From A Fool’s Game
The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.
—L.P. Hartley
They slept on the glass sun porch of that rented house at college, mattresses and springs set on the tiled floor at either end of the room, as far apart as the length of the porch would allow. Before the freeze, there had been a brief thaw, and for a day everything had dripped and loosened under a landscape that steamed, until the cold closed in again, dropped a foot of snow, took the Eastern Seaboard from Maine to Georgia, and outside the windows on three sides long icicles hung—luminous and jagged against the clear cold sky, glistening with an icy certainty in the dim yard light from the house next door.
Robert Snow remembers undressing in the cold and darkness of that room, remembers Thomas doing the same. Remembers the throb and heat of excitement in him. Thomas had just pulled up the flannel trousers of his pajamas, and Robbie stood naked, his thin body shivering with cold and fear, his cock twitching with desire and love, and then he did nothing more than touch Thomas’s bare shoulder, and there was a rush of Thomas’s heat and the full definition of his body against Robbie’s from groin to chest, and more heat on his back where Thomas’s arms and hands were, and it was like holding a lambent fire in the chill of that room, and there was the hard command of Thomas’s cock rising up beneath the flannel against the lonely strain of Robbie’s. And they kissed, mouths wide, a mutual clash of open mouths and tearing breath loud in that room, and the kiss rose to a peak of strained neck muscles, and then their mouths broke apart, and all in a motion, Robbie dropped to his knees on the cold tiles, dragging down Thomas’s pajamas and his hands went to Thomas’s buttocks and the cock slipped along his cheek in a slow slide of warm flesh, and then he pulled back and pushed forward as far as he could go into that fragrance at the root which was like the brief smell of cedar when you first open a blanket chest in a winter-cold attic, and as Robbie drew air, that odor came into him—Thomas McCloud’s most essential fragrance at the seat of life itself—and he felt Thomas’s body quicken, felt him stagger and bend, heard him cry out, and it astounded Robbie: to know that he had the power to make Thomas feel something so strongly that he quaked and staggered and cried out. And Robert Snow knew the cost of this act, the terrible expenditure, and the knowledge forced a dry sob they both heard that resonated in that room and still resonates in memory because even as Robbie’s mouth moved on Thomas, a form of pride Robert Snow had in himself fell away, and he felt lessened, not in the world’s eyes, but in his own. And this went to the quick of him, disconcerted and frightened him. But later, when he knew more of these things and the nature of love, he would come to understand that the lessening was not real. No, it was not a lessening that he had felt on that winter night, but the dislodgement of the pride that had kept him from Thomas. And he sobbed again and forced himself to continue this act because it was for Thomas, and later Thomas will say, “Look, Robbie, there’s nothing you do to me sexually that Caroline doesn’t.”
But Thomas gasped like he was taking in all the air of the room, and bent forward from the waist, his knees watery, and there was a giddy, dropping feeling in his stomach, and hot, sharp little shoots feathering out over the surface of his belly in that hard place beneath his ribs. And when the thing became unbearable in its pleasure, when he thought he would collapse, he put his arms under Robbie’s armpits, felt the brief moistness of the man in the cups of his palms, and pulled him up from the floor, and with one arm under Robbie’s shoulders and the other under Robbie’s knees, Thomas lifted him in his arms because he wanted to and could, and because the pleasure of the mouth had been more than he could bear, and because he did not know how he felt about Robert Snow, except he felt something huge and protective and profound that he had never thought another man could make him feel. And he heard Robbie’s light laugh at the unexpectedness of being airborne in the dark, and for a moment Thomas held Robbie against his chest, marveling at the bony-solid lightness of the man, the buoyancy of him, and the bright, light fragrance of the body. And then Thomas turned, took three steps, lay Robbie on his back amid that dry, male smell which is the odor of Thomas’s bed, and covered him with his body, covered Robert Snow, and that night in exuberance, Thomas took the skin of Robbie’s neck between his teeth, and, as Robbie thrashed and cried out, Thomas broke it, marked Robert Snow’s neck, once, twice—a bold marking.
