It took about a half hour of teasing, natural conversation and another fifteen minutes of gradual roughhousing to tow Jules away from Clay and Roscoe’s supervision on the sandy blankets. By the time they were up to their ankles in the lake, Martin was clear on two things – one, Jules had never roughhoused in his life; two, that he himself was horny enough to start chewing rocks.
Jules punched Martin, almost certainly by accident, square in the liver in response to some harmless two-handed shoving.
“Oh shit,” he said, when Martin automatically doubled over. No apology; attaboy.
“Listen,” Martin said, using this as an excuse to grab Jules’ shoulder. “Fighting is a social act. It’s contextual. Your response should mirror your opponent’s initial delivery.”
“Sure,” Jules said, unimpressed. “Losers who play fair would say that.”
“I play fair.”
“No, you don’t.” Jules fell back and lifted one foot behind his calf to wobble, flamingo-like in the surf. He wore a baggy T-shirt over shorts that were probably not swim trunks. He looked windblown and vulnerable as he gazed, distracted, by the unseen center of the lake. Martin had spent enough time around him by this point to know his explosions of energy could abruptly jackknife into insufferable, melancholy fits.
Jules’ glum line of sight changed course toward the beach. He was eyeing Roscoe and Co., of whom they were still within eyesight. Jackie had joined the group, wearing a resplendent, premature tan beneath his fur and, presumably, enough of something else to avoid getting arrested. Martin couldn’t see any evidence of it from this distance.
“Every time I see him,” Jules said, in a confiding tone, “I get like, this huge urge to rip out a handful of his chest hair.”
“He’d shove a big chain up your ass.”
“What’s he’s talking to Roscoe about?”
“Oh, the usual.” Roscoe’s ear was pointed toward Jackie, but his face appeared to be trained steadily on Martin. Piqued, Martin looked back and casually pressed his hand against the heated fabric between Jules’ shoulder blades. Then, a little ashamed, he looked away. “Recipes. Crochet.” He bumped Jules with his forearm. “Hey,” he asked, “would you?”
“Would I what?” He followed Martin’s nod. “Are you crazy? No!”
“Come on, Jackie’s a specimen. He just came along too late in the game.”
“It hasn’t given him any problems,” Jules noted. “I saw him have this guy on this steel inverted table once, yeah? So his feet were up and his head was down? And he was doing the whole chain-in-ass bit? But he had the other end wrapped around the guy’s neck, so when he shoved the chain in deeper the guy would get choked? And then –”
“And then?”
“Oh, you know. He weighted the guy’s balls.”
“Would have been really gauche if he’d forgotten.”
“But, but then –” Jules lurched through a giddy two-step for balance against a high wave and let himself rock into Martin’s waiting palm. “– He like, he rigged the weights to the chain so the guy would get choked even more.”
“Why wasn’t I invited to Jackie’s birthday party?”
“It was the guy on the table’s birthday,” Jules said. “It was before you got here.”
In the second it took for Martin to double-check that Roscoe was still keeping an eye on him, Jules, apropos to nothing, hauled back and smacked him hard over the nipple; He bolted, parallel of the shore, tripped up by the surf, but out of reach of Martin’s initial lunge. In the spirit of things, he called out a hapless and theatrical aaaa nooo! Then u-turned into the wet sand, unsuccessfully dodging outraged, promenading twinks who Martin avoided with more dexterity and with what, he hoped, came across as an apologetic and boyish grin.
Jules paused long enough to confirm he was being followed. He turned tail and bolted down the beach with such serious speed Martin was shocked into thinking he’d misread the entire situation. Then, as sometimes happened in pivotal moments, mutual understanding flowed from one to the other and Martin pursued.
These matters weren’t, he knew (had known for years) about playing fair, or about winning or losing, a life lesson Jules was too young to have learned. Right now, the point of the game was staying close enough to absorb the breakneck visual of the kid in motion, clipping blanket edges and darting through frisbee games and swerving, with becoming panic, from the odd illegal dog-off-leash. Martin hopscotched over the hard divots the balls and heels of Jules’ feet gauged out of the sand. An errant wave had soaked one side of his t-shirt and clung greyish to a sketched waist which Martin had, occasionally, recently (sneakily) grasped like an envelope in passing.
Both the pleasure and frustration of plotting the inevitable capture was interrupted by a foreboding creak in Martin’s bad knee – out of an abundance of caution more than pain, he slowed to a crawl and flopped down hard on the opposite thigh. In a minute, Jules flopped down beside him.
“Sorry,” he said, this time.
“Give me a sec, it’s fine.”
“I keep forgetting you’re like, sixty years old.”
“My PT said I’m going to need to swap this one out before I’m sixty.” Martin patted his knee. “Stay out of the trades, pal. Stick to the art.”
“You have, like, a union.” Jules settled lightly behind his back and curved himself, almost imperceptibly, where Martin’s ribs met his spine. He batted sand that didn’t exist from Martin’s bare shoulders, his knuckles gradually descending to the small of his back. Martin, who had been cooled off by the punching and the smacking and the running, sank deeper into the sand and lit up. He understood he would have to stay completely still so the kid could, in his own time, understand what his hands were doing and why they were doing it. “Does it hurt?” Jules asked.
“Nah, I’m tough. And brave.” Jules had a callous on his left forefinger; he deliberately rubbed it over Martin’s vertebrae. “You know,” he struggled, melting a little. “Manly.”
“My bar for manly is like, Jackie’s whole deal,” Jules said, shifting closer. “Just so you’re aware.”
“You want to take a spin on that table, I think.”
“I do not.” His denial lacked the vigor of his previous one, but Martin could believe this tone more. “It’s nice to watch a grown-up guy get tortured for once. All the stuff I was looking up when I was a teenager had girls in it.” With one hand he absently scratched Martin’s ribs and, with a kneading gesture, dug his knuckles into the skin. The other had crept around to lay flat on Martin’s stomach, the little finger searching out the limits of Martin’s waistband. “It was easier to find stuff of girls in latex, in like, the fashion of it. And what it had to, you know, bear up with. Physically. Because sometimes they were wearing it, but they’d also, you know. They were wearing the machines, too. That was interesting to me.”
The image of Jules’ brisk professional relationship with hard heterosexual S&M was one Martin had played with before, stymied only by the fact that Jules only rarely talked past it. He couldn’t imagine his pornographic education beginning any other way.
“So, what,” Martin encouraged, with deceptive lightness. “Insex? Or something like it?”
“Oh, def. I was thirteen. I was way too young.”
Martin had started sodomizing his friends at the mature age of twelve. He considered the wisdom of bringing Jules into this confidence, who now fully rested against Martin’s back with his cheek pressed sidelong of his shoulder. Besides the usual and boisterous arm-over-shoulder crap, Martin had otherwise failed to achieve such sustained and sincere physical closeness. He was saved from panic and premature judgements by some standard social calculation – if they were still safe enough within the gayer parameters of the beach – or somehow worse, if Roscoe was going to come along mother-henning.
“Hey,” Jules said, after some esoteric calculations of his own. “Did you ever see stuff on Rotten? Military executions? Fatal car accidents?”
“On what? Christ, no."
“Did you ever,” he continued, “did you like, catch Claudia on sites like that?”
“Listen –”
“Or was she like, a normal and healthy teenager and shit.”
“I wouldn’t –”
“Due to having such a great and emotionally present dad and all.”
It would have been an easier conversation with their standard two feet of distance in play. Martin turned his head and failed to connect eyes. “Listen,” he repeated, with hard-earned calm and patience. “Let’s not talk about my kid right now, alright?”
“Yeah?” Jules propped himself up on one knee and spoke mildly but firmly. “Is it too weird?”
He was capable of uncanny chameleonic imitations of maturity and self-control, in some conversations; of bigger, taller, stronger, older outlines that Martin, in a hunch, assumed possessed no faces. It was a dissonance of Jules that had long stopped disturbing him but made him feel sad and tender. He broke their closeness enough to match gazes.
“Is it weird for you?” Martin asked.
Unfortunately, Jules had never been afraid of eye contact. Martin had learned he could go a long time without blinking, though now he was forced to squint against blowing sand as he mulled things over.
“If I was a girl,” he concluded, “this would be fucked up and creepy.”
He stood up, burred from the knees-down in grit. Martin was still frequently caught off guard by the fact that he was tall.
“But I’m not,” Jules continued. “So I guess I’m not allowed to think about it like that.”
“If I’ve been making you uncomfortable this whole time, I’d want you to tell me.”
“I’m not uncomfortable,” Jules said. “Get up.”
No more doting concern about his knee, Martin noted, but his wariness subsided when Jules wrapped their hands together and began leading him along the beach. He wouldn’t have been up to another chase. Jules curved away from the bright, sunshine-y hilarity and far enough toward the cement bordering the park that they passed under the shadows of trees and the unwelcome presence of very small children, whom Jules stonily ignored as they toddled and tripped by the diametrically opposed wayside of preening men who weren’t Jules’ age or Martin’s age but at secret and acceptable times of life simply due to the reality that would never be further considered.
“I like you,” Martin said.
Nothing about Jules altered, neither his pace nor the pressure he used to hold Martin’s hand.
“I’ve liked you for months. But that doesn’t mean anything if you don’t have good feelings about it.”
Jules pulled up beside a set of brick restrooms. Unseasonably warm in mid-May, nothing was open proper despite the tropical bustle. An enterpriser had come along with a bolt-cutter and propped open the doors with cinderblocks.
“I like you too,” Jules said, and yanked Martin into the gents.
Martin, in less than an hour, had weathered about a dozen emotional and erotic dips and jerks. He was rendered suddenly naive and could truly admit he thought Jules was trying to find a place to talk with more privacy; A theory he thought proven when Jules did a cursory sweep of the undersides of the stalls.
“We could just go to –”
Jules lodged his fingertips into Martin’s bicep. “Show it to me,” he interrupted.
“Excuse me,” Martin apologized.
“Take it out. Take it out.” Jules punished his other bicep. His voice threaded upward in reedy demand. “Take it out and show it to me.”
In the half second it took for Martin to get his head together, snatch Jules to his side, and check for the one stall out of three that had a working lock (a chivalrous impulse he’d once been too young and too crude to enact) Jules boiled over with his standard response to any temporary frustration – seething fury. “Do I have to do fucking everything around here?” He bitched as Martin pushed him face first into the stall. “Why does nobody ever fucking listen to me? Is it so fucking hard –”
Martin spun him between the toilet, putting his own back to the stall door. “You’re really lucky you’re as cute as you are. Ever think about that?”
“No.” Jules stroked the divots he’d left on Martin’s arms before letting them roam over his chest. One thumb crooked across the lingering red mark above his nipple. “I didn’t actually mean to hit you hard.”
“It didn’t hurt,” Martin lied. He dipped his head for an impulsive kiss and got the mealy interior of Jules’ ear instead.
“No – just.” Jules rolled the back of his head against Martin’s corrective hand but kept his nails to himself this time. “I asked for the other thing –” he scolded, but let Martin lean in and scrub his face against his dark rumpled hair, something he’d wanted to do for ages. Despite the romping, Jules smelled extremely clean.
“What was that?”
Jules was a lithe, fighting little body. He held no room for leeway or interpretation and Martin, with glee, realized he was finally in the fortunate position to literally feel him get pissed off. “I said it tons! I’m not saying it again! You heard me!”
It occurred to Martin halfway through this lecture that maybe he was nervous about getting his cock out, a notion his hands would not allow. Jules staggered a little when Martin released him to yank his waistband down and haul himself into the open air. Jules yelling at him, he saw, had already done half the hard work of getting him towards fighting weight. An ambiguous sign, he figured.
“Oh,” Jules said. “Okay.” He melted, instantly docile, in the crook of Martin’s arm and smoothed his hot tongue over his jaw while his long, hard hands worked over Martin’s torso and stomach. “That’s nice.”
Martin tried not to arch into it too whorishly. “Let me kiss you,” he said – barely checked it down from a demand, a near miss.
Jules quieted in body; his thumb cruelly poised at the root of Martin’s dick. “Later,” he said.
“Pal…”
“I don’t want our first kiss to be in a toilet,” Jules explained, a little stricken. “I want it to be nice. Don’t try it here, please. I want to so bad, I won’t be able to stop you if you do – please don’t.”
Martin hadn’t been the only one dreaming; he was kind of touched. “You’re really sweet,” he said, feeling Jules up under his shirt with one hand, while the other gently disengaged Jules’ thumb so he could stroke himself. “What do you want with it?”
Jules’ eyes were huge and intent as he watched Martin at work. “Uh, wow,” he whispered, inanely.
“You like it?”
“You look really good.” Clear questions got clear answers. Martin was uncertain whether his brain was absorbing these important lessons as he got himself as hard as he could possibly stand without doing something profoundly stupid and cruel to the suddenly gentle little crush resting on his chest. “I like you so much, you’re so nice to me, you’re so nice to me, can I touch it?”
Martin held him with both arms as Jules granted his balls an obligatory grasp, a courtesy gesture before he moved along to other matters.
His actions, unlike his communication, hadn’t been affected by nerves or horniness – Jules explored him with near-sterile perfunctory skill that had Martin jerking and grunting. He imagined the kid lounging alone in front of his shitty laptop, taking in with slitted, businesslike meanness some bound, rubberized doll pumped and dripping around silicone rods stuffed in every hole, and when Jules’ warm palm slid accidentally over the head of his cock, he was exhilaratingly freed from every social nicety and moral doubt that kept him from indulging his suit – his promise to Roscoe, that Jules was young enough to be his son, that he’d said I won’t be able to stop you, that he was an alone and unprotected anonymous little cocksucker, a spontaneous animal slut who yanked his shirt up in the toilet stall to offer up the skin of his belly and still yipped with shock when Martin shoved him against the dispenser to fuck against his guts – all these incidentals twined into a single cord whose bite only enhanced the glamor of the trap.
Jules clawed open Martin’s bare back, chanting the stimulating but unfulfilled demands sluts always said to work themselves up into a frenzy – fuck me! I wanna suck you so bad! – interspersed with tender requests that Jules could, apparently, say in times like these.
“Be nice to me, be nice to me, be nice to me –”
Martin seized his ass and rammed his near-hairless stomach. He would have punched a new hole through it, if he could, a nasty companion for his cute little navel.
“Ple-eaaaaaase be nice to me, I’ll be good, I’ll be good, I’ll be good all the time –”
“I am fucking nice –” Martin bit out, with huge effort. “I’m a nice fucking man to you.”
Jules bounced energetically in his grip and uttered little ah! ah! ah!s in cooperative tandem, as if he really were being fucked, or imagining being fucked. “I wanna be good forever,” he moaned, then sighed and relaxed, a subtle cue Martin’s body recognized through the heat, and swiftly honored.
Martin grabbed his cock to more accurately pump his orgasm up and across Jules’ stomach – his enthusiasm, fueled by a few months of erotic repression, overshot the mark and he ended up nailing Jules’ chest and collarbone. He’d twisted Jules’ shirt up and away in a grip so tight his knuckles whitened, creating a slightly more violent image than he cared for the first afterglow, with Jules’ arms pressed and trapped against the stall, eyes clamped shut, the rest of him shivering. Martin pressed their heads together – he stroked his waist and hair, touched his face, checked over his front and found him compellingly flat in the groin.
“Pal,” he said. He rubbed them cheek to cheek. “Sweetheart.”
“Oh god,” Jules said. He opened one eye. “What did I say?”
“Nothing I didn’t want to hear.”
“Oh. Okay.” He laid his head down on Martin’s shoulder and sniffled. Reality and its exposure made Martin tug him closer – he could feel the dents the boxed edges of the toilet paper dispenser made low against Jules’ skin. “Do you still like me?”
He’d wised up to something unconsciously within the last five minutes and didn’t dare challenge Jules on why he’d ask such a question.
“I like you,” Martin said. “I like you so much.”
“Okay. That’s good. Okay.” But Jules stayed where he was and didn’t stop shaking until tepid streams of salty tears were well established down Martin’s raked shoulder.
They’d made a mess; One sink was wrapped in yellow caution tape. The second spat out lukewarm dribbles. The third gushed ice-cold torrents one had to attempt to catch in his cupped hands while the other pounded the press-tap and got his chest slapped with wet hands. Jules perked up at the chance to swat Martin around some more, who considered revising his standing theory that Jules was merely emotionally sadistic.
A harried father strolled through the entryway at an emergency trot, towing a kindergartener fast by the wrist – Jules and Martin scurried away snappish.
“Goddammit, I ripped you up.” Jules touched his back, which was beginning to burn a little.
“Oh, sure.” Martin threw his arm around Jules’ struggling shoulder. His body hummed like a transmission tower – he doubted he would ever worry about anything ever again. “Who cares?”
“They’re gonna notice –”
“I’ll put my shirt on.”
“– Jackie’ll probably smell it –”
“He probably can.” Jules grunted with dismay. “Pal, what would happen if you relaxed for more than two seconds at a time? Jackie’s the last person who could judge you.”
“It matters what Roscoe thinks of me,” Jules answered duly.
Roscoe had once been a sixteen-year-old twerp who’d been terrified of Martin. And now the hot little punk de jour under his arm was anxious about his opinion. Martin would have been happier for Roscoe’s turnaround of maturity and status, but, bound up as he was in his own worries, Martin doubted he had the slightest clue how Jules felt.
“We’re going to have to talk about this,” Martin said, when the walk turned solemn.
“I know.”
“Soon. I’m talking hours, not days.” He was determined not to give up any ground.
“I have to work tonight,” Jules said. He gazed blindly across the sand then seemed stricken with inspiration. “But I – Maybe. Hey. You want to come see a movie with me, tomorrow?”
“A what? Yeah.” He tried to recall the last time he’d been spontaneously asked on a date. He came up embarrassingly short. “Yes, absolutely. Of course.”
“We can talk after,” Jules said. He sounded very somber about it. Clay, Roscoe and Jackie were increasingly large smudges in the distance. Martin gave Jules a couple inches of personal space and the kid reached out and touched his ribs gently, with some finality. His hand fell away.
“You know,” Martin joked, trying to lighten the melancholy, “if you let me give you a piggyback ride, we could cover up my back that way.”
Clay’s crooked white umbrella, a hundred yards off, flashed ultra-visible. Jules sought it out and appeared briefly mesmerized by the sight. He looked backward at Martin with an expression he couldn’t even begin to interpret. “Just because I’m smaller than you” Jules said, “doesn’t mean I’m actually small.”
Martin’s knee radiated, a protesting throb. He waited in vain for the mutual understanding to flow. The valve had burst open once before that day, it could happen again. They stood there uselessly in the lack. But Jules didn’t wait on intangible things – he waited on Martin.
He jerked his head. “I’m not going back there alone.”
Martin grew up. “No,” he said. “You’re not.” And stepped forward.
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Clay could recite to the thread what he’d worn that early-summer brunch at Roscoe’s apartment; the loose, worn cords that were so easy to pull up his legs one-handed with the nice button that behaved in the cute little pants-slot (button eye? Hole, simple-pat? Jules would know, but he hadn’t met Jules just yet, if details were the thing). The cords were light green. Over this, he wore an oversized t-shirt, grey, one he could pull over his head without a battle, and over that a very long-sleeved chambray shirt he did not button because he enjoyed when it billowed behind his underarms. It made him feel like a famous painter, and nothing untoward showed to upset anyone. A recitation by rote and not of recollection, as Clay hadn’t found the need to recollect much for twenty-five years. Why bother, when it was such a pretty May Day, and the sidewalks were beginning to stay warm, and a robin plumped over there, in that very shrub?
And a soiree! How fun! Phil of all people opened the door for him. Strange, since Roscoe was quite host-y about these matters. “Here we are,” Phil said, with his standard dissected warmth. “Now the party’s started.”
“Darling,” said Clay Carrell, “I hope if already has.”
“And fashionably late, too.”
“I arrive, exactly as I have always arrived, when I intend to.”
He took a turn around the front room, received his acknowledgements and the few respectful touches or kisses some guests felt fit to grant him. He breezed by the goody table (it wasn’t nice manners to show undue interest in the food, directly after your entrance) and treated himself to a peep out the window. Roscoe did not have curtains to sensuously fling aside, a pity. Roscoe!
“Where, now?” He asked Bo G., who unlike others, solidly clapped Clay’s trim shoulder.
“He’s in the damn kitchen.” Bo G. understood him perfectly. “With that damn kid.”
Clay knew, theoretically, about the presence of a damn kid, but memory lay in the eye of the beholder and Clay had never managed to see him. He’d heard bizarre rumors Roscoe kept him stuffed in the shop basement; Clay thought that was a senseless place to store a child. Knowing now he must see at last, off he swanned to the kitchen entryway toward the damp clatter and crash of soapy dishware. He rapped the doorframe smartly. “Now you,” he said, “you, who did not answer your own door! I see you now!”
“Oh Clay,” Roscoe half-turned, smiled vaguely, and held up his bubbling hands. “That’s Clay,” he said to the long, young creature beside him who dangled on a tall stool. It didn’t answer. Clay thought that was only fair, as half the child’s face was a healing fog of yellows and burgundies and eggplant, all in evil gradients, descending from a half-swollen blue-skinned eye before dispersing and reconnecting among a strip of unbecoming, hairy stitches encrusted smack in the middle of the cheek. It could hardly have hurt to tape some nice white gauze over it, but not everyone knew the niceties of Gloria Vanderbilt as well as Clay.
“Clay,” Roscoe continued in the solid, directorial voice he affected whenever Clay was in the room, “Clay, this is Jules. I don’t think you two have run into each other.”
