Final Turn of the Wheel

I don’t know what draws me to the dining room window at the front of the house, but when I look out I see him—David—walking up the dirt drive from the county road, past my house, to his house farther up the mountain. Where has he been? He never goes out anymore. I hadn’t seen him walking the road all winter, which only now is turning into spring. Someone must have given him a lift this far. Why didn’t he ask me to take him wherever he’s been? He’s dressed up in a suit, but it hangs on him like he’s lost fifty pounds. He’s walking so wearily, hunched over on himself. He’s lost weight; there doesn’t seem to be much left of him. He was once so robust . . . we were essentially the same size at one time, back when we were both young enough to have plans for the future. I feel guilty that I’ve stayed the same . . . through it all.

As always, I feel the clutch of seeing him. I haven’t seen him for two months and five days now, not since the funeral for his Amy—and the only time before that in a long time was at the funeral for my Helen. Both times we’d been standing away from each other, not being able to chance more than a glance or two for each other.

Seeing him stirs something in me. I move around the house nervously, unable to concentrate on any task for long or to settle. It’s a good thing it’s only me now and there’s nothing much to do anyway.

I anticipate the phone call. I have no idea why I do. Nobody calls me anymore. It was Helen who had been the social one. Within two weeks of her passing I’d become an “Oh, does he still live around here?” someone people once had known. That is all right with me. It means the phone doesn’t ring and I can melt into the silence of the house, with only my memories for company. For some reason, though, I keep walking by the phone, looking at it, expecting it to ring. And when it does, I nearly jump out of my skin and don’t pick it up until the third ring.

“Please come up,” is all he says, and then I hear the click as the line goes dead. I don’t have to ask who it was. I knew who it would be—even though it has been nearly fifteen years since he last called me. Fourteen years, seven months, and six days, actually. He doesn’t give me time to respond. He knows I’ll come. He’s always been the one in control, even from a submissive position. And I do go, after I shower and shave and brush my teeth and carefully pick out my clothes—nothing worn, nothing needing mending. I couldn’t do that to Helen. I couldn’t go in anything that hadn’t been kept up and ironed nicely. It isn’t she who failed at anything.

The front door is open to his house. I don’t knock; I just walk on in. All the time I was showering, I was dreaming about where I’d find him—how I’d find him, and it made me go hot. That’s just where I find him, in his bedroom, stretched out on his bed, naked, propped up on his elbow with his eyes trained to the doorway.

The look he gives me when I appear in the doorway is worth it all—all the years of agreeing that “We can’t do this. Amy and Helen, both of them, are too good for us to continue doing this to them.”

He doesn’t have to tell me to take my clothes off. He doesn’t have to tell me anything. I am already half hard when I come onto the bed behind him and pull him into my chest. He is too frail for me to lie on top of him—God how frail he’s gotten and how quickly. He hadn’t been this frail at the funerals. And he is too proud to admit the effort to be on top of me would be too taxing, so we do it with me behind him, spooning him into my body.

We kiss and I cup and squeeze his cock and balls as he reaches back and strokes me harder. He is the one who puts me in position and juts his buttocks back to take me inside him. I would never be the one to take that responsibility. He had always been the one to take on the greater guilt. Leaving one hand to work his chest and nipples, I move the other one down to run my fingers through his pubic bush and down the sides of his engorged cock and work him there while we move our hips in rhythm, harmonizing our sighs, and taking our pleasure of each other.

It has been so long, but it seems otherwise. We still fit together perfectly, despite him having diminished in frame and me as solid as ever, and we have all of the same moves to pleasure the other that we ever did. I come in a peaceful flow and shared sighs. Then we sleep, me withering inside him and stroking his chest, cock, and balls until I have drifted off listening to his soft breathing, soft breathing with a bit of a ragged edge to it that I don’t remember it having before.

When I wake it is to see him sitting in a chair, facing me and looking at me while he fondles himself. Seeing me awake, he smiles and says, “I want you to help me with something. Come with me. No, as you are, please.”

