Chapter One of A Pardoner's Tale Continued

Sometimes I shake the way David does, after too much coffee. The sugar I’ve had doesn’t help, my thoughts are racing in a familiar way. The sugar high is something I’ve used all my life as a coping mechanism, but what a foolish trick. More often, these days, sugar only leaves me confused and tired. Which doesn’t stop me from helping myself to another cup of coffee with two heaping teaspoons.

“Seems like Dwight’s been gone a long time,” Aaron says.

“I miss Dwight,” Todd says. “I mean, as a friend.”

I miss Dwight too. He came here not long before I did, and already he’s gone. Well, recovery is different for everyone, as Brian would say. In group Dwight had a nice self-deprecating sense of humor, kind of like mine but without the pathos. He was so fair his hair was almost white. His chest hair too, thick and lickable. His nipples were so sensitive that breathing on them made him sigh. When his dick was hard it was the darkest part of him. He had a funny dickhead, like a knob of putty stuck off-center. I liked to ride it while he bucked like a bronco. “Fuck me, stud. Fuck me till dawn and I’ll slap your tits, just the way you like it.”

I got Dwight with one daring move. I don’t know where I got the balls for it. It was one morning when I was passing him in the hall. Unlike me he was showering after breakfast, traipsing toward the downstairs bathroom with a towel around his waist. I had never seen a man like him before: so pale, yet so hairy. Nearly white fur covered him from his shoulders on down. Something in Dwight was begging for me; and though I’d seen him half naked before, it was on that morning, that I got it: his nipples. They poked out of his pecs like deeper, darker treats peeking through cotton-candy nests. Oh, they ached to be touched, and my fingertips ached for them.

It might not have happened if I hadn’t dreamed about him the night before. He was as warm as a bear, and we were hibernating together, spoonwise, my dick planted firmly between his thighs. I woke up curled against my pillow, wondering why I’d intuited that Dwight was so warm. Was it one of those dream-puns that Freud was so fond of—a “hot” man serving the role of bed-warmer? It took effort to pull my dick from its crevice between pillow and mattress, where it had done its best to glue itself in place. It was washing my bed linens, for the third time that week, that brought me to that first floor hallway at the same time that Dwight was heading back from the shower. I knew he was returning from the shower, not heading to it, because while the rest of him was dry, the hair on his head was not; it was slicked back into a ducktail, which gave him a sexy, fifties-style look. And those nipples….

Who’s to say, really, what a friendly gesture is between men? I’d seen enough grabassing in “straight” locker rooms to know what a fuzzy line there could be between improper and acceptable touch…. And so I talked myself, during that few seconds’ walk down the hallway, into reaching out with my right hand and tweaking Dwight’s left nipple as he passed by. Without stopping he reached to slap my hand, missing it, letting loose a good-natured chuckle. I hadn’t stopped, either, but looked back over my shoulder to see him glancing at me. As I kept looking he swung around on his large bare feet and walked backward a few steps, facing me full-on as his towel suddenly slipped from where his left hand had been grasping it—slipped all the way to the floor. How embarrassing! Yet there was a pause—a significant pause—before Dwight stooped to grab the towel. In that split second I saw him naked for the first time. Saw the fur that continued down his belly to his groin, saw the pink tip of his irresistible dick, which swung in the lazy kind of arc peculiar to dicks in the process of lengthening, thickening…. So much happened during that split-second that, as Dwight tucked his towel in place again, I had to catch his eye to see what he had taken in. Yes, there was recognition there, in the half curve of his smile—an acknowledgement that something had begun, and it would be brought to a conclusion, hopefully sooner than later.

My prescient feeling about Dwight’s nipples soon made me wish I could predict other things with as much accuracy. He taught me so much about tits: working them with slickened fingertips, I could control his entire body. The right kind of tweaking could cause different parts of him to twitch uncontrollably—his buttocks, his feet. And he never failed to look at me with gratitude that I had so quickly found his weakness, his obsession, his reason for living.

But what was his reason for leaving? Of course there’s only one reason to leave: he had recovered. On the morning he told us he made a speech about life and change, presenting his case with sincerity and skill. But why he chose that exact time to go…wracking my brain gave me no answers, and if I were really honest I wouldn’t need one. Instead I would admit the truth: he left because he didn’t need us anymore.

