Chapter Text
I.
Of course he had seen the journals. Pages and pages of rambling accounts, an encyclopedia. How could I have hidden it from the one living person who knew me?
He filled me in on what I’d missed: More than once, black-out drunk, I had gone to write in a journal, left them out on the floor, blurted allusive reminders to myself. Boris mimed an exchange --
(Reasonable, low.) “Potter, what good is pen in time like this? Come back and let me take another hit.”
“Shit, shit, shit, I must write everything down!” (An exaggerated accent -- hard ‘r,’ long vowels, cold as East Coast wind; bizarrely high-pitched, like a girl, for which I punched him hard in the arm.) “I must write everything or I will die!”
I remember waking one morning in Vegas to an empty bed and an open notebook; the bathroom light was on, sink running, and I could see he’d saved his place. It was the most recent entry, though I had no recollection of writing it.
I still have those pages, unique from their neighbors for the drunken, meandering quality of my words:
Boris smells like sweat all the time and it’s like adult sweat not like Andy’s or Tom Cable’s or mine, it’s all warm like and thick. He smells like smoke and beer. One time he took a shower and he still smelled different from everyone else. Not in a bad way, but if you put a lot of people in front of me I would know which one was him without looking. Sorry if that’s gay. It’s his fault for being so fucking touchy feely, I can smell him everywhere. Sometimes I wish that Boris had known me in New York, before she died. I wish that he had known me my whole life. I wish he’d met her so he would know how good she was and he would know what I’m talking about when I talk about her. I wish we’d gone to the same school, and I could’ve been friends with him and not motherfucking Tom. He could have come over after school. She would have liked him and he would have liked her. It would be weird but good to see them talk. She would have liked his stories and asked me about him when he left. He would stay over all the time, and talk politics with my dad, and maybe he would have made things better around the apartment. He’s so alive, it could have saved us. How can somebody be so alive and so pale? I don’t understand that. She was alive like that when she told stories but she was never pale. I wonder if she was pale afterwards. I don’t want to think like that. Boris is asleep right now next to me. He is drooling a little, and Popper is sleeping on his head and he’s also drooling. Sometimes when I’m with Boris I want to
And it ends like that.
II.
(no subject)
Anyms Sender <[email protected]>
to me
Potter long time no c! Where R u? U left so soon!
Theodore Decker <[email protected]>
to Anyms Sender
Who is this? How did you find this address?
Anyms Sender <[email protected]>
to me
Hello???!! This is yr FRIEND BORYA!!!! Who else would it be calling u potter nd such ???? Congrats on fancy business email address! Just I googled ur NAME idiot LOL!!!! Since when does the old poofter use internet ?!?! Elder abuse 2 make him use fancy new system!! Use snail mail like a good boy!!
Theodore Decker <[email protected]>
to Anyms Sender
I just wanted to be sure. It’s been months since Amsterdam. A random email from a bunch of letters and numbers doesn’t exactly scream ‘trustworthy.’
What the fuck are you on? Do you read your emails before sending them? Apparently not!
It was Hobie’s idea to use these. He figures it’s more professional. He can use a computer just fine.
What about you? What’s with the random string of text? “Anonymous” is abbreviated as “anon.”, not “anyms” -- that sounds like an obscure plant. Don’t you have a personal email?
Anon. Sender <[email protected]>
to me
U sound like XANDRA! Apparently, apparently! I am high on nothing but life POTTER! and a little bit of cocaine! Good 4 him the old geezer!!! Did U remember nothing of our adventure? am in hiding, may as well be head hunted!! Laying low, as they say!! Never had a personal email and you don’t pick up the phone >:-( not the point anyway! I want to know how you are! You left so quickly I hardly get to say goodbye. What is the big rush? I am dying to know! How is the little snizhka??? And Popchik how is he? Tell me everything!!
Theodore Decker <[email protected]>
to Anon. Sender
Have you been calling from a number in Bosnia and Herzegovina? I’ve been screening those calls -- I thought they were spam. Why not just text me? And why are you in B&H?
I had to get back to Hobie and the shop. Do you remember what I told you about the pieces? Yeah, I’ve got to buy all those back. I’m not even in New York right now.
Kitsey is fine; I rarely talk to her. Popchik is going strong but may be deaf in one ear as of last week, as far as Hobie has told me.
There’s not much to tell. I’ve been traveling, which is nice. I was in Reno for a layover which made me think of Vegas and everything else. Sometimes I feel like I’m in a dream. Right now I’m up north.
What are you up to?
III.
I had already begun thinking of the story, which would become ‘the manuscript’ in my mind, when I stayed at Boris’ place in Antwerp. It was his idea, really.
