Rejection, page 9
The doll is delivered in a large black duffel with an instruction card written in a casual jokey style intended to make the consumer feel laughed-with. A brunette with an orthogonal jawline and bumpy abs that look more like unnippled teats, it smells strongly of new rubber and takes hours to off-gas. It’s chilly to the touch, requiring a minute of joyless foreplay to warm up. Soon he realizes that a body that feels no pain can’t be shamed either, and to finish the task he has to play porn in the background, negating the remedial value of the whole project. After he’s done, he strains his shoulder hauling the ninety-pound doll back into its bag.
With the body lying cold and bespooged by his front door, awaiting pickup, he lies on his couch, icing his shoulder. This isn’t preparing him for anything, he thinks, except for even weirder equipment. Unwanted queries soon follow: What if he can only be attracted to his abstract fantasies, perhaps even to the very quality of their nonexistence? Could it be that his libido isn’t stunted, but stillborn; that whatever limbic pathway joins stimulus to response has missed some crucial window of development and now only craves the unreal? Or is he just monogamously devoted to his fantasies, which have been his only comfort for so long that having a real partner feels unfaithful to them, these eidolons who never judged him and will never leave?
II. COMMUNICATION FIXES EVERYTHING
On his commute a month later, Kant passes a twenty-four-hour gym at a strip mall. The immutability of his race has always made him consider his own body likewise unchangeable, but he realizes that nothing’s stopping him from becoming, at the very least, thicker. Wasn’t coming out supposed to drive him to uncomfortable new ventures, and isn’t the gym notoriously the place where hot men go to get hotter? It seems impossible that a few pounds of firmer flesh will heal any psychic wounds; then again, he’s never tried it. He finally gets invested when he starts researching three-day splits and supplement regimens and meal-prep spreadsheets for tabulating optimal amounts of pea protein and white meat. Nothing is more comforting to him than min-maxing.
With this pleasant upswing of purpose, he signs up for a free day pass at the strip mall gym and, not owning proper workout clothes, chooses to wear teal swim trunks. When he enters the gym, his glasses fog even though it isn’t cold out. Beyond the check-in desk, damp bodies in polycotton invest themselves with hardness and diameter. He flinches when a barbell clangs to the ground nearby.
The locker room is a hotbox of armpit and Lysol. He’s never changed in one before, not even in gym class, where he used to change in the bathroom, one of many reasons he’d gotten bullied, though it was for being Asian, not gay, that they called him gay. His other reference point for locker rooms is porn, which gives this one the surreality of a lucid dream. He knows it’s silly to expect men with oiled V-tapers and blundering slabs of ruddy cockmeat striding about in a Roman caldarium. But he didn’t expect it to resemble a public bathroom, with its echoing coughs and mildewed tile. Wet footprints and shoeprints track the rubberized floor. An untanned, de-eroticized butt hovers in his periphery. It is unbearable, too little space for too much attention parceled among too few. Fortunately he can change quickly, as he’s already wearing his swim trunks under his jeans.
In the fluorescent lights, the thin rayon of his trunks reveals his bulge, making it feel simultaneously too large and too small. He warms up on the treadmill, but the nylon of his swim trunks rustles loudly, and his car keys welt his thigh through the netting of his pocket, so he dismounts and approaches the weight racks with his head lowered. He’s read that squats are the most comprehensive exercise, and he loads on the smallest plates that don’t look comically small. The nearest person, a chestnut-haired white guy in a yellow mesh tank top and earbuds recording his bench presses in a sweat-crinkled notebook, remarks at him, “That looks heavy.” Kant is fairly confident this is an insult. He tries to ignore the guy as he tiptoes to get the barbell up. The draping hem of his T-shirt trembles when he steps forward; his tendons creak and kneecaps pop in upsetting ways. Because his swim trunks are not absorbent, he worries sweat will begin to drip from them. As he totters back to re-rack the barbell, he stumbles and falls, and the barbell strikes the floor with a deafening clang. Everyone turns to look.
Tank top guy trots over and asks if he’s hurt, picking up the barbell and setting it back with a grunt. Kant says, No, sorry, I’m fine.
“Need a spot?” asks the guy.
