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It’s hot as balls when he starts, but you don’t get to choose when the epiphany drops. Or maybe some people do, people with less heart and more dignity than Ed, but he’s not those guys, he’s Ed.
Might take off next month, do a long road trip, he’d said into his bowl of red lentil soup. His mother froze, crusty bread paused mid-dunk. Butter leaked across the hot surface of her soup. His leg jiggled under the table. To California. Overdue.
Take the train, you ding-dong, she’d replied, whacking him with her napkin. Better for the world—and a real vacation. Who raised you?
She seemed utterly unfazed by his threat to disappear for a month, but that was Ma. Even if she’d miss the hell out of him, it would do him good, and she knew it.
Send me postcards. Or else.
So, the Lakeshore Limited rattles the guilt right out of him.
Good choice, the train. The hum and the sway, the solitude, the views. The vibrations that smooth his anxiety, like shaking an Etch A Sketch. He thought he’d have trouble sleeping, but the motion and the white noise have him out in seconds, every night. Small favors. Big ones, actually.
Ed decamps his roomette at dawn, does a chilly wander of Cleveland’s waterfront, waits for the city to open its eyes. Commuters stream by in sensible shoes with steaming coffees, tourist families stand in clusters looking up breakfast places on their phones. He does a quick lap of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame when it opens, a crystal pyramid building that reminds him of the Louvre if the Louvre was proximal to a place that sold a special hot dog with French fries on it.
It’s not his sort of place, normally, but it’s the kind of cheesy tourist shit Ma would do if she was still able to travel for stupid clumsy whims; he endures it so he can tell her about it later. It keeps his mind off things until he realizes he’s staring at a bright red blousy shirt with a frilly neckline. All around him: sequins, textures, the kind of bright jewel tones that Stede rarely wore, but that brought him to life when he did.
He picks up a postcard in the gift shop. Never too late to learn to shred, he writes on the backside of the photo of a cluster of guitars in M&M colors. He comes within a hair’s breadth of dropping it into the mailbox at the corner before he realizes he addressed the fucking thing to one Stede “jewel tones” Bonnet.
He shreds it, bins it. Take two.
Thought this leg would be easy. Hasn’t spent much time up here—he’s saving the old haunts for farther down the line. But the clothes were a trap. Or maybe it’s all still too goddamn fresh.
—
Milwaukee’s Midwestness hits him right between the eyes. He’s not in any place long enough to do more than the most basic tourist nonsense, but that’s the mood he’s in anyway. A little fluff, a little sugar. A carousel of dumb American brain candy—this time, beer and sausages and staring at the bay.
The sausage is truly something to write home about, so he decides to. He thumbs through a rack and finds a postcard he can’t resist, but also can’t bring himself to send to his actual mother: a pile of sausages with text reading You’re the Bun for Me.
But when he checks out, the dang bun card is there in his hand. He tucks it in his notebook, tries to summon some hope that he’ll have someone to give it to someday. Someone who’ll laugh exactly the way Stede would.
After Milwaukee, everything outside his roomette on the Empire Builder changes. Everything becomes sort of theme park campy. There’s a giant dinosaur statue standing guard in the parking lot of a gas station—tasteless maybe, but not as tasteless as the forty-foot cheese man. The man is made of cheese, he carries a cheese wheel, he leans on another. He is a self-cannibalizing cheese man—but that, Ed can relate to. Point is, America has an invisible line past which the country itself seems to have a midlife crisis (a midwest crisis?).
The train whizzes alongside a hundred or so motorcycles on the highway, mostly men his age plus a few women, all decked out in denim and leather, hooting and hollering at the train. It’s the middle of the day on a weekday, Ed thinks. Do they have jobs? Did Riding A Motorcycle become a profession while he wasn’t paying attention? But then, a Sturgis Rally flag flaps from the back of the bike of someone toward the rear, flagpole like it’s coming straight out of his ass.
Of course. The midlife crisis convention. Just chasing him down the track, like Buster Keaton on that little handcar thing.
Sure, fine, something like that was probably happening—for Ed, for Stede, too. Didn’t feel fair to tie a bow on it, like that was a tidy explanation. Felt reductive. A copout, almost. The Crisis can push you in a direction, maybe, open your stupid fucking heart to shit it would, under tamer conditions, keep safely shut out. But you don’t get to blame The Crisis for everything.
At some point, everything is just the choices you make. The Crisis can tell you to buy the bike, but blowing up your life at the annual Black Hills cocaine orgy? That’s on you, brother.
Had Ed made a good choice, or blown up his life? Maybe he’ll know by the return trip.
When the Empire Builder pivots north, the bikes fade away like a receding swarm of wasps, westward toward their destiny. He finds himself sincerely hoping they’re proud of their choices a week from now.
Hours later, he hops off for the night in Grand Forks, a place that seems to toe the line between solitude and loneliness with deadly precision. He’s got sea legs, but for trains, he thinks, wandering the chilly, empty streets in search of a beer and a bite. He picks a spot with outdoor seating, sips something dark that rhymes with the cooler temperature. Contemplates how fuckin’ big everything is out here. Makes him feel totally untethered, like there’s no apartment behind him, no bills, no failed relationships. Like he could disappear into smoke.
Ed, you should know I’m—I’m married. I mean it isn’t—hasn’t been in a long time, but—
I don’t care.
Ed had made plenty of choices, is the thing. Big ones.
—
He stands in downtown Spokane at dawn after a day and a half of the trusty Empire Builder zooming him through some of the most beautiful landscapes he’s ever seen in this godforsaken country. He stares at a thundering waterfall reflecting the apricot and plum of the sunrise, smack in the middle of town, and all his senses come online. He vows, right then, not to let the earnestness of the west coast scare him away this time. Learn something from it, maybe, even. Let it bite into him a little.
