Authors: Ericka Clay
THIRTEEN
Mitch
I can’t
say ”
I
love you” but I can say “yes” when Aaron invites me to his office. He's
an accountant for a mortgage firm and throws around strings of letters like
“PCAOB” and “GAAP” that have no real context for me, but I welcome them during
our rigid elevator ride.
“Calls?”
Aaron asks a
woman in a blue button down and I trail behind, overgrown puppy at his
heels. There’s a stain on the woman’s breast and when she follows my
gaze, her cheeks grow pink.
“No,
no calls,” she says. She picks at her mousy hair and mutters “dang it”
under her breath.
“A
milk cow,” Aaron says when we’re inside his office, the heavy wooden door shut
behind us. “They go and have babies, and I get to witness nature at
work. You’d think with all the powdered crap on the market today, they’d
stop making wet nurses of themselves.” I nod
along,
blink back an image of Elena with her hair down, short and neat above her
shoulders, Wren at her breast.
That sucking sound.
That quiet.
“Yeah,
so...will she think it’s weird?”
“Who, what?”
Aaron
places his bag behind his desk. I'm supposed to be finishing up a small
job at One Union National Plaza because Jimmy’s home sick with what he’s told
Pam is the flu and what he told me is some sort of “vicious cock killer” that
he’s sure that skank at the Cherokee gave him. But instead,
I'm in
the National Metropolitan bank tower a few
streets over from One Union National Plaza, watching Aaron loosen his
tie. It’s my birthday today and celebrating is an exercise in
lying. Elena thinks I'm working, then I’ll meet her at Wren’s therapist
for a family cry fest and then we’ll honor the day with knife throwing and
fried rice at Benihana.
And
Aaron thinks I'm leaving my wife.
“The woman out there, the one with the
leaky tits.
You know, do you think she thinks it’s weird I’m in here?” I whisper.
“Tricia?
We kind of have a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy at Willard. Tricia
don’t
ask, and I don’t tell.” My lip hurts because I’m
torturing it with my teeth.
“Ha,
relax. I told her you’re checking out the ceiling for water
damage.” He signals at a corner of the drop ceiling above our heads, and
there’s a stain there that looks like two half circles hashing it out.
“I
think the birthday boy needs a drink,” Aaron says. Thirty’s an age that’s
supposed to be ancient. And it does feel ancient to me after working in
the sun, carrying buckets up a ladder, crouching down on a hot roof, skin to
heat, blisters,
sweat
in my eye. Last night was
a hot bath and Elena rubbing icy hot into my shot muscles and useless spine,
and the menthol is lingering. So is the feel of Elena’s hands.
I’m
not leaving my wife.
Aaron
pours, and his eyes flicker. The fluorescent light dances across the
curve of his eyeball. I finally did it. Last night, no liquor, 3 a.m. and
stone cold sober. I called Aaron to tell him I was sorry.
That I love him.
That we’ll storm through life together.
Aaron
waits until the whisky burns through me because AA is just a thing my crazy
wife makes me do. And then he unbuttons the collar of my shirt and his
lips meet my collar bone.
“With
you, it’s not a want thing,” he says. He holds my hand and green eyes are
all I see. “It’s a need.
A forever thing.”
And his lips return to my neck, and I stare at the framed picture of Aaron
smiling with his parents, the parents who don’t know he’s gay and would be the
first to throw a stone if they ever found out.
Aaron
turns the door’s lock and there’s typing leaking through the small cracks where
door meets wall. Aaron places a finger at his lips, long, thin, trimmed
cuticle. No ring. And then I'm on my back, those two dirty circles
brawling on the ceiling, and I think, as Tricia with the leaky tits, type,
type, types our background noise, how nothing is forever.
~
I'm
spinning, sailing, swimming.
Everything with an
"s."
Aaron's lips are still on me and when I lick my
own, I taste him. Feel him. I'm on top of the world, but I'm also
buried in it, in the past. In that moment when Elena wrenched me free.
My
mother hurt. Physically mostly, but it was the head stuff that was the
worst. She never said "I love you," never showed up to school
for class plays or that one time I was awarded a blue ribbon for a poem I wrote
about the way wheat looks.
And
sometimes people would call me a fag. Mostly the guys in my class, but I
got the impression that they couldn't really smell it on me. More like
they hated that I did well in school, that I landed Elena and that Virginia
Sewell wanted to fuck me sideways. They hated all that but then one day
junior year, when a rag tag group of them came skidding in front of our house
and threw that rock through the front window with a piece of notebook paper
taped to it, the word "faggot" written out in Sharpie, my mother made
me put it in my room. She brushed off my
desk,
the blue ribbon trampled under her thick feet and placed it next to my book of
Longfellow.
"Don't
forget what you are," she said.
The
first time Elena came over my mother was out taking my Dad to the doctor.
This was before we knew about the lung cancer so he'd shake the house with his
hideous cough and Mama would say things like "See what you done?" and
I think she was aiming her words at me.
I
hid the faggot rock under a pile of clothes in my closet but Elena stubbed her
toe on it searching through the board games I kept on the top shelf in
there. Elena lived in a trailer so her closet was nothing more than a
cramped pocket of air with an accordion door, so she was impressed that she
could fit her whole body in mine.
"Who
did this?" she asked when she unveiled the faggot rock. She cradled
it in both hands and winced at the words.
"Jerry
Edelson. His crew," I said and shrugged it off. No big
deal. Ain't
nothing
to do with me.
"Why'd
you keep it?" she asked. At this point she knew about the
spoon. She knew about my naked body, and I had memorized hers. So I
told her. My mother made me. How pathetic.
