Where The Boys Are (18 page)

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Authors: William J. Mann

BOOK: Where The Boys Are
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There are consciences here. There are souls here. Like anywhere else, there is good and there is bad, but never is it as starkly delineated as some critics would describe. All I know is that these are the people—all of them, even the ones I don’t know—with whom I feel most at home.
I listen to the soulful lyrics of Mary Griffin mixing into the trance we’ve been dancing to.
“I wish I could keep you all of my life . . . this is my moment . . . this is my perfect moment with you . . .”
Yes, yes indeed. This is my moment. I am part of this, part of the now, part of what’s happening and pulsing and marking our lives. It may be a celebration of the ephemeral, but at least I’m experiencing it. Jason, the activist back home in Boston, and the angry guy here in the gym: will they ever feel they missed out? I don’t know. I just know Javitz is gone, his dance stopped in midstep. This moment is
mine
, and I’m savoring it.
Anthony spots us then and waves. He comes bearing gifts: a dozen bottles of water pressed up against his glistening chest. The boys dive upon him, and Anthony laughs heartily as he doles them out, a sexy young Santa Claus. I spot the gleam in his eyes. There’s no hiding how truly happy he is here among us all. As if he’s found a place at last. A home. Somewhere he finally belongs. I understand the sentiment, but not the longing behind it. I found a home here after Javitz’s death, after my world had been turned upside down and all its contents shaken out—but what brought
Anthony
here? What did all this replace?
“Thank you, Jeff,” he whispers. “Thank you for bringing me here.”
We kiss. I vow then and there to find out the mystery behind Anthony Sabe.
Meanwhile, at Nirvana
Lloyd
E
va’s a little tipsy. No, more than a little.
“I useta be Snow White, but I drifted,” she purrs, standing up on a dining room chair, hand on hip, her other hand pushing at her hair. She’s a miniature Mae West in an oversized red-and-blue ski sweater.
“It’s not the
men
in my life that count, it’s the
life
in my men.
Ooooooooh!”
Ty and I nearly slide under the table laughing. I actually can’t catch my breath. I’ve never seen her like this. She’s
hysterical.
Who knew?
“Frankie and Johnnie were lovers,”
she sings, going into a whole Westian routine. She’s dead-on. Uncanny, even. I wish Jeff could see this. Jeff
loves
Mae West.
Ty leans in close to me. “She used to do this for all the queens who’d come visit Steven,” he whispers. I notice he lets his hand remain on my knee.
I smile. Many times has Eva told me that she thought Ty, her late husband’s friend and lawyer, was in love with her. But when he arrived this morning in Provincetown, stepping out of his Lexus in his Prada suit and Versace sunglasses, I knew instantly that he was gay.
“Goodness, madam,” Ty’s saying now, feeding her lines, “what beautiful diamonds you’re wearing.”
“Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie,” she shoots right back. She steps up onto the dining room table and sashays across it, swinging her hips left to right.
“Ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom!” Ty shouts, keeping in time with her swings, just as I’m certain he’d done countless of times to the delight of her husband’s gay friends.
She stops in front of me.
“Ohhh.
I always
did
like a man in uniform, and that one fits you just grand.”
“This old thing?” I laugh, pulling on my UMass sweatshirt.
“Why don’t you come up some time ‘n’ see me? I’m home ev‘ry evenin’.
Ooooh.”
“Ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom!” Ty shouts out again as she swings hard and fast back down the table. I howl.
“I’m going to have to handcuff you,” Ty calls to her, another obviously well rehearsed line.
“Mustcha really?” she answers, on the spot and ready. “You know, I wasn’t born with ’em.”
Ty can hardly keep from laughing. “Many men would have been safer if you had,” he manages to say.
“I dunno,” she says, considering. “Hands ain’t ev‘rythin’.”
Back to swinging the hips down the table. “Ba-boom, ba-boom, ba—”
“Yaaaaaaaaaaa!!!”
I’m not sure what happened. One second she’s up there parading down the table; the next she’s gone. Ty is leaping out of his chair.
She’d walked right off the edge!
“Are you all right?” Ty’s shouting.
I run around to the other side of the table. Eva is sitting up, rubbing her ass.
“Eva, are you hurt?” I ask.
“Well, nobody can ever say I didn’t fall for ya,” she quips, still in character.
We all break up laughing, rolling on the floor. Ty falls over me, and I think it might be deliberate. Eva is nearly under the sofa.
“Hey!” she exclaims. “Look!”
