The Cosmopolitans by Sarah Schulman

Author:Sarah Schulman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781558619050
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY

Chapter 16

Wait! What happened here?

In order to understand the proper sequence of events, consider going back forty-eight hours in time.

Let us return to not the day before the night in question but two days before. The end of that shift where once again Earl worked a hard, gross, painful, boring day at the Lazio Brothers’ Slaughterhouse and finished it off, as usual, by taking a long shower, putting on dry clothes, and dusting off his street shoes. Back to, as he briefly reminisced in Chapter 11, those few moments of transition in the locker room when Earl had noted a kind of “softening” on the part of young Leon.

That day, instead of glaring at Earl like the daddy who’d taken away his supper, instead of purposefully stomping over to the far corner of the locker room and dressing furtively as though needing to be very, very careful, instead of all that rigmarole, Leon stood casually by the next bench over and slowly took off his dirty, bloodstained workshirt, put his street pants over his arm, walked demurely into the shower. Returned glistening wet, overly dressed for locker-room etiquette with his clean trousers already belted, but still shirtless, and took his merry time finding and putting on that slow-buttoning, long-sleeved shirt. Both the excessive modesty and the excessive display were clearly for Earl’s benefit. And that double message signified the poor boy’s conflicts. How operative they were.

Well, well, Earl thought to himself. I guess that’s Leon’s way of saying, “I’m sorry, now can you suck my cock?” Then Earl laughed out loud.

“What’s so funny?” Luis asked, stark naked like most of the guys.

“Life,” Earl said, putting on his soft jacket.

“What else is new?”

And all the walk home, Earl tried to calculate how many days it would be before Leon hit on him in some way, some crazy-ass, duplicitous way that would probably lead to something very, very hot and then for sure another blowup as that guy, that cat, that sleek young thing, that boy was not reliable to act right. Ah, Leon.

Earl remembered Bette saying, “I’m sorry, but he’s out. Draw a line through his name. Next!”

“Next,” Earl said to himself, coming upon the guys playing chess. “Next, next, next.”

“Earl, baby, what’s happening?” That was Jerome, waving him over. “You got time for a game of chess?”

“Don’t you have to be home for supper?”

Jerome sat longingly before the table, chess board laid into the concrete, pieces tantalizingly already in place and ready to go.

“My wife has her club night. Dinner is waiting for me in a chafing dish, so I can eat it any old time I want to. Besides, my wife doesn’t make me come home for supper. I go home for supper because I want to.”

“Glad I got that straight.”

They both started laughing.

“Don’t you believe a word,” Jerome whispered and twinkled his eye. “Come on, Earl, let’s play a game.”

“You know I don’t play chess.”

“I know that yesterday you did not play. But this is today. You can never imagine what may transpire over night.

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