by Caleb Crain
“Don’t freak him out,” said Leif.
Elspeth shrugged. She looked at her boyfriend, who gave no sign of either approval or warning, and then back at Leif. “I don’t think he’s stupid, is all I’m saying.”
“Do you want to try?” Leif offered to Matthew.
For the first time Matthew noticed a deck of cards on the coffee table. Perhaps the hydrangeas had been hiding it from his angle of vision. On the backs of the cards was printed a yellow sun on a black background—sol d’or, on a field sable, the symbol of sovereignty, which almost never appeared in the arms of a house except in exercises of the imagination.
Matthew looked again at Leif. There was something unstable in the air between them. He stepped, and Leif stepped with him, from the dining room into the parlor. They took seats across from the straight couple.
“I don’t think I have any feelings even about tarot cards,” said Matthew.
“You don’t have to,” said Leif. “All you need to do is feel Elspeth’s feelings. Just say what you feel, and I’ll tell you what card it is.”
“What I feel?”
“The feeling you get from Elspeth.” Leif leaned back as he lazily shuffled the deck overhand in his long fingers. “Actually, you better shuffle,” he said to Elspeth, “so he doesn’t get the idea it’s a card trick or something.” He delivered his instructions to Matthew as if giving the rules of a parlor game: “It’ll be that thing that for you is always right there but that you’ve learned not to talk about because you’ve come to realize it’s not there for other people. You know what I mean, don’t you? You can still feel it, right?”
So the boy was a kind of shaman. A pretty, casually seductive shaman. Cautiously: “Yes.”
“Most people can’t anymore. That’s why it’s easier for them.”
“Why what’s easier?” asked Matthew.
“You know. Everything, really.”
“Now you are creeping me out a little.”
“Three cards?” asked Elspeth.
Next to her, Raleigh fidgeted. “Why do you guys always do three, anyway?”
“Makes it easier,” said Leif.
“It does triple your odds,” Raleigh growled. He glanced at Matthew as if to make sure that he was being credited for his skepticism.
“I can’t really do the number cards,” said Elspeth, “and if I draw three, there’s almost always an atout or at least a face card in there.”
“A what?” asked Matthew.
“The Moon or the Papess or a card like that. A picture card. The instructions that came with the deck are in French. I guess I could have googled for the English word, but I wanted us to be using the cards in our own way. In a made-up way.”
“A scientific way,” said Leif. “Numbers are kind of our Achilles’ heel.”
“Why do you need them? Do you want to work the casinos?”
Leif frowned. “I wish.”
Elspeth drew a hand. “Aww,” she murmured, as if the cards she had pulled were somehow endearing. Then she flipped them facedown onto her lap.
“What do you see?” Leif asked Matthew.
Did he see anything? Nothing had happened. He had heard Elspeth’s soft exclamation, and he had watched her compose her face afterward, for the sake of the experiment, into a pleasant neutrality. Had there been anything else? He tried to revisit the sequence of his perceptions. He had also been aware of a strength that Elspeth seemed to draw from the proximity of the man beside her on the couch, and it had occurred to him, very briefly and somewhat inchoately, that the apparent contrast in the demeanors of the two, the disparity between Raleigh’s truculence and Elspeth’s readiness to accommodate, probably reflected a deeper harmony, the basis of which he hadn’t yet seen but without which they wouldn’t have felt comfortable being so unlike each other in the presence of a stranger. They were awfully young to have achieved such a harmony, but Matthew’s own parents had been even younger when they had met, he knew. He didn’t know the basis of his parents’ harmony, either. He had always associated it with concern for his brother and him, but it must have been something more general; it had preceded his brother and him, after all. For a long time, it had seemed to enable his parents to look out at the world with a kind of doubled attentiveness. As instruments of perception, they seemed to have been calibrated, or maybe a better word was tuned, by their contact with each other, though lately the process might have begun to falter a little.
