I'm Your Man (11 page)

Jake thought my father's attitude was based on resentment. Unlike my parents, I'd refused to be trapped in a bad marriage. Nor was I content to stay safely in Wisconsin and use the reputation and connections of the Dunhills or the Keplers to get ahead in business. In some ways, I agreed with Jake. Being successful on my own terms, in a business my father knew nothing about, cheated him out of taking credit for my accomplishments.

Since I'd spent most of my life trying to win his approval, I couldn't pretend his biting comments didn't upset me. I'd finally decided the best reaction was not to respond. I was afraid if our animosity ever escalated, my temper would get the best of me and I'd say things I never intended to say. At least not in anger.

I shrugged off the conversation and picked up the phone. “Hi, Adam. It's Blaine. When are you going back to Wisconsin?”

 

At least flying with Adam meant I had a ride from the airport to Eau Claire. After he dropped me at the hospital, I let him take my luggage to his place. I hadn't stayed at my parents' house in years, since my disastrous divorce from Sydney. And I no longer had the option of staying with the Stephensons now that Daniel and I had broken up. I told Adam I could rent a car and stay at a motel, but he wouldn't hear of it. I knew I'd be comfortable at his renovated farmhouse, although this would be my first opportunity to see Jeremy since Daniel and I had broken up. I wondered if that would make things different between us. Maybe we could form a Daniel's Ex-Boyfriends Club.

I found my oldest brother, Shane, flirting with a couple of nurses near the cardiac care unit. As usual, I felt a chill pass over me when I saw him. If I stopped working out and let my muscles get soft, then added a few cocktails to every afternoon, in a few years I'd be him. It was hard to believe that Shane, like me, had once been an award-winning high school athlete. Unfortunately for his wife, he still thought of himself as Eau Claire's hottest ladies' man.

Until I showed up, the nurses seemed to think so, too. He was none too pleased to see their attention shift to a younger, healthier version of himself, so he hurried me to a waiting area to fill me in on my mother's situation.

“She was just having the usual heart flutters she complains about,” he said, “but Dad got tired of being paged every day and hearing that she was having a heart attack. He finally convinced her to get a complete checkup. Her mitral valve wasn't working right, so they're repairing it. She'll be in the hospital a few days, then she'll do rehab as an outpatient. I guess you have to rebuild your strength slowly. I don't know. Anyway, this surgeon says he's done over a hundred of these operations and her prognosis is good. He tells us she's in great physical condition other than the valve problem.”

“Did he tell her that, too?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah. Naturally she told us later that he's just being positive so we won't be too worried about her. Oh, and that since he's only treating her heart condition, he really has no understanding of the many physical problems she's dealing with.”

“She'll outlive all of us. Where's Dad?”

“He had to oversee a wiring job at a new bank.”

I wasn't surprised. Whenever there was any crisis, my father was always at work. He'd come in later and make some grand gesture with flowers and brisk cheer that my mother would probably be too drugged to know about. Not that it mattered. He wasn't doing it for her, but so everyone else would know what a great husband he was.

As if reading my mind, Shane said, “Don't be too hard on the old man. You know what it's like to listen to her day and night. You moved all the way to New York. Work is his only escape from her.”

“What if something goes wrong? Any surgery is risky, no matter how many times the surgeon has done it. Dad should be here.”

“He'll be here later. He's only as far away as his cell phone.”

“Whatever,” I said.

I walked to the window and stared out, swept by a longing for Daniel that took me by surprise. For so long he'd been my refuge from Dunhill drama and disappointment. Even though he could never be with me on the rare occasions that I saw my family, the comfort of knowing I'd be going back to him had made my visits to Eau Claire endurable.

The worst part of visiting Wisconsin and being around my family was that I felt like I reverted to an identity I'd tried to outgrow. I always found myself hoping my parents would suddenly start acting like Jake and Sheila's parents. That if I presented myself to them as a happy, successful adult, they'd not only approve of me, but it would somehow fix their relationship.

