(no subject)
The crowd at the Bucky was typically thin on weekday nights, and tonight was no exception. It was another dreary Monday evening, the end of a dreary Monday proper, during which I’d done the dreary thing I always seemed to be doing: writing. Here I was, at 37, no closer to the superstardom or celebrity I so readily deserved than I had been at 36 or 35 or even 21. In typical fashion, my date, as it were, was late again. But knowing him as I did I went right ahead and ordered a Scotch whisky from the waiter. The Duke of Buckingham was a somber pub with an all-homosexual clientele, although these days it seemed more and more tourists were stumbling in, unaware, clutching each other’s arms and squealing, “Look, dear, it’s an authentic British pub!” before ordering fish and chips or Yorkshire pudding, something like that. No, these tourists weren’t even well-informed enough to be aware of let alone understand the concept of a pudding in this context. I suppose when they managed to seep in to trample on the decades-old salmon-colored carpet, they asked for bangers and mash with a wry little grin preceding a self-satisfied smile as if they too belonged somehow in a gay pub (not that they were aware it was meant to cater to a select group) eating pathetic mash made from half-fat milk and powder and sausages the fat black chef had picked up at the Tesco on his way to work in the afternoon. “Bangers, ha ha ha,” they generally crowed, and I found it quite annoying, being as if I ever came to the Bucky it was to meet a dear old friend or two (albeit very rarely was I meeting two). Little did they know that on Saturday afternoons the large groups of queens who populated this space would have the same laugh over the same damn pun and rib each other over the irony of eating a slang-termed late brunch in order to cure themselves of the most dreadful hangovers, the likes of which I’m certain were procured in the lead-up to the previous night’s banging.
I suppose I couldn’t blame the tourists for coming in, for seeking refuge from our cobbled alleyways in here. It was purposefully hidden, such as it was, down St. Anne’s Court, which was serendipitously wedged between Soho Square and the theater district. (Not that I had any use for milling around the West End these days, sad as it was that it seemed every third debut was for a splashy musical rehashing the work of some former great - or perhaps not - artist into trite fair for children and other easily bored tourists.) This was the exact sort of thing my mind began to reel over while I waited for Kyle to show up to our long-standing Monday night drink-and-meal, which began at the Bucky and regretably often ended at the Bucky. As noted their food was sad fare, but then again Kyle was quite stingy and considered the bill for virtually any fare worth eating to be outlandishly pricey. For my coin, why not simply spend a bit extra and not treat one’s digestive track like he was a naïve American on holiday? Still, good prices on the whisky, which pleased me greatly, as many establishments had long since cottoned onto the fact that most of us queers were ready and willing and able to pay out the nose for a cocktail, provided it came with an umbrella or the night ended in some stranger’s apartment.
It occurred to me that perhaps I should be irate that Kyle was, as he was wont to be, 10 minutes late. He’d never had the common sense of punctuality. “I believe I’ve forgotten my pocket watch again, dear,” he would often joke when he turned up to find me well into my second or third cup. Of course, as he wisely pointed out, my system absorbed alcohol like a thirsty plant; it took longer than usual to become quite saturated. Still, while I was contemplating making a show and acting quite disappointed in him, it occurred to me that I would never be able to feign disappointment in Kyle. He never had any excuse except for his own self-importance, and yet I would continue to forgive him until he was late to my funeral.
Although he was often dreadfully tardy Kyle was never truant entirely, and on this Monday evening he managed to show his face a few minutes before I finished my second whisky. I was about to signal the waiter (a young chap with bulging thighs) to come bring me an anticipatory third, when who should appear but my date, soaked though he was from the ceaseless summer downpour.
Kyle did not look happy. Being that we had been so close for nearly 20 years - since the first term of university, as it happened - I knew how to read him like a book. His shoulders were slumped, his eyes were downcast, and his perfectly plump lower lip was pouted just so slightly. What signaled to me that something deeper had gone awry was his hair. Where he usually sported a silken growth of somewhat-redder-than-auburn curls, his hair had been quite recently sheared, so that it merely brushed the upper ridges of his ears. I should call this a fairly dramatic cut, being that Kyle’s hair was one of his ongoing pet projects. He wasted (“Spent,” I imagined he might correct me) hundreds of quid on this compelling feature of his, as it took nearly ten years and the talents of an especially well-practiced girl off Kensington High Street to force it into a presentable style. And here he was, looking visibly miserable, or rather more visibly miserable than I’d last seen him on Saturday night, perched on the thighs of that incomprehensible Frenchman, giggling like a naughty nun or something likewise ridiculous. More worrying was this appalling haircut.
“Darling,” I said cordially, extending a gracious hand toward the chair on the other side of the table.
“It’s Christophe,” he moaned, not managing to seat himself. “He’s left me.”
“Darling!” I got up from my seat, and brought him to the banquette. “Here, here,” I said encouragingly, foisting the ends of my drink at him. Kyle did not drink whisky though, so he rejected it, and slumped against my shoulder. “You must tell me everything. What did he say? What did he do?”
“Oh, you know how it is,” he said dismissively, defeat pervading his words in a heartbreaking way. I did not know how it was; I had not had a relationship in three years, and I had ended the last one. Ironically, it was Kyle I was after; I had been hard-up for him since he invited me to spend the summer with his family after our first year. I couldn’t pinpoint the moment when this steely lust had softened into full-blossomed pining, but even I had to admit that the sympathetic-mate act sometimes wore me down. “They feed you these clichés, you know, ‘You’re so much better than I’ or ‘We must remain close’ or ‘And while I was fucking him, I think I contracted the clap, so you may want to have that checked out, and by the by, I shan’t be paying for it.’ ” Kyle heaved a deep sigh, and curled his hand into mine. “Why, Stanley? Why must I be doomed to live what little time on this green Earth I have left pining for an as-yet unmet phantasm of a man who won’t leave me to die alone like the wretch I feel like?”
“So you’re not quite over it yet,” I tried to joke, dryly.
“I’m quite miserable,” Kyle wailed, and then he buried his face in my armpit. I attempted to be loving and platonic, or to walk that line between loving and platonic that gay men often tread. Of course, I ended up stroking his dry, short hair, which I in turn found somewhat upsetting.
“Darling,” I said softly. “Why ever did you destroy your lovely hair?”
Kyle raised his head, and gave a dramatic sniffle. “Oh, it’s all Chris’ fault, that rogue bastard,” he seethed. “I don’t know what possessed me, dear, I really don’t, except that as I was eating a prawn mayo sandwich on my lunch break I happened to amble by a salon, and the sight of a shears reminded me of the way that wonderful terrible man would yank on my hair when we were…” He trailed off, and blushed. “Well,” he said with a cough. “When I got back to the office I immediately called Evenlyn” - Evenlyn being his stylist -“and told her the dreadful news and asked if she’d squeeze me in. To my great luck, she had an opening. Of course, that was why I was late this evening. I hope you’ll forgive me, Stanley, dear, but I just…” He trailed off again, and sighed. “They never stick around, do they?”
“Men can be so vile,” I offered.
“And yet so lovely,” he said dreamily. “Are you in the mood for a bite? I’ve been stuffing myself silly all day. I think I’ve been starving myself for Christophe for too long, but he’s gone now, isn’t he?”
“How did this break happen, exactly?” I asked.
“Hold on,” he said gingerly, getting up. “I’ll go order some mash and bangers at the bar. Care for a top-up?” he glanced down at my empty cup.
“Yes,” I said wryly. “Thank you, darling.”
“My pleasure.” He departed.
~
After putting away three bangers, a pile of mash, a steak-and-ale pie, and half of a curry, Kyle leaned back in his seat and said, “Are you ready to hear my sad tale now?”