She pulls a small, crude wooden figure of the Buddha from under the couch. She hands it to me. Something about the face makes me smile.
“It looks almost handmade,” I say, “as if somebody whittled it from a piece of wood.” I glance over at Eva. “It’s a good omen. A gift from the house.”
“Let’s fill the house with Buddhas!” she says. “All kinds of Buddhas!”
I hand the figure back to her. “Maybe we could paint this one. Bring it to life.”
“Maybe it’s time for another bottle of wine,” Ty says, refilling my wineglass.
That’s how the night goes. Empty bottles of wine stack up beside the trash. By the time the grandfather clock in the hallway chimes two, I’m on the floor shoulder to shoulder with Ty, leaning up against the couch. Eva is spread out above us, the Buddha on her chest. We’re passing around a joint. Good stuff. A perfect way to celebrate our first weekend in the house.
I have a nice, solid buzz. Nothing that impairs my thought process, just a nice, relaxing, contented feeling—a relief after the weeks of frenzied packing and unpacking, anxious transfers of money, and seemingly endless documents to sign. In between, we made probably two dozen trips down to Orleans or Hyannis to buy those household necessities we couldn’t find in Provincetown: shower rings, silk sheets, plush towels, coffeemakers for every room. “If we’re going to do this,” I insisted, “we should do it right.”
The days passed by in a blur, and I realized this morning I hadn’t called Jeff in nearly a week. But he hadn’t called me, either. It works both ways. He didn’t even send flowers on the day we closed.
“I never dreamed I’d be starting over like this,” Eva says, mellow now, handing the joint down to Ty. “Did you?”
He takes a hit. “Not like this, Eva,” he says after exhaling the smoke in a long, languid breath. “Not like this.”
Her hand rests on top of my head. “Well, if it wasn’t for this young man here, I might still be a widow living all alone in New York.”
“Well, you’re a still widow,” I say a bit dreamily, taking the joint from Ty. “There’s nothing I can do about that.”
There’s a silence. I didn’t mean for it to sound snotty. I meant it funny, but no one laughs. Was it insensitive? I hope Eva didn’t take it that way. Maybe I’m just feeling paranoid from the pot. Jeff always says I have a tendency to get that way when I mix pot and wine.
“Oh, by the way, Eva,” Ty tells her, “Alex was in the hospital. A throat infection. He’s out now, doing better.”
Alex.
The guy with AIDS to whom she’d been so devoted. The one she saw every day, the one she said she loved.
“I’m glad,” Eva says, looking away. “That he’s doing better, I mean.”
A few weeks ago, I asked her if leaving Alex would be difficult, and she said of
course
it would, but that she’d stay in touch, that she’d travel down to New York often to see him. But apparently she
hasn’t
been in touch, not if she didn’t know he’d been in (and out of) the hospital. Curious.
There are, in fact, lots of curious things about her.
Ever since that night in my old apartment—the night something had woken me up and I’d discovered Eva awake and she’d kissed my hand—sometimes I feel a little weird around her. Oh, I
love
Eva; I really do. It’s not weird enough for me to back out of the deal. But I’m a trained psychologist, after all: I can’t help diagnosing people. It’s not fair, really; I don’t like doing this with friends. I don’t want to start assigning them pathologies or suggesting meds.
But Jeff’s words have come to haunt me:
She’s in love with you, Lloyd, and if you can’t see that, then I think it’s time for the doctor to heal himself.
I insist to myself that she’s not
in love
with me. Maybe a little
infatuated.
That’s all it is. Infatuation. It isn’t
love
—not that kind of love, anyway—and she’ll see that, if she hasn’t already. It’s just a little crush, brought on by her grief over Steven and the sudden transformation we’ve made together. It’s nothing she won’t be able to work through. Maybe I ought to suggest a therapist she could see here in town. There are some really good ones in Provincetown, who know how to work with grief and depression.
Because, in truth, I worry. Just a little. The intimacy Eva sometimes presumes with me can make me distinctly uncomfortable. There are times she does indeed talk as if we’re a couple. At Sears in Hyannis the other day, she giggled to the clerk in the appliance department, “We still have to decide which one of us will do the laundry”—a simple enough statement, perhaps, but the clerk looked over at us as if we were married, a fifty-year-old lady and a thirty-something husband. And just now:
If it wasn’t for this young man, I’d still be a widow.
Well, you still are!
I suddenly want to shout.
You still are a widow!
