Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2006 00:23:28 +0200
From: Julian Obedient <julian.obedient@gmail.com>
Subject: A Second Chance

The stars, the stars, they fired the heavens with magnesium jets of
desire. They burned in his eyes as he walked by the river. Never had
he suffered such grievous despair as now he was feeling.

He was flaming with desire and aching with the fear of feeling it.

The trucks were rolling under the West Side Highway and the moon
looked like it would fall out of the sky, but it continued to hang
there nevertheless and it turned into a pallid stream of light, a band
stretching across the black surface of the Hudson.

There was nothing to do but to go home and to go to sleep, hoping that
the band of light might transform itself, in sleep, through sleep,
into the multi-foliate shape of a dream -- such a dream as makes sleep
more appealing than waking.

But a dream can bear pain as well as pleasure, recapitulate torments
undergone as well as realize wishes.

He woke confused. He had been a slave in a red Moroccan palace and
wore only a cloth of gold skirted round his hips. He stood high like
an Egyptian with his nipples stiff and commanding.

First thing he had to do was to try to remember what he had done last night.

Everything had been going smoothly in the days, the weeks, the months
before. He thought he had it beat this time.

Miriam had been tender. She was no longer talking about leaving him
and taking the children with her as she had that night two years ago
when she'd called him a rotten bastard and cursed him for continuing
his gay cruising even after the birth of the twins.

He had felt guilty enough to listen to her shouting without trying to
defend himself.

He did not want to go to Dr. Nostrand, but he did. For the sake of his
marriage, he did.

He pressed his lips together and vowed to give it his best shot. He'd
been trying to beat this thing since he was twelve!

Nostrand took him by the upper arm and guided him into his office.

Please, he said, pointing to a leather chair.

I feel pain.

You feel pain.

I want something I'm not allowed to want. I feel something I must not feel.

So it feels like pain when you have to stop yourself from feeling what you feel?

It feels like pain, yes.

Then the solution is simple. You must feel what you want to feel and
feel also that you are afraid to feel it. Yah. Expose all the
feelings. Right now they are powerful because they are in hiding,
waiting in ambush, using the darkness you are providing. They can jump
out at you at any moment and overpower you because you can't see them.

Yeah.

So if you give them darkness, they can only get stronger and bide
their time. No. You must acknowledge those feelings, bring them into
the open. In the light you can see them. And then you can discard
them.

So Andrew felt what he knew he felt. But now he felt it like it was
something that existed, yes, but was not necessarily his. He could
just pass it by.

Andrew thought it had worked. Miriam did, too. She had let down her
guard. So had he.

So it was strange that suddenly -- (suddenly?) he was overwhelmed, as
if he'd been hypnotized and given a post-hypnotic suggestion, by a
desire he did not want to have.

It was a hot August night. Miriam had flown with the children to her
parents in Sussex for a fortnight, and he was busy at the office every
day.

He got home Friday after seven, having spent a very long day doing
research and writing briefs in the Spenser trial, which was on the
docket before Judge Hermandiez for the second week of September.

You're wasting your time, darling, O'Brien said, leaning against the
window and watching the sun set illuminating the glass panels of a
skyscraper neighboring the one which housed their offices.

Huh? Andrew said

You're wasting your time. You'll never win this one.

Whose side are you on? Andrew said with indignation.

Everyone knows Hermandiez is a ball buster.

Maybe, Andrew said. But, then again, maybe I got tough balls.

Oh, butch! O'Brien cried. But, really, honey, you're a pussy.

Exhausted, hungry, unable to shake off  O'Brien's smarminess, when he
got home, or was it just the heat? His mind was grinding on nothing,
like the wheels of a car spinning in sand. Eating or resting, both
impossible.

He showered, shaved, toweled himself dry. He was pleased, turned on,
at how good he looked in the mirror. What a fool he'd been in his
twenties when he was still caught up in a superficial gay boy
sensibility and thought that thirty-seven was old.

He hadn't gone to The Web since, since he had tried to turn...to
reestablish things with Miriam. But tonight, even as he drifted over
there without being deliberate about it, once he was inside, he
realized that a part of him had known all day long that that was where
he was going to wind up.


