Chapter One - Paul #2
I’m safe in my spot and there’s just enough room between the shrub and fence for me to sit cross-legged.
Sometimes the smoke from his cigarettes wafts over this way, depending on the breeze and how long he sits.
I like to watch his hand travel to his mouth, his lips pucker around the filter, and the occasional glisten of moisture on his bottom lip from the beer.
I imagine the tip of my tongue licking it up.
I imagine those eyes staring into mine as he returns the favor.
I feel an erection beginning and try to think of something else, so I don’t have to run inside hunched over like some virgin; even though I am, but I can pretend. I’m good at distorting reality.
Blue must work somewhere dirty. I see it, faint, around his fingernails.
Motor oil? Dirt? Grease? I picture him in coveralls, covered in black oil, pushing out from underneath a Cadillac.
I imagine him telling the square businessman just how much it’s going to cost him to fix that leak.
And the square complains, his suit and tie too straight, and Blue is just too cool to give a damn.
He’d be like the shady innkeeper in Les Mis, Thènardier, just can’t be bothered, lighting up a Lucky, and blowing smoke in the old fella’s face.
But I don’t want him to be Thènardier, so I go back to Marius and Cosette, the young lovers, and wish it was the other way around. Or worse: I’m éponine, who loved and never had it returned, and I’ll die with his name on my lips.
Blue…
At six-oh-four, two beers and nine cigarettes later, he goes inside.
I’m left to wonder what happens then. I guess that he’s in the shower, washing away the day.
The parts of him I don’t see, just under those clothes, I have to create in my mind.
I imagine his chest hair is a shade darker than the hair on his head.
I imagine there’s a trail of it from his navel to his cock, and it’s huge and it just has to be.
It’s got to be. Maybe he touches it and it hardens, flushing red, and stands upright against his belly.
Maybe he jerks himself off in the shower and comes on the tile so it just washes away and there’s no evidence.
No one would know. He gets out with a towel around his waist and I bet he smells like Ivory and spice.
He’s gasoline in the summer heat, bed sheets damp, and eyelids fluttering through his dreams.
“Paul!”
I’m pulled from my otherworldly musings by Aunt Amy’s shrill. My dick deflates, and I stand up from behind the shrub. She’s in the patio doorway wearing the apron my mother made for her, the smell of marinade floating out from the kitchen behind her.
“What are you doing?” she asks.
“I thought I saw a bird’s nest.” I stick my hands in my pockets and make fists. I walk inside the house, right past her, to join her for dinner.
It isn’t so bad this evening.
The steak is tender, the potatoes crisp, and the cake tempting from the stand on the counter.
I can tell Aunt Amy is used to eating alone, because it’s like she has to remember I’m there.
To ask me things. I’d rather she didn’t ask me things, but I feel as if I have to go along with it. She didn’t have to take me in.
In between bites of steak and the cry of kids’ laughter a few doors down, she glances at me, and I pretend not to notice. It’s clear she’s got something on her mind.
Last time I came to stay with her was when I was thirteen and my mother couldn’t get out of bed.
No one would tell me why, but the glimpse I caught of her one morning as Pops helped her to the bathroom told me everything I needed to know.
She was far too skinny, her knees knobby, and her skin yellowish.
I figured they’d sent me to Aunt Amy’s so my mother could die in secret; they didn’t want me to see it.
But two months later, the day before I started eighth grade, I went home and there was a doctor at her bedside.
She was still too skinny, but her skin looked normal, rosy.
She’d reached out her arms and embraced me for the first time in months.
I didn’t like how I could feel her shoulder blades, her ribs.
Pops came in, told me to get up to my room, and shut the door behind me.
She was okay for a while after that. Gained some weight, and went to the beauty parlor.
Then one day after school when I was a sophomore, I went into my bedroom to find my shirts hanging in the closet and ironed, rather than folded neatly on my bed to put away myself.
I met our new housekeeper, Lola, and she made us a roast while my mother sat at the kitchen counter in her robe, sipping tea. Her smile was tired, her eyes sagging.
My mother would get better, then she would get worse, then better. On and on, a carnival ride with twists and turns, and I got so tired of it. I wanted something to stay the same. I wanted it all to just be over.
And then one day I got my wish.
“Your father called,” Aunt Amy says. She puts her fork down and dabs at her mouth with an embroidered napkin.
I take a long pull from the glass of milk Aunt Amy makes sure is there breakfast, lunch, and dinner like I’m twelve.
“I think you should talk to him,” she says, giving me a sidelong glance. “He just didn’t seem like himself.”
“Good,” I mutter, rolling a potato around on my plate with the fork. Like I’m twelve.
“It’ll be good for you two to talk.” She takes another bite and drinks her wine. “Just talk, Paulie. That’s all you have to do.”
I stare at her. She looks like my dad, but not in a good way.
She’s a mannish kind of woman, and my grandmother used to tell her so every day of her life.
She has my dad’s thick jawline and brow.
She tries to disguise both with makeup and distract with false lashes, and the reddest of red lips.
She curls her hair in a way that softens her features, but she’s still broad and tall.
If I think about it for a while, I feel sorry for her, being left behind like this.
No man to love or cherish her. Sometimes I think of her like Fantine.
In Les Mis , Fantine was left all alone and sent her daughter, Cosette, to be cared for by the Thènardiers.
She sold her hair, sold her teeth, and became a prostitute.
I wince at the thought of that happening to Aunt Amy.
