The Push & the Pull (33 page)

“How long have you been driving with just this shit?” Andrew asks.

“Mostly shit.” Glen raises a jaw to give Andrew an unmistakably appraising look. “I don't just listen to music; I listen to chance. You're probably just old enough to remember a VCR coming into the house, yes? That's your generation. Not mine. Not the one after. You saw the
shift into movies on demand, whereas younger kids don't know any different. They can't imagine that you used to have to catch movies. Sure, no one wants to go back to hanging off the mercy of TV, but movie rental spoiled us. A certain cartoon company fought like hell against the VCR before going on to make a fortune from it. Before that it was chance. Preferable? No. Totally annoying? Not at all. Back with thirteen channels or fewer, no DVDs in the mail, no specialty channels, a pair of rabbit ears bringing it all in, you got blessed. Late night at a cottage, too hot to sleep, voila — Bond at eleven.”

Andrew sits on both Glen's passenger seat and on a frayed orange couch as a boy at Paul Tucker's cottage, his short legs dangling between Paul's and his father's, a tiny screen glowing in one dark corner. Beside him here in the SUV, Dr. No is becoming Mr. Yes.

In the winter, when Andrew met Betty to walk her back to the house to explain his deception of September, he didn't bring flowers or hot cocoa in a travel mug or her favourite little toque. He didn't joke or grab at nostalgia, trying to rescue the them of now with the them of then. His hand didn't accidentally brush hers. Instead, he thanked her for coming and told her directly he'd missed her. Only after they walked for two silent blocks did he say anything mildly ingratiating.

“I've always liked walking beside you.”

Given what he was about to say at the house, even that felt schemingly casual, but he had to let her know. Her jawbone wasn't entirely sharpened with hostility.

At the house he simply said, “Front doorway only, I promise” and stooped to prop open the aluminum door with its imperfect little metal toggle. He opened the main door, stepped in to the base of the stairway and turned back to face her.

“Dog hygiene was my dad's other big joke. You've heard this? Why do dogs lick their balls? Right. Because they can. I lied to you about when he died because I could. Not to hurt you; no, please, I promise. It was fear, not cruelty, fear and shame. I lied because, quite simply, no one was going to correct me. I wanted you, and he was gone. I knew these two things in the same way: what was gone, what I wanted. I'm still getting used to how permanent death is. In ways, though, you also see it right away. Over and over, you process the one big fact you see with your first glimpse of the body: never again.

“I'd gone riding at night, with Mark. Dad was okay every other time I went riding, but this was at night. He was needier at night. His trache tube. His hand splint. The electrodes. I was guilty and elated every minute I was out. The guilt fuelled the elation and vice versa. I'd resist taking a piss because I'd have to think of him needing to go, the seven to ten minutes he'd spend just getting to the washroom. Was he okay? Still I kept riding. And he fell.

“I knew as soon as I was back, as soon as I saw him. I jerked at the door, but I had my bike in my hands. His head was . . . his head was right there. I had to drop the bike, then move it before I could open the door. Do you understand? Doing these little things? Turning a door handle? Setting something down? All that time his head was draining. Not pumping, not squirting. Draining, balancing out.

“He would have called my name. Like at night, if there was ever a power failure and he was standing, he'd call my name like a kid.
Andy. Andy
. I know he would have yelled my name as he fell, but I was out riding. For fun.”

Neither of them acknowledged the climbing pitch of his voice or the tears on his cheeks — or hers — until she stepped through the doorway and he wasn't speaking any more and she had him heaving in her arms. After a few minutes his shoulders did a little half-squirm as he pulled back his raw face to say, “I didn't want you like this.”

“Shhh,” she said, “come here. Come here.” Eventually she reached behind her to shut out the cold winter air. She walked him to the couch in the next room. Crying, stroking (“Just let me get my arm out”), they lay braided together. A wet kiss, two. Her breasts, his shoulders and thighs, were brushed then clutched, stroked by a finger then grabbed in a hand. Wordless mouths made deep kisses and they chased a quick living-room fuck in the glow of the street lights. He apologized endlessly. He left her the blanket while he phoned for pizza. She held it out like wings as he hurried back.

