A home at the end of the world (14 page)

“That’s probably a good idea,” I said.

He glanced again at the smoker, and settled himself at my end of the bar. He folded his arms on the splashboard and nodded his head.

“You’d be surprised how hard it is to get bartending jobs,” he said. “I mean in, you know, good places. You haven’t been here before, have you?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think I’d seen you.”

A depth of scrutiny passed briefly behind his pallid blue eyes. He was trying, without deep conviction or curiosity, to figure me out. I imagined the bar was frequented by young men looking to meet up with money. I was neither handsome enough to be on the block nor prosperous-looking enough to be a buyer.

“I just wanted to try it,” I said. “You can’t keep going to the same old places over and over again.”

He nodded, unconvinced. It was not a casual restaurant; not the sort of place for people without an ulterior motive.

“Do you, um, work around here?” he asked.

“Downtown,” I said. “I was just in the neighborhood. I’m a writer.”

“Really? What do you write?”

I told him the name of the newspaper, and he nodded with particular zeal. The paper was hot then. “What do you write?” he asked again.

“Oh, different things. Listen, do you get off soon?”

“Well, we close in another hour.”

“You want to meet me for a drink in a less creepy place?” I asked.

“Well, okay,” he said. “I mean, yes.”

“My name is Jonathan.”

“I’m Erich. My name is Erich.”

He nodded as he announced his name. His eyes lost their uncertainty. Here was my subvert business—I’d come to pick up the bartender.

I went for a walk, and met him an hour later at a place in the Thirties. He’d arrived ahead of me. He stood at the bar with a bottle of Budweiser, feigning interest in the Esther Williams movie on the videoscreen. He said hello and nodded slightly, as if agreeing with his own salutation.

I ordered a beer, and we worked our way through a conversation. We talked about the usual things, delivered brief accounts of our origins and ambitions. It was a Wednesday night, the crowd at the bar was sparse. Technicolor chorus girls splashed in a brilliant aquamarine world on the videoscreen, filling the room with a colored, shifting dusk. Erich was all edgy inattention, the sort of person who shreds napkins and taps his feet and fails to hear fully half of what’s said to him. His hair was already thinning on top—I would be surprised to learn he was three months younger than I.

After what seemed to both of us a decent interval—two beers—we went to his apartment on Twenty-fourth Street, where he introduced his second surprise.

He was great in bed. There is no other way to put it. It seemed nothing less than transfiguration. Conversing, he was fidgety and evasive, given to arrhythmic pauses and odd spasms of laughter. But when he got out of his clothes he took on the fluid self-assurance of a dancer. His physique was modest and sinewy, with veined arms and a prominent rib cage. That first night, when we got to his studio (a single room with a Pullman kitchen and bath), he was naked so quickly he might have been wearing a breakaway suit, the kind comedians use. He was dressed one moment and nude the next, while I was still unfastening the last button of my shirt.

“Hey,” I said, “how did you do that?”

He smiled, and helped me out of my own clothes. His movements were swift and efficient but gentle. He had abruptly traded his skittish, roving manner for calm focus and suave, unhurried competence. He unbuttoned my jeans and slid them tenderly down to my ankles, wrapped his arms around my waist and lifted me, with only a hint of strain, up onto the bed.

I was not excited by him. I was excited by the idea of sex, the ease of it—I had gone out and caught someone, an unacclaimed man who was mine to do with as I liked. I admit it—there was a streak of sadism in my lusts. There was the taint of vanity. I chose ordinary men who would not refuse; who would feel lucky to have me. I did not thrill to the sight of their flesh—which was either bulky or scrawny but always abashed and grateful—so much as I did to the fact of their capture. As Erich set me on his bed I was aroused in the general, unfocused way that had become familiar. I would let him command the sex but I would leave his apartment undefeated. Part of me was already gone, even now, as our chests touched for the first time and our legs fumbled for position. I was more important than this. The excitement I felt was edgy and not entirely pleasant, like a swarm of bees inside my chest.

Erich nuzzled my shoulder, ran his fingers lightly along my ribs. He had a dry, powdery touch. There was something sweet about his earnestness and his balding, elusive beauty. There was something dreadful about it.

