Leif and I hung out with Dee and Frank exactly once. Dee suggested we go bowling and we did. Frank was big into bowling; he had his own ball, which he carried in a special leather bag, and his own shoes, which he shined himself. He knew the owner, so we got to play for free. My shoes pinched, and Leif sucked down warm light beer that turned his mood sour very fast. Dee bowled strikes consistently. She was very good, and Frank took credit for that. While Dee lined herself up in front of our lane, the ball close to her chest, Frank turned to Leif. “So, what’s your story, man?”
Leif narrowed his eyes and pretended intense interest in Dee’s immaculate form. “Story?” he repeated.
“Yeah. The whole nine yards. What do you do? What makes you tick?”
I felt suddenly I was in a play, but I’d not been given the script for this scene.
Leif sipped his beer. “I’m a poet,” he said. It was like the whole bowling alley heard and cringed. Frank looked like Leif had admitted he worked for the IRS.
“Yeah? What’s that like?” Frank asked.
Leif turned back toward me for help. I shrugged and leaped up. It was my turn.
“Agony, Frank. It’s agony,” Leif said. “What about you?”
“I’m a firefighter. In training, actually.”
Frank tilted his chin toward the ceiling. Dee came back to us. She grinned and I leaned in close. “Jesus, Dee. Are you sweating?”
She laughed and dramatically wiped a bead of sweat from her forehead. “Frank takes this seriously.”
“Noted,” I said. I put my sweaty palms under the stream of cool air, which blew from the machine that returned our balls. I chose a deep maroon one, threw two gutter balls, and slunk back to my seat. Leif rubbed my shoulder and I tossed his hand off. He went to get another beer. Frank stood up and offered his hand to me. I stared at it.
“Come on,” he said. “I can give you some pointers.”
I shook my head. “I’ll study from here,” I told him.
“Go on, Peg,” Dee said. “He’s a great teacher.”
Frank’s face was sweaty and eager. He was handsome in a stiff way; he reminded me of one of those dickless Renaissance statues. I nodded. “Okay,” I told him. He grinned like he’d just won the fucking lottery. I followed him to the lane. “I’ll ruin your impeccable score, though,” I teased.
Frank didn’t take it as a joke; he just nodded grimly. He set his body up slowly so I could see everything. He had that dramatic poised form: His right leg ended up crossed behind his left; he followed through. He bowled a strike. “See?” he asked. He was too close and I took a step back. “Now you.”
I’d brought my maroon ball and I held it up against my chest. Frank stepped back toward me. He took my elbow in his hands, moved my body a little here, a little there; I could smell his Old Spice, which made me feel sick. He breathed on my neck not inconspicuously, and I thought, Fuck this. I dropped the ball and it rolled, painfully slow, toward the pins. Near the end of the lane, it careened into the gutter and stayed there. A buzzer sounded and a young man came to retrieve my ball, and the machine wiped the pins away and then began to set them back up again. I walked back to the chairs and sat next to Dee, whose face was trained on the grainy television near the bar. She hadn’t seen Frank’s lesson.
The TV was tuned to WTMJ. An anchor in a tight bright pink dress was interviewing a conservative radio talk show host. The segment’s headline scrolled across the bottom of the screen: “Local WISN-AM Talk Show Host Asks, Should Dentists Be Required to Treat AIDS Patients?” What we have here is a group of people who are responsible for their conditions. Ninety-five percent of people with HIV are personally responsible for their infection and should not complain. Look, if you’re a person who has anal sex with gay males and uses IV drugs, if this is your lifestyle, you’re to blame.
I wished there were a mute button. The anchor asked the talk show host about allegations that his words were harmful, even a serious threat to public health. He said he was only using “uncommon common sense.”
Dee shook her head. “Why do they give these people a platform?” she asked.
“Because they know we’ll watch it,” I said. She nodded.
