My heels hurt
May. 24th, 2010 20:20![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sekritomgTitle: The Rectum is a Tomb
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sekrit_omg
Rating: R, this chapter
Pairings: S/K; multiple others
Summary: A 1980s British historical AU in which Stan meets a prostitute and sighs a lot.
Author's notes: a) Homage to the literary gay fiction of the 1980s, specifically Hollinghurst. b) I'm not British. c) This is so, so AU.
By the way, if anyone is interested in reading this in one part, with all the correct formatting, the entire fic is on FF.net here.
To say I awoke in the morning would be a misstatement, as I’d spent whatever was left of the night drifting off into a shallow sleep and then waking suddenly to the realization that a man I’d once considered myself all but married to was dead. I was sad, but not heartbroken — discomforted. All writers — all Englishmen — understand grief. Death is in our genes, clinging virally to our tissues. Our greatest monuments, churches and castles, are paved with bones and if the centuries of tourists’ shoes can erase the names from the markers, the memory of death cannot be vanquished from our minds. We might try to fight it, propping up a rigid caste system to encourage the fantasy that our social conventions can best biological functions, but we know we are wrong.
What’s more, gay men are practically born grieving. All of our greatest treasures made their names by dying. Gary had simply joined that legacy, and if I mourned him now, I was merely lamenting that we could never have had what I wanted — a domestic life legally acknowledged by the state, blond-haired children, and the intermingling of financial assets. Gary was the only man who’d ever stirred this in me, the only man with whom I had ever been more interested in having babies than having sex. Which is not to say that I was not interested in having sex with him; I was, and I did — at great length, and frequently. Likewise, I do not mean that I have forever been disinclined to have a domestic life with any other man, particularly Kyle, merely that the love I felt for Kyle was ever-present, a rollicking tide of romance that I wished to crest over me, as it had overshadowed my life. The thought of Kyle’s love was too important to be relegated to mimicry of the heterosexual world.
As it happens, my first novel had been about Kyle; my second, Token. Of course, neither of these things was literally about the man who’d brought the work out of me, but rather, crudely edited stand-ins, bits and pieces I hacked off from Kyle and Token respectively and remolded to fit the point of my tale. Each of these fictions was indulgence: For me, the indulgence in an imaginary relationship with a man I wanted more control over; for the audience, indulgence in shameless erotica. These novels were nothing if not pornography with a hefty dose of schlock (one of those words I’d picked up at the Broflovski dinner table when I was 19 years old) — much pining and wondrously vivid descriptions of men’s (and boys’) body parts, assessing male torsos like they were dogs at show, or pedigreed horses, if pedigreed horses were meant to be masturbated about.
Kyle became, in my text, not a voluptuous auburn-haired creature with a sharp tongue, but a tow-headed runt who was basically a woman save for his perfect, average, blond-vanilla penis and hairless pillow of a scrotum. He had Kyle’s brain, to be sure, but as part of the surgical transformation I removed every trace of masculinity. He did not start arguments but carefully avoided them; he did not defy his family passively but rather, suffered under their fists.
This fictional Kyle I named Benjamin, and I became the narrator, tormented by an awaking into homosexual love. My protagonist was not a virgin (though Benjamin was), as he’d been sleeping for some time with his busty girlfriend — a pale blonde version of Wendy. Ridiculous, really, as the book devolved into unrealistic sex scenes that followed long periods of high drama and shrieking. The action was begun at school and ended at Benjamin’s sunny country home, modeled more on Brideshead than not, although a trip or two out to Blenheim Palace got me thinking about good, specific details. In the end of the story, fictional-me came to terms with his homosexuality and professed love to fictional-Kyle. Fictional-me and fictional-Kyle lived happily ever after in a quaint Yorkshire cottage, where fictional-me painted, and fictional-Kyle kept house, his family’s noble fortune keeping us happy with no children to support. (Being gay and all.) In the post-script, fictional-Kyle passed away from liver cancer. My editor kindly suggested I cut it, and I took his advice. The 405-page book contained 144 pages of pure gay smut, and sold reasonably well for that type of thing.
Spurred by this unexpected modest success, I completed a second novel about a quite different fictional-me, and fictional-Token. Fictional-Token was the son of a wealthy Indian industrialist who had been knighted; our fictional selves trolled around France on holiday fucking unguardedly in the back rooms of Paris nightclubs and the beaches of Marseilles. Loads and loads of sex, and I have reason to believe Token never even read it. Whereas I took a denialist route with the first book, framing the story around the self-acceptance trials of a young man that I never personally went through, the follow-up was all a plotless devolution into sex and flowing, sparkling champagne poured over ripe fruit in exotic, pricey France. Kyle and I had been to Marseilles in anticipation of my drafting this monstrosity; it is amazing what one can convince publishers to finance in the pursuit of bad literature. In any case, that one I was ashamed of. Would Token have recognized himself in the heavy-lidded young man fictional-me found himself romanced by? Doubtful. He would have been too distracted by my overuse of adverbs to care.
For a bit I’d coasted on the royalties — I was quite popular in America, by all accounts, which seemed from a distance to be a nation of hungry queers looking to devour something erotic and foreign. The fact that people over there liked my writing really didn’t help my opinion of the place, although I did receive an offer to actually go to New York City and read the thing aloud at some bookstore. “I’ll join you if you go,” Kyle had offered, but by then I’d met Gary, and in private I felt that a small bit of America had come to me at long last. When I was with Gary I did not write anything of substance, and after Gary left I was too busy cottaging to care.
So I’d written two bad books — and I knew they were bad because Gary read them both aloud, one after another, on our quiet evenings in my flat. In his effusive, flyover tone my words sounded dead — dull. Yes, all the emotion was there, the pathos of wanting Kyle and needing Kyle and having to do without Kyle; fictional-Token was harder to bear. Often after reading an arousing scene Gary would set the book down on the floor and very gingerly take my cock into his mouth by first balancing it on his lower lip and then letting it slip back until I was all but dripping down his esophagus.
That was the problem with dating a gay virgin — he found my writing to be enlightening, a massive turn-on, much the same way that he found me to be a revelation. But I was only an introduction, an overture before the libretto began. There was no reason to dislike my books, because there was nothing to judge them against. I took him in out of the cold, quite literally, and gave him the thing Colorado lacked: nakedness in all its forms.
Say what you will about the mountains but I cannot think of them as blank or uncomplicated. There are layers there, generations of the life of this planet compressed into hardness. My father went to the Rockies to consult on some seismic activity when I was 5, and brought me back a chunk of striated rock no larger than my palm is now. “That’s history there, Stanley,” he said to me when I unwrapped my rock, tied with cord and brown craft paper. “Each of those bands is 100 millennia.” At my parents’ home in Oxford atop my wobbly adolescent bookcase that rock sits still in a fossilized room, waiting for me to go home again. I know why Gary wanted to be with me; I never knew why he couldn’t stay.
And now it was irrelevant because he was dead.
~
On Saturday morning I panicked and called Butters at his flat. I knew he would be there, that no man had drawn him away from his television set and faithful, hulking bulldog. He cried “Good morning!” so cheerfully I pulled the phone away from my ear while the words reverberated. “Hello?” I heard his tinny voice ask as I drew the receiver back to me. “Who’s this?”
“Miss B, good morning.”
“Stanley! Oh, hello, good morning. Lovely day. Do you see how sunny it is? We’re just back from Southwark Park” — we being Butters and Desdemona, the bulldog — “and I was about to have a cup of tea and eat cakes. It’s so unexpected to hear from you, really, because generally I consider you the type of fellow who’s occupied on Saturday mornings.”
“Thanks for the frankness,” I said. I didn’t consider this amusing. “Glad your morning’s going well. I’ve a favor to ask you, actually.”
“Oh, anything.”
“Would you please convey to Kyle my apologies? I won’t be able to make it this evening.”
A sudden intake of air, and Butters made an audible little huh noise. “But it’s Saturday, you know. What are you going to do if not go out dancing?” Which was a ridiculous question, really, because it was quite rare that any of us actually danced.
“Most likely stay in and have a quiet night.”
“Well, at least come to Kyle’s and have a drink with us!”
“No, thank you. I’d prefer to be on my own this evening.”
“Stanley.” Butters sounded something only short of hysterical. “Is everything all right? I can’t imagine—”
“I’m fine, Butters, and you will be too. Just please give Kyle my regrets and have a lovely time without me this evening. All right?”
“Do you have a date?” Butters asked.
“Excuse me?”
“Are you seeing someone? Just bring him along.”
“I’m not seeing anyone, Butters, I just don’t want to hang around a bunch of drunken queens in a dark space with loud music tonight. Surely you can understand.” He most certainly could understand, that I was sure of, but of course I hadn’t told him why. No matter.
I made myself a cup of tea. I set it on the trunk doubling as a coffee table, and without so much as pausing I grabbed the photograph of myself and Gary off of the wall. For about two hours I sat on the sofa and stared at it while my tea grew cold. I wasn’t sure how to classify my feelings; I wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination happy, and yet the last thing I felt like doing was crying. I hadn’t really missed him since I’d last seen him; if anything, I felt like something of an anthropologist, studying my petrified feelings from afar, recollecting memories in the vein of archived ephemera. How does one mourn a person he’s no longer in love with and hasn’t seen for three years?
I decided to go swimming. For the longest time, so long I did not know how long it truly was, I splashed back and forth in the lap pool, kicking my way across chlorinated turquoise waters; by the time I trudged back to the showers the skin across my feet and hands was pinched into little faces, so angry I could barely feel the club floor underneath my toes. In the showers, I spent minutes lathering the lavender-scented shampoo into a fine froth in my hands, and before I’d rinsed my hair a short man with bony shoulders had appeared behind me and begun stroking my abdomen, snaking around my flanks and hips to the front.
“I was watching you swim laps,” he said into my ear. “You look like you’ve had a good workout.”
Grasping his hand, I lowered his reach, enticing him further with a growling, “I could use a second one,” clutching both of our fingers around the weight of my testicles. He groped a bit and kissed my neck.
I spun to face him. His hair was a preternatural blond — not dirty like Kenny’s, but yellowish and gold, darker than Miss B’s had been in her heyday, but reminiscent of Monet’s haystacks at noon. It was matted with wetness and droplets of water were forming at the ends of the tapered strands. That was his distinguishing feature — I could tell even in the shower that he had perfect hair, effortless and easy and wonderful. Some men, men like me, had well-enough hair that looked acceptable — I never fussed with my hair, and it never looked anything more than good. This man’s dripping locks formed a frame around his face that made me want to put my palms on his cheeks and kiss him — which I did, standing under the cooling jets of the shower at my club. This sort of thing happened in the showers all the time, but at this moment there happened to be no one nearby.
“My place or yours?” he asked, lips still against mine, water streaming into my eyes so I couldn’t see anything.
“Mine,” I said, which was a symptom of all the things affecting my better senses at the time. Tricking can often be a draw, and going back to someone’s flat puts you in dangerous territory — the unknown itself can be a massive threat. But it’s downright stupid to show a man you’ve met in the showers (or a toilet or a park) where you live. One never knows who wants to make it a habit.
