"You seem a million miles away. What has your attention—that newspaper or that Japanese maple out there? The tree is new, isn't it? Wasn't something else there before?" The questions came from Walker Sharp, the novelist, and Maxwell Ackerman's neighbor in the row of small, but very expensive, townhouses on Drayton Street, facing Savannah's thirty-acre Forsyth Park.
Max turned his eyes on the man sitting beside him on the terrace behind his townhouse. The two had been taking turns hosting each other for 5:00 p.m. drinks for two years. Both were alone now. They came from two different worlds—Sharp wrote literary novels and Maxwell was a sportsman, having been a professional tennis player when young and a sports commentator and sports gear representative in middle age—with the difference between them even more pronounced. In his fifties, Walker Sharp was still turning out a best-selling novel every year. The public life of Maxwell, now in his late sixties, had been over for nearly a decade and his private world had collapsed two years previously. Walker was about Maxwell's only day-to-day contact now other than Dinah and her husband, Horace, who took care of Maxwell's minimal needs.
"Sorry, I'm just being morose," Maxwell responded. "I see in today's paper that Stan Murphy has died. He was entered at Wimbledon for the first time the last year I played there. I looked through the rest of the obits, and all the other men reported to have died are younger than I am."
"It happens, Max," Walker said. "That's just today's paper."
"I know, but I looked at their ages and you know the first thing I thought? I thought that they didn't die so young that I'd say they died too young. No one can say they didn't get a full crack at life. And I'm older than they were when they died. I'll bet that's what others think too when they read those obits. That's what they'll think when they read mine. No one will say 'He died too young.' They'll say I had a good life, which is as good as saying 'It's about time.'"
"I like to look at it more like my mother did when she was in a nursing home at the last," Walker responded. He wasn't going to try to talk Maxwell out of his morose attitude toward this. He had too much respect for Maxwell to try to sugarcoat life for him. "Although I'm sure she regretted the loss of friends, she admitted to me once that her first thought when someone else died was that she had outlived another one."
"The tree out there," Maxwell said, getting around to answering the question, "I put that in to balance the other Japanese maple. But I won't live to see it large enough to do that."
"There was something else there before, wasn't there?" Walker asked, trying to change the subject to something that would depress his friend less—but unsuccessfully, as it turned out.
"Yes. There was a white birch tree. Neal put it in, wanting something there with interesting bark. I told him that white birches don't thrive here, but he said this one would for him. But it died . . . just like Neal did."
"It's been two years, Max," Walker said. "Neal wouldn't like for you to withdraw from the world that long." They paused in a few minutes of companionable silence before Walker picked up the conversation again. "I'm thinking of going to Club One this evening. Why don't you go with me?"
Club One was a gay bar and entertainment venue in downtown Savannah, known for its drag queen shows and as a good pickup venue. Walker and Maxwell both were gay. That was the main reason they were comfortable with each other, although they'd never gone with each other in that way. Maxwell had very definitely been partnered with Neal Jordan, the Savannah native who had brought Maxwell to town after a career on the road internationally.
"You aren't asking me out on a date, are you Walker?" Maxwell asked, a slight smile on his face. His eyes were still turned to the new Japanese maple, but what they were seeing was Neal planting the white birch. Since he wasn't looking at Walker, though, the novelist didn't hide what Walker, in fact, would like to see happen. And maybe, just maybe, Maxwell didn't look directly at Walker when he said that because he didn't want to see rejection in Walker's eyes.
"No, of course not," Walker quickly answered. "So, do you want to go?"
"No, thanks, not tonight. But do go ahead and go. You need to get out more."
As do you, Walker thought, as he pulled himself up from the lawn chair. "Maybe another night then," he said, as he moved toward the gate they'd put in the fence between their properties. Both of them knew that "maybe" was the operable word. "You need to get out as much as I do." If not more, he added in his mind.