“This is it, right?” she asked eventually. “You're not also a three-time absentee father or a life support system for various STDs, are you?”

“I was also high, a little, with Mark. I was high when he fell. Other than that, no, no more skeletons in the hallway . . . I've got to sell the house, though. That's what Larry has been phoning about. It's in his will, graduate and go.”

“Oh.”

Crucially, and perhaps strategically, Glen leaves Andrew in the truck while he books their motel room. Andrew's trust and comfort rise as he's left alone with Glen's cellphone, the remaining booze and a full name and address on his vehicle registration.

When they enter the musty motel room, Andrew proposes, “I'm gonna take the world's longest shower. Seeing as you have my vehicle inside of yours, how about I take your car keys into the washroom with me?”

“Why not take me in there with you?”

“Nobody can want it this dirty,” Andrew replies. He sweeps up one wine bottle and holds out a hand for the keys.

“Take this too,” Glen says, offering a translucent shopping bag with a visible can of shaving cream.

“Boy Scout Glen.”

In seconds Andrew isn't so much in a shower as in another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of wine, and of heat, cleansing, unknotting heat. Sleeves of dirt fall from his arms. The tan lines that cuff his thighs and arms are so precise he looks to be wearing an antique, one-piece male bathing costume of paleness, his body mapped into provinces of public and private life. His feet are so privately pale.

He drowns his filthy hiking shorts at the bottom of the tub. When he finally gives them a scrub he tries not to stare at his own stains, at the abject spectrum of his recent intestinal struggles. Already, yesterday's hunger, dehydration and diarrhea are vague to him. As the shorts come clean, he feels both embarrassed and dethroned at the thought of hanging them here to dry, as if he should be the laundryless hooker, the mistress without utility bills. If they were his cycling shorts, he could at least hang up the male-male equivalent of a thong. As is, he looks like a waylaid tourist.

Glen would no doubt prefer that Andrew put the razor he bought
to a more central environ, but Andrew's fading yeast infection still forbids it. Instead he simply begins unearthing his face, shaving away at ten days' worth of whiskers, peeling himself down to urban smoothness. He showers again to do his calves.

Stepping out of the small bathroom with a thin towel tied around his waist, Andrew is glad that all men are not created equal. Glen has been waiting in the bed wearing nothing more than a white sheet pulled halfway up his body. When he turns to stow some documents he'd been reading into a soft leather briefcase, Andrew is relieved at the modest size glimpsed between the sheets. He once heard a gay comedian list the three sizes of penis: Small, Medium and Keep That Thing Away From Me. His memory for jokes like this has been pulled through his brief adult life by uncertainty, curiosity and secrecy. Why
do
men buy so-called fitness magazines with bare-chested, ab-racked men on the front? The staff at some sports bars wear referee's uniforms to serve a mostly male clientele. What are they really refereeing? Right now he is clean, warm, tipsy and fed.
Bisexual
is just a word, whereas his dick is cylindrically hard. As he crosses the room he sees his slim back in a mirror. He can feel the strength in his thighs despite the wine in his thin blood.

Andrew stands beside the bed and reaches under the sheets for Glen's tackle. Ah, sex with men: he doesn't first have to use four-syllable words to talk about well-respected novels, indie film, indie rock or fantasy travel — and undressing is the only foreplay required. When Glen reaches to undo his towel, Andrew says, “No, up first” and spreads his legs in the towel. This perpendicular start launches a sex of purposeful reaches and grabs that seems so much easier than anything commencing in a horizontal embrace. And why bother with the kissing? Fully, gleefully naked, Andrew raises and plants heels or knees, offering one minute, taking the next.

The manageable sight and heft of Glen in hand or mouth complete the drop intuitively commenced when they had walked across the gas station parking lot. He likes meeting this plummeting decision, is relieved to lash himself to its falling weight. You will give me highway miles. I will take you inside. Of course I know how to do this.

