Almost Like Being in Love (10 page)

He’s not going to be thrilled about this.

Ch

P.S. Clayton turns edgy whenever he’s afraid you don’t need him any more. The rest of the world learned that in 1979. Where were you?

MCKENNA & WEBB

A LAW PARTNERSHIP

118 CONGRESS PARK, SUITE 407

SARATOGA SPRINGS, NEW YORK 12866

MEMORANDUM

TO
: Charleen

FROM
: Craig

DATE
: Color Me Barbra

SUBJECT
: Noah

1. In addition to being a terrific father, Jody’s responsible, intelligent, kind, redoubtable, loyal, cavalier, hunky, and moral. I can see why that would put you off. Especially when he pulls degenerate stunts like leaving red roses under your windshield wiper.

2. All right. If it’ll keep Costanzo happy, I won’t sue the Pioneer Scouts again until July. Early July.

3. In 1979, I was asleep in Clayton’s arms.

Craig McKenna

Attorney notes

Things to Do

___ Don’t bite off more than you can chew.

The only up side to the kind of day where you should have blown your brains out at 8:00 in the morning is driving your Miata through the sleepy elms that ring Loughberry Lake, knowing that in about ninety seconds you’ll be pulling into the driveway of the two-bedroom-with-den that you’ve shared for twelve years with your very own Lancelot, who at this precise moment is waiting to fold you into his heart, kiss your troubled brow, and tell you that everybody in the world is wrong except you.

But he isn’t there. The lights are still off and his Bronco is gone. So you fight off the disappointment, you remember how much you love him, and you take it in stride. Fuck you! You’re an asshole! I want a divorce!

Then you find the note on the dining room table, the champagne glass with the forget-me-not in it, and the box containing a wedding band that had to cost at least three million dollars.

CLAYTON’S HARDWARE

serving Saratoga Springs since 1988

Honey:

You might as well go ahead and open this now. I wanted to give it to you in front of a fire, but I’ve gotta work late.

You’d better like it. I paid retail.

C

This is what we call romance, Clayton-style. And it comes in many flavors: When he popped for my thirtieth birthday trip to France, it was only to keep me from booking us on a cruise instead. '“I’m not gonna spend fourteen days watching three hundred horny guys look at you.”(

When we nearly got into a fistfight in the Ikea parking lot after I’d tried to buy us a king-sized mattress and he’d insisted on a double, his reasons turned out to be deceptively simple. '“The one place I’m not gonna lose you is in bed.”( And when neither of us could afford the five days in Greece but we went anyway, it didn’t have anything to do with the wonders of the Ancient World. '“I always wanted to make out with you in the Acropolis.”(

One thing I learned a long time ago. Nobody argues with Clayton and wins.

‚There’s this new judo-kind-of-thing called tai chi. I’ve got a class in twenty
minutes.‛

‚Clayton, tai chi has been around for four thousand years.‛

‚Bullshit. I only heard about it in October.‛

Clayton wouldn’t admit until our first anniversary that he’d begun scoping me out a solid two weeks before I’d ever set eyes on him without his football helmet. Not that I’d have noticed him anyway, since I already had my hands full trying to convince the Harvard athletic department that the 5-foot-8 walk-on wasn’t a practical joke—and once the shock had worn off, they were actually willing to let me stick around until final cut, sort of as a consolation prize (not, however, with a straight face). That lasted until our third scrimmage, when I was lying on the bench working out a kink and an interior lineman accidentally sat on my head. '“You’re easy to miss,” he said by way of apology.( So when I claim that my career was cut short by a football injury, I’m telling the truth. As long as wounded pride counts.

What I hadn’t learned during my four years as a Beckley gridiron celebrity was that, in the real world, they have a term for a player who’s at least a foot and a half shorter than the rest of his squad: “lunch.”

Recreationally, I was a moving target; therapeutically, I also turned out to be terrific exercise for any jock who needed to stretch his rotator cuff by tossing me across the 50. So in both practice and theory, there was no reason to expect that I wouldn’t eventually be removed from Soldier’s Field in a Baggie—except that nobody ever got the chance. Instead, I’d find myself tearing toward the 10 with the ball under my arm and three pairs of pounding feet closing in on me like a pack of velociraptors that hadn’t eaten since the Cretaceous Era, when suddenly—coming from the right—I’d hear an unexpected CRUNCH! and a SOCK! and a POW! and a

“Get lost!” in rapid succession, and seconds later I’d turn up in the end zone—free, clear, and not bleeding. Though this happened a good half-dozen times, I never actually learned the identity of the tackle who’d appointed himself my own Han Solo—because in full uniform, he was indistinguishable from the Prudential Tower.

