by Paul Russell
“No,” Eric told him after a moment, taking him by the wrist and pushing his hand away.
“I thought you liked me,” Tracy said.
“Stupid,” Eric told him. “Of course I like you. I’m fucking crazy about you.”
It seemed impossible that they could be here like this. Tracy couldn’t contain himself.
“Then what’s the problem?”
“So what’s the problem?” Eric laughed bitterly. “You’re priceless. The problem is, either way, I’m going to regret this, whatever I do.”
“Then there’s no problem,” Tracy said quickly, afraid to give either of them time to think. He knew all about time. “Better to go ahead and make it with me than not make it with me.”
“We both know that’s not true,” Eric said simply. He sat up abruptly, and clasped his arms around his bare knees. Tracy watched him in profile: that ponytail of cruelly pulled-back hair he’d never seen unloosed, blond sideburn fading out into stubble, the jaw his fingers, unbelievably, had grazed. The space around him, the silence, was inviolable. Tracy had never been so conscious of the sky above the earth, the dangerous clouds that gathered there, the way humans lived beneath such grandeur and threat every moment of their lives. Eric, too, seemed intent on figuring up some incalculable sum.
“What the fuck,” he said at last. “Come on, let’s get out of here. And just remember”—he paused in slipping his T-shirt over his head—“you’re the one who started it.”
Tracy’s erection made it painful for him to stand up. When he tugged at his crotch to rearrange himself, he saw Eric’s gaze flicker there for a moment, darken, and then dart away.
Wordlessly, they walked, past the theater to the edge of campus, then along a busy street lined with student bars and bookshops. They were radiant criminals, unafraid, untouchable, bringing off the greatest caper the world had known. And the world, oblivious, let them pass right by.
Cutting through an empty lot, they entered the woods. It was a place Tracy would never have thought of going. A path took them alongside an overgrown field whose edges were thick with blackberry brambles. On the far side an abandoned house hid among young trees that had crowded up around it. The porch sagged, the windows were broken out, but despite the relentless procession of summer storms the roof still held. It solved a mystery.
“Totally illegal,” Eric said, “but what can you do? The rent’s unbeatable.” His mood had lightened; he reverted to his familiar, carefree self—the self who’d gotten drunk on vodka at a party in high school and let his best friend Charlie pierce his ear with a hot needle.
“You’re crazy,” Tracy told him. “Wasn’t there anyplace else you could stay?”
“Really, it was lots of fun,” Eric confessed. “At night there was an owl I could hear. Heather absolutely freaked when I told her about this place.”
But Tracy wasn’t freaked. He saw the difference between himself and the hated Heather quite clearly. To live like this seemed, at the moment, nothing less than heroic. To roam the world with only a knapsack of belongings; to sleep in fields, in the woods—even in abandoned houses. He himself had longed for great adventures. To visit India, Nepal, Tibet. To meet the friend who’d go anywhere with him, do anything.
“I want to kiss you,” he told his new friend of the wide world. Already he could sense the heady air of the Himalayas. He moved toward Eric; their embrace was clumsy. It tumbled them down in slow motion onto the floor. Tracy lay on top and explored Eric’s mouth with his tongue.
“You’re certainly the precocious one,” Eric laughed and pushed at him playfully. But he gasped as Tracy felt his way inside his gym shorts. “Hey,” he warned. His cock was long and thick and lazy. Freed from his shorts, it lay flopped over his thigh like a big snake sunning itself on a rock. Tracy raised it up and kissed its bulbous head. He breathed its sweet reek. His lips rested against hard beautiful flesh.
Then he felt Eric take both sides of his head and firmly lift him up. “I can’t do this, Tracy” he said. “You’re a kid. I can’t change that.”
“I know what I’m doing. I’m not a virgin,” Tracy lied.
“No,” Eric said. “I’m not doing this.”
