“That’s all it was.”
I shrug. I feel a little hurt, strangely enough. I thought it had actually meant more to him. Whatever. “I guess it was a fantasy for me, too,” I say. “Funny thing is, I never realized I
had
that particular fantasy. I never realized what a fucking narcissist I am.”
Shane turns to look over at me. “Come
on,
Henry. To get that body in that shape you spend
many
hours a week in the gym. Hours you could spend reading, or delivering hot meals to shut-ins, or visiting your mother, or watching reruns of
Growing Pains,
eating whole cans of Pringles. Not that you
should
be doing any of those things, but one can’t deny one’s narcissism when one spends six, seven,
eight
hours a week pumping heavy weights for no other reason than to enlarge one’s deltoids and pectorals—and watching oneself in a mirror as one does it.”
I look at him defensively. “I’m
not
denying it, Shane.
You’ve
made me acknowledge my narcissism. I’m not sure it’s something I like very much about myself, but you made me see it. So bully for you.”
“Don’t get touchy, Sallie Mae.” Shane laughs out loud suddenly. “You think you’re the only narcissist sitting here? I might not have your pecs or your biceps, but I have my own arsenal.” He pats his backpack. “The Windex bottle. That got me quite a
bit
of attention, didn’t it? In Palm Springs it was glow sticks. And I’ve just discovered Flame Wands that take the whole glow stick experience to a brand new level. I’m planning to debut them in Miami. They’re like fucking
spotlights
. Wait till you see. I’ll be able to turn the attention of the whole fucking dance floor on me. Don’t you see, Henry? In a sea of gym clones, I stand out. I
make
myself stand out.”
I look over at him. I’d never really thought of it that way before.
“I made
you
notice
me,
” Shane says simply.
“That you did,” I admit.
Shane sighs. “So don’t worry about letting me down gently. I understood right from the start what this was all about. I’ll be fine. I’ve got a whole bag of tricks I’m waiting to use.”
I smile. I reach over and take Shane’s hand back in mine. “You’re okay, you know that, Shane?”
“Usually,” he says. “Sometimes I forget. Remind me once in a while, okay?”
“Deal.”
We sit that way for about twenty minutes, reverting back to silence, watching the crowds scamper and scuttle around us. The clock in the center keeps track of the seconds that pass.
At a quarter to six, promptly as we’d planned, I recognize Jeff among the throng. Funny how it happens: how suddenly, out of the indistinguishable blur, a familiar face can pop right out at you. I’m quickly on my feet, waving him down.
But Jeff isn’t alone. Is it ... Lloyd?
No
. It’s the guy he went home with. The one who couldn’t dance—
“You remember Anthony?” Jeff’s asking.
“Yeah,” I say, giving him a look. “You remember Shane?”
I don’t need ESP to hear the question both of us are asking:
What the fuck is going on here?
“Shane was hoping for a ride up to Boston,” I quickly explain.
Jeff looks from me over at Shane. “Henry
did
explain to you that we’re crashing at my sister’s in Connecticut tonight? And that tomorrow we’re taking her five-year-old son to the movies?”
“I
adore
children,” Shane insists grandly, looking up at us, still sitting on the floor.
“Well, okay, then,” Jeff says, making a wry face. “Show him your Windex bottle. He’ll love that.”
Shane shrugs. “They all do.”
It’s my turn for questioning. “And Anthony?” I ask, turning to the fourth member of our little group. “You like kids, too?”
“Don’t really know any,” Anthony admits. “But Jeff says I’ll like Boston.” For the first time I notice a large backpack slung over Anthony’s shoulder.
“Oh,
did
he, now?” I ask. “And I thought you had just moved to New York, Anthony.”
Jeff blushes a little. “He did. But I told him it was easier to find a job in Boston.”
“But wherever will you
stay?”
I ask Anthony, heavy with sarcasm.
He smiles. “Jeff said I could crash with him.”
“Jeff’s got a good heart,” I purr, putting my arm around my sister’s shoulders. I whisper fiercely in his ear: “
What the fuck are you doing?”
