If I Should Fall: The Second Book of Geshichte Falls

LIFE AT SAINT ALBAN'S

conclusion

“You could live here,” Nehru said. “You could make a home.”

“Sometimes I do.”

It explained why the hallway and the bathroom were clean, if stacked with boxes, and this room, which did not face the gas station, but the plot of overgrown land leading to the trees, was nearly box free. The bureau and bed were clean. Cody lay down on the bed after Nehru, and it smelled of fabric softener. Nehru kissed him. He held out his hand.

Now Cody understood. It had been Nehru that Brad was trying to forget-or to remember-that one night. Nehru had been his lover. Surely.

Cody took Nehru’s hand in his larger one. They reclined on the bed, on the pillows, kissing and cradling each other. They kissed for a long time. They had left their clothes downstairs, Nehru with his thick, rounded body, strong thighs and shoulders, Cody of the thick hair, thick thighs, thick arms, heavy sex. No one was going anywhere tonight. He lay on his side, letting Nehru stroke his penis. While it grew like a tall, stocky, helmeted soldier, Nehru stopped to kiss him on his hips, on his stomach, stopped to take Cody’s penis deep in his mouth, as far as possible. Cody moaned to receive Nehru’s mouth. He clenched his teeth, hands opening and closing impotently, finally playing with his own nipples, rubbing his own chest and stomach, swearing before he sat up and, laying Nehru down, returned the favor.

There was not much certainty of what would come after, only what was right now. After they’d been steady at tasting each other for the better part of an hour, Cody opened the bottle of lube Nehru had brought, spread it on his fingers, and slid it into Nehru. Nehru shook a bottle, unscrewed it, inhaled in one nostril, next the other. Passed it to Cody. Cody shivered and went hot and light all at once then, as Nehru moved to lay on his stomach, pushing his ass up with deliberation. Slowly Cody entered him, pushing, pushing, and slowly began fucking. He felt Nehru’s smaller, stronger hands reaching back to his hips, drawing him in, Nehru’s body under him, pressing back. They passed the bottle back and forth, now and again, floating on hot waves, going hard as rocks, tingling with lightning, as the bed became an ocean, the sex shooting through them on the thin lines of their capillaries.

While Flipper rode Russell, pressed deep into him, high on the fumes of poppers, Russell pulled him deeper inside.

He rode Russell like a wave in the sea, and he was not lost because, like a heavy anchor, his penis was pulled deeper and deeper down. Flipper’s hands gripped Russell’s shoulders, and then his hands and they moaned like one creature praying, until the moaning was cursing, until the one creature was Flipper raised up, his body slapping into Russell’s, and Russell’s voice was raised in silent shouts.

They stopped now and again, to laugh, to catch breath, to suck and suck, and kiss. To fuck hard against the side of the bed and shout with the thrill of it. Flipper’s dick pounded through Russell.. Flipper’s hands massaged his back like no one ever had. His tongue entered his ass and made him sing.

While Cody pounded Nehru, pressed deep into him, high on the fumes of poppers, Nehru pulled him deeper inside.

“I’m gonna… fuckin… come,” Cody declared in a ragged voice more desperate than Nehru had ever heard.

He turned around so he could behold Cody, neck arched, mouth parted, eyes wide and shining as they looked down on him with a demon light, and them back up to the ceiling. Cody stood on the edge of the bed, fucking him deeply, the hand that wasn’t holding his hip reaching down to stroke Nehru’s cock with a gentleness countering the fierceness of his fucking until, crying out, eyes shut, dry mouths open, hands clenched into fists, they came so hard the night was briefly a fiery whiteness before both all but passed out.

In the early morning they lay like two spoons, and in the radiator heat that filled Abelard Hall only one thin sheet just barely covered Russell and Flipper to the waist. Flipper’s cheek was on Russell’s side and Russell was in arms that were long and strong, and certainly football player’s arms. They didn’t speak. They only lay there, and whenever a reason to speak almost came, one or the other decided it was not good enough. Flipper thought of saying that they should get Russell back to Jimmy’s room or to Ross’s room before anyone woke up. He thought of saying the color of the sky meant it must be seven o’clock. He thought of saying so much, even, I’m sorry. You’re too young. I took advantage. But he didn’t believe that. He believed he loved Russell and he believed as long as this boy was here, he’d want him to come to his bed. He believed yesterday had been the best day of his life and ended in the sweetest night.

Russell, for his part, understood now that Andy was jealous. That Andy Lagger, who had seemed so fine with everything, must have got it into his silly mind that Russell was competition. Or maybe he’d seen something between him and Flipper that the two of them had not. Certainly, since he’d come here he’d been looking at the boy with the coal black hair. Certainly they’d given themselves to each other like old lovers. Russell had been having sex with Jason for a while, and had done things with Cody, but none of it had been like last night, and though he thought he should feel like a slut or like a kid out of his depths, though he did not want to share the story of being a high schooler that went off and had sex with a boy in college, being with Flipper didn’t feel bad or risky or naughty. It didn’t feel like Jimmy and all of his girls. It felt like being with a best friend. It felt like giving everything to someone he trusted absolutely, and whom he knew would never break that trust. How he knew it, he could not say, but he suddenly started to cry thinking about it.

