Welcome to Braggsville (40 page)

Again, he was curious. Didn't it smell funny? Didn't it hurt like a motherfucking fatherfucker? Who was the boss? Still he wondered, had Charlie liked him? He had not known if he would be offended or relieved, but looking at Charlie that afternoon, Daron knew that even though he would never, ever, ever, under any circumstances have sex with Charlie—the thought terrified him, good heavens, even trying to not imagine Charlie's cock terrified him [he didn't like the slap-fight sound of that idea running naked through
his head]—he would be offended if this Charlie, this poised Charlie with the sculpted lips, didn't like him at least a little bit. That didn't make Daron gay. He was sure of it. (He had thought it through, even though following his own logic was a bit like tracking a shadow through a tunnel, he was never sure the idea he was tailing at the exit was the same idea he had been following at the entrance.) Yes, Daron was sure that didn't make him gay, nor did it make him gay to ask, What's it like?

What?

It. You know. What's the stuff like, when you do it?

Stuff? When you do it? It? Charlie blubbed his lips, and, as he did so, gave a sharp inhale and long exhale. A look of peace came over his face, his eyebrows lengthened. Now we're talking. That's the Daron I love. Louis said what shouldn't be said. You ask what shouldn't be asked.

So, does it hurt?

Does it hurt when you put your finger in your ass?

No. Who said that? Who said I put my finger in my ass? Did Candice—

Charlie waved him down, his arms scissoring big as a swimmer calling for help. Then he held his thumb and index finger about zero inches apart. That's your asshole.

So it does hurt. (Fuck! Why'd he say that? Of course it hurt, even taking a Thanksgiving kerplupple was no bear's walk in the woods.)

Initially, yeah. But it's like sex with a woman. You have to get aroused first. Men don't secrete anything, but it still helps to get aroused first. It's all about the introduction, the first impression.

Daron hmm-mmed studiously.

Ha! Charlie again blubbed his sculpted lips, wiggled his foot, and regarded Daron. It was a look Daron recognized but could not name. He'd last seen it the crisp November morning he and his father took Chamber, their German shepherd, out for the long walk. D'aron
had already finished digging the swallow, and was climbing out of the ditch when his father crouched before Chamber as if to tell him something. Chamber raised his gray forepaw to shake, his happy tongue hanging down like a hungry Christmas stocking. His father held on for a long moment, until D'aron, embarrassed, looked away. Finally, his father said, I'll be damned if this paw hasn't healed up right nicely. We'll head back. You best fill that hazard. And don't forget the rifle.

Daron again hmm-mmed studiously, this time holding Charlie's eyes as he did so.

Okay. I'll tell you. Charlie leaned in. You have this feeling, this undefined longing that rattles around like the pellet in those ball bearing mazes, and stuff pulls at it. But you don't know why or even what's pulling at it. Then when you finally have sex, this longing is given shape, texture, scent, sound, taste, until it can only be itself—like being beamed up to the USS
Enterprise
. So, when it happens, if it's supposed to happen, no matter how it hurts, or pleases, or disappoints, it feels right, and that's how you know. That's what it's like. It's like when cells specialize, said Charlie.

Daron flushed with unexpected joy, and hoped that the occasion when Charlie's cells first specialized was as thrilling as his first time with Candice, excepting her baseball trick, which raised not the joy of the specialized but the specter of the metastasized. He wheeled his hands like a steamboat paddle. What about? You know? Up or down?

Charlie described what it was like to penetrate someone, that odd interplay of affection and aggression. Daron found that similar to what he'd experienced his first time with Candice, except for the baseball. During the act itself, he had felt like he was piloting his body but not inhabiting it, that it was a drone, and for one unexpected and frightful moment was caught in a shockingly direct connection to Candice. This was followed by pure puzzlement at how
she could find it enjoyable, but he did—So oh well, he thought—and let slip away the question of how one person could let another person into their body, perceiving only at the moment of ejaculation exactly what Candice had done for him. How to say that the body could be a gift?

Charlie shared that, too, described what it was like to be penetrated, to invite another into your body, a voluntary possession, how different it was face-to-face versus from behind or the side, how top didn't always mean boss. How after the first time, he'd felt relief then shame then guilt. But thirty minutes later, by the end of round two, that storm had passed, and he nested into the guy's embrace like he'd finally arrived where he should be. It was sort of how I felt when we all met. It clicked.

