Franco had stayed home that day to clean his apartment—ostensibly to clean it. That is, he told everyone in the office that he’d be checking his messages but that he wouldn’t be in front of his computer, which was enough to let him shape the morning and afternoon according to his own sense of rhythm. It was a rare thing to be under his own steam on a weekday, and it made him equal parts uneasy, like he was a step away from destitution, and ecstatic, like he could go straight to the airport and buy a one-way ticket to Paris, no luggage, no questions, no regret. There was always too much pressure for the weekend to be fun for him to have enough time to feel good, and he knew he wasted too much time chasing something elusive.
It wasn’t that the place couldn’t use a freshening before his company arrived. He just wanted to listen to his music while he did it and maybe go out to lunch. These were simple pleasures—tender mercies, he said to himself with a smile, forgetting where he’d heard the phrase. He didn’t think he felt self-conscious about the mess because there wasn’t much mess to speak of, but he noticed some archipelagic piles of crumbs and dust when he was doing pushups the night before. He didn’t want to be thinking about crumbs while making cocktails and concocting clever things to say.
Not that Franco had to think—he was gregarious and quick-witted, maybe even clever. He wouldn’t say that about himself, not necessarily, but he wouldn’t feign modesty either. There was something about Frankie that made him a few degrees more self-conscious than he felt he should be, but he didn’t resent her for it. He responded to her attitude like it was music. This idea made him think of a snake rising one coil after another out of a basket, and though he knew the snake was just following the flute with its eyes and not dancing, the image somehow flattered him and he held onto it: he was the cobra, latent and powerful. It made him feel—well, was it too much to say masculine? He was, after all, a man.
He had been turning the broom sideways and playing a riff in the middle of the kitchen. It felt good to be silly, to be unobserved during a time he would usually be among others wearing suits and ties and trading grim stories about their weekends past or weekends of the future. Things were in good order by 10, so he watched the first part of a movie as he sent Frankie a few messages, things like he couldn’t wait to feel how wet she was and how he was going to make her choke on his fat cock if she didn’t follow his instructions exactly as he provided them. She loved this sort of thing, he knew, and of course he wouldn’t make her choke. In fact, he wasn’t sure that he really wanted to do that with her unless she said, “I really, really, really want to feel what it’s like to be at your mercy, to lose all control.”
Something else that he might—but no, it would change the complexion of their arrangement, corrupt it. And yet, he wasn’t sleeping with anyone else, not actively. There were others, certainly, but not anyone right then, and he had been tested the week before and felt good about the state of his health. Maybe, he thought, she would bring it up. That was always a possibility. Some women preferred it, he knew. It could be such a hassle, and after a certain age it seemed to matter much less. He started to get hard through his shorts as he thought about this and decided it was better not to fixate on it because it might not ever happen and anyway he didn’t mind if it didn’t—didn’t mind except that maybe it meant things between them had reached a plateau already, that there were no new places for them to go, no transgressions left unconsidered. And Alexander wept, he said out loud, because there were no more married women to ejaculate into.
He was being silly. What he didn’t realize right then (how could he, why would he) is that he was perhaps being too silly.
By 11:15, he couldn’t restrain himself anymore. He started thinking about lunch somewhere nice. He wanted to have a drink or two and maybe steak frites or a burger or even some oysters. He wanted to feel like he worked on Madison Avenue in the 50s. He wanted to strike up a simple, senseless conversation with a stranger, maybe even some tourists. People visited the city all the time, and he knew which restaurants they preferred. The same restaurants that rose to the tops of all the rankings every few months, the same restaurants the locals preferred. That’s the thing about this modern age, he said sententiously but with some awareness that it was sententious, everyone thinks they have good taste but they all just have the same taste.
He went to Maison d’If right in the middle of the city, just a half a block from his building, and was sitting at the bar with a menu in his hand before 11:45. Only a few tables were occupied, mostly with amorphous business types saying their how are yous as they sipped water and felt out how their companions would react if they ordered a drink before noon. There was one other person at the other end of the bar, a spindly-looking man hunched over a book, holding his head in one hand and, as all lanky men do, trying to fold in on himself out of shame. It would be perhaps uncool to disturb this man, so absorbed did he seem in his book, but then again Franco was convinced that no one ever wanted to be left alone at a bar—that they were just waiting for the right conversational partner and that indifference was, almost always, just a posture, an affectation.
