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Not in a decade has Louis roused before Armand, but inevitably, beside Lestat, he will be up and it will feel incredibly early. Louis grabs for his phone, charging beside him on the iridescent tripod table. It’s after 8 already. There go the London markets. Not so early.
Light crashes into the bedroom here in the afternoon; in the mornings, the gauze falls to the floor across the window uselessly, with the glow just suggested in the cracks between the blinds. It’s a shame, Louis thinks, because Lestat looks beautiful in sunlight, pulling the highlights from his hair and reddening his skin. A man meant to be seen in the light, or in lights at least, considering the mirrorball and the badly applied gels under which Lestat performed last night. They went home — well, to Lestat’s home. Ordered Thai, too many things, as was Lestat’s habit, insisting on a red and a yellow curry, a papaya salad with dried shrimps and a chicken satay, a sour sausage and a pad see ew. Ate it from the paper cartons and plastic boxes on the blush-pink couch. Prestige drama about housewives doing murders. Slow, sour sausage-tasting makeout, laced with Lestat’s small, tightly rolled little joints, and the inevitable shared cigarettes. He has a new brand, long elegant ones, which taste like nothing in particular to Louis but Lestat says they look like magic wands, and Louis sees this. Anyway, they weren’t meant to do any of this. Louis needed to be home today, and so he had planned to simply go home.
Inevitably, sex. A year in — longer even — and it’s good as the first time. Louis wonders if this isn’t overly romantic, but no, he can’t imagine what would be too romantic for them. Slow, slow, low voices, more touching than anything else, the kind of clothed sex where it gets everywhere, in the sheets, in the hair, and no rally for cleanup before inevitably passing out. Louis is shocked one of them got the blinds closed. Lestat likes to leave them open during sex. The HOA, Louis is told, will consider revising the rules and regulations so that fines can be levied in hopes of deterring such behavior. It’s a strong argument for living in the middle of nowhere, Louis thinks: nobody around to be offended if you like to fuck face pressed against the windows. On the other hand, the fun of fucking cheek-to-window is that someone might see. So maybe not.
Lestat is not waking, the long line of his body raveled in the sheets, most of which he’d gathered to him in the night, unwittingly, and Louis held him from behind, their bodies used to each other’s particular grooves and angles. If they continue, Louis thinks, they might learn to fit the other way, breath on the back of his neck as they sleep, several nights a week, under the fan in Lestat’s bedroom.
Downstairs, Louis weighs coffee beans in a porcelain saucer, grinds them in a machine that cost more than the stroller he bought for his newborn daughter, and sets the French press. This is not the best way to make coffee, Louis thinks, but it is surely the most charming way, imbued with ritual: steeping, plunging. Gently heating whole milk on the stove, again, echoes of Claudia’s first months. Louis pushes these thoughts aside.
There’s a little bowl on the counter now with demerara in it. Louis uses a fruit spoon to stir some into his as the milk finishes heating. Has a few initial sips of coffee. Watches neighbors on their way to work crossing the little courtyard with the pool in it outside of Lestat’s kitchen windows, beyond the patio.
At home, the bedroom windows are floor-to-ceiling, the blackout shades set to rise at 6:45.
Louis sits on the edge of the bed, holding his coffee and putting the other on the bedside table — an actual bedside table, with a drawer full of condoms, lip gloss, cheap mementos. Louis has only caught glimpses of these, the ephemera of a very full life, not necessarily in a good way. He doesn’t snoop. Instead, he kisses the exposed part of Lestat’s ear, and whispers, “I brought you coffee.” Louis then gets up and brings him a robe.
They sit in bed, listening to opera and drinking coffee, little touches, Lestat stroking the top of Louis’ foot with the ball of his. First cigarette of the morning; Louis declines but Lestat opens the window and lights one, gets back in bed, tucking his silk robe around him while searching for a pair of underwear.
“Just get a fresh pair,” Louis says, wondering why it needs to be the ones from the night before, tossed on the floor without care.
“I like these, they go with this robe.” How far could they have gone? Lestat is squatting on the floor, checking under the sheets.
“You don’t need to match.” Louis is thinking of how he’s wearing last night’s boxers, still. “You look plenty good, get back in bed.”
“Ordering me back into my own bed!” Mock offense. Gulps of coffee while he searches under the mattress. “Of course I look good, but I don’t want to settle for this.”
“I can’t imagine you wanna put those underwear back on anyway.” Something both kind of sexy and upsetting about it, like how he had to teach his kid to put on clean clothes in the morning instead of taking them out of the hamper. The soundtrack cycles into a mournful aria.
Apparently the underwear were quite far under the bed. Lestat stands with them in hand, eyeing their tacky condition, visibly half-hard under the black robe. “Well,” he says, inspecting them. “Did you rip these?”
“I don’t remember ripping them.”
Laughing, Lestat climbs onto the bed, to Louis. Kissing his jaw, face in his hands, chaste, closed-mouth. The coffee still in Louis’ hand. The cigarette smoldering in an ashtray hewn from solid rose quartz.
“What are you doing today?” Lestat asks, grasping for Louis’ hand as it slides under the robe.
“Why not more of this?” Under his fingers, the skin is freshly waxed, still a little bumpy.
“I have a trainer at 10, then lunch with Feefee.”
“You going in tonight?”
“I don’t know.” Lestat’s hands still for a moment, before he grips Louis’ fingers more tightly. “Shouldn’t I?”
“Your bar,” Louis says. “I don’t tell you what to do.”
“Well, you might.” Reaching over for the cigarette. Lestat puts it to Louis’ lips, lets him have a little drag before continuing on his own. Tapping ash from the end of it and leaving it in its shiny pink saucer. “She wants to meet at a place that makes poke bowls, except she doesn’t get it with the rice, she is on an all-protein diet, or something. This keto diet. She doesn’t use any of the sauces or anything. Maybe a little squirt of lime. I can’t imagine.”
“I’d go to the gym, I haven’t done that this week.”
“Well,” Lestat says, “it’s only Tuesday.”
“But then I gotta go home. Pick up my computer.”
“Well, yes, I’m sure you have work, or something.”
Yes, Louis needs to book a visit with Frieze people when he is in LA in two weeks. And he needs to make sure he gets onto the list for the new landscapes preview at Regen Projects. Also, some new little space is now open on the tenth floor of some overheated building that is, confusingly, in the garment district. He hasn’t been to LA yet this year, but the thought of walking down Ninth Street flocked by the bolts of sequined taffeta makes him think of Lestat. Lestat is arching into Louis’ hand and Louis misses him already. Armand has found them a perfect Venice midcentury with glass walls to nest in for the week, and Louis can only imagine its emptiness. They’ll drive out to Palm Springs for a couple of nights, an annual sojourn pegged to their anniversary, having dinner with a developer, the developer’s plans to build a new mixed-used complex that has a performing arts venue in its center, and the developer’s new actor boyfriend, who has a part on some NBC sitcom that doesn’t seem long for this world. Armand watched the pilot out of obligation and pronounced it “cute,” not a promising review. But also, Armand doesn’t go for broad comedy, exactly. Mean is more his brand — observant, dry. He would never jerk Louis with both hands at 9 in the morning. He would be on the phone with someone already, trying to get tickets to an Atlantic writer’s book launch, or something.
