Best Gay Erotica 2003, page 8
“What’s your hurry? Am I that unpleasant company?”
“Of course not,” Todd said. He pouted in a boyishly self-absorbed manner.
“It’s just that the snow’s making me cranky,” Tyler said.
“Let’s play some more,” Todd said. He stretched out his body and cupped his balls.
“Aren’t you worn out?” Tyler asked.
“No,” Todd said, his grin taking on a fake, impish quality. “Are you?”
“Yes,” Tyler said. “You’re too much for me.”
“So let’s just neck some more.”
Tyler didn’t really want to be unkind to him, though he knew he was being hustled now. “Neither of us has shaved.” “Want me to shave you?”
Years ago he would have been delighted with the offer. Hours ago he would have been delighted. “I’m not twenty anymore, though I wish I were, sometimes.” Tyler turned and looked at Todd. “Or I wish I was twenty and knew what I know now.”
Todd smirked. Tyler turned and faced the window again. As he did he caught sight of his own reflection this time, his white hair crossing against the currents of snow. Everything would be all right again soon. All he had to do was wait.
“Tyler?”
“Huh?”
“Wanna shower together?”
“Hmmm.”
“Or soak in a bath?”
“My joints are damp enough,” Tyler said.
Todd went into the bathroom. Tyler heard him take a leak and flush the toilet. Then he turned the water on. Then he heard the shower begin and the sound of the water change as Todd stepped into the flow. Tyler stayed at the window and ran a hand over his chest and pinched the slackness at his hips. He was still there when Todd came back into the room, dripping onto the carpet.
“Tyler?”
“Huh?’
“I’m going crazy in this room.”
“Put something on. You’re going to get a cold.”
Todd put his boxers back on and a T-shirt and ran the towel through his hair. Tyler watched the process in the reflections of the window, momentarily imagining Todd was a soccer player, toweling off after a game. The image burst apart in another flurry of snow and Tyler again felt old and vulnerable in his sagging flesh.
“Wanna get something to eat?” Todd asked.
“If you want.”
“Room service?” Todd asked.
“Sure.”
Behind him, Tyler heard Todd pad across the carpeted floor and sit at the desk, thumbing through the hotel journal till he reached the room service menu.
“What do you want?” Todd asked.
Tyler smirked at the loaded irony of the question. I want to be out of this room, in an airport, on my way home, away from you, on my way to someone else. For a moment he thought about running out like a lunatic—racing down the hall and into the lobby with nothing on. At least he might be arrested. At least it would take him to jail. Somewhere else.
“Nothing heavy,” he answered.
“How about some ice cream?” Todd asked. “Or a milkshake?”
“Coffee,” Tyler said. “I’d like something warmer.”
The ice cream and the coffee came ten minutes later. Todd’s spoon clinked against the glass at an annoying speed. Tyler sat in a chair facing the window, a cup in his hands.
“That killed a half-hour,” Tyler said when he had finished his coffee. Tyler finally pulled himself away from the window and sat on the edge of the bed and turned on the television. Todd curled up on the bed into a fetal position, a pillow cramped between his legs, as if waiting to be petted.
“Wanna watch a movie?” Todd asked. “They have a movie selection here.”
“Let’s check the news first,” Tyler replied. He flipped the channel, wondering if God would give him a respite with the snow. Even a little one. He shook his head to clear it.
“Something the matter?” Todd asked.
Tyler shook his head to indicate No. The moving images on the screen made his vision blur. He lay down, exhausted from the anxiety of trying to decide how long he might have to stay. He thought that maybe he couldn’t last—that he’d have to cancel his appointments for tomorrow as well. The snow had become his business now. Something tugged at his inner ear. A rumble that seemed to shake the foundation of the building. He lay still and quiet and then felt it again. “What?” he asked.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
Maybe it was Todd’s voice again, stirring in the room from some dead sentence. It tugged again, and Tyler realized it was a sound outside the room, far off. “Hear that?”
“I don’t hear anything.”
“It was the parking lot. Someone’s leaving.” Tyler felt his pulse quicken and, as he lifted himself off the bed, he struggled to overcome a dizziness. He padded across the carpet and looked out of the window again.
