by Mark Merlis
“Fourteen.”
“Fourteen, Jesus. So you must be …” Sexton did the arithmetic and, mercifully, didn’t say: You look older than that. “If he were the very same person, you wouldn’t love him any more. That’s really what I mean. My roommate meant something to me when I was twenty, my first lover when I was twenty-three, but I’m not the man who loved them. If there had been a—what do you call it?—a time warp, if through some magic of the telephone switching system I had got, on the other end, the same person I loved, unchanged, no daughter at Dartmouth, no Bunny—it wouldn’t have mattered.”
“Then why did you make the second call?”
“I’m sorry?”
“After you called the first person and … made this discovery, why did you call the second one, and then the one after that, however many?”
Sexton smiled. “Good question. I don’t know. I guess I was hoping it would be different. That there’d be someone I still … felt some connection with.”
Sexton put a new cigarette in his holder, looked at it for a while without lighting it. He murmured, “That’s it, I guess.”
“What?”
“I was trying to call myself.”
Sunday morning Joel and Michael had brunch, on the terrace at Hamilton’s. Joel had never done this before: taking your trick to brunch at Hamilton’s, so everybody who was there with his trick would see how much better you had done. You could tell the pairs who had just met, because they talked a lot and they looked at one another, only surreptitiously glancing at other tables. Couples who’d been together a while didn’t talk much, and when they did it was about the people at other tables.
Michael said he was going to have an egg-white omelet with grilled vegetables and no cheese.
“Oh,” Joel said. “Urn … me, too, maybe.”
Michael looked at Joel seriously. “You should get what you want.”
“I don’t want you to think I’m a piggy”
“It’s too late. I already think you’re a piggy” Michael grinned. “I know you’re a piggy” Which was not about breakfast. Joel grinned back. It was wonderful to sit on this terrace and share the knowledge that they had been piggies. Or some kind of animals.
Michael went on: “If I had my way, I’d have about a dozen eggs and biscuits with sausage gravy.”
This was the first identifiably ethnic remark Michael had made in their hours together. Not black, particularly, but southern. Maybe Joel was part southern himself; biscuits and sausage gravy sure sounded fine. He scanned the menu in vain. Just lots of different Benedicts: it was amazing how many different things could be interposed between a poached egg and an English muffin.
Michael wasn’t very black. He didn’t have any accent, not even a New Jersey one. He hadn’t done anything complicated to his hair. He wasn’t wearing two-hundred-dollar sneakers, or jeans whose waistband hovered at mid-thigh. Sam’s Kevin acted, dressed blacker than Michael. And was possibly better hung. Really, Joel had practically forgotten that Michael even was—
Right.
Joel was perfectly conscious that, while he was brunching with the most beautiful man on the terrace at Hamilton’s, everyone who saw them saw only a middle-aged white man and a young black man, the only one in the place. Michael had to be feeling the same thing. Or maybe not: he was twenty-six maybe, or twenty-seven, Joel hadn’t asked because he didn’t want to tell his own age. Michael had dwelt, say, twenty-six years in that skin, he couldn’t spend every waking minute thinking about what it said to people. At some point, if he wasn’t to go crazy, he must have said to himself: here I am, in this skin, this body, and I am just going to be. I am going to sip my mimosa and watch the people who pass by on Seventeenth Street. I am going to look out from inside here and I am not even going to think about what people see when they look back.
Which was the way he’d been in bed, really. So unselfconscious, so freely and unabashedly himself that he had freed Joel as well. They had done the things Joel could never do with Sam. Not all of them—Joel was not so limber in reality as in his dreams, and one act in particular that he had been especially fond of imagining turned out to violate several laws of physics. But they had done many things, Saturday night and into this morning. It all just seemed to happen. Joel didn’t have to, impossibly, spell out his desires. Michael discerned them, from a glance, from some almost imperceptible inclination of Joel’s body. He paid attention to Joel’s body, as he paid attention to his own.
