by L.C. Barlow
Chapter 19
RELAX
I went to Patrick's party that night dressed in blue jeans, a button-up shirt, and my delicious black coat that hugged me tight across the chest and abdomen and left off from my body at my waist. Its shiny black buttons reflected the outdoor light as I turned the brassy knob on the door to let myself in.
Already, there must have been twenty people there, and of course Patrick was in the middle of them all - darting here and there - making sure that he spoke to everyone and that they all had a drink or a dime in their hands. It was a cacophony of laughter, smiles, and crystal glasses.
When I arrived, Patrick bolted to me and said, "Finally, Jack! There are these three girls I want you to meet."
"Oh?" I asked.
"I want you to tell me which one I should fuck tonight." The look on his face was not a joking one, but one of concern, as though he were picking out an engagement ring rather than a liaison. We had never been closer as friends.
"You could have them all," I said, hoping I would not actually have to choose for him.
He nodded his head. "I will, but not tonight. Tonight, just one." He grabbed my hand. "I would entrust this to no one else."
He pulled me through the people, and they barely moved for us, so I rubbed against four or five warm bodies before we got to the three girls.
They were gorgeous. The blonde had crimped hair that looked like silk fibers in the overhead row lighting, and her makeup was done so intensely - dark grey eye shadow surrounded not only her eyes, but ran across the bone of her nose so that she wore a painted mask. Very few could have pulled it off, but she did beautifully.
The second was a brunette that was taller than the blonde, and she wore a matching gold necklace and earrings. The earrings dangled so low they touched her bare and creamy shoulders. Her cobalt blue dress barely came up past her nipples. It made even me want to trail my finger along her breasts.
The third was a red-head with curly hair, dressed as elegantly as the other two, but with a lip ring. It was like Mona Lisa with a piercing, or a statue of Venus with a tattoo. Because it was so unnecessary, it fit so perfectly.
"Which one?" Patrick asked me. I looked at them and was rendered speechless. They all looked like perfect marble statues, and I could not decide which Patrick should bring to life.
"What can they do?" I asked.
Patrick raised his eyebrows, turned to them inquiringly, and said, "Well... what can you do girls?"
"I can sing," said the blonde pleasantly, and before any of the others could answer, Patrick brightened instantaneously and said, "Well let's fucking hear it."
He did not grab her hand, but gestured with his pointer finger for her to follow him. Immediately, I saw what he meant to do. He brushed off the few people sitting on the piano bench as though they were mere pieces of dust, and he sat at the baby grand.
As soon as Patrick settled, he motioned for the girl to stand in front of the piano, and a halo formed around them. My view was crystal clear.
"What would you like to sing?" Patrick asked.
She mentioned a song and listed its E, A flat, A, B, F-sharp, A, recipe of chords.
Patrick nodded his head like an airline captain. He began on the piano with a brisk, upbeat, plink, plank, plink, plank noise. It sounded clean, like it was made by children in the rain rather than Patrick at the piano. A few of the girls in the crowd moved back and forth to the familiar tune. Soon, it was only the cigarette smoke that was still talking. Then, the blonde began to sing.
I looked across the crowd, and there were more people filing down from upstairs, more listening, more singing along softly. Someone had turned off the radio. What truly caught me, though, was the absolute breathtaking beauty of the blonde.
Her voice was an airy one - not thick like others, and it fit with the simplicity of the song. Her silver dress shined like a beacon in the room, a warm light around which all could warm themselves. The dark gray of its spiraling lace matched the eye shadow stretched across her face like a superhero mask, and as she continued to sing, I realized just how impeccably perfect this moment was. I looked at the weight of her breasts pressing against the shimmery fabric, and I knew why Patrick wanted her.
Suddenly, I was glad Patrick had asked me if I wanted him to fuck her, because without that moment there wouldn't be this one - where all of us gathered and communed as part of the blonde's singing and Patrick's playing.
Patrick, in the midst of his striking the keys, hungrily looked at the blonde, and it would have been obvious to anyone that he wanted her - and I wanted him to want her. I wanted to see him want her, because I knew what that want felt like, knew that it made living all the more alive, and I wanted him to feel it.
I admit that this was probably because I loved him. Yes, I did. Yet, at the same time, his wanting her had nothing to do with it. Something fresh had been injected into the room, like a syringe with a novel drug had been planted into the heart of Patrick's loft, and all the liquid went streaming through the air into the cracks and corridors of the loft, and we inhaled it, tasted it, drank it - this pure enjoyment.
