The Best Little Boy in the World (23 page)

Chris and I fell in love.

Well, Chris fell in love with me, and I sort of pushed myself in love with him.

That last weekend in August, just before I was to start work again, Chris and I left Piggy's together and had sex in my $20 motel room. It wasn't spectacular sex, even by my lenient standards. Chris was not my type: too intelligent, for one thing; a disappointing body, for another. But it was nice to be with someone on Saturday night. It was a good ego thing to be in bed with someone who could easily have modeled preppie sports coats in the Sunday
Times Magazine.
He seemed like a nice guy, and I liked his Southern drawl.

In the morning Chris told me that he didn't have to get back to work in the restaurant in Wellfleet until dinnertime and that he knew a great beach in Truro, nearby. It was indeed a great beach. Most Eastern beaches run into water on one side and asphalt parking lots on the other. This beach had the water, of course, but instead of the parking lot, this beach ran into a hundred-foot sand cliff. The cliff was so nearly vertical that you could bound down in exuberant free-fall ten-foot moon leaps, forming steep right triangles as you went: Left leg pushes out two feet from the cliff, fall eight feet, right foot rejoins the hypotenuse. Down you bound, a dozen steps to the beach below.

Equally remarkable, this was not a gay beach. Not that many beaches are gay—I just mean that here we were on a magnificent Sunday with no social life in view besides each other, when only a few miles down the Cape there were upwards of a thousand nearly naked homosexuals eager to boost our egos, and perhaps even a nearly naked White Knight or two for us to swoon over, like Golden Boy.

I can think of a few reasons why Chris chose the beach at Truro. First, he had been out longer than I had, for just over a year, and he may have had his fill of gay beaches. Some of his initial dizziness may have worn off. Second, he and Golden Boy were already best friends, and if there had ever been a swooning stage in their relationship, it had passed. Third, Chris may even have looked upon me as something of a White Knight myself. (Hah!) As for me, perhaps I was excited about making friends with someone who would be in Boston in the fall, whom I wouldn't feel embarrassed to introduce to Hank and Brook. Chris was starting out at Harvard
Business
school, for crying out loud. We could
"relate
" to each other.

In any case, there we were, talking about how nice it was finally to be with someone gay that you could
talk
to—always good material for a conversation—and apologizing for sounding so snobbish-Harvard-Yale, but really, most of the good-looking gay people you meet are so
shallow,
and all that.

Chris' job was ending the following week, just as mine would be beginning. He would be moving into Chase Hall at Harvard Business School, a mile's walk from my apartment in Cambridge. Very convenient. We agreed that we would get together back in Boston.

As it happened, we spent almost every evening together that fall. Although my new responsibilities at work kept me occupied, we generally talked on the phone once a day, or even twice, and I never stayed at the office past six or seven or on weekends the way I had before coming out.

After a few weeks we came to the realization that we were not just "doing a thing." We were "lovers." Two gay guys who spend most of their time together and who are supposed to feel guilty if they have sex with someone else are lovers. That was, after all, the object of the game I had been playing for three months. That was the point of going to the bar night after night, looking. To the gay bar or, I suppose for that matter, to the straight dating bar. That was what all the movies and the songs were about, and I was ready to get in on the fun. Enough of humming "What Kind of Fool Am I?" It was about time I had a lover, particularly inasmuch as I wouldn't have much time, now that work had started again, to go around looking. I am very practical about these things, as you can see.

What I am saying is that Chris was my lover because he fell in love with me; I was his lover because I liked him a lot and wanted to "have a lover."

One of the reasons Chris and I managed to stay together as long as we did, from September to April, is that Chris loved me in a strong, silent sort of way. He didn't tell me over and over that he loved me or bring me gifts or anything. If he had been effusive, if he had tried to make me more affectionate than I was, if he had told me the true extent to which my looking at other people hurt his feelings, he would have turned me off.

As you might imagine, we were not 100 percent sexually compatible. I couldn't fulfill my cowboy fantasies with him. Playing out fantasies is childish and embarrassing, and if you are embarrassed, you can't get into it. So when we had sex, quite frequently at first, I would just shut my eyes and fantasize. Compatibility, I think, is in some part measured by the ability of the sex partners to climax at the same time. Well, I could never do that with Chris (or anyone else) because that kind of precision timing required an awareness of the other person; I was concentrating largely on my fantasies in order to be able to come. So any orgasmic simultaneity became the full responsibility of my partner. Go ahead and come when I come, that's okay by me; only don't make too much noise or move around too much, or you will make me lose my train of thought, and
I
won't be able to come. And if it's all the same to you, try not to get it on me.

