Cleanness

by Garth Greenwell

  R. pulled out his guidebook then, with its useless maps, he was afraid we would lose the light before we saw San Marco. He started walking more quickly while I hung back, protesting; it didn’t matter, everything was beautiful, everything was something we hadn’t seen before and wouldn’t see again. But he insisted, increasingly frustrated as the map refused to align with the streets we walked; he was better with maps than I was but not by much. He got annoyed with me for walking too slowly and stopping too often, but I wanted to take photos of everything, the buildings, the canals, the laundry hung out in the damp air to dry, the mask shop with its window of carnival grotesques, backlit through the metal grill that had been pulled down. R. was growing frantic in a way I didn’t understand. We would lose the light, he kept saying, as though he were an artist imagining a scene, I want to see it before we lose the light. So I put away my camera and walked more quickly, I kept my eyes on R. to avoid being distracted by anything else. And he did find it, finally, by luck mostly, I think, suddenly we turned and it opened out before us, after the cramped alleys the expanse of the square, beyond it the horizon of water. R. turned to me, smiling, and surely it wasn’t at that moment that the bells began to ring, it’s a trick of memory to stage it that way, but it is how I remember it, the birds flying up, everyone turning to the Campanile, as we did, its top still bright as it caught the last of the sun. Merchants were walking through the crowds, hawking toys for children, spinning tops that burst into LED color as they helicoptered up. All that was new there was evanescent, the toys, the tourists, R. and I; all that was lasting was old, worn dull with looking though still I wondered to look at it, the centuries-old basilica, the bells, the gold lion on its pedestal, the sea that would swallow it; and everywhere also the books I had read, so that look, there, I could almost convince myself of it, Aschenbach stepping from uncertain water to stone.

  * * *

  I HAD A MIND FULL of useless things, I had always thought, or useless since graduate school, where they had been a kind of currency, the old stories and stray facts that were all that remained of the years in which I had wanted to be a scholar. The books I had read! But in the churches of Venice I found a use for them, I could read the paintings for R., or not the paintings but the stories they told: Joseph of Arimathea, Mary and Martha, Sebastian nursing his arrows. In churches in Bulgaria the paintings were more or less mute to me, but here they made a story I could read, and as I told it to him I saw the pleasure R. took in it, the way he looked at me and then at the painting, I loved to see it. I have a crush on teacher, he said, whispering, and then he smiled his smile that meant happiness, his whole face beaming, turning toward the painting now though I knew the smile was for me. Later, back in Bologna, where we arrived on the last train after all the restaurants had closed—we ate shrink-wrapped sandwiches and chocolate, shared a little bottle of prosecco, all of it from a twenty-four-hour shop near the station—he asked me to tell him more, it didn’t matter what. Tell me a story, he said, stretched out in bed as I lay beside him, running my hands across his chest and stomach, feeling his cock grow thick when I grabbed it, tell me another story.

  * * *

  I WOKE A FEW HOURS LATER too hot, stifling in the bedclothes. I switched on the lamp beside the bed. R. slept so deeply I never had to worry about waking him on the nights I couldn’t sleep, when I spent hours beside him reading or writing. But this time he did wake, or half wake, as I lay with a book propped on my stomach; he turned toward me and linked his arm through mine before settling back into sleep, his face pressed against my shoulder. I looked at him for a long time before going back to my book. They could make a whole life, I thought, surprised to think it, these moments that filled me up with sweetness, that had changed the texture of existence for me. I had never thought anything like it before.

