ONE
IT’S BEEN A COUPLE OF DECADES since Ari last held one of these chocolate bars, and the gold plastic wrapper crinkles in his jittery fingers. The red Hebrew letters on the label spell out the name of the candy: Pesek Zman, which means Free Time.
Free time, he thinks. Sometimes I’m sick to death of being free.
As a teenager, Ari used to keep a stash of those candies in his closet, on the shelf above his prep school uniform. Every morning, he buttoned up his dress shirt, yanked the knot of his necktie up to the collar of his button-down shirt as dictated by school dress code, and then deposited a piece of Pesek Zman in the inside pocket of his sport jacket.
And now, this Valentine’s Day, as a forty-one-year-old Medieval history professor residing in University Park, Maryland, he’ll repeat this ritual once more, at least the candy part of it.
He rips one of the wrapper—Ari requires three tries to tear it open—and bites into a cube of the milk chocolate, filled with a crispy wafer and hazelnut cream. According to the company’s website, he is tasting the king of chocolate bars, a moment of pure indulgence. Everyone needs a little time out from life, to stop and enjoy a beautiful moment.
To Ari the chocolate tastes cloyingly, stunningly sweet, makes his tongue curl. He mashes the candy into a grainy chocolate paste that sticks to his teeth and the roof of his mouth, struggles to get it down his gullet. He didn’t like the candy then and he doesn’t now. But liking Pesek Zman was never the point. He’d doled it out as a gift, piece by piece, day after day all throughout high school, to a boy he used to know.
He’d forgotten all about the candy until he’d been reminded of it by his husband—now ex-husband—a poet on suspension for screwing a student. The ex-husband’s name is M. Not an initial, just the letter, to express solidarity with the transgendered.
On their first evening together, after a few mojitos, the poet confessed his birth name: Michael.
They’d met the old-fashioned way, in a bar. Ari had been dragged there by a colleague, who’d expressed disbelief that Ari had never hitherto visited the one gay bar on campus. And there, holding court among a coterie of gay faculty, just over six feet tall, was M, wearing his oversized dark-framed glasses (prescription strength of zero, a fashion accessory), a purple checked shirt, and white pants that seemed to glow in the darkness of the bar, hugging his hips and thighs. “You’re a quiet one,” M told Ari at the end of the evening, when the rest of the crowd, recognizing the charge between these two, had filtered away. “What’s going on in that cute brain of yours?”
“How can you see it, I mean, my brain, to know that it’s, well, cute.” Ari hated that last word, one of those nauseating contemporary locutions.
M put his hand on the small of Ari’s back, a few fingers drifting playfully down, just inside the back of Ari’s belt. “If it’s anything like the rest of you,” he whispered, his breath tickling Ari’s ear, “then, well, that’s how I know.”
Two years later, they were investing in real estate. Or, rather Ari was investing and M was coming along for the ride. M would have preferred to live closer to downtown, to the “action,” but it was Ari who was supplying the down payment.
“I’m a man against action,” said Ari.
“You
