Gavin MacBain, Year 2

Gavin laughs when he sees him, standing in the foyer in his father’s Bullock and Jones from the sixties, one of those two-piece mod suits, old moth-eaten gray thing over a black t-shirt.

Louie takes the Rolling Rock Gavin’s brought him (already uncapped and almost too cold to hold; Gavin always puts a few in the freezer when he knows Louie’s coming) but grudgingly, frowning, “You said to wear a suit.”

In the low pendant light from above, Gavin’s eyes look deep-set and black, his smile like a knife wound, he says, “Alright, Sonny Crockett.”

“I do not look like Sonny Crockett.”

“Well, you don’t look like Rico.”

“At least I’m not wearing a waistcoat.”

“I look completely dashing in a waistcoat, Louie. You’re just making yourself seem jealous now. It’s not becoming of you.”

Around the big entryway arc, Louie peers at all the Christians schmoozing around the drawing room in their nice expensive formal wear, and guesses how many of the men in there are wondering where Gavin got to. He’s profiling: the chubby round men, balding and sweating in their suits; the tall paper-faced men with wrinkles around their mouths deep as gashes, whose wives have gaggled off somewhere in their puffy-armed dresses with huge floral prints, gossiping in circles. There is a handful of kids and of teenagers, girls with their hair pulled back too tight and their dresses cut too low and short, and boys that look like NASA employees with vacant or angry faces. Everyone’s eyes have a shuttered look to them, Louie thinks, from where he’s standing. Gavin is peering at them now, too, and he sighs as Louie asks, “Will I stand out too much?”

“Yeah,” Gavin croaks, with a cold little choke like a laugh. “You look alive.

“We don’t have to stay in there, though. I just have to make sure everybody sees me and gets their presents to me.”

“You wanna go out to the garden?”

“That’s what I had in mind. The pavilion.”

“They’ll miss you.”

Gavin snorts, eyes darting through the crowd, shining oddly. Louie knows his mother keeps all manner of painkillers and opiates in the bathroom cabinet upstairs, at hand, and he doesn’t really blame Gavin for getting into them sometimes.

He says, “I want you to stay with me when I go back in there, Louie.”

“That’s fine. Not like I have anywhere better to go.”

“Wish you’d’ve worn your lip ring.”

“You’re rubbing me in their faces,” Louie laughs, taking his first swig.

“I figure,” Gavin says brightly, smiling to himself, or maybe someone in the other room has noticed him and he’s being polite, “if I rub you in their faces, maybe they won’t try to rub themselves in mine tonight.” He pauses in a way that says if y’know what I mean, and Louie does. “Here,” pulling at Louie’s sleeve now, before taking his beer from him, “give me your—blazer thing. I want them to see your tattoos.”

--


“Where do you think your mother got to this time?” Louie asks, piling gifts on the bench, stepping aside for Gavin to add to the heap.

Gavin, sleeves rolled up to his elbows and collar unbuttoned just beyond the hollow of his throat, sets his light load down and steps back, pushing his hair away from his forehead, sweating a little in the humidity and the accent lights around the eaves of the gazebo.

“Maybe she found someone to let her suck his cock,” he says, sitting down and fishing out a particular present, setting it on his knees. “Maybe she got lucky.”

“What’s that one?”

“The man who hugged me.”

“Fairholm.”

“Good memory. He whispered in my ear when he was holding me. I was thinking having you with me would get me around all that, but— He told me to open it in private.”

“So now we have to open it,” Louie nods, tilting back his fourth beer before helping Gavin’s feet up into his lap, pulling off his shoes for him. Gavin pauses in his unwrapping to glance along the straight stretch of Louie’s long legs to where he’s got his ankles crossed on the dirty wooden floor, and smiles.

“You’re wearing your Steve Maddens.”

Pointy, square-toed things that make Louie think of scorpions, shining black with scales and sloping up off the ground from the balls of his feet.

