Let's Get Back to the Party, page 18
Once inside, I take a few deep breaths and pull out my phone to look busy. A high-schooler. Jesus. He said he was twenty-one. He said his name was Aaron. He said he lived in D.C. He stood me up. Why, because it was past his bedtime?
I think: Wait until Sean hears about this. Then I catch myself.
Through the rearview mirror, I watch Sebastian and the boy continue to talk. They’re not. No. Impossible. Twice while Sebastian speaks, the boy turns to look at me. Then Sebastian pats the boy’s shoulders again, and the boy picks up his bike, wipes his face with his sleeves, and slowly pedals down the street. Sebastian stands at the end of the driveway and watches the boy for what seems longer than necessary. Then he turns to look at me looking at him.
Unexpected traffic, as expected, strikes again. It’s already taken fifteen minutes just to get out of the hills and onto Interstate 66. Then, once again, we’re stuck. I bring down the passenger-side window and stick my head out into the air, look up and down the road. We’re not going anywhere anytime soon.
“Shit,” Sebastian says through his teeth.
It’s his first word since getting in the car.
We inch forward along the road, my fragile stomach bracing itself for every stop and start, Sebastian flipping through radio stations with seemingly no intention of ever stopping. Taylor Swift. Donald Trump. Drake. Bernie Sanders. Peter Bjorn and John. Hillary Clinton. Finally, Sebastian settles on some piece of classical music.
I ask what all that back there was about.
“A student. I told you.”
“Well, yeah. But what was he doing in your driveway?”
Sebastian goes to switch lanes, realizes he can’t make it, groans. “His boyfriend lives in my neighborhood. They just broke up this morning. Had a fight, sounds like. He was biking around for a while, crying. He saw me when I came out to the car. He’s pretty upset. I told him he should go home and talk to his parents.”
“Plenty more rainbow fish in the sea.” I think of some of the messages we once shared. The photos. “How old is he, exactly?”
“Seventeen.”
Shit.
“I feel awful he’s hurting,” Sebastian said.
“Can you imagine us like that, at seventeen? Crying to teachers about boyfriends? Having boyfriends?”
“It’s different now.”
“Well, good for him.”
Sebastian stares off into traffic. We stay silent until we approach a green sign that says it’s two miles to the Metro station. Sebastian grips his hands tighter on the wheel. It looks like something’s boiling behind his eyes.
“How do you know each other, Oscar?”
Great.
“Him? Oh, it’s nothing. It’s silly.”
“Friends of friends, you said.”
Oh, man.
“Yeah.”
“What does that mean?”
Shit.
“Nothing.”
“No, seriously. I want to know. Where did you meet him?”
Here we go.
“Well. Actually. If you must know. He messaged me earlier this summer. On Cruze. At that wedding we were at, if you can believe it.”
Sebastian laughs. “Cruze? No. No, I don’t think so. He’s not the type.”
“Well he was that night. We chatted. He sent me messages, some pictures. He told me he was a freshman in college. We were supposed to meet up.”
“But?”
“But he chickened out. Never showed. Now I know why. That’s it. Nothing else. I moved on.”
“Pictures,” Sebastian says, as if it’s the first time he’s ever heard the word.
“Yeah. That’s how I recognized him. That’s how he recognized me.”
“Wait. You sent him pictures back? What kind of pictures?”
“Are you serious about this?”
“I just. I just don’t think he’d do something like that. He’s different. It must be someone else. You must be mixing him up with someone else. God knows you go through them.” Without warning, the passenger-side window starts to come up, giving me barely enough time to pull my arm in. “Let’s keep the window closed,” Sebastian says without looking at me.
I take my phone and cradle it in my palm, carefully, like a loaded gun, mulling over Sebastian’s unsubtle slut-shaming, over how close I just came to being mangled.
“I can show you the photos if you’d like,” I say.
“No!”
I can’t tell if Sebastian’s yelling at me or the lime-green motorcycle winding its way between tight spaces in traffic.
We inch along. Up ahead, I can make out the red-blue spangle of police lights.
“So,” Sebastian says.
“So.”
“Did you have sex with him?”
“Sex.”
“Yeah. With Arthur. With my student. Did you have sex with him?”
“What did I just tell you a minute ago?”
“Why don’t I believe you?” Sebastian scoffs, closes his eyes, shakes his head. Another minute of silence, then: “I should have just left you in that parking lot.”
“What?”
“You looked like a sick dog out there, you know? Like one of my mom’s old dogs. Barfing your brains out. Crying. You’re thirty-five years old. And now you’re hooking up with kids.”
“I told you, I—” But what’s the use?
Up ahead, another green sign. One mile to go.
“Look,” I say. “It’s obvious you don’t want me in this car, and I don’t want to be here with you. Just pull over onto the shoulder. Right here. I’ll walk the rest of the way. It’s not far.”
“I’m not pulling over here, Oscar. There’s nowhere for me to turn around.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
I open the door and get out. All I hear is Sebastian say my name, and then I’m gone, heading down the shoulder toward the Metro station. I turn around, watch Sebastian struggle to close the passenger-side door. A gap in traffic opens up in front of Sebastian’s car; the driver behind him lays on the horn. Sebastian, straining for the door handle, looks out at me (and my middle finger) with revulsion and rage.
Given the tall grass and the uneven embankment, it takes twenty minutes to hike up to the station. Making matters worse, trains are on a weekend schedule, which means my next ride back to civilization won’t arrive for another eighteen minutes. I take the stairs up to the platform, ignoring the looks of the museum-bound families and the weekend office workers, and find a spot on a bench toward the end of the platform. I could flag a cab or call a car, yes, but I’ve hardly any battery life in my phone.
And there’s something important I have to do.
I sign on to Cruze. My chat history unfolds on my screen, and there, from last July, sandwiched between an invitation for sex and grilled cheese with Martin and an early-morning discussion about Republican presidential primaries, is my conversation with A. I take screen shots of several photos, drop them into a fresh text to Sebastian, and send the package on its way.
