I Am Not Myself These Days

  Back in bed I listen to every sound. The plastic tarp over the table on the balcony crunching in the cold wind. The two short clicks in the walls before the heat comes on with a low whoosh. I hear a constant bass hum all around—the nervous system of the building carrying electricity and gas and phone conversations to all our respective little boxes.

  I listen to it all—the constant, the rhythmic, and the random.

  It’s hard to measure the night by sound, but it can be done. I know that when the traffic noise is quietest, it’s about four thirty in the morning. I know that when the Times hits the door, it’s around five.

  Now the clock says it’s morning: 5:45. But the November sky still says midnight. I hear the elevator ding twenty yards down the hall outside our door. Seven seconds later I hear his keys in our lock. Then his heavy backpack hitting the floor.

  I hear the refrigerator door open, the unsealing vacuum wheezing as the cold inside air meets the dry heat in the apartment. A cupboard door. A glass. The crescendoing fizz of a new two-liter Diet Coke bottle opening.

  It’s a one-sided conversation with no one actually talking. I lie in the dark, close my eyes, and try not to listen to his movements around the apartment. These are the sounds of our life together before it got so messy. I want to say something back. Anything. Anything that sounds like things sounded last summer. Even just to myself. Just something out loud.

  The inside of my eyelids turn pink. My door has been opened and the light from the hallway shines through them. I won’t open them. There is no noise.

  Like an eclipse, the world behind my closed eyes goes dark again for just one second before I feel a kiss on my right eyelid.

  I keep them closed.

  A kiss on the left one.

  I open them.

  Jack looks down at me. Then closes his eyes.

  He leans over and puts his forehead on my chest and goes limp.

  “Blue’s Clues is on,” he says softly into my T-shirt, his muffled voice vibrating only a half-inch away from my heart.

  20

  Contestant, make your choice, I think to myself stepping out of the elevator and walking down the hallway toward our apartment. Coming home these past few months is like a game show. I have no more information about what I’ll find on the other side of my door than I do any other doorway in the hallway. Will Jack be high? Will he be alone? Will there be an orgy in the foyer? I may as well let myself into any random neighbor’s apartment…it couldn’t be anymore unnerving than mine.

  Contestant, do you choose what’s behind door number 42A? Where the middle-aged couple lives, whom I met once on the elevator dressed for a formal evening out? Are they right now eating their dinner of broiled chicken breasts and instant rice pilaf without a single word passing between them?

  Or do you choose 42B? Whose door is decorated with a dried wreath made up of magnolia leaves and baby’s breath that seem incongruous with the intense dark-eyed veiled Arab woman I’d seen taking the trash out one day?

  42D? The family with the brood of four blond children who witnessed me passed out in a puddle of my own sick?

  I choose 42E. Our apartment. I’m getting used to going for broke. Betting it all in the bonus round.

  I reach our apartment and prop my knee against the door while I dig in my satchel, looking for my keys. Just when I feel their jagged edges deep in the bottom, the door opens and Jack stands in front of me, naked except for a too-short navy blue tie that barely reaches his navel.

  “Going for an interview?” I ask.

  “How’d you like to make five hundred dollars?” he whispers.

  Five hundred dollars is about the same as I take home all week at my job at the advertising agency, and far more than I’d been able to command as Aqua lately. With drag queens showing up in every magazine and on every daytime talk show, the level of subversiveness of the profession has decreased dramatically and the number of job entrants into the night world of gender-bending has multiplied exponentially. Anyone who can afford to buy a housedress on Fourteenth Street seems to show up at the clubs and declare themselves a drag queen.

  “If it involves another man’s dick, I can live without it,” I reply, my one and only disastrous attempt at hooking still relatively at the top of my mind.

  “Only indirectly,” Jack continues, still whispering, pulling me into the foyer.

