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Whizzer Brown believes in many things. He believes in the power of physique. He keeps his waist trimmed slim, gut never not tucked into another pair of tailored dress pants, sleeves snug around arms kept busy with baseball and racquetball and sex. He likes the way people look at him. Likes strutting into a bar with the music pulsating like a teenage boy's heartbeat and seeing heads turn. God isn't real, but this is. Sex is.
He believes in sex, of course, in the undeniable weight of what pleasure feels like on a man's tongue, thigh, prick, what gets his pulse ticking like it's making up for what years of his life are hanging in the balance when he fucks another man. That danger, clear and present, presented as a fuck you, God, or maybe fuck you, Reagan, or most ironically as a gift of life, of living.
He believes in living moment by moment, precariously straddling -- as he does best -- the balance between risk and routine, never staying long enough for a pattern to form that pushes him over the edge into predictability. Predictability is not sexy or powerful. Predictability has gotten men like him killed. So he stays unpredictable, levies physique and sex against those who challenge this not-pattern and dares them to step up to the plate, bat further than he can run to reach. They only trust him as far as they can throw him; he does not need their trust. He needs nothing, he searches for nothing but somebody who can match his pace for even the shallowest of breaths before he pushes them back under the water, lobs the ball right back at their heads, falls over the precipice of promise and doesn't bother looking back. (What was that story, about sodomy and salt and looking back? He thinks if New York were to burn as a city of queers he'd like to know if he'd ever fucked a fallen angel, first.)
He believes in himself. Or at least his ability to protect, deflect, obstruct, defend. The offensive is for those whose fortresses are weak: he is not a knight searching for honour. He does not need to conquer new lands. He holds his own, slides into those of others and works his way up. No encounter leaves him worse for it. Every mistake is calculated; he's smarter than he looks, and quicker than he needs to be. If ever he is vulnerable it is to bait, to coax, to mock. If ever he is hurt...but nobody knows when he's hurt. Not even Marvin, with his smart, knowing eyes, with that clever, knowing mouth, with that all-assuming stare that threatens to cave Whizzer's whole world in.
He believes in self-preservation.
He believes in jumping boat when the boat is sinking.
He doesn't believe in love, not the promises of straight couples kissing in the rain on television or the sweet nothings on the mouths of those he takes to bed. Not Marvin's carefully chosen words, questions and answers posed to unmoor him. Whizzer is an anchored ship. Whizzer is a rowboat that knows no shore. Whizzer is not Trina: he does not hope the cheetah will change its stripes. He does not analyse the weight behind a kiss, a throwaway line, the way Marvin looks when he sleeps. He commits them to memory instead: what touch, taste, lingering looks he gets.
"Do you love me?" Marvin asks. Marvin always asks. Marvin never asks the right questions. Whizzer cracks an eye open from where he was pretending to be asleep and smiles, but more at the fact he was caught. More at the fact he meant to be caught. He is hook and snare all at once.
"Depends on the day," he says, easily.
Marvin's face crumples. Marvin's face always crumples. Marvin never hears the right answers. Whizzer rolls on his side and goes back to sleep, and Marvin doesn't. He knows this. He can't understand why it unsettles him so deeply.
("Do you love me?" Whizzer, in another world, asks. Marvin looks at him, and smiles, and everything will be alright.)
He doesn't believe in perfection. If he were able to he'd tear down every fucking picket fence in this country, stab every perfect father in the chest and let loose every perfect child into the wild. Perfect children that would have queers numbered among them. Perfect children who would grow to be imperfect adults. Imperfect Marvin wants a tight-knit family; imperfect Marvin wants his imperfect kid and wife and friend in the same household; imperfect Marvin doesn't care a whit for what anybody else wants. He wants it all. Nothing is everything to Whizzer, so he stays.
And he goes.
And they fight when he leaves, and fight when he returns. Fighting is fun. Fighting is sexy. Fighting is better than festering in feelings neither can nor want to vocalise; fighting is shouting and grabbing and eventually, always, ultimately, Marvin on top. Marvin sneering. Marvin gloating. Whizzer doing as he's told, but biting as he goes. Bruising soft, thin skin purple. Feeling his own hide thicken as Marvin tries to dent it, armour repairing the chinks before they can be found. Fighting is match after match of stamina, wit, and sex, and he's never been found lacking in any of those areas.
He doesn't believe in settling.
"Late for dinner again," Marvin says, and routine threatens to creep in. Whizzer rejects it, throws caution to the wind and lifts himself away with it. The height wrenches what love (no, not love) he feared from his chest and into the air; the drop nearly kills him. His knees are scraped when he goes back to wandering from bar to bar at ungodly hours, staring straight back at those who leer at him from within the safety of dark cars and street corners. He's supposed to land on his feet. He never lets anyone see him otherwise.
He believes he's in control.
In Marvin's story, he is disruptor and peacemaker both. He is the wild card that shakes up the otherwise perfect plot, and yet bends to fit the new lines created by his entry. He is silent, incapacitated actor, acted on, moved around like furniture.
"I left my kid and wife," Marvin says, and the tone is accusing. Of course. Marvin is a living example of men never stepping up to the plate. Marvin is selfish. Marvin does not accept blame anymore than he does, but the difference is that Marvin goes looking for trouble and wonders why his knuckles are bruised after the whole ordeal. He takes the plunge with Whizzer and his feet freeze on the way down.
