One night, I told Janice I’d never swum in the ocean. The next morning, we were on a train to the Rockaways, bathing suits under our clothes. Meredith came, too, as a witness.
“Witness to what?” I asked.
“Your stupidity,” Meredith answered, though she was giddy and kept laughing.
A man sitting across from us held himself with Philip’s same exacting posture, a reminder of their radio silence since that dinner weeks before, except for one day, when I’d written in their dog notebook that Alice had had a strange bowel movement, and one of them had written back, noted.
The train moved aboveground through two-story neighborhoods that looked more Midwest than New York. Then came the Atlantic, so vast and shimmering that I must have made a face.
“Second thoughts?” Meredith asked.
“Only first thoughts here,” I said.
At the beach, blowing sand stung our ankles and gulls hovered in the wind. The opaque outline of freighters drifted on the horizon.
Janice and I undressed. I wore a Speedo she’d recently encouraged me to buy, so small it felt obscene to wear in public, though our only company was a group of wet-suit-clad surfers. Janice had on a polka-dotted bikini, her skin pinked from the cold.
We ran toward the water. Waves flopped onto the beach with wet heft. We were in to our thighs, the cold so acute it burned. A wave gathered, and Janice dove under, but I hesitated and its muscle knocked me down anyway, pinning me to the sandy ocean floor. I was certain I was done for, but as I stumbled to my feet I saw that the water didn’t even reach my waist. I paddled out to where Janice lay in a back float.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been this cold,” I said.
“You’re from Minnesota,” Janice answered.
“The cold there is different.”
“Different how?”
“Not wet,” I said.
Janice wrapped her arms around me. I imagined her as a mother one day, her affection so regular her kids would think nothing of touch or eye contact. My father now reserved his love for the Lord; my mother treated affection like a recently expired food. Janice’s tattoo of a woman’s face was water-flecked so that it appeared to be sweating. She moved hair off my forehead, pointed to the next breaking wave. We dove under. I opened my eyes to watch the grace with which she cut through the greenish sea, the waves above us rising and crashing and rising again. I grabbed Janice’s leg, startling her, but then she saw me, bubbles boiling from her mouth, and in one seamless move yanked my Speedo down, swimming away with it in her left hand.
I was asleep when the phone rang. Staggering to answer it, I saw that it wasn’t yet seven in the morning. A pause followed my grumbled hello. Then Philip said, “It seems I’ve woken you, young man.”
Old man, I thought, peevish at his early call. But I told him it was good to hear from him.
“We have to head to London,” Philip said. “A last-minute thing.”
“Have a nice trip,” I answered.
“Thank you. But the dogs.”
“I can still walk them.”
“Could you come now? We need you to stay with them, if you’re able. It’s no notice at all, I know. Nicola was meant to ask you.”
It was a Sunday, and I’d been thrilled to sleep in. But Philip’s call, the chance to be useful while staying at their house was thrilling, too, so I threw clothes into my bag and got onto the subway.
The dogs skittered from room to room. One of them—I still got them mixed up when they were in motion—circled the luggage.
“Gordon,” Philip said. He wore sunglasses and a gray sweater. A watch gleamed on his wrist. “You’re too good. Nicola!” he called up the stairs.
A silence settled in that I wanted to shrug off, so I said, “I’m sorry that, at your dinner a few weeks ago, I let that Marcus fellow kiss me.”
“When Marcus has something in mind,” Philip replied. He patted his pockets, found what he was looking for. His rising eyebrows made it clear he had more to say. “Nicola told me, too, that you’d perhaps had one too many.”
“I was nervous.”
As I knelt down to accept the dog’s eager affection, I sensed Philip was looking at me. Part of me wanted to tell him that the sunglasses made his looking obvious, also secretive. But I wanted that attention, to pretend I was so involved with the dogs that I didn’t notice my T-shirt riding up or the sunlight brightening my arms. There was a heightened quality to being noticed that I coveted. I moved my fingers down Lola’s back, felt Philip follow the path of my hand. His face inched downward as I unknotted my sneaker’s laces.
The doorbell rang, and Nicola rushed down the stairs, also wearing sunglasses. I wondered if this was a rich-person thing.
“The farmer here to save us,” he said, kissing my cheeks before turning toward the door.
“I can get the luggage,” I said.
