Come Down: II.10

When I returned to my apartment from the Chelsea house, I sent Élouan a message on Instagram, informing them that I’d gotten home safe and I hoped they’d enjoyed their birthday present. They read the message, reacted with a heart, and did not reply.

The following Thursday night, I sent Élouan a message on Instagram, inquiring as to whether they would be attending the month’s Backwash the following evening. They read the message almost at once, replied nope five hours later.

That Saturday, I sent Élouan a message on Instagram, telling them that they’d missed a real barn-burner the previous evening, that the dominatrix had been in rare form, that Paris had been practicing his death drops. They read but did not reply to the message.

The next Tuesday, I sent Élouan a message on Instagram, asking if they might like me to come over one of these nights -- just because I was missing Adelaide the cat, of course, no other reason. It was Thursday night before I even received a read receipt on that message. No reply.

In retrospect my persistence is obvious in its desperation, or desperate in its obviousness, maybe both, and it feels almost implausible to me now that I did not so much as consider taking the hint that was offered to me by those read receipts. But the story of Élouan’s birthday as I would have retold it, had anyone I would have told it to not already been in attendance at the party, was one of absolute triumph: the surprise, the leading male role, the costumes, the ouzo, the threesome. I had been Élouan Gage’s shiny new birthday present, hand-selected by their partner! It was inconceivable that they might, just days later, no longer wish to play with me. No, they must have wanted, as I concluded at the time, to be chased. The threesome had been a kind of culmination, uniting us all in something larger than any given relationship shared by any given sub-pairing of the whole, and I could understand why Élouan might wish to reset things rather than attempt to maintain the level of emotional intensity that the threesome must have required of them, considering the level it had required of me, and return to our initial positioning as wooer and wooed. I was supportive of this development, even excited to be asked to take the reins, which, I realized when I sifted through our recent interactions, had mostly been in Dolly’s hands for the prior month or two. So, of course, I chased them. I was still careful not to send a second message until after my first had been, at minimum, seen, and preferably responded to in some way, but once I received some sign of life I would wait for an appropriate occasion and send another message, always striking the right tones: solicitous and teasing, fun, casual, flirtatious without ever being explicit, but -- yes -- persistent. Four messages in ten days had met with little more than silence, though, and I decided that it was time for some kind of gesture, something more than I had offered, something that acknowledged both this return to form and the inevitable changes that the threesome ought to have produced between us. So, on Friday night, sitting in a bathroom stall at the Quartz Club, having had one drink to loosen my tongue (or really my fingers) somewhat without losing me marks on clarity or eloquence, I composed a set of messages that, I hoped, gave Élouan the maximum amount of material to work with in crafting whatever our next scene was to be.

Any chance you’re around this weekend after Yankees wraps?

I don’t mean to be a pest -- I know you’re busy -- but I’ve been missing having a dance partner/scene partner/partner in crime. Can’t believe you’d introduce me to the best parties I’ve ever been to and then not come to those parties. They’re not half as fun without you.

(And the sex. I am also really, definitely missing the sex. The sooner you’re inside me, the better.)

I wrote the whole thing out as a single block of text in my notes app, read and reviewed it for errors, for tonal imbalances, for anything that might lessen its desired impact, then cut and pasted it to send it as three separate messages, lending it what I thought to be an impression of being somewhat more off the cuff than it was. Then I put my phone away, flushed the toilet, made an apologetic face at the line of people waiting for a stall, washed my hands, and went back to dancing. I made a rule for myself that I would not reopen Instagram until I had finished at least two more drinks, hoping that by the bottom of two additional glasses I would forget the very existence of my phone. When this plan, of course, failed -- I checked again halfway between bathroom and bar, and an additional three times over the course of a single gin rickey -- I jammed my thumb into the power button until my phone went completely dark and pushed my way into the center of the dance floor to bump up against a dozen other people who were, I imagined, also trying to forget things. I was, curiously, the only member of Élouan’s posse in attendance at the Quartz Club that night, which struck me as potentially significant in light of the messages I had just sent, but then again, it was still relatively early in the evening, and it was uncommon for everyone to show up at once unless I was gogo dancing, so perhaps I had just caught everyone on an off night. I jumped along to a beat that was slightly too fast to comfortably jump along to. I pulled out my phone and tried to check it, but it was off, of course, so I put it away. A few songs later, I did the same thing.

