Ivan and Goran did not talk about how long it had been since they had fucked. They did not talk about how long it had been since they had held each other and fallen asleep. They slept together, woke together, ate together, and otherwise went about their lives as though nothing at all had changed, though of course everything had.
It was not denial. It was something else—fear, perhaps, or a lack of caring.
They fought about dumb things, like who used more electricity or who used more water. But it was really a fight about them not fucking. Whenever Ivan tried to initiate sex, Goran was tired. Whenever Goran tried to initiate sex, Ivan felt cold and far away from himself. They couldn’t get themselves to align. They kept misfiring. Ivan slept on the couch, which aggravated his joints. Goran hid his pain medication. Ivan left glasses of water perched on Goran’s keyboard.
The not fucking had a cause, though they were not willing to face it. They were both graduate students, Goran in music and Ivan in finance, but Goran had family money. That was the beginning and the end of their trouble. Money made things easier, in one sense, when you had been raised without it. Like the first good gulp of air after a long run. But then came the burn.
Ivan felt like he could never get the upper hand. Goran paid most of their rent and most of their bills, paid for their groceries and their toiletries. What Ivan had to spare, he sent home to his parents or otherwise saved in dribs and drabs for some time in the near future. Goran never made a fuss about paying for things, until he was drunk or mad or irritated about something Ivan hadn’t done to his exact specification. Then it was, The least you could do this and The least you could do that, all in this tone of passive-aggressive reproach. He could barely remember why they’d gotten together in the first place. But then if he left, where would he go? He couldn’t afford a place on his own. He couldn’t afford anything. He was at the end of a bleak period in his life, finishing out an MBA in hopes of getting a decent job somewhere, anywhere, a job that would let him pay his parents back for all they had done for him. Goran didn’t understand that. He had money. So much money that it fell on him like dust or snow, floating down in great tufts from his parents and grandparents.
Goran said he spent the money so freely because it wasn’t really his. He was adopted, a black kid in a white family, studying music in the Midwest. Trying to be a musician, trying to figure out what it meant to be a musician in the world today. The money, he said, had been earmarked for some white kid who’d never been born. And so he’d slotted into that kid’s place. Whenever Goran talked about race, about being black, Ivan felt guilty for forgetting that he was black. Goran only ever brought it up when he got sad or drunk and talked about the money he’d spent earlier that day on dinner or lunch or buying a friend a new jacket for the winter. The gifts had the outward appearance of generosity, and Ivan thought of them as such, but there was something so pitiful underneath the giving, and Goran made him think it had to do with being black and having money from his rich white family.
He’d said that to Goran once, early on, as they were walking around the Ped Mall eating frozen yogurt. A jazz trio was playing at one end of the pavilion, and a black guy with a relaxer was singing acoustic covers of Michael Jackson songs at the other end. Goran had been talking about how he wished his parents could understand how difficult it was seeing the news of the black kid who’d been shot by police in Ohio. How hard it was for him to see that. We don’t understand, they kept saying. We tried to do right by you. We love you. Goran did a cruel imitation of their voices. And Ivan said, I wish I had your parents. Rich white people sound really nice right about now. And Goran had stopped and thrown his yogurt at Ivan’s head. Fuck you, Goran said. My people are dying and you’re full of self-pity.
Ivan had almost replied that those were not Goran’s people—not the black boy who had died playing with a toy gun, not the black boy who had died in Florida for walking home in the rain, not the black man strangled to death in New York, or the black man shot in the car while his children watched him bleed. They belonged to a dark fraternity of modern martyrs, and Goran belonged to a rich family from the Chicago suburbs, grown obscenely wealthy for their early invention of key manufacturing technologies and the reconstitution of American slavery as they exploited the labor of the working industrial class. But he did not say that. What did he know. It wasn’t his place. Instead he’d said, I’m sorry. You’re right. I don’t get it. And I’m sorry I don’t.
He tried to keep a low profile in both their relationship and their apartment. He tried to wash the dishes and fold the clothes and look after the trash cans and recycling. He tried to keep things good and running smoothly, and when he had a thought, he kept it to himself. Goran had enough going on. Goran liked to say that he was struggling to figure out where he fit. Where he was in the world. Mostly he just seemed so sad and so lost, and Ivan wanted to comfort him. But they couldn’t get it to work, so they drifted along.
Their apartment was a one-bedroom on the second floor of an old house at the corner of Iowa Avenue and Van Buren. Their downstairs neighbors were two roommates, painters in the MFA program. The man was pale and had a perpetual look of sleep deprivation. The woman was sullen and muscular, with buzzed platinum-blond hair. They were not a couple, though Ivan saw them often at the corner co-op buying discount organic produce, wearing matching overalls or jumpsuits. Ivan sometimes saw the man sitting on the shared front porch, smoking. The man would hike one leg up against his chest while the other one dangled low over the shrubs. The woman walked a large, barrel-chested gray dog that did not belong to her. Ivan knew it wasn’t hers because he never heard it. What he did hear from downstairs was their music. They played jazz standards and bluesy renditions of songs from the Great American Songbook, but what they played most of all were show tunes. They loved Cole Porter. They played Anything Goes with Patti LuPone over and over. He could feel it under his feet.
Some nights, Goran went to the poet bar and Ivan stayed home. Goran was sleeping with a married poet who had two small, blond children. Ivan had seen them in the café talking. Goran reached out and touched the man’s forearm, and the man glanced around furtively and then withdrew. Ivan assumed the poets, like dancers, all slept together. As if they were a restless pack rubbing against one another for heat in the winter. Iowa was a kind of cultural winter—they had all come to this speck of a city in the middle of a middle state in order to study art, to hone themselves and their ideas like perfect, terrifying weapons, and in the monastic kind of deprivation they found here, they turned to one another. Every dying species sought its own kind of comfort.
When he was alone, Ivan sat at Goran’s keyboard. He could play fragments of songs from the radio, but he couldn’t play anything complete. Once, while Goran was doing the dishes, he’d sat down behind the keyboard and played part of something from a band he liked, but before he’d even reached the end of what little he could manage, Goran threw a glass from the kitchen into the wall opposite Ivan’s head. It burst into a powder that dropped in fragments onto the keyboard, spraying into Ivan’s hair.
“Goran!” Ivan stood up slowly, carefully.
Goran was standing in the kitchen archway with soap dripping from his hands onto the carpet. His expression was hard and cruel. He said, “Don’t be stupid.”
Ivan had spent days picking the glass from the carpet. He ran the vacuum over the spot every day for weeks, but he could always feel the glass beneath his feet, pressing at him from among the fibers.
Ivan lived on student loans, amassing a pile of debt in order to study the meteorology of money. His parents couldn’t help him because they had wrung every penny from their lives to send him to ballet school, first in Boston and then later New York, where it had appeared likely that he would make a life for himself—until it turned out that his tendons were bad and wouldn’t heal, and at the age of seventeen he found himself needing to make other plans.
His mother was an elementary school teacher, and his father was a city mechanic for Boston who worked on the buses and the trucks and machines that broke down in the water sanitation plant. The strain of paying for his tuition those ten years had been hidden from him, except on Christmas breaks and summer vacation, when he came home and found his parents diminished and tired. They scraped and saved. They accepted money from their church and from their parents. They poured all their resources into him, until nothing was left for them. The summer he turned seventeen, Ivan remembered, he had lain awake in his bed, thinking how stupid it all seemed. To have given so much and to have tried so hard, only to come up against the hard fact of biology. He had lain in bed for hours and hours that summer, burning up with anger, until he vibrated with it. What a cruel fact of the world, that you could live your whole life in sight of what you want most and still find yourself unable to attain it, because of some vicious quirk.