We hung our torsos out a high window, wide enough that we could both fit with an inch allowance between our arms, and passed a blunt back and forth. It had been so long since I’d seen Boris smoke pot, and his distinctive, foreign mannerisms were so startlingly nostalgic, a buried memory, that I kept glancing at him instead of the sparkling wintry street scene below us. Belgium is dark in a way that France and the Netherlands are not, and the white smoke from his white profile against his black hair in the black night, his black paint-pool eyes on scleral white, white teeth on the black cave of his mouth -- it was so striking, a film noir, and I was high as a kite -- that I missed his words the first time he spoke them.
“What?”
He laughed, teeth bared like a shark. I often recognized his deft cons for what they were, and it made him somehow more honest in my eyes for how easily I read him -- he couldn’t hide from me if he tried. I had probed him just the night before and been whispered to in his snakey hissing drunkenness -- the wife, the children, pulled from a Swedish homeowner’s magazine, so comical I threw up laughing.
“Your writing, I said -- neimovernyy,” he said. “Fucking magic. Always thought so. You should put it all together, all your journals, write big fucking book. Fat old entsiklopediya.” He took a long drag and blew it all in my face. “I would read it.”
I coughed, laughing. “Yeah?”
“Fuck yeah,” he said. We had reached almost the end of the joint, and he inched his svelte fingers up the shaft, avoiding the heat but not urgently so. I wondered if he didn’t care, getting burned, if he was used to it as I was used to being left. Cigarette burns on his shoulder, forearm, thigh. “Would read front to back and then over again. You -- my favorite author.”
I was taken aback. “Well,” I said. I waited for him to pass what was left back to me, and instead he put it to my lips himself, as he sometimes did; I inhaled too much, and I reeled back, hacking throatily. “Shit. I’ll -- Maybe. Huh.”
He leaned back, shoulder to the window frame, regarding me. “You should do it,” he insisted. Long inhale, then a plume of smoke obscuring his eyes like a veil. “Write about our painting.”
IV.
B&H
Anon Sender <[email protected]>
to me
New email!! don’t panic is me
Anon Sender <[email protected]>
to me
I have no fucking clue where this piece of shit phone came from, bosnia i suppose, gyuri gave to me after our big adventure. Can’t text U because I don’t have yr number on new phone. 2 risky anyway. This way email is vry secure encrypted etc etc. poor fat old poustyschka! miss him. Where R U then? No kitsey? What happened 2 engagement? U with little red head girl then? was looking forward 2 big posh rich people wedding i had songs picked out 4 U! Wedding classics! Vry romantic nd such. Whole list. Mostly velvet underground. Have been listening to VU lately. What music do U like now? It has been so long since we laid around as boys in dirty desert headphones dangling listening 2 radiohead. Miss it vry much. Glad u r not wanting to die now tho. That is what i hope anyway. I keep thinking abt u sitting in amsterdam hotel cold drunk off ass wondering where i am. Fucking glad i found u when i did. U suicidal hooligan.
Theodore Decker <[email protected]>
to Anon Sender
Why do you need to keep switching emails like that? Are you in danger?
I’m in Portland, Oregon. It rains incessantly here. I’m going to be in Sweden next month, if you’d like to catch up. Maybe I can finally meet your wife and kids, yeah? I’m dying to ask them about real estate.
Kitsey and I are over. I haven’t spoken to her mother yet, and I’m dreading it.
I haven’t seen Pippa in a while. I started writing this story for her, and as I was writing it, it stopped being for her. It began as a gift, I wanted her to know me, but then I just realized how little I know about her. I still love her, of course, but I’m starting to think I might have a complicated relationship with women.
Oh really? Well, now you have to tell me which. Make me a playlist.
I haven’t been listening to music much these days. Hobie plays classical stuff on a record player sometimes, which I like -- Tchaikovsky, Liszt, Chopin. I found a beautiful old copy of the Beatles’ White Album on vinyl at an estate sale -- expensive, of course, but not an original (unnumbered, printed text, clearly a reissue). I played it over and over for a month or so -- drove Hobie nuts, I’m sure, although he’s too nice to say anything. You used to love that album.
Laughing at ‘suicidal hooligan.’ Don’t worry about it -- everything turned out for the best, right?
Theodore Decker <[email protected]>
to Anon Sender
Boris, where the fuck did you find an original press copy of the WHITE ALBUM? Do I need to go into hiding?
Anon Sender <[email protected]>
to me
2 remember me by!!! Dont panic, all good. Gone for a few weeks. C U L8R.
Comfy in nautica(NYC remember?)-Panda bear
Coney island baby-lou reed
Dear prudence-the beatles
Its you-animal collective
My wandering days are over-belle+sebastian
Everything in its right place-radiohead
Pale blue eyes-velvet underground
True love waits (fromNEW ALBUM!)-radiohead
After hours-velvet underground
Theodore Decker <[email protected]>
to Anon Sender
Where are you going? I need to talk to you.
