Blind hearts - 14. Free Food

Before making the last left turn for home, Alex pulled into the strip mall with its monk and nun roofs and its beefy red signs and its mosaic of red brick. The curvy font of the bakery sign shunted him forward to its abode, away from the slipshod profile of his mother, back in the car, languishing against the door. The shop smell of sugar and butter, lemons and vanilla brought him in relation to all things fresh and sunny of his boyhood, all those moments virtuous and vernal.

Bells tinkling hailed the entrance of a black, heavyset woman, her ashen hair tinged with a purple hue. They acknowledged each other warmly, and she went ahead to order a cake. Through homely timbre of her Jamaican brogue, an odd discomfort pricked Alex for not knowing her name. He felt like he had failed something fundamental, or perhaps the grateful feeling birthed by the circumambient bloom of sweets and satiety.

“Finally graduated, did she?” a matronly clerk said to her, “Now she can pay for us both a cruise to the Bahamas.”

The customer’s jowls plumped roundly with smiles. “I just so proud of her—make that inscription in yellow and pink. She loves that.”

Yellow and pink, crisp white and baby blue, ribbons dangled around Susan’s neck as she tapped away determinedly at a sewing machine, Alex pictured in a rueful abandon to memory. Soft eyes dampening her scowl, she would slap back his naughty little fingers away from her tomato-like pincushion. But that was then. Now she was just a frosty fat bitch. Alex gulped, waited for the Universe to annihilate him.

But behind the clerk, double doors burst open with Matteo, new, tight, buff, fresh, twinkling in his sleek apron, bearing a large tray of éclairs. Alex watched him in thankful lust as he reshuffled the tray of croissants, rearranged the bouquet of packed Madelaines, reset a paper roll into the credit card machine.

“I’ll take couple of those éclairs,” Alex said to him.

“Hey Alex, I didn’t see you,” Matteo said he was obliged to pay attention to the village idiot. “You pro’lly want the pear tarts too.”

“You bet.” Alex grinned.

“You should try the mini crème-brulées.”

“Sure, a couple of those.”

“And the Napoleons.

“Add those.”

Matteo rolled him a stare. “Feeling rich?”

“I’m feeling something.”

Matteo shook his head in gruff nonchalance and proceeded to box his order. And weighing the box in his hands, Alex wished Susan would at least try the éclairs, even though she was not keen on sweets, or smiles. Suddenly the box felt like a ten-ton whale, and he shrugged and dragged away to the door.

“You’re graduating, right?” Matteo’s inquiry sounded like a trick question.

“Yep! Can’t wait to be done,” Alex jeered too loudly.

Matteo’s look was unexpectedly considerate. As if fighting off miserly naysayers, he grabbed a pack of Madelaines and tossed it over to Alex, who caught it with a less-than-wished-for panache.

“Congratulations,” Matteo said.

Matteo, beaming there behind the gold railing of the counter, healthy gums, silver teeth, lively eyes, and those bare biceps of a man hard at work: Alex scurried away a snapshot for the midnight use and said mightily, “Thank you.” And he returned to the car with a near-audible rhythm of a jig, and in that selfsame spirit of vindication, plopped down the crinkly pack of Madelaines over the gearbox like he was showing off a great catch of fish.

“I should tell everyone I’m graduating just to score free stuff,” he said to Susan sweeping a sleepy uncomprehending gaze over him. “Matteo gave me that for free.”

“Why would he do that?”

“I dunno. He’s happy for me?”

“Why? Isn’t he straight?”

Alex looked away from her tiny precise eyes and surrendered himself to task of sticking a key into the ignition.

***

The excursion had quite vanquished Susan. Despite her stubborn shrills for Alex to rest in bed, lethargy glimmered in the excruciatingly slow way her eyes blinked over her quilt in progress, the damson hue to her balloon cheeks, her muted responses to Alex sighing away the day’s sunny adventures and its brusque little hurts for the tedium of laundry, dishes, and dinner.

Alex, sheared in an unnatural stillness, watched her red face nod off at the central sofa, her tepid gurgles steady over the television’s blather. He thought slyly that the next few days would be hard for her. She sure gave a good talk about moving out, but who the fuck was she kidding? Five years ago, he had spied on her trying to rise from that very couch, and failing with a miserable squish against the cushions. After gritting through her minutes of wheezing and wincing and darkening a sweaty red, he jumped in to give her hand. But she waved him off and announced with maternal harshness, “We’re getting divorced. You can choose to stay with your dad or with me. Let me know in a few days.” That huff of violence was the right impetus for her clear off the couch and walk away with the proud limp of a veteran.