“I am so incredibly charmed,” Clay said. He noticed right away that Jules was looking down, with a teenager’s cruel intent, to work out if Clay’s squashy white shoes truly fastened together with Velcro.  “Hideous whispers informed me you were stuck in a basement somewhere. I’m so glad you’re not; people belong aboveground.”
Titters in the room behind Clay. The events could have been connected; he was a witty person. “I can see you’re being very helpful to our lovely man – that’s fine, Roscoe works too hard to arrange the fun then misses out on it.” He scanned automatically over the child’s hands, which were long and battered, adolescently screwboned. He didn’t store them awkwardly like other wallflowers.
Clay felt keen, momentarily. “What do you play?”
The child’s one fully open eye was merely surface-bright and dark and blank. “Piano,” he said. He talked out one side of his mouth and his teeth didn’t show when he spoke.
“You do?” Roscoe was surprised. Their acquaintance was, apparently, short.
Clay dandled his stronger hand in front of his chest. “No-no,” he clarified, “you play?”
“Instruments,” Roscoe tried.
“Cards, my darling.”
“Oh.” The child – J name, Clay would need to hear it a few more times before it could be swallowed – cupped his hands and touched his thumbs together, the poor form of shuffling. “Right. I play.”
“What’s your special?”
“Anything.”
“How did you learn?”
“Old people.”
Clay, delighted, clapped his stronger palm against his weak knuckles. “Marvelous,” he declared. “They’re the best teachers because they’ve played so long – and so sour about it! I bet you have superior attention span to other babies your age. I bet you could play me right now. Roscoe?”
The little foundling looked to Roscoe. Either through injury or through stupidity, his face didn’t appear to express much.
“Sure, you should go and play if you want to play,” Roscoe encouraged. “I got it covered here.”
Clay always made sure he had large pockets, and he always carried a pack on him if suspected a social situation. He steered the child through the crowd out front – everybody seemed to be looking their way with one big grin – directly to the tiny second room and gestured for the magazines to be cleared off one of the end tables. “And pull up that little chair for your young bones,” he bossed. “And I will sit on the couch, and then we will play Gin Rummy – consider this your audition.”
Two men sharing the same chair in the corner yelped together. “Don’t let Frank hear you saying that, Clay!”
“Leave Frank to me.” Clay dismissed them all and cut the deck one handed. He braced his other wrist as firmly as he could against the table, to use it as a base to shuffle against. At this point, those who didn’t know Clay generally said please, I can do that for you! But this one just stared at the feat.
“Now.” Clay settled in after he served out two shares of ten and established the discard. “You must remind me of your name again, and then you may draw first, seeing as you’re brand new.”
“Jules,” said Jules. He drew and then discarded an ace of hearts, which Clay’s brain filed away of its own accord, along with the name as well, if he was lucky.
Clay graciously helped himself through three rounds of passive, plodding gameplay on Jules’ part. He appeared to be thinking merely through muscle memory and allowed Clay to initiate the knocks. Several times he failed to spot where his deadwood coincided with Clay’s melds, requiring a sporting nudge of the shoe on Clay’s part, who briefly worried, after three Gins, that despite the automatic nature of his play, the boy was a little stupid after all. Then he looked round and noticed three other gentlemen had thronged alongside the two on the chair and were absorbing the proceedings quite immodestly – a relief, the only problem at present being the teenage disease of self-consciousness.
“For goodness sakes.” Clay snapped his fingers, a rudeness he did not like to resort to. “If you please?”
The attention dispersed and they continued.
“You can’t mind people when they don’t even know what we’re doing,” Clay suggested.
“I can do whatever I want,” Jules muttered, rude enough. Clay wondered if he was in pain. He was playing one-handed himself, insistently rubbing the unblotted side of his jaw, and he kept jerking his chin apropos to nothing. Whenever a partygoer wandered into the room all these tics would halt for a time, before forcibly sputtering through his body to reignite the cycle. The agitation made him more aggressive in play, and Clay gradually realized he had (pardon his French) a real bitch on his hands. Frank’s opinion be damned – he’d get along just fine.
Now he just needed an opening to extend the invitation, but Clay was not much of a talker in play, and Jules seemed to mirror him. Roscoe wandered in with two orange juice glasses, the dearheart, and being the sensitive kind, left without pestering – minus a small jab at Clay. “You’re not wearing your bracelet,” he scolded.
“It’s ugly,” Clay explained. “Now, you can see we’re busy.”
Roscoe put a brief hand to Jules’ shoulder, who only looked up when he departed. He peered with sudden plaintiveness past Clay’s shoulder, then downward, spotting a folded napkin Roscoe had placed beside his cards. His face absented itself again. Without an expression, the wounds on his face became ghastlier and stood out sharply, deeply nuzzled as they were in winter-sallow skin, teenage skin or no. It was difficult to tell if, after healing, he would be pretty or ugly.
“You came to us very suddenly, I hear,” Clay said.
“I don’t want to know what you heard.” Jules spoke decisively through pink teeth and put the napkin to the corner of his mouth because he was, Clay finally noticed, bleeding. Clay discarded this data as a distraction.
“You’re a lucky little boy,” Clay continued, as Jules’ eyes revolved nastily around the room. “Roscoe is a very nice person. I myself am part of a very exclusive club, that could benefit you socially.”
“Oh, thure.”
“Oh, yeth. Did your old people teach you how to play bridge?”
“Hell,” Jules said. “Since, like, ten? Whatever.” He sipped from the orange juice, pulled an awful, squint-eyed face, and shook his head very slowly. The rim of the glass came away red and slimy and he was reluctant to swallow. “My gran had her old ladies, and I had to round out the play. My boyfriend’s mom played too –” It took him forever, in this state, to spit out the words and without the scaffold of cardplay, Clay had to mentally sweat to grasp the information. “– But he didn’t like me to play with her.”
“Who?”
“My boyfriend didn’t like –”
“Oh, forget him.” Clay waved away all these superfluous people. “I won’t allow almost ten years of experience to be sneezed at.”
He laid out the parameters of the card club to Jules, who rested the unharmed side of his face against balled knuckles and appeared to doze right through it. “They won’t like it,” he murmured, after Clay outlined the sparkling personalities of Frank F., Bo G. (introduced) and numerous others. “They’ll say I’m too young. And I’m tired of old people.”
“But you’re used to them.” Clay, a smooth fifty-five, considered himself a world apart from Frank and Bo.
“I’m doing stuff for Roscoe. I need to find a real job, too.”
“We meet multiple times a week – we have many people to satisfy!”
Jules’ slit eyes popped wide. He gradually lifted himself from his worn slouch. Clay noted Phil’s dour presence piercing his shoulder, and a bowl of pretzels placed sacrilegiously over the discard pile. “Give it up,” Phil said, in his never-ending mildness – amused by everything, and happy about none of it. “Bo already knows what you’re up to with our battered bride. He told me Frank’s gonna rip you a new one after he tattles.”
“Frank can’t rip his own farts,” Clay said. “He suffered chilblains in his youth.”
“I’ll tell him that for you and save you the trouble.”
“A number of people would!” Quite a few in fact, following Phil’s scalpel-edged lead, had taken the second room for open and were dousing it in separate conversations. Jules sat far back in his seat as if to observe, but Phil was the only one he kept his healthy eye on.
“Who’s winning?” Phil directed the question to Clay but put a hand against Jules’ spine and squeezed snappily. Jules twisted away.
“I am,” Clay said, modestly as possible. “But I have many unfair advantages. I’m on the home team. And being as I’m vice-president of the club –”
Jules worked his jaw until it clicked. His hand jerked toward his chin, but he caught himself and fished for the pretzels instead, which he gnawed on uneasily. The color he’d possessed, unattractive as it had been, had drained from his face leaving him claylike and nervous.
 “–With all privileges,” Clay continued, “afforded to me thereof, regarding membership –”Â
Jules gagged – an abrupt and distinctly un-partylike sound that silenced the room in an instant – and as easily as if he were part of the organic conversation occurring between Clay and Phil, he sat forward and ejected a neat spout of blood from his mouth, dirtying the juice and the cards, and overtop all this he spat and scattered a single sharp dirty pearl of a tooth.
The blood put pause deep in Clay’s gut, but, he noted, the color returned rapidly to Jules’ face, a vast improvement too; his body must have been relieved to rid itself of the little nag. The boy automatically wiped his speckled chin, but he’d already put his fingers through the mess on the table. He couldn’t take his eyes off the tooth. Neither could Phil.
“I believe we need a napkin,” Clay said to the room at large – certainly everybody could look, but nobody would do! The problem of crowds. Phil stepped back. He smiled, for whatever mysterious reason people behaved untowardly in odd social situations.
Jules simply got up, his hand politely clasped over his gushing mouth, and calmly left the room as though he’d been called away.
“For goodness sakes.” Clay followed suit; He had the vague inclination he must find Roscoe, to play mother. He left the cards and dental trash for others to sort – people had a bad habit of tidying up after him.
Once, a stranger’s voice floated up behind, I knew a guy who told me it was better the less teeth they had –
“Shut up Louis,” Phil’s voice responded, uncommonly hard. “I’m tired of hearing about what you’ve been told.”
-
“He’s too young!” Frank F. barked.
“I’m young – almost the youngest one here.” Clay sipped his coffee, which he didn’t like, but drank during card meetings for conviviality. It was important to belong to the group. “And an injection of youth and energy could be what we, as a gathering, have been yearning for.”
Frank glared around the folding table, at anybody on the committee who had dared to yearn without disclosing the fact. “Well?” He demanded. “Who’s found our energy wanting?”
“We’ve been in odd numbers for two months,” Alan M. helpfully pointed out. “Bo doesn’t have a partner, since Gregory.”
“Gregory. Right there.” Frank pointed. “Started here in his sixties, unretired, and I had my doubts – too young!”
“For god’s sake Frank,” Clay said. “The man dropped dead.”
“He couldn’t handle the stress.”
“Cease with Gregory,” Alan (sixties) requested, rubbing his chest anxiously. “Gives me the creeps.”
“I’ve never set eyes on this fabled kid,” Frank said. “Just how young is he?”
Clay, who had pumped Roscoe for information, drew this one out, for his own pleasure. Everybody leaned forward.
“Oh,” he said, with delicacy. “Around, say, nineteen or so.”
Frank bashed the table with his fist. “There!” He roared. “Too young!”
“A very new nineteen, at that – at least Roscoe says so.”
Frank F., overwhelmed with passion, got up and left the room to do something loud and rackety in the kitchen. Clay sat back and basked while everybody fought it out, not worried a jot. Committee days were so stimulating.
“Young is one thing, Clay,” said Alan, conveniently as Frank returned to the table. “A teenager is a whole other thing.”
“Half a thing,” Frank declared.
“He’ll have to be working,” Bo G. said. "He'll be hopping jobs. No consistent schedule."
“He’s going to get his first fucking boyfriend,” Frank added, “and the second that happens – goodbye, card club!”
“Oh, he’s already had a boyfriend.” Clay had no idea how he knew this – maybe he was lying. “And he’s not bound to get another for a while – I saw him at Roscoe’s brunch, and he looks very ugly.”
Frank turned to Bo. “He’s ugly?” He demanded.
Bo G., perhaps taking his own pleasure, took a long time to put his coffee down. “I saw him at Roscoe’s too. He’s not ugly. Somebody just worked his face over damn good.”
Frank jabbed his finger at Clay. “He’s going to heal up,” he predicted. “And bam – a boyfriend!”
“Who worked him over?” Alan asked, alarmed. “Somebody here?”
The facts, from Roscoe, were few enough, but Clay had written them down to assist his memory. He took out his little spiral pad. “Not here,” he soothed. “He arrived – approximately a month ago – from Indiana – probably nineteen –”
“Probably?”
“The bad thing happened; no Alan, I don’t know who – and voila – arrives at Roscoe’s. Who is kind enough, mind you, to lend a helping hand to a helpless, ugly urchin.”
“If Roscoe had any damn brains,” Bo said, “he’d find some understanding lady or a dyke, so he could work out these fatherly instincts in a less disruptive way.”
“Dykes want to keep their own babies – they’re the ones looking at us gents.”
“That’s what Martin did,” Bo said, pulling the empty mugs together into a friendly group at the center of the table. “Got pinned by some girl, not long after Val died, remember. What, ’88? – he’d carry this stacked blonde girl in with him from New York, when he came to visit Roscoe and Phil. Knocked her up and had to follow her to San Francisco.”
“Who?” Clay asked politely.
“Nobody expects you to remember important things,” Frank snapped. Such a shot, in mixed company, would have inspired somebody to scold Frank, but in the confines of the card committee, Clay was left to fend for himself, which was bliss – for Clay, polite, socially able, a smart dresser, a knower of vocab and etiquette, and demon card shark, was also tough. Most people had forgotten.
“His grandmother taught him to play when he was ten,” Clay announced. “He’s been playing as part of a group for years. Among other games, if we’d like him for our mixed open house – I played a two-on-two with him at Roscoe’s brunch before disaster struck, and he’s perfectly teachable. The groundwork is all there.”
“Disaster?” Frank was no dummy, unfortunately.
“Oh.” Clay flapped his hand at the inconvenient details. “Nothing. He lost a tooth and was mortified.”
“He’s still losing his baby teeth. It’s going to look like an elementary school in here.”
He spoke like a man who’d already made his decision. Everybody hopped on the ball, but Frank held them in suspense. He gave the floor to Bo.
“Considering,” he said, “You’re the one short a partner. This is an egalitarian club.”
Clay, who’d known from the start he would win, let his attention drift. Bo G., maybe unaware yet of the victory, worked it out to himself. He turned to Clay. “He’s not a complete dumbass, is he?”
“Haven’t the slightest.”
“Oh, go to hell.” Bo stood up and gathered up the bouquet of mugs. “Let the kid in. Let’s see what happens.”
“What,” Alan suggested, “would Gregory say about being replaced by a nineteen-year-old?”
“The problem with death is that’s it’s boring,” Bo G. mumbled to himself, as he stumped toward the kitchen. “Jesus Frank, what did you do in here?”
“I love egalitarianism,” Clay chirped. “It always seems to mean I win.”
Frank F. rubbed his spotted temples. “Clay,” he requested, “just shut the hell up.”
-
Months along, Clay Carrell tripped down a burning sunny sidewalk on his way somewhere – to Roscoe, maybe – it was a beautiful day again and he needed no reason to be out and about, as an independent man.
He passed by a line of parking jobs and as curiosity merited, he peeped into the windows until coming upon a mouse-colored car that still contained its driver. Clay peeked closer and to his delight, recognized Jules, even though his face was turned away and resting on his folded arms against the steering wheel.
Clay rapped the window. Jules jumped and shouted, saw Clay, and slouched back against the seat. The window buzzed.
“Don’t scare me, oh my god.”
“You’re a silly child,” Clay pronounced. “Because there’s nothing to be frightened of. Where are you going?”
Jules glanced around him, as if surprised to find he was still in the car. “I don’t know,” he said. “Somewhere, I guess.”
“Well, you’re in luck. I don’t know where I’m going either.” Clay trotted around to the passenger seat and helped himself inside – the door was unlocked. “You should secure that if you’re just going to loiter,” Clay said. “Any stranger could help themselves inside and do away with you.”
“You just said there’s nothing to be scared of.”
“You should always obey your instincts,” Clay advised. He buckled his seatbelt. “One of the first things I was taught, on independent living, was to lock the door behind me. I put a sticky-note on the wall to remind me, for that very purpose. Naturally I don’t need that anymore. Now, let’s be off.”
“Where?”
Irritated by this passiveness, Clay swept his hand at the potted road. Endless possibilities! Jules turned the key, and off they popped. What a relief, Clay thought, to be moving somewhere faster than usual. He checked the sun, saw they were heading vaguely west, and that was enough for him, context-wise. He settled back to let the young people do the work.
Jules, for his part, looked mildly amused, his usual expression around Clay. Driving a car, he looked more relaxed than Clay had ever seen. His face, a few months down the line, had healed in fits and starts, and now struggled to throw off the scrubby laceration on one cheek, and a stubborn blackened crescent hung on the bone underneath the eye. To the disappointment of the committee, Jules was not ugly – when the swelling cooled off, he was a fine-faced youth with a hawk nose braced by huge, dark eyes that were at turns combative or entirely closed away. He had black, vainly tousled hair and what Alan called an intriguing mouth before Frank told him to shut the hell up.
To everybody’s relief, these physical positives were usually obliterated by Jules’ general sourness, a bad attitude that occasionally banana-rotted into downright childishness. This was not a problem in the club, where squabbling was half the reason for arriving. The first significant interaction he provoked with Bo G. was a fight about Bo bringing up, too much in their first partnered scrimmage, what Gregory would have done in that scenario.
“I’m just saying,” Bo had said, “that Greg wouldn’t have overpromised on that bid, especially if he was aware he was a stranger in a new situation –”
“Go dig him up,” Jules suggested, “and see what bid you’ll get out of him now, asshole.”
Clay, in the present, snooped through a collection of CD cases hidden in the door’s side pocket. “Oh my,” he said. “Throbbing Gristle. Sounds disgusting. What is it?”
“Put it in and see.”
Clay did; He sat for several minutes through a groaning, desexed voice with a foreign accent working out some struggling words overtop an auditory ambiance of what Clay thought resembled seasick trains.
“How interesting,” Clay said. “It makes me feel ill.”
“That’s what it’s supposed to do.”
“I suppose nowadays bands function in all sorts of interesting ways.”
“They’re not nowadays, they’re from the seventies.” Jules, ignorant in many ways, still felt perfectly free to get snippy and rude with Clay. “They did this song,” he explained, “they did this one song based on this letter this mail-artist did from back then, about working in a burn unit.”
Clay felt the need to check for the sun’s location. “Really now?” He said politely.
“Yeah, about this woman in there who was burned so badly she couldn’t sleep. From the waist up she was like, just meat. She had no ears or nose or eyes, it was that bad. But they had to keep her alive.”
“Ah,” Clay understood. “Like me.”
Jules shut up – a rare feat – and Clay stared out at rushing traffic, wondering where everybody needed to be in such a damn hurry. He was curious to see if Roscoe had attempted, in his appropriate way, to fill Jules in. Apparently not.
“Uh,” Jules said. He flicked his eyes from the road and flashed them, with obligatory understanding across Clay’s weak, folded arm. “Sorry?”
“I kind of just thought you were paralyzed for some reason,” Jules continued brashly, to Clay’s relief.
“I certainly am,” Clay confirmed. “Paralyzed. And disfigured! It’s very ugly.”
“Your hand looks regular, just kind of little.”
“I was involved, incidentally, within a grease fire. A freak accident. The muscles shrank. The rest of the arm isn’t regular,” Clay said. “Nor the shoulder it connects to, or part of my chest and stomach. I try to be sensitive to the – the sensitivities of onlookers.”
“Can I see?”
Clay pierced him with a pretty decent look. “Darling,” he said. “Use your brains.”
Stopped at a red light, Jules could turn his head and bare his teeth in the approximation of a happy grin. His teeth, bless him, were getting awful scarecrow on one side. “It looks bad, right?” Jules asked.
“I suppose some don’t care about ugliness.” Clay turned to the CD library in his lap. “Cannibal Corpse,” he observed. The cover was so lurid he had to flip it over. “Good lord. Were you raised in a whorehouse?”
“In a regular house,” Jules said. “So, worse.”
Because it made sense, Clay insisted they stop for lunch at his absolute favorite restaurant, Panera Bread. They were on an interstate at this point, and Jules had to flip around on the exits to get them there. “I don’t really have much money,” he said.
“What a coincidence, neither do I.”
They went halfsies on one meal. They both shared weak appetites and lanky, girlish figures.
“I want to ask you a question,” Jules said.
Clay assented; how novel.
“What do you think about Phil?”
Clay wondered if the privacy of the booth was affecting him. It had been so long since he’d been asked for his opinion, outside of the context of cardplay or his health, that he completely forgot the question. “Pardon?”
Jules repeated himself patiently.
“I suppose I’ve known him for years,” Clay said. “The same way I’ve known Roscoe for years. He’s not exactly a man you have opinions on – he doesn’t share himself well.”
Jules dissected his half of the sandwich. He didn’t appear put out by the lack of information.
“Why do you want to know, dear?”
“He talks to me sometimes.”
“Well, that’s only polite. He’s around.”
“He’ll go out of his way to talk to me,” Jules clarified. “Kind of in a different way than other guys. And I want to talk to him back, which doesn’t really happen with anyone else. Except Roscoe sometimes.”
“Then there you have it.”
“But it’s different than with Roscoe.”
“Why?”
This question was beyond Jules’ capabilities. “I don’t know,” he said, and looked straight at Clay, hiding nothing. For the first time since Roscoe’s brunch, Clay saw he really was nothing more than a helpless, untrained child. Others might have been alarmed at him playing chauffeur.
“And then,” Jules continued, “he’ll stop talking to me for a long time. I’ll try and he’ll ignore me. And I don’t get why it bothers me. I don’t know if I even like him.”
“I don’t think you could like him,” Clay said. “Not in any significant way. He’s vulpine – you’re equine.”
“I’m what?”
Clay trotted the salt and pepper shakers across the tabletop. “Have you never seen the Kentucky Derby?” He asked. “And observed all the pretty horses? How they stamp their feet beforehand and toss their beautiful manes, when after all, there can be only one winner, draped with roses? Not only have we trained them to want to compete, we’ve taught them the difference between winning and losing. They’ll suffer forever, knowing the reality of competition – and they want it, despite the cruel reality of only one getting ahead, all the others left behind. Equine. That’s you.”