“Parents?” Matthew said aloud. “But that doesn’t make any sense.”
“What are these parents like?” Leif asked.
“Mild-mannered. A little worried.”
“Are they kind of . . . ?” Leif folded his hands and leaned forward, as if he were playacting the word he was looking for. “Organized? But that’s not what I mean exactly.”
“Sensible,” said Matthew, accepting Leif’s image.
“The king and queen of money,” Leif guessed.
Elspeth turned the cards over onto the coffee table. The third card was a three of cups.
“But my parents aren’t rich,” said Matthew.
“Tarot isn’t like that,” Leif said.
“I always think these two cards are so cute,” said Elspeth. “They’re so tidy. Look.”
The man and woman had large eyes and dainty fingers. They looked nothing like Matthew’s parents. They wore royal robes, and each carried an enormous coin. “The rulers of this world,” Matthew commented.
“Because the suit is money?” Elspeth said. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Marxist tarot,” Raleigh said appreciatively. “There could be a reference to Britain, since it’s a French deck.”
“Oh, I think the designs are older than—,” Elspeth began.
“Than British capitalism?” Raleigh asked, cutting her off.
“Maybe you’re right,” she conceded.
“‘Phlegmatic’ is the word I was looking for,” said Leif, shuffling the deck again.
“For the king and queen of money?” asked Matthew.
“Or for you. You look like you sit down and read whole books.”
There was a compliment in having been studied. “Don’t you read books?” Matthew asked.
“I try not to give the impression of being someone who reads them.”
“I’m pretentious, you mean.”
“No, phlegmatic,” Leif insisted. “So do you believe now?”
“No,” Matthew replied. “How does it work?”
“By metaphor?” Leif hazarded. “But it’s a funny kind of metaphor, where you know the tenor but not the vehicle.”
“It’s shut-eye,” Raleigh interrupted. “He’s cheating, but he’s so into it he doesn’t realize.”
“Raleigh believes in his own way,” said Leif.
“I believe it works. I just don’t believe there’s anything to it.”
“Can I talk to you a minute?” Matthew asked Leif.
“We’re going to have a homo moment,” Leif told the others.
“Of course,” Elspeth replied, to excuse them.
Matthew rose first, and in the dance that he and Leif fell into, he was expected to lead, though since he didn’t know the apartment, he had to look over his shoulder to Leif for guidance. In this awkward fashion, they made their way back into the corridor where they had come in, until, beside a row of coats hung on pegs, Matthew rounded on Leif, pushed him against the wall, and kissed him again.
“Can I see you?” asked Matthew. “But not to play cards.”
Leif looked away. “Are we going to be fuckbuddies?”
“I thought we could go on a date.”
Leif shrugged. “Okay.”
“What?”
“You’re good at it,” Leif said. He looked Matthew full in the eye.
Matthew called his phone,
so they would have each other’s numbers. Leif’s phone was as dumb as his. In another clinch, Matthew felt his cock stiffen, but he broke away. As he turned to descend the stairs, he heard Leif shout back along the corridor to his friends: “So was I wrong about him?”
* * *
—
It was a case of exactly the kind of boy he liked to fuck, was the way Matthew put it to himself as he unlocked his dark apartment. He liked to think through such matters a little brutally, in order to keep clear the distinction between what he wanted and what he thought he ought to want. The latter had a way of creeping in. While he was being brutal, he had to admit that even though he wanted Leif, he wasn’t sure, now that he was beyond reach of the spell cast by Leif’s immediate presence, that he was going to call him. There was an etiquette conformed to in most hookups, and in the months since his cohort of friends from grad school had moved away, Matthew had become used to the way it rendered disappointments as well as rewards foreseeable. Leif didn’t appear to be the sort of person who would abide by even an ungentleman’s agreement.