Well, now the black silk robe is soiled, the one pair of boxers Louis had on him is soiled, the velvet throw pillow next to him is soiled, and the cigarette’s remains are but a coil of ash in a rose-quartz dish beside the bed. A little more light is coming in now.
“Okay,” Louis pants against Lestat’s ragged breaths. “Let’s go to the gym.”
For lack of his own gym clothes, Louis borrows an oversized T-shirt and a pair of dumpy shorts that he cannot imagine Lestat ever having worn. Did someone leave them here? Did he buy them under some pretense of like, what, exactly — putting up the wallpaper? But, obviously not, that is simply nothing Lestat would ever do. Post-coital, he lies on the bed and watches Louis dress, hand to chest, breathing deeply with heavy lids.
“How am I supposed to work out now?” he asks, tracing some abstract design into the sticky spill on his thigh with the tip of a long nail. “I don’t even have time to shower, I must smell like some little room at a bathhouse.”
Has Lestat been to a proper bathhouse? Do they even exist anymore? Louis wonders. “You’re gonna spritz on some cologne, roll on some deodorant, put on your Keds, and get going,” he says.
“Okay, but I want to get a date-tahini shake from Camille’s on the way.”
Louis could go for one too, so, he acquiesces. Also, Lestat is driving. Silly to work out on an empty stomach, he thinks. They have a routine, a little one-two action where Lestat slides the car up at the end of the block and pedestrians shoot dirty looks his way as he sits behind the wheel, pink eyesore idling, and Louis runs in to get the shakes. Pushing the glass door open with his ass on the way back to the car with the cardboard caddy of shakes, he tries to estimate how many times they’ve gotten date shakes this year, on the way to the gym — between five and ten, Louis figures. Enough that it feels well-worn, handing Lestat a cold plastic cup over the convertible door, falling back into the bucket seat, trying to ignore the stares of passersby as they merge back into traffic. His day clothes shoved into a fancy grocery store tote bag in the backseat.
There is a bouquet in the lobby, sitting on the desk with the doorman. It’s paper-wrapped, plainly in some florist-standard clear-glass vase. Louis eyes it as he crosses to the elevators, thinking, nice to get some flowers. He doesn’t consider they’re his until Maurizio says, “These are for you, Mr. du Lac.”
Oh, all right — and as he picks them up, he realizes, ah, no.
Well, crap.
It turns out they are beautiful, feathery sprays of pampas dyed acid green, and orchids with electric-violet spots, and a wonderful card in a practiced flowing script, nothing like the handwriting of anyone he knows. Bleached amaranthus spills over the sides and pools on the counter, leaving a dusty little mess on the floor and a little wet across the marble. From a florist he’s never heard of, with a splotchy logo on a holographic card that’s dropped to the floor. They’re from Claudia and Madeleine, although it's properly (and Maddie), an aside with a little nickname, something Louis realizes he’s heard Claudia say but can’t imagine ever calling Madeleine himself.
“I’m excited for Saturday,” says Claudia when he calls her, almost immediately. “What’s on the menu do you think? Should I text Grace?”
It’s nothing Louis has himself been thinking about. “Yeah, sure, text her,” he says, fumbling around in the bags of beans as he realizes there’s coffee left in the carafe in the machine, not that he needs any more coffee at this point. Nice of Armand to make a pot alongside his early-morning espresso. “They’re beautiful flowers, I’ve never seen anything like this, all the colors in it are so—”
“Fake? Maddie knows this florist, she just opened a shop, it’s what she sent me this year for Valentine’s Day, I’m obsessed with her work. Maddie found her first but they put her in the New York Times a few months ago with all these other interesting florists, I know it’s not your style but anyone can just send some boring-ass bouquet, I mean. Right? Anyway, does Armand like them? I bet he hates them?”
Louis spills some coffee onto the counter next to his mug. “What?”
“Has he seen them? They’re anniversary flowers, you’d better show him, I don’t want him thinking I neglected your tenth anniversary.”
“Yeah, I’m gonna show him, right now.” Louis is dragging a dish towel across the counter, wondering if it’s now forever stained with coffee. “Thanks for the flowers—”
“We love you, Daddy Lou!”
Yeah, yeah, love you too, thanks, see you Saturday, bye.
Trying not to spill anything else, Louis regrets the damp against his shirt, the shirt he left in the night before, now stained with greenish flower water. The plumes and trailing buds are obviously wrong for the apartment. The colors of it remind him of — well, nothing appropriate to have on his mind as he carries the arrangement into Armand’s office.
“Oh,” he says, looking up from whatever he’s working on, email or something. “That’s — garish. Are these from you?”
“Nah. Not me, Claudia.” He puts them on a hardback that’s just sitting on the desk, hating to set a wet vase on the burl wood—
“Not on the book, darling,” Armand says, pulling it toward him as Louis lifts it: Under the Burning Sky: How Scientists at the Forefront of Raising the Alarm Are Met With Government and Industry Resistance on Acid Rain & Environmental Policy, Acid Rain and US Environment Policy From Nixon Through Bush, an unsellable title on a 1990s-bad jacket design, a real confluence of Courier New and a topic nobody’s paid attention to since that first Bush presidency.
Louis puts the flowers on the chrome tray Armand uses for sorting mail on the console.
“Happy anniversary,” he says, kissing Armand on the cheekbone, the best he can do from bending over. “Madeleine helped, I think.”
“Hm.” Armand is still, looking Louis up and down. “Did you spill coffee on yourself?”
“I think that’s from the flowers?”
“Yes, that’s the green stain, I think the brown one might be coffee.” He yanks on Louis’ shirt. “Hm. Why don’t you change?”
Now, trudging back to the closet, Louis remembers everything: dinner tonight, the new raw bar. He suggested it. Made the reservation, even. Armand is still, years beyond his initial arrival, skeptical of Gulf seafood. He cites the lack of food safety regulations. He cites the oil industry. Snobbish, but Louis concedes he has a point. Still, it’s been good enough for everyone Louis knows. It’s been good enough for Louis. Anyway this raw bar flies theirs in. The logo is fat, chrome 1980s block letters. It looks like somewhere to do coke in the bathroom, with the amount of lacquer and glass in the build-out. Lestat would fucking love it.
It's an effort to tamp down on the instinct to text Lestat about the anniversary, the flowers, the raw bar, all of it. They won’t see each other tonight. It’s the first time Louis has realized, ah, I miss him preemptively.
Of course, Lestat has texted a picture of his poke bowl. “It’s fine,” he’s said of the composition, a scoop of brown rice with a nest of red cabbage, edamame, matchstick cucumber and radish, confetti of nori and sesame seeds. Glistening cubes of raw salmon, all drizzled in something orange. Avocado. Segments of mandarin. Incongruous, Louis thinks, aware vaguely that he’s delaying whatever’s next by studying this not-well-framed, not-well-lit half-second shot of a pile of food in a paper tub. What’s he even supposed to say to this?
“Looks great,” he decides, although “fine” really was the more apt description. What does Lestat even talk about with Feefee, drag business? Scuffing up the stage with acrylic-soled heels? Louis scrapes his brain to identify which one Feefee even is, like, is she the one who dumpster dives, or the one who Claudia called a “New Jersey Hot Topic reject”? No, those might have been the same person — also the dumpster diving feels incongruous with keto.