“I’m born to suffer.” For someone with such an egregious taste in music, he seemed put out by the prospect.
“You’re an aggressive competitor,” Clay explained. He knew enough from the club. “You seek out games to win. Losing fuels your spirit even more than a win might. Phil avoids other people’s games – I can’t tell you how many invitations he’s received to the miscellaneous open-house – but he’ll slink behind other people’s finish lines all the same. Just to see how they act when he’s spotted. If he chooses to be. Vulpine.” Clay had looked this up in the dictionary – it was defined in one of his many spiral notebooks. “Foxy, darling. Of sneaky temperament.”
“I know what it means,” Jules whined. “I’m sneaky.”
“You are a mean little pony who spits out his sugar,” Clay said. “That does not a fox make, my dear.”
“You’re mean,” Jules sulked.
“It goes so often unobserved in me,” Clay agreed. “Because I’m most beloved and well taken care of. But that means I’ve been stuck in the stable for years – hellish.”
“You’re not in the stable,” Jules, ignorant, insisted. “You’re right here with me.”
“Wait and see,” Clay said. “Just wait.”
-
A problem of Clay’s existence was his inability to seek people out. Certainly, he could come across people in the bounds of everyday back-and-forth – he could spot someone at a gathering, or loiter, in acceptable places, where others were known to loiter. But if someone didn’t want to be found, Clay could not find them. He had limited addresses, phone numbers, emails. Computers frightened him. He had no end of ways to get ahold of Roscoe – they were all pasted up on Clay’s refrigerator, and an ugly collage they made, too.
Weeks, and months, slipped by, and Clay, even with the aid of his notes, lost why he’d been interested in speaking to Phil in the first place. The memo in his social calendar read 8/19/2006 – Jules in car at PB, talk of Phil – it signified nothing, except that Clay truly hated his handwriting. He was glad he hadn’t written more. He could have shown Jules and asked for clarification, but there were certain facts Jules didn’t need to be aware of yet. And Roscoe, if deputized, might tattletale and turn the boy against him, and just when he and Bo G. were starting to find a rapport not based on conflict.
Around Halloweentime, in fact, he overheard the most bizarre and intimate conversation between the two.
It had occurred during a rubber open play in Frank’s basement. Clay had no details, except that Jules had shown up for a couple weeks peaked and pale. His face, other than that, was of normal color, but forebodingly swollen around the nose and eyes. Clay thought he’d been coming down with something. Frank agreed and threatened to send him home – he’d been playing without ardor anyway. Jules hadn’t fought, for once – Bo G., of all people, ordered him to stay.
Clay had gone upstairs to freshen his seltzer. The screen to the patio was unguarded, and the kitchen was cool and buffeted. He saw Jules and Bo outside on the little concrete stamp, dashed overhead by a browning tree as they guarded their cigarettes from the wind. It was spooky – Clay hadn’t noticed them leaving the basement, and he briefly entertained the possibility of two copies of each body – one pair outside, one pair stashed underground.
He plastered himself against the wall, obeying the twitching muscle of an instinct he could no longer attach to a situation. He waited.
Jules spoke first. “I think Harper knows.”
“Did you tell him?” Bo G.
“No. I think he guessed.” The wind carried inside a crusty leaf and some mentholated air. “He says I should tell.”
Bo snorted, forcefully. “What does he know?”
“He says it’ll happen again if I don’t.”
“Maybe it will. You’ll never know. It’ll be to someone else.”
Jules had no answer to that.
“It’ll be someone else,” Bo said. “It’s done. You got it over with – think of it like that. You know what you need to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“You put it away,” Bo said. “You take it in your hands, and you put it away, and you shut the lid. You don’t look at it ever again. It only has to happen to you once. You did that part. That’s all you’re obligated to survive, that – the initial experience of it. Thinking it over – that’s the stuff that’ll kill you. You know what’ll happen if you think it over?”
Jules had yet to think of an answer.
“It’ll happen again,” Bo said. “To you. Again, and again. You’ll arrange the situations. You’ll put yourself in them, without knowing…”
Clay watched some crumbs of ash light across the kitchen, but by the time they reached the stove they’d cooled.
“Have you seen him again?” Bo demanded to know. He sounded angry, for reasons Clay could not possibly discern.
“I’ll always see him. I can’t not. He’s around.”
“For christ’s sake.”
“Do you know who I’m talking about?” Jules was beginning to sound shrill. “Do you know?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want to know. Don’t tell me.”
Sniffle, sniffle, clack. Somebody’s lighter flared up and died.
“I know this isn’t easy to hear.” It was odd to hear Bo G. attempt to behave gently. “Don’t think I don’t know. I understand.”
“Shut up. You don’t want to hear about me. I don’t want to hear about you. I don’t care what happened to you. Fuck what happened to you.”
“I know because I’m older than you –”
“You don’t know anything!” The sentence began loudly, and ended in a crazed whisper, as if Jules had realized too late they weren’t in total privacy. “You don’t know anything because you’re older! You’re all so fucking old and useless. I fucking hate all of you.”
“Jules –”
“You’re all so fucking old and stupid and miserable and alone and I hate all of you.” The hacked whisper began dissolving damply halfway through.
“Don’t start crying,” Bo ordered. “You can’t cry about this.”
“I can do whatever I want.”
Jules’ voice, crying, was about as ugly as his injured face had been, but Clay was already having trouble recalling it. Drawing – now there was a talent. Writing, frankly, sucked.
“You can’t do whatever you want.” Bo’s voice shifted, as he moved presumably closer to Jules. He sounded lost. He sounded like he was repeating some unlikeable stranger. “You have to be a man about this.”
“I’m not a man. That’s why it happened.”
“You are a man. You’re a man. If someone tries to push you around like that again, you have to stand up for yourself. You can’t wait until it’s too late – do you want to end up like Clay? Okay – Here – a little bit longer.”
Jules, crying, sounded like a little cat trying to throw up.
“Get it out,” Bo counseled. “Get it all out, then put it away. You don’t have to think about it again.”
“I made a mistake,” Jules sobbed. “It’s my fault.”
“It was an accident. Accidents happen.”
“I thought he liked me.”
“Accidents happen,” Bo repeated. He appeared stuck on it. “Accidents happen. They happen. You’re too young to know any better.”
“I thought he liked me.”
Clay took all this, and his empty glass, back down the stairs. He collided with Frank at the bottom.
“Don’t tell me he’s being sick up there,” Frank grouched.
“Nobody’s sick.” Clay pressed him back toward the tables. “He’s been a little stressed about work,” he explained. “Let Bo handle it.”
Lying was a treat he could rarely indulge in. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d done it. He could only guess if it had done any good – but that’s not where the pleasure was.
-
Christmastimes – happy times. And no snow yet! A shame. Clay wrote NO SNOW on his big calendar on the wall. He’d been getting hung up on details lately, when normally, he did not sweat the small stuff.
Wanting to be helpful in the spirit of the season (he made lovely cards, but true presents were rarely affordable) Clay found himself in the shop basement with Roscoe, sorting through the endless memorabilia through the years. Jules was present too, working, if lazily, at a little sloped desk with a harsh, bendable lamp clamped on one edge. He was doing strange things to two pieces of smelly rubber. A sharp alcohol stink pricked Clay’s head. He found himself getting snippy by turns, and, feeling bad, forced an abundant cheer. “You’ll be sorting this garbage forever,” he declared, cheerfully. “Val was collecting for years and years, all the surplus of his events.”
“Some tell me it’s history,” Roscoe said, looking up with interest for some reason. “But either way, it sure brings in the mice.”
“I saw one yesterday,” Jules called over the desk. “It ran right around the glue trap. You’re training them to be smart.”
“Do you know where the humane electric trap is? That looks like a little box?”
“I stomped it. The mouse. When you get smart, you get slow.”
“Marvelous. Spare me the details.”
“I heard it’s little bones break,” Jules chanted. “All the guts exploded out its mouth. It’s eyeballs –”
“You watch too much morbid stuff. You need to expand your horizons.”
“He’s a grim little boy,” Clay added. “He can be funny, though. Jules, what’s the funny word you showed me the other day?”
Jules started giggling and said noooo shut up! Clay, realizing he was being drawn into a contract, started giggling too. He looked toward the little desk to make sure he was matching the hilarity, but the desk light had swollen, swallowing all detail in Jules’ face to the point of bloodless beheading.
“Come on,” Roscoe said. “What was it?”
It came to Clay – painfully, with an equal throb in his good hand. He put down the little tin he was holding and had been struggling to open. “Faggotron,” he declared, with much purpose.
Jules snort-wheezed dismally. Whatever he was dipping his weeny paintbrush into smelled abominably.
“Jules, you know better,” Roscoe was scolding. “– get both of you in trouble –”
“Good god,” Clay exploded. “Whatever you’re working on, child, close it up – it stinks.”
“I have surgical masks. Gimme a sec –”
“Jules, now.” Roscoe said. “Clay, do you feel okay?”
“How could I not be well? Discussing mouse insides, among all this dust, and that piercing light –” Clay struggled to his knees.
“Clay, sit back down, alright?”
A ghastly sense of return, a return to a far worse time, froze Clay’s spine. The adrenaline forced words through his throat, more chemical than logical. “Where is Val?” he demanded. “Tell me this instant. Where did he go?”
“What’s happening?” Jules shrilled onward and upward in hideous alarm, but Clay’s visual perception shrank to exclude him. Roscoe vanished too, more purposeful in disintegration than he was in life. Clay heard a decisive voice call a strange spell – NO staywhereyouare – the always-herald of the big black brick whanged upside his head, a splitting log, the muting of the light he ached to perceive despite the pain, the smell of spitting, overflowing fat – though nobody ever believed him, when said that was what he always smelled. They didn’t believe him even when he wrote it down.
Time out of time out of time out time again and again. Alas. Clay snapped to on a squalid concrete floor. He turned his head and spied Roscoe, a couple feet away, his heavy thighs arranged in a runner’s lunge, consulting his watch. “You alright?” he asked, in utter calm.
From the bottom of his heart, Clay hated him – hated him with ease and abundance of an illogical baby. “Goddamn you to hell,” he said. “Did you put a finger on me?”
“You were going to hit your head on the floor,” Roscoe said. Clay hated him even more, knowing he was telling the perfect truth. “There was nothing soft to put in your way. I made sure you got down okay, then I let go.”
“You’re a beast for touching me,” Clay spit. “A beast. A wild animal. Fuck you.”
“I’m sorry,” Roscoe said simply. “Do you want to try sitting up?”
Clay’s good hand ached horribly. It would stress him for days, the idea of losing both hands. The anticipation was foul. Clay sat up. “How long?” he asked.
“About a minute. Fifty-eight and some milliseconds. I think that’s around the last one. We need to write it down in the little book.”
“You ruined my life.” Again, a cruel muscle flexed, one that understood something beyond Clay’s conscious understanding. “You ruined my life.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I was beautiful, and you destroyed me. You’re an animal.”
“I’m sorry.” Roscoe would take everything he did not deserve, and it only made Clay hate him more.
Beast himself, Clay looked around his enclosure. “Somebody else was here,” he said.
“Jules was here.”
“Where is he?”
“I made him go upstairs. He couldn’t deal with it.”
“He’s a tiny stupid coward.” There was nothing and nobody Clay wouldn’t smash to bits right now. “Childish bitch. What does he have to be afraid of?”
“You’re his friend and he was scared. I don’t think he’s seen something like that before.” Roscoe made his attention scarce, and Clay recognized, for dignity’s sake, he was supposed to check to see if he’d soiled himself. Came up negative. He recalled visiting the bathroom all day outside of all logic, with mounting anxiety. He was sure that was written down somewhere too – useless.
“And if you ever wore your goddamn bracelet,” Roscoe accused, “he might have had some idea of what to expect. Don’t go calling him a bitch or a coward. He’s just a kid.”
The only time Roscoe ever got irritated and demanding of Clay was immediately after witnessing one of the seizures. If Clay did not irrevocably and acutely despise any poor soul who became the main witness of one of his seizures, this propensity would have made him feel more tender toward the man. And now that Jules had seen one, his own time was coming.
“How long has Val been dead?” Clay asked.
“Twenty years. A long time.”
“I know his name. I can’t remember anything of his face.”
“You knew him before I ever showed up. I’ve known him dead longer than I knew him alive – I can’t picture his face either. Not without help.”
“How miserable it must be – that I’m one of the pieces of trash you’ve inherited from him.”
“You’re my friend.”
“Oh no. We’ll be friends again in a few days when I’ve forgotten all this. You’re counting down the seconds, as it gets foggier to me.” Clay raked his nails over his temples. He felt a dent and a curious, inorganic hardness deforming his fine skull. His hair was thinning. Fifty-five. How long since thirty-five? Going to sleep and waking old. “Being robbed of that – that I can’t even be angry at you, at anyone, all the time!”
Roscoe sat through all of this with his forehead balanced on his fingers, as if he were too tired to care. As if he’d heard this a dozen times before, this important speech of Clay’s. “What do you want to tell Jules?” he said.
“I told him about the burns,” Clay said. “And now he knows about this disgrace. And that’s as far as it should go, frankly.”
“If he doesn’t hear it from you, or from someone who cares about you, he’s going to get the details in a bad way.”
“Why shouldn’t he – as nasty gossip? That’s all it happened for – for nasty gossip.”
“You wrote it down once in your own words, remember? When you had that good health aide years ago; she helped you with the police report and court documents and – and the X-rays and things. Show him that – it’s in one of your binders.”
Clay had been told about this magic essay many times. Roscoe attached most importance to it, as an independent effort of self-authority. Clay, to his recollection (which was often wrong) had never shown it to anyone but himself, again and again. He would bring it out before bed, the time of day when he felt at his worst, and parse the stubby, emotionless sentences written by some imbecile who deserved whatever he got.
“He needs to know how these things happen.” Roscoe going on, and on, and on. “If we hide this stuff, it’s just going to repeat itself.”
“You’re far too late,” Clay said. “He’s already some slut.”
Roscoe got up and walked toward Jules’ little desk. He turned off the little light. When he was truly inspired to high anger, he always walked away. Not like a man at all, Clay thought. He couldn’t think of a worse person to teach Jules how to stand up for himself. If the child was lucky, he’d lose the next teeth on the other side of his face – invite some symmetry.
“Have Bo G. tell him,” Clay said, surprising himself.
Roscoe was surprised too. “Why Bo?”
“He was around during that time. He knows what to say. They’re partners, after all. Tell Bo I said so. I won’t ask myself. I won’t take responsibility –” Clay used a filing cabinet to help gather his feet underneath him. “Nobody allows me to take responsibility. So I won’t. Make Bo tell him. And just watch. He’ll treat me differently. He’ll treat me like all of you treat me.”
“I’ll tell Bo.”
“I want to go home now. You take me home. And I don’t want to be bothered tomorrow.”
He would have liked to say I hate you again. Such a vibrant phrase; but already, the stimulating anger was giving way to a constricting drowsiness. Roscoe, like he hadn’t heard Clay insult him and close friends, like he hadn’t said awful swear words he would never repeat in company, came over and helped him pick his way out of the historical mess he’d fallen within.
-
Time and time again – everybody became another year older. Clay got older. Roscoe got older. He helped Clay find a big new calendar for the wall. Jules, a new nineteen, presumably became a new twenty at some point. After a time, a more experienced twenty. It hardly made a difference to his maturity. He partnered so often with Bo he became a solid figure in Clay’s mental foreground – and for all Clay knew, he’d been there as long as Roscoe and Phil and the rest.
Another seizure, in writing, if not in memory. Clay saw it on the calendar. This time overseen by Alan M., in Frank’s kitchen, after the house had emptied from a post-tournament cocktail hour. Small mercy.
Exciting pastimes: Jules and Clay, driven to madness after begging a pack of Rider-Waite cards from an occultist friend of Roscoe’s longhaired shop cashier, tried their hand adapting it to the French Tarot and to introduce this to the club at large; rejected by Frank, Clay suggested a portes ouvertes of antique French parlor games which, using more conventional decks, Frank could hardly decline. Jules, though not part of the upper committee, had established himself socially as Clay’s deputy, and he was an efficient bully.
At one of these novel events, a blistering cold March afternoon, Clay was reminded of yet another novelty – the arrival of someone new. Which, as it turned out, was someone old. Roscoe said Clay had known Martin since the eighties. He was back from sunny California, for reasons Clay might have learned before he forgot.
He showed up among the basement folding tables that day, unfashionably early to take Frank to some expo or whatnot in the suburbs. A clumsy faux pas, Clay commented, as he oversaw a trial Piquet scrimmage between Jules and Bo G.
“I know what he’s here for,” Bo commented archly.
“Shut up,” Jules said.
Martin worked through the tables. Gregarious as he was, he always seemed to stop short, childishly bashful before Clay, unsure as to the amount of kid glove required in the interaction. Clay had piled up enough consistent interactions with the man to form this sustaining judgment.
“You are so very kind to safely usher our favorite senile gentleman,” Clay said, after the initial awkward greeting took place. “Not many would be so generous.”
“Let him crash,” Bo said. “Put him out of his misery. Then I’ll be president.”
“As vice-president,” Clay corrected, “I will be president.”
“I’m going to put rat poison in one of Alan’s gross fucking brandy alexanders,” Jules joined in. “And then I’ll be treasurer.”
“Is it safe for me to be overhearing this?” Martin asked, directing the question to Jules.
“Stick around and find out,” Jules grumbled.
“As a club representative, you must be more polite,” Clay scolded. “You’re a young man now. And Martin is an old friend.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” Martin said. He put his hand gently on the table. “Am I old enough to learn what the hell this game is?”
“Show him, Jules. Start a new game.”
“He doesn’t have to do a damn thing,” Bo said, abruptly. “Shut up, Clay.”
Jules, ignoring them both and shutting down any expression in his eyes, steered Martin to an empty table and forced him down into a chair. Clay snooped enough to spy Jules, in a nasty masterstroke, laying out a hand of Solitaire. Martin was too good-natured to pick up on the slight. He sat attentively under Jules’ pointed posture and followed his jabbing fingers, a docile lamb.
“He’s too old for him,” Bo G. declared. He smothered the gameplay and restacked the cards.
Clay sat down. “We’re all too old,” he said. “Isn’t it a tragedy?”
The Stock, Jules’ instructions floated over his head. The Waste. The Foundations. The Tableau. Undisciplined Martin gazed not at the cards, but at the face that made the words. He’d have to smarten up, Clay thought, if wanted to survive Jules’ bossing. After that he looked away. The sight made him melancholy.
-
Departing the remnants of the occasion that evening, he left Frank’s at sundown for the first time all day and was struck dumb by the stifling blanket of snow that had fallen. Clay’s mind, geared toward spring and daffodils and birds’ eggs and shining sun, whirlpooled a split moment into terror. Then he caught himself. How nice – a final, light-bright hug from jack frost.
Despite this pep talk, he had trouble moving. He tingled all over, his body recalling other falls in that cold cushion.
“Clay?”
“Oh gracious.” He turned around toward the porch. “Now, would you look at this landscape? And what on earth were you doing in there, without my noticing?”
Phil descended the steps easily. He stepped inside Clay’s tentative footprints. “Miscommunication,” he explained. “I thought Martin was going to be here, but he got shanghaied by Frank.”
“Appreciated, too.”
“Salvatore caught me and gabbed my ear off about a damn hour.” Phil reached out and took Clay’s elbow and started leading him down the unshoveled walkway. “Let me drive you home. You don’t get around so great in this stuff.”
“You’re a doll.”
Clay enjoyed riding in cars. It was something he wanted to do more. It was cozy inside Phil’s, with the big soft flakes suspended in the air as the spaces between all foundations darkened to black.
“Martin is not comfortable around me,” Clay said.
“Nobody’s really comfortable with you,” Phil explained. “You’re not a person to anybody. You remind people.”
Clay was fond of bluntness, even when he couldn’t understand what lay behind its’ motivation. “Of what?”
“That we can’t trust anybody – not even the people we’re closest to - who we see every day.” The tires zizzled pleasantly through a wet right turn. “Martin is just embarrassed. Since fatherhood made him mature, he’d prefer to think he was always that way. But he knows we all remember what he did to Drake.”
“Who, now?” Clay asked.
“Drake. He started sniffing around the neighborhood for you, after your group home closed. Years and years ago."
“Hmmm?”
Traffic piled up against a red light and Phil could turn to look at Clay. “You know something interesting I wonder about sometimes?”
“What could it be, darling?”
“If you remember more than you let on,” Phil revealed. He said this with no urgency or true amusement. Phil always spoke as if held no worries and felt no significance. He was most relaxed. Here was a man you could have a seizure around. “If you remember everything, and you’ve just been having fun with us this whole time.”
“What an idea!” Clay had to laugh. “And a tempting one. You want to know what I remember, dear?”
“Tell me.”
“Nothing. Not a speck. Zot. If only I could have fun with you all.” The cars inched forward. “I’d like to thank you, you know.”
“For what?”
“I have a feeling,” Clay said, “that you’ve always been very frank with me. And frankness is something I appreciate. You know who you remind me of? You remind me of Jules.”
Phil, driving comfortably with one hand on the wheel, pushed his head gently against the driver’s seat. He started to smile, close-lipped.
“Jules once asked me if my arm was never going to work normally, or look normally, then why didn’t the doctors simply amputate? Can you imagine anyone else having the nerve? But I appreciated being asked, all the same.” The question had pleased Clay so much, he’d made Jules write it down himself in the little notebook.
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him I was hardly in a state to be consulted.”
“You know how to get Jules to shut up?” Phil said in turn. “You get him on his stomach, and you grind his face into the floor.”