“No need, lovely Gordon,” Nicola answered.
A moment later, the driver came in, grabbed the bags, and wished me a good day.
After Philip and Nicola left, the dogs and I went on an epic walk. We left the Village and passed their gallery in Chelsea, where a series of burnt-looking sculptures was on display. The dogs drank from a clogged gutter. They stopped in the middle of the sidewalk to take endless, hissing pees. Back at the house, I stood in a front window, hoping passing people might get a glimpse of me.
I called Janice to share the luck of my last-minute gig.
“So you’re not coming,” she said.
“Not at the moment, no,” I answered, then remembered our plan to drive upstate to an outdoor sculpture park that afternoon. We were going to bring weed and a picnic and play CDs she and I loved, though Meredith hated them.
“I’m getting paid stupid money to stay with the dogs,” I said.
“That’s stupid,” Janice answered.
Annoyance tightened her voice. I thought of the nights she’d stayed at Meredith’s rather than our apartment, trying to tally her neglect and throw it back at her.
“We can go some other time,” I said.
“Something else?” she asked.
“What’s that?”
“You called to say something else?”
“I just wanted to tell you I can’t go today,” I said, though I hadn’t remembered our plan.
I waited for Janice to say more. When she didn’t, I said, “So I’ll see you,” and hung up.
I turned on the radio, then the television, but my unease at Janice’s anger held on. I watched a movie with no recollection of its plot, went on a run in Nicola’s exercise clothes, going so far uptown that my knees began to throb and I had to take the subway back. I made pasta with sauce whose label had not a word of English, then wandered to a bar, where I finally found distraction in a man with a Clark Kent jawline. I looked over. He looked back, giving me the attention I always wanted then, still do, I suppose. The man introduced himself. He leaned in as we talked, our banter taking on the urgent weight of secrets.
“We should go somewhere,” the man said.
“My place isn’t far,” I answered.
He picked up my jacket and his so I had to follow him.
Once at Philip and Nicola’s, though, the man turned mean. I often liked a bit of aggression, though his carried no playful subtext. He pulled my arm. I told him it hurt, but his tight grip stayed. When he asked how I managed to own such a place, I answered that I was house-sitting and he said, with a snide expression that made him both handsomer and more terrifying, “So you’re the butler” and threw his weight against me. He pinned my wrists down, fucked me roughly so that I grimaced, then looked at me like the grimacing was my fault. He came and collapsed on me with the aggressive exuberance of a football tackle, got dressed shortly after.
“Butler,” he said, and slid into his shoes.
I smiled, then wondered if my smile was part of the problem, that I wanted roughness but was also afraid of it, that I needed to tell people about this man who’d been terrible to me, not mentioning that terrible was what I’d asked for.
“Make sure the door closes behind you,” I said.
He left it open and walked down the sidewalk without turning around.
The next few nights, I stayed in. I tried on Nicola’s expensive sweaters, ate sculptural pieces of chocolate, and found it all boring. I wondered if wealth was a kind of deadening, though when I remembered how little I had in my bank account and the heaviness that had plagued me back in Bay Ridge, I grew angry at my easy forgetting. Once, at two in the morning, I made the dogs walk to the river with me where men used to fuck in droves, though now it was just people sleeping on benches and rats rattling through a garbage can and an old man with headphones on, his music so loud that, as he passed, I heard what sounded like a symphony.
I missed Janice. When I got back to Philip and Nicola’s, I called our apartment. The machine picked up. “Just saying hello,” I said. When she eventually heard the message, she’d realize it was from the middle of the night. I hoped she’d know that me calling late like that was my version of an apology.
On my last night of dog-sitting (though I didn’t know it was my last night then), Janice finally called.
“How are your dogs?” she asked, in her regular, amused fashion.
“They don’t let me smoke inside either,” I said.
“Those bitches.”
“Literally.”
I teared up at the return of our easy rhythm. One of the dogs, on the couch it wasn’t meant to occupy, looked at me with risen ears.
“You should leave those bitches and come to a party with us,” Janice said.
“When?”
“In three hours.”
“A party sounds nice,” I said, and went to Nicola’s closet to find something to wear.
The party was in a warehouse basement in a Brooklyn neighborhood even more abandoned-looking than Gowanus. Rusting steel beams held up the ceiling, its walls damp and cool. Colored lights warmed certain corners, the rest of the place washed in shadow. When Janice saw me, she said my name with a force that ousted the music and competing conversations.
