“You seem a million miles away. What has your attention—that newspaper or that Japanese maple out there? The tree is new, isn’t it? Wasn’t something else there before?” The questions came from Walker Sharp, the novelist, and Maxwell Ackerman’s neighbor in the row of small, but very expensive, townhouses on Drayton Street, facing Savannah’s thirty-acre Forsyth Park.
Max turned his eyes on the man sitting beside him on the terrace behind his townhouse. The two had been taking turns hosting each other for 5:00 p.m. drinks for two years. Both were alone now. They came from two different worlds—Sharp wrote literary novels and Maxwell was a sportsman, having been a professional tennis player when young and a sports commentator and sports gear representative in middle age—with the difference between them even more pronounced. In his fifties, Walker Sharp was still turning out a best-selling novel every year. The public life of Maxwell, now in his late sixties, had been over for nearly a decade and his private world had collapsed two years previously. Walker was about Maxwell’s only day-to-day contact now other than Dinah and her husband, Horace, who took care of Maxwell’s minimal needs.
“Sorry, I’m just being morose,” Maxwell responded. “I see in today’s paper that Stan Murphy has died. He was entered at Wimbledon for the first time the last year I played there. I looked through the rest of the obits, and all the other men reported to have died are younger than I am.”
“It happens, Max,” Walker said. “That’s just today’s paper.”
“I know, but I looked at their ages and you know the first thing I thought? I thought that they didn’t die so young that I’d say they died too young. No one can say they didn’t get a full crack at life. And I’m older than they were when they died. I’ll bet that’s what others think too when they read those obits. That’s what they’ll think when they read mine. No one will say ‘He died too young.’ They’ll say I had a good life, which is as good as saying ‘It’s about time.’”
“I like to look at it more like my mother did when she was in a nursing home at the last,” Walker responded. He wasn’t going to try to talk Maxwell out of his morose attitude toward this. He had too much respect for Maxwell to try to sugarcoat life for him. “Although I’m sure she regretted the loss of friends, she admitted to me once that her first thought when someone else died was that she had outlived another one.”
“The tree out there,” Maxwell said, getting around to answering the question, “I put that in to balance the other Japanese maple. But I won’t live to see it large enough to do that.”
“There was something else there before, wasn’t there?” Walker asked, trying to change the subject to something that would depress his friend less—but unsuccessfully, as it turned out.
“Yes. There was a white birch tree. Neal put it in, wanting something there with interesting bark. I told him that white birches don’t thrive here, but he said this one would for him. But it died . . . just like Neal did.”
“It’s been two years, Max,” Walker said. “Neal wouldn’t like for you to withdraw from the world that long.” They paused in a few minutes of companionable silence before Walker picked up the conversation again. “I’m thinking of going to Club One this evening. Why don’t you go with me?”
Club One was a gay bar and entertainment venue in downtown Savannah, known for its drag queen shows and as a good pickup venue. Walker and Maxwell both were gay. That was the main reason they were comfortable with each other, although they’d never gone with each other in that way. Maxwell had very definitely been partnered with Neal Jordan, the Savannah native who had brought Maxwell to town after a career on the road internationally.
“You aren’t asking me out on a date, are you Walker?” Maxwell asked, a slight smile on his face. His eyes were still turned to the new Japanese maple, but what they were seeing was Neal planting the white birch. Since he wasn’t looking at Walker, though, the novelist didn’t hide what Walker, in fact, would like to see happen. And maybe, just maybe, Maxwell didn’t look directly at Walker when he said that because he didn’t want to see rejection in Walker’s eyes.
“No, of course not,” Walker quickly answered. “So, do you want to go?”
“No, thanks, not tonight. But do go ahead and go. You need to get out more.”
As do you, Walker thought, as he pulled himself up from the lawn chair. “Maybe another night then,” he said, as he moved toward the gate they’d put in the fence between their properties. Both of them knew that “maybe” was the operable word. “You need to get out as much as I do.” If not more, he added in his mind.
* * * *
Max sat and watched Walker move off toward his own side of the fence. He knew what his neighbor was suggesting. He even suspected that Walker would go with him if he indicated that was what he wanted. There was a time, when Neal was still alive and Walker still had his wife, Alice, that they were attracted to each other and both realized it and suppressed it because they both had partners they didn’t want to betray.
