The apartment filled with a cold, gray light—it was early spring.
Noah and Bert were in bed, smoking, watching snow accumulate on the roof of the side porch. The house at the corner of Jefferson and Van Buren belonged to Bert, and Noah was renting one of the apartments on the second floor. That afternoon, though, they were in one of the empty units Bert was using for an office until he found a tenant.
They were stiff and musky from sex. The ridges of Bert’s knuckles were chewed up from being pressed into the wall for leverage. Noah’s thighs burned from the rasp of Bert’s beard.
“The house ain’t much to look at, but the land is good,” Bert said.
“Oh—that’s nice.”
“It should go for a fair price.”
“Does your old man know you’re selling his place out from under him?”
“He’s dying.”
Noah took the cigarette from Bert’s fingers. The filter was damp and tasted sour from Bert’s beer. He sat up on the overly soft mattress and looked down at the mound of Bert’s belly, the web of dark stretch marks, the cavern of his navel. He didn’t look like anyone’s first choice. Something flinty and desperate in his eyes, the balding, the thick glasses, the unironic trucker caps. Noah thought he looked like anyone anywhere.
“Well, that solves everything,” Noah said, the smoke filling his throat.
Bert reached for the cigarette with his bruised, thick fingers. “It does. Don’t feel sorry for him. Not a good man.”
“In that case,” Noah said. Bert had reached between his legs and was trying to make him hard again. His touch was fluent, searching, like a plea. Bert gripped him hard. The bed cried under them. The room was empty except for the bed and the dresser. The closet had some abandoned hangers, which made Noah’s chest hurt when he looked at them.
“He wasn’t good to us,” Bert said. “My mom and me. He was a bad man, so don’t think I’m being hard-hearted. He wasn’t good.”
Noah lay on his stomach so that he wouldn’t have to push Bert’s hand away. Bert settled a palm on the damp small of Noah’s back. The room grew cold. The listless red of the cigarette’s lit end drew an arc through the air when Bert talked. Noah watched it from the dark cradle of his arms.
“I’m not judging you,” Noah said.
“He was a shitty father. I’m not glad he’s dying. But I’m not sad either. He’s old.”
“Why do you feel so attacked?” Noah laughed.
“Because you don’t know how bad it was then. You’re what, twenty-three? You have no clue. Kids like you. You don’t know.”
“Is this a historical argument? I thought modern queers were ahistorical. Isn’t that what PrEP is for?”
Bert flinched and pulled his hand away. He took a long hit off the cigarette.
“You know I hate that word,” he said.
“It’s a joke.”
“People died,” Bert said, “so we wouldn’t have to hear that word anymore.”
“People died in Iowa?”
Bert pushed up from the bed. He was big, both tall and wide, and his shadow covered Noah entirely. Noah watched him pull on a flannel and his jeans. Ash fell onto the bedsheet. His motions were hectic but slow, and Noah saw in their casual unfolding the signal that he was supposed to clear out. He sat up, too.
At the door, they did not kiss. Noah stepped into the cool hall. Light from the bathroom struck the wall and opened a small pool of golden light. Bert supported himself against the door frame.
“Well, goodbye,” Noah said.
Bert did not say goodbye. He stood there silently a moment or two, and Noah waited for him to say something, and it was this waiting and withholding that gave the thing between them a shape. Noah went across the hall, and he heard Bert close the door behind him.
The bridge was scabbed with ice. Below them, the water churned gray and silver—the muted collisions of ice floes.
“I wasn’t trying to provoke him.”
“Oh, sure you weren’t,” Daw said. Gulls in winter white circled overhead. The industrial park issued tufts of clouds. “Totally.”
“Leave me alone. Who asked you,” Noah whined, but Daw only laughed at him.
They climbed the hill together. Daw had the gruff, square face of an Indiana farm kid, but he was from Connecticut and his parents were both professors—his father taught psychology and his mother taught business strategies. Both Daw and Noah were in the graduate dance program at Iowa. West Des Moines, Noah’s hometown, was famous for gymnastics, and sometimes the other dancers in their cohort called him a local. The thin, dark trees pelted them with water as they crushed the soft snow underfoot. They were running late for class because Noah had overslept, and Daw had come to fetch him.
Noah’s limbs were stiff, unreasonable. Climbing the hill sent random streaks of hot pain up his thighs and down his back. He could still feel Bert inside of him, and his eyes stung from the cigarette smoke even after his shower. He felt sweaty, and he suspected he had something like the flu.
“I swear to God, you always do this,” Daw said.
“I don’t, I don’t.”
“It’s your own fault if you end up dissolved in lye and stuffed in a barrel behind some old house. You know that, right? Antagonizing a serial killer.”
“He isn’t a serial killer,” Noah said, but he felt ambivalent about whether or not Bert actually possessed the capacity to murder him, or anyone for that matter. He just disagreed with Daw because it was fun to disagree with Daw. In truth, Bert had never been violent with him or loud with him. They didn’t argue or shout or slap each other. If they were in love, or even in a relationship, it might have been different. But as it was, Bert was his landlord and sometimes they fucked, and whatever tension or anger or frustration that existed between them found vent when they were naked and climbing on top of each other, licking each other’s pits, shoving each other’s faces into pillows and mattresses. Sex with Bert wasn’t hot or even satisfying. It was like yelling at the top of your lungs into a vast open field, how it left you panting and tired and in pain, but you felt that something had passed out of you and into the wider world. He was not attracted to Bert. He wasn’t attracted to anyone, really. But Bert was as good as anyone else would have been, and sometimes he knocked eighty bucks off the rent, and that was as good a reason as he could have wanted. It wasn’t love. It wasn’t lust. It wasn’t anything at all, and only in moments like this one did Noah feel a reflexive need to defend what it was that he and Bert did together.
