EPILOGUE
Dan Malloy leaned over Fenn and whispered his name.
“It’s time to get up,” he told him.
Fenn yawned and put his head in the pillow, but finally turned to look up at the man with the grey blue eyes and the grey golden hair.
“Aren’t you guys supposed to be off to meet Brendan or something?” Keith McDonald demanded, leaning against the door of the spare room.
“I need coffee,” Fenn said. “And cigarettes.”
“If you’d gotten up two hours ago,” Dan said on his way out, “we could be gone by now.
“Thackeray’s been up for hours.”
“I thought you might be dead, Dad,” Thackeray said as Fenn came out of his room.
“We need to make a run,” Dan said. “Go to the store for some things.”
“Can I go?” Thackeray asked Fenn.
“Of course you can. And don’t forget your scarf and gloves.”
While Fenn sat in what three months out of the year was the sun room, looking at the partially frozen lake, Keith McDonald sat down beside him.
“Could I possibly get a cigarette?”
Fenn smiled at him.
“I had no idea!”
“Dan doesn’t either.” As he took Fenn’s lighter, Keith said, “He doesn’t need to know everything.”
Fenn exhaled a long blast of smoke and Keith said, “Was that Paul Anderson who called last night?”
“He was one of the calls,” Fenn said.
“He was never right with Dylan and Elias. He called to say he was sorry about that. Why he called last night I don’t know. Christmas?”
“Anyway, the last call was Todd. He always calls me before he goes to bed.”
“That’s nice,” Keith murmured. “Thirty years, huh?”
“Oh, God,” Fenn shook his head. “How amazing is that?”
The two of them sat quiet, looking at the lake, and then Dan came in, crying, “Keith!”
He quickly stubbed out the cigarette while Fenn raised his high in salute.
“Good God! And now you’re poisoning my husband as well!”
Dan put down the grocery bag and the skull cap on his head was hanging loose.
“Your head looks like a navy blue condom,” Fenn noted.
Dan frowned, shook his head and said, “Are you ready? Thackeray’s in the car.”
“Bags are right there,” Fenn gestured to them.
The drive was long, sun and sun through shadows of tree limbs, white snow, sharp blue sky, asphalt, poor brave cows out in fields. The drive was the peace of being with Dan at last. How long he had been away. Fenn would turn and look at him, and Dan, knowing he was being looked at, would smile.
The first year he’d left the priesthood he was glad to be gone. He had been so desperately lonely and the Church felt so dead, so on its way out as if two thousand years was all it could stand. For a very long time he didn’t set foot in one even though Keith said Mass every Sunday.
And then, when they had moved to Michigan, he’d begun to help out in the shelters around town and, at last, he had come to the small church in town. He understood then why he wasn’t going. If Dan went, if he saw his lover lift that wafer and that cup, he would realize it was the same Body and the same Blood he’d lifted in Catholic churches, and he needed to do this again. There had been the relatively brief work of becoming an Anglican priest. It was the psychology of switching churches that lasted far beyond the paperwork. For some time he didn’t know if he was Anglican or if he was Catholic.
“You are alive,” Fenn said. “And you are with God. And that’s all that matters.”
“There were times when I wondered if you were right to let me go,” Dan told him.
“Surely you don’t wonder now. I think Keith took care of that.”
“No. Keith is something different. I wanted to be with you. I loved being a priest and a Catholic priest, but I would have put it all away to be anything for you. A lot of men would have let me. When Keith came I was done with that. It was a whole different thing. We hadn’t just let each other go, you and me. We had become something entirely different.”
Dan shrugged, “So we weren’t the issue. Not then. No, I learned that you were right much earlier.”
“When?”
“When I saw who was right for you. The same way that the Church and then Keith were right for me. It was Todd. I wasn’t jealous at all. I was glad. When Todd finally came, I understood.”
“I’M THINKING OF joining the army.”
“You telling or you asking?”
“I’m stating an option,” Todd said. “Feeling around to see how you feel?”
“What does it matter how I feel?”
“Why do you pretend it doesn’t?”
“If you go off to the Persian Gulf, or wherever they send you—And why, in God’s great ass would you want to go into the army?—then it’s really your business, not mine.”
“Firstly,” Todd said, folding his hands, “I want to go into the army to do something for my country. And secondly, I want to make a man out of myself.”
Fenn turned away from him and said, “I can’t even believe you said that shit. Not to me. Not with a straight face.”
“Can I come over tonight?”
Todd had learned to love. He had learned how important it was and that it could not wait. Bryant had taught him this.
“I go to horrid man after horrid man thinking that this dick’ll fuck me so hard it’ll get all the bad stuff out of me. Or get the part of me that liked the bad stuff out of me.”
“Fenn’s not that man.”
