A Good Squeeze
Vestal McIntyre
I lay on the floor of my apartment rolled in a Persian rug. With every inhalation, I smelled my own hot exhalation mixed with the woody smell of rug fibers and a hint of feet—that very human stink of dirty socks. (I asked my few visitors to leave their shoes at the door and I myself was usually barefoot.) But to inhale that recent exhalation, that wet, oxygen-poor air, seemed to be the goal now.
I waited quietly.
It was comforting, this pressure from all sides—a firm embrace but without the complications of human emotion and response to emotion, that ping-pong game that set my jaw to clenching. Only the crown of my head and the tips of my toes were free. Which school of belief said spiritual energy flowed into one’s body through the top of one’s head? And which old mystic was it who said she could see the angels treading air in the space above her followers’ heads? And how many of our holy figures besides the obvious and her son, did not descend into the earth, but took the A train to Sugar Hill way up in heaven? Thin air above and below me, but the air that I kept resharing with myself was thick with wetness it picked up somewhere in climbing my respiratory tree. Comforting. And sometimes a little comfort was as much as one could ask of life. But other times one could ask a little more.
The embrace weakened. The pressure lifted and I felt both relieved and disappointed. Belinda had stood up.
Now I was rolled over, whump, and over, whump, and again, whump, and I could breathe freely and light struck my closed eyelids and illuminated those bubbling lava-lamp paisleys.
“Rand, are you OK?”
“Yes.”
“I was getting worried. It had been a long time.”
I sat up and held my knees and was dizzied by a head rush. More paisleys. “There was no reason to be worried,” I said and opened my eyes. “None. It was really lovely. Thank you.” I put my fist before my mouth and coughed.
“You enjoyed it?”
“Yes. And now we know that I can go longer next time.”
“Right,” said Belinda. “Time’s almost up.”
“Oh, really.” I looked at the clock in the kitchen. “I was in there longer than I thought.”
“Almost forty minutes,” she said.
“My. Well, yes, the time’s almost up. I think we’re done anyway.” I stood and made a motion of dusting myself off, although there was no dust on me, since my apartment was kept very clean.
I went through the pockets of the jacket that hung by the door and found my wallet. Belinda nodded and accepted the folded bills without counting them. When I went to open the door, she stopped me.
“Rand,” she said, “I’ve been meaning to ask you something. Are you still practicing alone?”
“Yes,” I said.
“You shouldn’t, you know.”
I nodded. Her concern amused me and tapped the enormous, unspoken affection I felt for her, and I couldn’t repress a smile.
“But I’ve been thinking, if you must, you should at least have someone check up on you. There are cases where people have been trapped, alone, for days. You could die, Rand. It’s not funny.”
“I know,” I said. “That’s not what I’m smiling about. Go on.”
“Give a friend keys to your apartment. Tell the person to come check on you if he or she goes for a day or two without hearing from you. I insist, Rand. This stuff has its risks.”
“I’ll do it.”
“You won’t.”
“I will, I promise. Thank you, Belinda, I know you’re right.”
She smiled. “See you Tuesday?” she said.
“Tuesday.”
I didn’t mind obeying Belinda. The problem was, though, whom to ask. I had very few friends. Connie was the first who came to mind. She was orderly, responsible, aware of my practices, and nonjudgmental about them. She knew that I had hand restraints attached to either side of my bed, and that I had trouble sleeping without my hands safely enclosed in them. She knew sometimes I needed to gag myself or be gagged to feel at peace. I was sure she would be willing to be my “check-up person.” However, I usually only spoke to her once a week—a phone call on Sunday—and saw her about once a month. To make her my “check-up person” would have forced me into closer contact with her and, as much as I liked her, this was not my intent.
As I went down my mental list of friends, again and again this was the case—it would have forced me to call them more than was my habit. All except Frank.
At first, the thought of entrusting Frank with my well-being made me laugh. But then again, why not? He lived out in Queens, but found an excuse to come into Manhattan nearly every day. He had nothing better to do with his time, I supposed, than come over and make sure I wasn’t dead. He was irresponsible, but in this he might be trustworthy.
In many ways I considered Frank a special case. He drunkenly stumbled through life from boyfriend to boyfriend, still depending on the youthful charm and good looks that the alcohol was slowly ruining. He had been in a minor car accident some years earlier and had swindled his way into living on disability ever since. He was obviously well, but he kept up the act, even with friends like me, occasionally remembering to wince and put his hand to his lower back when he rose from a chair. But he had a good heart, and that is what bought my patience and made him a special case.
So I invited Frank over for takeout and a chat. When he arrived at my door, the rose in his cheek and the blur in his eye told me that he had already had a drink or two. “Happy May Day!” Frank said, holding out a neon blue bunch of Gerber daisies, the variety available at the corner deli.
“Is it May Day?” I said. “I didn’t realize. Come in.”
Frank would be embarrassing if he was capable of feeling embarrassment himself. If he ever apologized for showing up to my house drunk at five in the afternoon with a three-dollar bouquet, I wouldn’t be able to forgive him. But he would never apologize.
I put the flowers in a vase, where the dye immediately began to seep down the stalk into the water. “Lovely,” I said, which wasn’t completely tongue in cheek, as the swirls of blue in the water were as beautiful as the flowers were ugly. “Before we order food, there’s a favor I want to ask.”
“Anything,” said Frank, plopping onto the couch.
“Belinda says I need a check-up person.” As I began to explain, Frank laughed as if I were making a joke, although he knows I don’t make that kind of joke. Then, like a child that slowly realizes the gravity of the subject, he reassigned the expression of his mouth into a determined frown and his eyes into a concerned squint. “I’m certain you’ll never have to use these, but all the same ...” I placed the two linked key rings into his cupped palm, and he took them, fingering the keys—again, as a child would. “This set is for the door here, I’ve marked them with a red marker, and this set is for downstairs. I rarely do these things down there, but you never know.” (Years ago, I had bought the floor beneath mine, telling my parents it was an investment and that the rent I could charge a tenant would cover the mortgage, all the while knowing I would leave it empty, as a barrier. Now I stored a few pieces of furniture down there, nothing else.)
Frank knit his eyebrows and nodded, then he rose and placed the keys carefully into the pocket of his backpack, which was hanging by the door.
“You’ll never have to use them, Frank. It’s just a precaution. Now then, what to order for lunch?”
“Oh,” said Frank, “I’ll have to owe you one. I’m kind of short on cash at the moment.”
The lunches that Frank owes me at this point must number in the thousands.
Sometimes I wonder if I would be attracted to men if I hadn’t attended boarding school. I’ll call it Tenderwood Boys’ Academy. Despite girlfriends at home, real or invented, everyone there was gay.
The first hint of this penetrated my terrified thirteen-year-old brain during the tour, when the admissions officer nonchalantly pushed a bathroom door, letting it swing wide as we passed by, “. . . there are two bathrooms on every hall ...” and, there being no barrier (why, in the boys’ bathroom in a boys’ dormitory in a boys’ school, would there be?), I saw an alleyway lined on either side with stalls that led to a shower room glowing with golden tiles and seven? eight? showerheads pointing impudently toward a central drain hole.
Gang showers! I silently gasped.
And gang showers they were.
