Best Gay Romance 2008, page 16
The little girl is cooing like a pigeon. She’s got the hutch’s door open, her head inside it, and is shaking her hair wildly like an epileptic. I’m not certain if I should be concerned or not. The parents are still nowhere to be seen. At the back side of the cage, I crouch, look in through the mesh. She seems to be okay; only playing. A playful mood hits me as well, I’m not sure why, and I decide to go along with it. I cluck at the girl, bring my fingers to the wires, thumb and forefinger pinched together as if I’m holding bread crumbs or tasty grubs. I’m beginning to feel ridiculous, superfluous, like an old lecher, when she finally takes a step forward, hand and knee. She smiles, catching the thread of the game. She rocks back and forth, teasing.
“Here pidgey, pidgey, pidgey,” I say.
The little girl laughs, scootches herself forward until her entire body is held within the hutch. As her foot slips in, the laces of her sneakers catch the door, which closes behind her. I hear the latch drop firmly into place.
“You’re sleeping with somebody,” someone says. It’s Bob. He’s looking at me through the mesh, disgusted. For a moment I’m not sure what he means. I’m only thinking how bad it looks, me here with this little girl locked inside a cage. But Bob calmly opens the door. The girl climbs out and runs off, skipping into the bowels of the fluorescent monster.
“Jesus, Bob,” I say. “I’m not sleeping with anyone.”
“You want to, then. It’s the only thing that makes sense. Why you’re so hung up on this karma crap. You want me to leave you.”
We both stand, looking at one another over the top of the hutch. I try to mimic his expression of disgust, but can’t quite manage it.
“Let’s go home,” he says.
The previous weekend, we’d gone to Los Angeles for the Warhol Retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Bob had seen an advertisement somewhere and nearly begged me to tag along with him. I’d never been much of a Warhol fan, but I enjoyed Bob’s company, especially when we were alone together in crowds. I don’t know if I’d call it vanity, but I got a thrill out of watching people watch Bob walk by, looks (gapes) I’d never attained myself, no matter how primped and pomaded I was, even back when I’d had hair. And more than that, I liked Bob. I enjoyed being in his company, in crowds or otherwise. We’d been together for nearly four years, and I still found him as appealing as ever. He was simple, straightforward, honest, a counterbalance to my hidden dark side—a dark side which never really expressed itself, but which nevertheless lay in wait for the appropriate moment to lunge forward and ruin my life, as I was sure it someday would. And Bob was a tether to goodness, an anchor, a chain linked to the childhood virtues; Bob was faith, hope, and charity incarnate. Truly.
Saturday was Warhol, all day. Uneventful. Subdued. Muted whispers in a white space. That evening at dinner, Bob raved about the exhibit, but I couldn’t see the point. Dead people in primary colors. Soup cans. Brillo boxes. But I enjoyed Bob’s excitement. At the restaurant, I listened to his chatter, watched as linguini got slurped between his grinning lips.
Sunday we went to Venice Beach. The day was a pleasant one, midseventies in mid-March, a few cottontail clouds in an Easter-egg sky. Around us were the smells of a hippie carnival—patchouli, funnel cakes, pot smoke—carried in a sweet, salty air that made you want to drink deeply of all the smells. The motion of the people against the stationary backdrop of the beach, ocean and sky, was almost joyful. And the variety of the people themselves—their attitudes, performances, talents, and lack thereof, their states of undress—was dizzying.
Bob stopped at every other booth along the paved walk, eyes wide and jaw dangling. He giggled more than I’d ever heard him giggle. By noon he’d gotten two temporary henna tattoos (a Celtic cross on his right wrist and a jagged tribal armband around his left bicep). He’d stripped off his shirt to show them off. And he’d filled his belly with fifteen kinds of sugar.
“Your faces show your past, my children! The future is in your eyes!”
At a booth down the walk, a showman of some sort barked out a pitch.
“See the unseen, my children. Know the unknown! Twenty dollah! Only twenty dollah to know it all!”
