The Men from the Boys (45 page)

“Sure.”

He grins. “That's my design.”

“No way,” I say, surprised at how proud I feel. How my chest expands and my heart just about breaks. Somehow seeing Eduardo as designer—as creator—turns me on in a radical new way. I watch him as he talks, using his hands to express himself, to shape the air as he describes how the poster came to be, how he put it all together.

“Now, for the newspaper, I'm redesigning their logo. The one they have is so tired, so seventies.” He smiles over at me. “Sorry.”

“No, no, it's time we embraced the nineties. Go on.”

He pauses. “Jeff, I'm sorry I never sent you a note or anything when your father died.”

I wasn't sure if he knew. “I understand.”

“No, it was wrong of me.”

“I'm sorry I wasn't around when you got your test. After all, I was the one—”

He stops me. “It all turned out okay.”

“Did it?” I stand up, walking over to sit beside him on the couch. “Eduardo, are you happy?”

“Sure.” He closes his eyes. “Sure, I'm happy. Why wouldn't I be? I matter in Tommy's life. I really make a difference. He makes me feel that I'm the most important person in his life.”

“That's one of his gifts,” I admit. “And I'm sure you are the most important person in his life.” I pull back a little bit, giving him space. “But are you happy?”

His eyes open and move over to look at me. “Don't lecture me, Jeff.”

“I'm not—”

“Because you can't do that anymore. I won't let you.”

“All I'm suggesting is that we look at our lives, all of us.” I lean in closer to him. “I know things were pretty unbalanced between us last summer, and I just want to say I'm sorry.”

Eduardo turns his face. “Look, Tommy would be upset if he knew I were here. He really flipped out when I told him you and I had been—together. He really has some issues with you.”

“Not entirely unjustified,” I admit.

He sighs. “Of course, I told him that it was just a summer affair, that you have lots of them.” He faces me, cruelly. “Maybe this summer I'll meet the new boy, as Raphael met me.”

From somewhere outside the foghorn calls, a low, hopeful sound. “That's not how it was,” I tell him. “That's not how it turned out, and you know that.” Damn the torpedoes, I'm thinking. I'm going straight ahead, whether I push his eyes back to emptiness or not. “Remember how you said you felt you were second in my life? I don't doubt you felt that way. I don't doubt I treated you that way. But you weren't. You were first, Eduardo. Almost from the very start, you were first.”

He stands up. “Don't, Jeff.”

“Lloyd saw it happening. Hell, that's part of the reason we are where we are right now. I can't explain it fully, but when I was with you, I felt so alive, so full of hope and challenge and affirmation. I couldn't wait to see you every time I got here, but of course I never told you that, never admitted it, because I wasn't really even admitting it to myself. That would have been too scary, too risky. To fall in love with a trick. To fall in love with someone who wasn't Lloyd. To fall in love, period.”

I rise now too, coming up behind him. “I thought I was too old, that my days were numbered, that my time had passed. Not that I wasn't content with my lot, but I've learned that contentment is fleeting, that we have to be ready to grasp happiness wherever and whenever we find it. Well, I found it with you.”

We're both quiet, as if we both know we've now passed the point of no return.

Finally he speaks. “Last summer, to hear you say those words would have made me very happy.”

“But this summer?”

“They're far too scary. Last summer, you were safe. You had a lover. A lover we all assumed—you, me, Lloyd, everybody—that you'd be with for eternity. This summer you stand before me and say I'm first in your heart, or at least I was, and there's no Lloyd for you to go home to. Where does that put me?”

“Where do you want to be?”

He smiles. “Don't you see? I never wanted you and Lloyd to break up. That was never in my fantasy. You were role models for me. Proving to me that love can endure, that love can accommodate how we grow, how we change. I was devastated to hear you guys weren't living together. Hell, if Jeff and Lloyd couldn't make it, what hope was there for the rest of us?”

“I don't understand,” I say. “Why did you get so angry at me all the time, then?”

