Flesh and Blood

  Billy nodded. He knew the man was ridiculous, and possibly even dangerous, but he didn't want him to leave quite yet. The man was watching him with such naked reverence.

  “I like orange,” Billy said, sipping his coffee.

  “Right, youth,” the man said. “Burn it up, it'll last forever. I don't blame you, I was like that, too. My name's Cody.”

  “Do you always just start talking to strangers like this?”

  “Not all of them. I see something I recognize in you, just like I can see the light you're putting out. Orange, but with an outer layer of the most beautiful pure blue. Think of the color of the flame on a gas stove.”

  “I'm Will,” Billy said defiantly, and he felt, immediately, that he was giving a false name. When he caught up with the name a flood of possibility opened in his blood.

  “Lovely,” Cody said. “Charmed, I'm sure.”

  Cody shook his hand in the new way, palm first, so that his hand and Billy's joined like a boxer's gesture of triumph. Cody's hand was large and dry and uncallused.

  “Do you—are you from around here?” Billy asked.

  “I'm from Mars, child,” Cody said. His eyes were shot through with green. He had an angular woody handsomeness that flicked fitfully across a ravaged, homely face. He might have been as old as forty. “You're a student? Hah-vahd?”

  Billy nodded. He'd learned to feel pride and embarrassment over his privileges. In any conversation he sought to make it known that he did not come from a grand or protected place, but whenever he said that he felt as if he had lied. Hadn't he known money and love? Weren't his troubles, in fact, the complaints of the privileged?

  “Hah-vahd,” Cody said again, pleased and disdainful. “The new crop of saviors. What are you reading there?”

  Billy held up his copy of Absalom, Absalom! Cody nodded.

  “The grand old man himself,” he said. “Tell me, Will, what do you love in this world?”

  “What?”

  “What do you love?”

  Billy smiled nervously, and felt that he himself was at once desirable and slightly absurd. He wanted this man's continued attentions, not because he enjoyed them but because, if they were withdrawn—if Cody suddenly dismissed him as a dull Harvard boy—his own uncertain promise might start to wither inside him. Dullness might become a fact about him.

  “Well, I love Faulkner,” he said, and his ears burned at the well-behaved insufficiency of the answer. The more he needed to fascinate this Cody, the more he found himself hating him.

  “Not a book,” Cody said. “Not somebody dead. What do you love in the world, I mean the living, breathing organism?”

  “I love coffee,” Billy said thoughtlessly. “I love a good sale at Kmart. Now I'm afraid I've got to go.”

  Cody put his hand on Billy's forearm. His fingernails were a turgid, living pink, cut short.

  “Don't go yet,” he said. “Just walk with me for a minute first. I've got a feeling about you. I need to find out if I'm right”

  Billy spoke to Cody's hand. “You really are pushing it,” he said.

  “Just walk with me a few blocks. Things are happening, Will. Things are clicking and turning and opening and closing all around us. Do you know what I mean?”

  “No.”

  “Yes you do. Come on.”

  He hesitated. Then he decided he could do this as Will, a brave, reckless figure who did not quite exist. With mingled sensations of abandon and dread, Billy paid for his coffee and walked away with Cody. The streetlights had switched themselves on, pale lemon against the pale evening sky.

  “You don't really love sales at Kmart,” Cody said. “You were just being clever.”

  “Well, it was a pretentious question.”

  “Clever clever clever. You've got to be careful or that fancy school you go to will get you so clever and wised up and cynical that you'll think you can see through everything. You don't want to be that old.”

  Cody, as he walked, put out a faint scent of wood shavings. He was a compact man who moved through his own nimbus of odors and small metallic sounds: keys in his pockets, bracelets on his wrists. Billy was nervous and faintly humiliated. He felt a swelling at his crotch. He had always known what he wanted but he couldn't imagine turning his desires into flesh and so he'd lived like an aesthete, a young disciple. He'd been a friend and a scholar and a demure object of questioning glances, thin and talkative, elusively romantic, no one's. All his congress had been with himself, a hurried business. He'd been careful about his dreams.

  “I do want to be old,” he said. “And I don't see what's wrong with being clever.”