Stede is earnest. Was. That was the thing that knocked him on his ass—not a whiff of that east coast distance about him, nary a lick of cheap cynicism. Made Ed think about the people he surrounded himself with, his habit of hanging out with dead-eyed pragmatists who’d never caught a snowflake on their tongues. Stede did. Had done that. First time they hung out, actually. A freak run-in at the friend-of-a-friend birthday party he shouldn’t have even fucking been at, when his dimply smile and swishy wrist stopped Ed dead in his tracks, made him do a double, a triple, a fuckin’ septouple take.
You’re the fuckin’ lunatic buying out our entire website, Iz had said.
The miniature ship, first. The pointless thing Ed was sure would never sell. Then, later that night, a deluge: the tiny Shakespeare sets, three tiny Chippendale chairs, two perfect minuature oriental rugs. Ed had gone through later, checked him out, learned everything—like his addess. You know, Down Bad shit he wouldn’t admit to under threat of torture.
He'd learn later that the fancy minis were for his daughter's dollhouse. But the ship? That was all Stede's.
You’re Blackbeard, Stede had said, ignoring Iz, awe bordering on real fear on his face, and Ed was toast.
From there it was earnestness all the way down to his Italian leather shoes. Like the earnestness radiated out from him, infecting anyone in a three-foot radius. And Ed was always in that goddamn radius. Couldn’t drag himself out of it.
And then he dragged himself too far into it—Happy Hour run long, a cold brick wall and coats pulled tight. He assumed it was a typical rich guy marriage: she fucks her tennis instructor, he fucks the pool boy (or in this case, the friend-in-law), and they both politely ignore each other’s trifles in the grand upper crust tradition. But of course Ed had to go and get feelings—like, real ones, real hard ones, a throbbing feel-on—and suddenly the fact of a wife was like the fact of a body in the basement: ignore it at your peril, wind up on Dateline. A single moment of icy clarity had sung like a bell in his head: Ed had cried during sex, out of nowhere, just fell right out of him with his jizz. I want this forever, he whispered, sobbing. And sure, Stede had held him, did his duty, pet his hair. But after that? Nothing. No questions. Not a goddamn word, like he either wasn’t listening or didn’t care. Screaming loud silence behind him, slashed by the sound of his long, satisfying piss. Ed had known then, clear as the sound of his piss hitting the porcelain, that this was no pool boy situation.
Ed was the other woman.
So he’d done the honorable thing: he’d cut and fucking run. Well, first he’d spent two days eating ice cream like a kid with their tonsils out, but then he’d run straight out of his house and onto the train, where he could get some space, forget about Stede and his freckles and his sweet words—couldn’t be as serious as he’d been telling himself, surely.
Well, that was now three thousand scenic, breathtaking miles ago and yet! Here he is, thinking about Stede. Earnestly.
—
Seattle’s got earnestness to spare, too, but it’s okay. The plan was to take his time on the west coast, sort of meander down, so he forces himself to do that. Today, he’ll do some tourist shit for Ma, tomorrow will be a freebie. At Elliott Bay, he buys a Thich Nhat Hanh book about how to not want to kill yourself while doing the dishes and then immediately leaves it on the monorail on his way to look at the space needle—so much for zen. Space Needle's cool, so is the big waterfront market, and the Chihuly museum makes him cry real tears because you know who would love this weird shit?
He sends a Chihuly postcard to Ma, one with a photo of some crazy thing that looks like tentacles, orange and horrible and alive. It’s a flower, probably, but some things can be both—he learned that this year. Anyway, life’s weird: a flower and a kraken probably share half their DNA or something insane. But that’s about Stede again.
Something about the earnestness in the ether makes him realize: he’s not even mad at him. If anyone was dragging them into it, it was Ed. Too eager to convince them both it would be fine, they could handle it. He wanted it so bad he didn’t even get that he'd been lying to himself.
He’s mad at himself, really. That’s new.
He eats a donut so good it momentarily halts his tailspin. How can he stay mad at someone who bought him a donut so good? He stands there, licking sugar off his fingers, moaning. The water sparkles in the sinking sun and the Ferris wheel projects a rainbow onto the earth. A gull screams and swoops. He’s alive.
—
He decides he could probably live forever in his tiny roomette on the Coast Starlight down to Portland. The meal is fine, and he’s got a little bottle of whiskey in his bag. Peaky mountains, fertile valleys, water a color blue he almost forgot existed. When the city comes barreling into view, he feels like a little kid on his first train ever, bouncing in his seat.
Even the air smells different. Cleaner, greener, something.
God, but Stede would love Portland. Earnest weirdo capital of the goddamn world.
He stands there drinking coffee on the corner while a few hundred cyclists whiz by in various states of undress, music blaring, woos wooed, hands in the air. “Naked bike ride,” a fellow gawker informs him, lifting his own coffee in an approximation of cheers.
He smiles. Nope—scratch that, he’s tearing up.
Three thousand lives and miles ago, in his cramped one-bedroom flat, the first time Stede had been there, the third time they’d had sex. It was the middle of the day, they’d blown through breakfast (literally) and Ed’s stomach was growling for lunch.
Where do the balls go?
Excuse me?
You know, when you're— Stede gestured across the bedroom to Ed’s bike, leaning against the bay windows.
You’ve never ridden a bike?
Didn’t have that kind of childhood, I fear.
Okay but surely you’ve been naked, mate.
Mostly avoided it until I met you, if we’re being totally honest, he’d blushed.
