Robin and Ruby (3 page)

Robin’s face warms up in shame. He hates that Peter seems so distant, but it’s important to listen. That’s what George always says, that Robin doesn’t really
hear
what people are trying to tell him.

They drive through the narrow, brick-lined streets of Center City. The softly burning light on the old buildings is both soothing and unsettling. Like so many things, it seems too beautiful to trust. A couple years ago, visiting George at Penn, where he’s majoring in premed, Robin decided he wanted to live in Philly one day. In part, it was the appearance of the charming, history-bound architecture at golden, late-day moments like this. And in part it was simply that this wasn’t New York. He needed space from New York, the city that has owned him for so long, which is why he went to college in Pittsburgh, why he moved in with George this summer, why he set his sights on London. He needed space from his mother in her Manhattan apartment; she is too much the shaper of his life and has been for years. And he needed space from his past, all that sexual adventure that now seems to have marked him, along with every other guy having sex with guys, as endangered.

Peter has chosen an old-fashioned Greek restaurant in the midst of the gay neighborhood. “How do you know about this place?” Robin asks, and Peter mentions his ex-girlfriend Diana, who goes to college at Temple. Robin met her a few weeks ago: a high-strung, curvy girl who seemed to have the same dubious response to him that George had to Peter. What was that about, this doubt among friends?

Inside, the hostess, a woman with big, pretty eyes and big, shapely breasts who looks like a more Mediterranean version of Diana, leads them to a corner table. She might be as much as ten years older than him, or she might be a very mature teenager. Girls are like that; they look like women much earlier than boys look like men. Case in point: his own sister. For years he called Ruby “peanut,” and then he turned around, and she was nineteen, in college, this imposing young woman with a tough attitude who wore only black.

All these faces are suddenly crowding his mind: Ruby, Diana, this waitress who looks like Diana. It’s as though he’s erecting a protective female wall between himself and Peter’s air of masculine control.

Robin looks up from the menu and sees that Peter is staring at him with an admiration so unexpected and intense it looks almost mournful. “You’re so handsome,” Peter says. “When you space out, and your face relaxes, you’re like an angel.”

“OK, something’s wrong,” Robin says.

Peter sighs. “I’ll order for us first.”

Robin digs his cigarettes from his pocket.

“Don’t,” Peter says, even though there’s an ashtray on the table, white and royal blue and etched with an image of the Parthenon.

Robin fingers his cigarette, wondering how long he can hold it without lighting it. The clock on the wall says 6:32.

“I’m glad you called me,” Peter says.

“You are?”

“Sure. I had the whole ride to think.”

“About us.”

“It’s really about me.” Robin can hear the wind-up in Peter’s voice, and then he’s on a roll, reciting something like an autobiography of his twenty-eight years on the planet: raised with a drive for material success inherited from his father, an importer of Greek foods who wanted Peter to carry on the family business. Scarred by the overwhelming repression of his Orthodox family. Wasting too many years with a girlfriend he barely touched. It took so long to discover himself! Only in grad school, when he began to study great gay artists like Michelangelo and Leonardo, was he able to break free and to live in a more
examined
way.

Robin waits for Peter to get to the moment when he entered his life, toward their time together. These eight months have been so substantial to Robin, but now, placed in this chronology, they shrink to some kind of footnote, one brief stop along a larger, more essential path that Peter is traveling. And, really, they haven’t even shared eight full months. There was the furtive beginning, student and teacher sneaking extracurricular sex. There was a lengthy separation during Christmas break. Then at last came four months when they lived as boyfriends, spending nearly every night in Peter’s off-campus apartment. But that was cut off by Robin’s move to Philly at the end of May, and since then, there have been just a couple of visits.
Why didn’t you just stay in Pittsburgh with him, you fool?

“Meeting you has been so special to me,” Peter is saying. “You’re this interesting, handsome, younger guy, but you’ve had so many experiences, living in New York, and growing up in a such a troubled family. You’re sort of exotic to me, you feel very modern. It’s been amazing to have gotten close to you—”

“Do you ever think,” Robin interrupts, “how weird it is that we met at a school in Pittsburgh? Neither of us is from there, which makes it seem like we were
meant
to find each other.” He’s riffing now, scrambling, because he can feel where Peter’s monologue is leading.

