by Adam Haslett
“We can talk about it, can’t we? It doesn’t have to be right away.”
He nodded, passing a hand idly through my hair. This is what I had at the end of the day that Michael and Alec didn’t. A person.
I brushed my hand across his stomach until my fingers were just under the button of his jeans.
“I thought you’d already gotten your exercise for the day,” he said, his eyes narrowing.
We never used to dig at each other like this on the verge of sex, poking at each other’s desire. But I did it now, too, when he approached me. I tested his motivation. It was the means we’d invented to argue over our doubts without mentioning them. We kept making each other prove we wanted each other. Right at the moment of openness, when you didn’t want to have to prove anything.
“What’s that’s supposed to mean?” I said, withdrawing my hand. The most effective response to the smallness of the testing was to shame the other for doing it. If he felt momentarily guilty, he’d go soft again, at least enough to get us started. And once we’d begun, his diffidence would fall away, and I could forget awhile, under the cover of his wanting.
“Nothing,” he said, pulling me by the shoulders down toward him. On his tongue, I could taste the dinner I hadn’t finished, and suddenly I was starving.
Alec
I stepped off the train at Thirty-fourth Street before the doors were even fully open and dashed for the stairs, reaching the turnstile ahead of the crowd and yanking my suitcase up over the bar as I went. Then I was off, dodging and weaving through the choke of befuddled tourists and the loiterers standing by for Jersey Transit, across the shitty low-ceilinged concourse lined with newsstands and juice shops, pleased with my skill at avoiding collisions by fractions of an inch as I dipped and swung through the on-comers, then took the stairs two at a time up to the gates for Amtrak. There, a giant herd milled under the big board, sheep to the holiday slaughter, waiting to be told which stairway to mass at. My track hadn’t posted yet. I pushed my way through, and then down the far staircase, where, by using the lower-level entrances to the tracks, I could circumvent the crush. I’d made it. I wouldn’t be without a seat. The rush and relief together left me almost high.
Thirty seconds after the board flapped my track number, I was boarding the train, even as the passengers from DC were still getting off. I grabbed a window on the right side for a view of the water, and put my computer bag on the aisle seat to dissuade anyone from joining me. The herd was staggering in now, filling the empty doubles.
Several minutes later, when the train finally jerked forward, I felt the secret glee of having avoided a seatmate. Then the car door slid open and a straggler, a thirty-something white guy in khakis and a ski jacket, spotted the empty space, and asked if it was free. If I lied, the woman across the aisle would clock my deception no later than 125th Street. I pulled my computer bag onto my lap and, turning to the window, stared past my reflection at the black walls of the tunnel.
As we rolled slowly through the darkness, the energy of hustling to make the train began to subside, letting the events of the day seep back in. The end of the apartment hunt. In the last two weeks, I’d seen nineteen places—the dregs of December—one more lightless and cramped than the next. In desperation, I’d switched to a new broker two days before I had to leave the city. She had shown me another round of anonymous, immiserating rentals, and then without warning or fanfare escorted me onto a chrome-plated elevator and then into a condo with a fully adult bedroom, a dishwasher, and floor-to-ceiling windows facing south across Nineteenth Street. It was like waking from a nightmare to discover I hadn’t in fact been sentenced to life in a dungeon. Here was a place I could entertain people, friends, colleagues, even dates. They would see the clean, polished floors, the newish appliances, the generous portion of sky, and they would relax in the safety all this implied. New York apartments either reminded you that you lived in one of the most crowded places on earth or allowed you to forget it.
But she had baited me, this new broker. The place wasn’t just slightly out of my price range, it was five hundred dollars a month north of it—plus the higher broker fee. I was in the miraculously clean bathroom—white down into the grouting—stalling for time by pretending to evaluate the fixtures when I heard the front door open. It was another agent. He had two men with him, and he was answering their questions about the building’s management. I didn’t need to see them. Their voices were enough. I glimpsed right away what would happen. How they would move in here with their curated furniture, their dachshund, their two incomes, their plans for children and a larger place in a few years, erasing me with their domestic establishment like a town car swiping a pedestrian at a crosswalk and gliding on through the light. The elect, as Michael called them. The comfortably coupled.
But this didn’t have to be. I could push back. I’d find extra freelance work, take sandwiches to the office, lengthen the schedule of my student loans, pay off less each month on my credit card, buy cheaper groceries, shop discerningly at Banana Republic sales. True, I did most of these things already. But I could do them with more discipline.
I was leaving for Christmas in four hours. When I returned, even the worst of the rentals for January 1 would be gone. I’d be moving my stuff into storage and sleeping on friends’ couches.
I got myself out of that bathroom, and, without so much as a glimpse of my competitors, led my broker into the hall and told her that I’d take it. She smiled knowingly, and hurried me back to her office. By the time I’d filled out the application and frozen the listing with a deposit, I was sure I’d miss the train.
Now, passing over the Bronx River in the dusk, all I could think was how impulsive and ruinous my grabbing had been. How I’d panicked, and sunk the money I’d saved for first and last month’s rent on a place I couldn’t afford. It wasn’t until a half hour after Stamford and half of one of the Klonopins Michael had given me that I could bring myself to start the reading I’d planned to get through. Once I started, though, I didn’t stop. I zipped through one campaign finance filing after the next, highlighting, circling, typing a stream of notes, going at it like the research was due in hours, not days.
