Blink (6 page)

I cross the street and hurry into the station as I hear the rumble of an approaching train. I pause before the ticket window and promise myself:

I will live an honest life. For myself. For Andy. And I will steer clear of men who cannot do the same.

F
OR
A
long time, all I could do was lie on my bed and stare at the flickering images on television, letting its pale light wash over me. I muted the sound, so it was just the images. The officers of the Hill Street station chased another bad guy in what looked like the area just south of me, at Wilson and Broadway. After a time, though, the images ran together, blurred by tears and my own inability to understand myself.

I knew I should have been happy. The biggest day of my life was only a few weeks away. All my family would be here from Ohio. My older sister, Annette, would read from Corinthians at the service. My little sister, Kay, would walk down the aisle as Alison’s maid of honor in her floral print gown from I Magnin. My mother would cry as she was escorted up the aisle, and my father would beam, proud.

And what would I be thinking? Would I be full of hope or despair? Would I be confident that the love I felt for Alison would be enough to beat this thing?

Of course it would. It had to be.

I had to admit, though, if only to myself, that I wanted to know how my little dirty story might have played out if Mom hadn’t called. Part of me wanted to believe I would have been strong and turned away from the temptation of Carlos without outside intervention.

But here, alone in my studio, I knew I wouldn’t have. Couldn’t have.

Things had gone too far. The switch had been flipped.

Thank you, Mom, for turning it back to its rightful place
.

I guess I should have been relieved, grateful, that I hadn’t sinned, given in to the desires I wished fervently I could rip from inside me.

But I wasn’t. My mind strayed to what would have happened had the phone not rung.

And with images of Carlos and his dark eyes rising above me, our bodies slick with sweat and glued together, I drifted off to sleep.

“Come sit down.” Carlos pats the couch next to him. “Supper can wait,
Papi
. Today’s our anniversary.”

I look out at Carlos from the kitchen. He’s an old man now but no less handsome. He can still make my heart beat faster. His black hair is now silver but has the same luster, even if it’s now cropped much closer to his head. His brown skin is weathered these days, the lines around his eyes and mouth from laughter etched deeply. Wrinkles have crept across his broad forehead, and his firm gut has turned to a little potbelly. He wears chinos and a white T-shirt.

And he still looks hot. My Latin lover.

I adore this man. Our love has grown and matured, just like Carlos, aging with distinction, showing the wear and the joys and heartaches of the years, a fine patina. Yeah, he’s still the same beautiful man I fell in love with on the ‘L,’ but he’s so much more.

He’s my soul mate, my best friend, my person. The one I threw everything away for but got so much in return.

I put down the garlic press I was about to use to make a salad dressing, rinse my sticky fingers under the tap, dry them, and go in to join Carlos on the couch.

He smiles at me when I sit down beside him. He slides an arm around me. Oh, that smile! It can still set off alarms inside. And one thing that hasn’t changed about my Carlos, through all the years, are those dark chocolate orbs that drew me in the very first time I saw him. They’re regarding me now, making me feel like I am the only man in the world.

I give him a small peck on the cheek. “Now, what did you want to show me?”

Carlos opens the wide leather-bound photo album that’s been a fixture on our coffee table for all the decades we’ve been together. We don’t look at it much anymore, but come rain or come shine, Carlos unfailingly pulls it out every anniversary.

“Here we are,” he whispers, close to my ear because I don’t hear so well these days. “Weren’t we the gorgeous pair?”

“If you do say so yourself!” I laugh. And then I peer down at the picture on the very first page of the album.

It’s Carlos and me, back in the early 1980s. We are at Rosehill Cemetery on the city’s north side on an autumn day, our arms around each other, smiling for some stranger we had asked to take our picture. I remember her still—a middle-aged woman, beautiful, in loose fitting slacks and top, with dark hair and bangs—taking two or three shots with our Nikon to make sure we got one we would like. Why I remember her is because there was no judgment in her brown eyes, only a kind of wonder and collusion at the happiness that was obvious in our being together.