Louis checks his email — dinner’s at 8. Soiled shirt’s in the hamper. Pull on a new one, the cashmere polo with armpit embroidery. He checks his phone. He has managed to waste a pitiful twelve minutes.
The flowers are still in the office, but Armand has left. He’s in the kitchen now, Louis finds. Making mimosas.
“I cleaned up the flowers,” he says. “I mean, the wrappings and all, I took care of those.”
“Good.” Louis knows how to handle this, he reminds himself. He lives to handle this. Hand at the small of Armand’s back, dropping to the firmness below it. “That’s good, you like to be helpful.”
He sniffs. “I like to think I have been,” he says. And then: “These ten years.”
At least Louis can handle this ... neediness? No, this is something else, this way of Armand’s, the way he compresses his supplication under the weight of his experience. That’s what it is, experience — if Armand is nothing else, although Louis feels there is in fact much more to him, it’s someone who has lived. His British public school childhood, his dispatch to the continent, his years as the gilded subject, the palazzo, the floundering after being cut loose, making his floundering into a business — into an art. All it takes is a hand in his hair — the familiar feeling of glossy waves, the tilted chin, the big brown eyes. Armand casts the glamour of slightness; he’s taller than Louis, in fact, and between them is the real gym fiend, some part of at least one tit forever threatening to unfurl his shirts.
Louis reaches in, thumb pressing into the meat there, wiry hairs threading under nail. “Mimosas?”
Hitch of breath — got him again, Louis thinks.
“We should celebrate, I think. The flowers, I just thought—”
“Got a lot to celebrate, yeah.” Practically against his cheek, nipping briefly at the jaw. “Make me a mimosa.”
Again, between them, Armand is the mixologist, not that mimosas are mixology per se. But he knows the right ratio, Armand, each stemless flute the best balance of pulpy juice and the dry champagne, from the case they brought for Saturday night. This is what Armand knows: for a dinner-party in his honor, it’s correct to offer to supply the champagne. Point being, there’s half a case in the wine fridge under the counter; the other half is at Grace’s already. Perrier-Jouet. Anniversaryesque.
It's true, Louis thinks, on the terrace that hangs over the pavement, Mississippi in one direction, sliver of the wealth manager’s office toward the other. He is helpful. Pulling on the little ringlets of his hair, like silk practically. Actually piped out on the speakers. The A/V firm did a good job, Louis thinks. Not one snap in the vinyl lost out here. Bougainvillea beat back to where it can’t threaten the box hedges. The landscaper did a good job, Louis thinks. Oh god, he thinks. I have to come home tonight. I have to.
“Been a while since we had a day in,” Louis says, letting Armand bask in it. “I didn’t keep you from anything, when I came in — did I?”
“Looking at inventory,” he says. “I don’t want to get rid of Dubai, but maybe a Manhattan pied-à-terre?”
“That your gift to me? A little studio?”
“No, not a studio,” he says. “A loft in Tribeca, it’s a three-bedroom, but we’d subdivide it, keep the one-bed, flip the two.”
“Loft in Tribeca’s gonna be pretty steep.”
“Hence the flip,” Armand says.
“I don’t think I have the stomach for it,” says Louis. “Going over there all the time, another renovation, staying on top of a contractor, you know that shit’s exhausting.”
“It’s a wonderful project to embark on together, all the decisions, the romance of the swatches, and so on. All the pinboards. Romantic, I think, looking forward to something.” Armand empties his champagne glass and cranes, a little, into Louis. “Practically a white cube. The windows are only dramatic on the front — we can hang works on paper. The big ones, the Kara Walkers. Your preparatory sketches.”
“Those should go to a museum.”
“I agree.” Armand pauses. “Eventually.”
“Bring it back here and they’ll tax it,” Louis says.
“Promised gift?”
“Maybe.” Louis gets up, opening his hand for the empty glass between Armand’s thighs. He does not want to embark on a long, drawn-out renovation. Especially not in New York. The permits never materialize. Everything is on the scale of years. Or, so he’s heard.
Back in the office, Louis studies the arrangement. Its fronds, its exuberance. Its height and its depths. Maybe Madeleine placed the order, too, for all he knows. Back to the kitchen, where he’s left his phone. Not sure he likes what he changed into — well, better than gym clothes. He left the sweaty things in Lestat’s locker; they’re his, anyway, so Louis feels this is fine. Trudging back to the office.
“I’m gonna let them keep Armand company,” he texts Claudia, with a picture of them on the console. “Thank you again, they are lovely. Can’t wait to see you Saturday.” While she types back, he checks his J.P. Morgan statement. They weren’t cheap.
They certainly should bring back the Kara Walkers, Louis thinks, fishing a kombucha (watermelon-hibiscus, magenta sans-serif on a butter-yellow can) from the fridge and carrying it over to his laptop at the far end of the kitchen counter. This is what he came back for — well, no, he came back to plan the LA jaunt, and to answer some emails. Well, no, he wasn’t honestly planning on coming back for this, to stand at the counter with a rancid kombucha and study the inventory, looking at the dimensions of those big drawings, with their charcoal smears around the undulating hips and asses. Pudendal, he thinks. He remembers buying them and showing them to Claudia, who was 11, around the age he started showing her the art before he bought it, so that she understood this was all for her, on some level. Her attraction to Madeleine, the artist. Not exactly a Kara Walker.
He emails the assistant at the little gallery in the fashion district. Farleigh, their name is. People have such names.
The record is still playing, but the house is empty.
Lestat has texted, but he has always texted. He is a consummate texter.
“Feefee is making me go to work,” Lestat has written, an idea that is as ludicrous as it is believable. First of all, Lestat loves to swan around that bar, loves to put on a little outfit and sashay across the room, surveying the crowd, collecting bills for doing nothing but teetering on tall shoes, chatting at the door, showing off her immaculate collection of peroxide-platinum wigs: the feathery one that makes her look like the star of a 1970s pinup calendar; the victory rolls; the wavy starlet bob that’s the closest to the texture of her own real hair, which is longer than that wig but equally sumptuous.
And second of all, the notion that Feefee of all people could make Lestat do anything is just asinine. Lestat would happily tell Feefee to fuck right off, Louis imagines, he is always complaining that Feefee this or Feefee that. Feefee dumpster diving; Feefee poke bowls.
Now, Lestat’s ownership of this bar is as confusing to Louis as anything. The visa situation, yes, Louis understands that despite a sometimes-tenuous relationship to the gravity that keeps everyone else situated on terra firma, Lestat does not want to be made to go back to France, and does seem to take his investment seriously as the legal mechanism at work there. On the other hand, the bar has never turned a profit. As far as Louis can tell, Lestat has purchased it partly out of spite, and partly for leave to remain. And remained he has, ending up there more nights than not, never mind his weekly performance and hosting slots. All of Lestat’s talents seem either natural or ad hoc, teaching himself piano because why not, or maybe there was a teacher involved at some point; “choreography” in the flimsiest sense, they give Tonys for choreography, and here Lestat has all but picked it up on the basis of whims. Louis smiles, thinking of Lestat ordering the girls about to his grand visions. Then he loses interest, and leans against the façade with a cigarette, and maybe if he’s in the mood a yuzu-cucumber soda with a splash of gin in it, a little restless but mostly placated.
