“Would you put on a shirt already?” Gilda screamed at Charles, who was flexing his flabby muscles at the kitchen sink. She snapped shut the clamshell of her vanity mirror and arose from the dining table, with a dour expression pinching in the newly farded eyebrows.
Charles kept on with his schoolboy poses while Dimov, still in his work suit and tie, yawned idly at the dining table. He thought it was about time to commit the ultimate sacrilege to the gods of the Friday Evening and spend the rest of the night huddled over his laptop, dispensing poker philosophy on poker forums. But glinting in there with Charles’ prideful smirk at the muscles hiding under the quarter-inch layer of fat, was an assertive glaze, warning Dimov that he would not get away with sacrilege.
He made to retire away quietly, but there was Gilda removing her satin haltertop like she was auditioning for a b-grade porno.
Her blue-lined eyes swung over to Dimov’s gimlet-eyed stare. “If he can be half-naked, I too can.”
The logic was nowhere self-evident to Dimov absorbing sight of the falling rolls of her love handles.
“Come off it, you’re scarring Dimi,” Charles said.
“Then, get a shirt on,” she growled.
Charles rolled his eyes. “Aren’t you supposed to be getting drinks with girlfriends?”
“In another twenty minutes,” she said triumphantly.
“You two work it out. I’m heading inside,” Dimov declared, but he made ready for his disappearing act, Gilda cried back to him, “Wait, wait, what’s happening tomorrow night? Are we going to Miguel’s party?
“If Charley doesn’t care for it, then there’s no point,” Dimov said.
“Well then, Charley boy, make up with Miguel already!”
Queenly and rudely perturbed, Charles pulled the phone out of his jeans pocket and marching to the balcony, quipped, “the things I do for fat women.”
“Of course you balding fuck,” she shot back.
He flipped her off, like it was his last battle cry before going down to do what loyalty commanded, and then dashed open the screen doors.
“Mi’jo, why do you have to be the generalissimo? Pedro and Joachim have a say you know … I know, I know, but it won’t work out,” came Charles’ rapid lilt on the phone, not quite apologetic, but hopeful for understanding, “Yeah this love, you sure about that? I fall in love almost every day. It’s healthy for you, I hear, but it never quite sticks .... Plato had something about love in The Symposium. Love is so good that you just have to love everybody …”
Gilda shook her head, shined incredulous eyes onto Dimov, miming, “What the hell,” and chuckling, danced back to her room, leaving him with a full view of the love philosopher’s behind. Dimov thought he might as well as he took his seat again. The shoulders, not broad, not narrow, had the width weighty enough for him to wrap his hands around. Charles, rather girlish about unnecessary exertion, had superstitious ideas about fitness, and Dimov would concur that it was showing. There glimmered a faint definition of shoulder blades; one or two slats of muscle petered in there. One could forgive the less than precise muscle-to-fat ratio, as Charles’ buttocks swelled deliciously beneath the loose jeans.
Charles turned back sharply, twinkling an eye for Dimov, as though to cheer on the preternatural violation. Miguel seemed to have tired him because he paced back to the table, and flumped onto a seat next to Dimov. The phone call dragged out with more wearied assurances, “I know, I know, mi’jo,” while Dimov wandered over the less disturbing spread on the table: Gilda’s sequined purse, the chrome salt and pepper shakes, the folded up trapezoid of the newspaper looking ready to spring like a loaded up jack-in-the-box. Dimov moved to get up, but Charles stamped down on his thigh, stabbing up there a shard of pleasure. And he surrendered to the grassy, gratingly arousing scent of his old, old friend.
“Gilda’s thinking about moving out,” Charles said as an after thought to the phone call, his hand still possessive of Dimov’s thigh. “What are you going to do?”
The apt reply to abandonment was not immediate to Dimov glaring at the disappointing distance between the hand and his aching burden.
