The next night Philip invited me to drinks with a wealthy couple. I wanted to ask why. Even more, I wanted to go, so I kept quiet. My new boots clomped as we walked through the building’s tiled lobby.
The hosts, Marcel and Stefan, opened the door and, seeing me next to Philip, said, “You’re not Nicola,” and handed us martinis.
“How did you snag this one?” Marcel asked.
“I scooped him up, as it were,” Philip told him.
“Scoop,” Marcel said, and the three of them laughed.
Their apartment had high ceilings and low, square furniture. Views of a cathedral crowded its windows.
Philip examined a painting, commenting on depth and aesthetic, then asked, “Did you get the photos I sent over?”
“Pavel Brozik,” Stefan said. I wondered why Pavel hadn’t come.
As the hosts drank more, they made comments about my eyes and my shyness. I was thrilled to be noticed, even by men I had no interest in. Stefan handed me a glass of wine. I told him he was trying to get me drunk.
“Succeeding, it seems,” he answered, and listed places in Europe I needed to see.
“Maybe Majorca,” Marcel said.
“That beach where it’s all men and no clothes,” Stefan added.
“Sign me up,” I said, the heat of the hosts’ shoulders warm against my own.
Philip stood up. “We’ve abused your kindness staying so long.”
“Hardly,” Marcel said.
He was the handsomer of the two, his eyes the color of a winter river. But Philip insisted we had to leave and Stefan looked chastened as he went to get our jackets. I tried to understand what had just happened.
Philip and I walked next to a tree-lined canal. Birds darted between trees, their wings hollow breaths. The drinks I’d had numbed the back of my head.
“There are many ways to flirt,” Philip said.
“Meaning?” I asked.
“Meaning you don’t need to lie down for every man who gives you his attention.”
At an intersection, Philip turned right. “We go left,” I said, sure that he’d wanted me to flirt, also to pretend I wasn’t doing so, my failure at pretending what he found distasteful. At the next intersection, Philip waited for me to tell him which way to go.
“I assumed,” I said, “that I was invited to these drinks and not others, to be flirted with.”
I was young, figured that Stefan and Marcel wanted some of that as theirs. Watching a tram packed with passengers whip past, I thought to burn it all down. But Philip’s hard expression gave way, with it a chance to swallow my anger and embarrassment, at least for a while.
“I don’t always know how to be,” I said to fill the silence. “When people flirt and it’s clear we’re going to sleep together, then I’m fine. When it’s just flirtation, I don’t know. When to start and stop.”
“You can say no to things,” Philip said. “With what you do as much as your words. A thanks but no thanks.”
“How do I do that?”
“There isn’t a formula,” he said, though I imagined there was.
Philip put his hand on my back. I picked up my pace and the hand fell away.
“That’s a good start,” he said.
At the hotel’s entrance, the doorman looked lost in thought. When he saw us he snapped to it, opened the door, and wished us a good evening.
“Thank you,” I said, and tried on a smile that was polite but guarded, realizing the doorman did that same thing all the time.
In Philip’s room the next morning, running through the day’s schedule, he stopped mid-sentence and told me he’d made a dinner reservation for the two of us that night.
“It’s our last night here after all,” Philip said.
“Pavel, too?” I asked.
“That isn’t possible,” he said. “Seeing that he’s stateside again.”
Rain rattled the windows.
“Let me guess,” Philip said. “He didn’t tell you.”
“Doesn’t get an A for communication.”
“Young man,” Philip said.
“This young man is fine,” I told him, hoping to stave off a falling feeling. “But,” I went on, “I don’t know why I’m thinking of this now, but Andrew at the gallery.” Philip raised an eyebrow, perhaps expecting me to confess my love for Andrew instead. “He sent me an email yesterday. He thinks my name is Gregg. Though I’ve corrected him several times. Even spells it with two g’s at the end.”
“Who spells Gregg with two g’s at the end?” Philip asked.
“Who spells Gordon like it’s a different name?” I asked back.
“I’ll talk to Andrew,” Philip said, and told me he’d meet me in the lobby in an hour.
I went up to my room to change. As I picked out clothes, I got snagged on Pavel’s silent exit. “Maybe he doesn’t want you,” I mumbled. But as I slipped into the outfit I’d chosen, I rejected that idea. He hoped to paint me after all. I pulled out a package of Band-Aids, covered the delegation of blisters on my heels and toes, and put my new boots on.
The restaurant had thick stone walls and crisp tablecloths, and a waitstaff that moved through it with noiseless elegance. Men were required to wear jackets, so Philip lent me one of his. It fell wide across my shoulders.
