WRITING SAMPLES
STORIES | SEA CHANGE | ALL WE HAVE
Sea Change
From the novel Confluence by Alex Turner and Lucian Childs
Published in Prairie Fire, Summer 2025, Volume 46, No. 2
Anxious to get out of the drizzle and cold, I park my beat-up VW Beetle on Hastings and—shoulders hunched, jacket collar turned up—hustle over the rain-slicked sidewalk. In the entryway of an abandoned building, a sleeper lies entombed in a cardboard sarcophagus. Hookers sheltering under a tattered awning regard me hungrily. Moments later, a sunken-eyed fellow blunders by, his gaze transfixed by the neon in the barred window of a pawn shop.
January, 1964. Downtown Eastside, Vancouver.
Not exactly my idea of where I’d like to spend a Saturday night. But this is where I find the Montreal Club, the only place in town where I can have a good time, dance—and with any luck, meet someone.
For nearly five years, that possibility has lured me through these depressing surroundings to this gay dive. Since I split my small BC hometown, ditched the whole ingénue schtick and its dreary high school certainties, I have been making discoveries and mistakes, making up for lost time. One-night stands, romantic bust-ups, next morning hangovers—I suffer them willingly.
Before ducking off Hastings, I catch a glimpse of the Smilin’ Buddha, a nightclub catering to rockers and wannabe hipsters slumming it Eastside. Its cheerful illuminated sign and prominent position on the strip, the boisterous crowd of punks lounging out front, contrast sharply with the nameless entranceway, the deserted, dingy and poorly-lit stairwell that I now begin to ascend. I cast repeated glances over my shoulder until I reach the tenuous safety of the top landing. I press a buzzer and wait.
Through the wall, laughter and voices over the blare of music.
In what looks to be a movie theatre ticket booth, a woman appears. Mid-forties, with a rumpled, expressionless face. Probably the mobbed-up manager’s fresh squeeze. Her tortoise-shell glasses dangle from a chain atop a bosomy white cardigan.
At twenty-two, I have lost my baby fat and now have the angular features I find so attractive in other men. Still, I am sometimes mistaken as underaged and—though the I.D. I slip under the glass with my fiver is one that is no longer fake—I squirm as the woman gives me the once-over. Then, because I make the grade or because her discomfort dealing with yet another queer is too great, she waves me off with one overly bejeweled hand.
It is bad enough having to run this gauntlet, but as the door buzzes open and I push through into the bar, half the eyeballs in the room snap to attention. Coming into a place such as this, I feel as if I am making a stage entrance in a play for which I am miscast and underprepared. It is something I have never gotten accustomed to. Savour it, some of the older guys tell me, but the sooner I can disappear into the crowd here, the better I will feel.
Once out of the line of fire I scan the room, long and poorly illuminated by naked bulbs suspended in a row from the ceiling. Booths on one side, with tables and chairs along the opposite wall. But most of the space is taken up by the dance floor.
Tonight, the joint is jammed, really hopping. Lots of people I have never seen before. I swig from my flask, the whisky’s peaty burn trickling down my throat. The place is unlicensed, so patrons squirrel away booze in brown paper bags. I pocket the flask in my jacket, which I stash in a dark corner.
“Ted!” Above the din, someone shouts my new name. After relocating to Vancouver end of Grade 12, I resolved to discard, once and for all, the childishly sounding ‘Teddy’ that had dogged me into adulthood.
I survey the room and find Suzy, a friend of mine from art school, her arms outstretched, barging toward me through the crowd with another girl. They are both red-faced and talking fast. After hugs and kisses, I am dragged onto the dance floor.
I allow Mary Wells singing “My Guy” on the jukebox to sweep me away—swaying to the mid-tempo beat, inhaling deeply and closing my eyes. When I swim back to the surface, I notice Suzy and the other girl are moving more rapidly than the music warrants. My guess is that my friend has been into her mother’s diet pills again.
“Who else did you come with?” I yell in Suzy’s ear. She points to a gangly kid from school, dancing with a boy I don’t recognize—behind them guys dancing with guys, girls with girls. There are even a few straight couples in the mix, out at the gay bar to amp up their cool cred.
Through cigarette smoke, the movements of one dancer attract my notice. He is eighteen, maybe nineteen. With his curly black hair and dark complexion, his white T-shirt, the boy could have jumped right out of West Side Story. A sheen of sweat coats his face and arms.
I wave to the girls then plow through the dancers to the far end of the room, to the snack bar where the hustlers hang out. As usual, Jim is there—this time chatting up a towheaded kid with ruined teeth and a pimply complexion. Jim is a guy around forty I tricked with once, before I knew any better. A few bruises to my body and ego weren’t all I came away with. I got my first case of crabs. Could have been worse, someone cautioned me later.
Jim’s mission in life is to seduce every new and attractive boy that enters through the club door. So, he is the one I go to for the lay of the land. I tilt my head once in the direction of the dancing dark-haired boy.
“Who’s that?”
“Don’t know,” Jim grumbles. “But whoever he is, he’s not very friendly. Wouldn’t waste your time.”
Despite the warning, I can’t take my eyes off the boy. He has a real feel for the music and isn’t just going through the motions—merely plodding side to side, like most of the others on the dance floor. He improvises, swooping arms and leaps and turns. He appears oblivious to everyone around him, but he notices me watching finally and our eyes lock. He shoots me a quick smile, shrugs then continues his loopy inventions.
At the end of the song, the boy meanders through the crush of dancers to a booth where a pair of sour-faced Laurel and Hardy lookalikes have all along fixed their attention on him. The skinny one eyes me warily, while the plump fellow paws the young man as the three of them chat.
Every so often, the boy glances my way, so when he ambles over to the snack bar and stands beside me, I pluck up my courage. “I’ve been watching you dance,” I say.
He shoots me a sexy grin and even now he is rocking in half-time to the beat. “It’s great finally finding a place like this—though it’s a total dump. I had no idea there were…”
Someone drops a quarter in the jukebox on a fast song: crashing cymbals and saxes, Little Richard blasting out “Keep a Knockin’.” I lean forward, cupping a hand, graze his ear. “You’ve never been here before?”
“No.” His hazel eyes dart over my face as I draw back.
“So, where do you go?” I shout.
“Most of the time I’m studying. I’m first year biology at UBC. Keeps my nose to the grind, and me out of too much trouble.”
“You get into trouble?” Smiling, I arch an eyebrow.
The boy says nothing, just continues to grin broadly, ignoring the throng milling about to focus on me. He resumes bopping to the music and I jump around with him. We dance apart, but close. Bellowing above the music and conversation, I tell him my name and ask for his. Marc, he says, spelled with a ‘c’—short for Marcus. His mom’s Italian. Dad’s the usual from around here—Scots/Irish/English mongrel.
