by Michael Cart
I blather like the gay boys he mocks; I can’t help it. The proximity. “The class was guessing all kinds of stories about you. You’d been abducted by a Hollywood talent search crew. You’ve gone underground to fight crime. You and Francesca eloped.”
He cuts me off with a slice of his hand; he’s not in the mood. “I had family matters to deal with. They’re not done yet, but I figured it’d be more normal for me to be here, and I didn’t want to let you down.”
“I’m, um, sorry.” Does family matters always mean sickness? Or maybe someone had a wedding? Or had a mortgage foreclosed? Probably not that, not in his circle. Though I’ve lived my whole life in the U.S., I’m not confident about idioms that my parents avoid using.
“It’s okay.” He bangs out a mess of chords that disagree with that pronouncement, and he corrects himself. “It’s not okay, I mean, but thanks.”
“What is it? If you want to tell me, I mean.”
“It’s my sister,” he says, “and I don’t want to talk about it.”
We sit in silence. Two, three minutes, four. About the length of a standard ballad—I know because I’m singing to myself, I gave my love a cherry, very slowly, to keep from doing anything rash. I imagine I can hear his vertebrae clenching; I can feel his eyelashes gumming up. How can there be a chicken without a bone? Anything I do next will be the wrong thing. I stay like stone, looking at the music rack. The story of “I love you,” it has no end. A baby when it’s sleeping has no crying.
He moves first. He bangs his elbows on the keyboard and there’s an intake of breath. He starts to cry a little. Quietly. Shoulders rolling, head down. I’m stuck, I can’t move. But I can’t ignore this. I can’t even get away and go out for some toilet paper unless I stand on the bench and climb over him. The thought makes me dizzy.
The music from the rooms on either side of us gets louder, the laughing giddier. They seem to be working at dueling mazurkas. Maybe it’s the protective screen of all that noise that allows Blaise suddenly to let go. Quietly but fiercely, tears are splashing on the plastic keys. “Stop, shhh, it’s all right,” I say, though of course it isn’t all right, and what do I know anyway?
I try not to touch him—still, what can I do? The Godly Apparition is breaking apart before my eyes. It’s not like me to be cold, but I can’t trust myself. I’m quivering inside like a struck bell.
Then I don’t have to make the decision. He is turning to me and driving his face into my neck. My arms have no choice but to surround him—if they don’t, I’ll fall off the bench and bang my head on the air conditioner. “Hey, whoa,” I say in a whisper. “It’s okay, Blaise. Whatever’s wrong, it’s okay.”
He leans into me and I can’t help it, my hands grip the fabric of his shirt to keep from falling backward. He is shuddering now and his arms are around me, one hand at my hip, the other circling the back of my neck, as if cradling me, protecting me. He’s the one who’s upset; I should be protecting him. “Stop,” I whisper, and we are kissing each other on the neck at precisely the same instant. We pull apart. His characteristic froideur is blasted apart with grief of some obscure variety—and me? Me? I’m trying not to take advantage of the situation.
It’s almost like nausea, the way lust rises so saltily, and I keep trying to swallow it down. “What?” I say. That’s the last word I say. Our eyes lock before our mouths do; and now he is falling backward off the bench onto the floor, and pulling me after him. There are two or three moments of wrestling—from a distance you would think we were antagonists—then he pulls away. In revulsion, I think; his fit is over and sobriety has set in, and repugnance will follow. If there’s any justice he’ll break my middle finger.
But he’s only bounded up to lock the door. When he turns to fall upon me his buttoned sleeve catches on the doorknob. The sleeve rips right out from the shoulder. It doesn’t stop him. Nothing stops him. Nothing stops me. His thighs are clenching my hips, his blond forelocks sweeping my lashes, his hands working under my T-shirt, walking up my chest as if he wishes I were a woman, and he bucks against me, instrumentally. The twin mazurkas couching us from either side have become frenzied cacophony.
It is my first real kiss. We have exactly nine days left.
