Benediction

by Arnold, Jim

  “Follow me; I’m going to take good care of you,” she announced.

  We did X-rays; we did blood tests. Along the way I learned Monica was Italian, divorced and had two kids. Devout Catholic nonetheless, she was one of “three true sopranos” in Madonna of the Sea’s choir, and the kids were in Bible school on Sundays.

  I guess I hadn’t been able to suppress a judgmental smirk. She said, at one point, totally out of the blue, “I know so many gay people, and I just ignore the pope. Just want you to know that.”

  She took off down the hall and I skipped to catch up once again. It’s like we were in crafts class, art period—we made a plaster cast of my ass and thighs, a “cradle” into which I’d fit for the actual radiation treatments—and we played our favorite CDs while the materials dried. Since I was the patient, she let me pick Radiohead. I wanted to paint the cradle a robin’s egg blue but she said it had to stay white. “Hospital rules, you know.” She scrawled my name on it with a big red marker.

  While that dried, we went to another room where they measured me for the radiation coordinates. They found the exact location, deep inside my belly, where the prostate had once been, as that was where—at least in theory—the cancer still lurked.

  Monica asked, “Do you have any tattoos, Ben?”

  “Just the one,” I said, and pulled up my shirtsleeve to show her the bloody heart.

  “Then this won’t bother you.” She smiled.

  The technician permanently tattooed three dots on my body as coordinates for the lasers during radiation: a dot on my left hip, another on my right, and a final one about halfway between my navel and my cock, just to the left of the still red but less ghastly looking prostatectomy scar.

  Another insult in a long list, I thought as I lay there, eyes forced closed because of the spotlight above me. I could joke to Jake, “Check out the landing lights, baby,” referring to an old Joan Rivers joke, which so totally showed my age.

  Oh, wait. That’s right; I broke up with Jake. Or he broke up with me. I guess.

  Monica told me she’d now huddle with her team, and once their game plan had been figured out, they’d let me know when we’d start the radiation.

  “Dr. Sternberg will call later this week. What time of day did you want to do these treatments? Should be the same time every day—it’s going to be about eight weeks.”

  Monica’s white smock had come undone sometime during our crafts-and-laser time, and the silver crucifix she wore dangled dangerously close to dark, mysterious cleavage.

  Even for me, it was hard not to stare. So I did.

  * * *

  Most of Karen’s stuff was labeled “kitchen.” To stack the boxes neatly for eventual unpacking, I had to move one of the mousetraps with my shoe, which, of course, triggered it. Little bits of the chunky peanut butter bait peppered my face like buckshot, and the empty trap jumped off the floor, snapping at my knees like a mutant crab.

  I dropped the box and hoped the sound wasn’t some glass thing breaking. A girl like Karen probably had unusual wind chimes perfect for a bright kitchen window. Here they’d be a nice foreground visual and counterpoint to the lushness of Jake’s garden beyond.

  Jake.

  Other than the gray velour-topped foldout bed she took from the Russian Hill condominium she’d shared with Dennis, Karen would not add any furniture to the eclectic mix already in the flat.

  I thought she’d never stop with the boxes.

  “What was that?” Her muffled voice came from behind a brown card-board flap covering her face.

  “Mousetrap going off—don’t worry, there’s nothing in it,” I said.

  Karen added the box she carried to the stack growing in the corner. Her brow was shiny.

  “You said Tommy got rid of the rodents.”

  “Yeah—he did.”

  “So why the mousetraps?”

  “Tommy thinks they’re gone, but I don’t know if he’s one hundred percent sure, so—we’ve still got them. For a while, anyway, OK?”

  * * *

  She’d sleep in the living room. I didn’t spend much time in there anyway, rarely entertained guests and never watched television anymore. We jury-rigged some dark blue fabric to make curtains over the doorway for privacy. Luckily, there was a hallway and then a door—which actually closed, unlike most of them in the flat—to my bedroom, so there’d be at least that much distance between us.

