“I was actually thinking about not telling you because I thought ‘It’s not really his business,’” Swain said as she barged into Balliol’s bedroom.
“And then I thought, ‘Lincoln will find out sooner or later,’ and also I thought, ‘Well, it kind of is his business’. Besides, I do tell you everything.”
Balliol, whose door had been open and was now beginning to regret this, gave Swain a look that said, “Get on with it.”
“Oh, yes,” Swain said. “I’m seeing Mason. Not in a serious sense. But in a sense. We’re just friends. But I think we’re going to be good friends. He took me to Hecky’s Ribshack.”
“He never took me to Hecky’s Ribshack,” Balliol put down his book. “It must be serious.”
“I had to have the authentic African American Experience,” Swain told him.
“And did you?”
“Well, Hecky’s ex-wife came by and took a gun out on him. So from what I’ve seen on TV it was pretty authentic.”
Balliol couldn’t be too worried. Swain had grown up in New York and she didn’t seem very worried. Which he told her.
“Oh,” she said. “Well no one else was. Hecky just kept on taking orders. She fired a bullet through the menu board above his head. But then Mason pointed out to me five other holes. She called him a motherfucker. Apparently she does that a lot. And then she left.
“Also, we met your enemy, Chris Powers.”
“Chris Powers is not my enemy.”
“Mason says you all don’t get along.”
“Mason’s right, but not getting along doesn’t make someone your enemy. I don’t really trouble myself about Chris Powers.”
“He says—Mason says—it’s because Chris was Sully’s,” she whispered, even though they were in the house, indoors and both, for the most part, adults: “boyfriend.”
“He was,” Balliol said, shrugging. “But you have to understand, that didn’t have anything to do with it. I never liked Chris Powers.”
“But he’s so likeable.”
Balliol cocked his head and frowned.
“Yes, I think that’s it. I could never like someone that likeable. I think there’s more to life than being likeable. Like being authentic.”
“You think he’s fake?”
“I think he’s scared and confused. I think he hasn’t found out who he is. I know who I am, mostly.”
“And don’t care what people think about you.”
“No,” Balliol said. Then, “Mostly. Come on, Swain, don’t tell me you do?”
Swain said, “In the past I have pretended to care. I think I even told myself I cared. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I don’t.”
“I bet you don’t.”
“Don’t you think Mason’s cute?” Swain said.
“I’d never given it much thought. He’s good looking, yes. But... Mason’s always been sort of a lone wolf.”
“Like you?”
“I think that’s why I like him. Only he’s not a lone wolf now. Now there’s a—”
“If you call me a bitch—”
“I was going to say... she wolf,” Balliol smiled.
“I don’t think you were,” Swain disagreed, sitting on the bed.
“Now, what about you?”
“What about me?”
“Now you can get a playmate too?”
“A... what?” Balliol sat up straighter. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“A girl who is your friend. Who might, one day, be a girlfriend.”
“Did you make this term up?”
“Yes,” Swain said. “Does Mason have a cousin?”
“Mason has several cousins and no, don’t you dare try to set me up. Some of us aren’t looking for love. I like my life the way it is, Swain. Thank you.”
“A woman cannot help but change the men she loves. She places them in her—”
Balliol put his hand up, “Don’t start with that cauldron crap again.”
Oh,” Swain said in a deflated voice, looking down at the braid she’d pulled over her shoulder and was fingering. “Shot down twice in one day.”
Then she came in through the bathroom window. Just like the song. That’s what he liked about her. She had called about a half hour ago and asked what Addison was doing. He said nothing and was about to invite himself over when she just hung up the phone, laughing. And then she came over to his house. She climbed up the wall into the second story bathroom. She’d looked into the bathroom window to see behind the muted glass if anyone was moving. But it was dark, and so she’d climbed in through the bathtub. Just then someone walked in, but she was behind the curtain. She’d listened to Addison’s father pee for about three minutes. Why did old men pee so infrequently, and for so long? He didn’t wash his hands, which Bonnie couldn’t approve, and then she’d waited a few minutes until a door had shut and came out of the bathroom rapping on Addison’s door.