Theodore Decker <[email protected]>
to Anon Sender
Boris?
V.
There was a moment, in Antwerp, when I knew I had the choice -- that if I asked, if I implied , Boris would have me. We were high enough. It was my last night there. I would be gone early enough that we wouldn’t have to talk about it -- not in person, at least, not immediately after the fact. No strings attached.
He’d been philosophizing, of course -- that was how it started out. Pacing drunkenly in the living room, ranting about a book he’d read.
“Did you know the Black Death is reason for all this sexist bullshit? Most of it, anyway? Big fucking mess! Millions of people, dead, no labor force left -- church regulates fucking everything, says all you fuckers should be making babies. Said no aborting, no ass fucking, no Trojans, no abortion, all sex must make babies!”
“Boris, I don’t think they had condoms in the fourteen hundreds or whatever the fuck.”
“You know what I mean, what is word, for thing stopping sperma -- the fucking cum, what’s it called --”
“Contraception?”
“Yes, Potter! Contraception! No fucking contraception, said the church. Needed labor. Women -- produce labor force. Men -- labor force. See? Gavno! Fucking shame. It’s capitalism, Potter! Fucking evil machine! And racist, America and Western world, built on the backs of slaves -- it is inherent” (he pronounced it like in- her-ent) “to capitalism, this racism, this sexism! Primitive accumulation of capital from Blacks, Indigenous peoples! Completely fucking evil!”
“Mm.”
“Imagine if world were not product of capitalism: everybody free, everybody fucking, big orgies all the time.”
He stopped, apparently having made his point, and wandered over to the sofa, where he collapsed. His head lolled briefly onto my shoulder, then back on the armrest. He flung his arms up suddenly, groaning, revealing a white stretch of midriff, whorl of his navel and black hair crawling down his waistband. He’d grown more hair on his body since Vegas.
Eyes closed in anguish. “Now I am thinking of all those sinful sex acts. Fuck, I am horny.”
Predictably, so was I. I imagined it: his narrow hand, so close to my thigh, sliding over me, the heat of his palm on my erection.
I laughed. “Can’t you hire someone?”
“Never satisfies,” he sighed, almost too quiet to hear. “And always so fake. Too curvy. Unnatural.”
“You do tend to go for, uh, narrow-hipped women,” I observed.
He grinned. “Fuck, that is what I love. When they are straight-like and hard. Not dress too girly, no frills and such. So fucking hot .”
I murmured, noncommittal. I had never had a ‘type’ when it came to women; I’d hooked up with plenty of random girls and always enjoyed myself, but the ones I showed real interest in had little in common. In fact, I only ever had feelings for two women in all my life -- Pippa, and then Kitsey (and, in the latter case, “feelings” may have been a stretch). Certainly I preferred a gymnast body -- I recalled the Dutch girl from our school in Vegas, lithe and strong, with her delicate features and foreign mannerisms -- but it was hardly a dealbreaker.
“God, would give anything for a handjob right now. Or somebody to rub against.” He fell silent for a moment, not looking at me but at the ceiling. “ Frottage ,” he said eventually, accent heavy and slurred. “That is what they call it in French. Rubbing.”
I hummed, casual; meanwhile my whole body had gone taut as wire, strung tight with a nostalgic blend of anxiety -- it was fear and anticipation at once, the nervous excitement that made my palms sweat and my pulse race hotly. I had not felt like this in years. Was Boris…?
But I could not bring myself to ask, not even as my head spun with images, motion pictures of our bodies, not even as my dick woke up in my borrowed jeans. Instead I recrossed my legs, took my glass from the weathered coffee table, and downed six ounces of vodka tonic with the vigor of a frat kid.
“Woah, Potter, where all this coming from?”
I set it with finality on the bar cart beside me. “So. What do you think about Du Bois?”
VI.
Boris,
I hope this reaches you. It took me two weeks before I realized I could just send mail to your address in Antwerp. I realize you’re most likely traveling at the moment, but I’m counting on the chance that you haven’t abandoned your flat entirely and moved to tax-haven Andorra or the secluded Russian wilderness or, perhaps most likely, Papua New Guinea -- your favorite place on Earth.
I meant to tell you -- I’ve been working on a manuscript. Actually, it’s pretty much finished, now. I took your advice and dug through all those old journals, found a story in them. It’s just like you said -- a fat tome of a story, an encyclopedia. It’s about a lot of things, but mostly it’s about the painting. You’re the only person in the world who won’t be surprised by anything you read in there. It was also your idea. So, that being said, I’m including it in here. Every stupid page of it. You read The Idiot in a few months when we were sixteen, so I’m sure this will be a walk in the park for you compared to that. You also know how it ends.
I finally got around to sending some good old-fashioned snail mail. Does that make me a good boy? Hah.
