Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (C. AD 2009) in a Large City (21 page)

A while back, Edward had accidentally come across
one of John’s student loan bills. It freaked him out. At least they can’t
repossess your education, he thought.

The student loan thing is just kicking a can down
the road; those people should all be put in jail, he thought. All the private
lenders just managed to piggyback on a person—and you can’t declare
bankruptcy?

Edward made a point of being in the apartment only
when John was there, even though it was kind of a pain. He knew John’s cousin
and liked him, but still, sometimes you just wanted to be alone. It was a tiny
space, and even if you love the intruder, there comes a time when you remember
that person is watching cable, which costs money, so it’s time for him to put
a
quarter in the slot. Though of course the roommate’s girlfriend was home all
the
time too.

Also he wanted to be independent. But it would be
bad to step backward. To get his own apartment would be regressing. There would
be weird negotiations, like: Are you sleeping over? How would you parse out your
time? Those kind of discussions would become a necessity. But also Edward knew
that John would never ever sleep anywhere else. Edward had stayed everywhere,
and he’d had to basically beg John to come along. Plus John was kind of afraid
of cats. Once when Edward was house-sitting at this place with this little tiny
kitten, John was basically terrified every time it moved. John was a homebody
and also a bit of a charming control freak; he enjoyed playing on his own
turf.

Anyway the whole thing was like the dead shark
thing from
Annie Hall
, Edward thought: The
relationship had to keep moving or else it died.

CHAD MET AN
art history senior who attended one of the good local colleges. He had a
ridiculous name! Branford Loverford Covington. He’s so beautiful, Chad said.
Gorgeously beautiful.

They met in real life. Branford was friends with
Dieter, from John’s office. They had all been at the Phoenix one night, again,
and then Branford emailed Chad to follow up after, and they became museum
buddies. That meant that they were friends who went to museums together.

Chad made it clear that he lived with his partner.
I would like to be friends, Chad said to him. It’s very hard, Chad thought. In
his head, when Mariel Hemingway and Woody Allen were at that gallery in
Manhattan
, that’s how Chad felt about himself, though
he wasn’t as funny as Woody Allen. But he felt like the old creepy man leaning
on the sprightly young gorgeous person. He was too young to feel old and creepy!
But there he was, feeling disgusting under Branford’s clear gaze.

Branford’s parents disapproved of his lifestyle,
living in the City, studying high-minded things! They were the sort of family
that had never doubted its quality, its validity. They were the kind of family
that kept recycling the same names for their children, generation after
generation. They’d already gotten it right the first time.

Branford and Chad went to a show about the Bauhaus
together. They had intellectual conversations, about ideas and life and love
and
history and death. It’s a peculiar kind of heartbreak to be in love with someone
and to feel that flush of infatuation with someone else. Branford’s gravity was
crushing, and Chad wanted to let go and throw himself at him.

EDWARD HAD ONCE
asked John if John ever saw a future where he cleaned up a little bit.
And John was like, no, I’ll just get a cleaning lady.

There is a little bit of insanity that creeps into
your life because of filth. Like one day Edward couldn’t find his Nintendo game.
So he literally did nothing. He sat in the apartment while the roommate was out
and twiddled his thumbs. Edward spent a lot of time feeling sorry for himself.
He thought about things and worried. Like, he owed Aric a lot of money, he
thought. Or maybe he didn’t? He didn’t know how to approach it. He didn’t know
if he actually had to pay it or not. The thing was that he felt like he owed
something.

Edward thought the Internet had destroyed his brain
in the last two years. In part he thought it was chat. It was the closest thing
to telepathy. He could beam any thought into other people’s minds. And he was
faster, more articulate, funnier than in person, or he thought so. He taught
himself to program in BASIC when he was eight, but instead of using it for
anything interesting, he made little games. And he liked playing those text
games, which taught him to type and prepared him for the world of the Internet
that was to come, when chat, suddenly, became omnipresent. One thing that
happened was that things came easy when he was young, and then when things
didn’t come easy anymore, he didn’t know how to try, how to study, how to learn.
Also having a laptop meant you never had to be away from the Internet for long.
Everywhere had Internet now. If he could burn the Internet down, he thought he’d
be happy. He thought it had physically changed the way his brain worked. He
couldn’t even watch TV without a computer on his lap, or unless he was really
stoned, or preferably both. He was too poor to smoke too much pot. Though he’d
got some recently.

