With or Without You (7 page)

“I wanna meet him!”

For just a moment, I can’t hear the cars rushing by outside. I can’t hear the radio, which has been playing softly the entire ride home. I can only see the flashing red light on the dash, reminding me the hazards are on. It takes me roughly an hour to swallow and I gulp like I’m in a Tom and Jerry cartoon.

“Yeah.” I laugh nervously. “I’m gonna vote that idea off the island.”

Her eyes narrow. “Why?”

Trouble is, I don’t have a reason. But I can’t tell her that. “I dunno …” Once again, I see the pentimento. My home life seeping through the life I’ve forged with Erik. I can’t explain that I’m still not ready to make Erik real to anyone else. “Erik’s busy with school and stuff and … We’ll see.”

We stare at each other.

The last fifteen minutes of pent-up joy, everything I wanted—needed—to share fades. It’s like we’ve both woken from a dream, neither of us sure what just happened. I hate the consequences of happiness.

I lick my lips, slip the car back into gear, and merge into traffic. We’re six blocks from home before she speaks again.

“Evan, I understand why you haven’t mentioned Erik to M and D. I know you’ve got your own life to live, but I also hope you know you can trust me. I’d really like to meet this guy. I won’t snitch.”

“I know,” I whisper. I want to leap back in time and take it all back. Keep Erik to myself. Now he’s not just mine. Now he’s Shan’s, too. “We’ll see.”

We’re home and Mom is fawning over Shan. Mom tells Shan she’s lost weight. Shan stomps on my foot when I choke on a laugh. Dad rolls out to the living room and the three begin talking about New York and grad school
and Mom says she’s made Shan’s favorite—shepherd’s pie. I slip into the shower, then fresh clothes. On my way out, I say, “Don’t wait up. Davis and I are going to a late-night show.”

Shan smiles and mouths,
Have fun
. Mom and Dad don’t even notice. They continue to talk to Shan. I leave without a sound.

I always have a story. The only thing worse than needing one is when I don’t.

I’ve changed since Erik came along. I know it. The single most draining effort during the last year has been trying not to let all the changes show. I used to be a sloucher. Since Erik introduced me to yoga, I have great posture—back straight, shoulders square, head up. Mom noticed but couldn’t articulate it.

“We need to get you checked,” she said one day at the store, frowning and eyeing my perfectly straight spine, “for scoliosis.” I wanted to correct her, explain what scoliosis was, but she was showing concern and I didn’t want to spoil the moment.

Dad had a whole different take. “Are you giving me attitude?” I was helping him unload a delivery truck when he noticed. Instead of always looking down, I kept my head up. Between that and the posture, Dad thought I was looking cocky. Couldn’t help but smile. I was going for confident, but whatever. In a weird way, I think he
started giving me more respect. I’m always more conscious of my posture now when he’s around. Not necessarily because I want that respect, but because I think it freaks him out a little.

Davis was the only one who could really pinpoint the change, even if he didn’t know where it came from.

“You’re different,” he said. “It’s like you’re up to something.” Leave it to your best friend to know stuff he doesn’t even know. So I try to slouch and cast my eyes down whenever I’m around Mom or Davis. Let them see the old Evan. Somehow, I think my life works better when I’m less real to them.

I’ve also seen a change in my gait. Now, as I bound toward Gorham Street, my stride is sure and strong. If the trogs saw me now, I don’t think they’d recognize me. On the other hand, I worry that seeing a trog would bring out the other Evan, the one I banish when Erik’s around: meek, shy, acquiescent. This straight-backed, bouncy-gaited Evan is the only Evan Erik knows. I want to keep it that way.

I break into a run and hammer on the back of the Number 14 as it tries to pull away from the bus stop without me. It squeals and jerks to a stop. I slip my bus pass into the reader and take a seat. Twenty minutes later, I’m south of town, two short blocks from the Studio. I run the rest of the way.

Erik’s Studio is a self-storage unit he rents off the Beltway. On the outside it’s just another sky blue garage door set in a wall of chalky concrete blocks. But throw open that door and it’s like you’ve raised a periscope up into his brain. This is where he stores all the stuff he finds at rummage sales, estate auctions, and flea markets: a trove of spigots and toasters and blenders and mixers and rusty egg whisks, fused in combinations of two, three, four items. His creations hang from the ceiling by piano wire, jut up from the floor, and cling to the walls like postmodern tarantulas.

