What Binds Us (10 page)

“What the hell happened in there?” I asked Matthew as he backed his Jeep out of the garage.

“Mrs. Whyte caught Dondi screwing the gardener—or vice-versa.”

“The gardener?” I repeated, shocked.

“Yeah, the gardener. Don’t be such a snob. He went to Harvard!” he said, palming the wheel and spinning the Jeep around.

“No, I meant—you mean,
Max?
I wouldn’t have thought he was gay.”

“He probably isn’t,” Matthew said. “But such is the allure of Dondi.”

“Mrs. Whyte actually caught them?”

“Yeah. Can you see it? I’m surprised they never got caught before. They’ve been going at it since we were in high school.”

“They have?”

“Sure.” He gave me a sidelong glance while driving rather recklessly and too fast for my taste down the boulevard of broken dreams. “Why do you think he always made you sleep at the other end of the house? You really didn’t think he was spending all those nights alone, did you?”

“Oh,” I said. “Why didn’t you ever tell me you were gay?”

“I thought you knew. I thought you didn’t care, and why should you? You’re so in love with Dondi,” he added, his voice bitter.

The hurt in his voice, more than the words themselves, nearly broke my heart. How could he not know I loved
him?
“I thought I was in love with him once. I haven’t thought that in a long time.”

“But you told Mrs. Whyte—”

“That I slept with him.”

“No, you said—”

“I said, ‘I’ve slept with one. I’m in love with the other.’ And I wasn’t talking about Colin.”

“But—”

“Damn it, Matthew! I love you. Okay? I. Love. You. I love you so fucking much I feel like I’m losing my mind most of the time. I love you so much I don’t even care that
you
don’t love
me
.”

Just like that, I started to cry.

He turned to stare at me again. “We need to stop somewhere. We need to talk. If I try to drive and talk about this, I’ll kill us both.” He pulled into the parking lot of a roadside restaurant.

He got out first. When I got out he pulled me against him, wrapped his arms tightly around me. He was slightly taller than I and felt far more solid than I’d imagined he would. “Before either of us says another word,” he half whispered in his gravelly voice, “you need to know that I love you too. I think I always have.”

We stood like that for a long time, him holding me, me crying my eyes out.

Under a blue sky, under a red-and-white-striped umbrella on a deck that cantilevered over the bay, he told me, “I never thought much about women. That made me think I might be gay, although truth to tell, I didn’t think much about men either. I was so afraid—I knew Dondi was gay, of course. All those men. Everyone wanted him but it seemed always about sex. It scared me, sex without attachment. I was afraid that if I was gay, that’s all I’d ever have: sex without attachment. And then I met you and I stopped being afraid.” He lifted his head and looked at me with gray eyes as clear as the sky above and as filled with possibility.

A waiter brought our drinks.

Matthew waited until he left before he spoke again. “I suppose that’s all any of us really needs—someone to make us stop being afraid.”

“Why didn’t you ever say anything?”

“How could I? How could I ask you to love me, to take a chance on me when I wasn’t sure how far I was willing to go? I was—am—in love with you, but I wasn’t sure how to express that physically. I loved being with you, touching you. Heck, just looking at you made me happy.” He smiled, then biting his lip, continued. “But could I give you what you needed physically,
what Dondi gave you?
I honestly didn’t know.”

I watched his face carefully, wanting to erase all the pain and confusion there just beneath the surface of love. I’d never struggled with my sexuality. I’d assumed growing up that I’d meet a “nice girl,” get married, have babies because that’s what everyone told me boys did. Then I fell in love with another boy and everything changed.

But that’s life. You think you know where you’re headed, even have a map in hand. Then life holds up a sign: Not that way, this way. But I was learning I was the exception. Most people struggled to accept themselves. Even Dondi, when I’d met him, had declared himself bisexual, which I later understood to mean he’d kissed a girl once and hadn’t much liked it. It was almost as if bisexuality was a rest stop between heterosexuality and homosexuality.

“I thought about telling you. You remember last summer when I kissed you on the beach?”

I did. I couldn’t tell him that I’d thought of little else, the feel of his lips like a tattoo on mine. I nodded.