“Yes,” I answered, wiping my hands on a napkin. I’d been eating some chips with gravy as a sign of solidarity, although I wasn’t much enjoying it. “Please tell.”
“Well, dear.” Kyle removed his napkin from his lap. “There isn’t much to tell, I’m afraid. He’s been staying with me for about two months, as you know, and when I returned from our night out on Saturday, he was missing, as were my best steak knives.”
“So he pilfered your silver.” I was unimpressed.
“Oh, it’s more than all that.” I was always amazed at how quickly Kyle’s misery could morph into indignation, or one of its emotional kin. “He was never anything but a hoodlum, of course; taking my knives was about the best I could hope for when it ended.”
I nodded in mock-sympathy, when really I was glowing in triumph on the inside. Kyle had a tested affinity for these tall, dark, hardened, dirty, strong men. Vandals, sometimes, but often they were just ex-military, or even businessmen with a nasty turn. As I matched Kyle’s height exactly (was an inch shorter, when he’d done his hair), and sported no bulk, only a sleek, cultured swimmer’s build, I was hopelessly out of the running. Nevertheless, there was no reason I shouldn’t inwardly gloat when, at the end of these affairs, I was still here, and they had only made off with the flatware.
“The worst part is,” Kyle was saying, his half-ginger cheeks burning in quaint fury, “the next night I went to the pub across the street to drown my sorrows, and I saw him canoodling with an MP! Well, that’s the last straw, really. And there I was, all ready to forgive him, at least temporarily, and let him back in for a farewell go.”
I grimaced. “It’s … probably for the best that you didn’t. How did you know this new bloke was an MP?”
“Oh, that.” Kyle stiffened whenever he was talking about politics. “Well, when you know one, dear, you know them all.”
Kyle certainly knew one, or, as it happened, all of them. His mother, an estimable American woman, was a member of that club. Sheila’d come over from Brooklyn - or Boston, or some seaside district where they cultivated highly nasal accents - on a Rhodes. There she met the incorruptible Gerald Broflovski, esquire, who was lecturing or in residence at Merton or something while she procured a second A.B. Now, 40 years on, she was a British citizen, with a seat in the Commons and everything. Gerald was still a barrister, and still wonderfully well-informed in the field of social justice. He had the habit of talking down to me whenever I came by as if I were a child who needed these pressing issues sorted out by an adult. I think he was influenced by the other men his son brought around: scoundrels, tough blokes, the sorts of men who would gladly not only steal the silver, but slit another’s throat with it. I found them welcoming, and yet tedious. Mrs. Broflovski was a tireless crusader, although with each campaign her oncoming arthritis forced her to concede that perhaps this would be her last. So Kyle knew virtually all of these MPs, on sight at least if not by name or virtue.
“This one,” he seethed, “is a radical rat bastard by the name of Gregory. I don’t know the family name; I don’t even know his district, as it happens. All I know is he was romancing my ex-lover, braying at some private joke while Christophe ran his hands through his blond hair. He had the whitest teeth.” Kyle stopped, and rubbed his chin. “This sort of thing always happens to me, you know. I think I shall die an old maid.”
“Oh, no,” I assured him. “Your mate must out there. Why, perhaps he’s simply eluding you, having been under your nose this whole time.”
“I should like to think so. But what about you, Stanley? Don’t you ever wonder if perhaps you’ll meet the one?”
I sighed, and took a final drink of my whisky before answering. “I’m sure,” I said slowly, smacking my lips, “he is closer than all that.”
“I hope so.” Kyle raised his glass of shandy in salute. “Well, dear, here’s to us. At least I have you, you know. It’s better to have mates, perhaps, than the most satisfying sex of all.”
“That’s preposterous,” I replied. “When was the last time you had very satisfying sex?”
Kyle thought for a moment. “To be quite honest about it? On the walk home from the bar, while I was cursing Christophe and Gregory and radical politics and everything they all stood for together, I came across old Clyde.” Kyle smiled fondly, and set his drink down. “Well, you know, I was miserable, he was obviously trolling for something - or as it happens, someone. So, that was that.”
The color drained from my face. “Oh,” I said dismally. “How is old Clyde?”
Before continuing Kyle took a swig of his drink. “Allow me to tell you this: He is unpredictably well-hung. Would you never have imagined? He’s such a dreary little civil servant. It was beyond my wildest dreams, not to say I’d been dreaming of old Clyde for any reason.”
“No, me neither.” I was quite on the verge of having an apoplectic fit, if not from this information itself, then from the attempt to keep myself from exploding.
“But it’s like I’ve always said,” Kyle continued. He was quite oblivious to my discomfort. “You can always have sex with your friends, but you can never make friends out of your lovers.”
“Ah.” I swallowed. “What time is it?”
Kyle glanced around. “Well, dear,” he sighed. “I’d tell you, but I think I’ve forgotten my pocket watch.”
I checked my wrist. “It’s half-eight already,” I said, silently shaking. “Where does the time go?”
“I don’t know,” Kyle said. He finished his shandy, and began to take another bite of his lukewarm curry before thinking better of it. “Can I go home with you?” he asked. “I’d … I’d rather not be alone tonight.”
“Of course,” I said warmly, my tremors calming somewhat. “You’ve just been heartbroken, darling, so let me settle the bill.”
“But you’ve eaten so much less than I,” Kyle stated. Then he shrugged, his thrifty nature rearing its head. “Well, I’ll make it up another time, won’t I?”
“Surely,” I muttered, making a dash toward the bar.
~
When Kyle asked to come home with me, he meant to sleep with me - in the same bed. We’d had our trysts, most notably in college. They were infrequent, and usually under the sustained influence of any number of intoxicants. I don’t think either of us could recall to what extent they were satisfying. That was just one of the aspects of this so-called gay life I was rather beginning to dislike. It was all well and good to fuck your best mate, and in the morning he would just roll over and bemoan his head pain and you’d laugh over a basket of financiers and pain au chocolat about how you couldn’t remember anything about the whole thing except for how ridiculous it all must have been.
He had a perfectly respectable apartment in Notting Hill Gate, and of course by ‘perfectly respectable’ I do mean lovely, and ostentatious, and lavish. Kyle was in advertising. All these years, and I’d never quite gotten the hang of what it was that he did, except that it involved very long lunch breaks and socializing with a number of catty, gabby women he seemed to tire of long before they married and he had to attend some social function, possibly a wedding. “I do hate weddings,” Kyle was fond of saying. “It’s never my own, of course, and then it’s always such trouble finding an appropriate hat.” He was also irked by the fact that the invitations never came for Mr. Kyle Broflovski and Guest, which he cited as a critical injustice. I tried to support him in this regard, too, although I truly felt one of these boorish men, Christophe or whoever, would be horribly risible in a tuxedo.
I lived in a ramshackle mess of rooms over Hoxton Square. Kyle had serious reservations about taking the Underground to Old Street, thinking it unsafe. I found it no more unsafe than anyplace else, really, and the idea of finding a taxi preposterous. But Kyle was adamant, so I stood on the curb with my arm stuck out like a tourist or a fascist, holding my trench closed, as I was too lazy to secure the buttons. Perhaps if I had one reason to like what was happening around Soho, it was the ease of taxi procurement. I think most foreigners were unaware of how small central London was, really, or how easy it was to traverse the town by foot or even bus without resorting to cab. Still, there was something stately, grim, and romantic about paying a man to take you away, thinking not about where you were going or the ever-troubling problem of the meter.
