The Men from the Boys (43 page)

Provincetown, May 1995

It's Memorial Day weekend, and the town is packed. The boys have arrived in droves, hooting and hollering all through the streets in their little shorts and boots and open shirts. All winter long they've prepared for this very moment. They've bought all the accessories from International Male. They've pumped their pecs and popped their steroids. They've brought with them their stash of X and crystal meth. This afternoon, tea dance will spill out through the open doors all along the deck overlooking the bay. The boys will be happy, hopping, and horny.

“Jeffrey O'Brien, I can't believe your restraint,” Chanel says, grinning, when I tell her I have no plans to join them.

“Oh, please. Once some friend of Joan Crawford's asked her to go out for dinner. This was near the end of her life. She said no way, there was no possible way she could do it. The friend asked why not. ‘Well,' she said, ‘it just takes too long to put Joan Crawford together these days.' ”

Javitz sniffed. “That wasn't what she said. She said, ‘Do you want me, or do you want Joan Crawford? If you want me, I'll be ready in a few minutes. If you want Joan Crawford, you'll have to wait a couple of hours.' ”

We all laugh. “Same difference,” I tell him.

He's in bed. He hasn't left his bed much this past month. He was sleeping all afternoon; I had to wake him to tell him that Chanel was here. The results of his tests were inconclusive. He'll have to go up to Beth Israel next week for some more. Meanwhile, all he wants to do is sleep.

Lloyd left this morning. We didn't speak much during the time he was here. On each of Lloyd's trips since Javitz first told us about the fatigue, I've managed to be distant. He sleeps on the couch. Today, he had to get back because he agreed to do the holiday shift at the hospital. It's the first time in six years that the three of us haven't been together on Memorial Day in Provincetown.

Now Chanel and I sit on either side of Javitz's bed trying to encourage him to get dressed and join us on the deck. “In a little while,” he promises.

“You've been saying that all day,” I tell him.

“I have some news for you guys,” Chanel says. “I broke up with Kathryn.”

“Really?” I'm surprised, looking over the bed at her. “Why didn't you call me?”

“Oh, because in the end it didn't seem all that important. She was sweet, she was nice. But there wasn't anything there ultimately.”

“Not like with Wendy,” Javitz says.

“Romantic love drags us down, I've concluded,” Chanel says. “Distracts us from our goals in life. No more falling in love for me.”

I just look at her. “You want to fall in love again so bad you can taste it.”

She breaks into a broad grin.

“Go on, you two,” Javitz says. “I'm going to sleep for just an hour more.”

“Just an hour,” Chanel says. “I came all the way down here to see you.”

We head downstairs. We're quiet for a while, avoiding the topic. I start washing the dishes. She asks how Lloyd and I are doing. “Who knows?” I tell her. She asks if I've heard from Eduardo. “Yeah,” I tell her, “when he called to cancel out of lunch a few weeks ago.”

“We've really made a mess of our love lives, haven't we?” she says, laughing. “I mean it, Jeff. No more falling in love for me. That's my new rule.”

I glance at her over my shoulder. “Even when we rewrite all the rules, even when we tell ourselves this is the way it's going to be, we'll never be able to stop falling in love. Or wanting to fall in love, for that matter.”

Chanel grins. “You know, you're sounding more and more like Javitz all the time.”

“Heaven forbid,” I shudder, turning back to the dishes.

She stands, coming up behind me at the sink. “Jeff. What's wrong with him?”

I dry my hands, turn and face her. “We don't know,” I say softly. “But he had a viral load test. He's off the scale.”

“Which means ... ?”

“He's got a whole shitload of the virus, and it's running pretty rampant.”

“I brought him a magazine. He said he can't read.”

I nod my head. “We'll be going up to Beth Israel next week. I'm worried about CMV.”

She looks horrified. “Jeff, this all happened so quickly. He just moved here!”

“I know. But it hasn't been quick. Not really.”

