The East End

by Jason Allen

  Corey felt a twinge in his chest and pressed his back against the rows of cedar shingles, sliding down to sit on his heels. He crouched more tightly against the house just before the seal broke above his head. The handle kept cranking for the tall window to swivel open. Despite all the heavy scents from the mulch at his feet and the new buds on the branches all around, as soon as the window opened wide, he smelled the fabric softener on her clothes, the flowery trace of conditioner in her hair. Being this close to her surpassed any high he’d ever felt before, but he had to be smart. Invisibility and silence.

  Not wanting to risk blowing his cover but still not able to go, he stayed there with his arms around his knees for the next two hours, and without needing to look inside again he knew Tiffany had passed out right away, while Angelique stayed awake watching the entire movie. Corey listened along, imagining what she might be feeling, mentally watching scene after scene and taking in each of the main characters’ lines of dialogue. He knew without looking that Angelique loved the movie, every moment of it. And yet, since he’d never seen Casablanca before, after the end credits finished and he heard her trying to convince Tiffany to go to bed, he climbed back up to the roof, believing that he’d watched the classic black-and-white story with her in color.

  TWO

  Hours earlier, Leo Sheffield sat alone in the back of his limousine, stuck in Midtown gridlock, snorting a line of cocaine. He pinched his nose and poured another drink, growing more impatient as he rested his chin on his fist and gazed out the tinted window at the lights of Times Square. Electronic billboards glowed and flashed advertisements for movies and TV shows and a slew of services and products, while mammoth talking heads and anchorpeople mouthed brief summaries of the news highlights, closed-captioned transcripts stamped out below a giant video clip of a protest, and another screen showed the president boarding Air Force One. Leo wanted to lower the divider and climb up front and honk the horn himself, bored to death and also feeling boxed in by all the stimuli and information flashing and streaming by; instead, he cut a new line of coke on his pocket mirror and filled his nose, and with wildly blinking eyes then did his best to focus on the demon-red numbers of the Dow Jones scrolling around the corner.

  If the traffic ever finally moved, he would be on his way to pick up Henry, the plan being to spend the whole night with him out at the estate in Southampton, his last possible window to see him before the first big weekend of the summer began. Also the last night before he would once again need to don his trusty old mask and summon his thespian skills to play the role of good husband until sometime Monday. He daydreamed about the hours ahead with Henry—who’d sounded stable enough on the phone that afternoon, despite having spent the better part of the week under observation in Brooklyn Mount Sinai after a suicide attempt.

  Traffic still hadn’t moved, only the sea of people flooding the sidewalks and weaving between bumpers amid honking horns. Leo drifted back to two nights earlier, when he’d received a text from Henry saying he’d been all right since his release from the hospital on Monday. He’d excused himself from Sheila’s cocktail party in their Manhattan penthouse and locked the door to his home office to ensure the privacy he needed to make a call, carrying his drink out to the balcony as he dialed, feeling as though he’d forgotten to exhale all night when he sighed stale air from his lungs.

  On the third ring, Henry answered sounding drugged. “Hey, I was hoping you’d call.”

  Leo looked back through the balcony doors at the locked office door and spoke low. “I may not be able to talk long, but I wanted to check in.”

  “Thanks.”

  “How you feeling?”

  “All things considered,” Henry said, “I’m all right. I miss you, though.”

  “Me, too,” Leo said. He rested an elbow on the balcony railing and sipped his Scotch. In the distance the red lights of an airplane blinked. The faint city noises, car horns and screeching brakes, drifted up. He gazed down at the streetlamps and treetops of Central Park. The first and only walk he and Henry had taken together in public began right there on the walking path a block or so from his building, that night around Christmastime, after Sheila had fallen asleep with Prince Valium and Leo snuck out. He’d planned to end the affair during that walk, but the snowflakes settling on Henry’s shoulders and the crown of his knit hat, and his smile, had caught Leo off guard, effectively melting his worries away. Although the feelings on his end had never grown strong enough to consider divorcing Sheila and scrapping the life they’d shared for so long, the parting hug with Henry that night had lasted long enough for him to sink into watery visions of fantasy, to imagine a parallel universe where they could be together in public during daylight as well.

