Speak the Truth Quietly
Season 2, episode of Ben's birthday, Paul's POV
The guy is sweet; he's brown-eyed and youngish, and there's a tenderness there that's almost desperate. He flutters around the room, checking on guests, introducing himself. It's seven-twenty and I'm already exhausted, and there's a depression that comes with that, but there's something energizing about him. Something deeply, overwhelmingly pleasant.
The front door opens, everyone pops out of hiding with a scream, and suddenly, it's Ben.
It's like a terrible flashback with images and sounds: the quiet panic in his breath, the tight way he's speaking, the heavy stiffness in his shoulders and chest. It's all coming back to me and for a second, an awful, touching second, his eyes meet mine in the crowd. There's something about quiet people that gives them the power to break hearts with glances.
"My friends." he repeats, and there's that shocking sarcasm you hardly ever hear from him.
He marches off to his bedroom, holding his palm pilot, and his boyfriend is standing in the foyer looking like he's about to cry out of pure confusion. Everyone is quiet.
"Looks like it might be that time of the month."
Everyone glances over to a tall, dark haired man standing next to a shorter blonde. His voice is not hateful as he grabs a cigarette to light, and his eyes linger nowhere as everyone starts to mill around and grab their things, murmuring quietly under their breaths.
"Shut up, Brian." the brown-eyed boyfriend says, with venom, and his voice sounds challenged, tightened. That beautiful tenderness he displayed not moments before has broken into a very pure distress.
"Oh, Mikey," the dark-haired man, Brian, coos, his voice having gained an affected softness. While I grab my cell phone off a table and eavesdrop, he walks over to the boyfriend, Michael, and wraps his arms around him from behind. He kisses him on the side of his neck. "He'll get over it. Let's go get a beer, okay?"
"Get off." Michael says, shrugging away.
"I'll meet you outside?"
He and the blonde exit, and Michael closes his eyes and breathes deeply for a few moments.
I look up and Darren is approaching me with his boyfriend and his coat.
"What the fuck is wrong with him?" he asks, and there's distaste in his voice. I shrug.
"Who knows."
"Kind of a really shitty thing to do, isn't it?"
He sounds passively angry, and I don't think it's at Ben. Darren isn't Positive.
"Kind of." I agree.
We enter into a conversation that feels like a polite waltz: planned, pretty, courteous. He asks how I've been, then how I'm feeling, then he introduces me to his boyfriend, then he suggests we see each other soon. Then he leaves.
By the time I've said my goodbyes to everyone, the place is nearly cleared out; just the guy in the kimono (Emmett?) cleaning up, and that poor, puppy-dog of a boyfriend pacing the front hallway.
Suddenly my chest tightens with this huge, pervasive feeling of failure. Of failing someone I love. Twice.
"Hi." I say, walking toward him.
"Hello." he snaps.
"My name is Paul, we met--"
"Yeah, I remember."
I think the best idea is just to be quiet for a moment. Eventually, his eyes rise to meet mine, softened.
"I'm sorry. Something I thought… something important just fell apart, and I…" he laughs under his breath and strides away into the living room to grab his coat. "I'm going."
"Don't." I blurt, feeling out of place.
He looks up at me with a wild, open mouthed smile on his face. "Are you kidding me? Did you see him? I'm going!"
"Don't," I say again, and I can't believe I can't think of anything better to say. My brain races and trips over itself. "I know Ben better then you know Ben. I've been in love with him for longer than you have. Listen to me for a minute."
I don't know if this second piece of information is true, but I throw it out there and it seems to slow him down. He finishes putting on his coat, but then stops and looks at me expectantly. I swallow.
"Ben… he thinks it's his job to make everyone else… calm, like it's his job to stabilize everything, but when he lets that drop he's painfully transparent. It's an irksome quality, but there's something sweetly honest about it."
These are things I've said aloud to myself in the dark of my bedroom. These are words I've chanted while lying alone in hospital rooms, thinking about what might have been. This is part of my mantra, it gives me an indulgent pleasure to say it alone to myself out loud. I never thought I'd be telling it to my soul-mate's boyfriend.
"There was nothing sweet about that." Michael says dryly.
In my head I'm thinking: he's not a writer. In my head I'm thinking: Ben would get what I just said, he wouldn't be picking out words like "sweet" and making them mean everything. In my head I'm thinking: Ben's better than this kid. In my head I'm thinking: I'm better than this kid.
But then I remember how I got here in the first place, and why it's not me instead of Michael, and then I remember that I'm the worst person in the world.
"Something happened." I say. "Something big. He doesn't flip out about stupid shit."
Michael is quiet, and I believe that he's uncomfortable being given direction by me.
"Go talk to him." I say quietly.
"No fucking way."
"Please, just-- Ben and I had a moment like this, and I didn't step up, and…" I trail off. How badly do I want these two together?
