The Doorposts of Your House and on Your Gates

by Jacob Bacharach

  “Whose is he?” Isabel asked.

  “She. Isaac’s,” Sawyer told her. “Nominally.”

  They did some blow. It was not as good as Imlak’s. “So what do you do?” Isabel asked him.

  “I’m a doctor.”

  “You’re too young to be a doctor.”

  “Please, I’m thirty-four.”

  “What kind of doctor?”

  He was folding up his packet of cocaine. “Addiction medicine,” he said.

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  “My mouth to God’s ears. Come on.” He gestured toward the stairs. Back in the bar, the lights were up. Isaac was drinking a beer against the bar, while Steven and the model made out. Ryan was capping the liquor.

  “Hmm,” Isabel said. “I appear to have lost my ride.”

  “I sent them away,” Isaac told me. “I told them you were coming with us.”

  “You what?”

  “Come on,” Isaac told her. “Il faut qu’on vive sa vie. No one died from a little stranger danger. Sawyer, will you get my dog?”

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “Our place,” Sawyer replied from behind her. “Come on. We’ll give you a ride. We’re just up the hill. I’ve just got to grab the little girl.”

  Isabel bent herself into the back seat of Sawyer’s car. It was a small Mercedes, and she supposed then that he must really be a doctor—what a world, wasn’t it, where a car confirmed an occupation? Isaac kneeled on the front seat so that he faced her while Sawyer drove home. The dog was in the back seat with her; it had pirouetted once and settled into a ball, immediately asleep.

  “So Isabel,” Isaac asked, “do you like to party?”

  “I suppose I do,” she said.

  “Sawyer hates parties. Sawyer is seething right now, just thinking of all these people about to invade our domestic kingdom.”

  “He doesn’t seem to be seething,” Isabel said. She could see via the rearview that Sawyer had a crooked grin on his face.

  Isaac sniffled. “He just hides it well. So, what do you do?”

  “What do I do, or where do I work?” She replied.

  “Oh là. I can see you two have been talking. Did Sawyer already offer you an amuse-bouche? Il est tout comme toi,” he said, laying his head briefly on Sawyer’s shoulder. “Il se comporte comme un adulte, mon copain, mais il aime faire la fête. Do you speak French?”

  “A little, and badly.”

  “When Sawyer first hit on me, on Grindr, he tried to show off by acting all bilingual, all because he lived in France for like four months when he was in college a hundred years ago.”

  “This is true,” Sawyer said, his voice at once sardonic and affectionate. It was a question frequently posed by their friends: why, exactly, did Sawyer put up with him? There was the obvious: Isaac’s age and strange beauty, but there was nothing especially sexual about their relationship; it lacked any sharp edge of carnality, suggesting far more immediately the habits and tolerances of a long-married couple. They reminded Isabel of her and Ben, two people locked into the inevitable aesthetic of their own shared life, characters who discover their story is not their own.

  They lived in a big apartment in a new building near the intersection of Penn Avenue and Butler Street across from the bronze statue of a World War I doughboy that gazed forever forlornly toward downtown. It was a dull piece of corporate architecture—“Yuppie dormitories,” Barry called them—the sort that got thrown up in six months in gentrifying neighborhoods and then leased off to a lot of Young Urban Professional types. Like Sawyer, Isabel thought. It surprised her to think that Isaac could live there; it seemed a little too drywall-and-mid-range-fixtures for someone of his background and apparent tastes. It turned out that Isaac did not live there, not technically, although he spent most of his time there, since Sawyer, as an adult, managed to keep food in his refrigerator and extra toilet paper under the sink. It was very much Sawyer’s place, decorated very much as you’d expect from a mid-thirties gay yuppie making low six figures who, Isaac would tell you, had patterned his taste on the occasional design magazine tossed in with the yogurt and juices in the checkout line at Whole Foods. Isaac often made fun of Sawyer’s style behind his back. “His parents live in a four-bedroom colonial in a subdivision.” He was a snob, but he was right about the genealogy of his boyfriend’s tastes in art and housewares. Isaac had his own apartment in the city, a loft (owned by his aunt) that was almost uninhabitable due to his insatiable addiction to the acquisition of things: furniture, art, taxidermy, bolts of fabric, exotic houseplants (both living and dead), mannequins, costumes, and boxes and boxes of paperback books, which he never seemed to unpack or shelve. All of these collections were in equal parts wondrous finds and utter junk. Ironically, for all the furniture, he didn’t even have a proper bed, just a mattress roll and pad that he’d lay out on the floor when he needed it, which was usually to say, when he was fucking someone other than Sawyer and wasn’t able to do it in Sawyer’s place.

