“No. Not really.”
“A townie then?”
“Well, not really.”
His eyes peer around the canvas at me. “So what are you?”
“I don't know,” I say, smiling. “That's the problem.”
He chuckles. That's the right word, too: chuckles. His whole body moves when he laughs. He runs his cracked brown hand over his short beard and levels his eyes at me. “You're here because you have nowhere else to be,” he says. “You have no idea how long you'll stay, but you can't imagine it'll be very long.”
“Right on the money. How'd you know?”
“It's everybody's story when they first come to town.”
“Was it yours?”
“Sure was. But that was a long, long time ago.”
“How long?”
“I arrived here from New York in 1967.”
“Wow,” I say. Even Javitz was just a kid then. “I imagine the town has changed a lot, huh?”
“Guess it has. Don't really think about it much. There weren't so many tourists back then, I suppose. It was gay, but not gay the way it is today.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was the counterculture. Hippies and free lovers. Not professional gay boys with lots of money to throw around.”
“Were you one of them?” I ask. “The hippies and free lovers, I mean.”
He chuckles again. “Oh, no, not me. I was already too old, even then. I was already at the age where they said you were too old to trust.” He looks over at me. “I was about your age.”
That stings, but just a little. “How old do you think I am?” I challenge.
He studies me for a moment. “Thirty-three,” he says.
I smile despite myself. “Right on the money, yet again.”
“And thirty-four this year, I imagine.”
“This summer,” I say. “Guess I can't get away with it anymore.”
“Get away with what?”
“Well, summer in Provincetown can be pretty tough.”
He makes an impatient sound with his tongue, as if I'm being a fool. “People are far too concerned about aging these days,” he said, slightly irritated. “Gay people especially.”
“Well, gay culture is pretty youth-oriented.”
“Don't you believe it. That's your own fairy tale, concocted in your own head for your own reasons. If you choose to believe such things, there's nothing I can do to change your mind.”
“Well, I guess if you don't play the game, you don't have to follow the rules.”
“There was a man once a long time ago who came up here to live. Name of Henry Beston. Wrote a book about this place, what it's really like, what it's really about. You should read it. I can quote you some of it. Some of his words float around in my head every day: âThe world today is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot.' ”
He looks over at me.
“That's
what you need be thinking about, not how old you're getting.”
I like this man. “Might I ask how old
you
are?” I venture.
“I'm
sixty-one.”
He seems proud of it, sitting up straight in his chair. “And I haven't left this old town but once since I came here.”
“In almost thirty years you only left here
once?”
It's a thought that seems incomprehensible.
“Just once. Had to then, couldn't avoid it. It was my lover. He got sick, and they had to take him up to Boston.”
“I'm sorry. Did he ... ?”
“He's dead.” He paints a little more before continuing. “And not from the plague, either. Whenever I tell anyone my lover died they always assume it was AIDS. But we're too old for that. We're a generation ahead of the game. There's not too many of us around, but we're there.” He squints at the painting. “Nope, Chester died from a plain and simple, good old-fashioned heart attack. He was fifty-three.”
“Awfully young,” I tell him.
“Suppose so.”
“How long were you two together?”
“Thirty-one years.”
“Really?”
“Yup. He was twenty-two, I was twenty-four when we met. We served in Korea together. There was no one before him, and no one ever since.”
“Why, that'sâ” I'm a little choked up. “That's wonderful that you were together so long.”
“What's the matter?” he asks, picking up on my emotion, pausing in mid-stroke. “Oh, never mind. I get it. You're here because of lover problems.”
I smile. “We're in the midst of figuring out how to be together.”
“There's only one way to be together,” he tells me.
“What's that?”
“Be together.”
I laugh. “But it's not that easy.”
“No, it's not. It's not supposed to be.” He stands, stretches, sets his paintbrush down on the easel and moves back to study his work. “How long has it been?”
“Six, almost seven, years.”
“Ah. The old seven-year itch. It's true, you know. Seven's a hard number to come upon. Not sure why. Just is.” He picks up his brush and makes a few strokes, then sets it back down. “It's the time when you pretty much stop doing the bedroom bingo with each other.”
I laugh. “The bedroom bingo?”
“Sure,” he says, sitting back down. “Come on. Don't tell me you guys are still groping each other under the sheets?”
“Well, not exactly.”
“Well, you're not supposed to be. That's just the way it is.” He moves in close toward his canvas, removing his face from my line of vision. I'm about to respond when he continues speaking, pulling back while keeping his eyes glued to whatever it was he was studying in his painting. “You know what the trouble is?” he asks. “We never prepare ourselves for difference. Therefore, when it arrives, like an unwelcome visitor some early Sunday morning, we assume it's bad. Now, if we enter relationships prepared to greet difference when it comes ...”
I smile. “Do you speak from experience?”
“Hardly. Chester and I fought like the Bickersons.” He looks over at me quickly. “Ah, but you don't remember them. A radio couple.”
He's right. “So how'd you get through it?” I ask.
“Oh, we just weathered the storm. You learn to do that living out here on the beach.”
“I used to believe that if you loved each other, you could make it,” I tell him.
“Well, why'd you stop believing it?”
“Because everything seems so
hard.”
“Look, with good intentions you can still miss each other. You aim in the right direction and pray real hard, but sometimes you still miss.” He's back to painting, intent on something. “Just don't expect to be jumping each other's bones the way you did when you were twenty-six and had just met each other.”
“But it shouldn't be that way. You should still be able toâ”
He waves his hand as if to silence me. “Sure you should. And it should be summer all year round too, so we can always have lots of sun and warm water and boys in shorts. But without the winter, you know what we'd miss?”