Take that.
Soon my train pulls into the station with its familiar whine and hiss and we reverse course and head east along the curve of the interstate. Once we burrow underneath Arlington and the Potomac, my stomach starts to settle and my headache starts to subside.
Then I’m back in the city. I’m safe.
Rising from the depths into daylight, I check my phone. One percent battery. Two new texts. Not from Sebastian, from Bart.
The first: J and I are having a debate. Didn’t you meet this guy once?
The second: A link to a news item from a gay culture site. It’s not long; a bulletin tucked between a reality show recap and a photo gallery of shirtless celebrities. Not even the dignity of a photo. Just one headline and four sentences.
Gay Novelist Dies at 68
Sean Stokes, the novelist who transformed his sex life into thinly disguised fiction once called pornographic by critics, died at age 68. Stokes was popular in the 1970s for his detailed exploration of gay life in novels like 1975’s A Boyhood and its sequel, A Manhood (1978), as well as Skin Dreams (1980), 1001 Nights (1985), and The Little Deaths (1994). His most recent novel, Tiberius at the Villa (2015), was savaged by our critic, Robert Spellman (read it here). He is survived by his husband, the poet Jesse Board.
I read the paragraph three times. Four times. I keep reading it, standing there clueless on the sidewalk. I know as soon as I stop reading, as soon as I look up from my phone, it’ll be more than just words. It’ll be reality.
What the fuck is going on today?
My phone buzzes in my hand. For a second, I think it’s the precursor to some horrible public sorrow I can already feel at the top of my chest and the base of my throat. Not the first time I’ve barfed in public. But it’s just a Cruze message. A profile picture, once a torso, is now a face staring at me the same way it did earlier this morning. Its age now seventeen. Its location now forty-nine miles away. Its name still A.
Hey stranger, it reads.
Then my phone goes black.
Five
Tiberius at the Villa
Sebastian
A hand—one I’d seen stuffed into pockets, dragged through thick hair, rubbed against exhausted late-afternoon eyes, extended to receive graded essays, wrapped around my own in thanks and farewell—holds a cock. Squat, stubby, tapering off to a red arrowhead, networked with several veins, framed by artfully manicured pubic hair. The fingers around it open as if displaying a specimen for scientific study. A small plinth of flesh, taut and turgid, bisected by an opaque text box stating the obvious: So hard.
I put an immediate end to our after-school movies. I blamed it on administrative work, on nonexistent family issues. You’ve got your list, I told Arthur. You’re a scholar, and a scholar has to be comfortable pursuing his own passions. (I thought of the photos when I said this, the nudes that weren’t classically composed but urgently utilitarian, that didn’t celebrate the body but sold it. I regretted my choice of words.) Arthur was befuddled, but I didn’t relent. I couldn’t. Not because of the photos (which I’d deleted from my phone but not my mind) but because of what they meant. This boy is not the boy I thought he was.
They look, at first, like hills. An aerial shot of an alien landscape. It takes a moment for the buttocks to reveal themselves, abstracted by the angle from which they’ve been photographed, by the garish camera flash. Two thick gobbets of muscle and fat, freed of skinny jeans and underpants. Smooth at the crest, dark hairs guiding eyes toward a darker canyon.
I spent my afternoons at home, attacking the backyard with renewed vigor, ignoring the ever-persistent ache in my right shoulder. The labor kept me occupied, kept my mind off Arthur, off Oscar, off thoughts of the two of them together out there in the world, off feelings that something precious had been stolen from me. I told my father I was now thinking about building a fence around the house, something to keep all the deer shit away. Be my guest, my father said from his mountain retreat. But don’t be afraid to hire someone if you need help. I can do this alone, I said. I scoured how-to articles online, made recursive trips to the home improvement store. I brought home as many planks of pressure-treated cedar as I could fit in my car, carried them, one by one, into the backyard, stacked them compulsively into neat piles. Then I sat in the grass and worried my mind over what to do next, over the labor of actually seeing a project through to the end. I envisioned a ranch-style fence because it was the only type of fence I could conceive of building on my own. I saw it forced together with nails that would do just as well propping up a Grunewald Christ.
Chest hair, like delicate wings, arches in flight over tiny nipples. No face, just a squat neck, the hint of a rounded cherub chin, a soft body that leads down to a waistband of Skyler Mountain briefs. The glimpse of a bathroom counter: a sink’s scalloped edge, a toothpaste tube curled like a witch’s nail, the corner of a damp hand towel.
One Monday after class, as I packed my bag, Arthur came into my trailer without knocking. He held up a red envelope. Ivan’s Childhood, he said. I said nothing, just stood there looking at this boy who, in the last few weeks, had warped and melted like some abstract expressionist nightmare. I wasn’t daft, I knew my students had sex lives. Still. I’d thought of Arthur as someone free of that desperate need to be desired, to be seen. Now I knew he was just like the rest of us: bent and messy. Or maybe it was something else. Maybe I felt cheated. Maybe I wanted that body for myself. Did I? God. The lecherous high school teacher—a trope as old as Socrates. None of it made any sense, and so the only solution, as I saw it, was to dig a trench between the two of us. But a trench to keep him away from me, or me away from him, I wasn’t sure. You know, I said, I didn’t get much sleep this weekend. Calling it an early day and going straight to bed. Arthur was relentless. What about lunch tomorrow? Watch it on your own, I said. Tell me on Wednesday what you thought of it. Arthur stuffed the envelope back into his messenger bag and skulked over to the trailer door. Then he turned around. You’re upset with me, he said. But I’m not sure why. I’m not upset, Arthur. Is it from when I stopped by your house crying? Because that’s done with now, I’m over him. (I wondered: Over whom?) Arthur, I said, you should be spending more time after school with your peers anyway. I thought you were my peer, he said. I’m your teacher, I said. Oh, Arthur said.