We wash the dishes together without speaking further, me washing, her drying. Finally she says: “How much more time do you think Javitz has left?”

In the past, in the not-so-distant past, I'd evade that question whenever it was posed. “Oh, he's not going anywhere,” I'd say. “He's got more time than me,” I'd josh. But such responses are no longer appropriate, if they ever were. I answer truthfully. “A year?” I guess. “Maybe less, a little more. But I think we're finally getting near the end.”

I can't believe the words I've just articulated. I stand there with a dish in my hands, not moving, as if I had not been the one to speak, as if I had just heard the words for the first time myself. Chanel's reaction mirrors my own. It's not as if we didn't know, it's not as if we hadn't already thought this in our minds. But to hear the words, to say them ...

“I'm going for a walk,” she says. “I just need to get some air.”

“Sure. I may go out, too....”

“Tea dance?” she smiles weakly.

“No. Definitely not tea dance.”

We agree to meet back here for dinner. I head up to Javitz's room, sit on his bed, and gently stir him awake. “I'm going out for a bit,” I whisper. “Need anything?”

“No, thanks.”

“I thought you were going to get up soon.”

“I will.”

I kiss him lightly on the forehead. I stand, turning to leave the room. “Oh, darling ...” he says.

“Yes?”

“I just want you to know that you look great.”

My heart melts. I know what he means. I'm unshaven, and I'm wearing a plain blue T-shirt, not something that hugs my pecs. Old jeans, sneakers—hardly the uniform of the season. There will be boys out there: it's Memorial Day, for God's sake.

“My year is up,” I laugh. “Can't get away with it anymore. Might as well dress comfortably.”

We both laugh.

The street is indeed mobbed. The shutters over the shop windows have all been opened. Vacancy signs sway from the shingles of guest houses, replacing the ones that had read: “Closed for the Season.” People shout to each other from across the street, giddy after their long hibernations. The horse-drawn carriage is back for another season, clattering down the road, pulling its eager cargo of hets and their wide-eyed kids. The tourist trolley rattles by, an unwieldy monstrosity that veers awkwardly down the narrow streets. The tour director drones: “To your left, ladies and gentlemen, are original sea captains' homes, built in the late eighteenth century....” One of the women on the trolley seems fascinated by me, watching me as I walk. She's a blue-haired lady in red stretch pants and a halter top. She stares directly at me, narrowing her eyes. In my mind, the tour director intones: “To your right, ladies and gentlemen, is an authentic homosexual of the late
twentieth
century.” And they all turn and gawk, snapping photographs.

I decide to beat it out of town.

There's a rest stop right here on the Cape that I've never been to. Surely today it will be busy. It's all I really want today, and dinner later with Chanel. I hop into Javitz's car and head south. I miss Lloyd terribly, but I refuse to think about it for very long. Before he left this morning, he gave me a card. It was a lovely image of a purple sky, with an old-fashioned man-in-the-moon surrounded by a host of stars. The verse read:

 
It made me pause. Its sickeningly sweet words seemed to miss their mark. I showed it to Javitz, who roused himself enough to read it. “He's madly in love with you,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Sometimes I don't get the two of you at
all.”

I threw the card away. Somehow it made me angry. I didn't want to see it, didn't want it around. Did he expect I'd go all soft and gushy upon reading it? Did he expect it to comfort me?

And then there's Eduardo. Should I have been surprised that he called to cancel? No, nothing should surprise me anymore. But still, it did. He gave no reason, and I asked for none. So much for closure.

I pull into the rest stop. There are, as I'd hoped, quite a few cars. It's a pretty area, stretched along an inlet of the bay, not dirty and grimy like the stops on the way to Boston. I don't hesitate. I get out of the car, planning to head down the trail. But just then I see a police cruiser pull in behind me. I panic for the briefest of seconds, then relax, striding around to the front of the car and lifting the hood.

