You Can Say You Knew Me When (23 page)

Now it was his turn to be disoriented, to quiver and blink with confusion and gratitude. I felt remarkably liberated, as if I’d busted through a membrane into a purer atmosphere. He pulled a towel from under the bed, wiping up this mess we’d made, and we giggled wordlessly, like guilty lovers in a secret hideout, at once proud and shy of the pleasure we’d discovered.

He offered to fix me something from the
icebox
, though the fridge was in fact modern, as was much of the kitchen. The stove was an enormous, restaurant-size six-burner, with a separate grill and two ovens. Walt explained that another housemate, a chef, had lived here for over ten years, and the equipment was left over from his tenure. The chef had died in the late eighties. I asked him if it was AIDS. “No, no. Very few of us died from AIDS. We watched the youngsters who came out in the seventies and eighties drop like flies. By then, we were already past our prime.”

“But you’re still sexually active.”

“Not like that, not with so many partners and so much fucking. I certainly wasn’t going to bathhouses.”

Walt assembled a couple of ham sandwiches on white bread with mustard. Pretty bland stuff, but I devoured it. I told him then what I was up to, the details of my search. He said I had to meet Carter, whose recollections were crisper than Walt’s. “All I remember are the boys,” Walt said with a smirk. Would he tell Carter about what we did? “Course I’ll tell him about a catch like you.” We parted with a tight hug and an agreement to talk again. He stood at the door and waved as I biked away.

Out on the street, an afternoon fog, that San Francisco specialty, had settled thickly, the air crystalline with moisture. Pedaling uphill, I quickly dampened from weather soaking in and sweat leaking out. Back at my apartment, my body chilled, my head throbbing, I picked up a voice mail from Woody, steeped in annoyance and closing with, “We have to talk.” I turned off my phone’s ringer and fell asleep.

I went to his apartment the following night to confess, after a day spent trying to figure out how. I’d consulted no one; I’d gotten no advice. I’d simply brooded: alone, sober, inert in my bed for hours. After Rick, I had felt confused; after Red Shorts, depressed. But those encounters had been anonymous, or nearly so—trees that fell in the forest with no one around to hear but me. Walt would reverberate. I wanted to interview him, to meet his lover, perhaps with Woody in tow. There was no way to do that and expect the secret to keep. More than that, Walt was strike three, the threat, even the proof, of a pattern. Telling Woody about Walt was a way to make myself stop.

Woody sat in his state-of-the-art adjustable ergonomic chair, his back to his desk. Behind him, his laptop’s screensaver was looping through repetitions, a DNA helix turning inside a coal-black void, collapsing, disappearing, rebuilding itself.

“I had an adventure,” I began, and I told him everything about Walt, chronologically, so that he might be seduced into Walt’s charms as I had been. I watched his interest deepening as I piled on the details, and when I got to Walt’s sailor orgy, Woody’s eyes blinked wide in amazement, and this gesture alone calmed my nerves. But as I continued on, he seemed to realize where the story was headed: his legs began bouncing, his arms crossed, his back arched away. By the time I got to the bedroom, with Norman on the wall and Walt on his knees in front of me, Woody had been shaking his head for half a minute. “Why would you do that?”

“That’s what I’ve been telling you.”

“Yeah,
how.
Not the same as
why
.” The twisting colored light of the computer lit one side of his face like a mask, a sloppy blot of rouge, a bruise.

“I was in a weird mood,” I said. “The thing about Don dying, I mean, being dead. Finding out.”

Through clenched teeth, he said, “You’re saying you had sex with him because you read an obituary?”

“He was really old!” Exclaiming these words at full volume didn’t make them more convincing. Walt’s advanced age, my loophole, wasn’t working. “All I’m saying is that it’s not the same thing as if, like, I’d gone to Blow Buddies or picked up someone on the street—”

“Yeah, okay, Jamie. Those things would have been worse. But they don’t change the fact that you did
something.
You could at least admit that.”

“I am admitting it.”