“Russell!” Flipper sat up, and leaned over him. His voice was light and young and woody. He could have been a kid at OLM.

“Russell, are you—?”

Russell cleared his throat and wiped his face with the back of his hand. He was surprised by how large it was the same way he was surprised by how deep his voice was becoming. He was… a man in bed with another man. It was a little funny to him. He’d always thought of himself as a Russell sleeping with boys when he thought of himself sexually at all.

“I just feel happy,” Russell said. “And… glad to be here. With you, Flip. I just love you. I wouldn’t say that to anyone cause most people would react weird, but you’re great. You’re the best and…”

Flipper kissed him gently, and Russell was surprised his breath didn’t smell, and though he was worried about his own breath, he kissed him back. Words would spoil things, or fail to celebrate them properly, so turning from words, and using tongues and hands, linking bodies, the two of them found other ways to say just what they felt.

So this is what it was like to not feel like a child. That night he invited Cody over. He introduced him to his parents and Mr. and Mrs. Alexander seemed to like him enough, but he and Cody made coffee and talked about writing songs and then began to work on them. Chilli Comet Sundae was still a thing, and it needed a bass player and now that Leon was gone, that bass player could be Cody.

Cody didn’t say anything about the fact that three members of the band would have slept with each other. Nehru pointed that out almost playfully and said, “Well, it might make the harmonies tighter.”

It was well past ten when Cody said, “Well, what do we do?”

In other words, he could get up and go home, or they could talk about the other night, or… And Nehru understood how some people were, shy, retiring, believing that there was only so much they could do so often, so he leaned in and kissed Cody, and they fell on the bed, Cody sighing with relief while Nehru chuckled.

They made love slowly, as two people who aren’t in a hurry do. When Nehru finally climaxed between Cody’s buttocks, his heart was in his throat, and he lay contented and expectant when an arc of heat jutted from Cody’s penis to spray his stomach and chest.

The light in Nehru’s room was dim, and the window was open to the moon. On the clock radio, far away and tinny, Mama Cass sang:

 

Say "Night-ie night" and kiss me
Just hold me tight and tell me you'll miss me
While I'm alone and blue as can be
Dream a little dream of me

 

THAT NIGHT JIMMY SHOWED RUSSELL how to enter Saint Alban’s chapel without ever going outside. They went to the first floor of Abelard Hall where the nursing school was. Where the other floors above had main corridors ending with a window, this one ended in a door.

When Jimmy opened it he whispered, “The nurses don’t like us to come through here, so this is definitely off limits.”

It was a very unpretentious room converted into a classroom, and as they walked across it the floor boards creaked, but the door on the other side led to a flight of stairs, and when they were up it, Jimmy pushed another door open, and they were engulfed in a great darkness.

“Is this the church?” Russell asked.

“I don’t go to church,” Jimmy said to Russell, “and even I know what a church feels like. Come on, stick to the wall.”

The only light was the flickering red one they approached, which Russell realized must have been where the Blessed Sacrament was kept. Just in time, Jimmy told him to watch out for the steps. There were three of them. Russell would have forgotten to genuflect before the Tabernacle, but Jimmy—to Russell’s surprise—did it first, almost out of instinct. Then he moved to a wall and began flipping switches and Russell saw Saint Alban’s chapel.

It was easily large as Saint Adjeanet’s with ivory colored plaster walls and an arcade running down each side. From here, Russell could see the rows of polished pews and above the choir loft, the large, round stained glass window.

“It’s beautiful in the day time. When you can see the stain glass,” Jimmy said. “We could go outside I guess, and look at them.”

“I thought you said you never come here.”

“I never go to Mass,” Jimmy said. “But sometimes, when I need to be alone I walk around in here. I don’t think God minds.”

“He’s real good about that kind of thing,” Russell said. He observed the straw filled crèche at the foot of the altar steps, Mary and Joseph and all the shepherds, kneeling and waiting for a child not yet there.

“You know, letting people hang out in his house when they need space. Most people aren’t so courteous.”

“I play the piano in here some nights,” Jimmy pointed over the altar to the Grand.

“That’s beautiful,” Russell said. “That’s nothing like the junker we have at Saint Addy’s.”

“I remember that church,” Jimmy said. “It’s cute.”

Jimmy went across the altar and pulled out the piano stool then began playing. He was goofing around at first, and then Russell watched his cousin’s long hands on the keys, watched his back rise and fall, his shoulder blades become like wings, his eyes close. Keith was better than this?

