by Judith Frank
“I’m not leaving the house!” Matt shouted, making Daniel shush him furiously and close the door. “Okay? I live here! I’m not going outside and shiver on the front lawn while you throw my clothes out the window like a betrayed wife with mascara running down her face!” He grabbed a pillow and hugged it.
“I don’t want you here,” Daniel said, his face red and twisted. “I don’t want you here anymore. Do you know what these kids have been through? I can’t believe you! What if you got sick? Do you think they could take another loss like that? Or if you got me sick, or them?”
Daniel brushed his forearm against his eyes, and Matt sat quietly. I won’t get sick! is what he wanted to say, but he knew he couldn’t, he knew that once you’re thunderstruck, you no longer live in a country where the natives can decipher that kind of utterance. How he wished it was six months from now!—and the apologies and drama and penance and feeling like a horrible person were over, and he’d been tested and found negative. “I’m so so sorry, Daniel,” he said, his voice hoarse.
“I’m sure you are,” Daniel said. “And I accept your apology. I do. But that’s the best I can do; it doesn’t change how I feel.”
Despite his best efforts, Matt felt his eyes begin to prickle. “I told you, didn’t I? I didn’t have to do that!”
“Oh my God!” Daniel said. “You want to be congratulated for that? You want me to throw you a big party because you didn’t knowingly give me HIV?!”
Matt flushed angrily. “Of course not!” he said, embarrassed, because he did think he’d behaved decently. “But isn’t it proof that I can be trusted to observe precautions?”
“Proof that you can be trusted would be not spreading your ass for strangers!”
Matt flung himself facedown onto the bed, acting as if this was a regular fight, hoping that if he acted that way, it would be.
“Please go, Matt,” Daniel said. “I can’t have you here. It makes me feel . . .” He put his hand on his chest and tried to continue, but he couldn’t find the air. “Panicky,” he whispered. For a second, until the breath came, he thought he might be having a heart attack. He was focused like a laser on Matt leaving the house, it was his sole need, it was all he could do not to scream Go! a thousand times. He sucked in air with the sound of a screeching engine. “I can’t,” he panted. “I can’t have you here, I can’t take the vigilance, I can’t be reassuring you night and day that you’re still a good person, I can’t go back to feeling the way I did when Joel died. . . .”
Dismay flared in Matt’s chest, and he thought, Just for now, just for now. He forced himself to his feet, got his gym bag from the closet, and threw it at Daniel, who fended it off with his forearm. He’d go to Derrick and Brent’s. He got dressed and began packing, just a change of clothes, and then, in the bathroom, his toiletries. He took, without hesitation, the things they shared: toothpaste and shaving cream, the hairbrush. He scanned the bathroom, then took the Ativan and all the vitamins from the cabinet. He left the bedroom without looking at Daniel, the bag slung over his shoulder, and went downstairs. From the kitchen, he took a bag of oranges, the mint Milanos, all the beer in the fridge, and the vodka and scotch from the cabinet. He set the bag down at the back door and went back upstairs.
Daniel was lying facedown on the bed, his face buried in the crook of his arm. “I’m going to say good-bye to the kids,” Matt said.
Daniel looked up quickly, his face red. “Don’t you dare wake them up! I’ll tell them in the morning.”
“What will you tell them? That I up and left? Don’t you dare blame me.”
“I won’t,” Daniel said. “I promise.”
“What are you going to tell them?” Matt demanded. “I want to hear the exact words.”
“Please,” Daniel said, sitting now cross-legged and slumped. “I’m really tired. Let me sleep on it.”
Matt’s lips tightened and he got a surge of adrenaline at getting the upper hand for the first time. “I’m not leaving till I hear what you’re going to tell them.”
Daniel sighed tremulously and rubbed his eye hard with his forefinger. “My mind is drawing a blank,” he said.
“Tell them you kicked me out of the family.”
“I’m not saying that.”
“So you’re going to lie? I don’t want it sounding even mutual, Daniel. You’re so big on taking responsibility—you fucking take responsibility.”
