The Men from the Boys (5 page)

And now Eduardo. Who
are
these children? I can't sleep. His sweet breathing is driving me crazy. I slip out of bed and pad through the quiet house. It's a hot dry stretch of late June, a respite from weeks of dripping humidity. I smell cigarette smoke from the deck overlooking the bay. Javitz is there, smoking, watching the inky waves lick the eroding beach. The moon is high, and the stars are out, scattered across a dark gray sky. The only sound is the foghorn from Long Point—the saddest sound I know: the call of the men who trudge on back to their guest houses alone, rejected even by the desperate outside Spiritus at two a.m.

“Hey,” I whisper, respectful of the night and Javitz's space.

He turns, exhaling smoke. “All done?”

I smile. “He's asleep.”

“A name?”

“Eduardo.”

“I caught a glimpse as you came in. Beautiful.”

I nod, sitting on a deck chair, propping my feet up on a small table. “And young.”

“How young?”

“Twenty-two.”

Javitz sighs dramatically. “Are there such things as twenty-two-year-olds anymore?”

“One's sleeping in my bed right now. Go take a look.” I close my eyes. “What did
you
do tonight?”

“Went to the dunes. Got fucked twice.”

“Really?” My eyes are open now. “Is that why you're not sitting down?”

He laughs. “And neither of them was twenty-two,” he tells me, hardening his lips. “When are you going to sleep with a
man?”

“I do,” I say, cattily. “His name is Lloyd.”

“Other
than your boyfriend,” Javitz says archly.

“I
should
probably try,” I admit. “All these kids want is love and marriage.”

“This one too? Already?”

I nod.

“They've got it easy,” Javitz says, exhaling smoke. “All they're looking for are boyfriends.”

“They all think they're so far advanced-‘Oh, I've been out since I was fourteen,' or ‘I brought my boyfriend to my junior prom.' But they don't know anything about being gay. You know, I hate this age I'm at: stuck in the middle. A foot in both camps. You on one side, the kid in my bed on the other. Sometimes it feels as if I'm on a merry-go-round and it keeps going faster and faster and everything around me is getting all blurry and I can't make out what side I'm on anymore. It's like everything is spinning out of control, like at the end of
Strangers on a Train.”

“You were like him once.”

“No I wasn't.” I've thought about this. “I knev all of you guys. He doesn't.” I laugh. “Who does he have to teach him how to be gay?”

“You?” I can't tell if he's being sarcastic. “Here's a test,” he says. “Go in and ask him to explain the difference between Blanche Hudson and Blanche DuBois.”

I laugh. “But that's just it. I can't expect him to know. Those old movies were yours to share with me. They aren't mine.”

He sighs. “I imagine there
will
come a time when gay men know Judy Garland exclusively from
The Wizard of
Oz. Who do the queens do up here now in their acts? Madonna? Joan Rivers?
Oprah?
What a loss.” He takes a long, melodramatic drag on his cigarette.

“I thought you were trying to quit,” I say.

“I've decided I want to die of lung cancer,” he answers, deadpan, and then guffaws, that hoarse, throaty laugh that sounds like a fork caught in the garbage disposal, a laugh I don't think I'll ever be able to forget, not even when Javitz has been dead for thirty years.

I'm smiling. “Wouldn't
that
get them?” I say. “Javitz died of
what?
Lung cancer?”

“ ‘AIDS Activist Succumbs to Cigarettes,' ” Javitz laughs.

Now wouldn't
that
be something?

“What should I do?” I ask. “The kid's asleep in my bed. I can't sleep next to someone unless it's Lloyd.”

“You need to decide what kind of a summer you want,” Javitz says, suddenly serious.

“Yes, yes,” I say, annoyed at the lecture.

“Youth isn't the only instant in time in which we don't know what the fuck we're doing,” he says.

I know he means himself as well as me. This summer, next—the winter in between. What is it that we want from them? From each other? How much time do we have?

