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Authors: William J. Mann

Where The Boys Are (45 page)

BOOK: Where The Boys Are
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Meanwhile, in Provincetown
Jeff
“W
here is he?”
Eva looks surprised that I’m so direct. She’s standing behind the front desk with a woman, a dark-haired dyke half her age wearing a neon blue halter top and leather pants. I’ve seen her around town for years. Lloyd says they’re dating, that Eva’s posing as a lesbian these days.
“Hello to you, too, Jeff,” Eva says, giving me one of her phony smiles. “Are you looking for Lloyd?”
“I know where Lloyd is. I’m looking for Anthony.”
She remains unflappable. Her girlfriend looks over at her with concern, but Eva remains calm. “Anthony doesn’t want to see you,” she says pleasantly, going back to shuffling whatever papers she’d been shuffling when I came in.
I lean in over the desk. “Don’t play games with me, Eva. I need to talk with him.”
“Hey, buddy, you back up,” the halter-top woman says, quickly getting into my face, poking her finger at my chest.
“Candi, I can handle this,” Eva assures her.
The woman harrumphs, giving me the evil eye. “I’m going out,” she snarls. “I’ll be back in a bit.”
“Okay,” Eva chirps after her. Candi glowers at me and slams the door as she leaves.
Eva lifts her little round Munchkin eyes to meet mine. “I’ll repeat myself, Jeff. Maybe you misunderstood what I said. But it’s simple. Anthony doesn’t want to see you.”
I’m not going to be put off that easily. “How did he get here? Why is he with you?”
I can see the impatience betraying itself on her face. She sets her papers down and again makes eye contact with me. “I’m not sure it’s any of your business, Jeff.” She’s still trying to sound pleasant, but it’s strained.
“Look, Eva, I
care
about him. He lived with me for
ten months
. I know he’s going through a lot—”
“He’s doing fine,” she assures me, smiling again.
“What is this? Your fucking mission in life? To steal away every man who matters to me?”
“So,” she says, “that’s what you think.”
I close my eyes, trying to regroup. A strategy of confrontation hasn’t worked. Well, there’s more than one way of dealing with Eva Horner. Maybe I ought to try taking a page out of her own book....
“Oh, Eva,” I say, gripping the counter as if I need support to keep from falling. “It’s just that I—I’m so torn up about it all. I’m so—I feel so
unfinished
. I just need some closure. I just need to
understand.”
I raise my eyes to hers, trying to will them to glow with moisture. I’m not really lying. I
am
torn up about it. I do need closure. I’m just giving it the full dramatic effect the way she always has.
“Haven’t you ever felt that?” I plead. “The need to understand? To feel . . .
heard?”
It’s working. I can see her soften. Her shoulders relax their posture a bit, her mouth curling sympathetically.
“Jeff, I just
can’t
tell you where he is. He really needs some time to be alone. To
think.”
“But . . . I don’t understand.” I’m not acting anymore. I really do feel confused and upset. “How did he get here? How did you get involved?”
She sighs. “He called me. Simple as that.”
“From San Francisco?”
She nods.
“And you . . . paid for him to fly back here?”
She nods again.
“Why?”
Eva looks at me as if it’s plain. “Because he was in pain. Because he had nowhere else to go.”
“But why call you?”
She smiles sadly. “We’d had some good talks, especially when he stayed here after Brent’s overdose.” Her face hardens again. “Don’t you remember how upset he was? Oh, maybe you don’t. You were too consumed with your own anger to offer him much support.”
Okay, so she has a point there. Maybe I’m being crazy, bursting in here like this, demanding to know where Anthony is. Lloyd wanted no part of it. We had dinner earlier, and he remained defiantly noncommital in his support of my desire to see Anthony.
“What are your feelings for him, Jeff?” he asked me. “What’s coming up for you in all this? And what does it mean for us?”
I couldn’t answer him. Truth is, I don’t know. I just know I have to see Anthony again. I have too many questions, too many unresolved feelings.
But I’m ready to give up. There’s not much more I can do. I can’t exactly reach across the counter and grip Eva by the throat and demand she spill the beans, the way Humphrey Bogart might do to Peter Lorre or something. I just let out a long sigh.
Then I hear the door behind me.
“You want to see Anthony?”
It’s Candi. She stands there glaring at me, her hands folded across her small bosom. I look at her without replying.
“I just talked with him,” she says. “He said he’ll see you.”
“Candi,” Eva says. “Is he sure?”
The other woman nods. “Come on,” she says to me, pushing back out the door.
I follow her down Commercial Street. We don’t speak a word for the first five minutes.
The fog is rolling in, heavy and damp. From Long Point I can hear the foghorn warning ships not to come too close.
“Thanks for talking to him for me,” I finally say.
Candi turns to look at me. “I didn’t do anything for you. In fact, I advised Anthony to tell you to fuck off. Like he should ever trust you again, with you going behind his back and all.”
I don’t reply.
“Okay,” she says, seeming to reconsider her quick judgment. “So maybe I don’t know the whole story. But I
do
know that you and your boyfriend Lloyd think you’re both pretty perfect, and that you owe no responsibility to the people you draw into your lives.”
“Okay, hold on right there. You’re right, you
don’t
know the whole story. And you don’t know me from Adam. We’ve only just met.”
“I know your
type,
pal. And I know how Lloyd lords over Eva, thinking their whole dysfunctional relationship has been only
her
fault. He can’t see how
he
contributed, how it takes two to tango.” She smolders. “I suspect it’s been the same for you and Anthony.”
