His temper flared at random intervals. An old hobby of making up stories about passersby took on a spiteful tone, without any of the stories’ usual humor. There was one woman in particular—pearls, mauve cardigan matched to her blouse, sandy hair sprayed helmet-stiff—who passed them on the sidewalk with a fussy-looking spaniel in tow. “She’s going to put him in the oven the first time he’s sick on the rug,” Julian said, loudly enough that she might well have heard him. Paul quickly looked away into the street rather than meet her eyes.
Julian still came over for dinner whenever he could, but Paul’s family got on his nerves so badly that Paul couldn’t figure out why. Everything on television annoyed him—political talk shows, bland comedies—but Julian refused to forgo the after-dinner ritual even when he seemed to abhor it. If one of Paul’s sisters started to tell a lengthy family story, Julian barely concealed his impatience, and would latch on to an insignificant detail as an excuse to change the subject.
There was one dinner early in October—a Saturday evening, the first since March that felt as if it might frost overnight. The kitchen swam with autumn smells, chicken casserole and hot apple cider and summer dust scorching on the radiator. When Paul’s mother was gathering the dishes she paused at his seat, smiling a little shyly, and reached down to lift his chin.
“What are you looking at?” Paul protested, and she broke into a full grin.
“What?” She tapped the end of his nose the way she had when he was a toddler. “I made a good-looking kid, let me admire.”
It would have been merely embarrassing if not for Julian’s reaction. He didn’t laugh, or even look at Paul at all. He just glared at his plate, chewing on the inside of his cheek. He barely spoke for the rest of the night.
There were signs—small, intermittent, easy to ignore. The pattern never took shape inside his head because Paul didn’t bother to look for it. He’d resigned himself to the way they skirted around each other’s pain and frustrations, not least because Julian had insisted on it.
The call came on a Sunday, when they had hazy afternoon plans to see American Graffiti. Paul didn’t bother calling ahead before changing out of his fieldwork clothes and catching a southbound bus; both of them were long accustomed to drifting in and out of each other’s spaces, as if they were expecting each other. He didn’t register Julian’s voice beyond his front door until it stopped short at the sound of the knock. It took Paul a fraction of a second longer to realize what it might mean. There was a long pause.
“Un moment,” Julian said.
The deadbolt slid free. Julian didn’t open the door very far. He had the telephone mouthpiece pressed against his palm, the cord knotted through his fingers.
“Didn’t we—I mean—” Paul fought the urge to shrink back.
“Go home.” Julian spoke in a flat, airless staccato. “It’s not a good time.”
“Wait, I—”
But Julian shut the door again, and slid the chain lock for good measure. “I’m back,” he said. He still sounded as if he was afraid to breathe too deeply. Paul knew he was supposed to leave. He might even have obliged if his heart hadn’t been pounding so violently that he could barely move.
Julian spoke to his mother in French. Paul could only understand the long pauses in between, when he could hear Julian pacing; at one point there was the snap and whisper of a match. A few times Julian slipped into English in protest, but his mother didn’t let him get more than a couple words in edgewise.
Paul must have stood there for nearly an hour, resting his forehead on the door, listening to something he knew even without comprehending it. He only heard Julian’s voice rise once, toward the end of the conversation. Three syllables, none of which he understood, perfectly accented even as his voice wavered.
The silence that followed felt worse than the others. When Julian reverted to English, it was a retreat, as if he could put a barrier between himself and the far end of the line.
“That isn’t true,” he said, and didn’t speak again.
The call ended without so much as a goodbye. Julian threw the receiver into place so hard that the cradle hummed like ringing ears. Paul still couldn’t move. He was furious at Julian for telling him to leave, as if he would obey without question. He wanted to take the door off its hinges and force himself inside, to pull apart every hidden working of Julian’s life until he knew it well enough to put it back together.
The door swung open abruptly. Paul stumbled backward. Julian had been about to barrel straight through him, but he stopped dead at the threshold when he saw he wasn’t alone.