Bob shouldered his way through the crowd, careful not to corrupt the intricate traceries of the henna armband. I followed in his wake.
“So you want to know your future, my child?” the barker said. “You want to know your past?” He was holding out his arms, waving us closer. He wore nothing but a turban, blue as the sky, wrapped around his head, and around his waist a cloth like a diaper. His tan looked fake, orangey, but he couldn’t have faked the emaciation: twiggish arms and legs barely thick enough to stand on. His belly pooched out and caved inward at regular intervals.
Bob was holding out his hand to me, wanting money.
“What?” I said. “You’re not really thinking about doing this.”
“Sure. It’s a holiday, for Christ’s sake. Try to be fun for once.”
I handed him the money but didn’t stay around to watch.
I wanted water. Clear, clean, simple water. Not fruit smoothies, not colas, not lattes, espressos, or hyper-sweetened teas. I was beginning to feel coated, inside and out, by grime. I was sticky with the place and wanted cleansing.
When I got back from the water fountain, Bob was frowning. The psychic/guru/diaper-man was frowning. The two were seated cross-legged on a dark red rug on the sand, facing one another. Neither noticed that I’d approached.
“Nothing?” Bob was saying.
“No, no connection at all.” The man pulled Bob forward, ran his calloused fingers over Bob’s lips, nose, and the small creases at the corners of Bob’s eyes. “I’m sorry, my child.”
At the edge of the paved walk, I shuffled a foot in the sand, making enough sound to get Bob’s attention. For the tiniest fraction of a second, Bob’s face, as he turned to me, seemed strained, tightened, guilty. I wasn’t sure I recognized him, wasn’t sure that the man sitting before me was actually Bob. But then he rose, thanked the face-reader, and took my arm. We continued down the walk.
“Well?” I said.
“What?”
“What’d he say?”
Bob shook his head uncertainly.
“Nothing about your past or future?”
“Nothing much,” Bob said. “He said I think too much.”
“You? Really?”
“That’s what he said. And that I was a Buddhist novitiate in a previous life.”
“Really? You?”
“But that I was killed before becoming a real monk. In Tibet. By a tiger.”
“Oh,” I said. “Sorry.”
Bob shrugged his shoulders. “No biggie.”
We stopped to watch a fire-eater, then moved on.
“Nothing about me?” I said, finally. I’d been waiting for Bob to bring it up on his own, how we’d been together for lifetimes, how we were only fulfilling our destiny by loving one another in this life. “Anything? Hmm? Anything about me?”
“Nope,” he said. “Nope. Not a word.”
On the following Tuesday, during the first minute of my office hours, Trey Rothman walks in.
“I’ve done it,” he says. “I figured it out. Finally!”
“What’s that?”
“The zero proof. And it was so simple! Like you said, I was on the right path all along.”
He closes the door behind him as he comes in. He sits in a chair beside my desk, perches on the front-most edge of the seat. He’s leaning forward, legs primly aligned, fingertips flexing against the hollow metal spine of the spiral notebook on his lap. I can see the tiny brown hairs on his knuckles as his fingers move, the big white moons beneath the ragged nails. I look at the bones of his wrists, the tendons taut as harp strings, the veins, pulsing. I feel myself becoming aroused by every stupid, negligible detail of his body. I turn to my desk, scratch a pencil against the student paper I’ve been grading, pretend to make corrective marks.
“It was all because of you,” Trey says.
I realize it’s just flattery, just words of seduction, but for a moment I let myself be caught anyway. I sit back in my chair, clasp my hands behind my head. I imagine us in some columned outdoor chamber, far in the past. I, Socrates; he, ephebe. A young Plato, possibly. We’re wearing togas trimmed in gilt. Lounging affectedly. Talking deeply, intensely, about the very structure of the world. Forms, he’s saying. Ideals. The true nature of love, the duality of every living thing. And soon I realize he’s surpassed me in inventiveness, that I’ve been outmoded by the future, by more incisive arrangements of water, earth, fire, and air, and I know for a fact that someday even he, Plato, will betray me, misquote me, put words in my mouth that I never said, attribute to me thoughts I never conceived. I won’t be remembered as I truly was. I’m lost. I’m doomed.
