Martin and John (18 page)

My mind wandered, through memories of a trip we’d taken to Miami Beach the previous year, Six Days of Sex we’d called it, though mostly we drowsed on the sand, and I remembered flying here, to Kansas, two years ago when we’d moved from New York, and Martin, just struck by crypto, spent the flight in the bathroom with diarrhea. I remembered we needed groceries, then I realized we didn’t. Which is just to say that not even death commands your full attention. Not mine, and not Martin’s: I kept saying Shit over and over again, the way, I suppose, the way that I wanted to say No, and I wasn’t really aware of it until Martin said, Actually, I think it’s the blood loss that’s
going to do me in, and then he laughed at himself, just a couple of wet chuckles, but that’s all that had passed for laughter from him for a while, and the way his shoulders shook and the way his bones poked at his wet skin made me think of old rice-paper lanterns shaking in the wind, starting to melt in the rain, and when his body moved, blood and shit spurted out of him in clouds.

After a while the stream coming from Martin’s body was just red, and then it was clear, and for a moment I thought the water draining from the tub came from his body, and then I realized, Of course, he’s stopped hemorrhaging, and then, when I touched him with my left hand—my right hand can’t really feel temperature—I noticed that his skin was no warmer than the water coming from the shower and that the water had gone cold long ago. And when his body folded over at the waist and the pressure forced another long, smelly fart out of him and his face smacked the tub’s bottom, I didn’t think it was like a rice-paper lantern being closed, I thought it was like the body of a six-foot-two-inch man who weighed eighty pounds and who’d had all the shit and blood and water and air sucked out of him folding over in death. I shut off the shower then and watched the last water drain out of the tub, pulling strands of Martin’s hair with it, and I followed it down, through the pipes, into the cesspool, and then into the drum of a sewer-cleaning truck, and the truck drives to some fallow field and empties its fertile load of HIV-infected shit and blood, and the virus seeps down into the earth, into the aquifer, into every kernel of wheat and every blade of
grass and every human and every animal that eats of the grain and grass, and I imagined all of them, every human, every animal, all dying, and I did not care. In Kansas, in New York and California and Canada and Mexico, in Europe and Asia and Africa and South America, all around the world, they could all die and
I
would not care.

My face felt swollen and shapeless, like a moldy orange, as though grief had been shoved into my mouth like a handful of seeds. It felt uncomfortable in my mouth, but I didn’t know what to do, whether to spit, or just swallow.

I don’t know jewels, I remember saying. I remember saying, To me, all green precious stones are emeralds. Jade, someone said. Oh yes, I nodded, jade. Tourmaline, said another voice. Tourmaline? I said. Tourmaline, tourmaline, other voices said, trying to roll over the vowels with the same ease the first voice had. I knew neither word nor stone; imagining, I saw an emerald or jade or nothing, just black letters. Then I saw a smiling face. I’ll buy you one, it said. Oh no, I said, I don’t even know you. Martin, he said, just as he’d said tourmaline, and that name, too, meant nothing to me. No, I said again, flustered, turning away. It seemed he followed me around the party for a while, but at some point I realized that I was following him, and when that happened I stepped in front of him as he’d stepped in front of me and I said, Tourmaline. Nothing moved in the room until he smiled. His teeth were perfect. Pearls, I said, and when he got it he laughed, and he leaned over then, and kissed me.

I MET HIM the next day at a jewelry store. The hand Martin waved over the glass rack was impressive, palm large, fingers long and slender, nails buffed almost to a shine. A tan stretched from fingertips to underneath his cuff-linked arm; a wide coil of silver gleamed on his right ring finger. Tourmaline, he said, almost proudly, as if he already owned them. I leaned over the jewels that had been taken out of the case and mouthed a silent O. This piece of a word disturbed a few dust motes, which my eye followed down, ignoring the hundreds of green crystals resting on their black velvet bed, until another hand appeared, this one darker than Martin’s, covered with black hair and three thick knots of gold. A voice asked, Which one you like, sir? I stood up, turned to Martin, who waited with his hands folded atop his belt buckle, grinning. I don’t know, I said, they’re too beautiful, too, too much—you decide. Martin’s grin grew to a smile instantly. Too much for you? he said. Never! His hands suddenly swept the jewels into a single gleaming pile, and the man behind the counter smiled then, and folded his hands on his stomach exactly as Martin had. We’ll take all of them, Martin told the man, who smiled a moment longer, then turned to fetch something large enough to contain the mass of jewels. Martin told me, You can choose later. For now, just know that they’re yours for the asking. I nodded, but I was ignoring him. I was
thinking of the man, and how quickly he’d come to imitate Martin.

