by J. G Hayes
There was the bartender, watching the blare of a basketball game on the television perched at the bar’s end. There was an overweight businessman three stools down from me, whose angle of slumping declination decreased with each drink. On the last stool sat a senior citizen, that most forlorn of gay-bar denizens, sitting in shadow. Everything he owned seemed to have withered, except his eyes—these still burned with something. They had caught mine in the mirror once and that had been enough. Dust and ashes, ashes and dust … I had seen my future. Provided I survived the plague, of course.
Provided I survived this night.
The mid-thirtiesish guy (my own age), was four stools down on my other side. I had felt the bitterness of the evening falling from the folds of his tweed overcoat when he entered some twenty minutes earlier. He was still wrapped loosely in the coat, and upon his lap sat a large box done up in red and gold Christmas foil, with a now-crushed green bow on top. Like the rest of us, he was keeping his eyes frozen forward.
Dizzy strings of red bulbs crisscrossed the smoky ceiling. Multicolored lights chased each other around the edges of the bar’s plate-glass mirror. Holiday music set to a frenzied disco beat thumped across the empty dance floor behind us, mourning those who weren’t here, mocking those who were. As the songs, and their lyrics, played on, my reaction went from amused irony to an almost sweating desperation.
The businessman shook to life to order another drink. The bartender grudgingly obliged. I got the feeling he had somewhere else to go this evening, unlike, apparently, the rest of us. I turned my eyes downward in the face of his scorn, but I raised my finger nonetheless for another shot of oblivion. And yet I never could quite get there.
Maybe the holidays’ nastiest trick is its command to recall, to relive, to remember. With alcohol greasing the skids, my mind slid back thirty years, stopping at a long-ago Christmas the way a jukebox set at random yanks out a selection totally unexpected, but all too familiar. For quickly I was five again, and stepping out our old back door into a world made dazzling and supreme by a foot of snow the night before. It was Christmas Day in my reverie, and neither impassable roads nor a passel of young children would stop my parents from bundling us all up to go out to Aunt Anne’s in the country. Suddenly they were all with me, spilling out the door. I could hear their voices—Mom’s clear laugh, Dad still young and handsome, and alive, picking out targets for brother Bob to hit with snowballs, the girls gushing over the clothes and dolls they’d just received, and me, the youngest at the time, shocked into muteness by the triple sublimity of it all: a snowstorm, Christmas Day, and an upcoming ride on the numinous subway all on the same day. Everything was a kaleidoscope of delight that grew as the day unfurled like a flower, from the new snow-white coats of the too-tall pines, to the racehorse game my mother magically produced from her bag once we were tucked into our rumbling subway seats.
And then Aunt Anne’s, a gaggle of relations hugging me, wizened old relatives to mesmerize me with their tales, strange new cousins to play with, the smell of forty different delights melding into one in Aunt Anne’s kitchen: slow-basted turkey, gingerbread, orange peel upon the fire, bubbling cinnamon cider that coated the windows as its fragrance filled the house. And Aunt Anne’s secret stairway that led up to the attic, where still-wrapped presents for her favorite nephews and nieces lay before our rapacious eyes like just-discovered continents, limitless in their potential. And then from downstairs somewhere came the holy sound of Singing, Singing, the sound of singing and I felt there was singing throughout the universe …
BACK AT THE BAR now.
My eyes refocus and I see the young man in the overcoat, his handsome profile reflected in the mirror, staring down at nothing. His gaily wrapped package by this time has fallen on the floor, and I get the feeling it’s doomed to stay there, treasure at the bottom of a frozen sea. And he’s crying. Softly, almost silently, yet somehow this sound rises above the dueling cacophony of the television and the music. And it seems no one else can hear this.
But say what you will about the holidays, they do give us license, if we will but take it; the excuse to do, if not great things, then good things. So because it was Christmas Eve and I could get away with it, I abandoned my barstool and approached the crying young man.