Daniel rubbed his face hard, exhausted from the energy it had taken to get Matt to agree to leave. “I’ll tell them that you didn’t want to leave, because you love them—”
“Love us. Say ‘because he loves us.’ And why did I leave, then?”
“Because I decided it wasn’t safe for you to live with us.”
“No—I don’t accept that.”
They wrangled for another twenty minutes, for each proposition, Matt posing the difficult follow-up questions he knew Gal would ask. Finally, they decided on “I’m very angry at Matt for something he did, and I told him I don’t want to live with him anymore. What he did is between him and me. And he didn’t want to go, because he loves us.”
Matt nodded tiredly. His mouth was dry, and tasted terrible. He thought he should also demand visitation rights with the kids, but didn’t have the energy for it right now.
The dog followed him back down to the kitchen, and he stooped and kissed him on the snout. He called Derrick and Brent from the freezing car as he waited for it to warm, his breath billowing and his fingers aching from the cold. He woke Derrick up, so he told him to go back to sleep, that he was coming over but he’d let himself in. When he got there, Brent emerged sleepily in a bathrobe and said, “Big fight?”
“Big fight,” Matt said, taking off his jeans and putting on sweats, which, cold from the car, encased his legs in cold.
“What’d you do?”
“Funny,” Matt said. “Can I have a blanket?”
“Sure,” Brent said, and went back into the bedroom, from which Matt heard a quick conference in low voices between him and Derrick.
He took two sleeping pills and went to sleep on their couch, a cat curled behind his knees, thinking of all the smart retorts he’d failed to make—Haven’t you learned by now that nobody can keep anybody safe? Safety isn’t the only value in the world!—and vowing to remember them for later, when he and Daniel spoke again. Noam, he thought, would be up a few times during the night coughing, but that was Daniel’s problem. If he, Matt, had no rights—what a shit Daniel was to say that!—at least he would now have the right to a good night’s sleep. His mind spun and spun, and finally sleep came over him.
DANIEL OPENED THE CABINET and cursed Matt when he discovered the Ativan was missing. He went back into the bedroom, lay down on the bed, and pulled the covers up to his chin. His heart was hammering in his ears and fingers, and when he thought of Matt, panic tickled inside his chest with intolerably pestering fingers till he shuddered. Just as he’d felt when he’d heard about Joel, as if there were something tormenting inside him that he couldn’t get out. To go out and court unnecessary danger—as if they hadn’t been blown, like fish hunted with guns, into the bloody welter of those who lived every single grim, aching, horrible day with its consequences!
Crying would have helped ease him out of that free fall, but he couldn’t muster more than a humid and itchy tingle around the eyes. He’d cried enough over this past year, he thought bitterly, and he was not going to spill more tears over Matt. He had an urge to call someone, call Derrick, but everyone would think he was crazy for kicking Matt out; they’d think he wasn’t considering the kids. But now, honestly, he felt that he should have broken up with him as soon as he brought the kids home. Matt had tried to be there for them, because he needed so badly for people to think he was a good person. And sure, fine, he was good with them, especially with Gal, who didn’t have the intense entanglement with him she had with Daniel. But what good did it do to make an ace Halloween costume when he never pulled the harness in the baby’s
car seat tight enough?
He got up and took a hot bath, lay in the tub reading Matt’s Entertainment Weekly to still his thoughts, feeling the hot water encase his limbs but not penetrate. When he got out, his skin was red. Yo-yo came in and licked his wet feet. Daniel dried off, put on pajamas, and sat on top of the bed, flipping channels. The heat of his bath hit him belatedly and he broke out into an unpleasant prickle and then a sweat. He closed his eyes. He felt like a mangled crustacean on a hot beach littered with soda cans and cigarette butts. He knew he had no right to complain, since he was the one who’d done the breaking up, but he felt awful, and angry for being forced into it, too.
The TV flashed its disturbing late-night images, the ads for weight loss and call girls, the waxen or battered faces of murdered people being studied by medical examiners. He drifted to sleep and then woke up again, and sometime later he pushed off the bed and left the room, walked softly up the stairs to Matt’s study.
