When You Are Engulfed in Flames (17 page)

“Something funny?” our father would ask us, this as if he hadn’t heard, as if his chair, too, had not vibrated in the aftershock. “You think something’s funny, do you?”

If keeping a straight face was difficult, saying no was so exacting that it caused pain.

“So you were laughing at nothing?”

“Yes,” we would say. “At nothing.”

Then would come another mighty rip, and what was once difficult would now be impossible. My father kept a heavy serving spoon next to his plate, and I can’t remember how many times he brought it down on my head.

“You still think there’s something to laugh about?”

Strange that being walloped with a heavy spoon made everything seem funnier, but there you have it. My sisters and I would be helpless, doubled over, milk spraying out of our mouths and noses, the force all the stronger for having been bottled up. There were nights when the spoon got blood on it, nights when hairs would stick to the blood, but still our grandmother farted, and still we laughed until the walls shook.

Could that really have been forty years ago? The thought of my sisters and me, so young then, and so untroubled, was sobering, and within a minute, Chris Rock or no Chris Rock, I was the one crying on the night flight to Paris. It wasn’t my intention to steal anyone’s thunder. A minute or two was all I needed. But in the meantime here we were: two grown men in roomy seats, each blubbering in his own elite puddle of light.

Old Faithful

Out of nowhere I developed this lump. I think it was a cyst or a boil, one of those things you associate with trolls, and it was right on my tailbone, like a peach pit wedged into the top of my crack. That’s what it felt like, anyway. I was afraid to look. At first it was just this insignificant knot, but as it grew larger it started to hurt. Sitting became difficult, and forget about lying on my back or bending over. By day five, my tailbone was throbbing, and I told myself, just as I had the day before, that if this kept up I was going to see a doctor. “I mean it,” I said. I even went so far as to pull out the phone book and turn my back on it, hoping that the boil would know that I meant business and go away on its own. But of course it didn’t.

All of this took place in London, which is cruelly, insanely expensive. Hugh and I went to the movies one night, and our tickets cost the equivalent of forty dollars, this after spending sixty on pizzas. And these were mini-pizzas, not much bigger than pancakes. Given the price of a simple evening out, I figured that a doctor’s visit would cost around the same as a customized van. More than the money, though, I was afraid of the diagnosis. “Lower-back cancer,” the doctor would say. “It looks like we’ll have to remove your entire bottom.”

Actually, in England he’d probably have said “bum,” a word I have never really cottoned to. The sad thing is that he could remove my ass and most people wouldn’t even notice. It’s so insubstantial that the boil was actually an improvement, something like a bustle only filled with poison. The only real drawback was the pain.

For the first few days I kept my discomfort to myself, thinking all the while of what a good example I was setting. When Hugh feels bad, you hear about it immediately. A tiny splinter works itself into his palm, and he claims to know exactly how Jesus must have felt on the cross. He demands sympathy for insect bites and paper cuts, while I have to lose at least a quart of blood before I get so much as a pat on the hand.

One time in France we were lucky enough to catch an identical stomach virus. It was a twenty-four-hour bug, the kind that completely empties you out and takes away your will to live. You’d get yourself a glass of water, but that would involve standing, and so instead you just sort of stare toward the kitchen, hoping that maybe one of the pipes will burst and the water will come to you. We both had the exact same symptoms, yet he insisted that his virus was much more powerful than mine. I begged to differ, so there we were, competing over who was the sickest.

“You can at least move your hands,” he said.

“No,” I told him, “it was the wind that moved them. I have no muscle control whatsoever.”

“Liar.”

“Well, that’s a nice thing to say to someone who’ll probably die during the night. Thanks a lot, pal.”

At such times you have to wonder how things got to this point. You meet someone and fall in love; then umpteen years later you’re lying on the floor in a foreign country, promising, hoping, as a matter of principle, that you’ll be dead by sunrise. “I’ll show you,” I moaned, and then I must have fallen back to sleep.

