Blind hearts - 4. Behave!

The one annoying thing about being the non-drinker was being the default designated driver. There was Charles dragging Dimov off from the dinner table and towing him into his bedroom, and proclaiming, “Up, up, we’re going drinking.” Before he could scurry back to scrutinizing resumes on his laptop, Charles was flying through his drawers for the good shirt, the tight slacks, sending a zap of alarm through Dimov about the clothes askew on the floor. But Charles would not be refused.

On the way to the venue, Charles drove distractedly, engaging with dramatic turns and sudden stops, continually tapping buttons on the radio board. He slowed down before a neon façade of a bar. “And here. Pedro and his friends should be here.”

“The Argentinians from Vegas?”

“Yes! Can you believe our luck? The Universe works in mysterious ways.”

Apparently whatever happens in Vegas, doesn’t stay in Vegas. Dimov slid lower and lower in his seat, unable to shield himself against a drizzle of doom.

The Friday night crowd spilled out in the front patio. Dimov’s nerves grew tight as He stepped into the ordure of cologne, howls for the non-shitty beer, the eyes dilated and glassy. Instinctively his stares whirled over the fuzzy outlines of heads for the security of Charles’ skin-cut head, but the man had disappeared into the haze of bodies. Suddenly around him, the bar deepened into a lair of bestial loneliness. He wiped his forehead soothingly, and containing a jitter in his pulse, counted breaths to calm. He could do this, he assured himself, he could play the game like he had done so atavistically when he used to live in New York.

Something crawled in the small of his back, and the woody tones of a hated cologne tickled from his left. He, smiling, leaned into it and said, “Where are these friends?”

Charles inflated rather plump with ease and grabbed his arm like a little child leading a parent.

“Pedro’s been wondering about you.”

“I haven’t.” Dimov did not doubt the wondering was of a concupiscent nature.

“Behave, would you?”

For the next half hour, Dimov thought he was well-behaved before the holy three from Argentina: Pedro, Joaquin, Miguel—glossy, ruddy-faced, twenty-five old cherubim fallen out of heaven, for reasons Dimov divined sourly, of enjoying themselves too much with the lyre and harp.

Dimov was sipping through his first seltzer, Charles had ordered his fourth vodka gimlet. Seated in between Joaquin and Miguel, Charles looked like a silvery bald mannequin under the filtered lights above their booth. Inebriation had expanded redly over his cheeks, and then he planted his pleasant peach face into Joaquin’s blunt nose.

“Can you believe it?” Charles hiccupped. “I need glasses. How the hell does that happen?”

Now that, Dimov knew nothing about, but Charles had a way of blabbering about everything else but his most worrisome concern.

Charles pushed into Joaquin, quite mournfully. “Look at my eyes, you think they are bad?”

Joaquin pecked him abruptly on the chin. “Non, Cariño. Perfecto.” Not to be outdone, Miguel commandeered Charles’ face and planted his long one on the mouth. And there commenced the kissing tag between the three of them, to which in response, Dimov scurried away his gaze only to run headlong into the rheumy stare of Pedro beside him. He could appreciate the clean, angular look of Pedro’s face but not now. And he abandoned himself to blinking blandly over the bubbles nucleating over the length of the black straw in his tumbler.

Avoiding Pedro, Dimov planted his critical attentions to the booth across from their table. Over there a woman, with earrings long and white over her satined shoulders, was wailing about the Universe and its injustices to someone as smart and pretty as she. “I’m a really good person. Believe me, really believe me, I’m not a slut. Honest…” she slobbered over her female confidante musing over the bleeding rim of her martini glass.

Then something warm and heavy crowded over his shoulder, he turned back to see disappointingly Pedro’s face squashed with a rakish smile. A rise of indignation cracked through his skull, quite possibly ruining his face because Pedro bent away, squealing in boyish laughter and rapid-firing in lilting Spanish to Joaquin across from him. Apparently something about himself must have been fascinating. Dimov did not care to be buoyed to raillery as something was still cooking under his skull. Pedro, shining, sweaty, laughing, bent over Dimov again, and tried to pour some of his gin into his seltzer. Behave, Dimov groaned silently, behave, as he swiped his glass away before the splash hit, and then good-naturedly letting Pedro to feel the length of his fingers, the wave of hairs over his forearm.