I observe the two men eyeballing us from the booth and ask if the heavyset guy is his boyfriend. Marc laughs and tells me he would sure like to be. Last summer, they’d all worked together at a sawmill near Kamloops, where the men reside. The two friends travel to Vancouver some weekends to party, Marc says, and earlier this evening they rang him up and dragged him out.
“So, here I am.” He spreads his arms wide as if to exclaim ta da!
“Well, Marc with a ‘c’, if you don’t go out…”
“I didn’t say that,” he hollers. “I do get out, but not overnight. I still live with my parents.”
I track the way his body moves, how it rides the music. “Where do you go then?”
Places is all he offers, as Little Richard and the throaty sax fade out.
A slow number follows—Ray Charles crooning “That Lucky Old Sun.” Broadening across our faces, smiles light up our eyes as we shift to low gear. Hands fixed at our sides, we dance a few inches apart, resisting the magical field tugging us together, savouring the moment before the first spark when we touch. Finally pressing into one another, there is no hesitancy, no awkwardness over who is leading.
As our breathing slows, my hand explores his back, down the ridge of his spine, to cup his ass. His lips brush my neck, nibble my ear, then drift across my cheek to finally lock onto my mouth. We remain glommed onto each other, radiating heat, rocking back and forth, my leg pulsing between his thighs. Then my fingers steal under his belt, between underwear and skin.
A sudden intake of breath.
“Fuck,” he whispers in my ear, “I couldn’t stop.”
I hold him tightly until he subsides, then he tells me he better clean up and heads to the washroom. Maneuvering into the shadows, I loll against a wall to revel in the lingering sensation of his body snugged against mine.
After a few moments Marc reappears in the passageway that leads to the washroom, his eyes searching the dance floor, a worried expression shadowing his face. It morphs into a grin and he approaches me. “I thought maybe you’d split.”
I’d fretted myself over him doing the same. Smiling, I shake my head. “Not a chance.”
He stares at his feet, then up along my slender frame. “What happened on the dance floor…”
“Was exciting,” I say. “Still is.”
“Yes, I can see that.” He beams.
Just then, the buzzer blares. The lights go up, the music cuts off. Everyone knows the deal. Couples quickly disengage, snug contraband into crumpled paper sacks, which are hurriedly stashed in dark corners. The room then breaks into a sort of manic fire drill, women swapping out with the odd man at the booths and tables. Men tag-teaming with women to loiter in mixed company along the walls. All quietly eyeing the cops as they thump in.
There are three of them, this time. One, a woman to check on the girls. I fear a male cop will hassle Marc because he appears so young, but both march right past him. They pace the room, barking out questions, checking I.D., patting people down, flashing lights around for booze. One officer, his broad-brimmed service cap speckled with rain, demands I show my I.D. and empty my pockets. Once it is clear I’m not concealing anything, he moves aside to pounce on another victim.
When the police finally exit, the music switches back on and the lights dim. There is a collective sigh and it’s back to dancing. The whole performance lasts maybe fifteen minutes.
Everyone is accustomed to the show, but panic plays across Marc’s suddenly pale face. Opening my arms, I rush to give him a consoling hug, but he spins around and stalks off, trailing me in his wake. He elbows through the dance floor to the Laurel and Hardy duo ensconced in their threadbare booth. After grabbing his coat, Marc shouts at them, insisting they leave.
The entire time Marc and I danced, the buffoons glowered at us as if they were severely constipated. A pissy attitude sets me off. So, I find myself blurting out that I will give Marc a lift home. The scarecrow seems to begrudge me the offer, but his pudgy counterpart shoots daggers and informs me that he will be doing the honours.
* * *
Late one August afternoon, seven months after that run-in with the cops, I am walking to a party up the hill from Sunset Beach. It is sweltering and the young men I follow are dressed only in bathing suits and tank tops. Up ahead, at one of those high-rises springing up all along English Bay, our destination is flagged by the array along a balcony rail of still more scantily-clad young men.
On the building’s twelth floor, I make my way behind the group of partygoers down a long hallway. Many of the doors on either side are ajar, men filtering back and forth between them and the apartment at the end of the corridor.
At its front door, I glimpse more guys in shorts and bathing suits loitering about the living room, drinks and cigarettes in hand. Most are slim and tanned and many seem acquainted with one another; all are animated. Glancing in my direction, a handsome boy with sun-bleached hair, his taut body poured into slinky red Speedos.
“Hi gorgeous! Glad you could make it, Ted.”
Terry, the host, rushes over and drags me into a bear hug. My hands lightly pat his back, then dangle by my sides as I wait to be released. Terry is a large man—tall and heavyset, with a big voice to match. These last years, I’ve been made aware of my physical charms, but as far as the gorgeous goes, I don’t take it personally. Terry calls everyone that.
“C’mon in and have a drink—what’ll it be?”
“Beer’s fine.”
I don’t know Terry well but have been running into him a lot lately, most recently at the Castle, a straight pub on Granville Street that winks at its increasingly homosexual clientele. It was there that he invited me to this ‘beach bash’. From what I have heard, when not throwing parties or holding court at the Castle, Terry travels between Vancouver and Ottawa on some important government job.
He urges me away from the door to allow for guests to come and go. “Since you didn’t bring any beach stuff, you’ll find towels in the bathroom. And in the bedroom,” Terry says, ogling me up and down, “there’s a bathing suit I’m sure you’ll have no trouble filling.” He pats me on the rear and sails off to the fridge.
The men’s excited laughter and patter nearly drown out the stereo, the mournful final measures of “Stormy Weather” on Judy Garland’s Carnegie Hall album. After the song concludes, someone changes the LP to Ornette Coleman, the jazz high on a hoarse, beboppy sax.
I thread through the crowd to the balcony giving onto English Bay. I slip my shades against the blistering afternoon sun, broken in shards that shimmer off the water. Far below, Beach Avenue clogged with traffic, bodies sprawled on blankets and towels peppering the adjacent strand. Beyond that, the Vancouver skyline punctuated with building cranes, the Coast Mountains dotted with patches of snow.
“Great view, isn’t it?” Terry says, as he waylays me with a bottle of ice-cold beer. Beads of condensation dampen my fingers.
“Sure is.” I smile, but halfheartedly, not wanting my friendliness to be misinterpreted. “Bet the sunsets are fabulous.”
“They are.” Terry presses into me, his shoulder caressing mine. “Stick around, if you like. In an hour or so we can watch it together.” I ignore this flirtation, say nothing and Terry draws back. “In the meantime, you might try mingling. That’s what parties are for, you know.” He winks, waves to a newcomer and expertly navigates his bulk through the festivities.
