Lawnboy (31 page)

His house lay hidden behind a thatchy grove of palms. I hadn’t been inside more than two minutes when he started kissing me, eagerly, pressing the hard weight of his tongue into my mouth. It all seemed a tad fast. I hadn’t even had a chance to glance around, to check out the floor plan and furnishings, but I thought, all right, if we’re going to do this, we might as well get it over with. I was as ready as I’d ever be. Would I get a boner? I thought of La Quan.

We moved to the bedroom. In no time at all, he’d taken off his clothes, and he stood to the side of the bed. His was in much better shape than I’d anticipated; muscular and dense, a trimmed mat of reddish hair sprinkling his chest, leading down a thin line to his abdomen. It might have been the body of a twenty-five-year-old. But what really surprised me was his dick. How could such a gentle, mild-mannered fellow be hiding such a killer in his pants?

He lay on top of me, kissing me all over my face with an intensity I’d never met in anyone else. It unnerved me, for all my life I’d always been more into sex than my partners, and this felt off-putting, as if my efforts to reciprocate were coming up short. I didn’t want to disappoint. I closed my eyes and tried to think of Hector, his long lean body, his inky, close cropped hair, but all I saw were the scattered vague parts of him, and not the whole person, the disparate pieces never fusing into a soul. Same with William. He seemed remote, posed, a spread from
Honcho
or
Mandate.
I was trying too hard. Why wasn’t this easier? I opened my eyes and watched Perry’s face, his tightly shut eyes, his bitten lip, and thought,
You really died, didn’t you? You really died along with Andrew and are coming back to life.

He shuddered. He lay on top of me, wet, out of breath, burrowing his chin into the soft part of my shoulder. He opened his eyes and looked at me as if I might be a stranger. And then he grinned, recognizing me. “Yee ha,” he said plainly.

I lay there, nodded. I didn’t know what on earth we’d just done.

“Back in two seconds.” He kissed me once on the forehead, then disappeared inside the bathroom.

I fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, not waking up once until the following morning, when Perry came in the room dressed in a business suit, carrying a cup of hot coffee to the bedside. I stretched my arms over my head and yawned. “What time is it?”

“Late,” he said, his face a bit fretful now. “We overslept. It’s”—he picked up the alarm clock—“it’s twenty past eight.”

“Oh God,” I said, sitting up. “I need to be at the nursery. Bob’s going to kill me. I have a delivery of cedar chips at nine.”

“That’s okay, don’t worry. I’ll take you,” he said calmly.

He sat on the edge of the bed, watching me picking up my clothes from the floor. He sipped from his cup of coffee.

He hadn’t said a word in minutes. “Do you think we should pursue this?” he asked.

I glanced upward at him as I pulled on my sock. I wasn’t quite sure what he meant.

“I mean, should we try to see each other again?” He bit into the skin of his lip. “It’s not like I don’t have mixed feelings. I’m not even sure I’m ready.”

I kept looking at him. I could have said anything at that point. If I’d said no, what risk would there have been? Instead, I said, “I don’t see why not.”

His face relaxed a bit. He walked over to me, led me to a standing position, then held me tightly in his arms. His chest felt warm and enormous next to mine. “There’s something about you,” he said cryptically.

I kept absolutely silent.
Sweet man,
I thought.
Don’t you know who you’re fooling with? Don’t you know I’m only going to hurt you?

Three times a week Perry and I did the typical things—movies, dinners, walks, beach, gym—nothing unsettling or spectacular. Sometimes we just drove around when we managed to have a day off together. We’d spot an isolated road with a quirky name and turn onto it, only to find something waiting for us at the end: a Dalmatian sunning herself on a floating raft, a house painted with patterns of tulips. These odd little visions seemed to present themselves to us, and we stopped questioning them after a time, accepting them as a function of our being together. And always at night, there was the sex, sex that was playful and complicated and demanding, if only because Perry was putting so much effort into it.

Still, something bothered me about this whole endeavor. It was clear that he was much more committed to this than I was. I knew I could learn to love him. I could see that he had all the qualities that would make for a decent, stable boyfriend—patience, tolerance, compassion, brains, even an edge when need be. But I trusted my gut more than anything. I wanted to feel reckless, and it frustrated me that I was still questioning my involvement with him. Watching him make love to me, I thought nothing could be sadder between two people, that one could have such feeling for the other and not have any idea it wasn’t being returned to the same degree.

