Outsiders. Part 25

"He did write."

"Oh? Good!" Sheila whispered back. Carol started presenting again. They were silent for the rest of the agenda. When everyone was packing up, Joan was deeply grateful for Sheila's infirmity and the stainless steel excuse it gave her to cut and run before Carol pulled her aside. She shouldered Sheila's bag, and held her arm out for Sheila to lean on. Carol came over, looking surprised and sad that they were leaving.

"Oh, are you off already? Joan, I was hoping we could talk about the Michigan reunion party. Debbie did it last year, so it is my turn to host. I was thinking maybe we could combine efforts. What with your portion of the exhibit and all, we could work together on contacting the usual suspects and have them bring their Michigan memories video and such to the potluck in July."

Joan froze, trapped like Prometheus between the eagle and the rock. Sheila groaned piteously and doubled over.

Carol started. "My goodness, is she okay?"

Joan bent over to see Sheila grinning behind the curtain of her hair, so Joan shook her head.

"No, she's not. It's a reaction to the pain medication. Makes her very ill."

Sheila groaned explosively, promising colorful expulsion. Carol stepped back.

"We'll talk about this another time, Joan?"

"Another time," Joan agreed, half carrying her friend out the door. When she got Sheila in the pa.s.senger seat of her car, she finally laughed.

"You missed your calling. You are wasted on Women's Studies," Joan said. She interpreted Sheila's small wince as one of pain.

"Yeah. So, Billy wrote? He wasn't too much of a pest?"

Joan shook her head. "No, not really. Impish, as you said. But it was fun."

"Fun?"

"We wrote back and forth a bit. He asked me to play video games and drink scotch with him, and I told him only if he answered a question for me. Historical stuff."

"What kind of historical stuff?"

"Hadrian and Antinous."

"Joan."

"Not my fault, on my mother's grave. He started it," Joan started the car. "Isn't that why you gave him my e-mail?"

"I suppose so."

"Well, doesn't matter. He hasn't answered my challenge, and I expect he won't. We have really very little in common. I'm sure I scared him off."

"Cheer up. I might have given Carol your e-mail."

"You're walking home."

It was the blink of an eye until Friday, and Joan was able to suppress any disappointment that her e-mail was empty. Of course it was, as she'd intended it to be. Maybe she missed his sunny tone a little. It was easy to get used to, the romping canine warmth that admitted no impediments or distance. He was a golden retriever of a boy. She, Hadrian, was simply splendid, as was he, Antinous, and why not bask in that? Or so he seemed to say, between each line of the e-mails she reread. Come and play, Caesar. Aversion to boating on the Nile. Joan smiled, again, and wished she hadn't been quite so stern. It was intoxicating talking to someone who could both keep up and challenge her, who came at her with ready camaraderie and no barriers. Familiar in that lost old way, longer ago than the hurt. It became something that argued for itself, that emotion, that thread of familiarity. She liked the way he made her feel. All this was quite beneath her reason, gathering like guests around a fire at an inn on a wintry night. Waiting to justify itself when the time came.

No e-mails on Friday, and by ten p.m. Joan was able to admit to herself that her house was too quiet, the night hanging too still, and her e-mail was too empty. It is unfair of certain types of people, Joan thought, to go gamboling through life wagging tails and licking faces and charming their way past your defenses. Because they go gamboling right off again. What doesn't stay doesn't matter, she reminded herself from the quarry of her past.

Sat.u.r.day morning, as she was drinking her expensive organic, shade-grown and ethically-harvested coffee and reading the ArtVoice, her laptop, which just happened to be on, dinged at her announcing e-mail, which just happened to be open.