I peer back into the apartment through my sunglasses. After my eyes adjust, I note the tasteful Danish Modern furniture, the smattering of antique pieces. To my relief, there isn’t a cheap poster of a pricked, nearly-nude Saint Sebastian or a facsimile of Michelangelo’s hunky David. The only whiff of piss-elegance, two nude male wrestlers are bronzed in a frozen embrace on the coffee table in front of the chesterfield.
Slouched there on the sofa, his long legs draped over the seat’s rim, is one of the few people, along with myself, who is not nearly-naked. Despite the heat, he is dressed in a brown corduroy jacket with matching slacks. A cigarette in one hand, he cradles his drink in the other. Almost handsome in an egghead sort of way, his black horn-rimmed glasses dominate a small beak-like nose, a high forehead and pale face.
What stands out about him is his thick, unkempt hair—completely grey. He gives the impression of being simultaneously young and old. He could have ten or fifteen years on my twenty-two; on the other hand, he might be even younger.
After a couple of glances, I am introducing myself. He peers up at me, the eyes enlarged through the thick lenses seeming both menacing and vulnerable.
“Hello to you,” he says, startling me with the unexpected depth of his voice. “Dean.” Placing his drink next to a golf ball–sized globe of cut crystal on the marble tabletop, he presents his hand, palm down. For a second, I have the impression he means for me to kiss it.
I recover, shake it in the firm manner I had been taught in high school. “I guess we’re the only ones who don’t know everybody here,” I say, again watchful for signs my friendliness isn’t taken the wrong way. Releasing his hand, I note its slight tremor.
Sipping what appears to be a gin and tonic, Dean surveys the room. “You want to know everyone here?”
“Well, no. Not really.” I grin, keeping an eye on the blond boy in the red Speedos as he joins a group of men coming through the front door. “But knowing a few would be nice.”
“Well,” Dean says, following my gaze, “it appears as though you’re about to commence.” He takes another sip from his drink, leans back. “Has it always been Ted? What about Teddy? Or Teddy-boy?”
I gape at him, disheartened that my old name might have shadowed me here. Before I can get a word in, Dean continues. “No, you’re hardly a teddy-boy. How about Theodore? Now, there’s a moniker.”
“Ted will do just fine,” I reply.
“Good solid Ted.” Dean’s fist lightly bangs out the three words on the marble tabletop. Rattling sharply upon it, the multifaceted orb of cut glass. “Not to be confused with ‘stolid’.” He smiles, as if he is in on some private joke.
I carry on gawking at him, saying nothing.
“Don’t mind me. Really.” Dean slaps his face lightly as if admonishing a naughty child. He elevates his almost empty glass. “Afternoon drinks always get to me.” He then reaches for my arm, tugs me down next to him on the couch. “How about removing your sunglasses?”
With the beer racing to my head, the sudden movement, I feel dizzy and glance away. I wonder if talking to this guy is a mistake, yet resist the urge to bolt. Pocketing my glasses, feeling ridiculously exposed, I shift on the couch to face Dean.
He smiles. “Ah, there you are! You have such lovely eyes. I’m sure all kinds of people tell you that. And blue-grey. Not that usual with brown hair. But why are you still wearing it crewcut? Are you in the Forces?”
A needle scratching on vinyl interrupts my reply, putting brash old Ornette Coleman out of his misery and signaling another LP change. Dean sits up, cocks his ear. “Thank god that cacophony is over.” Listening intently to the opening bars of the new record, his face breaks into a smile. “Ah, Peggy! Now, there’s a singer.”
He scrutinizes me through his thick lenses. When I remain silent, he asks, “You don’t like Peggy Lee?”
I pull on my suds and shrug. “It’s not that I don’t like her. It’s just, there’s a weariness to her voice. I can’t say what it is, exactly.”
Dean reaches for a pack of Matinée, shakes out the smokes and offers me one. “A bit of the old ennui, perhaps?”
“Yeah, I guess.” I fish in my jeans pocket for my lighter, hold the flame up to Dean’s cigarette before firing up my own. “Even when she sings fast, there’s a kind of fatigue to her voice. I sometimes wonder if she’s had enough sleep. Too much of her gets me down.”
“Gets you down?” Dean sounds incredulous. “Peggy Lee gets you down? She doesn’t get to your heartstrings?”
“No, not really.” I gulp my beer, wonder when I formed opinions on singers I hardly listen to and know next to nothing about. “And I’m not sure I want my heartstrings gotten to.”
His eyebrows arched, Dean considers me for a moment. “Erecting walls around your emotions at such a tender age?”
“I wouldn’t put it that way. It’s just… melancholy singers like Peggy Lee, that’s the only music that interests them.”
I gesture to the willowy young men I’d viewed from the street, still arrayed along the balcony rail. I see guys like this often at the clubs, these parties. Always perfectly coiffed, deeply tanned—which in rainy Vancouver is an achievement. Their bragging references—to art openings and the opera, to jet-setting between Frisco, L.A. and P-town—are shot through with the word Mary, along with knowing winks and showy guffaws. What irks me about them most is the feigned indifference overlaying it all, the studied appearance of lassitude. It spoils what otherwise might be taken for silly, youthful exuberances.
“To me,” I say, turning away from the young men and back to Dean, “all that melancholy, it’s just a pose. A thing to avoid facing the real world.”
“Whatever that may be.” Dean’s face is expressionless. “Let me just say that no matter what peculiarities their fans exhibit, those ladies are great vocalists. And they’ll be remembered long after whatever was playing a moment ago has been forgotten. In my opinion, their songs bring solace to those who have experienced too much too soon, or perhaps not enough, ever.”
A red blur passes inches from my nose. My eyes track Speedo boy’s moulded globes sauntering out to the balcony. I turn my awareness back to Dean and catch his eyes darting from the boy to me.
“Young men,” Dean says, holding my gaze. “You were talking about melancholy young men.” He takes a drag from his cigarette. Though only half-finished, he butts it in a nearby ashtray, bending it till it breaks.
Returning his attention to me, Dean continues. “I take it you’re a rock ‘n’ roll man. Elvis, and all that.”
“Well, yeah, sure,” I say, aware of needing for some reason to regain points. “But there’s other stuff happening, more recent, like Bob Dylan.”
“Ack!” Dean presses the palms of his hands to both ears, fingers splayed theatrically. “The one who plays harmonica and guitar poorly,” he says, lowering his hands to his lap. “He sings through his nose—I can’t get past that whine. And I’m never clear about the lyrics!”
I don’t always understand the words, I say. But those I do, I love for their poetry, their honesty. I let him know I also love Gordon Lightfoot, The Kinks, The Animals. Peter, Paul and Mary. Everybody new bursting onto the scene.
After nearly an hour, I can’t believe how much I’ve shared with him. About growing up in the Fraser Valley, working for nearly two years at the TB unit in the bowels of Vancouver General. About attending classes to make up the high school courses I so disastrously fucked up. Finally deciding on art school and, after three years, still not knowing if I am cut out for it.