“Maybe they’re salting the highway.”
“No, listen,” Tyler said. In another minute he heard it again, barely above the blood beating in his ears. Todd joined him at the window. Tyler smelled the soap Todd had used. He was aware of Todd’s heat and the hairs on his leg stood up, warning him of Todd.
“It’s lighter,” Tyler said, looking out through the snow, the tone of his voice brighter, breezier.
“Sure is,” Todd added.
While they were watching the snow, a man walked beneath them through the parking lot. Tyler’s eyes followed him, watching the man’s mittened hands clap together. The snow swirled in thinner gusts now, flaking against the window before melting.
Tyler walked to the phone and dialed. “Are they back on schedule?” Tyler asked. As the receptionist explained that flights were now leaving, Tyler thought that his giddiness would give him a heart attack, his blood now a roar in his ears. He hung up the phone, smiling.
Tyler packed with a hurry and a determination he had not possessed since he had arrived in the city. He kept looking outside as he packed, watching the flurries thin out. He could now see the sharp line on the horizon where the highway was.
Todd was dressed in his jeans and coat in a matter of seconds. Tyler waited for him to ask for more money, but as Tyler lifted his suitcase off the bed and moved toward the door there was nothing. Impulsively Tyler stopped and kissed Todd abruptly on the lips with a passion he hadn’t shown the boy since he’d first arrived in the room. Todd slipped his arms under Tyler’s jacket and returned the kiss. Suddenly they were all hot and bothered at the idea of losing one another. “I’m here often,” Tyler said. “Could I see you again?”
Todd nodded and Tyler knew that if he wanted more he would have to pay the price of it. In the elevator he felt relaxed. Peace, he thought, and studied Todd with his clothes on, finding himself mentally undressing him and growing hard at the thought of the young man.
By the time Tyler reached the airport he was as exuberant as the sun, the light bouncing off the snowdrifts so brightly that he paused only to search for his sunglasses.
Spurt
Stephen Greco
This is not like me, going upstairs in the middle of the day to jerk off. For the second time today, no less. I used to love to masturbate—not just for the pleasure, but for the idea of giving it to myself. It was like me, years ago, to spend hours at it. But that was before my career took off, before the writing and teaching schedule began to strain under my responsibilities as what Vanity Fair calls “best-selling author–slash–talk show dependable.” And it was way before Josh, who’s made it his business to give me all the pleasure I need.
How many times have I climbed these stairs? Until now, I might have said a million. Today, as it happens, I know the real answer. During the thirty-one years I’ve owned this house, I’ve climbed the main stairs four times a day, on average, meaning that it’s been 117,180 times in all, so far. I didn’t do the math. Josh did, last night. We were having sex, during which, as often happens, he was focusing on my legs. After licking and massaging my thighs for half an hour, he climbed halfway on top of me and began rubbing his tight, hairless gymnast’s body all over me, his cock jamming against my left quad, shooting as soon as I started flexing. Afterward, as part of the ongoing narration he likes to provide during sex, he told me all the reasons why my legs were so great for, quote-unquote, a man my age—which happens to be sixty-three, as Josh never tires of pointing out to people who he thinks find me unusually vital, or surprisingly unwrinkled, or something. He took into account the gym and the work I do in my garden. But it’s the figure “117,180” that comes to mind at this moment, as I climb these stairs, since I know it’s at least 100,000 times that I’ve said I would fix that split baluster on the landing and at least 100,000 times that I’ve just put it out of my mind, as I’m probably going to do once again, right now.
Only, damn—that split looks worse than I remember it. Now, when did that happen? I don’t remember bumping it, though back before I gave up drinking this whole staircase took a lot of punishment, as I stumbled up to bed at night— alone for years, then occasionally with a stranger, or with someone who became slightly less strange during a short, ill-fated parody of courtship, then later with Josh, during the first year I knew him.