Even my fantasies end in despair. The word escapes me before I know I’ve said it: “Hemlock.”
“Professor?”
“Get out.”
Bedtime. Naked again. We’re saying nothing, Bob and I. He reaches to flip the lamp’s switch, to plunge us into darkness, but I grab his arm, stop him.
Am I good for you, Bob? I say it without saying it.
I touch his chin, pull it toward me. I look into his eyes, something I rarely do. We know each other too well to look at one another so intently. Bob looks back at me, but I can’t see his eyes, not really. The shadows are too strong, the lamp placed improperly.
I mount Bob’s belly, feeling him breathe beneath me. I straddle him, awkwardly arranging my legs for comfort, and pull the tabletop lamp closer to us, lighting both our faces. I lean over him, look closer.
Am I in there, Bob?
Deep black mirrors stare out, surrounded by clear yellow irises. The yellowness is Bob, all that he ever was, all that he ever will be. But the tiny black centers, the blackened hearts of the daisies, the emptiness contained with them—
“What?” Bob says.
“Nothing.”
THE CANALS OF MARS
Victor J. Banis
Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but ugly is there for everyone to see. I can afford to speak so flippantly on the subject, since I was, and I say it in all modesty, beautiful indeed.
The operative word, of course, is was. Was, before a vial exploded in the lab, and turned that beautiful face into a road map of Mars. In the novels, in the movies, this is where the handsome plastic surgeon rushes to the rescue, and by the next chapter-reel, I am Joan Crawford all over again, and on my way to becoming Mrs. Surgeon. Or, in my gay instance, Mister and Mister Surgeon.
Cut. First off, he was older than the hills and singularly unattractive. And he was already married and blatantly heterosexual. Don’t get me wrong: I have no objections to heterosexuals, so long as they aren’t too obvious. And, hell, if he had been able to make me lovely again, I’d have murdered her, had the change, and gone after the old codger regardless.
Three operations later, however, the mirror still showed me the surface of Mars. The craters had shrunk somewhat, and the canals had shifted, but it was still Mars. I balked at going under the knife a fourth time.
“No, it won’t be a dramatic improvement,” he said when I questioned him.
“In other words, I’m still going to look like something brought back up half eaten,” I asked, and the tone in which he assured me that I would look better told me that “better” still was not going to be very good.
Which was where we left it. Notwithstanding the pleasure of lying abed in a hospital—there is nothing quite like the personal touch of your own bedpan, is there?—and all that delicious food, I promised I would get back to him, without specifying in which life.
When you are damaged, as I was, they give you lots of money, as if that would compensate for what I had lost. I was grateful, though, that I did not have to work. Not because I am all that fond of lying about vegetating, but because I did not have to face all those slipping-away eyes that I was sure to encounter.
There were not many places one could go, however, without the same problem. Jason threw in the towel and was gone. Jason who loved “the soul of me,” who loved me “through and through,” was through. I told myself good riddance. He was too shallow to be of much use as a lover, and I tried not to think that I had mostly been just about as shallow most of my life. I definitely tried not to remember that I loved the bastard.
I am fortunate that I am comfortable with my own company, as many are not, and there is a certain bitter comfort in wallowing in self-pity. That wears thin, though, after a while, and the walls of my little apartment seemed to shrink inward with each passing day. So, when Douglas called me, to say he was going to spend a month or two at his cottage on the shore, and would I like to come along, I jumped at the chance. I might not have in the past. I had always understood that Douglas was in love with me—whatever that meant. Jason had been in love with me, too, he said, and what had that amounted to? Who knew what “love” was? I didn’t.
In the past, I might have wondered at Douglas’s intentions, getting me all alone in that little cottage of his. He was Jason’s friend. I liked him well enough on the few occasions when I had met him, and he was a lovely person—just not my type. Not as old as that surgeon, probably, but, really, too old for my tastes, sixty if he was a day, maybe more. I didn’t really know. Anyway, what difference does a number make? There comes a point—doesn’t there?—when you’re just old. Though I have to admit, if you weren’t hung up on age, he was a youthful-looking sixty-whatever.
