Above The Thunder

by Renee Manfredi

  Anna looked over, counted seven children, all dressed identically, ranging in age from about two to fifteen. “Yes,” she said, looking at the woman who was surely his widow, “Probably.”

  “Madam,” the store manager said behind her. “This is a very sad day for you indeed.”

  “What?” Anna said.

  “Please accept my deep condolences.”

  Anna whirled around. The manager was surely a hundred if he was a day, and blind. The clerk said something to him in Chinese. “I only would like my money returned,” she said.

  The man cocked his head as though listening to the drumbeat outside then nodded. “Yes. But please accept my sympathy on the loss of something precious. We will not give you additional problems.”

  Anna was unnerved as she and Stuart walked to the end of Chinatown to meet Jack at Nan King for dinner. “I think he must have thought I was part of the funeral outside. But surely he knew I was just a dumb tourist. Is it me, or is that creepy? The man gave me the heebie-jeebies.”

  “Who knows. Probably a language barrier thing,” Stuart said, opening the door for her. All through dinner the man’s comment grew into something like dread. She glanced over at the table beside her—a young couple, a family with two small children—and without knowing why or why she felt this way or under what conviction, she knew she would remember this day, that blind store manager, for the rest of her life.

  “Earth to Anna,” Jack said.

  She looked over, smiled. “You, by the way, look terrific,” she said. “Your color is good. I know just by looking at you that your T-cells are rallying.”

  “You think? Anyway, I must remind you that you are on vacation. Stop worrying. You’ve barely touched the meow-shoo pork. Here, kitty kitty.” He pushed the plate toward her.

  Anna laughed. “How do you know I’m worrying?”

  He handed her his cell phone. “You’ve got that look in your eye. Get it over with, because you have a long night ahead of you, missy.”

  Anna stepped outside and dialed Violet’s number. Everything was fine. “The lass has had her dinner and is practicing her dancing. You know, bog-stomping, high-kicks. She’s a jewel. Do you wish to speak to her?” Anna said no, just checking in to make sure everything was all right, she would call again tomorrow.

  Anna lit a cigarette, watched Jack and Stuart through the window. Stuart had never seemed to her like the obvious choice as Jack’s partner, but he brought a peace to Jack; it was palpable. It was the way she felt with Hugh all those years ago. Stuart, she suspected, was struggling with what he wanted. Jack hadn’t treated him very well in the years they were officially together, had made some comment once about people either having the monogamy gene or not having it, and how could he be faulted for not having what nature left out? To which Anna had said, you’re an ass. Still, whatever happened between them, she was grateful for Jack’s returning strength; she could have sworn she saw his T-cells increasing, or the effect of them anyway, in the same way when her daughter was an infant the child often seemed visibly bigger and rounder each morning.

  She lit another cigarette from the butt of the one still going, wrapped her raincoat tighter around her. The fog had moved into the bay and was hanging low, shrouding the storefronts and shops. The streets were black, glazed with rain.

  By the time Jack and Stuart came out, Anna’s heart was pounding so hard that it felt like her breath had to move around the pulse in her throat. Maybe it was that damn tea. She’d been drinking green tea all day long, which, she remembered now, was loaded with caffeine.

  “Are you ready?” Jack said. “We boxed up the rest of the dinner for later.”

  “Okay,” Anna said. “Maybe we should get a nightcap somewhere. Not in Chinatown, though.”

  “We have just the cap for your night, dear one,” Jack said, with an evil laugh. He walked ahead of her, and hailed a cab just past the gates of Chinatown.

  “Jack thinks it’s time to broaden your education,” Stuart said.

  “Oh?”

  He shrugged. “The gay underbelly. The places you’d never see except with us.”

  She glanced over. Stuart looked tired, as though fatigue and illness and anxiety were a baggy gray sweater that they were passing among the three of them and which he now wore.

  The cab stopped in front of what was surely some kind of sex club. There was a man in drag standing outside, wearing black leather, a Prince Valiant wig, and eye liner in the shape of wings, extending all the way up to his temples. “You’re kidding,” she said. “You brought me to a sex club?” But her outrage didn’t go as deep as she pretended.