He decided to study finance because he knew he could make a living that way, enough to support himself and his parents. While at school, he worked in restaurants and construction, in the cold and heat and the disgusting slush of Boston’s outer suburbs. He got accustomed to driving all day to a job site, working, and then driving the winding roads and blind curves to Somerville, only to wake up and do it again the next morning.
But he worked and studied and saved, and he graduated, and now at twenty-five he found himself at the tail end of his MBA, needing to bridge the summer in New York or San Francisco because he couldn’t do finance right in Iowa, unless he wanted to stay here permanently, which he did not. He didn’t have enough money to make it possible, and yet needed it very much to be possible. In this way, Ivan’s life hadn’t changed very much.
That January, he was helping his friend Noah build a shed out in the country. The land belonged to Bert, who owned several properties around Iowa City and the outlying areas. He bought up old houses and converted them into apartments to be rented by gangs of undergraduates and grad students. Ivan lived in one such apartment with Goran, though Bert was not their landlord. Noah rented from him. Bert was white, flabby, and wore thick glasses. He looked like one of those men from America’s Most Wanted. Sometimes Ivan looked up from where he was squatting on the ground, tying something to a stake, and found Bert staring at him. Noah would laugh and say, Don’t mind him.
The wind chapped his knuckles, but the work was good, and it left him feeling tired and hot. On bright days, he lay on his back in the bed of the truck and listened to the gray wind comb the grass flat. The fields were muddy. The spindly trees on the edge of the forest swayed.
Noah was in the dance program at Iowa. He’d grown up in West Des Moines, half Japanese, half white, and for most of his childhood he’d been an elite gymnast, until he got bored with it. He’d found the other boys tiresome in their intensity, and he used to get weird looks from their parents, like they were always scoping him out to see if he was outgrowing their own kids. In ballet, every boy was a little princeling. Ivan knew it well, the way teachers fawned over the boys, even the ones with bad feet and lazy tendencies. In ballet, if you were a boy you were a precious commodity, rare and exceptional, even if you were mediocre, and he said the music was better anyway. He liked dance. It suited him.
Ivan had first seen Noah when he attended a fall dance recital. It was some modernist nonsense, and the choreography wasn’t very good, but Noah was good in it. He had a fluid easiness to his dance, natural in ways that some people were forced. It was hard for Ivan to watch other people dance. He missed it so much that it hurt his stomach. It tired him out, too, because he found himself memorizing the choreography, twitching with the little shadow motions it took to get it down cold in the spine. But that night he’d just watched Noah dance, and later he bought him some drinks at the bar.
Noah said he had auditions coming up, now that he was graduating. Auditions that would determine the course of his life. Ivan said he could understand that. He had some interviews coming up, too. If he was lucky—fuck, if he was lucky. Noah said he was getting a very late start, but that was life, what could you do. Sometimes it just snuck up on you. Ivan laughed. Yeah, it was like that.
A large blond dog roamed the allotment. Noah called him Dota, after the video game, and gave him food from a bag he kept in the back of his truck. He said Bert told him not to do it, which was why he took special pleasure in feeding him and driving him around. Bert had said that the dog was wild and was full of fleas and ticks, and Noah’s eyes gleamed when he told Ivan this, as though they were coconspirators. Sometimes, Dota climbed up onto the truck bed next to Ivan and lay over him. It was warm under his weight, and Ivan would fall asleep that way despite the cold.
One afternoon, after they had knocked off for lunch, Noah went on one of his walks in the woods. Ivan and Dota climbed into the truck bed to nap. Then, seemingly the moment he closed his eyes, Ivan was startled by a sound like distant thunder. Dota jumped to the ground and let out a long howl. There was another sharp crack in the distance. It wasn’t thunder at all but rifle fire. Recollection, as firm as the sound itself, swept toward him as if across a great plain. Dota went in circles, yipping and dancing anxiously.
Ivan dialed Noah, but the sound of the ringer came from back over his shoulder in the truck cab. He leaped to the ground next to Dota. Another shot, the cracking wave of the sound. Was he supposed to go into the woods after Noah? Or stay where he was? He had no way of knowing if he was in danger. He waited. The wind changed direction. A bitter sulfur smell carried to him. So close. His fear sharpened.
But then another sound came over the tops of the trees—laughter. Noah’s voice. Ivan ran, jumping over the low ditch, to reach him at the edge of the woods. Noah was taller than Ivan, with thick, dark hair. His smile was crooked. He had a little tear of a scar near the middle of his lips.
“Fuck,” Ivan said, gripping him by the shoulders.
“Oh, hey,” Noah said.
“Didn’t you hear those guns?”
Noah laughed louder. His breath was hot on Ivan’s cheeks. Ivan shook him, and Noah just laughed louder.
“Those weren’t guns.”
“What?”
“Bert left some air canisters in his burning barrel. Fool.”
Ivan dug his fingers harder into Noah’s shoulders. The wind had turned and went back through the trees. Dota danced at their feet, leaping up and putting his front paws on Noah’s stomach. The dog barked twice, then looked back at Ivan and barked at him, too. His tongue was purple, spotted pink like a reptile.
“God,” Ivan said. “I thought. I thought.”
Noah laughed as he gripped Dota by his fur.
“Your face,” he said.
“God,” Ivan said.
After they pulled off from Bert’s place, Noah and Ivan found a deserted stretch of road to park. They unbuttoned each other’s flannels, and there in the creaking cold of Noah’s truck cab, they jerked each other off while Dota panted hot into their faces. Their hands were still stiff, still hard from building the shed, and they had splinters in their palms, dried mud caked under their nails, but under their clothes they were clean and smelled like the sea. Ivan bent over the center console and took Noah’s whole cock into his mouth. His pubic hair was dark and bristly. It tickled Ivan’s nose and lips. Noah shivered and asked if it was all right if he came in Ivan’s mouth, and Ivan only nodded and grumbled, and there it all was, hot and slimy on his tongue and the roof of his mouth. Noah did the same to him, but Ivan couldn’t stay hard, and after a while, he just pulled up his pants on the seat and said it was all right.
Dota lay his head on Ivan’s lap. He was too big to be in the cab with them, but it was too cold for him to ride in the back. Noah’s truck was old and lacked a CD player, but some guy Noah knew through his weed man had rigged it to play music from a cell phone. Noah drove with his chin on his left hand, his right lazily guiding them along. They listened to Rachmaninoff, which was not Ivan’s favorite, but which Noah preferred to the exclusion of almost everything else except Tupac.
The road was easy, a stretch of slick darkness running through yellow and brown fields. They sometimes passed houses crouching in oncoming crepuscular light, and it was like a painting of the dark interior of this country. Houses stripped by the wind and lesser fortune: white clapboard or crumbling brick; low, dark roofs; large front windows or slits of gold light in falling evening. Hills rose fitfully at the turns in the road, wild grass tufted out of their backs like fur. There were scraggly trees and frayed rope hanging from their branches and large tires sitting in yards or propped against sheds. The whole commonness of the world was before them.
“It’s depressing out here,” Ivan said.
