by Saints
Lenny looked at his watch and said, “I have ten minutes before the last bus leaves for the base.” He turned on his stool to face Pat and, almost imperceptibly, rubbed his right knee against Pat’s. “Or we could get a room at the Y.” Pat felt a moment of panic, unable to respond, but Lenny held his gaze, continuing to gently rub his leg. After a moment Lenny said, “I’m going to take your silence as a yes,” and stood up.
Pat had taken swimming lessons at the Y as a ten-year-old and remembered only how cold the water was and that he’d felt strangely excited in the locker room to be undressed in front of strangers. A lot of the men walked around drying themselves and talking to each other, unselfconscious of their nakedness, and Pat couldn’t help noticing how big their penises were. Once a man caught him staring and grinned at him, which made Pat’s face redden.
The neighborhood was run down even back then. The seven story cement block building looked desolate this late at night. The lobby was as dingy as the bus station, with cracked tile floors, walls yellowed from years of cigarette smoke, and a scarred wooden counter separating the night clerk from the guests. The clerk, an elderly man with a grizzled beard, opened the battered room register. Lenny pulled out his military ID and laid it on the counter. Matter-of-factly he said, “We drank too much at the girlie bar and missed our last bus to the base. Do you have a room?”
The clerk chuckled. “OK, Sergeant, I’ll put you and your buddy on the sixth floor. Stay away from the fourth floor. That’s where the queers are.”
Pat startled, wondering if somehow they had betrayed themselves, but Lenny laughed and said, “Thanks for the heads up. We’ll be careful.”
Room 606 was stifling, with an iron bed and a scarred desk with a wooden chair. They opened windows wide and faced each other, alone for the first time. A breeze blew into the room and Pat could feel the sweat begin to cool on his body. The mild high from the beer was evaporating, his courage waning. Lenny moved close, unbuttoning Pat’s shirt and running his fingertips over his curly red chest hairs. Pat’s nipples stiffened but his body was rigid.
“Relax,” Lenny whispered, stroking Pat’s cheek. “I’m not going to bite you.” He caressed Pat’s shoulders and arms, which were heavily muscled from a summer of loading trucks. “You have a great body.”
“I have to tell you something,” Pat said, moving away toward the window. He fumbled again for a cigarette. “I’ve never done this before.”
There was a momentary silence. Lenny said, “You’re kidding, right?” He shook his head in disbelief, then laughed softly. “How old did you say you were?”
Pat looked out the window, crossing his arms over his chest. “I told you in the bar that I was twenty-one. But I actually turned nineteen last week.”
“Lucky me. Come here, pretty boy.” When Pat didn’t move, Lenny went to him, flicked Pat’s cigarette out the window, and kissed him gently. Turning to the bed, Lenny pulled his tee shirt over his head, then unbuttoned his jeans and kicked them off. He was lean and muscular, his chest and flat belly nearly hairless. Pat followed suit, still uncomfortable, but his sex responded with a mind of its own. “You’re beautiful,” Lenny said, moving slowly against Pat, kissing his eyes, mouth and neck. The smell of stale beer and cigarette smoke from the bar lingered, but Pat had never been close enough to a man to know this new smell, a mix of sweat, fatigue, and desire.
They fell on the bed in a tangle, arms and legs, tongues. Pat had diligently made out with his girlfriend in high school for hours without feeling much of anything. And the few times he’d fooled around with other guys in seventh grade, he’d felt intensely turned on but filled with shame afterwards. This experience with Lenny was entirely new. It was awkward to figure out how their bodies fit together, but feeling Lenny’s erection against his own was electrifying.
When Pat came the first time he felt like his whole body was erupting. It was as if he’d been separated from the world by a spun glass shell, invisible but impenetrable, and in that first orgasm with a man, it shattered. Pat found the experience disorienting in its intensity. Then he wanted to try everything he’d ever imagined, and all at once. Lenny moved with assurance, evoking responses in Pat that made him tremble. After Pat went down on Lenny, Lenny laughed and said, “OK, now I believe that this is your first time.” Pat sat back, but Lenny, seeing his face, said “Hey, I was just kidding!” and drew Pat to him, rolling on top of him and tickling him until he squirmed with pleasure. Within seconds Pat was lost in desire.
