Major Conflict (4 page)

A confused look came over his face. He took a quick, long drag on his cigarette, staring at me the whole time, incredulous, as if he were seeing me for the very first time. Then, stabbing out the cigarette hard in the big plastic ashtray that was kept on the ledge there, he said, shaking his head, “I love you, Jeff, but I can't do that. I just can't. . . .” I thought he was going to start crying, but he pulled himself together and flung open the door to the sales floor and rushed out. “Wait, Greg,” I said, and I raced out after him, grabbing his arm just as he reached the large display table covered with travel books in the center of the store. It would have been hard to find a more conspicuous place, but I wasn't thinking. “Ouch, damn it, Jeff,” Greg yelled, rubbing his arm. I'd grabbed too hard. “Why don't you just rip my arm out of the socket, you idiot,” and he turned and continued walking toward the information desk in the front of the store. “Wait, Greg, I'm sorry—I . . .” and then I looked around and saw that, with the exception of the cashiers in the pit ringing up sales, everything else in the store had slowed down or stopped completely. I felt as if I'd been dropped into a film that had suddenly been switched to slow motion. Customers on the open staircase above the travel section paused between steps and looked down. Clerks shelving books in the back slowly turned their heads toward me. People browsing the green Michelin guides stopped browsing and looked up. Jane Light, the older woman who ordered the travel books and anchored the information desk, stopped talking and dipped her head down and looked out over her glasses at me.

I froze. It felt as if the ground had just disappeared from under my feet. I got hot and dizzy, and I imagine I turned beet red. I looked down at the table of travel books, then squatted down, as if I were looking for something in the overstock section below. I tried to breathe while listening to the store return to normal. I heard Jane Light's voice resume, and footsteps on the stairs again. And then I grabbed a travel guide, hurried back to the door to the back staircase, rushed inside, and took the steps down two at a time.

We avoided each other the rest of the afternoon, and when he left at five, I was relieved. This was it, I promised myself. No more hanging around with that faggot. I wasn't going to do it. But then around seven-thirty he called the store, slightly drunk, from J's downtown.

“We have to talk, Jeff,” he said, sounding frantic, as if he'd been crying.

“No, nothing to talk about,” I said curtly, ready to hang up on him.

“Meet me, Jeff, please, meet me in front of the church at Fifty-fifth when you get off.”

There was a pleading in his voice. I hesitated, but then hung up. Thirty seconds later the phone rang again. I picked it up.

“What,” I said. “What do you want from me?”

“Please, Jeff, you owe me this much, just meet me in front of Fifth Avenue Presbyterian when you're done with your shift. We can talk on the way to the train.”

“What will it take for you to understand?”

“Oh, I understand, Jeff, I understand you better than you understand yourself!”

“Fuck you,” I said under my breath. I was standing at the information desk. “And don't come up here. Don't come up here! Stay down there at your faggot bar!” And I slammed the phone down. I was so angry I felt sure that if Greg had been standing in front of me I would've beat the shit out of him.

After finishing my shift I hurried through the revolving doors and started walking briskly down Fifth Avenue. It was the last week in April, an unusually warm night, humid, windy, strange. It felt like rain. They'd been calling for rain all day, and I'd brought my big golf umbrella with me to work. At Fifty-sixth Street, while waiting for the light to change, I took off my suit jacket and flung it over my shoulder and loosened my tie.

I'd calmed down since the phone call from Greg and managed to get him out of my head. I had homework to do when I got home and ROTC matters on my mind. The light changed and I crossed Fifty-sixth Street. I passed Harry Winston, the famous jeweler, and was just approaching the Rizzoli Bookstore in the middle of the block when I noticed a figure standing up on the steps of the church. I realized that it was Greg, always so solemn, with his books and his worn-out shoes, his school-boy sweaters and his old blue corduroys that shone from too much wear. I froze, then made a beeline to the street, started walking across Fifth, trying to act as if I hadn't seen him. But he'd seen me, and he started coming after me. “Jeff! Jeff! Wait!” he shouted, and I started to run then, down Fifth Avenue. But he was faster than me, and by the time I reached Fifty-third Street he'd caught up with me. The light was red and there was traffic and I felt trapped.

“You fucking hypocrite!” he shouted. It was obvious he'd had a few more beers since the phone call.

