Milk (7 page)

Their watery reflection in storefront windows was illusive and glamorous, and when he turned into an alley Walter realized with a thrill that the fat man wanted to have sex. At the end of the alley was a Dumpster filled with cardboard and the man seemed familiar with a patch of snowless cement, warmed by a dryer vent.

Walter tried to kiss the man’s mouth, but his lips felt dry and muscular, and he could tell the man did not like kissing. He fumbled for the man’s cock inside his dress pants and as he located it, knelt. The man’s hand moved into Walter’s hair; he liked his hair stroked while he gave head, but then the fingers fisted, and Walter felt individual hairs pulled loose from their sockets as the man took hold of his cock and pointed the soft tip directly at Walter’s heart.

A spasm of repulsion shot through his body. But then he felt the cold asphalt through the material of his preacher pants, and he heard the sound of a thousand bits of ice
falling onto the metal lid of the Dumpster.
Just let me take my coat off
. He was shaking as he kneeled down again in front of the fat man, eye level now with his groin. Warm air tinged with the scent of fabric softener spilled out from the dryer vent as the fat man again took hold of Walter’s hair, but this time more gently. The urine made a flat sound and was warm and then cold against his shirt.

WALTER’S DAMP SHIRT was icy against his chest as he glanced up at the blue television light that illuminated the rectangular window of the Sanskrit boy’s apartment. Certain details interested him immensely. The little potato that sat in a muddy patch of snow near the curb. Particular snowflakes. He’d fixate on the trajectory of one until it seesawed down and obliterated itself on the pavement. An aura seemed to be coming off everything; the streetlights of course, but also a mailbox and a pair of polar-fleece mittens in a store window.

A man in a knit cap passed by, and Walter pretended fascination with a flyer advertising massages tacked up to the tree across from the boy’s building. Walter cataloged bits of foil on the ground and loose cassette tape in the
crease of the curb. His hands were freezing and he couldn’t stop shivering, nor could he stop thinking about the boy’s warm bed: the blue sheets with little butterflies on them and how his comforter and pillow were stuffed with duck-feather down. A light went on in a brownstone and he realized he’d spoken out loud. A tall woman with black hair and a long robe clenched at the waist looked at him severely, and he crossed the street and rang the boy’s bell. He was buzzed in immediately.
The boy had seen him from the window! The boy would be waiting with a shy smile and a cup of chamomile tea!

In the elevator he decided he needed an excuse. He’d say he’d left his scarf, the cashmere one he’d bought last year in India. But he had his scarf on, the five-dollar one he’d bought on the street last week; so he yanked it from around his neck and shoved it deep down into his pocket. The apartment door was open and he walked briskly down the hallway into the boy’s living room.

It was dark—there was only the gray light from the television and the sound of a woman’s voice speaking in French. Denim legs entwined on the couch; Walter realized the Sanskrit boy was lying with someone else. The boy glanced behind him, lazily holding out a twenty-dollar
bill. His eyes widened as he recognized Walter, and he jumped up.

“Can I use your bathroom?” Walter sputtered.

“No,” the boy said, “I thought you were the pizza guy. That’s why the door was—”

“Oh, let him,” the other boy said. He had a long soulful face and was sitting up now in the lotus position. “It’s at the end of the hall.”

There was a film around the hole in the toilet and a lacy frost on the sink spigot. The shower curtain hung off the rod and a little jade Buddha lay facedown in the soap dish. He heard the two boys arguing as he flushed the toilet and ran water into the sink.

Outside the bathroom, Walter felt himself sucked down the hallway and onto the boy’s bed. He lay in the dark, the comforter cool against his body, watching snow fall into the alley over the silver radiator. He heard footsteps and the overhead light flipped on and the Sanskrit boy’s face was red with rage.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

Walter was going to sit up and say that he felt better now, that he had a condition the doctors could never quite diagnose, part low blood sugar, part narcolepsy. But instead
he just closed his eyes and pretended to sleep. The boy stood there a minute and then pressed the numbers on his cell phone and spoke into the receiver. The other boy came and stood beside him, and both stared down.

