The Brink (17 page)

“I've done ketamine,” Spike tells Bodi. “And I can tell you it is so deeply fucked up that I can't even tell you.”

Henry stands with them, corralled as the witness, watching Van mix with the crowd in the living room. The fact that his friend, his possession, is socializing with others bothers him immeasurably. “Can I go?” he asks, and it triggers Spike's sense of action.

“We need to talk to this woman tonight.”

“That's absurd,” Bodi says.

And Spike answers, eyebrows raised, “Really? You want to tell me about absurd?” and Henry glimpses into their private dynamic, the corners of dismissal and condescension. As he edges away, leaving them to argue, the last thing he hears is Spike saying, with vivifying power, “If we bring the police into this, we look like cowards, and this gay man is
not
a coward,” and Bodi replying, “Would you stop saying ‘
this gay man
,' please?”

In the parlor, Van sits on the floor, rubbing his eyes. His shirtsleeves are rolled back and, in the firelight, his forearms look lathed, crafted, tended to. Van pats the back of Henry's calf, a contact that blooms.

“So are you Henry's boyfriend?” Ronnie asks.

“I'm more of an evacuation team,” Van answers. A flask sheathed in leather nestles between his legs. “Is somebody going to explain the writing on the outside of this place?”

“Drinking's not allowed,” Henry says.

“Yeah, well,” Doug says, nabbing the flask, “this whole weekend is off the handle.” He drinks and dashes it back to Van when Bodi approaches.

With a tight, dark expression—a coerced look Henry recognizes from his own marriage—Bodi explains that they're going out, to meet this woman and try to resolve things. Ronnie tells him that they're crazy to leave, but Spike will not be delayed.

“The roads are nutsy,” Van says. “But do what you gotta do.”

Bodi turns to Henry. “I'm asking you to be in charge while we're gone. And please everyone stay inside.” Another job Henry didn't ask for, does not want. The two men gather their jackets and are gone. Left to themselves, the men look at each other tentatively, as though some central part of the architecture—the force holding them, and the entire situation, together—had just been removed.

“Can we talk for a minute?” Henry says to Van. “In my room.”

“
Our
room,” Jed says.

On the stairs, Van slinks behind him, which makes Henry feel like a scold. Once in the garret, Van stretches out on the bed, his eyes red and raw. “You wouldn't believe the roads,” he says. “Remember that production of
A Christmas Carol
where the snow-rigging broke? And like mounds of it ended up on the stage?” He pulls his legs to his chest, one at a time, to stretch them, as though he'd come from some exertion.

“Are you high?” Henry asks.

Van stops and considers the ceiling. “God, Mrs. Cratchit had great tits.”

“Drunk
and
high?”

Van sits up on the edge of the bed and nods solemnly. “I know, I'm a disaster.”

Henry sits across from him. Van is living in the same pair of corduroys, same plaid shirt he last saw him in.

“Why did you come?” Henry asks, hoping for one kind of answer.

“I was going out of my mind in my place,” Van says. “You gave me a mission.”

Van rises and casually sifts through the closet. Out comes a stack of handkerchiefs in different colors. “Is there some kind of karate belt system for gay dudes that I'm not aware of?”

“They're my roommate's,” Henry says, finding relief in a subject that is not either of them. “Jed.”

“Which one's Jed?”

“The drugged-up little monster. I'm sure you saw him.”

Van pulls a brown pill bottle from the closet and examines the label. With a whistle, he says, “Haldol. This is the serious shit.”

At that, Henry sees the door crack open and Jed lets himself in, without knocking. Van tries to shove the pills back into the closet.

“What are you doing?” Jed asks.

“I'm looking for . . .” Van says, “this.” It is an iron.

Jed goes to his mattress and stares at them both emptily. “It's late. What are you trying to iron?”

Van tests its weight in his hand. “Just wanted to know if there was one. Make and model.”

Van is not a good liar when he's sober, but intoxicated, he's pathetic. Jed goes to the closet and studies his shelf for damage. “You weren't looking for that. You were going through my things.”

“Oh, come on, Jed,” Henry says. “He's just goofing around.”

“You just called me a drugged-up monster. I heard you.”

