Soft Hurts More Than Hard
Without electricity: I burn without heat. My heart is heavy with sighs, The kind lovers can heave Gazing into each other's eyes.
Keith's shoes were entirely wet.
The rain was hitting the earth in sharp spikes. It pounded on the winter windows that were protecting them as Keith shook water off his coat onto the floorboards on the back porch.
"You are soaked." Eric pushed him into the kitchen and brought him the long terry robe hanging in the shower across from the kitchen. Keith stood immobilized. Eric laid the robe on a chair and took off Keith's coat and untied his shoes.
"Get out of that wet stuff and put this on."
Keith was soaked through. He stood without moving. Eric started to undress him further.
"Leave me alone. I'll do it myself. Stop pulling at me," Keith complained pushing him away, wriggling out of his embrace.
"You'll catch your death."
"I don't care."
Eric stretched, nevertheless, his left arm, and turned on the oven.
Keith yielded and began to take off his wet things, dropping them in a heap on the kitchen floor. He stood naked and Eric gave him the robe, which he pulled close once his sleeves were in.
"Come, stand by the stove."
The heat from the burning gas rose and penetrated his flesh as he held his robe open to the oven.
Keith belted the robe and Eric guided him to sit at the oak planks table that Eric had made a dozen years ago when he was eighteen and staying at the house alone that summer before his parents were killed that fall in the plane crash. He had not known what to do with himself, going stir crazy in the country – so he baked bread and he built the table. He spent the summer inside himself, innocent of any inkling that circumstances would be so altered not a half a year later.
Eric poured tea into two big mugs.
"Some rum in it?"
Keith nodded and Eric poured a nice shot into the cup. Keith shuddered as he drank the stuff and it fired up inside him.
He did not stay long at the table. Eric showed him to a room and said, presenting it, "It's yours."
The sun rose. It was a strong and cold winter sun, dazzling the landscape without giving any warmth. Keith sat up in his attic bed and from where he sat he could see out the dormer window the long fields of rolling rills all the way to the distant mountains. He looked into the distance. He closed his eyes tight. They had begun to burn and sting. He would not have known how to release the tears. He pressed his hand to his chest and sat up. The house was cold. The shower water was also cold. It braced him. He was hungry. Being hungry gave him strength. For breakfast he took only coffee and a multivitamin. He felt like a prowling tiger, and looked, regally, like one, too, his outer magnificence never compromised by his inner turbulence.
Eric looked up from the book he was reading. He looked at Keith, without speaking, but with inviting friendliness.
"You are waiting for me to explain," Keith said defiantly, catching his glance and construing it, misconstruing it.
"I am not waiting for anything," Eric said. It was true.
"You are so noble." Keith fired at him.
"No", Eric said.
"What are you, then?"
"I am satisfied," Eric said, and shrugged.
"Lucky you."
"What's the matter?"
"You have to let me stay here."
"If you need to. I already said so,"
"What determines need?"
"If you say you need, you need."
Keith said nothing, pulled his lips back from his jaw. Stiffening them, he sucked in a breath.
"I need," he said releasing the word as a shadow-demand flickering on the breath.
By evening the sky had grown thick with snow clouds. A little before midnight, snow began falling, thickly and quickly. It continued throughout the next day.
Eric had been unavailable most of the time, locked in his study, holed up by his computer. Keith slept, on and off, whenever waves of sleepiness flooded through him, which they did, regularly. It was beyond him to do anything but collapse, sometimes at the kitchen table as he tried to read, sometimes in his bed.
It went on that way for months. Keith stayed through the winter and started to breathe comfortably as the spring began to pull at all of life and bring it into the open. During those indoor months before spring's reawakening, Eric hardly acknowledged his presence, and Keith kept to himself in return. This did not mean, though, that they did not give respect to each other's presence, prepare food in common, decide on chores, or work together when both were needed for something that had to be done.