But that ship had sailed, hadn’t it? Walker was still an attractive man at fifty-five. He had grayed but done so without losing his male model looks or his trim figure. And as far as Max knew, Walker was still healthy without any serious debilitations. Max couldn’t say the same. He took eleven pills a day—for high blood pressure, diabetes, atrial fibrillation, and now there were arthritic pains cropping up here and there. He supposed he should be lucky to have reached his late sixties. He’d had some injuries in his pro tennis days, ones that built up to forcing him off the court before he was thirty-five. Of course, thirty-five is old for a professional singles tennis player, so he got no sympathy when injuries forced him into retirement from that. Yes, he’d kept himself in shape with gym work and club tennis, motivated to continue to look good and fit on camera, but in the last year—no, the last two years, since Neal’s death—he felt like he was going to pot.
For someone whose career typically aged out at thirty, what was there to look forward to for the next fifty years? He had enjoyed life after modest fame to a large extent, but wasn’t that mostly because of Neal? Neal was not supposed to go first.
The only good thing he could say about his condition other than still looking presentable was that he still could get it up and still could produce cum. But he was driving it with his own hands these days. He knew that was by choice, but at the same time he was wary of being rejected if he tried to take his need for a spin with younger men.
It was too late to contemplate Walker. He couldn’t even say whether they would be a good fit. Max had done some flip-flopping in his wild and sexy tennis days, but he’d been an exclusive top with Neal. He and Walker had never gotten around to determining whether they’d be a fit. After Alice had left Walker, there had been a procession of young men next door, but their preferences other than gay hadn’t been something that Max had discerned. He had still been content with Neal.
No, it was too late for Max, he was convinced. And he was a nonperson now. He was just waiting around for the end, it seemed, reading the obituaries and regretting what he wouldn’t be around to do and see—the trip to New Zealand would never happen now; he should have done that one of the years he played in the Australian Open. Nor would he be doing the around-the-world ocean cruise—or the ski village retreat in Aspen that one of his early boyfriends, Serge, and he had dreamed of. Neal was a beach bum; he had had no interest in snow.
What to do tonight? Max wondered. He could have taken Walker up on the evening at Club One. Maybe that would have stirred his juices. He hadn’t had sex since six months before Neal died—since Neal had grown too weak for it. He didn’t even know if he could keep it up now when faced with having sex with a stranger. He could get it up; he took care of himself. But with all the pills he took, could he keep it up with another man to deliver a mutually satisfying ejaculation? Wasn’t he afraid he couldn’t? Wasn’t that why he was holding Walker at arms’ length now and why he felt a bit threatened by the suggestion that they go to Club One together? Did he want to know that he couldn’t get it up when watching a sex act on stage or in going into a back room with a stranger? And was he afraid of a stranger laughing at the suggestion of going with a sixty-seven-year-old man, not willing even to go far enough to find out that Max was gloriously hung?
Max would walk into town, go through a couple of the famous squares, go to a steak house—maybe one of Paula Dean’s restaurants—this evening and maybe pretend he wished he could have taken the risk to try out Club One.
But first he’d go across the street and into Forsyth Park. This is where he’d first picked up Neal, and where he’d asked Neal to partner with him—and where Neal had broken the news of his terminal illness. All on the same bench in an isolated part of the park.
Max, sitting on a bench—his bench—in Forsyth Park, barely noticed the young man with the tennis racket under his arm pass the first time. On the second pass, he did notice him, especially because the young man—looking a bit scruffy for tennis but otherwise quite good looking, slim and with a sultry look, a lock of hair flopping over into his eyes—paused and gave Max a scrutinizing look. On the third pass, Max watched the young man approach and stop, and stand in front of him.
“Excuse me, but aren’t you Max Ackerman? The tennis player?” the young man asked.
“You recognize me?” Max asked. The young man—maybe twenty, maybe not quite—was a real looker, but both his cutoff jeans and his T-shirt were the worse for wear. He was wearing scuffed-up tennis shoes, but no socks.
“Yeah, I heard you lived somewhere around here. I play pick-up tennis on the courts at the southern end of the park when I can. We talk about you there.”
“You talk about me?”
“Yeah. You’re gay, aren’t you? We are too—the guys who meet for tennis. We heard you had a younger guy living with you here—and that you were quite a rake when you were playing tennis. Sort of an open secret. Like the male Martina Navratilova or Billy Jean King.”
“Which dates me, doesn’t it?” Max said, with a little laugh.
