Between Men Read online

  “Awfully chatty,” said Dennis the minute he was gone. “And what he fails to realize is that I regard him the same way the mystery couple regard us!” “Three very different generations. He’s singing songs to them they’ve never even heard. Why, I bet those boys, even if they are gay, have never even heard of Noël Coward—much less Ruth Draper.”

  “Ignorance is like a delicate and exotic fruit,” said Kent. “Touch it and the bloom is gone.”

  We stared at him.

  “Oscar Wilde,” he said.

  “I’m sure they wish the four of us weren’t here,” said Dennis.

  “But we are, and I love to look at them!” said the stage manager, returning for his cigarettes.

  “But we mustn’t,” said Dennis. “We must give them that courtesy.”

  “You can, not me,” the stage manager said. “At my stage in life, there’s nothing you can do but look.” And with that he left the dining room again.

  In the morning at breakfast we were careful not to stare at them, though this time they both shared in the public babble of tips on beaches, adjusting your face mask, and ferry schedules. Then they grew visibly bored as the couple from Cincinnati began talking of bicycle tours of the Auvergne and finally excused themselves, while the stage manager made ready his chaise longue for yet another day of reading beside the antiquated pool whose bubbles rose like those from the air hose of a diver in an old adventure movie. Outside the day was dazzling—the wind tossing the palm tree tops about like shirts on a clothesline in the blazing light. Knowing he had one day left, Dennis became even more demanding about the photographs. First, he wanted pictures of them in the waves, then atop a coral cliff, then in a grove of palm trees, then close-ups beside a hibiscus and even the interior of the hibiscus itself. Then he said: “Please take a picture of that crab on my suntan lotion.”

  “That’s the kind of shot you don’t want,” I said.

  “I know. But I’d like the crab,” said Dennis. “It’s so pretty. Pretty please? After all, you are my official honeymoon photographer.”

  “I know,” I said. “But you have more than enough shots by now. Believe me, you’ll have plenty for the scrapbooks.”

  “Well, I hope so,” said Dennis with a sigh. “I sincerely hope so. Because that may be all I have.”

  “What do you mean?” I said, as we watched Kent attempting the backstroke in the choppy waves.

  “I mean one is simply aware that there are magic moments in life that do not last—if you get my drift.”

  “Like this one?” I said.

  “Yes. Because—let me be frank—we both know that while I adore Kent, I don’t know how much longer this marriage can last, because, like most people, he is not without his problems.”

  “For instance.”

  Dennis looked over at me.

  “A fondness for the grape,” he said.

  “He’s drinking?”

  “Yes—which means he’s got problems this girl can’t do anything about—which means it’s important for me to get photos while I can.”

  “You mean you’re already planning to divorce him while you’re on your honeymoon,” I said.

  “There’s always hope!” he said. “But one does have to think ahead. That’s why I want to tell the boy with braces to just get over the pretty one. Because let’s face it—there’s a lot more where he came from. Now, listen, dear—I will probably be asleep when the English aristocrat emerges from the water, but when he does,” he said, looking over at me, “when he does, you make sure you get the money shot. I want him just as he comes out, streaming with seawater, because he’s so pretty with his hair slicked down, and that glistening washboard stomach. Promise?”

  “Promise,” I said.

  Instead I fell asleep not long after Dennis. When I awoke my friends were arguing about the couple.

  “This isn’t the end of the world,” said Dennis. “He’s going to have lots of boyfriends after this one. Lots!”

  “But don’t you see? None of them will mean as much,” said Kent. “None of them will be what this one is—because the first time you fall in love, the world is still entire, it hasn’t been split up into a thousand little truths. Your first love is your first feeling that you can unlock the door—the door of life, with all its potential for happiness, for union with another soul. It’s your first ecstatic contact with the current that runs the universe!”

  “So what am I?” said Dennis. “Chopped liver?”

  “No, no, darling,” said Kent, “you are a very fine pâté.”