  * * *

  I WANTED TO MAKE him laugh at first, I meant it almost as a joke. We needed to laugh: it had been hard to return to Sofia after our days in Italy, more snow had fallen but by the time we arrived the city had turned gray again, the holidays were over, the cars kicked black sludge from their tires. And now it was his last night in my apartment; in the morning he would gather his things and go back to Studentski grad, his friends would arrive in the afternoon. We would return to our uncertain arrangements, emails and dates that he might break at the last minute or without any notice at all, those were the conditions, they were non-negotiable. He hated it, he said, he didn’t want to go back to hiding, and throughout the day his dread had increased and darkened, coloring everything, until by nighttime he could barely speak, he had folded in on himself as he did sometimes; it was hard for me to reach him, to have any effect on him at all. We watched a movie sitting side by side on the couch, I don’t remember what it was, something lighthearted, romantic, though he hardly laughed. We never really watched movies together, it was always a pretense, we would kiss and touch each other and then forget the movie, but now it was all I could do to get him to kiss me back. Finally he let me pull him up from the couch, I folded the computer shut and pulled him half resisting into the bedroom. He resisted less there, standing beside the bed, he opened his mouth to me, he let me draw him close and press my pelvis against his. He raised his arms for me to pull his shirt up and off, and I felt the mood shifting already, it lightened as his passivity became a game almost, his passivity and my insistence as I struggled with the buckle of his belt, the button on his jeans; I could feel him almost smile as I kissed him, as he answered me back more in his kisses, his tongue pressing against mine. I pushed his jeans and underwear down, breaking our kiss to kneel and hold them at his ankles while he pulled his legs free, kissing his cock, which wasn’t hard yet, just once before I rose again. He moved to kiss me again but I pulled away, then shoved him back, not hard, he could have resisted but he didn’t, he fell backward onto the bed. Onto our bed, I thought, which was what it had become in those days, not a lonely place but a place that belonged to both of us, a loving place; it was something I could think to myself but not say out loud. I took off my own clothes quickly and then launched myself on top of him, which made him flinch and laugh, just once and as if against his will. I caught myself with my hands and when he reached out his own hands, bracing them against my chest, I grabbed them one by one at the wrist and pinned them above his head. He made a noise at this, a little growl, interested and interrogative, as I ground against him, his cock harder now, mine fully hard. I lowered my face but dodged his kiss again, teasing him, and instead kissed his collarbone, first one side and then the other, and then the inside of his arm, just below the elbow, where I knew he was ticklish, and then I licked the pit of his arm, slowly, because I loved the taste of him, first the right and then the left, and he growled again. He was harder now, he pressed his hips up against mine, but I lifted myself off him, beyond his reach. He moaned in frustration, he tried to pull his hands free but I held them firm; Porta-te bem, I said to him, and then I did kiss him, I put my tongue in his mouth and he sucked at it hard, tasting me but tasting himself, too, that was what he loved, the taste of himself in my mouth. I broke off the kiss and dipped my head to his chest, kissing first one nipple and then the other, which he didn’t really like, he tolerated it, and then to go farther I had to let go of his wrists, which didn’t matter, he kept them obediently above his head. I kissed his ribs and then his stomach, always one side and then the other, keeping a symmetrical pattern, keeping it at his pelvis, too, pressing my lips to his right hip and his left but avoiding his cock, moving quickly. He made a noise of complaint but kept his arms where I had left them, still playing our game. He jerked a little when I kissed the inside of his thighs, he was sensitive there, too, but he didn’t try to stop me, he was being good, he let me do what I wanted. But I wasn’t sure what I wanted, or what I wanted had changed. I had thought I wanted to make him laugh, that after that I wanted sex, but I didn’t want sex, I realized, or not only sex. I had let my knees drop off the end of the bed as I moved lower, soon I was kne
eling on the floor at the foot of the bed. He was relaxed, more or less, his legs were outstretched, his feet splayed to either side, but his whole body tensed when he felt my lips on the sole of his foot, which he snatched away, I had to grab it and pull it back. He was ticklish there, too, he didn’t like to be touched there. It had been a line drawn early on, when it became clear I was more adventurous in sex, had a wider palette of things that turned me on; I hope you’re not into that, he had said, laughing, it’s gross, I don’t want you to be into that. It was a difference between us, that fewer things put me off, that I could be indifferent to something and still indulge it for my partner’s sake. That was what he did now, I guess, when he let me pull his foot back to me, holding it in both hands as I kissed the sole again, the arch and then the pads at the base of his toes, each of them, and then the toes themselves. What are you doing, he said, and I couldn’t answer, I wasn’t sure what I was doing as I took the other foot in my hands and repeated what I had done with the first. I was moving slowly now, the tone had changed; I didn’t want to make him laugh anymore, I didn’t know what I wanted him to feel. I kissed his ankles next, at three points, moving from the outside in, from right to left on his right leg, from left to right on his left, which would remain my pattern. Skups, R. said, a question in the way he said it, his name for me or our name for each other. But I didn’t answer, I made another band of these kisses, slightly higher than the first, and then another; I would cover him in kisses, that was what I wanted to do, and I would do it even though I could feel R.’s impatience, even as he said again Skupi, and then, don’t be cheesy, which was his warning against too much affection, against my surfeit of feeling. I ignored it, moving up another inch. It would take a long time, I realized; when you imagine something like that you don’t think about how long it will take, how large a body is, how small a pair of lips. But I would do it, I decided, a kind of unhurriedness opened up in me, a weird wide patience I sank into. I strung kisses across him, his calves and knees, his thighs, the flesh firm in the center and giving at the sides. They were places I had never touched him before, some of them, and this gave gravity to the moment, more gravity; I whispered I love you as I kissed him, and then two kisses later I whispered it again, which became a new pattern, to whisper it again and again. His cock was soft when I reached it, as mine was, I hadn’t noticed it until then. I almost passed over it, kissing his upper thigh on the right and then the left, but I didn’t skip it, I kissed it, too, as I had kissed the rest of him, and said again the words that somehow became more real with repetition. Usually words wear out the more you use them, they become featureless, rote, and more than any others this is true of the words I repeated to R.; even in our relationship that was still so new they had lost most of their flavor. I remembered the fear I had felt the first time I spoke them to him, weeks before, when they had had all their force; I had been terrified, really, not so much that they wouldn’t be answered (they weren’t, it would be days before he repeated them) as that they would scare him away, that he would startle like the wild thing I sometimes felt he was. But now we said them often, when we left each other and were reunited (even if it was only a room we left, only minutes we were separated). But repeating the words now didn’t dull them, it called them to attention somehow, to service, it restored them, and they became difficult to say again; I found myself almost unable to speak as I whispered into R.’s silence, kissing the soft flesh of his stomach, the firmer flesh over his ribs, his nipples and the patch of hair at the center of his chest, his collarbone, the taut skin at his windpipe. His arms were still raised but he had folded them at the elbow, crossing his forearms over his face. I kissed his armpits again, the exposed undersides of his arms, and then (I was kneeling now, my knees on either side of him) I took his arms in my hands and moved them away from his face. He hadn’t uttered a sound in all that time, the fifteen or twenty minutes it had taken me to make my way up his body, not since the interrogative of my name, the admonition I ignored; there hadn’t been any change in his breath, or none I had noticed, and so I was surprised to see the tears on his face, two lines that fell toward his ears, he hadn’t wiped them away. He didn’t try to hide them when I moved his arm, or tried only by turning his face slightly, as if he didn’t want to meet my gaze (though his eyes were shut, there was no gaze to meet). I paused, wanting to speak, to ask him what they were for, his tears, but I knew what they were for, and so I hung over him a moment before I continued kissing him, the line of his jaw, his chin, his cheek and lips, which didn’t answer mine, which suffered themselves to be kissed, his ears, the tracks of his tears, his eyes. It was a kind of blazon of him, of his body, I love you, I whispered again and again to him. And then, when I had laid the last line across his forehead—a garland, I thought, I had garlanded him—You are the most beautiful, I said to him, you are my beautiful boy, and he reached his arms up and pulled me down on top of him, clutching me. You are, he whispered to me, you are, you are.

