Chapter 8: The New Jan Brady
The only other guy walks by on carpeting still grooved with vacuum cleaner marks, still spotted with sunlight at what's supposed to be a nightclub, just open in the still-waning afternoon. I barely look up from a gin and topic, swishing the sizzle stick in mostly melted ice cubes, looking at Matt's dad's fingertips, like they're even less a a part of me as the dissolving ice in the glass. My, his, fat, devious fingers and the deceptive motives they enacted, would pass on to someone else, revert back to the actual Matt's dad, once I as Matt's dad slept with someone else again. A swallow of the gin and I resolved that someone wouldn't be Matt--not at all, and especially not after an afternoon looking into the kid's screwed up expressions, the kid's searching and yet accusing eyes. But if I slept with someone--another gulp; it's going to be an early . . . afternoon--how am I acting in this body any better than this body's usual owner usually acted? I would just be getting out of myself, or out of this self, and into someone else's body for a while in turn, not merely fucking him (and it takes another swallow, almost finishing the glass, to add, or her) but becoming him--I don't add, because I can't, that her in turn.
Talking to the kid, talking the kid down from his excitement; talking as Matt's dad, not knowing Matt's dad's character earlier than last night; saying what the kid wanted me to say about their past together, not knowing what kind of "fun" they had once had; acting out my job for my boss as a nearby eavesdropper, not knowing before then the boss broke the confidentiality and the fraternization rules--it was all so exhausting I'd headed for this old place, where an earlier I, as Trent, had met and become an earlier him, as lumberjack Pete. That had been back in the gospel phase, I guessed, ordering another drink from a bartender that looked bemused I was ordering a third with the place's door barely open. It had all seemed like vaguely existential fun and games then, as the men and more men, the selves and the other selves, went by. Now the job was at stake, the boss wasn't as straight as I'd (well, never) known him to be, Matt seemed set back as far as one of my clients could possibly be set back, and it was me--our--all of our faults, all of the mes who hadn't succeeded in getting this right. Mark was staying on another continent. Luke might fire me if he didn't sleep with me, and he still might not understand he'd be sleeping as me. Simon and Pete and Bryan and Asian Jim and Black Tony--all gone to a kind of amnesia and oblivion for them, all former, rocket-booster stages for me, John, wherever it finally turned out I'd been blasting toward all along. And what had I learned from any of this? How had I stopped hurting the gay guys around me my fancies and weird schizophrenia was hurting? What was I going to do for Matt, as Matt's dad? Was I losing Mark to Germany forever? Would Luke fire me for all of the Johns I've brought to the office and been? Was there even a point to visiting the one remaining Tony I hadn't seen, whom I hadn't seen, in fact, in twenty years, if seeing the Tonys so far, and becoming one of them, even, hadn't arrested whatever this was from happening again?
Weirdly, nearing the bottom of the third gin and tonic, I felt this condition, whatever it was, induced guilt and yet enabled promiscuity. I felt bad for not sleeping with Mark for so long, and yet it was safer to sleep with strangers, if I was going to come back as that stranger, and not take over the body of my best fuckbuddy, and never have, but be, that best fuckbuddy again. It was both amazing and devastating for the self esteem. As soon as I wanted to celebrate who I was and what body I inhabited, I risked passing out of that body and into the body I was celebrating it with. It made it difficult to keep, impossible to draw closer to, any friend with whom the sexual tension crackled. They thought I didn't want them, was cold and playing hard to get, when really I knew that sleeping with them would have meant becoming them, draining one's soul as some vampire and not merely giving of one's self in bed, but taking of another self in turn. It reinforced conventional heterosexual ways and yet made the practice of them impossible. A man could not go about becoming his wife each time he made love to her, her not remembering it and reappearing somewhere else afterward. No woman would stand for that, and no husband above the mean and vile creatures would keep enacting that, and so this seemed a gay-specific fantasy--curse, perhaps, I was enduring. It almost reinforced the shallowness we're always accused of, easing my assumption of lovers' identities, allowing the snake-like sloughing off of selves no longer wanted, advancing the consciousness from host to host with little remorse for what it had done to previous selves, previous shells that had housed that self for only so long as I, he, they had twisted snail-like, secreting selves with each twisted turn the story took. I hadn't stopped sleeping with others as I'd been sleeping as others. I hadn't changed my taste in men. I hadn't done anything other than say I loved Mark, and confess a certain affection for Simon, myself in Simon, myself as Simon. I still wondered what the next, the final Tony, would have to tell me. I wondered how, now, I would get along with Luke at work, knowing what I knew, knowing what he knew, knowing what he didn't know. I wondered if I would sometime have to sleep with John, the original me from way back when, to get this all to stop, or at least to be the man I once was. Or was that the point of all this--not to be that John again, in more ways, and in more Johns, than one?
At which point I looked up, almost spilled my drink, felt surprise and yet knew it was the next karmic turn the secreted snail's shell, of course, would take. He'd come into a gay bar when he professed his straightness--the second man in a row in my gay life to do so. He's sat down beside me when my reveries had kept me from even noticing his presence. He shocked me for being there, and yet, of course, it all, still, made perfect sense. "Hi," he said in a tone that implied we both knew we'd been expecting this, and were both continuing a conversation, not starting a new one.
Hi, I echoed back that tone, Matt's dad to Matt's counselor. I sat looking, of course, at Luke.
They jut. They point up and outward. They triangulate with the navel. They peek from--peak from tees. They mimic, flatly, less spectacularly, their female counterparts. They contract in cold and swell with heat. They spark sensitivity in some and sit there inertly in others. They cry out in clamps, singe with pain at bites, get subjected, oddly, to piercings, items hanging from them. They respond to fingertips, wince at pinching, coil and recoil with twisting, and feel especially good tweaked with the body's sexual energy is focused elsewhere. They inspire philosophy and enable experimentation with each new set. For, as Confucius first said, you can never know how hard a man wants his nipple bitten.
