Once we’d lit our cigarettes, Pavel told me he was going to Mexico City. And though I asked, “For vacation?” I understood he meant something more substantial.
“Going to live there for a while,” he said.
A car passed in a smear of music, and my stomach hollowed with surprise. I had no right to be surprised though. I’d long put my money on a world I imagined rather than the one that existed.
“Your apartment is here,” I said.
“It’s my friend Whitney’s. She’s been letting me borrow it while she’s been in Sydney, but she’s coming back. I thought I told you.”
“What’s in Mexico City?” I asked.
“A cheap apartment. New things to see.”
I couldn’t imagine going someplace else for newness, knew if I’d had an opportunity to leave, I’d consider Pavel as a reason not to. I hardly knew him but already he’d turned into a country for me to claim.
As Pavel stepped closer to me lust took over, though I wanted anger’s sour purpose, or at least enough pride to compel me to walk away. He kissed my forehead, my mouth.
“Now you know why I was being weird,” he said, some great burden unknotted.
“I still think you’re weird.”
“Always joking.”
“We should finish our drinks.”
“Oh,” Pavel said with surprise.
“You want me to cry?” I asked, the anger I’d hoped for breaking through, more so when his eyes softened with what looked like boredom.
“Let’s go back to my place,” he said, then told me he wasn’t leaving for two weeks.
Back at his apartment, he pressed a hand against my stomach. I felt its resistance when I breathed in. He put his free hand on my cheek, leaned close so I could smell his wine breath.
“I’ll probably be back in a year,” he said, with whispery sincerity.
I was angry still, so I turned him around and went at him fast. He closed his eyes though I wanted them open. He came with his strangulating sounds and muttered, “Thank you” as if I’d gotten him a coffee or reminded him to bring an umbrella on a day it was forecast to rain.
“You could always come visit for a bit,” Pavel said.
“I’ll let you know when my schedule opens up.”
Pavel was asleep two minutes later. “Mexico,” I whispered. He didn’t stir. “Pavel lives in a hovel,” I added. “He sometimes grovels and talks about Václav Havel. If not, he reads a novel.” I laughed at my stupidity, remembering then that I was still dog-sitting. I left. When the dogs were done, I rang Pavel’s buzzer, but he didn’t answer.
He called the next morning to ask if I’d left because of his news.
“The dogs,” I said.
He told me I should come over, that we should use his last weeks in the city. Though part of me wanted to shift to the sad solidity of remembrance, those next weeks brought a snow day’s elated surprise, everything whittled down to hours with him in bed and at restaurants and in his studio where for several hours, stillness was my one goal. Though each time I sat for him the same worry returned: that he’d started things up with me because he knew he wasn’t sticking around.
For Thanksgiving, Pavel went to visit his aunt in Philadelphia. Philip and Nicola celebrated with a dinner at their place in the city, where I was the helpful friend. Rebecca from the summer was there. I pulled her aside and said, “I haven’t forgotten what you said.” She looked embarrassed and again I felt as if I didn’t know the rules.
Nicola was pleasant to me for a change, talking about the godsend I’d been. “Before him, we barely managed,” he told the group. When someone suggested we all say what we were thankful for, Nicola said that he was thankful for me. My face heated up. I didn’t trust him. But it was nice to have a break from his overcaffeinated annoyance. When my turn came, I blurted out that I was thankful for Philip taking me to Europe. From Nicola’s tapering smile, I understood that I should have included him in my message. I added something to that effect, Nicola’s annoyed expression unmoved. A man whose name I kept forgetting declared that he was thankful for his dermatologist, pointing to places where wrinkles had once been. “Voilà,” he said.
“Voilà,” we repeated, in lieu of cheers.
Pavel left at the start of December, the blow of his departure softened by Janice’s return. I was so thrilled at her homecoming that I found it hard to talk to her, answering her questions about Pavel and my job in short, declarative sentences. But in a few days I became reaccustomed to her steady attention. She made dinners for us to share, invited me to sleep in her bed with her, the two of us tucked under a duvet I’d recently bought, where she admitted she’d been afraid to come back to the city after the attack. Janice told me stories, too, of Meredith singing along to cheesy songs on the radio, also how, when they moved through the lunar landscape of southern Utah, she’d wished I’d been with them. “I told Meredith, if we just had Gordon with us, it would have been perfect,” Janice said. Her face glowed under the Christmas lights strung across her ceiling. She brought me back a Don’t Mess with Texas T-shirt and chocolates from San Francisco, a jar of pickled pigs’ feet from Alabama she kept insisting were delicious.