A torrent of conversation at the front door—a raft of new arrivals hugging their host. Behind them, a striking dark-haired kid, not in beachwear like the others, separates himself from the group. By a tropical plant whose waxy leaves wind hungrily up a post toward the ceiling, he pauses to survey the room, then makes a beeline through the chatterboxes to the balcony. There is something familiar in the fluidity of his movements. I crane my neck to get a better look, but the crowd blocks my view.
Returning to Dean, I find him downing the last of his drink, then unfolding himself from the couch. As he straightens, I’m surprised to find he is well over six feet tall. Rubbing his stomach, Dean grimaces. “Got to make the bladder gladder.” He fixes me with a stare. “Now, don’t go away.” He snatches my empty beer bottle. “I’ll get you another.” He lurches off, softly singing something about love in the afternoon like lilac wine, being heady.
The sound of laughter draws my attention to the balcony and I again take note of the dark-haired young man. I cast about trying to place him until Dean returns with the drinks. Settling back on the couch with a sigh, he motions toward the hallway to the washroom.
“He’s back there.”
“Who?” I ask.
“That blond you’ve been cruising. Quite charming, in an ersatz Tab Hunter kind of way. Definitely not a melancholy young man. He thinks you’re cute.”
Noting my reddening face, Dean quickly adds, “Calm yourself. It was all voluntary on his part. I did not betray your heartstrings.” He presents his right hand in a three-fingered salute, as if taking the Boy Scout Oath.
“No, that’s not it,” I say. “A guy came in while you were getting drinks. I just now remembered who he is.”
“Someone you know?”
“Someone I knew. Or thought I was getting to know. Met him last winter at the Montreal Club.”
Dean’s face suddenly furrows in an expression of disgust. “I don’t dare go to that part of town at night. Definitely not my scene.”
“Never saw the guy again,” I say. “Until now.”
From the coffee table, I pick up the prism of glass and stare through it, the room refracting into technicolour edges. I am not sure I’m ready to get into this part of my past with Dean. The police raids at the club, the seemingly endless one night–stands, my hookups in public places. Dean is, after all, still a stranger. A pretty strange stranger at that.
I butt out my cigarette and, for courage, drain the rest of my beer. Rising to my feet, I excuse myself for a moment and barge through the tanned and manicured set on my way to the balcony.
“Marc?”
The mystery man pivots toward me, a baffled look on his face.
“We’ve met before,” I say.
One brow above his deep-set eyes arches slightly.
“The Montreal Club. Last January.”
“Oh, that time.” His cheeks reddening, he attempts to cover his embarrassment with a laugh. “I can’t believe how naïve I was.” Returning his attention to the bay, the smile crumples and his expression is replaced with one of disdain.
“So, you got home okay?”
“Oh sure. Sorry my friend gave you a hard time.”
“Where you been? I haven’t seen you around.”
He tells me he just returned from working again at the sawmill in the Interior. That in a few days he’s starting back at UBC. Just now, at Sunset Beach he trailed a group of guys he presumed were gay up the hill to Terry’s apartment.
“A bold move.”
He shrugs. “I have to do something. I still hardly know anyone. But I can’t relate to the scene.”
The sun is gaining now on the horizon. Inside, the din has lowered, the blond boy decamped, along with the tribe of willowy young men. Marc tells me he better split. If he misses dinner tonight, the grilling he’ll get from his folks won’t make staying any longer at this party worth the hassle.
I propose for a second time to give him a lift home and I am excited when he jumps at the offer. Marc heads to the front door, parting the remaining guests, who, judging by their expressions—some shy, some wolfish—are dazzled by him as much as I am.
Though I think I have made my intensions clear toward Dean, when I return to the sofa a hint of disappointment washes across his face.
“It appears you’ve met the love of your night,” he says.
“We could go for coffee sometime. Or a drink.”
Dean remains silent, his gaze now fixed on the figurine of the wrestling men on the coffee table. After searching the room for a pen, I scribble my phone number on a napkin, tuck its corner under the bronze’s base, then peck him on the cheek as he turns to peer wistfully out at the bay.
I’ve parked some distance down Beach Avenue and on our way to my car I reacquaint myself with Marc. He is darkly complected, shorter than I remember, but with the solid build I found so sexy last winter at the club. Under a mop of curly black hair and large, intense hazel eyes, his lips are full, drawing me to kiss them.
Bursting with energy Marc speeds ahead, while I attempt to keep up. A block before we get to my Beetle, Marc grabs my hand. Instinctively, I tug it away. He seems so disappointed, after checking to make certain no one is around, I sneak my fingers back into his.
Once in the car, he cups my face with one hand and leans over the stick shift to kiss me. For all the sex in the rough I’ve had, I’m still taken aback by such a public display, but succumb to his hands slipping under my shirt, fondling my chest. As the sun streams through the VW’s windows, he gives the streetscape over my shoulder what appears to be a look of defiance. Then he angles in for another kiss.
Out the corner of my eye, I notice a group of people approaching and shove Marc away. I warn him to not get into this here. Frowning, he retreats to the opposite side and slumps into his seat. “If you say so,” he rolls his eyes and says.
I let this little dig slide while Marc lays out the location of his parents’ house near UBC. With the sun cresting Vancouver Island and blasting into our eyes, I head west through the city center, over Burrard Bridge toward Point Grey.
This suppertime of the evening, the traffic is light and, when not shifting gears my hand rests lightly on Marc’s thigh. As we near Spanish Banks, he says he doesn’t have to be home just yet and suggests I pull into a wooded spot at the side of the road.
The fog billowing through Burrard Inlet chills us and we roll up our windows, except for a small gap at the top. From it, the sound of waves lapping the shoreline and the fishy smell of decomposing kelp. In the tunnel of trees before us, lights on the opposite waterfront trail through the dusk up the North Shore mountains to wink out into the advancing mists.
We hold hands for a bit, shy suddenly, not speaking. I switch on the radio: the tinny guitar chords and nasal whine of Bob Dylan. This song is everywhere these days—on record players in friends’ apartments, in jukebox diners, here on the radio—The Times They Are a-Changin’. An anthem of hope. Freedom at last. A new way of being together. And a plea for those who don’t understand to get out of the way.
The song makes me sad, though. Those beautiful sentiments don’t apply to me and Marc, or people like us. We have carved out a pleasant little hidey-hole for ourselves in Vancouver and a few other hot spots, but we are not really meant to be part of the song.
Still, it stirs something in us, and we begin to talk. Marc about his studies in biology, his hopes for being accepted to the graduate forestry program. Me about growing up in the Valley. School. He tells me art must be interesting—instead of weird, the way most people think—and wishes he, too, could have grown up outside the city. I let him know the only good thing about being from nowheresville: at university there’s no question of living with your parents. For the most part, he says he doesn’t mind.
