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sekritomgContinued from here.
The Broflovskis lived in Islington, a green nugget of suburbia north of the City and northwest of where I lived. Sandwiched in between was middle-class residential London, the parts of the city where people really only wanted to live their lives, unconcerned with things like titles and peerages and Oxford diplomas or the striations of rock faces. At least, this was how I conceptualized things. The house was situated on a row just as regal as the gated garden square Token and Wendy lived on, but without the garden. I was 19 when I first visited this stately home, purchased by Gerald Broflovski as a sort of dowry for his new wife when London was still two years shy of being ravaged by the Blitz. I think before the Second World War, Islington was not a particularly well-kept area, but it was an area with fat, white houses guarded by iron-picket fences and strapping lawns, decrepit though these manses were.
The Broflovskis were affluent in a quiet way; Sheila kept the lawns immaculate whilst navigating the lower house with a kind of practiced ease. Surely it was remarkable, and she frightened me.
Hence I almost screamed when she found me sitting on the pavement in front of her house on Friday night, waiting to meet her son.
“Stanley,” she said, trying to hoist me by the collar of my shirt. “What are you doing sitting out here alone?”
I stood up and brushed the fronts of my trousers, cheeks pink. “Waiting for Kyle, of course,” I answered.
Sheila looked at me as if I were insane. “Well, why didn’t you just ring the bell?”
“Um.” I wasn’t really sure what I was supposed to say. The thought of spending time alone with Kyle’s family was wrenching, and yet the mess I was in now seemed worse.
Her head was crowned by a wig in an acid, false-red color, towering higher than any sort of hairdo should reach — I didn’t care at all about hair, and even I was cognizant of this. The pile of fake hair trembled as she laughed, and groped me in a maternal hug. “Stanley, you’re too silly! You don’t need to be coquettish with me. It’s been so long! How are you?” Her accent was high and nasal, totally foreign, except for the inflections I recognized from Kyle — the way they both dragged vowels into unwilling diphthongs.
She let go of me, and I tried to figure out how I was, actually. “I’m … fine. How are you?”
“Eh.” She articulated a shrug, as if to emphasis the syllable. “Work keeps me busy. Especially the networking! It’s so blah. People wanting to make me go to the opera or whatever.” Her thick lips curved into a smirk. “How did you enjoy Death in Venice, anyway?”
“It — it, uh, I guess I didn’t really love—”
“Oh, I think I know what you mean. We can talk about it forever if you want. But, come inside before my soup burns. I know, soup in the summer, it’s crazy.” She began to waddle back into the house, but turned to crook a finger at me. “Come on, Stan. Don’t be shy, you’re practically family. Come along, and do me a favor.” She crept back up to me, looking around conspiratorially. “Don’t mention to Kyle I know you boys were there. It’s easier to guilt him when he thinks he got away with it.”
Thanks to some kind of benevolence, I only waited another five minutes for Kyle. He apologized for his lateness with big arm gestures and by covering his mouth with his hands.
“I’m not bothered by it,” I whispered in the parlor.
“It’s not you I care about,” he hissed. “My mother—” He arched his eyebrows. “I’m sure she’d prefer I’m on time.”
“I don’t think she actually minds.”
“No, you don’t understand how penance works.”
“Strange, because between the two of us, I’m the one that’s Catholic.”
“That’s not funny!” Kyle snapped. He was holding a bottle of white wine he’d brought for his parents, and he pointed it at me accusatorily. “I had a long day at work, so don’t you make this harder for me!”
“Okay.”
“My taxi driver asked me if I was meeting my girlfriend for dinner.”
“Okay.”
“I really hate getting asked things like that.”
“Well, what did you say?”
“I told him the truth; I said I was going to my parents’ for dinner. But isn’t that odd? No one ever thinks I have a girlfriend.” Looking at Kyle, with his sharp, tailored herringbone waistcoat and plucked eyebrows, it was difficult to see how anyone might make that mistake. “Oh, don’t even think that!”
“Think what?” I asked.
“You could pass if you wanted. If you cared, I mean, you could. People don’t usually confuse me, I think.”
“I think you’re paranoid. No one is even thinking about it, unless they’re of the passing persuasion themselves.”
“Possible,” Kyle agreed, nodding. “Possible.” I was certain he wasn’t listening.
Ike arrived shortly thereafter, accompanied by his father — who did not drive, and had gone with a chauffeur to fetch Ike from Euston. Whereas I truly had never bothered to learn to operate a vehicle, Gerald Broflovski certainly could; he simply found it beneath himself. I imagined for someone like Ike, this was very awkward — being met at a busy rail station on a Friday night by a man with a big gray beard wearing a cardigan, and his driver.
Ike Broflovski was in all senses the consummate prodigal son. He was, initially, Welsh; Gerald and Sheila had found him, at four days old, in an orphanage in Cardiff. Often Kyle complained about his boring family holidays in Britain, which Sheila felt were necessary to maintain her precarious position as a female American MP, or something. She was politically minded at all times, that woman. Anyway, I do not doubt that Cardiff in the early 1950s was no place to have fun for a 6-year-old boy, and yet I was certain Kyle really didn’t remember. (He got to go to New York City once a year as well, which sounded at least in his recollections to be the most exciting city in the world.)
So at 6 Kyle gained a little brother, a beady-eyed boy named Isaac by his adoptive parents, although he always went by Ike. I first met him as a sullen young teenager in the mid-1960s sitting on his bed listening to some kind of garage-sounding LP on headphones, noise escaping them audibly. He looked at me with profound disgust written on his face, and without removing his headphones he said, “Your hair looks ridiculous.” Then Kyle shut his door and said, “Ignore him,” after which we sat on his bed and humped for three hours.
Now Ike was 30, studying medicine at the University of Manchester, and having never been to Manchester I was not sure what to make of that fact — except that I knew Ike resolutely despised it. Still, he made the trip home, short though it was, as infrequently as possible. Ike, tall and gangly with unkempt charcoal hair and little brown eyes, had disappeared somewhere in the interim between the sullen garage-rock period and the surly medical period. Toward the end of our third year, Kyle rang me up frantic one night, explaining through inarticulate sobs that his brother had run off and no one knew where to.
When Ike reappeared, he was 18. It was 1970, and the boy was inked with jagged lines burned into his upper arms in what appeared to be biro. Upon close inspection even at present, the smallest traces of this mystery life lingered, most visible in the healed-over holes in the lobes of Ike’s ears. Unlike the rest of his family, hard-line but hardly radical Labour-supporters, Ike was an outspoken Tory. On election night May 1979, Gary and I had been invited to some garden party at Kyle’s parents’. As Ike was the only one in attendance in Thatcher-regalia, Gary had asked him why he leaned that way. He became very quiet and serious: “I have looked the heart of liberal England in the eyes, and it is not a healthy set of eyes,” he’s said, whatever that meant. “I’ve seen those people at their worst, you know. I’ve seen things. You don’t want those people leading this nation.”
“But your family!” Gary exclaimed.
“Well, they’re misguided. Special interests, you know. But radical bleeding-heart liberal elitists who thing they’re better than everybody?” Ike shrugged. “And the Irish can blow themselves up for all I care. Catholicism is irrelevant. God save the Queen.” Rather uninformed, but that about summed it up.
When Ike noticed Kyle and I ogling him in the foyer, he sauntered over. “Oh, you cut your hair,” he drawled at Kyle. He sounded so bored. “That’s interesting. You do look a bit more like a man now, although I suppose I understand if you feel it isn’t as glamorous, or something.” Ike shook his head. “Or whatever,” he added.
Kyle just glared at him, crossly. “I think deconstructing everything you’ve just said would make me burst into tears. So thank you, glad you like the haircut. But really it was a fluke and I am growing it back out.”
Ike eyed Kyle up and down, wrinkling his nose and stretching his left arm behind his head. “Well, whatever. Nice waistcoat.”
