Holidays in Blue

by Eve Morton

  “Yes. A friend is having me over for a drink.”

  “Do you think it’ll still happen?”

  Cosmin didn’t answer for some time. “Perhaps. But it also feels quite timeless right now, as if we might all skip Christmas this year. Too late, too bad, we’ll try again next year.”

  “My dad does that with dinner sometimes,” Eric said, chuckling. He related a long and complicated story about a misunderstanding his parents once had about who was responsible for getting take-out one night, when his mother and father assigned the task to the other, and so no one came home with food. “My sisters were starving. We were all waiting. And by the time our parents realized they’d both screwed up, my mother was mortified and my father was in denial. He basically went to bed without dinner. And we all ate peanut butter sandwiches.”

  Cosmin nodded as if he understood. Though he still seemed distant, he didn’t move from the room or pull away when Eric shifted closer. He didn’t sit down, either, but Eric saw a familiar look in his eye from the night before.

  “Hey,” Eric said. “You never told me about the Shakespeare news. Has there been an unearthed play?”

  Cosmin smiled. It was the right thing to say, and Eric beamed with pride as Cosmin finally sat down with him, atop the covers, to share whatever this was. “Oh, wouldn’t a mysterious found play be lovely? But that’s not the case. It’s about casting choices and their utter frustration, which I’m sure you can relate to.”

  “Is this about the gender-swap for Prospero?”

  “You know?”

  “Of course. It’s where our lives meet, dear Cosmin.” Eric bit his lip and quickly moved on. “It’s obvious why I don’t like it—competition, even though I’m a fool to even think I could be a stage actor at Stratford—but what about this is so bad for you?”

  “I don’t want to sound as if I’m saying women shouldn’t be cast in male roles generally, but having Prospero be a woman changes the entire dynamic of this play. A mother and daughter fighting it out on an island is commonplace, almost a cliché nowadays, as with son and father duking it out. We reject our parent that resembles us the most because it reminds us of getting old. That conflict is too obvious.”

  Eric considered the argument but countered it with his own observations on the epic fights his mother often had with his sisters. “I’d pay to see some of them done on the stage. Except, you know, as an audience member and not as the brother in the middle.”

  “That’s precisely it. Prospero and Miranda shouldn’t have fights like that. It’s comical. Prospero’s a tragic figure—and Shakespeare wanted him to be that way. His storyline fades out of the play deliberately. He loses the one thing he thought he had forever, Miranda. His heart is broken. And I just don’t think it has the same resonance if it’s a mother and daughter. Especially in that era, it was obvious that your daughter would leave.”

  “But still no less painful. Even now,” Eric said. “My mom and dad both went into a deep depression after Dana got married. It was like they didn’t expect her to change as a bride, then as a wife. She also moved to Ottawa.”

  Cosmin didn’t answer. His brows furrowed as if he realized the faulty logic on which his argument stood. If the play was a tragedy from Prospero’s perspective, and the characters could be gender-swapped, it meant that pain could transcend gender. And if The Tempest could be about any parent-child relationship, then it could be about Cosmin’s with his father. That seemed to be too tragic for Cosmin to bear.

  “Hey, I get it. I’m sorry.”

  Cosmin remained quiet. But when Eric squeezed his hand, he squeezed back. He shifted closer to him on the bed; he lifted Cosmin’s hand to his mouth, and kissed him with tenderness. Then Cosmin tugged him closer and turned their faces together, but still waited for Eric to kiss first. Once there, he kissed Eric much easier than Eric thought possible, opening up to him and allowing them to both linger in the act of making out as if they were both teenagers.

  “Do you still want to look for your father’s papers?” Eric asked after an hour of aimless making out and his own chatter about his family. “If you want. I don’t want to push.”

  “No need.”

  “Did you find them last night? That’s great! Right?”

  Cosmin nodded. Eric squeezed his hand again, still sensing something amiss. When the quiet between them became too much, Eric spoke. “You should get them, then. Show me.”

