Martin and John (20 page)

We took a cab. He was silent through Brooklyn’s unfamiliar streets, silent on the bridge, silent all the way through Manhattan, as one neighborhood after another yielded to the cab’s forward motion, until we were on our street, and still it was unfamiliar. Upstairs, in Oz, Martin strobed the a.b. tubes and fixed me with his smile. The lights did terrible things to his teeth. God, that was fun, he said, stripping off his trench coat. Light flashed through a small hole in its side, and I don’t know how but I
knew
what had happened. I grabbed the coat, put my finger through the hole. What’s this, Martin? I demanded. He shrugged his shoulders. Nothing. I went to the place on his body where the hole would be if he were wearing the coat. There was another hole there, in his jacket. And this, Martin, I said, pulling the jacket off him and poking my finger through the second hole. What’s this? Nothing. Nothing, I repeated. And I suppose this is nothing too? I said, and I went to jab my finger through the red-tinged hole in his white shirt,
but then I stopped. No, Martin, I said, pointing, that’s something. Martin just shrugged off the shirt, and I saw the scraped part of his skin where a knife, Johnson’s knife, had cut, and I saw dried blood on his skin. John, Martin said. His smile. I feel so horny right now. Martin—I started, but he grabbed me and closed my mouth with his. I pushed away from him as though he were mugging me. What did he
do
to you? I asked. Then Martin leaped at me with his index fingers extended. He poked them into me at various places on my body: my stomach, my chest, my face, my arms when I moved them to cover my face. Stop! I screamed, but he kept jabbing me until I pushed him so hard he fell on the bed. We looked at each other for a long time without speaking, and then a grin split Martin’s face and he ran to a window, slid it open, stepped onto the balcony, and let out a whoop of pure pleasure and exhilaration. Wind blew into the room, carrying leaves and a few pieces of paper, smashing flat the lines of silk that danced over the floor vents. I followed Martin to the balcony. I remember that I tried to understand. I pulled at my hair the way they do in movies, as if I could pull understanding right out of my brain, and that’s when Martin, the lights of the city and the a.b. tubes reflecting off his face, that’s when he turned to me and said, John, stop messing up your hair, you’re always messing up your hair. I looked at him, I can imagine how stupidly. What? I said. The whole idea is for it to stand up, Martin said, the way James’s used to, and the more you run your fingers through
it, the flatter it gets. Confused, I started to run my fingers through it again, but I caught myself. I stared at my hands, and then I shoved them in my pockets. I wanted to say something, but I didn’t know what. I said, I don’t understand, Martin. Martin said, That’s what Susan was supposed to tell you. I just looked at him. I was beyond asking. His hair moved in the wind, and I could feel my hair on my head, imitating his. What I like about you, he said. She was supposed to tell you what I like about you, wasn’t she? It’s that you don’t understand.

And he was right. I didn’t understand, and I would never understand. I turned from him then, walked to the edge of the balcony, looked up the broad avenue. The wind rushed down it, gathering speed—and debris as well, as it scooped up everything that lay on the street and sidewalks, and the raindrops that had begun to fall seemed thrown. I turned away from the city and looked at my feet. There was that disorienting mirrored floor: my feet seemed unnaturally large, my body impossibly long, my head lost in the night clouds, and, at such a distance, almost unrecognizable as me. I closed my eyes and heard the click-click of Martin’s shoes on the glass as he approached me; when I opened them I saw in the mirror his legs right behind mine. Black shoes, black pants: it seemed like a shadow had been grafted to my body, and when I saw a blurred arc as his hand reached out to touch me, I turned suddenly and said, No! I looked at his smiling face, tinged now by a hint of confusion, a touch of foul humor. Was this
also part of my shadow? The wind at my back pushed me toward him, and Martin crossed his arms and waited, as if my approach were inevitable. But when it seemed I could hold out no longer and would fall into him, I rushed past him and jumped, and I felt the wind rush up my pant legs and loose my shirt from my belt, spinning me wildly and carrying me far, far away from him. When I came down finally I was alone. A few other things tumbled from the sky with me: a mauve felt hat with the eye of a peacock feather tucked in the band, a plastic watch, and many, many pieces of paper, some of them dollar bills. I ignored them all, started walking. I didn’t understand what had just happened. I didn’t try to. There are only a few variables, after all: earth, air, fire, water; birth, love, hate, death; above all, desire. Their combinations are infinite, but still, I’ve always tried to keep each element clear and discrete in my mind (mundane, Martin would say, ordinary) because when they run together they make something incomprehensible, uncontrollable, something—something opulent. And, like most people, I don’t know what to make of opulence. Before Martin, I could only stare in awe. Now, I only ask its price.