No, no thanks, Kant replies, and leaves before the guy can respond.
So as not to look like he’s running in fright, Kant buys and drinks an enormous diet energy drink from a vending machine in the lobby, then goes to the bathroom and tees up at the urinal. Before he can start, the tank top guy from earlier walks in and installs himself two urinals away, even though a far wider buffer is possible. With the guy pissing freely, Kant’s bladder seals like a panic room. He’s been there too long to pretend he finished, and they’re too close to pretend his stream is inaudible. So he decides to wait the guy out, and tries to focus on his phone. Then he receives a message on his dating app, from a guy named Julian six feet away: That looks heavy. Kant looks over; the guy, Julian, is waving his phone screen at Kant, with a smile that seems opinionated.
Speech clogs Kant’s throat. He thought he’d feel a miraculous gratitude to be cruised, but he is so unconvinced of his own appeal, and so convinced of his inability to respond, that he ends up feeling like a sulky kid who won’t kiss his grandma. Julian leaves without flushing, squeezing Kant on the shoulder as he passes.
After Kant finally lets out his piss and fart and washes his hands for a full minute, he seeks the guy out, who introduces himself as Julian. When Kant tells him he’s new to the gym, Julian guides him around, shows him how to load the leg press and unfold the cushioned platform on the assisted pull-up machine. He offers to Venmo Julian for the lesson, and Julian laughs. “Just buy me a drink sometime.” Julian makes a show of friend-requesting him, gives another genial squeeze on the shoulder, and heads for the locker room.
At home, Kant forensically scours Julian’s social media, finding only evidence of a thoroughly well-adjusted man, with rainbow flag and Caucasian thumbs-up emojis in his bios. In his photos he is boyishly close-shaven, and in all of them wearing the same black beanie with various gray Henley shirts, laughing with his arms crossed, like he always has a reason to laugh and someone there to photograph it.
Amid this research, Julian messages him suggesting they hang out, and he agrees. He wills his expectations low, preparing for a no-show, or casual racism, even somehow physical bullying, the sort that defined his adolescence and has made him generally averse to touch and male bodies ever since.
The date goes exceedingly well, mainly because Julian takes point. They meet at the kind of upscale Italian place that serves meatballs but not spaghetti, Julian arriving late with a crescent of lotion on his cheek that he hasn’t fully massaged in, his stubble grown to the length where it just begins to acquire direction. Kant asks where Julian is from (Pasadena) and what he does for a living. Julian says he works “in the design space,” then declares that he doesn’t believe in small talk, especially anything work-related. Soon they find themselves agreeing that having kids is overrated, the French manner of keeping separate apartments after marriage is ideal, and college is an institution designed to reinforce class stratification, even though they both went.
They also share a history of being bullied—Julian for being emo, which he later realized was an excuse to dress up, which led to him coming out at age fifteen; being six years younger than Kant, he’d enjoyed the crucial lifeline of social media in high school. He talks about his strained relationship with his older brother, who was friends with many of his bullies, but who later wrote a successful college entrance essay about the heroic ordeal of having a gay brother. Trying to seem like he’s commiserating and not one-upping him, Kant talks about the four white boys in middle school who would pin him down and take turns sitting and farting on his face. Julian cuts him off there, squeezing his hand and making a sympathetic expression on the exact midpoint between frown and pout, then says, “God, that’s awful! I’m sorry to hear that. Though god, I probably would’ve been like, Go ahead and pin me down, boys, I’ll just cum!”
Not wanting to seem skinless and unhealed, Kant laughs, like he was going to tell a light anecdote all along, even though the full story had been that the bullying soon escalated to other “pranks,” which included prying his mouth open and forcing raw eggs and dogshit down his throat, or putting him in a chokehold and saying Time to put the freak to sleep until he passed out, or just wailing on him wherever bruises wouldn’t show, one time hard enough that he shit blood. Nor, despite an unfamiliar urge to reveal what a damaged deviant he is, does he say anything about the episode two years ago when he stripped down to his underwear, unable to bear facing death nude, and sat in a warm bath with a kitchen knife on the closed toilet seat beside him, drinking two glasses of whiskey and a taking handful of aspirin to dull pain and prevent clotting, until enough courage came to sever his life, such courage never arriving, the tip of the knife merely hyphenating his forearm before he broke down sobbing into his knees, getting out of the lukewarm bathwater, feeling stupid as he put the knife back in the drawer, and now whenever he touches a kitchen knife it feels like a mild electrical current is running through it. Instead he talks about how he thought doggystyle meant anal until he was twenty-two, which makes Julian laugh until he coughs.