It was warmer up on the top floor. He turned on the nearest lamp, habituated from long cohabitation with Matt not to use the overheads. The red walls gave off a muted glow against off-white wainscoting. Matt had moved into the smaller, less comfortable space when Gal and Noam arrived, and cast his magic over it, so that it now looked like an ideal design space—comfortable, modern, lovely. On his desk stood a chunk of engraved Lucite, a Best Young Designer award he’d won long ago, along with framed pictures of Matt with Daniel, with the kids. On the bulletin board was pinned the Ma’ariv front page with Matt in the photograph. Daniel gazed at it. His expression in the photograph was inscrutable behind the sunglasses, but you had to hand it to the man, he was gorgeous. Being loved by him had been an awesome treat. There was a hitch at Daniel’s heart, and for a second, he felt faint. He sat down on Matt’s swivel chair and closed his eyes. In the beginning, Matt was so beautiful to him that Daniel had had to learn to re-see him through a human lens rather than a purely aesthetic one. He had broken down that beauty in his mind and constructed a new one, so that the Matt he saw and loved was fresher and more real than the Matt their culture held up as the beauty standard for men. It was a beauty he believed only he could see.
And now—now Matt had let some other man in, some man who could see only the obvious beauty, and let him in closer than he’d ever invited even Daniel.
Daniel sank into the chair, becoming heavy and inert. After a few minutes he became aware that something was hurting. His jaw; he unclenched his teeth, opened his mouth wide, waggled his jaw from side to side.
Against the back wall stood a file cabinet, where they kept all the information about the mortgage, property taxes, and home repair, as well as their passports, the legal information about Daniel’s guardianship of the kids, the kids’ medical records. Daniel rose and opened the drawer, pulling out those files and stacking them neatly on the floor. He didn’t know what he was going to do with them, he was going on instinct, and hadn’t meant to look into the file cabinets in the first place. He felt ridiculous, like a character in a heist movie. If Matt forgot something and walked in, he didn’t know what he’d say.
He bent and took up his stack of legal documents, removing Matt’s passport and tossing it on the floor, and brought them over to the small pearl-colored sofa, sat down with them on his lap, and put his feet up on the coffee table, on which sat some brochures Matt had designed and a coffee cup filled with crayons and markers for Gal’s visits up there. These were the things he had: the kids, the house. These were the things he would tend, safeguard, cherish. He fell asleep with the files cradled to his chest.
CHAPTER 17
MATT WAS DAZED. He kept thinking it wasn’t possible, that for Daniel to break up with him while he was already destroyed by loss, for him to prefer parenting the kids alone to having him in the house—it seemed insane. For the first few weeks, Matt crashed on Derrick and Brent’s couch, protected from utter devastation by his belief that, soon, Daniel would come to his senses. Because what could he possibly tell the kids? Could he really look them in the eye and tell them that yet another parent had vanished from their lives? Could he really be that cruel? Or so furious and implacable that he’d rather take on the burden of dealing with Gal than have Matt in his house? He felt sorry, and guilty, and contrite about what he’d done, but Daniel’s reaction was so huge—so outsized and disproportionate, so utterly punitive to the kids, so fucking crazy—that he felt that it outweighed even his own crime, and that he and the kids were the ones who had been wronged.
Derrick and Brent were bewildered and appalled by this turn of events. When Matt told him what he’d done, Brent said, “Are you kidding me? You of all people!”
Derrick turned his face away and went into the bedroom. A few minutes later he emerged again into the living room, where Brent and Matt were sitting silently, hands in their laps. “Well, you showed him, didn’t you,” he said, sarcasm twisting his normally placid face. “You don’t have to be responsible if you don’t want to. You don’t have to put your family first—you’re too hot for that.”
“Derrick,” Brent said.
“For God’s sake, Matt,” Derrick said, sitting down heavily. “You know better than anyone else how terrible things happen to people in the world. Why would you go out and look for danger?”
They stayed up late, worrying and analyzing, drinking the booze Matt had taken from home. They speculated about his behavior, which he found kind of interesting and pleasurable—who didn’t love being the riddle to which his friends’ searching analytical attention was tuned?—until it quickly became irritating. “Like Derrick said—only nicer—I can totally imagine rebelling against your new domestic status,” Brent said, “that’s totally understandable. Or rebelling against Daniel, who, let’s face it, can be an arrogant prick at times. But in a way that harms yourself?! That’s what I’m struggling with. I mean, I never pegged you as self-destructive or suicidal. . . .”