  The first time Isabel visited that loft, it was the middle of the day, and Isaac wanted to get stoned. “It’s the middle of the day,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he told her, “but it’s Saturday!”

  She did a lap. It was like walking into an insane Victorian curio. “I can’t believe your aunt lets you wreck her place like this.”

  “Veronica’s been crazy since all that shit with her girlfriend,” he said. “She doesn’t give a fuck.”

  “What shit with her girlfriend?”

  “You don’t know?” Isaac had a way of being astonished that people didn’t already know things that they’d have no way of already knowing. “Oh man, wait till you hear this.”

  In Sawyer’s apartment, on the contrary, everything was in its place, and the white rug aligned perfectly with the edge of the gray couch. They arrived and Sawyer made Isabel a cocktail. The dog trundled around her legs. She crouched and scratched its ears. “What’s his name?”

  “Hers. Moth,” Sawyer said.

  “Moth,” Isabel repeated, rubbing his head. He gazed up at her.

  “It was originally Behemoth,” Sawyer said. “It was shortened out of either necessity or laziness.”

  “Nonsense,” Isaac objected. “It’s still Behemoth.” He bent and took the animal’s tiny, beautiful face in his hands. “He lieth under the lotus trees, in the covert of reeds and fens, doesn’t he now, doesn’t he? Yes he does. Yes he does.”

  The dog promptly lifted its little back leg and pissed on the floor.

  “Moth!” Isaac exclaimed.

  “Christ,” Sawyer said. “I’ll go get some paper towels.”

  “Aw,” said Isaac. “Shall any take him by the eyes or pierce through his nose with a snare?”

  The bartender and his boyfriend and their model showed up. A few girls arrived and eyed Isabel suspiciously before settling prettily onto a chaise. The bar boys drank beer. Isaac had a laptop open and kept starting songs and then changing his mind about them. “Honey,” he told Sawyer, “give everyone a little of the stuff, yeah?” They all did a little of the stuff, and Isaac settled on some music with a hint of North Africa or the Eastern Mediterranean. They all sat around looking at each other. The boys and girls from the bar were posing and biding their time, hoping for more free drugs. Isaac and the model made faces at each other. After a short while, the boys and girls realized that they weren’t going to get any more coke out of Sawyer and departed when their drinks were dry. Isabel made a move to go with them, but Isaac, who was perched on the arm of the couch beside her, put his hand on hers and said, “Ne pars pas, toi.” He raised an eyebrow, and she nodded as imperceptibly as she could.

  Incidentally, this was one reason to suspect that Isaac did remember Isabel from their previous meeting. They’d shared a few words in French at Barry’s house those several months before. It was true that Isaac spoke French indiscriminately, maybe most often to those who had the least idea what he was saying—this was all part of his own
affectation. But he seemed to know that Isabel would understand him. This, in any case, was her theory.

  Sawyer came back from shuffling their other guests out the door. He yawned. “I’m going to bed,” he said.

  Isabel was surprised he could be tired after doing coke.

  “Drugs make Sawyer sleepy,” Isaac said. “Everything makes Sawyer sleepy.”

  This seemed to be a subtle dig, but Sawyer laughed and touched his hair and said, “It’s true.” And then he smiled and said, “Even you, honey,” at which Isaac frowned. He offered Isabel his hand as if they’d just concluded a very productive business meeting and told her that it was very nice to meet her. Then he went to bed. Isaac got beers and then pulled out more drugs, which he’d given no prior indication of possessing. There was nothing, Isabel thought, as squirrely as a cokehead.

  “You and Sawyer are cute,” she said. What was it that compelled her to say such a thing? (She could hear Penny or Jenny shrieking, “Omigod you guys are so kyoot!” over the pulse of imaginary bass.)

  “I’m cute-ish,” Isaac said. “Although I am also very weird-looking. Sawyer is handsome. He’s my silver fox.”

