Across a Green Ocean (7 page)

Michael turned to see a young man, somewhat preppy-looking in a polo shirt and khaki pants, blond hair gleaming in the sun. “It does,” he replied. “I’m supposed to meet someone on Seventh Avenue, but I guess I won’t make it.”

“Me too,” the man said. “But I’m getting hungry. You want to grab a bite on this side of the street?”

Michael only looked at him for a few more seconds before agreeing. He wondered how long this man had been following him before picking him out among so many fine, shirtless specimens. It felt good to have been chosen.

Over lunch, at a fancy place he’d walked by many times but had never gone into, he found out that David was a lawyer and had grown up in Connecticut, and that his father, now retired, had also been a lawyer. Michael didn’t say anything about his family, not even his sister’s profession (Emily’s work was such that he didn’t think she and David were of the same tribe). By the end, when David took out his wallet, Michael let him pay.

On the street outside, when David turned to him, Michael expected him to say he’d had a good time, maybe even suggest that they do it again sometime. Instead, David said, “You want to go back to my place?”

In the cab, Michael reflected that this wasn’t so different from a normal hookup, of which he’d had a few—in college, when it had been new and exhilarating, and then after he’d moved to the city, where it seemed like a cliché. It was a bit strange, though, to be doing it not after an evening of drinking, to be seeing the other person’s face clearly, to be removing your clothes in the light rather than the dark. It was stranger still to wake up in that other person’s apartment, not in the middle of the night or in the grainy regret of morning, but with late-afternoon sunshine stippling both your naked bodies.

David was still sleeping, and Michael looked at him more closely. Without his glasses, his face looked younger, and he slept with one hand curled under his cheek, like a child. His body was long and concave in the middle, where the smattering of fair hair on his chest turned thicker and curlier. His penis was somewhat unremarkable, except for how quickly it had lengthened in Michael’s hand; now it was curled up against the inside of his thigh like a snail.

Michael got up to get a drink of water, but it was really a pretext to examine the rest of the situation he had found himself in. The apartment was several times the size of his own, and appointed sparsely with modern-looking furniture. What looked like actual art, rather than prints, hung on the walls. More significantly, the place looked like it belonged to an adult, an adult with money. At twenty-five, Michael was still used to secondhand furniture and multiple roommates, buying expired items and day-old bread from the grocery store in order to make the next rent check. He had only just started living without a roommate, because more than one person in the space in which he lived would be considered a fire hazard.

When he opened David’s refrigerator, he found little food, but a great deal of condiments and individual glass bottles of sparkling water. He opened one of the bottles and took it back into the bedroom, where David was awake and smiling lazily at him. Without asking, David took the bottle from him and drank long and hard. It struck Michael as a more intimate act than any of the ones they had experienced with each other.

In the month that followed, he found himself spending most nights with David, or on rare occasions, if they were downtown, back at Michael’s place. At first, Michael was ashamed of his apartment, its cramped size and lack of air-conditioning, the unscrub-bable stains in the bathroom. There was nowhere to sit except on the frameless futon, as if it were a life raft. So, they usually ended up at David’s, and if Michael came over early, he’d hang out in the bar next door, because he didn’t have a key to David’s place and he thought the doorman looked at him funny.

One day, Michael had just finished sucking David off, David’s taste still in the back of his mouth, when his cell phone rang. He wasn’t going to pick up, but he saw that it was Emily. Clearing his throat, he answered. Her voice was strangely calm, as if she were reporting something that had happened in another country. Although he comprehended what she was saying, his eyes were fixated on his own hand, lying on David’s hipbone, like a long, pale lizard. It was impossible that in one moment he should feel so complete, and then in the next, absolutely empty.

Without telling David what was wrong, he dressed and left the apartment, walked twenty blocks downtown in a daze before remembering he had told Emily that he would meet her at the train station. That night, at his mother’s house, after his mother and sister had gone to sleep, he finally called David to tell him what had happened. He did not say he would see David when he got back. As if an outsider to the situation, he listened to David struggle to find the right words to say and give up, a pattern that he would later recognize with other friends, coworkers, and people he didn’t know at his father’s funeral.

