbling into the Big Top. No trace even of their walkers with yellow half–tennis balls stuck on the aluminum feet.)
Some cities called in the FBI to pitchfork through turd-filled hay piles in the elephant stalls, to claw through the lions’ food fridge and then DNA test mounds of raw meat. Not a flake of human skin, not a broken human hair follicle: nada.
I’d long been a fan of “The Twilight Zone” and “X-Files.” Could any of this tabloid stuff really have happened? Fun to think so, but it was probably all made up. Even if those folks had actually gone missing, that was just coincidence. Most likely, the circus promoters themselves had started the rumors about missing people. Scary sells—a Hollywood maxim.
Not that the circus had to rely on phony hype, as far as I was concerned. Any circus with an act called The Great Masturbator was sure to be a sellout, given the number of perverts here in California. Of which I was surely one. I was intrigued by the tabloids’ descriptions of his “unusual self-pleasuring techniques” and “one-of-a-kind moving body art you’ve got to see to believe.”
My interest wasn’t piqued just because of the whole sexual aspect—heavens no! Not at all. I wasn’t that shallow, was I? No, I told myself, I was fascinated by the whole marketing approach. After all, in college I’d been a marketing major, which was why I’d expected to become the next hotshot somebody in a “Mad Men” agency. “The world is your oyster,” said the oh-so-original Dean at graduation three years ago. Unfortunately, he failed to anticipate that the oyster I’d happen to crawl into would wash up on shore and rot in its own stink under the morning sun. I was becoming nobody fast.
Not that anyone really noticed or cared. My parents have had nothing to do with me for years: “Homosexual abominations are doomed to a life of loneliness and we refuse to witness such a tragedy befall our very own son.” (Was it the befalling of the tragedy they minded, or the watching of it?)
My charming roommate noticed me only when the landlady pounded on the door for the rent. “Hey, Dude,” he’d say to me between smoke-sucking joint inhalations, “could you front my half again this month?”
And it’s not as though I had any romantic attachments, although I was usually able to find sex on those nights I felt so overwhelmed with desire I could think of nothing else. Those nights, I’d pound away at the keyboard answering any online ad I could find for a well-endowed muscle top. I needed to take a man deep inside, and wished I were an octopus—I’d need at least eight arms to clasp him close enough to satisfy myself. On the drive home after the hookup, I’d inevitably feel an emptiness no man was big enough to fill.
So, that Saturday night six months ago, exhausted from a lousy day at work and full of cu
riosity prompted by the tabloids, I went straight to the circus instead of returning home. I bought my requisite pink cotton candy (ever since I was a child, no carnival or fair was complete without pink cotton candy), then I poked into a tent to see the obligatory bearded lady in leopard-print cave-woman garb. Big deal, a transgendered person in fake fur.
Another tent housed Siamese twins supposedly joined at a hip that just happened to be covered by a shared, blousy, green-sequined tunic. I recognized the brothers who ran our local Thai restaurant, one in charge of the front of the house, the other who cooked in back.
So far, this circus was lame.
I had to show ID to enter the big tent, which smelled like sweat and elephant shit (not that I could really distinguish elephant shit from lion’s or any other animal’s). I practically buried my nose in the cotton candy while stumbling up the bleachers to an empty seat in the very last row, far from the various animals dancing on hind legs down front. Prancing ponies in spangled harnesses; dogs climbing on each other’s backs; a blond guy in a white leotard doing the obligatory shove-your-head-in-the-lion’s mouth. I hadn’t come here for schlock; from the looks of the yawning, fidgety crowd, neither had anyone else.
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