  It seemed to be the right thing to say. Cosmin left the guest room and soon returned with box after box from the room across the hall. Everything smelled old, a mixture of dust and Irish Spring soap. Each box had a name from the family on it, save for one that was blank. That was the first one Cosmin opened and pulled out what seemed to be a never-ending array of notebooks with finely written cursive inside.

  “Oh wow,” Eric joked. “Was your father Harriet the Spy?”

  Cosmin ignored the joke. Eric’s skin prickled, unsure why he had decided now, of all times, to try to be funny. He allowed his tongue to fall silent as Cosmin explained the numerous tomes.

  “These were my father’s. I think he might have started keeping these because my mother told him to, and she used to read them, but he wrote a lot. I had no idea about any of it. I had no idea about a lot of things.” Cosmin began to spill over every notebook, explaining the date’s significance, and reading aloud some passages. He’d gone through most of the boxes the night before; his sudden shifting and lack of sleep now made sense. He’d combed through his father’s ghost and found a life he didn’t understand. He explained the Romania trip, his own adoption, and all the details that his father had kept about that day, but never mentioned again. He also mentioned his father’s obsessive book highlighting and the collection of clippings.

  “I never knew him,” Cosmin stated. “He was this completely different person in print.”

  “I think we all kind of are, aren’t we? Especially with social media. Not being on my phone all the time, not having access to certain platforms, makes me feel strange today because I don’t know what’s going on, which is to say I don’t know who I am without a status update. But I also like not being that status update. Not being on my phone lets me feel like a kid again.” Eric made a face. “I mean, we all have these masks we wear and secrets we keep. The private and the public self, right?”

  “Yes, of course. Psychologist Erving Goffman would say it’s impossible to get through the social world without performing some aspect of yourself. Especially for work, especially in relationships. But my father didn’t have a relationship. He had words. Words, words, words. Which are fine, and insightful, but they don’t mean anything unless you tell someone. Or else...”

  “Or else what?” Eric asked. When again it seemed difficult to talk, Eric squeezed his hand and held on until he spoke.

  “Or else people end up hating you. I—I didn’t hate him. I know that logically. But he was a disappointing, cranky old man. I simply wrote him off at a certain point when I realized that I could talk and talk and talk to him, but I’d only get silence in return. But apparently he had been writing himself off, too. While I talked and talked and talked, he’d been writing. And now I know he loved me, and all those things parents are supposed to do, so I feel bad for feeling so frustrated. I just don’t understand how I’m supposed to love someone when they refuse to show me any love, or give me anything to love about them.”

  “He was afraid of being hurt,” Eric said, though his words felt feeble. This was not his area of expertise, not by a long shot. But he wanted to try and make Cosmin feel okay, and since Cosmin still sat in the bed, he figured he was doing a decent job. He wasn’t joking anymore, at least. He was being almost scary-serious. “Or maybe he was afraid of being loved?”

  “Yes, that is quite possible. But when you act as if you’re afraid of being hurt, all you end up doing is hurting the people who do care.”

 
“Oh, shit.”

  “What?” Cosmin asked.

  “Nothing. That’s just...no, that’s true. I never thought of it that way before. And it makes a hell of a lot of sense given some of the fights I’ve had in the past.” Eric shifted on the bed and felt the bruise at his back; the pain was inconsequential, especially as he felt Cosmin’s eyes on him, quietly begging him to go on. “I remember when my ex-wife used to say that she felt ugly or fat, and it hurt me as if she had said those words about me. I know I’m not ugly or fat, but neither was Trina, and I wasn’t upset because it was wrong, though of course it was—Trina’s still gorgeous—but it hurt because I loved her. And if she didn’t like herself, that was like her rejecting that love. It’s not the same type of relationship, and obviously has so much more history than just a fat day for an ex-wife, but your dad was doing the same things with his journals. By thinking he wasn’t good enough to communicate with you, he made you feel as if you weren’t worth communicating with.”