  “Don’t worry. It’s half and half,” Jack said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Half straight, half gay. Gay play is on the top two floors.” He pulled out his wallet and paid all three cover charges.

  “Don’t leave me alone in here,” Anna said, walking into the dark front room where a naked girl stood dancing next to a bouncer.

  “We won’t.”

  “And don’t fuck in front of me,” she said. “If you have to do that, send me off to the bar or something.”

  The three of them wandered down a narrow corridor. On one side, behind chain-link fencing various tableaus were being enacted. Plywood partitions divided the people within, cutting off their view of what was happening to the left or right of them. It was, Anna thought, like watching a human zoo. She stopped at the first station. There was a young naked Asian man with his hands cuffed above his head. A very overweight woman in black leather, at least in her late forties, maybe older, attached hot feathers to his scrotum. Six men in chairs behind the leather-clad woman watched, presumably waiting their turn. The woman, Anna saw, must be a dominatrix. One by one she yanked the feathers out as the boy winced, pleasure and pain intertwined. The woman kissed him on the lips after pulling out each feather.

  “What’s the point of that?” Anna whispered to Jack. “Does he get to have sex afterward?”

  “If you stand here long enough I’m sure you’ll find out,” Jack said. “But come upstairs with us. The really interesting stuff is upstairs. This is run-of-the mill schoolboy fantasy crap.”

  “I don’t want to be on the gay floors,” Anna said.

  “Why?”

  “Jack, I love you as I’d love a son. There are certain things I don’t want to know about you.”

  “She’s right,” Stuart said.

  “Anyway, I’m not going to stay in here very long. If I’m not here when you get back downstairs, I’ll be back at my hotel, and you can call or stop by later.”

  Jack asked if she was sure, and Anna said, “Of course.” Except an hour later, she was still moving throughout the club. A couple of years ago she and a group of women friends rented Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut and they debated about whether such things existed. Anna had said she doubted it, but now here it all was before her, people having sex everywhere, in every combination and with varying degrees of audience. The club patrons seemed to be mostly men in early to late middle age. Most appeared to be alone. She noticed that the minute a couple so much as kissed and headed toward one of the enclosed rooms, a group of men followed. Voyeurism was as much a part of it all as participation. She had to keep moving, was what she discovered; if she stood in one place too long men approached her. It felt like moving through catacombs, the sticky dark with its bodily smells like a place of the dead. She walked through the hallways, stopping briefly at a station here and there to watch the activities within—people doing things to each other she never would guess anybody would find pleasurable. Why would a grown man want to be spanked by a man with biceps as thick as soup pots? She wondered what kind of lives these people had during the day, what kind of longing and dreaming brought them here at night. What she found fascinating above all was the secrecy of it, the secret subterranean life that ran beneath the surface of the daily one. Her daughter had a secret life, one of drugs and back alleys and hazy dreamlike hours with strang
ers getting high. She envied these people, really, their desires of the flesh leading them down here from their sunlit hours as stockbrokers or insurance men. She herself had never lived a life apart from the one the world knew her by. Didn’t have hobbies that entranced her for hours, or work that was involving enough to keep her in a private world. Jack lived part of his life away from them all—first his numerous affairs, and now, his private memories of those times. Marvin had his art, Flynn had her visions.

  She watched as a transvestite worked on two men at once, overweight men in late middle age who Anna imagined were salesmen or cable TV repairmen. There was a jolly floridity to their faces, their cheeks shiny with sweat. What she found fascinating was the unselfconscious immersion in the things that were happening to them, as though it was perfectly normal to be naked and in a state of sexual arousal with a group of strangers looking on. Those watching had expressions of solemn concentration, almost piety, and not the smirking titillation she’d have expected.

  For the first time in years, Anna questioned her absent libido. Even watching the heterosexual activity, some of the men beautiful by anybody’s standards—hired by the club, she was sure, just as the beautiful young women hanging around the bars must be employees—she didn’t feel a flicker of anything.

