Gloomily, he watched as Michael breathed deep, focussed, and brought a foot against the inside of the other thigh. At some point he surprised himself by saying, "I guess you think I'm a real shithead."
Maybe it was the yoga, the calm it induced, but Michael was not the least bit ruffled by the comment. He said softly, "I don't for the life of me get what she sees in you."
In some unconscious parody of Michael's exercise, Ziggy folded up his thick unlimber legs.
"I mean," said Michael, his green eyes straight ahead, just the slightest waver in the limb that held his weight, "Angelina has a spark. Life. Warmth. She's romantic."
"I useta be romantic," Ziggy said.
His only answer was a skeptical silence, which, now that he'd taken the leap and started talking, he found extremely frustrating.
"I was," he went on. "Flowers. Candy. Little presents, the whole nine yards. Then . . . Michael, can I ask you something? Y'ever like girls?"
The gay guy was switching poses, kicking a leg behind him, keeping it parallel to his flattened back. "In high school, sure. That's what people did back then. Boys liked girls, girls liked boys. It was cute."
"You had dates? Caught some sex maybe?"
"Dates, sure. Sex, enough to know my heart wasn't in it."
"Exactly!" Ziggy said. "Exactly. 'Cause you were going through the motions, it wasn't who you were."
Michael dropped to his knees, spread his elbows on the floor, and lifted himself into a headstand, feet arched, toes pointed at the ceiling. Upside down, he said, "That's fair."
"Well that's what it's like for me," said Ziggy. "Since they changed my name, my face, since I can't go back to where I'm from. Before . . . look, I'm not saying I was a good person, but I knew who I was, I knew—"
Ziggy really thought that he was being honest, even bravely open. So he was surprised when Michael, still standing on his head, his inverted eyes oblique and haunting like something out of Egypt, cut him off. "Ziggy," he said, "I think that's all a load of bullshit, just a big excuse."
Ziggy spluttered, found no words. Over the course of several seconds, a feeling of affront grudgingly gave way to the secret thrill, the relief, of being caught.
"I mean," continued Michael, his mouth moving disconcertingly above his nose, "what I understand, you used to be a little cheese hoping to become a big cheese. You had to be afraid of stronger guys and you had to be afraid of cops. Tell me what's so different now?"
"What's different—" Ziggy started, but then could only rearrange his cramping legs and gesture in the air.
"You know what's different?" Michael said. "What's different is that now it's just you and Angelina, period. She's not the boss's daughter. She's not the girl from the neighborhood whose family is in your business. There is no neighborhood. There's you and there's her, and the only question that matters is, come what may, do you want to be with her."
"It's not that simple," Ziggy said, squirming in his chair.
"It is that simple," said Michael, his face flushed with conviction or from standing on his head so long. "The rest is crap."
"Her father wants to kill me. That's crap?"
Michael dropped his legs, assumed a graceful jacknife. "Fathers always wanna kill the boyfriend. It's, you know, a dick thing, universal. Okay, maybe not as much as this ... Look, run away. Elope. Wait it out, pick your moment, and run."
The idea pressed Ziggy back against his chair. "Run where? Mexico? Cuba? Live under a tree till we fuckin' starve to death?"
"Imagination, Ziggy. You'll figure something out."
Ziggy pursed his altered lips, shook his tight- skinned head. "Wouldn't be fair t'Angelina."
"More crap," said Michael. "More excuses. No one knows what's good for someone else. No one knows what's fair."
Ziggy said, "It's fair I bring her into this fuckin' mess I've made outa my life?"
"She seems to think it can be fixed."
"She's stubborner than I am."
Michael pancaked down, then rolled over and sat back against his heels. Blood was draining from his head but his face was still a ruddy pink, sparse freckles showing through the tan. He said, "You're pretty fucking stubborn yourself. You've made up your mind it's hopeless."
Ziggy looked off at a corner of the room, saw wisps of cobweb swaying slowly in the small breeze from the ceiling fan. "No," he said softly. "That's where you're wrong. I don't believe it's hopeless."
Michael sat there and said nothing.
"I act like it's hopeless," Ziggy went on. "Force a habit. Maybe I wish it was hopeless, it'd make things easier."