I do know. “All this,” I tell him.
“Precisely.” He smiles over at me. “There's something transcendent that happens, you know, in the winter. You just wait and see.” He looks again at his canvas. “Okay, thanks. I'm done with you.”
I'm startled by his sudden dismissal, hesitant to leave. I turn, but then stop, looking over at him. “May I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“How do you stand it, being alone? You said there's never been anyone since your lover died. You haven't left Provincetown in all that time. How do you
stand
it, being alone?”
He pauses, taking in a long breath and then slowly letting it out. He scratches his bald pate with the dry end of his paintbrush. “I never really thought about it. I just do.” He sets down his brush. “Course, I'm not really alone. Chester, he's out there in the waves, and in the wind, and in the cry of the gulls. I don't really feel alone, to be quite honest with you.” He smiles to himself. “Well, maybe sometimes I do. Sometimes I still miss him something fierce. But you just do it. You listen to the waves and the wind and you just do it. It's part of that transcendent thing I was talking to you about.”
He gestures for me to come over and look at the painting. I do, eagerly. It's nothing much, just a muddy watercolor of blues and grays and a dark vertical line that I assume to be me. “It's wonderful,” I tell him, and I mean it. “Just
beautiful.”
He gives it to me. At first I refuse, but he insists, and so I ask him to sign it for me. I can't make out his name. “Doesn't matter,” he says. “It's yours, not mine anymore.”
All the way back home, carrying my painting ahead of me as it dries in the new spring air, I'm giddy. I can't wait to show it to Javitz, find a place where I can hang it on the wall, my own little corner of the house.
He's just gotten up when I get there. He sits on the couch looking like an old man or a little boy, or a combination of both. His hair's a mess, his eyes bleary. “You okay?” I ask.
“I'm just so tired,” he says. “How was your walk?”
That's when the phone rings. Both of us jump as if a gunshot had just exploded behind us. Javitz stands slowly, his long limbs unfolding and lengthening. He walks over to answer the phone. His face betrays little. He laughs. “Yes, darling,” he says at last. “He's here.”
He hands me the phone. “It's Lloyd.”
We exchange a look. “Hello?” I say into the receiver.
“Hi, Cat. I've got news.”
“Oh? Good news?”
“I hope you'll see it that way.”
I feel my stomach tighten. I hate ominous phrases like that.
“I'm moving back into our apartment,” he says.
“What?”
“Cat, Drake bought it. You know how he was looking? Well,
he
was the buyer. He didn't want to say anything until the deal was final.”
“
Drake
bought our apartment?”
I see Javitz's eyebrows rise from across the room.
“Yeah. And he said I can live there. We can take our stuff out of storage. We won't have to pay that huge monthly fee. And it's been way too cramped for me at Naomi'sâ”
“Wait a minute.
You're
moving back? You didn't say âwe.' ”
There's silence on the other end of the phone.
“Well,” Lloyd says finally, “Drake plans to live there, too.”
I stop listening to him. What he says is lost on me. Maybe it's something to make me feel better, an attempt to reassure me. I don't know. I place the receiver down on the table and look over at Javitz. “Drake plans to live there, too,” I repeat calmly.
I glance over at my painting, leaning against the wall. The blues seem to have dried into the same color as the grays. I walk out of the house. I have a vague impression that Javitz has picked up the phone and is talking to Lloyd behind me, but I can't be sure.
Besides, at that moment, all that concerns me is getting outside, getting into that new spring air, filling my lungs until they explode in my chest.
Boston, October 1994
It's Halloween, and I'm handing out candy to the trick-or-treaters. There aren't many. Back when I was a kid on Juniper Lane, there were hundreds of kids, it seemed. The street was mobbed with them, little green Hulks and orange pumpkins and the occasional giant ketchup bottle. Here in the South End, there aren't many children. A Puerto Rican family on the next block has a couple of kids still young enough to dress up as cowboys or Power Rangers. There's a lesbian couple with a baby and a six-year-old boy around the corner, and on our street itself a gay man has custody of his twin daughters, who last year dressed like Raggedy Ann and Andy. “They fought over who could be Andy,” their father shrugged to me as I commented on the uniqueness of their costumes. “Drag kings in the making, I guess.”
I wonder if they'll be back this year. Last year, of course, Lloyd and I had passed out the candy together, a tradition he's chosen to break this year. “Why don't you come with me, Cat?” he asked. “I think you'd like it.”
“No,” I said. “I want to see the costumes.”
Occasionally there will be a clutch of twentysomething gay boys out for a lark, ringing doorbells dressed like Carol Channing or Lucy Ricardo. But so far no one has rung the doorbell all night, not a Carol or a Lucy or a witch or a pumpkin.
“Next to Christmas, Halloween is my favorite holiday,” I tell Mr. Tompkins. “Such a wonderful way of letting a child
imagine.”
There's a bowl of bite-sized Three Musketeers bars sitting on the hall table nearest the door. I think I hear someone on the front step, but I guess I'm wrong after the bell fails to ring.
Lloyd has gone to a Halloween celebration held by some real witches, authentic practitioners of wicca. “It's important that it be held tonight, Cat,” he explained. “Halloween is an important holiday in wicca. I'm sorry I have to break tradition. You could come if you want.”
But again I refused. So he left, meeting Naomi and some of the other folks from his meditation group. Last week they all did a past-life regression. “You were my brother in a previous life,” Lloyd told me when he got home.
“Was I gay?” I asked.
“I don't know,” he said, a little impatient with me. “That wasn't important.”