Surrender, Dorothy Read Free Page A

these thoughts about him.
    Shawn tore the packet open with his teeth, then stood up and led Adam to the bedroom. “Wait. Wait. No, ” Adam had said on the way, because his knee-jerk reaction to sex was always “No.” But now there was no reason for “No.” It wasn’t as though he was a teenager with an impending curfew, frantically making out withsomeone in the azaleas beside his house, while nearby his parents lay in bed as innocent as children, lulled by the gentle tedium of The Tonight Show. With Shawn, who was a complete stranger, there was the question of safety, of HIV status, but he held a condom in his hand like a peace offering. “Are you, are you … you know …,” Adam whispered a little later in bed, cringing at his own question.
    “Am I what?”
    “Healthy,” said Adam. “Clean. Negative.”
    “Well, to be honest, I don’t know,” Shawn said.
    “You don’t know?” said Adam, incredulous—he who had already been tested several times.
    “I’m not ready to take the test,” said Shawn. “The idea of it freaks me out. The abolute black or white quality. The yes or no.” He paused. “But look,” he added, “this will be totally safe. I’ve got this little latex raincoat here.” So Adam closed his eyes and let himself fall back against the bed.
    That night, seconds after Shawn was gone, Adam had called Sara up and babbled details to her: the line of hair running down Shawn’s stomach like an arrow leading the eye to its destination; the way Adam had felt frightened at the idea of having sex in daylight, where his own body and all its pores and imperfections would be on display, but how Shawn had made him feel at ease; and how, after the sex was through and Adam’s heart was still beating as fast as a hamster’s, the two men had lain on the bed and played Twenty Questions, which Adam had played during every long car ride of his childhood. Lying in bed with a lover after sex was almost like a long car ride. Times stood still; you didn’t know how long you would be there, inert bodies stuck together in this small space, limbs bumping, but you didn’t really care.
    This had all happened only a few weeks earlier, and somehow it had led to Adam inviting Shawn out to the beach house in Springs for the first weekend of August. He would be arriving in a few hours.
    Now Adam and Sara finished their lunch and climbed back into her mother’s Toyota, which was already hot from sitting in a parking lot in the sun. They drove a few miles more until Sara noticed a stand by the side of the road with a sign that read “PIES.” Sara thought they ought to buy one for their landlady, Mrs. Moyles, and so they did. She hopped out and returned with a fresh raspberry pie with a latticework crust. As they drove on toward the house, the pie box slid around on the seat between them, and Adam steadied it with his hand, feeling an intense swell of contentment.
    He could have driven with Sara forever; this was so much better than almost everything else in his life, certainly better than the writing that lately seemed to go nowhere. He knew that the follow-up to his first success would be closely watched. Everyone would want to know if he could do it again; could he make those matinee audiences weep with laughter? Oh, he thought, probably not. This summer he would finish his second play, and in the fall he would show it to Melville Wolf, his producer. “Make it funny,” Mel had warned. “Make it really, really funny. Make me bite my tongue, it’s so funny. Make the inside of my mouth bleed.”
    Adam constantly dwelled on the burden of his early success, and on the futility of even vaguely approximating the experience again. He had seen a TV talk show recently that featured a panel of ex—child stars; clips of their early work were shown, and in each case it was extremely painful to observe the long-gone purity of skin, silkiness of hair, and open-faced hopefulness of those children, and then have to compare