by Achy Obejas
So, basically, I’m at no risk. But after Sylvia told me her story about the broken rubber we decided we’d just stay on the safe sex diet until she gets another test, about six months down the road. And if we’re still together then, we’ll just guzzle each other up.
To my surprise, Sylvia was willing to drop the restrictions right after our little talk—convinced that, lesbian sex being what it is, the chances of actual transmission were so low we were probably safe anyway. But with a fresh mental picture of an increasingly sicker and bed-ridden Tomás, like a half-blind chick with its red mouth open, struggling to get out of the nest, I said no. I said we’d have to wait.
Tomás, besides being my roommate, is my best friend. We’ve been living together since we both graduated from Stevens College, a tiny school with a student population of seven hundred and fifteen in the middle of Nowheresville, Indiana. We both picked it because it had a good English department, offered us lots of scholarship money, and isn’t far from either of our repulsive little hometowns. When I met him, Tomás felt the need to travel back and forth every weekend because his high school sweetheart—some seriously Christian girl with whom he obviously didn’t have to prove anything sexual—was still a senior and he, struggling mightily to stay in the closet, figured he’d escape into heterosexual marriage as soon as possible.
I wasn’t in a much better place. My hometown sweetie was a junior whom I’d deliberately picked because he was younger and so underdeveloped. But in the summer between my high school graduation and arrival on campus, he’d had a growth spurt and a hormonal charge. Suddenly he was very tall, had grown a prickly moustache, and was getting erections all over the place. For a while I considered having oral sex with him. I thought it might be an easy way to keep him around without risking pregnancy or actually having to do it. But when he pulled his cock out of his pants and dropped it in my hands, I found the silkiness of its skin deceiving—a denial of its power and danger—and I couldn’t bring it to my mouth.
Mercifully, pretty much upon meeting, Tomas and I promptly dropped our hometown hang-ups and took up with each other. Together we had banter and fun, a solid study partnership, respect and refuge. In many ways, we were perfect together. Not that we acknowledged why we were interested in one another. That took about six months.
It was on a lark that we went to The Gold Star, an Indianapolis drag bar Tomás’s frat brothers thought might be an adventure. The brothers—all faceless now—had heard of the place from one of the older guys and decided to check it out. It was pretty cheesy—lots of weird tinsel, what looked like Christmas lights, several blinding disco balls, and queens who seemed as colorful and magically out of place as tropical birds.
None of us had been to a drag show before or had any idea what to expect. At first, I was afraid the frat guys would get boisterous and defensive and have to prove their manhood or something, but once we entered, a strange kind of silence fell over them. The music was very loud, but that wasn’t what caused it. And the place was packed, but that wasn’t it either.
We were seated ringside, with an unobstructed view of the stage and even a glimpse of the wings where, on closer inspection, the queens seemed more like men in women’s clothing than the women they were trying to project. They held their bodies differently in the shadows than in the light. Less loose. More angular. Impatient. I don’t know what it was.
One by one, the queens came out to the brilliant spotlight, their manners exaggerated and glittery. One of them resembled Elizabeth Taylor, complete with mole and what looked from our table like violet eyes. Another looked like Farrah Fawcett, who was so popular then, with her hair cascading in waves to her shoulders. They lip-synched along to records, usually something torchy like “What I Did for Love” (big fave) or “The Man That Got Away.” Everyone in the room knew the words and eventually sang along. Tomas and I looked at each other, then we both dropped our eyes in the same flickering instant.
While the queens mouthed lyrics, big beefy guys stepped up and, with what I was sure were sticky fingers, curled dollar bills into make-believe cleavages, immaculately manicured hands, hip-high boots, hot pants waistbands—whatever. The ritual was understood and expected, and Tomás and I were amazed. We looked on, transfixed, amateur anthropologists having stumbled upon an eerie, ancient, and enchanted world.