“Mom?” Addison’s voice called from behind the door. “Hold on.”
When he opened it, she pushed her way in. He shouted in shock and she closed the door behind them and then her arms swung from around his neck and her brown curls hand behind her.
“How?” he began in shock and wonder, and he pushed him down onto the bed, and pulled down his shorts. She held his dick in her hands while she worked down her jeans and panties, and then she started to fuck him, his mouth still open in an O of surprise.
“Uh—” he began while she fucked him harder and harder and he lay on his back, his mouth open, his eyes open, his palms open like crucifixion while she brought herself to orgasm.
She came before him. Addison turned her over and set to. The bed creaked faster and faster under her. His face turned red and white. There was a frown of concentration. She loved it when he was like this, rough and not polite. Faster and faster. Harder and harder. She squeezed him. Her hands went under his tee shirt and pull him to her harder and harder. He was on his knees, her legs were accordioned under her, they came together and tighter together, pushing into the atomic center, making a fusion. He came with a dizzying shout. Not right away, but in starts, about ten of them, his mouth open, his face turned away from her, his brown hair like a curtain against her chin, against her mouth, now as his head lowered, as his body still gave its seed, his hair was against her face like a soft brown veil. They lay together like that. The silence was profound. The silence after orgasm always was. He was still on his knees, her knees were still drawn to her chest They didn’t move. He was still hard when he came out of her. Her eyes looked at him. Under his tee shirt, above his shorts caught around his knees his penis was large and red, and wet. A patch of black hair was moist and went up into his shirt. Semen still trickled from him. His face was sloppy and lazy.
“Stay here,” he said.
She nodded.
“How did you...?” he began.
And that’s when she told him. She was drowsy and out of breath and so it took a long while to tell a short story. She told it in fragments.
When she was done, Addison disentangled himself from her and crawled off the bed shaking his shorts from around his ankles he moved in his tee shirt to the door, the bottom curve of his ass visible.
She laughed.
“What?” Addison said, as he locked it.
“Your curtain’s wide open. The whole neighborhood might have seen.”
Addison shook his head.
“The bed’s too low. The only thing they might see is this.”
He lifted up his tee shirt, took it off and massaged his dick in front of the window, and then moved across his room naked and pulled the drapes shut.
Bonnie was already naked on the bed when Addison lay down beside her and started sucking on her nipples. His tongue went over them again and again.
“You do that well,” she murmured. “You can keep on doing that.”
He did keep doing that. But then he said, “I need to do something else.”
He moved down and started eating her out. He buried his face in that good hair, and put his nose in that moist place, and his tongue was working away and she was unfolding like some meaty rose. She had to stop from shouting. She had to stop from melting. What if she melted all over this bed and there was nothing left come the morning? But something was melting. From the center of Addison’s comforter, a patch of wetness was spreading.
He turned her over. She was still dripping. He was hard again and dripping too. He put his face in her ass. Her kissed her all over. She’d never been kissed this deep before. She turned to him and sucked the life out of him. They moved on the bed, tangling and disentangling murmuring to each other filling the room with the scents of sweat and open bodies. Addison pulled back the bedspread.
“The lights?” Bonnie started.
“Leave ‘em on,” he said, sounding a little drunk.
“Bonnie?”
“Yeah?”
“Next time let’s film this? Let’s tape it so we can watch it while we do it? I always wanted to do that.”
She stopped in the middle of it and touched his face.
“What?”
In his worry he got deflated. Bonnie took his dick in his hand so he didn’t.
“I have a tape with me and Seth. Would that make you mad, or would it turn you on?”
“You and Seth taped it?”
Bonnie nodded. She repeated, “Would it make you mad or—”
“Bring it,” Addison said. And then he positioned himself inside of her and started fucking her. They went at it harder and harder, the bed crying out louder under them. Her hands on his shoulders in desperation, then sliding down his sweaty back, to the small of his back, to his ass, back up and all over again.
“Bring it,” he grunted going harder and harder. “Bring it.”
