The Men from the Boys (39 page)

“Then I wasn't gay. It would've been important if I was.”

Javitz was here. He listened intently to Lloyd describe falling into the trance, seeing the images of his past life surface on the black pond of his mind: Lloyd has always been a little wavy gravy, ever since I first met him, a lapsed Catholic like me who found the sudden lack of ritual and spiritual mystery in his life empty and unfulfilling. But now he and his friend Naomi seek out psychics and hands-on healers, meditate and hang crystals in their windows, chant “Om” as they walk home from the T.

“I don't understand his struggle, his search,” I said to Javitz. “I've tried to talk to him about it, but he seems so restless....”

“It's not that much different from your own, darling. You just have different ways of approaching it.”

“My own? I'm not searching for anything,” I counter. “What am I searching for?”

Javitz sighed. “Even the man with all the answers isn't going to try to answer
that
one.”

Now it's Halloween and Lloyd's gone off to commune with witches. I asked him one last time to stick around, and he asked me one last time to come, but both of us turned the other down.

“Why don't you call Chanel?” Lloyd suggested. “She's probably just sitting home with nothing to do.”

“Hardly. Ever since the breakup, she's been out every night. She's had sex with more women since leaving Wendy than she had in the entire time before her.”

“What about Tommy? We haven't seen him in a while.”

“Oh, I think he's still mad at me about that guy. What was his name?”

“Douglas.”

“Oh, yeah. How'd you remember?”

Lloyd just looked at me.

“Why, Lloyd! Were you jealous?”

He made a face, then he was out the door.

Finally the doorbell rings. It's Freddy Krueger, and he flashes his hand of knives at me. “Trick or treat,” he hisses. Behind him his mother waits impatiently.

I drop in a 3 Musketeers. “Happy Halloween!” I call out, delighted that someone has shown up.

Then the twin girls arrive, dressed as Red Sox players. “I tell you, I'm not doing a thing and they're turning into dykes right before my eyes,” their father laughs.

“Happy Halloween!” I call after them.

I turn to Mr. Tompkins. “See what your father is missing?”

The doorbell rings again. It's a hunchbacked little old man with big green eyes and a scar across his forehead who looks as if he isn't wearing a mask.

“Trick or treat,” he rasps.

I drop a 3 Musketeers into his outstretched paper bag and recoil immediately. “Great costume,” I manage to say.

“Can you guess my name?” he asks.

“Rumplestiltskin?” I offer.

He just laughs.

I close the door. I turn, alerted by a noise. It sounded like a cough, but I can't be sure. “Lloyd?”

I hear it again. It's a deep, throaty sound. I peer around the corner into the kitchen. There, in the middle of the floor, stands Mr. Tompkins, and his body is contorting, shuddering, as if—

“It's a hair ball,” I say out loud, trying to convince myself. “You got a hair ball, little one?”

He spasms. Dear God, this is no hair ball. It's a
stroke.
It's a fucking stroke. I've known it all along. I've waited for this moment, dreaded it—

“Hold on, baby. Hold
on.
I'm calling the doctor.”

The doorbell rings. Damn the trick-or-treaters. I search frantically for the vet's number, rifling through the stack of papers we keep stuck behind the microwave. They scatter to the floor in confusion. Mr. Tompkins pays them no mind; his eyes are waxy and fixated, his whole body shivering with each new spasm. “Hold on, baby,
please
hold on.”

The doorbell rings again, twice.

But what could the vet do even if I got to her in time? Don't think that way, Jeff, I scold myself. I find the number. I grab the cordless phone from the wall and pound in the digits. “Answering service,” comes a tinny voice.

“Where's Dr. Hanley?”

“The office is closed, sir. Is this an emergency?”

“It most certainly is. My cat—he's having a stroke.” I watch him. His body stiffens, his back legs shaking.

“I can page the doctor, sir.”

“Yes, yes! Page her!”

