Ways and means, p.4
Ways and Means, page 4
Alistair stared at the hand Mark was holding.
“And I think you might love me too.”
Alistair closed his eyes. When he opened them they were damp. Mark had never seen this emotion from Alistair, and he would have been glad of it if he didn’t suspect, for reasons he couldn’t pinpoint, that it had causes beyond the things they were saying.
“Have you ever thought?” he said. He felt himself moving his neck, as if testing the fit of a collar. “Have you ever considered?”
“Not now,” Alistair said.
Mark nodded. “You’re leaving. Checking out for a while.”
“Maybe for a long while.”
“How long?”
“Long enough.”
They fell silent. Mark had an instinct to keep talking, explaining, preempting, convincing. But he felt he’d already said too much. In his effort to overcome his native shyness he’d taken on a gabbiness that was foreign to him and that he didn’t much like. He felt embarrassed. He drew his thumbs over the back of Alistair’s hand, he pushed at his palm with his fingers. The gentleness of this touch struck him as being worlds away from the tawdriness of their usual exertions, when they would pass Elijah back and forth as if he were a piece of gym equipment. Being intransigent tops they’d never been inside each other, had never forayed into each other’s mucoid inner regions (regions as mysterious to themselves as to other people), had never summoned the will to let the other’s will prevail, and as he explored Alistair’s hand he felt that this touch, for all its timidity and for all the ribaldry of their past encounters, was the closest they’d ever come, really, to fucking.
Alistair took his hand from Mark’s and resumed scanning the room.
“You’re looking for your jacket,” Mark said levelly, “aren’t you.”
Alistair widened his eyes and nodded uncertainly, as if he’d remembered only now that he’d left it. He was a terrible actor. “Where is it?”
“In the other room.”
Alistair sprang up, but Mark stood and put out his hand. “I’ll get it.”
He went to the bedroom. In a delayed response to the utter failure of his proposal his heart began racing and his legs wobbling. He suspected he would be replaying this conversation weeks, months, years down the road, taunting himself with it on sleepless nights. He pulled Alistair’s jacket from the box and raised it to his nose; its scent had already faded. As he was folding it and draping it over his arm his hand passed over an object, soft and bulky, in one of the pockets. He spent a moment in perilous, resentment-fueled consideration, then slid his hand inside. If Alistair refused him access to his deeper reaches then he would infringe on his privacy in whatever petty, irrelevant, meaningless way he could.
In the pocket was a creased, unsealed white envelope. Mark crept his fingers under the flap and pushed it up. Inside was a stack of green bills, all $100s. He estimated, with clumsy, lurching guesswork, that they added up to five, maybe ten, thousand. He could think of no other source for this money than Nikolai. But the work Alistair had been doing for Nikolai didn’t strike him as the kind that paid in such large installments, or in cash—there was something dirty, déclassé, about this paper. He wondered if the cash explained, somehow, why Alistair had decided working for Nikolai wasn’t his thing. But after a moment these thoughts subsided in the face of the signal one, the painful one. Alistair had come for his money. He’d come for no reason besides. While Mark had been making a fool of himself by professing his feelings Alistair had simply been biding his time.
He returned the envelope to the pocket. He went back to the living room. Alistair was standing by the front door, holding his duffel. He watched Mark approach as if he were a relay runner waiting for the baton.
“Here,” Mark said. He made no effort to hide his indignation.
Alistair took the jacket. He moved his hand with attempted subtlety to the offending pocket and squeezed. “I think we both have a lot to think about,” he said.
Mark gave no reply.
“If you don’t hear from me for a while, it’s because I’m thinking.”
“I don’t expect to hear from you.”
Alistair’s eyes were still damp. He moved his lips.
“Have a nice time at home.”
Alistair looked at him fixedly, as if he were about to sketch him, and opened his mouth to say something. But then he dipped his head in goodbye, turned to the door, and left.
