It had rained for a week and Kyle was going stir crazy. Ever since Brad had taken his stuff from their cabin, packed his jeep and driven away to who knows where, Kyle had felt like he was going to die. The pain in his gut would not go away and the nagging pulse of unreleasable tears exhausted him.
There was something worse than loss in Brad's departure. There was real cruelty.
Don't think, once I'm gone, he said, that you'll be able to forget what it was like to be with me. I know how it's going to be. Every day you are going to ache with unfulfilled desire. You will struggle for release, but you will not be able to come. Your whole body is going to stretch in frustration, shaking with the need for my touch, but nothing you do will satisfy you. And your mind, your mind will keep spinning, unable to come to rest. You won't eat, you won't sleep, and nothing you do, not physical labor or mental exertion will satisfy your restlessness.
Why are you doing this? Kyle asked, knowing that if Brad said it, it would be so.
Because I want to, Brad said. Because I can.
With the touch of a button, the windowpane rose and Kyle was blocked out, cut off from him, left standing on the roadside. Brad pressed the accelerator, the car shot out of the driveway, down the dirt road, and out of sight. ___________________________________________________________________________
Kyle was stuck in Vermont till Labor Day when his pre-war floor-through in Park Slope, which he had sublet for the summer, while he and Brad rented this cabin, would be his again. He tried to work on his dissertation. He tried to put together the syllabus for his course on New Tendencies in Italian Renaissance Painting which he was scheduled to teach. He took long walks in the forest surrounding the cabin, even in the rain. But the walks left him beat, he made no progress on his dissertation, and he could not disentangle and organize his thoughts – he could not really grasp on to a thought – regarding Italian Renaissance painting or anything else.
It was a relief then when he recognized Daphne's van pull into his driveway.
You look like shit, she said as they approached each other, Kyle coming towards her from the cabin, Daphne, slipping out of the van and walking towards him.
It's better than how I feel, he said in response. But you! You look fantastic. You've been working out.
She took hold of him and gave him a kiss on the lips.
You're one faggot I'd sure like to fuck she said. Even if you do look like shit. Maybe I will this time, she said, rubbing her palm against the valley of his ass.
I'm glad to see you, he said. Have you had lunch? _______________________________________________________________________________
I need money, she said.
How much, Kyle asked.
A thousand dollars.
Phew! Kyle said. What for?
I don't need questions, she said. I need cash.
Sorry, he said.
Don't you trust me? she said.
Of course, I do, Kyle said.
Because if you don't, she continued.
Come on Daphne, he stopped her. When do you need it?
Right away.
I can give you a check.
I want cash.
There's an ATM machine in Hardwick.
We can drive there in the morning _____________________________________________________________________________
She left him in Hardwick after he gave her the money but would not tell him where she was heading.
If I'd known you were not going back to the cabin I would have taken my car, too, he said, trying not to sound vexed.
A cute boy like you will always find a ride, she said, pinching him on the cheek and giving him a quick kiss on the lips and sticking her tongue inside his mouth, sharp like a switch blade, and just as deftly retracting it.
As usual, it was raining, and she was right, it did not take him long to get a ride back to his cabin in a lumber delivery truck. ___________________________________________________________________________
It's about an hour before I've got to make the next delivery, all the way out to Victory.
Come in for a beer? Kyle said, picking up on Buzz's hint and grateful for the lift.
Buzz was a big bear of a man and downed three bottles of Maudit before Kyle finished his first.
What kind of beer is this? he asked.
It's Canadian, Kyle said.
Not bad, Buzz said. Makes me kind of raunchy. ___________________________________________________________________________
There was nothing exciting about what happened next, nothing erotic, for Kyle, nothing he wanted to happen again.
But he smiled when Buzz said now that I know you're here, I'll stop by to visit you whenever I have the time. And when Buzz left, Kyle stripped out of his urine-wet briefs and t-shirt, stashed them in a plastic bag, threw them in the trash and scrubbed himself hard in the shower, repeatedly soaping and rinsing his throbbing rectal canal.
Rage was buried as inaccessibly deep within him as tears. ___________________________________________________________________________
Nights, naturally, were most difficult, for darkness was like a lover, suggestive and seductive, the source of shadows and phantoms, the harbinger of desires that became almost palpable while remaining yet intangible.
