The Coming Storm

by Paul Russell

  Upstairs, in their bedroom, she closed the window she’d opened earlier to the afternoon’s warm sun. Would Louis remember to shut the windows downstairs? The chill never bothered him as it did her. She thought to call down, but decided against it. There was always that moment in their evenings when, even though they occupied the same bed, they went their separate ways.

  Once, she remembered as she undid the brooch at her collar, a call had come through at four in the morning, Libby’s voice childlike and sounding very far away, as if from some icy planet circling a fierce dwarf of a star: “Claire, honey, I’ve decided I’m going to kill myself.”

  She opened the little mahogany box where she kept the few pieces of jewelry she allowed herself—mostly old, mostly her mother’s—and laid the brooch thoughtfully to rest. She slipped off her blouse, inspected it for blemishes, and, finding none, hung it in the closet. She unfastened her bra.

  Libby, when she had found her in that immense folly of a house her husband had built her, was dancing alone and naked in an unused upstairs room. Claire had always feared unfurnished rooms, deserted streets, the long summers after school let out; bad things, she knew, happened in empty places. A marvelous night for a moondance, Libby sang along with the tape player balanced on a windowsill. She shook her bare, wide-nippled breast. The sunken scar of her shorn other, nearly two years gone, shone whitish. Her body had grown thick and fleshy, as if her brush with death had made her hungry for life.

  On the floor before her, on a single sheet of white typing paper, fifteen or twenty blue pills had been neatly laid out. A tall glass of water caught the light.

  Louis had waited downstairs. He wouldn’t come up. Your friend reminds me of Medusa, he’d once teased her on a night, years ago, when they had lain together after a rare, disarranging bit of love. Now she could sense him moving about anxiously downstairs. She knew she depended on him absolutely, clung to the slender lifeline his pacing spooled out for her as she lowered herself into the dark well, hand outstretched, to pull to safety her drowning comrade.

  She had always imagined, as she stepped into her nightgown, that they would somehow drown together, she and Libby. Instead they had grown old. Their nights grew longer. She imagined tendrils growing from her fingertips, her toes. To become something entirely other than what one was. By no means was Daphne Strauss’s best opera, but even the least of his scores was a world that could be lived in. Perhaps that was where she took her comfort—in how he filled out the emptiness, peopled it so lushly with notes.

  Downstairs Louis was farting. He did that, loudly, when he thought no one could hear. It spoke volumes about the life he led, the ways he hemmed himself in. Tonight he’d reminisced about Jack Emmerich. It was as if one small bit of flotsam had floated up from a submerged wreck. What was Louis like in the privacy of his soul, where no one could hear or see? She wasn’t sure she’d recognize him, if ever she were to glimpse that other self who was not, and had never been, her husband. And which was more real, that reserved, courtly, and difficult man she had lived with for forty years, or the unrevealed, sequestered Louis, his farts and shouts never to be visited by anyone? For she was certain that that other life existed; its details might remain hidden, but not the fact of its secret flourishing.

  She went to the bureau and touched, as she did every night before going to bed, the framed photos of Susan, of Caroline. She had said to them, You must exist. She had sent them recklessly out into the world, hapless emissaries of her sometime couplings with this man. What truths of their father did they carry? Or, for that matter, of their mother as well? For she had her own share of secret flourishings no one need know about.

  Moonlight streamed in the open window she’d shut against the chill. September was marching to an end. Soon she’d switch to flannel. She’d be putting extra blankets on the bed. From the woods behind the house an owl hooted: somewhere on the Forge School’s campus that solitary and nocturnal creature managed to survive. Downstairs, Louis farted again.

  She hadn’t forgotten the gray cat. Had only pushed it to the back of her mind, where it lurked as hopelessly as it had in its cage at the pound. How long, she wondered, would they keep it there before putting it down? Putting it to sleep, as the euphemism went. If she went back tomorrow…but she knew, stretching out her limbs under the quilt, the cool smooth sheets, she never would. She supposed they did it by lethal injection, though she really didn’t know. Somewhere she had read that impounded animals went on to medical experiments. They had their spines broken, or were infected with lethal agents. Science probed their mysteries in the hopes of bettering the world—or at least of prolonging human life, which was supposed to amount to the same thing.

