There were several people he knew at the club. He had a drink at the bar and chatted briefly. He was tempted to mention the odd scene at the cemetery, but something induced him to keep quiet about it.
He was restless, however, and he found his usual companions oddly boring, and after a single drink, he went back to his car and started for home, but when they neared the cemetery, he leaned forward in his seat.
“Stop here,” he told the driver. You couldn’t have the same hallucination twice, could you? They might have put the coffin in the grave by now, but even if they had filled in the hole, you couldn’t mistake a new grave. And if he found one, by God he’d rouse the caretaker again and take him to see for himself. Let him deny it then.
He got out and tried the gates, but they were locked. The caretaker’s house was just inside the gates and there was a bell. He thought about ringing. The rain had slackened a bit but now it began to pelt him angrily. He felt all at once utterly exhausted. He decided after all he wanted nothing more than to go home, and when a short time later he got into bed, he fell at once into a deep sleep.
Sometime later, he woke with a start. He had dreamed of the open grave and those two men standing on either side of the hearse, as if they were waiting for someone. He was sure now that he had seen them, that it had been no hallucination. The wind had come up, and his window suddenly rattled noisily.
He was seized with an unthinking terror. He had no idea why. He jumped from the bed and went to the window. The rain had turned to hail, hard pellets of ice flinging themselves at the glass. They sounded like fingers tapping on the pane and the cry of the wind might have been ghostly voices. The night pressed down on him like a great weight until he felt he could scarcely get his breath. He knew that a dawn must follow the long, dreary night, but he felt that no light would come into his wretched heart, that his soul must wander forever in darkness. The words repeated themselves in his mind: in darkness forever. The old clock on the fireplace mantle tolled the hour.
All at once he hated this place, the town, his house, everything. A sense of loneliness, so intense it pierced his heart, overwhelmed him. He wanted to be back in Los Angeles. He had friends there, and he couldn’t wait another year or two to see them again. Not even another day. What did he care about Martin’s Falls, West Virginia? What did he care about any of it, if he wasn’t happy? Life was too short to suffer needlessly. He’d been happy in Los Angeles. He’d be happy there again. He needn’t live in Beverly Hills, either, there were plenty of nice neighborhoods where one could live comfortably without a fortune.
“I’m going home, by God,” he said aloud. He had made up his mind to it. Let them think what they liked. Let them fire him if it suited them. He wouldn’t stay here a moment longer than was necessary. He’d catch a plane in the morning. By this time tomorrow he would be finished with this cursed town. He’d always hated it, why had he pretended otherwise to himself? He saw everything now clearly: there was the real illusion he had suffered, that he was happy here.
He sat down at the desk in his bedroom and immediately wrote a letter to the head of the firm. “I’ve just learned that I am desperately ill,” he wrote. “My only hope is with a doctor in California. I must go there at once.”
They found him dead the next morning, slumped across the surface of his desk, the letter clenched in his hand.
Clouds
They were lying in the grass, looking at the clouds in the sky, seeing shapes in them. It was what they had done on their first date. Not really a date, even, just being with one another for the first time, savoring the pleasure of being together. Lying in the tall grass, not talking much, watching the clouds form and reform.
Jack remembered he had felt like he was a kid all over again that day, discovering himself, discovering life in a way he hadn’t known it before. They’d met less than twenty-four hours earlier, and already Larry made him feel different from how he felt with anyone else. Larry was one of those rare individuals who seemed to “happen” rather than simply to exist. How could Jack not have fallen in love?
What was funny about it, what was so different was, it had always been a little boy’s kind of love. For all the passion, there had always been some innocence to it that he’d never felt with any other guy. Whoever heard of lying in the grass staring at clouds on a first date, whatever you called it?
And now here they were again, not even a year later—the same hill, up past the last of the houses, beyond the lake, the distant cars on the highway below sounding more like the laughing chatter of water in a rocky stream. The grass long and sun-warm pungent, tickling his ankle where his Dockers had ridden up, the sky the color of a robin’s egg, the clouds like egg whites whipped up in an enormous blue bowl—everything the same, and everything different, too.