“Got a problem?” the cop asks, slowing down, pulling up alongside of me.

“No,” I say in my butchest voice. “Just adding a little wiper fluid.”

The cop nods and circles out of the rest stop. It's a good thing I'm dressed the way I am—the dumb cop probably believed I really knew how to add wiper fluid to a car.

That's when I look up and see a man staring at me from two cars over.

I let the hood drop. I clap my hands together to get rid of the grime. The man is approaching me. He's in his fifties, not unattractive, a full head of white hair, a bit of a paunch. Even from here I can see the sun playing with his gold wedding band. He saunters up to the car.

“Hi,” he says.

“Hi,” I say back.

We stand for a few seconds looking at each other. His skin is very pink, his hands plump and clean. Well-manicured nails, with a gold Rolex watch complementing his wedding ring. He's a rich man—I can tell from his shoes: brown wingtips buffed to a high gloss.

“I always figure, nothing ventured, nothing gained,” he says, grinning. “You got a couple of minutes?”

I'm not sure what game he's playing, so I remain aloof. “What for?”

He winks. “I could show you a good time.”

There's a buzz, some kind of unspoken communication between us. I know what his fantasy is. I'm a straight boy, stopping to fix his car. A dirty, white-trash kind of straight boy. So I respond in kind:
“What?”

“Why not?” His voice gets a little breathy. “Give it a try. Nobody will ever know.”

“Hey, man,” I say, trying to sound like Marky Mark, “I don't do guys. I got a girl.”

“That's good. I'll do you. You don't have to reciprocate.”

I glance over my shoulder towards the trees. “In there, man?”

He nods. He's nearly salivating by now.

“Aw, I don't know....”

He stares down at my crotch. “I bet you could do with getting your rocks off.”

I look at him. “All right, man. But let's go fast.”

He leads the way. We tramp over grass that's been matted down by hundreds of men before us. He heads straight for a little clearing near the water. He turns and faces me.

“You're a catch,” he says. “You really are.” He falls to his knees in front of me. “A real straight guy. I only do straight guys. I hate goddamn femmes. If I wanted a girl, I'd get a girl.”

He unfastens my belt, pulls down the zipper. Suddenly I feel a little foolish, but I try not to let it interfere with my desire. The guy blows pretty well, getting me hard in a matter of seconds.

“Tell me about your girl,” he says up at me, between swallows of my dick. “She got nice tits?”

I don't like this person, but still I play along. “Yeah, man,” I say. “Nice big knockers.”

“Think about them now, while I'm blowing you.”

Hey, whatever floats your boat, guy. But something feels wrong now. Something feels really off.

“I never blow fags,” the guy on his knees tells me. “I only blow straight guys.”

Why does he have to keep talking? Just suck my dick, asshole. Knock off the gab.

“I'd rather go home without
any
action than blow a fag,” he says again, his face up under my nuts. “I'm very particular about who I blow.”

“Suck my dick,” I snarl. The contempt in my voice is no longer an act.

He obeys. I shoot. He takes it all, swallows every last bit, drinking it fast like we used to do as kids at the garden faucet.

“Thank you,” he sighs, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. I catch the glint of his wedding band in the sun again.

I pull away, zip up. My head hurts. I push off down the path, but take a wrong turn somewhere and get lost. Round and round I go, up a hill, down the other side. This is crazy, I tell myself. This is just a small area. But I'm lost as if in a maze, stumbling along well-worn paths, in and out of bushes and under trees. I come upon two men fucking, and their eyes greet me with desire, but I turn and begin to walk faster. I finally stop near the water to catch my breath.

“This can't be happening,” I whisper to myself. “This can't be real.”

And then I know that none of it is. Not the sex here, not tricking at the bar, not standing on the steps of Spiritus, not the idyll of a perfect home, a happy marriage, a summer love.

The man who just blew me walks up again.

“Ready for round two?” he asks.