This made Kyle beam. “Thanks. I had it made in the spring off some shop I forget the name of, actually, but the tailor was so lovely, he told me I had a waist like the Princess of Wales’ and then he offered to—”
“Oh, Kyle, no.” Ike waved a hand in his brother’s face. “I don’t actually care.”
“Oh.” Kyle sniffed. “I see. I didn’t make it with him, if that’s what you thought.”
“Right.”
Yawning, and without having said so much as hi to me, Ike walked away, slipping into the kitchen, from which we heard his mother squeal, “Ach, my little one!” and Ike mutter in reply, “Yes, hello.”
~
Dinner was clear, golden chicken soup with hard wedges of carrot bobbing around in shimmering patches of oil, followed by cold spears of asparagus, a crumbling chalk of mash, and moist, rich brisket. It had been cooked so long and at such a low temperature that the strip of fat peeled right off the spine of the meat. Kyle ate with enthusiasm, hardly pausing to breathe, while Ike sat in a stoic funk with his arms crossed, every so often assembling a forkful and chewing it slowly with a look of utter disgust. I liked the beef, and ate seconds, while I found the potatoes unbearable. They could have used something dairy: milk, cream, butter — anything, really. When Kyle noticed I wasn’t eating my vegetables, he began to just fork them right off my plate.
This whole thing was preceded by a short ceremony of a sort, in which Sheila put a napkin over her eyes and chanted something while lighting two candles. Then, holding a glass of wine steady for about 10 minutes, Gerald sang something very mournful, which held everyone’s attention. This ritual was not new to me, but I still found it foreign, up until the very last moment when Kyle tore a piece of woven egg bread off a loaf and handed it to me, smiling, and said, “Shavua tov. Certainly better than this one, I hope.”
“Pardon?”
“Have a good week, have a good week,” Gerald explained. “It means to have a nice week, the week ahead.”
“Okay,” I said. “Well, you too.”
“Thank you, Stanley.”
“Well, I try,” I mumbled.
Gerald took a seat, at which point we all followed. The Broflovskis chatted all through dinner, which was the opposite of my silent, frozen family. After a few perfunctory questions to Kyle (“How’s work, bubbelah?” “Oh, it’s dreadful as usual.” “Did you call your auntie?” “I will next week,” and similar) everyone turned their gazes to Ike.
“What?” he asked, nibbling a crust of bread. “Don’t you all look at me.”
“Well, then tell us how you are, sweetheart,” Sheila implored him. “You never call unless you want something.”
“Usually money,” Gerald added.
“You could call me, you know, if it’s so important.”
“Leviticus chapter 20, verse 9. Deuteronomy chapter 21, verse 18—”
“Ugh, dad, I don’t care.”
“Well, see where it gets you.” Sheila folded her hands in her lap. “Just tell us how you feel lately.”
Now Ike looked really disgusted. “I need to finish this godforsaken year already,” he said. “I am no longer sure what the point of being a house officer is, but I now know that indeed, I should have to be mad to want to work at a hospital.”
“So what will you do?” I asked.
“Probably open a surgery or something.” Ike shrugged. “I think that’s where the money is. I would like to move back to London, but — well, depends on what Flora likes, I suppose.”
“What’s she doing, then?” Kyle asked. “You never speak of her, really. Only brief mentions here and there.”
“Yeah, well, what am I supposed to tell you about her? What we do in the sack? She’s a goddamned receptionist, is what she is.”
“Fair enough,” Kyle said with a smirk.
Sheila cleared her throat. “That doesn’t make me happy. You’re seeing this girl, yes? So why do you talk about her like she’s just some receptionist?”
Ike rolled his eyes. “Because she is just some receptionist.”
“Your mother’s right, son.” Gerald spoke slowly, like he’d been deliberating on this topic all day long. “Why do you want to see some non-Jewish girl who’s just some receptionist?”
“You don’t speak about her with respect, is all,” Sheila added. “You want to find a girl you respect, bubbe, not some non-Jewish girl you think of as just a receptionist.”
“Good lord, are you all going to grill me on this right now? I came to tell you what I thought you’d see as good news.”
“Well?” Sheila asked. “Go on.”
“Well, I asked her to marry me. And Flora, being desperate, said yes — of course.”
All conversation at the table halted. Gerald dropped his silverware, and Sheila froze with her wineglass in mid-hoist.
“I said I asked my girlfriend to marry me and she accepted,” Ike repeated. “Aren’t any of you going to react to that? This family will parse to death any irrelevant scrap of information, but finally someone has something of substance to say at Sabbath dinner and everyone just stares at me.”
“I’m happy,” Kyle declared, and he did sound like he meant it. “Mazel tov, Ike, truly. When is the wedding, anyway?”
“Yes, the wedding.” Sheila was twisting her napkin in his hands. “Do you have a date yet?”
“I have to assume she’s hammering it out with her parents right now.” All eyes turned to Ike. “Well, next summer, I imagine. Isn’t that when girls like to marry?”
“Ah, good.” Sheila pretended to wipe her brow. “So that answers the question of whether or not this is an emergency.”
“An emergency?” Ike rolled his eyes at his mother. “I’d get her an abortion before I married her.”
“Have you?” Kyle asked. I laughed, but no one else did.
“Boys!” Sheila began to bang her dessert fork against her water goblet, as if part of a Parliamentary procedural. “Enough!”
“I have a question.” Kyle cleared his throat. “Ike, this is so important. May I bring a plus-one?”
“What?” Ike asked. “Sure, bring whoever. It doesn’t matter to me.”
“Really?”
“Well, yeah, what do I care?” Ike shrugged. “Bring whomever you like. It’s not my concern.”
“But Flora…” Kyle waved his hands, like he was attempting to clarify something he needn’t articulate: “She understands? You’ve … discussed it?”
“I don’t much see what there is to discuss.” Ike crossed his arms. “You do what you have to do, Kyle. I’ve mentioned it, I suppose, but you can’t ask someone to just accept something like that. Nevertheless, we’re brothers, I suppose.”
“You suppose?” Sheila gasped, clutching her chest. “Ach, God, my children—”
“Mom, don’t.” Ike sighed, putting fingers to his temples, like the conversation was difficult to bear. “I didn’t mean—”
Kyle was sitting with his elbows on the table, sleeves rolled up and fingers tented. For a moment I envisioned this was how he sat in meetings at work, intent and casual at the same time, cultivating a display of concentration. “I’m not offended,” he said deliberately. “But I am rather full. I think I ate too much. My god, if it’s not too much of one thing it’s another. Perhaps I should just abstain from eating, too, Stanley, hmmm?”
Here I was caught off-guard. “No, don’t do that,” I offered cautiously.
“Mmmph. I suppose. Are you going to finish your brisket?”
Looking down at my plate, there was a neat pile of strips of fat, sparse bits of meat flaking off in one or two spots — but no real brisket left to speak of. “Ah — no,” I answered. “No, I think I am finished.”
“Do you mind if I eat that, then?”
I glanced down at the fat on my plate, to Kyle, and then back to the plate. “Um.” Kyle was still resting his elbows on the table. “No, I … I suppose I don’t mind.”
Kyle gleefully ate.
~
Kyle’s parents retired to bed immediately after dinner, something about waking up early to walk to religious services. “Are you sure you don’t want to come?” Sheila had asked Ike before she went upstairs, combing her fingers through his hair.
“Ugh, no thank you.” He shook his head to free himself. “Last thing I need. Make Kyle go.”
“Kyle went last month,” she said.
“Oh, well, I cannot compare to that.”
Sheila slapped him. “Don’t be obnoxious!”
Ike was already bent over, laughing.
When his parents were gone, Kyle took three cans of Tetley’s from the refrigerator and handed one off to me and one to his brother. With beer in hand, he got down on his knees and fished a key out from underneath the bookcase near the French doors that led to the back garden.
“They still keep it under there?” Ike asked. “How juvenile.”
“Old people don’t like to think of new places to keep things.” Kyle slipped the key into the lock, twisting with ease. “Or at least Dad hates to.”