Hadrian, Very well, I accept your challenge. And to make it look like I'm serious and deep and s.h.i.+t like that I thought about it for a few days first. You ask me, how did Antinous die? We'll do this in your language. To answer that, I have to speak of how Antinous, I, lived, and what effect my pa.s.sing had on the world. We know that I was Hadrian's favorite and constant companion, from my boyhood until the day of my death, if not the very moment. Everywhere he went, the wandering Emperor, I went with him. We visited every corner of the Empire, we hunted, we feasted, and together we shared initiations into the Mysteries. You, yourself, wrote that the iconography of Antinous left behind, both from before his death and after, argue for a great love co-mingled with a great pa.s.sion, not just a Greco-styled l.u.s.t from an avowed h.e.l.lenophile susceptible to such loves and understanding of their potential and n.o.bility. From his profound and inconsolable grief after my death, doc.u.mented worriedly as excessive in his own time, we can say Hadrian loved me. But did I love him? Antinous is recorded in statues so plentiful we know his beautiful, sullen face under the mop of spilling curls, the downcast eyes, hooded and Dionysian, languid athlete's form, a young Hermes at sport, from early boyhood changing along as he advanced toward nineteen. His representation in marble can be seen as a sign of his great importance to Hadrian, not just at the end of their affair and his death, but from the first. A companion beloved not just for his beauty, which is so overabundant that it cannot be factored out-face it, I was hot-but also for his company. That sullen, fleshy beauty changed over the years, a moving target. What was loved was more than the flesh, though that too was loved. Because this other thing was loved, this intangible, we can say that the love of the flesh was only a part of it, and the rest was friends.h.i.+p. Strong, companionable, intimate, active, vigorous masculine friends.h.i.+p, sometimes teaching, sometimes pleasuring, and coupled with love. How can I a.s.sert this? Look what was left behind me. Not just the statues that Hadrian commissioned all over the Empire. The temples. The Emperor had me, his beloved dead Bithynian Greek boy who was drowned in the Nile, created as a G.o.d. I was wors.h.i.+pped, taking on aspects of Osiris, of Dionysos, of Hermes. Hadrian couldn't face eternity without seeing me again. Longing like that speaks of love given and love returned. There were other pretty boys, it wasn't just flesh. Hadrian, you, couldn't go on without the perfect friend, the divine companion. So, it doesn't matter how I died. What matters is a love existed between the Emperor and the favorite, the lover and the beloved, the eagle and Ganymede, a love great enough that it pushed back the borders of mortality and is remembered today when the Empire that birthed it has pa.s.sed away.

This is why you'll be over at my place at six tomorrow. We will drink scotch and play video games and swear blood brotherhood. Booyah!

Antinous Clever little punk used her own work against her. How could she argue with his reasoning when it was based on hers? Joan had to give him that. It looked like she was busy tomorrow.

Sheila had hinted around regarding brunch, but as Joan had been noncommittal, there were no plans. Therefore, there was no reason to explain what she was up to that evening to Sheila, or even face her, when she would easily get the truth from Joan. Let this be something she didn't think about too much in advance, for once. The timing was good, giving her little time to over-think it. She'd replied with Laconian grace, simply accepting the invitation and his address.

There was plenty of time to regret it on the way there and Joan did. She'd dressed, without thinking about it, in her uniform, black and white like a priest or referee or waiter. This was ridiculous.

But the light shown amber in the front windows of the address she'd been given, the porch steps were shallow and easy to climb, the door swung inward smoothly, and then the boy was there, no baseball cap this time, the blond hair sticking up in all directions with a carelessness that might just be carelessness, not art, wide eyes and wide grin and wide welcome, his hand out, clasping hers.

His arm landed around her shoulders, briefly, guiding her into the living room. Joan had feared frat house, at the worst. This was simple, but clean and orderly. The couch might be generations old, but it was st.u.r.dily built and held up stubbornly against time. The coffee table was wood and gla.s.s, low and rectangular, holding the gaming system and the controllers. Alien looking things, swollen, like b.u.t.terflies on steroids. Beside the controllers was a bottle of twelve-year-old single malt and two heavy-cut gla.s.s tumblers.