She just breathed in and out, her face hard, giving like she got, her hands pummeling out an excited drum beat as he fucked her harder, drumming his back, rat-at-tat-tat-ting his ass.
“Bring it!” Addison’s voice was strangled as he came. It was violent, it was like milk and fire and stardust. They came together. It took everything out of them, they rocked and swayed and blacked out.
Early Thursday morning, while gray light was pouring dully into the room, where the light had been left on all night, Bonnie Metzger, quietly, unwrapped herself from Addison. Effortlessly his body unfolded and he turned on his back, sleeping, but not snoring. The room smelled heavily of sex. It was like any heavy good smell. Bonnie wanted to be able to take it, but in the end she went to his desk and lit a stick of incense. She dressed slowly, opening the curtain, watching Addison drowse, the gray sunlight on his white chest. She didn’t want to wake him from this.
When she was dressed she came to the bed and kissed him gently at the place over his heart, between his breasts. He smiled a little and then she turned around, crawled out of his bedroom window, and was gone.
Mason never questioned the appropriateness of his father’s friends coming to his birthday party. Keisha did. She wondered if even she needed to be at her son’s seventeenth birthday party. But in Sidney’s world it was a family affair. Joel and Mark were family.
“I thought you might like this,” Mark handed Mason two wrapped boxes. They were heavier than Mason expected, and he looked at Mark.
“Well, you could open them now, but maybe you should open them later.”
Mason nodded, grinning at the promise of heavy gifts, and went to place them on the kitchen table saying, “Thank you, Dr. Powers.”
“Mason,” Mark said, visibly upset, “My name is Mark.”
Mason opened his mouth. Joel was Joel and his father’s other best friend had always been Dr. Powers. He looked like a Dr. Powers. Mason grew up in that moment when he knew how important something fairly simple was to this man.
“Yes…Mark,” he said.
The name came out strangled, but the older man smiled, grateful.
What!
Get out on the floor
I say let’s dance some more!
Put your hand on your hip
and let your backbone slip
and workout!
Awwwwwww!
Baby work out!
A half hour later there was the thrum of a ripping engine; Mason and Balliol ran to the door to see a motorcycle careening down the street driven by an old Black man with an older Black woman hanging out of the sidecar... yes, drinking a martini which she smashed to the ground as the motorcycle crashed into the lawn.
“Good God!” Savannah murmured, crossing her arms over her chest. She clasped Adam’s hand in terror, and he looked down at her, concerned.
The old man was her father; the older woman was her grandmother. She was small and ancient and her son was helping her pull a helmet off of her head. Her wig came off with it and Swain and Balliol each grasped Mason’s hands to keep from laughing. They all moved to the door.
“I see Mama chose to sit this one out,” Sidney murmured to his sister.
Grandma Darrow stood at the door with her son and Mason’s grandfather thrust a little bottle of Jim Bean in his hands.
“Father!” Keisha snapped at her father-in-law, but he shrugged and said, “The boy ain’t never too young.”
And to prove it, Mason had already downed it.
His grandfather took out a hundred dollar bill.
“How’s that look to you?”
“I have a hundred dollars,” Mason said, his voice bored with indifference.
His grandfather reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a check.
“How’s that look to you?”
Mason took it and pulled it from the prying eyes of Balliol and Swain, sticking it in one of the pockets of his cargo pants.
“I like that,” he said evenly, smiled at his grandfather and vanished to his room to put his money away.
“That’s what I like about Matthew,” his great-grandmother told them.
“Mason,” Sidney corrected.
“Who the hell’s Mason?” she frowned.
“Your great grandson,” Keisha told her.
“What?” she frowned. “You had another one?”
Keisha opened her mouth but Sidney just put a hand on her shoulder and shook his head.
“Yawl gone let me in or what?” Grandfather said and they moved into the house.
“What I need is a drink,” Grandmother Darrow said.
“What you need is to sit down,” her son said.
Addison turned to Mason and said, “How come you great-grandmother is Grandma Darrow, but her son is Grandfather Darrow? shouldn’t—”
“My grandmother refuses to be called Grandma anything. She prefers Liane. Last Christmas she said Grandmas had fat asses and knew how to cook. She also said that if Mom knew how to cook she’d be a perfect grandma one day.”
