E I G H T
POST
PRODIGAL
“Maybe you need to learn resurrection.”
- Donovan Shorter
Robert Dwyer was glad his partner in life and the keeper of his home, Isaiah Frey, believed whole heartedly in the principal of If it ain’t, broke don’t fix it. He was the sort of man who felt that if you had something ocne a week or once a month, there was no point in variety because that in itself was variety. Every Friday night there was a roast on the table when he finally came home, but in Lent there was always some type of fish dish. Frey never set foot in a church, and on the Saturday evening mass before Palm Sunday snuck into the vestibule of a nearby church to get palm branches and on Ash Wednesday and for seven Fridays after, made a feast of fish.
So on Sundays, When Rob was coming home he anticipated the chicken. A half hour out of town he thought of how the skin gold and crispy but a little sticky with the butter and the salt and paprika and the garlic would melt on his tongue, and how the bird, brined all night, exploded with the suculence of sage on his tongue. When he was in Mass on Sunday morning with his father and very often with his brother Josh, he imagined coming home in the early evening and being alone with Frey, being served by this man whom he was glad to serve, and being treated like a king by someone he fully thought of as his king. The rice, and the broccoli right after, the beer for him and the wine for Frey, and afterward tea for Frey, a cup off coffee for him, cigarettes, perhaps sitting on the back porch if it was a little warmer, looking at the sunset and hearing Frey slightly snore.
Frey might have his nephew or his son over, and they might be chuckling and laughing, and on their way to leave and live their lives. Or Frey might have his sister Sharon or his best friend Melanie. There were some occasions when Frey was not there strictly to seve, when he was in the living room with Melanie and Shannon and the troupe of his writer tfriends and he stood up to kiss Rob and tell him how glad he was that he was home, ask him about church and make him his plate, and then go back to what he was doing.. He never put a plate in the microwave. That seemed unloving He always prepared it in front of Rob, and talked to him a bit, and then told Rob he was welcome to sit in the iving room with everyone else knowing Rob never would.
There the occasional awkward Sunday return home. Once was when Jason was staying, Rob had come into the house only to be embraced by Jason first. The large and truthfully very handsome man had sat across from Rob trying to learn more about him and asking all about his interests, and Rob hadn’t known what to say to the man who had been Frey’s principal love and the father of his child, and hwo was, on top of everything, an actual and not an attempting artist.
The other awkward time had been when Rob had spent the morning at church with his brother, his father, Pat Thomas and Pat’s father, and then he’d gotten a phone call from Frey that said, “Pat’s coming to stay with the boys. You’d better bring him with you.”
This was after the day he and Frey had both been with Pat, in that bed in the house, and the strangeness of driving with his old friend and one time lover to his chief friend and constant lover had been so awkward, that while he drove and Pat fucked around with the radio stations he wondered, what is it that holds Pat Thomas to me? Even… why was it that me and Pat Thomas ever had sex? Recently? Why did I keep coming back to see him, be with him?
Pat grinned at something on the radio, and then laughed outloud, flashing his beautiful teeth and nudging Rob in the arm.
Pat was in his life for the very reason that Frey had never tried to push Pat out of it.
“It’s because he’s my only friend,”
This is why everything that had happened had happened. The intensity of their childhood friendship, the strange night when Pat’s mother and sister had died, and they had sat on the couch before, without words, Pat undressed him and had him and Rob had said nothing. He had not said stop, He had not said yes. He had simply let Pat have him on that sofa, and then he had let Pat walk off and go to bed. Neither one of them had spoken. So there was something fucked up about Pat, Rob understood that. He wasn’t an entirely right person.
But then again, neither was Rob. What kind of person would just let sex happen, would just lay there for that? He was as messed up a creature as Pat Thomas. He had to review their whole relationship. He had to review why he had been sure that Pat had so many other friends. But Pat hadn’t had friends. He was popular and very good looking, but he didn’t have friends. And Rob had to review why he thought he was friendless. Well now, when he thought of it, he was friendless, but that was not the same thing as being hated. He always went off on his own, and going off on his own hadn’t produced anything. Isaiah Frey was a solitary man, but he went off and came back with poetry and photography and a group of creators surrounding him. He went off on his own and came back with a boyfriend he couldn’t shake for twenty years and son. Rob had gone off on his own and come back with nothing.