After their second orgasms, bodies spent, the young men flopped back against the pillows. The bedding had become completely undone, and their clothes were strewn on the desk, the chair, the floor. The lampshade nearest the bed was askew. The room looked as if there’d been a frat party but without the beer keg. Bashful, Pat asked if he could curl up with his head on Lenny’s chest. Lenny complied with a grin, pulling him in close. Pat loved how smooth Lenny’s skin was, and for the first time felt the thump of another man’s heartbeat against his ear.
Lenny said, “When I first saw you come into the bar, I thought you were an undercover cop. You looked so serious, so like you didn’t want to be there. Then I thought of the young recruits at the base and figured you were just scared, and anyway too young to be a cop.”
He shifted slightly and Pat asked, “Am I too heavy?”
“Oh no, sweet boy. You’re perfect.” He absentmindedly stroked Pat’s hair. “I can’t believe you waited so long to have sex. I was experimenting when I was thirteen.”
“My family is very Catholic,” Pat said softly. “I’m very Catholic. I told my feelings about boys to our parish priest in the confessional when I was twelve, after I was in a circle jerk. He said, ‘You’ll go straight to Hell if you do that. That’s the worst sin, the worst.’”
Lenny kissed him on top of the head. “Well, Padraic, he was wrong about that. And he was probably a closet case.” He yawned and reached for his watch on the lamp table. “Listen, I’ve got to get the 7 o’clock bus to the base. I’m on duty at 8:00. I need to get some shuteye before I face my squadron commander.” He stretched and shifted Pat’s weight to the side. “Will you stay until I have to leave?”
Pat smiled a big smile. “Of course.” Lenny rolled over and, yawning loudly, was instantly asleep.
Pat slipped carefully off the bed and retrieved the crumpled pack of Marlboros from his shirt. As the sweat dried on his body, he sat on the wide window ledge facing east, relishing the simple pleasure of being naked, and lit a cigarette. He was never naked at home, except in the shower. Modesty was the rule, which included him and his little brother wearing underpants and tee shirts to bed, even in the sweltering summer heat. His two sisters wore nightgowns. Despite there being only one bathroom, the six Kellys maintained an ironclad propriety in keeping their bodies covered. Pat felt deeply relaxed as he viewed the faint, pale gray light beginning to show on the horizon, the Missouri River becoming visible less than a mile from where he sat.
The worst sin. How could that be, he wondered? He had never felt so alive. He hadn’t slept in nearly 24 hours, but his mind was alert. Even his skin tingled.
“Queer! Faggot!” The words had been bandied about the locker room after baseball practice, but never directed at Pat. He had felt disturbed nonetheless. He’d wondered early in high school if he was homosexual. During a Catholic retreat for the sophomore boys, the director, a hypermasculine priest who chummily referred to their girlfriends as “the ladies,” expounded on the kinds of sin that their “baser instincts” might drive them to. He smirked his way through masturbation, proceeded with a baseball metaphor involving female body parts and bases earned, and with no transition shifted to the word “bestiality,” which made the boys squirm. Finally he moved on to homosexuality, as if it were a near relative of sex with animals. Looking suspiciously at the boys for a long moment, he said, “Homosexuality is so disgusting, we won’t even talk about it here.”
Homosexuality, Pat had thought, Oh, dear God,
please don’t let this be true. I love my girlfriend. Isn’t that enough? But he had known in his heart it was true. Those furtive but exciting encounters in seventh grade had meant more to him, in the end, than it seemed to have meant to the others. Once the kissing parties started with girls, the other boys had lost interest in fooling around, and Pat willed himself to go along. But the desire had remained.
Pat was suddenly drawn back into the moment when he heard a sound: Lenny gently snoring. He felt a rush of tenderness as he looked at this man, so innocent in sleep, his arms wrapped around a pillow. I’m so lucky you were my first, he thought. Pat had one gay friend at college that he’d met in a poetry class, Justin, who had filled his head with stories of drunken parties and “wild sex,” whatever that meant. It was Justin who told Pat about the Ron D Voo Lounge months before. It had taken him this long just to walk in the door. And look at me now! He almost laughed aloud.