  Anna made her way outside, surprised at how ordinary everything looked once again. She took her cell phone out, but decided it was too late to call Violet. She had no reason to call anyway, except that her granddaughter’s face loomed before her with its private mask of secrets, of where she went when she disappeared for hours and the things she knew—how had Flynn been able to describe her grandfather so clearly? What kind of nightmares had such force that they consumed her for days on end? How much of her granddaughter lived in that private world? She turned, headed back into the club. She was too restless to stand here, too agitated to go back to her hotel.

  Stuart had lost Jack hours ago, just after he saw him duck into the men’s room, emerge with a stack of condoms, and then melt into a throng of bodies on one of the dance floors. They’d agreed to meet back at a central staircase at 1:00 A.M., which meant he still had an hour. He circled through the corridors, and found Jack at the entrance to one of the private rooms where he was watching four gay men fulfill some tired fantasy. “Hey,” Stuart said. “What are you doing on the sidelines, lad? Shouldn’t you be in the fleshy midst?” He was hoping that Jack would swagger back at the end of the evening with nothing but loose change in his pockets, the condoms used up. Certain decisions would have been easier had Jack acted true to form.

  “Must be getting old. This isn’t doing anything for me. None of these men,” Jack said, and led him away by the hand. “Have you seen the theme rooms?” He pulled Stuart into a room bearing the legend “Little Red Riding Hood’s Room” above the doorway. Inside, it was decorated like the fairy tale described, complete with brass bedstead and patchwork quilt and nightcaps on both pillows. A red cape hung from a peg, though sized to fit an adult male instead of a girl. Beneath it, a picnic basket held a red checkered tablecloth and brightly wrapped condoms by the dozens.

  Stuart laughed. “Do you want to be the Big Bad Wolf, or should I?”

  “I want to marry you,” Jack said.

  Stuart froze, didn’t dare look up.

  “That’s not part of the fairy tale.”

  “It’s part of mine.” He sat down on the bed, pulled out a cigarette. “I don’t want any of this anymore.” He gestured toward the men who had gathered in the doorway hoping to see a show. “I only want to be with you.” He made shooing gestures to the men looking in. “No show tonight, boys. We’re a couple of bitches here, talking about our relationship.”

  Stuart took the cape off the hook. It was beautiful, really, way too nice for a place like this. It was red velvet on one side, black silk on the inside. He wrapped it around his shoulders, capped the hood on his head. “My, Grandmother, what big bones you have. Or was it teeth?” He laughed, but stopped when he saw Jack’s stern expression.

  “I’m serious, Stuart,” he said quietly.

  “I know you are. But I don’t want to talk about it now. You’re not being fair. I have other involvements.”

  “I am your true heart, and you know it.”

  Stuart took off the cape, reached for the cigarette in Jack’s hand, took a drag, and coughed. He’d never been a smoker. “Yeah? Well, I also know that most of the time your false heart broke my true one. So, I don’t want to talk about it right now.” He got up and walked out, meandered down the hall, past the Cinderella room, past the men crowding into the room with the Pied Piper, and grabbed the first attractive man who smiled at him, and kissed him. There, he thought. There. I am nobody’s pilgrim now. He felt Jack behind him, watching, and kissed the man deeper. He tasted of cigarettes and the metallic yeast of beer.

  “Stuart,” Jack said behind him.

  Without taking his eyes off the young man’s face Stuart said evenly, “Why don’t you go find Anna. We’ve been up here a long time. She might have been sold into slavery by now.”

  The man smiled, his eyes shiny and black as olives, his scent musky and sweet at the same time—newly tilled earth and pineapple. “What’s your name?” Stuart said softly.

  “Steven,” he said, and smiled. “One second,” Stuart said to the boy. He turned, walked the few paces back to Jack. “You brought me here. This was your idea. If you say one more word, I’m leaving you forever, and for good.”