* * * *
Max sat and watched Walker move off toward his own side of the fence. He knew what his neighbor was suggesting. He even suspected that Walker would go with him if he indicated that was what he wanted. There was a time, when Neal was still alive and Walker still had his wife, Alice, that they were attracted to each other and both realized it and suppressed it because they both had partners they didn't want to betray.
But that ship had sailed, hadn't it? Walker was still an attractive man at fifty-five. He had grayed but done so without losing his male model looks or his trim figure. And as far as Max knew, Walker was still healthy without any serious debilitations. Max couldn't say the same. He took eleven pills a day—for high blood pressure, diabetes, atrial fibrillation, and now there were arthritic pains cropping up here and there. He supposed he should be lucky to have reached his late sixties. He'd had some injuries in his pro tennis days, ones that built up to forcing him off the court before he was thirty-five. Of course, thirty-five is old for a professional singles tennis player, so he got no sympathy when injuries forced him into retirement from that. Yes, he'd kept himself in shape with gym work and club tennis, motivated to continue to look good and fit on camera, but in the last year—no, the last two years, since Neal's death—he felt like he was going to pot.
For someone whose career typically aged out at thirty, what was there to look forward to for the next fifty years? He had enjoyed life after modest fame to a large extent, but wasn't that mostly because of Neal? Neal was
not
supposed to go first.
The only good thing he could say about his condition other than still looking presentable was that he still could get it up and still could produce cum. But he was driving it with his own hands these days. He knew that was by choice, but at the same time he was wary of being rejected if he tried to take his need for a spin with younger men.
It was too late to contemplate Walker. He couldn't even say whether they would be a good fit. Max had done some flip-flopping in his wild and sexy tennis days, but he'd been an exclusive top with Neal. He and Walker had never gotten around to determining whether they'd be a fit. After Alice had left Walker, there had been a procession of young men next door, but their preferences other than gay hadn't been something that Max had discerned. He had still been content with Neal.
No, it was too late for Max, he was convinced. And he was a nonperson now. He was just waiting around for the end, it seemed, reading the obituaries and regretting what he wouldn't be around to do and see—the trip to New Zealand would never happen now; he should have done that one of the years he played in the Australian Open. Nor would he be doing the around-the-world ocean cruise—or the ski village retreat in Aspen that one of his early boyfriends, Serge, and he had dreamed of. Neal was a beach bum; he had had no interest in snow.
What to do tonight? Max wondered. He could have taken Walker up on the evening at Club One. Maybe that would have stirred his juices. He hadn't had sex since six months before Neal died—since Neal had grown too weak for it. He didn't even know if he could keep it up now when faced with having sex with a stranger. He could get it up; he took care of himself. But with all the pills he took, could he keep it up with another man to deliver a mutually satisfying ejaculation? Wasn't he afraid he couldn't? Wasn't that why he was holding Walker at arms' length now and why he felt a bit threatened by the suggestion that they go to Club One together? Did he want to know that he couldn't get it up when watching a sex act on stage or in going into a back room with a stranger? And was he afraid of a stranger laughing at the suggestion of going with a sixty-seven-year-old man, not willing even to go far enough to find out that Max was gloriously hung?
Max would walk into town, go through a couple of the famous squares, go to a steak house—maybe one of Paula Dean's restaurants—this evening and maybe pretend he wished he could have taken the risk to try out Club One.
But first he'd go across the street and into Forsyth Park. This is where he'd first picked up Neal, and where he'd asked Neal to partner with him—and where Neal had broken the news of his terminal illness. All on the same bench in an isolated part of the park.
Max, sitting on a bench—his bench—in Forsyth Park, barely noticed the young man with the tennis racket under his arm pass the first time. On the second pass, he did notice him, especially because the young man—looking a bit scruffy for tennis but otherwise quite good looking, slim and with a sultry look, a lock of hair flopping over into his eyes—paused and gave Max a scrutinizing look. On the third pass, Max watched the young man approach and stop, and stand in front of him.
"Excuse me, but aren't you Max Ackerman? The tennis player?" the young man asked.
