Her ToyBear

by Bonnie Burrows

  And there it was, the question for which there was no answer. Or, actually, the question whose answer Jennifer did not know how to begin to explain to someone else because she hadn’t the means to begin to explain it to herself. How could she possibly tell even a close friend something so absurd, so impossible, something straight out of a fantasy? Or a horror movie? And how could she possibly expect Michelle to understand it when it was so far beyond her own comprehension?

  Jennifer simply answered, “Michelle, Wesley and I…we have a very serious difference that I didn’t realize was there at first. It was something I didn’t know about until the last time we were together. But it’s something that I frankly can’t wrap my head around. I can’t understand it and I can’t get past it. Wesley and I are just…two different kinds of people. We’re not the same kind at all.”

  “Well, if it’s not about your ages, how are you so different that you can’t find your way past it? Is it something he does?”

  That was the most plausible answer, and even that did not begin to approach the truth. Jennifer replied, “You might say that, yes. You might say it’s something that Wesley does.”

  Michelle pondered this for a moment and returned with, “Oh, something he does. What is it, then? Oh my God, Jen, is he hooked on something? He’s got some habit or something that he’s into that he can’t stop, is that it? Jen, what does he do? Is he on drugs?”

  Jennifer shut her eyes at the question. Drugs, she thought, would in a way be even better than the truth. If only it were drugs, then at least there was the possibility of rehab. She had never heard of any kind of program for what she’d found in her bed that morning. “It’s not drugs,” she replied.

  “Are you sure?” Michelle pressed. “So if it’s not drugs…oh, wait. You mean he doesn’t get high. But he’s a bodybuilding expert. Oh, Jen, you mean he’s on steroids? What is it, then, he’s hooked on steroids and he goes into some kind of rage from it? Jen, that’s really serious. That can mess you up as badly as getting high. He needs help…”

  Jennifer raised a hand to stop her. “No, Michelle, it’s not steroids either. Wesley isn’t on anything. It’s just…we’re different in a more basic way than I ever guessed we could be. There’s something about him that I can’t explain; I can’t talk about it. But I can’t deal with it, either. It’s just really not going to work with Wesley and me. I wish it could. He’s the most wonderful person I’ve ever met in every other way. But there’s just no way for it to work.”

  Michelle sat up straight again, studying her friend and assessing her posture, so slumped in sadness, and her expression, so shrouded with sorrow. Why would Jennifer not want to tell her what was really wrong? She guessed again, her eyes lighting up: “Oh, he’s a porn star, isn’t he? Jen, I might have known. Maybe I should have told you up front, warned you, a lot of these guys on Mucho Model do pornos—straight and gay. What happened, did you find one of his videos online someplace?”

  Jennifer was mildly aghast at the thought. This one disturbed her almost as much as the truth. “Michelle, no! For heaven’s sake, he doesn’t do anything like that!”

  “Well, if he’s not in porn…,” something else occurred to her. “He collects porn. Is that it? Has he got a computer full of porn or something?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Jennifer replied. “I’ve never seen his computer. I doubt it, though. What would someone who looks like him and has sex as much as he does need with a porn collection?” This discussion was depressing her more by the minute. All that Michelle was doing was firing shots in the dark that would never come anywhere near the target.

  Michelle shrugged and nodded, taking the point. “He’s not an escort, is he?” Before Jennifer could answer, she reconsidered, “No, he wouldn’t be. He spent so much time with you, he’d never see a client.” One more thing flashed in her mind: “He’s in trouble with the law, then. He did something else illegal, not drugs and not pimping himself out, but something else, and you found out about it.”

  Realizing the folly of trying to discuss with Michelle something that could not be talked about in rational human terms, Jennifer felt even more depressed, even more lost than before. She should never have let Michelle come over. But then that would have seemed as if she were avoiding her friend, and that would have been just as bad as what she was feeling right now.

  “He’s not in trouble with the law, either,” said Jennifer. “There’s just something between us that we can’t resolve. It’s something that we can’t fix because it’s about who we basically are as…people.” She tripped over the word because it was just so ironic. People. “We’re not going to get past this. And I don’t think we’re going to see each other anymore.” She looked up into Michelle’s eyes in a miserably futile attempt to lighten the mood. “But look at the bright side. There are a lot of other guys on Mucho Model, right?”

  Michelle said, “There are a lot of other guys on Mucho Model. But there’s not another guy like this kid. You know, Jen, even though we haven’t talked that much the last few weeks, every time I’ve seen you out in the hall or coming and going outside, or met you in the elevator, I’ve noticed something about you. I’ve seen you smiling for what looks like no reason. I’ve seen you walking like you could start dancing any minute. You’ve been different, like I’ve never seen you. Not even when you were still married and you thought things were good with you and Ken. And I’ve seen Wesley too, in the same places, smiling, looking like the happiest, proudest kid in the whole world. Did you know he and I talked a little bit?”

  Jennifer blinked at the question. “No, I didn’t. He never mentioned it.”

