Gossip (6 page)

Covering him from head to toe, holding his face and gently rocking our cocks, I broke off kissing just to see his smile again, a breathless, blissful grin. He ran a hand over my bristles—his fingers were in love with my skull—and said, “Can’t remember—the last time—enjoyed this so much.”

“You sure know how to enjoy yourself,” I said admiringly.

There was no mention of condoms, no suggestion we fuck. I don’t like fucking, even with someone I know; it is too deliberate and final. I prefer to exhaust the other variations. Sooner or later, one of you just wants to make the other come, although that wasn’t happening here. Each time someone got close, he stopped the other and we touched something else. I was enjoying this too much to want to finish yet, there was no place I had to be, and nothing else I wanted to do with this fellow. He seemed to feel the same about me. We moved out of the routine arc of sex into a daze of flesh and hormones.

We were sitting up, our legs around each other’s waist, his hand holding us together and slowly pumping, when he took his tongue from my mouth to whisper, “You have dinner plans?”

“Want to have dinner together?”

“Oh yeah.”

It would mean calling Nancy and telling her I wouldn’t be dropping by. She could guess why. It would leave me open to her teasing, but that seemed a small price for the chance to prolong this and maybe get to know this guy whose desires were such a perfect fit with mine. “Okay,” I said.

And he threw his head back and grinned. His hand had tightened its grip and quickened its strokes and he was moaning behind clenched teeth. I did not want to end yet, but his frantic rise in pitch and the slickness against my cock were too strong. I let go, clutching him with my knees while we shamelessly groaned in each other’s ear and squirted in his hand.

I fell back on the bed, gasping, my legs still wrapped around him. I clutched his soft foot and pressed the sole against my face like a telephone. I did not want to break contact. It was only sex; but sex for its own sake, with no consequences, no future, out-of-town sex with somebody else’s boyfriend, had been thoroughly satisfying.

He reappeared overhead, straddling me on extended arms, grinning. “Yow,” he said, then flipped around and nested in my armpit.

I liked having him there. His eyes were closed, his mouth still flush. A tomcat smile stood out on his pale face as if he wore lipstick.

“Do this often?” I teased. “Take home roadkill from the information superhighway?”

A brown eye snapped open. “I am not roadkill.” His indignation took me by surprise.

“Not you, silly. Me.”

“You? Well, you shouldn’t put yourself down either.” He seemed to have lost his sense of humor with his orgasm.

“All I meant was you know how to enjoy yourself with someone you just met.”

“I usually don’t. Do this or enjoy it.” He smiled and laid a leg across my middle to make clear that he enjoyed me, and to keep my body beside him.

But I was content to stay, glad that he wasn’t the type who promptly wipes off and gets dressed. It took practice to be so comfortable with tricking. I assumed he was being modest about his experience.

“How old are you?” I asked.

“Twenty-eight. And you?”

“Thirty-four. Like I said on the chatline.”

“I said I wouldn’t read that. I didn’t. So. Did we surprise each other, Sergeant Rock?”

“Oh yeah.” I didn’t tell him what I’d expected. If he couldn’t laugh at my roadkill crack, he wouldn’t be amused to hear what I had pictured.

“Do you have a lover?” he asked. The old-fashioned word.

“Nope.” As gently as possible, not wanting to make him guilty, I said, “But you do?”

“No.”

“Really?”

“No!” He was offended I didn’t believe him.

“Sorry. Just thought that’s why you had such a big bed.”

“It was here when I moved in. Almost everything belongs to the friend who owns it. He stays here when he’s in town, but he has his own room.”

“A gay friend or a straight friend?”

“Straight. And married. Why does it matter?”

“Just curious.” I wanted him to be attached or kept, to explain his apartment and car. Otherwise, I’d been picked up by a very successful younger man, and I really was roadkill.

“Everything has to be gay or straight with you New York types,” he grumbled, stroking the rill of bone by my temple.

While our voices said one thing, our bodies said something else. We remained curled against each other, too content to climb out of this warm bath of shared skin.

“Why do you do this to your head?” he asked.

“I like the look. The feel. Saves money on haircuts.”

“It’s not for the politics?”