I hope you haven’t gone forever. I really enjoyed your playlist.
Theo
P.S. Popchik misses you.
VII.
It would be months before I heard from Boris again. In the meantime, I threw myself into my work: I spent hours in the store, days and nights on planes, in customers’ homes. When I wasn’t working, I was rereading our emails. I played the same songs over and over, though I found a couple new artists I liked and felt pleased for it -- it had been so long since I listened to something new. Sometimes I took out the original press White Album; it was in remarkably good shape -- intimidatingly good -- and I was often too afraid to take it out of its dust jacket. The one time I laid it on the turntable, delicately positioned the needle on its smooth surface, I freaked out within the opening measure of “Back in the U.S.S.R.” and slid it anxiously back inside its covers.
More and more often my dreams were sunsoaked and sandy, otherwise soft and dark, overwhelmingly hazy, an impressionist rendering of a little white dog, a body, a bottle of booze. When I thought of Pippa, the knee jerk reaction of my gut to begin pining was followed swiftly by vague confusion, thoughts like why? and to what end? , and one day I woke up and went about my day and realized, in the middle of speaking to Hobie across a sticky diner table in Harlem, that I had gone over twelve hours without thinking once of Pippa, and that when I thought of her my thoughts turned to the manuscript, which made me think of Boris, who was likely very far away and was he alright and had he gotten my letter?
I listened to dreamy, dissociative stuff; Arthur Russell, Stereolab, Atlas Sound. Music that felt surreal enough to pander to the dream-like haze I walked through sometimes, the echo of completion that had carried and sedated me through the final days of writing the manuscript. New smells enriched my vocabulary: Chicago hot dogs; Spanish moss of the American South; clean forest air of rural Canada; rainforest flowers in Puerto Rico; sweet, rich beeswax on merchant streets of Eastern Europe; jasmine and smoke of a Guangxi tea house; salty wind of the Mediterranean. I spent a week in St. Petersburg and wished that Boris were with me, knelt in Savior of the Spilled Blood and wept at the Winter Palace (embarrassingly: the furniture was overwhelming).
I still kept a journal, actually, and one self-medicated night back in NYC I started to make a kind of list of my favorite smells:
Lately I have been thinking a lot about the smell of things. I read a DFW short story on the plane and he writes everything with a smell; it’s visceral. I thought today about that potion in the Harry Potter series that smells like the things you love. I wonder what mine would smell like. I imagine linseed oil, old oak, tobacco, Pippa’s smell. But that’s not right, is it? I don’t remember what she smells like. God, I don’t remember what she smells like. Did I ever know what she smells like? I know how Hobie smells, like paint and dust. I know how my mother smells, decades later, would know it anywhere -- sandalwood perfume -- and my dad, beer and nervous sweat. I know the smell of Kitsey -- clean and floral, cold. Mrs. Barbour, a powdered replication. God, what does Pippa smell like?
VIII.
Stepping off the plane to the hot mouth of Miami, I didn’t get farther than baggage claim before my phone started buzzing in my back pocket. Hobie.
“Hey, I just landed.”
“Oh, oh, good. Good.” His voice sounded tinny and frail over the phone. “How is it down there? You’re alright?”
“Yeah,” I said. I looked around myself; it was late, maybe midnight, and there were fewer than a dozen people down here besides myself including the neon-vested staff. “You?”
“Good, good. Just checking in. Ah -- and, there is another thing. Well… I know you just landed… I hate to distract you from your work.”
I rankled with anxiety immediately, already bracing myself for whatever legal trap I had fallen into this time. “What’s going on?”
“Oh, don’t sound all worried like that, it’s nothing bad! It’s a good thing, really. You have a visitor.”
I frowned, staring out at the empty orbiting tracks, a pale universe.
“It’s your friend, Boris! Popchik’s just delighted, you should’ve seen the way he lit up when Boris showed up at the door. He’s come all the way from Bosnia, can you believe it?”
He lied , I knew immediately, and despite myself, I laughed. “Wow.”
“I had to tell him you’re off traveling -- He says he’s in the city for business, you see, so he’ll be staying on another month or so. That’s what I’ve gleaned, anyhow.” When I didn’t answer: “And how are you? I told him you’d be back in a week or so. Well, no matter, I’m sure he’s very busy with this and that, but I just thought I’d let you know.”
“Yeah,” I said, a bit dumbly. I cleared my throat. “Thanks. Is he --?”
“He’s staying at a hotel nearby,” said Hobie, answering my question in a beat. “Although -- he’s here now, playing with Popchik in the kitchen, hah! -- Well, I invited him to stay the night, I’ve just had a wonderful homemade borscht, and I told him he’s welcome to stay as long as he wants -- I figured you wouldn’t mind if he kipped up in your room, would you? Otherwise, he could stay in the other room.” ‘Pippa’s,’ he didn’t say.