She’s still my father’s sister, though; she has his pushiness and his attitude when I don’t eat everything on my plate. It’s like she’s forgotten I’m nineteen and not twelve .
“Maybe…around nine o’clock?” She tilts her head at me. “You can use the phone in the parlor. For privacy.”
I don’t know why she calls it a parlor. Her house isn’t big enough for something so fancy. I look down at my half-empty plate, suddenly full. “Not tonight.”
“Tomorrow.”
“No.”
“Paul.”
She reaches across the table for my hands, so I put them in my lap. She clears her throat and withdraws her hand. She dabs at her lips again with the napkin, leaving red marks.
“You know, Paul,” she takes her plate, goes over to the sink, “the only way someone can apologize to you is if you let them.”
I look out the sliding glass doors at the dusk.
There’s a light on in Blue’s window. The kind of brash white light they put in apartment kitchens, a string you pull over the sink.
I think he eats his supper at the same time we do.
I expect it’s something manly, like roast beef or ham.
More beer and cigarettes. Maybe he listens to the radio or the television.
I imagine him at a tiny kitchen table, off-white with cigarette burns, a metal mismatching chair, waiting to hear the score from the game. Any game.
I decide I should see if Aunt Amy has any encyclopedias on her bookshelf so I can learn about baseball or something with a ball. The one time I had to in school, I broke my glasses sliding into second base. No one cared, and I couldn’t see the rest of the day.
“I think I’m going to go read,” I say, standing up from the table.
“You don’t want cake?” Aunt Amy says, scraping leftovers in the sink.
“Maybe later.”
I’m at the kitchen door when she stops me.
I turn and she puts her hands on my shoulders, her big man-hands, and I’m surprised to feel tears sting my eyes.
I wait for her to say it, because I know she wants to say it: He didn’t mean it, Paul.
He’s so sorry, Paul. Just forgive him. He swears he’ll never do it again.
For once, I just want someone to be on my side. My defender.
She looks at me for a long while, then lets me go. She turns back to the sink. “Enjoy your reading then.”
I take off like a bullet to my room, her guest room, and flop down on the quilt. I take off my glasses and bury my wet face in the pillow until it’s too dark to see anything.
It’s nearly six and Blue’s had about three cigarettes and it’s just the one beer.
I twist blades of grass together between my thumb and forefinger as I gaze up at him.
He could be a king surveying his lands. The King.
Elvis, gyrating his hips and caressing and crooning into a microphone.
And I don’t know why Elvis is a king anyway.
I think they just call him that because of his last picture, which I never saw and I don’t plan to.
He’s never really caught my attention anyway.
Not like Blue. Not like the way Blue smokes his cigarette, holding it between his thumb and pointer finger as he takes a drag and exhales through his nose. It reminds me of a Rudolph Valentino movie I saw once. And then again. And another time. And then another.
I found my mother’s Valentino collection when I was a freshman.
She was at the hospital again, no one was home, and I had nothing better to do.
I don’t know what it was. His eyes, maybe, like he could see all my secrets and know me through and through, all memorialized in sepia.
It was unnerving in a way I hadn’t experienced before.
Then the community theater showed all his old films one summer.
I watched A Sainted Devil and couldn’t catch my breath.
I went home in flames. All the way home and into my bedroom, where I locked the door, and touched myself, not for the first time, but it was perhaps the most desperate time, heated and panting, until I came all over my pants and my hand.
And looking at it, thick and milky-white on my skin and clothes, I suppose that just cemented it in fact, made it real: I’m different, a strange one, and I can’t ever tell a soul.
I hear a noise and glance up to see Blue lighting another cigarette. This is the fourth one. That’s a little unusual. I tuck my thumb over my palm and hold out four fingers so I can remember to keep count.
The thing is, I got obsessed with men who I thought might be like me, mostly fictional.
I think Javert was like me. What was it with his obsession with Valjean?
It couldn’t simply have been that Valjean was a criminal or that he changed his identity.
It was more, I think. It’s easy to hate someone you’re not supposed to love, and let their mercy kill you at last.
So, I have to wonder which one Blue is and which one I am. Right now, I’m a bit like Javert, I think. Obsessive and watchful.
I glance up at him again and this time he’s not where I’m expecting him. He’s moved. He’s standing now at the corner of the balcony. He leans over the black metal railing, cigarette at the corner of his lips.
And looking right at me.
Right. At. Me.
I dive under the shrub.
“Hey,” he calls.
I hug my knees to my chest, try to curl into a ball, but I’m too tall and my feet stick out.
“Hey, kid. I can see you.” His voice is smooth, even. “Come on out.”
My face burns. It burns for being caught, for being called “kid,” and for hearing his voice for the very first time.
“Hey,” he calls again.
I peek out from under the shrub and he’s staring down at me, his eyes sharp and his expression unreadable.
“Come here,” he says.
I swallow. “Huh?” My voice cracks.
“2B.” He nods to the front of the building.
My heart races like a prized horse at the derby. Half of me wants to pretend I didn’t hear him, and the other half is ready to scramble over the fence like a spider and sprint to his door. I hesitate.
“Just come on.”
“I’m - I’m sorry. I’m really sorry,” I say, shaking my head.
He rolls his eyes, puts out his cigarette. “I’ll meet you at the door.” Then he goes inside and the sliding door clicks.
It echoes in my ears for a handful of seconds. And then I get up, brush grass off my pants, and leave my discovered spot. I find the gate, open it, close it, and make my way across the alley, right to Blue’s front door.