Memorial(49)

Who said I was gay?

Please, said Janet.

I’ve got this sister, she said. As much as you talk to my parents, you’ll never hear about her.

Let me guess, I said. She’s the one on the mantel.

Yep. She’s got a wife and this kid and a house and everything. They’re cute together. But none of that matters.

Because she’s queer.

Because my parents are old, and change is hard.

That’s not an excuse, I said. It’s never an excuse.

But here you are, said Janet. So you’ll never come back again now that you know?

And I started to say something—although I still don’t know what it would’ve been—but that’s when Mary stepped back in the room. She asked if we wanted any coffee.

I looked at Janet. Her face wasn’t giving me anything.

I told Mary that’d be great.

That’s what I thought, she said, smiling.



* * *





One day, I told Ben all of that. We were at a bar in the Heights, out on the patio, and he’d been staring at the beers beside me. Once I’d finished my bottle, Ben folded his hands behind his head.

Of course that’s how she’s gonna react, he said. People don’t just do things like that. Eating other people’s food like it’s no big deal.

I did.

And you’re a weirdo. But they’re her parents. They’re old.

And, I said, waiting for the next thing.

And what? said Ben.

You know what. You almost said it.

Ben smirked at that, a rare sight from him.

That’s just not something we do, he said, laughing.

The skyline glowed under the patio’s lighting, an assembly of Christmas blinkers. A patch of traffic snaked around the cars parked bumper to bumper beside us, stacked like haphazard dominoes across one another’s backs. Some dog wandered between them with its tongue batting the concrete.

Then tell me, I said, what would you do?

I’d mind my fucking business, said Ben. But it’s not like anyone even lets us do that.

Us, I said.

Black people, said Ben.

All of a sudden, he was serious. He played with his fingers on the counter in front of us. So I grabbed one, making a ring around it, pulling it under the table, stretching it, and sliding my thumb across the whole of his hand. It was the most intimate thing we’d done in weeks. A blush rolled across his face. So I tightened my hold, running my finger across his wrist, which slackened, and then tightened, and then slackened again.

You’re annoying, said Ben.

You’re blushing, I said.

Shut up, said Ben, but he didn’t move his hand.



* * *





This is how our second year goes by:

I pull a new gig at this other restaurant.

Ben stays at his job with the kids.

We don’t buy a bedframe.

We fight.

We make up.

We fuck on the sofa, in the kitchen, on the floor.

I cook, and cook, and cook.

One neighbor has a baby.

Another has a stroke.

Whitekids invade the block, lining their porches with pumpkins on Halloween and Budweisers on the weekends.

Ma calls me from Tokyo, stalling on the line.

She asks how I’m doing.

I swear everything’s fine.



* * *




? ? ?

A brief list of Eiju’s favorite scents: steamed rice, crisp takoyaki, sesame oil. Laundered clothes. Grated ginger. My mother’s wet hair. My wet hair, as a boy, after he’d bathed me, lifting me from the tub.



* * *





One morning in the living room, Taro finished his checkup on Eiju, groping around his abdomen, and the motherfucker yelled out in pain.

I’d been taking a leak. When I ran out of the bathroom, Taro’d pursed his lips, and Eiju’d raised both of his arms.

No, he said, goddammit! No!

Taro stared at Eiju for a moment from the floor. Like he wanted to say something, but he didn’t know how the man would take it. He turned to me in the hallway, and then he turned toward Eiju again.

But Taro swallowed whatever he had to say. He rose to his knees, continuing with the exam. Neither man spoke, and Eiju lifted his arms when he was asked to, and he lowered them when Taro said so, and they went through the motions silently—poking and prodding and scooting around.

Once they’d finished, and Eiju slipped his shirt on, Taro packed up his shit wordlessly. He gave a slight bow to his patient, and his patient grunted him away.

But I cornered Taro outside. It’d become our thing. The block’s morning rituals had started up as he waited for me on the street, and I watched Taro wipe his brow with the back of his hand. When I offered him a cigarette, he smiled, waving me away.

I asked what went wrong, what the fuck I’d just witnessed, and Taro cracked the biggest grin.

Oh, he said, you know how men are.



* * *





Eiju never asked me what I talked about with Taro.

When I asked him why that was, he just shook his head.

What will it change, he said.



* * *





But I noticed that he’d started moving slower. Sometimes, Eiju dozed off in the middle of the day, grimacing himself awake. Whenever I asked what was wrong, he said it was none of my fucking business, although that didn’t change the fact that it was happening.