Continued, Take Me with You
Their eyes met in the mirror as they stood at their new bathroom sinks.
This happened often when they were young, when there was only one sink to huddle over, and they would break into the kind of stupid grins you could have for a person before you were intimately acquainted, before you shared a mortgage account and multivitamins for men over fifty, a login for a finance tracking app for couples called Honeydue, and a crush on the same local waiter.
Now, thirty years on, Norman was openly scraping his tongue with some kind of repellent tool their new dentist had given him.
“What?” Norman asked, and Jesse, towering over his husband, quickly replied it was nothing, even though every muscle in his face said that it was very much something.
To cover, Jesse scrambled for something to say that was not on the topic of oral hygiene.
“The nighthawks haven’t been around in a while.
” The nighthawks used to come in pairs to hunt insects that had been drawn by the landscaping lights.
You could set your clock by their arrival, promptly at eight forty-five.
“Sorry. That sounded like the opening line to a play. You know, by Tennessee Williams or William Inge.” Jesse could picture it so clearly.
A woman steps out onto her veranda at sunset and says, The nighthawks haven’t been around in a while.
And then she looks mournfully over the prairie, which of course is a set.
One of those homesteader windmills, perhaps, and papier-maché corn, a scrim lit to make the sky look just so.
Norman, however, was confused. “William Inge?”
Jesse grabbed two Advil from a large bottle. “Don’t even.”
Norman shrugged, perhaps assuming it was just one of those things Jesse was reading as he was preparing for his return to teaching. “Mating season is over,” he said of the nighthawks.
Jesse laughed and pointed at his husband’s dental tool. “You said a mouthful there.”
Norman rinsed the tongue scraper under the faucet and traded it for his toothbrush. “It’s supposed to improve my taste.”
“Well, I think you have excellent taste,” Jesse said, leaning over to give his husband a peck on the cheek. “But we should rethink these mirrors.”
A flickering of the bathroom lights, then a jolt.
Jesse grabbed the double vanity to steady himself.
Norman, toothbrush in one hand, phone in the other, glanced up at his husband.
Earthquakes were a way of life in the California desert; usually they were more often the rolling variety, not the kind that gave you a lurch.
“You okay?” Norman asked, and Jesse swayed his hips like he was standing on a surfboard.
Norman flipped the light switch off and on again, and the flickering stopped.
He mumbled something about calling their electrician.
The wiring was new; they had only recently completed a total renovation.
“They don’t make things like they used to,” he griped.
Jesse didn’t make much of it. “Our wiring is old, and we still flicker.”
“We bicker,” Norman corrected. “I don’t know about flicker.”
Their Joshua Tree home, built in 1974 by two renowned architects, a husband and wife whose names Norman knew but Jesse could never remember, had been redesigned by Norman before they moved in.
The real estate agent who sold them the house heralded the property as the perfect marriage of high design and ecotopian living; Jesse and Norman chuckled at the time, convinced that that perfectly described them as a couple even if, with a gun to their heads, neither could tell you what ecotopian meant.
The house was cutting-edge when it was built, then dated, now somehow modern again with Norman’s expansions and upgrades, as if the future that was being written had somewhere, somehow taken a turn.
Jesse stood upright and stared at his reflection over the sink. “Yeah, I definitely hate these mirrors.”
“No you don’t.”
“Yes, I do. We need different ones. These look too much like church windows.” Indeed, the mirrors were tall and arched at the top; there were two of them, one over each sink.
They had settled on them as a compromise pick—Jesse was six five and wanted to see his reflection without bending.
But maybe crouching was good for him, it could keep aging joints limber.
He squatted to see if they might make do with another choice, something more classically shaped.
His knees responded with a horrid crunch, like someone crumpling a plastic water bottle for recycling.
Norman just shook his head and went back to his phone.
“Toothpaste,” Jesse said, and without glancing up Norman handed the tube over, like they were surgeons passing a scalpel, unable to tear their eyes from a patient’s open viscera; Jesse’s Sonicare toothbrush, which needed replacing, was loud like a bone saw.
Forty-five seconds in, it died. “Gweat,” Jesse managed, opening a drawer to look for a free toothbrush from the dentist before remembering that he could still use the Sonicare manually.
