The Brink (15 page)

“This is where I last felt like a person,” I say.

Jess blinks slowly, preparing to speak. “My brother wanted to draw comic books,” she says. “I kept all his drawings.”

She knows who I am. She peels the label off the bottle. Half of it's already gone.

“Once I came to visit you in the hospital,” she says. “I was eleven. And I went by myself. I was so scared.” She smears the black eye shadow with the back of her hand. “They wouldn't let me see you.” Her hand moves toward me, searching for mine. “I'm sorry.”

I flinch. “Don't.”

Already, she's going slack. I wonder how big a dose I put in there, how long she's going to be out.

“I'm feeling sick,” she says.

Then she's gone, pillowed against the door. Her chest rises and falls even and regular. Her breath frosts a white cloud on the window. Her cell phone rings. Someone's looking for her. I undo my seatbelt. It takes some doing, but I press my head where it belongs, into her lap, into a warm invitation. I want to keep her like this for a long time.

Yes, Henry would like to say something.

In the early part of his marriage, Henry started an extension to the house that he never finished. Ten years and counting, conduit still sprouts from the ceiling. Pink ribs of insulation are just there. His wife, Margot, made him put in a twin bed to home it up. She was afraid their daughter Effie would go and electrocute herself, fork in socket, to a curly-haired cinder. But Effie didn't go into the room, because she thought it was haunted, and in a way, it was. Eventually, there was this door they didn't talk about and never went into.

Then, one morning this spring, Margot opened it. This was right after her test results came back negative, and she was all about new patterns. Like soy milk and morning Zumba and finishing the unfinished. She moved the bed to clean and Henry heard the crash of his magazines and videotapes. His body tensed in the magnifying quiet. At the state concert hall in New Brunswick, where he works as a stage manager, he's heard a soloist's violin crack and fold in from pressure. He's seen the lighting grid come raining.

Irrevocable things happen all the time.

Henry rose and found her on the edge of mattress, leafing
through his porn, his secret cache. Men in the photos, mouths and bodies penetrated on every page. At her feet, she'd made a neat stack of the videos, the sad lot of them, whose titles—
Fuckbuds
,
Dungeon Cops, The Delights of Allan Twinkler
—gave Henry's shame a fresh edge.

“Just tell me,” Margot said, “did these do you any good?” And at that moment, before it got bad and then worse, while they still had their patterns (a little sun of grapefruit in the morning, a joint each month on date night), Henry was more in love with her than he'd ever been. Love like she was the last log of a splintering raft. Henry was, and still is, terrified.

Six months later, Margot's therapist e-mails Henry's therapist a link. “Dawn Manor,” the website reads. “When it's time to get found.” On the website, a group of men sling their arms over each other like a softball team. Honestly, Henry prefers a little more space between people. This manor, a big Victorian in the Catskills, is a kind of workshop for “men who love men” but are bent out of shape about it. Henry can't find anybody close to his age in the photos, but he never sees people his age in advertisements unless they're for pills or Florida. On the “Who We Are” page, in a portrait staged with professional light, two men with identical goatees press their heads together with a golden retriever between them. “Dawn Manor is operated by author/certified intuitive Bodi Charles,” the caption reads, “and his husband Spike and dog Rigby.”

“His husband,” Henry says to himself, trying it out, and decides it sounds absurd. At fifty-three-years-old, with readers and a disconcertingly white thatch of hair on his chest, he'll be lucky to land a fuckbud. Now that his secret life, furtive visits to the Lion's Den adult bookstore, terrified opportunism in public restrooms, has become his actual one, he sees he has chosen to die horny and alone.

Tonight, his best friend Van, the sound engineer at the concert hall, is coming over to “christen the escape pod,” he said. They've been friends for years, and lovers in Henry's mind for nearly as long. At work, the production crew calls Van “the Pirate” on account of his hoop earring and his grizzle along the jaw; the nickname alone brings Henry's cheery erection out of early retirement. Van wears construction boots with the laces so loose they're really flip-flops. Everything he keeps on him—wallet, watch, Leatherman—is hitched to his belt with metal links, so none of his needs can get too far from him. Van is just about forty and newly divorced. His son visits on weekends. Henry is lonely enough not to care that he's in love with a straight man.

“I like the Christmas lights,” Van says on arrival, taking in the studio. “Very bachelor Noël.”

