The Men from the Boys (20 page)

Chanel rolls her eyes. “I'm getting a little tired of serial monogamy. I think you and Lloyd have the better idea.”

“Ah,” I say, “are we getting weary of Kathryn already?”

Chanel puts her arm around me, ducks me into the hallway where we won't be overheard. “She's not Wendy,” she tells me.

“Duh.”

“No, I mean, she doesn't set my heart racing the way Wendy did.”

“You've cut Wendy's picture out of every photograph you own. You told me the romance was over.”

She pouts. “It is. She's already found a new girlfriend. And they're having a baby.”

“I'm sorry,” I tell her.

“Did I make a mistake leaving her?” Chanel asks. “Hell, what am I saying? She started it.”

“You were both pretty impetuous.” I think about Lloyd and Marty, the little I know. One morning, after an argument the previous night, Lloyd just left, convinced he'd seen Marty's true, petty side. I don't know what the argument was about; I prefer to not know details.

I think about Lloyd and me, about that conversation we had, the idea that the passion was gone, how easy it was for me to fall in love with Eduardo. “Maybe it's not too late,” I tell Chanel. “Maybe you should talk to Wendy. Don't let her go if you still love her.”

She shrugs. “She's having a baby with her new girlfriend. I have no right to disturb her new life.”

“Maybe not,” I say, “but she loved you. You loved her. That was very obvious. And I will never accept that love like that just goes away. Baby or not. New girlfriends or not.”

“No,” she says, definitively. “I won't contact her. It's over. Besides, I have my career. I'm finally doing some interesting work, writing some pieces I think are going to get me attention. I've decided to get an agent. I don't have time for personal emotional baggage.”

“But without that—”

“Kathryn will suffice for the time being,” she says. “Unless Naomi turns queer. Keep me posted.”

I watch her move off towards Tommy. She goes up and strokes his face, kisses his nose. I remember how angry she was at me last summer, just as she and Wendy were breaking up. The excuse for her anger was what happened with Eduardo—but it was really her own grief about losing the woman she loved for so long. How could she have let it happen? I cautioned her to go slow. “You love each other,” I pleaded. “Don't give up so easily. Work it out. Find a way!”

I hear Tommy's laugh, a small, high-pitched sound, cut through the chatter. And how might he work it out now? What way might
he
find? My old friend.
The last one to go will see the others go before
her. I'm still numb from his news. Yet he seems liberated by his revelation, as if all he needed to do to feel better was tell us.

Lloyd is suddenly beside me. “You've got to go back to Magda. She said she wouldn't charge you.”

“What did she tell you?” I ask. “Should we try to find a way to come up with a down payment and buy the apartment?”

He looks solemn. “It's not a good idea, Jeff.”

“Did she say that?” I flash red with fury. “Are you going to base your decision on what some Gypsy in a mall tells you?”

“That's not what I'm basing my decision on.”

“Then what are we going to do? We have to be out of there in a few months.”

“Can we talk about this later?”

“Fine.” I'm pissed, and he knows it.

Are our lives that disposable?
See you
later,
Wendy. Let's give up, Jeff
. If such things are not worth fighting for, then what is?

My eyes wander back to Tommy. What does
he
think now, about the value of his life? What would he fight for, even now? Once, we fought like lions: closing down the Brooklyn Bridge, staging die-ins in the middle of Commonwealth Avenue. What will we fight for now?

Lloyd takes my hand, trying to bridge the gap between us. “You should go back, Cat. Ask Magda about your novel. Bring her a page.”

The earnestness of his eyes wins me back. “All right,” I say. “Maybe I will.” What is it about Lloyd that will not permit me to stay angry at him?

“So what was up with Tommy?” he asks.

Now it's my turn to be evasive. “Can we talk about it later?”

I imagine his reaction—and Javitz's—when I tell them about Tommy, who's now heating up the hot fudge in the microwave. You'd never know he just dropped a bombshell on us less than an hour ago. Everybody's laughing now, even Tommy, carrying on, the familiar banter of the group masking what lurks below the surface.

Javitz is gushing about the place Ernie has found for him in Provincetown. “I can move in anytime. Now I can put one of those bumper stickers on my car that says I'm a Provincetown year-rounder!” He grins idiotically, like those kids in fourth grade who were told they'd made the “ceiling club”—that elite clutch of egg-heads who would chalk up straight A's for a week. Big deal to the ceiling club, I always used to say. Big deal to year-rounders, I say now.

“Do you know the psychic said she saw
boats
when she visualized my new house?” Javitz continues. “I never even told her it was near the water. She just
knew!”
How quickly the skeptics are converted.

Naomi pulls me aside. “You have such a wonderful family,” she says.

“You mean this motley crew?”

“Yes.” She smiles. She's only an occasional participant in our little gatherings, a canny observer because of her outsider, hetero status. “You're very fortunate. I've tried telling that to Lloyd.”

“What do you mean, ‘tried'?”

“Well, with everything he's going through ...” she says, trailing off. Which immediately sets off a paranoia button in me. What has he confided to her? What has he told her about us—about me? What do the three of them—she and Lloyd and
Drake
—talk about to and from their meditation group? Does Naomi know more than I do about what's going on between Lloyd and Drake? Does she encourage it, or discourage it? “I've
tried
telling that to Lloyd,” she said. Does that mean he refuses to listen?

Javitz holds court in the kitchen, teasing Kathryn about being so shy, telling Tommy to wipe the hot fudge off his chin. Lloyd and Chanel have moved off into the living room to gossip, as they usually do, not interested in playing Javitz's games. The dividing lines are not by gender here, as they are in my parents' house, but rather by personality—yet the lines divide, nonetheless. No one mentions Melissa and Rose, but their absence is felt, a physical thing.

