The story, as Martin tells it over several sessions, goes like this: There he was at the peach bar on Pearl, squeezing stone fruits with his left hand until only the pits remained in his fist and then feeding himself the soft, ragged chunks one at a time. Just minding his own business. It was prime Palisade season. In his right hand he held his phone, reading a long text from his friend Candace about yet another hairy bachelor with no vegetables in his fridge and a mattress on the floor who had somehow hurt Candace’s feelings. Candace: who has an MBA and doesn’t need to date losers but gets sucked into their orbits like a comet crashing into a planet of mud; who makes six figures but will reliably spend six months cleaning up after a 35-year-old named Mike (always, always named Mike) with a Fight Club poster sticky-tacked to his bedroom wall; who will reach her long, beautiful arms down this Mike’s clogged kitchen sink to pull out the sludge of coffee grounds that he shouldn’t be dumping down there, and then, once her hands are clean, will send long text messages to Martin to vent, a routine of which Martin has lately tired. Still, he doesn’t complain, not wanting to be accused of acting like a bad friend. (He has learned, after enough sessions, that he is not being a bad friend, because to be implies permanence, whereas a good friend can occasionally act like a bad friend, and this framing, on the whole, is more accurate, if it can even be said that Martin is acting like a bad friend in the first place; but it could also be (another lesson) that his loss of patience is justified, and that he is actually continuing to act like, to be, a good friend by granting Candace the space to make these mistakes without expressing his judgment, etc. etc.) So anyway, there he was, eating his dinner of peaches and reading this whole novel of a text from Candace, and the moon was waning as it sometimes did, and just then a silver SUV came flying up the street going the wrong way and jumped the curb and the bike rack and came crashing through the window not ten feet to Martin’s left.
Here he pauses in the telling, understanding that from the way he’s described it, the crash seems like the important event of the story, even though it isn’t, not really—except for the curious coincidence that the man who was crushed under the car, whom Martin had seen earlier in the evening, looked exactly like his first boyfriend from college. Tyler, a protein-powder-and-three-bananas-for-breakfast type, a whipped-cream-off-my-cock type, a let’s-keep-this-a-secret type, who had dumped Martin after pledging a frat that lived off-campus in a party house known as The Shelter (“pick a bitch and take her home,” explained Sadie, a senior who lived, for reasons never discovered, on a freshman hall).
But no, the important thing about this night at the peach bar was that when Martin looked up at the sudden and violent commotion, at the shockwave of glass and the screams of innocents and the squelch of ripe peaches, he also discovered that a man he didn’t know was looking at him from a table across the room. The man was staring at him. It was almost like the man was looking through him, behind him, only there was nothing behind him. Martin was startled, but returned the other man’s eye contact anyway, with a directness that would have been too confrontational with anyone else, even with someone like Candace who loved a good staring contest. But Martin couldn’t help himself.
The man was handsome—handsome in exactly the manner that Martin had always wanted a man to be handsome, the handsome of his imagination wrought in flesh and blood: his eyes sad, sunken, defiantly uncharitable; his mouth downturned in what anyone else would have confused for a frown; his hair buzzed almost to the pate. He bore the sinister charm of a miser who has finally decided to spend all that he has saved, of a monk who has finally given up on his vows. Even the lime green of his shirt was liberatory and sardonic, cleverly glowing among the bar’s shadowy pinks and yellows and the flashing red of the ambulance that had appeared on the scene. Martin took in the man’s thin arms and torso, thinner than his own, so thin he thought he could crush the man just by straddling him. Which he was already imagining: the crush of their bodies, the cushion of his skin, the sweat pressed between them. He could see the man’s face in a gasp, pained but deliberate under the strain, not once telling Martin to stop crushing him—begging, even, for more.
“I’ve never had that feeling before,” he says. Seated in the armchair, he gazes up at the oil painting of a field of sunflowers. During his sessions with Dr. Scanlon his eyes trace and retrace the pillowy brushstrokes. It seems every week the office looks a little different, even if it’s just a throw pillow on the couch that wasn’t there before, or books on the shelf that used to be in a pile on the desk. The paint on the walls has changed a couple of times in the two years Martin has been seeing Dr. Scanlon. The sunflowers, though, have never moved. “I mean I could feel it in the moment, that I was feeling something new. The thought even crossed my mind that what I was experiencing was love at first sight.”
“That’s terrific,” Dr. Scanlon says.
“Well,” says Martin.
Because the story goes on, at the next session: Eric (for that was the man’s name, and also Martin’s stepdad’s name, which made him anxious at first) invited him to dinner, then two days later to another, more expensive dinner, then to his apartment, and then to his bedroom.
It wasn’t the crushing kind of sex Martin had imagined, but it was still aggressive, involving much hair pulling and name calling, and many different types of lubricant for different purposes. Soon they had a regular arrangement: dinner, often a walk through Cheesman, sometimes a drink, one time a round of bowling that bored both of them, and then sex.
