Benediction

by Arnold, Jim

  “Yes, I want entrance.” I picked up the money and held it out for High Desk to take. Arrogant little fucker, he made me wait. Finally, he took it without another word, gave me his best blank stare, and buzzed me inside.

  Den’s was a warren of dim, interconnected rooms, some with porn videos playing on screens that varied remarkably in color reproduction, others apparently empty and dark with monitors showing static (as if someone had forgotten to change the tape). There was an irritatingly bright snack room, where a piece of cheap paneling had gone missing from a section of the wall, revealing cracked plaster and water stains. Two half-full bowls of popcorn sat on a low table next to a vending machine badly in need of restocking. Nearby, a coffee urn burned whatever was left in it and dripped the watery brown liquid onto the pale green countertop with a plip, plip, plip, providing counterpoint to the pervasive bass.

  In one of the video rooms, two men sat silently, yet as far apart from each other as possible. One fellow appeared to be a rank-and-file middle-aged blue-collar worker, perhaps a postman. He looked up at me quickly, frowned, then turned his attention back to the blond, hairless, muscular boys on the screen.

  The other man was much younger and nicer looking, despite the terrified expression on his face and his chosen seat nearest the exit door. Brown eyes, brown curly hair, summer tan—yes, this was more like it. I immediately took him to be a straight college boy dunking a toe in the gay town lake.

  He got the lewdest grin I could conjure up, doing my best to channel the Alistair-Dakota energy from earlier.

  But what if he puts his hand down my pants and finds the Defendor?

  I got very bold anyway, stepped into his row and sat directly beside him. I could almost feel College Boy’s muscles tense up in horror at my intrusion, but I figured, you know, get used to it, handsome, cause a lot more of this is coming your way.

  He shifted, crossed his legs and pointed his feet away from me. As nonchalantly as possible—which wasn’t very—I let my hand drop onto his hairy thigh where his board shorts had ridden up.

  He turned to me suddenly. “What are you doing?” If it was intended as a whisper, it came out like a croak.

  “Thought you might like some company,” I said.

  He picked up my hand like it was a slimy dead fish and threw it back at me. “Thought wrong, arsehole.”

  College Boy got up immediately and bumped the doorframe on his way out, disturbing Mr. Postman up front, who turned around and scolded me with a loud “Shhhhhh!”

  I glared back, said nothing and checked my watch. There was still time left, so it was on to Plan B.

  Back in the dark corridors, I realized Den’s had not magically become the locus of Sydney gay social life. I didn’t even see College Boy roaming anymore. I was about to get back to the Mansfield and clean up from the beach when a sandy-haired figure about my general height and weight disappeared around a corner.

  I followed him. The hallway he’d turned into was empty, too. Doorways on both my right and left led into small, low-lit private play rooms, every one of them vacant—except for the last door on my right. Trusting fate, I pulled the Defendor out of my shorts and tucked it in my back pocket.

  The same sandy-haired man sat inside on a ripped, vinyl, padded ledge, grinning. With his arm outstretched, he motioned for me to enter.

  “Come on in, mate.”

  * * *

  You just knew this guy was a farmer who had talking pigs out in the barn. I hadn’t seen cut-off blue jeans in quite a while, which he’d topped with a scooped-neck tank top rife with what appeared to be coffee stains.

  He pumped my arm with a handshake, gracious enough but a little unusual given the circumstances. Back in the U.S., most men got right down to business and avoided any kind of intimate or even friendly preliminaries. “I’m Reggie, mate,” he said, much louder than necessary.

  “Uh, Bobby,” I replied.

  Reggie might have had a few years on me but had a really sexy body—lean, wiry, tan. His face was pleasant if not handsome, lined in the way you get from too much time spent in the sun, multiplied by years of smoking.

  “You from England?” he asked in all seriousness.

  “By way of San Francisco,” I said. “Really. I’m an American.”

  He was all over me then and I liked it. I hadn’t had “real” sex with Jake, Eric or anyone in six weeks and realized how much I’d missed the warmth of another man.

