Blind hearts - 10. Four weeks to Freedom

Embarrassed could be the word for what Dimov felt when Frank demanded him, “What the fuck did you say to Alex? He’s gone!” Alex apparently had left Richard’s house without tell the supposed boyfriend. Dimov colored in his seat, blinked over the dying dregs of a poker game. But Frank, cheeks pale, temples glistening, stared. Dimov donned him an old trickster fox waiting for the final twilight to eclipse its tired eyes. Diagnosed fragility had a way of rising surfs of aggression, and he said, a hardness thinning his voice, “I told him, you’re a closet case.” Murmurs squalled with Frank’s eyelids widening and then falling in a coda of rational resignation. And Frank slunk away to beautiful feet of Miss Janet in sultry black qipao and sang supplications for a ride home.

Dimov drove home, anxious in an immiscible mixture of vindication and industrial reserve. Tomorrow work would start sunless and soulless at 3:30 am, and he still had errands that would eat into his bedtime. Irritating still was the feeling of something awry in his judgment of Frank. It whiffed of unfulfilled desires. Maybe there was nothing. Maybe it was his own need for something that colored his perceptions.

Immoral, corrupted the world must be indeed if devotion between two men necessitated an erotic undertone. Really, David loving Jonathan meant exactly just that, he loved Jonathan, not he wanted Jonathan to fuck him silly. But this also glinted of a childish insistence on purity. Who knew the whys and wherefores anyway? Dimov, exasperated at his own blind heart, stepped on the gas pedal. And so circled and circled those thoughts in a search of a center that would hold, a heft of an anchor within.

When he arrived before his door, the interior sounds of Charles’ rapid lilt dominating Gilda’s soft drawls halted him. His hand hardened over the keys body-warm in his pocket. Down the blurred lengths of the corridor he looked, and up at the stippled ceiling inching lower and lower still. A few minutes more he thought, a few more minutes before he would find the repository of strong smiles and a strong voice needed to face them. What should he say about Alex? The party? Frank? Nothing. Yes nothing, because Alex did not matter anymore. The solution dazzled him with his own decisive pride even taunted with hints of him becoming more comfortable with Charles leaving. And at last he could open the door.

The living room was sprawling with camping gear, coolers pressurized with questionable contents, and the gladsome back and forth about the Universe’s bounteous graces in granting Gilda a lead part in an opera. Charles and Gilda, like drooping palm fronds, crowded the kitchen entrance. Dimov, frowning determinedly, stepped around the trash bags bloating with empty water containers, and refusing furiously not to name the ripening reek in the air. By the time he made way to them, he had forgotten everything of cheery resolve and was feeling ill with the cluttered disorder.

“And no we didn’t miss you any,” Charles said by way of greeting.

Dimov grunted a greeting. It took a few moments through his muddled irritation for his eyes to shape the hairy board of Charles’ chest, his belly’s modest rise and pink fall over the puckered bands of his sleep shorts, his fingers flicking daintily into the air. And of a sudden Dimov’s heart swelled to the point of acrid hurt. The beautiful idea was ballooning in him of Charles lithe and rosaceous, soft and smiling. He firmed his mouth and sought more calming vibrations in Gilda’s frowsy tracksuit.

Her hair had probably been a regal French roll earlier, but now its coarse waves slopped over the ears and flopped with her every giddy gesticulation at her good fortune.

“Can you believe it? Cosi Fan Tutte.” Her kohled eyes were shining. “I got the part! I got the part!”

Dimov smiled through internal cringing at her stratospheric octaves. “We need to have dinner next weekend or some time to celebrate.”

“Argentinian steakhouse sounds real good,” Charles said, with a mischievous pout.

“You’re paying?” Dimov asked bluntly.

Charles’s lips deformed in various shapes that suggested a plea. Dimov’s heart resumed bursting.

“Sure, sure, it’ll be my treat,” Dimov huffed, but just as soon feelings scrambled to reclaim aloof pride, prompting him to say, “You might as well invite your Argentinian kings.”