Stede, he’d laughed kindly, climbing into his lap, I could teach you how to ride a bike.
His brow stayed furrowed. Fixated. But where do they go? I can’t picture it.
You lunatic, they obviously go—
Ed couldn’t picture it either, which, funny thing, because they were his, and he was sort of protective of them. Where DID the balls go? He hopped out of bed stark naked, tiptoed around the bed on the cold hardwood, and climbed into the saddle, leaning a hand against the wall for support.
Ow. Fuckin’ pedals hurt my feet, Jesus.
But look! There they are, just sitting there. Fascinating, Stede said, sitting on the edge of the unmade bed, also naked, studying Ed’s balls like a rare bird through binoculars.
And see this is the bitch of it. That was new, that was revelatory. It was everything missing from every dour, mean, manipulative asshole in Ed’s black book. The laughing with their dicks out, the strange tangents, the whimsy. Stede’s refusal to be bested by all the things he didn’t already know in this world.
When would Ed get THAT again? Can’t wait another forty-mumble years.
He dashes off a postcard to Ma, a cutesy little hand-drawn thing with a bike and a bridge and a campfire, et cetera.Just saw fifty dicks on bikes, wish you were here. Actually wait, I don’t, that would make it weird. Love you.
—
The sun rises in Chico and he rises with it in his tiny, moving bed. On the east coast, he lives for leaf freak season—pumpkin spice is great, shut up—but the endless varietals of green out here really get him in the guts. Green so big, so vast, punctuated by little bursts of purple flowers like someone tripped and spilled them. Track-side foliage with leaves so big they could be some herbivorous dinosaur’s lunch. The jagged mountains that look punched up from the landscape, like the earth lost a fight with god.
He changes his shirt, shuffles out to breakfast. California’s where this stupid journey really starts—but he’s been trying not to think about that.
What hasn’t been said about San Francisco? All of it true, but nothing that captures it totally. Nothing that encompasses its contradictions, its nuances, its annoyances. A mix of that west coast earnestness and perpetual gold rush striving, how the people there sincerely believe they could exist with nothing, but deserve everything.
He knows the lay a bit, but it’s been a while. Nothing to see downtown—some things never change—so he makes his way through an ocean of scooters and weird bikes up and west. He pretends he doesn’t know he’s en route to Jackie’z until he gets there. It’s the only bar that doesn’t suck now, thanks to the nostalgia factory churning out tie-dye trinkets into the surrounding theme park full of teenagers eye-rolling at their vacationing parents that no one cares about the hippies anymore.
“The fuck you doin’ out here, Teach,” she says, ever nonplussed, ever bored of his bullshit. “Breakup?”
Made of knives, Jackie is.
“No comment.”
She feeds him a shot with his beer. The avocado toast he ate two hours ago stands no chance against it. It’s fun until the liquor gets him talking. Gets him confessing.
“You didn’t even fuckin’ talk to him?”
“What was I supposed to say, Jax? That I’m the plot catalyst in some hacky midcentury novel about how the center can’t hold, and so I had to go off into fuckin’ nature to find some worthless metaphysical truth?” He pauses, stunned. “Shit, that’s exactly what happened, isn’t it?”
“No, dipshit, I mean why didn’t you tell him you loved him?”
“And what the hell good would that have done,” he says, downing the rest of his beer.
“Mighta spurred him into action.”
“His empty marriage wasn’t enough to do that?”
“Maybe not with two kids, baby. This is real life, not some Hallmark movie. Sounds like you’re avoiding the hard shit again, but that’s just me.”
He hugs her for three full minutes, and manages not to cry until he’s out the door.
It takes the better part of an hour to get out to the beach, two buses plus some walking, but Muni’s mostly empty out there on a weekday, and anyway, it’s nice to get to blend in with the locals. He gives directions to the bridge to an older couple, and then directions to the Castro to a man with a thick German accent and a foldout map. He listens to the squeal and the whoosh of the air brakes as Golden Gate Park flies by.
And then there it is, big old bridge presiding over the goddamn Pacific, which is foggy and deserted except for some screeching gulls, a few fog-horning barges way out, and a dozen or so naked weirdos.
In his dizzying youth, these naked weirdos used to be older naked weirdos. But Ed’s their age now. His ballsack is just as wrinkly, his bum just as saggy.
He’s grateful to them, now, the old naked gay weirdos. Back then, he didn’t understand why you’d want to drop trow with an imperfect body and strut around pretending you didn’t give a fuck. Now he gets it: they really don’t give a fuck. They did it for the first time and some door opened inside them and they vowed never to close it again. You don’t like my wrinkly ballsack? Go to the normo beach, loser.
It makes him think of—yeah, okay, shut up. But Stede would get it too, he would love these old men, he would happily chat with them about their kids and their niche hobbies while stark, screaming naked on this freezing, foggy beach because he was just so goddamn delighted to be amongst proper maniacs, to be free, to be accepted, and that’s why Ed loves him.
And—oh god. He just admitted to Jackie that he loves him. He loves him.
—
The hum of the Coast Starlight wraps itself around him. He sighs, watches it roll by. The train flirts with the coast, then demurs, ducking back into the deserts and fields that Steinbeck couldn’t shut up about. It’s eleven human hours—an insane amount of time for a country like this, but it’s good for him. California’s its own thing—it doesn’t belong to him anymore. Whole state’s calling him a coward for running. There’s an impulse to rush through it, sorry, was just there a blink, but the balls-slow train reminds him to stay in it. That’s what he’s here for, to sit with the contradictions, the discomfort, the constant sense he’s out of place and everyone can tell.