Clay cackled at such an absurd image. “Now stop,” he said. “That’s quite mean!”
“You get your knee pressed in real low on his spine,” Phil continued quietly, “and you shove his face in, and you twist. You don’t stop until his nose starts bleeding. After that he quiets down and gets to liking it."
“That’s quite enough,” Clay insisted, patting his own mouth to discourage his giggles. “Don’t tease him when he’s not here to defend himself.”
Phil steered down the narrow enclave of a one-way street. They were entirely in the dark now, purged in fountains of orange light. Clay squeezed Phil’s wrist. “Stop!” he asked. “Just stop. Stop a moment.”
Phil braked. Eventually, he shifted to park. They watched the unseasonal snow drowse in the air, suspended in swags of streetlight. Clay could not see the end of the road. Nobody was out and about. A pleasant enclosure calmed his heart.
“Now just look at that,” he said, still holding Phil’s wrist. “Why must artists always act like they’re so miserable? If I could paint this picture, I would never be sad again.”
“Yeah,” Phil agreed, dreamily. “I see what you mean.”
He was watching the snow – Clay checked to confirm, and it made him glad. Watching together, faces trained out within a safe shelter like clever woodland creatures, Clay could believe he had somebody by his side who understood him by instinct, if not through conscious effort. He could communicate, through the act of sitting together, all the secrets his brain and body held away from his knowledge. It was the darkness that reminded him – not doing for oneself, not eating for oneself, nor speaking nor toileting for oneself, in a mass of years so long he could no longer comprehend; and lighted hour upon lighted hour, lying there and anticipating the moment of terror – terror he had yanked pleasure from, after many years of practice – when the light would go out.
Clay sat there and he wished to make this known – in goodwill, in peace, in love, surrounded, with no respite, by his beloved friends.
Analyzing the situation from all angles, Roscoe, the fair arbitrator, the sole solid voice of reason for everybody in the neighborhood but himself, was left with the insufficient and constant truth that there was nobody in the vicinity to blame. With nobody to blame he had nobody to advise, and with nobody to make fun of his advice, all his shortcomings formed a cyclone of immaturity within his breast.
He made a split decision – he could make decisions; he was an adult – and phoned up the one person who could not be more physically separated from the problem if he tried. Heedless of what time it was in San Francisco, Roscoe phoned, and by the time the ringing cleared he had nearly convinced himself that he had found the right person to blame after all.
“There’s a problem,” he stated clearly, before any how-do-you-dos could pass. “And I’m blaming you for all of it!”
“You got it, sport,” Martin replied, those 2,000 miles of distance, in Roscoe’s opinion, unduly bolstering his confidence. “Tell papa all about it.”
-
“Solids,” Roscoe asked the room, “or stripes?”
“Ugh,” said Harper, “shirts with collars.”
Roscoe rotated the selection a minute degree to the stool on Harper’s left.
Jules didn’t even pick up his chin. “Boy clothes are boring,” he declared.
Roscoe twirled a 160 to the only customer in the shop. “Jackie? Stripes? Colors? For goodness sakes.” Jackie, a good two-fifty in his socks, was sumptuously unearthing himself from his own tank top. “We have a dressing room for a reason.” The dressing room was a shower rod and sheet stabilized with clothes pins, but it certainly existed.
“Jack,” Harper advised, “The three-strikes consequence is not so interesting that you have to keep testing me so.” Harper, in his own words, preferred to keep the chest hair out of the register.
“Yeah,” Jules said, “plus there’s a lady present.”
“A confident man prefers a visual opinion.” Jackie threw a wink at Jules. To Roscoe he threw: “A Saturday night event, and you need to wear a shirt? That’s barbaric.” He thumped away toward the shower curtain, swinging his rag.
“Sure, I’ll just go out the way I am now.” Roscoe gestured at his undershirt and his not-even-nice jeans. “I’ll go out to my meeting like a slob. Or nude. Apparently, this is all I need to strive for!”
“Wear the solid, Roscoe,” Harper said. “Don’t have a heart attack. I couldn’t possibly stand more excitement.”
Jules and Harper possessed similar levels of social astuteness (inconveniently high) but Jules’ sadistic appetite for discomfort presented the skill with far more aggression than phlegmatic Harper ever mustered the motivation for. He twitched upright, terribly alert. “A meeting on Saturday night?” He posed.
“Yes,” Roscoe answered mildly, stepping into Jackie’s vacated mirror. He’d known Jules four long years and knew enough to work him, a little. “The communications head for that men’s health initiative that sponsored the safer sex seminar we played host for. Remember, Pride? You helped set up the folding tables.”
“Oh.” Jules, turned off instantly at the whiff of an informational brochure or pamphlet, sat back in his stool. “That’s boring. I feel bad for you.”
“Kid, your compassion is an inspiration.”
Harper picked up what Jules had childishly put down. “You’re extremely stressed,” he observed, “about your choice of shirt for a mere meeting.”
“You only have one chance to make a first impression,” Roscoe replied. He liked the stripes.
“But you met this guy before,” Jules said. “You literally just said.”
“One of those professional, no-nonsense Saturday night corporate one-on-one meetings,” Harper continued. “Perks of the white collar.”
“Business in that world doesn’t work the same as business here!” Roscoe fended and fought and failed to keep Jules and Harper from listing toward each other in the malevolent mind-meld they could occasionally broker when their victims’ irritation superseded whatever pet animosity they held toward one another. Jules provided the energy, and Harper contributed the bulk of the riposte. “You know. The department heads are interested in utilizing our space again, but nothing is approved until a million emails have been sent – emails on a corporate server – and until the right person signs the right release, you can hardly get the ok to speak to a man.” He rattled the hangers. Now he hated both shirts. “And anyway,” he continued, “I’m lucky he’s even decided to broach the topic with me on his own time, so I’ll have all my cards on the table before the holidays. It’s really inconvenient for both of us. And it’s a matter of public health.”
“Come on me, not in me,” Jules recited. “That’s one, right? An old one? From black-and-white times?”
“You’ve known of this man since June,” Harper laid out, “so exactly how many dates have you been on?”
“It’s not a date,” Roscoe said, mainly to himself, to keep calm. “It’s an informal meeting.”
“Speaking of informal –” Jackie briskly swept the shower curtain aside and presented his torso to the room. It was encased in a series of canvas straps. The man possessed the most prehensile chest hair Roscoe had ever seen. “Little man,” (this was Jules) “my buddy, if my goal were to seduce a very cutie-pie cashier, say, seduce him outright and carry him to my home to have my will in all ways, would this design be the one that allows said cashier to be seduced? And if not, what improvements could be made?”
“You’d have to pinky-swear you’d eat him up all in one bite,” Jules suggested, “so he wouldn’t have time to get scared.”
Harper, stiff in the wrists and face red, retrieved his Tristram Shandy from beneath the counter and began to ignore everybody.
“Jackie,” Roscoe said, “Stripes? I like stripes.”
Jackie shook his big mug slowly. “Solids,” he said.
Roscoe gave it up and started for his office again. In the jumbled space, it was slow going. Jules called: “Solid. Solid color.” He sounded abruptly calm and steady.
“The striped is a little more…” Roscoe shook the hanger again and stared hard at the shirt, realizing once more that he could barely hold an opinion on it. He may as well argue, he had a couple hours. “Jovial? Fun?”
“That’s what we call you behind your back,” Harper said behind his pages. “Fun Roscoe.”
Jules, instead of taking the path of least resistance, slithered bodily over the countertop and came for Roscoe that way. “No, no,” he said, as if he’d devoted a miniscule percentage of time in his hindbrain to figure out the issue while he and everybody else had fun with their torment. “Listen, so you two are doing this stupid extended-coy thing. Informal corporate meeting, sure. Buy into it. That’s what this guy will expect. Who looks jovial at a meeting? Play the game.”
“Play the game,” Roscoe said to himself as Jules freed him from the hangers. He wondered how long Jules would be able to say that so casually before the rules and the years made things stale.
“That’s how adults think they have to play,” Jules said, so fiercely it was as if he’d overheard the passing thought. “Don’t blame me if you’re too scared to do something different. This one needs pressed.” And he shoved his way down the narrow hall and disappeared behind the basement door. He slammed it shut.
“He reminds me of this houseboy I had a share in, back in the eighties,” Jackie mused. He’d pulled on his tank top but he was a man who remained spiritually naked, no matter the coverage. “Only this one didn’t have the attitude. And we weren’t having him do the ironing.” He lounged now against the glass countertop and spoke past Harper, though ostensibly to him, as was his respectful habit with cute young men who evaded his understanding.
“I cannot possibly,” Harper repeated, in arctic timbre, “bear any more excitement.”
-
Roscoe had come around to the fact that he was not particularly respected. That he was appreciated – a walking, talking, emotional necessity – had only to do with the physical existence of his environment – the bar and the leather shop – and the fact that he’d taken it all over after Val died. This one responsibility assumed in 1989 had earned him an immovable seat in the scene, but he’d been frozen in community judgment at 22 – an anxious, retiring, conflict-averse functional alcoholic. At his glummest moments he wondered if Val had left things to him less out of any belief in his business prowess, and more out of the practical sense that out of all the surrounding men, Roscoe would always have the least going on socially.
You could have respect, Roscoe thought while he buttoned his solid-color shirt behind his narrow office door, or be appreciated, or be beloved. Most men only had one. A few could muster two. Val had been the only one he’d known who’d netted all three.
“And you’re fucking dead,” he said aloud, and tried to nab his reflection in the black computer screen. These were not the thoughts to rev yourself up before a date. He sought back in time, not to Val, but far more recently when he’d been down in the basement pawing through historical paperwork while Jules hunched, absorbed, over some strap or belt or harness in his little workshop. They’d passed several minutes in total silence until Jules, out of nowhere, spoke aloud with so much poison Roscoe whirled around, exceedingly hurt. Jules remained completely bent, eyes on his work surface. He was shaking with passion and so keyed up over some frustrating detail his face had reddened and his eyes watered. He wore headphones. Not only had he been speaking to himself, but he wasn’t aware Roscoe had come downstairs.
He said to himself now what Jules had said down there. “Don’t,” he muttered, hand on the door, “Don’t be a fucking loser.”
He had met Bobby at the safer sex seminar; he’d told the truth. At the end, when the bar had cleared out, he’d walked past a trim man around his own height, with a lot of loose brown hair. He wore a green linen shirt that appeared out of place in the grubby surroundings yet managed to look rather graceful and cool. The man had reached out and touched Roscoe’s arm. “They told me when they hired me that parties were one of the job perks,” he said confidentially, as though he and Roscoe were well known to each other, “but they didn’t mention I’d have to organize them all.”
Roscoe, idiot, had blurted out “Oh!” And then, recited Bobby’s email address, which was how they knew each other. Bobby had laughed and compelled him to sit down. For months Roscoe had been sneaking out the shop’s back door to meet him for coffee, brief pleasant chats that thrilled him, though he wondered what someone that corporate-cute got out of it. Roscoe was not corporate – he was not even particularly leather. He was what a lot of the gay men around were – a forty-two-year-old guy.
Bobby had been the one to suggest a dinner, albeit with coy hedging, but Roscoe had suggested he meet him at the shop “to meet the crew” as his own gesture of good faith. After the shirt debacle he doubted the wisdom of this, but he left his office bravely and made his way to the front. Jules and Harper remained in position – Jackie, to his disloyal relief, had lumbered away.
“Alright, I’m out,” he tried to declare, boss-like. “Please, no calls. Unless there’s a deadly emergency, in which case, please call me.”
“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” Harper said.
“Yeah,” Jules said. “Whatever you do, don’t go out with this guy and finish your dissertation.”
Harper kicked out against Jules’ stool and upended him. At that moment the bell over the door jingled and Roscoe, distracted from the fracas, whipped around for what felt like the dozenth time that evening. “Hi!”
“Hi!” The nice thing about Bobby was that he naturally matched the energy of whatever greeting Roscoe gave. He looked pleasantly flustered coming out of the coolish autumn evening and fresh air blew in behind him. “Now I suddenly forget your name,” he directed to Harper, who was busy shoving Jules’ yapping head below the counter. “But I know it starts with an H.”
“Hello,” Harper said.
“Hello!” Bobby repeated, delightfully awkward.
Jules, behind Roscoe’s back must have resurfaced, for he gasped so significantly he gagged on air. He said, overloud: “Oh no!”
Roscoe wanted to ignore it; he could have ignored it, if he hadn’t seen the pleasure, all at once, drain from Bobby’s expression. He turned and saw Jules, wide-eyed with a transient horror that struggled not to jitter toward amusement, as if he had just become aware he’d laughed at a joke full of slurs. “Oh no,” he said again, and clapped a hand over his mouth. Jules was not someone who voluntarily shut himself up.
Roscoe looked back to Bobby, whose face was overcome with irritation; it de-aged him considerably. He folded his arms and drew himself up into a neat little package. His jaw set harder than Roscoe had ever seen it; He had the feeling this is what Bobby looked like in meetings.
A cold wind sucked through Roscoe’s bowels. “You two already know each other,” he predicted, and lapsed into a little horror himself, at the obvious innuendo.
“Not like that!” Jules said through his fingers.
“A little like that,” Bobby said coolly. “Only the matter of how and with who are not as clear. The shock on your face! I would think,” he continued, with nastiness Roscoe hadn’t thought him capable of, “you’d be used to this kind of thing happening to you!”
To Roscoe: “Should we go along now? I think we should.” His painful smile brought Roscoe gallantly out of his stupor. “Yes, yeah,” he agreed. “We’ll talk about it later.”
He ushered him gently out the door; the idyllic bells jingled; the smell of dying leaves and of balcony gas fires cleared their heads; and behind them among the brightly lit hedonism, Harper, triumphant enough to be heard through glass, intoned, “have any other smartass thoughts about my fucking dissertation now, you nasty little slut?”
-
In months past, Bobby had always been collected and softly confident in himself. Any faux pas or nervousness on Roscoe’s part had been gently absorbed and accepted by his mere mildness. Now, Roscoe found himself squiring a virtual teenager to dinner. They sat out on the restaurant’s patio, but Bobby cast his head around rapidly at any loud, passing group. His left hand unconsciously picked at its own cuticles. He carried on a staggered and desperate conversation with Roscoe about something funny that had occurred at work until Roscoe, ashamed he’d let this go on so long, found the little bit of steel he kept inside himself for these moments. He reached out and touched Bobby’s stiff hand, clenched through the gaps in the garden table. “Listen,” he began, but Bobby crumbled instantly.
“Oh my god,” he moaned. “I’m acting like a moron. I know.”
“No,” Roscoe insisted. He had enough experience to know the less he spoke, the more Bobby would blurt out. This was the function of Roscoe in any scene. He knew so many sordid secrets he was surprised no uptight bar queen had had him assassinated yet.
“I didn’t sleep with that brat,” Bobby explained. “Let me emphasize that.”
“I believe you,” he said, brat tweaking him inside, even as Bobby’s hand relaxed in minute segments.
“About a year ago,” Bobby continued, his eyes fixed on his and Roscoe’s stacked fingers. “I was in a relationship, an open relationship, so to speak. And it was open because, well, the man – Neil – he lived with me at that point – well, he was an animal.”
“Right.”
“I mean,” Bobby’s eyes widened, and he traveled off into some kind of fugue. “He possessed absolute filth. He was such a stud. He carried me off. I was astonished he was interested in me at all. I was literally possessed. He pushed you back into a wall and you just blacked out. My friends were mortified. I worshipped him, in private, though I could be such a catty bitch about his adventures; adventures where I was not included. But he could be, you know, very kind about it. He’d touch your face and ask why you were so worried. He kissed in public and held your hand. He wasn’t a malevolent person.” This came out in one long, humiliated gust. “He was sweet and relaxed, even when I was furious with him. Before that, I attracted boring men – you know, administrative people – and boring wouldn’t be so bad, but boring doesn’t mean nice and gentle. There’s nothing worse,” he said with some savageness, “than a boring, corporate, unkind man. And I dated stacks and stacks of them. Then Neil.”
“Neil.”
“Right.” Bobby held Roscoe’s hand proper, now. “Now, the rule was that he had to let me know if he was embarking on some conquest, and he wasn’t allowed to bring anybody back to my apartment. He was always bad about the letting me know part before the fact. It was always a “by the way honey” after the fact. And I put up with it, and I put up with it, then one night I came home unexpectedly after a work retreat was cancelled, and there’s Neil standing up in the kitchen, just roped with sweat, extremely post-post, just a towel over his shoulders. He said casual as you please, hi babe! Then guess who strides out of my bedroom.”
“Oh dear.”
“Not a stitch on his body,” Bobby gilded the image nicely. “He sees us both; He read the situation instantly, I give him that – He says, oh no! Just exactly how he said it back there.” Softer, and more dangerous, “with that stupid look on his face, like he was trying not to laugh at me.”
Jules, Jules, Roscoe chided in his brain. It was an automatic reflex, with the real culprit vanishing, as they always could, into the sexual ether of the past.
“It was one thing when he was going behind me to nail people his own way, his own age, his own level,” Bobby continued. “But seeing his aftermath with what looked like some teenager – these hot new young things coming up behind us, not a care in the world – that was the last straw. I’d gotten used to humiliation, but this was the kind that makes you see yourself. And I saw myself – this pent-up, boring, unkind, thirty-five-year-old admin sissy, obsessed with the sexual propriety of some goddamn hustler. I was better off sticking with my own kind.”
They ordered; they lapsed with the words for a while.
“It’s so stupid,” Bobby said quietly at one point, “To be heartbroken over what amounted to dumb sex games. You get older and older, but you can never get older than that.”
Roscoe had used this time to consider his next move. “Listen,” he said, drifting forward in his seat. “How much money would someone have to pay you to go back to being in your early twenties?”
Bobby released something; He laughed out loud, enough that he closed his eyes. “Oh god!” He cried out. “Awful! Awful!”
Roscoe shook his head. “Not even millions,” he said. “Not even.” He was pleased to find he agreed with what he was saying: not for a million bucks, not in a million years. “I think he’s a good kid,” he ventured, bolder. “Down in it, he’s a good kid. He’s running a little wild now. Most of them are. But, Bobby,” he said, more insistently, “There’s nothing to be jealous of there.”
“Skinny,” Bobby offered. “Youthful energy. Plastic brain. Full head of hair, no greys.”
“Puppy dogs online have more money than he does,” Roscoe said bluntly, walking the tripwire; he had two people to try not to betray. “He lives in an illegal basement. He works at Domino’s. He can’t get along with people his own age.”
“Demonic sex powers.”
“He’s treasurer for the neighborhood gay bridge club,” Roscoe countered. This did the trick; Bobby cackled briefly, then stifled himself out of kindness.
“Alright fine,” he agreed. “Fine, you’re right. I’m better than all that now. I should be glad about it.”
“You shouldn’t regret that you were brave enough to have your heart broken,” Roscoe said. “The only man I ever let break my heart was my father.”
Bobby had softened now to pre-Jules levels. “If I have a glass of wine with dinner,” he asked, “will we still be able to kiss goodnight?”
“Oh sure.” He mustered all his power to appear nonchalant about such a thing happening. “I’m not someone who’s particular.” Which was, miraculously, the first lie he’d told all evening.
-
He’d returned to the shop at the end of the night alone, meaning to placate Jules, but he only found Harper, who smirked to himself while he balanced the cash register. He was lighthearted for once and greeted him cheerfully, so Roscoe could guess he’d battered the complementary tale out of Jules, who’d been slick enough to slip away into the night. “Well, it’s not a big deal,” he said firmly as Harper’s smirk evolved into a one-sided grin. “Bobby and I talked, and he understands. It’s nobody’s fault, it's just an awkward situation.” He was still a little dizzy from the kissing and didn’t have the energy to scold Harper, who appeared truly gleeful with misfortune.
“Oh certainly,” Harper said. “Merely an awkward situation.”
Roscoe shot him a warning look with zero heat behind it. “Let the heterosexuals wreck their own lives about insignificant crap like this,” he lectured. “I should hope we are a little more sexually evolved than that.”
“And if you want to keep working here,” Roscoe shot back, “may I suggest you quit talking like you aren’t one?” This was about as rough as he could get with Harper, who primly returned to his steno pad.
But he overestimated Jules’ resilience – he stayed away from the shop for three days straight. It was his habit to lurk in the basement and putter regardless of if he had a piece on order and Roscoe was truly stumped. He was under the impression Martin had scrubbed most of the shame out of the kid. He settled on the idea that Jules was sulking over his privacy being pierced and, feeling sneaky, he made another date with Bobby on the fourth evening, when Jules was set to cover for Harper behind the register.
At the appointed hour, Jules sailed through the back door with his eyes half-shut and his face arranged into a careful, bland portrait. To Roscoe he said “Hey,” as if he’d been in the basement all week.
“Been busy?” He truly didn’t know – he had made it a rule not to pester Jules by phone.
“Sure.”
Jules kept one eye on Harper, who was grinning again as he stuffed graded papers into his satchel. He kept quiet until he could no longer resist. “There’s plenty of time,” said Jules’ older and blonder mirror-self, “to hide downstairs, baby child.”
Jules turned on Roscoe, betrayed. “You did not.”
“There’s nothing to do.” Roscoe flicked through his wallet, attempting to appear a bastion of mature calm. “It’s not a big deal. It’s not a big deal at all, so just relax.”
“I’m not talking to you about this.”
“That’s just fine,” Roscoe said. “There’s nothing to talk about. Because it’s not a big deal.”
