These Violent Delights

by Micah Nemerever

  When he arrived uninvited at Julian’s door the next day, it wasn’t the unblemished immortal idol that had brought him there. Instead he came for the boy who had tried in vain to comfort him, whose kiss at his forehead had felt like an uncertain imitation of something he’d only ever seen in the movies. He came because that kiss was as vulnerable in its way as Paul’s own unhappiness. Paul wouldn’t even see the scar until after. It was enough just to perceive the ones that Julian carried inside him, even if they were too elusive for Paul to name.

  Julian wasn’t expecting him. He was dressed for warmth, wool socks and haphazard layers, more careless and aesthetically indifferent than he usually let Paul see him. He answered the door with a book at his hip, marking the page with his first two fingers.

  He started to ask, then stopped.

  There was a long silent moment of understanding each other—of panic crashing through, so forcefully that it might have swept everything else away with it. Then Julian took him by the arm and quickly pulled him inside.

  After long desperate weeks of imagining him this way, it was frightening how tangible he was now. There was nothing divine about him. When Paul pushed him back against the door, part of him still expected Julian to withdraw into himself, yielding and passive as a doll. But through their clothes Paul could feel the spring-tight apprehension in Julian’s body. Paul only hesitated for a moment. They were breathless, eyelash-close. The snow-dimmed light deepened the color of Julian’s eyes like the sea under rain.

  “Go ahead,” said Julian, almost too quietly to hear, and when Paul kissed him it was as inevitable and instinctive as breathing.

  They didn’t properly undress; it was rushed and clumsy. Paul kept losing track of his own body, and when he found himself again, there was too much of him—clothes clinging to his skin, the weight of his knee making the mattress sigh. All that anchored him was the eager unhesitant way Julian touched him, the unexpectedly gentle reassurances he murmured against his mouth. When Paul couldn’t bear to meet his eyes any longer, he pressed his face to the shoulder of Julian’s sweater and shut his eyes tight; Julian wrapped one hand around the nape of his neck, soft and firm.

  They lay together for a long time after, not speaking, the closed circuit still echoing between them. Julian lifted Paul’s chin and studied his face, and Paul could tell it was a deliberate mercy that he didn’t ask if he was all right.

  Eventually Julian sidled out from under him. He rifled through his wardrobe, then his drawer, gathering a clean shirt and sweater that were more carefully matched than the ones they were replacing. He tugged off every layer at once, undershirt and all. It felt nonsensically intrusive to watch him, and Paul almost looked away, but when he caught his first glimpse of the scar he froze.

  When Julian looked toward him again, Paul couldn’t turn away fast enough to hide his face. Whatever Julian saw there, it didn’t appear to make him self-conscious, much less hurt him.

  It seemed impossible that Julian was still alive. The scar all but sliced him in half, sternum to hip and midway up his back. It rendered the truth of Julian’s body with startling brutality.

  “Car accident, obviously. When I was ten. The most American way to die, and I nearly managed it. The door peeled back like a sardine can, a big shard of it went straight through me.” Julian spoke calmly, dreamily, as if he couldn’t remember the pain—or as if he could remember, but chose not to struggle against it because he knew it was part of him.

  He folded the clothes over one arm and sat on the bed, and for a long moment he watched Paul’s face. He was impassive, or almost; Paul could sense there was some feeling that Julian wouldn’t let him see, even now.

  “You can touch it if you want,” said Julian. It was as if he’d put his hand to Paul’s chest and felt the shape of the impulse inside. “I thought you might like it.”

  It should have felt strange to touch him, but it didn’t, any more than touching his own body. When he’d kissed Julian for the first time, all Paul could think was Of course, and he would never forget the shiver that passed through Julian’s chest as he gave himself over to it too. Of course. The feeling would have been peaceful if not for the insidious way it made its way inside of him and took root.

  There was a perverse beauty to the scar, holding Julian’s body together in defiance of every force that had tried to pull it apart. Whenever Paul caught sight of it, he would feel an echo of its texture in his hands, smooth and dense and just slightly cooler than the surrounding skin.

