He had moved things around in his apartment, knocked down a dividing wall. It was still a mess but an open mess now, with his unmade bed between the kitchen and the paintings. “It looks good, doesn't it?” he said.
“It looks bigger,” I said.
“It was a lot of work. Tell me it looks stunning.”
“I'm speechless.”
“It
is
easier to work in.” I had pangs when he said this, since I hadn't been getting much painting done myself. I had never thought of Jason as a good example before.
“You want something to drink?” he said.
I laughed when he brought out a plastic water pitcher with a purifying filterâno nasty microbes for him. It looked so hygienic in that setting.
“Give me a break,” he said. “I'm fighting the good fight.”
Every single pull-up-your-socks pamphlet I'd read was full of battlefield metaphorsâthe body as a landscape of swarming minuscule violence, like the war of the ants in
Walden
. In fact the paintings Jason wanted to show me were of battles.
They were drawn as cartoonsâlike old G.I. Joe comicsâbut the combatants were naked and had a lot of lurid gore around their vital parts. The scenes were full of
stage bravery, heroes brandishing swords and whips. They had a mocking, boyish fervor and reminded me of other people's work. The art of AIDS that was relentlessly angry and couldn't stay away from irony: better painters than Jason had gotten beauty out of this. My own problem was that I wasn't that kind of painter.
I didn't hate the paintings. They were okay. I told Jason I really liked them.
He said, “I thought you would.”
“I'll bet.”
“You have paint in your hair,” he said. “I just noticed.”
“What color?”
“Cobalt blue. It's right above your ear. God, it's so bright. No, the other ear.”
It was an old trick. I hadn't painted in days and my hair was freshly shampooed.
“You're the one,” I said. “You can't go out in the street now with the stuff that's in
your
hair.” I ran my hands over his head, getting down to the scalp. He had nice thick brown hair. “Oh, big glob of paint here, big hideous clump of paint here.”
“No way,” he said. “Not possible.”
He had his eyes closed. I was the one who made the first move, more or less. I had my hands behind his neck and I stepped closer and drew him to me. I moved in for
the clinch, simple as that, and I thought, what the fuck am I doing, am I crazy? I didn't
have
to do it. I knew I was being the great jerk of all time, but I wanted to do the wrong thing.
I
FELT CRAZY
, the whole afternoon. While we were taking off each other's clothes, I heard myself say, “Oh,” as if I had just read a fact that astonished me. Our sex was like the sex we used to have after a fight, intense and reckless and hallucinated. Jason's body seemed sweetly young to me after Gabe's (oh, Gabe) and his weight on me was a different weight. I was lost (that was why I was doing this, to get lost), but not so delirious I couldn't keep track; I knew Jason's signals, we knew each other. Everything was vivid and a little monstrous. Sometimes we spoke, as if we were waving to each other from under water. Once when I made a stricken noise, he asked if he should be gentler, but in fact any sharpness, of his teeth or his grip, seemed right to me.
I think we were amazed. Everything we did we had done before, but we were running now on something like a joined spirit of defiance, and it took us further. I saw his face, the lower lip slack with arousal and the eyes half opening to check on me. It did something to me, to get that gaze from Jason.
He had a bedside shelf of condoms, lubricating gel, a box of latex glovesâfar more extensive than anything in
my
houseâand he gestured to them and said, “They can be fun, you know,” but I said, “Do we have to?” and we decided fast that we could risk reinfection (against all the advice of all the pamphlets) and skip the latex, just this once, just for a change. That in itself was startling, the smooth immediacy of his skin. Right there against my tongueâit was almost too present, too much. Jason made a particular sound when he was comingâa hoarse, low groan, very male and very moving to me.
As the day went on, all the play between us got more ornate and lengthy and choreographed. In the moments when we pausedâwe each got up a few times to pee and later we shared a sandwich with the plate on his bellyâwe sounded vastly amused and proud of ourselves. “I'm in a trance,” I said. “I'm gone.”