  That evening there were several empty tables. Half the guests had gone, and the inviolate air of privacy that held sway over the diners whose faces glowed above the little shells in which the candles burned seemed slightly less inviolate. The stage manager raised his glass of wine to us; we raised ours to his. The homosexuals now outnumbered their opposites. But this hardly seemed to our advantage. In the middle of the night I woke to the sound of arguing and knocked on the door of my friends’ room. Dennis stood in the doorway of the bathroom holding a towel filled with ice cubes to his head. “He hit me,” he said. “He hit me!”

  I looked over at his consort, who lay there with a pillow over his head discolored with vomit.

  The next morning I walked them to the boat and watched it go around the headland.

  The rest of my days on the island were spent in solitude; in the dining room, where I sat alone, happy to watch the other guests. Then the rest began to vanish, one by one, back to the mainland—till only four of us remained. Alone in my room I watched the woman cut flowers in her backyard: a synecdoche of domestic life. The nights continued starry, the days, even when it rained, were more beautiful afterward. The wild horses began to graze nearer the hotel. The two young men got more healthy-looking and handsome with each passing day—as if, with the departure of each guest, they could blossom a bit more, like flowers. Every day I took a road I’d not walked before and came upon another lagoon, another beach, another sea grape grove. When I returned to the hotel at dusk, however, the human wish to share these discoveries was confined to conversation with Peggy as she served me dinner: the curse of traveling alone. The two young men babbled away at their table. The stage manager read a novel by Gordon Merrick as he drank wine and smoked cigarettes, looking up every now and then to take in the youth and beauty across the room. One evening I walked back down the hill to the village. The young man ignoring the majestic sky was still in the phone booth. He was a synecdoche, too: of what I was not sure. In the morning I waited for the woman to clip gardenias, her blue nightgown blowing in the breeze. Then one day I heard the boy with the braces ask Peggy about boats back to Fajardo as she served them their toast and orange juice. When they were done eating, the outgoing one said to the stage manager, “Have a good day,” as he passed his table on the way out. The stage manager turned to me and said: “Have a good day! I can get that by dialing my bank!” Then he remarked, “Lately I’ve begun to realize that I’ve seen that boy somewhere. I’ve seen him somewhere and I cannot remember. Isn’t that maddening? I can’t remember where and yet I know I’ve seen him before.”

  Five years later I found out. During that period we did not go to the island anymore; the dollar was so strong, people started going to Brazil instead. That trip involved a night flight, too. After a week in Rio de Janeiro we would return to Manhattan at dawn. The snowy streets of brownstones the taxi went down at that hour made the city look like a town in northern Germany: sober and bourgeois. The sleeping people, the cold facades, the fresh snow on the garbage cans and side-walks, seemed to rebuke the sweaty bodies on the beach at Ipanema and in the clubs downtown. And I began to wonder why we had to go so far to find the sensual. One year I was the last person in the cab. Too awake to go home, I asked the driver to take me to a club in the West Forties where, on Sunday morning, I knew the party of the previous night would still be going. But I was wrong. Only a small crowd of people remained watching a stripper on stage. The str
ipper, however, looked familiar. It was the boy with the braces. Only now he was the boy with a snake wrapped around his body, undulating to the sound of Donna Summer singing “Love to Love You Baby.”

  It was a small club with only one exit, for performers and customers alike. I waited after closing for him to come out. He laughed when I told him about our obsession with him and his friend on the island. No one had been right, as it turned out. They had been stripping in a club in San Juan at the time—which was where the stage manager had no doubt seen him—and were taking a little vacation; and the last thing they wanted to deal with was our desire.