  “Yes, exactly.” Cosmin sighed. He regarded Eric with a tilt of his head. “I’d never heard you were married until you mentioned it. And at first you didn’t say you were married to a woman, though I suppose it would have been. Most people specify when it’s gay married rather than just married.”

  Eric snorted. “They do, don’t they? Huh. Well. It didn’t last, so you weren’t missing out on any good gossip.”

  “How long is not long?”

  Eric wanted to spell out the exact number of months, weeks, and days, if only to make it seem that much longer, that much better and more stable in hindsight. Instead he shrugged and said, “Almost five years.”

  “That’s still a long time.” Cosmin squeezed his hand now. “What happened?”

  Eric laughed. Oh, it was a stupid story. A silly story. He had run it over so many times in his mind, trying to figure out how it had gotten so out of hand, and then with the hopes of everything just going back to normal. Except that, of course, even if he could solve the unsolvable, there was no point now since Trina had Michael. And they were happy.

  When Cosmin squeezed his hand again, Eric realized that Cosmin’s story was kind of the same as his own, marred by tragedy that still seemed so melodramatic at the same time. His dad’s life was a time capsule, a message in a bottle to be found later—while Eric’s marriage was a quixotic tale of secret and then not-so-secret desires that bloomed on the surface and then could not be ignored. The only way out of these tropes for both of them was through.

  “So, okay, before I start, I want to say that I knew I was bisexual a long time ago. You and Maurice kind of cemented that.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah. But I was eighteen, and definitely already had some inklings that I was into men, too, so it’s not like the gay youth across the street corrupted me. No, more like Tom Cruise in Risky Business corrupted me at age twelve, and then I shoved the VHS in the trash compactor and tried to forget about it. Anyway, I knew I was bi but I never came out. When I went away to school, I met Trina and everything seemed to fall into place anyway, so what was the point? We got engaged. Played house. While I tried desperately to be an actor, she shot up in the business world. We moved to Toronto for me to do a TV show, and that’s when everything fell apart. You ever hear of Crime Bot?”

  Cosmin shook his head.

  “Really, I’m not surprised. It was like, some strange B-movie sci-fi TV show with a robot that solved crimes. Super dumb. But it was made by the same production company that did one of the Ghostbusters. It had massive funding for the first year, and even had some okay scripts, but it was incredibly niche. And you don’t strike me as a B-movie type of guy.”

  Cosmin shrugged. “I never watched a lot of TV, even back then.”

  “Weirdo,” Eric joked, and then sighed with the next stage of his story. “Well, anyway, it was a shitty show with shitty production and I shouldn’t have been shocked when it wasn’t renewed. I was depressed for a month and a half, unable to get any decent roles, and then unable to get out of bed for the audition if I did get something good. One day, I realized I was dreaming about one of my co-stars. Sexy stuff, you know? I never spoke more than two words to him out of character, but he suddenly became an obsession. I wanted him. I found his old movies and watched them all day while Trina was at work, and tried to track him down in real life, but he lived in BC. I swear, I didn’t want to cheat—I didn’t even think he was gay—but all of this was so clearly a strange coping tactic because I didn’t have a job anymore, and it felt like the only thing I knew for sure was my sexuality.”

  Eric sighed, and made sure Cosmin was still listening with a quick survey of his placid, yet deeply serious face before he continued. “I wanted to come out. I convinced myself that I would, but every time I got close, I figured there was no point. I had Trina. I loved Trina. My depression passed, I got a small gig and did a bunch of extra work. I thought I was fine.

  “Then we went to visit her parents in BC one year for Christmas, and I realized the actor—Jeff—was also skiing in the same resort. I lost my damn mind. I got so drunk and told Trina I wanted to fuck him.” Eric put his hands over his face. He knew he was flushed. He laughed at how ridiculous all of this was, if only to stop himself from breaking down at how hard it also was, too. “She was mad at first, but mostly because she thought I’d cheated. When she realized I was throwing a fit over dreams and watching bad Canadian horror films where he’d been shirtless, she told me not to worry. She wasn’t even weirded out by the bisexuality. She said it was fine, but she wished I’d told her earlier. Then, about a week later, she showed me her Kindle. And I realized she’d been reading gay romance novels. Like Harlequins but with two Fabios on the cover, not one.”