How many svelte young asses endured the sting of a towel-whip here? How many shy boys turned toward the corner to hide a boner, and how many brazen faces turned proudly toward the central drain hole to expose one? How many times did a boy glance at the source of echoing laughter to find that one thread of the hot stream was not water, but the yellow arc of his neighbor’s piss? In short, how many adult fantasies, nightmares, obsessions, and neuroses were born in this shower room?
The door swung closed on gently sighing hydraulics and the admissions officer continued: “The boys live two to a room, and often find their roommate to become their first and best friend.”
Indeed.
I loved Michael Prescott, my first roommate freshman year, who would creep from his corner to mine where we would cuddle and rub under the down comforter my mother had bought me after being shocked during that same tour by the solemnity of the folded and tucked woolen blankets.
Hunched and acne faced, Michael was almost as tall as I and a much better student. We traveled in different packs, and didn’t talk much even when we were back in our warm den, each wearing his earphones and studying under the lamp that lit his own opposite corner. But often, after the lights went out at ten, sometimes even hours later, after I had fallen asleep, Michael would make that dark journey, and I would never turn him away. Sometimes he would even fall asleep with me in my narrow bed. We would arrange ourselves in the bed to make the most efficient use of space—his feet by my head, my feet by his—while still enjoying each other’s warmth. He never complained about the very restless sleep that had plagued me since early childhood. (It wasn’t uncommon for me to find, upon waking, knotted sheets I had cast on the floor, or scratch marks on my face.) If I tossed and turned too much, he would simply wake me, I would calm myself, and we would both return to sleep.
Then, only a quarter into the school year, tragedy struck. Michael’s father, age fifty-one, dropped dead from a massive heart attack at his desk in a Manhattan law firm. Michael went home for two weeks, and when he returned he had changed. Now he wanted to sleep in my bed with me every night. Sex took secondary importance to sobbing quietly while I held him. Again, I never turned him away, but quietly asked the administration to assign me a new roommate at semester.
Later, I loved Chris Medici, the slender, girlish asthmatic whom, in leaving my bed to take a piss, I discovered taking a midnight shower. As I washed my hands and lingered in front of the mirror, his shower sputtered and ceased, and he began shyly toweling off in the shower room.
“What’s with the late-night shower, Medici?” I asked in a perfectly offhanded, abusive tone. (I assumed that it had to do with his being too shy to jack off within earshot of his roommate.)
“They let me,” he said. “It helps my wheezing.” As proof, he emitted a high-pitched, gravelly cough.
The next night I stayed awake, then, just before midnight, put on my bathrobe, grabbed my towel, and headed to the bathroom, reasoning that if I was caught in this minor infraction I would claim asthma. I had a feeling Chris Medici would know to meet me.
I was minutes into a nice hot shower when, sure enough, here came Chris. He hung his towel on a hook, then his bathrobe and, avoiding my gaze, charged up a showerhead on the opposite wall. Keeping his back turned, he touched the stream, adjusted, touched, then stepped under. I ended my pantomime of scrubbing and stood gazing at Chris as he heaved deep breaths of steam, his narrow back swelling, his tucked-under buttocks tucking further under. He glanced over his shoulder and, seeing me, blushed and went immediately back to his breathing. Then he dared to look back, dared to look down, dared to turn toward me. I walked across the room, shared his shower, and touched him.
We turned off our showers and ran, naked, into one of the stalls where, for the first time, I saw up close how some scrotums, when shivering wet and shrunken, are not pink like my own, but a lovely shade of brown.
To this day I have a habit I picked up in grammar school when a volunteer instructor came to my class every Wednesday for two months to teach us some basic sign language. Lesson one: the alphabet. Our little voices sang and our right hands raised in a strangely shifting pledge: fist to fan to cup to point, OK, pinkie, two, L, fist, fist . . . Now my hands, which were already delinquents scrambling for something to do, could spell. F-U-C-K Y-O-U they giggled to my practice partner when the volunteer looked away, G-O T-O S-L-E-E-P they told me from under the covers, I H-A-T-E Y-O-U they repeated under the dinner table, and, as I walked alone on the beach that summer in Newport, repeating in unison just for the comforting fists the word made deep in my jacket pockets, S-T-E-A-M, S-T-E-A-M.
Now, walking through Washington Square Park, past the dry fountain that served as an amphitheater for the overeager sunbathers (early May, sixty-five degrees and cloudy), my hands did a simple A-Q-A-Q in my pockets and my mind said, knit, knit, knit, then, purl, purl, purl: I was practicing on the way to my first knitting class.
I had been teaching myself from a book I had found at the library, and had done well producing two large scarves. It was a perfect occupation for my hands while I listened to music, and it being May, I thought, I could have an entire collection of sweaters by next winter, if I could learn ribbing, buttonholes, and more complex stitches. For these complicated operations the book proved useless.
When I emerged from the park onto Eighth Street, I heard someone call my name. It was Frank.
“What are you doing out?” he asked, as if I were a naughty puppy.
“Oh, nothing. I’m in a bit of a rush, though.”
“Rand, this is Nori,” Frank said, indicating his companion, whom I had not noticed. I looked at this tall Asian man and for the first time in ages was immediately dumbfounded by attraction. I reached for his hand. I might have said hello. His face was solemn and gorgeous—narrow jaw, protruding bottom lip, serene gaze. He bowed slightly as we shook hands—that wonderful Japanese style of greeting, a subtle, respectful bow which I vastly prefer over the messy strength-play of handshaking.
“Well, we won’t keep you,” Frank said, and they were gone.
In class I tried to pay attention as the instructor demonstrated the slipped-rib stitch and the seed stitch for the entire class by holding her hands high and exaggeratedly digging the needles and tossing the yarn while her long white braid wagged in reply, but my mind kept returning to Nori. Was he Frank’s new boyfriend?
At home, I forgot what I learned, returned to my simple knit-one-purl-one scarf and continued to wonder.
Then, one night in mid-May, I descended into the corridors beneath the porn theater on Third Avenue where I went during my rare moments of boredom and desperation for physical contact. Cruising for sex is one of the most awkward occupations imaginable, and one that ensures failure to those whose appearance betrays this awkwardness. So I found myself moving through the smelly, uncomfortable maze trying to convey the ease of an evening constitutional until the awkwardness won out and I lodged myself in a corner. As usual, I was not bombarded by solicitous leers, but the few glances cast my way carried a hint of worship. Square jawed and shaved bald, I have the type of features that many consider unattractive, even sinister, and some consider strikingly handsome, with no one falling in between. I considered this a luxury.
Five more minutes, I said to myself finally, shifting from foot to foot, then I’m going home.
Then, at the far end of a corridor, Nori appeared. He meandered slowly up the hall in my direction and almost ran into a column. Maybe his eyes hadn’t yet adjusted to the dark. In any case, there was no discernible attempt in his tall, somewhat bent form to mask the awkwardness.
He chose a spot against the wall perhaps ten feet from me and surveyed the hallway. He wore a smile of playful, perhaps drunken, embarrassment. With that smile he transcended all awkwardness and coolness and emerged simply beautiful. Everyone saw it; the men slowed as they passed.
Here was what I came for. I decided I must approach him or leave. I launched myself from the wall, thinking I would leave, and instead walked over to stand beside him. When our eyes met and he recognized me, I greeted him. He nodded. “Do you remember me?” I asked.
