The Weekend: A Novel by Peter Cameron Page B

lick it. He was scared of how sexy he found Lyle, afraid of alienating Lyle with his desire. He found almost everything about Lyle sexy: his body, his mind, his talk, the way he climbed stairs, the way his fingers gripped a fork, blushing with tension, the way he smelled and tasted, the impossibly soft way his back and neck and shoulders congregated, the spot there, the crux of him, naked and lick-able.
    Robert traced the corrugated route of Lyle’s spine down toward the tight valley of his buttocks. This motion, though intended to, did not rouse Lyle. And then Robert realized that Lyle was awake, and pretending to sleep. The skin across his shoulders gave him away—it was suddenly elastic with tension. It was not the skin of a sleeper. Robert removed his hand and got up. He stood beside
the bed for a moment, looking down at Lyle, who continued to feign sleep. Neither of them spoke. And then Robert saw the photograph of Lyle and Tony and the camel and the pyramids on the table beside the bed.
    He left the room. He went outside and stood in the front yard for a moment, and then walked up the long dirt driveway. The paved road it adjoined was surprisingly heavily traveled. The cars sped by noisily, blowing up hot storms of wind and dust as they passed. Robert began to walk along the side of the road, on the shoulder of a gulch. The gulch was full of stagnant water and soda cans; on its other side was a field of tall corn. Robert jumped across the ditch and walked between two rows of corn, far enough into the field so that he could not see the traffic. He sat on the ground and pulled his knees up against his chest and rested his forehead on them. It felt cool and peaceful in the corn. He could see the ground between his legs and watched some ants drag a piece of corn husk across his field of vision. Maybe I was wrong, he thought: maybe Lyle really was sleeping. I should have woken him up. I should have spoken to him. I shouldn’t have just left. I love Lyle, he thought.
    He got up and retraced his steps, but instead of going back along the driveway, he veered off into the woods. He thought that would be the quickest way to get back to Lyle.
     
     
    After Robert left, Lyle lay on the bed for a while. For a moment after he awoke he had thought the hand on his back was Tony’s. And as quickly as he thought that—it wasn’t even as deliberate as thinking: the hand, for an instant, was Tony’s—he realized it was Robert’s hand. Tony is dead, he told himself. It was strange that the most momentous event of his life—the death of his lover—
seemed sometimes to be so tentatively attached to his consciousness. He often awoke to, or dreamed of, a world where Tony was alive. Not a world in which Tony had come back to life, but a world in which Tony existed, as he had existed, where his existence was more often tolerated than appreciated. For Tony and Lyle had not always loved each other very well, and this fact made Lyle’s mourning all the more complicated. His sadness at losing Tony was ornamented with guilt.
    Lyle sat up. I need a swim, he thought. I’ll go find Robert and we’ll have a swim. He could imagine the cold clean water of the river around him. He called Robert’s name, softly, as if he might be waiting just outside the door. But of course there was no answer. Lyle put on his bathing suit and a T-shirt and a pair of sandals and went downstairs. He walked through the house and saw no one. He went out the back door and down the lawn, through a chink in the hedge, and stopped beside the garden. John was doing something fierce with a hoe: thrusting it into the ground, wriggling it, and removing it. Lyle stood outside the gate for a moment, watching John, and then he said, “Have you seen Robert?”
    John poked the hoe into the ground and turned around. He wiped his brow with the back of his hand. “No,” he said. “Are you going for a swim?”
    “Yes,” said Lyle. “But I was looking for