I did notice on this initial visit to The Gold Star that there were very few women in the club, and even fewer whom I might identify, by whatever means, as lesbians. Most of the women there had very heterosexual seeming male escorts who held them close, or put their arms around them as if to protect them. There was much laughter, and I remember thinking how sad it all was.
Those women who did look like dykes were pretty stereotypical—square-bodied, tough-looking. I noticed one of them staring at me, and I looked back for a moment, then immediately dropped my arm around Tomas’s shoulder in an awkward and inadvertent reversal of what I’d seen the heterosexuals do. She wore leather, had her thumb hooked into her jeans pocket, and raised up her beer to me as if to toast. I was flustered and looked away, afraid that perhaps I was being recognized as one of them—an idea that titillated as much it terrified me.
A week later, I went to the bar by myself. I hung out on the periphery and in the corners, scrutinizing every face that came near me and hoping to stay invisible, like a bat in the rafters. It took me hours to realize I’d come looking for the woman who’d lifted her beer in my direction. When it hit me, I crossed my arms on my chest and started to leave, muttering, “excuse me” without looking up as I bumped and pushed against the bodies lining the way out of the bar. Suddenly a familiar hand curled its fingers around my elbow and tugged; I jerked. When I turned around, I fell into Tomas’s arms. Behind him were a handful of his new friends, all singing along to “My One and Only.”
Sylvia’s lying on her side, stroking my back. Her nails, which I never feel when her hand’s inside me, are like feathers now, causing me chills. “I have to get up,” she whispers, kissing the back of my neck. All the soft little hairs stand on end at her touch.
“Nobody’s stopping you,” I tease. She moves her knee up against me so that her thigh comes right up and presses into me. I press back. I’m wet.
I know this is dangerous. This kind of comfort, so easy and familiar at the beginning, can become weighty later. Already, in the first couple of weeks we’ve spent together, Sylvia has been late to work almost every morning. Not because of some raging heat but because of this warmth. Later, when she gets in trouble at the office and the cuddling’s old hat, I know she’ll resent it.
“Hey, come on, get up,” I say, trying to hold off the future. I turn around, kiss her quickly, and push her away from me.
“All right,” she mutters. “I’m up, I’m up.” But she’s not. Instead, she lowers her head under the sheets and covers my nipple with her mouth. I grit my teeth, not because it isn’t wonderful, but because I’m trying not to moan. I’m trying really hard to be disciplined, to resist temptation. “Sylvia,” I groan, and although she makes some noise in response, I know she isn’t listening.
Eventually, she hops up, grabs clean underwear from an open drawer, and jumps into the shower. I stay in bed, listening to the sound of the water, the way the rush of it varies as she moves underneath it. I know that if I don’t get up right here and now, I’ll lie in bed all morning.
I can script it from here: the headlong rush into feelings and more feelings, the sense of awe (even though we’ve been here before), then that abrupt moment of discovery—something similar, I’m sure, to what Montezuma must have felt upon learning that Córtez was not a god, but a man—that moment when we will realize (as we must) that this is fine, for now, but nothing more.
“You’re wasting daylight,” Sylvia says, wet and shivering from her shower. Her body is covered with goose bumps. “You’re just too tempting.” She yanks the sheets from around me, grabs my ankles, and drops my legs over the side of her futon. “If you don’t get up
, I’ll never get out of here,” she says. “Don’t you have things to do?”
“Too many,” I say, pulling myself into a sitting position. For starters, I have to check in on Tomas, with whom I’ve been spending less and less time. “I have to see what the disease of the day is at my house,” I say, suddenly surprised and embarrassed at how bitter I sound.
Sylvia stands in front me and puts her fingers on a couple of pressure points on my neck. “You’re tense,” she says, and kisses my forehead as her fingers work on my muscles.
I close my eyes, not to relax, but because she’s beautiful, and it’s too painful to look.