He always watched Frey sitting at his desk, writing. In that, Frey and his cousin Donvoan were almost indistinguishable. Even, Rob reflected, to their preference for white boys, though he wasn’t much like Cade. But… Cade was a little like Jason. Never mind that.
One afternoon while Frey was scribbling he didn’t look up, but he said, “Your’e doing that thing.”
“What thing?”
“The thing where you watch me.”
“Because I was wondering,” Rob said, “How you do what you do?”
“Write?”
“Well, yes, but what I really meant is, you seem to be able to get to the truth. I mean, your truth. If I ask you a thing, about your life, about why whatever is happening is happening ,you can tell me. You know. But I look back on my life and it’s a blank. I can’t tell my story. I spent such a long time not thinking, that if I try to go back and figure out things now, figure why I did whatever I did, I can’t.”
“It’s never easy,” Frey said, looking up from his writing and closing the journal. “Not really.”
Rob thinks about what he almost let himself think when he saw Frey scribbling. Frey was scribbling painfully almost, not smoothly, but like someone writing with a razor, scratching into skin.
“It takes a long time to get to honesty.”
Where he got to with Pat was honesty. It was a reset button. A reset button is not forgiveness because it is not understanding. It might be resolution or it might be weariness, but it is not understanding. The reset button had begun the day Pat had come to the monastery with Josh and with DJ and Javon. Rob asked no questions, though he had several suspicions, all coolly confirmed or at least corroborated by Frey when he came back to bed.
“But it was good to talk to Pat,” Rob said, “and I want to live my life in a different way.’ “
“Not mad? Not mad at him?”
“I don’t know if I was mad with him.But I was weird with him.”
“Weird is almost worse than mad,” Frey said. “Yes, you do what you have to do.”
And Rob had done what he needed to, or ast least what he thought he had to, because Frey was easy. Almost after the monastery, they had packed up the few things in the little hosue, the few things Rob had, and come to live in Frey’s house, and those days were a delight, a delight because even though he had said he wanted to be with Frey and be his man, and even though he was sure he was and that they were together, Frey was not exactly a husband, and Rob was not exactly a spouse. He felt secure with Frey, but he didn’t feel quite married to Frey, and Frey did not seem like he needed them to be. On all the dating apps, men just wrote the same thing on their profiles. There was always someone writing NSA, no strings attached. It seemed a little vulgar to Rob, to want whatever you wanted, but at no cost. But at this moment with Frey he felt like their really were no string or like Frey wanted nothing more than his love and companionship. He didn’t want the fullness of a relationship that was barely a bud, and in those days Rob was always going between Frey’s house and his father’s, and Frey was always hustling teaching assignments at the community college and dealing with Javon and DJ and checking on his small royalties while making sure Jason sent child support. He was juggling with Jason. Jason was staying over. He was, once or twice, sleeping with Jason, Rob was sure. And in those first days, when Rob thought about the police academy and thought being state police made perfect sense for someone traveling between Ashby and Becket, Indiana, Pat had come home from medical school, and after church on Sunday, they had begun to meet.
It had been Josh who told him about Pat being home, and they had all gone to church together that Sunday. Josh and Rob and his father, and Pat and his father, and Rob wasn’t sure if he believed, and he didn’t think Josh really believed, but sitting in Saint Augustine’s brought some kind of peace to life. It made things make sense. Rob vaguely remembered he’d once thought of being a priest, and he wondered where the thought had gone. Had it gone when he found out he wanted to have sex one day, or was it finding out he wanted to have sex with men that had killed his taste for the Church? He couldn’t be sure. Every time he tried to ask those deep questions, he was never really sure of their answers. The past didn’t behave itself. Stories didn’t stay in one place. The befores became afters and you just had to return to this moment.
Rob and Josh and Pat were all talking at lunch after Mass, and Josh said he was going to get up and do some work. He was on his way back to college in a few days and Pat said, “You wanna hang out by the lake?” and Rob said he did.
They went by the lake, but not to the lake. They were in Voleman Park and over the hills, on the other side of it was the water, but they never got to look at the water, and somehow this felt like his whole relation to Pat. They sat on a bench and Pat said, “I dropped out of medical school.”