“Is it?”
“Look,” he said, motioning toward the windshield, to the houses they passed on either side of the road, but Noah shrugged.
“I don’t know. It just looks like people.”
“This is America. Why do they live this way?”
“You’re American. How do you live?” Noah asked sharply.
“Not like this,” Ivan said.
“Are you sure?”
“Whatever,” he said, though he knew this was not an answer.
“I told you before. If you need more money, there are things you can do.”
“I’m not going to sleep around for cash,” Ivan said.
“That’s not what I mean, and you know I don’t do that. Not with Bert.”
“Oh, so it’s a love match?” Ivan put his head against the glass.
Noah drew to a stop on the gravel shoulder of the country road. They were tilted a little into the ditch. The engine rumbled underneath like a drowsing animal. Dota picked up his head a little. Ivan stroked him.
“Don’t be so naive,” Noah said, leaning forward to brace himself against the steering wheel. “All I mean is, there’s this site. You can sign up. Make videos. Get cash. It’s easy. I do it. Some of the other guys in the program do it. Super simple.”
“Porn? Your plan is porn?”
“I’m sorry, but some of us don’t have trust funds. Including you.”
Ivan exhaled. This wasn’t the first time Noah had suggested making videos of himself, but Ivan hated even the most mundane forms of social media. Getting online felt like subjecting himself to the whims and feelings of other people, and he had a hard enough time doing that in person, with real people. He couldn’t imagine a legion of invisible watchers, their eyes upon him at any moment, scanning a perfect re-creation of his past actions.
“Your body is fucking amazing. Why not use it?” Noah asked.
“My body is shit. My knees are on fire, just from building a shed. I’m not some dancer anymore.”
Noah blew hot air from his nostrils. He drummed his fingers on the dash.
“You make me sick,” he said after a moment. “You make me fucking sick. Why complain if you’re not doing anything about it?”
“I wasn’t complaining.”
“Why do people live like this?” Noah said in an unkind version of Ivan’s voice.
“Why are you being so mean to me?”
“Because you’re wasting it all.”
“Wasting what?”
“Everything,” Noah said. But he put the truck back into drive and pulled back onto the road.
Ivan did not know what to say to that. He had thought he understood something about his life, but now he thought he understood nothing at all.
Noah put him out in the cold and was gone.
Ivan stood on the porch until he had gone numb from the cold.
Goran and Ivan went to a party at Noah’s apartment up the street. The sky was clear and dark, and a few hard stars glinted over them. Goran had just come from a late practice, and his brow was still damp. Occasionally he shivered or said something under his breath, directed not at Ivan but at someone else. Whenever Goran came home from rehearsal, the day’s conversations leaked out of him like a vapor. Rebuttals and redirects, subtle realignments of facts spontaneously burst forth.
Ivan had spent the day applying for summer internships. His head swam with the details of his résumé, neat columns of type shifting in holograph before his eyes. Their shoes scraped and slipped. Goran reached out to grip him. His hand went to Goran’s back, held him steady. It was a good, solid kind of contact.
They didn’t speak.
Noah lived on the second floor of a house on Jefferson Street. People spilled down the stairs of the front hall, out onto the porch and into the yard. The lights in the first-floor apartment were on, but the shades were drawn. As Ivan and Goran walked up the driveway, Goran pointed to the silhouette of a man moving.
“That’s where Timo’s boyfriend lives.”
“Is Timo going to be at the party?” Ivan asked.
“Maybe. They might be broken up. It’s never going well with them.”
Timo was Goran’s friend, maybe more-than-friend. They’d had a thing before Ivan got in the picture. Timo worked in math, in some way, and he was dating some townie. They were always breaking up and getting back together, which Ivan understood. Sometimes it was like that. Some days Goran took his married poet on dates to the café where Ivan worked, and on those days he saw Timo coming in after the poet left. They would nod to each other, he and Timo, and that was the extent of their communication. Goran saw Timo often. They ate dinner and went to concerts at the auditorium. Once, Timo had come to their apartment to return a record, but Goran wasn’t yet home, was still on his way. Ivan offered Timo water, but Timo didn’t accept. They stood there awkwardly for the fifteen minutes it took Goran to get home. Then Goran and Timo left together. The record was on the table. It was a Rubinstein recording, with an old, yellowed album cover. Ivan put on the record and listened to the long opening passages of the first piece. It was somber and yet contained a real brightness.
Ivan missed music. He missed moving to music. He missed dancing. He played the record all the way through and then started it again. When Goran returned, a little drunk, a little happy, he climbed onto Ivan’s lap and kissed him. They fucked while the record played itself out, then fell asleep, oblivious to its hiccupping, scratching silence.
The next morning, Goran was furious when he woke and found the record still spinning. It was unreasonable. The record had been playing when Goran returned, after all, and he could have stopped it himself. Ivan felt that they were both complicit in leaving the record out and in whatever damage might have occurred to the record or the stylus. But Goran didn’t feel that way, obviously. Instead, he said from the other room, “The least you could do.” But then went silent. He left the apartment and didn’t come back the whole day. It was the last time Timo had come to their place. The last time they’d fucked.
Goran kept his friends to himself. He and Ivan didn’t do a lot of social mixing. Their lives were like those dumb little toys you made in school with oil and food coloring and vinegar and sometimes water. Just lying there on each other, but never mixing.
The silhouette stopped in the middle of the window, turned, and receded from the shade, going deeper into the apartment. They climbed the steps. Goran reached over and rapped at the window to see if someone would come to check, but no one did. They went into the front hall and climbed the stairs to Noah’s apartment, squeezing by people on the stairs, their faces shiny with good times and good drugs. It reminded him of ballet school, where the parties had been spontaneous in a low-key, illicit way. Some of the older dancers had still older boyfriends and girlfriends or people they fucked. It resulted in a caravan of cigarettes, cheap vodka, cheap beer, cheap tabs of ecstasy, and not very cheap ketamine.
The drugs were, at first, a part of it. A way of asserting their dominance over their bodies, over their parents, over the paternal order of their instructors and the needs of dance. Their way of being independent, being alive in their flesh, until they had to wake up at the first gray slice of dawn and pour themselves into tights and limber up before morning class. The drugs were, at first, just another way of putting on the pelt of how they wanted to be seen. Beautiful, young, but older than their years, wise in that they could get their bodies to do what they wanted. Ivan remembered very clearly being fourteen and looking to one side of the studio, seeing boys just a little younger than him having fun and playing games of flexibility, seeing who could get their spine to bend back and down and grip their ankles, toppling over and laughing like kids. They were kids. And then looking to the other side of the studio and the boys no more than a year older than him, looking down through the studio windows at the streets below, something adult in their bored nonchalance, the way they were whispering to one another—making plans, Ivan knew, to smoke during lunch. That’s how young they still were, that they made plans to do something bad.
Climbing the stairs at Noah’s party, his hand at Goran’s back, Ivan could see in the eyes of these young people, too, how desperately they wanted to be—and how desperately this hinged on being seen. That if no one witnessed you in the state of freedom, then you were not free. This seemed, to Ivan, really sad. He wanted to grip their shoulders and tell them to leave and to go and just be, just get the fuck out and do something with themselves. They still had time, they were so young. But what right did he have? He was not older than them. Not old enough to justify giving them orphic warnings from the shores of his second life. But he did know something about wanting to be finished with a part of your life before you were really ready, how you could trick yourself into thinking you knew so much when in fact you knew nothing at all. These dancers. High, glossed out of their minds, riding a wave of pleasure. They were so fucking alive. And they were dead already. And it broke his heart.
