Bird Came Down

Ben didn’t drive, and Felix always rode a bike, so this day they had to walk all the way to the house where Felix stayed with his family, rolling the bike at his side.

“You’re going to meet my folks,” Felix said, “and you’re finally going to see my house.”

The first thing Felix discovered was that his family was not terribly welcoming. There were two times he had had friends over and, on both occasions it was awkward. Now there was a static in the air. They didn’t like strange people coming into their territory and this house was their territory. Mom made a meal and she was friendly, but a little phony. They took a walk around the lake north of the house, and for the first time Ben admitted looking at a guy whose shirt was off when he jogged. The runner did not look at Ben though, but Felix.

They sat up smoking and talking all night, and when it was time to go to bed, Ben got on the floor and Felix said, “What are you doing?” and Ben said, “Going to sleep,” and Felix said, “You can sleep on the bed with me. We’re adults.”

“Are you sure?” Ben asked.

That night they slept in the same bed and Ben began to squirm closer to him, touching him. Suddenly Felix kissed him and Ben sat up and said, “No.”

Hurt again, Felix backed away, and then Ben said, “Maybe just a little.”

They made out and then Ben sat on the edge of the bed, disconsolate.

“You’re not the one,” he said.

“Excuse me.”

“I thought you were the one—”

“You did?”

“But you’re not.”

“Oh,” said Felix, because he didn’t know what else to say. “Well, then…. Come back to bed.”

Ben did, and this time when Ben reached for him, Felix pushed him aside.

“You’re still with that April, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then don’t try to be with me.”

He had been kissed. He had kissed. He had been groped and felt up and he’d never been with anyone until then. He had not imagined it. Ben had thought he was the one. Ben had been in love with him. Ben said he wasn’t the one, which meant Ben wasn’t in love, or wasn’t sure. But Felix knew one thing was true. He wasn’t in love with Ben. Not anymore.

Felix rolled over and went to sleep.

“I think we could… have something,” Ben said the next morning over breakfast. “I think we could.”

“I had thought so too,” Felix told him. “But I’m not so dumb or so desperate I’d do something with you when you were still with that April.”

That was the first day they hugged and the first day Ben kissed him, and when Ben headed for home, Felix went to Mass and thanked God because, after all the years of being a plaster virgin, which was all fine and good, he was finally someone who had stepped into the world of love and desire.

The next week, when he returned to Ben’s place, after a drag out, exhausting fight with his family, after his father said men did not lay in beds with other men and Felix vowed to get his own place, as he should have long ago, he came to Ben, and Ben said sleep on the pallet, not with him. He went to sleep on the floor and looked at a rolled out condom that had slipped from under the TV. A lump of misery swelled in his throat and he wanted to leave, but tonight there was no place else to go. He had put such a gulf between himself and his family. Loss and despair burned in his heart, and his love for Ben was gone, but so was the love for his family. In the middle of the night, face hot and wet, the life he would know ever after had finally begun.

“Hello?”

“Hey, it’s me.”

“Joey, I know you!” Felix lied. He had thought it was Scott.

“Scott said I should call to see if you were alright?”

“I’m fine,” Felix turned and looked at Ben who was sitting on the couch rubbing his head.

“Is your car alright?”

“Why wouldn’t it be?” Joey asked.

“Nevermind then,” said Felix.

“Do you want me to come over later?”

“Yes. Yes I do. Are you in the building now?”

“I’m downstairs.” Joey laughed. “I can’t come up though, now. I mean I could, but I couldn’t stay.”

“No, no,” Felix shook his head. “Don’t you worry about that.”

“I’m free after six-thirty.”

“Then six-thirty is good.”

FELIX BEGAN GOING to the coffee shop as much as possible to get away from home and the memory of Ben, and it was on a computer, from the coffee shop he wrote a letter to Ben that he eventually pinned to the walls of the coffee shop and to a message board online.