After we ordered, I turned shy, and Philip took on the bulk of the conversation. He told me about his first time in this restaurant, then listed places I should travel to someday. The little travel I’d done had been to forgettable places—a mosquito-rich campsite in Wisconsin. A motel at the dusty foot of South Dakota’s Black Hills.
The food appeared. I considered telling Philip about Alan, but sensed he’d find it boring, then about the professor I’d fallen for in college who’d rejected me bluntly and given me a C. The waiter placed rolls onto our plates with silver tongs.
“The food’s so good we aren’t even talking,” I said, and chewed a mouthful of potato for longer than necessary. I asked if he was eager to head home, embarrassed at the stock question I’d leaned on.
“Sometimes I prefer life in a hotel,” he answered.
He cut his fish and smiled as if I were sweet, also lacking. I ate the rest of my dinner in silence then loitered in the bathroom until he’d had time to pay the bill.
It was a relief to get back to my room, though embarrassment at my failed conversation tainted it. At a dinner where I was meant to be charming, all I could come up with was clichéd observations about the food and the dogs and the lingering rain. As I lay on my bed, still in Philip’s blazer, I closed my eyes, knowing I’d likely wake up fully dressed the next morning, and remembered an email from June I hadn’t answered, in which she asked again when I might come visit.
I put a pillow over my face and closed my eyes.
A knock woke me up. My heart raced at the possibility of Pavel, until I remembered.
It was Philip. He slouched against the doorframe. Glancing at the clock, I saw it was three in the morning.
“I think I’ve been poisoned,” he said. “Food poisoning, I mean,” and threw up in his hand.
I breathed in the rotten, vinegar smell of his puke and brought him into my bathroom. Philip threw up again, this time in the sink. His face fell as he pulled down his pants and sat on the toilet.
“I’ll give you some space,” I said. But he took my hand, squeezed it. Breathing through my mouth, I rubbed his back, felt its cool, loose skin.
“I’m sorry, young man,” he whispered.
After an hour the worst seemed behind him. Philip sat on the bathroom floor, his thighs bone-white and hairless.
“You should take a shower,” I said.
I turned on the water, testing its temperature with my hand. All the while, I did my best not to look at the traffic of varicose veins lining his legs or the white thatch of hair above his penis. He stepped into the shower, slipped. I held out a hand to steady him. When that seemed insufficient, I stripped and joined him.
“I’m sorry,” he croaked.
“Shh,” I whispered.
Seeing him in this state erased my lackluster performance from dinner, so I washed his face and lathered up his midsection, picked up the removable showerhead to rinse his hair.
I dried Philip off and dressed him in one of my T-shirts and a pair of my underwear before helping him into bed. His clothes drooped over a chair. His watch ticked loudly.
“They should have given you a bigger bed,” he said.
“I’m just one person.”
“But what they’re charging,” he said, then shrugged, his indignation in the rearview mirror. “It wasn’t all some ruse to see you naked, you know,” Philip added.
“Would have been some ruse.”
“Not that it was unpleasant to see.”
I tried on a look that said thanks but no thanks, but gave up, kissing his forehead and lying next to him.
“Nicola worries,” Philip said. “And it’s annoying the way he worries.”
“So we shouldn’t worry him about this.”
Philip lay with his back toward me. A door in the hall outside creaked closed.
“Nicola didn’t stay in New York because of the gallery,” he said.
“I figured,” I said, though I hadn’t, then pictured the man Nicola stayed for, Nicola’s dick in my hand.
“He and I have never had an interest in a certain kind of exclusivity.”
On the street outside, the plaintive two-note wail of a siren sounded. Dampness from Philip’s hair shadowed his pillow.
“But things seem to be changing,” Philip said. “He says no when he used to say yes. Vanishes for days then returns without saying where he was. That leaves me waiting. And I’m not good at waiting, as this week has probably made clear to you.”
I wanted to offer a signal that I had, that it didn’t matter, so I rested a hand on his warm back.
“I guess I’m waiting for him to leave me,” Philip said.
He turned to face me, his blinking sped up. In the dim of the room, I couldn’t tell if he was crying.
“He’s always known how old you were,” I said.
“Knowing and experiencing aren’t the same.”
“I have a dumb question.”
“Is there any other kind?”
Minty heat huffed from his mouth.
“If you think he’s going to leave you, why don’t you leave him instead?” I asked.
Philip’s breath quickened and I worried he’d get sick again. But he put a hand on my forehead and answered, “Because maybe I’m wrong.”
Then he fell asleep.
I lay there wondering if this was what it was like to be a parent, with your child during a moment of abject fear or illness, disgusted by them, grateful, too, to have been with them at their most miserable.