Van wears a blazer and a cap that reads “VOLUNTEER” across the front; this visit, it occurs to Henry, may be a form of community service. Under his arm, Van carries a radio with a broken antennae that “gets angry” if you play with it too much. “From my divorce to yours
,”
Van says, leaning back in the other chair.

“Beer?” Henry asks.

Van shakes his head and asks for a soda. “I'm sober these days, chief.”

When Henry hired him, Van had been a mess. Van showed up at work with bloodshot eyes, lazy about feedback. Henry sensed around him a general state of transition, and he felt compelled to know it, join it, as if he himself were there, choosing his life all over again. Earlier this year, when Van's car got repo'd—a negotiation in the settlement had gone sour—Henry picked him up and drove him home, an errand that became the high point of his days. With his feet propped on the dash like a boy, Van would monologue about how bad his divorce had become. What Henry truly remembered, in a way that he was only beginning to understand, was the dark prairie of hair on Van's forearm, the surf at his collar: the places on men that he only now allows himself to see.

Henry dances the salt and pepper shakers in his hands for an hour, angling up to his confession. It is difficult to be honest with the people you find beautiful.

“I feel about twenty years late to this, but I think I just finally found out I am . . .” Henry says, “someone who is . . .”

“Gay,” Van says with a sly grin.

“Was it that obvious?”

“Come on, it's
theater
. Everybody's gay. Or at least tried out the buffet.” This alights Henry's sense of an opening. He feels relieved and vulnerable, newborn.

Van digs in the fridge. “I'll have that beer now.” When Henry shows surprise, Van shrugs. “Special occasions.”

They talk, rambling their way to midnight. On his departure, Van hugs him and Henry registers that a man has never held him so forcefully, so intimately. The sheer surface area nearly makes him puddle. “Congratulations,” Van says into his ear, and his hot breath makes new weather across Henry's interior life. “You'll never have boring sex again.”

Effie comes by Henry's apartment with throw rugs, donuts, and a scented candle the size of a layer cake that gives him headaches. She is in college in the city, and to his amazement, now that he is damaged, she's taken more of an interest in him, like the three-legged hamster she ministered to as a child. When Henry speaks to Margot, once a week by phone, she makes him feel as though his new life is a lunge from a moving vehicle. But Effie is Florence Nightingale to Henry's foot soldier, off in a war where the opposing armies touch penises. They're good together; raising her was the one thing he did well. She even wants to help him write a personal ad, for Craigslist or Manhunt or DaddyCentral or the cavalcade of humiliations online, but some things your daughter cannot help you do.

“CuriousFather,” he types. It sounds strange to him, his new name, if it is a name. He decides he is Oral Versatile Bear, a box he'd never thought he'd have to check in this world. He crops Margot out of a vacation photograph and posts it.

Within an hour, he has responses. The first is from a teenager in Poughkeepsie who asks him if he has back hair. The second, from FurJock06, wants to know his feelings on
“cockfighting.” He wades, blindly, through the acronyms—NSA, PNP, 4:20, P.A., T but V—but the shorthand is endless. A lanky, flawless young man named ThckReggie comes on strong, asking him, “Wanna get off?” before he even knows Henry's name. “Woof. You cam?” is Reggie's next message, followed by a link to a pornographic website. When Henry replies, Reggie seems not to listen or care. In fact, when Reggie continues to message, Henry discovers Reggie is a robot of some sort, and Henry finds another rung of indignity. Self-esteem dissipating by the second, he e-mails the kid in Poughkeepsie to report that he has back hair, yes. Two wings across his shoulder blades that he never, in a million years, would call an asset. The kid does not reply, will never reply.

The next day, feeling frustrated and combustible, Henry stops for gas and, across the cement island, a driver in sweatpants, sweatshirt, and sunglasses flashes him his penis, a thumb in blackened grass. Henry looks around, unsure if he is in the intended audience for a penis out in the daylight. But yes, the view is his and his alone. It's all Henry needs to break a sweat.

“You like?” the driver says, leaning against the flank of his SUV.

“I do,” Henry says. “I only saw it for a brief moment. But it made an impression.”

The driver nods. “I go for the coach type.”

“You a big sports fan?” Henry asks, because it seems germane and is something he can say. But the other driver seems
not to hear him, or care, or has decided he is no longer the coach type. The gas pump clicks, he puts the nozzle back into the pump and settles back in his car.