It had taken me a long time to figure out why I never enjoyed sitcoms. A part of me longed for happy endings to any family crisis, but I knew my family was not the Huxtables or the Tanners. I'd have been satisfied with the thirty-second relief offered by commercials. The right product could fix anything from split ends to excruciating pain. I'd tried in vain to be the cure for my parents' miserable marriage, like the kid version of Bufferin.

Maybe it would have worked if they'd ever fought, but the displeasure in our house was silent, leaving me helpless to fix it. The best I could offer was listening to my mother complain about her health or giving my father no reason to extend his disappointment with her to me.

“Oh, geez,” I said, catching sight of a pickup truck wheeling into a parking space outside. I knew by the Rebel flag in the back window that my brother Wayne had arrived. I turned back to Shane and asked, “How's Beverly doing? And the kids?”

“Great. Beverly's managing the Clinique counter at Drayden's now. All she's done is boost me into a higher tax bracket, but it makes her happy, so what the hell. You know Tony graduates this year. He got a football scholarship to Nebraska. Looks like we got another jock hero in the family. Pretty soon Dad'll be taking your pictures out of the lobby at Dunhill Electrical and replacing them with Tony's.”

“That's fine with me,” I said. “Life goes on. How are the twins?”

“Chuck made All State in track. And Nicky—well, he's just weird. He stays in his room listening to music or surfing the Internet all the time.”

I didn't blame him. It had to be tough being the gawky kid in a family with two self-absorbed parents and two overachieving brothers. I could only hope that if being gay was hereditary, the gene had bypassed Nicky. He already had enough strikes against him due to his lack of athletic prowess and his propensity to listen to Marilyn Manson and Eminem.

“Yeehaw,” Shane muttered as Wayne ambled into the waiting room in faded jeans, his orange T-shirt covered by a denim jacket. He was wearing a “gimme” cap with the Dunhill Electrical logo. Unlike Shane and me, Wayne had always been wiry, but he shared our green eyes and brown hair, although his fell in lanky strands over his collar. I knew if he took off the cap, I'd see a mullet cut.

“Hey, Blaine,” Wayne said. He looked at Shane and asked, “Any news on Mom yet?”

“No,” Shane said. “We're waiting.”

“Dad should be along soon. We just finished at the bank. I still think this whole thing is bogus.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Aw, hell, it ain't nothing but a heart murmur. This valve story is a plot between the doctors and the insurance companies to make money. They hit paydirt with a hypochondriac like Mom.”

“Wayne, I don't think they do heart surgery on a whim,” I said.

“Well, at least they let me and Shane donate blood for her. I damn sure wouldn't take any stranger's blood, with all the diseases out there. You can't trust anybody but family. You think if Mom got some fag's blood, she'd flirt with Miss Comensky and move to San Francisco?”

Miss Comensky had once been a girls' PE teacher, and though I was pretty sure she had no Sapphic leanings, such rumors had always swirled around her spinsterish state.

But it wasn't Miss Comensky I wanted to defend as Wayne's words replayed in my head:
some fag's blood.
I thought about Ken, and his sad, premature death. I remembered Adam's mother angrily talking about the ban on gay men donating blood. If my brothers knew the truth about me, they'd consider me unfit to offer what they had to our mother, as if my very nature tainted me or they were somehow purer than I was, no matter who they had sex with, as long as it wasn't with
some fag.

I heard with shock the words coming out of my mouth. “I'm gay.” When Wayne and I didn't join Shane's outburst of laughter, he broke off abruptly and stared at me. “That's nothing to joke about, Blaine.”

“I wasn't joking,” I said, refusing to take the out he'd given me.

“Well, that's just great,” Wayne muttered. “Why don't you tell Mom that and finish her off?”

“You can't be gay,” Shane said angrily. “You played football.”

“I don't think one has anything to do with the other,” I said.

“But you were married,” Shane said, refusing to give up.

“That would explain why Sydney divorced him,” Wayne said.