“Been a while since we had anybody new,” David says. Does he know that he’s tapping his fork with his fingernail, making it ting-ting-ting against his plate? “Not since Paul.”

Oh great, everyone looks at me. I try to smile and feel it misfire. No doubt my mouth looks as insincere as Todd’s voice sounds. They know that, when all is said and done, I’m different from them. I keep to myself too much. Yes, this is a place for healing, you’re supposed to be self-absorbed; but it’s also a place for—oh, that word—sharing. Sharing and caring. Insane little ditties run through my head all day: Oh, we share and care in our underwear.

I glance at Aaron, who’s smiling at me, just slightly. Like Dwight he’s almost painfully blond, especially in the fluorescent light of the kitchen—his eyebrows like frost, his lashes like attenuated snowflakes. Almost an albino. There’s another dimension to Aaron, too, for if you took his wintry paleness away, painted his eyebrows and lashes brown, his blue eyes hazel, you’d have Eric, my ex-husband.

He’s there, Eric, in my dreams, the ones I never talk about. He hovers over me, his features as clear as the media player of memory can make them, and his Spanish accent keeps on ticking when I turn the volume up. His words and actions are limited, though, as if I’ve run short on disk space. Often he’s naked, I see the freckles on his belly, the dick I know as well as my own, the dime-sized birthmark on his hip. He peers at me, as if at his own reflection in a mirror, and asks something like, “Paul, what are you doing?”

“What the fuck do you think I’m doing,” I ask gently.

His lower lip trembles. “Come back to me.”

“Come back to you?” I sweep my hand in dismissal, forcing him to step back. “You’re the one who left me, in case you’ve forgotten. You cheated on me. Then you left me.”

He raises the back of his hand to his mouth just as a sob tears it open. “No! That’s not true, Paul!” The vehemence of his words—he’s practically screaming—wakes me up. I lie in the dark, trying in vain to think about what’s true and what’s not. Wondering where my husband is now. What’s become of the king-size bed we shared. What’s become of our cat, whom I would never throw out a window, not even in a dream.

David gets seconds on orange juice. I warm up my coffee from the carafe. By the time we’ve sat down again Brian and Kent return, single file, Kent ducking into the kitchen as Brian, behind him, asks, “Well, what do you think?”

“It’s pretty nice,” Kent says.

So young. He looks young enough to be in high school, and he speaks—shades of Todd!—like a kid talking to a teacher, saying the right words but really thinking You’re full of shit. Oh, he likes to get fucked, all right: it comes through as clearly as his bright smile and untrimmed mustache. How about that mustache? He’s neat enough in other ways, why doesn’t he keep it straight-edged? He must think that ragged fringe curling against his lip looks sexy, and damned if it doesn’t. One unkempt detail can go a long way. I know you, Kent: you’re a little sex machine, working your sphincter around a lubricated shaft like you were born to it; in mouth or ass you can take two cocks at once, sucking them up like a Dirt Devil. I see you, I recognize you even from my humble vantage point—middle age, chalk-blue pajamas, white hairy ankles and all.

I wonder what Brian has seen. Does he feel that Kent is a good candidate? Hard to tell from his expression. “Well,” he says, sticking to the script, “I’m going to leave you all for a bit, so you guys can, you know, talk amongst yourselves.” He takes his coat from the rack and edges through the kitchen door—making a show of leaving the house so that Kent won’t think he’s hiding somewhere, listening.

Taking his seat at the table again, Kent looks at each of us in turn, seeking eye contact. Soon I’m trapped in his steady blue gaze; if my head were snatched away my eyeballs would stay in place, hanging in midair. Yet I return his gaze very calmly. Let him accuse me of hypocrisy, it wouldn’t be the first time. He should have been here when our last guest came through—a little shit with a shaved head, his salt-and-pepper mustache giving away his age. Rodney, his name was. As soon as the five of us were alone, Brian having slipped out the kitchen door, Rodney let us have it. “Fucking hypocrites!” he screamed. “You’ll never change, you know you won’t, you CAN’T. But once you’re completely brainwashed you’ll be just like your creepy ‘leader,’ telling guys they can get rid of their gayness, a GOD-GIVEN gayness, by the way. So don’t talk about God, you pathetic bastards. Just FUCK OFF, okay? Fuck yourselves, if you’re not secretly fucking each other!”

