“We can get you a raft and you can float around, and I can rub your feet,” he says.
“You’re never here. You work all the time,” Audrey says.
“When the people come to put in the pool, you can hold up your David Hockney picture and repel them.”
“What if they don’t understand that, Barnes? I can imagine that just causing a lot of confusion.”
“Then you lose,” he says. “If you show them the picture and they go ahead and put in the pool anyway, then either it’s not a real cross or they’re not real vampires.” He pats her ankle. “But no fair explaining to them,” he says. “It has to be as serious as charades.”
Martin tells me things that Barnes has told him. In the beginning, Martin didn’t want his sister to marry him, but Barnes was also his best friend and Martin didn’t want to betray Barnes’s confidences to him, so he asked me what I thought. Telling me mattered less than telling her, and I had impressed him long ago with my ability to keep a secret by not telling him his mother had a mastectomy the summer he went to Italy. He only found out when she died, two years later, and then he found out accidentally. “She didn’t want you to know,” I said. “How could you keep that a secret?” he said. He loves me and hates me for things like that. He loves me because I’m the kind of person people come to. It’s an attribute he wishes he had, because he’s a teacher. He teaches history in a private school. One time, when we were walking through Chelsea late at night, a nicely dressed old lady leaned over her gate and handed me a can of green beans and a can opener and said, “Please.” On the subway, a man handed me a letter and said, “You don’t have to say anything, but please read this paragraph. I just want somebody else to see it before I rip it up.” Most of these things have to do with love, in some odd way. The green beans did not have to do with love.
Martin and I are walking in the woods. The poison ivy is turning a bright autumnal red, so it’s easy to recognize. As we go deeper into the woods we see a tree house, with a ladder made of four boards nailed to the tree trunk. There are empty beer bottles around the tree, but I miss the most remarkable thing in the scene until Martin points it out: a white balloon wedged high above the tree house, where a thin branch forks. He throws some stones and finally bounces one off the balloon, but it doesn’t break it or set it free. “Maybe I can lure it down,” he says, and he picks up an empty Michelob bottle, holds it close to his lips, and taps his fingers on the glass as if he were playing a horn while he blows a slow stream of air across the top. It makes an eerie, hollow sound, and I’m glad when he stops and drops the bottle. He’s capable of surprising me as much as I surprise him. We lived together for years. A month ago, he came to the apartment I was subletting late one night, after two weeks of not returning my phone calls at work and keeping his phone pulled at home — came over and hit the buzzer and was standing there smiling when I looked out the window. He walked up the four flights, came in still smiling, and said, “I’m going to do something you’re really going to like.” I was ready to hit him if he tried to touch me, but he took me lightly by the wrist, so that I knew that was the only part of my body he’d touch, and sat down and pulled me into the chair with him, and whistled the harp break to “Isn’t She Lovely.” I had never heard him whistle before. I had no idea he knew the song. He whistled the long, complex interlude perfectly, and then sat there, silently, his lips warm against the top of my hair.
Martin pushes aside a low-hanging branch, so I can walk by. “You know what Barnes told me this morning?” he says. “He sees his regular shrink on Monday mornings, but a few weeks ago he started seeing a young woman shrink on Tuesdays and not telling either of them about the other. Then he said he was thinking about giving both of them up and buying a camera.”
“I don’t get it.”
“He does that — he starts to say one thing, and then he adds some non sequitur. I don’t know if he wants me to question him or just let him talk.”
“Ask.”
“You wouldn’t ask.”
“I’d probably ask,” I say.
We’re walking on leaves, through bright-green fern. From far away now, he tosses another stone, but it misses the branch; it doesn’t go near the balloon.
“You know what it is?” Martin says. “He never seems vague or random about anything. He graduated first in his class from medical school. All summer, the bastard hit a home run every time he was up at bat. He’s got that charming, self-deprecating way of saying things — the way he was talking about the swimming pool. So when he seems to be opening up to me, it would be unsophisticated for me to ask what going to two shrinks and giving up both of them and buying a camera is all about.”
“Maybe he talks to you because you don’t ask him questions.”
Martin is tossing an acorn in the air. He pockets it, and squeezes my hand.
“I wanted to make love to you last night,” he says, “but I knew she’d be walking through the living room all night.”
She did. She got up every few hours and tiptoed past the fold-out bed and went into the bathroom and stayed there, silently, for so long that I’d drift back to sleep and not realize she’d come out until I heard her walking back in again. Audrey has had two miscarriages in the year she’s been with Barnes. Audrey, who swore she’d never leave the city, never have children, who hung out with poets and painters, married the first respectable man she ever dated — her brother’s best friend as well — got pregnant, and grieved when she lost the first baby, grieved when she lost the second.
“Audrey will be all right,” I say, and push my fingers through his.
“We’re the ones I’m worried about,” he says. “Thinking about them stops me from talking about us.” He puts his arm around me as we walk. Our skin is sweaty — we have on too many clothes. We trample ferns I’d avoid if I were walking alone. With his head pressed against my shoulder, he says, “I need for you to talk to me. I’m out of my league with you people. I don’t know what you’re thinking, and I think you must be hating me.”
“I told you what I thought months ago. You said you needed time to think. What more can I do besides move so you have time to think?”
He is standing in front of me, touching the buttons of his wool shirt that I wear as a jacket, then brushing my hair behind my shoulders.
“You went, just like that,” he says. “You won’t tell me what your life is like.”
He moves his face toward mine, and I think he’s going to kiss me, but he only closes his eyes, puts his forehead against mine. “You know all my secrets,” he whispers, “and when we’re apart I feel like they’ve died inside you.”
At dinner, we’ve all had too much to drink. I study Martin’s face across the table and wonder what secrets he had in mind. That he’s afraid of driving over bridges? Afraid of gas stoves? That he can’t tell a Bordeaux from a Burgundy?
Barnes has explained, by drawing a picture on a napkin, how a triple-bypass operation is done. Audrey accidentally knocks over Barnes’s glass, and the drawing of the heart blurs under the spilled water. Martin says, “That’s a penis, Doctor.” Then he scribbles on my napkin, drips water on it, and says, “That is also a penis.” He is pretending to be taking a Rorschach test.
Barnes takes another napkin from the pile in the middle of the table and draws a penis. “What’s that?” he says to Martin.
“That’s a mushroom,” Martin says.
“You’re quite astute,” Barnes says. “I think you should go into medicine when you get over your crisis.”
Martin wads up a napkin and drops it in the puddle running across the table from Barnes’s napkin. “Did you ever have a crisis in your life?” he says to him, mopping up.