  Leo turned as a knock sounded against his office door, whispering into the phone, “Sorry to cut this short but I can’t really talk now. Sheila’s summoning me back to her goddamn party. We’re still on for Thursday, right?”

  “I’m counting down the minutes.”

  “So am I.”

  This silence, when each man waited for the other to say goodbye first, had often filled Leo’s face with warmth over the past six months, though now Henry’s recent drama had become the elephant that took up all the space in whichever room Leo inhabited. He needed to make sure Henry wouldn’t do anything so stupid or impulsive again—and so, after going back and forth about it, he’d invited him to Southampton for both their sakes. The prospect of seeing Henry’s stitched-up wrists, and a night of crying and consoling, didn’t appeal at all, but Leo did care for him, and despite the fact that he’d grown ambivalent about their future, even before the events of this week, a part of him did want to see him.

  Back in the Square, Leo bent forward and snorted another line of coke from his pocket mirror, smudged up the excess with his finger and rubbed the powder along his bottom gum. He pinched his nose and inspected it in the mirror until he’d wiped the nostril clean. The car crawled ahead while he stared at the bright advertisements for three more stoplight cycles, and then his driver finally managed to bully the limo through the dense crowds crossing against the green light.

  What felt like ages later, they pulled to the curb and Leo swung open his door. Henry entered, dressed in the charcoal-gray pinstripe Leo had purchased for him some months back, looking weary as he settled onto the leather seat across from him, honoring Leo’s rule that they never touch in public, and not in front of Pete, not even with the dark divider up. Leo swung the door closed thinking it felt wrong not to hug him, but regardless, as the limo pulled away from the curb, he set his drink in the side console and leaned back.

  After an awkward silence, he asked, “You all right?”

  Henry nodded with his head turned toward the window but didn’t say anything.

  “Sorry I couldn’t come see you,” Leo said. “I did try, but they don’t allow any visitors in the behavioral unit.”

  “I’m not blaming you,” Henry said, and Leo knew he wasn’t talking about seeing him at the hospital. “I know how busy you are,” Henry went on. “I just wish we could see each other more often.”

  Leo chopped a mound of cocaine with a razor blade and raked out three new lines.

  “Well, we’re together now.”

  “Yeah,” Henry said, “for one night.”

  Leo handed over the coke straw and pocket mirror, and during the exchange their fingers touched and he pulled his hand back as if from a sudden flame. Grinning, hoping the mood would lighten soon, he mixed a vodka tonic for Henry and poured another single-malt for himself. Henry’s stoic expression didn’t change, though, and when he leaned down and snorted his first two lines, the white gauze of his bandages peeked from the jacket’s cuffs. Pinching at his nose, Henry held the mirror out like a waiter, but Leo waved him off and prompted him to have another.

  Henry’s eyes focused on his own arm. “You saw this.”

  Leo slugged his drink, h
is eyes starting to water, imagining what Henry’s arms looked like under the gauze and padding. “How bad is it?”

  “The stitches itch, but otherwise...” He leaned back and kicked off his shoes. “I might not get to see you again for most of the summer, right? That’s what you said?”

  “I’m really sorry about that.”

  “No, no, it’s fine. I tried to kill myself, but I’m still here, so let’s just have a good night.”

  “I’d like that,” Leo said, yet the atmosphere in the car had grown dismal. He’d never seen someone look so deflated, especially not Henry, who’d usually been a fountain of energy. He sipped more of his drink and tried to feign a smile. No matter what Henry said tonight to let him off the hook, it was obvious—he’d done this to him. He’d pulled the rug out, crushed him.

