Men Who Love Men

by William J. Mann

  “Hey, you’re the one who set the terms.”

  “Fine.” I turn to leave. “I’m not sure what you had in your last relationship, Gale, but I think you’ll find absolutes just don’t fly in the real world.”

  “Thank you for dinner, Henry,” he says coldly. “I had a lovely time.”

  I don’t even respond. I just head out his door and back down the stairs to the street.

  “Henry.”

  I look up. Gale stands at the top of the stairs.

  “Let me know if you ever figure out what’s the most important thing you need in a lover,” he says. “I’d be curious to know.”

  He heads back inside.

  Why did I ever think I could make a relationship with Gale work? One more of Henry Weiner’s delusions. I don’t think I’ve ever met a greater control queen. I’m fuming, literally hot under my collar. And my anger stems less from the fact that Gale has kicked me out of his house once again, but because he remains so stubborn in his refusal to yield, even just a little bit.

  Okay, so maybe I bungled it by being too assertive. Maybe I should have handled the whole thing more gingerly. Maybe I shouldn’t have set the terms quite so severely, and let the night just unfold. But I wasn’t getting anywhere with him by going slow and easy either.

  I head back down Commercial Street. With Labor Day having come and gone, the crowd on the street is thinner. The whole pace of the village has slowed down, as if the entire population had just exhaled a collective sigh.

  I suppose that’s going to be the end of Gale and me. I can’t see how we could pick up and try it again. It’s over, before it ever really began.

  And it’s a shame, really. I liked Gale. I didn’t like the arrogant stubborn prick he could be, but occasionally I glimpsed another Gale: smart, vulnerable, sensitive. And one of the best kissers I’d ever encountered.

  I suddenly feel overwhelmingly sad. All at once, my body becomes heavy, and moving my legs to walk takes considerable effort. Part of it is the lingering pain of my bike accident; my whole right side is black and blue, and working out at the gym has proven impossible these past few days. But I know it is much more than that. My body, like my mind, simply seems to be shutting down. I am tired—so fucking tired—of the emotional rollercoaster of dating, of searching for love. I need to get off. I need to stop.

  “Hi, Henry.”

  I’ve paused to regain my equilibrium and I notice, sitting on the steps of the post office, is Martin.

  “Hi,” I manage to say.

  He rises and approaches me. “You okay?”

  “I’m just a little”—how to put it?—“bruised.” Yeah, that says it all. Bruised in body, mind, and spirit.

  “How did that happen?”

  I laugh. “Life.” I see he doesn’t get the joke. “And a bike accident,” I tell him. “I took a flying leap over the handlebars a few days ago.”

  “No broken bones?”

  I shake my head. “Just stiff muscles.”

  “Maybe a massage would help.”

  I nod. “Yeah. Good idea. I should go see Will,” Will being our local masseur.

  Martin’s smiling. “I was making the offer myself.”

  Oh, man. Is he hitting on me? I can’t deal with this right now.

  “Um, look, I need to get back to the guesthouse,” I say, forcing my legs to move again. “Take it easy, Martin.”

  He nods as I push past him back down the street. I hate to be so abrupt, but I’ve got to let him know that I’m just not interested. Martin’s a nice guy but—

  Give me one good reason for rejecting Martin out of hand. And don’t you dare say he’s too old!

  Shane’s voice.

  But he is too old! What the hell would we have to talk about? When I was twelve, he was twenty-four. I didn’t even yet know I was gay, and he was already out there disco dancing to the Village People. Growing up, we didn’t watch the same TV shows, listen to the same music, or learn the same things in school. If we tried a relationship, we’d have no cultural references in common. It would be a disaster!

  Of course I know there are many intergenerational relationships that seem to work just fine. But it simply would not work for me. I want a lover who will get my jokes, understand my points. I want to be able to say, “That is so Alice in Chains” and have him understand exactly what I mean. Because if he’s lived the same experiences I have, then he knows me. Or at least, he’s got the tools to know me.

  By the time I get back to Nirvana, I am ready to drop. I could fall asleep standing up. All I want to do is crawl into my bed and lose consciousness. I am so tired of thinking about relationships and men men men.

  But my night is not yet over.

  Coming in through the backdoor, I run nearly headfirst into Luke, who’s just emerged from the basement steps carrying a milk crate full of papers. As usual, he’s only wearing a thong.

  “Hi, Henry,” he says. But his voice is glum.

  “Hello,” I say. “Cleaning out your room?”