Why didn’t I text Dolly? Ask her how Élouan was doing, whether all was well, and while I was at it try to set up another lunch date? She would have been amenable to it, I’m sure, and perhaps it would have won me another week or two in their collective favor (although -- Élouan’s mirror eyes -- perhaps not). But, and I am sorry to say it is not a very satisfying reason, I just didn’t want to. My second time in bed with Dolly had made me no more attracted to her than my first, and I felt, for lack of a better word, guilty, like I might be leading her on and it would be somehow cruel to sleep with her again, although I had never professed to feel anything in particular for her and she had never asked. The abandon with which she conducted herself when my fingers were inside her made me uncomfortable, activated a sort of buried-deep Puritan propriety that I did not enjoy having to incorporate into my inventory of what I could and couldn’t feel, and besides, if what Élouan was doing was a reset, then I wanted a reset too, a little time for just the two of us, which they could carry back to Dolly afterward and describe in detail for her enjoyment, see, she would be getting something out of me keeping her at arm’s length for a bit after all.

I kissed a man -- almost as short as me, shaggy sandy hair, a pointed little ski-slope nose -- because he made it clear through a series of nonverbal collisions of his body against mine that he wanted to kiss me, and it was fine, it was not so boring as to prevent me from enjoying the experience, although of course I wanted Élouan to be kissing me instead, or really I wanted the same thing as always, boiled down: I wanted Élouan to be just about to kiss me. I gave in, powered my phone back on, and checked Instagram.

They had read my messages.

They had not yet responded to my messages, but that, I reasoned, was just as well; I wanted a considered response, something drafted and composed and rewritten for maximum effect, just as I had done, as if we were writing letters back and forth for posterity. It was late, and they were surely tired from their preantepenultimate performance, if I had kept track of the schedule correctly, of Damn Yankees, and they might have a cast party to attend the next night after the evening show, and either way they’d need to take Sunday night to recover after the closing matinee, so I could reasonably expect a proper response during the week, Monday, maybe Tuesday. I clicked my phone off, satisfied, and found the sandy-haired man again.

~

That read receipt sat below my messages, untouched, for a week.

~

On Saturday afternoon, the thirtieth of August, with brilliant yellow sunshine slanting through my studio’s windows and looking even yellower through the foot-grime kicked up against them, the final weekend before the students would return to the university’s campus and my locking-lid crates would get heavier and my package deliveries would multiply and I could, theoretically, sign up for another continuing education class if I so desired, not that I expected to so desire, at least if Élouan would just write to me -- Élouan wrote to me.

I cannot reproduce the contents of their response exactly. I would like to believe I have their words memorized, given the number of times I reread the messages in the immediate aftermath of receiving them, but I am not so naïve about the effects of time on human memory as to believe I am, in this respect, infallible. The fact is that I stared at my phone for several minutes, read and reread, closed Instagram, reopened Instagram, and stared at my phone for another minute or two before deleting the chat entirely in a fit of pique or self-preservation, I still can’t tell which. At once I felt its loss in the same hollow of my stomach that usually squirmed with the embarrassed-aroused feeling that I hadn’t experienced before Élouan and, as I breathed through the emptiness, that I suspected I might never experience again. I looked it up; deleted Instagram messages cannot be restored.

Sorry for not responding sooner, they said, more or less. But it’s a pretty overwhelming thing to have to respond to.

The word “overwhelming” I know for certain was used.

I hear you, and I don’t think you’re a pest, but it’s clear you’ve gotten a little too deep into this thing. For your sake I’m going to take a step back.

That last sentence, too, I would swear on anything is verbatim. “For your sake I’m going to take a step back.” A step back. For my sake.

I opened a new chat with them, after irretrievably deleting the old one, and asked what, precisely, they meant by a step back, and then I deleted that, too, and raised my arm halfway like I was going to hurl my phone across the room, and instead I tried to text Angus, whose last two messages to me had gone unresponded-to as I paced like a tiger waiting for Élouan’s next move, but what could I say to Angus? He didn’t even know Élouan and I had a thing into which I had gotten too deep, whatever that meant, whatever horrible thing that said about me, about my performance -- I thought of those actors who abuse the idea of the Method to be cruel to their castmates in the guise of playing the villain. I have never connected with the popular conception of the Method, by the way; I doubt, on some level, that complete emotional identification with oneself, let alone with a character, is even possible. Besides, the great pleasure of acting, of any kind of role-playing, is in the disconnect between what is communicated and what is felt, the nerves about whether one is projecting confidence, the joy of playing a tragic scene just right, the trying-on of a version of oneself that one has never gotten to be before. And certainly, if one enjoys a role enough, one can remain within it, sink into it, become it, and then, yes, emotionally identify with it to whatever extent such a thing is possible. But that comes later, not first. Was that what Élouan meant? That I had burrowed too far into my role in their life, that I had forgotten that it was a role? But that was ridiculous. If there was one and only one thing that it was impossible, with Élouan Gage, to forget, it was the theatre.

