Daddy
By Andrew Nickerson
The Tufts student cried out, “Yes, oh Daddy yes,” as Michael grabbed the boy’s hips to his own and pushed himself in deeper. An undergrad named Edward. The bedframe thumped against the bare wall as autumn swamp maples scratched the moonlight beyond the balcony. It all felt like a dream, or someone else’s life. Michael and Steve hadn’t had sex in over a year before he moved out.
Looking back, Michael added that lack to piling work schedules and the stress of building their own home. And, on top of it all, Steve’s father’s fast decline. In those final weeks, Steve’s personality constricted into retrograde. The headboard hit the wall to the rhythm of their carefully knit compromises frayed into new demands, culminating with Steve saying, “We need to finally get our shit together.” That meant more of Steve’s academic-minded friends, fevered political discussions over dinner, the push for children. Repression Michael recognized from his own hardline upbringing and, unwilling to bear it again, he broke away when Steve probably needed him most. The Tufts boy paddled the sheets under Michael and kicked the empty wall of Michael’s studio. One of the bloated new condo projects popping up all over Cambridge, commissioned to Steve’s architecture firm no less.
Steve had suggested an open relationship early on, which over ten years provided a kind of sanctuary during periods of argument or stasis. Some friendships even deepened as a result. During Steve’s last days with his father, the quickness with which Michael left had pushed those friends away, at least for the short term. It all happened so fast, and some part of him wanted nothing more than explain himself, to belong, but Steve had won all the sympathy. They would roll their eyes or shake their heads at Michael now—fumbling with condoms and getting lectured on PrEP by an undergrad for god sakes. He was lonely. The surrounding units of the Lux on Two apartment complex buzzed with eager young professionals just getting their hands on life. Dating apps as prolific and immediate as food delivery services dropped desire at your door in under an hour.
Edward brought a bottle of wine from the Trader Joe’s near the Bertucci’s where they’d met. They’d sipped from coffee mugs as Michael broadbrushed his situation and Edward went on about physics. The boy bounced on the futon while gushing over Moseley’s Law and the exploration of atomic structures through x-rays.
“This must be so boring,” Edward said as he swiped greasy bangs from his face.
“More exciting than a ninety-day marketing plan,” Michael said.
Edward’s eyes brightened and he used their cups and coasters as atomic models. At one point he froze midsentence, blinked, and searched his surroundings. Michael panicked, sure that this attractive boy, exuding excitement as same-aged Michael had fear, finally caught on that Michael was thirty-eight and alone. His belly stuck out when he leaned over, and his face drained whenever he caught a glimpse of it.
“I’m glad we got to hang out,” Michael said.
Edward tossed his props on the floor and threw one leg over Michael’s waist to straddle him. “You’re sweet,” he said, and Michael’s penis filled with blood. In his final weeks with Steve, he would lie awake in the dark as Steve stripped down and collapsed into bed beside him after another visit to the hospital. If Michael touched him, Steve pulled away. It felt so nice just to have a body on his, the smells of soap and sweat and chewing gum. Michael just wanted to hold Edward like a glider on the air, to let go of everything else within him and drift, just for a little while.
On the bed, Michael worked to keep up. He’d prepared to guide Edward in some way, as someone had guided him, but the boy charged ahead with disarming confidence. He asked Michael what he liked and seemed to pout with pity as Michael struggled to answer in kind to the crisp list Edward offered. Michael said he let the moment lead him as he trailed Edward’s chest and collarbone with his fingers, trying to keep his hands steady. Why was he so nervous? The frustration he had felt as Edward outlined HIV prevention bloomed into full fury and met his fear head-on. Michael came of age at the tail end of the crisis, remembered survivors older than him snapping at his innocence, summoning the specters of dead lovers and friends that swam in their eyes. The threat had far diminished, and education thrived. A different world than just ten years ago. Edward gave no reference to the past, and Michael fought off a vision of himself as another shaken, aging queen, or his own father’s fiery recounts of the 60’s—very turbulent, dangerous nogoodnicks. Extreme social unrest, war, whiners looking for handouts… Right Dad, please pass the broccoli.
