indiscretion. I saw the otherness of him, and it flipped me over from excitement to disgust—my own agitation soured, and I began bluffing my way through, cramming his cock blindly into my mouth. I was already thinking of going home and having a drink with Clare. Even as it happened, this was a story I would tell her. She and I would shake our heads together, and discuss the perplexing scarcity of love.
“Relax,” Erich whispered. I didn’t answer, because my mouth was full. When he repeated it, I pulled my head up and said, “I’m perfectly relaxed, thank you.” I would make him come quickly, come myself, and be back in my own skin, free on the street.
He slipped away, directing me to lie belly-down on the mattress. “You’re too tense,” he said. I skeptically obeyed, and he began massaging my back, tracing the curves of my shoulders and spine with his fingertips. “You’re very tight,” he said. “I can feel it all through here.”
Against my better judgment, I consigned myself to his hands. I disliked being told I was tense—it seemed he had recognized a flaw in my character. For the occasion of sex I always slipped over into an identity that was not quite my own. When making love I was like my own hypothetical older brother, a strong, slightly cynical man who lived adventurously, without the rabbity qualms that beset my other self. At my desk or on the subway I daydreamed of powerful, angry men who needed me to ease their pain. In bed with meek strangers I thought only of quick orgasm and escape.
Erich worked my back with ardent delicacy, his fingers expertly following the confluence of tendon and bone. When I remarked on his proficiency he said, “I took a course in this.” I would learn that he believed in acquiring accreditation. He was a diligent student of the world at large, and liked things broken down into sequences. He had also taken courses in conversational French, creative writing, and quiltmaking.
Under his ministrations, I relaxed almost against my will. Without having decided to, abruptly, I fell asleep. It was utterly unlike me. But I’d been keeping late hours, and working long days. The sensation resembled that of slipping under an anesthetic. One moment I was awake, looking at a framed photograph of two bland-faced strangers propped on the nightstand, and the next I was being roused from slumber by a kiss.
I startled, and nearly jumped off the bed. For a moment I lost track of everything. Where was I, and whose cologned jaw was this? “Shh,” he whispered. “It’s okay.”
“Oh God, did I fall asleep?” I asked. I was groggy and ashamed. Had I snored? Had I drooled?
“Just for a couple of minutes,” he said. He kissed my neck and gently but steadily positioned himself between my legs.
“I can’t believe this,” I said. “I’ve never, you know.”
“Just stay relaxed,” he said. “This is a dream you’re having.”
For some reason, I obeyed. Although my instinct was to return to myself, to quickly polish off the sex and get on about my business, I decided to relax. There was surprising, voluptuous pleasure in it. I let Erich manage things and our lovemaking passed as if in fact I was dreaming. He carried it through the way he pursued all his projects, with a scholar’s scrupulous attention. If our coupling lacked the abandon of true passion it had a schooled solidity that was the next best thing. Erich could pour a precise ounce of whiskey without measuring. He could make a double-wedding-ring quilt by hand. And he could tell how far to thrust, when to withdraw, when to throw in an unexpected move. I gave myself up to it. He enjoyed being in command, and I relinquished my own desire to impress.
We made love three times that night. After the first time we did not roll away. I didn’t make my escape. He held me, and I stroked his sparsely haired thigh. I could smell his sweat, which was sharp but not unpleasant. We embraced in silence for ten minutes or longer. Then he said, “Are you ready again?”
By the time I got dressed his apartment had lost some of its strangeness. It was not in any way an auspicious or even particularly comfortable home—a viewless room in a white brick building that must have been built, hurriedly, in the early sixties. It contained a platform bed covered with quilts, a stereo and television, and an absurdly large black sofa which, at sunrise, would begin its daily function of sucking up whatever light filtered in through the single window. On the wall was a silver-framed poster depicting a Matisse painting of a gaudy, lavishly draped room empty of life except for three dagger-shaped goldfish suspended in a bright blue bowl. Erich’s apartment could have been a doctor’s waiting room. It conveyed little about its inhabitant beyond a certain thin sorrow. Still, by the time I’d dressed, and had written down his phone number and left my own on a slip of paper, the apartment had taken on weight. It did not appear to be any less bleak than it had when we first arrived; it had merely begun to reveal itself as a place in which someone did, in fact, live. A red light blinked on the answering machine, signifying unheard messages. I blew Erich a kiss from the door, whispered, “See you later,” and walked three flights down to the street.