I cannot overstate the frustration of being so intimate with a man I yearned for so intensely, and so persistently. Despite his inheritance of his mother’s shapely features, Kyle fit well into most of my clothes, except the few things I hung onto that were tailored without a centimeter of error. (There is something deeply satisfying about turning up at a former lover’s formal birthday luncheon dressed impeccably in something incorporating silk.) I lent Kyle a pair of striped pajamas, which he laughed at.
“I always imagine you asleep in the nude,” he confided.
These little comments caught me off-guard whenever he casually dropped them into conversation.
“I make a point to go to bed like this so that in the unlikely case there’s a fire or something, I won’t have to evacuate in the nude.”
“I suppose if you didn’t live in such a hideously industrial wasteland it wouldn’t be a problem.”
“I hardly find it industrial,” I managed to choke out with mock-outrage. “I mean, look, there’s a wonderfully pleasant green out there.” I strode over to one of the windows and knocked on it.
“Oh, yes.” Kyle nodded along with his sarcastic assessment. “Sadly one can’t see the green through your dust-clouded windows.”
“Well, if you dislike it so, why not go back to your wonderful flat and have a cocktail by yourself and count your lavish blessings?”
“How rude!” Kyle’s annoyance was false, but he played it well. “I suppose you should be lucky I’m here with you; after all, it’s not like you’d be doing anything pivotal up here on your own, would you?”
“I have a story to finish,” I told him. As a writer, I found it fairly simple to maintain a certain standard of living by filling in the gaps with short columns for whatever publication was in need; usually it was some trashy gossip rag, although I found that sadly, virtually every paper was quickly tilting toward that standard. This assignment happened to be a breezy roman a clef about the son of the executive officer of a major brewing company. I hadn’t any clue where these editors get these outlandish ideas - like, say, the idea to publish gossip in a fictive voice with jabbing judgmental commentary laced throughout. Still, it was factual gossip, which I suppose was the nobler sort. Some months I soured on the scandal racket, and found myself disinterested in taking on these jobs. In those times, I found it easy enough to rely on my father for some income; wheedling usually worked on him, although even I could admit that as a youth, I never imaged my 37-year-old self as the type of man who routinely called upon his father to support me in my frivolous career as a dour aesthete who enjoyed drinking whisky on weeknights and champagne on the weekends, every weekend. Still, a man could be excused of such things, I think; there had to be some merit in enjoying oneself.
It was easy enough to wonder what my father would think of his only son spending another Monday night in his pajamas, drinking sherry with his old friend as they discussed escape routes out of the building.
“Of course,” Kyle concluded, “if your sprinklers went off, these lovely cotton pajamas would be ruined.”
“It’s nothing laundering wouldn’t fix,” I told him.
Kyle wept a bit more over Christophe, and I did try to be supportive, but I had long since realized that Kyle loved performing his disappointment for me far more than he was able to take solace from my reassurance or even my schadenfreude. It was a little ritual for us. Being a lapsed Catholic of the highest degree, Kyle was the object of my devotion now, and going through these cycles with him was the closest I ever came to worship.
“Do you remember the night we met?” he asked, weepily, referring to himself and Christophe. Of course I did; it was another routine evening out, and he swaggered into the club sucking on the end of a cigarette like it was candy. He cruised Kyle rather thoroughly, choosing not to send him drinks at our table but to come over himself and simply pluck Kyle out of his seat and carry him toward the dance floor. I was sure the attraction was completely genuine, and yet it was obvious to me that a Frenchman - any Frenchman, no matter how toned his arms were - looking to cohabitate with a bloke he picked up in a club (literally!) was only in search of a temporary arrangement.
Still, I did not like to see him hurting, as much as I enjoyed seeing him hurt. As the night crept forward, I continued pouring him glasses of sherry, stroking what was left of his hair and offering reassurances. Finally, around midnight, he took my hand away from his ear and asked me, “Why did I cut my hair off? I must look like something of a lesbian now.”
“You are certainly the most attractive lesbian I have ever met.”
We giggled about this. Neither of us knew any lesbians, mind you; they were roughly mythological creatures to us, and yet we were all too certain we’d recoil at the sight of one. In this way, I suppose they were like the modern-day Chimera or something. Or perhaps there were a Hydratic concept, many-headed and too complex for us. Still, we toasted to our good fortune to have never identified one in the wild. After this, we realized we’d finished all of my sherry, although with the pacing, my tolerance, and Kyle’s grand consumption, neither of us was really particularly drunk.
“So I won’t be ill tomorrow, fancy that,” Kyle mused. “Shall we?” I nodded, and took his arm, and let him lead me to my own bed, a wonderfully large-affair on a platform upstairs in the great tangle of lofted space of which my flat consisted. We curled up together, and Kyle summarized his latest muck-up of a fling: “Disastrous.”
“At least you’re having these trysts,” I mused. “How must it feel, do you think, to go from one lurid park toilet to the next, settling to fuck men you meet in the gym showers?”
“Oh, are you complaining?” Kyle asked. “As I recall, after Gary, you were quite adamant you would never date again.”
“Until I find the one,” I told him.
“Well.” Kyle reached over and turned out the bedside lamp. He rolled back toward me, and wrapped his arms around my torso. “Let us remember, Stanley dear, that we do have each other. Of course I expect you know by now that I would rather have you than any single piece of manhood in England.”
“What about the Commonwealth?” I asked, secretly wondering why he only seemed to feel this way in the wake of his romantic follies.
“There, too.” He kissed me, tenderly, on the lips, and tucked his head beside my shoulder. He closed his eyes and said, “Good night, dear.”
“Good night, darling.”
“Do wake me if you get up first.”
Before too long I heard his soft snoring permeate my bedroom. With some difficulty I managed to fall asleep, dreaming of looming deadlines and men at oaken desks ordering me to have my cock cut off.
~
When I awoke in the morning, Kyle was gone. He was not in the habit of composing notes, but I knew well enough that he had probably called a taxi and gone back to his flat so he could shower and dress for work. Some weekend nights after parties if Kyle came home with me, he would still be there in the morning. For that matter, if I was sleeping over at his, I was generally awoken when he did, and given some breakfast before being hustled out. I wasn’t sure that Kyle enjoyed his frivolous work, but if there was one thing his parents had instilled in him, it was an instinct to take business quite seriously. This made him, from 9 in the morning to 5 in the afternoon, something of a frenzied bore. He did, however, tend to a take an hour-long lunch break, which seemed to last for two hours. I sometimes met him, unless of course I was just rousing at noon, which was the case today.
His absence on these mid-mornings saddened me, but it was a very familiar sadness. In a very real way, I had been living with this absence since I’d met him. He was there, and he was not, like a phantom lover. In my youth it was very unsettling; now it was a well-worn melancholy; a perpetual longing. I think it must have been far more normal to me now than true contentment would have been. Or, perhaps it was the case that I was content, as I was not depressed, but I certainly wasn’t … well, the correct word was probably ‘exuberant.’
It was nearing 1 p.m., so I put a kettle on, and sat down at the wood-block table I kept near my kitchen. Or perhaps it was in my kitchen; I found the distinction very difficult to make, as my flat consisted of one very large space with several smaller catacomb-like rooms and a loft where I slept. Someday, the excavation of these annexes would prove profitable, I was certain, having spent years filling them with all varieties of inheritances from relatives deceased and living. My parents in particular liked to surprise me with a boot full of old rubbish, citing my ample storage space. “Perhaps this is valuable,” my father would suggest, shoving faded faux-velvet boxes of broken bits of Bakelite jewelry into my spare rooms.