He went home with a guy named Max Harrison who lived in a high-rise
off Ninth Avenue on Twenty-third Street.

Harrison was a few years younger than Andrew, slightly taller than
him, and well built, nicely muscled. His body was firm and hard.

I'll give you a massage, Harrison said sensing the tension that
prevented Andrew from responding to him. Lie down.

Andy stripped down to his black boxer briefs, smiled, and then to
nothing. He lay face down on a narrow bed in a long, narrow room
painted maroon, lit only by candles.

Harrison warmed some scented oil, lily of the valley, rubbing his
palms together. He began with Andy's lower back, spreading out slowly
gentle circles to cover his entire back with the kneading of his
fingers, playing the cords of his neck as if he were fingering a
recorder. And like a recorder, Andrew began to sing in long low moans
the tune being played upon him, the song of desire and surrender.

But before desire could peak or surrender become the erotic force that
drives him into a wild kind of submission and reciprocation, he
spilled himself in a slow and senseless ooze.

I can't stay, he said, and fled, shirt half unbuttoned with shaking
fingers, to the street in panic, although Harrison made no effort to
detain him.

It's okay, he said. Would you like some coffee before you go, but
Andrew thought it was a trick, that Max could spike the coffee, and
then, who knew what might happen?


It would have been the end of it, and everything would have been fine,
except for one thing which made the situation incomplete and therefore
unfinished and therefore a dangerously, damagingly lingering one. He
could not stop thinking about Harrison. Or, at least, his body could
not stop. And whenever his body thought about Harrison he became
furiously sexually aroused.

When he went up to Harrison at The Web the next night when he was
standing at the bar, Harrison snubbed him. It made sense. What else
could he do? Andrew had walked out on him last night, left him high
and dry. He was not a shrink or an eleemosynary institution for
confused faggots. And he did not need serial blue balls. So he turned
his back. It made sense.

But, Andrew said, I'm really sorry about last night, and I want to try it again.

What the hell do you think I am? Harrison turned from the torso and said.

I know, Andy said. I freaked out.

What's it to me? Harrison said. I don't force people to be with me,
but once they do choose to be, I expect they want to, that they know
what they are doing.

I'm really sorry, Andy said, but I can't get you out of my mind.

What do you want from me? Harrison said, amusement and disdain
expressing themselves in his voice and on his face. Do you even know?

I'm not sure I do, Andy said, but I know I can't get you out of my mind.

Tell you what, Max said. I'll give you a second try, but there have to
be some stipulations.

Stipulations? Andrew said.

Stipulations, Max repeated. You know what that means?

I ought to, Andy said. I'm a lawyer.

So much the better, Max said. Stipulations.

Complete obedience, complete passivity, unconditional surrender.

He sounded like the very devil extending his most alluring possibilities.

And Andrew said he'd sign the contract. He meant it metaphorically,
but the words felt eerie.

Go home, now, Max said.

What? Andrew said not understanding.

Go home, now, Max repeated.

But I thought...

There's no need for you to think, Max said, gently, consolingly, as if
speaking to a confused child.


But nothing happened, Andrew said hoping that would be enough. It was
almost true, too.

It was not enough.

Miriam crushed her cigarette out in the sea shell ashtray on her desk
and exhaled a cloud of pungent smoke at the same time.

What happened happened inside of you, she said. Whatever actually
transpired is not important. What is important is...

My god, Andrew shouted. You want to control every electrical impulse
that tingles through me.

I thought we had come to the point where you were able to acknowledge
responsibility for your own behavior.

He took a deep breath and he felt the isolation in his heart that he
had been damned with from birth. And every time it had been succored,
it was only temporary. But isolation was solid ground. Everybody else
was a phantom you had to watch out for.

He moped around the house when he was not at work.

But at work, he felt himself in another world, free in the solitary of
his active mind, formulating doctrines and making sense of human
action through the mediating grill of the law, which, it seemed to
him, was the only thing able to make experience sensible.

I don't know what to do with you, she said.