Oh well, he thought.
The music wasn’t loud, but it was excessively percussive. Ivan could feel it on his chest and his cheeks. Every bit of loose water in his body fizzed and shook. Goran took their coats through the apartment to the bedroom. Ivan went in search of beer in the kitchen.
There were about twenty people at the party, but because Noah’s apartment was small, it felt like more. Everybody touched everybody else. When Ivan bent over the sink to grab the beers from the slushy ice water, he felt someone’s warm breath on the nape of his neck, as intimate as if someone had slid their hand under his shirt. He stood there, his hand submerged in the basin of water, clutching the bottles, the breath coming on and coming off his skin. There was pressure in his lower back and between his shoulders, the square front of another person, the implication of human solidity. The dark, fine hairs on the sides of his neck grew heavy and damp from the breath, and when he looked up into the window that offered the reflection of the room back to him, he saw that it was Noah’s friend Bert pressed up against him. Their eyes met in the window, and Bert inhaled deeply, so close that Ivan could feel the wetness of his lips and the slick, firm cartilage of the tip of his nose. It grazed Ivan, landing at the very back of his skull, as purposeful as a finger, and then Bert stepped away.
Ivan took the beer through the crowd knit together in the kitchen and found Goran sitting on the couch arm. He handed him the beer—light, cheap, still dripping. Goran took it from him and held its head toward Ivan. Ivan tucked his own wet beer under his arm, where he had grown sweaty and hot, and he reached forward to twist the cap off Goran’s beer. It came away easy, and Ivan put the cap in his pocket. They toasted, and Ivan stood awkwardly next to Goran, but he kept having to shuffle to get away from the door that opened and shut to let people in or out.
The thing about a party was that no one could decide where to be. Noah was nowhere to be found. But there were dancers and poets, painters and would-be novelists—a shaggy bunch. Noah’s weed man was here, and the air was also filled with the scraggly vapor of marijuana, like a localized cloud system. The lights were low and throbbed their amber light, rendering all the faces familiar and strange at the same time. Ivan felt like he had met everyone before, but also like he’d been dropped onto an alien planet.
Noah appeared with Fatima, one of the dancers from his program, on one side and the downstairs painter on the other. They were laughing and falling over one another. Noah reached out and put his hand on Ivan’s shoulder.
“You made it,” he said.
“I did.”
“Goran!” Noah shouted.
The painter—was his name Howard? Richard? Pritchard? Leonard? Lennart? Something like that. Ivan could almost recall it. Fatima was the only black person in the dance program, which marked her out. She had started out in ballet the way they all did, but had switched to modern in undergraduate. The modern dancers were a dense core of five or six, and they held themselves back from the other dancers as though they were superior, and perhaps they were. Modern was technical and demanding—part acting, part contact sport, part nervous breakdown. The person who ran the modern section was one of those philosopher artists who shouted Wittgenstein at the dancers as they worked their way through the tangled knot of his choreography. It was less a dance than an institutionalized destruction of the self.
Ivan often saw Fatima at the café, where she worked extra shifts as a barista. The other dancers gave her a hard time about it, because it somehow made her seem at once less serious about her art and also more dedicated. They resented the implication that they wanted it less than Fatima because they didn’t work for it as hard as she did. The idea of judging the worth of art based on the artist’s rigor and dedication—there was a dreamlike logic to it.
Fatima put her arm around Noah’s waist, and he kissed the top of her head as though bestowing a benediction. Ivan laughed.
“Is everyone here already high?” Goran asked.
“That’s what happens when you’re late,” Noah said with a kind of song in his voice.
“It’s a party. You can’t be late to a party.”
“So say the stragglers,” Fatima said.
Goran pretended to be put out by this. He folded his arms across his chest and pouted. Ivan ran his fingers through Goran’s hair, but as he did so, he saw Fatima’s eyes on them. A look of consternation and fleeting irritation. She hummed in the back of her throat. Goran nudged Ivan away from him.
“How quick come the reasons for approving what we like,” said the painter neighbor. Noah laughed loudly, squeezing the painter neighbor’s side.
“Jane Austen. Who knew painters could read?”
“And not just Kant, right? Shocking,” the painter said.
“Well, this is above my pay grade,” said Fatima as she unwound herself from Noah and stuck out her hand to Goran. “Let’s go get you faded.”
Goran took her hand and rose from the couch. Noah took his place and patted his lap. Ivan lay on the couch so that his head was on Noah’s knees. The painter took Ivan’s place on the edge of the couch and watched them with an amused, warm look. He wore black overalls and a pink wool sweater. His hair was shaggy and dyed a bad copper color. Dark circles under his eyes and a chewed, raw lip.
“You two look like a fucking painting.”
Noah thrilled to this compliment and Ivan could feel the muscles in his thighs tightening. He looked up and watched Noah preen and pose, swinging his shoulders forward and back, tilting himself away and then toward Ivan. The painter nodded vigorously at each of these silly poses, as though he were considering them.
“Yep, just like Repin. Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan.”
“My name is Noah, not Ivan.”
“It’s an allusion. An homage,” the painter said, laughing. “Dancers. So literal.”
“What’s this painting?” Ivan asked. The painter looked momentarily surprised, and then he blushed.
“I don’t, really. Well, it’s like. Hmm,” he said.
“Don’t posture!” Noah said.
“I’m not,” the painter said, but he was.
“Busted,” Ivan said.
“No, no. There really is a painting called Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan. It’s like, kind of a pietà? I guess?”
“Pietà? Isn’t that about Jesus and the Virgin Mary?”
“I’m no virgin,” Noah said.
“We know,” the painter said. “It’s hard to explain if you don’t know anything about Russian history.”
“I am Russian,” Ivan said.
“You grew up in Boston.”
“I mean, yes, but my parents are Russian. I am Russian. Sort of.”
“An allusion,” Noah said.
“No. Yes. I mean,” the painter said, rubbing his neck. Ivan sat up and put his arm around the back of the couch. Noah leaned back so that his head brushed Ivan’s arm. He looked so warm and happy to be there that Ivan, without thinking, leaned over and kissed him on the lips. When he withdrew, he saw that Noah’s eyes were closed, and he was smiling. The painter grew quiet and still. Ivan was resting on his haunches on the couch, his arm trapped under Noah’s head, the warmth of his body, the distant noise of the party bathing them.
“I think it’s more a painting about man’s inhumanity to man.”
“That’s Sartre,” Noah said, without opening his eyes.
“It’s Burns, actually,” someone interrupted. It was a guy with reddish hair and sad brown eyes. He didn’t look like he belonged to anyone.
“Oh, a poet. Someone let a poet in here,” the painter said. Then he stood and gave the poet a loose hug. “This is Seamus.”
Noah nodded distractedly. Seamus gave a tight wave. Ivan nodded, too, following Noah’s lead. A poet. He had not known many poets in his life. Or any. Or maybe just some. A few. He’d seen poets in New York, at parties and at openings he’d attended, pretending to be older, more interested in things, than he was. Just letting that whole life of gleaming white rooms and champagne and coke in the bathroom wash over him, leaving no trace. But those poets had been adults. This poet was in a denim jacket and loose white sweater, looking not quite finished. Stafford. That was the painter’s name.