Philip’s hand sat next to mine. I held it. Light from outside leaked in through the window.
I pushed our flights back a day to give Philip time to recover and got our rooms for another night, saying “Entschuldigung” more times than I could remember. The day we were scheduled to leave, I went for a run, then treated myself to an expensive lunch, showing up at Philip’s room after, my duffel bag in tow. His suitcase lay open and unpacked, and the television blared.
“We’ll be late,” I said, and began tossing clothes into his bag.
“Stop with that,” he said with his earlier irritation. “Something’s happened.”
I first mistook what was unfolding on TV for a Bruce Willis movie. But with its shaky cameras and shrieking too primal to be performed, I soon understood it was real.
“A second plane just hit,” Philip said.
Smoke billowed from the Trade Center. A German newscaster spoke with non-newscaster agitation.
“Look,” Philip said.
Leaning close to the screen, we watched people jump from the building’s windows, holding each other’s hands as they barreled toward the ground. When the first tower collapsed, Philip let out a noise whose only match was that of the wounded deer I’d heard when I’d gone hunting with a childhood friend, its wet, mournful cry shivering through me for days after. Philip rested his head on my lap. He sputtered out incomplete phrases, “This can’t” being the most common. I rubbed his back, told him we were safe in this hotel.
“But Nicola,” he said.
“He has no business being down there,” I answered. “Even if he did, he can never get out of the house before ten.”
Philip winced. I apologized for my ill-timed joke. Dust darkened the TV camera.
For hours, we watched the towers fall on repeat. Also people running, a deluge of dust and smoke closing in on them. Later shots showed the Brooklyn Bridge, pedestrians in place of cars, their hair whitened by dust, as if cast as old people in a school play. I said that we should turn it off, and Philip agreed, but the silence allowed us to imagine more planes as bombs, more buildings falling in on themselves, so we turned the TV back on then ordered room service that neither of us ate.
The hotel informed us that our rooms were now booked by others, so we found a different place with one room free for the night.
“I hope you don’t mind sharing,” Philip said, as we checked in.
“I’m not worried you’ll try to seduce me, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“I hope, really, that you don’t think of me as some old man who just wants you along as eye candy.”
“I don’t think of you that way,” I said, the thrill of being considered eye candy one I kept to myself.
Philip told me he’d try to reach Nicola again.
In the middle of the night, Philip and I had gone to the hotel’s business center. When he logged in and saw an email from Nicola (I wasn’t anywhere near all that), he began to weep. His weeping was strange, beautiful, too, in its unvarnished way.
A man came into the business center, saw Philip crying, and did a terrible job of masking his annoyance. I looked up at him and said, “Do you not know what’s happening?” and the man left. I held Philip closer, felt lucky to be there with him, though I knew better than to say that out loud.
“He’s fine,” Philip repeated, then asked if I could email Nicola back for him. I wrote as Philip, telling Nicola I was so relieved to know he was safe. At the end I added, “Gordon is taking good care of me,” then hit send and told Philip we should try to sleep for a while.
Philip and I became known as “the Americans.” People he barely knew invited us to dinner. One wealthy collector insisted we stay at her house, though Philip politely refused. The new hotel I found for us was the fanciest so far, and though my room was small and faced a back alley, the place had a spa and a garden with architectural shrubs, a staff that seemed to be everywhere, asking if I wanted sparkling water or coffee.
On our second night, at a dinner at a large house, we were stars. But Philip’s smooth benevolence had left him, replaced by long pauses and short sentences. He was asked what it was like being away from New York just then and said only, “Difficult.” A question came next as to whether he knew anyone who’d been killed, and he answered, “Who can say?” When he continued in that same monosyllabic vein, guests turned to me. I answered elaborately about the strangeness of watching office workers run for their lives, how, had my life taken a slightly different turn, I might have been one of them.
“You’re not an aspiring artist?” someone asked.
“I’m not an aspiring anything,” I said.
A few people chuckled. I let them think it was a joke.
They asked about my family. I answered truthfully about my mom’s piecemeal jobs, adding stories of Dad and Jesus. I thought to talk about him as a joke, but terror turned everyone serious. So I mentioned his fellow parishioners writhing on the floor. The time my father, essentially a stranger to me now, spoke in tongues and how, despite the jadedness I wanted to feel, it was like listening to an unexpected, heartbreaking song. A refilled wineglass was a call for me to keep talking. I told them of the cold I’d grown up in, the college I hadn’t managed to finish, my ex I knew would end up a dentist like his parents, though he was trying to rebel by working at a bank. They laughed at that, made dentist jokes. All of them had perfect teeth.
