Contemporary Gay Romances (21 page)

“I found it! The spot!” Craig ran up to us. “There!” pointing down the beach.

“Where?” I asked.

“Just below those cliffs,” Craig said, sparring at me so suddenly I almost dropped the bigger beach bag, before he rushed off again, his big feet splat splatting the wet sand.

“I hope it’s not too much farther,” Mark said, only half-joking.

*

“Sto-op! Cra-ig! Don’t!”

He’d just dumped a baseball capful of cold Pacific water over my bare midriff. I leapt up and chased him into the ocean. At the water’s edge, he stopped and doubled back on me, using his superior stance and greater height and weight to throw me off balance into the swirling surf and there to grab handfuls of wet sand and thrust them deep into my Speedo. This proved to be incredibly annoying, and in addition, provided Craig with—if not the exact erotic stimulation he was looking for—then at least a substitute he could find gratifying.

“Cra-ig! Sto-op!”

I managed to pull away from his grip. But he wasn’t to be stopped so easily. For the next ten minutes he was at me constantly, after me, up and down the beach until I heard myself squealing like a teenaged girl, and then I figured out a way to trip him up and we were both rolling around in the surf, him unexpectedly so, soaking his walking shorts.

Chastened, he only made faint stabs at harassing me while I edged back to our towels. Mark was ostentatiously ignoring us, reading an oversized Somerset Maugham biography and listening to his portable CD player.

“Now I’m going to have to take these off and dry them!” Craig complained.

I would be washing sand out of my genitals all night because of his shenanigans. “Too bad! You should have known better than to come after me,” I said, searching through the beach bag for my own book.

“Well, I’m not going to sit around naked here in front of everyone,” he declared. He pointed behind us where the lower cliffs dropped into a half-natural, half-manmade stairway up, and where we had seen men dressed in only shorts and bathing suits standing about, striking poses: obviously the famous cruising area of Black’s Beach. “I’ll find a spot where I can be alone.”

“Who’s stopping you?” I let my disdain drip.

“Rat!” he said, without much heat.

“Dimwit!” I answered back, equally cool.

“I’d say more, except there’s a third person here,” Craig declared.

“He can’t hear with those headphones on. And he doesn’t care,” I added. That, I knew would really irritate Craig: the fact that Mark was so completely ignoring him despite all of Craig’s efforts to get his attention.

Craig grunted something under his breath, grabbed his backpack off the sand, and went muttering off.

I settled on the beach towel, covering myself with sunblock #30, then located my own paperback.

A few minutes later, Mark’s CD ended. He dropped the book and looked around.

“Put some of this on my shoulder blades, will you?” I asked.

“Where did he go?”

“Up there.” I gestured with my head.

“To cruise?”

“To dry off. And sulk.”

“Why sulk?”

“Because you’re ignoring him,” I said.

“He’s cute,” Mark said, meaning that he thought Craig had a good body. Which was undeniably true.

“He’s cute,” I admitted.

“But that mouth!” Mark laughed. “Sue really hated it! When I went to pick him up to come meet you at the airport, he wouldn’t stop saying terrible things about straights. I thought I’d have to throw him out of the car.”

“That’s Craig’s way of trying to impress you.”

“Sure.”

“No kidding. He’s wondering what in hell he’s doing sleeping with me now that he’s seen you. He’s wondering how to drop me and get in the sack with you.”

“It’s not going to happen.”

“I know that. And Craig knows too. That’s why he’s sulking.”

“You really pick ’em.”

“What about you and the Christmas Child?”

Mark’s own sometime boyfriend back in New York, nicknamed because of when and how he’d first appeared in Mark’s life and because of his puerile temperament.

“He’s no better,” Mark admitted, then went into a long story involving the Child that ended with us both shaking our heads.

The sun was hot, the breeze off the water intermittent, all of it quite delicious. We lay on our towels enjoying.

“We have good luck with beaches,” I said.

“I’ll say! We seem to spend a lot of time together on them.”

It was true. The long shorelines of Fire Island Pines, where we shared a house for a decade of summers, the more ragged, high-cliffed beaches of Truro where we’d take a house each September, the Hamptons, the nude beach at San Gregorio in the Bay Area, Las Tunas whenever we were in L.A., Jones Beach, Far Rockaway Beach, Gilgo. Our new favorites were on Turks and Caicos Islands. Mark’s business partner owned a place and we’d begun going there a few weeks at a time in the winter: wide white beaches, five shades of green-water Atlantic on the north, with a western shore only ten minutes from the house by boat, a strand so untouched we’d see no one, not a boat, not a footprint, all afternoon, and fish so unused to humans they’d bite your toes, while birds with markings unlike any I’d ever seen perched on our sun hats and pecked at the designs on our T-shirts and towels, thinking them edible. The east side was limestone, rocky inlets, half harbors, dreary fishing dock areas. South was Sapodilla Bay with languorous pale turquoise waters where I snorkeled; beachless, although the house was built on coral shelf perfect for sunning under papaya trees. We took boat rides with a local named Hammerhead Joe (he’d lift his shirt to show you the long knotted black scar from a shark he’d fought off) to nearby Shell Cay, Pine Cay, or to unnamed islets favored by plumed egrets, or populated by iguanas the size of Dalmatians.

“At least I have beaches to remember,” Mark said in that suddenly dark tone of voice he’d used earlier on the cliff: this time it was laced through with something else: irony? bitterness?

I wasn’t thinking when I replied, “I, for one, plan to go to the beach when I’m so old I’m doddering.”

“Not me,” Mark said. “You saw. I’ve lost all my strength.”

What was he saying. Surely he didn’t mean…?

