The Men from the Boys (10 page)

Boston, January 1995

Javitz is taking a shower. Lloyd's cleaning up after dinner: takeout Chinese from Hong Lee's to celebrate the homecoming. Javitz is staying with us for a few days, just to get his strength back. Mr. Tompkins gave him his usual welcome when we came through the door, attacking his pointy cowboy boots as he walked into the living room. “Glad to know some things never change,” Javitz said.

But it feels as if something
has.
I've got the oddest sensation something's
different.
“Do you feel it?” I asked Javitz, just a few moments before he lit up his cigarette and headed out to the deck, but he shook his head no, consumed by his habit.

Yet I did, and still do: cold and unsettling. It's like the time we were broken into, when the thief was so neat about it we didn't discover we'd been robbed for hours. Still, even in that time there had been a sense that things were
off
somehow, that they'd been moved and put back the way I'd left them. That's what lingered in the room: the very act of moving them. I sensed it. Sensed that my world had been invaded, then deftly covered over.

I open the drawer in the hallway table and check the little compartment in back. My father's ring is still there, right next to my grandmother's pieced-together ceramic dog and on top of the book from Eduardo. I relax, a little.

But then I notice a pair of gloves on top of the table. Soft brown leather, with white fur lining. Drake's gloves.

“Should I save any of the lo mein or throw it all away?”

Lloyd is looking over at me, poised to scrape the last of the Chinese food into the garbage. The stink chokes the room. Mr. Tompkins jumps up to sniff the garbage pail. Lloyd shoos him away.

“Lloyd,” I ask, knowing fully the answer to my question, “do you know whose gloves these are?”

He doesn't blink. “Oh, they're Drake's. He must have left them here.”

“They weren't there when I left,” I say. “He had them on when we shook hands good-bye.”

Lloyd stands up straight, the plate of lo mein still in his hand. “He came back while you were gone.”

“He came
back?
In this weather? Why?”

“To see the deck. We hadn't shown him the deck.”

Somehow I can see them, standing there in the kitchen, right where Lloyd is now. And they're kissing. I hate this power, hate always
knowing.
“So did you have sex with him again?”

He sighs. I know that if I ask, I need to prepare for the truth. Lloyd won't ever lie to me. “I just kissed him good-bye.”

“Here?”
I feel my anger surge, like a flame on a gas burner. So
that's
why the house had felt wrong. Drake had been
here,
in my space. Once, we had a rule: no tricking in our own house. But I broke the rule first, a couple years ago, with a guy I picked up at the gym. There wasn't anywhere else to go, so we came back here, for a quickie on the couch. Lloyd had made a face when I told him, but never said anything. I can't be a hypocrite now.

“I just went with the moment,” Lloyd says. He decides to toss the lo mein into the garbage. “Look, Drake is a great guy. You'd like him if you gave him a chance.”

That's exactly what I don't want to hear. “I suppose,” I say, and my voice cracks a little, Norma Shearer in
The Divorcee,
“there's
passion
with Drake.”

“Oh, Cat.” He comes to me, pulls me to him. I'm tight, stiff. Then I relax, settling into his arms.

“Oh, Dog.”

We hear Javitz finish his shower, the screech of hot water pipes abruptly shut off. “Aren't there any clean towels in this place?” he shouts.

I raise my eyebrows at Lloyd as if to say: See? He moves away to snatch one out of the dryer and bring it to Javitz. I feel nauseous from the smell of the food. I move out onto the deck. The snow has stopped, but it's raw and damp. I let the coldness cling to my skin.

“Cat?”

Lloyd has come outside.

“Cat, I don't like to see you hurting,” he says, his breath white in front of his face. “I wish I knew what to say to you to make you feel better.”

“You've said
quite
enough,” I say, using meanness as armor.

He touches my shoulder. “Look what I bought for you,” he says in his little-boy voice.

I grudgingly turn. In his palm, he holds a little green plastic cat, just as the woman at the Humane Society had once held Mr. Tompkins.