“We’re gonna miss our train,” Shane announces.
“Yeah, wouldn’t want that,” Jeff says, shrugging me off and hurrying toward the track. Anthony follows. Shane takes his time standing, unfolding his long form gradually, dusting off his jeans. I watch him.
“We came down as two and we’re going back as four,” I murmur, more to myself than anybody else.
Shane turns, winks, and blows a kiss. “We’re off to see the Wizard, stud boy.”
“Oy vey,” I say, sounding like my mother. But that’s how I feel, and “Oy vey” is all I can think to say. I just shake my head and follow the troops to the train.
A Week Later, Provincetown
Lloyd
“R
eally, Eva, I can’t eat any more,” I tell her, patting my gut, but she brings over another plate of waffles anyway.
She makes a face. “You haven’t tried any with blueberries.”
“The strawberries and bananas were plenty,” I insist.
My little apartment is filled with the aromas of coffee and cinnamon, vanilla and maple syrup. Eva drove up from New York, rising at three
A.M.
to make the six-hour trip. When she got here, I was still asleep, not expecting her until noon. But she came early, she explained, because suddenly she’d been filled with the desire to cook me breakfast. And cook she had: eggs and waffles and fresh fruit and freshly whipped cream.
It’s delicious, but it’s thrown me seriously off schedule. “I’m going to be late meeting Jeff,” I tell her. “I still have to shower and pick up the key from the realtor.”
“Just one more waffle,
please?
I made so much batter. They’ll go to waste.”
I smile. “You eat it. All you’ve had is a banana.”
She shakes her head. “I couldn’t possibly. I’m too excited. To actually be
here,
in Provincetown, planning for our home ...” She shivers.
She slips the waffle onto my plate. I sigh. “Okay, just half,” I say. She - beams, pouring a gob of syrup over the waffle and sprinkling a handful of blueberries on top.
I really
am
full but don’t want to hurt her feelings. She’s gone to so much effort, buying the fruit in New York last night because she knew nothing would be open here in town when she got here. She was so excited to do this, so filled with passion about our guest house. The energy is good.
And I’m hopeful that Jeff will come around, too. He agreed to come down today, and I arranged to show him the house even though we haven’t yet closed. Our realtor was a friend of Javitz’s, an artist who’d gotten sick about the same time Javitz had and who most of us thought would follow him to the great beyond. But Ernie’s one of those Lazaruses you hear about, one of the lucky ones: near death one day, he suddenly rose and walked, courtesy of the new drug cocktails. Now the struggling painter is a highly successful Provincetown real estate agent, making a killing off the inflated property values in town.
I manage to eat about a quarter of the waffle before my stomach feels as if it will burst. I push my plate away and wipe my mouth with my napkin. “Really, Eva, that’s the best I can do. It was fabulous, though. Beyond fabulous.”
She smiles, looking as if she might cry for happiness. “I’m so glad you liked it.”
I stand up. I have to get in the shower. It’s ten-thirty, and Jeff’s meeting me at the guest house by eleven. I don’t want to be late. After that fiasco on New Year’s Eve, I want this encounter to go smoothly.
Under the spray of the shower, I think about Jeff. There’s something going on with him that concerns me. I called him New Year’s Day on his cell phone, catching him at his sister’s. I could hear little Jeffy playing in the background. I told Jeff that I wished we’d spent the night together, and he seemed to melt, admitting that he wished the same. I asked him to come to Provincetown; he agreed he would, even going so far as to say he’d consider spending the night.
That’s when I asked to say hello to little Jeffy. “Tell him Unca Lloyd wants to say hi to him.” Last Christmas, Jeff and I had loaded up a sackful of toys and dressed as identical Santas, driving down to Connecticut and surprising the boy. He’d been ecstatic.
But Jeff hesitated. “He’s playing with somebody right now,” he said. “I don’t know if he’ll come to the phone.”
