“Jeff,” Javitz said a day later, holding the phone out to me, “it's Raphael.”
But now I did not take his call, for the crush of love inside my rib cage had eased. I told Javitz to tell him I'd left. Gone back to Boston. And Javitz, of course, lied for me.
Yet only a few days later, I yearned for Raphael as if I were Heathcliff and he Catherine, brooding about the house in a cloud of gray. Even now, the pinch of a Quebecois accent still pains me. I do not try to contact him. Such would not make the pain go away, only worsen it. For within a day of seeing him again, I'd send him home, and the ride would start anew.
But when Lloyd's here I don't have the desire, don't have that burning in my belly to lace up my boots and struggle into my tank top at eleven o'clock at night. When Lloyd's here, I have no urge to sweat on the dance floor, no ardor to see who will shoot the farthest in a cum contest.
Instead, we rent videos: Bette Davis or Tennessee Williams or
The Creature from the Black Lagoon.
We order in pizza and bake brownies, the fragrance of chocolate wafting out the windows. “Lloyd must be here,” Javitz says, returning from dinner with Ernie, widening his nostrils to savor the aroma. Sometimes he will stumble over Lloyd and me asleep on the floor, bundled together in the breathing position, while Ava Gardner swings her hips at Richard Burton above us on the screen.
I once whispered to Javitz: “How much passion should be left after six years?”
“Define âpassion,' ” is all he said in response.
But I couldn't. I just sat there, staring into that netherworld that exists between the time Lloyd leaves Provincetown for Boston and the time I pull on my tank top and stride out into the dark.
Javitz tried to reassure me. “Don't worry about passion,” he said. “It has a way of showing up in the unlikeliest of places.”
Like the time I threw my grandmother's ceramic German shepherd across the room, the one she'd given me the year she died, watching it shatter into a dozen pieces and Mr. Tompkins scurry into the other room. In my other hand was a notice that my car insurance was due. “How am I supposed to pay for this?” I screamed, sending the bill across the room after the dog. “What, do they think money just falls from the
sky?”
I'd just left my job so I could write full-time. It was a gutsy move, especially for somebody who grew up working-class. I was taught some basic truths by my parents, among them: You don't leave jobs where you get steady paychecks and health insurance. All I could hear was my father's voice: “You're doing
what?
How you gonna pay your
bills?”
I hadn't budgeted for the car insurance, had completely forgotten it, in fact. I'd made sure that a freelance check was coming to cover my share of the rent, that a couple of book reviews would pay for my student loan that month, and that the minimum payment on my ridiculously high credit-card bills would be taken care of by a long political essay. But there was nothing earmarked for my car insurance, which caused the whole delicate house of cards to come tumbling down.
Lloyd stood helplessly as I twisted like a tornado. Then he shifted into crisis management, precisely what he did all day at the hospital. “Come on, Cat,” he said, “settle down.”
In the oven the salmon was burning. Now that I was working from home, I was trying to break away from casseroles and microwave pizzas. I wanted Lloyd to look forward to a nice meal, but now it was smoldering behind us. He eased me into a chair and rescued the fish, turning off the potatoes and bringing the water for the corn on the cob back to simmer. “I'll take care of things here,” he said, sending me out for a walk through Copley Square to calm down.
The evening was salvaged. The salmon was not as rare as we liked, but Lloyd was happy. I regained my composure, even offered to clean up, thanking him for saving the day. He went to bed early. That's when I found, under my dinner plate, the sealed, stamped envelope for the insurance company and the detached slip with “Paid” written across it in Lloyd's handwriting. There was a Post-it note stuck to it, too, with the message: “Yes, in fact, sometimes money
has
been known to fall from the sky.”
And over on the mantel, my grandmother's ceramic German shepherd had been painstakingly glued back together.
“Hey, Cat,” I hear now, and I look up to see him.
Lloyd, shirtless, green-eyed and beautifulâsame as he ever was.
“Hey, Dog,” I answer.