After checking the time, he went to the bed and gently shook Lenny, who said, “No, no,” clutching his pillow tighter.
“If you want to get that bus, you’d better get your butt up,” Pat said.
“Since when did you get so bossy?” Lenny asked, rolling off the bed and stretching. “Ugh, you’re right. I’ve got to get moving.” Pulling on his clothes, he looked at Pat for a long moment, then said, “You have to be cautious, Padraic. This gay thing is tough to manage. Be careful who you hang out with. There are a lot of sharks out there.”
Pat suddenly felt bereft. “Won’t I see you again?”
Lenny was frowning as he dressed. He looked at Pat sitting on the edge of the bed and his face softened. “Sweet boy, my schedule is so unpredictable. And you live at home. How are we going to connect?” But he grabbed a pen from the desk drawer and scribbled down a phone number. “If you can talk privately, call me around noon on Tuesday. It’s the pay phone at my barracks. If someone else answers, hang up.”
That didn’t seem like much of a guarantee to Pat, but he was buoyed up by the hope that Lenny might see him again. “Go,” he said. “You’ll miss the bus.” Lenny kissed him once, hard, and was gone.
The room was very quiet. Pat sat on the rumpled bed and picked up the pillow that Lenny had held close. Burying his face in its softness, he inhaled deeply and was certain he could identify Lenny’s scent. Still holding the pillow, Pat turned back to the window and brightened. Eight long blocks led down to the Missouri River, and the densely packed buildings of downtown Omaha took on the colors of the sunrise, hundreds of plate-glass windows glistening peach, then rose, then crimson.
Fixing Uppers
Maureen Brady
“’Scuse me,” said the woman with the camera as she stepped in front of me to get a good angle on the bride and the bride. Sylvie and Bean were both in tuxes, which I thought did not bode well. I wanted to tell them before they went to the extreme of getting married maybe they should seek more contrast on the butch/femme scale. But I suspected I was just being cynical, trying to find reasons for my lifetime relationship to have crumbled before my eyes? Fortunately, my ex had not been invited to this wedding.
“Sure,” I said, my eyes on the photographer’s back. It was solid, substantial, a salt and pepper ponytail trailing down its center. Appealing, I thought, as she clicked away, shooting the brides as they stood under a canopy of trees in their side yard, the Hudson River flowing in the distance. Around my age, was my next thought, even though I had sworn off any sort of involvement for as far as I could see into the future.
I was antsy and wanted this ceremony to come to a close so they could break out the champagne, which might help me settle down and enjoy the party. But the mothers were taking turns giving little, or not so little, speeches. The only thing little about their speeches was the stingy amount of recognition they gave to what they were here for—the union of their daughters. Instead, they went on and on about themselves. Sylvie’s mother started it with how pretty the budding trees were, and how she had always wanted to be an artist, and at least now Sylvie might get to try her hand at being one, since she had a secure job as a paralegal. (What kind of a non-sequitur was that?) Bean’s mother ended it with, “This is not the wedding I always imagined for my Beatrice, but we’ll see. You all seem like very nice people.”
Sylvie looked pained. Bean scowled and rolled her eyes toward the river, and I thought, and hoped she could hear me thinking it: “Right, let’s take these two mothers down there and toss them in.”
The tenor picked up after the first toast, even though the bride and bride were AAer’s and half the folks there were toasting with some sickeningly sweet nonalcoholic pear juice, but it must have contained enough sugar to raise them up with the rest of us, because the mood changed to festive. A line up to congratulate the brides, finger foods delivered by a couple of slim, gay waiters, refills on the drinks, and the freedom to take a stroll down by the riverside, which I did with a couple of the guys I’d met at Bean and Sylvie’s house before.