As we reached New London, I finished marking up the pile and had nothing left to do but stare again out the window. The lines for the ferry to Orient Point filled the lot and trailed back onto the other side of the tracks, the travelers in their idling cars reading newspapers, smoking out of the slits of open windows, some napping, others appeasing their children. Above their heads, across the estuary, the naval base was lit from waterline to smokestack, a sleek gray sub moored to its giant dock. Off the coast a nearly full moon was rising. My mother would be telling whoever had already arrived to come and see.
As we crept out of the station, I noticed that the woman across the aisle was gone, along with several others nearby, leaving a number of empty seats. I glanced sidelong at the man next to me, thinking maybe he’d move now. But he was reading his book and seemed unaware. There wasn’t much to pick out in the dark. Just the sporadic lights of little houses along the water and the occasional cluster of low-slung shops at the railroad crossings of eastern Connecticut and the beginnings of Rhode Island.
When I leaned my chair back I could see my seatmate’s profile reflected in the glass. He was average-looking for a holiday returnee to the confines of the Northeast, not unhandsome, though carrying a tad extra weight in his face, for which the light beard was maybe a cover, and wearing a slightly dated pair of wire-rimmed glasses—the rims too thick—but he was definitely male and under forty.
Now that I thought back to it, before he took the seat, before he’d even asked if it was free, he had appraised me for an instant. Anyone would, checking for insanity before committing to a journey next to a stranger. But his face had brightened, and he had given me a little nod, which might have been merely relief at the fact that I wasn’t visibly crazy, but which it now occurred to me might have been something happier.
Where was the wife? Where was the girlfriend? There were no children. Suddenly, I was hard. Absurd, but involuntary.
He’d cruised me, that’s what he’d done, he’d cruised me but I hadn’t given him the chance to follow up because I’d been in such a state, and then was working like a fiend. To strike up a conversation now, from nothing, would be awkward. It would lead to facts, which could only get in the way.
I clasped my hands behind my head and stretched my legs. I hadn’t intended for my shirt and sweater to ride up off my jeans and expose an inch of my abdomen, but the mild shamelessness of it quickened my pulse (I boasted no six-pack but in this posture appeared reasonably skinny, and was, after all, younger). With my face to the window I could gaze at him with zero risk of being caught in a mistake.
And that’s what I did for the next few minutes, occasionally sensing the forced warm air of the train car on my strip of bare flesh. He shifted several times in his seat, crossing and uncrossing his legs, transferring his book from one hand to the other, but in his reflection, at least, I detected no spying in my direction, his attention absorbed by his sci-fi novel. Still cloaked in the immunity of facing away from him, I slouched further in my chair, and, feeling my blood move faster through my chest, reached into my pants to adjust myself. Briefly, of course, with all the crude nonchalance of the frat boy I wasn’t, but still a second or two longer than strictly necessary.
And there it was—the darting, avid glance, belying instantly any illusion of indifference. Followed quickly by an exploratory quarter-turn of his head to establish the coordinates of my own head and eyes. And then, most telling of all, imagining me to be ignorant of his inspection as I continued to peer out the window, he blatantly checked me out, head to foot, and rested his stare on the waist of my jeans. My breathing grew shallow, the drug of danger loosed into my veins. He had to see the breathing, the way my stomach and chest rose and fell. There was someone in the seat ahead and behind, making our privacy exquisitely tenuous. Without giving him any sign of acknowledgment, I slid my hand back into my pants and held my hard-on in my fist for several seconds before raising my hand back up again behind my head. That’s when he finally looked up into the window and saw my reflection.
Immediately I closed my eyes, blood racing in my head, trying to sense if it was too late, if my ruse of slovenliness and inattention might still be viable. He wasn’t that cute, after all. I’d guessed right, but had picked a soft target. Which made me pathetic in the eyes of cuter guys—the ones who mattered in the end. This was a flawed and vicious logic, I knew, but I had subscribed to it for so long now that it had a back door past self-forgiveness straight to conviction. I could override my own sneering judgment and keep going—somehow I always did—but the judgment never gave back the share of giddiness and pleasure that it stole. Self-loathing was stingy that way. It kept what it took. But it didn’t matter now. The danger had me in its thrall. The ride had begun.
I slid my hand into my pants a third time and held it there. Our eyes met for an instant on the glass, though it was hard to read his expression in the dim and shifting image. If I turned and looked at him now any vestige of intrigue would vanish. I wasn’t about to proceed to an Amtrak bathroom. We needed to string this out a bit. So I kept my head averted, and watched him gape as I gripped myself and pressed my wrist against the band of my jeans, exposing just the tip of my cock, keeping alive the fantasy that I was drowsily stretching. The window was high and narrow, cutting his reflection off at the chest, but the downward twisting motion of his shoulder told me that he too was touching himself. Game on. I pressed my wrist harder against my jeans, and another bump of adrenaline heated my face. The passengers ahead and behind were too close for either of us to whisper a thing.