“If you say so.”
“And I didn’t antagonize him.”
“Then why did he kick you out?”
“I don’t know,” Noah said, but he did know.
“Oh, sure,” Daw said. They were at the top of the hill near the Old Capitol Building. Behind them, on the other side of the river, where Daw lived, was the medical campus and arts complex, hidden behind a row of trees. The quad lay before them, blanketed in melting snow. The sun was low, but bright. The gray had burned off the world, and the shapes of the buildings emerged into sharp focus. Other students were milling around in anoraks and parkas. Daw pulled on the edge of Noah’s jacket and said, “Come on, let’s get a move on.”
They jogged the rest of the way across campus, with Daw occasionally throwing his arms over his head to get his blood flowing. Noah felt resentful of his vigor. In the hall, they dropped their bags near the pile with everyone else’s. They were not terribly late. The hall was still cold. In the large, open room, they sat on the floor with the five or so other dancers. The boards were cold, too, like a windowpane, a sudden, inhuman chill.
A few minutes later Fatima joined them, stretching her legs out on foam rollers. She had clear, dark eyes and a loud, raspy laugh. Daw looked away. He and Fatima did not get along—a rift that dated back to their first year in the program, when Daw had been standing around after a long rehearsal while people said some shitty things about Fatima always running late because of her job at the café, and Fatima had come around the corner and heard the whole thing and saw their faces. Daw tried to explain to her, but it all sounded like an excuse or a lie, and she had no reason to believe he wasn’t like the others, judgmental and resentful of the fact that she worked and danced, as though she thought this made her a cut above.
People said the same thing about Daw and the physics classes he took. The dancers got to audit classes in other departments so long as the professors were willing to grade them pass-fail, and sometimes people took a language class or a lit seminar—the kind of banal intellectual self-improvement that was native to the middle class, so that by the time they were done and had paired and married and settled into cocktail parties and small errands in midsize cities or boroughs of New York, they might be equipped to summon up shards of half-read novels or partially digested critical theory. It was also something they did to make themselves feel better about studying dance, which they considered a rigorous intellectual pursuit while they were in studio or in class, but which seemed like a hobby, like yoga, when they were moving through the streets to the same circuit of bars and cafés they always frequented. But Daw was the only person Noah knew who took physics and math courses. Last year, he’d taken quantum mechanics. He wanted to go to medical school after he graduated, he said, and he wanted to make sure he’d be prepared. Noah always said it back to him with a little laugh—prepared, yeah, me too—but the lives they were each preparing for were as different as the lives that had brought them to this program in the first place.
They were all posturing all the time. Everything they did was a posture, defensive or offensive, meant to demonstrate something to the outside world, perhaps that they were worthy or good or all right, perhaps to imply that they were in on the joke, that they were nothing and all they had were these crude choreographies of the self.
At times like this when two people he liked very much did not like each other, Noah wondered what to make of the pernicious nature of loyalty. You couldn’t be all things to all people, and any friendship contained such microbetrayals. This was the stuff of life. He leaned over and pinched Fatima on the thigh, which made her yelp and then slap his back. The sound of her palm striking him was like a bark from a startled dog, and the other people in the studio turned to look at them.
Troublemakers, their eyes said, children.
“Didn’t hear from you last night,” she said.
“I was busy,” he said. Daw laughed.
“Busy—I see.”
The instructor for class that day was Ólafur, who ran the modern subdiscipline. He was around fifty—lean and tall, with a meanness native to those who accept with bitterness a lesser, faded beauty later in life. He had come up in the Dutch National Ballet, but then he had spent the bulk of his career crafting agonized modern dances on themes of German aesthetics. He had a long nose and fair, graying hair.
Ólafur preferred the studio cold at first. Warm it with your bodies, with your effort, he said. If you are cold, work harder. The morning classes under Ólafur were difficult, both for the range of techniques he emphasized and also for the number of repetitions he demanded. No one wanted to see Ólafur first thing in the morning. In his first year, in the middle of his first session with Ólafur, Noah had vomited from the stress. Fatima worked under Ólafur directly, and sometimes she showed up to Noah’s apartment after their sessions sore and drenched in sweat, shivering all over as though she’d seen the horrors of war.
The three of them lifted their eyes and watched Ólafur stretching at the front of the room, and they felt the threat in his easy flexibility.
He looked like he could still do Apollo.
“I love to start the day with torture,” Noah said.
“I can’t wait to revisit my breakfast,” Daw said.
“This is the brand of optimism I need, boys.”
Through the door came one and then two and then finally groups of other students from their program, until the room was filled with them, the rustle of their clothes, the smell of talc and resin. The girls sewed their shoes quickly. The boys snapped the elastic of their tights in anxious anticipation. Daw pummeled his thighs to wake them up. Noah’s toes were numb. The floor was so cold and hard. Fatima was pinning her hair down, then stretching. She said she had a knot in her back. The bars were wheeled out and locked, and they aligned themselves, Fatima at Noah’s back, Noah and Daw on opposite sides of the same bar facing each other. A smile, wry, vaguely competitive. They began.