Nipples: vestigial in men and never lactative, more sensitive and vulnerable than anything around them on the chest, for no good evolutionary reason. Liable to be pinched by new partners, obliging one to explain, one does--one does not--love tit-play, they perk up at the mention like they've contracted in the cold. They geometrically top pectoral mounds of the stacked like so many, precise little cherries on sundae scoops. They corner like the pockets on a billiard table the far stretches of game areas stretched from the loins, down from the neck and mouth, and just in--and playfully so--from the armpits that one hadn't known since this lover (maybe even, since this encounter) could be erogenous zones. They pulse as the muscled learn to ripple deltoid and pectoral rhythmically. They respond to repeated pinching, growing and callousing to twice an original size. They carry around the smart of pain from a lover who had gotten toothy the night before, bringing out a wince of dull pain with even the lightest touch--and bringing out a grin, as that wince brings back the memory of the toothy fun the night before. They make one wonder as a man of nipples in a public place full of men: how many of us tweak them, play with them pinch them while we're jacking off? And--one more look around to the crowd you hope can't read your thoughts--how many of us forever leave them alone?
Then there's the fact that all of us have two and we always know where they are--tucked beneath fabric, pushing up layers of shirts, peeking out muscle shirts, finding tawny crescent moons in rips and tears. How many of us, the gay among us wonder, have pinched another man's nipples? Made another man realize his, and not just his girlfriend's, tits could sing with pleasure, could make one's mind go blank, could signal ecstasy--even while one still wore ninety percent of one's clothes? How many of us had worked at Confucius' maxim, not knowing but guessing how hard one's partner wanted one to bite, how much he really meant his oww, now stop, and how much he really wanted one to keep biting? How many of us had licked, how many sucked, how many had worked on the left one with the mouth, the right one with the fingers, switched, started again? It was silly. It was juvenile. It wasn't even something one thought the average gay man did. But lumberjack's hand down John's shirt, Asian boy's pinprick little nipples, John and Mark's fantasy of Matt Damon sucking Mary Mark's, and having a third nipple to play with, not just for good, but for extraordinary measure--nipples were our, gay men's secrets. John still grinned, having bitten with all of his might on one buddy's right, tugged with a clamp with all of the rest of John's might at the left, and still had heard him say, "That all you got?"
It was all they had, and it was all gay and straight men had. Even women had nipples and none of them were, strictly speaking, sex organs--just pressure points. The body's ready acupuncture, the spark plug jutting into into internal battery connections, the channel dial on a television before remotes came along, and one needs, one is afraid, some vertical and horizontal hold adjustment.
They reasoned, in moments of bro-culture passion, all of us, gay and straight men, have them, nipples. None of them, the nipples, marked us, then, as gay or straight. They had both had women tweak and bite theirs, and they'd both, since the days of energetic teenage rubdowns, tweaked and bitten those of women. They weren't sex organs either, just pressure points of nerve endings, which just responded, ecstasies alike, to accidental as well as intentional touch. They could touch one another's, then, and still be cool. They were only looking at one another's chests, one another's tits, like they looked at a chick's. They weren't gay, they weren't looking at their dicks, after all. They were just regarding what jutted out up front, what no man ever tried to hide or needed to hide. They were just--mutually, prolongedly, sensuously, tweaking one another above the waist. They were just--self-consciously, latently, poker-facedly, feeling a stirring below the waist as they worked on one another above it. They were deepening their voices. They were speaking of their women. They were bragging of their girlfriends' cleavage. They were glossing right over their previous times with other men, their lips, their penises, their nipples--tweaked, tasted, bitten, and of course, always, always, left alone.
They were innocent appendages, non-sex organs, tri-points one's torso had to have for the sakes of symmetry and balance, nothing more. And if two straight men sharing a beer should poke, should prod, should unexpectedly find mutual, innocent enjoyment therein, who was anyone else to tell them not to, to insist they leave one man's bro-tits, one's man nipples alone? Who, indeed--for, almost not noting what they were doing, they had left the public bar. They had headed for one of their abodes. They had reached out, rubbed poked, massages, pinched, reciprocated. They had stopped themselves, stopped each other, begun again--squeezed through a guilty conscience, wrung out emotional and physical sensation like the nipples were tight corners of dishrags compressed to dryness, wrung from the last moisture beads, tiny atoms left to feel the pressure of a vice grip, an applied clamp, a pincer, a piercer. They had--had they leaned in a little closer with their extended arms, their tightened fingers? Had they drawn close enough over mutually bared chests to brush lips against one another? Were they straight men, really behaving so? Were they still talking about their girlfriends? Going over hetero sexual triumphs? Still not speaking of other men embraced, kissed, pinched like this? Had they ever pinched another man's tits this hard? What would it mean, anyway, if they had? What would it mean if they hadn't?
What are the parts of a nipple called, and why don't we know their constituent parts, as we know those of eyes, ears, noses? Tip and ring, corona, aureole, pucker--pink or brown outee drawn to a point, or swell the size of a quarter permanently bouncing on one's--bust. Radii run outward as tip stands symmetrically above. Pectoral flex with deltoid as nipple curls flush. Early antenna of cold brushing down the body, of current running through the soul, of blush betraying the face's secrets, of eros peaking, piquing interest when one hadn't been aware. Points held in common with other men under dress shirts and tees everywhere, subterranean and dark through clothes too transparently colored flesh. Flat and flush with torsos' surfaces, they bespeak how they are not women's nipples. They are men's, static, inert, vestigial perigee to women's apogee. Tell that to two men, both straight, who've contrived to go from kissing to each having the other's held between his teeth.
It was too much--literally so. It didn't just sit there demurely on a muscular chest like I liked to see a nipple do. It bounced in perky rhythms, jiggled jellily, suddenly sprouted veins that suggested sag in later years. She'd loosed them and pressed them toward me and expected--I don't know what. Expected I'd latch onto them like an infant. Thought her tits would just be too much for my resistance. Thought I was her straight boyfriend, enamored after--how long had they been together again?--years with her tits. I'd been okay with them huddled in her blouse. I'd kept kissing back when they pressed against me. I'd bug-eyed, I'm pretty sure, when they'd come unclasped. Straight men would have said huzzah as the sheer voluptuous bulbousness, the splendid sphere of fleshy tipped delight, the girlfriend's rendition of the dimly, unconsciously remembered maternal teat of infancy--the reason men of old had called wives "mother," and more recently, hot mama, mamacita of full Freudian yore.