My face was so hot. The setting sunlight on my face didn’t feel like anything because my face was already the temperature of the sun. My stomach was empty and churning and I was so, so ashamed, and I thought of Élouan telling me that shame is poison, and that only made it worse.

I had a stout little bottle of whiskey in the cupboard that was missing only a few sips, brought home from Élouan’s birthday after everyone had declared its flavor unspeakable, not to mention undrinkable, and the housemates had persuaded me to take it off their hands on my way out the door. I selected a short glass, filled it halfway with ice cubes that always tasted slightly of rust because I continually forgot to make them with water from the filter pitcher, and poured myself two fingers. The whiskey was disgusting -- a melting-plastic burn that reminded me of Jet’s leftover lines, coupled with a round bitterness that tasted like wet leaves smelled -- but it was not necessarily bad. I got the whole glass down, grimacing with every sip, then added another ice cube to my half-melted set and refilled it. I felt my lines erasing themselves, becoming softer and looser, a little less Marco, and therefore a little more able to spin the situation around and around in my head, still desperately ashamed, but capable of looking it in the eye and puzzling it out. I regretted, again, deleting the messages so I could not analyze them word by word. But what I had was not entirely unpromising: a step back was not unequivocal, nor did it have to be permanent. Whatever I had done to make Élouan recoil, a suitable period of not doing it might reverse the damage. I had another drink; with the glass chilled and the alcohol watered down, the whiskey was improving with every sip, filling the chasm of mortification in my gut. The apartment grew dim. Besides, it was absurd to think that Élouan could excise me from their life in a few sentences, as if they would even want to. I was friends with their friends, lovers with their lovers -- one of them, anyway -- attended, was even on occasion paid to attend, the same parties they attended. They had invited me to those parties, introduced me around, encouraged me, made me, and if they truly wanted to take a step back, they were welcome to, but they would be stepping back from the dazzling world that spun around them to watch it spin around me instead, and if they truly wanted to do that, well, let them! The bottle was more than half-drunk and so was I, and it occurred to me that Backchannel was having a special event that night, the details of which Paris had sent me a few weeks prior with a dozen exclamation points; some kind of musical theatre-themed drag show and dance party that Madonna was performing at -- The Queens And I, were they calling it? Well, I would go, of course, and I would have a great time, the best time, unabashed in every way, hardly even thinking about Élouan, waving but otherwise ignoring them if they were there, making bland passing comments and changing the subject if their name was raised in their absence, doing the opposite of summoning them, banishing them, and embracing the night -- for my sake! And they would see me enjoying myself without them, or sense it, somehow, sense their banishment, and they would regret what they had said, feel that regret in every inch of their body, and soon enough they would turn back up -- they wouldn’t apologize, that wasn’t Élouan’s style -- but they would give me their mischievous smile like nothing at all had happened and say that perhaps they’d misjudged, perhaps I wasn’t too deep into anything after all, and I’d say no, I wasn’t, but if they played their cards right they could be. I finished off the whiskey -- why not? -- and struggled into my Pippin show tee and my denim cutoffs -- my limbs weren’t where they were supposed to be -- and bobbed up the stairs and out to the T, feeling like a wavering little flame in a boy’s body. I was too hot, and I couldn’t see quite straight, and my feet only went where I wanted them to go for maybe half of the steps I took, but damn it all to Hell, I was going to shine.

When I sat down on the train, I gave the empty seat beside me a little pat, enjoying the texture of the rubbed-down bowling alley carpet upholstery, geometric squiggles in primary colors on blue-grey. How many asses, I wondered, had touched that seat over the lifespan of the car? How many of the people attached to those asses had been broken up with -- was that what Élouan had done? broken up with me? -- via Instagram following the most interesting six months, give or take, of their entire life? The train squealed against the rails, taking a curve, and the whiskey sloshed inside me, audibly, I thought, like a water bottle being tossed against a punching bag. The man sitting across from me was giving me a strange look that my eyes, unfocused as they were, couldn’t interpret, but which I assumed must be something dark and complicated, jealousy crossed with pity crossed with admiration -- look at that gorgeous young twink, how could anyone break his heart? Have they no shame? -- but of course, Élouan really did have no shame, that was the entire point.