  I hadn’t had a roommate in years. It was probably true people really did get settled in their ways, particularly those who were single and lived alone. I told myself I was too young for that, too young to be rigid about domestic things such as cleaning schedules, arguments on the utility of hanging clothes on doorknobs or on which refrigerator shelf the fresh hummus dip would be stashed.

  There was the five hundred dollars she’d pay me every month to help out with the rent, and that was nice, certainly nothing to discount—but what I was really hoping for eventually were the funds for the feature film she’d tantalized me with at Galleria Café.

  At first I was a little disconcerted about the noise another body made in my flat. We’d been buddies, soul mates, colleagues on a film, hell—might as well say it though I winced at the thought—we were girlfriends. But even then she’d always gone home to Dennis and I’d come home to here.

  Karen hadn’t crossed any line where she was genuinely starting to irritate me, but I found myself retreating into my room anyway.

  The bulge in the wall had continued to enlarge over the period I’d been gone, and I’d included a short scribbled note about it in my latest rent check sent up to Bunny. The bulge’s crack—which now appeared at its center—would be investigated in an almost a surgically tentative way, using a heavy bronze letter opener scored as swag at an otherwise-tedious software convention a couple of years previous.

  I scraped around the edges. Curiously, no plaster dust or larger pieces fell from the dark crack. Over the months, the one fissure had split and then split again, till it spread out like a huge, mutant spider-tumor humping the Navajo white virgin walls.

  I inserted the letter opener deeper into the crack, expecting to immediately strike something solid that would reassure me. But I didn’t. It was just space, and an absurd amount of it, between the plaster on my side and what had to be the solid hallway wall on the other.

  I felt the thud of another dropped box and jumped. It was afternoon and the sun was out and there was traffic on Douglass, and then the hair on the back of my neck stood up.

  In the other room, Karen laughed—at what, I didn’t know. My computer startled me with the fanfare from Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, which signaled a message—specifically, an IM from Eric.

  * * *

  Eric: U there, Ben?

  I backed into the desk chair, not daring to take my eyes off the wall, which now had the letter opener obscenely dangling out of its crack.

  Me: Yes.

  Eric: What u doing?

  Me: A million things, Eric, a million fucking things.

  Eric: U in a bad mood?

  I took a deep breath.

  Me: No. I’m OK. I’ve got a roommate now. She’s moving in today. Eric: Shit!

  Me: What?

  Eric: Where will we fuck?

  The goddamn cursor blinked at me demandingly, Karen giggled and the letter opener fell out of its wall-gina, landing on the bare wood with a grating, echoey clatter.

  “What are you doing in there?” Karen was monitoring the premises already.

  “Nothing. Something fell off my desk,” I said. “Sorry about the noise.”

  Me: Calm down. We’ll just work around her schedule. I’m happy the logistics interest you!

  The exclamation point was probably a little outré, a certain signal of my intentions toward Eric, though I truly did not know whether he was ever present enough to pick up that brand of subtlety.

  Never underestimate your audience.

  I’d been told that once. Maybe even by Karen, maybe Glenda
, whomever—it was good advice. In my mind’s eye he smiled, gazed into his monitor and realized how much I desired him.

  Eric: So?

  Me: I do need to get out for a while.

  Eric: Been up to the park lately?

  Me: Isn’t it supposed to rain?

  Eric: I have an umbrella. I’ll keep you dry—for a while, anyway

  At this suggestive comment from someone who was not, at least in my experience, terrifically witty, I involuntarily shifted in my seat, squeezing my thighs together to elicit a small pulse of penis pleasure despite the semiwet Defendor.

  Me: The usual place?

  Eric: See you there. Half hour?

  I quickly did Viagra math in my head.

  Me: Forty-five.

  That must have been OK, as the chat software informed me that “User Eric appears to be offline.”

  * * *

  I told Karen I was going out for some exercise, which wasn’t a complete lie. I had no interest at all in running into anyone I might know between Douglass and the park, so I took my bike and rode it up the hill as far as I could, until the pavement became almost vertical and the sidewalks turned into steps.

