Dumping Billy (2 page)

“Oy vey!”
Elliot said with the best Yiddish accent a gay man from Indiana could manage. “When will you give up on this quest to get every little boy at Andrew Country Day in touch with his true feelings? And why discourage magic in his case? What else does the kid have?”

“Oh, come on, Elliot! Because magic won’t work, and he mustn’t think it’s his fault when it fails.” She shook her head. “You of all people. A trained statistician. A man who could trade this job in, triple your salary, and become chief actuarial at any pension fund.
You’re
telling me to encourage magic?”

Elliot shrugged. “Haven’t you ever had magical things happen?”

Kate refused the bait. Elliot, raised in the Midwest and stoic to the bone, had once told her, “The unexamined life is the only one worth living.” He often challenged her about the efficacy of psychology. Now, just to annoy her, he was going to take a perverse stand on magic. “If you think you’re going to start an argument today,” she warned him, “you’re out of your mind.” Then, to annoy him—as well as for his own good—she added, “I didn’t think corned beef was good for your cholesterol.”

“Oh, what’s a few hundred points one way or the other?” he asked cheerfully, swallowing another mouthful.

“You’ve got a death wish,” Kate said.

“Ooooh. Harsh words from a shrink.” He winced mockingly as he opened a Snapple.

“Look, I’m leaving,” she told him, gathering some notes from her desk and putting them into her file cabinet. If she left now, she’d be able to do a bit of shopping before meeting her friend Bina. She took a lipstick and mirror out of her purse, dabbed the color over her mouth, and smiled widely to make sure she didn’t have lipstick on her teeth. “I’ll see you for dinner.”

“Where are you going?”

“None of your beeswax.”

“A secret? Come on. Tell! What if I threw a tantrum like Brian?” Elliot reached into the toy box at his feet. Then he hurled a stuffed bear in Kate’s direction. “Would you tell me then?” The plush missile hit her squarely in the face. Elliot curled up in the chair, held his hands in front of his face, and started to beg rapidly. “It was an accident. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

“I’ll show you sorry,” Kate warned. She threw the bear back at Elliot, but it missed him.

“You throw like a girl,” Elliot taunted. Then he picked up another animal and threw it at Kate. “Duck!” he called as he reached for yet another toy to throw. It was indeed a duck, yellow and fluffy.

“Duck this, you math nerd,” Kate almost shouted as she grabbed a fuzzy rabbit and pummeled Elliot’s head. It felt good to blow off some steam.

“Abuse! Abuse!” Elliot screamed in delight as he rolled off the chair to protect himself. “Teacher abuse! Teacher abuse!” he continued to yell.

“Shut up, you idiot!” Kate told him, and rushed to close the office door. She turned from it just in time to get a stuffed elephant right in the face. It stunned her for a moment, then she grabbed the pachyderm and lunged at Elliot. “I’ll show you abuse, you sniveling cholesterol warehouse,” she threatened as she fell on top of Elliot and beat him repeatedly with the toy.

Elliot fought back with both an inflatable flamingo
and
a stuffed dog. He might be gay, but he was no wussy. When both he and Kate were exhausted, they sat panting and laughing together in the big chair, Kate on top. The door opened.

“Excuse me,” said Dr. McKay. Despite his words, he wasn’t the type to excuse anything. “I thought I heard a ruckus in here.”

George McKay, the principal of Andrew Country Day School, was a hypocrite, a social climber, a control freak, and a very bad dresser. He also had a knack of using words no one else had used for several decades.

“A ruckus?” Elliot asked.

“We were just testing out a new therapy,” Kate said quickly. “I hope we didn’t disturb you.”

“Well, it was certainly loud,” Dr. McKay complained.

“From the little I know of it, AAT—airborne animal therapy—can frequently be noisy,” Elliot said, poker-faced, “although it’s having significant measurable success in schools for the gifted, where it’s being pioneered. Of course,” he added, “it might not be right for this setting.” He nodded at Kate. “I’m not the expert,” he said as if he were deferring to Kate’s professional judgment. She smothered a laugh with a cough.

“We’ll put this off until after three o’clock, Dr. McKay,” she promised.

“All right, then,” he said primly. He left as suddenly as he had arrived, shutting the door with a firm but controlled click. Kate and Elliot looked at each other, waited for a count of ten, then burst into giggles that they had to stifle.

