The Tricky Part: One Boy's Fall from Trespass into Grace (28 page)

I’m in mourning here. For what happened, I think. Every smell, every site in Colorado reminds me of him. Of our bodies together. It was the force of flesh, I guess, muscle scooping up a naive altar boy, wasn’t it? What happened was dishonorable. Evil? But wasn’t there something honorable too? Holy? An awakening? Pleasure. It was unbelievably erotic. Or am I just remembering it that way? Wasn’t it awful? How much happened to me? How much did I make it happen? The questions are like a purgatory. A fire I’m stuck in. It was some kind of exchange. My little body for his big attention. He had a way of stroking my mind as well as my penis. Con artist. His penis was huge, frightening. I had never seen a man erect like that. The size, the will of the thing, shocking. A thrill, a terror
.

I was so little. It was like entering an adult race too soon and tearing muscles I’d need later to move well through the world. To find my own way. Or, maybe, it just strengthened me. What doesn’t destroy you . . . right?

At school a nun guided my fingers over the frets of a guitar. On weekends he slid his lips down my chest. I am two different people, aren’t I? The altar boy and the slut. One’s in hiding
.

Henry knows one and not the other
.

How can I hate the part of me that partook? Then, I hate myself. I hate myself
.

Nothing I can do or become will ever be as vivid as this black crime in my soul
.

Where do you put the ache, the anger, so it makes movement? Not statis?

At the end of that summer, I packed the secret pages away in my luggage. When I returned to New York I put them in a drawer and forgot about them.

MEN
.

The letters are yellow, painted on a sign above the second-floor hallway near the end of the aisle marked
FICTION
.

But I’m not thinking about that. About
MEN
.

It’s my day off from the play and I’m looking for a classic. A good solid read. The deep comfort of sinking into the era and into the lives of others. I’m thinking George Eliot. Or Tolstoy. Or Stegner. And maybe I’ll find a good new novel for Henry. A gift. I wander among the shelves, cracking open books, reading first sentences, catching the whiff of ink on new paper. I come across the Eliot I’ve always meant to tackle,
Middlemarch
, study the first words—
Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time
—and then, a force in a tight pair of jeans and a black turtleneck arrives to peruse the titles. A fat leather belt announces itself, the tip of it dangling toward the young man’s thigh. And, as best as I can describe it through the haze of the stubborn shame, it’s like this:

A body has arrived to take mine away.

And
away
is what I crave.

Suddenly, I am nearly shaking. Every pore of my skin alert to his presence, while George Eliot is obliterated. I hold myself motionless, as aloof as possible, trying to hide the waves of desire breaking off of me. My body screams as I feign silence, as I pray for discipline to close the door on this man and not the book in my hand. I glance over. His slip of a grin, the twitch of his brow, vocabulary from a language it seems I’ve studied now for years. A kind of Homo-Esperanto, spoken worldwide by a particular subsection of the tribe. I reshelve
Middlemarch
. My breath has gone shallow and quick like it does when you’re ill. Or breathless with anticipation.
Whose body is this?
I wonder, as I step back, try to take stock. What’s that my old therapist, the one I saw now and again for a year, what’s that he used to say about insanity? Repeating the same behavior again and again and expecting a different result.

It always leaves you feeling horrid. Stop. You’re losing control
.

So? Is control such a great thing?

He steps past me, deeper into the alphabet of
FICTION
. I move away and turn the corner toward
SELF-HELP
. Testing things. Is he really following, interested? He finds me again, gives me a quick look. He’s got bad skin, a sweet smile. He brushes his crotch. I do too and it’s off we go, in our electrified stupor, to the nearby park to see what’s up.

Book, gift, never purchased. An hour, a chunk of eternity, gone.

Next evening, I’m playing on Broadway again. “Doctor Stage,” an actor friend of mine calls it, “because, no matter what ails you, you always feel better after work than when you came in.” When we reach the finale, I look out at the audience as we take hands and make our company bow,
happy you’re here
, our bending bodies say,
so glad to be of service
. The chorus swells and I’m belting my F-sharp, it is tucked tightly inside the last, huge chord. Six months running and our harmony still gives me gooseflesh. The surge of music, a thousand people clapping, the lights at full tilt, it’s a golden moment eight times a week. A giant house full of joy. It happens every night except Monday, this musical story, this miraculous curtain call, and I know I’ll never get over how lucky I feel that this is my job, that I get to tell stories for a living. Up to the dressing room I go. Out of costume. The stage manager announces the call for next day’s understudy rehearsal, drops off the actors’ valuables that had been locked up for the evening. “Goodnight, folks. Good show!” come the last words over the loudspeaker. Down three flights of steps, I hand Josh the doorman the key to my dressing room. He slaps me five.

