Эйми Бендер - The Color Master

It’s okay, I tell them. Just feel his arm. Maybe the back of his neck. Just see what it feels like.

The sun slants through the curtains as their two hands reach over and they sort of grab at first but then relax. They explore the knuckles, the wrists, the elbows. They don’t giggle, but there is some nervous shifting, some more drinking from beers. Wet barley lips. One is from Oklahoma, and came out west to direct movies. The other lived in Oregon, in a clapboard house with an attic where he gathered bird nests from trees. They remember their first kiss with a girl, the years of masturbating in the shower before their sisters would bang on the door, yelling about hot water.

They are touching each other’s arms now, with freckles, with downy hair. Touch his stomach, I say, to both. Four eyes beam up at me, frightened. It’s okay, I say. It’s for me, I say. Please. And their hands, shaking slightly, reach down under the loose T-shirts and just glance over their stomachs, which have tiny lines of sweat forming in the creases from sitting.

I am in my chair. They feel scared, even from over here, but not awful scared. They’re openhearted and they can stand it. They have untested liberal minds. They are also getting turned on. Their faces move closer together as one grazes the inner arm of the other.

Kiss him, I say, out loud.

The light through the drawn curtains is a dark red and partially obscures their clean-shaven faces. They lean in, and their cheeks bump at first and finally touch. Their lips, so soft. They are tentative and frightened, faces pressing gently against each other. Lips meet. Boy lips on boy lips. I love watching them. I could watch them for hours. Their heads leaning and listing, the lips learning what to do, how almost-familiar it all is.

One stops. Looks at me. Is this all right? he asks. His lips glisten. Why don’t you come join us—

I’m watching this time, I say. Just watching. You’re so beautiful, both of you.

The other turns to me, eyes overly brightened. Come on, he calls. Come over!

I shake my head.

Absolutely! they both say.

No.

I’m on the weird island, over here. They love me too; I’m not totally absented. We all know I’m in the room.

Keep kissing, I say. I can’t tell you how much I love to watch you kissing.

Their big young male faces drink more beer and then lean back in and I see the erections, poking up from their pants, and they seem hopeful and nervous and vulnerable, and as they keep kissing, hands moving now down shoulders, to back, to stomach, I tell them to take off their shirts, and they do, because today they listen to me. I will not hurt them. I can only get away with this once. And the shoes kick off, and the pants roll down, and there they are, nude and strong, poking each other in the stomach. More beer. More tequila. Eyes closed. The reddish light flutters on the floor, and cars honk downstairs. I tell the one on the right, the one with the brown curls in his hair, to lean down. To try it out. Please, I say again. Please. My voice is so quiet, but we all hear everything. He bends down. The one on his knees now has on his face a combination of pained concern or confusion over what this might mean and utter joy too, and he opens his eyes and glances at me, and I smile at him, my whole body awake. He can see how turned on I am. There’s a furrow of worry in his brow, so I reach to the overalls straps and unclip them and pull my shirt up so that there are breasts in the room. Visiting. His face lights up, in part because he likes them, but even more because he knows them, he recognizes the shape, they are a marking point for identity and memory.

And then my overalls are back on and he closes his eyes again, I have relieved some knot in his thinking, and the first one is curled over and he doesn’t know quite what to do but also he has some ideas, and his mouth is earnest and effortful.

Their hands grip the carpet hairs. Look at the initial swell of a bicep, that bump after the dip of the inner elbow.

When they switch, they’re laughing. Everyone’s drunk. No one has come yet. They kiss in between switching, and their hands move all over, into inner thigh, rounded curve of the ass, sweaty necks. I feel the tide fading from my feet. They look up—come with us, come join us, they say, but I’m over here, I say, for today—and at once they are disappointed and also we all know the rhythm has been set as is. Tight calves and legs lifting. Brown curls and blond knees. When they’re kissing again, I could stare for hours. Men love to watch two women kiss, but how I love to watch two men. So clear in their focus. The amazing space created for me when there is nothing demanded or seen.

When they are sleeping, I go into my bedroom. It is darker than the rest of the apartment, and only large enough to fit a bed and a dresser. I don’t sit down, but I stand with the furniture, my whole body triggered. And it is only now that I feel the coldness of watching, the interminable loneliness, how the exit will happen, how they will hug me but something will have shifted, how our meetings will be awkward for a while, and possibly never recover. I slow down my breathing, move away from the clawing inside. After a while, I hear as they get up off the floor and let themselves out. They leave me a nice note, and one washes the cookie dish, and they even put the beer bottles in the recycling bin, but the rest of the evening is nothing but the trembling edges of something I am so tired of feeling and do not want to feel anymore.

There was an old man in Germany who thought he was a Nazi. He turned himself in to a small court in a town near Nuremberg, and said, “Restart the trials; I should be punished for what I have done.” He seemed to be around the right age, and his name was a fairly common German name—Hoefler—and his first name even more common—Hans—but still, they had records and looked up as many Hans Hoeflers as they could and cross-referenced and found nothing. “Where were you?” they asked him repeatedly. He lowered his eyes. “I was in the room for all of it,” he told them. “What room?” they asked. “The ROOM,” he said. They raised their eyebrows. “Of which room are you speaking?” they said. “There were many.”

“I heard the planning,” he said. “I popped the Zyklon B. I shot rows and rows of people.”

The judge coughed into his fist. Hans broke down crying, begging for forgiveness, and the secretary found herself resisting the urge to pat him on the head, which seemed like the wrong idea altogether. They found a photo of him at the time, sitting with small children in the park as a babysitter for the neighbors; turned out he was then only a child himself, and would never have been allowed in any “room” anyway. He was an old man by the time he showed up at the court, and at his insistence, two clerks who had some extra time on their hands visited his apartment, where they found his jacket pockets stuffed with ticket stubs, and videos, all around his television, of every Nazi movie that one could ever rent or see. When they played one titled The Room , one of the actors delivered Hans’s exact same line about the room. His TV didn’t even work except to show these videos. He owned action flicks, the comic-book film versions, Holocaust epics, documentaries, stories of one regular man in times of horror, and stories of one extraordinary man in times of horror. He could’ve opened a specialized movie store.

They filed their report and sent him home. “You’re just a regular man,” they told him. “Congratulations.”

This Hoefler, he stayed away for a month or so, but then he brought himself back to the court again. And again. He became their regular monthly visitor. The judge enjoyed seeing him, but he was unsure what to do with him, so he telephoned his niece, who was studying psychology and had talked about needing someone to test, and she in turn set up a mock Milgram obedience test for Hans, for her Ethics and History class.