“You came,” she said.
“I said I would,” I answered. Doubt flashed across her face. But she took my hand and said there were drinks. We moved through the party’s swarm of bodies to find them.
A few hours later, when I told Janice I had to leave, her sharpness returned. Anyone’s displeasure seemed to me a hair’s breadth from injury then, so I told her another hour wouldn’t hurt, and she took me to a bathroom to do coke. As two in the morning came and I told Janice I was heading out for real, she pointed to a pair of thin, weary-looking men, with cheekbones and postures that made me think they were Russian.
“Have you talked to Matthew and Dennis?” she asked.
“I’ve been with you, like, the entire night,” I said.
“They told me you’re wildly fuckable.”
I told Janice to bring me over.
Matthew and Dennis and I exchanged obvious observations about the party and its people. I waited for our conversation to peter out, but each time I made a C+ joke, they laughed and touched my shoulder. As their interest tightened, my awkwardness fell away and I began to speak with audacious authority. When they whispered to each other, I said, “Deciding who’s going to ask me to go home with you?” Theirs was a confidence I’d seen for so long as a foreign language. But my closeness to it now, the sense that they wanted me, made me wonder if it was less about a test to pass and rather a feeling to inhabit.
“Actually,” Matthew said, “we were whispering about what we want to do to you.”
The three of us found a cab from God knows where. In its back seat, one of them kissed my throat. The other squeezed my dick through my jeans. When the driver told us to knock it off, we groped one another more furiously.
Leaving their apartment a few hours later, my dog worries returned. They might be afraid, might have answered my neglect by pissing on an expensive carpet. I had money for a cab, but no cab appeared. So I walked, and the havoc the dogs had likely wreaked ballooned to destroyed cushions and curls of tart vomit, vases broken into several sharp pieces. Whenever a car passed, I hoped it was a cab, though it never was, though once the people inside a car rolled down their windows and asked me what I was staring at. I gave them a thumbs-up and turned a corner.
Back at the house, the dogs jumped and circled me, shivering as I picked up their leashes. But before I could get them outside, one, then the other, peed across the floor. I ran for paper towels, annoyed at their overactive bladders, relieved that their piss had only marred the hardwood.
I hadn’t eaten dinner, so I heated up leftover Thai food. Next, I ate a pint of ice cream, then finished with a pungent wedge of cheese, its price tag so absurd that, as a bite oozed down my throat, I said to the dogs, “That was probably a four-dollar swallow.”
Shortly after, I threw up, then passed out on the sofa. I woke up late the next morning to the dogs’ tongues dampening my face and ankles. My outfit from the night before lay crumpled across the floor.
The dogs and I had just come back from a walk when I saw a message blinking on the machine. As I pressed play, Philip’s tired baritone filled the room.
“Gordon, we’ve just landed,” he said. “We will see you soon.”
I sped through the house, collecting the plates and mugs and clothes I’d left everywhere. Each car outside I assumed was theirs. Each clicking branch the front door opening. As I stuffed sheets into the washing machine, I thought I’d throw up again, but the feeling passed. The phone rang. Hoping it was Philip with news of traffic or construction, I answered. It was my father.
“Thought you were living at that other number,” he said.
“Mostly, I am,” I answered.
“Gordon,” he said, a dripping pity in his voice I had no interest in.
“This is where I work.”
“Your girlfriend said you were staying there, with some men.”
“You know she isn’t my girlfriend,” I said.
He sighed. I used to be expert in his sadness, his happiness, too, especially when it spun wild. But Philip and Nicola would be back any minute, and I was angry at Janice for giving Dad this number, at him for using it.
“You can’t,” I said. Exhaustion amplified my anger. “You can’t just come and go.”
“I’m not,” Dad said with a self-satisfaction that allowed me to forget how I’d once felt close to him, or rather a sense of closeness that was right around a corner, a conversation in another room whose words I couldn’t quite make out. “I’m just worried about you.”
I answered that I’d outgrown being worried about, though I wanted exactly that, people up at night wondering about my finances and feelings. I told Dad I’d call him soon.