They say it’s an ill wind, however. With the face I now had, I did not have to worry about whether it was only my beauty that men were after.
I will give him credit. He was one of the few, the first, maybe, since the accident, who did not flinch when he saw me. He even managed to look me straight in the face, and not quickly avert his eyes.
“Pretty awful, isn’t it?” I said. He had come out to help me bring my bags in.
He smiled. “I’ve seen worse,” he said. “I used to work in a burn center.”
“I hope that wasn’t meant to make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside,” I said, following him up the wide, shallow steps to the front door.
“No, I’ve got martinis waiting. That’s their job.”
They failed, however. All they did was lower the barriers I had so carefully raised. The martinis, and Douglas. He was an elegant man, suave and distinguished. He was also thoughtful and gentle; I hadn’t known that about him before. Of course, I had never been alone at his beach cottage with him. Never, really, been alone with him at all.
He talked of all sorts of things, movies and people we both knew and recipes and the shore and the weather and, when I could bear it no longer and the tears began to stream down my cheeks, he stopped talking and just held me. He didn’t try to tell me it would be okay. He didn’t try to tell me that I was still beautiful. He did not swear it would all get better, or somehow magically go away, or any of the stupid, insensitive things that others had said that had only made me feel worse. He didn’t even chide me when I blubbered about the canals of Mars.
He just held me and gently kissed my cheek; not even the good one. He kissed the one that was scarred, kissed Mars’s canals as if they were the most natural things on this planet. He was the first person since the accident with the courage to put his lips to my flesh; the first, even, to put his arms around me. Jason had tried, and had paled and turned away before his lips touched me, and said with a sob, as if it were his heart breaking, “I can’t, I just can’t.” Then he left.
Douglas only held me and kissed my cheek, and when the tears stopped at last, he took me upstairs and tucked me into my bed like a little child, and brought me a cup of hot chocolate, and made me drink it, and sat and held my hand until I fell asleep.
“How long are you here for?” I asked him the next day. We were sitting on the little terrace. It was early in the season, the air still cool, but the sun warm, the ocean close enough for us to smell the brine and the seaweed. Too early for the tourists; too early, if only just, for the summer crowd.
“Till you’re better,” he said.
“Douglas, really, I’m all right,” I said. He gave me a mocking smile. “I will be, anyway. All right, I mean. You don’t have to look after me.”
“I don’t have to do anything,” he said with a snort. He got up from his chaise lounge and offered me a hand. “Let’s go for a dip, why don’t we?”
“I’m sure the water’s icy,” I said.
“No doubt.” He gave me a look that said he knew perfectly well that was not my reason for declining. “There’s nobody else around,” he said. “If anybody comes, we’ll see them miles off.”
Well, say I’m a freak if you will, but don’t call me a coward. I got up without a word and set my drink aside, and started for the beach. He fell into step beside me, whistling tunelessly.
I had planned to maintain my long-suffering attitude, to punish him—for what, I wasn’t quite clear, but surely no good deed should go unpunished. The water, however, wasn’t nearly so cold as I had expected, and the sun got warmer as it rose in the sky, and a warm breeze ruffled my hair. The gulls jeered at me and when Douglas got tired of my standing stiffly in knee deep water, toes firmly planted in the squish of sand, he splashed me, and I yelped and kicked water in his face and before I knew it, we were horsing around like a pair of kids, laughing and ducking one another, and I actually forgot that he was an old fart and I was a horror to gaze upon.
Until he said, “Shit,” loudly, and I followed his gaze, and saw a couple clambering over the rocks, heading in our direction.
I ran out of the water, grabbed my towel and started back toward the cottage, not wanting to be seen, knowing what would happen to their faces when they got close enough to see mine; and Douglas made a point of switching sides with me, so that he was between the scarred side of my face and the approaching strangers. They were probably not close enough to see, but I was grateful anyway. The canals were mine alone.