Dear Ben,

I’m sorry to deliver this bad news to you, and maybe you’re not going to want to speak to me again, call me all sorts of an asshole after I write this. That’s my second biggest fear. My real fear though is that you’ll blow it off and keep on denying some shit that’s pretty obvious and not just to me:

You’re gay.

I’m sorry, I don’t know how else to put it.

You’re gay. Quit asking me to deny it. Quit acting like it’s dirty, and going on about how you like girls, all these girls you loved in the past. Just stop it. Stop revising stories and changing pronouns. Give me that much respect. It doesn’t have to be dirty. It doesn’t have to be you surfing around looking at fisting websites. It could be beautiful. It could be happy. You could actually start to feel good about yourself. But if you treat it like its dirty, like you’re dirty, then you will be.

Okay, so maybe you don’t like that word. Gay. Maybe you don’t want to be navy. You want to be cornflower. And maybe you don’t want to end up with me. But I think you will. Fine. But end up with someone. You know why you can’t be into her. But ask yourself this, if a girl KNOWS that the guy she’s with wants to be with other people, wants to be with other MEN, then why the hell would she hang onto you—no matter how much you begged—if she loved you?

Sitting in his recliner, in his living room, Felix looked at Ben with his swollen head and said, “You need to leave. I wasn’t sure if you needed to leave or not, but now I remember how much I hate you.”

Back then, Felix had written more:

Everything was so difficult with you. You never told the truth, you always wanted something, but didn’t. Wanted to touch, but didn’t. Were gay, but wanted to be straight. It was just one long session of frustration and indecision. And that got old after a while. I didn’t know how to look for someone else without being disloyal to you and them. This apparently never bothered you while you while you cooked for me, took me out

places and then turned around and fucked someone else. With the drummer it might be nice. It would be sane.

I’d like sanity.

Ben wrote him back several shrill letters, showed up to the coffee shop, running a red pen through the posted poems until people shouted at him to stop and called him a closet pansy. But Felix did not respond. Felix did not write back. For the first time, in a very real way, as far as Felix was concerned, Ben was gone, and he would never love anyone the way he had loved Ben. He would never love so unwisely.

Things with the guitarist in the band did not turn out, but a little while later he made a profile online and he met more men. He kept looking for each of them to be the love of his life, but Val said a large penis was better than another heartbreak, and by then he had actually seen porn, so when Ezequiel came by, an olive skinned Argentinian who was a doctoral candidate at the university, Felix said yes. They got a hotel room and when he saw his penis, sausage large and heavy, Felix immediately put it in his mouth.

“Sook that coke! Sook that coke!” Ezequiel urged, then Ezequiel “sooked” his “coke”, and they made love all night. They didn’t do everything, but they did a great deal, and after Ezequiel he learned that men weren’t very dependable, and that it didn’t matter if you weren’t sure if you wanted to see them again because they were often afraid of seeing you. So he made a lot of love and he wrote a lot of poems.

And after a year of this, he walked into the public library and, of all people, who was working there after having lost his job, after saying he was moving to Colorado. Who was there now, but Ben?

Felix checked out books because he wanted to see him, and Ben checked them out for him, looking at him now and again, and then he said, “Well, would you like to go to lunch?”

“Don’t you have to work?” Felix asked.

“I’m off at one. If you could wait.”

And Felix said, “I can.”

They went to the Pub, and Ben told him how he was thinking of moving to Seattle in a few days because there wasn’t much of a reason to be here anymore, and as Felix ran a French fry through his ketchup, he thought of how much he really didn’t care about Ben.

“I was a virgin when you knew me,” Felix said, suddenly.

Ben blinked at him.

“Maybe you never understood that. I always thought I would come to you when you really loved me. When you were really mine, when I knew we would be together forever.”

Ben nodded, looking a little stupid.

“You needn’t worry about that anymore,” Felix told him. “I don’t feel that way now. It’s been others since you. It’s been a while since you.”

“Are you seeing someone?”

“I’m seeing a bunch of someones.”

“Anyone special?”

Felix gave a cheesy smile and said, “Everybody’s special.”