In October I read in the
Herald
that a woodwind ensemble from the Richmond Symphony was to perform in South Beach, in the concert hall on Lincoln Road. A while back I’d heard that Jane had taken a leave from Savannah to play second chair in Richmond, and I thought I’d show up to see if she’d be a part of things. I arrived ten minutes late, carrying a box of Fannie Mae candies, a token from another era. I couldn’t see all the players from where I was sitting, but I suspected she was in back, with a mop of tangled hair, her head lilting in time to the music.

When they stood to receive their applause I saw how wrong I was. She was sitting on the opposite side, her hair bleached silver, pulled back severely off her tanned forehead, with frosty lipstick, and green contacts. She’d appeared to have lost weight. She looked terrific, but oddly unapproachable at once. For a moment I was tempted to leave. Then I decided to wait for the crowd to disperse.

“Why didn’t you call me?” I called out to the stage.

Jane looked over to me, distracted from her conversation with the piccolist. “Oh my God,” she said, bringing her fingers to her mouth. “Don’t move. Give me time to change. Wait,” she said, pointing a finger at me. “Wait right there.”

In no time at all she came out in leggings and an oversized T-shirt emblazoned with the Empire State Building. It was quite touching: Already I could see the kind of middle-aged matron she was to become—stepping gingerly through the lanes of Palm Beach with a Saks bag on her arm and a fretful look on her face. “What’s all this?” I said, regarding her new look with a wary affection.

“Look who’s talking.” She rubbed the top of my shorn scalp, then pointed to herself. “Don’t you think I look like a drag queen?”

“For you,” I said, passing her the box of Trinidads. The gesture felt wrong suddenly, though I didn’t know why.

“Oh honey,” she said. “I can’t. I try not to eat candy anymore.”

“No?”

She wagged her head from side to side. “You meant well, though. Thanks.”

We sat in a little deli, the last of its kind on a street that was rapidly being overrun with galleries, stores, and gay pride shops festooned with rainbow flags. “It’s time for shame,” I’d said on the walk over. “I’m going to start it, I think. The latest industry. Gay shame.” Jane smiled slightly, but her mind seemed to be elsewhere.

She filled me in on what had been happening with her. To my surprise she’d gotten married last August. His name was Moon Lee; he came from a wealthy family who’d started up a successful carpet-cleaning business in Midlothian, Virginia, after their emigration from Seoul. She claimed to be in love with him, though I found that hard to believe. She adored her house, a center hall—“hip colonial” she called it. She was hoping that the current oboist would vacate her chair because she had no intention of returning to the “dingy backwater” of Savannah. Otherwise, she’d quit and go into retail if the chance presented itself. “I want to work,” she insisted. “I don’t want to sit around painting my toenails. And there’s this, of course.”

She tugged up her shirt, reached for my hand, and pressed it on her stomach. Beneath my palm I felt the sensation of something turning. “You’re pregnant,” I said.

“Mm hmm,” she said, smiling. “He’s due in July.”

“It’s a boy?”

“We don’t know yet.” She gazed longingly at the pastel-colored Sherman between the lips of a pretty young dyke. “Aren’t you excited?”

“Of course.”

Her eyes hazed over. “I’m a little surprised. I just thought you’d be more excited.”

“But Jane—”

She blinked away some odd welling of emotion, embarrassed. “What is it? Something’s bothering you, isn’t it?”

I started talking about Perry. It was hard to get it all out at once, organized. I told her about his generosity and attention. I told her about his own difficulties, his struggle to regain himself after the death of Andrew. I told her of my doubts, my paradoxical feelings, which seemed to fluctuate with every hour of the day. I talked so scrupulously, covering everything in such minute detail, that it occurred to me why all my confidants and friends hadn’t been returning my calls. I hadn’t realized it was bothering me so much. Only one thing I left out: the burning, low-grade fear that I was dying.

“So I don’t get it. What’s the big problem here?”

“What do you mean you don’t get it?”

“I mean, please, he’s falling in love. It sounds like he’d bend over backwards for you.”

“It’s a matter of integrity,” I continued. “I feel like I’m leading the poor guy on. Who knows what he expects from me?”

“It’s not like you’re married to him.”

“Of course not, but—”

“Enjoy this time,” she said evenly. “Enjoy this time, keep with it, and see how you feel in six months.”

