"And Mark Cohen will preview his new documentary about his inability to hold an erection on the High Holy Days," Roger piped in with a grin, smirking in Mark's general direction. Their friends, thinking it just an innocent joke between best friends, laughed. The object of the comment, the scrawny blonde filmmaker standing just beneath Roger, just turned around and glared up into Roger's eyes.
"Come off it, Marky, I was just joking around," Roger said softy, inaudible under the noise the rest of their friends were making. And then he hopped off the table, heading towards a Fender guitar. Mark sighed, and made fun of Maureen, watching Benny twist Mimi's arm in a corner. He took a deep breath, and decided to draw the attention back to Roger, for Mimi's sake.
"And ROGER will attempt to write a bittersweet evocative song," he joked, all eyes going instantly to Roger in the corner, who picked up the guitar and started to play Musetta's Waltz. Mark, however, cut in, getting his best friend back for the erection comment, "that doesn't remind us of Musetta's Waltz!"
As the revelry around him continued, Mark's mind drifted back to the days before April, before Roger had gone and gotten himself hooked on smack, when Collins was still a struggling philosophy major at NYU, and Benny was right there with him, studying business management...Benny, who had no real inclination for the arts himself but still loved them, who someday hoped to produced Roger's music or Mark's films, to lend an intelligent hand in an intellectual process. Those were the days, before Maureen, before Muffy, before Collins became the first of them to discover the dangers of Bohemia...
"Mark!" Benny called from a corner of the loft. "Benjamin Coffin calling Mark Cohen, come in Mark Cohen, do you read me?" Mark nodded, looking up from a notebook on which his latest screenplay was being drafted.
"I read you, Ben. What's up?"
"Me and Collins are going out."
"Ooh, with anyone in particular?" the blonde asked, laughing. Benny just threw a pencil at him, too lazy to walk all the way over.
"No, stupid. Angie's with her family...it's some stupid Jewish holiday today...aren't you Jewish, Cohen?" Mark laughed uneasily.
"I decided to screw religion when I left my family. I was never really all that into it." Benny laughed.
"You sound just like me. But don't you feel the least bit uneasy? Don't you feel like you should be doing something, like fasting or something? It doesn't feel weird at all?"
"Nope!" Mark proclaimed with a smile, plunging his hand into a box of Captain Crunch and eating a handful of the cereal. He grinned, half-chewed food spewing through his teeth. Benny shrugged.
"You're gross, Cohen. Just you wait, though. It'll hit you. You'll be doing something and you won't be able to go through with it because of guilt. It happens to all of us. Even our pouty guitarist. Keep an eye on him while we're out, will you? Collins is worried about the kid. His breakup with Laurel wasn't exactly…pleasant. Keep him out of our weed, too? Prices are climbing, and even between me and Collins we can't afford much." Mark laughed.
"Are you more concerned for your marijuana, or Roger?"
"The weed, of course. Are you stupid?" The friends laughed together, and Benny threw a pen at Mark's head as a way of saying goodbye.
"I love you too, you fuck!" Mark shouted as the two black boys exited the loft together, laughing. Mark smiled to himself. It was moments like those that reminded Mark why he left Brown University and his parents' monetary support for life in a loft that sometimes didn't have any heat or power, and for a diet that consisted mostly of Captain Crunch and Stoli.
"They're gone then?" asked said guitarist, darting out of his room with lighting speed to pick up the box near his door and start rummaging through it. "What's in here?"
"Yes, they're…hey! Those are mine!" Mark exclaimed as Roger pulled out some old film reels, reading the labels and then tossing them to the ground. "What are you doing?"
"I'm bored, and I heard Benny say no weed. I was hoping that if I annoyed you enough you'd turn a blind eye while I poke into their stash?" His eyes were so hopeful, and he turned on the pouty puppy-dog look that Mark had a hard time resisting, especially in Roger. But Mark stayed strong.
"No, Rog, you can't have any! Hey, watch that one, that one's special!" he shouted as Roger tossed a reel labeled 'Nani and Rachel' across the room, which landed with a clunk at Mark's feet.
"Why's that one so special?"
"Hand me the projector and I'll show you," Mark said proudly. Wordlessly, the guitarist lifted the projector out of the box and handed it to Mark, who hooked it up into the extension cord that held the apartment's appliances. He hooked up the reel and turned it on, projecting the image of two brown-haired, brown-eyed girls lying together on a bed, both wearing jeans and t-shirts, kissing.
"Whoa! Mark Cohen, pornographic film producer?"
"Nanette was one of my best friends back in Scarsdale. She paid me a good chunk of money to film her and her girlfriend without her parents finding out. Of course, I kept a copy for myself." The two watched in silence as the girl on the left slipped a hand under the shirt of the girl on the right.
"The one of the left's Nanette. We learned to tango together. That was back when our parents thought we were together." Mark laughed bitterly. "I'm still not sure if we were, by then. Maybe it was me who made her go lesbian."
