“Javier,” I whispered back. “Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve kissed anyone?”
He looked up at me. “Does it matter?”
“Kissing is serious business.”
He kissed me again. “That didn’t seem so serious, did it?”
“Yes,” I said. “It did.”
We didn’t speak for a long time.
“I have to go,” he whispered. “He’s waiting for me.”
“You’ll cook for him?”
“Yes.”
“I confess to being jealous of your uncle.”
“You’re not a jealous man,” he said.
“Maybe I am.”
“No.”
He was so certain of who I was. I didn’t want him to leave. He stepped closer. I started to say something but he placed his finger on my lips. I didn’t really know what I was going to say. And anyway, sometimes it didn’t matter, the things we said. It just didn’t matter.
He didn’t want a ride home. “My uncle doesn’t live far—I want to walk.” Maybe he needed some time to think. About me. Maybe. I wanted to stop. I wanted to stop writing the story of who he was and what he was thinking. Writing that story was starting to hurt.
When he left, I listened to his footsteps as he made his way down the stairs. I rushed out onto the balcony and watched him walk down the street. He turned around when he reached the corner. He waved. “I knew you’d be standing there,” he yelled.
I didn’t yell anything back.
I just stood there, leaning on the railing to the balcony. And watched him as he disappeared into the horizon of the city.
6.
Monday morning, I got this text from him: I thought about you when I woke up this morning. I read the text and then re-read it. And then re-read it again.
I felt like a school boy reading a note from a girl. No. A note from a boy.
I didn’t know how to answer his text. I only engaged in the practice because my nephews and nieces demanded it of me. We wrote silly and affectionate things to each other. But this was different. Finally around noon, I texted him back. Stay safe. That’s what I wrote. That’s when it occurred to me that I was afraid. I didn’t like to think of Javier walking the streets of Juárez, doing an errand, going to a store and getting killed, randomly for no reason. What good does it do to be afraid? He was right. Of course, he was right. But so many people had left already. Why couldn’t he leave too? I knew the answer to that question even before I asked it. He wasn’t the leaving kind. He loved his Juárez. I could see that in his eyes, in his unshaven face, in the way he moved and talked. I could almost taste his love for that poor and wretched city in his kisses. It enraged me that Juárez had become so chaotic and violent and capricious, a city hungry for the blood of its own people. How had this happened? I was sick to death of it, sick to death of the body count, sick to death that every killing went unprosecuted and unpunished. You could kill anybody. And what would happen? Nothing. The fucking city no longer cared who was killed. Soon, they would just be stepping over the bodies. Stay safe. Stay safe. Stay safe.
7.
The next Sunday, he appeared at my door. It was early. “They admitted my uncle into the hospital last night.”
“You look tired,” I said. And he did look tired. Tired and sad, his white shirt wrinkled.
“I slept in a chair in his room.”
We walked up the stairs into my apartment.
“I like your world,” he said as he stared at the new painting I was working on. He stared at the words on my computer. “Were you writing?”
“Yes.”
“You write on Sundays?”
“It’s like going to Mass.”
He smiled. “So this is communion.”
“Something like that.”
“What are you writing?”
“A poem.”
“About what?”
“About what’s going on in Juárez.”
“Why would you want to write about that?”
“Juárez is an obsession.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s a part of me.”
“You don’t live there.”
“We’re all one city, Javier.”
“That’s shit, Carlos.” I liked the anger in his voice. “You think the fucking border doesn’t matter?”
There are a lot of things I could have said, wanted to say, but the border was there and we lived on different sides of it. What good were utopian ideologies about borderless worlds from a writer of political poems? What good was an argument with a beautiful man?
He smiled. “It’s not you I’m mad at.”
“I know.”
“Don’t write about Juárez. Write about something beautiful.”
“That’s not what I do, Javier.”
“I know. Your books are getting sadder.”
“There’s a lot to be sad about.”
“That’s strange. Because you’re not a sad man.”
“No, I don’t think I am.”
“Why aren’t you sad?”
“I used to be. I’m better now.”
“And so you’re happy?”
“Right now I’m happy.”
“You’re complicated.”
“I’ve gone from being interesting to being complicated?”
He laughed. He put his head on my shoulder. He started to cry.
“He’s going to die,” he whispered. “I don’t have anyone.” His tears were soaking my shirt. I wanted to taste them, bathe in them, drown in them. “He’s going to die.” He kept repeating it over and over.
I never knew what to say when people cried. Especially men. Before my father died, I used to sit and listen to him weep. Sometimes I’d hold his hand. I was in love with that picture in my head: me holding my father’s hand. So that’s what I did. I took Javier’s hand and held it. I led him to my bedroom. “You should sleep,” I said. “You’re tired.”
He lay down on the bed. I took off his shoes.
He stared at the small mural I’d started on one of the walls. “I like it.”
“I just started it.”
“Leave it like that.”
“It’s only a sky.”
“It’s beautiful. Just a sky. Leave it like that.” He was tired and he was whispering.