We sat on the back patio. Without the lights on, it was pitch black outside, literally, but Kyle dragged a teak bench to the side of the house and lit the two gas lamps on either side of the doors. An eerie glow was cast around us, creating a pagan air to the conversation, which Kyle began by saying, “Ike, I am serious. Why are you getting married?”
Ike scoffed. “Don’t be jealous.”
“I’m not jealous.”
“Do not even lie. You want to get married so badly. If you’d ever met Flora you wouldn’t envy me at all. She’s as sharp as a pavement, and roughly as thick.”
“Then why are you marrying her?” I asked. “If I may butt in.”
“Sure, butt in.” Ike cracked the tab on his can of beer. “It’s probably not your first time today.”
“Don’t be rude,” Kyle chided.
“Don’t assume I don’t know, because I do.”
“Know what?”
Ike shrugged. “I don’t know. Look at the two of you.”
“What am I looking at?” Now Kyle sounded exasperated. “I don’t like cloying commentary! Out with it!”
“Well.” Ike wiped at some phantom foam on his lips. “It’s been ages since you’ve brought Stanley to dinner, hasn’t it?”
“It’s been ages since you’ve been to dinner!” Kyle protested. “Away in Manchester, you leave me here to deal with these — these people.”
“Don’t act like you dislike it.”
“Don’t act like I do like it!”
“I just think, well, Kyle, your patterns. You only bring home boys when you mean it.”
“And you never bring girls home and then you unenthusiastically announce you intend to marry them!” Kyle shouted back. “What am I supposed to make of that? What are we supposed to do with it? I don’t even know who this girl is and you want me to call her my sister-in-law?”
“I wouldn’t ask you to call her that. Oh, Kyle. Don’t be — just don’t be. It’s quite fine to be envious.”
“Excuse me,” I said, raising a hand. The conversation was making me uncomfortable, and the first nighttime chill of August had caught me off-guard, shivering in shirtsleeves and wondering why we were not sitting in the parlor — probably so Gerald and Sheila would not hear the conversation. Kyle and Ike were bickering still, taking no notice of me, so I interrupted them: “Why the hell do you want to marry this girl? I mean, really. She sounds stupid and uninspiring and desperate to marry — and you’re the only source of that information, so it’s likely verifiable. So, really?”
“Yes!” Kyle echoed. “That is what I want to know!”
Ike was pouring the final dregs of his beer onto the brick pavers we were sitting atop. He sighed. “I just want to get married, is all. I don’t really like any girl, so why not pick a girl who likes me?”
“Why do you even want to get married?” I pressed. “Not getting married is an option.”
“Oh, for you both it’s an option,” Ike spat. He had crushed his beer can and it was now sitting on the table bent over itself, as if in pain. “But someone has to reproduce in this family. Not to mention I am bored. Not to mention I do like her. She’s docile in public and sluttish in private, which — well, I don’t know how else a girl is supposed to act.”
“Suddenly I am not the fiercest misogynist you know, Stanley, am I?” Kyle asked. “Ike, that is really appalling. Liking a girl is fine but if you aim to marry you should try to find someone you’re in love with.”
“But that has occurred to me,” Ike countered, “and I increasingly feel that perhaps I am not capable of it. Like a girl, love a girl, it’s all the most basic level of affection. This is the best I am going to do, and please don’t decide to act like a 14-year-old and tell Mom and Dad. Or, well, tell Mom and Dad if you must. They already think I’m pathetic.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t do that,” Kyle assured him, clasping a hand to Ike’s shoulder. “After all, I do want to bring a date to the wedding.”
~
“I thought I’d be much drunker than this,” Kyle announced as we ambled down toward the Angel. In the dark, quiet Islington night, there was no one on the street, and only a sparse neon light or two illuminated while the upper-middle-class children of the borough slept soundly in their nurseries. “I should have drunk more,” Kyle reiterated. “It’s no good to leave a meal like that so lucid.”
“I don’t have a problem with it.” I was not drunk, either, but I didn’t care if Kyle knew it. I was beginning to forget that Gary had died, that it was for this reason that I’d been to Islington for dinner. I would forget, and then in dizzy horror something would trigger my memory, and then painfully the thought would fade until the next surge. The gaps in the cycle were widening, but I was unconcerned. Kyle was next to me, his arm brushing mine as we walked. I imagined that during the day he was warm in his work clothes, that the sheen of perspiration glossed his arms and chest. I thought of licking it off his stomach. This made me hard. We kept walking.
“I don’t think I’ll be able to catch a cab,” he said somewhere around St. John Street. “And the Underground’s probably closed by now. I haven’t got my pocket watch on me, so I couldn’t tell you what time it is.”
“I believe it was nearing midnight when we left your parents.”
“Ah, well, so the Tube is over. Mind if I come home with you?”
I stopped walking, and so did he. “Yeah, of course,” I answered. “I’ll lend you some pajamas.”
“Oh, that’s swell,” he mumbled. “Pajamas.”
“Certain you’re not drunk?” I asked, although I was quite sure that he wasn’t. I lamented internally that the wine at dinner hadn’t been up to snuff, that I hadn’t drunk more of it. We continued down St. John Street, passing closed-up storefronts primed to reopen in the morning.
Incidentally, in front of the seedy coffee shop I sometimes I cruised at, Kyle paused, and made a small noise in this throat that caught my attention. As I stopped and turned to him, he reached out to steady himself against the shop window. He frowned, and crouched down steadily to toy with his shoe.
“Sorry,” he said. He glanced up at me. “I’ve been wearing these all day. They’ve just become quite uncomfortable. This should teach me not to change shoes before dinner.”
I smiled at him, and he continued to poke at his loafers. “I could carry you, I suppose,” I said. “I’m so sorry it’s too late to catch a taxi.”
“Well, I’m sure they’re all caught up in traffic around the West End, ferrying tourists around at an infuriatingly slow speed.”
“Right.”
“Well.” He stood back up. “You know all those tourists and their foreign money are good for the economy.”
“Quite. I’m sure.”
“Do you know I took care of part of that campaign last winter? Did I talk about it? Bringing overseas money to Britain is apparently something of a pet concern for certain Tory members of our constitutional government.”
“And the liberals?”
“That’s the thing about politics, dear. When your party is not in power, you exert the bulk of your energy on simply trying to keep yourself afloat. For all she talks about it I think my mother’s spent the most time over the past five years trying to keep herself simply visible so she can hang onto her seat.” Like being seen at the opera with her patrons, perhaps?
“Well, what’s the point in that?” I asked. “I love your mother, darling, but there is simply nothing more despicable than two parties merely pissing all over each other’s agendas, and grappling with the uncontrollable urge to harness power for no reason but to have it.”
“You’re just so cynically hung up on the downsides of government that you refuse to see the beauty in the process.”
“No, Kyle. I love government. I hate politics. You see, this is why I cannot vote. The in-fighting makes me ill.”
We walked a bit further up the road.
“Do you ever go into that coffee shop back there?” Kyle asked.
“What?” I asked.
“That shop we stopped in front of. Do you ever go in there?”
I was silent for a moment, deciding how I wanted to handle this. “I stop in from time to time for a coffee,” I chose to inform him.
“Because I hear it’s quite cruisy,” he prompted.
“Oh. Well, I think I might have heard that, too.”
“And it would make me sick to think that you’re in there fucking random blokes, or using the glory holes or something.”
I was silent on this point.
“You know,” he continued, “I did once use one. A glory hole, I mean.”
“Really?” I probed. There were few stories I hadn’t heard in my 20 years of friendship with Kyle. Certainly I’d never heard anything about a glory hole.
“Oh, yes. At school, there was a really quiet shop immediately across the river from us. I kept hearing older boys talk about, well, fairies visiting the shop, so one day I walked down and went into the shop to purchase a packet of crisps. Really I wanted to, oh, explore. It’s not that I wanted to have sex, or anything. I mean, I was 13 years old. I suppose I was just curious. I’d never seen a cock, you know, other than my own. And I wanted to. What do you think of that?”