Edward could fuck anyone he wanted at a moment’s notice, openly, without imminent death or societal ostracism waiting like a mob at his door. To be so free with his body, to know exactly what he wanted at the ripe old age of twenty-one. Yet, he called out “Daddy” as they moved in rhythm and the bed creaked. Just a word noting Michael’s age, and Edward’s attraction to him for it, common in the community. But not a name Michael had heard in reference to himself, and so he fell deeper, into the world he had run from. Edward kissed Michael on his way out and said, “Let’s do this again sometime.” Alone on the bed, Michael dropped from the air, past his tiny balcony and into the pool below, glowing blue green against the night. Young professionals laughed and flicked fallen leaves from the water in celebration of the weekend and their lives stretching out endlessly beyond.
Months earlier, Michael arrived late to his and Steve’s house-warming party. The subdued tones and side glances that Steve’s friends unleashed for gross breaches of etiquette welcomed him. Bertrand, classics professor and Steve’s sometimes lover, filled the entryway with a tweedy frown and filled Michael in. Steve’s mother had phoned just an hour before to say that his father was in the hospital with stage four pancreatic cancer. Everyone else at the party accepted the news as it happened. Steve appeared from the kitchen and alternated between performing the witty host and drifting into silence over his drink. The evening ended soon after, but Bertrand and a couple others remained to help clean up and offer more consolation, to the point where Michael wanted to just kick them the hell out. “We can handle the rest,” he said, multiple times, before another friend in a bright lambswool sweater finally took the hint and pressed Steve’s hand in his own. “If you need anything,” he said. He then clutched Steve to his chest, followed by the other two on their way out the door.
“Where were you?” Steve said, scraping labneh-crusted crudites into the trash by the fridge.
“I had to work,” Michael said. “I texted. You know what a startup’s like.” He traced a finger along a thin crack in the granite countertop. Steve, an architect, had designed or signed off on every inch of the house, except for a few details here and there, like the kitchen granite. Michael had also pushed to cut down the mite-ridden maple in the front yard. “I’m so sorry honey.”
“Everyone else reacted,” Steve said. His face pinched in a way Michael had laughed at when he’d mentioned his family’s background in construction on their first date. “Bertrand offered to stay over if you didn’t come home.”
“I told you I was,” Michael said. “He’s a good friend.” Ten years of practice had helped him shift from escalation to disarmament.
“So that’s why your father needed so much help recently.”
“He was just getting old,” Steve said, his voice fading. He’d made more trips than usual out to Concord that year, he said to mow the lawn, help out around the house. Sometimes Michael went along too, but Steve’s father always held a professional veil over conversation that made Michael uneasy. His own father, who had died just after Michael graduated from college, had only ever said exactly what he meant. With Steve’s help, Michael practiced himself out of the habit at work, but thought it had no place around family.
“I’m not saying he knew,” Michael said.
“Of course he didn’t,” Steve said. “He’s so careful with his health. Not like—” He dropped the thought and rinsed plates for the dishwasher. Not like Michael’s father, who smoked and brought hamburger lunches to the construction sites.
“It’s been a long day,” Michael said. “You’ve had a huge shock. Let’s leave the rest of this for now and take some time to visit him tomorrow.”
A plate clamored in the sink and Steve gripped Michael in a fast hug. His hair tickled Michael’s nose and smelled of citrus and almond oil. “How hard it must’ve been for you,” Steve said, “losing yours so young. There’s this pit in my stomach that just wants to drop out completely.”
“It feels that way,” Michael said. “But it won’t.”
They sat on the stools at the island and picked at the grape leaves and cheese-stuffed dates. Michael kept his arm around Steve and listened to the hum of the fridge and sloshy whir of the dishwasher, the sounds of their house coming to life.
Michael first met Edward at the Alewife Bertucci’s after a long day of setting up Ikea furniture in his studio with his friend Trisha. She began at the startup a week after him, and a love for the same professional development books and work-life balance seminars had made them fast friends. Edward introduced himself and took their orders, and reappeared a few minutes later with their watered-down cocktails and scorched bruschetta, Michael said that he didn’t think he and Steve would get back together. Trisha had spent much of the afternoon unloading examples of her rocky relationship with her husband as they pieced together the plywood dresser.
