Whiskey & Charlie (19 page)

It was Whiskey, of course, who had first suggested Marco might be gay. They were in twelfth grade then, and Marco, who was the first friend Charlie made in Australia, had become one of his closest friends.

“You know Marco's a faggot, don't you?” Whiskey had said, coming into Charlie's room one night after Marco had left.

“What?”

“You know, a shirt lifter, a pillow biter.”

“For Christ's sake, Whiskey, I know what
faggot
means.”

“Calm down, Charlie. I'm just telling you what I've heard.”

“Heard from who?”

“No one in particular. It's a known thing.”

“Based on what evidence?”

“Jesus, we're not in court, are we? Do you want me to show you a gay porn mag I stole from his schoolbag or something? There's no evidence. It's a vibe you get. I can tell.”

“Well, you seem to know a lot about it, Whiskey. Maybe you're the one who's gay.”

Whiskey smirked. “How come I've had sex with so many girls then?”

“Says you.”

“Ask them yourself if you don't believe me.”

“Why would I bother?” Charlie said, irritated that the conversation had swung around so easily to Whiskey's sexual exploits. “I couldn't care less who you've had sex with. Now could you get lost? I have to hand this essay in tomorrow.”

Whiskey didn't move. “You've got to admit though,” he said, “Marco's a real faggot's name.”

“You're such a moron, Whiskey. Marco's an Italian name. Because guess what? His parents are Italian.”

“Why can't he just call himself Mark?”

“Why can't you call yourself William? Now could you please piss off?”

“Easy boy,” Whiskey said. “Don't shoot the messenger. I'm telling you for your own good. What kind of a brother would I be if I didn't tell you? You'd carry on hanging out with him, and pretty soon everyone would start saying you were a faggot too. You should be thanking me for this information.”

“I see. I get it now. Thank you, Whiskey. Thank you so much for telling me this. What a terrible mistake I might have made if you hadn't let me know. What would I do without you? How can I ever express my undying gratitude?”

Whiskey got up. “Have it your way, little brother. It's your funeral.”

“Shut the door behind you,” Charlie said, turning back to his essay.

“As you wish, sir.” Whiskey bowed extravagantly and closed the door.

x x x

It had taken him a while, but Charlie had eventually had to admit Whiskey was probably right about Marco. It wasn't just that Marco had never had a girlfriend—after all, Charlie hadn't exactly had a lot of luck in that department himself at that time. It was more that Marco hadn't shown any interest in girls whatsoever. When you were sixteen and seventeen, girls were what you talked about, even—or perhaps, especially—the ones you didn't have a chance in hell with. You said this one was cute or that one had great legs, or if you wanted to be cruder, you said this one had a nice ass or that one would go off like a firecracker in the sack. But Marco never said those kinds of things. Once he had become alert to it, Charlie had realized Marco never talked about girls at all. He wouldn't bring it up, and when the conversation swung that way—as it inevitably always did—he went quiet. He neither agreed nor disagreed with his friends' assessments of the girls they knew or wished they knew. If asked directly, he would be noncommittal. “She's okay,” he might say or, “She's not my type.” Charlie had wondered if Marco's other friends suspected him of being gay. He had tried to think of a way he might bring it up sometime. But he had known he never would. It would have made him too uncomfortable to talk about it.

Once he had allowed himself to believe Marco might be gay, Charlie's first reaction had been of anger. He had been angry with Marco for being different, angry with himself for choosing as a best friend the one guy in their grade who didn't like girls, angry to think he might be tarred with the same brush. He had, of course, also been angry with Whiskey for pointing it out to him and angrier still that he hadn't worked it out for himself. Then he had become afraid. He had been afraid that he himself was gay and he didn't know it yet, afraid that spending too much time with Marco had turned him, afraid that Marco might be interested in him. Years later, he had admitted this to Marco.

“Don't flatter yourself, mate,” Marco had said. “You're not my type.”

“Why?” Charlie asked indignantly. “What's wrong with me?”

Marco looked at him critically. “You're not exactly what I'd call buff.”

“What do you call that then?” Charlie flexed his biceps.

Marco snorted. “It's a good thing you're not gay. You'd never get lucky.”

“That's bullshit, and you know it,” Charlie said. By then he'd occasionally been to gay clubs with Marco and had attracted a great deal more attention than he ever had from women.

“Want to chow down on my big fat one?” a perfect stranger had said once, standing next to him at the bar. Charlie had choked on his drink.

x x x

Once they had left school, Marco's sexuality didn't seem to matter anywhere near as much. There was no longer any doubt about it in Charlie's mind, but by then he'd had time to get used to the idea, had gotten over his own issues about it, which in hindsight, he could see had been pretty pathetic to begin with. Over the next few years, there were times—admittedly, usually when Charlie was drunk—when he thought about asking Marco about it, forcing him to confess. But after a while it hadn't seemed important.

As Charlie found out later, Marco was waiting for his dad to die before he came out. He was twenty-two when his dad was diagnosed with cancer. That Christmas, his youngest sister, Rosemary, had taken him aside after lunch.

“I don't know if you're planning on telling anyone or not,” she had said, “but if Dad finds out you're gay, it will finish him off.”

Marco's other siblings were practically a different generation; they'd all been married for years, living in the suburbs with their kids. It wouldn't have even crossed their minds that Marco wouldn't go down the exact same path they had. But Rosemary was only a few years older than Marco, had friends with younger brothers and sisters who'd gone to school with Marco and Charlie. That must have been how she found out.

At first, Marco told Charlie, he had resented Rosemary for what she said, but a part of him had known she was right. Marco was the youngest of seven children; when he was born, his father was already forty. He was from a different culture, a different era, and the idea of men being with other men was beyond his comprehension. Marco didn't want to be estranged from his father when he died. So he kept his mouth shut. He didn't tell his mother, his brothers, his other sisters, his friends. Three years it took his dad to die, and in all that time, Marco never told a soul.