But for Robbie that electric jarring nip of teeth on his neck was all that existed on this earth, intensely present, intensely contained in one of the catch-phrases of those years: “be here now.”
And Robert Muirhead Snow was there.
Then morning—grey or bright he could not recall—and in the mirror of the bathroom medicine cabinet the broken vessels, the bruised skin, the pride, the open collared-shirt worn to his morning class, the eyes of people going there knowing what his night was, and later in the afternoon in the living room of that house at college, Caroline’s eyes going there just once. He felt satisfaction at where her glance fell, thinking, he gave me this. Thinking, he branded me. His hard-on was warm and sticky against my thigh. Thinking, maybe he’s trying to tell you something, Caroline. And you wanted to know from Thomas where it came from, who gave it to me, and Thomas lied. “Someone,” he told you. “I don’t know who.”
But again, there was this heat, the warmth like a furnace that Robert Snow would never forget, would always remember, because memory is bright and unbearable.
“And maybe it should have stopped there, gone no further,” Robert Snow tells himself now at age forty-eight on this 3 a.m. Monday morning in June, 1999, as he stands before his bathroom mirror shaving, preparing for a flight he does not have to take, and probably should not take, to Chicago where Thomas McCloud is. Yes, he thinks, perhaps it should have been put away on that long-ago December night, wrapped up in a box and shoved to the back of a drawer, to be forgotten except in dreams—this tangle of flowering vines and razor wire.
But it was stunning and miraculous to him at twenty-one, the wetness his hands would find on Thomas’s shoulders and buttocks and chest, the thin sheen of Thomas’s sweat before orgasm and then orgasm and Thomas’s deep cries. Robbie would be borne up on the wonder of all of that, more wondrous to him than his own orgasm. The mystery, the mystery! And perhaps it is the first wonder that he could never forget: their semen Robbie’s fingers caught flowing down his flanks, the great wonderful mess drying where the air touched, but liquid and moist, when, after many, heavy, satiated minutes, Thomas pushed up on his hands, and the glue of it was there on their bellies—the sticky, soft cocks and a ripe odor like catalpa trees in the spring. Love is in the details, Robert Snow sometimes thinks, which are, at the end, the sweet secrets, the profound intimacies.
They lay in that sticky mess in the dim light of that cold room with the opened curtains above Thomas’s bed framing the glittering spikes of ice-cycles, and Robbie was happy and oddly impish again when he spoke after many minutes, taking up again his sex lecture.
“Here’s a little fact you may not know, Tom. A cock is a perfect suction device. I mean when you’re in a cunt, your cock makes a vacuum that pulls out the semen of the guy who was there before you so that you can be the one to hit the bull’s-eye and have your genes passed on. It’s very competitive what goes on in there. There are different kinds of sperm. Some are the swift-footed ones, the wiggly swimmers, whose job it is to make a beeline for the egg, and then there are these big-bruiser sperm with stunted heads who run around beating up on foreign sperm, kicking-ass, so those guys know they ain’t welcome no more in Mr. Rogers’s neighborhood. It’s pretty funny when you think about it.”
“Far out,” Thomas said, very sleepy and heavy, his mind empty.
“And then there are these little monkeys about the height of your knees,” Robbie continued, “and all these guys do is fuck. I mean they fuck about fifty times a day. Any time there’s the slightest tension they start fucking and it doesn’t matter who they’re fucking—boy monkeys, girl monkeys, brother and sister monkeys, mom and dad monkeys, granny and grampa monkeys—they’re just indiscriminate little fuckers. But it’s so exuberant when you think about it. Just exuberant! A regular jamboree. And they have these hand signals they give each other when they’re fucking, things that mean stuff like, ‘Get a little lower. Ya, that’s better.’ Think about it, Tom. Think about everybody you’ve had any tension with today, and if you were one of those monkeys, you’d have fucked them. That sloppy-shit auto mechanic who gave you crap about your car. That librarian so rule crazy and uptight she wouldn’t let you check out any more books until you settled your library fines. If you were one of those little monkeys you’da had to fuck her until her glasses steamed.”
“Far out,” Tom repeated. “Far out.”