Oi. The point of the oedipal complex was that you repressed it. Here I was looking at Luke's girlfriend's breasts, and openly thinking of his, and of my, mother of old. The point of the woman, I supposed, taking her blouse and bra off, was to get Luke so worked up. The point, or points, of the breasts, were comically huge nipples that dwarfed, just put to shame, the pointed and tight little men's nipples I liked to play with, to a point, as it were. The point of running my hands and fingertips over globes, nipples, curves, pecs, was, I guessed, to get as turned on as she wanted me, Luke, to be. They were proffered, pointed toward me for my supposed edification, not for hers. I guess Luke went for this regularly, though there was nothing bi, nothing masculine, nothing boyish at all about his girlfriend's breasts. The point of continuing to push them on me, to having them jut into my face, was, I gathered but kept to myself, to remind Luke how much he, I liked them, always wanted, I kept surmising, more and more. A Sarah Silverman stand-up line echoed through the parts of my head that weren't transfixed by the dancing nipples and what the dance and the nipples told me about myself and about Luke. That other, less transfixed part remembered Sarah saying, take a shower with your boyfriend, your breasts will get very, very clean.
And so, as Luke, I tugged and tweaked. Clockwise and counter-clockwise, up and down and squished like I was milking out a pint--I had no idea what she was doing. Her mostly pleasurable expression told me he often did this to her, though she would sometimes open her eyes to see if I was relenting yet. Her bottoms, all of my clothes, remained on. We didn't keep kissing. I didn't apply lips or teeth to nipples, but I sure as heck didn't let go. I slowed my rhythm, I came back for more, I ceased tweaking long enough to check her reactions--and still, once could gather from this, Luke and Luke's girlfriend did this sort of thing regularly. No, I couldn't for the life of me remember Luke's girlfriend's name. No, I had no idea from my experiments so far, how long, if at all, she wanted me to go on squeezing and tweaking. It was getting old and routine for my fingertips. One could imagine what it was starting to be like for those nipples.
Nipples, and determining women's from men's: apart from the extra flesh, the wider circumference, to bouncy looseness less transfixed to vertical pectoral flesh, they more or less copied and amplified men's own teats--if one could call a man's nipple a teat at all. I guessed, then, it was what it was connected with, whom it was connected with, that made this like playing with the pits of a fleshy fruit, all of the fruit already eaten away, all of the gooeyness dried out and gone. I guessed its femaleness made it like gripping handfuls of beach sand, granules tricking joylessly away as a force of nature. I guessed my gayness, despite the different brains I'd viewed it from now, the different bodies I'd now been a gay boy within, made it like industriously milking the teats of a cow and being mildly indifferent that not more milk was coming out--for the sake, I was afraid, of production more than pleasure, mine, hers, or the cow's. I pinched the left nipple still and looked at its tip a moment: sorry, baby, I thought to myself, as though I were actually saying it to her: I'm as likely to go straight as the cow I'm imagining milking is likely in nursery rhymes to jump over that moon.
Which meant, I gathered, the bisexuality didn't go along with the brain I was inhabiting--if Luke was really bi, if bi was really a thing, if I could judge such a thing from beholding--from just holding, his girlfriend's breasts. It's not that I'm misogynist, that I don't like women. I could see a straight man, or a bi man, get a rise out of these tits. The flesh was becoming, the tits and nipples were there to play with, the oedipal hearkened, the hetero teenage romances flooded back to the brain from the days one had pretended not to know any better. But they were less fun in themselves, offered less pleasure in tweaking, than any attribute or appendage I could think of any body I'd lived in, any buddy I'd fucked or been fucked as, that or whom I could remember. Even Tony's swelling rubber balloons, resembling briefly in shape the fleshy balloons I now tweaked and twisted in different ways, were more fun than these. And Tony's balloons had been fun, briefly, for the popping, for the fetish, for the oddness. Luke's girlfriend's just persisted, bounce after bounce, for the mundanity, the ordinariness, the red flush just now beginning to spread across her nipples as they were wrung between my still working fingers. I stifled a sigh I didn't want her to hear for what it would imply: that this wasn't turning me on. That I didn't want to keep tweaking them. That I didn't care if they were turning her on, either. That if it were Sarah, and Sarah's tweaking boyfriend, both would say at this point, without so much as another tweak, these breasts were now clean enough.
"So," she said between my tugs on her dugs, "who's John now?"
It was hard not to give them a too-savage squeeze, a compression rendition of a jump or a jolt. It hit me with fingertips still clenched, they'd talked about me. He'd told her of my shape shifting. He must have updated her multiple times. He really must have cared. I looked into her eyes as she and I paused, the interest unfeigned but the pause in the sexplay tacitly acknowledged, but without either, disappointment or interest. I tried to read from that expression, how often thoughts of me had occurred to him, had occurred to her, as they had lain together before. I put on a cluelessness--"Who's--John. . ."--that was more of a case of stalling for time: had she even sensed, I now began to wonder, that I was John, and that I wasn't Luke, even now?
"Who is he now in his charade?" she clarified, arching her back in a way that told me I could let go of her breasts.
"Oh," I settled back, cracked knuckles that were tired from endless pinching. "'Charade' sounds so fake. John--" and I wonder if I'm pushing this too far as I say, "means it."
"Yeah, he means it," she said, as I tried to gauge how much of my story they'd shared, how much Luke had told her. Should I just out myself as John inches from her arms? Why was this evidently not the first time my name had come up when they'd been in bed together? What had she sensed--those eyes still too indifferently unfocused to guess how much she cared--about her man, and his man? Maybe even, about his men, I thought to myself, Luke's nipples still tender and sore from our sexplay, not too long ago.
I'd been on the mental tangent so long I hadn't realized she was still finishing her thought. "He means it, or all of those guys have just gotten their stories straight."
And I have the sense she's just humoring him--humoring me, about me. As if their conversation had taken on the tenor of, can you believe what John said to me today? Can you believe who John was today? Which still didn't explain why it was pillow talk for them, or what John, whichever John, was to Luke and his girl.
"They've"-- I pause for a nanosecond on the pronoun, risking giving myself away--"They've all known the business. They've all known how to talk to Matt." Nothing so much as a ripple from her rib cage gives away how much they'd breached client confidentiality together. "They've all had John's," and I pause, wondering how the real Luke would put this. "John's integrity."
