The Men from the Boys (6 page)

I pause on my way to feed the cat and look at myself in the hallway mirror. This is why I prefer tricks not spend the night: this face. Lloyd, of course, has grown accustomed to it. “Here,” he'll say, handing me his tweezers, “you've got a nose hair.” I'll never forget the day Javitz told us the truth about hair in the nose and the ears: “That's where it goes, you know. What you lose up top. Into the nose and the ears.”

“The
ears?”
I'd gulped.

“And your back, too, I'm afraid,” Javitz offered, slipping down his shirt to reveal a path of curly black follicles across his shoulders.

Every morning I step out of the shower and strain my neck around to see my back in the mirror, waiting in dread for the first offender to sprout. I stand in front of the hallway mirror and stretch the skin on my forehead. Those damn circles under my eyes, the crow's feet. I've tried everything: moisturizer at night, vanishing cream, flesh-toned makeup in the morning. “Damn,” I say to my face. My hair stands up like a shorter version of Elsa Lanchester's in Bride of
Frankenstein,
complete with the ever-expanding streak of gray.

This is how I must have looked that morning when Lloyd told me how different everything had become. I try not to think about that conversation, but sometimes I cannot escape it—like now, waking up without him, seeing my reflection in the mirror. That day, we lay in bed, the lazy warmth of a late Sunday morning tugging at us like a weight. When he spoke, when he told me how different it had become, I was suddenly self-conscious of my breath, as I had been the morning after the first night we'd slept together. I was certain also that my eyes were bloodshot, that more hair than usual littered my pillow, that a stray nose hair was destroying whatever might have been salvaged of my Sunday-morning face.

Mr. Tompkins yelps up at me like a puppy. Lloyd says he's ridiculous looking: way too fat, big clumsy double paws. But that only makes me love him more. He's grown impatient waiting for his breakfast. He's so fat he could probably live off his own weight for weeks, but he acts as if every meal might be his last. “Okay, okay,” I assure him.

I shake dry cat food into his dishes. He devours it hungrily. “Slow down, baby,” I say, “slow down.” Mr. Tompkins has a heart murmur. That and his weight make it likely his life will be short. Prime candidate for a stroke, the vet said. Mr. Tompkins is a bully, always jumping from countertops onto poor unsuspecting Javitz whenever he walks into the room. He seems driven, as if he'll squeeze out every last bit of life while he still can. Every day I look at his angry little eyes, and I end up loving him more. “Shouldn't he lose some weight?” I asked the vet a month ago, who simply shook her head.

“Just let him
live,”
she told me.

One day, I'm sure, I'll come home and Mr. Tompkins will have had a stroke. I wait for it to happen, think of it every time I leave the apartment. I imagine him lying there, unable to move, his back legs paralyzed. Summer is the worst: dumping him with our friends Melissa and Rose while we remove ourselves to Provincetown. What kind of parent am I? I think of Junebug, the cat I had as a boy, the cat I left behind, the cat they were going to feature in the newspaper because he was so old, but who was run over by my sister backing out of the driveway the day before the photographer came. His old spine was snapped in two, but it took the final guillotine of my father's shovel to end his long and honorable life.

That's when I hear the sound of Lloyd's key in the lock, and he comes inside with a man I've never seen.

“Jeff,” Lloyd says, “this is Drake.”

I'm taken by the surprise of an unfamiliar face so early in the morning. My instinct is to dodge him, slip back into the bathroom and flatten my hair, check for boogers. But it's too late for that. “Hi,” I manage to say, and shake hands.

There's a lot in that “Hi.” There's: So where were you? There's: Who is this man? There's also: Did you sleep with him? Is that why you didn't come home?

Lloyd reads some of it, if not all. “Drake works with me. He let me crash at his place.” He adds, pointedly: “He lives just a block from the hospital.”

“Oh,” I say.

“He wanted to see our apartment because he's considering buying a condo in this building,” Lloyd continues.

“Oh,” I say again.

