My Best Man (21 page)

“Don’t worry,” I tell him, laughing. “We only want dessert and coffee.” I give him my I’ve-been-drinking-red-wine smile, and before he leaves I notice he rests his glance on me a little longer than any straight guy would. Man, he’s definitely my type.

After he serves us coffee and two pieces of Chocolate Death Cake, that he almost drops in our laps, and we remind him that we need forks in order to eat them, Amity and I replay the evening in our heads and laugh while loading up on sugar and caffeine.

I excuse myself to go to the bathroom, and as I approach a table of eight, four couples of men and women, I hear cussing. “Fuck that!” and “Bullshit!” and other garbage is being spewed onto our waiter, Nicolo, who stands at the table with his arms at his side. I slow down to listen to what the problem is.

The waiter, his voice tense, tells a guy, “You asked for a Caesar and the buffalo wings.”

“No, I didn’t, Pancho,” the guy says derisively.

“Tim, don’t start,” a woman warns. I hear “faggot” slip out of one of the other guy’s mouths.

“He’s screwed everything up from the beginning,” a woman says to her date. And then I hear the word “faggot” again.

“Hey!” I say, stepping up to the table. “What gives you the right to talk to this guy like that?” I’m angry and shaking.

The table is silenced for a moment before one of the guys says, “Who the hell are you?”

I had a businessman treat me unkindly on the airplane my first month on the job. He called me a faggot because I couldn’t find a place for his carry-on luggage. And I had to stand there and take it because it’s my job to smile and keep my mouth shut. But another passenger came to my defense and really let the businessman have it for being so rude. Now is my chance to do the same for the waiter. I start to answer, and realize that Hunt, the guy Amity used to date, is part of this group. “I’m a friend of Hunt’s here,” I say as soon as I see Hunt. I walk over to his chair, put my hand on the back of it. “How’s it going, Hunt?” I’m pissed off and dripping with sarcasm.

He answers slowly. “Pretty good, Harry. How are things with you?”

“Who is this guy?” one of the other guys says.

There are at least twelve empty beer glasses sitting on the table. The women look embarrassed. A redheaded gal with spiky hair says, “Tim, just let it go. You ate the damn appetizer. Just pay for it.”

“I’m not so good,” I tell Hunt, answering his question. “Why don’t you tell your friends here that faggot isn’t a very nice word.” “Well I guess you already have,” he drawls. “Who is this guy?” his friend asks again.

“Tim, just shut up and pay the check!” the redhead spurts.

“I’m a faggot,” I tell the guy, “which means I’m allowed to use the word. But you’re not allowed, unless you’re one too.” “No fucking way,” the guy laughs disgustedly.

“Hunt here has experience with guys like me. He’ll tell you what we don’t appreciate.”

A couple of the girls look sickened and turn to Hunt. The drunken belligerent guy, Tim, rises from his chair. “Look, you Yankee smart-ass punk ……. “

“Tim!” the redhead yells.

“Tim,” Hunt echoes. “Let it go. I’ll explain later. Let’s just get the fuck out of here.” He slaps down several big bills, and one of the women says, “Don’t leave him a tip,” while looking pointedly at the waiter.

I step backward as Hunt pushes back from his chair, and they all leave. Tim gets in another, “Fucking faggots.” But Hunt presses him forward past Nicolo and me.

“Man,” Nicolo says after they’re gone, “you are my hero.” He’s potently masculine in a way most guys aren’t. There’s not a trace of sissy in him, and I’m surprised they were calling him a faggot. Maybe they were just trying to put him down in what they thought was the worst possible way.

“Aw shucks,” I say jokingly, flushed in the face. “I don’t know if I’ve ever been anyone’s hero.”

“You are now,” he says, drilling a hole into me with his black licorice eyes. “Nicolo,” he says, introducing himself again, this time offering his hand.

“Harry,” I tell him, shaking his hand.

“So how did you know that guy?” Nicolo asks.

“He dated my roommate -the girl I’m with tonight. He told her he used to proposition gay guys in bars and then take them out to the car and beat them up with his buddies. Never gave me any shit though. He was always real nice to me.”

“And your roommate dated him? What’s the matter with her?” he asks seriously.

“Nothing,” I say, slightly offended. “Her business is her business. She’s just my roommate.” It’s a weird moment. I’m slightly insulted that he insinuates Amity is inferior in some way for dating Hunt. And at the same time, I purposefully mislead him, telling him Amity and I are just roommates.

