Lane didn’t want to have to explain how deliberate that was, how he hadn’t been willing to let Eddie into the space he’d shared with Scott. He still wasn’t really happy about it, but he knew that letting Eddie—Eddie, who was still very much alive—into the space once occupied by a man who was dead was more important now. Lane said, “We usually don’t leave Times Square.”
Eddie seemed to be satisfied with this answer. He nodded. They walked a few steps and then Eddie stumbled, reminding Lane that he was probably still drunk.
Lane said, “Come, I’ll put you to bed.”
They started and stumbled, until suddenly Eddie doubled over. Sensing what was about to happen, Lane steered him toward a trash can on the street, at which point Eddie started groaning and retching and then, finally, vomiting.
When that seemed over, Lane led Eddie a few blocks uptown and then west on 26th Street to the apartment house he called home. When they were in the lobby, Lane slung an arm around Eddie and helped him up the stairs to Lane’s third-floor apartment. Once they were in the apartment, Lane pointed Eddie at the bed—the bed Lane had once shared with Scott, he couldn’t help but thinking. Eddie lay down and immediately curled up in a ball. Lane sat on the edge of the bed and helped him out of his shoes. Then he went into the kitchen and put some water on to boil, thinking he could make some tea.
Lane had to stop what he was doing and take a few deep breaths. He’d never let another man into the apartment, not since Scott’s death. He’d been with a few men over the years, but none had gotten to him the way Eddie had. And now Eddie had almost taken himself away the same way Scott had done, and Lane felt the loss of that. He was glad, too, that he’d stopped history from repeating itself.
He kept a framed photograph on a side table near the sofa. It was a picture Clarence had taken of Lane and Scott shortly after they’d come to New York, and the smiles on their faces were happy and relieved, full of a sense of awe that they’d arrived in this city of endless possibilities. Scott would jump off the Brooklyn Bridge four months later, which had changed everything, made those possibilities seem like foolish dreams.
“I’m sorry,” Lane said softly to the Scott in the photo. “I promised I would never let any man take your place in my heart, and no one ever will, but you’re not here now, and it seems I’ve already given a part of my heart to him. I won’t ever forget you. But he needs me right now.”
The kettle whistled. Lane turned it off and made a cup of tea. When he carried it into the bedroom, he saw that Eddie had gone to sleep. He put the tea on the side table and sat next to Eddie. He smoothed Eddie’s hair out of his face. “I hope your dreams are sweet,” he said.
Eddie grunted and stirred in his sleep but didn’t wake up. Lane lay down next to him, hoping that the mere fact of his proximity would be of some comfort to Eddie. He decided to drink the tea, so he scooted back to sit against the headboard, sipping tea and watching Eddie sleep.
Chapter 13
“There’ll Be Some Changes Made”
E
ddie came to in a bedroom he didn’t recognize, but, funnily enough, it
smelled
familiar. It smelled like Lane.
Suddenly, the last day flashed through his mind, and he remembered horrific patches of what had happened: Blanchard telling him that he and Marian were no longer a duo, that Marian was his star, and that Eddie’s song-and-dance skills would no longer be needed. He remembered leaving the theater and the emptiness he’d felt as he realized he was not only out of a job but that he was out of doing something he loved. He’d walked around downtown for a while until he’d found that speakeasy, the one he knew would be open in the middle of the afternoon, and he’d put all that completely awful juice into his body until the pain started to ease.
Exactly where the gun had come from, he couldn’t quite remember. There was some business with a man in a threadbare suit at the speakeasy who said he had the easy solution for Eddie’s problems. Eddie had forked over a hundred dollars, and twenty minutes later, he’d gotten the shiny gun out of the deal. The gun, he remembered now, that he hadn’t fired, that now lay on an elevated train platform. It had been a sad waste of money, especially now that Eddie’s source of income had dried up.
He wondered how he would pay for his room at the Knickerbocker, the place he’d been calling home for the last two years. Now that Blanchard had let him go, he knew he couldn’t compete with the upper echelon of performers for space in the bigger productions, and he knew he couldn’t stomach the embarrassment of auditioning for a lesser show. Sure, there were burlesques that might take a song-and-dance man, but Eddie would be competing with beautiful, scantily-clad women for the attention of the audience, and then he’d be back in the same situation. No, that would be unacceptable, too.
For a brief moment as he’d stumbled out of the speakeasy, it had seemed like a good idea to go see his father. Why this was the case, Eddie wasn’t sure; he hadn’t spoken to his father in more than a dozen years, not since the day Eddie had been thrown out of the house. Eddie had felt for years that he had no family, even though his blood relations were right there on the same island. He hadn’t seen them since he’d left, though, and they hadn’t come after him and had never attended his show, to his knowledge. He’d reasoned that if they couldn’t support him doing something he loved, he had no need for them. But then he’d seen the Sixth Avenue El in the distance after he’d stumbled out of the speakeasy and he’d considered taking it downtown and going back home with his tail between his legs and telling his father that of course he was right, that Elijah Cohen had no business dancing on Broadway, and he’d of course die alone and destitute just as his father had predicted, because no one had any use for a queer performer.