  Last week, exactly six months after their first full night together, Henry had said “I love you” at precisely the wrong time, a mere moment before Leo had planned to tell him he’d be spending the summer with Sheila and the kids out in Southampton, working from there as well, and that he might not get too many opportunities to call, either. Something broke in Henry then; Leo had seen it and then bungled along, babbling nervously about how he cared about him, cared a great deal in fact. But the truth was, he hadn’t considered whether he loved him. Now he worried that Henry did blame him, and might even have a grudge. And what a nightmare if he decided to tell someone at the company, or Sheila—or much worse, what if he tried to off himself again?

  Leo needed another minute to shrug off the paranoia that always set up like icicles in his veins during the early moments of their rides together, but which now had been compounded by Henry’s wrists and forearms. Behind the blackout glass, Pete sat up front and focused on the road, playing his role in the charade. He must have known Henry wasn’t just some ordinary business associate. Only a dunce wouldn’t have put two and two together by then, and even before all the drama this week, Leo still felt a hell of a lot more than uneasy at the thought of anyone knowing about this affair. But that didn’t matter as much anymore.

  As he looked at Henry now, it killed him to see such a dull glint in his eyes where there had always been so much light. Leo nearly leaned across to kiss him but felt an internal brake engage before he’d moved an inch. If anyone ever found out he’d been cheating on his wife with a man, a much younger man no less... The fallout still terrified him too much to risk it. No, he thought, I’ll wait.

  * * *

  An hour into the drive up the Long Island Expressway, Frank Sinatra crooned about a woman with loose morals from the limo speakers, and Leo couldn’t help but croon along now that Henry’s mood had dramatically improved by the third or fourth drink. Soon after Frank finished singing smack about the woman in the song, Henry suddenly curled in on himself, his drink sloshing over the rim of the glass as he fell into a fit of laughter.

  “What’s so funny?” Leo asked.

  Henry snorted two lines in quick succession, laughed more even before he raised his face from the coke and pinched his nose. He took a moment to pull himself together, and Leo leaned closer. Henry wiped away tears, cleared his throat and finally shouted over the music, “I was thinking about the night when Sheila tracked you down at the hotel and almost caught us, and then accused you of having an affair—with a woman.” He paused, laughing hard again. “‘Tell me her name, Leo! Tell me the bitch’s name!’ I couldn’t get enough of that story when you told me the next day, and I still can’t believe she thought your housekeeper might be the other woman. What’s her name again—Jada?”

  “Gina.”

  “Seriously, your wife is a piece of work. I mean, come on—your housekeeper? You two have been married longer than I’ve been alive, but does she fucking know you at all?”

  Leo had laughed along with Henry about his wife’s mistaken assumption that he’d been having an affair with a woman in the past, and though she’d been especially off-base in suspecting Gina, she hadn’t been wrong about the affair part. So now, the fact that Leo was riding to Sheila’s home-away-from-home with Henry, with the man he had been with at the hotel that night in February, the guilt welled up; as difficult as Sheila could be at times, he couldn’t bring himself to laugh, not at her expense, not now.

  “Let’s get back to what you were saying earlier,” Leo said, eager to change the subject. “That ridiculous idea that Americans are tired of the mega-marts, and that we should dump those stocks and any mutual funds that rely on them. Where do you come up with this stuff?”

  “It makes perfect sense! More and more people, myself included, have too much information about the worker exploitation, and are willing to drive out of the way to shop at a mom-and-pop instead of one of the Goliaths like Walmart.” Henry took a hefty gulp of his drink and pointed at Leo’s nose. “You missed a little something there, Pablo Escobar. And in case you haven’t noticed, capitalism is killing the planet.”

  “I knew it, I’ve been seduced by a goddamned commie.”

  “Well, you know what they say.”

  “What do they say, dimples?”

  “Commies do it till they’re red in the face. Get it? Red in the face!”