“AAT?” Kate gurgled.

“Hey, straight men love acronyms. Think of the army. He’ll be on the Internet in less than ten minutes, searching for ‘airborne animal therapy,’” Elliot predicted. He stood up and began collecting the stuffed animals. Kate got up to help him. The irony of the situation was that Elliot had helped Kate get hired, and since then George McKay had told several teachers that he suspected them of having an affair. Ridiculous as that idea was, the sight of the two of them in the chair was not one to instill confidence in Dr. McKay, who had frequently announced at teachers’ meetings that he “discouraged fraternizing among professional educational co-workers.”

When Kate and her “professional educational co-worker” finished laughing, she stood up, smoothed her skirt, and put her hair back up, this time with a barrette she found in her drawer. Elliot was standing still, looking down at the chair. He heaved a dramatic sigh.

“Oh, shit!” he told her. “You crushed my banana.” He held up the mangled fruit from his lunch bag, which had slipped under them during the battle.

Kate turned, struck the pose of a femme fatale, and rasped, “How times have changed. You used to like it when I did that.”

Elliot laughed. “I’ll leave all banana handling to you and Michael.”

Kate and her new boyfriend, Dr. Michael Atwood, were going to dinner with Elliot and his partner, Brice. It was Elliot’s introduction to Michael, and Kate felt a little flurry in her stomach at the thought. She hoped they liked each other. “If I don’t leave now, I’ll be late tonight,” she told him.

“Okay, okay.”

She grabbed her sweater from the back of her chair and moved toward the door.

“So you like your work so far,” Elliot said, watching her. As she passed by, Kate nodded. But she kept moving: She knew what was coming. “And even though I helped you get the job, you’re still not going to let me know where you’re going?”

Kate didn’t bother to answer as she sailed out of the room, Elliot scrambling to hurry after her. Elliot was what people in Brooklyn called “a nudge.”

Chapter Two

I
n all the years Kate had known Elliot—over ten now—he’d always managed to cheer her up when she was sad and support her in her successes. Now, as they walked down the corridor to his classroom, she glanced at him affectionately. The stretched-out orange T-shirt, the ugly green overshirt decorated with mustard, the slight love handles, and the wrinkled chinos didn’t make him look like much, but he had a keen mind and was a loving and generous friend. She felt a swell of gratitude toward him. As always, he had cheered her up and helped her make the break from school.

Kate was proud of the work she did with these kids. She had learned a lot from them, too. For one thing, the school catered to the children of the rich and successful, but Kate saw that money, privilege, and education brought on as much misery as had her own deprived childhood. She had lost her resentment of those with money, and she was grateful for that. She had not picked her calling for the money it earned; in fact, she regarded her work as a kind of vocation. It was one thing she never made light of, and she often found it hard to leave her work behind at the end of the day. But tonight she had to, to help Bina prepare for her big night and then, later, to introduce Michael to Elliot and Brice at dinner.

She waited just inside Elliot’s classroom as he chucked the offending lunch sack in a bin and started messing about in his untidy desk.

“You know, it’s very hard not to keep thinking about Brian. He’s so adorable, and has had a really difficult time. And I think the disappointment when his magic doesn’t work, which of course it won’t, could cause real problems later.” Kate sighed. “Boys are just so much more fragile than girls.”

“Tell me about it.” Elliot sighed deeply, too. “I’m still getting over the time Phyllis Bellusico told me I smelled.”

“Did you?” Kate asked, ready to be either his straight man or his audience. She was used to Elliot’s shticks. Since college they had been amusing each other with dark humor from their childhoods.

“Well, yes,” Elliot admitted reluctantly, “but I smelled
good.
I should have. I’d dumped an entire bottle of my mother’s White Shoulders into my underpants.”

“Pee-yuw,” Kate said, imitating any one of her school “clients.” “Maybe Brian has a point. I’d have to agree with Phyllis. And this happened . . . ?”

“In third grade, but with a little more therapy and Brice’s love and support, I expect to get over it in the next decade.”

Kate loved it when Elliot got going. She had to laugh. “Boys. They always break the thing they love.”