“It’s work,” she said, and sipped her blue Hawaiian. “No shame in counseling.”
“We’ve been through that. Active listening, I know.”
“What about the magic relationship ratio?” They had recently attended a seminar at the Kendall Marriott called “Behavioral Styles and Communication,” but Michael drew a blank on the term. Trisha shook her head as Edward asked how everything was. “Five fucks per fight,” she said. Edward glanced between Michael and Trisha and seemed to bite back a dimpled smirk that Michael found adorable. Trisha remained unphased, just pushed ahead in that way of hers. “Go ahead, look it up,” she said. “It’s science.”
The aimable glow in Edward’s face cooled into a more distant stillness. “That’s interesting,” he said. “I’m curious what studies yielded this data.” His skepticism, as Michael would later learn, targeted psychology, not Trisha. Edward’s parents, a physicist and neurobiologist in turn, taught him to view hard data and art from two far poles, so he dismissed any field that exposed their more porous boundaries. Like marketing did.
“Gottman,” Trisha said. She crunched down on the bruschetta and made a sour face.
“And how is everything?” Edward said. Trisha flushed and Michael laughed into his negroni. What a funny little scene, Michael thought. The restaurant sat at the base of the large parking garage attached to the Alewife subway station, in the same brutalist concrete style. His confusion over Steve flew away for a moment, like the pigeons on the sidewalk when a new party walked through the door.
“My friend is just helping me through a breakup,” he said. The first time he’d said that much aloud. Trisha patted his hand.
“Well, you won’t be single for long,” Edward said. He was probably fishing for a bigger tip, but Michael grinned anyway. Edward reached across the table to the bruschetta. “These are definitely burnt.” He winked at Michael and said, louder, “My apologies sir, ma’am. I’ll get a new appetizer out to you right away. The appetizer won’t appear on your bill, of course.” He lifted the plate and trooped off to the kitchen.
“I’m hardly a ‘ma’am,’” Trisha said.
Michael excused himself to the bathroom down the hall behind the bar. When he came out, Edward leaned against the opposite wall with his face in his phone. “Thanks for that,” Michael said.
“Are you on any dating apps?” Edward said. “I wasn’t sure, a guy your age.” The barb stung, but just a little, more mischievous than anything. Edward turned his phone around—rows upon rows of smiling faces and bare torsos. “I’m on this one, and a couple others. In case you needed a place to start.”
Michael only joined Steve once at the hospital. There was a performative element to Steve’s family that Michael only took for so long before dreaming up an exit strategy. They met Steve’s mother in the hallway outside his father’s room. A small woman who only ever seemed to smile, she said how glad his father would be to see them and then disappeared into his room with a nurse for almost half an hour. She greeted them again with the same expression, but accented by perspiration at her temples and upper lip. In the room, Steve’s father sat up in his bed in a blue oxford shirt. He gasped for air and said that he had just completed two hundred laps around the floor. The nurse looked down and Steve’s mother grinned through empty eyes. Michael was almost sure the nurse had just finished cleaning up some kind of accident, maybe replaced the bedding. But no one mentioned any of it.
On the ride home, Steve said how great his father looked, vibrant and opinionated.
“I know it’s hard, believe me,” Michael said.
“Would it kill you to just show some hope?” Steve said.
Michael knew that voice too well—a child unwilling to admit loss. Steve’s early life had been one long rehearsal in winning. When Michael had mourned his own father, they hadn’t faced this tension. His father died suddenly, and Michael’s grief centered on the connection they might have had. Given more time, Michael would have reshaped his father into a man who loved him freely and made him feel safe and seen. In the following years, as Michael continued to engage life, he realized how much of his rage rested in his own imagination. He refused to revisit such pained illusions with Steve, who nurtured them until they spilled out into the world.
One late night, toward the end, as Michael watched the news and ate takeout that he’d picked up for them both, Steve shuffled into the kitchen and said he wanted children. “A family. A real one. Not this bric-a-brac middling chosen family gobbledygook. Real family doesn’t need you to be pleasant. They stick by you when things get ugly, when you get ugly. It’s time to grow up.”
