Faking It (25 page)

"I was sorry about that, Devin." My voice softened. "You know that."

"David."

The word stopped us both in our tracks.

"What did you say?"

"My name is
David
."

"I don't know David."

We looked into each other's eyes for a moment, and then I shifted back to the pavement--the hurt I saw was too much for me to bear. I kicked pebbles on the ground.

"I don't want to say goodbye this way," I said softly as a tear rolled down my cheek and dropped onto the pavement, marking a dot. "I don't want it to end like this."

"I don't want it to end at all," he said.

We looked at each other again. He took my hand. "Please don't go," he pleaded, his voice breaking on the first word.

"I have to go, and this has to end," I said, looking at my hand in his.

"Why?"

"Because it was a lie."

He paused to ponder this.

"Not all of it."

"Too much of it."

"So, we can start over."

"As what? Friends? Lovers? What are we now--the escort and his former client? I can't and I don't want to start over. I want to start something new with someone else."

"God, don't do this to me, Andi. Please. Not right now."

I caressed his face with my free hand. "I don't want to hurt you."

He took hold of me and kissed me hard. My body surged--dammit, I felt that kiss in my toenails. We embraced in a way we'd never done before, kissing and clinging to each other. My mind raced while my body throbbed:
Maybe I don't have to leave. Maybe I could unpack the U-haul tomorrow, call NU, and tell them I changed my mind. Then I could call Mags and tell her not to give Sarah the keys to my office just yet. I could email Sam and tell him...what could I tell him? That I just met... that I was going back to... that I was starting...

I kissed him one last time.

"I'll always love you, Dev, and I'll always be grateful to you."

"David," he corrected me again, even more painfully than the first time, still holding my hand.

I repeated, more painfully than the first time, "I don't know David."

"I want you to," he said in almost a whisper.

I stood on my toes and spoke in his ear. "Then start
being
David."

He held onto my hand. I used my other to unclasp his, and then backed up to my car.

"Will you get back to the city okay?" I asked. He nodded, his eyes glassy. I got into the car and waved.

"Goodbye."

He raised and lowered his hand in a brash gesture. "Bye," he barely uttered.

***

I spent the drive listening to a book on tape and breaking out in tears for several stretches at a time. Thanks to a car accident on the ThrogsNeckBridge, rush hour traffic on I-95 through Hartford, and construction just past Providence, I didn't arrive at my new apartment until midnight. Sam was there, wide awake, with a carpet picnic awaiting me. Both his presence and thoughtfulness reassured me almost immediately.

"Welcome home, Sweetheart," he said warmly.

Physically and emotionally exhausted, all I could manage was a sigh.

Chapter Twenty-eight

October - Sixteen Months Later

S
EX WITH SAM IS FUCKING FABULOUS.

I'm not sure I have any point of reference beyond Devin; I'm not even sure it's a matter of comparison. Nevertheless, this has been the case since day one. Or night four, depending on how you look at it.

Night one, the night I'd arrived in Northampton, I crashed on the air mattress Sam had prepared for me. He crashed with me. Night two, I crashed again, this time on my own mattress, after spending the entire day unpacking boxes and moving furniture, with Sam's help, of course. He crashed with me again.

Night three, I had a temporary meltdown, one of those moments when you realize the enormity and possible stupidity of what you've just done--moved to a new city and state (even if it was a state in which you used to live); left behind your comfortable, familiar job and friends and family (again); and left behind a guy you-were-friends-with-and-sort-of-seeing-but-not-really-but-ended-up-sleeping-with-but-it-didn't-work-out-but-maybe-you-should've-tried. I suddenly looked at Sam as if he was a stranger, and decided I'd made a mistake, my mind's eye seeing Devin standing in the driveway of my East Meadow apartment, defeated. "Go away," I said to Sam, or something to that effect. He understood, wonderful creature that he is, and left me to sleep in what was suddenly a big empty bed, and it was only a full-size mattress. He wasn't mad or anything. Just smiled and hugged me and left.

