Men on Men

by George Stambolian (ed)

  I couldn’t remember Anthony’s body that well later on, but I could recall our last session in his Camaro, and how the next morning, I’d caught a glimpse of myself getting into the shower, the bruises on my throat like a spreading amethyst necklace, his teeth marks still visible, a parting gift to wear till it faded to flesh.

  A FEW MONTHS LATER, when my nun phase was in full force and I was on the verge of having my head shaved and taking the veil, I met Jack, one of Anthony’s “fucking English Department” types. I knew his wife, a small, sharp-featured woman, before I knew him, but I’d seen him in the halls. He had a loping gait that shifted his buns rather nicely when he’d stride by my classroom. I was attracted, assuming he’d made an “academic marriage,” but at the time I was still lighting votive candles and whatnot, so I limited myself to smiles and lingering looks.

  When Jack and I were placed in the same office the following fall semester, we became fast friends. Jack’s wife had, for reasons I had all kinds of theories about, left him, and Anthony was with his Cha-Cha Queens. Jack was a handsome man, not exotic in any fashion, except for his lips, which were a shade too full for such a classically American face, the lower one a little pendulous.

  He was tall and thin of the body type coaches call wiry. He had an open face, dark brown eyes, short chestnut hair, strong jawline, good teeth, broad shoulders—a reliably good-looking man, nothing spectacular. A thin version of Joel McCrea. And just like Joel before he turned to Westerns, he was charming.

  Lunch was what came first. It was the sexiest lunch I ever had. Cheese enchiladas awash in tomato sauce and sour cream in the university dining hall, hundreds of students milling around us, bumping our table. Jack could look at you in a way that you knew that your every last zit, protruding nose hair, or crooked, yellow tooth had disappeared. You were in bloom and that’s all there was to it.

  I don’t remember the conversation, although it’s not important anyway. The looks—the way he’d glance up from his plate as if you’d just said one of the most original things he’d ever heard, the way the light brought out the blond at the crown of his head, and the gestures—how he held his hands, the fingers stretching towards each other, elbows on the table, as if he could encompass anything in the space between where the fingers would eventually interlace.

  He WAS like that young Joel McCrea of the thirties—earnest, smart (but not effete), and good. He was good in that he couldn’t be touched, couldn’t be corrupted, couldn’t really be swayed. And goodness is the greatest seducer of all. I was like, well, Miriam Hopkins, at times—bright, energetic, perhaps a bit more savvy, a little zanier, but ultimately deferring to the security his earthy goodness provided. And at other times, I was Claudette Colbert: sophisticated, witty, gently mocking and, unlike Miriam, not entirely American; a suggestion of Europe in my background, something slightly wicked but enjoyable. I would educate him. When I wonder back on the first time, the first lunch, I see my mistake; I should’ve been Randolph Scott in Rule the High Country, then we could’ve been two ex-lawmen, just friends too old and too western for complications to develop.

  For months we were inseparable—had our lunch together, dinners, went out at night. People noticed and began coming to me on the sly, remarking how glad they were about Jack and me. They’d known he’d come out in time. In the beginning, I was careful to keep everything on a friendly basis; he was legally still a married man, and I didn’t want to get into something that would be great but a dead end. But Jack was affectionate, he proved his friendship with hugs, massages, and, occasionally, a kiss. We lapsed into something beyond friendship; I’m not sure what; I don’t think it has a name. But whatever it was, it stopped just short of sex.

  For a while, I liked the fact that people thought we were a couple or coupled when we really weren’t, not in the way they meant. Then somewhere, in the back of my head, the voices started. One went: “Stick with him. He’ll come around, it’ll be like nothing you’ve ever known.” The other one, the one that refused to be turned off, was along the lines of: “Ditch this asshole before the first good-looking woman comes along and he runs. Let him tease some other fruitcake.”