  Sinatra kept on crooning while the two men laughed to the point of coughing and mixed new drinks. Henry’s laughter finally trailed off while Leo was in the midst of snorting one more line. The moment he looked up from the pocket mirror he found Henry staring at him, deadpan, with an eyebrow raised.

  “They probably shouldn’t have let me out of the psych ward,” he said.

  “No, why is that?”

  “Because I must be crazy to be in this limousine of yours with this misogynist’s anthem playing. Didn’t the whole Rat Pack scene end way back when you were my age?”

  “Good stuff never gets old.”

  “Everything and everyone gets old, Papa Bear, and eventually it all dies. Now that I’m thinking of it, can we please kill this crusty, dusty, grab-her-by-the-crotch old-man music?” Henry paused and held his glass at his bottom lip. “Quit smiling at me like that, Leonard.”

  “Don’t call me Leonard.”

  “Fine, but one more song from Old Blue Eyes and I’m gonna start looking over my shoulder for someone to bring me a fucking gold watch for my retirement.”

  Leo set his drink in the side console, removed the gold Rolex from his wrist and handed it over. “Here,” he said. “For your retirement.”

  Henry drained his drink in a few gulps and poured a new one, tonic water still foaming over and dripping off the side when he accepted the watch. He let it dangle from his fingers and slung it around in circles. “Joke or not, I’m keeping this, mister.”

  “Goddamn it,” Leo said, mouthing his words so he wouldn’t be heard above the music, “I want to kiss you right now.”

  Henry shifted to the edge of his seat. “I’m not the one stopping you.”

  Leo smiled, suddenly aware of an overwhelming need to answer nature’s call. Through the intercom he asked Pete to pull over for a pit stop, and a couple minutes later, somewhere around the crossover from Nassau to Suffolk County, the limousine parked at a gas station and Leo stumbled out.

  Wobbly and disoriented, he crossed the parking lot toward the unisex bathroom, even more off-balance when he entered the weird light from a twitching fluorescent bulb against the dirty floor-to-ceiling tiles. One eye closed at the sight of flies buzzing around chicken bones and a black banana peel in the trash can. Then he glanced over at the filthy toilet, missing both a lid and a seat. After relieving himself, he looked into the cracked, graffiti-scrawled mirror, where his face split into jagged shards, and stood there thinking about Sheila, about how formal they’d been with one another for as far back as he could recall.

  Through no fault of hers, a few uninterrupted hours with his wife in any scenario had felt for years like a chore, like something to endure. Maybe now that the kids were a
ll grown it might not be so selfish, but rather an act of kindness, to finally separate. Especially now that another summer was set to begin tomorrow, which meant three straight months maintaining a calm facade while Sheila went fussing about over germaphobic missions to clean everything, though not cleaning anything herself, of course, but rather, directing Gina and the other employees from room to room with lists of anal tasks and a battle-pack of disinfectants.

  One of the long light bulbs over his shoulder ceased its twitching as it shut off, and in the half-light his broken reflection stared back. “Just get through the weekend,” he said. “Then do the right thing, and finally end it.”

  A knock on the bathroom door resonated inside the dim tiled room, which prompted him to look away from the mirror and pump the grimy liquid soap container above the sink. He rinsed quickly and reached out with a wet wad of paper towel as a barrier between his hand and whatever microbes might be thriving along the thin dead bolt on the door, slid it across and opened up, and then found Henry standing there with a maniacal grin. “Mind if I cut in?” he said, purposely grazing Leo’s pant leg with his hand as the two passed through the doorway in opposite directions.

  A few feet from the car, Pete stood facing Leo while talking quietly into his cell phone, but promptly finished his call and slipped the phone into his jacket pocket. “You could have kept talking,” Leo said. His jaw trembled from all the cocaine. His left nostril begged him to scratch it but he’d promised himself not to pinch at his nose. The drinks had long since kicked in, too, which made it a challenge to focus on his driver’s face.