After his father died, he became what he himself described as a
raving
poofter
, picking up men three or four nights a week. Once he had gotten that out of his system, he became like all the other people Charlie knew. He had flings; he had one-night stands; he had boyfriends from time to time. Then he met Guy. Guy was a historian who had spent six years writing and researching an epic five-hundred-thousand-word text on the Second Fleet.

“The
Second
Fleet?” Charlie had asked when he first met him.

Guy had laughed. “That's what everyone says. ‘Who could care less about the Second Fleet?'”

Guy was in his early forties, quietly spoken with a surprisingly hearty laugh. He was well read, well traveled, well adjusted. He had a penchant for shaker furniture and cello concertos. He adored Marco. After they had been together for six months, Marco moved in with Guy and his spoiled cat Marmaduke.

Marco had always been particularly sarcastic toward people who were overly gushing about their significant others, but after he met Guy, Charlie began to hear him use phrases like
everything
I've been looking for
and eventually
the
love
of
my
life
. And Guy, it appeared, felt the same. There was only one thing that marred their happiness, Marco told Charlie over one of their lunches at the Windsor: they couldn't get married.

“It's so unfair,” Marco had said. “Guy and I love each other. We want to spend our lives together. We're not hurting anyone else. How can that be wrong? It's no different from any man and woman who want to get married. Imagine if you weren't allowed to marry Juliet. Imagine if it was all you wanted, and you couldn't do it.”

Charlie had found such a situation impossible to imagine. He found himself in the opposite position, in which everyone wanted him and Juliet to get married, except Charlie himself.

x x x

Three or four times a year, Juliet received a magazine called
Fideliter
in the mail, a glossy, full-color publication detailing the latest developments and achievements at her old school. “
Fideliter
was the school motto—the Latin word for
faithfully
,” Juliet explained. The school depicted in
Fideliter
bore no relation to Charlie's own experience of school. According to a letter from the principal in one edition, Fintona Girls' School was a school where students were “nurtured and encouraged to explore their talents.” If they didn't know what their talents were, they had every opportunity to find out. For the artistically inclined, there was music, drama, and dance. For those who excelled at languages, there were trips to France, Germany, and Japan. There were debating and mock trials, the Duke of Edinburgh Awards Scheme, excursions in a bus with the school logo on the side. As well as hockey, athletics, netball, and basketball, the girls could play soccer and Aussie Rules Football.

“I wish they'd show photos of them in footy shorts,” Charlie had said to Juliet when he read that.

In eleventh and twelfth grades, you could also do archery or kickboxing, sailing, ice skating, or tenpin bowling. Every time Charlie read the magazine, they seemed to be celebrating the opening of a state-of-the-art facility—a theater, a technology center, a science wing.

Charlie could not have imagined a school where every one of the students was dressed identically, but the photos were there to prove it. From ages five to eighteen, all the girls wore the same blazers and straw boaters, the same tunics and cardigans, the same shirts and ties and socks and shoes. Juliet had told Charlie there were even regulation underpants available at the uniform shop, although after sixth grade, no one bought those.

Charlie was fascinated by
Fideliter
. Often he read it from cover to cover, which was more than Juliet did. What he liked most about it was the opportunity to imagine Juliet as she had been when she was still at school. He could picture her, in the pages of
Fideliter
, with ankle socks and a high ponytail. He could imagine her in the school play, overly dramatic and wearing too much makeup. He could see her cheering for her friends in the athletics carnival. He felt sentimental about Juliet in a way he never had about his other girlfriends. He wished he had known her as a teenager.

The last two pages of
Fideliter
were devoted to
Old
Girls' News,
and these were the pages Juliet paid the most attention to. Some of the news was spectacular. There were ex-students doing postgraduate courses at Oxford, Harvard, and the Sorbonne, a girl who had become a lawyer for the United Nations. But most of the news was ordinary—this girl had gotten married, that one had had a baby, the class of 1983 had enjoyed their twenty-year reunion.

“I can't believe Fiona Warren got married,” Juliet would say. “Everyone thought she was a lesbian.”

One day, long before Whiskey's accident, when life was still simple, Charlie had come home from indoor soccer to find Juliet crying over her latest issue of
Fideliter
.

“What's wrong?” he asked, thinking she must have read some bad news about an old friend. But Juliet wasn't even looking at the
Old
Girls' News
. The heading on the page she had open said
Tenth
Grade
Drama
Camp
.

“They're so young,” Juliet said, pointing at the photos.

Charlie looked closer, read the caption: “A dramatic moment in
A
Streetcar
Named
Desire
.” He felt confused. “Too young to understand
Streetcar
, do you think?”

Juliet sniffed. “I remember tenth grade drama camp,” she said. “We had such a good time. It seems so long ago. I wish I could go back to school.”

“What do you mean, Jules? What's really the matter?”

Juliet had turned to the back page and jabbed her finger at a photo of a bridal party. “Everyone's getting married,” she said miserably. “I must be the only one left.”

x x x

Charlie did not know how to explain his feelings about marriage to Juliet. He could hardly understand them himself. When Whiskey told Charlie Juliet was the most beautiful girl he'd ever meet, he had been right. She still looked as beautiful to Charlie as she had the night he met her. Charlie thought he would never grow tired of looking at her. When she closed her eyes on the pillow at night, her face wore an expression of great concentration, as though falling asleep was something you had to focus on to achieve, like winning a race or passing an exam. But once she was asleep, she looked perfectly calm. She did not drool or snore or gurgle or twitch. She barely moved. Charlie loved to watch her sleep.