Quarantine: Stories (14 page)

As we veered onto the exit ramp, Antwon asked, “Do you think he planned it? Do you think he drove the two hours knowing what he would ultimately do? Or do you think he was just planning to shoot video as usual and, leaning over the Falls, found himself unable to resist?”

“Do you think it was guilt?” I asked. “Do you think he’d actually done something to the baby?” No one said anything. I wondered if they thought I was mean for asking.

The discount chain was in a depressing town just off the interstate. The customers were mostly families, mostly rural poor: the men in work boots, like Don’s landlord; the younger women with peroxide hair, the older ones in elastic waistbands. I felt vaguely worried Antwon would get jumped in the restroom. There was no reason for my concern: these people were as nice as the next. But Antwon rarely left the city, he didn’t understand rural America. So I was relieved when he met up with me at the checkout. At the last minute, I grabbed a Dolly Parton greatest-hits compilation from the discount bin by the register.

In the car, Don said, “Driver’s choice,” and insisted we hear Dolly first, since we’d already heard the Janet Jackson song three times on the radio.

The first track was “Jolene.”

“This song was inspired by a hot bank teller,” I told them. “I read it in an interview. It was early in her marriage, and Dolly was jealous when she noticed her husband was making more and more trips to the bank.”

The next song was “Coat of Many Colors.” We listened to it, and a couple more tracks, and then we reached “I Will Always Love You.”

“I didn’t know Dolly recorded this, too,” I said.

“Too?” Antwon said. “It’s
her
song. This is the original.”

“Really? I thought the original was Whitney Houston.”

We listened to Dolly’s country twang, so different from the way Whitney’s voice climbed and soared. By the time the song’s bridge came around, Dolly wasn’t even singing, she was simply talking; her voice had dropped to a whisper.

Antwon said, “This version makes so much more sense. It’s less about the ‘I’ and more about the ‘you.’ ”

Something about Antwon’s comment made me mad. I thought,
Who is he to judge?
Besides, I liked Whitney’s cover. “Whitney’s version has sold more than Dolly’s,” I said. “It’s one of the best-selling singles of all time.”

“There’s little connection between popularity and quality, believe me. Besides, Whitney’s version is all flash. It doesn’t have any of the honesty or regret of Dolly’s. Saying good-bye to someone you love doesn’t sound like a gospel choir. There aren’t so many runs. It feels plainer, more like Dolly’s version, more like a whisper.”

Don said he agreed with Antwon. I thought about Antwon saying good-bye to Don when we left New York. What did they say to one another? Where had they eaten their last dinner? I’d never asked.

Don hadn’t given me permission to switch the CD yet, but I did it anyway, popping in the Janet Jackson, skipping right away to the single that was getting so much airplay. This time I not only danced in my seat, I sang along: “Got nice package alright / Guess I’m gonna have to ride it tonight.”

“Are those really the lyrics?” Antwon asked.

Janet’s Super Bowl “wardrobe malfunction” was three years away. For now—despite the sexy videos and the
Rolling Stone
cover with the hands over her bare breasts—she was still America’s sweetheart, the adorable baby girl of the Jackson clan, everyone’s little sister, her cheeks eminently and forever pinchable.

“It’s amazing what Janet gets away with,” I said.

“It doesn’t seem fair,” Antwon said.

When we got home, Antwon asked to see the store receipt from the CDs, and he dialed the phone number on the slip.

“I’d like to speak with the manager.” After waiting, he continued, “Yes, sir, I am calling to make a complaint. I have been shopping at your store for years. I was in there not one hour ago. I was there with my family: my wife and my son. I wanted duct tape. My wife wanted socks. Anyway, my son comes to me with a CD he found in the music department, and I say,
Sure, you can have it
, thinking to myself, This is a family establishment, a clean, Christian establishment. No reason not to buy my son a CD he found on the shelves. Well, when we got home, I went to duct taping the . . . errr . . . duct, and my wife is fixing dinner in the kitchen, and my son plays the CD on the kitchen stereo—son? What’s the name of that CD? Yes! Janet Jackson—and, sir, can I just read you some of these lyrics?” Antwon proceeded to read the lyrics, carefully and dramatically enunciating every syllable: “ ‘Got nice package alright / Guess I’m gonna have to ride it tonight.’ Now, sir, I’m guessing you and I both know she’s not singing about a UPS delivery, right? We know what she means. And, worse, my
son
knows what she means. Yes, sir, I understand. Yes, sir. Well, we appreciate that. And now that you know what’s contained in this CD, I trust you won’t stock such . . . such . . .
trash
, there’s no other way to say it . . . any longer.”

Antwon hung up. “We can return the CD for cash plus five-dollar store credit.”

Don and I burst out laughing, we had been holding it in the whole time. Antwon should have been laughing, too, but he wasn’t. At some point during the phone call, his tone had shifted, and he seemed genuinely mad, but I couldn’t figure out why.

Antwon disappeared into the bathroom to start getting ready for his performance that night.

I thought about what he had said in the car about it not being fair.

I remembered an art book he had given Don, and which I had found on the same bookshelf where I’d discovered the anthology of gay erotica. It was a book of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, whose name came up often when Congress made its fuss over public funding of art. I was thinking now of a particular self-portrait: Mapplethorpe in bottomless leather chaps, his naked, hairy asshole wrapped around the thick handle of a bullwhip. In the photo, he is turned around, looking over his shoulder at the camera, fully meeting the gaze of the viewer. He is offering a challenge. He is trying to shock us. Yet there is a softness to his expression. He looks, more than anything, vulnerable. The photo was included among those that the Corcoran Gallery in D.C. refused to display, even though the gallery had promised Mapplethorpe it would. The artist had died of AIDS just three or four months before the gallery reneged on its word. If Mapplethorpe were alive now, I thought, he’d be just a few years older than Antwon.