Drake is looking around the place awkwardly. He's older than us, mid-forties probably, classically Anglo-Saxon: Robert Redford with thick gray hair and fewer wrinkles. The kind who never lose their hair or their jawline. The kind that come from money, lots of it. Old money. Back to the
Mayflower
probably. I can tell this by the way he moves his chin, by the enunciation of his words, by the kind of coat he's wearing (avocado green with a brown corduroy collar). While his back is turned, I look at Lloyd and gesture at my Bride of Frankenstein bouffant. “Oh, stop,” he whispers.

“A nice place,” Drake is saying.

“It's a mess,” I say.

“Oh, you should see
my
place.” He laughs.

No, thanks, I think. I look at Lloyd and prepare to drive the dagger. “Javitz is feeling better,” I tell him, accusation hovering just below my nonchalance. “He may come home today.”

“Yeah, I talked with him.” Lloyd levels his eyes at me. They say: Don't you dare accuse me of being negligent with Javitz. “I called him last night, but you had just left.”

“So you woke him up.” I'm trying to get that damn dagger in, but it won't puncture.

“I don't think he minded.”

The edginess dissipates. We've held eye contact long enough, and neither has blinked. Meanwhile, Drake is looking back and forth between us.

“Well, I appreciate seeing the apartment,” he says. “It's a great building. I don't know why you don't consider buying your place.”

I look at Lloyd. I assume he has told Drake that our lease is up in May and that we were offered a chance to buy this apartment. If we don't buy, the owner is putting it on the market. We've made no decision, so I find it peculiar that Drake makes it all sound so finalized.

“It's that old down payment problem,” I explain. “Maybe you've heard of it. Struggling writers don't have a lot of capital in their checking accounts.” I smile, trying to sound less sarcastic. “But still, we'll see.”

Drake smiles. “Of course. I understand.”

That's bullshit—he's a richie if I ever saw one. My father used to say you can always tell a rich man by his shoes and his gloves. Drake's wearing those L. L. Bean duck boots, the ones with the green rubber toes. His gloves are soft butter leather, the kind that move with your fingers instead of turning them into robotic appendages.

“Well,” he's saying, “I'll be heading home now to get some shut-eye.” He puts his gloved hand out to me. I shake it, firmly.

“Thanks for the ride,” Lloyd says.

“Hope you end up staying,” Drake tells the both of us. “It'd be nice to have such attractive neighbors.”

We all smile.

Lloyd shows him to the door. I retreat to the kitchen, listen as they mumble their good-byes. Then Lloyd returns, staring at the back of my head as I push things around in the refrigerator.

“What's up with you?” he asks.

“It's not even eight o'clock in the morning and you bring somebody here! Look at me!”

I turn around and glare up at him from the cold air of the refrigerator. I'm not a pretty sight, I'm sure, especially with my face so green.

“You look fine,” Lloyd placates.

“So.” I look back into the refrigerator. “Did you sleep with him?”

“Jeff ...”

“Okay,” I say, taking out the egg carton and closing the refrigerator door, “you did.”

“And there's something wrong with that?”

I take a breath and relax. “No.” Of course there isn't. Why am I acting as if I'm Erica Kane just discovering Tom Cudahy's affair with Brooke English? Lloyd and I can't cheat on each other, not when we've redefined all the rules. “No,” I repeat. “There's nothing wrong with that.”

But I look at him, trying to understand why it's different now, why suddenly it feels so hard, why I feel so tired. I think again of the conversation we had that Sunday morning as we watched the rain clouds through the skylight, but I push it away, as usual.

“So why'd you tell him we
weren't
buying the place? Have we decided on that?” I ask.

“Jeff, I can't come up with the down payment all by myself.”

“I
know
that. I just didn't think we had decided
definitely.”
I take out a silver metal bowl from the cabinet, the reflection of my face concave and distorted.

“We haven't. Just let it go, okay?”

“It's gone,” I pretend.

Lloyd yawns.

“What?” I ask, all eyebrows. “Didn't you get
any
sleep?”

He looks at me. “No,” he says deliberately, then turns around and heads into the bedroom.

“He's in love with you,” I call after him in my best just-a-friendly-warning voice.