“My Serpants,” pointing his silver-ringed pinky at Gavin, bottle still at his mouth. Free hand pushes a thumb into the arch of Gavin’s foot—according to the complementary therapy of reflexology (which Louie once read an article on in a Discover he found in his proctologist’s waiting room): his abdomen.

“I knew you’d like them.”

“They’re fuckin’ fine,” setting his bottle down finally, using both hands.

“I thought of you,” Gavin smiles, past all the wrapping paper now and working the cardboard top off a typical sort of clothing box, only— well, pink.

“Fuck,” Louie breathes, fingers twitching around Gavin’s feet, as Gavin pulls from the bloom of delicate white tissue paper lacy little thing after lacy little thing: filigree corset flying with ribbons, feathery garters, tanga panties with laces up the back, soft mesh stockings that’ll go up to his ass, a gauzy slip trimmed in little bitty feathers.

“Must think you look good in blue,” Louie cocks his unpierced eyebrow. “I’d’ve thought red, to be honest. Maybe you can exchange them.”

“Probably go ravishingly with my new lip-gloss as they are.”

“Lip-gloss,” Louie echoes, with a cough. “MacBain’s present?”

“I think he expected me to wear it to the party. It may be subtle, but really, I’m not planning on seducing the entire diocese on my sixteenth birthday, sorry.”

“You should be getting a car. A Porsche. A Carrera. Charcoal. Full leather seats. The whole shebang, come on, everything. Vanity plates, even, what d’you want ‘em to say, baby?”

“Wait a minute now, a car? Like the sort of thing that’d allow me independent transportation away from the house? You’re overestimating Bishop MacBain.”

“How about—I H8 UR…P? Does it have to be just six characters?”

“You’re making me sad, Louie.”

Shaking his head, like dislodging a fly, Louie abandons a foot to reach into his back pocket, thinking now’s as good a time as any, murmuring, “Put that shit away.”

But Gavin’s busy petting the trim of his new slip, and just waits to see what Louie comes out with.

“Here.”

Something small, he opens his hand: silver—no, high polish chrome. A lighter. A Zippo. Gavin takes it, rolls it over. Engraved on the front is the word dicami.

“If you can afford a Zippo,” Gavin smiles, tracing a fingertip over the letters, “why buy all your lighters from the Fenway Exxon?”

“Can’t always afford a Zippo,” Louie shrugs, and he’s rubbing Gavin’s feet again. “But your begonias look great this year or something, I guess.”

Flicking it open, sparking the flame, he half-pouts, “But I liked needing you for a light, Louie.”

Louie shrugs again, “You still need me,” callused fingers working Gavin’s neck and heart simultaneously.

“Thank you,” Gavin murmurs, pocketing the lighter and finally packing Fairholm’s gift away, “for coming.”

And for all the things Louie figures are unsaid, are obvious, and have been since that day he was packing roses and Gavin was fourteen and too talkative about certain things, Louie says, “Anytime,” because it’s the closest thing to the truth that comes to mind.

Then, the gazebo lights flicker with a loud electric buzz, an omen, and they look up—Gavin, over his shoulder; Louie, over Gavin’s head—in time to see Bishop MacBain halfway down the walkway to where they are.

Gavin scrambles into his princely posture, feet on the floor finding his shoes and hands flying up to straighten his collar. Louie watches, rapt, the way Gavin, rolling back his shoulders, seems to shift even the set of his bones to better suit the company of the man approaching. Like undressing and redressing as fast as he can, and still with something as severe as the blood-and-bones transformation of man to wolf, or vice versa. Something like that.

Then, the way Gavin’s voice reaches some deferential octave from six or seven years ago (just this far from reminiscent of Cher Horowitz, total valley girl, Daddy’s girl), the way Gavin bows his head and keeps it bowed, as MacBain Senior steps onto the platform.

“Good evening, Daddy.”

“Happy birthday, Gavin.”