"So you made it, Hadrian. Sit down. Let me pour for you, we'll go old school."

Joan accepted the tumbler. "I'm curious, why scotch and video games? Seems incongruous. Beer and video games makes more sense."

"Ah, but you don't drink beer."

"How did you know that?"

"Asked Sheila. Besides, I thought that scotch would evoke the right emotion."

"For what?"

"For ruthlessly slaying zombies." Billy tilted his gla.s.s toward Joan's and they clinked the rims.

Joan took a sip. The scotch was slow on the heat, but lasting. It reminded Joan of her father, the sense memory coming on without warning and she was ten again, watching her father in the evening having his gla.s.s of scotch in his recliner, facing both the television set and the open front door, looking out on the porch and the street. He looked out the door, and beyond, ignoring the entertainment, though the fiction was dad wasn't to be disturbed during his unwinding time after work while he watched the news. Joan knew he didn't watch the news. He looked away into nothing, compressed down into a silence that took him hours to thaw, until he could put them to bed, her and her brother. Joan felt the helplessness again, unable to understand her father's silence, or his need, but yearning to do so, to bridge the gap between them. Even at ten, she'd known that wasn't possible. In watching her father she'd absorbed his practice of long silence and burying pain. The scotch came flavored with memory.

Billy handed her one of the swollen b.u.t.terflies, and Joan had to put the gla.s.s down and hold it clumsily. There were b.u.t.tons, k.n.o.bs, commands, involvement. Complexity.

"I've never been much of a game player," Joan said, turning the controller over in her hand.

"Gamer. And that was obvious. This is why we are starting you out on the most basic and satisfying of all video game genres, zombie destruction." Billy flopped down next to her on the couch, parallel, thigh touching hers, and took up his own controller.

"I'm not sure I have much of a taste for killing."

Billy grinned sideways at her. "Come on."

"Well, how could I know if I haven't done it?"

"You won't be able to stop once you try. It is addictive on the most primal, b.l.o.o.d.y, cathartic level. All lizard brain, no thought. It's like meditation, but with payout."

He ran through a quick and dirty series of commands that would allow her to shoot, hit and run. That, he a.s.serted, was all you needed. The rest was flourish.

The second round of scotch was poured as Billy fired up the system. Joan felt her nervous system arrested mid-firing, felt her adrenaline response kidnapped and turbocharged. It was glorious. Time went away. There was only stimulus, response, heightened sensitivity to noise, color, and motion, action and reaction. Billy and she, both represented by pixilated men in dark suits wearing sungla.s.ses indoors to express their cool, fired guns that rarely needed ammunition. He knew the game like the back of his hand, the ruined house, the complex beneath filled with science experiments done by evil corporations, or the military, or the government, or all of them. At first she followed his lead, charging through debris-filled corridors, blasting away at dark shapes as they sprang out from everywhere. Zombies, when blasted, exploded with such satisfying completeness, such an addictive noise.

By the third round she was leading the way, teaching Billy new angles of fire, the value of generals.h.i.+p, strategically initiating attacks, fighting back to back with him, guns blazing away, heart light, laughing at death. It was glorious in a way she hadn't felt since, well, long ago. Joan felt lifted out of herself, free, pure and happy. Pouring the scotch, he'd been true to the Ganymede role all night. This was four? The game was on pause; Joan leaned back and was suddenly aware of how stiff she was, how long she'd been in the same position. Time came back. They'd been slaying zombies for hours, and she'd had no idea. She took her gla.s.s and walked out on the porch. He followed. The sun was gone; the streetlights were on. The time, in the summer, when her mother would insist she run home. Be home by the time the streetlights come on. Here it was, past that border, into the wilderness.