I was frankly shocked that he wanted my opinion. “I think it’s only natural. I’m sure even a boy growing up straight would have been curious about something like that.”
“A boy growing up straight would have ignored it. What would you have done?”
Again, I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I was fucking my pillows and pretending it was a certain son of my mother’s friend from the time I was 11 years old. I’m sure a real penis would have interested me.”
“Well, I did see a real penis, actually. After the first time — and the second time — I simply bought my crisps and ran back to school, hyperventilating. The third time — well. The third time I crept behind the shelves of packaged pastas and Fairy Liquid — I’m aware of the irony — and went into the loo. There were two toilets, and I could tell a man was in one of them. So I went into the other, and tried to look through the hole —and before I knew it he’d, like, almost put his fingers through, but not really, they were just touching the hole. So I touched back, right, and he — I don’t know, he put his cock through. I nearly threw up on myself. I’d never seen one that wasn’t mine in real life, except I suppose for Ike’s when he was a baby. It was all pinched-looking, and I’d never seen an uncut one before, so that was quite a shock.”
“Well, what did you do?” I asked. Having never heard the story I was curious. Kyle had plenty of disturbing experiences at school — some of which he’d admitted to me over the years, and many of which Ike had done.
His face went red. “I don’t know, I touched it — I guess I put it into my mouth.”
“Jesus.” I stopped walking, and so did he. “Kyle, what do you mean you guess? How does one not remember something like that?”
“Fine, I don’t guess, I remember putting it into my mouth.”
“And what happened next?” I asked.
“What do you mean what happened next? I had a penis in my mouth, what do you think happened next? He fucked my mouth!”
I laughed, having to pause to do so without tripping over myself in the dark, as the nearest streetlamp was apparently out.
“It’s not funny!” Kyle protested. “I was terrified! I ran out of the shop weeping, and never went back.”
“I wish I’d known you at 13,” I said when I stopped giggling.
“No, you don’t. My adolescence was miserable. Utterly wretched.” We had begun to walk again, passing murky pools of gutter run-off and puddles of sick; the streets were virtually deserted but retained the relics of Friday-night passers-by. “I hated myself, Stanley. I just completely hated myself.”
“Fair enough,” I conceded. Having not hated myself quite so intensely — I reserved my anger for my parents and sister, immersing myself in keeping comprehensive and pathetic vitriolic journals — I wondered if, perhaps, had I known Kyle as a youth, he might have been less miserable. But to have known Kyle, I would have been attending his ancient and well-established public school, which likely have made me as miserable as he was.
When we arrived at my flat, Kyle darted up the stairs in front of me, and I wondered about his aching feet pounding up the concrete staircase. Once inside, I slammed the door and reached for the light switch, but was caught unaware and found myself forced unguarded into a tight embrace. Lips against mine, I was a prisoner to the doorframe. Never one to turn down a good snog, however, I opened my mouth, wondering where Kyle had found it in himself to be so dominating, why his mouth tasted only faintly of beer, and what I was going to say when he drew away. As he did so, my mind was reeling.
“Darling,” I said softly, inching fingers against his hairline. “I think you’re drunker than you think you are.”
He shook his head. “I’m not, Stanley. I’m completely sober.”
I was too. It felt uncomfortable. I wasn’t sure what to do or say, and Kyle was still holding me against the door to my flat. Being much stronger than he was, I could have disposed of the situation with little effort, and yet I did not.
He tightened his arms. “Will you please do me the honor of being my plus-one to Ike’s wedding? I’ll kill myself if you decline, I really will.”
“Of course I’ll be your plus-one.”
“You’ll be my date?”
“Yeah.”
In the moonlight streaming through the big, dusty windows, the batting of his lashes made just the most graceful, brief shadow. “I really mean like a date-date. … God, I must sound so girlish.”
“Well, the date hasn’t even been set, and who knows when that’ll be. But, yes, certainly. I’d love to go.”
“It’ll probably be out of town. She’s from Wigan, or something. Would you go out of town with me?”
“I would go anywhere with you.”
His heart was pounding in his chest, and so was mine — out of sync, but every few beats they did manage to meet up, and in between one of these sets of matching heartbeats he tipped himself up against my body, and kissed me again on the lips.
Kyle and I kissed often. We kissed hello at the Bucky, we kissed good-bye if one of us stayed over. I kissed him with tongue at midnight on New Year’s Eve 1982 and he kissed back, haphazardly, with visible granules of cocaine clinging to the downy hairs on his upper lip. We kissed when we graduated university and we kissed sometimes when one of us was upset. A gay man could kiss his best friend every day of his life and it would be less romantic and certainly less sexual than kissing his own mother. I couldn’t remember the last time I kissed Kyle on the lips because it had probably been really recent.
This one was different.
Our mouths fluttered together, wide open, tongues not meeting. I realized my eyes were shut, and I opened them to see one of his snap shut. Drawing away, his cheeks were red. I had to bolster my balance against the doorframe, and snapped the light switch on behind me. Kyle was blushing much deeper than I had imagined in the dark.
“You are smitten with me,” he said. “Don’t deny me. Admit it.”
I didn’t know what to say. This was the moment I’d been dreading my entire adult life. “All right.”
“Well, that wasn’t so bad, was it?”
“Excuse me?”
He let go of me, and I slumped back against the door. “All this time, Stanley. All you had to do was say it.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me.” He sighed, falling into the chair at the head of my wood-block kitchen table. “Come sit down,” he beckoned me, crooking his finger.
“I don’t know if I want to,” I replied.
He rolled his eyes. “Fine, then, don’t come sit next to me. Listen.” He put his head in his hands. “I am glad Gary is dead. I mean — oh, bollocks, that makes me sound mad and insensitive. I’m not—insensitive, I mean. Perhaps I’m a bit mad. … Or reverse those. I’m not sure any longer. Listen to me babbling like an idiot.” He laughed, bitterly. “Oh, you have no idea. Stanley. For three years I’ve been tortured by the idea that a phantom blond man was going to swoop down on this island and steal you away from me. The day he left I wept for hours, just out of happiness. I hate it when other people have your attention. You’re mine, do you know?”
I walked toward him. My arms were crossed. “Well, what was I supposed to do?” I threw my hands up. “Kyle, you’ve dated so many men it’s made me dizzy.”
“Well, you’ve fucked so many I’m shocked you’ve only had one case of syphilis.”
“I’ve had the clap a few times,” I admitted. “But mostly I do use protection. I didn’t really mean to come in anyone who wasn’t you. Honest.”
“It’s okay.” Kyle rapped his fingers on the table. “But it does make me a little sad. What am I talking about? It’s not okay, all right, you understand me? It hurts me, you know.”
“What does?”
“That you sleep with so many men!”
“Oh,” I said stupidly.
“Oh? Is that all you are going to say to me, oh?”
“Well, what do you want me to say?”
“I want you to apologize!”
“For what?” I asked.
“I — I’m not sure.”
I decided to take the seat next to him, sighing as I did. “I find it difficult to believe I am only 37. I feel I’ve lived at least twice that long.”
Kyle snorted. “That’s funny. You won’t be 37 until October. Do you remember what we did for my birthday?”
“I don’t know. Probably something with Christophe.”
“Oh, Christophe.” Kyle nodded. “You know, I’d forgotten about him.”
I hadn’t. The memory of meeting that man, Gregory, made my heart seize for a moment. Then I caught my breath. “He’s irrelevant, darling. Just another man, you know.” I turned to him; although his features were mostly obscured in the nighttime, the moonlight through my windows still caught his lashes. He looked very fetching, if pale. I took his chin in my hand, in a pose that echoed what I imagined a Victorian photocollage to look like. “I wouldn’t be that kind of man.”
He gulped. “What kind of man would that be?”
Without pausing, I answered, “One who leaves.”
“Oh.” His hands grasped onto me, one to my thigh and one to my flank. I was wearing a gauzy, taupe-colored button-down shirt — out of the ordinary for me, unusually formal, but something about dinner with Kyle’s parents made me fall in line. The material was so thin that it nearly disappeared between my skin and his fingertips.