  Eric paused again to see if Cosmin had any recognition, but of course, if he didn’t watch TV, why would he read romances, even if they were gay? He wouldn’t. Not even his father seemed the type to read them, judging from the descriptions Cosmin had given of his father’s painstaking annotations. “Well, anyway, Trina said she’d been reading these voraciously while at work. It turned her on. And hearing that I was into men excited her. We read them together for a while, and it was good. The dreams of my co-star disappeared. I didn’t want him—never did. Even now, I’ve looked him up and he’s an ass-hat. I just wanted my show back and I wanted to be out. Being out with Trina though was good. Just as good. Until I did something I shouldn’t have.”

  “You committed infidelity.”

  “I cheated. Yes. Saying it like that, though, makes it sound so much worse.”

  “I don’t mean for it to sound like an indictment,” Cosmin said. “I did a show about infidelity on Sleep Alone, actually. There was a lively discussion about how often it occurs, and how many couples actually stay together after the fact. Whenever I did general advice shows, too, we had a cheating spouse question at least every week. While it’s not a nice thing to deal with, a lot of marriages can bounce back from it.”

  “Not mine.”

  “And for that, I’m sorry.”

  Eric nodded and wanted to move on. But seeing Cosmin’s history laid bare in handwritten notebooks also made him want to tell the truth that only he and Trina knew. “It’s also a bit more complicated than I’m making it out to be.”

  “All relationships are. They have their own—”

  “I doubt you had a call-in show question like this. So let me tell it?” After Cosmin nodded, Eric went on. “So Trina eventually got bored of reading Kindle. She wanted to see it, you know? We watched movies, but soon enough, she gave me rules. I could fuck guys, but she had to be there. She wanted to watch us, like a voyeuristic threesome. So we found some guys on a dating site who were into it. We did that a couple times. And it made our marriage so much more powerful. If I had just stopped there, I’m convinced we would have been happy forever.”

  Even as Eric said the words, he knew it wasn’t true. Yeah, it h
ad been a heady experience for the woman he loved the most to watch him lose his virginity with a man—so thrilling that he sometimes still used it when he wanted to get off quickly—but it wasn’t something that would survive their marriage. One guy led to another led to another. Six months into the flings, and Trina stopped being interested, like she stopped being into the Kindle, while Eric was falling in deeper and deeper. He was in love.

  “It’s always the relationship that gets me. I can never just have sex,” Eric said. “Even when I thought I was into my co-star, it was more about the relationship I thought I wanted with him. I get hung up on the details, the daily things like how someone takes their coffee, what they look like sleeping, and if they’re a morning or a night person. I lose myself in that. Sex is good, but... I always want more.”

  Eric told Cosmin that Billy, one of his hook-ups, had become a regular thing. When Trina said she no longer wanted to watch Eric fuck guys, she expected all of it to stop. Eric called Billy that night to explain, but the feelings came back to him. This wasn’t about sex anymore—he liked Billy. Really liked him. A call led to dinner, which led to sex without Trina watching, and which became so much more. During a long weekend in Niagara, Eric realized he was in love with Billy, and that in spite of everything he’d once wanted with Trina, their marriage was going to have to end. But he, like ever, tried to only live in fantasies. He carried on the affair with Billy for another two months before Trina filed for divorce.

  Eric didn’t fight it. “I knew I deserved it. I mean, we were also having other issues. Trina was working late and getting promoted, while I was a complete washout as an actor. I tried to go back to school for a while, but I never finished. What was the point, you know? Trina was the breadwinner. She was the success, I was the failure. We bickered over everything. So a divorce was inevitable, especially considering what I was doing. We had two different lives, and I was only making the division between us deeper and deeper.”