The Men from the Boys (24 page)

He's packing, too, of course.

. “Hello, darling.”

I sit on the floor where his old ratty couch once rested, where once a scared twenty-two-year-old lingered, new to Boston, staring around this room at all the books, listening to Javitz talk about activism, about the movement, about social justice and personal revolution. Now the shelves stand empty, covered with dust.

“When's the moving date again?” I ask.

“Next Saturday.” He rests against a large cardboard box marked “Books.” That's what all of these boxes are. That's the accumulation of Javitz's life, not the silly little knickknacks I've been packing. “So why is it you keep forgetting which day I'm moving?”

“I just forget which day of the weekend, that's all.”

“Do you want this?” he asks. He holds a book out to me. Love
Goddesses of the Silver Screen.

“I
gave that to you,” I say, hurt, taking it from him. I open to the first page. Inscribed there in my handwriting: “To Javitz from Lana Turner, Hanukkah, 1991.”

“Guess I can't give away a personal autograph from Lana Turner,” he says, taking the book back.

“Her daughter's a lesbian,” I say.

“Yes, I know. She killed Johnny Stompanato.”

“Can you ever imagine finding that much rage?”

“Yes,” Javitz says, struggling to close the folds of one of the boxes. “Absolutely. Didn't we all feel it when we used to march through the streets?”

“Not rage like that.”

“You're talking about fury. Blind fury. Poor little Cheryl lashed out in a furious attempt to save what was precious to her. She saw Stompanato beating her mother. It was completely understandable. That's why no jury could ever have convicted her.”

“I can't imagine acting on that kind of anger.”

“If you did, I think you'd level several blocks of your neighborhood.” He comes over to me, cups my chin in his hands, as he used to do when we were lovers, when I was just twenty-two and eager to find my way in the world. “Do you want to talk about Eduardo?”

“No.” I won't look at him. I'm quiet for a moment. “What did he say about me?”

“Nothing.”

I laugh, bitterly. “That's what I thought.”

Javitz strokes my cheek. It makes me uncomfortable. “Why don't you at least tell me how angry you are with
me?”

“I'm not angry with you.”

“Hah.”

I pull away. “Okay, so maybe I am. But it's because I care about you. What if you get sick again? We won't be there.”

“You talk as if Provincetown were on the West Coast.”

“It's not the same. We couldn't be there as quickly.”

“If I get very sick, I'll be brought here to Boston. This is where my primary doctors are.”

“It's not the same.”

He sits down on a box. “No,” he says. “It's not the same.”

“And I just don't understand why you have to leave so soon. The place Ernie found isn't going anywhere. You've paid your deposit, and your lease here doesn't run out till
May.”

“It makes more sense to try and get out of this lease, since I'm already paying money in Provincetown—”

“Yeah, yeah,” I say. I've heard all the rationalizations. “It just feels as if you can't wait to get out of here.”

“Part of me can't.”

I swing around at him. “That's the part I don't understand.”

The phone rings, cutting through the scene like the cry of a bird.

Javitz answers. It's Ernie. There's a rush of laughter, hitting me. Then Javitz gets serious.
“What
did she do?” he barks into the phone. It's something about a case manager at the Collective. One of those straight white HIV-negative women they all can't stand so much. Javitz will have his hands full when he moves. They already want him to serve on the board to stir things up, get rid of the deadwood, bring more life into their activism. He will, of course. That's what Javitz does best.

He raises his finger to me as if to say “One minute” and I nod, smiling a little. But when his back is turned I slip out the door, out into the deep cold night. I consider heading down to Jamaica Plain to see Chanel, or over to Dorchester where Melissa and Rose live, but I don't think I want to see any of them right now. Tommy's out of the question, of course—might he and Eduardo, even now, be locked in a lover's clinch?—and I certainly don't feel like tricking. So I just sit on a bench in Harvard Square until my cheeks get so hard I can no longer stand it. Then I stand up, head for the T, and go home.