The Broflovskis lived in Islington, a green nugget of suburbia north of the City and northwest of where I lived. Sandwiched in between was middle-class residential London, the parts of the city where people really only wanted to live their lives, unconcerned with things like titles and peerages and Oxford diplomas or the striations of rock faces. At least, this was how I conceptualized things. The house was situated on a row just as regal as the gated garden square Token and Wendy lived on, but without the garden. I was 19 when I first visited this stately home, purchased by Gerald Broflovski as a sort of dowry for his new wife when London was still two years shy of being ravaged by the Blitz. I think before the Second World War, Islington was not a particularly well-kept area, but it was an area with fat, white houses guarded by iron-picket fences and strapping lawns, decrepit though these manses were.
The Broflovskis were affluent in a quiet way; Sheila kept the lawns immaculate whilst navigating the lower house with a kind of practiced ease. Surely it was remarkable, and she frightened me.
Hence I almost screamed when she found me sitting on the pavement in front of her house on Friday night, waiting to meet her son.
“Stanley,” she said, trying to hoist me by the collar of my shirt. “What are you doing sitting out here alone?”
I stood up and brushed the fronts of my trousers, cheeks pink. “Waiting for Kyle, of course,” I answered.
Sheila looked at me as if I were insane. “Well, why didn’t you just ring the bell?”
“Um.” I wasn’t really sure what I was supposed to say. The thought of spending time alone with Kyle’s family was wrenching, and yet the mess I was in now seemed worse.
Her head was crowned by a wig in an acid, false-red color, towering higher than any sort of hairdo should reach — I didn’t care at all about hair, and even I was cognizant of this. The pile of fake hair trembled as she laughed, and groped me in a maternal hug. “Stanley, you’re too silly! You don’t need to be coquettish with me. It’s been so long! How are you?” Her accent was high and nasal, totally foreign, except for the inflections I recognized from Kyle — the way they both dragged vowels into unwilling diphthongs.
She let go of me, and I tried to figure out how I was, actually. “I’m … fine. How are you?”
“Eh.” She articulated a shrug, as if to emphasis the syllable. “Work keeps me busy. Especially the networking! It’s so blah. People wanting to make me go to the opera or whatever.” Her thick lips curved into a smirk. “How did you enjoy Death in Venice, anyway?”
“It — it, uh, I guess I didn’t really love—”
“Oh, I think I know what you mean. We can talk about it forever if you want. But, come inside before my soup burns. I know, soup in the summer, it’s crazy.” She began to waddle back into the house, but turned to crook a finger at me. “Come on, Stan. Don’t be shy, you’re practically family. Come along, and do me a favor.” She crept back up to me, looking around conspiratorially. “Don’t mention to Kyle I know you boys were there. It’s easier to guilt him when he thinks he got away with it.”
Thanks to some kind of benevolence, I only waited another five minutes for Kyle. He apologized for his lateness with big arm gestures and by covering his mouth with his hands.
“I’m not bothered by it,” I whispered in the parlor.
“It’s not you I care about,” he hissed. “My mother—” He arched his eyebrows. “I’m sure she’d prefer I’m on time.”
“I don’t think she actually minds.”
“No, you don’t understand how penance works.”
“Strange, because between the two of us, I’m the one that’s Catholic.”
“That’s not funny!” Kyle snapped. He was holding a bottle of white wine he’d brought for his parents, and he pointed it at me accusatorily. “I had a long day at work, so don’t you make this harder for me!”
“Okay.”
“My taxi driver asked me if I was meeting my girlfriend for dinner.”
“Okay.”
“I really hate getting asked things like that.”
“Well, what did you say?”
“I told him the truth; I said I was going to my parents’ for dinner. But isn’t that odd? No one ever thinks I have a girlfriend.” Looking at Kyle, with his sharp, tailored herringbone waistcoat and plucked eyebrows, it was difficult to see how anyone might make that mistake. “Oh, don’t even think that!”
“Think what?” I asked.
“You could pass if you wanted. If you cared, I mean, you could. People don’t usually confuse me, I think.”
“I think you’re paranoid. No one is even thinking about it, unless they’re of the passing persuasion themselves.”
“Possible,” Kyle agreed, nodding. “Possible.” I was certain he wasn’t listening.
Ike arrived shortly thereafter, accompanied by his father — who did not drive, and had gone with a chauffeur to fetch Ike from Euston. Whereas I truly had never bothered to learn to operate a vehicle, Gerald Broflovski certainly could; he simply found it beneath himself. I imagined for someone like Ike, this was very awkward — being met at a busy rail station on a Friday night by a man with a big gray beard wearing a cardigan, and his driver.
Ike Broflovski was in all senses the consummate prodigal son. He was, initially, Welsh; Gerald and Sheila had found him, at four days old, in an orphanage in Cardiff. Often Kyle complained about his boring family holidays in Britain, which Sheila felt were necessary to maintain her precarious position as a female American MP, or something. She was politically minded at all times, that woman. Anyway, I do not doubt that Cardiff in the early 1950s was no place to have fun for a 6-year-old boy, and yet I was certain Kyle really didn’t remember. (He got to go to New York City once a year as well, which sounded at least in his recollections to be the most exciting city in the world.)
So at 6 Kyle gained a little brother, a beady-eyed boy named Isaac by his adoptive parents, although he always went by Ike. I first met him as a sullen young teenager in the mid-1960s sitting on his bed listening to some kind of garage-sounding LP on headphones, noise escaping them audibly. He looked at me with profound disgust written on his face, and without removing his headphones he said, “Your hair looks ridiculous.” Then Kyle shut his door and said, “Ignore him,” after which we sat on his bed and humped for three hours.
Now Ike was 30, studying medicine at the University of Manchester, and having never been to Manchester I was not sure what to make of that fact — except that I knew Ike resolutely despised it. Still, he made the trip home, short though it was, as infrequently as possible. Ike, tall and gangly with unkempt charcoal hair and little brown eyes, had disappeared somewhere in the interim between the sullen garage-rock period and the surly medical period. Toward the end of our third year, Kyle rang me up frantic one night, explaining through inarticulate sobs that his brother had run off and no one knew where to.
When Ike reappeared, he was 18. It was 1970, and the boy was inked with jagged lines burned into his upper arms in what appeared to be biro. Upon close inspection even at present, the smallest traces of this mystery life lingered, most visible in the healed-over holes in the lobes of Ike’s ears. Unlike the rest of his family, hard-line but hardly radical Labour-supporters, Ike was an outspoken Tory. On election night May 1979, Gary and I had been invited to some garden party at Kyle’s parents’. As Ike was the only one in attendance in Thatcher-regalia, Gary had asked him why he leaned that way. He became very quiet and serious: “I have looked the heart of liberal England in the eyes, and it is not a healthy set of eyes,” he’s said, whatever that meant. “I’ve seen those people at their worst, you know. I’ve seen things. You don’t want those people leading this nation.”
“But your family!” Gary exclaimed.
“Well, they’re misguided. Special interests, you know. But radical bleeding-heart liberal elitists who thing they’re better than everybody?” Ike shrugged. “And the Irish can blow themselves up for all I care. Catholicism is irrelevant. God save the Queen.” Rather uninformed, but that about summed it up.
When Ike noticed Kyle and I ogling him in the foyer, he sauntered over. “Oh, you cut your hair,” he drawled at Kyle. He sounded so bored. “That’s interesting. You do look a bit more like a man now, although I suppose I understand if you feel it isn’t as glamorous, or something.” Ike shook his head. “Or whatever,” he added.
Kyle just glared at him, crossly. “I think deconstructing everything you’ve just said would make me burst into tears. So thank you, glad you like the haircut. But really it was a fluke and I am growing it back out.”
Ike eyed Kyle up and down, wrinkling his nose and stretching his left arm behind his head. “Well, whatever. Nice waistcoat.”