‚How come you kept them from smithereening me when we didn’t even
know each other yet?‛

‚You never saw your ass in football pants. It would have been like letting
them take a jackhammer to the Mona Lisa.‛

Clayton played hard-to-get right from the start. So I let him. When he pretended to be aloof, I was aloofer. When he went out of his way to avoid me, I avoided him first. When he’d greet me with a blunt “Hey, McKenna,” he’d get an even blunter “Hey, Bergman” in return. Nothing makes him crazier than not having the upper hand. And once I’d figured that out, he was a marked man.

“Charleen, who’s the hunk with the buzz cut?”

“Sssssh!” she hissed. “That’s Clayton Bergman. He’s from the Bronx, his father was a longshoreman, and he’s straight.”

“In your dreams,” I whispered back. “Not with a body like that.” It was the second week of freshman year, and we were sitting in the fifth row of a three hundred–seat amphitheater that passed for one of Harvard’s smaller classrooms. Though I didn’t learn the truth for months, Clayton had deliberately plunked himself squarely into my line of vision so I could watch him ignoring me for an hour. It worked.

“
Hannibal the Carthaginian defined modern warfare blah blah blah
.”

Where did he get those shoulders? “
Not to be confused with Alexander the
Great blah blah blah.‛
He could pass for a war hero.
Any war
. I wonder what he’d look like in a tunic? Wrestling me. “
An ingenious military tactic
called the phalanx blah blah blah.‛
He’s got to know I’m staring at him. The least he could do is stare back. “
Lessons learned the hard way during the
Peloponnesian War blah blah blah.‛
I wish I were dead.

After class, I made Charleen tag along with me as we followed him across Harvard Square. The issue confronting us was how to run into him accidentally so it didn’t look like we were doing exactly what we were doing; of secondary concern was beating the traffic light across from the Coop before we lost him in the crowd. In the process, we caused a four-car pile-up—but that was only because Charleen lost a shoe while we were running from the oil tanker just before it veered away from us and plowed into the FedEx van parked in front of BayBanks.

“That’s the end,” she insisted as we caught our breath on the sidewalk next to the Wursthouse. “Effectively, unequivocally the end. Craig, I will not allow them to scrape me up from Mass Ave just so you can get laid!”

“Look! Look!” I cried, grabbing her arm and pointing half a block to the east. “He’s going into Grendel’s!” Charleen relaxed immediately as though the whole matter were settled.

“Perfect,” she said briskly, getting her Darien, Connecticut, voice back.

“They have a salad bar. Nobody’s going to suspect a chance encounter over the endive.” Yes! What did Travis used to say? The journey of a million miles begins with a single step.

The restaurant was jammed, but since neither one of us was hungry anyway, we picked up a couple of very small plates and waited until Clayton had reached the chick peas. Then we snuck in line behind him.

“Hey,” I said, looking up in phony surprise as our arms bumped over the scallions. “I liked the way you took him to the mat about Hannibal.

You really put the old fart in his place.” Clayton gave me the once-over like he was trying to figure out where he knew me from, while I made a point of not staring at the sexy stubble on his chin or the way his nose wrinkled up when he was deep-thinking. It was the longest three seconds of my life. Then he shrugged and said, “So?” And he left.

‚Honey, if we could get married, would you do it?‛

‚I don’t believe in appropriating heterosexual rituals.‛

‚Not even if I got you a ring?‛

‚Platinum?‛

Twenty minutes later, over coffee at the Greenhouse, I was examining four different ways of bumping myself off when Charleen looked up from a nonfat decaf double chocolate mocha and blurted, “Oh, shut up.

Didn’t you notice the way he was stringing you along until you looked away first? You couldn’t have played into his hands any better if you’d called him Captain Butler and swooned into the dill. Men are so transparent.” For just a second, all thoughts of lynching myself were put on hold while I leaned in to her urgently.