  The drug-induced red face could easily be attributed to exertion, if someone didn’t know any better. I did know better, and it bothered me to think that passersby might get an erroneous impression that I was out of shape.

  Focus on Eric; don’t think of…Jake.

  Eric was taller, he was younger, he was shy, he was Latin. At least, those were the obvious differences. Oh—he had access to drugs—Tylenol with codeine, courtesy of the cleaning lady.

  I’d remembered to put the cock ring on—one of those slim leather jobs with snaps, which invariably and painfully caught errant pubic hairs—and it had chafed both thighs and my perineum during the short bike ride.

  The last time I’d been in this particular park was when I saw Connie for the second time, but I hadn’t fully accepted that it was her, although looking back I now believed I knew this on a base level. Of course, there was the main attraction of Eric in the bushes, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to having a slight tingle of anticipation at the thought of another dead doggie sighting.

  Why was it she wouldn’t engage me? Bernard, Wayne and Mark had all interacted with me quite directly, and in Wayne’s case, it was rather intimate—I was as sure his tongue was in my mouth as I lay rolling down that hospital hallway on that gurney as I was that the steep stone stairs leading into Buena Vista Park made the back of my calves ache.

  I missed my dog. That was the one thing, maybe the only certain fact, I’d been able to make sense of about these curious hallucinations. Then there was that tongue—that was no drug-induced imagining.

  They’d all have to appear again and explain themselves.

  Up the stairs, up, up, up, the fragrant pathway now interspersed with stretches of wet asphalt. Where the fuck was Eric? I thought we’d agreed to meet at the picnic table under the carved-up eucalyptus about halfway up to the summit and adjacent to the dark woods.

  I stopped just short of the rise where that tree stood, leaning against a wooden railing for balance as I let out an exasperated groan. It made no sense to me anymore—this park thing. The question always came up, but conveniently Eric would just be there when my head demanded an answer from that other, more reasonable part of me.

  Even before the cancer, youth had not been a friend for a while. There’s nothing like an unexpected life-threatening illness to make a person really feel old, but I’d been checking the lines in the mirror, the gray hair and the flab around the waist as my 401K slowly but surely lost value month after month.

  I’d always hoped Providence would save me from being one of those tired queens who hung around in parks looking for blow jobs, but here I was coming dangerously close to fulfilling that scenario.

  “Ben.” Eric’s voice was soft but urgent. “What’re you doing down there?”

  I looked up. There he was, sitting on the picnic table like we’d planned, though he hadn’t been there less than a minute before.

  Truth was, I’d become a little spooked. “I got a cramp—my incision still hasn’t healed,” I said.

  “Come on. I’ve been here ten minutes already,” he said.

  “That’s what I love about you, Eric—you’re so romantic.”

  He stood up on top of the picnic table. “What is it with you, man? This is as much for you as it is for me. Weren’t you the dude who showed me this park to begin with?”

  I imagined that his voice carried through the ravines down into the trendy shops on Haight Street, where yuppies would pause, interrupting important shopping to listen and take sides during our argument.

  “Maybe I was; you’re probably right. I was just thinking how I’ve been coming here for years.”

  “Ben, you changed. You’re different with the cancer.”

  Eric looked really silly standing on that picnic table. I wasn’t sure whether he was going to laugh or cry or get angrier. “We don’t have to fight—it’s your choice, Eric.”

  I walked up and held out my hand to him. He jumped down, then sunk into my arms and pressed himself against me.

  The fresh Defendor I’d put on over my cock had gotten wetter during this mixed drama of mountain climbing and interpersonal strife. He couldn’t know about it; that was the one thing I’d have to control.

  Eric’s embrace turned into a warm kiss, and he pushed me back, into the trees that bordered the picnic area. The world was suddenly full of fragrance, that yerba buena sensation.