“You ever six-pack a girl?” Robbie asked, raising his head on the pillow next to Thomas.
“Did I ever what?” Thomas said, his eyes flying open, very alert now.
“You know, six-pack,” Robbie answered, shifting to lie on his side, facing Thomas. And in the vague light, he made the gesture of bringing his index finger and thumb together the way you’d hold the plastic on a sixer of beer.
“What you’re doing is kneeling behind a girl and you bend her down and you take your thumb and stick it in her asshole and your forefinger in her cunt and then slowly, real slowly, you squeeze them together and when she goes ‘Ooh, baby, ooh,’ you bite her ass. And then you’ve got your choice about what to do next ’cause she’s all opened up and if you wanna butt-fuck you can try a little persuasion or, you know, kinda slip up when you’re humping away and get in there by mistake, or just do the standard doggie-style cunt thing. I mean you’re in a win-win position. So to speak.”
Thomas laughed. “Jeeze, Robbie,” he said. “You’re like Everything You Wanted To Know About Sex and you’re so full of it half the time and the other half you’re . . . I don’t know what.”
Robbie was silent then.
“I don’t know either,” he answered. And he didn’t, for he had no real standard of comparison and no real wisdom in these matters. Nor did Thomas. They both had deep, instinctual feelings and emotions, but no words to put to these things at twenty-one. All they could do was make it up as they went.
“Pope,” Thomas said. “Pope was mean and scraggy as a dog and a rip-off and a wild man, but I liked him.” Thomas laughed. “Jeeze—Pope! What a freak!”
Robbie listened with one ear pressed against Thomas’s chest, listening to the origin of the words rumbling deep inside Thomas and with the other ear to the words as they came out into the cold air of the night room. It was a narrow bed, barely accommodating Thomas’s wide body and the blade of Robbie’s thin
one.
“Pope,” Thomas continued. “He was part of the crowd in Morocco at the end of that summer two years ago before I came home, when I’d had enough of Europe and enough of being alone all the time. But it was good to be alone. I was all that summer, and at that point I hadn’t gotten laid in almost six months.”
“Why?” Robbie asked.
He could feel the shrug of Thomas’s shoulders. Then Thomas extended an arm up into the darkness above them, held it there, speaking to the long, loosely curled fingers of a hand that will, in the fullness of time, become the skilled hand of a surgeon, but for now is only a young man’s tentative hand. “I don’t know. I’d broken up with the girl who took my cherry in high school, and for some reason I didn’t feel much. Three months went by, and then three more, and after a while it became kind of a game to see what
would happen if I didn’t do anything about getting laid. ‘This is a strange but interesting turn of events,’ I told myself.”
Thomas was silent. He brought his arm down, lay it across Robbie’s shoulders outside the covers.
“I met Pope right after I stopped living on this dope farm in Morocco. I had this room on the second floor of the building where they dried the dope and the farmer had assigned his twelve-year-old kid to kind of keep an eye on me. He slept on this little pallet at the bottom of the stairs to my room and he’d always go with me when I went into the town. I was always getting mobbed in the marketplace because of the color of my hair. People would just swarm all over me and try to touch the gold and sometimes they’d get a hold of it and it would hurt like hell and the kid would run interference for me. He carried this stick and he’d beat them away and yell at them. The dope farmer only knew two words in English. ‘Far out.’ Except he’d say it, ‘Faw out.’ F-a-w. ‘Faw out, faw out!’ he’d say. It was kind of funny.”