He stepped closer, choosing a seat two away from the reader, and greeted the bartender like an old friend. She was younger than him but not quite young and seemed happy to have someone to talk to.
“I’m thinking maybe a cocktail,” he said, flashing a look of mischief. “Does that sound too crazy?”
She shrugged. “He’s having an Abbé in Chains, which is like a whiskey and port cocktail, if you like whiskey.”
The man reading flinched at being referred to but kept his eyes down.
“Whiskey and… port? I can’t imagine it. Hey,” he said, knocking against the bar in a way that he realized was maybe too intrusive, “is it any good, that drink?”
It was when the man turned toward him that he realized it: Frankie’s husband, leaping suddenly to life from the lockscreen of her phone. He had to stop himself from saying, “Oh, Jeff, it’s you,” and felt that maybe his feeling of surprise had registered on his face in a way that was obvious. Frankie had said that Jeff knew but that she never told him the details—the who, the where, the what, the how. It was all part of their agreement, but then again maybe that wasn’t true. It was exciting, he wouldn’t deny, to see him out like this, to feel him so close, and he allowed himself the pleasure of pretending.
Jeff was tall but not so tall, certainly not so tall as him. His shoulders were narrow, his face drawn and angular, almost sad. Here was a man, Franco thought, who’d really feel a slap on the back. It would reverberate through his soul. It would rattle his cage. He was, Franco was, big: his hands were wide, his fingers were thick, and his shoulders were broad. The years had padded him but not so much that he couldn’t start a regimen and recover most of what he’d lost to beer and bar food. He didn’t mind his weight either, and it was true what he said about himself—he wore it well. Some people do. Jeff, he thought, would be ill at ease with everything, whether he was fat or fit, bedraggled or polished. He felt bad for the guy, unrelated to the business with Frankie. It looked like what Jeff really needed, reading all alone a few minutes before noon with a whiskey cocktail poised in his left hand, every so often smoothing his rumpled button-up, was a friend.
“It’s good, yeah. Sort of like a Manhattan.”
“But with port.”
“Yeah,” Jeff laughed, “with port. It’s sort of doing what the vermouth would do.”
“There’s also,” the bartender put in, leaning forward with her arms behind her back, “vermouth in it.”
“Gilding the lily, seems like, huh? I’ll try one and, um, maybe a dozen oysters as well. Oh, and steak frites.”
There passed a perilous moment during which Jeff looked back toward his book. It took some thinking to press the conversation forward, so Franco just introduced himself as he thought of what he could tell this man, how he could weave between his knotted elbows and touch his heart. He felt confident in Jeff’s relative size, not that it would have occurred to Franco to hurt anyone. It was just something he was used to, being bigger than most people and feeling them defer to him as a result. It was maybe a feeling he relied on too much, though everyone must live within their own frame and there is simply nothing to be done about that.
“I’m Franco,” he said.
“Franco,” Jeff repeated, dazed.
“Is it the red hair? Most people don’t imagine gingers having so many vowels in their names. My dad is Cuban, from Cuba. People mostly just call me Frank.”
“A dissident?”
“What? No, no, nothing like that, but yeah, I guess technically a dissident if he came here. He’s not one of those reactionary Cubans. He calls himself a communist, even. He just didn’t want to stay on the island. It’s not for everyone, island life, especially if you want to be a writer.”
“A writer? Your dad?”
Franco let himself laugh.
“I said ‘wanted to be’—he gave up on that pretty fast. He’s an adman. Or he was. He retired a few years ago.”
This was good, Franco thought, natural. One thing was leading to another. He wanted to say to Jeff, “I hear you’re a writer—or that you’re trying to be,” but there was no need to even use what he knew. He hadn’t even meant to say that his father had wanted to be a writer. In fact, he didn’t even know if his father had wanted that. He just assumed that all copywriters wanted to be taken more seriously, to think of themselves as artists just waiting for someone to notice them.
“An adman—a copywriter?”
“Yeah, but he retired as a creative director—one of many, I think. I never understood how any of that worked, how an advertising firm makes money. Especially now.”
“It’s… mysterious.”