  “Poison,” Cody said. “Wit and cleverness, worse for you than thirty cups of coffee. Talk about surrounding yourself with static electricity. But listen here, Will. Do you think you could love me?”

  “What?”

  “I think I could love you. For an hour. Maybe longer. There's no point in speaking in code. I see a purity in you I'd love to touch.”

  “What?” Billy laughed. His laugh had a swaying, arid squeak.

  “Don't act shocked. No is no, no is your business, but don't act like I'm asking a question you never thought of.”

  “Well.” The laugh again, though he hadn't meant to laugh. “I just—”

  He stopped walking. He and Cody stood in the middle of the block, with people passing around them. Ahead and to the right was a doughnut shop, part of a chain that had an outlet in Billy's hometown. He looked at the shop's bright sign, the rows of ordinary, lurid confections displayed on metal trays. He thought of his room, the books on his shelf.

  “I'm staying right down the street,” Cody said. “Why don't you come up and smoke a joint with me?”

  He looked at Cody's burnished, harmed face, and realized the question could answer itself. He didn't have to work at this; he didn't have to seek or decide. All he had to do was not say no.

  “Where are you staying?” he said.

  “This way,” Cody said. “Follow me.”

  He went with Cody down Brattle, past the usual stores. Cody talked and Will answered but the conversation didn't settle in him. He thought about danger and permission, the swelling in his crotch. He thought about changing his mind. Charlotte would praise his good sense, Inez would tease him for cowardice. The world shimmered around him, its streetlights and the colors of traffic. Inez preached a life of risks. Charlotte advocated wisdom, the careful weighing of losses and rewards. He couldn't tell what he, Billy, believed. A dog barked. He didn't know what he would do in a situation like this, so he let Cody lead him down Story Street and up the brick walk of an oatmeal-colored apartment building.

  Billy knew the building—he knew all the buildings in Harvard Square—and as Cody opened the lobby door with a key Billy felt a spasm of irritation. Cody was casting his strangeness onto the limitlessness of his streets. Now, forever, this building would emanate.

  “A friend's place,” Cody said. “She's off on a mission, I'm here to keep the demons out.”

  Billy laughed again, the high-pitched panicked sound. It wasn't the way he wanted to laugh. He wanted to be cool. He wanted to be brave and desired, free.

  “Don't think there aren't demons,” Cody said. “Demons and angels, wrestling over our souls. The world is a more important place than the corporations want you to believe. Let people get too serious, let them start thinking too much about good and evil, and they lose their urge to be customers. Pow. The whole idea of shopping goes right out the window.”

  “Well,” Billy said. He followed Cody up two flights of stairs, down a hallway featureless as a dream, and through a heavy brown door.

  The apartment was covered in tapestries, aswarm with flowers and paisleys and the stolid, walleyed profiles of elephants. The tapestries hung taut on the walls and in fat billows from the ceilings. Wan evening light seeped in through the windows and was absorbed by the layers of fabric, so that the room appeared murky and deep, a grotto. It smelled faintly of frankincense. Cody
lit a candle, and another, and a third.

  “A lot of bedspreads,” Billy said. “This is someone who believes in bedspreads.”

  “Sit down,” Cody said. “I'm going to make some tea.”

  He went into what would have been the kitchen, and Billy sat on a pillow. Then he stood up again and walked to the window. Headlights shone in the street now. The neon was lit. In an apartment across the street Billy could see the blue-gray flicker of television, and he knew a sharp, sudden envy. Someone was living the most ordinary and unsurprising of lives. Someone was sitting on his own sofa, popping a beer and watching the seven o'clock news. Billy resolved that he would drink a little tea, tell Cody it had been fine to meet him, and leave. He'd return to the order of his days, the simplicity of his skin.

  Cody brought out two mugs of tea and stood with them in the light of the candles. He let Billy come to him. “Long life,” Cody said, raising his mug. The tea smelled bitter. Billy let the steam wash over his face but did not drink.

  “Burdock root,” Cody said.

  “What?”

  “It's burdock-root tea. At first you hate it because you've lived on sugar all your life. Drink it, it's good for calming all needless anxieties.”