“Hey, you look great to me,” the young man. “Can I sit with you a bit? I mean, you’re not expecting anyone, are you? The younger guy you’re living with?”
“No, the bench is a public one. Sit, by all means, if you want. And there’s no waiting for my partner. He died—some time ago, actually. His name was Neal. Do you have a name, young man?”
“You can call me Jamie. I’m sorry about your partner.”
“That’s OK. I guess news travels slow in Savannah.”
“So, you waitin’ for someone else? You got someone else?”
“No, I’m not waiting for anyone else. You must play a rough game of tennis with these friends of yours,” Max said, wanting to change the subject. “You look like you’ve gotten the worst part of a rough game.”
“Yeah, well, these are my good clothes. I guess you can say that I don’t just play tennis at the park’s public courts. I live in the park too.”
“I’m sorry I said that,” Max said. “So, you’re homeless and live in the park?”
“Yeah, I do. It’s OK. I make do. I get some help. I have some regular guys who keep me going.”
“Regular guys?”
“Yeah, it’s how I heard that you like men. That’s what I do to get by. I take care of the needs of men. They pay me for sex. I probably shouldn’t say that in public, but you bein’ gay yourself and all . . .”
“I see. So, stopping by this bench . . .”
“Yeah, I thought maybe we could do a deal. It’s suppertime, and I heard—”
“You thought I might pay for your supper in exchange for a blow job?”
“Yeah. Like this bench, you know, is a favorite place for . . . you know. And the men who do me in the park—some of them who know you live nearby—ask me if I know you, if you’re done me. Like maybe it would give them a charge to do someone a famous tennis player has done. And, as I said, this is a bench where guys pick up other guys.”
“Yes, I know,” Max said, thinking about the first time he’d hooked up with Neal. Neal had given him a blow job over in those bushes over there. They’d met for the first time on this bench. They’d both known what this bench was used for. He’d taken Neal home then and never let him go again. “I’m afraid I’m a bit too old for all of that now.”
“You don’t look too old to me. But, if you’re not interested . . .” Jamie started to rise.
“I’m a bit lonely this evening—interests aside,” Max said. “Tell you what. Since you still are playing tennis despite the difficulty of your living arrangements and remember an old tennis player like me, I’d be happy to take you to dinner for the conversation, no strings attached.”
“I wouldn’t mind the strings attached,” Jamie said, “with you.”
“Let’s just say dinner, shall we?”
“If you don’t want it. But just whistle if you do. You look fine to me. It would be a gas to do a tennis legend.”
“I don’t think of myself as a tennis legend,” Max said, clearly flattered. And he hadn’t though in those terms for a good many years.
Rain was threatening, so Max took Jamie to a small restaurant nearby rather than into the historical area of town. They had a pleasant hour of eating and chatting, with Max discovering that Jamie was, indeed, well versed in both the playing and history of tennis. It was sprinkling when they exited the restaurant.
“I enjoyed it, Jamie,” Max said. “I guess I needed company this evening and I’ve enjoyed talking with you about tennis.”
“Thanks for dinner,” Jamie answered. “And if you want, I’ll come home with you and you can fuck me.”
“It’s tempting, Jamie. But I’m an old man and beyond that, I think it won’t be a good idea.”
“You think or you know?” Jamie asked. “It isn’t just the dinner. I like older men and you turn me on. It would be OK, if you’re worried, if, you know, you couldn’t perform to the end. I do old guys; I’d help you along. And if it just didn’t happen, that’s the way it is sometimes.”
“I don’t think I want to know the answer whether I could perform to the end, Jamie. But thanks, you’ve made me feel twenty years younger—and if I was twenty years younger, I’d still be more than twice your age. Thanks again for the company.” And, with that, Max launched himself into the falling raindrops and hurried back to his house.
The rain picked up and had become a deluge when, while locking up before going to bed, dressed in his sleeping shorts and a silk robe, Max found Jamie huddled in the shelter of his front porch.
“Jamie,” he said, turning on the porch light, and opening the door. “What are you doing there?”
“There’s nowhere in the park to shelter from rain like this,” Jamie said, “and they’ve put up a metal fence closing off the church porch I usually go to. Please, just let me sleep here until the rain stops. This isn’t the first time I’ve slept here. You just haven’t noticed.”
The “you just haven’t noticed” stung Max, especially now that he’d met the young man. How often had he seen him and just looked through him? “No. Come on in. I have plenty of bedrooms. There’s no reason for you to have to sleep out here.”