I was apologetic about all this, and Chris was understanding. We got to know each other awfully well, and I managed to tell him about my squeamishness and weaknesses and insecurities. I even managed to force myself to describe those famous fantasies in some lurid detail, embarrassing as they were to own up to. Telling him did not improve our sex, but it made him the undisputed closest friend I had—I mean
no one
else had gotten that far into my head—and he was willing to put up with my inhibitions and hangups because he loved me.

One thing we tried was putting Smucker's old-fashioned raspberry jam, my absolute favorite, all over Chris' thing. Like grinding up a child's medicine in a bowl of Jello. Very Skinnerian. It took me several months to reacquire my taste for Smucker's raspberry jam.

Our sex wasn't sufficiently satisfying for either of us, so we decided, as some gay lovers do, to go out on our own and do it with other people every so often. Two rules: Always tell you did it (after the fact), and never do it with someone we both really care about. Telling assured each of us that we really knew what was going on. Telling after the fact was the least painful way: "Chris, I did it with some trashy number from the bar, but there was nothing to it. I got him out of my system. You're still my main man." That was all there was to it, though I guess Chris didn't like my doing it with other people, even though we had agreed. Rule two was touchy. We wouldn't do it with each other's friends, because that could get very painful and complicated. But it required considerable self-restraint, inasmuch as we both tended to have attractive friends. Well, Golden Boy for example.

Golden Boy and Chris were "sisters." That means lots of talk and no sex. I don't know why they had never had sex—their relationship just never developed that way. They spent so much time together, though, that lots of people at the bar thought they were lovers. Of course, I have to go on record as not liking the expression "sisters." Between gay people I don't mind hearing it, but I am uncomfortable at the thought of straight people hearing it and getting the wrong idea. It's kind of the way blacks call each other niggers, I guess. There was no more femininity in the relationship between Chris and his "sister" than there is in the relationship between Nixon and Bebe Rebozo.

I got to see a lot of Golden Boy, and we became friends. The three of us would often go do things together, though three can be an uncomfortable number. Even where sex isn't involved, someone usually feels left out. My freshman year at Yale I had a second roommate besides Roger the teaser, but he was so left out I even forgot to mention him earlier. Well, if it's bad with three "straight" freshmen, it's much worse when there are little streaks of love and envy and jealousy and whatnot flashing around the room. Chris wanted Golden Boy and me to be friendly, but not too friendly. I felt left out when they started talking about things they had done together before I had appeared on the scene. I didn't like it when people thought Golden Boy was Chris' lover—not because I loved Chris so much, but because it wounded my pride and made me feel all the more left out. And I was jealous of Chris' relationship with Golden Boy. Does that about wrap it up? No, I forgot to mention that Golden Boy apparently had certain urgings and stirrings in my direction, of which I gradually became aware.

This area of friends can get quite sticky, more so in gay life than straight, because two gay lovers are likely to be attracted by a third gay guy, where with a straight couple, only the girl would be attracted by another guy and only the guy would be attracted by another girl. The two lovers naturally find themselves competing for the third party. Maybe not competing to get into bed with the third party. Maybe just competing for the biggest smile and the warmest handshake on parting. Egos are involved. Naturally, a gay lover relationship based on love, not looks, holds up under the strain—and many do. But it's a strain nonetheless.

Not only are there more combinations and permutations of emotion in gay life, because everyone can be attracted by everyone else, but there are also fewer restrictions imposed by society to help you avoid temptation. Far from being a sacred institution in society, it is illegal for two gay guys to marry. Thus there is no legal affirmation of a lover relationship, no crowd of well-wishers to witness the ceremony, no kids, natural or adopted, to bind the marriage. You are already outside the moral code, so you can forget about "doing the right thing for appearance's sake." Moreover, being outside the moral code, you don't have its discipline to help you order your life and to help you cope with temptation. Certainly, you can form your own moral code and be true to yourself. But creating your own—and sticking to it—is harder for someone gay than conforming to preexisting, pervasive social norms is for someone straight.