Nevertheless, I’d given my answer, and we went to my flat without talking or so much as looking at each other. He followed and I led, and once in my bedroom we snogged for quite some time, the afternoon decaying into a purple evening in late summer. In London sometimes there are still Anglican church bells to be heard in the distance, calling worshippers to prayer or signaling the time. Perhaps it was fitting that my local church was in fact Roman Catholic, and on this day I heard the judgment of the bells noisily reprimanding me from nearby, only across the square, as I fingered some unknown man.
We spoke little, and things proceeded accordingly, up to the moment when I was about to don a rubber. He grasped my wrist, eyes entreating me to stop. I wondered if I should tell him what I wanted was emotional protection, a barrier between myself and really having to be with someone, literally leaving traces of myself inside of him or, much worse, vice-versa.
“Oh, all right.” I tossed the rubber into the sheets, intellectually exhausted. “You like it raw?”
He shook his head. “I don’t like it at all, actually.”
This was hardly what I needed to hear. An erection was insisting itself inside my trembling fist, but it scarcely felt like my own. It felt detached, unrecognizable.
He tilted my chin up, flashing me a bittersweet smile. “You all right? We don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”
Brushing his hand away, I laughed. “Oh, I thought you didn’t want to.”
“Oh, I want to.” He laughed to himself, steely and collected. “Sorry, I should have been clearer. I just prefer we don’t go all the way. I reserve that privilege for my better half, if anyone.”
I nodded, because I understood. We resumed kissing.
~
“This was refreshing and odd,” he said as we sat down at a pub. I was drinking whisky again, not because I was thirsty but for the statement I hoped it would make to my latest companion. He and I paid separately for our drinks (perhaps to underscore the decided absence of romance) and took a table in the back, underneath a shadowy, Victorian overhang of iron curled in fleur-de-lis. The walls were scalloped burgundy textile, discolored with tobacco staining where it met the wainscoting, sheathed in recent panes of glass. The preservation of history — it was an inclination I was sympathetic to, and yet at the moment all I wanted was to shut my eyes and curl up into a ball.
Witnessing no response from me, he continued: “I don’t usually do that kind of thing. Step out, I mean. I suppose I just saw you alone, and couldn’t help myself.”
It was a rare occasion that I deigned to share a post-coital beverage with anyone whose name I didn’t know, but given the circumstances, I’d gone along. It occurred to me while we were shuffling through the streets, rough-skinned youths pushing past us on their way to the Old Street Tube, that I should ask why he was so eager to recommend a pub in my area. I’d never been to the Bunch of Thistles, but it seemed a decent enough place — mixed company, but just fine.
“Flattering,” I said over my glass. “I don’t suppose I’m the first one you’ve used that line on.”
He sighed, frowning. “I never lie,” he said. “Honesty is the most important quality. Emotional honesty, factual honesty, the spirit of honesty — I demand it from everyone. And you should demand it, too — from your lovers, your friends, your teachers, your government. Honesty is the cornerstone of society. And censorship is the suppression of honesty.”
There was a tone to his voice that told me he’d practiced these words — as if they were lifted from a play or a movie.
“So, how would your ‘better half’ take it if he knew we’d just…” I rolled my eyes. No need to finish the thought.
My date shook his head. “He’d probably ask me if I enjoyed it, or if you might like to join us some evening.”
“No, thank you.” I’d never been one for threesomes. Sometimes they tended to happen, in the back of a bookstore or some really filthy cottage. The backrooms at Camp were notorious for this — it was even more prevalent 10 years ago, when the idea of erotic excess was fresh and gay sex was finally legal, at least in name. Then it had been novel to grasp for everything one’s little hands could hold, literally and figuratively. The very pursuit of shoving as much or as many into every last orifice became religious itself. By the mid-1970s, I was living with Gary, or he was living with me, and the idea of fucking multiple men at once began to seem disingenuous. The joy of sex had always been, at least for me, in making a connection with one lover, reveling in him — and moving on. But in that moment, there is only him.
My trick was looking at me with those earnest eyes, perfect coif taunting me with its embodiment of some kind of solid domestic relationship. “Tell your boyfriend three-way fucking’s not for me,” I repeated. “Then I might have to do something rash like learn your name.”
“It’s Gregory.” His voice was so warm I wanted to hit him. Instead I drank whisky. “I say, is it a habit of yours to make it with strangers on a regular basis without learning their names? I enjoyed it, mind you, so it’s nothing to me if you don’t, but it’s simply safer to find out these sorts of things. If nothing else it’s how you might make new friends. And it’s potentially deadly to fuck strangers whose names you can’t be bothered to learn, Stanley. Or is it Stan? Whichever you prefer. I’m not picky, and I do hate to be rude.”
Of course, he now had my attention. “Who are you?” I gasped. “And why do you know my name?”
“Your name, dear? I know it because I read it off of the Oxford diploma on the wall, and the paycheck you left on the nightstand, from the Telegraph. Then, of course, I remembered reading your byline on piece of that gossipy nuisance about the Tetley heir, which led me to recall a novel you published about some kind of erotic odyssey through France. I didn’t read it, but my friend Chris did. Then again, he is Gallic, and practically breathes sex. Are you all right? You’re looking at me like I’m a stalker.”
I nodded, and shook it off: “It doesn’t seem too horridly ridiculous to come to that conclusion!” I snapped.
“Well, I’m not stalking you, I’m afraid. I’ve seen you around, milling around Hoxton Square and that coffee shop on Old Street. But I only made the connection when I saw you in the showers.”
“You’re not reassuring me in the least!”
“Calm down. I assure you, I’m an upstanding fellow. I’m a politician, which is how I’m good with names and to a lesser extent, faces. In fact, I am your MP. Maybe you’ve voted for me? Gregory—”
“Stop!” Before he could even get out his last time, I had cut him off. “Your friend,” I demanded. “Your ‘better half.’ What’s his name?”
“It’s Chris,” he said. “Short for Christophe. You seem nervous, dear.” His fingers were laced atop the table so serenely that it took all my strength not to throw the end of my drink in his face. “Don’t be nervous. I believe we’ve just had a misunderstanding. We’re all friends here, Stanley. Or do you prefer Stan?”
“I prefer neither,” I hissed, getting up. I threw a couple of coins down on the table for the barmaid. “This never happened.”
He cocked an eyebrow at me. “I think you’re being rash.”
“Rash? You’re practically a socialist and you’re calling me rash?”
“So you have heard of me,” he said, in a weary tone that implied this happened to him all the time.
“I’ve only heard that you’re single-handedly dismantling the British Empire.”
“I meant to leave politics out of it,” he said. “Come on, we had a lovely time tonight. Don’t let’s argue about that.”
“I don’t vote,” I announced. “Have a lovely evening.”
As I hurried away from the pub, I felt slightly ill. The nearer I got to my flat, the more I had managed to talk myself into the idea of taking an extended vacation. By the time I’d barricaded myself inside and collapsed on the sofa, my mind was made up; I would go to Gary’s funeral. And certainly, I would put this unlikely incident out of mind.
~
I visited a travel agent, a shrewish girl with big earrings hanging pendulously from her lobes, ovals of canary against the auburn frizz of her coif. I’d known her for a few years now, but hadn’t been in for some time, having traveled no place since Kyle and I returned from Thailand. We talked about vapid things for a while; her boyfriend was a hardscrabble mechanic in Tower Hamlets. I didn’t care about the other girl she’d found him with, or the bloody roses he’d given her in apology, but in polite society it’s unacceptable to come off as uncaring. After about 10 minutes of this I told her I needed to get to Colorado in two days’ time.
“A friend has passed,” I said, unsure of what the details would do to the cost of fare. “I’ve decided it’s imperative that I see him off.”
She looked at her chipped nails and looked back at me, citing a price I found ludicrous.
“No, you don’t understand. I have to fly to Denver two days from now, for a funeral. Can’t anything be done about the price?”
“Two days is short notice,” she repeated.
“But my friend has died and all I want is to attend his funeral, not go prancing around the Western hemisphere on holiday.”
“Family member?”
“Ex-lover,” I clarified.
“Condolences,” she said. Somehow she’d transformed from vapid to downright steely. “Wish I could help, mister, but travel costs what it costs, you know.”
I knew.
Unsure of how else to get my hands on the funds, I rang my father, the geology professor who considered me the failure of his loins. To make a case to him I first had to speak with my mother, the gatekeeper, who could not get her clutches on me without further wasting my time with trivialities.
“Your sister’s youngest has got an ear infection,” she reported. “But it’s okay, because she’s got him a prescription for antibiotics. Can you imagine a life without antibiotics? It was like that while I was growing up, you know. Now the doctors, anything that goes wrong they just hand out antibiotics. I had German measles when I was quite young, and no one ever prescribed me any sort of medications.”
“Well, that’s because German measles is a virus.”
“I don’t see what the difference is,” she replied. “You can cure anything lately, just anything. And doctors just prescribe antibiotics no matter what it is. You can barely take a breath without someone diagnosing you with a virus and giving you antibiotics or a jab for whatever it is. Frankly I think medicine is an overextended field. Lord knows I prefer private surgery to the National Health.”
“Listen, there are no cures for viruses,” I snapped. “You can prevent them but they certainly can’t be cured with antibiotics. People with no money have got to use the National Health, and be damned happy they can get anything instead of struggling through the overfed American plutocracy. Now for the love of god put my father on the phone or I’ll cry.”
If anything has consistently been effective on my mother since my boyhood, it was the threat of crying.
“I need an advance so I can afford a trip to Colorado,” I informed my father. We were not in the habit of saying hello.
“An excellent place, to be sure. You know, I went there once.”
“Right. But I’m not taking a holiday.”
“Well, I have to assume, knowing you, that it couldn’t be business.”
In any other situation I would work with the man, concentrate on lulling him into my point of view. But I felt the immediacy of the situation pressing at me, and decided to plunge into the crux of the issue: “I’ve a funeral over there, and I can’t afford a plane ticket. Would you please lend me the money?”
“Sorry for your loss.”
“Thanks.”
“Who died?”
“Gary. Gary Harrison.”
“Never heard of him.”
“Yes, you have.” It was torture keeping myself from gritting my teeth. “He was my boyfriend.”
“The ginger?”
“No, that’s Kyle. He lives in Notting Hill Gate. I know you know who he is. I’m not talking about Kyle. I’m talking about Gary. Pardon my shortness, but this really isn’t a joking matter. Gary and I were together for three years; I brought him home on several occasions. He had blond hair and I loved him.”
“Ohhhh. Ah, you mean the little missionary.”
“Please don’t make me beg.”
“All right, I’ll spare you the begging: no.”
“But I only need—”
“You don’t need anything, Stanley, you just want. Want want want want want. You want me to give you more of my hard-earned money. Haven’t you heard of the concept of ‘work ethic’? If you want money you’ll have to earn it.”
“This is not some frivolous triviality I’m playing at!” I cried. “Someone I loved is dead and I want to go to his funeral!”
“Love someone who can give me grandchildren,” my father replied. “Then we can talk.”
Deciding the conversation was over, I slammed down the receiver.
~
I sought no further for a ticket to Denver. I had a check on the nightstand, it was true, but I needed that for household expenses, or at least to eat. In any case, I spent Saturday night drinking and all of Sunday morning drinking, steadily, as soon as the sun woke me up. I barely felt anything, neither drunkenness nor sadness, but I did have a vague sense of injustice, as if there were something or someone I should be fighting harder. The truth was, by noon on Sunday I wasn’t sure why I wanted to go to Gary’s funeral, and the immediacy of the crisis had slowed; instead of moping, I decided to swim.