“No, it’s not,” I’d reply, “which is why you’ve been quite unable to foist it off on some unsuspecting antiquities dealer, and are therefore imposing it on me.” At which point my father would whine and groan and launch into an overwrought tantrum about how if I expected him to continue distributing his wealth (such as it was) at any time prior to his extinguishment, I had better shut my mouth and let him use my living space as gratis storage. Usually it was not a long wait to discover that in fact my mother had gotten on him again about the lack of spare rooms in the dreary little row house I’d grown up in.
After rubbishy junk from my mother and father, I suppose the second largest source of clutter in my apartment was my collection of papers, all of which I’d managed to somehow jam into dusty towers of filing cabinets. As a writer - an occupation I loathed increasingly as the years went by - I was excessively paranoid about letting a single one of my papers get out of sight. In the two-odd decades since I’d gone down from Magdalen, I’d managed somehow by sheer luck or the skin of my teeth to publish two novels, both of which were fairly dense with flowery language. Neither was a critical or a commercial success, but the truth about publishing was that I had been generally fortunate enough to have been paid by advance - not millions of quid, but enough, so it hardly mattered to me whether or not anyone, professional or literary or commoner or uneducated, liked my books. My payment had come regardless of their ability to perform, not unlike the way some men were able to continue having sex. When I thought back on it, my so-called professional life seemed to mirror my personal life in that I hardly would call myself a wonderful lay, and yet I was never left wondering when my next paycheck (so to speak) would arrive; it just always did, because in some horrible way horny men are like book publishers: They are willing to take a chance on anything, or almost everything. Here I was, very nearly 40, and I deeply felt as if I’d squandered too many resources. I tried to console myself with the fact that it was hardly my responsibility to feel guilt over where and when other entities were liable to take liberties with their cash or their erections. It hardly mattered. When I was nearing 30, it really bothered me, but in the ensuing 10 years I suppose I’d mastered it. Nevertheless, I was horridly protective of my papers. Every draft of those two damn novels was stored in the cubby-like rooms off the larger space of the flat, which I’d purchased with my first advance more or less with the idea of keeping drawer after drawer of drafts safe from interlopers. What a fancy! I had been so naïve.
When my tea was done I put it next to me to steep and sat down at the typewriter, which was how I enjoyed writing. At some point in my life it had occurred to me that I was never going to be the next Waugh, so I may as well drop the act and just write on a word processor like a contemporary. But then, possibly drunk, I rebelled against my own common sense. I didn’t care if what I handed in was riddled with errors, although if I was suspiciously and unusually concerned about impressing an editor I might whip out a red pen and correct my own work, as if I were something of an editor myself. I suppose the truth was that I had never been proud of what I was doing, and since it hardly made me happy I did not care if it was presentable or reasonable or even very good. The problem with all of this was that I didn’t know what else I could do that I would be much better at, or what might make me any happier. Despite Kyle’s nervous jokes about becoming his secretary, I would have been horrible at that. The only thing I had any interest in cataloguing was my own yellowing collection of novel leaves and rejected manuscripts. And that was only something of a pet project.
Around the time I was tapping out the last few lines of my assignment, the telephone rang. Determined to finish the damn story so that I could spend the rest of my week stalking pretty young things in the Kensington Gardens lavatory, I ignored it. I managed to commit another four words when the phone began crying out a second time. I had about four phones in the flat, one in the loft and the other three placed in sufficiently strategic positions so that I never had to walk far across the barren hardwood floors to get a call. I hit the space bar furiously, and went to the coffee table, for which I was using an old leather trunk with a lace table cloth over it. I also had a great interest in princess-style phones - of which I’d only managed to collect one over the years, a gift from Kyle for the holidays one year, in exchange for the outrageous oversized black rubber dildo I’d given him. Make a comment, if you like, but it was what he wanted, and I knew he got an awful lot of use out of it. It was one of those serendipitous gifts that managed to please both the gifter and the recipient, and I certainly had gotten my own share of use out of it, indirectly, imagining what Kyle must have looked like while making use of the overpriced dildo I’d bought him. Perhaps when I was still at school, thinking about my best mate impaling himself on a black cock of any variety, fake or real, would have made me extremely guilty and caused me to sulk. These days, it had rather a reverse effect, forcing me to become quite horny. I suppose the point of this anecdote was that when I spoke on the telephone Kyle had given me, I inevitably became hard. This gave phone sex a lurid, illicit third dimension of naughtiness, but even normal conversations became arousing because of it. I felt myself stiffening even before I picked up the phone and barked, “What?”
“Stanley,” a female voice lilted. “There’s no need to yell, mon cher, it is simply too early for yelling.”
“Wendy,” I sighed. I immediately felt wretched for snapping at her. “How’s tricks?”
“Oh, you know, perfectly dreadful.”
“By which you mean…”
She swallowed; I always heard when she swallowed over the telephone. I do not know how I could hear the viscous rivers of saliva in her mouth but I certainly could, and it was one of the few things I felt never merited mention to her, to whom I told almost every other thing about my life. Each thought and idea I had, no matter how wild or unsavory or brilliant, was filtered through Wendy.
“It’s such a horrible day, isn’t it?” she asked. It occurred to that I hadn’t even looked outside today, although by her comment I noticed it was actually quite light out.
“No, dear, I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean. It’s very bright out, isn’t it? Looks very warm.”
“I don’t mean the weather, you old fool, I mean the energy, or some like concept. Don’t you just feel it’s going to be a monstrous day?”
“Really I don’t. How do you mean?”
When I questioned her, she always became somewhat irritable. “I can’t describe it,” she snapped. Then she returned to savory form: “I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you to tea today, Stanley. I hope you’re not busy.”
“I’m never busy, or rather, never too busy,” I answered. “Why? Haven’t you got anyone else to have tea with?”
“Not to be insulting, dearest, but I wish I did. You’re always in such a moody way recently.”
“I am not.” She could have said the same thing about herself.
“Well, I’ve not seen you for so long now, it feels like. Why don’t you come take tea with me, hmm? I’ll serve those sandwiches you like.” If there was ever a reason to go to Wendy’s, it wasn’t to sit in the seemingly endless cushions of her parlor couches; it was to consume coronation chicken sandwiches, have a cup of tea, and relish the fact that your life could never be as dismal as hers was. Likewise, I think she often silently thanked God or fortune that her life wasn’t quite like mine. Nevertheless, aside from Kyle, she was certainly my dearest friend.
“I think I shall be able to make it. Shall we say 4?”
“Yes, yes, 4.”
“Will Lady Stevens be in attendance?”
“No.” She said this with firmness and in her voice, meant obviously to bolster me, as I had never been a great fan. “Bebe will not be there, I’m afraid. She’s enjoying the Cote d’Azur this month.”
Bebe was a woman who was well-equipped with intelligence of some variety, for it clearly took some talent to play her games, gossip-mongering and contact-acquisition. Still, she apparently was entirely uninformed on the matter of discerning which gentlemen were gay. I had no idea what Bebe was short for, and in complete honesty I should confess that I didn’t want to know. Babette or something, probably; something overinflated and girlish. I did not like her, and I knew that Wendy’s appreciation of her company completely accommodated my dislike. Still, she often made eyes at me; very clear eyes, at that; beckoning eyes; flirtatious eyes. I was always polite, although once at a tea she did get rather grabby after the other ladies had cleared out of the parlor. It was beyond my comprehension why she never simply did the computations and asked why her best friend had no children, or why she kept company with a confirmed bachelor, or why said bachelor was always the sole male (single or otherwise) at social functions in the private female sphere of Black House.
“What a shame,” I lied. “I shall see you at 4, then.”
“Good, good,” Wendy concluded. “I shall look forward to it, dearest.”