When Hugh and I bicker over who is in the most pain, I think back to my first boyfriend, whom I met while in my late twenties. Something about our combination was rotten, and as a result we competed over everything, no matter how petty. When someone laughed at one of his jokes, I would need to make that person laugh harder. If I found something half decent at a yard sale, he would have to find something better — and so on. My boyfriend’s mother was a handful, and every year, just before Christmas, she would schedule a mammogram, knowing that she would not get the results until after the holidays. The remote possibility of cancer was something to hang over her children’s heads, just out of reach, like mistletoe, and she took great pleasure in arranging it. The family would gather and she’d tear up, saying, “I don’t want to spoil your happiness, but this may well be our last Christmas together.” Other times, if somebody had something going on — a wedding, a graduation — she’d go in for exploratory surgery, anything to capture and hold attention. By the time I finally met her, she did not have a single organ that had not been touched by human hands.
Oh, my God,
I thought, watching her cry on our living room sofa,
my boyfriend’s family is more fucked-up than my own.
I mean, this actually bothered me.

We were together for six years, and when we finally broke up I felt like a failure, a divorced person. I now had what the self-help books called “relationship baggage,” which I would carry around for the rest of my life. The trick was to meet someone with similar baggage and form a matching set, but how would one go about finding such a person? Bars were out; I knew that much. I’d met my first boyfriend in a place called the Man Hole — not the sort of name that suggests fidelity. It was like meeting someone at fisticuffs and then complaining when he turned out to be violent. To be fair, he had never actually promised to be monogamous. That was my idea, and though I tried my hardest to convert him, the allure of other people was just too great.

Most of the gay couples I knew at that time had some sort of an arrangement. Boyfriend A could sleep with someone else as long as he didn’t bring him home — or as long as he
did
bring him home. And Boyfriend B was free to do the same. It was a good setup for those who enjoyed variety and the thrill of the hunt, but to me it was just scary, and way too much work — like having one job while applying for another. One boyfriend was all I could handle, all I
wanted
to handle, really, and while I found this to be perfectly natural, my friends saw it as a form of repression and came to view me as something of a puritan.
Am I?
I wondered. But there were buckles to polish and stones to kneel upon, and so I put the question out of my mind.

I needed a boyfriend as conventional as I was, and luckily I found one — just met him one evening through a mutual friend. I was thirty-three, and Hugh had just turned thirty. Like me, he had recently broken up with someone and had moved to New York to start over. We had a few practical things in common, but what really brought us together was our mutual fear of abandonment and group sex. It was a foundation, and we built on it, adding our fears of AIDS and pierced nipples, of commitment ceremonies and the loss of self-control. In dreams sometimes I’ll discover a handsome stranger waiting in my hotel room. He’s usually someone I’ve seen earlier that day, on the street or in a television commercial, and now he’s naked and beckoning me toward the bed. I look at my key, convinced that I have the wrong room, and when he springs forward and reaches for my zipper I run for the door, which is inevitably made of snakes or hot tar, one of those maddening, hard-to-clean building materials so often used in dreams. The handle moves this way and that, and while struggling to grab it I stammer an explanation as to why I can’t go through with this. “I have a boyfriend, see, and, well, the thing is that he’d kill me if he ever found out I’d been, you know, unfaithful or anything.”

Really, though, it’s not the fear of Hugh’s punishment that stops me. I remember once riding in the car with my dad. I was twelve, and it was just the two of us, coming home from the bank. We’d been silent for blocks, when out of nowhere he turned to me, saying, “I want you to know that I’ve never once cheated on your mother.”

“Um. OK,” I said. And then he turned on the radio and listened to a football game.

Years later, I mentioned this incident to a friend, who speculated that my father had said this specifically because he
had
been unfaithful. “That was a guilty conscience talking,” she said, but I knew that she was wrong. More likely my father was having some problem at work and needed to remind himself that he was not completely worthless. It sounds like something you’d read on a movie poster: sometimes the sins you haven’t committed are all you have to hold on to. If you’re really desperate, you might need to grope, saying, for example, “I’ve never killed anyone
with a hammer
” or “I’ve never stolen from anyone
who didn’t deserve it.
” But whatever his faults, my dad did not have to stoop quite that low.

I have never cheated on a boyfriend, and, as with my father, it’s become part of my idea of myself. In my foiled wet dreams I can glimpse at what my life would be like without my perfect record, of how lost I’d feel without this scrap of integrity, and the fear is enough to wake me up. Once I’m awake, though, I tend to lie there, wondering if I’ve made a grave mistake.

In books and movies infidelity always looks so compelling, so
right.
Here are people who defy petty convention and are rewarded with only the tastiest bits of human experience. Never do they grow old or suffer the crippling panic I feel whenever Hugh gets spontaneous and suggests we go to a restaurant.

“A restaurant? But what will we talk about?”

“I don’t know,” he’ll say. “What does it matter?”