This was usually my favorite moment, after the sex was finished and I was restored to myself, still young and viable, free to go everywhere. Tonight, though, I felt irritated and weightless; I couldn’t quite pick up my sense of myself. Twenty-fourth Street lay quietly in its bath of dark yellow light. A lone hooker strolled in black stockings and a fur jacket, and an all-night produce stand offered displays of oranges, waxy apples, and carnations dyed green for St. Patrick’s Day. I was infused with a bodily pleasure that was intricately, brittlely edged in regret. Something had been lost, at least for the moment—some measure of possibility. I walked twenty blocks home, but couldn’t shake the feeling. It followed me like a thief.
I didn’t get home until after four. Clare was asleep. When I saw her the following evening, I didn’t offer to tell her much about Erich. Clare and I based our conversations about men on a shared attitude of ironic disdain, and I wasn’t sure how to present a man like Erich. I was not in love, but for once an evening’s sex had been something other than clownish comedy, desperation, or boredom.
Clare said, “You’re being very quiet about this, Jonathan. What exactly is up?”
“Nothing’s up.” We were sipping Pernod on the sofa. Pernod was our latest drink. We had a habit of brief but devout loyalties to different exotic liquors.
“You’re being circumspect,” she said, “and you’re not the type. Does this guy seem like he could turn out to be someone special? What exactly are you hiding?”
“‘This guy’ is another would-be actor slinging drinks in hell. He happens to be a great fuck.”
“Honey, don’t toss something like that off lightly,” she said. “I met my last great fuck in, what, 1979? Let’s have a few details, please. Come on, give. This is your Aunt Clare.”
She took a deep swallow of her drink, and I thought I saw under her friendly avidity the plain fear that I would leave her; that I’d disappear into love. It showed in her eyes and along her mouth, which could go stern and disapproving despite her lavish crimson lipstick.
“Honey, there are places even the best of friends can’t travel together,” I said.
“Oh, that’s not true,” she said. “You don’t mean that, you’re just embarrassed by the subject. Right?”
Clare and I kept no secrets—that was the heady, reckless aspect of our friendship. Perhaps it was our substitute for the creaturely knowledge other couples glean from sex. Clare and I confessed everything. We stripped ourselves naked and numbered our faults. We knew one another’s most disreputable fantasies; we confessed our deceits and greeds, our self-flattering lies. We described all our sexual entanglements, and we knew the condition of one another’s bowels.
And now, for the first time, I wanted to hold something apart. I wasn’t sure why. It may have been that very uncertainty I hoped to preserve. Erich had surprised me with his gentle competence. Something about him touched me—his edgy good cheer and slender prospects. Something about him made me angry. I didn’t know what I felt and I disliked being asked to give my feelings a name. I may have feared that in describing them so early I’d sap them of their potential for growth or change. I may have been right.
But I chose that night not to cultivate secrets. I, too, feared solitude and abandonment, and I knew I would never make a life with Erich. He would, at best, have been a first step toward something uncertain that lay beyond the circle of domestic warmth I shared with Clare. She was my main love in the world. I had no other attachment half so profound.
So I told her everything. There wasn’t, as it turned out, very much to tell. When I had finished, Clare said, “Honey, you’ve just found yourself a Doctor Feelgood.” She sang a couple of lines from Aretha’s song. “‘Don’t call me no doctor, filling me up with all of them pills, I got me a man named Dr. Feelgood, makes me feel real gooo- oood.’”
That seemed a sufficient accounting, at least for the time being. Erich would be Doctor Feelgood. From that night on, the longer I called him by that name, the more perfectly it came to fit. Clare and I continued our sisterly relations with our loyalties undiluted. I had found myself a nice little thing on the side. Clare counseled me to ride it