The mirror turned him into another, and he embraced himself as if he were another, and he stood on the other side of the glass and seduced himself. ___________________________________________________________________________
Back in New York City, Kyle found the dean offered no resistance when he asked to postpone his seminar on Renaissance Italian Art until the spring term. Instead, he taught three lecture halls of Introduction to Art. He could recite his lectures in his sleep and most of the students attending the lectures listened to them in their sleep, sitting in the darkened auditorium at the end of the day, as he went from one slide to another, tracing patterns with his arrow head flashlight. ___________________________________________________________________________
The early morning light broke through the windows in the strange bedroom and Kyle woke disoriented to see a heavy early winter sky that presaged snow.
Who the fuck are you? Maryanne said, turning her naked body to him.
What? Kyle mumbled through the breaking fog of waking.
That's what you're thinking, isn't it? She said grabbing hold of him. And who's this ball busting bitch in bed next to me?
I was drunk, wasn't I? Kyle said feeling the hammering in his head as he became fully conscious.
Is that the way you say good morning to a girl you spent the night with?
Good morning, Kyle said.
It's time to get up.
Kyle tried to sit up, but she pushed him back down with the palms of her hand against his chest as she straddled him and with feather strokes made him erect.
I didn't mean that, she said as she lowered herself on to him and began riding him. ___________________________________________________________________________
What are you trying to prove? Brad said when he came back, calmly explaining that the other bedroom was still his room and that he had only moved out of the cabin, not the apartment, and had not said good-bye forever.
Where have you been? Kyle said, curious, but actually playing for time, trying to figure out what he would do, how he could keep Brad from coming back and reigniting the impossible desire that he had almost purged.
San Francisco, Brad said.
Why'd you come back?
Brad did not answer.
It can't be because you were longing to see me.
Why not? Brad smiled winningly.
Was it? Kyle said, forbidding elation.
I'm sick, Brad said.
Sick?
Not sick like in the early days, not sick onto death. Just a good old case of hepatitis. I need bed rest and someone to take care of me.
And you think you can use me for that.
I know I can count on you...despite...everything.
It was true. He could.
Kyle carried his course load, worked on his dissertation, and took on the burden of nursing and housekeeping for Brad, shopping, cooking, cleaning, sitting by his bedside and reading to him, and waiting for him in the waiting room during his weekly sessions at the doctor's for a check-up and blood-drawing. ___________________________________________________________________________
In the course of time, and under Kyle's unstinting care, Brad improved. The yellow cast of his skin and the yellow taint shading the whites of his eyes evaporated and his native copper hue returned. His spirits came back to the high resolution that had always driven them and he was no longer burdened by torpor.
All this gladdened Kyle, not, as one might expect, because it signaled the approaching end of his indenture, but because he was glad, the way one is glad in May, to see the bloom spring back in Brad on account of his reviving health.
His joy at Brad's recovery needed something tangible by which to express itself, something you could hold in your hand. Kyle went to a large midtown department store to see what he could get. He settled, with the help of a very sweet and wispy, almost gaunt, actually pretty, counterman, dressed all in black, whose violet eyes were hauntingly outlined by black eyeliner, on a lovely atomizer bottle of aftershave lotion.
It was just the thing after months of the bad body smell of disease to bring out the gentle fragrances of health.
But what do you think I am, a fragrance queen that you would get me perfume? Do you object to the way I smell?
It is not perfume, Kyle said flustered. It's aftershave. It's delicate and refreshing. I wanted to give you something light and happy after your months of a crushing illness. Open it. I tyink you'll like the way t smells.
But Brad refused to take it.
Why can't you accept it? It would please me so much if you would.
So it's not really a present for me, but a way of making me give you the gift of accepting it.
That was too much for Kyle.
I can never do anything you like.
I guess so, Brad said without affect.
What about how I took care of you? You accepted that.
You did it for yourself. You liked seeing me dependent on you.
Kyle's head was swimming.
You won't accept my gift? Kyle said, holding out the as yet unopened box.
Use it yourself if you care so much for flowery mists. ______________________________________________________________________
It was the same counterman at the store when Kyle went back to refund the unopened aftershave.
He did not want it, Kyle said.
Speaking the words to a stranger, who looked at him with eager sweetness and beautiful eyes, brought embarrassed and hopeless tears to his eyes in the middle of the store. The more he strove to restrain them, the more insistent they became. They would not be restrained.
He's a fool, the counterman said, touching his cheek tenderly. Come with me, he said, now leading him gently by the hand through a maze of sales.
Wait here, he said, installing Kyle in a small changing room. I am off in five minutes and we can go for a coffee. Ok?
Kyle nodded yes, smiling through his tears.
Simon, for that was the young man's name, kissed Kyle's wrist before he let it go.
I'll be back in five minutes, he said.
With a conspiratorial wink and a sublime smile he added as he drew the curtain, I never like to make a sale that leaves the customer unsatisfied.
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