The Donor
Chapter eleven
Terry had that feeling again, the feeling that
Jack was getting ready to break off with him. He noticed a small but disturbing
distance in Jack's manner and it was days before he found himself in Jack's
bed again. Everybody, everything around him seemed kind of haggard, and it was
only the beginning of summer. He could just see everybody drying up and collapsing
before the end.
He was searching for something in the store fronts
down the hill. A paint store in walking distance. He was about to do something,
not something he was planning, but preparing for while steadfastly not thinking
about it. Though he had a running thought: "it's much safer than they think."
He kept finding this thought in his mind, always pushed away by a surflike terror,
breathtaking, washing over and ebbing away, but not too deep to stand up in.
Two gallons of white paint was just about right
to carry home. He could have told Jack he was redecorating, and Jack probably
would have approved. But after the necklace, he didn't want to talk about it
with anyone. Everything about it was unspeakable and unbelievable. If he believed
the thing about Eurick, what he was doing was inconceivable. If he didn't, why
was it so hard to do it? Why was he in such a fragile state of mind? He never
said what he was doing, even to himself. He didn't even say the word "paint"
except when he was in the store, matching the paint chip.
He was breathing hard when he opened the door,
not only because he had rushed up the hill with the paint cans. He set them
down carefully in the middle of the apartment, his palms tingling with anticipation.
He caressed the latex gloves into position, teased open the can, and poured
the paint in incremental spurts into the paint tray. He rubbed the pink roller
over the ribs if the paint tray, hesitated, watching the drops splash thickly
back into the tray.
He took a shuddering breath, then spread the
paint in great viscous sweeps over the walls. When the walls were glistening
and blank, he stroked the broad brush gently across the lip of the can. He applied
the paint with short, quickening strokes. his breath coming in gasps. his tongue
prickly from the uric acid smell of the paint.
It was as much as he could do in one go. Later
he took down the flowers, the garlic, the talismans. He put them all in a box
in his bedroom.
He never once took off the necklace.
The next week he stopped off at different little
stores on the way home. He bought the things one at a time, and furtively, as
if anybody seeing him would know what he was going to do. Though he was still
not saying in words what that was. He bought a bowl of pure white stoneware:
no way he would use the dishes he ate out of. The scalpel fairly screamed as
he took it off the hook. The box of bandages felt lurid in his hand as he stood
in line to pay for it. He couldn't look at the things when he brought them home.
He dropped them in a corner where he wouldn't have to look at them.
He behaved as if he would forget everything as
soon as it was over.
Jack asked him at lunchtime how late he thought
he was going to be. "Oh, fiveish," he said. There was no rush on right
now.
"I'll take you home," Jack said, not
asking: a challenge.
"I've got errands," Terry said.
"I don't mind," Jack said. Terry could
look away from Jack's pale eyes, but there was nothing else in the world to
see.
"They're boring errands," Terry said.
He was thinking, "yes, bring him home, that's exactly what you need to
do, that's exactly what you need to do." But what he was saying was, "I
appreciate the offer, Jack, but I think I'd rather do these particular errands
alone."
Jack bit air, sucking in his lips and his temper
and whatever insult he read in Terry's words.
Terry almost ran after him saying "I can
explain!" but of course he couldn't.
That was the first night he took off the necklace.
He stood in the middle of the nearly empty livingroom. The night was hardly
dark enough to turn the windows into mirrors. What else, he thought, rubbing
his elbows. The invitation.
"Okay." He startled himself with his
own voice, uncertain and self-conscious in the quiet house. Could Eurick hear
him or not? It seemed like Eurick always just knew what Terry was up to. "I'm
inviting you, Eurick. This is the invitation. Come in."
Hours later, a dry throat, nothing else.
He felt stupid. Of course it wasn't true, any
of it. It was a game they played upstairs. And now they'd proved it. He went
to bed, thinking at least he didn't have to wear that uncomfortable necklace
anymore.
The experiment, if that was what it was, was
over, and he had time for Jack.
Now that Terry was on a different team from Jack,
it was not hard for Jack to avoid Terry. It wasn't conspicuous in any objective
way, but to Terry, it was conspicuous the way there was no Jack around him all
day, compared to the way that there had formerly been little incidents of Jack
scattered through the hours, detouring on his way from one place to another,
intercepting him at the water cooler.