“I wanted so much to ask you to stay but I knew that would mean you’d have to choose between me and Dondi. And I was afraid you’d choose him. I didn’t think I could stand that.”

“I would have chosen you, Matthew.”

“Why?”

His hands were lying on the table, palms down. I covered his right hand with my left, curling my fingers around his palm. He looked at me, his gray eyes cloudy with emotion. With the index finger of my right hand I traced the line of his brow, moving down his cheek and under his chin, lifting it so we were eye to eye. “Why not? Why do you think you’re less than Dondi—that you’re not the more desirable brother?”

“I don’t know. He’s so handsome, so dynamic. Everybody loves him. Everybody wants him.” He sounded bitter.

“Look, Dondi’s exciting. He’s fun, no doubt about it. But honestly, he’s exhausting. He’s always moving, doing. I felt like I was always running to catch up. With you I can be still, can just
be
. I think it was your stillness I first fell in love with. When we were together you seemed content. You weren’t thinking of what we could do instead or next. You weren’t looking around to see what else was going on.”

“That’s because I was happy just to be with you. I wanted to spend every moment with you so I’d have something to think back to once you left at the end of the summer. You know, I stole one of your T-shirts and when I was back at school I’d sleep with it. I finally cut pieces off of it and would walk around with a scrap in my pocket so I’d always have you near me. My roommates started calling me ‘Linus.’”

My mouth dropped open in surprise and I just stared at him for a moment.

He blushed, covered his face with his hands. “That sounds so pathetic,” he mumbled, “so fucked up. You must think—”

“Matthew.” I pulled his hands from his face. “That’s not pathetic. I totally get that.”

Growing up in my parents’ house, witness to their love, I had always believed in one perfect love like some people believed in the Promised Land. Staring at his face across the table, holding his hands in mine, I realized the Promised Land, in all its fabled magnificence, was within my sight at last.

“You’re just saying that,” he said unhappily.

“I stole your soap and used to walk around with it in my pocket,” I told him.

Now it was his turn to be surprised. He shook his head in wonder. Grinning, he closed his eyes, squeezed my hands. “I love you,” he said, “I do.”

“Can we go?”

He placed a handful of bills on the table. We stood simultaneously and he leaned in and grabbed my shoulders, brought his lips to mine. I kissed him back. His hand moved to the back of my head. When we broke apart, a middle-aged couple stared at us with violent eyes.

“You don’t understand,” Matthew told them. “I’ve waited all my life for this.” He took my hand and we left the restaurant.

We had been driving for some time, my hand firmly in his before I thought to ask him, “Matthew, where are we going?”

“I don’t know,” he answered. “I can’t think. I want to make love to you.”

“But?”

“But where? I don’t want our first time to be in a hotel room.”

“That’s sweet. We could go to my parents’, but that would be too weird and…no privacy. Besides, that’s two hours away. I don’t know that I can wait that long to touch you.”

He squeezed my hand. “I know,” he said. “The three furies—they’ll put us up for a few days.”

“The three furies,” I repeated. “You know, Panther told me last summer that you were in love with me.”

“And?”

“And I didn’t believe her.”

***

The three furies lived in a vast Sutton Place townhouse crammed from cellar to attic with Gothic furniture and dust, the latter at least as old as the former. After announcing us, a maid led us to an antique reception room down a long entry paved in black and white marble, where they waited for us, a family of their own making, bound together by everything but blood.

They welcomed us, Matthew like the prodigal returning, me with a certain genteel courtliness. Over blood-colored sherry in their drawing room, Matthew told them our story. He and I sat side-by-side on a cracked leather chesterfield. He held my hand as if he was afraid to let go. Or maybe I was the one who was afraid to let go.

“Do you mind about us?” he asked.

“Dear child, no. No.”

“Actually,” Panther said in her no-nonsense way, “I must tell you that Thomas here is the best thing that ever happened to you. Before him, you were so
morose
. You know, I think last summer at the fair was the first time I ever heard you laugh.”

Matthew blushed and squeezed my hand. I squeezed back.

“You boys look tired,” Amelia said.

“It’s been a hell of a day,” Matthew admitted.