It was during the second year that Josh helped me go dry. One day he’s this cute grad student at the other end of the table in my “Novel to Film” seminar. Two weeks later he’s stopping by my office on a pretext and inviting me to lunch off campus. Ten months after that he’s driving me across state lines to Hazelden and house-sitting until I get back. And three weeks after I get out of Hazelden I’m telling Josh it’s OK if he moves his stuff in. We’ve been together now as partners for two years. Partners, lovers; I still don’t know what words to use. Josh likes saying it’s a marriage, and I do love him enough to sign a contract, if it ever comes to that, and I do believe that despite the difference in our ages he can love me as fully as he says he does—though this relationship is turning out to be no less labor-intensive than my first one, with Andrew, years ago, when I had far less experience living with people.
God, when was that?—and how different it all was, once! Andrew and I met in the late ’60s, back when gay men were so sure that the only path to couplehood was political. So there we were, Andrew and me, each struggling to be a good Ozzie Nelson–meets–Emma Goldman–type husband, while plenty of our friends, the real revolutionaries, were rejecting “dyads” entirely and clumping together in tribes. Something of that struggle stayed with Andrew and me even into the ’80s, when death did us part, and by the time I met Josh I thought I had evolved beyond the romance of doctrine. This time, I thought when God finally saw fit to send me another contender, I will be wiser about love. Yet here we are, just as doctrinaire, in our own way: the sixty-three-year-old man and the twenty-four- year-old man agreeing explicitly and repeatedly to put aside their baggage about age—finding common ground on which to discuss Stonewall and hip-hop with a minimum of smugness—and coming together as spiritual equals.
It almost works. Although this morning the nature of the gap between us became a little clearer to me, when for some reason, after Josh left for the airport, I jerked off alone and really got into it. I mean, I really got into it, for the first time in years. Josh has a gymnastics meet tomorrow in Boston and I feel somehow, I don’t know, as if I’ve cheated on him. Christ, we’ll probably have sex tonight, since I’m taking a later flight to join him in Boston. Yet here I am, walking up these stairs again, to jerk off again, feeling guilty again—and feeling a little stupid for having forgotten how much I need this form of recreation, a little ashamed for having neglected it for so long, and even, in some juvenile corner of my mind, a little fearful that now God is going to rethink his lovely gift to me.
Of course, God might also just be trying to remind me of something else lovely. Lying there on my back, my legs spread wide, cock in hand, playing with my balls, building and edging for forty minutes, catching sight of myself in the mirror, and finally blowing a load all over my stomach, I felt like a teenager again, all atwitter. Actually, no, this is how I used to feel in my thirties, with Andrew, when all the options for living first seemed truly possible, sexually and otherwise. (Or should I say, sexually thus otherwise, since it was only after I fell in love that I found the faith to start writing about “Eros as a beacon of truth”—as a friendly critic once put it—and my career took off.) I looked down this morning and saw the body that Andrew cherished—and I’m happy to report that there’s so much of it left: the waist that’s exactly the same size it was thirty years ago, thanks to dietary discipline; the pecs that are as defined as ever, if not quite as hard; the toes that have not gotten all gnarled and ghastly; the hair that has stayed mostly dark, like my mother’s did, and is still on my head.
Josh doesn’t savor the twitter in me. I’d say he likes my youthfulness but is indifferent to my Inner Youth. He likes it when I show command. He loves the fact that I’m this established older guy who, by the standards of his generation, is nonetheless cool and tuned-in and in-shape. In fact, Josh expects me to demonstrate all these qualities constantly, and until recently I didn’t think too much about doing so, because his expectation itself probably helps keep me cool and tuned-in and in-shape. On the other hand, the foiblish youth in me is looking more embraceable than ever—a gift of old age? I am not only the bench-pressing, club-attending, Paul Smith–wearing, transgressive novel-producing old guy that Josh wants. I’m also the nerd who sits at the piano every day and practices Bach, like I did when I was a kid because I was shy. I’m also the fag who spends an obscene amount of money on an urn for the garden, because that’s what the pansy teenager dreamed of doing.