  The low winter sky grew heavier the longer the city bore its weight, and no amount of rain or snow could rinse the filth from the air. Paul moved through his days like a ghost, retreating to the farthest laboratory benches and the shadows under burned-out lights at the back of lecture halls. Whenever he returned from a run, there would be an invisible film of pollution on his skin, and no matter how hard he scrubbed or how hot he ran the shower, the greasy feeling never quite lifted away.

  The synagogue sent them a postcard to remind them, as if they needed it. There was a handwritten postscript from the rabbi, imploring them to “please reach out without hesitation if there’s anything at all that you need”; Paul’s mother hung the card on the refrigerator and covered the note with a magnet.

  Dread seeped through the cracks in the house. His mother descended into a quiet, frantic misery, so that he longed for the kind of unhappy she’d been just a few weeks before. His sisters fled from the house as much as he did, seizing every excuse they could to escape.

  He compounded his grief relentlessly, like pushing at a sore tooth with his tongue. He reread Silent Spring, then forced himself to press through Hiroshima and Eichmann in Jerusalem. During classes he would sit very still and shatter himself over and over, by flames and toxins and blunt force, until he was so numb that it almost felt like indifference. When he imagined the moment of death, he never let himself flinch. He had to look straight into the emptiness until it felt real. That was the only way he could be certain he didn’t want it.

  Paul could hardly stand to be apart from Julian anymore. There was little reason for them to be separated for more than a few hours, and so they rarely were—Paul only returned to his house to sleep, or for the few family dinners he couldn’t avoid. When Julian was in class, Paul let himself into his dorm room and waited until he got back. If Paul wasn’t in the mood to brave the public, Julian would bring their meals up from the dining hall on clam-shelled paper plates. On the days he was too miserable to eat or speak or even to sit upright, Julian curled up next to him and let him rest his head on his hip while he read aloud from a book of O’Hara or Mayakovsky. But even Julian couldn’t make the dread ebb completely. It wouldn’t; not on its own. Something would have to break. Last year it had been Danny Costello’s face.

  The yahrzeit, when it came, was bitter and bleak, the sky so dark with the threat of snow that the sun never seemed to rise. None of them had discussed what to do about it, because that would have required acknowledging it in advance. The debate over breakfast nearly turned ugly when Audrey, uneasily irreverent, suggested that they go to the movie theater.

  “We could pick at the movie on the way home,” she said, gesturing with her coffee cup as she spoke. “Point out all the plot holes and correct every little detail it got wrong. I think that would honor a part of Dad’s legacy that he was pretty proud of.”

  Paul nearly laughed, and Laurie started to smile, but their mother looked so wounded and furious that they both looked away and sank into their seats.

  “It was endearing,” Audrey protested. “It was just such a Dad thing. I thought it would be nice to remember something funny and annoying that we loved about him, instead of just the parts that are—”

  “Your father deserves respect.” His mother’s voice was clipped and airless. “He always did, Audrey. The least you could do is start showing it to him now.”

  Paul could see the effort it took for Audrey to bite her tongue. He wished she wouldn’t, and that th
e argument could devolve into the fight it wanted to be. Instead it festered all morning without anyone daring to mention it.

  After breakfast they took the candle to the cemetery in its little brass box. It fell to Audrey to place it at the base of the headstone because she was the only one who could stomach it. They waited in silence under the cobweb of black branches, watching the candle flame gutter in the cold.

  “Shouldn’t we say something?” said Laurie.

  “Why?” Paul countered. “Who do we think is listening?”

  But his mother was already drawing a deep inhale so that she could get through the kaddish without collapsing. He joined her along with the rest of them, because somehow there was still some comfort in following the pattern. There was no argument over who they were to each other or what the absence meant. Paul couldn’t forget the size of the void on the far side of the clouds, or his sense that any being that could encompass it would be too terrible and unfathomable to notice them at all. The only thing to pray to was the agreement between the four of them, and between them and the centuries of blood and bones that came before.