It’s just a manifestation of her grief. Grief can make even the most stable, the most insightful, the most introspective people behave in ways aberrant to their true selves.
And there’s another thing, too: that sleeping with the father bit. She made it sound so sweet and innocent, but a grown man sharing a bed with a nine-, ten-, eleven-year-old girl? Yes, the more I think about it, the more I feel I ought to recommend that she see someone—
“A half-dollar for your thoughts.” Ty’s hand is on my knee again. Our eyes meet.
“Just buzzing,” I say softly.
He smiles. Eva’s hand on my head and Ty’s on my knee. Okay, let’s make things even
more
awkward, shall we?
So I admit I find Ty attractive. He’s very handsome, very debonair, very sure of himself. I’ve always been partial to men with a little silver in their hair. It’s hard to imagine Ty pining after Eva, as she’s insisted he’s been doing for years since Steven’s death. It’s hard to see him pining after
any
woman, in fact, with his three gold rings studded with emeralds, his turquoise silk scarf, his solid onyx cufflinks. Yet despite the trappings, he’s not effeminate, just sophisticated, cosmopolitan, in the ways guys used to be back in the forties and the fifties. His skin is a deep, shiny cocoa, his eyes a startling brown-gold. I can’t pretend I don’t want to see him naked.
Maybe it’s because for the past several years before Jeff and I reconnected, I was celibate—part of my grief and healing process—and then suddenly there was a rush of sex with Jeff for a period of several months. But now there’s been nothing, not since Christmas. There’s a
hunger
to my horniness, the way I feel when I skip breakfast and lunch and then become ravenous by dinner. When Ty stands, walking in front of us out to the hallway to check his messages on his cell phone, I can’t resist checking out his butt. High and hard. My desire becomes a physical thing. I have to wrestle it down.
I turn suddenly, locking eyes with Eva on the couch. She’s caught me looking.
“Another hit, Lloyd?” she asks softly, holding out the joint.
“No, thanks.” I feel my face flush.
She stubs the roach out in an ashtray. “He hides it well, don’t you think?”
I stand up, brushing off my pants, trying to cover my erection. “Hides what?”
Eva smiles. “His feelings for me.”
I shake my head down at her. “Eva, that man is as queer as I am.”
She yawns and stretches. “Maybe. Maybe not.”
“What do you mean?”
She smiles enigmatically. “Nothing. Just—well, didn’t you once say human sexuality is a complex thing? That gay and straight are merely constructs?”
“I didn’t say that. Javitz did. I merely repeated it to you.”
“Well, I’ve been thinking about it. I think it’s very true. I think it’s true about Tyrone, and I think it’s true about you, too.”
I frown. “You’re trashed, Eva. If it’s true for us, why not for you? Maybe you just haven’t found the right woman.”
“Maybe I haven’t. Maybe
you
haven’t, either. Maybe Tyrone hasn’t.” She giggles, covering her mouth. “And maybe he
has.”
Ty’s come back into the room. He narrows his eyes at us. “What are you two conspiring about in here?”
“Just deciding what color to paint this room,” Eva tells him, sitting up now on the couch. “I think blue. What do you think?”
How well she covers up. How fast on her feet. She stands, extinguishing the candles we’d lit hours ago at dinner, now burned down to tiny stubs. It’s been a long day. A good day, bottom line. Ty answered a thousand questions about business law. Eva cooked us an excellent meal of wild mushrooms, risotto, and gingered string beans, and the bottles of wine Ty brought from a vineyard in upstate New York had been fabulous.
“Tyrone,” Eva says, “your room’s all made up. If you need anything, just whistle, okay?”
“Will do, love.”
“You know how to whistle, don’t you?” she purrs, back in character. “Just put your lips together and blow.”
“Wrong diva,” I correct her. “That’s Lauren Bacall.”
She kisses Ty, then approaches me. “I know my divas, sweetheart,” she assures me.
We kiss briefly on the lips. “You were very entertaining tonight,” I tell her, patting her cheek.
“Ohhhh,” she purrs. “I always do mah best work at night.”
She moves off, puttering around in the kitchen. She seems reluctant to go to bed. She washes wineglasses, puts dishes away, wipes down the counters. She’s clearly waiting until she’s sure Tyrone and I are also going upstairs—
alone,
to our
separate
rooms. A couple of times, Ty and I exchange those looks—those looks any gay man can recognize, looks that say,
Okay, how are we going to manage this?
There’s something unspoken about our flirtation:
Eva shouldn’t know about it.

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