These Violent Delights

by Micah Nemerever

  Paul tried to adapt, the way he had to everything else. He took in the affection without flinching, no matter how pathetic it made him feel. There was no time to doubt Julian, so he tried not to. All he could do was try to become the version of himself he could imagine Julian really loving this way—fierce and brilliant enough to match him, as fascinating as Julian thought he ought to be.

  He decided to learn to be impulsive, which meant planning the impulse so exhaustively that he could almost ignore his misgivings. But it convinced Julian, as if he were so eager for Paul to impress him that he didn’t think to question it. There was finally a day when Paul worked up the nerve to pull him into an empty classroom and barricade them inside, and the only thing that kept his resolve from wavering was the startled noise Julian made into his mouth. When he pinned Julian to the desk, Paul could feel an anxious laugh waiting inside Julian’s chest, and afterward he collapsed into such wild hysterics that Paul had to cover his mouth until he stopped.

  “What’s gotten into you?” Julian asked once he’d caught his breath, but Paul couldn’t trust himself to summon an answer that didn’t sound like a lie.

  The novelty never seemed to wear off. Julian would always grin when Paul kissed him in public and shudder now and then with suppressed laughter, and Paul was so terrified of being caught that he could barely speak for fear of being overheard. But they took every chance they could find, whenever they found a dark music room or a little-traveled stairwell. Midway through Julian’s late-evening shifts, Paul would seize his arm and lead him to a secluded spot behind the bound astrophysics journals. That always felt the most perilous, somehow, not because of any greater risk of being found but because they had to return to normal so quickly. Julian would go back to his cart, flushed and jittery, compulsively smoothing his hair long after he’d put it to rights. Paul would in his nearby carrel with his pile of books, barely moving, feeling so different from the person he really was that he wasn’t certain he still had the same name.

  For Paul it was never just a matter of making up for the time alone that they’d lost. What was important was that for all his newfound gentleness, Julian could still look at Paul as if there were something elusive inside him—something he wanted but couldn’t quite reach.

  In the cataclysm of summer Paul had dreamed of things getting back to normal. He’d imagined that after they finished grieving, his family would fall into its usual patterns, and that, reunited, he and Julian would eventually remember their own, despite everything. In several months there would be a second candle for the father who had abandoned him, and Paul would retreat into Julian’s promises not to do the same. Grief was normal enough that it felt almost safe, and Paul could imagine enduring it forever. He might be able to suspend the two of them together in amber, so long as his unhappiness remained the same.

  But there was no stasis, even in the places he had always imagined it. At the end of his great-grandmother’s shiva his grandfather flew into a frenzy, and every Sunday his grandparents’ house became a little less familiar. A fresh coat of paint on the front door, the squeaky third stair finally repaired, a new kitchen rug woven with the image of a hen and her eggs. His grandfather had never acknowledged Paul’s alleged camping trip, which was nearly the same as forgiving it, but when he mentioned “your Bubbe Sonia” there was a hint of accusation in his voice.

  There was a cascade of changes in his daily life as well, no less disorienting for being small enough he might once have ignored them. The price of their usual brand of toothpaste went up, and the new one had a slightly different false-mint scent. One weekend Laurie acquired a pageboy haircut, modeled after that of the straight-haired blond daughter on some television comedy. Laurie’s curls contracted the layers into a cloud of frizz, but she claimed to love it, despite her obvious regret. Audrey’s Volkswagen had new seat covers made from wooden beads, and no matter how deeply he searched his memory, Paul couldn’t remember noticing when she’d installed them.

  But it was his mother who jarred him the most. He realized one day that he couldn’t remember the last time she’d spent a whole day in her nightgown. Now every morning she would unfurl her hair from its plait and comb it, and even on the days that she didn’t leave the house she took to wearing lipstick again, tentative shades of coral pink, as if she were working her way back up to red. The shift felt so abrupt that Paul searched the medicine cabinet to see if she was taking a new pill, but he found only the usual canister of Seconal between the toothpaste and the aspirin. He decided she must have hidden whatever it was—if she had simply chosen to feel better without showing him how to do the same, he would never forgive her.