“Sleep,” I said.
It was cold outside. The wind was picking up and the clouds were gathering like a flock of unwelcome crows. I hated crows. They were mean and selfish and liked to dance around and gloat when they caught a lizard. I stepped out into the balcony and took a breath. I thought of smoking a cigarette—but I didn’t want to go back to that time. I wasn’t so young anymore. I’d made so many mistakes. Smoking was the least of it. I wouldn’t go back.
I walked back inside and decided to make a potato soup. I cleaned some potatoes, cubed them, cubed some onions, threw them into a pot and added some salt, some pepper, some garlic, chopped up some cilantro. A poor man’s soup. Not that I was poor, but making the soup reminded me of my mother. I loved her. And loved her soup.
I walked into the bedroom and watched Javier sleep. He was having a bad dream. He was shaking and muttering, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying. I sat on the bed and placed my hand on his chest. “It’s only a dream,” I whispered. He woke up, startled. There was that look of fear in his eyes. And then that look, that look of letting go.
“It’s okay,” I said.
I climbed into bed with him. He leaned into me. It was getting dark. I loved and hated winter. I felt his breath on my neck, felt the words he whispered, “Tell me something about you I don’t know.”
So I told him. About how my two older brothers had died in a car accident and how they’d left behind seven children between them. Seven children and two grieving, broken-hearted women who’d adored them. About how my father had suffered for years from depression and high blood pressure and Parkinson’s and diabetes and how he had suffered a stroke that left him brain dead and how I’d taken him
off the machine that kept him breathing. About the woman I’d loved and hurt and left. About the man who’d loved me, about how I’d never had the courage to return his love. About a young woman I’d met in London who had eyes as blue as a summer sky and how I’d lost myself in them when I imagined myself to be a man but was nothing more than a stupid adolescent. About how I picked onions long before I was old enough to have a legal job and dreamed of becoming something more than a worker with a bent back. About the scar I had across my chest because a barbed wire fence had ripped my skin as if it were no more than a piece of paper when I was a careless boy.
I didn’t even notice my own tears.
I felt his hand on my face. “Tears taste like the ocean. Did you know that?”
“Sometimes I think the ocean is made of tears.”
He put his finger on my lips. “Your life is better than your novels.”
I took his hand and stared into his palm. I sat up on the bed. “My novels are filled with beautiful men. The kind of men that I will never be.”
“You’re not sad. You’re just hurt.”
“We’re all hurt.”
And then, there we were, undressing each other. He ran his finger on my scar and kissed it. I stared at his perfect body. But I was most in love with his face, with his eyes, with that look of want that transcended the cheap desires of the body. I led him to the shower. I washed his back, his hair, his feet, his legs. “Let me,” he said. That was hard for me—to let him wash me. To let him touch me. But I let him.
8.
We listened to Miles Davis, ate potato soup and drank wine. I wondered if it could be like this for us. For me and him. For Javier and Juan Carlos. I watched him eat. I wondered if a man like me could ever fill the kind of hunger that lived inside of him.
“The soup is good,” he said.
“It’s nothing complicated.”
“It takes a lifetime to get good at something this simple.”
“That’s true. But only when it comes to food.”
He ran his hand through my hair.
I took his hand and kissed it. “What happened to your mother?”
“How do you know something happened to her?”
“You said you didn’t have anyone.”
He looked away. “She was killed.”
“How?”
He poured himself another glass of wine. “She was killed,” he said again. “We never found her body. She was a social worker. She was beautiful, my mother. She had me when she was seventeen. She was always young and fierce and so incredibly alive. All the men would always look at her. She became something of an activist. The transvestites made her into one, I think. Not that I blamed her for fighting. And then one day, she didn’t come home. She just disappeared.”
That was the look he had, the look he wore on his face: the remnants of hurt, the emotional scar, the knowledge that all the laughter in the world could be swept away by a capricious wind at any moment. And there was nothing he could do about it.
There weren’t any tears in his eyes. “I looked for her and looked for her and looked for her. The police did nothing. No one did anything. And who was she to them, anyway, just another woman who disappeared into the desert, her flesh swallowed up by the fucking sand.” And then his tears came just exactly in the same way that rainstorms came up in the desert, thunder, lightning, angry, monstrous rains that almost felt like bullets. I held him as he sobbed and wondered why the world was so cruel and why good and beautiful and decent men like Javier mattered so little when they should have mattered so much.
“It’s not true,” I whispered, “that you don’t have anyone.” I held his face in my hands. “Do you hear me, Javier?”
I made love to him.
And then he made love to me.
No one had ever whispered my name the way he whispered it. I fell asleep to the sound of my name.
When I woke, he was already dressed. It was night. “I have to go to the hospital,” he said.
“I’ll take you.”
“No. It’s just a few blocks.”
“It’s cold,” I said. “You didn’t bring a coat.” I got up and went to the closet. “Here. Put this on.”
He didn’t argue with me. He took the coat, put it on and kissed me. Then he was gone.
9.
