John Treat

It’s for You

By the time Jack turned left onto West 117th Street, the morning was warmer than when he’d left Esteban’s. He was feeling better about things. Late winter, early spring: this might be the day Jack opened the windows and left them open, at least a crack, until October. Bits of filthy, week-old snow survived in places never reached by the sun; a few leaves from last fall, still clogging drains, detained what was melting. The city was between seasons, just as Jack was, in his thoughts, somewhere between staying and leaving.

Last night had been unusual. That was part of the problem. He’d gone to Esteban’s place rather than he coming to his. Esteban’s straight roommate was out of town. She’d gone to her parents. Esteban and Jack wanted to watch Dynasty but didn’t feel like going to a bar to see it, and Jack didn’t have a television. He didn’t mind going to Esteban’s for a change. It was a modern apartment with all the amenities, but he kept track in his mind of how many times he visited, as if there were a limit he might reach. And if he reached it, his mind would be made up.

He’d gotten up early to go home and work. He had pages due, and he needed to proofread what he had typed the past week. Three bottles of White Out stood alongside the typewriter. No other plans today. He was pretty sure there was something in the refrigerator to eat.

            Jack walked up the two flights, unlocked the three locks, and darted across the room to open both his studio apartment’s windows. He thought of calling Esteban but didn’t, worried he was sleeping in. It was Saturday. Plus, there were other reasons. Like that count he was keeping in his head.

 Jack didn’t have blinds or curtains, and the sun was already making his place hot. He turned his radio on but kept the volume low. He peeled his shirt off and smelled both Esteban and the joint they’d smoked. Forget a shower. He wasn’t going anywhere today. He could live with his morning hair. No one was going to see him. He pulled on his navy blue gym shorts and made do with a dirty white T-shirt. A breeze marched in through the windows to battle the apartment’s staleness, worsened by the steam radiator that overheated his place three seasons of the year. Jack had to admit that Esteban, fully employed, had a better place. A part-time doorman and an elevator, to begin with. Air-conditioning.

They had met at a party, packed with men sporting incompatible colognes. Calvin Klein versus Paco Rabanne. Jack spotted him across the living room almost at once. Definitely his type, but in the company of a beautiful man. Jack assumed he was the boyfriend.

The details were no longer clear to either of them. They knew the party had been in January. Their reconstruction of events was that it had been someone’s birthday, probably the host’s, a guy named Ken that they didn’t know. They knew a few of Ken’s friends. Ken, or maybe it was Kent, was family to them through a homosexual kinship now lost to history. Ken-possibly-Kent hadn’t seemed annoyed to have them at his party. In Esteban’s case, here was a gorgeous, mysterious guest. Tall, broad-shouldered, with radiant medium-length jet black hair and perfect teeth. A face more pretty than handsome, accompanied by a voice deeper than expected. In Jack’s case, nonexistent good looks did nothing to earn him homo brownie points, but being a Columbia graduate student gave him intellectual street cred, at least until he graduated.

 They never would have met had this Mister Hot not brushed against Jack’s shoulder when they found themselves next to each other.

“So how do you know the birthday boy?” Mister Hot asked.

Jack hardly heard the question over the din of Nina Hagen’s screechy voice on the stereo. “Know? In the Biblical sense, not at all. Actually, not in any sense. I’m not sure why I’m here.”

Mister Hot took a fraction of a second longer to respond than he needed to, indicating he was debating what to say. “Kismet, maybe?”

Jack fell for the corny pick-up line but worked hard not to show it. “Kismet. From the Arabic, through the Turkish. A musical comedy. Not Minelli’s best work. ‘One’s lot in life.’”

Mister Hot grinned and clinked his wine glass against Jack’s. He said his name was Esteban and they were off to the races. Still, Jack was surprised when he was the one with whom Esteban chose to duck out of the party twenty minutes later. Once on the street, Esteban told him it was “French leave” not to say goodbye to the host of a party. You only have to say hello. Jack had done neither, and now he felt guilty. Then it occurred to him that Esteban hadn’t said goodbye to the beautiful man he’d shown up with. He wondered if Esteban would be as abrupt with him the next morning.

