Martin and John (21 page)

I hate the empty moment before emotion clarifies itself. I hate sitting on Susan’s couch and staring at her living room, which feels unfamiliar, even though nothing about it has changed. When she comes from the kitchen, carrying a platter of crackers that ring a smooth brown mound, she says, “Hummus,” and dips a finger into the speckled-green paste. “I think they put parsley in it or something.” Hummus. Parsley. The world revolves around this opposition for a moment, and then, when I’ve accepted it, I realize that I’m afraid. Susan sits on the couch, looks at me. I can see the curve of her breast through a gap between two open buttons of her shirt. It rises and falls with her breathing. I notice the dimmed lights, the hush, the new sound of wordless music, and into this heady air I breathe my first words of the night. “Susan,” I say, “you have to risk AIDS in order to get pregnant.” I wonder then, as her hands rush to her chest, if she undid the buttons deliberately.

SEDUCTION WAS MARTIN’S art. Sometimes on a Sunday morning, the light in the tiny rooms of our apartment softened by closed curtains, he told me old stories. In the living room, sprawled on a futon, or in the kitchen, as he fried bacon or made omelettes and I sat at the table. How loosely I held him in that small space, one hand around my coffee, the other tracing the waistband of his underwear, the smell of both—coffee, underwear—mixing in my nose. For a while the only sound would be his metal spatula scraping the pan, but when he started speaking it was like a catalogue, a litany, was unrolling from his mind. Martin had a great memory for names, places, dates, for technique, though soon I realized he wasn’t bragging, or trying to make me jealous, or being sentimental. He wasn’t trying to recapture his past—merely to validate its existence. The remains of those mornings are mental pictures that I’ve drawn from his words: Martin, in the Ramble, lowering his glasses, slowly undoing the buttons of his shirt. I remember how carefully he chose his words, as carefully as, in days past, he must have chosen his method. He didn’t unbutton his shirt: he undid the buttons one by one, his fingers working down his chest, a V of skin spreading behind his passing hand like the wake of a boat. And he knew me too, knew that my own backward-looking eyes would revel in this knowledge of his past, that my mind would take it in like liquor, until the
whole of his experience would become inseparable from my own, and it would seem that the words that had been mouthed in his ears had been whispered to me, and the hands that had run across his body had passed over mine. I don’t remember, I
am
Martin: in a club, sliding a beer down the nearly empty gutter of a bar, coins tinkling to the floor as the bottle passes; in an alley, standing in shadow, listening to approaching footsteps, striking a match at just the right time. Though I’m sure he told me about the men he picked up, I don’t remember their looks, why they attracted him, even if his seductions were successful. I did realize, even then, that he presented himself as an object, played roles out of movies and books; but he knew this too. You could in those days, John, he said. This was strange to me—not that he knew about roles, but that he had ever assumed them. I had played the pursuer in our relationship, had, on seeing him at Susan’s old piano at one of her parties, pulled a rose from a jade vase and placed the half-open flower in his lapel buttonhole as he sat at the piano. I wonder, though: if I had possessed the ability to see him differently, would his piano playing have seemed a pose, a façade even more romantic than the one I’d assumed? But knowing that would require a different set of eyes, now, and in the past as well, and all I really know is what I remember: Martin—my lover Martin, the object Martin—posing himself for sex, for it is only that object I now possess.

MEMORIES POLLUTE A planned atmosphere of seduction. Sus an’s apartment, if pared down to uneven wooden floors, cracked walls, and paint-smothered moldings, could be the one I once shared with Martin. I try to focus on her, but she pulls aside her hair and, beyond her shoulder, the ancient piano falls into view. Nostalgia traps us—the food, the music, everything, chosen according to past times. “My friend who likes hummus,” Susan has called me—what about that is sexy? She speaks now in a careful voice. “Do you remember—?” she starts. She stops when she sees what I look at. She knows that I—that we both—remember. It seems all we can do, and that is why she doesn’t finish her sentence. When Susan suddenly closes the windows, I think at first that she does so to foster the nostalgia, but when she sits down again there is more space between us than before. We both look at the new space, but neither of us moves into it.

I’VE BEEN WITH a girl before—once, when I was eighteen, a long time ago. She and I had just finished our first year in separate colleges and were home for the summer. We’d known each other for years, had even been close friends in high school, but it took nine months apart and, that summer, the absence of most of our friends to force us together. Still, I think it’s safe to claim we were experimenting, though not with sex; neither of us knew it about the other, but neither of us was a virgin. We were experimenting with love, and we
failed. And it’s not that I
didn’t
love her, nor she me. Who knows, without love it might have been easier—certainly less painful.

We drove to the river one night in my father’s old pickup. It was late June, early July. Already there was something between us: movies in the evenings after work, weekends in stores trying on expensive clothes that we never bought, long good nights on her front porch that left me alone in bed with a hard-on. We did a lot of things, I realize, that created their own conversations or made words unnecessary. We never talked about ourselves. On the way to the river, I sped down rutted dirt roads and the cab was filled with engine noises and music that screeched out of the single-speaker AM radio. We sang along and laughed and cursed at the more vicious bumps. At the river we rolled our socks into our shoes and waded into the shallow, slick-like-oil water. We held hands. It was night, the sky clear, and I invest the stars now with great significance, because you don’t really see them in the city and they have for so long been a symbol of romantic love. Ten feet away from the water the air had been hot and still, but in it we were cool, and laughed quietly at little jokes and skittered on stones hidden in the sand. Though we hadn’t talked about it, we both knew what was going to happen.