“Well, Seamus, welcome to the demimonde,” Stafford said.
“You brought the poet,” Noah said. Seamus flushed.
“I didn’t bring him. I mean. I invited him. Among others. A loose cohort.”
“Jesus, not the day care.”
Ivan felt a little sorry for Seamus. But then he seemed fine, if a little embarrassed.
“Seamus has a poem coming out in a very prestigious journal.” Stafford raised his eyebrows suggestively. “It’s a great poem.”
“What’s it about?” Noah asked, yawning.
“That’s not really . . .”
“It’s not a memoir,” Stafford said. “A poem isn’t about something, right? It just is.” He smiled at Seamus, who looked like he wanted to throw up.
“I was just being polite,” Noah drawled. “I don’t really give a fuck. Congratulations, though. That’s cool.”
“I’d like to hear about your poem,” Ivan said. Noah laughed. Seamus nodded.
“Cool, yeah. Maybe I’ll tell you all about it.” He made a dweeby little maneuver with his eyes, ducking his head in fake enthusiasm.
Noah laughed again. Ivan hated the falseness of it. The meanness. Noah’s eyelashes were damp with sweat. His skin glossy and clear. Ivan kissed him again, this time on the corner of the mouth, and Noah parted his lips just slightly, so that Ivan could taste the warm, metallic interior of his body. There was something charged and hot in the kiss, though it was not a good kiss, when he pulled away. Noah’s eyes opened just a little, and Ivan could see the slick blackness of his iris sliding around.
They hadn’t talked about that last time in the truck, a couple of weeks ago, when Noah had asked him if he was sure his life was so different from the people’s in the houses they passed. There was a question in Noah’s eyes and in the posture of his mouth. A question Ivan could not answer. Or, rather, he could answer it, but he wouldn’t, because his feelings were still a little hurt. Instead, he let Noah’s head rest on him, because it was all he could do in the way of apology without receiving one first. Noah closed his eyes again: let it ride.
“Garshin, the writer, was the model for the younger Ivan in that painting. He threw himself down a flight of stone stairs. And, like, he died. Later. But he died.”
“Jesus,” Noah said. “Are we back on that?”
“What a way to go,” Seamus said.
“I mean.”
“It’s a lot,” Ivan said. “It’s a fucking lot.”
Noah was studying Seamus. Ivan put his hands across Noah’s eyes.
“You’re being weird.”
“He’s all right,” Seamus said. “I don’t mind.”
“What happened to you?” Noah asked.
“I got burned,” Seamus said. He leaned closer to them on the couch and gestured with the back of his fingers to a circular scar that had mostly healed. Noah squinted, touched the mark with his fingertips.
Seamus jumped and yelped, and Noah jerked back. “Oh, fuck, I’m sorry!” But then Seamus just laughed. Snapped his teeth at Noah.
“Got you.”
Noah gave him the finger, slapped his chest.
Ivan’s heart was beating fast, and he tasted acid in the back of his throat. Seamus had gotten him, too.
“Okay, I like you slightly more now,” Noah said. “Why am I not higher? Why?” He pushed up from the couch, looped his arm around Stafford’s neck, who’d been watching them with amused detachment. Then he took up Seamus’s hand in his own as well. “We’re getting fucked up.”
Ivan watched them leave, feeling suddenly so heavy and tired. He sank lower on the couch and closed his eyes, tried to catch his breath for a moment.
Goran returned without Fatima but seemingly riding an azure cloud. Ivan was holding his warming beer between his thighs. The moisture soaked into his pants and into the cushion. A little damp spot in the world.
“Here you are. Frozen in place,” Goran said.
“Yep,” Ivan said. He’d taken off his boots, was sitting there in his gray socks. The party had entered a quiet phase, or maybe Ivan had simply acclimated to its noise, but either way it wasn’t so hard on him anymore. Goran sat next to him and put an arm around his neck. Sure enough, he had the skunky odor of marijuana. Ivan’s knees had begun to burn.
“How are you liking this party?”
“It’s all right, I guess. Same as any party.”
Goran hummed.
“How are you liking it?”
“Fine enough,” Goran said. He put his feet on the glass coffee table. Across the room, two women stood close, talking and holding hands. The night was ending. The porch had emptied about a half hour before, but the kitchen was still dense with bodies, an overcrowded nucleus. They would fission eventually. Give themselves to the night on their way home, trailing behind them their scents and their sweat and their voices, a comet trail of the time they’d had.
“You don’t seem happy,” Ivan said.
“I’m not.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be if you’re not.”
“I am.”
Goran sighed. “This is tiresome.”
Ivan came closer to Goran, but Goran turned away. Ivan traced the curve of Goran’s neck. There came a laugh, small, stifled.
“Hey,” Ivan said.
“Don’t mock me.”
“I’m not,” Ivan said. “Why do you always think I’m mocking you? I’m not. Hey. I mean it. I’m not.”
Goran turned to face him directly. It was alarming. It felt as if it had been years since they had looked at each other this way. Goran’s thick eyelashes. His eyes. The playful, annoyed curve of his mouth. The tension in his brows. Unremarkable human face, but familiar to Ivan. Goran’s nostrils flared just slightly.
“Then act like it.”
There was a small, stiff envelope taped to their door. Ivan turned it over and found the painter’s name: Stafford. Inside the envelope was a postcard on which the painter had written a small note:
The humanity!
~S
The postcard was a small print of a painting. An old man clutching a younger. A look of dazed horror in the old man’s eyes, almost cartoonish in size and emotion. The younger, dying man had some sort of bloody wound. There was terrific tension in the arms, the way the younger man braced himself against the floor. The faces were ghoulish and terrified. A large staff lay on the floor, thrust away from them. The men seemed possessed by fear of what they had done, of what lay ahead. The old man wanted to take it all back, Ivan could see. He wished he could undo what he’d done. The card had a smooth, tacky surface. Ivan tucked the card inside his jacket pocket.
Goran was out with his married poet again.
Ivan hung up his coat. It would be a while before he heard back about his applications, before he’d know if he got a spot or an interview. In the meantime, he trudged through his classes, nodding off as his professor droned on about accounting practices, about means of incorporation. The part of class he liked best was the case studies, thick packets of data on companies that had risen and fallen and been destroyed in the grand concourse of the market. He found it quite pleasurable, really, to read over the data preceding a decline, trying to pick out in the sea of numbers where the tide had started to turn, however imperceptibly, against the company. The infirmity in the organism of commerce.
He had applied to several firms and banks in New York, offices dotting the island of Manhattan. He had not been back to the city in a long while. Not since he left ballet school. That long, solemn train ride to Boston with his father’s old army duffel, full of clothes and tights, tucked under the seat. He’d felt like a soldier returning from war. It was snowing then.
He missed, in a silly way, summer in the city. The heat shimmering in the glass of the skyscrapers, and the cool shadows of Chinatown and the Lower East Side. He did not miss the stink of the river in summer. But there was something in the way people had of lying out in the sun, exposed and vulnerable to the eye. The whole city seeming to perform a radical opening of itself to expel heat. That was something he missed very much. Summer in Iowa, because he could not afford trips home to Boston, was more depressing. It was more a radical closing and folding in. Whole streets deserted during the heat of the day, the Ped Mall a white sore of concrete and dying trees. Summer in Iowa was a closed fist. Nowhere to run except to the movies, if you had cash for it. And even then. Even then.
