The Next

by Rafe Haze

  Oh, my god.

  This was not good news. It’s one thing to flirt with a neighbor, it’s another to invite him over. It requires a certain kind of pathology to think it appropriate to invite a complete stranger over to fuck the shit out of you in the very bedroom in which you sleep with your wife, in which your kids climb into bed when thunder scares them, in which your wife braids your daughter’s hair.

  I heard the window above me open. Ruben descended the fire escape, trying to step as lightly as possible on the thin metal stairs with his red Converse shoes. He was wearing well-fitted khaki pants that showed off his long thick legs and his tight ass, and a tight thermal shirt with a V-neck that accentuated the development of his chest and the breadth of his shoulders. When I’d seen him face-to-face, I was too busy being an asshole to realize there was a goddamn good reason the show he’d been putting on upstairs for the neighborhood was well worth watching. I ducked out of sight as he circled around the platform to climb down the second flight of the fire escape. I popped back up as he reached the bottom of the stairs, which ended at the approximate height of the top of the foot wide brick wall that separated my building’s section of the courtyard from that of the Perfects.

  Rather than lower the rusty ladder that would allow him to climb down to the ground, he hopped onto the brick wall. With catlike agility, I watched Ruben’s silhouette traverse the top of the wall, which took a right angle toward the Perfect’s building. Ruben then climbed onto the mirroring fire escape. He dexterously ascended the metallic stairs to the bottom of the Princess’s apartment. She was reading a fashion magazine on her bed, dipping a spoon into a container of yogurt. She was facing the window. Ruben could not get past.

  I looked up and saw Mr. Perfect observing Ruben’s actions from above. All that elation halted because of the Princess’s innocuous positioning. Mr. Perfect opened his window and stuck his head out to get a better look at what Ruben was doing. Ruben looked up at him, smiling, pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, and shrugged his shoulders helplessly, pointing with his index finger at the problem. Mr. Perfect seemed unperturbed. He pulled up his pants and exited the bedroom. I watched him walk through the short dividing hall to the living room and then exit the front door to the hall.

  What was he doing?

  The other neighbors were completely oblivious to this ridiculousness.

  The Couch Potatoes glued their eyes to their screen and their garlic bread to their asses.

  Schlongzilla was holding a script opposite some beautiful dark-haired actress who was also holding a script. They were rehearsing, apparently, gazing into each other’s eyes, mouthing soft dialogue. A love scene? He glanced away to pour two glasses of red wine. Right. Wasn’t difficult to see what kind of catharsis this rehearsal was leading to.

  I could tell by the way the Broadway Dancer kept grasping his forehead as he typed in his underwear on his laptop that he was nursing one whopping hangover.

  The Princess looked up from her magazine. The doorbell just rang. She put down her spoon and headed down the hall. Ruben seized the opportunity and darted up the stairs to Mr. Perfect’s open window and entered. Clad only in slacks and a long shirt, he must have been freezing. The Princess returned from the hall with a confused expression on her face; nobody was at the door. She stretched out on her bed again, picked up her spoon, and continued reading.

  It seemed like a lot of trouble to get from point A to point B. Why not just get buzzed in the front door like any normal person?

  Ahh, but this building had a doorman. Like many buildings on the island, it’s entirely possible the doorman in Perfect’s building had too watchful an eye on visitors. And perhaps a more fluid exchange of information with the Missus than the Mister would have. I wondered if this close eye on her husband was something the Missus felt was warranted from a previous matrimonial faltering.

  Hmm hmm.

  The fucking marathons married New Yorkers run to get ass.

  Moments later, Mr. Perfect entered the front door. He strode through the living room, tossing off his suit coat to the floor. As he entered the short dividing hall, he removed his belt and dropped it to the floor, and by the time he entered the bedroom he had dropped his trousers, leaving him clad only in his white button-down shirt. I doubted they even had a second to introduce themselves before Mr. Perfect pounced on Ruben and locked lips with him. With their mouths suctioned together like lampreys, Mr. Perfect unbuckled Ruben’s pants, simultaneously pushing him to the bed.