Henry sighs. He and Jed, the oldest and the youngest, are the two last boys to be picked for the team, and they need to band together. “We're all trying here,” Henry says, but trying for what? To be themselves, finally, and it is goddamn exhausting.

“I'm going to take a walk,” Jed says.

It's plainly a bad idea, but Henry wants his time with Van, and he won't stop him.

“Knock yourself out,” Van says.

Once Jed is gone—they listen for his footsteps on the stairs—Henry whispers, “You see what this place is like.”

Van lies on the bed, against Henry, oblivious to his power. “Maybe it's good for you,” he says. “We both know you need to get over me.” And the shock of its delivery detonates. All these months, Van knew his secret desire and now speaks it aloud like a boring headline.

Henry wills himself to grab for what he loves. He rests his
hand on Van's knee, the closest he can come. “I don't think that's true.”

Van pats Henry's hand. “I'm on the wrong team, buddy.”

Henry feels the moment between them dilating, narrowing to a point. “I don't think you're on anybody's team.”

Van lifts Henry's hand off his thigh and deposits it on the mattress. “And now I will avail myself of a libation,” he says, and heads out. Henry hammers his pillow. The question that he came up here to answer—who can I love?—is not a question after all. It is an impossibility. The downstairs phone rings and continues to ring. Henry yells for someone to answer it. Finally, the ringing stops, and in the silence, he hears music.

Downstairs, the men are missing, but the door into Spike and Bodi's private area is open. From inside comes the murmur of voices and a heavy muddle of incense. He enters, through a long hallway, which opens to a living room where Van and the others have collected, sipping from coffee cups. The room is cramped, more like a passageway converted into a parlor, with Van smoking a joint in an overbuilt recliner in the center of the room, like a cockpit for television consumption. Ronnie attends to the stereo, setting a Judy Collins song on the turntable, while Doug, sways back and forth on a loveseat, mouthing the lyrics.

“Welcome, Chief,” Van says coolly, and offers him a toke. Henry grits his teeth and tries to stare accountability into him.

“This is a really bad idea,” Henry says.

Ronnie combs through the LPs. “This really might be the gayest record collection on the planet.”

“Is there any Cher?” Doug says with his eyes closed. “Please let there be Cher.”

As a stage manager, Henry is known for his quiet control and firm hand, but now he sees the fantasy of it. He has no intrinsic authority, only what is given to him. So he takes a seat on the couch next to Doug and surrenders. When Doug passes the joint, Henry takes a single, ferocious inhale, welcoming the chance for a new personality.

“So Van, if you're not Henry's boyfriend,” Ronnie asks, “are you anybody's boyfriend?”

Van grins and there's this one crazy tooth that can still break Henry's loyal heart. It's as if he wants to pass here, among them. Ronnie swings around to Van's side and gives Van a shoulder massage with a boldness Henry can only imagine. “You know you have great hair,” Ronnie says. “It's muy
Pirates of Penzance
.” The recliner shifts back another notch, setting Van more prone.

“I took a Body Electric class once,” Ronnie says.

“Is that where they call it massage but you just end up jerking each other off?” Doug asks. It is, based on the longing in his face, a genuine question. Henry's thoughts drift toward a class that is also, somehow, quasi-public group sex, and how anything gets done.

Ronnie dismisses Doug. “People think that because people are ashamed of their own body's capacity for pleasure.”

“So it is about jerking each other off.”

“Jesus,” Ronnie says.

“Whatever you're doing feels awesome,” Van says and begins, with drunken volition, a story about his ten-year-old son, his soccer games, and his growing pains, “leg cramps that got so bad he'd just ball up and cry.”

“You're a dad?” Ronnie says.

Van marvels at a private happiness. “Yeah. You should try it. It's amazing.”

Ronnie asks, “Where's he now?”

Van doesn't answer, seems to fall into himself. Ronnie's hands pinch and knead his shoulders in what is a definitively nonerotic, fully half-assed massage. Ronnie mouths to Henry,
Oh my God, did he die?

Henry sits up, summoned back into the present moment. “Look, just leave him alone.”

“What'd I do?” Ronnie says.

“Can't you see he's upset?”