“You are Frank’s friend,” he said.
“Yes, Rand.” I didn’t reach for his hand, but gave a slight bow.
“Nori,” he said and returned my bow.
“Yes, I remember,” I said. Then I stood waiting for something to say.
“You want to go in?” he asked, indicating a doorway.
“Yes!” I said, perhaps too eagerly. I was shocked; nothing in his demeanor had betrayed an attraction.
I followed him in and we made fumbling attempts at sex that resulted in ejaculations but not much pleasure. Small dark closets can be entertaining for one person, I believe, but two’s a crowd. Nori was someone special; I wanted to hear his hesitant voice and feel his eyes on me as I undressed him.
I asked for his number, he told it to me, and I immediately committed it to memory.
In the cab home, I again wondered about the extent of Frank’s involvement with Nori. I had brought up the subject casually during a phone call the day after I ran into them on the street. Frank had said they weren’t dating, but offered no further information. I didn’t know if they had been or would be, or if there was any other reason I should consider Nori off-limits. If there was, I wouldn’t phone Nori. I would bury my attraction and quietly mourn. But if there wasn’t—and I tipped the cabbie extra in this hope—I would pursue. I hadn’t pursued anyone for a very long time.
At Tenderwood Academy I loved Tony Cole, the soccer star a year my senior who I always assumed was too handsome and athletic to have eyes for a goon like me. But then one hot afternoon near the end of my sophomore year, he found me away from a group of swimmers (swimming legally, in bathing suits, under the sun) in a bushy nook of the pond. I had been emptying my lungs to sink and sit lotus-style in the mud. He invited me to race him out to the island and, aware that I’d lose, hiding my eagerness to do so, I accepted the challenge.
Halfway there, it was obvious I’d never catch up. The race must have lost its thrill for Tony because he turned and swam back to me.
“You win, Tony.”
“You lose, Rand,” he said, not with pride or malice but with bone-dry boredom.
Then, for some reason, he shook his wet head, rose in the water, exposing his shoulders and those hairs that fanned out from the center of his chest, held his breath, and plunged down. He swam beneath me, thrust his head between my legs, and clutched the meat of my thighs. Confused and delighted, I rose as he rose and was sent into a sideways dive that painfully clapped my body against the surface of the water. I resurfaced and we treaded water together, laughed and panted and waited for what would come next.
Then some boys called Tony’s name and we swam reluctantly toward them.
For the rest of that warm month, I wished again and again that he would come recklessly groping toward me (how little I shunned physical contact back then!), maybe on one of those nights of illegal swimming, naked, under the moon. He never did.
The next year I loved my roommate, Richard Victor, who, as heir to a Pennsylvania smelting dynasty, might have been the richest boy of all.
Nearly all the Tenderwood boys were rich. Some made embarrassing attempts at acting like real teenagers, others showed their shame: they wore Birkenstocks and Greenpeace T-shirts, although their fathers were executives at Exxon. Still others were aware and haughty. Richard was one of these. He would walk into a classroom like a house cat, never rushed even when he was five minutes late. Then, in his wonderfully deep, faggy voice he would make purposely obscure comments and leave it to the teacher to justify them to the text because—Richard’s arched brows seemed to suggest—he (Richard) was paying him (teacher) to do so.
One evening in October Richard pulled his trunk out from under his bed, dug under his winter sweaters, and pulled out a small collection of gay porno magazines—gifts, he explained, from his uncle in San Francisco. Although this was in, what . . . 1987? these men were from the seventies—hairy chested, thick mustached, their big, lolling cocks basted with baby oil. San Franciscans, I remember thinking. Ten o’clock came, lights out, but we pulled out our flashlights and continued flipping the pages frantically until it was too much for us and our trembling hands abandoned scenes of firemen fucking and redassed leathermen receiving spankings to find each other.
That year we became something like boyfriends. But, more than Richard, more than anyone else at Tenderwood Academy, I loved Mr. Drake.
Mr. Drake. That name conveys the longing, the schoolboy crush that colored one little corner of our relationship (but I loved that corner as I did every part of what we had) more than the name I called him in private—Will. Mr. Drake was an artist in residence at Tenderwood, a painter. Mr. Drake’s residency began after winter recess my junior year and ended in November of my senior year.
“He looks like a young Montgomery Clift!” I said to Richard Victor after the assembly when Mr. Drake was introduced.
“Montgomery Clift after the accident, more like,” answered the jealous Richard.
Part of Mr. Drake’s residency requirement was that he hold informal hourlong painting lessons in the late afternoons while most boys were playing sports. I swallowed my pride, put aside my fear, and started attending every lesson he taught.
I was not then, never had been before, and never will be an artist. Although I love art, music, poetry, etc., I haven’t the slightest interest in producing the stuff. The paintings I made were ugly. I would hide them, sneak them back to my room, look at them one more time just to feel the disgust, then destroy them. You can imagine the humiliation of standing at an easel during an outdoor class with the man for whom I felt an all-consuming passion looking over my shoulder, giving me suggestions on how to capture landscape in watercolor. I would pretend to take the suggestions, pretend to care about the hateful thing, just in the hope that he might, in his instruction, lay his warm hand on my shoulder.
It became too painful to attend the lessons. I abruptly quit, and two days later slid a note under the door of Mr. Drake’s apartment. “Mr. Drake,” I told him, “I am completely blissfully painfully in love with you. I cannot bear to take your lessons anymore. I must know if you love me, too. Late tonight, I’m going to come here and tap on your door three times. I can’t tell you what time it will be, as that depends on when I can sneak out of my dormitory. If you love me, open the door.” (I think I was reading Jane Austen at the time.)
So late that night, I snuck across the wet lawn and up the darkened back stairwell to stand trembling before his door. I gave three light, measured taps, and almost immediately he pulled me in.
“Did anyone see you?” he whispered hoarsely.
“No.”
“Are you sure?” He thrust his head out the door to check the hall, then closed and locked it.
Although I was trembling, I was conscious of exuding a confidence, the confidence that comes with true love, and this began to infect Mr. Drake’s troubled expression. We both broke into a laughter of disbelief and joy. Then he kissed me and held me tight and we laughed again. Then he made love to me in an intense, beseeching way that I had never experienced. We were silent, both out of necessity and in order to witness more clearly the dramatic arc of the act. Then we lay naked together and Mr. Drake told me to return to my dormitory, which I did, happier than I’d ever been before or have been since.
I was soon in the middle of an affair with the resident artist. We actually spent relatively few nights together, he was so afraid we’d be caught. But those blissful nights, the recollection of whose every detail stole the sleep from subsequent nights, became my one and only objective. My studies, which were never a priority, were jettisoned completely in favor of imagining our next night together, and all those nights to come when we would be free from Tenderwood.
Needless to say, I never went to his lessons again. It was imperative that we seem completely unaware of each other. I watched him teaching from the woods, though, just as I watched him eating in the mess hall at the long table with the other instructors, whose drabness so contrasted with his brilliance it was hard to imagine them the same species, much less the same occupation. He shouldn’t eat with them! was my angry and somewhat deranged conclusion. He should eat only with me, out of doors, on hillsides. But, of course, that was impossible. I felt that conflicted pride—he was beautiful, he was mine, but no one knew it.