“Advertising revenue?”
“The way money moves. It is like a river that flows through you.”
“And the money is like the fish that you catch, I guess.”
“I don’t mean—it’s sort of from a movie. The money flows through you until one day the river changes directions and you…”
“Dry out, I get it. So,” Franco said, nodding toward the book, “what are you reading? It looks serious.”
“Oh,” he said, closing the book quickly. “It’s embarrassing.”
“What, is it like Mussolini’s biography or something?”
Jeff flushed crimson, making Franco wonder whether he had at a certain point actually read Mussolini’s biography at a bar just like this one.
“No, no—it’s Henri Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life.”
He murmured han-ree like he was ashamed to pronounce it, like he felt it to be too ostentatious.
“Oh yeah, he was kicked out of the communist party. Just like my dad!”
“A lot of it is,” Jeff said, waving his hand dismissively, “inscrutable.”
“Good word—you enjoy it, though?”
“I don’t read it for enjoyment,” Jeff said, smiling with his teeth. “I read it to—ah!”
A dozen oysters appeared.
Franco reached for them, but they were destined for Jeff. “Great minds!” Franco said, feeling genuinely embarrassed at his own effusion.
“I can’t resist when I’m out like this.”
“Out like this?”
“On my own,” Jeff said, sprinkling lemon juice over each oyster like he was a priest for the church of bivalves. “It’s such a pleasure—you feel sometimes like you could just float away.”
Franco smirked, more to himself than to Jeff, who wasn’t looking anyway. It was true, wasn’t it, that he’d had such a thought earlier. Maybe it wasn’t precisely the same thought, but the thrust of it was the same—the spirit of it. He felt that he was filled with the spirit of something that day and danced right out on the ledge of it all.
“It’s kind of fortuitous that we met,” Franco said.
“Oh?”
“Two men having lunch alone, each enjoying a dozen oysters—ah!”
Franco’s oysters arrived, somehow plumper and shinier than Jeff’s. He lemoned them all in a single, deft motion, then sipped his cocktail, savoring it as its warmth unspooled within him like a cobra getting out of its basket.
“I guess it’s even more fortuitous than you’d know.”
Franco felt a tingle along his scalp, even at the base of his spine.
“My wife’s name is Frankie—her nickname anyway.”
“Frank-OH and Frank-EE,” Franco chuckled, with maybe too much gusto.
Jeff didn’t seem to take notice.
“I always wanted to marry a cool girl—when I was younger, I mean. If someone had come back from this time just to tell younger me that my wife’s name was Frankie, I would think, ‘Mission accomplished.’”
“Oh, but isn’t it?”
Jeff shrugged. “That’s not what I mean. What you learn—or what I learned—is that no one is cool. Cool is a myth—it doesn’t exist.”
Franco pretended to think about this but knew instantly that he disagreed. Instead of voicing this disagreement, he nodded at Jeff’s nearly empty glass. “Do you think you’d have that again?”
“The Abbé? That’s a good question. I think I’d like to have pastis.”
Franco thought, “Get a load of this fucking guy,” but pastis did actually sound nice, he had to admit. He was at a French bistro after all. Why else would someone be here? “That sounds nice.” he said, “I don’t know when the last time I had it was.”
“What’s nice is that my boss is out of town this week, and the office is quiet. If there was ever a time for a long lunch…”
“…it is nigh! Yes, I get what you mean.”
They finished their oysters almost in unison, Jeff having slowed down out of unconscious sympathy. Franco started telling a very slightly exaggerated story about a time he took a three-hour lunch break and got so drunk before a hearing that he had to give himself a pep talk in a men’s room mirror.
“I was pointing at myself and saying things like, ‘You’ve got to prove that you’re a big enough boy—are you big enough?’ And then of course the judge comes out of one of the stalls, staring at me with this—it was a what’s-the-world-coming-to kind of look.”
“I had the same thing happen during my thesis defense, but I guess,” he added quickly, “that’s not really the same thing.”
“But the same how? Were you drunk?”
“No, no—one of my committee members just gave me the same withering look, like he couldn’t believe he had to sit through me talking inexpertly about The Aeneid.”
“You wrote a thesis about Latin?”
“Oh god, no, not even close!”