“Wait a minute,” I demanded, “and think before you answer. You mean I have a chance?”

“I mean the ever-dwindling supply of heterosexual males just shrunk some more,” she sighed.

“No, no,” I assured her empathetically. “It shrunk a long time ago.

You’re just finding out about it now. What should I do?”

“Dish it right back to him,” she ordered. “He’s got it coming and you need a hobby. Besides, you haven’t mentioned Travis in four hours.”

Charleen and I had first met in the Freshman Union shortly after I’d unpacked my jockstraps and decided I hated my roommate, I hated my life, and I despised Boston. Truth to tell—and except for the roomie, who really was an asshole—I’d been moping around campus for three days, daring a broken heart to heal. (Nothing feels better than knowing you’re the only guy since Romeo who figured out true love after he lost it.) His name was Travis and I’d met him in high school. At first I thought we were just buddies—until the third or fourth time I woke up naked and found him sleeping in my arms like a fucking angel. Duh. You don’t have to hit me over the head.

“I just can’t figure this out,” I said, kissing him yet again.

“It’s easy,” he replied, kissing back. “You love me.”

“Oh. Right.” From there on it was the Craig and Travis Show—or vice versa depending on who wanted top billing. We got through final exams together, we invaded Manhattan together, we took summer jobs at Colony Records together, and we rented a one-room sublet on West 92nd Street together—with a tiny bed that was still way too big for just us. 'That’s where we figured out Chin-in-the-Neck and Falling-Asleep-Kissing, two separate routines that took a lot of practice.) It was only for eight weeks and I guess I should have seen the handwriting on the wall—but when you’re 18, you always think it’s going to last forever. It doesn’t.

Putting him on the plane to USC in September was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, especially with both of us pretending it was only temporary but deep down knowing otherwise. It felt like my whole life had ended before it had even geared up to start.

We sent each other goofy letters for a couple of weeks, but then he stopped writing to me. And Harvard didn’t make it any better. Our freshman orientation advisor looked like Travis, the guy in the Coop walked like Travis, the guy in the cafeteria smiled like Travis, the guy in the library talked like Travis, and the guy on Mt. Auburn Street had a butt like Travis—except nobody in the world has a cuter one. It didn’t make any sense. Fenway Park was around the corner. Carlton Fisk and my Red Sox were practically neighbors. But who cared? The boy who’d taken a piece of me with him was 2,988.2 miles away. Zip code to zip code.

Charleen was a different story. Tall and honey blonde, she’d escaped gleefully to Cambridge after a lifetime of recreational asphyxiation in Upson Downs, where she’d never quite managed to introduce her Connecticut half to her liberal half. (She showed up at her coming-out party dressed in 501s and a tank top. Darien is still reeling.) But when she plopped down next to me in the Union lounge, she wasn’t in much better shape than I was.

“Look,” she snapped, without preamble. “You’re the seventh cute guy I’ve met since I got here. The other six had boyfriends. If you tell me the same thing, I’m going right out a window.” Without glancing up, I sighed miserably—a soulful tremor that had “Montague” written all over it—and told her exactly what she didn’t want to hear.

“I have an ex. Need a push?” So for the next two hours she got my Master’s thesis on Travis; after that, we introduced ourselves.

Which is why Charleen was the perfect partner in crime. We were both single, we were both pre-law, and we both liked men. Nobody else could have piloted Project Clayton the way she did:
1. Don’t ever look at him again.

Right. This is the same as telling an 8-year-old kid not to think about a hippopotamus—particularly when the hippo in question is built like Knute Rockne, with 52-inch pecs and 17-inch arms and a raw masculine intensity that could power the entire eastern half of Massachusetts every time he sneezed. But I tried. It nearly killed me, but I tried.

2. Wait until he’s eating alone in the cafeteria, then don’t sit with
him.

An opportunity that presented itself at least once a day and four times on weekends. I’d make sure he saw me standing at the register with my tray, scoping out the room to see if I could find a buddy to join. At first he’d turn his head away in advance, until he realized that I’d passed right by him and hadn’t even noticed he was there. (By now my peripheral vision had become a sixth sense: I could walk a straight line and still tell you exactly what was happening behind me, provided I didn’t collide with a wall while I was doing it.( This went on for less than a week before it really started to burn his ass. I could tell. Even peripherally.