Thomas laughed. So did Robbie. Again, Thomas was silent. Presently there came a shift of Thomas’s body, followed by a shift of Robbie’s which unglued his ear from Thomas’s chest. When Robbie lay his head there again, he could feel the coolness of the exposed skin—moist, smooth, soft—delicate as the cock skin, but firmer from the underlay of muscles and the strong curve of the rib cage. And as Robbie lay listening to the powerful beat of Thomas’s heart, he did not know that already he was storing up an almost architectural recollection of Thomas’s body; that he would come to know Thomas McCloud’s body in the way you know a familiar house at night—the breath of its walls, the tension of its rafters and floors, the gravitation and stance of it upon the earth, and that this recollection of Thomas’s body would last Robbie a lifetime. Thomas’s form was beloved to him, a body he would protect with his own, that he believed he would sacrifice with his own to preserve. And he understood the meaning of putting yourself in harm’s way. He would do that. Would attend this man to the cannon’s mouth if necessary. Impulsively, he moved a hand down along the outside of Thomas’s thigh, down over the knee as far as he could reach, halfway to the ankle, and then slid it back to brush the soft heaviness of the cock and balls with the back of his hand, pushing the limp cock up into the riot of hair, smoothed his hand up along the chest, following the pleasurable shudder of the body, then curled his fist under his cheek. He did that because he could and because he knew there was so little time and so much time, and that time was both his great enemy and his great ally.
“So what happened with Pope?” Robbie asked.
A sigh, a stretch from Thomas, a turn of his head toward the room where beyond the open curtains on three sides long icicles hang, filled with a cold blue light.
“We were tripping one night on the beach and all of a sudden we started dancing for the stars—mescaline does that. I thought I had all the answers. Dance for the stars, see God. We’d done that in Amsterdam in front of the Van Gogh pictures, just started dancing and laughing and had almost been arrested. And I remember thinking that because Pope was so beautiful the way he danced, if he wanted anything from me I’d give it to him, that there were no barriers between us. That if he wanted something from me, I’d have given it. That’s the closest I’ve ever come to anything like this, Robbie.”
Thomas paused. Robbie said nothing, but he’d heard the tone of Thomas’s voice—both resolute and frightened. Presently Thomas resumed speaking. And again Robbie heard the words inside Thomas’s chest and outside at the same time.
“We went to sleep. We had a fire and we lay down and went to sleep and when I woke up the next morning he was gone. He’d stolen maybe three hundred bucks from me and he’d left a ratty old Moroccan blanket neatly folded up—a gift, I guess, or Pope’s stoned idea of collateral for the loan he’d just helped himself to. Who knows what that blanket meant. But I just laughed. What else could you do? Pope was such a freak, such a rip-off. Pope. Christ, Pope! And I remember that morning I finally got a whiff of myself. I hadn’t showered in nearly two weeks, just swiped my pits whenever I could find a sink, and I was gamy, more than rank, and I thought, buddy, it’s time to go home.”
Thomas was silent again. The raspy little furnace kicked on, and Robbie realized how cold it had become, can remember thinking it had dropped another twenty degrees outside on that January winter night.
“There was another guy in London—an actor in some play about a rock star where a bunch of hippie-looking folks from the audience were recruited to sit on this set of bleachers on the stage. You know, become part of the scenery. And there was this wild dance at the end—the whole cast and some of the people from the bleachers—and there was this actor in the play who had hair like mine, that gold color, and we’d been catching each other’s eyes all during the performance, and right at the end with all this glitter and confetti shit falling out of the rafters and the rock band blaring, he just ran up the bleachers and whipped off this striped school scarf he was wearing and flipped it around my neck and pulled me toward him and gave me this big soul kiss right on the mouth and then pushed me away like he had this complete disdain for what he’d just done, like it was no big deal. The audience roared at his audacity, but I just laughed, just sat back, spread my arms along the seat behind me, and laughed to high heaven, and he leaped down the bleachers and ran off the stage with the other actors and the audience was whistling and clapping and stomping and all I could do was sit there and laugh and laugh and laugh. But he left me the scarf—you know the one, Robbie. You borrow it sometimes.”
Robbie saw in his mind the blue and white scarf and he saw, too, Pope and Thomas on the beach in Morocco beneath a vast African moon, could hear the whisper-stillness of the ancient sea, its rhythmic cloy and retreat on the beach, could smell the great blossom of Africa—the breath of a continent he’d smelled once on a warm, windy night in the South of Spain. And then the full vision opened in his mind.
