Major Conflict (25 page)

“Listen, I have one question for you,” I said, ignoring his goofy analysis of contemporary gay culture and our place, or lack thereof, in it. Later I'd realize that up until just about the moment the words came out of his mouth, I'd felt exactly the same way, but hearing them, and feeling what I was feeling now, I knew that whole way of seeing was wrong; it was like staring at one very narrow slice of a huge canvas.

“If this hadn't happened, would we be doing this right now?” I asked him. “Why do you have to do this to me in order to survive? Why do you have to lie in such a big way? I mean, I just can't get over how fucked up it is.”

“Jeff . . . I . . .”

“Answer the question,” I snapped. My voice rose. I was almost shouting at him. “Would we be doing this if your boss hadn't found out?”

“No, no, I don't think so,” he said, sighing.

I thought this would come as a relief, but I actually found myself growing angrier, getting more frustrated, because, as hurtful as it was, a personal rejection of me was at least comprehensible. But this made no sense to me.

“So then why are we doing this? Really, why are you doing it to me? For months we've been going out and acting like a couple . . . and it was so fucking great. I can't believe that means nothing. That you weren't feeling the same things I was. I saw your face, I heard what you said, I felt your body. I can't believe that was a complete lie or that I'm just an idiot.”

“Where is this coming from? I've never seen you so angry.”

“No, don't try to change the subject; respond to what I just said. Is what we were doing a lie? Was I wrong about the signals?”

“No, I loved every minute I've ever spent with you. I just think this is the right thing to do. Jeff, I don't know what to say. Do you think I want to do this? I don't. I mean, I just don't see what choice I have. It's the only way to stop the bullshit that's going on. Besides I want a family and kids. How can I have that with you? I mean, there are a lot of issues here.”

He was right on that point, I thought. How could we have kids? How could we carry on a relationship past one tour of duty with any certainty? Why did it have to be this way? It didn't. The problem was the army, not me. The problem was the policy, not me, not Paul, not all the Donna Summer–loving gay-priders in their muscle tees marching down Fifth Avenue on the last Sunday in June every year. It was them, the military, not me, not us. Either the army was going to have to change, or I was going to leave the army.

“So why the hell did you drag me into this?” I said. “You came after me, remember? What did you think was going to happen? You said you don't like women, so what are you gonna do? Just have affairs, keep some guy on the side, get blow jobs in a booth somewhere? Is that the kind of life you want?”

“Well, I've heard of people getting married and leading separate lives.” He was defensive now.

I laughed out loud. “What? Have you lost your mind? Oh, Paul, I just don't want to see you unhappy. What about Margaret? Have you already proposed?”

“No, not yet, but I know she'll say yes. We almost got married before. But seriously, Jeff, I've heard of a lot of people like us, who marry in the services to protect each other and get the benefits. It's not that weird.”

“Oh, that's priceless, just priceless. Let me cut you off right there. I can't do this. Why would I want to do this?”

“So you can have everything you want in life. That's what I'm thinking. I want a family, I want to continue to serve, and I want men. Why can't I have all three? I think I can make it work this way.”

“You just really don't get how pathetic that sounds, do you?”

“So what do you recommend?” he said, pissed now, and exasperated. “You tell me, almighty McGowan, what
you
think I should do.”

“Look, it's your life. I can't answer that for you. I can't tell you how to live your life. All I know is that we were doing just fine until you got caught, and now you've just gone totally off the deep end. Do you realize just how complicated that life will become, how deceitful, how lies beget lies beget lies? I think you're lying to yourself right now. You've already told yourself the first lie—that you can actually pull this off and be happy.”

There was a long silence as we stared at each other, standing on the exact spot where we'd made love so frantically that first night several months before.

“My decision is made.” He said it simply, although there was a slight hint of regret in his tone, one quiet note that seemed to be asking for my permission and maybe forgiveness.

“Okay, then,” I said, giving it to him, apparently.