“Sydney didn't divorce me. I divorced her.”

“How the hell could you turn gay? What's wrong with you?” Shane's face was getting redder, and I suspected he was itching to hit me.

“I didn't turn gay. It's the way I've been for as long as I can remember. It's not my intention to tell the folks. At least not now. So I'd appreciate it if you keep it to yourselves.”

“I'm sure not telling them,” Shane said. “I'm getting coffee. Do you want any?”

Both Wayne and I shook our heads, and Shane left us. I met my brother's gaze, determined not to back down now that I'd gotten this far.

“Well, hell,” Wayne finally said. “I'll tell you what it is. It's nobody's business. You know there are people in the government who'd like to round all of you up and stick you in a camp somewhere. You'd better be careful who you share that information with.”

I knew that in his own way, he was trying to offer brotherly advice, but I said, “Wayne, could you give the conspiracy theories a rest? If anybody's involved with fringe groups that the government is watching, it's you.”

He ignored that to ask, “Does Jake Meyers know you're a—that you're gay?”

“He's my best friend. Of course he knows.”

“He's not one, too, is he?”

“No,” I said wearily. “Maybe we could have this heart-to-heart another time?”

“Suits me,” Wayne said. “You're not sick, are you?”

“No.”

“That's good. You be careful and keep it that way.”

I was surprised and touched, and my mind wandered as he began to expound his theory about the origin of AIDS, which was, predictably, that it was another government conspiracy. In that respect, I was sure Wayne could find bosom buddies among some of the more virulent AIDS activists.

Since my brothers were so much older than me, we'd never been kids together. Although Shane had been the athletic one, it was Wayne who took the time to throw a football to me in the backyard. It was also Wayne who made sure I got to and from practice when I was older, since my father was always working and my mother said driving made her nervous. She had never gone to any of my games, nor could I remember Shane being there. My father always sat among his cronies in the press box, but Wayne stood on the other side of the fence behind the bench, sometimes yelling praise after I made a good play, or looking unconcerned if I'd blown one. I could never have confided all my teenage anxieties to him, but he did at least make me feel like someone in my family felt affection for me.

My father's arrival brought an end to Wayne's rambling. After a chilly greeting to me, he went to find Shane and, hopefully, a doctor who could tell us what was happening with my mother. I was sure that my father didn't want to sit in a waiting room, forced to make small talk with me, any longer than necessary. I didn't see how our relationship could deteriorate any further, even if he found out I was gay. But I was afraid he'd find a way to take it out on my mother, and her life seemed to hold little enough joy as it was.

I was relieved to hear that she was being taken from recovery to cardiac intensive care. We were only allowed a few minutes each to visit her. She was still too groggy to know what was going on. It bothered me more than I'd expected to see her looking so small and helpless in a hospital bed hooked up to monitors and IV tubes.

I was able to leave the hospital after offering a “staying with a friend” story without any uncomfortable questions. I reminded my father that I had my cell phone if he needed to reach me. I was sure my brothers didn't want to know into what den of homo iniquity I was taking myself, and my father probably assumed I was staying with Jake.

As I walked outside the hospital to call Adam on my cell phone, I heard a woman call my name. I turned and saw Gwendy Stephenson heading my way. I immediately imagined her in a Marlboro or Harley-Davidson ad, since she was wearing cowboy boots, blue jeans, and a cream turtleneck, over which was a brown leather coat with shearling lining. Her mousy blond hair wasn't styled, but swung healthily around her shoulders. Although she was Daniel's least favorite of his three sisters, I'd always liked her. Despite her feminine assets, she had broad shoulders and an androgynous look. Not to mention a wry sense of humor. In high school, Gwendy had been captain of the field hockey team and was known by the nickname “Dinty Moore,” like the hearty beef stew. There was something blunt and honest about her that reminded me of someone else . . .

Before I could complete the thought, she was giving me a big hug and saying, “I thought it was you. What are you doing in town?”