            He wasn’t. In fact, Esteban lingered over coffee. He said he hadn’t been with an Ivy League professor before. “A few of their students, though. Look at all the books you have. What’s your IQ? High, I bet.”

“I have no idea. I’m not a professor.” Jack put his eyeglasses on and smiled his best smile. “But I’ll play one, if it keeps you coming back for extra credit.” Jack clinked his mug against Esteban’s, but winced at how corny he could be.

Esteban sheepishly explained he’d gone to Montclair State for two years, but now did contract graphics work for Condé Nast. “It pays the bills. Wish I’d graduated, though.”

 They fell into a pattern of meeting three nights a week. Esteban made room for his toothbrush on Jack’s bathroom sink. They established a routine. Esteban would show up around eleven, when they’d ritually share the joint Jack would have rolled in preparation. Then, while listening to jazz, they’d eat the Italian hero Esteban picked up on the way. Eventually, Esteban would get off the sofa, followed by Jack, whose job it was to get the poppers out of his freezer. Both of them would unfold the sofa into a bed. In the mornings, Esteban got up early for work and let graduate student Jack doze.

            What cinched it early on, Jack realized later, were the phone calls that punctuated the days between their dates. At first, the calls’ only purpose was to confirm the day and time of the visits. There was soon no reason to do so. In time, the calls became chatty. Jack invented news to share, so dull was his grad school routine. Perhaps Esteban did the same. When he rang Jack, it was from Condé Nast, and when Esteban guessed he’d be home and not in the library. Jack always went back to the apartment to eat his lunch, most days a bologna sandwich and an apple.

For months, they circled around each other. By mutual but unspoken consent, they avoided doing anything together on weekends. Their immutable schedule was Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. Jack knew why. Meeting on a Saturday or Sunday would imply their relationship had graduated to being A Thing. Jack stayed in on weekend nights and worked on his dissertation. He let Esteban assume he was seeing other guys or going out where he might find some. Esteban, who’d lived in the city since quitting college, had a large circle of friends, some with memberships in private clubs Jack couldn’t get into, even as a guest. But what also prevented them from seeing each other from Friday through Sunday, what was so fraught with the danger, was that they might do something like couples do in plain view. Look for shirts at Bloomingdale’s. Jog in the Park. Eat brunch. Go to tea dance. Jack got the feeling that Esteban wasn’t out to everyone and needed to be discreet. Jack wondered, but didn’t ask, if Esteban didn’t play on both teams.

But they spent enough time together for things to finally click. Jack took on some of Esteban’s less pleasant habits, such as smoking indoors and leaving the cap off the toothpaste. He discovered Esteban was doing the same with some of his foibles. Esteban would sprawl out on his sofa bed without taking his shoes off. He would piss without closing the bathroom door.

Some days, Jack found on his makeshift desk articles Esteban had clipped from magazines and newspapers about Germany and placed there for him. Jack’s doctoral thesis was on Konrad Adenauer’s failure to fully de-Nazify the new Federal Republic. Esteban would leave the articles when Jack wasn’t around.

*     *

The night before the day he quarreled with Esteban, it rained. The day they quarreled, it was still raining.

            Jack woke up to the sound of big drops pelting the glass in his windows. He stretched his neck to look out toward the Hudson through the wet gray weather. From the dim light and the racket of a sanitation truck, he knew it was early. Esteban was lying in the same position he’d been in when they fell asleep: his back to Jack, a sheet grasped tightly around his smooth, blemish-free shoulders. Jack studied the back of Esteban’s head, the buzzed black hair covering the flawlessly symmetrical skull. Jack got out of bed. He pulled on a pair of flannel boxer shorts, walked over to the stove, and made coffee.