We hung up, and I took a moment to fondle my erection through my pants. It might have been a good time to abandon work on this project and go down to the lavatory at the coffee shop on Old Street and perhaps find a bloke whose company I could enjoy, but I thought it over and realized that I had only a couple of hours to finish the story, run it down to Fleet Street, and then jog back over to her place. In lieu of indulging myself in this way I decided to have a quick wank - a very quick one, truly, not one of these drawn-out luxuriant ones for which I’d draw a bath and bring in a porno mag or something and really enjoy the process. No, this would have to be efficient. I leaned back on the sofa and spread my legs and shut my eyes, instinctively running my palms over my thighs. After a brief delay I drew my cock out of my pants and really made quick work of the whole thing, coming into my hand so as not to waste any more time cleaning or laundering anything. If there was one thing I had learned the hard way, it was that semen was very difficult to get out of lace.
Continued here.
I suppose I couldn’t blame the tourists for coming in, for seeking refuge from our cobbled alleyways in here. It was purposefully hidden, such as it was, down St. Anne’s Court, which was serendipitously wedged between Soho Square and the theater district. (Not that I had any use for milling around the West End these days, sad as it was that it seemed every third debut was for a splashy musical rehashing the work of some former great - or perhaps not - artist into trite fair for children and other easily bored tourists.) This was the exact sort of thing my mind began to reel over while I waited for Kyle to show up to our long-standing Monday night drink-and-meal, which began at the Bucky and regretably often ended at the Bucky. As noted their food was sad fare, but then again Kyle was quite stingy and considered the bill for virtually any fare worth eating to be outlandishly pricey. For my coin, why not simply spend a bit extra and not treat one’s digestive track like he was a naïve American on holiday? Still, good prices on the whisky, which pleased me greatly, as many establishments had long since cottoned onto the fact that most of us queers were ready and willing and able to pay out the nose for a cocktail, provided it came with an umbrella or the night ended in some stranger’s apartment.
It occurred to me that perhaps I should be irate that Kyle was, as he was wont to be, 10 minutes late. He’d never had the common sense of punctuality. “I believe I’ve forgotten my pocket watch again, dear,” he would often joke when he turned up to find me well into my second or third cup. Of course, as he wisely pointed out, my system absorbed alcohol like a thirsty plant; it took longer than usual to become quite saturated. Still, while I was contemplating making a show and acting quite disappointed in him, it occurred to me that I would never be able to feign disappointment in Kyle. He never had any excuse except for his own self-importance, and yet I would continue to forgive him until he was late to my funeral.
Although he was often dreadfully tardy Kyle was never truant entirely, and on this Monday evening he managed to show his face a few minutes before I finished my second whisky. I was about to signal the waiter (a young chap with bulging thighs) to come bring me an anticipatory third, when who should appear but my date, soaked though he was from the ceaseless summer downpour.
Kyle did not look happy. Being that we had been so close for nearly 20 years - since the first term of university, as it happened - I knew how to read him like a book. His shoulders were slumped, his eyes were downcast, and his perfectly plump lower lip was pouted just so slightly. What signaled to me that something deeper had gone awry was his hair. Where he usually sported a silken growth of somewhat-redder-than-auburn curls, his hair had been quite recently sheared, so that it merely brushed the upper ridges of his ears. I should call this a fairly dramatic cut, being that Kyle’s hair was one of his ongoing pet projects. He wasted (“Spent,” I imagined he might correct me) hundreds of quid on this compelling feature of his, as it took nearly ten years and the talents of an especially well-practiced girl off Kensington High Street to force it into a presentable style. And here he was, looking visibly miserable, or rather more visibly miserable than I’d last seen him on Saturday night, perched on the thighs of that incomprehensible Frenchman, giggling like a naughty nun or something likewise ridiculous. More worrying was this appalling haircut.
“Darling,” I said cordially, extending a gracious hand toward the chair on the other side of the table.
“It’s Christophe,” he moaned, not managing to seat himself. “He’s left me.”
“Darling!” I got up from my seat, and brought him to the banquette. “Here, here,” I said encouragingly, foisting the ends of my drink at him. Kyle did not drink whisky though, so he rejected it, and slumped against my shoulder. “You must tell me everything. What did he say? What did he do?”
“Oh, you know how it is,” he said dismissively, defeat pervading his words in a heartbreaking way. I did not know how it was; I had not had a relationship in three years, and I had ended the last one. Ironically, it was Kyle I was after; I had been hard-up for him since he invited me to spend the summer with his family after our first year. I couldn’t pinpoint the moment when this steely lust had softened into full-blossomed pining, but even I had to admit that the sympathetic-mate act sometimes wore me down. “They feed you these clichés, you know, ‘You’re so much better than I’ or ‘We must remain close’ or ‘And while I was fucking him, I think I contracted the clap, so you may want to have that checked out, and by the by, I shan’t be paying for it.’ ” Kyle heaved a deep sigh, and curled his hand into mine. “Why, Stanley? Why must I be doomed to live what little time on this green Earth I have left pining for an as-yet unmet phantasm of a man who won’t leave me to die alone like the wretch I feel like?”
“So you’re not quite over it yet,” I tried to joke, dryly.
“I’m quite miserable,” Kyle wailed, and then he buried his face in my armpit. I attempted to be loving and platonic, or to walk that line between loving and platonic that gay men often tread. Of course, I ended up stroking his dry, short hair, which I in turn found somewhat upsetting.
“Darling,” I said softly. “Why ever did you destroy your lovely hair?”
Kyle raised his head, and gave a dramatic sniffle. “Oh, it’s all Chris’ fault, that rogue bastard,” he seethed. “I don’t know what possessed me, dear, I really don’t, except that as I was eating a prawn mayo sandwich on my lunch break I happened to amble by a salon, and the sight of a shears reminded me of the way that wonderful terrible man would yank on my hair when we were…” He trailed off, and blushed. “Well,” he said with a cough. “When I got back to the office I immediately called Evenlyn” - Evenlyn being his stylist -“and told her the dreadful news and asked if she’d squeeze me in. To my great luck, she had an opening. Of course, that was why I was late this evening. I hope you’ll forgive me, Stanley, dear, but I just…” He trailed off again, and sighed. “They never stick around, do they?”
“Men can be so vile,” I offered.
“And yet so lovely,” he said dreamily. “Are you in the mood for a bite? I’ve been stuffing myself silly all day. I think I’ve been starving myself for Christophe for too long, but he’s gone now, isn’t he?”
“How did this break happen, exactly?” I asked.
“Hold on,” he said gingerly, getting up. “I’ll go order some mash and bangers at the bar. Care for a top-up?” he glanced down at my empty cup.
“Yes,” I said wryly. “Thank you, darling.”
“My pleasure.” He departed.
~
After putting away three bangers, a pile of mash, a steak-and-ale pie, and half of a curry, Kyle leaned back in his seat and said, “Are you ready to hear my sad tale now?”
“Yes,” I answered, wiping my hands on a napkin. I’d been eating some chips with gravy as a sign of solidarity, although I wasn’t much enjoying it. “Please tell.”
“Well, dear.” Kyle removed his napkin from his lap. “There isn’t much to tell, I’m afraid. He’s been staying with me for about two months, as you know, and when I returned from our night out on Saturday, he was missing, as were my best steak knives.”
“So he pilfered your silver.” I was unimpressed.
“Oh, it’s more than all that.” I was always amazed at how quickly Kyle’s misery could morph into indignation, or one of its emotional kin. “He was never anything but a hoodlum, of course; taking my knives was about the best I could hope for when it ended.”