“Do you know how ugly hypocrisy is? Do you know how ugly that is? It's the ugliest thing in the world, Jeff; it's the ugliest thing you can be. And it's like a disease, it's like a cancer, it's insidious, it's going to eat you up until you're empty, until you're dead!”

I didn't look at him. I didn't speak. I tried to act as if he were a crazy homeless person. I couldn't wait for the light to change. I had to get away from him, so I turned down Fifty-third and starting jogging away. He jogged after me. It started to rain hard—one of those tremendous spring storms. I opened up my umbrella and, realizing I wasn't going to outrun him, just walked briskly across Fifty-third Street, trying my best to ignore him. But he didn't have an umbrella of his own, and as he yelled at me he kept trying to get under mine, and I kept hurrying up and pulling away, leaving him stranded in the downpour.

“Christ, Jeff, do you think I'm blind? Do you think I'm an idiot? I see. I know. You keep saying, ‘I'm straight, I'm straight, I'm straight,' but I see what's in your eyes when you look at me! Look at me. Look at me! Look at me now, Jeff! You fucking asshole, I can't believe I ever got involved with you. What am I doing? What am I doing? I can't believe . . . it wasn't supposed to be like this. Do you think I moved from Pittsburgh to New York so I could sneak around with some fucked-up closet case? You're straight? Straight! Do straight boys hold hands? Do you hold hands with your straight friends on the OTB counter at Grand Central? Do you talk on the phone with your ROTC buddies for hours every night? Go ahead, walk away, I'm soaked, fine, it's just water, Jeff, it's only rain, natural, a natural substance, I won't melt, unlike you. I know you can hear me. You'll be hearing this voice for the rest of your sad sorry life unless you get your shit together and face up to what's happening inside you. God, Jeff, you want everything to make so much sense! You want the whole world to make sense! You want
structure
. Your religion, the military. You need those nice, neat little hiearchies where everyone knows exactly what everything is and precisely where everyone stands. Everything wrapped up in these nice, tight little boxes. Fuck you! Go ahead, just keep walking, just keep walking, dry, stay dry, Jeff, make sure you always stay perfectly dry!”

He reached over and pulled the umbrella away from over my head, and I pulled it back, but even that short amount of exposure left me half drenched, it was raining that hard. “See, Jeff, it's just water, it's just rainwater, it won't hurt you. It's the most natural thing in the world!” We'd reached the Citicorp Building, and I ran down the steps to the plaza and the entrance to the subway station. When I got out of the rain, I stopped and closed my umbrella and turned around. Greg had stopped midway down the stairs. He stretched open his arms and raised his face directly into the rain, then looked down at me. “You're not going to stay dry forever, Jeff,” he yelled. I wasn't sure, there was too much rain, but it looked as if he was starting to cry, the way his head fell and started to shake a little. I turned and quickly fished a token from my pocket, rushed through the turnstile, and, without looking back, hurried down the steep escalator to the trains below.

We didn't speak to each other for the next month. I managed to focus on school and ROTC and avoid him as much as possible at work. But when the semester was finished, I started full-time at the bookstore for the summer. And slowly, we drifted back together. This time it became more serious. We played on the store softball team together, and after the second game a bunch of us went to a BBQ on the Upper West Side. Halfway through the meal, Greg got up and went to the bathroom. A few minutes later, I followed him, and we kissed for the first time, his back to the bathroom door in case anyone walked in on us. We went to the movies. We saw Arnold Schwarzenegger in
Red Sonia
in a crowded, smoky Times Square movie theater, the two of us hunched down low in our seats, knees touching the whole time, our fingers occasionally locking together as we passed the Coke and popcorn back and forth between us. Periodically Greg would light up a cigarette and then rest a hand on my knee. Afterward we had dinner at the Beefsteak Charlie's nearby on Forty-fourth Street and Broadway, where Greg had waited tables for a few years (the space is now used by ABC's
Good Morning America
). The following week we spent a day together up at the Cloisters (Greg lived close by, in Inwood), listening to Gregorian chants in the courtyard, walking through Fort Tryon Park, the Hudson and the Palisades spread out so grandly below us.