Family. That's what they are, after all. Friends, lovers, yes—but
family.
With all of the tricky nuances and idiosyncrasies that breed within families, the little secrets and doubts and fears and resentments.

And the hopes and dreams and love.

Then there's a knock at the door. Tommy rushes to answer it. Chanel has put the music back on. She and Lloyd are dancing around the room.
So smile for a while and let's be jolly
—

Tommy embraces the man at the door. I look over to see who it is.

CLASS

Provincetown, July 1994

Our deck this summer has afternoon sun, something to which we've all resigned ourselves. “Our last deck,” I tell visitors, “faced the east. Not only could we see the bay, but having coffee first thing in the morning with the sun full on our faces ...”

I don't need to finish. They understand.

Here in Provincetown, decks matter. The strategic placement of the deck—whether it takes morning or afternoon sun, whether it looks out over the placid bay or the cacophony of Commercial Street—directly affects a house's summer rental price. “But where's the deck?” we always ask, first thing.

Sitting here now, moving my chair to follow the arc of the sun despite the sunblock plastered all over my face, I'm thinking about decks, and views of the bay, and summers in Provincetown. Each season we've sought a better place than the one we had the year before. We've become more precise, more particular about what makes for good summer space. Except, of course, for the concession regarding the deck, this year's house is the best yet. It has two bathrooms, and somehow we've managed to snare
three
precious parking spaces—among the rarest of rare commodities in this town. Such things make up for a lack of morning sun: we shall, as Lloyd says, survive.

And sitting here, baking in the midday rays, the cellular phone on a table near my elbow, I laugh. How the hell did you ever wind up here, kid? I think to myself.

“What's so funny?” Eduardo asks.

He's stretched out on a towel a couple of feet away from my chair. His long thin body reflects the sun: he glistens as if he's been bronzed.

“Just being here,” I tell him. “Every once in a while it just hits me.”

“What does?”

Of course he can't understand. He grew up here. This is home. To him, this isn't some rarefied queer resort town, where decks and parking spaces matter, where they become things to flaunt in front of one's neighbors from Boston. This is where he went to high school, where he fought with his parents, where he dreamed of things to come.

“I just never grew up thinking this would be my life,” I try to explain.

He can understand that much at least. He never imagined this life for himself either, hanging out with the queers on their decks. “We're the same person, at the core,” I explained to him. “Working-class boys who find themselves in the midst of a distinctly middle-class gay culture.”

He'd never thought about such things before. “I always assumed my family
was
middle-class,” he said to me.

“We always do,” I smiled. “Nobody ever likes to think of themselves as being on either end. Nobody's ever rich, nobody's ever poor. Everybody's in the middle. I had a boyfriend once, in between Javitz and Lloyd, whose family had a butler. He thought he was middle-class. Did you have a butler?”

“Not quite.”

“Even Chanel tries it sometimes. She'll tell me about her father's financial troubles in Manila. But it's not just money that matters.”

“Then what does?”

“Experience. Position. Assumptions.”

Eduardo nods, as if he gets it. “How'd you ever get to be such a know-it-all?” he joshes. I just throw a towel at him.

He's been with me for three days now, ever since I fell into his arms and cried over Junebug. There was something in his embrace that was much more solid than I had expected. He held me all through the night, caressing my face when I'd wake up from strange, disorienting dreams, remembering as I awoke the death of an old cat, hearing in my mind the snap of his neck, the shovel against bone and asphalt. In the morning, I looked at Eduardo with no small degree of embarrassment. “Sorry I acted like such a child,” I said.

But he just reached across the bed and took my hand in his. “I had a cat when I was a kid, too.”

Later, walking out on the breakwater, watching the sun set over the dunes, I said to him, “It must have been interesting, growing up gay in a gay town.”

“It was hell,” Eduardo said plainly.

It was hell not because his parents were necessarily homophobic, but because the gays were viewed as the rich out-of-towners, coming in to take away their village.

“It's not so much that you all are gay,” Eduardo said to me, “but because they think
you
think you're better than them.”

The twist on the conventional gay-straight dichotomy was not lost on me, nor was the significance of Eduardo's reference to me as “you all”—as if I were part of something he was not. Here was a man with whom I had been making wild, intense love for nearly a month now, and yet he saw us as different, as part of two worlds, separated by a chasm as large as the one he no doubt felt between himself and his parents.

How to explain I too felt that way? That sometimes I had this unnerving notion that my life here, on this deck, in this sun, was a charade?

Eduardo's father is a fisherman, although there aren't many fish left, and the state has been threatening to close down the waters to commercial fishing. It's a situation similar to my own family: it's Eduardo's mother who brings home the more steady paycheck. She makes sandwiches and rings up groceries at Costa's Deli on Shank Painter Road, far enough away from the hordes of summer that most of the clientele are Portuguese natives. At the end of the day, Eduardo tells me, his mother comes home complaining about her feet. So I
can
say: “I understand.”

He wasn't sure I did, but at least he knew I was trying.

Because my parents aren't all that different from his. “What's that, the style now?” my mother asked, the second summer Lloyd, Javitz, and I rented a place in Provincetown. “Going back to the same place every year for your vacation?” It was a rare comment on my life, and no matter that it was slightly belligerent, I decided to seize the opportunity.

“It's not really a vacation, Ma,” I explained. “It's a place we go to get away.”

“Get away from what?” she asked.

For my parents, vacations mean a break, but not necessarily a rest. For them, vacations were an opportunity to do the things they didn't have a chance to do the rest of the year—like cleaning out the attic or painting the garage. So it was difficult for my mother to fathom the allure of Provincetown. “What do you do when you go up there?” she asked. “There's only so many times you can go on a whale watch.”