These Violent Delights

by Micah Nemerever

  He had to get through the first half of the party without Julian. One of Julian’s brothers was in town for the morning, and he insisted on being entertained. (“A long layover on his way down from Dartmouth for a crew meet,” Julian had explained, “which is a mortifying sentence, and I could kill Henry for forcing me to utter it.”) So Paul spent the hours before Julian’s arrival trying to fade into the wallpaper and avoid notice, which was difficult when the festivities were ostensibly in his honor.

  He could tell some of the family thought he was being churlish, no matter how much he widened his eyes or how amiable a shape he tried to make with his mouth. He did his best to absorb the small talk and best wishes, but he still caught sight of Hazel and her daughter, Debbie, exchanging a look of exasperation. He could hardly wait to get rid of us, one was thinking; It was inevitable that at least one of those kids was going to turn out funny, answered the other. They shared a discreet laugh, and Paul crushed his elbows against his sides until the fury faded.

  Julian was late; this wasn’t unusual for him, but it still stung. They started lunch without him, twenty minutes after he was supposed to arrive. Finally there was a tentative knock at his grandparents’ door, then a more decisive ring as Julian figured out how to work the old-fashioned twist doorbell. He was waiting on the porch with a hinged wooden box under one arm.

  “I hope I didn’t miss lunch, it smells great,” said Julian with breathless earnestness as he stepped into the foyer. Paul’s grandparents were waiting behind him, and Paul could tell Julian was engineering a very specific first impression. “I’m so sorry, my cabbie vastly overstated how well he knew the neighborhood.”

  “It’s fine,” Paul said, though he was quietly trying to discern whether the excuse was actually true or just a plausible thing for Julian’s persona to say.

  Paul’s grandparents had crept up beside him. His grandmother gave his shoulder a quick, prompting tap, and Paul scrambled for the script he was supposed to follow. “Um, right, so this is—I would like to introduce—Julian Fromme, he’s my friend from school, Julian I would like to introduce my grandparents Maurice and Flora Krakovsky—”

  “A solid effort,” said Paul’s grandmother fondly, “although for future reference, it may help to breathe. How are you, Julian? Let me take your coat, we’ve got your plate in a warm oven . . .”

  When his grandparents had drifted back out of earshot, Julian caught Paul’s eye and smiled—his real smile, sly and electric.

  “‘I would like to introduce,’” said Julian. “Poor Pablo. You’re so square, you’re a cube.”

  “Remind me, how much money did your parents spend on those nice straight teeth?” Paul countered, and the smile became a grin.

  “My brother says happy birthday, by the way,” Julian added. “Nice of him, I suppose. When he’s President, you’ll be able to tell all your friends.”

  “God, is that what he wants to be? Is he out of his mind?”

  “Oh, our Henry wants whatever Father tells him he wants. There’s not a single thought in his head that wasn’t bought and paid for by someone else, so it’s really the perfect job for him.”

  Paul soon forgot he’d ever been annoyed at Julian for being late. He even forgot how anxious his family had made him all morning. If they paid him any attention now, he no longer noticed; he imagined that in Julian’s presence they had gone sun-blind, and that they would only perceive Paul himself as a faint blur at the periphery. It freed him to speak, because anything he said would be forgotten as soon as he’d spoken. Whenever Julian answered a question, Paul caught himself joining in, trying to focus Julian’s brilliance to a fine, searing beam. He tried to coax Julian into venturing past the bland, polite persona designed to placate Paul’s mother. He prompted Julian to tell his most eloquent stories, to talk about topics Paul knew he was so passionate about that he wouldn’t be able to contain his enthusiasm. When Julian failed to divulge an interesting detail, Paul did it for him, eagerly, as if the life he described were his own.

  After the meal, the party began to dissipate. Charlie Parker faded out to soft static, and neither grandparent hurried to replace him. A young cousin had a temper tantrum, and his parents whisked him and his siblings home for their nap. The Mount Lebanon cousins made their goodbyes next, pleading traffic, and drove away into the torrent of late-winter rain. The rest of the group drifted into the living room, where there was a fresh Duke Ellington record and more coffee. Paul’s grandfather made a great show of cagily adding a splash of whiskey to each mug (Laurie received no more than a teaspoon).

