It’s almost four when we close up shop at my mother’s house, nearer to six when I finally get on the road to Tom’s place. It’s not all that far from Duane and Teresa’s to the dairy; Tom’s place is further west, nearer the river that loops and winds its way through the Bluegrass.
I’m nervous, of course, and perhaps a bit presumptuous, as well; this thing doesn’t have to go as planned, might be better if it didn’t, because the further we let this thing spin out between us, the more I’m going to be forced to make some kind of decision, one way or the other, yes or no, stay or go.
Some impulse leads me to pull off onto the shoulder, turn off the car. I stare into the distance, into the west; overhead, the sky is an immaculate and faultless cerulean, shading to a darker blue behind me with the oncoming evening. The sun hovers there, fat and indolent as the earth spins towards me to swallow it whole.
Stay or go.
Going is easy, if steeped in shame. There is a certain cowardice to be acknowledged in stopping here, refusing to go on, slinking home, perhaps late enough that I could fool everyone into thinking that I’d gone, and come back. But Teresa would know. I would know. Tom would know.
Staying is… well, less easy, more fraught with hazard. Staying means walking away from everything I’d spent the last fifteen years or so working for, many hundreds of sleepless nights working for nothing, trying to get myself out there and known. I am a man of a certain age, with perhaps less drive than I once had. But New York is a harsh mistress; as they say, if you make it there you can make it anywhere. It would take time to restart this life and this career; Tom would certainly be patient, but only to a point.
And yet, Tom.
I’d walked away once, driven by too many things I felt powerless to fight, and perhaps I should have fought harder for them. Tom, I think, is the more courageous of us, staying when I’d fled to hide myself among many anonymous millions, never hiding what he was even as he subjugated that desire to greater things.
I look at myself in the rear view mirror, at a man of a certain age and a certain temperament. I power down the window; summer and the evening and Kentucky slip in and wrap me in their various and subtle caresses. New-mown grass beckons, and cattle, and cicada and birdsong and the gold-orange-red of sunset. It is a different symphony of the senses here, but no less powerful and no less beguiling.
I thought to leave here, and I had to do it. One cannot go home again—my mother is dead and her house empty and I am grown, a man—but one can go back to a place that was once home and tease a new beginning out of its haunted and haunting familiarity.
I start the engine, put the car into gear.
—
I can see the sign in the distance, the winsome and smiling cow glowing teal and orange against the dusk. I turn into the drive and start up the hill; the house grows larger and larger, filling the windshield with its sturdy, time-worn bulk.
Tom is there at the front door as I step out of the car, but even as I start towards him, he closes the door behind him. There is a canvas tote at his feet and he hefts it as he approaches. The other arm clutches a red-and-black plaid blanket which he hands to me. He’s wearing a white t-shirt that hugs the rolling muscularity of his torso; the bottom half of him lurks under a pair of slouchy and faded madras shorts.
“Where are we—?” I start.
He smiles. “Let’s go down to the river.”
Together, we walk out behind the house and down a path that winds between the fenced pastures, away from the massed barns and dairy equipment, towards the sunset.
—
When this place was new, nearly two hundred years ago, being on the river meant survival. There were no railroads; horse and cart plied the rutted dirt roads that knitted these farm towns together. The river was a powerful force back then; ferries worked it back and forth, transporting goods to and from communities. Every farm that fronted the river had a landing on the water; goods were transported up and down the hill by horse or by cattle.
People lived and died by the vagaries of this river.
—
The road on which we walk loops down and down and down to the river some two hundred feet below us. I can’t imagine the herculean task that putting in this road must have been; today, it would have been achieved with dynamite and lumbering road-building equipment. Back then, it was hundreds of workers throwing their strength and their might into the limestone palisade, chewing out a roadbed inch by laborious inch.
As we walk, we are afforded tantalizing glimpses of the palisade, of the river. The road is a series of switchbacks etched into the soft rock, through which weep natural springs spilling onto the densely packed gravel bed. Oak and laurel and sassafras cling to the rock shelves, softening and blunting their harsh aspect, shading us from the waning sun
As we walk, we talk of everything and nothing. By tacit agreement, we don’t talk about the thing that is like a third person between us.
—
“I’d forgotten how beautiful this is,” I remark, at one point. I’d forgotten also, I remind myself, that going down this road is nearly as difficult as going up it; one must always brake oneself with the muscles of one’s calves and thighs, resisting the temptation to run headlong down the snaking path.