I was not, strictly speaking, fully gone yet, as Jason pointed out, but later when he had me hovering over that brink (he was a willful lover, determined in his patience), I forgot myself entirely and scraped my palm along the floor so that I had splinters later. I forgot everything.
Neither of us had much idea how many hours were passing. I suppose we thought we were in that zone of utter focus where moments don't pass. We were alsoâhow
could we not think this?âback in time to where we used to be, returned to the scene of the crime.
Who gave it to you?
Jason's apartment was full of things I had picked out and used for a while as mineâcoffee mugs, the drawing table, the selfsame set of blue-striped sheets on the bed. We were the ghosts haunting the battlefield.
It got to be late in the afternoon and then it got to be later. Of course I thought of Gabe, who would be home soon and would think I was having a good day at the studio. Jason was kissing the back of my knee while I thought this. His breath and the touch of his mouth felt warm, and my own skin was glowing with heat. Jason moved around to the front of my knee, and then he paused and rested his head on my shins.
“I have to go,” I said, lazily, without much conviction.
“What time is it?” Jason said. “Holy shit.” He rose up out of bed fast and started hunting for his underwear.
“Hey,” I said. “It's been great knowing you.”
He kissed me then and said, “You're still very nice,” which was not completely what I wanted to hear.
“Listen, try not to tell too many people about this,” I said.
“You don't have to insult me,” he said. “That doesn't have to be part of this.” He was pulling on his pants while he spoke.
I was getting up by now. “Slow down for a second,” I said.
“Who's rushing?” he said. He threw my bra and one of my shoes high up in the air, just to goof around, as if we were in a French bedroom farce. The black bra fanned out like a kite tail and the shoe clunked the ceiling, barely missing the light fixture.
“It's been fun,” I said.
“We can have fun, goddamn it,” Jason said, and to my total amazement, he winked again.
G
ABE WAS READING
a book in the living room when I got home. There he was, with his sharp nose and his streaked ponytail; I wasn't ready for him. I think I wanted him all of a sudden to be a man whose looks I couldn't standâor the opposite, I wanted to feel, for certain, a sudden outpouring of love and shame. But I was struck instead by just how comfortable and complete he looked sitting in that armchair. It took him a full minute to look up from the page, and he was still half in his book when he turned his gaze on me. “Hi,” I said. I could be off fucking the entire planet for years and Gabe would still be there reading when I got home. I did envy him, the way he looked just then.
He was reading Kafka's
The Penal Colony and Other
Tales
ârereading it, that isâprobably the first book I'd seen him with in months that didn't have to do with medical fortitude.
“I was trying to paint all day but I couldn't get anywhere,” I said, as if he was going to run to my studio to check.
“It'll kick in eventually,” Gabe said. I kissed the top of his head and I went in to take a shower, something I might have done after painting on any old day. It was a long shower and I was still so languorous that I really liked all those hot, pounding jets of water.
When I came out to the living room in my bathrobe, I said, “Did you know my insurance will pay something for massages? I'm going to get some.”
Gabe was still reading and he looked up again, confused.
“It's stress reduction,” I said. “You could get one too.”
“Not me. I don't think so.”
“It's quite harmless,” I said. “You would like it.”
“The world is too full of people getting massages,” Gabe said.
“What does that mean?”
“You can go get one. I'm not against it.”
“Yes, you are.”
“I work in a camera store. I'm surrounded by people
who want to take pictures of themselves all the time. Anything else in the world is not photo-worthy to more people than you would believe.”
I thought, oh, let him talk about how puffed up people are lately, that's how an old person talks, when the time to strut is over.
So I strutted in my bathrobe back to the bedroom and put on a clean outfit for dinner, a little sweater and checked toreador pants I hadn't worn in a while. I felt very sexy and cute after being with Jason. I felt that I was oozing beauty, that I had beauty to spare. I could take on a hundred lovers and they would all find things about me to delight in.