The hall is thronged and the buzz is soft and dignified, like a cocktail party for retirees. In the front of the room stands a baby grand with a vase of a dozen roses on its closed top. Tupperneck never had that kind of instrument, not for the students to play around with anyway. A light is trained on the roses. Everything is plain, a kind of stage set. A music stand and a microphone. A table with a decanter and a glass of water in which a lime swims among the ice.
The back row is mostly filled. “Would you mind terribly moving up a row?” Faroukh whispers to an elderly couple befogged in colognes of competing strengths. “I feel I should be back here, close to the exit in case of a noisy moment.”
The woman sniffs. “Come, Gerty,” says her husband. “We’ll hear no better one row up, don’t worry.”
They shift themselves. Faroukh settles in and wrestles the boys out of their heavy parkas.
“I’m thirsty,” says Matthias. Faroukh produces the sippy cup.
“Tirsty,” says Jamesy.
“Share,” says Faroukh. Uncharacteristically obedient, Matthias nods and hands the cup over. The sobriety in the room is calming to them, palpable. It’s the hush of expectation. Though they don’t know what to expect. Neither, for so much of his life, has Faroukh.
It takes me several days of asking questions—slowly, letting the answers steep before pushing on—to learn what has happened to Blaise. Little by little it comes clear—his distance, his isolation. He is an American kid living overseas these past six years, in Toulouse—the son of a French father and an American mother. His older sister, Monette, and her husband and their daughter, Cecile, disappeared several months ago in a small private plane that went down in the Mediterranean. Off the coast of Sardinia. It was clear they were dead; what else could have happened? Blaise’s parents have come to Monette’s lake house north of Tupperneck to reclaim family items before the home is gussied up and put on the market. Blaise has come along to be company—because in their loss they couldn’t stand to leave him in France—but he can’t tolerate their endless weeping. He’s struck a compromise: He will take a summer course locally, get out of the cottage several times a week.
This week, finally, bits of identifiable wreckage have begun to wash up on shore. Airplane fuselage, some luggage. This has rendered baseless any remaining hopes that no news might yet be good news.
“So now—you’ll go home?” I ask.
“There’s more to do,” Blaise replies, “but my parents are stepping up the schedule. Up till now it’s been like, treasure every spoon, every photo, every recipe. Now everything’s going in boxes or garbage bags: save or surrender. They can’t bear the task anymore, all at once. They’ll be done by the time the semester finishes.”
We are facing each other, sitting on the floor in the locked rehearsal room. I am in briefs, my legs locked about his waist; he is cool and clothed. I touch his knees, running my hands in his loose shorts, meaning comfort, but he misreads me as merely horny, and flinches. I freeze. I meant to say, You have me; I’m not your dead family but I’m here, alive, yours. I take his reaction to mean, I can’t afford to confuse grief and love, or I’ll explode.
What he also means—and I understand this little by little—little trial, big error—is that we will keep our romantic alliance a secret. In class we choose to ignore each other. We keep to our original seats, neither arriving together nor leaving together.
I’m not quite sure why. It isn’t that anyone would disapprove, not in this crowd. I suppose it’s that we haven’t got time to include anyone else. Nine days. Eight days. Seven.
Tod Farber especially can’t learn what’s going on. He would mind—he would be jealous, says Blaise. He’s never been inappropriate, nothing like that. Just louche. Just campy. It’s all in
sinuation.
“Why does he bother? He doesn’t know you’re in mourning. You only registered as…as so…aloof,” I whisper.
“How would you know what I registered as? You never glanced at me. While I sat behind you and watched at how your dark hair turns almost red when the sun strokes it—you were the icy one, never turning to give me the time of day. Everyone else did. Farber, and Francesca, and the Gay Boys Student League.”
I don’t want to hear about Francesca Comstock. She seemed rare enough to appeal to Blaise and it was just my luck, this once, that she stalked away, leaving me an opening.
Six days. Every evening Blaise takes the shuttle bus that the town puts on for summer folk and he returns to Monette’s lake house. Every night I walk back to Auntie Nurjahan’s—I can’t bear being around Herbie Manzella right now. But this isn’t good enough.