It was on a sandbar, surrounded by water, that we spread an old holey blanket through which the sand penetrated so easily that soon she suggested we abandon it and stretch out directly on the ground. I said no, the ground was damp, and
besides, it wasn’t really ground, but sand, it would get all over us. A stupid argument followed—we didn’t fight, but we became paralyzed by an inability to agree and eventually we fell silent, I half on, she half off the blanket. I remember lying there looking up at the stars and feeling the effort of not speaking growing harder and harder, when suddenly her face interrupted my view and she kissed me. The kiss went on for a long time, and then extended itself, as the rest of our bodies became part of it and our clothes came off. Then all at once she rolled off me, and even as I noticed that the blanket had become a wadded mass between us she said, John, do you remember Hank? and after I’d said yes, she said, I had a baby last April. His.

All at once things expanded: my mouth, my eyes, my mind, my arms and legs even, flung wide in an effort to catch the sky that seemed to be falling on me. Only one part of me shrunk. It’s unfair to say that her sudden revelation did us in; really, she merely provided the excuse I’d been looking for. What she said didn’t repel me, but just then—when I was wondering if I should put on a condom, wondering if this would feel as good as, or better or worse than, it did with boys—just then she made sex seem unerotic, less like fantasy, more like life.

She started to talk then; she told me about hiding in her dorm room because when she left it for meals or classes people pointed at her. Her friends advised her to abort. That was okay for other women, she said, but not for her. Counselors, her parents, people calling themselves her friends, told her to
drop out and raise the baby; if possible, marry the father. That, too, was okay for other women, but not for her. She had plans, and besides, who knew where he’d run away to? She told me about back pains and stomach cramps. She described an adoption agency that paid the medical bills and allowed her to screen parent profiles and name her baby. She held Stephanie in her arms once, and her mother snapped some pictures before the nurse came. She told me how Stephanie had turned her face to her breast and sucked the hospital gown. It made her think that humans should be marsupials, that we should have a pouch where we could grow in warmth and darkness, that nothing that fragile should have to face the world without the opportunity for retreat. When she’s eighteen, she told me, they’ll give her my name, she can look me up if she wants. Well, I said—I could think of nothing else to say—now I know why your mother flashes the porch light on and off.

We laughed too long at that—plainly, neither of us knew what to say. Then something made me mention the boys I’d had in college, and it was her turn to be beside me, silent. I told her that my problem seemed trivial compared to hers, but at least I understood it. I told her that I enjoyed anal intercourse, but when a boy pulled his penis out of me it felt like defecation. I really used these words; they seemed safely clinical. She told me that a woman she knew, on her fifth baby, said giving birth felt the same way: like taking a good shit. I felt she was offering me some kind of connection, but
only a ladder’s, and no matter how far I climbed, she would always be ahead of me.

After that we were beyond shyness, and we rolled close to hold each other for warmth. I remember that I tried to make sense of everything that had just happened. I couldn’t, but for some reason that didn’t make me feel uncomfortable. I did understand one thing, though: she and I would never be lovers, and the strongest emotion that realization produced in me was relief. And I should tell you that that girl, of course, was Susan. But on the river that night, I didn’t know what that would mean today, which is why I didn’t reveal it before. Because knowing this, knowing the future, changes things, changes the past.

SUSAN’S LAUGHTER COILS like smoke through the air before reaching my ears. Bent over so that her shirt falls open, she rolls a second joint. “They make machines for that,” I say. “Rolling joints?” she asks, laughing again. “Well, cigarettes, I suppose. But like most things, it does things it wasn’t intended to.” Her droll “Really” seems exaggerated; her follow-up—“Like assholes?”—surprises me. Trying to joke it off, I take the knife from the hummus. Susan’s shoulder rubs mine as I bend next to her. “Like this,” I say, and fake a stab. Her smile vanishes. She takes the knife and sets it on the table; the heavy clunk of metal on wood startles me. It’s too easy, how the meanings of once-familiar actions change. Susan slips the joint in my
mouth; “Such things are for people with clumsy fingers,” she says as she lights it, and maybe it’s because I’ve almost forgotten about the rolling machine, but when I’ve exhaled and she is still holding smoke in her lungs, I say, “There’s nothing wrong with my fingers,” and run them along her arm. Susan’s eyes lock on the space beyond my right shoulder. She exhales slowly. I’ve touched her a thousand times before; I do nothing to make this touch sexual. But the confusing blend of friendship and sexuality is inevitable. It is, after all, why we’re here.

THERE WAS A time when I’d wanted to be powerless, and have sex. I wanted to lose control. I went to the Spike. I met Henry.

About forty then, defined by a decade of discos, gyms, and steroids, Henry wore leather pants and an unbuttoned button-down blue plaid shirt with the sleeves ripped off. A man’s name, Lou, was tattooed on his shoulder, and his mustache was speckled gray. When he shook my hand my knuckles cracked. He bought me a beer, I bought him a beer, I told him what I wanted, he said, eventually, Do you have any limits? It was a Friday night; I said, I have to work Monday afternoon. And it’s not enough to say he hurt me, to say that for two days and three nights he controlled me: I asked for that. He gave me something else, something I didn’t understand until much later.