  We didn’t sit or lie on that questionable bench. Instead, arms wrapped around each other, we grappled and rubbed and literally bounced into and off the flimsy paneled walls of the small playroom.

  Tongues found each other and our shaking hands fumbled with snaps, zippers and buttons.

  Reggie was more excited about this than I was. The Viagra had worked, sort of, and I’d managed to come up with a passable stiffy, my first since the prostatectomy.

  Thank you, Reggie, I prayed silently, as he rubbed it with a shaking hand.

  And it leaked. But it wasn’t precum. I knew the liquid coming out of me was urine, drips of urine, tiny, excited, almost undetectable spurts of pee shooting into Reggie’s hand.

  “You’re fucking excited, mate,” he breathed into my ear. I squeezed his arm and quickly moved it around to my ass.

  Manipulating the center of attention to his cock, now covered in some real precum, I went to work on my knees. I felt only slightly guilty and minimally incredulous that as a somewhat incontinent prostate cancer patient I’d have the gall to go to a sex club at any time, but this excursion in broad daylight seemed particularly insane.

  I’d just find partners who liked water sports. That was reasonable. The important thing was that it was hard, legitimately if not amazingly hard, and I really hadn’t known whether Dr. Kim had been able to save those crucial Benediction erection nerves. He’d assured me he had, but something in his voice seemed to equivocate.

  The happy truth was here in this room with Reggie.

  Suddenly we’d flipped, he’d pulled me up and backed me into the wall. Now he was on his knees, and his mouth was…oh…no… He looked up at me with the oddest expression.

  “Tastes kind of funny, mate.”

  15

  It had been six weeks since I’d been to Safe Harbor. I flicked on the cubicle light and saw Kelly had stacked the mail. She hadn’t had the foresight to discriminate between the junk mail, of which there was tons, and things actually worth looking at, which would have been a much smaller but more interesting pile.

  Made one want to flee to somewhere like Peet’s, or somewhere like… the Slog, even.

  Maybe later.

  I’d managed to get through the entire Sydney experience without getting drunk. I did drink, yes, but not to messy excess. Some instincts at self-preservation had remained intact.

  There were more unpleasant tasks to face: Paul Sutcliffe and his gambit to take over my department as well as Jason’s possible mutiny from inside the ranks. That—and I’d discovered Glenda had left a succession of voice mails that were in no way related to Hell for the Holidays.

  In fact, the editing work being finished on the movie, I didn’t expect to hear from her ever again. She said she wanted to talk to me about “the future.” I thought she was fishing for work on Karen’s and my dream project, the as-yet-unknown feature.

  In her second call, she used the words legacy and heir. Someone had told her I’d made sperm donations, information I hadn’t even shared with Jake.

  * * *

  “It’s Glenda Bourne,” she said, picking up. I could hear a strained soundtrack rewind in the background.

  “I got your messages. I can’t imagine what you want.”

  There was dead air on the line. I sensed she was turning off her editing system, and the extra noise died away. “I think you know, Ben,” she said.

  “You want to wish me a get-well-soon?”

  “Karen told me your operation went perfect and so did the Sydney screening. So yes, congrats on tha
t, sport,” she said.

  “But,” I said.

  “Yes. But—there is more, you’re right. I decided a year or so ago that this was the time for me to finally be a mother. So I’m looking for a sperm donor.”

  “Who told—?”

  “I know you’ve got your sperm stored.”

  “God, Glenda. Can’t you get it somewhere else?”

  “I think we have compatible genes. Don’t you want to know about the eventual, the child—?”

  “I suppose I should be flattered, but it’s a little early. I have to say no. I mean, I just can’t imagine—”

  “Just think about it. I figured you’d say no the first time.”

  “And the second time, and the third time…” I said. She’d calculated the whole thing, and this really pissed me off.

  “I gotta go,” I said. “There’s six weeks of e-mails waiting.”

  * * *

  Jason and I had our customary Tuesday ten o’clock still on the schedule. I’d ask about Paul in oblique ways—it was important not to show fear; at least that was what the business books said. Jason, young though he was, could certainly sense blood in the water, and I didn’t want to appear weak or diminished in his eyes.