It seemed too wildly unfair only to get this far. “Please,” he heard himself say. He hated the unmistakable pitch of desperation in his voice. And he was amazed to see there were tears in Eric’s eyes. The young man curled his mouth. His brow furrowed up. Unable to speak, he simply shook his head. He took Tracy in his arms and held him, rocked him back and forth for the longest time in silence, tears streaming down his face, Tracy dry-eyed but pressing his cheek to Eric’s cheek in his hopeless attempt to make those tears his own.
It was seven years before Tracy saw him again. On a sunny day in June thousands marched down Fifth Avenue beneath banners and placards. Tracy stood on the sidelines and watched. And there was Eric, whose last name he had either forgotten or never known. He beat a hand drum and shouted slogans of desperation and defiance. He’d lost his looks; he was gaunt and bright-eyed, terrible signs Tracy had grown, over the years, to recognize. His ponytail had vanished, all that gorgeous silky hair Tracy had never seen loose now sheared so short he looked practically bald. Tracy was sure it was him: something in the limber way he moved, the loose way he threw his shoulders back. His lips had kissed those lips—even, for a moment, that big lazy cock that had never gotten entirely hard for him. The sun shone fiercely. Black and white balloons filled the sky. The sidewalks were mobbed with cheering onlookers. Eric banged relentlessly on his drum for the whole world to hear.
Tracy stood on the sidewalk in front of the address he’d been given and tried to find a front door, or a least a buzzer. To his surprise, only the slightest of headaches had chosen to settle behind his eyeballs, in the stiff back of his neck. His anus felt raw from last night’s adventures.
There was no door, no buzzer. To the side of the little building a locked iron gate led into an alley, and perhaps that was the way in.
“Arthur!” he called out in frustration, and at an open second-floor window Arthur appeared, smiling impishly, his head wrapped in a maroon bath towel.
“Oh young man,” he called down, falsetto. “Yoo hoo!”
“I bet you spend hours leaning out that window,” Tracy told him.
“My elbows’ve worn a bare spot on the sill. See, there’s this old Italian woman lurking in my ancestry. Now don’t run off. It’ll take me a minute to come down and let you in, honeypot.”
Someone had hung a bird feeder from one of the spindly street trees, and little gray birds hopped nervously from branch to branch. The overnight rain had caused most of the leaves to drop all at once; they formed a bright yellow skirt on the sidewalk. He was sure he didn’t feel the least bit nervous. You’re not obligated to go, Devin had counseled him.
Appearing behind the gate, Arthur fiddled noisily with the lock. “Maybe it makes some people feel secure,” he said, “but me, I feel like I’m in prison.”
“At least the Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t pester you,” Tracy told him.
“No,” Arthur said as the gate swung open heavily. “The Jehovah’s Witnesses definitely do not pester me.”
“Well, they actually came to my door,” Tracy said. “They brought children and pamphlets.”
“To sell? To give away? What did you do?”
“I was rather proud of myself. They asked me, Do you read the Bible? And I said yes, as a matter of fact I do, and I’m appalled by what I find there. How anybody could worship such a cruel and bloodthirsty God is beyond me. Well, they just turned and ran.” Wishing he could have drawn the anecdote out a bit more, he concluded, “I don’t think they’ll be back anytime soon.”
Arthur watched him curiously. “Just hope lightning doesn’t burn your house down,” he said with a seriousness that caught Tracy off guard. He took Tracy in his arms and planted a big wet kiss on his lips. Tracy let himself be gripped tightly for a long moment; then, as Arthur turned to lead hi
m into the building, he surreptitiously wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
With a flourish, Arthur threw open the door onto a very small, wood-paneled room. “It’s, well, charming,” Tracy judged.
“Cozy, I like to think of it as. But my own. Domestic bliss at last. I have no furniture—but then, I have no room for furniture. So it’s fine. At least I don’t have to put up with roommates. And there’re only five steps to negotiate. For that time when stairs start to be a problem.”
There was nothing in the tiny room to engage his attention conveniently—no books, no CDs, no personal artifacts at all—so he sat down on the step that led up to Arthur’s alcove bed. Regal in his maroon turban of a bath towel, Arthur took the room’s single wooden chair and seated himself grandly: hands on his hips, legs crossed at the knees. He’d always been such a queen. For an awkward silence they both studied the extremely worn Turkish carpet on the floor. “You like?” Arthur said at last. “I’ll put it in my will. Rescued from a garbage can. You could say I felt an affinity for it.”