“It wasn't Lloyd,” he says, smiling, as if he's the patient parent now, explaining to a perplexed child the simple truths of living. “It was all the others. It was the sense that nothing was real, that nothing was ever solid. Even when you said you weren't tricking—and I believed you—there still remained that option. Who was I to you then? Not your lover, certainly. Not a trick. But just one of the many men you defined places for in your life.”

“If you'd ever asked,” I tell him, “if you'd ever asked me to stop tricking, I would have.”

“Don't deceive yourself.”

“I'm not. I would have. Do you have any idea how important you were to me? Are to me?”

I sense a retreat. He looks out over the bay. “You taught me that we can define our relationships, our lives, any way we choose. That's what I'm doing with Tommy, no matter what you think of it. But I'm not sure you and I could agree on what the definition of us would be.”

I come up behind him, taking a chance. I slip my arms around his waist. He doesn't protest, doesn't tense. The smell of him quickens my pulse, gladdens and saddens me at the same time.

“Can't we see what happens?”

“I could never go back to the way it was,” he says very quietly.

“Neither could I,” I tell him, my lips near his ear. And I realize, for the first time, that I really wouldn't go back, no matter how much I lament the change of seasons. How much more exciting to create a future than recreate a past.

“Can you tell me,” Eduardo asks, turning in my arms to face me, “right here and now, that you have given up on Lloyd, that you could embrace a monogamous relationship with me, and be happy about it?”

“No,” I say simply. “Right here, right now, I couldn't say either of those things.”

He grins widely, as if I've said the right answer. “And I can't say that I want that. And I can't say that I don't want a relationship with Tommy, because he's a dear, sweet, wonderful man who needs me as much as I need him, and I don't care how you define that.”

“Then I should just forget you.”

“I'll tell you one thing, buckaroo,” Eduardo says, and his eyes suddenly come alive—his old eyes, the eyes from last summer, the eyes that loved me. “I've never felt more passionately about a man than I felt toward you.”

That's when Ernie comes in, spying us standing there with our eyes locked together. He just smiles, as if he senses something, smells the sudden release of testosterone in the room. He heads upstairs to Javitz's room, and Eduardo and I go outside, to the little stretch of grass hidden from the road by a line of shrubbery.

“Jeff,” Eduardo says, “it was very hard for me to see Javitz so sick.”

“Because of Tommy?”

“Because of everyone. Everything.” He looks at me, and his eyes are wide and wild. “Sometimes I worry I'm going to be the only one left.”

I kiss him. Hard and deep, and it comes flowing right back up between us, burning up from our toes, careening up from our gut, exploding out of our hands and mouths and tongues. We fall to the grass on our knees, still locked together, fighting like dogs for supremacy on top. “Hey,” I say, breaking free from hot, wet lips, “you've been working out, Brad Pitt.” He pins me down, winning fair and square. He pulls off his shirt, and his chest has indeed tightened since last I saw it; his abs have most definitely defined themselves.

He takes a condom from his wallet and rolls it down along his shaft. It's been a long time since any man has entered me, so it takes some adjustment on my part. But he manages, lifting my ass with his hands, guiding his dick inside. Through it all, we remain locked in each other's gaze. We make love right there, oblivious of everything else in our lives but our shared passion. It's all still there, every last bit of it, and when we come, we come together, slicking our bodies as if the juice had simply been waiting for this moment, as if we hadn't climaxed in the entire nine months we'd been apart.

We make no plans to see each other. We talk no more of commitment or lovers or definitions. We part simply: a kiss, a touch, our eyes. He walks back home to his parents, and I try not to think, try not to live anywhere else but in this precious, blissful moment. But of course the phone rings then, and when I run inside to answer it, it's Lloyd on the other end of the line, telling me that Mr. Tompkins has finally had his stroke, that he might already be dead.

