The Men from the Boys (23 page)

“He's retired now. He did a lot of things. Sold shoes, worked as a night watchman.”

“Hey,” Eduardo's father said, brightening, “I was a night watchman for a couple years over at the Coast Guard.”

“Does your mother work?” Eduardo's mother asked from the other end of the table.

I turned. “She's retired, too, but for eleven years she worked at Kmart.”

“Wish we had one of those around here. All we've got is the Bradlees down in Orleans.” She smiled at me. I could tell she liked the fact that my mother worked. “Want some more chicken?”

“Don't mind if I do,” I said.

After dinner she brought out a Duncan Hines chocolate cake with sugar frosting and M&M's on top—just the way my mother always made for me—and it was better than anything I'd ever tasted from the trendy French bakery all the gay boys patronized on Commercial Street.

“It's all in how you beat the eggs,” his mother confided to me with a wink.

After we left, Eduardo said, “I can't believe how much they liked you.”

“They're good people.”

Eduardo stopped in his tracks, as if what I said had stunned him. “You don't know how much I appreciate you saying that.”

“They are. They remind me a lot of my parents—if my parents were younger and cool.”

He laughed. “If anyone had ever told me I'd have brought a guy home to meet my family, I would've said they were crazy. If they'd said the guy would end up thinking my parents were cool, then I'd have known they were really nuts. But listening to you talk to my dad, watching you eat my mom's cake—you made me like them more tonight than I have in a long time.” He kissed me quickly. “Thank you for that.”

“Do they know about us?” I asked.

“I told them you had a lover.” He shrugged. “Let them draw their own conclusions.”

“You going to be okay with Lloyd at my birthday party tomorrow night?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said, as cocky as only boys can be. “Is he going to be okay with me?”

An interesting question. And suddenly I realize I haven't seen Lloyd in nearly two weeks, that we may have spoken only once in that time on the phone. “You seeing Eduardo?” he'd asked that one time. “Sure,” I'd said, not thinking any more about it. Could he be staying away because of Eduardo? No, not Lloyd—such things didn't bother him.

Yet I feel a trifle guilty nonetheless, as if I'm betraying Lloyd somehow. How silly. How can we betray each other when we've opened up all the rules? He falls for
his
tricks all the time: those warm, funny cards he gets in the mail, the laughter from an unexpected phone call. But still, I can't quite shake the feeling that all this is somehow—different.

Now, on our way back from the dunes, I look at Eduardo as if I'm not sure who he is. “How come you never ask me about Lloyd?” I ask him suddenly. “About our relationship?”

“What's there to ask?”

“I don't know. What we're like as a couple, if I think we'll be together forever ...”

“You will be.” He smiles. “What else should I think?”

Now we're approaching the house, and I can tell Eduardo is looking to see if Lloyd's car is there yet. “Don't worry,” I say. “He's not here yet.”

“I'm not jealous of Lloyd,” Eduardo says, turning to me suddenly. “It's the others.”

“What others?”

“I know you go out sometimes without me.”

“You mean, to trick?”

He nods.

“I haven't, not in a while.”

“Could you tell me you never would again? That from now on, it would just be me—and Lloyd, of course?”

I shake my head. “I—I don't think I could tell you that, honestly.”

“If you had,” he says, smirking, “I would have known you were lying.”

He turns to go inside. “Wait a minute,” I say. “Would you want that? Are you
asking
me to do that?”

“No,” he says deliberately, “I would never ask you to do that.”

Javitz's words. He's been talking to Javitz. They had their lunch—a long, rambling walk along the pier as Javitz described it. Neither would reveal what they talked about, but I can hear Javitz's voice as plain as the sun setting up there in the sky: “You can never
ask
him to stop. That's the surest way to lose him.”

I watch Eduardo as he goes inside the house. The screen door bangs behind him. I give him a few minutes to connect with Javitz, to tell him about our trip. Javitz will take care of him, I tell myself. Javitz will see to it that he doesn't get hurt.