  Julian had fallen quiet. He gave the impression of being serenely unguarded. Paul lingered in the doorway to observe him, trying to decide whether he was looking at the machinery or at the ghost that turned its gears.

  He watched Julian reach toward the sugar bowl, the movements of his hands and the way his shirt shifted over his shoulders. As he was collecting a third sugar cube, he looked up and met Paul’s eyes with a ready smile. There was no evidence of a shift, but Paul also knew better than to think he would be able to detect it.

  He returned the smile, wary and sincere, and sat alongside Julian in the armchair.

  “Anyone mind if I smoke?” Julian asked the room. He settled back as he spoke, draping one arm carelessly around Paul’s neck. When no one objected, Julian held a cigarette between his teeth and lit it one-handed. Paul tried to imagine his own body moving with the same fluid grace.

  “You never opened the one Julian brought,” Laurie pointed out after a while. Sure enough, the box sat undisturbed in the front hallway. Paul had set it there with the opened gifts, the inevitable hiking socks and hand-knit sweaters and books that were almost, but not quite, the kind he actually liked.

  “I figured, you know—later,” Paul said to his shoes, but she was already rising to retrieve it. “I don’t like turning it into a performance.”

  “It is later,” said Audrey. “All the cousins are gone, there’s nobody here but us chickens.”

  Paul hesitated before opening the box, wishing the others would take pity on him and look away. He lifted the lid just far enough to parse the contents—then shut it again and quickly fastened the latch.

  “Are they the wrong kind?” Julian asked, with a guilelessness that might even have convinced Paul if he hadn’t known better. “I can take them back and get different ones, I just got the brand my mother said was good.”

  “You know perfectly well,” said Paul quietly, but his stammer overtook him and he couldn’t summon any words beyond that.

  There was no preventing it. The box was pulled from his hands, its contents inspected; there were appreciative murmurs and shared looks of tight-lipped alarm.

  Paul had hoped they wouldn’t know enough to understand, but they had the same memories he did. A few summers ago he’d saved up for weeks, pulling weeds and washing windows up and down the street, so that he could go to the art supply shop near Carnegie-Mellon and buy a single tube of real carmine red. He’d used every scrap of it, flattening the tube down to a sliver and then slicing it open to scrape out the remnants. It hadn’t even been quite top-of-the-line, not like these; the mere presence of the word artist instead of student on the label had been so daunting that he was afraid to open it once he had it.

  “Don’t you dare fret about ‘wasting’ them,” said Julian. “I like your weird paintings, I want there to be more of them.”

  If Julian had detected Paul’s embarrassment at all, he was atypically oblivious about where it might have come from—misattributing it, apparently, to mere modesty. There was nothing to do but forgive him, but it didn’t happen without effort. It came slowly, breath by breath, before Paul could finally manage a smile.

  Paul’s grandfather was sitting in the other armchair, watching the two of them. He held the box open in his large hands while Paul’s grandmother perched on the arm, reading glasses held aloft as she looked inside. Their faces were shrewdly calm, as if they were waiting for the right mo
ment to share a piece of bad news.

  “You have a very generous friend, Paulie,” said his grandfather gravely.

  They took advantage of the chaos as the party was finally ending. While the others gathered their coats, Paul’s grandparents ushered his mother into the dining room, then shut themselves away behind the louvered French doors. Paul only listened in for a moment; it was all that he could stand.

  “It’s just that he’s so lonely. He pretends he isn’t, but he wouldn’t try so hard if he weren’t. It’s hard on him the same way it is on Paul, they’re both so smart, and I think that’s why he—”

  “Ruth—oh, Ruth, honey, it wouldn’t be so bad if it were just him. Paul could take care of himself, provided he wanted to, but—wasn’t there some concern, before?”

