"How Does It Feel?"

Short fiction about being caught gay in the 80s. 

- Red Noise Collective

How Does It Feel?

 

The boys had come from the beach, were washing up in the bathtub just off the deck. By eight, Evan could already ride the big waves, had his own custom-made five-foot board, was on the way to becoming a pro surfer, like all his brothers. Darren was not a surfer, pro or otherwise. He body-surfed or boogie-boarded alongside the boys in the deep water or waited on the beach with the girls. 

Evan started it, that gorgeous touching and trying in the sudsy warm bathtub. Darren had hesitated. He was two years older and more aware of his wrongness in relation to the order of things. But ultimately, the holy symmetry of it compelled him: A body separate, but so like his own. They found a way to float and do it, breathing shallow to keep their lungs from sinking, toes and fingers clinging to the glazed blue Mexican tiles above the water line. 

Are you guilty if you don’t know what you’re doing is wrong? How many misdeeds have been excused by this reasoning. Probably as many as are committed in the name of love. And are the two children strangely adept in these meanderings, a bit too precocious to have come to these delights unrehearsed? The answers to these questions are as unknowable as why the warm water felt so good that day, the tingling soap bubbles so scintillating, or why the door was ajar.

Evan’s mother had been sunbathing on the deck, flipping through the glossy pages of her Vanity Fair. They were almost unreadable in the midday sun, but her sunglasses were so far away and her plastic goblet of Soave Bolla so comfortingly cold between her legs on the chez lounge. An interview with Nancy Regan. How that valium-addicted zombie had become the posterchild for drug prevention she had no idea. Ronny was right: Lock up the dealers and throw away the key. She recognized a sound coming from the bathroom—treble, sibilant, rhythmic, like the ripples of a rowboat meeting the shore—but her mind refused to place it.

She dropped her magazine and looked behind her. The door to the bathroom was open. She set her glass on the wicker table and rose to shut it. It’d be alright if she closed the door. The kids’ll be alright, she reminded herself. Right when you think they’re not, it turns out they’re fine, she was thinking, when she saw the boys, caught them locked in that disgusting pose. 

"What the hell are you two doing? Stop that this minute!" she screamed. She pulled her son out of the bathtub and dragged him outside, then went back for the neighbor boy who tried to hide behind a mountain of suds. She latched onto Darren’s ear and pulled and pulled until she’d deposited both their bare asses on the hot, splintering planks of the old deck. The midday sun flayed their sunburned shoulders. They hunched to shade their nakedness. Their backs were to the ocean.

“Who taught you to do that?” she hissed. Droplets of spit and chardonnay spattered their faces. Neither boy spoke. Evan started to cry.

“You’re the older one, Darren. You should know better.” Like her son, Darren was looking at the ground.

“Nothing to say for yourselves? If your daddy were here Evan. Just think what he’d do to you.”

“I didn’t think…” Evan began.

“You didn’t think what?”

“We were just horsing around.”

“That’s not what it looked like to me.”

“We didn’t mean to make you mad.”

“How could you be involved in something like that?”

Evan raised his head, as if to reach for his mother’s embrace, but she turned away with an exasperated sigh. “Who started it. That’s what I want to know.”

Both boys began to speak, then stopped themselves.

“Who was it?”

Darren spoke. “I’m sorry Joan.” 

“You! You’re only ten! How’d you know how to do it?”

There was another long silence as the boys sat, not daring to look at each other. Evan had stopped crying, but was gasping in short bursts. After a while Joan asked, “Was it because it felt good?” That’s when Darren began to cry, not stifled sniffles, like Evan, but long, sonorous sobs. Joan sat down on the chez lounge. “I’m just trying to understand,” she said, and made a fist around the stem of her wine glass.