This made Kyle beam. “Thanks. I had it made in the spring off some shop I forget the name of, actually, but the tailor was so lovely, he told me I had a waist like the Princess of Wales’ and then he offered to—”
“Oh, Kyle, no.” Ike waved a hand in his brother’s face. “I don’t actually care.”
“Oh.” Kyle sniffed. “I see. I didn’t make it with him, if that’s what you thought.”
“Right.”
Yawning, and without having said so much as hi to me, Ike walked away, slipping into the kitchen, from which we heard his mother squeal, “Ach, my little one!” and Ike mutter in reply, “Yes, hello.”
~
Dinner was clear, golden chicken soup with hard wedges of carrot bobbing around in shimmering patches of oil, followed by cold spears of asparagus, a crumbling chalk of mash, and moist, rich brisket. It had been cooked so long and at such a low temperature that the strip of fat peeled right off the spine of the meat. Kyle ate with enthusiasm, hardly pausing to breathe, while Ike sat in a stoic funk with his arms crossed, every so often assembling a forkful and chewing it slowly with a look of utter disgust. I liked the beef, and ate seconds, while I found the potatoes unbearable. They could have used something dairy: milk, cream, butter — anything, really. When Kyle noticed I wasn’t eating my vegetables, he began to just fork them right off my plate.
This whole thing was preceded by a short ceremony of a sort, in which Sheila put a napkin over her eyes and chanted something while lighting two candles. Then, holding a glass of wine steady for about 10 minutes, Gerald sang something very mournful, which held everyone’s attention. This ritual was not new to me, but I still found it foreign, up until the very last moment when Kyle tore a piece of woven egg bread off a loaf and handed it to me, smiling, and said, “Shavua tov. Certainly better than this one, I hope.”
“Pardon?”
“Have a good week, have a good week,” Gerald explained. “It means to have a nice week, the week ahead.”
“Okay,” I said. “Well, you too.”
“Thank you, Stanley.”
“Well, I try,” I mumbled.
Gerald took a seat, at which point we all followed. The Broflovskis chatted all through dinner, which was the opposite of my silent, frozen family. After a few perfunctory questions to Kyle (“How’s work, bubbelah?” “Oh, it’s dreadful as usual.” “Did you call your auntie?” “I will next week,” and similar) everyone turned their gazes to Ike.
“What?” he asked, nibbling a crust of bread. “Don’t you all look at me.”
“Well, then tell us how you are, sweetheart,” Sheila implored him. “You never call unless you want something.”
“Usually money,” Gerald added.
“You could call me, you know, if it’s so important.”
“Leviticus chapter 20, verse 9. Deuteronomy chapter 21, verse 18—”
“Ugh, dad, I don’t care.”
“Well, see where it gets you.” Sheila folded her hands in her lap. “Just tell us how you feel lately.”
Now Ike looked really disgusted. “I need to finish this godforsaken year already,” he said. “I am no longer sure what the point of being a house officer is, but I now know that indeed, I should have to be mad to want to work at a hospital.”
“So what will you do?” I asked.
“Probably open a surgery or something.” Ike shrugged. “I think that’s where the money is. I would like to move back to London, but — well, depends on what Flora likes, I suppose.”
“What’s she doing, then?” Kyle asked. “You never speak of her, really. Only brief mentions here and there.”
“Yeah, well, what am I supposed to tell you about her? What we do in the sack? She’s a goddamned receptionist, is what she is.”
“Fair enough,” Kyle said with a smirk.
Sheila cleared her throat. “That doesn’t make me happy. You’re seeing this girl, yes? So why do you talk about her like she’s just some receptionist?”
Ike rolled his eyes. “Because she is just some receptionist.”
“Your mother’s right, son.” Gerald spoke slowly, like he’d been deliberating on this topic all day long. “Why do you want to see some non-Jewish girl who’s just some receptionist?”
“You don’t speak about her with respect, is all,” Sheila added. “You want to find a girl you respect, bubbe, not some non-Jewish girl you think of as just a receptionist.”
“Good lord, are you all going to grill me on this right now? I came to tell you what I thought you’d see as good news.”
“Well?” Sheila asked. “Go on.”
“Well, I asked her to marry me. And Flora, being desperate, said yes — of course.”
All conversation at the table halted. Gerald dropped his silverware, and Sheila froze with her wineglass in mid-hoist.
“I said I asked my girlfriend to marry me and she accepted,” Ike repeated. “Aren’t any of you going to react to that? This family will parse to death any irrelevant scrap of information, but finally someone has something of substance to say at Sabbath dinner and everyone just stares at me.”
“I’m happy,” Kyle declared, and he did sound like he meant it. “Mazel tov, Ike, truly. When is the wedding, anyway?”
“Yes, the wedding.” Sheila was twisting her napkin in his hands. “Do you have a date yet?”
“I have to assume she’s hammering it out with her parents right now.” All eyes turned to Ike. “Well, next summer, I imagine. Isn’t that when girls like to marry?”
“Ah, good.” Sheila pretended to wipe her brow. “So that answers the question of whether or not this is an emergency.”
“An emergency?” Ike rolled his eyes at his mother. “I’d get her an abortion before I married her.”
“Have you?” Kyle asked. I laughed, but no one else did.
“Boys!” Sheila began to bang her dessert fork against her water goblet, as if part of a Parliamentary procedural. “Enough!”
“I have a question.” Kyle cleared his throat. “Ike, this is so important. May I bring a plus-one?”
“What?” Ike asked. “Sure, bring whoever. It doesn’t matter to me.”
“Really?”
“Well, yeah, what do I care?” Ike shrugged. “Bring whomever you like. It’s not my concern.”
“But Flora…” Kyle waved his hands, like he was attempting to clarify something he needn’t articulate: “She understands? You’ve … discussed it?”
“I don’t much see what there is to discuss.” Ike crossed his arms. “You do what you have to do, Kyle. I’ve mentioned it, I suppose, but you can’t ask someone to just accept something like that. Nevertheless, we’re brothers, I suppose.”
“You suppose?” Sheila gasped, clutching her chest. “Ach, God, my children—”
“Mom, don’t.” Ike sighed, putting fingers to his temples, like the conversation was difficult to bear. “I didn’t mean—”
Kyle was sitting with his elbows on the table, sleeves rolled up and fingers tented. For a moment I envisioned this was how he sat in meetings at work, intent and casual at the same time, cultivating a display of concentration. “I’m not offended,” he said deliberately. “But I am rather full. I think I ate too much. My god, if it’s not too much of one thing it’s another. Perhaps I should just abstain from eating, too, Stanley, hmmm?”
Here I was caught off-guard. “No, don’t do that,” I offered cautiously.
“Mmmph. I suppose. Are you going to finish your brisket?”
Looking down at my plate, there was a neat pile of strips of fat, sparse bits of meat flaking off in one or two spots — but no real brisket left to speak of. “Ah — no,” I answered. “No, I think I am finished.”
“Do you mind if I eat that, then?”
I glanced down at the fat on my plate, to Kyle, and then back to the plate. “Um.” Kyle was still resting his elbows on the table. “No, I … I suppose I don’t mind.”
Kyle gleefully ate.
~
Kyle’s parents retired to bed immediately after dinner, something about waking up early to walk to religious services. “Are you sure you don’t want to come?” Sheila had asked Ike before she went upstairs, combing her fingers through his hair.
“Ugh, no thank you.” He shook his head to free himself. “Last thing I need. Make Kyle go.”
“Kyle went last month,” she said.
“Oh, well, I cannot compare to that.”
Sheila slapped him. “Don’t be obnoxious!”
Ike was already bent over, laughing.
When his parents were gone, Kyle took three cans of Tetley’s from the refrigerator and handed one off to me and one to his brother. With beer in hand, he got down on his knees and fished a key out from underneath the bookcase near the French doors that led to the back garden.
“They still keep it under there?” Ike asked. “How juvenile.”
“Old people don’t like to think of new places to keep things.” Kyle slipped the key into the lock, twisting with ease. “Or at least Dad hates to.”