Once we go to the pool, arriving separately, but that’s a mistake we realize almost at once. Our mutual attraction would be a matter of public record to anyone paying the barest of attention, and everyone pays attention to Blaise. He leaves first, his towel wrapped securely around his waist. I stay in the pool. Doing laps, cooling off. It isn’t good enough.
On the fifth day we make a plan that might work. Nobody mops up Pierce Hall during the summer. No Korean lady with a vacuum and spray polish. We’ve scoped it out: The night security detail comes through sometime between nine and ten. So we hang out in Pierce, in Rehearsal Room E in the attics on the third floor. At 9 P.M. we turn out the light. We lie low—literally. The guard can see as he passes the door that the lights inside are off. If he tries the door—which one night he does, causing us to clench each other the harder as we lie on the floor, entwined in the dark—he finds it locked.
We lie all night in each other’s arms, in a heap of blankets Blaise has borrowed from a cupboard in the lake house. If we need to use the bathroom or even shower, we do it in the dark. Not a single light to signal a midnight presence to any campus cop driving around bored. Not a candle, a flashlight, a match.
And we get nervy. This place was a home, after all, once upon a time. And a well-appointed home. It still has a kitchen and a fridge, a bathroom with a huge, old clawfooted tub. At four in the morning we move the extra music stands out of the tub and rinse out the dust, and find a plug, and run the water. We turn to each other in the only light there is; we feel for each other with hands that have learned to be bold, to possess without apology.
We roam the place in the dark, holding hands, finding new corners in which to kiss. It is our own home, our imagined otherlife in the dark.
And we make out; it’s exciting. Once on Farber’s desk in Pierce 203.
Blaise asks about Laurel Finn. I keep my words to a minimum. If Blaise can be so circumspect about his emotional entanglements, why can’t I? “It’s over, at least for now,” I say. “I’m not thinking of Laurel right now. What about you? Why are you so hoity about the chorus boy wannabes when you know perfectly well what they’re up to, and you’re up to it too?”
“I’m not being holier-than-thou,” says Blaise. “I’m just tired of everyone trying to jump my bones all the time. You’re the only guy in this group who has an evident girlfriend. I think that’s why I could risk touching you when I was losing it that afternoon. I knew you wouldn’t take advantage.”
I didn’t answer that. “Still, is it an act? An anti-gay thing so as to throw off suspicion?”
“I don’t know what it is.” However brilliant Blaise is at international life, however highly Tod Farber regards Blaise’s compositional strengths, Blaise seems oddly clueless about himself. Almost deferential to his own confusions. “I just don’t expect much except people wanting something out of me.”
“But what do you want? Stop; besides that. Really.”
“Mmmm. This.” And as often as not it isn’t the sex, or put another way, it’s what comes after and before the sex: It’s the animal purr that the human body imitates, the animal comfort. It’s boys in the treehouse being together against the adults. It’s the game of being nonchalant in front of Herbie and Abby and David and the others. I don’t know how to name it any better than Blaise does, I guess. I just finally know how to recognize it when it stares me in the face.
A girl in a black skirt and a white shirt comes through, passing out programs. There is a picture of Blaise on the front, a studio shot for publicity purposes.
Faroukh is knocked sideways, the formality of it. He has only seen Blaise once after saying good-bye at Tupperneck. It was eight years later, when they were both about twenty-six. Blaise had begun to rise, perhaps not yet meteorically but definitely. Faroukh was in his third and final year as a middle-school English teacher.
A letter had come from a literary agent, and another letter from an entertainment lawyer. Mr. d’Anjou had written a song based on lyrics of Mr. Rahmani’s, and would like permission to buy them outright or, barring that, to settle on a royalty split of 75–25 in favor of the composer, given the Grammy nomination and the forthcoming album, as yet untitled, due in the stores next Christmas.
Faroukh had made the big mistake of mentioning it to his father, who had proposed accompanying his son to Manhattan to sign the agreements. “You are sweet boy,” said his baba, “yet you know nothing about money.” And it was true that Baba and Maman had surprisingly managed to amass enough money or credit in the intervening years to buy four rental units, and all on Baba’s salary as a janitor.