Abruptly Candi makes a turn down an alleyway between two art galleries. Stretching out on a pier onto the beach is a row of wind-beaten cottages. In only one does any light burn. Candi raps on the door.
“I’ve brought him,” she announces.
The door opens. Anthony stands behind the screen, looking out at me.
“Thanks,” he says, pushing open the screen door so I can enter.
“You want me to wait here?” Candi asks. “In case he gives you any trouble?”
“No, that’ll be okay,” he says. She grunts and moves back toward the street. I step inside.
It’s a single room, no bigger than a cell, really, probably twelve by eight. Room enough only for a bed and a chair, though there’s a nice view of the beach and the water.
Anthony seems to notice my surprise at his squalor. “Eva’s looking into getting me a better place,” he says. “It’s all she could get at such short notice.”
I stuff my hands down into my pockets. “She’s paying your rent?”
He nods. “Just until I get a job.”
My eyebrows raise themselves. “You want to
live
in Provincetown?”
He smiles awkwardly. “Just until . . . well, just for a while.”
We’re quiet. I look at him. How beautiful he is. He looks a little haggard, and his beard stubble seems heavier, more mature, than I remembered. But his eyes still have that same glow.
“I’ve missed you,” I tell him.
He looks away. “No, you haven’t.”
I feel at a loss to express myself. “Would I have come down here to find you if I hadn’t?”
He shrugs, still not looking at me. “You came to see Lloyd.”
I walk up behind him and place my hands on his shoulders. “I came to see you.”
He turns to face me. He’s crying.
“Why did you come back?” I ask him. “Why not stay in San Francisco?”
“I could’ve,” he says, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. “I met a guy who offered me a place to stay.”
I’m sure he had. And probably within hours of running away from me. The next sugar daddy to give him a roof over his head, three meals a day . . .
“But I didn’t want to,” Anthony’s saying. “I wanted to come home.”
“Home?”
He nods. “For the first time in my life, I felt like I had a home here. In Boston. In Provincetown. With all my friends here.”
I sit down on his bed. The mattress is horribly thin and soft.
“Come back to Boston with me,” I say, surprising myself. I hadn’t planned on suggesting such a thing. But seeing him again—seeing him here—I want him back.
He just smiles. “You don’t really want that.”
“I do,” I tell him. “We can leave right now.”
“Why? So you can ask me more questions? Try to find out what you still want to know?”
I’m silent. Could I promise not to ask any more questions?
“And what about Lloyd?” Anthony is shaking his head. “No, Jeff, you don’t really want me to go back to Boston with you.”
I look at him. “It’s just that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you since you left.”
“About me? Or my so-called secret past?”
“You, Anthony.”
He stands over me. “Jeff, you have no idea how important those ten months with you were to me. I never really had a home or a family before. You gave that to me.”
I look up at him hard. “You don’t run out on family when they ask questions, Anthony. You don’t keep secrets from family.”
He sits down beside me. “You’re also supposed to
trust
family. Not go behind their backs.”
I have no answer for that.
“Jeff, I
want
to tell you everything, but I can’t. I’m just not ready yet. ”
“Have you told Eva?”
He shakes his head. “No. And she’s never asked.” He looks at me pointedly. “She doesn’t seem to require that in exchange for friendship.”
I look away.
“She’s been so awesome to me, Jeff. Paying my way back here from San Francisco, finding me a place to live, introducing me to all of her friends . . .”
So he
has
found another sugar daddy. Except it’s a
mommy.
“Anthony, just a word of caution,” I tell him. “Eva doesn’t give anything freely. She expects a payback.”
“No, Jeff. She’s said I needn’t ever repay her.”
I laugh bitterly. “Oh, she doesn’t care about money. She’s got plenty of that. She expects your constant presence, your undying devotion. She’s made Lloyd’s life miserable. You know that. And if you don’t fulfill her needs, she turns on you, like she has Lloyd. She’s letting their whole business go down the tubes so she can play at being a lesbian.”
Anthony makes a face. “She
is
a lesbian. She just finally realized it and came out of the closet.”
I scoff. “She’s as much of a lesbian as
I
am, Anthony. Eva is a black hole of emotion. She’ll do and say anything to feel intimacy in her life. These Provincetown dykes start paying her a little attention and suddenly she becomes one of them, just to fill up the aching void in her life.”
Anthony stands and crosses over to his little sink, wedged into the corner of the room. He turns on me. I can see he’s angry.
“You just don’t get it, Jeff,” he says. “And you know why? Because you’re Mr. Queer Activist. Mr. Professional Gay. You came out of the
womb
gay! Well, not everybody knows and accepts it that easily.”
“Anthony, look—”
“No, you listen to
me
for a change, Jeff. You had Javitz to teach you. He took you down to all those big marches and demonstrations in New York and Washington. You went all over the country learning how to be gay. Well, not all of us had that, Jeff. Just because you’ve been gay all your life doesn’t mean that everybody has had your same experience. You told me how you just stopped doing crystal. Just like that. You didn’t need detox, you didn’t need any help. You’re a strong person, Jeff, and good for you. But not everybody is you. Not everybody is as lucky as you!”
“I understand that, Anthony, but—”
“You know what, Jeff? You
don’t
have all the answers. I used to think you did. But you don’t.” He folds his arms across his chest. His eyes narrow as they stare at me, and a small smile shapes his lips. “You have it all wrong, you know,” he says quietly. “About me and Mrs. Riley. You think you’re so clever, Jeff. But you have it
all wrong
.”
BOOK: Where The Boys Are
10.74Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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