  In the last couple of weeks we’d gotten ourselves as far back into normal as we could ever credibly classify ourselves. Jack’s been true to his word of “no party calls,” and Aqua’s been on her best behavior. (Or worst behavior, if you’re the kind who likes it when she blacks out on top of the club speakers.)

  Peering past Jack, I see a video camera set on a tripod in the middle of the living room. A cable snakes across the floor and disappears into our bedroom.

  “Do we have our own cable access show now?” I ask, whispering for no good reason other than the fact that Jack is.

  “I have a client in the bedroom.”

  “Our bedroom?!” Jack and I agreed early on that he wouldn’t do anything with his customers on our bed. It may seem like an insignificant bow to traditional monogamy, but to me it’s as close as we come to a family value.

  “He’s not on the bed. He’s in the chair watching me on the TV. It’s a live feed.”

  “Oh,” I whisper. In the last few months I’m easily placated by most any explanation. Rational or otherwise. If I’m told enough to survive the situation, that’s probably plenty. Any more and I’ll just be frightened. Or disgusted. “Whatever this guy wants, I’m not going in the bedroom with him,” I warn Jack.

  “You don’t have to. He just wants to watch two guys. I was just paging Grey when I heard you at the door. I thought you might like a shot at the money.”

  “What do I have to do?”

  “We just need to make out a little, then fuck.”

  “While he’s watching,” I clarify.

  “From the bedroom,” Jack adds reassuringly.

  Jack’s apologized for the incident with Trey in the kitchen, and we’ve since settled back into a congenial routine, one that reminds me of the first couple of months we were dating. After weeks of not talking, it seemed now, in some ways, like we had just met. But a different kind of first impression. More like we’d just met through friends who had warned each of us about the other one. Told us the dark secrets we should know about each other. And now we’re not so much overlooking them as we are looking past them.

  With this newfound knowledge of each other, we’d been able to return to our old comfortable habits, deli breakfasts, reading the Times to each other, chatting in the shower about our respective workdays. But we avoided sex. We were romantic to the point of being treacly, but actual physical contact seemed to overstep some newfound boundary in our relationship.

  One of the few bonuses of Jack’s profession was that it afforded us opportunities like the present one. We could ease back into a sex life via cash sanctioned role-playing.

  “Why the tie?” I ask.

  “You have to wear one too,” Jack says. “Part of the fantasy.”

  “Do I get to meet the guy?” I always want to meet his clients. Partly out of fear that they’re better versions of me, and partly out of simple voyeurism.

  “At the end. He’s going to interrupt us and yell at us,” Jack says. “He’s the principal. We’re the prep school kids.”

  I’m disappointed. Not by the prospect of being watched while having sex and then being yelled at, but that I’m agreeing to participate in such a cliché fantasy.

  “He won’t cum on our chair, will he?”

  “I gave him a towel. He said he’s not jerking off anyway.”

  Standing in the foyer, Jack begins to undress me. A feeling of closeness comes over me like I hadn’t felt with him in a long while. I remember a night when I was at camp the summer before sixth grade when the three other boys in my tent were planning on holding a girl named Jennifer underwater and taking th
e top of her bathing suit off. They waited until they thought I was asleep. I was too “good” to be included in their scheming. I rustled and turned over in my bunk to let them think they had woken me up, hoping they would ask me to join them, but each time they would stop whispering until they thought I’d fallen asleep again. I hated being the good boy no matter how much I was rewarded for it.

  I’m not too good for Jack.

  Jack strips me to my underwear and fumbles while knotting the blue boys’ school tie around my neck.

  “I’ll do it,” I say, taking it out of his hands. He smiles at me. I kiss him on the forehead. “What’s my name, Aidan?” I ask.

  “Jonah,” he offers, pulling me into the living room.

  He sits me down on the futon and steps out of frame. I try not to look directly into the camera. I wish I had a textbook or something. Wouldn’t that be more convincing? Studying for an exam?

  Verisimilitude doesn’t seem to be a big priority for this client, I conclude, and start fiddling with my tie to have something to do with my hands. La, la, la…sitting in my underwear fiddling with my tie.

