Two Pieces

We meet—where else? Protesting.

I seduce him with stories of long ago labor movements. My great-grandpa was a tailor, my great-grandma a seamstress. Were they political, he asks, his voice a gaseous whisper. Who can say? I shrug, and I allow a deep sadness to overcome me, as though it is too painful to discuss these ghosts that I myself brought up, as if Scabby’s gaze is a blazing, uncouth light that scatters the shadows of the past. Scabby is suitably chastened and deeply impressed with my depth of feeling.

After we meet again at a unionizing Chipotle in Union Square, we wind up sleeping together. I’m the first New Yorker besides the NYPD who can get Scabby off a picket line, and my methods are far more subtle and tender. Underneath my ministrations, his billowy flesh grows first warm and yielding, then taut and insistent. We cry out together, though I am far from orgasm. He starts to apologize for something; I kiss his eyelids and tell him I don’t care, I just am glad he’s next to me. We fall asleep.

Scabby has been out for a while, but I’m the first guy he’s been serious about. One really late night around Washington Square, someone shouts faggots at us and throws what looks like a Baja Blast at me. Scabby, normally so outspoken, is stunned. I chase after the voice, screaming and cursing the NYU gentrifying piece of shit to go back to shithole Iowa and rot! I always assume homophobes are transplants. Bad habit, really. When I check back with Scabby, he laughs a bit, dazed. In the village? There isn’t even a Taco Bell until like 14th street! He says, And I say, so random. When he gets quiet I reach out and hold his rubbery claw. He leans in. We walk over to Chess Forum and play a game and have some bad coffee.

Scabby first sees me have a panic attack about three months in. It goes okay. He tries to solve things for a while until I half laugh and half cry and tell him he doesn’t have to do anything, just lay down with me and hold me. He does so, a bit stiffly at first, but then both our breathing calms down. He says, I was worried you would shout at me. I say, Why? And he brings up exes, and his dad, who got loud when stressed, and even sometimes would punch the wall. He looks at me a long time, with his flat, painted, red eyes. Don’t shout at me, he says. I am so relieved to be held, for my heart not to be racing, I barely notice how I manage to stroke his fur and say I promise you, I never will.

The first promise I break to Scabby, about a year into dating, is not shouting. I still have not shouted at Scabby the inflatable rat. Sometimes my voice climbs up and he gets mad, as if I shouted, but I know my shouting voice and I tell him that’s not shouting. We fight about that for a bit instead of what the fight is about, which is that I broke a different promise and bought some film at B&H for a photography class I’m doing. Scabby was really supportive of me doing the photography class, he worries I don’t have enough hobbies. But he hates B&H even though they and their employees reached a contract. He thinks they’re really sleazy. It doesn’t help the fight that I get kinda weirded out how mad he is at B&H, and at some point, I raise the antisemitism question. He brushes it off, but I’m insistent, Scabby is actually generally really intense when Hasidic businesses are bad actors, and I think it’s a little weird. He says it’s just because when he was raised in the south he hated all that religious hypocrisy shit that was around him. We make up, and weirdly, that’s the conversation that leads to him coming to synagogue with me for the first time for the High Holy Days.

Time goes on. He meets my mom. She’s been really mean about him behind his back. Still with that goyishe bag of hot air? But when they meet, she gives him a chance, and soon they’re laughing all about me. It’s fine by me, I can take a joke. Scabby and my mom make fun of how excited I get when I talk about movies. My mom rolls her eyes and tells Scabby about the time I only spoke in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle quotes for three weeks. Scabby laughs so hard it looks like that time one of his ropes was loose and he bobbed in the wind. Sitting in that kitchen with my mother in a good mood and the inflatable rat I love, I feel a contentment that I can’t describe. It hollows me out, I want to sob in joy. On the train back to the city, I squeeze Scabby’s claw. Three weeks later, I propose.

You know that thing? Where you’re just starting to move through life with the hopeful existence of a soap bubble, at a rate others might even consider reasonable? And the red-hot dice of pain haven’t tumbled in your chest in a few weeks and you’re not crying so much lately and the hollow wondering if this is it, if this is all you are and do, that hollowness is a kind of half filled-in, sort of like a rugelach where the baker was stingy with the chocolate but the dough is still good and sweet enough? That thing? You know, where your ancestors feel at peace even though it’s been years since you stepped foot in a synagogue, and you think, who knows, maybe they’re at peace BECAUSE you haven’t stepped foot in a synagogue, whoever said your ancestors were such holy rollers anyway? That thing where you think, I’m not a bad Jew, I’m just a Jew, a poshiter Yid, a simple person who’s just doing what needs to be done, maybe a little less? And who does that hurt? That thing where it’s getting OK like that and then you run into your cousin? Your tall and strong cousin? The cousin you hate who loves you? That thing where you see the loathsome ramrod posture of your cousin down the street and you’re in shock because you barely remembered you live in the same city? And then your cousin is upon you, asking how you are with that loving smile and what you’re up to these days? That thing where your horrible beautiful cousin insists on taking you out to lunch and asking all sorts of questions about employment and relationships and health and never even asks about your spiritual struggle with the souls of your (shared) ancestors, because you’ve never mentioned that struggle to your cousin? That thing where you mumble and equivocate through a conversation with your normal healthy cousin about normal healthy matters because you know in your dry, overbaked, less-than-half-filled rugelach heart, that you are neither normal nor healthy? And your cousin seems delighted all the same to see you and you hate that your cousin is delighted? That thing where eventually you disentangle yourself and rush back to your bathroom and look in the mirror and breathe quite heavily because your ancestors are screaming at you and you can feel the pain begin to rumble and moan inside you? That thing where you try to breathe through the pain and the screaming and then attempt a smile? That thing where your cousin’s delighted, unforgiving face stares back at you from the mirror? Don’t you hate that?