These Violent Delights Read online

  “I still remember the five positions,” she said. “After all these years.”

  But I wasn’t listening. I was watching Dame Margot do her thing, balanced on one leg like an impossibly graceful flamingo as the men came up and handed her flowers. When she turned en pointe I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. She looked like the ballet dancer in my sister’s musical box. I had no idea a human being could move that way; she was quite simply the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in all my short life.

  “I want to dance with her,” I said.

  My dad scraped himself up out of the recliner and scruffed my hair as he passed. “Good luck with that,” he said. “Everyone will call you a fag your whole life. Besides, I’m pretty sure she’s dead.”

  “Do you remember the first time you wanted to dance?” I ask Liane, as we’re waiting on the sidelines for the various Montagues and Capulets to quit fucking around and remember where their asses are supposed to be at any given time in the piece.

  “Nope,” she says, her freshly chapsticked lips popping on the p. She grimaces as she unwinds the wrapping from her toes.

  “Seriously? You don’t remember at all?”

  She shakes her head and winces. “Uh uh. I think I was born wanting to dance. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t.” Another wince as she peels away the wrapping. I hear something rip and cringe in sympathy. “What I do remember is the first time I realized it wasn’t all poofy skirts and feeling like a princess. Ow, fuck. Do you think my toenail is supposed to be that color?”

  “No.” It’s black, edged with puce and magenta. “It looks like it’s about to fall off.”

  “Not yet. It’s hanging on at the quick. For now.”

  Something oozes. I turn my head away.

  I take out the paper on Edward II. “If Marlowe’s Edward II is written as a classic tragedy, how far can the character of Gaveston be said to be Edward’s tragic flaw? Discuss with reference to the tradition of the tragic flaw in Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy.”

  Jesus, fuck. Does this mean I’m going to have to cross reference a bunch of other tragedies? Macbeth, I guess. Othello. Hamlet. And the bigger tragedy when my parents cut me off because I got kicked out of college for not knowing enough useless shit about a bunch of English guys who have been dead for like five hundred years.

  “You watched them?” says Liane, out of nowhere, and I look up.

  “Huh?”

  “The movies,” she says. “You were humming – When Doves Cry. Did you watch the Baz Lurhmann version lately?”

  “No,” I say. “Just an earworm. Anyway, I thought we weren’t supposed to watch them?” Mme. Levonian says we shouldn’t watch the various movie versions of Romeo and Juliet; they might prevent us from putting our own original spin on the characters.

  “Yeah, well, she’s a hypocrite,” says Liane, strapping on her pointe shoes. “She made me watch the tomb scene from the last time the Royal Ballet did it, trying to make the point that I wasn’t looking nearly dead enough in rehearsals.”

  “You looked pretty damn dead to me,” I say. It’s the part where Romeo comes across Juliet in the tomb and thinks she’s really dead, and not just temporarily playing possum thanks to Friar Laurence’s magic roofies. He scoops her up and dances with her in a parody of the balcony pas de deux, only he’s basically dancing with a piece of meat. “Actually I was kind of disturbed by it.”

  “You and me both,” she says. She looks much better now that the toes are tidily tucked away; ballet dancers are only beautiful from the ankles upwards. “She told me to imagine someone had severed my spinal cord at the neck and I was like, thanks. Way to tap into my worst nightmare.” She leans over to look at the paper, and I catch a whiff of her sweat. Girl sweat. The top of her arm bumps mine. “What are you reading?”

  “Ugh. Fucking English homework. Professor Moore.”

  She laughs. “Oh. Saint Thomas?”

  “What?”

  “Saint Thomas More. Get it?”

  “No.”

  Liane sighs. “He has the exact same name – except for one o - as that Tudor chancellor or whatever he was. He was a Catholic martyr. They made him a saint.”

  “And that’s the joke? Saint Thomas More?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s not even funny.”

  “No,” she says. “You just have no sense of humor. Anyway, how bad can he be? I always thought he was kind of cute. That accent.”