No one except Richard, and this terrified Mr. Drake. But how could I keep him from knowing? He was my roommate! I continued to screw Richard, just to keep him from getting too jealous and snitching.
Mr. Drake asked me if I thought the other instructors suspected anything. I told him I didn’t, and to further ease his mind I related rumors and truths of other faculty-student contact I had heard over the years. These stories, like every other word we had spoken since our last art lesson, were whispered. Nothing calmed his fears, though, and he broke it off. I cried, left him crazy letters, tossed in my sleep. His mood darkened and he left his post a month early.
Was it during this period of longing, hopelessly, for Mr. Drake that my sleep became so torturous and I flailed my arms so violently that I finally devised my first system of self-restraint? I took a towel, tied the ends, and laid it across my bed. Then I lay down on it and put my hands through the loops created on either side, and felt somehow comforted. Was that the first time? That would make sense. And I try to make sense.
Unlike most people, I turned from a child into a man in a matter of weeks. I graduated and, four days later, turned eighteen and received my first check from my trust fund. I defied my parents’ command to go to Dartmouth, where I had been accepted (it seemed too much another Tenderwood), and moved to New York City. On my one-month anniversary of living there, I decided it was time. After three brief conversations with other William Drakes in Manhattan, his unmistakable voice answered. To this day, I still remember the phone number.
“Hello?”
“Will? It’s Rand. I’m here in New York.”
“Rand? Where are you?”
“I’m here. I live here now.”
There was a long pause, then three sentences: “I can’t talk. I’m not alone. Don’t call here.” I stood frozen, unable to put down the phone. Nine words in three sentences, the last I would ever hear him speak: statement, statement, command; whispered, of course.
I wandered New York for some time chilled to the bone, then slowly embarked on the series of disappointments adults call “dating.” Where were all the men I had assumed would be waiting in every café and gay bar? (I was never denied entrance to any bar, gay or otherwise, having always seemed older than my years.) I started to discover that in this city that seemed to be so crowded, one still had to go out in search of people. And in this adult market the currency was no longer just kisses and body fluids; safety, diversion, status, the future—things such as these were on the block, and every transaction left me feeling either guiltily indebted or, more often, robbed.
The next time I saw Frank, I told him. “Remember that guy Nori you introduced me to?” I said. “I met him again.”
“Yeah? Where?” he said.
“At that porn theater on Third Avenue.”
“I didn’t know you went to porn theaters.” Again, the naughty-puppy treatment.
“Well,” I continued, “we fooled around there at the theater, and he gave me his number. I want to call him, but I thought I should ask you first. Do you mind? You said you weren’t seeing him, right?”
For a moment it was as if Frank had turned to stone. His face drained of color and I could see the gin blossoms at the tip of his nose. Then he shook it off.
“Um, sure, Rand. Do whatever you want.”
“You seem unsure,” I said.
“No, it’s fine. Do what you want.”
It was clear to me that something very sad had passed between Frank and Nori, and it was only my own selfish desire that kept me from investigating it further. I asked no more questions, and called Nori. We had a short, friendly conversation. It seemed he was busy working on a project (he was in civil engineering at NYU) but would complete it and present it the following Thursday, which happened to be the eve of a three-day weekend. He suggested we get together then, and I was flattered that he postponed our meeting until a time of leisure.
Then it very impetuously and prematurely occurred to me to invite Nori on a weekend road trip to Montreal.
I had had a lovely time there with Connie a year and a half before. We had spent the days together exploring the city, then after dinner our paths would part—Connie’s to theaters and lesbian bars, mine to gay bars, jazz clubs, and saunas. The city was chilly and magical, populated with beautiful, scrawny, dark-eyed, French-speaking men. Ever since, I had thought that if I ever found a worthwhile boyfriend, I would take him there.
Not that I presumed to consider Nori even a proto-boyfriend, but he was certainly worthwhile, and at this moment in life when I had decided that a companion would not distract me from my search, that was enough.
I arranged to meet him for breakfast Friday morning, explaining that I was going to leave town. I reserved a car and hotel rooms with king-size beds, making sure everything could be canceled with minimal penalties.
Over breakfast, Nori proved to be as bright and charming as I had sensed, and at a perfect moment near the end he asked, “You are leaving town? Where are you going?”
“Well,” I said, “I’m going to Montreal, just for a relaxing weekend. Have you ever been there?”
“No, but people say it is nice.”
“Yes, it’s very nice. I like it very much. Would you like to come with me?” I was sure the answer would be no, in which case I would politely finish breakfast, then flee, never to call him again.
“Um,” said Nori, cocking his head and looking down at the corner of his place mat, which his fingers were repeatedly dog-earing and smoothing, “this is so nice. But I do not have lots of money, so I cannot.”
“Oh—well, everything’s paid for already—the hotels and things,” I said. “I mean, I’m going with or without company. So it wouldn’t take any money really, I mean. Things are cheap there.”
“You don’t mind?” he said tentatively.
“Oh, no, in fact I’d really love the company.” S-A-Y Y-E-S, said my hand under the table.
“All right,” Nori said, and he laughed.
He told me it would take just an hour for him to pack. I gave him my address and told him to meet me as soon as he was ready.
Again, I was surprised at his willingness, and wondered if I should consider it a warning sign. But, I said to myself, a sign warning what?
When Nori arrived at my door, the look on his face told me he was reconsidering. He came in and set down his backpack. I hugged him tentatively and kissed him on the mouth but, still, he frowned. “What is it?” I asked. “Is everything all right?”
“Do you have downstairs neighbors?” he asked.
“Um, yes. Why, did someone stop you in the hall?”
“No.”
“Is everything OK? Do you still want to go?”
“Oh, yes. I still want to go to Montreal,” he said.
And we left.
After leaving Tenderwood Academy, I kept in touch with only one friend—my jealous junior-year roommate and boyfriend, Richard Victor. He had gone to college in England, where he found a handsome Irishman to love, and for a while after graduating they lived in a stone house in the Irish countryside, which is where I visited them.
“This place is very rustic,” Richard had warned me before I went, but I assured him that simple, rustic beauty was what I craved.
The house, the rolling hills, the silence were all beautiful. I visited at the end of the summer and, though everything was still green and misty, there was a chill in the night air. Only the john was too rustic for my taste—an outhouse at a short distance behind the house.
I usually flush several times during a bowel movement, whispering an apology to the water gods. I consider the ability to immediately whisk away our shit the greatest wonder of the modern domestic world. How could I endure shitting into a cesspool?
The first time, I nearly panicked. But I calmed myself, held my breath, and did it. After a few days it was almost bearable.
Richard and his boyfriend were very much in love. They had vigorous sex almost nightly, and through a gap in the rafters, I could hear every thud of flesh against flesh, every sharp inhalation. Usually, I would put on headphones and patiently listen to music until they were done, at which point I would fall into fitful, unrestrained sleep. One night, though, near the end of my visit, the sounds aroused me sexually. I began to guess at the exact position Richard and his boyfriend were in; from my experiences junior year I knew Richard could be quite innovative. I wanted to masturbate. Doing it there, while listening, felt too shamefully lonely and prurient, but where could I go?