That word made them all look at one another. “First of all, I told you the condom broke. Second, Christ, it was the opposite of that,” Matt protested. “It was—It made me feel more alive than I had in months.”
“It’s not just about you, though,” Derrick said. “When you have kids, it’s not just about you anymore.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Derrick, could there be a more self-righteous cliché?” Matt snapped. “Even I wouldn’t say that, and I have kids!”
“You had kids,” Derrick said.
Matt’s face grew hot. He’d never been talked to that way by Derrick, who was one of the least judgmental people he knew. And he was conscious of deserving it, which made him feel even worse.
“Maybe it was a cry for help,” Brent interposed. “A cry for help, to get Daniel to notice you and your own pain.”
Matt sighed and sat up, placed his beer bottle on the coffee table. “Okay, let’s stop talking about this,” he said.
“Well,” Derrick said, interlacing his fingers and reaching his palms up in a big stretch, “you wouldn’t be the first gay man to fuck without a condom because it made him feel more alive.”
“Was it at least good?” Brent asked.
Matt considered what to tell them, and settled upon a simple “Yes.”
“Well, at least that,” Brent said, while Derrick leveled at him a disapproving stare.
“At least that,” Matt said. He was sitting at the edge of their big armchair; it was late at night and they had already said “Okay, time to go to bed” three or four times.
Derrick and Brent were standing now, and collecting bottles and glasses from the living room tables; Matt went into the kitchen to get a damp sponge. Derrick disappeared and came back with a pillow and blanket as he was wiping off the coffee table. “Are you scared?” he asked.
It was one of those moments where Derrick reached out simply and touched your very soul. “Yes,” Matt whispered.
“MATT WENT BYE-BYE” WAS the way Daniel told Noam. To Gal he said, “Honey, I have to tell you something. Matt’s not going
to live here anymore.”
“Did you have a fight?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said, setting a bowl of cereal in front of her.
“I knew it,” she said.
It was a cold January morning, and the radiators were clanging as the heat came on. He sat down opposite her, moving her orange juice away from the edge of the table, and told her the things he’d promised Matt he’d say: that Matt loved them and didn’t want to leave, that it was his, Daniel’s, decision, because Matt did something that made him very angry. His eyes were dry and grainy and each time he blinked he felt as though his corneas were being scratched. He needed to get some coffee into his body. Still, he was conscious as he spoke of doing a good job using age-appropriate language, and of being conscientious to Matt’s demands.
Gal watched him, taking it in. Her lips were smeared past their edges with lip balm—the effort to heal their chronic winter cracks had obviously been an impatient one—and she pressed them together in a blotting motion. “Maybe you could marry a girl now,” she said.
“Gal,” he sighed. “Is that all you have to say?”
What was she supposed to say, she wondered, gazing at her uncle. His face was worn and dotted with bumps and bristles. Without his glasses she could see the purple under his eyes. Her bare feet were cold; her cereal was puffing up in the milk. Noam’s eyes were flitting back and forth from her to Daniel, staticky filaments of his hair stirring gently in the air. “Bye-bye,” he whispered.
“I’ll take you to school today,” Daniel said. “So we don’t have to rush for the bus.”
Gal put down her spoon, went up to her room, closed the door without slamming it so that Daniel wouldn’t follow, and lay down on the unmade bed. With an irritated grunt, she twisted and pulled out the pajamas that were balled under her hip, flung them on the floor. She knew without question that she was never going to see Matt again. Something awful seeped over her, a sludge of panic and helplessness. Hatred of Daniel, for making Matt leave. She told herself that actually it was okay, Matt wasn’t really a parent anyway. It wasn’t like her parents dying. But who, she wondered, would take her to her riding lessons? If Daniel made her give them up, she would never talk to him again; she would live silently in this house till all the heavy silent air made it burst like a balloon, or a bomb.