“I come down here every so often, even now,” Tom answers. “It helps me take my mind off things.”
“It would be interesting to put a house down here.”
Tom glances at me, smiles. “You’d have to get permission from the owner. Might be difficult.”
“I’m sure he could be persuaded.”
“With a good enough argument. He’s known to be stubborn, and not very bright.”
We’re close enough now—maybe halfway down, I’m not sure—to be able to hear the river over other sounds, a faint, hissing sibilance as the carefree water teases the timeworn bank, laughing at its predicament.
As we walk, we talk of everything and nothing, of architecture and cattle, of our individual selves, of what has been.
—
With one last turn, here we are, at the base of the palisade. Our road flattens and fans out onto a bit of lush green lawn. No trace remains, of course, of whatever the first inhabitants of the farm up above us built to handle the riverboats and ferries. Our side of the palisade catches the remaining sun; bits of the orange and red light burn the very top of the cliff. We are in a kind of half-light here; the opposite bank is all inky shadow. Tom walks over to a collection of scattered boulders, worn smooth; the river must have flowed here at one point, blunted the stones’ rough edges over time. He sets down the tote. I make a grand show of unrolling the blanket and arranging it over the rocks, then sit down beside him.
Of course, I know where we are. It’s the place we always went to back then, to be alone, to talk about the things that moved us, specifically that one dark and elusive traveler within each of us. These boulders form a loose semicircle, large enough for two bodies to nest side by side; the floor of this impromptu crèche is smooth and blanketed by fallen leaves.
Here, only here, could we be our true selves.
He knows that I’m remembering that past. It’s no accident that he’s taken me here, but I don’t mind. I’m allowing this thing to go where it will.
He bends over, takes out first a bottle of wine and two plastic glasses, hands the bottle and the glasses to me. I open the wine and pour some out for us while he busies himself with the rest of his tote, pulling out containers and crackers and utensils. Shortly, we have an impromptu picnic arrayed around us.
Lastly, he rummages around the bottom of the tote, surfaces with some small white plastic object. He inspects it, flicks something on the bottom of it, and a warm yellow light begins to emanate from the thing, one of those battery-powered tea lights. I chuckle.
He smiles. “Hey, this is a high-class operation.”
We busy ourselves for a few moments with the wine and the food, smearing things on crackers, on chips, forking shrimp and pasta salad into our mouths. The wine surprises us with a crisp, apple-y flavor. When we come up for air, we are surrounded by a darkness kept at bay only by the bravery of our tea light. I can hear furtive sounds around us, beyond the omnipresent hiss and slide of the river only a few dozen feet away. I try to remember from my childhood what I was told about this; fox, I imagine, and perhaps the odd coyote or bobcat. No bears. I don’t think I ever heard anything about bears.
I belch slightly. “Thank you, Tom. That was good.”
“Well, mostly it was just clearing out the fridge. I’m not sure how old some of the stuff was. Especially the shrimp.”
I chuckle. He’d had to peel off plastic, unwrap and undo. Cooking in the modern age.
We help ourselves to more wine, listen silently for a few minutes to the river.
“So,” Tom starts. “You’re probably going to go back, soon.”
We start teasing this thing out, luring it out into the open. “Yes,” I respond. “Probably this weekend. The house is pretty much clean, for… whatever.”
“Your dad staying?”
“I… don’t know. Not if my sister has her way. I don’t care, really.”
“So, you’re not… ”
“No.” My response is more forceful than it should be. “I’m sorry. I… no.”
“I understand. I just… ” He sighs.
“Tom… ” Frustration, there, perhaps as much with myself as with him, and this. Just tell him, you idiot, I command myself.
A few seconds tick by.
Then, “I’m just going to say it, Mark. I really, really want you to stay. I know it won’t be easy… but, I’ll have some money, out of all this. I can carry us, for a while.” He pauses. “I know that sounds like I’m trying to bribe you, but… ” I chuckle, open my mouth to speak, but he goes on, holding up a hand to silence me. “Seeing you, at the funeral… well, it just all came back. Us. What we… well, I guess what we could have been. Should have been.” He shifts position on the stones. “I mean—fuck your mother, and fuck my family, right? We should have just said that.”
“But we didn’t.”
“We didn’t.” He edges closer to me. “We can, now.”
I look at him, he at me. Something curdles between us, some force outside of us, drawing us closer.
We kiss.
We pull back.
We kiss again.
