in heaven a half hour, a Romance fanfic

IN HEAVEN A HALF HOUR
NOVEMBER 7 2007

Gus is saying, “This is a new low for me. I’ve never done this before.” He grabs my hand with the cigarette and breathes from it. I can feel his lips on my knuckles.

For a second I panic. “Oh, shit. Were you – I’m sorry. That’s a shitty way – I’m sorry.”

He looks at me and his eyebrows furrow. When I first met Gus he watched me and everything with this look of perpetual, unabated terror. The second time I met Gus he looked at me and in his eyes was the control of refined sensuality. I think now that is the only look he gives anyone. It takes him a second to comprehend and when he does he laughs maniacally, hysteric. He says, “Oh, God, no. I meant I’ve never settled Rhian’s debts like this. I don’t want you or anyone thinking I do this all the time.”

Rhian usually settles his debts with my money. This is the problem. Rhian Trophy owes me sixty thousand dollars which is a sum he doesn’t have. But I’m not heartless or stupid enough to storm into Rhian’s lair with a semiautomatic and demand my hard-earned cash.

I first laid eyes on Gus before he was Rhian’s toy. This was in Bedford-Stuyvesant. It was only the third deal I’d ever been to and I was only there because the money involved was my money. Do you know who my father is? I thought so. I don’t need money, and I like pills. The solutions to my problems are simple.

I’d known Rhian since we were both nineteen and he knew dealing and I knew money. We were kind of a dream team, I guess. Waiting around for the kids with the blocks of cocaine I went to buy myself a drink and lo and behold sitting on the sidewalk outside the all-night supermarket where I bought myself a beer was this skinny messy little fuckup with a cream soda who said his name was Gus.

“Are you Ellis?” he asked when I sat down next to him. He regarded the space of the curb between us with this nervous trepidation.

“Yeah,” I said. “I heard about your friend. I’m sorry.”

“This is the first time I’ve been in Brooklyn since then.” He smiled at me nervously. Rhian’s partner and Gus’s best friend was this kid a little older than me named Vice Jacobs, shot when a deal went awry two months before. I suppose this explained why Gus regarded everything with this anxious terror but I only put two and two together much later. Gus folded his bangs into his hair with crooked white fingers. He sighed. “This always makes me nervous.” His eyes were big in the streetlight, this thin sheen of sweat on his forehead. He was incredibly pale, sunless pale, like living in caves.

The next time I laid eyes on Gus I was going to see Rhian in Washington Heights to discuss what we could do about him owing me sixty thousand dollars. Some crackhead kid let me in and I went up the stairs to Rhian’s room and as I knocked on the door Gus came out buttoning his black corduroys. With the black hair and so pale he was a ghost, his eyes this steel blue-gray; his thin eyebrows furrowed when he saw me. “Ellis,” he said, he smiled wryly, in his eyes the total and complete control of his undeniable sensuality. “Do you need Rhian.”

“I do.” Gus called for him with his eyes still locked in mine and then he squeezed past me and down the hall and the stairs in the corner and away.

Rhian came to the door and he said “Ellis.”

“I figured out how you can pay me back.” I strained my neck for a glimpse of Gus as a ghost on the stairs but he was gone. Rhian invited me in and he shut the door behind us. His room was hot, the humidity of sex.

Rhian said, “Hmm? How.”

“Your boy. Gus.”

Rhian pursed his lips. In Rhian’s eyes is his total command of people, this undeniable power. “What about Gus.”

“He lives with me for three months.”

Rhian paused for a minute. “No deal.”

“Alright, then. Better start funding at par.” I don’t even know why I said that, ‘funding at par.’ In my better life I was a history major at Dartmouth in the hall named after my great-grandfather. I turned and went to leave.

Rhian said “Ellis. Wait.”

I did.

“Once a week for as long as you want.”

“Open-ended?”

“I always need money.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I’ll call you with logistics.”

I don’t know how he knew my number but that night I got a call and it was Gus. “Rhian said something about settling his debt.”

“Yeah.”

