by Paul Russell
Tracy stood and watched. They were both at a sudden loss with each other. He hadn’t expected to feel awkward, and neither, apparently, had Devin, who busied himself with putting away the dishes in the dish rack.
“Hey,” Tracy said decisively. “Calm down. Come here.”
He held out his arms; an excitement surged in his chest.
“Hello,” Devin said gently, as he came into his arms. Imitating the boy in the bar he’d observed earlier, the pool player, Tracy leaned his head into Devin’s neck. There was a pause in music called the fermata, that eye with its raised eyebrow that commanded, Stop here, linger, take a deep breath before moving on. Louis Tremper had introduced him to the word during one of those sessions of after-dinner music-listening that had become something of a weekly ritual. Suddenly he had to laugh, not so much at Louis Tremper intruding on his thoughts at such a moment as the urgent pressure he had become aware of in his bladder. “I don’t know why I’ve got to piss so much,” he told Devin, releasing himself from their embrace. “I must have the world’s smallest.”
The walls of Devin’s bathroom were painted black, and there was no mirror over the basin. As he pissed a clear heavy stream he considered how easily, and with what a sense of relief, he’d taken up Forge School’s strict regimen. His life there was bare, uncluttered, and if he’d stayed away from Devin’s cité radieuse—all that aimless energy that was Manhattan, specifically gay Manhattan, its clubs and restaurants and gyms, its ceaseless striving for the chic and the buffed, under the guise of which one’s real life, whatever undiscovered thing that might be, frittered itself away—his exile wasn’t unintentional. Even now, inside this not unpleasant fermata, all he secretly wanted was to be back in Middle Forge reading a book and sipping a cup of tea. With a shiver of longing that was a little surprising, he found himself missing Betsy and the lovely, clarifying emptiness of his rooms.
He’d arranged for one of his students to house-sit; given him keys, instructions on feeding and walking the dog, free run of the place. Noah Lathrop probably wasn’t the best choice, but it was a gamble Tracy’d felt he wanted to take. He’d made light, to Devin, of Louis’s welcoming words about the Forge School, but the truth was that he had actually taken them to heart, and he was trying to earn his students’ respect, their trust. With Noah, from the very first, he had felt an unspoken challenge that was also, perhaps, a call for help. Here was a kid more chased by trouble than most. His father was the one Tracy had been thinking of earlier, the man who ruined third world countries with the stroke of a corporate pen.
At the thought of Noah, a pang of emptiness spread through him. He saw the boy as he had last seen him, standing in the doorway, having shed the slightly soiled Forge School sweatshirt he’d been wearing when he arrived, gym bag in hand, for his weekend of house-sitting; as Noah had pulled it over his head, his sky-blue T-shirt had ridden up, revealing an expanse of flat belly, the heart-stopping flaw of the navel set tautly in the smooth flesh. He’d rolled the sweatshirt into a tight ball, kneading it thoughtfully as he absorbed one or two last-minute instructions. As the taxi waited at the curb, Tracy resisted the urge to attempt some casual bit of affection—a hug goodbye, perhaps, or that light peck on the cheek Europeans found so unobjectionable. Instead he registered only the immense gulf between teacher and student as Noah, turning, still seemingly preoccupied with wadding up his sweatshirt, mumbled “See you when you get back,” and disappeared inside.
Tracy found Devin already stripped and in bed. Unbuttoning his shirt, he folded it carefully and placed it on top of his overnight bag, in which lay, even now, the Halloween present Noah had sprung on him before he left. What to make of that offering, or what he would say about it on his return, he had not the slightest clue, and he realized it was exactly this quandary that he had been keeping at bay since leaving Middle Forge.
He sat on the edge of the bed to take off his shoes and socks. It was late; almost certainly Noah was in bed, his body curled under warm covers; probably he was fast asleep. Tracy shivered in the apartment’s chill air as he stood and removed his pants. With comical eagerness his cock pointed straight out in front of him.
Devin’s smooth body was warm as Tracy snuggled in next to it. He put his arms around his treacherous friend of many years and pulled him close. He could smell, not unpleasantly, the whiskey and cigarette smoke on his breath. Someone had once remarked to him, “Kissing is like eating a warm peach,” and Tracy always thought of that whenever he found himself in the sweet, wet surprise of a kiss with a man.