  She had helped Tracy Parker acquire a dog. She had looked a doomed cat in the eye and looked away. She could not bear to contemplate the visit they’d have to make to the vet one day soon with Lux. All this management of life and death. And there was Libby to think about too.

  Sleep had always, blessedly, come to her instantly. Sleep was welcoming arms; sleep was the dark cave. Desire for oblivion. She did not fear to name it—and named, it didn’t particularly threaten her. It was simply what she lived with, as she lived with any number of things. That daily reprieve from life that guaranteed her life. Everyone made a pact with something or someone. No one escaped. Claire had never considered herself an exception to anything.

  III

  They sat in an uncrowded First Avenue bar, their fourth or fifth in a chilly October evening of exuberant wandering, and watched, during the occasional lapse in their conversation, two short-haired young men play a game of pool. Dressed identically—jeans, black boots, gold rings in both ears—the two players could have been brothers, even twins, though the way they touched each other suggested that they were lovers.

  For some moments Tracy gazed their way in wistful contemplation. To be back in New York was to feel haunted. Though he had been away only two months, the city he had loved and perhaps inexplicably fled and now returned to for a weekend visit seemed strangely unreal compared to the brave new life he had elected for himself in that town of quiet desperation some miles up the Hudson. Turning his attention back to his friend, he said, “Basically I’m staying one step ahead. I teach all day, then rush home and try to figure out what to do tomorrow. It’s exciting, I guess, but exhausting.”

  Devin Shimabukuro toyed with the cigarette he’d extracted from the Marlboro pack that lay between them on the table. “You can’t fake it?” he asked.

  “They’re smarter than you think,” Tracy said. “They give me a run for my money. But they’re fun that way.”

  “Want one?” Devin offered the cigarette.

  “Why not? I’ve been living like a saint. It’s driving me off the deep end.”

  “I’m sure you love it,” Devin said. “You always had saintly tendencies.”

  “Get out.” Tracy slapped playfully at him from across the table, into which countless patrons had carved their names, frustrations, longings.

  “Which I personally have tried to encourage,” Devin went on. Flicking his lighter, he held it out. Tracy leaned over to touch the flame with the tip of his cigarette. Devin drew another one out of the packet for himself.

  Tracy had always been crazy about the way Devin handled his cigarettes. If he could manage cigarettes half that well, he’d smoke all the time too.

  Tilting back his head, Devin blew a plume of smoke from his thin lips.

  “You’re watching me,” he said.

  “I know. I can’t help it.”

  Devin half shut his eyelids and smiled at him langorously. His father was courtly Japanese, his mother a fierce Jew from Chicago. The mix had spawned an extraordinary beauty. At twenty-five he was boyish and aloof. An edge of wear was just beginning to show itself in the fineness of his features. He took up his empty glass and forlornly turned it upside down. One or two drops fell into the ashtray. He made his mouth into a theatrical pout. “Another beer?” he wondered.


  “You do encourage me, don’t you? My head’s practically spinning. I’m out of the habit. I’m going to have a splitting hangover tomorrow.”

  “That’s what Bloody Marys are for.”

  “You,” Tracy chastised him fondly.

  One of the pool players had moved near them to prepare a shot. He checked over his shoulder to make sure his cue would clear them. Tracy gave himself over to a momentary study of the young man’s denim-sheathed buttocks. Did his companion fuck him? He found himself picturing it: the young man bent over the pool table, cheeks spread, pink puckered hole ready to receive his partner, the one pumping away inside the other with brilliant abandon. Desire flickered in him, thirsty and dry. The player tensed and shot, his buttocks clenching in sympathetic spasm. The ball ricocheted against others with a succession of sharp, satisfying clicks.