“It's so weird,” I say to him. “Sometimes it feels as if I'm this survivor of a spaceship wreck on another planet. I manage to camouflage myself and fit in, but I know I'm just biding my time, because eventually they'll discover me—like Donald Sutherland did to Veronica Cartwright at the end of
Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”

“Dawling,” Javitz says, and when he wants to make a point, as he does now, his Bronx accent becomes thicker, “the merry-go-round metaphor worked, but barely. Now your symbolism is showing. You're a writah. You can do bettah than that.”

I sneer, “Can I?” I've been having a miserable time writing ever since I got here last week. I've produced nothing.

“Yes,” he says, serious now, “you
can.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” I say.

“And Lloyd will be here tomorrow,” he advises. “Perhaps early.”

“You know, I want to go in, wake Eduardo, and ask him if he's ever seen
All About Eve.”

He arches an eyebrow. “And if he hasn't?”

“Kick him out.” I smile.

“Why don't you try something easier? Like
The Wizard of Oz?”

I stand up. “All right. I'll give him a break.”

I leave Javitz to his cigarettes and lung cancer. It's almost five a.m. I'll be up in a few hours. Have breakfast with the kid. Send him on his way. Get down to writing. Wait for Lloyd. I know the routine.

Yet when I open the door, Eduardo is gone.

I feel as if I've been punched in the gut. The sheets are still warm and the scent of his semen haunts the room. I look around. There is nothing in the room but a bed, a dresser, a pair of dumbbells, my boots on the floor, and the cold dusty radiator against the wall.

And I have the nerve to ask what happened to the boy?

Hah. As if I didn't know.

LOVERS

Boston, January 1995

Queer word,
lover.

Queer because it means something so, radically different to queers than it does to straights. “She's my lover,” a straight man says, and he's talking about an illicit affair. “She's my lover,” my dyke friend Melissa says, and she's talking about Rose, the woman she's been with for eleven years. Straights use
lover
to mean sex; queers use
lover
to mean love.

My lover, Lloyd Duane Griffith, didn't come home last night.

“Jesus,” I say, waking up hard with the realization. My cat stares down at me from my chest. He's a fat one, that Mr. Tompkins, nearly twenty pounds. He kneads my neck with his paws as he's done ever since he was a kitten. “Yes, baby,” I assure him. “I'll feed you.”

I throw aside the bulky afghan my mother crocheted for me when I was fourteen. The hardwood floor is cold on my feet. Outside the snow has started falling lightly again. Mr. Tompkins yowls to be fed. Where the hell is Lloyd?

It's 7:28 a.m. I hear the high-pitched whine of the garbage truck from out on the street, collecting the discarded scraps of a city's life. I inch up the thermostat. Old city brownstones like this-no matter how fashionably renovated—are always difficult to keep warm. Especially when one's lover has failed to come home.

“You have to be careful walking down Tremont Street late at night,” Lloyd told a visitor from New York not long ago.

“I didn't realize crime was that big of a problem in the South End,” the visitor said.

“It isn't. I'm talking about the
men.”
And Lloyd grinned.

True, even in the depths of winter I've snared a trick or two on the corner of Clarendon and Tremont or outside the Metropolitan Gym. The South End is like a republic unto itself—we even have our own flags, those gaudy rainbow atrocities that wave from decks and doorways—and its citizens are known throughout the city for a fierce and lusty patriotism.

But Lloyd isn't like me. The South End can be a meat market, but that's never held him up before. When one is married to a psychologist in a crisis program, one becomes accustomed to falling asleep alone. Lloyd got beeped after dinner. That's why he wasn't able to go to the hospital to see Javitz with me. I fell asleep expecting him to crawl in beside me as usual, that comforting shuffle in the black of the night. “I'm home, Cat,” he will whisper, a breath near my ear, his warmth settling into the bed like butter melting into a piece of toast. Then, even in the indigo haze of sleep, I mold my body into his, curling into what we call the breathing position: legs locked together, Lloyd's right arm around my chest. We fall asleep breathing in unison: up and down, up and down, up and down.

But not last night. I check the machine. Good. It's blinking. I press play. Lloyd's voice: “Sorry, Cat. It's 1:15 and I'm still here. Might not see you till morning. Love ya.”

I breathe.

