“That was incredible,” he said. I thought so too.
“I like being inside you.” Not just his body but his mind, too. I wanted him to think of me the way I thought of him. And I wanted him to see himself for the treasure he truly was.
Our separation was a tiny death as I eased out and tied off the condom, tossing it onto the floor to be dealt with later. It was a bad habit I’d picked up from Franco when we’d treated our dorm room like a pay-by-the-hour hotel. I grabbed a corner of the sheet and wiped my hand and the puddles that had collected on Arden’s stomach, then lay alongside him with my arm and leg trapping him in my embrace. He turned toward me, so that we could be tangled up in each other again.
“You make me wish I were a poet,” I said, not even as a joke. I’d tried my hand at poetry in undergrad, but I wasn’t very good at it. Poets have a gift of carving away at everything non-essential, leaving the reader with lines that pierce the psyche like a shiv. I was always too attached to my words.
Arden laughed and poked me playfully. “Why’s that?”
“So, I could dedicate poems to you. They’d all be terrible. And none of them would rhyme.”
“I thought it was no longer fashionable for things to rhyme.”
I chuckled, thinking of Liam and his assessment of my condition,a madness most discreet.I recited the lines of that passage to Arden.
“Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs;
Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers' eyes;
Being vexed, a sea nourished with loving tears.
What is it else? A madness most discreet,
A choking gall, and a preserving sweet.”
Arden stared at me with soft, expressive eyes. “I could listen to you recite Shakespeare all night long.”
“Don’t tempt me.” I drew him close so that our noses brushed lightly. His eyes closed, and he let out a contented sigh.
“It’s too late,” he whispered, “for the both of us.”
He was absolutely right. With Arden, I chose madness.
Part II.
“Are you an alcoholic?” the boy asked his father one day. The man drank a lot. Beer during the day and wine at night with only an occasional soda in between. Hardly any water at all, which was what the boy preferred, even though water on the boat was room temperature, and the tank made it taste funny, like farts. Sometimes at night before he fell asleep, damp with sweat and itchy with mosquito bites, the boy would fantasize about drinking ice-cold glasses of water, one after another, like counting sheep.
The man squinted at the boy, not meanly but not nicely either. “I’m a sailor,” he said.
“Is it safe to be drinking and driving?” the boy asked. His mother had always told him the two didn’t mix. She’d been killed in a car accident while coming home from a late-night shift at the grocery store where she worked. She’d forgotten to turn on her lights, or so the other driver had claimed. His aunt said the man who hit her deserved to be in jail. The boy didn’t care either way about the man’s fate. It didn’t change the fact that his mother was dead.
“We’re going pretty slow,” the captain speculated. “The reaction time to avoid hitting something out here is a few hours at least.” He let out a terrific yawn, like a lion, and took another sip of beer. The boy watched him, had been watching him for days now. Trying, in his own way, to understand this man who claimed to be his father.
“Why don’t you take a turn at the wheel?” The captain stepped aside, offering him the helm.
“I’m nine years old,” the boy said, indignant.
“Never too young to learn.”
The boy came over and climbed onto the pilot’s seat so that he could see over the curve of the wheel. The mainsail was full and blocked most of his view, but the captain pointed to the digital compass on the dash and told him where they were aiming—south by southwest. The boy gripped the polished wooden spokes in both hands and carefully steered the rudder, keeping the outline of the boat pointed at the tiny green arrow. The captain supervised him for a while, nudging him this way or that when necessary, drinking his beer and belching quietly.
“Take over for a while,” the captain said with a clap on his back. “Yell for me if the sails start to flap.”
The boy preened that he should be trusted with such an important job (at only nine years old!) The captain fell onto the couch behind the cockpit. The boy’s gaze was riveted on the compass and the sail, back and forth, back and forth, making sure neither faltered.
Behind him, the captain’s snores were as rhythmic as the waves jostling the boat’s hull and the snapping of the ropes in the wind.
9