  Wow. How long had Mr. Perfect been storing up these impulses? Since he was sixteen?

  As the pair of lampreys approached the bed, Ruben’s dick was missile hard and sticking out of his khakis in launch position. Mr. Perfect smeared a finger of lube onto it and massaged it to a shine. The platform bed was the kind with a layer of drawers underneath and a thick box spring, making it perfectly high enough for what they were about to do. Romance was not the name of the game at the moment. In lust-driven swiftness, Mr. Perfect bent over the bed, his stomach on the shiny quilt, his arms in front of him, stretched out to the pillows, burying his nose and forehead into the quilt, with his legs bent at perfect right angles down to the floor, his muscular hairy globes thrust into the air. With one hand strangling the pillow in front of him, he reached with his other to pull Ruben’s dick between his bulging lobes.

  The Peasant was crowning The King.

  My penis was responding to the coronation.

  Ruben plunged deeply into Mr. Perfect’s hole, slamming his thighs tightly against Perfect’s thick, muscular hamstrings. My imagination supplied the sounds of the thighs and hamstrings slapping together, the squish of lube frothing into a white foam around the base of the piston, the primal moans caused by Perfect’s hole stretching to accommodate Ruben’s beefy dick, of Ruben’s breathless shock of having his flesh forcefully engulfed and squeezed tight by a lubed pink hole.

  Mr. Perfect opened his jaw and took a large mouthful of the quilt, and then clenched down, muffling grunts and screams of pain and unimaginable pleasure.

  I started stroking my dick furiously. Straight, gay, bi-sexual—I didn’t care one iota. This was hawt man-on-man action in the flesh and, although part of my brain judged it to be the antithesis of what I really wanted, another part of my brain was sending blood down to engorge my member by the pint. My whole pubic area was sweating again from the intensity of what I was watching, providing a sweet slickness to my strokes.

  The men’s pistoning was rapidly becoming more frenetic. Mr. Perfect began sweating through his white button shirt, and as the cotton clung to his back, the details of his well-developed lats and rear deltoids appeared. God, he was a sexy motherfucker.

  I heard a raspy “Oh, Fuck!” echo across the courtyard.

  Mr. Perfect grabbed his shirt and wrestled it over his head, free and naked. His back shone wet, hard, and striated with muscles. A pool of sweat gleamed in the small of his back. I grabbed my dick tighter. Ruben’s face glistened. His abdomen peeked out from under his shirt occasionally, flexing, tightening, releasing.

  Suddenly something caught my eye.

  My heart fucking froze.

  Mrs. Perfect opened the front door. She had returned unexpectedly.

  Oh my fucking god!

  She dropped her suitcase on the floor. That noise caused Mr. Perfect and Ruben to freeze like the snapping of a Polaroid. Mrs. Perfect uttered something—perhaps, “Honey, I’m home?” I watched in horror as Ruben scrambled to hide somewhere.

  Mrs. Perfect eyed the coat on the floor. She lifted her brow.

  Ruben hopped out the window onto the fire escape, his shiny dick still waving in the air. Mr. Perfect grabbed the lube, made one sweeping brush with his forearm across the quilt to smooth it out, and darted to the bathroom, closing the door. Ah, he would pretend to take a shower.

  Mrs. Perfect entered the dividing hall and saw the belt. She picked it up, rigidly grasping it.

  Ruben descended the fire escape only a
couple steps, but stopped before he’d be forced to enter directly in front of the Princess.

  Yappity yap yap.

  Mrs. Perfect paused in the empty bedroom. She sniffed and widened her eyes. Confusion? Anger? Disgust? I could not tell because steam drifting from the bathroom into the bedroom, fogged up the window. Mrs. Perfect went to the open window.

  Knock knock knock.

  Was that my door?

  Ruben flattened against the cold brick wall beneath her. He sucked in his stomach, simultaneously tucking his dick back into his pants.

  Knock knock knock.

  “Who’s there?” I barked.

  “It’s Johanna.”

  I shut the curtain with a swift movement, sending dust flying.

  Shit me to hell!