He did so slowly at first, like it might bite, then elbowed Norman to see what held his attention.
He seemed to be growing increasingly agitated.
Norman held up his phone. “Look at this email.”
Jesse squinted. It seemed like run-of-the-mill spam. “I don’t see anything.”
Norman sighed. “Look again.” The email was from Bonk of America.
Jesse spit in the sink, then reached for the readers Norman was wearing, carefully slipping them off of his husband’s ears; he then held them up to the phone like opera glasses. “Does that say bonk?”
“BONK.” Norman reclaimed his glasses. “Obviously it’s a scam.
But my father wouldn’t know that. He’d be replying with his login information.
” He continued his rant about how the world was becoming both less just and more stupid and how there had to be a better way.
Jesse agreed, having recently himself yelled at his own mother for sharing a photo on Facebook of a glowing couple celebrating their seventieth wedding anniversary because it was clearly AI.
“How do you know it’s AI?” she had asked, as if he was the one who was artificial.
“Because the woman has fourteen fingers!”
But Jesse knew Norman well enough to know he wasn’t so much concerned about his elderly father as he was about himself turning sixty, a milestone that gay men who came of age in the eighties and nineties never thought they would see.
He feared that the day when he’d feel out of step with the world was not all that far off.
But the truth was Norman had never been more attractive or sharp, his hair now more salt than pepper, his eyes the same warm saddle brown, and he had recently opened his own architectural firm.
The house they were living in was their dream, remodeled with Norman’s design.
Or rather, it became their dream after other dreams had fallen apart.
Jesse tried to lighten the mood as he dabbed a cream called AGE DEFENDER, all caps, under his eyes. “Hey. A man walks into a bar.”
Norman reached for the floss. “A joke? Really?”
“Gross,” Jesse said when a small piece of their dinner was launched onto the mirror by Norman’s aggressive flossing. “Now we have to get new mirrors.”
“A man walks into a bar…” Norman prompted.
“Oh yeah. A man walks into a bar,” Jesse repeated. “BONK.”
The lights flickered again. At least they seemed to appreciate the punch line.
“Remind me before bed to check the generator,” Norman instructed, unmoved. “If the power goes out in the night, I want to be prepared.” Neither of them could sleep without the symphony of air-conditioning, their white noise machine, and a fan.
“Check the generator,” Jesse said unhelpfully, screwing the lid on the jar of his eye serum.
Their eyes met again in the mirror. This time Norman glared.
“What is it you think we’re doing? I’m literally going to bed right now.”
They had both been drawn to the desert, but Norman’s attraction had bordered on obsession.
The desert was wilderness stripped bare, he would say, no pretension, no airs.
Fresh water was scarce, yes, but it didn’t keep life from thriving.
Jesse preferred civilization. The desert, yes, but Palm Springs.
“Embalm Springs?” Norman protested at the time, referring to its population of retirees. “We’re too young to be old.”
“We’re too old to be young,” Jesse had countered, but he gave in to Norman’s prodding, and the generator, which Jesse had insisted upon, eased some of his concerns.
And Joshua Tree was pretty cool. The first civilizations sprang from the desert sand, after all, and moving there felt like a return to basics despite the freeways and outlet malls and casinos and cell towers that blighted the once pristine landscape.
But when it came right down to it, it was the stars, and indeed this far out from the most densely populated parts of the Coachella Valley you were rewarded with a breathtaking display of them smattered across the sky almost nightly.
Amateur photographers from around the world drove deep into the neighboring national park to photograph the Milky Way, away from all light pollution.
And despite development and sprawl, most of the desert remained intact.
Perhaps that was what their agent meant by ecotopian.
“Come with me,” Norman insisted.
“To check on the generator? What are we, conjoined twins?”
“It’s dark. I need someone to hold the flashlight.”
Jesse didn’t want to. There were too many spiders out there.
“C’mon. It will be an adventure.”
Jesse shook his head. “Oh, no. I’m not falling for that again,” he laughed. “But hey, I want you to know something. I love you. I love you very much.” To show he was being sincere, he enveloped Norman in an enormous bear hug until Norman relented and went limp. “Even if mating season is over.”