Toward the end of dinner, I realized Philip had left to use the bathroom a long time before. I excused myself and found him lying on a sofa fortified with pillows.
“I can’t believe we came,” he said.
“They’re being nice,” I said.
“Wanting us to perform at a time like this.”
“I’ll tell them you have a headache.”
“That sounds like an excuse,” Philip said.
“What should I say then?”
“Let’s just go.”
Walking back to our hotel, Philip’s stunned gloom lifted. “I didn’t know all that about you,” he said.
At the elevator, he kissed my forehead, pulled gently on my ear, and said, “Sleep tight.” And though I thought I would, in my luxurious room, excitement kept me awake. I performed push-ups in hopes of exercising feeling out of myself, moved on to stretches I’d learned in fifth grade. In the middle of a series of squats, I heard noise outside and saw a trio of hotel staff members smoking. I waved. They waved back. I belonged down there with them, listening to stories about guests’ outlandish demands, but their expressions asked me one question: How may we help you? I smiled, shook my head, and closed the curtains.
Flights to the States were grounded. I called Philip’s travel agent every few hours, but got the same answer.
After two days of lunches and dinners, Philip began to decline invitations, making a thoughtless barb about us refusing to be their hired hands. He took me to museums. In front of certain paintings, Philip asked me what I saw.
“It’s good,” I said of one of a woman next to a window.
“That’s not what I asked.”
He told me to look closely, talked about color and gesture. Philip was trying to instruct me. What he offered didn’t take. And though I often clung hard to the imagined, at that moment I didn’t want to. So I told him the truth, that I saw black marks I hadn’t noticed before, the frame coming undone at one corner, but none of it felt revelatory.
“Not like your father and Jesus,” Philip said.
“I hadn’t been thinking about that,” I told him.
“I just don’t want you to be reluctant.”
Reluctant wasn’t what I felt, so I said as much.
“What are you feeling then?” he asked.
“Like I want a coffee. To go to one of those outdoor cafés where we can people-watch.”
We found a café. I tried to look at a woman and her dog, a pair of sullen, squinting teens, but Philip’s company was a distraction. Our coffees done, clouds piling up above the skyline, I told him we should go back to the hotel to rest for a while.
That night, at a pub with tall ceilings and medieval-looking chandeliers and waiters who placed beers at our table before we ordered them, Philip asked me what was next.
“I don’t know,” I said, unsure of his question’s specific meaning.
“I mean after you’ve worked for us,” Philip clarified.
“I like working for you,” I said, and talked about other jobs I’d had, and my parents who treated work like a chronic condition to manage.
“There’s more, you know,” he said.
“I know,” I answered.
He arched his eyebrows, out of pity, I thought first. But it was potential he wanted to convey, a sense that I could want and actually get things.
“That will have to be our project,” he said. “A map, of sorts.”
A waiter whizzed past, dropping new beers in front of us on his way.
“When we get back,” I said, “what will you do?”
He talked about the shows they’d have to postpone because of the attack. I wanted to know about Nicola, who, when Philip finally reached him on the phone that afternoon, said that the connection was too bad for any sort of conversation. “Young man,” Philip said, then waved the waiter over for the bill.
We walked down a narrow street, buildings pressed close so we could barely see the sky. People glided past on bicycles, a few of them rang their bells. Philip hooked his arm in mine.
“Why didn’t Nicola come?” I asked.
“Let’s talk about pleasant things,” he said.
“Is there someone else?”
“I don’t want to think about that now, while we’re having such a nice time.”
Philip told me instead about the first man he’d been with, how it had blown his marriage apart. His wild years after that, “Taking amphetamines so I barely slept.” He described his first orgy, saying I should try one if I hadn’t already.
“So many dicks and asses,” I said.
“That’s the point,” Philip said. “Gluttony.”
He talked about a fling he’d had with Rock Hudson in his L.A. days. “I was a muscle boy for a time, if you can believe it,” Philip said. “Going to Venice Beach, doing pull-ups until my arms were on fire. I was at a party and there he was.”
Philip told me about a maid he’d had growing up who’d taught him the ins and outs of sewing. “I don’t remember how it came up, but shortly after I met Rock, we were at another party and I was telling a story about our maid Lola, the hours of sewing she and I did. He made a joke about the sweatshop she was running. Later, though, he asked if I still knew how. Told me he wanted some pants made to show off some gifts he had in the back and front. I went to his place the next day to measure. Turns out those gifts were considerable.”
“And after you measured, did you?”
“Sleep together?” he asked.
I nodded. He nodded back.