I assumed it was a little friend. But when I heard Jeffy say no, that he was too busy playing his computer game to talk to me, I heard
another
voice—an adult male voice—offer to wait until he got back. Still Jeffy refused to come to the phone. I asked Jeff who was playing with the boy.
“Um ... his name in Anthony,” Jeff said.
“Who’s Anthony?”
He hesitated. “Some guy I met in New York.”
I
was stunned. “Why’s he with you in Connecticut?”
“He ... um ... he’s coming back to Boston with me. He wants to look for a job.”
I didn’t have to ask where he’d be staying. Remember what I said about Jeff and me? How we just seem to know things about each other? I knew in that moment that this Anthony person was going to be staying with Jeff, and it troubled me. It’s not like Jeff to just invite a stranger to stay with him. Jeff was, in fact,
notorious
for preferring that tricks not spend the night. He didn’t even care for
friends
crashing for more that a day or two on his couch. And here was this Anthony
moving in
.
I knew right away it was a reaction against me. Against the guest house. I had made a move that had appeared to exclude Jeff, and so he was taking similar action against me.
I was angry when I hung up the phone, pissed off by his childish game-playing. My anger, however, has evolved into concern over whether this Anthony is trustworthy, and concern over Jeff’s state of mind. Had my news really been so devastating to him?
I determine that I’ll get to the bottom of it today. I’ll let him know how much I want his involvement. I’ll introduce him to Eva. I’m sure he’ll love her. Especially once he learns about Steven. I can still smell the cinnamon in the air, even through the closed bathroom door. How could Jeff
not
love her? How could anyone?
That’s when I hear her sobbing.
Jeff
As Lloyd predicted, it’s a house I’ve passed many times, a sturdy but undistinguished Cape on a side street a few blocks past the Ice House, overgrown with ivy, with a shingle out front that reads
SEABREEZE INN.
A soft, steady snow has begun to fall, blanketing the town with three or four inches. There’s no sound, only the occasional wail of the wind off the bay. I look at my watch. I’m a little early, but usually so is Lloyd.
I push my hands down deep into the pockets of my leather jacket, the snow collecting on my shoulders and the top of my woolen hat. I watch, nearly entranced, as the shingle swings silently back and forth. The peacefulness of the place offers me a clarity that I haven’t had in days. I think about the stranger back home in Boston, sitting on my bed watching TV, flipping through the channels with the remote control.
What the fuck did I do?
I ask myself.
In the wind, I can hear Javitz’s answer:
You asshole, you know precisely well what you did.
A gust of wind seems to laugh at me. The way Javitz would, when I was being obtuse or stubborn.
Inviting a complete stranger to live with you, he’s telling me, was an impulsive act, a passive-aggressive counter-punch to Lloyd. Who knows who that boy in your apartment really is? What could he be making off with, right at this very moment?
But Anthony’s no thief. I trust my instincts enough to know that. I saw how authentic he’d been with little Jeffy. Anyone who can play that well with a kid is definitely trustworthy. We’d all arrived from New York at my sister’s house ready to do nothing but crash, the lateness and the drugs of the night before finally catching up with us. I sprawled out on Ann Marie’s couch, Henry fell asleep in a chair, and the Windex queen propped himself in a corner and gabbed all night on his cell phone. Alone among us it had been Anthony to get down on the floor and play computer games with Jeffy. From under half-lidded eyes I observed that he let the kid win every time.
Yet in almost every other way, Anthony has remained a mystery. He still hasn’t shared much more about himself than he had the first day. I asked him again about his family, but he simply restated they wanted nothing to do with him. I asked him again where he’d grown up, and he only repeated “outside Chicago.” I asked him again if he’d ever had a relationship, and he said, for the third time, no. It’s as if his life only began six months ago, when he’d stumbled into his first circuit party.
I look at my watch again. Ten minutes to eleven. I consider waiting in my car, but despite the cold, I’m enjoying the air and the light. I used to
love
spending time in Provincetown in the winter. There’s something about the rawness and the wind that makes you feel right on the edge of life, as if you were pushing living to its limits. That was the reason Javitz has so loved it here. He was forever pushing limits, his and ours.
