Well, it seems to me, Frederick said, raising his head while still inside him and gazing into Ted's eyes, that you were lucky.
On the empty pillow beside them the moon cast a foliated pattern formed by the shadow of the leaves blocking its beams from entering undappled through the open window.
How was I lucky? Ted asked.
You are here, he said kissing him again.
Yes, Ted said. With you.
With all your faculties intact, Frederick corrected him.
What do you mean?
From what I understand, at times you were in a pretty deep trance.
Probably, Ted conceded. It's hard to remember. There are definitely blank spaces.
I mean, he might have turned you into a dog or castrated you, Frederick said, smoothing Ted's hair with an ambiguous gesture that fell somewhere between stroking and petting.
You don't mean that.
Some guys can get pretty extreme once they see they can get a guy in their power, Frederick answered with a teasing glint in his eyes.
Would you do that to me?
Do what? Frederick said.
Turn me into a dog or castrate me?
Would you want me to?
Not castrate. But to be your dog... I wonder, he said nuzzling inside the curve of his neck and licking it with a long canine stroke of his tongue.
•
Ted slept the night in Frederick's bed.
The Monday morning sun came through the window, superseding the moon, and shone too brightly for him.
I have to go to work, Frederick said.
Unfortunately, I don't, Ted said.
You don't have a job?
I told you. Everything was connected. My master was also my boss. Everything went.
Do you want a job?
Yes.
I may have something. But you can't go dressed the way you were last night when I met you.
Frederick examined Ted and winked.
You don't like how my crotch looks in tight jeans or how my nipples look pressing against stretched cotton? Ted answered coyly.
I think you'll fit into some things of mine, Frederick said ignoring him. Take a shower. There are shaving things on the shelf over the sink. I'll put what you ought to wear on the bed and I'll make some coffee. Be quick. I've got to shower, too.
Shower with me, Teddy said.
Who'll make the coffee then and lay out what you've got to wear?
You can do that afterwards.
•
I can't be sure I'm myself anymore, Ted laughed looking at himself in the mirror. I think maybe I'm you.
Then who am I? Frederick said.
Maybe you are really me and I am really you.
Well right now, let's try to be ourselves because you've got to get through this interview. It's nothing, really. They need someone to cover Gregory's station.
Where's Gregory?
He was hit by a truck yesterday afternoon.
Are you serious?
He was hit by a truck as he was crossing Houston Street.
How is he?
He's alive, but he won't be in any condition to work for at least a year.
What kind of work did he do?
•
It makes me nervous that my good luck comes as the result of somebody else's misfortune, Ted said over the roar of the subway.
When you see what the work entails, you might not think it's such good luck.
It was tedious, writing filler for industrial publications dealing with energy resources, but it was a field that Ted was familiar with, and he was promoted after three months and put in charge of a team of filler writers.
Three months after that he was back to writing economic analyses, as he did at Farrell and da Ponte, of military readiness to defend oil fields in countries where he had never been.
•
I'm not comfortable with all this good luck, Ted explained, but it was not really what was bothering him. He had not yet put his finger on that.
What makes you think it's luck?
What else can it be? I meet you, I get a job, I get a promotion. How do you account for it?
One: You met me because I scoped you out at a bar for a couple of nights, talked to the bartender about you, and zeroed in on you, figuring you were proud and consequently ashamed that you were into submission.
Two: You are electricity to fuck.
Three: You are a good writer, know the field, and know how to make a good appearance in an office.
Simple!
But it makes me nervous.
When things are going well?
I guess I feel like I don't deserve it, that it's a mistake and I'm going to have to pay for it.
It's more likely to be that way if you think so. But if you really want to be punished...
Frederick hesitated because nothing more needed to be said for him to be understood.
But Ted surprised him.
I didn't say that. Maybe I've had enough of that, he said.
It was only then that Frederick realized what his real interest had been when he saw Ted. He had thought of himself as being a savior for a guy he sensed was on the outs with himself. Maybe he was. But that was not the whole of it.
•
Ted had had enough.
It was not just his psychosexual nature that was undergoing a significant and completely unexpected and hardly accountable transformation. His way of encountering the world was changing.
His job of writing reports for giant energy conglomerates, as he had done as far back as when he worked for Farrell and da Ponte, had been sometimes tedious and sometimes challenging. But it had not been odious. He had not found it odious, only, at worst, a private burden, the one he had to bear, as everyone else had to bear their jobs. That was life. He marshaled data and devised presentation strategies that often won him the praise of important men. But now the content of his reports, not just the burden of making them, but their purpose, had began to matter to him and to bother him. These were war plans.
He had not mentioned it to Frederick, but he had begun thinking about what he was doing after he met Ilia. Ilia had made him see things in a new light.
