Between Men

by Richard Canning

When Nori arrived at my door, the look on his face told me he was reconsidering. He came in and set down his backpack. I hugged him tentatively and kissed him on the mouth but, still, he frowned. “What is it?” I asked. “Is everything all right?”

  “Do you have downstairs neighbors?” he asked.

  “Um, yes. Why, did someone stop you in the hall?”

  “No.”

  “Is everything OK? Do you still want to go?”

  “Oh, yes. I still want to go to Montreal,” he said.

  And we left.

  After leaving Tenderwood Academy, I kept in touch with only one friend—my jealous junior-year roommate and boyfriend, Richard Victor. He had gone to college in England, where he found a handsome Irishman to love, and for a while after graduating they lived in a stone house in the Irish countryside, which is where I visited them.

  “This place is very rustic,” Richard had warned me before I went, but I assured him that simple, rustic beauty was what I craved.

  The house, the rolling hills, the silence were all beautiful. I visited at the end of the summer and, though everything was still green and misty, there was a chill in the night air. Only the john was too rustic for my taste—an outhouse at a short distance behind the house.

  I usually flush several times during a bowel movement, whispering an apology to the water gods. I consider the ability to immediately whisk away our shit the greatest wonder of the modern domestic world. How could I endure shitting into a cesspool?

  The first time, I nearly panicked. But I calmed myself, held my breath, and did it. After a few days it was almost bearable.

  Richard and his boyfriend were very much in love. They had vigorous sex almost nightly, and through a gap in the rafters, I could hear every thud of flesh against flesh, every sharp inhalation. Usually, I would put on headphones and patiently listen to music until they were done, at which point I would fall into fitful, unrestrained sleep. One night, though, near the end of my visit, the sounds aroused me sexually. I began to guess at the exact position Richard and his boyfriend were in; from my experiences junior year I knew Richard could be quite innovative. I wanted to masturbate. Doing it there, while listening, felt too shamefully lonely and prurient, but where could I go?

  I went to the outhouse. I sat over the cesspool and jacked off. It was a windy night and, just as I came, some of autumn’s first-fallen leaves were blown under the door. In the moment of orgasm, in that ecstatic rush of whatever it is in our brains that makes us feel joyful, everything was unspeakably beautiful—those leaves, the outhouse, even the smell.

  I returned to bed shaken and stayed awake for hours thinking about my experience. I wondered, are we fooled by our orgasms into loving whatever is before us at the moment? Or is the orgasm a doorway to a transcendent state where we see the true essential beauty of things? Where shit smells delicious?

  Somehow I was reminded of my childhood. I had never thought much of it, but when I was very young, there were moments when I was so wracked by the beauty of the moon, so overwhelmed with love for the family dog, so enraptured by the taste of cherry cordials that tears would fall from my eyes. How had I come so far from that joy?

  When I got home from Ireland I did some experiments. I would choose an everyday object, say, a spoon, and I would place it before me as I jacked off. I would force myself to concentrate on the spoon at the moment of orgasm.

  O the beauty of the silver! The functionality! The subtle bend of the neck just before the dipper! The awesomely distorted reflections!

  Later, I opened the Times to a photo of some particularly repellent figure in city government. I jacked off and focused on his face at the moment of orgasm. His offenses against the people of New York fell from his back like a heavy load. He was human, forgiven, and beautiful. As I cleaned up, I glanced at his face again in folding the paper, and felt my old detestation.

  The thing that kept me from shooing away these thoughts as the handiwork of serotonin was the similarity they bore to the simple love for things and people I remember from my early youth. I began the arduous process of collecting memories, trying to decipher the process that led to my mind and body’s insulation. How, for example, at Tenderwood Academy, was I able to live closely with so many boys, and love many, like more, and tolerate the rest? I didn’t remember hating one boy among those hundreds. And now I had to create imaginary doubles for my friends—assemblages of their best qualities that kept my ambivalence from slipping into distaste. At the occasional dinner party to which I dragged myself, I had to turn away from the other guests when they spoke while chewing. As my other senses had been numbed, my sense of smell had become strangely acute, to the point of sometimes triggering a gag response when presented with other people’s odors.

