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Brandon has to have the bathroom floor re-tiled and re-grouted. He tries scrubbing it down after he returns from the hospital, but there are still faint brown stains where Sissy's blood pooled the deepest. So in the morning he calls off work and brings in some contractors to rip up the whole bathroom floor and replace it with tiles that are almost, but not exactly, the same design as before. It's all done by the time Sissy gets back from the psych ward the following week. If she notices the change, she doesn't say anything, and Brandon never brings it up.
As part of her treatment plan, Sissy has to see a therapist every week. Brandon goes with her to her first appointment. Her therapist is a tall, slim, no-nonsense brunette with chin-length hair and wire-frame glasses. Brandon thinks idly about how he would fuck her as he sits in the waiting room and flips through old copies of The New Yorker. He gets on his phone and scrolls through ads on Craigslist: first w4m, then m4m, then finally t4m. Forty-five minutes go by. He doesn't send out a reply to any of the ads while waiting for Sissy, and he considers that a small victory.
“You should try therapy,” Sissy says to him that evening.
Brandon remembers how, several years earlier, she had scoffed at the psychologist their mother had forced her to see and complained endlessly about going to the appointments. “I don't need therapy,” he says.
“Bullshit,” she says.
“I haven't tried to off myself.” He cleans the dishes from dinner and doesn't look at her.
“So that means you're fine?” She kicks him, hard, in the back of his shin. “You're so full of shit,” she says, her voice getting thick like she's going to cry.
He was supposed to be nice to her. “Yeah,” Brandon agrees, putting the last pan in the drying rack and squeezing the sponge into the sink. “So?” He glances over. She's sniffling a little, her chest rising and falling rapidly, pressing her breasts against the thin front of her over-sized shirt. “Maybe that's just how I am.”
“Never mind,” she says, then stands. The collar of her shirt slips down off one shoulder. She goes into the living room, sits in the nest of her bedding on the futon, and picks up her phone from the coffee table. She texts someone. Brandon thinks about leaving her to go out. He doesn't feel like going to a club or a bar. He thinks about trying to get a handjob in one of the public restrooms in Central Park or the restroom at Macy's. But he doesn't want to leave Sissy alone. She's still wearing a bandage on each wrist. The white gauze folds into deep creases as her fingers fly over the touchscreen of her phone. “It's not like you can't afford it,” she says.
“What?”
“Therapy.” She doesn't look up.
“I can afford lots of things.” His new laptop is sitting on the table. It hosts a new, rapidly expanding folder of videos and pictures he hasn't been able to stop himself from saving.
“You want to watch a movie?” she asks, looking up from her phone.
He skims his fingers along the edge of his laptop. “I want to go for a run.”
“So go,” Sissy says. She stares at him, daring Brandon to tell her not to hurt herself.
He breaks eye contact first, and goes to his room. He changes his clothes, shoves his feet into his sneakers, and grabs his iPod from where he left it on his nightstand. “I'll be back in an hour,” he tells Sissy before he leaves. She doesn't look up, so he puts his earbuds in, brings up Bach's “Concerto No. 5 in F Minor,” and leaves the apartment.
On the sidewalk outside of his apartment, he begins to run. He decides to go to the right, which takes him away from Central Park, away from the temptation of anonymous men with rough hands.
*
When Brandon was nearly twelve years old, his father caught him playing with one of Sissy's dolls. Not a fashion doll, because she hadn't been quite old enough for the house to be strewn with Barbies, but some other, larger doll with chubby limbs and long hair. He had been doing the doll's hair while he watched television, making a dozen tiny braids in her yarn hair. His father snatched the doll out of his hands as he passed Brandon on the way to the kitchen. “I won't have any poufters in this house,” he said. He tossed the doll into the far corner of the room, where the bulk of Sissy's toys were gathered. Brandon waited, frozen on the couch, until he heard his father talking to his mam in the next room. Then he stood, ran upstairs to his bedroom without bothering to turn off the television, and slammed the door behind him.