For the next hour Mark sat on the couch in silence. He distracted himself by making an intensive study of the sounds outside his windows: buses hissing, trucks gurgling phlegmily, planes keening as they crisscrossed through the air, carrying people and freight, facilitating exchange. When he grew too used to these sounds he turned on the TV. CNN was showing a clip of Trump speaking at a recent debate. Nothing could have suited Mark’s masochistic purposes better, he felt, than the sound of this man’s pitiless hectoring.
“Our country and our trade and our deals and most importantly our jobs are going to hell,” Trump told the moderator.
Mark put his face in his hands. All his adult life he’d believed that deep down inside him lay the kernel of one greatness, one glorious offering, and that when he found it and formed it and brought it forth to the world it would make up for all his cowardliness, his paralysis, his passivity. For years he’d believed this gift was a book, and even as this belief had come to seem more and more delusional he’d held on to it for lack of any other object, any other bright light, to organize his life around. And then he’d met Alistair McCabe and decided he’d been wrong, his gift was plainer, his offering was his love. But Alistair didn’t want this gift, and he had no one else to give it to, and he had nothing else to give. He’d been living in a fantasy, and now the fantasy was over.
“Our country is in serious, serious trouble,” Trump said. “It’s a bubble and it’s going to explode, believe me.”
Mark resumed packing. He waited with dread for Elijah’s return. He did his best to push thoughts of Alistair away, but one kept nagging at him: not his disbelief at Alistair’s hard-heartedness, not his undiminished yearning for him, but his sense, which rose like debris from his subconscious and emerged more fully as the minutes passed, that Alistair had been afraid of something.
──────
“You awake?”
Elijah opened his eyes. At the edge of consciousness he recalled a dream of the ocean. But what he’d taken for the sound of waves, he realized now, was actually the sound of Jay flipping pages. Jay was sitting up in bed, across the room, with some paperbacks and his gray five-subject notebook splayed before him. Elijah shut his eyes and pressed his face into the couch. He wanted to return to the ocean, to its salt, its sun, its cool uterine weightlessness.
“I’ll get you coffee,” Jay said, sliding off the bed. “With sugar! For my poor friend.”
“Thank you.”
Elijah sat up. He couldn’t tell what time it was. Jay’s studio, on the top floor of a Midtown walk-up, had only two windows and they both looked onto the air shaft. At all hours of the day it looked either very early or very late. “How long have I been asleep?”
“Since we graduated,” Jay said. In the narrow kitchen off the living-room-bedroom, under the harsh white light of a naked bulb, he dumped sugar from a Domino cylinder into a mug. “You’ve had your beauty rest.”
Elijah pieced together the preceding hours. He’d left his own couch at six a.m., taken a car to Jay’s, spent some thirty minutes filling him in on his fight with Mark, and then, apparently, fallen asleep on another couch. He had a newly sharpened sense of himself as a vagabond, a supplicant feeding on others’ hospitality, roaming in search of soft surfaces on which to lay his weary head.
Jay handed him the coffee and leaped back onto the bed. “The rest of us,” he said, “can do with less sleep.”
Elijah, in his grogginess, tried to smile reassuringly. Jay wasn’t unattractive—in his way he was dashing, almost princely—but he wasn’t exactly an ideal image to wake up to. He had penetrating blue eyes and a bony, angular frame; he wore his sandy hair buzzed at the sides and floppy and center-parted on top, if only to give himself something to shake as he talked; and when his mouth wasn’t hung open in boredom or arranged into an impish grin it was wrapped around his USB-chargeable vape. As of last summer he also had braces, though on this point he couldn’t be blamed. During his childhood his parents had neglected to fix his mangled dentition and in his twenties he’d been too poor to do it himself. Only after he’d met Howie Gallion, a year earlier, and come into his patronage had Jay had enough money to see a dentist, but by then his teeth were too far gone for Invisalign—something about his incisors. He looked at Elijah now and smiled happily and metallically. He held up one of the paperbacks: Nietzsche.
“Your favorite,” Elijah said.
“I don’t have favorites,” Jay said.