But
Elena nodded and got this glint in her eye, the same glint she'd get when she'd
rub my crotch at the drive-in or slyly lift her skirt at me in the dirt patch
that posed as a parking lot at school.
"Well,
then. Let's teach her a lesson."
That
night things were quiet. I made sure everyone was in their correct
positions watching Dallas and, that's when I heard it, rubber squealing against
gravel. I could hear Elena's two brothers whooping it up in their truck
through the living room window before a rock, a new rock, tore through it.
It
said "child abuser."
My
mother said nothing, threw it in the black glad bag and sat back down to watch
JR's tired face. From that point on, she stopped checking to make sure
faggot rock stayed on my desk.
I
asked Elena later how she got Hank and Bobby to do it. She had found
their stash of porno magazines so they owed her.
My
cell vibrates in my pocket and I as I fish it out, I'm about to say "Miss
me already?" but fortunately I do a quick screen check first. It's
Jimmy.
"We've
got a problem," he says.
Oh
shit.
~
“I
want to begin the way I start all of my family sessions and have everyone tell
me how their day’s going. Let us all know what you did, what you’re going
to do, how you feel. Just a simple exercise to break the ice,” Dr. Kathy
says. She’s large a woman, but she’s not afraid of her width. She
spreads out her legs, rests her forearms on her massive thighs and hunches over
like a man. There’s a mole on her face, a focal point that helps me avoid
Elena’s glances that make me wonder if she can smell Aaron on my clothes.
“It’s
a good day,” Wren says. Elena and I both glance at her. She sits
straight and tall in the middle of us on the blue and white striped
couch. She’s practiced and beautiful and her hands are finger locked and
resting in her lap like she’s waiting for her turn in the spelling bee.
“And
why is it a good day, Wren?” Dr. Kathy’s voice is upbeat but not
condescending. She looks Wren straight in the eye.
“It’s
a good day because they’re both here,” she says. I jump a little.
Elena’s hand has found my wrist.
“And
it’s Daddy’s birthday so we get to go eat
and he said
in the car that I can go watch the fire.”
“The fire?”
“At
the restaurant,” I say, and I'm sure my face is the color of the blood red
Razorback pennant on Dr. Kathy’s wall.
“Happy birthday, Mitch.”
“Thank
you.” And I
likes
her in this moment, but then
she says the next thing.
“How’s your day so far?” and the like is
replaced with panic.
I rehearsed in the truck after Jimmy called:
leak in the men’s bathroom at One Union National Plaza, easy job, cranky
business men, ate lunch in the truck while listening to some Republican spout
off about some Democrat. We didn't have time to discuss details when I
met Wren and Elena who were already sitting in Dr. Kathy's waiting room.
And the receptionist kept glancing over at us every time I tried to open my
mouth so there was just this stony silence, until now. Elena's holding my
hand.
I
try to find the mole again but instead I find Dr. Kathy’s gray eyes, and every
false detail is concrete hardening.
“Rough,”
I say.
Dr.
Kathy smiles and looks at Wren. “It’s play time,” she says and Wren
beams. She takes Wren’s hand and they walk to a door in the wall with a
two-sided mirror. Elena and I get up to follow them, but Dr. Kathy smiles
again and motions us to sit back down.
“Wren’s
just going to play with Sarah and the other dolls for a moment. Wren, I'm
going to talk with your parents for a little while and then have you come back
in, okay?” Wren agrees and the door is closed, and now Dr. Kathy spreads
her hips, reattaches her forearms to her thighs in the blue and white striped
chair that matches the couch.
“Why
rough?” she says.
“You
know, life is hard.”
“I
don’t know. Tell me about your life,” she says. I look at Elena and
figure she must feel it, too. The way Dr. Kathy’s eyes are kind of like a
hand removing the sheet from our naked bodies.
“It’s
hard.
Scary sometimes.
Like when I’m
standing on a roof.” The thud is everywhere, echoing off the ceiling, and
I don’t know if Dr. Kathy is listening to my words or my heart.
“Why
do you think it’s scary?”
I
don’t know what happens. I can’t find the mole, the grey eyes are still
turning into me like a knife tip and Elena’s hand is no longer on my
wrist. I keep hearing Jimmy in my head - "She knows, man. Jig
is up" - when I tried to deny it and then I hear Elena saying "We
teach her a lesson" and get a mental glimpse of my mother's face when she
was bested at her own game.
And
then I think of Aaron. How he loves me the way I fully want to be loved.
How
I'm a coward.
“I’m
cheating on my wife,” I say.
But again, maybe not.
~
We
go out to eat only because it’s a promise to Wren, so the whole time the chef
is massacring shrimp and steak in a fiery ring, Elena sits on the other side of
our daughter, not saying a word. She orders a Mai-Tai, I order a beer,
and we don’t talk about that either.
“Who
is she? Who is she?” over and over again, but there was no time to answer
Elena because Dr. Kathy kept saying “breathe.” And then she said we
needed to compose
ourselves, that
it was time to bring
Wren in and work with her, focus on her problem. She suggested couples
counseling and gave us the name of her colleague in the office next door.
We’re supposed to go in once a week and all my misguided mind can think about
is more bills, more gas money, more time sputtering through my tightly gripped
fingers.
Elena
killed the tissue box on the coffee table between us and Dr. Kathy so now her
face is eerily reminiscent of a Picasso painting and it wasn’t until Wren asked
“Please?” that she agreed to go inside the restaurant with wiped clean cheeks
and a flesh colored mouth.