Was that when you knew you were in love?

No, dude. That was Tracey, this other guy. A real jerk. He dumped me a week later. Turned out he was a test pilot.

The doorbell. Daron, disappointed that Candice and Freddie were back so soon, slammed the door with relief on the Mormons littering his porch.

That's solid C-O-two.

You know what's solid C-O-two? They go around asking people to join a made-up religion with a metaphysical glass ceiling. That's cold. Besides, it's not even a real religion. I've been to real church.

Oh, have you?

Yeah. A black one back in the Holler.

A black one is a real one? There's some essentializing I can let slide.

He wanted Charlie to continue, but the mood had passed, and the ensuing bantering was not the gift horse to kick in the balls. Besides, he had heard what he needed to hear: The act is different. The feeling is not. (The act still scared the shit out of him.)

Daron laughed. Again, louder.

What?

Etymology.

What?

Anus means ring, as in, With this I thee wed.

Charlie cut up, then asked, Why are you reading about anuses?

I'm gonna be a college grad. I gotta know what shit means.

W
HEN THEY LEANED OVER
the coarse wooden railing of their balcony—how he loves her leaning, sprite's hope gracing her face—the entire Loyola campus opened up, Holy Name cathedral their favorite, the parapet walk atop the tower high enough, she insisted, To see the future. Predictably, the first night they crept up those 162 steps, fueled by spirits, laughing through their noses, the sky was a blue-black bisque. They couldn't see their building, let alone tomorrow. They could smell the sour dishwater odor of the cafeteria, a nearby bakery, the mournful river. They could hear an ambulance, a siren of sorority pledges, car starters barking far too loudly for the hour. The night they climbed those 162 steps with Charlie and Freddie was a clear night, laughter wafted from open windows like home cooking, and somewhere downriver a foghorn refused to stand on ceremony. Daron took that as a sign. The moon'll tell you, Nana always said. You might not like it, but it'll tell you.

This time at the station, as if to give Daron and Charlie time alone, Candice and Freddie fell behind (that's why he liked him—confirmed when Candice later admitted that Operation Vodka was his idea). When their train was called, Freddie pulled his hair under a knit cap, and when he turned to wave, he resembled Lenny Bruce Lee, and Daron squeezed Candice's hand so hard that she snatched it to her chest with a short bark. After the whistle sounded, she and Daron ran alongside the train, Daron timing his strides with the clanking side rods. When they could follow no more, Charlie and Freddie stuck their heads through the window, and Daron felt like
they were seeing him off. How strange and wonderful, he thought, it was to have friends.

L
ATER THAT EVENING
after Charlie and Freddie left, Daron walked in on Candice in the bathroom, I just need the Vaseline. She was brushing her teeth, and waved him by with a winging elbow, grunting her okay, he'd thought. It was the scene he'd imagined so long ago at home in B-ville, couples sharing small spaces while attending to separate tasks, carpooling through life in defiance of physics. After a time, they hardly noticed each other. But he would never grow weary of watching Candice. Each day a gift of observation or revelation, or both. Two coughs and one throat clearing were only the beginning. Each day their lexicon would grow, their shorthandoffs to the heart: slang, ironic advertising slogans, winks, fingers grazing earlobes, book titles, film quotes, conspicuous lyrics, a tidal wave of desire surfing a wisp of a glance, their private language a suprasemiotic domain, a code not even Turing could crack. But when she slapped the Vaseline into his palm, spit a tangle of pink foam, and shouldered by him without wiping her chin, the enigma was his alone.

She'd been acting oddly ever since Charlie left. Was she raking because she wasn't baking, as Nana said? Candy-Anne? he called. Candy-Bear, what's wrong?

The bedroom door slammed in response. Stomping. I'll study at the library, she called, that punctuated by banging the only other door worth slamming, the front door, shut with force sufficient that the windowpanes rattled in their mullions and the whole apartment felt to cough with embarrassment. When she returned later, sans books, it was not to watch the shows he'd DVRed and dutifully waited to view. And later, when he thought he heard her crying in the bathroom and tapped on the door—What's wrong, Candy?—only a flush in answer.