  Greensleeves

  Kevin Killian

  It was Charlie’s wife who introduced her husband to Piers—Moira Watson, who loved entertaining gay guys at their house in the Marina, at parties, dinners, impromptu gabfests. When pressed to account for her affinity for gay men, Moira always smiled and said, “I am a gay man, trapped in a woman’s body.” You might almost believe it, so determined was her grin. “This is San Francisco!” she would exclaim, a sassy gleam in her large brown eyes. Moira worked for a fledgling Web company with a large, dignified office, like a sliver of Tara, in the South Park section south of Market in San Francisco. VV5 designed advertising gimmicks for Web sites, while the money people sweated it out, hoping someone would buy some of Moira’s space. Long hours, not-bad pay, lots and lots of burnout potential. And always a party to go to, many of them Moira’s. Moira Watson, at thirty-five, was always at least slightly conscious that she was old—old, that is, compared to the boys and girls who flooded Media Gulch by the thousands; the children who had been born reading William Gibson novels, net surfing, and bobbing sleek heads to an unseen ribbon of world-rap cyber music; they who, therefore, had this one unimaginable advantage over her. A geometrical advantage; it was like playing Risk with an opponent who not only owns all of Asia and Europe but Mars and Venus, too. Yet many of these youngsters were lazy, hadn’t Moira’s drive. Their posture, she figured, was what had given them the name of “slackers.” When she tried to slouch, her shoulders hurt. She didn’t do badly. She tried at least to keep herself from getting into an “old attitude.” Gay men gave her a kind of spark; watching them and touching them she found she could still burn down the house, without drugs. Except for her Zoloft. But everyone was on Zoloft or Prozac, almost as if it weren’t a drug but another form of gravity, a law to itself from which no one would want to rebel.

  Afterward, Charlie remembered the first time he saw Piers Garrison, at one of Moira’s Sunday lunch parties. He’d been deputized to stand guard in the kitchen and pour margaritas. And keep up light chatter and pretty much play the dummy who knows nothing about computers and isn’t ashamed to say so. To play Moira’s husband. He would be a mirror to Moira’s guests, who would receive a pleasing reflection of their own great knowledge in the silvery depths of his smiley ignorance. Naturally, since he made them feel both smart and tolerant, Moira’s friends from VV5 tended to like Charlie, who worked in banking somewhere. At forty-three, he was way older than any of them, a man of medium height and build, with thinning fair hair and slate blue eyes. He was pouring a scotch and water, and Piers was looking up with eyes of dark green, through thick brown lashes, over the rim of the glass, and suddenly the idea hit Charlie—“Guy’s got a crush on me.” Then, before he could think a second thought, Moira slipped between them, slid one arm around each of their waists.

  Piers Garrison was tall and lanky, well formed, with thick, wavy brown hair and fine-boned features. Charlie had to look up at him: his eyes were at the level of Piers’s chin. Charlie could smell sexual excitation as well as most men, and he smelled it in the way Piers was staring at him, through sleepy-looking eyes, half-open mouth. His lips were red, as though he’d been drinking sangria, but his tongue was pale pink, like a doll’s pillow.

  Moira smiled. “You two don’t know each other. Piers, this is my husband, Charlie Watson.”

  Charlie reached across Moira to shake Piers’s hand. He could feel the warmth of his wife’s fingertips fitted intimately inside the back of his waistband, between the suspenders. “I was making Piers a drink.”

  “Piers does computer graphics,” she explained. “He’s got the biggest Syquest drive you’ve ever seen.”

  Piers must have heard this joke a dozen times, but he grinned dutifully, though his green eyes remained thoughtful. Big white teeth on Piers for sure. Like Chiclets. What was a Syquest drive, anyway?

  “Hey, are you pierced?” Charlie asked, with a certain thrill of daring.

  “Everyone always asks him that,” said Moira, with a slight frown, “because of that name. Remember, Piers, even Vanderbilt at the meeting, and Charlie, this man Vanderbilt must be seventy, and straight as an arrow. If he knows about piercing, then everyone does. Another example,” she began happily, “of how deeply gay male culture has penetrated the straight world, right up to the boardroom.”