A little stunned with the luxury of touching another body after so long, he slid his hands along slim, boyish hips till he found what he was looking for. Tracy always teased Devin that his parents had given him the best of both worlds: the slender body of an Asian, the cock of a Caucasian. In the dark of desire, this substantial offering he grasped might almost belong to anyone he chose to imagine. His desire was specific and urgent. “Go on,” he told Devin huskily, “I want you inside me.”
Devin laughed. “He’s passionate tonight,” he observed to no one in particular. “Mary, where’s that condom?”
Disentangling himself, Tracy reached over to find his pile of clothes. Devin’s thumb traced the crack of his ass. His shirt pocket was empty, his pants pockets, too. “I can’t find it,” he said.
“Did it fall on the floor?”
“Why does this always happen? Can you turn on the light?”
“Honey, you know I’m not going in there without a rubber.”
“I don’t see it anywhere,” Tracy said dejectedly.
“I tell you what,” Devin said. “Frank keeps a bowl of the little darlings by his bed. You go in there and borrow one. I’m sure he won’t mind.”
The air was cold on his flesh. Tracy felt a little silly, traipsing around an apartment naked, his still-aroused cock jutting out in front of him. For a moment there with Devin he’d felt the most delicious anticipation, as if, somehow, it wasn’t Devin beside him in the darkness but the pulse of some mad possibility. Now all that fantasy was gone, but nonetheless a strange elation still worked in him. On the nightstand beside Frank’s bed, as Devin had said, sat a dainty antique bowl incongruously filled to the brim with foil squares. As he plucked out two for good measure, he heard a noise, footsteps, and then, confused, afraid, turned around to find himself face to face with a quizzical-looking Frank who had just walked in the door.
“May I help you?” Frank said, not so much deadpan as simply earnest.
“Um, hello,” Tracy told him, conscious of the gaze that was eagerly taking in his fading hard-on. “I was just, um…” He waved the condoms forlornly in front of Frank’s face.
“Oh,” Devin’s roommate said mildly, “you’re welcome to them.”
“You’re a saint,” Tracy told him. “I definitely owe you one.”
“Anytime,” Frank said. His tone was warm and sincere. “And you and Devin have a good night.”
Tracy found Devin with a pillow pressed to his face, heaving with suppressed laughter. When Devin uncovered his eyes, Tracy made a fright face—open-mouthed, wide-eyed—and fell into bed beside his companion.
“Perfect,” Devin gasped. “Perfect. Now where were we?”
“Jesus Christ,” Tracy moaned. “How am I ever going to live that one down?”
“Oh,” Devin told him as he moved in closer, “we’ll fix that in no time. See, I’m all ready to go. Roll that thing down on me. That’s good. Now how do you want to do this?”
Usually he wasn’t quite so voluble. “Shh,” Tracy said. “Just let me turn out the light.” He was surprised by how swiftly desire once again overtook him. Anybody can be anybody, he told himself as he eased his body down onto Devin’s, the blunt pain of a beautiful pleasure wedging him open, filling him up, for all the world, he thought, like a delicious flower of fire blossoming inside him. No one is anyone, he told himself with relief as the flaming flower bloomed and unbloomed rhythmically in his flesh. Noah Lathrop was
just a troubled boy he happened to know, a problem student he taught, an odd stray flicker of yearning, a phantasm.
Devin always went off to sleep immediately afterward. He had left the radio on low, tuned to a classical music station, which he claimed helped him sleep better. Like the rumblings of an uneasy stomach, thunder obscured its background murmur now and again with its more urgent demands. From the next room came the unmistakable sounds of Frank spending some quality time alone. Tracy lay awake, trying to listen to one set of sounds but hot the other, or to both together, or to neither, but his bladder was full again and his mind as wide awake as it ever was. Sex did that to him: opened some part of his brain that usually was still. He could never find sleep till hours afterward. In a kind of alert stupor he lay motionless, unable or unwilling to hoist himself from the futon and stumble through the dark to the bathroom. Once, long ago, he and Devin had woken in the morning to find that someone—they never knew who, and though both playfully accused the other neither would admit it—had pissed the bed. Another chord of thunder added its voice to the quiet business of a piano concerto. He thought about getting up to turn it off, but some bit of tenderness toward Devin made him refrain. At least one of them should sleep restfully.
