The Next (8 page)

How could anyone live with that much pressure to be perfect every second of every hour of every day? What was at risk for her if she weren’t perfect? She was young—barely drinking age—so she still had lots of time. What was so imperfect about her interior that required that much overcompensating on the outside, right down to the final dab of perfume on her neck from the lid of the tiny ornate pink glass bottle?

When I was completing a song, staying up for forty-eight hours in a row perfecting every last cadence, every last sixteenth note, every last pianissimo or crescendo expression, I was the Princess. She used makeup, I used treble and bass clefs. She used a silver ribbon in her hair, I used crisp, perfectly un-smudged laser copy paper to print the score. She needed validation from the man she was about to meet, and I needed validation from any ear my music would meet. I understood the Princess’s need, and a particularly petty part of me loathed her for reflecting my folly.

Errrrrg.

I lifted my hand. I closed the keyboard lid and piled the books and crap back on top of it.

Not ready.

Suddenly I became aware of a figure standing against the window above the Princess’s apartment facing my apartment square on. My heart skipped a beat, and I automatically ducked to the right behind the curtain. It was perfectly unnecessary to hide. All the lights were out in my apartment, and the curtain wasn’t open wide enough to see in. As far as anyone was concerned, nobody was home here on the third floor. Then why was someone facing my apartment with such direct attentiveness?

I slowly peeked around the curtain until I spied the figure again. To my surprise, Mr. Perfect stood at the window of his bedroom, facing my building. As always, he was wearing a suit, looking the picture of professionalism, dignity, power, and success. His hair was salt and pepper, feathered back to display the rugged handsomeness of his face.

This was a man to whom entire floors of employees in Manhattan glass high-rises might kowtow when he stepped off the elevator. This was a man university libraries might be named after. This was a man who might advise Atlas to shrug.

And this was a man standing at the window facing my apartment groping his dick through his pants.

What the hell?

I traced his hand to his arm, to his broad shoulders, to his white collared neck, to his defined jawline, and then to his deep set dark eyes. They were directed not at my window, but at the window of the floor above mine.

Holy shit!

Ruben just moved in and was already putting on a show for the neighbors. What kind of professionalism did they teach those lovelies at Juilliard, anyway? But I thought Mr. Perfect was straight. He had a family who had only just exited the door to go play in the snow for the weekend.

A closeted faggot in Manhattan? That’d be an anomaly.

Marzoli’s sarcasm rebounded in my brain. Yes, but in all the time I’d lived here and observed Mr. and Mrs. Perfect, I never once saw anything to indicate the husband would do what he was now doing.

He pulled down his fly and burrowed through the dark pants to retrieve his pole. He dangled his fleshy white dick in front of his dark charcoal trousers. The white meat bobbed up and down at first. Mr. Perfect put his arms up above his shoulders and braced his hands against the window, providing Ruben upstairs with a perfectly unobstructed view of his dick. His trousers inched their way down his thick hairy thighs, then dropped past his knees to his ankles.

Ruben must have been putting on some kind of performance, because Mr. Perfect’s pole pulsated from a southward pointing direction to a northward pointing direction without any assistance from his hands. Mr. Perfect bit his lower lip with his perfect teeth, indicating a desire that came directly from his groin. I could almost hear a guttural rasping moan pushing its way through his esophagus and past his moist lips. His dick thrust slightly forward, hardening and reddening at the head.

It occurred to me just then that if I could observe this, others could too. But that was not possible. Perfect’s bedroom window was recessed and flanked by three, tall, fortunately positioned trees. The retail level of my building had no courtyard windows, and the floor above Ruben had a wide, unused balcony that prevented any direct views down. I’d never realized until that moment that Ruben and I had the only clear view of Mr. and Mrs. Perfect’s bedroom window.

Mr. Perfect wrapped the fingers of his right hand around his hard shaft, pumping it slowly. He moistened his lips with his tongue, his gaze directed to Ruben’s window. His eyelids settled halfway down as he indulged in the pleasure of his fist reaching the tenderness of his rod’s head and then retracted on a slow tight descent to the base.