A week into her return, her stories shifted to those of Meredith’s moodiness, the states they drove through where Meredith didn’t say a word. But each time I asked if they were breaking up, Janice’s brow tightened and she said, “Sometimes things are hard,” in a tone that seemed meant to convince her and me at the same time.
Janice got a job at a dive bar with a beamed ceiling and large maps on its walls and a back room where bands played and burlesque was performed. Burlesque became her obsession. She talked about one of the performers with an excitement I translated as lust. A few weeks into the job, Janice started performing, too, showing me the pasties and tiny thong she’d bought. She stood in our living room, a corset pushing her breasts almost to the latitude of her shoulders.
“What does Meredith think about all this?” I asked.
“I haven’t told her,” Janice answered.
I’d just gotten out of the shower, the apartment steamy and shampoo-smelling.
“When we were in Tucson,” Janice said, “at a barbecue of a friend of a friend, one of the guests, an older dyke—hot in a weathered sort of way—she and I struck up a conversation. Within minutes, Meredith told me we had to leave. She didn’t talk to me for almost a day.”
“Because of the old lady?”
“A hot old lady,” Janice added.
“So you’re not telling her.”
“For now,” Janice said, then asked if I thought less of her.
“Never,” I said.
I kissed her forehead. My damp hair brushed against hers.
For Christmas—Philip and Nicola off to a Caribbean island—I stayed with the dogs. As they were leaving, Philip handed me an envelope. There was a tasteful card inside, also fifteen hundred dollars. I was so flustered I forced the dogs to take a walk in the rain. As we meandered through the neighborhood, I smoked and passed expensive stores, glad the wet dogs kept me from going inside.
Janice and Meredith came over the next day, guffawing as they explored each room. As Janice and I lay on Philip and Nicola’s bed, Meredith told us how much each piece of art on the walls might go for.
“You suggesting we rob them?” I asked.
“Just informational,” Meredith said, and we went onto the back patio to smoke.
We scoured the city for a place still selling trees and found Philip and Nicola’s decorations in a closet. Janice made us bitter cocktails as we trimmed the tree while Meredith told us about the job she’d just gotten for the broadcast of the Times Square New Year’s Eve show, with its combination of long hours and ludicrously good money.
“I still don’t know what a gaffer does,” I said.
“Because you don’t listen,” Meredith told me.
The dogs’ tails shook the tree’s branches.
Janice and Meredith slept in Philip and Nicola’s room. In the morning, we made eggs with lox, drank mimosas with their champagne. I took out the cash Philip had given me and spread it out on the counter one large bill at a time. “Our job is to spend this,” I said.
“Jesus, sugar,” Janice said. Meredith counted it once, again.
I called a French restaurant Nicola raved about, asked if they could squeeze us in for lunch. When I mentioned the gallery, the man on the phone paused, answered that he could seat us at two.
In Philip and Nicola’s closet, we cobbled together outfits. Over her dress, Janice put on one of Philip’s cashmere sweaters. She lined one arm with the beaded bracelets Nicola had from his brief dalliance with Buddhism. Meredith chose a black blazer. I went back to Nicola’s aspirational stash and picked a pair of gray pants, a white shirt with heavy cuff links. When the three of us were ready, we stood in front of the closet’s large mirror. I wished for a camera, then changed my mind, as it would miss exactly what was alive between the three of us then, showing instead our blemished skin and half-closed eyes, the woozy look on my face when I’m happy.
In a cab after lunch we passed a store I’d admired while walking the dogs, regal-looking coats in its window. I asked the driver to stop, told Janice and Meredith I needed help picking out a present.
“For who?” Janice asked.
“For me,” I said.
The salesperson greeted us coolly, though soon she decided we were worth her while, and swaddled us in her attention.
“This one needs a new coat,” Meredith said.
I tried on coats that were simultaneously soft and sturdy. One had square shoulders, another a repetition of delicate buttons. As the salesperson helped me into a fourth one, the idea of spending several hundred dollars grew vulgar and dumb. But each time I eyed the door, I asked to try on another and reminded myself that I had money now.