Lately, when I see Josh fetishizing my age, I find myself wincing slightly, despite my thrill in being made to feel like a porn star four times a week, and the responsibly intellectual envy of my older friends. I realize that Josh and I always talk about this issue…and we never talk about it. God knows, we know plenty of people in his crowd who are in culturally mixed relationships in which fetishization sometimes becomes an issue. Maybe tonight, over dinner, I’ll pretend to be all creaky and aged. My elbow has been acting up again; I’ll fake a motor control problem. I’m sure he’ll laugh; he always laughs at my jokes. At the same time, I can ask him about the baluster. I’ll start with the baluster! My plane gets in around seven. He’ll pick me up in the full-size car he took such pains to rent. (Safety nut.) We’ll probably go to a restaurant on the way back to the hotel. In the car, he’ll tell me about the other gymnasts—who’s in shape, who’s offering the stiffest competition, who’s the cutest. He’ll tell me all about his flight this morning, about settling into the hotel and checking out the arena where the meet takes place. He’ll ask me about my one o’clock lecture, which he knows I didn’t want to cancel even though I do like traveling with him and, in fact, have been looking forward to being in Boston with him for weeks, since I haven’t done the strolling tour there since I was, um, his age.
We’ll be chatting over appetizers, and he’ll have ordered a salad (health nut), and there’ll be a lull and I’ll say, “Oh, Josh, do you know what I noticed? That split in the baluster on the upper landing looks worse than it used to. What happened there, do you know? Did people get upstairs during the book party? Was it your friends, or my friends….?”
He’ll smile and think I’m some kind of dear for being so concerned about my house. And I’ll look into those incandescent green eyes and think how curly that luscious black hair would be if he didn’t have to buzz it so short; and I’ll notice that somebody across the restaurant is looking our way and trying to figure out exactly what we are; and I’ll feel Josh’s hand on my knee, under the table, and I’ll realize how unexpectedly happy I am, after losing so much. Knowing me, I’ll probably also have a thought of my darling Andrew, propped up in his hospital bed, skinny and wan, the time he told me—whenever that was; last week? some other century?—that he wanted me to find another boyfriend, that it would be all right with him, that there would be a time when I’d be glad he had said this.
Josh will know nothing about the baluster. If he’d been aware of any fresh damage, he’d have mentioned it immediately, I know. And he certainly won’t rise to any “your friends/my friends” bait I might throw out. He’s too wise for that. God knows that fetishism alone wouldn’t have given him the patience to deal with the rather large idea I have about myself and my lengthening personal history. It was soon after we met that Josh got beyond his automatic, good boy’s respect for my relationship with my home and his smart boy’s appreciation of the fact that I had planned this place with Andrew as a post-Stonewall love nest. To Josh’s credit, he understood right away when I first explained what the proportions and materials and pathways of this house mean to me, down deep.
I remember the conversation. It was a crushingly hot summer night and we were sitting on the front porch in our tank tops, after dancing at the local gay club. Some kids drove by in a convertible blaring Outkast. Josh was surprised I knew it was Outkast. I was explaining that in college I had studied to be an architect, that the writing happened later. I had grown up in a small town during a world war that everybody talked about but nobody really saw, since this was before TV. Enemy soldiers and bombing scared the shit out of me, despite adult reassurances; and then I had gotten through high school during real-life Happy Days by doodling through every class: floor plans of sculptural, free-form houses that I later saw were screamingly womb-like. College for me was about looking to protect myself in something built.
Josh got all that. Then, after a moment, our shirts were off and we were fooling around right there on the porch.
As it happens, I didn’t build this house; I bought it. The moment I saw it, I knew that some progressive architect back in 1922 had thought just what I was thinking about how solid and safe things should be, but how light and open, too. Andrew and I had barely set foot on the porch with the Realtor before we were catching each other’s eye and blurting out something like, “This is it! This is the place!” Going inside was like coming home—Manderly but on a scale appropriate to just-off- campus: warmly paneled entry hall with built-in window benches and its own stone fireplace; inviting archways leading to library, living room, and kitchen; a wide, thickly crafted staircase rising in three landings to the bedrooms. Something in both our minds was able to ignite at that moment, because of those sticks and stones—a long-standing assumption, or maybe it was only a hope, that the world was indeed a place where people like Andrew and me could live happily together. Then we lived happily together, for a few years.