  “He’s not that old! He’s younger than me. And also, he doesn’t have gray hair, which I think is a prerequisite.”

  “Oh, he does. You just have to get up in there. It’s hidden.”

  “It’s well hidden. You guys remind me of me and my ex. My ex and I? Me and my ex. Ben. He was older than me as well.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Architect.”

  Isaac raised his eyebrows. “Oh dear, how dire.”

  “Well,” Isabel said, missing his point, “Sawyer’s a doctor!”

  “I like a man who brings home the bacon.” He sprawled across the couch, his legs dangling over the armrests. “It suits me.”

  They did a little more blow and sipped at their drinks, and Isaac played absently with his phone, a habit that Isabel was old enough to find rude and a bit off-putting, although at three-thirty in the morning, what did social graces matter, really, besides which, she knew that her sentiment was hopelessly out of date. They yammered at each other about trivia. He asked her about her work again. That was the night that he described Barry as post-gay, in fact. Isabel asked him about Arthur Imlak. “My father hates him,” Isaac said, “which endears him to me.”

  “Who, Arthur or your father?”

  “Oh, either. It depends.”

  “Why does your father hate him? By the way, I’d really, really love to meet your dad someday. I’m sure you’re sick of hearing it, but he’s really . . . well someone I’d like to meet. God, sorry, that sounds so creepy to hear myself say. I admire him, is better. He, I mean, he practically invented my field.”

  Isaac had produced a cigarette from somewhere and lit it. He rolled his eyes. “My father is bonkers, but I guess I’m glad you find his bullshit convincing. I guess it beats the alternatives. We’ve all got to believe in something. He hates Imlak because Imlak fucked him over in a property deal or something. Don’t ask me the details. I’m a spoiled rich kid, so I have no idea how money works. If Dad hasn’t stolen everything out of my trust yet, I intend to fritter it all away on utter frivolity and die penniless and young. I’m thinking thirty-eight.” He exhaled.

  “I’m thirty-eight,” Isabel said. “I guess that means you just gave me a compliment.”

  “I do the strangest things when I’m not paying attention.”

  “What was this deal?”

  “Fuck if I know. I do know that my dad actually made a bunch of money in it, which is the irony, I guess. I suppose Arthur made a lot more subsequently, and I suspect that this pissed Abbie off, because he believes himself to be uniquely entitled to the best fortune available in any given situation. Do you know that he originally was going to name me Dieudonné. Thank God, my mother objected—bless her heart, she remains just subtly racist enough to tell him that it sounded Haitian. Personally, I love Arthur. He helps me out, money-wise, from time to time, whenever Abbie’s gotten shady about my accounts. He takes me sailing down in Florida sometimes.”

  “The Shale Boat,” Isabel said.

  Isaac laughed. “Yes,” he said. “How did you know? I call it the S.S. Minnow, on account of the fact that Arthur sounds like Thurston Howell, III. He has a house right on Tampa Bay. Sawyer and I were down last fall. Arthur knows all the Navy generals down there and got one of them to bring over an actual working cannon from some battleship from the War of 1812, which he fired out of his front yard into the bay during a party.”

  “Does the Navy have generals?” she asked.

