“Well, then,” I say, with a little shrug. “Congratulations.”
“Thanks, Jeff,” he says, and he hugs me.
Ick.
“I'm so proud of you,” Lloyd says. “And envious, too.”
“You'll take your leap, Lloyd. I'm sure of it.”
I point towards the house. “I'm getting cold. How about we go inside and I'll make some tea?”
They exchange a look. “Thanks, Jeff,” Drake says, “but I was just stopping by to give Lloydâto give both of youâthe news. I thought I'd go on over to Naomi's now and tell her, too.”
“She'll be so happy for you,” Lloyd says.
I smile, leaving them to one final hug and whoop through the air. I unlock the door, step inside, pull off my boots, turn up the heat, and sit down next to Mr. Tompkins on the couch. “May I please pet you?” I ask. I try, and he lets me for a few seconds, then turns to nip at my hand. I push him off the couch. “There,” I say. “That's what you get for always being so nasty.”
“What did you mean, you're envious?” I ask Lloyd when he comes inside.
“I'm envious of anyone being that free,” he says, kicking off his boots in the hallway, shaking snow onto the hardwood floor.
I walk over and snatch up his boots, placing them beside mine. “I keep a newspaper next to the door for a
reason,”
I scold.
But Lloyd's still talking, not listening to me. “I'd love to be able to walk out of that crisis program and never come back.”
“How's Drake going to live?” I ask.
“Maybe he'll start a private practice. Maybe he'll travel and wash dishes in diners.”
“Don't you see, Lloyd? The only reason he's able to do this is because he's from the upper fucking middle class. I mean, come on. Like we could ever do that.”
“But you
did,”
Lloyd reminds me.
“But not just like
that,”
I protest. “I had to plan, and organize, and save.”
“How do you know he hasn't?”
“Oh, come on. He doesn't have the kind of debt we have. He must have a nice little family trust fund somewhere, doesn't he?”
Lloyd doesn't answer. He's found Mr. Tompkins, and now they're rocking in the wooden rocking chair next to the wood-burning stove. There's no biting, none at all.
“Drake's a richie, isn't he?” I ask, getting in close. “The kind of guy we've never had much patience for.” I place my hand on Lloyd's chair, preventing it from moving. “Isn't he?”
Lloyd looks up at me. “Let my chair go. I want to rock.”
“I knew he was a richie the moment I met him. He's one of those rich Wasps with last names for first names. Drake. Please. Hasn't that always been a rule of ours? How we could never trust someone who had a last name for a first name? Carter? Forsythe?
Drake?”
“Javitz?” Lloyd says sharply, looking up at me.
“That doesn't count,” I snap. “Javitz's first name is David.”
Lloyd turns his face away. I let the chair go and he starts rocking again. I watch him for a few seconds, but he just buries his face in Mr. Tompkins's long gray fur. I turn and walk to the door. I pull my boots back on, wrap my coat around me. Back down the steps and out to the street I go. I don't know where I'm heading, and I don't much care at the moment. The tears come, freezing on my eyelashes, but it matters little: all I can see is sand anyway, long windswept dunes of sand.
Provincetown, August 1994
“I've never realized how beautiful the dunes really are,” Eduardo says, and I stroke his hair as he sits between my legs, his head resting against my chest.
We're on the north side of town, where few tourists venture, facing the beach at Race Point, sitting in a warm soft valley of sand, staring out over the rolling dunes. The sun bleaches them white as far as the eye can see, long graceful curves of sand, sediment that once was the stuff of mighty rocks, ground to fine powder by eons of waves. The sky over us is a sharp, cutting blue, unbroken by clouds. A few yards from us a strange, twisted tree grows out of the sand, its branches like gnarled arms reaching out to embrace us.
“I used to come here as a kid,” Eduardo says, as if he were all grown up now, “but I never appreciated how beautiful it was, especially contrasted against the blue ocean.” He reaches up to kiss me. “Not until you showed me.”
“Well, at least you can say I taught you something.” I smile.