Looking back, I’d say we did very well. Not a lip trembled, not an eyelash fluttered as we sat and watched Rodney, who was shaking so hard he nearly fell off his chair. We didn’t argue, didn’t cry—okay, one tear appeared on my cheek, but it dried up quickly—and didn’t correct his notion that we talked about God. As he’d already been told, God didn’t enter into our affairs. Poor guy—he must have suspected that the minute his back was turned we’d be beating him with Bibles. Sitting, staring calmly, our advantage was almost unfair. No wonder he finally bolted to his feet and ran, leaving the kitchen door open, his footsteps crunching through fresh-fallen snow, his car roaring furiously as it overtook the stop sign at the top of the hill.

For another minute, we just continued to stare. Finally Dwight, who was still with us, said, “Jesus fucking Christ.” It was enough to release the tension, we laughed as if it was the funniest thing we’d ever heard.

Now Kent is giving us the hairy eyeball. I plant my feet flat on the floor and take a big gulp of coffee. Another outburst is unlikely; Rodney was an anomaly, guys are too thoroughly screened to fake their way in here—though how or when I was screened I cannot say. Sure enough, Kent’s voice is soft as he asks, “So you guys aren’t...?”

We sit perfectly still, as if we’ve put our heads together and decided to let composure speak for itself. Even David manages not to fidget.

“Nobody likes to suck dick? You don’t even like to look at pictures of naked guys?”

Continued composure. Unruffled feathers.

“Jesus,” Kent says, “don’t you guys even beat off?”

My composure breaks, in the form of a short, sharp laugh that sounds and feels more like a sneeze. No one else’s breaks, though. David speaks up clearly and calmly. “You might not believe it now,” he says, “but it’s possible to lead a life where you’re not obsessed with sex all the time. It’s possible.”

Kent sticks his tongue in his cheek, rolls it around as if tasting something new.

“We’re not, like, monks or anything,” Todd says. “It’s not like we’re giving up sex forever, or anything like that.” To my surprise Todd has found a new way to overcome his habitual sarcastic tone: by growing louder. His next statement fairly booms. “It’s just that some of us would like to get married, have kids.”

Kent sits for a moment, considering. He looks down at the floor. The table leg squeaks, he must be rubbing his boot against it. “I haven’t been doing much with my life lately,” he says. “Not really.”

“You can do something here,” Aaron says. “We can help you. We support each other. We’re doing it.”

If there’s a double meaning to We’re doing it, it doesn’t show on Aaron’s perfectly sober face. Now an increasingly awkward silence seems to point out that I’m the only one who hasn’t added to the pep talk. Isn’t there something I can say? I don’t have to search my thoughts too far before I come up against a wall. It’s a high, blank wall, but at least I know what’s on the other side: grief, a whole shitstorm of grief and loss and despair. When I speak it’s to that wall, as if I might break through it, then level off the sea of muck so that I could, for the first time in what seems like years, glimpse the horizon.

“Do it, Kent,” I tell him. “Do it now, while you’re still young enough that you haven’t ruined your life yet, or anyone else’s. Do it before so much time has passed that you don’t know if you can. Do it so you don’t have to learn how scary that is, or what it feels like to live with all that regret.”

More silence, but of a different kind. Kent seems about to speak, his lips trembling; instead he just looks at me while I blush for the third time this morning, feeling it like a warm dry cloth laid over my face. I’ve done what had to be done, what could only be done by me—the oldest man at the table, the one with more gray hair than anyone else.

Brian would be proud.

Sunday breakfast is always followed by free time—a reminder that we are “free” from the burdens of churchgoing and other religious rot. I head for the den, where I can stare at the book-lined walls and smoke one cigarette after another. The only other smoker in the house is Brian, who keeps trying to quit. He’ll duck into the room, light up and start pacing, biting drags off his fag, crushing it out when it’s half gone. I said to him once, “If you’re going to smoke, you might as well enjoy it,” then wished I hadn’t, for he looked even more ashamed. Maybe he feels that, as an expert on quitting queer life, he should set an example in quitting smoking as well. If you can forsake blow jobs, doesn’t it follow that you can stop sucking on Marlboros? Yet I’m glad—secretly glad—that I’m not the only smoker in the house.

