True to his word, Roger was quick in the shower, paid a larger-than-customary chunk of the rent, took a brief catnap like a vampire in the middle of the day, and left the living room clean whenever he was out. He wore long sleeves and gloves at all times.
Roger Gordon would have remained a liminal presence—a faint scent of gun oil in the air, the Bluebeard Duffle Bag in the coat closet, and a garbage can perpetually full of take-out packaging—had not Kimmy invited him to her birthday party out of desperation to prove she had friends who hadn't come out of a bunker. This party, also, was a mixture of miracle and disaster, with the disasters more immediately apparent.
Kimmy's birthday party took place at 8:00 pm in the living room of their apartment—Roger's bedroom—so he could hardly not be invited. Titus lent Kimmy a dresser and a card table for refreshments and provided music that neither Kimmy nor Roger had acquired a taste for. Kimmy had spent her whole birthday reserve fund on a makeover at a department store, a hot pink dress (second hand) that turned out to have an impervious stain on the rump, and a pair of heels (also second hand) that she could not walk in. Because she had no free cash remaining, the party was bring-your-own-beer. Titus donated a few two-liter bottles of store-brand pop. Roger, looking shy and unreasonably pleased with himself, contributed twelve cans of sardines and two packs of expired saltine crackers, which Kimmy and Titus both felt to be unfit for human consumption. Dong Nguyen from GED class, who was the closest fit to Kimmy's idea of a normal friend, got hit on the head by a falling chunk of frozen condensation from a window air conditioner on the way over and spent almost the whole party chattering with Roger in Vietnamese while Roger held a cold cloth to his head wound and examined his pupils.
Kimmy's step-half-sister Kymmi and Kimmy's estranged father-in-law crashed the party, and Kimmy spent hours she would have preferred to spend talking to Dong instead squabbling with, and then chasing down, a girl who was half her age but her unfortunate equal in maturity. By the time they located and returned with Kymmi, the food and drinks had been put away, Dong and Roger were both gone, there was Victor Frankenstein's bicycle in the coat closet with a note reading Happy Birthday Kimmy in Dong's careful block print, and Kimmy was fighting enraged, frustrated tears.
The first miracle showed itself at the end of Kimmy and Dong's next GED class. Dong followed her out the door and poked her in the elbow.
"Hi, Dong," she said. "Thanks for the bike. I love it."
"Oh, it ain't no thing," said Dong carefully. He steeled himself, reached down, and folded one hand around hers. "Kimmy. I am learning American culture as fast as I can learn. In case I do things wrong, I gotta tell you," here he took hold with both hands, "Kimmy, you're my first flame and my best girl. When I take out other girls, you talk to them, they will tell you, that Dong Nguyen, he is a stand-up guy and no L-seven. They will tell you I pick up the tab and never take advantage. Then, when I ask you will you step out with me, maybe you say let's go steady."
Kimmy rocked back. Her first instinct was to step away; she had spent years fantasizing about winning herself a normal boyfriend who wasn't taped together out of old soup cans, but Can Man had never been a cranky Vietnamese national who took notes on sports movies. On the other hand, the thought of Dong romancing other girls made her clench her fists. "Why not practice with me first?"
Dong blinked, and dug a notebook out of his back pocket. He flipped through several pages without avail and looked back up at her. "How is that practice?"
"Well, we can date a few times, three times, for practice, and then if we both like dating, we can start again for real," Kimmy explained.
Dong held his breath for nearly a minute and his hands trembled faintly. "No pressure." He put his notebook back in his pocket and took her hand. "Kimmy, will you come to Esoteric Groceries with me to eat food samples tonight. After, we will covert-infiltrate a movie theater."
After the party, Roger began to use the apartment while Kimmy and Titus were in it. He hung around on the couch, writing in Cyrillic in his many blank notebooks and reading old foreign newspaper articles and conspiracy theories he'd printed out at the library. He bought a pot, and made gallons of soup that simmered continuously, filling the apartment with steam and a homey smell that belied that the potatoes and vegetables were blemished produce Roger had begged off the Chinese restaurant where Dong worked, and the meat was usually a mix of necks, gizzards, and feet. He ate like a dozen Irish pensioners.
Kimmy thought it was tasty. Kimmy thought anything that didn't come out of a can was tasty.
One Saturday afternoon that spring, he and Kimmy took a field trip to the farmer's market that came to Brooklyn once a week. They stuck close together, both stunned and gaping at the tent booths, the milling yuppies and hipsters and hippies, the children strapped into elaborate strollers, the rows of fruit, the walls of greens. It was an overcast day with patches of sun, just cool enough that Roger was not out of place in his long sleeves. He twisted and slithered through the crowd, drifting with the flow and sliding through gaps in foot traffic, guiding Kimmy in his wake with the ease of long and forgotten practice. A girl at a fruit stall offered him a June strawberry to sample. Roger never turned down free food.
As he bit into the strawberry, the sun broke through the clouds and he began to sniffle. He wiped his eyes with his glove, found Kimmy, navigated out of the crowd to stand beside a dumpster and collect himself.
"Are you allergic?" Kimmy asked, confused. His eyes were red and puffy.
"I thought I imagined it," Roger replied, hoarse. "How good these are. It tastes like I remember. It was real. Oh, God."
"I remember my first fruit roll-up after I got . . . back," Kimmy said. "It was totally overwhelming."
Rogers took a long sniff. "I want to try that too. First we gotta buy some of that real fruit."
