by Paul Russell
“So,” he said, desperate to right the situation, “how did you first know about yourself? That’s something that’s always interested me. Sexual orientation.” Though he spoke the phrase carefully, with scientific detachment, he could hear how his voice sounded more strained than he would have wished.
“I just knew,” said the Fatwa. “That’s how it is. Either you know or you don’t.”
“I see,” Noah said.
“Just like you know you’re straight. It’s the same for faggots.”
“I really hate that word,” Noah said. It was one of his dad’s words: “Don’t be a little faggot,” his dad would say to someone he was disappointed in.
“Yeah, well, get used to it,” the Fatwa told him. “It’s what I am. By the way,” he added, as if this conversation interested him not at all, “do you have any juice or anything? I need some sugar. Do you mind if I go raid the fridge?”
“Go right ahead,” Noah told him. He was surprised to find himself suddenly so unsteady, trembling even. Don’t be stupid, he told himself. We’re just talking. But the trembling wouldn’t go away. He suppressed a hiccup that arrived out of nowhere, but then another came, and another, the kind of hiccups he got when he was nervous. He held his breath but they tapped up from inside him insistently.
Brimming glass of orange juice in hand, the Fatwa reemerged onto the balcony. He paused, midstep, to take a long gulp. Making no move to sit down, he looked down at Noah strangely.
“What?” Noah asked.
“You’ve got the hiccups,” he observed wistfully.
“Duh,” Noah said.
“Here, drink some of this.” He held out his half-full glass, but Noah shook his head. The Fatwa, however, was not so easily dissuaded. Without a word he sat down on the edge of the chaise longue so that his hip was touching Noah’s leg. “Really,” he said. “Take a long drink.” His eyes, staring straight into Noah’s, looked blurry, but not just from the pot. A phrase floated into Noah’s head: the eyes of desire. It made him want to laugh, but instead another hiccup surfaced. Though he was absolutely right, it turned out. Setting the glass on the balcony’s wide ledge, the Fatwa said softly, “You’re really cute, you know. Has anybody ever told you that?” His hand crept up Noah’s thigh.
“I told you I’m not into that stuff,” Noah warned him, but he knew his trembling body told the Fatwa a different story.
“You’re shaking like a leaf,” the Fatwa said. “You don’t have to be so nervous. I just want to kiss you.”
You shouldn’t be surprised, Noah told himself. You shouldn’t be angry. You set the trap, and look who got caught. He’d known for a long time that he wondered way too much about things. What guys did together. What it would be like. The curiosity that killed the cat. Back in the summer, on a dare with what he thought of as his dark side, he’d even worked up the courage to buy a plastic-wrapped magazine off a newsstand on the street. Men in Heat #7 XXX All Male Action. The Pakistani vendor didn’t even blink when he handed over his money. Forbidden purchase in hand, he’d scurried off to peruse the glossy pages in private. What he saw, especially in the spread “Swim Practice,” where a blond teenage beauty only a few years older than himself paired off with a handsome, dark-haired athlete somewhere in his late twenties, repulsed and amazed him, the most horrifyingly lovely images he’d ever laid eyes on.
He’d known all along that something like this would have to happen. It was what you got, playing with fire. It was why he’d spoken to the Fatwa in the first place. Everybody knew the Fatwa was a faggot, and maybe to a faggot like him Noah Lathrop III was cute. How convenient, Noah thought, and then he thought, in that seemingly endless instant before the Fatwa’s lips actually touched his, that no one had more contempt for the faggot freak who lived down the hall than he did, and that was why he was here right now, on his dad’s balcony, letting the Fatwa lean down to kiss him. He wanted to know exactly what it was like. How bad it could get. He was the one who’d burned down the woods, after all.
The Fatwa’s lips closed over his lower lip, more a gentle tugging bite than a kiss. If he wanted, he could stop this, but he found he did not want to stop it. He was interested by the sensation of the Fatwa leaning over him, his smoky intimate breath, the awkward angle of the chaise longue. He did not close his eyes, though he noticed that the Fatwa did. Presumably this all meant something else to him. The tongue surprised /him, a mobile wedge of flesh slithering into his mouth, running over his teeth, his gums. He tried to block its invasion with his own tongue but discovered that was exactly what made a kiss work, their tongues fighting each other, hard to tell who was in whose mouth when.