And out into the night I am flying home on my bicycle when I see a young man standing on a corner of Ninth Avenue. I slow down, smacked by a longing that’s been crouching quietly under my ribs. He’s swarthy, cute. Instantly, I perceive that he is interested. It’s there in the air, coming at me. A libidinous vibe. I come to a stop near the curb and offer him a quick smile.

“What the fuck do you want!” he blurts out.

“I . . . I . . . thought maybe you could sell me a joint,” I lie.

“Get the fuck out of here, faggot!”

He steps over suddenly and kicks the front wheel of my bike. Hard. The handlebars jerk out of my grip. I regain my hold and start pedaling. He decides to give chase. Runs and kicks my back tire. I nearly fall. “Get the fuck out of here,” he screams. “You’re lucky I don’t have a fucking gun.”

My legs are pumping, my heart exploding with shame, fear. I take a right and head toward the river, then left for a block, and stop to collapse against a mailbox. The street is silent, seemingly safe.

After a while, I pedal slowly home, wondering what I was thinking. He was a guy standing on the corner, minding his own business. How is it that I can long for something so badly that the longing makes me trust any possible path for attaining it? All this want inside, but just what the actual want is, I don’t know. It’s somehow not about sex, I think. But something to do with danger, destruction.

How many times now have I walked into a park alone, late at night, telling myself with each step to turn around. Get out. A part of me arguing:
But there’s sanctity in everything, isn’t there? Even behind a bush in a park with a stranger. There’s something to be learned
.

Once, a guy gripped me by the belt of my just-opened jeans and told me in a suddenly menacing voice that I’d better disappear or I might get hurt. “Give me ten bucks and I’ll get you out of here safe,” he growled. And like a light switching on in a dark and empty room, I saw how stupid, how unconscious, my act. And back on the lighted avenue, ten dollars poorer, it floats through my addled brain that there is something suicidal in what I’m doing. Something angry. My bottomless search is a curse I don’t understand. Why do I do this? What is this fierce longing for a connection that, if stumbled upon, crumbles to nothing?

I’
M LATE, HE’S
already in bed.

The lamp in our room is turned low. Henry’s lying face up on his side of the bed. Eyes closed, perfectly silent. His hands are folded carefully over his chest, one on top of the other, a body laid to rest. His sweet, Slavic head is sunk into the pillow. He looks like a great leader lying in state. Lenin, perhaps, who, like my dear Henry, was bald and brainy. My breath stops as I get a disturbing, momentary glimpse of what he might look like in death. My God, I think, he is too still. But as I stand in the door of our room and stare, I see that a certain, deep quality of life emanates from him. I also see the gray wires that flow from the tiny speakers in his ears to the new CD player and I breathe again. He’s awake, I can tell, and listening, even as he drifts toward sleep.

I wonder what he’s playing. His tastes are refined and wide. He listens to composers I’ve heard of but whose names I could never spell or pronounce, whose music I rarely recognize. Henry’s played piano since he was a boy. Music is a constant for him, a staple, a passion. I know how important it is for him to simply stop all else and listen. He’s that way with the people he loves too. He listens. He’s lost now, I imagine, in chord progressions, compositional elements that elude me. (Though he insists I’d hear so much more if I
stopped
. . . “You treat music as if it’s underscoring for all your activities,” he often tells me.) I look at his powerful shoulders under his T-shirt. They’re broad like those of his father, and his Polish grandfather, who was once a wrestler in the circus. I watch his chest, thanks be to God, rise and fall with breath.

I move gingerly toward the closet to begin hanging up my clothes. I can’t help it, I speak. “What are you listening to?” I watch a ripple move across his tranquil face. I see how my voice has dipped into his world. My voice, which is so much a part of this earth. My voice, which has come, after our years together, to sound like his. I’m sorry for having disturbed his singular space, but I want his attention. I want him to kiss me. To look at me.