But then he’d been young in New York. Well, younger. When you were that young, nothing mattered except your body and what you could do with it. He’d lived wholly by that body. Until it turned on him. But for a while, fuck.
Still, the matter of getting back there. Even if he got a job in one of those banks, he’d have to find a place. And pay: Rent. Security. The ticket up. The ticket back. The price of a U-Haul, unless he decided to sell off all his shit. Storage. Not for the first time, he thought of asking Goran. But he already asked Goran for so much. Needed him for so much. Sometimes he couldn’t tell the difference between how he felt for Goran and what Goran did for him. He needed a little juice of his own. A little magic.
Then there was Noah. His advice.
In the back of his sock drawer, Ivan kept a camera he’d used to record himself in his ballet days. He’d bought it with money he won in a dance competition. It had been a stupid purchase then. It was even more stupid now. But he’d at least gotten a couple of years out of it. These days, he seldom used it. But now, remembering Noah’s words, he took the camera from its place in his drawer. He set it on the top of the dresser and crouched in front of it. His knees burned. His thighs ached.
The camera had a red, flashing light. It was angry like a pulse.
Ivan took a deep breath, waited. Below him, the painters were playing the score from Evita. Ivan didn’t know what his face was doing in the camera’s gaze, if he looked sad or angry, calm or anxious. He only knew how he felt: a tight quivering in his stomach like a plucked string, the tension in his knees threatening to give way, the quick-slow hitch of his heartbeat. He felt uneasy in himself. At odds with his body, like it disagreed with what he was making it do. It was true that his body had become a rebellious thing, surly and uncooperative. But so, too, had his demands. When he was a dancer, he’d known what to ask of himself, but now he felt unformed and unyoked. What was he to do with himself now and forever? It had been eight years. Surely, he should have had some idea by now. But no. That life of his was gone, and in its place was only a series of vague demands issuing up out of the dark of himself: food, sleep, sex. It’s all he had.
He might begin again, he thought. Might find something in all of this. Some small, human thing. Ivan undressed himself in front of the camera, and he crouched again in front of it. He would try, he would try. He would let himself do this.
It was, after all, possible.
The videos surprised Ivan in that they were not difficult to make once he began to record himself. He emptied his mind of expectation or thought. Let the movement come from where it came from, let it do what it would do. He touched himself and felt nothing. He slid out of his clothes and felt nothing. The camera caught everything. Every flicker of motion, every shadow. He did not move toward anything. He did not decide upon anything. It began in the body and ended in the body. When he gripped his cock and stroked himself, it was the body. Ivan watched himself remotely, feeling cool satisfaction at the smoothness of his movements, the easiness of his figure. He filled himself and emptied himself with his fingers, slicked from his mouth. He slid himself upon rubber implements, pushed them into and out of the place where he was clenched tight and hot.
Sometimes he came, and sometimes he did not, but there was no pleasure in it. There was nothing in it at all, except the satisfaction afterward of having moved. He recorded himself for only short periods of time. It was the time constraint that imbued the clips with meaning. When he played them back and watched them, it was like seeing someone else’s body. He chopped the clips in strange places so that they cut off unexpectedly or dropped into darkness, while the audio played still. Sometimes he was just off frame, and there was only the faint impression of his shadow upon the wall, the suggestion of motion. He posted the first clip to the microblogging site and sat alone in the dark of the apartment, waiting for something, for anything, to happen.
A few minutes later he deleted the clip, but then he reuploaded it. He held his breath. He deleted the clip. He reuploaded it.
The next day he received a notification that the clip had had fifty views, and he had a subscriber. When he realized that there was a steady initial trickle of people coming in, he uploaded another clip and another. Three clips freely floating through the servers of a microblogging site, all showing bits of Ivan. His face and his cock and his stomach and his back, all fragments of himself digitized and transmitted. It felt silly and easy. For him to post these clips, and for other people to respond by paying him monthly for access to them. Even the ones he’d given away for free. But pay him they did.
How stupid. How very stupid.
In early March, Ivan mailed his parents two checks for three hundred dollars each. It was not enough. But it was something. It was nice to be able to shave off a little bit and give it to them. His mother called to thank him. Ivan was on the rowing machine at the gym and had to get off to take the call. He stood out in the cold under the rec center awning. Snow falling in mounds and drifts. He could see the hospital back and above him, somber brick and stone against a heavy gray sky.
“You didn’t have to send,” she said. “You didn’t. How can you live if you send.”
“It was okay,” he said. “I had extra.”
“What extra?” She was suspicious. Doubtful. “You not eat? How can you eat if you send?”
“No, no,” Ivan said. “Eating is fine. I’m good. I just had extra. Please.”
“Your father is happy. I am happy. We are happy. But how you eat if you send?”
Ivan laughed, but his mother got upset at his laughing. That was how it had been in ballet school—her pleading with him, worrying over him. Once, when he failed to return her call—he’d dropped his phone down a grate—she’d gotten on a train and come all the way to New York from Boston. He found her waiting for him after class, worried. When she saw him, she nodded and touched his face and said she was happy he was okay. Happy he was alive. She cooked him soup on the hot plate in his subsidized housing, and then she got on another train and was gone by the time he had to leave for evening class.
“I’m okay,” he said. “I’m okay. I promise. I just had a little extra.”
She paused. Then she said she’d use it for Easter dinner at the church. To make a big meal.
“You should use it for yourself,” he said, a little annoyed. “It’s not for that. It’s for you.”
“Is for me, yes.”
“No, not for church. For you.”
“Yes, is for me.”
Ivan shook his left arm hard to wake it back up. He was cooling down too fast in the snow.
“How can it be for you if you give it to church.”
“Is not for church, is for me. For God. For you.”
“Okay,” he said. “You can do what you want, I know. And Papa is happy? Okay?”
“Papa is good. Very happy.”
“Okay. Then I am, too.”
His mother said goodbye, and Ivan hung up the phone. He stood a little longer in the falling snow, looking upward, telling himself it wasn’t so bad, this thing he was doing.
Back in the gym, he set his phone at the base of the machine and got back into rowing position. He got the camera app open and set it to record. He did a few reps to warm his muscles again, to get back into the rhythm of things. When his thighs felt loose and his muscle had some give to it, he took a deep breath and gave himself over. He didn’t look into the camera’s tiny dark eye. Instead, he fixed his gaze on the wall, where a Hawkeyes banner hung. He gazed at it, his vision so tight on the banner that people going into and out of his line of sight were just blurry figures. The hardness of the handle, the smell of the cord heating as it wound and unwound around the flywheel. But he kept going, gliding along the machine’s course and back, pumping himself bigger, faster, harder. His posture erect, perfect as he had been taught. His knee burned like a motherfucker, but he felt loose and good and kept going.
At home, he stripped and showered. Then got his laptop and opened the footage. He adjusted and cropped and put on a black-and-white filter. He blunted the sound and overlaid an audio clip he had pinched from an ASMR channel of gym noises. The sound of his own breathing went away, replaced by this stolen audio, shorn of context. But it made the clip feel authentic. More itself.
This grainy clip, five minutes long, shot up the axis of his thighs, centered on the dark expanse of his crotch. And the bulk of his chest and arms. He didn’t know what other people saw in this video except the implication of sex. The same way you sometimes felt when you passed someone on the street and could see the suggestion of their body, their strength, through their clothes, or when they turned and you caught their gaze, and you could imagine how they would look lost in pleasure.