There was only one window—as, aside from the lavatory, there was only one room—to Matthew’s apartment, but it was a generous one, a bow window that spanned the front wall and looked out, from the fourth story, over an avenue block; below were a bodega, a dry cleaner, a pizzeria, a tattoo parlor. The window faced southwest, and by day it was lit fiercely by sun. Tonight it was no more than faintly salted by a glare reflected upward from the pavement, and the room lay in a blue darkness, out of which were resolved, as Matthew crossed it, the familiar shadows of the card table where he ate his meals, the futon that he folded up every morning and unfolded every night, and the desk, just beside the window, where he didn’t write his dissertation. In the darkness his things looked impersonal, as if he were returning home to them after a long stay in a hospital and had forgotten, or at least misplaced for a while, the roles they played in his life.
Because he used the windowsill as a shelf for library books, he had to guide the blinds, as he lowered them, into a channel that he had left open between the backs of the books and the window sash. As his desk lamp flickered on, the spines of institutional buckram shifted from apparent grays to actual olives, crimsons, and browns, the white impress of the call numbers remaining constant. He sat down to check his email. There were only the usual notifications from his department, which he was free to delete because it was his writing year and he wasn’t teaching or taking any classes.
It was too late to do more than wash greens for a salad and scramble some eggs, and as he began to tear leaves into his colander, he thought about the game that he and the boy had played with the tarot cards. Seeing into other people’s minds was something a literary scholar tried to do every day, hoping to perceive, across centuries, meanings that in some cases people might not even have been aware that they were giving away. But to read a living person’s secret thoughts, while sitting in the same room with him . . . That was impossible, and Matthew had been asked to believe he could do it, which was the sort of game that only a young person would insist on. A test for lovers. In their first years of adjusting to an open sexuality, gays seemed to like to tell stories about themselves that were elaborate. Matthew’s explanation was that it took time to learn to do without the machinery of hiding, and for a while one’s story remained encumbered with unnecessary structure. He guessed that Leif’s myth of himself had such a character. To protect himself, Leif had probably accreted a layer of self-regard, like a shell, which he was soon going to find it convenient to break. It would fracture along the seam of its implausibility.
If the guess was accurate, the future that was possible between Matthew and Leif was less likely to resemble a conversation than attendance at a performance, a division of roles that Matthew didn’t ordinarily have much patience for.
But the boy was so beautiful. Maybe Matthew could muster up a week or two of patience.
* * *
—
The next morning, with a promptness that most of the men Matthew knew would have avoided as a defect of strategy, Leif called.
“I said I would help out the Kitchen with serving lunch today at Occupy.”
“Is this a date?” Matthew asked.
“You and dates.”
The protesters were encamped across the river, Matthew knew, in a part of the city he rarely went to. Though their camp was almost two months old, he hadn’t yet visited. He agreed with most of the reforms that the protesters were demanding—or rather, making a point of not demanding—but he had the usual aesthetic problems with the left, and he didn’t think of himself as political. He may have been writing on kingship, but in twenty-first-century America, he told himself, kingship was merely historical. If he gave the puzzle in his dissertation the name sovereignty, he couldn’t as easily justify his lack of curiosity, but no one pressed him to justify it, and if they had, he would have pointed out that graduate students with unfinished dissertations are famously vulnerable to distractions that take the form of purposes. To give even a little of oneself to a cause so undefined would bring too many questions too close to the surface.
But now that a pretty boy had invited him . . .
He rode his bicycle into the city. It was one of those late fall days that the warming of the world has rendered so temperate and brilliant. An undeserved mercy. On the bridge, the wire diamonds of the suicide barrier fluttered past like frames of movie film, and he looked down through them at the water below, which was jade in color that day and textured like alligator skin with white caps. The sight of salt water always brought a kind of equilibrium to some inner part of him. So much water was so unfakably a thing of nature. Danger was part of its appeal. He felt alive.
Before leaving, he had looked at a map on the internet for the specific block and for a way to approach it on the downtown’s one-way streets. He locked up to a street sign while still a few blocks away.