I could hear not just the piano, but the very fibers in the strings being plucked. I could perceive not only the woman's voice, but the flesh in that voice and the brilliant vibrations through that flesh.
Thank God Patrick wanted to fuck angels, because then I got to hear them sing.
When both she and Patrick were done, everyone gave them a round of applause, and though many asked for another song, Patrick told them "No," like a child, and both she and he came back to me. Slowly, the conversations that had highlighted the loft returned, and there were noises of hearty humanity again.
Before either of them said anything, I told Patrick, "This is the one."
"I dare say you're right," he said and smiled. He slipped his arm around the blonde and kissed her neck. She seemed to almost purr, obviously pleased that she had passed the impromptu test.
"Let's go then," she told him, and Patrick smiled, smelling her neck again, but then he pulled back somewhat and said, "Hold on. There's something else I want first."
He turned to me, and my heart stuttered.
"Tell me something about yourself. Something new. Something true."
"What?" I asked.
"I demand you explain yourself. I demand you tell me anything."
I shot him a quizzical look, and I shifted this look to the blonde. But she was going with the flow, going wherever Patrick took her. She smiled at me like she was part of this plot.
"Haven't we done this before?" I asked him.
"We've done everything before," he said. "Well," and he thought to himself, "not everything per se, but most."
"There's no fun in repetition," I said.
"No, Jack," he replied. "Fun is only in repetition."
He motioned his hand out like a mafia godfather expressing concern about his daughter's wedding. "Before I have sex with her, I want you to tell me something about yourself. Where are you from?" he asked.
The questions came, slowly, softly, as though his thinking of them was snow falling. "Where were you born? What is your sister like? Who was your first lover?" He said this last one in a whisper. When I didn't respond, he continued to give me a pleasant plethora of questions. "How old are you? What did you do between high school and college? What interests you? What are your hobbies and favorite foods? What are your favorite movies? Do you hate politics? Do you believe in God?"
I looked at him, his burning orange hair, his green eyes, the lovely freckles and high cheekbones, his lankiness. He was so calm, amidst this hullabaloo of a party. Though the music of the stereo started again, and the blonde hung about him like a Christmas ornament, he noticed nothing, was interested in nothing, but my response. For a moment, I wondered if he wanted me, not the blonde, but then I shook the idea away.
"I thought you said there were other ways to get to know someone," I replied.
"Oh there are," he said,
and he stroked the blonde's back, stepped a few feet and lifted a Guinness from out of a silver ice chest. He popped the top off with the sapphire ring on his right hand, brought it to his mouth, and took a long swallow. "But now I'm in a different mood, and I demand an answer."
"You... demand?" I laughed.
"Yes. I think that's fair." It seemed too odd to me to be discussing this as though we were alone, as though he wasn't ready for sex. There were people clustered all about us, bumping into him occasionally and me as well. "You are my best friend, after all. And I hardly know you."
I felt both flattered and confused. Finally, I noticed the others around us again, and I said jokingly, "With as short a time as we've been best friends, answers to these questions could tear us apart irrevocably, and your weed is way too good for me to act so foolish."
He nodded in agreement. "That it is. But what if I said you couldn't have anymore if you didn't answer me?"
"What question do you want me to answer?" I said quickly, like a junkie who needed a fix. I did this purposely in jest. "So you can get on with..." I cast my eyes on the singing woman, "this night."
"For a person like you? The last one. Answer the last one."
"What was it?"
"Do you believe in God?" he said gently, like he was talking to a kindergartner, rather than someone who illegally broke into a stranger's house for his soul.
"I won't answer that one." I looked at the blonde again, and she was smiling at me. The other two girls were now standing close to her. The red one placed a hand on her shoulder, and the movement spoke of pure sex.
"Why?" Patrick asked.
"Because you will want a reason, and I don't have quality reasons for anything I do."
"I don't care about reasons."
"Well then," I said, "I won't tell you because you're Catholic."
"What does that mean?"
"You're easily offended."
"So then you don't believe in God?" he asked. "And you won't tell me because you don't want to offend me?"
I started to feel a bit anxious. The crowd of people suddenly felt overwhelming, like a bucket of perfume poured over me. I might start suffocating soon, I thought. "Haven't the things I've already said about fate and the universe given you any indication?" I asked.
"They've given me no indication, because you don't seem like you match what you say."
"I don't understand."
"Yes, you do," he replied like a psychoanalyst. "Your words... your actions... don't fit you," he said louder, battling very gently the other voices in the crowd.