  A particularly unwelcome change was that, after a year and a half of gentle nagging from her parents and their rabbi, his mother went back to attending regular Shabbat services. She treated this as a whim of her own, which shouldn’t affect her children’s observance in the least. “You can tag along if you want,” she’d say, already dressed and using her talking-to-the-neighbors voice. But she had decided that the neighbors would never again remark on the family’s reticence and drawn curtains. There was no real choice in whether or not to indulge her—even Audrey complied, yawning and reluctant and heavy-limbed from her Friday-night indulgences. They were all afraid one wrong move would push her back into isolation.

  Bitter and irrational as he knew it was, Paul couldn’t shake the feeling that his mother had made this change in part to ensure that he would spend a few more hours each week being watched. Milling around the parking lot in the same good clothes as last week, the neighbors would chat with his mother, So glad to see you around more often and It does you good to get out of the house, Ruthie, it really does. But now and then Paul could tell they were more interested in him than in her.

  He would have preferred the sympathy and vicarious shame that had followed him since his father’s death, or even the wary suspicion after word of the Danny Costello incident began to spread. Now the neighbors looked at Paul with carnival-sideshow curiosity. He wondered whether his mother could hear the accusation in their voices when they mentioned his name to her. Perhaps she had simply decided to pretend it didn’t exist, like every other ugliness she chose to ignore.

  One Saturday in August the Koenigs convinced his mother and grandparents to come to their house for Shabbat lunch. They lived across the street from Paul’s family, a little farther uphill, in a row house built in a mirror of the same plan. Being in their house always filled Paul with a peculiar anxiety, as if he might walk into a room and find his double waiting inside. The Koenigs’ dining room, with its robin’s-egg walls and gauzy curtains and gleaming cutlery, was patterned on the same lifestyle magazines as the Frommes’ house. The echo only made Paul more uneasy. The house’s every detail felt precision-engineered to set him on edge.

  The Koenig parents were stringently courteous, which was part of the reason Paul had never much liked them. They complimented Laurie’s new hair and Audrey’s homemade paisley tunic dress, and pretended the color in Paul’s face was a handsome tan rather than a sunburn. Mr. Koenig joked clumsily about Nixon because he knew Paul’s grandparents would laugh on principle, and Mrs. Koenig made vague platitudes about his mother’s strength and sweetness while reaching across the table to squeeze her hand.

  But when Paul’s family wasn’t looking, the Koenigs watched him from the corners of their eyes, and their fascination and alarm were unconcealed. He remembered a distant Friday afternoon when Mrs. Koenig was watering her plants on the porch, how she’d lifted one gloved hand to wave while Paul and Julian were making their goodbyes. The Koenigs, he could tell, were doing the same thing Paul had been trained to do in his biology seminars: bringing the specimen in for examination, searching in vain for disconfirming evidence.

  After lunch the party drifted into the living room with coffee and cake, and the Koenigs’ teenage son asked to show Paul his baseball card collection. “I’m not going to trade,” he assured his parents, “I just want to show
him. This cheapskate won’t trade for anything. He’s got a mint Clemente rookie card and I’ve never even seen it, he’ll tell you.”

  Mrs. Koenig smiled so brightly that no one seemed to notice she had gone a little pale.

  “Leave the door open,” she said automatically, then added quickly, for the sake of Paul’s mother, “I don’t want to hear one peep of haggling today.”

  Eddie Koenig believed he and Paul were great friends, mostly because he believed himself to be great friends with everybody. He was a year and a half younger than Paul and had played shortstop on the same Little League team, where he’d achieved widespread admiration from the other boys for eating a June beetle on a dare. He had skinny legs and rosacea, and his voice, though loud, had not yet finished breaking. His bedroom was right at the top of the stairs, where Laurie’s was in the house’s mirror image.