*
Sissy leaves two months later to go back to L.A. and live with her latest loser of a boyfriend while she sings in clubs and in the background on albums that don't make any money. Brandon is relieved. The week before she leaves, he fumbles in her dirty laundry for a pair of her panties. She's in the shower, and he rubs his thumb over the crotch as he listens for the sound of running water to cut out. He bends over and sniffs them, inhaling hard and fast, then shoves them back into the laundry bag. The shower is still running. He goes to his bedroom, but doesn't try to jerk off.
He takes the day off work so he can go with Sissy to LaGuardia on the day of her flight. He can't go all the way to the gate with her, but he hugs her after she checks her bags. He offers to buy her lunch, but she says no. “Call me,” he says, “if you need anything.”
“Will you pick up the phone?” she asks.
“Leave a message,” he says.
After Sissy disappears through security, Brandon takes a cab back into the city. He stops at an ATM, then calls an escort he's used before, one who can usually come out in the afternoon. She meets him at his apartment, and he fucks her without paying much attention to her or to himself. Once she's been paid in full, she leaves. Brandon reads over a document for work, writes up a proposal his boss wanted done two days ago, and watches a DVD of old Looney Tunes episodes until it begins to annoy him. He leaves his apartment with the intention of getting Thai food from a takeout place several blocks over. Instead, he winds up in a dive bar, ordering a beer and watching some guys play pool. He makes small talk with a woman at least ten years older than him for a while, until she calls him “son” and starts talking about the kid she has who just started college. He excuses himself to go to the bathroom. While standing at the urinal, one of the pool players comes up beside him. His hand grazes Brandon's ass as he passes. “Nice,” he says. Brandon looks over and watches as the man strokes his own dick. He becomes erect as well, and doesn't object when the man reaches over and starts to jerk him off. After a moment, Brandon reciprocates.
The man comes first, and Brandon follows him soon after. They both zip up. The man leaves. Brandon flushes the urinal, then stops to wash his hands. He decides not to get another drink. Instead, he goes and gets the Pad Thai he'd originally gone out in search of. He takes it back to his apartment and eats the entire container as he chats with a girl on a porn site and watches her strip on her webcam. He tells her he's touching himself even though he's not. When they finish, he is alone.
*
On Brandon's thirteenth birthday, after he blew out the candles on the cake his mother had made for their family party, his father joked that he was going to get him a whore to make him a man. Brandon cringed as his mother tittered out a nervous laugh and both his aunts smiled tightly. His father lifted his beer bottle to Brandon, and Brandon ducked his chin. He looked at the smoking candles on his cake and wished his father would drop dead where he stood. Sissy slid off Auntie Maureen's lap and went to Brandon. He picked her up, sat her astride his knee, and wished he could just disappear forever.
*
The following week, Brandon schedules an appointment with a therapist five minutes from his office. The visit is covered by his company health insurance. He tells the receptionist that he wants to start counseling to deal with “personal problems.”
He chose the name of a male therapist at random from the list provided by his insurance, and so he's surprised when Alan Blake calls his name from the door of the waiting room. Alan is young, certainly no older than Brandon. He is short and slim, and wears khakis, a casual sweater, and glasses with thick black rims. “Hello, Brandon,” he says. “Why don't you come on back?”
Brandon spends most of the hour talking about his job, his degree in marketing, the music he likes. He tells Alan about his family, their move from Ireland, and his sister's fluctuating career as a singer. At the end of the session, he mentions Sissy's suicide attempt. Alan raises his eyebrows and says, “That must have been very hard for you.”
“Yeah,” Brandon says.
They sit in silence for nearly a minute before Alan says, “Why don't we go ahead and talk about this next week?” He schedules Brandon in his computer, then writes the time and date down on a card that he hands to Brandon.
During their next session, Brandon recounts Sissy's time in the hospital and her recovery. He mentions Sissy's string of disappointing boyfriends, the unavailable men she tends to chase after. “We haven't talked much about your relationships yet,” Alan notes. Brandon agrees. “Why is that?”
“I don't have any,” Brandon says. He shifts in his his chair. “I mean, I had a girlfriend a few years ago. But it didn't last.”
“Why is that?”
“I guess we wanted different things.”
“Would you like to have a relationship?”