We sat on the back patio. Without the lights on, it was pitch black outside, literally, but Kyle dragged a teak bench to the side of the house and lit the two gas lamps on either side of the doors. An eerie glow was cast around us, creating a pagan air to the conversation, which Kyle began by saying, “Ike, I am serious. Why are you getting married?”
Ike scoffed. “Don’t be jealous.”
“I’m not jealous.”
“Do not even lie. You want to get married so badly. If you’d ever met Flora you wouldn’t envy me at all. She’s as sharp as a pavement, and roughly as thick.”
“Then why are you marrying her?” I asked. “If I may butt in.”
“Sure, butt in.” Ike cracked the tab on his can of beer. “It’s probably not your first time today.”
“Don’t be rude,” Kyle chided.
“Don’t assume I don’t know, because I do.”
“Know what?”
Ike shrugged. “I don’t know. Look at the two of you.”
“What am I looking at?” Now Kyle sounded exasperated. “I don’t like cloying commentary! Out with it!”
“Well.” Ike wiped at some phantom foam on his lips. “It’s been ages since you’ve brought Stanley to dinner, hasn’t it?”
“It’s been ages since you’ve been to dinner!” Kyle protested. “Away in Manchester, you leave me here to deal with these — these people.”
“Don’t act like you dislike it.”
“Don’t act like I do like it!”
“I just think, well, Kyle, your patterns. You only bring home boys when you mean it.”
“And you never bring girls home and then you unenthusiastically announce you intend to marry them!” Kyle shouted back. “What am I supposed to make of that? What are we supposed to do with it? I don’t even know who this girl is and you want me to call her my sister-in-law?”
“I wouldn’t ask you to call her that. Oh, Kyle. Don’t be — just don’t be. It’s quite fine to be envious.”
“Excuse me,” I said, raising a hand. The conversation was making me uncomfortable, and the first nighttime chill of August had caught me off-guard, shivering in shirtsleeves and wondering why we were not sitting in the parlor — probably so Gerald and Sheila would not hear the conversation. Kyle and Ike were bickering still, taking no notice of me, so I interrupted them: “Why the hell do you want to marry this girl? I mean, really. She sounds stupid and uninspiring and desperate to marry — and you’re the only source of that information, so it’s likely verifiable. So, really?”
“Yes!” Kyle echoed. “That is what I want to know!”
Ike was pouring the final dregs of his beer onto the brick pavers we were sitting atop. He sighed. “I just want to get married, is all. I don’t really like any girl, so why not pick a girl who likes me?”
“Why do you even want to get married?” I pressed. “Not getting married is an option.”
“Oh, for you both it’s an option,” Ike spat. He had crushed his beer can and it was now sitting on the table bent over itself, as if in pain. “But someone has to reproduce in this family. Not to mention I am bored. Not to mention I do like her. She’s docile in public and sluttish in private, which — well, I don’t know how else a girl is supposed to act.”
“Suddenly I am not the fiercest misogynist you know, Stanley, am I?” Kyle asked. “Ike, that is really appalling. Liking a girl is fine but if you aim to marry you should try to find someone you’re in love with.”
“But that has occurred to me,” Ike countered, “and I increasingly feel that perhaps I am not capable of it. Like a girl, love a girl, it’s all the most basic level of affection. This is the best I am going to do, and please don’t decide to act like a 14-year-old and tell Mom and Dad. Or, well, tell Mom and Dad if you must. They already think I’m pathetic.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t do that,” Kyle assured him, clasping a hand to Ike’s shoulder. “After all, I do want to bring a date to the wedding.”
~
“I thought I’d be much drunker than this,” Kyle announced as we ambled down toward the Angel. In the dark, quiet Islington night, there was no one on the street, and only a sparse neon light or two illuminated while the upper-middle-class children of the borough slept soundly in their nurseries. “I should have drunk more,” Kyle reiterated. “It’s no good to leave a meal like that so lucid.”
“I don’t have a problem with it.” I was not drunk, either, but I didn’t care if Kyle knew it. I was beginning to forget that Gary had died, that it was for this reason that I’d been to Islington for dinner. I would forget, and then in dizzy horror something would trigger my memory, and then painfully the thought would fade until the next surge. The gaps in the cycle were widening, but I was unconcerned. Kyle was next to me, his arm brushing mine as we walked. I imagined that during the day he was warm in his work clothes, that the sheen of perspiration glossed his arms and chest. I thought of licking it off his stomach. This made me hard. We kept walking.
“I don’t think I’ll be able to catch a cab,” he said somewhere around St. John Street. “And the Underground’s probably closed by now. I haven’t got my pocket watch on me, so I couldn’t tell you what time it is.”
“I believe it was nearing midnight when we left your parents.”
“Ah, well, so the Tube is over. Mind if I come home with you?”
I stopped walking, and so did he. “Yeah, of course,” I answered. “I’ll lend you some pajamas.”
“Oh, that’s swell,” he mumbled. “Pajamas.”
“Certain you’re not drunk?” I asked, although I was quite sure that he wasn’t. I lamented internally that the wine at dinner hadn’t been up to snuff, that I hadn’t drunk more of it. We continued down St. John Street, passing closed-up storefronts primed to reopen in the morning.
Incidentally, in front of the seedy coffee shop I sometimes I cruised at, Kyle paused, and made a small noise in this throat that caught my attention. As I stopped and turned to him, he reached out to steady himself against the shop window. He frowned, and crouched down steadily to toy with his shoe.
“Sorry,” he said. He glanced up at me. “I’ve been wearing these all day. They’ve just become quite uncomfortable. This should teach me not to change shoes before dinner.”
I smiled at him, and he continued to poke at his loafers. “I could carry you, I suppose,” I said. “I’m so sorry it’s too late to catch a taxi.”
“Well, I’m sure they’re all caught up in traffic around the West End, ferrying tourists around at an infuriatingly slow speed.”
“Right.”
“Well.” He stood back up. “You know all those tourists and their foreign money are good for the economy.”
“Quite. I’m sure.”
“Do you know I took care of part of that campaign last winter? Did I talk about it? Bringing overseas money to Britain is apparently something of a pet concern for certain Tory members of our constitutional government.”
“And the liberals?”
“That’s the thing about politics, dear. When your party is not in power, you exert the bulk of your energy on simply trying to keep yourself afloat. For all she talks about it I think my mother’s spent the most time over the past five years trying to keep herself simply visible so she can hang onto her seat.” Like being seen at the opera with her patrons, perhaps?
“Well, what’s the point in that?” I asked. “I love your mother, darling, but there is simply nothing more despicable than two parties merely pissing all over each other’s agendas, and grappling with the uncontrollable urge to harness power for no reason but to have it.”
“You’re just so cynically hung up on the downsides of government that you refuse to see the beauty in the process.”
“No, Kyle. I love government. I hate politics. You see, this is why I cannot vote. The in-fighting makes me ill.”
We walked a bit further up the road.
“Do you ever go into that coffee shop back there?” Kyle asked.
“What?” I asked.
“That shop we stopped in front of. Do you ever go in there?”
I was silent for a moment, deciding how I wanted to handle this. “I stop in from time to time for a coffee,” I chose to inform him.
“Because I hear it’s quite cruisy,” he prompted.
“Oh. Well, I think I might have heard that, too.”
“And it would make me sick to think that you’re in there fucking random blokes, or using the glory holes or something.”
I was silent on this point.
“You know,” he continued, “I did once use one. A glory hole, I mean.”
“Really?” I probed. There were few stories I hadn’t heard in my 20 years of friendship with Kyle. Certainly I’d never heard anything about a glory hole.
“Oh, yes. At school, there was a really quiet shop immediately across the river from us. I kept hearing older boys talk about, well, fairies visiting the shop, so one day I walked down and went into the shop to purchase a packet of crisps. Really I wanted to, oh, explore. It’s not that I wanted to have sex, or anything. I mean, I was 13 years old. I suppose I was just curious. I’d never seen a cock, you know, other than my own. And I wanted to. What do you think of that?”
I was frankly shocked that he wanted my opinion. “I think it’s only natural. I’m sure even a boy growing up straight would have been curious about something like that.”