Jay returned to his notebook. He was always scribbling passages from things he read, jotting ideas, refining his strange worldview, more recently making notes toward his mysterious art project, which, like the braces, Howie had promised to pay for. Elijah was curious about the contents of the notebook—his curiosities were wide, impartial, varied—but he respected Jay’s privacy, and he was somewhat scared to look at it.
“Listen to this,” Jay said. He read a Nietzsche quote he’d transcribed. “Untroubled, scornful, outrageous—that is how wisdom wants us to be: she is a woman and never loves anyone but a warrior.”
“Very sweet,” Elijah said.
“I think you misheard.”
“Talking about the coffee.”
“And this,” Jay said. “I am opposed to the pernicious modern effeminacy of feeling.”
“I’m confused,” Elijah said. “Wisdom is female—but female feeling is bad?”
Jay looked at the notebook with a crestfallen expression. He was thirty, he was fifteen: holing up in his room, flying out occasionally to impress and distress, balking at the unmoved faces of his listeners, racing back to his bed flustered and flushed. He pulled his vape from his pocket. A little blue light on the end of the pen glowed as he inhaled, then dimmed as he breathed out. “I see your point.”
“I’m not smart enough,” Elijah said. “You know this.”
Jay flashed a silvery smile, half of pity, half of agreement. “You have other kinds of intelligence.”
“Don’t be so nice.”
While Jay sank back into Nietzsche, whom he referred to as “the Neetch,” Elijah sat forward and checked his reflection. He pushed back his dark hair, taking succor from its thickness. He reveled in his runner’s leanness, the chiseled contours of his arms. He sat back and sipped his coffee. Who could begrudge him his vanity, he thought, when he had so little else going for him? Economically he was powerless, artistically he was a failure, intellectually he was a dim light: he knew this. But on this last point he felt a perverse pride, a limp and luxurious self-acceptance. He’d never had much interest in ideas. He liked colors, lines, feelings, sensations; ideas for him had a way of hardening these things, blanching them, drying them out. Why Jay, who pretended to intellectual distinction, had ever taken a liking to Elijah was a mystery, just as it was a mystery why Elijah had taken a liking to him. Half the ideas Jay spouted Elijah couldn’t make sense of and the other half he urged him, with a hushing voice and flapping hands, to tone down. But he was content to let these mysteries be. He and Jay liked each other without quite understanding each other, and this seemed to him as good a foundation for a friendship as any.
He rested the mug on the floor (Jay had no tables) and went to the bathroom, which belonged on a blog about the horrors of Craigslist. Grouting black with dirt, irremovable rust stains on the toilet bowl, thin wooden shelves that looked to be held up by paint. He rinsed his face, ran a wet finger over his teeth, gargled and spat. He watched a cockroach scurry under the moisture-bubbled vanity. There was no logical explanation for why Jay lived in this apartment. Howie paid for Jay’s life and as Elijah understood it the carte was blanche. Jay could easily ask for an upgrade; he could more easily live with Howie in Howie’s penthouse a few blocks west. But Jay seemed to value his independence and he seemed to prefer his independence dingy, and Elijah both respected this and resented it (in Elijah’s experience these feelings usually came as a pair). He sometimes wondered who he himself might have become, what he himself might have been motivated to accomplish, if he’d left Mark’s plush nest and elected for a grubby monastic existence much like Jay’s. If Mark followed through on his pledge to end their lease he would soon find out.
When he emerged from the bathroom Jay had put aside the Neetch and was waiting for him. He patted the bed but Elijah returned to the couch.
“Ready to talk when you are,” Jay said brightly.
“There’s nothing to talk about,” Elijah said. “It’s over. Even if he can’t say it, even if he pretends all he wants is a break, it’s over. And now I’m homeless.”
“You really think he’s serious about moving out?”
“He’s very unhappy.”
“Aren’t you unhappy?”
“Of course,” Elijah said. “But my unhappiness has no threat attached to it. My unhappiness has no consequences.”