And sure enough, Peter says, “It’s just not the right time in my life to be in this relationship,” and then, “What we’ve had has been important to me, but I can’t really commit to it,” and then, “I hope we can move on to some other kind of friendship without the pressure to try and make a sexual relationship work.”

Peter is saying the words and Robin is hearing them, they’re accumulating weight and solidity. “Given everything I just outlined, the only conclusion that I can reach is that we should break up.”

He feels it like a physical impact.

This is actually happening.

You’re being dumped.

“I hope you understand,” Peter says, and Robin shakes his head no.

The waitress appears and sets down a platter of various mushy substances, shaded beige to gray, and a basket of pita cut into long strips and fried into crispness. Quick upon her heels is a doughy busboy, who refills Peter’s water glass with a messy splash. The sound of the ice being jostled by the water becomes for Robin the very sound of his relationship being dismantled, and before he knows it he has lighted the cigarette in his hand.

He looks at the time. 6:39. Over the course of seven minutes, his relationship has ended.

The inhaling and exhaling of smoke seems to organize his ability to speak. “I’ll give you credit,” he says calmly. “You drove all this way. You could have said this over the phone.”

Peter smiles shyly and drops his gaze downward, happy to take the compliment. Robin tells himself, Beg for a second chance. Let the tears flow. Show him how you feel. No, fuck that. You should say the meanest thing you can think of and then throw your ice water in his fucking face.

Peter says, “I’d love to know how this sounds to you.”

“Shitty.”

“Tell you what. I won’t say anything else. I’ll let you lead from here.”

Robin nods and smokes his cigarette. He doesn’t know where to look.

Peter says, “Meantime, how about we eat? This is hummus, this is baba ganoush, and this is tzatziki.” He points as he identifies each one, then grabs a pita slice, dips, and eats. Robin puts out the cigarette and then does what Peter does. Dips and eats. Chews and swallows. He compliments the food, as if this will somehow counteract everything that Peter has just said to him.

“The tzatziki’s good,” Robin mumbles. “I’ve never had it before.”

“Yogurt and mint,” Peter says, mouth full.

As the meal proceeds, Robin notes Peter’s every facial expression and gesture. He seems satisfied, or at least relieved. Where is the doubt, the remorse? Robin’s own thoughts return to a fantasy he’s sometimes indulged since meeting Peter, the one about moving in with him to a little cottage by a creek on a bucolic patch of land in the western Pennsylvania countryside, while Peter finishes his dissertation and Robin decorates the house, cooks meals, auditions for summer stock plays. He has no idea where this vision originated or how he, a city boy who loves taxis and tall buildings and restaurants, could possibly remain satisfied out in the boonies. The fantasy curdles, and he sees himself staring at a closed door, behind which Peter types out pages of whatever it is he has to say about Renaissance art. He sees himself going quickly insane, snapping and turning against Peter, who has ruined his life by promising him love that he can’t deliver, sees himself creeping up on Peter’s bed, a kitchen knife in hand, the blade poised above Peter’s heart…

His mother once admitted that she fantasized killing his father after he asked for a divorce. Dorothy had seemed absolutely bonkers to Robin at the time, beyond the realm of understanding or sympathy. But now he sees that he’s just like her, and that hurt finds hurt and magnifies it.

What will she say when he tells her about this, about Peter?
Peter’s really quite provincial. You need someone more sophisticated. I had a feeling this wouldn’t work out.
George will say it more simply:
I never trusted him.

When the bill lands on the table, Robin doesn’t budge, even though his pockets are full of tip money. They have always split their costs, but not this time. This one’s on Peter. And then, as the waitress takes the money away, Robin is seized with panic. Has he just given the breakup his blessing, letting Peter pay his way out of their relationship? It’s all suddenly so real: not a scene he’s starring in but his actual life.

Outside the restaurant, they linger under the bright summer sky. The heat of the day has passed, but the humidity clings, and under his work clothes, his skin is grimy, coated in burnt butter. He resists the urge to light up again. “Will you stay over tonight?” he asks, as Peter jiggles the car keys.

