Sing With Me at the Edge of Paradise: Stories

Iron Horse Prize for a First Book of Collected Prose

Katie Cortese, Series Editor

Sing With

Me at the

Edge of

Paradise

Stories

Joe

Baumann

texas tech university press

Copyright © 2023 by Texas Tech University Press

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, including electronic storage and retrieval systems, except by explicit prior written permission of the publisher. Brief passages excerpted for review and critical purposes are excepted.

This book is typeset in Adobe Caslon Pro. The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of

ANSI

/

NISO

Z39.48-1992 (R1997). ♾

Designed by Hannah Gaskamp

Cover design by Hannah Gaskamp; artwork is The Rebuke of Adam and Eve by Charles-Joseph Natoire. It was donated into the public domain by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Baumann, Joe, 1985– author. Title: Sing With Me at the Edge of Paradise: Stories / Joe Baumann. Description: Lubbock, Texas: Texas Tech University Press, [2023] | Summary: A collection of short stories surrounding queer men of various ages trying to temper their expectations of the world with their lived experience—Provided by publisher.

Identifiers:

LCCN

2022024276 (print) |

LCCN

2022024277 (ebook)

ISBN

978-1-68283-160-1 (cloth; alk. paper)

ISBN

978-1-68283-161-8 (ebook)

Subjects:

LCGFT

: Short stories. Classification:

LCC

PS

3602.A96276 S56 2022 (print) |

LCC

PS

3602.A96276 (ebook) |

DDC

813/.6—dc23/eng/20220606

LC

record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022024276

LC

ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022024277

Printed in the United States of America

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 / 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Texas Tech University Press

Box 41037

Lubbock, Texas 79409-1037

USA

800.832.4042

ttup@ttu.edu

www.ttupress.org

for my parents and sisters

Contents

Give Us Your Pity, Give Us Your Love

Melt With You

The Water Is Coming, the Water Is Here

The Louder You Are, the Faster They Ride

Shearing

We All Yearn for Defenes­tration

Where We Go After

There Won’t Be Questions

How I Know You’re Here

Close the Door on This Laughing Heart

The Right Kind of Love, the Wrong Kind of Death

Spin the Dial

Churchgoing

What You Have Always Wanted

When You Sink Your Teeth In

Sing With Me at the Edge of Paradise

Acknowledgments

Sing With

Me at the

Edge of

Paradise

Give Us Your Pity, Give Us Your Love

No one liked the Luftwaiths. They were the sort of people who used words like peripatetic and anodyne in casual conversations during sporting events or at bars eating buffalo wings. They wore boat shoes even though they didn’t own a boat, and they were seen on several occasions checking out ski goggles despite the fact that they never went to Aspen or Vale or Switzerland. She smelled like depilatory creams, he like hair spray. They installed a wine fridge next to their dishwasher but stocked it with four-dollar bottles from Aldi. Nick Luftwaith drank German beers, pretending that they didn’t cost five ninety-nine a six pack. He insisted on pronouncing hefeweizen with the proper Aryan vee-sound in the middle to prove he was cultured and world-worthy.

No one liked the frangipani that grew around the sides of their house or the fact that they paid Mexicans to take care of their grass and trim back their hedges and crape myrtles. Everyone agreed that Lina Luftwaith had the voice of a screech owl, so pitchy and raw our stomachs contorted whenever she told a story, and hell was to be paid by anyone who made her laugh. Jokes were verboten at a Luftwaith gathering.

Yet go to their gatherings we did. Because despite all of the things we hated about the Luftwaiths, Lina was a brilliant cook, home-taught, as she never failed to remind us when we huddled around her canape platters and took generous helpings of her niçoise salads. She made delectable beef tartare, which no one, to this day, is quite sure how she convinced any of us to eat, we who were used to medium well sirloins at Applebee’s and no-pink burgers at Red Robin. With her culinary prowess Lina Luftwaith could make us momentarily forget how annoying she and her husband were, how much more they belonged in some sleepy New England cubbyhole teaching Sylvia Plath and Plato than nestled in our Midwestern suburb where the rainbow flag they hung from their porch in support of their daughter coming out as a lesbian was almost as great an eyesore as the electric charging station they installed on the side of their garage for their Pininfarina.