He couldn’t understand the outsized misery emanating from Jules’ slumped shoulders. He looked like a gangling, tortured foal. “What’s wrong now?” He asked, too gently and too late, because Jules was already facing away, and Bobby was already jingling through the door.
“Hii-iii-!” Harper greeted him first, happy as a clam.
Bobby smiled weakly. “Hi,” he said softly, toward Roscoe, and Roscoe was touched that he was trying. “Jules, hello.”
Jules was utterly still. “Mmhmm,” he mumbled, and Roscoe, suddenly a bit sick with foreboding, wanted to grab Bobby and rush him out the door. But Bobby was graciously (relentlessly) coming forward.
“Now hear me out,” he said, mildly. “I was surprised. I still had some feelings about the whole situation. But it’s over with now.” He shrugged and offered his hand (Jules literally leaned away). “Let’s just forget about it,” he suggested. “Let’s leave it with Neil. Wherever the hell that devil is.”
“Yeah.” Jules woke up and allowed himself to shake hands, though he let go snappish. “He was, uh, a pretty active guy.”
“Oh, I certainly know.” Bobby moved toward Roscoe.
“I mean, I know too.” Jules barreled forward, an uncontrolled tone entering his voice. “As in, I knew. Like, knew him. Knew of him. For like, a year before that night. But like, maybe you weren’t even seeing him at that point?”
“Probably should head out now,” Roscoe suggested, but Bobby planted his feet.
“Like,” Jules said, his face a mask of blank horror, as if he were under some horrible influence and couldn’t possibly stop speaking until all was revealed. “Maybe you weren’t even seeing each other around, uh, fall-winter of 2008? Because that’s when we were uh, most active. Together. With others.”
“Pardon me,” Bobby said, “others?”
“Yeah,” Jules answered, totally helpless. “You know, the gangbangs.”
“Gangbangs?”
“Not that I arranged that,” Jules swerved. “My old man at the time arranged all those. But I was there, as, you know, the subject of the evening. And Neil was a participant uh, most of the time. And sometimes individually, for house calls.”
“House calls?” This was Harper, cross-legged on the carpet, clutching his satchel and likewise paralyzed by the situation.
“But maybe you weren’t even seeing him, at that point,” Jules repeated, like saying it enough times would make it true. “At that point, fallish and winterish of 2008?”
Roscoe gripped Bobby by the shoulders, unwilling to move him extrajudicially, but hoping to impede him if he lunged forward. Jules, for his part, did not bodily retreat.
“No,” Bobby answered at long last, his voice a monument of cold dignity that surpassed even Harper’s abilities. “No,” he repeated. “No, I was not aware of the gangbangs. Or of house calls. I was also not aware that my boyfriend, at the time, was some kind of doctor to small animals. Let’s go now,” he said to Roscoe, and revolved gracefully underneath his hands without dislodging his grip. “I’d like to leave now.”
“Right,” Roscoe agreed. He ushered him out, pained that he couldn’t discreetly look back. No tender autumnal milieu appealed to his senses this time, and Harper, struck as dumb as everybody else, made no glass-passing remarks. When the door slammed, the door slammed.
-
There were, to Roscoe’s dismay, no vulnerable talks this time. Bobby, drawing on some kind of work persona for power, handled the evening and the conversations with brisk, friendly professionalism and relaxed only a few degrees when it became clear Roscoe wasn’t going to push the issue. And it would have been fine, if this had ended that evening – it lasted through the whole week, and into the next. Bobby took the date-arrangements into his own hands, and they met away from the shop. This way, he gradually recovered some of his previous warmth, but he swiftly hardened anytime Roscoe brought up some doing or event connected to the shop or bar. He couldn’t even mention Harper without Bobby’s eyes glazing over protectively. Roscoe didn’t bring up Jules’ existence whatsoever, and this, after barely seven days, made him feel like a real piece of shit.
He understood, at last, that he’d made it as a gay man past forty and had never had to delineate his life in even trivial ways. His friends were everybody else’s friends, his job was everybody’s trivial and unhealthy sanctuary, and he never had any reason to hide himself. When he could no longer bear his family, he’d left them. When his AA sponsor reared his head with too much religion, he’d broken off and made his own sobriety group. When those sober friends got snitty about him owning a bar, he’d walked right through them and continuously among them and left them free to leave or stay or slink back, however they needed. He’d never considered himself a person with principles until now, when it seemed impossible to heed their calling.
He newly considered the position of Jules and Harper, who were still too fresh to be beloved or appreciated or respected. Without the stability of those prisons, they floated in some hellish erotic no-man’s land, out of sight of their own peers, hobbled economically, excised from shared history, right or wrong. He remembered Harper, years ago, a scrawny little adjunct with Kurt Cobain’s hairstyle and fire in his face, charging through the doors with his retail resume hot in hand. He recalled Jules, not as many years ago, speaking very calmly, face half-maimed and half blind, no resume, inquiring about the antique sign in the window, leather bespoke, custom order. (I’m afraid it’s an old sign, Roscoe had said, horrorstruck that Jules was even upright. Do you consider that a wise business decision? Jules had replied, blood down his chin, speaking crisply through pink teeth). The hot new young things – sure.
And Bobby, neighborhoods away all this time, on another planet practically, lost in all this context, buried enough to be oblivious to it. He greeted Roscoe now with apprehension in his eyes that lasted and lasted and only vanished at the end of the night when they were separating anyway.
“Listen,” Roscoe said, but he didn’t know what to say and he didn’t know what to do.
“It’s alright.” Bobby petted his cheek. “It’s alright. It’s nothing.”
But he’d begun to make small, suggestive comments, very skillfully (a doctor to small animals), in ways Roscoe couldn’t counter – mostly about groups of young gays when they passed. Bobby would say something brief and clear and cruel and just as quickly shut it down and peer at Roscoe from his peripheral, observing the tested waters. A talent for verbal knackery could, would, be used just as easily for personal self-satisfaction as well as for social good.
And Jules, still a teenager at heart, but beholden to his adult ambitions, showed up at the shop as usual but dealt with the situation by refusing to speak to Roscoe whatsoever. He was hurt by this apparent anger, and once when he tried to come down the basement stairs behind Jules, the kid had shouted, brutally, over his shoulder: NO!
The fathers Roscoe had known had mostly been deplorable; He didn’t like feeling he’d become one himself.
He called Martin.
-
“Leaving so soon, gangbang boy?” Harper called out after the basement door slammed shut.
“You,” Jules answered, walking around the counter, and deliberately smashing every metal outcrop of his bag and kit and equipment into its locked glass cabinet, “are not pretty enough to be this mean. No wonder you haven’t had a boyfriend in years.”
“And where’s your boyfriend?” Harper stretched his arm across the counter to block Jules’ way. “Roscoe called and said he wants both of us here. I know he must have texted you; you shouldn’t be leaving.”
“I can do whatever I want.”
“Oh, you demonstrably do.” Jules dropped all his things on the ground at once, with the following expected awful noise. He deliberately made rackets when you didn’t want one and was still capable of supernatural silence when it suited his needs. “I don’t know why you’re acting like a child. If you’re old enough for high-risk sex, you’re old enough to handle high risk consequences.”
“This is not a natural consequence,” Jules argued. “This is a bizarre fucking freak-ass coincidence because god hates me.”
“And before the freak-ass coincidence interfered with your comfortable situation,” Harper poked and prodded, “you seemed perfectly at peace with the fact that you had probably ruined somebody’s relationship.”
“Neil was a high-risk person to be in a relationship with.” Jules’ voice pitched raggedly higher and higher, as was so whenever he got too excited. He started pulling together his bags again. “I knew it after he fucked me once. If Bobby didn’t figure that out after knowing him for years, then he was a fucking moron.”
“And you’ll tell him that to his face, too,” Harper said. “To Roscoe’s only beau!”
“Why not?” The front door jingled and opened broadly. “If he’s going to act like some wounded bitch every time he sees me, why shouldn’t I get the jump on him? But not now.” Jules turned and collided with a familiar, half-bare chest.
“Oh, fuck off,” he wailed, backing away from what he knew, in his experience, was an immovable surface. “Will everybody quit fucking interfering with my shit?”
“Now, now,” Jackie said, unbothered as usual. He topped Jules’ shoulders with his heavy hands. “What’s the hurry?”
“Jackie,” Jules asked, immediately popping on his most fetching impersonation of innocence. “If I asked you to carry me away right now, out the door past everybody to wherever you wanted to take me, would you do it?”
Jackie appeared to regard these words visually. “Mmm-mmm. No.” He shook his head with some regret. “I’m sorry, little brother. We have to face our fears.” He grasped Jules’ ribcage in a paralyzing, two-handed grip, lifted him like a hollow doll and propped him on the countertop next to Harper’s register. Jules, kitten-rigid in some kind of tonic seizure, grabbed two handfuls of Jackie’s shirt in shock. And there wasn’t much shirt to spare.
“Alright now,” Jackie said, satisfied that all was right in the world – his world. “Who can tell me what all the emotions are about?”
“He’s upset because him being a massive fucking whore has preemptively ruined Roscoe’s first relationship in years,” Harper supplied, testy about the no boyfriend line himself.
Jackie, in a rare event, looked directly at Harper and with some disapproval. “I never understood,” he said, “any m or bottom’s insistence that swear words are for them to say. I’d leave the heavy language to the men, son.”
Harper, too proud to slump, merely narrowed his eyes and dragged his nails across the counter.
“I just said like three swears,” Jules interjected, with jumbled loyalty. “And that’s after you came in.”
“Harp’s older than you, he should know better.”
“Well, he’s right.” Jules had to look askance to say it. “I was a huge whore and I ruined Roscoe’s life, and I don’t know what to do.”
Jackie nodded, then thought twice, and shook his head solemnly. “Don’t understand at all, sorry.”
Jules rapidly regained coherence. “I homewrecked a guy a year ago,” he explained. “And he showed up just now as Roscoe’s new boyfriend, and he hates me. And turns out, I’d been homewrecking him for the year before that too, only I didn’t know it due to the uh, casual nature of the events.”
“Ah,” Jackie said, in an enlightened way, as he and Jules realized a common language. “Gangbangs. Martin was around.”
“Right,” Jules said, relieved. “But now he’s not, and I fucked it all up.”
“You young people. No, no,” he said toward Harper, who’d been about to interject, feeling lonely in the conversation. “Young people. You let any problem that happens now ruin all the good things that happened before. Calling yourself a whore – since when is that your job? Boys should be happy – they should smile and laugh and bounce around and feel good about turning over.” He cast, again, a significant look at Harper.
“I’m going to find a way to kill you,” Harper said. “Silently. When you least expect it.”
“Sure you will – you’re a lot smarter than me.” He turned back to Jules, who had restlessly moved his grip from Jackie’s shirt to his biceps. “Listen,” he said, kindly, “you’re taking responsibility for things that aren’t your business to take on. Martin did what he did to you as an act of love. You behave the way you do as an act of love toward him, even if he’s gone. I’d be pretty sad if you kicked yourself around because another adult got their feelings hurt.” Jackie, again, peered tangibly into the open air. “Some guys, adult guys,” he continued, “just can’t bear to know how intimately we’re all connected. Spooks them. Roscoe’s guy, he can learn. I won’t judge him, never met him. But it’s a lot easier if you never get to be that way in the first place.”
Jules, by this time, was gazing intently at Jackie’s bland, stereotypical face as if he had to absorb all the answers from it before cynicism again wised him up. In a moment of weakness, he dropped his forehead on one of his square and improbable pecs – Jackie, briefly and appropriately, patted Jules on the head, and even Harper looked uncertain about scolding the proceedings. He lucked out, because just then Roscoe, accompanied by a morose Bobby, strode through the front door.
The sight of Jules on the counter, being publicly snuggled by a creature like Jackie, was simply too much for Bobby to bear. He shot out, the snake that rears with eyeball-lancing precision, “Oh god! You let him carry on in your own business?”
“Bobby.” Roscoe grabbed his forearm. Bobby shook free.
“It’s one thing when you carry on in the privacy of your own home,” he spat at Jules. “Or should I say, more accurately, in one’s own basement squat?”
Jules, held back by Jackie’s huge paw, forgetting every single lesson he’d just attempted to absorb, shrieked with rage. “You haggard, unloved queen! Fuck you!”
“I’d rather be a haggard queen than a used-up slut!”
“I’d rather be a used-up slut than some neocon society faggot!”
“It’s always you uneducated goddamn children slinging around correct phrases like neocon, because you’re all too goddamn selfish to give your all to one person!”
Harper, who’d taught Jules the word neocon, just barely opened his mouth before Jackie valiantly drew him and stool both toward the protection of his insane body.
“Maybe if you really were giving your all to Neil,” Jules continued screaming, “he wouldn’t have been fucking cheating on you every fucking second of every fucking day!”
“– With fucking whores like you making it possible –!”
A clothing rack tipped; seemingly of its own accord, it tipped and terminated the human outburst with its own; Harper yelped, christ, the slings! as though they were made of glass,and Roscoe, arm outstretched for reasons nobody had actually seen with their own eyes – they’d long forgotten he was there – bellowed in the loudest voice any of them had ever heard him use:
“BE QUIET!”
Everybody, quiet; they froze in place too, all except Jackie, who fully turned around with great interest, thrusting his chest out hard as if he needed it to properly hear. But Roscoe was turning on Bobby, now shaky in the knees and white in the face. He touched his mouth, like he didn’t understand who on earth had just passed all those insults.
“That is unacceptable,” Roscoe said to him.
The shop space, its contents so incongruous with what was going on, seized the words and froze them. The air twanged and vibrated.
“That is unacceptable,” Roscoe repeated, gaining power. “It’s always been unacceptable, and it’s my fault for not telling you before, but I’m telling you now: you can’t talk to my employees like that. You can’t talk to my friends like that. I’m not interested in someone who feels they have a right to speak to people like that; if that’s so impossible for you to quit doing, then this stops right here. Bobby? This stops here. Right now. There’s no compromise. Do you understand?”
Bobby had clutched one arm around his stomach, as if seized with sudden cramps during this speech. He wiped his face with his hand, words out of reach.
“And you!” Roscoe turned on Jules, who leaned so far back on the counter he was in danger of injury. “You, buster, are not nineteen anymore! You’re old enough to know when you should act like the bigger man! No screaming! No silent treatment! And quit saying faggot! Both of you!” He gracefully included Harper; nobody was left out.
Everybody, stunned, waited for something. Nobody knew what.
“I’m sorry,” someone said quietly. It was Bobby, who among all in the shop, was the only one standing alone. “I’m really terribly sorry. I’m acting exactly as –” he cut himself off. “Well, exactly as was said. And it might seem easy to say this,” he explained, this time to Roscoe. “But I’m truly ashamed right now. I don’t know what to do.”
Roscoe struggled not to wilt in the face of this weakness.  “I want you to apologize to Jules,” he said, doubling down.
Bobby veered toward Jules like a well-trained child. “Jules, I’m sorry,” he said, very simply, and seemed on the verge of saying more before a surge of emotion disfigured his face; he hid again behind his hand.
Jules contrary to the situation, whispered to Harper: “what do I do?”
“Traditionally, one accepts,” Harper advised.
“Right,” Jules said. “I accept. Uh. Sorry for calling you a neocon and the f-word and haggard and unloved and a queen.”
Bobby laughed shortly and bitterly, almost on the verge of tears, and not one of them would have known how to move forward if not for Jackie, who cleared his throat and said, quite loud, “Roscoe, have you seen that shithead Danny Bride sneaking around at all?”
“What?” Some of Roscoe’s signature haplessness retook; after such decisive behavior, the change was like a douse of cold water. Everybody looked around confused, freed from some spell. “I don’t – pardon me?”
“Well.” Jackie scratched his head, one of his other favorite gestures, and stepped away from the counter. “If you see him, tell that chickenhead the longer he stays away from me, the worse I’ll rip him up. Don’t parse it gentle – he doesn’t really understand stuff that way.” Jackie approached Bobby, who leaned back, stunned. “I’m Jackie,” said Jackie, and he held out his hand. He shook the tips of Bobby’s offered fingers in a gentlemanly manner. “Jackie. You’ll see me around. Pleasure to meet you.”
“Enchanted,” Bobby said, his eyes now dry and stable.
“Right,” Roscoe said, as Jackie trundled through the door exactly the same as he’d entered it. “Right. So, there’s that. And now,” he placed his hand on Bobby’s shoulder. “If you don’t mind, we have reservations, don’t we?”
“We do,” Bobby said, a little thick in the throat and not unsurprised at Roscoe touching him. He did not touch back, and something about the pain of this unmatched gesture made Jules and Harper start bustling around for anything to do but watch. “Yes, if you like, we do.”
“I’ll be back later,” Roscoe called out as he led Bobby away. “And one of you should really fix that rack. You know, if you aren’t too busy working.”
“Sure, big daddy,” Harper said. “Say the word and I’ll polish the boots you don’t own.”
Roscoe, the bigger man, let this go unchallenged. The door jinged and janged.
Jules, quick to recover and his enviable plastic brain ready for life’s next great mystery turned to Harper and asked, “how come Jackie knows you’re a bottom?”
-
Outside, far enough from the shop door but not enough from the bar, Roscoe grabbed Bobby and swung him around. “I’m not actually a yeller,” he said.
Bobby blinked, once at him, once toward the smokers lounging on the façade, then he seemed to give up and held Roscoe back – he didn’t notice.
“I’m not,” Roscoe insisted. “I don’t shout. I don’t make demands. I’m not that kind of person. But I couldn’t stand myself if I didn’t do everything possible to live with myself and keep you here. Because I want all of this. I want all of this, alright? These are my people and I want you here with me. Are you listening?”
Bobby, now eloquent beyond words, stared back at him with due attention. Roscoe understood exactly what Neil had seen in him – he had looked at the right time and caught a moment of breaking-open in a face that could be kind or cruel. An opening so large and so tender you thought you could stick your hand in – but you couldn’t – and Roscoe, looking back on what he had assumed of Bobby before, knew he’d been blind to the man right in front of him, this stranger peering into his face right now, who wanted to meet him too; the regular guy that he was.
The previous night, over the phone, after laughing himself sick over the sexual hijinks, Martin laid down his own reasoning. “Can I tell you,” Martin had asked, “about a mindset that helped me when I was in a tough spot about what my relationship with the kid was going to be? There were the usual issues with honesty and fear, on both sides. But, you know, all that stuff gets carried along by the realities of the situation as they present themselves. The age difference, being one of them. Which some might call significant to unacceptable.”
(I’m aware, Roscoe had said, bitchy – Bobby was only six years younger.)
“It’s especially hard when the younger in that kind of situation has only ever had shitty experiences with adults in authority. Grown-up is such a fuckless phrase, isn’t it?” Martin remarked. “Kids don’t like grown-ups. They don’t want to bang around with grown-ups. They don’t want to trust grown-ups. But boy, when you look like one, especially in comparison, it’s easy to act the part, right? And maybe a little bit of you – him, whoever – does need a grown-up sometimes, but you can’t sustain a mature relationship like that. You know, a mature relationship with the works. Anyway,” Martin continued. “I sort of had a talk with myself. Then I had a talk with him, about what I was going to do – what I was going to do, listen – and what I was going to do, was start giving him very real, very tangible experiences to help him work out emotionally that I wasn’t a grown-up – I was a man.”
He waited, sat with the obvious to see the deeper meaning beneath what Martin was saying, before realizing Martin was not that kind of person – none of his friends were.
(You’re telling me to man up? That’s it?)
“I am, huh,” Martin said. “Yeah, that is exactly what I’m telling you to do. Because you’re the boss, and those are your employees, and that’s your boyfriend. They may whine and cry and get scared, but they need you to act the part. They’ll either calm down that they have a lead to follow – or they’ll man up themselves one day, god willing.”
(And how exactly does a man discover the right decision to make? The right decision that gets him everything he wants?)
“Let’s not get too essentialist,” Martin said. “Nobody on earth gets the privilege of one-hundred percent certainty. That’s what makes our choices so important. Even if things go wrong, now or in the future, we have to know the decisions we made in the moment were acts of love.”
Martin paused for a long time. Roscoe could literally see him shrugging, oh well! From 2,000 miles away, the sadness was, for a millisecond, awful and acute. Then it was gone.
(My old man set those up for me. Is that what he called you?)
“No,” Martin had said. “Jules called me Dad.”
Roscoe, back in the moment outside the bar, held Bobby in his arms and had not a clue what the next move would be to give everyone everything they wanted. But Bobby, in his own wisdom, let himself break open further.
“I don’t want to impede on your plans,” he suggested, shyly. “But exactly how attached are you to those reservations?”
Down the street, in the opposite direction than planned, arm in arm. Roscoe had seen it happen to others plenty, and now that he was living it, wasn’t sure where his mind was supposed to be besides anchored to some bizarre, blank emotion others would call calm. Bobby might change his mind before they reached Roscoe’s apartment; he might not. Roscoe might choke in bed at the critical moment; he might not. He put his arm around Bobby’s neck and walked in the dark and hoped he’d be strong enough to put his arm around the whole rest of his life. Everywhere, he thought, thousands of people were rolling over and doing just that, staring forward at a bulwark of love that might fail – and they put their arm around it.
These are the acts that convince us we’ve become adults, Martin had said.
