Marie Sexton - Coda 04 - Strawberries for Dessert (10 page)

Oh God. I wished there was a nearby hole I could climb into to hide. It wasn’t that I hid my homosexuality at work. It was simply that it had never come up. I didn’t go to the company Christmas parties, and I didn’t go out for beers with the guys. I did my work and I kept to myself. It was my own self-imposed version of “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” And although I knew some of my co-workers had their suspicions, nobody had ever had the nerve to question me.

Cole was looking at me for help, and I was standing there like an idiot, trying to figure out what to say. Saying he was just a friend seemed like an insult. Saying he was my partner was vastly untrue. Saying he was my lover would certainly embarrass Marcus.

Cole finally gave up on me and turned back to Marcus. “What Jonny seems unable to say is that I am his date.”

 

“Oh,” Marcus stammered, as his face turned even more red. “So the two of you are, ummm… a couple?”

Cole smiled at him, actually batted his eyes a little, and I worried that Marcus’s imminent heart attack might be even closer than I had anticipated. “I guess you could call us friends with benefits,” Cole said.

“Oh,” Marcus said again. He was starting to sweat a little, and I could see him frantically scanning the crowd. I assumed he was looking for his wife to come and rescue him.

“Cole!” I said in alarm.

 

78

 

“Do you object to that definition, love? How exactly would
you
classify our relationship?”

“Marcus, thanks for the drink offer, but we really need to go—” “Of course,” Marcus said with obvious relief.

I grabbed Cole’s arm and steered him toward the door. Once we were outside, he pulled away from me angrily. “Let go of me! I’m not a child!”

“Why in the world did you say that him?” I snapped.

“I waited for you to answer him, and you were just standing there with your mouth hanging open! I thought the man at least deserved a response.”

“You couldn’t have been a little less obvious?”

“Was I supposed to lie to him? You’re the one that invited me out! You’re the one that obviously has a problem with this. Maybe you’d like to make me a list of all the things I’m allowed to say when we run into people you know. Maybe you’d like to inform me of exactly how I
should
classify our relationship, in case we’re ever asked again. Lord knows I wouldn’t want to
embarrass
you.”

He turned and walked toward the car, and I trailed along behind him, fuming the entire time. We drove back to my place in stony silence. I couldn’t believe how angry I was. I fought back the urge to lash out at him. I knew it would only make matters worse. The best thing would be to get back to my house, where his car was parked, and go our separate ways, at least for a few days. At least until I could look at him without feeling rage welling up inside of me.

We got to my house, and I expected him to head straight for his car. Instead, he followed me to the door, and I realized that he had probably left his keys inside, on the table by the door. I opened the door and we went in. He didn’t pick up his keys and leave, but I knew he wasn’t planning on staying by the fact that he didn’t take off his shoes the minute we were in the door.

“Well,” he said, crossing the room and turning to stare at me challengingly with one hand on his hip, “let’s hear it, then.” 79

 

“Hear
what
?” I asked through clenched teeth.

“Whatever it is that’s got you in such a lather. You’re obviously furious at me. You’ve been completely unbearable all night, and now you’re practically foaming at the mouth. So quit stewing in your own juices, and let’s just get this over with, shall we? What the hell is your problem?”

I wanted to tell him that it was nothing. I wanted to tell him to go home before I said something cruel. But his attitude only made me angrier. Every aspect of his flamboyance was worse now. Every layer of his affectation was accentuated: the cadence of his speech, the way he stood with his hand on his hip as he flipped his hair out of his eyes, and the way he managed to look down his nose at me, even though I was taller than him by at least two inches. “You really don’t know?” I asked.

He turned away from me, flipping his hair in theatrical dismissal. “I have my suspicions, but we may as well work with the cold, hard facts, don’t you think, love?”

“Fine!” I said, fighting to keep from yelling. “You want to know what’s bothering me?
You’re
bothering me! I can’t believe the way you acted tonight. With my
boss
! And last night, with my father! It’s embarrassing—”

“Last night was your fault, not mine—”
“
What
?”

