by Judith Frank
He felt fingers touching his own, and a gentle tug; Andrew was leading him away, and upstairs.
The bedrooms were up in the turret, and looking up into the domed ceiling above them, which was whitewashed and crisscrossed by silver braces, Matt grew dizzy. There weren’t seven bedrooms, but there were five. Five bedrooms: Matt’s mind held on to that as though he might be tested on it later. He stood at the doorways while Andrew went in and handled things: bed ruffles, picture frames, jewelry boxes. Was he going to steal something? Matt wondered vaguely, but it seemed that he was mostly just a toucher. At the doorway of one of the smaller bedrooms he heard a murmur: “Check this out.” The clunk of a latch being lifted, then a curve of a tight, patterned shirt as Andrew ducked into a small trapdoor opening in the far wall. Matt looked quickly around the hall, feeling like a cartoon spy, or a cat burglar, then slipped into the room and bent to enter the small space. He expected to be entering a roughed-out storage space, full of suitcases and mouse droppings and milk crates filled with old record albums, but when he heard a tiny click and light warmed the space, he saw that it was somebody’s hideaway, with a love seat, a tiny table, and a tiny lamp with birds and butterflies painted on the shade. Even where the roughed-out ceiling peaked highest, it was too cramped to stand. It smelled of wood chips.
“Whoa,” they breathed.
They fell onto the couch and kissed the jarring, tooth-clashing kissing of urgent strangers, hands clutching each other’s hair. Andrew’s lips were full and dry, his breath raucous from cigarettes and alcohol, his tongue a little rude. They pulled down their pants, awkward in the tiny space, seams and belts scraping their thighs, then collapsed back onto the couch, looked at each other nose to nose, eyes crossing, and laughed.
Matt’s body absorbed the weight of the man on top of him, the cool scented air, the silence that swathed them after the noise of the party. They kissed and kissed, to the sounds of their own breathing and grunting. Matt’s hard-on was warm and rosy. It was exciting to be with someone larger than he was, to watch his face become blind and bloated with need.
Andrew slipped onto the floor and turned Matt away from him, and Matt felt Andrew’s fingers slide down his back to his ass. His fingers, and then his tongue. This was a new development; he stiffened with shock and pleasure, feeling himself fondled, tasted, handled like an intriguing object on a dresser. He heard a rip of foil and the snap of a condom. He heard Andrew whisper again, felt the press of his hard-on against him.
“Wait,” Matt murmured, his mind arrested, a swamp animal popping its head out of the ooze. Andrew was nuzzling his neck with his lips, stroking him, sliding in by small degrees. He was using lube, thank God; Matt wondered where he had stashed it in those tight pants. He couldn’t do this, he knew. One part of him was pulling away; the other was experimenting with just one more moment, one more moment before it really counted. His life outside that tiny room had dimmed and fallen away. Matt breathed and tried to open up, leaned into the pain, leaned into it till it became a glowing ember instead.
He let it happen. He let himself be carried on waves of pleasure, like a sloop, by gentle thrusting. And then it stopped. “Don’t stop,” he croaked, and then he heard Andrew say, “Shit.” And then, fumbling, “Shit. The condom broke.”
Matt groaned and rested his head on his forearms, his body tense and hungry. He waited for Andrew to pull out, but he didn’t; instead Andrew’s arms came around and slid under Matt’s shirt, stroked his nipples, his belly. He kissed, and then bit, Matt’s shoulder blade. When Matt tried to break away, Andrew’s arms tightened around him. He was whispering something, holding Matt down, his breath hot on Matt’s neck. Matt made out the word “please,” which brought another piercing surge of pleasure. Held by a determined man in this sighing, enfolding space, he felt as if he might fly apart at the seams. He closed his eyes and let his mind swirl, felt a grand, gorgeous submission swell over him. He felt Andrew move inside him again, harder this time, then faster; felt his fingers gripping his hips, and then there was a cry as he came. They rested there for a moment, Andrew’s body heaving on top of his. Matt heard the high faint whistle of his own orgasm, approaching and then blasting through him like a blaring bass beat from a teenager’s passing car.