Thumb hovering over Lestat’s little message to react to it, Louis thinks about Lestat’s lip gloss staining both the glass and the cigarette. Thinks about the blast of air conditioning Lestat doesn’t mind letting out the front door. It’s the same at home, or rather Lestat’s home, both of them on the patio in the evening, trading a cigarette back and forth and letting the open door keep them cool and dry under the little lights and the disco ball Lestat put up for new year’s and never took down.
The door slides open. Just for a moment, Louis is on that patio. Listening to the gentle sucking sounds of the Kreepy Krauly in the little pool. The wheeze of the a/c as it pushes past the screen door.
But, no, it’s Armand.
“Were you coming back?” he asks, closing the door fully, and bolting it, too. “Another mimosa? I could do.”
Louis looks up from his phone. He sees Armand, and he sees the business card from the florist on the counter, where Armand must have put it, after picking it up.
“I gotta do something,” Louis says, glancing at the card before he slips his phone into his pocket, and approaches Armand.
“Is everything all right?” He tilts his head.
“I just need to run out,” Louis says. “I’m gonna change for dinner first — no, let’s have a mimosa.” The card said the shop closed at 6. “Let’s have another one, and then I’ll change for dinner, and then I gotta run out. But I’ll pick you up?”
Armand opens his mouth, as if to say something — but he is obedient, and so he doesn’t. “All right,” he says, sniffing it in, almost.
Holding each other, the duct pummeling them with frigid air. Gratitude on the tip of Louis’ tongue: for glancing back. For turning around. For taking “I got a kid” in stride. You seem so young, he’d said, how old is she? The whirlwind of it: the courthouse, that first astounding place they lived on Demourelles with its marble terrace backing up to the bayou. Louis had nightmares about Claudia wandering off, but Armand was right to reassure him that she would naturally stay in, and away from the water. This didn’t hold, but they were so good at first, or maybe it was the shocking pleasure of the little family unit, Armand’s solemn stepfather routine, the way he held Florence’s gaze long enough for her to sigh, “Well,” and walk away. It wasn’t typical of her to retreat. It all happened so fast. A mad season.
Then, Dubai: sometimes, in their windowless bedroom, Louis could swear he felt the building moving as he laid under the Japanese linens, Armand a foot away, nearer to the stacks of books Louis had been amassing on his side of the bed than to his husband. The growing collection of things on the wall, the studio art and the impact leatherworks, the custom caning around the pit they slept in. The cushioned surfaces, for bracing. Even before they sent Claudia away — even before she left — it was impossible to hear her getting up in the middle of the night when Louis was lying in the middle of that sunken bed. All he could feel and hear was the building. Armand was inches away but he slept so quietly.
It was the first time in Louis’ life that he had ever felt truly alone.
But he wasn’t, right? He isn’t. Armand lets go of him, and presses himself up, somehow, for a kiss, despite the fact that he is taller.
“Make me a mimosa,” Louis says, before their lips are even parted.
“Of course,” Armand agrees, as though he wouldn’t.
The bouncer knows Louis well by now. She is an old hand, must have been posted at this door well before Lestat arrived. There is little wait to get in, it’s still evening, the sun beating down through the humidity. It’s after dark that the crowds will form thickly down the street, but nevertheless Louis is appropriately deferential, nodding at the bouncer (whose name he still doesn’t know, may never learn) and jogging down into the shallow basement space, bouquet to chest. It’s a partial basement, really, half-sunk. A few tourists sit at the bar; Louis can tell from the way they’re sweaty, paper shopping bags at the feet of their stools. Maybe they heard about this place; Louis doubts they heard about the talent. Maybe they wandered far and needed to duck into some air conditioning, have a fortifying draught before the walk back to the hotel, or to dinner, or to wherever tourists go. Louis has never been a tourist in New Orleans.
He thinks, sadly, as he sweeps across the floor and behind the stage, of how when they met Armand was new, all wide lapels and hunger for what he’d heard was a world-class gay scene, a retirement home for a certain kind of art fag with money. He probably wouldn’t have stayed, if not for Louis. Tantalizing to think: what if they hadn’t crossed paths, passed each other without a glance, and Armand had moved on? Who would Louis be tip-toeing around in his own penthouse, home for the moment just to retrieve his computer? Another dear sweet man with noodles for limbs? Or maybe nobody. Claudia, possibly. If things has been different.
There are a couple of girls backstage, all getting into their things. It’s a little pornographic, to Louis: Miss Scars stacking lashes, still in her boy drawers, brows glued, bare chest.
“You’re early, Lou, sweetie,” she says — Louis has no idea about what any of them do when they are not back here to stumble into Lestat’s meaningless stories about them, that idle gossip.
“He here?” Louis asks, pausing.
“Yeah, but—” Veronica starts to say.
Shrugging off the ominous “but,” Louis thanks her, plows ahead.
There’s only one near-private space back here, and Louis knocks once, refusing to wait before he enters, flowers first.
It’s fine, he thinks, spotting “but” immediately: Lestat has his foot in a woman’s lap. It takes Louis a moment to notice: she is scrubbing the old polish off his toes with a big wet puff of cotton wool, red with gold sheen to it. It’s a beautiful color, Louis remembers thinking, when he had Lestat on his back earlier in the week and caught a foot and bit the big toe. There is also a matching lipstick.
“Louis,” he says, pulling his foot away. “What a treat. Do you know Antoinette—”
“Antoine,” she corrects, sitting up straighter. She is half-ready, in her boxers, platinum bob pinned back into a pixie — no, not a pixie, her hair’s too slicked-back. Louis has seen her perform, he realizes. An old-timey routine, cane and hat. Sideburns drawn on, ashen on her cheekbones. Most galling, her little breasts are free under her sleeveless undershirt — men’s cut, which does nothing to blur her sinewy figure, for it’s thin enough to see through. She probably binds, Louis thinks, which he has never considered before. In any case, her titties are hard under there, pushing into the cotton, because the air conditioning in this bar is constantly cranked. Something about how they’re right at Lestat’s eyeline spikes Louis’ attention, and then he lets go; he may not, cannot, be too upset about it, all considering.
“Yeah, hi,” he says, studying Lestat’s face. Amusement, naughty pleasure. Delight at being caught in something. He hasn’t got any drag on yet, is still in the filthy little athletic shorts he left the gym in, and the blousey-big gauze-y T-shirt. His tits are stiff too, Louis sees, because he is always looking for this when he looks at Lestat, and again, because of the a/c. On a different evening, he’d push Antoinette (Antoine) out of the way, and climb onto Lestat’s lap, and pinch his cute pink peaks until they were twice the size and scarlet, swelling between Louis’ fingers as a little punishment for sitting backstage here with the swaggering, half-dressed Antoine.
Louis sets the flowers down.
“Are those for me?” Lestat folds his hands in his lap, sitting up, both feet now on the floor.
“Give us a moment,” Louis tells Antoine, stepping back so she — he? — whoever, correct pronoun, has a path to retreat.