Walter slit his eyes just enough to see the pale orb of the Sanskrit boy’s head.

Snow was slanted against the windows of the parsonage kitchen and the little yard was blanketed; just the tips of the azalea bush pressed up over the full line of snow. Walter still smelled of piss and his arm ached from where the Sanskrit boy had yanked him up off the bed. He walked with his glass of ice water and stood in the living room. There was a shape on the couch and at first he thought his eye was superimposing the scene from earlier tonight, Sanskrit boy and brown-haired boy melded together on the couch.

“Father, my mother kicked me out,” Junot said, sitting up. “Mary said I could sleep here.”

“That’s fine,” Walter said. “Are you warm enough?”

Junot motioned to the blanket Mary had gotten from the hall closet. “It was awful, Father,” he said. “She said I was just like my dad. She kept saying
‘Arbol que crece torcido
jamás su tronco endereza
—
cuando algo empieza mal, termina mal
,’ and that I was a crook and a bloodsucker.” The boy’s white T-shirt glowed in the dark room. And Walter saw out the window how snow was piled up on the boxwoods so that they looked like angel food cakes. “She threw my boom box out the window and said I was going to hell.” Junot’s teeth were white as sour cream and the expanse of his eyes was a liquid black.

“It sounds terrible.”

“I guess I give her problems,” Junot said sadly.

“Get some sleep now,” Walter said as he moved up the stairs. He wore only his underwear, and his cock was getting hard. An ice cube in his drink cracked. “In the morning, we’ll shovel.”

“Thank you, Father,” Junot said.

Walter rolled over, pressed himself into the mattress and covered the back of his head with a pillow.
Junot’s lips, his eyebrows, the baby hairs at the nape of his neck. The way his jeans rode low on his hips
. His skin was milky brown and he smelled like Carlos, crème soda and black pepper. Walter couldn’t take it anymore and stood up by the side of his bed. He put his hands on his hips. Snow rushed
past the window, the darkness offsetting the chaotic pattern of rushing white.

Walter kneeled down and pulled out the enamel canister. The lid stuck at first, but by using the file on his nail clipper, he levered the top off, and there, in a plastic bag tied with a twisty, was what remained of Carlos. He looked at the white ash and bits of gray bone matter.

That people you loved died was unacceptable. Also that people you fucked wanted you to vanish was unacceptable. But really it was mostly that people you loved died—this was completely unacceptable.

He sat the canister on the nightstand and lit a cigarette, blew out a tendril of smoke. Carlos had been explicit about his ashes; he wanted them scattered down by Bargemusic. Walter had been putting it off, but as soon as it got light he decided to walk down to the bridge. He thought of the ashes floating down into the East River, the fine gray dust burnt clean and pure.

JOHN SHAVED OFF his beard, then laid his surplice out on the bed along with the gold ring the order gave him when he’d taken his vow. He moved around his cell slowly. He was worried about rousing Brother Peter, with whom he shared a bathroom and who was a notoriously light sleeper.

He’d been winnowing his possessions for weeks and had just a stack of old letters secured with a rubber band, an envelope of money he’d saved from his weekly allowance and the crucifix that had hung over his bed. He wore khakis, a white button-down and his tennis shoes as he walked down the long hallway past the meditation garden with the dogwood tree and wood benches and through the common room, where the
New York Times
lay on the
round table alongside the
Christian Science Monitor
. He saw the stone hand that sat on a side table and the photo of the order’s monastery in Zimbabwe.

The ratty velvet couch, the bronze lamp with the linen shade, the worn oriental, everything was soaked through with incense and loneliness, and he couldn’t wait to get out. The carpet runner ended and his tennis shoes squelched against the wood. He went up on tiptoe as he passed the kitchen door. He knew Mac was inside preparing the monks’ breakfast.

Mac looked more like a wizard than a monk with his long gray hair and beard. He’d worked most of his life in a leprosorium in Africa, and when John first came to Holy Cross, he’d sat next to him at meals listening to Mac’s stories: the legless girl who rolled around on a wheeled pedestal and the old man with a face so disfigured he wore a hood with eye slits. The central symbol of Mac’s life was the round communion wafer lying in the palm of a leper’s hand.

