Remembering Christmas (30 page)
Read Remembering Christmas Online
Authors: Drew Ferguson
Although there was noise all around them, impatient travelers singing along with the Christmas music, rowdy barflies making one holiday toast after the other, the air around Theo and Rob was suddenly quiet. They maintained eye contact for as long as they could, then eyed their empty glasses wondering what to say or do next. Theo acted first; when in doubt, joke. “Well Stephanie did have an amazing time,” Theo said. “Just read page sixty-seven of my yearbook, she wrote it right there, in red ink, âThanks, Teddy, I had an amazing time at the prom.'”
“She wrote the same thing in my yearbook!” Rob declared.
Theo kicked Rob playfully under the table. “She did not!”
“I don't know, I don't even know where that thing is,” Rob said, kicking Theo back, the side of his foot finding Theo's calf. “I do remember Debbie wrote about three pages in the back, she wrote so much she had to continue on the page with the lunch ladies' photos.”
Sometimes men, gay or straight, could be so ignorant. “Because she loved you!” Theo declared. “You guys could have been a perfect couple.”
“Why? The prom was our only date.”
“That's how things start,” Theo explained, then began to rattle on, not fully aware of every word that was rattling out of his mouth. “I just remember being jealous, I mean really jealous of her 'cause you guys looked great together, you were both Italian, for a while there you both had the same haircut, that grungy kind of postâDavid Cassidy shag thing, your parents knew each other, you both loved English class, you sat next to each other in the back and were always whispering. One day when she kept passing you notes all freakin' class, I swear to God I was trying to figure out a way to cut off her hand with my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle ruler, but I didn't want to risk detention so I . . .”
“You were jealous of Debbie?” Rob interrupted.
I can sort of accept that you're this happy heterosexual now, but I cannot accept that you're stupid.
“Rob, come on, you must have known I was jealous.”
“Rob, come on, you must have known I was jealous.”
“Why must I have known that?” Rob asked.
“Because . . .” Theo started, but couldn't figure out how to finish all the screwed-up, complicated feelings that were his teenage mind and heart.
“I thought you knew me better than that?” Theo thought Rob looked hurt, but that couldn't be true. “Debbie meant nothing to me, you were closer to her than I was, especially when she was in that show.”
“Oh my God,
Gypsy!
Her Mama Rose is still talked about!” Theo gushed. “I can still picture her ripping through âRose's Turn,' and Mr. Marsch knew somebody who knew somebody and he was able to get the huge âRose' light they used for one of the national tours of the show. Every night when that light came on and Debbie belted out that song, the audience flipped out!”
Gypsy!
Her Mama Rose is still talked about!” Theo gushed. “I can still picture her ripping through âRose's Turn,' and Mr. Marsch knew somebody who knew somebody and he was able to get the huge âRose' light they used for one of the national tours of the show. Every night when that light came on and Debbie belted out that song, the audience flipped out!”
Rob was amused by Theo's excitement, but he didn't share in it. “You see, I wasn't jealous of you and Debbie. Maybe it's 'cause I never got into the whole musical theatre thing.”
Well if that isn't proof that you're not a poof.
“You missed out on some great experiences, my friend.”
“You missed out on some great experiences, my friend.”
Shaking his head, Rob smiled. “No, I had some great experiences, thanks to you, my friend.” Theo fought every buzzed urge in his body not to bring up the peach schnapps from prom night, and just when his resolve was growing weak was shocked to hear Rob mention it first. “And yeah, I do remember the peach schnapps.”
Bing Crosby and David Bowie were singing a duet; if that wasn't a sign that miraculous things could happen, Theo didn't know what was. Holding on tight to that sign of the Second Coming or the apocalypse, Theo forged ahead, saying things he had only said in his mind for the past fifteen years. “I remember exactly how it tasted on your lips.”
Again Rob smiled, which completely unnerved Theo. Why wasn't he getting uncomfortable? Why wasn't he dashing out the door into the snow to flag down a plane and demand it fly him back to Fairfield? Why was he acting like a gay man?
“Despite being forced to sit through one lame musical after another, that was a very sweet time,” Rob admitted. “All of high school was very sweet, thanks to you.”