There’d been Arthur’s phone call a year ago, after several months of lapsed contact between them. In answer to Tracy’s somewhat surprised “So how’ve you been?” he’d said mildly, almost apologetically, “I’m afraid I’ve been having a little health problem,” a bad cold he hadn’t taken care of until one afternoon he collapsed in the editorial offices of the women’s magazine he worked for and had to be spirited to the emergency room. Diagnosing pneumonia, his doctor had remarked tersely, “I suppose you realize what this means.”
“Whatever you are,” Tracy said, unwilling to take his eyes from the relative safety of the carpet, “I wouldn’t call it moth-eaten.”
“Always the diplomat,” Arthur told him, reaching out across the narrow space of the room to pat him on the knee.
He’d been unsafe with Arthur. In a moment of unaccountable madness, he’d let Arthur fuck him without a condom. They couldn’t find any in the apartment, it was late, it was cold out, they were both a little drunk, a little stoned, they were both feeling carried away. “Go ahead,” he’d said, “put it in me,” and then felt, after a few deep thrusts, Arthur’s semen spurt inside him. Afterwards they hadn’t talked about it; they’d pretended not to notice it had happened.
He’d always tried to be careful. He could count on the fingers of one hand the times he’d swallowed another man’s come. Only twice in his life had he let himself get fucked without a condom, and that other time had been years ago. The thing to do, of course, was to get tested. But it wasn’t that he wouldn’t do it; he couldn’t. Knowing for certain, losing for good the farfetched possibility that there was nothing to worry about, that it was all in his head, the psychic terror and lifeline of that game he played nightly with his own darker thoughts—all that paralyzed him. And look at it this way, he argued to himself: if your dad, who never smoked or drank, died of liver cancer at forty-nine, then you, who’ve been fucked in the ass by a cock loaded with deadly virus, could very well live to be a hundred.
He didn’t believe that for an instant.
“Let me get dressed,” Arthur said, “and we’ll go out. One does tend to exhaust, rather too quickly, the meager charms of my new abode. Are you hungry? There’s a lovely little restaurant around the corner, which I’ve managed to make my home away from home.”
He stood and slipped his bathrobe from his shoulders. He’d always been skin and bones, but now the skin stretched over those bones was translucent as the parchment on which monks had copied out their hymns to the God Tracy professed to deny. Arthur was wasting away. His ribs really were a cage. Only his cock, that formidable organ, remained undaunted. Horsedick, Tracy had used to tease him. All that was four years ago—in between Tracy had lived a year in Japan, gone trekking in Nepal, read nearly half of Proust and built houses in the Hamptons. The virus didn’t care about those things. If it was going to hunt him down, it wouldn’t matter how far he ran or how many bargains he made.
For an instant he thought about just giving up; why not surprise them both and go down on that cock with all the abandon he used to muster when they were going out?
Who would that joke be on? he wondered as Arthur, oblivious to all that desperate fantasy, selected from his closet a red-and-black flannel shirt. He pulled on khakis four sizes too big and cinched them together with a broad belt. Unwrapping the towel from around his head, he shook out the longish hair he tinted with a henna rinse.
From the very first it had been madness. Swept off his feet: that was the only way to describe that feeling of being caught up by the wonderful whirlwind this talkative rail of a boy from south Texas, met at a dinner party through mutual friends, turned out to be. At twenty-two, Tracy had never met anybody quite like him. Seven years older and vastly more experienced in the ways of the world, Arthur was game for practically anything, as Tracy found out later that night. He’d heard of a wild time, but he’d never found himself thrown in with such primitive unfettered energy as Arthur brought to bed with him. Naturally cautious to a fault, Tracy had found something inside him whispering yes, and despite his better judgment plunged in.