There’s a layer of space between us, like a blanket. He doesn’t know I’ve put it there, but I feel him note its presence, take advantage of the protection it offers. I say, Let me show you a trick, and I unroll a condom on his cock with my mouth. We laugh, neither of us says anything, and then I say, “I want it to feel like rape.” He couldn’t possibly understand why I ask him to do these things, but he does them anyway, for his own reasons, which are probably as simple as my own but which are as distant from my understanding as my reasoning is from his. This is the state of things between us when I scream for the first time. “Harder!” I yell into the blank pate of my bedroom: these blank walls, so recently emptied, like the inside of a hairless skull. “Fuck me harder!” I scream again, and he does. He’s older, forty-five, maybe fifty, and his torso where it rises up and splits from mine is hairy, gray, sweaty in the dim light. His body rocks back, then smacks into mine again and again, and with each push I feel a twinge of pain as his penis tries to straighten
a bend in my intestine. I want that twinge to grow into a stab. I scream again, beg him, “Fuck me till I—” I cut myself off. I was going to say, Fuck me till I bleed. This is my first mistake of the night, as for a few moments I’m taken over by thoughts which tell me why this man can’t make me bleed
. Lying on my back, legs vertical across his chest, feet in the air: he pushed at me but I couldn’t relax. Grunts of other men more successful at their endeavors than we penetrated the thin door. With a sigh he said, Maybe some other time, and I nodded. Then he bent one of my legs forward and began massaging my toes, my instep, my arch, the ball of my foot. Or maybe we should start at the bottom, he said, and he said also, Don’t worry, and he smiled. I nodded again, exhausted, closed my eyes, chewed my lip. With a crunch he bit my toe fiercely, my own teeth punctured my lip, and then, when he loosened his jaws, I breathed out all the air in my lungs. Every muscle of my body, which had tensed toward my toe, relaxed for just a moment, and with a push and a loud grunt he shoved his penis inside me.
Then there’s the room again, its barren walls, a piece of furniture creeps into my line of sight: the dresser, its brown top swept bare. I hear hard breathing. I look at him. His eyes are closed and he’s working his hips, he’s smiling and biting his lip in exertion. “Hit me!” I scream. His eyes pop open in fear, his head snaps back, he stops fucking. I sit up on my elbows and put my face right in his and yell, “Hit me! Smack my face!” and I think the first time he strikes me just to push me away. He waits a moment after the blow, lets the sound fade from the
room, and then he hits me on the other side of my face and I feel the red heat of his hand sweep over the skin of my cheek. He slaps me again, right hand, left hand, right hand, left hand, and I squirm my ass around on his cock and moan encouragement at him. He chuckles and mumbles something under his breath, then starts to slide in and out of me again. He stops for a second to hit me really hard, twice, and then he grabs my ankles and begins fucking in earnest, grunting with each push forward, sighing with each pull back. I’m dizzy from those last two punches, my eyes are unfocused but point toward the ceiling. My thoughts are confused too, they roll through my head like water and slosh painlessly off the sides of my skull.
His fingers were as thin as the cigarette he held with them. He said, I wonder if you hate me as much as I hate you. I said nothing, brought the pan of eggs to the table and divided them between our plates. Deliberately, he flicked ashes on his. He said, You only stay because I’m sick. Because I’m helpless. Stop, I said, please. But he didn’t stop: with one finger he pushed his plate slowly toward the edge of the table. Before it fell I grabbed it, moved it out of his reach, and then I got up, went to him, sat on his lap. Ow! he cried. Goddammit, get off me! His cigarette fell to the floor. As I watched, the linoleum peeled back from the burning end and turned black. I love you, I said. I wanted to scream.
Things start to make sense. The ceiling, a long thin crack stretching along its surface, comes sharply into focus. Emotions seize me like a wild animal attacking from behind, claws dig into my shoulders and rake down
my back, and I want to scream mindlessly, Will nothing make you go away?
I kissed him. He pulled his head back and turned away, but he was crying. I love you, I said again, and then I left the room
. And then, for just a moment, life gives me a brief, if maudlin, respite, as the lyrics to an old song,
Feelings, wo wo wo feelings,
float up to me like echoes in a deep well. He sang to me: he was drunk and he was dying and we were both laughing, and despite myself I laugh again. Above me, still fucking steadily, the man looks down at my laugh, smiles, laughs a little himself, and I sit up then and put my face right in his. “Stop,” I hiss, and the man stops. And then he says that thing that every top says, even the ones that pay you: “Am I hurting you?” “A little,” I tell him, though it’s an answer he’ll never understand, and then I’m silent long enough for his face to chill a little with fear. Fear, I wonder, that I’ll ask him to leave, or fear that I’ll ask him to violate me in yet another way? “Go to the closet,” I say then, and he does, pulling out of me slowly so the condom doesn’t come off and padding gingerly across the floor. The windows are open, I imagine the air must be cold on his bare feet. I want to feel sorry for him, but I also don’t want to feel anything at all. The man stops at the closet door, doesn’t open it until I tell him to. “Tell me what you see.” He skips the obvious, the boxes on the shelf, the clothes on hangers, the shoes on the floor. “The gun?” he says. That question in his voice. I don’t ask him to clarify. I lie back, look at the crack in the ceiling again.
