Robin and Ruby (10 page)

Hips thrust, toes curl, teeth grip a lower lip.

“I’m close,” Robin says.

“Not yet. Take your hands off your penis. Put your hands on your hips. Catch your breath. Try to hold back.”

He wonders if all along he’s wanted George to admire him like this, if some part of him craved this kind of attention. Has he been angling for this all along, since they’ve lived together?
Exhibitionist.
But if that’s so, then why does this feel like such a surprise?

“All right. You can look.”

For a split second he worries that he’ll open his eyes to some strange sight, like George contorted into a crazy position or wearing some kinky outfit, but no. He’s naked, his body tense with stimulation. George has a different jacking method, two hands pumping at once, maybe because he’s bigger and needs more friction. Robin shuffles closer, nearly touching George, who leans back against the wall.

He doesn’t have much left in him.

He has said so many things to George over so many years, but never before this: “I’m coming.” This one is new.

And then he’s everywhere, exploding, and then George is too, loudly, swearing, “Damn, damn, damn…” Robin feels a wild, exhilarating confusion that contains the need to burst into laughter, or perhaps break into the tears that have been held in check all day.

They lie on the bed, bumped up against each other. Robin reaches out and finds George’s hand and squeezes, and George does the same, holding tight, like earlier, in the bushes, hiding from discovery.

George mumbles, “We’ll sleep well now.”

The bed is too small to allow anything but tangling together, more so because there are damp spots to avoid, but Robin finds he has no desire to cross the hall to his own spacious mattress. To leave George’s room would mark the end of something he’s not yet ready to give up. Whatever just happened, he can’t walk away from. He wants a cigarette, but George doesn’t let him smoke in here. So he backs himself into George, letting George spoon him from behind, their arms braiding together. He listens to the roar of blood rushing in his ears, aware that the pot hasn’t yet let go its sensory hold. George’s sweat-slicked body rises and falls behind him. Soon George is snoring, hushed and contented.

Eventually, Robin sleeps. He can’t tell for how long, or how deep; no dreams mark the shift. Then suddenly he’s alert and jittery. He rotates beneath George’s arms, repositions himself on his back, crosses his arms on his chest like a corpse. On the wall is the row of postcards, lined up perfectly inside a band of streetlight coming in from the window. The placement, Robin sees, is intentional. George has tacked them in this arrangement so that he can look at them even at night.

James Baldwin stares down at Robin as if chiding him: “Brother, I saw this one coming.”

Sleep eludes him now. There’s a bright, pale flash of illumination. Lightning. He sits up as the thunder crashes, and notices then the hissing of rain. How long has it been raining? Maybe he did sleep for a while. But he’s awake now.

He slides out of George’s bed and tiptoes into the coolness of the apartment. They’ve left lights on everywhere.

A tendril of water gleams on the floor, rain sneaking in through the front window, which has been left open. He throws it open wider and sticks his head out into the slanting shower, an instant, cool caress against his bare skin. His tousled hair catches the moisture, which beads on the tops of his ears and trickles down his neck and shoulders. He melts into it, a soft wave along his flesh. Below, the street is like dark earth that has been turned over; the concrete sidewalks, empty and hushed, look like they’re covered in moss. He fantasizes waking George for a naked sprint to the corner and back, a couple of urban nature boys staking their claim.

Then he turns back into the living room, and there, beneath the lamp, is the fallen answering machine. The rainwater is trickling toward it. He picks it back up, plugs it in again. The red message light blinks.

Perhaps it’s penance, or remorse, or just the curiosity that accompanies insomnia, but he absolutely needs to know what Peter has said.

Play.

“I’m sorry to bother you.” The voice is female, slightly strained, fighting to be heard above background noise: traffic, music, a roar that might be the wind. For just an instant he mistakes her for Rosellen, calling with a late-night request to fill a shift. Then he understands. It’s his sister.

“I’m calling from Seaside Heights. Can you believe it?” Right, she’s down the shore this weekend with Calvin. In his disorientation, he can’t quite conjure it: Ruby in Seaside, a party town for teenagers. “Remember when Dorothy and Clark took us down here? Remember we stayed in that motel near the boardwalk? I just walked by that motel! I
think
it was the same one, with the picture of the lady diving in the water. It seems so long ago, but nothing’s really changed.”