“No -- I mean, yes, that’s fine.” I reeled with the information -- Boris, cooking borscht for Hobie? “Of course I don’t mind.”
“Well, wonderful!” I spotted my suitcase, an old heavy thing, antique in the pejorative sense. “When do you think you’ll be back? We can all have dinner together. My treat!”
“I fly home on the eighth,” I said, reciting without thinking a line I had fed to several clients over the past two weeks. “That’s --” I fumbled, grabbed my luggage off the racing conveyor belt, and panted over the line. “Sorry. Um, that’s two days from now.”
“Goodness, that’s soon! I’ll have to let Mrs. Barbour know; she’s been asking after you.”
My stomach dropped. “Oh.”
There was a beat of silence. I leaned against a charging station, bag in hand, waiting.
“Theo… I --” Hobie sighed. “You know that whatever you do, whatever you decide, you will always have my support. But, that being said, I do think… Well, it would be the right thing to do, to figure this out, once and for all, don’t you think? I know it’s none of my business, but Mrs. Barbour, she’s a very nice, very reasonable woman -- Don’t you think you two, or, I don’t know, you and Kitsey, maybe you could sit down and have a chat?”
“Yeah,” I found myself saying. “You’re right. I will. Tell her I’ll -- Just let her know when I’m coming back, if you don’t mind. I can handle everything else.”
“Alright. Alright, Theo.” A pause. “I’m proud of you.”
Where I’d felt cold, sunken with dread a moment before, these unexpected words filled me with a fresh rush of warmth, and I found myself smiling into the receiver.
“Well, anyway, take good care of yourself down there. Don’t go near any alligators. Your bedroom will be waiting for you when you get back.”
“Thanks, Hobie.”
“Not at all. Bring me back some oranges, will you? They’re really not the same up north.”
“Promise I will. See you soon.”
“See you soon, Theo.”
IX.
Boris, as I would learn in two days time, ended up splitting his time between Hobie’s and a lavish apartment-style master suite in Soho, and when Hobie led me to my -- Weltie’s -- bedroom upon my mid-morning arrival, there was a head of inky hair on my pillow, and a little white ball of fluff on top of that, and I smiled so wide, then, that my cheeks hurt all that day, from the moment Boris took my shoulders -- bare-chested and with a healthy, flushed look about him that I had not seen on him before -- to our dinner later that night, Hobie sat between us at a bar in a Japanese restaurant, catching each other’s eyes across steaming shells of saké and kaiseki ryori, his smile devilish and suggestive, a promise, a spell.
He and Hobie got on famously, and when the waiters finally kicked us out -- it was by then nearly midnight -- Hobie went to pay the bill and was bested, fast as a striking cobra, by Boris with a couple of crumpled fifties. For some reason, the image struck me as supremely funny, and I started laughing; Boris took one look at me and cracked up, too, grasping me on the arm:
“Potter, you are drunk --”
Which was so funny in itself that I doubled over, cackling, and soon Hobie could not help but join in, and the three of us laughed and laughed until our server took the check and asked us not unkindly to get the fuck out of there, which we did, once Boris had used the restroom and flirted outrageously with the hostess.
That night, he retreated to his hotel, and I to Weltie’s bedroom. I watched him all the way down the street, until he blinked out of sight, as Hobie enthused about him to my distracted ear.
The pillow still smelled like him. I put in my earbuds -- rediscovered weeks ago in an old backpack in the closet -- and put on the playlist from his email.
I'm not living
I'm just killing time
Your tiny hands
Your crazy kitten smile
Just don't leave
Don't leave
X.
Boris had read the manuscript. It was the first thing he said when I saw him the next day, buttoned up and fresh faced at a Polish place in Greenpoint --
“I read your story!”
“Yeah?”
Smiling, wicked. “Yah. I liked it. No -- I loved it. It was, what is word, poetic. Big meaning, life-changing.”
“What -- profound?”
“Yes! That is what I mean.” He had ordered for us already, bowls of what I discerned to be duck blood soup, jellied pigs feet, and several potato dumplings full of sweet curd cheese and minced meat. “I have questions though -- many questions. Not a bad thing --” he rushed to reassure me, apparently seeing something in my expression. “That means it was good. I took notes!”
“Oh yeah?”
He grinned at me, beginning to fill my plate with pigs feet and dumplings, big scoops of a kind of carrot salad when it was insinuated on our overladen table. “Yes. So much about furniture. You love it, no? Was obvious, the way you write about it. And Pippa. Did you send her a copy?”
I explained to him my dilemma -- there was too much in there that Pippa couldn’t know, things that would make her complicit, things that I didn’t want her to know.