Alex felt tight in his chest; heat swam across his cheeks, as all around him glimmered a palimpsest of stifled wishes. He darted out to the verandah for a liberating view of the sky. But the air, evening cool, was not fresh enough, not free enough. Forgetting himself someplace far away made more sense, as he thumbed through his phone contacts dazedly.

“Fancy you calling me,” Tony answered groggily. “Nope, you’re not coming over tonight.”

“Man, oh man—” Alex peeped through the screen doors, afraid that Susan had overhead, and preferring discretion, he closed the glass doors resolutely.

“I called you because I was thinking about you,” Alex said.

“Thinking about my dick is not the same thing as thinking about me.”

Alex checked himself. Since when did Tony turn into a needy fuck?

“You should get a piece of me when you can. You never know, when I won’t be around anymore.”

“Sure,” Tony said, deadpan.

“Serious. I got a Wall Street job.”

“Bullshit.”

Now Alex was hurt. “I’m fucking serious.”

“Good, you’ll be rich—buy me dinner. Then we’ll fuck like rabbits, and you’re staying the night. None of your half-assed running away shit.”

There were a few good men Alex would buy dinner first over Tony. Alex paced himself, reconsidered another avenue to get what he wanted

“Not tonight, love.” Alex faked a cough. “I have a bullshit cultural studies paper to write.”

“Good enough for a fuck, but good enough for buy dinner—I don’t got time for this.”

“Hey, hey, what did I do?”

“I dunno. Nothing. Yeah, exactly that, nothing. Maybe that’s problem. I’ve just been thinking about my life…”

Oh dear, he most definitely did not call him to listen him think. Alex scratched himself, counseled himself patience. Through the doors, he could see Susan stir, which quickened him to say, “Thinking about what, love?”

“Buy me dinner, I’ll tell what.”

Alex excused himself, dropped the phone, stared at the limp sun. And in those seconds dissolving into the mist of his own obsolescence, he floated to a mirage of Frank, who clinked his forehead against his and whispered, “You’re hopeless.”

***

Alex, over the next couple of days, was spared the agony of a 102-degree fever, but not the 9.0 magnitude coughs that interrupted every tenth minute of lectures. Another ten-minute seizure of coughing dove him out of the class to the back of the Bren Hall. And under the more exclusive shade of a California Maple, he gave the coughs his all: tears trickled, his sides protested muscular strain, his vision blurred over the high wall of windows shielding fellows sniggering at his geriatric performance.

There were the workers, heavy paunch, pug-faced, too parched for college-aged fribbery, confident with a lackadaisical can’t-do attitude. They gangled along in their work utility vehicles without so much as a soft glance of mindful engagement. The 4 pm mood of the day felt just as uncaring, quiet, cool, much too aloof to give a fuck about him or that bastard itch at the back of his throat. If only he could plunge his whole hand down there and rip the throat out.

He spat to the side. With all his quaking and convulsing, his lungs only delivered a pathetic-sized droplet of greenish-grey gunk.

Fuck this. His mother had nagged at him to stay in bed, and well he should have been a good little boy and done just as Mom said. Alex sighed. His phone rang. It was his father, David.

“Sorry, I didn’t call back sooner,” David said.

Apologies were also refreshing when they were least expected.

“So you’re sticking around SoCal then,” his dad added with shy envy.

“Yeah, Mom’s not feeling too well.”

“She can take care of herself, you know.”

Did that make him feel better for leaving a bride for twenty years for someone twenty years ago, Alex wondered in a bitter spurt of recollection.

“We’ll see,” Alex said cautiously.

“Any way it goes, we’re proud of you.”

The ‘we’ dampened him just as the spare silence precipitated an annoying niggle of cough. He clenched his teeth through the hedge words to express both goodly concern and judicious disapproval of the girlfriend.

“I’ll see you both for lunch this Sunday, then?” Alex was ebullient.

“Yes, we’ll talk more then.”