She takes this wordlessly, stroking Luke's arm and torso again, no clue that I could see that I and Luke, Luke and John, I as John in Matt's dad's bod, had had a great deal of integrity as a pair in John's bed. "Well, then, who's he been, to show his famous integrity lately?"
"He was"--finding it odd to talk about myself as someone else, and yet, not someone else--"Matt's dad last." I mean for the stress on the last word to say he's not--I'm not--Matt's dad now, leaving the door open to out myself. She's still tensing, though, over the announcement, fingers pausing in mid torso-stroke. I wait, a little anxiously, wondering where she'll take us next.
"I didn't know he could be someone else you know," she said first. That told me they'd discussed the many Johns seriously. They'd floated theories, much like I had myself, what this magical John could and couldn't do. Luke must even have shared the part about John's former johns showing up again, after the fact and none the wiser--drawing a blank, in fact, about it all.
"I didn't know"--she said again, drawing herself in a bit on the revelation. "Wait--so, Matt's dad's gay?"
That told me they've been over Matt's case together, too, perhaps in this very bed, suggesting the phrase strange bedfellows to me in a whole different way. She'd put her finger on it, so to speak, I thought, laying fingers and palms back on her--only partially to distract her.
"No," I venture, "not wholly. I guess it works with bi men, too," I manage to say without involuntarily winking.
"Or with men who. . . " and, God, I find myself wishing she'd complete the thought.
"'Men who . . ?'"
She playfully socks me one--which reassures me she's sure I'm Luke, and she's sure the kind of guy Luke is. "Men who aren't 100%."
I'm stunned by the repetition of Matt's wording. Which must have been Luke's wording. It might even have been her wording, too. Conversations from work had come home to this household before. Luke had used their, had used my, language to talk about my shapeshifting, about my johns. And not just about what it meant for me, John. But also, what it meant for--and I'm looking directly back into her casual-once-again eyes--what it meant for Luke. How can I get her to tell me?
"What are you waiting for?" she asks, and I don't even know if she means waiting for something now, before I reply, or waiting for something from John, before I--do what, I can't say for sure. She chuckles to herself and asks a question that already clarifies, correcting herself: "what are you waiting for, and"--opening her eyes to look a shade accusingly--"who are you waiting for?"
"Who am I waiting for"--I'm trying not to make it so obvious how much my breath is catching on the question--"Who am I waiting for John--to be?"
She doesn't seem to think I need her to affirm this by nodding. She's just gazing straight at me, nothing to read in those eyes. "A---"--now I'm trying to hide my own nervous gulp--"a woman, maybe?" with a mock elementary expression.
She laughs, taking it seriously, all the same. "Well, I don't think he's going to be a woman," she says, and I find this oddly reassuring, looking at her naked breasts. "And I don't think," she says more softly and more subtly, "that's whom you're waiting for."
I resist a whom bomb at the worst possible time. Who does she think I--whom she mistakes for Luke; who would be waiting for John; who she doesn't know is me--would be waiting for? I have to pause for the briefest of nanoseconds, to ask myself implicitly, had I got all of that? It's my turn to draw into myself cringingly as I say, "you think I'm waiting for him to be the right guy?"
Her hands on my, on Luke's torso, reassure almost maternally. "Honey, we've been through this," she says softly. I'm reconstructing in my head what the conversations must have been. She repeats, "not 100%." The phrase echoes for me, distinguishing Luke at the office from Luke at home, Luke in macho banter with me, Luke in bed with nipple man last night, and Luke with nipple woman right now. There'd been truth to what I'd sensed ever since first working with Luke--so much truth, he'd spoken it as I'd never thought as John he'd been willing to. He'd told his girl of his man crush. She'd taken it, hadn't been freaked out by it, had felt comfortable enough to bring it up to him in bed. Would I, then, take it further? Had I, without knowing I was him, taken it there, already? Swallowing tentatively one more time, I decide as Luke, deciding, I will, and I already have.
"Honey," I say, embarrassed I still haven't said the woman's name. "Right now, I'm"--looking into her eyes, wishing those reassuring strokes on the chest would just continue--"I'm--"
John, as Luke, knew it was a bad idea to bring Teresa, his girlfriend, fully dressed now, to work. Yet here she was, brightly and confidently looking up at him from the same chair John, as himself and John as others, had occupied. She knew he had the body of the boss, the body of the man, Luke, she'd dated--oddly, it seemed--for years. She knew, she'd had it explained, she'd gone through the gambit of questions to establish--he has the soul of John, the underling inside the boss, the subordinate borrowing the boss's body. She understood the mastery, as she saw it, of Luke's body over John's mind, and that's not, John had paused several times to say to himself--mastery is not what you would call Luke's behavior when Luke had been in bed with Matt's dad.
But what had he mastered, he asked himself. He'd gone through more than ten bodies now, black and white, gay and bi, young and old, top and bottom. He'd burned through friendships, apparently lost fuckbuddies, compromised professional relationships, and almost lost clients. He'd gone home to Luke's house a half a dozen nights now, to play hetero husband with the woman now beaming at him. He'd gone along with this truth because he'd unwittingly rented her boyfriend's body, like some postmodern air b&b. She had come, somehow, along with the place. He'd followed her circuitous conversations on what Luke had told her about John, about the other johns, about Luke's involvement and level of concern, she supposed, about John and the changing johns. He'd come to work and/or tried to be the boss the others in the office mistook him for.
He'd asked himself in tight spots, in crucial management moments, what would Luke do in this situation? And since he was Luke, or the nearest thing, the nearest person to it, or to him, until he moved on sexually and the old Luke reemerged existentially, this Luke, who was John, did just what he thought the old Luke, would do, and thereby, did. Lots of people in lots of workplaces wished they could, in one way or another, fuck or fuck with the boss. Unlike any of them in history that he ever knew of, John, as another, had fucked him, and in the course of it, had fucked with his boss, and now he had to live with it, with him, as him--whatever. This wasn't what anybody had ever meant, ever, by sleeping their way to the top.
