God Says No

by James Hannaham

  Eventually Miquel got to a point in the song where he had forgotten the lyrics. He finally shut his trap and finished his pancakes. I watched him chew, thinking I’d never liked how he opened his mouth partway when he ate.

  “You think we can be boyfriends without ever having sex, don’t you?” he suddenly exclaimed, his mouth still full.

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  The waiter returned. “How’s everything?”

  “Terrific!” Miquel responded, suddenly chirpy.

  “Another Bud Dry?”

  “Don’t you have anything stronger?”

  The waiter laughed nervously and rocked on his heels. “Beer and wine is it, I’m afraid.”

  Miquel rolled his eyes. “Okay, I guess.” The service bell rang and the waiter sprang off toward the kitchen.

  “Wouldn’t it bother you when I brought other guys home?”

  “Other guys?”

  Miquel played with his hair, thinking of a response. I wanted to hug him, but I could see that he might have wanted to hit me in the face. “Wait a second. You want to be celibate and monogamous?” He snorted.

  “Yes, Miquel. I want to be celibate with you.” That way of putting it came to me right then. It sounded so original and holy. August, for all his worldly ways, never forgot what Christ had done to make him possible. He and I remained devoutly Christian. In Atlanta, nobody found that too strange.

  Miquel’s face muscles tensed. “That’s almost funny,” he said. He looked away for a while, like we were stranded in a rowboat and he thought he’d spotted land. Violently, he smashed his cigarette out in his syrup and immediately lit another. He stuck one in my face and I held up my hand to decline. “Jesus Christ deluxe with onions.”

  He knew that comment would get my goat. A rubber band in my head popped. I slammed my open palm down on the tabletop and the silverware jingled. “Stop it! Stop it!” I shouted. “You know I can’t stand it when you blaspheme against the Lord!”

  Miquel turned away when I yelled. When he turned back, his eyes were red and sore. His lower lids were filling with tears. It was the wounded look I found so irresistible. He rested his chin in his palm, covered his face, and wept. Then he turned all the way around. His back shook, but he didn’t make any noise. That made me very uncomfortable. I touched his spine to comfort him and he wriggled away. I pushed a napkin into the cage under his elbow, but he shoved it back through with his opposite hand. I watched the waiter more passively now, and the other customers, too. Some them were still looking at us out of the corners of their eyes, in case we flared up again.

  It took a few minutes, but Miquel raised his head, found the napkin on his own, and wiped his eyes. He breathed in deeply and let it out slowly. Soon I could no longer stand the lull in the conversation.

  “Hey,” I said in a soothing voice. “Think of it this way. You’ve already made it most of a year without having sex. This will just be a continuation.” I announced this while Miquel cried himself out, as a compliment to his stick-to-it-iveness, a way of thanking him. “Why is it all of a sudden such a huge issue?”

  The waiter dropped a wet bottle of beer between us in passing. Miquel raised it to his lips and soon all the liquid vanished into him. He straightened his spine, put his elbow on the table, cupped his hand, and rested his cheek in it. “No,” he sighed. “I didn’t make it almost a whole year without having sex, Augie.” His lips formed a pathetic smile.

  My first thought was that he had figured out a way to trick me, the way Annie had done with my nightly erections. I opened my mouth to say something like that. Then the truth sank in with an ugly chill.

  It didn’t matter to me that I would be straight soon. In fact, I completely forgot that aspect of my future in that moment. Besides, if Miquel had done this six months earlier, he might have transmitted some awful disease from whoever this was. What good would straightness be then? It might mean I could never have another child, or I’d die.

  But then I panicked, imagining Miquel kicking me out of his magical house into the street, like Adam out of paradise, or like my daddy banishing Joe from our lives forever. I would never stroke the furry chair again. My name hadn’t been added to his lease. I had no legal right to be there. I couldn’t afford much else on a temp’s wages. Shivers passed through me when I thought of what Marilyn had said about the Patriot Inn. No one leaves here for long.

  The question almost refused to leave my mouth. “Did this happen-Is there a time— When ... ?”