“I’ve got somewhere lined up,” Peter says, nodding vigorously. “But I’ll drive you home.”

“Lined up? With Diana?”

“Mm-hmm.”

There’s something suspect about Peter’s behavior. He keeps nodding as he lets himself into the car.

Robin looks into the empty hatchback. “Where’s your bag? Where are your clothes?”

“They’re already at Diana’s.”

“You went there first? Before you picked me up?”

Peter nods. “I figured you’d need some space—”

“You had this all planned out.” He gets in, slams the door. “You said it’s all about you and your path in life and your fucking destiny, but it’s about me, about what’s wrong with me. Why don’t you just say it?”

Peter starts the ignition and without looking whooshes into traffic. A blare of a car horn startles them both into a shaky calm.

“OK, yes,” Peter says, his gaze on the road, “there are some things about you—not that you’re a bad person, but there is the difference in our ages—eight years is a lot—and the fact that you have all of your twenties still ahead of you, whereas I want to figure out other things, start settling in to my adult life.”

“I’ve already
had
my twenties. I had them in my teens.”

“There’s also that,” Peter says. “Your history.”

Robin feels his heartbeat quicken. “You mean my sexual history.”

“Yes,” Peter says, softly but emphatically. “Especially after the last time.”

The last time
: The sex they had, during Peter’s previous visit, three weeks ago. That hot, hot moment when Peter slipped inside Robin unsheathed, and Robin let him thrust, thrust, thrust. Thirty seconds like that, maybe sixty, maybe a whole minute and thirty seconds. A tiny span of time that felt eternal. They both knew what was happening. Robin even said an encouraging
yes,
but finally Peter froze, cold realization on his face. “What are you doing?” he asked, and pulled out.

“I haven’t been with anyone since I’ve been with you,” Robin says. “And I haven’t wanted to, either.”

“With this virus, when I sleep with someone, I’m sleeping with
everyone
he’s
ever
had sex with.”

“Well, that’s only a
few
dozen people,” Robin says and then neither of them says anything more.

His head is flooding with chatter, noise he wants to float away from. He pushes the play button on the cassette deck. Exposé mixes into Lisa Lisa singing “I Wonder If I Take You Home,” a perky song that he understands now is really an anthem of doubt. Robin snaps it off after just a few measures.

As Peter heads along Walnut Street toward West Philly, Robin imagines leaping from the car and running back to the restaurant, which is really a wish to run backward in time, to just a short while ago, when Peter was still his boyfriend. But in fact he feels paralyzed, rigid with the horror of being discarded by this man he was sure was the right one, the safe one, the one who would prevent him from chasing after his every dangerous impulse.

The ride passes in silence. They cross over the Schuylkill River, past the big neoclassical train station and into the Penn campus, mostly quiet now that the summer is here. Peter reflexively locks the doors as they move into the surrounding neighborhood, where once-stately, now-dilapidated single-family homes are the outward sign of the poverty and crime that runs deep here. Peter pulls up to the curb in front of the row house where Robin and George share an upper-floor apartment. On the neighboring stoop, two teenage boys turn their attention to the car; these two, sometimes along with a couple more just like them, dressed in backward baseball caps and shiny tracksuits, are always here, staring at Robin as he comes and goes, never saying anything directly to him but often talking loudly among themselves in a way that unsettles him, because they’re letting him know whose turf this is. For the first week he would offer a hello, but he never got a verbal reply, and one time he heard one say what sounded like, “Crackers tryin’a take over the ’hood.” After that he just moved past quietly.

The fact is that Robin picked exactly the wrong time to move into West Philly, just a week after police helicopters dropped a bomb on a separatist black commune twenty blocks away. There was still smoke rising from the ruins on Osage Avenue when George helped Robin lug his bags up to the apartment, and the first call Robin got from his mother was an urgent plea that he get out of there quickly. In the weeks since, he’s quietly wondered if he should have listened to her. But it became a point of pride to not flee the heat, to be one of the few white faces in the crowd at Clark Park last weekend when the neighborhood demonstrated against police brutality. Plus, how could he leave George? He needed to show George that he was
down
with him.