Luke's body, the bi boss's perspective, was, after all, turning out to offer a weird vantage point on the world. Women's bodies loped voluptuously in sight. Female forms accentuated themselves in ways the old Luke had never cared to notice. Luscious curves suddenly followed alluring contours to plunging necklines, deliciously rounded frames, skirts the old John, who was never much of a crossdresser, would sooner have worn than wanted to get into. Pouting cheeks, angelic eyes, even flounces and bounces of bangs and curls had caught his eye like he'd been fashion designing his entire life. Not just Teresa's form, but the figures of women who walked or strutted by were ten times more noticeable than they had ever been to previous Johns' eyes. He'd looked at Teresa as she was talking, taken in the lilt of her head to the side as she'd admired him, and though that bi began in the body, Luke's body in this case, and not in the mind that was, that had always been, gay and John's alone. Men still appealed in their subtle khakis, their pleasing pouches and bulging packages, just as they always had. But this was the first man he'd supposed he'd inhabited, not just in a sexual but in a somatic if temporary way, not exclusively apparently gay, and it was no more apparent where Luke's body left off and John's soul within began, as it was where bi shaded off, blended with, overlapped, perhaps, with gay. And he followed his curlicue intellectual pursuit in his head the whole time and every time she'd been speaking, and though he'd kept the eye contact with her the entire time, he had no idea what she had said. A laughing old dictum of Woody Allen's had run through his head on the pragmatic advantages of--female, he supposed--bisexuality. If nothing else, Woody had said, it doubled one's chances for a date on a Saturday night.
That had been one of the things he'd been afraid of, he reflected as she prattled on, probably aware and unfazed he'd ceased to heed her. Saturday night, or any other night, she could press her voluptuous breasts against him and enjoy the straight sides of Luke's bi body, to the exclusion, if not the consternation of the gay sides of what she knew--and said she believed--was John's fag soul. For her, he couldn't be on the down low or in deep, deep denial, as she had proof in the form of John's personality her man had been with men, or at least, had been with one man, John as Matt's dad. She knew each time she held Luke's hand and each time John felt it in his palms as she clasped them, he'd not only strayed from her bed but strayed from her sex. He tried to read from her glances, words, and actions, if Luke had ever told her he'd been with men before, contrary to what Luke had told John and the other men they worked with whom Luke had confided in. He replayed his mental tapes of John as Matt's dad sleeping with Luke, not knowing he'd been Luke at the time, and had felt the actions and attitudes were those of the very eager newbie. But this body, now he inhabited it, clearly say the world as a bi boy saw it. Her hand as she clasped his clearly seemed to imply acceptance of this fact and of this past, and all he could do was read these facts and conjectures, concluding one never knew other people as well as one thought one knew other people, even when one had the miraculous means of being those other people for a while. He'd also come away with more respect for straight men, even men who apparently, occasionally, jumped the fence as Matt's dad and Teresa's boyfriend seemed sometimes to do. Two gay guys encounter one another and know they're like minded in their pursuits of mutually getting off. Once that happens, they think about being partners, fuckbuddies, or proverbial ships in the night or in the afternoon delights. But straight men were obliged to seek out, interact with, and woo, women as entirely different creatures, with their own un-likemindedness, their own codes, and their own unfathomable reasons for wanting to, or not wanting to, sleep with them. All John wanted to do was explore each new partner's embodiment of familiar territory--familiar right down to the curves, orifices, hairs and scents. Luke liked territories that resembled his own, as well as territories completely, unfathomably foreign, and run by a ruler, a queen, of an entirely different set of minds. Gay men slept with one another, while straight men worked perpetually in potentially enemy, perhaps alien territory. Bi men, he gasped at his own reflections, were the amphibians of these worlds, the immigrants as well as emigrants, those obliged and adaptable to be comfortable, at home and away.
Only, at home--their home, her home, he, John inside Luke, felt least like he was inside a home. He'd stayed with her and acted as though she were his beard, his fag hag, his straight sidekick, useful for being there when the other Luke, the real Luke, eventually wandered home in his oblivious haze and tried explain what she would already know from him, from John. He'd neglected home, he'd only come to work, he hadn't gone to SLAA, he'd not frequented the bars, as this body, hers, had suddenly held sway over apparently bi parts of himself. He'd rejiggered the mental conversations on whether sexuality resided in the body or the mind, if one was gay in one's head or in one's hard-on, whether bisexuality really was separate, sundered, or gradually shaded off of gay or off of straight.
And he'd had more to think about, more to worry about, than the average straight guy did in pondering such things, much less, than the average, if there could be an average, guy who'd been through the shapeshifting John had gone through. He could sleep with Teresa and wake up, he imagined, as Teresa. He could be Teresa as Tiresias. He could literalize some never-explained Virginia Woolf Orlando conceit. He could cross over as no one he'd heard of had ever crossed before, and he had to contemplate doing so as a gay guy, who, one would reason, would least want that crossing of any kind of guy there was. He had not, John had not, thought of his homosexuality as his femininity or his effeminacy. He had not thought of himself, as some gay guys do, as any more of a woman for his desire for men. He'd not been attracted to feminine men nor androgyny, but had been a man's man, attracted to other men's men--none of whom were lesser men for the fact of their attraction to men. And yet he was already thinking in terms of less and more, of gaining or losing some quantity or quality if he did cross over, and not just sleep with a woman as he'd been sleeping with men, but sleep as a woman, as he'd, as she'd, never slept, alone or with anyone, before. Those breasts, those curves, those wiles, that cunt, could be his/hers. He could be, she could be, Teresa as Tiresias, and though as a gay guy he had never wanted to be a woman, those breasts loomed large in his imagination. That cunt had its straight men's siren call. That woman had seemed to know sleeping with him would reset and transform her as well as him, make her herself and yet himself, a continuing body inhabited by another, hitherto male soul. That Teresa would be--already was, by the way she was acting, the new Jan Brady, the familiar self, unprecedentedly, socially triumphantly renewed. That home, Teresa's home, could be her place of deflowering, of seduction, of a kind that had never happened before.
"He hasn't been home," was the first thing Mark--holy shit, it's Mark, back from deutschland for the first time in a month!--said, breaking my reverie before I'd even noticed he'd come in.