He went back and forth in his thinking about
it. It was more dignified to accept that he'd blown it and it was all over.
It was stupid not to try to do something about it before it was too late. But
it was too late already, wasn't it? He found reasons to pass Jack's door, and
hesitated there for brief fractions of seconds, but the threshold seemed too
high to cross.
Mary was in a bad mood when he collected Dylan.
Her jaw was set and she didn't talk to Terry at all, addressing her short words
to Dylan. Terry didn't ask. At night he stared at the phone until his eyes wouldn't
stay open, but there was nothing he could think of to say, no decent apology
to make, no possible explanation. His white white walls unnerved him, and every
sound in the city sounded as if it originated in the skeleton of the house.
Jack didn't speak to him the next day either.
Terry doodled little pyramids of circles and ovals while he waited for the computer
to perform its task, and he thought he'd be glad to go crawling to Jack, to
abase himself in any way, if he could figure out how. But he wasn't ready to
make a scene if Jack was really finished with him.
If Jack would say something, Terry would know
what to do. He thought Jack probably felt this way when Terry wouldn't go home
with him, and he felt bad that he hadn't spent more effort making believable
excuses, letting Jack know he'd be available again. He just hadn't thought ahead.
Hadn't thought.
Silence all day at work, silence all night at
home. On this third night he spoke out loud again. Musing bitterly. "I
invited you. Why didn't you come? Faker."
He looked at the clock. Too late to go out. Too
early to expect nature to knock him out.
"What the fuck do you think you're doing?"
Eurick's voice.
Terry turned slowly, startled but not really
surprised. Eurick looked awful.
"It's a gift," Terry said.
"I don't want it." Eurick said. It
was obvious as he chewed his lip that he was lying.
"You don't want it because you think it's
dangerous," Terry said. "But I've noticed things. It's not like you
say it is at all."
Eurick shook his head. "wishful thinking,"
passing his hand over his mouth, "I know how it feels."
"I see you all the time among unprotected
people and you act like you don't even know they have blood in their veins.
You share a bed with Mary. You're completely comfortable with her. You even
had a good time at Dylan's birthday party. You acted like you'd never been hungry
in your life," conveniently ignoring the flash of a glance Terry had seen,"and
it wasn't the first time I saw you do that."
"After Dylan's party I had headaches for
days from the sun."
"But you forgot everything during the party.
You forgot you ever wanted blood."
"You're talking about a yard full of little
kids," Eurick said with an expression of distaste.
"If you were what you think you are it wouldn't
have made any difference."
"You've seen things with your own eyes.
I know I can't make you believe the things I feel."
"I didn't say I don't believe any of it."
Terry reached behind the couch where he had stashed the bowl and the other things,
conscious that Eurick's eyes followed him,. "I just know that you're not
the monster you think you are."
"I'm not a monster. I don't want to be a
monster. I don't want you to make me a monster."
Terry sat down. He arranged the things on the
table in front of himself. "You're not a monster," he said, rolling
up his sleeve. "I don't want to make you a monster, and I couldn't if I
did."
His arm was slender and smooth and pale on the
inside, the tendons and the blue veins just under the skin at the wrist and
the elbow. "It's just a little gift to you and Mary. A little break for
her, a little extra for you." He didn't look up, but he knew Eurick was
staring at him. It's only a little blood. She says it's only a little. It'll
go right into the bowl, you can take it away with you. No big deal." He
paused to tie his arm off, making a fist like they told him to do at the blood
drive. Opening and closing it. He wiped his wrist with alcohol. He had a sudden
doubt about using the wrist. People killed themselves slitting their wrists.
But he was pretty sure -- it was the vein, right there, not the artery.
He had trouble with the scalpel. He hadn't practiced.
He was pretty sure what to do. He didn't really want to do it.
He took it as proof that he wasn't crazy, the
fact that he didn't really want to cut himself.
"This is not Mary's idea," Eurick said.
"She didn't even want me to come try to talk you out of this."
It was as if the skin were impervious there,
or the scalpel was dull. He couldn't -- but suddenly he was through the skin.
Off target, and only a superficial slice. "Rats," he said, looking
up to see Eurick biting both hands, not moving. He opened his mouth to tease
him, but decided he didn't want to remind Eurick that he could easily get the
scalpel from him.