Provincetown, August 1994

“Happy birthday, dear Jeff-and-Javitz,” they all sing, squeezing in both our names, “happy birthday tooooooo youuuuuuuuu.”

Everybody claps and we both bend over, blowing out the
eighty-
one candles on the cake, the sum of both our ages. The cake looks as if it's a torch, but we manage to get them all.

“How old are you now?” Rose continues singing.

“I'm a day older than him,” Javitz says, nodding at me.

“Funny,” I say, “you don't
look
twenty-eight.”

“Neither do
you,
darling.”

“Thanks for reminding me.”

Lloyd gives me a big kiss. I sense Eduardo on the other side of the room watching. Rose snaps a picture of the two of us, then Melissa pulls Javitz and me together with her in between. “Take a picture of me with the two birthday boys,” she instructs her girlfriend. Then she whispers in my ear: “Are you sleeping with that child?”

“Yes,” I tell her through my grin as Rose snaps yet another photo.

“Be careful,” Melissa says, smiling too. “He's in love with you. I can tell.”

So? I want to ask. Why is that something I need to be careful of? Why isn't that seen as a good thing?

Chanel and Wendy are here, too, but Tommy didn't come. I think he's still mad at me over that guy last spring. What was his name again? Daniel? Dave? Hell, what was I supposed to do? Tell the guy, “Sorry, I can't sleep with you, but my
friend
is interested”? (I can hear Javitz telling me, quite plainly, “Yes.”)

Chanel's in charge of the music. “I brought both Joan Baez and Donna Summer,” she assures us. “I promise to play an equal balance of the sixties and the seventies.”

Javitz has his arm around Eduardo. “What about something for the boy here? He'll want something contemporary.” He pauses. “Although, for the life of me, I'm not sure I know what is contemporary these days. Tell me, Eduardo. What's your musical taste?”

“I like older music,” Eduardo says. “Like early Madonna, the Material Girl period.”

A beat. Then Javitz says, “Oh. That far back, huh?” And he rolls those Javitz eyes.

“I
love
the decorations,” Melissa smiles, pulling me aside. Red, pink, and purple crepe paper, twirled together, hangs in arcs from the ceiling.
“Very
classy.” She winks.

“Hey,” Lloyd says, mock offended. “I didn't have much time.”

Classy. The very first out gay men I ever met, back in the early 1980s—the Material Girl period, in fact—used that word. I was still an undergraduate, and they were two wealthy white men who lived in a great apartment, held great jobs (architect and lawyer), and had great taste. “Oh, he has no
class,”
they sighed when I expressed my attraction to a local salesclerk with a mustache and a 1979 Pontiac Firebird. I quickly observed that to be gay meant one had to “have class”—in other words, to reject anything in one's background that was less than absolutely, positively fabulous, and to pretend we all grew up upper-middle-class.

I look around at our little family. None of them here is very “classy.” Melissa in her long carrot-shaped earrings, an aggressive femme from Brooklyn. Rose, a car mechanic, born and raised in the industrial valley of central Massachusetts. Wendy, a parson's daughter from the South. Only Chanel came from money, but her dark skin, her slanted eyes, her accent—just a pinch left, but still there —will always set her apart, stand her out as something
other.
She'd never be “classy” the way that architect and lawyer defined the term. She'd never be invited to their fabulous apartment, no matter how much money her father made.

When I dated Robert—that tall, blue-eyed, square-jawed blond Wasp who had the most amazing set of pecs I've ever seen but no soul lurking beneath them—I had none of these friends. Oh, I knew them: I worked with Chanel, I was in a writing course with Melissa. But we weren't
family
then. Robert and I spent our weekends with two or three other gay white male couples, all of them solidly middle- and upper-class. Two of them had gone to prep school with Robert; another graduated with him from Princeton. They were friendly, and bright, but I was always in the kitchen when they were in the living room, always reading a newspaper or watching television while they laughed their laughs, talked their talk.