It’s a simple portrait, fleshy and alive, plucked out of a Renaissance painting. The demure eyes, the lips open in a dumb impression of seduction, revealing the darkness inside which a wet tongue waits. It takes a moment for the entirety of the photo to make itself known. The viewer has to know where to look, what to look for, to understand this simple headshot captioned with the word Yum. Were it a painting by some modern-day Caravaggio, hung in a small corner of some obscure art museum, the card underneath its modest frame would read Arthur Ayer (b. 1998), Cherub with Cum.
Arthur was now the last to arrive and the first to leave class. He was now the last to arrive and the first to leave the Wednesday group meetings. The students were making decorations for prom and signs for June’s Capital Pride Parade from flimsy craft-store paperboard I’d brought in. mortimer secondary lgbtq students. proud to be a mortimer secondary student. we love all our students. gay is ok at mss. in memory: thomas pitt. This last was Arthur’s.
During a guest lecture on visual literacy by the digital librarian, I sat off in a corner like the class dunce and graded reading quizzes. Occasionally, I stopped to rub my sore shoulder, search my palms for splinters, look at Arthur in the second row staring at the artwork on my trailer wall. I saw the light of his phone go off in his pocket, imagined an incoming text from Oscar soliciting more pictures, more messages. I took out my phone and, under cover of graded papers, created a new Cruze profile. No name, no photograph, no stats. I found A. immediately, five feet away. I saw the small green light. I thought about typing something—Pay attention to Ms. Edison—when a message appeared at the top of my screen. Philip98, five miles away. Sup. Arthur turned his head at the sound. I flushed red, lowered the volume on my phone, logged off, and deleted the app. Arthur stared at me for another moment, then turned his attention back to Ms. Edison, who was patiently guiding the class through the last five minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
On a Friday afternoon, three weeks before senior prom, I stepped out of my trailer into a world rushing with wind. Inside my workbag were short essays on King Lear and a catalog of J.M.W. Turner seascapes I intended to flip through over the weekend. I walked across the blacktop with its potholes like bullet wounds, thinking about other people’s happiness. Then I saw Arthur and Raymond over by the flagpole. I stopped, slipped behind the flimsy siding of T-1, and watched. The two boys stood apart, arms crossing over their chests and dangling at their sides and crossing again, as if tempted to reach out to one another. Raymond said something and Arthur looked down, dejected. Like he’s being chastised, I thought. Then it was Arthur’s turn to plead what I assumed was his case. He reached out a hand to Raymond, who jerked his away. A moment later, as if realizing he’d gone too far, Raymond reached back and squeezed Arthur’s forearm. Other students walked by this scene, uninterested. Arthur and Raymond spoke for another few minutes, then turned and began to walk toward the end of the school, through the faculty parking lot, past the dwindling construction, between the familiar gap in the trees that led down to Lake Mortimer. When they disappeared, I stepped out from behind the trailer and followed their footsteps until I got to my car. I opened the driver’s-side door and tossed my workbag into the passenger seat, then looked up at the tree line ahead, the shrubs thick with new growth. I told myself I should go home. I told myself I should make a drink, a big one. I told myself I should grade my essays, read my book, enjoy my solitude. I told myself that wasn’t my world out there beyond those trees, it was theirs. I told myself I didn’t belong where they were going. I told myself to go read some Yeats instead. I looked at my bag lying in the car and thought, again, of Arthur’s photographs, the secret life they briefly revealed, the body they taunted me with. I thought about the young in one another’s arms, about a tattered coat upon a stick. I thought about a boyhood I never had, the warped manhood I was stuck with for the rest of my life. Then I closed the car door and walked, as if it were any other afternoon, across the faculty parking lot and toward the path leading to the lake. Just to make sure everything was okay. Just to make sure Arthur didn’t need my help. Have a nice day, Mr. Mote, Corrie said as she walked past me and into a waiting van. I crossed over into the woods, and someone else called out my name. Dani. Where are you going, Sebastian? A walk, I said. Need to clear my head. With growing anxiety, I sensed the two boys getting farther and farther away. Were they even going to the lake? What if they were going somewhere else? Somewhere I wouldn’t be able to find them? Dani asked if I needed company. I shook my head, said I’d call her later, then continued on the gravel path that ran for a quarter-mile along Lake Mortimer Road before it banked right and dropped down a gentle hill. At the bottom, I slowed down, then stepped off the path into the woods, creeping, wincing at the crunch of underbrush and leafmeal, watching slices of Lake Mortimer reveal themselves through the scrim of trees. I tried to look for Arthur’s purple hoodie, for Raymond’s navy windbreaker. I saw a woman running peaceful laps around the lake, saw a man on the far shore step out onto his back porch with his phone. I looked and looked and looked, but I couldn’t see either of the boys. Then I realized the reason I couldn’t see them was because they weren’t walking. They were sitting, almost right below me, at the bottom of the slope on whose edge I stood, on a bench made of recycled plastic, not looking at each other but out at the rippling water. Raymond’s legs swung back and forth. I couldn’t see Arthur’s, then realized it was because he was sitting cross-legged on the bench. I took a few tender steps forward, bracing myself against a tree trunk, extending my neck to try and hear what they were saying. I heard, faintly, Raymond’s voice carried on the wind. They’re not just pictures, he said. They are, Arthur said. They are just pictures. I was just fooling around. I never met anyone. I thought it was just me, Raymond said. I didn’t think I’d have to share you with other people. I know I’m going to be at another school next year, but still. Arthur turned to look at Raymond. I’m sorry, he said. Maybe Trent was right about you, Raymond said. Don’t say that, Arthur said. Don’t say that. The afternoon jogger passed by, smiled, raised a hand in greeting. Let’s just enjoy these last few months, Arthur said. Let’s just enjoy prom. Please. I like you, you like me. Why can’t it just be that simple? That’s not what I want, Raymond said. I told you at the beginning. Arthur folded his