“What?”
“I’m just saying,” Bryant said, “I know how you feel about him. I don’t know if anyone else knows. But I see it. I think there are two sorts of guys you need. The love of your life, and the fix it guy, the one who sort of… preps you for the love of your life, or does what the love of your life can’t do.
“I want to offer it to you. I want to sleep with you, Todd. Alright?”
Todd caressed Bryant’s hand and then their hands folded firmly together, and Todd Meradan said:
“Alright.”
The bulk of his life Todd had simply not understood anything. The time with Bryant was like understanding for the very first time. Bryant taught him friendship and love. And it was a friendship. There was nothing else to call it. Bryant taught him how to be with someone who valued him. He could tell all of this to Fenn one day. Maybe. Not today. Today he spoke to the man he had left alone for a year, the man he was going to have.
“I’m coming over tonight,” Todd said. “I’ll be over at about eight. The guy from the army is coming around here this afternoon and we’re going to talk.”
“He just wants to get you killed.”
“I’m not going to be some grunt who just goes and gets shot. I’ve got a degree in journalism. They’ll have a good use for me.”
“I just don’t know why you don’t write for a newspaper.”
Todd said back, “You know what?”
“No. What?”
“I think you do. I think you know why I do everything, but you just string me along. You just make me work for the littlest thing.”
“Todd. I will be thirty-two. You might be twenty-three. Up until now I never made anyone work for anything, and look where it got me.”
“Yeah, with your own house that Tom made the down payment on, and the only theatre in town.”
When Todd arrived that night he didn’t tap on the door.
“You didn’t even knock.”
Todd pretended not to hear him as he crossed the room.
“What if I gave up on you?” Fenn said. “You’re taking a lot of chances. What if I said to hell with you and moved on?”
“What if you did?” said Todd
“What if—?”
“Fenn Houghton!”
Todd leaned down and put his mouth on Fenn’s. Fenn cupped Todd’s face in his hands and ran his hand over the thin black beard growing along Todd’s jaw line. They kissed awkwardly like that, catching each other’s waists. Fenn reached up to touch his hair, to hang from the warm pulsing of his neck.
“You’re not pulling back,” Todd said, in wonder. “You always pulled back.”
Fenn held Todd’s face in his hands.
They freed themselves just long enough to get to the sofa, and then continued again, for a long time, tired of all games, finding everything useless but this. A loud car came down Versailles playing mariachi music, and then there was silence.
They parted.
“Is there one reason we shouldn’t just do this shit? Is there one reason we shouldn’t just take this to the bedroom?”
“Or the floor?” Fenn mouthed on his neck.
Todd’s mouth parted and he whispered, “or the kitchen table.”
They nuzzled for a long time. Fenn reached for Todd’s face, and holding it in his hands, staring at the dark eyes ringed by their constant olive shadow, at the straight fall of his slightly hooked nose, at his full mouth, the little beard, the little soul patch under his mouth.
Fenn placed his mouth upon Todd’s, opened to the wetness. He pulled away, he stood up, for just a moment, his knee telling him he wasn’t twenty anymore. No, but he didn’t want to be twenty anymore.
He held out his hand.
Todd took it in his larger one. In the darkening house Fenn could just see the fine hair going up Todd’s arm.
They didn’t say anything. Fenn just led him upstairs. Head hanging in obedience, penis thick and rising with longing, Todd walked up after him.
“No one’s here.”
“No one’s here,” Todd said, hooking his hands into Fenn’s pants.
“No one’s here,” the word here was crushed by Todd’s mouth on Fenn’s.
They kissed for a long time. No one was going anywhere. Nothing was pressing. No one had better show up. The boy who had always been a fact, and a factor on the edge of his mind, was a real thing, and a thing to be made love to, grown up now and free. And maybe, Fenn thought, he had grown up too.
He unbuckled his belt, and Todd held him. Todd shuffled off his jeans and lay on his side, letting Fenn pull down his dark blue briefs, letting his sex fall slowly out of them. While Fenn pulled underwear slowly down Todd’s thighs, Todd pulled off his work shirt, and pulled off his tee shirt, and lay naked. All of his long body, that olive color, the dusting of black hair deeper, thicker on his chest, toward his groin where his sex was dark as Fenn’s nearly, and he pulled at Fenn now, at his trousers, at his underwear, while Fenn’s hands kneaded him, stopped to kiss him on his hips, on his stomach, stopped to take his penis deep in his mouth, as far as possible. Todd, who had gotten to Fenn’s pants and underwear and now had his hands under his shirt, moaned. He clenched his teeth, hands opening and closing impotently, finally playing with his own nipples, rubbing his own chest and stomach, swearing before he sat up and, laying Fenn down, returned the favor.