After three drinks, Julian with sleepy eyelids asks, “Okay, hotseat: When was the last time you were with a guy?”
Kant takes a long sip of water, wishing for the topic to change itself.
“Oh. Am I gonna be the first?” Julian says evenly. “What an honor. I would’ve thought you were a killer.”
He’s not sure what game Julian is playing, ascribing to him power and options he clearly lacks, but it doesn’t matter, because now they’re kissing in an Uber to Julian’s place.
Following his first kiss, the loss of his virginity is an anticlimax. After a demure interval in the bathroom, Julian takes the lead and maneuvers beneath him, whereupon Kant discovers that though they may have chemistry, they do not have physics—Kant’s thighbones are shorter than Julian’s, forcing a relocation to the edge of the bed, then the trial-and-error of angles and newtons, going tangent when he means to go secant. Every position feels like doing a plank, and he’s put off by the novel dimension of smell—however marshy and squelching his fantasies were, they never had an odor, and Julian’s is eyewateringly tart, like some savory citrus. It feels counterintuitive for someone so nice to smell so strong.
As Kant begins to worry whether he will be able to finish, Julian reaches back to still him and says, “Time out.” Kant withdraws, sees a streak of scarlet on the condom, and unwillingly thinks Fresh spring roll with sriracha. He startles and stammers apologies.
Julian does a glance back and hurries off the bed, wipes his face with both hands in exasperation. “Ugh, sorry, this is so awkward—it’s this hemorrhoid thing. It’s fine! You didn’t mess anything up. We just gotta call it for tonight. Rain check, okay?”
Julian’s embarrassment should feel equalizing, letting Kant off the hook performance-wise; instead, he feels guilty for causing actual harm to Julian—then aroused by the harm, making him suspect his subconscious may have done it on purpose—and finally horrified by the arousal, to the point where he’s turned off again.
Despite this failure, they keep seeing each other. Their compatibility rests in their shared taste for spending enormous amounts of time occupied together in silence. Julian, he learns, is someone who says Right on instead of Yes and never unsubscribes from political email lists, who believes the greatest song in human history is Passion Pit’s “Sleepyhead” and owns a drawerful of Henley shirts. He is tanned and centered, his chakras agape, comprehensively Californian.
They spend Fridays and Saturdays together, agreeing that being in their late twenties/early thirties they are too old for clubs (though unlike Julian, Kant has never been to one). Kant will visit Julian’s very nice apartment, exuding well-roundedness and hobbyist homesteading. Swing-top bottles of ginger beer ferment on the windowsill, near a rack of matching copper cookware. Tastefully concealed smart-home appliances and hot pink grow lamps shining on planters of lemongrass, basil, and weed. In the basement of his ground-floor duplex is a DIY woodworking bench, and a series of shelves and complicated machinery that Julian explains is a cheese cave in progress.
Kant expends serious effort in seeming unslovenly and being a good boyfriend by cooking and cleaning a lot when he stays over at Julian’s. In the morning Kant makes complicated toasts, with roasted shallot baba ghanoush or tangerine marmalade or smashed avocado, and coffee so strong it gives him contractions. He picks up the single-use contact lens packets Julian leaves everywhere; he finds internet recipes to make, spends evenings cranking and slicing pasta dough to make pappardelle with lemon zest. Occasionally the time this takes, and the ease with which Julian accepts these favors, makes Kant feel resentful, before he reminds himself that Julian never asked him to do any of it. At dinnertime the two of them bring the food into Julian’s bedroom and balance the plates on their thighs sitting in bed to watch “something stupid,” usually reality shows about either wilderness survival or cooking, and every time Julian will make the same joke about how these shows make food taste better. Whenever Kant gets up to use the bathroom, he asks if Julian wants another red wine, and the answer is always a sheepish yes. After three episodes, Kant will take both their empty dishes back to the kitchen, clean and dry everything, then slap all the light switches off, knowing Julian is lazy enough to leave them on overnight, and bring two glasses of water for Julian to keep on his side table because he sweats so much in his sleep, even with the bladeless fan he constantly has trained on his face.
