Halfway Home by Paul Monette Read Free Book Online Page B

least sexual thing imaginable. I can't even say the smell transports me back. All I can say is someone else has slept here first, another man. And there is no pain and no regret, not the slightest sense of loss. I sleep a hundred fathoms deep.
    For hours.Dreamless and utterly still. It's the downside of the afternoon before I even start flopping about, turning side to side to grope the last pockets of slumber. Most of this is AIDS, of course. You go three or four days at a pretty normal clip, and then the virus requires a minor coma. I wake up dazed as Goldilocks, disoriented by the new room, and vaguely aware that the bears are due back any minute. Guilty; I'm not sure why.
    And sad. That is the oddest part. I get up and pad out to the balcony, the sun on the water like molten flame, and I want to cry out with loneliness. But I swear it's not Brian. He may have been the catalyst, him and his perfect isosceles of family niceness, yet this one is all my own. For I've never loved anyone all the way through—or maybe it's no one has ever loved me back. You'd think I'd get the direction right, considering this is what scalds the most. I can handle being alone, even dying alone. It's not that I'm desperate for somebody now, or maybe I'm too proud to want it anymore. But the fact that I never really had it, never touched life that deep, I carry around like chronic pain, what they call in the disability biz a preexisting condition.
    Till now I have managed to put it out of mind entirely during my two months at the beach. Somehow I gave it a rest, with no one to whine at and no one to pine for. But now I feel like I'm reaching for an actual physical man I can't have, just like I reached for those birds. He is always a foot from my grasp, or standing below on the terrace where Brian stood this morning. I admit I have mixed them up, Brian and the man I have never had.
    I don't really mean to see him in icon terms, all buffed like the airhead beauties you pass in Boys' Town, wincing at their blondness. It's not the body I'm aching for anyway. I want to be known. The quirks and the edges, the bumps and the hollows—I want somebody to see it all whole. And I want to have had years of that, even if it has to be over now. And I haven't. All I have had is two months here, six months there, wrestling with men who never quite fit. It's strange, I don't have such a bottomless well of self-pity about my illness, but about the man who never was, the hole in my heart goes all the way to China.
    Anyway, I'm perched on Cora's balcony like a gargoyle, feeling sorry. The sun hurts. I don't know what else to do except take it an hour at a time, letting the loneliness leach out till I am simply alone again. I'm staring down at Brian's spot on the terrace, fixed on his absence, because somehow this is the symbol for what I've missed. And suddenly there is a shadow and then a figure, as if my longing has materialized a man. The light's in my eyes, I can't quite see.
    "Hullo," says Gray, one arm up to block the sun. "I decided that screen shouldn't wait till Monday."
    I laugh. The sheer ordinariness of the remark just about knocks me over. The netherworld of lost men that's seized me in its operatic grip vanishes on the spot. "Let me grab a shirt. I'll be right down."
    I spiral down the stairs, yanking on an oversize sweat shirt. Gray is already crouched by one of the parlor windows, his trusty toolbox beside him. He's replacing a rusty latch, pulling the old screws out and filling them with wood glue. He works at all chores with fanatic neatness and marvelous patience. I lean in the archway just behind him, watching. Nothing ever got fixed in my father's house in Chester, unless he could throw a beer bottle at it.
    "I have to weed the goldfish pond," says Gray, always making a list in his head. "Brother get off all right?"
    "Finally," I reply. "His car wouldn't start. He had to spend the night."
    "Nice-looking man." Gray doesn't overstep, any more than