arms and leaned forward. I watched his tiny shoulders shake. Raymond looked at Arthur, first with disappointment, then with a slowly growing sympathy like nothing I’d ever seen on a face so young. He put his hand on Arthur’s purple back. Rob and Trent and Mauricio, let them go on that shitty site, he said. You’re better than that. Just be here, in the real world. With me. Arthur looked up at Raymond. The boys shifted their bodies closer to one another. They started to kiss. I caught my breath, slipped back behind the tree. The private drama of two teens playing out by a lake after school—I had no reason to be here. No right. I was a wolf, a viper disrupting the natural order of this sylvan scene. No. I knew who I was. I was Giovanni the Lame and these two boys the clandestine lovers Paolo Malatesta and Francesca da Rimini, and it was a scene put down by Ingres, by Doré, by Delacroix. Me, hiding behind the arras, boiling with jealousy. Except I had no sword to unsheathe. A breeze crept through the woods and everything around me—the treetops, the surface of the lake, Arthur’s hair—trembled. The boys continued to kiss, and I felt as if I were watching a film about a life that should have been mine. I felt, in that moment, duped by fate. Arthur uncrossed his legs and lay them on Raymond’s lap. They stopped kissing long enough for Arthur to scoot closer, long enough for the afternoon jogger to pass. Then they continued. I watched Arthur and thought about my secret evening with that ratty purple hoodie. What I could have done with it but didn’t do. The memory of that moment, not just its tragedy but its tenderness, almost made me cry. At the very least, it was enough to push me to the surface of my afternoon delusion, enough to remind me of what I must look like clinging to a tree and spying on two teenage boys, enough to make me realize I needed to leave. Now. Slowly, I pushed back from the tree and began to crabwalk up to more level terrain. Then the ground gave way beneath my feet. I slipped down the embankment not with the justified anger of a royal cuckold but the juvenile idiocy of a court jester, tumbling through the screen of shrubbery, over branches that snapped like bones, sliding the last few seconds on my stomach, feet first, the way I used to slide down carpeted basement stairs as a kid. There was an explosion of birds, the landslide rush of dead leaves and soil. My dress shirt was forced up out of my pants and into the pits of my arms. I stopped when I hit the gravel path. I lay there on my stomach, back exposed to the early May sun, face hot with shame, right hip caked in something that smelled like the feces of a woodland animal. I felt the boys’ eyes and wished the ground would just keep giving way, that it wouldn’t stop until I’d been swallowed up and safely wrapped in its chilly depths. Mr. Mote, Arthur said. Whoa shit, Raymond said. I rose to my feet and tugged my shirt down over my exposed belly. I tried to act as if this were the most ordinary thing in the world, a high school teacher tumbling from the woods. Arthur and Raymond were still in one another’s arms. I definitely smelled shit. I had no idea what to say and neither, it seemed, did the boys, so I walked around and sat on the corner of the bench, brushing dirt off my pant legs and shirtsleeves. The boys slid over to make room for me, or to avoid the smell. Arthur asked if I was okay. Fine, I said, tasting soil inside my lower lip. Let’s go, Raymond said. He took Arthur’s hand and pulled him to his feet. I looked at Arthur, who stood clutching the strap of his bag as if bracing for a reason to dive inside it. Then I realized: He knows. He knows I heard everything. He doesn’t need to ask. I thought, again, of the photographs. This time, I thought of long fingers that weren’t mine roving along plump inner thighs, thought of a purple hoodie tossed carelessly on strange floors. Then, because I had to say something to counteract the shame I felt, something to tip the balance of power back in my favor, I asked: Did you have sex with my friend Oscar on that site? (I regretted the word, friend, which I swore I’d never use again after I’d first opened those text messages in traffic weeks earlier.) Arthur became a statue, as if all the life inside him had flushed out of a pinhole in the top of his head, leaving nothing behind but this vacuous shape, this empty shell of a boy. Then I saw water behind Arthur’s eyes and knew the boy was still in there. The mortification shocked me, and I wanted to reach out and grab my question and stuff it back in my dirt-filled mouth. Raymond yanked his hand out of Arthur’s. You’re disgusting, he said to Arthur, then turned and sprinted on the gravel path leading back to the road. I watched him go, then turned back to see Arthur shriveling next to me. His messenger bag was open in his lap, and I saw a trigonometry workbook, deodorant, a school-issued tablet, two bent sticks of unwrapped gum, a rolled-up shirt, a small baggie of pretzel rods. It was like peering at a tiny universe through a microscope. I put a hand on Arthur’s shoulder and stared into the thick, eggplant-purple crop of his freshly dyed hair. I’m sorry, I said. I’m so sorry. I should not have said that. Arthur stared at me over his shoulder. He no longer looked surprised, as he did in the Caravaggio painting. He looked furious. What were you doing up there? He was yelling, his voice thick with an authority, a righteousness that frightened me. What were you doing up there? Were you spying on us? This has nothing to do with you, Mr. Mote! Nothing at all! It’s none of your business what I do and with whom! Arthur stood up and threw his bag over his shoulder. Is that why you’ve been mad at me this whole time? Because you think I fucked your friend? I almost fell back from the force of that word coming from those lips. Arthur, I said. I reached out for a purple sleeve, but Arthur was already walking away. Leave me alone, Mr. Mote. Oscar’s right: You’re crazy. Then he ran up the road. I sat by the lake, on the bench. I folded my hands between my legs to try and keep them from shaking. The jogger came by again, flushed with exertion, and slowed as she passed. Everything’s fine, I said. Then, because I didn’t know what else to say: My son’s just upset is all. I sat there for another hour or so, staring at the water, until the jogger had left and the sky started to bruise milky-red. Then I willed my body to move, told myself I needed to get to my car, needed to get home, needed to take a shower. I made the slow, shameful walk back up the path through the woods and out into the open air along Lake Mortimer Road, where the faces behind each passing car seemed to judge me mercilessly. Back in the school parking lot, I started my car. I turned to see my workbag in the passenger seat, still there, a reminder of an entirely different life to which I could now never return.