“Where do you live.”

“Near Washington Square Park.”

“I need your address, idiot.”

I gave it to him. Obviously.

Once a week and now it has been three months and Gus has only called me Rhian once. This is good because I originally thought he would do it all the time. I don’t know how much of that I can take. I’ve been told that I am a good lover, good enough I guess. I don’t know about Rhian. Gus doesn’t tell me anything.

This was the third week. He comes to my apartment and he knocks on my door and I take him inside and get him a glass of cream soda and then we fuck and then he goes home. The third week he is pinned against the mirror in my bathroom. I kiss the back of his neck. I love the back of his neck. I love the fog of his breath on the glass. He folds his bangs into his hair. He bites hard on his thumb and he cries out and he calls me Rhian.

I let him sleep on the bathroom floor.

Late at night I feel something cold on my back and I turn over and Gus is climbing into my bed. I turn to face him and he hugs his knees to his chest and then he looks at me like he did on the street in Brooklyn, with this nervous trepidation.

“You can do whatever you want to me, okay? That’s the deal. But you have to promise there are two things you will never do,” he says.

“Okay. What are they.”

“Never. Never, never like we just did, please, with the mirror, the bathroom… and never on the table. Never. Do you understand, never.”

“Never.”

“Never ever ever.” He folds his bangs into his hair. “I’m sorry for all that but it’s the way it has to be.” His voice cracks. I see the old Gus in his wet eyes, his anxious face. “I’m sorry but I can never take that again.”

He doesn’t tell me anything.

Gus comes to my door and I ask him if he would like to have dinner with me first. “What?” he says. “This is not part of our deal.” But he’s smiling. He still has that controlled sensuality in his steely eyes. I’ve only seen the old Gus once. I don’t even remember the old Gus.

“I’m hungry.”

“Where do you want to go.”

“Where do you want to go?”

“I don’t know any restaurants. I like Indian food. If you want to get me some Indian food.”

I get him some Indian food. He eats with his fingers, ravenously. He rips the flatbread into pieces and wraps chicken and onion in it and puts it in his mouth. “What?” he says when he catches me watching.

“You’re hungry.”

“Yeah. I guess.”

Later he says, “I like doing things like getting dinner and all that. If you wouldn’t mind, uh, we could do that more often.”

Rhian says he’s sorry and I can do whatever I want to Gus over this but he has to borrow five thousand more dollars from me and I can fuck the shit out of Gus if I want to but he really needs five thousand dollars.

He sends Gus over that night which makes it twice in one week. I order in, Mexican. Gus eats it on the floor in my living room with HBO on mute and he says, “Rhian’s not happy.”

“Why.”

“He’s borrowing money from you to pay off someone else. I really think we are nearing the end of an era with the Recreation Department.”

He’s always called it that. The Recreation Department. I used to think that and see kids on the playground in Tompkins Square Park. I think it now and I see Gus in my bed, in Rhian’s bed, on the sidewalk in Brooklyn, waiting to be let out.

“When Vice died it was the beginning of the end,” he says. “I think I knew that, and we all knew that except Rhian, and that’s why they all started leaving, and that’s why I tried to leave.”

“When did you try to leave?”

“About six months ago. I got tired of Rhian.”

“You came back.”

“I loved him.” I look at Gus and it is the Gus from the sidewalk in Brooklyn. “There are limits, you know. You can’t love someone so much that you can ignore what they do.”

I can’t ignore what Gus does. I go to see Rhian to negotiate this five thousand dollars and I let myself into his room. He’s sitting up in his bed with his joint reading the National Geographic and next to him is this shadow of nakedness of Gus, silent in sleep, his soft familiar breaths.

Rhian says, “Ellis.”

I say, “Rhian.”

“Do you have the money?”

“I transferred it to your account this morning.” Gus stirs and opens his eyes and looks at me. He says nothing. Rhian looks at him for a long moment and then back to me.

“I sent him twice, is that enough?”

“Yeah. It’s fine. It’s enough.”

