The Men from the Boys (8 page)

“Mr. who?”

“Mr. Tompkins. I don't know where the name came from. The universe just gave it to me. Trust me.”

So I did. Always have. So I don't know why we don't talk about our tricks. I do know that on that day—the day Mr. Tompkins joined our family, hiding under the couch for hours, the last time either of us can recall him ever showing any fear—I know that on that day, Lloyd and I made mad, passionate love. First in the shower, then out on the deck, not caring if the whole South End could see. Then we made dinner, butternut squash and cornbread, because Lloyd had just gone vegetarian (except, of course, for those particular seafood dishes he couldn't resist, like salmon and lobster and my famous tuna casserole). I was gamely giving it a shot as well (I gave up after a week, missing my fried chicken too much). We were both famished, eating like bears, ending with an entire box of Little Debbies.

Then, spent, we climbed into bed and curled into the breathing position, our new little chunk of fur beside us on the pillow. Mr. Tompkins began kneading my neck with his soft baby paws as if he'd find a nipple there.

“I think he was taken away from his mother too soon,” I said.

Lloyd smiled. “He thinks
you're
his mother.”

“Well, he ain't gonna get no milk outta
me,”
I say, laughing.

Lloyd just looked at me as if he knew better. “Don't be so sure,” he said.

Boston, January 1995

The fight wasn't about Drake. It was about the laundry. And I'm still fuming about it as I get on the elevator at the hospital, where I've come to bring Javitz home.

“What floor?”

It's a cute guy asking, offering to push the button. I smile at him, noticing the curve of his nose. But there's nothing in his eyes back at me. He's straight, I tell myself. Or he just thinks I'm too old, as so many of the boys have since Eduardo.

Javitz called about an hour ago. He was very chipper, very up, no more talk about dead third-grade teachers. I was in the middle of laundry, and the phone woke Lloyd.

“Who was it?” he asked.

“Javitz,” I answered. “I've got to go pick him up. We were right. They're sending him home.”

“That's great,” Lloyd said.

“Yeah, well, I have so much shit to do,” I snarled. I wasn't resentful about picking Javitz up from the hospital. I was resentful that I had to do it when I had piles of laundry and Lloyd was asleep because he'd been
out having sex all night.

“Do you want me to finish that?” he offered.

Wrong move. Gave me an opening.

“Don't bother. I just wish you'd pick up after yourself. We
do
have a place for dirty clothes. It's called a
hamper.”

“All right, Jeff. What's
really
going on here?” Lloyd is always doing this: nothing is about the here-and-now, nothing is about the mundane.

“It's about fucking
underwear
!” I screamed. “Fucking dirty
underwear
left all over the bathroom and every towel used up and getting moldy—
that's
what it's about!”

Of course, my hysterics only served to confirm his belief that it had nothing whatsoever to do with his boxers or the dearth of clean towels. In his view, it wasn't even about Drake; it was about my deep-seated rage against my parents—my mother for turning her back on me, my father for having the gall to die without ever telling me how proud he was of me. It might even go deeper than that: could it be karma from a previous life that I'm working through in this one?

“You need to get at the heart of your rage, Jeff.” He stood there, shaking his head in smug self-affirmation. I wanted to throw the laundry basket at him.

It was not at all like the night we met.

“Hey,” Lloyd said to me then, from somewhere behind a haze of dirty blue smoke.

We were at a cheesy club just outside Boston, one of those suburban wonderlands, where Millie Moon and her Pumpettes were trying very hard to be offensively funny. “I'm the Kmart queen,” she sang in her stiletto heels, but half these queens were too: so what's the joke? I was there for only one reason: to trick. I was newly separated from Robert, the boyfriend who filled the gap between Javitz and Lloyd—very prettily, I might add, but the poor thing hadn't a thought in his Waspy head. Tonight, I expected the pickings to be easy. At least that had been my experience here before. Lloyd's approach seemed to justify my expectations.

“Hey,” I said in return.