“Then why . . .” Theo felt the courage leave his body, float away like a snowflake in a storm. But a wind came and blew the snowflake back, making it swirl until it landed safely in Rob's waiting hands.
“Did I marry a woman?”
“Yeah.” It was all Theo had the strength to say.
Rob slid the empty tumbler closer to Theo so it was less than an inch from his fingers. He looked down at Theo's hands, and he may have wanted to reach out and grab them, but he didn't; he didn't pull away, but he kept his grip on his glass. When he looked up at Theo his bangs fell to the side, his hair looked so soft, like his skin, Theo wanted to test them both, see which one was softest, but he didn't dare move, he felt like he was sitting next to Rob's indoor pool again, with Rob's head in his lap, afraid to breathe. This time at least he didn't have to ask Rob to look at him. “When I was finally away from you, in college, I changed,” Rob said. “I hadn't really given it that much thought when I was with you. I mean, I know that some of the kids talked behind our backs and called us The Gay Boys.”
“One of the more kind remarks,” Theo added.
A tilt of the head, a conspiratorial smile. “I honestly have to say those remarks, those words, they didn't really bother me.”
“Because down deep you knew you weren't the gay boy everybody was talking about?” Theo asked, with more than a hint of sarcasm.
Oddly, Rob didn't bristle from the comment, nor did he sprinkle onto the conversation his own serving of sarcasm. He leaned in closer, touched Theo's hand, and kept looking right into his eyes. “No, they didn't bother me because I didn't care about them,” he corrected. “I only cared about you, Teddy, you know that, don't you?”
Like a child who for weeks had been begging to sit on Santa's lap only to retreat to the safety of his mother's side when the moment arrived, Theo pulled his hand away from Rob's gentle touch. Slightly embarrassed, he rubbed his hands over his thighs and then like a pouting child sat on his hands. And like a pouting child he remained silent for a few seconds while he thought about it. Finally he replied, “Yeah, I do.”
Bing and Bowie were rudely interrupted by a loud female voice that demanded attention from all Lambert-St. Louis International Airport passengers. When she started to speak in the flat, nasally Midwestern tone, sounding like Madonna did before she got all Anglophiled, a part of Theo wanted her to announce that his flight was ready to depart, pluck him from this reunion that was getting increasingly harder to deal with, from this ghost he was finding it increasingly harder to face, but no such luck, the Madonna-esque airport voice simply reminded everyone to “watch your luggage at all times to ensure every passenger's safety.” If given the choice right at this moment, Theo wasn't sure what he would choose to deal with: a terrorist or the truth. Unfortunately, he wasn't given that choice.
“Look, before I started dating Audra seriously, I thought long and hard about what we had,” Rob said. “I loved you.”
Theo was impressed. There was no hesitation, no fear, no worry that what he was about to say was going to be scoffed at, no worry that he was going to appear less of a man after he said those three words. Maybe it was because he used the past tense, maybe it was because he was skilled at lying to customers and getting them to believe whatever nonsense came out of his mouth or maybe it was because those words were true.
Unable to remain still, Theo's hands sprung free, floundered a bit, until they found each other and created a tightly woven fist that shook a little. “Rob, please don't say what you don't mean.”
Rob placed two fingers on top of Theo's fist; the touch was soft, but the result was warm and calming. “Listen to me, I loved you. And I was in love with you. I didn't spend endless hours trying to define it, I didn't give it a name or classify it as something specific, but I know how I felt.” Slowly, Theo's fingers loosened, and the fist melted away to just two hands, folded together, being touched by a couple of other fingers. Those fingers grew even warmer, and Theo almost sighed when Rob grabbed one of his fingers and rubbed the smooth nail as he continued to tell him things Theo had never imagined he would hear. “I cried the day you left for college. I had never cried a day in my life and all of a sudden there I was on your porch and in the driveway was your dad's Honda packed with all your stuff and I had to run from your house so you and your parents wouldn't see me crying like a baby.”
Rob's touch, his words, felt wonderful; it made Theo feel ten, sixteen, twenty, thirty-six, all at the same time. “You never told me this.”