With that he got up and walked out. And as I watched him go I felt, for the first time in my life, as if I had more in common with the dancing, shirtless, gay-prider than with the closeted gay U.S. Army captain who'd just walked out of my life for good.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Bob in a Black Velvet Dress

The weeks following the scene with Paul at Chili's were demoralizing, to say the least. I'm not one prone to depression, or even bad moods, really. And I'm not one who generally gets bogged down in any kind of existential speculation, but now I was feeling as if all the meaning had been drained from my life. I simply went about my business, doing everything on autopilot, feeling the whole time as if I had lead weights attached to my legs. As it turned out, Paul hadn't walked out of my life entirely on that day in my apartment. He called several times over the next few weeks, to try to convince me that what he was doing made sense, and to let me know how much he missed me. It was difficult, hearing that, since I missed him terribly, too, so much so that there were times when I almost convinced myself that we could make it work, but then I'd come to my senses and do my best to get off the phone as quickly as possible. Eventually, he stopped calling. The last I heard from him was the wedding invitation I received a few months later. I didn't attend the wedding.

During this time I was sitting in one of the interminable battalion meetings we had to attend all too frequently. My portion of the briefings wasn't until the end, so I would often let my mind wander, thinking ahead to a practical joke we were planning for one of our colleagues who would soon be leaving to assume command. It was something stupid and fun that helped me keep my mind off Paul.

The captain leaving was a great guy and a talented officer. At one point, when he was younger, he'd been heavily into bodybuilding. For some reason there were a lot of photos of him from those days floating around the post. One of his office mates got hold of one of them—a very unflattering shot of him posing in a really tight Speedo. We'd decided to make a bunch of T-shirts with the photo on them and all show up at his send-off party wearing one. I was chuckling to myself in the meeting, imagining the look on the guy's face when he saw the T-shirts, when a soldier poked his head into the room and motioned for me to come out. I quietly excused myself and went to see what he wanted.

“Sir . . . you have a call,” he said, looking a little nervous.

“Couldn't you take a message? I'm in the middle of a meeting here,” I said peevishly.

He looked at me squarely. “Sir, you need to take this call.”

That was convincing enough. The guy had spooked me. I hurried to the phone.

“Hello, Captain McGowan, how may I help you?”

“Jeffrey? Jeffrey, is that you?” a voice, thick with a Scottish brogue, came at me through the receiver. It was Mrs. Gaffney, the wife of the superintendent of my grandmother's building in Jackson Heights.

“Mrs. Gaffney, hello, how are you?” I said, cheering up at the sound of the familiar voice, but then checking myself, realizing how strange it was for her to be calling me.

“Jeffrey, you need to come home immediately. Your grandmother passed away last night. I am so sorry I had to tell you that.”

My mind went blank. I was stunned, speechless. I froze up.

“Sir, are you all right?” the soldier said. “Can I get you anything?”

“No, no. Can you give me a minute?”

He walked out quietly, and I closed the door behind him.

Suddenly Mrs. Gaffney's voice came back into focus.

“Jeffrey, are you there? Jeff? Hello?”

“I'm here Mrs. G. What happened?”

“She died in her sleep.”

“I'll be home as soon as I can. Thanks, Mrs. Gaffney,” and I gently placed the phone back onto its cradle.

I just stood there for a few minutes, frozen in place, listening to the room breathe, as it were. I knew that once I allowed myself to feel this wholly, I'd be a mess, and I still had my presentation to do, so I pulled myself together and returned to the meeting. Though I thought I had it under control, it must've been written all over my face, judging from the way everyone looked at me when I walked back into the room. Taking my seat again, I tried to ignore the looks and to lighten, or at least neutralize, the expression on my own face. I sat and stared straight ahead, until it was time to do my presentation, which I did mechanically, with a forced smile plastered across my face the whole time. At the end I made a lame attempt at a joke, and the men laughed politely. I couldn't bear it another moment.

“Excuse me,” I said, and I fled the room, going straight to my battalion commander's office around the corner.