Jay sucked on his vape. He disliked Mark, if with much less fervor than Mark disliked him, and he clearly fantasized about a scenario in which he and Elijah palled around, free of commitments and attachments, like a gay Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, as they had at Vassar. But he would never outright say this. He was delicate with Elijah if with no one or nothing else. “If Mark is as serious about ending the lease as he is about his writing,” he said, “it’ll take him two years to call a mover. And then another two years to book them.”
Elijah had to concede that Jay had a point. But this depressed him as much as it reassured him. “So what, then? We stay together, making each other miserable forever?”
“Unless you decide your unhappiness does have consequences,” Jay said. “If you’re so unhappy you could leave, you know—of your own volition.”
“I don’t have any money,” Elijah said. “And I love him.”
“I’d encourage you,” Jay said, “to consider the ordering of those sentences.”
Elijah did love Mark, more than Jay knew, more than Mark knew, more than he himself cared to admit. But it was also true that the meagerness of his savings was a factor in his reluctance to end things. Every year his freelance graphic design work brought him somewhere in the vicinity of $20,000. Most of this, in an effort to shore up some sense of financial independence, he spent, and over the years he’d managed to set aside only $7,000. If Mark kept his word he’d be forced to find his own place, and between the security deposit he’d have to put down and the new furniture he’d have to buy and the cost of the movers he’d burn through his money in the first month, after which he’d have to ramp up his freelancing considerably just to keep a roof (he imagined a low, water-stained ceiling, bordered by nicked and overpainted crown molding, in some charmless corner of Brooklyn or, God help him, Queens) over his head. He resented the scant time he put into his job already. The thought of spending forty, fifty, sixty hours a week designing corporate slide decks, medical brochures, wedding invitations, personal websites, making sense of incoherent briefs and reliably grotesque “mood boards,” fighting email wars of attrition with clients who knew everything about their “vision” except how to describe it, sitting in on meetings with skeletal marketing teams at poorly funded, badly conceived, nowhere-going startups: it made him want to drink bleach. He was content to do this work only as long as he didn’t have to rely on it, only as long as it constituted a mere performance of self-sufficiency, only as long as it remained, in the time it occupied, secondary to his art, his failure to produce art notwithstanding. He was unhappy, to be sure, but he didn’t trust himself to survive on his own.
“It just makes me sad,” Jay said. “I think you’re talented. I think you could be great. But I see you perched in Mark’s apartment, like a parrot in a cage, and I wonder if he’s holding you back.”
“It’s not his fault,” Elijah said. “He’s as supportive as anyone could be. If I couldn’t make it as an artist with his support, I never will.”
“I’m not convinced,” Jay said. “He’s a good guy, sure. I guess that matters to some people. But don’t you think his support comes with stipulations?”
“Like faithfulness?” Elijah said. “Then how do you explain Alistair?”
“He wants you to be a good guy too,” Jay said. “Clean and wholesome. When he brings you around his family he wants you in your polo shirt and khakis, commenting on the weather, complimenting his mother’s canapés, clapping when his father taps the ball into the hole.”
“Mark hates his family.”
“He pretends to,” Jay said. “All that queasiness about his father’s trailer parks. You’ll notice it didn’t stop him from taking the money. I have no sympathy for people who pooh-pooh the supposedly evil enterprises that they’re completely parasitic upon. Make your choice!”
When it came to Jay, here lay the rub: for every ten off-the-wall things he said, one stuck.
“And in any case he’s just like them,” Jay said. “Decent, decent.”
“What’s wrong with decent?”
Jay looked at Elijah questioningly, almost forlornly, and then shook his hair. “Has it ever occurred to you that Mark’s support is dependent on your not succeeding?” he said. “That, if you made something brilliant, he’d resent you?”
“I seem to have made him resent me without making anything brilliant,” Elijah said.
“That he wouldn’t be able to stand it? The sight of you coming into your own?”
“I wouldn’t know. I haven’t come into my own.”
“That’s what I’m saying,” Jay said. “I think you stay in your cage because you know if you leave you’ll upset him. You think you’ll lose everything. But what you’ll lose isn’t everything. I think you have much more to gain.”