I think: Wait until Sean hears about this. Then I catch myself.
Through the rearview mirror, I watch Sebastian and the boy continue to talk. They’re not. No. Impossible. Twice while Sebastian speaks, the boy turns to look at me. Then Sebastian pats the boy’s shoulders again, and the boy picks up his bike, wipes his face with his sleeves, and slowly pedals down the street. Sebastian stands at the end of the driveway and watches the boy for what seems longer than necessary. Then he turns to look at me looking at him.
Unexpected traffic, as expected, strikes again. It’s already taken fifteen minutes just to get out of the hills and onto Interstate 66. Then, once again, we’re stuck. I bring down the passenger-side window and stick my head out into the air, look up and down the road. We’re not going anywhere anytime soon.
“Shit,” Sebastian says through his teeth.
It’s his first word since getting in the car.
We inch forward along the road, my fragile stomach bracing itself for every stop and start, Sebastian flipping through radio stations with seemingly no intention of ever stopping. Taylor Swift. Donald Trump. Drake. Bernie Sanders. Peter Bjorn and John. Hillary Clinton. Finally, Sebastian settles on some piece of classical music.
I ask what all that back there was about.
“A student. I told you.”
“Well, yeah. But what was he doing in your driveway?”
Sebastian goes to switch lanes, realizes he can’t make it, groans. “His boyfriend lives in my neighborhood. They just broke up this morning. Had a fight, sounds like. He was biking around for a while, crying. He saw me when I came out to the car. He’s pretty upset. I told him he should go home and talk to his parents.”
“Plenty more rainbow fish in the sea.” I think of some of the messages we once shared. The photos. “How old is he, exactly?”
“Seventeen.”
Shit.
“I feel awful he’s hurting,” Sebastian said.
“Can you imagine us like that, at seventeen? Crying to teachers about boyfriends? Having boyfriends?”
“It’s different now.”
“Well, good for him.”
Sebastian stares off into traffic. We stay silent until we approach a green sign that says it’s two miles to the Metro station. Sebastian grips his hands tighter on the wheel. It looks like something’s boiling behind his eyes.
“How do you know each other, Oscar?”
Great.
“Him? Oh, it’s nothing. It’s silly.”
“Friends of friends, you said.”
Oh, man.
“Yeah.”
“What does that mean?”
Shit.
“Nothing.”
“No, seriously. I want to know. Where did you meet him?”
Here we go.
“Well. Actually. If you must know. He messaged me earlier this summer. On Cruze. At that wedding we were at, if you can believe it.”
Sebastian laughs. “Cruze? No. No, I don’t think so. He’s not the type.”
“Well he was that night. We chatted. He sent me messages, some pictures. He told me he was a freshman in college. We were supposed to meet up.”
“But?”
“But he chickened out. Never showed. Now I know why. That’s it. Nothing else. I moved on.”
“Pictures,” Sebastian says, as if it’s the first time he’s ever heard the word.
“Yeah. That’s how I recognized him. That’s how he recognized me.”
“Wait. You sent him pictures back? What kind of pictures?”
“Are you serious about this?”
“I just. I just don’t think he’d do something like that. He’s different. It must be someone else. You must be mixing him up with someone else. God knows you go through them.” Without warning, the passenger-side window starts to come up, giving me barely enough time to pull my arm in. “Let’s keep the window closed,” Sebastian says without looking at me.
I take my phone and cradle it in my palm, carefully, like a loaded gun, mulling over Sebastian’s unsubtle slut-shaming, over how close I just came to being mangled.
“I can show you the photos if you’d like,” I say.
“No!”
I can’t tell if Sebastian’s yelling at me or the lime-green motorcycle winding its way between tight spaces in traffic.
We inch along. Up ahead, I can make out the red-blue spangle of police lights.
“So,” Sebastian says.
“So.”
“Did you have sex with him?”
“Sex.”
“Yeah. With Arthur. With my student. Did you have sex with him?”
“What did I just tell you a minute ago?”
“Why don’t I believe you?” Sebastian scoffs, closes his eyes, shakes his head. Another minute of silence, then: “I should have just left you in that parking lot.”
“What?”
“You looked like a sick dog out there, you know? Like one of my mom’s old dogs. Barfing your brains out. Crying. You’re thirty-five years old. And now you’re hooking up with kids.”
“I told you, I—” But what’s the use?
Up ahead, another green sign. One mile to go.
“Look,” I say. “It’s obvious you don’t want me in this car, and I don’t want to be here with you. Just pull over onto the shoulder. Right here. I’ll walk the rest of the way. It’s not far.”
“I’m not pulling over here, Oscar. There’s nowhere for me to turn around.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
I open the door and get out. All I hear is Sebastian say my name, and then I’m gone, heading down the shoulder toward the Metro station. I turn around, watch Sebastian struggle to close the passenger-side door. A gap in traffic opens up in front of Sebastian’s car; the driver behind him lays on the horn. Sebastian, straining for the door handle, looks out at me (and my middle finger) with revulsion and rage.
Given the tall grass and the uneven embankment, it takes twenty minutes to hike up to the station. Making matters worse, trains are on a weekend schedule, which means my next ride back to civilization won’t arrive for another eighteen minutes. I take the stairs up to the platform, ignoring the looks of the museum-bound families and the weekend office workers, and find a spot on a bench toward the end of the platform. I could flag a cab or call a car, yes, but I’ve hardly any battery life in my phone.
And there’s something important I have to do.
I sign on to Cruze. My chat history unfolds on my screen, and there, from last July, sandwiched between an invitation for sex and grilled cheese with Martin and an early-morning discussion about Republican presidential primaries, is my conversation with A. I take screen shots of several photos, drop them into a fresh text to Sebastian, and send the package on its way.
Take that.