There was a mutiny of noise, a surrendering release of energy into the air, as the class period had ended. Bicycles whizzed by, youngsters bent over their backpacks at awkward angles, and cars were kick started with sluggish neighs. Deciding to call it a day, Alex heaved his backpack and shambled down the street, into the restless sea of students phoning in the trivialities cogitated and ruminated through the lecture. He crossed the street and glanced over the schizophrenic row of tall, broad pines and box squat hedges, blue irises and purple fountainheads, curving away and downward into a dense parking lot. Impatience was the name of the day, and a prickly irritation. The possibility of Susan, languid and listless, in a sunlight-throttled bedroom prompted an irregular rhythm to his gait.

She can take care of herself. He bet she could as he came to a full halt at a four-way stop. She was her own responsibility, just like all the other guys had a responsibility to take of themselves—those whom he had cuddled and fucked and left without so much as a thought to their beating, quivering hearts, Tony, Jacob, Dimov, Frank ….

He paused and shivered a glance up and over the daggered crowns of twin pines, dark-hued and defeated under the sun’s citrine glare. He should wait a bit, he thought. Get a coffee, call Tony and renegotiate a fuck without dinner, make a head start on the cultural studies term paper that was due in three days. No, he would not call his mom for ideas on dinner, or call ahead about his evening plans. She could take every bit of care for herself.

The alacrity of his ideas was but a blunt knife, cutting, and cutting, stirring him none away from the gathering squall of exhaust from a receding truck. Its ruinous sulfurs, its leaden blackness, he inhaled deeply and something of fortitude arose in him. And towards the blandly geometrical cliff wall of the information technology, he turned, hopeful the undertow of unease would disappear after a few hours of coffee and stupid coughs.

But there, across the street was Frank, who evidently had been watching him for some time, his hands in the pockets of his jeans, his patchy stubble imputing his glare with an arousing aggression. Alex gritted his teeth through the rude rush of blood hardening him, deadening his sights and sounds to everything rational. He had to tell him about free Madelaines, fucking Dimov, Wall Street, the impromptu soccer match against a trio of sexy Haitians, the idea to buy some Kruggerands with the recent tumble in the gold market, the bitch at the drugstore who refused to sell him the good cough syrup, and other little non-insights he had gathered in the three weeks of his absence. Did you know that you could get high on nutmeg? Frank had to know, and he had to be by his side to absorb every smile and scowl of his.

Alex gulped, clenched his fists, and suddenly a figure, ovoid waist, hard-looking breasts underneath black stretch fabric—Janet—coalesced by Frank’s side. Glaring at him still, Frank was bluffly unconcerned with her leaning onto his shoulder as she lifted up her sandaled foot to note something possibly kinky.

There, the truth was plain. Frank could take care of himself and had taken care of himself, just as he would have to go home and take care of his hard dick and stuff nuisance feelings back into the tight little box of his heart. Good going, man. He hurled himself across the street and flipped off the glowering driver who had screeched to a stop. His feelings roused an angry lascivious surge. Tony—what happened to the lost art of enjoying a mutual sexy time of not giving a shit? He groaned, he did not have time to pick through bitchy bullshit, so Jacob had better be available. If not Jacob’s solid and senseless thrusts, an impromptu notice should do, but fucking would have to wait until he had taken care of his mom and the damned term paper.

Suddenly, the hedging row of pines dwarfed him threateningly with its overbearing haggard heights. And he faltered before the white sun and the senseless abundance of sky. It was all so useless. Would the sun go kill itself already? Where in the fucking world was the place of absolute rest?

“Yo, Alex!”

Wildly, he wished the voice to be Frank’s.

“Hey, Alex, I said to wait up.”

The sound of footsteps slapped up from behind him, and he turned to see Frank’s face red and fresh with sweat. His black hair was longer now, pasted limply to his cheeks. Alex turned with the dangerous idea to take hold of his head and feel the soul and smell of him in his hands. But Janet, where was she? Tremulously he scanned above Frank’s burning eyes, to the right, the left, above, for her curly mane.

Frank tapped his shoulder, and Alex grew wild with lust.

“You’re going home?”

Alex remembered to cough and sniffle. “Yeah, my cough’s killing me.”

“Good. Give me a ride home,” Frank ordered, walking on ahead.

“Oi, you didn’t ditch Janet?”