“Good night, Jeff.” He closes the door.

“Just a friendly warning,” I say, and crack five eggs into a bowl, not caring if half of the shells go in there with them.

Provincetown, June 1994

“I'll be at the breakwater,” I tell Javitz. “Have Lloyd meet me there.”

I make my way through town from our house on the East End. It's early morning, before nine. On Commercial Street only a few vendors have opened their doors. The Portuguese bakery is one of them, the wheaty aroma of fresh-baked loaves braiding with the thickness of hardening fudge from the candy store across the street. Few gay boys are out this early, only bleary-eyed sales clerks opening up the shutters on the T-shirt shops. The tanginess of the sea assaults them: they scrunch up their noses, unsure whether the smell is pleasant or foul. It is the odor of rotting seaweed, baby crabs and snails, the scent of a salty low tide.

I cut between two shops and pad across the brown-sugar beach toward the pier. The surf approaches tentatively. Waves lap the shore, offering the only sound beyond the call of the gulls that cut wide swaths in the sharp blueness above me. The sun slants across the bay, thousands of twinkling lights whose brilliance is lost as quickly as they appear. A couple of white-rumped sandpipers run ahead of me on the sand. Washed up here and there are tangles of weed: long twisting green trails, like the discarded boas of an army of drag queens.

There are days, like today, when I need the soul of Provincetown.

Not the heart. The heart beats loudly every afternoon from four to six at tea dance, a bass backbeat that can be heard all the way down Commercial Street. But this morning, waking up alone, I wanted to find something else. So I'm heading here, to the very tip.

I climb up onto the stones of the breakwater and find a suitable one, sitting down to face the rising sun. It's gonna be a scawchah, as the locals say. The humidity is creeping back, in the haze off Long Point, in the stickiness of the wood along the pier. Here, on the breakwater, it's cooler, with a breeze rolling in from the bay. A gull keeps circling in the blue above me, complaining perhaps that I have taken her spot. For a second I pretend I'm Tippi Hedren, about to get my forehead gashed. Then I close my eyes and doze a little, trying to forget about the trick who ditched me.

Of course, I didn't sleep last night except for fits. Once I woke up and wasn't sure if it was my trick or my lover in bed next to me, but it ended up being neither. Eduardo ditched me, I remembered, forcing myself back to sleep.

A couple of women pass me on their way out to Long Point. They're holding hands. “Good morning,” they say, almost in unison. I smile back.

The breakwater is a catwalk of cut granite stones connecting the town to Long Point. Massive slabs of granite, sparkling silver in the sun, the breakwater keeps the sandy dunes from dissolving into the sea. At high tide, the surface of the water on one side is textured with blue swells; on the other, it is smooth and satiny, like a dark turquoise mirror. The stones are scarred with the marks of whatever machines broke them from the earth, then lifted them and relinquished them into place. Scars that prove man is stronger than stone, more enduring. No cement holds these rocks together, no glue. Just their sheer weight keeps them in place.

Some people use the breakers merely as a bridge to get out to the beaches on Long Point, where the sand is finer and the cruising less heavy than at Herring Cove. I, however, use them as a test of my stamina: from stone to stone I leap, always landing on my feet and never in the cracks between. Then, satisfied that I can still do it, I lie on a flat rock in the sun, like a seal, belly side up.

That's how I am now, waiting for Lloyd. He should be here soon. He promised he'd leave Boston by eight, so he'd be here by ten. So why am I thinking about
Eduardo?
Why does it bother me so much that he's gone?

I shouldn't be surprised. It's the same old script. “You loved Raphael,” Javitz said last summer, and he was right. Many times I have fallen in love in the course of one sun-blistering afternoon. It lasted until barely the following day, when the rains came and washed away the humidity from the cracking clay of the Cape. Raphael was a sweet cocoa-skinned boy who spoke in the mellifluous tones of French Canada and who became transfixed by my tongue. “Give it to me,” he implored, and I thrust it into his mouth, into his ear, into his armpit. Then I'd laugh: laugh at his eager passion, and roll off of him and make him ask again.