When Esteban got up, he stared at Jack. He said nothing as he walked past him, dick swinging. He urinated for a long time in the bathroom.

Jack had no idea what was wrong. But to be safe, he went on the offensive when Esteban came out.

“Ess, I’m thinking of leaving New York.”

There was no reaction. Jack continued.

“As soon as I hand my thesis in.”

“Okay,” Esteban mumbled while scratching one hairy armpit, “I’ll bite.”

 “I’ve had it here. It’s no fun anymore. Everyone’s so fuckin’ bitchy now.” Jack halted, unsure what to hurl next in his campaign to stir up trouble where there had been none. Today, Jack would not be straight with anyone. He raised the stakes.

 “Not you, of course. You’re no fun anymore just because you’ve always been a bitch. Plus, everything here is so goddamn expensive.”

“Anything else?” Esteban said while yawning.

Jack kept pouring boiling water into the Chemex carafe. He made the thin stream wash the coffee grounds back into the center of the folded paper towel he used instead of store-bought filters. Was he trying to break up?

“Look, sorry. Don’t know what’s wrong with me. It’s not a good time to be looking for a job. I’m going to need one.”

“That’s not all that’s bothering you,” Esteban said.

“I know,” Jack said. The news he read in the Native, and what he overheard at the bars, was depressing him. He never talked to Esteban about it, but they read and overheard the same things. There was no need to. Condoms never appeared by the sofa bed. What would be the point now?

A few minutes later, Esteban was dressed for work. He left the apartment without saying goodbye. Jack had poured him a cup of coffee, but Esteban didn’t pause to drink it. Jack threw it down the drain.

He used a souvenir magnet of the Statue of Liberty a previous tenant had abandoned to stick a note on the refrigerator door reminding him to buy more paper towels. Then he sat down at his desk and resumed tinkering with his Works Consulted, thinking it would distract him from this foul mood that had come out of nowhere. But no, it didn’t.

*     *

            Esteban borrowed a car and drove them to a spot in New Jersey with a perfect view of Manhattan. It was a gravel pit, and evening. They walked to the top of the highest pile, where they could see everything.

            “It’s my birthday,” Esteban told Jack.

            “How are we going to celebrate?” asked Jack, a bit surprised. He wasn’t exactly sure how old Esteban was. Too shy to ask after these months together, he’d sneak a look at Esteban’s driver’s license later.

            Esteban unbuckled his belt and pulled his zipper down. Jack got on his knees and helped him lower his pants. Either the moon or the lights of the city faintly illuminated that half of Esteban’s cock not in the dark. Before starting work on it, Jack had a question.

            “You’re so beautiful, Ess. Why me?” Jack wasn’t fishing for compliments. He wanted to know.

            Esteban put a hand on Jack’s head and played with his hair. “I saw you across the room. Your face had ‘nice’ written all over it. That’s what you are, right? I thought to myself, yeah, about time to try ‘nice’ for a change.”

            Jack took Esteban’s hand out of his hair and squeezed it tight. Jack wondered just how nice he really was. Guile could be mistaken for reticence. Or maybe his reticence was guile in disguise. Jack now knew that if he stopped being nice, or stopped pretending to be nice, Esteban would leave him. The thought both frightened Jack and gave him a new power.

*     *

Esteban took Jack out for dinner the day he turned in his dissertation. He had missed the earlier deadline, so he wouldn’t actually get his degree until December, but they would celebrate anyway. They went to Odeon, near Esteban’s place. Esteban knew one of the managers. They’d get good service, and maybe a break on the bill.

            Agreeably drunk by the end of the meal, they hit on the idea of a road trip. Esteban said, Okay, anywhere on the West Coast, after he preemptively vetoed Florida. “Too many other Cubans.”

Jack wanted to go somewhere remote. He proposed Alaska, but Esteban whined no way, too cold. “Nanook of the North turf, for chrissake. Think San Diego, Jack, not igloos.”

