Martin and John (22 page)

It was not, I think, in Henry’s nature to hurt anyone. When
I stroked his slick-leathered thigh in the taxi, he moaned; there was nothing dominant about it. If he’d had his way, we probably would have had sex normally, with perhaps a few accoutrements: a leather harness, latex gloves. But I insisted, and he knew what to do. We both did, we
all
did; we’d been taught, by people now mostly dead. So I submitted to his kissing, stripped for him, called him Master; on his order, I licked his boots. He collared me, attached a leash, led me on my knees to his bedroom. I was drawn but not quartered, tied to the four bedposts. My ass gripped his sheets and pulled them into my crack. The red-rubber-ball gag started out egg-sized, but soon became an orange in my mouth. He stuffed wax in my ears and I heard my breath come fast and shallow. He hooded me. And he knew, Henry. Before zipping the eye slits, he pulled a mirror from the wall and held it above me. I saw what I’d wanted to see: not myself, but a picture from a magazine. I was powerless, if not ridiculous. But I hadn’t lost control. Then he closed the eye slits. They didn’t seal completely, and I could see, if I shut one eye or the other, the jagged outline of the zipper and Henry’s shadow as he moved about the room. Still, I was close enough to blind and nearly deaf from the wax. Bound, gagged, unable to do anything else, I waited.

S/M, if you let it, or if you can’t stop it, delivers what it promises: pain that transforms. At first I understood things. I felt him handle my cock and balls; I could see, without looking, the thong stretching my balls away from my body and
separating them from each other. It hurt, and my hips rocked a little in protest. The nipple clamps were two sharp pains that translated into two useless pulls against my bindings. When he twisted the clamps I tensed, trying not to resist, trying to be above the pain, but I realized that my head was rolling from side to side. And then I didn’t know what was happening. Later I found he’d been pouring hot wax over my chest, stomach, balls, but then it just felt like my skin was on fire. I couldn’t help myself, I struggled. The gag hadn’t been a gag until the first time I tried to scream against it, and then it was. But even though I knew I couldn’t speak, I continued to try, tried to force the gag from my mouth by the power of my breath alone.

It went on like this, until eventually I was just struggling. The pain ceased to have meaning in any real way. I simply wanted to be released, but I had no control over that. In realizing this, and accepting it, a wave of heat washed through me and seemed to separate my inner body from my skin. The pain, and the fighting, were outside me, and inside I was still. I barely noticed when Henry cut off my head and held it above my body so I could look again at myself. My skin, inflated like a balloon, was held to earth only by thin ties at the wrists and ankles. I smiled to think of my real self bouncing around freely inside, painless, weightless, like a child in the Moon Walk at the fair. My mind bounced too, from memory to memory, and all of them seemed somehow transformed into visions that, no matter how painful they might
have been once, were now ecstatic, and it was wonderful, a kind of freedom from the past—it was what I wanted. And then he made me come. I felt his hand on my cock vaguely at first, not knowing what he was doing. But as he pumped I grew hard, the wax cooled, I forgot the tit clamps and cock-and-ball harness, and he kept pumping until eventually, inevitably, I came. And it was just like any other too-long-delayed orgasm: anticlimactic and tiring. I lay in my bonds, bored. And for two more days and two more nights I was bored, as Henry tried to think of ever more exciting things to torment and arouse me. Oh, it was amazing what he could do, and not draw blood.

And I remember asking him a totally inappropriate question once, when the gag was out of my mouth. Lou, I said, is he still alive? Henry scratched the tattoo as if he wished it would come off. Louise, he said, my ex-wife. Yes.

SUSAN BATS AT smoke, goes to open the windows. Worming my toes into the warm space where she’d sat, I close my eyes and lean back, only to jump forward when Susan sits on my feet. “My violet!” she says, pointing at my hands, immersed in a pot in her lap. “My feet!” I respond. She raises herself so I can move them, and I pull my fingers from her plant, a withered African violet. Brown-edged leaves hang from an aged, thick stem; dead ones line the pot. “I told him I’m no good with plants,” she says, and when I realize she
means Martin, I grab the pot again. “Maybe you should take it home.” “Maybe I should.” Sometimes I only understand people through objects, and in the solid unerotic shape of this plant I see Susan: were she truly trying to seduce me, she wouldn’t have brought Martin into the room more than he already is. Already she’s sliding across the couch. “I’d feel bad if it died.” There’s a hush after I say this; it’s an old rule and now I’ve broken it: don’t mention death around people who have lost someone. “Jesus, John,” Susan says then, taking my hand, forcing me to look up from Martin’s plant. “When you make love to me, please, don’t think of him.” Quiet after that, broken only by the sound of the plant being set on the table. What’s truly remarkable, I suppose, isn’t that it’s dying, but that it lived this long. We stare at each other in silence. And it’s like the first time: when the silence becomes uncomfortable, we kiss, and then, for just a moment, I hear water running somewhere close by.

