“Don’t be a shit-head. Come out. We don’t need money.”
I didn’t see Craig again after I quit the restaurant. James would call or stop by my dorm room to see if I wanted to play the game. Mostly I was good to go, but sometimes I just didn’t feel like kissing up to some dog. I wanted someone to kiss up to me. I wanted to do something I wasn’t supposed to do, just for a night, and then I’d be good for weeks.
I hit the Bunkhouse. I could feel the men looking at me: skinny boy-faced men in their silver V-neck shirts, queens, bashful young ones out looking for the first time. There were always the guys looking for love, dressed in a polo shirt or knitted sweater; these men were tired of the scene. They had disillusionment stamped in their faces. They complained into their drinks that all anyone wanted was a random fuck. I stayed clear of them.
An older man in an expensive suit sat at the bar, nodding his head to the music and scanning the crowd. A gold watch peeked out from under the cuff of his jacket. He was a vulture, looking to impress a stringy-muscled boy—any one of them—as they came off the dance floor to wedge between the barstools for a drink. The boys were like me, except I wasn’t going to end up someone’s bitch. The suit could buy me all the drinks he wanted, but I was more like him than some gold-digging pretty boy.
My summer with Oryn started out like this: a lingering glance, a smile, a casual trip to his car in the parking lot. It was near the end of my junior year, and I had withdrawn from all my classes—dropped out, according to the school. I had no plans, no job. I had nowhere to go except home, and who wants to go there, admitting defeat? I sold my stereo and my computer and spent most nights crashing in James’s dorm room, where I kept my stuff in bags on the floor of his closet. Some weekend nights I’d go home with some butter face, or I’d make it down to the Bunkhouse and hook up, spend a night in a motel room at someone else’s expense. But the semester was coming to an end, and James’s dorm room wasn’t going to be an option anymore.
“Do you want to go to my apartment?” Oryn said as we left the Bunkhouse.
I thought about it on the short walk to his car. Waking up next to a man in his apartment: what was that like?
“I live in Astoria, but I can give you money to take the train home in the morning. I can drive you home in the morning.”
I spent the night, the next night, and came back a week later because Oryn had tickets to Porno for Pyros at Roseland. My things moved from James’s dorm room to Oryn’s apartment. Soon there was an empty drawer for my underwear.
I imagined the other clients dreamed about the beach while lying in their tanning beds, wearing Speedos or nothing and those little eye protectors while bright heat emitted from bulbs inches from their skin, but I saw only black with flashes of white, like a freshly paved wet parking lot, its shallow puddles reflecting light from a streetlamp, or a girl in black in the same desolate parking lot, her skin and her string of pearls standing out in the darkness.
After twenty minutes, my skin felt tight. I stepped out and looked back at the bed. I could imagine myself lying inside, even rotating while my body turned gold to match the color of my dyed yellow hair. The thought made me dizzy. Back at the apartment, all was quiet except for the humming of the air conditioner. This belonged to me until Oryn came home. I stripped and lay on the cool white sofa, my sweat drying to my skin. Oryn would find me sleeping there when he came home from work, the result of his romantic gestures blond and broiled.
According to Shelly, I had been romantic twice. The first time was on our one-year anniversary, November 17. Her mother was out of town visiting relatives, her father was at work, and Shelly was at school all day. I decided I would let myself in and surprise her with a hot candle-lit bubble bath, ready to dip into when she came in from the cold. I cleaned the bathroom. I set up candles on the sink, put a radio on the toilet seat, and found a station playing smooth jazz that floated like steam around the shower curtain. But when I went to fill the tub half an hour before she was to get home, all that came out of the faucet was freezing water. By the time she showed up, I had four huge pots of water heating on the range top and four potfuls already dumped into the tub.
The second time was the following summer. It was blazing hot for over a week, and when I came to Shelly’s house from my line-cook job at night she would moan and wheeze with a damp washcloth on her forehead. On one particularly boiling night she sat up crying in the dark because she felt as though she were suffocating. I told her to get dressed. We sneaked her out the window and walked to a motel on the highway that had air-conditioning.
In early August, when I had just gotten back from tanning and getting my roots bleached, Oryn came home with a big cardboard box. He carried it into the living room, where I lounged on the sofa in my boxers, watching Kids in the Hall reruns.
“I got you something,” he said. He put the box on the coffee table. “Guess what it is.”
“A silk shirt.” He had gotten me three by this time, and the last time I had offended him when I didn’t act surprised.
“Come on, be serious.”
I stretched my leg out to the coffee table and tapped the box with my foot to estimate its weight. The box was heavy. He always brought home samples of shampoo and fragrances that the company gave away. I thought the gift might be that, and I said so.
“No, why would I give you that as a gift? It’s something else. Something you said you wanted.”
I didn’t remember asking for anything. “I give up,” I said.
He opened the box. There were half-used tubes of acrylics and oils, brushes, watercolors, a little bottle of paint thinner, a small palette, and some other painting supplies.
He said, “I know this retired professor who used to teach art history at NYU, and he paints too, and now he’s writing a book on interior design—but anyway, he was getting rid of some old supplies his partner left behind. He said I could have them, so I brought them home for you.”
“That’s nice,” I said. “Thank you.”
Oryn seemed disappointed. “You know, that one day when you said you might want to take up painting? That day we were watching that painting show?”
Then I remembered. It was my first week living with Oryn and we were watching Bob Ross paint a landscape on PBS. Oryn leaned in toward me, slowly got his hand under my shirt, and started rubbing my side with the backs of his fingers. He rubbed for about five minutes, finally wedging his hand between my back and the sofa, but I really wasn’t into him touching me right then. I’d told him that I wanted to paint like Bob Ross, just so he would get the point that I wasn’t in the mood.
I sifted through the box of art supplies and felt the weight of a paint-speckled pallet in my hands.
“I guess you don’t want this stuff,” he said.
“Yeah, I think I changed my mind about painting.”
“You don’t even want to try?”
I dropped the pallette back into the box. “I want to finish watching this show, actually.”
He stood there, to the side, by the coffee table, looking at me. The show cut to a commercial and I flipped through the channels.
“Whatever you want.” He picked up the box and carried it toward the door.
“Where