Alone together, I enjoy our companionable silence, but it creeps me out to sit in public, propped in our chairs like a pair of mummies. At a nearby table there’s always a couple in their late seventies, holding their menus with trembling, spotted hands.

“Soup’s a good thing,” the wife will say, and the man will nod or grunt or fool with the stem of his wineglass. Eventually he’ll look my way, and I’ll catch in his eye a look of grim recognition.

We are your future, he seems to say.

I’m so afraid that Hugh and I won’t have anything to talk about that now, before leaving home, I’ll comb the papers and jot down a half-dozen topics that might keep a conversation going at least through the entrees. The last time we ate out, I prepared by reading both the
Herald Tribune
and
The Animal Finder’s Guide,
a quarterly publication devoted to exotic pets and the nuts who keep them. The waiter took our orders, and as he walked away I turned to Hugh, saying, “So, anyway, I hear that monkeys can really become surly once they reach breeding age.”

“Well, I could have told you
that,
” he said. “It happened with my own monkey.”

I tried to draw him out, but it saddens Hugh to discuss his childhood monkey. “Oh, Maxwell,” he’ll sigh, and within a minute he’ll have started crying. Next on my list were the five warning signs of depression among captive camels, but I couldn’t read my handwriting, and the topic crashed and burned after sign number two: an unwillingness to cush. At a nearby table an elderly woman arranged and rearranged the napkin in her lap. Her husband stared at a potted plant, and I resorted to the
Herald Tribune.
“Did you hear about those three Indian women who were burned as witches?”

“What?”

“Neighbors accused them of casting spells and burned them alive.”

“Well, that’s horrible,” he said, slightly accusatory, as if I myself had had a hand in it. “You can’t go around burning people alive, not in this day and age.”

“I know it, but —”

“It’s sick is what it is. I remember once when I was living in Somalia there was this woman . . .”

“Yes!” I whispered, and then I looked over at the elderly couple, thinking,
See, we’re talking witch burnings!
It’s work, though, and it’s always
my
work. If I left it up to Hugh, we’d just sit there acting like what we are: two people so familiar with each other they could scream. Sometimes, when I find it hard to sleep, I’ll think of when we first met, of the newness of each other’s body, and my impatience to know everything about this person. Looking back, I should have taken it more slowly, measured him out over the course of fifty years rather than cramming him in so quickly. By the end of our first month together, he’d been so thoroughly interrogated that all I had left was breaking news — what little had happened in the few hours since I’d last seen him. Were he a cop or an emergency room doctor, there might have been a lot to catch up on, but like me Hugh works alone, so there was never much to report. “I ate some potato chips,” he might say, to which I’d reply, “What kind?” or “That’s funny, so did I!” More often than not, we’d just breathe into our separate receivers.

“Are you still there?”

“I’m here.”

“Good. Don’t hang up.”

“I won’t.”

In New York we slept on a futon. I took the left side and would lie awake at night, looking at the closet door. In Paris we got a real bed in a room just big enough to contain it. Hugh would fall asleep immediately, the way he’s always done, and I’d stare at the blank wall, wondering about all the people who’d slept in this room before us. The building dated from the seventeenth century, and I envisioned musketeers in tall, soft boots, pleasuring the sorts of women who wouldn’t complain when sword tips tore the sheets. I saw gentlemen in top hats and sleeping caps, women in bonnets and berets and beaded headbands, a swarm of phantom copulators all looking down and comparing my life with theirs.

After Paris came London, and a bedroom on the sixth floor with windows looking onto neat rows of Edwardian chimney tops. A friend characterized it as a “Peter Pan view,” and now I can’t see it any other way. I lie awake thinking of someone with a hook for a hand, and then, inevitably, of youth, and whether I have wasted it. Twenty-five years ago I was a young man with his whole sexual life ahead of him. How had 9,125 relatively uneventful days passed so quickly, and how can I keep it from happening again? In another twenty-five years I’ll be doddering, and twenty-five years after that I’ll be one of the figures haunting my Paris bedroom. Is it morally permissible, I wonder, to cheat
after
death? Is it even called cheating at that point? What are the rules? Do I have to wait a certain amount of time, or can I just jump, or, as the case may be, seep right in?

During the period that I had my boil, these questions seemed particularly relevant. The pain was always greater after dark, and by the sixth night I was fairly certain that I was dying. Hugh had gone to sleep hours earlier, and it startled me to hear his voice. “What do you say we lance that thing?” he said.