The day had been the kind you get only in autumn, with a sky so brilliant and blue it almost glowed. It seemed crafted from paint, as though the birds would be stained by it, disappearing into its shocking color. The trees on the leaves behind us were at the peak of fall beauty—brilliant orange, yellow, and red competed to see which could shine brightest.

“People probably thought we were weird, wandering around a cemetery,” I say to Carlos. “Who does that?”

“
Chulo
, we are weird. That’s why we’ve stuck together through all these years.”

“That and hot sex.” I wink at him, and he shakes his head, but he’s smiling.

Rosehill was a special place. We loved wandering among the crypts and tombstones there, the manicured lawns, the pond with its geese and swans. It wasn’t a place of death for us, but a sanctuary of peace and serenity, an oasis in our busy metropolis. Early on we spent many happy weekends wandering among the tombstones, reading them, seeing how far back in history we could go, and wondering about the lives of the people buried beneath our feet or entombed before us.

“Look at us.” Carlos taps the photo, and I do. I see two young men, one impossibly, exotically handsome and the other vibrantly young, a mutt that occurred when Italian met German met Welsh. Both guys are dark. Both, as befitting the times, had big moustaches that now look a little silly.

Both are in love. There’s no denying it. It shines out from the photograph, which is why Carlos and I have put it by itself on the very first page of the album that traces our lives together through imagery.

We turn the pages, our heads close together. There we are under our first Christmas tree. We had waited until the last minute to pick something up, and it was a true Charlie Brown affair, with bald patches and brown spots. If I close my eyes, I can still hear the needles dropping quickly to the sheet we had wrapped around its base. Carlos would later amass an expensive collection of ornaments that we still pulled out with reverence each year, but this first Christmas, we had made an emergency trip to a Goldblatt’s on Christmas Eve and picked through what was left. The tree was decorated with strings of blinking multicolored lights, candy canes, and, oddly,
Star Wars
figurine ornaments left over from 1977. We topped the tree with a Dorothy doll from
The Wizard of Oz
.

“That had to have been the ugliest, or gayest, Christmas tree ever,” I say.

Carlos nudges my shoulder with his own. “It’s beautiful. It was our first. Remember the present you gave me under that tree?”

We both let out a low-pitched chuckle, my mind drifting back to the blowjob I had given him that morning as his first present in the glow of the flashing lights. “You mean the bikini underwear?” I ask innocently.

“Yeah, right.” He flips a page, and there we are the following summer in Provincetown. The trip had been a gift to ourselves. We had never been away together, and we drove across the country, stopping to see my family in Ohio, then a weekend in Manhattan, and we finally ended up at the edge of the country, in the gayest little hamlet in the US. We called that time our honeymoon, and if the number of times we had sex was any indication, the appellation was an apt one. We barely got out of our room in the little yellow bed-and-breakfast where we barely slept. But yet there we were on Commercial Street, arms around each other once again, our olive complexions deepened to a rich brown hue by the summer sun. My nose and the upper edges of my cheeks are rosy. Again, the love radiates. And there’s one I took of Carlos as he lay on a towel on the beach, the ocean’s diamond-studded water glistening behind him. He was asleep and had never liked the picture, but I treasure it because I know why he was so tired, and it wasn’t because of the sun.

There’s a trip to Havana, taken at last after we’d been together a decade. We had gone to visit Carlos’s father, who was dying from pancreatic cancer, and to see the place where Carlos had been born. I still remember the tropical heat and the faded elegance of the city, the palm trees swaying in the damp, hot breeze.

We page through, the years unreeling before us like dominoes falling. Birthdays, holidays, dinners with Alison and my godson, Tate. (Yes, Alison and I made amends, although it wasn’t easy at first.) Tate became a sort of surrogate son for Carlos and me, and after his birth to Alison and her husband, Billy, he spent a lot of time at our house in Ravenswood, and the pictures reflect his growing up. Here Carlos and I are, with Tate between us, at his graduation from Indiana University.