Soon my train pulls into the station with its familiar whine and hiss and we reverse course and head east along the curve of the interstate. Once we burrow underneath Arlington and the Potomac, my stomach starts to settle and my headache starts to subside.
Then I’m back in the city. I’m safe.
Rising from the depths into daylight, I check my phone. One percent battery. Two new texts. Not from Sebastian, from Bart.
The first: J and I are having a debate. Didn’t you meet this guy once?
The second: A link to a news item from a gay culture site. It’s not long; a bulletin tucked between a reality show recap and a photo gallery of shirtless celebrities. Not even the dignity of a photo. Just one headline and four sentences.
Gay Novelist Dies at 68
Sean Stokes, the novelist who transformed his sex life into thinly disguised fiction once called pornographic by critics, died at age 68. Stokes was popular in the 1970s for his detailed exploration of gay life in novels like 1975’s A Boyhood and its sequel, A Manhood (1978), as well as Skin Dreams (1980), 1001 Nights (1985), and The Little Deaths (1994). His most recent novel, Tiberius at the Villa (2015), was savaged by our critic, Robert Spellman (read it here). He is survived by his husband, the poet Jesse Board.
I read the paragraph three times. Four times. I keep reading it, standing there clueless on the sidewalk. I know as soon as I stop reading, as soon as I look up from my phone, it’ll be more than just words. It’ll be reality.
What the fuck is going on today?
My phone buzzes in my hand. For a second, I think it’s the precursor to some horrible public sorrow I can already feel at the top of my chest and the base of my throat. Not the first time I’ve barfed in public. But it’s just a Cruze message. A profile picture, once a torso, is now a face staring at me the same way it did earlier this morning. Its age now seventeen. Its location now forty-nine miles away. Its name still A.
Hey stranger, it reads.
Then my phone goes black.
Five
Tiberius at the Villa
Sebastian
A hand—one I’d seen stuffed into pockets, dragged through thick hair, rubbed against exhausted late-afternoon eyes, extended to receive graded essays, wrapped around my own in thanks and farewell—holds a cock. Squat, stubby, tapering off to a red arrowhead, networked with several veins, framed by artfully manicured pubic hair. The fingers around it open as if displaying a specimen for scientific study. A small plinth of flesh, taut and turgid, bisected by an opaque text box stating the obvious: So hard.
I put an immediate end to our after-school movies. I blamed it on administrative work, on nonexistent family issues. You’ve got your list, I told Arthur. You’re a scholar, and a scholar has to be comfortable pursuing his own passions. (I thought of the photos when I said this, the nudes that weren’t classically composed but urgently utilitarian, that didn’t celebrate the body but sold it. I regretted my choice of words.) Arthur was befuddled, but I didn’t relent. I couldn’t. Not because of the photos (which I’d deleted from my phone but not my mind) but because of what they meant. This boy is not the boy I thought he was.
They look, at first, like hills. An aerial shot of an alien landscape. It takes a moment for the buttocks to reveal themselves, abstracted by the angle from which they’ve been photographed, by the garish camera flash. Two thick gobbets of muscle and fat, freed of skinny jeans and underpants. Smooth at the crest, dark hairs guiding eyes toward a darker canyon.
I spent my afternoons at home, attacking the backyard with renewed vigor, ignoring the ever-persistent ache in my right shoulder. The labor kept me occupied, kept my mind off Arthur, off Oscar, off thoughts of the two of them together out there in the world, off feelings that something precious had been stolen from me. I told my father I was now thinking about building a fence around the house, something to keep all the deer shit away. Be my guest, my father said from his mountain retreat. But don’t be afraid to hire someone if you need help. I can do this alone, I said. I scoured how-to articles online, made recursive trips to the home improvement store. I brought home as many planks of pressure-treated cedar as I could fit in my car, carried them, one by one, into the backyard, stacked them compulsively into neat piles. Then I sat in the grass and worried my mind over what to do next, over the labor of actually seeing a project through to the end. I envisioned a ranch-style fence because it was the only type of fence I could conceive of building on my own. I saw it forced together with nails that would do just as well propping up a Grunewald Christ.
Chest hair, like delicate wings, arches in flight over tiny nipples. No face, just a squat neck, the hint of a rounded cherub chin, a soft body that leads down to a waistband of Skyler Mountain briefs. The glimpse of a bathroom counter: a sink’s scalloped edge, a toothpaste tube curled like a witch’s nail, the corner of a damp hand towel.
One Monday after class, as I packed my bag, Arthur came into my trailer without knocking. He held up a red envelope. Ivan’s Childhood, he said. I said nothing, just stood there looking at this boy who, in the last few weeks, had warped and melted like some abstract expressionist nightmare. I wasn’t daft, I knew my students had sex lives. Still. I’d thought of Arthur as someone free of that desperate need to be desired, to be seen. Now I knew he was just like the rest of us: bent and messy. Or maybe it was something else. Maybe I felt cheated. Maybe I wanted that body for myself. Did I? God. The lecherous high school teacher—a trope as old as Socrates. None of it made any sense, and so the only solution, as I saw it, was to dig a trench between the two of us. But a trench to keep him away from me, or me away from him, I wasn’t sure. You know, I said, I didn’t get much sleep this weekend. Calling it an early day and going straight to bed. Arthur was relentless. What about lunch tomorrow? Watch it on your own, I said. Tell me on Wednesday what you thought of it. Arthur stuffed the envelope back into his messenger bag and skulked over to the trailer door. Then he turned around. You’re upset with me, he said. But I’m not sure why. I’m not upset, Arthur. Is it from when I stopped by your house crying? Because that’s done with now, I’m over him. (I wondered: Over whom?) Arthur, I said, you should be spending more time after school with your peers anyway. I thought you were my peer, he said. I’m your teacher, I said. Oh, Arthur said.