“They were selling them at Hong Lee's,” he says.

I melt. This one will go with the others, the family on my dresser and bookcase. Lloyd buys them for me, has ever since the nicknames started. Green cats, red cats, orange cats, blue: it's like a Dr. Seuss rhyme, except there's no rhyme or reason to how I feel.

I take the cat. Lloyd and I kiss quickly, mending the pain for now, putting it where we can't see it, until it falls off the shelf again and we have to pick it up.

I watch him as he goes back inside. I hear him call to Javitz: “What're you
doing
in there? Rewriting Scripture?” I hear them laugh. I feel the love bounce back and forth between them like a rubber ball.

Lovers:
those who love. Those who comfort and take care, those who hold each other, share each other's fears and dreams. It would apply to both of them, both Lloyd and Javitz.
My lovers.
Straights use
lover
to mean sex; queers use
lover
to mean love. So what if Lloyd and I haven't had sex in months? That's not what
lover
means, not to us. Javitz and I stopped having sex seven
years
ago—but he hasn't ceased being my lover, although we say he has and the world—with the possible exception of the Provincetown wags—believes that to be true.

If we were straight, Lloyd and I, we'd be married. Married in a church or by a justice of the peace, with blood tests and a certificate. Nobody would ever call us lovers. There'd be no Javitz, of course, just the two of us. We'd be husband and wife, for richer for poorer, in good times and in bad, till death do us part—and there's something comforting in the idea of that, something appealing as well as confining and deadening. As it is, Lloyd could walk out tomorrow if he wished. There's no joint checking account, no real estate, no piece of paper that insists he stay. True, we'd have to figure out who would take what, what in the course of six years was collected by him, what by me, who'd get Mr. Tompkins, of course. Then we'd settle into being
friends—
but would it be any different from what Javitz already is to the two of us? And how different would it be to what the two of us already are?

“There's no more passion,” he had said.

Damn you, I think, looking down at my little green cat. How dare you? Yes, I want to love Lloyd with all the passion that's gotten stuck in my throat, the passion that collects behind my teeth, that threatens to break my ribs. I want to see how that passion ripens after six, sixteen,
sixty
years—an audacious dream in a world where time has become such a fragile commodity. True, I have fallen in love in the course of one afternoon, but I have also seen the rains come and wash that love away. There is love in those indiscriminate kisses, to be sure: but what of kisses that
do
discriminate, that grow drier and airier, that as often fall on the back of the neck as on the lips?

“Define
passion,”
Javitz had dared.

When I finally go back inside, Javitz is on the couch, already asleep. Snoring like a dragon in his lair. I open the hall closet and pull down an extra blanket. I cover him, tucking it under his feet so that it won't slip off in the night. It's going to get cold. From the cabinet under the sink, I take out a jar of chocolate syrup, which Javitz always mixes with his milk in the morning. It's a little surprise for him, a little welcome-home. I leave it on the counter where he'll see it when he wakes up.

Then I tiptoe into bed beside Lloyd, who murmurs dreamily. I pull him gently into the breathing position and lean up on my elbow for a while, watching him sleep.

FRIENDS

Provincetown, July 1994

“There's no word for me,” Javitz says, the foghorn across the bay making its mournful call.

“There soitenly isn't,” I reply, Groucho Marx tapping an invisible cigar.

He gives me that Javitz face, all eyes and nose. “Well, what
am
I? Your
friend?”

Good question. He's never much liked that word. He has a T-shirt that reads: “Fuck you. I have enough
friends.”

He doesn't expect to be called “lover,” either, although that might be a more apt description to explain what he is to Lloyd and me. We hold power of attorney for Javitz. When the time comes, it will be up to us to determine when life support is shut off, when the morphine gets jacked up. And why? Because we're his
best friends
in the entire world. That's why he's given us this horrible honor.

“I know,” Lloyd says suddenly, his eyes opening. He's getting a shoulder massage from Javitz, sitting out on the deck overlooking the bay. “You're a frendover.”

“Friend of her?” Javitz grumbles. “Who's ‘her'?”

