Spider Season (30 page)

“Benjamin, please. We talked about this. You said you’d give me more time.”

“You’d never betray me, would you, Ismael?”

“Of course I wouldn’t.”

I gripped his hips to hold him steady and buried my tongue in the trail of dark hair that ran down his belly. I heard him gasp, short and sharp. Then I pressed my face against his crotch and he moaned, long and low. Beneath his briefs he was as hard as I was. I pinched the waistband and pulled them down and off him so that he was naked, exposed to me in a way that he’d never been with a woman or another man, if what he’d told me about himself was true.

I looked up into his face.

“So do you trust me or not? Which is it, Ismael? Because it’s either one or the other. The time to decide is now.”

His eyes were a confusion of fear and desire. He parted his lips, but no words came out. His silence told me all I needed to know. I took him in my mouth, all of him, right down to the nest of thick hair and firm muscles of his abdomen. He grabbed my head with both hands, digging in with his nails like a man holding on for the ride of his life. I reached around to grip his buttocks, one in each hand, kneading the soft parts until I found the muscle beneath, as he clenched up like every other homosexual virgin facing his first time. He could have reached back to push my hands away or ordered me to stop. He didn’t.

I pulled back, coming off him quickly, and pressed the flat of my hand against his chest, pushing him back on the bed and kicking off my sweatpants at the same time.

“I’m glad to hear you say that, Ismael—that you’d never betray me. It tells me so much about you.”

I reached for the condom, tore the package open with my teeth, and rolled on the latex, watching his conflicted eyes move from my face to my cock and back again. I lathered myself with gel until I was slick, then pushed his legs high and used a finger to lube him for safer passage.

“Trust me,” I said. “Trust me the way I trusted you.”

I took my position between his legs, his ankles up over my shoulders. I turned to kiss his muscular calves, to run my tongue over his hairiness, to nibble at his flesh. I bit harder until he cried out. His stiff cock jerked and quivered.

“I saw you with Cathryn Conroy,” I said.

“Oh.” His voice was small, surprised.

I parted the cheeks of his ass and placed the tip of my cock where I wanted it to be. His breathing was shallow, hesitant.

“The other day, at the door to your room, when you invited her in.”

“I was going to tell you about that.”

“I bet you were.”

I thrust my hips forward slightly, opening him just a little. He cried out and clinched against the pressure, keeping me out.

“Benjamin, please! Stop! It’s not the right time. It feels wrong.”

“It feels wrong?”

“Yes!”

I grabbed his throat with my right hand, pinning him down.

“It felt wrong when I saw Conroy going into your apartment.”

“Why?”

I gripped tighter, choking him.

“You told Conroy about what happened between me and my father, the day I killed him. You repeated what I’d confessed to you five years ago.”

“No!”

“Did you think because you left the priesthood you no longer had to honor your vow of confidentiality?”

“Benjamin, you don’t understand—”

“I trusted you, Ismael. I opened my heart to you, bared my soul, confessed my worst sins. And you betrayed me.”

“That’s not true!”

I pressed down with my right hand, cutting off his air, and thrust forward again with my hips. He pushed and flailed at me with both hands, trying to keep me from penetrating any deeper while fighting desperately for air. I was about to plunge into him, to hurt him and shame him and make him feel my anger in a way he’d never forget, when I heard someone pounding on the door. Then I heard Maurice’s voice, alarmed and shrill.

“Benjamin! What’s going on? Are you all right?”

He pounded harder and kept calling my name. I stared at Ismael’s reddening face, and into his terrified eyes.

“Benjamin! Open this door!”

I loosened my hold on Ismael’s throat and withdrew from his rectum, where I’d only started to penetrate, not yet drawing blood. He fell back on the pillow, coughing and rubbing his neck. Tears flooded his face.

I turned my head toward the door.

“It’s all right, Maurice. Everything’s okay.”

“Are you sure? I heard an awful commotion.”

“We’re fine, Maurice. Don’t worry.”

Through the door, he explained that he’d changed his mind and decided to come home after all, heeding my advice. He’d taken a taxi, he said, and heard loud voices through the open window as he walked up the drive.