  “I am such a bad shot,” he complained with a sigh. Resting his hand on his partner’s shoulder, he leaned a close-cropped head into the other’s neck, and Tracy felt in himself such an uncomplicated outflowing of goodwill toward these lovers or brothers or both that his sudden, inexplicable proximity to tears startled him.

  When he looked back at Devin, his friend was watching him curiously. Tracy rummaged in his memory to recognize that stare.

  “What?” he said quizzically.

  Devin continued to stare at him. His voice was casual and matter-of-fact. He might have been saying anything in that tone of voice, but the dreamy look that stole over his features betrayed him. What he was saying was, “Let’s go home and have sex.”

  “I’m enjoying being out like this,” Tracy told him. “Let’s have another beer. Then we can go home.”

  Devin’s smile showed his acceptance of that. He stretched his legs out under the table and rested them on the seat of Tracy’s booth. He wore pointed Italian shoes so fashionable they were practically ugly.

  Tracy didn’t resist the invitation. Reaching out his hand, he stroked Devin’s thin ankles through his socks. Ankles could excite him. He shook from himself a sudden torpor of desire.

  “I have to go piss,” he said. “You order.”

  In the bathroom, the urinal was occupied, and the stall also. The man at the urinal seemed not to have relieved himself in a week, his stream was so copious and unending. A photo collage of men so young they were scarcely out of adolescence adorned the walls. Naked and smiling as broadly as toothpaste advertisements, they all had erections some bit of trick photography had doubled or tripled in size. The effect, initially more comic than arousing, was finally, Tracy decided, more depressing than anything else. With some relief he turned his attention to the condom dispenser whose bulk on the wall hid at least some of that relentless display. He fished in his pockets for change. “That’s the idea,” said the man of the endless bladder as he zipped and moved over to the washbasin. “Have fun. Play safe. Getting lucky tonight?”

  Tracy pocketed the condom and positioned himself in front of the urinal. “I’m visiting an old friend,” he said as he extricated his penis from his jeans.

  The man considered him frankly. “You wouldn’t want to liven things up, would you?”

  Once upon a time the man had obviously been quite handsome. Now, stranded in his middle forties, some bright urgency in his gaze betrayed the desperation with which he sought to hold back the ticking clock.

  Tracy was almost apologetic. People fell for him. His smile won them over, his brown eyes. He’d never gotten by on that, but it was something he carried with him. And he was still young. He had no doubt how much that counted for. “I haven’t seen this friend in a while,” he explained. But in spite of himself he felt the unsought stirrings of an erection; his piss came in fitful spurts.

  “Old times’ night,” the man said. “I understand.”

  He took a slip of paper from his wallet and wrote out a phone number. “You never know,” he murmured, and boldly slid the folded paper into Tracy’s shirt pocket. “You have, by the way, a very beautiful cock there,” he mentioned as he walked away.

  From the stall, still occupied as it turned out, came a snort of laughter.

  Disconcerted, Tracy zipped up and returned to the booth without washing his hands. Devin had ordered not only beer but shots of whiskey as well. “I’m still celebrating your return to the cité radieuse,” he explained. He held Tracy’s hand in his and stroked it fondly. “You’ve been away from us down here far too long, lamb chop.”

  “Who’d have thought I’d end up in exile?” Tracy told him. “I guess it’s my own damn fault.”

  “Upstate,” Devin sighed. “I hear there’re a lot of prisons upstate.”

  “Prisons and prep schools.”

  “Youth must be educated,” Devin said. “One way or another. No one said it would be easy, or that the cost would not be great. Some might even consider you a hero, slaving away to make the future safe for”—he paused and threw up his hands—“well, for whomever.”

  “Safe for the rich,” Tracy told him disgustedly. “I’m working my butt off so some superprivileged spoiled brats can get into college and not fuck up their lives too much. The headmaster was quite frank about that when I first took the job. We’re making sure the little darlings don’t embarrass themselves too much when they step into Daddy’s business, which is probably some corporation that ruins third world countries with the stroke of a pen. Only he didn’t quite put it that way.”