I went to the outhouse. I sat over the cesspool and jacked off. It was a windy night and, just as I came, some of autumn’s first-fallen leaves were blown under the door. In the moment of orgasm, in that ecstatic rush of whatever it is in our brains that makes us feel joyful, everything was unspeakably beautiful—those leaves, the outhouse, even the smell.
I returned to bed shaken and stayed awake for hours thinking about my experience. I wondered, are we fooled by our orgasms into loving whatever is before us at the moment? Or is the orgasm a doorway to a transcendent state where we see the true essential beauty of things? Where shit smells delicious?
Somehow I was reminded of my childhood. I had never thought much of it, but when I was very young, there were moments when I was so wracked by the beauty of the moon, so overwhelmed with love for the family dog, so enraptured by the taste of cherry cordials that tears would fall from my eyes. How had I come so far from that joy?
When I got home from Ireland I did some experiments. I would choose an everyday object, say, a spoon, and I would place it before me as I jacked off. I would force myself to concentrate on the spoon at the moment of orgasm.
O the beauty of the silver! The functionality! The subtle bend of the neck just before the dipper! The awesomely distorted reflections!
Later, I opened the Times to a photo of some particularly repellent figure in city government. I jacked off and focused on his face at the moment of orgasm. His offenses against the people of New York fell from his back like a heavy load. He was human, forgiven, and beautiful. As I cleaned up, I glanced at his face again in folding the paper, and felt my old detestation.
The thing that kept me from shooing away these thoughts as the handiwork of serotonin was the similarity they bore to the simple love for things and people I remember from my early youth. I began the arduous process of collecting memories, trying to decipher the process that led to my mind and body’s insulation. How, for example, at Tenderwood Academy, was I able to live closely with so many boys, and love many, like more, and tolerate the rest? I didn’t remember hating one boy among those hundreds. And now I had to create imaginary doubles for my friends—assemblages of their best qualities that kept my ambivalence from slipping into distaste. At the occasional dinner party to which I dragged myself, I had to turn away from the other guests when they spoke while chewing. As my other senses had been numbed, my sense of smell had become strangely acute, to the point of sometimes triggering a gag response when presented with other people’s odors.
Still, it would be a mistake to imply that I wanted to return to some previous mental state, as I was generally happy with my worldview; I wouldn’t reverse my insulation any more than I would actually forgive that city official his offenses. What I wanted was solely interior—to distill from the world, for my own enjoyment, the beauty that I cautiously hoped to be its true essence.
On the way up to Montreal, Nori and I stopped for a picnic at what was advertised on a roadside as a “Historical Shaker Village.” The visitors’ center was closed, though, and only two of the buildings appeared to have been restored. They were locked. We walked past them, through the tall grass buzzing with insects, to the largest building, or shell of a building really, as it had experienced a fire that had left it roofless and without upper floors. Stone walls thirty feet tall surrounded an interior of lawns and thickets at different elevations, separated by the rubble of walls. We climbed down into an inner room, sunken five feet into the ground. The afternoon sun blazed down. Nori lay back on the grass, and I set down our lunch and reclined beside him.
“Do you miss Japan?” I asked after a minute.
“Sometimes,” he said. Then he wriggled and took from the billfold in his back pocket a tiny photo. “I miss Hitoshi.” Nori handed me a picture of a very handsome silver-haired man.
“Hitoshi?” I asked.
“He is my lover, um, my husband.”
I looked more closely. There was deep tenderness in the smile Hitoshi gave the photographer, marred slightly by a cringe at the lens. He wore a black suit, and his hair was oiled back from a narrow forehead, a pointed, intelligent face. He must have been several years older than Nori.
“You took the picture,” I said.
“Yes.”
“He loves you.”
“Yes. He has my heart, you know? I am with him in Japan. I miss him. But I have other boyfriends, so I don’t get too sad. He wants that. He knows it is good for me to have other boyfriends, because he cannot be here.” Nori’s English was that of someone who had studied it for years before speaking it—near-perfect grammar, but a Japanese rhythm forcing sounds together in odd combinations.
“Why doesn’t he come to America?” I asked.
“Maybe someday, if I am rich, he will come to America. Now it is very hard because he does not have lots of money.”
“He can come and get a job, it’s not so difficult, is it?”
“It is very difficult. Hitoshi has HIV. He gets help in Japan with medicine that he cannot get here. When I am an engineer and I make lots of money, then he will come.”
I looked back down at Nori’s handsome husband, whose tenderness embarrassed me. This was a picture meant only for the photographer, to whom I returned it.
“Does he have other boyfriends, too?”
“Well, I tell him to. That it is good. He tried, but it makes him very sad because it makes him miss me more. So he does not have other boyfriends. He waits for me.”
Nori rolled onto his elbow and looked at me. I moved my head under his so it would shield me from the sun. He kissed me. “It is all right that I have a Hitoshi?”
“Of course,” I said.
“I thought it is good to tell you, so you should know.”
“Yes, of course.”
That night, I made love to Nori in a hotel room overlooking Lake Champlain. I touched the length of his lovely, smooth body. The ridges of the hips that, on skinny boys, create graceful lines that frame the flat abdomen then curve toward the cock, are actually the edges of the upper pelvis. They have the beautiful name they deserve: the crests of ilium. I lay my face against Nori’s left crest of ilium and kissed his belly. There was only a wisp of hair under his navel; otherwise his belly was bare and flat. A small patch of scrubby pubic hair, then a thin penis, simple and precious.
Sex was more somber than I had imagined before Hitoshi entered the picture. Less flights of fancy, less reckless exploration. Now that Nori loved and was loved monumentally, I felt my meaning had changed, swaying toward serious pleasure in the shadow.
I took Nori’s penis into my mouth, put my hands to his sides, thumbs resting along his beautiful crests of ilium. I knew their name from an artists’ anatomy book that Mr. Drake had had on his shelf. The models were red-faced athletes of the twenties with strings around their waists and single, fake fig leaves hanging over their genitals. Lines led from their bodies to wonderful words: sternum, abdomen, internal oblique, crest of ilium. Somehow these stern-faced men were infinitely more exciting than the nude and lusty seventies sailors of Richard Victor’s porno. Maybe it was just that they were citizens of the land of Will Drake, who was sleeping quietly a few feet away, and who, even in sleeping—or, especially in sleeping—radiated beauty.
Nori lay behind me and I let him penetrate me slowly. Breathing hard, I stopped him once to let me catch up, then let him go all the way in, until his body came flush with mine, his chin on my shoulder and his breath in my ear.
What did I want from him? It hadn’t occurred to me to wonder this until now, making love to him. The third party, I supposed, must always have an agenda. Only two can blindly explore. Maybe it was better this way. The sex, with its frankness and intensity, was almost certainly better. Maybe I would be able to enjoy Nori more in every sense now that I needn’t concern myself with his heart.
Afterward, Nori fell asleep against my shoulder and, unable to sleep while touching another, I gently eased his head onto a pillow and moved away. I realized I had no idea what I wanted from him or from any man. I had no blueprint. I wondered, had I never known a real adult relationship?
