Simcha

Before we even begin, I have noticed that when I put up a new story, even though my name is not new and several people know if I am to their taste or not, they still show up to read and give negative ratings but no comments. Having said that, if I look on this story, which is a continuation of a series, and see the same low ratings I did with Baptism, I will know you are trolls. And now.... on with our tale...

Efrem Walker’s greatest joy was squeezing himself tight, knees lifted nearly to his chest in the heat of that room, thighs, large and strong and brown like a vice around the waist of Isaac Abraham Weaver, using those thighs to urge him deeper and deeper, running his hands over the ivory shoulders like bird’s wings, down the back to the hollow over his flexing ass where sweat gathered. Isaac pushing deeper into him, Isaac’s palms pressed to his shoulders, his neck straining above him, his face arched up, arching down, going pink as those green eyes bore down into him, Efrem was filled with him. In the same moment that Isaac bent to kiss him, Efrem pulled his face down for the kiss.

All worry fled or ceased to matter in these moments while the bed gently creaked back and forth in Efrem’s apartment off the Parkway, and as they kissed things grew not gentler, but rougher, Isaac’s face redder, Efrem’s insistence and shouts, louder, the bed creaking more and more, the thunderous ache going deeper and deeper inside and, at last, Isaac’s fingers sinking like claws while the veins in his red neck struck out and he arched back his head to scream.

The scream was followed by a shuddering holy ghost incomprehension from Efrem, as the seed was rocked from his body. Isaac, out of him, was still coming, and it was hard to tell whose semen and what wetness jetted over chests. It hardly mattered. Isaac, kneeling between his legs, Efrem, thighs still bunched up, both shook in the aftermath of things and it was a long time before either of them moved from their positions, both of them shuddering as, outside of the third story apartment, the sun began to set.

Now they both panted, Isaac reaching down, Efrem up, to rub each other’s arms, to run hands over each other, Efrem bringing Isaac down to hold him, making space for him, to cradle his damp head. The yellow sun went redder, melting like a damaged egg yolk.

“You should shower before you go,” Efrem said.

“Are you throwing me out?”

“No, I’m reminding you that it’s late and you need to shower before you go home.”

“I wish I could stay here.”

“That’s a little impossible at the moment.”

“But still,” Isaac said, looking at Efrem’s arm and running a finger across it, “Don’t you ever wish… That I could stay?”

“You have stayed.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I do know what you mean,” Efrem said, sitting up a little, because sitting up was the position of reality, and he thought it was best to be real right now, “And it doesn’t do to wish for things that aren’t going to happen. That you aren’t going to do.”

Isaac’s body changed. Isaac’s body had been part of Efrem’s life for…. Actually not as long as he thought. They had been friends first, and for a long time tighter than twins. He understood Isaac;s moods totally, and even when they weren’t making love, they were almost one, so this division, this little irritation, this anger, Efrem felt.

“I asked you,” Isaac said, sitting up, “I asked you the first time we made love if you wanted me to leave her, if you wanted me not to get married. You sat up on your goddamned logical high horse and told me I should.”

“You were a grown ass man and you’re blaming me for making your decisions? Do you even know what you sound like?”

“You said you weren’t ready for us,” Isaac reached for his glasses. Like Efrem, he was blind without them. Isaac’s head was always nearly clean shaven, dark as were his square rimmed spectacles. He reached for the pack of Marlboros they’d been smoking before sex. “You said you’d stay with Sean and I should stay with Jinny and—”

“If you’re just going to sit up and blame me for your bad choices—” Efrem began.

“I am NOT blaming you.” Isaac failed at lighting his cigarette.

“You are,” Efrem, said. He took the cigarette from Isaac’s trembling fingers, calmly lit it, and then returned it to him.

Isaac sat on the edge of the bed, like the Thinking Man, but he was the smoking man and as darkness gathered he took two puffs and the burning cigarette hung dangerously, threatening to ash over Efrem’s new carpet, which Efrem stopped himself from saying.

“I thought the baby was coming,” Isaac said. “I was… Not happy like I should have been, I guess I was resolved. I guess. I’m glad it didn’t come. I’m glad… And that makes me terrible. I’ve been with Jinny since I was thirteen, and I love her. I mean, I do, but I don’t want to be with her anymore. This isn’t right. Not us. I mean, me and Jinny. It just isn’t right. It was once, but now.”

Isaac ashed his cigarette just in time and Efrem felt like an ass for watching the ash as much as he was watching his best friend…. His… lover? Yes, his lover.

Suddenly, putting the glass ashtray on the night stand, his shoulders shaking, Isaac buried his face in his hands and began to weep. This apartment, Efrem’s first home, with the thick walls and the unobtrusive neighbors, was the first place where they’d allowed themselves to have screaming sex, to give way to all of their feelings. The house of shouts was now the house of weeping, and Efrem climbed over the covers and gathered Isaac into his arms.

Sobbing and shaking his head as the night drew on, Isaac wept, “I can’t go back, I can’t go back, oh God, I can’t go back.”

The telling his wife, the realizing his wife also had a lover, the fairly amicable divorce, the packing and moving out was all a formality. Moving in with Efrem meant little because Efrem being his best friend, everyone expected Isaac to go to him anyway. Even the gradual revelation to everyone that Efrem was his lover meant little to their friends. This evening, as day darkened to night, and the room that had been filled with the smell of sweat and sex and cigarette smoke was now filled with weeping, was how Isaac Weaver came to the home of Efrem Walker and, at last, the two of them became one couple.