“Get some sleep, Maurice. I’ll see you in the morning.”

I heard his footsteps treading lightly down the stairs. Then it was quiet. Ismael and I were alone, and I was faced with what I’d done, and almost done.

*   *   *

At times, the line between rape and consensual sex can be a fine one, not always clearly drawn, as some would have it. But the distinction rarely matters, because the heart knows.

If Maurice hadn’t arrived when he did that night, I would have raped Ismael Aragon. I knew that. We both knew.

The moment I was off him, he grabbed the bedsheet and drew it up around him, covering himself. I climbed off the bed and pulled on my sweatpants, unable to let him see my face, my eyes. I spoke over my shoulder, barely turning my head.

“You can use the shower if you want.”

It was the only thing I could think of to say, the only thing I had the courage to say. He dragged the sheet from the bed, keeping it around him, and gathered up his clothes from the floor. He ducked into the bathroom for a minute and I heard him sobbing behind the locked door. After a while, he grew quiet. I heard him blow his nose, then run the tap in the sink.

When he came out, dressed, he kept his eyes on me. I kept mine moving.

“Cathryn Conroy called me,” he said, with surprising calm, “because she wanted to ask a few questions about you. I don’t know how she got my number. I assumed you’d given it to her.”

I spoke quietly, barely whispering. “I didn’t.”

“I suppose I should have called you,” he went on, “and asked about it first, but she said she was in my neighborhood and was in a hurry, so I told her to come up. She turned on her recorder and began asking questions. I told her that you and I were dating and that I liked you very much, and that you’d been a tremendous source of support as I’d faced sexual identity issues. I told her that I considered you my closest friend, that despite all the trouble you’ve had, there was another side of you that many people didn’t know. That deep down, I felt you had a good heart, that you were a good person. She seemed disappointed in my responses and tried to get me to say more, or to say something different, but I didn’t. The subject of your father never came up. That’s the simple truth, Benjamin. You can believe it or not.”

“Ismael—”

I stepped toward him, but he put up a hand and backed away, toward the door. “If Miss Conroy knows something about your father’s death, something you’ve kept private, she didn’t hear it from me. Do you remember what I told you five years ago, when I took your confession?”

“Some of it.”

“I reminded you that when you took your father’s life, you were seventeen. That you acted in the heat of the moment when your father was a genuine threat. I doubt that you really know what your feelings were when you pulled that trigger, Benjamin. Time and guilt have a way of warping memory, of blurring reality. Whatever might have happened that day, God is a forgiving Lord. He has surely forgiven you, Benjamin. But you still need to forgive yourself. You need to forgive yourself for so many things.”

“But she knows,” I said. “She knows that I’d thought about killing my father long before I did it. She
knows,
Ismael.”

“Then you must have revealed that to someone else as well. Because I never betrayed you, Benjamin, and I never would.”

Then you must have revealed that to someone else as well. Because I never betrayed you, Benjamin, and I never would.

There
was
someone else, whom I’d completely forgotten until now. Alexandra Templeton. Years ago, in a moment of anguish, I’d told her. Templeton, who was as ambitious as she was accomplished. Templeton, who was friendly with Cathryn Conroy, who’d helped Templeton land her big-shot agent and get her book deal.

Ismael opened the door. I reached out for him, but he kept his hand up to keep me away.

“Please, Benjamin. Just leave me alone.”

He stepped out and closed the door softly behind him, like a gentle but firm good-bye. From the window, I watched him walk down the driveway. He never looked back before he turned into the street. I saw his headlights come on and watched him drive away.

I don’t know how long I stood there, staring out. An hour maybe. I’d like to say that I felt empty and numb inside. The truth is I only wished I felt that way.

I was my father’s son. I’d been haunted by the fact of it for years but never more than now. He lived inside me as surely as the heart that beat within my chest. I was less than two weeks from my fiftieth birthday, and he continued to cleave to me like a shadow. I was still trying to please him, mimic him, elude him, kill him. At what point does the son free himself from the father? I wondered. At what point does the son exert his own will, become his own man, breathe his own air? Is it even possible?