I sat down on the squishy stool next to his.
We stared forward at our own solemn reflections. He kept up his quiet crying, but—Christmas miracle—we reached for each other, and our hands met and clasped halfway along the immeasurable distance between us.
Silently we sat, hand in hand, staring straight ahead, the din of the disco and the drone of the television falling hard all around us, holding back the horror of this night. And still he cried.
At last he turned to me. I turned to him. We stared at each other for a moment. Then he smiled and reached down to the ground to retrieve his package. He handed it to me.
“Merry Christmas,” he said.
There Is a Balm in Gilead
The person who did the cleaning every Wednesday afternoon had just finished, but you checked the rooms anyway—all of them. Nine of them, if you counted the small study on the second floor, and you always did. A lot of rooms for the Back Bay. You put your glasses on to make sure everything was in order, that everything was spotless. You consulted the antique marble clock on the living room mantel. It said you still had forty-five minutes before he came, but with all you had to do you thought rushing at the last minute would prove catastrophic.
You hadn’t seen him in eight years.
You decided on the upstairs bathroom for your shower. That was the master bedroom’s shower, closer to the dressing room. It was nearly as large as the flat you had grown up in; you measured it your second day here three years ago. It was done in large slate-blue tiles and golden walls with an orange wash stippled over them—somehow it reminded you of an Enya album cover every time you were in there. You stripped in the dressing room, threw your dirty clothes onto the closet floor.
There were many soap and shampoo and conditioner choices in the built-in shower caddy beside you, but you made your selections instantly, decisively, without any of your usual hesitations. The lavender-musk body wash; the chamomile shampoo; the evening primrose finishing conditioner.
You got half-hard while you showered. You tried to assign this to the primitive herbal smells, the slippery feel of the gel as you washed, and not the fact that you would see him in less than an hour. As you washed your chest, a memory bashed you: One night in the D Street bedroom, the moon full or close enough, he had risen from the bed, opened the blinds and windows, had come naked back to you. I want moon air in here, he told you. I want to see you washed in moon air. You wondered, why this one, why this particular memory as opposed to ten thousand others. Maybe because it had been one of the only times he had been poetic, had given vent to the poetry that you always knew sang within him.
You gritted your teeth, closed your eyes, pressed your hands against the shower wall. To hold back the memories, to push them back. You were careful to spray the sudsy residue off the gleaming stone-tile walls when you finished.
What lay before you this evening could never be construed as anything other than work—difficult, soul-wrenching—but still you luxuriated in the feel of the Egyptian cotton towel, half the size of a bedspread. When you finished drying you stood naked before the full-length teak-framed mirror at the bathroom’s other end, just beyond the marble Jacuzzi tub. You examined your body minutely; you turned around, you walked away from the mirror with your head turned over your shoulder. You flexed, your face serious. You saw that you still had it; thirty-eight but you still had it. The hair as red as ever, the skin as taut and smooth. Tauter now with a bit more muscle, if anything, you told yourself. You still had it. Amazing after all the things your body had been through, you thought. You thanked God for your body, for the miracle it was, the miracle of life. But you thanked him more for your sobriety.
You put on the Armani suit. You worried this might be too
much—but it would impress him, and all week you had planned on wearing it, all week, ever since his phone call. You stuck with the Armani but you didn’t wear the tie.
You dressed left; it showed through the suit. Not to the point of being featured but just enough for him to notice—of course he would notice. But what of that? The shoes pinched a little, but that was nothing. Three-hundred dollar shoes, but they pinched a little.
You checked all the rooms again. You left all the windows open halfway, exactly. You always did when the weather allowed and you noticed how the June city twilight breeze puffed the velvet curtains in some of the rooms but not others. The rooms took on a diffused pink-and-orange glow. You hoped the long twilight, the sounds of the trees all whispering just outside, would last. You lit certain soft lamps in rooms on the first floor. The place had never looked better. You thought how the intangibles were cooperating with you tonight. That was good; you would need all the help you could get.