After that, the deluge. We stand up, look at each other in the amber glow of the light. What I felt for Tom twenty years ago I still feel for him now, and it overwhelms me. The river, to my right, laughs at me now, daring me to throw myself into this river, this swift and powerful and muscular current.
I am a head taller than Tom, look down at him, reach out and rustle my fingers through the inky black burr of hair on his head. He closes his eyes, leans into my touch.
The rest follows. We untie and unzip and unbutton, stand soon before each other naked.
I have forgotten the reality of his body, the bear-like hairiness of it, the bulk of it. His time with the dairy has graced him with a workmanlike muscularity, earned honestly.
In my adopted home, men like me labor to maintain a certain artifice that becomes its own language. We gym and shave and pluck and hone and starve and run and lift and curl, striving towards some unreachable grail of perfect desirability, and I am no stranger to that, myself. How many miles, leagues, astronomical units of distance have I hurled myself around the reservoir in the park, alongside others, hoping to stave off the unavoidable? How much have I worried over some new wrinkle or blemish or mole? How many tons lifted into the air, over and over, sculpting myself?
Tom, in front of me, is the real thing, forthright and tangible, what men are, honestly and without that artifice, with wrinkles and blemishes and moles all testament to a life lived. And missing fingers, perfect in his imperfection.
My hand reaches out again, tickles down through the thatch of hair on his chest, his ribs, his belly, teasing out a brown-pink nipple here, the cavern hollow of his navel there.
And there, rising up to me, that most secret part of him, wakened from its slumbers, thick and hard and full in my hand as I sink towards it and open my mouth to it, to speak this greater truth to it, and to him.
—
And, by degrees, this thing spools out and out and out into the watchful night.
Tom is there, recumbent in the hollow of rocks, on his back, arms and legs splayed out across the hummocky rock as I straddle him, facing him, looking down at his stunned face—a man witnessing some miracle, it seems—as I work him into me. I have forgotten the wonder of this, the primeval beauty of it.
We quietly add our voices to the night chorus, murmurs and moans and slurred vowels answering to those unseen things that wait in the shadows. What do these creatures think, who watch us at our labors, as I shuttle up and down, knitting the two of us together with my motion?
Tom reaches out for me, draws me down upon him and I pause in my frenetic, frantic pursuit. We kiss and he embraces me, hugs me close and tight as our tongues work past each other. I can taste in his mouth, still, the wine, the tart, crisp orchard tang of it, clear and strong.
Abruptly, Tom rears up; still inside me, he flips me onto my back and eases me down upon the blanket, scratchy under the smooth skin of my back. He settles down on top of me and I embrace him as he did me, with arms and legs, cleaving him to me.
We buck and heave under the stars and the breeze soughing through the trees. Our passion finds its voice in our voices as we shout, defiant, into the night; the percussive and staccato sound of this arcing out, bouncing off the shelves of limestone wrinkling down the face of the palisade.
Tom pulls away, slows, becomes silent, something working at his face and I watch the twitching dance of muscles there fighting, fighting, fighting what he cannot stop. He takes my ankles in his grasp, spreads me open wide beneath him, looks down at himself slipping in and out of me. There is now no sound but the to-and-fro of his breathing, catching in his throat, mumbling past parted lips.
I don’t want this to end, if only because its ending means tumbling back into prosaic reality and having to acknowledge the truth of it, of this, what it means and doesn’t mean.
Tom looks down at me, eyes wide and staring and I think I understand. He wants to see everything, all of it, see past it perhaps, where it might end. Where he wants it to end. I stare back, even as I work at myself, coaxing myself higher and higher up the ladder. Do I want what he wants? I do, I think. Can I have it? Can I allow myself to have it?
Nature takes over from us, now; we’ve gone as far as we can, surrender ourselves to the last of it as the first spasms rack us, separating us from ourselves, up and over and back down in a warm, sweet rush.
Tom falls down upon me again, his heaviness a blanket I most willingly wrap myself in. I love feeling him on top of me and inside me. Our breathing is rough and labored as we slide back into ourselves, then slows as we allow time to start up again. He kisses me and even as our lips meet, I chuckle, as does he.
He slips from me, rolls over onto his back. I make room for him, snuggle against him, his arm crooked round my shoulders, our legs overlapping. Silently, we stare up into the stars. My vision winkles out some slight movement up there, far overhead, some small scratch of light moving against the background. A satellite, perhaps, or some space station. A small bzzzt! of sound flits past my ear; a mosquito, of course, and I wonder if we might regret this come morning.