He sat on the rail, back against the corner pillar. She leaned on the rail, hands spread. She was afraid briefly that he would ruin that fragile peaceful moment, puncture it with a word. Like the end of a movie, when you are still in that world and don't want to come back down just yet. Billy sipped at his scotch and looked out in silence. She'd had too much scotch to drive home. No great matter, she could walk; it was a clear night and it wasn't that far. Just down Elmwood. She drained the tumbler, and set it decisively on the rail. She stood up, posture returning after hours of being someone else. Billy caught her eye. Not yet. Joan nodded to him, briefly, sketching thanks. He inclined his head, briefer still, and she walked away, down the porch steps and into the warm night.

The e-mail came two respectable days later, so Joan would admit if pressed to it, though she spent most of the preceding days pacing. She was a d.y.k.e, a butch d.y.k.e. The last person anyone would suspect of dating a boy. Transmen, Joan thought, could date other transmen, gay men, straight girls, femme lesbians, bis.e.xual women, but not butch lesbians. That was just too odd, strange, askance, oblique, queer, weird in the old strange magic way.

Joan tried looking at it not as a fixed form, but liquid within a fixed form. Billy was a boy. That she had no trouble acknowledging; she'd been in the community long enough to have some exposure to trans issues, and tried to be open-minded. She just didn't have any trans friends before. It wasn't her issue, so she paid it respect out of solidarity of s.e.xual minorities, but didn't cast much thought to it otherwise.

It helped that Billy was pretty; Joan could admit that. You could look at him and still read him as a particularly andro d.y.k.e, or a fey boy, the outside, but his presence read male to her. Sheila had said that he ID'd as queer. What in the world did that mean? He was clearly on testosterone; he had that voice. His beard was coming in like a blond fifteen-year-old boy's, but still coming in. His body had changed, muscle rose and swelled, fat distribution changed, his hips were uns.h.i.+elded, naked, allowing his jeans to sag where a girl's might cling to her curves. Yet he knew d.y.k.e courts.h.i.+p. He'd lingered in the community; he must have female socialization. So then, was this just romancing a pretty d.y.k.e boi? No stranger than butch on butch, or butch on boi, no stranger than that great strangeness, female masculinity attracted to itself, or its kin, or brother, or reflection.

But Billy's masculinity, while languid and playful, while sunny and boyish, wasn't female. Her masculinity was far grimmer, somber, experienced, filled with sad knowledge of the world. It was a masculinity of control and discipline, not free and unaggressive and unconcerned with status as his. What was it that separated them-personality, experience, self perception? Surely he'd been butch when he was a girl, Joan thought. No, seen as butch. Billy hadn't been a girl. She had. How could she separate his individual case from the gender? What was Billy and what was boy, and why not boi? If he'd been a girl, even with their age difference, Joan had no doubt that they'd be lovers. No question. So what was the hesitation now? His companions.h.i.+p was unprecedented. She felt more herself with him. He was young, and that was a concern. How serious could he be? Any age difference in a relations.h.i.+p was a potential conflict. So great an age difference made them strangers to one another's world. Queer? Hadn't that gone out in the nineties? What did he mean by it? Not male, not female? Still lesbian identified? Boyd.y.k.e? Trannyf.a.g? He desired her; she could feel it. He desired her masculinity. Did that make him gay? Make them gay men? Of what century or epoch?

Joan had to decide whether she was going to contact Billy...or not. If not, was she waiting for him to contact her? Or another option entirely involving renunciation? If not, what tone to take? The e-mail, blissfully, set the tone at neutral and established the names, who they were, in standing to one another.

Hadrian, There's nothing quite like the lingering satisfaction of ma.s.s slaughter of zombies. We couldn't have felt more full of life after hunting lions in Egypt. "Barbarian Legion" is showing on the Antique Stuff channel on Thursday, and you're not yet cool enough to have seen it, yet it will stir your martial heart. You were a fine soldier, Hadrian, a fine commander of the legions. Come see what happened to your army in the fourth century.

Aim high and squeeze gently, Antinous No sooner had she read it, than the phone rang. Joan started rather sideways as a rabbit might jump from a fox or a wolf.