For years he had played what he called the memory game. Whenever the present, whether through anxiety or insomnia, became too present, he’d consciously cut some cord that bound him to it and allow his mind to drift, rudderless, within a memory. Often he found himself reliving, with undiminished pitch, a certain distant summer of storms. In memory, at least, blistering squalls broke out across the landscape every late afternoon, gray curtains of rain shot through with blue-white snaps of lightning, heart-stopping eruptions of thunder. Then the clearing aftermath, sunsets of fantastic drama. A decade later Tracy could no longer recall the exact details of his initial meeting with Eric, nor trace the slow degrees by which, over two months, they had become friends. He couldn’t even remember Eric’s last name, an omission of memory that plagued him until he decided he must never have known it in the first place—as if it were possible to be so preoccupied with a person as to miss so fundamental a thing as that.
What he could never forget was the wondrous shock of falling in love. He was fifteen. Emotions he’d glanced at on other occasions and then shunted nervously aside coalesced around this lanky, twenty-seven-year-old costume designer and wouldn’t dissipate. August found them together every noon on the lawn in front of the theater where Tracy worked as a summer intern. Shirtless, they’d stretch out in the long grass and take the healing brunt of a noontime sun that gave no clue of the thunderheads it already, in secret, had begun to breed.
“It’s because we’re so close to the ocean,” Eric told him. “The seacoast of Connecticut is famous for its storms.” Like much of what he said, it was enchanting if dubious. Hailing from Kansas, Eric was an aficionado of violent weather, its vagaries, its cruel wonders. Once a tornado had passed directly over him as he lay prone in a ditch by the side of the highway, sparing him, but he’d never forget the cyclonic roar, the sudden ear-thumping dip in pressure, the eerie feeling that some ghost of enormous force was treading across his back. He talked vividly and nonstop—they both did, it seemed, in their daily respite together before their tasks took them separate ways, Tracy to help in building a great stage ark for Noye’s Fludde, Eric to the cramped little costume shop to fashion shining robes for the patriarch and his sons, or elaborate heads of papier-mâché for the fabulous animals the ark would bear to safety.
One thing Eric had let slip, early on in their voluble friendship: how he suspected, despite his girlfriend in Manhattan, whose praises he freely sang and whom he went every weekend to see, that he was probably, all things considered, a bit gay. He reported it casually, the way you might report “I’m a Libra” or “I graduated from Oberlin,” both of which were in fact the case. But unlike those other facts, this one possessed Tracy completely. His own fledgling secret, never before uttered, perched on his tongue, tested its newfound wings, but then, despite everything, refused to fly. Before he could say it, they’d somehow moved on to other, safer things. And then day after day passed, and the subject didn’t come up again; they talked about Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams and the weather in Kansas and he began to wonder whether Eric had ever confessed such a thing about himself, or whether his own less-than-reliable imagination hadn’t spawned those words, the way tornadoes appeared out of nowhere in the heartlands.
Each evening he drove home to his parents’ house nursing the unaccountable certainty that he would never see Eric again, that some mysterious reckoning would take him suddenly away, no message left, no good-bye. Storms passed over the house, an old maple in the backyard came down, and once he saw lightning dance like a sprite along the telephone wires. Then the reprieve of blue sky to the west. He flung himself out of doors, walking for hours, solitary, his heart storming without any end in sight.
Nights in particular were torment. No sooner had he shut his eyes than Eric’s afterimage, as if imprinted by lightning, swam before him: the loose, vibrant ease with which he carried himself, his teasing smile and liquid eyes, the way he wore his blond hair, fine as midwestern corn silk, pulled back tightly in a pony tail.