He laughed—cackled, really. Franco remembered something Frankie had told him, how Jeff was easily startled, like a horse or show dog that’s been too coddled. He was always preening—well, not always, just when he was sure no one was observing him.
“Then,” Franco had asked, pulling her legs apart, “how would you know that’s what he’s doing?”
“Because,” she’d said, “I observe in secret.”
When the pastis came, they still hadn’t eaten their food. Franco felt the first sip make an impact, lighting an inner flame that he’d have to keep feeding unless he also meant to nap some time before the evening.
“But maybe,” Franco suggested—he thought—slyly, “you were the one who wanted to be a writer.”
“Oh, sure, sure, but you know,” Jeff said, wiping his lips against his forearm, “how that goes.”
“Not personally.”
Jeff raised his eyebrows but let it go with another shrug. “When you fixate on something it’s hard to remember that not everyone else—in fact hardly anyone else—does. I think about the Laestrygonians a lot, for instance.”
“The who?”
“It’s not important,” Jeff dismissed. “I can never pronounce it properly when I come across it—if I see it out in the wild, I mean. If I’m introducing it, as I am now, then I can rehearse, I can prepare. But when called to do it? I flounder. My wife has the same problem with poor Eurylochus.”
“Who?” Franco said again, though feeling a tingle of recognition this time.
“I guess you’d call him Odysseus’s first mate.” He snorted after another sip. “His Gilligan.”
Franco tilted the glass and felt the anise cut the back of his throat. He coughed, his eyes filling with tears. He wondered whether he’d confess his real name, whether he could be so maudlin in the middle of the day.
“It’s been years since I’ve read The Odyssey. And you know what? I don’t think I’ve ever read it. I think I read an adaptation in seventh grade that was specifically for young readers. And then a few passages here and there handed to us on printouts. And I saw the made-for-TV version.”
“With Armand Assante. Yes, I know it well,” Jeff said, “My parents bought me the VHS box set, which I think was just two tapes.”
“What a chest that guy had. Tough for him to play, what is it, 18 and 50 in the same show.”
“Probably like 18 to 38 or 20 to 40, but I know what you mean. I don’t think Armand was ever a convincing young man.”
“And it made Hector seem like a dick,” Franco said, “but the theatrical movie, the one with Brad Pitt? Hector’s kind of, like, the hero.”
“He’s nothing in The Iliad. Most of them are nothing, but then there’s Diomedes, who is too much like Achilles and I guess always gets cut from the adaptations. You get the sense that all the main characters are physically bigger than everyone else—not just muscularly but the way a football player would be big next to a toddler.”
Franco opened his mouth without having anything to say, and that momentary hitch gave Jeff the space to expatiate.
“I can’t remember his name, but there was a scholar, from Harvard, I think, who traveled to I want to say Albania or Croatia between the first and second world wars—I think it was then, maybe the 20s, maybe the 30s—and he made these wax recordings…”
“What’s a wax recording?”
“Like on a wax cylinder. I don’t know what it is, I just take it to mean ‘very old and crackly recording.’ He made these recordings of these street musicians, these bards, these… poets, I guess, reciting stories, and the rhythm of the stories and their content was like the epic Homeric poetry, and his theory was that…”
“There was no Homer,” Franco guessed.
“Actually, the opposite! Sort of, anyway—that Homer was the most famous of these poets but that the tradition had carried through all the way from antiquity to the 20s or 30s along the Adriatic coast, and you could still hear the old, lost world in the voices of these men he recorded, as if they were traveling to us from the end of a long tunnel to the past. “He killed himself, this scholar. I think he shot himself, though there was some speculation that his wife killed him or that something un…conventional happened.”
“More unconventional than a suicide along the Adriatic, I take it.”
Jeff smiled but his eyes weakened at the corners and glazed over, on the verge of tears. His feelings, Franco realized, were hurt. He could hear Frankie telling him something like that, something like, “My house runs on my husband’s hurt feelings.” She’d said it with annoyance, like she was describing a refrigerator that worked just well enough to preclude any serious discussion of a replacement, and Franco thought, “Well, you see? This is why a woman runs around. No one likes a man who complains.”
“These… oddments of things I’ve learned,” Jeff said, “their impact is dulled because I can’t recall the details.”