By night four, I'd regained my senses. It happened while I was alone in my apartment, setting up my office space. All it took was the thought of Sam's hug: he holds either firmly in an assuring way, or squeezes cuddly-like. When I'd sent him away the night before, he did both. This time, I called him: "Get over here." He came over and I yanked him through the doorway before he even had a chance to knock and pulled him into the bedroom and took leave of all inhibition. Just like that. (I couldn't help but think that Devin the Escort would've been proud.) Granted, Sam and I had been talking about it ever since that night in front of the fireplace during spring break weekend, when he said he wanted us to wait. We'd exchanged emails and phone calls inquiring what kind of sex we wanted and how we wanted our first time to be and what we each liked and didn't like, and I even put Devin's claim of "you can't have good sex if you can't talk about good sex" to use by challenging Sam to respond to it, to which he rose to the challenge by producing a four-page essay, citing sources and everything.

On night four, we did everything we'd talked about, and some things we didn't, and haven't been able to keep our damn hands off each other since. And what amazed me was how
easy
it was for me--natural, I mean. As if I'd never had a single insecurity about sex. As if I'd been having sex throughout my adult life. As if Sam and I had known each other throughout the duration of our lives. I wondered who was to get the credit for this: was it Sam, with his way of making me feel so at home? What did he have that Andrew and the others didn't? Or was it Devin, for teaching me how to make me feel at home myself? Or had I simply been there all along?

Regardless of the answer, sex with Sam is fucking fabulous.

I suppose sex with Sam is so fabulous because Sam is fabulous. He cooks, for one thing. Makes French toast for dinner, smoothies for breakfast, and vegetable soup from scratch for lunch, among other things. I've taken to baking lately--even tried cheesecake in response to his chicken parmesan. He loves my cupcakes.

Sam also reads to me. I'd forgotten how much I love to be read to, something my brothers used to do for me when we were kids, before they had gigs or rehearsals or lessons to run off to. Sam reads everything to me, from novels to newspaper articles to selected student papers. He has a beatific reading voice and, like my brothers used to, often makes up voices for characters or narrators. Sometimes I get so swept away by his rounded tones and placid articulations that I forget to listen to the content. In the early days, Sam's reading made me horny as hell--one time, while reading a section of Bill Bryson's
A Walk in the Woods
in which Bryson expounds on the history of the park rangers, Sam put the book down and looked at me.

"Sweetheart, are you listening to me?" he asked.

I pounced on him like a cat does a toy mouse laced with catnip.

By the end of my first semester at NU, I had moved out of my apartment and into Sam's house, delighted by how quickly "his" became "ours": hardwood floors, earthy-colored walls, and lots of bookcases. We literally picked out curtains together, along with plush, coffeehouse-style sofas and bistro chairs and tables. And we got a cat--an orange tuxedo that we named "Donny Most" (after the guy who played Ralph Malph on the old
Happy Days
series). We even shared the same sense of humor.

And Sam makes me laugh constantly.

Not to say that we don't have a couple of knock-down, drag-out fights once in awhile. Not to say that my demons (or his) don't show up uninvited now and then. Not to say Sam isn't stubborn as hell, a hopeless packrat, and stingy with the butter when he cooks. Worse yet, he's high maintenance while trying to pass himself off as low maintenance--it became clear early on that we were going to need our own bathrooms. But we write apology letters in the form of memoirs or allegories and leave them on the bedside tables. We sit and talk until our throats are dry and/or we reach consensus. Sam is patient and understanding. He listens. And I listen to him in ways I never listened to my exes. Perhaps because I know him better than I ever knew them. Or perhaps because I've gotten so good at silencing the voices of self-judgment that kept me from truly hearing anyone else.

Besides, I'd discovered the joys of make-up sex, so even fighting with Sam proved fabulous in the end.

I not only fell in love with Sam, but I fell in love with New England all over again, and saw it with new eyes: Manhattan without her makeup on. Low maintenance Long Island. Trails and trees offset by hills and mountains flanked by sand and sea. We frequently took little trips to Boston and Cape Cod and New Hampshire and Vermont.

By the end of my second semester at NU, Sam asked me to marry him, and I accepted.

Yet, despite all this bliss, I occasionally found myself missing Devin.