Lloyd sometimes grumbles now that our little family only exists because of some connection through me. But he's wrong, really. It's because
of him
that our family lives: because of him and me together, as a couple, drawing them around us. I had no family when I was with Robert. When I finally had had enough, telling him and his pecs to go get lost, I made no attempt to keep up with the others. I ran into one of them a year later. “I'm sorry we haven't been in touch,” he said to me. But I wasn't: that's just the way it is. Friends come, friends go.

But I don't want these friends to go. Lloyd and Javitz and Chanel and Melissa and Rose—and Eduardo, too:
finally, finally,
can't we find our own? Can't we pull this one and that one in from the rain and say, “Stay here. Stay here and let's be together when we all get old”?

That's when Lloyd gets beeped.

“Shit,” he says, coming back from the phone. “I've got to go back to Boston. One of my patients was threatening to jump off the Charlestown Bridge. They've got him now at the hospital.”

“Lloyd,” I cry. “It's my
birthday.”

“I'm sorry, Cat. Really I am. But you're coming back this weekend, aren't you? We'll celebrate then. I'll take you out. Give you a break from cooking.”

I feel like Lucy being patronized by Ricky, who can't stay for dinner because he has to go sing at the club. “I could go back with you now,” I offer in a small voice.

“Stay here with our friends.” He smiles, a little twinge of something at the corners of his mouth. “And Eduardo.”

Oh, yes. Eduardo. I look across the room and there he is. But I don't want him—I want
Lloyd,
I want to make love to Lloyd tonight so desperately, even though that's becoming so rare these days, little more than jerk-off sessions while we talk about lobster and corn on the cob. I want the breathing position, and I want Lloyd's heartbeat in the still of the night. Can this strange, unexpected distance be because of Eduardo? I realize I haven't missed Lloyd at all in the past two weeks, two weeks wrapped up in the passionate embrace of my new lover, and I feel guilty about that. Tonight, however, I do miss Lloyd—miss him already, and he hasn't even left. “Don't go,” I say in a small voice, but he doesn't hear me. He's already kissing Javitz good-bye, apologizing for darting off. It's Javitz's birthday, too, and Javitz is, as usual, more understanding than I am.

“See ya, everybody,” Lloyd calls out.

There's a flutter of good-byes, like the Munchkins to Dorothy as she starts off down the Yellow Brick Road. Eduardo walks over to Lloyd and stops him.

“I'm sorry you have to go,” he says. “I was looking forward to getting a chance to hang out with you.”

Lloyd appears touched. “Well,” he says, a little awkwardly, “maybe some other time.”

“I hope so.”

Javitz eases into me. “Well, wasn't
that
sweet?” he whispers.

It certainly was. A surge of feeling rises in my chest for Eduardo. I'm not sure what it is, but it's something. He continues to surprise me, that boy.

“Are you very disappointed that Lloyd had to leave?” Eduardo asks, coming up behind me timidly after we've all waved good-bye.

“Yes,” I tell him.

“You don't like it when things don't go your way, the way you planned.”

I look at him. “Who does?”

“But you take it personally.” He's not making a judgment. He says it as a matter of discovery, as something he thinks he's realizing for the first time. Who is this child? What makes him an expert on me all of a sudden?

Still, I concede a little. “I don't deal well with rejection,” I admit.

He smirks. “I don't suppose you've had much experience with that.”

Javitz overhears us. “Please. Don't encourage his ego.”

“Well, it's true,” I say. “I've never been dumped. I've always done the dumping.”

“You mean in relationships?” Eduardo asks, and suddenly I feel horrible, like a complete asshole, an uncaring, unthinking idiot. Javitz just smiles.

“Yes, in relationships,” he says to Eduardo. “Jeff has never been the dumpee.”

The party breaks apart shortly after that. Melissa and Rose are heading back to Dorchester, Chanel and Wendy are staying at a guest house. They've been fighting. They barely spoke to each other all night, popping in CDs without so much as making eye contact. I can't figure out what's eating them, but Melissa thinks it's because Wendy really wants a baby and Chanel says she isn't ready. “Wouldn't that be
lovely,
though?” Melissa said to me. “Our little family would all become aunts and uncles.”