“You do live in a strange city,” Lanya said. “Maybe I do too.” She looked at Denny. “Where do you live?”
“Right here.” Denny frowned. “Most of the time.”
“Oh.” After a moment, Lanya said: “You two’ve been at it? Why don’t you two make it then—” she moved her tennis shoes from beneath her, raised her knees, dropped her meshed fists between—“and I’ll watch. I’ve been in the other room when two guys were balling. But I’ve never been in the same bed. The idea sort of turns me on.”
Kid said: “I just meant—”
“I know,” Lanya said. “You want Denny and me to ball, and you want to watch. Well—” she shrugged, tossed her hair and grinned—“I think you’re cute—” at Denny. “I wouldn’t mind that.”
“Gee,” Denny said, “I don’t know if…” and shifted into some other emotional gear: “because you see that’s what we were…” and into another: “before. It was okay. But…” He went forward on his fists, lowered his haunches. “It’s just that it wasn’t her…” He glanced over the edge. “Like she said. And I’d never done it that way either.”
“Oh.” Lanya said, pushing her elbows together.
Kid thought: I still don’t know her name. “Hey,” he said to Lanya. “Come here.”
Lanya pursed her lips, hesitated with stiffened arms; then they un-stiffened. She came forward.
“You too, motherfucker.” Denny practically fell against his side. Kid caught the boy’s neck in the crook of his arm. The blades swung beyond Denny’s face, dim in half light. Kid pulled his arm tight around Lanya’s shoulder, his hand an epaulet over blouse, collar bone, muscle.
“If you don’t play, you don’t watch.”
He had been planning to squeeze them affectionately, maybe say something else funny, and let go. But, for a moment, he was aware they were two entirely different temperatures; and something in his own heat was defined, resolved, released. And Denny (his shoulder hot and still powdery dry) reached across Kid’s chest, put two fingers against Lanya’s cheek (her neck against Kid’s arm cooler and softer, as though it had been recently dried after rain) and said, “You’re…” and stopped when she reached out and put her palm on Denny’s neck. Kid said: “Yeah…” She watched, something happening in her face, which became quiet laughter, her eyes going back and forth between Kid’s and Denny’s, pulling herself closer.
Denny’s head suddenly moved. His laugh back was sharp, shrill. Still, whatever tensions were in it eased in it.
“You open your mouth after this morning, cocksucker,” Kid said, “and it won’t be my dick you get in it—”
“Kid…!” Lanya’s protest was real.
But Denny caught Lanya’s forearm, turned his face into her palm.
Something in the machinery between Kid’s belly and loin tightened. Denny was trying to climb over him. Kid moved a leg between them—something scraped. Lanya got one elbow under her. Kid’s hand dragged her back. It’s clumsy, Kid thought. It is clumsy! and a despair that he had been trying to hold in suspension for—how long? broke. He thought he was going to cry. What came out was a great, voiceless gasp.
Denny lay his head down on Lanya’s hand that was on Kid’s chest. Then he said, softly, “Aren’t we gonna take our clothes off…this time?”
Lanya moved her other hand down Denny’s head till she was holding his ear.
“Don’t pull,” Denny said.
“I’m not pulling,” she said. “I’m tickling.”
“Oh,” Denny said. And then: “That’s nice.” And then, raising his head, “I think you better take that thing off—at least.”
(Kid looked at his hand still in the air. It was quieter in the other room.)
Lanya suddenly sat. “Oh wow. Sure.” She wore one of her stranger expressions. “I didn’t even see!”
Kneeling over him, she took Kid’s wrist, got the clasp. Kid was completely astonished when Denny’s hands joined hers and, with no clumsiness, the blades opened, fell away: the harness was lifted from his tingling wrist.
Lanya put it on the window ledge by the blind, where it stood, upright, a long, bright crown.
Kid turned his freed hand in the air, looking at the hirsute joints and ruined tips flex, horny palms and knuckles folding, opening, till, tired, it began to waver, fall. Someone tugged at his belt. Someone pulled at his vest shoulder. He laughed, turning, while through some door in another room a lot of people left.
They made love.
It was energetic. It was graceful. It was intense. He was a warmth that moved around and between them. They were warmths that moved around him, between him and each other. Once, eyes closed against the damp blanket, he moved his hand across her rib cage, brushing beneath her breasts with the knuckle of his thumb (she caught her breath…) till he reached her arm (…then let it out) and followed her arm to where her elbow bent on Denny’s belly, and on to where her hand held Denny’s penis.
After moments, his hand came away, against the embankment of her hip, crossed it. He pressed his fingertips in the hair over her pubic bone, slid them down to cup, to press in. First one, then the other, he touched their genitals. Finally he pushed himself to his knees, put one knee across them, watched them watch him, blinked. Sweat dribbled his cheek. A drop caught in his eyelash and shook. He bent his head.
Is it only an hour, he wondered, that encompassed three people’s four orgasms? Now I know why, though foreplay can be delineated in all its fascinating and psychotropic detail, a poet must use asterisks or blank paper for orgasmic mechanics that satisfying: they open to something so wide you can now understand why, when sex is that good, you may say, “The sex is not the most important part,” and feel these words analog some shadow of truth.
Then he remembered, amidst his auto-pontifications, there were two other people who would have to agree with him before he could even suspect such meanderings correct. Grinning, he pushed up on his hands, climbed over one of them (stopped to stare at the sleeping face, full up, lips momentarily pressing, nostrils flaring, two fingers coming to scratch the nose and fall away, still in sleep), looked over at the other (this one on the side, lips parted, lower eyelid mashed slightly open revealing an albumen line, breath whispering against curled knuckles) and, after taking the pen from Lanya’s pocket and putting it in a buttonhole of his vest, climbed down, dragging his clothes on top of him.
He wondered, if they woke, would they think he had gone to the bathroom.
In the doorway, he pulled on his pants, put on his vest. There was a cold line against his chest…The pen. The chain around him was hot. He ran his fingertips along it, concerned and trying to recall why.
In the strangely quiet hall, he went to the porch door, opened it. And squinted. Gold trapezoids lay high up the lapped-plank wall. His moist skin was slathered with bronze. Each hair on his forearm glowed amber.
He heard his own loud breath; he closed his mouth.
Looking down at his chest, before his vision blurred with tears, he saw that one prism had laid out on his skin a tiny chain of color.
The house was perfectly silent behind him.
He rubbed his eyes, shook his head.
The tearing stopped, anyway.
He raised his eyes again, looked out the porch window at the horizon again—
When he’d first moved to New York City to go to Columbia, he had brought with him an absolute panic of the Bomb. It had been October; he had no Thursday morning classes, was still half-asleep in the sweaty sheets of a persistent, Indian summer. Sirens woke him—he remembered no scheduled test. A jet snarled somewhere on the sky. He got chills and immediately tried to logic them away. This is the sort of coincidence, he thought, blinking at the dull window, that can ruin a good day.
Then the window filled with blinding yellow light.
He’d leaped from the bed, taking the sheets with him. His throat cramped and his heart exploded while he watched gold fire spill window to window down the tenement across the street.
The fireball! he thought, beyond the pain in his terrified body. The light’s here now. The shock and the sound will arrive in four seconds, five seconds and I will be dead…