Little Reef and Other Stories Page 6

  It twinged under her ribs, first the left, then the right, trading sides. Too much to look out for, the liver, the pancreas. In the twinkling of an eye, her body’s blinking, freezing spiritual eye.

  Sometime past midnight she turned away from Gary. Across the blinds in the window that overlooked the street the lights of a patrol car prowled past and the car’s intricate security system issued a bleep of disapproval, a smart-technology vote of no confidence. This light could detect the subtle odor of a potentially epidemic disease inside a domicile, borne by Diane Ludner. Even then she knew she was dreaming, but then the dream continued vividly, captivating her: Diane, its bewildered and physically uncomfortable captive. The light reversed course and Diane knew she was had—just like in some old early seventies movie, Omega Man or Soylent Green.

  But it wasn’t her fault. Nothing could be her fault, only her responsibility.

  barracuda

  She’d failed at everything in her past so it surprised her that she was making it in New York. And not that she was in love with her job. The PR biz kept getting crazier. Becca was just ripped that their star client Adonis had come in at lunchtime—without his usual entourage. He’d stopped to chat with her at her desk and at one point even told her that he never lunched. Used to seeing him in spike heel boots in videos, you might not have guessed it, but he was tiny—five feet high at the most. He was about six inches wide and had an amazing waist, almost no waist, a waist more like a wrist, and perfect little features bunched prettily to the center of his face with a trim, skinny black mustache. His hair was pulled into a lamé turban and he was well groomed and smelled of tuberose. She’d asked him what his scent was, and Adonis had giggled. Then he had told Becca it was in fact tuberose, as though imparting the great secret of his own immortal, unstoppable pop allure. Adonis was sex condensed into five feet by six inches, period. Becca’s father, the dead rector, would have made a meal out of the mustache. It was the star’s style, and her father thought he was the funniest man he knew, the subtlest, picking out one feature of somebody’s looks and running with it. “Get Little Richard,” he’d probably say behind Adonis’s back. As if.

  Adonis had come off as fascinating to Becca and she was trying to say just how, although she was having trouble fusing her ideas while perched on a stool in her green fog of margaritas.

  “He’s a fruitarian,” Becca explained about Adonis, “and a Seventh-day Adventist.”

  “What the blab’s that mean?” said Hunter, the dumber one of her two close gay friends.

  Imagine coming from Miami, from Cuban Americans, and being called Hunter.

  “It means he only eats fruit. If fruit doesn’t get picked, it falls off the plant. It’s good for the plant, our taking the fruit, and doesn’t hurt it at all—so fruitarians think it’s more humane.”

  “No,” said Hunter, “I mean Seventh-day Adventist. What the hay’s that mean?”

  If you weren’t Catholic or Jewish, she knew, Hunter couldn’t place you. Not possible to be a lapsed Episcopalian, Becca thought—not that she’d ever get Hunter to understand what she had gone through. Already Hunter and Jesse were ahead of her in the drinks department tonight.

  The smarter and cuter Jesse said, “It’s a cult, right, Seventh-day Adventism?”

  “Sort of,” Becca explained, “I guess more of a denomination. I don’t know. But I think they’re one of those that don’t drink alcohol or caffeine and are pretty strict about their diets.”

  “That puts me out,” said Jesse, who was from Maine and called himself a hunter-gatherer.

  “Me, too,” said Hunter.

  “But they’re a brand of Christian, I know,” Jesse said. “Whatever. Christian.”

  This made Becca laugh. How come all of the cute guys had names that started with a J?

  The bartender came over and said, “Anybody need anything?”

  “No thank you,” Becca said. “We were just laughing about something interesting.”

  The bartender closed his mouth, as though suddenly remembering what he’d forgotten to do all the way across town. She wasn’t ready for her free second drink yet. She trilled laughter. Still, the bartender didn’t move. He stayed in Becca’s headlights, a captive audience, poor guy.

  Already she was tipsy (what was wrong with her!) and she said, regretting it immediately, “It’s just been such an amazing day. So, I’ve been at my firm over a year and never once has any star client of ours come in, like just to say hi? But one finally did today, a really important one.”