And he’d ached, oh, how he’d ached, and he couldn’t think of a way to make the ache stop except for the increasingly appealing idea of just lying down on the tracks and letting physics take over, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to do it, some tiny part of him not quite ready to give up yet. And he stood on the platform and waited for a train, and when one pulled up, he couldn’t make himself get on it, either, couldn’t make himself go down to the Lower East Side and admit his defeat to his father. He’d let the train go by, stared at the tracks, and thought, well, there would be another.
But somehow, rather than sliced into pieces or stuffed into a tenement with his family, Eddie was in a bed, a very warm one with nice sheets and a down comforter, a bed that smelled like Lane.
Lane.
That’s what had happened. Lane had appeared like he’d been conjured, and he’d stood there and he’d said, “I care about you. Stay with me,” and that had seemed like an impossible thing to argue with. The part of Eddie that hadn’t been quite ready to give up yet had won over the part that was, and he let himself be led to Lane’s apartment. That was, apparently, where he was now.
His head hurt. That was the next thing he became aware of. Not just a dull ache, but full on acute pain, like someone had shoved a knife into his right eye. He rolled onto his back and grumbled and looked around the room. Somehow, it had become night. The light was on in the bedroom, but it was perfectly dark outside. He rolled over and looked around and saw that Lane was there, sitting propped against the headboard, his head bowed forward, asleep.
Eddie tried to ignore the pain in his head, although that was a futile activity if ever there was one. He needed . . . something. Food. Water. Lane. He reached over and ran a hand over Lane’s knee, which pulled Lane out of sleep.
“Hello there,” Lane said. “How do you feel?”
“Like I’ve been dragged through Hell on my head.”
Lane smiled. “That good?” Then he lowered his voice. “Do you remember what happened?”
Eddie nodded, which hurt tremendously. He put a hand to his forehead and stifled a groan.
“I think I have some aspirin,” Lane said, getting off the bed. He vanished through the bedroom door and came back a moment later holding a glass of water and a small brown bottle. He motioned for Eddie to sit up, which Eddie did with great effort, and then Lane handed over the glass of water. Eddie took a sip and watched Lane dump a couple of pills out of the bottle. He handed those to Eddie, too. “That should take care of your headache. As for the rest, well, I’ll do what I can.”
Eddie swallowed the pills and drank the rest of the water and then handed the glass back to Lane. He lay back down. “This is a nice apartment,” he said. “How long have you been here?”
“Five years or so.”
Eddie nodded. “How is it we’ve never been here together before? Even that time we went to the club on Fourteenth Street, we still wound up at the Knickerbocker.”
Lane walked over to the bed and sat down. “Honestly? I didn’t want you here.”
Eddie felt shame wash over him. As if this day hadn’t been bad enough. He lowered his head. “Oh.”
“Not for why you think,” Lane said. He shook his head. “Might as well tell you. I ran to New York from Illinois. With a man named Scott.”
Eddie nodded. “Sure.”
“We lived here together.”
Eddie nodded, trying to figure out what Lane was telling him. Did Scott still live here? Would he cause trouble for Eddie?
“He, ah. He’s dead.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
Lane smiled, but there was no oomph behind it. “He hated himself. Hated what he was, what we were together. And we . . . I was supposed to marry his sister. But I just couldn’t. She was a nice girl, but we barely knew each other. Our mothers were great friends, though, so we planned this wedding. I thought I could do it, that I could just pretend, but I got one look at Scott and it was all over. He was what I wanted, not my fiancée. Scott came to me one night, snuck into my room at my parents’ house, and said we should run away to New York. We hitchhiked to Chicago and caught the Twentieth Century Limited the next day. And everything with us was great, but as time went on, it wore away at Scott. He was miserable away from his family, and he was ashamed of his life with me, and we got harassed sometimes when we went out together. And he just . . . it ended one night. He went to the Brooklyn Bridge and jumped into the East River.”
“Oh God,” Eddie said, letting that sink in.
“So you can see why one lover bent on doing himself harm was quite enough.”
Eddie could only imagine what must have gone through Lane’s head. “Is that why you came after me today?”
“Well, in part.”
Eddie grunted. “Couldn’t have another suicide on your conscience, eh?”
Lane balked. “No, Eddie. I want you, I want to be
with you
, and I couldn’t bear not to have you around anymore. I mean that honestly.” Lane pressed a hand to his heart. “I will admit that I thought of Scott when I heard the news that you’d been let go from the Doozies and I worried that you might try to do something extreme, and I had to find you because I couldn’t lose you the same way I lost Scott.” He gave a tiny half smile. “It seems I’ve grown quite fond of you.”
Eddie didn’t know what to do with that. He couldn’t fathom how this had happened, how he’d found himself in the apartment of a very nice—albeit Mob-tied—man who seemed to genuinely like him, how everything in his life had gone so horribly wrong in the space of a day, but yet here was this one beacon of hope.
When Eddie turned to Lane, he saw that Lane was looking at him intently.
“Here’s the crazy part,” Lane said. “I’m falling in love with you.”
