The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [91]
Owen slid closer to him and leaned toward him and took his face in two hands and kissed him, a proper and unambiguous kiss but also a soft and careful one, as he tilted the damaged part of his face away. Affenlight realized in what was as close to an epiphanic flash as he’d ever dared to come that there were many ways of living that had never been named or tried. The chapel bells tolled a long slow song of six o’clock. His tongue, Owen’s tongue, two tongues. At least he wasn’t quite so old that he didn’t have lips to kiss. He thought of Whitman’s adhesion: the liking of like for like. Although he and Owen were not much alike and in a way kissing Owen was much like kissing a woman, you could close your eyes and find the same softness, same brush of noses, same thick wetness of the inner walls of cheeks. Except with women Affenlight leaned forward, and now he leaned back.
Owen slipped out of his sweater, which was seafoam green, soft to the touch, with a hole at one elbow. Affenlight traced his fingertips up and down Owen’s bare arm below his T-shirt. The two of them kissed again, kept kissing, and it was, still, surprisingly like what happened between a man and a woman—although, thought Affenlight, perhaps I’m the only person in the world naive enough to be surprised by this—and then Owen cupped one hand over the bulge that had appeared in the inseam of Affenlight’s herringbone slacks. Affenlight flinched. Owen stopped and looked at him. “Are you okay?”
Was he okay? He was nervous, certainly. Even frightened. If Owen were a girl, Affenlight would have been worried about the politics, the ethics, the power relations of the situation—that was largely why it had never happened with a girl—but here there was too much else to worry about, and it was clear where the power lay: with Owen. Affenlight felt dazed, vertiginous. But he’d come this far, and there seemed no reason to stop right here. He nodded.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
Owen undid the slacks’ clasp and unzipped the zipper, dainty silver tooth by dainty silver tooth, with a guileful smile on his face, a very complex smile, mischievous and beatific and maybe a tiny bit malicious, a beautiful smooth-skinned person—did he ever even shave?—who would not necessarily grow old but would certainly someday die. He used his hands to work out the intricacies of slacks and undershorts and brought Affenlight out into the open—Affenlight, strange synecdoche!—and bent and kissed him on the tip of the penis in a womanly way. And kissed for a few more seconds before looking up. “I guess I can’t,” he said, lifting his head, the smile categorizable now, rueful and tender and a little wry. He tapped a finger against his injured jaw. “I can barely open my mouth.”
“That’s okay.” Affenlight said, and meant it, though his voice sounded strange and hoarse. He picked Owen’s sweater off the couch and began to fold it, matching sleeve to sleeve. He pinched the medial crease and draped the sweater over his forearm, all the while feeling a swell of delight at the fastidiousness of this delay, so different from the frenzied garment-rending of cinematic lovers. He’d long ago learned that he found a twinge of erotic joy in the act of buttoning a girlfriend’s jacket, zipping her sweater to the chin, bundling her up against the northern cold of Westish, New Haven, Cambridge, Westish again. After folding the sweater neatly he placed it on the warped wooden floorboards between Owen’s two-toned shoes, which looked like the saddle shoes of old, and, with the limberness of a man no older than forty, the soundly thrumming heart of seventeen, slid down from his chair and knelt upon it, a hand on each of Owen’s knees. Kneeling, whatever the circumstances, could hardly fail to remind him, however