I tucked my hands under my legs. If I hadn’t been exhausted from travel and sex, this would have been difficult, but now the illogic of sleep started to weave itself easily into my thoughts. Not knowing what I wanted, I allowed myself to be Nori, longing so desperately for his steady and melancholy Hitoshi. Then I allowed myself to be a child again and longed for Mr. Drake.
But, I decided after my many jack-off experiments, the orgasm is so short-lived! If I was to go anywhere with this I had to extend the period of ecstasy.
I took Ecstasy, but even as I explored the wonderland of my apartment feeling surge after surge of goodness, I was aware of an artificial tang to the flavor of the experience, a bitterness that lingers on the tongue after one takes a pill. And the aftermath, two full days of sorrow spent in bed and in movie theaters, as I was too sad to read, was more than I could bear.
I read books on transcendental meditation, and even went to a class at the Open Center, but found the effort to divorce the mind from the body contrary to my goals.
Then I wondered, what if the answer was, again, encoded somewhere in my past?
There was a certain type of activity that I had always been drawn to. I remember being five or six and taking all the clothing off the hangers until there was a massive pile on the closet floor, then crawling under the pile and feeling a perfect stillness and satisfaction in the thick, warm dark. Whenever I went swimming, I never played with the other children, but made my own game of swimming to the deepest point, emptying my lungs and sitting on the ground for as long as I could. (This usually brought the bitter reproach of whatever nanny or lifeguard was present.)
I have countless memories of being alone and impulsively wrapping a blanket around my head; or lying on the floor and thrusting my feet deep between box spring and mattress; or coiling whatever rope, towel, or bathrobe belt that came into my grasp around and around my wrists until they were drawn together in a happy bond. And at different points since puberty I had asked lovers to place their hands over my face during sex, or fill my gaping mouth with their fingers, or smother me, gently, with a pillow.
But these were examples of indulging a taste I otherwise tried to ignore. Only with my sleeping arrangements, out of necessity, did I allow myself to create an elaborate system of restraint. Had I stifled the very impulses that would lead me to that state of transcendence?
I decided to completely indulge myself in whatever self-restraining activity I could successfully and safely accomplish alone.
Also, I cautiously answered a few personal ads, inviting gay sadists to come bind me, gag me, etc., but each experience left me feeling unfulfilled and a little sore. Then, in a different section of the personals, I found Belinda:
Strong intelligent mature redhead. Available only for advanced role play and bondage. Experienced. Will work with clients to develop unconventional methods of satisfaction. Serious calls only.
How difficult it is to reconstruct a broken frame of mind, no matter how recently it was broken!
What would I have done with Nori in Montreal if there were no such man as Hitoshi? Holed us up in the inn and held him until it felt like he was mine? Spent money on him? Been bored by him? Climbed Mont-Royal to survey the city and the gray Saint Lawrence beyond and convinced him to hide here with me until his friends stopped calling and NYU forgot his name, then return to live quietly in my loft?
It’s impossible to imagine how he would have responded to a radical proposal. As it was, he was uniformly, cheerfully willing. We visited the cathedral where English-speaking Canadian tourists took flash pictures next to NO FLASH PHOTOGRAPHY edicts in French while mournful singing echoed from a hidden side chapel and a grand-mother wept, prayed, rocked in her pew. We ate delicious Vietnamese food for lunch, then bad French food for dinner, and Nori insisted he liked it all. I couldn’t imagine the hard, resolved side of him that perhaps only Hitoshi saw—that chose to leave Japan; that chose to take on lovers.
Would I have taken him to the sauna? Who knows? But I did.
That night as we walked the halls, our bare feet making kissing noises against the tiles, I imagined how we looked together. To these diminutive Montrealers, we were tall as lampposts. In the mist we could have appeared as different versions of the same stooped, hollow-chested but handsome man, one the color of tea with milk, the other the color of, well, milk. Or as one man followed by his ghost into the swirling mist of the steam room. The man sits and adjusts his towel as his ghost does the same, then the illusion is broken as the man leans in to share some quiet English words with his ghost, who is really his pale friend. Then they both respond to other men’s greetings in French. Were they Torontonians? No, Americans more likely.
Nori and I had discovered earlier in the day that our French was about equal, and although this was a few degrees worse than Nori’s English, we merci’ed our way through the day, enjoying the equal footing, bypassing the momentary resentment, the speed bump a Montreal waitress goes over before she lists the specials in English. And now we talked with the three other residents of the steam room in our halting French about New York and about Montreal.
“Gay men in Montreal,” said Nori, “seem to be friendlier than gay men in New York.”
“You’re not speaking of us specifically, are you?” said the hairy-chested man with stubby, nervous fingers. “We’re friendly because we’re hitting on you.”
We all introduced ourselves. These three were friends—two accountants who were talking up Nori while the third, a musician named Jean, had taken a shine to me.
“Montrealers and French Canadians in general,” Jean said, taking up the subject from his friend, “are friendly out of pure tackiness. New Yorkers can afford to be unfriendly.”
“That’s silly,” I said.
“The beauty of New York and New Yorkers is an unfriendly beauty,” Jean said with wavering authority, causing me to consider that patently non-American trait—the willingness to try out theories in casual conversation. To most Americans it seems intellectual, pretentious, un-Christian; I loved it. “The beauty is in the street noise and in the way buildings lean against each other. But,” he said, taking on a dramatic sadness, “there is also a problem with the New York gays, and American gays in general . . . they’re becoming straight. It’s like a science fiction movie, really.”
“Oh, hush, Jean,” said one of Nori’s accountants. “Always talking.” The man turned to Nori and me. “We just came here to relax before a party. Would you like to come? It is our friend’s party. There will be lots of boys.”
Nori and I looked to each other. “Well ...” I said hesitantly.
Jean suddenly broke into English: “You were hoping for some action here?”
I nodded.
“It’s too early. Midnight on Saturday? Everyone’s still at the bars. It’ll be hours before this place gets going. Come to the party with us.”
It was a couple of hours and several drinks later, as Jean and I stood in a dim corner of a crowded living room, that I was able to return to the subject he had raised in the sauna. “Jean, you said that gay men in the U.S. are becoming straight. What did you mean?”
Now he spoke in English. “Gay men in the U.S.,” he said, “they talk out of two sides of their heads. They say, ‘You straight people must respect us—we want rights—we want to live by our own rules,’ then they say, ‘May we please live by your rules? May we please get married and have children and live in Ohio? May we join the army? We don’t want to be outlaws anymore. We want to be just like you. We want to have a day at Disney World.’ And in this I mean Torontonians, too, because they want to be Americans. Long before Quebec secedes from Canada, Toronto will secede and join the U.S.
“Are you like this, Rand? Do you want to marry some man and have little gay babies?”
“No, definitely not,” I said. “The impossibility of procreation has always been one of my favorite aspects of gay sex.”
“Yes,” said Jean, and raised his wavering glass in salute. “And do you talk out of both sides of your head? Or do you talk out of your ass, as you should? As I do?”
We were both drunk—I for the first time in years. Usually I am satisfied by a little cognac or some scotch, but tonight I had drunk untold amounts of god-knows-what, as the host merrily wandered his party with pitcher after pitcher of fruity concoctions.
Jean continued. “Maybe we Quebecois are old-fashioned, but you see we still have our gay village where we laugh at everything. It’s always been the same neighborhood; the straights are not interested in coming here. It’s not like New York where the straights chase the gays from this to that part of town until they all give up and, what is the word ... integrate?”