The second time he was more successful. A rubbery
pop, and then the blood was seeping over his skin. It seemed to be flowing fast
at the wound, but only a few drops hit the inside of the white bowl, making
little spiky circles like sun disks which ran away into pale streaks.
"I'm sorry, I don't know how long this takes,"
Terry said. "I'd have done it in advance, but I didn't know if you were
going to come."
Eurick's eyes were dilated black.
"Don't worry. I've got these bandages to
bind it off with before too much comes out." Terry's heart lifted: Eurick
had stopped chewing on his hands and was smiling a tender haggard smile of acquiescence.
It was getting painful to hold his wrist up over
the bowl, and the wound ached. Terry wished it would flow faster and be done
-- and Eurick wasn't standing in front of him anymore.
The couch cushion next to him sank and Terry
could feel Eurick's cold bulk there. He swallowed as Eurick took hold of him,
gently, pulling him close, circling round him and taking his wrist. As Eurick
hesitated another two drops splatted into the bowl. Terry looked up from the
two red circles as they ran away, and into Eurick's deep eyes, and nodded, folding
into Eurick's cold breast. "It's okay," he said.
Eurick still hesitated, and little rain of small
drops splashed into the thin film at the bottom of the bowl. Tinier drops bounced
back to the sides.
"It's okay," Terry snapped, afraid
the blood would get on his clothes or his furniture. "Go ahead."
"Only a little bit," Eurick said.
When he began it was like a kiss. Eurick's tongue
lapped across the mess the blood had made over Terry's arm, tracking the red
trails down to his elbow and around on the back where fine pale hairs lay against
the skin.
And then. He got Terry's wrist with both hands
and got to work on it. It was nothing like the blood drive at the Red Cross
now. He was always relaxed during the blood draw there, but he never had this
sense of crumpling into a friendly, sweet, welcoming abyss. He pressed his fingers
against Eurick's cheek and let his head fall on Eurick's shoulder.
Maybe he slept.
"Good thing you got these big bandages,"
Eurick said softly, as Terry passively watched him snugging the bandage down
firmly over his wrist. "You want a lot of pressure on that so it will stop
bleeding quick."
Terry was in a slow-witted fog, but here was
Eurick: businesslike, brisk, cool and friendly. To look at him, he'd dropped
ten years. He had a little of that confident smirk Terry had seen in February,
after Mary had left him blood.
"Do me a favor," Eurick said, standing
up. "Stay away from me for a couple of days. And put that necklace back
on. You might be right about it, but you don't know how it feels."
Terry nodded. He would do anything for Eurick
now. Really. When he's thought that before, he hadn't known what it meant. Now
he did. Even the ache in the wound was pleasurable. He curled into the cushions
and watched Eurick clean up. "Pleasurable" -- a funny word. "Please,"
now, that was even funnier. When you asked for something, you would say it,
but who was the one who was pleased? Who was pleased now? Had Terry said "Please
let me give you this?" Next time he would. He'd say please.
He woke up thirsty, maybe a little tired. He
changed the bandage carefully and put extra ones in his pocket. He put on a
long-sleeve sweater over his long-sleeve shirt. He remembered the remarks about
people who wore turtleneck shirts to cover their hickeys -- "vampire bite
you last night?"
He drank an extra glass of orange juice and an
extra cup of coffee. He started out a little earlier, propelled by an eager
sense of well-being over a slippery anxiety down at ground level. The morning
was bright, the fog burned off before it could accumulate, the house looked
like a fairy tale house with its roses and nasturtiums and its rickety-legged
stairs.
The next task was fixing things with Jack. Everything
seemed possible this morning. This afternoon, he'd fix things with Mary.
The thing to do was to make a little symbolic
gesture to break the ice with Jack. As if he were starting from scratch. It
really seemed possible. everything seemed possible. The sun glinted off the
streetcar tracks and the plastic panel signs above the little stores. The streets
had never seemed wider, or brighter, or cleaner. He had change in his pocket
for every panhandler he passed. He felt like the dancing hero of an old musical,
passing pleasantries with every quarter.
Here was a square blond woman dressed in too
many layers of sweatshirts and a frayed red watchcap, her hands full of improbable
flowers, great blooms with ungainly stems, clearly stolen from people's yards.