“—and it’s not my problem if you’re embarrassed by your sexuality.”

 

“I’m not embarrassed about being gay! I’m embarrassed by
you
! Why do you have to act so goddamn flamboyant?”

He froze. For just a moment, he was deathly still. And then he turned, very slowly, to look at me. “What did you just say to me?” There was an angry warning in his eyes, but I ignored it.

“You heard me.”

 

80

“Of course I heard you,” he said icily. “I thought I would allow you the luxury of taking it back. Rather diplomatic of me, don’t you think?”

“I don’t need to take it back!”

 

“Are you
quite
sure about that, darling?” He turned away from me with a perfectly orchestrated toss of his head.

He was giving me a chance to get out of this before I pushed it too far, but I wasn’t about to take it. All I could think about was the way he had acted with my father and the embarrassment on Marcus’s face, and it made me furious. “I don’t
want
to take it back, Cole! I want you to answer me! Why do you have to act like such a, a, a—” I stumbled, stopped short, not really wanting to say any of the words that had popped into my head. But it was too late.

He turned and pinned me with a piercing stare. “A
what
?” he asked, advancing on me. “Which term will you throw at me, lovey? Do you think I haven’t heard them all? Queen, fag, fairy, flamer—”

Those were the terms that had come to mind, but they sounded even worse out loud than they had in my head. It should have made me ashamed, but instead it only made me angrier at him for throwing them back in my face. “Jesus Christ, Cole, I wasn’t going to say
any
of those things!”

“Don’t kid yourself, darling. It was all over your face.” He put one hand on his hip, cocked his other hip out, and tossed his head back. He was amping it up, turning it into a performance just for my benefit. He batted his eyelashes at me. “Does it offend you
so much
, darling? You never seem to mind when we’re in the bedroom.”

“Goddamn it, Cole, I’m not talking about
in t he be droom
! I’m talking about when we’re out
in public
! Why do you have to act like every bad stereotype Hollywood has ever dreamed up for us?”

“Why do you have to act like such an arrogant, uptight prick?” “So we’re going to resort to name calling, rather than discussing this rationally?”

 

81

“Oh, I’m sorry. Are we actually
discussing
something? You’ll have to forgive my confusion. I thought you were simply attacking me for not being a perfect carbon copy of every
straight
man you’ve ever wished you could fuck!”

That word, coming from him, sounded more obscene than normal. I realized I had never actually heard him swear before. “Cole,
stop
! I’m not attacking you.”

“It certainly feels like you are. My mistake, darling.” “My name is
not
‘darling’. It’s
Jonathan
. And if that’s too hard for you to remember, you can just call me Jon.”

 

“I can think of plenty of other things I would
rather
call you right at this particular moment.”

 

“That was my
boss
, for God’s sake. I have to work with him! I need him to respect me! Would it kill you tone it down a bit?”

His eyes flashed, and to my surprise, in the blink of an eye, he cut the act. It was like a curtain came down, and suddenly he there in front of me—no affectation at all. And he was livid. “Do you think you’re the first man to be embarrassed by me, Jonny-boy? Do you think you’re the first man who’s ever asked me to ‘tone it down’? Because you’re not! Better men than you have asked me to change, and I’ll tell you what I told them: go to hell!”

He turned and headed for the door, grabbing his keys off of the table as he went.

 

“Damn it, Cole! Wait!”

 

But he didn’t stop. He slammed my front door so hard that my windows rattled. I didn’t go after him.

 

82

Date: October 12
From: Cole
To: Jared

Good lord Sweets, if you never set me up again, it will be too soon! I honestly have no idea what you were thinking.

I
THOUGHT
at first that he would call. He didn’t. I thought that when I got home from work the next night, he would be there waiting for me like always. He wasn’t.

I realized then that it was up to me.