Lloyd, unlike me, has a real job. He spends his days in a crisis stabilization program, persuading flipped-out husbands to give up their knives and overwrought mothers not to hurl their babies out of tenth-floor windows. When he gets home, he's understandably strung out.

“Why did I choose this life?” he asked last night, as I prepared a typical casserole dinner: canned tuna in spring water, egg noodles, Campbell's cream of mushroom soup.

“Why?” I asked. “What happened today?”

“This kid,” he said. “This wiry little white boy from South Boston attacked his sister with her Beautiful Chrissy doll. She had to get fifteen stitches.”

“I didn't know they still made Beautiful Chrissys.”

“His mother brought it to show us. She said he goes nuts like this all the time. The kid's only nine years old, but his mother wanted him arrested. ‘Throw him in jail! I don't want him!' she screamed.”

“How sad.”

“No wonder the kid has problems. He's probably been abused himself. I'm trying to get him placed in a foster home.”

Lloyd grimaced to see the tuna casserole I was scooping onto his plate.

“Well, I'm sorry it's not nouvelle cuisine.” I sighed airily, pausing in mid-scoop. “It's the best I could do with what we had here in the house.”

“It's fine,” Lloyd said, taking a bite and grinning up at me. I plopped a helping onto my plate and replaced the casserole dish in the oven. It didn't look much more appetizing to me, but I'd never admit it.

“It's just that I'm so tired of always being the one who has to save everyone else,” he said with his mouth full. “Is that what I was put on this earth for?”

That's when his beeper went off again. He groaned. “What karma am I working through?”

Lloyd is what they called in the eighties “new age.” Of course, the term is passé now, but he still meditates and talks about karma and dharma. Lately it's all become more intense—a photo of a guru on the wall, a string of visits to psychics—but he's been into “alternative spiritualities” for as long as I've known him. “All wanderlust types are,” Javitz said, shortly after meeting Lloyd for the first time.

“What do you mean, ‘wanderlust'?” I asked. I didn't like the sound of that. True, Lloyd hadn't expected to settle down as quickly as we did. Ever since we've been together, he's periodically mused about moving out west. Or maybe to the desert, or to Amsterdam. It's always someplace. After Javitz got sick a couple of years ago, Lloyd didn't talk about moving so much anymore, but it's still there. “Honey,” he said just the other night, “what would you think about living in India for a year?” I threw a pillow at him.

“Don't worry, darling,” Javitz had promised, years ago. “You'll be good for each other. Remember what they used to say about Astaire and Rogers? He gave her class and she gave him sex. Well, you'll give him nest and he'll give you flight.”

Opposites attract. He's fair, I'm dark. He prefers the White Party, me the Black. Or used to, anyway, when the party circuit page from
Genre
was torn out and highlighted in yellow, hung on our refrigerator door. Now we're too tired most of the time, too cranky after a week of work. Just a couple of years ago, we trekked on down for Hotlanta, made it to the Morning Party on Fire Island, and that's not counting all the parties in Provincetown. Then, we always had a surplus of energy, and not just from the chemicals. Then, we could stay up dancing until six in the morning and go out for breakfast still high and horny from X. We don't much talk much about the weariness that's settled in: it's just there. “There's a new party in Montreal,” I told Lloyd not long ago. “The Wet and Wild. They give you water pistols at the door.” We both just smiled; nothing more was said.

Yet our energies have always been different. Off I'd go with my ACT UP buddies to storm City Hall and Lloyd would stay home, shaking his head. “Send them love, not anger. Putting that kind of negative energy out into the world only makes things worse.” It's not that he wasn't supportive, or even sympathetic to the cause, but he honestly believes the world can be changed from within. “Look inside your heart for the answers,” he told me on our second date.

“But I haven't asked any questions,” I said in response.

He smiled indulgently.

It has been six years. Once, I could not imagine being with one man for so long. Once, six years seemed an eternity. Now it seems no time at all. Once, I primped in front of the mirror before Lloyd got home, trimming my eyebrows and snipping errant nose hairs. Once, Lloyd and I loved each other the way I loved Eduardo last summer, all hot dicks and open mouths. Once, people predicted we wouldn't last another year when we opened the relationship. Once, it hadn't mattered what people thought: we knew they were wrong.