  Then Jack walks back in and sits at the opposite end of the futon. Here we are. Just two schoolboys, sitting around in their ties and underwear. I’m wondering if I should whistle or something, when Jack slides closer to me. I pretend not to notice him, staring out the window at the darkening November sky. The Empire State Building is lit up with orange and yellow lights and I’m trying to figure out the significance of the colors when I feel Jack’s hand on my thigh.

  It’s warm. And tentative. I don’t remember the first time Jack actually did touch my skin. Was it that first night when I came home with him from the bar and he watched me discard Aqua and listened to me talk in the bath that he drew for me? Did he touch me in bed that night? The night I don’t remember because I was so drunk I couldn’t remember his voice on the phone the next day?

  His hand moves to my cheek and turns my face toward his.

  “Hey, Jonah.”

  “Hey, Aidan.”

  “I saw you in gym class today,” Jack says, slightly louder than he needs to, being only inches away from my face. I realize we need to be heard by the microphone on the camera sitting ten feet away. It suddenly hits me. I’m in a porn movie.

  “I saw you in the showers,” I reply at equal volume.

  “I hope no one catches us,” Jack continues, rubbing his fingers across my right nipple.

  “There’s no one here but you and me,” I say, improvising and picking up his cues.

  “I’ve never done anything like this.”

  “Me neither,” I add. My abdomen starts shaking as I stifle a laugh that I know would reduce us both to tears if I let it go. “The principal would kill us if he knew.”

  Jack plants his face on my shoulder, pretending to kiss it but actually trying to suffocate his own giggling. Pathos. I need to dredge up some pathos in order not to dissolve into a laughing fit. None of my roles in high school productions of Bye Bye Birdy and Brigadoon have prepared me with any particular methodology for this current performance.

  “Would you like to suck my dick?” is the best I can come up with. Jack is on the verge of busting out laughing, so my lap is actually a good place to hide his face. I’m an improv genius.

  Jack obligingly starts fishing underneath the waistband of my underwear. I lean back and watch him kissing my navel. I start to rub his hair. He looks up at me.

  Instead of heading down, his kisses wend their way up my chest to my neck. I feel his soft hair rub against my earlobe. His breath reaches my ear.

  “I’ve always loved you,” he whispers, far too quiet for the camera to pick up.

  In the months we’ve been together, I’ve consistently tried to figure out what makes him tick, with no luck. He shuns all my attempts at pop psychoanalysis by saying “I y’am what I y’am” in a bad Popeye impersonation. I’ve fully explored what attracts me to him: his ease, his directness, the fact that he does pretty much anything he wants without being crippled by a stack of built-up fears and anxieties. Like being at the eye doctor as they place different lenses over your eyes—“Is this better, or this one?”—being with Jack is as simple as finding the lens that makes everything suddenly come clear.

  But what was I to him? I’d been so relieved that suddenly I could see clearly that I just ran around looking at everything using him as a lens. I’d been looking right through him. Whenever I try to imagine what it is in him that finds me attractive, all I can come up with is entertainment value.

  Now, while fumbling around naked in front of a camera hooked up to a TV in another room in front of a man I’ve never seen, I wonder what we look like to this stranger. I wish I could somehow go sit next to the client and watch Jack and me naked together on the screen, to see how we come together as one unit, what it is that makes us a couple. Talk with this stranger about it. Quiz the guy. What are you looking at? Describe this scene for me. What are those two people doing together? Why?

  But right now Jack’s skin feels so good to me, I can’t imagine detaching. We touch each other like we touch ourselves, so similar that sometimes while kissing his body I find myself inadvertently kissing my own arm without being able to tell the difference. He smells like honey and cinnamon, like the desert and cactuses he draws for me. I try to be the sky for him. Mist and rain and breezes.