Ilia had been a graduate student in chemistry at Columbia. He came with his family from St. Petersburg shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union. His father had worked dutifully all his career, a bureaucrat in an administrative position whose function Ilia had never learned and about which his father would say nothing even after they had been comfortably reestablished in Montclair. Even that stroke of luck, emigrating from Russia, was a mystery to the boy. What could a twelve year-old boy know about the intricacy of squirreling money away surreptitiously and so carefully that finally it could become a small and accessible fortune? All his father would say, ever, is that he had put in his time and sometimes good fortune seeks out those who do not try to force it but who do not transgress.
A quiet life sometimes pays off, he said one night, as he drank a glass of kvass, over a dinner of borsch and beef stroganoff, with new American friends he had made, at their home, decorated with silver trays and cut crystal decanters that graced a heavily wrought, glassed-in breakfront in their dining room. Its windows gave out onto an untouched acre of woodland that separated their house from their guests', neighbors. Mr. Pritchard, his father's new friend, commuted every day in a big black SUV to a bank he worked at in New York City on Wall Street. He was younger than his father and showed an unmistakable sense of admiration and awe for him when he listened to him speak about their old life in St. Petersburg.
Mr. Pritchard's wife, Natalie, was younger than his mother, too, but they too had become friends and liked to go shopping at the great baroque mall that you had to drive quite a distance to get to. They went almost every Monday, the day his mother had off, as well as weekends, from the university library where she worked in the Russian Literature division.
His father worked, too, but it was from home, at a computer, and – the more things change, the more they remained the same (Ilia had learned the phrase in his junior high French class) – Ilia still was not sure what his father did when he worked.
It was in the French class that Ilia met Alexander. Mrs. Pontcarette called him Alexander in class, Alexondr, actually, but the first time they spoke, when Alexander sat down next to Ilia in the lunchroom, he told him to call him Alex and asked him what it was like to live in St. Petersburg and what it had been like to live under communism.
Ilia said he did not remember much but that he often stood on long lines with his mother waiting to buy bread and vegetables.
Although Ilia's parents were much older than the Pritchards, Alex was his age. Ilia had not been their first son. A brother he had never known had died in Afghanistan and he, Ilia, was a child of their old age, an unexpected blessing.
As their parents sat around the table drinking tea and vodka and dipping little silver spoons into small clay pots of jam that Ilia's mother had made from assorted berries, Ilia and Alexander left the table to the adults and, out the kitchen door, flung themselves into the just-beginning-to-darken woodland, for it was spring and night had begun to fall later and later, especially after the clocks had been changed.
They ran through the woods and scampered up a tree to a platform they had built and there collapsed breathless. They fell against each other but did not separate in embarrassment at the pleasure of their contiguity that they felt, but grazed in the field of eroticism that somehow they entered whenever they were close.
They turned their glowing faces towards each other and as if by the force of nature that moved them lithely to run through the woods, rather than with the will that made them behave as they were expected to in the house or in school, they were drawn so fiercely to each other that, for the first time, they kissed each other with open mouths and living tongues.
In high school they grew apart. They did not become enemies. They smiled at each other and from time to time saw each other, went skating or to the movies, or when their schedules put them in the same classes, played basketball on the same team or collaborated on a science project on the structure of the heart and the blood system. But their blood-beating passion for each other had ebbed. Alex began to go steady with Wendy and to play the clarinet. Ilia became deeply absorbed in his studies. He was fascinated by chemistry, devoted to writing poetry, which he sent out to university magazines where it actually was published, and he grew, over night, addicted – that was the word others teasingly called it – to opera, particularly to Russian opera, which he could understand because of his fluency in his mother tongue.
It was Frederick who had introduced Ted to Ilia, oblivious to the consequences of what he could not foresee, but Ted had noticed immediately that Ilia had something that Frederick lacked, despite all the charm and insouciance that Frederick projected. Ilia had a seriousness about him that Frederick could never command, and Ilia, without arrogance, but with a sense of the relative value of things, knew it, and could not draw from himself a great deal of regard for Frederick, although he never strayed from magnanimity in his behavior towards him. it was quickly apparent to Ted that they were acquaintances, not friends.
We tricked once, Ilia later told him, one night while I was still at Columbia after a few beers at the West End.
Consequently, it did not surprise Ted that upon leaving them at Benny's where Frederick and Ted had run into him, Ilia asked Ted, after establishing that they were not a couple, to give him his number so that they could get together.
I'm meeting my parents at the Russian Tea Room, he said, otherwise...
He did not need to finish the sentence with further words. His smile said everything he intended to express.
Ilia shook Frederick's hand but he kissed Ted on the lips.
I'll call you tomorrow, he said.
Well, Frederick said shaking his head as Ilia made his way out of the bar, that was smooth.
Are you jealous? Ted asked gently.
Don't flatter yourself, Frederick answered, disguising the injury he felt with a camp and a signal to the bartender to refill his glass.
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