It’s a simple portrait, fleshy and alive, plucked out of a Renaissance painting. The demure eyes, the lips open in a dumb impression of seduction, revealing the darkness inside which a wet tongue waits. It takes a moment for the entirety of the photo to make itself known. The viewer has to know where to look, what to look for, to understand this simple headshot captioned with the word Yum. Were it a painting by some modern-day Caravaggio, hung in a small corner of some obscure art museum, the card underneath its modest frame would read Arthur Ayer (b. 1998), Cherub with Cum.
Arthur was now the last to arrive and the first to leave class. He was now the last to arrive and the first to leave the Wednesday group meetings. The students were making decorations for prom and signs for June’s Capital Pride Parade from flimsy craft-store paperboard I’d brought in. mortimer secondary lgbtq students. proud to be a mortimer secondary student. we love all our students. gay is ok at mss. in memory: thomas pitt. This last was Arthur’s.
During a guest lecture on visual literacy by the digital librarian, I sat off in a corner like the class dunce and graded reading quizzes. Occasionally, I stopped to rub my sore shoulder, search my palms for splinters, look at Arthur in the second row staring at the artwork on my trailer wall. I saw the light of his phone go off in his pocket, imagined an incoming text from Oscar soliciting more pictures, more messages. I took out my phone and, under cover of graded papers, created a new Cruze profile. No name, no photograph, no stats. I found A. immediately, five feet away. I saw the small green light. I thought about typing something—Pay attention to Ms. Edison—when a message appeared at the top of my screen. Philip98, five miles away. Sup. Arthur turned his head at the sound. I flushed red, lowered the volume on my phone, logged off, and deleted the app. Arthur stared at me for another moment, then turned his attention back to Ms. Edison, who was patiently guiding the class through the last five minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
On a Friday afternoon, three weeks before senior prom, I stepped out of my trailer into a world rushing with wind. Inside my workbag were short essays on King Lear and a catalog of J.M.W. Turner seascapes I intended to flip through over the weekend. I walked across the blacktop with its potholes like bullet wounds, thinking about other people’s happiness. Then I saw Arthur and Raymond over by the flagpole. I stopped, slipped behind the flimsy siding of T-1, and watched. The two boys stood apart, arms crossing over their chests and dangling at their sides and crossing again, as if tempted to reach out to one another. Raymond said something and Arthur looked down, dejected. Like he’s being chastised, I thought. Then it was Arthur’s turn to plead what I assumed was his case. He reached out a hand to Raymond, who jerked his away. A moment later, as if realizing he’d gone too far, Raymond reached back and squeezed Arthur’s forearm. Other students walked by this scene, uninterested. Arthur and Raymond spoke for another few minutes, then turned and began to walk toward the end of the school, through the faculty parking lot, past the dwindling construction, between the familiar gap in the trees that led down to Lake Mortimer. When they disappeared, I stepped out from behind the trailer and followed their footsteps until I got to my car. I opened the driver’s-side door and tossed my workbag into the passenger seat, then looked up at the tree line ahead, the shrubs thick with new growth. I told myself I should go home. I told myself I should make a drink, a big one. I told myself I should grade my essays, read my book, enjoy my solitude. I told myself that wasn’t my world out there beyond those trees, it was theirs. I told myself I didn’t belong where they were going. I told myself to go read some Yeats instead. I looked at my bag lying in the car and thought, again, of Arthur’s photographs, the secret life they briefly revealed, the body they taunted me with. I thought about the young in one another’s arms, about a tattered coat upon a stick. I thought about a boyhood I never had, the warped manhood I was stuck with for the rest of my life. Then I closed the car door and walked, as if it were any other afternoon, across the faculty parking lot and toward the path leading to the lake. Just to make sure everything was okay. Just to make sure Arthur didn’t need my help. Have a nice day, Mr. Mote, Corrie said as she walked past me and into a waiting van. I crossed over into the woods, and someone else called out my name. Dani. Where are you going, Sebastian? A walk, I said. Need to clear my head. With growing anxiety, I sensed the two boys getting farther and farther away. Were they even going to the lake? What if they were going somewhere else? Somewhere I wouldn’t be able to find them? Dani asked if I needed company. I shook my head, said I’d call her later, then continued on the gravel path that ran for a quarter-mile along Lake Mortimer Road before it banked right and dropped down a gentle hill. At the bottom, I slowed down, then stepped off the path into the woods, creeping, wincing at the crunch of underbrush and leafmeal, watching slices of Lake Mortimer reveal themselves through the scrim of trees. I tried to look for Arthur’s purple hoodie, for Raymond’s navy windbreaker. I saw a woman running peaceful laps around the lake, saw a man on the far shore step out onto his back porch with his phone. I looked and looked and looked, but I couldn’t see either of the boys. Then I realized the reason I couldn’t see them was because they weren’t walking. They were sitting, almost right below me, at the bottom of the slope on whose edge I stood, on a bench made of recycled plastic, not looking at each other but out at the rippling water. Raymond’s legs swung back and forth. I couldn’t see Arthur’s, then realized it was because he was sitting cross-legged on the bench. I took a few tender steps forward, bracing myself against a tree trunk, extending my neck to try and hear what they were saying. I heard, faintly, Raymond’s voice carried on the wind. They’re not just pictures, he said. They are, Arthur said. They are just pictures. I was just fooling around. I never met anyone. I thought it was just me, Raymond said. I didn’t think I’d have to share you with other people. I know I’m going to be at another school next year, but still. Arthur turned to look at Raymond. I’m sorry, he said. Maybe Trent was right about you, Raymond said. Don’t say that, Arthur said. Don’t say that. The afternoon jogger passed by, smiled, raised a hand in greeting. Let’s just enjoy these last few months, Arthur said. Let’s just enjoy prom. Please. I like you, you like me. Why can’t it just be that simple? That’s not what I want, Raymond said. I told you at the beginning. Arthur folded his