He had one hundred dollars, so he’d gone out and
bought some. He really only liked smoking pot alone. He just wanted to watch
Oprah
and smoke pot, but didn’t want to talk to
anyone. Some guy took him to some other guy’s apartment and he didn’t even know
who was selling it. John had slept with one of the guys once, and it was very
awkward and he gave the guy the money and took a smaller bag and the guy was
like, you can take the bigger bag, and so Edward spent seventy dollars and got
what seemed like a lot. And he gave a lot of it away. He did feel bad that he’d
introduced John to pot. John was pretty clean when Edward met him. He smoked
too
many cigarettes—well, so did Edward—but also cigarettes were probably his
number-one financial expenditure. He wouldn’t go a day without buying cigarettes
no matter how broke he was.

Edward’s friendship circle had really changed. Part
of it was breaking up with Aric. And Jason’s ex, who’d been one of Edward’s
closest friends, he was still off on the other coast. Another friend had moved
to another state to go to grad school. And moving home, all the endless back
and
forth, the house-sitting, it had disrupted other friendships. So more and more
Edward was hanging out with John’s friends, though at least Jason bridged that
gap, as their friend. But he felt a need to branch out on his own. Also he
couldn’t stand being near John and Chad. He liked them both. But together they
had this whole thing—last time he’d seen them they were flailing around so much
that John hit Edward in the face on accident. But it was all of a piece. Edward
thought he’d lost a lot of ground in terms of his independence. He’d been with
Aric since he was twenty-two. He thought he’d missed out on developing certain
skills. And so his natural instinct was to gravitate very close to one person
and—well, on the other hand, it was fun. But it felt a little bit dire. Edward
would feel bad if John stayed home all the time, but that is what he wanted.
If
they didn’t lay out the terms of what they were doing, fights ensued. John
tended to double-book. Sometimes triple-book. John piled more and more people
into every possible occasion. Edward thought John fancied himself this very
spontaneous person who would go where the night took him. And he did, except
he
was hemmed in by the wall of conflicting plans he’d make every night.

Getting out of all of this could be accomplished by
Edward getting an apartment. That would be pretty hard to do when he had only
thirty dollars left of that hundred.

IT WAS A
long week that John was gone. Edward stewed at his parents’ house. He
realized he had very mixed feelings about cohabitating, so he wanted to pretend
that he wasn’t actually doing so in as many ways as possible. Before he left,
John had again offered to make him keys. And Edward said, but doesn’t that big
key cost like forty dollars to duplicate? And John said, oh okay, never
mind.

Edward worried that their whole relationship would
happen as fast as it already had. That they’d burn through and in a year it’d
be
done. John didn’t worry at all though, so he said. Don’t worry about it, he
always said. Enjoy yourself. Don’t worry about it. It was a wall of “don’t
worry.” One day they’d had a little fight over nothing, basically, and Edward
explained that he’d made these extrapolations, that like, no, the reason this
tiny thing bothers me is that he anticipated being with John a really long time.
So Edward was thinking his whole life he’d never get to choose what they were
going to watch on TV. And that Edward was thinking that way freaked John out
a
little bit. At least so Edward thought.

Edward could wedge himself into a cozy feedback
loop, amplifying problems—or nonproblems—by thinking too much. Edward told John
to choose just one thing that Edward was interested in and then, going forward,
he should pretend to be also interested in it. Because so far if there were two
choices of what was on TV, something that Edward would like and anything else,
it was always anything else.