They’d already talked about children, among other possible paths in their life together, and decided against the idea. Michael said as much. Delicate negotiations over the course of their relationship, sometimes involving friends, two therapists, but, remarkably, never blood. From his deathbed, Steve’s father overrode all of it in mere weeks, until he seemed to speak from Steve’s mouth more than Steve did.
Steve entrenched himself, called on friends to accompany him to the hospital in Michael’s stead. The chosen family he seemed to renounce, who shunned Michael’s withdrawal in Steve’s hour of need. Michael felt trapped and helpless in a way he last knew in high school and college, before coming out, when all he wanted to do was run. This time, as hard as it was, as much as their friends whispered self-absorbed, craven, breakdown, he did.
Tufts campus clung to the glow of summer perched above Powder House Square and the shops and houses bordering Mystic River. Michael pulled up Boston Ave. in the purple hour, amidst the wander and scurry of incoming students and their parents. His own parents had dropped him twenty years ago at the base of a similar hill in upstate New York, having no experience with college themselves, and he carried his giant duffel around for an hour before an orientation leader pointed where to go. How strange that the same feeling visited him as he walked up to Hillside, Edward’s dorm, in a windbreaker and hat purchased from the same middle-aged man store frequented by the wistful and anxious fathers dotted around the green.
Edward burst from the door and pulled Michael through the narrow hallway and into his room. Simple wooden beds, desks, and dressers, with clothes thrown haphazardly around one side. “My roommate’s a total pig,” Edward said. He smirked at Michael and added, “No, it’s me. He doesn’t get in for another couple of days.”
“A friend of yours?” Michael said.
Edward tossed a couple of t-shirts from a bag onto his bed. The university housed summer students in other buildings, but he had begun the move a week ago. “He’s neat and quiet and at his girlfriend’s half the time,” Edward said.
“Sounds like a real Judy,” Michael said.
It wasn’t so much that Edward didn’t register the term, and the community implied through Ms. Garland, as that he showed no curiosity. Michael felt an uncomfortable kinship with the father erupting down the hall at a daughter who said no one cared about classic rock bands like R.E.M. or Concrete Blonde. Her mother said it was obviously time to go, that the girl could finish unpacking by herself. Michael caught so much of his own father and the men who offered direction in his place rising up in him like a slighted conqueror. Rather than claim new territory he saw by rights as his own, the way they had, he folded the clothes on the bed so that he and Edward could lay there.
As the lights around campus blinked on, Edward ran his hand up Michael’s back to his shoulder and said, “Come on, I want to show you something.”
Darkness muted any differences between the many people shuffling through the green. Michael imagined himself and Edward as just two more shadows, free of all the conflicting associations rising up for him to push down again. Some guys he knew performed to the roles, turning anyone accustomed to the world in front of them into a dupe. Safer, maybe, to look down from the gates of a private world on anyone who didn’t share it. One thing was for sure, Steve’s children would never know uncertainty.
Edward grabbed Michael’s hand and led him up to the roof of Tisch Library, where smally clusters of students and parents murmured, and the glittering blur of the Boston skyline played against the moon-doused night beyond. A plateau in the climb of Michael’s life, lifting him along with this community in transition. The far-off towers fell against one another like bones tossed to intimate the future. Michael, unmoored and startled awake each night as empty time pressed on, put his arm around Edward and pulled him close.
“Hard to let go, isn’t it?” a man said nearby. Michael recognized the voice that had barked in the dorm earlier, now cooing like a dove. Balding with a belly that hung over his jeans, next to a woman in a grey bob. Their daughter smiled in recognition at Edward and he asked about her class schedule. Apparently, she followed a pre-med track and they had shared a couple of courses.
“We come here to say goodbye,” the woman said. “Every year since she was a freshman.”
“It’s my first time,” Michael said. “Just beautiful.”
“Course, by now they can barely wait for us to shove the hell off,” the man said.
“You have like a three-hour drive,” the girl said.
“We should get back,” the woman said.
“So concerned for our welfare,” the man said, chuckling. He patted Edward’s shoulder like a football coach. “Have a great year, son.”