There was an upright in the corner—Goran wasn’t playing their class today, Noah saw with a little disappointment. The pianist was someone he didn’t recognize. A strip of a young woman, with pin-straight light-blond hair. Her head was quite small, and her shoulders were narrow, but birdlike. She was warming up her fingers with scales, but she kept missing or flubbing. Noah hummed to warm the air in his sinuses, to get his face feeling more elastic. The tension in his shoulders abated. The pianist settled. Ólafur rose from a crouch and gave with a flick of his fingers the sign for the pianist to begin.
Bert’s father owned a house on some decent land in the country. It was a two-story house, white with broad windows on the first floor and tall windows on the second. The land out behind the house rose and fell, so that from the front you could see the far fields but not the near fields. In the distance, there were dense trees that broke quite suddenly into open pasture. Noah understood the land at once.
He and his parents had lived in a similar house on a much smaller plot of land far out in the country. Noah had grown up driving tractors and climbing trees. That was where he discovered his natural flexibility and sense of balance, climbing and then leaping from increasingly higher branches until his mother spotted him and came screaming out of the house. They had neighbors who were also poor, and sometimes they exchanged vegetables or windbreakers or sweaters. They got by on his dad’s salary in the factory, and his mom sometimes gave pottery lessons in the city, but mostly she spent her time smoking in the kitchen and making meals that were too salty or too hard. His father was Japanese but from Colorado, where his grandparents still lived and operated a laundromat, and his mother was white, from Iowa originally, going all the way back to the prairie days. Noah had been raised on Laura Ingalls Wilder and bad Chinese takeout. His dad smoked and drove a truck and wore denim jackets, and sometimes he’d swear and sometimes he’d pat the back of Noah’s head and smile and say nothing. He and his dad had the same hair and the same crooked mouth. His dad had rough, blistered hands, and he could build anything at all, Noah thought, but the thing about his dad that perplexed Noah the most and sometimes kept him up at night was that when he told his parents he wanted to dance, it was his father who’d said sure and his mother who’d blinked as if stunned and said that it was no way to live and he should do something else. That first time Bert took him to the place in the country, Noah had experienced a weird feeling of recognition, and he’d wanted to cry, but he didn’t.
It was about a week after their fight that Noah and Bert went back to the house in the country. Bert’s old man was still dying, but Bert wanted help repairing some sheds and maybe building a place to store the firewood or other tools.
Back at the end of winter, Noah and Ivan had built sheds on the adjoining allotments. But this was on the main place, where Bert and his sister and three brothers had grown up. He thought he could understand Bert a little now, seeing the fields and how close the sky stooped in the distance. He understood the peculiar loneliness of such a place, the way that loneliness held fast to you, no matter how far away you ran. You grow up in a place like this, Noah thought, and it haunts your dreams until you die.
Anyway, he told Bert that Ivan had done most of the heavy lifting with the shed, but he could use a hammer and could hold things if Bert gave him directions. Bert laughed and said he wasn’t looking for a foreman—what he had in mind was essentially what Noah had offered. Hold the boards, hit the nails, and so on.
The wind was the real killer. They were out in the fields unprotected. The yellow grass lay flat. The trees on the edge of the field swirled so hard that he thought they’d wrench free of the ground and blow away. Bert held a cigarette in the corner of his mouth while he nailed, and Noah held the boards as straight and flush as he could as they put walls back on the shed. Their hands were chapped and stiff by the time they had done even ten minutes of work. By the time they had finished one of the walls, Noah’s hands were almost totally white and his knuckles hurt. Bert had banged the side of his thumb with the hammer, and now his nail was purple. They retreated to Noah’s truck to wait out the wind.
Bert poured coffee out of a thermos into Styrofoam cups. They sipped it while the wind groaned against the windows. The sky was opaque and low.
“I was wondering,” Noah said, “if you’re planning to sell this place, why are we making repairs?” He said it as a kind of joke, and even meant to laugh, but his voice betrayed him, grew serious and quiet. Bert nodded, but then he shrugged.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I just wanted to do something nice.”
“For your dad?”
“No. I don’t think so anyway. I wanted to do something. You know, he used to say I never did anything around here. I never cleaned up after myself or helped him in the field. He kept saying I was lazy, useless. That sort of thing. And I guess I just. I don’t know. It felt important that I do something.”
“That doesn’t sound like you. Lazy, I mean.”
“Well, it’s different when you’ve got a business to run. And when you’re an adult.”
“Lots of kids are lazy. I was.”
“My father wasn’t the kind of person who believed that children should be excused from responsibility just because they were kids.”
Bert’s face was quite plump. He had shaved, but poorly, and there were patches of gray whiskers on his cheeks. Noah watched him as he spoke. He didn’t grow pensive or thoughtful or anything like that, but there was a steadily growing sadness in his eyes as he looked out over the field at their patchwork job on the shed.
“I just wanted to do something.”
“I’m sure he’s grateful,” Noah said, but Bert flinched as he said it.
“It’s not for him—I’m not trying to prove anything to him. I am a grown man.”
“I know that,” Noah said.
“Fuck. Kids, fucking children.”