  “Yeah, well don’t be fooled by the Benedict Cumberbatch routine,” I say. “He’s riding my ass hard enough lately.” Her eyebrows go up and I scowl. “Yeah, not like that, Liane.”

  “You should hit it. Maybe raise your grades a little.”

  “Fuck you. I’m not gay.”

  She giggles. “Everyone is a little bit gay.”

  “Are you?”

  “Sure,” she says. “I’ve fooled around.”

  I stare at her. “Well, this conversation just got a whole lot more interesting.”

  “Shut up.”

  I lean in, bumping her shoulder. “You just made my boyparts tingle.”

  “Fuck off. I don’t have time for your tingly boyparts.”

  “You might. They’re very pretty.”

  She laughs. “Yeah, I’m sure they are, but right now I’m too busy learning to dance like a corpse.” She nods across the room, to where the three harlots – they’re actually billed as that – are rehearsing. “Go hit up a harlot or something.”

  “I’ve tried. One’s gay, the other’s engaged and the third one said if mine was the last dick on earth she’d be in a long term relationship with her Rampant Rabbit, whatever that is. I don’t get it. Girls used to have all the time in the world for me.”

  “Yeah, that was then. Before we elected a serial molester as president. I’m afraid all the marching and attempting to retain control of our own reproductive systems is going to cut into our dating time.” She sighs. “So, you know. If you want to get laid you may have to learn to smoke a pole or two.”

  Smoke a pole. This is coming from our Juliet. She’s such a delicate flower.

  “And how am I supposed to do that?”

  “The trick is to wrap your lips over your teeth. And you don’t so much suck as bob your head up and dow–”

  “–yeah, okay. I get it. I’m playing your protective cousin, by the way. You’re not supposed to even know how to suck a dick, let alone give me tips.”

  We both start laughing, picturing the explosion if Juliet offered cocksucking advice to Tybalt. The whole city of Verona would be reduced to a smoking crater in the earth.

  “See?” I say. “I do have a sense of humor. It’s just that your Saint Thomas joke wasn’t funny.”

  She wipes the corner of her eye and sobers. “Well, yeah. That’s not the only reason they call him Saint Thomas, and that part isn’t so funny.”

  “What part?”

  “Jesus, Milos. Do you live under a rock? His boyfriend had cancer.”

  “Shit. That’s awful.”

  “You seriously didn’t know?”

  “No.”

  Liane shakes her head. “How? They had a whole bunch of fundraisers. There was like a fun run. People shaving their heads and stuff. How did you not know?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I was busy with my own shit.”

  She sucks in a long breath through her teeth. “Fu-uck. You are self-absorbed even by theatrical standards. That’s…that’s almost impressive. I don’t even know.”

  “What?” I say. “How is that self-absorbed? It was none of my business, Liane. If people kept their noses out of one another’s business then the world would be a much nicer place, in my opinion.” She looks at me like I just ripped the worst fart in Christendom, but I’m not taking it lying down. Just because she’s a goddamn bleeding heart doesn’t mean I have to be. “My shit is not his business. His shit is not my business. And quit looking at me like that, because what you think of me right now? Yeah, that’s also
none of my business.”

  Liane gives a snorty little laugh. “Okay.”

  “Is that a thing? What I just said? About what people think about me is none of my business?” I’ve heard it somewhere but I can’t make the connection, and it’s only compounding her amusement. Plus Romeo’s getting restless over there. “That sounds like a thing someone said one time.”

  “Eleanor Roosevelt, I think,” she says, getting up from her chair. “Google it. I gotta go play dead.”

  3

  Tom

  I have the worst temper.

  Simon was shocked the first time he saw it; it didn’t gel with the Twinings Tea twee picture of Englishness he’d built up in his head. I don’t even remember what our first fight was about, but I remember making up all too clearly. The headboard left a dent in the wall that I had to refill when I moved out of that apartment, because I was worried I’d lose my deposit. Even at the best of times he managed to complicate things.

