The Front Runner (15 page)

gave. Each of us gave, and gave again, until we were drained and hurting.

That first time, we shied away from the ultimate act of love and possession that the Supreme Court had declared legal. In our macho pride, neither of us had ever permitted another man to do that. For months yet, each of us would still have a deep-rooted fear of offending precisely that maleness that we loved in the other. In addition, I dreaded the idea of hurting Billy physically, or of upsetting that relentless psych that kept him in front on the track.

It would take far more trust and confidence than we had on that April morning before each of us would not only tolerate being taken, but actually wish for it as the ultimate way of pleasing the other. In fact, I would be the first to surrender—my fear of damaging Billy was so strong that I would wind up hurting his feelings by at first refusing his own surrender.

But for now, what we were able to give and receive was more than enough.

We lay finished.

I had expected to feel shattered after this intimacy with my ghost. Instead I felt peaceful. It was warm there on the dry leaves. The morning sun was shining right on us, and I felt empty, almost weightless. I felt very clean, as if the light were shining straight through me—as if the forest air were moving through all the cells of my body.

His legs lay across my arm, and my head lay on his thighs. He still had his arms around my lower body, and his face pressed against my groin. In the silence, I could almost hear our hearts beat. They had the slow deep pulse of the distance runner—mine was about forty-eight and his was forty. I could see that pulse beating in his genitals—the penis, still swollen and moist, moved slowly as it lay across his thigh. My mouth tasted of his salt and his semen.

The leaves crackled a little under us. Nearby, the water gurgled as it slid over the rock. The birds had stopped their dawn caroling and were into the softer,

more businesslike daytime notes. In the distance was the soft rumble of a jet plane.

I couldn't move. In my sweet inertia, I was like a rock. I would lie there till a glacier moved me.

Billy drew a long slow breath and ran his hand along my thigh one more time. My arm was going to sleep, so with deep regrets I pulled it slowly from under his thighs. It took an effort, but I raised myself up on my elbow. He stayed as he was, his face between my thighs, his hand stroking. My groin was spattered with a little glistening semen, and Billy started to lick it up slowly, first out of the pubic hair, then off my bare skin to the side. His eyes were closed.

It was dreamlike yet so real: the feel of his warm tongue on my body. He moved slowly, turning against me, kissing his way up along my torso. He was dry now, and warm, with a fine dust of salt on his skin. His tongue left a wet trail in my body hair. He reached my breast, kissed my nipples, nuzzled his face in my thick, chest hair. Something in this mute act of worship made me think that no other lovemaking had ever stirred him so deeply.

I lay back down, putting one arm around him, and he lay against me with his face buried in my neck, his fingers playing slowly in my chest hair.

"You're hairy," he said in that low voice I could barely catch. "I like hair." Suddenly he raised his head and smiled at me drowsily. "The first time I saw you in shorts, your hairy thighs really turned me on."

I stroked his head, picking the leaves out of his hair.

"Mr. Brown, you're very well hung."

I laughed a little. "You're good for my ego."

"Really. You have a great body. I hope I look like you when I'm your age. You look more like thirty-three, thirty-four."

He wasn't going to lie and tell me I looked like twenty-three. I couldn't have accepted that, and he knew it. Thirty-three I could accept. It made me feel relieved. I wondered how I could have panicked in front of the mirror earlier.

"How did you manage all these months?" I asked.

He laughed softly. "I got very depraved. My dharma was a mess."

"Now I suppose you'll tell me you slept with Vince or something."

"Christ, no," he said. "I just thought of you like mad and jerked off."

He sat up slowly, blinking in the bright light. We were both a sight. That book of photographs hadn't shown the cruel realities of screwing in the woods. Our sticky buttocks were stuck with bits of leaf and bark and moss. Our knees and elbows were black with dirt. The carpet of leaves was somewhat torn up. All around us, the silky fiddleheads of ferns were pushing up—we had rolled on some of them and crushed them. Our clothes lay in soggy disorder where they had fallen.