Laps back and forth across the pool did not tire me so much as get me thinking about the tall, dark man in a well-cut pair of little trunks I had seen swanning out to the weight room about the same time I’d been heading for a swim. I found him in the sauna, sweating comfortably on a white, thick towel, and joined him in there, resting a hand on his chest as he breathed. Neither of us spoke. He led me to a bathhouse I’d never visited before, down in the City, not far from Eric’s condo. For a moment as my trick negotiated with the man at the front desk, I wondered if I should not be frightened of whom I might come across in the twisty little streets of the oldest part of London. Instinctively, however, I was soon angling myself into a new, hairless sphincter.
Only at the end did we exchange words: “You were fine,” he said, distracted, observing his own nails as he lay on his back in the tiny, red-lit room. His voice was thick with a Slavic accent, which reminded me of the Cold War, and Gerald Broflovski’s dire-sounding seminars around the dinner table on the nature of the fascist soul. “I’ve had better,” my lover said, twisting the knife.
“You certainly didn’t live up to the way you filled out your trunks,” I spat back. He threw a pot of petroleum at me, and I was grateful to leave.
~
I was convinced that Kyle had run away to elope with Clyde in Shropshire, and meeting him for drinks was probably pointless. Still, I got ready to go, lacing my trainers and sniffing my denim trousers to make sure they didn’t smell like anything that might prove offensive to Kyle, or the future Mrs. Clyde Donovan, whoever decided to show up to the Bucky to meet me.
“You look so awful!” Kyle exclaimed when he saw me. He was late, but I only knew that because I had heard a couple of tourists announce the time when they mistakenly wandered in a few minutes before Kyle. “Stanley, sweetheart, have you brushed your hair lately?” he stuck a hand in my rat’s nest, and attempted to groom out some kind of shape. “My dear, you’re being awfully quiet and your hair looks like something I might have a nightmare about. Are you okay?”
“I don’t know,” I said. Two empty whisky tumblers sat in front of me. I’d even chewed up the leftover ice. “How’s old Clyde?”
“Old Clyde hasn’t been around lately,” Kyle said darkly. Then, his tone became lighter, and he joyfully declared, “His mother fell down the stairs or something. I haven’t seen him since the night after the opera. Actually, we had a tremendous fight. His mother called my flat, which appalled me, because lord knows, I hadn’t given him permission to give anyone my number. And I wouldn’t, just for the record, Stanley — I’d never do that. I don’t like him. He’s just awful, of course, and after we fuck — I cannot even call it making love, as he’s got absolutely no passion for anything — I just beg him to hold me — to anything, actually. I just want him to touch my skin, to tell me he enjoyed it, to look me in the eyes, to—”
I grimaced. “But, back to the story.”
“But back to the story,” he agreed. I glanced down at my crotch, wondering if it was the anti-erotic vibe of death and departure or the lost yearnings of Kyle’s love life that were stifling my erection tonight. “We had just finished, and I was on top of him, in his face, trying to get him to stay awake and talk to me. I know, why would a reasonable person ever want to talk with Clyde? It would just make me feel so much less of a depraved whore. I want him to talk to me so badly. Half the time he doesn’t even say anything, and the other half of the time, it’s all, ‘Oh, Craig’s been talking about developing an art gallery, and he’d like me to help foot the bill, so if I do, what do you think I should have myself listed as on the statements?’ I just don’t care, you know, and it’s driving me nuts—”
“The story, Kyle,” I gritted out. “Tell me the story, please.”
“You’re getting very snippy, dear. Something’s the matter. What’s the matter?”
I sighed. “Please tell me the end of your story.”
“Oh.” He coughed. “Um, the end. Well, he was drifting off asleep and I was attempting to get him not to. And the phone rings, and it’s his mother. Apparently she slipped, and took a tumble at the bottom of the staircase. It was only a couple of stairs, and he said she said she was entirely fine, but she was sufficiently startled to motivate him to run home. I said it was appalling that he’d wake up and hop out of bed and run off to his mother, but when I’m naked next to him with his seed dripping down my thighs, he just rolls over and falls asleep. Am I insane, or is there a problem with that?”
“Oh, you’re not insane.”
“Thanks! I appreciate that. In any case, I became very angry and picked up a loafer from the floor and threw it at his face. Made a nice long gash, too. … And it will definitely scar! I hope his mother asks him how he cut himself and he has to dance around the issue of enraging some male lover who launched a shoe at him.”
“Yeah, that’s a good story.”
“And as he left I realized I’d best take your advice and stop sleeping with people for a while.” A grin of unparalleled satisfaction bled across his face. “Are you proud of me?”
I nodded. “Yes, very good.” I wanted to get up and hug him, but I was certain there was no point.
And Kyle was still talking: “The only problem is, I keep having sex dreams about him! Isn’t that ludicrous? It’s that godforsaken cock of his, it keeps haunting my slumber. Last night I dreamt that it was completely detached from him — almost as if it were a dildo, you know, but consecutively it was still Clyde’s cock. It’s odd how that happens in dreams, but it must happen to you, too, at times. In any case, that fat old thing, in my dream I was practically impaled on it, and when I awoke I had the hardest erection in forever. But I wasn’t sure if celibacy means I have to abstain from masturbation, too. Luckily it went down after I went to the loo. Do you think next time I should just indulge myself?”
“I don’t know, darling.” I frowned. I wished I had another whisky, but Kyle would be offended if I got up in the middle of his rant. “Do whatever.”
“Do you ever dream of cocks?” he asked. “It is the strangest genre, isn’t it? I wish I had a psychoanalyst at times simply to see the scandalized look on his face when I told him these things.”
I sniffed. “You assume your therapist would be male.”
He grinned. “Stanley, are you accusing me of subtle male chauvinism?”
“Kyle, my darling, I am outright calling you a misogynist.”
He laughed, and it delighted me. He threw his head back, chest heaving, hands clasped. “You’re right! I am!” I knew he found it funny because it was true. He wiped his eyes, still chuckling. “And now I suppose I’m an abstinent misogynist.”
“I guess so.”
He shrugged. “So be it. What were you drinking? Oh, how stupid of me to ask. I am going to get myself a cider.” He picked up one of my empty glasses. “Want another?”
“If you don’t mind,” I said.
Returning with a pint of cider and a third whisky for me, Kyle’s expression had dimmed considerably. “I don’t get you tonight,” he said, sitting down, before pausing to take a first sip of his drink. I tried to remain stony-faced as he wiped his lips. “Something is obviously off. I know you like to play like you know everything about me and you’re a great riddle, but I assure you, I can tell when you’re miserable just by looking at you.”
It took a moment for me to assess the veracity of his claim. In one way, each moment we’d spent together, hours upon hours of them since our youths, bled together into one great chorus of misery. Did he have any idea?
“If nothing else, you must owe me some excuse for refusing to come to my flat to have a drink on Saturday. And to call Butters instead of telling me yourself! You are either doing a poor job of hiding something, or incensed at me. But I don’t think you would have shown up today if you were, would you? … Mmm, no. Now that I think about it, you would, simply to make a point. Stanley, I am trying. You haven’t even brushed your hair—”
“I never brush my hair,” I broke in to say. “I’m not you. I don’t care what my hair looks like.”
“Well, you usually at least try to arrange it with your hands so it has some semblance of order. But you’re right, you’re very butch, which is why it bothers me that you’re being evasive. Just tell me. Is it money? I put these on your tab” — he pointed to the drinks on the table; mine was almost half gone — “but I can pay it off. I can’t feel good about feeling miserable if you’re actually unhappy. It doesn’t work for me that way!”
I took first a deep breath, and then I finished my drink in one fluid gulp, for courage. Kyle was looking at me, hands slack on the table, pint virtually untouched. The arch of his mouth was slouching in genuine concern, his eyes open wide and concerned. Kyle might fake smoking to impress a suitor — as he had Christophe at the beginning of the summer, which was only a few months prior and felt years past — or interest in some bloke’s stamp collection, or force himself to recite basic sentiments in German. But he was no good about outright feigning concern.
“Gary has passed away,” I said, slowly, as if I were speaking to a child, not a 36-year-old man.
“My goodness!” Kyle’s face has scrunched up with the unpredictable awkwardness of someone who does not know how he should feel, but is still surprised, and probably a bit unnerved to find that he doesn’t quite care. “I’m so sorry.” From across the table, he took my hand. “When and how?”
“This week.” I sighed, despite myself. Part of me did feel a bit better. “His mother called me. He was ill, I don’t know with what exactly because I didn’t want to upset her with questions. I was just caught off guard, you know and — well, I suppose I was grateful she had called.”
“I didn’t realize you were still on speaking terms! Are you going to the funeral? When is it?”
Ignoring the matter of the funeral I said, “We were not on speaking terms. She had my telephone number, obviously. I had Gary’s but I never used it.”
“Oh, Stanley.” Kyle abandoned his seat to join me at the banquette. He put his arms around me, burrowing his cheek into my neck, giving me the barest hint of a kiss by brushing his lips against my cheek. “I’m so sorry,” he whispered.
“I know.” I managed to return the gesture, locking my hands into his sides. “Don’t be.”
“My god, I am, though! How do you feel?”
“Sad, I suppose.” I shrugged into our embrace. “But not very sad. He was already a ghost in so many ways.”
“You don’t know what killed him,” Kyle repeated.
“She said an ‘immunodeficiency,’ that was her word. But I don’t care what he died from. It’s unfortunate enough to know he’s gone.”
“Maybe my brother would know.” Kyle sat up, straightening his posture away from my body, the sad little cluster of dejection we had morphed into. He brightened. “I don’t want to let you alone. You need someone to care for you. When will you decide about the funeral?”
I pinched my nose. “I don’t know. I don’t think I shall go.”
“Oh, but he was important to you—”
If Kyle had been this interested in or concerned about Gary when Gary had been not only alive, but living with me, perhaps Kyle would have been in the position to get a call from Gary’s mother himself, so he could have interrogated her personally.
“Kyle, I don’t know. Darling, please don’t make me deal with it.”
“But you have to! Death is not a fleeting thing. It’s terrifying!”
“No, it is exactly a fleeting thing. It’s we who make it into something terrifying.”
He crawled back onto me, reattaching to my flank and curling his hand into my shirt. “I’m quite free this week, except lunch on Wednesday is with the bitches from Oxo. One of them propositioned me in the loo last week, did I mention?”
I shook my head.
“Well, one of them did. And he looked okay, honestly, but even a week ago I kept thinking I had better salvage things with Clyde, and you know I detest that sort of thing because it makes me feel like a trollop. Maybe I would have taken him up this week, but this celibacy idea is too alluring at the moment. And, well — he’s married, of course. And that simply won’t do for me.”
“Maybe you should give him my number. I’m still trying to be sexually active.”
In my arms, I felt him tense. “No, that’s all right,” he said icily. “But I do have an idea. Would you like to come to dinner on Friday? Assuming you’re not at a funeral.”
“Love to,” I said.
“Oh, good. I’ll see you before then, of course. But just for reference, sun down is about 8:30, I don’t know specifically — so expect I suppose to arrive about 8 or so, with or without me.”