He breathes in through his nose and out through his mouth and resents that after five rounds it sort of works. He relaxes into the seat. Melts into it, really. It’s warm, and the scenery is so beautiful it’s actually narcotic. He blinks, drifts, daydreams, dreams. Stede, pointing at plants, naming them as they passed. Stede, back in the sleeper car from his last leg, coming back from dinner, a little drunk, eager but never desperate, always in control, Ed dozing in the little bed, Don’t wake up, Edward, sweetheart, I’ll have you just like this—
“Are you in the business?” asks a voice full of viola sounds and caramel, and sure, Ed’s hair looks killer at this ambient humidity level, but that particular pick-up line should have died in the 90s with floppy discs and Tamagotchis.
He looks like he’s in the business, himself. Hair Ken-doll coiffed, perfect two-day stubble, tie loosened past the open collar button, blonde, tall, slim, Botox, nose job, Xanax eyes. A wife, probably, mistress too. The REALLY good pills in a little mint tin. Ed would be an occasional treat, on his birthday or after a promotion.
Ed blinks and blinks, can’t stop looking at him. Then he realizes: this guy is Stede, but put through a rock tumbler for a while.
This is what he thought he was getting, at the beginning. The smooth planes of an empty affair, no sharp edges to cut himself on. But that’s not who Stede was, not at all. Beneath the fancy pomade and the tailored suits, he’s all rough edges, all delicious grit.
LA is a ways off. Far enough, certainly, to join the Rail Club, or whatever the Mile-High Club for trains is called.
“Nah. But I can sequence your genome, if that gets you going,” Ed says, just to fuck with him.
He laughs. Nary a crinkle around those blue eyes. “Face like that? And you’ve gotta be, what,” he looks Ed up and down, “six foot? You could definitely be in the business.”
“Porno, maybe,” Ed says, and he laughs again.
“What brings you out here?”
A year ago, he wouldn’t have hesitated. He’d have leaned into his space, murmured Funny, I’m looking for a handsome stranger, actually.
“Scattering my dad’s ashes,” he says, and the dude fucks right off, barely a polite excuse in his wake.
“Maybe I should be in the business,” Ed mutters with an eye roll.
Finally in LA, he leaves a big tip for his early dinner, composed of vegetables he can only dream about back east and a glass of cheap white wine that hits every single spot. Ambling toward Los Feliz, he can’t stop thinking about the guy on the train.
Had he expected to go back to that? Hadn’t really considered the after at all. It was like as soon as Stede showed up, the after didn’t exist. Like there wasn’t meant to be an after.
He knocks.
Yeah, probably should have called first, but he was never gonna do that, so—
“EDDIE!” Mary launches herself into him. “Annie’s gonna flip, get in here.”
And she does. In a more respectable city, her scream would have earned a cop’s flashlight tapping on the door, courtesy of her least fun neighbor. But they’re a stone’s throw from the Scientology building, so maybe anything sorta fuckin’ goes.
Anne cracks a red blend that’s to die for, in that it will probably kill him—red turns him gushy, puddley. She pours it into fancy vintage green glass goblets with embossed leaves on the sides. Mary rolls the joints in record time. California weed is no joke, he remembers, resting his in a massive vintage amber ashtray that could happily have been the weapon in an episode of Murder, She Wrote. The couches are old and sunken like Ed’s face these days, but those two haven’t changed a bit. Anne’s cleaning her fingernails with a focus so intense Ed almost doesn’t worry about the pocket knife she’s using to do it, and Mary’s in a storytelling mood, lighting one off the back of the other, cracking him up. Weed always made her talkative and studious.
The subject of just what the hell he’s doing here comes up, because of course it does. He’s swimming through consciousness now, thanks to the joint, viscera floating loose from his bones.
“I thought I was angry,” he says, “but I think I just miss him?”
“Teach,” Mary says, serious. “You never miss anybody. Ever.”
“Yeah. Soft in my old age.”
“Don’t do that,” she says. “Not this time.”
“You can’t tell me what to do.”
“I’m the only one who gets to tell you what to do.” She smirks. “Remember?”
Conditions of Ed’s surrender. Of her forgiveness. What would a visit be without a total reprise? Once more from the top.
“The look on your face.” Anne giggles, a burst of motion and energy. They’re opposite types of stoners, which always makes this interesting. “I’ll never forget it.”
Neither will Ed. Mary’s scary on a lazy Sunday morning—she’s like staring at a goddamn meteor when you’ve been missing for two days with her paramour.
But Anne’s giggles are contagious, and it really is funny, in retrospect. The Incident.
“That photo of us,” he says through laughter, “with your hand in the cake, absolute batshit—”
“Framed in the hallway,” Anne says, skipping off to grab it.
“Must we,” Mary deadpans, but Ed can hear the corner of her smirk.
And there it is, Ed with his head thrown back in laughter, shoulder-length hair, dizzying twenties, cheap white button down smeared with buttercream, and Annie, gorgeous and psychotic to his left, JUST MARRIED sash, whole hand in the supermarket cake on the wobbly four-top, grabbing a literal fistful, the moment before she shoved it into her gaping maw perfectly captured by some tourist who generously offered to send the print to them in the mail after she’d had it developed—and in fact did so, alongside a beautiful note wishing them and their nuptials eternal happiness. In the bottom left of the photo, a stray hand, blonde hair—
“Fuckin’ Elvis,” Anne says. “That fraud.”
“We really thought—”
“God, can you imagine—”
“We were so fuckin’ stupid, Teach.”
“No, we were so drunk,” he corrects. “Fuck.”
He kisses the glass in the frame, kisses Anne right on her mouth, climbs into Mary’s lap and kisses her all over while she squirms and bats him. His old, shitty couch groans as he flops back onto it and relights his joint.
