by Josh Lanyon
For a few moments, we lay there in silence. I willed him to reach out. If he made any gesture at all, gave me any opening…
But he did not, and in a short while I could tell he was asleep.
I lay there watching the bold, gold face of the moon tangled in the trees outside the window. I watched till the moon drifted away and the stars faded and the sky paled and the sun rose.
At about six thirty I felt Stephen wake, although he didn’t move.
I said, “I have to give the Old Man my answer today.”
“We both know what the answer is.” He sounded weary.
“It’s…not just my decision.”
His laugh was an echo of its normal self. “You’re learning. You’ve memorized the right things to say even if you don’t believe them.”
After my struggle to reach this point of emotional epiphany, his brusque rejection left me bewildered. “I thought that was what you wanted. What you were telling me. That this had to be a joint decision.”
He turned his head. Despite the fact that he occasionally fretted over the age difference between us, this was the first time he’d ever looked old to me. There were lines in his face, an emptiness in his eyes that didn’t come from lack of sleep. I had done that, and it sickened me.
“It has to be more than lip service. You want to go. I’m not going to stop you.”
I elbowed into a sitting position. “I don’t want to go. I feel like I owe him. He let me walk away when I asked. He didn’t have to do that. He could have —”
Stephen sat up too. “You don’t have to explain. I told you last night I understand how boring all this is after the life you’ve led.”
“No. You don’t understand. This—what I have with you, what we have here together—is exactly what I want. What I dreamed of.”
He said impatiently, “Then why are you throwing it away?”
“I’m not. If I do this, it’s because I have to, not because I want to. And it will be the last time. I promise you that.”
He threw back the covers, got up, reaching for his maroon bathrobe. “You promised once before, yet here we are.”
“I couldn’t foresee this.”
“That’s funny. I could.”
“Stephen…don’t.”
Maybe he heard the pain in my voice; I couldn’t conceal it. Certainly I could hear the pain in his as he cried, “What do you want from me?”
What did I want from him? Besides reassurance that if I did this, it wasn’t at the expense of our life together. And how could he guarantee that? I was ashamed to even ask.
When I didn’t speak, he said in a voice of goaded frustration, “Jesus Christ, Mark!”
He slammed into the bathroom, and I went downstairs to put the coffee on.
A few minutes later I heard him and Buck on the staircase; then Stephen called from the hallway, “I’m going for a run.”
“Be careful,” I said automatically.
He didn’t answer.
The house was uncomfortably silent after they left.
On weekends Stephen permitted himself a big, cholesterol-laden breakfast, and I placed bacon in the frying pan, moving automatically around the kitchen, trying to analyze my situation objectively, strategically.
It seemed to me that at least part of what I was fighting was Stephen’s own insecurity about us. Astonishing as it was, he was genuinely uneasy about the twenty-one year age difference between us, failing to understand how much I needed his centered maturity, how attractive I found his assurance, his wisdom, his—usually—unruffled approach to life.
From the first time I’d seen him, smiling across the ugly, flaming centerpiece at some tedious State Department dinner, I’d wanted him—loved him, if there was such a thing as love at first sight. If anyone had grounds for insecurity, it was me. The last time I’d screwed up, Stephen had done his level best to replace me with good old Bryce Boxer. In fact, if I understood the situation correctly, the only reason Stephen had let me back in his life was because good old Bryce had basically insisted that Stephen needed to work out what he really felt for me before they could be together. I had Stephen because Bryce was foolish enough to send him back to me.
Bryce would be only too delighted to pick up the pieces this time.
As for our life being boring…
That was like arguing that warmth and light and love and happiness were boring. Suffice it to say, I’d had all the excitement anyone could handle for one lifetime.
But although this was all very clear in my mind, I didn’t know how to communicate it to Stephen. I thought I had communicated it. Maybe not in words. I wasn’t particularly good about explaining my feelings, but surely he could tell in every other way?
Somehow—I had to figure out how—I had to make him understand this in the little time we had left.
When he came back from his run, his hooded sweatshirt was wet from the fog.
“Coffee’s ready. Lena left a jar of apple butter for the toast,” I said. “Did you want your eggs fried or scrambled?”
He poured dog food into Buck’s bowl and said carefully, “Actually, I was thinking I’d go into work.”
My mouth dried. “I thought you had today off.”
He said something I didn’t catch.
“What?”
“I’ll be home for dinner.” He went on through, his feet pounding on the staircase as he jogged upstairs.
I found myself unable to call after him, form my protest. We had so little time left.
Less than I’d thought. What had Dickens said? Life is made of ever so many partings welded together.
I put the frying pan on the floor next to Buck’s dish, grabbed my jacket, and walked down to the lake.
Chapter Four
It had been a long day. A long day and a bad day.
The phone rang several times, but I didn’t pick up and no one left a message. When it rang at four, I heard it out, waited for Stephen’s voice to tell me he wasn’t coming home, but once again there was only silence.
Stephen arrived a few minutes later bearing a bottle of wine and Chinese takeaway.