“Frendover,” Lloyd repeats. “ ‘Friend-lover,' combined.”

I laugh. I'm leaning in the door frame, half in the kitchen. The sun is setting over the dunes to our right, a spill of primary colors.

“How about ‘lovrend'?” I suggest. The water boils on the stove for the pasta. I go back inside, but leave the door open so I can hear Javitz's reaction.

It's just one of his long, long dramatic sighs.

“There's no way to describe me,” he says, airily.

“Ain't that the truth,” Lloyd mumbles, winking at me.

Javitz slaps the back of Lloyd's head, but he keeps up the massage. I break the brittle log of linguine in two, dropping the halves into the bubbling water.

Friend. What a concept. I have had many friends, friends who meant the world, who meant my life, meant their lives, our lives together. They have come in waves: grade school, high school, college. First job, grad school, the gay bars after first coming out. Each time, my friends became the most important people in my life. Each time, in the heat of the friendship, I expected that my friends would last forever. “To Jeff,” Francine Niemerski wrote across my senior yearbook photo. “A friendship like ours will last an eternity. We'll never forget our weekend with Pooty Bear.”

Fourteen years later I no longer remember what Pooty Bear was, or what that weekend was all about, and Francine's face is but a dim blur: a red-haired girl with a large nose. She went to St. Margaret's, the girls' school that was sister to the all-boy St. Francis Academy, which I attended. The two schools shared dances, school plays, and bus rides in the morning and afternoon. How well I remember those bus rides. They stunk of peanut butter and wax paper, carbon monoxide and the armpits of pubescent boys. Clare Aresco and Dave Wysocki would make out in the back, all hands and Clare's long auburn hair. I'd push my head into the hard green Naugahyde seat and turn my eyes to catch a glimpse of Dave's flushed face as he came up for air. Immediately, I'd get hard, quickly averting my eyes to stare straight ahead. But Gordon and Stick, my buddies, would keep twisting around to gawk.

“He's got a tit,” Gordon would report.

“Her hand's in his pants,” Stick would hiss through his teeth.

I'd sit without breathing, aware of the stirring in my crotch, wondering if those around me could tell, if they could see the prickly heat rising on the back of my neck. The idea that Dave Wysocki was gratifying his libido—something that had not yet occurred for me—was tantalizing. I felt no envy of Dave, only shared passion. Later, when I got home, I'd jerk off thinking about Dave's red face.

“You know why I hate getting old?” I say suddenly to Javitz.

He pauses in Lloyd's massage to look over at me. Lloyd taps the fingers on his shoulders, as if to say: “Keep going.”

“Why?” Javitz asks wearily, as if there are no reasons he hasn't heard before.

“I hate it because I didn't have a chance to be young when I was young.”

“Oh, that.” Javitz resumes kneading Lloyd's sore shoulders. He says all the tension he gets on his job goes there. “What queer did?”

“They do now, some of them,” Lloyd says, not opening his eyes.

“That's right,” I agree. “Some of these kids up here are eighteen and nineteen. Younger even. They come up here with their gay
youth group,
for God's sake.”

“Babies on parade,” Javitz says, sighing.

“When I was eighteen, I couldn't
imagine
a place like Provincetown,” I tell him. “I didn't get to be young until I was twenty-five.”

“At least,” Lloyd seconds.

“So are you trying to make up for lost time?” Javitz asks.

“Might be,” I muse. The water has come to a rapid boil again; the pasta is nearly ready. I've made a ton of it. Chanel and Wendy and Melissa and Rose are coming by. It's Fourth of July weekend, and we're going to watch the fireworks from our deck.

“Really,” I continue, draining the pasta, “I never got to make out the way Dave Wysocki did in high school. I mean, make out and
like
it.”

“Translated,” Lloyd says, “you didn't get to make out with
boys.”

“Exactly.”

See, Lloyd understands. It was never that way with Javitz. “Not until I was well out of college did I start playing around,” I say, and Lloyd nods in recognition.