  “He told me how he was almost never in his own apartment anymore because he was always over here, and he loved coming over here to see you. He didn’t go into any of the details, of course, and I didn’t need to know them. But I knew what he was talking about. He told me you were the nicest, most special person he’d ever met. And he wasn’t the least bit embarrassed by your ages. He had that look about him, that look that a guy gets when he’s got a girl and he’s proud of himself because he knows he makes her happy.”

  And Jennifer thought back over all the hours that she’d spent with Wesley in the penthouse, and the way he looked at her. She thought of the raw sex in his eyes and the affection and adoration on his young face. Something in her longed to see that look again and know that she was the one who put it there.

  “Honey,” Michelle went on, “all I’m saying is, if he’s not on drugs and he’s not on steroids and he’s not on trouble with the law, and it’s not your ages, and there’s nobody else he’s seeing and nobody else he’s interested in, can this whatever-it-is that you don’t want to talk about really be that bad? Can it really be something the two of you can’t sit down and work out together? Do you really want to stop being that happy and never feel that way again?”

  Jennifer sank her face into one palm, now more confused than ever. “I don’t know, Michelle. I tell you, I just don’t know.”

  “Well, think about it,” Michelle said. “‘Cause I’ll tell you something else: There are a lot of women our age who would love to have themselves a Wesley. And in my line of work, I know plenty of guys who’d like one, too. If I had me a Wesley, I wouldn’t be so quick to let him go until I was sure as hell I’d done every last thing I could to hang onto him. Wesleys are not like the subway, Jennifer. They do not come on schedule.”

  For the rest of the visit, they lightened the mood by talking about Michelle’s work: shows that she was casting, stories about the actors in them, and other actors she had known. And once or twice, Michelle even managed to make Jennifer crack a smile or laugh just the tiniest bit, which made Michelle feel better and took Jennifer’s mind off things for the moment.

  But as Jennifer was seeing her out, Michelle spun around in the doorway with a finger in the air and called out, “He’s into bondage, isn’t he? Handcuffs, kinky stuff, corporal punishment, like that guy in the billionaire movie, right?”<
br />
  Wearily, but almost laughing again, Jennifer replied, “No, he’s not. He’s a perfectly vanilla young man. Go home, Michelle; I’ll see you later.”

  “Call me!” said Michelle as Jennifer shut the door.

  On her way back up to her suddenly empty bedroom, Jennifer rolled the conversation back in her mind until she came to the part when she likened Michelle’s guesses to shots in the dark at a target she could not possibly recognize. She was right at the middle of the stairway when she thought it sounded like…a bear hunt.

  Feeling frozen and set afire at once, Jennifer put one hand over her mouth and the other on her stomach and sank onto the stair. She just had to make that analogy, didn’t she? She just had to compare Michelle to a hunter in the forest, packing a rifle, loaded for bear. For bear. A big…black…bear.

  And that was when she again recalled the dinner. That dinner, when she’d told Wesley not to bother to dress but to just keep on the robe because she had every intention of having him out of that robe and onto and into her. She’d served him trout almondine, which he loved, and he’d told her that he’d had trout plenty of times back in Quebec—but never like that.

  Suddenly the full import of what he’d said struck her like the swipe of a massive animal paw. Never like that.

  We’d, um…go to the brook and get ‘em right fresh out of the water. That’s how we’d have ‘em, right straight from the brook. Still flopping around. That was exactly what Wesley had said. And now Jennifer realized what he’d meant.

  What she had found in her bed—that was what had been to the brook in Quebec. And taken the trout right from the water. And had it differently—as differently as it could get—from the way she had prepared it.

  The last bricks of Jennifer’s wall of denial fell away. Reality as she knew it was gone. It was true.

  The bear was her Wesley.

  _______________

  Bereft of seeing Jennifer or being in her bed, Wesley threw himself into his job and into working out to maintain the body that he still so desperately wanted to give his artist-lover. He coached the clientele of Diamond Gym and did not respond to the flirting of the women—or the men—who so obviously wanted to sleep with him. He suspended his Mucho Model account so that no other photographers or artists could contact him.

  Though he still could use the money from modeling, he needed to be away from that situation for the time being. He went out running, going faster and farther than he’d ever run in his life, as if to leave in the distance the heartbreak of Jennifer being afraid of him and not wanting him anymore. So many times, alone in bed in his apartment, he sat naked, nursing an aching erection and stroking himself to a climax that was only physically satisfying, wishing he could still give it all to her. He would curl up and go to sleep, then, with tears in his eyes.

  So many times, he wanted to call her. He would pick up the phone, bring up her number, and hover his finger over it. With one press, he could call her, or at least text her. But he imagined hearing the fear in her voice when she answered, or seeing words like LEAVE ME ALONE on the screen, and he lost his will and put the phone down.

  Instead of calling her, he took to his weights—the free weights in his apartment or the machines at Diamond Gym, where he had staff privileges—and pumped iron. He pumped long and he pumped hard until he made himself sore and too fatigued to go on. For want of pumping long and hard on top of Jennifer and exhausting himself from showing her how much he wanted her, Wesley pumped iron. Until now, working out had always made him feel good. Now it made him feel like just a body—a body without another body to hold.