  “Amazing,” said the bartender, fluttering his pretty lashes knowing they were pretty-ass.

  “Right?” said Becca.

  It wasn’t that crowded. She liked it this way. There was always the anticipation of more things to come, more crazy jibes to overhear and laugh about, chill videos, more new customers she might turn and talk to. The bartender wiped up a little spill in front of her and began moving away from them. When it was dead like this, the bartender stayed close to the bar back, who was always in a tank top, the two chatting at the end. The bar back was adorably young, with an arch and innocent demeanor. Left alone down there, he’d stand staring and sing along to the divas.

  A new video began. Before the first note was sung, Hunter said, “One of her best ever.”

  “Please,” said Jesse, “it’s so recherché and already her voice was completely shredded.”

  “It’s not as bad as it eventually got,” said Becca knowingly. “I’d hate to hear her now.”

  This was meant as a joke, as the diva in question had recently died by perhaps suicide, a detail that was not mentioned because it was too boring or unnecessary or something, whatever.

  Hunter stirred his drink and languidly said, “Now, forget it,” and Jesse pinched a smile.

  Jesse was the handsomer of the two boys, so the more conservative of demeanor. Hunter was the prettier, about-to-go-off sex freak. If both were straight Becca would’ve had a hard time choosing, as if. She felt fat, but not as fat as she’d felt a couple months ago. She’d worked on it.

  It was early, the beginning of happy hour, giving them good stools near the main screen. She secretly hoped Adonis would come on, the one where he played the heart-shaped guitar and that featured Baby Scrimp. She wanted to tell them about the rose, but Hunter would probably just make a crack about that, too. Coming in, he’d cracked that he liked her short, baggy dress.

  “It really suits you,” he’d said neutrally, “in a classic-rock, Stevie Nicks kind of way.”

  It hurt, but she loved him and felt that in his cracked perverse way he loved her as well.

  Adonis had given her this gorgeous coral rose. He had given her the rose and said that he liked her dress. Hunter was bitchier, more demanding. Adonis, a soulful man, a great performer.

  She wasn’t going to mention it. She sometimes stopped to ask herself why she bothered coming to gay bars so much, but it wasn’t like they only went to bars. They stayed and hung out in Queens in one of their apartments and smoked a bowl. Actually, that was her favorite thing to do. Jesse and Hunter could be friendlier there, appreciating her cooking and baking. And being from Bucks County, a simpler place she missed, though the time wasn’t right to go back, she felt at home in the kitchen. It was like doing something nice for a lover or family member. With gay friends it was the best of both worlds. But too much weed and Hunter would begin making more jokes. “Jeez, Bec,” he said one night, “have some of your own dang banana bread— you made it, remember?”

  “I’m going to,” she said and paused, “when I’m good and ready, you big heinous bitch.”

  The word heinous was popular just then. It was hard to keep up, but Becca tried.

  And she went out on the fire escape to smoke. Jesse joined her, asking for a ciggy and consoling her, saying she was right to call him a bitch. Jesse would make someone a great lover.

  Lover. She liked this word. Becca’s last lover was black, but not all gay men were color-blind: a myth about
homosexuals she would no longer kid herself about. They could be as mean and intolerant as the next guy—as, say, the rector, who’d put himself at the right hand of Jesus.

  “Disgusting, filthy habit, both of you,” Hunter called, eating, not putting on an ounce.

