I Loved You More (15 page)

“What did you say?” Hank says.

“I told him,” Olga says, “that I was simply on an afternoon stroll, picking wildflowers. Then he started screaming at me and calling me names.”

“Names?” Hank says. “What'd he say? What kind of names?”

“
You dumb bitch
,” Olga says.

“Where is this guy?” Hank says.

“
This is private property
, he screamed at me,
you dumb bitch
,” Olga says. “
Don't you see the
no trespassing
sign? These flowers aren't wild flowers. These flowers are the subject of my doctorate at MIT
,” Olga says. “And then he threatened to call the police.”

Olga's really crying again. Along about then is when we hear the siren.

HANK'S WALKING BACK
and forth between the refrigerator and the door. He's beside himself with being pissed. At the whole deal, pissed. The screaming neighbor, Olga, the cop outside. Pissed at himself, too, I guess. Never really seen Hank like that. The way he's talking to Olga surprises me. Hank's always one for the underdog, a guy who's got your back. But he's telling Olga she should've known better, didn't she see the no trespassing sign, what the fuck what she thinking – and it's only making her cry more.

“Hank,” I say, “take it easy on her, will you?”

The way Hank's black eyes look at me. Fuck. His eyes go cold and faraway, and all of a sudden he's a big slab of marble staring me down and my stomach is full of ashes.

When he speaks, Hank's lips move but his teeth stay clenched together.

“Stay out of this, Gruney,” Hank says.

IT MAY NOT
seem like much, but this is a big moment between Hank and me.

The moment, however, is one that I take part in, but Hank doesn't.

It was more the way Hank said it than what he said.
Stay out of this
stirred up all Little Ben's shit. My big baby torpor was immediate and overwhelming. Little Ben was outside the grown-up male world again and there were rules going on and I didn't understand the rules. The code of honor. This is my woman and you don't get between me and my woman. All the while in me Big Ben is yelling:
Code of honor my fucking ass. Who the fuck are you to speak to me as if I were a child?

What's also always inherent in moments like these is the total impossibility to talk about it while it's happening. After all, there was a cop walking up the driveway.

Plus, men just don't do that. They don't stop in the middle of everything and say
you just really hurt my feelings
. Isn't that a perfect definition of a guy who's a pussy? Isn't that what boot camp is all about? What could be more male than a boot camp and a drill sergeant calling the soldier in training a
little bitch
? What does the soldier do – stop and tell the sergeant that his feelings have been hurt?

I'm such a homo I just don't get it. Big Ben either had to bitch-slap Little Ben and tell him to cowboy up and take it like a man or stop and listen to Little Ben and see what it is that he needs.

In either case, I've got a big mess on my hands.

For Hank, the moment goes by without even noticing it. He's just an Italian guy who's letting off steam and feels crowded and needs his space.

THE COP IS
a kid, barely twenty-one. A big round baby face, round glasses. I'm the one who goes out and talks to him. Esther's my friend and I'm the one responsible for the house. The sun is hot and he's sweating way too much for a cop to sweat. He's threatening to write out a warrant for Olga's arrest. Trespassing and the theft of valuable property.

Cops scare me. Even twenty-one-year-old chubby boy cops. Plus Little Ben is still smarting from what Hank said. I'm feeling shaky and it takes me a while. To talk. When the Fascists killed Lorca, they slit his throat. Cut his balls and his cock off first, then cut out his voice box.

Speaking and fucking. How they're the same. Penetrating the void, then putting something of you in there.

The words. I finally find the words and get my mouth to talk, and if that can happen, if I can actually get to the point of speaking words, then more often than not I can be very charming.

Propinquity. The cop stays two arm's lengths away. I tell the cop the situation. That Olga is a foreign exchange student, and that this is her first time in the countryside of America, and she has mistakenly thought the flowers are God's flowers like in her country and are growing there for free.

Hank walks out the door then, into the sun. The picture of cool. His chest up, his shoulders down, Hank's big guy walk down the driveway. Hank reaches out his hand, the cop reaches out his, and they shake hands, that firm manly handshake I've tried so often but usually overdo.

“Hank Christian, officer,” Hank says.

Hank, all that guy stuff down in spades, in no time at all he and the cop have made the connection. I can feel it. That man-to-man thing. But how they do it, I'll never know.

“Would you like to come in and meet Olga?” Hank says. “And have a cool drink with us?”

The cop is loaded down with all kinds of gear. Sounds like a pack mule when he walks. Inside, Olga greets us in the kitchen, those black eyes of hers that make Hank's look brown, the cornflower blue sleeveless smock thing she's changed into, her nipples under the cornflower blue smock thing, her beautiful braided long black hair, the matching cornflower blue scarf in her hair, the gold hoop earrings, the gold bracelets on her long, thin brown arms, Olga's beautiful smile.

In her very best English-as-a-second-language accent that
makes her sound like someone Spanish speaking English-English not American, Olga says:

“Good afternoon, officer. Would you like a glass of lemonade?”

THANK GOD OLGA'S
got her passport with her. And her visa.

A warning. That's all we end up with. A written warning on a piece of large pink paper that I'm obliged to give to Esther.

When the cop finishes his lemonade, he gets up, walks to the door. He has to be packing twenty pounds. Just as he grabs for the doorknob, before he opens the door and walks out, he stops. Puts his hat on, cocks it to the side. Turns his baby face around to Hank and Olga and me. In his best grown-up tough guy voice, he says:

“If I were you,” the cop says, “I'd go over to your neighbor's house and apologize to him.”