The blood seething in his eardrums irritated him, and when the Fatwa’s long bony fingers started pawing the front of his chinos, closing greedily around his excitement down there, he grabbed at the offending wrist to try to steer it away. But the Fatwa’s hand, having found what it wanted, was undeterred. Drowning in the attention, Noah tried to come up for air. Was it a signal? Breathing hard, the Fatwa broke off his kiss to concentrate on undoing the buttons of Noah’s pants. Noah hardly had time to wonder before he felt the astonishment of himself exposed to the air. “Lovely,” the Fatwa said, and then dove instantly toward his captive prey. Noah let out an involuntary groan. The pictures in Men in Heat #7 had only conveyed so much visual information. There was no way they could convey the particular information of this, the swoon of it.
“Bedroom,” he heard the Fatwa murmur huskily, his voice muffled, as if coming from sleep, as if desire settled a drowse on you impossible to disentangle yourself from, as impossible as getting out from under the warm covers on a cold, rainy morning. Taking Noah’s hand, the Fatwa clumsily pulled him from the chaise longue, the two of them almost falling back onto the cushions, which wouldn’t necessarily have been a bad thing, Noah thought, still blurred and dizzy from all that tongue, the wet warmth of that mouth as it closed around his blood-thick flesh, the absolute power he had been made to feel—as if, at that moment, he were master of the world, or at least of Chris Tyler, that formerly shy, nondescript kid from Connecticut who right now couldn’t get enough of what Noah had to offer. And it struck him that this was the first time in his fifteen years he’d ever felt, completely and unambiguously, without any shadow of doubt, that what he had to offer, even if only for the flurried moment it lasted, was something that somebody else absolutely couldn’t live without.
Under the punishing torrent of hot water, the fiercest the state-of-the-art shower could deliver, Noah stood shivering. Steam-wreathed and seemingly oblivious to his erstwhile partner in crime, or at least folly, Chris Tyler soaped himself thoroughly. Sharing a shower: another first, Noah supposed, regarding with as much indifference as he could muster the tall bony body of his mortal enemy. The Fatwa sputtered contentedly, allowing the streaming water to rinse away the suds he’d lathered up. Then, with a decisive gesture, he abruptly shut off the flow. Grabbing a towel, he dried himself vigorously and wrapped the towel around his waist. Unable to snap his fingers and make the Fatwa simply disappear, which is what he would have preferred, and having no better ideas, Noah followed suit—as he had done, he realized, since the beginning of this madness some hour before. That reassured him, somehow. He had taken no initiative; he had simply been there, allowing what was meant to happen to happen and then observing it objectively. The scientific method.
“Well, that was all very nice, I must say,” the Fatwa announced after throwing himself down on the bed. “And you got rid of your hiccups. Christian’s patented cure. I could make a fortune. But now”—he yawned contentedly—“what I feel like is a nap.”
Nice? Noah thought. Was that what it was—nice? He didn’t feel so nice; he felt like he’d been thrown off a cliff and hadn’t yet hit the ground below.
Chris, however, prattled on. “I thought you weren’t into that stuff. For somebody who’s not into it, you throw a pretty good fuck.”
“I’ve got an open mind,” Noah told h
im grimly. “I’ll try anything once.” He had the vague sense that they should have been using a condom, but of course it was too late now. He hadn’t even thought of it—or, to be more precise, by the time he’d thought about it, one surprising moment shading into the next, they were already too far gone in what they were doing to call a halt. It wasn’t like he could suddenly have claimed a time-out in all that seamlessly evolving activity.
“You knew exactly what you were doing, didn’t you?” the Fatwa said. “I mean, when you came up to me on the platform yesterday. You were just using me to find out some things about yourself.”
“You had your fun,” Noah told him, at once hating and approving his indifferent, dismissive tone. He had taken a seat in a chair in the corner of the room, from which unplanned vantage he could see up Chris’s towel to where his cock, still substantial even at ease, lolled about on top of the loose sac of his balls. Even though he was glad he’d been able to resist actually putting his lips on that thing, the fact that he was still, on some level, way too curious about what it would be like to suck dick irritated him. More than that, it seriously disturbed him. Was it true that, in his heart of hearts, he was a fag just like all the rest of them?