“I don't know. I guess.” He smooths out a wrinkle in his trousers. Alan's legs are crossed at the knee. He finds himself focusing on that juncture, on the way his thighs come together. He wonders whether Alan has a wife or a girlfriend. He imagines Alan fucking a woman, but finds it off-putting. “It's hard, though.”
“Relationships take a lot of work,” Alan agrees. He shifts in his chair and laces his fingers together over his knee. “Do you think there's something keeping you from being in a relationship?”
“No,” Brandon lies.
*
When he was twenty-seven, he spent Thanksgiving weekend at his parents house. He'd driven down to New Jersey from upstate New York, where he was working for a struggling firm that primarily managed the accounts of regionally-based chain stores. He thought about moving to the city as he drove. He was sure that he if he got a job there, everything would be better.
He spent the night in his old room. Sissy teased him all through dinner, kicking him under the table and making faces at him. His mother was nervous, his father was drunk, and the ordeal of the holiday seemed hollow, ritual, and sad. In the morning, his mother took Sissy and her teenaged friends out shopping. Brandon was sitting in the living room, watching Law and Order with his father when they returned in the afternoon. One of Sissy friends was staying for dinner. She was a brunette, athletic and taller than Sissy. They stormed up the stairs to Sissy's room. Brandon watched them go. His father mumbled, “They're lovely at that age.” Brandon ignored this. “You have a girlfriend?” His father asked.
“You know I don't,” Brandon said.
His father sighed. “Then what the hell do you know,” he grumbled.
*
When he gets home from therapy, there's a message on his machine from Sissy. She says she's fine, but she just wanted to talk. Brandon deletes the message. He makes dinner, eats it, then masturbates to videos on Xtube. It takes him a long time to come, and when he does it's not very satisfying. He cleans the kitchen and the living room. He makes his bed. He calls Sissy, but she doesn't pick up. It's later than he thought it was, and she's probably out with friends. He leaves her a message. When he's in the bathroom, getting ready to go to bed, he spends a long time looking at the tile. He's trying to find a spot of brown, some evidence of Sissy's blood that was left behind. There is none. The tile is blue and the caulk is white. Toothpaste drips from his toothbrush onto the floor, and he wipes it up with toilet paper. He takes his laptop into bed with him and chats with several different girls on his favorite porn site. He doesn't try to masturbate, but still he keeps talking to them until he can no longer keep his eyes open.
At his third appointment with Alan, he talks about his boss and Sissy. He mentions Marianne and the date they went on. “Are you comfortable with your sexuality?” Alan asks him.
Brandon pretends not to understand the question. “What's there to be comfortable with?”
“All right,” Alan says. “Are you satisfied, then, with your sex life?”
“Yeah,” Brandon says. “Sure.” He jiggles his left knee up and down. Alan watches him, and he watches Alan back. Alan's shirt is unbuttoned at the throat. Brandon thinks about touching him there, at the white hollow of his throat.
“You wouldn't prefer to be in a relationship?”
Brandon shrugs. “It doesn't matter.” Then feeling like Sissy, he says, “They're all bullshit anyway.”
“What are?”
“Relationships. Love. No one stays together forever.”
“Very few people do,” Alan agrees. “But does that mean we shouldn't try?” Brandon doesn't answer. “What would you like, Brandon? What would make you happy?”
Brandon doesn't know. “I want to wake up to Bach in the morning and fall asleep to the Stones,” he says when the silence becomes too much. Alan smiles, and Brandon imagines him smiling the same way at a pretty girlfriend, a painter or maybe a graphic designer. He can see Alan smiling at her after they kiss, after they have sex. He wishes Alan wouldn't smile. When Alan uncrosses his legs, Brandon watches. He doesn't move the way Brandon sees women move, slow and teasing for the benefit of an audience. Still, Brandon doesn't look away from the fork between his thighs as Alan settles his right knee over his left.
“Think about it,” Alan says, “for next time.”
But Brandon doesn't want to go to therapy anymore. He thinks he should tell Alan that he's not coming back, but instead he accepts the card with his next appointment date on it. “See you next week,” he says.
“Take care,” Alan says as Brandon walks out the door.