“Which UC are you three attending again?” Dimov asked, mostly to take his mind of the circling softness on his hand.

“UCLA. Business course only for one year,” Pedro said.

Charles pushed forward from the Joaquin’s hand smoothing over his skin cut. “Dimi, the college boy, we met in Vegas, he was going to UCLA too?”

Dimov tasted the salt on his tongue. “Irvine.” But Charles was not paying attention, instead poring over Miguel’s lips.

Dimov turned warily to Pedro commanding his arm now. “So what do you think about America so far?”

Pedro lifted pinched eyes to him, and Dimov felt intimately the stupidity of his question.

“Your first time, male or female?” Pedro asked teasingly.

Dimov shifted, fumed on the temerity of it, sought a parity of concern from Charles, but the man was still lovingly festooned with play kisses, and that pain cooking under his skull now was barreling down his spine, then he rethought his umbrage. Maybe the question wasn’t inappropriate. It was just something to melt the evening, yes the evening still raucous with the lady’s rising clinks of “I’m a good person, why won’t he love me?” To which gods should he pray to for a quick denouement?

Dimov ejected, “Female. Senior year of high school. We’re supposed to be a studying a calculus midterm.” The image of Sylvia’s bouffant hair, her viciously red lips rather sharpened the edge in his tone.

Pedro retreated to his drink with an air of deep, unrecoverable hurt. A few of moments of silent surliness turned Dimov over, then he moved into Pedro, knees brushed against each other. “But I can’t get enough—” Dimov slipped his hand into the darkness underneath the table. Pedro drank again, this time with a burst of energy so grand that liquid splashed over his clean jaw. And when the wet cheek was against his, the lips tingly and corroded with gin were against his, he sighed into the inevitable and warned himself to behave.

***

Unfortunately Dimov did not stay well-behaved. After he had driven them all back from West Hollywood to Pedro’s place in Westwood, he abandoned Charles to the fate of three horny men and went home to play online poker through the rest of the night. On Sunday morning, as he waded groggily in his sleep shorts to the kitchen, his mind turned tiredly on whether he had been a dick to Pedro. The boy was a good kisser. Then his thoughts dissolved away as soon as he started the complicated sequences of buttons on the coffeemaker. He could see outside the window the rectangular tops of the apartment buildings and the dusty red rung of balconies.

The coffeemaker made its final belches, and a nutty, roasting scent pricked Dimov with a sense of purpose for the day. Placing a cup under its nozzle, he noted with insouciance that Charles’s departure to Philadelphia would lead to a healthier coffee budget in the coming months. Strange how the man cursed his darling coffeemaker a steel carcass that shat mud. These moments of the dramatic and the kitshy, Dimov rolled his eyes at the cartoon drawing of cat’s face on his mug, had a way of blunting a man’s ego. He could still remember the laughter shambling out in the living room, a sort of conspiratorial “hear, hear” against him, those people who had drank his wine, ate his turkey, leaked grease over the kitchen linoleum.

And Charles, hip against the oven door, in those stupidly short short whose contours gave him an exact measurement, and the chest bare and hairy under a waistcoat, still bled more insults against his coffeemaker. Yes, Charles was drunk. It could be excused, but he should still have called him a common-kissing bitch. He refrained, nursed the copper flooding his mouth, and gingerly offered tea.

And now with the kitchen trembling in the light, and the lawnmower gnawing so hungrily outside, Dimov could see with the clarity afforded by three years of brooding that Charles wouldn’t have been the least put off if he had called him a bitch. Part of being common was the privilege of asserting non-offence at banal inhumanity.

Two months before that ghastly thanksgiving, Charles had called him from New York, ostensibly to mother away his idiot child ways, but Dimov got a barrage of lisped-tinged ire on the phone, “Dick move, switching jobs and moving to LA without telling me.”