But I know that I won’t.
I wait for whatever Tom might say, in this space that feels like an interlude in a play whose lines I have only roughly committed to memory.
But then he scratches his belly, props himself up on one elbow, smiles down at me. “We might want to go back up to the house. Might get eaten alive if we stay here much longer.”
We rouse ourselves, dress, put the remains of the picnic in the tote, fold up the blanket. Even in the darkness, there is still somehow enough light to make our way across the small meadow and up the road, our footsteps crunching on the gravel.
And when we get back to the house? Then what? Awkward bits. Do I stay? Do I go home? I feel out of sorts in my clothing, itchy and sweaty; I could use a shower. Despite that, I feel… validated? Is that fair? Is that what sex means? Someone finds you attractive enough to want to make love with you? Fair enough, but I think there’s more to it than that. I want there to be more to it than that. This feels more like a… well, for the life of me, it feels like a “welcome home” kind of thing: this is who we are, this is what we have between us, therefore this is what we do.
But after twenty years? I don’t know. I know that this is more than just the carrying out of a physical act; each of us has always been capable of having that in our lives. I certainly have. I sense that Tom has, too; although his options might be more limited than mine, they do exist, everywhere, if one knows where to find them. There are the obvious delights in that; there is also emptiness.
Is that what my life is, now? Empty? Busy, certainly, if only professionally. My career has consumed me; I have let it consume me, because I thought I had to. We are taught that early on: work is everything. If you’re not in studio, you’re not serious. If you’re not spending every waking hour thinking, doing, creating, then you’re just wasting your time. And we swallowed it; we let it carry us away.
Is this what Tom endured as well? Watching his life consumed by a job he didn’t really want, taking it only to please his father, taking it only because no one else would, a son’s duty to his father. For me, at least, my hard work paid off, or has so far: a portfolio of good work, important work, work that has been well-reviewed, has won awards. And I am proud of it. For Tom, though… unable to do anything to stop the slow hemorrhage as customer after customer deserted him for cheaper goods elsewhere.
We climb, higher and higher, slower than when we came down, but we steadily rise to the top of the cliff, and the dairy, and the house. I have a rapidly shrinking window of opportunity to figure this thing out, and nothing suggests itself. To say what I know he wants me to say—and which part of me wants to say, as well—is simple. Five words: I want to stay here. But behind that, a promise that cannot be undone without undoing the both of us.
The sounds of the river have faded. There are now only the incidental sounds of a summer night, punctuated by the grit, grit, grit of our footsteps as we labor up the hill. With each step I seem closer to New York, closer to leaving.
There’s the opposite to consider, as well. Four words are enough for that: come to New York. He knows as well as I do that that’s a possibility he can—must—consider. It’s easier for him to consider this; he’s already well into the process of unraveling himself from this community.
But I’d called us city mouse and country mouse, earlier. More truth in that than I care to admit; what will he do with himself if he comes away with me? He’s spent all of his life so far in this place, knows no other. And the city, this city… it had frightened me, when I first saw it, as it must frighten everyone. But I’d wanted it, was willing to become something else in order to stay.
Would Tom? Am I underestimating him?
The climb gets the better of me; I stop, lean against the rock shelf.
Tom grins. “Well, if you’d cut down on that pack-a-day habit… ”
“We have elevators to do this for us.”
“Wimp. We don’t need no stinkin’ elevators.”
This is about the spot where, on the way down, I had remarked about building a house. I try to imagine it, some sleek and modern thing jutting out over the palisade, my own masterpiece, the house I’d been drawing all of my life. Just enough room for the two of us.
Out of the corner of my eye I can see Tom looking at me. I turn, look a question at him.
“Okay,” he responds.
“Okay… ” I counter.
“If I do this… ” he starts. He closes his eyes; something glimmers there, under the lids. He starts over. “If I do this thing—if I go back with you—you’re going to have to help me.”
The house in my mind shimmers, shatters, falls away and down in a fog of glass and steel and concrete and fantasy. Everything I could say to this—every little joke and clever turn of phrase—follows that were-house down.
“I will,” I promise. “I will.”
Tom breathes out, the sound of it ragged and nervous, and I understand. I felt the same way, that first time, circling in the air around the island spread out beneath me, clawing up into the air, hope and danger in equal measure coursing in its streets.
“You better, or… ”
We hug each other, kiss. I understand that I am on probation, that nothing has really been settled between us, that this is as far as he can go for now. The city and I will have to prove ourselves to him.