It isn’t long before we are necking again. In that confined space, it becomes almost like a wrestling match. First, he gains the advantage, then I do. And now my fly is open—Marc’s tongue, the moist warmth—and I’m seeing stars. Only, it isn’t stars. I open my eyes and spy in the rearview mirror flashing lights, and realize it is the cops.
The windows are steamed over so they can’t get a look inside. One fat cop, in fact, who takes his time shambling toward the car while we straighten ourselves up. He raps his knuckles on the glass, and I crank down the window to have my eyes blasted by the beam from his flashlight. It skitters off my face across the back seat, to linger on Mark. After this quick inspection, the policeman growls, “What’re you young fellas doing? Where you coming from? Where do you live? Driver’s licenses and insurance, please.”
Fortunately, a stack of books is slumped across the backseat, and I contrive some story about studying at my place to get a jump on the fall term. That we have stopped by the beach to talk and listen to music before I drive my friend the rest of the way home.
The cop rakes his flashlight across our faces again. “You know, young fellas, a lot of perverts frequent this area. You wouldn’t want to be mixed up with something disgusting like that, would you?” He bangs on the car roof to emphasize his point.
After the man speeds off, I see Marc’s face has paled. He is shaking—I guess because he fears the cop might contact his folks. But when we are on our way again, it is obvious that concern has been overtaken by anger.
All the way to his parents’, he rages about the injustice of needing to lie about why we were there and what we were doing. When I reply that we took a chance, and that it is, after all, a public place, he yells, “So fucking what!”
Then he throws in my face our harassment last winter at the Montreal Club. That the cops are supposed to protect and serve, not intimidate. Then he rails about how sleazy the bar is, about all our clubs being relegated to the asshole parts of town. As he goes on, it’s clear he feels I am complicit in the whole thing by not challenging it.
I drive through the misty suburban streets in a stunned silence, as if I’m on autopilot. After a while, all I can think to say: “Come on, Marc. We all get popped eventually. That’s just the way it is.”
He recoils, crushes back against the passenger door. “It’s bullshit! In its own way, it’s just as fucked-up as what’s happening in the States. People there are fighting for their rights. Martin Luther King, and all. When is it going to be our turn?” He shouts all this, his face contorted in anger, with hurt.
He insists I drop him a couple of blocks from his house. Just before he bolts from the car, he bellows, “Do you think of yourself as some kind of criminal?”
Before I can respond, he leaps out, slams the car door—probably startling the whole neighbourhood—then sprints away.
And now, I am angry. At myself. For being complacent so long. I want badly to tell him how right he is about all this. To be angry alongside him. When I realize I have no way to contact him, I rachet the car back into gear, barrel along the street in the direction he ran.
But there is no one, only the fog churning through the tree limbs in the last of the waning light.
All We Have
From the novel Confluence by Alex Turner and Lucian Childs
Forthcoming in The New Quarterly, Summer 2026, Volume 179
I snap a new drawing pad onto the stand with two metal clips, as the other art students filter into the studio—through a forest of antique easels, past the glossy anatomical illustrations, the reproductions of drawings by the Old Masters. A grey Vancouver January, 1961. The chill at my back pours through tall double-sash windows, the view through them halved by a fire escape along the diagonal.
The instructor, Raymond Takahashi, appears in the doorway, his artist smock smudged with oil paint and acrylics. At the head of the room in front of a wide blackboard, he perches on his desktop’s edge and surveys the class. He gives me the slightest of nods and I echo his discretion. At school, we keep it all business, me only going as far as calling him Mr. T—like some of the kids. Never Ray, as I do at drunken parties at he and Randall’s house or when the three of us are there hanging out.
The couple befriended me last year, after Randall picked me up at a gay cruising spot near Spanish Banks. As it turned out, this was strictly platonic. I was being recruited as one of Randall’s strays, as Ray jokingly calls the promising young men his partner is in the habit of collecting.
In the end, though, I wasn’t so much Randall’s stray as Ray’s. After he heard of my interest in art, he invited me to gallery openings, to the museum for an exhibition on the Group of Seven. Sundays I often breakfasted at their apartment—all of North Van splayed out before us through the big picture windows—and, afterward, Ray and I would spend the afternoon sketching in Stanley Park. It was Ray who encouraged me to attend art school. He even wrangled a couple of grants and talked me up with Admissions.
The class now waits on a guy new to posing who Ray just hired, who undresses behind a privacy screen. When the model finally slips out from behind the partition, wearing house slippers and a tattered blue bathrobe, he appears to be my age, nineteen. Handsome, but in an unconventional way—his forehead too prominent under the short brown hair, his ears too large.
Ray motions with an open palm to the dais in the center of the room, space heaters like the huts of sentinels emitting a rosy glow at two corners. The model mounts the platform. The thin robe puddles at his feet. Students reach for conté and charcoal, flip sheets in sketchpads. After Ray calls three-minute gestures, the silence in the room is broken only by the scratch of crayons on paper, the occasional scrape of an easel on the concrete floor or Ray’s hushed comments as he circulates among the students.
The model is clad only in a white jockstrap. His physique is finely muscled, like that of a dancer or distance runner. The older models, with their sagging, blemished bodies, range listlessly through uninspiring poses. But this boy is a conjuror of dramatic gestures—his arms outstretched to some longed-for horizon, or crouching, as if weighed down by a tremendous burden.
I’ve long grown accustomed to objectifying models, both male and female. I imagine myself the dispassionate surgeon scrutinizing patients on an operating table: just contour and mass, muscle and ligament. But I am undone now by the ferociousness with which this kid shifts through the short poses—by his oddball beauty—and my hands hover over the drawing pad, unable to contact its rough paper.
Ray startles me out of my inertia, announcing the first twenty-minute sketch. The boy strikes a three-quarter back pose, standing erect but relaxed, his weight shifted to his left leg, hand resting on that hip, the right leg held loosely in front of him and slightly bent.
Now, I’m sketching furiously, slashing the conté across the sheet. It is as if I am marking a line, not down the paper, but down the model’s body itself. Stroking its muscles through the crayon; witnessing them for the first time. I experience a kind of detachment I’ve never felt. As if there is no difference between the young man and myself.
Ray declaring the fifteen-minute break annoys me, interrupts my flow. Students set aside their drawing instruments and head out the door for coffee at the café across the street. The model stretches, wraps himself in his robe, extracts a bright red apple from its pocket and steps down from the dais. As he munches on the fruit, he ambles around the room, examining drawings on easels or scattered on the floor.
I eye my sketch critically, noting how the knee projected toward me is out of proportion from my clumsy foreshortening.
A tap on my shoulder.