The coat I settled on was dark and plaid. I paid, peeling bills from their bundle as if it were a delicate piece of fruit.
That night we smoked weed and went to a Broadway show. Its songs were cheesy, the dialogue stilted, but the tap dancing brought us to our feet. We took a cab to a club after and danced in sweaty celebration until I remembered the dogs and returned home to walk them.
New Year’s Eve was coming. Along with it, rumors about the next terrorist attack: subway cars exploding just as one year switched to the next, Times Square—where Meredith would be—an ideal target. Janice began a campaign to get Meredith to quit her job, though after their cross-country trek, neither of them had any money. There were other jobs, Janice kept saying. Meredith’s annoyance accumulated in tandem with Janice’s worry. I wanted our easiness back, to smooth out this sudden patch of rough air, so I told them we should have a New Year’s Eve dinner. Janice paused at the mention of a party, her ragtag friends at the house drinking expensive booze and sitting on luxurious furniture. She put a hand on my cheek, said, “That could be just the thing.” Meredith mouthed thank you in my direction.
Janice invited ten friends. Many of them had friends they wanted to bring. Our guest list ballooned to seventeen.
We bought steaks and champagne and oysters, the money from Philip whittled down to scraps. Janice wore one of her corsets along with a pair of Philip’s dress pants. I put on one of Nicola’s suits, forgoing a shirt under the blazer.
With unannounced friends in tow, soon more than two dozen people crowded the house’s main floor. They ate canapés, drank martinis. The dogs wound through the crowd, scavenging for food scraps and attention.
People smoked in the backyard, bringing bursts of cold back in with them. While I was out there, Janice’s friend Aisha dropped a cigarette. Its tip singed a small hole into the blazer I had on. I convinced myself that Nicola wouldn’t notice and went to check on Janice. She kept the New Year’s Eve broadcast on, but muted. The screen toggled between Dick Clark and bands playing with manic glee and the crowd caged together, red-faced from cold or booze or both.
Someone spilled a drink, though it landed on the kitchen’s hardwood. A different guest broke a glass and an impulse to end the party right then flooded me. But Janice walked through the crowd with childlike exuberance, her joy so strong that it infected me and her two friends arranging lines of coke on the kitchen counter and the trio of women making out on the sofa where Philip often sat reading the paper.
At midnight we gathered around the still-muted television. The ball fell, slow and cumbersome and underwhelming, and confetti covered the crowd. Janice squeezed my hand. Muted, the cheering on TV passed for wild panic. But a minute passed with no explosion. Five more and Janice’s grip loosened.
“We did it,” she said, and gave me a belated New Year’s kiss.
Giddy with relief, Janice announced that she’d perform the burlesque she’d been learning. Chair legs scraped as we dragged furniture out of the way. Someone lit a cigarette. I swallowed the impulse to scold them. As a bottle of champagne was opened and foam fountained to the floor, catastrophe loomed closer. But then Janice’s friend Jeffrey, whom I’d briefly slept with, arrived. He moved his cold hands under my blazer and across my bare torso. I kissed him, lying as I said, “I was hoping you’d show.”
Janice closed the pocket doors separating the living and dining rooms. When we reopened them, old-time jazz music played, and Janice stood wearing a corset and bottoms that barely covered her ass. She walked to the beat, turned a bentwood chair backward and sat on it, legs splayed. She pressed the balls of her feet on the downbeat, her heels next. With the tiniest pulse of her hips, Janice inched the chair forward.
The song’s brassy intro gave way to a woman singing about a man who didn’t know what he had, wouldn’t have it much longer. Janice yanked off her corset, revealing a small sequined bra. She slammed her heels down, dropping with a grunt as the singer sang, “Gone.”
“Gone,” Janice repeated in a snorted whisper.
“Gone,” the singer sang again, this time holding the note, her voice a deep-timbred bell. Janice rose to her feet. Never before had going from sitting to standing felt to me like a reckoning. Her hips tipped. She spun around and her bra was gone, her tasseled pasties spinning to the rhythm. A friend snapped Polaroids of Janice as she shimmied, as she climbed onto the chair.
The performance’s end was met with a standing ovation from the humans, yips from the dogs, tears from me at how Janice could transform a room’s weather. We went outside for cigarettes, came in and made pitchers of margaritas and Moscow mules. Janice stayed in her costume until she got too cold.
