by Hal Bodner
“I’d never have done it, honey, if you were here. If you were with me. I told him I didn’t want to but, you know how Corey is. He’s got this idea that sex will help me take my mind off what’s going on. That sex will take care of almost anything and...” His voice trailed off for a moment before he resumed, his tone expressing his awe at the memory. “It was Leo. Oh, Tony, he was beautiful. I know it sounds cliché but he was like some savage beast, beautiful and dangerous at the same time. There was something else about him. I don’t know how to describe it...I guess you could say he was sort of...noble. The weird thing was, this time I checked the statues and the Leo was still up on his pedestal while the guy was standing in the apartment.” He laughed bitterly. “I was crazy enough to start thinking they were somehow coming to life. But with Leo right there and Corey, well, helping things out, I figured at least this one was real. Maybe I was hallucinating, or fantasizing or whatever, but if there was an actual guy in the room, I couldn’t be that far around the bend. Confused maybe, but not completely insane. But then I mentioned him to Corey this morning and do you know what?”
He paused again, waiting for the answer that never came.
“Corey had no idea what I was talking about! According to him, I went out for a few hours, came back with some groceries and we had dinner – that’s all. He doesn’t remember Leo – he swears we didn’t have sex – he said he wanted to but I looked too tired. He doesn’t even remember that we took a shower together afterwards like we used to do in college. He says he spent the whole afternoon watching TV on the couch while I cooked. He was even able to tell me which episodes he saw, not like that means anything because he’s seen them all a hundred times and can quote ’em from start to finish. Oh, Tony...” he wailed. “What’s wrong with me?”
“Stress, if you ask me.”
Alex whirled. He hadn’t realized he’d risen and was clutching one of Tony’s hands. A man in his mid-thirties wearing a white coat stood in the hospital room doorway. Alex blushed and sputtered for a minute. Though he might doubt his own sanity, he wasn’t sure what the doctor had overheard and had no desire to be locked up in a straitjacket in a rubber room.
“Heya, Joey,” he stammered.
“That’s Doctor Joey to you, boy,” he said with mock severity. “Show some respect for eight years of med school, will ya?”
He came into the room and checked the charts and fiddled with some dials while he spoke. “You sound like you’ve been through the mill, kiddo. Not that I blame you. Tony’s in no discomfort – I’m making sure of that. But you...when the heck are you gonna come clean and admit how rough this is on you?”
“How much did you hear?”
Joey frowned and punched the touchpad of one of the machines until the dial reading met with his satisfaction. “Just something about Corey’s shenanigans. And you feeling like you were going crazy – which is perfectly natural with what you’re dealing with. If you ask me, Corey’s the one who should be tied to a psychiatrist’s couch, not you. If we’re lucky, we could find him a shrink who’d prescribe a chastity belt for him. And a muzzle.”
Joe Caprese was an old flame of Tony’s from way back before he and Alex had met. The two had dated for a while and got along splendidly. They still did. But in spite of their commitment to make things work between them, they found they were sexually incompatible. While both Tony and Alex considered themselves “versatile” and switched positions with enthusiastic erotic abandon, Joey was an exclusive “bottom” and after a while, Tony had later confessed to Alex, their sex life had gotten monotonous.
“He’s a doctor, for Pete’s sake!” Tony had complained. “You’d think he’d know his way around the human body, right?”
Having no issues outside the bedroom, and legitimately enjoying each other’s company, Tony and Joey had stayed friends. Once Alex came into the picture, they would frequently go out together as a group – Tony, Alex, Joey and whatever sweet young thing Joey was dating at the moment. Joey was the type who was incessantly searching for a husband, and seemed never able to find a relationship to last more than a few weeks. Very probably, the fact that as he grew older he found himself attracted to younger and younger men was part of the problem. The last one he’d brought to dinner, scarcely two weeks before Tony had been taken ill, looked like he was barely twenty-one.