He stood out for me as a proverbial sight for sore eyes--engaging blue eyes, understated smile, an expression I had just been beginning to forget the distinctiveness of. He stood above the cubicle where I sat, glancing down at whom he thought was Luke, and acting as though he'd hadn't been gone, in a foreign country, for weeks at a time. He even gleamed a bit of a smile, which struck me as unusual, given that he barely knew Luke, and had no inkling--I didn't think--that Luke was me.
I stood up before I could speak, leaned toward him, and angled in for the kiss we'd been customarily using to establish it was me, John, inside each new host. He watched me rise, guessed as I zeroed in what I was doing, let his expression go bug-eyed. Mine must have matched, as we're both, eyes wide open, moving in for the kiss and simultaneously amazed that it's what we're doing.
"So you're--" he begins to say, once again customarily, as he would declare it was me, John, only after the confirmatory kiss we hadn't yet managed, this time, to have. We fall back into a second of unspoken expression, eyeing one another and mentally working out the calculations: if I was John, inside Luke, he must have been thinking, I must have broken the taboo--again, he was thinking--against the semi-straight boss and slept with him. Or, relented, and let the semi- not-so-semi-straight boss sleep with me. If Mark was back, I, John, was meanwhile thinking, we could resume our weirdly populated but in-effect sexless partnership. Or, we could do what appeared to be the harder work of figuring why he'd stayed so long in deutschland. It could have to do, I further began to reflect, with what was keeping him there for so long. Or, it could have to do with what, or whom, here, had been keeping him away.
"You must be the flight attendant," Teresa, not yet Tiresias, said at this point in our mutually unspoken reveries. She'd moved up to standing with us, interrupting our already interrupted, incipient kisses, and beaming, with what seemed to me to be feminine wiles, at both of us. "I've heard," she said through what might be called a shit-eating grin, "so much about you."
Mark held out his hand mutely for her to shake it, his own face reflecting rapid recalculations. "And you must be" he said through a stamped-on smile, "Luke's . . . ."
"Girlfriend," she finished for him--which struck us both as curious. She hadn't said fiancée , as I'd feared she would. She hadn't corrected him to say she was now John's girlfriend. Which must mean she still felt herself connected to the body, but not the mind or the soul, I, John, currently inhabited.
Whatever Mark's mental calculations were, they drew his glance back to me, as his lip curled up slightly to match swift cogitations. I was evidently, it must have seemed to him, within Luke's body when Luke's body's admirer, Teresa, was with him, was with me. I must, then, this suggested to him, not be inside Teresa, not in a currently sexual way but in the sense that I was not yet inhabiting Teresa as I had been inhabiting the bodies of Trent, Luke and Simon. But then, the implication must have struck him, as I risked feigning omniscience in guessing, that I could be Teresa, soon, if I kept up what appeared to be the affection that at least she felt between us. Teresa took up Luke's hand and squeezed, as if to visualize Mark's thoughts for him--to which the lip curled all the more inconclusively.
"So," someone said to fill the pause. I guess it was me. "You spent an extra long time in Germany this time." Again, it was filler, meant to express longing for Mark and gladness at his return, but it took a left turn, without my bidding, at chiding him for remaining away for so long. We still hadn't kissed, and I guess my expression of having missed him, filled in for what I'd wished my lips would have been doing: kissing him deeply, as John, to assure him that, as Luke and Mark, we could resume our fuckbuddy couplehood, even after the long interval my question drew our attention to.
"It has indeed been a long time," Mark broke his own silence. "I've even been back in the country for a few days," occasioning an "oh!" from the still wily Teresa. "I went to and waited at--" and as always, the pronoun gave him pause--"your house."
"His house," Teresa jumped in-- "He's been with me, at my--" and two could evidently play at that game-- "my house with--" and she met my eyes, which she still saw as Luke's eyes in saying it, "My house--with Luke."
I drew in a breath, maintained the eye contact with Mark, maintained admiring the owner of those eyes, and said, "We're waiting for the oblivious Luke"--using the term we'd invoked for the former selves, wandering gradually back to their lives with no knowledge of my, our sexual switcheroo--"to wander back. We don't want to be away when he does."
He shut his eyes slightly, to think through what this information meant for him. "So, you were Simon--" be began, and waited patiently, as I caught him up, from black Tony to Matt's dad to Luke, as well as I could with the added listening audience of Teresa--whose turn it was for the eyes to widen. She hadn't heard the full story yet, and had assumed, it seemed, her Luke had given in to long-standing temptations and slept with me, John, and now and thereby, John as Luke. By the time I had caught him up, they were both openly staring at me.
"And while you're waiting for him," Mark took the tentative mental footsteps, "you two are--"
Teresa and I both swallowed in a momentary fading of her feminine wiles, as her eyes met mine. "Getting to know each other," she said suggestively, "coming to work together. Filling one another in on recent relationship history." This last implied more of an intimacy than Mark had been prepared for, and he seemed to be reassuring himself I was still myself, was still John even though I was in Luke, and was still gay, even though this Teresa was evidently playing a much bigger role in my life than he'd anticipated. All of the misadventures with Simon and his predecessors, I realized the same moment that he did, hadn't prepared him for my going straight.
I felt the urge to fill the pause in again with the reflective question, "and what have you been up to?," both at home and away. But the door was once again opening and the being striving in--angular, tall, blond and serious-chinned--threatened to answer my question. He cut a figure not far from Peter Berlin's. He answered for the territory where Mark had recently been on his flights and layovers. He was someone whom no one I knew would kick out of bed--myself, and even Teresa, included. He was wrapping his arms around Mark before I knew it, motioning toward pecking him on the cheek, asking him if he'd found John yet, prompting Mark to say, "Allow me to introduce--"
Hans, he'd said. I looked at Mark with Hans between us, as I'd once looked at Mark with Simon between us, but I sensed Mark wasn't sharing, this time. I thought about that three-way tryst and how Mark had brought it on, sharing a paramour with a fuckbuddy willingly. Now it seemed he was seeking out another man, of another nationality, to be apart from me altogether, and not to join with me as he had with me and with Simon. I wasn't who I had been then bodily, but it was the soul doing the looking, John's glancing out of Luke's eyes, and seeing Mark, still the same soul, return my glance--and then quickly, look at Hans. Hans's expression told me he was slowly taking this all in, leaving time for the translation, and guessing I was the man, or the men, from what he must have seen as Mark's fixed stare. Teresa tried, too, to make sense of all of this, but to no avail. "You're. . . Hans?"