There’s Carlos, wan and pale, in our sleigh bed after his heart surgery two years ago. That was a scary time, a time when I thought I would lose him. I couldn’t imagine what the world would be like without him in it.

“That’s a bad picture,” Carlos says darkly of the one of him sick.

“Well, you’re not at your best, it’s true, but it reminds me of how close I came to losing you then. And it does my heart good to look at this and then at this”—I grab his face and turn it toward me, squeezing his cheeks—“and know you’ll outlive me.”

“Don’t say that.”

We have always argued that we each wanted to be the one to go first so we wouldn’t have to bear the loss of the other. We chimed in as one, “We’ll die together in a plane crash,” and laughed together at our black humor. It’s a comfort.

The last photograph in the book was taken just last year. Carlos and I had traveled out to Seattle, Washington, where we had friends who had relocated there from Chicago ten years before—Mary and Sandy. They were getting married, a June wedding at St. Mark’s Cathedral, and they asked us to be ushers. The brides were radiant, and the day couldn’t have been more perfect.

But the picture before us now, the one that brought tears to both our eyes, was not of Mary and Sandy. It was of Carlos and me. He had surprised me with a wedding ring on our cross-country flight.

I had just assumed we were comfortable in our couplehood and that marriage, even though it was being made legal in increasing numbers of states, was something that wasn’t for us. The gesture of the ring and Carlos’s shy, almost tentative “Will you marry me?” was a moment I’ll always treasure. It was a delight, unexpected, yet it felt completely right.

The last picture was Carlos and me in the dark suits we had brought for what I thought was Mary and Sandy’s wedding but what turned out to be our own. We look a little solemn and, in spite of being in our fifties, young and full of hope. We’re standing on the front steps of the municipal court after having just made it official.

In the picture, Carlos turns and kisses me, and as he does, our bodies begin to morph, the years falling away until at last we are the young men we were in the first photo.

I jerked awake, sheets tangled around my legs. The TV was still on. Some infomercial for a spray-on hair replacement product for men played, and outside, the sky was beginning to lighten over Lake Michigan. I rolled over and reached up to open the window, to allow the clean lake air to wash over and awaken me. My little plastic alarm clock told me it was just past six. I was relieved; I would not be late for work.

I lay back down against my pillow and closed my eyes, and for the first time, the dream images rushed upon me. Like a picture emerging from a pointillist painting the farther back you stepped away from it, I drank in the images of Carlos and me—and a lifetime shared together.

I laughed when the image I had just before waking came to me.
Our wedding? Yeah, like that would ever happen! In what world?

I rolled over to call Alison. I knew she would be up and getting ready, hot rollers in her honey-blonde hair, putting makeup on.

When she answered, I said, “I just called to say good morning, sweetheart.”

“Oh thank God, I thought maybe there was something wrong.” She laughed. “You’re sweet.”

I closed my eyes, feeling the guilt of what had transpired the night before—both in real life and in my dream—lying like a leaden weight upon my chest. “You’re the one,” I said softly.

We were quiet for a moment. Then Alison said, “I really have to get back to getting ready, honey. I can’t miss my train.”

“I know. I just wanted to hear your voice and to tell you that—” My voice catching in my throat caught me unawares. I choked out a quivering breath, my eyes damp, a lump in my throat. “That I’m really looking forward to July.”

Alison didn’t rush in with a response, and it was most likely then she realized my difficulty breathing was because I was on the verge of tears. Warily, she said, “Me too, sweetheart. Me too.” She paused again. “Andy? Is everything okay?”

There was a part—a big part—that just wanted to blurt it all out. I could imagine both the devastation and relief. How I loved her so, so much, but that I didn’t know who I was. That maybe our getting married was wrong, not because I loved someone else but because I
could
, and that person would be a man. To beg her forgiveness for my not understanding myself. To beg her to be a part of my life, but that we must find a way to
not
travel life’s road together, living a lie. I could set her free.