David takes my hand and guides me to the back of the house, to his inner sanctum, his pottery room. The pottery room was where he has always retreated when he is tense or anxious or melancholy. It’s where I had envisioned him living the hours away after Amy’s death. It’s where we first fucked, the tension of not doing so having gotten to us when our wives were out shopping.

“Please. Over in that bin,” he says, “A large handful of clay, please.” He keeps telling me to add clay until the ball is the size he wants. He sits me on the stool in front of the wheel after pulling the stool away from it. “There, put it on the wheel,” he says.

As I lean over and put the ball of clay on the wheel, he kneels in front of me, spreading my thighs, moving his frail body between my knees, and takes me inside his mouth, cupping my balls in one of his hands and gently distending them. I sit there, leaning over, the ball of clay resting on the wheel but also cupped in my hands, as he works my cock with his mouth, engorging me, and making me tremble and moan for him.

He does not let me come, though. Rising, he tells me to do so also long enough to pull the stool closer to the wheel. “Sit,” he says, and when I do, he turns and comes down into my lap, positioning himself on my erection and then taking me deep inside him, coming down until his buttocks nestle in my crotch.

Then, at his direction and guidance, with him sitting in my lap, both of us facing the wheel, which is now positioned between our spread thighs, we start working the clay together on the wheel, my hands on the clay and his hands, trembling, on mine, guiding my hands as the wheel turns and the clay begins to take form. I am deep inside him, pulsing. He is rising and falling, almost imperceptibly, on my shaft, but enough so that we both know we are fucking. We have become one, joined at the core but also at the clay with our hands. I kiss him on the back of his neck, and he begins to hum.

We were never happier, connected as one, than we are at this moment. This fleeting moment.

We are making something with the clay, but I know not what. So I ask. Years later I wonder if life would have taken another turn at this point if I had not asked. Of course it wouldn’t have, but I fantasize that it might have.

“What are we making?”

“An urn,” he answers.

That probably would have satisfied me. An urn was something I sort of knew—enough not to have to ask further. But David doesn’t leave it there.

“A funeral urn,” he says.

“Ah.” I can’t say more for several moments. I’m too choked up. But I understand it all now—not having contacted me after Helen and Amy had passed until now; his walking in from the main road so wearily in a suit, no doubt returning from that decisive trip to the doctor’s office; his having become so frail so fast; his “at long last” telephone call early today; our also “at long last” sex; his wish and need for my help in forming this urn.

I direct my attention to the urn we are making. It’s important now that I don’t screw this up, that nothing I do in working it on the wheel under his hands causes it to collapse into itself—not like my world is collapsing into itself at this moment.

At length I have myself under control. I have come inside him again and the urn is taking shape. I’m not fucking that up like I helped fuck everything else up in life so far. So I ask.

“How long?”

“Not long now,” he says in a small, resigned voice. I know we aren’t talking about the completion of the urn.

“Well,” I answer.

He takes our hands away from the wheel, but I entwine my fingers in his and won’t let him go. I can’t let him go. The urn is formed, its shape perfect. He smiles, and I know he is pleased with it. I feel a loss at it being completed, though. Maybe if we could just continue turning the wheel . . .

The smile turns to a slight grimace and becomes wistful.

“What?” I ask.

“I’m afraid. The way it was with Amy . . . I don’t think I could endure that.”

“We’ll just have to see what comes,” I answer after a moment of silence.

“We?” he murmurs and the smile strengthens a bit, but then he sighs and looks around the room. The light in the room is dimming. “It’s getting dark,” he says. “You’ll be needing to go home.”

“I think I’m home now,” I answer, impulsively, but as certain as I can be about anything at this moment.

We pause, each concentrating on the breathing of the other. “Are you sure? It will be difficult.” I can hear the catch in his voice, a glimmer of hope maybe.

“Everything worth having in life is difficult,” I respond. My mind is working on what, if anything, I will ever need enough to leave his side again. He and I were much the same size once. If it doesn’t disturb him, I can just fit into his clothes—fit right into his life. All I can think of that’s there, in my house, and not here—in our house—is my gun case . . . if . . . well, if. I’m not taking lightly what he has asked of me without forming the words.

But I wouldn’t think of that now—and, please God it never comes to that. Now is time for living to the utmost, not for dying.