  He could hear the panic in how briskly his mother ignored the question.

  “You don’t understand how good this has been for him,” she said. “He’s never had someone his age he could talk to before—I’m not sure either of them have. Of course they don’t know how they’re supposed to behave around each other, they haven’t learned yet, and they’re still so young—”

  “He’s seventeen.” (His grandfather knew, of course, what teenage boys got up to.) “Two years younger than you were when Audrey was born. He isn’t that young. He knows.”

  “It isn’t healthy to let him carry on like this. You need to do something, or this is going to get out of hand.”

  “Jake said he would grow out of it.” His mother held his father’s name in her mouth as if the shape of it could cut her tongue.

  “For god’s sake, Ruthie,” said his grandfather. “Look at the way he looks at that boy. This isn’t going to go away by itself.”

  Paul tightened the belt of his raincoat as if to cinch his fluttering insides into place. He turned away and stalked out; his sisters were both still waiting in the front hallway, but they recoiled quickly and didn’t try to stop him.

  Julian waited in the back seat of the Buick, door hanging open, droplets dusting the inside of the glass. Paul threw himself inside and slammed the door. He could feel Julian watching him, but refused to look his way.

  “Are you—?” Julian started to ask, but Paul’s last nerve finally snapped. He wasn’t even aware of hitting the back of the passenger seat until the shock was reverberating between his elbow and his fist. He hadn’t broken anything, he knew that right away, but there was a ringing jagged pain in the bones of his hand that told him it had been a close thing.

  “Okay,” said Julian coolly. “Thank you for your clarity.”

  Paul stretched his hand to let sensation flow back into his fingers. His knuckles ached with the slow promise of a bruise. “Shut up. It isn’t about you.”

  He expected Julian to snap at him, but he didn’t. He just set his jaw and shut his eyes, the way he did when he had decided to absorb an insult from his father rather than pick a fight. It was unfair of him to be hurt, unfair of him to put himself deliberately in the way of Paul’s anger. Paul looked away quickly and stared at his knees, wringing his injured hand to worsen the pain.

  “I don’t want to take it back.” Julian looked at his hands as he spoke, so carelessly that Paul couldn’t tell whether he was avoiding his eyes. “It’s supposed to be a vote of confidence. You’re always saying you want to create something that matters—I wanted to show you that I know you can. I just want you to believe me when I tell you you’re worth something.”

  “I don’t want you to tell me that. I’ll believe it when it’s true. And in the meantime this sort of thing is just—just so conspicuously unearned, it’s so obvious that I haven’t done anything to deserve it that I—”

  “Spare me, Pablo,” said Julian acidly. “This isn’t a transaction.”

  He had never wanted reassurance. When Julian finally lashed out at him, it was a relief.

  10.

  He expected a confrontation at home, but it didn’t happen immediately. His family handled him with kid gloves, the way they always had. “They’re nice people,” Julian had said, as if it were an amusing peculiarity rather than evidence of cowardice. His grandparents still had him over for lunch on Sundays, and even if the questions about girls had grown more frequent, they asked them so carelessly that Paul couldn’t tell. Julian was still welcome at his mother’s kitchen table. He still watched with performative raptness as she demonstrated how to fry mushrooms or sew on a button; Paul’s mother still laughed, quietly but sincerely, at the stories of prep-school whimsy that were too sunny to be the whole truth. When she walked past Julian, she would often squeeze his arm gently, as if he were one of her own children.

  The strangeness of it sometimes took Paul aback. What existed between them shouldn’t share a reality with the world outside; it should be its own truth, self-contained and defined on its own terms, the same way that a dream was true. But at odd moments the two realities converged as he watched Julian’s body move through the world and remembered how recently and how intimately they had touched. He would notice the angle of Julian’s wrist as he turned a doorknob and remember twisting that wrist behind his back—letting his teeth cut a slim black bruise into the flesh of Julian’s shoulder, only hours before, a wound so fresh that Julian must still feel it sting. Now and then there was a stray note in Julian’s laugh that rhymed with the way the right touch could make his voice break. The familiarity drew an uncanny bright line between two moments that should never have been able to reach each other. Look at you, Paul would think, in a voice he despised because it imposed itself from the outside. Look what you’re doing. What’s wrong with you?