Vampires in July was the current marathon theme. Jules was a block away with Cal at the Dairy Queen. They were depressurizing after Daughters of Darkness at 10AM and Jean Rollin’s The Rape of the Vampire at noon. Artistically jittered by Delphine Seyrig’s costuming, Jules insisted they skip something called Blood and Doughnuts based simply off the juvenile title, to be better prepared for Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu, and so Jules could sketch in his little pad – Cal toddled faithfully behind him. After Marty, and after Ava, Jules prioritized Cal; the kid, besides support groups and therapy and work (he was a receptionist!) had absolutely nothing in his life, as far as Jules knew. No close friends, no hobbies, no clubs, no events, no strong interests. He did not watch television; he did not listen to music “on purpose”. No wonder the guy was so fucked up. They spent a lot of time together that would otherwise have been devoted to Marty, who had begun to casually, supportively, ask, what are you and Cal up to this week, kid?
Once seated, Cal, courteous, asked about Marty; Jules, insane, told him about the belt situation. Explained further when Cal appeared confused. It wasn’t shocking to tell Cal these things – he told Cal, consciously and on purpose, things he’d never told anybody else in his life. Small, untalented, generic, and flavorless as he was, he possessed an influential miasma that Jules could not resist.
“That’s not so bad,” Cal insisted, after Jules tore through the belt issue in its entirety. “That’s like, a really standard category of, you know, S&M discipline stuff. That’s not bad at all.”
Cal had learned this from Jules, who had also lied to Cal after being told some of his most outrageously literal – coprophilia literal – Sadeian fantasies. “That’s not a big deal!” Jules would say. It took every ounce of strength to make it truthful on his face. “Get real, I’ve heard ten times worse than that.” And he’d been rewarded by Cal’s potent relief.
“He sounds like a nice person,” Cal continued. “I don’t know why you refuse to talk to him about this stuff. It’s not like he’ll force you to do every weird thing you ever fantasize about.”
Cal had yet to be told the full extent force factored into those fantasies, but it was still an unwise thing to say to someone like Jules, who could respond: “If you actually believed that, then a lot of your own problems would clear up.”
“Hey, that’s not nice.” Cal owned a very cute sulk. He showed it off sometimes. It almost gave him a personality. He was blond, bland, and adorable; cute as a button, in fact. In drag, he would have looked like Mimsy Farmer.
Inside his head, Jules would stuff him into frocks, make up his face, fuss with his hair, and furthermore, to think about doing so would give him serious thrills. It made him rub his legs together. This absurd stuff was so outside the bounds of both Jules’ acknowledged and denied sexuality that it had no power to disturb him.
“Maybe you want to get beat up because you feel guilty about something,” said Cal. “Maybe that’s what scares you about it.”
“What have I got to be guilty about?”
“Uh, I dunno. Being a huge dick? Skipping Group because you have a hot older boyfriend now?” Cal sulked (cute, cute!). “No, I’m joking. Childhood stuff, obviously. But I would say that. But if you feel guilty, you’re perceiving the fantasy as a form of self-harm. And your physical body knows this and abhors it – the physical body doesn’t want to die. Your body can’t commune with your brain, because your brain is responsible for pumping all this anti-life energy into your body – so you’re suffering.”
“Do you think about hurting yourself ever?” Jules asked, trying to cut through all the somatherapy. “You to yourself?”
“Yes,” said Cal, who leaned so well into Jules’ cuts. “Every second of every hour of every day. Are we gonna be late to Nosferatu?”
No – a problem with the reel delayed the screening. The Vampire Lovers slipped in its stead.
Jules and Cal cuddled in the back, not Jules’ normal survey when he attended the movies alone. Jules, who was nineteen years old before he could step foot in a movie theater, now had a favored spot to sit at the movies. Gran did not like indoors that were not her house. If you were indoors in a place that was not your house, if you continuously put yourself in strange indoors, ever closer you came to being indoors at the same time as an anti-social terrorist with a gun, or a brown terrorist with a bomb, and he’d blast your brains all over that structural interior. You would get your fucking brains blown out (Jules, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, looking up headshot victim on the family computer) (Jules, same, looking up Columbine security camera feed on the library computer in Ellettsville) (Jules, copy/paste, rotten.com, computer, The Gaping Maw, at least until 2005 – oh well!) At fourteen, he could cook a thanksgiving meal for five, draft original dress patterns, play Arabesque Op. 18 in C Major on the piano. At fourteen he didn’t know who Shakespeare was, had been shaky on the differences between continent/country, but goddamn did he know the visual aftermath of a suicide bomb. Him, indulging these perversions, while Cal four hundred miles southwest in Missouri, got his brains raped out.
He and Cal held hands. They did this at the movies. Jules and Marty held hands sometimes, while they laid down together. Jules would get the idea Marty was staring hard at the back of his head, trying to figure him out. Jules felt the eyes. He stared hard at the wall, stared intentionally, blinked intentionally until the wall lost meaning, and disappeared. In this same manner he could stare at a movie screen when he could not focus or had seen the film before. His brain was an accordion mirror he could flatten or zigzag until pleasantly refracted, and so deeply separate from his meat, it could chew and swallow details and discard others without his input. In this buzzy state, he held Cal’s hand, and after this state, it would be difficult to stand or speak or be unhappy.
Not like that, it’s not meant to be worn over a bodice. It would ruin the shape. Take it off. Go on!
Oh well…alright.
“You’re not even watching,” Cal hissed.
…the dress you have is very pretty, but it’s for a country girl! In town, you must be more sophisticated…
I’ve never worn anything so daring – what will my father think?
He will enjoy it. All men enjoy such things. But I fear it will be too large for you.
Cal tugged Jules’ hand. Jules was currently Ingrid Pitt, a pale-eyed pair of professional breasts, nude before her vanity mirror. Call tugged harder. Cal was the current topless brunette ingenue in the bedroom, bobbing trimly over her discarded undergarment.
“I’ve seen it before,” Jules said, and put his arm over Cal’s shoulder and pulled him hard within so Cal could embrace him and rest his face in Jules’ neck. The armrests in the old theater did not fold up so this was painful but expected. They’d done this many times before and Jules was not physically capable of feeling guilty – he’d already told Marty a little about his feelings about Cal and the mild physicality that occurred between them. He was not guilty at all, not even over their occasional kisses, which was nothing like the nasty fuck-kissing he did with Marty.
And Marty, in his nice-man voice, had said: I think it’s important for you to have relationships with boys your own age.
-
Marty, art-wise, was active in New York City from 1980 to 1988, and the bulk of the stuff Jules was really interested in, the videotape trade material, had dematerialized with the closure of the bars and clubs that hosted the libraries. Marty estimated he’d helped produce what would have amounted to 150 films. The leather house where he’d done his training supported itself with this entrepreneurship, filming harder scenes by host request, and occasionally free and clear when the inspiration struck. Three of these tapes survived within Marty’s possession, housed at his real place in San Francisco. Two were so delicate he was afraid to touch them without better technical help – one, a stouter character, a friend had digitized and burned onto a CD, which Marty stored in his laptop. He showed Jules one free afternoon.
Scene: a dim, stone cellar interior that bears a creepy resemblance to Jules’ illegally zoned basement apartment. A powerfully built clone, made more tantalizing by the fact he’s in his thirties, no waify queen this, stands rod-straight, his arms chained and shackled behind his back. His chest thrusts and heaves with desperate breath, and the tendons in his neck bulge against a choke chain –
“This was a huge craze at the time,” Marty explained.
Several cuts focus on the man’s straining wrists, his writhing pectorals, his twitching thighs. In these standing shots, he is filmed only from the top of his pubic line. Thankfully, the man’s huge cock inexorably rises, and cuddles up with his hairless abdomen. A well-timed zoom catches its delicate, minute twitches, its graceful widening –
“Hello,” Jules said, and stroked his throat automatically.
Another man enters the scene, also of powerful build, but with less delineated musculature. His authority is symbolized through the costuming of his large belly; that he wears a beard and a cross-chest harness; that he holds a length of chain which he uses to flog the bound man’s thighs and chest. The man howls –
“This is kind of general to be representing a craze,” Jules observed.
“Wait a second.”
“You have flouted the authority of my house. You have sown chaos and discord among my slaves. You have insulted those you should have adored and respected as masters. For these crimes there can be no trust, and because there can be no trust there can be no forgiveness, and because I cannot forgive you, I sentence you to death!” Panning shot across a table. On the table: a thick rope noose, solemnized by its usage of a traditional hangman’s knot.
“Okay,” Jules said, enlightened.
Protracted hanging scene: Some budget ingenuity is exercised to immerse the viewer in this woeful situation. A long time is spent on the executioner looping the noose through a hook system drilled into the stone ceiling. The condemned man gasps when the choke chain is removed but does not plead his case. The noose is tightened around his thick neck. Several isolated shots are devoted to the rope twitching and tightening under its mortal load. Several shots are devoted to the man’s face and neck, which gradually redden, then purple. Veins stand out on his forehead. His temples throb. The executioner begins to flog his nonetheless dripping cock. The pain improves its size and the victim’s mouth fish-gasps wordlessly, webbed with spit. The cock is, frankly, the bestest, most prettiest cock on the face of the planet –
“He was a pretty popular guy,” Marty said.
The man heralds his own death with a massive comeshot. It arcs away from the terminal body and destroys itself under its own velocity and is instantly lost in poor lighting. The tight length of rope just above the noose knot is abruptly cut with shears and a heavy THUMP is heard –
“I was so angry they cut the rope,” Marty said. “It took me about a hundred tries to tie that damn knot. We could have used it again.”
Jules thought the cross-sensory coupling of the cut rope vanishing from the frame, and the audio of whatever they threw on the floor to represent the load of a dead body had been genuinely good filmmaking, so he just said “Hmmmmm.”
An intimate pan of the victim’s dead muscles, his sweaty, peaceful face, the manly, diminutive eyelashes of his closed lids. Then another abrupt cut, to the sheared noose on the table, laid out in the same position it had been introduced. Cinch.
“There you go,” said Marty. “From ’83 to ’84 all anybody wanted to see was extremely muscular men die and orgasm in simulated hangings. The old guys told me it was a minor fad in the early sixties, and then it came back for a blip.”
“And it was one hundred percent faked?”
“Our standing-up ones were,” Marty answered. “The ones with those real dramatic nooses, yes. We didn’t even stick them on top of a box. He was standing on the floor the whole time.”
“I’m glad there weren’t any shots of his like, feet rising up on tiptoe,” Jules said. He closed the laptop. He enjoyed exercising some minor authority over Marty’s belongings. “You know, from heel to tiptoe and then cutting away the second he’d have to start being lifted into the air. That would get old fast.”
“There was no shortage of people who had actual safety harnesses for hangings,” Marty mused. “Plenty of groups doing the same thing as us could have shown someone strung up and dangling. But I never saw them in videos when this was popular.”
“What was the hanged guy’s name?”
“Robert. Robert, never Bobby. The people who could call him by a nickname called him Bertie. He’s got some land and a cute little piece in the Adirondacks, now. They stay up there in a cabin and live a wholesome life.”
“Him, his piece, and his massive dick.”
“Hey, now.” Marty was currently Big Spoon. It had been pecking rain and humid all day, and it made the hours long. Jules had risen at the crack of dawn to bang out some necessaries in the shop basement, departed for a half-shift at Domino’s, and adjourned to Marty’s sublet, where he liked to lie down after work. Marty’s request for one private get-together a week had been overindulged to the point of becoming unnecessary – Jules gave him most of his free time, now. He skipped Group. He’d stopped volunteering for Roscoe’s various community events. Roscoe, a big fan of the whole Marty/Jules thing, was not snippy about it, though Jules could have gone without the maiden-aunt looks of indulgent approval Roscoe was inclined to grant him, these days. “He was so, so insecure about his dick. He thought he would never find true love because everybody would only love him for how big and beautiful it was.”
Jules cooed sympathetically. It mimicked an unconscious noise he made during a good deep necking, and so well that Marty automatically, helplessly, rooted toward his neck and cheek. Jules stretched away, chastely.
“He was a celibate person when I knew him. He went kind of hypochondriac in the 80’s. A lot of guys did.” Marty, chastened: “He was lucky he was so talented at solo work. But he stayed healthy and now he has some money to enjoy, thank god.”
“Who was the fat dom guy?”
“That,” Marty explained, with some serious acid, “was Magister Gary.” Jules cackled. Marty rolled him over onto his back and held him down by the stomach, as one would with a gentle and forgiving cat. “And he was such a great big fucker. He was such a dick. That execution speech wasn’t scripted. The man really talked like that.”
“You, you, you have sown chaos and discord among –”
“Trainee Martin,” recited Marty, “you have allowed three granules of powder to remain atop the Barkeeper’s Friend canister. This flouting of order cannot stand. Without the caning I am about to visit upon you, these three granules of powder will grow into a mountain of chaos and discord.”
“Aw, you got caned?”
“All the time,” Marty said. “I was a pretty bad kid.”      Â
“That’s sexy.”
“Oh, well, if you say so.” He rolled over on top of Jules, framed his waist between his knees and stared down, his expression an ambiguous sketch. “How would you feel,” he said, after an awkward period of meeting one another’s eyes, “if I said I wanted to film you?”
“I’d say,” Jules answered, “that it sounds like you want to film me.”
-
Jules pondered if 18, 19, 20, 21, 22-year-old Marty, in accordance with what the old guys at the bar called the good old days of tradition and ritual, had been obligated to give up ass to the corny greyhairs ruling his leatherhouse. He wondered if Marty had to suck dick he wasn’t attracted to, take on unnatural poses, wear stupid outfits, go by generic, boring names (you, boy!) to filigree the dour concept of going through what everybody else around him had gone through to win their cute little leather caps they kept so special in pussy-ass octagonal velvet-lined corrugated boxes.
But I learned more self-control, Marty later hedged. He was careful to balance his acid moments with diplomacy around Jules. I learned some self-control, some useful skills, and I learned what I wanted to prioritize in my own relationships. But, he continued, none of that guarantees you’ll know how to utilize that knowledge, because you’re still a stupid asshole in your early twenties.
Jules inquired how his own attitude would have flown around Magister Gary and the gang.
You would have been thrashed on principle about thirty times a day, Marty answered instantly. Or, Marty edited, you would get away with murder constantly. Fifty-fifty chances.
Jules took this as Marty’s polite way of telling Jules he was also a stupid asshole in his early twenties, and furthermore, that Marty was kind enough to let him get away with murder. Jules wondered how much longer he could possibly get away with the scam he was running on the poor guy.
-
Being filmed was not a titillating experience. Jules thought there wasn’t much point in filming if you weren’t having real sex, which he and Marty were not having, due to Jules being insane.
Scene: Jules hunkers down on the floor; Marty sets up the camcorder on its three little legs; Jules gives head; Cinch.
During, he felt he was being watched by an annoying little housepet left in the bedroom by accident. Jules hated animals, pettable domestics especially (cats, wary of; dogs, terrified of). What pure relief he felt, though, that this kink was not, after all, another repressed freak thing he’d have to deal with, a sexual curveball he might have failed to control himself under if he’d actually been into it – to survive this relationship, he would have to accept occasional curveballs – but it made him so sad to feel apathetic about sucking cock, the one thing he purely, truly, sincerely loved to do, beside kissing and being kissed.
Imagine! She bled 300 virgins to death!
Thinking back, he had no idea where he’d found the courage to ask Marty to stick his hand down his throat. He never asked again and Marty, wiser than Jules, didn’t bring it up. And Jules never asked for Marty to put the cold towel over his face again, or to rub him all over and scrutinize his body – so revolting and yet so interesting –
“Maybe if we watched it together later –” Marty suggested, elsewhere in the real world where adults like him could survive and kids like Jules could not.
 – or to grab him hard at the nape (she hung them up by the wrists and whipped them until their tortured flesh was torn to shreds) or by the hair on the back of head which was the perfect length to be nabbed, (then she clipped off their fingers with shears) to hold his head and fuck his face, slap his face hard if he gagged, (she pricked their bodies with needles) slap him again just for the hell of it, slap him again and again – Jules lost track. Force him, (she tore off their nipples with silver pincers) to purely, truly, sincerely force him to accept real sex, (she pushed white-hot pokers into their faces) to force him to come from it, to force him while he kept his hand around Jules’ neck and tell him if he did not come he was going to choke him out, (and when they parted their lips to scream she shoved the flaming rod into their mouths) he would choke him until he was dead, call him a bitch and a whore and a slut for taking money from Phil and for not waiting patiently for Marty to appear on the horizon before sucking dozens and dozens of other men, to submerge his head underwater while he did all of the above, to thrash him on principle thirty times a day, and more explicitly, to beat him heavily, ass to ankles, with a belt, and a belt only; ass to ankles, then his chest, force him to (she pierced their veins with rusty nails and slit their throats) look.
Jules could tamp down the reams and reams of rape fantasies – rape realities, as they rapidly matured – mounding up and dirtying his affections, but he could not ignore the belt. He could not put away the inevitable fact that if Marty beat him with a belt, he would get hard, and if Marty continued to beat him with a belt, he would come from it without being touched. The belt existed without dressage, existed intrinsically unto itself. Jules snooped through Marty’s drawers once to make sure none of his existing belts lived up to the image – they did not. A problem? He would think it over.
“It was fine,” Jules reassured Marty, after he’d brushed his teeth. “We can try it again later, maybe.” And he looked into the mirror over the closet door to remember if he was wearing clothes.
Their white bodies pumped out young blood over her naked skin, blood, beautiful red blood over her hands and her arms and her legs and her face.
He hadn’t known, not at ten or twelve or sixteen, what Gran had been looking for when she frisked him so thoroughly for signs of adulthood, used all her selectively cogent faculties toward his body and not toward the computer or his movies or his music or his friends. Jules knew he was wising up because he couldn’t look back at those times without marveling at how stupid he had been. And if he had to focus, intentionally focus, not to hear now your chest, now your underarms, now your wee-wee when Marty touched him up kindly, then that was his own fucking fault. Marinelli’s were dumb, poor, fearful, inbred, uncommunicative, but they did not whine. No, they were not whiners. They could not. He would not. Her hands and her arms and her legs and her face. Blood, beautiful red blood. Gag.
One day, Marty would frisk Jules himself and divine what his little sweetheart really deserved. It was in his body, and it was in his pictures and his sound. And there was nothing Jules could do but grow up.
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It took twenty minutes flat, between Jules slamming the door shut upon his exit from the backseat to Martin spotting his dark head reappearing over the hoods of parked cars. He returned by himself, without Paul. Walking normally, he slid into the passenger seat and closed the door with little politeness. He offered no words. Martin played at fumbling with the keys to lengthen the time between the silence and the engine in case words were going to be offered right away. He doubted it, and correctly.
“Take me somewhere,” Jules said, once they’d nosed into traffic. He sounded terribly hoarse. A livid red puddle marred his cheek, and the rest of his skin transitioned from saturated to sallow between streetlights.
“Home?” Martin asked.
Jules nixed this with another bout of silence.
Martin tried again. “My apartment?”
Jules rested his temple against the window. “I’m hungry,” he said, and Martin took this as an offered kindness – Jules was as pathological about food as he was with money, and dining out married the worst of both factors, all of which Jules had laid out for him: The admittance of appetite; the act of eating; being observed eating; being at the mercy of someone else’s kitchen; being at the mercy of your companion’s meal; the exchange of cash; the indignity of being paid for; wanting to be paid for; worrying if you would be paid for.
Considering the arrangement in the parking garage and inside Paul’s apartment, Martin wondered if Jules had experienced a sudden epiphany about how silly that struggle and anxiety had been, and resolved to let it all go and become a much easier person to date. Ha-ha! Jules’ voice caroled in his brain: As if!
Martin had been chauffeured in Jules’ car often enough now to start finding the silence in his rental off-putting. He always forgot to put on the radio. If Jules had to take a sharp turn in his own, the cumulative plastic clatter of dozens upon dozens of CD jewel cases were enough to rain out whatever bridgeless, hookless, sonic cut-and-paste he was using to transmigrate his muffled emotions. Jules would tell him the names of artists and albums; Martin would try very hard to remember, until he figured out Jules was freest identifying the names of musicians toward which he felt the least.
I like this, Martin gently prompted, white lied, once when Jules had been stuck on the same album for a week and his curiosity would not let him resist. This was before the first of their several consummations and he’d felt unpleasantly disconnected from his romantic pursuit. Huh, Jules replied, underneath a barrage of repetitious guitar and martial drums and a singer’s shredded voice bellowing BLOWYOURBRAINS! OUUUUUUUT! BLOWYOURBRAINS! OUUUUU-HOOOU-OOOOOOOOUT!
And after they’d bonded a little more, and Martin told Jules how, historically, he was usually the one pursued by his marks, Jules cackled against his bare thigh and showed all the crooked and missing teeth on his bad left side, and thereon Martin’s education began. At least, his education regarding the song, which was about a pedophiliac serial killer – a religious cult – the biologically essential murder of male/female coitus – cannibalism – a playground snatching – a parent fucking their child.
Don’t worry about it, I like other stuff too, Jules said.
-
In the street outside the diner in Jules’ neighborhood, the only place cheap enough to hoodwink his neuroticism, he was stricken with an explosive coughing fit and didn’t fight when Martin helped him step over the curb. Inside, the sympathetic waitress Martin liked was nowhere to be seen, and they were gestured sharply to the booth near the washroom by a nasty young man not much older than Jules, whom Jules had affectionately dubbed their hate-crime server.
Jules hacked into his napkin and ducked his head under the sticky tabletop.
“Did Paul not even give you a glass of water?”
Jules resurfaced instantly. “Oh yeah, I asked for a glass of water,” he said. “And a cuddle, and a blankie.”
Martin wanted to touch his face. “Did he hit you?”
“You know he hit me.”