“Sir, may I see you?”

“Sure S-Four, what can I do you for?” he said affably.

“My grandmother just died, sir. She raised me like her own son. I need to go home as soon as possible.”

His face changed immediately, and he came out from behind his desk and put his arm around me and walked me to the door.

“I'm so sorry to hear that. Take whatever time you need. Don't worry about the paperwork; we'll straighten it out later.”

Walking out of headquarters, I began crying to myself. For years I had dreaded this moment. But it had always remained purely theoretical in my head; it never seemed like a real possibility. It would happen eventually, maybe next year, or the next century, but not today, not right now. Talk about kicking someone when they're down! I'd lost my great love and my grandmother, all in the course of a few months. It sure would have been nice to be able to count on Paul's support at a time like this, but the good old army had seen fit to make sure that couldn't happen. I'd never felt more alone in my entire life.

During the long drive up to New York I thought a lot about my grandmother and how special she was, how she'd managed up until the very end to retain that unique spark she had—staying so active, always going to the senior center at St. Joan of Arc, remaining vitally interested in the people in the building and in the neighborhood, hanging out with her “gray panther” girlfriends, ladies with names like Tessy and Marge and Gertrude and Fran. We talked often on the telephone, and she never failed to mention her friends. And she was always so completely supportive of me, no matter what was going on in my life. Of course, I never came out to her. I'd barely come out to myself by the time she died. And I was convinced she was generationally challenged, so to speak, though looking back on it now, she might have surprised me, who knows?

She was strong and feisty and full of spirit. If I called her and she sensed that I was angry at something, she would tell me to “kick 'em in the knees.” She bore a strong resemblance to the Queen Mother, and though she was only five feet three inches or so, she could be quite fearsome when she got going. I loved when she told me about going to rummage sales and finding some god-awful piece of bric-a-brac and haggling the price down by half, from fifty cents to a quarter. Nobody—but nobody—took advantage of Maxine Reid. She spoke with her sister, Maude, every day and had a fight with her every other day—usually over something that had happened more than fifty years before—the most contentious of which was affectionately called the “Maude the mule” fight.

Maxine and Maude, two sisters. One day when she was about twelve years old, Maude was coming home from school, angry and hurt at having been teased by a boy who often razzed her about a popular comic strip character, Maude the mule. As it happened the boy's house was on her way home. When she reached the house, she'd become so enraged at him that she picked up a big clump of mud and hurled it at the front door and then hid behind the neighbor's lilac bush. Apparently no one was home, so she went ahead and plastered the whole front of the house. Well, she got into a lot of trouble for this. It was the main reason why she changed her name to Mary. My grandmother spent fifty years trying to get Maude (now Mary) to admit that she'd been wrong, that her behavior had been far short of ladylike. But until the day she died Maude refused to admit she'd done anything wrong. I think they both just liked the story and liked fighting, and they knew if they ever fully resolved it a lot of the steam would go out of it.

One of the main reasons I think I may have underestimated my grandmother's willingness to deal with my sexuality has to do with a phone conversation I had with her about a year before she died. It went something like this:

“Jeffrey? Hello. Oh, I'm so glad you called. I need your advice about something that's going on in the building.”

“Really? What?”

“Well, you remember the Catours on the fifth floor? You know, Father Catour's parents?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, they decided to sell the apartment. They want to move to a nicer place. I don't know what could be a nicer place at their age, but they want to go. Did you say hello to them the last time you came home? I hope so. Everybody always asks about you and the army.”

I rolled my eyes and bit my tongue. She asked this question almost every time we spoke on the phone. In her view it was worse than a mortal sin for me to come home and fail to say hello to every single person I'd ever known in the building and the neighborhood. And I always made sure to do it since if I missed anybody she'd be sure to find out about it and I'd never hear the end of it.

“Yes, Grandma, I said hello to the Catours the last time. So what happened?”

“Well, they sold the apartment and a, a . . . person bought it.”

“A person? Who . . . what's their name?”

