Adam Haslett - You Are Not a Stranger Here

He came on a Tuesday. Rain was falling through the naked branches of the trees onto a carpet of rotting foliage. Gramm paused in front of the house, his hands buried in his pockets, the hood of his sweatshirt sheltering him from the weather.

For several minutes he stood there, glancing back in the direction from which he’d come and then again at the gray shutters and curtained windows.

He was shaking when I opened the door. I led him into the kitchen.

“Are you sick?” I asked.

He shrugged. Under the room’s overhead light, he looked pale, worn out, the mockery all gone. I offered him a drink but he shook his head. He was upset. I poured him a vodka anyway and put it down beside him.

“Listen,” he said suddenly. “I’m sorry about what happened to your parents.” He spoke in a rush, as though he’d been holding the sentiment in for days and needed to be rid of it.

I tightened my grip on the counter’s sharp edge until I felt nothing but pain radiating from the palm of my hand.

“I just think we should forget about all this,” he said.

“Can we do that? Can we forget about it?”

I said nothing.

His shoulders quivered.

“Why did you ask me here?” he said, the resolve drained from his voice.

“I wanted to see you.”

“Don’t say that.”

“It’s true.”

I crossed to where he sat, and taking his right hand in mine, moved it to the table, wrapping his damp fingers around the glass. He held his breath as I touched him.

“Drink it,” I said.

With shaking hand, he lifted the glass to his lips. I watched the lump of his throat rise and fall as he swallowed. When he’d finished, I filled the glass again.

“Go on,” I said.

He shook his head.

“Go on,” I repeated. “I want you to.”

He obeyed, emptying the glass twice more as I stood over him. I put the bottle down and lifted my T-shirt off, baring the purple and yellowed bruises that covered my chest. He shrunk back, closing his eyes. With my thumbs, I pressed them open again. I knelt before him. I took hold of his loose hands and formed them into fists. He wept. The tears ran down his pale cheeks and dripped from his chin.

“Please,” he whispered, “let me go.”

I slid my fingers along the inside of his thigh. Through his cotton pants, I cupped his balls gently in my hand. I felt his penis swell, his muscles tense. He drew back the fist I had made for him and hit me in the eye, sobbing as he did it.

“Are you happy now?” he cried.

“No,” I said.

He swung again and knocked me against the door of the oven. Beneath the tears I saw blood in his cheeks, glow of the boy I’d spent years admiring. I lifted myself to my knees and from the drawer by the stove I took the knife my father used to cut tomatoes and onions on the nights he’d tried to make me dinner, crying as he boiled water in my mother’s pots. I offered the knife up to Gramm and when he would not take it I put it in his hand and closed his fingers over the handle. Leaning forward, I hugged him around the legs, burying my face in the warmth of his stomach.

Waiting. Hoping.

WE REMAINED TOUCHING like that for several minutes, the rise and fall of his belly against my cheek the only movement. His weeping stopped, and gradually his breath became deep and even. He placed the blade on the counter over my shoulder and then gently backed away. It felt as though a long time had passed, as though we had been traveling some great distance and were now tired, sapped of the force that had brought us here, empty, to this room. I knew a sudden shame at the sight of my bruised skin and stood up to put on my shirt. At the table, Gramm sat motionless, his unblinking eyes turned finally inward. I moved to the window. Outside, the rain had tapered to a drizzle.

Weeds in my mother’s garden, bent low by the earlier downpour, swayed now in the breeze. On the branches of the dogwood, crows shook their black feathers.

As I watched the storm passing, a pickup slowed across the street in front of Mrs. Polk’s house and pulled into her drive.

Mr. Raffello stepped around the bed of the truck, and lifting the plastic sheeting, raised my dark amber chest in his arms.

For the first time in a long while, I began to cry.

THROUGH THE OPEN French doors, Owen surveyed the garden. The day was hot for June, a pale sun burning in a cloudless sky, wilting the last of the irises, the rhododendron blossoms drooping. A breeze moved through the laburnum trees, carrying a sheet of the Sunday paper into the rose border. Mrs. Giles’s collie yapped on the other side of the hedge.

With his handkerchief, Owen wiped sweat from the back of his neck.

His sister, Hillary, stood at the counter sorting strawberries.

She’d nearly finished the dinner preparations, though Ben wouldn’t arrive for hours yet. She wore a beige linen dress he’d never seen on her before. Her black-and-gray hair, usually kept up in a bun, hung down to her shoulders. For a woman in her mid-fifties, she had a slender, graceful figure.

“You’re awfully dressed up,” he said.

“The wine,” she said. “Why don’t you open a bottle of the red? And we’ll need the tray from the dining room.”

“We’re using the silver, are we?”

“Yes, I thought we would.”

“We didn’t use the silver at Christmas.”

He watched Hillary dig for something in the fridge.

“It should be on the right under the carving dish,” she said.

Raising himself from his chair, Owen walked through into the dining room. From the sideboard he removed the familiar gravy boats and serving dishes until he found the tarnished platter. The china and silver had come from their parents’

when their father died, along with the side tables and sitting chairs and the pictures on the walls.

“It’d take an hour to clean this,” he called into the kitchen.

“There’s polish in the cabinet.”

“We’ve five perfectly good trays in the cupboard.”

“It’s behind the drink, on the left.”

He gritted his teeth. She could be so bloody imperious.

“This is some production,” he muttered, seated again at the kitchen table. He daubed a cloth in polish and drew it over the smooth metal. They weren’t in the habit of having people in to dinner. Aunt Philippa from Shropshire, their mother’s sister, usually came at Christmas and stayed three or four nights. Now and again, Hillary had Miriam Franks, one of her fellow teachers from the comprehensive, in on a Sunday. They’d have coffee in the living room afterward and talk about the students. Occasionally they’d go out if a new restaurant opened on the High Street, but they’d never been gourmets. Most of Owen’s partners at the firm had professed to discover wine at a certain age and now took their holidays in Italy. He and Hillary rented a cottage in the Lake District the last two weeks of August. They had been going for years and were perfectly happy with it. A nice little stone house that caught all the afternoon light and had a view of Lake Windermere.

He pressed the cloth harder onto the tray, rubbing at the tarnished corners. Years ago he’d gone to dinners, up in Knightsbridge and Mayfair. Richard Stallybrass, an art dealer, gave private gentlemen’s parties, as he called them, at his flat on Belgrave Place. All very civilized. Solicitors, journalists, the odd duke or MP, there with the implicit and, in the 1970s, safe assumption that nothing would be said. Half of them had wives and children. Saul Thompson, an old friend from school, had introduced Owen to this little world and for several years Owen had been quite taken with it.

He’d looked at flats in central London, encouraged by Saul to leave the suburbs and enjoy the pleasures of the city.