  Carefully, Billy tipped the mug to his lips. The tea did in fact have a foul taste, like water that had pooled on a forest floor. Cody laughed.

  “You have to give it a chance,” he said. He opened a box that sat on a wooden table, took out a plastic bag full of dull green-brown dope, and rolled a joint quickly, with the skill and focus of a baker. The box was elaborately carved, inlaid with mother-of-pearl. When Cody lit the joint, his face took the light of the match like a painting revealed on the wall of a cave. Cody's face was pocked, extravagantly lined. In repose, all his handsomeness fell away from him.

  He gave the joint to Billy. Billy sucked the smoke deep into his lungs, felt with gratitude the familiar sweet burning. When he passed the joint back to Cody, Cody put his hand, gently, on Billy's chest.

  “I can feel your heart,” he said. “Child, what are you so afraid of?”

  “I'm not afraid,” Billy said. He let Cody take his hit, got the joint back, filled his lungs again.

  “Well, if you were afraid, you'd have no reason to be,” Cody said. “This is just love, Mr. Will. This is just what you nose around for every day of your life. It only means good things about you.”

  “I think—” Billy said. “Listen, I should go.” He gave the joint back to Cody.

  “So soon?”

  “Yeah. Well, I could say something really ridiculous like I just remembered I was supposed to meet someone, but really—” He hoped to be loved for his honesty. He was a good and kindly boy who still knew the limits of what should be allowed. Cody, a sweet fatherly man, would love him for everything he decided not to do. The air was full of shade and unsteady light.

  “Listen, really—” Billy said, and his voice sounded remote, as if it were coming from another boy who stood in another room. He watched Cody put the joint in the ashtray and move closer to him. He felt Cody's hand settle, gently, on his shoulders. There was the woody smell. There were the faint clickings. Billy wanted and didn't want.

  “All's well, child,” Cody said. “Don't you worry. This is goodness here, every bit of it.”

  Cody's hands moved down Billy's spine and then Billy was on the other side of something. Then something was happening and even if Billy pulled away and ran from the apartment it would still have happened. He was on the other side and with a terrible sense of relief he let Cody unbutton his shirt. He felt, briefly, as calm and entitled as a child being undressed for bed.

  “Lovely,” Cody whispered. “You're a lovely boy and that's a fine thing, to be thin and pretty like you are.”

  Billy let the word roll around in him. Pretty. He put his fingers on the top button of Cody's shirt and with a rush of exhilaration he opened it. There was a new patch of Cody's skin, brown, speckled with black hair. Billy could not believe he had permission to do this. Blood hammered in his skull and a part of him floated up and watched, exultant, terrified, as his hands moved down the buttons of Cody's shirt. Cody's shirt hung open. Billy could see the soft muscles of his chest, the furred mound of his stomach. Billy careened between squeamish desire and a hot, howling embarrassment.

  “Come here,” Cody said. “Come over here.” He led Billy to a mattress covered with pillows, and there he took Billy's shirt off with steady, almost clinical certainty, as if he, Cody, was a doctor and the shirt was doing Billy some slow undetectable harm. “Now lie down,” Cody said.

  “I—;”

  “Shh.” Cody put a thick brown finger to his lips. Billy obeyed. All he had to do was not say no. Candlelight moved across the tapestries like a breeze. He felt Cody unlacing his shoes. Suddenly, Billy needed to speak. Suddenly he believed that if he didn't hear his own voice in the room he'd lose himself. He'd disappear into the nowhere that hovered around the edges of the world.

  “Listen, Cody,” he said, and his voice was small in the dusky air. “I don't think I want to do this, I mean, I think I'd better go.”

  “You don't want to go,” Cody said. “That's just your voice talking.”

  Billy was filled with rage. He could have kicked Cody—Cody's intent, lined face was bent over the toe of his shoe—and jumped up screaming, 'Don't tell me what I want.'

  He didn't move. His own rage rose hotly to the surface of his skin and then turned into something else, something unfamiliar. Anger and desire and fear were so intertwined in him he couldn't tell one from the other. He lay quietly under the combined weight of them as Cody, with a soft grunt of effort, took his boots off and set them on the floor. As Billy watched his boots being set aside like that he thought, quickly and not fearfully, of his own death.