He shuddered inside and held the ears of his soul to keep his
tranquility undisturbed, but listened with the ears of his mind to try
and figure out how he could improve and prove himself more
satisfactory to her.

But sometimes he got tired of that and saw himself made up and
costumed, serving in a candlelit chamber a beautiful boy who adored
him, to whom he had surrendered his very soul.


He had in a stupid moment, given one of his e-mail addresses to Harrison.

I will expect you this Friday at 9:30 at the bar at The Web.

That's all it said.

Andrew was inclined to ignore it but was drawn to linger over the
message and read it again and again.


Miriam was irritable Friday morning as she was packing her small bag
for a week in New Orleans where she was going for The National Book
Association's annual convention. There were three titles, important
books by important figures, a political memoir, a historical romance,
and a critique of the policies of the present American government that
she had particular interest in. She had shepherded them through
printing and wanted to supervise how they were marketed, too.

She ought to have been excited. But she was uneasy. She reviewed the
possible causes, anxiety about flying, fear that her books would not
be well received, the same misgivings she always had as a mother
leaving the children for any length of time. Sure, all those were
possibilities. But, no, it was Andrew. Something was unsettled. She
could not put her finger on it. But there was something disquieting in
the air between them.

Oh, well, she sighed and cleared her mind.

She was cheerful at parting when she got into the taxi for the
airport, regretting that she had been irritable.

Don't be too lonely without me. Don't let the kids run you ragged.
Don't wear yourself out at work.

Any do's?

Do think of me when... She blushed. You know when.

And don't you exhaust yourself either. The books are wonderful, and I
know you'll be able to place them.

He left her and picked the kids up from school and took them to the
health food restaurant for dinner and read the next chapter of Silas
Marner to them before bed.

Once they were asleep, he mixed vodka and grapefruit juice over ice
and sipped slowly as he looked over his e-mails.

As if in a trance, he changed his clothes to an old, torn pair of
jeans and motorcycle boots.

He stood in front of the mirror trying to decide whether to put on a
white sleeveless athletic shirt or a black one. He played idly with
his nipples which seemed to stretch with undefined desire and stiffen.

He chose a square-topped white tight-fitting top.

Margie, he said, speaking into his cell-phone. It's Andrew. Is it ok
if I go out for awhile and you keep an eye and ear open for the kids?

Margie was a downstairs neighbor. She had a key to the apartment and
often looked after the kids when Andrew or Miriam wanted to go out.

Sure, she said. Mind if I go through your DVD collection.

Not at all, Marge.

Or if I fall asleep on your couch?

Of course not. Thanks so much! There's some cold Raki in the fridge, too.


It was chilly enough that he could wear his leather jacket but still
not so chilly that you couldn't leave it unzipped.

He was a little self-conscious about his nipples, but he also liked
it, the way they pressed against the tight fabric. He breathed deeply
and stretched his pecs upward.

The smell of beer hit him as he pushed his way into The Web and over to the bar.

Hello, Andrew said to Max.

I want a vodka martini was all Harrison said, but it was clear he
expected Andrew to bring it to him.

Yes sir. Andrew had intended it to sound cheeky. But it didn't. It
didn't sound anything out of the ordinary.

Andrew came back with the martini for Max and had gotten one for himself, too.

Harrison laughed and waved a finger.

No, no, he said. That is not done. You don't get anything for yourself
without getting my permission first.

Andrew pulled a disbelieving face and Harrison said in a low voice,
smiling, as if he were speaking of love, speaking slowly, if you're
going to be my bitch, you're going to follow my rules. Put your drink
down next to me. You drink if and when I say you do.


By the time he left the bar, Andrew, with Harrison's permission had
drunk enough martinis to make him stagger giddily.

You really ought not drink so much if you can't hold it, Max laughed
pressing him tightly to him, steadying him as they walked.

But you said I could, Andrew teased back, looking into his eyes and
stumbling because he could not see what he was doing.

And do you do everything I say, Harrison asked with an amused grin.

I do, Andrew said. I absolutely do.

How do you account for that? Harrison taunted him.

Because...just because.


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