“A lot more than that.”
We kiss again. I've got that silly, spacey feeling, that absurd high I last felt sitting in the jasmine-scented bathtub with Lloyd half a million years ago. I had forgotten its giddy bliss, its preposterous delight. I rub my nose against Eduardo's and he laughs.
“I have something for you,” he says. He sits up, reaches over to his backpack, and fumbles around inside. He produces a small white box. “Happy birthday, buckaroo,” he says.
“Hey,” I say. “The party's not till tonight.”
“I know. I wanted to give you something when we were alone.”
I carefully remove the lid from the box. It's a necklace, a small four-pointed star on a fine old gold chain.
“I found it in an antique store. I just love the shape.” He gets real close. “I've never told you, but the first night we met, the night I slipped outâdo you remember that?”
Could I ever forget? I tell him yes, I remember.
“That night, on my walk home, I saw a star just like that in the sky.”
I caress the star between my fingers. “How could you tell it was like this?”
“It was amazing. It was so big. At first I thought it was a UFO. It had four points, just like that, really bright.”
I smirk. “Maybe it was a Coast Guard helicopter.”
“It was a
star.”
He frowns. “You're so unromantic.”
“That's not true.” I kiss his ear, running my tongue over its ridges and then down his neck, the way that drives him crazy. There's a hollow spot behind his ear that I love. I press my tongue there, sending him into a paroxysm of passion. I see his fingers clench in a futile attempt to grip sand. We do it right there in the dunes. A passing ship might spy us; a ranger might stumble over us; we don't care. We kiss long and deep, turning our faces wet with saliva. We roll over each other, pulling off shirts and shorts as we do so, sand up my crack and in my pubic hair. I suck the flesh of his soft neck into my mouth. He gasps weakly, “No ... marks,” but it's too late, I'm sure of that. I go down on him, sucking his dick with as much fervor as I sucked his neck. He shoots, surprising me, and I taste his salty cum before pulling off and watching him erupt over his hard flat belly.
“Sorry,” he says. “I couldn't hold back.”
I just smile, wiping my lips.
The sun sinks lower in the sky. “Wish we had time to watch the sunset,” Eduardo says.
I wrap my arms around his small waist. “Did you know that Provincetown is the only place on the East Coast where the sun sets over the ocean?”
“No way.”
“Yes,” I tell him. Javitz has told me this a dozen times. He seems to love the idea, brags about it, as if that explains his fascination with the place. “It's because of the way the Cape curls back into itself.”
“I never knew that,” Eduardo says. “And I grew up here.”
I shrug. “Hang around me long enough, kid, and you'll pick up all sorts of stuff.”
We get dressed, gather our stuff to head back. “Hey,” I say suddenly. “Where's my necklace?”
We search. It's nowhere. I kick the sand furiously. It's like my little plastic witch:
gone,
gone where the goblins go, as if the earth just swallowed it up, snatched it away. As if I wasn't supposed to have it, yet again. “Boys shouldn't have necklaces,” I can hear my mother say. “Boys shouldn't love more than one person at a time.” I'm desperate to find it, cursing my carelessness. Sand flies in our faces as I dig, a dog after a bone.
“Jeff,” Eduardo says, “take it easy.”
“But you
gave
it to me. I don't want to leave here without it.”
Eduardo smiles. “I can just see this in one of your short stories, how some poor soul lost a precious keepsake in the sand.”
“No way. It's
such
a cliché. I'd
never
use it.” I look up at him. “How come you're not upset?”
“Because I'm touched by how upset
you
are.”
I continue to dig.
“Jeff,” Eduardo says, embracing me, stilling my hands. “Did you ever see the movie Harold and
Maude?”
“Of course I have. Ruth Gordon, Bud Cort.”
“Whoever. But there's that scene, when he gives her a ring, and she throws it into the water.”
“So she'd always know where it is,” I finish.
“Right.”
“Even when I don't know where
you
are?” I ask, touching his face.
“I'm not going anywhere,” he promises.
We trudge back through the sand to the house.
