Major Conflict (24 page)

“No problem, I understand,” I said. And I did. “Where you thinking of taking them?”

“Probably here, actually, for dinner, and then, you know, out for some drinking. I'm not sure I can take the whole night with them, though. I mean, they're good guys and all, but I've got my limits. So I was thinking I might break away after and stop by at Legends or Flex for a nightcap. I wanted to make sure you didn't mind.”

“You're too much, Paul. Of course I don't mind,” I said, smiling. Legends and Flex were two of the big gay bars on Hargett Street in Raleigh.

A week later he called me at the office.

“I really need to see you,” he said. “Can you meet me for lunch? Something happened at work today.”

“Sure, what's up, Paul? Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I'm fine, but . . . I'll tell you at lunch. How about the Korean place in an hour, say?”

“See you then,” I said.

He was already there when I arrived at the restaurant. He'd apparently had a haircut in the last day or so, and it was the shortest I'd ever seen it. It looked really good on him. It always amazed me when I discovered he could do something to make himself even better-looking than before, and I caught my breath a little when I saw him sitting at the table.

Before I could even compliment his haircut, he was telling me what had happened.

“Hey,” he said, as I sat down across from him, “somebody from my unit saw me coming out of Legends.”

“What, who? What happened?”

“You know those buddies I went out with last weekend?”

I nodded my head. “Yeah,” I said.

“Well, it turns out I did break away from them,” he said, talking very fast, “you know, like I said I might have to, and I went to Legends for a nightcap and I had a couple beers, and then somebody from the unit must've seen me leaving and it got back to my boss somehow and he called me in. I don't know what to do, Jeff; what am I going to do?” He had an anguished look on his face. His eyes, normally that friendly, open, warm blue, looked haunted and distant now.

“Well, first of all, what did he say?”

“He called me in to talk about a slide presentation that I've been working on. We got through the slides and then he asked me where I'd been last weekend. I told him I was out with the guys. He got a weird look on his face and asked me if I was with them the whole night. I said yes. He said to me, ‘That's funny, someone from the shop says they saw you coming out of one of those gay bars up there.' I said that must have been a mistake because I turned in pretty early and what would I be doing in a gay bar anyway. I tried to make a joke, but I was so nervous and he didn't seem to buy it. He looked at me and didn't say anything.”

“Okay, so you told him that you weren't there, so don't worry about it. What's he going to do? Listen, it's not like he saw you having sex with someone, for God's sake, so what can he do? Just lie low for a while. Work a little harder and keep your head down, and it'll blow over.”

“I don't know about that, Jeff. I mean he even asked me what color shirt I was wearing. I don't know—
fuck
! Why did this have to happen? I should have just gone back to Fayetteville.”

“Come on, Paul, don't blame yourself, it's not as big a deal as you think, believe me. He knows how good an officer you are. He'll get over it. Just try to be seen with Jessica at an event or something.” Jessica was Paul's beard, a close friend who didn't know about us, but whom Paul took to events as a sort of girlfriend. He sighed heavily and looked away.

“Yeah, maybe. Maybe you're right,” he said, but he didn't seem at all convinced.

We kept seeing each other regularly over the course of the next month. Paul updated me periodically on the situation at work. His relationship with his boss went from being friendly and open to formal and distant. Graffiti appeared in the bathroom—“Paul is a fag,” that kind of thing. I tried to comfort him as best I could and to help him keep things in perspective. I was willing to do almost anything to accommodate his growing paranoia. We kept up our basic routine in terms of seeing each other, but we started spending most of our time at my place since there were other guys from his unit in the complex where he lived.

But nothing was ever quite the same after that. Something had been poisoned. I kept thinking things would blow over, but his anxiety only grew worse, and it got to the point where it seemed as if he'd never be relaxed or happy again. All that ease I'd admired so much, that confidence, that youthful optimism, had been drained out of him by the constant feeling of being hunted, of being watched and judged and made to feel as if one false move, one wrong word, would put an immediate end to the career he'd spent a good part of his young life working for.

