All I Love and Know (41 page)

Gal squatted on the rug and watched him. His chin was squashed double against his neck; his big hands had lost their clasp at his lap, and now the lifeless fingers barely touched. She could see his chest rising and falling above the gut that pushed out his shirt. She had seen Savta sick once, when she'd gone over to their house with Ema. While Ema argued with Sabba in the kitchen, Gal crept into the bedroom. Savta was under the covers, her face as bleached and immobile as stone in sun, and Gal focused fiercely on her chest to see if it was moving. For a second, terror plunged through her. But there—there was the faintest of movements. She imagined Savta in a pile of corpses. She wasn't supposed to know about the pile of corpses, she was pretty sure. Was it cold in there, or warm? She imagined it having this same sick smell. That night, in bed, and for many nights after that, Gal practiced breathing so shallow nobody could see her chest move. She could do it about five or six times before she needed to gulp in air, and felt its clean, beautiful swell inside her
. C'mo gal
, she thought. Like a wave.

DERRICK AND BRENT RETURNED
home, and Matt and Daniel planned to spend New Year's with them. But that evening Daniel felt he couldn't leave the kids alone with their grandparents, given Malka's condition, and he didn't want to bring a babysitter into this situation either. He sent Matt over alone, saying, “You have to go, we haven't seen them since Brent got tenure,” and promising a thousand times that he didn't really care about New Year's anyway.

When Matt arrived, he could tell Brent was already slightly drunk: his cheeks were flushed and his eyes narrowed and a little watery. Soon he would become cuttingly observant and funny. He also had a tendency, when drunk, to climb onto Matt's lap and kiss him wetly, wondering with sentimental fervor why they'd never gotten together.

They toasted his tenure with tequila shots and beer. “Really, honey,” Matt said. “Knowing you can stay here—whew! Because what would I do without you?”

“No kidding,” Derrick said. “I was all, ‘I can move, my job is portable'—but really, I didn't mean it, I was just trying to be supportive.”

Brent laughed. “You talk a good game, Mr. Man, but I saw through that one.”

They sat on stools at the kitchen ell, and Matt filled them in on Yaakov and Malka's visit while they winced and sighed. They ordered in pizza, and after they'd eaten, they went into the living room and sprawled out. There was a party Brent had heard about, some rich guy on Pomeroy Terrace, and they'd go in a little while. They watched a
Project Runway
rerun, a challenge in which the designers had to create looks out of salad vegetables, and then another reality show in which contestants apparently made famous from other reality shows were given a series of team challenges on an obstacle course. Matt was deeply relaxed, for the first time in weeks, sunk into an easy chair with a cat on his lap, Derrick and Brent on the couch with their legs draped over each other. They pondered the reality show convention of being challenged to eat disgusting things like insects and maggots, and decided that it was some kind of commentary on Americans consuming such a huge share of the world's resources, although what kind of commentary, they weren't sure. Around eleven thirty, they looked at their watches and at one another. Derrick stretched and groaned, settled more deeply into the couch. “I can't do it,” he said. “Too tired. Too old. You guys go. Do you despise me?”

“Yes, we despise you,” Brent and Matt said in unison. But Brent wasn't up for going either.

Matt stared at him in exasperation. “Well, as intrigued as I am by the idea of a rich guy on Pomeroy Terrace,” Matt said, “if you're not going, I'm not going. I should go kiss Daniel at midnight anyway.” He stood and got his jacket. “Thanks for letting me celebrate with you.”

He hugged and kissed them both, and stepped out into the Northampton night. Christmas lights from the fire station dotted his peripheral vision and glinted from the puddles; mist rose from the huge piles of melting snow that had been plowed into the meridian, giving the night a billowy movie set feel. He walked through the wet streets of downtown with an unzipped jacket and ungloved hands, stepping around groups of teenagers and families celebrating First Night.