For his birthday in July I invited him out to my apartment, and we walked over to Flushing Meadow Park and made out on the ground in front of the Unisphere, the big silver globe left over from the 1964 World's Fair. I don't know what came over me. I mean, it was broad daylight, in the middle of the afternoon, in a city park. There was a group of Mexicans playing soccer on the dustbowl of a field in front of us. I bought us two Cokes and two hot dogs at a cart, and we sat down on the grass nearby and watched them play. Occasionally the number 7 train, up on its elevated track, would rumble by behind us. A Mets game was in progress, so every now and then we could hear the crowd cheering and the organ playing over at Shea Stadium. It was Greg's twenty-third birthday, so after finishing our hot dogs we started horsing around, kind of wrestling, and I said I had to give him his birthday punches. I started out softly, just tapping him, really— Greg was thin and somewhat delicate—punching him lightly on the arm. And he was laughing at first and pretending to struggle, but as the numbers grew higher, I don't know why, the punches grew progressively harder. I began to feel something well up in me, not anger, really, but something else, I've never known what to call it, and as I got closer to twenty the punches got even harder and Greg started saying, “Stop, Jeff, stop,” though still laughing, still taking it all goodnaturedly—but then at twenty-one I just let loose and really smacked him hard on the arm, and I saw the look on his face, a little water welled up in his eyes, and then twenty-two, harder, and his laughing stopped, then twenty-three, and I was holding him down now. “And one to grow on,” I said, and hauled off and popped him as hard as I could. “Ow—fuck, Jeff, damn,” he said, crawling away from me on the grass and rubbing his arm. He was trying his best to hold back the tears now, and I looked at his face and suddenly was filled with such regret and longing at having hurt him, and such overwhelming desire, that I crawled over and took him in my arms and kissed him deep on the mouth. We collapsed onto the grass, rolled around, our mouths locked together, our tongues twisting around each other. We both got hard instantly and the rolling around turned into a kind of wrestling, and I feel certain that had we not been interrupted, we would have soon been tearing off our clothes. But
“Maricón!”
came flying at us from a dozen different sources, like a swarm of flies. The Mexicans were shocked.
“Maricón!”
again, and laughter, and then the soccer ball came flying toward us, just barely missing Greg in the head, and we stood up and hurried off toward the train and Queens Boulevard.

My grandmother was out when we arrived back at the apartment. I think we both knew what this meant. We went directly to my room. I closed the door, snapped the fan on high, and we fell into the bed together, resuming the kiss that the Mexicans had interrupted, hardly missing a beat. We were sweaty now, and the cool air felt good on our skin. The noise from the fan sealed the room shut, in a way, so that it seemed at that moment that nothing in the whole world existed except Greg and me. We kissed until our lips ached, and then I found myself pushing Greg's head down to my crotch, and before I knew it he had me in his mouth and I was exploding.

In those few moments during the orgasm the world seemed to switch from color to black-and-white, and now, suddenly, though a part of me wanted just to enjoy the easy languor of lulling about in the afternoon heat with Greg, a larger part of me had me jumping up and pulling on my white briefs and jeans and rushing off to the bathroom. When I returned to my room, I was hoping Greg would be dressed and ready to go, but he was still lying there in the breeze from the fan, a peaceful half-smile on his face.

“You should get dressed,” I said. “My grandmother might come home.”

“Oh, okay,” Greg said, and he lazily pulled himself up and started putting his clothes back on.

After he was dressed he said, “So, what should we do now?”

“I really need to do some stuff around here. How about if I just see you tomorrow at work? You know how to get to the train from here, right?”

Greg looked a little crestfallen, but he said okay and stood up and drew near to kiss me good-bye. I grabbed him and kissed him hard in the middle of the forehead. “Happy birthday,” I said. He looked a little startled but just smiled and turned around. I walked him to the front door, and he was gone.

After he left I straightened my bed and sprayed the room with Lysol, convinced that the smell of sex was everywhere, and then I tried to put the whole thing out of my mind. But a few hours later it was all I could think of again, and I decided to try to write a note to let him know how I felt. I wanted it to be clear that I liked him a lot as a friend but that the sex wasn't going to happen again. I wasn't gay; we were just friends. After a half-dozen false starts I finally came up with this draft, which I ended up copying onto a yellow notepad and giving to him the next day at work.