SOMETIMES SEX IS perfect. I remember my fourth time with Martin, the first time we fucked. I remember the fourth time because that’s when I fell for him. Something held us back our first three times; our minds were elsewhere, our hands could have been tied. But the fourth time. There we were: Martin’s place, Martin’s old couch. There we were: Martin and John. The two of us, 3 A.M., empty bottles on the coffee table. We had exhausted conversation, wine had
exhausted us, we stared at the TV. It was turned off. How did he do it? I mean, I know what he did: he put his hand on my leg. He didn’t look at me when he did it, just lifted his right hand off his right leg and set it down on my left one, just above my knee. Just above my knee, and then it slid up my thigh, slowly, but not wasting time. That’s what he did. But how did he make my diaphragm contract so tightly that I couldn’t take one breath for the entire minute it took his hand to move to my belt? My stomach was so tight a penny would have bounced off it. His fingers found the belt buckle, worked it, a small sound of metal on metal, a sudden release, a rush of air—my lungs’ air—and my pants were open and I gasped for breath.

Martin put his hand back in his lap. His words, when they came, were even. He could have been talking about the weather. You could slip a condom on your cock, he said, and twirl me on it like a globe on its axis. The words took shape in the room; they made sex seem as understandable as pornography. On the blank TV screen I imagined I saw Martin and myself, fucking. I looked down at my open pants, at my underwear, white as a sheet of paper. Or I could do you, he said. Still, I hesitated, not because I didn’t want him, but because the very thought of fucking Martin added so many possibilities to my life that I grew dizzy contemplating them. Just do what you want to do, Martin said, but do it now. I kissed him. I pulled open the buttons of his shirt, pushed down his pants. I bent over him and ran my tongue over his
chest, into his navel, down to his cock and balls. When I got there I swabbed the shaft until it glistened. I rolled his balls around my mouth the way a child rolls marbles in his hand. And it’s important to know that I didn’t do this because I suddenly loved him. I just wanted to fuck. Do it, I whispered. Do it.

And he did, lying on the floor, on a rug, though I didn’t twirl as easily as those globes in high school, and in fact, after one revolution, I didn’t twirl at all, but sat astride him and rocked up and down. And he pumped, pumped like anyone in any skinflick ever made, though I didn’t think of that then, but only of the amazing sensation of having this man inside me. A funny thing happened then. He pumped and I rocked, and I rocked and he pumped, and eventually our rhythm must have been just right, because the rug, a small Persian carpet–type thing patterned in tangled growing vines, came out from under us as if it had been pulled. I fell over, he slipped out of me, we ended up on our sides, side by side, laughing. We lay on the floor for a long time, mouths open, our stomachs heaving as we sucked in air. We touched each other only with our fingertips, and then only slightly, and we lay on the floor for a long time, laughing.

We finished on his bed. I don’t remember going there, just a point at which the world returned like a shadow and I saw my cum splashed on his stomach and legs, and his splashed on mine, and below us was a white sheet instead of the rug. Then for a moment I wanted to take everything a step further.
I wanted to run my finger through Martin’s cum and lick the finger clean. But Martin smiled at me. He kissed me. When my hands went for his body, he caught them halfway and held them. In a light voice he said, In my experience, there are two kinds of men in the world: those who play with their lover’s hair when they’re getting a blowjob, and those who play with their own. Though I tried, I couldn’t remember what I’d done. Which type am I? I asked. You, he said, and showed me as he told me, put one hand on my head, and one on yours. And which are you? Martin looked at my hair. If there was a mirror handy, he said, you wouldn’t have to ask that question. His words didn’t really
mean
anything, but they accomplished what I think he meant them to: I forgot my desire to taste his cum. He lifted the sheet then and fluffed it with his arms, like wings, then let it settle on our shoulders, and I didn’t realize we were standing up until I awoke hours later.