And then the touch was gone. “Because I was afraid.” Rob surveyed the room, taking it all in, but not really seeing any one thing, but Theo couldn't take his eyes off of him. “Once I understood what being gay really meant and how half the world, including my father, was against it, I got scared; I figured if I didn't mention it to anyone, including you, it wouldn't be real, none of it really would have happened.”
Put Theo away in a box and store it with the other Christmas decorations. Shove it in the back of the closet, we'll see if we want to use them next year, probably not though. “The odd thing was the longer you were out of my life, the less I thought about it, and the more I thought about girls.”
“So what are you saying, you really were just gay for me?”
“I told you, I could be myself around you, I didn't have to act like some popular jock, I didn't have to pretend to be smart and happy and all put together, because I was none of those things, but you made me laugh and you made me feel good about myself and the world.”
“I wish I would have known all of that.”
“Now who's being stupid? You knew all that, you just wanted more from me, more than I could give you, so you got mad.” Rob took a moment for Theo to digest his words as he sipped on another piece of ice. “After graduation, when we were separated I started to understand more, I started to figure things out, and I knew that for all our similarities we had one primary difference.”
“I'm gay, and you're straight.”
“Yeah. For a while there I wished it wasn't so, I wished I was gay because we had so much fun together. I tried to fool around with this one guy at college who, uh, kinda looked like you, but it totally didn't work out.”
“So then you called me to use me for one last test run.”
Rob looked at Theo like the parent who looks at the child who refuses to crawl into Santa's lap. “You're kidding me right? I wanted to see if I had made it all up; I wanted to see if maybe I was just one of those people who loved a person and didn't worry about their gender. I wanted to see if I still loved you enough to say the hell with it, you're the person I want to spend my life with.”
Anger was starting to mix in with nostalgia. “But clearly that's not the way it turned out.”
“You remember how it was, Theo, that last time: It was awkward, forced, neither one of us really wanted it to happen, but we were both too afraid to stop it.”
You want truth, Rob? I'll give you some truth.
“I wasn't afraid, Rob, not about wanting to stop it; I was afraid that you were going to want it to be over too soon, that you were going to go back to school and forget about me again like you did before and that's exactly what happened.”
Why stop now when you're on a roll, Theo; throw some more truth into the fire.
“I called you a few times, I even wrote you a letter, a very dramatic one if I might add. Did you read it or did you get bored with it like you got bored with what Debbie wrote in your yearbook?”
“I wasn't afraid, Rob, not about wanting to stop it; I was afraid that you were going to want it to be over too soon, that you were going to go back to school and forget about me again like you did before and that's exactly what happened.”
Why stop now when you're on a roll, Theo; throw some more truth into the fire.
“I called you a few times, I even wrote you a letter, a very dramatic one if I might add. Did you read it or did you get bored with it like you got bored with what Debbie wrote in your yearbook?”
Chalk it up to the holiday spirit, but Rob wasn't taking the bait. “I remember every word of your letter,” he said. “I read it several times. But I was twenty years old, Teddy; I was a dumb kid, I didn't know how to respond.”
“So you didn't.”
“No, I didn't,” Rob admitted. “And every once in a while I feel like a complete jerk for that. I know I should've said something, but you were in Boston, I was in Jersey. . . . Look, I'm not ashamed of what we had, I've never been ashamed of it, not then, not now, but I think I knew once I met you again that it was all in the past.”
Sometimes the past can repeat itself,
Theo thought.
Theo thought.
“And it was only you,” Rob added. “You are the only guy I ever loved.”
And despite all the odds turn up in the present.
“And for the longest time in my life it was only you too,” Theo said quietly. “I'm not trying to interrogate you, and I'm sure as hell not trying to judge you, but you were the one who said hello to me. You must have known what subjects we would talk about, you must have known this was going to be dredged up.”
“And for the longest time in my life it was only you too,” Theo said quietly. “I'm not trying to interrogate you, and I'm sure as hell not trying to judge you, but you were the one who said hello to me. You must have known what subjects we would talk about, you must have known this was going to be dredged up.”
Classic Rob Colangelo emerged; he leaned back in his chair, his bangs bouncing, and smiled charmingly. “Honestly, when I saw you I was just really happy.”
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