Christmas Spirit: with More Christmas Spirits

by David Connor

  None of us chose a beverage. Mr. Asher probably wasn’t thirsty. Dr. Wise probably couldn’t drink. And I’d been too busy wondering if the Long Island Medium would travel this far south to really pay attention to the choices. Aidan shut the fridge.

  “Aidan,” Mr. Asher said. “Do you really want to live down here fulltime, away from the only family you have left?”

  Mr. Asher and his second family were on a Floridian Christmas vacation. He’d invited Aidan along. It seemed as if he was truly trying to mend fences. “I told him I was already going. Don’t need his plane ticket. Don’t need his hotel room. Don’t need him.” Aidan, on the other hand, was still bitter.

  “Your grandfather left you a sizable amount of money, but taxes, upkeep, utilities… you’ll go through it rather quickly,” Mr. Asher warned.

  “Don’t need your parenting.” Aidan took a long pull from his bottle. “Too little, too late.”

  His father bit his lower lip, possibly symbolically. “Okay. Your brothers and sisters are looking forward to meeting you. It’s time we get all closer, son.”

  “It definitely is.”

  “I can leave you two alone,” I offered. I was certain that “son” thing wasn’t going to fly. Aidan had already ignored it once. In my mind, Mr. Asher was pressing his luck, and figured I should let them air their dirty linen in private. Besides all that, I wanted to search the Internet for psychic medium John Edward’s website.

  “Stay. It will only get worse if you’re not there to buffer.”

  “I don’t want you to go,” Aidan said to me. “You, on the other hand…” He turned toward his father a moment, then put his back to him and stuck his butt in the air. I had a feeling Aidan was telling his father to kiss it.

  “Look, Aidan. As disrespectful as you want to be…whatever. You have a right, I guess.”

  “You guess, do you?” Aidan started swiping at the floor along with swiping at his father. “I’m all alone now. And that’s better than being with you.”

  “Aidan…”

  “I’m not selling this place or the one back in New York no matter what you say.” Aidan wouldn’t look at the man.

  “You’re a kid, Aidan.”

  He looked at him then. “You’re an asshole, Dad.”

  I felt like a voyeur.

  “At least they’re in the same room. That’s a start.”

  “I was one when I sent you to live with your grandfather. A kid and a moron. I was almost the same age you are now, and just as frigging immature.”

  “Bite my ass.” Aidan turned it toward him again.

  “You’re proving my point, Aidan.”

  Aidan slam dunked the towel into the sink. “Fuck off.” He finished his beer in four gulps.

  “Is it?” I asked Dr. Wise. “Is this really progress?”

  “I wouldn’t have been good for you, Aidan. Your mother knew it. Your grandfather did. I get that it kind of sucks I straightened out right after you left, but—”

  “I didn’t leave. You left.” Aidan went to the fridge again.

  “I can’t stop at one beer, either, you know.”

  Aidan froze in his tracks.

  “It’s hereditary,” Mr. Asher said. “I’m sorry for that too.”

  Aidan slammed the refrigerator door so hard a couple of palm tree magnets and a surfing Santa one fell off.

  “I lost almost everything, Aidan. My job, my home… My son.”

  Aidan balled his hands into fists.

  “Sometimes, we do things that hurt because it’s best for someone we love. Leaving you with your grandfather was the only mature thing I ever did before I stopped drinking. It was maybe the only smart thing. I let you go because I loved you, Aidan, but I couldn’t finish raising you. Thanks to your grandfather you turned out—”

  “Turned out what?” Aidan smacked the countertop hard. “A fucking college dropout on probation for a bar fight? A fucking loser who drinks alone at home now to stay outta trouble? A fucking nothing with no job?” Aidan counted off on his fingers. “No future, no focus, and no friends. No one at all. Bravo to both of you!” There were tears in his eyes.

  “I want to see you more,” Mr. Asher said simply.

  Aidan raised his palms to the ceiling. “See me? Now, see ya later.”

  Aaron Asher smiled. He didn’t seem like a bad guy. “Okay,” he said. “At least one dinner… all six of us. Seven. You too, Matthew… Kipster.”

