Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club Read Free Page A

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    I walked back inside and decided to make a potato soup. I cleaned some potatoes, cubed them, cubed some onions, threw them into a pot and added some salt, some pepper, some garlic, chopped up some cilantro. A poor man’s soup. Not that I was poor, but making the soup reminded me of my mother. I loved her. And loved her soup.
    I walked into the bedroom and watched Javier sleep. He was having a bad dream. He was shaking and muttering, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying. I sat on the bed and placed my hand on his chest. “It’s only a dream,” I whispered. He woke up, startled. There was that look of fear in his eyes. And then that look, that look of letting go.
    “It’s okay,” I said.
    I climbed into bed with him. He leaned into me. It was getting dark. I loved and hated winter. I felt his breath on my neck, felt the words he whispered, “Tell me something about you I don’t know.”
    So I told him. About how my two older brothers had died in a car accident and how they’d left behind seven children between them. Seven children and two grieving, broken-hearted women who’d adored them. About how my father had suffered for years from depression and high blood pressure and Parkinson’s and diabetes and how he had suffered a stroke that left him brain dead and how I’d taken him off the machine that kept himbreathing. About the woman I’d loved and hurt and left. About the man who’d loved me, about how I’d never had the courage to return his love. About a young woman I’d met in London who had eyes as blue as a summer sky and how I’d lost myself in them when I imagined myself to be a man but was nothing more than a stupid adolescent. About how I picked onions long before I was old enough to have a legal job and dreamed of becoming something more than a worker with a bent back. About the scar I had across my chest because a barbed wire fence had ripped my skin as if it were no more than a piece of paper when I was a careless boy.
    I didn’t even notice my own tears.
    I felt his hand on my face. “Tears taste like the ocean. Did you know that?”
    “Sometimes I think the ocean is made of tears.”
    He put his finger on my lips. “Your life is better than your novels.”
    I took his hand and stared into his palm. I sat up on the bed. “My novels are filled with beautiful men. The kind of men that I will never be.”
    “You’re not sad. You’re just hurt.”
    “We’re all hurt.”
    And then, there we were, undressing each other. He ran his finger on my scar and kissed it. I stared at his perfect body. But I was most in love with his face, with his eyes, with that look of want that transcended the cheap desires of the body. I led him to the shower. I washed his back, his hair, his feet, his legs. “Let me,” he said. That was hard for me—to let him wash me. To let him touch me. But I let him.
    8.
    We listened to Miles Davis, ate potato soup and drank wine. I wondered if it could be like this for us. For me and him. For Javier and Juan Carlos.I watched him eat. I wondered if a man like me could ever fill the kind of hunger that lived inside of him.
    “The soup is good,” he said.
    “It’s nothing complicated.”
    “It takes a lifetime to get good at something this simple.”
    “That’s true. But only when it comes to food.”
    He ran his hand through my hair.
    I took his hand and kissed it. “What happened to your mother?”
    “How do you know something happened to her?”
    “You said you didn’t have anyone.”
    He looked away. “She was killed.”
    “How?”
    He poured himself another glass of wine. “She was killed,” he said again. “We never found her body. She was a social worker. She was beautiful, my mother. She had me when she was seventeen. She was always young and fierce and so incredibly alive. All the men would always look at her. She became something of an activist. The transvestites made her into one, I think. Not that I blamed her for fighting. And then