I turn and face the setting sun. Damn the cliché. All I can think about is my lost star, somewhere out there in the sand.

Boston, February 1995

I'm packing, taking down the ornaments of our lives, the accumulations of six years, the little bric-a-brac that suddenly trigger a rush of memories and cause me to stop, sit down, and remember. The slightly moldy Indian corn from the drive through western Massachusetts three Halloweens ago, the time we picked our own pumpkins and Lloyd tripped and smashed his on the sidewalk when we got home. I felt so bad I gave him mine. The napkin holders I bought for our first Thanksgiving here, shaped like little turkeys, when Javitz made that horrible tasteless “Jewish soup” and we all went crazy with the salt shakers. A Christmas angel, a gift from Rose, that's topped our tree for the last five years. A program book from a Boston Pops concert, the one where Chanel fell asleep and snored through the overture.

“I've cleaned out the storage area,” Lloyd says, coming in through the back door.

“It's like I'm wrapping up little bits of our lives,” I muse, folding newspaper over a sculpture of a cat and a dog, made for us by an artist friend who's since died.

“You need help?”

“Just in figuring out when and where we're going to unwrap them.”

We've been checking the paper every day looking for another apartment. Nothing's jumped out at us yet. We go back and forth on this subject, getting nowhere. Lloyd suddenly announced last week he was tired of living in the South End; perhaps we should move out to JP near Chanel? “I'm sick of living in a ghetto,” Lloyd said, and I raised my eyebrows at him. This was the first I'd heard of it. Drake's words, probably.

“Might as well start packing, regardless of where we end up,” I said a couple days ago. “It'll make it easier to move at the last minute.”

So that's what we've been doing. Packing up all the little knickknacks, all the little decorations that serve as links between our past and present, that connect our lives, that ground us in this place. “Let's get rid of as much as we can,” Lloyd said, and I agreed: six years is a long time to accumulate stuff. But what could I throw away? The Indian corn, maybe. But not Rose's tattered angel. Not the photo magnets we brought home from our trip to St. Croix four years ago, showing a long white beach and deep blue water. Not the hundreds of little cats Lloyd has given me over the years, red cats, green cats, yellow cats, blue. Not the little notes and cards (“To my Cat—Love, your Dog”) that have all gone into one drawer each time I've found them hidden under my pillow or taped to the bathroom mirror. There are so many now that the drawer won't properly close. I search for one in particular. I find it: “Yes, in fact,” it reads, “sometimes money
has
been known to fall from the sky.” I stare at that note for a long time.

“I don't think I adapt well to change,” I say.

“That's just hitting you?”

“I loved our life here.”

Lloyd makes a sad smile. “All things to their season.”

“I'm sure our next place will be just as wonderful,” I say, but there's a part of me that doesn't believe a word of it, that I'm just talking to make myself feel better. “Yet this place will always be special.”

“Of course it will.”

I open the drawer in the little table near the door. My father's ring sits inside, the one he'd been awarded upon graduation from eighth grade, the one he gave me the last time I saw him, just a few months before he died. I never wear it: it's gaudy, with a big fake amethyst in the front. I keep it here, where no one can ever find it, where no one can ever take it from me.

Beside it is the ceramic German shepherd that was my grand-mother's. I run my finger over the lines of glue that hold it together, right across the poor dog's snout. “Hey,” I call to Lloyd. “Remember this?”

He smiles.

Finally, underneath, one last treasure: a thin green book. The
Giving Tree.
I'm afraid to open it, to see the inscription written on the title page.

I close the drawer.

“I'd like to have one last dinner party here,” I announce. “Invite all our friends.”

Lloyd makes a face. “It's too much work, Jeff. Let's wait till we're in a new place. Let's wait till we have some new friends and invite them too.”

“What's wrong with our old friends?”

“Nothing.”

“You're always talking about making new friends. What's wrong with the friends we've got?”