“But there’s no need,” Faroukh had said. “Once we decide on terms, we can execute the documents by mail.”
“Is better in person,” said Baba, and Faroukh realized his father was grasping at a legitimate reason to visit the big city. Baba would not indulge himself in pleasures, and so Faroukh couldn’t deny him this one. He made the hotel booking only after confirming that an executor for Mr. d’Anjou would sign the contract since the artist would be out of the country at the time.
Mr. Rahmani dyed his moustache a regrettably uniform black and bought a suit jacket at the Salvation Army. Faroukh and his father traveled together by Amtrak to the big city. They found an Iranian restaurant on West End Avenue where the waiters spoke Farsi, and Faroukh’s baba wept at the sound of it. And at the ripe pomegranates on the table. And at the pungent beads of zereshk added to the rice, smelling like Dizbad, smelling like Mashad, smelling like home.
The next day they arrived at the lawyer’s office. Forty-five minutes after the scheduled appointment time, they were shown into a large conference room with a photocopy machine in the corner and a tray of fancy pastries simultaneously softening and crusting over on the windowsill. With a flourish Yusuf Rahmani brought out the rosewater loukoumia that his wife had made to sweeten the deal. No one took a piece.
This would not take long, said the lawyers, and indeed they were halfway through the short stack of documents when an executive assistant opened the door and announced, “Blaise d’Anjou is passing through and wants to swing in?” and the bigwigs nodded. At once Blaise was in the doorway, before Faroukh could even rise. Blaise took in Rahmani père et fils with one sweep of his eyes. He was accompanied by a cunning young man in a good cut of designer jeans. Dancer type.
Faroukh didn’t remember the words, exactly how it happened; Blaise clearly hadn’t expected this encounter. He reddened and stammered an apology for intruding and backed up. “We’ll have our reunion another time, soon,” he claimed, “later,” and disappeared. Faroukh couldn’t read it; he’d never been good at that kind of thing and still wasn’t. It was like an apparition, little more than that.
So he was more than surprised when, a half hour later, on his way back from the men’s room at the end of the hall, Blaise appeared from behind a column and pushed him into a walk-in cloak room. Pushed him, back and back into the depths of the room, out of sight, against a row of hangers on which hung men’s and women’s good winter coats strongly powdered with scent of cologne and mothballs. Blaise threw his arms around Faroukh’s waist in the d
ark, as if it was the same dark as in Pierce eight years earlier. He gripped Faroukh’s behind and hoisted him up against the coats with such force that stitches ripped in the seat of Faroukh’s new trousers. Faroukh had to flail to grab a hanger, a coathook, to keep from falling backward. “You!” panted Blaise, “You! You!”
“Are you mad?” Farouk had hissed back, kissing his lost friend, kicking for his lost footing, grabbing for a hold of his lost lover. Blaise was already hot and seconds shy of a mess.
That evening they’d managed two hours more in a hotel room on lower Madison Avenue, escaped from their mutual obligations through various pretexts of one sort or other. The other guy, Faroukh learned, was the brother of Blaise’s girlfriend. Faroukh didn’t ask any more. There were too many ways to be hurt.
“Call me. Or I’ll call you,” said Blaise. “Later. Later.” But stupefied with a relief that was already vanishing, with regret already setting in, Faroukh let Blaise’s phone number drift onto the subway track of the Number 1 as he hurried back to his father.
“Is nice,” said his baba on the train home next morning. Faroukh wanted the conversation to be about Blaise. He held his breath. “Is very nice,” said Baba, looking away, looking out the window. “But is no Teheran.”
The Blaise in the photo tonight is yet again older but still recognizably potent. A look of interior complexity that might be conceit. That perfect nose. A chin that has grown a cleft, how odd. Could Hollywood people have clefts dug surgically?
“Who dat?” asked Matthias, looking over Faroukh’s forearm at the paper. The people sitting nearby look away, clearly hoping Matthias isn’t going to pepper the evening with adorable childish interpolations.