Tattoos & Teacups (10 page)

“Why don’t you come over later?”

I considered the work I needed to do for my upcoming lectures. Dismissed it. “Yeah. I’ll let you know when I’m back.”

He shook his head. “Don’t bother. Just turn up. I’ll be there.”

“Okay.” I kissed him again. “See you later.”

Chris waved to Chloe as we pulled out of the lot. She had turned the radio on as she waited for me. I considered turning it down to talk to her. However much I wanted to ignore the repercussions of our afternoon, it wouldn’t be responsible of me to turn my back on her.

“Can we talk?” I said, raising my voice over the music.

“I’m sure we can,” she muttered. I turned the radio down.

“I’m not upset with you, Chloe,” I said, sighing. “In fact, that went a lot better than I was anticipating.”

She looked at me in shock.

I refrained from rolling my eyes.

“I promise,” I continued. “I don’t blame you for having questions. I think you could do a little bit of work on respecting your elders—”

“Chris isn’t my elder,” she interjected. “He’s practically my peer.”

“He’s my boyfriend, so I’d be grateful if you treated him with the same respect you show to your stepdad.”

“Mike has been living with me and Mom since I was five. I only just met Chris,” she said.

When had my daughter gotten to be so reasonable? That certainly wasn’t something she’d inherited from her mother.

“That’s a fair comment,” I conceded.

“He’s young, Dad,” she said, fiddling with the hem of her shirt. “And hot.”

“And gay,” I said gently.

She scowled.

I parked up and escorted my daughter back into the house, determined to speak to her mother. At that point Luisa could have been in labor with her third spawn and I still would have wanted to talk to her. Probably.

Fortunately for me, she was not in labor and was out of bed.

“Come in, Robert,” she called from the living room. I kissed Chloe on the cheek, and she stomped back up to her bedroom without saying goodbye. Luisa was perched on an armchair looking like a shrine to some goddess of fertility; with her legs folded up underneath her and her large belly swelling over her knees, she once again resembled one the weebles that our daughter had never heard of.

“I thought I’d give you some advance warning,” I said, sitting when she directed me to the sofa.

“Oh?”

“Our daughter met my boyfriend today.”

“Oh.”

“Pregnancy seems to have rendered you incapable of normal speech.”

She threw a cushion at me.

“What happened?” Lu asked.

“I think she has a little crush,” I admitted sheepishly.

“On your boyfriend?” she asked, incredulous.

“Yes.”

“Oh.”

“Luisa! If she hadn’t overheard you and Jilly discussing it in the first place, this never would have happened.”

“Ah. Sorry.”

“Bloody hell. Women,” I muttered.

“Tell me all about him,” she said while rubbing her hands together with glee.

“He’s a twenty-three-year-old rock star with tattoos and a Mohawk haircut.”

She squealed with laughter and rubbed her belly with both hands, gasping for breath. “I like that one.”

“I’m serious,” I said. “He plays drums in a band. And he hasn’t shaved his head, but his hair spikes up in the middle.”

“You are serious,” she said, frowning. “He’s twenty-three?”

“And this is where I think Chloe’s problem comes from,” I said. “She was quite happy to tell us that Chris is only nine years older than she.”

“Oh dear. And he has tattoos?”

“Yes. Quite a few.”

Luisa sighed. “Teenagers.”

“She asked Chris if he had AIDS.”

“Oh lord.”

“Yeah, that was my response too.”

“Robert? I’ll talk to her.”

I stood. “Thanks. I thought I’d just give you a heads-up.”

“Thanks,” she echoed, struggling to stand. I pushed her back down into her chair.

“Sit. Stay,” I commanded. “I’ll see myself out. Call me when you have that baby.”

“I will. Thanks, Robert.”

I kissed the top of her head before I left. She was still a friend, more so since big decisions about Chloe’s life needed to be made. Luisa never made me feel left out, even when I never felt like I had a valid opinion or even a right to make the decisions between us. She was the one who had to deal with the consequences, anyway.

T
HE
period of coming out of the closet, for me, took several years. I’d laid out the bones of the story for Chris, but the details were mine, and I kept them locked in a fairly dark part of myself. My first, tentative “Mum, Dad, I think I like boys too,” had happened aged seventeen when my whole world barely made sense to me. My parents initially blamed the stress of the move and my trouble fitting into this new environment. America was so, so different from Scotland, and I ached for the familiar feel of home.

Despite my inability—or unwillingness—to adjust, the rest of my family seemed to think the U.S. was the dream that they had all been waiting to live, and I was alone in feeling so utterly lost. In that environment it sort of made sense that these new questions about sex and my own sexuality would get buried under the aching need to fit in.

I lost myself in my schoolwork and found much of it was targeted for an intelligence below my own. With my parents’ reaction to my painful coming-out being to refer me to a psychiatrist and school counselor, I decided to take a more scientific approach to my situation and explore my other options.

Thus, Luisa.

She was a friend already and a good one, at that. I was pretty sure she latched onto me at the beginning because of my accent, but that was quickly forgiven as she proved herself a useful aide and good friend while showing me my awkward way around my new environment.

She chose Boston for college even though it was clear to me, at least, that her heart wasn’t in academia. Being a little social butterfly, though, well, she would undoubtedly outshine me in that respect.

I bungled through the first semester, throwing myself into my studies with an energy and enthusiasm that I’d not felt in nearly two years. Here I was challenged and my opinions probed, not just “What do you think?” but “Why do you think that?”