  Still, it would be a mistake to imply that I wanted to return to some previous mental state, as I was generally happy with my worldview; I wouldn’t reverse my insulation any more than I would actually forgive that city official his offenses. What I wanted was solely interior—to distill from the world, for my own enjoyment, the beauty that I cautiously hoped to be its true essence.

  On the way up to Montreal, Nori and I stopped for a picnic at what was advertised on a roadside as a “Historical Shaker Village.” The visitors’ center was closed, though, and only two of the buildings appeared to have been restored. They were locked. We walked past them, through the tall grass buzzing with insects, to the largest building, or shell of a building really, as it had experienced a fire that had left it roofless and without upper floors. Stone walls thirty feet tall surrounded an interior of lawns and thickets at different elevations, separated by the rubble of walls. We climbed down into an inner room, sunken five feet into the ground. The afternoon sun blazed down. Nori lay back on the grass, and I set down our lunch and reclined beside him.

  “Do you miss Japan?” I asked after a minute.

  “Sometimes,” he said. Then he wriggled and took from the billfold in his back pocket a tiny photo. “I miss Hitoshi.” Nori handed me a picture of a very handsome silver-haired man.

  “Hitoshi?” I asked.

  “He is my lover, um, my husband.”

  I looked more closely. There was deep tenderness in the smile Hitoshi gave the photographer, marred slightly by a cringe at the lens. He wore a black suit, and his hair was oiled back from a narrow forehead, a pointed, intelligent face. He must have been several years older than Nori.

  “You took the picture,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “He loves you.”

  “Yes. He has my heart, you know? I am with him in Japan. I miss him. But I have other boyfriends, so I don’t get too sad. He wants that. He knows it is good for me to have other boyfriends, because he cannot be here.” Nori’s English was that of someone who had studied it for years before speaking it—near-perfect grammar, but a Japanese rhythm forcing sounds together in odd combinations.

  “Why doesn’t he come to America?” I asked.

  “Maybe someday, if I am rich, he will come to America. Now it is very hard because he does not have lots of money.”

  “He can come and get a job, it’s not so difficult, is it?”

  “It is very difficult. Hitoshi has HIV. He gets help in Japan with medicine that he cannot get here. When I am an engineer and I make lots of money, then he will come.”

  I looked back down at Nori’s handsome husband, whose tenderness embarrassed me. This was a picture meant only for the photographer, to whom I returned it.

  “Does he have other boyfriends, too?”

  “Well, I tell him to. That it is good. He tried, but it makes him very sad because it makes him miss me more. So he does not have other boyfriends. He waits for me.”

  Nori rolled onto his elbow and looked at me. I moved my head under his so it would shield me from the sun. He kissed me. “It is all right that I have a Hitoshi?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “I thought it is good to tell you, so you should know.”

&nbs
p; “Yes, of course.”

  That night, I made love to Nori in a hotel room overlooking Lake Champlain. I touched the length of his lovely, smooth body. The ridges of the hips that, on skinny boys, create graceful lines that frame the flat abdomen then curve toward the cock, are actually the edges of the upper pelvis. They have the beautiful name they deserve: the crests of ilium. I lay my face against Nori’s left crest of ilium and kissed his belly. There was only a wisp of hair under his navel; otherwise his belly was bare and flat. A small patch of scrubby pubic hair, then a thin penis, simple and precious.

  Sex was more somber than I had imagined before Hitoshi entered the picture. Less flights of fancy, less reckless exploration. Now that Nori loved and was loved monumentally, I felt my meaning had changed, swaying toward serious pleasure in the shadow.