  And now we’re here, in the worst of times – again. It doesn’t seem fair, after everything we’ve been through. There were times over the last eighteen months where I would have gone full-on Faustus – offered up my soul to any passing devil – just to see him sitting upright the way he is now. He’s claimed our favorite window seat in the coffee shop and sits warming his hands on the sides of his mug, the weak spring sun catching the chestnut lights in his dark hair.

  His hair has grown back wavy, which is strange, because it was always straight before he lost it. He looks good. Reconditioned. Restored, like a painting that will never look exactly like it did before but looks better for the work. If you weren’t looking carefully at the before and after you’d never know.

  He hasn’t seen me. I could leave right now and save myself the pain, but some masochistic instinct keeps me standing there, and by then it’s too late; he’s turned his head and caught my eye. I know very well I’m being manipulated. He always does this – goads me into blowing up and then exploits my guilt about it.

  But I cross the room and sit down anyway, because I’m a pushover and a fool. “Hello, Simon.”

  His smile is so sweet and candid that I almost give him what he came for there and then. “I’m so glad you made it,” he says. “I thought for a moment there that you were going to stand me up.”

  “I can still leave.”

  “No,” he says. “Please. Don’t.”

  The scent of his tea wafts across the table towards me. Ginger. I know the smell better than I should; we both do. All that peppermint and ginger, all those natural anti-emetics and stomach settlers that we scrambled for in desperation. One corner of the work surface in the kitchen was permanently heaped with gnarled, pale brown lumps of ginger root.

  I wonder he can even stand the smell, with all the memories that come with it. As for me I’m reminded of those long, dry-heaving nights, and the battles we’d have when I ended up in tears trying to beg him to let me take him back to the hospital. Couldn’t he see he needed IV fluids? He was bringing up bile and his eyes were starting to sink back in his head from dehydration, the ridges of his brow all the more prominent for their hairless shine. But no, he said. I can’t. I won’t. I can’t look at the inside of another hospital or I really will die. Make me some ginger tea; then we’ll talk.

  “What is it that you want?” I say, more gently than I’d rehearsed. It’s hard to be angry with someone when you’ve seen them so helpless.

  He takes a breath. “I feel bad,” he says. “About the way it ended between us.”

  “Well, that makes two of us.” He looks so well, and that makes it harder somehow, because he should be mine. Surely we should have earned our Happily Ever After; I proved myself and my love a million times over, only for some waterheaded notion to snatch it away from under my nose.

  “I’ve been talking to Pastor Phillip–”

  “–fuck Pastor Phillip.” So much for my resolution to be kind. I can’t help it. I hate that man like the poison he is.

  “You’re not making this easy, Tom.”

  “Is there a reason I should?”

  Simon sighs. “Look, I’m trying to make recompense for my sins.”

  I’m a sin. We were a sin. I remember how he started to draw away as the treatment wound down, and for a while I was worried that his illness had pulled whatever tenderness we once had between us too taut, like an elastic band that eventually snaps and hurts you. But then he started going to church and coming back to bed, where we fucked like the grateful second-chancers we were. Or at least I thought so.

  Looking back I realize that the piquant new spice in the bedroom was nothing more than guilt, brought on by his fresh perception of sin.

  “Your sins,” I say. Because of course this has to be about him.

  He takes a sip of tea. “Look, I know it’s difficult for you to understand,” he says, like a parent trying to explain divorce to a particularly thick child. “But my life has changed dramatically these past eighteen months. It’s not easy for me, either, Tom. The cancer – it changed everything I thought I ever knew about myself, and then some. It’s like…I don’t know. I feel like an Etch-A-Sketch or something. Remember those? It’s like God picked me up and shook me blank all over again. Showed me the possibilities of what I could be.”

  “What? Straight?”

  Ironic that his straight hair grew back wavy, while his orientation allegedly went the other way. God, but those curls are pretty on him. If it weren’t for his eyes he’d look Byronic, like that dark-eyed tattooed toerag Milos, but Simon’s eyes are a clear, candid blue, made all the more striking by his thick, black eyelashes. Come to think of it, they also might have grown back with an extra curl to them.

  “I still love you,” says Simon, out of nowhere, and I melt.