“Oh, no.” I groaned. “Kyle, really.”
“What? It’s been a long time since you’ve seen my parents. I mean, rather than in stealth at the opera. And I haven’t been to dinner in weeks and my mother is close to slaughtering me. And Ike will be there!”
“Oh, he’ll be in town?” I asked, managing to restrain myself from slapping him for tricking me.
“Yeah, he will, but — but I’m mostly concerned about you. I don’t want you to be alone this week, Stanley. You need to be around people.”
Somehow I felt this was the last thing I needed.
~
Kenny and I had been meeting at the Old Street coffee shop before our liaisons. At first I was deeply suspicious of his motivations, and suspected that Eric was somehow the invisible hand pulling the strings in this tryst. This was undoubtedly Kyle’s influence — he had made it his hobby to doubt Eric’s motivations, scorn his actions. I suppose the cynical answer to the question no one had asked — because no one knew — as to why I kept showing up to meet Kenny was that I wanted to sleep with him.
But I didn’t — not this week, at least. I woke up in the morning hardly aware of what day it was. I hadn’t bought a newspaper in days, had turned in my review of Death in Venice at some point — it was short enough, 400 words, half of which was a summary. Perhaps I would be paid soon. It didn’t matter. I found some stale digestives and a hard-boiled egg in the pantry and ate them slowly, standing by the windows, looking out onto Hoxton Square. Below me, squirrels chased across the grass, savoring the end of the summer.
It was raining, and I could not muster the enthusiasm to rally for an afternoon of illicit sex. I considered not meeting Kenny at all, and did try to talk myself out of it. What had I to lose by failing to show? Certainly for all his blustering about being in a position of power, Kenny had no recourse if I decided to stand him up. I was free to be with whomever I wanted whenever it pleased me; he had only the eight hours of Eric’s workday to run around charging men for sex.
But meet him I did, albeit belatedly, habit proving a comfort. “You’re tardy,” he said playfully, swatting me on the shoulder when I found him sitting in an armchair in the back of the shop. “Tick-tock, Stanley.”
“Yeah, well.” I shrugged.
“Buy me a coffee?”
“I suppose.”
I bought myself a latte and Kenneth a black coffee, thin and hot. He liked it with sugar but not milk, and he made me watch him crumble seven stale sugar cubes into his drink.
“That’ll rot your teeth,” I warned.
“I don’t care anymore! I’ve got someone to pay for my dentist now. Maybe Eric might get them fixed.”
“How do you mean?”
He shrugged and took his first sip of coffee.
“Have you considered going to university?”
Kenny set his cup down. “I’d have to finish school first, wouldn’t I?”
“How much education have you had?”
His brow wrinkled. “I left when I was 14,” he confessed. “I would have left earlier, but my mother thought I should stay. I don’t know why. When I turned 14 I one day realized, I’m not book smart. That, and I got caught being ‘inappropriate’ — so they said — behind the wrestling mats with a girl two years up from me. So I left then. Yeah, I was 14.”
“That was a long time ago, I reckon.”
“Oh, no, it wasn’t so long. It was only—” He halted himself, before continuing, “Only like 10 years ago or thereabouts.”
“I’m much older than you and 10 years feels like ages ago to me.”
“What does age have to do with it?”
“I’ve lived longer, so time moves faster for me.”
“Oh.”
I finished my latte before he finished his coffee, and scanned the crowd in the shop. There was the usual complement of lunch-break suits, popping in to cottage; there was also a steady contingent of younger artists, all of whom had sullen, lost looks on their faces. They sat together but did not speak, nursing a single mug of watered-down espresso for hours, scribbling in notebooks while they sat spread-legged, both the boys and the girls. Their hair was uniformly ratty and they mostly wore gray. One boy with hennaed hair in spikes wore purple boots with pointed toes and thick black platforms.
Kenny caught me staring at the cluster of youths. “You’re checking out the redhead,” he said, snapping his fingers in my face. “You know, I might be here for the money, but it is possible to hurt my feelings.”
“Oh, yeah, right,” I hissed. “And how do you think Eric feels? Paying you for companionship, supporting you, and you’re here to make it with me.”
“Well, Eric doesn’t know. I don’t make eyes at people right in front of him.”
I sat back, sighing. “It’s irrelevant, actually. It’s been lovely, but look at the time.” I shook my fist to indicate to him that I meant to be getting on with my day, whatever that might consist of. “Cheers, Ken. Thanks for meeting me.”
Predictably, he followed me out of the store and out onto the street, where he tugged at the back of my shirt to halt me. “Wait just a minute!”
“What?” I stopped, throwing my hands up, whipping around to face him.
“Aren’t we, um.” He was feeling around in the back pocket of his trousers for a cigarette. Maybe he wasn’t used to rejection? “You can’t just walk away from me, you know.”
“I can’t?”
“Well, no.”
Another pair of dark-clothed wraiths walked by us — this a pair, the girl round and stout with layers of white chalk on her cheeks, the scarlet grease on her lips carefully applied. The boy was tall, too tall, with a fat nose that reminded me something of Kyle’s before it was broken. The girl’s fishnet shirt caught on the lintel as her companion held the door open for her, and she brushed past without noticing, or at least without stopping. Duly, the netting burst as she disappeared into the store. Kenny eyed them with suspicion, and I stood with my arms crossed.
When the door was again shut, Kenny said, “I wouldn’t have come if I’d known you weren’t going to follow through.”
“Wouldn’t you?” I asked.
His cheeks turned pink. “I am trying to make a living!”
“Your living is Eric’s concern, not mine. If you’d prefer to follow me back to my flat, feel free. I’m going to try to write something, but you’re welcome to keep me company.” Even as I said this I was picturing him stomping away; I would duck back into the shop and chat up the red-haired artist with the purple shoes.
Kenny looked pained, wrinkling his nose while he contemplated his options. While he did this, I crossed my arms and tried to convey impatience.
“Okay,” he said, finally. “Let’s go back to yours, then.”
He wasn’t over for long, but long enough for me to make both of us a cup of tea. We sat on the sofa, the steam wafting off of his beverage wilting the tips of his fringe, so that they matted against his forehead ever so slightly.
“I’m not often rejected,” he said after a few tentative sips. “And I don’t usually drink tea at all, really.”
“I suggest you begin if you want to seem a natural Englishman.” I smiled, to try to bolster his mood, but the look of dismay on his face could not be banished. “Oh, really, it hasn’t anything to do with you. This has been an odd week for me, to say the least.”
“Oh, has it?” Kenny fidgeted uncomfortably on my sofa, kicking the trunk that I used for a coffee table rhythmically. I’m sure he wasn’t aware he was doing it. “Are you going to elaborate?”
“You know, I don’t really owe you an explanation.”
“Yes, you do!” he spat. “Because I came all the way to meet you, and I’ll be damned if I leave your flat without getting what I want!”
“Well, what do you want?” I asked. “Money? I can give you 60 quid, if you want it.” A lie. I really couldn’t. At least, I shouldn’t. Paying him for sex, that was one thing. Paying him to boost his self-esteem, that was simply idiotic.
He shook his head. “That’s not what I want.”
“Oh.” Suddenly, he looked less haughty to me, and more vulnerable. The ratty hems of his trousers brushed against my furniture, clashing with my lacquer princess phone. It seemed he was actually here to have sex with me — an idea I’d not considered. Suddenly I felt sorry for him, but as I didn’t want to sleep with him, I felt the best I could do was explain.
Predictably, he wasn’t sure what to say. “Sorry, I guess,” he mumbled, throwing the hood of his thin sweatshirt over his damp hair. “Next time just say so.”
“Well, let us hope there is not a next time.” At the door, I kissed him goodbye on the cheek. “Whoring is not quite the romantic calling you envisioned, is it? Have you found some greater truth to life yet?”
He looked at me as if I were mad, rubbing the spot on his cheek where my lips had been. After a moment he said, slowly, “I think people are the great truth to life, and death hurts less if we are together.”
“That is very poetic,” I said. “But alas, you are someone’s, and I am grieving. Go home to Eric. Make him feel as if he’s getting something for his money.”
“You are going to go back to the coffee shop and fuck that stupid ghost boy with the hideous hair and shoes,” he replied.
I didn’t deny a thing, just kissed him on the other cheek as he departed — because, of course, he was correct. A half hour later I was back in that shop, stealthily waiting to corner that pale specimen when he was away from his friends, trying to draw him to my corner with long glances and careful fingers at my lips.
If Token was something exotic out of Conrad, this miserable boy with deep cheekbones was Percy Bysshe Shelley, or maybe the opening chapter of Wuthering Heights, in which the tone is gothic and staid, like the stale air of a sealed crypt. The henna in his hair was so like Kyle’s at university, except not wild and curly, but manipulated to perfection. The color, though — the color was just perfect. Shades of red on top of shades of red, but this boy had laced black in, too. I stared him down until we locked gazes, and then he could barely focus on whatever he was scribbling in his notebook.
At last he approached me on my overstuffed throne in the corner of the shop, scowling — my trench coat unbelted, hair mussed, and dick throbbing.
“You’re staring at me,” he said, speaking in the most joyless, effected little tone. “You left with that boy and came back to stare at me.”
“Guilty,” I admitted. I decided to test the waters a bit: “But you’re so carefully cultivated, I should think you want girls to stare at you.”
In a jerky motion, he dug into the pocket of his (incredibly tight) trousers for a cigarette. “Why would I want girls to stare at me?” he asked. “I find traditional ideas about fairytale love make me nauseated. And besides, going with girls is so conformist. Are you a fucking conformist?” As he lit his cigarette he glared down at me, dangling that little code word for me to reach toward.
“Of course not,” I said, satisfied with myself. In my mind he was a boy, but I was thinking it lightly — he looked very mid-twenties, and I could see underneath the very thin, powdery layer of foundation he wore that his cheeks were pitted with acne scars.
“I don’t know that we have anything in common, though.” He exhaled with such grace that in his fingers, the cigarette seemed to fuse with his anatomy. “I cannot embrace the lies that the fucking government wants the citizens of Britain to eat from their fucking trough. If you want some kind of fairytale thing I suggest you look elsewhere. Life is pain, and that is why I write.”
“I write because life is long and I need something to fill it with. You see, I recently found out that my ex died, and I don’t think I can make it to the funeral. So certainly I understand pain, and I think we have a great deal in common. Do you think you need some kind of filling, as well? Because I think I can assist you in that regard.”
The cigarette was shedding ashes right onto the cement floor of the coffee shop. He fidgeted from side to side, not knowing how to stand still. “I think I might appreciate that, yeah.” He hunched down to speak at my level. “I have to finish up here. Meet me at the center of the roundabout in half an hour.”
He went back to his friends, and I slipped out quietly. The sex, I’m afraid, was mediocre, and he cried afterward, choking out something cliché about never having been with a man before. When I offered to take him to the Duke of Buckingham for a drink, he snapped at me, “Like I want to go drinking after I let you fuck me like some kind of conformist!” It seemed he was a very confused fellow, and I left dispirited, only to return home and drink a bottle of sherry and fall asleep on the sofa. It was only 10 p.m. I was awakened at 7 the next morning when I heard the church bells ringing across the square, the empty bottle sticking into my side.