  I believed that second voice but made myself trust the first. That summer was a terrible one in Tucson. It had started getting hot in April, climbing into the low 90s. By mid-June, it was 104, 106, 108, every day. The hours passed in a stupor of white heat. Jack and I would stay up all night, then sleep until one or two in the afternoon. He’d call about four, then we’d decide where we were going for dinner—green salads, stuffed avocados, and gazpacho all summer long.

  At night, we’d go swimming at a friend’s house we were caretaking. After, we’d walk around the city until two or three in the morning, the only time it was cool enough to do so, fending off stray dogs with rocks we kept in our pockets. By August I was anxious and cranky; school would be starting soon, and I felt if something didn’t give now, it never would.

  On Jack’s thirtieth birthday, we went to the Tack Room, Tucson’s only four-star restaurant, to celebrate. I had good wine, Montrachet, not too much, but certainly enough. Jack didn’t have a drop. “Liquor has never touched my lips,” he used to say, mock serious but with pride. Like every other night, we wound up at the pool. I was, to my happy surprise, deliriously, delightfully drunk. For the first time in weeks, the weight of the summer had lifted.

  I was on my back in the water, our friend’s house was in the desert, close to the foothills, so there was nothing to block my view of the forest of stars overhead, so thick they were crowding each other for room. With my head in the water so that only my eyes, nose and mouth were above it, I could blot out everything.

  I turned my head and watched Jack haul himself out of the deep end. Naked in the moonlight, he glowed, brown and hairless, so smooth like chrome. You’d glide off him, I thought. The only hair on his body was a fringe above his cock. His cock was long, sort of fat, and I remember his balls were uneven—the left one rode higher than the right, and they moved, fighting for position, like pistons, when he walked. He smiled when I looked at him a little too long, a little too obviously.

  Jack jumped back in and swam over to me. “You’re sinking,” he said.

  He put his arm under my back, and I rested my head on his right shoulder. Under my cheek, his shoulder resembled nothing so much as a nice scoop of caramel custard. I put my tongue to his breastbone and closed my lips over a fold of flesh, pulling slightly for a moment.

  I let go and swung my body upright, slowly so as not to alarm him, keeping my head on his shoulder. I felt him receding, more water between us, when I draped my right arm over his left shoulder, but I wouldn’t let go. Our bodies touched, and I moved against him, my shoulders to his shoulders, my chest to his chest. I was standing on his toes in five feet of water. He didn’t move really, but I felt his body turn inward, away from me. Finally, I raised my head and looked at his face. He wasn’t looking at me but beyond me, over me, around me, every way but into my eyes.

  I let my free arm travel down through the water till my hand found his cock and balls and cupped them together. He instantly drew back, grabbing for them himself. I don’t know if he thought I was going to steal them or twist them off or what, but for a moment, he held himself, clasping his genitals to his stomach.

  He looked at me then. “I’ve got to change the filter,” he said and walked over to the steps in the shallow end.

  THE GOOD-LOOKING WOMAN the second voice had foretold came along two weeks later when school started, a twenty-year-old blonde in Jack’s Chaucer course. Paula, Jack and I became a threesome, perplexing everyone, until I bowed out. Jack couldn’t understand what was wrong, why we didn’t have such wonderful times like before. But at the end of our group dates, he went home with Paula, and I went home to my studio.

  After spending months with him and him alone, I found that my other lives were practically dead. Friends were either pissed at me for having neglected them or simply forgot to include me anym
ore—I’d been gone too long.

  That’s why, on Halloween, I found myself in the front seat of Jack’s old Peugeot, squeezed between his girlfriend and his wife while he drove. As ridiculous as this foursome sounds, I didn’t want to stay home alone on All Hallow’s Eve.

  The back seat was filled with friends from the department. All around me was the swirl of heterosexual small talk. My deskmate’s mother had found out her roommate, Pat, was really Patrick, not Patty. Another woman’s sister was having a first child at thirty-nine. Is that all they have to worry about? was all I could think. Living together and late pregnancies. Didn’t they read Newsweek with a pretty man dying of AIDS on the cover?