He was cute. A little shorter than I, dark blond hair, green eyes, a chiseled jaw, the requisite sideburns for that summer. He wore a white ribbed tank top and I noticed the cut of his body right away. When a potential trick is this cute, you don't look beyond him and make believe you're uninterested. That's a strategy that works eighty-five percent of the time, but not when they're this cute. Guys like this might think “Fuck you” and go on to someone else. I take many risks in my life—I use too much salt, I ride in cars without air bags, I suck without the use of condoms—but I draw the line here.

Rick Astley was the rage that year. Lloyd remembers that I did not look at him once the entire time we were on the dance floor. It drove him nuts. But I knew I had him then: there was no need to carry the attention to extremes. We spoke little: the script was a late-eighties minimalist experiment. New wave queer cinema, and in the very last scene we shake hands and go home alone.

How
very
eighties.

Yet it took me by complete surprise. “Maybe we can get together sometime,” Lloyd said.

“What about right now?” I asked, a smile tricking my lips.

He smiled back. “Maybe some other time.”

And I was snared.

That was the thing: I hadn't caught him, as I'd thought. He'd caught me.

The elevator doors open. I turn to the cute guy beside me. He stares straight ahead. His loss, I say to myself. I step out of the elevator and head down the corridor to Javitz's room.

Lloyd and I finally made love on our fourth date. It was a record for me to wait that long. I arrived on time, ringing his doorbell, a clutch of daisies in my hand. “Come on in,” he called. “I'm upstairs.”

I could hear water running. He was down on all fours, testing the water in the bathtub with his hand. Mounds of suds had accumulated. Candles were lit, suffusing the room in a flickering pink light. “What are you doing?” I asked.

He said not a word. He stood and kissed me, his lips like the flowers in my hand, sweet, soft, and delicate. He took the daisies, kissed each of them, then plucked off their heads and dropped them into the tub. Hey, I thought, those cost seven bucks. Then he unbuttoned my shirt, gently pulling it out from my pants. He unfastened my belt, unzipped my jeans. “What're you ... ?” I asked again, laughing, but my voice sounded cold, incongruous to the scene. I tried to relax, but this was not part of any script that I knew.

“Undress me,” he whispered.

I obeyed. I hadn't yet seen his body fully. I'd felt it through his shirt, and had been impressed. Now, paring him of his clothes, I felt a rush of blood into my face, my fingertips. My dick stiffened, lengthened. He was beautiful: every soft curve, every defined cut. Shorter than me by a couple of inches, he looked up at me from half-lidded eyes. I didn't move with the grace he had: I yanked and husked, rending every last stitch of clothing from him, even his underwear. Lloyd stood before me naked as a nymph, and I embraced him, biting down onto his neck.

We gingerly stepped into the hot oily water, scented with jasmine. I gritted my teeth as I suffered the sting of the heat on my butt and my nuts. I lost my erection, but it hardly mattered. We sat in the tub, facing each other, toes intertwined, daisy heads floating by like lotus blossoms. The water lapped against our chests with every subtle stirring we made. I felt its warmth pervade my body, soothing me. I closed my eyes. I could hear Lloyd's steady breathing. He began to stroke my calf.

Later, on his bed, our skin soft and moist, we made love. My lips discovered the places on his body that gave him particular pleasure—his neck, his balls—while his hands caressed me with a tenderness I'd never known before. It had been worth the wait. The fragrance of the scented bathwater clung to us and aroused a passion in me that I'd never experienced with Javitz, never encountered with any boyfriend or trick. I kissed Lloyd as hard as I could. When I entered him, there was such delirious pressure in my throat, as if I might cry or laugh, I wasn't sure. His legs encircled my shoulders and with every thrust I heard my own heart, high in my ears. We went on like this for a long time, and then we reversed positions and went on even longer. When we came, within minutes of each other, I didn't feel spent. I felt invigorated. Ready to go again.