Noah grunted and leaned back against his seat. He held the cup of coffee between his legs. His floorboard was full of papers and empty bottles. It smelled like old motor oil and gasoline. His father had signed the truck over to him when he turned sixteen, and Noah had driven it to out-of-state competitions and down to Iowa City when he started college. The truck had seen him through these last seven years, and it was not new or beautiful, but it kept going, and what else could he ask of it?
Bert had a bad knee and smoked menthols. Noah found it kind of nostalgic, like faded jeans and noisy windbreakers, white socks and sneakers. It reminded him of the nineties, all that VHS heartbreak and running around until his lungs ached, because in the nineties Noah had been, what, a toddler, born at the very end of that decade, barely squeaking into it, and so when he smelled menthols, he thought of his father and the truck and the trip back from the dance class, the city skyline receding in the rearview, and the encroaching darkness of the trees like a threat of rain, green bleeding black under the widening sky that canted and sank down. Anyway, it made a kind of sense to Noah that he would end up with a person like this, except, what did that mean anyway, end up, because he and Bert were just fucking—for the money, for the good time, for, what, for the laughs, to say that he had done it, fucked some soft-bellied white man, let himself be fucked by a soft-bellied white man who looked like he might have murdered someone? Some crazy-faced nobody? Some lonely little fucker out in the middle of nowhere who had missed AIDS only because it had swept over his tiny little crack in the world, except in the case of all those lonely dying men returning home from greater, vaster cities? Some lucky little nobody? Letting himself be taken? By some lesser colossus? Noah had no room to judge. Who was he? He’d grown up in West Des Moines, famous for gymnastics and other fag shit, and he had not left. No Juilliard for him, he of almost prodigious talent, he of almost, almost good enough, a shard of greater gifts, talented, but weren’t there a million talented boys and no space for any of them? He was all right. He would make due. But who was he to judge Bert? Nobody. Nobody.
But still, Noah thought, that didn’t mean he couldn’t stand up for himself. Set the score right. Talk back.
“I am not a child,” Noah said.
“You act like it sometimes. You think it’s all acceptance and pride parades and easy psychology. You think it’s easy to cut people out of your life when they treat you bad.”
“I don’t think that at all,” Noah said. “You can’t put that on me.”
“You can’t know how it was before. It was awful for us. Our people died.”
“Let us sit upon the ground,” Noah snapped, “and tell sad stories of the deaths of fags.”
Bert turned toward him. Noah saw it from the corner of his vision. He sensed in that motion something bad. Something awful. But before he could do anything about it, he felt the coffee splash hot and urgent against the side of his face and his neck. He screamed as it soaked into his sweater and shirt. The coffee cooled almost immediately, but there was so much of it, and at first it was so hot that Noah couldn’t feel his face. He shook, almost spilling his own coffee onto his lap. He tried to wipe the coffee away by pressing his face down against his shoulder, but he was wet and it wouldn’t come off.
He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t see. There was just the heat and the cry of the wind and the crackling as the plastic of his seat gave with his motion.
“I’m so sorry,” Bert said almost immediately after he had done it. “Oh my God.”
Noah could barely hear him. The coffee was in his ears. Everything had that muted, watery quality to it. Noah felt Bert press something to his face. It was only then that he could feel the distant, prickly surface of his body again. Not the sensation of touch exactly, but pressure, crude and insistent. Bert was blotting him off with his flannel. He could smell, sort of, his sweat and deodorant, and also whiskey.
“Stop, stop,” Noah said, but Bert kept going, blotting and saying he was sorry, so sorry, he didn’t mean it, wanted to take it back, and the wind cried on, and the trees went on beating their limbs against each other.
He was starting to peel along his neck and cheek. The skin was tender and pink. He had not been burned, only badly scalded, and though the coffee had raised welts for the first day or so, he was recovered enough to go back to his life. Outside, the cold had broken open. They were emerging from the brutal overhang of winter. True spring was on the horizon.
Noah had taken up the habit of going into the empty studio after the last rehearsal of the evening and working on a piece that he would use for auditions later in the spring. He was trying to find a place in New York or San Francisco or Portland. He was happy with any of those, and barring that, he would settle for Chicago or Atlanta. He wanted to leave the Midwest, and though he felt no particular allegiances to the coasts, he was ready to live in a proper city with hordes of anonymous people alongside whom he could vanish.
He had a couple of audition pieces he used for graduate school, but now he would need something more mature. He knew that one mistake he’d made before was not preparing a technical classical piece. Instead he’d gone in with mood and tone, some hastily prepared contemporary piece lacking narrative, lacking form. He’d made up for it with improvisation and the beauty of his line, but you couldn’t fake the whole thing, and during the classical repertory phases of his grad school auditions, he’d made enough mistakes that he knew he wasn’t getting into Yale or Brown, his first choices. Iowa had accepted him mainly because his undergraduate instructor was a faculty member and his audition piece had been crafted under her steady guidance.
This time would be different. Noah had danced The Nutcracker and one of Balanchine’s neoclassical ballets during the fall and winter recitals. He took extra lessons alongside the skinny, terrifying girls who focused exclusively on classical, transplants from Bolshoi or Paris. They were not cold or clinical or precise. They laughed and joked like young girls anywhere. They had the awkward, shuffling step of dancers not in motion. And when he talked to them, they seemed much younger than they were. It made sense. They had sacrificed all the routes through life that did not terminate in a position at one of the world’s leading companies. They had given up everything else to bet on this one chance, this one life.