We kiss each other: light, dry, puckered lips. I'm glad to see him: always am, even after just a few days of separation, that same old kick to the heart, the kind of kick my father used to give the furnace to get it going. “All it needed was a little kick,” he'd say, and it's true for me too.
“Missed you, Cat,” he says.
I don't know when our nicknames began, or how they came to be. It seems they've always been there. Javitz hates it when we call each other “Cat” and “Dog” in front of him. “Dawlings,” he says, making a point, “what was cute the first time becomes annoying the fifth and positively nauseating the tenth or the eleventh.”
Ah, what does he know? I touch my Dog's face. “I had a dream about you last night.”
“Yeah? What was it about?”
“I can't remember much, but we were at my mother's house,” I tell him. “I was sitting with my parents in the living room, and my mother was talking about getting new paneling. I was telling her that she should just rip the stuff down and go for the exposed brick.”
“So where was I?”
“That's where it gets weird. You were in my old room, where we used to have a record playerâit was plastic and bright orange, I rememberâand you were standing over it, playing â(I Never Promised You a) Rose Garden' by Lynn Anderson.”
He laughs, that happy little boy laugh that I love so much, the laugh he had when I first met him, when we both were young. “I had that forty-five,” he says. “Used to play it all the time.”
“Sister Mary Bridget used to play it for us in fourth grade,” I remember. “She said there was an important message to be learned there.”
“What?” Lloyd asks. “ âLower your expectations'?”
“ âWhen you take you gotta give, so live and live or let go-wo-vo-wo-wo,' ” I sing.
“ âI beg your pardon,' ” he chimes in.
“ âI never promised you a rose garden,' ” we warble together.
We laugh. He loves that I can still make him laugh, even after all this time. “You're such a funny Cat,” he says. “So then what happened?”
“When?”
“In your dream.”
“Oh. That was it. That's how it ended.”
He laughs again. We sit quietly for a minute. “So,” he says finally, “did you trick while I was gone?”
“Of course I did.”
He grins. “How silly of me.”
That's the way it is. I trick; Lloyd has meaningful encounters. At least, that's Javitz's take on the whole thing. Lloyd finds the soul; I find the dick. It's true that Lloyd doesn't have sex with other people as often as I do in Provincetown. When he does, it lasts a weekâa week I'm in Boston, of course. At the end of the week, his trick heads back to New York or Philadelphia or wherever he came from. Then there's a series of postcards, an occasional phone call. Lloyd doesn't understand how I can move from one trick to another in the course of a weekend. He understands less the shock of love I feel after they leave. “Why not in the moment?” he asks, but he doesn't really want an answer, not really.
Lloyd tends to trick with older menâmen five, ten, even fifteen years older than himself. Javitz thinks it's because it preserves his own image of himself: as
boy.
Lloyd says older men are more likely to be in touch with their inner spirits. Whatever. At least we don't end up very often competing for tricks.
He gets this far-off look in his eyes when I talk about my boys. He encourages me to talk about them, but he doesn't say much when I do. I like to imagine that maybe, deep down, there's a pinch of jealousy, the same tiny stab to the heart I feel when I play back a message and hear an unfamiliar male voice calling Lloyd “just to say hello.”
“Jealousy is no indication of love,” he has told me, and he's right: I even used it as the first sentence of an essay I wrote for a gay magazine last year. I argued that we needed to move beyond the constraints of jealousy, that jealousy is a heterosexist trap. I theorized that by opening our relationships, we queers were teaching the world how to rethink our lives. That's why Lloyd and I had done it, I implied: not because after two years of monogamy, our sex lives had settled into a predictable pattern and we were eager to see what else might be out there.
It's safe to hide behind a byline, where I can be such a pompous asshole. Because deep down inside, in my petty little jealous heart, I hate all of Lloyd's tricks. And how I wish he'd admit to hating mine. But he doesn't, of course, which makes me feel ridiculous for wanting him to do so, like a conventional hetero housewife, Lucy Ricardo without the laugh track.