  I took Nori’s penis into my mouth, put my hands to his sides, thumbs resting along his beautiful crests of ilium. I knew their name from an artists’ anatomy book that Mr. Drake had had on his shelf. The models were red-faced athletes of the twenties with strings around their waists and single, fake fig leaves hanging over their genitals. Lines led from their bodies to wonderful words: sternum, abdomen, internal oblique, crest of ilium. Somehow these stern-faced men were infinitely more exciting than the nude and lusty seventies sailors of Richard Victor’s porno. Maybe it was just that they were citizens of the land of Will Drake, who was sleeping quietly a few feet away, and who, even in sleeping—or, especially in sleeping—radiated beauty.

  Nori lay behind me and I let him penetrate me slowly. Breathing hard, I stopped him once to let me catch up, then let him go all the way in, until his body came flush with mine, his chin on my shoulder and his breath in my ear.

  What did I want from him? It hadn’t occurred to me to wonder this until now, making love to him. The third party, I supposed, must always have an agenda. Only two can blindly explore. Maybe it was better this way. The sex, with its frankness and intensity, was almost certainly better. Maybe I would be able to enjoy Nori more in every sense now that I needn’t concern myself with his heart.

  Afterward, Nori fell asleep against my shoulder and, unable to sleep while touching another, I gently eased his head onto a pillow and moved away. I realized I had no idea what I wanted from him or from any man. I had no blueprint. I wondered, had I never known a real adult relationship?

  I tucked my hands under my legs. If I hadn’t been exhausted from travel and sex, this would have been difficult, but now the illogic of sleep started to weave itself easily into my thoughts. Not knowing what I wanted, I allowed myself to be Nori, longing so desperately for his steady and melancholy Hitoshi. Then I allowed myself to be a child again and longed for Mr. Drake.

  But, I decided after my many jack-off experiments, the orgasm is so short-lived! If I was to go anywhere with this I had to extend the period of ecstasy.

  I took Ecstasy, but even as I explored the wonderland of my apartment feeling surge after surge of goodness, I was aware of an artificial tang to the flavor of the experience, a bitterness that lingers on the tongue after one takes a pill. And the aftermath, two full days of sorrow spent in bed and in movie theaters, as I was too sad to read, was more than I could bear.

  I read books on transcendental meditation, and even went to a class at the Open Center, but found the effort to divorce the mind from the body contrary to my goals.

  Then I wondered, what if the answer was, again, encoded somewhere in my past?

  There was a certain type of activity that I had always been drawn to. I remember being five or six and taking all the clothing off the hangers until there was a massive pile on the closet floor, then crawling under the pile and feeling a perfect stillness and satisfaction in the thick, warm dark. Whenever I went swimming, I never played with the other children, but made my own game of swimming to the deepest point, emptying my lungs and sitting on the ground for as long as I could. (This usually brought the bitter reproach of whatever nanny or lifeguard was present.)

  I have countless memories of being alone and impulsively wrapping a blanket around my head; or lying on the floor and thrusting my feet deep between box spring and mattress; or coiling whatever rope, towel, or bathrobe belt that came into my grasp around and around my wrists until they were drawn together in a happy bond. And at different points since puberty I had asked lovers to place their hands over my face during sex, or fill my gaping mouth with their fingers, or smother me, gently, with a pillow.

  But these were examples of indulging a taste I otherwise tried to ignore. Only with my sleeping arrangements, out of necessity, did I allow myself to create an elaborate system of restraint. Had I stifled the very impulses that would lead me to that state of transcendence?

  I decided to completely indulge myself in whatever self-restraining activity I could successfully and safely accomplish alone.

  Also, I cautiously answered a few personal ads, inviting gay sadists to come bind me, gag me, etc., but each experience left me feeling unfulfilled and a little sore. Then, in a different section of the personals, I found Belinda:

  Strong intelligent mature redhead. Available only for advanced role play and bondage. Experienced. Will work with clients to develop unconventional methods of satisfaction. Serious calls only.

  How difficult it is to reconstruct a broken frame of mind, no matter how recently it was broken!

  What would I have done with Nori in Montreal if there were no such man as Hitoshi? Holed us up in the inn and held him until it felt like he was mine? Spent money on him? Been bored by him? Climbed Mont-Royal to survey the city and the gray Saint Lawrence beyond and convinced him to hide here with me until his friends stopped calling and NYU forgot his name, then return to live quietly in my loft?