“Yes,” Chris said quietly, even drowsily, as if a nap really were what he wanted now, “I certainly did have my fun.” For a minute or two he lay silent, eyes closed, spread unself-consciously on the bed while Noah told himself, severely, not to despise this person who had quite justly accused him of taking advantage. Just get him up, get him moving. Get him out of the apartment. “Don’t even think about going to sleep,” he was about to say when Chris’s voice startled him.
“I heard you that time,” he was saying. “I was in my room. I know you were there. I know you were part of it.”
For a moment Noah had no idea what he was talking about.
“The day your friends hung the pigeon on my door,” Chris went on, eyes still closed, as if, by talking in his sleep, he could uncover certainties his waking brain failed to know. “I heard you out there with them,” he said. “I heard your voice.”
It’s not true, Noah wanted to tell him. But in a certain sense it was, in fact, true. As he knew too well. He’d gone along. He hadn’t done a thing to stop it. But the real truth, the complicated truth—that his own situation was precarious as well; that he hadn’t wanted to risk compromising it to come to the aid of someone he didn’t even know—how could he even begin to explain that?
“I didn’t know you then,” he said lamely.
Chris sounded stern. “Well, now you do. Now you know me very well. But as I think I said before, this isn’t the Forge, so it doesn’t mean anything. What about when we’re back? What about then? Are you going to know me then?”
More than anything, Noah hated being lectured to. He knew that what he had to say would sound cruel, but he had no other choice. “We’ll see,” he said curtly.
Chris opened his hazel eyes and looked at Noah. “Would it just be too surprising if I told you I understood?” Noah could manage to return his gaze for only a few seconds before having to look away. “Believe it or not,” Chris continued mildly, “I know all about confusion. So don’t feel bad.”
He sat up on the side of the bed and looked around. “My, my, we’re a messy couple,” he observed. Unfurling the towel from around his waist, he reached down to retrieve his boxers, the white tangle of his shirt. “Throw me my pants from over there, wall you?” he asked.
Noah dressed as well. It made him happier to be back inside his clothes. Chris stood at the window as he finished buttoning his shirt. “You know,” he said in that same reflective voice he’d used earlier when he fingered Noah on the pigeon incident, “people think Kurt Cobain killed himself because of drugs. But he didn’t. He killed himself because he had AIDS. The papers never printed that. It got all hushed up. And you know who else has AIDS? Michael Stipe. And Rob Lowe’s brother. How do I know this? My doctor friend. He knows the people who know. Can you imagine if that got out? What it would do…”
Why was he saying this? It made Noah vaguely uneasy. He reassured himself that he’d had his unprotected dick in Chris Tyler’s ass only about thirty seconds, all told—well, maybe a little more, but not much. AIDS wasn’t something he exactly liked to think about, except when he needed a plague to wipe out nine-tenths of the population so the cities could fall into ruin and the forests grow back and swallow them up.
“Well, see you, as they say,” Chris told him at the door. For an instant Noah was afraid the tall, strange boy might try to give him a hug or kiss or something, but obviously Chris knew better than that.
“Yeah,” Noah told him carefully, coolly, though not without respect. “See you.”
He shut the door behind him and reminded himself how easily, all in all, Chris had let him get off. He hadn’t had to suck cock and he hadn’t gotten fucked. He was still intact, his orifices unviolated, which meant the afternoon’s insanity was something he could either pretend happened or didn’t happen, but either way it didn’t really change anything if he didn’t want it to. He’d satisfied his curiosity, and the cat had not been killed. The chances were quite excellent he’d never be tempted to do anything like this ever again.
As if it were only another ordinary evening at home, international businessman and frequent flyer Noah Lathrop, Jr., lately returned from halfway around the world, mixed himself a martini in the monogrammed silver shaker he’d inherited from his father, the original Noah Lathrop, a man too concerned with his Hartford bank ever to travel at all, except for two weeks to the Cape every year like clockwork. Noah III sat at the small table in the kitchen and watched his dad add a drop of vermouth, shake Tanqueray and ice, a ritual precisely and lovingly performed. His dad approached his poisons as if they were holy, administering himself doses of alcohol or cocaine the way mountain Baptists take up rattlesnakes, emerging from his self-inflicted ordeal stronger and purer than before. Noah had never known his dad to suffer anything remotely resembling a hangover.