Lloyd's asleep now, faceup in the sun, the earphones of his Walk-man inserted, the tiny sound of R.E.M. managing to seep through the flimsy foam rubber. I look down at him: how young he looks when his eyes are closed. How perfectly content and happy. I think about how fast six years have passed.
I'm sweating, and I'm afraid that despite the sunblock I might be burning. Wrinkles, I tell myself: wrinkles. I can practically feel my skin creasing, shriveling up like newspaper caught by a new flame. I lay my hand on Lloyd's shoulder, pink and hot.
That's when I see Eduardo.
He's walking towards us, deep in conversation with another boy, a dark-haired child with no shirt and a short pleated miniskirt around his waist. Eduardo's wearing a white ribbed tank top, his brown skin made only more beautiful contrasted against the white.
They don't see me as they approach. I make quick calculations in my head: Do I strike up a conversation? Do I pretend to be asleep, lying here next to Lloyd? Do I introduce the two of them?
But choices are eliminated when Eduardo notices me.
“Hey,” he says, unsure whether to approach.
Lloyd doesn't stir. He's still asleep, or appears to be.
“Hey,” I respond.
Eduardo is two rocks away. His little boyfriend has fallen behind, but he's looking at me, as if he knows exactly who I am.
“Sorry about last night,” Eduardo says.
I raise my eyebrows and feel the tightness of my forehead. I
am
burning. “You mean about leaving?” I ask.
He nods. “I just couldn't stay.... I felt funny, you know?”
For the first time he seems to notice Lloyd. He shrinks back.
“It's okay,” I say. “He's asleep.”
“Is that ... ?”
“Yeah. That's Lloyd.”
Eduardo smiles. “He's cute.”
I hate that. I hate when a boy I've tricked with sees Lloyd and gets that look in his eyes.
Hey,
I want to say, he's mine. You're mine. Knock this off.
Besides, Lloyd doesn't like boys. He only likes
men.
Older men. Why do you think he's still with me?
“Listen,” I say to Eduardo, “call me sometime. Okay?”
The boy looks at me. “Why?” he asks, the same question as last night.
I have no better answer today. “Well,” I say, “if you don't want to...”
Eduardo holds my gaze. “Give me your number.”
So I do, and we say nothing further to each other. He and his skirted friend continue their trek out to Long Point, surely in the midst of some deep intellectual conversation about the relative merits of tea dance versus after-tea, or else marveling over the peculiar characteristics of that particular generation of gay men who give out their numbers to young boys while their lovers sleep peacefully beside them in the sun.
Lovers who then sit up, look at them knowingly, and grin.
“So that was him, huh?” Lloyd asks.
I can't tell if my face is hot from being caught or if I'm finally sun-blistering, right here and now. “Yeah,” I say. “I didn't know you were awake. I would've introduced you.”
“Very cute,” Lloyd says, looking after Eduardo. “Very
young.”
“Oh, don't talk to me about it,” I josh. But I needn't worry.
He won't.
“Of
course
we should talk about our tricks,” Lloyd had said, four years ago, right after we opened the relationship.
It was actually the day we adopted Mr. Tompkins. A child of our own. Lloyd really wanted one. He'd had a cat once before, in his last relationship, with a man named Marty. But Marty kept the cat when Lloyd up and left him one morning, even before Marty was awake. They'd been together little more than a year. I've never met Marty, seen only one picture, but he haunts me. We don't talk much about him, and neither do we talk about our tricks. But Lloyd thought we should give it a try. We discussed the idea on the ride over to the Humane Society, tossing it back and forth like the hot potato it was. We were still talking about it as we stepped inside the pound.
“Well,” I said, “I'm not sure I want every
detail....”
“No, but we shouldn't be
afraid
of details, either.”
A woman held out a kitten to us, so small he fit in the palm of her hand. It's hard to imagine Mr. Tompkins, all twenty pounds of him, ever being that tiny. But he was, and he mewled at us.
“Oh, Lloyd,” I said, my heart breaking.
“That's him,” Lloyd said. “That's the one we want.” He looked at me. “That's Mr. Tompkins.”