Gabe wanted to finish reading one more Kafka tale before we did anything about dinner. “Read,” I said, quite nicely. In my own version of domestic fervor, I went outside to get luscious and overpriced takeout from the store near us that Gabe called Effete Foods. I got all Gabe's favorite tidbitsâsmoked trout, lentil salad, golden beets with sesame oil, mussel and potato salad. And when I laid them out, I said, “Who invented salad? Did people always eat it?”
“Salt,” Gabe said. “It means salted.”
And he got to tell me about the salt road in ancient Rome and the empire's need to defend it. Also how the
Chinese communists had to give up one territory they held in the 1930s because their salt supply was blocked and they were dying of salt hunger. It was the kind of information Gabe was happy in; he pointed with his fork when he talked. I asked questions, I laughed at his jokes, I kept the conversation hopping along. I needed to see him animated and cheerful, and why not? “This is heaven. Did you taste this?” I kept saying. The food did taste fabulous to me. I made him eat multiple helpings of the stuff and I got him to smack his lips over it. “Isn't this great?” I said. For the first time in our four years together, I felt condescending toward Gabe.
W
E WATCHED SOME
dumb sitcom on TV and I was giddy that night; I talked back to the set and I made up dirty parodies of the commercials. I did my best to be delightful to Gabe. When he got into bed, I greeted him in a warm and wifely way, and our lovemaking was as decent as any we'd had for a while. I was triumphant that night, because I didn't have to be grateful.
I
BELIEVED
I
'D
had a one-day fling with Jason that was terrific and pleasantly dangerous and over and done with. I had shown a small resurgence of my old taste for adventure and the whole thing (which I clearly felt the
better for) had been a fluke event, natural to someone of my, oh, expansive temperament. I could nurse the afterglow as a wicked secret and it was nobody's business.
Nursing it was what undid me. I went to bed that night thinking of Jason, and the duplicity in this (Gabe was slumbering next to me while I had my steamy little reveries) did not bother me any more than a child has any sort of conscience about eating candy in secret.
I went to work with that sugary feeling, and it kept me company at my desk all day. All morning and all afternoon I did nothing but muse about Jason, and after six, when everyone had left the gallery, I called Jason on the phone, somewhat to his surprise.
That is, he had not been expecting me to call at that moment. I don't know that Jason was ever surprised by someone wanting him. “It's me,” I said.
“Melanie?” he said.
“Guess again,” I said. “Can't keep track of your women, can you?”
Actually I didn't care so much if he wasn't mad for me, I just wanted more of him. I felt lucid and ruthless. Why shouldn't I have at least some of what I wanted? I couldn't help thinking this.
I did ask how his day had gone, but I cut to the chase pretty fast. “I could come by tomorrow, if you want, on
my lunch break,” I said. The Melanies of this world could fend for themselves.
“Sure,” he said. I had not expected him to say noâI wouldn't have asked otherwiseâbut right when I heard his little breezy assent, I had the sort of panic that goes with buying something too expensive.
W
HEN
I
WENT
to Jason's the next day and rang his buzzer, he called out through the intercom, “Is this secret agent 101?” He was slouching in his doorway as I climbed his stairs, and after he held me in an appropriately passionate crush, he asked if I wanted coffee. Everything in the way he handled even those first five minutes showed he thought I would be making a habit of this.
Jason tended to be confident about most things, and I was freeâI knew thisânot to go where he led. I might have said, “I guess you know this is just for today,” or, “I can't do this again but let's make the most of it,” something like the lyric of a jazz standard. He wouldn't have given me an argumentâI could have slipped out of there without any haranguing or bullying or underhanded persuasion on his part.
We got into bed pretty fast. I didn't have much more than an hour for lunch, and we were ready for each other, heavy-lidded with remembrance of the day before.
It was all very friendly, even with the roughness and the haste. Jason said, “Your underwear is great,” and, “This is the best lunch I've had in months.” He was upbeat and casual, and this casualness delighted me greatly. We didn't have to be solemn, did we? I was proud of us, light and bright as we were in the face of whatever. It made the recent sex with Gabe seem terrified and formal.