He wasn't in a hurry. He was drunk, and the night was comfortable, and the air cooled his face. Music—bluegrass, swing, zydeco—emerged from various events in the buildings around him. His boots made a pleasing noise as his heels ground the wet, gritty pavement. The house would be quiet by now, Malka and Yaakov huddled under the spare comforter in the dark bedroom, Daniel asleep on the air mattress unless one of the kids was up with nightmares. He thought of the house, the people in it, and it tilted in his mind till he saw it from the perspective of an alien observer. It was a box full of strangers. Strangers: Somehow, out of its billions and billions of people, the universe had hurtled these six from the plots of earth they were born and lived on, across the seas, over the prairie, and into the very same set of rooms. The randomness of it blew his mind. He thought: There wasn't one of them he'd have chosen under normal circumstances. Even Daniel. He was glad he'd chosen him, but he had to be honest about it.

A notion on the very surface of his mind, separate from thought, made him turn toward Pomeroy Terrace instead of toward home. He picked up his pace, his mind nowhere, his will glimmering in twitches of his muscles like the faintest of radio signals, until the sound of dance music and the sight of cars crammed next to each other at the curb indicated which house it was. It was a huge purple Victorian he drove past almost daily, and the party was in a turret.

Inside, a techno baseline thundering in his ears, he nosed his way toward the bar, sidling past clusters of men talking loudly over the music and laughing. The house was broken into several condos, but even still, this one was huge, with lustrous oak floors. He nodded at a colleague of Brent's whose name he'd forgotten; some guys from the gay runner's group he'd run with a few years ago; Jeff Schafer, another designer he knew, who occasionally referred work his way. There were women here and there, spiky-haired, short-skirted, lipsticked—straight, he assessed—but it was mostly men, as though a gay scene had popped up out of nowhere, like those barns and castles and old-woman-who-lived-in-a-shoe shoes that rose, looming and latticed, out of the pages of Noam's storybooks. On the windows, heavy flowered curtains hung from iron rods curiously hammered and curlicued at the ends. Built-in bookcases soared to the ceiling. An enormous flat-screen TV broadcast a New Year's countdown show with the volume off; it was six minutes to midnight.

Who on earth owned this place? Matt found the long table serving as a bar and poured himself a vodka tonic, found a strip of lime next to a wet paring knife and squeezed it in, feeling it bite at a tiny cut on his thumb. He drank it quickly in order to re-kick-start the buzz that had faded. How had he ended up here? He was still wearing his jacket; he would stay for just a few minutes, absorb it as a strange tale he would tell Daniel tomorrow, the story of a gay wonderland that had sprung up in the middle of honest, lesbionic Northampton. The sight of full-speed flirting—bursts of fake laughter, voices brimming with irony, eyes careless and languid and calculating, or darting to gauge the impression a joke had made—made him feel superior, repelled; at the same time, taking in the rich tones of male voices and male scent made him giddy. He quickly finished his drink and poured himself another as people started gathering in front of the TV screen, counting down. At midnight, they gave out a shout and started hugging and kissing.

Happy New Year, Daniel
, he thought
. Let's hope it's an improvement on the last one!
He was dying for a cigarette; his eyes sought out and found a pair of elegant French doors leading out to a deck. He went outside with his drink, trying to pick up the smell of cigarette smoke, the glow of an ember. The house was on a fairly busy street, but back here it was quiet except for the occasional celebratory burst of honks from passing cars. On a separate level of the deck a few steps down, a canvas cover wet with melted snow and plastered with dead oak leaves stretched over a hot tub. The bare branches of trees waved gently in the misty sky. There was a couple making out, hands clutching. A man stood smoking at the corner of the wood railing, and as soon as he saw Matt zeroing in on him, he laughed and held out a cigarette pack.

“That obvious, huh?” Matt said. He set his drink on the railing and pulled a cigarette out of the pack, leaned forward as the guy reached toward him with his hand cupped around the flame of his lighter. He was drunk by now, and as he lightly touched the man's hand and drew on the cigarette, he was fully cognizant that he was an utter cliché of a gay man on the prowl, only somehow that very awareness made it unreal, the way a stick figure gestures toward a portrait, or a portrait gestures toward the living, breathing human face.

“Happy New Year,” the guy said. “I'm Andrew.”

“Matt. Happy New Year.” He drew on his cigarette and exhaled with pleasure. Through the dim reflected light coming through the French doors, Matt was taking in this guy's particular brand of beauty. He was bigger and younger than Matt, full in the face; in middle age he'd be cursing what would become a double chin, but now that fullness made him look younger rather than older, at once angelic and sensual. His eyes were clear and wide and he had the expression of someone on the verge of laughter, or amazement.