On a day that Efrem Walker had arbitrarily chosen to be their anniversary, he decided to make Yorkshire puddings. No actual date worked for an anniversary. The first time they’d had sex was after Isaac had found out his mother was a lesbian suicide. He was very much engaged to Jinny and that didn’t seem like a good date. All of their first times had been under the shadow of adultery Efrem should have felt worse about than he did, and the day that Isaac had lost his shit and ended up never leaving was also an unfit day, as was the day of Isaac’s divorce. They’d never had a marriage because Efrem was leery of the institution, and so he had chosen, because Isaac was Jewish if only nominally, Rosh Hoshanah of the year they’d first began to live together and that was the evening of September 15th, so ever after, September 15th was their anniversary.

At first, Efrem had been disappointed in Yorkshire pudding. He reminded himself that British people had a very different concept of pudding—or for that matter good taste—than Americans, and learned how to mix the batter, pour it over hot grease and patiently await the miracle of spongy soufflé like bread. The first time he had made it for himself, nibbling experimentally. He told himself he should not have expected pudding. It was good enough. The good thing about life in the last few years was the explosion of the internet where you could find almost anything it seemed. There you could click buttons on your computer to be directed to the article for the perfect tikka masala. Of course the irritating thing was that people could not just leave a damn recipe. No, they had to write an entire article about the making of the thing, the first attempt at the thing, the way people loved the old thing and the other recipes that were like it. And then, no one had the same recipe either. But this was a small business and Efrem told himself things could have been worse. Things could have been far more than merely inconvenient, and in many places in this world, they were.

Unlike Christmas, Rosh Hoshanah moved all over the place or, as Isaac explained, it was on a lunar calendar. However it was never far from their anniversary, and Efrem always found a way to add apples or honey to the anniversary dinner.

“You don’t have to cook all the time,” Isaac said. “You know that. I can cook too and give you a rest.”

But the truth was Efrem was the better cook and didn’t want Isaac in his kitchen. He was content for Isaac to do the rest and they were a couple where the rest was significant, but not overwhelming, for they were not in a hurry to live the life of grown ups. For a very few years they had owned a house, but were too bored and disinterested to care for it. They never knew how to fill more than a few rooms, and mostly they filled them with books, cushions, religious statues and prayer beads. There had been an enormous kitchen and they’d put the bed in so it could face the backyard which became overgrown and earned threats from code enforcement. Squirrels and raccoons lived in the rafters, neighbors annoyed. In the end they tried to rent the place and when that fell through, with no one buying, the two of them walked away from it until the bank foreclosed.

They did not love money. They needed it, but did not understand it. They had little of it, but assumed in the way of middle class people that, in some way, even if not abundantly, it would always be there. Isaac had his family bookstore and his father and Efrem had a mother and sister. Isaac was a philosophy professor when no one needed philosophy, and the patches on jacket and pants which had started as an affectation had become simple necessity. Efrem was a tutor and had gone to work with Isaac’s father in the bookstore. They had started out in Efrem’s apartment on Finnalay Parkway, and after the house, lived in a little apartment on Aramy over a junkshop. The radiators screamed in the winter and put out too much heat. During the summer they put old air conditioners in the windows. The bath tub was streaked with rust and good for only showers, and the gas stove and refrigerator were a combined fifty years old. Along the walls of the old place were sagging bookshelves made of cinder blocks and old boards.

They were incredibly happy.

Often they ate with Isaac’s ex wife. This was not as strange as one would think. Isaac had known Virginia O’Muil longer than he had known Efrem and Efrem had known her most of his life. His sister was not only her closest friend, but married to her cousin Ryan. Efrem’s niece and nephew called Jinny auntie. What was more, they were all a little tinged by scandal, for the O’Muils were still Catholic enough to not be entirely easy with Jinny’s new husband, Kevin, being an ex priest. Also, Kevin and Virginia had similar ideas to Isaac and Efrem about adult life and money. Kevin worked in a soup kitchen and did counseling at Saint Antonin’s and Jinny worked at a day care, so they no richer than the other couple.

What was more, even if Jinny had not told her parents, they suspected, as Isaac knew, that at the same time he had begun sleeping with Efrem, she had begun sleeping with Kevin, that while he’d been saying Mass every day, for a full year and a half he had been sleeping with Jinny, that on the weekend that Isaac had gone off to be with Efrem, Jinny had driven down south to Lassador to be with Kevin. Hypocrisy makes forgiveness hard, but these four people at table were not hypocrites. They were so relieved to know about their mutual sin, to know that the other party had found love, to know they were released from the misery of reception, that they looked back on the past with true laughter, a laughter of thanksgiving, and greeted each other with real joy.

“I need something,” Isaac had said one evening. “I feel foolish because all those years ago I said I would be a good Catholic. I got baptized and everything and it seems not to…. I do hate to say it, but it seems not to be working. Isn’t that an awful thing to think?”

He had not looked at Kevin, but he was sort of addressing the man who, after all, had been a priest. The priests he’d known seemed to have no doubts about anything.

Kevin was similar to Isaac, something Efrem had noted, though taller and a little more muscular and less shaven. Efrem grinned to look from one to the other and think, “Isaac 2.0, Isaac 4.0.”

“I made a choice like that once,” Kevin reminded him. “And I thought I couldn’t change it.”

“But you didn’t leave the Church.”

“No,” Kevin lifted a finger, “but I did break my vow of celibacy several times.”

“Several times?” Jinny raised an eyebrow.

“Several times with you my dear,” he said, blinking through his glasses.

Jinny was never fully convinced of this. By his own admission Kevin had been no virgin when he’d taken her into his bed, but of course, neither had she.

“We have all,” Kevin said heavily, “broken sacred vows to keep other sacred vows and twisted ourselves up in deception in order to keep alive things that probably needed to die.”

“So,” Isaac said after a while—he was wearing a fawn colored jacket and looking very good to Efrem—“you’re saying I should just stop trying…. to be in the Church.”

“I’m saying you should find your way,” Kevin said, “and not somebody else’s.”