“Don't you want to expand our circle? Don't you want to see who else is out there? Wouldn't it be nice if we found a gay male couple to be friendly with? We've got dykes and single guys. Ever wonder why that is?”

“No.”

“I'd like to find some friends who take chances, who take leaps—”

“Like
Drake?”

He gets a defensive look on his face. “Yes,” he says. “Like Drake.” He pauses. “Like Javitz, too.”

“I
like
our dyke friends,” I say.

“So do I. That's not the issue.” He comes to me, touches my face. “But think how it is for me. The way it's always been. When we met, I'd just broken up with Marty. I had no friends. I moved right into your world. All of our friends today came through you.” He laughs. “Everyone at my birthday party was there because of you. Only Drake was there for me.”

I get angry. “What about me?
I
was there because of you. Don't
I
count?”

“Of course you do,” he says, backing down, avoiding an argument. “I didn't mean to imply that.”

“I'm sick of packing,” I say, tossing a plate into the pile of crumpled newspapers. “I'm going to start dinner.”

“What are we having?”

I look at him and attempt a smile. “I thought I'd make you a vegetable pie.”

There's not much that I can cook well. Casseroles come out always tasting the same, whether they're tuna or potato or garbanzo bean. And there's only so much you can do with pasta. But I make a mean veggie pie—a tumble of fresh vegetables (okay, sometimes they're frozen) in a cream sauce (Campbell's cream of potato soup) baked in a flaky (albeit store-bought) crust. For the past six years, that's been my delicacy. Whenever I tell Lloyd on the phone that's what we're having for dinner, he replies that he can't wait to get home—and that always makes me happier than he could ever possibly know.

“Jeff,” Lloyd says.

“Yeah?”

“I need to be up-front with you about something.”

“What?” I hate that tone. I hate always knowing when something's coming. He's going to tell me that he can't have dinner with me, that Drake's taking him to dinner, that Drake will be here shortly, that Drake is the man for him, that he's leaving me and I'll never see him again—

“I think I've OD'd on your veggie pies.”

I look at him for a few moments as if I don't understand him. And I don't, not really. I haven't since that awful morning he told me there was no more passion. It's as if there had been a pod growing in the basement of this house, a pod that produced a new Lloyd, one who looks just like him, talks like him, but isn't him, not at all. The old Lloyd
loved
my vegetable pies, just as the old Eduardo loved
me
—just as the old Javitz would never leave me, not in a million years.

“Please don't be offended, Cat,” he says, coming at me, hands wagging, unsure as to whether he should laugh or cry or embrace me or go away. “It's just that—well, you make them so often ...”

“I thought it was a treat for you.”

“It's very sweet, honey. Go ahead. Make the pie. You know how I love them.”

I don't know who this man is standing in front of me. “So what
else
have you been keeping from me?” I ask.

He sighs. “Don't get melodramatic. We're only talking about a pie here.”

“You know, I think I need to go for a walk.”

“Okay. A walk's good. How about if
I
fix dinner? That'd be a nice change, huh? I mean, for you. So you don't have to cook.”

But I'm already out the door.

I ignore the boys in the display cases along Tremont Street. I remember a time, and not so long ago, when I'd walk down this stretch and look for eyes. And I'd find them, too. Once, and not so long ago, a pair of eyes actually came outside of Mildred's and introduced themselves. That no longer happens—at least, not to me.

I find myself on the T. I change at Downtown Crossing, shouldering my way through the Saturday crowd. I settle into a seat on the red line, one of those spiffy new cars with the automatic voice announcing every stop. Except today it's stuck: “Central Square,” it says over and over, and one old Eastern European woman looks terribly confused. I get off at Harvard, pushing my way through the throng of tourists and students who clog the street, just as the sun sinks below the horizon, bathing Harvard Square in long purple shadows across white snow. I trudge a block north, knock quickly on Javitz's door, and let myself in.