This is the continuation of the Jay and Michael stories begun in What Didn't Happen and The Good Guys and continued in Mercy is the House of God. You can read this without reading those, but you might want to read them first, or at least refresh your memory.
“This is a horrible fucking place,” Jay Strickland said.
“And let me be very clear about how fucking horrible this place is.
“It’s not horrible like four years of high school was horrible, and it’s not horrible like borderline depression, and it’s not horrible like when I felt I was losing you and then when I got a phone call from your mother that said you were missing. It’s not horrible like when I sat in that cabin on Christmas Eve and thought you might be dead. This,” Jay Strickland said, as they sat on the sand dune, “is an ordinary kind of horrible. It’s the kind of horrible you want to have, the horrible of being in a shitty, dull place and paying too much for too little food. This is common horribleness, and when you can afford to go on and on about it, then life is otherwise pretty good.”
Beside him, in baggy brown swim trunks, his very ordinary and pale chest exposed to the sun, was the curly haired Michael Cleveland, whose eyes were behind black shades with rounded flames and who muttered, “Fuck,” because he’d been trying to light a cigarette against the wind and no amount of shielding his hand made a light possible.
“Hold on,” James Strickland said, taking the cigarette and using his white fedora to shield his hand. He bent down in a particular way and a moment later came the smell of burning tobacco. He handed it to Michael and out of his madras shirt, Jay took a cigarette for himself and lit it off of Michael’s.
“The ordinary kind of bullshit,” Michael said.
“Do you know,” Michael began, “when I was gone I read the Bible a lot, and I remember reading about Jesus taking seven demons from Mary Magdalene, and then I read something else where Jesus talked about someone being exorcised and then more demons coming back worse than before. That sort of fucked me up.”
“I think it’s smart to not take Jesus too seriously,” Jay said. “If you read that book too much, you’ll lose your mind and, quite frankly, neither one of us can afford to loose much more of our minds again.”
This has been the third time that year they had traveled west to North Dakota, and now they stopped here, a few hours east of Chicago. Jay had shipped their bags ahead, saying they needed only backpacks and the things they carried.
The dune was almost clean, but there was, coming up through the grass, the fair share of cigarette butts—to which they would contribute—and plastic bottles and, yes, there it was, an old condom. But beneath them the white beach spread to the deep blue water, and before them stretched the great lake till its horizon reached a deeper blue and then touched the pale blue of the sky. People milled about on the beach and a red house on stilts was the life guard’s tower.
“Well, yes,” Michael blew smoke out of his nose, “I never even looked at the Bible until the end of last year, so I see what you’re saying, but does it make sense to say that there are certain parts that speak to me? Like little echoes, and I wonder about Mary Magdalene and think, was she ever afraid that those demons would come back? When she was on her best day and the sky was bright and sunny, did she ever get afraid that she would go back to that place?”
“Do you?”
Michael leaned back on his elbows. Jay was not sure if he’d grown the little beard on purpose or not.
“Yes,” he said.
“When we first got together, all those years ago I was so happy. I was happy, but I was still earthbound if that makes sense. I still felt the old depression, knew I needed to take care of myself and shit, was used to it, knew the black dog wasn’t far off. And then I began to decline, to spiral down, and Mickey Avedon… well ,you know what that did to me.
“But lately, after Christmas, especially after I found out you had come for me, I felt like all of that was lifted from me, like this demon that had been on my back, sometimes heavy and sometimes less heavy for thirty years was just—poof—gone. And the truth is. I get a little afraid when I’m feeling happy that he’ll come back. And when he comes back I won’t know what to do with him.”
“I need to clean my glasses.”
“What?”
Jay repeated, squinting through them, “I need to clean my glasses.”
“I was talking about—”
“I know what you were talking about,” Jay said, pushing his glasses back up his nose, “but I don’t know what to say to that, and the fact remains, I need to clean my glasses.”
While Michael shook his head, Jay said, “But I do know what to say to that. Let’s get up off this hill and go back to the water. It’s the only reason we came, and no matter what everything else is, the water isn’t horrible.”
Climbing down the dune is far easier than climbing up. All through this dune are paths leading up and leading down, and there are others walking through the grass. Any path will take you down, and as they travel theirs they see, lying half in and half out of the grass, a woman red and freckled by the sun who must come out here every day she is so hot dog colored. She looks about sixty and in her black bathing suit her legs are splayed open in a way that makes Jay smile to himself and think it’s a good think he isn’t thirty years older and one hundred percent more heterosexual.
After the splayed open woman, the path descends to a little sand valley and on the other side of this rises another dune, but that dune is not their concern. They are turning toward the water. The walking is hard and hot on their feel till they come to where the water packs the sand and walk over the pebbles and warm waves heated by all the ninety degree days before this cooler one.
“I would say it’s like liquid glass,” Jay says as, in his white shorts and Madras shirt he wades in up to his waist, “except liquid glass is a real thing, and it doesn’t feel like this at all.”
The water is transparent at the shore and chalky blue beyond, glinting with sunlight as heavy waves wash over both of them.
Michael laughs and splashes him.