Michael chuckled as well, and Edward winked impishly at him. The family submerged to the walkway below.
Edward thrust his hand into Michael’s back pocket and squeezed. “Want to walk me back to my room, Daddy?” he said.
Michael kissed his cheek and headed toward the stairs. “Don’t call me that,” he said. Across the Charles River and into Boston Harbor, the bones held their shape.
A few days later, Michael met Steve at 1369, the coffee house they had haunted together with friends through grad school and budding careers. A narrow corridor with small tables running straight back and employee artwork on the walls. In the center of the room, at their old table, Steve rustled the daily paper in a button-down oxford while a young boy of four or five poked his thumb into a donut and sucked off the jam. Bertrand’s son, raised within the sunlit temple of his parents’ enlightened and open attitudes toward love and partnership.
Michael smiled at Bertrand’s son, named Pericles after the Greek golden age statesman and general, and said, “We meet again, your grace.” The name always irritated Bertrand, and now, apparently, Steve. The boy giggled and slid under the table with his donut, as though sharing the joke on his father’s pomposity and reclaiming his name for himself like a secret.
“Ok, off the floor now Perry,” Steve said, in a voice not his own. How strange, Michael thought, how so many men suddenly gave orders, but not all, thank God. And how children blindly obeyed. But not this one.
Steve sighed and folded the paper twice. He sipped his espresso and motioned to the latte in front of Michael. “Your favorite, right?” he said. “I’m just watching him while Bertrand gives a lecture.” Or, one could say, taught a class. “He’s been over a lot recently.” Steve bit his lip, as though daring Michael to find every possible meaning behind his words. “I’m actually glad you texted. He may be moving in for a while.” Steve dropped his eyes and fiddled with that stupid little cup, in all the confusion and fear that he held back so well but Michael knew how to see. He talked about how Bertrand had been there for him, how he’d done more soul-searching, but all Michael saw were their best moments together, louder and brighter, pulled into nostalgia like coffee grounds into espresso.
The house had been their giddy project. Of course, all final approvals went through Steve, the architect, and Michael lacked the expertise for some of the thornier decisions. Steve always asked for his input and reveled in Michael’s choice of a natural granite for their countertops, with a thin crack running down its center on the kitchen island. Maybe they didn’t fuck five times for every fight, but they fucked in every room, like a christening. Laying in sheets so white they glowed, Steve cupped Michael’s balls in his hand and his beard scratched Michael’s cheek as he whispered, “So big.” Michael laughed as Steve’s fingers lifted him. “Remember this?” Steve said. He drew Michael’s hand to his penis and pressed it there. “Those balls belong with this dick. These belong with that one.” Steve recited his assessment from the first night they’d spent together, which instantly put Michael at ease. Edward did the same, and the loss that had hidden within the transition at the roof of the library took shape.
“It was good of you to come to the funeral,” Steve said. “I’m sorry I wasn’t in a better place to receive you.”
Pericles thumped his leg and shook the table. Steve gripped its sides in anticipation of another jostle that never came.
“It was a nice service,” Michael said. “Your dad and I had our own journey.” A slap of sadness forced Michael to admit that he had suffered a loss too. “I want to stop by the house, make a list of what’s mine.”
“You asked me here to tell me that? Seems cruel.”
“I didn’t want to just throw it out over the phone. This made sense.”
“Ok. Come by when we’re not around. You might run into some contractors.”
“Why?”
“Bertrand and I are working through some changes. New floors, cabinets, some fixtures.”
“They are new. All of them are new.”
Pericles popped back into his seat and chatted with his donut about all the places they would rather be than there.
“Never mind. It’s fine,” Michael said.
“Bertrand came with me when Dad was in hospice. Dad kept mistaking him for you. Don’t look a thing like each other. ‘Sorry I didn’t believe in you boys at the beginning,’ he said. ‘You’ll have a beautiful family.’” Steve ran his knuckles under Pericles’ chin and the boy shook him off. “’We will, Dad,’ I said.”
