“I only met him once,” Colin confided. “He’s cute, like a TV character.”
We were now two weeks into the small thing that wasn’t supposed to change anything. Billy had been busy much of the night, and Colin and I sat at a table away from the bar, talking about him. Billy watched us in between serving drinks, and when Colin approached the bar, he looked at Billy’s throat instead of his eyes.
“It was after the fact, though. And I kept thinking, ‘You have a lot of nerve to talk to me like this,’” Colin said. He twiddled the stirrer in his bourbon glass and then turned and met Billy’s eyes now that he was across the room from him. He was referring to a moment I didn’t think he’d described yet, but I didn’t feel up to asking him to clarify what he meant, and simply nodded instead.
When Billy came over to clear the table, he looked at neither of us, as if our glasses really were the only thing he was after.
Things weren’t going well, however Billy had thought this would go. Billy was losing them both. Colin was upset, clearly ready to break up with him, and Justin had told me that Billy wanted to see him again, hoping to “perform better.” After Justin said this, neither of us said anything.
The night previous, Billy had taken Justin to a party on the roof of someone Billy knew from the neighborhood. There was a stairwell that wound up to the roof from the bedroom. Billy was having drinks, looking down to Brooklyn and Manhattan, and Justin went downstairs, and then the host as well, shortly after.
The host was standing there, as if he hadn’t made it all the way down. He had his dick out, and it was in Justin’s mouth.
|
It was quiet for a while, and so Billy finally thought to go looking for either of them. He went to the stairs and looked down.
Justin was at the foot of the stairs. The host was standing there, as if he hadn’t made it all the way down. He had his dick out, and it was in Justin’s mouth. Billy watched for a little bit, neither of them seeming to notice, and then turned and lit a cigarette, walking back to the edge of the roof deck. Justin came back to the roof that night where Billy was smoking, smiling at Billy like he always did.
Billy still wanted Justin after this. He told me this story at the bar, behind the taps, before Colin had arrived. I said, “You know Justin slept with you for free beer while he was here.” I hadn’t been thinking it and just said it, and after, it felt true. The bar was around the corner, he didn’t make enough money to buy all the beer he was going to drink that spring. He’d never had to pay before and wasn’t about to start now.
“We’re not together,” Billy said to this. “He wasn’t cheating on me. I mean, I was surprised.” And then he laughed.
From behind the bar, Billy looked up at me and moved his head toward the door. I stood. Colin gave me a wan smile. I got up as Colin sat, and went outside for a cigarette, and Billy followed me. “Have you seen Justin?” he asked.
“No,” I said, trying to make my answer colorless, to hide my disgust.
“He was supposed to be here a while ago. Are you taking Colin home?”
I laughed. “No.”
“He wants it, you know. We talked about it. You could have it, if you wanted it.”
I waited as the smoke floated out of my mouth. Smoking was so convenient in conversations, it was why I’d never quit. You could prolong the moment between one thing and the other, between when your life was one way and when it was another, and just look at it. For now, my life was in some unexpected third place. Three things had fallen out of Billy’s voice just then: one being that Billy, from his tone, had always resented Colin and me in some way I’d never understood or even guessed at. Two was that Colin wanted me. Three was that I wanted Colin, too. This was what I’d wanted. All that talk of what was my next move. This was why I’d stood up and walked away back when Justin and Billy first met. Colin wasn’t ever going to cheat on Billy—that was part of why I loved him. And so when I turned out to be the only thing between Billy and Justin getting together, I got out of the way.
I put the cigarette out and pulled open the door to the bar. It had all started to feel like something I’d done before.
|
I laughed. “Thanks,” I said, again, jocular, like the “it” he’d spoken of was nothing to me. And then I put the cigarette out and pulled open the door to the bar. It had all started to feel like something I’d done before.
Colin’s back came into view. He was knitting quietly. In the moment before he turned to look at me, a short film of our imaginary future ran through my head: walking Brooklyn Heights holding hands, cooking in the kitchen, him radiantly naked underneath me. All of it opened in the dark bar around him and then closed as I pulled even with him and our eyes met, and I could see, he was worried that I knew what Billy had just said. Or that I knew and hadn’t reacted.