  But when they were alone, he could promise himself that he and Julian were each other’s birthright, and that the only unnatural thing was the fact that their blood was divided between two bodies. He could believe that even calling it “sex” was incorrect, because it wasn’t about anything so shallow as physical desire. They wanted each other in the way of flesh wanting to knit itself together over a wound.

  As winter faded into a dreary spring, Julian grew more tense with every passing day. Tentative summer plans to watch a professor’s house had fallen through—his parents were demanding that he accompany them to visit his grandfather in France at the very least, and the professor decided that his orchids required a house sitter who could provide continuous care. As the end of the school year grew nearer, there were no other opportunities. Julian pretended to find the topic merely irritating, but his dread was clear from the sheer number of times he mentioned it.

  Eventually Julian couldn’t talk around it any longer. He’d been in a volatile mood all day, snappish and brittle and not making any effort to hide it. They had the house to themselves, but as usual they had barricaded themselves in Paul’s room. Warm, dirty rain glazed the window; Julian was sitting up beside him, watching it fall.

  “This summer is going to kill me.”

  Paul felt a twist of annoyance at him for speaking. He wanted to keep pretending that the full extent of space and time only reached as far as the walls of his room. When Paul pulled the blanket over his head, he could pretend in the dull light that their skin was the same color, no freckles or veins or scars to break the illusion. He could convince himself not to know that his own limbs belonged to him and Julian’s didn’t. Both their hands were the same lean shape, indistinguishable in the dark.

  “I hate being there,” said Julian. Paul listened to his voice moving through his chest, the eerie way it rang hollow on one side but not the other. “I hate their creepy Stepford town. I hate the dinner parties they throw for their war-profiteer friends. I hate how when we go to the country club, my dad always wears the same fucking sunglasses that he thinks distract people from the bridge of his nose. Three months of them, without a real human being for miles around—if I don’t take a hammer to every last one of them, it’ll be a miracle.”

  Paul noticed with a sudden, sickly chill that Julian had said nothing about missing him.

  “You co
uld come stay with me if you get too tired of them,” he said, trying to convince himself as much as Julian. “Or I could even come visit for a few days, just, if you wanted backup—”

  Julian laughed so dismissively that Paul didn’t dare keep talking.

  “What you can do is write to me,” Julian said. It didn’t sound like anything he actually needed so much as an acquiescence to Paul’s childishness. “And keep an eye out for anything—anything at all—that might get me back up here before August. The rest is my problem, not yours.”

  Carefully, half certain that it was a mistake, Paul pulled the blanket down and propped himself up on his arm to meet Julian’s eyes.

  “Listen,” he said. “What do they do to you?”

  Julian looked as if he’d never heard such a pathetic question.

  “What do they do to me?” he echoed, singsong and impatient. There was something a little flat about his vowels, and with a twist of self-disgust Paul recognized it as an imitation of his accent. “God, Pablo. It’s not fucking Peyton Place, they don’t have to ‘do’ anything.”

  “So why do you feel so sorry for yourself?” It sounded much nastier out loud than it had in his head, but he pressed on, desperately, as if that might achieve anything besides making it worse. “Either you’re lying to me, and they’re worse than you say, or what you’re going home to isn’t much worse than what I’m going to be stuck here with all summer, so I don’t—”

  Julian’s gaze was ice-cold.

  “You don’t have the first idea what you’re talking about,” he said. “Shut up before you make a fool of yourself.”

  Paul let the ugly silence settle over them. He disentangled his legs from Julian’s and put some space between them, lying on the edge of the twin mattress with his arms folded tight. Julian shrugged back into his unbuttoned shirt and sat hugging his knees. His fingertips brushed his lips now and then, restlessly, as if his hands were itching for a cigarette.