Authors: William J. Mann

Where The Boys Are (52 page)

BOOK: Where The Boys Are

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Christmas Day, Boston

Lloyd

W
e chopped down the tree together, just like old times, a tall, fragrant blue spruce with some of its cones still intact. We hauled it back into the city on top of my car and then up the three flights to Jeff’s apartment, where we secured it into the stand only to find its branches were much longer and heavier on one side, making it look squat, like a fat lady curtsying. Once, after we’d gotten all the ornaments attached to her body, Miss Lucy (as we dubbed the tree) toppled over, and we came running back into the room to the sound of glass breaking and aluminum beads rolling across the floor. We simply laughed, righted the poor old girl, and tied her to the wall.

Out had come the gifts: a pile for Jeff, a pile for me, a pile for Mr. Tompkins. When he was a kitten, Mr. Tompkins would climb up inside the Christmas tree, meowing through the tinsel. Now the best he can do is sit underneath beside his pile of gifts, idly knocking low-hanging ornaments with his paw. It’s a game that quickly bores him, however, and with a heavy sigh, he curls up back on the couch and falls asleep.

“He seems so much more content these days,” Jeff observes. “He hasn’t taken off anybody’s finger in
weeks.
”

I smile smugly. “Maybe he’s just glad to have me back around.”

Jeff wraps his arms around my waist. “He’s not the only one.”

We kiss. We’ve just returned from a day at Jeff’s sister’s house, where we dressed as Santa and Mrs. Claus and surprised little Jeffy with a sackful of gifts. The kid looked up shrewdly at Mrs. Claus and instantly identified her as Jeff under the wig and red lipstick. “Hey, Unca Jeff,” he said. “Are you a big old
drag queen?”
We all just cracked up.

It’s been a lovely day. Even Jeff’s mom gave me a hug and a kiss, not to mention a gift (a flannel shirt, a size too big). I placed a call to my parents in Iowa, promising we’d visit soon. Yes,
we.
Jeff and I. Maybe in February. Jeff even got on the phone and wished them all a happy holiday. My dad said it seemed maybe I was “settling down.” I said I just might be, at that.

Tonight we’ve planned a little gathering with Henry and Shane. Henry actually brought Shane home with him for Hanukkah, and last night he spent Christmas Eve with Shane and his mother in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. They’ve been together almost constantly since Henry cooked that birthday dinner. “The pasta was a little soggy,” Henry admitted to me, “but everything else was tasty and firm.”

It’s good to see him happy and focused. Whether he and Shane will be able to make something work between them remains to be seen. Henry’s been pretty fixated on muscle-boy types for a long time, and Shane shows no inclination to head to the gym. “If it’s meant to happen,” I’ve told Henry, with him finishing my sentence: “It will.”

“Lloyd,” Jeff says now, “before they get here, I thought we might want to open these gifts.” He reaches far behind the tree and withdraws two small boxes wrapped in red cellophane, both topped with white satin bows.

“Who are they from?” I ask, but even as the words came out of my mouth, I know.

“They’re from Eva,” Jeff replies.

Eva.
She hasn’t been far from my thoughts all day. I know she’s back at Nirvana, she and Candi, taking care of our houseful of guests. Two days ago, she came to me and told me she’d decided to sell me her share in Nirvana. “This isn’t easy,” she admitted. “But the work I need to be doing right now doesn’t involve running a guest house.”

“And what is the work you need to be doing?” I asked her.

She just smiled. “I’m finding that out, little by little, every day.”

It was, in truth, what I’d been hoping for. I didn’t want to lose Nirvana. There was no way the two of us could go on together, but I’d come to love the guest house and my work there. Yet is it even feasible? Could I possibly afford to buy her out? What might she ask as a price? Could this be her strategy—one last manipulation to get what she really wants? If she demands an amount she knows I can’t pay, she could then buy
me
out, and keep the place all to herself. Maybe sell it later for an enormous profit.

I remember looking at her as she told me of her decision. She seemed so different. For the first time in months, I felt inclined to trust her words, not second-guess her motives. Part of it’s simply knowing she’s in therapy, working on her stuff—the “work she needs to be doing.” Part of it’s Candi: underneath her tough exterior, she’s a good woman, loyal—and introspective, too, if she was the force behind Eva’s finally seeing a therapist. In fact, we’ve all spent so much time debating whether or not Eva is really a lesbian that we’ve overlooked the real significance of the relationship. It’s the first time in her life that Eva has formed a bond with another woman. That’s progress. That’s breaking out of the pathology. No matter what she turns out to be, no matter the truth of her relationship with Candi, she’s turned some kind of corner.