“OK, thanks. And if you want to—”
“Just come in out of the rain until it stops,” Max said.
Max woke to a thunderclap and a flash of light at the windows of the master bedroom. That may not have been what woke him up, though. He was on his back, his legs spread, and Jamie was lying between his legs, holding Max’s cock up with a fist wrapped around the base, and Jamie had his mouth on Max’s cock, sucking his cock head. Max had no idea how long this had been going on before he came fully awake, but he was in erection and was holding Jamie’s head between his hands.
He was with a young man and he was maintaining an erection.
“Ummm, ummm,” Jamie murmured and took his mouth off Max’s cock long enough to look up into Max’s face, both of their faces illuminated by another flash of lightning, and mutter, “Didn’t know you’d be hung like this. I thought maybe you were worried that you couldn’t get it up any more. There’s no reason to worry about that, though, is there? You’re huge . . . . and hard as granite.”
Yes, he’d been worried about that; no, clearly there was no reason for him to be worried. He let the young man have his way as he rose up Max’s body, settling himself in place straddling the older man’s hips, positioned the cock head at his hole, and slowly sank on it. The two men groaned and moaned in harmony, as Jamie rode Max’s cock to a very satisfying mutual ejaculation.
After coming, Jamie lowered his chest onto Max’s and they embraced.
“You know you didn’t have to do that,” Max murmured.
“I wanted to. I want to again. I’d like to do it with you driving. Whatever you were worried about, clearly it’s not a problem.”
The two dozed. Forty-five minutes later, with the storm still raging outside, Jamie was on his back on the bed, fisting his ankles and raising and spreading his legs, while Max knelt between them and fucked the young man in long, initially slow, but increasingly rapid thrusts of his cock, ending in Jamie crying out the stroke-off of his own cock with his hand and Max filling the bulb of a condom with a strong shot of cum.
Toward morning, all quiet outside now, Jamie was on his side, his buttocks cuddled into Max’s crotch and Max holding Jamie’s leg up while he mined the young man’s ass with his miraculously rehardened shaft. The two men were panting in coordinated sighs and whispering to each other about pulling the greatest satisfaction in the fuck out of each other. Jamie had already agreed not to be homeless any more.
There no longer was any question of whether Max could still get it up and keep it up for another man—or whether or not he wanted to do it with Jamie.
* * * *
“So, are these your tennis buddies?” Max asked as he returned from an evening run around Forsyth Park and entered the house. He had the urge to add, and is that my beer? But he knew it was. The four young men were sprawled around the living room.
“This is them, yes,” Jamie said, and he introduced the other three in the room, not showing the least bit of embarrassment that he’d brought his friends into the house. There was no point in telling them to make themselves comfortable, as they seemed to be quite at home on his expensive furniture, some of it antiques that he’d acquired during his travels abroad. Two of the young men were sitting yoga style on an Oriental carpet and obviously were being intimate with each other when they’d heard Max enter the house.
“I guess I’ll go up and shower,” Max said. “It was a sauna out there tonight.”
“Would you like company?” Jamie asked. “Todd here is skeptical about you.”
“Skeptical about me?”
“Yes, he doubts what I’ve told him about how hung you are.”
Terrific, Max thought. He’s sharing our sex life with his friends. “I don’t think I need help showering, Jamie,” he said, with a bit of pique and turned and climbed the stairs.
The door to one of the guest rooms on the floor above was open, and it was obvious to Max what was going on in there. Two more of Jamie’s friends were on the bed, one on top of the other, both naked. They were, of course, fucking. Max paused and watched for a moment, in shock that it was happening in his house and knowing he should break it up, but also aroused—and feeling the arousal—which, he couldn’t help appreciating, was gratifying. No, he wasn’t over the hill in the ability to be aroused, to get hard from it, and to steam on to an ejaculation. This presence of Jamie and his assumptions and not recognizing boundaries couldn’t go on, of course, but, dammit, it was taking years off of Max’s life. Max knew he also should have taken Jamie’s age and lifestyle into account when he invited him to live here. Jamie was being purposely disrespectful. He was just young.
It was probably this confusion in how to react to this sexual invasion of his house and life that slowed Max’s reactions and permitted desire to overwhelm him when he came out of the shower into his bedroom to find Jamie and his well-muscled black friend, Todd, standing inside the bedroom door.
“Drop the towel and show Todd how hung you are, Max,” Jamie said.