“What the? Why?”
“I don’t know,” Pat said, shrugging. “I wasn’t… feeling it sounds like the wrong word. Sounds irresponsible.”
Pat thought on it and then said, “I wasn’t ready for it. I don’t have the energy I need for it. I need to stop. I’m broken a little. I’ve been patching myself up, but I’m not right. And I don’t know how to get right.”
Rob said, to be kind or maybe to be funny, “I don’t know if I was ever right.”
“You’re the rightest person I know,” Pat Thomas said. “Only you didn’t know it. You could never see it.”
He said, “If you can’t see it, I guess it doesn’t matter then.”
“I’m joining the police academy,” Rob said.
“Good. You should. That’s a real thing, and you’d be good at it. Helping people.”
Rob nodded and Pat said, “Why’d you do it?”
“Police academy?”
“Yeah..”
“I think the reason you said. Seemed like I could help folks. I saw a lot of bad cops on TV and thought I could be a good one. I wanted to do something good. Is that why you went to med school?”
“No,” Pat shook his head, looking blank and a little drunk.
“I wanted to make money.”
With a touch of discovery, but not the slightest hint of irony, Pat said, “It turns out, it takes al little more than wanting to make money to be a good doctor.”
“You could be a lawyer?” Rob suggested with a grin.
“Yes,” Pat said. “I had thought of that.”
Now, somewhere two year later, when he understands everything a little bit better Rob sees that Pat who just turns around and chuckles now, is a very different person than him, always was, was the kind of person who eventually understood a joke and laughed at it, not the kind of person who made one. Looking back, Rob realizes Pat Thomas didn’t know who he was, and Rob didn’t think of himself as anyone at all, and that was a problem, because, if he wans’t anybody, then who the hell was Isaiah in love with, and if he didn’t think he was anything, really, then what was coming home to Isaiah? He had met Isiah in the dark, a blank profile on an app, a set of lusts and needs, a body that had met his, and they had traveld from that into this, but what was he really? Just breath. And Pat didn’t seem to be anything either. That was why he said, “Do you remember that house? The little one where me and Frey stayed?”
Pat, his arms folded over his chest, nodded.
“Yeah.” he said.
“Do you wanna go back there for a bir?”
“Yeah,” Pat said.
It wasn’t jealousy over Jason, or lovelessness, or anything like that, but the overwhelming feeling next to Pat that neither one of them was quite real, and that bodies were real and feelings were real and need was real. That was the reason they went back to that little house and had sex, and when it was done Rob did feel real, and the closer he drove back to Ashby and Frey, the more real he felt, and the less real anything with Pat was.
It never would have ended unless Frey had come that day. This was increasingly the way his life moved. When he came back to Becket it was less and less real. It was the life he’d had that he had to keep coming to. His brother, who was back at college, in the land of the living was not in town most of the time , and it saved the questions about what Josh’s relationship was to Pat. And when he was in Becket he wasn’t real, and Pat had ceased to be real. Or maybe it was better to say, being ghosts, they had ceased to be present. This was the place to catch up with all that was lost. The passivity of his past life was made up for here, on weekend in the house with Pat, in looking boldly at him in church. That one spoiled night long ago when Pat had touched him and he had lain down, and he had been as lifeless and lacking in willn as a doll while Pat shuttled up and down on top of him was made up for by his pushing Pat against the wall, thrusting hands into his jeans, yanking them down, unpeeling his underwear, and taking Pat in his mouth. The past was amended by the two of them, so long distant, squeezing their bodies together so tight there was no space, while they both breathed and moaned and pulled together in that bed. The past was resolved to Rob by his hardness, his thickness, as he pushed up Pat’s legs and entered him ,and trapped by Pat’s hot tightness, could not stop entering, could not stop thrusting,. Then came the mutual gasping and crying out, taking Pat’s head and fucking his mouth while he yanked his hair and Pat begged for it.
In all that time, they never talked about life, not really, But there was no life, only that house and what happened in it, and what happened in it was the past. No, over and over again Rob thought, it wasn’t sex, it was the past, the fucked up refucked, the unresolved, slowly reassembled.
MORE TOMORROW