He continues to surprise me, Eduardo does. Last night, he took me to meet his parents, although he debated the wisdom of doing so. Not because of their reaction to me: their acceptance of his queerness had been lukewarm but real. It was my reaction he worried about, something I understood fully. The boyfriend who filled the gap between Javitz and Lloyd had been upper-middle-class. Robert Chase Chandler. The Fourth. Later, when I told Lloyd about him, he said to me: “Never trust anyone with a last name for a first or middle name. Or with numerals as a suffix.” I never did trust Robert. His family had three homes: the big house in Newton, a New York apartment, and a country house on a lake in New Hampshire. I couldn't imagine Robert ever seeing my parents' home, their faux oakwood paneling, their lack of a dining room, the way they ate every meal in the kitchen.
The house where Eduardo grew up was a small, one-floor ranch, not unlike my own parents' home. In the short driveway a child's bicycleâbelonging to Eduardo's eleven-year-old sisterâwas trimmed with long green and red tassels. Along the edge of the house were planted pink and blue plastic roses, presided over by the Virgin Mary in a clam shell. Last night, as we approached the house, I remembered passing through the neighborhood a couple of summers ago. I was with a friend, one of the “fabulous” boys from Boston, the kind who had the big loft apartments in the South End and the lofty airs to match. He commented how many of the homes here in the Portuguese section displayed artificial flowers.
“That's
unfortunate,” he sniffed, pointing to the rows of blue roses. “Plastic. Can they not afford
seeds?”
“You're the first guy I've ever felt comfortable bringing home to my parents,” Eduardo said, moments before we went inside.
“I'm honored,” I tell him.
It's a queer thing being gay and working class. Sometimes I wonder what I might have been like had I not been gay. If I had been my brother, for example. My brother and I attended the same state university, but only I ventured into a world my parents had never known. And the truth is, had I not been a gay kid, I never would have been invited into that world. A visiting gay lecturer took me to dinner, and later introduced me to well-known activists and writers when I visited him in Boston. Every June, I'd head down to New York for the gay pride celebrations. I met people; I read books; I listened to speeches.
Had I not been gay, I wonder, would I have been like my brother, happy to be a Knight of Columbus chugging beer on a Friday night, playing basketball with the guys, taking his kids to spaghetti suppers at the local Italian eatery and his wife to the annual Spring Fling thrown by the Junior Women's Club? There's a beauty in that, of course, a simple but nonetheless profound beauty. Had I not been gay, that could well have been me, and I might not have been unhappy.
“It's nice to meet you, Jeff,” Eduardo's mother said, shaking my hand. His father was behind her. He was a tall man, thin like Eduardo, but with a deeply lined, cracked face and big, rough hands. He shook my hand as well. Eduardo's younger sisters all watched me with curious brown eyes.
“Will you stay for dinner?” his mother asked. “It's just frozen fried chicken.”
“I love frozen fried chicken,” I said. Always have, ever since my mother would serve those Swanson's TV dinners and Ann Marie and I would eat them off TV tables watching reruns of
Gilligan's Island.
Eduardo's parents warmed to me when they saw how I devoured that chicken. We talked about student loans and car payments and the problems with health insurance and cash advances on our credit cards. We had both used such advances to pay bills in the past: paying off debt by accumulating more. I'd used cash advances a couple of times as my share of the deposit on our summer places.
“That's
how you afford it?” his father asked me.
“That and friends,” I said. “We have a rather unique arrangement. Each of us puts in as much as we can, and somehow, we always manage to end up with enough to rent a place every summer.”
“But somebody ends up paying more,” Eduardo's father said.
“Yes. And it's not me, I'm afraid. I'm always on the lower end.”
“Seems to me everybody should pay equal,” he insisted.
“This way it allows those of us who don't have as much to share some of the privileges,” I offered. “We all contribute to the summer in different ways. In the end, I think things balance out.”
He seemed to consider this. “Pass me that chicken, will you?” He took another drumstick. “So what does your father do, Jeff?”