dough. His pink nipples rode innocently on the pale curve of his chest. The only change was a small red dragon, with a snake’s body and a mistrustful look, he’d had tattooed on his shoulder.
He grinned at me, slightly embarrassed but unafraid. I thought of Carlton, boy-naked in the cemetery under a hard blue sky.
“I’m going to turn the cold on full blast,” he said. “And I bet it’ll still feel tepid.”
“Yeah. It will,” I said.
He walked naked down the hall to the bathroom. I followed him. I could have stayed in the bedroom and put my clothes on, but I didn’t. I sat on the toilet lid and talked to him while he showered.
When he was finished we went into the living room together. Our nudity had clicked over by then, lost its raw foolishness. Our skins had become a kind of clothing. He said, “The trouble with this place is, there’s no cross ventilation. Do you think it’d be any cooler on the roof?”
I said yes, maybe it would be. He told me to wait, and ran to the bathroom. He came back with two towels.
“Here,” he said, tossing me one. “For decency’s sake, in case we run into somebody.”
“You mean go up there with nothing but a towel on?”
“People have done worse things in lesser emergencies. Come on.”
He got a tray of ice cubes from the refrigerator. We wrapped the towels around our waists, and went barefoot into the hallway. It was mostly quiet. Electric fans whirred behind closed doors, and salsa music drifted up the stairwell. “Shh,” he said. He tiptoed in an exaggerated way up the stairs to the roof, holding the dripping blue plastic ice tray. I stuck close behind.
The roof was black and empty, a tarred plateau surrounded by the electric riot of the city. A hot wind blew, carrying the smell of garbage so far gone it was turning sweet. “Better than nothing,” Jonathan said. “At least the air’s moving.”
There was a dreamlike feel, standing all but naked in the middle of everything like that. There was excitement and a tingling, pleasant fear.
“It’s nice up here,” I said. “It’s sort of beautiful.”
“Sort of,” he said. He took his towel off, and spread it on the tar paper. His skin was ice-gray in the dark.
“People can see you,” I said. Two blocks away, a high-rise blazed like a city in itself.
“Not if we lie down,” he said. “It’s pretty dark up here. And, besides, who cares if they do see us?”
He lay on his towel as if he was at the beach. I took mine off and spread it near his. Moving air from Third Street, full of car horns and Spanish music, touched my exposed parts.
“Here.” He cracked the plastic tray. He handed me an ice cube, and kept one for himself. “Just rub yourself with it,” he said. “It isn’t much, but it’s all we’ve got.”
We lay side by side on our towels, running the ice over our sweating skins. After a while he reached over and pressed his own ice cube against the mound of my belly. “As long as Mom’s out,” he said, “let old Uncle Jonny take care of you.”
“Okay,” I said, and did the same to him. We didn’t talk any more about what we were doing. We talked instead about work and music and Clare. While we talked we ran ice over one another’s bellies and chests and faces. There was sex between us but we didn’t have sex—we committed no outright acts. It was a sweeter, more brotherly kind of lovemaking. It was devotion to each other’s comfort, and deep familiarity with our own imperfect bodies. As one cube melted we took another from the tray. Jonathan swabbed ice over my back, and then I did it to him. I felt each moment break, a new possibility, as we lay using up the last of the ice and talking about whatever passed through our heads. Above us, a few pale stars had scattered themselves across a broiling, bruise-colored sky.
CLARE
I’D BEEN thinking of having a baby since I was twelve. But I didn’t start thinking seriously about it until my late thirties. Jonathan and I had joked about parenthood—it was our method of flirtation. We always had a scheme going. That was how we discharged whatever emotional static might otherwise have built up. It’s strange for two people to be in love without the possibility of sex. You find yourself planning trips and discussing moneymaking ventures. You bicker over colors for a house you’ll never own together. You debate names for a baby you won’t conceive.
Lately, though, I wasn’t so sure. I’d get my money in a little over a year, more than half a million, but at thirty-eight you can’t think of your life as still beginning. Hope takes on a fragility. Think too hard and it’s gone. I was surprised by the inner emptiness I felt, my heart and belly swinging on cords. I’d always been so present in the passing moments. I’d assumed that was enough—to taste the coffee and the wine, to feel the sex along every nerve, to see all the movies. I’d thought the question of accomplishment would seem beside the point if I just paid careful attention to every single thing that happened.
Soon there would be an important addition to the list of things I was too old to do. I could see the danger: aging woman in love with gay man gets pregnant to compensate herself for the connections she failed to make. I couldn’t follow that course with a straight face. Still, it gnawed at me. Jonathan had work, and a lover I’d never met. He had the latitude still available to a man of twenty-seven. With my breasts shifting lower on my rib cage, I wanted something permanent. I wanted to do a better job with a child than my parents had done with me. I wanted my money and health and good fortune to be put to better use.
One night Bobby came out of the bathroom in his Jockey shorts, singing “Wild Horses.” I was going into my room and we inched past one another in the hall. He smiled. He had a soft, bulky body, muscles vying with incipient fat. My mother would have called him “a big husky fellow,” approvingly. Marriage to my father had cured her of her interest in slender, devious men. Bobby was a Midwestern specimen. He was strong and square-boned, untroubled. I said, “Hey, gorgeous.”
His face reddened. In the late eighties there was still a man living in New York City who could blush at a compliment. He said, “Um, I’ll be ready in a little bit.”
We were going out somewhere. I don’t remember where. I said, “Take your time, nobody’ll be there before midnight anyway.”
“Okay.” He went into the room he shared with Jonathan. I paused, then walked into the bathroom and rubbed a circle on the steamed mirror. There was my face. Neither pretty nor plain. I’d always been a queasy combination of my mother and father.
Surprisingly, my mother was growing better-looking. At an age when women are considered “handsome” rather than “beautiful,” she was in fact quite handsome: slightly mannish, broad-faced, with scrubbed pink skin and hair gone from brown to gunmetal gray. Her inexpressive face hadn’t wrinkled, and her abrupt, businesslike manner seemed more attractive as other women her age began appearing in stiff ruffles and too much rouge. My mother had caught up with herself. She’d found her beauty. She was always meant to be sixty, even as a girl.
My father, on the other hand, had withered like a plum. His cheeks had deflated and touched bone. His bristly, blue-black hair had dissolved, and the skin hung loose and leathery on his neck. As a girl I’d looked hopefully in mirrors for every sign of my father’s face remade in mine. Now I checked for signs of his deterioration, and found them. My neck had gone a little slack. The skin around my eyes was darkening. The genes were at work.
I ran my fingers through my hair. Then I went to Bobby and Jonathan’s room, and stood in the doorway. Bobby was bent over a dresser drawer, looking for a pair of socks. His ass was larger than the ideal, but shapely. If the word “Rubensesque” applied to men, it would be perfect for Bobby. His flesh was ample but proportionate, like those old pink-and-white beauties cavorting in dusky glades. There was something maidenly about his reticence, though he wasn’t feminine in the least. He might have been a stag. A precise tiny-hoofed creature, shy but not delicate.
I said, “Why don’t you wear the black gabardine shirt tonight?”