But there’s yet another reason Eva seems different to me. I’ve had time to digest what she said, to live with it. It
does
take two to tango, and I can see quite plainly now my own part in the dance. “Darling,” Javitz used to say, “the first step toward enlightenment is recognizing our own accountability.”

“Eva,” I said to her, “I want you to know that I’m sorry, too.”

She looked at me.

“For everything and anything,” I added.

“Thank you, Lloyd,” she said simply.

I look down now at the gifts in Jeff’s hands. “How did you get these?” I ask.

“She gave them to Shane, who brought them by.”

I look up into Jeff’s eyes. “I have to admit I’m a little scared to open it.”

He smiles. “I’ll go first.” He tears off the cellophane and opens the small cardboard box. He lifts out a chrome-framed photograph, taken a year ago in the snow: Jeff and I with our arms around each other’s shoulders. I can hear Eva’s voice:
“Say, ‘If you please, pass the cheese!’ ”
We look a little pained staring into her lens, but also infinitely younger—evidence of just how much you go through in the course of one year.

“Open yours, Lloyd,” Jeff says.

I brace myself. Will it be another expensive gift? An intimate item of Steven’s? But even as I peel the cellophane wrapping from the box, I know it won’t be. I let out a little sound when I recognize it. It’s the little wooden Buddha we found under the couch at Nirvana so long ago. How often I’d wondered where he went. He’s painstakingly painted, smiling serenely.

“Oh, Jeff,” I say, sitting down on the couch, the Buddha staring up at me.

He looks down at my gift. “Did she paint that? Do it herself?”

I keep looking at the Buddha, and he keeps looking at me. “Yes,” I say. “I’m sure she did.”

Jeff sits down beside me. “Call her, Lloyd,” he urges.

I sigh. I reach over and pick up the phone, pressing in the numbers for Nirvana. I have no idea what I’ll say:
Thanks? Merry Christmas? Let’s rethink everything?

I get the machine. “Eva,” I say, “I just wanted to tell you that the Buddha is lovely. It’s—just wonderful. Thank you. It means—a great deal.” I realize I’m crying. I can’t even say Merry Christmas. I hang up the phone.

Jeff takes me in his arms.

Jeff

“It’s okay,” I tell Lloyd. “Go ahead and cry.”

“I think she finally gets it,” he says, wiping his nose. “And finally, I do, too.”

I hope so, but I remain just a tiny bit suspicious. True, my heart has softened toward Eva. Her gift to me was symbolic, I think, recognizing—even honoring—the relationship between Lloyd and me. She would never have given such a gift a year ago. And I can’t deny that I remain grateful for the help she extended to Anthony. But at what cost, I still wonder? Is she now as entangled in Anthony’s life as she once was in Lloyd’s? Is that why she can talk of selling Nirvana? Has she found a new male host body off of which to leech?

Okay, I know that sounds way hard. And I know Eva has been making a great show of her newfound lesbianism. I’m just
cautious;
that’s all. Maybe a little cynical. It’s in my nature to be cynical—as you’ve probably detected by now. It’s just hard for me to believe that Eva Horner can ever
give
without demanding
more
in exchange.

“What’s been most difficult for me,” Lloyd is saying, “has been realizing just how
unaware
I was of my
own
part in all this. I always think I’m so self-aware, so conscious.”

Now
that
much I agree with. It’s not just Eva who bears responsibility for their breakup. For breakup is what it was, just as the split between Anthony and me was a breakup. And I know damn well that I shoulder
my
share of the responsibility for that.

Anthony.
I just can’t bring myself to call him Brian. Brian Murphy remains seventeen years old in my mind, a villainous jock, the kind I myself knew in high school, the kind I was only too glad to see caught and punished, sent away for life. Anthony Sabe was another person: just turned thirty, a boy-man without a cruel thought in his head, gentle soul who’d somehow survived living among wolves. Lloyd told me this morning that Anthony’s little cottage in Provincetown is now empty. Where has he gone?

Just as I’m sure Eva has never been far from Lloyd’s thoughts these past few days, so too has Anthony always been close at hand for me. And just as Lloyd struggles with his own accountability, I’ve wrestled with my own. If I
had
trusted Anthony, allowed him to tell me the truth in his own time, might things have been different? Might he still be here?

But if he were, would Lloyd and I have put up this Christmas tree together? Would we now be nestled together on this couch, Mr. Tompkins purring between us?

