The Same Deep Water As You

And at first, they’re happy —

It’s like their school days back again, and without Mrs. Wilson’s little visits this place would be a shambles — days spent in their pyjamas, late breakfasts, watching the sun rise from the living room floor. It makes the optimal staging ground for academic papers and long letters home to Mother — long afternoons too good to be spent doing anything moral or improving. Brandon leaning on the piano to listen, watching Phillip’s hands trace out cadenzas, or the two of them making love in broad daylight, smoking innumerable cigarettes, dirtying innumerable glasses — going nowhere.

The windows afford a really terrific view. Brandon paints it; the previous owners photographed it. Phillip can only look down and imagine the drop, what it might be like to meet the pavement head-first. On summer days the asphalt crawls with warped heat and in the winter it’s a river of trampled snow, rutted with footprints. From above the passersby on foot appear diminished — not quite anonymous specks on the ground just yet, this isn’t the Chrysler Building, but hurrying around like beetles, all the strolling widows and fat bankers and bareheaded young men enjoying the sunshine. He’s bored of them already. Mankind as a class hasn’t interested him since the day he tumbled into knowing Brandon.

They’re happy until they aren’t. In a holding pattern, somebody might say.

*

He doesn’t reach out for him until they’re walking back to the car — the picture was a forgettable thing and a perfectly pleasant way to spend an hour and a half in the dark. Phillip had been waiting for it all that while, waiting on Brandon’s perverse sense of humor to manifest itself. But it hadn’t, and all that cagey waiting and anticipation had been for nothing. And then after — they’d rung up a tab between the two of them, washing away the taste of a second-rate theater with a series of Scotch sours and Brandon’s grip tightening on his leg under the table, unseen and covert. The press of his hand sends a hot shiver up to Phillip’s groin.

This isn’t that kind of club. Phillip wouldn’t even know where to find that kind of club.

Brandon is fickle that way. He won’t touch him in the dark, but he’ll do it in the middle of a crowded room. He’ll lean on him in the hall, but he doesn’t put his arm around him until they’re on the street.

“You’re drunk.”

“Am I?” Brandon’s arm cinches around his waist, the hard edge of his body jostling against Phillip’s side. His hand slots into Phillip’s coat pocket.

It rained while they were drinking; the concrete is soaked dark. Phillip’s breath comes in sharp pulls, the wet air sticks to his face like damp cloth. There were nights like this at school, when everything was damp and glossy and alive with uncertainty, when there were rainstorms after six o’clock and the sky got dark early and everything felt different. In the lights, Brandon’s face is vacant, a good-looking mask. Phillip’s throat aches, so he swallows.

Brandon doesn’t drink to ease his nerves — he never has any trouble with nerves at all. There’s a thumbprint-blotch of pink color in both his cheeks and a tipsy slackness in his voice; his eyes shine. The stumble in his gait isn’t fooling, or the uncertain spread of his fingers, like he’s no longer certain what his body can do and has to fling himself on Phillip’s questionable mercies. It’s a little exciting — in a guilty way. Phillip shifts to bear him up a little.

“You’re a drunken louse,” he says. “I’m getting tired of the city.”

Brandon leans his heavy head against Phillip’s shoulder; his hair is mussed and casts spider-shadows over his face in the streetlights. “Where would you rather go?”

“Someplace with a better character.”

“We could go out to the country for Christmas, and stay there.”

Shut your eyes and have visions of it. Matching tennis rackets in the hall, wooly socks, black coffee and fried eggs, friendly dogs. Phillip keeps walking.

There are men who live together like that well into old age, even in Connecticut. Women too, probably, mannish women growing still more mannish in happy solitude. The two of them are not precisely rich in years, and whenever Phillip tries to conjure up a future for himself in his mind’s eye, with or without Brandon, it is always: dead, dead, dead.

It’s ridiculous. Someone will see them. Ball up those newspaper-ad images and toss them out, replace them with nosy Connecticut neighbors, prying old women, inquisitive young girls.

“I’d rather go someplace different. The French Riviera, maybe.”

“But Phillip, you’ve never been to France. You don’t know any more French than I do.” Enough for Baudelaire, bad schoolboy quotations about voyages to Cythera breathed against the crook of Phillip’s shoulder between classes. But those were in the Cadell days, and they’ve both forgotten plenty since then.

“We could go to Italy.”

“Too depressing,” Brandon replies, shaking his head in a slow drunken arc. Phillip deposits him at the doorstep, fumbling for his keys. Brandon is reaching out to him, fumbling through the layers of his coat, tugging at his scarf.

He wants to kiss him very badly, here on the front step, and damn the neighbors.

Brandon’s eyes are bright, and his lower lip is shining. “We ought to invite good old David over sometime, and congratulate him. Like a late housewarming party.”

“Very late,” Phillip says.

The scarf slithers at the back of Phillip’s neck, a sudden quick stripe of heat. In Brandon’s hands it functions like a bell-pull, a noose. He’s not drunk at all, suddenly; he’s archly, venomously sober and any thought of kissing him dries up pretty quickly.

“Don’t try to be funny. You know perfectly well you aren’t.”

If they don’t act — this will be how Brandon remembers him, weak and willful at the same time. If they do, it’ll have to be David. After that they’ll stay in the city and terrorize the neighbors. Or they’ll run off to the country and enact their will on a sleepier set of citizens.