Martin wondered if things were moving too quickly. He wondered if they were putting too much emphasis on the sex. They were not, anyway, getting to know each other on any other level. Their conversations at dinner and along the sidewalks comprised bland observations about the day’s weather, about the weather to come, about the freshness of seasonal fruits and vegetables. Eric’s behavior was so orderly and controlled that there was nothing to interpret in his body language. He made no Freudian slips. He was a man of no surprises. In the bedroom, he was clear and direct about what he wanted, but no more expressive than a doctor ordering a test, and when they were finished with their exercises, he never lay spent in the bed, but would jump up right away to wash and clean. He made Martin get up, too, so he could change the sheets.
The result of this routine was that a month had passed and Martin felt he knew as little about Eric as he had that first night at the peach bar. Of course, whenever Eric knelt behind him to lick flavored jellies out of his anal divide, whenever he inserted four of his fingers into Martin’s rectum and held them in there gently quivering, Martin had to accept that what they were sharing was undeniably an intimate and mutual knowledge, from which was bound to grow a kind of respect, and one that he did not share with anyone else. This much was instructive, at least, but beyond that it was difficult—certainly it was difficult while another man’s hands pried open the unseen corners of his body—to get a clear idea of what he wanted from this intimacy, what he hoped for, what it all meant.
“There’s nothing wrong with that,” Dr. Scanlon says.
Martin shifts his gaze to the sunlight in the window and says, “I know.”
Eric changed his name: Bolívar, he said, call him Bolívar, but that took a while to get right. Martin kept stuttering over it, and even when it took, he kept putting the emphasis on the wrong syllable, on the o. He asked if he was even Hispanic, at which Bolívar glared at him, and Martin thought he’d offended him, so he said never mind, it was none of his business.
They played minigolf. They rode horses. They ate cantaloupe and free-range chicken and egg salad sandwiches and charcuterie boards and fried squid and stuffed mushrooms. Martin learned to take the whole fist. They bought fresh basil at the farmer’s market and made pesto and spread it on water crackers. They rented a cabin for a long weekend and went on a long hike and crossed paths with a herd of mountain goats that paid them no mind. They ate Korean barbecue and Italian meringue and Polish sausages. They tried various things with their feet and concluded that neither of them had a thing for feet. They went ice skating. Martin suggested karaoke but Eric—Bolívar—said no, so they went to the opera instead. They sent care packages to friends overseas. They made donations and purchases. They broke a riding crop. They ate hamburgers heaped with relish and pickles.
Candace was desperate to meet Martin’s mystery man and suggested a double date; she and her long, beautiful arms and her stubby boyfriend du jour, Mike, who worked in software or sales or maybe software sales. Martin realized he had no idea what Bolívar did for a living, so while they shared a pan of lasagna one night he asked, and Bolívar said it was complicated, but Martin pressed him on it, and finally his boyfriend said:
“Imagine the world is the size and shape of a pear. Drop the pear into a pool of molten lead, and what do you think happens? Does the lead give way to the pear, which is as heavy as the earth, or does the pear disintegrate? Where does it go? I’m talking about the conservation of pear-mass. You’re not following; that’s okay. Imagine instead a boulder the size of your body at the top of a hill where no one has ever set foot. How did it get there? Was it always there, and if so, how big was it before the wind and the rain eroded it to the size of you? Or, if not, did some unobservable force roll it uphill? What if it were any other stone? No? I’ve confused you again—I know, it’s very technical. Imagine, if you can, a hive of honeybees. Try to tally them—is there a number of bees, or no number of bees? Would knowing the exact number of bees in the hive change how you taste the honey? Does your answer change if the bees know that they’re being counted? I mean in the actuarial sense; what is the risk of accounting? Is the risk of being stung greater than the risk of getting the wrong answer?… Still? I thought I was being pretty clear. Anyway, I sit at a desk and I inculcate.”
“Or something like that,” Martin says.
And Dr. Scanlon says, “Hmm.”
The red flags started popping up: When Sheridan (Bolívar had changed his name again) showed up for the double date with Candace and Mike, he had grown a full head of hair, a swooping mop that covered his ears, even though that morning when Martin woke up in his bed, he’d had his usual buzzcut. The sight of him made Martin laugh. He wondered if Sheridan had gotten himself a wig for the date, but as the four of them sat at the snail bar knocking back course after course of hot, garlicky gastropods, his boyfriend’s hair grew even longer, often in quick, effortful spurts of an inch or so, so that by the time they were paying the check his hair was already down to his waist.
“He seems serious,” Candace said while Mike and Sheridan were in the bathroom.
“I think I like that about him,” Martin said.
“No, yeah,” Candace said.
When they got back to his apartment, Sheridan, carrying the ends of his hair spooled around his arm, went into the bathroom. When he came out, his head was shaved again and he was holding a pair of thick ropes that he had fashioned from the discarded hair. He wanted to use the ropes for a sexual game that required his hands to be tied to the bedposts.