  “Last week, when you were in tech.” The technical rehearsals had lasted from 9 a.m. until midnight for four days. “I was lonely.”

  Slightly relieved, I took a big breath for the next question. “Is it— Are you in ... Is he another man?” I sipped my ice water, hoping I could survive whatever fate he dealt me.

  Miquel spat a “Ha!” across the table. “The last experience I had with a woman was when I left the womb.”

  In sketchy terms, he described an encounter a lot like my bathroom stuff. With Annie, I had put my times with men into a box that said Not Cheating. But I thought differently now that I was in her position. As angry as I was at Miquel, it came to me that letting him see me get upset would mean admitting to myself that I’d done something wrong when I skipped out on my family. Miquel might also decide to leave me. Annie’s presence grew so strong in my imagination that I could almost see her sitting in the empty chair, clutching the bouquet of carnations. Hoping that she would have mercy on me if she ever found out, I went against my boiling rage and tried to forgive Miquel. This is what Christ would have done, I thought, if His boyfriend- Of course I couldn’t finish that twisted, blasphemous thought.

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “It’s okay,” he mocked. “You’re full of shit, Nelson Mandela. Next you’re going to give me another sermon about turning your cheeks, or the Prodigal Son’s loaves of bread or something. It’s not okay and you know it.”

  “What do you want me to say, Frosty?”

  “Get angry! Get jealous! Show me that I matter to you, dumbass!” Then he muttered, almost to himself, “Why do you think I did it in the first place?”

  Way to turn it around on me, I thought. I couldn’t do any of those things on command. Cleaning my fingernails with my other fingernails, I waited for an answer to come into my mind. The sounds of pop music, the dishes clattering in the kitchen, and the hum of conversation grew louder in my head. The noise drowned out the sensitive reaction I wished I could have.

  “Calling people names isn’t polite,” I managed. “I should be the one calling you names.” The waiter skidded past with two plates resting on his sleek forearm. Leaning into his path I asked, “Can we get the check, please?”

  Miquel folded his arms and glared at me. The busboy cleared our dishes away carefully, like somebody defusing a bomb. Somehow the restaurant had emptied out without my noticing. Miquel lit another cigarette and blew smoke rings. His open mouth looked as rude as a blow-up doll’s. The expression on his face rejected me, and the more I thought about the day when we’d break up, the more tears came to me, like a locomotive whooshing up the tracks. Miquel’s mouth opened and he reached across the table to touch me. I let him stroke my arm.

  “Oh my God,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  Once I raised my head and blew my nose, I figured we ought to turn the conversation back to more pleasant matters. “Did you really like the show?” I asked.

  His words slid out of his mouth as carelessly as the smoke. “I hate Rex Messina’s work,” he said. “He’s so pretentious. He thinks he’s the Dalai Lama of Mime or something. As if mime needed a Dalai Lama. What mime really needs is to be put out of its misery. The only good thing about that show was the lighting design.”

  These words crushed me more than his confession. I wanted to ask, Not even me? But by the time I understood how much more that comment had struck home, we had paid the bill, so I got up and went to the parking lot instead. The night was sticky-warm, so hu
mid I felt I could almost drown in the air. We got halfway home before I remembered the carnations. Miquel never mentioned them, and I never reminded him.

  On the last night of The Titicut Project, the cast went out with the audience to celebrate. The run hadn’t ended so well. The last audience had fewer people in it than the cast, one of the saddest things that can happen in the theater. The only folks there were a couple who worked with Helene and a trio of young guys who piled out when we still had ten minutes left. Helene’s friends wanted to congratulate her by taking some of us out to dinner, so they stayed and watched us break down the set and lights.

  Rex gave us notes, and Spitz took to grumbling that the notes didn’t matter, since the run had ended. Everybody else knew Rex would disagree with that, because for him, notes had as much to do with life as the show. If he could have followed us home and given us notes about what we did there, I bet he would have.

  Afterward, the cast went to one of those Japanese restaurants where you sit on the floor. Raw fish didn’t strike my fancy. Instead, I ate a big plate of shrimp tempura. At supper Rex fairly talked his jaws off about the value of doing shows without an audience. He sat at the head of the table and his nose vibrated as he spoke.