So many times I thought about calling him, or writing a letter and actually mailing it, apologizing for the way things ended between us that day in East Meadow. I would often think about the things we used to do together. It all seemed like another lifetime; and when I imagined him with his clients, I no longer felt the sickening jealousy in the pit of my stomach. In fact, I had adopted the classic Devin mentality: business as usual. He had sex with these women. He may not have technically consummated these relationships with copulation, but he had sex with every last one of them. He seduced them or submitted to their seductions, danced around them with foreplay, and indulged them in their hedonistic fantasies and exigency. It's all perfectly acceptable to me now. And indeed, I was one of them, and okay with that, too. And I imagined myself going back, every now and then, to Cafe Dante on

Bleaker Street

and asking Dev for pointers on fantasy play.

I missed his charm and wit. I missed his chiseled features. I missed his coy wink. I missed our conversations and banter. I missed seeing him in his boxers. I missed the comfort level we'd reached with each other.

But being with Sam also made me realize how Devin and I had barely scratched the surface of a relationship. For all we had exposed, we also withheld. For all we gave, we also kept to ourselves. We'd passed up so many opportunities to be intimate that when we finally slept together, we were strangers.

I didn't tell Sam about sleeping with Devin. I wasn't deliberately keeping it a secret--I simply didn't know what to say. Devin and I were more like fictional characters than actual people. We were artifacts, creations of each other's imaginations. Friends and lovers and teachers and escorts.

***

Sam and I had a three-day weekend for Columbus Day and decided to spend it in Boston. We arrived Friday afternoon and stayed at a friend's apartment in the North End. That night we dined at an Italian restaurant down the street that took me back twenty years to my grandmother's Queens kitchen. I introduced Sam to gnocchi; in gratitude, he bought me flowers that turned the head of every Bostonian who passed us on the street.

Late Saturday morning, after breakfast, Sam perused the
Boston Leisure Weekly
, a local community paper, while I did dishes.

"Hey Sweetheart, listen to this," he said, and read aloud:

Life can be a series of happy mistakes.

I was still new to the Boston area (and its art scene) when I had decided to check out the Senior Art Show at the Boston School of Art.

Keep in mind that I'm a relocated New Yorker. Manhattan, to be exact. I'd gotten used to grids. I'd gotten used to numerical progressions, to cross-street references (57
^th
and 5
^th
. 7
^th
and Lex). I'd gotten used to dichotomies: East and West, Upper and Lower, Uptown and Downtown. So you can imagine what a city like Boston does to a guy's sense of direction. How many times have I gone in circles only to find that my intended destination was right down the block?

And so, after a series of wrong turns and getting caught in a downpour, I conceded that I was lost yet again and stumbled into what turned out to be a belly dancing class to ask for directions. The cymbal-clicking, veil-waving temptresses were actually a group of printmaking students who privately met once a week to "unleash their inner goddesses." And although the dancing was certainly an art form unto itself and undoubtedly worthy of my attention, it was not what I had in mind. So I politely (and soggily) declined their offer to join their group, and instead thanked them, heading out once again.

Quickly dismissing an image of my soaking body flopping and gyrating, surrounded by printmaking belly dancers, I'd hoped I was getting close, until I passed a propped door with a brushed bronzed plaque that read
Graduate Gallery
. This was still not my final destination, but the low lighting and satisfying purr of the air conditioner drew me in; and once inside, I almost immediately felt a shift in reality. A sign near the gallery's entrance introduced me to the collection by Jesse Bartlett, and I decided to stay and get acquainted. Together, the paintings displayed a balance of the energy, movement, and warm earthy colors of the cave paintings of Lascaux partnered with the edge of modern city life and a skilled, albeit young, hand.

Each piece contains its own voice, its own message. A fragment of city life as seen, experienced, and recorded from every angle and position imaginable. Twenty-six-year-old Bartlett brings a unique perspective to his paintings. "City life was unlike anything I'd ever seen before," says the Granby, Vermont native who relocated to Boston for his graduate work in contemporary painting. "It was just raw and I was blown away by it. Blindsided, you know? And everybody just walks around like nothing's happening. And I just stop and stare," he shrugs, "because it's all I can do."