“Hm,” I said, “there goes Nori.” A man had led him by the hand into a side room.
“How old do you think I am, Rand? Guess.”
“Thirty-five.”
“Thank you, angel. Forty-eight. Surprised? Yes, I’m very well-preserved. You are, maybe, twenty-nine?”
He had guessed it exactly.
“When I was your age, my lover and I, with six of our friends, had a bridge club. We met the first and third Wednesday of every month. There were penalties for missing a game, penalties for conversation at the table, big penalties for cheating, although that was very rare. With the fines we would buy sherry and cheese for the next game. No gambling, of course. We were like little old ladies. Naturally, it was funny, but when we were on the phone planning the event, then together playing the game, we were very serious about it. It was like we were practicing. But, for what? Were we paying tribute to the little old ladies or making war on them? All those men but one—Andy, he is here, maybe you met him?—all those men but me and Andy are dead now. My lover, too, in 1990. It is sad, but it happens. Little old ladies die. But I tell you this, my friends did not die for the right to go to Disney World. They didn’t die for anything. Their deaths were completely, utterly pointless. That’s the only way to be at peace with it. Accept it as complete pointlessness. That’s what I’m saying about the Americans—they’re trying to change their destiny, to have a point. The destiny of gays is pointlessness, just as the destiny of straights is ugliness. Don’t try to jump the track. It is better to be pointless and laugh. That is our job, I think. Like they say in blues songs, laughing just to keep from crying.”
During this Jean had wandered, but now he seemed to remember to whom he was speaking. “So you will promise me, handsome Rand, that you and Nori will not go to Provincetown and get married.”
“Out of the question,” I said. “Besides, I think Nori is already married. He has a lover in Japan he called his husband.”
“Ah, so you are the other woman, so to speak.” Jean ran his fingers along the underside of mine, lifting them, and sang the Nina Simone song: “‘The other woman finds time to manicure her nails. / The other woman is perfect where her rival fails ...’ Do you like the party?”
I put my hands to his hips, then slid them under his shirt and up his back to feel the ribs under his shoulder blades. “Yes, it’s quite a party.” I looked over his shoulder and past the trees. Men in twos and threes were kissing, fondling, shedding clothing.
“Where is Nori?” asked Jean.
“He was lured into a bedroom earlier,” I said.
“That’s a pity. I’m sure he’s nothing but a pile of bones now. We’re a bunch of cannibals, you know.”
“And old ladies,” I added.
“Yes, old lady cannibals.” He kissed me, then pulled back and, in a wicked-witch voice, said, “Delicious.”
I woke up sore and naked, having cast off the blankets in the night. I went to the bathroom and vomited sour fruit juice, alcohol, acid—last night’s party gone rancid. I wiped the lip of the toilet bowl with a starchy hotel towel and washed my face. When I returned to the bedroom I saw that Nori was sleeping on the floor. Sometime during the night he had made a bed by folding the extra comforter into a pallet under the window, and now he lay stiffly on his back, wrapped in a sheet, with lines of trouble in his brow. Or was he squinting to keep out the sun? I stepped over him and closed the curtains, then knelt down.
“Nori, why are you sleeping on the floor?” I whispered.
He frowned and turned away from me.
“Come back to bed.” I put my hand to his shoulder, but he jerked away. I was startled. “Nori, what is it? Why are you down here?”
He leveled an angry, bloodshot gaze at me. “You don’t remember?” My thoughts struggled through the mire of the previous night. Had we had sex? I barely remembered returning to the hotel room. We had had sex in separate groups at the party. Was that what upset him? No, now I remembered holding each other, chuckling conspiratorially in the elevator, and then we had collapsed onto the bed . . . right?
“No,” I said. “I don’t remember. What happened?”
“You hit me in the night.”
“What?”
“We went to sleep and then I woke up. You were hitting me.”
“Oh, God,” I said, squeezing my eyes shut. “Nori, I apologize.”
“I didn’t understand. I thought you were dreaming so I said your name to wake you up. But you kept hitting. You were awake. You were angry.”
“No, Nori. I . . . it has nothing to do with you. I have trouble sleeping. Or . . . trouble while I’m asleep. It’s kind of like sleepwalking.”
He looked at me with fear and disbelief.
“Nori, please forgive me. I would never hurt you intentionally. I think you’re fantastic. It’s just me. I’ve always been like this.”
I put my hand on his shoulder and he softened, just slightly.
“I thought maybe you were asleep,” he conceded. “I thought you were mad that I had sex at the party, or you were jealous about Hitoshi, and maybe since you were asleep it . . . came out. I was scared.”
“But I wasn’t angry! It would have happened whether or not you were here. You see, I’m used to sleeping restrained. It’s very complicated.”
He didn’t understand. “How do you know you weren’t angry if you can’t remember?”
For a moment I was speechless. “Because I’m not angry now. I have no reason to be angry with you, Nori, I like you very much.”
“Maybe you are not angry when you are awake,” he replied, sitting up, “because you don’t have a reason. But when you are dreaming, things happen without reason. When you’re dreaming, you’re angry.”
“Nori, I’m so sorry.” I put my arms around him and drew him up to stand. Then the room rocked and he supported me. We were both naked, and there was something vaguely delightful about the sickness and his body next to mine. “If it’s true and I’m angry in my sleep,” I said, “it’s not at you. I promise. It started years and years ago.”
His gaze shifted and he turned to sit on the corner of the bed. He probably thought I was insane, and in that, he was certainly not the first.
I stretched out onto the bed, my mind limping to catch up to where my body had taken me: How were we so intimate here? How had I come to beg and how had he become so stony?
There was nothing more to say. I thumbed the flesh of his buttock with my big toe. He lay down, but with his head at the opposite end of the bed from mine. I propped my head against his ankle to gaze up the foreshortened and shifting landscape of his body until it rolled, dizzyingly, away, and he said, “It’s late. We’ve got to drive.”
And so, with my heart broken, just a little, I drove. We got into the city late, and I woke Nori to direct me to his building.
“Did you have a good time?” I asked dejectedly when we arrived.
“Yes, I did,” he said. His brightness had returned. “Thank you.”
“Again, I’m really sorry. ...”
“Please, it’s OK. Don’t worry. I had a good time.”
“Well, I hope I can see you again. Maybe . . . we could get together with Frank sometime. The three of us.”
The silence that followed allowed me to consider what this offer, which had spontaneously leaped from my mouth, meant. The best hope for Nori and me now was to relate on that level—friends.
“Frank is your good friend?” asked Nori.
“Yes. We’re very close,” I responded.
I wondered if he was about to tell me about their relationship. If so, I would stop him. At this point, it was so unnecessary. But he started in a different vein: “Rand, the apartment under yours—no one lives there.”
“Right.”
“But it is yours.”
“Yes, why do you ask?”
“Maybe I shouldn’t say so, but Frank is not a very good friend to you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you let Frank use that apartment?”
“No,” I said. With a wave of sickness, I realized what Nori was telling me.
“But Frank has a key,” he said.
“Yes.”
