Flesh and Blood

by Michael Cunningham

  On the sidewalk ahead of him, two boys whispered and laughed, shoved one another with the easy familiarity of brothers. They were big and young, underdressed in cheap leather jackets and bright scarves, painfully handsome in their size and their broad, unexceptional faces. By their heedless presence they told the street that sex was not a torment, not a doomed striving of the spirit. Sex was ordinary as grass—what's the big deal? Will tried to be unobtrusive, to watch them without appearing to. He wanted . . . Not them, though he'd gladly have slept with either. It wasn't anything quite so simple as a yearning of the body. He wanted their certainty, the easy motion of them. He wanted whatever they were creating with their jokes and loud laughter, and he wanted what they made for themselves when they ran up the stairs of a brick apartment building, clattering in their boots, going home to bed together or to a party Will wouldn't know about because it was the province of young men like these, confident and affable, brand-new. Will fidgeted with his jacket, adjusted the cuffs. He'd be thirty-five in a little more than a month. He liked his life well enough—he couldn't think of another he'd prefer—but still he felt haunted by absence. Still the years felt featureless, for all their event, and still he waited to inhabit himself. He had no complaints about the details, the hard but satisfying work and the band of good-hearted, interesting friends and the series of affairs that lasted anywhere from three weeks to a year but always turned out to have contained the specifics of their endings right at the start, in the first brittle conversations, the first nervous sex. Passions turned into needs; strong opinions devolved into peevishness or rage. Will didn't mind, not really. He told himself that anything could happen. Anything still could. He had affairs, and always held on to some kind of friendship after the sex and the hope were gone. He worked out at his gym, ran five miles every other day, spent hours shopping for the right pair of boots, and yes it was all vanity but he wanted something that lay beyond simple vanity and the small, sour satisfactions it offered. He was looking to fall into conviction, so he no longer needed to stare covertly and wistfully at strangers. So he no longer needed to envy foolish boys, or the muscles of men less muscular than he.

  Because he wasn't tired he walked four blocks out of his way to have a beer and watch the women play pool. He stood gratefully in the dark yellow heat of the bar, watching them clear the table. This band of women was notorious; nobody could beat them. Hardly anyone tried. Men sipped their drinks and watched the women beat one another. On the far side of the bar, in another room, a few determined souls danced to “Smalltown Boy,” though on a cold weeknight in April even the disc jockey didn't look like he believed in music.

  A thin woman in black jeans banked the 2 ball, sent it spinning into the corner pocket like blameless competence being born. Will said something appreciative to a man standing near him, or the man said something appreciative to him. They'd never agree on who spoke first. It would never seem to matter who spoke.

  “These women are good.”

  “Terrifying.”

  “I always wanted to be the kind of guy who's good at pool.”

  “I sometimes forget that I'm not. I walk around like somebody who's good at pool. I try to walk around that way.”

  “How exactly does a man who's good at pool walk?”

  “You know. Confident. He struts. Maybe a little bowlegged.”

  “Ambitious. I mostly just try not to fall over.”

  “I fell on the way here. I tripped over nothing, this little bump in the sidewalk about a sixteenth of an inch high. While I was strutting along looking like a man who's good at pool.”

  “You fell ?”

  “I stumbled. There were people around. And you know, I'm never sure how to recover when something like that happens. I can never decide. Do you go on as if nothing had happened? Do you smile and shake your head? Do you look back at whatever it was you fell over?”

  “You can always just sit down on the curb and weep.”

  “I guess so.”

  The woman in black jeans cracked the cue ball into the 6, which knocked the 10 ball into a side pocket.

  “I'm out of clever things to say now,” the man said.

  “Me, too,” Will answered.

  His name was Harry. He was neither handsome nor homely. He had hard, thin arms and a cowlick. He had a quirky face, eyes with flecks of yellow in them, and lines bracketing his mouth. He was forty and he looked like forty. The name Harry fit him. Harry was the right name for his dishevelment, his black-rimmed glasses, the graceful shifting of his ass inside the baggy, wrinkled wool slacks he wore.

