Robin and Ruby

The truth will set you free—
but first it will make you miserable.

—Vito Russo

PART ONE: THE CITY OF BROTHERLY LOVE

PART TWO: DOWN THE SHORE

PART THREE: THE GARDEN STATE

Acknowledgments

S
ometimes life throws you a job that you’re not yet ready to do.

The Friday dinner shift at Rosellen’s had started deadly: just one table in Robin’s section for the first hour, and then an unexpected surge of customers, and suddenly he was in the weeds, juggling an indecisive four-top and this party of eight professionals lobbing one highly specific demand after another: five different temperatures of steak; an omelet from the brunch menu but with egg whites only; two pepper grinders to be left on the table, even though he assured them that Rosellen’s Upscale Southern Cuisine was perfectly spiced. One guy wanted his salad with dressing on the side; another wanted his salad with dressing “extra tossed,” whatever that meant. The whole bunch of them seemed to be trying to prove that they were in charge, as if the monumental shoulder pads in their pin-striped power suits didn’t already send that message. But the fussiness of their needs made them all seem like little kids.

Then they ordered wine. In thirty minutes’ time, they ordered four fucking bottles! Uncorking wine is Robin’s personal doom. You’re supposed to keep up a conversation with the table while you finesse the captain’s knife, and you’re supposed to make it look effortless, like tying your shoes, but for Robin it’s more like tying a tie: too short, too long, too short again, almost right but not quite. He sweated through the first Bordeaux, the bottle wedged in his armpit instead of in the crook of his elbow where it’s supposed to be. The second one also took effort, but it came out more smoothly, and maybe he got too confident, because with the third bottle, he snapped the cork in two and had to return to the bar for a replacement. Rosellen would take that one out of his check.

Now here he is with a fourth red, so stressed out that he decides to just rest it on the floor, clamped between his feet. Bending over, he announces, “Ladies and gentlemen, whatever it takes,” and yanks up with all his strength.
Splup!
The cork emerges, miraculously intact. Robin waves it in the air on the tip of the corkscrew, a little flourish, the end of a magic trick. A couple of the diners, already tipsy, put their hands together and applaud.

He sees all of this unfold in the enormous rectangular mirror on the wall behind the table, as if he is starring in a short, comic film about a clown in a crisp white shirt.

There in the mirror, he spots George across the dining room, mouth hanging open. George, who’s not just a coworker but his roommate and his best friend, smiles at him, even as he shakes his head in disbelief. Robin simply shrugs and lets his gaze float upward, miming,
What else could I do?
Acting his part: the boy who just can’t help himself. But he’s also aware that the hostess and the bartender have witnessed the bottle-on-the-floor stunt, and so word of this will travel back to Rosellen, who won’t be amused.

The shift ticks by in a kind of blur. The awareness of having messed up has a way of seeping out and saturating all his thoughts, leaving Robin feeling strangely indistinct, as if the separate edges of things are melting together. He starts to think he has a low-grade fever, and he touches his forehead, which is maybe a bit warm. Could he have picked up a cold, a summer flu? He touches his neck, poking at his glands, and that does it: triggers the mental spiral, the one he can’t avoid, the one he still can’t shut down, even after the test results assured him he was negative. This is not a cold, it’s a symptom of the Big One, the first sign of the virus that’s been lying in wait, ready to erupt and take him down, once and for all….

“Do I feel a little warm to you?” he asks George.

George puts his hand on Robin’s forehead.

“I’m having a freak-out, about, you know—”

“Shh. Not here,” George says, looking around to see if anyone is in earshot. And then, more gently, he adds, “You’re in a restaurant kitchen in the middle of June. Of course you’re warm.”

In spite of everything, Robin lets himself smile, though it’s a smile with a tint of the gallows:
If you get sick, you’ll never have to serve another table of yuppies another bottle of wine again.

As he makes his way to the kitchen to check on his last order for the night, he feels a pinch against his thigh: the folded corner of the envelope he’s been carrying all day in his pocket. He’d almost forgotten it was there. Now he rubs his fingertips along its smooth surface, as if it’s a talisman that will remove all obstacles from his path.

It had arrived in the mail that morning, before he left for work: the letter he was sure would never be sent.