“Not if they can kill it,” Elliot replied bitterly. He had been tormented by kids in school. After a moment he said, “I have to go to Dean and DeLuca to get rice for our dinner tonight. Brice is making his world-famous risotto. You can tell Michael it’s your recipe. The way to a man’s heart . . .”

Kate looked up with a suspicious glance. “Yeah, and please be on your best behavior. Elliot,” she began, “can’t you just—”

“No,” Elliot retorted, “I can’t just anything.” He walked over to her and gave her a quick hug. “I don’t want to discourage or criticize you. I just want to make sure you know what you’re doing.”

“Oh, God! Who knows what they’re doing when they try to find a soul mate?”

“Well, you have a point there. But I don’t want you to be hurt again, Kate.” He paused.

Kate knew where he was going, and she didn’t want him to. Her last entanglement had ended so badly that she didn’t know how she would have gotten through it without Elliot. She had invested a lot of time and emotion in Steven Kaplan, all of it worse than wasted. It had left her more suspicious and distrusting of men than she liked to admit. One of the good things about Michael was that she could trust him completely. He might not have Steven’s banter and easy charm, but he had substance and achievement and sincerity. At least she thought so.

“That’s why you’re meeting Michael.”

“Ever since Steven, I get to meet your
new
boyfriends. I’d like you to just find the right one and make him an
old
boyfriend.”

“He’s thirty-four. Old enough?”

Elliot rolled his eyes. “I worry about you.”

Kate looked directly at Elliot. “This one is different. He’s got his doctorate in anthropology, and he’s very promising.”

“Promising what? You always think they’re different, and you always think they’re promising, until they bore you, and then—”

“Oh, stop,” Kate interrupted. “I know: I won’t pick losers on account of my father, and I won’t pick winners on account of my father. Yadda, yadda, yadda.”

“Don’t leave out your fear of commitment, yadda.”

“I’ll have you committed if you bring that up one more time. How come for thirty-one years you’re allowed to be a gay bachelor—in both respects of the phrase—and then one day you hook up with Brice. Bingo! But since then I’m neurotic for not doing the same.”

“Hey, I don’t want you to hook up with Brice,” Elliot cried in mock protest. “We’re both strictly monogamous.”

“I can’t tell you how relieved I am to hear that,” Kate retorted. “But don’t project your fears onto me. It isn’t easy to find a kindhearted, dependable, intelligent, sensual single man in Manhattan.”

“Tell me about it!” Elliot exclaimed. “I had to try almost every guy on the island before I met Brice.”

“Try not to be bitter, Elliot. I try so hard not to be.” She reached up and wiped off a remaining bit of banana from his mouth with her thumb, then gave him a little peck on the lips. “Do you really have to be gay?” Then she smiled. Elliot was everything to her except her lover. And sometimes she thought that’s what made her love him the most. Elliot was safe. Unlike the other men in her life, Elliot would always be there.

“What makes you think I’m gay?” Elliot asked with wide-eyed innocence. “Is that your professional opinion, doctor, or just a guess? Is it my spectator pumps?”

In fact, Elliot was not a flamboyant homosexual. He didn’t look or act like what Kate’s old Brooklyn crowd might have called “a fag,” and like most of the young gay men in New York, he didn’t go in for the high-maintenance
GQ.
Elliot looked and acted like a grade school math teacher—no, what he looked like, she thought affectionately, was a classic nerd: The only thing missing was the broken glasses held together with tape.

“How did a little queer kid from Indiana get to be so well-adjusted?” Kate asked him, also not for the first time.

Elliot reached over, took one of Kate’s hands, and held it in both of his. “Listen closely,” he told her, “because I am going to tell you something from Indiana about getting in touch with your true feelings.” He looked at her intently and asked, “Are you listening? Because I am
not
going to repeat this.” Kate nodded, and Elliot continued. “I got in touch with my true feelings by learning how to mask them very early in life. When you realize that your true feelings are most likely going to get the shit kicked out of you, you learn how to hide them and nurse them inside of you for as long as you have to until you find a safe place to express them.” He smiled and gave Kate’s hand a gentle squeeze. “You and Brice are where I can express them. And I don’t recommend kids try to find a best friend and lover when they’re in Andrew Country Day.”

“I hear you,” Kate agreed, and thought of poor Brian again.

“So, what
are
you doing now before dinner? Feel like making the trip to Dean and DeLuca with me?”