He stood and walked out of the room, stirring the air as he passed. From the kitchen I heard him crack a tray of ice and fill a glass with liquid—a gurgle, a fizz, the little snaps of the unthawed cubes, each particular sound extending his absence.

He carried back a tumbler full of dark liquid, speaking as he entered. “It’s not like I don’t understand the lure of sex with someone else. It’s not like I haven’t been attracted—” He paused, lips curving downward. “But I haven’t let anything go this far.”

“What are you drinking?” I asked.

He dropped heavily into his chair, elbows on knees, forehead toppling into the weave of his long fingers. “Remember that night you came downtown to meet me? At that lounge where we had that fight in the street? You left early, and I was so mad.”

I nodded. That was right after Red Shorts.

“I made out with Roger,” he said.

“Roger the tweaker?”

“He’s not a
tweaker
.”

“He did a little bit in the bathroom, right?”

“That was a joke. It’s a routine he does:
I’m going to the men’s room to smoke some gay crack!
”

I didn’t smile.

“We were drunk,” he said. “We made out for a little while in the bathroom. Nothing happened. Nothing
else.
I was tempted, but I held back.”

He sat up and gulped his drink down to the ice, then clattered the glass on his desk, the impact jolting his computer. The DNA ladder disappeared into a uniform gray glow that revealed an open e-mail window, an e-mail that I decided must be from, or to, Roger.

“Well, this is unexpected,” I said.

“We were drunk,” he repeated. “See, this is why I wanted you to come to dinner at Annie’s.”

“But wasn’t Roger there?”

“I wanted him to see us together, to get the picture of you and I as a couple, because I’m pretty sure he has a crush on me, and I probably gave him the wrong impression by kissing him that night.”

“That little bitch,” I muttered.

“He’s not a bitch. You don’t even know him.”

No, I didn’t. He’d been a joke to me: a gossipy little technofag with a baggie of speed in the pocket of his designer jeans. Now all of a sudden he was my rival—my younger, cuter, less depressed rival.

“Must self-medicate,” I said.

On the kitchen counter I found a bottle of bourbon, a liter of ginger ale, and the tray of ice, already puddling. All the makings of something sweet and watery, when what I craved in that moment was a lick of salt—dry, abrasive, cauterizing. I wanted to be sanded-down raw, not rubbed in sugar. “Do you have any tequila?” I shouted, opening a cupboard.

“You have no right to be mad,” Woody said, startling me from the doorway.

“I’m not mad.”
I’m sure he has tequila somewhere
. “I just never imagined that you—” I couldn’t finish the sentence. I turned to look at him. “Ian thinks we should have an open relationship.”

“Ian’s not your boyfriend.”

“This guy Walt and his
husband
, they’ve been together forever and they’ve always had guys on the side.”

“Is that what you want?” he asked. A challenge.

I gave up on the tequila, grabbed the bourbon by its neck, dumped some into a glass. “I want things to be like they were a week ago, when we were playing detective.”

He began shaking his head again. “I want you to think about whatever it is you’re going through because ever since your father died—”

“Oh, Woody, not that again. I’m dealing with it. I am, in my own way.”

“You still haven’t owned it.”

“But I’m sure paying for it.”

“Actually, I’m paying for it, Jamie. Literally and figuratively.”

Ugh, look at us. Me, wisecracking through a shot of liquor. Him, standing tall, arms akimbo, mouth a wounded crease, wronged. I saw us on TV as talk-show guests, a caption beneath him reading
TOO MUCH PSYCHOBABBLE
and another beneath me saying
CAN
’
T BE TRUSTED
.

The bourbon was hot in my throat as I muttered my way from the room, announcing that I was leaving. When he started to follow, I grabbed my coat and scurried away like a startled yard cat. He called out, “Don’t be that way.” But I was that way, so I kept going.

A strategy recorded on a fresh page in my notebook. Enacted, too, for several remarkably sober days. A strategy not only for jump-starting my career but for keeping my boyfriend.