“You going for coffee?”
I step around to find Suzy, the girl who for the past few months I’m supposedly dating. We’ve not yet kissed and have barely touched, which triggers a huge sense of relief, but also a stubborn remorse. She is dressed in a puffy grey turtleneck sweater, her black leotards showing off her trim legs. With her short hair, her black eyeliner and white lip gloss, she is doing her best Audrey Hepburn impersonation.
“No,” I say, keeping an eye on the model who is leafing through a stack of drawings on the floor. “Think I’ll work a bit more on this last sketch.”
Suzy sighs long and loudly, accompanying the performance with the rolling of her eyes. She presents her open palm, in which I place a quarter fumbled from the pocket of my jeans. After she’s gone, I erase the lower right leg on the sketch and from memory attempt to correct the foreshortening.
“Mind if I take a look?”
I start, nearly topple my easel when the model speaks directly behind me.
“Yeah, sure,” I say. “Though it’s not very good yet.”
He examines, not the drawing on the easel, but some earlier sketches on the ripped pages at my feet. He crouches to get a better look, the robe pulling back to reveal his thighs just above the kneecap. He crunches into the last of his apple, sits back on his heels. The movement parts the robe’s fabric, opening a V from his shoulder, exposing a line of dark chest hair that dips out of sight at his waist.
He pages unhurriedly through the sketches, resting finally on one of a model balancing on one leg, arm outstretched, torso torqued to the left. “Don’t know how you get all that with so few lines.”
“How do you come up with those crazy poses?”
He rises to his feet and looks me directly in the eyes. “No weak gestures. That’s what Ray always says.”
“Ray?”
“Yeah, you know. Takahashi.”
“Aren’t you new to modeling?”
“Here, yeah. But I’ve done some classes at the university and some private sessions.”
“Private?”
“Sure, that’s how Ray and I met.” He cinches the tie-cord of his robe slightly. “Looks like you got a thing against declarative sentences.”
“A what?”
The model chuckles, extends his hand. “Name’s Paul.”
“Ted,” I say, my eyes lighting on his slender, elegant fingers. I lift my own to match his greeting, but notice they are covered in red conté. “My fingers… they’re all…”
“No worries,” Paul says, slipping his hand into mine and winking. “Not like I never got dirty before.”
I clasp Paul’s hand, cool from his standing so long in one position in this chilly room. I feel a little kick in my stomach as I note the golden flecks in his irises, his gaze as it pierces mine.
He considers me a moment longer than I would expect, pivots to examine my drawing clipped to the easel, the twenty-minute sketch, his features captured in the quickly drawn lines. He glances from the drawing back to me and pinches the bridge of his nose. Rakes a thumb outward along the skin below his eye, smudging a ruddy stripe across his cheekbone. “You sure got me there. It’s like looking in a mirror.”
The classroom door bursts open, students coursing in from their break. “Back to the drawing board, eh?” Paul says, uncinching the cord at his waist, allowing the hems of the robe to drape apart.
My eyes dart from the sight of his jockstrap to take in Suzy standing just inside the doorway, watching us, a paper coffee cup in each hand. I step backward, away from Paul, unable to prevent the blush from rising in my face.
“You…” I stammer, as he turns toward the dais. “You’ve got conté smudged across your cheek.”
Paul regards the smear of chalk in his right palm, in the hand that had all too briefly held mine. He grinds his thumb into it, reaches forward and drags the rust red colour across my skin, outlining my eye socket’s lower ridge.
“There,” he says. “We’re like brothers now.”
* * *
I sprint up the stairs to the third-floor walkup that serves as Ray’s studio. Through my winter coat, the thick cardboard of my drawing pad chafes my armpit. I barely notice it, I’m so excited over my little tête-à-tête with Paul moments earlier at life drawing class.
His behaviour felt flirtatious, something Ray confirmed when I interrogated him after the schoolroom had emptied. Ray cast a quick look at the blur of students in the hallway rushing to the next session and told me some men behave like that. The hot ones, especially. It’s their way of establishing authority. He wouldn’t reveal Paul’s sexuality, but hinted that at the private sessions he arranged for his gay artist friends—for which Paul modeled—the young man appeared completely at home.
I turn my key in the lock, shoulder the wooden door, its sticky hinges at last giving way. When it bursts open—my clumsy arms and legs doing a flat-footed dance—I lurch into the narrow room.
On its back wall, a grid of small-paned windows opens onto the North Shore mountains, whose slopes are basted with tatters of white clouds beneath a mantle of grey stratus. Another cold front, perhaps, descending from the northwest.
From a skylight—the glass’s crosshatched chicken wire obscured in the accumulated grime—a diffuse luminosity pours onto raw canvases slabbed against the side walls. Hung salon-style above them are fifteen or so completed pieces. Their riot of swooping, mostly colourless forms—like Japanese brushwork—echo Ray’s abstract-expressionist heroes.
Crowded into one corner is a table with my paints and palettes, an easel I’d repaired—one of the school’s originals from the ’20s, judging by the rough state in which I found it.
My pack thuds onto the tattered couch, where I sometimes sleep when I work too late and miss the last bus, where I mean to bunk tonight. I perch the sketchpad across the arms of a shabby, upholstered chair, slip out the drawings I just completed.
I handed in three of the best, as Ray requested. Seated at his desk in the classroom, Ray examined them in the light flooding through the tall windows. He was particularly pleased today, he told me. It was the first he’d witnessed me capture some real feelings and transcend the merely technical.
The sketch of the twenty-minute pose, I withheld from him. The standing three-quarter back view with its foreshortened leg that needed correcting. I am still shaken by what occurred in class, never having experienced such a loss of control. It frightens me, the cruelty embedded in Paul’s gesture. It excites me as well.
Lowering the drawing to the floor, kneeling in front of it, I perceive its power emanating off the light grey sheet, the sexual suggested by the slightly cocked hip, the non-supporting leg loosely turned out, so the fleshiness of his thigh is presented to me. I reach out to the page, trace the outline of that thigh, my finger smudging the crayon.
And I imagine the two of us in our bed, in a house we’ve built on a lake somewhere in the mountains near my little hometown. There are days, long stretches, we only rise from the sheets to piss or to forage in the kitchen, between bouts of sex or sleeping, curled in each other’s limbs, soothed by the rippling of water outside our windows. Here, too, is the perception of a loosening of self, so that alongside Paul and I is the presence of a third, not either of us, but both at once. It is that awareness that cocoons us in our bed, for in it is a sensation of repair. The wounds accumulated over our short lives scabbing and peeling off to reveal the bright pink skin of Us.
Pain in my knees intrudes on my daydreaming. The mountains on the opposite shore of Burrard Inlet are rouged now by the setting sun. How much time have I spent, lost here, imagining my real life to come?