            What Jack didn’t mention was that he wanted to go where whatever was killing people in New York wasn’t killing people there. San Diego didn’t seem a good candidate.

Portland, Oregon was the compromise by the time Esteban paid the check. A week later, Esteban had told his boss he couldn’t take on any more freelance work for a while, and Jack had borrowed two thousand dollars from his older sister and her husband. In that same week, Jack, without mentioning it to Esteban, wrangled an interview for a one-year teaching job in Portland.

            “Who the hell do you know in Oregon?” a frowning Esteban had asked Jack when he raised the idea over dessert.

It was true, he didn’t know anyone there. That was part of the appeal. There’ll be lots of trees and mountains, Jack countered, and they’d get to eat elk and bear and stuff like that. It felt like the right time to take a break from New York, Jack’s real reason. Esteban had been quarreling with his boss, and Jack was increasingly moody at home. A geographical might be just the thing, Jack had decided for the both of them before they had even entered the restaurant.

*     *

            “Why are you packing?” Esteban walked in but hadn’t shut the door.

            “Because,” Jack drawled sarcastically, “we’re taking a trip.”

            “Not for another week. Why the eager beaver?”

             Jack looked up from counting socks and underwear. “I wish we were going tomorrow. I wish we were going tonight.”

Esteban crossed to the refrigerator, took out a beer, and sat cross-legged on the floor where he wasn’t in the way of Jack’s scurrying. “Do you wish you were going alone? Without me, is that it?”

“Where’d you come up with that, of all things?”

Esteban moved the neck of the beer bottle around in his mouth as if he were giving it a blowjob. But Jack recognized this as a sign Esteban was thinking before he spoke and not any kind of invitation. Jack reminded himself to go back to being nice.

*     *

They took Amtrak, stopping to visit an old friend of Esteban’s in Chicago. There were six hours to kill before their next train. They rendezvoused in an Irish pub outside Union Station. Jack assumed Esteban’s friend would be some old boyfriend, but she wasn’t. Ana Maria, Jack figured out by listening to their conversation, had parents who knew Esteban’s back in Cuba. With Jack’s permission, the two fell into Spanish, leaving him to his thoughts, which included this one: Esteban comes from a family that fled, too, just as Jack was now. After Castro, to New Jersey. He thought about the difference between fleeing a revolution and fleeing a plague. Was there any? Just how forthright had Ess’ parents been, Jack wondered, when they packed his little suitcase, put two heavy coats on him for reasons he couldn’t fathom, stuffed his pockets with his mother’s jewelry with no explanation, and told him they were “taking a little trip” without adding they’d never return? Not very, Jack guessed. Now it was Jack who wasn’t being completely forthright with Ess.

Ana Maria turned to Jack when Esteban went to the men’s room. “He’s never visited me before. What did you do to get him to leave New York?” She laughed, throwing her thick blond hair back.

Jack often unknowingly rapped his fingers against a hard surface when worried about what to say. Here the hard surface was a wooden tabletop covered with carved initials. He knew other people could misinterpret his nervous tic as a signal of impatience. Jack wouldn’t mind if Ana Maria did. He didn’t answer her question, not out of rudeness, but because he had no answer.

She saw them off on the train platform. Ess kissed her on both cheeks. Jack awkwardly hugged her. After they’d boarded, Jack asked Ess questions. If she was that much of a good family friend, why hadn’t you visited her before?

Ess shrugged. “We’ve got a lot of good family friends in this country. You have to understand, everyone left. We had money and Castro was going to take it. We’re all here.”

Jack wondered how Ess’ family chose which of their fellow exiles to stay friends with, and those they were content to let go and forget. “Well, not everyone’s going to leave New York.”

“What?” said Ess, surprised. “What’s New York got to do with Cuba?”

*     *

When the Empire Builder pulled into Portland two days later, Jack and Esteban had enough of their cramped cabinette. They’d only slept in it. Most of the time they had sat in the observation car together, or separated from each other by inert old couples or families with young children in constant motion.