I nodded in mock-sympathy, when really I was glowing in triumph on the inside. Kyle had a tested affinity for these tall, dark, hardened, dirty, strong men. Vandals, sometimes, but often they were just ex-military, or even businessmen with a nasty turn. As I matched Kyle’s height exactly (was an inch shorter, when he’d done his hair), and sported no bulk, only a sleek, cultured swimmer’s build, I was hopelessly out of the running. Nevertheless, there was no reason I shouldn’t inwardly gloat when, at the end of these affairs, I was still here, and they had only made off with the flatware.
“The worst part is,” Kyle was saying, his half-ginger cheeks burning in quaint fury, “the next night I went to the pub across the street to drown my sorrows, and I saw him canoodling with an MP! Well, that’s the last straw, really. And there I was, all ready to forgive him, at least temporarily, and let him back in for a farewell go.”
I grimaced. “It’s … probably for the best that you didn’t. How did you know this new bloke was an MP?”
“Oh, that.” Kyle stiffened whenever he was talking about politics. “Well, when you know one, dear, you know them all.”
Kyle certainly knew one, or, as it happened, all of them. His mother, an estimable American woman, was a member of that club. Sheila’d come over from Brooklyn - or Boston, or some seaside district where they cultivated highly nasal accents - on a Rhodes. There she met the incorruptible Gerald Broflovski, esquire, who was lecturing or in residence at Merton or something while she procured a second A.B. Now, 40 years on, she was a British citizen, with a seat in the Commons and everything. Gerald was still a barrister, and still wonderfully well-informed in the field of social justice. He had the habit of talking down to me whenever I came by as if I were a child who needed these pressing issues sorted out by an adult. I think he was influenced by the other men his son brought around: scoundrels, tough blokes, the sorts of men who would gladly not only steal the silver, but slit another’s throat with it. I found them welcoming, and yet tedious. Mrs. Broflovski was a tireless crusader, although with each campaign her oncoming arthritis forced her to concede that perhaps this would be her last. So Kyle knew virtually all of these MPs, on sight at least if not by name or virtue.
“This one,” he seethed, “is a radical rat bastard by the name of Gregory. I don’t know the family name; I don’t even know his district, as it happens. All I know is he was romancing my ex-lover, braying at some private joke while Christophe ran his hands through his blond hair. He had the whitest teeth.” Kyle stopped, and rubbed his chin. “This sort of thing always happens to me, you know. I think I shall die an old maid.”
“Oh, no,” I assured him. “Your mate must out there. Why, perhaps he’s simply eluding you, having been under your nose this whole time.”
“I should like to think so. But what about you, Stanley? Don’t you ever wonder if perhaps you’ll meet the one?”
I sighed, and took a final drink of my whisky before answering. “I’m sure,” I said slowly, smacking my lips, “he is closer than all that.”
“I hope so.” Kyle raised his glass of shandy in salute. “Well, dear, here’s to us. At least I have you, you know. It’s better to have mates, perhaps, than the most satisfying sex of all.”
“That’s preposterous,” I replied. “When was the last time you had very satisfying sex?”
Kyle thought for a moment. “To be quite honest about it? On the walk home from the bar, while I was cursing Christophe and Gregory and radical politics and everything they all stood for together, I came across old Clyde.” Kyle smiled fondly, and set his drink down. “Well, you know, I was miserable, he was obviously trolling for something - or as it happens, someone. So, that was that.”
The color drained from my face. “Oh,” I said dismally. “How is old Clyde?”
Before continuing Kyle took a swig of his drink. “Allow me to tell you this: He is unpredictably well-hung. Would you never have imagined? He’s such a dreary little civil servant. It was beyond my wildest dreams, not to say I’d been dreaming of old Clyde for any reason.”
“No, me neither.” I was quite on the verge of having an apoplectic fit, if not from this information itself, then from the attempt to keep myself from exploding.
“But it’s like I’ve always said,” Kyle continued. He was quite oblivious to my discomfort. “You can always have sex with your friends, but you can never make friends out of your lovers.”
“Ah.” I swallowed. “What time is it?”
Kyle glanced around. “Well, dear,” he sighed. “I’d tell you, but I think I’ve forgotten my pocket watch.”
I checked my wrist. “It’s half-eight already,” I said, silently shaking. “Where does the time go?”
“I don’t know,” Kyle said. He finished his shandy, and began to take another bite of his lukewarm curry before thinking better of it. “Can I go home with you?” he asked. “I’d … I’d rather not be alone tonight.”
“Of course,” I said warmly, my tremors calming somewhat. “You’ve just been heartbroken, darling, so let me settle the bill.”
“But you’ve eaten so much less than I,” Kyle stated. Then he shrugged, his thrifty nature rearing its head. “Well, I’ll make it up another time, won’t I?”
“Surely,” I muttered, making a dash toward the bar.
~
When Kyle asked to come home with me, he meant to sleep with me - in the same bed. We’d had our trysts, most notably in college. They were infrequent, and usually under the sustained influence of any number of intoxicants. I don’t think either of us could recall to what extent they were satisfying. That was just one of the aspects of this so-called gay life I was rather beginning to dislike. It was all well and good to fuck your best mate, and in the morning he would just roll over and bemoan his head pain and you’d laugh over a basket of financiers and pain au chocolat about how you couldn’t remember anything about the whole thing except for how ridiculous it all must have been.
He had a perfectly respectable apartment in Notting Hill Gate, and of course by ‘perfectly respectable’ I do mean lovely, and ostentatious, and lavish. Kyle was in advertising. All these years, and I’d never quite gotten the hang of what it was that he did, except that it involved very long lunch breaks and socializing with a number of catty, gabby women he seemed to tire of long before they married and he had to attend some social function, possibly a wedding. “I do hate weddings,” Kyle was fond of saying. “It’s never my own, of course, and then it’s always such trouble finding an appropriate hat.” He was also irked by the fact that the invitations never came for Mr. Kyle Broflovski and Guest, which he cited as a critical injustice. I tried to support him in this regard, too, although I truly felt one of these boorish men, Christophe or whoever, would be horribly risible in a tuxedo.
I lived in a ramshackle mess of rooms over Hoxton Square. Kyle had serious reservations about taking the Underground to Old Street, thinking it unsafe. I found it no more unsafe than anyplace else, really, and the idea of finding a taxi preposterous. But Kyle was adamant, so I stood on the curb with my arm stuck out like a tourist or a fascist, holding my trench closed, as I was too lazy to secure the buttons. Perhaps if I had one reason to like what was happening around Soho, it was the ease of taxi procurement. I think most foreigners were unaware of how small central London was, really, or how easy it was to traverse the town by foot or even bus without resorting to cab. Still, there was something stately, grim, and romantic about paying a man to take you away, thinking not about where you were going or the ever-troubling problem of the meter.
I cannot overstate the frustration of being so intimate with a man I yearned for so intensely, and so persistently. Despite his inheritance of his mother’s shapely features, Kyle fit well into most of my clothes, except the few things I hung onto that were tailored without a centimeter of error. (There is something deeply satisfying about turning up at a former lover’s formal birthday luncheon dressed impeccably in something incorporating silk.) I lent Kyle a pair of striped pajamas, which he laughed at.
“I always imagine you asleep in the nude,” he confided.
These little comments caught me off-guard whenever he casually dropped them into conversation.
“I make a point to go to bed like this so that in the unlikely case there’s a fire or something, I won’t have to evacuate in the nude.”
“I suppose if you didn’t live in such a hideously industrial wasteland it wouldn’t be a problem.”
“I hardly find it industrial,” I managed to choke out with mock-outrage. “I mean, look, there’s a wonderfully pleasant green out there.” I strode over to one of the windows and knocked on it.