  * * *

  THEY USED SOME KIND of accelerant, they must have, so that when the three children touched their torches to it (angling their bodies away, keeping the greatest distance between themselves and the fire) the flame leapt up the wood, from the base to the ridiculous crown the whole frog blazed up. And with it there was a huge explosion of sound, air horns and rattlers and little handheld bells children jingled, and above them all human voices, the crowd cheering both the fire and the New Year, which had just struck. There were hundreds of people in the square, pressed tight near the wooden barricades that held them back from the fire but more spread out near the edges, where we were; there was space here for people to toast one another, with wine in plastic cups or little glass bottles like those R. had bought for us, prosecco with a twist-off cap. After we drank I leaned toward him and cupped his face in my palm and we kissed. I moved my mouth in a way he liked, kissing first his upper lip and then his lower before I drew away, hanging my arm around his shoulder. And then, as the statue burned—it was huge, it would take a long time to burn—there was another sound, a salute of drums and a burst of guitars, and then the far corner of the square lit up with floodlights, and there was a new shout from the crowd as it shifted toward the platform where the band had begun to play, four skinny boys bent over their instruments. There was a keyboard as well as the guitars and drums, it was an American sound, I thought, which contrasted with the stone buildings around us, with the pagan fire. R. and I didn’t move as the crowd thinned further; we wouldn’t stay, it was cold and the band wasn’t very good, we would watch the fire a little longer and then go back to the hotel. R. pulled away from me suddenly and reached into his coat pocket, taking from it the packet of raisins he had bought earlier with the wine. I almost forgot, he said, it’s almost too late. He handed me his bottle and took off one of his mittens so he could open the packet. Give me your hand, he said, so I put the bottles on the ground and held it out to him, taking my glove off as he asked, and he counted out twelve raisins, placing them in my palm in a single line from my wrist to the tip of my third finger, then counting another twelve for himself. It was the Portuguese tradition, he had told me, a raisin for each month of the year that had passed, a wish for each month of the year to come. He looked at me and smiled, Skups, he said, feliz ano, and we kissed again. He ate his all at once, tossing them in his mouth and putting his mitten back on before he leaned down for his bottle and turned to watch the fire. But I didn’t watch the fire, I kept my eyes on him, though it was cold and I wanted to be back in the hotel with him, in the warmth of our bed. I took my time, I put the raisins in my mouth one by one, thinking a wish for each, though all my wishes were the same wish.

  A VALEDICTION

  There was a moment, as the little beaten cab took another tight turn too quickly, when suddenly to our left we could see all at once the three hills of Veliko Turnovo, the houses of the old town clinging to their terraces, the river Yantra snaking its way beneath. I had seen it in precisely this way when I had visit
ed the city a year before, and now R., sitting in the back seat beside me, took a sharp breath at the wonder of it. His fingers found mine as I reached for him across the seat, and we continued looking with our hands linked low, beneath the driver’s notice, freed from the weight of uncertainty or sorrow we had carried with us on the train from Gorna Oryahovitsa, a pressure that had almost seemed caused by the trees crowding the tracks, their long branches brushing the clouded glass of our wagon. It was mid-August, nearly the end of summer; R. would be leaving soon. He had come back to Sofia in May, just after finishing his degree in Lisbon, and our idea had been that he would stay, though it was a sacrifice for him to exchange his sun-drunk city, with its river and avenues and tiles, for a city that even in high summer held on to its grayness, like an animal somehow suspicious of the season, unwilling to shed its coat. But R. quickly realized how little there was for him in Sofia, where he had no friends or relatives, and where without the language there was almost no prospect of work, and so what we had thought of as the beginning of real life had become instead an extended vacation, culminating in this final trip together before he went back home.