  As it grows darker, the orange and yellow lights from the Empire State Building color our skin and the room around us. The wind picks up in sudden strong gusts that only occur this high in the sky. Fat, heavy gobs of snowy rain hit against the window. Still we are together. Our bodies turn and roll and rub together as long as the invisible man pays us to. Our skin grows numb from the constant touch, the rubbing against the fabric beneath us. The tease of being on the edge of orgasm for so long is intense—a dull, bruising pressure building inside us. As if it would be impossible for us not to be touching. To pull us apart would be as sharp a pain as pulling off our very skin.

  “What are you two boys doing!”

  The door to our bedroom slams open. The noise startles us and we fly to separate edges of the futon as if we really had been caught. I’d completely forgotten that this man was in our bedroom. Watching. He looks to be around fifty, with dyed auburn hair combed with a perfectly straight side part. He’s wearing navy blue polyester suit pants that are too tight and bunch up at the zipper and a light blue short-sleeved dress shirt with two large round sweat stains under his arms. His forehead shines with sweat and his skin blushes with rage. I’m genuinely embarrassed. Still incredibly hard, I cover myself.

  “What are you two boys doing!” he repeats.

  “Nothing,” Jack answers, doing nothing to hide his stiffness. Now it’s easy to tell who’s the professional. I suddenly realize it’s not the sex that’s the difficult part of being an escort, it’s the bits before and after.

  “I said what are you boys doing?!”

  I’m at a loss now. I’m in my recurring nightmare of being in a play without ever having seen a script. And either this man knows his part really well, or he’s genuinely pissed at us.

  “We were playing,” Jack continues.

  “What were you playing with?!”

  “We were playing with our dicks,” Jack says.

  “And?”

  “Our mouths.”

  “And?”

  “Our asses.”

  “Stand up.”

  We both do as he says. I watch Jack. I’ll follow his lead. The raging man seems as if he could drop dead of a coronary at any second.

  “Come here.”

  We slowly walk over to where he stands. Having been lying down for so long, I grow a little dizzy and grab Jack’s arm.

  “Don’t touch him!”

  I let go. Now I just want to hang on to him more out of fear than imbalance.

  “Kneel down.”

  I shoot Jack a glance. I try to figure out how to say, “I’m not giving this guy head” with j
ust my eyes. We kneel down. The man’s hands lower and I grimace, hoping against hope that his pubic hair isn’t the same fake orange shade as his head.

  The man places one hand on the top of each of our heads.

  “Our Father, who art in heaven…”

  Jack joins in.

  “Hallowed be thy name.”

  I follow suit.

  “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

  We repeat the prayer at least a dozen times before he instructs us to sit back on the futon. He disappears into the bedroom and emerges a minute later in his jacket and hat. His face now sports a broad friendly smile. A complete hundred-and-eighty-degree mood shift. He asks Jack for a pen and paper, and then sits next to us writing the address and phone number of the church in Brooklyn he belongs to.

  “If you guys ever feel like it, give me a call and we can go together one Sunday. There’s a great youth service on Thursday nights too!” he adds cheerfully before heading out the door.

  Jack calls the agency and tells them to end the hourly charge. Five hundred dollars apiece. Just like that. Finally, I’m a successful hooker.

  21

  Thanksgiving.

  I don’t care what Butterball.com says, the hardest part about cooking the perfect Thanksgiving dinner is avoiding the splinters of broken crack pipes that collect in the crevices of the kitchen floor.

  Even though Jack’s been clean for three and a half weeks, I still wind up getting little shards of glass embedded in my feet every time I make a pot of coffee. I’ve cut back to two shows a week, and treat them like a real job. I show up on time, drink just enough to keep dancing, get my cash and go home. We’re proud of how well we’ve gotten everything back on track. However surreal that track may be.

  Last week, on our way home from a movie, Jack saw an ad for fresh turkeys in the window of the Food Emporium down the street. Without telling me what he was doing, he dragged me inside and placed an order for the largest one they could get.