“Oh, yes.” Kyle nodded along with his sarcastic assessment. “Sadly one can’t see the green through your dust-clouded windows.”
“Well, if you dislike it so, why not go back to your wonderful flat and have a cocktail by yourself and count your lavish blessings?”
“How rude!” Kyle’s annoyance was false, but he played it well. “I suppose you should be lucky I’m here with you; after all, it’s not like you’d be doing anything pivotal up here on your own, would you?”
“I have a story to finish,” I told him. As a writer, I found it fairly simple to maintain a certain standard of living by filling in the gaps with short columns for whatever publication was in need; usually it was some trashy gossip rag, although I found that sadly, virtually every paper was quickly tilting toward that standard. This assignment happened to be a breezy roman a clef about the son of the executive officer of a major brewing company. I hadn’t any clue where these editors get these outlandish ideas - like, say, the idea to publish gossip in a fictive voice with jabbing judgmental commentary laced throughout. Still, it was factual gossip, which I suppose was the nobler sort. Some months I soured on the scandal racket, and found myself disinterested in taking on these jobs. In those times, I found it easy enough to rely on my father for some income; wheedling usually worked on him, although even I could admit that as a youth, I never imaged my 37-year-old self as the type of man who routinely called upon his father to support me in my frivolous career as a dour aesthete who enjoyed drinking whisky on weeknights and champagne on the weekends, every weekend. Still, a man could be excused of such things, I think; there had to be some merit in enjoying oneself.
It was easy enough to wonder what my father would think of his only son spending another Monday night in his pajamas, drinking sherry with his old friend as they discussed escape routes out of the building.
“Of course,” Kyle concluded, “if your sprinklers went off, these lovely cotton pajamas would be ruined.”
“It’s nothing laundering wouldn’t fix,” I told him.
Kyle wept a bit more over Christophe, and I did try to be supportive, but I had long since realized that Kyle loved performing his disappointment for me far more than he was able to take solace from my reassurance or even my schadenfreude. It was a little ritual for us. Being a lapsed Catholic of the highest degree, Kyle was the object of my devotion now, and going through these cycles with him was the closest I ever came to worship.
“Do you remember the night we met?” he asked, weepily, referring to himself and Christophe. Of course I did; it was another routine evening out, and he swaggered into the club sucking on the end of a cigarette like it was candy. He cruised Kyle rather thoroughly, choosing not to send him drinks at our table but to come over himself and simply pluck Kyle out of his seat and carry him toward the dance floor. I was sure the attraction was completely genuine, and yet it was obvious to me that a Frenchman - any Frenchman, no matter how toned his arms were - looking to cohabitate with a bloke he picked up in a club (literally!) was only in search of a temporary arrangement.
Still, I did not like to see him hurting, as much as I enjoyed seeing him hurt. As the night crept forward, I continued pouring him glasses of sherry, stroking what was left of his hair and offering reassurances. Finally, around midnight, he took my hand away from his ear and asked me, “Why did I cut my hair off? I must look like something of a lesbian now.”
“You are certainly the most attractive lesbian I have ever met.”
We giggled about this. Neither of us knew any lesbians, mind you; they were roughly mythological creatures to us, and yet we were all too certain we’d recoil at the sight of one. In this way, I suppose they were like the modern-day Chimera or something. Or perhaps there were a Hydratic concept, many-headed and too complex for us. Still, we toasted to our good fortune to have never identified one in the wild. After this, we realized we’d finished all of my sherry, although with the pacing, my tolerance, and Kyle’s grand consumption, neither of us was really particularly drunk.
“So I won’t be ill tomorrow, fancy that,” Kyle mused. “Shall we?” I nodded, and took his arm, and let him lead me to my own bed, a wonderfully large-affair on a platform upstairs in the great tangle of lofted space of which my flat consisted. We curled up together, and Kyle summarized his latest muck-up of a fling: “Disastrous.”
“At least you’re having these trysts,” I mused. “How must it feel, do you think, to go from one lurid park toilet to the next, settling to fuck men you meet in the gym showers?”
“Oh, are you complaining?” Kyle asked. “As I recall, after Gary, you were quite adamant you would never date again.”
“Until I find the one,” I told him.
“Well.” Kyle reached over and turned out the bedside lamp. He rolled back toward me, and wrapped his arms around my torso. “Let us remember, Stanley dear, that we do have each other. Of course I expect you know by now that I would rather have you than any single piece of manhood in England.”
“What about the Commonwealth?” I asked, secretly wondering why he only seemed to feel this way in the wake of his romantic follies.
“There, too.” He kissed me, tenderly, on the lips, and tucked his head beside my shoulder. He closed his eyes and said, “Good night, dear.”
“Good night, darling.”
“Do wake me if you get up first.”
Before too long I heard his soft snoring permeate my bedroom. With some difficulty I managed to fall asleep, dreaming of looming deadlines and men at oaken desks ordering me to have my cock cut off.
~
When I awoke in the morning, Kyle was gone. He was not in the habit of composing notes, but I knew well enough that he had probably called a taxi and gone back to his flat so he could shower and dress for work. Some weekend nights after parties if Kyle came home with me, he would still be there in the morning. For that matter, if I was sleeping over at his, I was generally awoken when he did, and given some breakfast before being hustled out. I wasn’t sure that Kyle enjoyed his frivolous work, but if there was one thing his parents had instilled in him, it was an instinct to take business quite seriously. This made him, from 9 in the morning to 5 in the afternoon, something of a frenzied bore. He did, however, tend to a take an hour-long lunch break, which seemed to last for two hours. I sometimes met him, unless of course I was just rousing at noon, which was the case today.
His absence on these mid-mornings saddened me, but it was a very familiar sadness. In a very real way, I had been living with this absence since I’d met him. He was there, and he was not, like a phantom lover. In my youth it was very unsettling; now it was a well-worn melancholy; a perpetual longing. I think it must have been far more normal to me now than true contentment would have been. Or, perhaps it was the case that I was content, as I was not depressed, but I certainly wasn’t … well, the correct word was probably ‘exuberant.’
It was nearing 1 p.m., so I put a kettle on, and sat down at the wood-block table I kept near my kitchen. Or perhaps it was in my kitchen; I found the distinction very difficult to make, as my flat consisted of one very large space with several smaller catacomb-like rooms and a loft where I slept. Someday, the excavation of these annexes would prove profitable, I was certain, having spent years filling them with all varieties of inheritances from relatives deceased and living. My parents in particular liked to surprise me with a boot full of old rubbish, citing my ample storage space. “Perhaps this is valuable,” my father would suggest, shoving faded faux-velvet boxes of broken bits of Bakelite jewelry into my spare rooms.
“No, it’s not,” I’d reply, “which is why you’ve been quite unable to foist it off on some unsuspecting antiquities dealer, and are therefore imposing it on me.” At which point my father would whine and groan and launch into an overwrought tantrum about how if I expected him to continue distributing his wealth (such as it was) at any time prior to his extinguishment, I had better shut my mouth and let him use my living space as gratis storage. Usually it was not a long wait to discover that in fact my mother had gotten on him again about the lack of spare rooms in the dreary little row house I’d grown up in.