Returning from the river, I passed by the gifts lined up on one side of the wraparound porch, mine a weed whacker with a large bow around its handle—one of the many practical items they had listed on their Lowe’s registry—and searched out my nametag on one of the tables before I went to replenish my drink. I needn’t have bothered doing that as I was seated with the drinkers and our wine glasses got re-filled at a reliable clip. I remember less and less as the lunch went on, but I know our table laughed a lot, and when we had our visitation from the brides, I leaned over and said how sorry I was about their mothers using this platform to make the wrong speeches, and when Bean’s face dropped, I realized my bringing up their mothers was completely gratuitous; that a nasty part of me had seeped out, wanting to kill their happiness at their great day by reminding them of their evil mothers.
Ever since the break-up with my ex I hadn’t been able to keep down the feeling that a person who was me and yet not me was lurking just beneath my skin, judging everything we came up against in a super sarcastic way, and making me want to break out and deliver a punch, or stick out a foot to trip an unsuspecting victim. I was annoyed at having to listen to her slant on things but figured I’d better, because it seemed like, in an obnoxious way, she was trying to protect me. After all, the more innocent me had journeyed right up to a major betrayal by my ex without any notion such an offence might be in store.
I gulped down another glass of wine, hoping to obliterate this extra voice, at least for now.
At the roadside, where only a smattering of cars remained, I fumbled for my keys. Unaccustomed to carrying a purse, I turned out its contents onto the hood of my car. They weren’t there, of course, because they were under a wad of tissues in my jacket pocket. One by one I put back the wallet, the change and my cell phone and zipped the purse up again.
“You okay?” a voice said behind me. It was the photographer.
“Don’t force me to walk a straight line,” I said, “but otherwise I’m fine.”
She tilted her head and seriously considered me.
“Get some good photos?” I asked with a slur.
“Sure did.” She paused, then added, “I thought the two of them looked lovely, and it was such a nice wedding.”
“Guess so,” I said, and then felt compelled to add, “I’m not all that much for the institution of marriage, but I guess it’s okay for those who feel they need it.”
I stepped away from where I’d been leaning against my car and nearly lost my footing but caught myself before I went down.
“Whoa,” said the photographer, helping to right me. “No way you’re going to get behind the wheel.”
“Sure I am,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”
Was it possible she didn’t hear me? Because she shifted her large camera bag to her other shoulder and took a firm hold on my elbow and guided me a couple of cars further up the hill, where she planted me against the driver’s door while she loaded her stuff into the back seat, then walked me around and deposited me on the passenger se
at as carefully as she’d deposited her camera bag in the back. “But…but my car,” I protested weakly.
“I’ll bring you back to get it when you’re sober,” she said squarely, leaving me without a choice.
Next thing I knew we were in her driveway. Cute ’50s style one-story bungalow with a closed-in porch across the front. Was she single? Did she live alone? My head spun. Had we introduced ourselves earlier? If so, I couldn’t remember her name.
“Um…Is this your house?”
She nodded.
“I don’t even know you,” wobbled out of my mouth. “Or your name.”
“Jackie,” she said.
“Oh.”
“Yours?”
“Ginger,” I burped.
“Okay, Ginger, let’s get you some coffee,” she said then, and before I could struggle my way out, she came around and helped steady me. As she walked me up the bluestone path, the warmth of her hand passed into my elbow. It felt so good I missed it the instant she let go to manage her keys.
At her kitchen table, one of those enameled metal tables with side leaves that pulled out to widen it, I blew on the hot coffee, steaming my face. At the first sip, my head straightened up enough to make me realize how much I had overdone my drinking at the wedding. When? Well, it had gone on for such a long time, starting with the champagne…It was that waiter, refilling the wine glasses whenever they were half full. One of the ways I tried to control my drinking was to count glasses and slow down if I got to three. Damn him. I had no idea how it had gotten to be nearly ten o’clock at night.
Jackie’s green eyes were upon me, watching as I sobered up a fraction. “Drink up,” she said. “And we’ll put you to bed.”
The room suddenly took on a charge. Put me to bed! Was she going to bed me? I tried not to show my reaction, though I was secretly thrilled that she might lie down beside me. I half drained my cup of coffee in a gulp and said, “I don’t usually drink coffee after noon because it will keep me awake.”