I felt my own dick hardening. Was it the sight of a man that caused this reaction? Or was it the illicitness of the situation that caused it? Or was it a malicious enjoyment of something more sickly subversive? Was it the successful and powerful leveled to depravity by the need for something no position at the head of a board meeting table could provide? That no conformity to family virtues could provide? That no trip to the weekend house with the wife and kids could provide? That no jump in the market could provide? The king jacking off for the hot pawn across the court meant the king could be had for the price of a pound of twinkie flesh, and this satisfaction shot my rod to a smug erection.

Wrapping my lips around her nipple and tracing it with my tongue, causing her low moan.

Thoughts of Johanna’s body flashed into my brain as I watched Mr. Perfect’s stroking increase in intensity.

The warm flesh between Johanna’s vagina and her hole.

Mr. Perfect flung off his jacket and unbuttoned his shirt. His chest was solid and hairy, and his ripped abdomen contracted and expanded as he jacked his rod up and down.

Was the thing that turned me on the most about Johanna the same leveling of status? The queen leveled by the tonguing of one of her subjects? Was that all it had been? Surely more…

Mr. Perfect’s fisting had reached a frenzy. He had to be close now. Through the ceiling, I heard a faint moan. Ruben had reached his climax. Mr. Perfect responded by suspending the stroking and holding a tight vice grip on the head of his dick. With the wrenching of his abdomen, his cum splattered against the window glass. Thick strands of semen followed the initial onslaught in short firings, striping the window in white gelatinous lines which immediately oozed down the pane.

You bad, nasty, naughty King!

Mr. Perfect once again let his meat dangle as he lifted his arms and braced himself against the window with his hands, recovering his breath. He lowered his head. I could tell by his energy that he would not acknowledge Ruben again tonight. Shame? Or the inordinate adeptness to compartmentalize? I did not know, but Mr. Perfect did not lift his eyes again. Rather, he turned away from the window and went toward the bathroom, turning the lights off and plunging the room into darkness. The show was over. Get your purse from under the seat and go home.

My rod had already softened, having made no stops of pleasure along tonight’s train ride. When was the last time I’d had an orgasm? Couldn’t remember.

Marzoli’s full lips. His neck. His voice. His gentle dark eyes.

What the fuck!

No!

What the hell was I thinking about a dude like Marzoli for? I’d fantasized sparingly through my life about man-on-man blow jobs, but only with some larger-than-life slab of muscle I’d absolutely no personal connection with. I’d justified those rare fantasies by the need for novelty and too much wine. There was no pining involved, no more emotional attachment than one has for bacon.

But now…with Marzoli…

He’d touched my shoulder. He’d looked into my eyes. He was so much more than bacon. I’d be an idiot to think about…about his lips…his chest…his jawline…

Ughh.

Why the fuck would I choose to entertain the hope for something I may never get? Why? One more new disappointment…one more new failure…one more new reason to despise myself…and I just might…who the fuck knows?

If I could, I would re-center by surfing for some straight porn and try to normalize. Try to let fly some of this frustration. If I had internet connectivity.

If I could connect.

I swallowed hard, shoved my dick back into safety, and zipped up my pants.

Andrea Bocelli’s heartbreak was reaching an epic climax.

Jesus fucking Christ! Turn that shit off!

As if hearing and taking pity, the Princess took one more look at her doll face in the mirror, tussled her hair one last time, clicked off the CD player, and departed down the hall. The lights flicked off.

Have a good date, Princess.
I hope he appreciates your perfection. He probably won’t, but he should. I do.

Chapter Nine

Paul glanced at me with fear in his eyes.

He was waiting for me to cue our escape from the crook of the tree overlooking Jessie on his knees and the boy standing over him, staring at us with rage in his eyes.

The boy shoved Jessie to the side.