A cab pulled up outside. A woman from across the street—she had an ancient, foggy-eyed cocker spaniel—tottered out of it. I made coffee, and bought flowers at a nearby deli, arranging them in a vase. I was putting away glasses when the front door unlocked. The dogs let loose a series of tandem barks. Nicola saw the flowers and coffee and looked at me like I was a precious mineral. I wanted to be that. Wanted, too, not to need his look to authenticate my value.
“Young man,” Philip said.
“Stay and have coffee with us,” Nicola added.
Philip’s brow dropped, darkening his look of tired goodwill.
“You need to settle in,” I said.
I kissed each of them on the lips, wondered why I’d done it, and left.
At home, I flopped onto my air mattress and fell asleep. I woke up hours later to darkness outside and the ringing phone.
“Why am I so popular?” I mumbled, though even in jest that notion thrilled me. Philip said hello before I had the chance to.
“Did I wake you again?” he asked. “We have a good doctor. You could go to him for your sleep problem.”
I assured him there was no problem. He asked if I could stop by in the morning. “Before your other dogs.”
Worry wound through me. I might have broken something, missed a security camera that showed them the company I’d kept. Or my father had called again, asking what I really did for them.
“We have a proposition,” Philip said. “Though I think young people use that word in a more carnal way than is my intention.”
I asked him what time. He told me. On the notepad next to our phone, Janice had written: Your Dad called 5x.
I walked to the bar, hoping to find Janice there, to call her out for having shared Philip and Nicola’s number. But when I arrived and saw her there, all my imagined chidings dropped to the floor. Janice handed me a drink.
“Queer beer,” I said.
“Sometimes I think you only like me because I serve you,” Janice answered.
She smiled, though I sensed its reluctance, trust’s frayed edge.
“I’ll happily serve you,” I said.
“What happened?” she asked. “Last night, I mean.”
I told Janice about Matthew and Dennis, amplifying the already considerable length of Dennis’s dick to claim it had probed previously unexamined parts of me.
“Like a deep-sea explorer,” Janice said.
“Cock Cousteau,” I said.
Janice laughed and topped off my beer.
It got late, the bar about to close. Janice asked if I wanted to wait for her.
“Always,” I answered, and hoped that was true.
Janice moved her finger across the scar on my forehead. “You never told me about this.”
“My father,” I said.
Her attention sharpened, so serious it startled me.
“He didn’t like hit me or anything, but that scar, he’s the reason.”
“Also the reason you don’t answer his messages?”
There was no single event to point to, no hinge between before and after, though when I tell people about him, it’s sometimes easiest to cite the accident or his unswerving devotion to the Lord rather than what was truer, that like an artery’s blockage, our end was an accumulation.
“Yes and no,” I answered.
“Very specific,” Janice said.
But there was no easy answer to give. I could tell her that my father confounded me, that in moments I’d loved him with a fierceness my young self didn’t know what to do with, that I’d been ashamed of him with that same wild fire, and learned early how loving someone meant to also see the ways they were pathetic and small.
As we finished cleaning the bar and Janice clicked off the lights, I hoped what she and I had would return without her anger’s bitter aftertaste. In the years since, Janice is the person I’ve become closest to, though we live far apart now and don’t have to share the stultifying slog of the day-to-day. Still there are moments when she’s failed me with a force I’m undone by, and I hate to consider the ways I’ve surely done the same to her. Years after we’d lived together, when Janice and her wife had decided to try for kids, she mentioned casually that they were going to use the sperm of her wife’s dear friend. I’d called to report on a mediocre date but cut the story short, sure Alex and Janice had ruled me out, that they saw me as too caustic and strange, too easily wooed by self-pity. I didn’t call her again for weeks. When Janice reached out, she acted as if everything were normal. Perhaps that was easier, just as it seemed easier for me to nurse my hurt rather than decide whether I wanted someone with my genes out in the world, scared and mean and miserly in the way I can be, though I try and remind myself that I also experience moments, even now, of such joy that I cry or laugh or have to walk for hours to manage its electricity.
Janice double-checked the locks on the bar’s front door.
“I said yes and no before, because that’s the only way I can answer,” I said.
“I know, Gordon,” Janice said, and hailed a cab though we only lived a few blocks away. The cabdriver asked why we didn’t just walk. Janice repeated our address, then tapped on the plexiglass barrier. The driver pulled out onto Fourth Avenue, moved neck and neck with the handful of other cabs taking people home.