Martin and John (14 page)

“But you tell me something now,” I say to Martin. “Tell me where you came from.” “Hell,” Martin says. “I came from Hell’s Warehouse.” I laugh a little, then curl up on the floor and look at him on the couch. “Johnson was an asshole—” he starts. “No,” I stop him. “I don’t want to hear about Johnson. Tell me about New York.” Now he says no, he says, “Can’t you see I’m tired?” And then he walks to the bedroom, mumbling, “Johnson is such a fucker,” and I let him go. On the back porch I watch the plant, and the prairie, and somewhere in the distance, I watch the night as well, waiting for its return. Late in the afternoon I join Martin in bed. He’s so still he seems to be fading away, and not wanting to disturb him, I leave him, poke a candle in a wax-covered bottle, and sit close to watch it melt into yet another layer of wax, viscous at first, like sludgy water, then brittle, like ice. In one long, softly curved rivulet, I let myself remember the curve of my first lover’s face. I say his name aloud: “Henry.” The puff of air that escapes my mouth with his name sets the candle flickering, and then, with a sputter, it goes out.

THE AIR CONDITIONER has malfunctioned the second night at work: the guardhouse is freezing and the windows
have fogged over. Charlie sits on a wooden stool today, his back bowed. I hadn’t noticed a stool in the room yesterday; it must have been shoved under the counter. Charlie looks at the formica surface now, white and barrenly clean except for a lidded cardboard box. “Did you clean up?” I ask. “Not me,” he says. “Guess they did it during the day. Put my stuff in that box there.” He doesn’t turn to me when he talks. “Brrr,” I say, and fake a shiver even though he’s not watching. “Why don’t we go out?” “Not scheduled to go for another hour,” Charlie says. “We’ll go around twice this time.” He finally looks at me. “It’s hot as hell out there,” he says. “Yeah,” I say, “well, it’s cold as hell in here.” Charlie just nods his head and heaves his weight off the stool, pushes open the door. As I follow him out I squeeze his shoulder, letting my hand linger for just a moment. If he even feels it, he says nothing.

“So what do you do during the day?” I ask. Charlie plods along, slow tonight, silent. “Sleep a little,” he finally says, after I’ve almost forgotten the question. “Sleep a lot now, actually. About five or six hours right after I get home, another couple before I come in for the night.” “I can’t go to sleep right when I get in. I usually wait a few hours. Too wired up, I guess.” This isn’t true: I never sleep anymore. “No, no, that’s not right,” Charlie says quickly, cutting the air with his hand. “You should go straight to sleep when you get home. Otherwise, you’ll just be run down and cranky.” I sigh, not wanting to get into it. Charlie looks over, and I can see his grin in the pale glow of the plant’s lights. “You got a woman?” he asks,
and there’s a mischievous youthful tone in his voice that I want to preserve. But I answer, “No,” and leave it at that. Charlie doesn’t. He seems suddenly animated. “Oh, come on, Johnny boy. You’re how old?” “Twenty,” I say. “Twenty,” he repeats. “And no woman? No girlfriend?” For a second I think he stumbles on that, but then he skips on ahead. “When I was your age I was already married, me and my wife did it every day. And when she wasn’t around, I always had my hand.” My laugh sounds strained. “Okay, Charlie, I get the picture. But there
are
other things you can do, you know.” We walk on in the darkness, a quarter mile or so. I hear an isolated dust devil spinning in the prairie beyond the fence. Farther away, a few cattle low sleepily, disturbed by the wind or a passing coyote. But Charlie seems intent only on the ground in front of his feet and the gravel crunching under his boots. Then his voice comes, confused: “Are we still talking about your dick?” I don’t answer.

“Hey,” he says quickly, and clears his throat. “You live with your parents maybe?” “No.” “Oh. I just thought, you know, if you were living at home, maybe that’s why you weren’t, you know, with any girls.” “No, that’s not it.” “You write to them?” “What?” I say, not sure what he’s getting at. “Oh. No, I don’t write. My parents live here in town.” “See them some, then?” “No, never.” Charlie looks at me briefly. “You live in the same town as them, but not in the same house, yet you don’t go see them or write?” I sigh. “We had a falling out,” I say. Charlie waits three steps. “Mind if I ask about what?”
“They didn’t like a friend of mine.” “Look,” he says, taking me by the arm. “That’s no reason not to speak to your parents anymore. I mean, surely you can work something out.” His hand on my arm squeezes tightly; it doesn’t feel like he’s squeezing my flesh, though, but something imagined in its place. “That’s just not a good reason to break off with your parents,” he repeats, letting go of my arm. I think about screaming, but don’t. “You tell them that,” I say. We’re almost back to the guardhouse now, where last night we went inside, poked through paperbacks, listened to the radio, but tonight, with Charlie’s things packed in that cardboard box and nothing of my own moved in yet, we’ll just hang around and drink coffee, Charlie on his stool, me leaning against a blank glass wall. At the door Charlie turns back to me, holding it closed. “I was just asking because I’ve got a son, and, well, he’s probably a lot older than you, but I never hear from him either. And I’ve got this feeling he’s going to miss me one day, and maybe I’ll be dead by then and so what can he do? So just …” His voice trails off and his fingers tap the door. “Say something, John. Don’t wait that long.”