“It was your nightmare. You said…”

“At work I’ve got to take naps every afternoon,” Mark interrupted. “I close the door and tell Cindy not to let calls through, and I put my feet upon the desk. Sometimes I curl up on the rug in front of my desk. Every afternoon. One, two hours.”

“I didn’t know that. Since when?”

“Every afternoon,” he repeated. “It’s started,” he added in a smaller, less certain voice. “I know it. It’s…started.”

That electrical jolt rushed up my spine again.

“Sue noticed right away when I got out here,” Mark went on. “And I don’t mean she just noticed how much I’m sleeping since I got here. She…we always take photos of each other every time we see each other. This time she wanted to wait till today. After I’d gotten more color is the way she put it.”

“Mark! You’re not saying you’re…?” Symptomatic was the word. Or sero-converted.

“I’m saying it’s started,” Mark said flatly. Then, “Do you like him?”

The change of subject was so odd that for a second I thought Mark was going to say that Craig was symptomatic too.

“We have good sex and all,” I said. “But I don’t think it will develop into anything or that he’ll move East to be with me. In fact, I’d say my being here these past few days has pointed that out.”

Not what Mark wanted to hear. I remembered how much he’d encouraged me to get the air tickets, to reserve the room in the Balboa Park Inn. I’d thought because he’d wanted my company here.

“I’m not that disappointed,” I began.

“Because I’d like to know that you have…you know, someone…you like.”

He’d encouraged me to come out here and go after Craig following our hot little affair in Manhattan two months ago, because Mark wanted someone to be around after Mark was gone. This was too much.

“Look, maybe this is all just stress?” I tried. “All the work at the firm? The paper you had to deliver at the convention?”

“Maybe.” Mark didn’t want to argue. We never argued.

“Soon it will be summer. You’ll hang out more. And in the fall we’ll go back to the Caribbean. That always restores you.”

He let me go on, looking at me in that fond way that he had for no one else in the world, no one, so I felt calmed again. The subject had been breached and we’d shoved it back.

We went back to reading, listening to music, sipping soft drinks. Above us, hang gliders in loose formation, blotting out the sun, speckled the sands with shadows. I wished…

Craig chose then to return, his shorts already dry.

“I did not have sex!” he declared, unasked.

“No doubt you were asked by scores,” I said.

“It was sug-ges-ted,” Craig said, suggestively, looking at where Mark lay, gorgeous on his towel. “But I told them some nasty older guy down here had at me so voraciously I had nothing left to give.”

“Poor you!”

“Had at me night and day,” he insisted. “You’re burning!” he said and used that as an excuse to turn me onto my stomach, straddle my hips, and seductively and thoroughly rub my entire back and legs with suntan lotion. When that had completely aroused me and failed to get Mark’s attention, Craig climbed off, declared he had to wash the gook off, and headed for the water.

He decided to go for a walk. When he was too far to be seen, Mark sat up, put on a T-shirt. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

“The ammonite fossils? I haven’t really looked.”

“Let’s look!” he said. I too put on a shirt and we aimed toward the nearest cliff face, the direction opposite where Craig had gone.

The cliff was layered like a wedding cake. Actually many more times than that, but the strata were all clearly delineated.

“Hard to believe each layer is hundreds of years,” Mark mused.

“More like thousands of years.”

“And this green streak?”

“Believe it or not that’s aquatic life, algae and other early water plants. As they died, they dropped to the surface and were squashed. The streak represents a time when this was all covered with water. Given these sediments below and above, I’d hazard it was a huge shallow lake for a couple of thousand years. Then land rose, emptied the water, and covered it with soil.”

“Your fossils would be there?”

“If it were a branch of the ocean they should be. They were so common then. Far more common than fish or shellfish today. The ocean was thick with ammonites during the Mesozoic. They comprised ninety percent of sea life. Eighty percent of all the animal life on the planet. They were wiped out during the great same extinction that killed off the dinosaurs. You can see the line where it happened on the big cliff. It’s known as the K-T boundary.”

“A giant lake,” Mark mused. “With its shoreline where? Out there somewhere?” pointing to the Pacific.

“Pretty far out, I’d guess. Then it became desert. But of course during that time this exact chunk of land wasn’t here at thirty-two degrees north of the equator. It was much farther south. Somewhere off what’s now Peru.”

“Continental drift,” he said. “Big plates moving slowly. When was that, about sixty million years ago?”

“Scientists call it deep time. Remember back in 1987, on my birthday, when we read about that star that went nova in the Southern Hemisphere, the one in the lesser Magellanic Cloud? That took place about the same time. Because it was so far away, it’s taken all this time for the burst of light it caused to reach us. All this time for the light made in that huge explosion to stimulate our vision.”

“Deep time.” Mark was beginning to perspire. I moved us along a section of the cliff out of the sun. “Eighty percent of the animal life just vanished forever… There must be shallow time, too,” he suddenly said. “The shallowest of all time.” He laughed and turned and sat down on a little sand hill hidden by this bend of cliff. “That’s
my
time.”

“Mark.”

“Go on looking. I want to think about eighty percent of all life vanishing forever and no one even noticing.”

“They were noticed.”

“You can’t even find their fossils! And you’re looking!”

There’s a point in everyone who is interested in science’s life when you are suddenly faced with having to specialize. It’s a fearful moment, and the real fear is that you’ve missed something essential, some moment during that decade and a half of nature walks and difficult-to-explain-to-others experiments with planaria worms and dirt and matches and soot that all young scientists have experienced, some moment when—sitting in a shaft of sunlight, hidden in reeds, you watch an egg hatch, minuscule life emerge, kicking, clawing, scurrying—a moment that somehow you become aware of
must
happen. But in happening, forever will replace that other moment in which something else, somewhere else, equally directing in its potential, now
cannot
happen. There you are, however choosing: or having chosen for you: life—or once-life.