  Paul reluctantly allowed himself to be installed at the foot of the twin bed, where he paged through Eddie’s binder of baseball cards while his companion amiably rattled off batting averages. After a while the texture of the conversation downstairs grew smoother, as if Mrs. Koenig no longer had one ear turned toward the stairwell.

  “So listen,” said Eddie suddenly. He was speaking more quietly than usual, though his voice still rang. “What exactly do you guys do over there?”

  Paul lingered unseeingly over a grainy color image of Dock Ellis, grasping a ball behind his glove.

  “Same thing you do over here,” he said, a little too sharply to sell the lie. “What kind of a stupid question is that?”

  “You know what I mean.” Eddie glanced over his shoulder at the open door and leaned across the bedspread to whisper. “When that weird friend of yours goes over when you’re alone. Is it grass? Where does he get it?”

  “He doesn’t.” He probably ought to have lied, but he was too irritated to care. “It’s nothing like that. How about you mind your own business?”

  Eddie leaned back against his headboard again, as calmly as if Paul hadn’t snapped at him. Eddie’s even temper had always infuriated him—there was an unblemished, unquestionable maleness to Eddie, as if he’d never felt any emotion strongly enough to let it shake him. Downstairs, Paul’s grandfather told the punch line to a joke with a familiar rhythm, and the living room erupted with laughter.

  “I’m just saying,” said Eddie, cheerfully needling as always. “My folks think you guys are homos. Maybe buying pot isn’t so bad.”

  Eddie had clearly expected him to react with revulsion—to counter the accusation with a protest, or to turn it into a joke by returning it in kind. What Eddie clearly didn’t expect was for Paul to freeze in horror, wide-eyed and silent, heart beating so hard that he couldn’t speak.

  Eddie’s grin faltered. He took the binder back and held it gingerly, as if he feared Paul’s touch had contaminated it.

  It would have been easy in that moment to pretend the conversation had never happened. They could have both retreated into the fiction that Paul was invisible, Paul flattening himself into nothingness while Eddie laughed him off and forgot everything. The sheer unfairness of it sent a shiver through Paul’s chest.

  “So how much do you want me to tell you?”

  Eddie tossed the binder onto his dresser and looked at him in confusion. “What?”

  Paul didn’t allow himself to waver. “You asked ‘what exactly we do.’” Paul held his body taut to keep from shaking. “Are the generalities sufficient,” he said, “or do you want to know specifically who does what?”

  He took a vicious satisfaction in the silence that followed. Eddie stared at him, saucer-eyed; by the time he remembered how to shut his mouth, he’d given up on mustering a protest.

  “I’m for a soda,” Eddie said. He was deliberately slow as he got to his feet, as if he were fighting the urge to recoil. “You coming?”

  Eddie clearly didn’t want to leave him unsupervised in his bedroom, but Paul couldn’t face the others. While Eddie took the stairs down two at a time, Paul shut himself into the bathroom across the hall. The tile in the Koenigs’ bathroom was green instead of yellow; they still bought the Fleischers’ old brand of toothpaste. Mrs. Koenig had left a tube of lipstick on the bathroom counter, the same vermilion that marked the rim of her drinking glass. Paul pressed his shoulders against the half-familiar wall and watched his reflection in the mirror over the sink. He practiced neutral expressions, trying to ignore the patter of conversation downstairs, until he finally found a version of his own face that he thought he might be able to keep steady.

  3.

  When she felt Julian had missed too many family dinners, Paul’s mother sent him across town with a casserole dish full of cold lamb chops. Paul hadn’t told her anything was wrong—when Julian explained his new arrangements to her, he’d been indefatigably cheerful, and he made the shift sound like an idle experiment in self-sufficiency that he could abandon the moment it began to bore him. (“My dad’s always on me about ‘what it’s like in the real world,’” he’d said, the mention of his family so casual that it made Paul jump. “I figured I should get an idea of how things actually work so I can get on his nerves by correcting him.”) But even Julian couldn’t convincingly lie about how well he was eating when he was out of her reach. While she was filling the casserole dish, Paul’s mother quietly scolded Julian in absentia, a muttered monologue about vitamins and protein that she normally directed at Paul himself. “Does he like tzimmes?” she asked Paul a little accusingly, and when he shrugged she made a small disapproving noise and scraped the leftover vegetables into the dish anyway.