When finally I did turn toward him, I avoided his eyes, staring instead at his hand in his pants. I could have been a boy again in England, in the showers at Finton Hall, stealing a glimpse of the upper-form rugby players, terrified I’d be caught, such was the liquidity of time in the press of the moment. Until we acknowledged each other, he could be anyone at all to me.
He leaned into the aisle, checking for passengers wobbling back to their seats from the café car. Seeing none, he slid his right hand onto my thigh. I closed my eyes again for a second and sank further into my seat.
I loved men. Obviously. But it wasn’t just sex. To know for certain, as I did right now, that a man was paying attention to me, to me and no one else—what more was there to want than that? To matter, and know that you mattered.
“Providence, ladies and gentlemen, Providence!”
We jerked our hands out of our pants, leaning away from each other, and the conductor lurched past. I hadn’t even noticed the lights of the city. We were already approaching the station. The older woman in front of us got up and began struggling with her bag in the rack.
“Here, let me,” the guy whose face I still hadn’t really taken in said, leaping up to help her.
“Oh, thank you,” she said. “Grandchildren! So many presents!”
The train slowed beside the platform, and the car woke from its slumber. People gathered luggage, others got up to stretch. Someone began listening to music on a headset. I took a sheaf of papers from my bag and pretended to read.
I kept up the pretense all the way out of Providence and into the darkened scrubland of southeastern Mass., as if I’d hallucinated the last twenty minutes, aware that the guy was doing the same, clutching his open novel but failing to turn the page. We’d slipped across the line but couldn’t get back over it now without one of us declaring himself.
At last, the conductor came on the loudspeaker and announced Route 128.
“This is me,” the guy said, in a quiet, controlled voice. “You?”
“Yeah,” I said, and just like that we were back in the spell of the hunt, my derision for his middling looks once more no match for the thrill.
At the station, I followed him off the train, staying three or so yards behind. Up the steps onto the covered bridge. Across the tracks, down into the parking lot. Then out past the other cars to one of the back rows, where he clicked open the doors of a Mazda sedan, and lifted his suitcase into the trunk before taking a seat behind the wheel. I put my bag in the backseat. Willing my hand not to shake, I opened the passenger-side door, and got in. He’d started the car and turned on the heat.
“I’m Gary,” he said.
“Alec,” I said.
And with that he removed his glasses, leaned over the emergency brake, and, unzipping my jeans, took my dick in his mouth. My head rocked backward against the seat and then quickly forward. He had strands of gray at his temples and the beginnings of a bald spot. I looked away to my left. Across the parking lot families milled at the platform, the disembarking travelers finding their rides in the crosshatch of headlights. I closed my eyes and lasted only a minute longer. He swallowed. I zipped my jeans, opened the door, and, grabbing my suitcase from the back, strode toward the station house, searching for the pay phone. By the time my mother answered, the anesthesia was almost complete.
Margaret
Spotting me on the bench by the library entrance, my colleague Suzanne breezes over in her miniskirt, rummaging in her bag for a cigarette. She’s wearing red lipstick and too little for the weather. A femme fatale in middle age.
“Filthy me,” she exclaims as she lights a Winston, waving her hand to disperse the smoke, her clutch of silver bracelets jangling. She coils one bare leg around the other, tucking her foot hard against her calf, then, arching her spine, exhales up and away into the gathering dusk. “And so it ends,” she says with gruff languor, as though we had just struck the set of a Broadway musical, rather than come to the end of a workweek.
She’s an unlikely librarian, her flair wasted, if not resented, by everyone but the high school boys and their fathers. Early on, she decided that I was to be her ally against the forces of boredom and small-mindedness. I was too tired to resist. She was one of the first
new friends I made after John died, she and my neighbor Dorothy, and I’m still thankful for them both. Suzanne and I are by now the two stalwarts of the Walcott town library, the aging single lady and the widow.
She is always quick to note the disproportionate enthusiasm of the male trustees for our younger female coworkers, and about that she has a point. It’s not what men say or do to you. It’s what they say and do for other women, and not you. The little questions and compliments, the daily recognitions. It took me a while to understand the subtlety of it, the way invisibility works at my age. I suppose it shouldn’t have surprised me that couples who’d known John and me together didn’t call as often after he died, but it did. I thought it was owing to the manner of his death at first, the awkwardness of the subject, but really they were just more comfortable with other married pairs.
The job’s been good for me that way—meeting new people for whom I’m simply a colleague, nothing more complicated than that.
“Come to Kanty’s with me,” she says. “You never come.”
It’s the restaurant where she entertains the bartender on Friday evenings, and drinks more wine than she should before driving home. Luckily, I’ve never had a taste for alcohol in any quantity, or else I might have been tempted by it.
I tell her I’m waiting to be picked up. “Celia and Alec came back early this year—for my birthday.”
She turns, stomps her high heel in mock indignation, then lights into me for giving her no notice. “I would have had a cake and a card! What is it with you? You’re getting a cake on Monday, be sure of it.”
“Don’t be silly,” I say, recognizing my car as it enters the parking lot.