Mark stutteringly explained hooking up with Hans on a layover in deutschland, eyes darting back to me to accentuate meanings he left unspoken to Teresa. His eyes asked me not to blame him. A glance down Luke's frame appealed to me to grant my shapeshifting in his favor, as though no one, not even the most faithful partner, would put up with this--this being, my being man after man after man. My neck pinioned as the forehead sank forward and down, nonverbally pleading, the shapeshifting wasn't my fault, and I was trying to shake it. But if I had now been two separate men since my closest fuckbuddy had last laid eyes on then-me, was I really shaking it? Was my sex-addiction, my shape-shifting as apparent side effect, getting even worse? I swallowed, still mute as these thoughts ran through my head. Had I gotten so bad in all of these revolving mes, I was pushing Mark away?
And, was I drawing Teresa nearer, upping the ante in some psycho melodrama? She forced a twitchy smile as her eyes darted back and forth between me and Hans, whom, evidently, she was also coming to admire. If Mark clung to the gay soul now in a straightish man's body, Teresa had invested in the body's enhancement by its itinerant gay resident. If I were straighter for being inside Luke, I was thereby less of my gay self--or was I?--and further from Mark, and Hans was thereby his understandable retreat. He was even my replacement, not in the sense that I'd take over his body post-coitally as I had been doing, but rather, that he'd replaced me, maybe already, in Mark's affections. Sleeping with Teresa would mean becoming female for a while, becoming straight, it seemed, forever after, and ending fuckbuddyhood with my best bud, whose replacement hailed from another land, but who would, unlike me, be it in America or in deutschland, always be himself. What would I always be, I asked myself, forever starting over, with, in, and as, some new man?
No new man, or new woman, had joined SLAA since Mark and John as an earlier host had last gone, and they we circled up with folks who remembered them--or who remembered, rather, the lovers they had previously been. They recognized Mark, though it had been a long time, and welcomed him heartily with steaming coffee in Styrofoam cups. They raised eyebrows, then pursed their lips as they nodded at John, newly inside Luke, not recognizing the host but hearing the timbre, even the whine, within of the man who'd been away for the span of many meetings, too. They greeted Hans, his hands in Mark's, with approval, as a new face and, hopefully, a sign of Mark breaking from sex-addiction. They returned blank expressions to Teresa, who didn't appear to know what group she was joining. Sipping her coffee, looking around the meeting room that doubled as the overbooked basement of a community hall-church, she very much looked, as it were, like she was along for the ride.
They'd recited twelve steps. They'd distributed medallions. They'd rolled their eyes in doubt, they'd cringed and nodded their sympathies. Cell phones kept going off in purses as embarrassed owners dived for them sheepishly, but evidently still didn't turn them off. In the stories they told over coffee, backs were patted, old lovers had returned out of nowhere, nymphomaniacs had bedded pool boys, secretaries had catered sexually to bosses, old saws had been confirmed, envelopes had been pushed. John inside Luke was starting to celebrate the fact that he hadn't been back to the group since Mark's departure to deutschland--then to feel guilty about the internal celebration. Mark watched Luke's eyes for the signs of John within, registered the cringes, and awaited the whom bomb. Teresa watched Luke, too, for signs of Luke, but had the sensation she was looking at her fiancé's face as a mask, a set of features not manifesting but concealing inner character--it really wasn't someone whom she knew inside there. It didn't appear, she began to admit to herself, as though the wearer of that mask was going to become that someone. Hans had to leave some American colloquialisms untranslated, as Mark wasn't having it, but he got enough of the gist to wonder, were all Americans like this?
When their turns had come around the circle of raconteurs, Mark had confessed he'd stayed away, not just from the group but from the country, not naming any names but looking at John and actually saying out loud, "it was a long layover, if you know what I mean." People knew, once he reminded them of his flight-attendant day job--night job--day and night job, and that was part of the problem, in fact. He'd been sure he'd run from the country, "run from someone here," rather, he made himself say, because that person changed, not too little, but too much. As others' ears perked up, John felt Luke's ears burn. But only a few were glancing at him, as the others watched Mark tell his story. Hans, Mark went on, meant stability, meant always being himself, and meant learning another culture, even as he had the same person to come home to. He'd been other than monogamous for lengthy spans, he said to verbalized sighs and cringes, John's as well as others'. He looked at Hans, took his hands, and wondered without saying so, how much of this tender confession was getting lost in translation.
Hans had haltingly taken up the confession, uncertain of the language and of the rituals enacted by the group. Once he was a boyfriend's and a boyfriend was his, he said, much to some of the homophobes' chagrin, they were partners exclusively, which gained more open, enthusiastic praise. They supported monogamy, if heterosexuality, and Hans seemed to be getting it right for at least one of those two. He hadn't admitted he'd had a problem, as all of his predecessors, including Mark, had, but supporters, exclusive partners, were welcome, too, and somewhere in guttural vowels, Teutonic dipthongs, things had gotten sehr gemutlich. They were warming collectively, even excepting John's resistance, to the newly welcomed Hans.
Teresa seemed surprised to speak, up, seemed to have to be goaded to put the coffee cup and cell phone down, though she'd clearly been listening, emoting along to what her fellow twelve-steppers had said. A nervous tick had her smoothing non-existent hair back from her forehead, rubbing a nose whose itch was borne of self-consciousness more than sniffles. She hadn't admitted to having a problem, either, and kept looking at John, at Luke hosting John, for prompts on how even to begin. Her man, she'd eventually said, not naming him, "had always been at least mentally bisexual." The homophobes who'd hissed at Hans paused thoughtfully in their incipient jeers. "But," she'd said, and they'd all waited through the most pregnant pause. Lately he'd changed, he'd not been himself, he'd been, she supposed, with the other man he'd long delayed sleeping with. She'd noticed Luke's, John's eyes on the ground, yet continued, "instead of feeling cheated on. Instead of feeling wronged," she'd waited, she said, for him to come to terms with his new self. The group, of course, felt she'd lost her chance to make him more loyal to her instead, that once he'd crossed that line--they said, not naming the line--he wouldn't go back, to straightness, or to her. She rallied, she begged to differ, she'd said something to the effect of variety being her fiancé's spice of life--but another woman, on the other side of the circle, in her first time speaking up, had asked her point blank if and how she could still call him her fiancé, after what he'd done, after whom he'd done it with.