It was Leif’s turn. It was obvious to me he was taking all of this much too seriously in an attempt to match Frank’s fervor. Frank came back from the bar and sat between Dee and me; my left thigh touched his right. He reached his long arms behind us and brushed my shoulder with his fingertips.
“What are you guys talking about?” Frank asked.
“The news,” Dee said. She gestured toward the TV, where the radio host was still talking and the headline still scrolled. Frank’s eyes narrowed and then he laughed.
“Who gives a shit about a bunch of fags,” he said. Leif was poised to release his ball, but there was a hiccup in his elbow. The word shook him. I had a memory of the cops’ blinding lights as we all exited the bar in Walker’s Point that night. The ball fell heavy from Leif’s hands, bounced once, and then picked up momentum near the end of the lane. I think we were all surprised to see it was a strike. Leif turned back to us before the ball hit the pins, though. Dee clapped her hands together; I saw her baby self for a split second, and it made my heart ache.
“What did you just say?” Leif asked.
Frank laughed. I stood up.
“You’ve got another ball there,” Frank said. He motioned at the lanes behind Leif.
“Stand up,” Leif said.
And Frank did and Leif punched him in the nose so he fell back into the seat. Dee put her hands in her hair but didn’t make any noise.
“And don’t you ever fucking touch Peg. Understood?”
Frank said nothing, but he scrambled to get out of the seat and on his feet. When he tried to move toward Leif, Dee grabbed his arm. He threw her off and she stumbled back, surprised. A hard knot formed in the pit of my stomach. She refused to make eye contact with me. A large man appeared from the back office and shouted something about the police.
“We’re going already,” Leif shouted at him. Leif and I grabbed our things and I didn’t look back at Dee.
“Was that entirely necessary?” I asked Leif in the car back to Riverwest. He was chain-smoking through a crack in the window, and the car was practically hotboxed.
“That guy’s a certified asshole.”
“You’re the one who hit him.”
“Maybe if you hadn’t let him grope you. I mean, Jesus H. Christ, woman.”
“Let him?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Fuck you.” I pressed my body against the passenger window. “You’re drunk.” Neither of us had the energy to sink our teeth into the argument. At a stoplight, steam from an open storm sewer coiled up and choked a lamppost. I wondered what Dee would do tonight, if Frank would be angry with her or if he’d be gentle with her, if he was even capable of gentleness. I felt everything then was make-believe, like we were playing these women who dated these kinds of men in one long, bad game of truth or dare. Everyone was choosing dare every time.
Later that night, Leif woke me as he climbed into bed. He made a C shape to cup his body around mine, slipped his arm underneath my neck. He took my earlobe into his mouth and sucked on it; I breathed slow and deep to mimic hard sleep, but still he put his hand between my legs to see if I was wet, and I was.
After that, I didn’t see much of Frank, but I saw signs of him all over Dee. Once, in her dorm room, she pulled off a tattered paint-stained tank top, and there was a nasty wound on the washboard of her ribs. She put on a flowered top and smoothed it over her lovely stomach, but I pulled the shirt back up and pointed. “What the hell’s that?”
Dee inspected the wound. “Frank’s dog bit me.”
I raised an eyebrow and let the shirt fall.
“He’s training his St. Bernard to attack, but the dog got confused,” Dee said. She shrugged, like, No big deal.
“Why?” I asked her. I resisted the urge to pull her shirt back up, to get close to the wound, to try to fix it.
Dee gave me an incredulous look. “You heard about that woman who got raped: The guy climbed right in her first-floor bedroom window.”
I had heard. So had Leif and almost the entirety of Milwaukee. Leif had bought me a knife, and he’d taken to keeping his loaded gun next to our bed at night. Frank, apparently, had bought himself an attack dog. I repeated something our mother once told me: “Watch out for the overprotective types.”
Dee huffed. “Well, I like that he’s protective of me.”
I almost said, No, you don’t, but I stopped. I was reminded suddenly of our conversation about her sex life. She’d said the same thing then: But I like it.
“Maybe he could start by protecting you from his damn dog,” I told her.