  He was surprised to hear himself sounding so sour. He’d perhaps been talking too much to Reid Fallone, whose mordant epithets for his students were legion and, in their way, contagious.

  “Face it,” Devin told him, “everything’s a compromise. We all do it. You think the fashion industry’s a vision of socialist utopia? Rich people all over again. They control the world and there’s nothing you or I can do about it.”

  “Let’s don’t talk politics,” Tracy said. He took up the shot glass and downed his whiskey in a stinging swallow. “I’ll get too depressed. And actually, some of the kids at the Forge aren’t too bad.”

  “Here’s to ignoring reality.” Devin raised his own glass. “Or at least softening the edges. And to the boys of the Forge, as you call it—at least the ones who aren’t too bad. So tell me, any cuties in your classes? Hot little numbers itching for the teacher to bring them out?”

  “Please.” Tracy prodded Devin’s ankle. “Don’t be prurient.”

  “I’m always prurient,” Devin told him. “But I can afford to be. I don’t teach them. To me they’re just tight little theoretical bodies to be drooled over from afar.”

  “Yeah, tell me about it,” Tracy said. “They’re just kids.”

  “Be honest,” Devin cajoled him. “Don’t you find there’s something really attractive and, well, moving about a fifteen-year-old boy?”

  “Let’s not continue this little discussion,” Tracy said.

  “But I think I’m on to something.”

  “You wish.”

  “I don’t know,” Devin teased. “I can imagine things getting to be very difficult.”

  “I think,” Tracy told him, “you let your fantasies get a little out of hand. Teaching isn’t what you think it is. Anyway, let’s get off this subject.” He reached in his pocket and took out the condom. “See what I got?”

  “Pour moi?”

  He laid it on the table between them.

  “Pour whomever.”

  “Only one?”

  “You’re incorrigible,” Tracy told him. He took up the foil pack and replaced it in his shirt pocket. “It’s the thought that counts. I’m depending on you to be well stocked. Now let’s go home.”

  Out in the streets, a fine chill rain had begun to fall. “I’m so happy to be here,” he had to exclaim. He took Devin’s arm as they walked west toward the apartment. “It’s just so stultifying up there. Everybody’s so straight; they all have wives and kids. Can I tell you? I actually got so desperate I went to a meeting of the county’s gay and lesbian group. Sort of a support
group with volleyball games and square dancing on the side. It was in the basement of a church. So depressing. There wasn’t anybody in the room I’d touch with a ten-foot pole. They all looked so lumpy and depressed, and such bad haircuts. It’s from living upstate. It does something to you.”

  “Get out while there’s still time, girl,” Devin said. “I didn’t want to mention your haircut. I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.”

  Devin’s apartment was above an Afghan restaurant. Pungent aromas of cumin and lamb and eggplant pervaded his rooms. His roommate, Frank, was out for the evening, if not the entire night.

  “My selfish roommate,” Devin said. “You’ll get a kick out of this. The other night I’m lying in bed jerking off before I go to sleep, and I can hear that Frank’s jerking off too. So I say, ‘Hey Frank, why don’t you just come in here and fuck me while you’re at it?’ And you know what he says? ‘I need to spend some quality time alone.’ And it’s not like he was making a joke.”

  “Frank’s sweet,” Tracy thought he should say, though he agreed: Frank tended to be depressingly earnest. He wondered if he too could seem like that at times.

  “He is sweet,” Devin affirmed. “And look: he left us flowers. He’s such a homosexual.”

  Frank had arranged a gather of lemony gladiolas in a vase on the coffee table.

  “Well,” Tracy had to observe, “I feel very welcomed.”

  “Though the place is just a mess,” Devin apologized. In a manic burst of energy he moved about the room straightening the pillows on the sofa, the magazines on the coffee table. He took off his thin black tie and unbuttoned the collar of his white shirt. “What a day it was at the office,” he vamped. “That is, before I met you.”