  Mr. Asher shook my hand. I looked for Aidan in his face. They had the same hair color. Mr. Asher’s was short, but curly. I bet if he let it grow, he could have done it in dreads, like Aidan’s.

  “He looks more like his mother.”

  “Nice to meet you too, Mr. Asher.”

  “Aaron. And it was actually quite unpleasant.” He made his way to the door. “Sorry about that. Maybe next time we’ll do better.”

  “Well, that went well,” the holiday haunter said sarcastically once Aidan’s dad was on his way across the yard. Aidan cried hard as I held him in my arms. “That’s more like it,” I heard.

  I wondered if no one had been there to hug Aidan the entire time he’d been grieving. Who would have been? He’d just said he had no one.

  “I don’t smoke no more,” he told me as I rubbed his bare back and he wet the shoulder of my seersucker shirt. “‘Sixty years of cigarette smoking,’ the doctor was all, ‘he brought this on himself, you know.’ What kind of thing is that to say to someone when someone they care about dies?”

  “Pretty cruddy,” I said.

  “Though also true. I’m glad he stopped.”

  Aidan sniffled and unwound himself from my embrace. He flicked at the spot his tears left on my shoulder, as if it could be so easily erased. “Sorry.”

  “Dude, seriously, no big deal.”

  “I miss him, Kip. I miss him like fuck.” Aidan sounded so different than he had a year ago. Some of the spark was gone.

  “Of course.”

  He took my hand. “I told him who I was… when I got there that night. ‘I know who you are, Houdini,’ he says. It was hard for him to talk, but he did, ya know?”

  “Yeah?”

  “‘I could smell you coming a mile away,’ he says. He teased me about the Axe.”

  I smiled, because Aidan did.

  “I’m not sure if Aidan can’t hear me, or if he chooses not to. That’s where you come in. I had a feeling we’d connect.”

  “He always bought me, like, twenty cans every Christmas. Last year, he bought me some fifty dollar shit in a bottle. I found the gifts eventually. Everything but my stocking. I sort of wanted the message. I told you about that too, remember?”

  “Of course.”

  “I didn’t go looking for the longest time. Grampy always wrote messages on the tags too, not just ‘to’ and ‘from’. ‘You’re a man now, smell like one’ the one on the designer aftershave said.”

  I gave his bare shoulder a squeeze.

  “I used some this morning,” Aidan said.

  “You smell good,” I told him.

  “I miss his voice.”

  “I bet you could still hear it, if you listen really carefully.”

  “Good one.”

  Aidan let it pass, though. “Come see the living room.”

  I was expecting something like the house from Golden Girls, all palm frond wallpaper and whicker. It looked more like a cabin, I thought. There was a lot of wood; exposed, roughhewn ceiling beams, wall paneling, and built-in shelving. The couch was brown leather. It looked cozy, as long as the AC was on. Aidan stood on tiptoe to hang a wreath above the fireplace that had been lying flat against it.

  “I meant to have all this done before you got there,” he said with a tinge of contrition.

  “We can finish it together.”

  “That a boy.”

  I looked at a photograph of Aidan in his cap and gown, all high-school-looking front and center on the mantel. There was a frame on either side, one with a young woman, the other with an
older one, Aidan’s mom and his grams, I presumed. He didn’t introduce them to me.

  “My Mandy, my Rori, and my Aidan.” His grandfather did, however.

  “He does look more like his mom.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “You. You look like her, I think.”

  “Do I?” Aidan asked.

  “Yeah. Quite a bit.”

  There were a couple of Christmas cards across the mantel too. “People who forgot to cross me off their mailing list when I croaked,” I was told.

  The tree had lights but no ornaments. “Grab some balls.” Aidan nodded toward the red totes in the middle of the room. “Pig.”

  He smirked. So did I.

  “So, Kipster…” His back to me, Aidan started draping garland. “Are you, um, seeing anyone?” The way his shoulder and back muscles moved, the way his boxers contoured to his sweaty rear end, I had to stare. Suddenly, I thought I spotted new ink. “Kipster?”