You prayed to your Higher Power. You weren’t sure you were doing the right thing, but your higher aim was noble.
You got an ice bucket from under the kitchen sink. It wasn’t dusty but you rinsed it anyway. You remembered a priest you had known when you were seventeen who had given you a silver ice bucket that year as a Christmas present. You thought at the time what an odd gift that was. You still thought that. You filled it halfway with ice from the automatic dispenser at the stainless-steel Sub-Zero refrigerator. You recalled how you’d stolen a look at your father’s pay stub when you were seven; he had grossed that year several hundred dollars less than this refrigerator had cost two months ago.
You hurried out into the hall and left the ice bucket on the bottom step of the maroon-carpeted winding stairway. You bounded upstairs two at a time for the Listerine. You rinsed your mouth out. You had gotten a little sun that morning, just enough so that, in the mirror, you glowed. A very small drop of the mouthwash dribbled onto the Armani suit. You blotted it away with a wet tissue. It didn’t stain. You went back downstairs.
You brought the ice bucket out into the parlor. It was a double parlor but you put the far light on, over the ferns at the bay window, to make the room look even larger. This is where it would happen, where you would confront the past, him. Heal the past, maybe, heal the both of you. It was two days before the solstice and the long summer twilight infused the room with a vermilion-tangerine light that came from nowhere, everywhere. The room looked plaintive, almost beseeching, in this light, and you wondered if you could take it. You placed the ice bucket onto the mahogany table, moored among the leather sofas. You put one can of diet cola and one imported beer into the ice bucket.
You looked at the clock at the same time the doorbell rang. Of course he was still punctual. Your heart leapt up; he had held empire over you for almost thirty years and your heart still leapt up. You made yourself sit still until you counted to thirty, and this reminded you of “this has been a test of the emergency broadcast system” announcements on the radio when you were both young, when you and he had held your breaths during the blare signal in case the Communists attacked with bombs.
You counted to thirty after you heard the buzzer, to set the tone. You would set the tone throughout the evening, and this was the necessary beginning. You couldn’t appear anxious at all. You had come too far. You knew he wouldn’t ring the buzzer again and he didn’t, not when he had gotten a look at the imposing front of the brown-stone. Wealth had always impressed him, intimidated him.
That was the problem.
You made yourself smile before you opened the door.
“Tim,” you said, half dropping your eyelids. You congratulated yourself on this gesture. It was unplanned but perfect; he might have been the neighbor you saw twice a year and that was enough. You extended your hand and wondered how you didn’t drop.
“Not Timmy?” he asked, and as usual his question caught you unawares, but you’d had years to practice hiding this. His eyes were still as blue as your dreams remembered, that recurring dream in which his eyes turned into waterfalls. There was still one way that his eyes looked and you wanted to hurt him for it, belittle him; a second later they were different, and you wanted to hold him forever. You examined these feelings and found they ran into each other, like a prism of color. One became the other and you couldn’t say where, how.
“Tim, Timmy,” you said. You shrugged. “You’re still Timmy?” and you turned it around on him, you had hoped you would. “Ahh … come on in.” His eyes took in the place at a glance and they swelled. They ran through the foyer into the continent of rooms beyond, then back to you. He smirked when he caught you watching him; you knew he hated thinking you had caught him being impressed. But who wouldn’t be impressed? You almost laughed at the joy of seeing him, the absurdity of the role you had donned for this evening.
“Nice place,” he said quietly as you led him into the parlor. You couldn’t help smiling at the astonishment in his voice, the envy, but at the same time you begged saints that he wouldn’t be poignant tonight. You thought silence and poignancy out of him would be the end of you.
When you got to the middle of the room where the sofas were, he was still looking around, almost slack-jawed. There was so much to take in, the baby grand in the next room, the antique silk-watered wallpaper, the hand-painted pilasters; but still his eyes kept smashing back to you and you thought of consumption, of something being consumed every time he looked at you. Still. You remembered yourself, broke into a smile.