“If you ever need him. You can call me, and he’ll go. I know – the money, it’s hard. You can do whatever you want with him.”

I look at Gus and instead of his refined sensuality there is this unmistakable shock in his eyes, written all over his pale face.

“I might need him tonight.”

Rhian takes a deep breath from his joint. “He’ll go with you now, then.”

We get out on the street and Gus says, “What the fuck!?” He doesn’t speak the soft post-coital murmur he does with me. I have never seen him really, truly angry. Now he is angry. “I can’t believe. That’s not what I am. I’ve only ever slept with two people. That’s not some kind of fucking eighteenth century brothel he runs, it’s a fucking drug den. The way he talks – God. I can’t deal with that anymore.”

“You can stay with me as long as you want.”

He looks at me but he doesn’t say anything. When we get back to my apartment I shut the door and Gus grabs my face and he kisses me. He never starts these things. He holds my face. When he pulls back he studies my face and he runs his thumbs along my cheekbones.

I say, “I might love you.”

He says, “I know.”

We make love and he calls me Ellis.

When I wake up Gus is gone. I look all over and I call his name and I am alone. I go into the bathroom and I take two of Rhian’s yellow pills and I lean against the mirror and I shut my eyes and I see the fog of Gus’s breath on it, the whiteness of the back of his neck. He’s gone, he’s gone.

I go to the bank and tell them the transfer of five thousand dollars from my account to Rhian Trophy’s was a fraudulent charge and I don’t know a Rhian Trophy and I certainly didn’t wire him money. I watch them on the computer withdraw the funds from Rhian’s account and reimburse me. I tell my doorman that if Gus ever comes around again not to let him in.

Two nights later I’m walking through Washington Square Park on my way home from a party and a voice in the shadow says, “Your doorman wouldn’t let me in.” The thinness and paleness make it Gus, instantly. In the light I can see his black eye, his split lip, his defined limp. In his one working eye he is losing his control.

He says, “What happened to the money.”

“I took it back.”

“What’d you do that for.”

“He beat you up so I would give him the money.”

“Exactly.”

“And you’re going to stay with him.”

Gus chews on his split lip.

“Exactly.”

“You can’t think that I want this,” he says.

“I think you do.”

“You can’t think that.”

“He sells you out to settle his debts and he beats you and you love him.”

“I don’t, please, I don’t.” The tracks of tears on his face. “I don’t want to be that but it’s all I can be. I’m a college dropout and I spent the last year of my life being someone I swore I would never be and I want to say I can stay good but I’m so weak, so weak and there are so many strong people! And if it’s not Rhian it’s going to be someone else.”

“I’m not very strong either.”

Gus doesn’t say anything.

“Do you want to come over?”

He says, “I never want to go back.”

“Good.”

“But I have to.”

He takes my hand with the cigarette and he takes a breath and then he gets up and dresses, slowly exhaling. “I promise,” he says, “Someday I’ll be strong enough and I won’t go back.”

“When.”

“You’ll know when.”

He leans over and he kisses my forehead. He wraps his scarf around his neck and he says, “I’ll see you next week.”

IF YOU DID NOT UNDERSTAND THIS AT ALL IT IS BECAUSE YOU DID NOT READ (my story) NEVER EVER, EVER DID. SO READ IT BEFORE YOU COMPLAIN ABOUT THIS MAKING LITTLE TO NO SENSE. THANKYOU.

see the movie "before the devil knows you're dead." i saw it on tuesday and all the scenes with the drug dealer in trump tower were very reminiscent of rhian and gus to me. so of course i had to write this the next day in study hall wherein i was so bored i was translating architecture in helsinki lyrics into french (vivre dans les endroits comme ca, c'est toujours la meme chose!!)
this will not make it into the novel i'm trying to write called "recreation department." WHICH is about gus and how much of a little fuckup he is. i loooove him so much. however a whole bunch of other stuff which you have not read will be in there and i would love people to read it... so if you want to read recreation department (what i have thus far) please review and tell me your email address.
danke. ilu.