I
could hear Antwon cursing in the bathroom. “Don, do you have any aftershave?” he shouted, and Don said no.

“What does aftershave do?” I asked. I’d never used it, though I seemed to remember that my dad did.

“It’s an antiseptic,” Don explained.

A minute later Antwon was still cursing, and I went in to see what was wrong. He had cut himself. He was standing at the mirror, blood on his chin. He was in his underwear: white cotton briefs. They made him look young.

“Let me put a Band-Aid,” I said. He was taller than I was, and when I put the Band-Aid on I had to lean in close and I lost my balance. My forearms touched his chest. It was warm and clean from his shower.

His cheeks smelled like mouthwash.

“Did you put Listerine on your face?” I asked.

“It’s the same as aftershave.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Yes, it is.” He looked at me and smiled, and for a second I thought he was going to pinch my cheek, but instead he slapped my ass and called me a pet name I’d never been called before:
Squirrel
. I thought of the enchanted creatures in the forest who stood in for Prince Charming before Sleeping Beauty found her real one. I thought of Rocky and Bullwinkle, a bickering gay couple if I’d ever seen one. I thought of hoarding: how—after moving upstate—whenever I visited New York City, I would imagine each art exhibit, each dance concert, each drag show, each cultural excursion as an acorn, and if I collected enough I might just make it through the long winter. I remembered myself, a few years ago, not long after I started dating Don, on a couch in the back of a bar (a different couch and a different bar from where Don first told me about Antwon, though they are all the same), sitting in the lap of an older man, contemplating cheating on Don, fingering the older man’s gold ring: Married?
Was.
Was?
He died.
How? (Pause.)
The usual way.
(Even longer pause—his body tense, then relaxed—then in a jarring, cheerful voice . . .)
But I’m a healthy squirrel.

I didn’t go home with the man that night. Now, I smoothed the Band-Aid over Antwon’s chin, allowing my finger to drift down his neck, across his chest, circling the gray hairs. Antwon remained frozen. He looked confused. The door was open. Don was in the kitchen, just down the hall. I didn’t know why I was doing it, but it felt good. Antwon’s body felt good. I ran my fingers down his torso—his dancer’s abs still taut but beginning to soften with age—and over his cotton briefs, tracing the contours of his hip.

A
ntwon said he’d figured out a way to solve the problems from the previous night’s performance. Instead of “surrendering to the desire of others,” he was only going to surrender to the desires of a few preselected people whom he himself had screened and approved. He would choose five of us—me and Don and three of his pet students from his class that week. Four of us would be in charge of calling out the numbers, and one student would hold the numbered cards.
We
would determine the length of the dance instead of the audience. Then he would preselect three more pet students—one to say
eyes
, one to say
mouth
, one to say
body
—so there would be eight of us total, standing on the side of the stage, controlling him.

The dance began.
Mouth.

“This past week I haven’t been able to sleep. The downstairs neighbors are loud, but I don’t think that’s it.”

The girl said
mouth
again, and Antwon stopped talking.

Eyes.
Antwon, blinded, ambled to the front row of the audience, almost tripping over a man sitting in a chair. It was an elderly man, perhaps the grandfather of one of the students performing. Antwon stroked his legs. Then he sat in his lap and caressed his face. In another venue, in New York for instance, people would have been laughing. Here they were not. Antwon stood up and started moving toward the back of the stage.

Body.
He froze.
Eyes.
He opened them wide, stood silent and still, fully meeting the gaze of the viewers.

Mouth.
“I couldn’t sleep in New York either. It’s been over a year since I slept soundly.”

Mouth. Body. Eyes.
All in quick succession. Antwon stumbled around. He looked lost. He settled into some simple gestures, mostly elbows and hands.

Mouth
, the girl said again. “That’s when my mom died: a year ago. We were very close, though I hadn’t seen her in a long time. She lived in Indiana, where I was born and raised. Thirty years I lived in New York, and she never visited, not once. Never saw me perform. When she died, she left me a Cutlass Supreme. I don’t know how to drive. I’ve never known how to drive.”

Body.
Antwon was standing still again, staring into the audience. “She also left me her life’s savings—seventeen thousand dollars—which I added to some money I’d saved over the years. I used it all for a down payment on an apartment in Chinatown off Grand Street. Now I live down the street from my ex-wife, whom I married before I became a full-time fudge-packer and she became a full-time donut-banger, though we should have known, even then, that that was the way it was going to go. Not that I regret it. What’s to regret? Fudge and donuts? It’s not such a bad combination. Back then, she aborted our child. Now I babysit the daughter she adopted with her partner.”

A middle-aged man and woman stood up angrily and angled their way toward the exit. Others followed.

“Mouth!” a rogue audience member shouted,
not
the girl on the side of the stage who had been designated to say
mouth
. Then she said
mouth
, too, echoing the audience member. But Antwon didn’t stop speaking. Maybe he was confused. Or maybe he was deliberately ignoring the orders he’d been given.

“My mother was my only family, the only family I know of. Now I am alone.”

Mouth
, the designated student said more emphatically this time, and Antwon stopped.

Body.
Antwon hustled toward the back of the stage, then threw himself against the back wall, repeatedly, violently, as though he were trying to put back in place a dislocated shoulder. He fell to the floor and thrashed around. I wondered if he hurt himself.