So we were in equal measure affronted, shocked, and gratified by what happened with Troy. Troy Luftwaith: captain of the baseball team and a thespian both, the boy who also played a mean Beethoven concerto, the boy who took the girl with Down syndrome to prom, the boy who nailed a full ride to Reed and chose the study of Japanese instead of going to Vanderbilt to play left field. The boy who spent half of the summer after his sophomore year of college in Guatemala, building huts that would become a school for little girls. Troy Luftwaith, the boy who spent the second half of that summer back home in his parents’ house, lounging next to their in-ground pool, drinking emerald bottles of Stella Artois on the sly, drinking them with girls, some of those girls still in high school, one of them only fifteen.

We never knew her name; it was kept out of the papers. But what we did know was that, on a weekend when Lina and Nick Luftwaith decided to shuck the Midwest for a trip to Portland, Maine, Troy Luftwaith brought his girls over on a Friday night and something happened. The stories are fuzzed and engorged with half-truths and exaggerations: that there were drugs, not just marijuana but cocaine and

LSD

and even Quaaludes and heroin, that not only did Troy ply the girls with beer and blow but also cheap tequila and absinthe, which the fifteen-year-old drank straight from the bottle so her mouth was ringed an algae color when she slipped and took a tumble, her ankle buckling against the wet cement border of the pool. Then she toppled into the lukewarm water where nary a single leaf or dead bug floated and Troy, being the macho, perfect man that he was, dove in after her, chucking his precious iPhone from the pocket of his Banana Republic yachting shorts onto the grass as he leapt.

We didn’t hear the splashes or the shrieks or the laughter that followed when Troy lifted the girl out of the water and the rest of his bubbly coterie, looking on in a mixture of horror and drunken humor, clapped for him. Some of us may have peered out of our windows or around our privacy fences and scowled at their streamlined bodies and perfect tans, their hairless legs, but whatever they were saying or doing was muffled by the electronica and girly pop pumping from the speakers Nick Luftwaith had wired around and into the pool, as if being able to hear Katy Perry and Kraftwerk while submerged in the deep end was a summer’s necessity. Those who could see the goings-on would have rolled our eyes and gone back to our Reader’s Digests and Law & Order reruns, shaking our heads.

Because they were soaked, Troy led the girl inside, and because none of the others followed them, no one knows for certain what took place. But twenty minutes later the fifteen-year-old came stumbling out onto the patio, a gash ripped open along her forehead. The other girls screamed at the horror-film gore, dashing about like a scattering drove of frightened deer. The fifteen-year-old, blinded by her own gushing bodily fluid, stumbled into the pool again. Troy appeared a moment later, wearing nothing but a towel, which was splattered with a suspiciously wine-stain-

looking smear, and once again tossed himself into the water, letting the towel fall in a snake heap near the sliding door.

To his credit, Troy called 911. Soon, the spangly, jingoist red and blue of cop cars and an ambulance surrounded the Luftwaith house. We watched from our porches, arms folded over our chests, as the girl was carted away by a pair of hunky

EMT

s, her body covered in a white sheet all the way up to her chin. She was shivering and moaning, said those who were closest by. It didn’t look like she was breathing, said others. We could hear her screams and accusations, said even more. Troy left soon thereafter, led into the back of a police cruiser by a woman officer nearly a foot shorter than him. He wasn’t yet in handcuffs.

The Luftwaiths returned the next day, a steamy Saturday too hot for anyone to spend outside. So we did not see how they slumped through their house, but we imagined the looks on their faces as they took in the destruction of their backyard, where broken glass and dusty drugs smeared the concrete. Troy’s towel was gone, gathered up as evidence. Police tape fluttered around the pool, a cruel, parading ribbon whipped by the hot wind. We imagined Lina’s howling sorrow, Nick’s rude stoicism. We imagined what they said to one another as they drove to the police station, short quibbling insults, or maybe glimmering hopeful presumption that the authorities were wrong, that there was some explanation for what had happened. Troy, their Troy, their perfect Troy with his lovely golden tan and well-defined midsection and inscrutably high

GPA

, would not do whatever he was accused of doing. He was smart, because the Luftwaiths were smart, and a Luftwaith would not do anything stupid and wrong and illegal.

We did not know until the next day that Troy had killed himself. When he couldn’t rig the frayed sheets to the bars in his holding cell (because there were none, the door a steel trap with a portcullis window), he took a more gruesome approach. Deep in the night while his parents were in the upper fingers of the Maine mitten and the night clerk at the county jail was nodding off, Troy smashed his head against the concrete wall, over and over. How he had the strength and wherewithal to keep bashing and bashing after the first crack of his skull we would never know, but the story was all over the news by that Sunday night, and we went to sleep with visions of Troy Luftwaith’s brain matter smeared on a concrete floor.

