The Metropolis Case_ A Novel - Matthew Gallaway [71]
He pretended to debate the issue, going back and forth like this for the rest of the week, until to his alleged shock he found himself at the appointed time outside the appointed coffee shop, where he spotted in a booth a man who more or less fit the description of the ad. He decided to leave, but as he walked past the doorway, his legs made a right turn and carried him through, and the guy nodded at him in a casual but conspiratorial way to confirm that he was indeed the object of Martin’s epistolary desire. Though momentarily disconcerted, Martin managed to reach out and shake the man’s hand as he slid into the other side of the booth, as if they were old friends.
Between his signal to the waitress for a cup of coffee and a comment on the weather, he examined “Boris” and decided that he was not bad-looking, Russian or Polish maybe, with the stained fingers of a working-class man and a wiry build that appealed to Martin. “I’m a little nervous,” he confessed. “I’ve never really done this before.”
“Girlfriend?”
“Engaged—you?”
Boris raised his left hand to display a wedding ring. “Married.”
“Does she know?” Martin whispered.
“Are you fucking crazy?”
“Just paranoid. So where is she right now?” Martin thought of Amanda at work at Louise Bourgeois’s studio in Brooklyn.
“Out of town.” Boris frowned. “So you really haven’t ever done this?”
“No,” Martin responded a little aggressively, as if the idea were insulting. “You?”
Boris stirred his coffee. “So you want to come over?”
Martin started to say sorry, he didn’t but once again was vetoed by something else that directed him to pause for a few seconds while he looked at the last rays of daylight reflecting off the back of a spoon on his saucer. “Okay, sure,” he said, as if accepting an invitation to go play a game of checkers.
They soon arrived in the apartment, a fifth-floor walk-up on Tenth Street. Breathless from both anticipation and the ascent, Martin followed Boris through a rusty kitchen and a cluttered bedroom to a living room, this last space illuminated by a dusty twilight that filtered through a pair of large windows, which judging from the coagulated paint around the frames, were sealed shut. Boris wordlessly began to unbutton his shirt, prompting Martin to do the same, which led to a rather somber removal of pants and underwear, this last item providing a stark reminder of what exactly they were doing here and led them to approach each other, tentatively at first and then with the overwrought ferocity of bad actors as they fell groping onto a brown corduroy couch.
Even as it happened, Martin felt perplexed by what had driven him here and wished that he could fly back to his apartment, purged of all desire except for Amanda. He remembered getting wasted in college, those magical nights when, two-thirds of the way through a party, at say 2:00 A.M., he would arrive at a perfectly lambent moment of intoxication and desire, when the world became plastic and surreal as he fell into the arms of his teammates, sliding down their sturdy, muscular frames to his knees as they caressed his thirsty lips with the end of the beer tap. At the time, there was nothing he wanted more than to cross that unspoken line, yet now that it was happening, exactly as he had fantasized, he could barely stop from laughing at the disappointment he felt, and was consoled only by the growing certainty that he would never do this again. But determined to go through with it, he felt a saliva-moistened