Martin did not like the grimy neighborhood, or the diner, or the ugly-minded server Jules found so funny, or the cruel tut-tut look on his lover’s casual face. Jules sucked down a glass of water, no ice, and Martin imagined him as a loner at the table, cruising the waiter as a gag and getting slammed straight to hell. He did know Paul hit. They’d discussed the hit explicitly, the two grown-ups, far away from their little pitcher.
“Fix your face,” Jules said. “The trauma is minimal.”
“Something’s bothering you.”
“God, sure. I felt like I was watching a movie I didn’t like, but not enough I could walk out of the theater.” Jules held the lukewarm glass to his jaw. “It was bothering me in the backseat of the car while you two went through you little pimp script, and it bothered me when I saw you two exchange the envelope that may or may not have had real money inside, and it bothered me walking up with Paul, and in the elevator, and in the foyer of Paul’s apartment – it was bothering me. First of all, where were you?”
Jules pointed.
“I was in the car,” Martin said, accustomed to these debriefs.
“Wrong answer.”
Martin immersed himself. “I was the pimp, selling you to a stranger.”
“Right answer,” Jules said, “to a question I wasn’t asking. Let me try again.”
But he didn’t try, right away. The server slammed menus onto the table with such force the table’s uneven legs barked against the floor; even Jules recoiled. Martin would have stood up, but Jules kicked him in the shin.
“It’s like, so funny that he’s getting worse,” Jules said, and stole Martin’s water cup.
“He wasn’t always that bad?”
“Singular guys like that don’t care about one faggot in their vicinity,” Jules explained. The smack mark on his face was, if anything, getting worse and he was beginning to squint. “When I got to go to high school, everybody could clock me, but nobody cared, because I wasn’t trying to fuck anyone.”
Any erotic fulfillment Martin might have gleaned from Jules’ delinquent teen escapades had been overrun by the discovery that he had fallen out of touch with what the kids were going through. Most of his dear friends were his age, many were older, and the young people around them had acted as mute, respectful ears to their compiled experiences. He’d been spoiled. Now he had Jules to observe and immerse himself within, who couldn’t have cared less about Martin’s coming of age through the seventies and eighties, was indifferent toward AIDS, was outright caustic toward the leather protocols that had given Martin so much direction in his youth, and, as far as Martin could tell, incapable of personal nostalgia, even when it related to the time periods of his most beloved, horrible music or his rancid gore films and video nasties. Martin had never met an artistic twenty-something so fundamentally bad at fantasy. Once, trying to rev up the evening early in the relationship, Martin had asked what Jules thought about when he masturbated. “You think I masturbate?” Jules, appalled, answered.
If he had taken that that little anecdote seriously, before his meeting with Paul, Martin realized, then this night would not have happened.
But Jules was traveling on his own track. “I think I’ve been really open with you,” he said, a sudden burst. “I think I’ve allowed a lot. I think we got really close in a really short period of time. What are you not getting from me that made tonight happen?”
“What do you think tonight was?” Martin’s desperate attempt to merge.
“A stupid, therapeutic roleplay scenario.” Jules’ voice was distorted by his hand palpating his cheek. Worse than angry, he sounded cheated.
“I didn’t mean it as a therapeutic.”
“Oh, shut up,” Jules said. “It was a transaction play. I’m not dumb. I know what you know about what I’ve done. You brought cash props. If you included it, you included it for a reason. Not only do I have to suck off some stranger and get slapped around, I have to ponder on healing themes and come to some kind of positive conclusion. We just start getting really, really intimate, and you impose this – this – this – distance. You weren’t even in the room! You were sitting in a fucking car!”
“I guess,” Martin tried, “I can’t convince you I did this solely because it was a scenario that gets me off? That your reaction beyond going through with it didn’t matter?”
“Get real,” Jules said. “Anything you do to me, you do for me.”
It was a pretty good line; Martin was touched. He reached out to grasp Jules’ free hand with both of his. He wished they were anywhere else but in public. “Oh, my buddy,” he said, absolutely nothing else in his head but goo. “Oh, kiddo.”
But Jules was capable of horrible sternness and didn’t react to this tenderness. “I can’t believe you weren’t even in the room with us. He had this framed print of Salvador Dali on the cover of TIME. And one of those stupid balls of fake leaves in a gold rim. I saw that from like, the floor, and was all if Marty was in here, I wouldn’t be noticing the shitty culture.”
“Why on earth didn’t you call it?” Martin gave his wrist a tug. Jules tugged back, listless.
“I don’t know,” he said. He thought about it. “I guess I know what a huge bitch I can be. I guess I wanted to give it a shot and see what I was missing.”
The physical reality was untenable – parties had arrived, been seated, waited, and served around the pair, and Jules, with the mute, desperate pain of a house pet, could not stop pawing at his face. Martin, hot and uneasy, rose to leave and Jules followed; but not as meekly as he looked. He said, in an overloud voice as they passed from inside to outside, and the male server swept behind their backs: “You know he’d fuck a man, right?” The jingle-bells strapped to the door were not so cheerful when they were pointedly slammed.
“It’s true,” Jules said, as Martin steered him over curb. “They’re only that mad when they know they’d fuck. If it came down to it.” And he was silent until they reached Martin’s sublet, where Martin distracted himself with ice in the freezer and Jules half-undressed on the edge of the bed before resting his head in hand, ruminating somewhere behind his empty face.
Martin believed his romantic habits were healthily balanced, and had been so for some time – he had not made a habit of linking up with very young men or particularly aggressive ones; but he’d collected a few throughout his late thirties and forties, just enough to know Jules was not the angriest, the most socially wronged, or the most antisocial among them – he was fastidious, virtually sober, socially perceptive, and possessed of a well-muscled work ethic bizarre to behold in a twenty-one year old – (Martin handed over the ice) but (Martin began to undress; in the long closet mirror, Jules’ forearm flexed) he was, or had been, or could remain, one of the most inaccessible.
While Martin had done his chasing and wooing, this had been exciting, sexually frustrating, pleasantly silly. He’d felt very young. He listened hard to Jules’ music in the car and wondered if the kid was sending him subconscious clues and messages through the song choices, a conceit he had to give up after he heard, beneath the instrumental clutter of one song, the voice of Mario Savio intoning, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels! Upon the levers! Upon all the apparatus and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it -! In retrospect, he had not been prepared for Jules, so firmly guarded, to have swung open the door so sudden and wide. He’d thought, once inside that door, the places Jules would go were the places Martin could guide him.
Because Jules had given him the right, Martin seized him by the shoulders without asking and pressed him back against the mattress. The ice slapped against the floor, and Jules rubbed his wet face against the sheets with the indifference of someone who’d seen it coming. He said, “ok,” just a vocal reflex, then looked Martin flat in the face with big, black, take-it-or-leave-it eyes and Martin’s wrist, scraped lightly by Jules’ fingers, was shocked by his freezing hand. He knew at once two things: that the plaintive, whiny atmosphere souring his headspace, the one with words that went will you please lighten up, will you please let me understand you, will you please let me like you harkened back not to his hearty memories as a grown man fucking and relating with other grown men, but to his experiences with his daughter Claudia during her teenage years; and that he would not in a million years be getting hard tonight.
He pressed his face into Jules’ neck and demurred.
Jules was canny. “You can’t even make love to me,” he said, and wriggled towards his side of the bed. The first time Jules had uttered the phrase make love Martin almost fell on the floor laughing; instinct and a miraculously timed sneeze stopped his lungs (that’s romantic, Jules had responded mildly, and handed over the Kleenex)
Sometime during the night, which Martin only became aware of in the morning, Jules migrated backwards against his chest, and he could enjoy a few minutes of conscious rest against the rare treat of a pliant and silent Jules. But the evening before asserted itself. He’d pretty much fucked it up, he decided. He’d allowed himself to be lulled into a false sense of security. Jules had stroked his ego for three months straight and he’d lost his edge. Possibly he’d lost it long ago.  Jules wasn’t waking up and Martin tried hard to follow.
He lay with one arm lightly around Jules’ ribs and the light lengthened across the walls and he entertained all sorts of grim, unproductive thoughts. You weren’t even in the room! Why hadn’t he been in the room? Such a small, simple detail. Jules tended to sleep with at least one hand palm-upward on the pillow, his fingertips nestled together. He’d held something in his sleep and dropped it. Martin wanted to find it and give it back, no matter how trivial – a tennis ball, a wadded washcloth, the belt Martin used to beat him and choke him, a yarn skein, the car keys to the 99’  – but Jules was only careless with his body, not his belongings – so odious, so sick at heart that you can’t take part, you can’t even passively take part put your body upon the gears and upon the wheels and upon the levers – There’d been a big, clashing piano. He’d forgotten the band already.
He woke up again much later, Jules superheated against his torso, beginning to grumble and sniffle under the blanket. Martin’s phone made a racket in the kitchen, and he went to make it quiet. It was Paul.
“Congratulations,” said Paul, bright and clear, possibly up for hours. “That’s a hell of a lot of raw talent for you to deal with. I’m not sure why you leave the house.”
Martin was so instantly incensed, so suddenly and hideously jealous, he could not move or speak. Then, in a clap of the hand, the velocity halted, the emotions vanished, and the memory of their clarity and clearness left him empty and amused and sweet-tempered. He was just a stupid old guy, he decided, and moved into the bedroom. “Oh sure,” he replied.
Jules was upright and cross-legged, his long, bare, gorgeous back to him, his head enough in profile Martin could half-read the expression on his face. It was either suspicious or gloomy, and it was his business now.
“How’s your boy?” Paul asked.
“Oh, fine,” Martin said. Jules turned, confirmed he was on the phone, and gathered up the blanket around him, like he intended to leave and give Martin privacy. Instead, Martin engaged the speaker and tossed the phone onto the bed.
“Between you and me,” Paul’s degraded voice bloomed, “I think the hit was a little sloppy on my part. But you know what it’s like when you’ve only got one hit in you.”
“We’ve all been there,” Martin replied casually, tucking himself back in while Jules performed a series of double-takes and emphasized, by merely bulging his eyes, what the fuck Marty? “But too excessive for what I was thinking. It was pretty much a wash once you let him go.”
“Well, tell the kid I apologize. Tell him he’s welcome back anytime.”
Jules slithered irresistibly into Martin’s lap and hooked him around the neck with both elbows. He wore a toothy, lunatic smile and his eyes were bright and focused.
“I think, as an experiment, we might have found out all we needed.” Martin leaned back to accommodate.
“Sure, but what a shame. Come to think of it, he’s very sexy, but what was I picking up on – is he, uh, just the tiniest bit, kind of creepy?”
Jules was bluntly slapping Martin’s ribcage with the heel of his hand to express his mute hilarity. “Be thankful –” Martin fended off the hand. “Be thankful you don’t have to watch movies with him. Women fucking corpses. Women sawing off corpse penises. Women getting pregnant from corpses. You’re better off not dealing with it.”
Jules battered him with such intensity Martin had to seize him in his arms and crush him, not an easy task. Jules was smaller than him, but not small in general, he was rangy and a scrapper.
“I had a feeling he was not super immersed,” Paul continued. “He appeared unfocused. It was off-putting. I almost called it, but I decided it wasn’t worth it. I hope you agree.”
“Everything’s just fine.” Martin adjusted his hold as Jules settled down. “Just fine. I wouldn’t worry about it.”
They talked casual for a while – Paul recommended an up-and-coming workshop in their neck of the woods, run by an old acquaintance they shared (where did all these old acquaintances come from?) regarding headspace reinforcement, for the sake of Jules’ training – until Martin’s breeziness convinced him there couldn’t be anything else to discuss about yesterday’s tryst, except for the fact it had been nothing to write home about. Martin said good-bye, but Jules’ darting hand killed the call. With his heel, he launched the cell toward the foot of the bed.
“You dog.” He slithered all the way up Martin’s chest, something he tended to do when he was turned on. Martin preferred it to clawing. “That was one of your old friends!”
“The great thing about casual old friends,” Martin corrected, gathering Jules up and depositing him down once more, “Is what they don’t know won’t hurt them.”
“Still,” Jules said, even while Martin tended to his oblivious body. “Aren’t we all responsible for each other? Wasn’t this his chance to grow? Are we just on earth to use each other? Ow -! Man, I can’t believe he called me creepy. That’s sooo –”
Without pain, or shock, or novelty, it sometimes took Jules ten or fifteen minutes to settle down into sex. He would not shut up, he would brace himself against Martin’s body like an inexperienced swimmer being dragged out into the lake, he would kick himself free from Martin’s snares, roll away, hold his head, then roll back. After finding a superficial calm, his body would rediscover the motions and his awkward, bony hands would caress Martin’s hardworking back. But Martin would feel one of his open eyes against his cheek and know he was staring blindly at the ceiling, maybe thinking what the hell is going on?
Jules once said to him, only once, and casually, “too bad you can’t just beat the shit out of me all the time,” and Martin knew better than to vocally disagree. He didn’t know how to tell Jules that after the great opening of the door, the permission to start fucks while the other was asleep, the granted across-the-board freedom to apply maintenance discipline, the instructions to continue after a no, no, stop, that sometimes after experiencing all these gifts, you would not want them. You could take them or leave them. You could leave them behind as decisively as you forced yourself to forget the time your creepy, youthful boyfriend un-blinked up at you as you both made love; and you had to forget, because you saw that inexplicable, parentified expression on his childless face, the one that said, please lighten up, please let me like you, please let me understand you – twenty-one years old! So who had he learned it from?
STRICT ZONE 1 – CAKE BOSS (a valet’s graceful carriage undertaking an inconvenienced task)
STRICT ZONE 2 – RUBBER VALLEY (heavy latex degradation/objectification/forniphilia/machinification - good ol vanilla jealousy amongst idyll Wisconsin Dells)Â
STRICT ZONE 3 - HOT BOX OR BLISS (a tender jock ingenue ignores Our Heroes and exerts a bloody boundary)
STRICT ZONE 4 – HETEROFUCK (Happy Birthday, Domme Lux!)
STRICT ZONE 5 – LYDIA SUCKS (The Abjection of The Service Top)
STRICT ZONE 6 – BROKE DICK (UTIs, prostatitis, and the chastity journeys we make alone the way)
STRICT ZONE 7 – I NEVER TIRE, I SERVE (The Estrangement)
And it came to pass, a few weeks after she and Jules made a bad decision on his thrifted futon, that they met again during 4th of July merrymaking.Â
Lux toddled in grey lake water among Ava, Claire, and Archie (Celeste down and out with summer flu). Lux couldn’t swim, a fact disclosed in private to Ava, which Ava hadn’t kept to herself, and the group formed a stooped, anxious ring around her doggy-paddling. She was forced, among the smell of hot dogs in the safe green grass hundreds of yards beyond and the ominous cloud cover above, to make sure only her ass whomped her protectors’ knees when the waves tried to boil her body up and away. She’d made a mistake, and her only wardrobe protection beyond her suit itself and her spandex underthing was a hastily added solid color sarong, which while dry didn’t match, and while wet, just looked lousy and modest. But she couldn’t be parted with it and had made up a past bout of minor skin cancer, a pin-mole insidiously located on her protected inner thigh, the paranoia of which haunted her still. Even Ava dropped her chin for the C-word.
Now she suggested Lux float on her back and allow her perception of the water to form fingers in the magic slot located on her lower back, and soon she’d be floating like crazy among the wacky kids and her hot workmates and her boss and all their invisible pubes. A wave slapped dirty fingers up Lux’s nose.
“It’s kind of like learning a language,” Archie contributed. “Got to learn it when you’re young. Looks like your parents fucking doomed you.”
“My pap pap slam-dunked me in our above-ground when I was five,” said Claire, who floated tummy-down in frog position by exerting no effort Lux could observe. “I bobbed right back up, but like, what if I hadn’t?”
Lux, six feet tall, decided to use it to her advantage and planted her knees in the sandbar. She could just about do it and keep her eyes and forehead in periscope position.
“Reuben and I are thinking of installing an above-ground,” said Ava, and seeing Lux shrink, rose to her feet and splashed water across her dewy collarbone. Lux pushed every single one of them out of her mind and stared between the chops out into the open sea to make-believe Michigan somewhere on the other side. A rhythmic slap approached from the left and the white bow of a lifeguard’s canoe sailed past their collected heads.
“Hey now,” scolded the familiar voice behind the sunglasses, “only three hot bitches are allowed in the water at a time. Think of the community.”
Ava sloshed around at the familiarity, but everybody else had already noticed it was, absurdly, Jules, and sent up a bunch of soggy greetings, all except Lux who rose into a semi-crouch in the drifting seabed out of surprise, and Ava, who let them all perform verbal recognition on her behalf and only spared a nod.
Jules looked very high school, very lanky on the bobbing bench, with the oars braced under his tanned arms and his cute red tank top cinched under his fanny pack. He rode the up-down of the surf the same way he did most things, with enough bored grace to suggest he’d learned quite enough and had more interesting things to do. Lux had recently learned this conceit of his could be bypassed, and she was glad he kept the sunglasses on when he looked her over.
“What’s up Cathy,” he said, with the same Sophomore carelessness, and she plunged her head under an oncoming wave, the pressure preferable to the dawning knowledge that now, he had information he could disclose, and he’d had it for weeks.
She rose again, squinting. She couldn’t tell if he had caught on.
“What?” he asked. “What did I do?”
“You got another job, Jules?” Ava surged forward, displaced Lux. “Roscoe doesn’t give you enough to do, on top of commissions?”
“Give me another commission and you’ll find out.” He drew the left oar’s pole hard under his titty to keep the nose of the canoe from slicing into their crescent. The mechanism bucked like a horse and the wind snatched the ugly white hat off his head and toward an oblivion of preteens due north. Claire yelped and threw herself into the water, rippled away to go fetch it. “You ever been in the cellar underneath Rawhide, Ava? That’s like, thrice-darkness. I was gonna kill myself.”
“I’ve never been in a situation that required me to be in the cellar underneath Rawhide.” Prim Ava glanced pityingly at Lux, who allowed wave after wave to pummel her head in her effort to stay low. “Poor baby. She can’t swim.”
“Throw her off the pier,” Jules suggested.
“It worked for Claire’s pap pap,” Archie said, and braced an annoying hand on the back of Lux’s neck. “Sorry babe, looks like you’re going down.”
Lux threw herself underwater before Archie could push her into the drink. Beneath the top swell she had enough time to touch her palms to the sand and try to dig her hands where she’d braced her knees, but she was blind, and the divots were washed away and the grains were swept off and replaced swept off and replaced, and she panicked when the water tugged the sarong’s knot. She resurfaced from the green and grey, coughing and yanking the weedy fabric around her legs. Ava, shining and petite against the sky, so securely tucked to smoothness, had finished with Jules herself and was high stepping back to shore.
“…I’m just saying, you should definitely try it out –” Archie had spoken in the interim. Jules was nodding. He’d shoved the sunglasses up and over his curly head and while his gaze was trained forward to take in the gamboling bathers, Lux could feel him keeping her in the corner of his eye.
 -
She remembered being in good if overenergetic spirits. She recalled a hot yellow sun. She wore her lavender halter with the powder-blue culottes, her hair freshly hennaed from the night before and trustily bunned. She traveled from a three-hour duo with Ava regarding some mind-numbing bouts of predicament ropework that left her guiltily bored of the client and his ballerina snobbishness, but pleased with her improving knots, and with the fact she could at least trick Ava into thinking she was a viable rope top. She’d exited the bus prematurely and entered the sidewalk throng to burn through her constipated spirits, past a raucous patio partition of a dippy sport’s bar and collided with Jules himself, exiting.
It was like striking a human-size grasshopper. He recoiled, elbows up, and almost upset a busboy’s tray. She reared at his excess, ready to dive into the full indulgence of her insult. In the past year after the Annelise Petro incident she’d only seen him at a distance. Their last words, exchanged in close quarters within Jules’s car more than twelve months ago, had not been civil. He was much tanner than she remembered of him in previous summers. He’d filled out in the chest and shoulders. For a second, she could glimpse he’d gained some weird physical vitality – but as she observed, the color drained from his face. His shoulders slumped. He looked sick as a dog. She’d thought he was drunk.
She grabbed him by the shoulders and steered his head away from her. “Do not,” she ordered, “Do not fucking puke on me.”
He pulled himself straight but didn’t dislodge from her grip. “Don’t say anything,” he hissed, dirt-sober, and before she could make him clarify, a middle-aged couple loomed over his shoulders. The woman, a full six inches shorter than both Lux and Jules (it was just then Lux realized she and Jules were precisely the same height) sparkled nervously, trussed in Cubs blues.
“Oh Jules,” she said, “Who’s this?”
She was blond and ferrety, but in the man, Lux could see a sour and fleshy shadow of Jules’s own face and bearing. He looked at her with the same stern contemplation Jules had leveled on her in the past, and Jules presently, dead in the eyes, curled in on himself like a shrimp.
She’d inexplicably exited her rancorous ditch and stumbled over Jules in the no-man’s land of Blood Relatives. She wanted to, against all rational thought, shove him behind her back and put her arms out.
Instead, she reached a hand to the man (dad? Oh boy, what fun) and chirped, “Hi, I’m Catherine!”
And to the woman (mother? God in heaven), “don’t we just all love Jules!”
The woman shriveled with feeling that hardly looked like relief. The man gravely shook Lux’s hand, and she was pleased with his grip’s condescending pressure. Her body moved far ahead of her brain. She could see herself at distance, popping one toe behind her planted heel, one hip cocked, tits pushed out, but no further than her glowing smile. “And how do you two know each other,” the man said, said, explicitly did not ask. Neither man nor woman introduced themselves.