But when Ronnie retracts his hand, Van grabs it and keeps it on him. He swipes his face and replies, “It's fine. Keep going.”

Ronnie goes back to the massage and Van groans, a sound in their years of friendship Henry has never heard him make. With that single sound, the room suddenly seems more dense, a hot close dream. A tiny metallic clack: Doug undoing his belt. “That's right,” Doug says, his eyes jumping all over Van's body, like he's checking to see how pieces of machinery come together. He kneels at Van's side and rubs the inseam of Van's pants and Van flinches.

“Just relax,” Doug says.

“What are you doing?” Henry asks quietly.

Doug pulls Van's shirt up out of his waist and Henry catches a glimpse of a white blade of flesh at Van's groin before he closes his eyes.

He hears the rustle and give of the leather recliner, the rake of Ronnie's fingers. The teeth of a zipper giving way. It would be so easy for Henry to join. He's close enough to feel the transgression with his hands. “Fuck yeah,” Doug says over and over, in a hungry loop.

He can't watch Van be taken, fed upon. There are certain rules to things. Aren't there rules? Henry walks calmly, decisively, out of the room, taking the stairs two a time, back to his room, where he sits on the bed, disoriented, his blood thumping. He throws open the window and gulps in the cold. Across the lawn, Jed, in his orange coat, treks in the fresh snow at the perimeter of the house lights. Henry calls out to him, the other exile, but Henry discovers he has nothing to say. So he waves hello. Jed waves back, sweetly, like they're two boys departing from each other after an evening of play. Then he moves further and further out until Henry can no longer see him at all.

Henry wakes up in his clothes. He stares at Jed's bed across the room until he realizes that it is immaculate, the way Jed had left it the night before. He never came back from his walk. The morning assembles itself, finally, as an emergency.

He searches the other rooms, the bathroom. Nothing. He's
not inside. Downstairs, Henry finds Van on the living room floor, cocooned in a crocheted blanket. His shoes and socks are off and Henry sees on Van's foot a little meadow of hair split by a scar, a scar about which Henry will never know the story.

Henry nudges him awake. “What?” Van asks, bleary, and Henry stares at his face, slack from sleep, the closest he'll ever come. And he feels nothing, the end of an idea. It's not a kiss Henry wants, but a chance to be known, fully, in this life.

Henry says, “You need to leave.”

“Now?” Van says.

“Now.”

Bodi enters the living room and gives Henry a noncommittal nod. He's not angry, or at least he's oblivious; the men must have cleaned up, erased the night from the room. They will get away with it. Nothing will be noticed. Bodi goes to the front window to stare at the feet of snow piled on the lawn, the heap of the night's weather.

“Everything went all right last night?” Bodi asks.

“Jed's missing,” Henry says. “He went for a walk and never came back.”

Bodi's face falls. “Oh, Christ, my fucking insurance.”

He rings the house bell and Doug and Ronnie collect in the foyer, purposefully missing each other's eyes. “The kid went AWOL?” Doug asks. “Could have called that.”

Bodi asks them to go looking, and Henry's first to be outside, happy to be free of the house. He punches through the snow, going to the trees, where he last saw Jed. At the edge of the forest, he turns back to look at the other men,
splintering across the lawn. Van's at his car, wiping the snow from the windshield, preparing to go. They see each other, for a moment, a final view, until Henry turns away. By Monday, Van will have quit and be moving to Florida.

About fifty yards into the trees, Henry comes across Jed's body, propped against a spruce. At some point in the night, Jed unbuttoned his orange jacket, with nothing underneath. No shirt, just his skin exposed to the air and covered by a light ramp of snow. Henry kneels beside him, and Jed's eyes open and find him. His face is glazed, but he's alive. Inside the lining of Jed's jacket, tucked in the pocket, is the spray paint can with a red cap.

“Leave me here,” Jed says, barely over a whisper. “I'm not right.”

Henry takes the cylinder of paint from the jacket and palms it. The metal is frigid to the touch, nearly empty, and the ball clacks inside. Henry tosses the can into the woods, as far as he can. It's a good throw, a good release. “You're coming with me,” Henry says, committing to it. Then he curls his arms around the boy and lifts.