  Already I was regretting my decision to come. The four of us in the front scat had the makings of a very bad novel—HIS WIFE, HIS MISTRESS, HIS BEST FRIEND! I could easily imagine the lurid orange cover. Except on the cover the car was red and it was a convertible. Imagining what the English Department party had in store for me, I slunk down in the seat and rested my knees on the dash.

  At the party I managed to lose Jack, Paula, and Jack’s wife. I danced three straight Stevie Wonder songs with Bitsy, secretary to the Liberal Arts Dean. She was fifty, a grandmother with great legs who looked swell in a red-fringed flapper outfit that perfectly complemented my scarlet taffeta choir robe. I had bought it because it looked like something Burt Lancaster might have worn in Elmer Gantry, absurdly flamboyant but riveting.

  I found a bush a safe distance from the house and took a leak. After, I watched the dancers on the patio. Paula had come as a tree, her long blond hair, which hung to her waist, was spread out on the papier-mâché branches around her head to resemble Spanish moss.

  “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”

  I didn’t know if it was my own voice or someone else’s. A hand on my shoulder. Jack had found me. I shrugged him off.

  His half smile became a pout of sorts, the lower lip curling even farther down. He turned his head toward the dancers.

  “I thought you liked her,” he said after the song ended.

  If there’d been a large rock within my reach, he would’ve been dead. “I like her fine,” I said. “That’s got nothing to do with it.”

  “Sorry,” he replied. Then, still facing the patio, he touched my elbow and repeated, “Sorry.”

  “You can look at me when you talk,” I shouted, startled at the shrill alien voice, wondering what ventriloquist was playing a trick on me. “I’m not a goddamn Medusa.”

  He looked, along with the twenty other people outside, but his face was blank. What he dreaded most, a scene, was occurring, and what’s more, his friends—and Paula—were watching. But he stayed calm, stayed himself.

  “You don’t have to yell,” he said.

  I was so mad I couldn’t think; it was glorious not to be able to think. I struck out with one arm and hit him in the chest, my right foot already behind his left heel; he tumbled backwards into the bush I’d pissed in. Not waiting to check the look on his face, I walked through the backyard gate and headed for home, my scarlet taffeta bell sleeves inflating on either side of me in the evening breeze.

  Lately, I’ve been feeling needy again. Three months after Jack. I swear I don’t believe it myself. But there’s this line in a Bonnie Raitt song: “And when you need a lover, nothing else will do.” And it’s true. After a while, my lust wasn’t satiated by repeated dates with Mrs. Thumb and her four skinny daughters, no matter how inventive my fantasies. Of course, the next line in the song is “And when you need love most, it turns its back on you.” But when blood engorges your capillaries, you tend to forget. At least I do.

  After years of bar cruising, I found that I literally couldn’t do it anymore. I’d get within sight of a gay bar and feel like I was going to throw up, or if I was able to make it inside, I’d get viselike headaches from maintaining eye contact.

  Cruising in your own car is more fun. When you’re behind the wheel, all locked in, you’re in control, subject only to the pressures of your own hormones, which may tend to blur your judgment. There’s a stretch in South Tucson I particularly like between Sixth and Thirty-Ninth. On the weekends, if I’m not going to a show or to dinner, I sometimes find myself in the vicinity.

  There’s even a man, Luchi, I talk to. He always has the same comer staked out and nobody bothers him. He’s a punk Chicano, wears a black 40s Zoot Suit, rayon shot with gold thread, with a white undershirt beneath the jacket, a gold cross around his neck, black pointy greaser boots on his feet. He makes me laugh; he always tells me I have too much class for this neighborhood and wants to know when I’m gonna let him drive my car.

  I play my scene with him, and he plays along. Maybe he doesn’t know where it comes from, but he’s a quick learner, never drops his cues. It’s 1958, and I’m Lana Turner, or Joan Crawford, or Hedy Lamarr, and I’m “mature,” slightly less glamorous than I once was, and I need love. And I have money, which I’ve managed to hold on to from more sumptuous times, and I just may dole it out to a man who can degrade me in the right manner. He’s not Jean-Paul or Joel, he’s more like Jeff Chandler or Cliff Robertson, or worse even, George Nader in The Female Animal. Eventually, he’ll love me, although he won’t be able to resist the temptation to exploit me, and I won’t be able to resist letting him.

