at the door as a groom deflowered his bride after a wedding, or raping a dozen nuns at a local convent. By contrast, the naughty M relishes dirty jokes, crass innuendo, stories involving the rudest of body parts. He writes odes to gay sex with rough men at rest stops in the small Kentucky town where he grew up. He regularly accuses colleagues of “slut-shaming.”
And in the final months of their marriage, M regularly bemoaned their “vanilla” sex life, comparing their bedroom to that old Woody Allen joke about a restaurant where the food is terrible—and such small portions!
Last August, several months before the suspension for sexual harassment, M and Ari had been unpacking boxes in their new home, a ten-minute drive from the University where he recently received tenure in reward for occasionally interrupting his students’ drinking, drugging, and texting to inform them about equivalent bad behavior centuries before they were born.
M was making a show of straining to lift a heavy cardboard box which, oddly, the movers had marked in all capital letters “CATHOUSE.” Finally, he gave up and pushed the box across the floor into one of the bedrooms, putting his whole body into it, so that his low-cut jeans rode even further down his hips. In another context, it could have been a strip tease, which Ari wouldn’t have enjoyed. Frankness about all matters sexual turned him off. Ari required romance to be served with a good helping of subtlety and shadows. He’d once stopped an encounter cold when M turned on the lights midway through, so they could see themselves performing in the bedroom mirror.
Ari was in the kitchen, carefully unwrapping a coffee mug that said, “In Dog Years, I’m Dead.” A present from M, who used to give more thoughtful gifts like books of poetry, and once a heavy Latin dictionary Ari had been craving. Ari didn’t care for the mug, but couldn’t throw it away.
M came in holding a heavy blue book in his hand, a high school yearbook. “Who’s Justin?”
Ari backed himself against the sink, pressing the mug against his chest. “What?” he said.
M opened the book to the inside of the back cover, pointed to a few scribbled lines, and held out the book for Ari to read. “Justin,” he said.
The way he said the name felt dirty, or maybe like an accusation. “I already know what it says,” said Ari, finally setting down the mug on the chipped countertop. They were hoping to replace it someday with some tasteful quartz. “I just was surprised to hear you mention his name.”
“He wrote, ‘Thanks for the candy, you’re so sweet,’” M recited.
“Yes, he did write that,” said Ari, turning to face the sink. “He’s just, well, that’s his sense of humor.”
“You’re so sweet? That doesn’t sound like a joke. Was he cute?”
“I don’t know,” said Ari, digging around in a cardboard box marked “FRAGILE.” “I never realized we had so many damned coffee mugs.”
“This is the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard about you,” said M. “What does he mean, thanks for the candy? Is that code for something nasty? He must have been cute.”
“Very well. Give me that book. You can judge for yourself.” Ari takes it and flips to the relevant page with Justin’s picture, Justin’s eyes staring off into space, into a distant, better future. Ari’s reluctant to let the book go, but he does. “Satisfied?”
“He’s black,” said M.
“And?”
“So you like black guys? Ari, you should have told me. I know lots of cute black guys. We could finally have a threesome.”
“You misunderstand me,” said Ari. Not for the first time, he thinks, but does not say aloud. “It’s not that I’m attracted to black guys per se. Or that I’m not attracted to them. I just liked him. Not his race. Him.”
“Where is he now?”
“I don’t know. We lost touch. He was just a boy I once liked in high school. That was centuries ago.”
“Ari, I love this. I’m seeing you in this whole new light. Haven’t you thought of Googling him?”
“No, I have not. That would be a violation of his privacy.”
“Oh, stop it. Don’t you ever Google yourself?”
“Whatever for? I know myself.”
“Well, I’m going to.” M whips out his smartphone.
“Please don’t. I really don’t like to do things like that. I’m not a fan of this brave new world that you’re so fond of.”
But M’s fingers are too nimble for Ari to stop him. “Uh-oh,” says M.
“What?” Ari catches his breath, feels something sink inside his chest. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”
“No, worse. He’s straight.”
Ari wants to throw one of his mugs at M’s head. Instead he gives a good tug at his husband’s carefully sculpted, dark wavy hair tamed with something called “product.” “Darling, please shut up.”
“Don’t you want to hear more?” asks M, using the reverse camera in his phone to pat his hair back into place.
“No.”
“You know, I found his wife. Hang on.” Tap, tap, tap on his phone. “Look, here she is. She’s cute.”
“I’m not interested.”
“She’s white. Maybe there’s hope for you, after all.”
“Okay, okay. You’ve had your little joke. Can we get back to these boxes now?”
But M would not be deterred. As Ari resumed the work of unpacking, M settled on a footrest and sporadically shouted out bits of news. For instance, after living in Michigan, North Carolina, and Boston, only a few years ago Justin and his wife settled in northern Virginia. Justin recently assumed the position of CEO of Shut Up and Kiss Me, a popular online dating app with over a million registered users. (Why this company was headquartered in non-romantic Washington of all places, Ari had no idea.)
Later, as they went to pick up pizza, M teased Ari, “Shut Up and Kiss Me, Justin!”
“Aren’t you the soul of wit,” said Ari, whose nerves were frayed from both the tedium of unpacking and the tedium of M’s teasing. His hands felt rough against the steering wheel, his skin dry from handling all that paper and those boxes. The house had been built in the late 1920s and was in dire need of a remodel, especially the kitchen and bathrooms. It was small, meant as a starter home for lovey-dovey newlyweds, rather than a bickering gay couple.
“You could send him some candy, at his office, you know? Like anonymously,” said M later at the restaurant. “Then see if he can guess that it was you.”
Ari was working on a meat lover’s supreme while M had ordered a cheese-less pizza, gluten-free. He was watching his waistline, part of his master plan to defeat the aging process. In anyone else, Ari would have written off these machinations as vanity, yet in M’s assiduous efforts to keep up with the young people, their bodies, fashions,