Erik, my beautiful boy, my nurse, is also a sculptor.

My favorite sculpture is in his friend’s gallery (it wasn’t just a pickup line; he really knows someone with an art gallery) in Milwaukee. He took two antique iceboxes and turned them into robots. One has mixer beaters for eyes, toilet plungers for arms, and mops for legs. The other is meant to look incomplete. It has no eyes but a spiral mouth—a discarded burner from an electric stove—rolling pins for arms, and one leg made from a tower of fused pork-and-beans cans. Two strategically placed potato mashers assure you each is male. They’re holding each other. And you get the idea that the one with the beaters wants to look into the eyes of the other robot—eyes that aren’t there. Erik calls it
Some Assembly Requited
. It’s the first image that pops into
my mind whenever I think about us as a couple.

It’s a toasty night. I navigate through the labyrinth of cloned garages toward the sounds of Gregory Douglass singing “Hard.” Erik’s choice of music on any given day acts like a road map, guiding me to his mood.

I’ll miss you hard enough to hide it,
I need you hard enough to try,
I love you hard enough to move on …

“Hard,” in Erik’s world, means caution.
Curves ahead, slow down
. It tells me he’s been brooding today and he’s working his way out of a funk. It tells me he’s remembering past boyfriends, bad relationships. But that’s about to change. Because I am here to negate all funks. The caring boyfriend has arrived.

I turn the corner to Unit 481. As expected, he’s standing in just his favorite pair of paint-spattered, ripped jeans. I have seen the man in a business suit, in swim trunks, and totally naked, but nothing gets me revved like seeing him in those jeans, shirtless and barefoot. He even makes the colossal welding mask that swallows his head look sexy.

The space reeks with industrial backwash; singed metal and pungent magnesium. The familiar hiss of the welder blends seamlessly with the music’s synthesizer as
the squeal of two chunks of steel fusing together threatens to drown out both.

I lean on the entryway and gape at the work in progress. This is one of the biggest things he’s ever done. It’s unlike any of his other sculptures; very literal, not at all abstract. He’s created a skeleton of pipes, around which he’s wrapping long strips of steel sheeting that he’s first run over with a buffer so they’re coated in circular grooves, giving them a tarnished, scratched look. This sculpture is of two angels holding spears overhead in their outstretched arms, one foot off the ground as though they’re leaping into the sky together. Their wings, like mirrors, shoot out with a width twice the statue’s height. He calls it
Fierce Angels.

“Why ‘fierce’?” I asked when he first showed it to me.

“Angels have to be fierce nowadays,” he reasoned. “We’ve come up with a thousand new ways to be crappy to one another since Biblical times when angels roamed freely. You’ve heard about people going ‘where angels fear to tread’? Not these two. Nothing scares them. They’ll go anywhere to help somebody out of a jam.”

Erik calls this his hobby. His heart, he assures me, is in medicine. He’s the top of his class in nursing school and he puts in more hours than any other intern at University Hospital. But even though he doesn’t call himself a “serious” artist, I know Erik is pouring everything he’s
got into this piece. It’s his first commission. At the end of the summer, the city is going to unveil it down at Reid Park as the celebration of their “clean up the neighborhood” project for that area.

Last year, two gay kids got the crap beat out of them at that park. One of them, a guy named Cory Tanner, was only just released from the hospital this spring, but he’s still something of a vegetable. Malaika led the charge to get the city to start patrolling that area more often and rallied a group of volunteers to clean up the park and start a neighborhood watch group. Once things turned around, the mayor agreed to a “victory” celebration and the city council commissioned a statue to commemorate the event. Guess who hooked Malaika up with the sculptor?

The blinding dagger of light from the welder vanishes, the machine’s hum dies down, and Erik lifts off the mask to find me in the doorway. I grin like a moron. I only have to wait the time it takes for him to discard the welder and helmet before he’s pulled me into his arms. His exposed skin glistens with fresh sweat that smells like sweet pickles.

“Hey,” he whispers, leaning his forehead in to touch mine. I love it when he does this. “Glad you could make it. Did Shan get in okay?”