  And then when they left, they were sick of each other again. They had to withdraw; they had to pull themselves forward into another year of pretending to forget.

  “I want to go to services tonight, I think,” Laurie said tentatively in the car. “Anyone want to go too?”

  Audrey said nothing, wringing her hands in front of the heating vent as the Buick sat idling. In the passenger seat Paul’s mother sat very still, and he could tell she was imagining the same thing he was—the neighbors’ faces turning toward them when the rabbi read his father’s name. Nearly all the neighbors had been compassionate, which really meant deigning to pity. After it happened, the wives had brought trays of food, while their husbands offered to make repairs around the house and clean the gutters in the fall. But compassion didn’t mean their faces wouldn’t register the gravity of his father’s final sin—their surprise at having to hear his father’s name spoken aloud, among their own deserving loved ones, as if he had any right to be mourned the same way.

  “I’m sure your grandparents will go with you,” his mother said after a long pause. “I’m sorry, honey. I’m just too tired today.”

  Once they reached home, they scattered. Laurie escaped to their grandparents’ house, Audrey to cover a friend’s shift at the record store. As Paul was leaving, he saw the light flick on above the stairwell. He pictured his mother leaning over the bathroom sink, tying her hair back into its plait with a Seconal waiting on her tongue. Whenever he got home, whether in one hour or eight, he knew she would be asleep.

  When he boarded the bus to campus, he was barely conscious of where he was going—he was preoccupied by fantasies of crashing, every anonymous body around him torn and battered. At first he imagined dying alongside the rest of them, agony splintering through him, perfect understanding and then perfect oblivion. He asked himself if this was what he wanted, and he kept asking until he could believe his own answer. Paul was still braver than his father. He would try to survive like Julian, defiant, holding his body together through sheer will to live.

  Paul was in his winter clothes, hat pulled low over his red hair and one of Julian’s old scarves covering his face, but the other boys in the dormitory still recognized him. They never got used to Paul’s comings and goings. Often they muttered to one another as he passed; occasionally he heard a ring of jeering laughter.

  He couldn’t relax until he’d put Julian’s door between him and the world outside. It wasn’t that he was afraid of the others, exactly. But he remembered Danny Costello crumpled on the linoleum, blood-slick hands covering his head. He remembered how suddenly the dread had receded, how every other sensation was buried beneath the thrill of relief. Paul didn’t trust himself to listen too closely to what the boys said outside the door. If he heard the wrong thing, he knew his self-control would snap.

  Julian was out, but he’d left his day planner open on his desk (group proj. mtg., 12–2ish—bring Goffman—do not concuss K. with it). Paul shed his shoes, hat, and coat, but he kept the scarf close. It smelled like menthol drops and orange peel and a dusty trace of smoke, deeply familiar and nothing like home.

  He set aside his glasses and lay on the unmade bed in his cemetery clothes, watching the signal flags catch on the eddies of heat from the radiator. Outside the window, at the outer edge of his vision, snow was finally falling.

  When Julian returned, Paul drifted out of his uneasy sleep, consciousness fanning outward petal by petal with the sound of Julian’s voice. There was a fresh cool weight over his body—the blanket, he realized after a few seconds, pulled up to cover him.

  “I’m not sure if it’s the cold or the smog or both.” Julian was chatting idly as he put away his belongings. Paul watched him from the corner of his eye as he stepped out of his shoes. “But I’ve been a wheezy mess all week, it’s mortifying. Listen, I sound like an accordion . . .”

  He shut his eyes again until Julian had slid under the covers beside him. They settled against each other a little gracelessly, more intent on closeness than comfort. Paul pressed his mouth to Julian’s temples and wrists and the side of his throat so that he could feel his pulse against his teeth. There were still a few half-melted fragments of snow clinging to Julian’s hair, but they dissolved between Paul’s fingers as soon as he touched them.

  “Listen,” Julian said again, and drew a deliberate inhale. There was a ringing haze in his breathing, air struggling to find a path around scar tissue. Paul feared suddenly that a fissure would appear inside the broken lung. He pictured blood bubbling up and spilling from Julian’s nose and mouth.