“I can’t do that to anybody.”

Her eyes sparkled green. “Just what the
hell
are you doing to him?”

“I mean, for all I know, he’s in love with some image of me, and not me. He doesn’t love me. I mean, what the hell would he want with me, anyway?”

My admission flustered me. My eyes darted toward the window, where I watched a rollerblader weaving, turning backwards, drawing figure eights in and out through the pedestrians. He was shirtless, sinewy, in amazing shape, a crazed, ecstatic look in his eyes. Cocaine? Crystal meth? I looked back at Jane. She appeared to be completely entrenched in her thoughts.

“You know what I think.”

“What?”

She gazed down at the tabletop. “I think you’re so used to being treated like crap that you don’t know what to do with someone who’s actually decent and responsible.”

“What?”

“Shhhh—”

“Listen—”

I dug my fingernails into my palm.

“It’s not all that easy to be with someone who’s kind. You have to have a certain sense of yourself. You have to be able to say, ‘I deserve to be with someone who’s good to me.’”

“You sound like you’re talking about yourself.”

She shrugged her left shoulder. “Anyway, that’s all I have to say on the subject. Enough already.” She folded her hands on the Formica. She glanced at the dessert menu, returned it to the aqua wire stand. Then in a hushed voice she said, “Don’t fuck things up.”

“No?” But I didn’t feel any better, and I didn’t think she’d heard one thing I’d said.

***

It happened weeks later. I was driving the pickup to Perry’s house, where I planned to tell him that I didn’t want to see him anymore. Things had been so much easier once I’d admitted this to myself, and my life had opened up again, allowing me to relax and to concentrate on the things that were important. The trick was to do it kindly, without menace, without making him feel I was deserting him forever. He’d been through too much. Perhaps I could tell him I needed a break for a while; perhaps I could tell him I only wanted to see him once a week, for a while at least. I’d play it by ear. In any case, what I had in mind would hurt him like hell, but it would be best in the long run, and he’d thank me one day for my brutal honesty, I knew it.

He stood outside the house, watering the bottlebrush with his shirt off. His nipple ring glinted in the sun.

“Aren’t we bold?” I stepped out of Bob’s pickup. I pointed to his bare chest, on display for all the suburban mothers to see. A grassquit flew over our heads.

“Hey, sexy.” He dropped the hose, grabbed me to him, and attempted to wrestle me to the lawn.

“Not here. The grass is all wet.”

“What’s wrong with wet?”

Not five minutes later we were in his bedroom. God, I thought. This was going to be harder than I’d imagined. I’d have to tell him after we were finished, and that would hurt even more, feel more like a betrayal. I heaved a huge sigh then stiffened my limbs. I heard him squirting lotion into his hand.

“What’s that?” I said, and clenched up, resisting his touch.

“Shhh—” he said. “I’m going to rub your back.”

I lay there, trying to relax as his hands, strong and pressured, kneaded the muscles of my shoulders. I hadn’t realized how tense I’d been. It felt terrific actually, although it hurt like a blowtorch, like he was writing his name onto my skin. Little utterances emanated from my mouth. After a while I moved into a place beyond thought. It only took minutes. I found myself floating, backstroking through a pool the size of space. Stars fizzled out, and I looked over my shoulder and saw a little earth turning in the darkness, silent. Even from this place I could see it diminishing. Even from this safe place I saw great forests burning down, towers crumbling, vast countries of people scrambling for food. I saw that there wasn’t very much time. I didn’t believe in epiphanies or easy answers or sudden revelations, but all at once Jane’s words came flying home to me, a hail of pellets flung against a wall. I turned over on my back. I looked up at Perry. I saw him at six, waiting to be photographed with his mother and sister, staring sternly at the wolf puppet waving in the assistant’s hand. I saw him at twenty-six, arm in arm with Andrew, in black robe and mortarboard, grinning upon his graduation from medical school. I saw him at ten, walking alone through Disneyland after his father left him off with a twenty-dollar bill, not knowing what else to do with him. I saw him at thirty-nine, feeling the heat gathering in Andrew’s stomach as his body went cold. I saw him in the future, older, with a head full of white—all of these images stacking up at once, projecting themselves simultaneously onto a screen. A door might have fallen open beneath my feet, and then another. What had I been resisting? What was my strength? Had the thing I’d wanted all along been right here with me, for months, and I hadn’t even seen it?