  “I—” he said, and he said no more than that. As urgently as he had needed to speak he now needed to be quiet, to slip in among the pillows and tapestries and the jar of peacock feathers that winked in the semi-dark. He joined the room and anything could happen to him. Everything was all right.

  Tenderly, but with the same clinical sureness, Cody opened the buttons of Billy's pants and pulled them off. Billy lay in his socks and boxer shorts, breathing. He had a hard-on and he was still embarrassed but now in an abstract way—he was embarrassed and pleased and he watched a line of pale green elephants bisect the fabric overhead. He had joined the room. Anything could happen. He saw his pants and his shirt puddled on the floor and they were the clothes of someone else, someone he'd invented.

  Cody took Billy's shorts off. Cody whispered, “Lovely.” Billy was breathing. He was naked except for his socks. He was someone to whom the word lovely applied. Cody removed his own clothes. Billy raised his head and watched with a queasy, prickling interest as Cody shrugged away his shirt, kicked off his shoes, stepped out of his bell-bottoms. He wore no underwear. He stood furrily naked, erect. His arms were thin; he had a belly. Cody knelt on the mattress and rubbed Billy's chest with the palms of his hands. Billy didn't look at him. He looked back up at the ceiling, where the elephants marched trunk to tail, and he felt Cody's lips on his belly. Briefly, he panicked. His heart fluttered. This can't happen. This can't. But he held still and it was allowed. It did happen. Cody's lips, ticklish with their stubble, moved down and then they had taken Billy inside. Billy's stomach heaved. He worried about teeth. He didn't look anywhere but up. Cody's mouth moved. Billy said to himself, This is happening. He felt powerful and ridiculous. He remembered the forearm of the waiter who'd given him his coffee an hour ago. The waiter had been handsome in a pallid, dissatisfied way. His forearms had been pale and hairless, ropy with little muscles that jumped. Billy looked at Cody's bare shoulders, the top of Cody's windblown head. Cody's head moved and there was the sensation, strong but remote, edged with vertigo, nothing like the familiar thrills Billy summoned in himself, quickly, with his own hand. Cody's hair was black, disordered, innocent. The waiter had seemed hurt by his own beauty. He
'd been sullen. The muscles in his arms had jumped as he poured the coffee. Billy saw that he could think of the waiter's arm and say to himself the word beautiful There was permission and he said the word, silently. The arm became beautiful and then the man did, an unhappy stranger with a shadow of mustache. A man who was naked sometimes, who would have slim hips and a sullen way of standing, with his arms folded over his bare chest. Billy thought of the waiter's sculpted unhappiness. He watched the top of Cody's head. Yes. Bix had put his blood on Billy's face. The waiter's buttocks would be small and precise. Yes. He thought of Bix—the quiet rage of him, the crazy light in his eyes—and he thought of the waiter's small innocent buttocks and he thought of himself lifted by strong arms and then with a single exclamation of surprise, he came.

  That was it. It was over.

  Immediately, it turned to nothing. It had been so much and now it was nothing, just dull shame and the desire to be elsewhere. Cody wiped his mouth, smiled. He patted Billy's stomach and reached with his other hand into the ashtray for the joint.

  “Mmm,” he said, relighting the joint. “Delicious.”

  Billy didn't speak. He saw that he was alone in a room with a lustful, crazy old man.

  “It's all right,” Cody said, offering him the joint. “You're all right, everything's fine.”

  “I have to go,” Billy said. He did not accept the joint.

  “I know.”

  Billy got himself off the mattress, put his clothes back on. Cody watched. Billy could feel him watching. He didn't want to look back at Cody but when he was dressed he had to and what he saw was a thin homely man sitting cross-legged, smoking the last of a joint, with a round belly and the purple stub of a penis protruding from a splotch of dark hair. Billy couldn't believe it. This ugliness, this sad flesh.

  “Bye,” he said.

  “Goodbye. Don't worry.”

  “I'm not.”

  “I'll be here another two days,” Cody said.