MY BEST FRIEND’S birthday is coming up, Martin said, soon after we met. I want you to come with me. But I don’t even know him, I said. Her, Martin corrected me. Susan. You will love Susan, and Susan will love you. Besides, Martin said, it’s
my
party. We had much to do, it seemed, but if there was a plan I never discerned it. We stopped in one store, purchased silver service for twenty. In another, Martin weaved his way in and out of hundreds of lamps, some on tables, some hanging by gilt chains, others growing from the floor, all of them turned on. The store seemed flooded, mostly by heat, and light. I felt seasick. That one, Martin pointed, and that one and that one and that one. When we shopped for Susan’s party, I could never tell what were decorations and what were presents. A half hour in the light store proved too much for me, and I stepped outside for some air. A gust of wind swirled out with me, picked up a few leaves, set them down, and I sat on the curb. Martin was beside me in an instant. What’s the matter? he demanded. Nothing, I said, it was just hot in there, the light hurt my eyes. Just a moment, Martin said; he put his head inside the door and called out an address. Send everything there, he said, and then he had an arm around me, hailed a taxi, pushed me in, felt my forehead for a temperature. Martin, I’m fine, I was just a little hot. In the taxi’s dark interior, wind from
open windows cooled the sweat on my skin. Martin’s ministrations, like everything else about him, seemed overdone. Sure, Martin said, okay, fine, his voice quiet, subdued almost. He put his hands on his lap. I felt bad then, as if I’d spurned him, and I took his hand in mine, but then I let go of it. Did it burn you? Martin said. What? I said. Oh no, it’s just … I took his hand and turned it palm up. A diamond, a huge diamond, was mounted on his silver ring. Oh, Martin said, and wagged his fingers. Light caught the diamond, and it winked at me. I thought it was a wart, I said. Martin laughed. No, he said, it was my father’s. Why do you wear it like that? I asked. It’s the only thing I’m afraid of having stolen, I guess. He shrugged then, and closed his hand. The diamond disappeared. My parents didn’t leave us much, he said, except money.

In time, I came to understand Martin’s apartment, but on that first visit I was lost. Perhaps I
was
feverish, I thought, perhaps delirious, perhaps I sleepwalked. A circular elevator took us to it, and when the doors opened we stood in the apartment’s center, and then Martin strode away, and I waited in the elevator until I realized that I was one or two hundred feet above the ground and held in space only by a wire, and I stepped out of the elevator onto a floor made of yellow bricks, and the doors closed behind me. I looked around. My first impression was that the Sydney Opera House had cracked open and fallen on its side. The yellow bricks, I saw, weren’t the whole floor, but only a four-foot-wide strip that disappeared into the apartment. Then Martin returned around a
bend in a wall, his left sleeve rolled up to his elbow, a damp cloth draped over that forearm and a glass in his left hand. Aspirin, he said, and he dropped the pills into my mouth with his right hand and held the glass as I drank. I was still swallowing the aspirin’s bitter taste when Martin began to swab my face with the cloth, and surprised at how good it felt, I closed my eyes against the cool water leaking off my forehead. The thing to remember, Martin said, leading me by the hand on a widening circle through his apartment, is that in Oz the yellow brick road always leads to the Emerald City. We stood at the door of an oval room with walls covered in softly glowing, lazily wandering tubes—blue, red, green, yellow, purple—whose path was interrupted only where they arched over doors or French windows. The room’s dimensions were lost in color. The Emerald City? I asked. Aurora borealis actually, Martin said. I just shrugged, and walked to one of the windows. Looking down, I nearly fell over with dizziness, because we were so high that all I could see was blue sky, clouds, a plane flying far below us. Then I realized there was a balcony beyond the window and its mirrored floor reflected the sky. But when I stepped away from the view, my queasiness stayed with me, and I made my way to the only object I recognized in the room—the bed. Are you still hot? Martin asked, and I nodded. I unbuttoned my shirt, lay down. Martin adjusted a dial on the wall, and air surged from floor vents, and then slivers of green silk lifted up and began waving in the air, dancing like tendrils of seaweed on the ocean floor. And I’ll say
this much: I knew something was wrong, even then. With him, with me, with the combination? That I didn’t know.

