Eden

It happened so very quickly, Now it was just January, just the beginning of a new year, and they’d come together Thanksgiving of the last one. Isaiah pressed his head into Jason’s naked stomach.

“Jason?”

“Yes?”

“Guess what?”

“Hum?”

“I told Evan we’re together.”

Jason’s fingers, which were laced with his, stopped moving for a moment. And then they started again, fingers playing with his.

“That’s good. Now we should tell everyone. You’re not exactly something I want to be quiet about.”

Melanie Barrett stood there and read:

You

Came to see

The bridge

They call it golden,

But all you saw was Rust

And I adore

that Bridge

And you

saw nothing

It was on one of their last classes, and when everyone clapped, Melanie smiled and blushed with rare humble pleasure. Isaiah thought, “That was a poem. We’ve all really written some poetry.”

Siona had found her way from being a stripper across the state line, to being here at Monserrat, in the heart of what was something like an art scene, and she was on the committee for the first creative writing magazine, and she voted for Isaiah’s poem, ignorant of who had written it, for the names were covered over. When it was voted into the magazine, unanimously, and Isaiah revealed to be the poet, she shouted.

“I didn’t know it was yours! I didn’t! God, it really did something to me. How did you do that?”

Dickens would have said it was the best of times, but the worst of times because their creative writing class would come to an end and how would they sustain this? The good thing was most of the friends they had made were not leaving. They were freshmen or they were going to make a stake in the new Monserrat. But would they be together and how could they keep what they had found here?

“Okay!” Evan was saying, “So this is the coolest thing. When Antony went to Egypt and ended up with Cleopatra they really believed they were immortal. Right? They believed in living life to the fullest and they formed this dining party and called themselves, get this: The Immortal Livers. Not like livers in your chest that never gave out—”

“I kinda got that.”

“But people who just kept on living. I think that’s great. I think that’s fantastic. If I knew people like that, we could form a society. But you know, Citeaux’s not really full of Immortal Livers.”

“I’m planning my twenty-first birthday party. It would be great if you were there.”

“It would be,” Jason agreed. “But I’m going to be back home. I’ll send you something though.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“I know. But I wish I was there, so I’ll just send something… in lieu of me.”

“In lieu.”

“I’m using that phrase a lot lately. I like it.”

His twenty-first birthday party was at his mother’s house. Half the family was there, and slowly the friends drifted in too. Melanie came with José Cuervo stuffed in her bra, pulling the bottle out of her breasts as she entered the house. Shanna and Jesse and Frank showed up later. Jazmine was so drunk she danced in a circle in the backyard with his sister Sharon’s baby, Javon, until she had to leave the boy on the ground and run off to throw up.

But when the party wound down, Shanna, Melanie and Isaiah were still awake and so they drove all over town. Melanie was determined to find a hotel with a pool they could break into. They drove all the way to Canary Springs to find one. No luck.

Late that night, early that morning, in the ratty café under the viaduct they sat drinking coffee and lighting cigarettes and Isaiah said:

“This has nothing to do with my birthday—”

“Of course it does,” said Melanie, believing that he meant their sitting in a café under a viaduct at four o’clock in the morning in mid May.

“No, I meant what I am about to say.

“See, I think we need each other. I think not just as friends, but as… artists we found something. And we should keep it going.”

“You mean like a writing club?” Shanna said, excitedly.

“Yes,” said Isaiah. “But more than that. An us club, a we club. We will come together to discuss what we are doing, to help each other do it.”

“A society!” Melanie said with a breath of delicious secrecy.

“What will we call it?”

“Does it have to have a name?” Isaiah wondered.

“Yes,” Shanna insisted.

Melanie nodded.

“The Immortal Livers,” Isaiah said.

They both looked at him.

And then Melanie said, “I don’t like it.”

“Neither do I,” Isaiah admitted, “but until I can think of something else, let’s keep it.”

Siona agreed, and since neither one of them asked where the hell such a name had come from, Isaiah offered no explanation.

THE SEMESTER BEFORE HIS twenty-first birthday, when Isaiah writing life was brilliant, his love life reached its nadir. Jason was brooding, distant and secretive or simply depressed. At that time, his other friends became a relief to Isaiah. Jason had originally planned to stay for summer school, but when that year was over, Jason had told Isaiah that he was thinking of going back home all summer and returning in the first week of September. In addition, he left school a week early in a cloud of shrugs and murmurs while Isaiah was preparing for final exams.

Isaiah did not beg him to stay. He contented himself with Jason’s half answers and depressions until finally, toward the end of that year, he called his beloved and said, “If we are through, there are other people out there, so I need to know it. You act as if we’re through.”

Jason received the message at his parent’s house. He had gone back to Illinois for a few days before the end of the year. Isaiah’s words so terrified him that Jason immediately made arrangements with Burt Haarlem to share an apartment over the summer and then he drove to Isaiah’s dorm room while he was getting ready to move off campus. Jason arrived, tired and sweaty.

“I’ve been driving three hours,” he said. “We’re not over.”

That had been the semester before their senior year. Jason had been given a dorm on the other side of where Isaiah was. Six rooms, three on either side, were all that separated them.

“It’s too bad we don’t have the same room, or live next door,” Jason said.

Isaiah, who was always fond of his privacy and had enough of Jason’s easels set up all over his suite already, disagreed. But he kept this to himself.

One day, after a long bit of funniness, Isaiah finally asked Jason what was the matter.

“Nothing’s the matter,” he said in a high and ridiculous voice, and he sent Isaiah a smile both silly and slightly frightened.

“How long have we been together?”