After rubbishy junk from my mother and father, I suppose the second largest source of clutter in my apartment was my collection of papers, all of which I’d managed to somehow jam into dusty towers of filing cabinets. As a writer - an occupation I loathed increasingly as the years went by - I was excessively paranoid about letting a single one of my papers get out of sight. In the two-odd decades since I’d gone down from Magdalen, I’d managed somehow by sheer luck or the skin of my teeth to publish two novels, both of which were fairly dense with flowery language. Neither was a critical or a commercial success, but the truth about publishing was that I had been generally fortunate enough to have been paid by advance - not millions of quid, but enough, so it hardly mattered to me whether or not anyone, professional or literary or commoner or uneducated, liked my books. My payment had come regardless of their ability to perform, not unlike the way some men were able to continue having sex. When I thought back on it, my so-called professional life seemed to mirror my personal life in that I hardly would call myself a wonderful lay, and yet I was never left wondering when my next paycheck (so to speak) would arrive; it just always did, because in some horrible way horny men are like book publishers: They are willing to take a chance on anything, or almost everything. Here I was, very nearly 40, and I deeply felt as if I’d squandered too many resources. I tried to console myself with the fact that it was hardly my responsibility to feel guilt over where and when other entities were liable to take liberties with their cash or their erections. It hardly mattered. When I was nearing 30, it really bothered me, but in the ensuing 10 years I suppose I’d mastered it. Nevertheless, I was horridly protective of my papers. Every draft of those two damn novels was stored in the cubby-like rooms off the larger space of the flat, which I’d purchased with my first advance more or less with the idea of keeping drawer after drawer of drafts safe from interlopers. What a fancy! I had been so naïve.
When my tea was done I put it next to me to steep and sat down at the typewriter, which was how I enjoyed writing. At some point in my life it had occurred to me that I was never going to be the next Waugh, so I may as well drop the act and just write on a word processor like a contemporary. But then, possibly drunk, I rebelled against my own common sense. I didn’t care if what I handed in was riddled with errors, although if I was suspiciously and unusually concerned about impressing an editor I might whip out a red pen and correct my own work, as if I were something of an editor myself. I suppose the truth was that I had never been proud of what I was doing, and since it hardly made me happy I did not care if it was presentable or reasonable or even very good. The problem with all of this was that I didn’t know what else I could do that I would be much better at, or what might make me any happier. Despite Kyle’s nervous jokes about becoming his secretary, I would have been horrible at that. The only thing I had any interest in cataloguing was my own yellowing collection of novel leaves and rejected manuscripts. And that was only something of a pet project.
Around the time I was tapping out the last few lines of my assignment, the telephone rang. Determined to finish the damn story so that I could spend the rest of my week stalking pretty young things in the Kensington Gardens lavatory, I ignored it. I managed to commit another four words when the phone began crying out a second time. I had about four phones in the flat, one in the loft and the other three placed in sufficiently strategic positions so that I never had to walk far across the barren hardwood floors to get a call. I hit the space bar furiously, and went to the coffee table, for which I was using an old leather trunk with a lace table cloth over it. I also had a great interest in princess-style phones - of which I’d only managed to collect one over the years, a gift from Kyle for the holidays one year, in exchange for the outrageous oversized black rubber dildo I’d given him. Make a comment, if you like, but it was what he wanted, and I knew he got an awful lot of use out of it. It was one of those serendipitous gifts that managed to please both the gifter and the recipient, and I certainly had gotten my own share of use out of it, indirectly, imagining what Kyle must have looked like while making use of the overpriced dildo I’d bought him. Perhaps when I was still at school, thinking about my best mate impaling himself on a black cock of any variety, fake or real, would have made me extremely guilty and caused me to sulk. These days, it had rather a reverse effect, forcing me to become quite horny. I suppose the point of this anecdote was that when I spoke on the telephone Kyle had given me, I inevitably became hard. This gave phone sex a lurid, illicit third dimension of naughtiness, but even normal conversations became arousing because of it. I felt myself stiffening even before I picked up the phone and barked, “What?”
“Stanley,” a female voice lilted. “There’s no need to yell, mon cher, it is simply too early for yelling.”
“Wendy,” I sighed. I immediately felt wretched for snapping at her. “How’s tricks?”
“Oh, you know, perfectly dreadful.”
“By which you mean…”
She swallowed; I always heard when she swallowed over the telephone. I do not know how I could hear the viscous rivers of saliva in her mouth but I certainly could, and it was one of the few things I felt never merited mention to her, to whom I told almost every other thing about my life. Each thought and idea I had, no matter how wild or unsavory or brilliant, was filtered through Wendy.
“It’s such a horrible day, isn’t it?” she asked. It occurred to that I hadn’t even looked outside today, although by her comment I noticed it was actually quite light out.
“No, dear, I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean. It’s very bright out, isn’t it? Looks very warm.”
“I don’t mean the weather, you old fool, I mean the energy, or some like concept. Don’t you just feel it’s going to be a monstrous day?”
“Really I don’t. How do you mean?”
When I questioned her, she always became somewhat irritable. “I can’t describe it,” she snapped. Then she returned to savory form: “I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you to tea today, Stanley. I hope you’re not busy.”
“I’m never busy, or rather, never too busy,” I answered. “Why? Haven’t you got anyone else to have tea with?”
“Not to be insulting, dearest, but I wish I did. You’re always in such a moody way recently.”
“I am not.” She could have said the same thing about herself.
“Well, I’ve not seen you for so long now, it feels like. Why don’t you come take tea with me, hmm? I’ll serve those sandwiches you like.” If there was ever a reason to go to Wendy’s, it wasn’t to sit in the seemingly endless cushions of her parlor couches; it was to consume coronation chicken sandwiches, have a cup of tea, and relish the fact that your life could never be as dismal as hers was. Likewise, I think she often silently thanked God or fortune that her life wasn’t quite like mine. Nevertheless, aside from Kyle, she was certainly my dearest friend.
“I think I shall be able to make it. Shall we say 4?”
“Yes, yes, 4.”
“Will Lady Stevens be in attendance?”
“No.” She said this with firmness and in her voice, meant obviously to bolster me, as I had never been a great fan. “Bebe will not be there, I’m afraid. She’s enjoying the Cote d’Azur this month.”
Bebe was a woman who was well-equipped with intelligence of some variety, for it clearly took some talent to play her games, gossip-mongering and contact-acquisition. Still, she apparently was entirely uninformed on the matter of discerning which gentlemen were gay. I had no idea what Bebe was short for, and in complete honesty I should confess that I didn’t want to know. Babette or something, probably; something overinflated and girlish. I did not like her, and I knew that Wendy’s appreciation of her company completely accommodated my dislike. Still, she often made eyes at me; very clear eyes, at that; beckoning eyes; flirtatious eyes. I was always polite, although once at a tea she did get rather grabby after the other ladies had cleared out of the parlor. It was beyond my comprehension why she never simply did the computations and asked why her best friend had no children, or why she kept company with a confirmed bachelor, or why said bachelor was always the sole male (single or otherwise) at social functions in the private female sphere of Black House.
“What a shame,” I lied. “I shall see you at 4, then.”
“Good, good,” Wendy concluded. “I shall look forward to it, dearest.”
We hung up, and I took a moment to fondle my erection through my pants. It might have been a good time to abandon work on this project and go down to the lavatory at the coffee shop on Old Street and perhaps find a bloke whose company I could enjoy, but I thought it over and realized that I had only a couple of hours to finish the story, run it down to Fleet Street, and then jog back over to her place. In lieu of indulging myself in this way I decided to have a quick wank - a very quick one, truly, not one of these drawn-out luxuriant ones for which I’d draw a bath and bring in a porno mag or something and really enjoy the process. No, this would have to be efficient. I leaned back on the sofa and spread my legs and shut my eyes, instinctively running my palms over my thighs. After a brief delay I drew my cock out of my pants and really made quick work of the whole thing, coming into my hand so as not to waste any more time cleaning or laundering anything. If there was one thing I had learned the hard way, it was that semen was very difficult to get out of lace.
Continued here.