Bonnie and Addison both choked on their pop and Mason said, “Careful, we just got the carpet cleaned.”
“Grandma Darrow was making the rounds meeting everyone again and insisting that Matthew was the best great grandson any woman could have when she stopped at Mark, frowned and said, “Are you the homo?”
“Oh, God,” Mason heard his mother murmur. He was glad Sully hadn’t shown up yet.
They all waited for Mark to say something, and he finally said, “I share my life with another man. I hope you won’t hold that against me.”
“No,” she said. “But I probably won’t like you.”
He looked at her.
“You see,” she explained. “I hate white folks—”
“Time to get you a drink,” Sidney assessed steering his grandmother toward the kitchen and out of the company.
“Well, shit,” Savannah muttered to Adam, taking out a cigarette. “If your relatives can’t embarrass you, who the hell can?”
“Except for there was this one white boy, before I met your father. Harvey... back in... 1935, I believe.” she was saying from the kitchen as everyone else was trying to move away from her into the living room.
“He asked me to give him some...” her voice grew louder with the narration. “Oh, yeah, hit that glass. Well, naturally I did. And I don’t care what they say about white men and Black men, I’ll tell you, his shit was so big—”
“You’ll have to forgive her,” Sidney said. “She’s senile and two generations removed from the plantation.”
That was the beginning of the awkardness. It got stranger. Seth showed up before dinner and he and Joel just stood looking at each other.
“I didn’t know he’d be here,” Seth whispered to Mason. “Here, I got you this.” He gave him the new Liz Phair CD. “Shit, I need to leave.”
“Joel!” Mason shouted out, catching Seth’s wrist.
“What are you?” Seth whispered.
Joel was used to being called Uncle Joel, but then Mark was used to being called Dr. Powers and not being asked if he was a homo. Joel came forward, a little afraid. These days people tended to be a little afraid around Mason.
“You,” he said to Seth. “And you,” he said to Joel. “Quit being jackasses. Talk!” and then he walked off into the living room.
Sully arrived with Tommy who was already talking as he climbed out of the car,
“Grief. The car stalled in front of a bus and then these people had to come and push us up the hill and back onto the level street. I knew how to fix everything. Sully didn’t. But you should have seen him pick up. He’ll be a mechanic before the year’s over.”
Sully grinned broadly. “We got stuck on Pensacola Avenue. We thought we’d never get here. Happy birthday, Mason.”
To Mason’s surprise, Sully hugged him quickly.
Balliol had joined them now and Tommy was asking what he and Sully had missed.
“So far?” Balliol said. “Everything.”
“And believe it or not,” Mason added. “That’s actually a good thing.”
THEY STOOD AT EITHER END OF Sidney’s studio, looking at each other, arms crossed over their chests.
It was Joel who spoke first.
“How are things at your aunt’s?”
Seth nodded, and played with his hair. “Fine.”
Joel was about to tell his son he needed a haircut. He stopped himself.
Seth’s shoulders sloped. He was bigger than Joel now. He had been for some time. His height must have come from his grandfather. Jarrod McKenna had been a large man and the Flahertys and O’Muils were always large.
“I was at your graduation.”
“I know,” Seth said. “I saw you.”
He added, “I came to the apartment. To get some of my things. You weren’t there.”
Joel shook his head. “I might have been at work.”
“It was Saturday.”
“I work Saturdays now. They changed my schedule.”
“You loved that old schedule. You got twelve off for...”
“Mass,” Joel finished.
“Yeah.
“I don’t suppose you go to that anymore.”
“Only Sundays.”
“Dad, I... didn’t mean what I said... about you being... I didn’t mean it.”
Joel swallowed and nodded.
“It’s just,” Seth said, “it must have been hard. You hadn’t had anyone sense Mom. And you take the Church so seriously.” Then he added. “I don’t think you should. I think you should do what you want. I mean, you are doing what you want, but I think you should do it and not feel bad about it. You should go to Sidney’s church. It’s like a Catholic church. But they’re not all nutsy about... sex.”