Again that shrug, the frightened smile. That was what white men looked like when they lied. Isaiah had never seen himself in the mirror when he lied, and he’d spent his whole life in this world with few investments in other Black men, so what they looked like when lying, he could not tell. But in white men there was this ill concealed fear, the lie badly told which said almost that they wanted to be caught at it.

“I count two years,” Isaiah told him. “And I know you. I can see you. Not into you, or I’d know what was going on. What’s going on?”

So Jason tried his second tactic. He got angry. The space in his forehead knotted and he stood up yelling:

“Don’t do this to me! Don’t hound me! You never let anything go.”

Isaiah let it go then. He was feeling distinctly out of love with Jason that day.

One day, toward Christmas of that year, when dry snow like white ice was twirling outside of Basil Hall, and it tried to stick, but couldn’t, Jason tapped on the cracked door of Isaiah’s suite before entering slowly.

“I need to talk to you.”

“Is this about what I asked you a few weeks ago?”

“Yes.”

“The thing that’s been bothering you for a while now?”

“Um hum. Can I sit down?”

Isaiah felt strangely cold and out of patience with Jason, as if things had run their course. And he was busy with editing the creative writing magazine, re-editing because the chief editor wasn’t doing her job. He was tired of Jason and his moods, and so he gestured for him to sit down on the bed, not looking at him, but paying attention to the stacks of paper on his desk before the window. Isaiah Frey was filled with the dark grey of the early winter evening.

“I have something to tell you,” Jason said. “But I’m not sure how.”

“The best way is to be quick and to the point,” Isaiah said.

Isaiah supposed Jason was about to say something like, “The magic is gone”, which it was. Or, “We won’t work out”, which was possible. Or, “We’ve become two different people”, which was debatable.

Instead what Jason Henley said was:

“I have a son.”

“A little boy. He’s about two—”

“About two!”

“I… ah… Listen.”

“I’m listening,” said Isaiah. All he could do was listen.

“My girlfriend in high school—”

“High school was more than two years ago. We’ve been together two years. You—”

“Listen—” the first word started as a yell, “Isaiah,” he said, pleadingly.

“It was after you told me what you told me. When I came back sophomore year. That you were gay and yadda yadda and it started making me think about how I felt about you.” He looked directly at Isaiah, “Still feel about you.” He started to touch Isaiah’s cheek, but one look told him this would be a mistake.

“We were getting closer and closer before Thanksgiving Break and Elle, that’s her name, my ex-girlfriend, wanted to know where we stood. I didn’t know if I was gay or not so…”

“So you fucked her to find out?”

Jason’s face looked like he’d just seen someone throw up. Isaiah felt like he’d just thrown up.

Then Jason said, weakly, “Did you think I was a virgin when I met you?”

And then he said, “I was a virgin when I met you. I… Didn’t know. I needed to know, so I had sex with her, alright?”

“No!” Isaiah said quickly, standing up. “No, it’s not alright that you fucked your ex-girlfriend the weekend before…. Before you came to me and kissed me, right?”

“Because by then I was sure.”

“Because you’d fucked her enough to know?”

There was no way it sounded good, and Jason knew this. He thought the best thing to do was be quiet. He’d always thought that, which is why he never told Isaiah.

“And from the one time you fucked her—”

“Stop saying that!” Jason snapped.

“From that one time… came… a baby.”

Jason muttered, “It wasn’t one time.”

“So you fuck—I’m sorry, you had coitus with her a lot to make sure you were gay.”

“I needed to know that I was in love with you,” Jason said simply. “That it was you I wanted to be with. And every time I was with her-”

“Jason,” Isaiah put a hand up. “I… I don’t want to hear about every time you were with someone else. I really don’t. I don’t want to know that the whole time I was thinking… whatever I was thinking, loving you and everything two years back, you were screwing someone to prove something, or find out something. Screwing someone who apparently had your child.

“Just tell me… quickly. Have you been sleeping with her while we—”

“No!” Jason shouted. “How could you think that?”

“Because you’ve been hiding a secret baby from me for two years!”

“Not two years. It hasn’t been that long.”

“But you just said—”

“I didn’t always know about him. I… Annex isn’t a huge town, not like Chicago. But it’s big enough that you don’t see everyone, and after I broke up with Elle, I didn’t see her. Then someone told me she had a kid. Naturally I thought, could it be mine? No, but she would have told me. Stuff like that. And then, one day, my cousin told me plain as shit that Elle had my kid and I found her number and asked her if it was true and she said yeah.”

Isaiah opened his desk drawer and pulled out the open pack of Marlboros. He took one up, examined it, and then lit it. The room had darkened now and the orange of the cherry was the brightest light.

“And this… one… day… When you found out… About this baby?”

He had been quiet so long Jason was staring off into space.

“How long ago was that?”

“Huh?”

Isaiah spoke quickly: “I said how long ago did you find out about the kid?”

Jason replied with equal rapidity, anxious to get the confession out of his mouth.

“About a year ago.”

“Shit!” said Melanie exhaling a jet of smoke into the air.

Evan leaned in and said, “So let me get this straight—”

“Now that is an ironic turn of phrase,” Isaiah noted.

“Jason has… hidden a secret baby from you for about a year now?”

“Yes,” Isaiah said. “That’s just the thing. He lied to me about this child for an entire year.”

“Shit!” Shanna exclaimed. “The only good thing about this is you’ve got a whole new novel plot.”

Evan looked at her sharply.

“I wasn’t joking. Well, I was. But what else can we do? God!”

“What are you going to do?” Melanie said. “Are you all going to stay together?”

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