He cleaned the pus crusted around his catheter where it poked from his chest. He
looked up and saw me in the mirror. Come here, he said. I walked to him. Stand behind me, he said. He pulled me so close that my chest pressed against his back and his hair tickled my nose. Then he bent his head to the side and I saw my head in the mirror perched above his body and I knew what he was doing, but I stood there and let him do it. Look carefully, he said, and I looked at his drooping nipples and the lines of his ribs and his ashen skin and my face. This is going to be you one day, he said. And I hope it’s soon.
I pull out an old voice, my fuck-me-I’m-only-a-child voice, and I say, “It’s always been my fantasy to get fucked by a gun.” I want something to happen then, for a wind that isn’t blowing to flutter a candle that isn’t burning and send shadows that don’t exist scurrying over the walls. But there’s only a brief silence, and then the man says, “You want me to fuck you with the gun?” and, not trusting language, I sit up and look at him and nod my head. What I see is that his penis is softening, the condom wrinkled like sagging panty hose, gray and ugly in this light. What I see is the man reach in and grab my .22, take it from the closet, close the door behind him.
What I think is, A younger man wouldn’t do this, and then there’s a blank spot of time and when things return I’m holding my knees with my hands and I feel an inch or two of cold steel sliding into my rectum and I imagine the long black barrel of the gun poking out of me like a dark extension of my spine. Questions should be asked: why do I want him to do this? and, now that he’s actually started: why is he doing it? But I don’t want to ask, I just want to
replace one pain with another, or with nothing. A length of hollow steel starts working back and forth inside me, ramming me now, and again, and again, making me grunt with pain, making me hiss, making my mind a blank wall, bare of everything. And then, even then, it starts to adjust, my mind, I start to think again
. She was old and dry, her hair graying, her eyes hidden in wrinkles and she was only twenty-eight years old. The look they gave me was so overwhelmingly weak that I had to cover them with my hand, my hand with its crooked fingers and arthritic pains, my broken hand covered up those eyes which looked at me, which accused me, which told me more plainly than words, You are his son. Bruises old and new covered her arms, legs, back, breasts, face, and the jagged ends of broken bones made strange bulges under her skin. Light came down from the basement door at the top of the stairs and then it was gone, and there was just my father’s shadow.
The gun is pounding into me deeper, but that’s not why I’m moaning. I think, Not him, not her, not here, not now. I try to get control. I try to think about the gun. I make myself imagine that my asshole is an eye and I’m looking down the long tunnel of the gun barrel. It’s dark, and at the other end I imagine I see a nick of light glint off the copper head of the bullet in the chamber, a little flash of death as the bullet takes off and starts its hundredth-of-a-second hurtle toward my body, where it will tear up each vertebra, destroy my spinal cord, leave behind an empty tube and an empty body, leave
behind nothing but numbness. And then quietly, so quietly, I whisper, “Pull the trigger.”
“What?” the man whispers back, and though I want to I can’t sit up, the gun is in me all the way up to my neck and I can only stare at the cracked ceiling and scream, “Pull the trigger!” The gun goes loose then as the man lets go of it without pulling it out of me. I sit up, see him backing away from the bed, and then it happens: the condom that had covered his penis and protected him from me slips off his limp dick and falls to the floor, and the splat it makes is loud, impossibly loud, in the silence of the room. The man reaches down and covers himself with his hands. He looks around until he sees his clothes, and then he dives for them, bundles them to his groin, runs out of the room. And I lie on my bed while he dresses in the other room, a rifle hanging from my anus like the shit-filled entrail of a slaughtered hog, and I cry quietly, and when the outside door opens, the pressure changes in the house and wind rushes in through the open windows of my room, the curtains fly from the windows like startled ghosts, but when the door closes, everything goes still again, as if the home has just been dropped behind a giant boulder. In the sudden quiet I hear myself sob aloud and I think that at last I’ve succeeded, because I cry only for myself, and if any thought of Martin remains, or of my mother, or of my father, they founder in a sea of other names, and nameless faces, and in the faces of hundreds of men whom I remember by a common name, a name that remains unconnected to any identity no matter how many times it is assumed. And that name, I must remind myself, is my own: John.