“You fuckin’ idiots,” Mary says. “Like every Elvis impersonator in LAS FUCKIN’ VEGAS is just wandering around looking for shotgun weddings to officiate.”
“Okay, well, excuse me,” Anne chokes, “for being misled by every film and sitcom ever made.”
“I blame Jack. His idea. And he fuckin’ lives there, ought to have known better.” Ed pulls, exhales. “Anyway, it got you serious, didn’t it, Mary? Ought to thank me. Know what? You’re welcome.”
Mary throws her lighter at him, but she can’t hold back the grin.
Ever been married, Ed? Stede, out of the clear blue sky, strolling back toward Ed’s place.
Almost. Sort of. For about eight hours.
Until Anne and Ed came limping back, bruised inside and out, dehydrated to the point of delirium. Mary had demanded to see the proof, the certificate. Which was when they realized they’d never signed a thing, just gave a few hundred bucks to some grifter in a Halloween costume. Anne said Oh, thank god, and collapsed onto Mary’s shoulder, sobbing hungover apologies, and Ed realized he was actually, somehow, still very drunk.
They’re making out now, so Ed tunes out for a bit. God, but wouldn’t that be fun? Stede in some kind of wide, white silk trousers, Ed in leather. Fake church, bad Elvis, neon, endless parties banging down the door. Laughter bouncing off rafters, real paperwork this time, an all-you-can-eat buffet with optional karaoke after. A wink at the institution, but the commitment as serious as the desert heat.
For real. Just once.
“I’d marry him, is the thing?” As he realizes he’s said it out loud, he also realizes he’s crying. Damn California weed got him again. They stop what they’re doing and hurl themselves into a cuddle pile on top of him, stroking and soothing him, letting him cry it out.
A crack like the big one, loud enough to make three hearts stop—but it’s only the shitty couch collapsing. Anne pees herself a little, darts for the bathroom, and Mary—finally—breaks open laughing, face pressed to her knees, shaking.
“You’re still the only man I’d let marry my wife,” she gasps.
He thought they’d never live that down. But here they are. Maybe anything’s possible.
—
Leaving California is like climbing out of a dream, but then it always is. Reality rattles its way back into him as the Sunset Limited picks up speed. Settling in his roomette, he realizes he sort of missed the sway and churn of the universe, the sense of motion putting distance between him and his stubborn midlife stuckness. Like prying himself off the sidewalk with a spatula. He waves goodbye to Anne and Mary, eats his dinner, and he’s out in minutes.
When he wakes, the world is red as the devil’s ass.
The southwest isn’t a place he’s spent a lot of time, but now he’s here, he can tell that was a mistake. Tucson is cool. After a lazy lap of downtown, he gets a burrito big as his forearm that he will fantasize about back east, and has to slow down halfway through so he can properly savor it. He’s behind on sending postcards to Ma, so he scribbles out the three he’s been holding but hasn’t mailed, hopes she doesn’t mind the postmark.
He pauses. He picked up two in San Francisco, one with a cutesy line drawing of some cool Victorians, and another from the same press with a line drawing of a cable car that says Ride me.
He could send it. Hah hah, a funny joke from a friend. He fills in the address, daring himself. All he can think to write is, You can ride them, but they don’t go anywhere you need to be, which is true of cable cars, and also of—well.
He tucks it in the back of his notebook, hoping he’ll find it funny someday. He drops the cards to Ma in a corner box. As the sun sets, the temperature drops by thirty degrees. It’s like he can feel the desert out there, pulsing, waiting to devour him.
He shivers, pulls his jacket tight. Time to head back to the train.
—
It’s a day and a half on the good old Sunset Limited. It’s funny out here, how obvious it is when a state becomes another state. Not so much on the east coast. As New Mexico faded into the gray expanse of west Texas, an honest-to-god tumbleweed rolled past. Texas was four states of its own, but then, suddenly, dense green, water, swamp air, and he knew: Louisiana.
Six hours to New Orleans. He wanders to the dining car, stretching his legs, wanting to see some other people.
“Oh my god your hair,” someone says to him. A woman, tasteful fillers, perfect makeup. She’s sitting with two men Ed clocks as gay, who are sipping what look like mimosas and filming each other laughing. The phone doing the filming whips to Ed.
“Davey, you’re live,” the woman giggles.
“Oh, sorry,” Davey says, pointing the camera down, “do you mind?”
“It’s good, mate.”
Ed takes the table diagonally across from them and pretends to read the novel he picked up at Antigone in Tucson. He orders a sandwich and a glass of wine. He learns, eavesdropping, that they’re hair and makeup artists for a band playing a gig in Nola tomorrow. Big deal folks, namedropping so many celebrities he’s amazed the waitstaff doesn’t trip, and holy shit, he’s never wanted Stede around so bad. He can picture Stede sidling right up, dishing, asking for haircare and styling tips. Ed would too, if he were there. Alone, they’ll think he wants something from them. Together, they’re just strangers on a train, passing time with idle gossip, like humanity has done since it climbed out of the apes.
No more avoiding it, not after California. He can picture him everywhere. Every fucking corner of his life. Wednesday night TV bingeings, Sunday morning farm market coffee sippings, annoying cousin birthday party breeze-throughs, stiff-necked work parties, wild-haired adventures to nowhere and back.
That’s what’s so goddamn annoying. Ed’s life was all empty spaces, all ready to be filled by him. His life must have had some empty spaces, too, or else Ed wouldn’t have spent so much time with him. But Ed didn’t fit into those spaces, did he?