The sand was wet and black under that moon—he saw that—and the beach fire was high, burning bright, wild with flames and crackling sparks shooting straight up into the still black air beneath that enormous milky moon. And he saw himself there in that vision of what may have happened striding up to the fire coming from a long way down the beach. He heard clear laughter and the whoops of young men from a long way off; saw Thomas’s little MG pulled up just at the edge of the fire light, the headlights like eyes reflecting flames, and Thomas and Pope dancing—two wild men whooping and circling the fire, throwing their bodies into leaps and spins. And then, just as abruptly as they’d started dancing, they stopped and collapsed on the spread sleeping bags. And they sat close with meditative eyes fixed on the flames while something built between them, a palpable tension which was really suppressed action reaching into an unknown place to which they could not bring themselves to step. Robbie could feel Thomas’s loneliness and his urgency to know things, could see and feel all of this as he lay next to Thomas McCloud in that narrow bed they’d come to.
“I’ve eaten your come,” Robbie said quietly, his lips murmuring against Thomas’s bare chest. “It’s gone to build my cells. You’re a part of me now.” And the rich smell of the man was in his nostrils.
Thomas heard and he thought of the privacies that exist between men and women who are lovers, and he thought, too, that he had never realized that such privacies could exist between men.
“Ah Robbie, Robbie,” Thomas said quietly because he knew all this was temporary as a carnival—giddy and bright and whirling. It would have its run, then be packed up. He brought a hand up from the mattress and lay it on the small of Robbie’s back, trying to make that hand send some warmth into this other man who is a man just like himself.
And in the brittle cold of that glass room with icicles hanging jagged beyond the many windows, Robert Snow felt the warm settlement of that hand on him and heard the resigned quality of Thomas’s voice in the winter darkness. And Robbie knew that he had given up something in himself. It was not that he had lost something. It was less definite than that. He had consciously given something up, renounced something, chosen this thing over other things. He had done that at age twenty-one.
And Thomas knew Robbie had.
After the lock of Thomas’s thighs and the up-thrust of his groin; after the spasm and the release and the poise and the settle—after all of that, Thomas McCloud knew what had been given to him was his absolutely and forever. And in Thomas there was a vortex of agony and a vortex of joy and a great profound sense of gratitude that of all the men on the earth, one man loved him enough to give him this. “But what am I to do?” he asked himself. “Shit, what am I supposed to do now?”
One day Thomas McCloud took his camera and began photographing every wall, ceiling, and floor of that house he shared with Robert Snow. The idea was to make a model by gluing the photographs to cardboard and assembling the entire thing into a miniature house. But he abandoned the task after a few shots, and to this day Robert Snow has a stack of black and white photographs of that place where he set himself on the course that has not yet ended for him.
The bathroom was quite small. A grown man six feet tall could spread his arms and touch all four walls. It was dark, too, with a tiny casement window at eye level above the toilet which you faced when you pissed, and the room always smelled of Thomas McCloud’s toiletries—Dial soap and Colgate toothpaste and Noxzema Menthol Shaving Cream, that puffed pastry of smells he brought to bed with him.
The kitchen was long and narrow and very bright—it faced south and was a pleasant place to sit of an afternoon drinking coffee at the Formica-topped table, the sunlight filtered by cheap, gold-colored gauze curtains that had come with the furnished house. Thomas McCloud was an early riser, Robbie a late sleeper, but the morning after they first made love, Robbie rose groggily with him to go to that kitchen and sit at the table waiting for the furnace heat to come up and smoking a cigarette and drinking the first cup of excellent coffee Thomas made in a little aluminum coffee pot that was heated on the stove. That was always the morning sound—the first hissing overflow as the water came to a boil, and then the gurgle of percolation, and the darkness of the windows in winter, or, in other seasons, the transparent water-spill of new sunlight through the east-facing back door just off the adjoining utility room where Robbie had turned into a little study for himself. But on that morning after the first lovemaking, Robbie felt a joy that he did not know was possible, an intoxication that lasted all day, an aliveness that he did not know existed until it came to him. It was as if there were invisible wires in his shoulder blades that held him suspended above the pavement as he walked—a lightness, a drift, an unmitigated joy. They met there again in the late afternoon, in that kitchen where they ate a man-muck of unappetizing food, and, as Thomas once again made coffee, Robbie spoke from his heart, spoke eloquently, and Thomas McCloud heard his words and saw the joy in Robbie’s tranquil eyes, and it was the eyes more than the words that he could not endure. “I enjoyed what happened last night, Robbie, but I don’t want to repeat it,” he said when Robbie had finished. And Robert Snow’s body was devastated at those words, the voice of his fiber and nerves protested, and, hearing Thomas’s words, Robbie’s mind was astonished at how they contradicted what Thomas’s body had said the night before. “How could he not want to repeat something that had been so pleasurable?” Robbie asked himself.