And, in truth, Anthony’s question still resonates for me without a satisfactory answer:
“Knowing what you know, do you still feel the same for me?”

Do I really love so conditionally? I lean back into the cushions of the couch, suddenly overtaken by sadness. How had it been that Javitz had been able to love without conditions?

Lloyd’s looking at me. He can read my thoughts. But you know that by now.

“We’ve made Javitz into a god,” he tells me, “when he was a man. Just like us.”

I sigh. “Javitz wouldn’t have made a mess of things like we have. Anthony, Eva, Henry... and ourselves, Lloyd. We still don’t know what we are to each other.”

“Of course we know, Jeff.” He smiles. “We know very well what we are to each other. We love each other. We are living our lives together—as crazy as those lives sometimes are.”

I think of Anthony’s words:
“What I want is what I’ve seen between you and Lloyd. Two people trying to work out a life together. Struggling and accommodating and making dreams actually happen.”

Lloyd runs a hand through my hair. “I think we’ve been too hard on ourselves at times, Jeff. Look, we fuck up. We’re sometimes stubborn and insensitive. But generally we do the best we can. We want to do the right thing. When we mess up, we try to put things right.”

I shrug. “Maybe you ought to ask Anthony if he feels I put things right.”

“Jeff, you did what you needed to do.”

“Be careful what you go searching for,” I say, shaking my head. “You never know what you’ll find.”

Lloyd looks at me. He’s quiet. I can tell he’s thinking.

“What?” I ask. “What’s going on in that head of yours?”

“I think it’s time for you to see something.” He reaches down into his briefcase leaning against the side of the couch. He extracts a video.

“What is ...
that?”
I ask suspiciously.

“Javitz,” he says.

That’s what I thought. “Oh, Lloyd, I’m not sure . . .”

He looks at me intently. “You
need
to see him, Jeff.
Hear
him. This tape has sustained me, given me strength.” He pauses. “But there’s something I discovered at the end—something I didn’t know was on there. That’s what I
really
want you to see.”

He pops the video into the VCR and switches on the TV. And there’s Javitz, Lloyd and me, clowning around on the deck. Wonder of wonders, I don’t dissolve into a puddle or collapse in paroxyms of grief. I smile. I laugh. It’s so damn
good
seeing Javitz again. How young we all look. Was my face ever really that unlined? Did Lloyd ever really have that much hair?

Then the image fades to black. “There’s more,” Lloyd assures me before I can say anything. “Javitz apparently recorded it after we went to bed.”

Thirty seconds, then forty, pass. Finally, Javitz flickers back onto the screen, a huge closeup, from forehead to chin, looking directly into the camera. It’s so intimate that I instinctively gasp, pulling back a little. There he is, pores and all: the man who’d taught me, who’d loved me, on whom I’d tried to model my life. There he is: all big brown eyes and curly black hair, full lips and cigarette smoke.

“Hello darlings,” he says, in the same voice that greeted us every morning for almost a decade. “I’m figuring out how to work this damn thing. Remember, in my day all we had was Super-8.” He laughs, that unforgettable rasp, like a fork caught in a garbage disposal.

Lloyd reaches over and takes my hand.

“The two of you have just toddled off to bed,” Javitz is saying. “We’re all a little stoned. I’m not sure when you’ll see this. Maybe tomorrow, if I even remember I’ve taped it.” He takes a drag on his cigarette. I swear I can smell the smoke. “We were talking tonight about
process.
God knows how we got onto that. But we
do
get onto these things, the three of us, don’t we? We’ll talk them to death or until one of you falls asleep. Tonight it was
you,
Lloyd.”

He laughs once more.

“Anyway,
process.
I said a lot of things tonight about process, but let me just add one more. Something I want you to remember. Process means making mistakes. That’s the whole point. You make mistakes and you learn and you do your best to fix them, then you move on to make more mistakes.” His eyes twinkle. “Get where I’m going with this? Sure, you do. When I get sick—because it’s not an
if
but a
when
—you
will
make mistakes. That’s how it goes. That’s
process.
You make mistakes and you fix them and you move on.”

He inhales again on his cigarette, his eyes looking off dreamily past the camera.

“I don’t want you wasting time worrying over mistakes,” he says firmly. “Listen to me when I tell you this. There aren’t two other people in the whole entire world I’d ever trust to make mistakes around me. You two are my heart and my soul.”

I feel the tears come.