New Orleans is gorgeous, as ever. Bourbon Street isn’t his speed these days, but it’s still fun to wander, fun to watch everyone be much drunker than he’d probably be able to get if he tried. He compliments a stray queen in Blanche Dubois drag, and she calls him gorgeous—really popping that first syllable—drags him into a bar, buys him a shot. He climbs up to a second floor and out onto the balcony. He plants himself on a chair behind a row of twinkle lights, and watches the night unfold, accompanied by some warm thing with absinthe in it. Someone’s crying already, it’s only 8PM. A couple on the corner is gesturing, fighting. Bourbon street chews everyone up and spits them right out. But what else is new?
He kills a long morning with too much coffee and too many beignets. Bumming around St. Louis Cathedral, people watching, he overhears a thirties-ish woman in front of him gushing to her husband or boyfriend or whoever that “it looks just like Cinderella’s Castle,” and Ed thinks, no, Cinderella’s Castle looks just like THIS, and maybe that’s the difference between him now and when he was younger and stupider: now he knows what’s real and what’s artifice and imitation, what’s stone and mortar weathered through time, and what’s styrofoam, fiberglass, and lightweight fuckin’ cement.
It hits him then that that’s what stings so bad about this.
Stede’s real. What happened was real. Ed knows it.
Did Stede know it?
—
He leaves the city of New Orleans on The City of New Orleans, which seems confusing for the sake of it. As the train races north, he watches summer turn to fall in real time before his eyes. By the time he steps off the train, it’s jacket weather.
It’s also full dark. He thought he’d go straight to his hotel, but Beale Street is alive as ever. Even if it’s just Bourbon Street with more barbecue, it still tugs at him. Dripping with neon, but still with secret dark corners. He decides on a nightcap, but everything is choked, even on a weekday. People are dancing on bartops, loud music pours from every doorway.
Down an alley toward his room, he finds … a bar, but in the open, a little unobtrusive strip of stools opposite a few tables, in what might be a small, square park in another city. He orders a beer—just one, really—and as he settles on his stool to savor it, the lights come up on a tiny gazebo in the corner. A voice sets “Ain’t No Sunshine” dripping down his spine. When the chords kick in he nearly melts down off his stool. He cranes to see, and it’s three men in glasses and Hawaiian shirts who look like they ought to have no business with the blues—but that’s Memphis, always a surprise. He stays for the whole set, thinking about slow dancing. Thinking about sunshine. Thinking about home.
Chicago’s next, and that’s—well. A whole thing.
—
He really tries, with the deep dish. You can’t fuckin’ eat it with your hands, can’t fold it. They turned the most perfect on-the-go food into a sit-down experience. They fucked the ratios. They let the humble tomato leave home without its pants on, a bitter and messy goop that half winds up on the plate. Lunatics.
Chicago’s cool, though. It’s also cold. He digs around in the bottom of his bag and pulls out the hoodie he brought, the one that was advertised as THE LAST HOODIE YOU WILL EVER BUY, that was, in reality, maybe the fifth-to-last hoodie he ever bought. It’s a good hoodie, though, solid. Hood sticks out perfectly under his leather jacket, sleeves hit exactly where they aren’t annoying. But then, Stede called it becoming once, and so maybe it was the best one.
Zoomed right by Chicago on his pass out west. This chat’s gonna cut deep, he knows it. Convinced himself he’d fare better on the back end, after seeing some friends, taking some time to space out, listening to his stubborn heart thud away inside his brittle ribs. Thought he’d be okay, by now.
He’s technically okay, in the same way a tomato is technically a fruit.
He makes his way to the Blue Line, Wicker Park bound. On the way, he pops into Open Books and grabs a card for Ma—a little letterpress line drawing of the city with the text Someone in Chicago Loves You. He tucks it in his bag to fill out later, and steps on the train with a big breath.
“You used to do this shit to me all the time.”
The swear jars him. Fang’s a quiet one, an easy one. Rarely barbed, which that, uhh, for sure was.
“Really?”
Fang picks up the ball with the dog ball grabber stick thing, hurls the ball across the dog park. Ed’s never seen a dog move so goddamn fast as Fang’s little ginger menace. Didn’t know they could.
“Yeah, mate! You’re a blast, you’re a good time. But then you turn into a pill bug, and then, well. No more Eddie.”
“Really?”
Fang levels him with a glare. “Ask me ‘really’ again.”
This is why he saved this shit for last. Fang’s all heart and depth, ten water signs in a trench coat (how many water signs are there?). That maddening combination of tender feelings, with his own lane so goddamn clear you could eat off it. And every time he’s come to Fang about something real, Ed’s learned something about himself. Bastard.
“Sorry,” he grins. “Okay, can you give me a for-instance?”
“Which one? Whenever shit got hard for you, you’d disappear. Every breakup, every bad work thing. You’re like a cat with a broken leg. But you never stop to think how it makes anyone else feel.”
“How … how does it make you feel?”
“Hurt my fuckin’ feelings, man! Made me not want to go to you with my hard shit, like when my dog died? Couldn’t count on you, not if I didn’t know whether you were gonna evade me for a week, and then grovel about it—who would want to bother with you like that? Feeling guilty for needing shit? Defeats the purpose. Whole point of friends is to go through shit together. When you know someone long enough, the care’s gotta be reciprocal, man, or it’s nothing.”
Okay, fine, fair. Jesus.
“I mean … I still cared about you?”
“People can’t read your mind, Eddie. They can’t.”
“I just. Like.” God, it’s so frustrating. He sighs, he cracks his neck. He watches Fang hurl that damn ball three more times. “Like. Okay, maybe it’s a stupid question, but I’m asking. What … am I supposed to do? How is screaming and yelling about how mad I am gonna make it go away?”
