I said he wasn’t lying, and Julian laughed.
After a moment, he said: “The men in my family, we’re warriors. We come from a long line of military, going way back in the Philippines. It can make you a certain type.”
I knew what type Julian meant—the swaggering, man-splaining dudes Fiona cycled through in our twenties. Maybe a good part of the thirties.
“My brother and Bobby?” Julian said. “You don’t know the shenanigans they used to get into.”
“He’s still an asshole sometimes,” I said. “But Bobby’s a good dad.”
Julian stubbed out his cigarette on the bottom of his boot. “It’s why I had to get out of the Marines. You ever lived in a place near a base?” I shook my head. “There’s nothing to do. I was throwing away so much cash on strippers,” he said. “Getting wasted all the time. Acting a fool.”
“Bobby’s right about one thing,” I said. “This party is dead as hell.”
“You know a better one?” He buried his hands in his pockets.
“We can chill at my place,” I said. “Smoke some weed.”
“I better not,” he said. “I might get tested for this new job in New York.” Then he met my eyes and an understanding came into his face softly. He squinted, studying me. “But didn’t Bobby call you a—”
“Bobby’s an idiot,” I said.
“Yeah, I’ve met him. The guy who just kicked me out of his party.”
I called a car to drive us to my apartment.
* * *
? ? ?
Upstairs, things got going. Then something dawned on me. It had been a long time since I kept condoms stocked at my place.
“Bad news,” I said, pulling back.
“I got you,” Julian said. He reached into his khakis, puddled next to the bed.
There was a beautiful, strange energy between us. As if inside him there was a magnet—I’d felt its pull even at Fi and Bobby’s—drawing me to him; but the closer I came, the magnet seemed to switch to its other end and began to repel me. Then it flipped again, and I rushed toward him swiftly. Still, the entire episode lasted not long after we began. I’d forgotten how fast it goes with a man. How linear the trajectory. He asked me if I—？ And I almost laughed. Yes, I said, smiling. I enjoyed him very much.
The next morning, we stood in my kitchen barefoot. While we waited for the coffee to percolate, Julian talked about the time he got blown up in Afghanistan, casual like. Just another routine patrol in the desert, he said, until the Humvee rolled over an IED, and then: a deafening boom. The hell was that? Julian was the ranking officer in the company. He moved quickly to check out the three other Marines—dazed, but all still breathing—before he peered outside the vehicle to assess the damage. Charred metal, broken glass, halo of dust. His eyes burned. The enemy was out there. Fucking insurgents. He radioed for backup, doing everything to suppress the panic crushing his throat.
“All of a sudden I started to laugh,” he said. Once the laughing came on he couldn’t stop. The giddiness spread through the truck, passed from man to man, like a relay baton.
The sun shone bright through the kitchen windows of my apartment. I asked him what had been so funny.
“It was just so . . . ridiculous,” he said after a while. “Our underwear and socks flying out there, mixed up with all the burnt mess and debris.”
“Maybe you were in shock,” I said.
“Maybe.” After a moment, he said: “One of the guys with me that day, I saw him come back from another patrol later on. They’d gotten blown up, too. Another fucking IED.”
I asked if he turned out okay. Julian shook his head, slow. “He wasn’t responding at all. Bleeding, eardrums blasted. He was drooling.” He made a gesture, running his fingers from the side of his mouth down his chin. “He never recovered from that,” he said. His voice was quiet, matter-of-fact. “The guy’s a vegetable now. Basically.”
The moka gurgled on the stove. I asked Julian how he takes his coffee. I didn’t know what else to say. We sat there quiet for a while. I asked him about New York. He said he had a job lined up in Manhattan. Analyst for an investment bank. I talked about my writing, the two pilots that didn’t get picked up, the sci-fi script in development purgatory. He was twenty-seven: four years in the naval academy; five years active, including two tours in Afghanistan. I told him I was thirty-two, shaving five years off my real age and our ten-year difference.