“Trick or treat.” He kissed me briskly on my startled mouth. Cool and minty fresh. I loved the clean, male taste of him.
“Trick?” I inquired doubtfully, watching him set the little cartons on the tile counter.
He shook his head. “Treat. Happy Halloween.”
“I’d forgotten all about it.”
“Not a big holiday where you come from. Why don’t you open a bottle of wine?”
I felt a bit like a sleepwalker as I opened the wine, poured it into two glasses. I handed Stephen his glass.
Meeting my eyes, he said wryly, “You look like you think I might have booby trapped the egg rolls.”
“This morning you weren’t speaking to me. Tonight it’s Mongolian beef. I can’t help wondering if this is the condemned man’s hearty last meal.”
“No.” He sipped the wine, swallowed. “I’m sorry about this morning. I’ve got a heck of a lot of nerve lecturing you about talking and then walking out on you. I just…needed time to think today.”
I braced myself for it. “And?”
His gaze held mine. “I’m not going to hold you to the promise you made me. If you feel this is what you have to do, then”—he drew a deep breath and expelled it slowly—“I accept that.”
It took a second or two to absorb that my first and foremost reaction was sick disappointment. I realized that I’d hoped he would refuse to let me go. That he would deliver an ultimatum, somehow come up with a legitimate reason for why I couldn’t leave. All day I had put off phoning my answer to the Old Man in hope of this.
I didn’t let myself show any of that, though. I said, “And assuming I survive, will I still have a home to come back to?”
He said quietly, “Don’t joke about not surviving. Do me that much of a favor.”
I’m not joking. But if he was as worried as he clearly was, he didn’t need to hear
my own fears.
I got plates out of the cupboard and spoons from the drawer. We sat down at the table, dished out the food. Stephen talked about his patients and the med center while we both picked our way through the Chinese food.
It was completely normal and utterly weird.
Stephen said suddenly, as though feeling his way through a maze, “Do you feel I’m neglecting you?”
“No.”
But he was still thinking this over. “I have been busy, but…” Whatever he read in my expression changed his own. He said uncertainly, “Maybe this is partly my fault. I’ve been trying not to smother you, making sure you had plenty of time—room—to be confident that you aren’t making a mistake.”
Protecting himself in case I bailed on him once more. Yes, I understood that.
I said, “I don’t think you believe me when I say I don’t want to go. I’m not bored or frustrated living here. I was happy. I am happy.” He opened his mouth, and I headed him off. “Maybe you’re right and I’m having some problems adjusting to civilian life, but…I want to adjust. I want to teach. I want to be your lover and wake up with you every morning and go to sleep next to you every night. I want what we have here.”
Stupidly, I was getting choked up again. It was with relief that I heard the doorbell ring, although in my experience, doorbells ringing unexpectedly at eight o’clock at night rarely signal anything good.
I half rose, but Stephen reminded me, “Halloween. I’ll get it.”
Was he afraid I might lose it and blow away the little ghosts and goblins invading our front porch?
After yesterday evening, he probably was.
Buck and I followed him to the hall where we could watch. A chorus of high voices cried, “Trick or treat!”
And so it began. Over the next several hours, I watched Stephen handing out gobs of autumn-colored packages of candy to swarms of kids. He was terrific. I’d never had even the slightest paternal inclinations, but it gave me a funny, warm feeling watching Stephen with his little neighbors. He admired costumes and made bad jokes all the while handing out ungodly amounts of sweeties.
Had he wanted kids? Was that one of the sacrifices he had made in order to be true to who he was? There was still so much I didn’t know about him.
The ghosts and goblins and miniature Transformers eventually trickled off and stopped. Stephen turned off the porch lights.
He finished off the last of the wine and I drank my scotch as we sat in front of the fire in the study.
“Did you want to go up?” he asked, and I realized I’d been miles away, staring into the flames.
I gazed at him, and his expression seemed odd to me. As though he were waiting for something. What?
“I’ll lock up downstairs.”
He nodded and left me to it. I went through the house checking windows and doors, turning the lights off, locking up.
I had felt good earlier, watching Stephen with the kids. Now I felt drained and melancholy. As though I were doing all this for the last time, saying good-bye to the house and the all the things in it, which was silly because Stephen had promised me that I could home again, that I was not leaving for the last time.
Bryce would not be stepping into my shoes, but I wondered who would remember to lock Stephen’s doors and windows with me gone. Who would take care of him? It wouldn’t occur to Stephen that he needed taking care of too. Or that I was the person to do it.
The bedroom light was on, Buck dozing in front of the fire, Stephen sitting up in bed. He wasn’t reading, though; his arms were folded across his knees, and he was staring out the window at the moon in the magnolia branches.
I stepped out of my jeans, tossed them to the antique hope chest at the foot of the bed, pulled on my flannel sleep pants. He dragged the blankets back for me, and I slid in beside him on sheets warm and scented of him.
He turned out the light. I felt something close to a wave of panic that we were just supposed to close our eyes and go to sleep, but to my relief he reached for me. I went to him gratefully, holding him tight. He stroked my bare back.
