Forrest Gander - As a Friend

It was because I was drawn to him and because he didn’t have time for me that I began to see more of Sarah. I’d visit with her at the bookstore where she worked and I’d listen, at the house, while she practiced her cello. We’d talk about Les. He was our narcotic.

* * *

Maybe I fell in love with Les through Sarah, but what it looked like to some people was that I had fallen in love with her. Maybe I had fallen in love with Sarah too, somehow, but I couldn’t really tell where Les stopped and she began. They were so entangled, you couldn’t razor them apart.

Even when she was complaining about Les to me, she spoke about him with a land of violent intensity spiked with awe. As though he were a god with some regrettably tragic underworld habits.

I began to speak badly of him at the same time that it must have been obvious that I was aping his gestures and certain phrases he used. Vice versa became verse visa . Instead of as usual , I’d say per usual . So and so is excellent company , I’d mimic. Or, Yeah, he’s good news . Or I’d add Les’s familiar as they say to my own sentences. Gotta go, as they say . I wanted him to disappear so I could become him.

Because it was said he’d earned a black belt and made money for a while in Mountain Home by teaching karate to police officers, I studied karate from a book I bought at the bookstore where Sarah worked. At night, in the window of my apartment over the Laundromat, I kicked at my reflection, hissing.

* * *

Having quit surveying for the day, we fell together, per usual , at The High Hat before heading home. Quinton, Les, me, and now and then two part-timers, Mike and Brady. A traveling fair was encamped outside town and several of the carnies stood at the bar, lumped together and awkward like remnants of some outcast race. Three about our age and one considerably more weathered. Maybe a full set of teeth between them. Out of place not so much for what they wore, although the fat one’s t-shirt didn’t cover his stomach, but for the way their movements were out of sync. Their heads bobbled around on their necks like windshield figurines and their voices were ill-tuned to the bar’s low-key hum.

Before we finished our beers, Les kicked up from the booth, mug in hand. In a subdued voice, as though talking to himself, he said, I should be with them. And he walked over to them and said something and they closed in around him like brothers and when I left, soon after that, I couldn’t even catch his eye to nod goodnight.

* * *

When people saw Les, they touched him. Coming into the bar or into the surveyor’s office before work, he would pass through a gauntlet of hands extended in greeting. He was like a votive stone. For his own part, he was reserved. But men and women alike, cursory acquaintances and friends, hugged him hello and goodbye or touched him on the shoulder, people who saw him every day, people who weren’t physical with anyone else.

I was desperate for him to notice me, to like me. But I had nothing to offer someone like him. My adoration was worthless. He had awakened in me something major, life-changing. An imagination of a different way to be in the world. He was determined and he was at ease inside his body. You looked at him, at the loose way he walked, and you thought about sex. His torso rode on his hips like a snake on its coil. Maybe he wasn’t even fully conscious of the effect he had on me. But part of what he awakened in me was a horrible awareness that I would never be the only person I now wanted to be.

* * *

He invited me to spend a Saturday hiking through Lost Valley with him and Sarah. It was all I wanted, my two infatuations on either side of me. The day was a stunner. The bright purplish-red flowers of Judas trees lit up the north-facing slope, glittering in a pointillist blur of oaks and maples and shagbark hickories. But at the beginning of the dirt path that only accommodated two side by side, Les and Sarah began talking about François Villon. Very earnestly, as if it were going to affect the way they conducted the rest of their lives. And for nearly an hour I followed them morosely and they didn’t think to include me, even out of politeness. They didn’t throw me a crust of the conversation. We passed a huge wild black cherry tree they never noticed and when we reached the peak, I wandered off so they’d be forced to come looking for me, which they did, irritably, as though I were the asshole, before we started back down in silence.

* * *

The first time I saw him naked, we had been surveying near Bull Shoals Lake and Sarah met us at the boathouse with three tickets to see Bobby Bland’s second set at The Palace. We packed our gear into Quinton’s truck and borrowed his flashlight. Quinton said hasta luego and drove back to town. And then we went down to the dock, Sarah leading with the flashlight in case a moccasin had curled onto the still-warm planks. She stripped first and I will never forget the luminescence of her angular body in the semi-dark. The long line of her clavicles and her extended throat and the breathtaking slight swing of her breasts as she bent to sit and then slid off the mossy edge of the dock into the water.

I could smell him when he took off his shirt — vinegar and goat. His muscled arms and stocky legs. He shucked his jeans and boxers in one motion and dove from the dock quickly but not before I glimpsed and then — as right in front of me his body jackknifed open over waves lit softly by the full moon — clearly saw a leather ring around his cock and balls.

* * *

Les answered the door after I knocked on a weekday after midnight. I had been drinking Wild Turkey with Quinton and felt shattered. I needed to see Les because he eclipsed me. I despised him, I was in love with him. I coveted Sarah’s consuming, inflamed, total love for him. I knew I would never have the means to elicit that kind of devotion from anyone.

So I found myself parked in front of their house and then at their door, drunk, weeping, ridiculous, sucking in big quavery breaths. And he stepped outside with me into the yard so we wouldn’t wake Sarah, his thick hair mussed with sleep, and he listened to me crying and blubbering about my last girlfriend. Stood there in boxer shorts and a white undershirt with his arms across his chest and it started to rain but he didn’t move and I kept on blubbering but I was aware too of the rain and cold and I felt less sure about why I was so upset and he stood there listening to me even after the conviction of emotion washed out of my voice. I was thinking we ought to go inside because it was pouring and the rain was like ice, but he didn’t seem to notice and he was present for my benefit, tuned to me without offering any facile analysis or palliative.

There was a pause and then just the sound of the rain beating the grass and a whooshing like ocean around us in the leafy oaks. Then the light in the living room came on and I glanced at the window but didn’t see Sarah and he never took his eyes off my face. At once I knew I didn’t believe the things I was saying, that I hadn’t come to their door in pangs of grief for my old girlfriend but for other reasons entirely. Again, I glanced at the window and wanted to go inside. I imagined being inside looking out at us in the rain, the wide, relaxed shoulders of the poet blocking out a clear view of me. I started shivering and my words guttered out. All that magmatic emotion had subsided. I felt nothing but cold and wet and I wanted to go inside to be with them.

Then he said something to me — I no longer remember what — and I stepped forward with anxiety and relief and hugged him, but he was distant, his body solid and stiff, my ear pressed briefly to his hard shoulder, to the wet transparentized cloth over his skin.