At one point, Alex and Tony conceived the misbegotten idea that they should introduce their respective best friends to each other. Joey would provide financial and emotional stability to the relationship, which Corey desperately needed. In turn, Corey might loosen the doctor up a little; Joey often complained that he knew he was retentive but couldn’t seem to do anything about it. Besides, even though Corey was a decade or so older than most of Joey’s dates, he was exactly the doctor’s physical type. In theory, it was a match made in heaven.
In reality, it had been like trying to mix oil and vinegar. The two men were obviously physically attracted to each other; that was obvious from the instant they met. But within a remarkably short time, Corey’s frivolousness started wearing on Joey’s nerves and he started making subtly sarcastic comments about overgrown children. For his part, Corey found Joey’s innate reserve to be stuck up and pretentious, and predictably couldn’t help poking fun at him and jacking up his antics to new heights just to see what kind of reaction he could provoke.
The evening had not gone well and, later that night, Alex and Tony had made a pact and resolved never to try anything like it again. Nevertheless, though Corey and Joey would never be close, they’d managed to work out a tolerable truce between them – mostly so that the four of them could get together in public as friends without driving Alex and Tony crazy with their incessant posturing and bickering.
“Hmmm, I don’t like these uremic levels.”
A blast of panic overtook Alex. “What?”
“Oh, sorry.” Joey grimaced at his indiscretion. “Thinking aloud. Nothing to worry about yet. Still…” He glanced down at the chart and shook his head. “I’m thinking putting him on dialysis might be a good idea.”
“Dialysis?” Alex felt a wave of terror wash over him.
Joey hastened to calm him. “It’s just a precaution, Alex,” he soothed. “His urine output has dropped over the past few days. His kidneys seem fine but I don’t want to take chances. Dialysis will take the stress off them. We talked about this possibility, remember?”
“When we were going over the health care authorization thingies?”
“Medical power of attorney. Yeah. Besides...” He patted Tony’s shoulder affectionately. “I’ve always been jealous that you got to marry the most beautiful man I ever met. We don’t want that pretty face getting all bloated and puffy. Tony would kill me if I let that happen.”
“When do you want to do this?”
Joey hesitated a fraction of a second before venturing, “Now would probably be a good time.”
Alex felt his heart sink.
“Don’t look so glum, Alex. Taking the burden from his kidneys might help his body to marshal the resources to beat this thing.”
“This thing? The thing no one seems to know what it is.”
“Doctors aren’t perfect, Alex,” Joey said, sighing. “We do the best we can with what we know. Hell, you’d think after three thousand years of medical science we’d know our way around the human body by now, wouldn’t you?”
Alex’s eyes widened at Joey’s unconscious echo of the joke Tony had made so often but decided it had just been coincidence.
“I’ll get the forms for you to sign and we’ll get him hooked up right away. I want you to look at me, Alex.”
Reluctantly, Alex met Joey’s eyes.
“I’m not going to let anything happen to him if I can help it. I promise you. Do you understand me?”
Alex nodded, miserable.
“I’ll be right back. Stay here. You can wait in the lounge until we’re finished with Tony and then...” He glanced at his watch. “I’m off shift in abou
t twenty minutes. I’m taking you out for a bite and you can tell Doctor Joey all about this silly notion you have that you’re going crazy. Don’t budge ’til I get back. Doctor’s orders.”
An hour and a half later, Alex was listlessly toying with the remains of a slice of peach cobbler, picking bits of crust up with his fork, setting them back down untasted and shifting the gooey peaches around the plate.
“If you were in the mood for mush, Alex, you could have ordered it,” Joey said. “I’m sure the chef would have come up with something.”
“Just not hungry, I guess.”
“I’m not surprised.”
Throughout the meal, Joey had been urging him to eat while Alex just picked at his plate. Undaunted, Joey kept ordering different dishes, hoping one of them would pique his friend’s appetite. Now they sat with enough food on the table to feed five people, but aside from a few leaves of salad and a taste of the cobbler, none of it had made its way into Alex’s mouth.
Exasperated, the doctor tried one final time. “You’re too thin, boy-o. If you don’t eat at least one bite of that desert, I’m gonna have you involuntarily committed to my care and force-feed you.”