Fighting a heartburn rilling his gullet, Dimov smiled affirmatively at the couple who absolutely loved the idea of a forest of grey lamp posts. Charles, optimistic cat Charles, accepted his vague noises as apology. But he was not prepared when Charles demanded, “When are you inviting me over?”

Dimov took a few moments to wave the couple goodbye and then suffered a few hard moments of cringing. “I don’t know if—”

“You didn’t believe it when I said I loved you, did you?”

Dimov sighed. Charles again being common. He loved you, your brother, your uncle, the cut of the coat, your Chihuahua, your hat, you red tie, your mom, your sister, your mud-pie refried beans. He loved you, and he would embrace the strung out dopehead as deeply as his night lay. Dimov felt again like the idiot child who burnt his suit.

“You’re fucking sore at me,” Charles attacked.

“Please—”

“Give me a date. Pay the plane ticket because I’m a little short on money. Set the time, and let’s fuck.”

Dimov’s hand holding up the cell phone fell limp against his chest. Twilight was shading around the outlines of the flat rooftops, and the happy sounds singing among the lamp posts rose thrillingly in a praise for art, for bulbous lampheads like glowing frogs, for the cool but steadfast preserve of love. What a racket.

Two months later Charles invaded his space with his cabal from New York for the ghastly thanksgiving. Sex was gladly and shrewdly off the table. His face plumply pink, Charles sported a moustache, he boasted it the result of a bet. Dimov grunted along with the rousing agreement that it was great seeing old friends ago. And then thanksgiving dinner, the insults to his coffeemaker and the drunken slurring insistence that he was lonely in Los Angeles.

There’s the thing, this loneliness being seen as crime, a moral failing, and you must do something about it. Get stoned, get drunk, get fucked, if all that failed, you must do yourself and everyone else a favor and jump off a building preferably out of sight from those who could possibly know you. Dimov wanted to bellow proudly the majesty of the Siberian tundra in his soul and defend his right to be the sad little human being. It was his claim, his entitlement after all Charles had refused to do something about it not one year earlier.

But he did not say that to Charles smoothing his temples and uttering more indulgent worries about his lonely Los Angeles condo. How could he? The common Charles had him wrapped in the tightest strings of disorder, a sweet, cuttingly sour disorder.

And now, the lawnmower was sputtering bullets, disturbing Dimov from his reverie. He helped himself to coffee and more sentiments of helplessness before the crick and crunk at the door alerted him to shape up and look passably stoic. There rushed in the whiff of stale cologne and something plastic and rubbery. Charles, in Friday’s green sequined shirt and black slacks, lumbered to the kitchen.

“Oh great, coffee.” Charles took Dimov’s cup for his own.

Dimov wanted to say something, but he made ready the three spoons of sugars that Charles would need.

“How was your night?” Charles asked.

“Not as interesting as yours.”

“I know that. At least tell me a story. An explosion? You tackled a robber and it ended in a wrestling march that had a great happy ending…”

Dimov eyed him strangely, slid into nodding as if he understood what pebbles were inside Charles’ head, then waited for the coffee maker to belch its way to magic.

“Went to the art walk downtown with Kenny and Patrick,” Dimov groaned.

Looking sufficiently chastised, Charles sipped on his coffee.

Dimov thought the coffee took too long and looked over his left wrist for the time, but his wrist was bare. He droned, “What time is it, anyway?”

“I dunno.”

They looked around the many digital clock dials in the kitchen: on the microwave, the coffeemaker, even the damn dishwasher.

“Nine thirty,” Charles said. “Glenda still asleep?”

“Yes she is—” Dimov scurried out of the kitchen and pounded on Glenda’s door. After a few moments, a disheveled Glenda in satin pajamas opened. Angry, sleepy, and not amused she was, until he said, “You have an audition at half past ten, don’t you?”

“Shit. Fuck me.” Glenda banged her head against the edge of the door. “Fuck me. I’m late for it, fuck me.”

“You say that one more time, I’m giving Dimi the go ahead to do just that,” Charles called out from the kitchen.

