ONE
IT’S BEEN A COUPLE OF DECADES since Ari last held one of these chocolate bars, and the gold plastic wrapper crinkles in his jittery fingers. The red Hebrew letters on the label spell out the name of the candy: Pesek Zman, which means Free Time.
Free time, he thinks. Sometimes I’m sick to death of being free.
As a teenager, Ari used to keep a stash of those candies in his closet, on the shelf above his prep school uniform. Every morning, he buttoned up his dress shirt, yanked the knot of his necktie up to the collar of his button-down shirt as dictated by school dress code, and then deposited a piece of Pesek Zman in the inside pocket of his sport jacket.
And now, this Valentine’s Day, as a forty-one-year-old Medieval history professor residing in University Park, Maryland, he’ll repeat this ritual once more, at least the candy part of it.
He rips one of the wrapper—Ari requires three tries to tear it open—and bites into a cube of the milk chocolate, filled with a crispy wafer and hazelnut cream. According to the company’s website, he is tasting the king of chocolate bars, a moment of pure indulgence. Everyone needs a little time out from life, to stop and enjoy a beautiful moment.
To Ari the chocolate tastes cloyingly, stunningly sweet, makes his tongue curl. He mashes the candy into a grainy chocolate paste that sticks to his teeth and the roof of his mouth, struggles to get it down his gullet. He didn’t like the candy then and he doesn’t now. But liking Pesek Zman was never the point. He’d doled it out as a gift, piece by piece, day after day all throughout high school, to a boy he used to know.
He’d forgotten all about the candy until he’d been reminded of it by his husband—now ex-husband—a poet on suspension for screwing a student. The ex-husband’s name is M. Not an initial, just the letter, to express solidarity with the transgendered.
On their first evening together, after a few mojitos, the poet confessed his birth name: Michael.
They’d met the old-fashioned way, in a bar. Ari had been dragged there by a colleague, who’d expressed disbelief that Ari had never hitherto visited the one gay bar on campus. And there, holding court among a coterie of gay faculty, just over six feet tall, was M, wearing his oversized dark-framed glasses (prescription strength of zero, a fashion accessory), a purple checked shirt, and white pants that seemed to glow in the darkness of the bar, hugging his hips and thighs. “You’re a quiet one,” M told Ari at the end of the evening, when the rest of the crowd, recognizing the charge between these two, had filtered away. “What’s going on in that cute brain of yours?”
“How can you see it, I mean, my brain, to know that it’s, well, cute.” Ari hated that last word, one of those nauseating contemporary locutions.
M put his hand on the small of Ari’s back, a few fingers drifting playfully down, just inside the back of Ari’s belt. “If it’s anything like the rest of you,” he whispered, his breath tickling Ari’s ear, “then, well, that’s how I know.”
Two years later, they were investing in real estate. Or, rather Ari was investing and M was coming along for the ride. M would have preferred to live closer to downtown, to the “action,” but it was Ari who was supplying the down payment.
“I’m a man against action,” said Ari.
“You were born old,” said M.
It’s strange that they became a couple. Ari hates bawdy humor or raunchy talk, ironic considering that he teaches and writes about the Middle Ages, a time when nothing could be funnier than listening at the door as a groom deflowered his bride after a wedding, or raping a dozen nuns at a local convent. By contrast, the naughty M relishes dirty jokes, crass innuendo, stories involving the rudest of body parts. He writes odes to gay sex with rough men at rest stops in the small Kentucky town where he grew up. He regularly accuses colleagues of “slut-shaming.”
And in the final months of their marriage, M regularly bemoaned their “vanilla” sex life, comparing their bedroom to that old Woody Allen joke about a restaurant where the food is terrible—and such small portions!
Last August, several months before the suspension for sexual harassment, M and Ari had been unpacking boxes in their new home, a ten-minute drive from the University where he recently received tenure in reward for occasionally interrupting his students’ drinking, drugging, and texting to inform them about equivalent bad behavior centuries before they were born.
M was making a show of straining to lift a heavy cardboard box which, oddly, the movers had marked in all capital letters “CATHOUSE.” Finally, he gave up and pushed the box across the floor into one of the bedrooms, putting his whole body into it, so that his low-cut jeans rode even further down his hips. In another context, it could have been a strip tease, which Ari wouldn’t have enjoyed. Frankness about all matters sexual turned him off. Ari required romance to be served with a good helping of subtlety and shadows. He’d once stopped an encounter cold when M turned on the lights midway through, so they could see themselves performing in the bedroom mirror.
Ari was in the kitchen, carefully unwrapping a coffee mug that said, “In Dog Years, I’m Dead.” A present from M, who used to give more thoughtful gifts like books of poetry, and once a heavy Latin dictionary Ari had been craving. Ari didn’t care for the mug, but couldn’t throw it away.
M came in holding a heavy blue book in his hand, a high school yearbook. “Who’s Justin?”
Ari backed himself against the sink, pressing the mug against his chest. “What?” he said.
M opened the book to the inside of the back cover, pointed to a few scribbled lines, and held out the book for Ari to read. “Justin,” he said.
The way he said the name felt dirty, or maybe like an accusation. “I already know what it says,” said Ari, finally setting down the mug on the chipped countertop. They were hoping to replace it someday with some tasteful quartz. “I just was surprised to hear you mention his name.”
“He wrote, ‘Thanks for the candy, you’re so sweet,’” M recited.
“Yes, he did write that,” said Ari, turning to face the sink. “He’s just, well, that’s his sense of humor.”
“You’re so sweet? That doesn’t sound like a joke. Was he cute?”
“I don’t know,” said Ari, digging around in a cardboard box marked “FRAGILE.” “I never realized we had so many damned coffee mugs.”
“This is the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard about you,” said M. “What does he mean, thanks for the candy? Is that code for something nasty? He must have been cute.”