He turns and slowly ascends the guardhouse’s two steps. “Hell, the last time I saw him was at his mother’s funeral. When people are dead, that’s not a good time to get acquainted, you know?” He laughs a little, and turns back to me. “Well, that sure came out funny, didn’t it? No matter. You understood me, right?” I nod, not looking at him, thinking, though I try not to, of Henry. Thinking: I understand you, but
do you understand me? In the distance I think I see our house and a light shimmering in a window. Just an illusion: the moon glinting off a windowpane, the wetness around my eyes playing tricks with my vision. I swipe at them angrily. “What’s the matter?” Charlie asks as I brush past him into the freezing cubicle. “Dust,” I say, “it’s nothing. Just an old allergy flaring up on me,” and I stab at my eyes again.

MARTIN GASPS NEXT to me in his sleep, sucking for air as if he were exhausted, sick, dying. For a brief second I imagine that he is dying, but that fiction, that future, is too empty to contemplate. Unable to sleep when I returned home from work, I jumped around, jittery. I practically forced Martin into making love, and in the end all he did was jerk me off. In the middle of it, looking at me with yellow eyes, he said, “You look terrible. You’ve got to sleep.” I pretended not to hear him, but now I wonder: do I look as bad as he does, as wasted, as washed out? He sleeps under the covers today; his pale body pokes from the green blanket like an ocean-bleached bone covered in seaweed. But then I think, He is my handsomest drowned man, I have cleaned and polished him before, and I will do so again.

“Martin,” I whisper in his white seashell of an ear. “Wake up.” He is completely without reaction, not speaking, not moving, not even breathing differently. “Martin,” I repeat, louder this time, and tap his shoulder. “Wake up. I want to
talk to you.” He moves this time, only a little, but I sigh with relief. “Come on,” I call loudly. He doesn’t really react, but his breathing has altered. “Please,” I whine. “I can’t sleep. I haven’t slept for days. It’s driving me crazy.” Suddenly I really am worried about myself, and I jump out of bed, flip on the light, run to a small mirror on the wall. My eyes are bloodshot and circled with dark rings. My lips are cracked and seem slightly swollen. I’ve forgotten to shave since the job started, and my beard has come in shabbily, in patches. That’s all I can see of myself in the mirror, the tiny square of my face, and it seems masklike, a mask that, in its decrepitude, seems to accurately project what lies underneath. “Martin!” I call.

And his hands are on my shoulders, soothing, cool. I turn and hug him desperately. It’s all right, he says. In the large mirror over the dresser I can see only my face and arms wrapped around his sheet-draped body. In the farther mirror I don’t look as bad: a little pale, somewhat unkempt. Disheveled. As though I’d just had sex. And then, remembering the first image, my cracked lips and sunken eyes, I add a mental note: in a desert. I let go of Martin and rush over to a small bookcase. We’d hollowed out a copy of
Gulliver’s Travels,
thinking it somehow appropriate, and from within its bindings I dump our savings. A pile of bills and a few coins fall to the floor. I’d told him keeping the money in a book was a romantic thing to do; now I see it as the work of a siege mentality: keep what you need close to home, in case you must flee. “Let’s go,” I say. “Right now. Let’s just go.” Martin
comes to me, letting the sheet slip from his body. The hair on his stomach is sticky and clumped together from where I’d come on him a little while ago, and though I wish him silent, he speaks. “We can’t leave, John,” he says, gathering up the money. “You know there’s not enough here.” He has the money in both hands; the bills poke from his fingers like leaves. There are barely seven hundred dollars there. We were able to buy the house on a loan two years ago, and the payments keep the pile small. He called the house an investment when we first talked of buying it, saying it would increase in value and, with the selling of it, finance our move to New York. But, seeing him with that skimpy wad of money in his hands, like leaves, I realize that one doesn’t buy a house in order to leave it. Martin
is
like a tree, a tree of the prairie; he wants only to grow in one place, and drink what little there is.