Congratulations. A slot in our London theatre program has become available for next spring’s semester. Because you were first on the waiting list, we’re happy to extend to you…

A semester abroad, studying theater. Only a handful of college juniors are invited. Someone has apparently backed out, and now Robin gets to take his place. A few months ago, when the original letter came, the one saying, “Sorry, but…” his mother had insisted he not give up hope, you never knew what might happen. She said she had a feeling about this one. One of Dorothy’s famous “feelings.” He didn’t give it much weight. She was wrong as often as she was right.

But here it is on paper, his name, Robin MacKenzie, and the date, June 11, 1985, a few days ago, and the official signature of the Chair of the School of Drama.
Congratulations.
You won’t be spending the spring of your senior year on campus, in Pittsburgh; you’ll spend it in London. You might actually, one day, be an actor. You might even have talent.

Might,
because amid the elation, he feels something else: the lingering pinprick of embarrassment from the original rejection.

George had retrieved the letter from their mailbox this morning. Robin was ironing their work shirts at the time. (George was useless with an iron, and not much better at most other household tasks, and Rosellen would probably send him home if he came to work in a wrinkled shirt.) After he read the letter, Robin went back to ironing.

“It’s great news,” George said. “Why don’t you look like you’re into it?”

“Because first on the waiting list still means second-best.”

George put his hand on the back of Robin’s head and rubbed, in that comforting way he had of asserting their friendship, and it did make Robin feel better, to know that George believed in him, wanted the best for him, wanted to see this as a prize, rather than some new setup for failure.

“You know I’ll come to visit,” George told him.

“I’ll sneak you over in my suitcase. You might fit.” A timeworn joke: at five-feet-seven, George is four inches shorter than him.

“Is Margaret Thatcher letting any more black boys into her country?” George asks. Race riots in England have been showing up in the news, and after what happened in West Philly last month, George has been paying attention.

Now, hours later, the letter is already rumpled. After sharing it with George, Robin called his mother and read it over the phone to her (“Didn’t I tell you!” Dorothy proclaimed) and then listened as she repeated the news to his sister, Ruby. “You’re so lucky,” Ruby said, which gave him a moment’s pause: was that it? Luck, and not talent?

By the time he was ready to call Peter, he’d read the letter so many times he nearly had it memorized.

Peter was the one person Robin was nervous about breaking the news to, because what would it mean to tell your lover that you’d be leaving the country for six months? He called but got no answer and couldn’t leave a message because Peter didn’t have an answering machine. Where had Peter been all morning? And then, when Robin finally got him on the phone, right before leaving for the restaurant, what did it mean that he said, “I’m glad that you’re going”? Wasn’t the idea of a separation even a little bit sad? “Oh, come on, Robin, I’m
happy
for you. This is what you wanted.”

“You’re going to visit me, right?”

Peter laughed as if the question was unreasonable. “I can’t make promises for next spring.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m in school, too?”

“I’m just talking about a visit. Most people would want to visit their boyfriends in London.”

And then they were having a fight: “That’s not what I meant.” “That’s what you said.” “No, you’re twisting it around.” “No,
you
never listen.” It went on, and got loud, and then they fell silent, and finally Robin said, “I need you to come here. I can’t stand being this far away from you for another weekend.”
Here
meaning Philadelphia, where Robin has moved for the summer to live with George and wait tables at Rosellen’s, while Peter stayed behind in Pittsburgh, at Carnegie Mellon, working on his dissertation.

Peter sighed and after a moment said, OK, he would come the next day, Saturday. It was the perfect, romantic end to the argument, and it reminded Robin why being in love with Peter had, from the start, given him a sense of security, a net beneath the high-wire act of being in a real relationship. He and Peter have so many interests in common, high and low: They could stand in front of a single painting in a museum for an hour and not run out of things to say; they could sit through
Desperately Seeking Susan
in back-to-back screenings and laugh at the same gags twice. Peter loved him. Why pick a fight? Why doubt it? Does the tightrope walker let himself fall in order to test the net?

“OK, Blanco, you’re officially on probation,” Rosellen tells him. “One more broken cork and…” She slices her hand across her neck.

It’s 10:30 in the morning. Saturday brunch is just beginning, but Robin has been called into the small cluttered office out of which Rosellen runs Rosellen’s. He stands across the desk from her while she shuffles through purchase orders and invoices. Her smooth bronze forehead and gold hoop earrings catch the overhead light. The smell of sizzling butter fills the air. He hates that smell; it stays in his uniform even after he washes it.