  Moreover, he knew there was still something that he should have told Jennifer, even above and beyond what he should have told her before she’d learned it in the worst possible way. And so, one evening after work, he slumped, dejected and anxious at once, onto his bed—and called home.

  He got his mother on the phone and explained the whole thing, trying not to sound as mortified as he felt at having done exactly what his parents had explicitly warned him not to do. On the other end, up in Quebec, Jocelyn Horne listened patiently and attentively. And when Wesley’s story was done, she finally spoke up.

  “Wesley, baby, I’m so sorry. You went with your heart, and you got caught up in what you were feeling. I know how this must hurt. I’m sorry, sweetheart.”

  The sound of his mother’s voice only partly soothed Wesley’s feelings. Though she spoke of him obeying his heart, the truth was that he was also obeying a very different part of his anatomy, not one in his chest or his head, but one located further down his body.

  “I went and did what you and Dad always warned me about doing,” he said. “How many times did you tell me, ‘Don’t fall in love with a human?’ And I still did it.”

  “Wesley,” said Jocelyn, “now you have to stop thinking that way. Yes, your father and I warned you. But you wanted to go out into the world, and we knew that when you leave home, you never know what you’re going to find out there. You didn’t know there would be some human woman who’d make you feel this way. You remember, your father and I also told you to listen to what we learn from nature. The world does things you just can’t predict.”

  “I’m glad you’re not mad at me, Mom.”

  “Baby, why would I be mad?”

  “Because she’s human. And because she’s like, old enough to be my mo…,” he caught himself. “She’s like twenty years older than me.”

  “I heard you the first time,” Jocelyn said. “And you know we don’t judge things the way they do. They’re afraid of everything, so they judge everything.”

  “She’s not really like that, Mom,” said Wesley. “She’s smart—intelligent. She’s been places, and she knows things. She’s sensitive, and she’s got a good sense of humor, and she’s not prejudiced. She’s really beautiful, Mom; you’d like her. It’s just…she’s not used to these things. Her whole life, she’s probably thought people like us are just, like, myths and fantasies and things in the movies. Any human would freak out, waking up in the morning and finding one of our kind like Jennifer found me. I can’t blame her. I just wish she wasn’t scared of me now.”

  The sympathy and love in his mother’s voice came through the phone and wrapped themselves around Wesley like a blanket. “Oh, Wesley… Oh, baby, you really do care about her, don’t you?”

  Against his every effort to hold himself together, Wesley melted into tears. “Mom, I love her. I really do, Mom. I love her, and I’m sorry for what I did to her. And I’ll probably never see her again. I’ll probably never get to tell her…”

  “You haven’t tried to speak to her at all since it happened?”

  “I can’t stand it, Mom. You should have seen her. She was terrified of me. I love her so much, and she was terrified to be anywhere near me.” He cried harder, soaking his face, which was now a mask of unutterable sadness. “I’m scared, Mom. I love her and I’m scared…”

  “Sweetheart, don’t cry. Honey, I know this is going to be hard for you to hear, but we both know why this happened the way it did. The time is coming, Wesley.”

  “I know, Mom. That’s probably why it happened. Because the time is coming, and being with her, it hit my cycle and made me shift while I was asleep. I know. But I’ll never get a chance to explain it to her, and she’ll be carrying this around and she won’t understand. I love her, Mom. I want to make it right.”

  “Yes, baby, of course you do,” Jocelyn said soothingly. “But she’s human. You might not be able to make it right. You might just have to let her go. Unless you think she might tell someone. Do you think she’ll try to cause some kind of trouble for you, now that she knows?”

  “No, I don’t think she’s that kind. She’s a lady and she’s rich and she’s got, like, friends in society. I don’t think she’d want to be embarrassed by going around telling stories about how her younger boyfriend turned into a bear. She’d probably be scared of them thinking she was a drunk or she was on drugs or somethi
ng.”

  “I hope you’re right, son,” said Jocelyn. “Frightened humans are so dangerous. I hate to think of them coming after you and you having to run from them. I hate to think of what they could do to you.”

  “Jennifer wouldn’t do that, Mom,” Wesley said, gulping back his sobs. “I know she wouldn’t. She’s scared, but she’s too good for that. I know it.”

  “All right, honey, I believe you,” said Jocelyn. “Then you just have to pull yourself together and concentrate on what you’re going to have to do soon. Your father and I are going to book the usual place in Osborn Wood. We’ve got the time blocked out. You’ve got to be getting ready to go.”

  “I know, Mom. I already cleared it with my boss. I’ll be there. I just wish… I just wish I could have had a chance to explain everything to Jennifer. If we were still together, I’d have to explain it to her now. And…I’d have to tell her there was a chance I’d never see her again. Maybe you’re right. Maybe it would have been harder if none of this had happened.”

  “You see? I was thinking the same thing,” Jocelyn said, putting a reassuring maternal smile in her voice. “It could be better for you and Jennifer that she found out the way she did. You just focus on Osborn Wood and try to let go. You might be needing all your strength soon. You know you’re my strong boy. And Daddy and I love you so much.”