arms and leaned forward. I watched his tiny shoulders shake. Raymond looked at Arthur, first with disappointment, then with a slowly growing sympathy like nothing I’d ever seen on a face so young. He put his hand on Arthur’s purple back. Rob and Trent and Mauricio, let them go on that shitty site, he said. You’re better than that. Just be here, in the real world. With me. Arthur looked up at Raymond. The boys shifted their bodies closer to one another. They started to kiss. I caught my breath, slipped back behind the tree. The private drama of two teens playing out by a lake after school—I had no reason to be here. No right. I was a wolf, a viper disrupting the natural order of this sylvan scene. No. I knew who I was. I was Giovanni the Lame and these two boys the clandestine lovers Paolo Malatesta and Francesca da Rimini, and it was a scene put down by Ingres, by Doré, by Delacroix. Me, hiding behind the arras, boiling with jealousy. Except I had no sword to unsheathe. A breeze crept through the woods and everything around me—the treetops, the surface of the lake, Arthur’s hair—trembled. The boys continued to kiss, and I felt as if I were watching a film about a life that should have been mine. I felt, in that moment, duped by fate. Arthur uncrossed his legs and lay them on Raymond’s lap. They stopped kissing long enough for Arthur to scoot closer, long enough for the afternoon jogger to pass. Then they continued. I watched Arthur and thought about my secret evening with that ratty purple hoodie. What I could have done with it but didn’t do. The memory of that moment, not just its tragedy but its tenderness, almost made me cry. At the very least, it was enough to push me to the surface of my afternoon delusion, enough to remind me of what I must look like clinging to a tree and spying on two teenage boys, enough to make me realize I needed to leave. Now. Slowly, I pushed back from the tree and began to crabwalk up to more level terrain. Then the ground gave way beneath my feet. I slipped down the embankment not with the justified anger of a royal cuckold but the juvenile idiocy of a court jester, tumbling through the screen of shrubbery, over branches that snapped like bones, sliding the last few seconds on my stomach, feet first, the way I used to slide down carpeted basement stairs as a kid. There was an explosion of birds, the landslide rush of dead leaves and soil. My dress shirt was forced up out of my pants and into the pits of my arms. I stopped when I hit the gravel path. I lay there on my stomach, back exposed to the early May sun, face hot with shame, right hip caked in something that smelled like the feces of a woodland animal. I felt the boys’ eyes and wished the ground would just keep giving way, that it wouldn’t stop until I’d been swallowed up and safely wrapped in its chilly depths. Mr. Mote, Arthur said. Whoa shit, Raymond said. I rose to my feet and tugged my shirt down over my exposed belly. I tried to act as if this were the most ordinary thing in the world, a high school teacher tumbling from the woods. Arthur and Raymond were still in one another’s arms. I definitely smelled shit. I had no idea what to say and neither, it seemed, did the boys, so I walked around and sat on the corner of the bench, brushing dirt off my pant legs and shirtsleeves. The boys slid over to make room for me, or to avoid the smell. Arthur asked if I was okay. Fine, I said, tasting soil inside my lower lip. Let’s go, Raymond said. He took Arthur’s hand and pulled him to his feet. I looked at Arthur, who stood clutching the strap of his bag as if bracing for a reason to dive inside it. Then I realized: He knows. He knows I heard everything. He doesn’t need to ask. I thought, again, of the photographs. This time, I thought of long fingers that weren’t mine roving along plump inner thighs, thought of a purple hoodie tossed carelessly on strange floors. Then, because I had to say something to counteract the shame I felt, something to tip the balance of power back in my favor, I asked: Did you have sex with my friend Oscar on that site? (I regretted the word, friend, which I swore I’d never use again after I’d first opened those text messages in traffic weeks earlier.) Arthur became a statue, as if all the life inside him had flushed out of a pinhole in the top of his head, leaving nothing behind but this vacuous shape, this empty shell of a boy. Then I saw water behind Arthur’s eyes and knew the boy was still in there. The mortification shocked me, and I wanted to reach out and grab my question and stuff it back in my dirt-filled mouth. Raymond yanked his hand out of Arthur’s. You’re disgusting, he said to Arthur, then turned and sprinted on the gravel path leading back to the road. I watched him go, then turned back to see Arthur shriveling next to me. His messenger bag was open in his lap, and I saw a trigonometry workbook, deodorant, a school-issued tablet, two bent sticks of unwrapped gum, a rolled-up shirt, a small baggie of pretzel rods. It was like peering at a tiny universe through a microscope. I put a hand on Arthur’s shoulder and stared into the thick, eggplant-purple crop of his freshly dyed hair. I’m sorry, I said. I’m so sorry. I should not have said that. Arthur stared at me over his shoulder. He no longer looked surprised, as he did in the Caravaggio painting. He looked furious. What were you doing up there? He was yelling, his voice thick with an authority, a righteousness that frightened me. What were you doing up there? Were you spying on us? This has nothing to do with you, Mr. Mote! Nothing at all! It’s none of your business what I do and with whom! Arthur stood up and threw his bag over his shoulder. Is that why you’ve been mad at me this whole time? Because you think I fucked your friend? I almost fell back from the force of that word coming from those lips. Arthur, I said. I reached out for a purple sleeve, but Arthur was already walking away. Leave me alone, Mr. Mote. Oscar’s right: You’re crazy. Then he ran up the road. I sat by the lake, on the bench. I folded my hands between my legs to try and keep them from shaking. The jogger came by again, flushed with exertion, and slowed as she passed. Everything’s fine, I said. Then, because I didn’t know what else to say: My son’s just upset is all. I sat there for another hour or so, staring at the water, until the jogger had left and the sky started to bruise milky-red. Then I willed my body to move, told myself I needed to get to my car, needed to get home, needed to take a shower. I made the slow, shameful walk back up the path through the woods and out into the open air along Lake Mortimer Road, where the faces behind each passing car seemed to judge me mercilessly. Back in the school parking lot, I started my car. I turned to see my workbag in the passenger seat, still there, a reminder of an entirely different life to which I could now never return.