He lay for a while on top of me, peppering my chest with kisses. Then he deftly revolved our bodies so that I was on top. I got a thorough look at him, for the first time. He was thin but big-boned, his abdomen more densely furred than his chest. His cock angled off to the right, raggedly skirted by a vein. His gaunt, hairy stomach and skewed cock suddenly repulsed me. Usually with strangers there was a moment of shock like this, when I fully comprehended the privacy of their bodies. Looking at Erich’s thin torso, I felt as if I had caught him in some indiscretion. I saw the otherness of him, and it flipped me over from excitement to disgust—my own agitation soured, and I began bluffing my way through, cramming his cock blindly into my mouth. I was already thinking of going home and having a drink with Clare. Even as it happened, this was a story I would tell her. She and I would shake our heads together, and discuss the perplexing scarcity of love.

“Relax,” Erich whispered. I didn’t answer, because my mouth was full. When he repeated it, I pulled my head up and said, “I’m perfectly relaxed, thank you.” I would make him come quickly, come myself, and be back in my own skin, free on the street.

He slipped away, directing me to lie belly-down on the mattress. “You’re too tense,” he said. I skeptically obeyed, and he began massaging my back, tracing the curves of my shoulders and spine with his fingertips. “You’re very tight,” he said. “I can feel it all through here.”

Against my better judgment, I consigned myself to his hands. I disliked being told I was tense—it seemed he had recognized a flaw in my character. For the occasion of sex I always slipped over into an identity that was not quite my own. When making love I was like my own hypothetical older brother, a strong, slightly cynical man who lived adventurously, without the rabbity qualms that beset my other self. At my desk or on the subway I daydreamed of powerful, angry men who needed me to ease their pain. In bed with meek strangers I thought only of quick orgasm and escape.

Erich worked my back with ardent delicacy, his fingers expertly following the confluence of tendon and bone. When I remarked on his proficiency he said, “I took a course in this.” I would learn that he believed in acquiring accreditation. He was a diligent student of the world at large, and liked things broken down into sequences. He had also taken courses in conversational French, creative writing, and quiltmaking.

Under his ministrations, I relaxed almost against my will. Without having decided to, abruptly, I fell asleep. It was utterly unlike me. But I’d been keeping late hours, and working long days. The sensation resembled that of slipping under an anesthetic. One moment I was awake, looking at a framed photograph of two bland-faced strangers propped on the nightstand, and the next I was being roused from slumber by a kiss.

I startled, and nearly jumped off the bed. For a moment I lost track of everything. Where was I, and whose cologned jaw was this? “Shh,” he whispered. “It’s okay.”

“Oh God, did I fall asleep?” I asked. I was groggy and ashamed. Had I snored? Had I drooled?

“Just for a couple of minutes,” he said. He kissed my neck and gently but steadily positioned himself between my legs.

“I can’t believe this,” I said. “I’ve never, you know.”

“Just stay relaxed,” he said. “This is a dream you’re having.”

For some reason, I obeyed. Although my instinct was to return to myself, to quickly polish off the sex and get on about my business, I decided to relax. There was surprising, voluptuous pleasure in it. I let Erich manage things and our lovemaking passed as if in fact I was dreaming. He carried it through the way he pursued all his projects, with a scholar’s scrupulous attention. If our coupling lacked the abandon of true passion it had a schooled solidity that was the next best thing. Erich could pour a precise ounce of whiskey without measuring. He could make a double-wedding-ring quilt by hand. And he could tell how far to thrust, when to withdraw, when to throw in an unexpected move. I gave myself up to it. He enjoyed being in command, and I relinquished my own desire to impress.

We made love three times that night. After the first time we did not roll away. I didn’t make my escape. He held me, and I stroked his sparsely haired thigh. I could smell his sweat, which was sharp but not unpleasant. We embraced in silence for ten minutes or longer. Then he said, “Are you ready again?”

