​THIRTEEN

Mitch

I can’t say “I love you,” but I can say “yes” when Aaron invites me to his office. He's an accountant for a mortgage firm and throws around strings of letters like “PCAOB” and “GAAP” that have no real context for me, but I welcome them during our rigid elevator ride.

“Calls?” Aaron asks a woman in a blue button down, and I trail behind, overgrown puppy at his heels. There’s a stain on the woman’s breast, and when she follows my gaze, her cheeks grow pink.

“No, no calls,” she says. She picks at her mousy hair and mutters “dang it” under her breath.

“A milk cow,” Aaron says when we’re inside his office, the heavy wooden door shut behind us. “They go and have babies, and I get to witness nature at work. You’d think with all the powdered garbage on the market today, they’d stop making wet nurses of themselves.” I nod along, blink back an image of Elena with her hair down, short and neat above her shoulders, Sela at her breast. That sucking sound. That quiet.

“Yeah, so...will she think it’s weird?”

“Who, what?” Aaron places his bag behind his desk. I'm supposed to be finishing up a small job at One Union National Plaza because Jimmy’s home sick with what he’s told Pam is the flu and what he told me is some sort of “vicious love killer” that he’s sure that dealer at the Cherokee gave him. But instead, I'm in the National Metropolitan bank tower a few streets over from One Union National Plaza, watching Aaron loosen his tie. It’s my birthday today, and celebrating is an exercise in lying. Elena thinks I'm working, and then I’ll meet her at Sela’s therapist for a family cryfest which will be followed by fried rice and knife throwing at Benihana to honor the day.

And Aaron thinks I'm leaving my wife.

“The woman out there, the one who’s...leaking. You know, do you think she thinks it’s weird I’m in here?” I whisper.

“Tricia? We kind of have a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy at Willard. Tricia don’t ask, and I don’t tell.” My lip hurts because I’m torturing it with my teeth.

“Ha, relax. I told her you’re checking out the ceiling for water damage.” He signals at a corner of the drop ceiling above our heads, and there’s a stain there that looks like two half circles hashing it out.

“I think the birthday boy needs a drink,” Aaron says. Thirty’s an age that’s supposed to be ancient. And it does feel ancient to me after years of working in the sun, carrying buckets up a ladder, crouching down on a hot roof, skin to heat, sweat in my eyes. Last night was a hot bath and Elena rubbing icy hot into my shot muscles and useless spine, and the menthol is lingering. So is the feel of Elena’s hands.

I’m not leaving my wife.

Aaron pours, and his eyes flicker, the fluorescent light dancing across the curve of his eyeball. I finally did it. Last night, no liquor, 3 a.m. and stone cold sober. I called Aaron to tell him I was sorry. That I love him. That we’ll storm through life, just us. Together.

Aaron waits until the whiskey burns through me because AA is just a thing my crazy wife makes me do. And then he unbuttons the collar of my shirt, and his lips meet my collar bone.

“With you, it’s not a want thing,” he says. He holds my hand, and green eyes are all I see. “It’s a need thing. A forever thing.” And his lips return to my neck, and I stare at the framed picture of Aaron smiling with his parents, the parents who know he’s gay and were the first to throw a stone when they found out.

Aaron turns the door’s lock, and there’s typing leaking through the small cracks where door meets wall. He places a finger at his lips, long, thin, trimmed cuticle. No ring. And then my eyes meet ceiling, those two dirty circles still brawling it out, and I think, as Tricia with the leaky chest type, type, types our background noise, how nothing is forever.

#

I'm spinning, sailing, swimming. Everything with an “s.” Aaron's lips are still on me, and when I lick my own, I taste him. Feel him. I'm on top of the world, but I'm also buried in it, in the past. In that moment when Elena wrenched me free.

My mama hurt. Physically mostly, but it was the head stuff that was the worst. She never said, “I love you,” never showed up to school for class plays or that one time I was awarded a blue ribbon for a poem I wrote about the way wheat looks in a windstorm.

And sometimes people would call me a fag. Mostly the guys in my class, but I got the impression that they couldn't really smell it on me. More like they hated that I did well in school, that I landed Elena and that Virginia Sewell wanted me too. They hated all that, but then one day, junior year, when a ragtag group of them came skidding in front of our house and threw that rock through the front window with a piece of notebook paper taped to it, the word “faggot” written out in Sharpie, my mama made me put it in my room. She brushed off my desk, the blue ribbon trampled under her thick feet and placed it next to my book of Longfellow.

“Don't forget what you are,” she said.

The first time Elena came over, Mama was out taking Daddy to the doctor. This was before we knew about the lung cancer, so he'd shake the house with his hideous cough, and Mama would say things to me like “See what you done?”

I hid Faggot Rock under a pile of clothes in my closet, but Elena stubbed her toe on it searching through the board games I kept on the top shelf in there. Elena lived in a trailer, so her closet was nothing more than a cramped pocket of air with an accordion door. She was impressed that she could fit her whole body in mine.

“Who did this?” she asked when she unveiled the rock. She cradled it in both hands and winced at the words.

“Jerry Edelson. His crew,” I said and shrugged it off. No big deal. Ain't nothing to do with me.

“Why'd you keep it?” she asked. At this point she knew about the spoon. She knew the map of pain on my body, and I had memorized hers. So, I told her, “My mother made me.” How pathetic.

But Elena nodded and got this glint in her eye, the same glint she'd get when she'd kiss my lips at the drive-in or slyly lift her skirt at me in the dirt patch that posed as a parking lot at school.

“Well, then. Let's teach her a lesson.”