  Possibilities pour into my mind. Happily Ever After – the long awaited sequel. I want to take him home, back to the bed we had to buy after we broke my elderly box spring in the first flush of lust. I want this new, restored, reconditioned version. I need to know if his mouth still tastes the same, if his dick has the same heft in my hand as before. If he still makes the same slow, shuddering gasp when I first fold back his thighs and enter him. If he still loves me, then anything is possible.

  “Darling…” I say, and reach out to take his hand.

  But he draws it back, and it’s like a bucket of ice water being emptied over my poor, stupid, hopelessly optimistic head.

  “No,” he says. “Not like that. I have to love you as a friend now. That’s why I need your forgiveness.”

  He needs it. I’ve given him everything and still he wants more. “Why? Because one day you came home from church smelling of that chlorinated baptismal pool and announced you’d been saved?”

  “I was saved. I told you–”

  “–yes. Holy Etch-A-Sketch. Thanks for the metaphor.” Out of the corner of my eye I can see a waitress hovering, wondering if it’s safe to come over and interrupt this conversation. Well, wonder no more, waitress. And stand well back. “So your God is all about love unless it’s gay love? Is that it?”

  Simon flushes. “I know it’s difficult,” he says. “And I was as resistant as anyone at first, but you have to accept the Lord’s truth. It hurt me as much as it hurt you…”

  Oh, I doubt that.

  “…but eventually I had to accept that the way that we loved one another was…” He trails off.

  “Was what? Say it, you mealy-mouthed sack of shit. You owe me that much.”

  His eyes fill as they meet mine. “It was wrong,” he says. “It was wrong, Tom.”

  I want to hurt him so thoroughly that he hates me forever. Burned bridges are childish, but they feel like they’d make everything less painful right now.

  “We went to Pride,” I said, leaning over the table. “We bought champagne when the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage. We were talking about taking the plunge ourselves – remember? Before everything else happened. All of that. And you’re just going to erase
who you are and pretend you’re someone else because that huckster Phil told you that Jesus wants you for a sunbeam?”

  He swallows and blinks back the tears, but its too late. The way they gather on his lashes reminds me of how naked his eyes looked when he had no lashes to bat. “I was really hoping you’d be reasonable,” he says.

  “No. No, you weren’t. You were hoping I’d be furious, so that you could say that at least you tried to make things right and that it wasn’t your fault things went so horribly sour.”

  Simon opens his mouth, but I’m done. I don’t want to hear any more. “No, don’t even try,” I say. “Because I know you, Simon, and I don’t just mean carnally. I’ve mopped up your vomit and literally wiped your arse, and I saw the nothing in your eyes when you were staring death in the face. And I get that you were frightened, I do. I can’t even imagine what you saw or didn’t see in those moments. But I will not be turned into some devil who tempted you off the straight and narrow, and especially not by a bleach-reeking, gay-hating shitbag like Pastor fucking Phil. Stop drinking his Kool-Aid for five minutes and at least find the guts to admit that what we had was real.”

  “I’m not trying to demonize you,” says Simon, whining now. “But I need this, Tom. I need closure.”

  “Yeah, well – that’s your fucking problem, dear. Not mine.” I never ever begrudged him needing me when he was ill, but now I see it. That need never dimmed for a second. Deep down he always needed me, because deep down he really is that selfish. I get up from the table.

  “I’m getting married,” he says, and it’s a last ditch attempt to make me see, to confer my blessing on the new life he left me for, all so he can skip off into the heterosexual sunset with a clear conscience. It’s so stupid that I have to laugh.

  “To a woman?” I say. “You’re getting married to a woman?”

  “Yes. You’d like her, she’s…”

  I hold up a hand. I can’t breathe. It’s too ridiculous to even contemplate. The same man who put a dent in my wall and broke my box spring, the hungry power bottom who almost put me in hospital with a slipped disc when I was trying to keep pace with him. In all those years he only ever fucked me once, and it wasn’t a success. I used to joke that I’d never met anyone who loved dick as much as he did.