I was torn. Part of me was still angry. I didn’t believe that I had done anything wrong. I had seen him turn the levels of his flamboyance up and down like the volume on the TV. I knew he could do it. I just didn’t understand why he was unwilling to do it when it mattered the most to me. But I also knew that I didn’t want things to end between us. I especially didn’t want them to end on such unfriendly terms. I felt certain that if I could just talk to him about it reasonably, without it turning into a shouting match, we could reach some sort of understanding.

I finally broke down and called him three days later. He picked up on the fourth ring, right before it would have gone to his voice mail. “What?” he snapped, in lieu of saying hello. Any doubts I might have had that he was still angry went right out the window. “It’s me.”

 

“I know.”

 

83

 

Not a good start to the conversation. I made myself count to five, then said, “I’m sorry.”

 

“Sorry for what
exactly
, darling?”

 

“I’m sorry for—” I stumbled, trying to figure out what I was supposed to say. “For making you angry.”

There was a stony silence on the other end of the line, and then he asked, “Are you
really
sorry, or is it only that your bed felt awfully empty these last few nights?”

“Jesus, Cole,” I said, fighting back my anger. “Do you have to make this so hard? I’m trying to apologize—”

 

“Listen, honey,” he interrupted me, “here’s the thing: I leave for Hawaii at the crack of dawn, so—”

 

“What?”

 

“—I really don’t have the time to wait for you to pull your head out of your ass.”

“You’re
leaving
?”
“Did I not just say that?”
“We have
one
fight, and you’re just going to fly off to Hawaii?”

“As a matter of fact, I am. I dare say you’d leave yourself too, darling, if only you could.” There was an almost inaudible click, and he was gone.

The entire thing made me furious. I couldn’t decide which one of us I was annoyed at more—him for being so arrogant or myself for even trying to apologize. I spent the evening getting gloriously drunk, and the entire next day at work regretting it. By five o’clock the nausea and headache had passed, but I still felt like I had been run over by a freight train. I managed to leave the office a few minutes early and drove home. My plan was a frozen pizza with an Alka-Seltzer chaser followed by a shower and then straight to bed.

It wasn’t until after my shower that I noticed the light on my answering machine blinking at me. Every person I knew had my cell phone number. I rarely even paid attention to my land line. I hit play, 84

and Cole’s voice filled the room, light and feminine and mocking. But there was a bitter edge to it this time too. There was not a doubt in my mind that he had intentionally called my home number while I was at work in order to avoid having to actually talk to me.

“Here’s what it boils down to: I don’t want things to end between us. Not really. And especially not like this. Even if you are an uptight prick, you’re still my favorite person in all of Phoenix. But there are three things you need to know, and you better believe me when I tell you that these three things are one hundred percent non-negotiable. I won’t change who I am. I won’t spend all of our time together holed up in your bedroom just to keep from embarrassing you. And I won’t
ever
talk to you about this again.” There was a pause, and I wondered if he had stopped to count to five. “I’ll be home in exactly two weeks, Jonny-Boy. Ball’s in your court now.”

I
SPENT
the next few days telling myself that I didn’t need him. It wasn’t as if I loved him. It wasn’t as if we had any kind of real relationship at all. We were fuck buddies, plain and simple. It was better to just forget him and move on.

The problem was I couldn’t quite convince myself that it was true. Although I wouldn’t have called it love, the fact was I had grown used to having him around. I could not deny that I was fond of him, and more than that, I missed him. When I was being honest with myself, which was only about half of the time, I knew that I didn’t want things to end between us any more than he did. But despite all that, I still felt that he should have been willing to take my feelings into account too.

I had lunch with my dad the following week. I tried to act like everything was normal, but I failed miserably. I knew I was being surly and short-tempered, but I couldn’t seem to do anything to stop. Finally, as we were finishing our meal, he asked in exasperation, “What’s wrong, Jon?”

“Nothing!” I snapped.

 

85

“Uh
huh
,” he said, smiling. It annoyed me, because it meant he thought my bad mood was funny, more than anything. “Is this about the fruitcake?”

I bristled at that, and then was even more annoyed at myself for the fact my dad was right. It was Cole’s “fruitiness,” as my dad called it, that had caused this entire predicament.