Except my boyfriend didn’t want updates on my productivity. He didn’t even want conversation. He wanted ten days of no contact. “It’s not a breakup,” he explained, the night after we argued in his apartment. “It’s a time-out.”

Like what Deirdre decrees when AJ is shouting, scampering and splattering food all at once.

I opened my mouth to ask why, but what I heard myself saying instead was, “Sure, whatever you need.” And, “Sounds like a smart idea.” For all my flaws I’m not clueless. I know when I’m being put on notice.

Two boring days later, I left him a voice mail. “Hey-ey, Wormy. Just thinking about you. Hoping everything’s okay. Nothing much to report. Just—everything’s fine. A little lonely. But I’m making good use of the time, so that’s good. Misssss yooooou.” Sighs and sweet nothings. A thirteen-year-old girl daydreaming of her boy-crush, feeling sorry for herself and thinking he should know that.

I didn’t really expect a call back, so it wasn’t a problem when he didn’t.

Four days in. “Hey, sorry to bother you. Quick question: I talked to Gold’s Gym today about joining up, and I’m not sure, but it seems expensive to me. There’s this sale, but then there’s this enrollment fee, so the per-month cost seems…What do you pay at 24 Hour Fitness? What’s the max you would pay? Can you leave me a quick message, because the sale ends tomorrow.” A concrete request. Time-sensitive. A reply wouldn’t have violated the time-out, right? A little flexibility, please. I wouldn’t have called if it wasn’t important.

No doubt he’d gleaned an unsurprising subtext:
I wouldn’t have called if it wasn’t about money. If it didn’t seem like I might need to probably borrow a bit of money for this.

Well, fine, there would be another sale, and in the meantime I could take advantage of a one-week trial membership. A gym in the Castro screamed
Warning! Danger! Sluts-in-Recovery Keep Out!,
but I was six days into my separation, newly resolute, and let’s face it, Roger was easily twenty pounds slimmer than me (maybe thirty, the fucking waif), a reality that must be battled head-on.

During my intake session, a very buff young Asian guy asked me personal questions. I did not answer them all truthfully.

“Have you worked out before?”

“Oh, sure, but it’s been a few years.”

When he asked my age, I lied, too, but I lied up, said I was five years older. “You look great for thirty-eight,” he said, which was what I’d been aiming for.

Set loose inside the gym, I was overwhelmed by the clutter of metal structures, each machine engineered to allow a single muscle group to harden into classical prominence. Where to begin? I lingered near two strongmen in conversation: “What are you working on today?” “Back and bi.” “I’m on chest and tri.” “Tomorrow I do legs.” “I hate legs.” “Yeah, legs kick my ass.”

I headed for the treadmills and stepping machines. Yes, this is what I needed:
cardio.
I climbed up on an empty one, pressing a button labeled
FAT BURN
. The display remained blank. I pressed
START
. Nothing started. I pressed
CLEAR
, though there was nothing on the display to clear. Ruby-red LED digits burst into life. I keyed in my weight, my (actual) age,
FAT BURN
,
ENTER
.
ENJOY YOUR WORKOUT
, the display commanded. My feet settled into the flat, black plastic flippers, which glided smoothly through sweat-producing revolutions without taking me anywhere, a treadmill without the tread, a StairMaster without stairs. I was doing it, just like I belonged. The display kept track of how many calories I was shedding and how far a “distance” I was traveling. I could stay in this spot for miles. I would watch as five hundred calories were stripped away, one step at a time. The residue of an entire meal, eradicated in forty minutes. (Was that right? I’d have to start reading the calorie charts on my groceries.)

All day I had dreaded that I would stand out, undeveloped and uncoordinated, but it soon became evident that my lack of perfect pecs and washboard abs rendered me invisible among the muscled beauties. From my fat-burning perch I stared at the hunks; I noticed others watching, too. All eyes were on the white tank top, who might have stepped out of a Bruce Weber photo: trim, bronzed, his smooth surfaces unblemished, his smooth angles polished like ice. And that one over there, proportioned as though by an edict from Mount Olympus: shoulders a meter wide, waist trim and tight, his sculpted arm tugging a cable that turned a pulley that moved a stack of weights as tall as a hydrant.

