These Violent Delights

by Micah Nemerever

He tried to tell himself that Julian would laugh it off and forget about it, and that the out-of-character promptness of his reply was a sign of boredom instead of alarm. But he couldn’t relax knowing Julian still had his letter and could refer back to it whenever he wanted to remind himself why Paul wasn’t worth his time. If they ever saw each other again, he resolved to steal that letter and burn it, too. The weight of the if was almost more than he could bear.

  June 2, 1973

  Hello, stranger.

  Even from 200 miles away I can hear you sulking. I never said, nor intended to imply, that you ought to stop writing, so either you’re up there wallowing in self-loathing or you’re giving me the silent treatment on purpose, as punishment for having the gall to say “no” to you. Both have the effect of turning your crisis of self-worth into a problem I am supposed to solve for you, and I don’t think I’ve made any secret of finding that fucking tedious.

  Or perhaps you’ve been too busy to write, in which case I’m being unfair. Still, I hope this will serve as your impetus to make the time if you don’t already have it. Or (ahem) to emerge from your sulk a better man. I will not actually be able to tell the difference, and if you reply in due haste I’m happy to give you the benefit of the doubt.

  Things are bad here, so I won’t write about it. It isn’t anything specific, nothing I’d know how to explain to you in a way you’d understand. And even if I could, I wouldn’t want to, because it isn’t your problem and it’s not for you to take on. I can’t put it any more plainly than that, so if you’re holding your breath for an apology, read this again. Believe in the things I try to tell you instead of the things you think you deserve to be told.

  Keep writing. It doesn’t matter what about. Please keep writing.

  —J.

  2.

  He did as he was told. It was all he could do. Even though Julian’s letters still arrived just once a week—usually on Tuesdays, as if he’d set them as a weekend chore. Even though Julian concealed every fragment of his own life, piece by piece, until Paul might as well have been writing to a constellation of opinions and ideas rather than a human being. The anecdotes about Julian’s brothers shrank away to nothing; the already rare mentions of his parents disappeared altogether. Paul only found out after the fact that Julian had had a birthday in mid-June (“Don’t feel bad, I didn’t tell you”)—and there was no mention of what he’d done to mark the occasion, if anything. Vague as the letter was, it stated plainly that Paul shouldn’t send a present. If he insisted, Julian wrote, he should wait till August and give it in person.

  At the beginning of the summer, Paul had at least been able to situate Julian in some kind of context. There were details he could extrapolate from, even if they were sparse. The lavender-sweet French country air at his grandfather’s summer house, a relief after months of Pittsburgh pollution; in Maryland his family had a garden, humid and immaculate (Julian had seen an orange butterfly he hoped Paul would be able to identify from a hazy description). Until now Julian’s relatives had been as indistinguishable and carefully posed as mannequins, but at least Paul had known they existed. Now, for all Paul could tell, the Frommes’ family home was completely empty. The house itself might not even exist at all, not since Julian had stopped acknowledging the deck chairs or the wallpaper or the shutters battened against a gale.

  Worst of all, there was no indication of what was going on inside Julian’s head. The only emotion he would ever name, or even allude to, was boredom. Paul knew by now that Julian used this word to describe any form of discontent, however acute or persistent it might be. It could indicate genuine boredom or something far more malignant.

  As Julian’s family receded from view, they became all the more monstrous. Paul could no longer believe, if he ever had at all, that they were merely shallow and cold in a way that exasperated Julian but didn’t hurt him. They couldn’t keep Julian from him like this unless there was something more to them, something worse. When Paul summoned an image of them now, they were no longer mannequins in fine white tennis clothes. They melted—plastic buckling, distorted and inhuman—into hateful misshapen faces and greedy, clutching hands. Paul remembered Danny Costello’s father sitting in the hall outside the principal’s office, his hard gin-blossom face, his bloodshot eyes unfocused and glaring—the flare of compassion for the other boy that Paul had felt, then decided not to feel. He felt it for Julian now, as he built a new picture of Julian’s father as a man capable of keeping such a tight grasp. His ugliness might be dressed in a suit and tie in the name of patrician civility, but his eyes were just as cruel. Paul’s father had talked about men like this, whose hands were steady even when they were drunk and who knew how to hit their wives and children without leaving a mark. The law couldn’t do much with them; Paul’s father dealt with them by returning after his shift and bruising his knuckles on their jaws.

