“That’s part of how we can improve on the formula. After all, haven’t Jeff and I shown, after sixteen years, that you can have a lasting commitment without being monogamous?”
“Oh, come on,” I say, surprised at how antagonistic I’m feeling. But I can’t help myself. “You guys haven’t been together for sixteen years. Not really. You’ve had your share of ups and downs. There have been big chunks of time when you’ve been apart, when you haven’t known how to define yourselves. I know. I was there.”
“That’s why we want you as our best man, Henry,” Lloyd says simply. “We’ve been through a lot together. You know us better than anyone.”
The smile has faded from Jeff’s face. I can tell he’s annoyed that I’m not jumping for joy. Indeed, I’m surprised myself. Why am I being such a putz? Why am I not thrilled? Why am I not throwing my arms around the two of them, congratulating them? Jeff and Lloyd are my best friends!
“Henry,” Jeff says, talking to me patiently, as if he were addressing a child, “what marriage offers Lloyd and me is a public acknowledgement of our relationship. After all, I had to show up for three—count ‘em—three of my brother’s weddings, even though each one of them was a disaster and everyone knew it from the start. Now he can show up for mine—which, by the way, has lasted longer than all three of his put together.”
I make a face. “So that’s why you’re getting married? To get even with your family? To force some kind of acknowledgement from them?”
Jeff holds my gaze. “That’s one reason, yes. That’s the reason anyone gets married. So that the world can see and recognize and affirm their relationship. Finally the state is giving gay people that same opportunity.”
“Henry,” Lloyd asks, “are you not happy for us?”
“Well, of course I’m happy for you,” I manage to say. “Don’t get me wrong.”
“It sure doesn’t seem that way,” Jeff says, clearly peeved. “Maybe we ought to skip the champagne.”
“No, we’re not skipping the champagne,” Lloyd says. “I’m going to pop the cork as soon as Henry gives us his answer.”
I frown. “My answer to what?”
“Maybe you didn’t hear me.” Lloyd smiles kindly and finds my eyes. “We’re asking you to be our best man.”
Once, years ago, during one of those in-between, questioning periods for Jeff and Lloyd, I had allowed myself to imagine Lloyd asking me a very different question. I had imagined him asking me to marry him, or at least to join him in a committed relationship. Of course, it was folly, and deep down, I knew it. Jeff was always the one Lloyd loved. But still I allowed myself, however briefly, to dream. And now, instead of asking me to marry him, Lloyd was asking me to be his best man.
I gaze into his eyes, then look over at Jeff, who’s looking back at me.
“You are hopelessly enmeshed with those two,” Joey once told me. “You want Lloyd and you want to be Jeff.”
I shrugged him off, but an earlier boyfriend, Shane, had once made a very similar statement. “Henry,” Shane had said, handing me back my keys in a manner not so different from the way I’d later hand Joey his, “you won’t be able to really love anyone until you learn to love yourself.”
I had sighed. “Please, Shane. Can we end this without psychoanalysis?”
“No, we can’t,” Shane insisted, in the way only Shane could insist. “The problem is that you are always defining yourself against either Jeff or Lloyd, and in your estimation, you always come up short.”
Shane was smart. Of all my boyfriends, he probably knew me best. He saw through everything. He’d met me, in fact, on the dance floor with Jeff, and saw up close and personal my early infatuation with him. That I once worshipped Jeff and everything about him was obvious. Just by asking me to dance one night, Jeff O’Brien had changed my life. I’d been a skinny computer geek in my early twenties who’d always watched Jeff from afar, and when one night he’d looked over and extended his hand to me, I couldn’t believe my luck. Jeff O’Brien—he of the blue eyes and six-pack and bubble butt—was asking me to dance.
And though we never had sex, Jeff dubbed me his “sister” and took me under his wing. Henry Weiner only really came alive under Jeff O’Brien’s tutelage. Jeff got me to the gym. He taught me how to dress. He allowed me to tag along with him in the days when the gay party circuit was at its height. Off we’d fly to San Francisco and Palm Springs and Chicago and Atlanta and Montreal, and in Jeff’s afterglow, I was transformed. He became, in the words of Shane, my own personal deity. Despite the fact that my grandfather had been a rabbi, I’d never believed in God—until Jeff came along.
It was a pretty heady time, I admit. How thrilling, how completely new, was the experience of being looked at, of being able to take off my shirt at Gay Pride and get barked at by hot boys. I got so buff, in fact, I discovered there were guys who were willing to pay good money just to touch—and maybe lick a little—so, for a time, I was an escort. Jeff called me the Happy Hooker. But I didn’t stay happy for long. Despite all the attention, I felt lonely. Instead of making me feel more special, hustling eventually made me feel pretty worthless. Enter Lloyd Griffith.
It was, of course, inevitable that I’d meet Lloyd through Jeff, and in the gaze of those soft green eyes, a different sort of fascination emerged. Lloyd had spent many years as a psychologist, though when I met him he was transitioning to his new career running his Provincetown guesthouse. Still, Lloyd knew very well how to zero in on one’s core issues. He helped me to see that my whole life was ego—not just in my need to be physically admired, but in my constant search for external affirmation. By going within—which we did, in long, intimate meditation sessions at sunrise in the stillness of Beech Forest—I was able to find some internal peace and satisfaction. Then, after a sacred sex workshop, we had incredibly passionate sex, and that pushed me over the edge of bliss. In no time at all, I was head over heels in love with Dr. Lloyd Griffith.
Of course, the feelings for Lloyd went exactly nowhere, and I was soon back to doing what I do best: being alone. I stopped going to the gym. Ice cream became a substitute for all the sex I’d been having. There were brief flickers of hope—named Daniel, named Joey—but always I ended up back in my little apartment above Nirvana watching Good Times on TV Land. When I started responding to ideas with shouts of “Dy-no-mite!” Jeff issued a moratorium on seventies TV shows for a month. I cheated. I was back to J.J. and Maude and Fred Sanford in a week and a half.
And despite all I’d learned from Lloyd about ego, I can’t deny that I’ve come to miss some of that old external affirmation. Sure, I still try to meditate, and sometimes I still practice little rituals like saying, “I love you, you are good” to my reflection in the mirror. But there’s something about a guy coming up to you on the dance floor, running his finger down your torso, tasting your sweat and telling you, “You oughta bottle this stuff,” that just makes your day.
Yes, I know all this dependence on my ego to feel good about myself once ensured my downfall. But here’s the thing: I spent too many years on the sidelines to go happily into retirement. My time at the ball just wasn’t long enough. I had, what? Three years? Four at the most. Jeff might be able to sit in on a Saturday night baking brownies and watching old Bette Davis movies with Lloyd and a bunch of lesbian friends—but he had a good fifteen years out there! I’m not ready to fade away like that.
Is that the reason I’m being so resistant to the idea of Jeff and Lloyd getting married? Because the idea of settled domesticity unnerves me? Because I don’t want that to be me, curled up on a couch eating brownies, getting fatter, becoming more and more forgotten by the boys on the dance floor?
No, that’s not it. I’d be only too happy to go that route if it was Lloyd next to me.
Or anyone, for that matter.
I’d give anything to have what they have, to not be alone.
Marriage.