  “Small audiences don’t bother me, guys. On the contrary,” he said. “For centuries, writers have made their work for one person at a time to receive in silence. There’s a timeless beauty to that phenomenon of silence and a one-to-one audience-even when it happens in a theater.” Ever since Miquel insulted him, I believed him less, and that night his conversation just sounded like an excuse for nobody showing up. It even took him a good while to get Erica on his side; she carefully sipped green tea and pouted instead of agreeing. I felt real bad for all of us.

  Miquel had the car that night, so Isla gave me a ride home. I threw up the tempura on her dashboard. Once I’d helped her clean up the mess and gone upstairs, it was 11:30 on a Sunday night. I quietly slid the key into the lock to keep from waking Miquel up. I dumped my tote bag by the shoe area, as usual, pushed off my Doc Martens, and yawned. The empty couch soaked up pink light from the streetlamp outside. Usually Miquel left the sofa draped with linens, but not that night.

  Probably he hadn’t come home yet; some nights he went out to drink. But when I tried the door to the bedroom, it was locked. This was unusual, since the door to the bedroom didn’t have a lock. I jiggled the knob gently at first, then pushed hard on the frame, but it wouldn’t give. Miquel had probably moved the dresser to block the door as a way to take back his bedroom. That made me angry. He could have asked for the room back and I would have said yes. How could I say no? I just lived there; it was his apartment.

  I was fixing to pound on the door and wake him up, but in the silence, I heard a steady knocking. I had heard that sound before, whenever I sat up and leaned back too far watching TV in bed. But this noise came regular as a clock. Between the knocks I heard an animal-type growl, not a noise I had ever heard Miquel make. The growl turned into a voice I had never heard either. It told somebody to do a bunch of things-nasty sex things. It called out names and cursed and told the other person that he enjoyed everything like a dirty whore. It could have been the voice of Satan. And the person hearing it had to be Miquel.

  Well, I flipped. I knew Miquel didn’t agree with the celibacy idea, but I thought I had let him know that I didn’t want an open relationship. He hadn’t said he would or wouldn’t, but having sex and moving the dresser left no doubt. Did he even care where I slept? I pushed myself against the door, but even my bulk couldn’t budge that hefty dresser. By that time they’d built up momentum, and I don’t think Miquel or the satanic man heard the sound. Maybe they ignored it.

  Standing and listening for a bit, it dawned on me that I didn’t want to meet that growling man. He sounded pretty mean. I was angry, but he sounded like a man with a knife or a gun. By and by he would finish his little adventure with Miquel and they would come out of that room. I didn’t want to see his face, or any proof of their carnal passion. Maybe this really was the Devil. Thank the Lord, I thought, I’m going to turn straight one day and leave all this behind.

  I spread linens out on the couch. They smelled dryer-fresh, so I put them up to my nose like in a commercial, then tucked the fitted sheet around the pillows and pulled the flat sheet up to my waist in the night air. If I slept, the growling man would be gone when I woke up to get ready for work, and I could avoid a fight. I lay down and closed my eyes.

  Of course I couldn’t sleep. I lay on my back with my arms folded, fuming, then opened my eyes and watched the ceiling fan spin. I made myself dizzy trying to follow just one of the blades with my eyes. The only way to avoid them once they got done, I knew, was to leave the apartment. Since I was having trouble sleeping already, it made sense for me to get up, get dressed, and take a walk through Piedmont Park. So that’s what I did.

  The night was clear and balmy, with a half moon, a few stars, and a breeze. God had polished everything in the sky. The heavens had a silvery sparkle that hung on all the edges of the leaves and the blades of grass, too. I stuck my hands into my pockets. I sure wished we had a dog. Walking him in the wee hours would have kept me from looking so suspicious. Holding a leash would’ve given me something to do with my hands. Everybody knows about idle hands.