PASSION

Boston, December 1994

My mother loved me with all the passion she had for life, and she never let me forget that. That is, until the day I told her I was queer, and whatever passion there had been for me dissipated like the smoke of her cigarettes, exhaled into the air. My father used to say, “You're passionate about those kids,” when she'd meet us at the bus stop, cookies in hand, when she'd sit in the dirt of her rock garden with us, planting marigolds. “Not every mother gets up at five o'clock in the morning to make lunches,” she used to say, whenever she got angry with us. “Lots of mothers just give their kids money and tell ‘em to buy a sandwich at school!”

Passionate. That was what my mother was. But for the last decade my mother has been anything but, instead becoming the dry, indifferent ghost of the woman I once loved.

Today, however, is one for the record books. My mother has come to visit me. My sister, Ann Marie, drove her to Boston in the '86 blue Camaro she bought with her income tax refund last year. “I'd never drive my car into Boston,” my mother insisted, so Ann Marie did the honors. With them is Ann Marie's new baby boy, a ten-pound, blue-eyed tyke named Jeffrey Michael. Right after he was born, Ann Marie backed out of her proposed marriage to the fiancé whose name I cannot recall, a man whose hair was as long as his arrest record. “I've had enough disasters in my life,” Ann Marie reasoned. “Why look for another?”

They were coming to Boston today, my mother said, so I could see the baby. “Who knows when you'd be coming back to see
us?”
she'd said on the phone. Besides, she added, there were a few things of my father's she wanted to give to me.

She knew I was likely not coming home for Christmas. I hadn't in several years, although this year, being the first without my father, I had considered going. I think my mother wanted to see me for the holidays, one way or another. Strange concept, my mother wanting to see me.

“How neat you keep this place,” she comments, first thing, walking through the living room. “You should've seen how he used to keep his room,” she says over her shoulder to Lloyd.

She lights up a cigarette. Lloyd looks at me. I don't say anything. She puffs up the room. What am I supposed to do: send my mother out to the deck? Good thing Javitz isn't here.

The baby is wide-eyed and fat. “Look how big he is!” I exclaim, taking the child into my arms.

“Not bigger than Mr. Tompkins,” Lloyd says.

“He'll be six and he still won't be bigger than that cat,” I quip.

Mr. Tompkins nips at my mother's hand when she replaces her cigarette case in her purse. “Hey,” she scolds, shaking her finger at him. “You behave.” He runs, and we don't see him the rest of the day. No one has ever before intimidated Mr. Tompkins into obedience.

“I hope that you don't mind that I named the baby Jeffrey Michael,” Ann Marie says, as I place her son down on the couch for Lloyd and I to google over. “I mean, that should've been your right.”

My mother harrumphs. “I told her not to be silly. I mean, you're not having any children.”

“You never know, Mother,” I say, smiling up from the gurgling creature on the couch. “Lloyd and I might surprise you.”

She raises her eyebrows, the eyebrows she still pencils in carefully every morning in front of her mirror. She looks back and forth between Lloyd and me, then shrugs. “It's the nineties. I keep forgetting.”

“I just love him so much,” Ann Marie coos, picking the child up and holding him to her breast. “It's like I never loved anyone this much. All I can think about is him. He's my whole world. Like I never want any other man in my life but him.” .

“She's passionate about that child,” my mother tells me.

“That's wonderful,” I say. I've never seen my sister so happy, so content, so focused on anything other than herself.

“I told her, well, what does she need a husband for?” My mother exhales a cloud of smoke. “I know, I know. I've always been one to believe that a child needs two parents. And I still do. But that's the best scenario. There are others, maybe not perfect, but there are others.”

She's walking around the room, inspecting photographs. Javitz and Lloyd and I in our Provincetown beads and boots and tank tops. Melissa and Rose kissing over an anniversary cake. She picks one up for closer inspection—the whole gang plus Eduardo at my birthday party last summer—but makes no comment. “Your father insisted that the child be born legitimately,” she says. “But you know, I'd rather see her happy and that child raised well than have them stuck in some—what do you call it—defunctioning?—”