“I’m glad that’s not your date you are with,” he says with his Spanish accent.

“Why is that?” I ask.

“Because I would like you to have coffee and dessert with me, not her.”

Wow. He’s bold when he’s not being a waiter. The way he says it, it almost sounds as if he doesn’t like Amity. It bothers me, but I can’t refuse -he looks too much like Guillermo Vilas. “I’d like that,” I tell him, smiling. After all, Amity said I could bring my boyfriends over to our house after we’re married. And I sure would love having this one as a boyfriend. “Well, excuse me,” I tell him, starting for the bathroom.

“Harry,” he tells me, offering straight white teeth from behind aubergine lips, “it was a pleasure to meet you.”

My motor is officially running. “You too.”

By the time I return to the table, Amity has whipped the other waiter, Thomas, into a sexually frustrated frenzy, and he’s smiling at her every chance he gets as he passes by. I tell her about Nicolo and what happened with Hunt, and she said she watched it all from her seat. So now we’re hyped up on sugar, caffeine, and waiters. It is confusing though. I mean, Amity is my date, and I’m hers. She just endorsed my virtue to the longtime employees of the airline, and I’ve never felt so connected to her. But our natural inclination is to cruise these sexy waiters. I’m beginning to realize that, besides being similar to a gay guy in the way she gives blow jobs, Amity is also similar to gay guys, all guys, in that she constantly has a roving eye. Engaged or not, the fact is we both like guys. “Let’s take these boys home,” I suggest, giving in to my ego or my penisbrain.

Amity smiles and says, “No, Harry,” with her experienced counsel. “We’ll just give. them our phone numbers tonight,” she says, writing our names and numbers down on a napkin and leaving it on the table. “You and I will go home together.”

I feel like an idiot. Of course she’s right. We’re a couple. And this is our night to be together. Considering her loving acknowledgment of me at the awards dinner, I hope I haven’t hurt. her feelings. Or is she just playing a hand of cards?

That night, at home, in her bed, we lie side by side and talk. “Thomas and Nicolo,” she says to the ceiling.

“Nicolo and Thomas,” I answer, helping to create legends of our waiters’ names.

“I can tell Thomas is a gentleman. I wonder where he’s from?” Amity says, referring to her waiter. “He had some kind of European accent.”

“That guy’s pretty tall. Amsterdam?”

“Yes,” Amity says breathlessly, “and Emily Post says the manners of Europeans and South Americans are more elegant than those of Americans.”

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“Does that mean he’ll bow and say, “May I eat your pussy please?” “

“Ja, ja,” Amity sings. “And I will say bedankt!”

“Well, it’s all perfect. Because Nicolo is Latin American. And I know enough Spanish to say gracias.” Ah, the Spanish language. I think about my ex-boyfriend in Kansas. We met one day in Spanish class, went to my apartment to practice rolling our Rs, and finally rolled each other. Matthew was on the college swim team when we were undergrads; his body is killer still. He has sky blue eyes, big pecs with perfect nipples, and curly dark hair that falls almost to his wide, wide shoulders. An absolute wolf (our college term for a babe), and my ego is still shot that he dumped me. Amity picks up on my silence, my mood change.

“What is it, Harry?” she asks, reaching over and holding my hand in the dark.

“I was just thinking about Matthew.”

“Do you still miss him?”

“Sometimes. I don’t know why. He was such a jerk.” “Harry, this world has bigger things in store for you than Kansas. Matthew couldn’t handle that. He knew when you took this flight attendant job that your life was going to change in wonderful ways, and he just wasn’t ready to let that change happen to him. So he loved you enough to set you free. You’re lucky. Do you understand?”

Where the heck did she come up with that simple analysis? Poor thing, for all her acumen in dealing with people, sometimes she really is naive. Matthew was a rotten snake who dumped me only because I would never see my inheritance. It amazes me that, for all the subterfuge and intrigue she casts upon the innocent King of Jordan, she’s blind to the machinations of the guilty commoner known as Matthew.