Charles’ eyes glided off him to the crags of discarded camping gear in the living room, and his flicking sounded harsher. Dimov knew something was up. But did he want to ask? And why he was already regretting bringing up the Latin trio?

Gilda’s prim and curt eyes descended on Charles. “I told you. You have to say sorry to Miguel’s tight ass.”

“We’ve been through already.”

“Come on, admit it. Miguel was on the point about you. I mean, seriously, the park ranger? You got perfect three yummy guys in your tent, and then you go make out with Monsieur Buckteeth.” Gilda shuddered in a grand show of disgust.

“Jim doesn’t have buckteeth.”

Gilda persevered a cool stare.

“Maybe, whatever. My business is my fucking business,” Charles said dimly.

Dimov looked at him askance. Charles sighed, mumbled about packing and thrift stores, and slapped off to his room. Gilda snorted over the luminous slab of her phone. Maybe her FU to an unexpected kink in her luck or her reproach at Charles’ expansive ways, Dimov bit through the minutes to determine.

“This was all last night?” Dimov asked.

“Good thing you skipped out. Six hours of Spanish bickering is so not fun.” With that, the ugly weights were fully unloaded and dispatched a thousand miles away, and she began beaming cheerily at her phone. “I’m so excited. I have to call my mom.” And she minced away to her bedroom, the tracksuit swishing loudly from in between her thick thighs.

Her impatient door bang precipitated a tremble, which shivered through the walls and sharpening up the fusty smell of stale chips. Under the overheard conical glare, he was bleeding salt. He stood rigid and silent under a horrent hail of questions. Did Charles call him after the jerkoff fucked him? Before? During??? What was his nonsense call about beautiful stars?

Dimov darted into the kitchen for a cool glass of water. The faucet gushed, eight ounces of charcoal filtered H2O sated, and still his heart was flustering in indignation. It was as if a spike was driving up his spine, driving and boring and still unable break through an impalpable but adamantine shield of his core. He felt lost and alone and desperately hungry. A sandy glow, the onion-scented cold were the fridge’s immediate suggestions, and the empty egg crate that Charles must have left, His three-month old tub of yogurt, the nine-tenths finished chocolate bars. Dimov slammed on the door and kicked it twice as appropriate punishment.

“Did you want the guitar? I was just going to sell it.”

Dimov ground down on a shiver, and hoping anxiously that no one witnessed his high emotion, inched up his head to see Charles swinging in from the tawny-hued corridor.

Charles said, “I never thought it would so hard to get rid of shit. I have these books that are worth nothing, but it feels so wrong to junk.”

The man was really moving in a month, Dimov thought crossly, burying his heating face again into cold fog of the fridge. “Don’t worry too much about getting rid of everything. I’ll take care of the rest,” he said.

“Thanks, but I’m good.”

Dimov sucked in the onion cold. Of course Charles was good, he was always good, always self-sufficient, never in need of his strong arms.

“If you need any help, just let me know,” said David extricating himself from the fridge.

“You didn’t want anything from the fridge?”

“No, nothing ... And get rid of the yogurt and the empty crate.” Dimov edged past his bare chest for the refreshing black of the balcony.

Beyond the black ridge of gable roofs and formless trees, and over the horizon’s edge, city light showered the sky with intensities too lively for the late hour. Dimov pictured happiness blossoming in the crater yawning gigantic spotlights to the night, perhaps not happiness over there but someone grinning in quiet joy because they had flopped a royal flush or the special man whom the Universe had fated to his. Whatever that happiness was, it wasn’t Alex or Charles or weekends of poker. It was ridiculous really how the stygian border of houses and trees as tall as houses held back the light barrage. The high wall of sleeping souls and decanting desires was keeping him away from what should be his.