Damn it. See what happens? This is
precisely
why I don’t come to Provincetown anymore. Because it makes me think of Javitz. Even more than during the hectic summer months, I can feel Javitz here in the winter. He’s present in the wind he loved so much, in the taste of the brine in the air, in the uncanny light that reflects off the water in three directions. Even after four years, thinking of Javitz is still too hard for me to do.
God, I wish Lloyd would hurry up and get here.
The wind whipping in from the bay is getting colder. I consider standing on the wraparound front porch of the guest house; at least up there I’d be sheltered. But somehow I just don’t feel right walking up the steps until Lloyd is with me.
It’s not my house, after all.
I look around at the houses on the street, wishing in at least one I’d spy a light, a shade being lifted by a curious homeowner. But no one. The snow collects in window boxes, drifts up against front doors. Here Provincetown still looks the way it must have thirty, forty years ago. Weather-stung white clapboard houses with widows’ walks, stone walls overgrown with sea grass. In the winter most of the places in this part of town are boarded up, their owners safe and warm in New York town houses, like the one Eva’s leaving to move here.
What if this were our house? Mine and Lloyd’s?
The shingle creaks in the wind.
SEABREEZE INN
—a sign I know will soon be changed to read
NIRVANA
.
What would we have named it, Lloyd and I? Would I have even agreed to such an idea? To run a guest house?
I’d never considered it. But then, he’d never asked me. The few innkeepers I know seem overworked and scattered. The workload is tremendous, the responsibility daunting. But I can’t deny, standing here, watching the shingle sway in the wind, that I wish the place were mine. Mine and Lloyd’s. It’s hard even to remember now what it was like when we’d lived together. I have only fragments, memories like torn pages in my mind: watching the six o’clock local news cross-legged on the floor, balancing our dinners on our laps. Putting up the Christmas tree. Waking up on the edge of the bed at three in the morning, Lloyd’s arms snaked around me. Faux-finishing the walls of the bathroom. Grocery shopping at the Star Market, always opening the bag of potato chips before we checked out. It’s the silly, ordinary things I remember, little images and moments I’d never admit to cherishing as much as I do.
But in so many of those memories, Javitz is there, too. Topping the Christmas tree with a Star of David. Critiquing the color of the bathroom. Taking the half-eaten bag of chips away from us and finishing them off himself. Listening to us bicker, rolling his eyes and signaling when one of us went out of bounds.
“Shit,” I say out loud, amazed at how quickly my thoughts go around to Javitz again, standing here.
It’s eleven o’clock. Where the
fuck
is Lloyd?
Lloyd
“It’s okay,” I tell her. “It’s okay.”
Eva shudders in my arms. I’m very conscious of how precariously my towel is secured at my waist. I’d rushed out of the shower when I heard her crying. She was sitting at the kitchen table with her face in her hands, sobbing uncontrollably. “What’s the matter?” I shouted, but she was unable to answer for several minutes. She just wept hysterically, as if she’d gotten a telegram giving her bad news.
But it’s just a memory.
“It just came over me,” she manages to say. “I thought of Steven. Of our life together. And here I am starting something new ...”
“I know,” I tell her, stooping down, one hand holding on to my towel to keep it in place. “Sometimes it does make you feel guilty in a way. How we’re continuing our lives, moving on.”
She grips my free hand. “You understand.”
I look up at the clock. It’s now a few minutes past eleven, and I still have to get the key. The guest house is in the East End, a good ten-minute walk from here. I’d ride my bike, but it’s snowing pretty hard now. I’ll make faster time on foot. Still, I’m going to be at least fifteen minutes late for Jeff—more if I have to console her much longer.
I try to head back into the bathroom to towel off, but she holds on to my hand. “I’m sorry to be such a burden,” she says. “The tears—I never know when they might strike.”
“Grief is an unpredictable thing,” I say. “Look, Eva, I’ve got to hurry. Jeff is waiting.”