They were sitting next to each other when a voice came over the speaker to announce the train had crossed from North Dakota into Montana.

“No difference,” Jack said. Neither had spoken in a while.

“What?”

“Montana looks just like North Dakota. Except maybe more horses and fewer cows.”

“The Rockies are coming up. And after that, in time, an ocean, Doctor Ph.D. Be patient.”

Esteban went back to his crossword puzzle. Jack watched a pencil tip, held between the thumb and index finger in his lover’s large right hand, glide across newsprint seeking a place to alight.

“Seven-letter word. ‘What Jack went to bed with.’ C’mon, you must know, Jack.”

Jack hated crossword puzzles. But he knew the answer. “Must be vinegar, since brown paper isn’t seven letters.”

Esteban looked up with incredulity. Jack realized Esteban had no reason to know English nursery rhymes.

“Jack and Jill. Up the hill. Broke his crown. Jill came tumbling down, etcetera, etcetera. Actually about Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Guillotined in the French Revolution.”

            Esteban’s look went from amazement to dumb wonder. Jack noticed and so added, with a giggle, “Ask me anything. I’m a historian. I know all the happy endings. Ha ha ha.”

When Esteban turned back to his puzzle, Jack took the cue to muse about all the possible endings for the two of them, happy and otherwise.

*     *

They spent money on a rental car and then a motel that, clueless about the local geography, they found in a part of downtown made up of near-empty parking lots, an old movie theater, and auto body repair shops. Esteban said it reminded him of New Jersey, and he didn’t mean it as a compliment.

            Their first night in Portland, they drove to the neighborhood where Damron’s Guide said the gay bars were. They were surprised by how easy it was to park. Neither of the bars they checked out, Jack noticed, had collection jars for “health crisis” donations. The next day, they drove to Mount Hood, which was more of an excursion than Jack had planned for them. Nothing is close to anything else out here, he remarked to Esteban. There are empty spaces between towns.

The third day, they struck out for the Pacific coast and walked on the beach, shirtless, though it wasn’t quite warm enough. Esteban got a little tan and Jack the start of a burn. The fourth day, Jack took the car and pretended to visit a relative in Salem, but in fact drove less than two miles to interview at Portland State. The sixth day, Jack received good news on the motel room’s telephone. On the seventh, they rested.

They got up at noon. Jack was going to tell Esteban some of the truth about the job. Esteban was fiddling with the blinds in their motel room when Jack started to talk.

            “There’s a job here, Ess. I heard about it before we left the city. The other day? That aunt? There was no aunt. I went to talk to people at the university. They’ve offered it to me. I want to say yes. Bird in the hand and all that crap.”

            Esteban stopped playing with the blinds and, without turning to face his boyfriend, said what Jack guessed was the first thing to enter his mind. “You’ll hate the winters here.”

*     *

            By the end of the second week, Esteban agreed to stay on in Portland with Jack. For the time being, he said. He called Condé Nast and lied when he said he’d found a better gig “on the coast.” Jack wondered if this meant they were a couple now. Or they were simply next to each other, inhabiting the same place, a small motel room in a small city.

            They bickered, but compromised on an apartment that came with a month-to-month lease. They were hedging their bets on the Great Pacific Northwest. At first, the place seemed vastly larger than what each had in New York. There was a big living room with an alcove where a bar might have been, a bedroom with a walk-in closet, and a kitchen with a life-sized refrigerator, even a garbage disposal and dishwasher. But there were two people in it full-time. No one left for work in the mornings. One consolation to the new arrangement was the rent they’d save out here, except that neither of them had a job that paid them anything yet, and things weren’t exactly free in what Esteban called “Sacagawea Land.” He joked that he’d imagined they’d be in a teepee and paddling around in birch-bark canoes.

Neither had much reason to go out during the day. There was a lot of togetherness. They took walks. Their new place was near the wide, slow-moving river Jack had learned as a kid explorers had followed to an ocean they couldn’t be sure was really there.