  They finished their beers. They left the bar together, without having agreed on what they were doing. Will was tired of pretty boys and he was still in love with pretty boys and he wanted, in some numbed way, to rest. He walked along the wet black streets with Harry. He felt neither attracted nor repelled.

  “This is where I turn,” Harry said. They stood on the corner together. Droplets haloed the lights, scraps of neon shone on the asphalt. Harry took his glasses off, wiped them on his jacket.

  “Do you think we should trade phone numbers or something?” Will said.

  Maybe they'd be friends. Maybe they'd have sex, and become friends.

  “Yes. I think we should.”

  “I don't have a pen.”

  “I don't think I do, either.”

  “Maybe we should just go home together.”

  “I don't know. I've pretty much decided to stop sleeping with guys right away.”

  “Actually, I'd more or less decided the same thing.”

  “It gets things off to a funny start, sleeping with somebody before you know if his parents are alive or dead. Not that I think anything is starting up.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I always think I'll be sort of smooth and butch and graceful. And I never am.”

  “Neither one of us has tripped yet.”

  “That's true.”

  “Maybe we should call each other up and go out on a date.”

  “That's really terrifying.”

  “I know.”

  “If I told you my phone number, would you remember it?”

  “Sure.”

  “You won't remember it. Let's go to my place right now.”

  “You think it's a good idea?”

  “No. But let's do it, anyway.”

  Harry lived on the second floor of a brownstone. He was a cardiologist, he played the saxophone. Naked, with one small lamp burning, he was small and chiseled, nearly hairless. He didn't exercise. He'd been a fast-moving, sinewy boy and now as a man he had the body of an aging acrobat, thin snakes of muscle on his arms and legs and an incipient belly, round and hard and economical under the smooth flat squares of his chest. Will knew right away that if anything happened beyond one night, he'd be the beauty and Harry the one who paid cool, humorous tribute. Will loved and hated the idea. It surprised him. Here in this expensive but haphazardly furnished apartment, he was the one with the body and no cash. It wasn't where he'd expected to go.

  In bed, Harry kissed the muscles of Will's chest. He ran his tongue over Will's nipples, worked his way down. Will liked it well enough. The sensations, Harry's tongue and Harry's bed, were pleasant, just that. It was neither large nor dangerous. There was nothing to fail at. Will stroked Harry's shoulders, and did not worry. He let it happen. When Harry kissed his way back up to Will's face, they moved carefully together, as if they held an egg pillowed between their stomachs.

  Harry, Will thought. Why does his name have to be Harry?

  Afterward, they slept. Will started to leave, more out of politeness than desire, and Harry held his arm. “Just stay,” Harry said. And he did. It seemed right to stay. He fell quickly, deeply asleep with his back touching Harry's back.

  When he was still Billy he sat in the dark of his father's closet, exploring. He burrowed amid the wreckage of shoe-polish tins, brushes, lost coins. The closet floor was snug and blackly glittering as a storm drain. Things drifted down and
settled there. He groped around on the floor until his hands touched something solid—a shoehorn, perfect as a floating keyhole. He put the shoehorn to his lips, tasted the slick rubbery non-taste of the new. He bit down hard, then held it in the strip of light that shone under the door. His toothmarks were surprisingly perfect, symmetrical.

  His mother's closet, next door to this one, was a garden of color and sweet, flowery smells. He liked that closet, too, but found its lushness overpowering and its heavy, perfumed air difficult to breathe. In his father's closet, things were spare and disorderly. Things were the color of night. Overhead, the dangling sleeves and cuffs disappeared up into blackness. On the linoleum, his father's shoes waited silently. Billy put his face down close to one of his father's black dress-up shoes. It was titanic, nearly as long as Billy's arm, and even in the dark of the closet it put out a dull, brown-black shine. Billy inhaled. The shoe had a ripe but strangely compelling odor. It smelled of polish and it smelled in some unspeakable way of Billy's father's secret life. A strong, foul, fascinating smell. He was lost in the smell when his father opened the closet door.