"You're jealous," said Billy.

"Sure," I said. "Would you want me to be otherwise?"

"I'm
jealous," said Billy. "I know Vince tried to cruise you when we came. And you told him he was a very attractive kid." He smiled blissfully, picked off a broken fiddlehead and threw it at me. "But there's no reason for either of us to be jealous."

I was gently, sleepily brushing the leaves off him. It was not a tense conversation—we were both too limp for that. But suddenly we were saying things we had to say.

"Does that mean you won't get tired of me too soon?" I said, trying to say it as casually as possible.

He looked at me steadily. "Yeah," he said, "my dad is anxious like that. He puts up a good front, but . . . Anyway, you don't have to worry. I'll be loving you for the rest of my life."

"That's a long time," I said. I didn't want to remind him of his own observation that gay relationships seldom lasted that long.

He shook his head. "I never wanted to love anyone that long before." He laughed a little. "It's funny. You're the first thing that I can project into the future, after Montreal. The rest just goes up to Mon-

treal and stops. Even running somehow . . . stops there. I don't mean that I'll stop running afterward. But . . . you know what I mean. Right now, I'm just running and loving you, and that's all I want to do with myself."

He lay down on the leaves again and stretched luxuriously beside me. I felt that same ease, that same slackening of the months of hurt and tension.

"I want to sleep," he said.

"Nothing doing," I said. "We both have classes. We have to get back"

We both got stiffly up. We moved so slowly that we might have been drugged. Suddenly Billy started laughing.

"What?" I said.

He pointed down at our feet. We were both still wearing our shoes.

We stood by the little waterfall and cleaned ourselves off. Then we pulled our clammy clothes back on. We were shivering a little, even in the warm sun.

"Speaking of Montreal," I said, "there's something we ought to agree on. For the moment, this has to take its place in what we're trying to do. If it interferes, it might cause you to fail. That might spoil our feeling for each other too."

"Yeah," said Billy. "I was thinking of that. Actually, the pressure's off us now, so it'll be easier. We can both just relax and get on with it."

"The pressure is going to be coming from other people from now on," I said.

Suddenly I had more questions. I wanted to talk to him about being married and about living together. But he'd already said he disapproved of ceremonies, and anyway I knew it was not the moment to come out with our relationship. I wanted to keep it secret as long as I could.

I decided not to spoil that moment with any discussions of this sort, and just swallowed the questions.

Billy was laughing again. He was convulsed. He pointed at my stopwatch. "Mr. Brown, you even forgot to stop your watch before you grabbed me."

We both leaned against the rock, laughing, shiver-

ing in our wet clothes. "Mr. Brown," he said, "what was our pace per mile?"

"More like 3:50," I said.

We walked slowly back with our arms around each other, our sides pressed together. About a mile from the edge of the woods, we saw Vince and Jacques coming along the trail. I drew away from Billy nervous-

ly.

"Hell," said Billy, "we want them to know, don't we?"

So we kept walking like that, two lovers, with bits of leaf still in our hair. Vince and Jacques came loping up to us, grinning widely. They stopped just long enough to enable Jacques to caper around us. He was playing an invisible recorder and making noises that sounded like the Mendelssohn wedding march. Vince punched me gently, and punched Billy gently.

"Now maybe we'll have some peace and quiet," he said.

NINE

AS graduation 1975 neared, every passing day told me how right I'd been not to say no to Billy. The decision had been right not only for me, but for him too.

Both of us relaxed. I stopped barking at him. He stopped fighting me about his training schedule. It was amazing how docile he suddenly was about cutting down his mileage. He was still a little addicted to it, and fidgeted like an ex-junkie sometimes. "I fought you because I resented your behavior to me," he said. "Now I'm going to be good."

For me, the relaxation was gradual, as the buried tensions and pains of years slowly dissolved. For Billy, the relaxation was immediate. From that first morning in the woods, he abandoned himself to love.