Martin, who normally wasn’t into that kind of thing, saw for the first time in his boyfriend’s eyes a sense of desperation, which maybe had always been there but which Martin hadn’t noticed, and which, now that it was apparent, eclipsed all his seriousness, his cleanliness, his sensitivity, his perceptive and piercing silences, all his intelligence; and this sudden vision of him as a hungry creature disgusted Martin. It filled him with pity. What else could he feel about him? He felt he had no choice but to accept the ropes, lovingly and beautifully made, and tie Sheridan down, and when he was flat on his back Martin sat on him and crushed him, crushed him just as he had imagined doing when first he had seen him at the peach bar. It was even more satisfying than he could have hoped: Sheridan begged for release from the ropes; he squealed underneath him; he gasped for air; and all night Martin laughed above him and wondered why he had never fallen so fully in love before.
How wonderful it was to smother his love like this! To stop worrying that it might suffocate him and just suffocate him, to bury him in his love, waterboard him with it, clobber him with it. What he thought had been a shallow acquaintance of sexual exchange, a relationship with no depth beyond the penetrations they practiced so regularly, Martin now realized had been a prelude for the real unlocking of his desires. He had never felt so free, so free and so outraged at all the life that he had lived that had not been free before now.
After Martin had had his third orgasm and cut the ropes and fallen asleep, Sheridan went to sleep, too, in his arms, and didn’t even make him get up so he could change the sheets.
The sunflowers have become a glossy photograph of a barn on a hill. It isn’t the same.
“Do you like it? A friend sent it to me,” Dr. Scanlon says. “It’s called The Barn.”
They went on a cruise. Scherehofstadt-Z-Adler-Tonga-Rafifulstikniss-CoriSori-VanOssman-Coeur took Martin on a tour of the Norwegian fjords, the sight of which made Martin cry. It was all so beautiful, so beautiful and so doomed, and he thought he might be pregnant, and everyone else on the boat was a Swedish pensioner, and then while they were out of town Candace wrote saying that one of the old Mikes had died in a bike accident and she couldn’t sleep because he was haunting her apartment, so Martin asked to go home early and Scherehofstadt-Z-Adler-Tonga-Rafifulstikniss-CoriSori-VanOssman-Coeur booked them a pair of last-minute tickets, but it was three layovers, three airlines, thirty-five hours. He read to Martin from The Dream Songs the whole time. When they got home, Martin turned down his offer to split a lasagna and went home.
He stood inside the bedroom that his boyfriend had never seen and knew, deep down, that he was longing for someone less lovable. He finally understood why Candace went back time and again to unkempt men in underfurnished apartments with bad dress sense and knowledge only of the missionary position, and he was jealous suddenly of his friend, jealous of the stability her mediocre taste afforded her, and he found he was selfishly delighted at her misery. But when he visited her apartment, his jealousy vanished quickly, for it was clear what anguish Candace was in because of the ghost of the dead Mike, which was sitting in her favorite armchair reading her magazines and whistling old theme songs with the shrill insistence of a tea kettle. It was no wonder she couldn’t sleep. As they stood in the living room wearing earmuffs, looking at the problem and trying to name it, Martin decided the dead man didn’t make for such an unattractive roommate, and he suggested to Candace that maybe they could take turns hosting the Mike until he fulfilled his spiritual purpose and could move on from this life.
“Sounds good to me,” Candace said. She crossed her arms and shivered.
Martin approached the Mike slowly, as if he were a wild animal liable to spook, but he just kept reading his magazine, flipping idly through the pages. Martin got close enough to see the Mike’s five o’clock shadow, preserved from the moment of the collision. After some hesitation, Martin placed his hand on what was made to look like a shoulder but was really just dim air. Startled, the Mike stopped whistling. He looked up at Martin just then with a mature, knowing look, the kind he had been incapable of in life. Like he understood, understood everything, understood the answers of life and the secrets of death, but also that Martin was inviting him into his home, and perhaps into his heart, and that such openness was not a gift given lightly; and seeing the Mike seeing this, Martin felt himself falling into a helpless love for the dead man, and just like that he disappeared. The magazine he was reading fell into the armchair with a soft thud. Martin and Candace were left with a ringing in their ears for several seconds and at length they both started to cry, but neither one could say exactly why. After a while they dried their eyes and blew their noses and went out for shaved ice. When Martin got home that night he called Scherehofstadt-Z-Adler-Tonga-Rafifulstikniss-CoriSori-VanOssman-Coeur, who was now Tom, and explained that love was overstimulating, that he wasn’t ready for it, that he was probably too fragile for it, and anyway he couldn’t see him anymore, he had to be alone for a while. When he had gotten all of this off his chest, Tom said nothing, and Martin asked if he was still there, and Tom said:
“Now I have some idea of what the sun thinks of the clouds.”
“What do you suppose he meant by that?” Dr. Scanlon asks.
“I think,” Martin begins, but the words have already escaped him, gone wherever words go, and left him staring into the empty spaces that hug the edges of everything in the office. The window is open. The barn is blue.