  It’s impossible to imagine how he would have responded to a radical proposal. As it was, he was uniformly, cheerfully willing. We visited the cathedral where English-speaking Canadian tourists took flash pictures next to NO FLASH PHOTOGRAPHY edicts in French while mournful singing echoed from a hidden side chapel and a grand-mother wept, prayed, rocked in her pew. We ate delicious Vietnamese food for lunch, then bad French food for dinner, and Nori insisted he liked it all. I couldn’t imagine the hard, resolved side of him that perhaps only Hitoshi saw—that chose to leave Japan; that chose to take on lovers.

  Would I have taken him to the sauna? Who knows? But I did.

  That night as we walked the halls, our bare feet making kissing noises against the tiles, I imagined how we looked together. To these diminutive Montrealers, we were tall as lampposts. In the mist we could have appeared as different versions of the same stooped, hollow-chested but handsome man, one the color of tea with milk, the other the color of, well, milk. Or as one man followed by his ghost into the swirling mist of the steam room. The man sits and adjusts his towel as his ghost does the same, then the illusion is broken as the man leans in to share some quiet English words with his ghost, who is really his pale friend. Then they both respond to other men’s greetings in French. Were they Torontonians? No, Americans more likely.

  Nori and I had discovered earlier in the day that our French was about equal, and although this was a few degrees worse than Nori’s English, we merci’ed our way through the day, enjoying the equal footing, bypassing the momentary resentment, the speed bump a Montreal waitress goes over before she lists the specials in English. And now we talked with the three other residents of the steam room in our halting French about New York and about Montreal.

  “Gay men in Montreal,” said Nori, “seem to be friendlier than gay men in New York.”

  “You’re not speaking of us specifically, are you?” said the hairy-chested man with stubby, nervous fingers. “We’re friendly because we’re hitting on you.”

  We all introduced ourselves. These three were friends—two accountants who were talking up Nori while the third, a musician named Jean, had taken a shine to me.

  “Montrealers and French Canadians in general,” Jean said, taking up the subject
from his friend, “are friendly out of pure tackiness. New Yorkers can afford to be unfriendly.”

  “That’s silly,” I said.

  “The beauty of New York and New Yorkers is an unfriendly beauty,” Jean said with wavering authority, causing me to consider that patently non-American trait—the willingness to try out theories in casual conversation. To most Americans it seems intellectual, pretentious, un-Christian; I loved it. “The beauty is in the street noise and in the way buildings lean against each other. But,” he said, taking on a dramatic sadness, “there is also a problem with the New York gays, and American gays in general . . . they’re becoming straight. It’s like a science fiction movie, really.”

  “Oh, hush, Jean,” said one of Nori’s accountants. “Always talking.” The man turned to Nori and me. “We just came here to relax before a party. Would you like to come? It is our friend’s party. There will be lots of boys.”

  Nori and I looked to each other. “Well ...” I said hesitantly.

  Jean suddenly broke into English: “You were hoping for some action here?”

  I nodded.

  “It’s too early. Midnight on Saturday? Everyone’s still at the bars. It’ll be hours before this place gets going. Come to the party with us.”

  It was a couple of hours and several drinks later, as Jean and I stood in a dim corner of a crowded living room, that I was able to return to the subject he had raised in the sauna. “Jean, you said that gay men in the U.S. are becoming straight. What did you mean?”

  Now he spoke in English. “Gay men in the U.S.,” he said, “they talk out of two sides of their heads. They say, ‘You straight people must respect us—we want rights—we want to live by our own rules,’ then they say, ‘May we please live by your rules? May we please get married and have children and live in Ohio? May we join the army? We don’t want to be outlaws anymore. We want to be just like you. We want to have a day at Disney World.’ And in this I mean Torontonians, too, because they want to be Americans. Long before Quebec secedes from Canada, Toronto will secede and join the U.S.