But Antoine will not. “I work here,” he says haughtily, crossing his arms to hide a little. “I’m MCing in forty-five minutes.”
“I don’t care,” Louis says. He or she has no right, Louis thinks, because Antoine only comes in on girls’ night. Ladies’ night. Whatever they call it.
“Lestat.”
“Go get ready with the girls,” Lestat says, eyes fixed on the arrangement he’s been brought. “You’re being slow, anyway.”
“Quicker than you, with those damn claws.” Grabbing some wad of costume from a cabinet. Huffing past Louis, nearly kicking the vase.
Lestat is gazing up. “My flowers? What’s the occasion?” He rises. “May I see them? They’re very beautiful.”
They are beautiful, Louis thinks, the hundreds of dollars of them, the orchids and roses and ranunculus, the dyed baby’s breath sprays. The carnations in yellow-orange-pink hues of sunset, unlike any kind of carnation Louis has seen before. Shocks of glitter throughout, the wilder and likely more expensive twin to the one still on the console in its chrome dish in the office. And that one is beautiful, too, but this one is for Lestat, because it screams. Is dazzling.
Louis hands it to him, places it on Lestat’s lap. He cradles it, almost like a child, feeling its weight on his thighs. But he never breaks away from looking up at Louis, searching for something — meaning in the gesture, probably: “Why did you bring me this?” Licking his lips, the way his big pink tongue darts around, creature-like, somebody so hungry for sensation that he laps at himself, at the air, at anything he can get a little taste of. Like it helps with the overwhelming impact of the bouquet, with its sloshing clear vase and confetti of whisper-lavender-white buds onto the floor.
It's hard for Louis to say what he means. The flowers are what he means, really, a gesture as loving as he could conjure.
It is awkward, standing here: looking down at Lestat, who is looking back up at Louis. Both of them searching each other’s faces, Louis wanting inherently to be at his level. The beat of whatever is now on in the bar is seeping into here, this little room, strewn with the evidence of a drag show in process: the wadded tissues, the discarded fans, and the bits of glitter that are liable to live forever in their microbiomes after the refuse dissolves into the water supply.
Without breaking his gaze, Lestat rises, and lowers. He puts the flowers aside, pushing them away. On his knees, he is moony, staring up at Louis with full and total intensity, his pupils as black with desire as they are gaping in the dimly lit little room, just enough light there to refract in the glitter that's caught in the fibers of the mostly plastic rug.
Louis realizes he has to say something; the room is tense in the quiet, queens chattering behind the stage as the clientele filters in.
The chair Antoine has been in earlier is right there, and so Louis sits on it. Lestat grabs his calves, burying his face in Louis' thighs, the linen of his pants marked with Lestat's fine powder, the hair just waiting for Louis to comb his fingers through it. They don't do this, Louis thinks, reminded of the reason he's come in the supplicating posture.
"It's my anniversary," Louis says, softly. He is unsure what to do with his hands, letting go of Lestat's hair for fear he might yank it. The posture is too familiar, and yet not, eerie in how much he stiffens at the possibility of making demands. "Ten years," he adds. "I gotta take him out to dinner."
"So why did you come?" Lestat asks, grabbing Louis' thigh so that his claws (melon fondant today, pinkly orange, with their yellow gems glued near the cuticle) are brandished. Implicit threat. Like some kinda creature. Nothing human looks like this, Louis thinks. It's surreal, the summery nails pressing into his dip-dyed royal-porphyry linen slacks.
"Claudia sent me — us, me and Armand — these wild-ass flowers, you know, and the card that came with it had the address. I just thought, they're real beautiful, and I thought—" He shakes his head. "You know what I thought."
"Well, why would you think that, Louis?" Lestat is audibly trying to swallow back whatever he's feeling. Louis pointedly decides not to interpret.
"You need me to say it?"
Lestat swallows, thickly, his waterlines catching the yellow lights of the vanity as they swell with the first of his tears. "Yes?"
"I thought you had more confidence than that."
Bitterly: "Well, I don't, obviously."
Crisis of self-confidence, then, he must be having, Louis thinks, because this is what Louis loves about him: his shimmering, captivating satisfaction. His self-perpetuation, the way he fills the room with himself and Louis is relieved, momentarily, of the need to worry about who else is in it. The antithesis, really, of the empty vessel that is Armand: ten years of "on your knees, boy" and "lick my boots, boy" and "tell me you love it, boy, beg for it." Looking down, Louis sees the boots Armand will inevitably lick, the Saint Laurents with the harness; bit of a heel, which Louis doesn't typically wear. Back home, beside the shoe rack, it seemed like the best gesture he could make toward their future: beautiful little fripperies of black leather with gleaming hardware, the leather stiff, and everything polished. And Louis loves Armand, of course he does, loves to fill him up and push him down, to watch the careful trace of his tongue as it flicks into the O-ring that sits in the vicinity of Louis' ankle, laving gratefully across the least of him and so grateful to be allowed — to be made, even.
Louis cups Lestat's chin. "I love you," he says.
Lestat's breath hitches.
“I didn’t want you to think — well, I have to go get dinner with him.”
“No you don’t,” Lestat says. “You don’t have to do anything.”
“You’re right,” Louis agrees. “So I brought you flowers because I want you to know, like, how I feel. You say it to me and so I felt like, I should tell him.”
“Yes, tell me what, that you are content with me as your mistress?”
“No, I didn’t say that,” says Louis. “You know we got a thing, he knows all about you.”
“Yes.” There, the grip — at least there’s no glitter in the manicure, or it might snag on Louis’ very fine summer-weight pants. “With the flowers, that is what you are telling me.”
“I’m telling you I love you. I don’t just say it, you know, I really do.”
Tilting his chin up, and swallowing. “Let me suck you.”
Well — shocking to say no, but. “I have to go, I need to pick him up.”
“Please.” Gripping harder. “Can’t he wait a little?”
Louis says, “Not on our anniversary. I just left in the middle of it to get someone else flowers.”
“You wake up in my bed,” Lestat says, “and bring me flowers on the anniversary of your marriage to another man, and tell me you love me, and then you walk away from me as I beg for you. And then I am supposed to, what, put glue stick on my brows, and simply loiter behind the bar serving the underpriced sparkling wine you so deride to the happy couples who come in here on dates? Will that be so good for the business you say I should care about, the forlorn queen crying into their vodka with diet Red Bulls?”
“If you’re so sad about all this I think sucking me off isn’t just gonna fix it.” Louis is trying to understand how this happened. Lestat was the one in here with someone else, he thinks. I brought him the flowers, Louis thinks. Dinner with Armand’s got nothing to do with Lestat. Offensive to try to make it seem so. “We should talk tomorrow, you want me to come by? I can bring something for lunch.”
Lestat straightens, thumbs hooking into Louis’ belt loops. “I want you in my mouth. I need it.”
“Okay,” Louis says, “I’ll come in the morning.”
“After dinner.”
“I gotta go home with him. He’s my husband.”
“Oh, your husband, how tidy.”
“He is my husband, it’s just different. And I really gotta go.” Finally, Louis rises. “This whole ... open thing, it’s not perfect. We just gotta talk about it.”
“Fine,” which erupts out of Lestat on a first sob. “Go if you’re leaving. I can’t.”