Frank recoiled with a parental look warning him. Alex shrank, would resettle himself to the apprehensive still without Janet, but Frank’s eyes were much too thrilling. He glanced away for more boring sight of the laptop bag strap cutting diagonally across the royal board of Frank’s chest, or the supple plump of his bicep underneath the tight sleeve. There was one good thing about Janet was her insistence on abs and biceps, Alex thought greedily, as his eyes drifted down the straight-leg jeans. It could be tighter, but straight guys were stubbornly dull about these things. However, the dimple in the fly was the perfect hook for the thirteen-month old memory of his uncut dick.

There was a rude gust of wind, pelting him with dust and seeds, and Alex damned the reality before him, the never-ending quest to be the Act of God.

Frank was smiling at him now, knowingly, with the encompassing look that understood him to the core.

“Shit all right with you?” Alex asked more to distract himself.

“Hell no, Mom’s has turned a simple graduation dinner into fucking wedding planning.”

It was worse than that apparently; she wanted Alex and Susan to attend. The thought of Susan sneering at her every sedulous manic inquiry was enough to make Alex wilt where it hurt.

“We’ll have to pass on this party. Mom’s too sick to enjoy champagne and caviar,” Alex said archly.

“I thought so—you got a job yet?”

“Yeah, of course I got a job.” Alex skipped boisterously to walk abreast of him. Their elbows touched, and he breathed hard through the electric feeling that too quickly evaporated.

“Got the software job. The internship people even called to offer me back the job I had turned down.”

“No shit!” Frank said.

“Yeah, yeah.”

“So New York then?” Frank tasted the heady bloom of the opportunity. “You should fucking thank me for making you apply for the internship. Shit, you were fucking bitching about mom, mom, mom. See she survived.”

“Survived after a three week stint at the hospital after the internship,” Alex corrected.

“Hell, she survived. Blow me already.”

The order stilled Alex for an instant, before he recovered with a mock bravado. “Take a number at the end of the line.”

Frank shrugged. “So you still aren’t going to do Wall Street? Your mom can follow you to New York, you know.”

Alex paused to shrug away the strident echoes of Susan upbraiding Liana’s mother over her immoral foreclosure due to the resetting of the mortgage rates.

“Yeah, there’s no way that will happen,” Alex concluded defeatedly.

But Frank was not listening, as his gaze was high and resolute over the open field of cars. There was an errant strand of hair trailing over his earlobe, and Alex burned with indecision, brush it away, or continue to stare at the sideburn mapping a square jawline? A fragrant burst of pine soughed, along with Frank’s attentions back him, and again for a moment there he felt as if Frank was telling him to be patient: these things would happen in due time.

Frank began, “where did you—”

“Look, I was an ass, ditching you there with Janet in Malibu.”

“No skin off my back. Thanks to your dick move, I and Janet got to talking, and things are … looking up. I told you Sam Hoyt was an idiot.”

Scurrying ahead into the maze of parked cars, Alex gulped down on a hard ball of resentment, muttered, “I parked over here.”

The drive was quiet save for regular interruptions of Alex coughing. He kept flipping through radio channels for the right wall of sound to blast away the rats nibbling at his nerves. Frank seemed unconcerned with way he was fully turned to window and giving him an open view of his crotch.

Classical, Alex decided resolutely as the radio host rhapsodized over Mendelssohn’s wedding march for Midsummer’s Night Dream. Classical music was not music in Alex’s view, but it could work at least for the final stretch of two miles. The announcer’s voice gave way to the blare of trumpets, which was tad too strenuous for speakers, and the jaunty sequence of strings, none too pleasing, and then the very dead feeling that came after finding something so ordinary after expecting a bout of genius.

Numbly morose, Alex switched off the radio. His foot was sluggish on the brakes as his sights cascaded away dizzyingly through the side view of a park and its islands of Yellow Jacarandas. Its lawn, neat, immaculately green, ran headlong into a mind-numbing nowhere of more squat trees. It was paralyzing, this approaching doom of the final left turn.

“Janet wants to go on a final trip to play Black Jack,” Frank said

“I thought she was done with our horsing around?”

“One last trip doesn’t hurt.” Frank’s knees were vibrating; it could be impatience or disappointment.

“I have school stuff to finish. I’m passing.”