Michael was still looking out at the street; neither of them had spoken for a while. Joel thought of questions he might ask. Things he actually wanted to know: Did Michael grow up poor? Had he been to college? How did he wind up at Hecht’s? Did he plan to be in menswear the rest of his life? But all these questions would have been asked from across a divide, as if Joel were an anthropologist. If Michael had said yes, he grew up poor, what would Joel have done with this intelligence? Tell me in detail what it was like, living on the thrifty food plan; I’ll take notes.
What did he and Sam talk about their first days, before they were able to talk about the daily business of their life together?
“Oh, look,” Michael said. “A Corvette.”
Joel looked. “Uh-huh.”
“That’s what I want. Except not red, that’s a cop magnet. I want a black one. And not a convertible, the kind of Targa top they have.”
“Uh-huh,” Joel said. He had no idea what a Targa top was.
“What kind of car do you drive?”
“I don’t have a car.”
“You don’t?”
Joel said slowly, as if talking to a lunatic, “We haven’t been in a car.”
“No, but I thought, you know, you just didn’t use it to get around the city. You really don’t have a car?”
Joel hadn’t until now felt that this was especially eccentric. “It just isn’t worth it.”
“Do you even know how to drive?”
“Of course I know how to drive.” He drove once a year, or had until this year. Once a year he and Sam had flown to Boston and rented a car to go to Provincetown. Sam wouldn’t let Joel take the wheel until they got onto the Cape itself, to that stretch of Route 6 that was just two lanes and that a child could have navigated. Joel wondered now if he would ever drive again. “I was driving when you were in diapers.”
Luckily, Michael responded to this unfortunate, and probably accurate, remark with a snap of his fingers and a haughty, “I don’t do diapers.”
“What—do people … do diapers?”
“Sure. There’s this whole scene.”
“I don’t think I want to know about it.”
“Me either.” Michael shuddered. “But, hey, don’t you have any kinks?”
Joel had thought that some of their activities last night and this morning constituted kinks. “I guess not. How about you?”
“Nah. Just this thing for old white guys.”
This said lightly, as if Joel shouldn’t mind. He was an old white guy, and he had stumbled on a beautiful man who had a thing for them. Or for their wallets.
Michael’s zero-calorie omelet arrived, along with Joel’s Piggy Benedict. Joel was ravenous: he ate everything, even the melon slice and the strawberry, and was contemplating cleaning up the remaining hollandaise sauce with a spoon, while Michael had downed one or two grilled vegetables and had taken two bites from a piece of toast with no butter. Michael ate even slower than Sam; Joel would probably be watching him nibble all afternoon.
“So,” Joel said. “Are you saving up?”
“What?”
“For the car. For the Corvette with the Targa top?”
Michael put his fork down—the last thing Joel had meant him to do. “No,” he said, with a rising inflection that suggested the question was crazy. Which it was. Joel understood: people didn’t save up for things. This concept was left over from old movies where large, tumultuous families stowed spare nickels in a cookie jar so the studious daughter could go to college and then writ
e about her tumultuous family. Michael would have a Corvette if he won the lotto or found a sugar daddy. Meanwhile, his financial planning probably consisted of transferring his Visa balance to a new MasterCard with a low introductory interest rate. As his career planning probably consisted of making sure he didn’t call in sick so often that he got written up.
The divide between them wasn’t racial, or even generational. There were people like Joel, who put money in accounts they couldn’t draw on until they were fifty-nine and a half, and people like Michael, who must have thought that reaching fifty-nine and a half was neither likely nor even especially desirable.
Jesus, was he positive? He and Joel hadn’t—that word of Melanie’s again—they hadn’t barebacked. But neither of them, not last night or in their first encounter last week, had sat up and said, “Oh, we better be careful. Remember our health insurance!”
If he wasn’t infected, he was possibly one of those kids who figured he would be sooner or later, that it was just a part of being gay—eat your omelet slowly, taste every mouthful, because you’re never going to be fifty-nine and a half, or even forty.