When Tomas first got sick, he got what seemed like every opportunistic disease associated with AIDS: tiny zits that became huge rashes, major thrush, syphilis, something that looked like mold all over the bottom of his feet, constant bouts of pneumonia, and really bad periodontal infections. His breath was like sulfur. Some days, if there hadn’t been too much traffic in and out of his room, it hung in the air like a toxic cloud.
Now Tomas mostly just lies there, too weak to read, wheezing in this horribly slow, stingy way. We light sage in his room. His breath is too slight to smell anyway, but I suspect if I could smell it, it’d be muskier now. Maybe I’m just used to it, I don’t know.
“Where is Charles II when you need him?” Tomás whispers. He wears his glasses in bed. They make his head seem larger and more square, like the head of a famine victim. “I need to shave off my hair, to wear a huge, powdered periwig. I want to be buried in something with ruffles, laces, and ribbons.”
I don’t say anything. I remember him back in college, hanging around the dressing room at The Gold Star, telling the queens how to use their accessories—how to swing their shiny purses; when in a song to stop and touch their faux pearls; how to toss their scarves with authority. I never understood why Tomas stayed on the sidelines, never taking the stage himself. Now I just smile and pat the lump in the bed that corresponds to his hand.
“Look at nature: It’s always the males who are glorious, massive, and colorful,” he says, closing his eyes. His nostrils are crusty. “Boy lions have their manes. Boy chickens have combs and wattles and fluff. And what about that outrageous cock of the rock with his wild orange pompadour, huh?”
And I’m thinking, yeah, but it’s the girl lions who kill, and it’s the girl birds who lay the eggs. So why do I feel so useless?
What I told Sylvia was that I wanted to be ravished. After I explained everything—that I wanted the encounter to be anonymous, that it had to be in a public place, that I wanted to resist, and that I never wanted to see the other woman again—she told me I was confused.
“You want to be raped,” she said, disgusted. “You can’t want to be raped.”
“I don’t want to be raped,” I said. “I want to be taken.”
“Against your will?”
“Well, a little against my will,” I admitted.
“That’s like being a little pregnant,” she said, clearly frustrated.
“It’s a fantasy, Syl,” I said. “The same rules don’t apply.”
“I’m worried about you,” she said, then turned on her side with her back to me.
We stayed like that in the dark for a few minutes until, finally, I molded my body around hers. She was a little stiff at first, but eventually relaxed and pushed back against me so that the fabric of her slip rubbed lazily against my bare stomach. She groped behind her, meaning, I think, to stroke me with her free hand, but instead of feathers her nails felt like little claws this time. I wanted to get a glass of water and to pee, but I didn’t want to move either, afraid whatever I did would have meaning well beyond my actual gestures.
“I can’t rape you,” she said in a whisper that sounded both frightened and wistful.
I pulled her closer. “I don’t want you to rape me.”
“I can’t ravish you either,” she said. “I can’t do anything like that. It’s completely beyond me.”
I sighed. “Honey, relax, it’s a fantasy,” I said. “It’s not about you.” Then I felt her stiffen again, and her body peeled away from me in an instant, as if her slip were a layer of skin, blistering.
“Se te olvidal que me quieres a pesar de lo dices.”
When I get home, Tomás’s mother is visiting. Mostly, I like Virginia, twice married, twice widowed, and still looking. She’s washing a sink full of socks and singing along with Olga Guillot, who croons from the stereo speakers. When Virginia sees me, she holds up her wet and soapy hands as if she were a doctor emerging from surgery and beckons me for a kiss.
“How is he?” I ask, and she just shrugs. They have the same shrug, I think (even though Tomas doesn’t shrug much anymore): they lean their heads to the right, as if they’re trying to make their ears touch their shoulders.
“Pues llevamos en el alma cicatrices/imposibles de borrar,” Virginia sings to the socks, submerging her hands once more in the sink. “What can I tell you?” she says to me, then shrugs again.