Life was full of such moments, the self momentarily exposed. What he and all the other people on this site were doing was harvesting such moments, not through happenstance or spontaneity but using some apparatus of mass production. Like the fields upon fields upon fields of corn and soy out by Bert’s place.
The relationship between sex and what he did in these videos, he thought, was the same as the relationship between the way people used to farm and what had become known as agribusiness. He could understand the elegance of it, the sophistication that came with scale and concatenation. It was the same thing in banking. He wasn’t interested in business, in any of that entrepreneurship bullshit that was really just prosperity gospel for atheists. No, he wanted something more than that: He wanted to be a part of that rarefied class that got to skim the money from the money. They who got to set the invisible laws by which the whole of the world functioned. Ivan had grown up thinking that dancers and choreographers and the great geniuses—Balanchine, Robbins, Joffrey, Ailey, Diaghilev—were the inheritors of the priestly class, the keepers of culture and legacy. But now he understood that the new priests were the bankers. The financiers. What was culture compared to the brute, terrible force of money and its ability to make and remake worlds?
Ivan uploaded the video from the rowing machine, stretching out his sore knee as he watched the progress bar tick upward. When the clip was fully uploaded, he closed the site and put his laptop away. Then he lay there on his bed, thinking of the conversation he’d had with his mother.
Your father is happy. I am happy. We are happy.
Ivan curled up into a ball and thought that it was good they were happy. He had done this with his body. He had done something good and right.
Ivan was with Noah when he heard back about the internship.
They were loading scrap tin onto Noah’s truck with Bert. He was puffing with the exertion, his blotchy face gone blotchier, and his glasses all fogged. The wind was particularly scathing that day, whipping down on and through them in gray waves. Sometimes it blew in bits of gravel from the road. They landed on the tin like hail.
Noah and Bert were carrying the tin across the ditch and dropping it down by the truck, and Ivan had to bend and lift it up. The tin kept pulling on stray threads in his gloves, and he wished he’d brought the leather ones. Bert stood up and whistled.
“Boy, it’s a bitch out here today.”
Noah slapped him across the belly and said, “You’re the one who said it had to be today.”
Bert shoved at him, then laughed, and they went back down into the ditch and started throwing the tin up the other side. It clattered as it fell. Ivan checked his phone and saw the email notification. It was from one of the smaller banks in Manhattan—not his first choice, but still beyond what he’d expected to get. The title was ambiguous, just, “re: SIDOROV, IVAN D.” He felt his stomach drop. Surely, if it was good news, they would have called. Surely.
Noah poked his head above the lip of the ditch and called his name. But Ivan was just looking down at his phone until the screen went dark.
“I think I just got rejected from my internship.”
“Bummer,” Noah said.
“I got your internship right here,” Bert called.
Ivan looked at the two of them in the ditch. Noah in a hoodie and overalls, oversized leather gloves. Bert in a white sweatshirt streaked in dirt. Red fisherman cap low on his head. Looking old next to Noah. He thought for a moment that this could be his life: Loading scrap in ditches. Hauling tin. Working shifts just to keep his head over the lip of a ditch.
Noah went from laughing to frowning.
“Hey, hey, Ivan. Come on.”
He saw his whole future closing down in front of him. But then, but then, but then—he swallowed.
“Sorry about that.”
“Did you open it?”
“No,” he said. “It just. They’d call, right? If it was a yes, they’d call.”
Noah nodded. Then climbed out of the ditch and took his hands out of the gloves. His palms were dry and ashy. Ivan handed him the phone.
“What’s your code?”
“Nine seven three zero five,” he said.
Noah typed the code into the phone. Ivan couldn’t bear to look at him. His mouth was dry, his heart going hard. He turned. Looked at the tin in the truck bed. Bert had climbed out of the ditch.
“What’s going on?”
Noah didn’t answer. Ivan watched the flat horizon. The dark mud and the flattened grass running all the way back to the old house. Dota jumped down from the truck, and Bert clapped his hands hard and loud.
“Get, get on, now!” He stomped, and Dota yipped happily. Bert lunged and Dota took off in a blond flash around the truck and out to the fields. Ivan turned.
“Well?” he asked. “What, do you have to decipher it or what.”
Noah looked at him, then down at the phone and then back up.
“You got it,” he said.
“No, you’re lying.”
Noah grinned. “Yeah, I’m lying.”
“No, you’re not,” Ivan said. He reached for the phone. It was a long email, one that began not with congratulations but with a long description of the applicant pool. How many applications there had been, from how many different parts of the country and the world. A description of the bank and its services, its history and clientele, a set of descriptive remarks about the fit and the kind of associates they were looking for, hoping to find. Down and down the column of text ran, words and phrases bolded and underlined, dates in the future that made his stomach hurt with possibility. And then, at the very end of the email, Please confirm receipt of this message to schedule your interview for later this spring. We hope that you will be able to join us and look forward to hearing from you.
Was this? Was this? Was this? Was this—it? Was this the moment it all became possible?
“Oh my God,” he said, turning to Bert and Noah, who was still smiling.
“Told you!”
“You must be happy. New York, though. So expensive.”
“He’s got his ways,” Noah said.
“Yeah, but it’s not going to be cheap. That’s my point.”
“Shut up, let him have his thing.”
Ivan’s hands shook. “Oh my God.”
“You said that already,” Bert said.
Goran was at his keyboard. He’d been practicing Chopin for the spring concert in the Music Department when Ivan had told him about the internship. Goran had stopped playing and stared into the wall above the keyboard. There was a shadowy indentation where he’d thrown the glass earlier that winter. Ivan sat on the couch arm, watching him, waiting for some sign.
“I don’t understand,” he said at last. “You’re moving to New York?”
“It wouldn’t be until summer, but, yeah, it’s looking that way.”
“Interesting.”
“That’s a funny way of saying congratulations.”
“I just mean. You didn’t ask me if I wanted to come with you. Or if I even could.”
“You graduate this year, Goran. I mean, come on. I’m not blindsiding you with this. I’m bringing it up because I hope it can be a thing we do. Together.”
“That’s not what you did at all,” Goran said. “You brought this in and you put it down in front of me, and you’re like Surprise! I have something awesome! It’s great! It has nothing to do with me. You did this and it has nothing to do with me. That’s so fucked up.”
This was not true. Well, it wasn’t entirely true. Well, it was entirely factual, but it was also the least generous possible reading of what had happened. Goran turned on the stool and gazed up at him, his slender eyebrows arched. He had a quietly, passively furious expression.
“I think that’s an unfair read of it, but okay.”
“How would you read it?”
“That something good happened for my partner, and I’m happy for him. For once, it would be nice if you could be happy for me.”
“Wow, the maudlin quotient just got very high in here right now.”
“Fuck you.”
“What a change of pace that would be,” Goran said with an exuberant opening of his arms.
Ivan pressed his palms to his cheeks and tried to calm himself. The back of his mouth was ringing again, a sharp, persistent vibration.
“How are you going to afford being in New York, anyway? I doubt that pimp of Noah’s pays that much for the shitty construction you guys have been doing.”
Goran was smiling. Ivan went into the kitchen to get an aspirin from the cupboard above the sink. He chewed the aspirin into powder and gulped it down with hot water.