“I think that’s just getting older.”
Their food arrived as an anticlimax, and they both ate slowly. Franco had lost his appetite, wanting to talk rather than masticate but not knowing what else to say. The pastis reared up within him and whispered that he should just come out with it because for all he knew Jeff and Frankie were open with each other and maybe even just using him as part of an inscrutable sexual game. Not inscrutable—Franco would maybe like it, maybe welcome it. He would not want to be intimidated, and Jeff didn’t intimidate him. He could conduct, arrange, lead—it was what came naturally.
“My sister’s kids love the Beatrix Potter books. Do you know them?”
Franco felt that it would be better to just shake his head rather than say anything, that such a gesture conveyed solemnity, respect. He wanted Jeff to know that he was listening, taking him seriously—he wanted Jeff to feel that he was, anyway.
“There’s a riddle that always strikes me in The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin, which is a pun because Squirrel Nutkin, not to spoil it, loses his tail. It’s four lines, maybe six? And it’s simple, and it rhymes, of course, and even though I want to, for the life of me I can’t memorize it, which I take to be proof that my degrees are meaningless. There was a time when you had to be able to recite poetry from memory to at least put your toes on the green at Pembroke College. And now?”
He groaned with theatrical disgust.
“So, in an admission of defeat, I wrote it down on the back of a gum wrapper and carry it with me in my shirt pocket.”
“You switch it out whenever you change shirts?”
But Jeff didn’t answer. Or, he answered by removing the gum wrapper, which had been rolled into a little silver joint that glinted under the bar lights. He unfurled it like the Talmud, hushed and reverent, careful not to tear the edges. As he read, his voice started to warble with emotion.
The man in the wilderness said to me,
“How many strawberries grow in the sea?”
I answered him as I thought good—
“As many red herrings as grow in the wood.”
One or two tears tapped against the bar. Franco averted his eyes, fearing that witnessing too much of this could infect him with something terminal, something debilitating. He thought,
“What a dang-ass freak this guy is!” Then, he remembered something that he’d forgotten, something buried in a tomb at the foot of a statue that itself was buried under drifts of sand and showers of stone.
The sun, whose rays,
are all ablaze
with ever-living glory
does not deny his majesty,
he scorns to tell a story!
He don’t exclaim,
“I blush for shame,
so kindly be indulgent.”
But fierce and bold,
in fiery gold,
he glories all effulgent!
I mean to rule the earth
as he the sky—
we really know our worth,
the sun and I!
“It’s nice of you to quote doggerel back to me and not something more… more…”
“What’s that, doggerel? It’s like, bad, right? Like stupid or trite or… ”
“Careless,” Jeff sighed, tilting the glass and finishing nearly two ounces of pastis in a single swallow.
“Oh,” Franco thought, “now here is someone who drinks.”
They steered through the—what would you call it? Straits? Over the shoals?—and made it outside feeling grand. Franco felt grand, anyway, like all his joints had an extra half an inch of space between them, like he’d just stepped out of a steam room. He looked over at Jeff, who’d paid and left not quite with but at the same time as him, as if in tacit agreement, as if they were temporarily synchronized. He wondered if he should pat Jeff’s back. That was his first instinct, which he usually followed, but he also wondered whether he really dared to touch the man and feel his body move under his shirt. Frankie said he exercised compulsively but aimlessly—he ran, he swam, he lifted weights, he did pilates sometimes, too, which seemed to disgust her. He wasn’t training for anything, he didn’t play any sports. It was like he was trying to tear himself apart at the seams. Franco let his hand hover over Jeff’s back. He shuddered, afraid that he’d feel too many ribs, like Jeff was a dog whose mistreatment and malnutrition hid beneath a glossy coat. Frankie was soft where he expected her to be, where he wanted her to be. He didn’t dare confuse these impressions and let his hand fall.
“Isn’t it perverse?” Jeff said all of a sudden, squinting up into the blue alley of sky visible between the tops of the buildings.
Franco felt his pulse in his throat. “Perverse?”
“The things people have to do these days just to make friends.”
Jeff’s hand, when he offered it, came to Franco as if through a curtain, and he stared at it for so long that it really did seem disembodied, floating there at the end of a knobby wrist, waiting patiently to be touched.