He recalled Pedro leaning on him with his full lips open, inviting, waiting. The frisky twink was most definitely not the way, but it was something. There was only one thing to do. And he, leaning on the balcony railing, called Pedro. Before regret would burden, the ring tone broke into a low singsong voice bearing a hello, and he bolted himself to the idea of being suave and carefree.

Dimov said breathily, “You still angry with me?”

“Charley make you call me?”

Dimov swallowed hard. Why did he have to talk about Charley now? He prepared himself. “I was thinking about you, that’s all. I was thinking about Joshua Tree. I was thinking it could have been fun. Definitely more fun that my grumpy weekend at my laptop.”

“Sad, sad you.”

“I know right? Sad me. But we must start somewhere and then perhaps something else.”

“Really Charles didn’t ask you to call me.”

Dimov kicked softly against the railing. “Charles is too busy being sulky and sorry about his behavior this weekend.”

“He is?” Pedro’s voice was depressingly bright for Dimov to understand.

“Tell your friends to forgive him. Charles is a … mariquita—”

“Exactly a butterfly. I keep telling Miguel that, but you know, l’amor—call me this week to plan something.”

“Yes, sure, please, I’ll call you Wednesday or Thursday.”

Dimov unbuttoned his collar. At last the cool air soothed his damp neck and breathed over him a still, a feeling light and bright. And beyond the angular outlines, bulky in the dark, glinting faintly of stray metal, he grasped of a way, yet hidden, but being paved and gilded, and all for his manful eminence. And in time, these tenebrous ramparts would fall away, and the road, one-way to fulfillment, would be made apparent.

“You know what LA needs?” A voice shot out from the unknown behind him. Dimov flinched at the lilting chimes hitting notes of need.

Charles chuckled. “A good hard blizzard. You know, so fucking cold, it freezes the entire ocean into an ice block …”

Dimov turned deliberately to the satyr manning the door and grinned weakly. “I don’t like cold …. And I’m going to bed.” Just as he squeezed past him, Charles whispered, “Aren’t you going to kiss me goodnight.”

Dimov blinked, nonplussed, before recovering with the realization of his darling common Charles. Gilda kissed him good night, and the long line of friends and strangers kissing him goodnight in the hole in the wall apartment in New York too.

There was a string of light sweeping across Charles’s brow. “You know we don’t have to eat at the steakhouse if you don’t care to. I’d hate to impose.”

Dimov spluttered a little snort. Charles always imposed. The entire idea of Charles’ living with him had been a monstrous imposition. What now with him?

“I’m okay with it, if not Gilda will demand that vegan place again,” Dimov said, straining for cool.

Barely a few inches from the bare chest rising and falling gently in a lulling rhythm, Dimov could not quite duck away or even look up the arousing edge of his jaw.

Charles smiled, which Dimov took as an invitation to banter, to divulge the dirty deeds of the weekend. Yes, the pause should be the cue for him dilate on Alex and his red hair and his annoying slipperiness. But his insides were liquid and brackish; he was bereft of that certain gilded path again. Charles looked over the wide dark of the night then the crowded lights inside, all the while Dimov fixated on the shady sag in his lips.

“Feels shitty here. Your hole in the wall apartment had more life than this place,” said Charles, looking down.

“I’ll take the sun over life.” Dimov, feeling easier, appreciated Charles’s reversion to his own too common mean.

“The sun doesn’t make up for shitty pizza joints—you’re not going to ditch me in Philly, just for the sun?”

“Of course not.”

“I fucking hope so. It’ll be shitty if you dropped off the planet like you did the last time.”

Dimov darted him a narrow look. But Charles, in his flighty way, glided over it and kissed him goodnight and flounced in a devil-may-cry manner down the ghostly corridor.

Dimov shut away the sliding door hard; the bang reverberated through the walls wainscoted with shadows. He dumped himself into a loveseat and leaned over his knees, the kiss still burning a rose on his cheek. Those tired thoughts paced again. Four weeks till Charles would move out. Four weeks till he could stop flagellating himself for allowing Charles to stay with him. Four weeks—he could do this.