“A boy growing up straight would have ignored it. What would you have done?”
Again, I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I was fucking my pillows and pretending it was a certain son of my mother’s friend from the time I was 11 years old. I’m sure a real penis would have interested me.”
“Well, I did see a real penis, actually. After the first time — and the second time — I simply bought my crisps and ran back to school, hyperventilating. The third time — well. The third time I crept behind the shelves of packaged pastas and Fairy Liquid — I’m aware of the irony — and went into the loo. There were two toilets, and I could tell a man was in one of them. So I went into the other, and tried to look through the hole —and before I knew it he’d, like, almost put his fingers through, but not really, they were just touching the hole. So I touched back, right, and he — I don’t know, he put his cock through. I nearly threw up on myself. I’d never seen one that wasn’t mine in real life, except I suppose for Ike’s when he was a baby. It was all pinched-looking, and I’d never seen an uncut one before, so that was quite a shock.”
“Well, what did you do?” I asked. Having never heard the story I was curious. Kyle had plenty of disturbing experiences at school — some of which he’d admitted to me over the years, and many of which Ike had done.
His face went red. “I don’t know, I touched it — I guess I put it into my mouth.”
“Jesus.” I stopped walking, and so did he. “Kyle, what do you mean you guess? How does one not remember something like that?”
“Fine, I don’t guess, I remember putting it into my mouth.”
“And what happened next?” I asked.
“What do you mean what happened next? I had a penis in my mouth, what do you think happened next? He fucked my mouth!”
I laughed, having to pause to do so without tripping over myself in the dark, as the nearest streetlamp was apparently out.
“It’s not funny!” Kyle protested. “I was terrified! I ran out of the shop weeping, and never went back.”
“I wish I’d known you at 13,” I said when I stopped giggling.
“No, you don’t. My adolescence was miserable. Utterly wretched.” We had begun to walk again, passing murky pools of gutter run-off and puddles of sick; the streets were virtually deserted but retained the relics of Friday-night passers-by. “I hated myself, Stanley. I just completely hated myself.”
“Fair enough,” I conceded. Having not hated myself quite so intensely — I reserved my anger for my parents and sister, immersing myself in keeping comprehensive and pathetic vitriolic journals — I wondered if, perhaps, had I known Kyle as a youth, he might have been less miserable. But to have known Kyle, I would have been attending his ancient and well-established public school, which likely have made me as miserable as he was.
When we arrived at my flat, Kyle darted up the stairs in front of me, and I wondered about his aching feet pounding up the concrete staircase. Once inside, I slammed the door and reached for the light switch, but was caught unaware and found myself forced unguarded into a tight embrace. Lips against mine, I was a prisoner to the doorframe. Never one to turn down a good snog, however, I opened my mouth, wondering where Kyle had found it in himself to be so dominating, why his mouth tasted only faintly of beer, and what I was going to say when he drew away. As he did so, my mind was reeling.
“Darling,” I said softly, inching fingers against his hairline. “I think you’re drunker than you think you are.”
He shook his head. “I’m not, Stanley. I’m completely sober.”
I was too. It felt uncomfortable. I wasn’t sure what to do or say, and Kyle was still holding me against the door to my flat. Being much stronger than he was, I could have disposed of the situation with little effort, and yet I did not.
He tightened his arms. “Will you please do me the honor of being my plus-one to Ike’s wedding? I’ll kill myself if you decline, I really will.”
“Of course I’ll be your plus-one.”
“You’ll be my date?”
“Yeah.”
In the moonlight streaming through the big, dusty windows, the batting of his lashes made just the most graceful, brief shadow. “I really mean like a date-date. … God, I must sound so girlish.”
“Well, the date hasn’t even been set, and who knows when that’ll be. But, yes, certainly. I’d love to go.”
“It’ll probably be out of town. She’s from Wigan, or something. Would you go out of town with me?”
“I would go anywhere with you.”
His heart was pounding in his chest, and so was mine — out of sync, but every few beats they did manage to meet up, and in between one of these sets of matching heartbeats he tipped himself up against my body, and kissed me again on the lips.
Kyle and I kissed often. We kissed hello at the Bucky, we kissed good-bye if one of us stayed over. I kissed him with tongue at midnight on New Year’s Eve 1982 and he kissed back, haphazardly, with visible granules of cocaine clinging to the downy hairs on his upper lip. We kissed when we graduated university and we kissed sometimes when one of us was upset. A gay man could kiss his best friend every day of his life and it would be less romantic and certainly less sexual than kissing his own mother. I couldn’t remember the last time I kissed Kyle on the lips because it had probably been really recent.
This one was different.
Our mouths fluttered together, wide open, tongues not meeting. I realized my eyes were shut, and I opened them to see one of his snap shut. Drawing away, his cheeks were red. I had to bolster my balance against the doorframe, and snapped the light switch on behind me. Kyle was blushing much deeper than I had imagined in the dark.
“You are smitten with me,” he said. “Don’t deny me. Admit it.”
I didn’t know what to say. This was the moment I’d been dreading my entire adult life. “All right.”
“Well, that wasn’t so bad, was it?”
“Excuse me?”
He let go of me, and I slumped back against the door. “All this time, Stanley. All you had to do was say it.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me.” He sighed, falling into the chair at the head of my wood-block kitchen table. “Come sit down,” he beckoned me, crooking his finger.
“I don’t know if I want to,” I replied.
He rolled his eyes. “Fine, then, don’t come sit next to me. Listen.” He put his head in his hands. “I am glad Gary is dead. I mean — oh, bollocks, that makes me sound mad and insensitive. I’m not—insensitive, I mean. Perhaps I’m a bit mad. … Or reverse those. I’m not sure any longer. Listen to me babbling like an idiot.” He laughed, bitterly. “Oh, you have no idea. Stanley. For three years I’ve been tortured by the idea that a phantom blond man was going to swoop down on this island and steal you away from me. The day he left I wept for hours, just out of happiness. I hate it when other people have your attention. You’re mine, do you know?”
I walked toward him. My arms were crossed. “Well, what was I supposed to do?” I threw my hands up. “Kyle, you’ve dated so many men it’s made me dizzy.”
“Well, you’ve fucked so many I’m shocked you’ve only had one case of syphilis.”
“I’ve had the clap a few times,” I admitted. “But mostly I do use protection. I didn’t really mean to come in anyone who wasn’t you. Honest.”
“It’s okay.” Kyle rapped his fingers on the table. “But it does make me a little sad. What am I talking about? It’s not okay, all right, you understand me? It hurts me, you know.”
“What does?”
“That you sleep with so many men!”
“Oh,” I said stupidly.
“Oh? Is that all you are going to say to me, oh?”
“Well, what do you want me to say?”
“I want you to apologize!”
“For what?” I asked.
“I — I’m not sure.”
I decided to take the seat next to him, sighing as I did. “I find it difficult to believe I am only 37. I feel I’ve lived at least twice that long.”
Kyle snorted. “That’s funny. You won’t be 37 until October. Do you remember what we did for my birthday?”
“I don’t know. Probably something with Christophe.”
“Oh, Christophe.” Kyle nodded. “You know, I’d forgotten about him.”
I hadn’t. The memory of meeting that man, Gregory, made my heart seize for a moment. Then I caught my breath. “He’s irrelevant, darling. Just another man, you know.” I turned to him; although his features were mostly obscured in the nighttime, the moonlight through my windows still caught his lashes. He looked very fetching, if pale. I took his chin in my hand, in a pose that echoed what I imagined a Victorian photocollage to look like. “I wouldn’t be that kind of man.”
He gulped. “What kind of man would that be?”
Without pausing, I answered, “One who leaves.”
“Oh.” His hands grasped onto me, one to my thigh and one to my flank. I was wearing a gauzy, taupe-colored button-down shirt — out of the ordinary for me, unusually formal, but something about dinner with Kyle’s parents made me fall in line. The material was so thin that it nearly disappeared between my skin and his fingertips.