"Gee, Mark, that must have sucked. I'd never date a girl again if I thought I made one go lesbian." This time, Mark's laugh was more uncomfortable than amused. Roger picked up on it, surprising Mark. "What?"
"Nothing. Just...nothing. You don't want to know."
"Oh, but I do, Marky…" Roger pouted, and Mark knew he lost.
"Well…I kinda did give up on girls after that."
"But you said you dated a bunch of assholes at Brown…oh. Oh…"
"Yeah. See, you didn't want to know." Roger shook his head and slung an arm around Mark's shoulders.
"Cohen. I'm a musician. My type is really the last kind for you to think we actually care about that. I mean, why do you think sometimes we get more boys at gigs than girls? You know our drummer, Andy – he's straight, but I think he's the only one in the band." Mark's eyes went wide, and suddenly they both forgot the girls deep in passion of their own projected on the wall behind them. All of a sudden, nothing existed but the two boys.
Neither knew it, but both had been watching each other more than usual recently. Mark had watched Roger sink into his music, and watched the way Roger's eyes lit up as he played his guitar. The same thing, Roger was slowly noticing, happened to Mark when he was holding his camera. Mark was happiest behind the camera, the way Roger loved to be in front of it. Neither thought that the other could ever feel the same.
"Roger…" Mark breathed, swinging his arm randomly, tugging the projector cord out of its socket, the wall turning white as the pictures faded. The two closed the distance between them and their lips met in a sudden, passionate and needy kiss.
"Mark…oh, Mark," Roger whispered as their lips parted, his hands wrapped around the filmmaker's body. "God, Mark, you don't know…"
"Shhhh, Rog, I do…"
And then Mark noticed something. He noticed an odd reaction his body was having, and his mind instantly flashed back to the past, and remembered making out with Nanette in a back room of the chapel on Yom Kippur so many years ago…remembered the way his body responded…or didn't respond…every time he'd tried to be with someone on one of the days when he knew he should have been in synagogue. He pulled away from Roger instantly, leaving a confused guitarist.
"Marky? S'wrong?" Roger asked lazily, flopping back on the threadbare couch. Mark shook his head, laughing bitterly.
"It's Yom Kippur. Rog, this is so sacrilegious it's not even funny."
"Says the boy who told Benny that it doesn't bother him that he completely fucked religion in the ass after leaving home." Mark just stared at Roger. "Yeah, I was listening. I've been half stalking you for the past few months, fuck, Mark, of course I was listening." The scrawny boy blushed. "Come back over here, Mark."
"I can't," he muttered, and had no problem ignoring Roger, as even his body wasn't pleading for him to return.
"Why the fuck not?"
"Because…iveneverbeenabletokeepanerectiononthehighholydays." Mark said quickly, jumbling the words together. Roger cocked his head to the side, and then laughed, finally unscrambling the words.
"Oh my God. Are you serious!" Mark blushed, and nodded. "That's hilarious."
"Even Nani had more of a drive on these days, and she was the daughter of the rabbi," he explained quietly, half-hoping Roger wouldn't hear him. But he did, and continued laughing hysterically. "Stop laughing at me."
"But Marky, it's just so damn funny." Mark's only response was to pout in Roger's direction, and pouting was something neither boy could stand up to…Mark's sad eyes made Roger's knees go weak, and he instantly rushed over to Mark, wrapping him in a hug from behind. "It's fine, Mark, I don't usually fuck on the first date anyway."
"Since when?" Mark quipped, knowing better from tales of Roger's sexcapades. The guitarist sighed.
"Since the person was more than just a meaningless fuck to me." He kissed Mark softly on the cheek. "You're more than just a meaningless fuck to me. I don't think I could ever forgive myself if I treated my best friend like a meaningless fuck."
"You mean it?" Mark asked, turning around to look into Roger's brown eyes. He nodded, completely captivated by the blueness of the other boy's eyes.
"Yeah. Mark…I never realized how…blue…your eyes were…" he whispered, warm breath fogging up Mark's glasses. Mark smiled.
"She said the same thing. Nani, that is."
"She had good taste. Mark, it doesn't matter to me if you have some weird sexual dysfunction on the High Holy Days. Can't we forget that for now?" He pouted, and Mark swore to someday tell Roger how much his pouting affected him.
Some other time, he resolved, as Roger captured his lips in another passionate kiss, and he thought he felt his body warming up to Roger already.
"Maybe you just never found the right person to cure you," Roger suggested as they broke for air.
"Let's find out," Mark smirked, and they fell into the couch, determined to fix whatever was wrong with Mark right then and there.
Mark stood in the Life Café years later, watching Roger walk out into the cold with Mimi, and laughed to himself at how badly Roger had lied just a few moments earlier, because Mark was able to hold an erection on the High Holy Days. But only with one special person. Only with Roger.