By day he found some furtive consolation in studying Eric’s half-naked body reclined next to him in the grass: his featureless navel set in a flat belly, the trail of dark hairs that disappeared past the waist of his gym shorts. Often Eric wore an earring in his left ear, a tiny blue-green stud you could miss if you didn’t look closely. Other days there was just the hole where his lobe had been pierced, and that was worth examining closely as well.
Every morning Eric brought a duffel bag with him to the costume shop, and at the end of the day he reclaimed it, hoisting it over his shoulder and sauntering off to wherever he spent those nights Tracy would have given his soul to share. Small things made the boy desperate. One morning they stood at the mailboxes and Eric read through a note he’d received.
“You’re frowning,” Tracy told him.
“Oh,” Eric said, “it’s just from a guy I ran into last weekend at a party. It’s nothing.” And folding the piece of paper, he stuck it into his bag. But the words made Tracy burn. That afternoon he excused himself from his stagework and hastened to the costume shop. Eric had told him he and his assistant had to drive into town after lunch to buy some things. No one was around. Sick and excited, he found the duffel bag stashed in a corner. Loosening its cord, he slid his hand inside. His fingers touched soft fabric, underwear and socks and T-shirts. Resisting the temptation to spill the contents onto the floor, to smother his face in communion with all that secret, sweat-sour fabric, he instead extracted the folded-up slip of paper and read breathlessly.
“You’re right,” was all it said. “I was an asshole. I’m sorry.”
Anything was possible, of course, but nonetheless he felt utterly, despondently sure. Something had happened that night, or hadn’t happened—but whichever it was, a terrible sense of loss accosted him. With unsteady hands he replaced the note in the duffel bag. In a fit of frustration, he made his way back to the stage. He had the beginnings of a headache, and the incessant banging of hammers as they built the ark seemed to nail the lid on the coffin of all his hopes.
As a child Tracy had been fascinated by an hourglass that sat on the desk in his grandfather’s study. Whenever he visited their house in Connecticut, he would sneak into that hushed room, redolent of old books and leather armchairs and pipe smoke (his grandfather and namesake had retired from a New York law firm of legendary prestige). When he inverted the glass, at first nothing seemed to happen. Though a steady trickle leaked through, the level on top hardly changed. Only at the end did all the sand suddenly appear to run out at once.
For a week of performances, Noye’s Fludde sailed through its deluge to reach safe shore. Who could have guessed, in advance, its odd relevance? When the audience joined in for a final, heaving hymn, tears came to Tracy�
��s eyes. The month had been the most important of his life. Helpless, he watched the vortex open as Eric made ready to return to New York, where he and his girlfriend would be looking for an apartment together for the coming winter, which would, Tracy felt sure, be never-ending.
Those lunches on the sun-drenched lawn turned gray with anxiety. Each day he trembled on the verge of that bold confession he’d spent sleepless nights rehearsing. But each day slipped from him. Then at the last possible moment he found himself speaking. They had shared what was to be their final lunch together; they lay on their backs, shirts rolled up underneath their heads as pillows. No breeze blew; the air was sultry and thick.
“I want to sleep with you,” Tracy said. The words sounded dull and impossible. Silence swallowed them up, and Eric only laughed.
“Do you have any idea what you’re saying?” he wondered aloud, as if they had both been napping, as if Tracy had spoken incoherent words in his slumber.
“I want to have sex with you,” Tracy said. This time the words were clearer; they hung there and refused to disappear. He felt as if he were swimming up from some great drowning depth. His heart beat so furiously in his chest it seemed impossible the whole lawn didn’t hear. When he dared look Eric’s way, Eric had turned on his side and propped himself on one arm. He was watching him with a soft and unfocused gaze.
“Hey, Tracy,” he said gently, perplexedly. “Don’t you think you’re way too young for this?”
Tracy was on his side now too, facing Eric across mere inches of space, a gap both negligible and infinite, and Eric was shaking his head slowly. “I should have realized,” he went on, as if in bemusement—or perhaps it was wonder. “I guess I should’ve noticed.”
Boldly, Tracy reached out his hand. Lightning did not strike. He touched, tentatively, then with growing assurance, his friend’s lightly stubbled cheek. He ran his fingers along the jawline he’d longed for a whole month to caress.