I scramble to a standing position, hobble to the couch. Sprawling upon it, resting my head on my pack, my hand drifts down my torso, loosens my belt, fingers slipping under the waistband.
* * *
Days later, on one of Vancouver’s rare sunny afternoons, I sprint all the way to school, attempting to wear myself out. To tamp down my excitement, so as not to appear the sappy romantic when I see Paul. But I want that magic again, the interplay between hand and eye, scrutinizing every detail shadowed across his nearly naked body and translating it onto the page.
More than anything, though, I need to talk to him. Over these days, our imaginary life in our lakeside love nest has lost its intensity. Since I know so little about him, I lack the specifics to power my fairy tale. How the folds of the pillow mark his face when he first wakes, the way he holds his coffee cup at breakfast, the little things that make him happy, that piss him off.
Rounding the corner of our building, I find him leaning against one of the abstract alabaster salmon at the foot of the stairs. The entrance’s Egyptian-looking pylon towers over him, its faux hieroglyphic flora and fauna incised in the grey concrete.
“Hey,” Paul says, a smile spreading from ear to ear.
I am dumbstruck, as bewitched as I’d been the first time I saw him.
“You okay?”
Paul reaches over, cups his hand around my forearm and I jolt, as if suddenly shaken awake.
“I got my wires crossed today,” he says. “Forgot Ray hired that old lady model. The one with the saggy bazookas.”
Suzy brushes past me, hurries up the stairs, glances back at Paul and I when she reaches the top landing.
“Was thinking,” Paul says, “too pretty to be inside. Why don’t you skip class? Maybe the two of us could take a walk.” He runs a thumb along the ridgeline under his right eye. “You know, brother to brother.”
At this reference, another jolt—an electric sensation coursing up my spine, my mind empty like this azure sky. Though I still haven’t managed to say a word, I find myself following him around the corner to Victory Square, the Dominion Building’s vermilion top aglow there in the afternoon sun. Heading left, we pass the stately white columns of Waterfront Station. On its port side, we dash through the tidal flats, the snowy peak of Grouse Mountain smiling at us from across the harbour.
On a rocky shoal edging the water, Paul and I stretch out on our coats, the sun warming us through our sweaters. I think again of the fantastical versions of ourselves, lovestruck at our cabin, and am saddened by how distant we are from that connection. I struggle for some way to cover the gap. “I don’t see how you stay still for so long. In the poses,” I say, retreading ground.
“Weight-bearing gestures, no outstretched arms. Let everything relax on your frame.”
“I guess I mean, mentally, with everyone staring.”
“I don’t mind being looked at,” he says, a slight breeze luffing his brown hair. “With some people, I quite like it.” He directs his smile to me, searching my eyes for a moment, then glancing away. “And it gives me time to think about what I’m doing with my life.”
What he’s doing, he says, is taking a year off after high school, grubstaked by his father, a prosperous Winnipeg businessman. The posing thing is for fun, a way to meet interesting people—something he tells me he could never do in Winnipeg.
I outline my particulars. Our family’s clapboard bungalow, our small hometown. My dotty mom out in her garden reciting Romantic poetry. My dad in the village pool singing songs from his childhood in Ireland, his whole body stretched out on the surface, supported by the warm water from the hot springs.
Paul hurls a rock into the choppy water. And in the silence that follows, I sense a shift take place between us, some rough correspondence over our small-town childhoods, our loving, if somewhat tiresome, families.
At last, he turns a toothy smile on me and he says, “You feel like coming over Friday night? My housemates and I are throwing a big party.”
* * *
I’m standing on the third-floor landing of a rambling old house near the university, hanging onto a newel post for dear life, as kids race up and down the staircase. It took ten minutes for me to work my way here through the crowd, past peeling wallpaper, its grapevine print water stained and yellowed with age.
When I finally reach what the kids call Paul’s Pad—a closet, really, off a dark hall in the former servants’ quarters—I find it crammed with people huddled under a cloud of tobacco and marijuana smoke. Paul leaps up when he catches sight of me, tumbles over the rows of outstretched legs and falls into my arms.
“Oh, man, it’s so good to see you.” The side of Paul’s face nuzzles my cheek as he shouts in my ear over the music. “I wasn’t sure you’d come.”
I hadn’t been certain myself. I promised Suzy I’d take her to La Doce Vita at the Majestic. Though I knew her to be a Fellini freak, when I broke the news about not being able to make it Friday night, she didn’t seem especially disappointed.
“Oh man, it’s so great to see you.” He’s talking fast, his head swiveling to take in each passerby. When he focuses again on me, I notice his pupils are dilated. “I’m so fucked up,” he says, grabbing my hand. “Come on, let’s check out the dancing.”
He starts down the oval staircase, trailing me behind him. With the warmth of his touch, a wave of lust, affection, a fierce loyalty sweeps over me. At the same time, I experience an urge to jerk my hand away, though none of the kids lounging on the steps, talking, pay us any mind.
We fairly skip down the stairs toward the thumping bass and brass, Chubby Checker crooning “Let’s Twist Again” over the doo-wop backup singers. In the living room, the few pieces of furniture have been shoved to the periphery and in the low ruddy light kids are swinging their arms and legs side-to-side in the dance that has been such a craze. Paul starts jumping about, crashing into one kid, whose drink erupts from a plastic cup to drench some girl in a leather top.
I prop myself against the wall. The sight of this sweaty, smiling mass of kids, moving as one to this popular song, makes me feel even more the outlier. I’m about to shrink off into some dark corner and light a cigarette when Paul again seizes my hand.
“Come on. Let’s dance.”
I freeze, wrench my hand away. “But I don’t have anybody to…”
Paul leans in, so as he speaks his breath flutters across the side of my face. “It’s not like that anymore, Ted. You can dance with yourself. Or everyone.” He squeezes my hand and winks. “You can even dance with me.”
Propelling me by the shoulders ahead of him, we plow into the crush of swaying kids. Someone gives me a joint and I pass it on without toking up. I experience a rush of happiness, even so. There in the muddle of bumping and grinding, Paul is turning more and more to nudge me with his hips.
Some guys lurking at the edge of the dancers call his name, reach over to shake his hand. A few girls rush in, frame his face in their fingers and pepper him with kisses. They spin him around and he is swallowed in the crowd.
My eyes sweep the dance floor for Paul, then skid to a stop on Suzy, across the room dancing with another girl. Just then the music slows, the twinkling chords of Patsy Cline’s “Crazy.” People pair off, even a couple of guys dancing together. And Suzy, she’s folded in that girl’s arms, snogging her openly in the dim, red light.
Something inside me short circuits and, without thinking, I bolt. In a downstairs bedroom, I claw like a junkyard dog through the pile of coats. I plunge through the crowd into the hallway. A beer in both hands, Paul jabbers to a girl dressed in a tennis outfit, who looks flushed, as if she’d just come from the court.