Alasdair MacBain is the cleanest, sharpest-looking man Louie has ever met. He’s younger than Louie’s father, barely over forty, with a hermetically-sealed look about him, the most perfect respectable haircut any powerful man could ever achieve, and this stature that Louie would have otherwise thought was lost to the politicians of ancient Rome, if MacBain wasn’t always standing around looking like Dictator For Life. The outward makings of a great man, for a sick fuck.

He smiles at his son without blinking, hardly with moving his lips. Then, he turns his stone blue eyes on an unsuspecting Louie.

“Mister Isador,” pours his goopy honey voice. Louie’s stomach turns.

“Monsignor.”

“Alasdair,” MacBain corrects, in a very uninviting way, probably more meant to suggest something about Louie’s religious orientation, or lack thereof. Louie shrugs his shoulders at him, holding his gaze.

Spurning that, MacBain turns his head again to look at Gavin, who is still looking at the floor around his father’s shoes.

“Have you,” he begins slowly, and Gavin glances up, “introduced Mister Isador,” he might as well just call Louie Gardener, for the way he oozes out his name the way a slug might ooze out of another, just as revolted person’s mouth, “to everyone, sweetheart?”

“No, Daddy.”

MacBain’s face smoothes, vaguely, with something that’s probably relief.

“To His Grace, Bishop Fairholm?” he asks.

“Yes, Daddy.”

The tendons in MacBain’s neck constrict, briefly, visibly. Otherwise, no change.

“Very well,” he snaps, and directs his gaze to the heap of gifts spread around the gazebo. “Did he deliver his present to you?”

“Yes, Daddy.”

“Were you appreciative?”

“Yes, Daddy.”

“Will you express your gratitude to him? Let him know you enjoy it.”

“Yes, Daddy.”

“Enthusiastically.”

“Of course, Daddy. When?”

MacBain glances at Louie, who has folded his arms behind his head, leaning back on the rail and watching the exchange from under low lids. He pokes his tongue into the inside of his cheek, for half of that universal gesture, and MacBain’s nostrils flair, if for just a split second, and he looks away.

“We will see him on Sunday, Gavin, soon enough,” MacBain answers, cautiously. “Have you seen your brother this evening? Lift your face when you answer me.”

Gavin looks up, and Louie has never seen a straighter transition from neck to spine.

“Not since this afternoon, Daddy.”

“I wanted to introduce him to some of the pastors.”

“He would probably be more comfortable meeting the children, Daddy, if he’s to be an altar server, too.”

“No, Gavin,” Louie interjects, leaning forward, keeping his eyes on the bishop and dropping a heavy hand on Gavin’s knee. Both MacBains turn mildly alarmed looks on him. “Think what Daddy’s trying to say here is Callum needs to start getting acquainted with his genuflecting posts.”

“Louie—!”

“Mister Isador,” MacBain huffs, squaring his jaw and lifting his chin to this ridiculous angle. Louie butts in again before he can continue.

“I think Giuseppe was asking about you Thursday.”

MacBain lets all his air out through his nose, his mouth tight.

“Maybe it was Wednesday,” Louie tends to thicken his South Boston accent when he talks to MacBain about this sort of thing. Just for authentication purposes. “Anyway, he asked, said he hadn’t talked to you in a while, was wondering if you were maybe—what’d he say—weaseling around on him. I told him no way, but it’d probably be better for you if you got in touch with him yourself. Alasdair.”

“What are you asking for, Isador?” MacBain clips out.

Louie nods at him, once, a sort of dismissal. “Talk to Giuseppe.”

“Very well.”

One last tight little smile at Gavin, a snippy last, “Happy birthday, sweetheart,” and he leaves.

When they’ve watched him walk all the way back to the house and shut the door behind him, Gavin falls over sideways onto Louie’s lap, wraps his arms around his waist and presses his face into his stomach, sighing, “Marry me.”

Louie leans back against the rail again, patting Gavin’s head, and smiles as he brings his beer to his mouth.

“Yeah, okay.”