  “You’re back!”

  I nearly jumped out of my Aeron. Kelly had crept up silently.

  “I am.”

  “How are you?” She cocked her head and scrunched up her nose, in the cute and somewhat confused way I supposed all straight girls do when their boss is a gay man practically old enough to be their father.

  “So glad you’re back.” She rolled her eyes now, her blond head shaking slightly. “Paul’s been up to his usual tricks, and Jason’s been kind of bossy.”

  “Maybe this afternoon you can tell me all about it?” Kelly could turn out to be an untapped source of insider information I’d ignore at my own peril.

  * * *

  There were the usual, pleasant “glad to see you’s” and the “we were so worried’s!” a person gets at a company when he or she has been gone for a while and nobody’s really sure why—though I thought Tony had made that clear. They seemed to know it was a medical reason: About half assumed I had AIDS, was a lost case and would be retiring on disability shortly. Many of the rest, I found out, had heard I’d had a nervous breakdown on a BART train near the Oakland Airport and had been sent to a loony bin in a derelict walnut grove outside of Sacramento.

  I composed a companywide e-mail, excoriated the rumormongers and appealed for a modicum of sympathy. Just as Jason appeared in front of me with his clipboard, I came to my senses and deleted it.

  “Ben—you know, you look OK,” he said. I knew he was sincere—or as sincere as he got. The bits about him being cozy with Paul would have traveled well and frequently, and Jason was clever enough to know he had to play this very carefully with me.

  “And—you know, I think I am.” It was a relief to see a friend. As I looked into his face, that young, sleep-deprived-yet-unlined face, I really hoped he wasn’t in some weird cahoots with Sutcliffe.

  I considered spilling the beans about everything that had happened in New York.

  If I did that, within the hour, everyone at Safe Harbor would know we took ecstasy and Paul kissed me in public, on the mouth, tongue and spit, and, more important, they’d know we’d been playing hooky from ASMA on the company dime.

  Jason was cool but not that cool.

  “So—how’d it go?” I clasped my hands and rested them on the desk.

  “I never knew you got so many phone calls, so many useless phone calls from people trying to sell us stuff we don’t need—”

  “Don’t ever answer the phone. You just return voice mails to those you have to.”

  He looked slightly pissed, as if I’d been delinquent to not mention this before my sick leave.

  “Other than that, it was just really busy,” he said. “I have a bunch of folders if you want to go through them, the upcoming trade shows, the press announcements, the—”

  “We can do that later.” I leaned in. “How did your meetings go with Tony?”

  Jason’s face registered no discernable shift.

  “He was straight up; that kind of surprised me,” he said.

  “Straight up?”

  “Yeah. Friendly, helpful, his door always open.” He leaned back against the cubicle wall, away from me. “Didn’t think he’d be that way.”

  “That’s great—for you both.”

  His eyes left my face and found the clock on the wall. I’d lost him. My prostatectomy scar itched, and I wanted to scratch it open and bleed red all over this little gray world.

  “Ben, if there’s nothing else, I’ve got a million things going on today—”

  “What about those meetings you called me about in Sydney?”

  Poor Jason. He looked a little pale, a little sick, as he aimlessly rubbed the table top with a sweaty hand.

  “What about those flowcharts on easels, big diagrams and new reporting relationships in bright colors for Tony’s colorblind eyes?”

  His face turned red. Whatever else I could say about Jason, he wasn’t very good at lying.

  “Geez, Ben.” He stared at me blankly. “I don’t…Well. Some of what he says makes sense, you know.”

  “Makes sense? Jason!”

  Now we both knew where he stood. I was so disappointed—I even grimaced as one might do before one pukes, followed by an incredibly long and vomitless few seconds of silence.

  “You should probably just talk to Paul about it,” he said, finally. “Can I go now?”