The dining room, sharing a wall with the kitchen, was little more than a windowless pass-through at the center of the house, open to the living room through a wide arch. It had a nondescript linoleum floor, an extension of the kitchen tiles. Here, on two low tables covered by Pope’s moth-eaten Moroccan blanket, sat Thomas’s splendid stereo equipment—a tuner, turntable, tape deck, and speakers of the best German construction and durability. And here the songs of those years were played from morning till night, sometimes at volume so loud the floorboards vibrated, sometimes so very low that the music seemed like a vague thought passing in your mind.
There was “Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play your song for me. I’m not sleepy and there ain’t no place I’m going to,” and “Little Darling, it’s been a long cold lonely winter,” and “Busted flat in Baton Rouge, waitin’ for a train, and I’s feeling nearly as faded as my jeans,” and “Well, come on, all you big strong men, Uncle Sam needs your help again. Got himself in a terrible jam, way down yonder in Vietnam,” and “She came in through the bathroom window protected by a silver spoon,” and “And while the Pope owns 51 percent of General Motors,” and “Maybe I’ll go to Amsterdam or maybe I’ll go to Rome and rent me a grand piano and put some flowers ’round my room,” and “He blew his mind out in a car,” and “Bang! Bang! Maxwell’s silver hammer came down upon his head,” and “Picture yourself in a boat on a river with tangerine trees and marmalade skies,” and “While Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters, Sons of bankers, sons of lawyers, Turn around and say good morning to the night,” and “With no money in our coats and no loving in our souls, you can’t say we’re satisfied,” and “I see my life come shining in from the west down to the east, any day now, any day now, I shall be released.”
And those songs and a hundred others accompanied everything Thomas McCloud and Robert Snow did in those years, were always active in their lives. And Robbie was sure that those songs were convictions of the heart, formulas for right living. The songs were alive in him, but would live no longer than he and Thomas lived. Would be, in time, as dead and quaint as the songs popular in the 1890s, and the last century’s tens, teens, and twenties, would fade like the songs of the generations that had come before him. Even at twenty-one, Robbie knew this more profoundly than Thomas—this urgency to things, the fading and passing of the time in which they lived. But still there was the lilt and the lightness, the litheness of his generation in those songs—the joy, the optimism. The incredible and impenetrable sadness, too, was in those songs. The sad edge to the joy and the optimism. And years after those songs were first sung, hearing them again, Robert Snow would see that time and place where he had blundered upon that love that seemed to have been waiting for him. The songs made him see the wide dusty corridors with marble squares of grey and white, the tall, deep, windows of the classrooms with tattered green shades, the white glass globes of the ceiling lights hanging from long chains, the intricate, iron spiral stairs of the book stacks in a library bearing a family name of Caroline’s, and the long musty rows of the shelves, and going to dinner in the twilight—the light, quick footsteps of the other men all around him on the walks, the bricks stamped with the last name of his father’s college and law school buddy whose family had manufactured them in Chicago.