After ending the call with David, Michael sat in his old bedroom, still trying to feel something. He thought of his mother and sister in their own rooms, the efficient walls of silence that surrounded them all. Finally, he was able to dredge up an old hurt that had long since scabbed over but would twinge if he prodded it hard enough. It was much easier to feel anger at his father, and something his father had done years ago, than at the randomness of his father’s death.

Michael had seen his father two weekends earlier, one of the rare times he’d gone back home that summer—partly to escape the heat in the city and partly to get some perspective on his relationship with David, which was turning out to be much more intense than he’d expected. At the time, David’s closeness had been part of everything that had felt too close about the city; simply another thing that he needed to get away from. His father had been his usual taciturn self, glowering over something as minor as a creaky door hinge or a dead patch of grass on the lawn. He’d also been particularly concerned about a crape myrtle tree in the backyard that had caught a disease and had consequently lost all of its leaves, appearing as though it were in the dead of winter. Michael’s father talked to him about what to do with the tree and finally announced he was going to cut it down; Michael had agreed. That was the essence of the last, illuminating conversation he had with his father.

At the funeral, since he didn’t speak Chinese, most of the people there bypassed him. Emily seemed to be handling everything in her usual, capable manner, and he felt unnecessary, like an uninvited guest. So instead he snuck away early on with Amy Bradley, who had come in from Boston, where she attended design school. They went out and sat on the back porch.

“How’re you holding up?” Amy asked.

“Could be better,” Michael replied. “Any chance you got a cigarette on you?”

Amy grinned. “I have something better.” She extracted a neatly rolled joint from her pocket. “I thought you might need this.”

For a moment, Michael hesitated, knowing it wouldn’t look good if he were caught smoking pot at his father’s funeral. What would his mother think? But what the hell—next to Emily, he looked like a delinquent, anyway.

Passing the joint back and forth reminded him of when he and Amy were teenagers, parked in the woods in her parents’ car, or up in her room. They spent afternoons at her house with pads of heavy Manila paper, Amy sketching clothing designs and Michael sketching her as she sketched. She was already into fashion then, making clothes on her own sewing machine and using Michael as a dress form.
You make the perfect model,
she gushed, which he interpreted to mean that he had the figure of an anorexic, prepubescent girl, and wasn’t sure if he should take it as a compliment or not. Still, he stood motionless for hours as she pinned and re-pinned.

You would not have known Amy was talented in that arena from the way she dressed at school: torn black shirts, ripped black jeans, boots that looked like she would kick someone’s head in if they looked at her wrong. She convinced Michael to join her in a social experiment, in which they wore their clothes inside out for a week. No one noticed, which Amy said was the whole point. When Amy cut her hair and dyed it black, people said they looked like twins, which they did not bother to dignify with an answer. Aside from the fact that Amy wasn’t Chinese, she was short and her body full of curves that she tried to hide beneath her shapeless dark outfits. She decreed that she and Michael should kiss each other on the cheek, twice, whenever they ran into each other in the halls (
So European,
Amy had said). No one seemed to notice that either.

Early in their junior year in high school, Michael discovered that Amy was in love with him. She had kissed him on the mouth one night, when her parents were out and they’d broken into her father’s liquor cabinet. One moment they’d been laughing about Courtney Snell’s ridiculous answer in social studies class (“Where do Chicanos come from, Courtney?” “Um, Chicago?”), and then Amy pressed her lips so fleetingly to his that he thought he had imagined it.

“Did you feel anything?” Amy asked hopefully.