It broke my heart to watch him struggle under this pressure, to see his spirit so diminished. And for the first time in my life I was outraged at what was happening. The injustice of it had suddenly become so clear. It was unfair. It was mean-spirited. I was viewing it from the other side now, the side I should have been viewing it from all along. It was happening to someone I cared about, so in a sense it was happening to me.

About two months later we were having dinner at Chili's. It was a Friday night, and he'd called me at the office earlier and said he needed talk to me.

“You know,” he said, after we'd gotten drinks and had ordered our food. “The last couple months have been really shitty.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “But you know I'm here for you, right? And it's getting better, isn't it?”

He smiled warmly at me. “Well, as a matter of fact it's been getting worse. But you've been amazing, Jeff, thanks. That's why it's so hard for me to say what I'm about to say.”

My stomach dropped. I felt my forehead getting hot.

“Jeff, I don't want to lose my career. I can't lose it. It's all I have. I really think my boss has moved into high gear and is looking to fuck me over real good. I don't want go to work every day feeling like I've got a target on my back. I don't want to read about myself on the walls of the men's room. I've come so far, and I don't want to do anything else now except be a soldier. So . . . I've decided . . . to get married.”

I was thunderstruck. I felt nothing, or maybe everything all at once. For a moment I wasn't sure I'd heard him right. I hoped I'd heard him wrong. I just stared at him with my mouth slightly open.

“Jeff, are you all right? Did you hear what I said?”

“I heard you.” Words were coming out of my mouth. Three words strung together—subject, verb, pronoun—a rational sentence. And then another sentence came out, “Who do you want to marry?”

“I've been talking to Margaret—my old girlfriend from back home? We were serious for a long time, and I know it could work with her.”

I was stunned, and now silent. I stared at him, the hurt turning to anger, then back to confusion, then hurt again. I was shocked, pissed, deeply wounded, and finally all these words just came rushing out of me.

“I don't know what to say. I'm really confused, Paul. How could I have misread this so completely? How could you do this to me? I mean, you're attracted to men, right? I mean, you don't like women, right? You said you haven't slept with a woman since college. I just can't believe this is happening. And just how's it going to work? Explain it to me, Paul. Explain it to me! You were lying to me, weren't you? You were lying the whole time. Is it me and you just don't want to hurt my feelings? I mean, I'm an adult, I can handle that you might want to move on. I can handle that probably better than this fake marriage shit.”

“No, no, no. Please, Jeff, I wasn't lying, believe me. And no, it isn't because I want to break up with you. I
don't
want to break up with you. I
have
to break up with you. I don't have a choice. I want to be able to finish my career, and this asshole is hunting me. I have do this in order to survive. I am gonna do this with her; I'm going to marry Margaret because she's my best friend and, uh . . . as for the sex . . . we've had sex before. It's not like I can't . . . you know, do it.”

“That's just ridiculous. Let me get this right, your unit thinks you're gay, and marrying someone is going to solve it? What about Margaret and her feelings? Isn't marriage supposed to be until death do you part? One OER [officer evaluation report] is not going to destroy your career. I think you're a fucking hypocrite, Paul, that's what I think. There has to be something you're not telling me. Did you get caught in the act?” I heard echoes of Greg in my voice here, felt that hard, spring rain on Lexington Avenue, saw Greg on the steps of the Citicorp Plaza, the fountain splashing hard in the downpour, his arms up in the air; it was me now, that was me now. He'd been right, after all.
I wouldn't
stay dry forever, and now I was drenched straight through, I was soaking-wet angry and hurt and lost, losing the most important person in my life. But I wouldn't appreciate the tremendous irony of the situation until later on when it occurred to me how decently Paul had treated me compared to the way I'd treated Greg a decade before.

“Jeff, I mean . . . listen, I know you're hurt, but come on. And no, I didn't get caught. I wouldn't do that to you. You know I wouldn't do that to you. Besides, they would've booted me instantly. Please, Jeff, I'm trying to make you understand. It's about my career. I have a good shot at going to CGSC first look. I'm not gonna lose that.”