By the time I got dressed his apartment had lost some of its strangeness. It was not in any way an auspicious or even particularly comfortable home—a viewless room in a white brick building that must have been built, hurriedly, in the early sixties. It contained a platform bed covered with quilts, a stereo and television, and an absurdly large black sofa which, at sunrise, would begin its daily function of sucking up whatever light filtered in through the single window. On the wall was a silver-framed poster depicting a Matisse painting of a gaudy, lavishly draped room empty of life except for three dagger-shaped goldfish suspended in a bright blue bowl. Erich’s apartment could have been a doctor’s waiting room. It conveyed little about its inhabitant beyond a certain thin sorrow. Still, by the time I’d dressed, and had written down his phone number and left my own on a slip of paper, the apartment had taken on weight. It did not appear to be any less bleak than it had when we first arrived; it had merely begun to reveal itself as a place in which someone did, in fact, live. A red light blinked on the answering machine, signifying unheard messages. I blew Erich a kiss from the door, whispered, “See you later,” and walked three flights down to the street.

This was usually my favorite moment, after the sex was finished and I was restored to myself, still young and viable, free to go everywhere. Tonight, though, I felt irritated and weightless; I couldn’t quite pick up my sense of myself. Twenty-fourth Street lay quietly in its bath of dark yellow light. A lone hooker strolled in black stockings and a fur jacket, and an all-night produce stand offered displays of oranges, waxy apples, and carnations dyed green for St. Patrick’s Day. I was infused with a bodily pleasure that was intricately, brittlely edged in regret. Something had been lost, at least for the moment—some measure of possibility. I walked twenty blocks home, but couldn’t shake the feeling. It followed me like a thief.

I didn’t get home until after four. Clare was asleep. When I saw her the following evening, I didn’t offer to tell her much about Erich. Clare and I based our conversations about men on a shared attitude of ironic disdain, and I wasn’t sure how to present a man like Erich. I was not in love, but for once an evening’s sex had been something other than clownish comedy, desperation, or boredom.

Clare said, “You’re being very quiet about this, Jonathan. What exactly is up?”

“Nothing’s up.” We were sipping Pernod on the sofa. Pernod was our latest drink. We had a habit of brief but devout loyalties to different exotic liquors.

“You’re being circumspect,” she said, “and you’re not the type. Does this guy seem like he could turn out to be someone special? What exactly are you hiding?”

“‘This guy’ is another would-be actor slinging drinks in hell. He happens to be a great fuck.”

“Honey, don’t toss something like that off lightly,” she said. “I met my last great fuck in, what, 1979? Let’s have a few details, please. Come on, give. This is your Aunt Clare.”

She took a deep swallow of her drink, and I thought I saw under her friendly avidity the plain fear that I would leave her; that I’d disappear into love. It showed in her eyes and along her mouth, which could go stern and disapproving despite her lavish crimson lipstick.

“Honey, there are places even the best of friends can’t travel together,” I said.

“Oh, that’s not true,” she said. “You don’t mean that, you’re just embarrassed by the subject. Right?”

Clare and I kept no secrets—that was the heady, reckless aspect of our friendship. Perhaps it was our substitute for the creaturely knowledge other couples glean from sex. Clare and I confessed everything. We stripped ourselves naked and numbered our faults. We knew one another’s most disreputable fantasies; we confessed our deceits and greeds, our self-flattering lies. We described all our sexual entanglements, and we knew the condition of one another’s bowels.

And now, for the first time, I wanted to hold something apart. I wasn’t sure why. It may have been that very uncertainty I hoped to preserve. Erich had surprised me with his gentle competence. Something about him touched me—his edgy good cheer and slender prospects. Something about him made me angry. I didn’t know what I felt and I disliked being asked to give my feelings a name. I may have feared that in describing them so early I’d sap them of their potential for growth or change. I may have been right.

But I chose that night not to cultivate secrets. I, too, feared solitude and abandonment, and I knew I would never make a life with Erich. He would, at best, have been a first step toward something uncertain that lay beyond the circle of domestic warmth I shared with Clare. She was my main love in the world. I had no other attachment half so profound.

So I told her everything. There wasn’t, as it turned out, very much to tell. When I had finished, Clare said, “Honey, you’ve just found yourself a Doctor Feelgood.” She sang a couple of lines from Aretha’s song. “‘Don’t call me no doctor, filling me up with all of them pills, I got me a man named Dr. Feelgood, makes me feel real gooo-oood.’”