“Eddie,” Fang says, clipping the leash to the dog’s collar, “that’s the problem right there. You think you have to make it go away. It doesn’t. Once you feel it, it’s yours. And you get to sit with it. But it’s a hell of a lot less lonely to ask other people to sit with it with you.”
The dog nuzzles Fang’s leg. The way Fang pets his ears makes Ed jealous.
“And this guy, Ed,” Fang says, “I mean, what would you think, if you were him?”
Nothing Ed wants him to think, that’s for sure.
He walks Fang home, hugs him for like. Twenty minutes. Thanks him. Apologizes. Makes promises he’s actually gonna keep this time.
On the L back to his hotel, he stares at the byzantine schedule he scribbled in his notebook with a sigh. He crosses out a stop, decisively. Then two more. He recalculates.
It’s time to talk it out. Even if he's scared. Can’t live on a train forever. And, even if he fucks it up, a day will pass, and a day will pass, and a day will pass, and when he collects enough days passing, they will magically become time passing, and then maybe he’ll be healing.
Before he can change his mind, he fills out the postcard to Ma.
Back on Thursday, earlier than expected. Can’t wait to see you. Xo, Ed. Leaves it at the desk at his hotel with a smile and a thanks.
—
Maybe it’s just being back on the east coast, but everything past Chicago feels like the denouement. Once he'd made his mind up, couldn't wait to be home. Couldn't wait to see Ma.
Bizarrely, can’t wait to have the conversation he doesn’t want to have.
He barely experiences Philadelphia. Goes through the motions, orders one with Whiz. He dashes a postcard off to Ma, even though he’ll probably get there before it. He hangs around the bell for a little because it’s always fun to watch hundreds of tourists act like disappointed size queens in real time. Logan Square is like fireworks on the ground, the way fall is showing off.
Normally he loves Philadelphia and all its weird contradictions. The meanness and the kindness, the three-hundred-year-old brick buildings with Sephoras jammed inside. Especially this time of year, when it’s not an armpit of swamp heat.
But his mind is on the Acela, the seven hours between him and finally putting all this shit to bed, once he collapses into his seat.
Tomorrow morning. Finally.
He’ll talk to him. He’ll be honest. Regardless how it goes, maybe someday, he’ll be able to hold his head high about it.
—
An hour out from boston, he texts Ma. Call you this weekend
Oh! Thought you had another week. Safe rest of your travels.
Postcard must not have made it. Weird.
Funny how it all catches up to you at once. By that last hour, his ass aches, his back is stiff, he can’t wait to put his ass flat on the goddamn hardwood in the center of his apartment and get back the inch he lost in height from all this sitting and rattling.
He wants to kiss the floor at South Station, but stops himself, if only just. His bag weighs four thousand pounds. His knee is disintegrating. He’s starving and exhausted and dreading the thing that happens tomorrow, which is a thing that will definitely happen tomorrow, as soon as he works himself up to deciding it’s time for tomorrow’s thing to happen.
He crushes his cig at the curb as his Lyft driver turns the music up and speeds off. He hoists his bag for the actual last time, feels his neck twinge from carrying it on the same side for the past three weeks. No matter: what awaits him is a hot shower, a big fuckin’ salad and a side of fries from the good place at the corner, a bed that doesn’t move.
As he turns onto the path, a figure shoots to standing by his door.
“Jesus, fuck—STEDE?”
“Ed? Oh thank god. I guessed your arrival time based on the timetables and postmark date and—well, anyway, it was a shot in the dark, I was beginning to get worried your neighbors might call the police.”
“Mate—” There is a tiny part of him that dares to be charmed. He tries to snuff it out by crushing his eyeballs with his thumb and forefinger. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“The postcard?”
From Cleveland? Ed tore that one up—
“From Chicago?”
The postcard. From Chicago. The postcard from Chicago that said, Somebody in Chicago loves you. The one that he accidentally sent to Stede Bonnet instead of his mother. Seven conflicting feelings assault him. He doesn’t know which to listen to.
Stede Bonnet waits, fidgeting. Ed strides past him to unlock the door, buying time with his eyes down.
“That wasn’t supposed to go to you.”
“But it had my name. And my address.”
“Okay well, it was like, a fuckin’ drunk dial, but like. With a pen, okay?”
Stede’s voice goes sappy. “Ed, you drunk dialed me? That’s so—”
“Look, it’s a good thing you’re here”—which, again, why WAS he here? Why does he seem so nervous?—“I got some shit to get off my chest,” Ed says, getting the dang key in the lock and FINALLY stepping inside to drop his bag, shed his jacket and hoodie, take off his miserable boots.
Stede steps in behind him, closing his door, helpfully clicking on the lamp he knows Ed prefers at night to the overhead monstrosity. “Oh,” he says, dejected. “Okay. Because—well. It’s just that I had some things I felt I ought to say too, and I think maybe given everything, perhaps I should go first?”
Ed’s body tries to whip around to look at him, but his fingers are stubbornly focused on untangling the knot in his boot lace. He nearly keels over right in his foyer, saving himself with a hand on his wobbly coatrack—small miracles.
The knot is—yeah it’s permanent. With all his might, he uses the toe of the untied boot as a shoehorn to yank his foot out past the knot, nearly dislocating his ankle in the process and stumbling three steps backward. He rights himself with what remains of his dignity, smoothes his shirt, and turns to Stede, finally, who is—
Radiant. Smiling like he’s about to cry. Fondness oozes from him.
No. It can’t be, because—
“I wanted to apologize. For the last time, when you—well. You deserved more comfort and assurance than I was able to give, Ed. I was afraid to make promises to you I wouldn’t keep. You know how it was, my marriage.”