I give her my number and hang up. I stand there, not knowing what to do. “Oh, God, Lloyd, why did you have to go
tonight?”
I cry. I squat on the floor next to Mr. Tompkins. I'm watching him die, I think to myself. I'm watching him die.

His little eyes suddenly turn up at me. “Baby.... ?”

Then he upchucks a hair ball the size of a large turd and sits down peacefully on his hind legs.

“Hey,” I say. The hair ball sits between us, long, slimy, and furry. Mr. Tompkins stands, sniffs it, then walks nonchalantly over to his dish and begins to eat.

“It
was
a hair ball,” I whisper, almost in awe. “You're
okay.”

I reach down and hug him, pressing my cheek to his back. He reaches over and tries to nip at my ear. “You're
okay
,” I say again.

The phone rings. It's the vet. “He's
okay
,” I tell her, a little embarrassed. “Sorry to have disturbed you.”

There are no more trick-or-treaters. It's just as well. I climb into bed and fall asleep, Mr. Tompkins at my side, breathing easily. I have a strange and twisting dream. I'm in some kind of long dark tunnel, and I can't see a thing. Somebody's following me. I turn and it's the hunchback who rang my doorbell. “Guess my name,” he calls out from the dark. “Guess my name.”

I begin to run. I run as far as I can, until I can run no farther. I'm winded, gasping for breath. I can't believe how out of shape I am. I used to be able to run and run and run in my dreams. I turn the corner into a room and I crouch down. I think the hunchback runs past the doorway but I can't be sure. There are other people hiding in the room as well: I can see the whites of their eyes. I reach out to touch one of them in the dark, to feel warm human flesh, to connect with another person. But I flail around aimlessly in the dark.

That's what I'm doing in my sleep, reaching out for Lloyd as I have so many times since we began sharing a bed and I'd wake up from nightmares. “Sometimes I think all I'd require of a lover is that he sleep with me,” Javitz has said. “No sex. No chores. No obligations other than to be there for me in the middle of the night.”

My hand slaps cold sheets: Lloyd isn't home yet. I curse the witches in my mind. But then I connect—he
is
there. I've found him. He sleeps deeply beside me, and the relief I feel shudders through my chest. I pull close to him and assume the breathing position. His arms wrap around me in his sleep. In moments, the nightmare is forgotten, and all is right in the world.

Provincetown, April 1995

“Where is he?” I hear Lloyd asking from downstairs.

“He's very angry,” I hear Javitz say, and to my surprise: “I'm not sure I blame him.”

“He didn't let me finish,” Lloyd protests.

I appear at the top of the stairs. “What else is there to say?”

“Please, Cat, talk to me.”

I relent. Slowly I descend the stairs, conscious of my effect. “Please, no melodrama,” Javitz had begged after I'd returned home. He told me Lloyd was on his way here. “Just don't go crazy on him. That'll push him right away.”

I had just gotten back from my walk along the beach. I found myself on the spot far out near Race Point where Eduardo and I had made love on my birthday last year. I sat down in the sand and shivered in the cold breeze, watching the dunes break apart gently in the wind, sand blowing into the sky, stinging my eyes.

And of course I began to search. My fingers pressed into the sand at my sides, and although I never took my eyes away from the sky, I moved my hands through the cold, damp sand, hoping, praying they might catch on a chain, and I'd pull from the earth an antique star, a four-pointed star that I would wear forever under my shirt, close to my heart.

But at the moment, I've given up on miracles. All I know is that Drake-Drake Anderson Knowles, a richie from way back—is living in
my
apartment with
my
lover, and I'm out here by myself. And I'm pissed.

“He's taken my place,” I say to Lloyd after Javitz has left us alone. “It couldn't be more perfect. The furniture comes back; you come back. The only thing missing is me.”

“Jeff, calm down.”

“I won't calm down! Fuck you! It's all very pretty. All very neat. How did you ever think of it? I just can't believe you went to all the trouble of packing up all our stuff and hauling it to the storage bin when you knew all along that as soon as I was gone, you'd go and bring it right back.”