Made him see, too, the living room of that little rented house. The two narrow windows facing north set at one side of the long wall so the place was always a study in light and shadow. At the dark end was an old, seat-sprung sofa, very soft and welcoming, where Thomas sometimes sprawled and where Robbie would go to him, kneel beside him, touch him, cover him. It was here that Thomas had said one day in despair, “I can’t give you anything but this, Robbie,” and had taken Robbie’s hand and placed it on the hard bulge in Thomas’s Levi’s. Set before it was a huge coffee table made of a flush door resting on upright concrete blocks filling nearly the length of the room and surrounded by half a dozen sagging canvas director’s chairs. The surface of the table was strewn with copies of the New Yorker and Rolling Stone (Robbie had been a charter subscriber) and the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal; and the books they were reading—The Sacred Mushroom and The Cross, The Doors of Perception, The Winter Soldier, The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Great Mother, The Golden Bough, Go Down, Moses, Sexual Politics, Bulfinch’s Mythology, The Persian Boy, Thinking About Women, The Razor’s Edge, Women in Love, The Devils of Loudun, Soul on Ice, and a dog-eared copy of The Whole Earth Catalog. There, too, sat the marijuana hookah and a nickel-plated, electric cigarette rolling machine used during World War II that had belonged to Robbie’s father; hideous lavender cups crusted with dried coffee; a set of Beatnik bongo drums Robbie had owned since he was twelve years old and skulked sullenly about Jackson Park Highlands in Chicago wearing a black trench coat; and always, in spring and summer, a mason jar of ditch flowers or lilacs, and once, at Christmas, a pine tree decorated with a lone and pathetic string of lights and six or seven birds’ nests discovered on winter walks, one of which held a fistful of beautifully rolled joints left as a present by their sweet friend Perpetually Stoned Wilkey, dead now twenty-five years longer than he had lived.
And there was the glass sun porch where Thomas and Robbie slept on mattresses and springs set low to the tiled concrete floor. And outside, beyond one set of sliding windows under which Thomas’s bed was set, was the little slab of cement with a telephone company cable-spool table where they sat in good weather bringing the heavy chrome chairs from the kitchen. Here, too, were strung the clotheslines that crisscrossed the little yard, for the men liked to hang laundry there washed at the laundromat but dried in the sun of those years.
It was altogether a plain little grey-shingled house with a low hip roof up which they would sometimes scramble to sprawl watching the stars. It was a house that seemed out of time, filled with that endless time particular to youth, the kind of house young men make away from home, a place that reflects them, that is them, and that has little to do with the houses in which they had grown.
In spring and summer when it rained, lying abed on the sun porch you could hear the plash on the terrace and the faint, continuous hum of water on the roof. With all the windows open, the rain smell would move through in waves, and there would be a clammy dampness in the sheets. And on warm nights the wind would take the drawn curtains, ripple them all in a line, occasionally kicking them out into the room, a billow and ripple and calm. In winter, it was a cold place, never warm, the beds even colder, set as they were low to the floor. Thomas slept beneath a heavy, army-issue sleeping bag, Robbie beneath heaps of blankets topped by a bright Navajo rug that had come from an uncle’s boyhood room and in sheets starkly embroidered with the firmly stated words, “Maid’s room” that he’d found in the attic at home and brought to college as a joke. Sometimes in the night Robbie would ask, “Tom, can I come over?” And there would be a pause and Thomas would say softly, “Sure, Robbie. Sure.” The floor was very cold on his bare feet and Robbie would hurry across it to Thomas’s bed and the living warmth of the man, and in the winter darkness, Thomas’s buttocks would be against Robbie’s belly and cock as they lay close. And Robbie would put an arm around Thomas’s waist, which in the darkness was warm and narrow—a young man’s hard-thin waist. And always there was the dusty smell of Thomas’s hair, and the other smell of his neck, and yet another smell of his shoulders. And there seemed to be a world of thought between them—Robbie could feel it in the darkness, feel it drain with his blood to his hard-on. And always when they lay like that, Thomas’s cock was hard. Never once had it not been. And when Robbie clasped it, Thomas turned, lay on his back and pulled Robbie atop him, or nudged Robbie onto his back and covered him. And everything they did and everything that happened was connected to that place, that house. For Robert Snow there was nothing real beyond it. No town. No campus. No classrooms. There was only that house.
Andrew Allegretti’s fiction has appeared in a number of magazines including TriQuarterly, Private Arts, and Stand Magazine (UK). He is the recipient of a number of Illinois Arts Council Fellowships for his novel Winter House and IAC awards for short fiction. Two other excerpts from his novel A Fool’s Game have appeared in f6 and f7, F Magazine’s novels-in-progress issues.