“I have money,” Ivan said.
“Oh, do you? And how’s that? You get a paper route?”
“Why are you being so negative?” Ivan asked.
Goran was in the kitchen doorway. He shrugged. “I’m not. I’m being practical.”
“No, you’re being an asshole. And I don’t understand why. All I ever do is walk around here like a kicked puppy. I stay out of your way. I take up no space. We hardly even see each other. I don’t even think you like me anymore, Goran. But this. This is just. Beyond.”
“Maybe I don’t like you.”
“Yeah, I’m getting that feeling.”
“But so what if I don’t like you? We’re together. Sometimes I don’t like you, okay. Sometimes I hate the way you look or smell. Okay. Fine. I’m an asshole. But I still want to be with you. That counts for something, right? That’s something.”
Ivan closed his eyes. He tried to remember what it was like when they were good and together and all right. He tried to imagine what it was like the first time they met on the app and made plans to see each other outside the auditorium at night. They’d stood on the bridge and looked at the lights of the auditorium, gold and tiered like a delicate rock formation. Then they’d walked around the river path and talked all night about music, about ballet, about where they spent their afternoons, best place for coffee, how to dodge the undergrads.
That night had been so good, like something out of a dream. And they were so far from it now.
“I can’t make you happy,” Ivan said.
“You do make me happy. This is me happy. I am happy.”
“This can’t be happiness. If this is you happy, then I don’t think I understand what happiness is for.”
“Sometimes happiness is just letting people feel how they fucking feel,” Goran said.
He looked the furthest thing from happy. He looked pissed off. He looked annoyed. He looked like he was going to cry. His eyes welled. He bit at the inside of his jaw, then sat down sharply at the kitchen table, trying to catch his breath. Ivan sat down next to him, reached for his hand, and for the first time in a very long time, Goran let him.
“I think you need to be needed,” Ivan said. “And that’s not something I can do anymore.”
“Oh, great,” Goran said. “You’ve decided you don’t need me anymore either, and you’re just bailing. Cool.”
“What do you mean? Stop being so cryptic.”
Goran didn’t say anything. He just looked down at the table. Ivan understood then.
“Your poet. This is about your fucking poet,” he said. Ivan stood up.
Goran followed him into their small bedroom.
“I’m not proud of it.”
“Well, I do things I’m not proud of, too. I don’t make it your problem.”
“Yeah, like what? Hauling scrap metal?”
“Making videos of myself beating off so I can send my parents money, for one. How about that.”
Goran stared, his mouth a little open, and then, drawing it closed, he said, “You’re what?”
“Like I said, I have the money. I don’t need your charity or your benediction.”
“I can’t believe—you’re making porn?” Goran said.
“Why? You watch porn. We watch porn. Porn isn’t bad.”
“No, but—that’s different. You’re making it? You won’t fuck me, but you’re making porn.”
“You’re literally fucking a married poet. Oh, I’m sorry. Were.”
“Now you’re being sanctimonious.”
“Please don’t be selfish, Goran. Please.”
“You’re selfish!”
“I’m selfish?” Ivan asked. “Me? I am selfish? Me.”
“Yes, you. This is selfish. Stop it, right now.”
“You are being unreasonable,” Ivan said.
“Why are you doing this? Do you want attention? Is that it?”
“No,” Ivan said.
“A pornographer. Imagine. I’m sure the investment bankers will love that.”
Ivan knew it was hopeless to get Goran to understand anything about the money part of it. Goran had a trust fund. He’d come from wealth, moved with wealth as though it were a different, better kind of element. Goran wouldn’t understand why someone like him, like Ivan, would need to make money, make enough of it to get by, to ensure a future for himself and his family. Goran didn’t need to think about the future because the future held no mystery to him, except in aesthetic terms. But Ivan couldn’t live on aesthetics. There was anger flashing in Goran’s eyes. Disgust and hatred.
“Why is this so difficult for you? What did I do wrong? I don’t belong to you,” Ivan said. “I’m a person. I don’t belong to you.”
“That’s right, you sure don’t,” Goran said, and that was the end of the argument.
Ivan sat on the edge of the couch, and Goran went back to playing the Chopin. It was clear to him now why Noah had said what he’d said in the truck. He understood now how cruel and simple the question had been: why do people live this way? The answer was, because they must.
It was late March—a cold spring.
Things got worse between them after Ivan told Goran about the videos. Ivan moved out, and for a couple of weeks they didn’t really talk at all. Then Goran asked if they could talk, if they could try to figure out how to be together again. Ivan wasn’t sure what he wanted, but after he’d let Goran pay their bills for so long, he felt like he ought to at least try.
They met at the café where Goran had gone on those first anxious dates with his married poet. Fatima let them have espresso for free.
“How are you?” Goran asked. It had been a few weeks since Ivan had moved out.
“The same. You?”
“Ditto.”
“Good,” Ivan said.
“I don’t know about that.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Aren’t we all,” Goran said. He put his chin on his hand. Spooned the crema from his espresso. “Oh, you left something.”
“What?”
Goran took from his jacket pocket a small postcard. Ivan recognized it right away as the card given to him by the painter from downstairs. He couldn’t help but laugh at it.
“I found this in my coat.”
“I thought I left it in my coat,” Ivan said.
Goran laughed. It felt like forgiveness.
“Thank you,” Ivan said, taking up the card and creasing it.
“Ouch,” Goran said.
“What? Oh, it’s fine.” He creased the card again, and again until it was too tight to make smaller. He dropped it into his shirt pocket.
“It was an interesting painting,” Goran said.
“The model for the younger Ivan was a writer, Garshin. He killed himself on some stone stairs,” Ivan said.
“You don’t say.”
“In real life, Ivan the Terrible killed his son.”
“How Shakespearean.”
“Some say it’s cursed—people keep trying to destroy it. The painting, I mean.”
“Cursed image,” Goran said, laughing.
“I don’t believe in curses,” Ivan said. “I think it’s all just bad timing.” It was a lie. Ivan did believe in curses and destiny. He believed it all.
“You just might be right,” Goran said.
It was the first time Goran had ever said Ivan was right about something. It was nothing. A fleck of mercy. But it was, Ivan knew, his way of trying. Of being better. The weeks apart had softened Goran in some almost indiscernible way. The bristly outline of his nature was a defense mechanism for some inner anxiety.
“You can put your sword down,” Ivan said. “I think, if it’s going to work, if we’re going to be in it, we have to decide we want to be in it. Not because you need me or I need you. But because. We want to be in it. It can’t be the way it was.”
“I know,” Goran said, nodding.
“No, like, don’t just say you know because you want to get through this part fast. It can’t just be over because you want it to be how it was.”
Goran nodded, then, catching himself, stopped. He took a deep breath and held his hand out on the table.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay, we go slow. We go easy. I want to be a better version of myself.”
“I like you how you are,” Ivan said. “I just want you to be nice to me.”
“Steep price,” Goran said.
“Please.”
“Okay. Okay.”
Ivan put his hand in Goran’s. In the closing of Goran’s palm, Ivan thought that things would be all right between them. That it would work out, and they would go to New York and be happy. They had to get to the end of the semester. To the end of classes. To the end of work. To the end of this particular phase of their history.
“I’m going to try. About the videos. I’m going to try,” Goran said.
“I know,” Ivan said. “I get it.”