“You think I
planned
this?”

“No,” I say. I don't, not really. “But it feels that way.”

He tries to touch me but I shrug him off.

“Jeff, I won't do it. It was a stupid, stupid idea.”

I cross my arms and turn away from him. “That you would even
consider—”

“It just seemed to make sense, Jeff. I'm sorry. I didn't think how it would affect you. I've been so caught up in my own shit. I'm sorry.”

I'm still facing away from him. I don't want to give up being angry, not yet.

“Jeff, it's not like I don't miss you. I do, horribly.”

“Then let's find an apartment together.”

He sighs. He drops his arms to his sides and looks away. “Oh, Jeff. I'm just not ready to move back in together. We need time.”

I turn to face him. “How much more time do we need?”

“I don't know.”

“Is this about Drake? Did you want to move in with him because you thought you could be lovers?”

“No. I don't think Drake and I—”

“Well, I'm sure he does.”

Lloyd sits down on the couch, exhausted. “I don't know what he thinks.”

“Are you just trying to get back at me because of Eduardo?”

Lloyd seems to say a mantra in his head before answering. “Jeff, you're spinning out of control.”

“And by the way,” I ask, reveling in how nasty I can be, “whatever happened to Drake's going off to find his path, traveling across the country?”

Lloyd hesitates. “He got another job at the hospital.”

“I thought he hated the hospital.”

Lloyd swallows. “It's a better job. He couldn't turn it down.”

I sneer. “Paid too much money, huh?”

He doesn't respond.

“So how do we leave this? How am I supposed to plan for the summer, the fall? When will you be ready?”

“Jeff, I think—I think we ought to just stay living apart for a while. Not plan to find another place.”

Not plan to find another place.
The gravity of those words threatens to pull me down, but I fight them. “What are you saying?”

He tries to hug me, but again I push off his arms. “I'm saying,” he says, “I think we ought not to live together until I can figure out my shit.”

“You want to break up, then.”

“You can call it whatever you want.”

I take a deep breath. My eyes find my painting, still leaning against the wall, and I focus on the dark figure that's supposed to be me amid the blues and the grays.

“It's just that it's gotten too comfortable,” Lloyd says. “I want to see if we can find a way to make it less comfortable, less
settling.”

“
'Too comfortable'?
What the
hell
is wrong with comfort? I
like
being comfortable. It's a
good
thing, Lloyd.”

“Too much of anything is never a good thing.” He sighs. “Look, it's not as if this just
happened.
It's not as if this hasn't been building up.
You
had a hand in this outcome, too.”

I make a face as if he's crazy.

“Ever since last summer, you've been different, Jeff. I know you'll never love me again in the way you loved Eduardo.”

I stare at him. “Fuck you, Lloyd,” I say huskily. “Fuck you a million times and then fuck you again.”

“Don't talk to me that way,” he says, getting indignant.

I snap. “Don't
you
huff up your chest at
me!
Don't
you
talk about Eduardo when you have
Drake
living with you in
our
apartment! Did it ever occur to you that maybe I'm not
supposed
to love you in the way I loved Eduardo? Did it ever occur to you that maybe we're
exactly
where we're supposed to be, that maybe what we feel for each other is not what it was six years ago but has actually become something even better, and brighter, and more—well,
transcendent?”

“Oh, Cat, I want to say the right thing, I want to do right by you....”

“Don't bother. I don't
need
anyone to take care of me. Not you, not Javitz. I can do it myself.” I look at him squarely. “And I'll start right now. Get the hell out of here, Lloyd.”

He knows I'll throw a major fit if he refuses. He understands me well enough to know that in moments I might just throw something across the room. I've done it before. And this time, he won't be around to glue it back together again.

He pulls on his coat. He yells up the stairs: “Javitz, I'm going for a walk. I'll be back.”