Continued here.
Author:
sekrit_omgRating: R, this chapter
Pairings: S/K; multiple others
Summary: A 1980s British historical AU in which Stan meets a prostitute and sighs a lot.
Author's notes: a) Homage to the literary gay fiction of the 1980s, specifically Hollinghurst. b) I'm not British. c) This is so, so AU.
By the way, if anyone is interested in reading this in one part, with all the correct formatting, the entire fic is on FF.net here.
To say I awoke in the morning would be a misstatement, as I’d spent whatever was left of the night drifting off into a shallow sleep and then waking suddenly to the realization that a man I’d once considered myself all but married to was dead. I was sad, but not heartbroken — discomforted. All writers — all Englishmen — understand grief. Death is in our genes, clinging virally to our tissues. Our greatest monuments, churches and castles, are paved with bones and if the centuries of tourists’ shoes can erase the names from the markers, the memory of death cannot be vanquished from our minds. We might try to fight it, propping up a rigid caste system to encourage the fantasy that our social conventions can best biological functions, but we know we are wrong.
What’s more, gay men are practically born grieving. All of our greatest treasures made their names by dying. Gary had simply joined that legacy, and if I mourned him now, I was merely lamenting that we could never have had what I wanted — a domestic life legally acknowledged by the state, blond-haired children, and the intermingling of financial assets. Gary was the only man who’d ever stirred this in me, the only man with whom I had ever been more interested in having babies than having sex. Which is not to say that I was not interested in having sex with him; I was, and I did — at great length, and frequently. Likewise, I do not mean that I have forever been disinclined to have a domestic life with any other man, particularly Kyle, merely that the love I felt for Kyle was ever-present, a rollicking tide of romance that I wished to crest over me, as it had overshadowed my life. The thought of Kyle’s love was too important to be relegated to mimicry of the heterosexual world.
As it happens, my first novel had been about Kyle; my second, Token. Of course, neither of these things was literally about the man who’d brought the work out of me, but rather, crudely edited stand-ins, bits and pieces I hacked off from Kyle and Token respectively and remolded to fit the point of my tale. Each of these fictions was indulgence: For me, the indulgence in an imaginary relationship with a man I wanted more control over; for the audience, indulgence in shameless erotica. These novels were nothing if not pornography with a hefty dose of schlock (one of those words I’d picked up at the Broflovski dinner table when I was 19 years old) — much pining and wondrously vivid descriptions of men’s (and boys’) body parts, assessing male torsos like they were dogs at show, or pedigreed horses, if pedigreed horses were meant to be masturbated about.
Kyle became, in my text, not a voluptuous auburn-haired creature with a sharp tongue, but a tow-headed runt who was basically a woman save for his perfect, average, blond-vanilla penis and hairless pillow of a scrotum. He had Kyle’s brain, to be sure, but as part of the surgical transformation I removed every trace of masculinity. He did not start arguments but carefully avoided them; he did not defy his family passively but rather, suffered under their fists.
This fictional Kyle I named Benjamin, and I became the narrator, tormented by an awaking into homosexual love. My protagonist was not a virgin (though Benjamin was), as he’d been sleeping for some time with his busty girlfriend — a pale blonde version of Wendy. Ridiculous, really, as the book devolved into unrealistic sex scenes that followed long periods of high drama and shrieking. The action was begun at school and ended at Benjamin’s sunny country home, modeled more on Brideshead than not, although a trip or two out to Blenheim Palace got me thinking about good, specific details. In the end of the story, fictional-me came to terms with his homosexuality and professed love to fictional-Kyle. Fictional-me and fictional-Kyle lived happily ever after in a quaint Yorkshire cottage, where fictional-me painted, and fictional-Kyle kept house, his family’s noble fortune keeping us happy with no children to support. (Being gay and all.) In the post-script, fictional-Kyle passed away from liver cancer. My editor kindly suggested I cut it, and I took his advice. The 405-page book contained 144 pages of pure gay smut, and sold reasonably well for that type of thing.
Spurred by this unexpected modest success, I completed a second novel about a quite different fictional-me, and fictional-Token. Fictional-Token was the son of a wealthy Indian industrialist who had been knighted; our fictional selves trolled around France on holiday fucking unguardedly in the back rooms of Paris nightclubs and the beaches of Marseilles. Loads and loads of sex, and I have reason to believe Token never even read it. Whereas I took a denialist route with the first book, framing the story around the self-acceptance trials of a young man that I never personally went through, the follow-up was all a plotless devolution into sex and flowing, sparkling champagne poured over ripe fruit in exotic, pricey France. Kyle and I had been to Marseilles in anticipation of my drafting this monstrosity; it is amazing what one can convince publishers to finance in the pursuit of bad literature. In any case, that one I was ashamed of. Would Token have recognized himself in the heavy-lidded young man fictional-me found himself romanced by? Doubtful. He would have been too distracted by my overuse of adverbs to care.
For a bit I’d coasted on the royalties — I was quite popular in America, by all accounts, which seemed from a distance to be a nation of hungry queers looking to devour something erotic and foreign. The fact that people over there liked my writing really didn’t help my opinion of the place, although I did receive an offer to actually go to New York City and read the thing aloud at some bookstore. “I’ll join you if you go,” Kyle had offered, but by then I’d met Gary, and in private I felt that a small bit of America had come to me at long last. When I was with Gary I did not write anything of substance, and after Gary left I was too busy cottaging to care.
So I’d written two bad books — and I knew they were bad because Gary read them both aloud, one after another, on our quiet evenings in my flat. In his effusive, flyover tone my words sounded dead — dull. Yes, all the emotion was there, the pathos of wanting Kyle and needing Kyle and having to do without Kyle; fictional-Token was harder to bear. Often after reading an arousing scene Gary would set the book down on the floor and very gingerly take my cock into his mouth by first balancing it on his lower lip and then letting it slip back until I was all but dripping down his esophagus.
That was the problem with dating a gay virgin — he found my writing to be enlightening, a massive turn-on, much the same way that he found me to be a revelation. But I was only an introduction, an overture before the libretto began. There was no reason to dislike my books, because there was nothing to judge them against. I took him in out of the cold, quite literally, and gave him the thing Colorado lacked: nakedness in all its forms.
Say what you will about the mountains but I cannot think of them as blank or uncomplicated. There are layers there, generations of the life of this planet compressed into hardness. My father went to the Rockies to consult on some seismic activity when I was 5, and brought me back a chunk of striated rock no larger than my palm is now. “That’s history there, Stanley,” he said to me when I unwrapped my rock, tied with cord and brown craft paper. “Each of those bands is 100 millennia.” At my parents’ home in Oxford atop my wobbly adolescent bookcase that rock sits still in a fossilized room, waiting for me to go home again. I know why Gary wanted to be with me; I never knew why he couldn’t stay.
And now it was irrelevant because he was dead.
~
On Saturday morning I panicked and called Butters at his flat. I knew he would be there, that no man had drawn him away from his television set and faithful, hulking bulldog. He cried “Good morning!” so cheerfully I pulled the phone away from my ear while the words reverberated. “Hello?” I heard his tinny voice ask as I drew the receiver back to me. “Who’s this?”
“Miss B, good morning.”
“Stanley! Oh, hello, good morning. Lovely day. Do you see how sunny it is? We’re just back from Southwark Park” — we being Butters and Desdemona, the bulldog — “and I was about to have a cup of tea and eat cakes. It’s so unexpected to hear from you, really, because generally I consider you the type of fellow who’s occupied on Saturday mornings.”
“Thanks for the frankness,” I said. I didn’t consider this amusing. “Glad your morning’s going well. I’ve a favor to ask you, actually.”
“Oh, anything.”
“Would you please convey to Kyle my apologies? I won’t be able to make it this evening.”
A sudden intake of air, and Butters made an audible little huh noise. “But it’s Saturday, you know. What are you going to do if not go out dancing?” Which was a ridiculous question, really, because it was quite rare that any of us actually danced.
“Most likely stay in and have a quiet night.”
“Well, at least come to Kyle’s and have a drink with us!”
“No, thank you. I’d prefer to be on my own this evening.”
“Stanley.” Butters sounded something only short of hysterical. “Is everything all right? I can’t imagine—”
“I’m fine, Butters, and you will be too. Just please give Kyle my regrets and have a lovely time without me this evening. All right?”
“Do you have a date?” Butters asked.
“Excuse me?”
“Are you seeing someone? Just bring him along.”
“I’m not seeing anyone, Butters, I just don’t want to hang around a bunch of drunken queens in a dark space with loud music tonight. Surely you can understand.” He most certainly could understand, that I was sure of, but of course I hadn’t told him why. No matter.
I made myself a cup of tea. I set it on the trunk doubling as a coffee table, and without so much as pausing I grabbed the photograph of myself and Gary off of the wall. For about two hours I sat on the sofa and stared at it while my tea grew cold. I wasn’t sure how to classify my feelings; I wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination happy, and yet the last thing I felt like doing was crying. I hadn’t really missed him since I’d last seen him; if anything, I felt like something of an anthropologist, studying my petrified feelings from afar, recollecting memories in the vein of archived ephemera. How does one mourn a person he’s no longer in love with and hasn’t seen for three years?
I decided to go swimming. For the longest time, so long I did not know how long it truly was, I splashed back and forth in the lap pool, kicking my way across chlorinated turquoise waters; by the time I trudged back to the showers the skin across my feet and hands was pinched into little faces, so angry I could barely feel the club floor underneath my toes. In the showers, I spent minutes lathering the lavender-scented shampoo into a fine froth in my hands, and before I’d rinsed my hair a short man with bony shoulders had appeared behind me and begun stroking my abdomen, snaking around my flanks and hips to the front.
“I was watching you swim laps,” he said into my ear. “You look like you’ve had a good workout.”
Grasping his hand, I lowered his reach, enticing him further with a growling, “I could use a second one,” clutching both of our fingers around the weight of my testicles. He groped a bit and kissed my neck.
I spun to face him. His hair was a preternatural blond — not dirty like Kenny’s, but yellowish and gold, darker than Miss B’s had been in her heyday, but reminiscent of Monet’s haystacks at noon. It was matted with wetness and droplets of water were forming at the ends of the tapered strands. That was his distinguishing feature — I could tell even in the shower that he had perfect hair, effortless and easy and wonderful. Some men, men like me, had well-enough hair that looked acceptable — I never fussed with my hair, and it never looked anything more than good. This man’s dripping locks formed a frame around his face that made me want to put my palms on his cheeks and kiss him — which I did, standing under the cooling jets of the shower at my club. This sort of thing happened in the showers all the time, but at this moment there happened to be no one nearby.
“My place or yours?” he asked, lips still against mine, water streaming into my eyes so I couldn’t see anything.
“Mine,” I said, which was a symptom of all the things affecting my better senses at the time. Tricking can often be a draw, and going back to someone’s flat puts you in dangerous territory — the unknown itself can be a massive threat. But it’s downright stupid to show a man you’ve met in the showers (or a toilet or a park) where you live. One never knows who wants to make it a habit.