Erik often showed up at our apartment in Riverwest late at night with a busted lip or a bruised eye; he said he got in fights at the clubs. We patched him up and fed him each time. He’d take long showers at our place, and sometimes I thought I heard him crying, but Leif said he was praying. I think we both knew he wasn’t the praying type, though. In late May, he showed up with a badly swollen lip, and Leif finally asked where the hell he was living. Erik said he’d been staying with his boyfriend, a man who owned a bar in Walker’s Point. Leif had a lot to say about this. Erik tried to use our own living situation as collateral.
“You live with Peg, though,” he said to Leif over one breakfast at our place.
“That’s different. We’ve been together for a while.”
Erik sounded like a baby, and Leif sounded like a dad.
“You’re so closed-minded,” Erik whined.
“Can’t you get something on your own?”
“I can’t afford something on my own.”
“Have you looked around here?”
I eyed the apartment. With morning sunlight, and the plants I’d started from seedlings growing on the windowsill, the place looked less depressing than when we’d moved in, but there was still so much dirt.
“I don’t want to live around here; these places are so crappy. Plus, people are always getting robbed here.” Erik turned to me. “No offense.”
I shrugged. “I haven’t been robbed,” I said.
“Yeah,” Leif said. “Also. Beggars can’t be choosers, man. Have you talked to Ma?”
Leif’s response stung me for some reason.
“What good will it do?” Erik asked.
“Fine. I can’t let you stay here anymore. I mean it. I’m sick of fielding Ma’s calls. I’m sick of lying for you. Do it your damn self.” Leif pushed away from the table and slammed the bedroom door. Upstairs, someone beat on the floor with a broomstick. The neighbors complained that Leif and I were loud. And they’d told the landlord they’d seen young men coming and going at all hours of the night. We had received a formal warning.
“What about you, huh?” Erik asked me. He grinned; he was as beautiful as his brother, and infinitely more charming, though I never would have told Leif.
I wrote my work number down on a napkin. “If you need me. But don’t tell Leif.”
I slid him the paper and he pocketed it.
Leif was true to his word. He didn’t let Erik back into our apartment, and he refused to answer his brother’s calls. I knew Erik was in and out of trouble. He liked to come by the library to see me after he’d been on benders. He’d show up strung out and sometimes still coked up, and I knew he hadn’t eaten in days. He worked fifteen hours a week, and I assumed he spent the meager money he made on drinks and drugs. His cheekbones grew sharp. Sometimes I’d buy us sandwiches or hot dogs, and we’d eat on the benches atop the bluff overlooking the lake. There was a historical reconstruction of the Denis Sullivan, complete with billowing white sails, anchored in the harbor that summer. From atop the bluff, the ship was a white speck in Lake Michigan’s gray froth.
“I heard people are paying five hundred bucks for five-course meals on that ship,” Erik said. “Can you believe it? They’ve turned the damn thing into a restaurant.”
He’d devoured his sandwich and was licking mustard from his fingers. I handed him my second half. He didn’t refuse.
“Sounds nauseating,” I said.
“I have to tell you a secret,” he said.
“Okay,” I said.
“I’m . . . homeless,” he said, spitting the word out like it was thick phlegm.
“Jesus,” I said, because I didn’t know what else he expected.
“Don’t tell Leif, please.”
“I can’t make any promises.”
He nodded. “What should I do?”
I thought about what I would do. “What about Dee?” I asked him.
He nodded. “I know,” he said. “But she lives in a damn closet.”
“I bet she’d make room.”
“It’s not just that,” he whispered.
I leaned closer to him. “What is it?”
“Frank,” he said. “He won’t have it.”
I bristled. “Well, fuck him.” Erik made a face, like, Don’t go there, so I backed off. “Look, I’ll talk to her, okay?”
He didn’t object. I wiped a bit of mustard from his chin. He put his head on my shoulder. I breathed in the smell of his hair, which smelled just like Leif’s.