Eden

When Jason returned with DJ,the school year was about a week under way, and his one time lover seemed so oblivious to this, so smiley faced and gee-willickers stupid, that Isaiah wanted to slap him. But Adam had spoken to him before he left and Sharon and Jazmine had weighed in as well. He told DJ, “Go and play with Javon, and I’ve left your homework assignments for what you’ve missed. I told your teacher you’d have it all done by the middle of next week. No. Don’t look at me like that.”

When DJ was gone to the back of the house Isaiah told Jason, “You have two options. Turn over custody of DJ to me right now—I’ve got the paperwork, you can stay a few days to get it notarized—or go and take him with you. Those are your options.”

Jason hemmed and hawwed about it. He really wanted to have his cake and eat it too. Isaiah continued, “And of course I expect you to pay for his schooling, and his clothing, for his upkeep, really, because he is your son. But he stays with me. I have the raising of him.”

In the end, Jason realized what had become clear to Isaiah and Melanie long ago. He had no long term parenting skills. And so he agreed, and two days later they sat in a law office by the highway and DJ looked from Jason to Isaiah, then said, “You’re my dad now?”

Isaiah raised an eyebrow and looked at the papers, and then at Jason.

“That would seem to be the way of it.”

DJ was a discreet, sensitive child, and he waited until Jason was gone to ask Isaiah, “Does that mean I can call you Dad?”

And Isaiah said, “If you must.”

And DJ decided that he did.

Late that night, Isaiah Frey thought of making another pot off coffee, but simply used the remains of that last pot and poured it into two cups. He mixed the cream and sugar until it fissed. This was the first of the humid nights. It had been cold. That change in weather, he supposed, was why his sickness had come. This new humidty melted the heavy places in his nostrils and behind his head. He came into the backyard, where he could hear the train passing and Rob was sitting in that direction, looking at the hedge, and watching the thin clouds pass over the stars.

“You look like a forlorn hound,” Isaiah said as he sat down in the lounge chair beside Rob’s and put the mug of coffee into his huge hands.

“The coffee should make me hotter,” Rob said, taking the mug up and sipping, “But I still always want coffee late at night.”

“It’s almost like you ignored what I said,” Frey noted, putting the coffee cup down on the little tray between them.

“What are we doing?” Rob said.

“Frey thought of being facetious and saying, drinking coffee, but instead he said nothing, and let Rob keep talking.

“What are you going to do?” he said. “You’re going to have to go back to town, go back and work. What happens when you leave?”

Frey was thinking of what would happen when they went back in, when they showered off the restaurant and his nephew and his foster son, who thankfully were not staying. Frey was thinking of when they returned to the bedroom and slept. He was thinking of the good things of life, the coolness of the air conditioner, the smell of delicious food from the restaurant, his nephew and his son around him, Rob pressed against him, nothing separating their skins, the adventures in love they made every night.

“I haven’t allowed myself to think very far,” Frey said, “Because nothing has ever led very far, not in a long time. And so I take things for what they are in the moment. I loved the moment. I wasn’t thinking of the future at all. I can’t trust many men to want much of a future.

“The Bible is right. Men really are like grass and the flower of the field. And they want. They have lusts. They want to fuck, but they want to be loved. They want so much, but they don’t know how to get it and they want it like impulses, little electric shocks and when the shocks pass through, they don’t have the energy for the stuff that matters.

“Men don’t have desires. Not really. Desire is deep. Desire persist. It turns into strength then turns into will. You need something that carries you past the moment of your erection, or the moment of your depression for that matter. Most men don’t have it. So it doesn’t do to make plans for them.”

“Are you saying that about me?” Rob turned to him.

“No,” Frey said. “That has never been you. But it wasn’t a lot of men, and so I started to count on them, and then… they weren’t worth counting on.”

Rob touched Isaiah’s hand. He ran his finger along the lines of his fingers as if he were tracing them, but he let them go before he spoke.

“I’ve had sex with a lot of people.”

Isaiah did not look at him, and Rob continued.

“Once, I met a man. I brought him home. We smoked pot and drank bourbon and he fucked me in my ass so hard I could feel it for three days. I don’t speak to him and don’t wish to. There was no conversation he had to offer. But he meant everything. The night he fucked me it was everything. And it was all that it could be.

“I,” Rob said, picking up his coffee cup, “Get what it means to take everything of everything you get from a guy and not count on tomorrow. I completely fucking get that. One night, online, I said I wanted to fuck faceless and nameless in the dark, and I needed to fuck faceless and nameless in the dark and you must have too. So we did, and we were that to each other. And we’ve been more than that, but what we will be, we haven’t decided that, Frey. I haven’t properly asked.

“But for me, sitting here with you is everything, and every time we fuck it’s everything. When we had sex under the the stars in that truck it was everything, and when I brought you medicine and watched over you, that was everything.”

Frey had not spoken, and still he did not speak, and though above them the sherbet colored lights were haloed by moths, his yard was in darkness.

“When I was younger,” Frey finally said, “when I was with Jason, I wanted a husband, or maybe I wanted to be a wife. Since then I’ve known love in a lot of different ways, and the men who want something just like straight people only gay, the same old married thing only in pink,”

Frey shook his head. “I don’t want that. When you try to tie up love and lust in convention, make them look like what people have said they should, then they suffer. So, you have to decide what you want what we’re doing to look like, but don’t come back telling me you want it to look like some shit you’ve seen a thousand times before.”

Rob took his hand in the dark and kissed him.

“Mr. Frey,” he said, “I wouldn’t dare give you the some shit you’ve seen a thousand times before.”

“Tomorrow we should go to the beach,” DJ decided from the bathroom.

In his bed, Javon turned a little so he could look out of the balcony windows to the highway and said, “We could do that. We’ll also go see Isaiah and that new friend of his.”

“I like Rob,” DJ was saying, “and I admire Dad’s ability to always find a friend.”

“Find a friend!” Javon barked out a laugh.

As the bathroom door came open, DJ stepped out, his brown hair sticking up still wet from the shower, a white towel wrapped about his waist. He sat on the other twin bed, and put on deodorant and then reached for the nightstand and began combing his hair.

“Can you imagine if we could afford to stay on the beach?”

“I think homeless people afford it every night.”

“You’re hilarious.”

“And with no effort,” Javon shrugged, then said, “Can you imagine how much those fucking beach houses cost? Palaces!” Javon declared. “Every one.”

“But we can afford to go to the beach, to Dune Park, at least.”

“This is the strangest town,” Javon said. “On the beach these huge palaces and then, once you cross to the other side of the train tracks, literally on the other side of the train tracks, a regular little almsot hillbilly town.”

“Maybe the downtown is where it all makes sense.”

Javon had turned out his lamp light and removed the too heavy comforter from his bed so he lay on his back feeling the cool air from the vents, and listening to DJ who sat in the dim glow of his bedside lamp.

` “You know what I was thinking?” DJ said.

“I feel like you’re about to tell me.”

“You’re right,” his cousin said. “We could go prowling at night. We could go to the beach at night.”

“And I could be a Black eighteen year old male around really expensive houses in a not very progressive state and be arrested.

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

“I’m always thinking of that,” Javon said, his eyes closed. He yawned. “Are you done now?”

“Yes, Javon,” DJ said, almost penitently.

“Then let’s go to bed.”

Without shutting off the light, because he knew Javon wanted to see him, he stood up, unwound his towel, and naked, came into bed with his cousin, reaching behind him to turn off the light as they lay together in the darkness.