"Oh really? What do you think fits me?"
"Come, please." He asked in a way meant to massage the message from me. "Tell me what you think." He took his arm from the blonde and now touched the back of my left arm gently.
It was like the lighting of a match, what happened in the next few minutes.
Patrick started to ask the question louder and louder. Soon, the crowd started to listen to him. The word "God," for some reason, silenced the people near us fast. Brian - an old friend of his, and a new friend of mine - was close to us. When he heard Patrick almost yell he began watching, concerned. Still, I would not say anything. I stared at Patrick, nonplussed.
"Alright," Patrick finally said matter-of-factly. He looked around at the crowd. His voice had a new, brilliant hue to it. "You answer this question, or...," he pointed at Brian a few feet away from him, "I'm taking Brian's pants off and burning them in the fireplace."
"What the fuck, Patrick?" Brian said from where he stood, his martini gripped delicately in his hand. "I hear you. I am standing right here, and I hear you. There ain't no way you're fucking taking these designer label jeans and burnin' them. You know they beautiful! They've got a soul, Patrick. Jack, just answer his damn question." Now quite a few people surrounding us stared.
I shook my head. "I don't care if you throw Brian in that fireplace. I'm not answering the question."
"Excuse me? What did you say?" said Brian. He cocked his head and placed a hand behind his ear.
"What's a little fire? You know you're going to hell anyway," I replied.
"See? Right there." Brian pointed his beer at me. "A believer."
"That isn't proof," Patrick said.
"Uh huh, it is. These jeans are safe." Brian made invisible circles around his butt with the hand holding the beer.
Patrick walked to me. "Answer that question, or I'm doing it."
I laughed, thinking how he could never pull something like that off in a room full of this many people. "You can't bully someone into seriously answering a question as important and heavy as that one is."
I sat down on the arm of the couch behind me and pulled out a cigarette. I looked to the blonde, and said, "Besides, you have better... things... to be doing." I lit the cigarette. "You'd have a better chance at bullying me over my favorite color," I said as an aside.
"It's going to be chaos. Chaos that you could have stopped," Patrick said with a soft voice, as he inched to my left, towards Brian. He bumped into a few people on the way there. Brian's eyes were widening.
"Patrick, you're being ridiculous," I said, squinting at him.
"How can you live with yourself, Jack? Knowing that you could have saved those designer jeans with a soul? Gucci is going to rain down on you. Hard. 'Fuck!' you'll say. 'Gucci's rainin' hard!'"
"I hate you," I replied.
Brian, I could tell, was thinking about running. His body turned away from Patrick before his eyes ever did. "I am ser-i-ous, Patrick. Don't you come any closer. Don't you do it. I will pour these hors d'oeuvres all over this white carpet," he said pointing to a plate on a stand nearby. "I will do it! Jack, just answer the damn question!"
By now, Patrick was right by Brian who was swatting uselessly at him with a magazine he had grabbed from the coffee table.
Then, BAM! they were both on the white floor. People shot back like they were at a murder scene. The girls squeaked as they scampered away in their heels.
"Motherfucker," said Brian. "Oh, it's on, now. It is on!" He put an arm-hold on Patrick as Patrick was grabbing the waist of Brian's jeans and tugging hard enough to pull them down past his ass. I could see Brian's bare stomach now, and the jeans threatened to slip lower. I thought someone would stop them, but nobody made a move. In fact, some of the group started laughing. Two people entering the loft merely stood and watched while they closed the door.
"Aaahhh!!!" Brian screamed, high-pitched, like a girl. Patrick laughed and turned as red in his face as his hair before he was able to slip out of Brian's lock, and then he grabbed the legs of Brian's pants and pulled hard.
The pants didn't budge, and Patrick ended up dragging Brian across the carpet. People scurried out from behind him. By now I had forgotten about my cigarette, and I sat on the armrest of the couch, frozen, holding it on the tips of my fingers.
"I ain't never gonna forget this!" Brian screamed. "I hate you Patrick!" More laughter from the crowd.
"Look at what you're doing to us, Jack." Patrick said this to me as calmly as would a waiter telling me the specials on the menu. He dragged Brian's wriggling body over the carpet, one slow heave at a time. The others looked from the wrestling men to me, but I didn't move.
Patrick scrambled to the fireplace and pressed the gas on. "And you could have stopped it all," he said, shaking his head like, "Isn't it a shame?"
