He took a step toward them.
“What about you?” He offered a flower to a woman biting her lip and sweating above it. The woman looked down at the stone in her hand, turned it over. She tried to look at the house, but couldn’t get past Dad or the flower.
“All right.” She let go of the stone and took the flower before hastily moving to the back of the group.
“And you?” Dad was making another sale.
Grand was offering his own flowers. Those in the crowd in front of me stared, waiting to see if I too would be something to stop their throwing.
“A flower for your stone?” I stepped forward.
And there we three were, slowly dismantling the mob that had so wanted to tear us apart. We tossed the stones into a big pile in the front yard. Every click of stone against stone made me flinch, made us all flinch behind petals and stems.
As I was handing a flower over, I saw Grand slowly extend a Russian Red to Yellch. Without a word, Yellch gave his stone to Grand. Because their hands lingered for so long in the exchange, you could from afar have thought they were merely friends, or gardeners at the very least, holding hands and talking flowers.
In the back of the crowd, I saw Elohim. No one had given him a flower yet, so I asked him in my best voice, “A flower for your stone, Mr. Elohim?”
He held up his empty hands. And yet wasn’t that whole crowd just one big stone for him?
“Do you remember when you threw stones at me, Fielding? Don’t lower your head like that. Look at me. Do you remember?”
I nodded.
He nodded too. “I hope one day you know what that feels like.”
He took the flower and turned away, the crowd going with him.
Years later, when I was standing on my last roof, the stones finally came for me. They came sudden and from the sky. They hit cars and dinged. They hit the slate roof and broke the tiles I was standing on. Still, while others ran inside, I stayed.
“Hey, buddy, you’re gonna get killed up there in this hail.”
But I stayed and spread my arms out, tilting my face up, the wound before the scar and I, dear Elohim, finally knowing what it feels like.
23
These troublesome disguises which we wear
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And that must end us; that must be our cure—
To be no more. Sad cure! for who would lose …
—MILTON, PARADISE LOST 4:740 2:142–151
WHEN I WAS thirty-three, I met a man. My house was burning down and he was the one with the hose, come to save me. I liked that about him. That he put fires out, didn’t start them.
Come here, memory of him. I’ll make guitar songs out of his eyes. Come here, memory of him. Give me the Sunday in the warm bathtub when I leaned back against his wet chest and he washed my hair. Come here, memory of him, remind me of the morning sun, like good yellow, on his face. Come here, you memory of him, and give him well.
His dark skin was like that of the color of a bird’s feather I found beneath my window long ago. I almost told him about that feather. I almost told him about Sal. I almost told him all my baseball-shaped secrets, but I was too distracted by the possibility of happiness with him. Far too distracted by him pulling me in by the loop of my jeans and reading me Langston Hughes.
Heaven was no bigger than a queen-sized bed during those days. Blankets kicked off, pillows even. Just a white sheeted square and us. Chests were pillows. Arms and legs were blankets. Waist deep in each other. A heaven of mounting gasps and sides rising and falling in the same deep breaths, breaths grassy enough to walk on from here to Elysian Fields, where paradise is set in motion by the almost too beautiful connection of one man and another.
Sometimes it’d be him over me like a swinging branch and my mouth feeling that slight curved fruit of his neck until I felt like I was falling away from him and that paradise. I’d almost scream, a fearful grasp on him, “I’m falling away from you.”
“I’ll never let you fall,” he’d promise.
And so the heaven continued like a scurry to eat the last apple before the tree gets cut down.
Yes, heaven is a breathless mouth. It is the core underneath, where two souls meet and give and take little pieces of each other, all the while the light orbits, rippling soft on the edges.
He was mine and I was his. He told me so as he pulled me and my jeans into him on the street, the Empire State Building in the distance.
After the kiss, he asked why I looked about to break. I said I didn’t know, but wasn’t it because I did know? Because I knew all the great splendor of a man. I knew the heaven of making love to him later. All the splendid, heavenly things Grand would never know.
We caught the eye of an old man passing by.
“Do you think his frown is because we’re gay or interracial?” he asked, his dark skin the best part of me.
“I’m not gay.”
“What do you call us, Fielding?”