“That is how it is with women,” he advised me. “They are great for romance -- great comrades, even, excellent fighters -- but secrets? Intimate thoughts, being vulnerable?” (‘Vul- nair -eh-bil.’) “No good. They do not understand.” He tapped his head, a foreign gesture that I knew well. “Different experiences. It is better to confide in another man, someone who knows your pain as well as you do.”
I digested this as I tucked into the food, and I wondered if Boris had confided in his mother, if he had been vulnerable and young with her as I had with mine. I wondered if I had been vulnerable with anybody since, and then I looked at Boris, and he was watching me, a calculating look in his eyes, eyebrows expressive and white throat bobbing with deep swigs of beer, and I felt silly for even wondering.
XI.
We stood on the balcony of his second-story suite that night throwing crumbs for pigeons, chatting intermittently about the manuscript, our shared past.
“You know you told me once?”
I turned to look at him; his fingers picked apart a roll, eyes somewhere else entirely. I had hardly opened my mouth to ask what, exactly, I had told him, when he barrelled on, appearing oblivious to my confusion.
“Well, a few times. Always very drunk, usually high, so much you couldn’t move sometimes. It was still you in there --” he rapped his head with his knuckles, meaning ‘your brain’ -- “but like you were talking to yourself, eyes usually closed. First time was that night I dressed you like a little shitting baby, you were totally fucking out of it.”
I was startled by the image. “What are you talking about?”
“You were sick from the drugs. I can’t remember what you were on that night, most likely was some combination of vodka and snorting crushed up pills of Xandra’s and your dad’s. Oh, I remember now, was that laced fucking weed I picked up from a new dealer, utter shite. It fucked us both, I wanted to die it was so bad, but you -- you were worse. You took off all your clothes and climbed out on the roof, jumped off into the pool. I told you about this part, I think. You were sitting on the bottom, would not come up, I had to get in and drag you out. God, you were not heavy, but you were stronger than you looked, Potter. You would not put on your clothes, kept screaming and crying, kicking and thrashing, got me good in the ribs a couple times. You were very suicidal that night, saying you were supposed to die, you wanted to die.
“I would try to pull a shirt over your arms, and you would not let me put it on, would fling your arms about like a toddler in tantrum. Well you finally puked, got it all out of your system. Big mess, all over the carpet, could not make it to the bathroom. I dragged you to the toilet -- you had shit yourself, throwing up everywhere, sweaty all over and shivering like a sick dog. God, you were miserable. Am glad you don’t remember it.”
“Boris, get to the point.”
He glanced at me, finally, surprised by the shaky quality of my voice -- as though he had forgotten that this was news to me, and not an age-dulled memory. The emotions that his words brought up were too muddled and agonizing to name, but above all was a sense of such tremulous anxiety that I got up and leaned over the balustrade, afraid I might “puke.”
My plea was followed by what seemed, to my ears, a tense silence, and then rather suddenly his chair scraped back and he was with me at the railing. Close enough that his sweater grazed my bare arm, all damp wool and warmth.
“It is no bother, you know.” He had made his voice softer than before, a decibel I identified as tender. “You would have done same for me.”
I had no answer to this; he was right, and yet this, too, rankled something uncomfortable deep beneath my skin, a feeling that was exacerbated by the next thing he said.
“You told me that night that you loved me.”
His voice, those words: I remained still, unmoved, and only as he continued did it hit and draw a sharp breath from an impossible place in me.
“I was holding you on the bed. You would not let me leave, not even to use toilet, kept telling me to just piss myself, hah! You were -- Well, you know, very out of it.” I spared a modicum of alarm at what this could possibly have alluded to. “No clothes, crying. I pet your hair, was thinking of all the ways I would fuck over that dealer, the little shit. Then you turn to me, pushing your little head up under my chin, and you say, ‘Borya, love you so much.’”
Those words, again, a piercing blow each time he uttered them. “I did not call you ‘Borya.’”
Waving his hand, dismissive. “Boris, whatever. Same thing. Was the first time you said it.”
I had said it other times, then, was the implication. A thought came to me unbidden, a memory. “So, you did know.”
“Eh?”
I turned to him at the sound of a lit match; he was pinning a cigarette between his teeth, cupping the flame of his swanky gold lighter (it looked much like his father’s) as he lit the end. I remembered something he had said once -- that cigarettes and smoking are romanticized by tobacco companies for profit, advertising designed to tempt and trick. I thought of this and wondered vaguely how those movies had tricked me, that a little ugly stick in my friend’s mouth, his fingers, could make my blood burn and sputter like hot popping oil.
“I --” My mouth dried up. “I thought you knew.”
“That you loved me?” He blew it out on a cloud of smoke. “Sure, you told me many times. Was not sure how you meant it. You never wanted to kiss, even when drunk, you would push my face away like --” He mimed a hand against his mouth; he was chuckling, though a bit numbly. “Sex with you, kissing with Kotku. Put you together and maybe I had a relationship.”