  An older guy at the end of the bar, but closer to the door, with big bronze hair like a noble Roman helmet, was studying the slick glossy full-color bar rags. He came in from the foyer with a stack and sat down and took out his reading glasses. He studied these gay reports on what was going on in New York gay life for their gossip and toward the back the personal websites and cell numbers of hustlers and massage therapists. He was a professor close to retirement, she thought, who kept thin not because he had to but because he had the natural discipline. The readers he put on were drugstore half-moons. Becca knew that the very backs of the magazines featured photo spreads of guys at huge parties in various states of publishable near undress. She’d peeked in on this life, too. With Hunter she had done Halloween, the whole crawl, accompanying him to bars and the after-parties. Hunter would leave her hanging toward the end then peel off so she’d have to get back to Astoria whichever way she could. He’d make her swear this was fine—pretending to care for her safety but just hoping to get laid. Jesse swam in different waters. He worked at a magazine styling photo shoots of modern-chic or antique-filled rooms, the owners of these rooms posed defiantly on couches resembling cloth-covered concrete slabs, or silk-upholstered canapés. So queerly, Jesse would insist on a word like canapé. The subjects were dignifiedly aged, or else dazzlingly forced with enormous effort into a false perpetual youth. Some clients he called “near royalty.” Nor did it bother Becca that she’d never meet these people ever, Hunter’s chosen tribe.

  “Please, royalty?” he’d said. “I think what he means is nouveau riche—while I’m related to Castellano dukes. Havana? Boatloads more aristocracy than with any Hollywood trash.”

  “Darling,” Becca had countered that time, “I think all Jesse said was near royalty.”

  The nice geezer kept studying the rags, making notes, typing info into his smartphone.

  The next few videos were retro and she was back in high school in Bensalem. She’d like to see some of those assholes now. Hot jocks, slut cheerleaders, or fly girls who didn’t cheerlead but who would ridiculously overtreat their hair. The worst were the frumpy girls sneering at her because they were like her, and dumpy weird Aaron in forensics trying to discuss the Epicureans with her, quoting Lucretius, or quoting Epictetus, who’d said, “If you desire to be good then start by believing you’re bad.” Aaron was sweet but didn’t know her father called him the Dolt when, yeah, she’d let him take her to the prom. “Live! It’s a mistake not to,” he kept quoting, then got sick on forties so that he had to stop saying it. He tried to get her bra off when they parked—and she wanted it off, it wasn’t that, it’s just that he didn’t know how to do it. Poor guy, he just didn’t have what Becca wanted. Better the memories of her neighbor who did well in basketball whose parents were very Presbyterian and snob. They were at church when he had a cold and she snuck in through his window and they got into bed and it was lovely, from the first insertion to the time when he yelled “Oh, crap!” and had a fast-erupting orgasm, his mass and weight big all over her. After that, she was ready for Penn, ready to get the hell out, though her grades weren’t great. No one would ever ask about them, which was the dirty secret. All you needed was those references.

  In the center of one rag you could undo a map of Manhattan, gay bars all marked. When he was done typing the addresses into his phone, the man returned the rags to the foyer and came back inside, settled on his stool again with his light-brown drink, and patiently began finishing it.

  And the pretty Latin guy in the stocking cap and nerdy eye frames, complexion unflawed: straight Latin men were mad about her but she wouldn’t marry one. When she finally moved on, she narrated to herself—marrying somebody who need not be rich—she’d just be “Rebecca.”

  The bartender was monitoring their levels and loped back casually, and Hunter began to flirt with him by asking him about his Halloween costume for this year. The bartender said that he’d been thinking about it and wanted to go as an MIA in Nam, if the weather stayed like this.

  Jesse, as though framing himself in a movie, suddenly slammed his glass on the bar and some of the ice came hopping out and spilled over the counter and he yelped and flung his arms around and pretended to flail haplessly. It was too early for this and it got on Becca’s nerves.

  “Did I do that?” Jesse said and laughed at himself, showing his white and straight teeth.

  Really, Jesse had one of two choices: become like her father, the handsome devil who’s sliding through, just getting by, or break out and get sober and become his full, wonderful self.

  Hunter, looking steadily at the bartender, said, “Opens her mouth and her purse falls out.”

  Bitch. Hunter was wonderful but was always there to say the wrong thing, bitch. Bitch!

  The bartender scooped up the spilled ice. “No worries. Another round, guys?”

  “God yes,” Becca said, like a secondary female character in a coming-out film. “Please.”

  Hunter, playing the charmer and thinking he might get the bartender, said, “This one and me, we go back,” and threw his arm around Jesse, who pretended to bristle and be put-out. What was Hunter doing, whom was he trying to make jealous? The bartender rapidly filled his shaker.