“If I wasn’t so short-staffed, I’d let you go,” she says. “You know I’m doing you a favor.”

Of course I know,
he wants to say,
’cause you never let me forget it.
But what he says is, “Sorry I keep messing up,” as he tries to cope by picturing himself onstage,
finding his focus
, as his acting teachers say. The focus here is on keeping a paycheck coming in. Paying his half of the rent. Proving to everyone—to Peter, to his mother—that coming to Philly this summer wasn’t just a foolish, impulsive move. He stops the nervous tapping of his foot and turns on his smile to lighten the mood. “Rosellen, if I could afford it, I’d buy ten cases of wine, and I’d practice at home until I got it right.”

“You know I pride myself on my wine list,” she says. “Some folks think African Americans don’t know about good French wine.”

“Luckily none of the African American waiters mess up like I do,” he says. “Blame it on Whitey.”

“I not blaming
Whitey
,” she says coolly. “I’m blaming you.”

Rosellen’s is a new restaurant. New, as in opened less than a year ago, on South Street, west of Broad, but new in concept, too. Early reviews in the Philly papers have dubbed Rosellen’s cuisine “Yuppie Soul Food,” words that she has banned everyone on the premises from ever speaking. She’s coined her own term, “New U.S.,” which stands for Upscale Southern, and which Robin is supposed to recite as he greets his tables.

So far, the local press has been kind. There aren’t many like Rosellen: a female African American chef. That’s another term, “African American,” that she makes them all use, instead of “black,” which is how George has always referred to himself. Rosellen is strict about language. Chinese are “Asians.” Street people are to be called “the homeless,” never bums or bag ladies. She herself is a lesbian, and though she doesn’t make too much of that with the press or the customers, she sometimes talks with Robin and George about “the struggle of the lesbian and gay community.” Rosellen is George’s cousin, which is why Robin works here, the only reason, because not only is Robin a pale, blue-eyed white boy, he also has no experience beyond busing tables at an Italian restaurant in a New Jersey mall, near where he and George grew up. Rosellen has a soft spot for George; they’re the two gay members of the Lincoln family. So she agreed to meet Robin, and after pronouncing him “easy on the eyes,” she threw a few shifts his way. During his first week, he knocked a glass of wine across a table onto a customer and had to comp the entire dinner.

As Robin leaves her office, George is standing with Malik, the other waiter on duty. “This sister is fly,” Malik is saying. “Tonight it’s
all
going on.”

“
Word
,” George answers. “But keep it safe. Pack a rubber.”

“She’s got the contraception. She already told me, one of them diaphragms.”

“Brother, you gotta think about disease.”

“Maybe
you
do,” Malik says, taking a step away.

Robin feels his face heating up. But George remains calm. “I’ll tell you straight up, everybody has to protect himself.”

“She’s no freak,” Malik says, as he heads off to a customer.

Robin scans the dining room. Malik and George have two tables each, but no one has been seated in his own section.

George turns to Robin. “Did you get a yellin’ from Rosellen? She cut you with your captain’s knife?”

“She made me fall on it. It’s a bloody mess back there.” He lowers his voice. “Maybe I should just go back to Pittsburgh and live with Peter. Save myself rent for the summer.”

“Oh, you’ve been paying rent?” George asks, arching an eyebrow.

“I will be. You know I will—”

“Kidding,” George says, but Robin can’t help but feel bad; George pulled a hundred dollars out of his scholarship money to cover him this month. George shrugs. “I told you, it was cheaper than paying the dry cleaners to iron my shirts.”

George carries a basket of cornbread to a four-top of pale Germans, two men and two women in their late twenties who stare with open, eager faces as he recites the ingredients in the omelet of the day. Robin sees how George doesn’t try to flirt and charm. I’ll act like him today, Robin thinks. Won’t try to please everyone. Slow and steady. Calm and unemotional. No broken corks. No sweat on my brow. You’re on probation, so play it safe. Of course, George, with his Malcolm X glasses and his two-inch fro pinched into baby dreads at the tips, fits in here in a way Robin never will. If Robin said “word” or “brother” to someone like Malik, if he said that the special of the day was “dope,” as George just did, he’d sound like an actor miscast for his role.