“Okay.” Louis swallows. “I really didn’t mean to make you unhappy. I thought you’d like the flowers.”
Lestat says nothing, because he is crying. So Louis kisses his cheek, tasting salt, and the crown of his head, and he goes.
Outside the little room, Antoine, or Antoinette, is still half-dressed, and leaning on the wall.
“You’re not supposed to smoke back here,” Louis says, pushing the door closed behind him.
“Like I give a shit,” Antoine says, shaking the ash onto the floor in a tremble. “Whole show’s gonna start late because of you.”
Louis shrugs. “I didn’t tell you to loiter around listening instead of getting dressed.” But even as he pushes past, Louis is content that someone is there. It soothes him a little, to think that at least Lestat doesn’t have to spend the night alone. Heading out through the front of the bar, Veronica waves at him, and Louis nods back, trying to exit as quickly as he can, thinking: if what Lestat needs to do now is choke on Antoinette’s strap, fine. Louis will simply not be bothered if he does.
Armand is waiting in front of their building, in his Gucci loafers in the pebbled sienna, and his wide-legged trousers with the rolled cuff, and his cream-with-eyelet oxford unbuttoned one past his sternum. Louis thinks: yeah. That’s his man.
“Did you do whatever it was you had to do?” Armand slides into the car, the careful grace of him, wary of the drape of his pants before closing the door.
Another couple, the bald Brads, are exiting the building, and catch sight of Louis and Armand idling, and wave. Armand is so icy to the neighbors when he doesn’t have to be: smiles tightly, nods, and turns to Louis to look away as he reaches for the seat cooler, to turn it down from the setting the BMW had decided Armand wanted.
Louis, who regrets his feeling that it’s smart to be liked by anyone they share an HOA with, grins, and waves back like a robot from the elbow, and says, “Nice night!”
Whatever the putrid gossip that travels through the pipes in this building, Louis can’t hate this specific couple too much. For one, they own a very small unit they can probably scarcely afford, 650 square feet with a stupid loft built into it out of drywall, the kind of thing that gets people a New York Times Styles Section feature — Louis can’t be jealous because he’s already had one. Armand thinks their current place could make Architectural Digest, but this worries Louis, because it makes it sound like Armand is ready to sell.
Also, the Brads are a decade younger than Louis, and while only one of them has a shaved head properly, the other is clearly balding. And finally, they are both named Brad. Yes, one of them introduced himself as “Bradley” at the summer mixer on the roof, but that was never going to stick. Louis can’t imagine. Incredibly embarrassing. As embarrassing as being the boy in the Marius photos that kept getting posted on social media as a filthy example of obvious underage exploitation, back when that was what people were enraged about? Well, embarrassment is a spectrum. Armand, at least, carries himself like he schedules his emotions for a four-hour window on Sundays.
“Beautiful,” one of the Brads, the less bald one, shouts back, as they head to their Uber.
“We don’t want to be late,” Armand says, looking up from his phone.
They aren’t.
The meal is fine. Good, even. Actually — it’s great. The best seats in the house, the corner of the undulating raw bar, its mottled rose marble and Deco-chrome accents glowing under the neon and black lacquer of the dining room. Opulent, Louis thinks, when they hand him the menu with its tidy tick boxes, specially printed with HAPPY ANNIVERSARY. Armand studies it carefully, using his phone to investigate the varieties of oysters.
“They’ll tell you what it is,” Louis says, as if Armand hasn’t sipped his share.
He seems distracted, Armand, asking for a bottle of sparkling water, sipping it slowly when his glass is filled with Vichy. He shrugs at Louis’ suggestion, demurring with, “Oh, you’ll order for us, I trust you, darling,” and his sad half-smile, the one he saves for conversations that aren’t truly serious, just slightly tense.
“Do you want to split a dozen? Maybe we should get the tower.”
“Sure.” Patting Louis’ hand. Maybe he doesn’t want to think. But then he adds, “And the prawns will be nice, I think.”
Louis would have expected, from his local bias or maybe the look of the room, that prawns in the shell (Spain) would have come simply poached, on ice maybe like the oysters, but these heaving red carabineros are based in garlicky butter, resting on toast, and dressed with a glob of comeback sauce. It’s not typical of Armand to eat something so unguent, but at the very least the prawns are delicious, their own juices spilling out of the shell, weeping into the sauce and soaking the bread, the server having told them to dig the meat out by hand and smear it through everything. The plate is delivered to them with a handful of wet wipes, which Armand eyes nervously, sipping first his water and then his gin and tonic, his buffed nails instinctively clenching the starched white napkin.
“Smart chef,” Louis says, to fly in all this fancy seafood, and serve it with some local flourish. He drags a shrimp onto his plate and starts to tear the legs away, hoping to find the seam that unravels the whole thing.
Armand is still just staring at it.
“Here.” Louis reaches in, some of the brothy fluids that spilled out of the head on his fingers. He plucks one from the dish and leaves it on Armand’s plate. “It’s great, you’ll really love it.”
Sucking the head out, and tossing it into the hammered-chrome vessel that collects the discards, beady black eyes and all.
“Well,” Armand says, reaching for his knife. “Yes, I think the chef is certainly creative.”
“We ate shrimp like this last year,” Louis says, “plancha, in that alley place near Barceloneta.”
“That alley place is a Bib Gourmand.” Armand cuts the head away from the body, and slips a tine of his fork under the shell. “At least the drink is properly made. Do you think they’d rank if Michelin came to New Orleans?”
This is one of Armand’s favorite games, the “how would some irrelevant outside factor apply to New Orleans?” beat.
“Maybe,” Louis says. “Maybe they’ll make it on some best-of lists this year.”
“They could do,” Armand agrees, sounding very British suddenly. He gives up on trying to get the last bit of meat out of the cup of the tail, and finally prepares to eat the body of his prawn in one bite, pushing it through the big plate for the sauces as he does.
“Don’t forget that bread,” Louis says. “I wonder where they get it. They don’t make this in house, right? They can’t.”
The bread is now sopping enough that Armand can get a little corner of it on his fork with the shrimp, without any real effort. “A phenomenal pan de cristal.” Wiping his lips. Glancing nervously at the wet wipes, despite the fact his hands are clean.
It makes Louis wipe his on his own napkin, before tearing into the next shrimp.
“I do think about that trip,” Armand says, dreamily, tearing open the foil packet. “The color of the sea, from the ferry, do you remember it? And looking out over the pool over breakfast from the terrace in Tangier—”
“It was a nice trip,” Louis agrees. And it was, sumptuously beautiful. Everything was orange and ultramarine and desert rose and mauve, calls to prayer on one end and flamenco on the other. Louis has never known Armand to be religious, but that first afternoon in Marrakech, eating figs and drinking mint tea under the tented pavilion of the Royal Mansour, they heard the muezzin calling. And before Armand could even put down the fine teacup, his mouth was following along to Asr, tracing the words silently, as if to merely feel their shapes for the first time in a long while. Louis hasn’t thought of it often, but it was one of those rare and fleeting access points to Armand’s buried origins, well before everything else that had smoothed him into the man reaching for a damp cloth to wipe away just the idea of mess.