When Meredith arrived a few hours later, Janice kept saying, “She’s here!” until Meredith told her that we all knew, that she could stop saying it now. And when Jeffrey lingered, I said to him, “Why don’t I show you to my room,” so we went there and I remembered why I’d liked sleeping with him, also how shockingly loud he got during sex (he told me once how his neighbors had complained about his sex noise so much that his lease hadn’t been renewed).
The next morning, Janice, Meredith, and I cleaned the house and disassembled the tree. When Meredith was in the shower, Janice asked me not to mention her performance the night before. I hooked my pinkie in hers. Then they left. I missed them right away, the quiet so disconcerting that I was glad for the distraction of the dogs and the relatively warm weather.
New Year’s Day dragged by. I called my mom in Arizona. She asked if I was one of the people she’d seen crowded in the cold the night before just for a moment on television. When I told her I’d never do such a thing, she said, “When did you turn into such a snob?” and I felt like I couldn’t win. I tried my father, too, but got his machine. He and June were likely at church, swaying in holy thanks for having made it through the year, unlike the people Philip and I had watched on television a few months before, deciding to jump because at least they’d make quick work of it, or at least, for their last moments, they’d breathe cleaner air.
Philip returned the next night, not looking tanned or rested. On his knees, he accepted the dogs’ frenetic attention.
“Where’s your other half?” I asked.
“Happy New Year,” Philip said. Dog tongues flagged toward him. “I told Nicola I needed to be alone for a while.”
The dogs examined Philip’s suitcase with a series of quick, audible sniffs. I wasn’t sure whether to offer congratulations or condolences.
“In Germany, you asked why I stayed with him,” Philip said. “No one’s asked me that before.”
“That’s just because I don’t know any better.”
I showed him the mail I’d collected, the list of phone messages, and told him I’d get out of his hair.
“Have a drink with me,” Philip said. “A toast to a new year.”
In the kitchen, Philip watched me make martinis. It felt good to be watched by him.
“So it’s over?” I asked.
Philip shrugged, the windows of neighboring buildings a checkerboard of light.
“I heard how Pavel treated you,” he said.
“Pavel was fine.”
Philip’s eyebrows rose.
“The paintings he did of you are quite good,” he said.
“Nicola said the same thing. When I thanked him for the compliment, he reminded me that I hadn’t painted them.”
“Such a catty one, that man.”
I asked how they’d met. He answered with the story of a lover who’d died in the early years of the plague, Philip certain he had it, too, getting tested constantly, enforcing celibacy until desire’s pull grew too strong and he met Nicola.
“I have a strange favor to ask,” Philip said.
“The stranger the better.”
“Would you stay in the guest room tonight? I think I’ll sleep better that way.”
Philip reddened for the first time since I’d known him, his question now somehow more delicate than me in the bathroom as he got sick, or holding him up in the shower. He hooked a finger into his drink to exhume an olive.
“Happy to,” I said. “Your sheets are nicer than mine anyway.”
Philip nodded, as if in vehement agreement, then walked upstairs. I stayed up late, reading magazines, scrolling through the television, in case he came back down.
A few days later, Philip asked that I stop by the gallery. On his office wall hung a half dozen me’s. Some stared. Some looked away, the dick in the naked one more substantial than its inspiration.
“Look at you,” Philip said, his delight so large he looked infirm.
“I just had to lie there, or stand very still.”
“Shut up,” Philip said, then laughed and asked Andrew to move them around so one of me standing was next to another where I was lying down. Andrew handled the paintings with pregnant care; he told me how much he liked them.
“I didn’t paint them!” I reminded him.
“Which one should we bring home?” Philip asked.
We settled on one of me in an old T-shirt. Andrew said he’d have one of the art handlers bring it to the house, though it was small enough to fit under my arm, then left.
“I’m taking us out to celebrate,” Philip said, again with an expression of geriatric joy. For a moment I worried that he’d been right back in Germany: Dementia was coming to claim him. But then his face shifted, and everything wise and discerning reasserted itself.
We went to a place on the water in Brooklyn where we ate scallops and delicate chicken livers, Manhattan our starry backdrop.
I stayed at Philip’s that night, too. The next night I went home, but when I got to Philip’s the next morning I could tell he’d slept badly, so I returned to my apartment to gather a larger bag of clothes.