“It’s like water. The water’s like water.”
“You can stop splashing me now.”
“I could,” Michael agrees, but he doesn’t.
“Make yourself useful,” Jay says, and hands Michael his glasses.
While Michael places them into the case he wears around his neck to hold his boyfriend’s glasses, Jay takes a great breath and waits for the next big wave. When it comes, rolling up milky blue and translucent, he bobs down and rolls into it. He turns like clothes in a washing machine, does a little circle where his whole world is water, feels the wave carrying him to the land, comes up again.
Michael looks back at him, and Jay smiles. He cannot tell the look on Michael’s face. Jay dives into the water again. Eyes closed he moves for Michael and yanks him by his calves down into the water.
Michael comes up spitting out water and shaking his head.
“You’re a horrible person,” Michael spits out water, and his face is hidden by the dark seaweedy mass of his hair.
“I am.”
“I could have lost your glasses.”
As he hands them back to Jay, Jay Strickland says, “I would have to wear the old pair then.”
Jay stands, arms crossed over his chest, legs planted wide apart in the water.
He sees two boys walking along the beach. He can’t stop looking at them. One boy is black, the other white. Now, to him, children look like children. They may be sixteen, but sixteen looks like childhood, and their bodies are spare and tight and muscled, but spare and tight and muscled like kids come out of childhood who haven’t lived life or eaten enough biscuits. The white boy is deeply tanned and wears silver shades. The Black boy is in green trunks. Both of them are completely dry, so they are here to be seen. Cheerfully they wave at Jay and Michael and Jay waves back.
“It’s the funniest thing,” he says, watching them depart. “There was a time when I would sympathize with sad and unhappy teenagers, and look back and remember what it was like, but now I see the beautiful ones too, and become so happy. I am happy for them that they’re setting out on life and everything is right for them right now. I don’t know what happened to them yesterday or what’s happening tomorrow, but right now they are beautiful and happy, and that makes me feel beautiful too.”
Jay stops talking.
“Am I rambling?”
He looks up at Michael who is looking down on him, smiling.
“No,” he says. “You never really ramble. Even when you do.”
The waves push against them so they both sway a little, then regain their balance. A gull gives a cheerful screech and skims just above them.
“Life is actually a pretty good thing,” Michael says.
Jay takes a wet strand of Michael’s hair
“You’re starting to look untidy. I think I’d like to cut this.”
There was nothing more doleful than an old Christmas hymn. They should have been happy in that saccharine way if they were like the rest of Christmas, but the one thing that had never gone away from the old hymns was the ancient longing, that sweet terrible sadness. Jay never let carols or recordings that weren’t less than fifty years old play. In the darkness of his room, the choir sang:
O little town of Bethlehem
How still we see thee lie
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep
The silent stars go by
Yet in thy dark streets shineth
The everlasting Light
The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee tonight
Michael, exhausted, had said he needed to shower. In one last bid for peace and love he asked Jay if he would come with him. Jay said he would not, that he was tired himself and had bathed and needed sleep. He lay in the annoying doorless room, covers over him, truly tired now that he allowed himself to relax, now that Michael was here. Westminster Choir sang over his sleeping head and as his body untightened after the fear and the anticipation of death, hot tears came to his eyes. Jay Strickland, who never really cried, felt himself doing so now..
Now the choir was singing something else about silent nights and dark nights where all hope seemed gone and there was one light and the light was coming from a stable where a child was born. In the song it was bleak and midwinter, or the earth was cold like a stone or it was snowing even though it never snowed in Palestine. Dark streets shinethed with the everlasting light. The songs all sort of went together He did not notice how the shower water had stopped long ago. James Strickland did not entirely notice that he was still crying, just a little. How ridiculous. How foolish. This was not something he did.
“I’m sorry James,” Michael said.
This was the second time he had called him James tonight, and in fifteen years, not since they had met as freshmen at Saint Ignatius, Michael had never called him James.
“I am sorry.”
Jay said nothing. The heavy comforter was pulled up and Michael climbed into the bed and pulled the cover over them.
“You said you were going to the couch,” Jay made himself say. “I’m so upset with you.”
“I know, Michael said. “But please don’t let’s go to bed without you holding me and me holding you. I swear I’ll go if you want me to.”
His voice was sober and desperate and Jay thought to himself, after all your sadness, you become so angry you turn you back on him like this. You are so foolish. He did not turn around, though he did let Michael wrap his arms about him
“You’re naked,” Jay accused.
“When did either one of us ever sleep with clothes on, and what do you not know about me?”
Jay knew he was like candle wax, melting now, but soon to go back to hardness, not ready to forgive. He turned around and let Michael into his arms and he wasn’t sure which one of them kissed first, and when they had kissed and their limbs were linking nothing else mattered. While the carols continued in the lit living room, they gave themselves up to lovemaking in the darkness of the cabin bedroom. Jay was shocked out of himself by an orgasm so bright it lit the darkness of the night, shocked out of his anger. They shook together in the darkness, looking into the shadows of the other’s open mouth and open eyes, settling on saying nothing, not even cleaning the pool of semen welling between their bellies.