THAT NIGHT, AFTER
our first bottle of wine, the sun making a spectacle of itself going down, is when Hank and Olga finally start to relax. Their visit to the enraged neighbor has cleared things up. I never doubted it. Just being close to Hank, to Olga, their physical beauty unnerves the gods. Plus their offerings of a bottle of wine, and Olga-made gazpacho and a blackberry torte. Turns out the neighbor and Hank had the same baseball team they liked. Philadelphia's, I think. The Phillies, maybe. Or is that football?

Something's still caught in my throat, though, between my throat and my heart, that place that hurts where I smoke. But it ain't smoke. It's Hank.
You stay out of this
.

We're on the screened-in porch, the dark night around us getting deeper. White linen, the good silverware. Tall candles, short fat candles, votive candles, candles and candles. Their light, the way it always moves. So full and golden. Big, heavy white dinner plates. Each of us, a water glass and a wine glass, crystal that hums a wet finger along the rim. On the table, Olga's big
bouquet of red, yellow, and purple stolen flowers she's arranged into a large, blue glass vase. Hank gives me a wink then starts in:

Olga Rivas
, he says,
so pastoral, so Keats and Shelley, in her white dress like in a Matisse painting picking lovely wild flowers and effluvious herbs in a garden meadow
. Not in a mean-spirited way. But the way like only Hank can do. Olga cusses,
hijo tu puta madre
, throws a baguette at Hank, then an Anjou pear. But it isn't long and Olga is laughing. She's sitting on Hank's lap and Hank and Olga are laughing.

I don't laugh. That big baby torpor in me. I try and tell myself that Hank's a guy and guys are just this way, and I'm not a guy, never been one, never will be, and it's just too fucking much to comprehend. Just let it go.

But Hank is my friend. My friend that I love.

It ain't long and way too loud, Big Ben just comes shooting out my mouth:

“Fuck, Hank,” I say. “You and I got to fucking talk.”

Olga and Hank stop. They look over to me like who's he? Olga's one eyebrow goes up. Spanish, the way she uses her eyes. Latina Attitude. She doesn't like it I got the attention. And Hank. The look on his face. At first he acts like he doesn't know what I'm talking about. But Hank's eyes, the way they get fuck-you blacker, Hank knows.

Olga gets off Hank's lap, steps away. She keeps her hand on his shoulder as she speaks.

“I'll go open another bottle of wine,” Olga says.

“
Mi amor?
” she says, “you want the California cabernet or the Bordeaux?”

HANK'S BODY IS
on alert, but still he slouches down in his chair. One leg is up and his bare foot sets on the seat. I can't quite see his face behind Olga's big bouquet of red, yellow, and purple stolen flowers. The way he holds his head, Hank's face is in the shadows of the candlelight. I slide my chair over so we can see eye-to-eye. At the sternum, right in the middle of my chest, a
lightbulb that you can see the filament flickering. All the Running Boy wants is for me to get my ass out of there. It's a showdown, all right, we both know it, and I wish it weren't, but how else do you do shit like this.

“That's how guys do it, ain't it?” I say.

Hank stays hunched over, his head down, looking at his hands. Rolls his thumbs. Zeus is pissed and something big is going to blow. God the Father's going to kick ass. Supreme, the power of men. Terrifying, really. Something so terrifying about this moment and so familiar, but I don't know why.

GOT TO GO
pal
. The words that hurt. Years later, Zeus, God the Father, Hank must have sat that way in his house in Florida holding onto the pages of that last letter I wrote him. God the Father ready to kick ass, the sadness, trying to see through it. I should have made the joke about the hair. Made him laugh. But I didn't.

THERE ARE PETALS,
yellow ones from the sunflower, fallen onto the white, starched tablecloth. The petals rub off yellow onto my fingers. I take a deep breath.

“That's why male love is back-to-back,” I say. “It's about maintaining your position. If you love another guy you show support.”

“Gruney?” Hank says, “what the hell you talking about?”

“
Stay out of this, Gruney
,” I say. “You hurt my feelings.”

Hank's leg comes down off the chair and is a big thud on the floor. His face big and bright with candlelight. His empty wine glass right there. His fingerprints on his wine glass.

“Come on, man,” Hank says. “I was angry. Don't take it personal.”

“It's weird, Hank,” I say, “how far away you can go and how fast. Then when you do speak, there's threat behind it.”

“That's your shit, Gruney,” Hank says.

“But really it's all bluff,” I say.

“And if it isn't?”

“You throw a thunderbolt,” I say.

Hank's face goes back into the shadows. Yellow is all over the place. On my fingers, on the tablecloth. Yellow fingerprints on my wine glass. I always make a mess of things.

“Hank, you were stressed, I get it,” I say. “It just freaked me out you were talking to Olga that way. Does that make me a traitor?”

“I was angry,” Hank says.

“Angry's okay,” I say, “but is that the only appropriate emotion? Can't men be afraid and confused too?”

Out there in the dark, in the kitchen, Olga is opening drawers. Between Hank and me, the table and all the candles. The fires reflecting on the glasses, the shiny silverware. On the edge of flickering light and dark, Hank's face disappears, reappears. The way he holds his body so still. The Enigma of Hank. The Warrior Ghost.

The old house is big and dark. It holds our silence. Only Olga in the kitchen. The pop of a bottle cork. Hank goes to speak but he has to stop first to clear his throat.

“I thought that's what I was doing,” Hank says.

“What?”

“Showing you how confused and scared I was,” Hank says.

“Hank,” I say, “when a man talks to me like that all I can hear is my father.”

“Fuck, Gruney,” Hank says, “you're doing it again.”

“I'm not saying you're an asshole,” I say, “or that I'm superior. I do shit like that all the time. You're my friend, man, and this is what friends do.”

“Like that night at Ursula Crohn's,” Hank says.

“Friends don't let friends get away with shit like that,” I say. “I know I'm way too sensitive, but I don't want any shit to come between us, so I got to tell you when shit comes up.”