That very first time it was early evening, gathering twilight, with not much certainty of what would come after, only what was right now. After they’d been steady at tasting each other’s bodies for the better part of an hour, Todd dipped his finger in the olive oil, slid it into Fenn and then, with deliberation, placed himself in Fenn, and began fucking him. He felt Fenn’s smaller, stronger hands on his waist, Fenn’s body under him.
Under him, eyes wide, Fenn pulled him deeper inside. He beheld Todd, neck arched, mouth parted, eyes wide and shining as they looked down on him with a demon light, and then back up to the ceiling. Todd knelt on the bed, fucking him deeply, the long arm reaching down to stroke his cock with a gentleness countering the fierceness of his fucking until, with a startled shout, eyes shut, dry mouth open, hands clenched into fist, they came so hard both all but passed out.
The room went from twilight to dark while they lay there and, at last, Todd rolled to his side.
“You alright?” he asked.
“Yes,” Fenn’s voice was very quiet, almost a ghost of a voice.
“You’re so quiet,” Todd said.
“I just didn’t have anything to say,” Fenn told him. “And I am not in a hurry to speak, or move, or do anything,” Fenn continued. “Because…”
“Because I’m here now.”
Fenn agreed: “You’re here.”
“You look like the Two Wisemen,” Todd greeted Dan and Fenn as they entered the kitchen.
“Why not the Three?” Fenn asked. “Thackeray is with us.”
“I think it’s because we’re old,” Dan said with a crooked smile.”
“Dan, get yourself some punch,” Todd told him, squeezing his shoulder. He wrapped an arm around Fenn and told him, “We are equally grey and equally old now, Houghton.”
“Actually,” Fenn pointed out, “you are grayer than me.”
“You would hold onto that.”
“Of course I would,” Fenn squeezed Todd’s ass.
“He’s grown so big,” Dan marveled over Raphael, and Sheridan said, “Bren’s been waiting for you guys.”
“Me or Fenn?”
“Both.”
Dan looked toward Fenn, and Fenn, beside Todd shrugged.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” Fenn said. “Where’s Bren?”
“In the apartment.”
“I’m going to the restroom first,” Fenn decided.
“You’re back!” Laurel cried as her uncle entered the kitchen. She hugged him, but said, “If I know you, you’re on the way to the bathroom?”
“Exactly.”
“When you get out I have to show you something,” Laurel told him.
“Show me now,” Fenn said.
Smiling, Laurel held out her finger and Fenn murmured, “Goddamn, it’s the North Star.”
“I tried to tell her the size of the diamond wasn’t important,” Caroline said.
“But you didn’t believe it, did you?” Fenn asked his niece.
“No,” Caroline confessed. “I’m afraid I didn’t.”
“It’s going to be outdoors. Lane Brown’s doing it,” Laurel explained. “It will be Reform, so everyone will compromise and no one will be pleased!”
When Fenn came out of the bathroom he met Dan, and they left the house to go down to the apartment. The door was open and the place was, if not crowded, well occupied.
“Dad!” Dylan greeted him.
“You need to go over to the Andersons my oldest apple,” Fenn said, wrapping an arm around his son. “In fact, take Thackeray with you. In fact,” Fenn looked around the whole living room, seeing that Brendan was sitting pensive at his old writing desk—
“Take Lance and Elias too.”
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” Lance said.
“It is,” Fenn told him, someone shortly. “Now go.”
And so they did, and when Fenn had put them out of the house and Brendan had turned his chair around, looking a little weary, Fenn said, “So what is the problem, Mr. Miller?”
Brendan stretched out his limbs, yawning like a lion.
“I am so glad to see the both of you,” he said to Fenn and Dan. “I’m almost finished with the story.”
“I thought you were finished when I read it a month ago.”
“I was, but I was putting in some last bits and… now…”
Dan was reading the last paragraph, and he said, “From what I know of books, it seems like a good place to close.”
“But you haven’t actually read the book,” Fenn and Brendan said together, and then they looked at each other. There had always been something between them, Layla’s uncle and Layla’s oldest friend, Todd’s husband and the first boyfriend of Todd’s niece. This was the apartment Fenn had made for him, the first place he and Kenny had lived together. For that matter, the first place he’d made love to Sheridan. Fenn came to the screen and read it saying: “Oh, Bren, I have read the whole book. And I think you’re afraid to let it go.”
“It’s not missing anything?”
Fenn stood straighter. He took a deep breath and said, “Move over, and trust me in this, okay?”
“A’right?” Brendan raised an eyebrow, and scooted his seat over while Fenn bent down in front of the computer and said, “It’s only missing two words.”
And then Fenn Houghton hit the caps lock and smiling, swiftly he typed:
THE END
