We had just had sex. It used to be that we made love. Or he made love not to me. I made love to him. It was so stupidly ironic—I couldn't stand him for a long time. He did not pursue me or even speak to me. But he did do that a hundred times over, by avoiding me, looking away from me when I accidentally looked at him.
We had had student housing at Traylor University. Now we live in a cruddy apartment where the roaches stay for free.
Wish I had a roach right now. We'd toke up and he'd cry and be sad and I'd pretend to comfort him. But the act was growing stale. The act was getting tiresome.
We were on the real world path now. Starting out. Starting now. And believe you me, nothing was coming up roses. And he did not love me. He said he did, for a while. He said the words, but his eyes were looking inside his dream. Perhaps he was trying to find me in there. Perhaps he was trying to cobble me into his long lost love. Perhaps he was trying to forgive me for not being the right person.
Which irritated me. Made me mad. He made sex to me like he was angry. And he was angry. Because I was not the high school boy he had sat next to in chemistry. With whom he had no chemistry. The boy he loved. And will love till he dies. Which may be damned soon if I don't get out of here.
We lie here on this blazing hot night. No air conditioner. Window fan. City noises. Bleak and desolate. He shot into me. I shot into him. We were like needles inoculating ourselves against each other. Oh, not junkies. I mean we shot each other with our penises. And it was as bald and base and as meaningless at that.
I felt like I had fur on my tongue. Naked with him was like being totally clothed. Why the hell would I have finally given him a chance? Sorry for him? Probably. A shoulder to cry on. That was rich. The psychological dichotomy of the thing. How he had to pretend with his true love. And how I had to be so damned understanding.
When he finished humping me, my legs round his shoulders; I really honestly did count the number of holes in the ceiling. I thought that only happened in Jim Thompson novels. Jim would have loved us. He really would have.
I want to tell him, it's over; it's enough. Sex like food for us makes us thinner. We eat all kinds of sugary and salty stuff and we can't gain weight. It's gotten worse the last year. Sex makes us un-sexed. I don't desire him anymore. I did once. I had to play the parameters of his game. Step delicately around the other one, the lost Lenore, ha.
I at least had the civility to pretend. He just came home from work one day, and the ice had broken. Very thin ice. Like what I had tried to build, like his pretending, all the little Legos I had assembled, came crashing down. We were different. He didn't think I knew him. That I had ever been touched by him. That he had never said he loved me. Well, he had. And he blew the whole thing one hundred and sixty degrees around.
We became brother and brother or brother and sister maybe. I don't know. I want a cigarette. He thinks a person can forget the past, like last Tuesday maybe. Like he's dropped into a new world and pulled me along, so I don't notice the difference.
But face it; it was phony to begin with. It was nothing really. He wanted so much. But he got me instead. There was no quiet softness. No kissing. No whispered pillow talk. No holding tight and crying for no apparent reason. There was no laughter. No confidences. No falling into bed and giggling and making love sweet and easy and hard and exciting.
We had not done that anyway. He was taking away my illusions of those things. That he had endured in order to make me feel better. I tried to talk to him about it, but he wouldn't. He would just clam up and make me feel like a fool. So we hardly spoke anymore. We had sex like machines.
I sat on the side of the bed. The mattress was killing my back. I stepped my bare left foot on a roach and sent it flying across the tiny room to carom off the wall and lie there on the filthy floor, with its back broken or something, with its legs tumbling and fighting and clawing in the air. I should go over there and kill it. But it's like a thousand miles of deep hot breathless desert to cross. They don't feel pain, do they?
God, I'm going out of my mind. Consideration for, and guilt because of, my almost but not quite killing it, for maiming it and making it suffer. It's us suffering. I get a cigarette from the table and light up.