  Chapter Ten

  “You ill?” Johanna asked, easing her Kelly green couture dress into my office chair, the only one vacant.

  “No. Yes. No. I don’t know.”

  I was definitely flustered. I’d managed to buy some time to let my dick deflate by throwing on sweats and holding a mound of dirty clothing in front of my groin as I answered the door, pretending to be cleaning.

  “You look like shit,” the lady volunteered.

  “Thank you.”

  “My therapist thinks I need closure.”

  “On what?”

  “On us.”

  “I think he’s right.”

  “I think she’s wrong.”

  Oops. It’s not as if she hadn’t been going to the same therapist for two years.

  “I think she just thinks you’re cute,” Johanna said, “and nobody likes to see cute people suffer.”

  “That’s sweet. Well, go ahead. Close.”

  She bit her lip. I don’t think she’d thought this through beyond this point. And that was not like her. I ought to have acknowledged the rare and beautiful opportunity to have a moment of unprepared candor with her.

  I smiled for the first time in months. A follow-up conversation after a breakup is supposed to be emotional and all-consuming with the gravitas of two people who need to simultaneously express their love for each other while justifying their need to remain apart. It was supposed to help lift the fog. Yet here I was, with Johanna right in front of me, wondering if Ruben made it past the Princess, wondering if Mrs. Perfect put enough pieces together to start calculating a divorce settlement, wondering if the children were right behind Mommy in the hallway to complicate that lovely farce…

  “Are you here?” demanded Johanna.

  I refocused on Johanna being back in my apartment. I observed her demeanor. She was highly conflicted inside, yet attempting to adopt a comfortable posture in the chair rather than remain standing upright. She wanted me to feel comfortable—or at least safe—to speak freely. She wore a soft green dress with an elegant yet relaxed feminine cut. She was open to being thought of as sexy but did not want me to feel pressured into thinking of her that way. This was probably the most unguarded she’d been in front of me for years. She and her therapist really had been working hard. I ought not to take that lightly.

  Honesty. Honesty.

  “I haven’t really talked too much since you left. I’m not used to it. I’m sorry.”

  Johanna took that in, and it appeared to resonate deeper in her than either one of us expected. For the first time she looked around the room. She saw a human tragedy mapped out in mounds. Her eyes watered slightly. She sighed softly and ran her fingers along part of the piano, eyeing all the remnants piled on top of it.

  Looking away from me, she said in a soft voice, “I always loved your music. It’s important to me that you know that.”

  “It used to be important to me that you loved my music.”

  Used to be. I actually said those words. I actually meant them too. I did not mean to injure her, but I had two reasons for saying them. One: I was never terribly trusting that Johanna’s esteem came from a creatively truthful place. Two: I was not terribly sure I would ever write another song again.

  She wanted honesty, but I felt immediately guilty and pressured to compensate her in some way she’d value.

  “You look beautiful.”

  “Coming from anyone else, that would be flattering,” she responded.

  Fair enough. Part of me strained to hear the soft padding of Ruben back up the fire escape in front of my window. Or the faint terse arguing of The Perfects across the courtyard.

  Refocus.

  “What did your therapist hope for us to do tonight?”

  “Just talk.”

  “With what result? To reconcile?”

  She sized my directness up. Since day one, I was never clear whether she appreciated this proclivity in me.

  Marzoli would appreciate it.

  Johanna looked away from me toward the closed curtains, as if there were a view to be lost in.

  “Possibly,” she said softly.

  God, she really was beautiful. If only she knew and appreciated that she was beautiful—not in a Vogue cover shot way, but in an ageless, exquisite, incredibly inspiring way.

  “In my mind,” she continued, almost at the level of a whisper, “when I used to picture our future, I would picture us as the Layworths.”

  “As who?”

  “The Layworths,” Johanna repeated, moving toward the curtain. To my terror, she pulled it open with one swift movement before I could stop her. “Your Mr. and Mrs. Perfect.”

  She pointed her hand toward the Perfects, and I followed it across the courtyard.