He had his hands in the pockets of his navy-blue raincoat. It was a shade too small for him, the cuffs leaving an inch of bare skin at each wrist, and he looked somehow diminished, narrow-shouldered and thin and younger than he pretended. His face was bloodless except at his mouth and the exhaustion-dark edges of his eyelids.
“I’m out of cigarettes.” He lowered his eyes and tugged the door shut; his hands shook as he tried to lock it, but he persisted, patiently, as though he hadn’t noticed the problem.
“I’ll come with you.”
There was no cruelty in Julian’s voice. There was no emotion at all. “No. I don’t want you right now. Go home.”
He gave up on the door and left it unlocked, pocketing his keys as if he had succeeded. He tried to sidle past Paul into the hallway, but Paul’s patience snapped free from its last thread.
“I don’t want to.” Paul barely noticed how tightly he had seized Julian’s arm. “Julian—”
“Do as I fucking tell you.”
Paul let go of him. It was all he could do not to recoil altogether. Julian still spoke in a dull monotone, but the words were coming more quickly.
“I will call you,” he said, “when I’m ready to deal with you. All right? I’ll be patient and I’ll be nice and I’ll tell you how goddamn sorry I am about how much I’m upsetting you. In the meantime I need to go for a walk and put some cancer into my lungs and take a few hours—just a few fucking hours—before I have to start managing how you feel.”
The worst part was that Julian wasn’t even trying to hurt him. Paul could tell he hadn’t heard the cruelty in the words until they left his mouth. When Julian lashed out at him in the past, each word was precisely calibrated to get Julian what he wanted. But there was no control now, not even a pretense of it. It wasn’t that it was the cruelest thing he had ever said; it was that it might have been the first moment of unmediated honesty Julian had ever given him.
Paul had no right to be angry, but he was—the same sour anger he’d always felt as a child when his father chastised him for a transgression of which they both knew Paul was guilty. It was all he could do not to slide backward into childishness and scream “It isn’t fair,” when what he really meant—what those words always meant—was that he didn’t like having to know how fair it really was.
“I was worried about you.” It was the only thing he could think to say that was actually true, and it still felt like a cheap shot.
For the first time, Julian’s eyes fully focused on Paul’s face. Even with his shoulders against the wall, he looked hardly capable of staying upright. He was braced as if for a blow, and Paul nearly hated himself enough to oblige him.
“I told you to leave,” Julian said quietly. “I can’t do it, I can’t be him right now and I can’t stand for you to hate me for it, so please, for god’s sake, just go.”
He did. It was his own idea, finally, because he could tell for the first time that Julian didn’t actually want him to. Leaving mapped perfectly to all Paul’s own faults, his all-devouring need and his terror of seeing the truth of it. As he walked away he heard Julian say his name, but he pushed through the front door without turning around.
8.
There was nothing he could do except prove that Julian’s accusation was right. He wasn’t capable of anything else. Paul had known that all along—he’d etched it into the white spaces in his journal, betw
een the eager pathetic promises he would never be able to keep. The truth was there in everything about him. Stagnant running times, a body that felt thin as air.
Julian liked to trace his fingertips along the lines of concave skin between Paul’s ribs, while Paul held very still and fought the urge to tell him not to look. When he changed out of his clothes that night, he forced himself to examine himself in the mirror. He could feel the ghost of Julian’s hands on his rib cage; Paul followed the path of Julian’s touch with his fingernails, scraping hard, until blood blossomed just under the surface of his skin.
The next day he searched his flat file and found Julian’s favorite of his paintings. Brown wilted flowers and crumbling sunset moth specimens, fruits pitted with mold—a Dutch still life left to rot. It was pretentious and stilted, striving for something it would never reach, and if Julian loved it at all, it was only a fleeting whim he would soon outgrow. Paul cut the canvas free of its stretcher, and with a utility knife and a T square he meticulously sliced it to ribbons.