I wasn’t living the out-and-proud lifestyle that I’d been dreaming of but something close to it. I didn’t date females, I cautiously frequented the occasional gay bar, and I started taking the first steps to discovering myself.

That Christmas, when I returned home, I had decided not to flaunt anything in front of the two people who were funding my education. They were thrilled with the grades I was pulling in, and their utter refusal to discuss my sexuality seemed to cement my opinion that they considered it little more than a passing fancy, something that had undoubtedly been counseled out of me.

Two nights before Christmas, there was something of a high school reunion for those of us who had been away for the past three months. Lu wore a dark red dress made of some floaty material; it skimmed over her collarbones and flared at the knee, showing plenty of the pale golden skin that graced her body. Her hair, dark, shiny curls of it, bounced at her shoulders, and diamonds (or their false counterparts) glittered at her ears.

I was confused. After spending so many weeks trying to find my identity as a homosexual person, these strange, unfamiliar heterosexual longings made me feel something of a phony. A phony and a failure, since I clearly couldn’t even make a decision about something as natural and intrinsic as my sexual orientation.

I had never been much of a drinker, not like my father, who considered whiskey and water to be equally as important to his personal survival. Please don’t mistake me; he wasn’t a drunk or abusive with his liquor, although some of his behaviors could certainly be considered those of an alcoholic.

The respect I had for my father was the type that came with love and a healthy dose of fear. He never beat me, not once, not even when I deserved it, but as I grew, I started to understand his own personal brand of emotional blackmail that he used on Jilly more than me. She was the princess to his king of the castle.

And I became the disappointment, the only son who managed to drunkenly impregnate a girl who was a friend, a good friend, and a nice person. The last thing Luisa Robinson ever deserved was me. At least, that was the message that was repeatedly imposed on me over the following year.

The act of conception itself took place in the basement of my parents’ home. My mother claimed the reason she’d chosen our house was because it reminded her of Scotland in its architecture, and I could see why; it was one of the oldest houses in the town and built at least partially from stone rather than the more modern wooden erections that surrounded it. The stone and a buffer of a whole story of house between us and my sleeping family meant neither Lu nor I had any concerns about being heard or caught.

Clearly contraception was not at the forefront of either of our minds as we fumbled our way toward a mutually unsatisfactory conclusion.

Then there was her panicked voice on a telephone call about six weeks later—“No, Robert, I’m
late
.”—and the dawning realization of the possibility of fatherhood, at that time something I was not cut out for. I could barely take care of myself and clearly could not take care of my sexual partners on any level.

And from that one night, my singular, awkward, sexuality-confirming experience of making love to a woman, Chloe was created.

There was a lot of “We’re very disappointed in you, Robert”s and “We taught you better than this, Robert”s even though that wasn’t strictly true. The facts of life, the birds and the bees, if you will, was all information I’d gleaned from books, and mostly scientific books at that. My high school’s abstinence-only sex education course had reached its natural conclusion because even though I knew what contraception was and what it did, the message to use it had not been strong. The message had been not to do it at all, but a fat lot of good that had been for Luisa and me.

The only light in the entire knocking-up fiasco was that Lu was due in the last weeks of August, only a short time before she was due to start her second year of college, but those few weeks proved enough for the college admissions to allow her to enroll.

Since it was all naturally my fault, I was the one who moved to a new college and worked in a coffee shop by day, bar by night establishment that paid me peanuts but showed my parents that I was serious about taking care of my responsibilities and consequentially kept us secure under the roof they put over our heads.

The moment my daughter slipped her way into the world, ten days early, bloody and screaming but blessedly healthy, was one that defined my short life to that point. Lu changed in my eyes from amazing woman to goddess. I read, after, that the pain a woman experiences while giving birth is comparable to fracturing twenty bones in your body in one go. When I delivered this information to Luisa, she merely raised an eyebrow in what was a clear threat to my testicles.

She was placed in my arms first at Lu’s insistence with the words “Congratulations, Mr. McKinnon, it’s a girl,” and my world tilted on its axis. I’d spent the previous nine months going to every doctor’s appointment, every ultrasound scan and birthing class and parenting class, but nothing could prepare me for the moment when I became a man and a father.

Our little family was naturally dysfunctional, but even as Chloe grew up with a stepfather and weekends-only dad, she never stopped being perfect to me.

As for my parents, they continued to ignore their gay son and only heap praise and love on their straight son, despite all the work Jilly and I did to try to make them understand the latter did not exist. After they were frankly abysmally rude to one of my exes, I stopped taking him to any family functions and swallowed the bitter realization that I would never be good enough for them and as long as I continued to follow my wicked and sinful path through the world, they would never accept me.

That was okay, though. My contact with them grew less and less, their interest in my bastard child waned, and our relationship became, although cool, still cordial.

Sometimes I resented them, and at others, when the news of another gay teen suicide came through the news, I felt blessedly relieved that they didn’t care enough to make my life that difficult. Things could have been so much worse, and I was well aware of it.

I’d learned a long time ago how differently my body responded when it was smooth, hard muscles under my hands rather than soft, squidgy curves and the unyielding hardness of another man’s sex rather than slick, wet heat. Chris reinforced my desires on every level, but the chances of me introducing him to my parents, even if we stayed together forever, were slim to none. They wouldn’t understand him, and to be fair, it would probably only upset them or convince them that I was suffering from a midlife crisis.

I’d stopped being sad at their reactions years ago. I had finally found someone special. And nothing they could say or do could spoil that.

Chapter 6