One day at breakfast, sitting around the old Formica-topped table that had come with the apartment, Jack was about to mention it was raining again when Esteban asked a question.

“Where’s the butter?”

Jack was accustomed to these queries from Esteban. The butter could presumably be found in the refrigerator. But Esteban was not asking where the butter was. He was telling Jack to go get it for him. Jack did get up, but only to refill his coffee cup. Before turning to go back to the table, he glanced at the Statue of Liberty magnet on the refrigerator he had brought from New York and thought, it’s a long way from Lady Liberty to Oregon. We’ve gone west and we’ve gone north, too. But we’ve brought everything with us.

Back in his chair, Jack looked at Esteban and thought about how the two of them might appear to a third person watching. There wasn’t, of course, nor could there be. They didn’t know anyone in Portland aside from a nodding acquaintance with a couple of bartenders.

They were shirtless in their boxer briefs. Esteban stared back.

“Get it yourself.”

Jack opened the sugar bowl on the table, pulled out their bag of dope, and rolled a joint. There wasn’t much left. They hadn’t made a connection yet.

Esteban did not stir. He noisily scraped a butter-less knife across his cold dry toast, unevenly browned due to his inattentive dangling of it over the gas range. Jack got up again, took the butter out of the refrigerator, and slammed it down in front of Esteban.

After two tokes of the joint, Jack decided to enliven their sullen meal with an announcement just then scripted in his mind. Regardless of Esteban’s own long-term plans, of which he’d heard nothing and doubted even existed, he’d be staying on in Portland.

“I’m hoping that adjunct job the university offered me leads to something else. There’s nothing better back home.” Pause for dramatic effect. “Doesn’t pay much, but I think I’ll like it here.” Jack waited for the man with the smooth muscular torso sitting across from him to signal that he had digested this.

Esteban methodically covered every miniscule nook and cranny of toast with the butter and ate it with a look of studied indifference in front of the now-stoned boyfriend.

            “You have a Ph.D. In German history. You’re going to teach English? Here in Lumberjack Land? Newsflash, they speak it already. Sort of, anyway.”

            Jack declined to point out to Esteban that he did not quite have his degree yet. There was no point in giving Esteban more ammunition to use against him this early in the morning. But he admitted he had a point. Aren’t you supposed to find the job you’ve trained for?

When they balled that afternoon on the kitchen floor, in a coupling that would have looked like a fight to that theoretical third person watching, they took advantage of butter still unreturned to the refrigerator. Jack said something about Bertolucci. Esteban mimicked Brando’s voice. Laughing and giggling amid the jabs and blows, they enjoyed being silly, and acting younger than they were. As if it were years ago. As if, Jack thought, I really am a nice person.

*     *

            “The light. It stays so light out here, even late,” Esteban observed one evening. In winter, Jack realized, it will turn dark very early.

            Esteban looked for work, if half-heartedly. Jack, at loose ends until fall classes began, got someone to pack up his remaining stuff in New York and ship it. There was just enough money for that once he asked Esteban to chip in. They might still have to sell a few things until his or Esteban’s first paycheck came in. Esteban said nothing about telling his New York roommate he wouldn’t be going back, and Jack didn’t bring it up.

            Esteban found a job at a studio that did mechanical drawings for architects. But two days before he was to start, and while they were unpacking boxes, their phone rang.

            “It’s for you.”

            Esteban was on the phone for a long time. He said little. He hung up, went into the kitchen for a beer, and resumed helping Jack unpack the heavy winter clothes he would never need here.

            Jack paused to watch until he was sure Esteban knew he was being watched.

            “I’ve got to go back,” Esteban said slowly.

            “Why?” Jack immediately thought of the straight woman Esteban lived with. He still wondered about that.

            “Someone you don’t know. Someone from before.”