  With Julian’s every letter Paul drummed himself into a rage against his imagined version of Julian’s father. He pictured smashing in that vaguely defined face, sometimes with his baseball bat, sometimes with his hands. He would arrive on Julian’s doorstep, knowing he was needed, knowing he was wanted there. One by one he would break the grasp of every hand that tried to hold Julian in place. He hated them, and his hatred would make him brave.

  But despite his fantasies, Paul knew too little, and Julian gave him nothing. Julian tried to conceal the distance between them by pretending he hadn’t noticed it at all, much less engineered it. As he withdrew, his letters became warmer, filled with doodles and inside jokes and effusive thanks for whatever Paul had sent him most recently. He answered every question Paul asked him except the important ones, and Paul eventually gave up on asking if he was all right. “I’m worried about you,” he allowed himself now and again, but Julian didn’t acknowledge these asides, either.

  Writing turned into a compulsion. Two letters a week became three, sometimes four. When Paul didn’t have much to write about, he filled his envelopes with small watercolor sketches and magazine clippings. Julian always responded to these offerings with such a complete performance of delight that Paul had trouble believing he really meant it. One week Paul sent him a copy of the Conservatory’s brochure for the summer butterfly garden; Paul himself was featured on the front flap, showing an Atlas moth to a cluster of gleefully horrified children. Julian replied with a now-predictable outpouring of teasing and whimsical caricatures. As always, Paul wanted to be charmed—but it was a kind of affection Julian had never shown when they were face-to-face, and it kept Paul writhing at the end of the hook so helplessly that he could never quite believe it wasn’t by design.

  The next time he felt the urge to ask whether Julian was all right, he decided it was better to be angry than afraid. Sometimes, he wrote, I feel like what you’re really hiding is that you’re sick of me.

  Julian’s reply, uncharacteristically direct: If I were sick of you, believe me, you’d know.

  Paul had to resign himself to the fear, to the helpless fury he could never find a reason for. The dread settled into place just below his stomach. At night he tried to focus his attention on the space that curled up against him in the dark, to imagine merely missing Julian rather than fearing what his distance might signify. He tried to remember how it had felt to believe that he and Julian knew each other more profoundly than either of them knew themselves. But if that were true, he knew now, he wouldn’t have to guess what Julian was keeping from him. There was nothing mutual about their understanding and never had been; he’d only been convinced otherwise by how perfectly Julian understood him.

  It wasn’t until Audrey confronted him that he realized how visible his suffering was from the outside. For all the pains Paul was taking to hold his unhappiness below the surface, some part of him was grateful to be seen. For Audrey to notice meant that he was still tethered to reality, if only by a thread.

  She sprang the conversation on him while they were in the car, an old trick of their father’s when he wanted to t
rap them in a lecture. Audrey had finally saved up enough for a car of her own, a little green Volkswagen whose interior smelled persistently and inexplicably of fennel. She was proud as a peacock of her new acquisition, and took every possible excuse to jingle her new keys and take the car for a spin, so he didn’t think anything of it when she offered to pick him up from his volunteer shift at the Conservatory. Still, when the bait-and-switch came, it didn’t entirely surprise him.

  They crammed his bicycle awkwardly into the back seat and rode in silence. Audrey kept lollipops in her glove box, and was worrying at one of them as she drove. Paul couldn’t quite ignore the noise the hard candy made whenever it clicked against her teeth.

  “So,” she said as the car emerged from the park onto Forbes Avenue. “You know I try to pretty much stay out of your business, right?”

  “So you tell me whenever you’re about to pry into it.”