“I borrowed a friend’s sewing machine, worked all night—thanks to some stalwart pills—then brought the pants over to his place. He put them on. They were perfect. But do you know what he said, the two of us standing in front of the mirror looking at those perfect pants on that perfect man?” A church chimed midnight, the street we were on empty apart from parked cars. “Make them tighter.”
I asked what happened with the two of them next.
“We just slept together that one time,” he said.
From his distant expression I sensed he was thinking about those pants. Also that man.
I would come to remember the private bounty of those days, Philip recoiling from everyone but me, the drive we took to a castle on an island framed by sawtooth mountains, the shops we went to where Philip saw a sweater he thought would look nice on me, a leather satchel to replace my beat-up messenger bag, and bought both. A night we lay on his bed watching a Julia Roberts movie and when he kept forgetting her name, he told me he sometimes worried he was touched by the beginnings of dementia.
“You’re the most undemented person I know,” I said.
He fell asleep midway through the movie. I joined shortly after. When I woke up in the morning, Philip was gone. He came back with a bag bursting with pastries. We ate them on the unmade bed, kept going when we were full, crumbs and powdered sugar dusting our chins.
We went to dinner in a place with flower arrangements so precariously centered on tables we had to lean to see each other. Our waiter answered us with deadpan amusement when Philip asked if he could take the flowers away. And just before Philip handed him the signed check, he asked, “Is there a nearby bar for a nightcap?”
“I know a few,” the waiter said in crisp English.
“Another question,” Philip said. “My friend is hoping you’d have that nightcap with us.”
The waiter didn’t look over at me as he told Philip the name of a bar where he’d meet us in an hour. He took our signed check and went to a different table.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“He’s been looking at you all night,” Philip said.
“So?”
“And you’ve been looking back. Two sharks circling one another.” Philip’s brow flattened with annoyance. “So I’m helping you out,” he said. “Is your concern that I want to be a part of the action? I don’t, so you can rid yourself of that fear.”
“That wasn’t my fear.”
“What then?”
The hardness I’d had to contend with in the last ten days grew.
“I didn’t realize he was looking at me,” I said.
I hadn’t realized I’d been looking either, any more than a person normally looked at a waiter. A busboy stacked several plates on his arm.
“Young man,” Philip said. “We need to do something about your eyes.”
After the drink, the waiter walked back with us to the hotel. Once in my room, he undressed and kissed me with an urgency so unlike his earlier poise, and I wished for more time with him, in this city, Pavel demoted to a mild ache. As the waiter slipped a condom onto my dick, I thought to thank Philip, who’d noticed the waiter and me watching each other. Then I moved into the waiter and could only think about that. And when my hands crept toward his throat, he nodded, and I put them there.
The waiter was asleep when the phone rang. A web of early-morning light covered the comforter. It was Philip’s travel agent. I’d become well acquainted with her in the last few days.
“Did I wake you, Gordon?” she asked.
“Pretty early here,” I said.
“That’s a yes, I take it. I’m sorry for that. But I got flights.”
The waiter let out a sighing exhale. A blanket sat at his hips, showing off his stomach’s delicate dappling of hair.
“Great,” I whispered.
“You can leave later today,” she said.
The waiter’s T-shirt and brightly colored underwear lay on the floor. I picked the underwear up, moved it to my face, and breathed in.
“Anything for tomorrow instead?” I asked.
The travel agent—her name was Valerie Esposito; Philip and I had taken to using that full name whenever we said it—answered, “I thought Philip was eager to get back.”
“Something came up here,” I said.
“Okay. Give me ten minutes.”
I hung up and kissed the waiter’s stomach. He woke up laughing, telling me my mouth tickled. He said “tickled” in such a delicious way that I asked him to say it again.
“Why again?” he asked, sitting up so the blankets fell and I saw he was already partly hard.
“Because I want you to,” I said.
“Tickled,” the waiter repeated.
I didn’t answer the phone when Valerie called back but waited until the waiter and I had secured a date for that evening to hear about the new flights she’d gotten us.
I found Philip at the hotel’s restaurant. The headline of his newspaper, written in large font and all caps, discussed armed force and prayers.
“We’re saved,” I told him. “We can leave tomorrow.”
“Oh,” Philip said.
Another night was punitive for him. But another night was all I wanted, so I told him, “It was the best Valerie Esposito could do.”
“She’s a miracle worker, for sure.”
“Speaking of miracle workers,” I said, and began to tell him about the waiter’s skill and particular gifts. But Philip looked at me with pained embarrassment, and I realized that I’d been talking loudly enough for nearby guests to hear the details I’d begun to share about the waiter’s ass and the noises he made, how, when I was on top of him, he leaned his head back so I could only see the whites of his eyes.