“The night we met, he took me there. We had sex there. I’m sorry. He didn’t tell me it was your place. He pretended it was his. He said we had to be very quiet, not to wake up the neighbors. But it was you he didn’t want to wake up.” He fiddled nervously with his keys, which he had already taken out. “Maybe I shouldn’t have said. But, you know, maybe I should.”
“I’ve dealt with Frank’s problems before,” I said. “It’s good you told me.”
Nori reached for his backpack in the backseat and set it in his lap.
“Thank you, Rand. I had fun in Montreal.”
“And maybe,” I said, “we should just leave it at that?”
“Maybe.” He leaned over, kissed me, and left.
Shaking my head, I pulled back into traffic. Something made me laugh. As I wondered what it was, I remembered Jean’s theory about gay men, that it is our job to laugh.
Exhausted from the trip, I went home and got in bed, but then lay awake for hours. I imagined going downstairs and finding that Frank had moved in—that I opened the door and it was his apartment in Queens, only now it was here. I finally fell asleep as the sun was rising and slept late into the morning. On the way out to return the rental car I peeked into the apartment and, of course, everything was as I had left it.
Later, while unpacking my bag, I noticed on the answering machine’s blinking display that I had eleven messages. I didn’t even know that it could hold that many! I pressed play, and what unrolled was as comical as it was grotesque:
Hey Rand, it’s Frank. Haven’t talked to you for a couple days. Doing the old check-up. Give me a ring.
Rand, it’s Frank, give me a call.
Frank again. Call me.
Look, Rand, give me a call. Is everything all right? Don’t make me come over there. Bye.
On and on it went, like a bad radio play. The pitch of his voice increased with tension, like a violin string whose key is being turned and turned.
Rand, it’s Frank. Did you go out of town? Call me.
I had forgotten to tell Frank that I was leaving town. Had he come to check on me and found the apartment empty? Wouldn’t he have left a note?
Then it struck me: he knew I was going to call Nori, and that Nori might end up here, and that Nori might tell me. The cowardly whine of Frank’s voice, which was still being played by the machine, nauseated me. Years ago I had removed the possibility of a friend betraying me. I never asked anything of anyone. How had this happened? I felt sick and profoundly unsafe.
I would have all the locks changed. I would do it today. But first, I had to calm myself.
I went to my closet and found the racquetball on the top shelf. In the kitchen I wrapped the ball with cellophane and pushed it into place in my mouth. A length of cellophane around the back of my head secured the ball in place. Then I went back to the closet and pushed the clothing to either side, creating a snug space for myself. I stepped in and bound my ankles and knees with old shirts. I drew the doors carefully closed, put my hands above the rod, and coiled a light cotton shirt around my wrists, then attempted to tie it. It was clumsy, but it would do. Slowly, I relaxed the muscles of my legs until I was hanging by my wrists, my body supported on either side by soft cushions of clothing. After a few moments I was sure that the knot at my wrists would not give. A warm pain began to spread from my armpits down my back, and I found a little stillness.
To put it simply, I sought simplicity, which is to say, a complete form of complexity, unified and elusive. I had realized years earlier that the layout of my apartment was the layout of my mind, and that it was cluttered. I had gotten rid of everything I didn’t need—which was most of what I had owned—by giving it away or putting it downstairs. I felt calmed. There was room for sunlight to flood in.
I didn’t waste words or time. I ordered in, and I usually ate alone. All of this aided in my search for something that I couldn’t name, something inside me. I believed I’d recognize it when I found it.
I think this search began with something I misheard my father say over the phone, many years before. Late in the series of arguments we had had over my refusal to go to Dartmouth, my father decided to make it personal. He accused me of sending my mother into a nervous breakdown with my decision.
“Rand,” he said, “how can you be so coal-hearted?”
I had been cleaning my fingernails as I argued, but now I put down the nail file. I was struck by that image: instead of a shiny, red heart pumping away in my chest, I had a dull lump of black coal, like one a bad child got in his Christmas stocking. For the first and only time, my father gave me pause.
Of course it was a mistake. My father had used the hackneyed description “cold-hearted,” and I came up with a boring defense he would understand: it was my life, my decision, my money, etc.
After the call I toyed with the idea, imagining myself a bad boy’s Christmas stocking. Who, then, if not my parents, those very accusers, dropped into my empty body that lump of coal that would be my heart (denying, as we must, the existence of Santa)? And if I had a coal heart, how much pressure exerted equally from all sides would it take to squeeze it into a diamond, the world’s hardest and most beautiful rock?
Now, years later, I wondered something similar: if I gathered all the evidence of life’s beauty (which, I’d found, I could only begin to do if I am surrounded by emptiness), and gave it a good squeeze, embossing my heart with all those memories and sensations, was there a moment (or eternity) of transcendence, when I touched the beautiful truth of life? When I was comforted? When I held up to my face and was illuminated by that tiny jewel, the hope of whose existence compelled us—all of us—not to hang ourselves with extension cords from light fixtures?
A crack, light, the knot at my wrists gave, and I was out onto the floor.
“Oh my God!” screamed Frank. He knelt over me and cradled my head. “Rand,” he wailed, “are you OK? How long have you been in there? I’m so sorry!”
I blinked my eyes, trying to focus. Then I saw Frank’s frantic expression and laughter began to bubble up from my chest, but my mouth was still gagged so it must have sounded like I was suffocating.
“Shit! Fuck!” muttered Frank, as he tore at the cellophane, scratching my cheek. He plucked out the racquetball, sending saliva flying, and I burst into a deep, cleansing laughter.
“Are you OK? How long have you been in there?”
“As long as I can remember,” I howled as I pushed him away and rose to my feet. I laughed and laughed at the fear on his face. Finally I settled down and told him I had only been in there an hour. He was quiet and bewildered, and I almost pitied him. “Let’s get takeout,” I said.
After Frank left I called the locksmith.
The more salt one adds to water, the greater a submerged body’s buoyancy in that water. And the greater pressure experienced by a body forcibly submerged.
Facedown, I wore an oxygen mask attached to a pliable plastic hose, which was taped loosely to the tiled wall. This was an apparatus of my own invention created from supplies found on Canal Street, and based on the design of a snorkel.
The water was tepid, and I could taste the saltiness. Belinda flattened black industrial-strength garbage bags against my back and the backs of my legs. She gently lowered bubble-wrapped twenty-five-pound weights between my shoulder blades, into the dip of my lower back, onto the backs of my thighs, into the cradle of my loosely bound ankles. She placed a Ziploc bag of ball bearings onto the back of my neck.
She was done, and I was quiet.
It was somewhat bothersome that my hands were unrestrained. Belinda had insisted that I keep the index finger and thumb of both hands pressed together in OK signs. If the hands relaxed and the fingers parted, she’d assume I’d lost consciousness and immediately end the experiment. I had assured her I’d be fine, but she had insisted, and, of course, I appreciated her concern.
It usually started when I ceased to think of what I saw as darkness but, rather, a shade of neutrality.
I felt a wonderful displacement: which way was I facing? In which direction was my head pointing? The mental map of my surroundings became a maze; I lost the layout of my apartment. Which way was which? I let it go.
The bubbling lava-lamp paisleys came and I lost myself in them for a while, then they divided and revealed a great open expanse. I entered it and, softly, so as not to break the stillness, said, “Yes?”