The days brightened. Eric emerged from his office with a kick in his step as he crossed his land and took in the spring's new-minted air. Keith felt like clawing at something. He took long walks over dirt that would be dust by midsummer. Now everything was green and cool. He bit his lips and imagined the city, bar fights and women in tight red skirts. In his mind he watched as strangers felt their thighs.
Keith was offended when Eric told him Adrian was arriving from Arizona at the end of the week and would be living at the house, too.
"You can't stay here all summer," Adrian said, only three days after he arrived.
"Why not?" Eric said.
"Because I won't let you," Adrian said laughing.
He did not, and a week later – "But it's golden here in August," Eric protested, in farewell, as Adrian hustled him aboard -- the two took the train to Manhattan, where Adrian's aunt left him the use of her apartment, looking east over Central Park, at least until the new year.
Keith was hurt and resented not being invited, too.
"You can stay here," Eric assured him.
"Thanks," Keith said, biting back bitterness.
But August was golden. What Eric had said was true. The air itself was polished by a touch of golden light when it was suffused with the gleam of the mid-afternoon sun.
Keith slipped into a routine that was not altogether unpleasant, walking through the rolling meadows and dense-grown woods in the morning and lying lakeside in the sun and swimming in the afternoon. Evenings he wrote and caressed himself. "Our genitals are suffused with grief," he scrawled in blue characters on a large canvas. Over that airy text he constructed a diaphanous sketch -- with lime, and orange, and yellow shadowings -- of a man with rimless round eyeglasses sitting at a desk and looking into the distance.
He became a recurring figure in a series of Keith's paintings. Painting him in woodland settings as well as in the library, the kitchen, and the bedroom, riding a horse, fondling himself, or reading a book, absorbed Keith and brought his balance back to him. He phoned the gallery that showed his work and promised to bring them the new canvases.
"Come now," Marc said on the other end. "I want to see them. I can present them in early December."
Keith was non-committal.
"I want to see you. I can give you a place to stay for as long as you like."
Eric was happy that Keith was working. He sounded sane when he called to say he was coming into the city and that the house would be empty. Eric told him it was not a problem, to give the keys to Margery and to call him when he got into the city.
"Do you want to replace the idea that you have of yourself with the idea that I have of you?" The beautiful stranger smiled and winked.
"That is one of the worst, if not the worst pick-up line I have ever heard," Eric said, grinning.
"But it worked."
Eric looked him up and down. "Maybe so," he said.
"Do you live with anyone?"
"I'm staying at a friend's."
"How friendly?"
"I'm close with all my friends."
The stranger looked at him.
"That's part of it," Eric said.
"Larry," said the stranger, offering his hand.
"Eric," Eric said taking his hand and grinning.
"Someone has been enjoying himself," Adrian crooned through a smirk when Eric walked into the kitchen and slumped down on a chair by the oak worktable two days later.
I am blissfully exhausted.
"How are you surviving? Still living on the inheritance?
"You are changing the subject, but, yes, I am. I have a book coming out, a selection of my columns and a new essay. I could not do it if I had to keep a regular job or if that was all I had to live on."
Eric and Keith met at a café on the west side, in the upper sixties, near Central Park.
"I was difficult," Keith said.
"You were," Eric answered, but without reproach.
"And you were impervious," Keith said.
"I've learned how to protect myself."
"That's quite an admission coming from you," Keith said.
Eric nodded, but withheld comment.
It made Keith uneasy.
"Why are you going over this?" finally, Eric asked.
"I don't know," Keith said, grabbing his hair with his clenched hand.
"Is so much torment useful to you?" Eric asked.
"After all," Keith hissed, "you understand nothing."
"I was at the gallery, yesterday," Eric said, hopping over Keith's words. "I think your paintings are terrific."
Keith shook his head. "I don't know what I ever saw in you," he said with a grin and a sigh.
Eric smiled. "It's finished," he said, comfortingly, like a doctor assuring him that the fever has broken and the crisis is passed.
They walked a short way together when they left the shop and parted at the corner of Lexington Avenue, without touching, only with shrugs and mumbled words of farewell.
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