The second to the last time I saw Tomas shrug like that was when he came back from a business trip to San Francisco about a year and a half ago. He’d had an adventure, he told me, a crazy weekend fling with a beautiful boy he’d met in the cookbook section of a bookstore. “I feasted for two days and nights, feasted as if in Valhalla,” he had said, grinning.
It wasn’t until later that he told me he’d had anal sex for the first time in five years, and that he knew exactly when the boy’s rubber had broken, but knew, too, that it was too late. He said he didn’t stop, but rather tightened his legs around the boy’s waist.
The last time I saw Tomás shrug like that, like his mother just did in our kitchen, was when he got diagnosed with HIV a few months later. “I’m not hanging around,” he said. “I’m not going to drag this out from here to eternity. I’m going to live my life, and then I’m going to drop dead.”
We didn’t cry—we barely even hugged. Instead, we put Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” on the stereo, cranked it up as loud as it would go, then danced and danced around our apartment like cranes in the wild, our arms out, knees up, eyes wide open.
“Se te olvidalque hasta puedo hacerte mal si me decido,” Virginia sings sadly, and points to her son’s bedroom door with her chin. Some months back, when his vision was still sharp, Tomas read that goldfinch were considered protection against the plague during the Dark Ages, and he put a little picture of one on his door. Most of his visitors misunderstood—and Tomas didn’t explain, or didn’t make sense when he explained—and people just thought he’d developed a thing for birds, so they brought over all sorts of drawings and photos. Soon his door became covered with images of toucans and blackburnian warblers and flamingos and, of course, Tomas’s favorite—the cock of the rock, a flaming orange South American bird with feathers swept as high as Conway Twitty’s hair.
“Pues tu amor lo tengo muy comprometido—” I drop my coat and head for Tomas’s room. “...Pero a fuerzalno será.”
“Howya doin’?” I ask Tomas, taking a seat on the chair next to his bed. I smell the sage burning on his dresser. His eyes are a little more yellowish than usual, as if there’s some sort of film over them.
“My body’s like Africa at the beginning of time,” he says in a barely audible whisper. “The cradleland, I’m housing a most impressive roster of protozoa fungi bacteria single-celled parasites, all kinds of free-living organisms, I’m the Nile, I’m Cleopatra herself.”
He talks in a rush, practically without punctuation. For an instant I’m afraid he’s going to choke.
“I feel so light today,” Tomás says. “My bones are empty.”
I want to tell him about aerodynamics, about the way a hollow skeleton helps birds fly, but at that moment Virginia steps into the room and asks if I’ll give her a ride to the train station. “It’s starting to snow,” she says, standing at the bedroom door, her hands still soapy and outstretched. I can hear the water still running in the kitchen sink.
Tomás closes his eyes, makes an attempt to move his hand from under the covers. “Don’t take too long,” he tells me. His eyebrow twitches. Virginia stands at the door for a moment, confused. Then she shrugs.
As I wait for Virginia to say good-bye to Tomás, I stand by the front door and check my key chain for the car key, the front door key, the apartment key. I count the change in my pocket, ascertain that I’ve got my cash card, my Visa, my driver’s license, then realize I’m also carrying a photograph of my first lover, a half-Arab, half-Welsh women’s studies instructor from my college days. I realize she has a remarkable resemblance to Sylvia.
I didn’t plan it. I dropped off Virginia at the train station, realized the traffic was only going to get worse because of the snow, and knew that I needed to piss before I drove home. I threw the car next to the curb right under the L tracks, noticing a bird’s nest stuffed into the joint where the girders met. As I rushed to the station—convinced my bladder might explode—I heard behind me the fluttering of birds. I turned to look, but by the time I pinpointed them, they were just black dots disappearing into the white cover of snow.
Inside the train station rest room, the walls melted into the floor, all small white tiles with occasional spots of baby blue tiles where damage had been repaired. It was cavernous, with cathedral-like ceilings and larger-than-life mirrors above the sinks. The fixtures were metal and glistening. Everything smelled of ammonia. When I entered, my running shoes made a kind of muffled sound.