It turned out to be way over his head. He was disconcerted to discover exactly how much sex Arthur had had in his short life: on the docks and in back rooms and with strangers he’d brought home from the street, anonymous and dangerous and obliterating sex. He loved getting slapped around, or pissed on; he loved, as Tracy would squeamishly learn, taking a fist up his ass. Accosted by two men in a doorway on his way to meet Tracy one evening after work, he’d followed them upstairs and smoked crack, reporting afterward, cheerfully, “My hair felt like it was on fire.” His one regret: those two shady characters hadn’t fucked him. He’d thought that was on the agenda, and sex on crack, by all accounts, was supposed to give you a truly life-expanding perspective on the world.
Tracy, who’d waited for an hour at the café before finally giving up and going home, listened with something very like terror to this man he’d made the mistake of confessing his eternal love for only two weeks before. Arthur, who was all for love, albeit of a more temporal kind, had confessed back that he himself, unfortunately, wasn’t in love at the moment, wasn’t sure he wanted to be in love right now, didn’t think, in fact, he quite had the time for it. Which wasn’t to say there wasn’t lots of truly fabulous stuff that could happen between the two of them. Tracy hid his hurt and soldiered on, but in only a few more weeks he was ready to understand quite clearly the ways in which he couldn’t, whether through cowardice or just plain prudence, rise to Arthur’s challenge. At the same time he began to glimpse in this love of his life—beyond the charm, the sweetness, the wit—a certain cold desperation lurking. He’d understood that he had to bail out of this particular whirlwind.
“So,” Arthur said, regarding himself in the mirror (he ran a bony hand through his hair to muss it), “do I look gorgeous these days or what?”
“Gorgeous is as gorgeous does,” Tracy told him regretfully.
The little restaurant around the corner was the kind of place that had made Tracy love New York. It threatened, in fact, like so many small moments this weekend, to make him fall in love all over again. Hardly bigger than the railway car he’d ridden down in, its tables huddled close. An elbow’s length away, three women carried on a lively conversation in Italian.
Their waiter was too quietly beautiful to be either an actor or a model, just one of those boys who, like moths, find their way to Chelsea. He handed them their menus with lovely presence. “So how’s your sex life?” Arthur asked. “Oh, not you, honey,” he told the waiter. “I mean this one. By the way, Tracy, you should order the trout with pepper bacon.”
“I’m a vegetarian,” Tracy reminded him.
“Well, I have to tell you, it must be this disease, but all I ever want these days is meat, meat, meat. I think I’ll have the trout, and with extra bacon if that’s possible. You, my dear,” he went on, “should order the yummy sweet-potato pancakes. And for
dessert”—Arthur smiled beatifically at the waiter—“we will both have double helpings of you.”
Tracy could only marvel at their waiter’s truly wonderful self-possession. Arthur was a regular here, after all.
“See?” Arthur tapped Tracy lightly on the wrist. “You are hungry. So back to my question. S-E-X. And you’d better tell me you’re getting it on somewhere, somehow, with someone up there in your new home. Otherwise you’re just taking up valuable space on the planet.”
Tracy laughed uncomfortably, though something like this line of questioning was presumably what he’d come to Arthur for. “Sorry to disappoint,” he said.
“Well, I at least thought you and Miss Devin-Eleven would still be getting things on.”
“Oh, that,” Tracy said, his memory of last night now bleakly clear. “Your typical all-night convenience store” was how Arthur had once described Tracy’s friend from college. Between those two there existed a fierce mutual animosity that Tracy afforded himself the luxury of believing had everything to do with him. “Did you know Devin’s got a real boyfriend these days? Apparently I’m the last to know. He only told me this morning. It’s serious with a capital S. They’re thinking of buying an apartment on the Upper West Side. I find out all this, I might add, only after we’d done it every which way. So much for serious.”
“My dear, if I didn’t know better, I’d say you sound bitter. And anyway, never, never apologize the morning after for what your hormones were telling you last night.”
“You’re right. It’s his serious relationship, not mine. Devin and I have been this way with each other for years. I can’t imagine it’s about to change anytime soon.”
“The old friends syndrome,” Arthur said. “Tell me about it. What is with gay men?”
But Tracy didn’t know what was with gay men.