In the evenings, Noah perfected his port de bras, his carriage. He tried to force his turnout a little wider. His fifth, which had never been good, became comfortable, easy. The sweat over the new skin stung and felt alien, like it was not a part of him, but he was so busy with the combinations that he soon forgot it.
He was grateful that Ivan came to watch, gave him advice on how he looked during a turn or a leap. Sometimes, Ivan would reach down and adjust his hip, push at the bend of his back, and Noah thought of the time in his truck out at Bert’s place, when he and Ivan had sucked each other off out of boredom more than anything else.
“How’s it going with Goran? And New York?” he asked one night. Ivan was stretching and cooling down in the corner. He didn’t dance anymore, not really, not with his knee, but he liked to warm up and cool down just to remember how it used to be. Ivan leaned over and looked up at him, his body flat to the floor. Such perfect flexibility. Noah felt a twinge of envy. Some people got it all.
“New York is on,” Ivan said with a slow grin.
“Yeah? You got it?”
Ivan laughed and pushed up. “Yeah, I got it. Interview was last week. I found out yesterday.”
Noah slid across the floor to him, pulled Ivan into a bear hug.
“You didn’t say shit! Come on! What are we doing here? We should be drunk right now. Are you joking?”
“No, this is important. I want you to kill this audition.”
“No! We are getting drunk and then high immediately,” Noah said. Ivan leaned back on his hands. He flushed bright red under the studio lights. He couldn’t stop from smiling. But then his eyes welled up, and his laughter turned to a hiccupping cry.
“I’m so happy,” he said. “I’m so fucking happy. And it terrifies me.”
Ivan was choking, sobbing and choking and smiling and wiping tears. Noah hugged him. Then kissed him, as if he could steal a little of that happiness and a little of that terror for himself. They kissed, and then Noah stood and pulled Ivan up.
Noah bought them a six-pack at John’s and they went back up to his apartment, where they drank and got high, and they laughed and they cried and Noah said, “Your life is going to be so fucking beautiful. You don’t even know. It’s going to be incredible.”
“I’ve been so afraid to tell Goran,” Ivan said. “The last time, he just. I’m so scared.”
“Fuck Goran,” Noah said. “Fuck him. This is for you.”
“Easy for you to say, fuck Goran. I mean.”
“Listen. If he wants to be with you, he will go with you. If he doesn’t, I mean, hey, so what. There are plenty of dicks in the sea.”
“Ha-ha,” Ivan said.
“No, not ha-ha. Listen. Do you know what I would give to be in your position. I mean. Fuck. I’m about to go on these auditions, to be looked over like chattel. And if I have too much fat in my ass or my turnout is five degrees off, it’s like, sorry, get a new life. It’s miserable. But you have something. Like, come on! It’s brilliant. You got your ticket out. How is that not worth celebrating.”
“I’m happy. I’m just afraid.”
“Hello, he slut-shamed you. For doing what you had to do. He is codependent! And toxic!”
“He’s your friend too. You don’t have to lean on him to lift me up, Noah.”
“Okay, yes, I was talking shit, okay, yeah. But come on. This is for you. Cheers. To motherfucking Ivan the Terrible. The rest will take care of itself.”
They toasted, and then they got high, and they toasted, and then they got high, and when Noah’s apartment got too dark to move in, they fell asleep where they were.
On one of the nights when he was practicing, Noah looked up to see Ólafur enter the studio from the side door. Their eyes met in the mirror, and Noah thought he saw a brief smile.
“It’s midnight,” he said.
The studio was warm. Outside, rain tapped the high window. The studio had been a gymnasium, converted after the Second World War. There was a legend that people had learned bayonet technique here, the perfect way to spear a person.
“I know,” Noah said.
“You’re not supposed to be here.”
“Just practicing,” Noah said.
Ólafur sat next to Noah’s things and rested his back against the mirror. He smelled like fresh coffee. His gaze was warm, playful. It was entirely unlike him.
“Your turnout is better,” he said.
“Thank you.”
“So this is why you don’t puke in class anymore.”
“I puked one time.”
“You’re not fat, either.”
Noah rested his hands on the barre and stretched backward until he heard the satisfying pop of his back, the slight shift in his sacral bones.
“You are doing well—but your face, what happened?”
“Oh, this? Must be the weather,” Noah said. When he righted himself, Ólafur was still watching him, not amused by Noah’s little joke. “It’s nothing.”
“Come here,” Ólafur said, waving to a spot on the floor in front of him.
“It’s fine.”
Ólafur ceased his waving and pointed instead in a clean, perfect line. He would not talk again until he was obeyed, Noah knew from class and from Fatima. Ólafur wielded his silence like a gravitational field. Noah sat. He could smell his own sweat and the stink of his tights. Ólafur came close, and his fingertips were cool. They smelled of cigarette smoke and something more acidic, bright, like vinegar. He had a mole on his left cheek, flat and dark brown like a fleck of rust. His touch was firm, as if he were correcting bad posture or a lazy hip, when he touched Noah’s face. His jaw at first, shifting it so that Noah’s head tilted upward. Noah felt the subtle strain of his muscles, the opening of his shoulders. His body moved out of a reflex to please. Ólafur touched the boundary between the new and old skin, which had started to flake and fall away.
“Something very hot did this,” Ólafur said.
“Clumsy,” Noah said.
“That I believe.”