As quiet as he tried to be, the door swung open and he was blinded with fluorescent light.

“John?” Mac said. “You’re going?”

“I’m sorry.”

“No need to apologize,” he said, smiling. “Let me accompany you up the hill.”

John had expected Mac to be angry or at least disappointed, but he wasn’t going to try and convince John to stay or mention the fantasy woman. Mac had said John’s fantasy girl was a robot, an idealized notion of romantic love, impossible to replicate. But now, Mac seemed to realize the woman had won. Mac walked beside him up the long asphalt drive. The trunks of the trees around them were black and creaked in the breeze. John wanted to say something, but the raw reality of what he was about to do rendered him speechless. He kept his hands deep in his empty pockets and his eyes on the white tips of his tennis shoes. At the end of the drive, the red taxi waited, “Brown Sugar” blasting out the windows. When the driver saw them he turned down the radio.

“I’ll write you.”

“No you won’t,” Mac said.

“I will,” John insisted, concentrating on the first line of gray light at the horizon. He had failed as a monk; he had not let himself become absorbed into the monastic life; out of insecurity, he had tried to protect his identity.

Mac opened the car door and John threw his bag inside.

“What should I tell the others?” he asked.

“That I’m sorry,” John said as he sank down into the backseat and pulled the door closed. His chest felt thick and achy. The driver turned the Stones back up and pulled out onto the highway. John looked back at Mac drenched in reflected red light.

The backseat of the cab reeked of smoke and the beige vinyl was sticky, details that seemed to foreshadow the chaos and shabbiness of his new life.
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
The car sped down the highway toward the band of yellow at the horizon, and John lay his cheek against the cold window flecked with tiny drops of water. God’s voice came back to him.
So you can know yourself
.

The first week outside the monastery, car alarms, garbage trucks, the subway, all grated on his tender nerves. Women on the city streets hurt him with their fragile preoccupied features. He missed the bells that had rung every few hours, and the offices haunted him, vespers in particular. The monks’ plainsong was loud inside his head. At first he felt his fifteen years in the
monastery had been wasted, but then he realized that constant prayer had honed his perceptions. He saw that nothing was wholly static; color hummed with a kind of energy. He noted each individual leaf on each individual tree. Every person on the street sent out a delicate aura.

He rented a studio in Brooklyn Heights and began in the evening to go to a bar on Court Street, a generic place called Murphy’s. There the television blasted football games and the regulars were mostly red-faced men and a few slack-faced ladies who laughed too loud. He’d been drawn to a petite Hispanic woman who had, when he approached, explained curtly that she wanted to be left alone. At Bar Tabac, the woman with feather earrings said she was waiting for her boyfriend, and at Churchill’s, the attractive lady in the business suit told him she was gay. Similar scenarios resulted in all the watering holes around Brooklyn Heights.

He was frustrated and usually woke with a hard-on that was biblical in its intensity. Sometimes he masturbated, but afterward he always felt depressed. One day he picked up a
Village Voice
and flipped to the ads in the back.
Cheap Sluts. Hot Local Girls. Live One-on-One Action
. The
thonged rear ends and cleavage stimulated him, but he’d be too shy for phone sex.

The listings under
Adult Body Work
confused him. The pictures were flagrant, women’s hands cupping their surgically enhanced breasts and pulling back the cheeks of their rear ends to show their anuses. There was only one ad that appealed to him.
Kathy
, a blonde in a white nightgown standing before a fireplace.
Outcalls Only
, the ad said, and John assumed this meant she’d come to his place.

The money was sealed in an envelope on the mantel and he poured brandy into two teacups. He’d showered, shaved and dressed carefully in his khakis and white button-down. When the buzzer rang the woman who walked down the stairs was not the Kathy from the picture. This Kathy had thick reddish hair, cut full at the top with long straight pieces coming down against her neck. Her eyes were huge and brown and her lips full but flat. She wore a leather miniskirt with metal studs and a tight black blouse. Her accent was Slavic with some New Jersey underneath. He felt his face get warm as she went over the economics of their endeavor.