She muttered "a dollar for a flower, a flower for a dollar," and Terry
focused in on a stalk of cymbidium orchids among the valerians and variegated
roses and bird of paradise. "I'll take them all," he said, handing
her a twenty and marching off with them, the faint scent of the gaudy roses
in his nostrils.
The place was still rather empty when he arrived.
He glanced at the clock and made straight for Jack's office. The door was open,
a cup of white coffee on the corner of the desk, an open briefcase. Jack was
somewhere else. Quickly, furtively, Terry arranged the flowers in a heart shape
across the open space in the middle of Jack's desk.
He couldn't get enough water. He began to bring
three cups back to his station at a time, so he wouldn't be getting up so much.
By ten o'clock his energy had faded, but not his sense of well-being. He didn't
feel exactly drowsy, but snoozing was an attractive thought. He stopped checking
for Jack after a while.
Jack's face loomed in his peripheral vision,
but his reaction was slow: long enough a before he turned his eyes from the
screen for all the sweet trust of the morning to flee. He was petrified. Jack
was carrying around his manager face, all affable neutrality. He stayed just
long enough to say, "Pick me up at my office when you're ready to go to
lunch," and then he was gone, leaving no signal of his intention, no secret
smile, no cold signal that this was to be the meeting where Jack told him off
once and for all.
Terry turned back to the screen, petrified for
another long fraction of a second before he picked up the flow of the work he
was doing.. The work went on before, but the color of the half-dream under his
work thoughts was murkier now.
He was almost the last to go to lunch. He waited
until he had made the same slip on the keyboard three times in a row. He discovered
as he stood up that a large part of the water he'd taken in through the morning
was demanding to be let out again.
"Got to visit the john before I visit Jack,"
he told himself.
He caught himself in the mirror. He didn't look
nearly as good as he felt. He slapped his cheeks, and rinsed with cold water,
and thought he looked a little less pale.
He stepped into Jack's office. The flowers had
been put into a bowl, or maybe a ceiling light shade. "Get the door, will
you," Jack said. "There's a lock."
The lock was a finicky little button hidden behind
the knob. Terry chipped his thumbnail working it. He was sucking the side of
his thumb as he crossed into the room, watching Jack for an indication.
Jack met him in the middle of the room. He took
Terry's face into his hands and kissed him, hard, pulling him into the corner.
Terry hesitated. "Here?"
"Just be quiet," Jack said softly,
pushing him lightly against the wall. In seconds Jack had him half undressed
and shuddering. Terry dropped to his knees. It was over so quickly he was taken
by surprise by a mouthful of familiar taste and swallowed it before he remembered
the new rule he was supposed to be following. He fell back on his haunches.
"Sorry," Jack said.
"It's okay." He stood up and straightened
himself out. He looked at his watch. There was plenty of time. "Want lunch?"
"No, you go ahead," he said, returning
to his desk, picking up a piece of paper.
Terry was too surprised to move right away.
Jack looked up briefly. "I'll see you later,"
he pronounced clearly.
Deflated, Terry walked out and down to the street.
The aftertaste was bitter and waxy. Aimless, he ran out of time and ended up
eating greasy piroshki from a dark corner store.
He slowed down more and more during the day.
Marcia called an unpleasant meeting to discuss some dissatisfactions she had
with the way the work was going. It took up most of the afternoon, which meant
that all Terry had to do was sit up and look attentive, but it also meant that
he didn't get much more done. He didn't have much to do with the problems being
discussed. Marcia could have done the whole thing with three team members.
Of the people who did have suggestions to make,
Lana made the most sense, but every time she spoke Marcia shut her down. Lana
gave up after a while, and started passing Terry notes with what she would have
said, but she indicated by a shake of her head she didn't want Terry to be her
voice. Marcia noticed.
The meeting dragged on after five. Terry went
to scribble on his time card. He didn't have the energy left to talk things
over with Lana, but he commiserated with her with a glance, a hug, and a pat
on the arm.
Jack hadn't waited for him. He wasn't in his
office and he wasn't by the door. As he mounted the streetcar he felt his spirits
sink as low as they had been high before. "Maybe he'll call tonight,"
he thought. "Or maybe not."
But the next thing he had to was to check in
with Mary. Last night was meant as a gift to her as well as to Eurick, but in
the light of afternoon he thought she could very easily see it differently.
There were lots of ways she could take it wrong. She might be jealous. She might
be angry. She might not believe all the soothing things Terry had said to Eurick.
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