People are just so annoying, was what Edward
thought. Even people you love are annoying. The good news is that things could
get worked out in sex, even in ways you didn’t realize maybe. Even though Edward
realized he’d never have sex as much as he did with his boyfriend his sophomore
year of college, when they basically blew off a semester in order to have sex.
Though maybe it would help if there was more of a working bed at John’s
apartment? Still it was romantic, as they did get a bit huddled up in its broken
embrace.

WHEN JOHN
FINALLY
returned from overseas to another, nearer country—at this
time, it was often cheaper, bizarrely, to fly to multiple destinations in the
airplanes than to fly directly from point to point—John found out his phone
didn’t work anymore. He’d been putting the phone company off for a long time
again, and the phone no longer had service.

But there was Internet at the airport, so he went
online and Jason was there. And Jason wrote, oh my God, I met the hot transit
reporter from the local TV news station, he’s so hot. And didn’t even ask about
how the trip was.

So John hadn’t missed anything in a week.

The bars were amazing overseas. And the museums
too. Timothy had warned him in advance to order mixed drinks to save money, but
this was incorrect advice. Everyone over there drank Jack Daniels, for some
reason, but it was much more expensive than beer. He arrived with 350 dollars,
100 dollars of which was borrowed from Edward, improbably. That came to about
200 units in this other currency. This was gone by the weekend, four days in.
Cigarettes were only 2.40 units or so, and pints of beer were 1 unit.

The first two nights, John and Fred hit the bars
pretty hard. On Saturday night,
Don’t Look Now
,
starring Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland, was playing at the local theater
at midnight. So they went to the hot bar by Fred’s house and had a couple
drinks; then midnight rolled around. There was almost no one in the theater.

But suddenly there was a man with a microphone. “I
know most of you here,” he said, “except for a couple of you, and the theater
has very graciously allowed me, on the occasion of my fiftieth birthday, to
screen my favorite movie in my favorite theater.” The movie was incredible. The
evening was incredible. Half a century! And after, John and Fred breezed back
into the bar with their hand stamps, past the huge line, to be with the young
men again.

The big difference that John could see between the
City and overseas was that all the bars over there were dance bars, and everyone
danced. Fred had gone boy crazy while living there, John found. He had three
friends. One was a hot boy from the hinterlands who was basically Fred’s Edward:
He’d been in a relationship for nearly five years, and most likely was not
available. Or maybe so! And everywhere they went, Fred was like, whipping
around, looking at boys. And yes, okay, they were all very attractive, John
thought . . . and yet John wasn’t tempted. Nothing happened. The
accents were beginning to give him a headache. Well. One particularly aggressive
boy threw himself on John and began kissing him vigorously. Still John arrived
safe, and unsullied, at home near the City, every penny spent, without even the
money to get from the airport to his house.

THE NEW BOSS
fired John’s boss Trixie.

We need your salary to pay other people more money,
is what her boss said.

John felt, as much as he could still feel about
work, bad. He was out of the office when it happened. He and other people in
the
office exchanged tiny text messages that said things like “yikes.”

THE YEAR, IT
ended. John’s room—John and Edward’s room?—was filthier than ever.

There were, on his desk, a few notes from the
state, about that tax issue from a few years back, before John started working
at a real job. They still wanted 417.11 dollars.

Deeper in the drawer: a phone bill, due October 8,
with a total due of 271.19 dollars, with a minimum payment of 151.65.

A bill from Callen-Lorde health services, regarding
a doctor’s visit. The visit cost 200 dollars, but was offset by a sliding scale
discount of 130, and he’d paid 25 at the time, so they wanted 45 more.

There was a letter from I.C. System Inc. of St.
Paul–Minneapolis, on behalf of Jason Hudson, DDS, for a dentist bill in the
amount of 461.93 dollars.

There was a letter from NYU Langone Medical Center
regarding a doctor’s visit on September 23 with Dr. Lisa Kalik. The visit had
cost 250 dollars, but Oxford, John’s health insurance, had paid the majority
of
it and they now wanted to be paid 30 dollars.