I swat the money from his hands. I squat down like a child. “There’s lots here,” I say, and indeed, it looks like a lot, since we’ve never bothered to exchange the ones and fives for tens and twenties. Looking up at him, I’m at eye level with his penis. “There’s lots we could do with this,” I say. Martin kneels beside me. “John,” he says quietly, “this wouldn’t even pay for our plane tickets.” “Then forget about the plane tickets. Pretend we’re already there.” He asks what I mean. “A game, Martin, let’s play a game.” I settle on the floor, sitting Indian-style. “We’re in New York, see, and we’ve got all this money in our pockets.” Martin sits back against the bedroom wall and closes his eyes. With the loss of their tiny spots of
color, his white frame seems to melt into the wall. “Please, John, I’m not in the mood for pretend games. I’m tired of talking about New York. It makes me sick.” “No, Martin, please.” I put my fingers on his mouth, silencing him. “I need to keep this one story going, okay? It means a lot to me.” He opens his eyes. “It means too much to you, John.” “No, no, not too much. You don’t understand, Martin. This New York, it’s the only story I believe in anymore. All those other stories, the ones they teach you growing up, I gave those up years ago. But this one I need. I need to have at least one story.” Martin takes my hand from his chin, holds it in his. “John, come on, you don’t need stories. That’s why I’m here.” I look at him, confused, staring full on into the bottomless tranquillity of his eyes. What’s in there that makes him say that? “I’m not saying I should be your whole life,” he continues, “just that I’m here. There’s more I can offer you than just stories about New York.” “Henry said something like that once. Said he could give me more than my mother ever could.” Martin’s voice, when it comes, is disgusted. “Henry was an old lech who took advantage of a little kid.” “I
loved
Henry!” I yell. Then, in a quieter voice: “God, I remember being with him. He was so gentle. It didn’t matter how often we did it, he’d always treat me like it was my first time. He went so slow, so kind. It almost felt like my first time, you know, each time. No one’s ever done that for me since.” I look up, startled. “I guess that means you.” Martin sighs. “John, you were thirteen. Your pubic hair still feels new at thirteen.”

Henry, my first lover, was gray-haired and fleshy, a kind man run out of town because here they can still do that, rather than use the courts or jail. Here, they can fire someone from his job, not cash his checks, not sell him food from the only grocery store in town. And of course the town didn’t single out just Henry, but Martin refuses to understand that. I thought I could sleep with him just once. I used to sneak over there nearly every night. Henry wasn’t old, but he’d reached a point, I think, where sex tired him out more than when you’re young. And I’d worked hard that night, got him to do it twice, so he was exhausted, and then I lay with him until he fell asleep, telling him all the while I’d leave. And when he fell asleep, I curled up next to him, my face right in his, so I could feel his breath on my skin, and I went to sleep. The next thing I knew, my parents were there, and the sheriff, and Henry’s neighbor, who’d seen me coming and going. I don’t remember what they said, and I don’t remember them actually hitting me. I just remember Henry yelling, I told you not to fall asleep! And I started to say I was sorry, but someone put a hand over my mouth, so he never learned that. He left soon after. I remember seeing him once or twice more. I never approached him. He’d have run from me, I think; I’d probably have run from him. He looked scared, hunted. His face sagged, his stomach had swelled. In weeks, he’d grown old. Years later I’d wanted to call him, tell him I’d at last met someone else: Martin. But instead, I got in a fight with my parents and they announced, their trump card, making them
winners despite the fact that it had nothing to do with anything, By the way, Henry’s dead. Dropped off like a bug in winter. Heart disease, or some such.

Martin is stacking the money into neat piles when I look up. I watch him until he’s finished. He looks at me. “Okay, we’re there. We have seven hundred and twenty dollars. We can do anything you want.” He pauses. “John, I’m sorry. I had no idea.” “How could you? I never told you.” Martin starts to say something, then stops, and then we rent a hotel room: a hundred dollars. We go shopping: Martin shows me where to go for cheap used clothing, which sidewalks are okay to shop from, which are rip-offs. One day stretches into two, and there is another night’s rent, and meals, most cheap, but a couple of more pricey ones in midtown. When only a small pile of unspent money is left, I suggest we go to a concert. Martin smiles and says the name of a bar. Maxwell’s, in Hoboken. “It’ll be cheaper that way,” he says, “and it’ll give us a chance to get out of the city.” “But we just got here.” He pulls out two dollars in quarters from the small pile of change. “For the PATH,” he says, “it’s like the subway to Jersey.” Then he pulls out ten dollars each for ticket money. “We’ll think cheap. A local band is playing tonight.” We have a couple of beers at Maxwell’s, more money. The concert is good, really loud, and toward the end the back room of the bar gets raucous with dancing people bouncing off each other. We slip out just before the end of the first encore. “Oh!” I cry, “but it’s gotten dark and cold in Hoboken, New Jersey, and it’s
raining cats and dogs. We get to walk in the rain!” “Ah!” Martin exclaims, smiling, “but there’s a gypsy cab right here, to whisk us back to the train station in warmth and speed!” “And to use up the rest of our dollar bills,” I say, holding up four wrinkled singles. There’s only a loose pile of change on the floor now. “It’s okay,” Martin tells me, saying he paid for an extra night at the hotel; all we have to do is get back. He smiles wickedly. “And then your ass is
mine.”
“And we have just enough to do it,” I say. “A dollar for you”—I count out four quarters—“and a dollar for me,” I add, taking the last coins, two quarters and a half-dollar. “Wait.” Martin stops me. “What’s that?” “This? It’s just a half-dollar.” “But the PATH machines don’t take them. You should’ve changed it.” “What do you mean, I should’ve changed it? I don’t know the first thing about those machines. Let’s change it now.” He slumps against the wall and pulls the sheet across his lap. “But it’s late, nothing’s open.” “So what does that mean?” “It means we’re stuck.” “We’re stuck in Hoboken?” Martin laughs a little. “In the cold and the dark and the rain,” he says. “Yes,” I say. I remember, it was I who made it rain.