He had been too cautious, he saw as soon as he walked a block further. There were plenty of empty posts to lock a bike to. Was he nervous? He tried to check his reflection in a store window but saw only a hollow shadow in the center of the bright street scene. The crowd around him on the sidewalk didn’t seem too unusual. Ponderous tourists. Straight men in shapeless suits. Maybe there were a few more of the city’s young people than were usually to be found in such a charmless neighborhood. Is there a reason they’re all walking so slow? he wondered with reflexive urban irritation.
There was; he had reached the encampment. There wasn’t a vista. In fact, all he could see, at first, was a row of half a dozen people, in ordinary dress, some cheery, some solemn, holding up sheets of oaktag painted with facts and slogans. A few, instead of holding their signs, had laid them on the cement and were squatting or kneeling beside them. The important thing, evidently, was to have a human face next to every sign and a human hand ready to touch it. Police were trying to hurry pedestrians through a narrow defile between the sign holders and a mirroring palisade, a few feet away, of tourists and businesspeople taking photographs with their cell phones. It might have been a diagram in a biochemistry textbook, Matthew thought: a transfer of ions along the osculation of two membranes.
A few steps down, and Matthew was standing on the granite pavement of the occupied park, which in this corner was sunk a few feet below the sidewalk that ringed it. The occupation was surrounded, Matthew realized upon looking up. Policemen stationed along the bordering sidewalk were scanning the park’s interior. Matthew watched as one shifted his gaze from spot to spot in a professional simulation of curiosity. In a far corner, a crane had raised a white metal observation cabin, which had the gleam of a new device. It must have been bought with the city’s share of antiterrorism money. Its windows were darkened with the apparent intention of preventing those on the ground from knowing exactly when they were being observed.
Well, so Matthew would show up in a database. To mi
nd too much about the surveillance would be a form of surrender to it.
Leif hadn’t specified which part of the encampment, and Matthew was a few minutes early, so he went for a wander. There were signs about student loans, carbon emissions, and a recent case of police brutality. At the People’s Library, which was an array of transparent plastic bins full of books and hand-stapled pamphlets, he didn’t see any scholarship on Renaissance England. Further along, under the kind of square canopy that Latino families bring to the park for quinceañeras, a few protesters were working at computers. Otherwise the infrastructure seemed to consist of tarps, pizza boxes, folding plastic tables, duct tape, and the granite pavement of the park itself. He had expected to be one of many lookers-on, but most people were in conversations that supplied them with a visible and ongoing context of belonging, in twos, threes, or larger circles, and Matthew felt the absence of such a context in his own case. The longer he went without speaking to anyone, the more aware he became of his isolation. He saw people signaling with frilly hand gestures that he had read about online, which meant “Agree,” “Disagree,” or “Louder, please,” and he admired their shamelessness but didn’t think he would ever be able to make the gestures himself. Similarly, when he walked across the path of a speech being transmitted by human microphone—a relay of people amplifying a speech by shouting it, phrase by phrase, as it reached them—he couldn’t bring himself to participate. He had a history of not joining things. He hoped his reticence wasn’t registering with the people around him. He didn’t want to seem unsympathetic. He didn’t want to be mistaken for a cop.
He came to the drum circle, but on the matter of aggressive noisemaking, he was for better or worse a conventional homosexual, and he moved on.
In one zone, nothing rose higher than his waist. Though it was midday, young men and women lay resting on sleeping bags, their hands mittened, their necks scarved, their eyes intermittently closed. A few were spooning each other, indifferent to observation. Many had waterproofed the underside of their sleeping bags with blue tarps or with black plastic garbage bags that they had cut open and unfolded into sheets, and a number of them lay beside a roll of clothes and possessions wrapped in a matching sheet of blue tarp or black plastic. Here and there a roll was the length and shape of a person and resembled a bagged corpse. While Matthew was watching, one of these apparent corpses uncovered a living face; a man was shifting in his sleep.