MORNING AT MARTIN’S: it took me by surprise. I opened my eyes to a room that had just enough noise in it to seem unearthly quiet: the air from the vents, the rustle of the dancing fabric, the hum of the gas in the a.b. tubes, Martin’s breathing beside me. It took me a second to place each of these sounds, and when I noticed the last I turned and put my arm around him and relaxed into the memory of the sex we’d had last night. That’s when I noticed my shirtsleeve on my arm, and I could remember no sex, and I realized I must have fallen asleep as soon as I’d gone to bed. I rolled away from Martin then, feeling like I’d assumed an intimacy I hadn’t earned, and this finally pulled me out of his strange bedroom, and I noticed myself then, my stomach and my head, both of which were spinning. You awake? I heard. Yes, I said quietly. Martin’s body leaned over mine; in a few places, through my clothes, we touched. Would you like something? For my stomach, I said, not aspirin. I lay on my side and didn’t look at him, though I felt his eyes on me. How about the bathroom? he said finally, and I let him lead me by the hand through a door into a room that looked more like a bathroom than the bedroom had looked like a bedroom: sink, tub, towels on the wall, things like that. He stood me next to something urn-like, filled with water. What’s this? I said. The toilet. Right, I said, and threw up.
Martin put a hand on my neck while I bent over, and when he rubbed back and forth his diamond scratched me lightly. After he flushed, I said, I should’ve never eaten that cheeseburger. I take it you’re not Jewish, then, Martin said, leading me to the bedroom. Didn’t my New Testament name give it away? I said, and I almost didn’t hear us laughing, because I was thinking that Martin’s wasn’t the kind of joke I laughed at, and mine wasn’t the kind of joke I told.

There is something languorous, indulgent even, about making love in the afternoon, when you’re just a little ill. You have to do absolutely nothing. Even kiss him back and he’ll be rewarded, and he’ll stroke your body all the more passionately, and he’ll keep asking you things like How do you feel? (good) Am I hurting you? (no) Do you want me to stop? (no, no), and if, when it’s over, you turn from him without a word to fall asleep, he will feel like he’s done his job well, and he’ll put an arm around you, and he’ll say, I’m just going to be quiet now, so you can fall asleep, and then he’ll keep talking, saying nothing, saying, I’ll fix us a light supper later that won’t upset your stomach, saying, Mmmm, and wetting the back of your neck with his tongue until you do fall asleep, feeling like you’re pressed up against the stomach of a mother cat, who licks you until you’re wet, and then until you’re dry, and clean.

THERE ARE MANY ways he could’ve kept me. The easiest would have been leaving me in his apartment and not
showing me how to get out. But instead, somehow, he did this to my heart. I feel like claiming that he pulled it from my chest and locked it in a cage. But if he did, then it was a cage so finely wrought—or should I just call it opulent?—that even after I became aware of it, I was so fascinated by its design I didn’t notice that, in his own way, Martin limited my experience far more than it had been before I knew him. But this knowledge came later; that weekend, only Monday came, and I said, I need to go to work. You’re sure you feel okay? is all he said. I nodded. We’d better get you something to wear. He pointed to my clothes on the floor. Those are unsuitable for human habitation. Where do you work? At the
Journal of the American Medical Association.
I copy-edit. Martin made a face and flipped a switch beyond a door, producing enough light to overwhelm the a.b. tubes surrounding it. Nothing too flashy, then, he said, and disappeared. He came back a moment later with a severe-looking black suit and a white shirt with a large red rose sewn on the left front panel. But it was the silk briefs that made me pause. Martin, my clothes are fine, really. Nonsense, Martin said, I’ll have them cleaned, they’ll be ready tonight. I sat on the bed, damp from my shower, still naked, holding the boxers in my lap. I’m not sure I’m free to come by tonight. Work keeps me really busy during the week. Martin threw a pair of socks at me. Then I’ll have them sent to your place. What’s your address? I looked at him. From somewhere, pen and paper had materialized in his hands, and he sat on a chair I hadn’t seen before. I laughed
then, just a little—this place was too much. And then, when I realized I didn’t want him to have my address, I stopped. I have to bring your clothes back to you, I said. Martin looked up from his pad, his face bright. Then I’ll see you tonight? Wonderful!