("I left my life," Whizzer, in another world, says. But this -- Marvin's smile, Marvin's hands, Marvin's touch and voice and warmth -- this is living.)
Whizzer wants to be in control.
Whizzer comes when he's called, smirks around sentiment, dances over the cracks in Marvin's photoframe of a picture-perfect family. He bends so far backwards he almost can't tell where the break begins.
But he can:
Marvin, who wants to be loved but is clever to reciprocate instead of offer. Marvin, who wants all the cards face-up on the table when Whizzer isn't sure he knows his own hand himself. Marvin, who wants more than he deserves, and gets it anyway: Jason on weekends, Mendel's bent ear, Trina's forgiveness, Whizzer. Whizzer coming back no matter how many times he walks out of the door, no matter how many times Marvin asks him to. Marvin, who has mastered in his years the craft of manipulation and is now trying his hand out on anybody less well-versed, but if there's anything that Whizzer truly anticipates it is the wiles and ways by which Marvin asks for attention and affection.
("Love me," Marvin, in this world, says. Whizzer cries with laughter and breaks things: the chess set, the door when he slams it shut after, Marvin's heart.)
He doesn't believe in dysfunction, doesn't stop to mend broken men or promise them more than he can realistically hope to give. He walks away after he wins that chess game, righteously smarting all over and yet, even under that gleeful triumph, even deeper beneath that flushed out, jubilant exterior, he feels the break more keenly than ever. He is no doctor. He is no psychiatrist. For that he is not sorry, but fuck, if he isn't sorry that he couldn't stay.
He doesn't cry. It's not that he doesn't believe in crying. It's that Marvin weaponised his feelings, threw fits like a child and demanded his needs be met. He turned every smile into a hook and sunk it into Trina, Jason, Mendel, Whizzer. He turned every tear into a story Whizzer desperately couldn't help himself from hearing. Whizzer doesn't play like that; he doesn't need to expose himself to be gratified. He doesn't believe in broadcasting insecurity. He believes, of course, in how effective it is when Marvin does it.
"I think you should go," Marvin says, voice cold. Whizzer looks him straight in the eye and then turns on his heels. He doesn't cry, not even when he's out in the cold night, not even when he's ceremoniously marching down the long, unlovely street, not even when the day breaks on the bleakness and he's still walking and his feet ache from carrying him away from another almost-life he got to lead but left behind. This -- this, this, this, this, them -- was a game, and now it's Game Over. Marvin got to hit Restart, so why can't he? Circumstance changes, so why can't he?
Nothing changes; nothing should.
His physique doesn't falter, and the sex is still good as always. He takes charge, as always. He shaves off pounds rich strangers buy him in Italian food and overpriced dessert on the court and charges forth, as always. He considers every move, but the risk is never greater than the reward. He pointedly does not think of a divorced megalomaniac, trying to take two halves of a broken family and tie them back together with his heartstrings. He not-thinks for ages.
And then one day, as he is not-thinking outside the window of a designer store, staring at a mannequin dressed in a hideous checkered shirt, something changes. The page turns and he is reintroduced into Marvin's narrative, this time lead instead of support, plot instead of what transforms it. Jason tugs on his sleeve, headphones around his neck and sheepish smile -- oh, but he is so much like Marvin -- on his face and asks, uncertain: "Do you want to come to my Little League game?" And the question is barbed. Jason is barbed. Jason, who adopted manipulativeness and twisted it into his own. Jason, whose innocent eyes betray a sliver of something ulterior.
Whizzer should say no, firmly, no, immediately, no, without a trace of doubt in his voice. No. Not again. He remembers days spent teaching Jason to bat when Marvin was busy, Marvin was too busy to spend time with his own son, Marvin was too busy to care. He remembers an infectious smile with missing teeth when the bat swung and the ball arced through the air, at last, after days on end. He remembers, and he doesn't say no. He asks, instead: "Will your father be going?"
It is a question he already knows the answer to. It is a question to which answer won't make or break his response to Jason's invitation. Play the game, accept the stakes, but Whizzer this time is very sure he will not go down the same route.
And yet he finds himself standing on the field, trying not to watch the way Marvin's disinterest turns into shock. Marvin, who should look worse for wear and does, but manages the look so well Whizzer can't believe it. Marvin, who's pretending to look unaffected but whose eyes are already hungry again, hungry the way Whizzer liked them best, hungry the way that slides into vulnerability, that exposes the crack more clearly than ever. Marvin, whose hands are in his hair the way he loved them; Marvin, whose wife is rolling her eyes and shifting in her seat; Marvin, whose psychiatrist is now happily married to Marvin's ex-wife; Marvin. Marvin's son on the field, hitting the ball. Dropping the bat, running. Turning to look at him with wide, surprised eyes. Whizzer thinks, he looks like Marvin, and then thinks, here we are again. Another predictable turn of the page. Another routine he will be surprised by how fast he settles into. The hand in his hair is replaced with two, one fondly resting on the beginnings of his receding hairline, the other rubbing circles into his scalp. He closes his eyes, breathes, and believes in second chances.