“Janácek,” he says quietly. His voice is soft, floating in ether, floating elsewhere, like him. He seems to me, in moments like this, not of the earth. “Piano works,” he whispers, his eyes still closed. I hear his desire to stay where he is inside the sound and the meaning that comes with it. I hear the echo of patience it takes for him to pop up from within and speak. I can see that he’s receiving something. A message from the composer? Voices from beyond? I wonder what Janácek would think at witnessing such concentration. If the composer walked in I’d say, “Look at that guy on the bed, he’s a brilliant man (whose maternal grandparents were Czech, by the way), and he’s drinking in
your
work. You are gone from here, but talking to him still. Isn’t that something?”

So much of Henry is a mystery to me, I think. How deeply he loves certain things, loves me, and how far from me he can seem. And I think how much I love that too.

I skitter across the room and deposit my backpack near the desk. I put my wallet on the bureau and strip to my underwear. I glance in the bedroom mirror, taking stock again of how my thirties are treating me. The slight, new folds above the hips, the circles under the eyes, the slightly leathery look of the face. I check the curves of my chest to see if the weights I lifted at the Y that afternoon have had any effect. I see how aroused I remain under the cotton of my Calvin Kleins. I think of the phone calls I could make, the mail I should answer. Maybe I’ll stay up a while. I look to my lover, think of being naked with him. Of being wanted. Wanting. The litany of endless desires skating across my brain.

Henry’s repose is stillness itself.

I sit on the edge of the bed, ready to ask him about his day. To insist. But he looks so calm.

I go to wash my face, take a final pee.

I come back. He’s still there, still. I crawl in next to him and one of his hands levitates, moves over, and rests on my chest for a moment. After a while, he turns and pulls the headphones out of the stereo and piano music floods the room. His hands have returned gracefully to his chest.

“Beautiful playing,” I say. “Who’s the pianist?”

“Firkusny,” he whispers.

I press my little toe against his and tap along in rhythm to what must be, I think, Firkusny’s left hand.

“Did you buy soy milk?” I ask.

“Yeah. I got two.”

“Thanks . . . any messages?”

“Just Michael. He got us tickets to his show Sunday night.”

“Oh. Good.”

There’s more I could ask but I remain silent. I listen. I scooch my hip over so that it touches his, tucks into the curve there like perfect sense. Bones, continents, linked.

“What’s this piece called?”

“ ‘Auf verwachsenem Pfade’. . . ‘On the Overgrown Path’ . . . I think.”

“Sounds sad,” I say, and give Henry a quick, light peck on the cheek. He responds, his eyes still closed, by puckering his lips and offering a delicate kiss to the air. I know it’s meant for me, this bubble of him coming up from the deep. I feel how it’s linked to the countless kisses of so many kinds we’ve shared before. I know he’s glad. I’m where he wants me. Close. We listen to the delicate piano for a time, toe to toe, hip to hip.

Henry says, “Oh, I got this today. Listen. . . .” He reaches for the remote, the fancy clicker that goes with the new player. The one I got him for his birthday. He loves it because he can stay still and choose exactly what he wants, three CDs at a time. It’s a big success, this present. A happy gift coming from happy, steady gigs: me in another musical, Henry performing in another Shakespeare in the Park. “Listen . . . to this adagio section,” he says. “Ravel. Concerto in G Major. Listen.”

I do. I listen and it is unspeakably beautiful. From the very first gentle notes of piano to the entrance of strings and clarinet, I am lifted and caressed. I am floating home, at first, to Denver, over the mountains. The places I walked as a boy. And then, suddenly, I’m thinking of my Great Aunt Virginia, who just died at ninety-five. She loved music with a passion similar to Henry’s. “It saves my life, it does,” she used to say. “Makes me right with the world when nothing else can.” She lived alone in London and told me how walking along the Thames toward the Royal Symphony Hall and stopping for tea before a concert, how this was heaven on earth for her. She must have known this piece, this gorgeous Ravel.
How did he compose a thing of such beauty?
It’s as if his very soul is soaring through our little apartment. Henry’s toe presses against mine and my eyes well up and I promise myself to remember this—the depth of my gratefulness. To remember living this moment of contentment. When the noise, the galaxy of desires, skittering across my day, calmed to this very one: to be with Henry as he offers a piece of music to me. To lie, to listen with Henry, as we hold our separate thoughts is, for now, completely, utterly, enough.