“That one,” Jack pointed, breaking the silence. “It looks like a boat, doesn’t it? A canoe, maybe, or a rowboat.”
Larry squinted, took a minute to think about it. “It looks like a dick to me.”
“You know, you’re the only person I can think of who would see that.”
“What?” Surprised, wanting to be offended, but not quite. “You don’t think it does? Look at it. It’s uncut, and there’s the balls, even, hanging below…”
Jack wanted to be agreeable. Wanting to be done with quarreling, he looked long and hard at the cloud, till the bright sunshine began to hurt his eyes. “I don’t know. Maybe. A little. I guess if you have that on your mind to begin with…”
Laughter, sounding not altogether amused. “What, you think that’s all I think about…?”
“Um, not all, no. But you do think about it a lot.”
“But I don’t, really, not the way you’re implying. You’re just, you know, saying that because of, well, what I asked. And you still haven’t said if…”
A deep sigh. “Larry, I can’t. I’ve already told you. I just can’t.”
“You mean you don’t want to.”
“Fine, put it that way, then. I don’t want to.”
A long silence lay between them, an awkward silence, each of them thinking out their position, marshalling their arguments. Jack wished they could just drop it altogether, but he knew Larry wasn’t ready yet to give up on the idea. He could be so damned stubborn when he got something stuck in his craw. He could never just let anything go. Let things be.
“Okay, look,” Larry said finally, running the tip of one finger lightly along the shell of Jack’s ear, “so the idea doesn’t turn you on. But it turns me on. I’m being honest with you here. We agreed from the beginning that we’d be honest with one another, so I’m telling you how I feel. Don’t you think you could do it for me? To make me happy?”
“And what about me? Doesn’t it count for anything if I have to do something that makes me unhappy?”
“I don’t see why it should make you unhappy.”
“It just does. That’s not how I am. That’s not how I meant for our relationship to be.”
“This doesn’t change our relationship. This isn’t about you and me, as a couple. It’s just…well, something to spice it up, if you want to look at it that way. I mean, fuck, it makes me horny just thinking about it. Look.”
Jack looked, almost against his will, briefly—and unnecessarily. He already knew what he would see. The sight was not uncommon. “It doesn’t make me horny. It makes me feel creepy, if you want to know the truth.”
“I don’t see why. Come on, you said yourself, he’s hot. If you were single…”
“If I were single, I’d jump in bed with him in a minute. Who wouldn’t? Hey, he’s like something out of a porno film. I’m not saying he’s not hot.”
“So?”
“But I’m not single. That’s the whole point. And even if I were, he’d never ask me. I’m not in his league.”
“Sure he would. He wouldn’t have suggested this if he didn’t think you were cute too.”
“Oh, come on, this is all about him and you. I’m just, well, someone to be accommodated.”
“If you don’t mind my saying so, there’s a lot of guys who would really like being accommodated by him. A hell of a lot.”
“I’m sure that’s true.”
Another silence, longer this time. “You know, maybe you’re the one who’s not being honest.”
“I’m telling you exactly how I feel. You asked, and I’m being honest with you.”
“I mean, honest with yourself. Look, you admit he’s hot, you say you’d go to bed with him if the circumstances were different. Plus, you know I want to do it.”
“And you know I don’t.”
“Why are you being so stubborn? It’s not like we’re going to move him in with us. He doesn’t even have to come to our apartment, we’ll go to his. For one night. Or an hour, even, maybe two, we’ll leave whenever you say. We go home, and that’s all there is to it. It’s over, done. We don’t have to talk about it ever again, if you don’t want.”
“But we will.”
“I won’t. I promise.”
“Even if we don’t, even if neither of us ever says a word about it, it will still be there. It’ll be in my mind. It’ll be in yours, too, whether you admit it or not.”
“Look, it’s not like we’re picking somebody up in a bar. I’ve been hot for him since college. We were on the swim team together. I used to fantasize. I just never knew, I never imagined he felt the same way. If I miss out on this opportunity…” He paused, let the remark dangle, like a spent member.
“You’ll hate me forever? Is that what you’re trying to say?”