“Fine,” Alex snapped and defiantly shoveled a large forkful into his mouth, pretending to chew with overacted gusto and managing somehow to make himself swallow. “Satisfied?” He pushed his plate away and folded his arms across his chest stubbornly.
“Don’t you stick that chin out at me, young man.”
“Don’t you keep shaking that fork in my face.”
The doctor gave up with a huge sigh of defeat. “At least I got a few glasses of red wine into you. They say it’s supposed to be healthy, but all I know is it tastes good.” He pushed back his own plate and dabbed at his mouth with a napkin. “Now, about these visions you say you’re having...”
With artful skill, Joey had spent most of lunch working his way past Alex’s initial resistance to talk about what he’d experienced. By the time the main course had arrived – and Alex was well into his second glass of wine – Alex had started to confess. Once he began, the words rushed out of him, and by dessert, Alex had told Joey practically everything. He’d been careful, however, to edit his account so all the elements of realism, all the physical evidence that the hallucinations had not been merely fantasy, were absent from the telling.
“It’s all perfectly natural, it seems to me,” the doctor said.
“Everyone keeps telling me that.”
“By everyone, you mean Cheryl?” Joey snorted with derision. “Ever since she changed her last name to Dawn-Squirrel, my opinion of her has dropped into the toilet. Not that it was ever high to begin with.”
“It’s her spirit animal. She first came to her at dawn. It makes perfect sense to me.”
“It’s a girl squirrel?” Joey rolled his eyes. “How’d she find that out? Pick it up and look underneath?”
Cheryl was a longstanding subject of argument between them. The doctor had his feet planted in logic and reality as firmly as two oak tree trunks while the therapist’s head, in Joey’s opinion, was drifting in some disembodied stupor up in the firmament.
“She’s holistic, Joey. Mind affects body and vice versa. They’ve been doing this sort of thing in China for thousands of years. Just because Western medicine doesn’t...” From the politely blank look on his face, Alex could see the shutters of Joey’s mind were already firmly closed. “Look, I don’t want to have this conversation with you again. Not right now.”
Joey ignored him and persisted. “Good. You know I don’t hold with this New Age touchy-feely stuff she’s into. Give me a good Jungian analyst any day. Have you ever been to her house? Crystals and tarot cards all over the place. And...” His nose wrinkled with distaste. “What’s with those cats? How many does she have? Ten? Twenty?”
“Three.”
“Seems like more. Sure as hell stinks like it. If you ask me, Cheryl’s a crazy Cat Lady in the making.”
“Lay off, will ya? She helps me, doesn’t she?”
“Not if you’re hallucinating, she doesn’t. What’s her prescribed course of treatment? Lighting candles and meditating on your karma? Rain dances? I’m surprised Missy Dawn-Squirrel doesn’t have you traipsing around her office in a deerskin loincloth waving a tomahawk.”
“Something like that.” Alex grinned weakly at the image.
The therapist’s spiritual oddities had infiltrated every aspect of her life – except the way she dressed. No matter how much she might secretly want to dangle crystals and pagan religious symbols from long chains around her neck and weave feathers through her hair, she was well aware that the success of her practice depended on presenting a professional demeanor to the world at large, a professionalism made even more vital by the unconventionality of her techniques. Alex had often kidded her that her penchant for rigidly tailored designer suits – all in natural fabrics, of course – virtually guaranteed she’d never attract the kind of New Age, Peace Corps-volunteering girls she preferred to bed. The wealthy Long Island lesbian look, Alex tried to convince her, would frighten them off. He couldn’t deny she was more than kooky, to be sure, but underneath, he was convinced she was a damned good therapist.
“Lemme put my two cents in,” Joey said. “It’s not uncommon for people to go all Linda Lovelace when they’re trying to deal with their grief. It’s like opening up an emotional pressure valve to let the excess steam out. Sometimes when you’re confronted with death, you try to reaffirm life. What better way to do that than with sex?”
“Death?” Alex cried out with alarm. “But, you said... Tony’s not...!”
