Beautiful Lies

twelve

I rang the buzzer beside the red door but there was no answer. I gave a dollar to a homeless man pushing a shopping cart filled with doll carcasses and tin cans while I waited, waved to a cop I knew from Five Roses as he and his partner cruised down Avenue A. Some kids were shouting on the playground across the street in Tompkins Square Park. I thought of Justin Wheeler and wondered where he was today. I rang the buzzer again and then tried the knob. I was surprised when the door pushed open.

“Hello?” I called before stepping onto a tiny landing before a steep staircase that led into blackness. When there was no answer, I went back onto the street and looked around for another red door but saw that this was the only one. I leaned back inside.

“Jake?”

I heard a pounding then, the sound of metal on metal. I moved inside again and let the door shut behind me. I felt my way up the dark staircase, the plaster wall cool to my hand, the tall stairway so narrow that if I fanned out my elbows just a little, I could touch both walls. At the top, I stepped onto the floor of a gigantic loft, dark except for the far corner, which was lit by bright artist’s lights on giant tripods. He stood there, oblivious to my entry, bringing a large hammer down hard on a smooth arc of metal that stood twice as tall and twice as wide as he was.

Writers are first and foremost observers. We watch. We lose ourselves in the watching and then the telling of the world we find. Often we feel on the fringes, in the margins of life. And that’s where we belong. What you are a part of, you cannot observe. I lost myself in the watching of this stranger who’d shared my bed the night before. I watched as the taut, defined muscles on his back tensed and writhed beneath his skin with each hammer strike, as the sheen of sweat on his body reflected the harsh light from the high lamps. I watched the way his fingers gripped the wooden handle of the hammer and how his knuckles were white and swollen, the veins as thick as rope. I felt the vibration, the heavy clang that filled the large space with each blow. I looked around the room and in the black saw dark forms lurking, born from the same hammer. I felt it electric in the air, coming off of him in waves. Anger. He was punishing that piece of metal. He was punishing himself. Something in my belly churned, some combination of fear and desire.

He lifted the hammer and paused midswing, let it drop to his side, and turned around. His face was flushed and drawn. He wore a look of interrupted intensity, as though I’d walked in on him making love.

“Ridley,” he said, though I wasn’t sure how he knew I was there.

I was quiet a second, feeling embarrassed for standing there watching him as I had. “Hi,” I said finally, moving toward him. My footfalls echoed loudly off the walls and ceiling.

He wiped the sweat from his brow with his forearm and put the hammer on the floor.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said, stepping into the light.

“I forgot to tell you the buzzer doesn’t work,” he said, looking at me strangely. “I left the door open and hoped you’d give it a push.”

I nodded. “I did that.”

“I had a feeling you would.”

He looked different to me. Something in his face was hard. In the harsh light, there was no mistaking the marks on his body, the line from his neck to his collarbone clearly the mark of something sharp and angry, the starburst of scarred flesh on his shoulder which looked like a gunshot wound, though I admit I’d never seen one before. Who was this guy? Why had I revealed so much of myself to this stranger?

I took an unconscious step back from him, but he reached out for my arm, put a gentle hand on my wrist.

“It’s okay,” he said, as if he’d read the sudden uncertainty in my eyes. “I go to a weird place when I’m working. I get lost in my head.”

I nodded. I understood that, of course. I reached a hand for the scar on his neck and saw him flinch a little. I paused, looked him in the eye, and kept reaching for it. My finger traced the smooth white line. It felt softer than the rest of his skin, like a delicate gauze. I felt him shudder beneath my touch. He closed his eyes. I put my hand on the thick scar on his shoulder; a rubber ball beneath his flesh. There was just one word in my mind. Pain.

I moved into him and didn’t care that he was covered with sweat. I didn’t ask him then how he’d gotten those scars. Partly because I wasn’t sure I wanted to know and partly because I could sense he wasn’t ready to tell me. Asking seemed invasive, seemed to violate an unspoken agreement that he’d tell me the things I needed to know in time. Is it possible to be wary of someone and trust him, too? He tightened his arms around me and held on to me hard, then released me, started peeling off my clothes, his mouth on my neck.

The harsh white light gave me pause as he stripped me down. Not that I resisted. Not that I wasn’t tugging at the button on his jeans and sliding them down his hips with as much desperation as he was undoing buttons and clasps to get to my skin. There was no hiding beneath this light. Every flaw, every imperfection would be revealed. But don’t we all crave that as much as we fear it? To show ourselves completely, to be loved anyway. He took me hard and deep on the floor on top of the pile of our clothes, the zipper of my coat digging into my back. It was an earthquake.

We lay there awhile, just quiet, looking at each other. Words seemed cheap, unnecessary. I could hear the faintest hum of street noise, could see his computer glowing blue in a little room off the loft that I guessed was his office. I was starting to get a little cold, even though he was beside me. I looked into his face; the softness, the kindness I’d seen there had returned during our lovemaking and I was glad of it.

“Look,” he said, taking my hand. “We’ve got things to talk about.”

I hate it when people say that. It’s never good.

“Like what?” I said, laughing a little against my nervousness. “Wait, I know…you’re a Mormon Fundamentalist and you want to take me as your third spiritual wife.”

“Uh, no.”

“You work for the CIA and you’re taking off on a top-secret mission and you don’t know when we’ll see each other again?”

“Wrong again.”

“You really are a cabaret dancer?”

“Seriously, Ridley,” he said, propping himself up on an elbow. “About your problem, remember? I told you I knew someone who might be able to help you.”

I nodded.

“I was going to tell you as soon as you got here but—”

“My tongue was in your mouth?”

“Right,” he said with a light laugh. He reached a hand out and pushed a strand of hair out of my eyes. He’d done that before and I liked the way it felt, as if we were intimates already. I looked away from him. I had almost successfully put the whole mess out of my head, and now I braced myself as the waves of fear and sadness came crashing back. They washed over me and in a second I was soaked with dread.

“Well…tell me.”

“I’d rather show you. Let’s get dressed and head back to my place.”