I don’t see Brian during this Sunday morning smoke because he’s left for the supermarket, to get supplies; Kent has already decided he’ll be moving in tonight. So I sit and smoke and listen to the vague winter complaints of the house and David’s noodling on the piano in the living room. Todd and Aaron are probably upstairs, reading or perhaps writing letters with the standard apologies: Sorry you can’t visit me here, sorry we can’t even talk on the phone, sorry I can’t even give you the address. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Those are the rules…. Rules, that is, meant to protect our privacy, and our safety in this little Maine town where the locals would torch the place if they thought it contained homosexuals, recovering or not.

The slamming of the kitchen door wakes me. Christ, have I been dozing with a lit cigarette in my hand? I check my hand, my lap, the chair, the floor, the ashtray. Nothing burning. The kitchen noise means that Brian is back from his shopping; I couldn’t have slept very long. Long enough, though, for a thousand tiny dreams, and I close my eyes to try to recapture some. It was also a dream that was troubling me when I woke up earlier this morning, I’m sure of it. This certainty itself is reassuring, since dreams are nothing to worry about. Still, I’d like to know exactly what it was I’d seen in my sleep, and whether or not it has just revisited me....

Something brushes my cheek, startling me again. Another nap has come and gone, an extremely brief one, and though I didn’t feel the familiar oops-I-left-a-cigarette-burning panic, there was panic in me just the same: what could have touched me? I look around for the winter housefly (rare) that might have settled on my face; I wave my hands, seeking out the draft (not so rare) that might have caressed me. Nothing doing. But now I know: something touched me during the night, too. Brushed my cheek, and more—left me twisted in my sheets, too. It was no delusion.

As I sit and smoke my fourth cigarette of the day, I pick my way through the minefield of what I like to call my consciousness. Some crap is always on the edge of exploding, and if it should all blow at once—all the events, say, of the last six months or so—it would leave a Paul-sized crater where I used to be. Should I confide more in Brian? He already knows what a mess I am, but he doesn’t know...everything. I don’t know everything. Does anybody?

Not that he doesn’t think he knows everything. How smug he sounds, calling me into his office on the first floor, just beyond the living room. “Come on in, Paul.”

His naked chest is coated with curly red hair, and I know that under the desk he’s naked as well. Out of sight, maybe, but I can smell his hard dick. It sets me to salivating.

“How old are you, Paul?”

Again? “Uh…forty-five. I think.”

“You realize your life may be two-thirds over? Two-thirds! Think of it!”

“I guess I’d rather think of it as half over … assuming I’ll live to be 90, which, I admit, isn’t too likely, given my family….” I’m mumbling. I hate when I mumble in front of Brian, it makes me feel like a bratty kid who’s been brought before the principal.

“Whether it’s half or two-thirds, Paul, the key word is ‘over.’ What are you going to do with what you’ve got left?”

His blue eyes are so bright; they are (a) his most prominent feature, followed by (b) his curly ginger mustache and (c) his Adam’s apple, like a tonsure among the bristles his razor didn’t quite reach. From there my eyes slip easily down his chest. His nipples are hard, and why wouldn’t they be, it must be twenty below outside and this is far from being the warmest room in the house. If I pressed my palm against the windowpane near his right shoulder it would probably stick, fast-frozen. Just the thought of it makes my hand cold, I slide it under my thigh as I stare at that perky right nipple and wonder, for the hundredth time, if it has a telltale hole from an old piercing.

“Look, Paul,” he says when I am obviously at a loss for words. “Look. Is this what you want?” With a push against the floor he sends his chair rolling back, and I have to stand up now to see that he is indeed sitting there naked. He spreads his knees, lifts his pelvis slightly. His hard cock strains against his flat, hairy belly; his balls are tight and wrinkled, his scrotum reacting to the chill in the air. His hands with their long, sensitive fingers appear on either side of his bush, framing the goods. “Is this what you want?”

Drooling, I watch a delicate finger trace the length of his cock. His other hand appears beneath his balls, and they respond, descending in the warmth of his palm. Making a circle of his thumb and forefinger, he slides it over his shaft, moving up and down like a magician seeking to prove that the audience volunteer has no strings holding him up. He is not quite jerking himself off, just keeping enough contact to ensure that his cock stays its hardest. “Look, Paul. Take a good look.” His fingers move across his balls, poking and tickling them while his other hand takes a firmer grip on his shaft. “Is this what you want?”

“I…I don’t know what to say.” Unfortunately my dick is speaking for me, I can’t hide the erection that’s pitching a tent in my sweatpants.