Could Joel ask? Did people ask this question? Maybe it was part of contemporary dating etiquette. But if so, you were probably supposed to ask it somewhat earlier in the proceedings, not at brunch the next day. The answer couldn’t matter now. Or it could: Joel could still improve his odds by assuring there were no further opportunities for transmission. They would be more careful, Joel would make it plain that they needed to—
No, he wouldn’t. If Michael stayed another night—if he didn’t just finish his omelet, wait for Joel to pay the check, and then walk away—they weren’t going to shroud themselves in Saran Wrap and talk dirty to each other from across the room. It might be their very last time. Or, if it wasn’t, then the next time might be, or the next.
Joel and Sam had had a last time. The weekend before Sam left. Had Sam known it, that they would never be together again? What could that have been like? What would it have been like if Joel had known, too, that this was going to be it?
Michael put his fork down again. “What are you thinking?”
“Nothing.”
He would have paid attention. If he had known it was the last time, he would have looked at, touched, tasted every surface of that body that was so familiar he had stopped seeing it at all.
When Joel woke up, it was seven in the evening, still daylight. Michael was in the living room, watching MTV. Joel stayed where he was. He wanted to be with Michael, but he didn’t want to watch MTV. More precisely, he didn’t want to watch MTV naked. Michael’s clothes were on the chair in the bedroom, he was in the living room naked. Joel felt, somehow, that for him to go out into his own living room naked just now would be asking too much: too great an imposition on Michael’s good will, or greed.
Once, in his tricking days, Joel had miraculously spirited home a gorgeous man—a modern dancer, the guy said, touring with some company from New York. The encounter had proceeded in the usual clunky way: the two of them seated separately in the living room, Joel at last suggesting the tour of the rest of the apartment. The clothed grappling on Joel’s bed, shirts wrestled off, shoes. Then the guy said he had to pee. While he was absent Joel went ahead and finished undressing. The guy came back, looked down at Joel’s body, which was arranged in whatever casual posture Joel had thought might be most fetching, and said: “That was a mistake.” Joel just lay there, speechless, while the guy tied his shoes, pulled his Lacoste back on, fled. It was a wonder Joel didn’t go off the next day and take holy orders.
If the guy was in fact a dancer from New York, he was probably, in the late seventies, positive; perhaps he had unwittingly saved Joel’s life.
Joel called out, “Hey.”
“Oh, you’re up,” Michael said. He turned down the volume on MTV but didn’t leave the living room. “I thought you were going to sleep till Tuesday.”
“I was up half the night.”
“I know, I was there.”
“So how come you’re not sleepy?”
Michael didn’t need to answer. Because I’m not an old man.
“I guess we ought to think about getting something to eat,” Joel said.
“You just had a huge dinner.”
This was kind of southern, too, wasn’t it? Calling the midday meal dinner, it spoke of some world anterior to Trenton, some little town somewhere from which the Greeleys had escaped.
“I’m kind of funny,” Joel said. “Sometimes I have as many as two meals in one day.”
Michael laughed. Joel was pleased with himself, and oddly surprised that Michael got the joke. Why shouldn’t he? Probably people spoke English in Trenton.
Michael appeared in the doorway. A. hundred times more beautiful than that dancer from New York. He looked down at Joel, Joel pulled the sheet up almost to his neck. Michael just stood, serenely naked, for a minute. Then he said, “I’m going to take a shower. You got any more clean towels?”
“I don’t think so.”
Michael clucked and headed into the bathroom. Imagine making him use the same old towel. Why was he going to take a shower anyway? They had both showered before brunch, and they hadn’t done anything after, just came back and went straight to sleep.
Joel guessed he was supposed to take another shower, too. However long this lasted, they were embarked on some sort of regime. Joel’s hygiene would be under continuous scrutiny, and his eating habits, and the way he dressed.