I couldn't look at him now.

“Listen, Jeff, would you look at me. Jeff, look at me. It's not like we can get married or anything, you know. Can't you see it in the long term? Can't you see what I'm doing? I'm going to be leaving soon and what then? Who knows if we would ever get an assignment together again. It was going to have to end sometime. You knew that; didn't you know that?”

I forced myself to look at him now. “I kind of thought it would end when we stopped caring about each other,” I said, my voice cracking a little, but I pulled myself together. “But I guess that's not what you had in mind. Now,” I said, “let us summarize, shall we? This is your plan: you're going to discard a good relationship, the best relationship you ever had, you once told me, so that you can use and deceive a long-time friend in order to get to CGSC [Command and General Staff College]? That's pretty fuckin' ruthless. And for what? To run out the clock and get a shitty government pension? I can't believe you think this is right. I don't believe you think it's right. I felt like I knew you up until this moment. Now it feels like I don't know you at all.”

“Jeff, I know you're hurt.”

“Just be quiet for a minute, you. I am hurt, you're right. I am. I had hoped that things could . . . continue between us. I mean I really . . . care for you.” Now I felt tears beginning to well up, but I shut them down out of sheer resentment.

“You're missing the real point here, though, Paul,” I said. “I'll get over this, eventually. But you go through with this decision, and you'll never get over it. You'll have to live with it for the rest of your life. Are you prepared to do that? It's you I'm worried about, not me. I'm worried about you making a really bad decision. Think about it. What are you going to do? Imagine your daily life. How are you going to arrange it? Just have affairs to satisfy yourself? I know you know that's fucked up. But shit, listen, I need to go. I have to get out of here.” I stood up abruptly and started walking away.

“How are you going to get home? I drove, remember?” he shouted.

“Don't worry about it,” I yelled back, spinning quickly through the revolving doors and out to the parking lot.

I walked the five miles home that night, on the shoulder of the highway, never once breaking my stride, walking as if I could walk away from the pain. I cried most of the way. When I wasn't crying, I was thinking how absurd the situation was, and how unfair. All of this heartbreak just because my boyfriend was seen coming out of a gay bar? Was that really the whole story? Amazing. And so royally fucked up. I couldn't get over it. Paul had committed no crime. He'd hurt no one, hadn't damaged any property; he'd done nothing, in fact, but be seen coming out of a bar. And because of that I was losing him.

When I got home there was a message from Paul.

“Jeff, I'm worried about you. Please call me when you get in.”

“Fuck you,” I yelled, smacking the delete button hard.

I ignored his messages over the next couple of days. On the third day, he came by the office, but I was out. That night my doorbell rang, and I knew it was him. I decided that avoiding him was not going to solve anything, plus I'd begun to miss him already.

“Jeez, Jeff,” he said, as I opened the door and he walked into the apartment. “Where have you been? Didn't you get my messages? Or were you just not returning my calls?”

“I got 'em.”

“Sooo . . . what's going on?”

“Well, it's obvious, isn't it? I'm hurt, and I need to be alone. I mean the whole situation is fucked. I keep asking myself why I'm in the army, if this is what I have to deal with. I have to tell you, Paul, what you're doing is just stupid. And I really think I'd feel the same way even if I wasn't so personally invested in the whole thing. I've been thinking real hard about this, and I know I can't change who I am, but this? What you're doing is not the answer.”

“Jeff, all I want to do is survive. I mean, it's hard to find a job when you're more senior. You're less marketable. I want my pension, shitty as it might be. I love what I do . . . and really, come on, who's kidding who here? You see how they live in the civilian world; you're not like them, neither am I. We're not really gay. I mean I'm not into Donna Summer and the club scene. All they're into is decorating, drugs, and sex. Trivial shit, and I'm not trivial, and neither are you. We'll never fit in.”