They returned giddy and laden with two cases of delicate little ripe strawberries and pounds of vegetables that none of them had any idea what they were. Most of the vegetables went into Roger's soup pot, and in six hours it didn't matter what they'd been to begin with, except for the leeks. The leeks were delicious in the soup.
Roger spent less and less time with his notebooks, stashing them in the ceiling of the coat closet with his sheaves of library print-outs about unsolved murders of diplomats and heads of state. Occasionally he would look at the closet guiltily as he filled out job applications or read tourist guides to New York and other major cities. The hours he spent on the couch gave Titus plenty of opportunity to stare suspiciously at him and compare his face with historical photos online.
Titus observed him closely over four days, then soothed himself through a short nervous breakdown on the fifth day. He claimed laryngitis at the Monster Palace and the restaurant made do with a mute werewolf. On the sixth day, he used as a mantra, "don't interfere, don't interfere, you are out of your depth Titus Andromedon, it would be hypocritical and dangerous to interfere." On the seventh day, he said, "Did you know that Bucky Barnes was the catalyst of my sexual awakening?"
Titus watched Roger stiffen, then blink when he puzzled through the phrase "sexual awakening."
"He was?" Roger asked carefully.
"I was in seventh grade," Titus recounted, a shiver of adrenaline fading away, "and I had to write a biography report on a hero of World War II. Naturally, I started reading about Gabe Jones, because every brother writing about World War II has to either write about Gabe Jones or explain why not. Of course I love Gabe Jones, Gabe Jones was a hero to the people, but seemed like half the boys in my class were writing reports on Gabe Jones; the material had been explored. But something about Bucky Barnes awakened something in little middle-school Titus Andromedon, because out of all the Howling Commandos, Bucky Barnes was The Hot One."
"Huh," said Roger.
"I say this because you and the historical Bucky Barnes look eerily alike, and the resemblance is distracting me."
"That's why you been staring at me, because you're distracted," Roger clarified.
"Exactly."
They smiled falsely at each-other.
"You think I'm hot."
"I think you'd clean up okay," Titus sniffed. "Why, does that flatter you? Does that feed your ego?"
"You think I look like some schmuck who's been dead seventy years. Flowers might be in order."
Titus ambled around the living room, throwing quick glances at Roger while Roger, pretending to fill out a McDonald's application, threw quick glances up at him. "There's more to learn about Bucky Barnes than I found at my middle school library," Titus continued. "For instance. Mister Barnes and his sidekick Proto-Captain-America spent three years in a very gay neighborhood in Brooklyn, at the time the gayest borough in all New York and possibly the world. Nowadays Brooklyn is very different. It's been gentrified. A different set of people took it over. However. History doesn't venture to say what Mister Barnes and Mister America meant by living three years in a single apartment in the gayest neighborhood in all New York. Maybe the rent was cheap. But history does say, in every biography and every textbook, that Mister Barnes was a party animal. And who throws the greatest parties in every era?"
"The proletariat?"
"The gays," Titus said sternly. "So, Roger Gordon. What would you say, if I took you out clubbing, that means partying, with me tomorrow night when I get off work? I can't stay out past three, though, I'm not twenty-two anymore."
Roger furrowed his brow. Titus fancied he could hear the gears grinding in his head—he could hear gears grinding somewhere. At last, Roger said, "Well, I got no Mamma to cry over me, and no Pa to belt me in the nose. I think that's a swell idea." He grinned up at Titus, exactly like the historical Bucky Barnes.
"I love the future!" Roger Gordon rambled as he and Titus stumbled back down the steps of the apartment at four AM. "I love Beyoncé! I love America! I love flavored vodka!" Roger had consumed enough alcohol to kill a horse and embalm its carcass, and was moderately drunk. Titus was well-past moderately drunk, because Roger had bought him drinks all night to be sociable.
"Shh, shh, Kimmy sleeping," Titus hissed, and Roger shook himself, took hold of the door with two hands, one on the knob and one on one of the decorative panels, and opened it so slowly and firmly that there was no sound. He looked both ways and stalked in on silent feet. "That's creepy shh, too shushy," Titus said, turning on the light.
Roger unlaced his shoes, took them to the kitchen, and began to wipe sticky spots off them. He was in the pants, shirt, and suspenders from his waiter getup, and his special-occasion gloves. Titus leaned against the wall and watched him. Roger appeared to own three outfits, including the suit, and he fussed over them like he'd been raised in the Great Depression. "I'm happy," Roger said, as though he'd only just realized it.
"Izzat a 'thank-you, Titus?'"
"Thank-you, Titus." He set his shoes down on the counter, slumped heavily to the floor, and began to cry silently. His hair fell over his face.
Titus pushed himself off the wall and wobbled over. "Oh, honey, sweetiecakes, don't cry, buckybabe." He lowered himself to the floor beside him, got up, wiped the floor with a dishtowel, and sat down again, wrapping his arm, still holding the towel, around Roger's broad shoulders. "You'll make your face all puffy. You white boys age like . . . like . . . oh, I am drunk."
Roger stopped crying by breathing very slowly and carefully.
"You're young and gorgeous, and you have money, and a roof over your head, and you got propositioned by so many beautiful men tonight, and you can pull off suspenders and a fedora without looking like a meninist . . . of course you're happy. Life iz beautiful and you deserve it."
Roger leaned into Titus's arm. "You've a right to your opinion," he rasped.
"Of course I'm right. I am the most streetwise person in this apartment. Everyone knows that." Titus gripped the countertop, scuffed his feet, slumped again. "Now help me up. I may vomit."