  But Piers was blushing, furiously, as if he had never, ever, been asked the question before. He shook his head no. “Family name,” he mumbled. “Nice to meet you.” Moira’s apartment on Chestnut boasted sensational views of the Marina—and Piers retreated, with his drink, to stand beside a full-length drape and watch the sailboats darting briskly across the purple bay. The sun in his eyes produced a squint that wasn’t, Charlie thought, unbecoming. When he wasn’t squinting, Charlie thought critically, Piers’s looks were kind of bland. It was when he was in pain that they took on the noble pallor of, say, Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia. He wondered what kind of underwear Piers had on—right now. Like a flip book of paper dolls, he pictured Piers in different kinds of underwear, standing against a perfectly blank background he could cut away at will with a pair of sharp scissors. Decided he looked best in boxer shorts—white ones like his own, perhaps with tiny shamrocks dotting them to match his eyes. Whether Piers actually wore them or not was an open question.

  But he wasn’t pierced—if he were telling the truth, and Charlie prided himself on his ability to spot a liar at thirty paces.

  One afternoon a few days later Charlie called his wife’s office and asked the receptionist to connect him to Piers. “Remember me?”

  “Yes, sir, I sure do,” said Piers.

  “I was thinking maybe you and I should get together.”

  For a few seconds Charlie could hear nothing on the other end of the line. He was about to hang up when he heard Piers’s voice again. “Sir, you’re right.”

  “What’s your address?”

  Piers gave it to him.

  “What kind of underwear you got on, right now?”

  The slight pause before Piers replied was all Charlie needed to know. It was the slight pause of the man who, though not a habitual liar, is anxious to cater to the erotic fantasies of another, more manly man. They made a date for that evening.

  “I guess I’m at a time in my life when I need a change,” Charlie confided, over a mountain of beef at the House of Prime Rib at Van Ness. Its baronial atmosphere, its smoky smells of overcooked spinach and beef and big tankers of beer, were a little out of Piers’s element, which is where Charlie wanted him. Off-kilter, he thought, confusing this tired metaphor with a mental image of a kilt; a kilt drawn up over the lower parts of a naked Scots guardsman. Off-kilter. “You have family here in the city?”

  “I have a brother,” Piers said slowly. “He’s gay, too.”

  “Ever have sex with him?”

  Piers looked shocked, but Charlie persisted. “Why not, what’s wrong with me asking you that?”

  “Eddy’s a whole lot younger than I am,” responded Piers slowly, distracted and troubled. By this time Charlie had the tongs from the salad in Piers’s lap, and was rubbing up and down his dick like a violin. “He’s twenty, I’m twenty-nine.”

  “Well, I want to meet him,” Charlie said. “Sometime.” He added that Piers could be his sub if he wanted to, and Piers agreed—this radiant smile broke across his face like the sun breaking fre
e of fog. Charlie didn’t expect such instant compliance. It knocked him on his ass.

  Piers lived in a cottage, set back from the street, just about in the backyard of another house, in a part of San Francisco some call “Glen Park.” This is where he received Charlie, where he wrote a contract at a big mahogany desk in which he swore to serve Charlie for the rest of his life. Signed it with blood. They both did. Charlie liked to do a lot of reading, so early on he told Piers that if he ever wanted to express himself, it must be in writing. “Dear Sir, may I suck your cock?” “Please, sir, whip my white bitch ass with your thick brown money belt.” Simple things. Little love notes. “I don’t want to hear a word out of your mouth,” Charlie said. “I get enough yakking at home.”

  He pointed to Piers’s computer. “Type me some notes on that,” he said. “Tell me about what I should do to your skinny butt.” While Piers was typing, very nimbly, Charlie picked up a framed photo from Piers’s mantelpiece. This was “Eddy,” Piers’s young brother, who was twenty and what Piers described as a “club kid.” Charlie hardly knew what that was, but suspected the worst. Eddy’s sullen gaze and full lower lip turned Charlie on. He’d like to have half an hour making that lower lip quiver. He wondered if Eddy was a bottom, too. He looked more fleshy than Piers, whose body was rather, I don’t know, aesthetic.

  One evening Charlie spotted an empty crushed beer can sitting in the garbage can Piers kept chained to one side of the cottage. “You don’t drink beer,” Charlie said. “What the fuck is this, pal?”