Promotion politics! That's what it had to be.

His father had warned this happened eventually with all women. Cohabitation, engagement, marriage, kids—not necessarily in that order these days, but each one is a rank, and the higher the rank, the more they demand and the less they explain. Your girlfriend is a private, your fiancée a captain, your live-in a lieutenant, your wife an admiral, your old lady a drill sergeant. Trick is to grant them privileges without promoting them. That's the trick, all right.

They'd had this conversation in the garage when D'aron was in middle school, his father scooting around on his favorite creeper, inspecting the muffler and the CV joints under Maylene's pickup. Her boyfriend was away at school: vocational training. As they conversed, D'aron watched his father's Red Wings tap out the tempo of his speech.

How do you do that trick? he asked.

D'aron grinned when, before answering, his father dug his heels in and rolled out from under the car for emphasis, which meant hearing French. His father believed you had to look a man in the eye when you spoke French. (French was of course known about town as the Dirty Italian at that time because all things French were on the No Fly List.)

His father thought about it a moment. No damned idea, son. If I could figure that I wouldn't be in the hotbox.

You'd be in the rib with the sleeves?

His father laughed every bit of air out of his lungs, as he had when an even younger D'aron asked how they knew it was French kissing if no one was actually talking. It was not a laugh of encouragement, no matter how many times his father apologized, said, I'm not laughing at you, boy, I'm laughing with you, only in advance of you gettin' the joke. And so, with a keen awareness of his naiveté at hand, an awareness spiny and febrile in feeling and effect, Daron had always expected his initiation into the mysteries of intimacy to be a
somber affair, but after that first flailing cocktail of sweat and desire, after they lay stuporous in an afterburn longer than the flight itself, only energy enough to inch over to the dry spot—her giggling, he in drunken delight at having a bedful of her—after walking his fingers across her sweet rise of thigh and into that acreage where legs swell with envy, after wondering if there was a name for that kiss of a crease under her ass, after recovering from his astonishment that the actual could be greater than or equal to the imagined, and while attempting to predict his refractory period, she yelped and nearly tripped over the sheets scampering to the bathroom, Bam! A minute later, she returned wearing his robe—Excuse me, but it says Hilton, Daron, Hilton! She stood with her fists clutched to her stomach, moaning, Something's wrong, something's wrong. Did the condom slip off?

What?

Look!

She guided his trembling hands to her navel. Through the terry cloth he felt a lump the size of a fist and hard as a skull. His first thought was C/cancer! (Ridiculous, he knew even at the time, but Big C was the guest star in every waiting room brochure and on every other TV show, not to mention all those pink ribbons. And everything caused cancer: balsamic vinegar, underwire bras, barbecue. Secrets even.) So his first thought was, C/cancer!, until the node started to move, to roll. He jerked his hands away, cracking one of Candice's nails in the process. She retreated to French: Ooh la la, Daron, relax, tranquille. Meanwhile, the lump—too large to be benign—rustled and moled down the folds of the robe. A baseball landed between her feet, the red stitches looking for the first time just that. She withdrew from the pocket two walnuts, smiling. We didn't have marbles. We didn't have a frozen chicken or hot dogs, either.

[As this happened, he had noticed that her chipped golden toenail polish highlighted a thread pattern in the carpet, a short weave called Berber, and he wondered why carpet, that most stationary of
furnishings, would be named after a nomadic people. He'd also noticed that her fingernails did not match her toenails, or the Berber. He'd also noticed that the first image that stomped into his head without knocking or wiping its feet was Louis on the gurney in the morgue, and he feared for the first time that he and Candice could not be together, that the past few splendid months had been a period of tentative remission, a long kiss good night, and fate plotted in the wings to claim them all. {What if D'aron had not been Ron-Ron, had not been Philadelphia Freedom? Faggot? What if Daron had met her in the party, on the parquet, and asked her to dance? But . . . would they still be here?} Was Agent Denver right in ways Daron had not considered? When all four of them—Charlie, Candice, Daron, and Denver—had last met, Denver ended the session by announcing, It's not over yet, but soon enough we'll be able to go our separate ways. Daron said to himself at the time, Please go your own fucking way as soon as you fucking can, but us, we're not separating for shit. Then this. God, what was going to happen to them? Nana would have known what to do.]