It had been one of those days when he had not been able to deny himself any longer. It had started early, just after breakfast. By just after lunch, he had been in a state of high piss off. Everybody else had a movement to represent them. Even perverts had a movement to represent them. Look at the way the queers had become the New Big Thing, complete with their own talk shows and television shows and magazines. He was doing nothing wrong, and there was nothing wrong with what he was. He felt no differently than any other man, except in this sense: he didn’t deny it as well, and he refused to compromise his integrity to fit into the groove of the bourgeoisie. Besides, what he did was better than what they did because what they did was furtive and sly. He had never been either of those things.
He had lunch at a hole-in-the-wall diner near his office, and when he was done he couldn’t make himself go back and sit behind a desk. He called Elyse and told her he wouldn’t be back for two more hours. He had a dental emergency, and the dentist was able to fit him right in. Then he’d left the diner and gone walking in the one direction he knew he could find relief.
One of the things he hated about the situation he was in was the neighborhoods he had to go to to get some relief. When he was younger, those neighborhoods tended to be gay ones. Since the priest pedophilia scandals, though, the “gay community”—for God’s sake, when did queers get a community?—had been less complaisant about allowing “them” to operate in their midst, and the places had moved on to more standard red-light districts. “Adult” districts, they called them now, to stress as far as possible the assumption that no-body would come down there who wasn’t over the age of eighteen. Dennis would have been surprised if most of the hookers were over fifteen, and the cops knew it, too. Everybody knew that the girls who walked the streets up here were barely into high school, if they bothered to go to school at all. Here was the real perversion, even worse than the perversion of being a queer. These guys who went for the teenaged girls were not looking for relationships. They didn’t even think about imparting wisdom or understanding. They only wanted to use those very young bodies in any way that would get them off, and then they wanted to disappear. Dennis Ledeski would have given his life not to have to disappear.
He knew where he was going because he had been there before. There was a house, just on the edge of the district, the kind of place where in other neighborhoods crack cocaine would be sold. This house was much better taken care of, and it had a tattoo parlor on the ground floor. You could go up there and pretend you were getting a tattoo and then slip into the back when the time was right. If something went wrong, you had an excuse for being where you were.
On the day Dennis proposed to Jillie, he went up the front steps of this house half convinced that he would never marry. Marriage was not only a trap—that much had been proved in a million movies and in every novel he had ever been given to read in college literature courses—but it was second best. No man could feel for a woman what he felt for a boy, a perfect boy, the one who would carry his legacy into the future as no biological son ever could. This was something the Greeks had known, too. Women were for breeding. You slept with them to get descendants. You couldn’t talk to them. You couldn’t tell them your deepest hopes and fears. You couldn’t discuss the important things, like philosophy and art. Women were half men, and the half that was missing was the soul. Nikos Kazantzakis had said it: “I can never get used to the Western notion that women have souls.”
On that day Dennis had a boy, a boy he’d seen half a dozen times, one he thought would have everything he needed in a boy. He wasn’t gay, and the boy wasn’t either. He didn’t want to have sex with grown men. He had been thinking for weeks that what he ought to do was find some way to have the boy come to live with him. The best thing would have been to be able to adopt, but he knew better than to try it. The next best thing would have been to find a woman with a son of the right age who understood, as he did, the importance of that son’s relationship with an older man. He had actually come across a few women like that, but they’d all been black. He couldn’t see himself with a black protegee. There was too much of a difference in background and expectations.
Now, though, he had this boy, and this boy was waiting for him because he always was. He had no idea where the boy came from. He didn’t know who his people were, or if they even existed anymore. He only knew the boy was here, in the rooms on the floors above the tattoo parlor every time he came.