Other problems gays have remaining faithful to their lovers are: The career problem, which is beginning to appear in straight life also with the feminist movement. How will gay lovers stay together if their careers conflict geographically? And the dominance problem. Who will do the dishes if both guys happen to be rather aggressive and masculine and unwilling to take on the "feminine role," circa 1955?

Three is a complicated number. Seven is ludicrous, but wait.

Golden Boy was hopelessly hung up on a young attorney named Dennis Moyer. Dennis had recently graduated from Harvard Law School and worked for one of Boston's stodgier firms, in the corporate taxation department. I was surprised when I first met him at Sporters. Here was Golden Boy, who could have had anyone he wanted, choosing a decent but unspectacular-looking guy in his late twenties. Now I know there is much more to life than looks, but in gay life most of the people you meet you meet on the basis of their looks, and you find out what's inside them only later.

As I got to know Dennis and as I got to know Golden Boy better, I began to understand. Dennis appears to be stability personified. He smokes a pipe; he speaks in carefully considered, deep tones. He is solid and masculine. Someone to lean on. Someone to complement a less stable personality. Dennis is the mature breadwinner type. Golden Boy, I learned first to my instinctive dismay and now to my amusement, likes to cook, likes to get everything in the apartment just right, loves to go shopping.

I was startled to realize that Golden Boy, who had the world around his finger, was not as happy as I was—I who didn't even enjoy kissing. Golden Boy looked the way I had always wanted to look; Golden Boy had no hangups in bed; Golden Boy was president of his class; and Golden Boy was in the depths of despair over Dennis Moyer.

If that sounds a mite melodramatic, it's the way GB would want it. I think he is a little like me in the way he enjoys his cosmic depression. He is a romantic and was determined that his woe-begotten relationship with Dennis should be the world's saddest love story.

Whenever Chris and I saw GB, we heard another episode. I never heard them from Dennis' end, so I can't say exactly who was being cruel to whom, who was being unfair. All I know is that Dennis was an all-consuming passion for GB.

One day, after GB and I had become rather close friends, he called me (I think Chris was not in at the time, or else he would have called Chris first) and announced, after I asked him why he sounded so terrible, that he had tried to kill himself the night before. He had just given up on life. If he couldn't have things work out with Dennis—and he couldn't—then he had no reason to go on living. It sounded as melodramatic as usual, but I was hardly going to vent my customary cynicism at a time like this.

You
what?

Well, he had swallowed a whole bottle full of sleeping pills up on the fourth floor of the library around midnight, in one of those rooms that was
sure
to be deserted until morning. He would have done it back at the dorm, but, of course, he might have been discovered—and, even if not, he wanted to spare his neighbors the horror of finding his corpse. So he went up to that deserted room and, naturally, fell asleep. But apparently some girl he knew went up there to study for an exam. She tried to wake him up, and then she tried harder, and then she got frightened and called the campus police and they called an ambulance and took him to Mass. General where the emergency staff pumped his stomach, and now he was home.

Can I reconstruct my feelings as Golden Boy described his attempted suicide? There was the pleasure you feel, but do not admit, when you hear another person's problems. You are instinctively glad that
you
don't have that problem—that
you
didn't catch poison ivy all over your body, even your genitals, as you rolled around in the dunes—that it's your buddy who was hit, not you, out there in that foxhole. And there is the excitement, which is also pleasurable. You want the two-alarm blaze to be put out with a minimum of damage to the building—but part of you wants the flames to go spectacularly out of control escalating the blaze to a major five-alarm disaster. Jump!
Jump!
Then there is the feeling of superiority as someone lets down his guard and tells you his problems. There is pleasure in feeling superior to a Golden Boy. You may not be as good-looking, but you can cope, and that makes you feel good. Then, too, it was pleasurably flattering to be the first of Golden Boy's inner circle to hear this dreadful news. Hadn't I always wanted someone like him to need me? (Of course the very act of needing changed his image—made him seem weaker.) What could make us closer friends than sharing a secret like this? That thought was pleasing. It
was
a secret, of course. I love secrets. The only people who would know would be the girl who found him, the people at the hospital, me, Chris, and Dennis Moyer. (Well, what was the point of the suicide if you didn't let Dennis Moyer know about it?) And it appeared that I would be the first to tell Chris the awful news, as GB had been unable to reach him and I was meeting him later that day for dinner. Everyone sort of likes to be the bearer of important news, even bad news.