“Oh, it’s like any haircut. It might have social meaning at first, but then it becomes just a haircut.”

I enjoy talking in bed with strangers. Often they just want to sleep or go home or I am too disappointed to want to loiter myself. But when the mood is right, I love the inside-out intimacy of learning about the vertical life of a body that I’ve already known horizontally.

“How long have you been out?” I asked.

“Depends on how you define out.”

I wasn’t alarmed; it’s always a tricky question. “When did you start having sex with guys?”

“Oh, seventeen.”

“Really? You have the jump on me.”

“How old were you?”

“Depends on what counts as the first time.”

“Your first time in bed with a man.”

“Twenty-one. Only his wife and another woman were in bed with us.”

“Truly?” he said, making a face.

I told him the story, the comic version, which I hadn’t repeated since my days when all postcoital talk seemed to be about first times. I gave no names.

He listened with growing concern for my shame, and distress that women were present. “I hope you didn’t have sex with
them.”

I assured him I hadn’t, although that disappointed some men.

“What an awful couple,” he muttered. “What kind of wife can do that with her husband? Both those women sound awful.”

His righteous disgust amused me. After all, I’d been appalled myself at the time. “But I was just as bad. Tim and Nina’s only crime was that they didn’t know how serious Nancy and I were. My only regret is that I was too stupidly romantic to enjoy it as the goof it was.”

“No. You couldn’t help yourself. You were in love. And women are wired differently from men. For a woman to do that, a married woman especially, a moral defect is present.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. He must not have known many women. “So how did it happen for you?”

“Oh—” He drew close again and stroked the hairs on my arm. “I had a paper route. I saved up my money. And hired a hustler.”

“At seventeen?”

“Uh-huh.” His grin was back. “My parents went off to an aunt’s funeral one weekend. I couldn’t go because of my paper route. That night I dialed a number I’d found in a gay newspaper and asked for a call boy.”

“Where was this?”

“Baltimore.”

“They have call boys in Baltimore?”

“They have them everywhere,” he said, surprised at my naïveté. “But he drove out to the house, saw I was just a kid and, well—we had fun all night long. We didn’t get a wink of sleep. He even helped me deliver my papers the next morning. And he only charged his basic house-call rate.”

“How old was he?”

“Twenty-five, twenty-six.”

“You could’ve charged him.” I hid my unease over his cold practicality, and my envy, wondering which of us had been more bourgeois, me for thinking sex needed love or him for reducing it to cash. “But he was nice?”

“Very.” He stroked my arm as if comparing me to his hustler.

I noticed a clock by the telephone. It was after seven. We’d been together for three hours, most of it naked.

“You still serious about dinner?”

“Of course.”

“Then I better call the friend I’m staying with. Tell her not to expect me.”

I got up and went out to the living room and my clothes. Passing a mirror in the hall, I paused to see if I was as hot and beautiful as I’d felt during sex. No, I was the same ropy, slightly hairy rectangle crowned with a bare lightbulb. Fishing Nancy’s number from my jeans, I considered getting dressed before calling her, but I wanted to shower before we went to eat. The apartment was warm, an old steam-heated cave with high ceilings and thick walls. I noticed the three televisions again in the darkness. I stopped to inspect a bookcase, hoping we had something in common besides lust. The only novel was by Tom Clancy. The rest was political nonfiction, memoirs and journalism, with nothing remotely gay except a recent biography of Eleanor Roosevelt.

When I returned to the light, Bill lay on the white ice floe of the bed with one knee raised, his other leg laid across it, smiling to himself, the triangle of legs framing his fuzzy core. There was nothing beautiful about his nudity either, but his face remained cute. I sat with my back to him to use the phone.

It was a direct line. Nancy answered after a single ring.

“Hi, it’s me,” I said.

“Was just thinking about you.” She sounded quite chipper. “So you coming over?”

“Not tonight. Do you mind? I ran into an old friend and he asked me to have dinner with him.”

Silence. “How old a friend?”

“Old enough.”

“You know what I mean.” She snorted amiably. “So should I expect you home later or do you want to call here tomorrow?”

It wasn’t as if this were a common occurrence when I visited Nancy. “I’ll be back tonight. It’s just dinner.”