  “When I have to, sure,” she said, unabashed. “Like when I see you tying yourself into knots over someone who can’t be bothered to give you half as much attention as you give him. I wouldn’t say anything if it weren’t obviously upsetting you, but . . .”

  He had tried, clumsily, to conceal the imbalance in how often he and Julian wrote to each other. He hid his own letters between outgoing bills, or else covertly walked them downhill to the nearest street-corner mailbox. But Audrey—protective, impatient Audrey—had of course noticed it anyway.

  Audrey let the silence fester. When they had to stop for a red light, she reached forward and hesitantly squeezed his forearm. She was trying to look gentle and maternal, traits that were utterly foreign to her.

  “Poor little bug,” she said with awkward tenderness. “Listen, I’ve been there, it’s a fucking drag.”

  He couldn’t think of a way to defend himself without confiding in her, and this infuriated him.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” was all he could say.

  Audrey sighed and let go of his arm.

  “Believe it or not, I kind of do,” she said carefully. “I know sometimes you can be really invested, and the other person is just sort of . . . trying on a new idea of themselves, and you end up as collateral damage once they get sick of playing dress-up as someone more interesting than they actually are. Don’t ask me how I know, but—”

  “There’s something going on with his family.” He felt as if he’d broken a confidence. “I don’t know what it is, but I can tell, he isn’t being—it’s not like you were saying, it’s not that he doesn’t want to, it’s more like he can’t.”

  But the longer he spoke, the less certain he was that it was true. Perhaps Julian wasn’t hiding anything at all, and was pushing Paul away not out of necessity but because he was nearing the end of his patience. Perhaps the airy house by the sea still stood, and perhaps its residents’ worst sin against Julian was to annoy him. The possibility cast a bitter pall even over Julian’s demand that he keep writing. He might have devoured Paul’s need for him with such unfettered hunger that he had made himself sick on it. Everything else eventually bored him. There was no reason for Paul to think he was any different.

  Audrey must have seen the doubt in his face, but she was either too kind or too cowardly to acknowledge it.

  “If you’re right,” she said, “I wish he’d at least tell you what’s going on so you can stop running yourself ragged.”

  He didn’t dare tell her that he wished for the same thing, but not because he craved relief. It was because he was certain he could only feel whole again if Julian gave him a reason to show up on his doorstep and slit his parents’ throats.

  July 6, 1973

  Paul—

  I just can’t imagine you on a beach. I picture you lurking under the boardwalk like a barnacle, wearing long slacks and your army coat and one of those countless black turtlenecks. Just a pair of dark eyes peering out from the shadows, perhaps with a sketchbook open on your knees, casting judgment on the heliolatry of the philistines beyond. The sunburn you mentioned is no obstacle to this image, because if the sun touched you even for a moment you’d go up in flames like a vampire. (I grew a plant in the dark once for a science project, and it came up so skinny and pale. When I put it in the sun it died.)

  I wish I’d known you were in Cape May before you were nearly gone. We were at the same latitude down to the minute, did you know that? When I got your postcard I went down to the dock for a while and looked due east, straight at you, wondering if you would turn around and look back.

  For reasons I won’t detail, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about our old pal Milgram. There’s a variable he didn’t account for, and it’s that he was at fucking Yale. All those nice Mayflower Society boys, who went to prep schools just like mine and who were Ivy League–bound before they could walk. And here is what I learned about these boys: the haute bourgeoisie is a perpetual motion engine of in-group compliance, and all who fail to conform to the masculine norm in particular are to be met not only with disdain but with violence.

  It isn’t just that the young man of means is conditioned to obey (though he certainly is—Daddy always knows best, and the nice fellow in the white coat probably does, too). It’s that he is also conditioned not to particularly care about the collateral damage of his obedience. Of course most Yale boys would turn up the watts—what do they care about the poor bastard on the other side? Their fathers make their fortunes pouring poison into the sky. What’s a little one-on-one torture when you know the world is yours to ruin?