“Did you call him? Malik. Or Holohan? Whichever it is.”
The last thing I wanted to talk about. I shook my head, face pressed to the hollow of shoulder and arm. He smoothed his hand down the curve of my spine, his touch lingering over the shifts of muscle and bone as I tried to control my breathing.
He said slowly, “You’re shaking.”
I tried to laugh.
“You don’t want to go, do you?”
I shook my head.
“Then why the hell are you going?”
“I…”
He sat up, dislodging me, and turned on the light. I put my hand up belatedly to shield my eyes.
He said tautly, “Why are you going, Mark? Why are you doing this?”
“I owe him.”
“Bullshit.” He said it so fiercely I fell silent. “You gave him ten years. For ten years you risked your life and sanity for him. You’ve been beaten, stabbed, shot. How the hell do you figure you owe him another minute more?
“He’s fighting for his political survival.”
“His political survival? Against your life? Our life. No. That’s not an even exchange. You don’t owe him a goddamned thing more. He was your employer and he used you until you weren’t of anymore use, and then he cut you loose. And you think because he let you keep your pension—that we don’t need, by the way—he did you some great favor? Anything he did for you, he did because it was convenient to him.”
Partly that was true. Partly…no. But I didn’t argue it with Stephen because he was getting angrier by the minute without my help.
“Why?” he demanded again. “It was one thing when I thought you wanted to go, but —”
“Because I don’t deserve this.”
I’m not sure who was more thrown by that outburst. Stephen’s eyes did a funny little triple blink as if the information was coming into his brain too fast to process. But he questioned calmly enough, “What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. You know what I am. You said it yourself.”
“Mark —” Whatever he had been about to say, he cut off. In that other voice, the quiet, calm voice he said, “I know what you did for a living. Is that what you mean?”
All at once I was so tired I couldn’t see straight. I rubbed my eyes and said, “I don’t know. Do you think it’s a coincidence?”
“What?”
“Everyone I love dies.”
“Mark, you can’t honestly think—yes, for the record. I do think it’s a coincidence. Sad, tragic, and…inevitable. Because we all die.”
“You know what I think? I think you’re right. I think I’m not fit for civilized society.”
“I never said that.”
I closed my eyes.
“I never said that. I don’t believe it for one minute. You did the things you were ordered to do because you believed you were helping to make the world a safer place, that you were protecting the people who needed and deserved protecting.”
“That the ends justified the means.”
He said with complete certainty, “You don’t believe that. You’ve done things you don’t want to talk about, but you did them because you believed there was no other choice.”
He sounded absolutely positive about this, which was especially strange given that earlier in the evening I’d been thinking there was still so much about each other we didn’t know.
Maybe not the important things, though. Maybe we did know those things.
“You are not one of the bad guys.”
I opened my eyes, scrutinized his face, tried to see if he really meant that or not. “And I don’t know anyone who values peace, who understands how fine the line is between chaos and civilization more than you.”
“Yesterday evening,” I began.
“I don’t know that your instinct was wrong,” Stephen admitted. “I know that like most people, I’m slow to recognize danger sig
nals, that my instinct is to avoid violence, not meet it head on. Not escalate it. I was afraid for you. I’m afraid for you now. That’s why I was—and am—angry.”
I considered this uncertainly. Afraid for my physical welfare or mental welfare or spiritual welfare or all of the above? Did it matter? He was right to be worried. I was.
Stephen said, “Did you sleep at all last night?”
“No.”
He gathered me against him again. “No wonder you’re talking nonsense.”
Not nonsense, though. Nice of him to pretend that it was, but it wasn’t, and we both knew it.
Stephen continued to hold me. Cradle of arms. Where had I heard that phrase before? Sentimental twaddle. But lovely too. I suppose he thought I might sleep, but as exhausted as I was, I couldn’t let go enough to sleep. I needed to get up and make my phone calls. The last obstacle had been removed. Stephen would accept my decision and at the end of the job would still let me back into his life. So this was victory. This called for celebration.
I lay there dry-eyed and hollow.
What use would I be to the Old Man—to anyone—as I was? Didn’t anyone see that I was different now? That I had changed? I’d lost my edge—filed it down in an attempt to live safely with Stephen in his world—and now it was gone. Even Stephen, who knew me better than anyone on earth, apparently did not see this fundamental truth. Maybe it didn’t exist. Maybe I hadn’t changed at all.
Safe to say the world had not changed. I closed my eyes. Listened to the steady pound of his heart, the slow breaths—as peaceful as when he slept. He wasn’t sleeping though. He stroked my hair.
Finally—I have no idea how much time passed—I whispered, “What if I did just choose this?”
“What?” He lowered his head to better hear me.
“If I do have a choice, can’t I choose this?”
“Yes.”
He said it immediately as though…as though there were no shame in it, as though he wouldn’t think worse of me for shirking my duty, for letting down a friend—for letting down the Old Man, who had been so much more and so much less than a friend.
“Yes,” he repeated as though he himself didn’t have serious doubts about us, about the wisdom of letting me back into his life.