So I acted like someone who didn’t know of his new arrangement. I didn’t want to be the other Justin, didn’t want to be the face on the other side of the coin spinning in the air between them. I wanted more than that. I had finally found something I wanted, I just didn’t know how to get it yet.
I saw Colin relax, gave him a perfunctory kiss on his cheek and walked home.
♦◊♦
Justin didn’t appear that night. In fact, he didn’t show up for months. I knew Billy and Colin had been a popular couple, and when Justin’s role in their breakup was known, by unspoken agreement, the other patrons in the bar had ignored him. Drinking in Brooklyn wasn’t the same as other places, I knew. It was more personal somehow. Most of us who went there spent more time with each other, even silently in our regular places throughout the bar, even if we never spoke a word, than we did with a roommate. So it was as if it had happened to us also, and besides, it was easier to blame Justin for what happened than Billy, because everyone got their drinks from Billy—no one wanted to be mad at him. But there was also that Justin had closed his line of credit by having sex with Billy. If you are getting free drinks from a bartender, the only way to keep getting them is to continue to withhold sex.
Justin finally came by again on a night when Billy wasn’t working. “Billy and Colin broke up,” he told me, apropos of nothing.
“Yep,” I said. I had just run into Colin and gotten his number. I was hoping to ask him out before he had too much rebound sex and ended up with someone else besides me.
Billy and Colin had spent some weeks crying and fighting, having sex and then storming away from each other. When they last spoke, Billy told Colin he was going to go have sex with two of his ex-boyfriends. I imagined him going from one to another, as if trying to collect from them something that actually had been taken by Justin. Justin’s disappearance had jolted Billy. His confidence had tilted off-center, and all the orbits around it were now off as well. Justin, though, was unchanged. His departure had protected him and the golden-boy quality was as bright as ever, as if we were now no longer in a bad play but in a ridiculous movie where he revealed he was an alien, or an angel.
“I met my first boyfriend when I was doing theater. He was a college student, I was in high school, and he came to do a workshop for us. I would go to his dorm room and tell my parents that I was going to take workshops, and staying with friends.” He lifted his pint and sloughed off a portion, swallowing in gulps. “He was the friend I was staying with.”
“Where have you been,” I asked. I finally understood why he told me these stories. It was as if he thought that by telling me his secrets, it automatically made us friends. It was such a lonely thing to do.
“I went upstate to my aunt’s. I took a job for the summer there at a bar and hung out. Things were getting a little too … you know.”
I did, so I said nothing. I just smiled.
“I’m leaving,” he said. “For L.A. again. Tomorrow. I’m just passing through. I thought maybe I’d see Billy but I’m glad I at least got to see you.”
It had never occurred to me, that Justin had feelings for Billy. I think it had just occurred to him. This was maybe the worst thing I could think of. Billy had made his peace finally with what happened, he had moved on. I thought of inviting him to leave with me, to go to another bar, and then Randy arrived.
Randy was a regular who worked in fashion merchandising. He took one look at Justin and came right over. It was amazing to watch. Randy had a goatee he’d braided so it was like a horn, and for all I knew he got boys to sit on it, and looking at him, something in Justin’s eyes seemed to liquefy, an emulsion I knew well for seeing it with Billy. But I knew it from me, too—like many people, even Justin didn’t want to be who he was.
I had the idea not to help. It would be so easy, though, and there was no time left.
I introduced them. They had not met before. It occurred to me that Randy was innocent of any knowledge of what had happened somehow and not playing dumb. He was often away on freelance jobs. Things would move now very quickly: They left together to smoke a joint in the bathroom, which was so tight that you would have to shotgun each other even if you weren’t completely interested in fucking, which, of course, they were. “We’ll be back,” Justin said to me, as he put his coat on to go to Randy’s apartment across the street.
Billy came in shortly afterward. We had a drink together. I said nothing about Justin at all. Colin’s number in my pocket burned like a coal.
♦◊♦
—Photo Glenn Harper/Flickr
Sources…
[…]here are some links to sites that we link to because we think they are worth visiting[…]…
On creating the feeling you want the reader to feel…
“Do you think writers have to feel what they want the reader to feel when they’re writing?” I asked my friend Alex Chee in email this weekend, after reading a new story of his that powerfully evokes the kind of moony, depressive, sick…
What a beautiful writer you are. The scene, the feelings…you capture it, and you captured me, right off the bat!
Laura, thank you.