  In the morning, early, Harry got up to make coffee. Will lay in bed, half awake, returning from his dreams. Small incidents of gray, rainy light played on the keys and bell of a saxophone. There were shelves crowded with books, books piled in corners, books stacked on a rickety chair. There were daffodils dried to scabs in a drinking glass. Harry came back from the kitchen, bare-assed and sleepy in a white tank top. Just Hanes, the kind old men wore. He gave Will a mug of coffee, got back into bed.

  “Could you sleep?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Will said.

  There was nothing unusual to say. They sipped their coffee. “I have to be at school in an hour and a half,” Will said.

  “I go in late on Fridays.”

  “Nice.”

  The coffee mugs were heavy and white, the kind waitresses slap down on diner counters. On the table beside the bed: a Kleenex box, a notebook, a scattering of pens, a solemn-faced stone angel, and a paperback copy of Anna Karenina.

  “You're reading Tolstoy?” Will said.

  “I read Anna Karenina every few years. I'm a Tolstoy slut.”

  “I love Tolstoy, too. George Eliot is the one I'm really a slut for, though.”

  “Middlemarch is incredible.”

  “I read that every few years. It practically gives me a nose-bleed. “

  There was nothing unusual to say. There was a sense of occasion, occasion made out of the simplest materials, and the passing seconds were apertures, clicking by. It occurred to Will that he could be to Harry what he'd always wanted pretty men to be to him. He could be kind and intelligent, present, with a world inside him. He could stay for a while and then, when he wanted his freedom again, he could go.

  With mingled sensations of pride and sympathy, Will put his hand on the bony complications of Harry's thin, pale knee.

  They had dinner together two nights later. They told their stories, or parts of them. Harry came from nine children, an immense cold house in Detroit, a father who believed in military discipline and a mother who searched between the rules so hard she fell into religion. Harry's only regret, the only one he'd admit to, was music. He treated heart patients and that was fine, he liked doing it well enough, but it would never take the place of pulling in chestfuls of air and giving it back to people as one long melody.

  He said, “I didn't have the courage to be a musician.” On the restaurant walls, old posters announced ocean liners that hadn't sailed in thirty years.

  Will said, “It takes courage to be a doctor.”

  “Not really. Not the same kind. Once you start being a doctor it just rolls you along, it has this momentum. It would take a lot more courage to quit practicing medicine than it takes to do it.”

  “Do you want to quit?”

  “No, I like what I do. I like playing the sax in my apartment and fantasizing about playing in clubs. Some fantasies are better as fantasies, don't you think?”

  “I guess. I was going to be an architect and I've ended up teaching fifth grade.”

  “Isn't it what you want to do?”

  “It's become what I want to do. I think I did it at first to spite my father.”

  “I've done much worse things to spite my father than teach fifth grade.”

  “He had such grand hopes for me, he was so intent on my becoming some kind of big deal, and one day I looked him in the eye and said, 'Fuck you, I'm going to be an elementary school teacher.'“

  “I did a lot of drugs and played guitar all the time. I had to go to medical school in Mexico.”

  “I got drunk and drove too fast. My friends and I wrecked three cars before we graduated from high school.”

  “That must have shown him.”

  “I guess.”

  “Plus, it was fun.”

  “Hm?”

  “It was fun to do drugs and play the guitar. I'm sure it was fun wrecking those cars. It hasn't all just been to get back at our fathers.”

  “Well, no. I guess it hasn't.”

  Harry smiled, ran his finger along the rim of his water glass. His fingers were tufted with golden hair. A loose thread hung from his cuff, tickling his wrist, and without thinking Will glanced at his own wrist, as if the thread had touched him, too.

  He was not afraid of Harry. He wondered if he'd been a little bit afraid of every other man he'd ever known.