Michael shook his head, although he
had
felt something, besides the burn of bourbon from Amy’s lips. What he had felt was disappointment. He had been disappointed that it had been Amy who had kissed him, not Peter Lawrence, the slender, brown-haired boy who sat in front of him in math class and smelled not only like gym socks, but something that made his very skin tingle. The other time he’d felt that sensation, like an itch somewhere that couldn’t be scratched, was when he was twelve and had been spying over the fence next door. Scott Bradley, Amy’s brother, who was Emily’s age, was swimming in the pool. His body looked long and tantalizing beneath the surface, the points of his shoulder blades glinting through the water. Just then Michael’s father, coming home from work, saw Michael at the top of the fence—although not what he was looking at—and yelled at him for doing something so dangerous. Michael had jumped down from the fence, twisting his ankle in the process.

After the kissing fiasco, Amy became obsessed with boys at school who would prove to be just as unattainable: guys who had girlfriends, jocks who would never look twice at her. Michael would accompany her to dances where she’d hope to steal some boy away from his date, but it would go off badly, and she’d drink too much spiked punch, and the evening would end with her in the girls’ room, throwing up, with Michael holding back her hair.
Why are you so nice to me?
she’d say in between sobs.
Because I can’t be anything else to you,
he’d wanted to reply.

Amy was the only person from that part of his life who knew he was gay. She’d known from that night when he was sixteen, when he’d had nowhere else to go and no one else to turn to. She hadn’t treated him any differently since then, except to get a little jealous of the female friends he made when he went away to college; especially Shannon Krist, whom he’d brought home once, even though he told her that Shannon thought she might be a lesbian. Over the years, Amy grew into herself, letting her hair return to its regular strawberry blond, although it was still spiky and short; keeping only a few tasteful piercings; dressing in her own geometric, angular designs that would cause people to stop her in the street and ask her where she bought her clothes.

Now, Amy asked, her eyes half-lidded from the pot, “Do you wish you’d ever talked to your father about what happened that night?”

“That was almost ten years ago. He probably forgot about it.”

“But
you
haven’t.”

“Doesn’t make any difference. Maybe it wouldn’t have if I’d reminded him while he was around. He would never have admitted that what he said was wrong.”

“But it
was
wrong.”

Michael shrugged. “Not in his mind it wasn’t. I’m sure he’s said a lot worse. Done a lot worse, too, but that’s beside the point.”

“Do you think you’ll ever tell your mom and sister?”

“Which part of it?”

“All of it.”

He sighed. “Not right now. They have too much to deal with.”

After a pause, Amy said, “I’m seeing someone. Don’t judge. He’s one of my teachers and—
don’t judge
—he says I have a lot of talent. What do you think?”

“I think,” Michael said, “that you’re still going after the wrong men.”

“That’s probably true.”

“I’m seeing someone too. His name is David. He pays for everything.”

Amy arched a brow. “So you feel like a kept woman?”

“I don’t know how I feel about it. Sometimes I think things are going well, and I don’t know how I lucked out, and other times I feel like something bad is going to happen. Like this.”

Amy said softly, “Your father didn’t die because you were enjoying yourself with a man.”

Michael considered this for a moment. Amy spoke so plainly, with such conviction, yet he couldn’t quite disassociate what Emily had told him over the phone a few days ago with the feeling of David’s skin, the salty essence of him.

“I think I’m going to break up with David when I get back,” he said.

“You do that,” Amy replied. “Maybe I’ll break up with my guy too.”

They looked at each other, as if daring the other to look away first, and then started laughing. Both of them knew that this was easier said than done.

Michael left Amy on the porch and went upstairs to use the bathroom. He was passing his sister’s bedroom door, which was slightly open, when he saw something inside that made him pause: Emily and Julian, going at it like horny teenagers. He stepped away, and then chuckled to himself. So Emily wasn’t that perfectly behaved after all.

After he got back to the city, he did break up with David. Then he couldn’t stay away, and they got back together. This pattern repeated itself over the following year, with little variation. When they were apart, Michael didn’t call for days, went out with other friends. During this time, he imagined David sitting in his tasteful apartment, sipping his mineral water, alone. David gave Michael expensive presents for his birthday and the holidays. Michael gave David nothing, unless you counted grief.