  * * *

  The Harrington Galleria on Utah Street was an old multistory warehouse affair that had been heavily fortified and trussed up following the big ’89 quake. It now housed furniture, fabric, and interior design offices, all surrounding a massive open atrium-type center, into which an overpriced yet very popular restaurant, Galleria Café, had been thrust.

  Safe Harbor employees weren’t in the rarified league of those who’d already cashed out rich stock options from the dot-coms—but we did have credit cards. And we liked to pretend.

  Karen was waiting when I walked in. My black umbrella got stuck in the door, making for a rather clumsy entrance.

  “Over here!” Karen said, waving at me.

  The waiter dropped off a steaming basket of sourdough chunks. Karen grabbed it.

  “I told you I had good news,” she said, deciding which bread chunk to pick.

  “I could use some after this morning. I feel like I got hit by a train.”

  “What?” Her attention had been diverted to the restaurant’s specials list, hand lettered on parchment in biodegradable ink.

  “Strange thing happened—while sitting in that Jacuzzi in Palm Springs or chasing sexy lifesaver sightings in Oz, I forgot all about office politics. They got nastier,” I said, taking the bread basket from her.

  She smiled back. “We got into Turin, we got into New York and… we’re in L.A., too, Ben. That’s what I wanted to tell you.”

  “Really?”

  “We did good! And for sure, I’m going to L.A. with you, probably not New York and certainly not To-ri-no—”

  “Have you decided?” Our red-goateed waiter interrupted.

  “Ravioli sounds good, the one with the vodka tomato sauce?” Karen said. “Ben?”

  “Salmon, salmon.” I didn’t remember whether they had any or not, but it probably was a safe choice. Apparently, it was the magic word because after I uttered it he blinked, turned around and left.

  “You’re so healthy. I should follow that lead.” Karen sunk into another piece of bread.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You look fantastic. Is it the hair? I know there’s something new—”

  “My teeth,” she said. She bared them for me in a wide Cheshire grin.

  “Preternaturally white,” I said. “You had them bleached?”

  “Mmmm,” she nodded. Her face turned serious. “The first step, since I’m…single…aga
in.”

  “What?”

  “Ben, you heard me. You’re the smartest person I know; don’t play dumbshit.”

  She wiped a couple of tears away with the linen napkin. I wondered whether all the librarians at San Francisco Public Library wore mascara or if it was just Karen, who, of course, was really a film producer anyway.

  “Dennis is…what? Is he…gone? Is he crazy?”

  God. I knew that men like Dennis Carstens, with their dwindling but still substantial dot-com fortunes, were now prime and desperate targets for gold diggers of any persuasion. You could always throw a bag over some rich guy’s head, though Dennis wasn’t even remotely ugly. Karen had won the lottery on this one.

  “My hunch was right. He came to me the day you left for Australia. A woman at his work. Shannon.”

  The waiter returned to top off Karen’s iced tea. He lingered, perhaps sensing dirt.

  “We’re good,” I said, and he nodded and left. “What kind of parent names their kid Shannon?”

  “Perhaps she was conceived at a beer bust on St. Patrick’s Day,” Karen said, blowing her nose.

  “I’m really sorry; I always thought you guys had a great…” I bit my lip.

  “More than anyone, you should realize appearances can be deceiving.”

  “So, what—”

  “Divorce, probably.” Karen cut me off, suddenly back to her old bossy, businesslike self. “And I’ll get some big money. Enough for our next film—feature money, Ben.”

  A different waitperson, a short young woman dressed up like a cook—so maybe she was one—brought out the fish for me and the pinkish ravioli for Karen.

  The salmon melted under light pressure from my fork.

  “I’m going to need a place to stay for a while,” Karen said as she nibbled around the edges of an enormous scalloped slab of pocket pasta. “If you hear of anything, could you let me know?”

  * * *

  The confrontation with Paul didn’t happen because by the time I’d figured out what to say in the order I wanted to say it in, he’d already gone home to Santa Clara.

  Karen and I took longer at lunch than we should have, of course, what with her news of divorce. Interesting how we conspired so quickly to segue from the “comforting the wronged wife” conversation to the “let’s plan how to spend Dennis’s money” conversation.