Nevertheless, I’d given my answer, and we went to my flat without talking or so much as looking at each other. He followed and I led, and once in my bedroom we snogged for quite some time, the afternoon decaying into a purple evening in late summer. In London sometimes there are still Anglican church bells to be heard in the distance, calling worshippers to prayer or signaling the time. Perhaps it was fitting that my local church was in fact Roman Catholic, and on this day I heard the judgment of the bells noisily reprimanding me from nearby, only across the square, as I fingered some unknown man.
We spoke little, and things proceeded accordingly, up to the moment when I was about to don a rubber. He grasped my wrist, eyes entreating me to stop. I wondered if I should tell him what I wanted was emotional protection, a barrier between myself and really having to be with someone, literally leaving traces of myself inside of him or, much worse, vice-versa.
“Oh, all right.” I tossed the rubber into the sheets, intellectually exhausted. “You like it raw?”
He shook his head. “I don’t like it at all, actually.”
This was hardly what I needed to hear. An erection was insisting itself inside my trembling fist, but it scarcely felt like my own. It felt detached, unrecognizable.
He tilted my chin up, flashing me a bittersweet smile. “You all right? We don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”
Brushing his hand away, I laughed. “Oh, I thought you didn’t want to.”
“Oh, I want to.” He laughed to himself, steely and collected. “Sorry, I should have been clearer. I just prefer we don’t go all the way. I reserve that privilege for my better half, if anyone.”
I nodded, because I understood. We resumed kissing.
~
“This was refreshing and odd,” he said as we sat down at a pub. I was drinking whisky again, not because I was thirsty but for the statement I hoped it would make to my latest companion. He and I paid separately for our drinks (perhaps to underscore the decided absence of romance) and took a table in the back, underneath a shadowy, Victorian overhang of iron curled in fleur-de-lis. The walls were scalloped burgundy textile, discolored with tobacco staining where it met the wainscoting, sheathed in recent panes of glass. The preservation of history — it was an inclination I was sympathetic to, and yet at the moment all I wanted was to shut my eyes and curl up into a ball.
Witnessing no response from me, he continued: “I don’t usually do that kind of thing. Step out, I mean. I suppose I just saw you alone, and couldn’t help myself.”
It was a rare occasion that I deigned to share a post-coital beverage with anyone whose name I didn’t know, but given the circumstances, I’d gone along. It occurred to me while we were shuffling through the streets, rough-skinned youths pushing past us on their way to the Old Street Tube, that I should ask why he was so eager to recommend a pub in my area. I’d never been to the Bunch of Thistles, but it seemed a decent enough place — mixed company, but just fine.
“Flattering,” I said over my glass. “I don’t suppose I’m the first one you’ve used that line on.”
He sighed, frowning. “I never lie,” he said. “Honesty is the most important quality. Emotional honesty, factual honesty, the spirit of honesty — I demand it from everyone. And you should demand it, too — from your lovers, your friends, your teachers, your government. Honesty is the cornerstone of society. And censorship is the suppression of honesty.”
There was a tone to his voice that told me he’d practiced these words — as if they were lifted from a play or a movie.
“So, how would your ‘better half’ take it if he knew we’d just…” I rolled my eyes. No need to finish the thought.
My date shook his head. “He’d probably ask me if I enjoyed it, or if you might like to join us some evening.”
“No, thank you.” I’d never been one for threesomes. Sometimes they tended to happen, in the back of a bookstore or some really filthy cottage. The backrooms at Camp were notorious for this — it was even more prevalent 10 years ago, when the idea of erotic excess was fresh and gay sex was finally legal, at least in name. Then it had been novel to grasp for everything one’s little hands could hold, literally and figuratively. The very pursuit of shoving as much or as many into every last orifice became religious itself. By the mid-1970s, I was living with Gary, or he was living with me, and the idea of fucking multiple men at once began to seem disingenuous. The joy of sex had always been, at least for me, in making a connection with one lover, reveling in him — and moving on. But in that moment, there is only him.
My trick was looking at me with those earnest eyes, perfect coif taunting me with its embodiment of some kind of solid domestic relationship. “Tell your boyfriend three-way fucking’s not for me,” I repeated. “Then I might have to do something rash like learn your name.”
“It’s Gregory.” His voice was so warm I wanted to hit him. Instead I drank whisky. “I say, is it a habit of yours to make it with strangers on a regular basis without learning their names? I enjoyed it, mind you, so it’s nothing to me if you don’t, but it’s simply safer to find out these sorts of things. If nothing else it’s how you might make new friends. And it’s potentially deadly to fuck strangers whose names you can’t be bothered to learn, Stanley. Or is it Stan? Whichever you prefer. I’m not picky, and I do hate to be rude.”
Of course, he now had my attention. “Who are you?” I gasped. “And why do you know my name?”
“Your name, dear? I know it because I read it off of the Oxford diploma on the wall, and the paycheck you left on the nightstand, from the Telegraph. Then, of course, I remembered reading your byline on piece of that gossipy nuisance about the Tetley heir, which led me to recall a novel you published about some kind of erotic odyssey through France. I didn’t read it, but my friend Chris did. Then again, he is Gallic, and practically breathes sex. Are you all right? You’re looking at me like I’m a stalker.”
I nodded, and shook it off: “It doesn’t seem too horridly ridiculous to come to that conclusion!” I snapped.
“Well, I’m not stalking you, I’m afraid. I’ve seen you around, milling around Hoxton Square and that coffee shop on Old Street. But I only made the connection when I saw you in the showers.”
“You’re not reassuring me in the least!”
“Calm down. I assure you, I’m an upstanding fellow. I’m a politician, which is how I’m good with names and to a lesser extent, faces. In fact, I am your MP. Maybe you’ve voted for me? Gregory—”
“Stop!” Before he could even get out his last time, I had cut him off. “Your friend,” I demanded. “Your ‘better half.’ What’s his name?”
“It’s Chris,” he said. “Short for Christophe. You seem nervous, dear.” His fingers were laced atop the table so serenely that it took all my strength not to throw the end of my drink in his face. “Don’t be nervous. I believe we’ve just had a misunderstanding. We’re all friends here, Stanley. Or do you prefer Stan?”
“I prefer neither,” I hissed, getting up. I threw a couple of coins down on the table for the barmaid. “This never happened.”
He cocked an eyebrow at me. “I think you’re being rash.”
“Rash? You’re practically a socialist and you’re calling me rash?”
“So you have heard of me,” he said, in a weary tone that implied this happened to him all the time.
“I’ve only heard that you’re single-handedly dismantling the British Empire.”
“I meant to leave politics out of it,” he said. “Come on, we had a lovely time tonight. Don’t let’s argue about that.”
“I don’t vote,” I announced. “Have a lovely evening.”
As I hurried away from the pub, I felt slightly ill. The nearer I got to my flat, the more I had managed to talk myself into the idea of taking an extended vacation. By the time I’d barricaded myself inside and collapsed on the sofa, my mind was made up; I would go to Gary’s funeral. And certainly, I would put this unlikely incident out of mind.
~
I visited a travel agent, a shrewish girl with big earrings hanging pendulously from her lobes, ovals of canary against the auburn frizz of her coif. I’d known her for a few years now, but hadn’t been in for some time, having traveled no place since Kyle and I returned from Thailand. We talked about vapid things for a while; her boyfriend was a hardscrabble mechanic in Tower Hamlets. I didn’t care about the other girl she’d found him with, or the bloody roses he’d given her in apology, but in polite society it’s unacceptable to come off as uncaring. After about 10 minutes of this I told her I needed to get to Colorado in two days’ time.
“A friend has passed,” I said, unsure of what the details would do to the cost of fare. “I’ve decided it’s imperative that I see him off.”
She looked at her chipped nails and looked back at me, citing a price I found ludicrous.
“No, you don’t understand. I have to fly to Denver two days from now, for a funeral. Can’t anything be done about the price?”
“Two days is short notice,” she repeated.
“But my friend has died and all I want is to attend his funeral, not go prancing around the Western hemisphere on holiday.”
“Family member?”
“Ex-lover,” I clarified.
“Condolences,” she said. Somehow she’d transformed from vapid to downright steely. “Wish I could help, mister, but travel costs what it costs, you know.”
I knew.
Unsure of how else to get my hands on the funds, I rang my father, the geology professor who considered me the failure of his loins. To make a case to him I first had to speak with my mother, the gatekeeper, who could not get her clutches on me without further wasting my time with trivialities.
“Your sister’s youngest has got an ear infection,” she reported. “But it’s okay, because she’s got him a prescription for antibiotics. Can you imagine a life without antibiotics? It was like that while I was growing up, you know. Now the doctors, anything that goes wrong they just hand out antibiotics. I had German measles when I was quite young, and no one ever prescribed me any sort of medications.”
“Well, that’s because German measles is a virus.”
“I don’t see what the difference is,” she replied. “You can cure anything lately, just anything. And doctors just prescribe antibiotics no matter what it is. You can barely take a breath without someone diagnosing you with a virus and giving you antibiotics or a jab for whatever it is. Frankly I think medicine is an overextended field. Lord knows I prefer private surgery to the National Health.”
“Listen, there are no cures for viruses,” I snapped. “You can prevent them but they certainly can’t be cured with antibiotics. People with no money have got to use the National Health, and be damned happy they can get anything instead of struggling through the overfed American plutocracy. Now for the love of god put my father on the phone or I’ll cry.”
If anything has consistently been effective on my mother since my boyhood, it was the threat of crying.
“I need an advance so I can afford a trip to Colorado,” I informed my father. We were not in the habit of saying hello.
“An excellent place, to be sure. You know, I went there once.”
“Right. But I’m not taking a holiday.”
“Well, I have to assume, knowing you, that it couldn’t be business.”
In any other situation I would work with the man, concentrate on lulling him into my point of view. But I felt the immediacy of the situation pressing at me, and decided to plunge into the crux of the issue: “I’ve a funeral over there, and I can’t afford a plane ticket. Would you please lend me the money?”
“Sorry for your loss.”
“Thanks.”
“Who died?”
“Gary. Gary Harrison.”
“Never heard of him.”
“Yes, you have.” It was torture keeping myself from gritting my teeth. “He was my boyfriend.”
“The ginger?”
“No, that’s Kyle. He lives in Notting Hill Gate. I know you know who he is. I’m not talking about Kyle. I’m talking about Gary. Pardon my shortness, but this really isn’t a joking matter. Gary and I were together for three years; I brought him home on several occasions. He had blond hair and I loved him.”
“Ohhhh. Ah, you mean the little missionary.”
“Please don’t make me beg.”
“All right, I’ll spare you the begging: no.”
“But I only need—”
“You don’t need anything, Stanley, you just want. Want want want want want. You want me to give you more of my hard-earned money. Haven’t you heard of the concept of ‘work ethic’? If you want money you’ll have to earn it.”
“This is not some frivolous triviality I’m playing at!” I cried. “Someone I loved is dead and I want to go to his funeral!”
“Love someone who can give me grandchildren,” my father replied. “Then we can talk.”
Deciding the conversation was over, I slammed down the receiver.
~
I sought no further for a ticket to Denver. I had a check on the nightstand, it was true, but I needed that for household expenses, or at least to eat. In any case, I spent Saturday night drinking and all of Sunday morning drinking, steadily, as soon as the sun woke me up. I barely felt anything, neither drunkenness nor sadness, but I did have a vague sense of injustice, as if there were something or someone I should be fighting harder. The truth was, by noon on Sunday I wasn’t sure why I wanted to go to Gary’s funeral, and the immediacy of the crisis had slowed; instead of moping, I decided to swim.