Robin recalls that family vacation with a wisp of ghostly resentment: Dorothy and Clark, bickering in the car over things like which lane on the Parkway was moving fastest, or which gas station was likely to offer the lowest price per gallon, and only cheering up in the evening over cocktails at dinner. When he thinks back on it, how could he
not
have known there were problems in his parents’ marriage? Years before Jackson’s accident, there were already problems. But the accident brought them all to the surface.

Ruby is apologizing for the lengthy message, stretching it lengthier. “…I guess I just felt like talking. It’s not a big deal. I left the party and didn’t tell Calvin. There was this guy I used to know from Crossroads—that Catholic retreat weekend? I don’t think you ever met him. He was at this party—it was so out of nowhere—and now I’m trying to find him. I
followed
him. I’m a little buzzed. I’m not sure what I’m doing—”
Blpppp.

The machine had cut her off with a robotic slurp.

She didn’t sound quite right. Ruby doesn’t have much tolerance for drinking.

He digs out his Parliaments and lights one off the gas stove. Smoke fills the hollow between the counter and the cabinets. He stares at the phone. There’s no way to reach her now. If he chose to indulge this flush of worry, he could call his insomniac mother; it’s 2
A.M
., and she might still be enthroned at this moment on her sofa, poring over the latest Book of the Month Club selection. He can picture the sheen of her cream-colored robe, the lamplight twinkling off her reading glasses, her face scrubbed of makeup. (He wonders: When Dorothy thinks of him, as she must, is she able to form such an accurate picture? The details of his routine are unknown to her; the things he did tonight are definitely beyond what she could imagine about him. She knows he’s gay, she knows George is, too; but the two of them, old friends,
just like brothers,
together like they were tonight? No, Dorothy wouldn’t consider it possible.)

He pushes the save button. The message light goes dark.

Tomorrow is Sunday. Ruby will probably wake with a hangover and then call in the afternoon to fill out the story. She’ll be embarrassed. She’ll be with Calvin again, eating breakfast at a comically late hour. She’ll turn the conversation around, ask Robin about his night.

Will he tell her about this evening that began with rejection and ended up with something quite the opposite? He still feels the bruise of being dumped and the humiliation of the fight outside the club. With just a few hours’ distance, he understands the finality of it. Peter is finished with him. But then there’s the unfinished story: this thing with George. Ruby has known George nearly as long as he has. Will he tell his sister what has happened here? And if he doesn’t, what does that say?

The first time Robin told his sister, in plain terms, about a crush on a boy, she should have been way too young to understand. She was only twelve, but she had figured out about Scott, had overheard a phone call. “Ruby, this will probably sound weird to you,” Robin had stammered, one winter morning in Greenlawn, not long after Jackson died. “Scott is more than a friend.”

“Does that mean you
like
him?” she asked, looking him in the eyes.

“Yeah,” Robin admitted. “The way a guy likes a girl.”

But Scott had moved to another town a half-hour bus ride away, and he had stopped calling, and he wouldn’t come to the phone when Robin called. Robin decided he had to go see Scott and say something to his face, friendly or unkind, he didn’t know which it would be. Ruby listened to all this and then told Robin she would cover for him; and so she made possible the long adventure that followed.

His time with Scott that day was brief. They were alone for a while in Scott’s room; they got stoned; they kissed and groped each other and then had a fight.
Breakup sex
is what he would call it now. Robin left, knowing he probably wouldn’t see Scott anymore. Afterward, wiping tears from his cheeks with the cuff of his sweat jacket, he found himself not on the bus back to Greenlawn but on a bus to New York City. He hardly remembered making the decision, but there he was, enveloped in the flurry of Port Authority on a Saturday afternoon, running from his first heartbreak.

He set out on foot downtown, along Broadway, moving from one public square to another—Times, Herald, Union, Washington—in between which were long, anonymous stretches of sidewalk. In Washington Square, he parked himself on the back of a bench, feeling less sorry for himself now that he had navigated so many city blocks and wound up in a place he knew well. He’d been in Washington Square with his mother, many times, and once with Scott, but never alone; it was a triumph just being here. The sun emerged from a bank of clouds, but he had no gloves, so his hands stayed in the pockets of his down vest. He stared at strangers moving past. In the city you saw all kinds: glamorous, exotic, trendy, scary, old, young, the kind who looked you in the eye and the kind who whizzed right by. All of them were a relief from the sameness of Greenlawn, from the hierarchy of high school, from the sadness that had overtaken his family.