  But the first taste of that next one, amazing—“Just what the doctor ordered,” as the rector would have said and said every damn time. The first taste of the next one and she’d be content.

  Hunter and Jesse had met at NYU, friends pre-Becca—before Hunter’s Time of Doubt.

  She’d met Hunter at a pre-party. These things in New York had levels and stratifications. You were invited to the pre-party but not the after-, say, but either way, you wouldn’t go to both.

  She could remember back when she was lighthearted, when she could still be hilarious.

  More coming into the bar. A fifty-plus guy asking for a manhattan. The bartender carded him, like really? The guy acted flattered but obviously didn’t know it was just a formality. Then the bartender served it and the man clarified, he wanted it on the rocks, and the bartender obeyed, he hadn’t heard. He poured it over a glass of ice. Becca’s father before he died, and it was grisly, a gnarly thing to watch, liked manhattans. He was the rector by then, about to die. The people of the congregation came from miles around. They’d loved him for his liberal bent. He’d asked for a manhattan the night he died. The congregants formed a ring around the bed as he sipped it, and he said the thing and they laughed. They didn’t stick around, though, moving on to supper clubs.

  Becca supposed he’d had a kind of dry, effective humor, and that she’d learned hers from him. Nor was it like Daddy would have disapproved of the company she was keeping. He’d had plenty of gays milling through, taking communion. Once she’d thought Daddy was gay— but no. He’d described himself as a fellow traveler in his parish, and his many indiscretions with women had proved him straight, she’d only ultimately learned. Flamier ones, like Hunter, he’d despised.

  So they were at this pre-party, and she didn’t remember what it was for. A book of photos or some project. Project she’d learned, meant anything involving giving a party at the end. Also no one organized anything, they were curators of it, whatever. New York only had curators.

  That night, Hunter had been a really good lover, attentive—like a little brother, actually.

  In the morning, he’d told her about Jesse. He’d wanted her to meet Jesse. Obviously, he was in love with this guy Jesse. Even then she got it—that Hunter and Jesse were never to be.

  The boys went out for a cigarette, leaving her alone. Even that, Hunter’s new smoking.

  One day he hated, looking down on something, and the next day he loved, was hooked.

  She’d never gotten the full story. Hu
nter kept changing the story, but she knew one thing. He’d known about himself before taking her home, and weirdly the sex had been good, soft then hard in all the right proportions and she wasn’t face-down for it. She wished she knew what was genuine about Hunter. There was going to be a time of reckoning for the boy. He could not play around with others’ feelings forever. It took every scrap of Becca’s Christian charity at times. It wasn’t all his fault. Hunter had too many people to please, didn’t know what he truly wanted.

  He had to make his family proud. This seemed weird to the indifferent Protestant Becca, raised coolly, ambivalently. Yet incredible Jesse was under no illusions about himself, and he’d never been. Looking at him sitting there calmly soaking up the bar’s ambient red-filtered light to breathtaking advantage. He forthrightly wanted the same things and never changed his story. He wanted a husband as soon as it was legal, two yellow lab dogs, children eventually. He loved life and nature, all the undefended creatures of the biosphere. Jesse was admirably, covertly spiritual and could tell you how many whales and polar bears there were left in the world, week by week.

  A very pretty man. Where did they come from? These giants in down-to-earth sizes, the princes? Walking among us, but rare, were the princes. Philosophers, poets of Gaia. He hadn’t asked about Adonis, but he was a reserved one, a cool customer. He was going to ask, she knew. It was Jesse’s style to ignore her for a while then hone in with this mad, killing empathy of his.

  Once recently when Jesse had said something about it, and Becca had replied that yes she was losing weight, twenty pounds in three months all told, Hunter had scowled and said, “It’s not good for you to lose it so fast, Becca. Jiminy Crickets, be careful. Don’t expire on us.”

  And then and there Jesse had taken her hand, kissed it, and said, “I’m proud of you.”

  Right now the boys were outside gossiping, and Becca thought, I’m already tipsy. Hunter was right, though. She had to watch. And go easy on the alcohol, lady. Those hidden sugars.