“I’m just going to run to the restroom,” he said in answer to Jonah’s puzzled look. “Don’t eat my steak while I’m gone.” He attempted a smile.
He locked himself into a stall and unbuttoned his jeans, leaning one hand against the wall and positioning himself over the toilet bowl. He closed his eyes and saw Cleo. She was kneeling in front of him, naked, and smiling up at him. He rubbed his shaft and imagined reaching down to smooth the part of her golden hair. He stroked her breasts, pinched her nipples. Then he squeezed hard. He shoved his cock in her mouth, feeling her gag on it. He was gripping the back of her head, cramming himself deeper down her throat. Tears were sliding down her cheeks; he pulled out and slapped one side of her face, then the other. He was fucking her from behind now, hands spreading her cheeks apart. He was ramming into her puckered pink asshole. He was spanking her, spitting on her, pulling her long hair. He was flipping her over, yanking her legs apart. He was sinking back into her pussy now, smashing into her wet cunt. He was jamming his fingers down her tight red throat. He was pushing his thumbs into her eyes. Then he was punching her face, her beautiful, irreverent, heartbreaking face, pound pound pound, until his fist smashed through, into the hollow beneath like a china doll, and there was nothing but a black jagged hole where her mouth and nose had been. And then he was fucking the hole, fucking it, fucking it, fucking it, fucking the space where her face had been until, with one long ropy spurt, he fell into it and disappeared completely.
Somehow he made it through the remainder of lunch with only the slight mishap of distractedly agreeing to get Jonah a credit card. Christine would be irate, but he would deal with that later. They walked back from the restaurant up Columbus Avenue, stopping to wander around the flea market on Seventy-Seventh. Jonah was traipsing behind him on his phone, blind to the hodgepodge of junk on display. Anders felt the urge to throw his own phone in the trash. He drifted over to another table and leafed dispassionately through a stack of i-D magazines from the 1980s until, with a start, he found himself staring back.
The picture was in an alleyway in SoHo, black and white and deliberately grainy, so it appeared even older than it was. He had no memory of it being taken, but that was hardly surprising. He flipped back to the front cover: 1982. He’d been twenty years old. He was wearing an oversize pair of slacks and a suit jacket with no shirt, slouched against the brick wall, hands in pockets, in the timeless pose of youthful insouciance. He was impossibly slender; hollow cheekbones, hollow chest, pale hair flopped over one eye, the other staring straight into the camera, into him.
“Hey Jonah, come look at this!”
He held the magazine open so he could see.
“That you?”
“It appears so.”
“There’s a kid in the grade above me who’s a model,” said Jonah, slumping his shoulders. “Everyone likes him. Was it, like, fun?”
“Modeling? Sometimes. Mostly it was tedious.”
And terrifying, which he’d never admitted to anyone. He rarely talked about those early years when he’d first moved to New York. How he’d been passed around by casting agents, managers, and stylists, all older than him, all clued into this world of suggestion and innuendo he could not decipher. There was one photoshoot where he’d been convinced to strip naked but for a smear of lipstick. He remembered keenly now the baffling humiliation of trying to appear unfazed in front of the photographer. He still didn’t know what those pictures were for.
Jonah leaned to peer closer at the image in his hands.
“No, it’s not you … Look, it says the model’s name here. Jack.”
“What?” Anders lifted the page closer to his face and scanned the text. Jonah was right. The model was credited under another name.
“Weird.” Jonah shrugged. “Looks a lot like you.”
Jonah wandered away toward another antique stall, leaving Anders staring at his nonself in embarrassment. On closer inspection, this model was thinner than he’d ever been, with a more symmetrical, American-looking face. Anders snapped the magazine shut and put it back on the pile. What was it his agent used to say? Everyone was replaceable.
“Hey Anders,” Jonah called from a nearby stall. He was tossing a brown leather soccer ball from hand to hand. It was as old as Anders, the kind his father might have practiced with. “Want to kick this around? I have tryouts in a week.”
A hundred bucks for a soccer ball (“It’s hand-stitched,” the vendor kept insisting), but it didn’t matter. Jonah let Anders keep his arm around his shoulder for the length of two whole avenues as they walked to the park. He’d never been great at being an authority figure for Jonah, something Christine had often berated him for when they were together. But it was different for him. He’d known Jonah since he was four, two-thirds of his life but not his whole life. He wasn’t guaranteed love.
They stood opposite each other on the Great Lawn, tapping the ball back and forth. Anders’s mind settled in with the rhythm of the ball; his thoughts began to slow and order themselves. She wasn’t going to leave Frank. She needed him too much. And even if she did, she and Anders couldn’t be together. It was too messy, a relationship born of the destruction of a marriage and a friendship. And yet here he was convincing himself it was a good idea, like some romantic idiot. Enough.
“You’ve still got a pretty good leg for an old guy,” called Jonah.
“Thanks,” Anders called back. “But I’m not old.”
“You’re like fifty,” Jonah said, moving closer.
“I’m forty-fucking-five,” Anders said.
Jonah laughed. “Language!”
“Don’t tell your mother.”
“But you don’t have kids,” Jonah said suddenly.
“I have you.”
“Yeah, I know, but real kids that live with you and shit.”
“Language,” Anders said, less convincingly.
“Look—” Jonah held the ball still with his foot. “I just think my mom worries about you. I heard her on the phone to Aunt Vicky, talking about you.”
“Is Auntie Vicky the one with the kid in Model UN?”
“Ned? That kid’s an ass.”
“Total ass,” said Anders and felt Jonah’s smile warm him from the inside. “No one needs to worry about me. Now, show me your kick-ups.”
Anders watched Jonah bounce the ball from his toe to his knee and back again. He counted along with him, nine, ten, eleven, twelve … He was forty-five. He didn’t have real kids that lived with him and shit. He wasn’t married, never had been. His longest relationship had been the six years with Christine. But he was still healthy, still had his looks. If he had a baby next year, he’d only be sixty-six when the kid was twenty. That wasn’t so old. People ran marathons at sixty-six. He just needed to meet someone. Someone without all the baggage. Jonah lost control of the ball, and Anders ran to retrieve it.
“Hey Jonah,” he said, tossing the ball back to him. “I’m thinking of moving to LA. How would you feel about that?”
“Like to the beach?”