  “Huh?”

  Aidan turned. “Seeing anyone? Are? You?”

  “I’m still Kipster?”

  “That’s how I thought of you this whole last year. Kipster… Kip, when we have to be mature. That’s who you are to me. Is that okay?”

  “You thought of me?”

  “Of course he did.”

  Aidan turned around. “You gonna answer my question?”

  “What was it again?”

  He shot me a scowl.

  “Oh.” I looked at my shoes, and then worked my way back up to his crotch.

  “His eyes are up there.”

  “I was…,” I started. “Seeing someone, that is. For a little while. It’s sort of… over. Have you?”

  “‘Have I?’ Not, ‘am I?’.”

  “He caught ya.”

  “Because you know I don’t see, I just fuck, right?” Aidan turned back to the tree. “How many have I fucked, you wonder.”

  What I really wondered then was if Aidan was teasing me, or if he was mad.

  “Forty-three.” He laughed. “You still a virgin?”

  “I… Well…” I hung a shiny glass ball as red as my cheeks. We were right next to each other, and when he reached across me, his armpit came close to my nose. I didn’t hate it one bit. “In some ways, I guess.”

  “You guess? You’re a biology teacher,” Aidan said. “I think you’d know.”

  “The definition of sex isn’t so black and white.”

  That got his attention. “Spill.” He turned again.

  “I had oral sex.” I took a step back. “Several times. Not as many as you.”

  “You stroking his ego or defending your virtue?”

  “Just one guy. A few times,” I said. “But then we stopped.”

  “You didn’t like it?”

  “It felt good… during.”

  “And that’s bad?” Aidan reached for another rope of tinsel.

  “It is when it feels lousy afterwards.”

  “Oh.”

  “You know that night, the night we were studying?” I asked.

  “When my grandfather died?”

  “Yeah.” Suddenly, I didn’t want to finish what I was going to say.

  “Go ahead, tell him.”

  “Huh?” I asked.

  “I didn’t say nothin’. I was waiting for you,” Aidan said.

  “Oh. Well, that felt good. It felt good being with you.”

  “We didn’t have sex, Kipster.”

  “I know. But what we did do… just lying together in bed, that was nice. And that’s what I wanted it to feel like after… with Nick.”

  “That was nice. Especially when I fell asleep.”

  “I knew it!”

  Aidan laughed. “Wait. Nick?”

  “Dr. Barbaro.”

  Suddenly, Aidan was so close to me I could hear him breathing. It was getting heavy. “Barbaro sucked your cock?” He fondled his garland.

  “Yes.”

  “Did you fuck him?”

  “No.”

  “Did he finger your—?”

  “Aidan!” I looked at the floor.

  “Sorry, Kipster. Kip...” Aidan handed the tinsel to me. “You’re the first guy I ever had here,” he said. “Grampy told me to.”

  “When?” I wondered if it was before or after he’d died.

  “We carted all this stuff back to New York last year after Thanksgiving. Then I had to bring it back down.”

  I worked to create perfect fluffy gold scallops as Aidan talked.

  “You’re better at that,” Aidan said. He took over with the ornaments. “We’ve had some of these since I was little. I made this one.” He held up a mutilated piece of lined notebook paper. “It’s a snowflake.”

  “I know.”

  “Liar.”

  I hadn’t. Either way, I was relieved talk of my sex life had ended.

  “Barbaro blow good?”

  I guess it hadn’t, after all. “I… I don’t know.”

  “Nothing to compare it to, right?”

  “Right.” I stepped back to admire my work and felt a little bit like a loser for my lack of sexual experience at age twenty-six.

  “That’s okay,” Aidan said. “I’ll ask again after.”

  Did he want me to ask “After what?”

  “Did you blow him? Did you like both? Did you prefer one over the other?” I could tell by his cheeks, even though his back is to me, that he was smiling.

  “Yes.”

  “That wasn’t a yes or no question, Kipster.”

  “I’m not nice.”

  That made Aidan turn around again. “No?”

  “The whole time I was with him—every time—I was thinking of someone else.”