"I always fell in love with unhappy people," he said. "I was a sucker that way. I wanted to change their lives and make them happy. It never worked out. It was the same with you. You were the unhappiest guy I ever saw. But you're stronger than the others, and you really want to be happy. This time it's going to work."

The relaxation had a curious effect: for the first week or so, both of us wanted to sleep all the time. Billy nodded off in classes. In the afternoons he went back to his dorm and napped. I found myself falling asleep in my office with my head on the typewriter. I found my eyes falling shut as I stood by the truck supposedly timing my runners. We both found that we couldn't stay awake past nine
P.M.
We laughed about it.

But our happiness was far from complete. It was painful to continue on the same daily schedule as before. We saw each other only during workouts, classes and team open house. We snatched an hour of

love every day or every other day, in the evenings at my house, or in the woods, or in my car somewhere. When Billy's father came to New York, we snatched a half hour in his hotel room when he was out. When night came, Billy always went back to his dorm to sleep.

Above all I hungered for him at night—not merely for his body, but for his presence. I thought: Have I waited twenty years for this, only to wake up in the morning and find myself in an empty bed?

We often called each other up on the phone. I'd be home about ten
P.M.
working out new training schedules for the teams, and the phone would ring. "Hi, Mr. Brown," he would say. "Hello, Mr. Sive," I would say. "Mr. Brown," he'd say, "I can't get any studying done because I'm thinking about your body." "You're not even supposed to be
up
at this hour," I'd say. "You're supposed to be asleep."

Though Joe Prescott had told me long ago it would be strictly my business, I felt obliged to tell him. He took the news with his usual equanimity. Vince and Jacques had not been able to resist telling a couple of friends among their straight teammates, who in turn couldn't resist telling a few other students and faculty. They observed that Billy did indeed sometimes go to my house alone in the evening, and that I wasn't yelling at him any more.

The reaction was: Ho hum, another picturesque pair. Unfortunately this knowledge eventually found its way off campus.

Billy started studying extra hard, trying to make up for lost time. When May came, all three boys' portfolios were graded "Pass" and they were able to graduate.

Whereupon Joe Prescott then hired Vince and Billy as teachers, with the idea that they would develop a gay studies program. Joe had gotten more and more interested in the whole question of gay rights, and thought Prescott could make a practical contribution that would be in keeping with the college's aim of "more human people."

He also took Jacques onto the faculty as a graduate assistant in the environmental activist course.

All three boys were delighted with this development, and so was I. It solved the problem of a base for their training until the Olympic Trials. Billy, of course, stayed on campus to be near me, and the other two stayed on to start working up their course material. It was making their gayness more public, but the rumors in the track world were now so insistent that we knew by next fall sometime their cover would be blown.

That summer I finally began to see Billy's true potential as a runner. For the first time I began to think that a medal in Montreal was not just a wet dream.

After the Drake Relays, his improvement had stopped, as his overstrained system slowly, secretly healed itself. I wasn't too worried—it was the familiar plateau in an athlete's development. By now I had him on the program I was sure was right for him. I'd run it through a computer and tinkered with it endlessly, studying the results. He was now weaned down to a mere 100 miles a week, and a single daily workout. But it was all quality and strength work.

Every day he ran thirty to eighty minutes in the woods, burning through it at a 5 or 5:15 mile pace. All the hills made it a beautiful brutal strength exercise. Then he went back to the track for speed laps. He would do, say ten quarters or twenty to twenty-five 110s at seventy-five percent effort. Before a major meet, I would let him add some second daily workouts of five miles run at nearly race pace. He loved that second workout—he behaved like a child who'd been given a popsicle.

In July he suddenly started improving again. His three- and six-mile times started dropping so rapidly that I knew he would break twenty-eight minutes in the 10,000 meter any time now, and go 13:35 in the 5,000.

We kept strictly to our sparse meeting schedule, and did not parade our relationship on campus, because summer school was going on, and a good number of

students and faculty were there. Nevertheless, we were met with a growing number of hostile remarks when we traveled to meets that summer.