CHAPTER SIX
CONTINUED
LIFE WAS IN that place where things are thriving. Looking back, Frey realizes that often when things are thriving, when you are most free it is because you have taken the big chance and absolutely nothing is certain any longer. So you are afraid, half terrified, and nothing is fully formed. How they would continue to pay for this apartment, what would become of their children or of their love lives, and certainly of their hole-ridden education, Frey could not say. He was writing love poems. He was sending them to Adam. They weren’t poems about how in love with Adam he was, not exactly. But they were poems about the love he was experiencing with him. Since that visit where the two of them had slept together for three nights, they found a language to discuss desire. It wasn’t embarrassing anymore or inappropriate to write in the midst of talking of other things, “I want to taste you again.” Or even, “I still remember eating your ass.”
He wrote:
I am still remembering the white geography,
the porcelain country of your skin.
I never saw such milk before,
poured out all across my bed,
poured out in the form of long limbs
lain across me, stretched over comforter and pillow,
hot with life and desire and the place,
black as the pit,
where you stored your sex,
red sex,
pink sex,
rising out of vulcan blackness,
out of hair darker,
curlier than mine and
your mouth on mine, and your rough hands, unlotioned,
forgotten, untendered
calloused with music running
over me, a ragged softness, the softness of mouths,
demanded the softness
of the surprise entry into me.
Surely that was the strangest country,
surely your coming into me, my coming
into you, the gasp, the pour, the heat,
the liquid heat, the honey of a man was the miracle.
You know I journeyed through monasteries
and all the way to lourdes for a miracle,
good lord, I found it here with you,
in you, pulsing.
And he wrote:
red beard
I feared never
to touch something as soft as that roughness,
as cool as the heat of your breath,
as eagle eyes through glasses looking
down on me when I begged you to ride me
and you did it like the Mississippi you
did it just like jesus walking on water,
sailing on waters of come and leave and
stay and good-god and goddamnment in our bed,
the bed that will always be ours after
you stained it with the knowledge of you
after you cracked yourself like a paradise
fruit all over it, and I cannot get the stain out.
In every fiber, every little thread,
you are still there,
erasing old lovers and making
way for newer loves
In the midst of all this life, not exactly knowing what he would do next year—because he knew he wasn’t going to continue in the graduate program—he received this letter.
“Dear Mr. Frey, My name is Robert Dwyer. I am a
Freshmen in college this year. I just read your book, and it gives me hope. I mean, I know that sounds pretentious, but my life has been not so good, and I didn’t think anyone understood me. And then I read about you, and your friends and the writing club, the Immortal Livers, and about how you all stayed friends and about what college was like for you. And I realized I wasn’t alone, and that there are good people in the world. See, I am gay too. My life isn’t as exciting as yours and I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with it. But now I do know. I want to form friendships and be involved in all sorts of things, like art maybe, and make a difference. Thank you. I’m not saying everything I mean to say. I’m really not a very good letter writer. But this is
Yours, respectfully,
Robert A. Dwyer
P.S. If you could please tell me, sir, do you have any more books and where can I get them?
In the “book hang”, or whatever Melanie wanted to call it, someone, no, this specific someone, this Robert Dwyer, had gotten his book, and it had done something to him. It was a part of him. Frey had pulled out something inside of him and placed it into someone else. This was what he’d always wanted to do. This was writing. This was the real magic! He had a public now. Even if it was only a public of one.
He wrote back. Frey did not hear from Rob though, and this was a great disappointment because he was hoping that something new had begun, that this was the beginning of the life to which he was called. He was twenty-eight by now which was knocking at the door of thirty, and he was sure that though he was a writer for many reasons, the chief of them was that he couldn’t possibly be anything else.
“I want McDonalds,” Frey said.
“Sometimes you do,” said Rob.
“There’s one right across the street from back home.”
“Speaking of back home. Do you plan to go back?”
“Eventually,” Frey said. “But what I was going to say was that I used to talk shit about the food and now I don’t want to. I just want the food. I would like a salty burger right now with just the rigt amount of grease. The fries… Yeah,” Frey said putting his shoes on. “Let’s do that.”
“So,” Rob’s eyebrow was raised as he started to get off the couch. “No cooking, and all McDonalds.”
“And shakes.”
“But are you ever going to tell me about back home? About everything?”
“What? I live in Calverton. It isn’t glamorous. Not even a little bit, and beside. You tell so little. You ask a lot. I tell a lot, but getting a story out of you is one hell of a challenge.”
“Well, just ask,” Rob said, reaching for Frey’s keys and handing them over.
“Whaddo you want to know?”
Damn,” Frey said.
“What?”
“Now that you’ve said just ask, I don’t know what to ask.
Rob grinned and then Frey said, “I do!
“The Black guy. You said I wasn’t the first.’
Rob grinned. “Really, that’s what you care about?”
“No,” Frey shook his head. “Not really. Not at all. But it’s a beginning place.”
Rob smiled and said, “There could have been lots of Black guys,”
“No,” Frey shook his head, “there couldn’t have been. Who was he?”
“He was….” Rob looked thoughtful, he touched the little red beard budding at his chin. “I wouldn’t know you if I didn’t know him. And he was a lot like you, to tell you the truth.”
Then Rob said said, “Was your redhead like me?”
“No one’s like you. Tell me about him.”
Rob shrugged.
“I’ll tell you about Alex in the car.”