We didn't sleep at all that night. We watched the sun come up, and I talked: talked a mile a minute, talked a blue streak, talked, talked, talked. “I'm such a Chatty Cathy tonight,” I gushed. Usually it had been Javitz who talked: solving my problems, offering answers, giving advice. Maybe because solving problems was what Lloyd did for a living, and not what he wanted to do on a date, he simply listened. He listened to every word of it. I told him about my family: my brother, my sister, how my mother had turned her back on me when I told her I was queer. I told him about my dream to write a novel someday, to give up the job at the newspaper and really
write.
I told him about Javitz, and how hard it was to end that relationship, but I had to, really. “It was just time, you know?” I said. He nodded.

That night, Lloyd found my soul, touched it in a way it had never been touched. Six years later, we're still together. It hasn't always been easy. When we moved in with each other, just four months after we met, I thought we'd never survive our first laundry crisis. “I'll wash clothes if you take care of the garbage,” I offered, and so it was agreed. But his pants came out of the dryer too wrinkled, an expensive blue shirt was ruined by a stray dot of bleach. “Then do it
yourself
!” I shrieked. “All right, I
will!”
he shouted back.

Yet we survived. We survived his going back to school. We survived his coming out to his folks back on the farm in Iowa. We survived my leaving my job, my career crisis, my father's death. We survived Javitz's bout with pneumonia. We survived him getting better and then getting sick again. We survived our own tests, sitting together on one chair, holding hands, waiting for the joint results. True, there were a few more ruined shirts in the course of six years, that damn jug of bleach never fully secure in my hands. But Lloyd said we could survive anything, so long as we trusted the universe, and each other.

So what had happened to change that? Why did it feel so hard now to trust?

“The drugs wore off,” Javitz had said simply when I asked him what he thought.

“The drugs?”

“Come on, darling. That silly, ridiculous attraction that lasts a year, sometimes two. I call it the Bob and Rod Syndrome. Even with all their muscles, our pinup boys for gay marriage were still vulnerable to all those unleashed endorphins running through their bodies. But once the chemical flurry settles down, so, I'm afraid, do we.”

Is that what happened with Javitz and me? I wondered, but didn't ask: we rarely discuss such things. But his words seemed to acknowledge that Lloyd and I were different than he and I had been—that the yin and yang that existed between Lloyd and me could possibly survive the end of the endorphins.

“You'll be good for each other,” Javitz said. “You'll give him nest and he'll give you flight.”

“Hey,” I say, turning the corner now into his hospital room.

“Get me my pants,” Javitz commands. He's stumbling around the room in one of those johnnies they make you wear, a flimsy white apron that exposes the butt. “I just scared a nurse by winking at her with my asshole.”

I barely smile. I hand him his jeans from the top of a cabinet. “You happy to be going home?”

What a stupid question. He looks at me, with that Javitz look. “No, I'm as glum as you. What'samattah?”

Damn him for always knowing. “Nothing,” I say. “Let's just get you out of here.”

“Not until you tell me what's wrong.”

“Javitz, I'm here to take you home from the hospital after you have spent weeks languishing in your bed, obsessing on life and death. Let's take one thing at a time, shall we?”

He doesn't respond. He just stands there, hands on his hips, looking ridiculous in that johnny, and I know he won't budge from that silly pose until I tell him.

“Oh, Lloyd and I were bickering.”

He sighs, as if relieved. As if so what else is new. He pulls up his jeans.

I'm annoyed that he's dismissive. “He didn't come home last night,” I say, trying to make it more significant. I feel like a tattletale.

“Oh?” This seems to pique his interest.

“His name is Drake.”

“Ohh,”
Javitz says, and he smiles. “Tell me more.”

“I don't know much more,” I say. “Except that he's in love with Lloyd.”

Javitz is pulling on a shirt. I help him. He needs to sit down afterward, a little dizzy.

“You okay?” I ask, my hand on his shoulder.

“That's what happens when they keep you down for five days straight.”

“You don't do anything straight,” I remind him.

“Oh, right.” He feels his shirt pocket for his cigarettes. “God, am I dying for one of these.”

“Precisely,” I tell him.

He gives me a face. “So tell me. How do you know he's in love with Lloyd?”