I smile, but inside I flinch. Again, that weird feeling in my stomach:
Shan knows about Erik.

“Piece of cake,” I report.

Erik takes my chin between his thumb and forefinger. “Listen, I wanted to apologize. For just showing up at graduation. I should have checked with you first.”

He cups my cheek in his hand and tows me in for a kiss. How is this happening? How has this happened for nearly a year? I silently intone my kiss prayer:
Please let this tell him that I love him and let things continue just as they have been when we go home at night.
It’s childish but it’s what I think whenever we kiss. It’s worked so far.

When we break, I whisper, “You are always welcome in my life.”

He tilts his head and I consult my mental book, where I’ve cataloged everything there is to know about him: I call it the DictionErik. Tilted head. Noun. What Erik does when he’s not so sure about something. Add a sharp, quick intake of air and the meaning changes:
Yeah, let’s talk about that.
But instead, his shoulders slump.

Slump. Verb.
Everything’s cool.

When he’s this close, I can see the cracks in the armor he wears around everyone else. Not even Super Boyfriend is impervious to stress. We haven’t seen much of each other lately, between our mutual race to finish school and his hospital job and extracurricular work on
Fierce Angels.
He’s tired.

“How was work?” I ask softly.

As a nursing intern, Erik often jokes that he’s so low on the totem pole, he’s not even above ground. As a result, he gets shit on a lot, figuratively and literally. He gets all the jobs that the registered nurses don’t want to do. But he takes it all in stride because he digs his work. He spends a lot of time working with AIDS patients, which alternately sends him home elated or ready to collapse. Today was a collapse day.

Worry and concern drain from his body as he announces, “Mr. Benton was discharged yesterday.”

“Erik, that’s great! No small thanks to your TLC, I’m sure.”

Sometimes I meet Erik at the hospital, and I’ve gotten to know Mr. Benton over the last few months. He’s an older guy, really funny, but with a lot of health problems. He’s in and out of the hospital frequently, largely because he forgets to take his meds. Erik went so far as to use his own money to buy this guy a watch that went off whenever it was time to take his pills. But he still forgets. Erik loves Benton and I love that he’s happy Benton’s home again.

We talk about little things. Movies we want to see, new restaurants we want to try. We’re swaying, not necessarily to what the boom box dictates but to what we want to hear. When we’re like this, I forget that I lead two lives. I don’t care.

I close my eyes and dismiss any conflicting sensations. The total commitment to joy when I’m with him versus the stifling tundra that is my other life. Happy/Sad. Hot/Cold. Somewhere in the middle lies the exact synthesis of how I feel about Erik. Rapture at absolute zero.

I know that if I keep us here, our foreheads touching and dancing to internal syncopation, there will be more brooding and reflection. “When I’m like that,” he told me once, “don’t let me go there.” So I reach over and tap the pause button on the boom box.

Then I poke him in the ribs. “So, uh, you know, not to be rude, because I’m all about the slow dancing with my topless boyfriend, but didn’t someone mention something about presents? Evan needs presents.”

Brooding Boyfriend evaporates. Erik slaps his forehead. “Presents! I forgot about the presents! Yes, we must have presents!”

He takes my hand and yanks. We exaggerate giant steps over mounds of broken pails and make contorted turns around dilapidated wagon wheels toward the back of the garage. A tall something, hidden beneath a rumpled blue tarpaulin, waits in the corner, the end of our trek. He positions me in front of the mystery object, stands to one side like a magician’s assistant, and snaps off the tarp with a flourish.

I’m facing a tall, U-shaped frame made of dark finished
oak. I’m reminded of this antique standing mirror I saw in a second-hand shop over on Monroe Street, only here the mirror is missing. The thick poles on the sides are hand-carved, with grooves that spiral down. Up and down the vertical poles, reaching out into the empty space where the mirror should be, is a series of polished steel clamps in various sizes. The poles connect near my feet to a thin horizontal base that anchors the whole contraption firmly to the ground.

Erik throws his forearm over my shoulder and leans in to me. “Now, I haven’t taken this for a spin yet—I thought I’d leave that up to you—but I’m hoping this will be less cumbersome than THE CLAW.”