He lay wasted and pulsing. When Andrew pulled out of him he was overcome by relief and then a sadness so pungent it made him want to cry. Daniel, see? Those were the words that glinted in the dim light of his mind. This was a real conversation, this was being intimate with someone. He was shattered. It was all he’d ever wanted.
His cheek was pressed into the rough weave of the love seat, his heartbeat swishing in his ear. He was nowhere. Maybe I’ll stay here forever, he thought.
CHAPTER 16
MALKA AND YAAKOV left two days after New Year’s, in a cloud of shame and regret, Gal clinging to them and weeping as they entered the security line, Noam taking his cue from her and letting loose with a fake melodramatic wail. Daniel held Malka’s hand in both of his own. “Thank you for coming,” he said, his voice raised over the noise of the crying children. “You are welcome anytime.” No matter how you feel. He wanted to convey that, but she’d recovered only enough to rise from bed and totter tentatively through the house, as though moving through a new element with precarious footing, and he thought he’d mortify her if he actually said so. Instead, he held her hands for an extra moment, then pulled her toward him into an embrace. He squeezed her before letting her go, and she patted his cheek.
“Yalla, let’s go,” Yaakov said. He shook Daniel’s hand with the same hearty evasiveness he’d greeted him with, and let his grandchildren hug him before kissing each on the head, rising, and taking Malka’s elbow. “Until Purim,” he said, and Gal said, “Until Purim.” That was when they planned to go back to Israel for the children’s mandated yearly visit, and for a memorial for Joel and Ilana.
They watched them stop in front of the first security guard, and Yaakov handed Malka their passports and tickets. They watched him help her off with her coat, and lay it on the conveyor belt with his own, and then, one at a time, they went through the metal detector and disappeared in the crowd of people on the other side.
“Oh, I’m so sad,” Gal said as Daniel shepherded her toward the exit, Noam in the stroller in front of them. “I already miss them so much!”
As they stopped at the elevator and Gal pressed the down button, and he made sure the children’s coats were zipped, Daniel imagined Malka boarding the plane, sitting down, closing her eyes, and waiting for takeoff. He could see her prepare—which she did perhaps better than anyone else—to sit quietly, hands in her lap, as they tore loose and roared into the sky.
IT SNOWED AND WARMED, then snowed and warmed again, so that it became treacherous to walk outside, and everybody tracked sand inside the front door, an irritant when they walked barefoot or in socks. Gal went back to school after the Christmas holiday, and without her grandparents to come home to, the household felt smaller and more tenuous. Her birthday was approaching, another event to dread and to get through. Her grandparents were going to come, but she didn’t want a party with kids. Dani kept asking her if she was sure, and each time he asked, anxiety and embarrassment crept over her because she didn’t have any friends. Except Rafi, who didn’t really count because none of the girls in her class had a boy for a best friend, and because he was deaf. Dani said she used to have lots of friends when she was little, but it was hard to conjure that person; when he showed her the album of her kindergarten class, the faces gazed out at her, impassive, patterns of light and shadow, each called something that felt like a label on a picture. Peggy said that she did still know how to make friends, she was just dealing with a lot, and that the first year of all the big events and holidays without her parents was the hardest. Dani said that they could just invite her whole class, but she didn’t trust him to throw the right kind of party, whatever that was.
She was pretty sure Grandma and Grampa were going to get her horseb
ack riding lessons, and that was the one thing she looked forward to.
WHAT GOT TO MATT was having done something he couldn’t tell a soul about, used as he was to enjoying events in retrospect, in storytelling, almost more than he did at the time itself. If he could tell someone about it, he thought, he could work through its strangeness, the sense of radiant connection it had given him. He could work through what had made him cave the very first moment having sex without a condom had presented itself to him as an option, after so many years of disapproval for those who did it. At times, as he worked, his mind drifted back to the party, and he could hardly believe it had even happened. Then he remembered the sensation of being looked at with such intense desire, of being grasped in a man’s arms, and he thought he understood what Jay and all the reckless men he’d known and disavowed were searching for.