Noah laughed, but Ólafur had begun to stroke his cheek. The motion revealed to Noah all the fine hairs on his own face, which caught on the surface of Ólafur’s thumb. It was like a second skin, a raised barrier that existed just a few microns out from the surface of his actual body, as if they were touching without touching, a pressure before pressure. Noah looked away. He couldn’t stand the intense focus in Ólafur’s eyes. It made him feel small and transparent, like some kind of eel or baby lizard.
“San Francisco is out of your league, Noah. You should focus on your Portland audition,” he said.
Noah nodded tightly. Ólafur withdrew his hand, but they remained sitting there together in the warm studio.
“You have a chance,” Ólafur said. “A real one. It’s not true for everybody.”
“Sure, I know,” Noah said.
Ólafur scratched his jaw. The rasp of his nails through the bristle of his beard filled the studio. More rain against the high windows. Their reflections were a little warped by the dimples near the bottom of the mirror where the panels had been joined. A hole in the floor filled with grit and dust. Noah watched Ólafur lift his hand again, watched its slow, downward dive, like a bird, and he knew before it touched him where it would land. It moved from the light of the studio into the warm, dark hollow between Noah’s legs, and when the pressure came over him, cupping him through the tights, Noah sighed because it was a relief to have been right.
Fatima stood under the café overhang smoking when Noah arrived, slightly out of breath.
“Took you long enough,” she said with a practiced boredom, looking for a moment like a teenager faking cool. Noah bowed with a flourish. The rain was cold and sharp. Across the street, the gravel pit filled with a grayish sludge.
“I see you already found a smoke.”
Fatima nodded, puffing her cheeks. “So I did.”
Noah dropped into the chair next to her. He peeled out of his anorak. His arms and back were sore. His thighs hummed, stray muscles twitching, jerking to life like startled horses. There were sodden, sad feeder boxes clinging to the railing.
“I want to die,” he said, putting his head on the cold table, some cheap aluminum thing.
Fatima unfurled her arm and flicked ashes into the rain. Through the café window, he could hear the music: Chopin? Satie? No, it occurred to him suddenly, it was neoclassical, electro-influenced.
“Don’t whine.”
“You sound like Ólafur.”
Fatima grunted.
“Can I have another?”
Noah took the cigarettes from his inside pocket, and Fatima drew one from the miraculously dry pack. The aroma was deep and pungent, sweet. She closed her eyes.
“What’s with all the huff and puff,” Noah asked.
“I’m pregnant,” she said. The smoke rose swiftly and then was obliterated by the rain. Fatima shook her head as if to clear a thought. “Not for the first time, but still.”
“Oh,” Noah said.
“Don’t get histrionic. Life goes on.”
“It’s . . . Are you all right?”
Fatima shrugged, shook her head again. Her eyes were clear and sharp. The rain struck the overhang with the insistent tat-tat-tat of pretend gunfire. She was still wearing her barista apron. It was her lunch break. She picked at the underside of her fingernails, the cigarette held skillfully in place at the corner of her mouth.
“Do you need anything?”
“Time, money, an abortion—the usual.”
“Fatima.”
“No, I’m fine. It’s fine, I don’t know. It’ll be fine.”
“Okay, sure,” Noah said. To give his hands something to do, he took out the novel he’d been reading at home when Fatima had texted him that she needed a smoke, stat. He lay it facedown on the table and flattened its spine. It was a novel by Mauriac, but now he wished he’d brought along something lighter, like Colette. Noah had aspired to muster the kind of sturdy patience necessary to get through Mauriac’s work, which was elegant and precise but tedious and upright. But now he felt exhausted by the demands of Mauriac’s moral vision, which was like a long channel from which several streams were drawn simultaneously. Mauriac’s work was dominated by mercy and reason. There was an astringent, Jesuit pragmatism to the novel Noah was reading. It made him anxious for something to grasp on to—fury, pain, destruction. Instead, the novel felt like a cool, flat sheet of ice into which he had wedged the dull, inadequate blade of his attention. He tried to read, but the text swam under his eyes.
Fatima joined him at the table and rested her head against his shoulder. The smoke burned his eyes, but he didn’t complain. There were things in the world worse and harder than secondhand smoke. He turned so that his face was in Fatima’s hair. He kissed her head and looped an arm around her so that he could rub her arm. She didn’t say that she cared or that she enjoyed it, but she moved closer to him somehow in that moment, and they watched for a while as the rain plummeted like a dying species.
Bert was still sorry about the coffee. Now, when they had sex, he was gentle and slow in a way that made the sex less enjoyable for Noah. He tried to explain to Bert that he didn’t need such consideration, but Bert could only feel remorse, which to Noah seemed like carefully calculated self-pity. Sometimes, when he touched the place on Noah’s neck and cheek where the skin was still faintly lighter, he was so overwhelmed with emotion that he couldn’t even get hard. Then Noah would kneel for fifteen minutes between Bert’s fleshy thighs, sucking on him, trying with all of his might to urge him into ardor, into life, but no give, no heat, no pulse, only the gray slab of flesh. Like trying to bleed a stone except the stone was a sponge, he said to Daw, to Fatima, to Ólafur.
It would have been one thing if the coffee had erased their argument along with a portion of Noah’s skin. But it did not. They still fought about the same, vague thing: That Noah couldn’t understand how bad it had been for him, for them—meaning, Noah assumed, the whole line of homosexuals in the greater Midwest in the late midcentury. How could he, when Noah had learned to fuck via the internet and other digital caves of affirmation, enclaves where no one called anyone else faggot except as a sign of brotherhood, of love? It was, Noah knew, ridiculous. Sentiment pulled inside out and turned to spite.