"h.e.l.lo?"

"Joan!" It was Carol's voice, no mistaking the particular enthusiasm and energy.

"Carol."

"Am I catching you at a bad time?"

"I honestly have no idea," Joan said before quite thinking about it.

"Is it one of your research fugues?"

"I'm sorry, my what?" Joan asked, shocked into the conversation at last.

"Sheila confided in me about them. Well, I worry when you don't come to the planning meetings, so I guess I was talking about it one night and Sheila took me aside and told me. About how you get so caught up in your work, you forget the outside world for days at a time. I would hate to interrupt anything important like that. You get so pa.s.sionate about your work."

"Do I? No, no, I wasn't working, just reading e-mail."

"Oh, is there anything good?"

"Hard to say yet."

"Well, one woman's spam is another woman's treasure."

"What can I do for you, Carol?" Joan asked, trying now to sound polite and focused.

"We said at the meeting we'd talk another time about my idea."

"Oh, well, now?" Joan asked, wondering if there was a way she could dodge this. Her mind wasn't in Michigan right now, or at a potluck.

"No, silly! I wouldn't ambush you. Thursday night."

"Thursday, oh, well, sorry, Thursday isn't good for me."

"But I checked with Sheila, just to see if it would conflict for you. I hate to waste your time if I can know ahead of time, and Sheila said you were free as far as she knew, and who would know if Sheila wouldn't, right?"

"I haven't told Sheila about this. It's a meeting I just set up."

"What sort of meeting? I thought your cla.s.ses were done for the summer. Sheila mentioned how much you were looking forward to being free. No students to supervise, no cla.s.ses, nothing."

"A private meeting."

"Private, oh, a date! I'm sorry, Joan; I didn't mean to press you on it. You can be so n.o.ble about things, play them so close to the vest. I won't say another word about it."

Until she got off the phone and dialed again, Joan thought. She'd just intimated to the entire Feminist Film Festival phone tree that she was dating. Now everyone would pop blood vessels to find out whom. It was the beauty of the community. Nothing remained unknown for long. Denial would be taken as confirmation, as would no comment and direct confirmation. The key was to maintain a dignified silence and plausible deniability.

Remarkably, it took Sheila fifteen minutes after she and Carol had hung up to call Joan in a frenzy.

"Tell me you are lying. Lying like a dog to get out of a pseudodate with Carol. There is no other explanation for her knowing something that I don't, not something crucial, like you dating again. h.e.l.lo, entire best friend vetting rights abrogated here!"

"I wasn't lying, but Carol took it a particular way I hadn't meant."

"That's a load of hedging. She grilled the h.e.l.l out of me about your schedule, so I have it very clearly in mind. You are free on Thursday."

"No, I'm not."

"Are you going to make me ask?"

"I'm watching a doc.u.mentary with a friend."

"Who? And what?"

"It's about the use of barbarians in the army of the late Roman Empire. Who would be Billy."

Sheila sounded disappointed. "Oh. A doc.u.mentary with Billy doesn't equal a date. Carol made that part up. Wait, I thought it was scotch and video games."

"That was Sunday."

"So you are hitting it off."

"You could say." Joan felt her throat thicken. She didn't want to talk about Billy just yet, no matter Sheila's best-friend rights. But she would if she were asked.

"You've needed some male bonding. Particularly with someone who gets you. Roman army doc.u.mentary indeed."

She'd already told the rest of the city, so Joan e-mailed Billy back.

Antinous, The fighting has stirred my martial blood. We must go to war again, back to back, soon. I ask myself, are the undead my enemies? Then I think, anything trying to eat my brains is my enemy and worthy of destruction. Thursday it is.

Hadrian "Why is it always the way, the bogeymen of our grandfather's day are the neighbors of ours?" Joan asked.

"You mean the Germans?" Billy asked, watching the screen.