“It’s the same thing that happened with my boyfriend Richard,” she continues. “I told Richard I’d marry him but I just wanted to get out of the house. See, my parents were so cruel to me. They

had money, but they never cared for me the way they cared for my brother and sister. I was restless. I was at school in Fort Worth, and I didn’t really have any desire to finish. The only thing I ever got an A in was art. My final project was a self-portrait entitled “Rug Burns On My Thighs.” “

“Was it hard earned, that A?” I ask, smiling.

She sits up, looks at me. “Why do you ask me that way?”

I chuckle. “Well, I heard you had a little trouble with a professor.”

“How dare you?” Amity says, her brow wrinkled, her eyes burning a hole in me. “If you know something, don’t act like you don’t.”

“OK,” I say defensively. “I heard from a friend of mine that you slept with a professor and ended up suing him.”

Tears fill her eyes. “Are you enjoying making me feel like trash, Harry Ford? You think you can just say anything you want because of who you are and I’m supposed to take it?”

“God, no. I’ve never acted like that with you. With anybody. What’s the big deal? I thought it was funny.”

“Real funny,” she says, more caustic than I’ve ever seen her. “I work hard to make you feel worthy, Mr. Ford. I don’t need to be shot out of the sky by your knowledge of my past,” she finishes, grabbing a pillow and hugging it to her chest.

“You work to make me feel? What kind of a sentence is that?” “I do work at it,” she huffs.

“That makes me feel like you’re not being real that I’m some kind of project.”

“Now wait,” she says, backpedaling. “You’re not a project. What I meant was… Oh never mind. You’ll never understand me. How can you?”

“Why not? Besides, that’s crazy. I do understand you,” I argue.

“No,” she answers, exasperated, “you don’t. I thought I was so lucky to find you, Harry. I’ve never been able to find a man like

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AHUy lfli i i you. This girl has so much love to give, but most men want to own me, and I just don’t want a man like that. And here I thought I finally found the right man in you, Harry Ford.”

“You have,” I say, wanting to be wanted, wanting this thing to ultimately work out. “I love you, Amity. I really do. I’m going to share my inheritance with you, surely you know that. Anything you need.”

“You give me all I need,” she says, lying back on the bed. The tears are falling sideways down her cheeks. “I didn’t mean to get so squirrely.” She wipes at the tears with her ring finger. “Listen, Bubba. If we do get married, if we decide to go through with it, I just want a thin gold band on my finger. Nothing fancy. No diamonds, babe. Just a thin gold band. I don’t want your money, and I don’t care if you don’t make love to me with your dick, as long as you save just a little piece of your heart for me.”

Her words assure me. “I always will,” I tell her, reaching out for her hand.

After a small repose in silence, we begin speaking again and spend the rest of the night talking about lost loves, postcards never written, life’s curves, dreams of the future, travel to exotic countries, and anything else our imaginations dredge. And though we seem to be closer than ever before, there’s still something that isn’t right, something we’ve yet to get unearthed between us.

Eventually, something amazing starts to happen outside the window of her bedroom. “Amity, look,” I say. “The sun is rising. It’s morning.” And she casts her eyes toward the fiery red of a brand-new dawn, then looks back at me and kisses me lightly, once, on the lips, before closing her eyes and falling asleep. I close my eyes to the red sky while remembering the old sailor’ sad age “Red sky at morning, sailors take warning.”

ne week later, on another humid Texas morning, Amity and I are on the sofa in the sitting room, avoiding the morning sun of the living room .. it’s already nearly eighty-five degrees outside according to Willard Scott, who’s broadly broadcasting the weather of major cities from the little black-and-white TV sitting on the kitchen counter. I sip a glass of water while waiting for the coffeemaker to spit out a pot of java gasoline. Amity is drinking a glass of iced tea with lemon and somehow painting her toenails at the same time. The phone rings.

“That’s for me,” Amity states, setting down the bottle of polish. “How do you know?”

She looks at her watch. “Because Susan and I agreed to talk at nine o’clock on Thursday morning, and it’s nine o’clock on Thurs day morning.”

The phone continues to ring. “Susan? As in my mother?” Amity nods affirmatively while picking up the receiver. “Hello, Susan. This is Amity,” she sings. After a pause she chimes, “Oh, we’re fine as frog hair. Just happier every day we spend together every night too.”

The night before, I’d stayed home while Amity was out on a date with Kim, the rich guy who’s going through his mid life crisis.

It was laughingly absurd to come home from flying and find a note from my fiancee that read:

My Harry,

I’m out on a date Love your guts