Noah suspected that their arguments were a kind of penance. Residual generational guilt. Bert felt he had to pay something for pleasure, for joy, for forgetting for just a moment that he was, if not free, at least unburdened, that the world no longer required of him his constant vigil: the sending up of flesh-and-blood atonement. That he was relieved of his duty, that his watch had ended.
That thing you said,” Bert drawled. “What was that from?”
They were in the empty upstairs apartment again. There was still no tenant. Smoke hung over them.
“What thing?” Noah asked.
“That sit-on-the-ground thing.”
“Richard II.”
“That’s a person.”
“A play. About a person. Or a version of a person, anyway.”
“It made me nuts.”
“It’s kind of about self-pity,” Noah said, turning over. He put his head under the pillow, where it was cool and smelled like sweat, like their bodies, like detergent.
“Is that who I am to you?”
“I’m nobody, who are you?”
“What?”
Noah laughed.
“I can’t hear you,” Bert said. His hand was on the small of Noah’s back, and then there was more of him suddenly, coming closer. The whole hot weight of his body pressing into Noah. He sank into the mattress. The pillow went taut, and Noah could no longer lift his head. The pillow pressed close and hot. He couldn’t breathe, really. It felt as though his neck would snap if he tried to sit up. So much pressure, tension. “I can’t hear you,” Bert said. His voice was muffled, far away: “Speak up, speak up, speak up.”
The auditions went as well as Noah could have hoped. San Francisco wasn’t looking for his particular set of strengths at the moment but would keep him in mind for future openings, and Portland liked his overall package and liked that his advisers called him team-oriented and a hard worker. Minneapolis said yes, but they wouldn’t have a spot for him until the following winter. Oklahoma City was interested but had to wait on their funding to be approved to know what and when they could offer officially. Dallas was out. Memphis was out. Joffrey had laughed, but they said they’d keep an eye out for visiting roles he might slot into. Miami was thrilled he had auditioned but cool afterward, so that was likely a no, too. Noah had spent three or four weeks flying to various cities, burning through his travel stipend from the department, landing and dancing and hoping, depositing in each city a tiny fleck of his self-worth and value, and what he felt after that long stretch of travel apart from a sleep deficit and permanently bruised ankles and knees from knocking into strange bedside tables was a sense of having ended a part of his life forever.
He might never dance again, he knew, and even if he did, he might not ever dance the way he had wanted to years and years ago, as a kid, when it wasn’t a job or a prospect but just something he did. He had known this for a while, but it had never occurred to him in just those terms, not until he got off the plane from his last audition, the one in Portland, and stood silently weeping in the Cedar Rapids airport. It was over. It was over. It was over.
When Noah told Ólafur about the auditions in totality, Ólafur nodded.
“I knew it. Yes. I knew it. See, it’s fine,” he said with the calm of someone placating an anxious child. They were in Noah’s bed again. Ólafur’s partner worked in the medical school and the hospital as an instructor and surgeon, although Ólafur said he preferred the teaching to surgery. Ólafur sat cross-legged, reading the email on Noah’s phone. The room felt close and musky. Above them, stray footsteps, the sound of something banging. The summer tenants had come early. Noah thought of Bert out in the country, in the house with his dying father. He hadn’t heard from him in a week or so—it had been hectic with the travel, with the auditions, with life. Bert alone in the rural darkness, staring out the window, seeing stars, the glint of lights in the homes of their distant neighbors, listening to the beep of the machines, a dying father reduced to a husk of flesh and an assortment of cables and whirring pumps.
“Maybe I won’t do any of it,” Noah said. “Maybe I’ll just drift. Or get a real job.”
“Is that what your parents want for you? A real job?”
Noah laughed at that, a little alarmed at the prospect of his parents intruding into his life. He hadn’t spoken to his mother in years. It wasn’t bad with them. They just didn’t have anything to say to each other on the phone.
“No,” he said. “No, not like that. I think they want me to be happy.”
“How American,” Ólafur said with a sneer, his voice a little cold. “Happiness.”
“You dance for a living.”
“Ah, yes, but who said happiness had anything to do with it?”
“I guess that’s true.”
“Dancing is not about happiness. It’s about sacrifice.”
“Ah, yes, ritual bloodletting. How could I forget?”
Ólafur dropped the phone onto Noah’s stomach. Noah jumped—it didn’t hurt, but there was a terrifying, hollow thump. He hadn’t been expecting it, hadn’t hardened himself to the impact.
“You don’t know anything,” Ólafur said, sounding in his own way like Bert.
“No, I don’t,” Noah said. He put his arm across his eyes. “I don’t know anything at all.” There was a resinous, burning taste in Noah’s mouth, and he wondered if it was from the semen or the cigarette or the pepper on the trout at dinner. Or if it was something else entirely, some part of himself sloughed off and dissolving. His nose filled with a sulfurous smell. Ólafur’s weight shifted on the bed, and Noah sat up to watch him get dressed. He was going home to his partner and their house, which was filled with the shrapnel of their lives, and for a moment, just a moment, Noah was overwhelmed with the idea of the totality of those things, all those many artifacts that he would never see or touch or know, and this was sad to him, that after all this time of knowing Ólafur and having experienced particular and intense arrangements of their bodies, there remained more about him that he did not know. He did not love Ólafur. He did not want to be in his life, really, nothing like that. No, it was the sudden, brilliant awareness of how small this was between them, how little it meant, and how his life had become the assembly of such small, inconsequential things.