“Well, now, Jeffrey, that's what I am calling about, and honestly I just don't know what to do. This person . . . is a . . . man . . . for now, but soon may not be.”

I had to think for a second to figure out exactly what she was trying to tell me. “Ya lost me,” I said.

“Well he . . . wants to become a woman,” she said, with a sharp intake of breath followed by a slow, anxious sigh.

“You mean to tell me that a transsexual moved into the building?”

“Oh Jeffrey! Don't use that kind of language!”

It took every ounce of control I had to keep myself from bursting out laughing. I knew she was totally sincere, that she was really having trouble getting her mind around the situation, and I didn't want to hurt her feelings.

“Well, Grandma, if you're a man and you want to be a woman, that's what it's called. A transsexual. Same if you're a woman who wants to be a man.”

“Well, I've never heard that word before. It doesn't sound nice at all.”

“That's the proper word. So what is it exactly that you need advising on?”

“Jeffrey, please don't be a pill. This is serious, what do I say?”

“Whaddya mean what do you say?”

“Well, what do I call him? How do I greet him? Does he hold the door for me or do I do it for him?”

“Okay, slow down, Gram, let's take it one step at a time. What's his name?”

“Bob, his name is Bob.”

“Okay, then, that's what you call him. Just call him Bob and say hello like you would to anyone else.”

“Well, I guess.” She didn't seem convinced.

About a week later, I called her to see how things had gone.

“Hello, Gramma, it's me.”

“Jeffrey? Oh, I'm so happy you called. How've you been?”

“Good, good, so what happened with Bob?”

“Bob? You mean Barbara.”

“Barbara?”

“Yes, yes, the woman who bought the Catours' apartment.”

“I thought it was a guy named Bob who bought the apartment.”

“Well, the other day I met her on the stoop and I said hello just like you said I should, and ended up talking to her for over an hour. She's really a nice person!”

“So, now you know what do when you see him?”

“Honestly, Jeffrey—her—her name is Barbara, get with it!”

“Sorry, her, Barbara.”

“Times, they are a-changing, sonny. You should try to be a little more modern like your old gramma here.”

“Well when you put it that way . . .”

I knew that people tend to have different standards for their children as opposed to the children of their friends or strangers. So chances are she would not have been as thrilled about my sexuality as she was about her newfound tolerance of transsexual Barbara living in Father Catour's parents' old apartment. But still, I sometimes liked to believe that she would have come around eventually.

Now, of course, I'd never know. She was dead. The woman who had picked up the slack when her own daughter couldn't meet her responsibility and took me in and raised me like a son was now dead. As I cleaned out her apartment and planned the funeral over the next few days, I was often struck by the finality of it, of death, and how brutal that finality was. The apartment was so quiet now, and I felt so alone in it. There were moments when I was filled with the same horrible feeling I had back in seventh grade when my grandfather died— that nothing would ever be right again, that nothing would ever be the same again. And, of course, nothing ever would be the same again.

I knew that my grandmother had lived a full life and that it was a blessing that she went quickly in her sleep. I could understand all of that, the big picture, so to speak. But the reality of it on the ground was different, harder to grasp. What about those little things I took for granted? Who was I going to call for advice? Who would keep me updated on the weekly
National Enquirer
headlines? Or the gossip in the building? My link to Jackson Heights and New York, to the world from which I had sprung, had been abruptly severed, and I felt unmoored now, homeless, in a sense—I was alone now in the world.

I'm not usually given to emotional outbursts, but, sorting through her things in the apartment, I often found myself crying for no apparent reason. I tried to keep it all together by organizing and prioritizing with military precision all that needed to be done to take care of her affairs and lay her to rest. As the days passed I was touched by how many people dropped by the apartment or simply stopped me on the street to offer their condolences and tell me what a wonderful person my grandmother had been. I didn't know half of them, but they all acted as if they'd known me for years, my grandmother having been so proud of me, apparently, that she'd kept everyone she knew up-to-date on her grandson's life.