When he had come to, Andrew was gone. Matt had risen and pulled on his pants, ducked through the little door and into the dark, silent bedroom and hallway. The party was over, and he felt his way down the stairs on the toes of his boots, his heart hammering when the steps creaked, into the living room, then rushed for the door, certain that he would be confronted by a haughty guy in a dressing gown demanding an explanation. He slipped out and closed it as silently as he could, fled down the front porch steps into the neighborhood. He still felt noodly and stoned, a little nauseated, and the night air coated his hot face. He expected to be stopped by the police at any moment. It wasn’t till he was six or seven blocks away that his heart slowed.
At the dark doorway of his house, he’d fumbled with the keys, turning and holding them toward the streetlight a few houses down, till he found the right one. He shushed the dog and went into the living room as quietly as he could; he waited till Daniel stopped shifting at the noise, then slipped quickly into the bathroom. In the shower he soaped copiously between his legs, winced at the sting around his asshole, worried that he was torn. The adrenaline was wearing off, and he could feel the soreness at his chin where Andrew’s beard stubble had rubbed him, bruises at his knees where they’d pressed into the floor. He had been keeping his mind intentionally blank, but as he rubbed himself briskly with a towel, his body felt something coming on, and by the time he was beside Daniel in bed, the sheets clinging to his still-damp body, a great cloud of fear swarmed over and deafened him. What had he done?
Now Malka and Yaakov had gone, at least, and the house was beginning to feel like theirs again. Every single day Matt enjoyed being in his own bedroom, enjoyed going downstairs to make breakfast for the kids and not having to make conversation with anybody but the dog. When everybody had gone—to work, day care, school—he took his second cup of coffee up to his study and played computer games for half an hour before getting down to work. He’d bought a new pair of small, high-end speakers for the computer, and he played music turned up loud, the way he’d worked as a young man, singing, embraced and stirred by the clear, powerful sound. Lydia and Sam were coming in a few weeks for Gal’s birthday, but they were staying only for a few days this time, and in a hotel, and he thought he could manage that.
The bruises had faded, his chin healed. Most of the time now, the encounter seemed very far away, and his body chaste and contained. Did it have to have happened? Did the reality held in memory have to translate into a raw, physical event at a party somewhere? Wouldn’t it exist only if they insisted it had?
A FEW WEEKS LATER, Gal stood with Lydia and Sam inside a drafty paneled room, breathing in the smells of hay, horse sweat, manure. There was an old oak reception desk in the front with an appointment ledger flopped open upon it, its pages a mess of scribbles in pencil and pen. Farther in, a few adults and kids sat at the edges of cracked leather couches, in a sitting area with tack hung on the walls, horse magazines splayed on trunks and tables, a fire going in the fireplace. Gal stuffed her coat in Lydia’s arms and looked the kids over. She was in a beginner class with three other girls and one boy. Two were wearing jeans and sneakers, and her confidence wobbled for a second: Were they dressed wrong, or was she? But the others were wearing jodhpurs and boots like she was. She’d gotten them, and a helmet, as presents from Matt and Daniel this morning, her birthday.
Their teachers were Briana and Shannon, Briana a ponytailed teenager with a quick smile, Shannon older, weathered, a little stern. It was Shannon who took her into the stall to meet her horse. It was cold, and their breath mingled in the air. “This is Caesar,” Shannon said. She explained how Gal should never stand behind a horse, always by its side or shoulders, and cross to the other side in front of it instead of behind. “Don’t even do it once,” she said. “Don’t think, ‘Oh, no one’s looking, I can just slip around him this one time.’ Horses can be unpredictable, and they can kick you to kingdom come.” Caesar bent his face down toward her and snorted, and Gal touched the impossibly soft skin around his nostrils. “We call a brown horse with a black mane and tail a bay,” Shannon said. “Now, Caesar here is a bit of a clown, and if you let him get away with it, he’ll do all kinds of shenanigans. So I’m assigning him to you, because you look like a girl who doesn’t take nonsense from other people. Am I right?”