"No! Noooo!" Brian screamed again like a girl. "I just wanted to go to a party, motherfuckers! God, how does this always happen to me?!"
"Just answer the question, Jack, and all of this ends," Patrick said calmly.
But all of this bedlam was too hilarious for me to end it.
While Patrick held onto Brian's pants with one hand, he grabbed a cigar lighter on the fireplace's white brick seating area and lit the gas. Whoosh! it went.
Now Patrick pounced on Brian. "My God this is gay," I commented.
"Oh yeah?" said Patrick. He glanced at me as he fought with Brian by t
wo women and three men I had never seen before. "Does it offend any moral structure set into you by overly conservative Baptist ministers?" he asked amid grunts and hollers from Brian. "Or does it flatter your liberal tolerance given you by your lesbian Lutheran church leader? Or do you as an atheist or agnostic simply not care, or believe there's no way of knowing if this homosexual facsimile is okay?"
"Just answer the fucking question!" roared Brian, who now, except for his shirt and ankles, was completely bare. His entire face was tense with strain.
"Oh my God, Brian! Why didn't you say you weren't wearing underwear?!" said Patrick, and by this point the entire crowd erupted with laughter. It seemed to go on and on for miles.
"I am! I am!" Brian yelled. "They're in the fucking pants, you asshole! Let me put them on!"
"I can't trust you!" Patrick yelled amid whoops and hollers.
"Yes, you can!"
"No, I can't. I'm just going to have to throw everything in the fire!"
"Noooo! Goddamn you Patrick! You are dead to me!"
Finally, it was over. Patrick ripped Brian's pants off of his legs and plunged them deep into the massive fireplace. Brian didn't even try to save them.
He bolted straight for the kitchen, his ass mooning me and some of the others behind him as he ran. In two seconds, he was through the crowd and back, and he had Patrick's cooking apron on with the image of a woman's body in lingerie on its front. He didn't tie it firm, though, but instead went for the tray of hors d'oeuvres.
"Dinner is served, you sick son-of-a-bitch!" he yelled, and he threw everything across Patrick's immaculately white carpet. There was a collective gasp as sandwiches and sauces splashed like paint on canvas, and then the noodles followed, plopping with the sound of raw meat hitting a cutting board.
Patrick sat on the fireplace's seat, grabbing a poker to stoke the now burning jeans. He looked like a man who was explaining a graph in a business meeting.
"Oh, it ain't over yet!" fumed Brian. He stalked to the kitchen.
"I think he's really angry," I said from where I was sitting.
"Yeah, well, I would be, too," said Patrick. "Now we don't have anything to eat."
The crowd was completely silent, and Brian returned with a bottle of red wine. "A little vino maybe?" Brian said, looking like a naked, half-female, half black-man, half-demon bent on revenge. Never taking his eyes off of Patrick, he removed the stopper and poured the wine in swirls, splattering as much of the carpet as possible. He threw the bottle on the floor, and then he and Patrick just stared at each other, panting.
Finally, Patrick turned to me. "When will the pandemonium end, Jack?" he said. "When will it be enough for you?"
I swallowed the view of the black smoke of the fireplace and the jeans turning to ash, the bloody looking sauce spilled across the white floor, interspersed here and there with purple wine, and then to the crowd and my naked friend, covering himself with the figure of a hot female in black lingerie. I gave in.
"Alright," I said. "Sometimes."
"Sometimes what?" Patrick asked.
"Sometimes I believe in God."
"Now, we are getting somewhere."
There were whispers in and amongst the people, and they floated like feathers fresh from a cockfight. Patrick stepped to me. "I'd love to finish this conversation, but I have a girl to fuck," he said.
He grabbed the wrist of the blonde, and then he turned back and smiled at me. "Unless you'd like to join us?" I looked at him, and he pointed to the red headed girl. "This one I would choose for you." But I replied that I didn't "do" red-heads, making note to look at Patrick's red hair, and after this statement, he turned away from me and grabbed the wrist of the brunette like a man who had almost forgotten to pick a chardonnay off the store shelf to buy. They left for the upstairs, many making the way easy for him by scurrying.
Brian was still panting, but looking less and less angry. He rolled his eyes and came over to the couch. On the cushion close to me he plopped himself, his legs dangerously wide for only a cooking apron covering him.
When the crowd was looking at us less and less, and talking more and more, Brian's panting had stopped, and I asked him if he wanted some pot to take the edge off.
He replied, "I'd appreciate that." I rolled us both a joint.