To his credit, Max didn’t drop the towel. To his debit, though, he permitted Jamie to walk over and pull the towel off him—and then to allow Todd to touch him, and both of the young men to suck it, and then for the young men to push him onto his back on the bed and, one after the other, to mount his hips, bury their channels on his cock, and ride him to ejaculations.
Later, after they’d dozed, Max lying between them, he took it on himself, moving in one direction and then the other, to cover the young men and fuck each of them again. This wasn’t his first threesome—not by any shot. His years on the pro tennis circuit had been wild years. But it was the first time he’d had two men in his bed, fucking them both, in over thirty years.
He wasn’t immune to the delight that he wasn’t as far gone as he feared he was—that he could still perform.
They were all still there the next morning—the two young men in Max’s bed, two young men each in the guest rooms, and another one dead drunk snoring on the living room floor, a wine stain on the Oriental carpet there.
“If you don’t mind, we’ll be camping out here for a few days,” Jamie said. “You have such a big, empty house.”
Possibly because Max was mounted on Todd’s ass in the bed and doing pushups on him led him to just grunt, which Jamie took as assent and Max didn’t countermand later.
* * * *
“There you are, hiding out in my back yard, in the dark. Can I bring you a beer?” Walker had seen the glow of a lighted cigarette on his back terrace from his second-floor breakfast room and had come to investigate.
“A beer would be nice,” Max answered. He waited, quietly, thinking over his life, as Walker brought the beer back.
“It’s been quiet over at your place for a couple of nights,” Walker said, as he settled in a patio chair next to Max. “I would have thought you would have come over at the height of the partying rather than now. Did you tucker all of the youngsters out?”
“They’ve moved on. It helped that I didn’t replenish the snack cupboard and drinks frig.”
“You wanted them to move on?”
“Yes, I think so. It was fun for a few days—and informative—but we obviously weren’t in the same generation. Jamie warned me early that they wouldn’t be staying long. I wouldn’t have panicked those last couple of days if I’d known he was serious.”
“And Jamie? Are you glad he has left? Or hasn’t he left?”
“Yes, he’s gone. I’m grateful to him—for so many reasons—but he’s too young for me. I arranged for him to be in a halfway house—and his friends too. The program there specializes in developing tennis talent. I’m embarrassed to say that I leaned on the program directors by using my background shamelessly.”
“Grateful for him? And you said he and the other guys taught you something?” Walker stretched his forearm out on the arm of his chair. Almost absentmindedly—perhaps unconsciously—Max covered it with his forearm and took Walker’s hand in his. A little chill went up Walker’s spine. Could he hope?
“Yes, Jamie solved the question of whether I still could perform with another man as I had in my thirties and forties.”
“And?”
“I can, at least for now.”
“Ah, good. I could tell that that bothered you.”
“It scared the hell of out me. But he also helped me see that there was just too big a divide between his generation and mine—that I was more in the mood for slow and easy. Something more sunset than sunrise. I think the colors of a sunset can be just as vibrant as those of a sunrise.”
“Slow and easy is good,” Walker said. “That’s more for someone my age, I think. You know I went to Club One that night I invited you to go with me, and I found that crowd was too young for me. I think someone a bit older than me would be more my style. Of course it would be nice if he were hung and still could keep it up.”
“You think?” Max asked. “That was a nice thing I found out with Jamie and his friends—that I still could get it up and keep it up.” There was a slight pause before Max added, “You know I’ve been sitting here thinking about what would be the perfect age in a partner myself. A lot older than Jamie and his crowd. Maybe someone in his fifties. Of course, he’d have to be a bottom.”
“Yes, that’s so important, isn’t it? I’d have to partner with a top myself.”
“And he’d have to be a real looker.”
“Yes, that would be important. A real looker like me, right?” Walker laughed at his own self-depreciating joke.
“Yes, like you,” Max said, without laughing.
They went silent. Walker’s sensations went to his forearm stretched out on the arm of the patio chair. Max was stroking it lightly now. Walker had gone hard from that. He wondered if maybe Max was hard too. He looked down at Max’s lap. The man was in athletic shorts and even in the dim light, Walker could tell that he was erect—and hung.
“Have you ever seen how I’ve decorated my bedroom?” Walker asked in a quiet voice.
“Why, no, I don’t think I have,” Max answered.
“Would you like to see it?”
“I think I would, yes.”
“Would now be a good time?”
“Perfect.”
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