I’m swept outside by kids rushing to light up cigarettes. Why am I sprinting now from something I’ve always dreamed of? Those young guys dancing together. And Suzy kissing the girl? It should be a relief. We can finally drop the whole dating routine.
Paul shouts my name through the open front door. But I’m already halfway down the street, ramming my arms into my jacket. Running where? To the beach, yes. Only three blocks. Down these twisty residential streets: English Bay.
There, lights from a cargo ship that hulks in the shadows smear a red line onto the dark water. I collapse on a patch of grass on the narrow shoreline and peel off my socks. Sink my toes into the sand, both braced and repelled by its clamminess.
The sound of shoes striking the pavement. Paul—panting, grappling into his winter coat. “What the fuck, Ted? Why’d you run away?”
I am speechless, my thoughts still in shambles. Shaking now from the cold, I cram my feet back into my shoes, zip up my coat and grip it closed at the collar.
Paul shrugs out of his jacket and drapes it across my shoulders, even though it leaves him only in a light sweater. Lowering himself beside me, he threads a pack of cigarettes out of a coat pocket and jostles out a hand-rolled joint. Its ends twisted into tight tips like withered white flower blossoms.
“I never…” I say, shaking my head.
“Go on, you’ll like it.”
He strikes a wooden match on his jeans and I toke up, endeavoring not to act like the novice, attempting to suppress a cough. I’m dizzy and elated, feeling the gap between us closing, as if we’re inching toward the love I’ve fantasized.
“You still high?” I say.
“Completely baked.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t then.” I lick my fingers and am about to pinch out the joint.
“Oh, no you don’t. Hand that over, mister. Tonight, we’re celebrating.”
“Celebrating what?”
He seizes my coat collar, tugs me toward him, his face looming suddenly out of the dark. Lips locking onto mine, he’s sucking my tongue into his mouth, then biting my lips. He forces me backwards onto the sand, hauls my hands above my head and clasps them by the wrists, while grinding his hips into mine.
I twist my head sideways to catch a breath. On the deck of that nearby cargo ship, fireflies bob up and down: men smoking cigarettes, staving off their boredom, I guess. The image of Paul and I at that lake house flashes in my mind. Our bed, where we sometimes argue but are never really out of sync. Our lovemaking and tears. Naked, straining ever closer in the advancing morning light.
“Stop,” I say, forcing Paul off me and sidling out from under him onto the sand. “Slow down. You’re wasted, Paul. I don’t want… not like this.”
“This is exactly what you want,” he says, his voice a low growl, thick with desire. Reaching over, he cups my cock. It is painfully hard, straining against the dark blue cloth of my jeans. My eyes close, my shoulders slacken and I let out a sigh. At once, he pounces on me again, smashing his mouth onto mine. Then he shrugs off our jackets, jerks my sweater over my head, and blunders with the buttons of my shirt.
A line of kids files down the trail behind us, heading for the surf. They’re laughing loudly, while passing around a small pipe.
I push Paul away.
“Come on,” he says. His voice sounds so childlike, I begin to relent. For I understand behind this rough behavior are our hormones, the urgency of being nineteen, the power of these youthful first connections.
“I just want to get my rocks off,” he says.
At this, my sympathy for him vanishes. All the guys he’s probably been with line up before me now. He fucking them, getting fucked by them. But that image turns me on as well. My noble aspirations drain from me under his kisses.
“Okay,” I say, “but not here.”
“My room then.”
“It’s probably full of passed out kids.”
“Your place.” He murmurs in my ear.
“The landlady watches us like a hawk. Against the rules.”
“Fuck the rules.” He’s pawing open my shirt now, his fingernails scratching parallel red lines down my chest.
I think of Ray. His studio. Friday nights, he’s usually there painting.
The stoners on the beach now are belting some high-spirited melody, while skipping hand-in-hand down the hardpacked sand between us and the water. One of them interrupts her singing to scowl over at Paul and me grappling in the weeds. “Jeezze, morons,” she says, “get a fucking room.”
Startled, Paul tumbles off me onto his side. I scramble out from under him and spring to my feet. “Bug off,” I say to the girl. Her face mocking a churlish ten-year-old, she curtsies then scurries back to the singers. I return my attention to Paul, who is seated, eyes fixed on the lights of the cargo ship across the Bay.
“Look, let’s wait,” I say. “When you’re not loaded. When we know each other better. We don’t have to do this now.”
“All we have is now, Ted,” Paul says, struggling back into his coat, his voice sad, no longer pleading.
* * *
After the weekend visiting my parents, Monday I race up the front steps at school and rush into Ray’s class. He is stationed behind his desk in the otherwise empty room. I hear the rustle of clothes as Paul undresses behind the partition.
“Look, I’m sorry about what happened.” I figure there’s no need to be cagey around Ray, who has probably already gotten an earful.
“Ted,” Ray says.
“It’s just all so new to me, Paul. But I’m in. Whatever you want.”
Ray jolts to his feet, thrusting back his chair, the metal guides squealing on the concrete floor. “Ted, please stop.”
From around the corner of the privacy screen steps the old woman Ray sometimes employs, her breasts ballooning the fluffy blue bathrobe.
“Paul is in Whistler, Ted. Working at a ski resort for the rest of the season.”
The model squints and scowls. Out of the robe’s pocket, she retrieves the portable radio she sometimes listens to during long poses, plugs in her earphones and sequesters herself behind the screen.
“He’s a free spirit, Ted. A bit rough. I thought you were aware of that.”
My face burns, flushing not from anger, but embarrassment. I slump onto a stool behind one of the easels. Letting my drawing pad drop to the floor, I crumple forward, my head buried in my palms. Ray crosses the room and positions himself beside me, his hand hovering midair for a moment before lighting on my shoulder.
“You’ll get over this, darling. We all have.”
In my mind, I glimpse the love nest on the lake near my hometown. It is collapsing onto itself now, bursting into flame. I view its blackened and burnt-out shell.
“Look, here’s the plan,” Ray says, giving my shoulder a squeeze. “No arguments. You’ll come to dinner tonight. The three of us will have a good cry. We’ll drink a couple of bottles of Randall’s pricey cabernet, get drunk and howl at the moon. If it’s not out, we’ll use our imaginations. We have that. Don’t we, darling?”
As light streams through the tall windows onto the forest of listing easels, I lift my hand across my chest and rest it on his. Ray regards the privacy screen uneasily, the students streaming past the open doorway. He caresses my shoulder once more, then returns to his desk.
I hop from the stool, my tennies slapping the concrete floor. Retrieving my drawing pad, I clip it to the easel, slip the case of conté from my pack, let out a sigh, then wait for Suzy and the rest of my classmates to troop in.