By the time another business trip came up to cross the Atlantic, I was ready and grabbed at it. It was back to my old stomping grounds when I'd worked in that European branch—and when I'd been with Cal. And when I'd been such a wandering ass that I now couldn't forget about my sins against Cal.
The trip would give me a chance to atone for my sins—to confess and take my punishment—or, I don't know, exorcise my demon. Who knows? I'm not Catholic, but this seemed to be a very Catholic thing I needed to do to square myself with Cal. Not in person, of course. That wasn't going to happen. But at least to myself. I had just been waiting for this chance to go back to the scene of my crimes and erase what I could.
I didn't seek out the Jazz Club immediately upon landing, but pretty close to that. I checked into a hotel and was almost immediately out on the street, walking the familiar pavement. I'd picked a hotel closer to the club than to my company's offices. It was clear to me what my priorities were in coming here. I had two days to get this done before I had to appear at the office. And I'd had two years to plan what I had to do.
The Jazz Club—the signage in English, I guess to appear more cosmopolitan—was a basement venue reached by a door at the head of an alley in the old town, where the buildings were three and four stories, flats above and businesses below, that were an architect's delight and an engineer's nightmare.
I could hear the strains of the saxophonist from nearly a block away—a rendition of Billy Joel's "Just the Way You Were," pretty much the way Cal used to play it. I slipped into nostalgia almost immediately, even before descending the steps into the cave-like room where those who loved jazz—and particularly jazz played on the saxophone—gathered nightly. I stopped on the stairs, closed my eyes, and imagined that Cal would be on the small stage under the haze of smoke when I got down there. And that I could just enter the club and reenter his life with an entirely new attitude—not be the shitty little snip I was when we parted, or, rather, when I'd flitted off in a snit and taken the first transfer available back to New York.
The musician had moved into the Stan Getz arrangement of the "Girl from Ipanema" before I reached the bottom of the stairs. It was another one of Cal's standards. This wasn't going to be easy on me. But maybe that was part of what I needed for this act or atonement, or exorcism, or whatever.
The saxophonist the club now had certainly was no Cal. He was short and pudgy, black and wrinkled, and wore a beret on a wild-haired wooly black-shot-with-gray head. He may have sounded like Cal, but he certainly didn't look like my tall and thin handsome Aussie.
I sat at a table near the back of the room, which was three-quarters full of patrons here for the music, rapt in the sweet tones of the sax. When I was seated, I braved a look toward the bar that ran nearly the full width of the room along the back wall. I wasn't sure if I wanted him still to be here or not. He had become the most important element of this ritual I had decided I needed to go through, so, for that reason, he still needed to be here—and still needed to have the wants he had expressed to me while I was with Cal, and most pointedly when Cal and I were having difficulties. But if he wasn't here, maybe I could take that as a sign that I didn't need the ritual confession of my sins and punishing atonement for them at all.
But he was there, behind the bar, where he worked as one of the bartenders and also as the club bouncer, not that this club needed a bouncer. The patrons were sophisticated, well heeled, and here for the music. The saxophonist had moved into "Take Five" in the Dave Brubeck version from his
Time Out
album. The patrons would be floating on that for some time. They wouldn't be paying any attention to what was happening at my table.
The big Slav, Horst, saw me from behind the bar, did a double take, and then smiled. He raised a bottle of Scotch, and I nodded in assent. He fiddled under the bar for a few seconds, but quickly had added two glasses to the bottle and was moving toward my table. He was as monstrously big as always—a head or more taller than I was, broad shouldered, and muscular. Completely unlike Cal. It was weird that I was planning to use him to make atonement—in my mind, at least—for how I had treated Cal, but somehow it had seemed fitting. The last thing Cal had said before I flounced out on him was, "If I don't satisfy you, go fuck Horst."
But Cal did satisfy me. He always did. I just didn't know it at the time. I was always after more—mostly more attention to me. I had grown since then, but I couldn't square that directly with Cal now. He was departed. Not in the sense of the final last breath, but back to Australia, which was as close as he could get to being dead to me and still breathing.
"You came back," Horst said, as he sat down, precariously, on a chair meant for a much more normal-sized person than he was.
"Yes, I came back," I said as he poured out two stiff glasses of Scotch. He'd brought good Scotch. He was still interested, on the make, which fit into my plans, even if it sent a chill up my back. Besides the magnificently muscled oversized body, Horst was pug ugly with a bald head resembling a bullet and a face that only his pug could love.
"He's not here anymore," he said. "Went back to Australia not long after you left."
"I know. I didn't come here to see him. I came here to see you."
That obviously pleased the big Slav. He smiled and took his wallet out of his pocket and placed it on the surface of the table. He immediately pulled a photograph out of it, but I knew he'd placed it on the table so that I could see the indentation the condom disk made in the leather of the wallet—a very wide condom disk, a Magnum size. He had done this signaling before when he'd been trying to make me. He wanted me to know he required a Magnum—and that he went everywhere prepared to use it.
That's what he'd done when he saw that Cal and I were having difficulty and he wanted some of what Cal got—some of what some others were getting, which was at the root of the problems between Cal and me. He'd slapped the wallet, showing the indentation, down on a tabletop, drawn my attention to it, and said, "You want a real man? I'm a real man."
He flipped the photograph over and showed it to me. "Nice blond little piece, isn't he?" Horst said. "Curly hair just like you. Cal had him in here almost before your seat at the table had gotten cold. That didn't last long, though. None of his progression of cute little pieces like this twink and you lasted long with Cal. He pulled up stakes and returned to Adelaide soon thereafter."
"Soon after what?" I asked.
"Soon after I'd fucked the stuffing out of this one," Horst said with a grin. "Squealed like a little pig, he did. He loved it but couldn't walk straight for days afterward. Cal was pissed."
I know, I know, I screamed in my mind. You have a big cock.
He was rubbing a finger over the indentation of the condom disk. He was trying too hard. I'd come in with the intention of using him as punishment. He wouldn't know it, but he didn't have to sell himself to me. He poured us both another shot of the Scotch and asked me what I'd come here for.
I was honest—to a point. I told him I'd come for him, that I hadn't stopped thinking about him since I'd gone back to the States. This was half true. I couldn't stop thinking about Cal and what I'd done to him, but Horst did fit into those thoughts—and then, increasingly, into my plans for atonement.