“Or how about this?” He lifts his knees, raising them nearly to his shoulders—if his chair was the kind that tilted he’d be flat on his back by now—and while I can’t quite see his asshole, that’s clearly where the tip of his middle finger is headed, inserting itself as his tongue barely protrudes from his mouth, as if the two are connected. “How about it, Paul? This is all there is, isn’t it? The be-all and end-all. You’d give up your whole life for it. In fact, you already have.”

When my tongue comes unglued it’s only to whine. “Don’t be unfair.”

“Unfair?” Slowly he unfurls himself from his curled-up position. His dick is hard as ever, but he ignores it completely as he rolls his chair back under the desk. “I’ll tell you what’s unfair: you’ve given up your life for this, and what you’ve got now is nothing.”

Okay, it’s true: nothing to hold, nothing to keep. And nothing to say, apparently.

“It’s not too late, Paul. No matter what you think, it’s not too late.”

I could go back to my seat, but even that small decision is too much at the moment. I stand, swaying, prepared to fall either way.

“Remember free will? Remember choosing? Think, Paul! Use that magnificent brain of yours!”

“Uh…I must have missed something. Just a minute ago you were playing with yourself, if I’m not….”

He leans forward as if I’ve discovered something that needs a closer look. “The key word, Paul, is ‘playing.’ It’s just playing, after all. It’s not real, it’s not life itself.”

The argument feels familiar, I’ve heard it a hundred times, but there’s something accompanying it, something intense in his blue eyes that can’t be denied. I’m asking silently, Is it really that simple? And he’s saying, without speaking, Of course, of course.

Now I ask again, as I light cigarette number five: Does anyone know everything?

As if in answer the doorknob rattles. When the door swings open a half-second later I expect to see Brian, hunchbacked with guilt, fitting a cigarette to his lips. Instead I see a cigarette, but the man it’s attached to is Kent. He’s startled to see me, his eyebrows go up—or rather eyebrow, for it’s more like a single straight line hooding both eyes. Ordinarily I like the feral look of excess hair in a few well-chosen places, but right now it only makes me nervous.

“Sorry,” he says.

It takes me a moment to respond. “That’s all right” is what finally comes out, though the pause before it makes it sound like a lie. “I just came in,” I explain, “to look for a book.” Yet it must be obvious, from the pack of cigs beside me and the butts in the ashtray, that I came here to smoke and smoke and smoke.

Kent doesn’t seem fazed by my awkwardness. He nods, lips his cigarette and lights it, and I’m lost, watching him. No sultry jazz musician ever handled his mouthpiece the way Kent handles a cigarette. He takes a drag, rolls the taste around with his tongue and lets it go, his lips puckering the smoke into a thin line like steam escaping through a fissure. He nods, as if in silent agreement with his coffin nail, and takes another drag, grasping the filter with two fingers as he bites off smoke, tilts his head back and, blinking rapidly, exhales through his nose. Finally he looks at me again, takes a step in my direction. Then another. My back stiffens against the chair—What am I afraid of?—and I think I might actually cry out till I see he’s only heading for the ashtray by my right elbow.

“Sorry to interrupt you,” he says, mixing his ash with mine.

“Oh, no, not at all. I was just….” What? Haven’t I already told him I was looking for a book? I stare at my lap, but my eyes refuse to focus. Do I even know how to read?

“I’m moving in tonight,” he says. “Just thought I’d look around a bit more.”

I smile, or try to, as his bright blue eyes zero in on mine. “Sure. Fine. Welcome.” Did that sound friendly? And why is he still looking into my eyes, even as he takes another drag? Finally I have to look away, my face flushing again for no reason. We’re just a couple of guys having a conversation, no big deal. It happens all the time around here.

Except that it doesn’t. Not like this. Even when I first met Todd and David and Aaron and Dwight, there was nothing like what I’m feeling now—as if I’ve not only thought of doing wrong, but have already done it. And Kent knows.

That’s it! Kent knows. He knows that something brushed my cheek in the night, and then....

And then there were two bodies, and a lot of grappling under the sheets, as if we were trying to catch a mouse, not each other. Hands that hadn’t touched another male body in ages stumbled upon dimly remembered erogenous zones. The clumsiness, the desperation, the accidental roughness was part of a thrill that did not, could not last long once hands found hard cocks, hot and slippery, achingly touchy. The explosion that followed was potent and copious, I thought the sheets would melt, the air ignite.