“Go!” I commanded.

Paul scrambled down to the ground as fast as he could, his feet searching for branches big enough to sustain his weight. He snapped the small ones, sending him down several feet as his arms flailed to find something to keep him from plummeting the rest of the way.

The furious boy darted toward our tree, slowed only by his attempt to shove his still erect rod back into his jeans and zip them up without gouging it.

“Hurry!” Paul screamed as he finally leaped five feet to the ground.

My left foot found one branch, and I put all of my weight on it, but it snapped. I began to fall. I grabbed the root of the branch to catch myself, but the jagged daggers of splintered wood gouged my forearm, scraping a thick red line into my skin. All I could do was dig my tennis shoes into the bark and spread my arms out in the chance that a branch would catch and break my plummet.

One branch hit my armpit, jolting my body with pain. I swung my other arm to grasp the branch, clinging fifteen feet above the ground.

“Jesus, Paul! Run!” I ordered.

In the distance, I heard Jessie cry, “Leave them alone!”

Paul took off as fast as he could down the hill toward the stream just as the angry blond kid reached the base of my tree, the Swiss Army knife clenched tightly in his white knuckled grasp.

Gentle Debussy arpeggios wafted down through the ceiling.

I woke up in a sweat.

Was it past three o’clock already?

I’d spent the day trying to finish an old song before the sun set. This song was hardly the result of a burst of creativity and inspiration. I’d written it two years ago, but considered it too precious and hammy to put my name to it, so I deleted it, leaving many of the chords unspecified and the initial slapped-on baseline unchanged. However, I’d not emptied the trash and decided to unearth it. Indeed, “Paralyzed” had a cheese factor of twelve out of ten, but anything better was just a hop, skip, and jump the distance of about twenty Verrazano bridges away from me.

I had been washing my underwear in the sink that morning when I found the card Marzoli had given to me. I
could
call him. But why? I couldn’t place exactly what I wanted from that sergeant, but he made me...damn it…he made me
yearn.
But yearn for what, exactly? Aside from that confusion, why for fuck’s sake would he want to return to a dump like this? To a dump like me?

I hadn’t looked at myself in the mirror for months. No doubt I had tight abs when I was with Johanna, taking those damn core classes four times a week. It seemed a flat belly was one of the prerequisites to being the main squeeze of the queen and the fashionista long-haired skirts she called friends. A year ago I might have thought any woman, let alone a man, casting an eye my direction was earned and deserved. But it’d been a year since those glorious days, and I had absolutely no desire to feed my joy with lovely visions of increased flab and decreased tone. No thank you. I left the hooded sweater and dusty sheets draped over the mirror. What I interpreted as Marzoli’s attraction to me was, after all, just a Sicilian Puerto Rican’s street instincts to oil the machinery as he pumped a stranger for information. Right?

And yet…

As pathetic as I knew it to be, Marzoli’s attention was, in sad fact, the only indication of the arrival of the Next I had to cling to. It made no logical sense, but I needed to call him. I needed to pay my cell phone bill to call him. I needed to sell a song to get the money to pay the bill. I needed to revive this piece of shit song in order to sell it. This was my idiotic jump into the rapids above Niagara Falls, hoping that Mr. Tall Dark & Handsome was Superman. But clinging to anything was a hope in and of itself, and wasn’t that better than not clinging to anything at all?

Revising music in my present bog of bitterness was like pushing a stalled car to the nearest gas station. There was no downward slope to ease the strain or helpful pickup truck to give your bumper a nudge. You just pushed, one backbreaking step at a time, one drop of sweat after another. When I finally arrived at the station, I printed the damn six pages using the last ounce of ink left in the laser printer. In fact, the bottom half of the last page was already a faded grey. Yep, “Paralyzed” would be the last thing I printed for good long time. How fucking apropos. Sealing the envelope, I addressed it to Rebecca Stray, my agent. I opened the book of stamps only to discover it was empty.