They speak of little, really. Louis imagines it’s like this, with a husband: the quiet understanding. This doesn’t mean they don’t talk; their chatter is ceaseless, about the forthcoming NOMA surrealism show, for which Armand insists they must be present at the opening preview party; of Claudia’s recent credit card bill, the one with the twelve-hundred-dollar charge for a hotel room in Beacon, about which Louis knows nothing; about whether the eyelets are a little too much. Louis says no, and fingers one between pointer and thumb as he rubs the silky cotton, admiring the little glimpses of Armand’s tawny skin, both through the eyelets and between the lapels. His breastbone. The swell of his wonderful tits, matted with wonderfully soft, dark hair that Louis loves to drag against the sensitive rim of his nostrils as he works through it to the stiffening peaks buried beneath.
“I hope your hands are clean,” Armand mutters, heard turning, the subtle shift of his jaw that Louis knows means he likes it.
They order dessert, kakigori with a rainbow of condensed milk soaking the compacted shape of it, the colors distinctly flavored with rosewater (a magenta) and pistachio (pale green) and orange blossom (butter-yellow, like one shade darket than condensed milk from the can). Deep in the ice they find a cherries jubilee ice cream, the sting of the kirschwasser masking the pleasure of the icy-creamy contrast. The whole confection cost thirty-one dollars.
Louis can’t help but dwell on how they could possibly have priced this mess to that very extra dollar. By far, it’s the most disappointing thing they order. And all Louis can think is, oh, Lestat would have hated this. He would have made fun of the feeble little Italian flag design, haphazardly applied. He would have had Louis laughing about it.
Instead, Armand carefully scrapes the different flavored milks off of the surface as if he is excavating archaeological strata.
“Why don’t we take a trip?” Armand suggests, pushing them gently back toward the topic of travel.
“We take trips all the time,” says Louis, thoroughly done with their monstrous dessert. “LA soon, even.”
“Weekends away don’t count,” Armand is saying as the bill is slid in front of them in its leather binder. “Little business jaunts aren’t what I mean.”
Louis studies the check, making a mental inventory of the oysters, the tower, the gambas, the Brussels crisped to the point of unrecognizability in their salty-spicy-sour dressing, and the puff of ice now melting before them, exposing more of the pink ice cream as everything collapses into a milky puddle. No kakigori is as good as the one he took Claudia to try in the Metairie strip mall on kindergarten half-day, her brown eyes nearly as big as the dish itself. Of course, Louis doesn’t remember if it was good, actually, or what this means for kakigori — like, the ice-to-filling ratio, or the volume of topping, or something. He presumes. But this memory is one of four or five he’s clasped tightly of exposing Claudia to the things beyond her reach, the paintings and the poetry (not that he understood any of it, really) and the polarizing desserts for less than ten bucks that would take up an afternoon of their time when Louis was in his early-mid-twenties and it seemed all they had was time. Thirty-one dollars! He adds the tip and signs the bill in his anachronistically legible script: big fat P, neat little D, flourishes at the head and tail of the big, swooping L.
Hands clasped together as they walk through the bar, Armand clutching Louis’ bicep as they wait for the valet at the air-conditioned host stand.
The host, his (his?) hair having mostly fallen out of his banana clip since he led them to the bar, cocks his head at Armand and says, “You look so familiar.”
Armand clears his throat, eyes large, in that tell-tale way whenever he is noticed like this: not on his own merits, but at the back of someone’s memory, a phantom from a spread in i-D, or the late-2000s permanent collection installation at the Stedelijk, or the little retrospective at the ICA in Philly a few autumns ago, to which Armand sent his regrets after grappling with the invitation all summer, finally declining with a polite, “We’re on Corfu that weekend” — and it was true, they did make a little skip over to Corfu, to sit on the Aegean and stew about it, Armand twitching every time he opened something on his phone to see more and more photos from the event, none of which he showed to Louis. Then they went up to London, met Claudia there, stayed all three restless at David’s magisterial house on Montagu Square, enticing their 15-year-old daughter with, “You know, Ted Hughes lived across the square,” as if this held currency of any kind for Claudia. And it is good that it didn’t, Louis thinks, making the connection suddenly, elbow on the host stand in this godforsaken raw bar. Great she never read The Bell Jar.
Armand gives the host his tilted chin and says, “I’m a type, I’m afraid. The fallen cherub, begging for absolution.”
“Oh yeah? I guess that’s, like, kind of a serve.”
Stepping out to the car, Armand huffs out, “Youths!”
Louis, for his part, can only calculate youth by its proximity to Claudia. To him, the sweet-lipped host seemed several years out of college, six or seven maybe, and unusually poised in his summer-weight cotton sweater and plastic daisy-chain choker. Like something Louis would have seen at a club in his own youth, sweating in the middle of the street in the cudgel of June’s humidity that short, blistering year before Claudia. It’s nice, he thinks, that boys (or, boys?) can get a job where they flirt with the customers in eyelet button-downs. Normal as anything possibly could be.
And, on the other hand, once they’re buckled and pulling off of the curb: “Why do you say things like that?”
“Like what?” Armand asks.
“That cherub shit.”
It’s dark now, and Louis is driving, so he can only imagine the look on Armand’s face: beleaguered, searching.
“Well, what do you imagine I ought have said?”
“Maybe just like, I’m not familiar, you don’t know me.”
“But you know I must be familiar to him, of course. It has nothing to do with being known. Or well-known.”
“You don’t have to give that up to everyone you meet,” Louis says. “You can keep it close to you.”
“If I recall you were just slightly offended that I waited to tell you the whole story until there was sufficient cause. And anyway, the offhand remark is hardly giving it up. You’re very even in your approach, Louis. A little flourish might be how I cope.”
“With my evenness? I don’t think I’m too even.”
“No, with my own history, and you don’t know how much I adore your evenness.” Quietly: “It has been very good for me.”
So Louis knows now what their night will be: the quiet car ride, the chatty neighbors on the elevator, and then the ritual once they’re home. Thank god, and also disappointing, that there’s nothing left over to put in the fridge. Louis has Armand kneeling in the foyer while he puts on Heat Wave, which means first taking the Pet Shop Boys out from earlier, replacing it in its sleeve, finding its place in the built-ins, and then striding back to Armand as Louis unfastens his belt, in no rush. Thinking, thank god I brushed all that powder off the front of my pants.
“Should I be even with you?” Louis asks, looking down into Armand’s wide doe eyes. He pulls his belt slowly from its loops, fingering the snakeskin as he tugs. “Balance things out, maybe?”
“I’d like that, yes,”
Louis puts a finger to his lips. “I didn’t say you could talk.”
Part of the skill is improvisation, as it goes. Louis takes the night slowly, sending Armand to ready himself for a little reprieve — but Louis first makes the mistake of checking his phone. There are the anticipated congratulatory messages: from his nieces, the godforsaken wealth manager he’ll see on Saturday night, and from Daniel, whose note to both of them is appended with, “of course you know I’m not one for this lovey-dovey stuff”; Louis has to wonder how he could get that out of the meagre time they’ve spent all three together.