WAS? Ed’s eyes dart to the left hand that anxiously clutches his right—ring finger, tan line, naked.
“There’d been others before you, but never anyone … like you. So I made those promises inside my heart, instead.”
Ed looks at him properly, now. For the first time. Maybe ever. Really lets himself look. His clothes are brighter, his posture is straighter, his eyes are damp with feeling. He is nervous, clearly—fidgeting hands, shifting feet.
And Ed is hopeless. Hopeless. Massive structural failures inside his heart and guts, barriers down, feelings leaking everywhere.
“But,” Ed says, eyes jumping all over Stede’s starched shirt, his tight jeans, his swooped hair, his empty goddamn finger, “but I had a speech I was gonna give, I—I went on this whole spiritual journey, and you just—I mean you …”
“Do you want to give it? Your speech?”
“I—fucking—yes! Yes I do!”
“Well then. I want to listen.”
Stede assumes what can only be described as a listening posture. Ed steadies himself. Closes his eyes a beat, tries to locate the part of him that had something to say, and—no. Nope. Not a word. Bunch of bats flying around drunk up there. But then he opens his eyes and Stede is waiting patiently, easy smile, big kind eyes with pain at the edges—Stede, who just upended a cushy life, a family, for Ed. Who gambled his sparkling clean criminal record on a train showing up when it was supposed to so he could pace around on Ed’s doorstep and not have to wait an extra second to tell him he’s sorry—and everyone on Ed’s stupid little spiritual journey becomes correct all at once. Ed WAS avoiding the hard shit, he WAS downplaying it, he DID run away when it got too big, and this man—and here’s the really annoying part—knew it, and waited for him anyway.
“I love you.”
“I know,” Stede says, the fucking bastard, but his smile says it back. “I knew when you cried.” He steps closer. “And I knew you deserved better.” Shaking, he puts a tentative palm on Ed’s shoulder above his heart. “So I’m trying to be better. I’m sorry. And I love you too.”
Three weeks of thinking about him every moment he could spare it, and with no warning whatsoever he’s inches away, smelling sweet and looking gorgeous and saying everything Ed’s needed to hear for months. Even if the neighbors had called the cops, and they showed up right now and busted through Ed’s door, it wouldn’t stop him kissing Stede.
And the kiss. It’s different, now that he’s letting himself feel it. Now that he knows he feels it too. Now, it’s like that fuckin’ ride at the carnival that pushes you down faster than gravity only to wing you right back up to the top to do it again. Now, he doesn’t have to be scared of freefall.
“I’m disgusting,” Ed says, foreheads resting. “Been stewing in my juices since Philadelphia this morning.”
“I can go, if that’s—”
“No,” Ed whines. It’s all too much, it’s been too much and he’s too raw. “Supposed to want me anyway. Supposed to want me even if I’m covered in Whiz.”
“Is that—”
“Cheese.”
“Okay, well. I would? I think? Just want you to be comfortable.”
Ed doesn’t ask—he’s beyond asking, beyond normal human communication—just pulls him into the bathroom, strips Stede out of his fancy clothes while Stede laughs and tries to help as Ed keeps swatting his hands away.
His shower is a goddamn dream after a month of pitiful hard water trickles and days splashing his pits in sinks not meant for the purpose. Good enough he doesn’t even pretend to share, just stands there in the deluge, moaning, with his dick half hard and tears running down his face. Stede, laughing, turns him, kneads at his shoulders.
“Feeling better?”
“God, you have no idea.”
“Some idea, I think,” he says low into Ed’s shoulder.
What starts as an earnest attempt to wash each other goes quickly off course into heavy groping. When Ed steps on the washcloth and almost goes skidding across the tub, he finally lets go of Stede long enough to kill the tap.
“Should I get ready for—“
“Yes please,” Stede says brightly, pink high on his cheeks.
When it’s done, he slips giggling across the hardwood in wet bare feet, no towel, no robe. Stede’s there on the bed, low light, golden, erect, happy. It’s not a rush, they left the rushing back in the before, when it was always going to end. It’s eager, but the kind that’s silly and free. They did what they had to do to earn this moment, to live in it fully.
Later, from his perch atop Stede’s cock, back arched, wet hair tickling his spine, thighs bitten by manicured fingernails, the hot rush of sensation reaches his heart and triggers that thing, that weird kind of feeling he’d never felt before, the one that sent him running to the other ocean. It’s everything at once, the way white is composed of all the other colors. It’s love wrapped around pain and grief and fear and loneliness and relief all at once—a goddamn ravioli of emotion.
“Fuck. Gonna cry again.”
Stede only grips him tighter. Looks right at him, as if to say he isn’t scared at all—he feels it too.
“I'm okay with forever,” Stede says, because of course he heard Ed say that.
After, naked, starving while the takeout takes its time arriving, Ed says, “We should go to a nude beach sometime.”
“Oh? Never been.”
“Went to one in San Francisco. Weird scene, but I like it.”
He laughs. “I’d do it with you. I’d do anything with you, probably.”
“When I was there, I couldn’t stop thinking about you. It’s mostly men, you know, our age, some older. Kept thinking about your eyes popping out of your head, you tearing your clothes in half and sprinting for the water—not in a sex way, like, you know, just because they’re all so fuckin’ happy. Like they’ve been waiting their whole lives to be seen that way. To be free that way.”
“Edward,” he says, and Ed realizes that for the first time in his presence, Stede is crying. “That sounds … beautiful. Can we go? Really?”
“Course,” he says, giving his hand a squeeze. “Promise.”