I turned from the window, suddenly nauseated, and dashed to the bathroom to throw up. As I rinsed my mouth and washed up at the sink, I saw my vial of testosterone nearby, next to several packaged syringes bound together by a rubber band. At what cost, I asked myself, had I replenished my youthful vigor, my depleted manhood? What constituted manhood? What did it mean to be a real man? At that moment, I knew that Ismael was a more complete man than I could ever hope to be, more dependable, more self-aware, more courageous. All my muscles and libido and rage didn’t make me more of a man at all.

I turned to glimpse my face in the mirror and what I saw was a fool, a fraud, a pathetic imposter.

The vial had one dose left, with three refills marked on the label. I stroked a hard biceps, remembering what the testosterone had done for me. Then I shut my eyes, trying to blot out the image of what I’d done to Ismael, turning a sexual act that should have been infused with tenderness and pleasure into something rapacious and reprehensible. I didn’t blame the steroid for what I’d done; that was all on me. But the testosterone boost was part of it—part of my desperate quest to measure up to a perverted standard of manhood that caused more grief than good.

I grabbed the vial and syringes, tossed them into the waste can, pulled on some fresh clothes, and left the apartment.

*   *   *

I drove the freeways for hours, without a destination. I sped anonymously through cities and suburbs, past millions of buildings, darkened windows, silent rooms. Through a borderless landscape of asphalt and concrete, brick and mortar, metal and glass, neon and billboards, commerce run amok, endless miles of crackling transmission lines that connected everyone yet connected no one at all. Through the dark early morning hours I glided, a man alone among millions, with no idea why I was here, no sense of belonging, no purpose other than to propagate. Which I’d managed to do, but I’d even screwed that up. Thousands of drivers sped past me, nameless, faceless, locked in their steel compartments, a rush of hard metal and power.

It was nearly 5:00
A.M.
when I finally stopped. I was somewhere off the 101 in the Santa Monica Mountains. A wildfire had flared up, moving quickly, an orange glow coming up over a nearby ridge. Burning embers danced about like fireflies. Fire trucks were all around me, their big engines groaning as they carried firefighters in yellow helmets and heavy protective jackets into the hills, toward the advancing flames. Coming out was a stream of civilian vehicles, packed with people, pets, belongings. A lone woman walked on foot beside the road, leading two horses by their reins. Behind her, across an open field, a gray mare galloped through the drifting smoke, eyes wide in terror, nostrils flaring.

Two cops pulled a barricade across my side of the road, blocking traffic going in. One of them ordered me to turn around and get out.

I returned to West Hollywood just before dawn, coming down through Laurel Canyon and turning west on Santa Monica Boulevard. It had been years since I’d been on the boulevard in the early morning hours, and it seemed spookily quiet. The only people I saw were one or two young men passed out on the sidewalk in their vomit and weary, brown-skinned workers from the clubs, waiting at bus stops for their communal transportation home.

The light was green as I approached San Vicente Boulevard, but I slowed for two scrawny coyotes pausing in the middle of the intersection. In recent years, we’d begun to see more of them in the city, as far south as the Fairfax District and the Grove, sometimes in broad daylight, driven down from the hills by drought and hunger and diminishing space. The light turned red, but they remained where they were, alert but indecisive. Finally, one trotted south, toward the Pacific Design Center and West Hollywood Park. The other followed. They passed beneath a banner stretched across the street, promoting the seventh annual West Hollywood Book Fair. Then I couldn’t see them anymore.

The light changed again and I drove on to Hilldale, where I turned right and continued up the hill to Norma Place.

Maurice was sitting alone on the front porch swing, as if waiting for me so we could return to the hospital. He was in fresh clothes and his long, white hair looked clean, pulled back and secured behind his head. At first, I was heartened. But as I climbed from the Metro and approached the house, I got a closer glimpse of his drawn face, and the bereft look in his eyes.

He sat waiting in the swing, which Fred had built with his own hands long before Jacques or I had known them. The cats were there, half-asleep on Maurice’s lap as he rubbed them around the ears. They barely looked up as I slid onto the swing beside him.