“You don’t have to apologize. It was only going to be pizza. Although one of the Harvard boys did ask about my bald friend.”

I laughed—a large bare foot was stroking my back. “You just want to make me feel bad for standing you up.”

“He did ask. Honest. I don’t know the depth of his interest. I always assumed he was neuter. But he did ask.”

“I’ll come by the office tomorrow night. I promise.” I grabbed the pesky foot and held it in my lap.

“He won’t be here tomorrow night.”

“But you will. I’ll see you later.”

I hung up guiltily, unsure why I felt guilty. I found Bill watching me with his double smile, that smile behind a smile. His foot was smooth, with no calluses or corns, the suburban foot of a man with a car. He wiggled his toes in my hand.

“Would you
like to spend the night?” he asked.

“I can’t. I promised my friend I’d meet her later.” But I lay back down beside him. After being away for ten minutes, I’d forgotten how good his body felt. He still had the fresh smutty smell of an ailanthus tree in full bud.

“Where does your friend work?” he asked.

“The Hart Building.”

“Oh. She works for a senator?”

“Uh-huh. Freeman.”

“Hmm.” A note of contempt.

“You don’t like Senator Freeman?”

He opened his mouth, then shut it and snuggled against me. “Let’s not talk about
that.”

I put my arm around him, but I was curious now, suspicious. “What do you write for, Bill? Newspapers? Magazines?”

“Whoever will have me. Although recently I’ve been too busy finishing my book to write for anyone. But I’ve appeared in the op-ed pages of the
Wall Street Journal.
Twice.”

“Then you write about business?”

“Politics.”

I approached warily, fearing the worst. “Who’s your steadiest customer?”

“The
Washington Times.
Although my best work goes to
American Truths.”

“So you’re”—I almost said right-wing but caught myself—“conservative.”

“I don’t label my point of view. Although the liberal press isn’t interested in what I want to talk about.”

Only a right-winger would talk like that. Yet I felt no twinge of shock or nausea. Holding him against me, I found my beliefs suspended, my righteousness gone. I stroked the cool mound of his bottom. “What do you think of Pat Robertson?”

“A bigot. He and the rest of the religious right. A gay man would have to be an idiot to support them.”

At least he considered himself gay. “But you don’t have problems with other conservatives?”

“There’re all kinds of Republicans, just as there’re all kinds of gay people. Despite how things look from New York.”

So I’d tricked with a young Republican, a journalist. And it changed him. He no longer seemed like a friendly, horny kid but older, colder, slightly smug, even as his chin nuzzled my chest.

“I remember when I first started going to bars,” I began. “I went home with this guy. We were already in bed and he suddenly said, ‘Excuse me. But I have to ask before we continue. What are your politics?’”

Bill laughed, his breath tickling my chest hair. “What did you tell him?”

“The truth. That I was sort of a leftist liberal with socialist pretentions. Which was fine. He just didn’t want to have sex with a neo-Nazi.”

His face jerked up. He looked stung. “You think I’m a Nazi?”

“No, no,” I quickly said. “Just something I remembered. And how funny his timing was.” I drew him against me to assure us both that I didn’t really think he was the enemy.

“It is funny,” he said. “And stupid.” He thought for a moment. “Once my book is published,” he muttered, “I won’t be able to meet guys like you. It’ll be the end of my anonymity.”

The happy, groundless fear of the first-time author. “What’s your book about?”

“Washington under the Clintons.”

“An attack?”

“An objective appraisal.”

I doubted that. “But you have a publisher?”

“Yes!” Again he sounded hurt; his skin was not only soft but thin. “Crown. It’s due out in April. I’m finished except for correcting the galleys. Which is how I’ll spend next month.”

“Congratulations. They’re a good house.” Maybe his book actually was an objective appraisal.

“Thanks,” he sniffed. “Sorry to be so touchy. My humor and other people’s don’t always mesh. Which is why I have things like ‘laugh’ and ‘pun intended’ on the function keys of my Powerbook. But you can’t do that in person without sounding autistic.”

He changed again, from a smug ideologue to a sweetly insecure nerd.

“Well, I know
American Truths
only by its reputation. I’ve never looked at it.”