I wanted to call him, but didn’t. I’d leave it up to him. If his uncle was dying, he’d be calling his cousins to come into town, taking care of things. He’d always taken care of things. He was that kind of man. There were takers and there were givers and he was a giver. I thought about him, pictured him sitting next to his uncle’s bed.
On Tuesday night, he called. It was late, near midnight. “Will you come?”
“I’ll be right there.” I said. It didn’t take me long to get dressed and rush out the door. The hospital was down the street. I walked up to the fifth floor and found the room. He was there, holding his uncle’s hand. I moved next to him and placed my hand on his back.
“They didn’t come,” he whispered. “His sons. They didn’t come.”
“You’re his son,” I said.
We sat and listened to his uncle struggling to breathe. The last breaths of the dying are loud and haunting. The body, even in the dying, wants to live, fights greedily for one more breath of air—and damn the pain.
I knew Javier would stand there until his uncle took his last breath. I stood there with him. That was all I could do.
Javier remained an alert and faithful sentry to the last. When the room grew quiet and still, Javier gasped as if he’d felt the stab of a knife. His body shook. Grief was like that—it was an earthquake in the heart. But grief was also a cruel thief that stole away the control you had over your own body.
I kissed Javier’s shoulder—though I doubt he was aware that I was even there. I went to get the nurse. I took my time. Javier had more than earned a moment alone with an uncle he so clearly adored.
He never left the room until the funeral home came to collect the body. By then the sun was rising.
I drove him to his uncle’s house. We didn’t pass many words between us as we drove. When we arrived, I opened the front door and sat Javier down on a chair, Javier who was drunk with sorrow and exhaustion.
“This was where he sat,” he said.
I nodded. “Then it’s a good place,” I said.
I rummaged through the kitchen and put on some coffee.
Javier walked into the kitchen and sat at the table.
“I don’t think I want any coffee,” he said.
I nodded. “You should get some sleep.”
“I don’t want to stay here,” he said. “It’s too sad.”
“Get some things,” I said.
He nodded.
The drive to my apartment took less than five minutes, but Javier was asleep when we arrived. I helped him up the stairs, his limp and tired body giving out on him. He fell into bed, all his clothes still on. I took off his shoes and let him sleep.
I threw myself on the couch. When I woke up, Javier was across from me, sitting in my reading chair.
He smiled at me.
“What time is it?”
“It’s three in the afternoon.”
“How long have you been sitting there?”
“I just woke up. I put on some coffee.”
I nodded. “I could use some.”
He pulled me from the couch and held me.
“I have to go to the funeral home,” he said.
“I’ll take you.”
“No.”
“Then take my car.”
He nodded.
We showered together.
I watched him shave. I watched him dress. He was graceful and elegant. Even the sadness on his face was mesmerizing. I didn’t know how I’d fallen in love with him. I wasn’t the falling-in-love kind of man. Some of my friends had suggested that I was disgustingly self-sufficient. I had never thought of myself that way. Perhaps they were right. But watching Javier at
that moment, I wanted to need him. I wanted him to be the air I breathed.
I kissed him as he was putting on his shoes. “I’m sorry,” I said. “That you lost him.”
He nodded. “He was so sick. It’s good,” he said. “Sometimes death is good.”
“Sometimes it is. But it still hurts.”
“Hurt comes with the day, Carlos.”
“And sometimes so does love,” I said.
I saw the look on his face. I understood at that moment that he was in love with me. And I didn’t care that I hadn’t earned that love and didn’t deserve it. I understood that I would take that love and hold on to it for as long as I could. And the thought entered my head that we would be together—and that we might be happy.
10.
The funeral was at the cathedral where his uncle had attended mass for over fifty years. He had married his wife there, had baptized his children there, had marked and measured his life in that sacred building. It did not matter that neither Javier nor I were believers. How could we believe in a church that did not believe in us—either separately or together? Still, that church and its rituals were a part of us. Our bodies—if not our hearts—were familiar with the medieval chants. There was a strange and intimate comfort there.
His uncle’s sons sat in the front row next to Javier. They were formal, successful men who lived in other cities. There was something hard about them, but they were civil and respectful. “They’re like my aunt,” he said. “Even in love, they are loveless.” That made me smile.
There were not many people in attendance. Most of the mourners were not mourners at all, but friends of Javier’s. They embraced him and comforted him and it was obvious that he was deeply loved.
At the gravesite, Javier sobbed like a boy, unashamed of his tears.
I could feel my heart leaping towards him in the same way that a believer’s heart might leap towards the face of God.
11.
Javier and I settled into what might be called a routine. He would come to stay with me every Friday after work. We would go out, watch a movie, hold hands in the dark theater, go out to dinner, come home, make love. Our lives took on the soft and lovely rhythms of a life that was very nearly normal. On Saturdays, we would go to his uncle’s house and work on it. He’d inherited the place with no arguments from his male cousins—who neither needed the money nor wanted any of the remnants of their father’s life. We both liked working with our hands. We were both men in that kind of way.