"If he wants to talk he can come out here." Michael insists, twitching toward the door, eyes flitting up every few moments, frightened-looking and defensive. It makes me annoyed that he's so damn quick to run away. I wonder if I'm just delaying the inevitable.
"If I go in and talk to him, will you wait?"
He looks at me and sighs.
"I'm leaving in ten minutes."
"Okay." I'll take it.
Deep down, I like this. I can talk to Ben about important things without putting myself on the line. And yet, as soon as I open his bedroom door, he looks up at me. And I'm on the line.
"You're really the last person I want to see right now." he says flatly.
"How about your boyfriend."
"Get out, Paul."
"He's standing out there, looking like he's about to cry."
He's quiet. I'm standing directly in front of him as he sits on the edge of his bed.
I remember so much about his body; it's changed-- not like mine has, it hasn't thinned or stripped itself down or weakened drastically, leaving this dead flesh, this bored muscle and tired color-- it's a more desperate body now, more noticeably hard and cut, you can see some of his time invested in it, in its up-keep. When we were dating he was more carefully made, less hard angles, less bulk, less random, heavy build, more human looking. More simple looking, more soft. His muscles were recreational and useful, not so frantic.
He's still beautiful and I still love him, but he's more transparent. I suppose I'm more transparent, still, as everything in me and of me has turned a gooey, dullish shade of gray.
"You want to tell me what's going on?" I ask, and my voice rings in ugly, pale tones of boredom or detachment.
"I really don't."
"Then tell him. Ben…" I sigh, and I realize that even under this guise I'll never be comfortable lecturing him, telling him what to do, or what he's doing. It's one of my many prices being paid for one of my many, many sins. "He doesn't want to just walk out. You can see it. If he did, he'd be gone by now. He seems like a special guy. Go talk to him."
"Listen though, seriously, I can't deal with you right now, Paul, I--"
"I'm not asking you to deal with me! Meet him, face him, Ben, give him something. You can't just send him out there with nothing; he won't come back. You were terrible just now, darling, you were awful."
"How is it possible that even you can't understand! God--! I-I can't look at you!"
There's something, I can feel it, there's some reason he's talking to me in this way. It's specific to me, it's not a random anger that's happening here. My eyes scan the room for want of something to do; there, in the trash bin by the bedside table there is a stiff white paper bag, small, with a prescription note stapled to the front. The bag is unopened.
Suddenly, my brain is flooded with spasmodic understanding, and overwhelming my interest in solving this problem is a clenching, biting fear at the base of my throat that hits home with a terrible familiar metallic taste and the brief flash of a dead white color and florescent light and the smell of sick people, that dry, baby-powder, machinery smell.
Again my body feels safer in front of him; shielded in this momentary understanding. I half-kneel by the bedside so my face is upturned toward his.
"You're sick? You saw the doctor? Are you in trouble, here, Benjamin?" I ask, and I want to suck the last word back into my chest because it's strong and full of an ownership that I'm not entitled to.
He's still not looking at me. He's still clenching his eyes shut, head hung. After a moment he murmurs something unintelligible.
"What?" I ask barkingly, too loud, everything about me is too loud, it always is. He's so pleasantly quiet. He'd be happy to just stay quiet, but I always push him, always force him toward loudness. He said once that love is supposed to make you want to whisper and I made him want to scream.
"Nothing." he says quietly. He's quiet again, though, this is nice, this is better. He's not so full of random destruction.
"You can tell me, you can talk to me."
"No, it's fine." he promises. He stands up off the bed. He looks so tired it hurts to watch him stand, to watch him cross the room and then cross back, full of dreadful, painful movement that's fighting against every muscle. He does look pale, I realize. More pale than usual. He's good at misdirection. "I'm sorry I yelled."
"Ben--!" And I realize that this new calm isn't good; it's just Ben, pulling back inside himself, pulling farther away. Why could we never speak the truth quietly to each other?
"I'm fine, Paul. I'm sorry I blew up at everybody, it's been a long day. Michael still out there?" he asks.
"Ben, you shouldn't go talk to him unless you've got something to say."
"I can tell him I'm sorry. I really am sorry."
And I know that he is, but I hate that he thinks that fixes it. Only little children think that, that apologies are the end of the dilemma.
We look at each other for a moment until I lose my nerve and glance away. Whatever. I'll take it. Maybe this guy has something that I don't.
"He said ten minutes." I looked at my watch. "It's only been five or six. Come on."
I stand up tiredly. I can tell that Ben's following me, but it's not really like following. I get the feeling that I didn't have to be here at all, that I'm just what I look like: dead weight, bored muscle, useless, sludgy flesh.
We walk out into the hall and it takes both of us a moment to register the fact that the apartment is a completely silent, void, tumbleweed sort of empty. The kind of silent stillness that echoes back at you; the kind of quiet that screams instead of whispers.