Laps back and forth across the pool did not tire me so much as get me thinking about the tall, dark man in a well-cut pair of little trunks I had seen swanning out to the weight room about the same time I’d been heading for a swim. I found him in the sauna, sweating comfortably on a white, thick towel, and joined him in there, resting a hand on his chest as he breathed. Neither of us spoke. He led me to a bathhouse I’d never visited before, down in the City, not far from Eric’s condo. For a moment as my trick negotiated with the man at the front desk, I wondered if I should not be frightened of whom I might come across in the twisty little streets of the oldest part of London. Instinctively, however, I was soon angling myself into a new, hairless sphincter.
Only at the end did we exchange words: “You were fine,” he said, distracted, observing his own nails as he lay on his back in the tiny, red-lit room. His voice was thick with a Slavic accent, which reminded me of the Cold War, and Gerald Broflovski’s dire-sounding seminars around the dinner table on the nature of the fascist soul. “I’ve had better,” my lover said, twisting the knife.
“You certainly didn’t live up to the way you filled out your trunks,” I spat back. He threw a pot of petroleum at me, and I was grateful to leave.
~
I was convinced that Kyle had run away to elope with Clyde in Shropshire, and meeting him for drinks was probably pointless. Still, I got ready to go, lacing my trainers and sniffing my denim trousers to make sure they didn’t smell like anything that might prove offensive to Kyle, or the future Mrs. Clyde Donovan, whoever decided to show up to the Bucky to meet me.
“You look so awful!” Kyle exclaimed when he saw me. He was late, but I only knew that because I had heard a couple of tourists announce the time when they mistakenly wandered in a few minutes before Kyle. “Stanley, sweetheart, have you brushed your hair lately?” he stuck a hand in my rat’s nest, and attempted to groom out some kind of shape. “My dear, you’re being awfully quiet and your hair looks like something I might have a nightmare about. Are you okay?”
“I don’t know,” I said. Two empty whisky tumblers sat in front of me. I’d even chewed up the leftover ice. “How’s old Clyde?”
“Old Clyde hasn’t been around lately,” Kyle said darkly. Then, his tone became lighter, and he joyfully declared, “His mother fell down the stairs or something. I haven’t seen him since the night after the opera. Actually, we had a tremendous fight. His mother called my flat, which appalled me, because lord knows, I hadn’t given him permission to give anyone my number. And I wouldn’t, just for the record, Stanley — I’d never do that. I don’t like him. He’s just awful, of course, and after we fuck — I cannot even call it making love, as he’s got absolutely no passion for anything — I just beg him to hold me — to anything, actually. I just want him to touch my skin, to tell me he enjoyed it, to look me in the eyes, to—”
I grimaced. “But, back to the story.”
“But back to the story,” he agreed. I glanced down at my crotch, wondering if it was the anti-erotic vibe of death and departure or the lost yearnings of Kyle’s love life that were stifling my erection tonight. “We had just finished, and I was on top of him, in his face, trying to get him to stay awake and talk to me. I know, why would a reasonable person ever want to talk with Clyde? It would just make me feel so much less of a depraved whore. I want him to talk to me so badly. Half the time he doesn’t even say anything, and the other half of the time, it’s all, ‘Oh, Craig’s been talking about developing an art gallery, and he’d like me to help foot the bill, so if I do, what do you think I should have myself listed as on the statements?’ I just don’t care, you know, and it’s driving me nuts—”
“The story, Kyle,” I gritted out. “Tell me the story, please.”
“You’re getting very snippy, dear. Something’s the matter. What’s the matter?”
I sighed. “Please tell me the end of your story.”
“Oh.” He coughed. “Um, the end. Well, he was drifting off asleep and I was attempting to get him not to. And the phone rings, and it’s his mother. Apparently she slipped, and took a tumble at the bottom of the staircase. It was only a couple of stairs, and he said she said she was entirely fine, but she was sufficiently startled to motivate him to run home. I said it was appalling that he’d wake up and hop out of bed and run off to his mother, but when I’m naked next to him with his seed dripping down my thighs, he just rolls over and falls asleep. Am I insane, or is there a problem with that?”
“Oh, you’re not insane.”
“Thanks! I appreciate that. In any case, I became very angry and picked up a loafer from the floor and threw it at his face. Made a nice long gash, too. … And it will definitely scar! I hope his mother asks him how he cut himself and he has to dance around the issue of enraging some male lover who launched a shoe at him.”
“Yeah, that’s a good story.”
“And as he left I realized I’d best take your advice and stop sleeping with people for a while.” A grin of unparalleled satisfaction bled across his face. “Are you proud of me?”
I nodded. “Yes, very good.” I wanted to get up and hug him, but I was certain there was no point.
And Kyle was still talking: “The only problem is, I keep having sex dreams about him! Isn’t that ludicrous? It’s that godforsaken cock of his, it keeps haunting my slumber. Last night I dreamt that it was completely detached from him — almost as if it were a dildo, you know, but consecutively it was still Clyde’s cock. It’s odd how that happens in dreams, but it must happen to you, too, at times. In any case, that fat old thing, in my dream I was practically impaled on it, and when I awoke I had the hardest erection in forever. But I wasn’t sure if celibacy means I have to abstain from masturbation, too. Luckily it went down after I went to the loo. Do you think next time I should just indulge myself?”
“I don’t know, darling.” I frowned. I wished I had another whisky, but Kyle would be offended if I got up in the middle of his rant. “Do whatever.”
“Do you ever dream of cocks?” he asked. “It is the strangest genre, isn’t it? I wish I had a psychoanalyst at times simply to see the scandalized look on his face when I told him these things.”
I sniffed. “You assume your therapist would be male.”
He grinned. “Stanley, are you accusing me of subtle male chauvinism?”
“Kyle, my darling, I am outright calling you a misogynist.”
He laughed, and it delighted me. He threw his head back, chest heaving, hands clasped. “You’re right! I am!” I knew he found it funny because it was true. He wiped his eyes, still chuckling. “And now I suppose I’m an abstinent misogynist.”
“I guess so.”
He shrugged. “So be it. What were you drinking? Oh, how stupid of me to ask. I am going to get myself a cider.” He picked up one of my empty glasses. “Want another?”
“If you don’t mind,” I said.
Returning with a pint of cider and a third whisky for me, Kyle’s expression had dimmed considerably. “I don’t get you tonight,” he said, sitting down, before pausing to take a first sip of his drink. I tried to remain stony-faced as he wiped his lips. “Something is obviously off. I know you like to play like you know everything about me and you’re a great riddle, but I assure you, I can tell when you’re miserable just by looking at you.”
It took a moment for me to assess the veracity of his claim. In one way, each moment we’d spent together, hours upon hours of them since our youths, bled together into one great chorus of misery. Did he have any idea?
“If nothing else, you must owe me some excuse for refusing to come to my flat to have a drink on Saturday. And to call Butters instead of telling me yourself! You are either doing a poor job of hiding something, or incensed at me. But I don’t think you would have shown up today if you were, would you? … Mmm, no. Now that I think about it, you would, simply to make a point. Stanley, I am trying. You haven’t even brushed your hair—”
“I never brush my hair,” I broke in to say. “I’m not you. I don’t care what my hair looks like.”
“Well, you usually at least try to arrange it with your hands so it has some semblance of order. But you’re right, you’re very butch, which is why it bothers me that you’re being evasive. Just tell me. Is it money? I put these on your tab” — he pointed to the drinks on the table; mine was almost half gone — “but I can pay it off. I can’t feel good about feeling miserable if you’re actually unhappy. It doesn’t work for me that way!”
I took first a deep breath, and then I finished my drink in one fluid gulp, for courage. Kyle was looking at me, hands slack on the table, pint virtually untouched. The arch of his mouth was slouching in genuine concern, his eyes open wide and concerned. Kyle might fake smoking to impress a suitor — as he had Christophe at the beginning of the summer, which was only a few months prior and felt years past — or interest in some bloke’s stamp collection, or force himself to recite basic sentiments in German. But he was no good about outright feigning concern.
“Gary has passed away,” I said, slowly, as if I were speaking to a child, not a 36-year-old man.
“My goodness!” Kyle’s face has scrunched up with the unpredictable awkwardness of someone who does not know how he should feel, but is still surprised, and probably a bit unnerved to find that he doesn’t quite care. “I’m so sorry.” From across the table, he took my hand. “When and how?”
“This week.” I sighed, despite myself. Part of me did feel a bit better. “His mother called me. He was ill, I don’t know with what exactly because I didn’t want to upset her with questions. I was just caught off guard, you know and — well, I suppose I was grateful she had called.”
“I didn’t realize you were still on speaking terms! Are you going to the funeral? When is it?”
Ignoring the matter of the funeral I said, “We were not on speaking terms. She had my telephone number, obviously. I had Gary’s but I never used it.”
“Oh, Stanley.” Kyle abandoned his seat to join me at the banquette. He put his arms around me, burrowing his cheek into my neck, giving me the barest hint of a kiss by brushing his lips against my cheek. “I’m so sorry,” he whispered.
“I know.” I managed to return the gesture, locking my hands into his sides. “Don’t be.”
“My god, I am, though! How do you feel?”
“Sad, I suppose.” I shrugged into our embrace. “But not very sad. He was already a ghost in so many ways.”
“You don’t know what killed him,” Kyle repeated.
“She said an ‘immunodeficiency,’ that was her word. But I don’t care what he died from. It’s unfortunate enough to know he’s gone.”
“Maybe my brother would know.” Kyle sat up, straightening his posture away from my body, the sad little cluster of dejection we had morphed into. He brightened. “I don’t want to let you alone. You need someone to care for you. When will you decide about the funeral?”
I pinched my nose. “I don’t know. I don’t think I shall go.”
“Oh, but he was important to you—”
If Kyle had been this interested in or concerned about Gary when Gary had been not only alive, but living with me, perhaps Kyle would have been in the position to get a call from Gary’s mother himself, so he could have interrogated her personally.
“Kyle, I don’t know. Darling, please don’t make me deal with it.”
“But you have to! Death is not a fleeting thing. It’s terrifying!”
“No, it is exactly a fleeting thing. It’s we who make it into something terrifying.”
He crawled back onto me, reattaching to my flank and curling his hand into my shirt. “I’m quite free this week, except lunch on Wednesday is with the bitches from Oxo. One of them propositioned me in the loo last week, did I mention?”
I shook my head.
“Well, one of them did. And he looked okay, honestly, but even a week ago I kept thinking I had better salvage things with Clyde, and you know I detest that sort of thing because it makes me feel like a trollop. Maybe I would have taken him up this week, but this celibacy idea is too alluring at the moment. And, well — he’s married, of course. And that simply won’t do for me.”
“Maybe you should give him my number. I’m still trying to be sexually active.”
In my arms, I felt him tense. “No, that’s all right,” he said icily. “But I do have an idea. Would you like to come to dinner on Friday? Assuming you’re not at a funeral.”
“Love to,” I said.
“Oh, good. I’ll see you before then, of course. But just for reference, sun down is about 8:30, I don’t know specifically — so expect I suppose to arrive about 8 or so, with or without me.”
“Oh, no.” I groaned. “Kyle, really.”