That night, things were quiet. I made sure everyone was in their correct positions watching Dallas, and that's when I heard it, rubber squealing against gravel. Elena's two brothers were whooping it up in their truck, and then a rock, a new rock, tore through our living room window.

It said, “Child Abuser.”

My mother said nothing, threw it in the black Glad bag and sat back down to watch JR's tired face. From that point on, she stopped checking to make sure Faggot Rock stayed on my desk.

I asked Elena later how she got Hank and Bobby to do it. She said she had found their stash of dirty magazines, so they owed her.

My cell vibrates in my pocket, and as I fish it out, I'm about to say, “Miss me already?”, but fortunately, I do a quick screen check first. It's Jimmy.

“We've got a problem,” he says.

Oh dang.

#

“I want to begin the way I start all my family sessions and have everyone tell me how their day’s going. Let us all know what you did, what you’re going to do, how you feel. Just a simple exercise to break the ice,” Dr. Kathy says. She’s large a woman, but she’s not afraid of her width. She spreads out her legs, rests her forearms on her massive thighs and hunches over like a man. There’s a mole on her face, a focal point that helps me avoid Elena’s glances that make me wonder if she can smell Aaron on my clothes.

“It’s a good day,” Sela says. Elena and I both glance at her. She sits straight and tall in the middle of us on the blue and white striped couch. She’s practiced and beautiful and her hands are finger-locked and resting in her lap like she’s waiting for her turn in the spelling bee.

“And why is it a good day, Sela?” Dr. Kathy’s voice is upbeat but not condescending. She looks Sela straight in the eye.

“It’s a good day because they’re both here,” she says. I jump a little. Elena’s hand has found my wrist.

“And it’s Daddy’s birthday, so we get to go eat, and he said in the car that I can go watch the fire.”

“The fire?”

“At the restaurant,” I explain, and I'm sure my face is the color of the blood-red Razorback pennant on Dr. Kathy’s wall.

“Happy birthday, Mitch.”

“Thank you.” And I like her in this moment, but then she says the next thing: “How’s your day so far?”

The like is replaced with panic. I rehearsed in the truck after Jimmy called: leak in the men’s bathroom at One Union National Plaza, easy job, cranky businessmen, ate lunch in the truck while listening to some Republican spout off about some Democrat. We didn't have time to discuss details when I met Elena and Sela who were already sitting in Dr. Kathy's waiting room. And the receptionist kept glancing over at us every time I tried to open my mouth so there was just this stony silence until now. Elena's holding my hand.

I try to find the mole again but instead I find Dr. Kathy’s gray eyes, and every false detail is concrete hardening.

“Rough,” I say.

Dr. Kathy smiles and looks at Sela. “It’s playtime,” she says, and Sela beams. She takes Sela’s hand, and they walk to a door in the wall with a two-sided mirror. Elena and I get up to follow them, but Dr. Kathy smiles again and motions us to sit back down.

“Sela’s just going to play with Sarah and the other dolls for a moment. Sela, I'm going to talk with your parents for a little while and then have you come back in, okay?” Sela agrees and the door is closed, and now Dr. Kathy spreads her hips, reattaches her forearms to her thighs in the blue and white striped chair that matches the couch.

“Why rough?” she says.

“You know, life’s hard.”

“I don’t know. Tell me about your life,” she says. I look at Elena and figure she must feel it, too. The way Dr. Kathy’s eyes are kind of like a hand removing the sheet from our naked bodies.

“It’s hard. Scary sometimes. Like when I’m standing on a roof.” The thud is everywhere, echoing off the ceiling, and I don’t know if Dr. Kathy is listening to my words or my heart.

“Why do you think it’s scary?”

I don’t know what happens. I can’t find the mole, the grey eyes are still turning into me like a knife tip, and Elena’s hand is no longer on my wrist. I keep hearing Jimmy in my head— “She knows, man. Jig is up”—when I tried to deny it, and then I hear Elena’s “We teach her a lesson,” and I get a mental glimpse of Mama’s face when she was bested at her own game.

And then I think of Aaron. How he loves me the way I fully want to be loved.

How I'm a coward.

“I’m cheating on my wife,” I say.

But then again, maybe not.

#

We go out to eat only because it’s a promise to Sela, so the whole time the chef is massacring shrimp and steak in a fiery ring, Elena sits on the other side of our daughter, not saying a word. She orders a Mai-Tai, I order a beer, and we don’t talk about that either.

“Who is she? Who is she?” over and over again, but there was no time to answer Elena because Dr. Kathy kept saying “breathe.” And then she said we needed to compose ourselves— that it was time to bring Sela in and work with her, focus on her problem. She suggested couples counseling and gave us the name of her colleague in the office next door. We’re supposed to go in once a week, and all my misguided mind can think about is more bills, more gas money, more time sputtering through my tightly gripped fingers.

Elena killed the tissue box on the coffee table between us and Dr. Kathy, so her face was eerily reminiscent of a Picasso painting. And it wasn’t until Sela asked, “Please?” that she agreed to go inside the restaurant with wiped clean cheeks and a flesh-colored mouth.

And what am I supposed to say? “I like dudes, get on board with it?” So, I'm drinking a beer, and there’s a lady sitting across from us with a guy next to her—an oily-haired, pony-tailed biker type. She’s drinking the same beer as me, and her lips curl around the glass shaft, and for an instant I think like an ordinary man, a man that’s not doomed to be called a fag for the rest of his life. And as I drink and will the buzz to swallow me whole, I call her Sheila in my head, some bimbo I picked up at a bar one weekend when I was supposedly working. It could fit. I take another swig. It does fit. And when I look at my wife who’s statue still, staring into the oily flames, I think about her naked feet, her ruthless love. My dismal life.