In the morning Julian had telephoned twice. Paul was out for his run for the first call, and when he returned he found Audrey fielding the second. She was leaning on the wall in the hallway, still in her pajamas, skeptically fidgeting with the phone cord. When she caught Paul’s eye she lowered the receiver from her ear, but she didn’t bother covering the mouthpiece.
“It’s not even eight,” she said. “I thought he went to finishing school or something.”
Paul squirmed out of his track jacket and used the inside to dab at the sweat on his neck. His skin felt tacky and gritty, glazed with filth from the polluted air.
“I have my electrodynamics midterm today.” Paul tried to make himself sound careless and blunt, the way he imagined Eddie Koenig would be if he turned down an invitation from a friend. But his eye contact with Audrey became a stare, and he could barely feel his face in order to arrange it into the right expression. “I’m headed straight out after I shower. Tell him I can’t talk today.”
Audrey stared right back at him. This time she did cover the mouthpiece before she spoke.
“Did he do something?” she asked, as if she hoped she could turn the question into a joke depending on his reaction.
Paul folded the jacket over his arm. It was too prim a gesture, not at all belonging to the kind of boy he was pretending to be.
“Nothing’s wrong,” he said with a shrug. “We don’t have to see each other every day.”
He headed up the stairs before Audrey could argue. While he passed above her head, Paul thought he could hear Julian’s voice in the receiver, but he kept walking rather than risk making out the words.
The next two nights the telephone rang just before dinner, when Julian knew they would be home. Paul told his mother he would answer, then approached the phone so slowly that Julian might be afraid he was letting it ring.
Both times, he listened just long enough to let Julian hate him. “How long are you going to sulk?” he asked the first time. Paul pushed down the receiver hook without answering, and for a few minutes he listened to the hiss of the dead line while he made one-sided small talk about their statistics exam.
The next evening there was a sharp edge to Julian’s voice that Paul had rarely heard before, and he deliberately didn’t let himself identify it. “You’re being ridiculous,” Julian said, very quickly, as if he already knew Paul would hang up on him. “I was upset about them, you know it wasn’t anything to do with you. Don’t be so—”
Emerging from the basement, Audrey nearly caught sight of him tapping the phone hook again, but his hand had fallen back to his side by the time she looked his way.
“He has to work,” he told his mother before she could ask, and she clicked her tongue and put two of the raw potatoes back in their basket.
In his head, over and over, Paul spoke to himself in Julian’s voice—slightly different accusations each time. While his microbiology classmates chatted through a lull in their midterm, Paul slouched at his bench, chin resting on his forearms, and watched his centrifuge vibrate gently as it spun. He imagined Julian approaching him on his way home, catching him by the arm like a child snatching after a lost toy. That Julian would be impatient and petulant, bored without Paul around to entertain him—not quite tired of being adored, though he would be soon, and they both knew it. “I didn’t mean it, Pablo,” he would say, as if Paul’s hurt feelings were the only thing that was wrong. And Paul would follow him home and collapse into his arms, hating himself for how grateful he was for these last undeserved fragments.
But that was only if Julian had anything left to give him. Another variation crept up on Paul that evening—he tried to drown the thoughts out with the music in his headphones, but he felt an echo of Julian sit beside him on the bed, and he couldn’t help but listen. This Julian was arrogant and cold, kinder than the first because he was ready to tell the truth. You’re always going to be this way. (He wouldn’t take off his coat. He sat very straight, ignoring Paul’s gaze as if he couldn’t feel it.) You’re exhausting. It’s getting very dull. You don’t think this is worth my time anymore either, do you?
Paul didn’t consider skipping their statistics class, because he knew Julian wouldn’t, and he wanted Julian to feel himself being ignored. Maybe it would hurt him; Paul didn’t mind if it did. But it would hurt Paul more. That was what he really wanted Julian to feel.