“Fuck you. Fuck me, I’m late. The universe has turned on me today.”

Dimov dramatically twirled her away from the door and manhandled her to the bathroom. “The Universe, I assure you, does not think about you, me or anybody.” He installed her in front for of the bathroom sink, shook her gently. “You still have time.” He left her alone and shut the door.

He went back to the kitchen and looked over his darling expresso machine on juddering on the cusp of delivering brown gold.

“Pedro said he wanted to see the desert bloom at Joshua Tree,” Charles said.

Dimov shrugged, retrieved a small cup from the dishwasher, thinking not kindly about Charles getting hard to every syllable of Italianate Spanish from his Argentinian friends.

“I think we should all make it a trip, You, me, Glenda and Pedro and his friends. In two weeks say…”

“I’m busy that weekend.”

“Doing what?”

“Busy. I was planning go fishing at the Hustler Casino. Then go with Winifred to the Hollywood Cemetery that night. They are showing All about Eve.”

“You go fishing almost every weekend. And you can watch the movie anytime you want. And I’m leaving L.A in five weeks anyway.”

“Winifred doesn’t like getting stiffed.”

“Bring her along camping.”

“I’ll have to think about it.”

Eyes glaring straight and wild at Dimov, Charles slurped on the coffee. And then coffee. But Glenda came to kitchen, looking oddly presentable in a corset blouse and tight jeans. Charles took the cup of coffee from Dimov and handed it to her.

“Drink that and wake up already.”

“The Universe is telling me something ominous. It does not bode well for me today.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Charles smoothed her curls over her temples. “No excuses, my dear.” He slapped her butt, ripping her a shiver. “Now go and win that audition.”

“Yessir.” And she was out the door with Dimov’s coffee.

Dimov turned on the coffee machine and began opening compartments and secret chambers to remove the coffee grounds.

“You have a problem with Pedro and his friends?” Charles asked.

“Dear, no. They’re great company.”

“But you ditched Pedro. He was feeling bad at it too.”

Dimov grunted at Charles being so commonly concerned, but Charles persisted. “And you were tight all night long in the bar too.”

“You were sozzled. How would you know what I was feeling all night?” Dimov blurted, immediately regretted his loss of control but the rumble in back of his throat was pressing. “You dragged me there, and you know I don’t like drinking.”

“Except with College Boy.”

“What College Boy?”

“The red-haired we met in Vegas when we were all supposed to spend time together.”

“Alex?”

Charles scratched his scruffy jaw impatiently, glaring at him. Chastened, Dimov fell back into the counter and tried to recreate mentally the precise red of Alex’s eyelashes.

“What about Alex?” Dimov said, “I told you, he gave me a blowjob, I jerked him off, and I thought he was cocky. I don't even have his number. Now what exactly is the problem?”

“With College boy? Nothing. You say he’s cocky. I say you’re a hard ass. But that’s nothing new. I don’t care. But I do care that you seem to have a problem with my friends, you won’t come out and say it.”

“You’re reading tea leaves and coming up stupid.”

Charles calmly finished the contents of his cup, walked by Dimov to wash the cup then hang it on the dish rack. His large hands dripping wet, he glowered back to the dull Dimov.

“And what now?” Dimov growled.

“You’re giving me the poker face.” A smile appeared on his thin lips then he slid to Dimov’s front, eye to eye, mouth to mouth. Dimov’s heart dithered a start. “I’m going to bed. Wake me when you’re less pissy.”

The lazy, slapping footfalls of Charles out of sight, Dimov clenched a fist over the warm metal top of the coffeemaker. The plan to go fishing at the casino he deemed ill-advised because he was too ‘pissy’ to think straight. ‘Pissy,’ that could be the word for it, but he preferred ‘terrified.’

Coffee, right coffee. He took the same mug that Charles had washed and poured himself another cup. Bitter, biting, scalding was the sip, and the vortex of the past seven years he had known Charles. He scoffed at the sadness, the loneliness, and the wrath, the heart-rendering wrath that had been his inner coat of skin. It was pathetic, and there was something he could do about 'pathetic.'