Then Jimmy was playing a tune.

And Russell began, quietly, to sing to it.

I wonder as I wander out under the sky

how Jesus my savior should come forth

to die

for poor lonely sinners

 like you and like I

I wonder as I wander

out under the sky

 

When Mary birthed Jesus,

twas in a cow’s stall,

with wisemen and farmers

and shepherds and all,

but high from God’s heaven a star’s light

did fall,

and promise of ages it did then recall

 

Jimmy went on playing until the last notes went off into the air of the church around them, until the very last note hovered in the silence of the church for a while. The cousins sat together silent for awhile.

Russell wanted to ask Jimmy so many questions that were so inappropriate right now, in a church, after a Christmas carol, with the nativity crèche only a few feet away. He should have asked something holy, but Russell suspected that Jimmy wouldn’t be able to answer any holy questions anyway. He waited until they were leaving the church. Jimmy decided to go out in the cold and round the large chapel rather than pass through the nursing school again.     

“Do you remember at John and Jackie’s wedding when I asked you what sex was like?”

“Uh… yeah,” Jimmy said.

Every word they said turned into frost clouds.

“And I told you I was going to be gay or be a priest?”

“Yup. Some people are both.”

“I don’t have time for that,” Russell said.

Jimmy cackled, “Well, how’s that situation going?”

“I’m not going to be a priest,” Russell said.

“Good, we’ve got enough of those in the family.”

“I didn’t even get Confirmed.”

“Do you…” Jimmy looked at him, “not believe in God?”

“It’s not God that’s the problem. It’s more like I don’t know if I believe in Christians.”

Jimmy chuckled.

“That’s fair.”

Then Russell said, “And, besides, I thought I didn’t understand sex, or want sex or…”

“Stuff kicked in for you!”

They were approaching the steps of Abelard Hall.

“I’m gay after all,” Russell said.

Jimmy looked very reflective.

At last he said, “Oh.”

Jimmy sat down on the step making sure there was enough coat to keep his ass warm.

Russell still stood before him.           

Jimmy’s floppy hair hung in his eyes while he reached into his pocket for a cigarette.

“You, ah… You sure about this?”

“I have a boyfriend,” Russell said.

“You do? Is it that Gilead you always talk about?”

“Oh, no! God no! No.”

“Is Gilead a dog face?”

“No, Gilead is fine. I mean he’s fine looking. I mean… I mean, that’s not happening with Gilead. Jason. His name is Jason.”

“Oh…”

While Jimmy began to smoke and offered Russell a cigarette, he said, “So how does it work? Are you guys like… going to movies? He… takes you to restaurants.”

“No, he came to our house the night Jackie had John’s baby. He was with us the whole time, but that was one of the first times we went out out. I mean, he goes to school with me. I see him all day, and he hangs in our crowd.”

And then Russell said, “Primarily we have lots of sex.”

“Well,” Jimmy said, “there it is.”

“Yes,” Russell said. “Exactly.”

Russell was watching Jimmy’s spidery fingers, watching the smoke leave his nostrils. His cousin knew about sex. This was why he was talking to him. Jimmy finally said, “You don’t love him.”

“What?”

“There’s someone else isn’t there? Someone you really love.”

Cody flashed through Russell’s mind. It hurt to think about him. Just like that all the silly moments they’d had flashed with the moment of intimacy when he’d been in the truck, his head between Cody’s legs, and the later moment in his room when Cody had done it to him. All of those moments were eclipsed by the one time Cody had kissed him, pressed those thick lips to his.

“This guy you’re with,” Jimmy continued, “you like him. Like a friend, but you don’t talk about him, and it’s not cause he’s a secret. You don’t go to bed thinking of him. You like him, but you don’t love him. You’re not… in love.”

The word love filled him. He was warm with the memory of Flipper that morning. Hot for the desire to be with him one last time before he had to go home. Everything felt innocent with him. Even this morning, on the way to breakfast, when he had held onto the cold window ledge, and looked out onto the bare trees of beyond the campus radio station and Flipper, grasping his hips and breathing hard, fucked him, it hadn’t felt dirty. He was embarrassed to think about the black haired milk skinned boy he couldn’t have, who would be so far away, embarrassed because when he thought of him, as much as when he thought of Cody, he thought: Flipper is love.

“No,” Russell discovered, “I don’t guess I am in love with Jason. But… I like what we have.”

He saw half the cigarette was a long ash. As he lifted it to his lips the ash tube fell onto his scarf.

Russell had thought Cody was right about life being a Sacred Net. But life was an Escher drawing too, and there was no top, no bottom, no telling anything.

“What should I do?” he wondered, inhaling. “I like what we have.”

“Then that’s what you should do,” Jimmy said.

“Keep liking it, but don’t be too surprised it if ends.”