  Paul expected it to be a rushed, tense visit—Julian hurrying to get ready for an evening shift, and Paul left as usual to sit at the Formica table with his chin in his hands, waiting to absorb any stray flares from Julian’s temper. From the moment Julian opened the door, it was clear that he was as brittle and irritable as Paul had expected—after their eyes met, there was a long, exhausting moment in which Julian tried to force calm into his body, as if he were doing Paul a grudging favor that he might withdraw on a whim. He looked at the dish in Paul’s hands with his head tilted slightly, as if in kittenish curiosity, but the rest of him was so tense with impatience that Paul wished he hadn’t come.

  “Ma misses you.” Paul gestured sheepishly with the dish—it was olive green and baby blue, emblazoned with cartoon daisies, and if Julian had been in a better mood Paul might have been embarrassed to be seen with it. “She’s still reading that Burr book,” he added when Julian failed to react. “You shouldn’t have asked her about it, she has opinions for you now.”

  “That’s kind of sweet,” Julian said, but he didn’t even try to smile. He lifted the lid off the casserole dish and peered in skeptically. “Ugh, those fucking carrots . . .”

  Julian didn’t invite him inside. While he was arranging the dish in his empty refrigerator, Paul sidled unbidden through the tiny front hallway. The entire apartment was little bigger than Paul’s bedroom. Bookshelves overflowed, and every cooking pan sat out on the stove because there was nowhere else to put them. There was no room for a couch, so two papasan chairs sat jaw to jaw. The only decoration was a cluster of potted plants on the windowsill—cloth and plastic, every one, because Julian couldn’t keep real ones alive.

  The dining table had to double as a desk. When Paul sat down, he was careful not to bump the teetering textbook-stack centerpiece, but he did pick up the smear of papers and tap it straight. He half listened to Julian telling him he’d called in sick—“You’d better stick around awhile,” he said offhandedly, as if he didn’t actually care one way or the other, and for a moment Paul hated him for making him dread staying.

  When Paul set the papers back down, he realized one of them didn’t belong. Among the notebook pages and mimeographed journal articles, there was a single sheet of stationery. It wasn’t quite the same as Julian’s nautilus-shell paper—blue instead of gray, with a motif up the side of soaring terns. Henry’s handwriting was tidy and bo
yish, very little like his brother’s, but midway through the first sentence Paul started hearing the letter in the voice they shared.

  I must insist that you put this directly into savings. I will send more as my own expenses allow. If I find the checks have not been cashed, I will be forced to make a personal visit and escort you to the bank myself. As I’m sure you’re aware, this would put me in a potentially uncomfortable position, and I trust that if only for my sake you will have the

  Julian snatched the letter out of Paul’s hand so sharply that its edge sliced a stinging line up his palm.

  “Ouch—I’m sorry, but it was there, you left it out, I didn’t mean to look—”

  “Sure you didn’t.”

  Even after the weeks of his relentless affection, Paul could have painted the real Julian from memory. He could use those expensive oil paints to remember the arching scar-darted line of Julian’s eyebrow, the way his mouth and the planes of his face rendered the subtle shift from expressionlessness to disdain. Paul never stopped expecting that look, no matter how long Julian withheld it. In painting him, his hands would always know that sudden coldness in Julian’s eyes—how his irises could chill even the warmest light the moment it touched them. What Paul had lost was his tolerance for the way it felt. He’d forgotten that whenever Julian looked at him this way, it left a fresh cut. It reminded him he was something Julian wanted but rarely needed.

  Julian only let contempt overtake him for an instant, but it was enough. The anger faded quickly, but the frustration didn’t. He watched Paul’s face a moment longer, then carefully crushed the letter in one hand.