A door bang, heels clopping, a cloud of Fougère sweetness wafting in, and Gilda, gratefully clothed, peering out of the corridor. The evening dazzled with possibility in her shiny face.
“I was telling Dimov, you were thinking of moving out,” said Charles lifting the offending hand to smooth his clean-shaven cheek.
Her glow darkened. “I was just thinking aloud, you know.”
“When you know, let me know,” Dimov said, in a dislocated aura of denied possibility.
“Not for another few months at least, I feel bad leaving you alone here,” she said.
“Don’t worry. I can always hop on a plane to Philly,” Dimov said.
“You would?” Charles seemed elated, and his thighs jittered with joy as well, widening open, rubbing up against Dimov’s knee.
“I was joking,” Dimov grunted, hardening himself to a more solid feeling rising again.
With sterile poise, she picked up the purse and secured it under her arm and looked on softly at Charles nursing a secret hurt, and then to the mean and unyielding Dimov.
“The Universe rolls on,” she said, as if surrendering to the painful illogic of the cosmos. “I’m headed out. Charley, you still meeting the boy at Fairfax?
He shrugged. “I’m probably cancelling.”
“I’m going to bed,” Dimov said, arising, but Charles stamped him down.
“No, you’re not. You’re coming with me to Fairfax.”
“Good luck with making Dimov do anything,” Gilda said.
After the final door bang, the room was ringing, shaking up in Dimov’s ears, and Charles, with feline neediness, was stroking up and down the length of his thigh. His mouth was half open, and Dimov could see over the pinkish glints, the warm bed of his tongue, ready, waiting in there. Of a sudden, Dimov felt like a dead stone in the lake of his succulent feeling.
Charles was much taken up with the simple act of stroking of his knee. And over his painful and bursting state, Dimov riffled painfully past the moment to the maddening, unfulfilling existential echoes in Charles, love of his life Charles, being common again.
Dimov held onto Charles’ hand warm, wide, a finely hirsute. “Are you going to love me, Charley?”
Coldly, aloofly, Charles retrieved his hand, like switching off a boring channel. An air of exasperation spun as he interlaced his fingers over his lap and ruminated the dark vanish of the table.
He reconsidered him, and not with a ruffle of warmth in his eyes. “I fight to make you say you love me, while I tell you I love you everyday.”
“Yes, every six hours even ... but you tell everybody that.”
“Ah? You need to get over your hangup already.”
“Would you spare me your BULLSHIT?”
Dimov saw his hands were shaking and he saw Charles, in his usual longsuffering resignation, glance over his shaking hands. And the thought blatted down his ears: he had done it again. Again with being the idiot child. Again with this adolescent ruse of seeming irrevocably lost.
And when the next evening, Dimov was driving Charles and Gilda to Pedro’s house, his mind was encamped with the monstrous movements of the day before: the muddling senselessness of his anger, the fundamental logic of a hard cock in his pants. And Gilda, at the driver side seat, scatted freely: Echo Park was a trite ghetto, Silver lake was too silvery with hipsters, West Hollywood was fake. The Westside was full of momma bears. Downtown Los Angeles could be tolerable except for the omnipresent stink of piss. The Universe had willed Sedona to be perfect. She took a moment to press a black curl to her forehead, to comprehend the universal dispassion swallowing up her words, and then limped a glance to the backseat, to Charles clenching a fist on his lap.
“You’re pulling a Dimov, being so quiet there,” she said, “Martinis did not go so well last night?”
“He was a raging top,” Charles said.
“And? That’s so your thing.”
“I was in no mood to be topped.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, it happens.”
Gilda sighed long and hard enough to impel Dimov to swerve through a left turn. Something at last dropped out of his brain about Gilda’s plans to move out. No more Charles to scold about him being brooding and quiet. No more Gilda to cheer his sententious screeds against his Siberian temperament. Strange how they thought broodiness sinful. There were worse sins he could think of, selfishness yes, laziness definitely, or even paralysis.