From the living room came the lively noise of the party, his dad’s inner circle—the lawyer Roger Baldrick and his coke-fiend wife; Jean, the tough, chain-smoking Vassar graduate who worked on Wall Street and raised horses on her farm in Millbrook; Max Cohen, who also worked on Wall Street; Gunila, his dad’s fiancée and soon-to-be third wife; and of course A. J. Griffiths, whose southern-accented voice boomed out distinctively—as well as others Noah didn’t know, people who came and went, who used his dad and got used in return, who were expendable whether they understood it or not on a festive night like tonight.
He’d followed his dad into the kitchen on purpose, but, as usual when the two of them were alone, found himself at a complete loss for anything to say. He had learned long ago that idle questions like “How was your trip?” or “What was it like over there?” did not even elicit answers. His dad didn’t do small talk—he reserved his speech for more important matters—and Noah had the distinct and queasy feeling that he was about as unimportant an item as could be found on his dad’s crowded agenda. He’d been eight when his parents divorced, his only vivid memories of those years being the large hedge at the back of the property that had a hole in it where he spent hours playing by himself and hiding from the world; a red pedal car he’d loved; an alarmingly vivid dream of a peacock standing in his room, at the foot of his bed, slowly fanning open its tail, which was covered not with iridescent spots but with real, staring human eyes; finally, an antique Chinese lamp his mother threw at his dad but missed, the lamp hitting the wall instead but for some reason not shattering, something so miraculous-seeming that it stopped, if only for a stunned moment, their quarrel in midshout.
“So how’s school,” his dad said, a statement rather than a question. He concentrated on the more important business of pouring his martini from shaker to glass without wasting a drop. He had just flown in from some unimaginably exotic or sordid city in Central Asia and nothing about him was changed. “There’s somethi
ng lacking in your dad,” his mother told him once. “He’s incapable of being touched by anything.”
“Fine,” he told his dad. “School’s fine. Not much to report.” It was the first time they’d seen each other since the start of the semester.
“Well, that’s good. Want one of these, buddy? It won’t kill you.”
Noah shook his head. Raising the glass to his lips, his dad sipped gratefully. “I had to come a long way to get this baby,” he said.
Later, Noah knew, there would be cocaine as well. He had to admire his dad’s huge stamina even as its extremes sometimes unnerved him. The man slept four hours a night at most, his life an unbearable expanse of wakefulness to his son, who absolutely depended on long blank stretches of unconsciousness, easily sleeping fourteen or fifteen hours a day when allowed, craving those episodes of oblivion so much that he felt vaguely cheated if, on waking, he could recall a dream that had inserted itself into his otherwise empty slumber. Those dreams were mostly tedious and threatening. Only the other night a large bald black man standing next to him on the subway had been trying to prick him with a tiny concealed hypodermic needle, and he’d thought on waking, Maybe, like Tim and Gary, I’m a racist after all, and I’m just fooling myself. But who said dreams didn’t lie as much as anything else? He’d had any number of annoying dreams lately, none of which he particularly wanted to take credit for.
“Shall we join the party?” his dad suggested, as if it was stupid for the two of them to be stuck in the kitchen alone together. For an instant Noah wanted to say “Wait,” but clearly his dad was right: there was no reason. “Have you talked to Gunila?” his dad said as they moved into the living room. “I expect you to, you know.”
“I haven’t really talked to anybody. I sort of have a headache.”
His dad stopped and looked at him. “I’ve been on a fucking airplane for the last two days and you have a headache,” he said, not in anger or contempt, but just as an observation. Then he simply turned and walked over to his friends. Surprisingly close to tears, Noah bit his lip, remembering with a sting of shame his one trip out of the country with his dad and then-stepmom Kendra, years ago, a weeklong vacation in London where a humiliating bout of traveler’s diarrhea had forced him to stay behind at the hotel the whole week, and his dad’s quiet fury, as if Noah were somehow to blame for this failure of his constitution.