“But you know all that.” He sighs. “I suppose it’s just the pot talking. But there’s something else, darlings. Something maybe you
don’t
know.” He seems to hesitate before continuing. “Being with you, sharing my life with you, has given me great and abiding passion. Like tonight. Like so many nights.” His voice thickens. “But still, there are times, after such moments of passion, when it can be very difficult for me to watch the two of you stagger off to bed together, closing your door behind you, while I go back to my room, alone.”

Lloyd squeezes my hand.

“You see?” Javitz runs his hand through his long, thick hair. “As much as I treasure our friendship, as much as I celebrate the family we have created, as much as I believe in the worth and the unique value of what the three of us mean to each other, I have never found that one man in my life the way the two of you have found together. Sometimes I watch the two of you spin your wheels, caught up in this or that drama. I want to bop your heads together. It’s all so fleeting. Cherish what you have together. It is
precious.
So goddamn
precious.
It is what we all, each one of us, ultimately searches for in this life. You have been extraordinarily generous in allowing me into your lives. But has it ever kept you from going deeper between yourselves? I wonder.”

He exhales smoke, momentarily obscuring his features.

“And maybe I’m just stoned and a little horny.” He lets out one of his long, audacious sighs. “Guess I’ll be heading out to the dick dock now.” He cackles, leaning in toward the camera. “How do you shut this damn thing off?”

Then blackness.

He’s gone.

We sit there in complete silence for several minutes. I wipe the tears off my face with the sleeve of my sweater.

“He forgives me for not being there,” I finally manage to say.
“He forgives me.
He already knew we’d make mistakes.”

“You
were
there, Jeff.” Lloyd puts his arm around me. “And you have continued to be there. We’ve both spent too much time imagining Javitz laughing at our attempts to carry on. But he hasn’t been laughing. We’ve made our mistakes and we’ve learned and we’ve gone on.” He smiles. “I venture to think Javitz has actually been pretty proud of us.”

I think of Henry. “You’ve taught me so much,” he said. “Now let me use it.”

“Maybe,” I say, “maybe you’re right. Maybe I
have
managed, somehow amid all the craziness, to pass on what Javitz taught. Maybe I haven’t been such a fraud after all.”

“I think that’s right, Cat. I think you’ve done a pretty good job.”

I look at him. “Then why has it been so hard for the two of us to come together?”

Lloyd sighs. “I think we fell back into an old pattern. You and I never had much experience at just being a couple. There was always Javitz. He was right. As wonderful and enriching as our relationship with him was, Javitz was also our buffer. Our protection against our own intimacy ever getting too deep.”

I look back at the darkened television screen. “He wanted so much what we had,” I say softly. “And he died without ever finding it.”

Lloyd nods his head. “And I think once Javitz was gone, you and I didn’t know quite what to do with each other. How to be together. How to
be
, period. So we drifted apart.”

I smile wanly. “It makes me think of parents who lose a child. You’d think it would draw them closer, but it often ends up driving them apart.”

“Exactly,” Lloyd says. “And we never had any role models. There aren’t a lot of examples of relationships outside the heterosexual norm that we could follow. So, when we reconnected, without even thinking about it, we began setting up the old triangular structure, the only one we knew. I brought in Eva and you brought in Anthony. Because we somehow believed that we needed a third person from which to bounce—or deflect—our intimacy with each other.”

I cover my face with my hands. He’s right. He’s dead-on right.

“I don’t want to be afraid of making commitments anymore,” Lloyd says. “You and I—we have our work cut out for us.”

“I’m willing to give it a shot,” I tell him.

He takes my hands. “We make mistakes, we learn, and we move on to make more.”

“Does there ever come a time when the mistakes stop?” I ask, looking at him. “Or at least, become fewer and fewer?”

Lloyd smiles at me. “I think they already have.”

My eyes find his. “I love you, Lloyd.”

“I love you, Jeff. I never want to spend a Christmas without you.”

We kiss.

“Let’s watch the video again,” I say.

Lloyd hits REWIND on the remote. We sit through it once more in each other’s arms.

“I don’t ever want to stop missing him,” I say when it’s all over.

Lloyd smiles. “I don’t think that’s possible.”

The doorbell rings. It’s Shane and Henry. They’re bearing gifts. Ahead of them trots Clara, all pop-eyed at the sight of Mr. Tompkins, who could easily make two of her. They study each other for a moment, then decide on bemused tolerance as the best strategy for coexistence.

“We could take a lesson from them, huh, Jeff?” Shane asks quietly as Henry and Lloyd head into the kitchen.

“Are you suggesting that
you and I
might be friends,
too
, Shane?”

“Sure,” he says. “Want to shake on it?”

BOOK: Where The Boys Are

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