Then there was my door closing gently, and bare feet crossing the hall, scurrying off to … where?

Kent can see all of this in my eyes, I know it. So I ask him, silently, Where? Who? Which door closed softly in the night? But he only smokes, and stares, and reads me like the books I’m feigning interest in. It’s time for another effort to make all this seem natural, but as seconds tick by the chance to redeem the moment moves at warp speed, out of sight. He crushes out his cigarette and says, “Okay, see you later…Paul? Is that right?”

I nod. “Paul.” The name that sounds like a funeral bell. “See you, Kent.”

The door is about to close behind him when he pauses again. “Say, can I ask you something?”

To pose that question is already asking something, a pet peeve of mine. But I try to put on a bright smile. “Of course.”

“That guy who left recently? Dwight?”

I don’t know why, but his question disappoints me. I guess I expected something more personal. “Six inches, Kent. Versatile, yes, extremely so. I swallow, too. Always have. In for a penny, in for a pound.” “What about Dwight?”

“Did you know him? I mean, did you get to know him before he left?”

Sucking Dwight’s chest hair while he moans, polishing his off-center knob till he begs me to bring him off. “A little, I suppose.” Enough to know that Dwight had a problem. Not that half the world isn’t disturbed—no, three-quarters of the world, at least. With Dwight it was anger. “We’re all angry,” I told him once, knowing that the anger that had once motivated me was gone, leaving me hollow.

I rock him in my arms as he cries. “I can’t do this anymore,” he says. “I can’t, I can’t.”

“Baby, hush.” I hold his scrotum, warm his balls in the palm of my hand. A final pearl of cum leaks from his slit. “You can do anything you want, I don’t mind.”

He nearly chokes on tears. “That’s not what I mean!” Heaving himself up, he turns toward the door as if he might step like this, naked and still semi-erect, into the hallway. Instead he raises his pale fist and slams his knuckles into the wall. “Shit!”

“Baby, baby.” Arms encircling him from behind, my fingertips soothing his tits. “Let me sell you a pardon. I’m the only one who can, you know….”

His fist slams the wall again. The ancient plaster crumbles, but that’s not what I’m worried about. “Honey, don’t,” I tell him. “That’s your jackoff hand, you don’t want to….”

Kent’s voice intrudes. He’s still questioning me, but it’s hard to follow. It’s too much like having a real conversation, I’m not used to it. “Excuse me?” I ask.

“I asked you if you saw him leave the house. Dwight.”

“I don’t see….”

“On the day he left. Did you actually see him go?”

“ Well, no, I don’t think I did.” Actually I know I didn’t. No one did, we didn’t even know he was gone till Brian announced it at breakfast. “Why do you ask?”

“Oh, no reason.”

As if such a question could fail to have a reason. I’d sneer at him if he wasn’t so cute, standing there with his little package pointed at me. “Mind if I ask you a question, Kent?” “Why, not at all. Eight inches. Get your trick towel ready, I blow a wad like you’ve never seen. But you have to fuck me for a good hour first.” He seems about to shut the door, then pauses again.

“Have you ever seen anybody leave the house?” he asks.

Well, I’ve seen Brian leave the house, and come back, too. You can smell the cold air clinging to his parka. And Riley, our gopher and handyman—he comes and goes, too. But it’s too late to give an answer like that; darned if I haven’t let a pause slip in, a long enough one to reveal that I know what Kent’s really asking. Which leads me, somehow, to Chaucer.

“Do you know what The Pardoner’s Tale is about?” I ask him. “These three guys, these ‘rioters,’ are in a tavern, getting drunk as usual, when they learn that a friend has been killed by a thief named Death. They go off in search of Death, to give him what for, and an old man directs them to a tree, telling them they’ll find Death underneath it. But instead they find piles of gold under the tree. They decide to carry it off, but not until it gets dark. One of them goes back into town for some food and drink. While he’s gone the other two start plotting: when their friend gets back with the provisions they’ll kill him, so they can split the gold two ways. And when the guy gets back, they do. Kill him. But then they drink the wine, and what do you know, the guy had poisoned it so he’d have all the gold to himself. So they all end up dead. It’s just like they were told, there’s death under the tree.”