Accelerated by wine, relief, surrender and a transgressive arousal he'll later wonder if the fully gay ever lose, he drifts from the strokes,
gulps and licks into a quasi-telepathic link with Betty. Inclining his weight back past the fulcrum of his knees and lowering a jaw to the mattress to enable and entice Glen, he moves also into some future when he can describe it all to Betty. He'll tell her how easy it was to turn his body into a version of hers, to angle his own hips as he had angled hers, to receive the exploratory thumb he used to give. He will only ever find words for this moment in her presence, could relate to her alone the undilutability of this fit.

I thought of you the entire time
, the adulterers half-lie, trying to forget about the orgasm they can't forget about. Near the finish, this telepathic link with Betty is scrambled briefly by difference. When Andrew straddles and posts he meets longer, stronger arms. Where you have clutched at those two faceted pools at the base of my spine, this one can reach up and down my entire buttocks, marks ripples on the surface of my back's disturbed water. A pelt of chest hair is in Andrew's fingers and Betty's. What power to deliver this inside, to crest and deepen his every whinny. Already this experience is a memory, something to share with someone not here, someone who should be here. With its unstoppable pushes and multiple pulls, memory is an orgy.

Betty stayed over again on the night of Andrew's hallway confession. After a few restorative days of constant hugging and classes cut for hours in bed, for movies, for reading novels, for yes sex, again sex, thank you sex, how dare you sex, we've just had a shower sex — for confidence and disclosure, Betty pulled off for a day. Class again. The library. Errands.

That night he found a moss green envelope waiting for him on the dining-room table. Taped inside a card of calligraphic Japanese flowers was an image of a small cockroach rolling a Timbit. No, wait, smaller than a Timbit, and with tiny bits of green leaf sticking out everywhere. Maybe she wanted him to be as strong as an ant, capable of carrying numerous times his own weight. Switching from the image to her looping inscription he read:

The male dung beetle spends countless hours tirelessly building a ball of dung before parading it past potential mates (think of the new trucks cruising Princess St.). Females require the insulated, nutritious dung for a nest. They, too, need to see that a man has his shit together before mating.

You were afraid I'd condemn you for letting your father die. That's just not possible. (In fact, it's a little crazy, but one step at a time here.) There's simply nothing for me to judge there. Do remember, though, that I contest your note. With us, the way your father died is not worse than lying to me. Please look beyond your grief to see that.

Healing is the admission price we pay for love. I'm your celebration. I'm your preventative exercise. I'm not your treatment.

Let's heal.

—
Your Bet

He wakes in a bed to layers of panic and a new pain. Where am — What's he — The bike.

The rest of the bed is empty, the room still. His bike leans against a wall of the motel room, extra fruit hanging in a grocery bag off one handlebar. He is stupefied at the vulnerability of this coma. It's 4:14 in the afternoon, and he'd been dead enough not to hear an exit or the entrance of his bike. Exhaling with relief, he rolls onto his back. And pain. How am I going to put this on the saddle?

Another hot shower and a snack don't even take him to six p.m. Before every small chore he peeks out the curtains, perpetually debating the tactical necessity of waiting for the cover of darkness. He didn't gain more than seventy kilometres in Glen's truck, a distance he'll make himself by morning. He had thought a milking fuck delivered on cabled calves and glistening flanks would score him hundreds of kilometres.

Reading naked in bed, he staves off the growing hunger as long as he can, defending himself with underripened bananas, decent oranges and a final whiff of grapeshot. The sun looks tireless as he mines his own lammy cliché and watches television news in a rented, ugly room. A split face wouldn't be national news, so he flicks channels looking for the newscast with the cheapest decor and the most flashy anchor-woman. Listening, he understands maybe a third of the French, but the pictures and icons help. A labour strike. Something about doctors. Pollution and water. Nothing about a cyclist on the run.

Face it, you got away. Relax. Be human again.

Miscalculate or drop your guard and you'll never leave the country, will work shit jobs forever, would drag a partner down.

Eventually, he burns the day's novel pages, that useless mass, in the bathtub and upends the food bag hoping for something other than fruit. A new jar of Nutella rolls onto the bed,
Cheers
written across its label with his pink highlighter. He eats the Nutella with a finger.