The Beauty of Men Never Dies: An Autobiographical Novel

Panama

112 Panama It was pissing down rain in Panama City. Rainy season. Who knew? No one ever goes to Panama from Miami. All you know about it is that middle-class Americans from the Midwest go there to retire in gated communities as much like Illinois as possible. Middle, middle, middle. But Fenil wanted to meet there. Direct flights flew to Panama from where he was and from where I was. And it was cold where he was and hot where I was. I had to fit it into a tight schedule, as I was going to go to Europe to spend time with Peter. That had been booked for a long time, and there was no changing it. But I had been missing Fenil a lot. Strange. Someone becomes the person in your life whether you have decided upon it or not. And there you are. We met in a seventy-story hotel in Panama. When I arrived in the room, there was a scrawled note on my bed. “I am at the pool.” Fenil loves these kinds of places. The pools, the gyms, the little restaurants, the room service. Fenil is ahead of his years. He is only twenty-six but has lived much more than twenty-six years. He is always taken to be older than he is. Partly because of the way he carries his body: very self-assured. Partly because of his voice: low and manly. Usually men don’t realize that life isn’t the same year repeating itself until they reach the age of twentyeight . They then realize that they are aging and steps must be taken that life doesn’t pass unheeded. Fenil is already there and recently has become more involved in keeping his body fit. At hotels and beaches he swims a 113 Panama lot and is in the gym every day. He is an early riser, which I am not, but I accompany him to the gym frequently if it isn’t too early. I went to join him at the pool, which was a vertiginous cliff ’s-edge body of water on the thirteenth floor of the hotel. All the time I was in Panama City I felt like a bird in flight paused on quivering branches high in the air. Our room was on the seventeenth floor with a balcony hanging high. I cannot imagine relaxing or sunbathing so far up in the air without a hint of dizzying vertigo hovering about me. And yet stories and stories reached above me, with people evidently quite at ease on their balconies, at the height where small planes go. This is the twenty-first century. What everyone assumes is all right to do is what everyone does without question. Why would they put balconies on the seventieth floor if it wasn’t all right? And to be fair, you never hear of anyone tumbling from a high hotel balcony. Or rarely. Fenil was lying beside the pool and immediately got up. “I knew you must be somewhere around. I was starting to get a hard-on,” he said. He often made these provocative remarks. I cannot say that I disliked them. “Would you rather go to the room or have lunch?” I said. There was a very open-air restaurant between the two pools on this high bird perch. “I think I’d rather eat at the moment,” he said. He had flown overnight . I had called the hotel and asked that he be allowed to go to the room even though he was to arrive early in the morning. They had been very hospitable, he said. Some hotels hadn’t been so accommodating to this handsome young man in other cities, and he hadn’t liked it. Eating lunch, we looked out over the skyscraper-jammed horizon of Panama City. Something is going on in Panama, I’m not quite sure what, but there is a lot of money there. The hotel was tightly locked in on both sides by sister skyscrapers going up, both in midconstruction. Workmen were scampering over both of them, munching sandwiches on railless balconies high above us. Leaning out of windows perilously to screw in this or adjust that. You had to have no sense of where you are to do what they were doing. One man was standing on a folding 114 Panama ladder doing something to a balcony ceiling...