From Madeleine, who says she hoped they liked the flowers, a rare personal message outside of the threads that have him and Claudia on them, and him, Claudia, and Armand — and one that’s just Louis and Armand and Madeleine, from after that really bad fight last year, the one that forced an end to his second date with Lestat, coming back from some picnic in an empty park, and Louis didn’t even get to come. Armand paid for that transgression dearly, not least because he was party to a flurry of anxious messages (from Madeleine) and reassurances (from Louis), all three of them feeling guilty about discussing Claudia behind her back — except Armand, perhaps, who dryly suggested not long after that, “This is how you care for someone who’s too young to regulate herself. Transparency is a privilege.”
“She regulates,” Louis said, “she’s not too young,” which is his typical defense whenever anyone else notices what he has known at least a while now.
But, well, transparency is a privilege. He thanks Madeleine kindly for her congratulations, see you Saturday, and then looks at the single message from Lestat: picture of the flowers back at his apartment, around the time Louis and Armand were cracking the shells off of their shrimp. “They are beautiful.” And that is it.
Louis can hear the pipes shudder, and that’s how he knows Armand is done with the shower — well, the showerhead, anyway. A real damned-either-way situation he has here: cruel to leave Lestat on read, but it feels rude to reply to him in the middle of a scene. Louis is half-hard, not unmoved in how he has one man cleaning up for him, and another mooning over his flowers at home. He leaves the phone by the record player, flipping it in the middle of the last track on side A to get things going again, and rubbing himself idly though his pants as he wanders into the bedroom and toward their armoire.
The whole thing is custom: a guy in the Bay Area builds these things to store gear, tigerwood and polished-brass hardware, the interior lined in dark-green silk. A catalogue of implements, their flails and phalanges, everything stiff leather and shiny ochre-black in the diluted-yellow bedroom lamplight. Armand’s footsteps behind him, the way the music carries across the condo, room to room (the A/V firm did a good job, Louis thinks, as he does often). Their air conditioning cycling off; Armand hates the heat, the humidity, but he hates “the sting of American intolerance for climate conditions” more, as if temperate Britain pre-climate upheaval gives him some natural tolerance for any kind of weather, anywhere. It doesn’t, but he tells a good story about himself to himself, about what he’s happy to endure as a good and patient boy.
The good and patient boy sits naked on the bed, his lotioned skin giving off its own umber glow.
Louis closes the armoire. There are implements of skilled craft, lovingly made to their instruction: the handle weighted to fill the hand; the flared shape; the leather selected from mailed swatches. Instruments collected over ten years, a fortune spent on this particular predilection, a funhouse imitation of their other collection, the trove they really don’t know what to do with. Like there’s some point to owning this art as it sits in a hangar in Dubai.
They might as well buy a Tribeca loft, Louis thinks, coming to sit beside Armand and push his chin up, kissing him first dry and shallow and then with a hint of crooked incisor. Just a little gouge. Why not have a place to put everything? Armand stiffens at the shock of hard scrape against his neck, arching, his lashes threatening with a tremor—
“Eyes open,” against the neck. Stiff words. Reinforcing it with his grip of Armand’s thigh. “Don’t shut em, you hear me?”
Louis wants to feel Armand’s skin, trace the trails of his veins until they disappear under his moistened skin, and reawaken the dormant thing that made him love Armand in the first place. The waif with centuries of experience in his eyes, seemingly, sumptuous brown eyes under a sweep of thick ringlets, the hints of personal history in his veiled comments and broad suggestions.
A night Under den Linden walking back to the Adlon from Gendarmenmarkt, Claudia several steps ahead of them and looking back only to moan about the cold. A story about too many souvenir mugs of gluhwein, unfinished sentences and implications, nothing Louis could put together yet. He tries to remember the fragments: they went somewhere after, didn’t they? A rented flat, an artsy crowd.
Soothing the hot, angry almost-handprints on the backs of Armand’s thighs, the offhand remark about how nice it was to be cared for again. What do you mean, again? And the comment, oh, it reminds me of being young, of how gentle they are with you when you’re a boy. Louis asking, literally, a boy? And Armand blushing a little, and saying, well, isn’t “boy” just a liminal state, ill-defined, the discrepancy between what it is and what it means, and Louis simply lying there continuing to rub in the rose salve and thinking, what the fuck?
It's good with Armand, it always is; he would never dream of defying a command of Louis’. He does like it this way. If Armand were to deny — naturally he wouldn’t, but, if he were — the whole thing would crumble, it would collapse, their decade-long waste dissolving into some stream of their history to be washed away, into the ocean, carried to the shores of every beach they’ve sat on, Armand checking the markets on his iPad and Louis rubbing the sunlight from his eyes, as if that was the reason Gigi was fuzzy on the page. Leaning over to ask about a phrase and Armand whispering the translation across the sliced fruit and sparkling water.
Louis is thinking, mercifully, of nothing when he comes, nothing except the moment’s mounting thrill, the delicious familiar embrace between them. All feeling, no bother, except to occasionally reach out toward Armand’s face to check if he is still looking, tired lids now trembling, directly at the wall.
Unclear why it feels how it feels; nothing was so intense, Louis thinks, as he trudges to the kitchen. The poor needle, he thinks, pulling the arm out of the groove. Armand has said leaving it to spin won’t damage the record, but Armand is not so old that he knows everything about records. It’s an affectation for him, too, this vintage one. They make nicer ones now, with an automatic function, but Armand wanted this older one. The A/V firm did a great job.
It's never so quiet up here as it was in Dubai. The pipes shudder, and the Sub-Zero wheezes (Sub-Zero, Armand mouthed at Louis across the showroom), and the floors creak. Across the counter as Louis is pouring Schweppes over ice, his phone is oddly silent.
He gives Armand the glass and takes the can into the bathroom, filling the tub, just thinking about how Armand confessed to him, earnestly, the first time they went to a supermarket together, that he preferred the pink kind. They don’t have it in the US, oh well. Right there in the Rouses cereal aisle, Louis thought, oh god, if my mother were to hear that.
“Tub’s filling,” over Armand’s repose.
“Thank you.” He’s finished the soda. On the nightstand, the ice is melting. His eyes are still wide-open. “Does the idea of getting up feel impossible? I would like a bath but can hardly fathom it.”
“You want me to carry you?”
“No, even that is a step beyond.”
“I can go turn off the water,” Louis says. “You don’t have to get in now, I can always fill it up again.”
“I can’t believe I’m going to ask for this, but, darling, a cigarette? Like the old days.”
Well, what must he do but oblige? That’s when Louis knows he won’t be getting back to his phone tonight.
It’s been a while since they shared a cigarette. When Louis takes it from his lips it tastes faintly of ginger, or maybe that taste is already in his mouth and inhaling Armand’s breath off it just doubles its presence, makes Louis aware. Regardless, he is, what, shocked? By how normal it feels to be in bed with Armand. Ten years, of course, it should be. It should feel like he has never been anywhere else.
In the morning, Louis will get up with the sun in his eyes, and he will stumble back into the kitchen. He’ll pick up his phone from where he left it beside the turntable, side B of Heat Wave staring up at him, and he’ll write to Lestat, “Make sure you replace the water.” Because if Louis doesn’t then Lestat won’t, and the flowers will start to wilt in a day or so, and seeing them withered the next time he is over will make Louis a little sad.
He hopes they last a long time.