“Of course,” she says, but it still takes several more second before she releases her grip.
I hurriedly dress and pull on my hat and gloves. I give her one final embrace. She seems reluctant to let go, her tiny hands clinging to my wool sweater, her heavy breasts pressed up against my stomach. Finally, I have to take her by the shoulders and look down into her swollen eyes. I tell her to take a walk in the snow and clear her head, then to meet us at the guest house.
Thankfully, Ernie’s not at the office when I arrive, so I won’t have to engage in time-consuming small talk. His assistant hands me the key and I begin a fast trot down Commercial Street. The wind slaps my cheeks. I think about Eva’s tears. They had come last week in New York as well. She had been sitting there on the couch, smiling as I called Jeff on my cell phone, but then, just as I was hanging up, she broke down in tears. A sudden memory of Steven, she explained as I consoled her, putting my arms around her and moving her head to my shoulder.
And now, tears once more.
I don’t like playing psychologist with my friends. I can’t be diagnosing them every time they act out or have a fit. But Eva’s more than a friend: she’s becoming family, and I’m planning a major life change with her. I tell myself that her little outbursts are signs of nothing more than a temporary adjustment disorder. A grief problem, maybe on the edge of depression. Nothing that can’t be treated. Maybe I’ll suggest an antidepressant, have her see someone. It’s nothing that I need to be overly concerned about.
First impressions tell the truth: mine of Eva was one of
strength
. I remember how strong she was with Alex. How insightful she was about taking those baby steps back to life. How she had counseled me so sagely about my own grief, sitting up with me late into the night talking about life and love and death and loss. It’s exhilarating to talk so openly about my grief, to have it understood and resonated, especially with how guarded Jeff has become. When I’m with Eva, I feel more heard and more appreciated than I’ve been in a long, long time.
I needn’t worry that she isn’t up to all this. Her strength inspires me. This is a woman who, when she discovered her husband’s gayness, had not only accepted it but
embraced
it. Hadn’t she cared for him lovingly during his final illness? How many women could have done that? Wouldn’t most have thrown him out, viewing his sexuality as some kind of personal affront? How many could have sat at his bedside along with gay friends and lovers, all of them linking hands in Steven’s final moments? It’s an image of love and unity that brings tears to my eyes whenever Eva describes it to me.
That’s what true family is.
“I loved Steven’s gay friends,” she told me that first day we’d met. “I even loved his lovers.” It was right after I’d told her about the family that Jeff and Javitz and I had made, a family misunderstood by so many but which Eva seemed instinctively to appreciate. When she went on to describe the queer family she and Steven had constructed, it made sense. Our whole so-called coincidental meeting at the seminar suddenly seemed karmic. We were
destined
for this path together.
I trudge through the thickening snow remembering that night. We’d disclosed so much about ourselves right away. We’d gone out for coffee after visiting Alex, and within moments of sitting down in the booth I’d learned she was fifty years old, that she’d had a scare with breast cancer two years ago (the lump turned out to be benign) and that her husband had died of AIDS. We sat there for hours swapping stories, marveling over the synchronicities in our lives.
“This Jeff person you keep mentioning,” she observed toward the end of the night. “Are you ... lovers?”
I smiled. “We’re a rather unconventional couple,” I explained. “We were together for six years, then drifted apart after Javitz’s death. Lately we’ve started to reconnect. I believe we’re soul mates.”
Look, I’m smart enough to recognize Eva is a little threatened by Jeff. I understand she’s probably a little frightened about meeting him. Maybe that’s why her nerves are on edge today. Hey, it’s only natural. A little insecurity is to be expected. This is a big change she’s making, after all. She’s overhauling her life, uprooting herself from the world she’s known for so long. She’ll have to leave Alex, to whom she’s become so attached. But she has the strength to do it. I’m confident of that.
And once Jeff gets to know her, I’m certain he’ll love her. How could he not?
I see him standing there in the snow, looking up at the guest house. I run the last few yards. “Cat!” I shout. “Cat!”