“What? It’s been a long time since you’ve seen my parents. I mean, rather than in stealth at the opera. And I haven’t been to dinner in weeks and my mother is close to slaughtering me. And Ike will be there!”
“Oh, he’ll be in town?” I asked, managing to restrain myself from slapping him for tricking me.
“Yeah, he will, but — but I’m mostly concerned about you. I don’t want you to be alone this week, Stanley. You need to be around people.”
Somehow I felt this was the last thing I needed.
~
Kenny and I had been meeting at the Old Street coffee shop before our liaisons. At first I was deeply suspicious of his motivations, and suspected that Eric was somehow the invisible hand pulling the strings in this tryst. This was undoubtedly Kyle’s influence — he had made it his hobby to doubt Eric’s motivations, scorn his actions. I suppose the cynical answer to the question no one had asked — because no one knew — as to why I kept showing up to meet Kenny was that I wanted to sleep with him.
But I didn’t — not this week, at least. I woke up in the morning hardly aware of what day it was. I hadn’t bought a newspaper in days, had turned in my review of Death in Venice at some point — it was short enough, 400 words, half of which was a summary. Perhaps I would be paid soon. It didn’t matter. I found some stale digestives and a hard-boiled egg in the pantry and ate them slowly, standing by the windows, looking out onto Hoxton Square. Below me, squirrels chased across the grass, savoring the end of the summer.
It was raining, and I could not muster the enthusiasm to rally for an afternoon of illicit sex. I considered not meeting Kenny at all, and did try to talk myself out of it. What had I to lose by failing to show? Certainly for all his blustering about being in a position of power, Kenny had no recourse if I decided to stand him up. I was free to be with whomever I wanted whenever it pleased me; he had only the eight hours of Eric’s workday to run around charging men for sex.
But meet him I did, albeit belatedly, habit proving a comfort. “You’re tardy,” he said playfully, swatting me on the shoulder when I found him sitting in an armchair in the back of the shop. “Tick-tock, Stanley.”
“Yeah, well.” I shrugged.
“Buy me a coffee?”
“I suppose.”
I bought myself a latte and Kenneth a black coffee, thin and hot. He liked it with sugar but not milk, and he made me watch him crumble seven stale sugar cubes into his drink.
“That’ll rot your teeth,” I warned.
“I don’t care anymore! I’ve got someone to pay for my dentist now. Maybe Eric might get them fixed.”
“How do you mean?”
He shrugged and took his first sip of coffee.
“Have you considered going to university?”
Kenny set his cup down. “I’d have to finish school first, wouldn’t I?”
“How much education have you had?”
His brow wrinkled. “I left when I was 14,” he confessed. “I would have left earlier, but my mother thought I should stay. I don’t know why. When I turned 14 I one day realized, I’m not book smart. That, and I got caught being ‘inappropriate’ — so they said — behind the wrestling mats with a girl two years up from me. So I left then. Yeah, I was 14.”
“That was a long time ago, I reckon.”
“Oh, no, it wasn’t so long. It was only—” He halted himself, before continuing, “Only like 10 years ago or thereabouts.”
“I’m much older than you and 10 years feels like ages ago to me.”
“What does age have to do with it?”
“I’ve lived longer, so time moves faster for me.”
“Oh.”
I finished my latte before he finished his coffee, and scanned the crowd in the shop. There was the usual complement of lunch-break suits, popping in to cottage; there was also a steady contingent of younger artists, all of whom had sullen, lost looks on their faces. They sat together but did not speak, nursing a single mug of watered-down espresso for hours, scribbling in notebooks while they sat spread-legged, both the boys and the girls. Their hair was uniformly ratty and they mostly wore gray. One boy with hennaed hair in spikes wore purple boots with pointed toes and thick black platforms.
Kenny caught me staring at the cluster of youths. “You’re checking out the redhead,” he said, snapping his fingers in my face. “You know, I might be here for the money, but it is possible to hurt my feelings.”
“Oh, yeah, right,” I hissed. “And how do you think Eric feels? Paying you for companionship, supporting you, and you’re here to make it with me.”
“Well, Eric doesn’t know. I don’t make eyes at people right in front of him.”
I sat back, sighing. “It’s irrelevant, actually. It’s been lovely, but look at the time.” I shook my fist to indicate to him that I meant to be getting on with my day, whatever that might consist of. “Cheers, Ken. Thanks for meeting me.”
Predictably, he followed me out of the store and out onto the street, where he tugged at the back of my shirt to halt me. “Wait just a minute!”
“What?” I stopped, throwing my hands up, whipping around to face him.
“Aren’t we, um.” He was feeling around in the back pocket of his trousers for a cigarette. Maybe he wasn’t used to rejection? “You can’t just walk away from me, you know.”
“I can’t?”
“Well, no.”
Another pair of dark-clothed wraiths walked by us — this a pair, the girl round and stout with layers of white chalk on her cheeks, the scarlet grease on her lips carefully applied. The boy was tall, too tall, with a fat nose that reminded me something of Kyle’s before it was broken. The girl’s fishnet shirt caught on the lintel as her companion held the door open for her, and she brushed past without noticing, or at least without stopping. Duly, the netting burst as she disappeared into the store. Kenny eyed them with suspicion, and I stood with my arms crossed.
When the door was again shut, Kenny said, “I wouldn’t have come if I’d known you weren’t going to follow through.”
“Wouldn’t you?” I asked.
His cheeks turned pink. “I am trying to make a living!”
“Your living is Eric’s concern, not mine. If you’d prefer to follow me back to my flat, feel free. I’m going to try to write something, but you’re welcome to keep me company.” Even as I said this I was picturing him stomping away; I would duck back into the shop and chat up the red-haired artist with the purple shoes.
Kenny looked pained, wrinkling his nose while he contemplated his options. While he did this, I crossed my arms and tried to convey impatience.
“Okay,” he said, finally. “Let’s go back to yours, then.”
He wasn’t over for long, but long enough for me to make both of us a cup of tea. We sat on the sofa, the steam wafting off of his beverage wilting the tips of his fringe, so that they matted against his forehead ever so slightly.
“I’m not often rejected,” he said after a few tentative sips. “And I don’t usually drink tea at all, really.”
“I suggest you begin if you want to seem a natural Englishman.” I smiled, to try to bolster his mood, but the look of dismay on his face could not be banished. “Oh, really, it hasn’t anything to do with you. This has been an odd week for me, to say the least.”
“Oh, has it?” Kenny fidgeted uncomfortably on my sofa, kicking the trunk that I used for a coffee table rhythmically. I’m sure he wasn’t aware he was doing it. “Are you going to elaborate?”
“You know, I don’t really owe you an explanation.”
“Yes, you do!” he spat. “Because I came all the way to meet you, and I’ll be damned if I leave your flat without getting what I want!”
“Well, what do you want?” I asked. “Money? I can give you 60 quid, if you want it.” A lie. I really couldn’t. At least, I shouldn’t. Paying him for sex, that was one thing. Paying him to boost his self-esteem, that was simply idiotic.
He shook his head. “That’s not what I want.”
“Oh.” Suddenly, he looked less haughty to me, and more vulnerable. The ratty hems of his trousers brushed against my furniture, clashing with my lacquer princess phone. It seemed he was actually here to have sex with me — an idea I’d not considered. Suddenly I felt sorry for him, but as I didn’t want to sleep with him, I felt the best I could do was explain.
Predictably, he wasn’t sure what to say. “Sorry, I guess,” he mumbled, throwing the hood of his thin sweatshirt over his damp hair. “Next time just say so.”
“Well, let us hope there is not a next time.” At the door, I kissed him goodbye on the cheek. “Whoring is not quite the romantic calling you envisioned, is it? Have you found some greater truth to life yet?”
He looked at me as if I were mad, rubbing the spot on his cheek where my lips had been. After a moment he said, slowly, “I think people are the great truth to life, and death hurts less if we are together.”
“That is very poetic,” I said. “But alas, you are someone’s, and I am grieving. Go home to Eric. Make him feel as if he’s getting something for his money.”
“You are going to go back to the coffee shop and fuck that stupid ghost boy with the hideous hair and shoes,” he replied.
I didn’t deny a thing, just kissed him on the other cheek as he departed — because, of course, he was correct. A half hour later I was back in that shop, stealthily waiting to corner that pale specimen when he was away from his friends, trying to draw him to my corner with long glances and careful fingers at my lips.
If Token was something exotic out of Conrad, this miserable boy with deep cheekbones was Percy Bysshe Shelley, or maybe the opening chapter of Wuthering Heights, in which the tone is gothic and staid, like the stale air of a sealed crypt. The henna in his hair was so like Kyle’s at university, except not wild and curly, but manipulated to perfection. The color, though — the color was just perfect. Shades of red on top of shades of red, but this boy had laced black in, too. I stared him down until we locked gazes, and then he could barely focus on whatever he was scribbling in his notebook.
At last he approached me on my overstuffed throne in the corner of the shop, scowling — my trench coat unbelted, hair mussed, and dick throbbing.
“You’re staring at me,” he said, speaking in the most joyless, effected little tone. “You left with that boy and came back to stare at me.”
“Guilty,” I admitted. I decided to test the waters a bit: “But you’re so carefully cultivated, I should think you want girls to stare at you.”
In a jerky motion, he dug into the pocket of his (incredibly tight) trousers for a cigarette. “Why would I want girls to stare at me?” he asked. “I find traditional ideas about fairytale love make me nauseated. And besides, going with girls is so conformist. Are you a fucking conformist?” As he lit his cigarette he glared down at me, dangling that little code word for me to reach toward.
“Of course not,” I said, satisfied with myself. In my mind he was a boy, but I was thinking it lightly — he looked very mid-twenties, and I could see underneath the very thin, powdery layer of foundation he wore that his cheeks were pitted with acne scars.
“I don’t know that we have anything in common, though.” He exhaled with such grace that in his fingers, the cigarette seemed to fuse with his anatomy. “I cannot embrace the lies that the fucking government wants the citizens of Britain to eat from their fucking trough. If you want some kind of fairytale thing I suggest you look elsewhere. Life is pain, and that is why I write.”
“I write because life is long and I need something to fill it with. You see, I recently found out that my ex died, and I don’t think I can make it to the funeral. So certainly I understand pain, and I think we have a great deal in common. Do you think you need some kind of filling, as well? Because I think I can assist you in that regard.”
The cigarette was shedding ashes right onto the cement floor of the coffee shop. He fidgeted from side to side, not knowing how to stand still. “I think I might appreciate that, yeah.” He hunched down to speak at my level. “I have to finish up here. Meet me at the center of the roundabout in half an hour.”
He went back to his friends, and I slipped out quietly. The sex, I’m afraid, was mediocre, and he cried afterward, choking out something cliché about never having been with a man before. When I offered to take him to the Duke of Buckingham for a drink, he snapped at me, “Like I want to go drinking after I let you fuck me like some kind of conformist!” It seemed he was a very confused fellow, and I left dispirited, only to return home and drink a bottle of sherry and fall asleep on the sofa. It was only 10 p.m. I was awakened at 7 the next morning when I heard the church bells ringing across the square, the empty bottle sticking into my side.
Continued here.
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Date: 2011-09-09 23:03 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-09 23:25 (UTC)