“Wait, could I get your number?” Henry asks, but the other driver is already pulling out. Henry follows him, feeling confused and abbreviated. In a low-grade sex fever, he tracks the SUV into the wilds of Monmouth County. Finally, the other driver drives into the three-car garage of a suburban manse, and Henry parks at the curb, about to choke on the possibilities. Then the other driver steps out of his car—he's squatter, more thuggish than Henry remembers—and unmistakably shakes his head at Henry, decisively, brutally,
no
, and vanishes inside.

Henry decides that since he has come this far out of his way, he deserves something, the gift of a body at least. He crosses the front lawn and peeks in the bay window. Track lights halo a bowl of polished stones on a console table. Across the room, he can make out the colorful plastic of a child's play castle, and he's desperate enough to not to care if there's a baby in the vicinity. The baby can watch, honestly. Suddenly, he finds he is knocking at the front door, knowing with every step that he is moving somehow away from a person he understands.

A woman opens it, in a white blouse, working the earrings from her ear. “Can I help you?”

The other driver, Henry's prize, cowers on the stairs. Henry can feel his secret becoming a knife.

“I'm sorry,” Henry says. “I must have the wrong address.”

“Who are you looking for?” she asks, and Henry turns and runs.

Three weeks later, he's is on the train upstate to Dawn Manor. He's been instructed to get off at a small station where a van will pick him up. “We'll be doing bodywork,” Bodi Charles told him over the phone. “Make sure to bring comfortable clothing.” Henry gazes down his front. In the stress of the separation, with Effie's donuts and nachos for dinner, he no longer has comfortable clothing.

A nondescript minivan idles in the station lot. The driver, in a leather jacket and black T-shirt, jumps out and throws open the passenger door. He introduces himself as Spike, and his handshake, it reassures Henry to find, is vigorous with heterosexuality. Spike's face and scalp are as smooth as glazed ceramic except for a brown goatee so manicured it could be topiary. Henry finds he is the only passenger and sits as far back as possible.

The densely forested road gives way to acres of rolling hills. Henry feels out of joint in such an isolated and rustic place; if he's going to find himself, it's going to be somewhere off the Garden State Parkway, near Indian food and a Hobby Lobby. Spike turns into a long gravel driveway. A peace flag bolted to a roadside maple only increases Henry's sense of personal doom.

“Look, I've changed my mind. Could you take me back to the train station?”

Spike answers, “There's only one train a day.”

“I'll stay at a hotel.”

“There's no hotel.”

“Then I'll call a cab,” Henry says.

But Spike has already parked in front of the Manor, a three-story Victorian painted, of all possible colors, purple. A wooden double door, impeccably restored, opens onto a broad porch with a row of wooden rocking chairs. The house is surrounded by trees, as though they carved the property out of forest.

“You've come this far,” Spike says. “Try going a little bit further.”

Henry steps out of the van and closes his eyes. He takes a moment to notice the cold, a private sign that he is one year older. Soon, his December birthday will come and go and he may never answer the questions his body is asking.

Spike lifts his bag. “Also, you don't want to deal with the cancellation policy.”

In the hardwood foyer, a pussy-willow branch teeters in a vase like an accusatory finger. Above the telephone stand hangs a photographic portrait of Rigby the retriever slavering in a swatch of autumn light. Henry counts six armchairs in the living room and nothing else. The place seems willfully under-decorated, as if everything might need to be rearranged or cleared for yoga or trust falls. This is precisely how Margot always wanted their home to be—airy, uncluttered. Perhaps now it is, since he was the clutter.

Spike leads Henry up the narrow stairs. “So no cell phone use inside the house, please. And no alcohol, no drugs, no sex, and no plastics. Bodi is environmentally sensitive.”

“Plastics?” Henry asks.

“Some guys think they can bring their rubber gear anywhere.” Spike stops on the landing. “You have no idea what I'm talking about, do you?”

Henry's room is on the second floor, wedged under one of the gables. It's the sort of space people turn into a crypt of winter clothes and exercise equipment. A blond young man, Henry guesses midtwenties, lays on one of two twin beds like a deposited doll. He's dressed in a puffy orange hunting jacket and loafers without socks. With a small terror, Henry understands that this is his roommate.

“Jed,” Spike says, “you know you can take off your jacket.”

“Are there
no
single rooms?” Henry asks as kindly, diplomatically, as possible. Jed snorts.

“Everybody gets a roommate,” Spike explains, one hand on the doorknob, which, Henry notices, does not have a lock. “If we put people in singles, they just close off to the process.”