A few days later, Michael stalked around the house he and Steve had built together, listing items on his phone. Steve was off at Bertrand’s lecture, “The Universe Is Change: Queer Identity in Ancient Rome.” The muted tones of dusk leaked into the east-facing kitchen, built for morning. Three granite samples stacked against a circular saw by the prep sink, where a contractor snapped a tape measure around the countertops. Michael’s father, had he lived. A sixty-something walrus with a deep cough, cigarette smoke wrapped around him like a blanket. That slumped exhaustion from enduring customer whims and delusions of expertise.
In the yard behind Michael’s parents’ old house, that sticky summer he turned ten, he remembered all those evenings building his father’s treehouse. Michael strained on a ladder, arms shaking as he held a heavy wooden joist while his father drilled into the ancient swamp maple. He learned to nail, drill, and saw. For a week beforehand, between day camp and his father’s return from work, Michael sketched dreamy, wild plans. Ladders reached to a crow’s nest at the treetop; tube slides spiraled down from the main landing; ropes and netting webbed around a trap door underneath. His father squinted at the plans over dinner, bleary-eyed and dusted in drywall, interjecting a nod or snicker. Michael accompanied his father silently to the local lumberyard and stood by as he chatted and laughed with other men. They followed his plan of a simple square base, not eight feet off the ground, a railing running around the edge. Not even a fucking rope to climb.
This problem had haunted and eluded him for so long; how ungrateful and guilty he had felt for his rage toward this gift, elated and resenting this long-desired time with his father. He had fallen from an open second floor on a job site; his heart, again. Dead by the time Michael and his mother arrived at the hospital. Maybe that quick shock, the lack of sentimental goodbyes, planted the freedom that Michael explored afterward, misinterpreted as aimlessness. Recently, he had stumbled upon an article from Harvard or MIT about accumulating nerve damage in the brain translating to fewer frames per second, thus the experience of time moving more quickly as one aged. In other words, they would never make up for what was missed anyway, best for Michael to move forward in his own way.
“I can’t believe they’re changing everything again,” he said. The countertop called out to him. The house hemorrhaged angular precision and clean lines.
The contractor sniffed the air, his mustache spilling over his upper lip. “Yep,” he said, and Michael heard that exhaustion again. “Let ‘em know I’ll be back bright and early.” He tapped the granite samples on his way out the door.
Michael sat alone in the settling grey. He wrestled out a foot-square section of the countertop with the circular saw and made a note to his list. He thought of Steve and Bertrand discussing the best sconces for entertaining while little Pericles wiped his sticky fingers all over the new floors. In another life, he still breezed through the clean-lined rooms, dressed for salons, action committees, and book clubs, hundreds of dollars’ worth of wine and crudites covering the crack in the granite island. Maybe he would find his way back to that world, but it would never define him again. And he would never wear the narrow certainty of the countless men who so eagerly impressed themselves upon him when he was so desperate to be seen.
Edward sprawled on Michael’s boxy new bed in his speedo, arms behind his head, and complained about his father restricting his plans to study abroad. “He says wherever I go has to have a comparable physics department. ‘I’m just concerned about your future,’” he said, pinching his fingers to his thumbs like puppets.
Michael sat on the end of the bed. He kissed the soles of Edward’s feet, soft and bleachy with chlorine. He wasn’t sure what they were to one another, but that uncertainty didn’t worry him. “Physics is the same everywhere, right? Here for instance.” He rubbed his thumbs up the balls of Edward’s feet and Edward purred. “You can’t figure out where you want to be unless you step outside of where you’ve been.”
Edward groaned. “Ok, Michael,” he said. “Just say you’ll visit me.”
Michael slid up Edward’s smooth body until their faces nearly touched. “Of course,” he lied. The sting of letting go hurt less and less, and fastened him to the heat between their bodies and the breeze tickling in from the balcony. If time did in fact speed up as he aged, perhaps each moment, and the connections between them, rang more deeply. Nearby trees shivered as leaves fluttered down and set the pool below alight. Late night residents swam and chatted, barely noticing, so caught up in the fevered preludes of the dreams they mistook for futures.
Andrew Nickerson is a fiction writer who lives in Cambridge, MA, and grew up in Connecticut. His work, which explores queer relationships and identity, has appeared in Guesthouse Magazine and Euphony Journal. He received an MFA from Emerson College.