We continue on up the hill. Gradually, the road flattens around us as we rise up to the level of the pasture; a more ordered nature reasserts itself around us, freckled and constellated with lights, bounded and bordered with fencing. I can see Tom’s house in the distance. We reach the edge of the road, cross it—something defiant and mysterious about standing in the middle of a deserted road at night—and walk along the low stone wall that separates the dairy from the road until we reach a gate, duck under it, skitter across a cattle guard, start up the road to the house. The huddled metal buildings of the dairy cluster around us, lighted by harsh and actinic silver-blue lighting that throws bright-black shadows in front of us. I am reminded of some film I once saw in college, something from the twenties, German and stark and mysterious, monsters in white make-up lurking in the depths, craven and vampiric.
And because I need to say something, and because I don’t know what else to say, I say the only thing that comes to me, a thing that has danced in my head for most of a week, since I learned of Tom’s plans.
“It’ll have to be strange for you to see the dairy become something else.”
Tom glances at me, his face hard to read in the fugitive light. “Yes.”
“Houses, all around you. Or—well, you’ve seen where Teresa and Duane live… ”
He chuckles. “Yes.”
“… little boxes made of ticky-tack… ” I sing, badly.
“Better than that, I hope,” he responds. “I guess I won’t have to see it, if I don’t want to. They probably won’t want me sticking around, anyway.”
“Would you have stayed?” I ask. “I mean, if… ”
“Yeah, probably,” he answers. “Nowhere else to go, really. It still means something to me.”
“I know.”
“It’s why I’m keeping it. I insisted on that, as part of the deal. I can’t give away everything. Even if I go with you.”
“Tom… ”
“Sorry. I just… well… ”
I understand again what I’m not-asking him—I never really posed the question; he’s simply intuited it through whatever shared intimacy exists between us—to give up to come with me back to New York. It’s easier to let go of a place you thought you hated, and when the people with you in that place make it easy to let go, as my mother had for me. But, for Tom, with nearly forty years spent tied to this place, it won’t be as easy. He’d made his own peace in this place, as I had done in New York.
The light from the yard behind us casts our shadows in front of us, blending with each step into the dark fields around us. The house rises before us; it sits on the crown of the hill, regal and imperious even if it never meant to be.
“Beautiful,” I whisper.
Tom grasps my hand and squeezes it. “Yes,” he answers.
The house is like a third person in all of this; silent, yes, but hard to ignore, an iron-tough dowager matriarch humbled into muteness by age and illness, but demanding nonetheless, whose every glance and glower implore you not to forget her.
We cross the garden, pause, look back at the path we’d just taken; the pastures billow out and away and down from us, empty now of cattle and the permanence that their presence invoked. That, perhaps, is what Tom didn’t want to see that day of the auction, but made himself see because he had to.
We move to one of the doors; Tom pulls a rattly handful of keys from his pockets, paws through them, inserts one into the lock, lets us inside.
In darkness, Tom moves through the house and I follow, trusting him. This house has so written itself into him that he knows her like a lover, every nuance and corner, every shadow and unseen contour. Together, we move through the kitchen and dining room, into the stair hall. On each side of the stair are arranged many dozens of photographs, many generations of Hannas, dour and grim and unsmiling, yielding to guarded smiles borne of increasing prosperity, and finally to people I know and then to one boy in particular. We creak up the stairs and down the hall to Tom’s bedroom, the same bedroom he’d had as a child.
I have not been here for twenty years. We had thought to come here, one lazy afternoon, to make love and were nearly caught doing so by some one of his sisters, back early from a friend’s place. After that, we’d escaped to the river and the hollowed rock.
We undress silently, shucking our second skins like snakes. Tom moves to a window, opens it to a cooling breeze that raises goosebumps on our bare flesh.
Nothing of Tom’s childhood remains in this room, but it is not cold and impersonal. It’s the room of an adult man, a bachelor, really; it’s simple and austere, furnished in a carefully-curated selection from the house’s furniture, pieces I half-remember from the hours I spent with him and his family. There is a certain monasticism about it, a certain hint of denial.
We lay down side by side, on top of the duvet, our legs, arms, torsos parallel to each other’s. I can feel a shoal of warmth from Tom’s body beside me, catch the scent of him, musky and not unpleasant. Together, we watch a sliver of moon creep down into the trees and out of sight.
Our breathing shallows and slows, and presently we sleep.
Posted 1 January 2025