  Jack nodded, and turned away. Stuart watched him walk to the staircase, down to the breeders with their Oedipal or bad Boy Scout fantasies. Jack looked back once, caught Stuart’s eye just as he moved into the dark room with the beautiful young man. This, he saw, was the Space Odyssey room, completely black. There wasn’t a trace of light from anywhere; even the crack beneath the door had been sealed off. There was no way to tell who was where, or how many people were crammed therein.

  Steven was just inside the doorway. “This way,” he said, and took Stuart’s hand. There was an echo, microphones rigged up to amplify and echo voices. There was murmuring all around him, quiet, throaty noises, the crackling of cellophane, the clink of buckles and snaps.

  “Was that your boyfriend?” he asked Stuart.

  “Yeah,” Stuart said. “One of them.”

  Steven put his hands on either side of Stuart’s face and kissed him. Stuart tasted mint.

  “How old are you?” Stuart said, and heard the question bounce along the walls.

  “Twenty-five. Why?”

  Stuart shrugged, but of course the boy couldn’t see this. “No reason. Except that I’m getting old, I guess.”

  “Haven’t been here before, eh?”

  “It’s not that.”

  “Don’t talk,” he whispered, then undid Stuart’s pants. “Oh, it’s that, then,” he said.

  “What?” Stuart said.

  “It’s the honey-honey waiting for you. It’s the jealous boyfriend, not nerves. The old guilt wilt.”

  Stuart heard sniggers all around him. He grabbed the boy and kissed him, forced his tongue into the cool cavern of the boy’s mouth, ran his hands over the perfect young skin. Stuart thought of Jack downstairs, with Anna, no doubt, the two of them mocking the puerile fantasies unfolding around them, and felt anger snake up from his gut. Not at this boy, not really at Jack, but at doing what he was doing now and its necessity.

  “I have cheated on you,” he would tell David on the phone later, admitting first to this boy and then to the indiscretion with Jack. Immorality aside, lying and secrecy never made much sense to him; it only delayed the inevitability of what you had to face.

  “Don’t ask me what you don’t want to know,” he would tell Jack later, with the edge of irritation he’d heard so many times from Jack himself.

  “Did I ever tell you about the time I fucked this boy in a club, and his skin was so creamy that I swear I tasted butter in my mouth?” To whom he would say this, he couldn’t yet imagine.
r />   The boy covered Stuart’s body with his own. Stuart hesitated, but couldn’t resist, couldn’t turn away from the velvety darkness and the smooth hands and silky hair, the gorgeous images blooming in his mind of every summer day of his boyhood, of every lovely thing he’d ever lost coming back to him all at once.

  Jack found Anna dancing with three men in the bar closest to the entrance. He walked up to her, smiled, and elbowed his way in. “How’s tricks?” she shouted to him over the music. “No pun intended.” She looked flushed and happy. He wondered if she’d gotten laid. She looked, anyway, about twenty years younger than the last time he saw here, her face no longer creased and doughy from worry.

  Jack slow-danced with Anna when the music changed, from the thumping techno beat to some god-awful grope-song typically played in breeder bars. “I want to get out of here soon,” he said, his head resting on her shoulder.

  “Okay,” she said. “Me too.”

  “Where’s Stuart?”

  “Upstairs cheating on me.” He felt her startle against him, and he laughed until it felt like the laughter might turn inside out to what it really was.

  “Oh,” she said. “And so what the hell are you doing down here with me? Isn’t this the city of boys?”

  “Don’t ask.” He led her to the bar and ordered them shots of tequila with gin and tonic chasers. “So, what happened to you?”

  She turned, her face radiant and glowing. “What do you mean?”

  “Did you get laid?”

  She made a face of disgust. “God, no. This isn’t my thing.” She took a sip of her drink. “I’ve just had some revelations.”

  “Oh? With whom?”

  She smiled, drew her lips in. “I mean, I have figured things out. Figured out certain things.”

  He nodded, and she said, “This is it. This is all there is. One moment to the next.” She looked over at him. “Well, you already live that way. I had this vision of carting around a suitcase that’s heavy, but only half full.”

  Jack leaned in, cupped his hand over his ear; the music was getting louder. “I said, it’s stupid to think that you always need to have extra space for what might come.”