  (There was only one of Milgram’s participants who immediately clocked what the experiment really was. Funnily enough, he was Jewish—one of the few who managed to squeak past the quota. Amazing what a difference it makes when you know how easily it could be you at the business end of the buzzer.)

  I’m trying to remember now what it’s like when we speak in person. Your voice changes when you’re angry—something in the sharpness of the consonants. But your handwriting doesn’t change at all, and it makes you seem more dispassionate than you’re capable of being. But I know I can always count on you to maintain your revolutionary fervor. It’s the two of us, contra mundum, looking down into the machinery. All I’ve ever learned to do is survive it, and that just barely. I’ve always admired your ardor in wanting to smash the gears.

  What a lonely, dreary thing it is to know the truth. What a relief it is that now neither of us has to be alone in knowing.

  I hope you looked west while I was looking east, and that for a moment you met my eyes without knowing it. I know you never look away, even when your eyes are closed, but I’m never certain you can see what’s really there.

  I miss you to pieces.

  Yours always

  —J.

  3.

  He would swear in retrospect that there was a shift in the air, that day in mid-July that the rupture came. He could never explain what about it was different. It was much like the ugly summer days that had come before it, smog-dreary and maddeningly still, heat trapped under the dome of the low beige-blue sky. Paul had retreated to the swimming pool the last several mornings, ever since an abortive run left his chest aching. The only thing that should have distinguished that day was its agonizing monotony, the boredom and stir-craziness of a filthy city in high summer. But part of him knew, or would remember knowing. It was a feeling in the same fold of soft tissue in his chest that experienced a sense of foreboding the day his father killed himself—the place inside him that had once, and sometimes still, believed in God.

  He worked an uneventful morning shift at the butterfly garden. The latest Atlas moth was dying, but that was no surprise; they were larger than the other saturniids and lost strength more quickly, no matter how relentlessly they had eaten when they still had mouths. This one was six days old now, sluggish and docile in the way of a starving creature that didn’t expect to eat. Paul could see the early signs in how it moved its wings, as if they hung from a rusted hinge. At the end of his last demonstration, he relea
sed his grip on the moth’s abdomen, but it didn’t retreat to its usual perch beside the skylight. It rested in his hand for a long while, very still, its soft strange weight balanced on his palm. He pitied it in a way that he never felt for the ones he killed.

  Outside the gardens, the world was quiet, all its sounds muffled. The streets were unusually empty as he bicycled home. He was insensitive at last to the anxious misery that had thrummed through him for weeks. What had replaced it was a profound and unmistakable sadness. His nerves were cool, the world’s edges sanded smooth.

  When he arrived, he found the house in chaos. His mother’s car was gone, and Audrey’s sat by the curb with both its doors hanging open. Laurie was sitting on the stairs inside, hugging her knapsack, while Audrey careened from room to room like a disoriented fly.

  “God, where’ve you been?” Audrey remembered the answer to her question before she had finished asking it. “You need to pack an overnight bag. We’re going to Hazel’s, Bubbe Sonia had a stroke.”

  “Is—?” he started to ask, but she had already darted back downstairs. He turned to Laurie, who looked at him blankly before she parsed the question he didn’t want to ask.

  “Not yet,” said Laurie flatly. “But she’s ninety-two, so . . . yeah. Not yet.”

  He remembered how small and sad his great-grandmother had looked at the end of his last visit to her rest home—sitting alone in her little white room, watching with solemn rheumy eyes as they left her behind. His body suddenly felt ungainly and out of place, an awkward distraction from the gravity of the news. But the fog of anticipatory quiet hadn’t lifted, even in the turmoil. Without it he imagined he might grieve, or at least feel pity. Instead the only feeling he could identify was the claustrophobic dread of being trapped in the middle as his family circled the wagons.

  Paul hadn’t quite finished packing when the phone rang, and he tried to ignore it until he remembered that they were expecting news. His sisters were waiting in the car, so he ran downstairs to pick up, his half-zipped knapsack and a black collar shirt bundled in one arm.