Julian was already waiting when he arrived at the lecture hall. He’d settled in their usual spot in the last row, sitting with his ankles crossed on the back of the chair in front of him. When he caught Paul’s eye, Julian didn’t visibly react. He’d folded every ragged edge back under the surface, as if Paul had only imagined they’d ever been there. Paul paused at the desk, and Julian gave him a prompting smile. When he didn’t join him, Julian sighed, and the fondness in his eyes was so patronizing that Paul was sick at the thought that he’d ever tolerated it.
“Don’t be dumb, Fleischer.”
He was wry and careless. Paul could see his body waiting to shift slightly when he joined him—to lean toward him, break the last of the ice with a joke. But Paul waited in silence, until the slight smile began to falter, then walked away.
He didn’t notice Julian leaving the lecture early. Paul had been sitting toward the front, shielded by a cluster of ponytailed girls in swim-team jackets. When the lecture ended, the seat in the back row was already empty, but Julian had left behind a book that must have fallen from his bag—it was his careworn chess book, its title nearly ground to powder by the white crease in the spine. Paul scooped the book up and pocketed it, though he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to give it back or throw it away.
When he drew close to the bicycle racks, Paul saw Julian waiting for him. There was no escaping him now—he was leaning beside Paul’s bicycle, hands in the pockets of his wool coat, beneath a soft vermilion canopy of turning leaves. As Paul approached, Julian drew a deep breath and straightened. There was something unsettling in the way the golden autumn light moved over his cheekbones, a beauty so fleeting and elusive that Paul knew he wouldn’t be able to hold it in his memory. Keep this, he pleaded with himself, but it was already nearly gone.
“Hey, Pablo.”
Paul couldn’t make himself answer. He knelt silently to unlock his bicycle. Julian stood over him, excruciatingly close, and rested his fingertips on the handlebar.
“Is it that you want me to say sorry? It’s a little kindergarten of you, but I’ll do it, if that makes you feel better.”
Just being near him slid Paul’s eyes back into sharp, unbearable focus. The dying leaves glowing behind him like stained glass—colors searing, brighter than they’d ever been, as if the world was only real again now.
“I don’t need you to be sorry.”
Paul got to his feet and shoved the bicycle lock into his knapsack. He only realized he was smiling when he saw a flash of fear in Julian’s face.
“You were right,” Paul went on in a rush. “I’m
not worth the effort. I don’t give you anything worth having, all I fucking do is need, I’m repulsive, it’s not like I can blame you—”
“I never said a word of that.”
“You didn’t need to. I know it’s what you meant.”
Julian’s silence was as good as a confession. His face was so blank that Paul could read anything he wanted in his features. He chose disgust.
“I’m never going to deserve you.” He couldn’t stop talking. Part of him didn’t want to. “I know everything that’s wrong with me, and I can’t fix it, I don’t even know how, nothing I try works. No matter what I do, I’m still weak and afraid of everything, I’m not brave like you—”
“You have no idea what I’m afraid of,” Julian tried to cut in, but Paul refused to parse anything but the bitterness in his voice.
“Nothing I do is ever going to matter.” The longer he spoke, the lighter he felt. “Everything I do is so small and so useless. I’m not like you. I don’t even have a shape of my own to hold anything else in place. The world would be exactly the same without me—if I disappeared you’d be the same, as if I’d never been here at all. I’ll never matter the way you do, and you know it. You don’t need me.”
Julian had gone unnaturally still. It was intoxicating to believe he was frightened and repelled by this hideous thing Paul had finally revealed himself to be. The thought filled Paul with such sick euphoria that he could hardly feel his body any longer.
“Why do you think I’m here?” Julian’s voice was so slow and cruel that his panic was almost undetectable. “I could have decided I could get by without you. It would’ve been easy. I could have stayed with them and gone to goddamn Georgetown, I could’ve done everything they wanted, and I would’ve been fine, mostly—and I didn’t. I chose you. But that can’t possibly mean anything, can it? Because you don’t matter.”
These Violent Delights Page 23