Which is my way of saying that I know what he’s asking. He’s asking if I’ve ever seen anybody—any of us pilgrims—leave the house alive. Well, no. Not really. But then Dwight’s the only one who’s left since I’ve been here.

“Okay,” he says, sounding as if he’s humoring me. “Okay, Paul. See you later.”

Wait, I want to call after him. I didn’t tell you everything after all. Somebody keeps coming into my room last night. It’s not a dream or a fantasy, it’s real. But Kent has closed the door behind him.

Now Brian comes in, his cheeks still flushed from being outside. Agitated, he bounces on his heels a few times, and just when I think he’s going to take out a cigarette he takes out his dick instead. This is made easier by the fact that he never wears underwear, though I feel like asking him, Gosh Brian, doesn’t that ever cause a problem, I mean what do you do about those embarrassing pecker tracks on your jeans? But as usual he starts talking first. “You want this, Paul? You want it? Tell me how bad you want it.” His fist moves so fast he’s going to tear that big dick right off, I’ve never seen him so horny, never seen his prick so hard. He’s going to jizz any second, which doesn’t stop me from getting out of my chair and walking right through him.

It’s almost midnight. In the room next to mine Kent is pumping seed for all he’s worth, masturbating so furiously that he can’t sit or lie or stand still. He’s reeling about the room, crashing into walls and furniture, panting and cussing as his shoulder contacts a wall or he stubs his toe on the rug, throwing himself to the floor and thrusting his hips in the air. Of course I can’t see this but I can hear it and picture it. We’ve all been through the same thing. He’s draining himself of spooge, he’ll find it hanging from the ceiling in the morning, obscuring the corners like cobwebs. It’s a strange ritual, because you can’t really drain the body of anything: given the minimum daily requirements of nourishment and oxygen and warmth, it will just keep on making more. But it’s the symbolism of the act that counts, and I understand symbols very well.

I have one in front of me now, the edition of The Canterbury Tales that I took from the den, illustrated with faded woodcuts of the pilgrims, including the dour, elongated Pardoner. In his famous essay George Lyman Kittredge called him “the one lost soul among the pilgrims.” Irredeemable, because he’s not only a cheat and a liar but also, it turns out, a homosexual—at least most scholars think so. There’s the telling detail that he travels with a male companion, and also he’s referred to as a “mare”—slang for you-know-what. Plus he looks like a fairy, a little too light in his medieval loafers.

So I feel for the Pardoner, who pardons others falsely and slavishly while clutching his own sin tight to his chest. He keeps me company as I make this effort to remember, to create a record for myself alone, an understanding of what’s been happening to me over the last several months.

This afternoon I woke from a long but unfulfilling nap to a winter twilight that was just a few shades lighter than midnight. I sat up, and in the minute or two that it took to orient myself I sensed not only the house but the whole little town settling around me. I heard creaking footsteps in the kitchen and also, some distance away, the wind whistling through a crack in a funhouse window. Even the sea made its presence felt, the low tide dragging like slush across the sand. Heightened senses for sure, thanks to a dream that wasn’t the usual obscure teaser but vivid as life itself—a life I’ve known elsewhere. I listened, I crept to the window, looked out at the back yard with its few bare oaks. I closed my eyes and another scene appeared, as clear as Eric’s face and voice had been as he’d called, That’s not the truth, Paul! It was the sea I was looking at—not a winter sea but an autumn one, viewed from the window of … a diner. I sat alone in a booth, eating pancakes. They were real diner pancakes, hot from the griddle, topped with blueberries in a deliriously thick syrup, like pie filling—hell, it probably was pie filling. The sugar high mingled with a caffeine rush as I refilled my mug from the thermal pot at my elbow.

That was it. No action, and no meaning, really, just a snapshot from my mostly unremembered recent life. But it gave me hope that I might be able to piece my story together, after all. Throughout the evening, a dull Sunday evening of dinner and playing cards, pieces of the past kept floating past my eyes, adding to my conviction.

It’s a story full of reeling that I have to tell, like the jackoff scene next door, with more than its share of stubbed toes and bruises. And other things, things I can only trick out vaguely from here and now. A car will drown, and there is someone or something else, a restless shadow in my memory—something emptied of life that nevertheless keeps moving, senselessly, rhythmically, in the darkness.

 

© 2005 Wayne Courtois - Contributor's Bio