“Why don’t we all turn in,” Panther suggested, even though it was barely past six in the evening. “I suppose you boys will be sharing a room?”

Matthew blushed and nodded.

“Your first night together?” Clare asked, looking at us shrewdly.

I nodded and smiled, grateful for her tact and her perception. Matthew blushed again.

***

At last, Matthew stood naked before me.

He did not possess the savage musculature of Michelangelo’s David, was more the David of Donatello’s imagination: slim, narrow-hipped, almost girlish. He was a beautiful white cat, lean and graceful. He had hair on his legs, long silky strands like climbing vines that only accentuated his nakedness. I thought of all those nights at Aurora when he’d lain on the other side of a door and might as well have been on the other side of the world. I thought of all those orgasms puddled on my stomach, damning as spilled milk, induced by just this image.

He stared at me from across the room, his big gray eyes dark with wonder. “You have red pubic hair,” he said. “I always wondered if you would.”

“You thought about what I looked like naked?”

“Well, yeah,” he admitted. “I’m only human.”

“You know, I used to think of you as the ice prince. Asleep and unreachable under glass.”

“I’m not.”

“I know.”

“I’m right here,” he said. “You can touch me.” His eyes shone like silver.

I reached out and pinched one of his nipples. He jumped. “Oh! Sorry! Did I hurt you?” I asked.

“No. It’s just that no one has ever touched me like that before.”

“Huh? You mean—”

“Yes,” he whispered, “I do.”

“Well, high time we change that.”

“Can we keep the lights on?” he asked. “I want to see you.”

Flesh touched flesh. Limbs entwined: black, white, black; lips and tongue and teeth tasted flesh too long hungered for. We did everything. Nothing about either of us was forbidden the other. “No” was not in the vocabulary of our sex. I looked at his face through the V of my legs. I looked at his face above me and below me. I found I liked saying his name, said it over and over again. He said nothing, only smiled in the light and held me close.

Always before, sex had been a negating experience. With ejaculation came an end to desire, to intimacy. With Matthew, sex was an affirmation, a shouted yes. Afterwards, we stood on the threshold of something. Always before, the threshold had been behind me. And I’d stood alone.

He leaned on one elbow, staring at me.

“What,” I asked him, “do you see when you look at me?”

“I see everything I ever hoped for.”

Suddenly self-conscious, I pulled the covers up over me and turned to him, this amazing man in whose heart and bed I’d landed.

Matthew sat up abruptly, pulling his bony knees against his chest, wrapping his arms around his legs. Leaning his head against his drawn knees, he looked at me. “Do you believe in God?” he asked suddenly.

I pushed myself up on my elbows and pressed my back against the pillows. The sheet slipped from my waist and for a moment I contemplated my nakedness. My first boyfriend was the son of the local preacher. He would sneak out of his father’s house on Saturday nights and into my bed. Sunday morning, bleary-eyed and with a belly full of come, he stood in church and shouted hallelujah and hurled praise on the very altar that called him an abomination. I’d been young, just fifteen, but I knew I could neither hate myself nor pray at the altar of a hateful God. I’d left him to his prayer and secret lusts.

“No,” I said. “What about you?”

“Before I met you, I believed in nothing.”

“And after?”

“After, I knew there was a God because there was a you.”

“So, now you believe in God?”

“I believe in you.”

“I’m no God.”

“No. You’re better than that. You’re the flesh and blood embodiment of hope. You’re a prayer answered.”

“Matthew, I’m just someone who loves you.”

He laughed. “I love the way you do that—just cut to the heart of the matter. You’re right, you’re just someone who loves me, but that makes you everything to me. Someone who loves me. You’re mother earth.”

“And you’re the man in the moon.” He reached for my hand. “Together, we are eternal.”

The three furies turned out to be our salvation by offering us a summer sublet in a house they owned in West Philly. We’d have to move out in the fall because it was already rented, but we had a month to figure out what we were going to do.

“I have to talk to my parents,” I said. “They might call Aurora and find out I’m not there. They’ll worry.”

“You want to go home?”

I nodded. “I need to.”

“Okay. I want to go with you. I want to meet them, if that’s okay.”