“When did you start having sex?” Joel said suddenly.
Seth opened his mouth, but his face turned red and he couldn’t say anything.
“You weren’t supposed to find... what you found,” he said to his father.
“I should have found what I found a long time ago,” Joel said. “Where was I?”
“Working,” Seth said.
“I wasn’t there for you.”
“Yes you were,” Seth said a little fiercely. “What were you supposed to do? Breathe down my neck my whole life and make sure I never did anything?”
“But you did EVERYTHING, Seth. I saw it. I didn’t know you had done any of it. But that’s cause I wasn’t thinking. I wasn’t responsible. I let everything slide. I was so concerned about my good life and so... incapable of making anyone else be good I just stopped trying. Seth what I found in your room was wrong. All the drugs… All the... You sold drugs?” Joel whispered.
“I wanted money,” Seth said desperately. And then he said, “I wanted...”
“To be cool?”
He sighed. “No. I thought I was going to say that, but it’s not true. I... had stopped wanting. Period. I thought that up until Andy got killed. That I didn’t want to live, that it didn’t matter, that it was all... bullshit.
“There was nothing to believe in. I don’t believe in the Church. I believe in it even less now that we’ve got that old German motherfucker in the Vatican saying stuff about gay folks and shit. He’s worse than the last old fart.
“I don’t believe in society. I don’t believe in school. School? That’s the Church trying to make you fit for society. It’s all... I wanted something I enjoyed. I just wanted to enjoy shit and do shit and I’m not you, Dad. Nothing held me back. I wasn’t afraid.”
“You think that’s what it is?” Joel said after awhile. “I try to be good because I’m afraid?”
“Of the Church. Of God?” Seth confessed. “I always thought you were... a little.”
“I think you’re right,” Joel said. “A little. But... it’s not that. I...
“I don’t understand how to be a Christian anymore but I love so much. That’s what it is. Love frees me up, Seth. Now more than it did before. Fear was there, but then I met... Shelley,” this was still a difficult topic. “And now I get brave. Not as brave as I should be, but love makes me do all sorts of things. And prevents me from doing other things.”
“I’m in love, Dad.”
Joel looked up at him.
“It’s not like anything before. It’s so different than before. I’m a lot... less crazy than I was, but… I know what you mean, I’m braver too.”
“Does she have a name?”
Seth nodded.
“Are you going to tell me?”
Seth came close to his father. “It’s Addison’s ex girlfriend.”
“Oh,” Joel said breathlessly.
“Yeah,” Seth said. “I still haven’t told him.”
They were quiet for a moment and then Joel said, “Do you want to come back home?”
“I don’t know.”
“You want to stay with your aunt?”
“No,” Seth said. “But… she doesn’t pay attention, there aren’t any rules and.…” Joel watched a look cross over his sons; face and then Seth said, “Dad, I’m sleeping with Becky. That... It doesn’t matter how much you’ve changed or that I’m a grownup now or whatever, that’s not going to fly if we’re living in the same apartment and you know a girl’s in my bed.”
“No,” Joel saw that was right. It didn’t matter that Shelley was in his. It didn’t matter that wherever he was Seth was going to sleep with Becky anyway, there was something... wrong... about his eighteen year old son sleeping with a high school girl across the hallway from him.
“Seth, I’m so scared for you.”
“Dad, don’t do that. I mean don’t be. I’m eighteen now.”
“I was eighteen over twenty years ago. It’s not that old. And I’m scared for myself, and I’ve screwed up so bad and.…”
“It’s too late now, isn’t it?” Seth said. “But I want to be closer to you. I want to leave Aunt Kate’s.”
“I think…” Joel began, “the apartment downstairs from me is open. Would you want to look at that?”
“I can’t afford it.”
“We can look at all that later. If you want to.”
Seth nodded.
“Dad,” he said.
“Um hum.”
“Could I come home just tonight?”
“Yes, of course. It could be just us. Like old times.”
Seth nodded again.
“Good,” he said.
“Dad?”
“Yes, Seth.”
“Aunt Kate’s house smells like cat piss.”