I was frowning at him. “Hold on -- ‘kissing with Kotku?’ I thought you two were fucking all the time.”
He shook his head slowly. “No.”
“But you said --”
He scoffed, all Slavic. “Was lying, of course. She gave me a couple handjobs, yes, was fine. Mostly we made out, and that was at school or at your house. She shared a room with her sister and had no lock on her door; we usually got high and talked about her family if we were sober enough. Was almost always high there.”
“I thought she was…” I couldn’t finish; I had meant to say, ‘I thought she was easy/slutty/all over the place,’ but that wasn’t true, was it? From what I remembered, Kotku had had a difficult life, and I was in no place to judge her. But still, I had the impression that she was fairly sexually active, certainly no stranger to sex.
Boris shrugged -- ‘It is what it is.’
“Wait. If you weren’t having sex with Kotku, and your Swedish wife was fake, then who have you been fucking?”
He plucked the cigarette from his lips, grimaced around a fresh trail of smoke. “I did not lie about that girl in the car. That was true. The handjob with KT was true, but it was awful.”
“You said you came in your pants before she even got the zip down.”
“I was lying , Potter. God, you are so gullible. No, do not be angry, is very endearing.” He brought the cigarette halfway to his mouth, seemed to change his mind, and snuffed it out on the railing. “These past years… I have had women, here and there. Long term, no. I get drunk, go out, fuck and fall asleep. Myriam and I… She is very good woman. I thought I was in love with her, God, I thought she was sexiest woman I had ever met.” He shook his head, almost as if to himself. “She still is. But one night, I am shitfaced drunk, trying to kiss her -- she hits me over the head, says, ‘Borya, you fool, you do not love me, you have no idea who you love,’ and I cried like a baby while she took care of me all that night. She is the best woman I have ever met. No other woman like her in the world.”
I was shaking my head; I couldn’t believe it. Boris had always seemed mad about women, constantly infatuated and adorational -- borderline obsessive. His story tracked, but I was startled by the lack of real intimacy. His words were achingly familiar.
“What about the woman who got you into heroin?”
Boris sighed, a mournful sound. “Ah, Petra. I met her maybe five-six years ago, friend of a friend of Dima. We had great fun, but she fell for some tough-looking meth addict type in the end.” Pouting. “She broke my heart.”
“Did you fuck her?” I felt embarrassed as soon as I asked; it wasn’t my business, was it?
Boris seemed unmoved. “I did, two-three times maybe, all high on E or maybe once smoking pot, cannot remember. Anyway, was not very good. Still, she was so hot , this nerd type, yah? Rich girl, wore these sexy glasses, but had very tragic past -- molested by her stepdad, brother in rehab for heroin addiction --”
“Maybe you shouldn’t tell me -- Hang on, her brother was a heroin addict and that’s what you chose to round out your ‘bad boy’ persona?”
Boris shrugged lazily. “People love what is familiar to them. And, we had a lot of it in storage at the time, figured I may as well taste the forbidden fruit.” He turned to look at me, and his eyes at that moment reminded me strongly of something I had written in the manuscript: Yul Brynner, that clever slant in his eyes, devilish and foreign. I was struck down by it, his gaze an unstoppable force against me. I felt pinned and, strangest of all, itchy and hot beneath my very skin.
Boris smiled, greedy. “You are blushing.”
“What?” I brought my hands to my face, as though I could feel the redness of it. I felt hot, seen. “Boris, what -- What’s the point of all this?”
His expression slipped, eyes seeming to search me for a moment -- and then he looked away. Something unusual in the quirk of his eyebrows. Careful -- which he wasn’t usually.
“Just thought you should know.” Casual flip of his hair. “Notes for your story, yah?”
XII.
We tucked in that night on opposite sides of the mattress. Around two in the morning -- sleep eluding me -- I felt him turn over in bed, heard his impatient little sigh; and then an arm was sliding snakelike over me, heavy and warm, and his body crept nearer, hand finding my chest, the collar of my shirt, long cool finger to my heated skin; his body narrow, muscled, chest to my back, bare knee poking my leg, the heavy settled smell of soap and sweat, tobacco, that smoky warmth, the foreign sort of clovey scent that pervaded his flat in Antwerp. He fell asleep with his nose in my hair. And it was all so familiar that my whole body seemed to ache with it -- like hearing an old song from your childhood, the stuff your mother plays on vinyl in the living room, dances to and swings your little hands in hers, sun in the windows or a summer storm, the overwhelming rightness of being home.
XIII.
The next morning, before Boris woke up (his eyelashes: long, straight, feathery black), I went to the desk and penned a letter before I could change my mind. As I finished up, I heard rustling in the other room and a low moan.
“Potter… Where you off to?” His voice was sleep-roughened, familiar.