Ólafur leaned back across the bed and kissed Noah hard, and Noah wound his fingers through Ólafur’s hair, then gripped at his shoulders and back. He pulled at him, but Ólafur was stronger, sturdier, and he shoved Noah away—and back he went, off the side of the bed, and his head hit the corner of his dresser with a quick, hard rap.
“Oh God,” Ólafur said, but Noah just closed his eyes. The world vibrated and pulsed. His breath was heavy and slow. Ólafur crouched, and Noah smiled then laughed—his vision swam and there was something like a dark stain spreading beneath his field of sight.
“Well done,” Noah said.
Daw stayed with Noah—the doctor was not sure if it was a real concussion or something like a concussion.
“You can’t be a little concussed,” Daw said. But Noah shrugged. He was noncommittal on it, but Daw stayed with him for a week. Noah taught him how to make miso. They played cards in the dim room, and Daw read him the end of the Mauriac novel and then later, because Noah begged for it, Daw read him some Proust. Toward the end of the week they watched a movie, and when Noah couldn’t look at the screen because of the splitting pain behind his eyes, Daw lay a cool cloth over his face and massaged Noah’s feet. They laughed and shuffled through the gossip of their lives—Daw had taken a practice MCAT and planned to do a gap year. He was done dancing for one lifetime, he said. Fatima came over on the weekend and lay on her back on Noah’s bed with a water bottle on her stomach. She and Daw didn’t fight or ignore each other. They talked, too, about plans made and then undone. She was going back East.
“This is it, boys. The start of our lives,” she said.
Daw was the first one to laugh at that, then Noah, then Fatima.
“You make it sound so optimistic,” he said.
“This year has been hell,” Noah said.
“But we survived it.”
“Barely,” Daw said sternly, and with an emotion that Noah couldn’t penetrate.
“How are your boyfriends taking the news of your departure?” Fatima asked, and a bolt of panic lanced its way through Noah, because it was not clear to him until that very moment that Fatima knew about Ólafur.
“Oh, well,” Noah said, looking away, out the window, where the trees swirled in dark circles.
“Ólafur will be fine,” Daw said.
“Who even told you?”
“It was obvious.”
“How was it obvious?”
“Don’t be naive,” Fatima said sharply. Her eyes flashed with anger, but she settled back onto her elbows. “It’s fine. Take what you can get.”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“It’s always like that,” Fatima said. “It’s always always always like that. You just pretend it isn’t. You go banging around through life, and then you’re surprised when you end up with a concussion.”
“That is an unfortunate extended metaphor,” he said.
“We all knew. It’s no big deal. Don’t act so surprised,” Daw said.
“You should be more worried about the serial killer.”
“He isn’t a serial killer.”
“The more you insist he isn’t,” Fatima said, “the more I feel compelled to point out that . . . he did in fact try to suffocate you.”
“It wasn’t like that,” Noah said before he could stop himself. Fatima’s laughter filled the room, and Daw could only shake his head.
Bert’s father died in the middle of May. There was no funeral because Bert said it was a pointless expense. Noah rode out to the house to see him. A cold snap had frozen the water in the soil, so the ground had a hollow, crunching quality to it. Noah leaned back against his truck door in the front yard. Bert stood up on the porch, looking down at him.
“Good to see you,” Noah said.
“You’ve been a ghost.”
“I was busy.”
“I bet,” Bert said. “Do you want to come in?”
“No, no. I just came to see how you are.”
“Well, here I am.”
“You look okay,” Noah said. Bert was thinner and paler. His hair had a tawny sheen to it. He looked delicate. His eyes were raw and red. His cap was threadbare. The door was open behind him, dark like a mouth.
“Do I?” Bert asked in genuine curiosity. “I don’t feel it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t you start that, too,” Bert said. “Sorry for what?”
“I don’t know,” Noah said. “I guess, I just feel like, I’m sorry you’re in pain. For your loss. For whatever lack of peace you have about it all.”
“You don’t know anything about it,” Bert said, knocking his knuckles against the banister.
“I do,” Noah said. “I do know about it.”
“What do you know?”
“My dad died, too, you know. While ago, but he died. I know about it.”
“You didn’t say anything.”
“I imagine you can understand now why not,” Noah said laughing, but his throat was hot and his eyes were burning. “You get it now.”
“Suppose I do.”
“I’m leaving in the summer.”
“I figured.”
“I’m going to Portland.”
Bert nodded stiffly. Noah sucked in the cold, clean air. He looked at the sparse grass of the yard, the peach tree that flowered prematurely and now was frozen. The rolling fields, the houses sitting like animals in wait.
“Wish you’d said something before,” Bert said.
“About?”
“The lease. It’ll be hard to fill your apartment.”
Noah smiled. He put his hand on the latch of his truck door. “Not in the summer, it won’t.”
He popped the door, and there was the familiar whine of the interior. Bert raised his hand slowly and gave a jerk of a wave.
Noah lifted his hand back, waving in counterrhythm.
It was a little like a dance, he thought later as he drove the road home, away from that place. He hated the feeling of relief that moved through him when he realized he’d never do it again.