Stationary for hours that afternoon, he discovered that strangers wanted to gab with him, usually bums who asked questions but then interrupted the answer with non sequiturs, and also shifty-eyed men, who wanted to sell him drugs and were sometimes hard to shake. One old white lady jabbed her cane at him, snarling, “Get your feet off the bench! People sit there!” He wished he could tell his mother about these people; she would relish the details, like the way the old lady’s cane had a gold handle in the shape of a mushroom. But of course he couldn’t tell her, because he was breaking her rules by being here, alone, without permission. That day, he didn’t care. Jackson was dead. Scott didn’t love him. What was left to lose? As long as he remained in public, he felt safe from harm, and in any case he felt strong enough to handle whatever was heading his way.

He remembers the four dark-haired Italian girls who approached his bench that afternoon. They wore Catholic-school skirts and black tights, and they surrounded him in a loose circle. He had noticed them eyeing him and gossiping with collective curiosity; now they taunted him about the sweat jacket hood he had tugged over his blue eyes. “We want to see your face,” one of them said, and when he pushed back the hood they all giggled. He pulled the hood back up; one of them pushed it down again. Up again, and then back down. It was their little game, and he gave in, like a puppy agreeing to heel and accept a vigorous petting. They giggled again when he told them his name, again when he said he was from New Jersey. They went to Saint-someone high school in a Brooklyn neighborhood he’d never heard of. He tagged along with them to a diner, where they squeezed into a red vinyl both, pressing him against the wall, knocking knees with him under the table.

The oldest one, Lila, fired off questions: “Do you have a girlfriend? Do you like disco? Are you popular? Do you take a shower every day?”

He answered some truthfully, some not, creating a version of himself in bits and pieces, understanding quickly that a little bit of mystery would appeal to these boy-crazy girls. Finally, the waitress, sick of the noise they were making, told them to leave. Lila pulled a LeSportsac purse from her school book bag, and he let her pay for his éclair and coffee. She wrote her phone number down for him.

After he said good-bye to the girls at the top of a subway entrance, he turned toward Christopher Street. He had no plan for the day, but these few blocks drew him in deeper, because of all the men hanging out, even in winter. Hood up, peering into shop windows, some filled with leather clothes, some with objects that at age fourteen he couldn’t identify, but which seemed to be for sex, he found himself thinking of Scott, back in New Jersey, which seemed now like the other side of the world.

“Yo! Blue eyes, come on over,” called a voice from a stoop. Two guys were waving at him, older teenagers, maybe as old as twenty, and they had the kind of dark features his mother referred to as
ethnic.
He stood near them and accepted a cigarette. They laughed at him when he tried to pass himself off as eighteen. Colder now that the afternoon was turning to evening, he went along with them to a place called Julius; he’d expected an Orange Julius, the fast food chain, but it was a bar, a gay bar populated with a dozen men. He hesitated at the door, then told himself he’d just look and leave. No harm in checking it out.

He had never been in a bar of any kind and was surprised how dark it was and how smoky. Guys sitting in pairs drank beer and conversed; others stood by themselves along the walls, as if waiting for someone. He had the revelation that anyone might sit here for hours and no one would mind. That’s what people do in bars, why they go. There are no expectations; there are no rules.

I’ll give myself five minutes, he told himself. Just to get the sense of the place.

The two guys had seemed alike at first: Hispanic accents, dark skin, colorful winter coats opened at the neck revealing gold chains. But they were quite different. The taller, better-looking one, Juan, who did all the talking, had an exaggerated personality. He called Robin “honey” and chattered on about a “rich lover” who was going to take him on a cruise, a “Princess cruise,” just like on
The Love Boat
. He was the kind of homosexual Dorothy would refer to as
flamboyant
. The quieter one, Manny, had a rough-looking face that was softened by lush eyelashes and pillowy lips. He had wiry hair on his knuckles, but his forearms were smooth and muscled. Manny leaned back on his barstool, accentuating the hefty mound in the crotch of his Levi’s, and when he caught Robin staring down there, he raised an eyebrow at him suggestively. Time to go, Robin told himself, but he stayed put. Manny called him “Robby” and put his hand on the seat of Robin’s pants while Robin drank from a bottle of Rolling Rock. (He associated this brand of beer with his mother’s Polish cousins, carousing at family barbecues in New England, which made him remember that by now, she was probably starting to worry. He’d leave as soon as he finished the beer.) Juan slapped Manny’s hand away from Robin and wagged a finger. “
Mira
, you keep off the
pollo
!” To Robin, Juan admonished: “You’re jailbait, honey, and this one has a wife and baby in Spanish Harlem.”