  Now, by this time, I knew what kind of men hung around in public parks at weird times of the night without dogs. Though I couldn’t see any of those men on the street once I got up to the park entrance, I couldn’t stop myself from expecting, maybe hoping, to see them. A young lady in a sports bra whizzed by on her bicycle. Across the street, a couple were having a disagreement in a hatchback. I saw a homeless man sleeping on a bench with his head under a crumpled newspaper. Satan whispered in my ear how exciting it would be to find a man and have a sexual encounter. But that would make me no better than the sodomites I’d left upstairs. If everything went according to schedule, I’d start to want physical closeness with a woman pretty soon. Maybe this bad luck with men had the purpose of weaning me off them.

  Soon after I entered the park, another set of footsteps mixed with the sound of my own. When they got loud enough, I turned around and saw a muscle-bound white man leading a dachshund on a leash. The dachshund scurried ahead of the man. His red T-shirt fit tight around his barrel chest, and his trousers were made of a shiny black material, probably leather. My blood started to race, so I turned away quickly before he got too close. But I couldn’t stop myself from taking another look.

  Even though the situation frightened me, something about this guy seemed friendly and familiar. He raised his chin and said hello under his breath. I did the same, trying to imitate him exactly. His bent nose made his face more interesting. I slowed down.

  “Great night, ain’t it?” he said. I turned and he stopped, so I had to stop, too. We had paused in an area where a huge magnolia tree blocked out the glare from the lamps on either side, as well as the moonlight. The man might have stopped there deliberately. The shadows of leaves made us look unfinished, like the night had bitten chunks out of our bodies.

  “I suppose so,” I said. “Almost like room temperature.” My nervous laugh hopped out of my throat. The dog stood on his back legs and steadied himself on my shin, peering at me and wagging his tail.

  “That’s Percy,” the man said. “Short for Percival.”

  “Oh,” I replied, bending to stroke the dog’s neck.

  “He’s always looking for something to hump. Just like his daddy,” he laughed. I recognized the man’s accent as one from South Carolina. He could have been Euge McCaffrey grown up. In fact, I longed for any connection to my past so much that I thought I might be trying to turn the guy into him with my mind. But I couldn’t see him so well, and he hadn’t recognized me. Wouldn’t Euge have remembered? A powerful surge of homesickness swelled in my heart. I longed for my old bad life as I hadn’t since the Lord had shown me the way. That gave me the courage to ask the one question you simply don�
�t ask until all the business gets done.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Lance.”

  He wouldn’t admit to being Euge. I had no idea where I stood, so my spirits quickly sank. “You from South Carolina?”

  “No. Why?”

  “No reason. You just sound like you’re from there is all.”

  “Near there.” He backed away casually and tied the dog’s leash to a nearby bench. “You wanna take a walk? Like a nature walk?” Without waiting for an answer, he left the path and went up a small hill to another tree that stood farther back, in a darker, more secluded area. When I hesitated, he checked behind him to make sure I was following. My legs moved up the path almost by themselves.

  His back narrowed into his waist and flared at the hips. If Euge had slimmed down, fixed his teeth, and dyed his hair, I thought, this could be him. I recalled that Euge had three blemishes by each corner of his mouth. This guy had four. Or had Euge had four? Why had he told me his name was Lance? Why was he denying me? Some gay friends of Miquel’s used special fake names when they picked up guys. Could this so-called Lance have been like me, living under another name? My eagerness to find out the truth became unbearable. But in order to know for sure, I would have to risk opening the door to my old life.

  When I joined him again, he had found a cozy spot on the far side of the tree. He leaned against the trunk, seductively. The natural canopy of broad, flat leaves made it so dark that I almost couldn’t see him, but the dim light gave his body a faint aura. Following the light with my eyes, I realized that he had unbuttoned his jeans and pushed them to his thighs. He called out to me.

  “Hey, you. Dude.” Since I couldn’t decide on which name to tell him, I didn’t fill in the name part. “Over here.” I got closer. I pushed aside my guilty conscience and opened my mouth for a kiss. But instead of pressing his face against mine, he took hold of my shoulders and pushed down on them real hard. One by one my knees bent and made contact with the mud. A little defiantly, I kneeled too far from where he stood. I made it so that he would have to step forward to get me if he wanted me to suck him off.