I folded and pocketed the letter, resolving to mail it as soon as I could -- there would be stamps and envelopes at the front desk, I guessed.
“Just out here,” I said. “You hungry?”
“God, yes,” came his impassioned reply. I heard him get up, bare feet on the rug, and pace into the front hall beside me. “Writing more stories, yes?”
I laughed, turned to face him. He looked like a Kiprensky painting. One of his self-portraits, I thought -- the one with the lips.
“What?”
“Uh --” I was embarrassed. What was wrong with me? “Just exhausted, sorry.” I rubbed my eyes, berating myself in the privacy of my head.
“You did not sleep well?” An expression of tender concern crossed his features; he brought a hand to cup my cheek, then pressed the cool back of his hand to my forehead. I could only stand and allow it. “You feel warm. Are you sick? How do you feel? Headache? Nausea?” He pronounced it ‘ naw -shee-uh.’
“No -- No, I’m alright,” I said, and I did not pull his hand away, because I was afraid that if I touched him I would lose control. God, but I was sick, I felt feverish all over, and I counted reflexively the days since I’d had a hit, and then I remembered that I was clean.
Boris pulled back and gave me the once-over. “If you say so,” he relented, turning finally away. “Alright, well, I am starving, don’t know about you, but I could eat like Henry VIII just now! -- I need some protein, you know, something filling. Ah, let’s go downstairs, am sure they’ll have some brunch or whatever -- is eleven A.M, too late for breakfast, but what they call it, continental -- we shall get ourselves some of that, yes? Potter?”
I spurred myself to action, and we went downstairs in the same clothes as yesterday, yawning all the way and the stairwell full of his offhand remarks as he alleged to have a ‘thing’ against elevators.
“Always avoid them if I can. God, they are cramped and so awkward, strangers coming in, trapped with you.” His mouth curved a moue of distaste. “Myriam was trapped in elevator once -- same lift as this fat white old bastard, sleazy ublyudok , trying to sidle in close to her, all slimy like, get his hands on her. He tries to kiss her and she castrates the motherfucker.”
I realized I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not, and didn’t ask for fear of finding out.
We walked out into the lobby, a palace, and I got my letter sealed, stamped and dumped in a mail collection at the front desk while Boris hunted down a meal for us. We ended up bailing, wandering Soho for a place that was still serving breakfast -- we were both in the mood for pancakes, or, in Boris' case, syrniki.
The whole way I kept looking at him, waiting for something, I don't know what. His hair was pulled back for once -- tucked under an inconspicuous black cap -- and I could see his cheekbones, vivid beneath his eyes, almost milk-white in the sun. It occurred to me that I should have wrote about that in the manuscript -- I should have written about his cheekbones, his lips, how his skin shone like scarred marble. It was all I could see sometimes, the savage wilderness of his hair, his spirit, chaos and warmth in his eyes that defied the planned, perfect lines of his face. His body with its cultish appeal, the way he carried himself like a sleek, slinky cat; all muscle and bone, skin like cream, hair black as wet earth; the length of his throat, a column ending in the corinthian curls of his hair, ionic lips, doric edge to his jaw. And as fervently as I wished I had written it -- as desperately as I wished I could speak it -- now, even -- I knew like the world was cruel that my words were all wrong, scrambled and sticky in my head, and that the great fear of losing him -- the greatest fear, my god -- was two times, three times as heavy as my love, and it was all I could think, and I couldn't do it.
XIV.
Dear Pippa,
I’m in New York as I write this -- staying in a hotel if you can believe it. And before you ask, yes, Hobie’s alright, I’m alright; just staying with a friend. Do you remember Boris? He asks after you often.
I want to tell you, firstly, that I read the letter you sent me and appreciated it very much, and I’m sorry that it’s taken me so long to respond. I do understand what you mean to say, and I’m sorry that I couldn’t come to the same conclusion sooner. I am grateful for your kindness and your patient explanation, and I want to assure you that, after some consideration, I must agree with you. I admit that it has taken some time for me to grow comfortable with the idea, but it does feel right, it does makes sense, and more than anything I truly want the best for you; and to your immense credit, as I’ve processed your words these past few months, I’ve been learning some new things about myself. Or, maybe not-so-new, but you know how these things go.
If all of this is cryptic and nonsensical, forgive me. What I’m trying to say is that I miss you, and I’m sorry, and I hope we can be friends just like always. I hope that you and Everett are well. I promise not to buy you any more necklaces, not one, not ever again, although I’m afraid I can’t resist the books and CDs and all -- we’re so alike one another, I know intuitively what you’d like, you know? On that note, I think you ought to check out Slapp Happy, and I eagerly await your response (and recommendations, please). You’re the oldest friend I have, and I cherish that dearly.
Yours sincerely,
Theo
P.S. Is Hobie gay?