When I got to Backchannel, the floor was packed with people staring up at the center mezzanine as a drag king thrust his hips at them, a foot-long daisy made out of balloons protruding from his latex shorts, mouthing furiously along with his green-painted lips to a Spring Awakening song -- “My Junk.” Balled-up dollar bills arced through the air and up onto the shiny floor of the mezzanine as the song scratched and transitioned into a cut-and-pasted “Hard to Be the Bard” from Something Rotten that repeated the words it’s hard! It’s hard! So very, very hard! over and over to raucous applause. I swung by the bar first and, perhaps enticed by the balloon-flower-dildo to order something slightly more fun than my usual, asked for a pair of B-52s and downed them in quick succession. The whole place was tilted at a rakish angle, and I pushed through the crowd as the drag king took his leave and a queen in a gigantic Cinderella ballgown emerged, looking for Élouan’s posse -- my friends. But I didn’t see them -- in fact, I didn’t see anybody in particular, just a homogenous wall of bodies with blurred faces and open mouths, yelling for the new act, and it would have been rude to keep pushing through, so I yelled too, and then yelled even louder when the Cinderella queen stepped down and Madonna took her place, not lip-synching but actually singing “Out Tonight” from Rent, half an octave lower than Mimi’s voice, turning the song into a sultry growl, wrapped in successive layers of pride flags, more color combinations than I’d seen outside of Wiki guides to microidentities, each flag skimpier than the last until, by the end of the song, she was down to pink rhinestone pasties and a blue-and-white thong which, taking her bows, she stuffed with crumpled dollar bills.

“That’s my friend!” I yelled to anyone who would listen, pointing at Madonna as she made her way off the mezzanine. Where she went, I reasoned, the posse would follow, so I kept an eye on her, tracking her through the crowd, although while doing so I also stopped at the closest of Backchannel’s three bars for another B-52, which was even more fun, even sweeter and smoother and creamier, than the first pair had been. I was unsteady on my feet, that angle of the floor tilting past rakish into steep, but there was Madonna, Paris hanging off her arm, Shea clearly gushing about her performance based on the hand gestures, Alder and October, presumably having already gushed and moved on, making out in the corner behind Madonna -- they were all here. I rushed to meet them, almost tripped, caught myself, arrived at the group to find that they were all looking at me already.

“Hi!” I said. “Madonna, you were incredible, oh my God.”

“Thanks.” She pursed her lips at me. “Are you good?”

“What? Yes. Why? Yes, I’m good.”

I looked around at their indistinct faces, these people who had, just two weeks ago, dressed in ridiculous pants with me and called me my lord, and all of their eyebrows were tipped up in something like unease, and all of their mouths were set in straight lines, and every last one of their eyes under the lights of the by-then-escalating dance party looked shiny and hard and flat as mirrors.

“Take care of yourself, okay? Drink some water,” Paris said, hand flashing out to give me a pat on the arm before just as quickly withdrawing.

“Ooh, Madonna, is that Slayder Kinnie?” Shea pointed across the club at a drag king with a sparkly silver painted-on beard and wolf ears. “You have to introduce us. Have a good night, Marco.”

And the three of them -- no, the five of them, Alder and October, too, slipped away even as I watched -- were gone, vanished into the pulsating crowd. No hugs, no offers of drinks, no welcome, no back-and-forth, nothing at all, nothing but bland and mild concern and an unceremonious goodbye. Of course, they had been Élouan’s friends first, all of them, but they knew me, didn’t they, hadn’t they come out to watch me gogo dance, hadn’t we shared cars and sips of drinks and gossip and sweat? But then, I realized, drifting toward another of the bars, who knew what Élouan had been telling them? They’d had a week -- no, two weeks, really -- to craft a story while I’d all but sat on my hands, ignoring everything that wasn’t a message from them. The crazed stalker ex, most likely; it reeked of high drama, of intrigue, of a boy who got in too deep, too attached, of someone who might see Élouan at a party a month or two from now and -- imagine it! -- slap them in the face.

Or they might have said nothing at all, and the thought of that was so very, infinitely worse, not just because the posse might never have cared much for my company after all but because it would mean I was not, in Élouan’s eyes, worthy even of a story, that I could do nothing but down another B-52. It was sweltering in the club; it must have been, because I was soaked with sweat, t-shirt stuck to my back and arms shiny and dewdropped, but I was freezing cold. Not only my feet but my fingers weren’t moving the way I wanted them to, fumbly with the shot glasses like they were in the wintertime when I tried to unlock my crates after coming in from the cold, and in the swirling light they had a little bit of a blue-purple cast to them, too, I thought, or maybe that was just what I wanted to see, what I thought I ought to see given all the mirrors around me, reflecting blue-purple forever into the deep tunnel that mirrors pointed towards each other conjure, more and more and more of me surrounding me, keeping me and the rest of the world apart, the lines between Marco and ‘guy having fun at a party’ never starker, more obvious, more permanent than they were in that moment. The back of my throat burned -- bile on its way up. I ran for the bathroom, and that stumbling, baby-deer run, fairly certain I could at least make it to a sink or a trash can but by no means counting on making it to a toilet, is my final intact memory of Saturday the thirtieth of August.

Might Makes Write and all the writing shared herein are licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.