As I laid on a floor mat, stretching after my workout, I listened to the white noise of all those rotating, sliding, slamming devices and the pulsing dance music over the speakers, and I noted the concentration on the many glistening faces, and I wondered how all this exertion might be tapped and made into something useful. Five hundred calories times five hundred people times five hundred gyms times five hundred days—together we could solve the world’s energy problems! No more oil, no more coal, shut down the nuclear reactors! People Make the Power!

In the communal shower, a brightly lit, blue-tiled area where eight chrome fixtures pointed inward, a guy stood facing the door, running soap suds across his chest. Like me, he was not among the hottest of the hotties, not a Dolores Park Speedo stud, just a thirtysomething guy soft around the middle. I smiled, Mr. Friendly, as if I didn’t know why he looked my way, and I turned my back to him. When I spun around to rinse, I saw that his soapy ministrations had stiffened him up below. In his eyes was so much confidence that I got hard, too.
Goddamn it
. I looked away. My eyes found a sign on the wall proclaiming S
EXUAL
A
CTIVITY IS
S
TRICTLY
F
ORBIDDEN AND
W
ILL
R
ESULT IN
L
OSS OF
M
EMBERSHIP
. Someone had blacked out the
SHIP
. Loss of member: the ultimate punishment. Still, he was undeterred. He tilted his head toward the steam room, just off the showers.

It occurred to me right then, feeling the chafe of temptation, that Woody wanted me to fail. That ten days, he knew, was plenty of time for me to stumble into trouble. This wasn’t about
space
. This was a test. With a violent jerk, I spun the temperature dial from red to blue. I let the frigid water punish me until I shriveled.

As I exited, another guy walked in, and my shower pal turned his attention toward the newcomer. I dressed and packed quickly. On my way out of the locker room I glanced back and saw the second guy following the first through the steam-room door, their bare asses disappearing into a cloud of vapor.

I smoked a lot of pot that night. The next morning, I did not go back to the gym. Nor did I at any point for the rest of my free-trial week. But that final image of
strictly forbidden
activity stayed with me, and I used it, alone in bed every night.

Day Eight. I left him another voice mail, this one a giddy performance: “We interrupt this time-out to issue a bulletin from Special Agent Garner to Master Sleuth Nelson. Come in Nelson. I have been forced to breach the no-contact zone to issue this urgent update to our investigation. This evening, Saturday, from six to nine p.m., at a gallery in downtown San Francisco, a certain lady painter from the days of Frisco past will be exhibiting her artwork. This is a rare chance to meet one of our investigation’s key informants in person. Your presence is highly encouraged.”

I did not receive a reply.

“He’s smarter than I realized,” Colleen said of Woody.

“Because he’s with Roger all day, every day, while I’m here alone, imagining him with Roger?”

“No.” She paused to apply lipstick, blood-dark to complement her new black hair. The furrow of her brow indicated either concentration on her task or annoyance with me. Or both. We stood side by side in her bathroom, readying ourselves for Ray’s opening. The hour I’d been here had been spent updating her on boyfriend drama. She’d been attentive, prettying herself up as the story grew uglier. “Because he’s realized the only way to get you to look at your shit is to stop babying you.”

“Why, that’s brilliant!” I slapped my forehead in astonishment.

She capped the lipstick. “I told you, give the guy credit.”

“I’m being sarcastic, in case you didn’t notice. Don’t you see? He imposes this silence, which is so patronizing, so controlling, and now he’s convincing my friends that it’s good for me. He’s showing his true colors. Underneath the friendly surface he’s very manipulative.” As the separation had gestated, I’d stretched about as far as I thought I could, and I now felt a tinge of mania. “How can he resist this? I know for sure that he wants to meet Ray.”