After that he could have asked me to do anything. A caress from Martin had more strength than any punch Henry would ever land. But he rarely used this power, and I suppose I had the same control over him. Didn’t he, as well, sleep standing in my arms? We shut the windows, turned off the phone, unplugged the clock. We wore no clothes for days, and used our time to make love, to eat, and sleep. What I remember from that time, the time we shut out the world, is sweating on his bed as he dove into me, and someone somewhere flushing a toilet and the wall behind Martin’s bed rattling as water rushed through pipes concealed within it.

Just after that time I asked Susan what pregnancy was like. She’d been talking, vaguely, about having a baby, though she said she couldn’t name five straight men in the world that she’d want to father it. If you’ve ever had a cock moving deep inside you, you know that it can feel like a part of you, even as you realize that it belongs to him. Can you imagine this staying in you after he pulls out, staying, growing, moving around eventually, making its presence, its separate life, known? This is how I imagined pregnancy. I asked Susan if this was reasonable. She sighed and smiled. Not even close, she said. Not even close.

WHEN HER SHIRT comes off, I’m struck by the strength in Susan’s shoulders. Instead of unbuttoning it, she pulls it over her head, and her hair falls back audibly to surround her thin neck. Sometimes I think it’s Susan, and not Martin, who is the love of my life. I don’t know why I believe in such a concept—perhaps because thinking it distracts me from the larger fact: that I can have neither of them. Except for Susan, except for tonight. And that other night: I remember the river, both of us tenderly helping the other off with clothes. Tonight we kiss for a while, then stop, come to the bedroom. In here, candles instead of electric light or darkness, windows open but curtains drawn, so that they move in the breeze. Incense. The music from the other room. Susan busies herself with setting the stage, and then we pull our clothes off alone
and pretend to ignore each other. But Susan, folding her bra in half, catches my eye. “There’s an extra toothbrush if you want to brush your teeth,” she says, and looks away. I have to fight back laughter. I know the kind of laughter it would be, cynical laughter, sad laughter, having more to do with things outside this room than in it. I feel like something’s been stolen from me. I want to compliment her, tell her I think she’s beautiful. At the river, I could have done so—I did, because the sex we had then was, we thought, just between the two of us. And it’s not that Susan is no longer beautiful, no longer sexual. But her sexuality exists apart from me. Her apartment, these trappings, are one thing; she’ll play with them. But not with herself. Not tonight. Tonight I’m not her lover. I’m just helping her to have her baby.

WHEN SHE FIRST came to us, only Martin and I knew he was sick. We’d known for months, but were still unwilling to give his illness the legitimacy, the finality, of a name. She presented her plan: she would have a baby and raise it alone. Perhaps one day she would marry, but she didn’t foresee it and she didn’t particularly care. She was happy fucking around: she wanted a baby, not a husband. But she didn’t want anonymous sperm or the hassle of a turkey baster, and she couldn’t afford artificial insemination. She wanted to do it the old-fashioned way. And she wanted to make love to me. I asked what she expected of me, besides sperm. Uncle John,
she said. You will be Uncle John, and this one here will be Uncle Martin. She must have wondered why she laughed alone at her joke.

Before she left she asked him if he’d lost weight. After she left he said he was cold. In the bedroom I curled up with him under the blanket. Then he was hot and wanted to throw the blanket off, but I suggested we take our clothes off instead. And then he was cold again, and I took him in my arms and rolled us in the blanket, and when I’d finished we were pressed together front to front and I opened my mouth and closed it over his and tickled his lips with my tongue until he let me in. And then he pulled back and said, You shouldn’t, and I looked into his face, so pale that it seemed almost greenish, and I said, I should, and kissed him again.

Wrapped in the blanket, stretched out on the bed, we could have been suspended in space. By our feet, by our heads, by our cocks, suspended in time. I reached down and pushed my cock between his sweating thin legs and pulled his between mine. Sometimes when we did it that way I imagined that I was inside him, but that night I imagined I was inside a woman. That was the only way he’d let us do it anymore, he said my health has got to be protected, said he loves me too much to kill me, said anything to keep me away from him because now, now that he’s sick, he’s afraid of what he wants because he’s afraid of what he wanted because he thinks that what he wanted not what he did is why he’s going to die.