“Can you believe this place?” Andrew said. “Apparently there are seven bedrooms upstairs.”

“You're kidding,” Matt said, his heartbeat quickening gleefully.

They drifted back in, languorously, “to explore the house,” Matt thought merrily, fingers making big cartoon scare quotes in his mind, and found that people were clustered around the bar, heads thrown back, lips sucking, throats working. Jell-O shots! He slid his way in. They had been set out in trays, artisanal, glistening in layers of fluorescent colors, as gorgeous as tiny pastries, or jewels. He lifted one and Andrew lifted one, and they brought them to their noses first, then their tongues, and then they slurped them down. They looked at each other with narrowed eyes, evaluating: Matt tasted a complicated mix of tequila and lime, and was that something spicy? His tongue and palate tingled on the perfect edge of the pleasant-unpleasant continuum. He ate a pellucid champagne shot with a raspberry suspended in it, and reached for another, this one in the shape of a tiny house. It dawned on him: It was
this
house!—with gables and turrets—the owner must have had them specially made.
Good for you, bucko!
he thought, biting into the house, sucking it in and feeling it slide down his throat. By now he could no longer parse the flavors; they were too layered, too subtle, and his mind was rapidly losing its capacity to make fine distinctions.

He felt fingers touching his own, and a gentle tug; Andrew was leading him away, and upstairs.

The bedrooms were up in the turret, and looking up into the domed ceiling above them, which was whitewashed and crisscrossed by silver braces, Matt grew dizzy. There weren't seven bedrooms, but there were five. Five bedrooms: Matt's mind held on to that as though he might be tested on it later. He stood at the doorways while Andrew went in and handled things: bed ruffles, picture frames, jewelry boxes. Was he going to steal something? Matt wondered vaguely, but it seemed that he was mostly just a toucher. At the doorway of one of the smaller bedrooms he heard a murmur: “Check this out.” The clunk of a latch being lifted, then a curve of a tight, patterned shirt as Andrew ducked into a small trapdoor opening in the far wall. Matt looked quickly around the hall, feeling like a cartoon spy, or a cat burglar, then slipped into the room and bent to enter the small space. He expected to be entering a roughed-out storage space, full of suitcases and mouse droppings and milk crates filled with old record albums, but when he heard a tiny click and light warmed the space, he saw that it was somebody's hideaway, with a love seat, a tiny table, and a tiny lamp with birds and butterflies painted on the shade. Even where the roughed-out ceiling peaked highest, it was too cramped to stand. It smelled of wood chips.

“Whoa,” they breathed.

They fell onto the couch and kissed the jarring, tooth-clashing kissing of urgent strangers, hands clutching each other's hair. Andrew's lips were full and dry, his breath raucous from cigarettes and alcohol, his tongue a little rude. They pulled down their pants, awkward in the tiny space, seams and belts scraping their thighs, then collapsed back onto the couch, looked at each other nose to nose, eyes crossing, and laughed.

Matt's body absorbed the weight of the man on top of him, the cool scented air, the silence that swathed them after the noise of the party. They kissed and kissed, to the sounds of their own breathing and grunting. Matt's hard-on was warm and rosy. It was exciting to be with someone larger than he was, to watch his face become blind and bloated with need.

Andrew slipped onto the floor and turned Matt away from him, and Matt felt Andrew's fingers slide down his back to his ass. His fingers, and then his tongue. This was a new development; he stiffened with shock and pleasure, feeling himself fondled, tasted, handled like an intriguing object on a dresser. He heard a rip of foil and the snap of a condom. He heard Andrew whisper again, felt the press of his hard-on against him.

“Wait,” Matt murmured, his mind arrested, a swamp animal popping its head out of the ooze. Andrew was nuzzling his neck with his lips, stroking him, sliding in by small degrees. He was using lube, thank God; Matt wondered where he had stashed it in those tight pants. He couldn't do this, he knew. One part of him was pulling away; the other was experimenting with just one more moment, one more moment before it really counted. His life outside that tiny room had dimmed and fallen away. Matt breathed and tried to open up, leaned into the pain, leaned into it till it became a glowing ember instead.