“Yeah …”

And Alex pulled into the open parking lot of the apartment complex. His foot was heavy on the brake and his hands griped the wheel, and there was a condemnation and damnation in the air over their past hour. Having gathered up his bag, Frank opened the door, looked back to Alex, with a naked expectation of something, which seeded another coughing fit from Alex.

“I’ll see you later.” Frank’s disappointed tone was touching.

Alex, rubbing mindlessly at his chest, watched through his window, Frank say a boisterous hello to an elderly tenant, do a gymnastic-like kick against the rail fence, then pausing as if to evaluate his less-than-Olympic performance. Alex only had to turn off the ignition and go up to him and—he gritted his teeth—and exactly nothing.

Frank, however, was whirling back towards his car. Alex’s heart arose. Shakily, he looked around the car to see if Frank had forgotten something. The door opened, moving a wind of musk and terrible feeling, and Alex wished he had peeled away five minutes ago, after all Susan was still limp and listless in bed.

The blast of the door bang quaking through him, he smiled. “You forgot something?”

“What do you fucking think?”

A fatidic doom was all Alex could feel in Frank’s hard blank expression at the dashboard.

“Wow there, what’s this about?” Alex said laughingly.

“Don’t fuck with me. You know what this is about. ”

Alex prepared himself. “Fuck me, I don’t read minds. Speak up or get out.”

“Why do I feel like if we don’t fuck each other, you’re going to cut me loose?”

Was that it? Alex turned off the ignition, stared at the reflection of his misery in the side view mirror, said with a still voice, “We joke and all, but you know well I don’t go around flipping straight guys.” His mind was drowning; words, his own soul would spill away, but he clenched his teeth, smiled tightly to Frank. “You got nothing to worry about it.”

Frank scoffed. “This is me, you’re talking to, not some idiot you picked off Grindr.”

Fuck you. The tinkle of keys came abreast of his unsteadiness.

“I got to go. Mom hasn’t been able to get out of bed for the past three days.” Frank did not budge or oblige a twinge of sympathy. Alex thought something more understanding should do. “New York, Korea, hell even Arizona with Tom, you and Janet are getting ready to do your own thing. And I’ll go do my own thing. Things are changing. That’s what graduation does: it scatters people all over.”

“No shit?” There was little laugh from Frank, a rather fearful interlude that irked Alex supremely. He wanted to grab him by the hair and shove his dick into the gaping mouth just to shut him up.

Alex’s thoughts trundled about bitterly, then he muttered, “You don’t want to fuck me. I don’t want to fuck you, what else is new?”

“When did you get to be so lame?”

“You’re the one who’s giving me queeny bullshit about cutting you loose, and I’m the one who’s lame? Fuck this, I got to go now.”

Alex glared at the grinning Frank, but the man was no more stirred to open the door and leave. Instead his laughter howled louder, and Alex knew it: Frank was fucking with him.

“Queeny bullshit huh? Sure, I’d fuck you. But then you’d turned around and be such an unfeeling fuck about it, and go blow all of Frat Alley. Or you’d do your little stunts and put me in such a mind fuck. Oh, you’re good at that. Like when you said, you were going to Chicago but ended up in Irvine. Or like how you pretended I didn’t exist earlier at the crosswalk. God, it’s like I’m another of your idiots you fuck and dump.” Frank sounded less jovial and more resigned. “With you as my best friend, I thank God everyday I like pussy—”

“Get out.”

It took a moment for Frank to grasp the chilling portent in Alex’s tone. Frank’s cheeks turned pale, the corner of his lips tight, and in a mysterious way Alex was a little thrilled.

“I said, get the fuck out of my car,” Alex said, tight and hoarse.

“Fuck you.” Frank threw back weakly, opening the door. Even the door slam was weak, or his bandy huff around the ficus hedge.

Alex was shaking, and the light was in his eyes, there was iron in his mouth. He thought Frank was the same like the rest of them, those limp-dicked closet cases. A mind fuck Frank said? Frank could have just said he wanted to fuck him and spare him the speech.

Alex collected himself, stuck his key into the ignition, and came around to a pleasant surmise of the day. He had been controlled. He had surrendered not one molecule of himself to Frank. Mom would be pleased .... Alex sighed. And as he pulled away and merged into the tight lane of traffic, fear quivered in there with pride.