Philip got me to watch movies with subtitles. I got him to watch Unsolved Mysteries. He claimed to hate it, though for days he’d ask me about a particular cold case, making speculations as to who might have done what to whom. We didn’t talk about Nicola at all.
We went to a gay dive bar, its wall-length mirror cloudy from decades of cigarette smoke. With its low ceiling and small windows, it felt like a basement. Foam spilled from gashes in the vinyl stools. After a few martinis, Philip pointed to a man at the far end of the bar.
“I think you have an admirer,” he said.
I looked up and saw the man turn away, pleased that he’d been caught. He had an impish smile, dark scruff.
A minute later, Philip kissed my cheek, wished me a good night, and whispered, “You should have him over.”
I caught his eye to see if he was joking, but his expression stayed serious, a reminder in it about seeing things and taking them.
“I was worried that old man was your boyfriend,” the man said, moving to the stool Philip had just left. The bartender shook a cocktail shaker. Tina Turner rasped on the jukebox.
“A friend without the boy,” I said.
I asked what he was drinking and bought us a round. His sweet smile widened, his hand rested on and warmed my back.
When we left an hour later, I took him to Philip’s.
“You live here?” he asked.
“At the moment,” I said, walking him up the stairs. Philip’s room was dark. On the third floor, a wrinkle of light showed under the office door across from my room. The man and I stumbled out of our clothes. I left the door partly open.
When the man paused, I worried he’d changed his mind. But he was looking at the wall.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“A painting.”
“But it’s you, yes?”
“I guess it is,” I said, then dropped to my knees, felt his excitement gather as I pressed my mouth against his zipper.
The man left. I went to the kitchen in just boxer shorts to chug a glass of water, saw my compact arms in the window’s reflection, the hair between my nipples that Pavel made more substantial in one painting, removed altogether in another. A gentle creaking sounded on the stairs.
“He’s gone,” I said.
Philip appeared in pajamas and a robe, like a TV grandpa.
“You’re half naked,” he said.
“Was all naked five minutes ago. Anyway, you’ve seen the whole shebang before.”
“A lovely shebang,” he said, then looked embarrassed. “God, I’ve become one of those old men.”
“I don’t mind.”
Philip’s shoulders and brow fell in defeated choreography. I put the kettle on. He seemed to be moving farther away from me when I wanted the opposite, so I said, “That guy from your first dinner party. He was the lecherous one.”
“Marcus,” Philip said.
“You’re different.”
“How?”
Though I often lied or chose vagueness, I wanted the opposite then, so I said, “I like it when you look at me. Like how Pavel did when he was painting. Trying to catch every delicate detail.” I turned back to my reflection, saw pride in how I’d begun to hold my shoulders. The floor was cool against my feet. Philip smiled, relieved, and said, “Catching every detail, yes.”
We made tea and drank it in the living room with the television on. It was the middle of the night, so we settled on an old sitcom Philip claimed he’d never seen, though he recognized one of the actresses from when she’d once come into the gallery to haggle over a painting. As the show went on, with its puns and pratfalls, Philip kept saying, “I don’t know why this is funny,” though his laugh slipped out in percussive darts that woke up the dogs.
“You had fun?” Philip asked, looking at the television rather than me.
“That man knew what he was doing,” I said. “With his mouth and dick alike.”
“Nice when they have expertise.”
“He was loud toward the end. Couldn’t seem to get enough of my nipples either.”
“I heard that,” Philip said. “Not that I was listening.”
Characters on TV argued. A laugh track rose in chortling waves.
“I mean,” I went on, “they kind of hurt now.”
I was shirtless still and turned my chest toward Philip. He looked quickly, agreed the man had done a number on them, then got up and came back with two whiskeys.
We clinked glasses. Antics unspooled on television, and I grew tired in the way I did as a child, knowing sleep would soon overwhelm me.
I woke up on the sofa in the morning, wrapped in a blanket. Philip lay asleep on the other sofa, his breath deep and rattling.
I was making coffee and feeding the dogs, the blanket caping my shoulders, when Philip found me in the kitchen. I waited for his shyness or reserve, but he asked if I’d gotten that man’s number the night before.
“You want to call him?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“But it sounded as if you had fun,” he said. “That’s all I was asking about. More fun.”
I got dressed and walked the dogs and hoped Nicola wouldn’t come back, though of course he would, if only to get more of his clothes.