he gathered his courage and told his parents he was gay at twenty years of age, they had given him their support. The revelation didn’t necessarily make them any closer, but it wasn’t awkward, and it didn’t drive them apart.
It just…was.
In that sense, Noah knew—once again—that he was privileged. He wasn’t treated as an embarrassment, or even as the wayward son who was dating someone his parents didn’t like. He was treated the same way he had always been treated, and while that also left something to be desired, he had always believed that a person can’t miss something that they never had.
Still, he was perplexed. A lot of people faced bigger adversities than the completelashuels. But the complicity of the completelashuels in the great silence surrounding the lives of gay men and lesbians angered him. When they hid in their closets, and even worked against their own interests, they made people like Noah do all the work. They could feel safe celebrating a Friday Happy Hour at JR’s because he did their work for them, and helped free their lives in the hours they weren’t glued to both their desks and their self-denial.
In a sense, Noah felt he was working overtime to make their lives easier. And while Max Abraham had a hardworking son, he didn’t like working quite that hard.
He glanced at a clock on the generic white wall of the waiting room and was surprised to see that a half hour had passed. Tricia would be ending her visit soon, which meant that Noah would have to prepare himself for an afternoon of strained small talk with his father’s trophy wife. In his head, he began preparing topics, a task complicated by the fact that he really didn’t know his stepmother all that well. Max and Tricia had been married for five years, a period coinciding with his self-imposed exile in Washington. They really hadn’t had time to bond in the interim. This, Noah supposed, would have to be that time.
He ticked through possible small-talk topics in his head. Politics would be taboo, as would homosexuality. Family issues would also be verboten; the last thing Tricia needed to hear was a litany of his problems with her husband. However, her family was an option; Noah knew little about them, except that they were all still living a remarkably unremarkable existence in Buffalo. Of course, he also knew almost nothing about Buffalo, beyond snow, the Bills, and chicken wings, so if they had to go in that direction, Tricia would have to carry the conversation.
Since Noah had little interest in interior design, gardening, and social gossip—the usual interests of the Park Avenue Trophy Wife crowd—those topics were out. Pop culture could kill an hour, he thought, as long as she appreciated old movies and good theater. And the conversation would come to an abrupt end if she mentioned Mamma Mia or any boy bands. That was for certain.
He sighed. It was going to be an afternoon spent in light conversation about growing up in Buffalo. There was no way around it.
The squeaking wheels of a gurney snapped him out of his thoughts. Noah looked up to see the empty cot pass him, pushed by a short, cute, and very blond nurse. And since the nurse was also male, he offered a smile and received one in return.
Too damn easy, he thought, watching the nurse as he guided the gurney through the waiting room. The man gave him one last glance and smile as he left, and Noah returned to the Tricia dilemma.
It was not that Noah didn’t like Tricia. But his father was sixty-four, she was thirty-eight, and Noah was thirty-four. To Noah, it was…strange. Uncomfortable.
At least when his mother remarried she had the decency to marry someone who was only a decade younger. Sixty-four related to fifty-four much better than sixty-four related to thirty-eight. As the son who had to relate to all of those people, Noah considered that an undeniable truth. A stepmother who was basically his own age was just…wrong.
He looked again after the departed nurse, wondering if an afternoon assignation would be appropriate while his father was in a hospital bed, before deciding that, although it would be more fun than forced conversation with Tricia, it would also be tacky. Propriety was so unfair in this sort of circumstance.
Minutes later Tricia walked into the waiting room and, spotting Noah, motioned for him to join her. Wordlessly, he obeyed.
They walked the few blocks from the hospital to Max and Tricia Abraham’s Park Avenue apartment. The day was warm, the sidewalks were busy, and neither of them—lost in their own thoughts and not quite sure how to relate to one another outside of pleasant smiles and banal observations about the weather or the traffic—felt the need for conversation. When they reached the lobby of the white-brick building at the corner of East Seventy-third Street, Tricia excused herself to get the mail, which was as close as they came to conversation. Then, envelopes in her hand, they ascended in the elevator to the eleventh floor in silence.
Once inside the apartment, Noah dropped his bag in the foyer and awkwardly followed Tricia as she walked room to room, distractedly straightening things that didn’t need straightening. It had been a while since he had been home, Noah realized, and—as he had expected—Tricia had been busying herself redecorating. Almost certainly through his father’s influence, there was now a lot of leather in the apartment: couch, armchairs…even the padding at the edges of a set of end tables. He felt it made the large living room seem more closed and intimate, although the light curtains on the large south-facing windows and the tasteful use of flowers were clearly Tricia’s efforts to soften the testosterone-driven room.
Tricia walked into the kitchen, all modern and metallic, filled with appliances Noah couldn’t begin to identify, which uniformly bore the logos of what appeared to be an array of German and Swedish firms. It was only when she reached the refrigerator that she finally asked him, “Are you going to follow me everywhere for the next few days?”
He blushed. “Uh…I just thought you might need help.”
“What I need,” she said, opening up the refrigerator, “is a glass of wine.” She took an uncorked white wine bottle from the shelf inside the door. “Care to join me?”
“Sure,” he said, impulsively trying to forge a bond with her even though he really didn’t feel like having a drink, especially so early in the afternoon.
She poured two glasses, offered him one, and motioned to the living room, where they sat an appropriate distance apart. She took the leather couch; he took one of the leather chairs.
“A lot of leather,” Noah said, stumbling in his effort to come up with an ice-breaker.
“It was your father’s idea. Obviously. Although I’ve come to like it. We bought the furniture last year, and I guess he was in a particularly masculine frame of mind. Take this leather, throw in a bunch of red meat, add a high-pressure legal practice, and I guess you’ve proven your manhood without having to embarrass yourself with a mistress or a shiny red sports car.” She looked at Noah and smiled. “You see? It was easier to get used to the leather than worry about the mistress.”
It had never before crossed his mind that Tricia had been his father’s mistress before she was his wife. But now it had, and he couldn’t shake the thought. He wished she hadn’t brought up his father’s apparent recent need to reaffirm his masculinity, because it made him realize that his father had had decades in which to go through several midlife crises.
“So how is your mother?” she asked, moving the topic of conversation from one area of discomfort to another.
“Fine. She’s…fine.”
“I’ve always liked her.”
Noah twitched. Did his father’s third wife really just say something nice about his father’s first wife? How would they have even—?
“We were both on a benefit committee for the Whitney a few years ago,” she said, anticipating his reaction and, in fact, seeming to enjoy it. “So how does she like living in Florida?”
“Fine.” He paused. “Just fine.”
Noah’s relationship with his mother was, if possible, even more complex than his relationship with his father. Divorced from Max just a few years after Noah was born, Frieda Feldman Abraham took her