“There are two more days to the time-out,” Colleen said, marching into the hall to fill a vertical mirror with the evening’s outfit. I watched as she modeled: silver leather boots climbing to the top of her calves, a snug dark dress dropping to the knee. She’d found the dress in a vintage store and bedazzled the hell out of it. Tendrils of rhinestones roped from shoulders to hips, catching lamplight and throwing back sparks.

“You look like a million bucks.”

“Or at least fifty,” she replied, though I could tell she was pleased. Colleen had always been tough, outspoken, opinionated—but strangely, not always confident. In her thirties she bore a visible polish; she’d sloughed off the remnants of an extended, sometimes awkward girlhood, and now a sexy, self-assured woman stood in her place.

I stepped next to her at the mirror. My hair had grown out, and tonight I’d stopped trying to tamp down the flyaways and was letting it go its own rakish way. I wore a secondhand, gray wool suit originally purchased a couple of years earlier, on the big side at the time, but a perfect fit now. I had the perfect pale blue shirt to wear with it. I’d left the neck untied, and now I opened an extra button, freeing a few sprouts of reddish chest fur. Cool suit, wild hair, hot babe at my side: Who needs a gym body when you’ve got fifty-dollar style?

“I’m glad you’re my date tonight,” I said to Colleen. “No more talk about Woody.”

“Woody?” she feigned breezily.

“Ha! That’s my girl.”

Arms linked, we strolled early evening Market Street, downtown’s glass doors still discharging working folks, nine-to-fivers who’d been stretched to seven, eight p.m. I watched one desk-weary businessman after another eyeball Colleen, and instead of slipping into the usual sister act with her—
Oh, girl, that one just checked you out!
—I made a game of glaring at them:
Back off! She’s mine.
While she talked, I held myself on alert, walking taller, coiling her into me securely, pretending for a few blocks that we were a couple, that I wasn’t a philandering fag out with his gal pal, but actually straight, on a date,
the man—
an approximation that on the surface took almost no effort at all, and beneath warranted just a small shift in consciousness: to see men not as possible conquests but as competitors. Desire transformed into rivalry. The appeal of that shift—a dram of power, swallowed quickly—was immediately intoxicating, and I daydreamed the possibility that this other life existed for me, a straight guy’s life, if I could just slip into its inverse flow and ride it standing.

Early evening in San Francisco, when the city feels most like a jewel of the Wild West: The blue-black sky hangs wide, hugging the clutter of tall buildings. Honky-tonk illumination—neon, tungsten, halogen—bounces from a hundred sources: wrought iron street lamps floodlighting the pavement, red warning hands blinking at the far end of crosswalks, static crackling on the guide wires of electric buses. In your cool suit, in your cool city, you can forget the problems that plagued you that day, because the night is coming, bringing with it, maybe, another chance.

The gallery was clogged by the time we strolled in. The crowd seemed at first glance of a uniform age and height—sixty-five at the youngest, five-foot-eight at the tallest. Elderly and stooped, gray haired or bald pated. Woody would have towered here. Professorial blazers mixed with outdoorsy fleece and silk-screened Indonesian prints. Colleen and I handed over our coats to a young woman guarding a rack of hangers, and then I guided Colleen through the room, once again noting the eyes drinking her in, and once again deeming this my victory, too: her public appeal also elevating me, the guy whose hand, pressing with assurance on the small of her back, swept her forward.

The walls beamed with the robust colors of Ray’s landscape paintings, but there was no immediate sign of Ray. So I scanned for the evening’s number-two priority, the food table. “Cross your fingers,” I whispered to Colleen. “I think I see dinner.” I let myself imagine sushi rolls and Middle Eastern sandwiches, maybe even something warmed over a blue flame, requiring a fork. Up close, the buffet revealed only cubes of cheese, seeded crackers, humus and pita, baby carrots.
Party starters,
we called this spread, we who had depended upon many an opening over the years to fill our bellies.