When the waitress came and said, “One check or two,” Felix pointed at Ben and said, “Put it on his tab.”

Ben blinked, and then when the waitress looked at him, he nodded and said, “Uh… yeah. Put it on my tab.”

When Felix was getting ready to leave, Ben said, “Where are you going?”

“I thought I was going home. Where should I be going?”

Ben seemed so dumb. He couldn’t put an answer together. Finally Ben said, “We could… go back to my place.”

“Alright,” Felix nodded. “We can do that.”

Back in his apartment, Ben was obviously glad to see him, glad to talk, to be with him, but neither one of them brought up their last time, and Felix could not fully look at him, could not love him. After an hour Ben bit his lower lip and tapped his foot nervously. He rubbed his hands together and said, “Ehhhh… So what should we do now?”

But Felix understood a little of what he was. He understood what was wrong with how they had been before. Ben had no business leading anything. The idea of he on one side of Ben and April on the other had been as bad as anything else. So Felix looked at Ben for a while and then took him by the hand and into the bedroom.

When they both lay naked, on their backs, catching their breaths, settling into their bodies, Felix said, “I just thought that was the elephant in the room... the thing we were both nervous about.”

Ben laughed and turned to him, lying on his side, running a finger over Felix’s chest.

“So you thought, let’s just screw, and get all the awkwardness out of the way?”

“Or at least know where we stand.

“I love you,” Ben said. “I’m in love with you. I’ve always been in love with you.”

Ben sat up.

“Tell me you love me too.”

“No,” Felix said.

“What?”

“No.”

Ben blinked.

“Why?”

But Felix was already getting dressed when he explained, “Because I don’t. And I was pretty sure that I didn’t. But I wanted this moment—” He pulled on his shirt and reached for his messenger bag. “I wanted this moment, with you, right here, naked, looking at me the way you are right now. I’ve wanted it for years.”

While the life drained from Ben’s stricken face and he sat, hair sticking up, naked in bed, Felix continued, “And now, after all the shit you put me through, you’ve given me the best present in the world, and I want to remember you. Just—like—this.”

And so Felix left him.

“You there?” Joey whispered, leaning on his side and tapping Felix’s chest.

“Huh?” Felix said, then shaking his head he said, “Yes.”

Joey nodded, and under the covers he pressed his body against Felix’s.

“Could I ask you to do something for me?”

“Well,” Joey said, his lips against Felix’s shoulder, “I am the maintenance man.”

“Could you run me on an errand?”

“Uh?” Joey stretched and sat up in bed, looking down at Felix.

“I guess. Like… right now?”

Felix nodded his shaven head.

“I’m afraid so.”

A light went on when their car pulled up behind the battered car on Hurst Street. The door opened and Ben came running out. Felix got out of the passenger seat and, his eyes black, Ben ran toward him.

“What are you doing now?” Ben shouted.

Felix caught his shoulders.

“What are you doing to me now?” Ben’s voice almost broke.

“Apologizing,” Felix said.

Ben blinked at him.

From the inside of the car, Ben saw Joey looking up at him, but now he looked back at Felix.

“I did love you,” Felix told him. “I loved you more than anyone else ever did. Alright? I want you to understand that. I… I would have given my whole life to you. You remember that. You remember me talking pictures of you when you slept. You remember what I wrote you, the letters, the notes, how much I loved you. You remember that. Somebody loved you, really loved you. For you. Alright?”

Ben closed his eyes, his face twisted and he turned his head. Felix released him. Another light went on in the house.

Finally, Ben looked up at him.

“Do you still?” he asked him.

Felix took a deep breath, but what he said was, “Good night, Ben.”

He kissed him on the cheek, and then he climbed into the car, and signaled for Joey to drive.

As they went up Hurst Street, Ben’s form and the form of the wrecked car dwindling in the night. Joey said, “Do you?”

“Do I what?”

“Still love him?”

“Oh,” Felix looked distracted. “No, I don’t think so.”

And then he added, “And I’m definitely not paying to fix his car.”

Theme Song: My Skin, Natalie Merchant