is fine,” Clarence replied as he counted out one month’s rent and one month’s security.
He moved in the following Saturday, him and his friend.
Clarence Simon and Awed Johnson. Roommates.
Fred peeked through the curtains again. “He tell you he was going to share the place with someone?”
Millie wrung her hands nervously and paced at her husband’s heels. “No, but I—”
“Did you even ask?”
“No, I didn’t think to—”
“Shit, Millie, can’t you even handle business right?”
Fred never took his eyes off Clarence and Awed. He stayed at that window until every last box, suitcase, and lamp was off the sidewalk and in his house.
“Two men. I don’t know,” Fred said when he finally turned around to look at his wife.
Clarence’s friend—his roommate, Awed—was barely five feet tall, with midnight skin and a broad chest. Dagger tattoos dripping blood graced his left and right biceps. A shag of hair hung at his chin, and he would plait it into four braids, clasping the ends with multicolored rubber bands.
Campbell thought he was handsome, in a jailhouse sort of way, even with the fishhook scar that started at the top of his right ear and ended in a curve just above his cheekbone.
“You make sure you stay away from him. Both of them,” Fred warned her before throwing Millie a nasty look. “They mess up one time, and they’re on the street,” he said.
Awed claimed to work construction, but he seemed to be home more often than he was at work. From what Campbell could tell, he spent most of his days chain-smoking, drinking beer, and blasting his Rick James albums.
You could hear everything through the heating vents. Everything.
Clarence, on the other hand, toiled away as a paralegal for a number of prestigious downtown law firms.
“Well, you know, at Lieberman, Hertz, and Fitz, we don’t have to . . .” “At Lieberman, Katz, and Jacobson, we always . . .” “I may have to look for another job because Lieb, Howard, and Cole . . .”
Clarence changed jobs regularly. Six times in the first three months they’d known him.
“Mrs. Loring. Mrs. L.—hellloooooo!” he’d sung through the door one day. “I picked you up a little something. Just a little gift, you know, to celebrate . . . celebrate the house and, well . . . you’ve been such great landlords. A little housewarming-slash-appreciation gift, I guess.” Clarence had a tendency to babble. He shoved a small red-and-white-striped box at Millie.
“Oh,” she exclaimed as she looked down at the words Junior’s Most Fabulous Cheesecake. “Oh,” she said again, and then smiled with delight. “You really shouldn’t have gone to so much—”
“Oh, it was no trouble at all. It’s a strawberry cheesecake, my favorite. My, do you like cheesecake? Strawberries? Stupid, stupid me, I really should have checked with you first, shouldn’t I? I mean, you could hate cheesecake—be allergic to strawberries, even. I had a friend that was allergic to strawberries; he would just swell up like a big red ball whenever he had one. How could anyone be allergic to a little ol’ strawberry? I mean, they are the sweetest things. Now blackberries, yuck! I hate those with a passion. I could understand a person’s body breaking out in hives after having one of those things, although some say the blacker the berry the sweeter the— Oh, look at me going on and on.”
Clarence finally took a breath, and Millie took one right along with him. Campbell, who had been listening from the kitchen, just giggled to herself.
“I love strawberries and cheesecake. Thank you so much,” Millie said, and another warm smile spread across her face.
“You’re welcome. Very, very welcome,” Clarence said, and surprisingly turned and walked upstairs without another word.
“Yeah, he’s got plenty of sugar in his tank,” Fred commented afterward as he grabbed a glass from the cabinet.
“Oh, Fred. Some men are just a little feminine—it don’t mean he’s gay.”
“Oh, he’s a faggot all right,” Fred said as he held the glass up to the light to examine it.
“Fred!” Millie screamed, and turned on him.
“What?” He gave her a dumbfounded look.
“That word, it’s disgusting.”
“What word, faggot?”
Millie went rigid. “Yes.”
“Well, that’s what he is, Millie. I’m just calling it the way I see it.”
“Can’t you just say gay like the rest of the world?”
“I don’t know anybody who says gay, Millie. What world do you live in?”
“Stop it.” Millie shook her head.
Well, it was becoming quite evident to Campbell that Clarence did have a little sugar in his tank.
The more comfortable he became with them, the more melodious his voice grew, the more expressive his hands became as he used them to pilot himself through conversations. Campbell thought of them, his hands, as pigeons during their morning flights over her house, diving and climbing, their movements sensuous and erratic all at once.
Fred rarely stayed to listen to Clarence’s drawn-out, overwrought stories, but Millie and Campbell quietly, politely took in every word he had to say.
If Clarence was gay, then Awed was something else, but at that tender age, Campbell didn’t know what the proper term should be.
It seemed that Awed liked women too, liked them enough to bring them home when Clarence was at work, bring them home and do to them what he did to Clarence on nights Clarence came home with a case of beer or a fifth of scotch.
Somehow Campbell felt that Awed didn’t touch him in that way on evenings when Clarence came home empty-handed.
One day, as Campbell sat at the kitchen table trying to concentrate on a particular history problem, a steady knocking started beneath her. She was used to the sound, accustomed to hearing it on nights when the house was quiet and she was supposed to be asleep.
On those nights, Millie would pull herself out of bed and turn the television on to drown out the sound of Clarence and Awed’s lovemaking. If Fred happened to be home, he would shake his head in disgust, grab his bathrobe, and step outside to have a cigarette or take a walk.
It was always over quickly, just as Fred flicked the glowing butt of his Winston out into the street or rounded the corner that happened to have a working pay phone.
But on that day, the sun still high in the sky and schoolchildren playing hopscotch on the street, the knocking sound was annoying, and Campbell thought it inappropriate for that time of day.
She