            Jack unfolded a sweater he’d forgotten he had. He felt the muscles in his shoulders tighten. This was not the first time Esteban played a guessing game with him. There was little in their relationship that wasn’t “before.” Jack felt like a stranger had just entered the apartment. He was tempted to swing his head around and look.

            “How long?”

            “How long, what?”

            “How long will you be gone?”

            Esteban looked up and gave Jack a quizzical look. Jack was angry with himself for asking, and at Esteban for not answering. The tightening in his shoulders spread down his back.

            When Esteban flew out the following Saturday, it was on the first half of a $198 round-trip ticket. Jack went with him on the airport bus from downtown. He said goodbye at the boarding gate.

            “Bring back some dope, Ess. We don’t know anyone here yet.”

Sure, Esteban said, as he handed his boarding pass to the airline gate agent who, also being homosexual, smiled at them both.

*     *

Jack was bored. He took long walks around his new neighborhood, and then further. He wandered the university campus to acclimate himself. He ate his meals at the famous food trucks. He browsed at Powell’s bookstore and browsed some more. When he found his advisor’s book about the resettlement of stateless persons after World War II, his heart skipped a beat. Not because it was about other people who sought refuge, but because the sight of his teacher’s name on the cover brought back New York. Jack’s New York before there was an Esteban in it, and before other things.

He painted the living room orange in an act of rebellion against Portland’s gray skies, but in other ways, he surrendered. He shopped at the organic farmer’s market. He learned about craft beers. He became ridiculously polite. He started wearing socks with his sandals. He found a Mount Hood magnet to put on his refrigerator next to the Statue of Liberty one. He organized and reorganized the stuff shipped to him from New York. He cleared the kitchen table to use it as the desk he needed to turn his dissertation into a book. One of the moving boxes contained his typewriter. He placed it on the table where Esteban sat.

Jack wondered if he had calculated wrong. Why was this machine where his boyfriend should be? He decided that, no, he hadn’t calculated enough and that was the problem. He hadn't lived long enough in New York to become inseparable from it. That was the good news. The city was falling apart, but he had no real plans in leaving it. Now he faced that. Where the fuck was he now? Port-land? He wished he was looking for something, not what he was trying to avoid.

            In Esteban’s absence, Jack got horny. One night, he had a dream about a romp he and Esteban had in New York. Esteban was on the sofa bed in Jack’s studio apartment wearing a Police Athletic League T-shirt and a pair of old gym shorts. He was reading the Post, eating an apple, and enjoying the warmth of the late-afternoon sun, like a lazy cat.

Jack was coming home from school after a day in the library’s stacks and a meeting with his advisor. When he saw Esteban on the bed, his eyes went right away to the dark place between the bottom edge of the gym shorts and his thigh, where he saw a slice of thick dark cock curled like a snake in a jet-black bush, its foreskin commanding Jack’s mouth to make it disappear. He got on the bed, fully clothed and precariously balanced on his knees at the edge. With one hand he pushed Esteban’s apple-holding hand aside and grabbed the paper out of the other. He pushed Esteban’s heavy thighs apart and leaned forward. Esteban started to talk, his head on the pillow and looking up at the ceiling. But Jack wasn’t listening.

            That was when the third person arrived, the shadow, the thing not invited, the one to watch them. It snuck into the room and stood to one side. It watched as Jack moved his body, as Esteban placed his hands with the long fingers on Jack’s hips and kept talking—not to him in particular, or to himself, but to anyone who would listen. The stranger moved in closer and laid down beside them.

Still, Jack and Esteban did not pay this half-alive, half-dead thing any mind. Jack used his hands to gather the flesh on Esteban’s smooth pectorals and molded them into pyramids, and as he did, he talked, too. Now all three of them were talking. Words, sounds, flowed past others they’d unleashed. Summer light streamed in to illuminate them on the bed. The unfathomable words made the small room so small that all three of them had no choice but to ooze out the open window and dribble down like hot tar, like a river of spunk, to the sidewalk below.