  Luchi usually gives me a few bucks and I go to a taco place a couple blocks up and get him food. He likes to eat on the hood of my car, says I’m good for business, a pretty white man with a big car, makes prospective clients think he’s worth the dough. I do see a lot of fat old hens nervously cruising him while shooting me ‘murderous glares. He gets a kick out of this, holds my hand through the window, and sings me little songs. “Feliz Navidad” mostly. I suspect he doesn’t know Spanish any better than I do.

  Luchi has a tendency to get horny, especially if business is slow. I’m not sure if it’s the lack of money or what; I guess even hustlers need their release. He’ll come very close to the window, take my hand, press it against his crotch so I can feel his cock pulsing through the thin material. He’ll moan then, low.

  “You like that, don’t you?” he’ll say.

  I do, but I don’t tell him. I smile or nod, but I never say anything.

  Then he’ll slip my hand down the front of his pants between his silk underwear and his flat stomach. “You like me,” he’ll say, “I can tell. When are you going to open the door?”

  “Soon,” I’ll tell him, already beginning to ease my hand out. “Maybe tomorrow.”

  But I’m protecting my options this time around. Up goes the window. He smiles from the other side. He knows what this means. We never finish the scene, but we enjoy doing it over and over again. Who knows when the next offer’s coming our way?

  NOTHING EVER JUST DISAPPEARS

  Sam D'Allesandro

  I DIDN’T KNOW EXACTLY WHAT HE MEANT by “accessible.” He said he liked people who were, because he wasn’t. He said a lot of things that I didn’t exactly understand, or that seemed to carry connotations other than those most obvious. Or then again maybe they didn’t. And often I would have asked for more information, explanation … intent, if he had been someone else saying the same thing. I didn’t want to know him as much as I wanted to be able to be around my image of him. I didn’t want things to get too difficult. I wanted to continue to be uncertain about him for as long as possible—to sustain the way it is with meeting someone new before a more thorough understanding brings comfort into the relationship. I did not want comfort. I did want to be comfortable with not seeking comfort or predictability in him. I wanted to be challenged but not in pain. All of these thoughts came to me some weeks after our first meeting.

  I met him at the cigarette store. We just started talking. He seemed aimless, but not confused; unhurried but not unscheduled—we went to the park to see the ducks. We talked and smoked, smoked and talked. In fact he talked to me more than most of my friends do. That attracted me. He was interested in me, and that interested me. H
ere’s what I found out that afternoon: He was a painter. He was a waiter. He was thirty. It was enough to know. We talked about other things, observations, an irritating little girl that kept screaming and splashing her mother, the duck with one leg, the cherry trees. They were in bloom. He had a camera with him and took my picture. Later, on the street he told me he’d had a good time. I took his number, it started raining, and we both went home.

  “Do you go out much?”

  “Not much.”

  “Where do you go?”

  “Nowhere special.”

  “Do you like to dance?”

  “Yes, but I don’t like the dance places.”

  “I know what you mean. Sometimes you have to forget your dislike of them so you can go and have a good time.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “I like small things, that’s where my pleasure comes from. The big things disappoint me but there is always something small to enjoy for a moment, to look to for keeping life pleasurable. I like these cigarettes. I like a beer. I like the park.”

  “Sure, but it sounds like you’re afraid to make yourself vulnerable to disappointment, so you miss the big things—it could make your life flat. I understand what you mean, but I think it’s a mistake.”

  “Maybe so but then I’m not committed to living correctly at the moment either. It’s hard for me to think about wasting my life when the alternatives don’t seem much less wasteful. The way I see it we’re all just doing things anyway. I’m not sure I think it matters so much how they’re done.”

  “I know what you mean. I think it does matter, but I’m not sure how. Your way is not bad. I do the same thing. We’re the same.”