“Jeez, you look great,” you said, taking a seat opposite him. The two kid-leather sofas you were seated on were separated only by the mahogany table, inlaid with ivory, but neither of you were leaning forward yet. On the contrary, you were eyeing each other like opponents before a boxing match, you thought—ramrod straight and backs pressed against the leather. He was wearing black microfiber pants and a short-sleeved periwinkle shirt with the top two buttons undone, but undone in a subtle way. Only he could manage something that like. It was a brilliant color on him and the light in the room flew to it, but still his eyes mocked it. The shirt couldn’t compete with his eyes; what shirt ever could? You could see the first tufts of his auburn chest hair, the chest hairs you had counted one night while he laid back and laughed at you. You had counted them from his collarbone all the way down to … to …
The hair of his head was still chestnut, and for a quick second a part of you wanted to haul him outside so you could see, again, what the sun did to his hair. You remembered how the sun on his hair had always arrested you, always crushed whatever else you had been thinking of. You looked at the hand-carved grandfather clock for reassurance and wondered whether you were more what you wanted to do, or more what you should do, and why these disparate parts of you were sometimes at each other’s throats. But you looked again at his hair and saw silver strands on the side—only a few. You recalled how you had longed for this day, longed for the time when the aging process would wipe its loving hands across him and how this might show him that your love of him was pure, everlasting, and not dependent upon his looks alone. That was how much you had loved him, and you had longed for this day so you could show this to him, share this with him.
That was a long time ago.
You prayed he hadn’t become Republican, hadn’t gone into a Gated Community of the Mind where there was no room for compassion or justice in government or life. His compassion had always been the best part of him, though sometimes his fear fought it, kept it hidden.
“You haven’t changed at all,” you said. “I was so glad to get your call, to hear you were swinging back through town.”
‘‘Swinging?” he echoed, and there it was still, the half-mocking tone in his voice, though you thought the years had watered it down a bit, as they water down all things.
“You don’t mean you’re … staying? Moving back to town?” you managed to ask.
“Well, I am heading on to Atlanta tonight for business, like I told you. But I thought I might … just
see what real estate was doing here, what was available. Just … in case.” He paused.
“I’ve put my Chicago place up for sale,” he mumbled.
Your eyes met. You wondered if his vulnerable look was affectation. You damned him for his vulnerable look. No, you thought, no, he mustn’t do this to you, not before you had your say.
“It’s through the roof real estate,” you said, throwing your left arm up on the back of the sofa in a proprietary way and sitting back, remembering the light and breezy manner you had selected for tonight to go along with the Armani. “Thinking of… investing?” you threw out, and you hoped he didn’t hear your gulp. He had a small pimple under his right eye and you remembered, as you always did when you saw him in person, that he was mortal, human, fallible. You loved him more for it. For some reason you recollected a particular Saturday afternoon thirty years ago when the two of you had been playing War with the other neighborhood boys, and the area under his nostrils had been dirty, grimy.
“What?” he asked. Your eyes had betrayed you for one moment.
“Nothing. I was just thinking of something … but I’m being wicked rude, I haven’t asked you yet if you want anything. What do you want? Have a beer?” and you slid the ice bucket in his direction. He studied the bucket, its contents.
“Okay. Ahh, there’s only one there, though,” he said, half-laughing, pointing. He still liked to point, apparently.
“I’m having the tonic,” you said. “So, how’s Chicago?”
“You’re having the tonic?” he asked, and he lifted the beer from the bucket, twisted the cap off it, and its “hiss, gush” was a siren to you. “You quit?”
“Why do you sound so surprised?” you asked, and you sat back again and crossed your legs as you brought the bottle to your lips.
“Wow, you … well, I don’t mean to sound surprised but… wow. Sean the wild man? Sean that nobody could tell what to do? The Party Animal? Hmmph. I guess you’ve changed, huh?”