*     *

Esteban called from New York and did all the talking.

            “He’s okay. With better friends than I ever was. I’m not really needed. I’m headed out to Hoboken to visit my parents.”

            Jack looked out the window at the sun setting, three hours after it must have in New York. There were reasons Jack should be glad Esteban was leaving him. There were reasons Esteban should wish himself free of Jack. They hadn’t been together that long, but each was already a liability to the other.

            “No you’re not.”

            “Huh?”

            “You’re not visiting your parents. You’re moving in with them.”

            “What gives you that idea?”

            “Well, you’re not rushing back here, are you?” Jack wasn’t sure if that was an observation or a warning.

            “Bad time to talk, I guess. Sorry. Look, I could be on the rag, too, Jack, if I wanted to be. So fuck you.”

            Some days later, Jack rehearsed what he would say to Esteban when it was his turn to call.

—I’m staying put, Ess. Maybe you thought this was going to be just a long vacation, but it’s not. I’m out. No, I’m not moving here for ‘all the wrong reasons.’ How would you know? No, I’m not implying that. That’s how you think, not me.

            —Yeah, I guessed that. Your family and all your friends are there. That’s cool. Look, fine. We’ll still see each other. Yeah. Sure. How could I stay away? No, this is not about that. Don’t start. I’ll be back in New York soon. Thanksgiving. Plus, we have three weeks off at the end of the semester.

—A lot of my shit is still there. Yeah, more winter coats I won’t need, ha ha. You keep them. Yeah, I know. Just for a few weeks.

            But when Jack did dial Esteban, the conversation went differently.

            “Hi, Ess.”

            “Yo, Jack.”

            “What’s up?”

            “Not much. I’ll be back soon.”

            “Oh? When? You have the other half of the ticket to use up.”

            “Not sure.”

            “Ess, I’m not going back to New York.”

            Silence.

            “I know that. You realize you’re leaving a big city for a tiny one? Millions of people versus basically none.”

“You’ve never understood me.” Well, your city is hemorrhaging people fast, Jack thought. New York is bailing, Esteban. But Jack didn’t say that. “Well, I grew up in a place with no people, remember?” came out instead, a gratuitous swipe against the Granite State.

            “If you recall, that’s why you came to New York. So much for that ‘Live Free or Die’ shit.”

            Esteban had a point. Jack had fled before. He looked up from the phone cord he had idly wrapped around his fingers and surveyed the apartment. Two suitcases blocked half of the entryway. He hadn’t moved them to his basement storage unit. That would have required resolve. He could see dirty dishes piled on the kitchen counter. They might stay there forever, as Jack planned another of his rebellions. Neither of them had taken down the outdated calendar with the color photo of Crater Lake and an ad for a Korean dry cleaners on it. Neither of them had really moved in.

            “How is he?”

            “Haven’t heard anything.”

            Jack was scanning the apartment when his eyes reached the pile of winter clothing on the floor, both his and Esteban’s. He stared at it as he and Ess, still on the line with each other, pretended for a few minutes that something still bound them together. Something that this descent into the nighttime blackness on both sides of the continent hadn’t yet disguised.

            “Well, I’m fine.”

            “I’m fine, too.”

They exchanged no more words other than goodbye. Two years later, Jack’s new boyfriend, Tim, answered the phone in their apartment one evening. He passed the handset to Jack with three short words. “It’s for you.”

John Whittier Treat has lived in the Pacific Northwest since leaving New York in 1983.  His fiction has won the Christopher Hewitt Prize, and he has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His novel The Rise and Fall of the Yellow House, was a finalist for the 2016 Lambda Prize for Best Gay Fiction. A novella, Maid Service, was published in 2020 and his second novel, First Consonants, came out from Jaded Ibis Press this year. Treat is currently at work on his third novel, The Sixth City of Refuge, set among survivalists in rural eastern Washington State. Find him online at www.johnwhittiertreat.com.