Daughter Tina Luftwaith came home from the Twin Cities, where she ran a co-op that sold vegan muffins and omelets. Her arms were tattooed with rainbow waves and tribal swirls that ate up her shoulders and hid the definition in her forearms, strengthened from hauling crates and slicing bricks of slimy tofu. Someone said that she had announced herself as non-binary, a term that made most of us scratch our heads and the computer dorks among us make terrible jokes about ones and zeroes. We watched her arrival, Tina stoic and silent as her parents came out to greet her, Lina letting loose her horsey sobs while Nick chucked a knuckle against his daughter’s arm.

We attended the funeral, sitting near the back, a somber affair in a church whose air conditioning was on the fritz. We sweated through our suits and dresses, thankful for the reception at the Luftwaith house where they uncorked bottles of surprisingly expensive Beaujolais and Semillon. The meat trays were catered from Trader Joe’s, the charcuterie bought from Cheese Express. We mulled over the delicatessens, filling our plates, popping cherry tomatoes in our mouths for the loamy, warm burst. The seeds stuck between our teeth, and we left them there.

In the following weeks, we gave ourselves to the Luftwaiths. Nick we plied with double bocks at his favorite tavern; Lina we offered our casseroles, left on the stoop in pans covered in aluminum foil, loaded with sour cream and butter and enough salt to cure them for months. The Luftwaiths drank our drinks and ate our foods, and we watched as their lean, hawkish faces transformed beneath the bubble of their tears. We encouraged them to get out of the house as much as possible, to go to the carnivals that cycled around, bopping from one Catholic church to the next, to attend bingo, to join book clubs. The Luftwaiths listened, as if we’d hypnotized them.

But right around Christmas, the Luftwaiths quit their jobs. Nick abandoned the small tech start-up that had something to do with delivering cat and dog food, where he sat on an exercise ball instead of a desk chair and didn’t work on Fridays. Lina, who was a part-time guidance counselor at an expensive private school with turrets and free laptops for all students, used all of her sick time to run out the semester, and she gave up the yoga classes she taught on the weekends at the

YWCA

. On a snowy day thirty-six hours short of the new year, a moving van appeared on the curb outside the Luftwaith house and three burly men started hauling out boxes and bamboo furniture. They worked with a fierce efficiency, ignoring the stinging cold and the buildup of melting ice on the sidewalk. When the moving truck pulled away, it left grimy streaks in the snow. We stared at the Luftwaith house for hours, wondering when they would follow, but we never saw the white Pininfarina. The rainbow flag, we noticed, had been taken down sometime in the night. The only reminder that they had ever been there was the charging station. We imagined it buzzing like a generator, giving away to the sky whatever tiny bit of Luftwaith energy was still there to be had.

• • • •

The Marlins moved in a month later. We wondered, at first, whether the Luftwaith house would go unsold, cursed by the events of the summer. But then, as January spilled into February and an unexpected warm front left our lawns soupy swirls of mud and dead grass, a U-Haul with a Ford Focus hitched to the back pulled up to the empty house. A trio half-fell from the truck’s high cab, a pair of trundling, rotund parents and their equally large daughter, their bouncy shape swallowed up in their Target brand puffy coats. Another car arrived, driven by a pimply boy with braces that glanced sunlight off his teeth. They spent hours unloading, nearly crushing one another with their bureaus and mattresses. Watching them struggle with a futon made us laugh into our steaming coffee mugs.

We hated them immediately. Their name reminded us of stagnant water and the terrible smell of canned tuna. They set out potted plants on their front stoop when March rolled around and then summarily failed to water them, leaving the stalks to wilt to a cruel brown and then a black that made us think of Ebola and leprosy. The Marlins did not invite anyone over, nor did they bother introducing themselves up and down the block. When we brought them tins of popcorn or Russell Stover chocolates, they gave us watery thank-yous and shut the door. They didn’t wave when they saw us sitting on our porches or mowing our lawns. We never stood around their pool in our cargo shorts, drinking their beers. For all we knew, they didn’t keep alcohol in the house. Their daughter played flute in the marching band, her face flushed the color of pezzottaite as she went for the high notes, the plume on her shako writhing like a dying animal. The boy was a nephew who lived across town in one of those hipster neighborhoods full of bistros and art galleries. We never saw him again.