Jules, white-lipped, opened his mouth but Lux flowed over him. “2007,” she answered, “Leidermeister Playhouse, down in, uh, are you from around here? No? Well, Tinley-ish. Way down there. Spring musical. I was on playbill. And Jules was doing costumes for Pippin.”
For the first time, Jules treated her to the sweet sight of his smug, sick face struck totally dumb.
“Theater!” The woman bubbled. She put her hand on her companion’s meaty forearm, placating.
But the man was not letting her go without a fight. “Theater,” he said. “And what part did you play.”
She treated him to her glowing smile first (cracking, a little). If Jules had learned his own abysmal manners from these creeps, then he’d somehow made improvements on his own time.
“The Mother,” she improvised. “Of course.”
“Stepmother,” Jules piped up, at last.
It was all yadda-yadda to Lux, but the man finally checked the neon dial of his watch, gripped the woman by the elbow, said they would have to start taking pains for a cab if they wanted to catch the game in time. “Sure,” Jules said, though his permission hadn’t been asked, his advice unsought. “You’re not far away.”
“You call her and say you saw us, sir,” the man said. “She’ll expect it.”
Jules was too busy accepting limp patty-pats from the woman, who shot Lux a tragic grin before she scampered up the sidewalk, followed by the broad back of her presumed husband. No proper hug, no I-Love-You, no masculine head smacks or back whacks or take-care-of-yourself-you-hear pronouncements. They just walked away. Her own parents would be appalled.
The life was coming back to Jules’s face, but he was still doubled over, as if from a cramp. “Jiminy Christmas,” he uttered, and she wanted, in a surge, nothing more than to pinch his cheeks and trap his head in her armpit and noogie him to death and bust his fluff. Instead, she assisted him away from the crowd, and before long they strolled down a quiet residential street, arm in arm. She decided to give him five whole minutes to recover from the encounter, but he did it in two.
“Ledermeister,” he said to her, appalled.
“Leider,” she corrected.
“You nutty bitch,” he dared, but there was no gas behind it.
“It’s like you think I’m some kind of pervert or something,” she said, and before she could help it, she started to nag. “What did you think I was going to say? Jules makes rubber sex suits with built-in condoms? I saw him in street clothes in a high-etiquette dungeon fingering my boss’s twenty-one-year-old latex bottom?” She felt him up a little in her haste, accidentally, and he squeaked. “Who actually has something to lose here?” She asked. “Who’s the fucking dominatrix here?”
“You don’t like me,” Jules said, coolly. “I had no idea what you would say.”
He sounded terribly calm. The sidewalk was dappled in shadows of maple leaves and, boxed in by reasonable townhouses on both sides, she was inclined to stay calm as well, and in her calm, she found a strange truth.
“I like you just fine,” she said.
“Oh.” Â
She liked him just fine. She liked him more than she liked Ava.
They walked.
“God, it’s fucking hot,” she said. It would be more comfortable not to have their arms around the other, but she didn’t unlatch.
“I moved to this neighborhood a couple weeks ago,” he said. “We’re not too far. I’ve got a window unit.”
A window unit meant he’d accumulated an actual window; a net gain from what she remembered of the dismal basement unit she’d ducked inside three times over their three year acquaintance, along with a damp cement strip notating the kitchen and two hoary pipes jutting six inches from the ceiling where tawny water dripped into provided buckets and Jules himself, barefoot, crisscross applesauce on a carpet square stringing the hundredth of ten-thousand waiting bugle beads with one or two local drag queens, staring open mouthed at a small, shit television propped up on a pile of clean laundry encased in a garbage bag, and onscreen a shoulder-padded daytime soap actress made lines like “there’s nothing to worry about Blake – do you really think I’d expose the Nazi treasure to outsiders?”
“Yeah, let’s,” she said.
He’d found a squat, orangey building with collapsed flower beds out front and only the faintest smell of weed in the halls. She noted, vain, that he opened the doors for her and motioned her up the stairs first and it wasn’t until she’d reached the top landing of the third floor, and he was sorting out keys that she felt the pluck of that old sexy situation, which was Going Inside a Boy’s Apartment, something she hadn’t done since college, and even at that time, something that usually happened under the close watch of protective friends. She couldn’t eye him either, to see which way his intentions were shifting – he was already eying her – but then he let her inside and the feeling was wiped out by absurd, maternal relief.
“Oh, thank God,” she blurted out. “This is so much better.”
The place still smelled like paint and floor wax, and she walked about at her leisure, touching the walls, and flapping her arms, knowing she wasn’t going to crash into a spiderweb or trod on mummified centipedes. The only furniture yet was a pulled-out futon (he was a bedmaker, who knew) and the walls had been built out to delineate a kitchen. She lifted the back of her shirt to the air conditioner.
“I thought you were an idiot for accepting that place, before,” she told him, regarding the old basement. “Or you’d picked it to antagonize people on purpose.”
“Give me a break! I was broke. I was nineteen.”
He shed one flip-flop on his way to the kitchen. She watched it prone on the floor while she calculated.
“No, no,” she reminded him. “When we first met, Ava said you were twenty. We were in a bar. She made you duck under the table when the bouncer made rounds. You were illegal.”
“Nuh-uh,” he said, unevenly thwap-thwapping back to her. He handed her a beer. “I was here a whole year before you showed up. I came before you.”
He sat on the edge of the futon, and she considered that perspective as he scratched the back of his shin with his bare foot. He had long, narrow feet, and when he was looking at things that weren’t people looking back at him, his eyes tended to glaze over. He was looking at the blank wall.
“Hold up,” she said. “How old are you now?”
“Old enough for you to sit next to me,” he replied.
It didn’t mean anything, coming from him. She left her beer on the windowsill and sat next to him. He’d have to get a nicer bed at some point, she thought, bouncing up and down a little, and wondered if, all along, his manners and his living situation pissed her off so much not because, as she initially believed, they were representations of his obnoxious personality, but because she had been frightened that he was going to get hurt and clearly no one else around was going to warn him otherwise.
“You must have left your parents pretty quick,” she said.
“That was my aunt and uncle, just now.”
“Were they more fun when you were growing up?”
“My grandma raised me,” he said. “For eight years. Then we swapped.”
She unfastened her sandal straps and tried to dream up a guess about him that could possibly be correct, but she had the feeling if she said raised in a house? He’d go no, in Mr. Toad’s canary-colored caravan, and the woodland squirrels taught me how to sew, and I lost my virginity to Morlocks. She wondered if she was the first girl he’d ever brought up here. She wondered if his aunt and uncle already knew he was gay. She wondered if he was gay. And in her wonderings, she missed, at first, his growing impatience beside her. He touched her hand; she accidentally flipped her right sandal underneath the futon.
“Crap,” she said.
He rolled his eyes and slid to the floor, slipped between her legs, and with one cheek pressed to her thigh he rooted one armed underneath the springs and came out with the sandal, which he deliberately tossed several feet away. He came up on his knees, face lifted to hers, and she had to spread her own knees to accommodate him. His stern little expression was very cute, and she was warm with pleasant condescension, something sorely missing from her and Ava’s ropework that afternoon. She was tired of art, she decided, ignoring Jules’ cold hands creeping up the back her shirt, and she was tired of fantasy and she was sick of endurance feats physical and mental, and she was tired of her own cowardly communication, so much so the tiny bubble of unearned pride she felt for Jules’s ability to maneuver himself into the positions he required ballooned, out of control, into an old familiar cocoon where she couldn’t hurt him and he couldn’t hurt her.
“Nobody knows,” he told her, perhaps feeling it too. “But I can be a good boy.”
Jiminy Christmas, indeed. But he couldn’t have her for cheap, and he clawed her spine too confidently. She put her palm to his left cheek, let her thumbnail scrape over a pale divot where it looked like the nap of a paint scraper had teased out a pill of his flesh, years ago.
“Listen,” she asked, and squeezed his ribs with her knees. “If you had met me while I was with relatives, and I looked scared about it, what would you have done?”
His fixed gaze skittered to the side, over the wall, across the floor, and while he didn’t retreat, he only spoke up when his face reached a zenith of clumsy guilt. “I would have fucked around with you first,” he admitted. “Only a little.”
“I thought so,” she said, and smacked him a nasty one across the face.
With no furniture around, the crack resonated. Jules took it open-eyed. He didn’t whine or argue and only clenched his jaw a couple seconds after, when the real pain hit. He faced her again, glowing and pink, his left eye watering. She couldn’t help it. She grabbed his head and squeezed and clawed and palpated, yanked his lamby hair, perfect for yanking, and beat his butt with her heels. His head thrashed and his hands flapped around behind her back. She seized one and forced it down on the blanket and let the other undo her halter knot while she bridled him with her free thumb. His back molars rose on the edges in sharp ridges, and she whirled her wrist under his chin until she could see him swallow from the inside. The whites of his eyes showed.
“Good boy my ass,” she said, to herself, but he heard and appeared wounded. “Okay, okay,” she conceded. She wiped her thumb on his face, forgave him silently, and even her playful meanness disintegrated. He crawled over her lap and rubbed his red-hot face in her shoulder, gnawed painlessly on her clavicle. His shorts stuck out in front.
She knew a hundred ways of positioning and a hundred more roleplay scenarios he’d probably accept without suspecting she used them not to her pleasure, but to protect her modesty. She was sick of it all, hadn’t fucked or been fucked properly since she’d been his age, and was horny enough to maim. She took him again by the shorthairs along the nape of his toasted neck, and when he sighed down her back, she pressed his hand to her groin.
“Feel,” she ordered.
He felt dopily, paused, and resumed. Squeezed. Offered no comment.
“Tell me what that is,” she said.
He had delicate ways when he had enough patience to reveal them. Without asking permission he slipped a hand down her waistband, far between her legs, far too quickly for her to chase him off, and by the time she felt him properly, he held her so the head nestled in the heel of his hand, wedged against the meat of his thumb. He felt her up against the underside vein of his silky wrist.
“That’s the cock that’s gonna fuck me,” he answered, correctly.
 -
She had condoms in her purse. He had Vaseline in a bric-a-brac moving tub besides the futon. He rolled onto his narrow tummy, and she flipped him onto his back again so fast he nearly rolled off the mattress. She wished, as she watched him raise a knee and finger himself, that she’d brought her toolkit with her from the club where she kept her nitrile gloves and her fancy salves and her more mobile toys. Jules laid himself out on the futon like somebody else would on a beach, languid and comfortable and she pressed one of his nipples with impatience. She suspected he’d be chatty, but he didn’t speak at all during the preliminaries. He had more body hair than she would have expected, but not enough to grab, and a severe bathing suit tan line that reminded her of Ava’s jabs about the minor gossip between him and Roscoe. She wondered if some queen paid him to lay out on a patio somewhere, if that kind of arrangement still happened, and she wondered if he could let go of the sniping and the attitude long enough to show that hypothetical crowd what he was showing her now – that he was, actually, a very good boy.
When he was ready for her, the very good boy reached out with his arms (and made gimme-gimme clutches with his hands). She obligingly sank on top of him, then, quicker than she intended, into him, guided by his hooked shin and a decisive hand on her ass. She clawed his scalp and arched, involuntarily driving herself forward. A telltale sensation like he’d dumped a bucket of his own blood over her head soaked her from head to toe, and for a hot second she thought it was too late – then he jerked one her nipples until she shrieked and came back to him, stunned.Â
You’ve got more than that in you, she heard him say, through the haze in her brain, and in between two blinks he swapped out the sadist faunlet for, once again, being her very good boy, and he undid her bun with one hand and guided her head so he could kiss her mouth and calm her down. She saw from above his legs lock around the small of her back. She was shocked she could get hard enough to effectively penetrate, a shock that blissfully vaporized as she rocked inside him.
His own cock, which they mutually ignored, was restrained by her soft stomach. Her breasts ached, pressed against his chest, and she had to break free from his clasp to prop herself on her forearms. He followed her, licked her lips until she gave up and sank back down. The tip of his nose was cold against her cheek. She could feel his lashes and the curve of his eyeball roam around in the socket. He was a ferocious and intent kisser, not nearly so languid now, and every goosebump outside his skin and strand of muscle beneath rose to her, encased her in his prickles. His focus made her quite aware of a separation between her hips (melted, as far as she was concerned) and her brain, electric-bright now, entertaining Jules by turns as a barbed, poisonous plant, as a nuzzling, brainless creature, as a mean bottom slut who clawed her bottom and held her hair in a knot in his fist, who maybe needed to be exercised as a handler would a spirited pony, in order to nurture his kindness, improve his manners, and keep his juices fresh – and she giggled involuntarily, a tight muscle in her back relaxed, and she came inside a boy for the first time.
She either made an unacceptable noise, or a had been making noises all along. A downstairs neighbor ratta-tat-tatted their ceiling, Jules’s floor. Practical as a fillet knife, Jules pushed her out of his ass, swung one leg wide, slammed his heel rudely against the floorboards, uttered “fuck off, asshole” then rolled back to her again and rubbed his face between her breasts. She cuddled him a couple tender seconds, which he tolerated, before scuttling backward and regarding her from a lucid distance as she disposed the condom.
“Come back here, she said. He looked like a praying mantis.
First, he stuck his legs off the thin mattress and with one judicious sweep of his torso, seemed to crack every bone in his body. Then he crawled over and allowed himself to be held.
“Oh,” she noticed. “You didn’t come.” His dick was still hard, and when he laid his back flat against her hip, it bobbed due west of his belly button.
“Relax, it doesn’t always happen for me.”
She ignored him and let her ego propel her forward. He reclined on her like she was a chaise and breathed through his nose.
“You know what Ava calls you?” She asked, jerking him onward and upward, hopefully.
“I’m a community opportunist,” he answered smugly. “Plus, Roscoe’s houseboy.”
Two out of two, verbatim. She drew her nails up and down his stomach and he twitched, fought against curling up. “Houseboy,” he repeated, hissed. “The last houseboy passed away in the fucking nineties. They peeled him down with the wallpaper.” She felt, through his spine, how he tried and failed to work up a temper. “Then they tatted his chalk outline above some burlesque artist’s John Willie tramp stamp. Mistress Avalon sure is concerned with faggot business.”
“Your boys don’t make you come?” She asked, a hill over him now, and above arguing. He sparred solely with himself.
“What boys? These guys – big guys –”
She went back for more Vaseline, not great for this kind of thing, but she was getting the idea Jules had a sensible nursery spirit and rarely abused himself. He didn’t appear to know much about his body and froze like a striker frame when she rolled the tip of him in her palm for more than fifteen seconds.
“– They think your asshole is your only sex organ,” he continued. “They hate themselves for loving twinks. And then they give you the reach around and if you aren’t wet like pussy then oh-h-h-h my god, it’s like the fucking sky is falling –”
She sat up, and his feet paddled the blanket to stay in contact. He reached behind her and grabbed her hair again but didn’t pull. He turned his face into her neck, and he shook all over.
“Being a slut is really hard,” he said, woefully, failing to hide, for a millisecond, the ghost of what might have been a sweet kid. Or it was her imagination. Either way, she made him come all over himself. It didn’t seem to register to him until the drops hit his chest. He looked down at his sad, wet dick and then back up at her, so testily she laughed in his face. He was smudged pink all over from her lipstick, and she pinched his springy cheeks.
“I’m a cradle-robber,” she declared.
“Okay, Methuselah,” he said, unimpressed, and darted away into the dirty ivory bathroom before she could slap his ass.
He recovered rapidly. In the sunny room things took a slumber party turn. He fetched her abandoned beer, dug out makeup wipes he inexplicably possessed, and repaired the damage to her makeup. He berated her when she couldn’t stop giggling.
“I was kind of wondering…” he began.
He paused. Sex had made him tactful.
“Go on,” she allowed.
“I was wondering if I’d ever figure out why you bothered being a dominatrix.” He used the point of his little finger to clear wet black scuzz from the corner of her eye. She hardly felt it. “Ava’s got her thing about being top dog. Claire’s a sadist. And somebody needs to get around to neutering Archie before he starts spraying the furniture. You, a mystery.”
“You think about me!” She preened and wiggled.
“You go on.”
“I like,” she confided, “to strap muscle hunks to the pommel horse and tickle them until they scream.”
“Gee whiz.”
“I like straitjackets, but I don’t like rope,” she continued. “And I like floggers, but not single-tail whips. And I like human furniture, but not human ashtrays.”
“The Marquis de Lux over here.”
He’d reached around and started French-braiding her hair. She put her ear to his chest and found his mousey heart.
“My mom and dad were angels,” she continued. “And my sisters were angels and my aunts and uncles and my grandparents. They were angels from the start. So was I. I liked it. Doctors like it too. When a kid is angelic, and very, very, very, very good, and says the right things, and rolls over. They give you what you need.” She thought that over. “They decide to give you what you need,” she clarified. “I was rolling over constantly. I didn’t know how to stop. It freaked me out.”
Jules’s heart answered wug-wug-wug. He sat in her lap and tried to get her braid to stay fixed in a twist. “See, I’m the opposite,” he said. “I’m a huge cunt, but I’m always looking for an excuse to be nice.”
Her hair unwound down her back. He clamped her bobby pins between his teeth, to deliberately make the job harder, then, looking down in their laps, spit them on the floor. And as quickly as she decided she needed to find her clothes and depart, having revealed too much, she stayed the entire night.
 -
On the lifeguard pavilions, the green flags were lowered, and yellow flags were handed up.
“Archie,” said Jules, from the safety of the canoe, “Head on back to dry land. No! no,” he called when Archie took Lux’s elbow. “Cathy and I need to talk really quick.”
“It’s not safe,” Archie said.
“I’m Red Cross certified,” Jules said, arms outspread up the oars as far as they could go. “I’m a beautiful heroine, waiting to happen. Also, I’m in fucking charge.”
“Go away, Archie,” Lux agreed, and Archie slopped to the shore, his broad back damp red in the sun’s undergrowth. Dark clouds approached from the west.
“Actually, that’s my boss.” Jules pointed to the sand straight ahead, where a bronzed ingenue, her thigh muscles sticking out like bread loaves, appeared to be watching the duo intently.
“You’ll get in trouble,” Lux cautioned.
“She wants to ride me hard and put me away wet, I think I can get away with it. I feel like you must have,” he added, pointedly. “She’s nineteen.”
It was hard to glare when wet, and it was hard to talk with Jules high and dry. Lux was clammy and clingy, and she couldn’t understand why he sniped at her. Then he crouched down, chest to knees, under pretext of scraping the oars straight down his gunwales and snapped, with pure, guileless annoyance: “Why are you pissed off? I’m the one who should be mad.”
That was too much to bear. “Jules –”
“I showed you my hole and said call me.” He straightened, the little snot, sincerity evaporated. “And you didn’t call me. Now I feel cheap.”
“Jules,” she said, sticking to her own path. “They don’t know.”
“Of course, they don’t know!” He said, clueless, if technically correct. “I didn’t think you’d spread it around to that crowd.”
“Shut up, Jules,” she tried again, and when his mouth opened automatically, she really blew. “Shut the fuck up!”
He shut the fuck up.
“They don’t know. They don’t know.”
She refused to say anymore. She wasn’t in the mood to roll over. Funny, how fucking a guy in the ass could spackle over a few of the gaping holes in her dignity. Patiently, she watched Jules rock to-and-fro, his face oscillating between his premature certainty and the vanishing tail of what she was trying to explain. Then he exclaimed, “huh!” and raised his face to the heavens.
Whistles sounded north and south, and one of his canoe companions raced twenty yards past, churning the creaming waves to reach the point to disembark. Jules ignored it all.
“Oh.” He started, blank-faced. “There’s bossola.”
He waved to the girl on the beach, who was really putting her back into her whistle. “Jesus, baby,” he said just as abruptly to Lux, who had been forced to retreat a few feet to find higher ground. “Now I’m really starting to worry.”
It was either of their guesses, as to what situation he was talking about. Lux wasn’t sure herself, and doubted he knew. His confusion reminded her less of him now, more of him the morning after, when she’d woken up, found him sitting bolt upright, staring at the walls of his clean, sunny studio. He’d turned to her bleary face, and with no confidence whatsoever, asked, Is it really so much better?Â
“You want to climb up?” He asked now. “I’ll tell boss you have a cramp.”
“No, I can make it by myself.” She strolled backwards, ass out of the water, and twisted the sarong in front.
“I told Roscoe I fucked a girl for the first time,” he called to her, his eyes cast demurely downward. “You should have seen the sweat roll down his back.”
“I’ll call you,” she promised.
“Yeah, you better,” he advised, and shielded his face against the bursting spray. “Before someone else does. Ladies love the canoe.”
One perky heave-ho, and he displaced bow and stern, fixed his little craft perpendicular to the beach, and cast off toward the pier.
On the beach, Archie and Claire scuttled in the sand, packing their bags, and shaking out their towels. Claire held Jules’s rogue, soaked hat. “I was going to swim back over, but she yanked me out,” she explained, and pointed out Jules’s bossola, who had, watching Lux emerge from the dirty waters, eyed her face, eyed her cleavage, and continued stalking down the shore. She had an ass that needed to be seen to be believed. Lux hoped Jules wouldn’t tease her too much. She might call him sooner, to demand that exclusively. Possibilities, vistas, scenarios, she thought of all these and wrapped her towel around her waist, and she faced the dreary city skyline and she dreamed, and the full force of her imagination asserted itself.
“I’ll give it to him when I see him next.”Â
Domme Lux took property of the hat.
Ava, ever watchful, caressed their folded umbrella. “I thought you and Jules didn’t get along,” she said. Deliberately did not ask. Lux, in that moment, didn’t care. It wasn’t her job to teach Ava manners.