  He and Harry made careful love. It was good sex, good enough, but it lay differently along Will's skin. Ordinarily he felt concealed by sex; he disappeared into the beauty of the other man. With Harry he was more visible. Sometimes he liked the sensation. Sometimes he thought he'd get up and leave, return to the comfort and the familiar unhappiness of his usual life.

  They went to movies, they ate in restaurants. On the first sunny day they drove to Provincetown in Harry's car, walked shivering at the water's edge in sweaters and coats. Harry stood in a brown suede jacket, scraps of dark hair blowing against his eyeglasses, and a perfect beauty gathered around him, a beauty of circumstance, the bright cold sky and the fine golden stubble on his upper lip. Will and he made no declarations; it just unfolded. Another night and another, all day Sunday with coffee and the newspapers.

  Sometimes Will believed he was falling in love.

  Sometimes he told himself, I want more than this.

  He'd been waiting so long for a dark-haired boy-man, a hero carrying all he'd learned about adventure and the body. He'd prepared himself for that; he'd turned into someone who could have it. Will had never pictured a thin, decent-looking man who disliked dancing and late nights. He'd never pictured questionable taste in clothes, rooms full of clutter, thin legs and a flat ass.

  They talked, always. There was everything to say. Will found no limit to what he could tell. Lying in bed at night, he said, “I worry sometimes that I can't really fall in love. Not what other people mean by 'fall in love.' “

  “What do other people mean?” Harry asked. His bare leg was hooked over Will's legs. Harry's jacket and pants had been draped on a chair and they sat in the dark like someone patient and elderly, keeping watch.

  “I don't know. A loss of the self, I guess.”

  “Why would you want to lose yourself?”

  “What I mean is, I worry that love calls for some kind of fundamental generosity I lack. I worry that I'm not generous, maybe that's it. I'm very vain.”

  “I know you're vain,” Harry said. “It's not the worst failing.”

  “That's part of the trouble. It's not even a grand sin. It's one of the creepy minor sins. Better to be really, truly bad.”

  “Do you think it's time to tell me you love me? Do you feel like I'm waiting for you to do that?”

  “No. I don't know. Are you?”

  “I don't think so. Maybe I am. I don't need you to, though.”

  “It's been six months,” Will said.

  “Almost seven. Please don't turn this into something you coul
d fail at.”

  “But you can fail. At love. You can pull back. You can get to a certain point, and then say no.”

  “I guess so. Do you feel like that's what you're doing?”

  “I'm not sure. Maybe.”

  “Love gets a bad rap. Who wouldn't be afraid after all those movies?”

  “Do you think you love me?”

  “You just want me to say it first,” Harry said.

  “Do you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “It doesn't kill me if you're not sure. I'm not nervous like that.”

  “You're really not, are you?” Will said.

  “No. I'm really not.”

  They kissed, and made love again.

  It happened to Will when he forgot his umbrella. He'd left Harry's apartment in the morning and gotten to the street and then gone back. The door was open. Harry was playing his saxophone in the bedroom, a quick riff before he got ready for work. He didn't hear Will come in. He stood in his shorts and a pair of white socks, playing. Will didn't recognize the tune. He watched from the doorway. He'd seen Harry play plenty of times but never like this, never when Harry didn't know he was being watched. Something changed this way. Harry leaned over the saxophone, his eyes squeezed shut and his face flushed. He was more lost than Will had seen him, even during sex. A vein bulged fatly at his temple. He played well, not brilliantly, but he was lost in it. He was a man with the beginnings of a belly playing a saxophone in a disorderly bedroom, wearing baggy white socks and blue striped boxer shorts as rain spattered the windows. It was only that. But something rose up in Will. He would never understand it. He believed he saw Harry's childhood and Harry's old age, the whole curve of Harry's life that was passing through this room, this moment. Briefly Will left himself and joined Harry in the ongoing rush and clatter of being Harry, and briefly he felt Harry's fears and hopes and something else. The sum of his days. The sensation of living inside his body, blowing music through the horn. Will stood silently. He didn't speak. He got his umbrella from the living room. He left.