Someone suggested we egg their house or leave fiery bags of dog scat on their porch, and although we nodded in agreement, no one ever did. One time, in early April, a car smashed into the willow tree in the Marlins’ front yard, but the driver was someone we didn’t know, his blood canted in way too much booze. The tree had to be removed, and it felt like the last excision of the Luftwaiths, who had strung a tire swing from its strongest branch. No one ever used it, but it made us think of them and their horrible, apple-pie charm.

Finally, someone admitted it: we missed the Luftwaiths. We missed Lina’s nubuck shoe collection, we missed Nick’s Cuban cigars that he kept on display—never smoked—in his study. We yearned for his terrible, esoteric jokes that required a working knowledge of Derrida in order to understand. We’d have given anything to hear her horrible stories of the times she drank too many happy hour margaritas when she was underage, flirting with the Hispanic waiters at her favorite Mexican restaurant so they didn’t ask her for

ID

when she and her girlfriends got loaded and devoured basket after basket of free chips then spent the next day sweating out Cuervo during step class. We wished we could go back to the night that Troy Luftwaith took that fifteen-year-old inside the house, so that one of us—any one—could have leaned out a window and told him to stop right there, maybe threaten that the cops were coming. Then, maybe, the girls would have scattered, and Troy would have frozen in his tracks and sent the fifteen-year-old flying away. The Luftwaiths would still be here, and we would still frown at them and whisper behind their backs, but we would also tinkle with joy at seeing them leaving their garage on a pair of sleek bikes, Lina looking spectacular in her Schwinn helmet, Nick quirky and weird under his Bern. We would laugh to one another that their riding gloves made them look like wannabe Lance Armstrongs. But we would wait for them to come huffing back, Nick’s left arm cocked down at a ninety-degree angle to signal the turn into their driveway even though not a single car was nearby. Those gestures meant something to us, something we could only see in their absence. They kept us awake at night, they pulled at us as we had rhythmic, simple sex with our husbands and wives. They called to us in our dreams.

Because deep down, just a little bit, we wanted those things for ourselves. We wanted to usher the Luftwaiths into our homes. We wanted them to review our carpeted bathrooms, our pink-wallpapered kitchens, our bland living rooms and unfinished basements. We wanted them to take a long gander, then look us in the eye and tell us what they could do to give us just a little bit of what they had.

Melt With You

The first time Hugh pulled me into a wall, we were at a horrible party in an industrial style loft with twenty-foot ceilings, exposed ductwork, slick concrete flooring, marble counters, and glass tabletops. We’d been invited by a long-lost friend of Hugh’s who failed to show up and we knew no one there. Everyone was wearing beanies and decorative scarfs and drinking boxed wine out of thimble-sized cups. As people arrived and the sound of their chatter grew, someone would crank up the stereo, which was playing weird folk music without any lyrics. Then, to hear each other over the increased sound, people would speak louder. I wondered at how thick or thin the building’s walls were, and whether a neighbor might pound on the door and complain or simply call the police. I dismissed the latter; this was the St. Louis suburbs.

Hugh and I found a quiet corner down the apartment’s single hallway and stationed ourselves near the bathroom. After the third person asked us if we were in line for its use despite the fact that the door was open and it was unoccupied, Hugh sighed.

Should we leave? I said.

He shook his head. I knew he missed his friend and longed to see him, and neither of us wanted to admit that we’d been stood up.

So instead of swerving our way through the crowded living room and finding something else to do for the night, Hugh cuffed my bicep and said, Can I show you something?

I took a sip of my wine, which was white and warm and tasted like sour grapes. I could practically smell the dirty feet that had mashed them. Sure.

Without another word Hugh leaned back against the wall and tugged me with him. I expected to simply press against the white paint, which I thought, for no good reason, would be hot. Instead, I felt the sensation of breaking, slowly, through the surface of still water, but I wasn’t wet. And before I could let out any noises of surprise, we were inside the apartment’s wall.

• • • •

By inside the wall I don’t mean that we were crammed between layers of sheetrock or bumping shoulders with studs. We weren’t tangled up against electrical wires or plumbing or forced to pluck insulation from our hair or avoid inhaling asbestos into our lungs. I wasn’t stepping around carpenters’ nails or bumping my elbows into air vents. I could still see Hugh, and I could still see the entire party. We’d simply merged into the wall as though painted there, living murals that could see those gathered around us.

Won’t this freak people out?

Hugh shook his head. It’s like one of those mirrors in police shows.

"We can see