  He looked away quickly, but Julian still saw some ugly truth in his face. Paul felt Julian’s fingertips press into the side of his chest, as if he were measuring the gaps between his ribs.

  “Oh,” Julian said. “That was today, wasn’t it?”

  Paul thought at first that the question perturbed him because he had told Julian and then forgotten about it. Then he remembered that he hadn’t—wouldn’t have, ever, even if he’d resolved to forget afterward. “I don’t . . . ,” he started to say.

  “That was creepy of me.” Julian didn’t sound sorry. “I saw the postcard on your mom’s fridge. I had to look up what it meant.” He added, “That’s one of those things my family doesn’t do.”

  There was a jarring gentleness in Julian’s voice, uncharacteristically wary, but it didn’t entirely eclipse the cool verve of curiosity. Paul avoided Julian’s eyes until he was certain he wouldn’t press for details. He knew, or thought he knew, that Julian cared whether or not he was in pain—but there was also a part of Julian that was fascinated by how the pain worked, just as he was fascinated when Paul revealed a weakness or idiosyncrasy during a chess game. Perhaps he scrutinized it in case he needed to use it someday. The alternative was that it was curiosity for curiosity’s sake, which was almost more dangerous.

  “There’s this idea in psychoanalysis that I’ve always liked.” Julian pulled himself closer and rested his head in the crook of Paul’s arm. “It’s that what we call ‘love’ is actually letting your identity fill in around the shape of the other person—you love someone by defining yourself against them. It says loss hurts because there’s nothing holding that part of you in place anymore. But your outline still holds, and it keeps holding. The thing you shaped yourself into by loving them, you never stop being that. The marks are permanent, so the idea of the person you loved is permanent, too.”

  Only as permanent as I am, Paul wanted to say, but being cynical in response to Julian’s kindness would have been cheap.

  “But I’ve always been shaped around you.” Paul had given up on trying not to stammer through his sincerity; whenever he became embarrassed Julian would kiss his forehead and promise to be charmed by it. “It’s different, you’re different, it’s—I always think of a passage from the Symposium, this allegory about people who started off as t
wo halves of a whole, but then something cut them apart, and they spend their whole lives looking for their other half so they can fit themselves back together. And that’s how it feels, it hurts, it’s like I lost you before I was born.”

  “I don’t think you’ve ever felt anything that didn’t hurt you,” Julian said. “We’ve found each other, out of everyone else in the world. Does that hurt, too?”

  Paul abruptly let go of Julian’s hair and slid his hand under the layers of sweater and shirt. He felt the embossed ragged line of the scar and imagined how deeply it threaded between muscle and interstice. Julian yielded as if Paul were following his command.

  “What happens if I lose you again?” Paul didn’t mean to ask it aloud, but he couldn’t stop himself.

  “You don’t.”

  “How do I know that?”

  A sharp, inscrutable smile. “You don’t.”

  Paul could never forget, not quite, that the closeness between them was an illusion. He had no scar to mirror Julian’s, because the wound that had cut them into separate bodies was much older and deeper, invisible. When he kissed Julian, there was always a moment when he believed they could heal the division. But it didn’t matter how urgently or reverently they touched each other, how inseparable they pretended to be. He couldn’t trust that they wouldn’t be parted again, not so long as the separation still existed.

  9.

  Weeks ago, he’d tried to tell his family that he didn’t want them to do anything for his birthday. They hadn’t listened last year, when the day came so soon after the funeral that it still startled him to see his reflection in an uncovered mirror. He had all but pleaded then, but they insisted. The cousins brought gifts wrapped in bright crêpe, and his grandmother baked a cake he could barely taste, and they all pretended vehemently that he still had a childhood left to indulge. If they’d been willing to make him endure that charade for the sake of their sense of normalcy, then Paul knew that this year’s battle was already lost. When the day arrived, there was nothing he could do but set his shoulders, resolve to endure it, and try to convince his face to smile.