months after Joey dumped me, the phone rang, and somehow I knew it was him. “I’m leaving Provincetown,” he said to me. “I can’t seem to make it here.” He was moving to New York. Did I want to meet him for coffee before he left?
I felt the blood quicken in my veins. “Yes,” I said, hoping.
I cleaned my apartment, just in case. I told myself it was entirely possible that Joey might want to come back here. Maybe for one last quickie. Maybe after we fell into each other’s arms over coffee and decided how foolish we’d been to ever break up.
We met at a coffee joint in the West End. Joey was wearing clothes I didn’t remember. A yellow polo shirt, a pair of khakis I’d never seen, and red tennis shoes that clashed with his shirt. In two months, I wondered, had he bought a whole new wardrobe? Had he discarded everything that I had known, chucked every last bit of our life together?
We ordered our coffees. Standing at the counter, we made small talk. “How’s the guesthouse?” he asked. I told him fine. I asked about his mother. “She’s fine,” he told me. “How are Jeff and Lloyd?” They were fine, too, I told him.
I wanted to scream. For God’s sake, Joey, how can we be standing here talking like mere acquaintances on the street when I’ve licked lint out of your navel?
But we kept our faces composed and our voices level. I asked him why he decided on New York.
“I’m seeing someone there,” he told me.
It was then that our coffees arrived. The girl behind the counter attempted to fit a lid onto mine, but as she did so, she spilled a little, burning her hand. She put it quickly to her mouth, and Joey asked her if she was all right. “I’ll live,” she said.
That’s when it hit me. I’m seeing someone.
“I didn’t know,” I told him as we walked out to the benches, my legs threatening to turn to jelly. “Did you meet him here?”
“Yes,” Joey said, “at Tea Dance.”
Where we had met, too. Where most boyfriends are met in Provincetown. I searched Joey’s eyes for something, for anything. Had he forgotten?
What is the process in which emotions become memories? At what point does the feeling recede, the passion dissolve, and the details become merely data stored by the brain? For me, it has yet to occur, but Joey seemed to be moving along just fine.
Still, unlike the night we broke up, I remained composed. “I wish you all the luck,” I told him. “What I want is for you to be happy.”
“Thank you, Henry.”
I felt absurd for having taken so long fixing my hair before I came over here. I was an idiot for trying on four shirts before deciding on the one I was wearing. Suddenly I wished I hadn’t shaved, and that the apartment I was planning to return to wasn’t quite so spic and span.
“I didn’t go looking for a new relationship,” Joey said suddenly, defending himself even without any accusation from me. “It just happened. And it feels right.”
I smiled at him, sipping my coffee, burning my tongue. I don’t remember what else we said. Nonsense stuff, really. About the real-estate market, about mutual funds and mutual friends. When we’d run out of even those topics, Joey stood, extending his hand and saying good-bye. But I wasn’t quite ready to separate from him forever. I stood as well, and told him I was going his way, so we might as well walk together. His presence was comforting to me after so long apart, if slightly unreal—and unsettling, too, because Joey was different, with his new clothes and his new lover. But it was preferable to being apart from him, for this time I sensed it would be forever. We walked a few blocks, and again Joey put out his hand to me to say good-bye. “I’ll walk a little further,” I said. So we walked on in silence, the only sound the squeak of his new sneakers. Still, it was something.
“Why don’t we part here?” Joey said finally, firmly, as we approached the center of town. I knew I could go no further with him, so I nodded. We hugged, at his initiation. No last cry of yearning bubbled up to escape from my lips, just a simple, “Thanks.” I felt, fleetingly, the warmth of his body once again, a body I knew every inch of, even parts Joey himself had never seen.
He continued down Commercial Street, while I hurried up to Bradford so I could peer down from the next block and catch a glimpse of him crossing the street, a flash of yellow and red in a crowd of people. That’s the last time I saw him. For all our time together, that’s the image that stays in my mind.
I didn’t go looking for a new relationship. It just happened. And it feels right.
So why hasn’t it just happened for me? I have been looking. Over and over again. Lloyd thinks that’s why I haven’t found a lover since Joey. I’ve been looking too hard. It’s when you’re not looking, he says, that you find it.
And I wasn’t looking when I met Gale. He approached me.
Maybe this is it. Finally.
But so had Luke approached me, and I hadn’t been looking then, either. And look how that turned out.
I try not to project anything about Gale. I try to beat back the urge to fantasize, to hope. That’s what always does me in. I start hoping, wishing, praying—and then it falls apart.
I wonder, for just the briefest of moments, what happened between Jeff and Luke. I skipped the dinner with Eliot and Oscar, even though they’re friends from way back and I haven’t seen them in a year. I just wasn’t in the mood to be chatty tonight—or to see Jeff’s rosy post-coitus glow. Instead, I slipped into my apartment and kept the lights turned off so no one could see that I was home. With the blinds closed I watched All in the Family, the episode where Archie gets locked in the basement. Buoyed by my meeting with Gale, I was able to laugh—and my laughter almost allowed me to resist the urge for a dish of ice cream. Resistance, of course, proved futile, so while the end credits ran, I snuck downstairs to the guesthouse kitchen and absconded with an unopened pint of Cherry Garcia. I ate two thirds of it straight from the carton watching reruns of The Match Game. Gotta love that Charles Nelson Reilly.
So I remain in the dark about what actually transpired between Jeff and Luke. But I can surmise this much: Jeff’s not the sort to let tricks hang around too long after sex, so I imagine the kid was sent on his way about thirty minutes after both had shot their loads, with maybe a couple of movie posters rolled up in his backpack as consolation prizes. If Luke had been hoping to weasel his way into Jeff’s life in order to jumpstart his own writing career, no doubt he was keenly disappointed. I know Jeff all too well.
Jeff. Jeffrey Michael O’Brien. I lie here wide awake shaking my head as I think about him. Even as he plans his goddamn wedding, he’s rolling around in bed with boys he picks up off the street.
Well, at least I had Luke first.
“Damn,” I say, sitting up in bed.
I can’t sleep. I punch my pillow, resettle myself on my side. But the silence of the room overwhelms me. The rain has stopped. Gone is the steady, reassuring beat against the glass of the skylights. I find myself thinking, as I do quite often lately when I can’t fall asleep, about Joey’s new boyfriend. Except that he’s not so new, at least not anymore. Surely by now they’ve settled into a routine, with their own set of little code words and habits, like Joey and I used to have. Does Joey still call hair in the shower drain “goopers”? And has the boyfriend figured out the best way to make sure Joey starts his day in a good mood is to get up before him and make sure there are no goopers in the drain?
The new boyfriend is blond. And a goy. I know, because Jeff saw the two of them in New York at Gay Pride. Until then, I’d been insistent that I didn’t want to know what the boyfriend looked like. But of course, on another level, I was desperate to know. So after feigning disinterest for about a minute and a half, I begged Jeff to tell me.
“Tall, blond, pretty hunky,” he reported.
“God damn it,” I muttered.