“No, no, no. That’s not what I meant,” Joey hastened to correct himself. “I’m not talking about anyone actually dying. I mean, when we’re faced with the possibility of death and...” He spoke faster to say what he wanted to say before Alex could misinterpret him again. “Any time someone we love is sick with a serious illness, even if it’s something they’ll recover from – as I’m optimistic Tony will eventually – the emotions we experience are the same as if we’d already lost them.”
Alex breathed a sigh of relief. For a moment, he’d thought...
“It’s human nature for some people to want to fuck when we’re confronted with that kind of loss,” Joey continued. “Look, kiddo, you’re a highly sexual guy. Not as sexual as some people – and you know who I mean. At least you’re responsible about what you do with your dick. Guys like Corey, on the other hand, must have Teflon assholes. Otherwise, it’d be him who you were visiting in a hospital bed.”
“He takes precautions.” Alex often felt he had to defend his friend against Joey’s prudishness.
“And you should too. If, that is, you ever decide to actually go out and do something aside from dream about it – no matter how real the dreams seem to you. Look, you moved into this place with dozens of these obscene statues staring down at you and...”
“They’re not obscene. They’re beautiful. They’re art. If anyone should be able to recognize art when they see it, it’s me. Besides, there’s only one dozen, not dozens.”
“Whatever.” Joey dismissed Alex’s protests with a casual wave. “Don’t you see the connection, how they triggered your subconscious?”
“I suppose,” Alex slowly ventured, not buying the explanation for an instant, yet wanting to believe it very badly.
“I’m no tofu-eating, crystal-gazing, herbal lesbian therapist like Cheryl, but it seems to me she’s gotten the gist of things right. Even if I’m not wild about the ways she explains things,” he grumbled. “Get your ass back into the gym, at least, will you? Start cruising some flesh-and-blood gods instead of salivating over a few hunks of marble. You’ve lost weight and you’re pale. The exercise will do you good. Tag along with Corey. At least he’s good for that.”
Joey took a sip from his coffee and grimaced before motioning to a waiter. “Cold already. So…” He changed the subject. “How’s the work going? You spending enough time at the
easel? No creative blocks?”
“Actually, I think the stress is making me more creative than normal.”
“That makes sense.” He nodded sagely. “Painting helps you release the tension so you can function. A lot of artists are like that, or so I’m told. I wouldn’t know. I can barely draw a straight line. The interns are always complaining my handwriting sucks.”
“Just like your bedside manner?” Alex asked archly.
“Now, that’s the old sarcastic asshole we all know and love.” Joey grinned. “You know, since your work is so cathartic for you, it occurs to me...”
“What?”
The thought was interrupted by the arrival of a fresh cup of coffee. Joey busied himself adding non-dairy creamer and ersatz sugar, tasting repeatedly until it met his satisfaction.
“That’s so annoying.”
Joey looked at him, questioning.
“The way you put in like a quarter packet of that sugar shit, sip it, make a face, add cream, sip it again, make a worse face, dump in more, and keep doing it over and over again until it’s sludge. It’s not like you don’t always put in three packs of sugar and half a thingy of cream every time.”
“What’s the point of drinking it if it’s not the way I like it?”
Alex stuck his tongue out at the light beige beverage in Joey’s cup. “What’s the point of drinking it at all the way you gussy it up?”
“You’re trying to distract me, Alex.”
The artist fluttered his eyelashes, feigning innocence.
“We were taking about catharsis and I think...” Joey paused, clearly uncertain of how to make the suggestion without provoking a reaction, while Alex waited expectantly.
“I think, maybe...you should try painting one of them.”
* * * *
Alex took an uncharacteristically long time setting up. No matter how he shifted the easel supporting the blank canvas, he couldn’t seem to get it illuminated properly. He angled it several different ways, but each time he thought he was ready to begin, the skylight frame would cause his shadow to fall across it and obscure the area where he’d intended to start work. When finally, it was satisfactorily placed, Alex found some of his brushes had stiffened. Annoyed with himself for neglecting to clean them properly, he shoved them aside and took out his pencils. Though he rarely sketched the image onto the canvas before starting in with the oils, he thought that this time, given his conflicted emotions about his subject, easing into things might be best.