Gal didn’t know what shenanigans were, but she did understand nonsense, and the way Shannon described her set off a little rush of delight and pride.
Shannon set a footstool near Caesar’s neck and gestured for Gal to step up on it. She left the stall for a second and returned holding a bridle by the crown. “I’m going to show you how to bridle him. You’re a little short, so I’ll do the top part. Here’s your job: putting the bit in his mouth. It’s the hardest and most important part of the process.”
She showed Gal how to hold the bit in front of Caesar’s mouth, and slip her thumb into the back of his mouth. Gal felt the warm slime of his spit, the spongy tongue. He shifted with a groan. “Slip it in!” Shannon said, and she did, feeling it clonk against his teeth, then settle.
“Nice work.” Shannon put the crown over his ears, showed her the correct tightness of the throat latch. Gal wiped her hand on her pants, then surreptitiously gave it a smell. If she had to go home right that moment, she thought, she’d have had a fantastic time.
They saddled Caesar, Shannon inviting Gal to run her hand between the cinch and his gut, to see how tight it should be. Then she led him from the stall and tied him in the barn’s big hallway, and boosted Gal up onto him. Dizzied by the unexpected height, Gal gripped his mane, but Shannon showed her how to gather and hold the reins, how to pull back to stop him. There were three already mounted as well, but Gal tuned them out, sat back, and reveled in stable music: the saddle’s creak as she shifted on it, horses heaving and snuffling, the slap slap of the straps as Shannon adjusted the stirrups, Caesar’s munch on the bit.
Five helmeted kids rode in circles in a chilly ring, Shannon and Briana calling out instructions from the middle, stopping them sometimes to demonstrate on one kid the way the foot should sit in the stirrup, the height at which the reins should be held. Shannon said, “Horses are flight animals, not fight animals. Do you know what that means?” Parents lined the sides of the ring behind the barrier; Gal glanced at Sam when she passed him, got a thumbs-up. She nudged along Caesar’s immense body with her heels and thighs, swaying with his rhythms, feeling the pull in her calves as she strained to keep her heels down, the jolt of the trot that yanked her forward and made her teeth clatter till she could get into a posting rhythm for a second or two before her tailbone smacked back onto the saddle. She watched the swishing tail of the horse in front of her, which lifted for a moment as its anus turned inside out and released steaming grassy turds. The cold encased her cheeks and fingers; she felt the bones in her butt and the warm rub on her crotch, saw her breath materializing in front of her. And when she’d dismounted and Shannon took Caesar’s bridle and saddle off and handed her a curry brush, she brushed his coat where it was dark and wet from the saddle, stroking hard with the grain and grooving fine lines into the hair, then moving to his rear an
d brushing, dust and dirt motes swirling in the air, till she was sweaty and her arms ached. Briana brought her a carrot and showed her how to offer it to Caesar, and Gal laughed as his big lips scrabbled on her open palm, and he chewed it with a deep meditative grind. When she rejoined her grandparents in the reception area, she was beaming. “Did you like it?” they asked, and she flung her arms around them. “Bye, Shannon!” she yelled as her teacher came up to the desk to look at the schedule, and when Shannon looked up and her scowling face broke into a smile, she thought: She smiled at me!
After dinner the grandparents and uncles and Rafi and Yossi sang her the Hebrew happy birthday song, and they had a chocolate birthday cake Daniel had made. Yossi handed Rafi the present they’d brought and nudged him toward Gal; he thrust it toward her with a grin. It was two costumes, a police officer and a pirate. Gal and Rafi dressed Noam in the pirate costume, then took turns arresting him in severe authoritarian voices. It was native Hebrew Gal heard from Rafi, but slightly distorted. When you told him something, your words spooled out there and maybe they clicked into the machinery of his ear and maybe they didn’t. He always had a slightly distant look, as if he were trying to remember where he’d put his shoes; she thought he might be a little slow, but Matt told her he wasn’t. Sometimes she took his chin in her fingers and turned his face toward her before she spoke.