In receipt of these unsolicited favors Julian likes to tease him for being a service top, but Kant understands his own intentions better than that—in the same way that he’d once converted his sexual repression and friendlessness into excellent grades, he realizes he has transposed his whole achievement M.O. onto his relationship, being helpful and solicitous and doing Julian’s chores as if it will entitle him to what he wants, i.e., outlandishly violent and degrading sex. So all of this caretaking is just pointless sublimation, Kant knows, he really is a genius at channeling his bullshit into laudable endeavors, and it only deepens his conviction that he’ll never be able to give Julian the easy loving he deserves, so maybe he should end things before they get any more entangled, so that it won’t hurt as much to leave him.
Since their first attempt, they have not had sex. Sometimes in bed Julian will tug at the elastic of Kant’s pajama bottoms or press an amiable semi against the back of his thigh, but it always stops there. For Julian, sex is just stuff—hand stuff, mouth stuff, butt stuff, the light attitude of a well-adjusted guy, for whom sex is dessert; maybe he doesn’t need it as much. At any rate Julian hasn’t officially complained.
It’s when they’re lying in bed that Kant feels most acutely the membrane that draws up over his heart in the presence of others. The prospect of undressing in front of someone else gives him overpowering willies, like rubbing burlap with cold dry hands, so he changes in the bathroom. His sleep suffers from the fear of accidentally kneeing Julian or waking him with his snores, and the ambient breeze from Julian’s sleep fan dries out Kant’s sinuses, so he wakes with his nostrils encrusted like a geode, and winces as he extracts the bloody caltrops hardened around his nose hairs.
In the summer, they attend a backyard party where Kant meets Julian’s close friends, with whom Julian visits a different country every year. Entering a backyard patio crisscrossed with string lights, Julian says, “What’s up, sluts?” to the assembled group, who are mostly white and all gay and very hot and tall in a rich way and artfully tattooed and eating charcuterie. Half are in tank tops and half in open button-down shirts, exposing opposite regions of skin, yet signifying the same type of ease. In particular Julian’s ex-boyfriend, Noah, is appallingly buff, with a Thanos jawline, an immaculate Caesar cut. His abs are as craggy and segmented as a prizewinning pumpkin and run all the way up to his forehead basically. Julian introduces Kant to Noah: “So, this is my boyfriend, he designs armor for a living. He makes these cool game music things too, what do you call them? Right, chiptunes—oh god, and you should see him play Mario, he can beat it in like five minutes, it’s crazy. He’s just the best.”
“Whoa, armor? So you’re like a blacksmith?” Noah asks.
It is awful, not only to learn that Julian believes these are Kant’s main selling points, but to see how Julian must describe him misleadingly to make him sound interesting. No, um, Kant explains, it’s virtual armor for . . . it’s, it’s a mobile fantasy game that’s free to download and play but you can buy optional sets of armor that your in-game characters can wear, but it’s purely cosmetic, and even though the armor doesn’t give you any advantages our users like to customize their avatars so it’s um a really profitable business model but a lot of gamers hate it and there’s been articles about that . . . but yeah.
Noah makes active listening sounds at all the wrong moments, which only emphasizes how actively he is not listening. Kant is aware of reflecting poorly on Julian as everyone’s interest visibly flags; to avoid being distracted by eye contact, he keeps his gaze trained over Noah’s shoulder, and Noah keeps glancing behind himself to see what Kant is looking at. Finally, Noah says he’s getting a drink refill. Kant can clearly see him walk straight to another group of people and talk to them.
Thereafter Kant spends the evening silently at Julian’s heel, with the lowered eyes and ungladsome grin of primate submission, passively excluded from the conversations about celebrities he doesn’t know, shows he hasn’t streamed, and is acknowledged only when someone takes a question they’ve already asked Julian and regifts it to him. How about you, do you like hiking too? No matter how Kant replies, the answer is either That’s so cool or Okay, work!