When he heard the water start, he jumped out of bed, meaning to be all dressed before Michael came out. He was gratified to unearth one pair of briefs with no holes in them. Now pants. Certainly not the Dockers Michael had scoffed at the other night. Jeans, then, and what, a polo shirt? The first two he tried on made him look like one of those little Chinese statuettes of a wise man; you were supposed to rub its belly and make a wish. The third had an enormous grease stain from some forgotten night of gluttony, the fourth had vertical stripes. When had he ever been so foolish as to buy a shirt with vertical stripes, like the longitude markings on a globe?
He lay back down on the bed, in his briefs, and despondently lit a cigarette. Impossible. Even if Michael had a thing for old white guys, there were plenty out there who did not resemble globes. Who took numerous showers, dressed impeccably. Who had cars. Corvettes, some of them, which they would cheerfully let Michael drive.
Michael came out of the bathroom, toweling himself. “That’s as far as you got?”
“I don’t have anything to wear.”
“Just wear that. I think white briefs are hot.”
Joel snorted. Suddenly Michael was on the bed, straddling him, looking down at his globular body. At his distended belly and sagging chest, so pale next to Michael’s chestnut skin. Michael’s brow furrowed, just for an instant, but long enough that Joel heard: What am I doing with this monster? Michael ran a finger down Joel’s sternum—gently, repeatedly, stroking. He smiled and sighed. He didn’t stop smiling even when his finger went lower, all but lost itself in the girdle of white fat below Joel’s navel. Beads of water glistened on Michael’s faceted shoulders, dripped down onto Joel.
The sun was going down. For a minute or two Michael’s body was rosewood of an impossible richness. Even Joel’s body was red-gold. Joel felt—not beautiful, he would never feel beautiful—he felt that perhaps he was entitled to be where he was just then. Or, more simply, he felt that he was where he was.
Michael tipped forward, his chest pressing down on Joel’s, his lips nuzzling the side of Joel’s neck. The weight of him, the way his hard muscles bore into Joel’s softness like the prow of a ship cutting through water: so hard to breathe under the damp weight of him. Joel wanted to roll him off, but didn’t want to break the moment. So he was aware that it was a moment, already past because of his awareness. Michael might have been holding him, but Joel was an actor miming holding.
What was Michael thinking? Nothing. Joel felt Michael’s heart beating, h
eard his breathing, and imagined he was thinking nothing at all. Because Joel was a racist, because he could not attribute to Michael any human depth, just dismissed him as some sort of splendid, thoughtless animal? No, past this: because Michael was so entirely other that Joel could not see inside the way he usually saw inside people, by attributing to them his own interior life. Michael was lying on top of him, breathing into his neck, and thinking—what?
Wondering, maybe, how long to continue this tableau. Or, maybe, feeling Joel’s heartbeat and wondering what Joel was thinking, or whether Joel was thinking at all. Maybe Michael was as dizzy as Joel was, spiraling into the mystery of two warm men holding one another and still strangers.
Was this it, was this all you got? Just a couple of bodies twined together, as sleeping puppies interlock in a pet shop window.
Michael giggled.
“What?” Joel said.
“I don’t think you’ve taken a breath in the last five minutes.”
“So I guess we’re almost there,” Joel said, when he spoke to Bate on Tuesday.
“Mr. Lingeman, we’ve only started. What you’ve given me now is the rudimentary information people usually bring in when they retain me.”
“Oh.”
“Except usually they know where the missing person was a month ago, maybe a year ago. Petras … how did you say it again?”
“I’m not sure how to say it.”
“He’s had a lifetime to hide himself.”
What an odd way of putting it: as if Petras Baranauskas had actually spent his life concealing himself from Joel. While Joel, who was It, had to cover his eyes and count to a zillion before he could set off in search of the hidden one.
Being It was expensive. For what Joel had already spent on Bate, he could have gone down to Hecht’s and let Michael pick him a whole new wardrobe, and Bate was only at the starting point. This was expensive and silly and Joel had almost stopped caring about it, almost hadn’t called. No, of course that wasn’t so. Having got the name and the birth date and the last known address, so much intelligence, he could not have kept himself from calling. But he was a little ashamed of it.