  “Tell him who.”

  “Oh.” Aidan went back to his chore. “You like older guys, then? He’s, like, over fifty, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And way taller than me. You like tall guys better?”

  “I like who I like,” I said. “I liked him. I thought he was sexy. I just didn’t…”

  “Love him?” Aidan stepped beside me and surveyed the tree.

  “I didn’t love him. No.”

  “Tell Aidan it’s because you love him.”

  “Did you think you did, when you sucked his cock?” Aidan picked up a blue ball. Apparently we needed more blue, or maybe it was a subliminal message.

  “I thought I could. I knew I didn’t… not yet. I made that big deal with you… that night… I’m a hypocrite, I guess.”

  “You’re a human being.” Aidan hung the ornament. He turned and touched my cheek. “Nobody’s perfect, but you’re the closest I’ve ever come to it.”

  “Tell him!”

  I grabbed Aidan’s arm and I spun him around. “It’s you, Aidan, okay? It’s you. I’ve been in love with you for months—over a year. It was almost immediate, like I told you last December. And it seems to be everlasting, which I’m telling you now. I haven’t gotten over it… over you. I’m not going to. I can have sex with a bunch of men, as many times as I want to, and I’m still going to love you. I think sex with you would be hot and explosive, and comfortable and nice. Maybe not the first time, because I’d be nervous, but eventually. I want to have sex with you, Aidan. I want us to be together. I frigging love you!”

  5

  Aidan opened his mouth after my big declaration of everlasting love fell out of mine. It took a while, but he finally said, “Help me find the star.”

  We searched through red plastic bins without another word. I felt like a fool.

  “Here it is.” Aidan held it up.

  “It’s beautiful.”

  There was a round orb in the center, etched glass, with five golden points coming off. Circles of sparkling gold wire appeared to orbit around them in twenty shiny loops.

  “Grampy made it.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yup. Gimme a boost,” Aidan said. “On your shoulders.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

&nb
sp; He tugged on my shirt. I got on my knees in front of him.

  “You’re facing the wrong way, Kipster.” My front was to his front, my back to the tree. “Wishful thinking?” he asked.

  His words hurt my heart. He had no idea.

  I lifted him skyward and he placed the star. When he plugged it in, it didn’t light. “Aww. Crap!” he exclaimed.

  “Probably just needs a new bulb. You got one?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Set me down. I’ll check.”

  Aidan came up empty.

  “We’ll run into town and get one later on,” he said.

  When we reached for the same ornament in the Christmas tote afterward and brushed hands, Aidan jerked away. “It’s good enough,” he said, and then he walked away.

  “Do you want me to leave?” I asked.

  “Leave?” Aidan stopped by the fireplace. He seemed shocked.

  “Go home?”

  “Fuck, no.”

  “I just thought… after what I just told you… if I made you uncomfortable…”

  “Kip, no. It’s all good. Let’s take a break. Wanna go lay by the pond a bit.”

  “Sure.”

  “Lie, I mean.” Aidan smiled. “And probably not have sex.”

  “Probably?”

  Aidan walked away, right out of the room this time.

  “He’s back to being scared by all that. Someone else he loved left him. Me. The last person he felt truly did. It’s not going to be easy getting him to open up again.”

  Aidan stepped back into the openness of the archway. He frowned. “Do you wanna leave... if we’re not gonna?”

  “No.”

  “Good.” His smile returned.

  “At least skinny dip!”

  “Skinny dip?” I asked as I entered the kitchen.

  “Skinny dipping… good idea.” Aidan nodded. He grinned. “Sure. That’s not sex.”

  “I didn’t say it.”

  “You didn’t just say skinny dip?” He looked dubiously.

  “Well… I did. But I didn’t say it first.”

  We’d made it to the back door. “Yeah, right. Who did?” Aidan asked.

  I pointed to the Shelf Elf on the windowsill. “Him?”

  “Fuck him.”

  “Ssh!”

  Aidan turned. “I didn’t say anything.”

  “Consummating your relationship will help Aidan realize there’s a strong connection between love and sex.”