  He got me up against a tree, a stripped eucalyptus with smooth bark. His hands roamed, strong and insistent, with that Argentinian entitledness bordering on arrogance I’d learned to crave from him. Panic rose from deep in my gut as his fingers traveled south toward my belt, then slipped under it.

  I brushed his cheek backward to disengage his lips from mine. “Hey, do you think we should move somewhere else? Anybody could see—”

  “There’s nobody around; you said so yourself,” he whispered, pushing me back. He’d undone my belt before I could stop him. My navy undershorts were wet where the edges of the Defendor met the cloth. I grabbed his wrist as his palm pressed against the pad and it squished like a sponge.

  “What the fuck?” he said, shooting surprise—or horror—into my eyes.

  But he didn’t stop. I was paralyzed against the tree, a sorry vision of a nonassertive Catholic saint, as Eric pulled down my shorts to expose the yellowed Defendor.

  “For a while—the operation—I have to…wear these,” I said.

  “This is totally disgusting.” He looked behind the Defendor at my very soft dick, which still had the leather cock ring encircling it in a hopeful way—like a cheerleader.

  I pulled his fingers off the pad and pulled my shorts up.

  Eric stood up at the same time.

  “Jesus, Ben, what’s wrong with you?”

  “Would you believe it if I told you I just forgot? I had to get out of the house for a while.”

  “How could you forget that thing was down there?” He glanced down at the front of my jeans. This was now more embarrassing than ever.

  “I know—it’s stupid. Of course I know it’s there; I guess I pretend it’s not.”

  Eric pulled his black skullcap back down over his head as the afternoon sea breeze kicked in. “It’s OK not to do this for a while—it’s not going to kill me. I think you need to get better from your…problem.”

  “I feel so—” He wouldn’t let me finish, so I didn’t actually have to say the words “foolish” or “insane.” Instead, he gave me that sultry, half-lidded sneer that made me weak in the knees, and then put two of his fingers in my mouth for me to suck.

  With his other hand he pushed down on my shoulder until I was kneeling in front of him. He stroked the back of my head, pulling me into the warmth of his crotch, and I felt his cock stiffen against my cheek.

  * * *

  Eric did
n’t run off down the pathway through the trees like the other time. We left the park together, soundlessly, his shoulder touching mine all the way back to the Haight Street steps. Somehow I knew Connie wouldn’t make an appearance—so far, the predictable MO for sightings of her and my Deadboys were when I was alone—except for that hospital visitation by Connie and Wayne, when I was clearly under the influence of major drugs.

  I shivered as we waited for the light.

  “It’s not that cold out here anymore,” Eric said.

  “Hug me anyway,” I said as the light changed and an impatient motorist honked for us to cross.

  “Suppose one of your friends—or one of Jake’s friends—drives by?”

  “I’ll take that chance.”

  It was wonderful to feel his body between me and the cold ocean wind. That public embrace was the most intimate we’d ever been. I whispered “thank you” into his ear and brush my lips to his skin.

  Then it was all business, much too soon. “Call me if you need anything,” he said, that throwaway line that, although it did not negate the shoulder-to-shoulder walk or the hug, certainly diminished it.

  * * *

  Not wanting to engage Karen so soon again—surely she was still unpacking and probably would be for a while—I took the long way back. The houses on Buena Vista Terrace were magnificent, all with huge, sparkling clean windows that looked out over downtown and the bay.

  I hadn’t passed more than three or four of these stately homes when the chirp of a car alarm knocked me out of a reverie in which I’d forgotten all about the ridiculous scene that had just transpired in the park.

  It was Dr. Davis Sternberg, opening the door to his big black car, which partially blocked the sidewalk in front of what was most likely his big blue house.

  “Umm, good afternoon,” I said. “Aren’t you Dr. Sternberg?”

  I knew very well it was him. At first, he appeared slightly annoyed, as if he’d thought that perhaps he’d gotten some dog shit on his shoes and was going to have an elaborate, time-wasting cleaning ritual.

  “Yes?” he said, pushing his glasses back up his nose. The open-door warning bell annoyed me.