  “Whatever they are. I told Sawyer we ought to try to get one of them to fuck me and get it on tape. He’s such a prude, though. Anyway, it was à cause d’Arthur that we moved to fucking Uniontown in the first place, I guess. See, he owned the land where we built The Gamelands, which Abbie was desperate to get his hands on, and there was some kind of complicated switcheroo. I sort of imagine them like the contract scene in A Night at the Opera. Of course, in the deal, Mom and I also get hauled down to Fayette County. Fayette Nam. The not-what-we-were-promised land. Well, I mean, I wasn’t born yet, but you get the idea. Everyone else at the Uniontown Country Club had a father who was either a lawyer or owned a car dealership, and they’d all been playing golf together since they were white-wine-pickled zygotes riding along in their mothers’ foursomes. Abbie, in one of his vain attempts to buy me off, got me golf clubs when I was like twelve. Well, I managed to talk Marco Larimer into letting me blow him in the woods behind the seventh green, but then he told his mom, who was—is—a fucking county commissioner. She took it well enough, because she’s a criminal and criminals, even the prejudiced ones, have a higher tolerance for perversion than ordinary decent folks, thank God. And she didn’t tell my parents either. But you know, word got around, and no one wanted to talk to some little homo.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Eh.” He shrugged. He told her his stories about going to school in that old coal town. “So, like, it’s the first day of school at Laurel Highlands Jr. High School, and I’ve made it through half the day without getting noticed by anyone, really, or so I think, which is a minor miracle for me. Then I’m back at my locker right before lunch and this kid—Adam Martens, locker right next to mine for the next six fucking years—looks at me and says, ‘Mayer. I heard yinz were joosh.’ I mean, I don’t understand what the fuck he’s talking about. I just look at him. I’m probably not even five feet tall at the time, and he’s this big rangy redneck from North Union Township with fuzz on his lip and a bad buzz cut that makes him look like he’s got a bold future going on a shooting spree on an army base after a bad tour in Afghanistan. He’s scowling at me and I don’t know how to respond, so I say, ‘I’m sorry?’ About as dorky polite as I could possibly be. I mean, what am I, Maggie Smith? And he says it again. ‘I heard yinz were joosh.’ Oh, fuck; I realize he’s saying Jewish. He’s like a legit Fayette County boy. It’s another dialect, I swear. And this is like the worst nightmare, because I really just have no experience with actual anti-Semitism. I mean, it doesn’t really come up in elementary school, except the one time I had to explain to the class what a menorah was. I was all prepared to be called a fag, not a Jew! So I just sort of nod and mumble, ‘Yeah, I’m Jewish.’ ‘Huh,’ he says. I realize he’s come to his locker to get a can of Skoal. He puts in a dip, then spits in this disgusting cup that he’s got in his locker. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘I don’t stand next ta no juice.’”

  “God,” Isabel said.

  “He wasn’t so bad in the end. He came to my bar mitzvah, believe it or not. Anyway, he’s in jail, now.”

  “What for?”

  But he was bent over the table again, and when he looked up, he said, “So, you really want to meet my dad, huh?”

  “I mean, yeah. Yes.”

  He nodded and handed her a rolled ten dollar bill, which Isabel waved away. Then she thought better and accepted. It was late. Th
ey talked for a while longer. She left, despite his offer of a couch, drove home, foolishly and recklessly. The next morning, when she came out onto her porch to get the paper, because she was the sort of person who still got a paper, believing, probably incorrectly, that it represented some kind of defiance of history’s dumb momentum, she saw that she’d parked with two wheels in the grass and a headlight, still lit, now dying, nudging into the hedge below the porch.

  6

  While Isabel wanted to become friends with Isaac, she expected to become friends with Sawyer. They were closer in age for one thing, both professional, neither prone to Isaac’s preferences for excess, or in any case slower to recover from excess, more prone to regret it, and therefore less assiduous in its pursuit. And that’s what seemed to happen at first. They fell into an easy rapport with each other. Of course, to become friends with a couple is necessarily to imagine where your loyalties will lie when they split up. Isabel was especially prone to ideating the inevitable dissolution of any human unit with more than one member. It presented an obstacle, because what she really needed was to contrive a way to meet Abbie Mayer, and Isaac was the obvious path.

  Sawyer and Isaac were perpetually on the rocks, and both of them exquisitely calculated their behavior to embarrass and frustrate the other. Isaac was transparently unfaithful, although his infidelity was often more a matter of style than action, while Sawyer, though he wasn’t shy about betraying a degree of annoyance, typically reacted to Isaac’s deliberate provocations with a blithe unconcern that infuriated the younger man. “I’ve never understood jealousy,” Sawyer told Isabel. It was just the two of them at dinner two months after they’d met. “It seems,” he said, “to reveal a lack of self-confidence.”

  Isabel protested that you could be confident but could still experience jealousy.

  “Maybe.” He put on a face as if mulling it over, but he was just composing his next sentiment. “But I still think that in a relationship, a romantic one, I mean, jealousy is really just anxiety about sexual performance, which is, I don’t know, sort of related to that social anxiety that some people have where they’re always worried that someone, somewhere, might be having more fun than they are at any given time.” This observation about someone, somewhere was a mantra of his. It often showed up in a talk he gave on addiction.