“No, shit no, I won’t hate you. I couldn’t hate you. But, well, yes, the truth? I’d resent it. I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t. I told you I’m being completely honest.”
“What happens the next time?”
“What next time? You mean, if he wants to do it again? He won’t. He’s a come and go sort of guy, always has been. Anyway, even if he did, say he suggested it somewhere down the line, say he called even and said, ‘let’s do it again,’ I wouldn’t, I’d say no, I can’t, I’ve got a boyfriend.”
“But you’ve got a boyfriend now.”
A pained sigh. “Ah, come on, I just want to get him out of my system. That’s all.”
“Anyway, I didn’t mean, the next time with him. I think you’re right, he’s the type, well, it’s all about conquests, I got that vibe from him right off the bat. Fresh meat, that’s all they’re after, that kind. What I actually meant was, what about the next hot guy who wants to do it with us. There are a lot of guys out there who play that game. Every couple runs into it sooner or later. It’s messed up a lot of relationships.”
“It won’t mess up ours. And there won’t be any next guy, either. I mean, sure, you’re right, a lot of guys are into that scene, and somewhere down the line someone may float the idea, but it wouldn’t be the same for me, can’t you see that? This is a special case, a one-time-only thing. I wouldn’t ask you to do it otherwise. It’s not like I need other guys to make me happy, like I’m out trolling or something. You make me happy, you’re what’s important to me. I mean, like, I wouldn’t go to bed with him without you.”
“I guess he suggested that too.”
“Uh, not exactly. Well, yes, sort of. He hinted, you might say. But I wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize what we’ve got. You know that. I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
“Well, then…?”
Jack put his head back, looked up at the sky, at the barely drifting clouds, wishing the conversation was over, knowing it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be until someone gave in, knowing who the someone would have to be. “That one,” he said after a minute, pointing, “it looks like a fish. One of those long, thin fishes—a barracuda, maybe. Or an eel.”
Larry laughed.
“What?”
“I’m not going to say it.”
“No, go on. What do you think it looks like?”
“It looks like a dick to me.”
Jack laughed too, and shook his head. “You’re hopeless, you know that.”
Larry raised himself on an elbow, loomed above him, blotting out the clouds, the sun, the sky, his face a silhouette. “So, what do you say? I told him I’d call him back.”
Jack turned his head. They looked into one another’s eyes, each of them trying to read the other’s mind.
“It’s just this one time?”
“I swear it. I’ll never bring it up again.”
“And it won’t change anything? Between the two of us, I mean.”
“Nothing. It’ll be for tonight, and tomorrow we’ll be exactly the way we’ve always been. I give you my word. Just you and me, against the world.”
“We’ll always have Paris.”
“Exactly.”
The odd thing was, he thought Larry meant it. Or, he meant to mean it. He really believed that nothing would change. Or he wanted to believe that.
But it would. Of course it would. He didn’t completely understand it, but Jack knew that it already had changed. Everything. They weren’t the couple they’d been a day earlier, not even what they had been an hour earlier, before this conversation had begun.
Whatever damage this might do to their relationship, it wasn’t about the future, either. The damage had already been done, had been done he supposed, last night, when Larry ran into an old acquaintance from school, all that, “Hey, look who’s here, gosh it’s great to see you, how’ve you been?”
The world, their world, had shifted then, in that instant when the two of them exchanged those looks, those unmistakable looks, every man, straight or gay, knew them—the quick surprised smile, the flicker of an eyelash, the flare of a nostril, like an animal catching the scent. You could all but smell the testosterone, see the sparks flashing, hear the jungle drums.
In a sense, the rest of it probably didn’t matter so much. Once you’d done it in your heart—in your balls, probably Larry would say—it was done, and that was it. Once you struck the baseball, the arc of its flight was inevitable.
Larry saw in Jack’s eyes when he’d won the argument. He grinned and kissed him lightly, gratefully, and lay back down again beside him. At least he had the good sense not to gloat. To let the rest of it just happen. As it would.
Jack watched the fish cloud become a shoe, a woman’s shoe. He didn’t mention this to Larry, though. Larry wouldn’t see it as a shoe. That much he understood.
The
Princess of the Andes