  But there was nothing to see. Ruben was nowhere to be seen. Mr. and Mrs. Layworth, as the Perfects were called, were not to be seen. No children were jumping about the living room or kitchen. No lights were on in the rest of the apartment at all. It was almost as if everything I’d seen a couple minutes earlier never occurred.

  The curtains on the bedroom were drawn shut. Were Mama and Papa Perfect having makeup sex already? Could Mr. Layworth transition that quickly? Scarily, my intuition said yes. I could only assume Ruben had succeeded in crawling back down the fire escape, across the wall, and up our fire escape while my curtain was closed. I disliked the little twerp, but my intestines knotted at the idea of him being entangled in the damned domestic cracking of the Perfects’ perfection.

  Johanna continued, “I used to picture us one day achieving what they achieved. Of you successfully at the top of your field, like Nicolas Layworth, and me at the top like Sophie Layworth. With children. Happy children. Beautiful three-bedroom apartment. A home in the country. Money. A powerful and creative circle of friends who can do things for us, and who we can do things for. A perfect life. What the Layworths have.”

  She gazed out across the courtyard with a faraway look, as if gazing over her coffee plantation in Africa, and sighed, “That’s what I used to want.”

  When I first met Johanna, I met this woman. This woman who spoke with a faraway, melancholic peacefulness of hazy dreams. She seemed to me to be a fulcrum between a distant tragic past and a distant hopeful future. She believed embracing both of these enriched life’s tranquility and excitement. She had once been a beautiful haiku, made unfathomably profound by its very simplicity, and she’d inspired song after song from my feverish fingers.

  But too much New York, or too much hope and too few results, or, most likely, too much proximity to me changed her. The faraway look gave way to ambitious immediacy and speed. Dreams gave way to pragmatism and steps on a ladder. She evolved from a profound but ambiguous haiku to a detailed Excel spreadsheet, loathing lack of clarity. Our problems developed because I did not and would not evolve along that path. But then, my path hardly gave me cause for self-righteousness. Aside from completing “Paralyzed,” I was not writing any songs at all, was I?

  But when she sighed, gazing over her coffee plantation in Africa, and whispered, “That’s what I used to want,” that timeless Johanna emerged again. Perhaps her missing what we once had revived the poetry in her, or perhaps it was, in fact, due to some su
ccessful intensive therapy. Or perhaps not being near me. This exquisite abandonment of desiring all that Manhattan ambition told her she ought to desire made my heart alight on some warm ancient breeze.

  But my heart had fucking jumped the gun, for the tenor in her voice suddenly hardened as she completed her thought, “And it’s what we can still have. We can still become the Layworths. We can still have the apartment. If you just get on some goddamn anti-depressants and start writing again, we can have it all. We can have gorgeous children. The second house in the Hamptons. You and me.”

  I bit my impulse to describe how marred the Layworths’ perfection really was underneath because I realized I’d need to reveal my prolonged observation of two men frothily fucking the shit out of each other.

  “Johanna, you don’t even know the Layworths.”

  “I know that I’ve got five years left to have a baby before I end up like that…” She indicated the Beached Whale. “And you end up like one of them…” She indicated the Couch Potatoes. “Look at me and tell me that’s really what you want to become.”

  She was valiantly fighting back tears, stiffening her shoulders, swallowing hard, and I was saddened. She’d become much too much of a New Yorker to cry openly and freely anymore. To my surprise, I found myself suddenly very protective of my neighbors. Sure, I could smear shit over their lives in my silent monologue, but that was reserved only for me and my vituperous abuse, not for anyone else.

  Marzoli’s words leaped back into my brain and out my lips. “You don’t know anything about them.”

  “Do you still love me?”

  Fucking awesome question.

  “I haven’t written a song about you for a long time.”

  Fucking rotten answer.

  She absorbed the response like a crash test Honda against a brick wall at sixty miles an hour, but in excruciating slow motion. In spite of the cruelty of what I said, her slow response did her credit. It was acknowledgement that she was vaguely aware of how much she’d changed since we met, and not all the change was for the best. Johanna’s tears finally fell. It was not a kind of “hold me” cry.