Whom he had done it with, who he had done it as, whose name was John, felt the cruelty of the question. Teresa wasn't to blame for Luke's suppressed bisexuality, and bisexuality wasn't a thing even to blame anyone on or for. Teresa, likewise, had nothing to do with Luke's sleeping with John or John's sleeping with Luke, or with John's boss, or with Matt's dad. She'd just gotten herself, and her too-endowed-for-John breasts, into the middle of a gay- and bi-man's charade. She'd never protested, she'd even, once she understood the situation, taken it with glee, and she didn't now deserve the group's wrath or the woman's awful question. John inside Luke broke his own silence to try to say as much. He looked around to a room of tuned-out faces, people manifestly not understanding, until he saw Mark's expression and Hans' visible attempts to understand it. And again, though they were at a different configuration of the circle now, John had seen Teresa coming between them then, as he saw Hans coming between them now, and as he'd seen Simon coming between them long ago. His shapeshifting wasn't John's fault either, he didn't think, and yet it threatened to straighten him, first in the arms, then in the body of Teresa. It threatened to end his relationship with Mark. It pushed Mark into Hans' loving arms, and pushed John himself into Teresa's maternal ones. In Hans' arms, Mark would remain Mark. Too close to Teresa, John would become Teresa. Eventually, emptily, and zombie-like, the real, former, oblivious Luke, and even further down the line, the real, former, oblivious Teresa, would come along. Though he'd defended Teresa instead of confessing for himself, though he'd now fallen silent in the evening's second pregnant pause, they waited in silence as he'd teared up. He was crying publicly in front of semi-strangers. It wasn't a breakthrough. They still took it as one.
They still took it as--one: took the soul of John and Luke as his present host to be one person. Took the apparent, sobbing Luke and the befuddled Teresa to be one, intact couple. Took the foreigner but already familiar Hans and Mark the prodigal son to be one partnership, much, again, to some of the homophobes' chagrin. Took them all, as one, to be sincerely following the twelve steps toward chastity, toward escape from sex addiction, toward life-long and meaningful monogamy, toward a replacement, substitute caffeine addiction at the bottom of the Styrofoam cups, and toward sincerely meaning what a few of them were consciously, falsely making themselves say. They'd almost, John cynically observed through his sincere tears, achieved this absurd oneness for the night and for the session, when the night's final arrival opened the door and joined them, as another returner, it turned out, to this circle of addicts.
The returner looked himself. He looked well. He looked contrite for coming in late. He looked around to gauge the mood. He paused on John's, Luke's tears, but out of concern, not recognition. He'd looked right past, without even registering, Teresa, Hans, and Mark, whose look was reflecting his soul crying out. He was, John and Mark realized at the same time, not at all uncute. He was, of course, Simon, back from the chaste, if not back from the dead.
He took a chair and resumed his habitual expression, his wire-rims slipping down the bridge of his nose, his politeness manifest in conscientious concentration. He looked away, but looked back, at the two men openly staring at him, even as they exchanged glances with one another, then looked back at him. He forced himself to look away at the person in the circle actually talking, then glanced back to see--yes, both men were still staring at him.
It was for John inside Luke as though his bedroom mirror has found him again, that first morning he'd looked into it as Trent. He'd seen Simon, he'd fucked Simon, he'd been Simon, he'd shared Simon with Mark in what had begun as a menage a trois. Now the predictable, complete lack of recognition plainly shone in the man's face, as his expression darted back and forth, in and out of, "umm, why me?" appeals that he mutely made to the staring Mark and John. The face was, to John, uncanny in its recognition, yet not at all familiar, one's self and not one's self, a figure striking for its emptiness, its lack of accommodation. He was just Simon again, unaware and unconfirming that Simon had ever not been Simon, that Simon had ever been John.
John and Mark had both broken the circle to hover over Simon. The circle's speakers stammeringly continued. The coffee still swilled in Styrofoam. Simon still politely tried to ignore them. Mark proffered his hand, limply shook it in Simon's, tested the man's impassive expression for signs he knew him, even if he'd never known John. They'd quietly introduced, Mark had reminded, Hans had pulled Mark back. Simon had raised eyebrows with Hans in an effort to elicit sympathies beyond the too-persistent Mark. But Hans didn't speak eyebrow, evidently, densely returning another blank expression. Mark had thought Simon would remember him as constant Mark, but Simon seemed a complete blank to both of them. Simon sat there, proof at last in his unreadability, that John really had been shape-shifting, really did leave men they'd both been with, dull and oblivious in their wake. Simon was, and looked to have been, always Simon. Mark and John, and Mark looking at John, and Mark looking at Luke's mask covering John, saw themselves mutually forgotten by another, who had been mutually remembered and bonded by one another, and mutually, it seemed, misunderstood by Mark's Hans and John's Teresa--who wasn't even John's Teresa: she was Luke's fiancée.
Mark and John inside Luke sighed as one in a sudden silence. Teresa and Hans shared a look. The rest of the sharers wondered what this band of strangers wasn't sharing. Simon opened his mouth and spoke to the group at large of disorientation, of wandering lost and not knowing where he'd been. Mark and John reflected that at least he hadn't said he hadn't known who he'd been. John wondered, in spite of himself, if that should have been a whom. It was too depressing to correct himself, too pessimistic to feel he'd gone from shape-shifting man to man, to losing each successive self, to seeing a complete lack of any former self, a total lack of self-recognition, written plainly on Simon's face. Mark, John, and Hans had gotten up to leave without consulting one another. Turned toward the door, John inside Luke looked back at Teresa, who remained seated, as if she were somehow, now, more a part of the circle instead. She seemed to understand she could not go with them as a threesome, couldn't be part of what looked like it might be another menage a trois. She would never be his new Jan Brady. She knew a woman was the last thing John wanted to be after seeing Simon, not seeing, not knowing him in turn. She sighed and let them leave. Even on the show, after all, she'd really always been the same old Jan.