That really didn’t make any sense to Eddie. They hadn’t known each other that long, had they? Only six weeks, two months, something like that. Or three months, maybe; Eddie had lost track. Granted, they saw each other a few times a week, and sometimes the days blended together. Eddie liked Lane a great deal. And Lane had gone to all that trouble to talk him off the subway platform, hadn’t he? And still . . . “This was an arrangement.”
“It’s not anymore,” Lane said, leaning closer to Eddie. “At least, that’s not all it is. Not to me.”
Eddie wanted to protest but found the words died on his tongue. He was still too tied up with grief over everything to be able to sort through his feelings tangled in the gnarled branches that seemed to have taken root around his heart, and everything felt tainted and ruined. Everything was, of course, except Lane, sitting there next to him, looking so serious. Lane who was offering love and hope. Lane, who had kept him from making what was increasingly starting to feel like a terrible mistake.
But was it enough? Men didn’t love each other, not the way men and women did, or that was what Eddie had always thought. And yet . . .
He reached over and took Lane’s hand and threaded their fingers together. He realized that he wanted that love, he wanted it desperately, and he wanted to reciprocate it, though he wasn’t sure how.
“I’ve never known anyone like you,” Eddie said. “When I was young, I would fool around with the other boys I met, the ones who hung around Coney Island and later the ones who worked in the theater. There was one, his name was Bailey, he worked at the New Amsterdam for Mr. Ziegfeld as a stagehand.” Eddie shook his head. “This was so long ago. We were so young. We were completely infatuated with each other. He wanted to be a dancer, too, but he could never get the rhythm quite right. He was always too awkward on his feet. Anyway, we used to meet at this cafeteria on Broadway. Do you remember it?”
Lane nodded. “Big Jasper Fish used to hang around there, right? The one near Forty-eighth Street? Closed last year?”
“Yes, that’s it. Did you know Big Jasper?”
“No. Only by reputation”
Eddie sighed. “So Bailey and I would meet there every Tuesday. We’d use our piddling wages to buy dinner and then we’d find some place to go for the night, usually the room he had at a boardinghouse in the West Thirties. Then one Tuesday, he wasn’t there anymore. Big Jasper himself told me he’d heard Bailey had taken up with some opera singer and moved downtown. Jasper told me that it wasn’t worth it for me to give up my heart because queer men would never be to each other what men and women are.”
“So you haven’t. Given up your heart, I mean.”
“No, not since then.”
Lane reached over and traced a line along Eddie’s jaw with his finger. “Jasper was wrong.”
Eddie found himself hard pressed to disagree when he was this close to Lane. He leaned a little closer, hoping Lane would take him into his arms, but instead, Lane started to lean forward, his lips slightly parted, and Eddie knew what he wanted. Only Eddie wasn’t sure he was ready to give it quite yet. He turned his head to the side and let Lane kiss his cheek.
“Bang it, Eddie. Let me kiss you.”
Eddie couldn’t explain why he was so reluctant to kiss Lane, not in a way that was rational or made any sense. The one time they’d kissed before had confirmed a lot of things for him, namely that he was falling for Lane, too, and that getting lost in those kisses was a surefire way to get his heart stomped on. Because while he believed that Lane meant every word he said now, there was still a niggling doubt in the back of his mind, a worry that it would all end as soon as Lane met someone better than Eddie. Which, as far as Eddie could tell, “someone better” could have been a great number of men.
Lane made a frustrated snarl at Eddie’s hesitation. “When we kissed the last time, the world did not end. The stars kept shining, the earth kept turning.”
“Why do you want to?”
“Why don’t you?”
It felt like a dare. Eddie looked at Lane and saw his eyebrows furrowed in frustration, but he wondered if he didn’t also see a little bit of sadness there, a little bit of pain. He wondered how much Lane’s Scott had contributed to that pain and sadness, and how much Eddie himself contributed to it.
“I’m sorry, Lane, I—”
“Don’t apologize. Kiss me.”
And Eddie still hesitated, but the look on Lane’s face was so earnest that it was hard to shy away from it. He swallowed his pride and moved forward. He gently pressed his lips against Lane’s.
And then he was lost. The warmth of Lane’s lips and his body under Eddie’s hands went a long way toward soothing the turmoil inside him. Lane groaned softly as he lifted his hands and moved his fingers through Eddie’s hair. He pressed his tongue forward and pried Eddie’s lips open, so Eddie opened and let him in. They devoured each other and Eddie wondered briefly why he’d denied himself this pleasure, but of course, he knew: this was too good, too perfect. He pulled away slightly and sighed.
“See, that wasn’t so bad,” Lane said with a smile. He still had his hands in Eddie’s hair, so he tugged a little, and then they were kissing again.
Eddie found he didn’t really have the energy to do much more than that, but he liked the kissing, despite himself. Lane’s lips were warm and tasted of something vaguely metallic and very masculine. And wasn’t that the greater problem here? That Lane was so masculine, that he wasn’t a woman, that everything about Eddie’s life had taken this turn away from where he should have been? That instead of taking the opportunity of losing his theater job to go back to the straight and narrow and to do what his family wanted of him, he instead decided his life was over? What did that say about him?