  “Exactly. Tossing out all this trash that I once considered my great American novel.”

  Despite how tired I am, I look over at him. He’s clearly upset—or at least, he’s pretending to be upset.

  “Why the loss of confidence?” I ask, against my better judgment.

  “Jeff didn’t like it,” he says. “So why bother going on?”

  Luke pushes out the back door. I watch him from the window. Heading into the small fenced-off area where we keep our dumpster, he upends the crate and dumps its contents inside. Then he comes back out onto the terrace and sits down hard on a bench. He lights up a cigarette.

  I shouldn’t go out there. But something compels me to do so. This kid is a sneak, but somehow the sight of him, sitting in his thong smoking a cigarette, breaks my heart just a little.

  “Luke,” I say.

  “What?”

  “I thought you were trying to quit.”

  “What do you care?” He doesn’t look up at me.

  “Look, the point is, why are you giving up after one critique?” I’m standing over him, resisting the urge to sit beside him. “It seems to me a critique is meant to help you get better, not quit.”

  “Jeff said he thought my whole premise was flawed,” Luke says, taking another puff and exhaling the smoke over his head. “How do I fix that? I can’t. So I’m tossing it.”

  “Well, that’s your choice,” I say.

  He stubs the cigarette out on the ground and stands up. “But thanks for asking, Henry.” He heads back inside, the screen door slamming behind him.

  Behind me I hear the low growl of the cat from next door. The damn thing is in the dumpster again, and will probably leave a whole trail of trash after it’s picked through our scraps. I head inside the enclosed area and clap my hands, prompting the cat to leap back over the fence into its own yard. But as I turn to leave, I spot something on the ground.

  A binder of paper. Part of what Luke was throwing away.

  I stoop down to retrieve it, intending to toss it into the dumpster. But somehow I just can’t do it. The title grabs me: DARRYL’S STORY.

  I stare down at it.

  A man screams in the middle of the night, reads the first line.

  Looking around to make sure Luke isn’t watching, I take it back inside. What makes me want to read this? It’s not right, I know, but I can’t help myself. Luke’s been a mystery to me ever since I met him, and I suppose Lloyd is right: I do have a fixation on him. So if his words can tell me anything about who he is, who he really is…

  Inside my apartment, I flop down on my bed and begin to read.

  A man screams in the middle of the night.

  I am dreaming. Mostly I dream in black and white—mostly black. I am dreaming of my father, who’s talking to me, intense and focused, his face filling the screen of my dreamscape. He’s talking faster and faster and higher and higher until he suddenly leans his head back and screams, his face turning into Elsa Lanchester a
s the Bride of Frankenstein.

  “Whoa,” I say, pulling back for a second before resuming.

  I wake up, sweat in my armpits, sweat on my face, sweat dampening my sheets. The screaming continues. I think for a moment that I’m back in my childhood bedroom, and the screams are coming from my TV set, where a grainy black-and-white horror film casts flickering silver shadows in the darkness. But the screaming is real, coming from a man outside on the street.

  I peer between my blinds. A few lights go on in an uneasy pattern down the block of rowhouses. A man in a terrycloth robe runs down his front steps. I keep still in the dark, tightening my muscles, my body sticking to my sheets.

  New York at night is a swarm of insects. Giant cockroaches crawl out of the sewers. I know; I’ve seen them. Men scream and sirens sing. Helicopters fly low overhead, their spotlights searching for assassins. I’ve seen them too.

  Silence slaps my room. The screaming has abruptly stopped.

  I peer outside again. The man in the terrycloth robe sees me. I let my blinds snap and retreat to my covers.

  It is film noir here tonight. Peter Lorre is hunched in the shadows of my room. My father told me once, near the end, that life is not like the movies. He said there are no happy endings. It’s not Shirley Temple tap dancing backwards up the stairs with Bojangles Robinson. No, it’s a different Robinson—Edward G.—wandering the streets, forever mad, hearing Joan Bennett—the woman he killed—saying over and over and over: “Jeepers, Johnny, I love ya.” Film noir. Black film. Black life.

  I’m dreaming again. My father is angry. I wouldn’t kiss him goodnight. “I’ll go away if you want me to,” he says. He points out the window, a long arm and long finger like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. Outside, the sun is setting without any color. Leaves are falling from our maple tree, gray leaves, and they blow across the grass haphazardly, out into the street. I’m crying, begging my father not to go. But he refuses to kiss me goodnight once I finally offer up my lips.

  The sirens start and I’m awake. They get louder and louder, coming for the man who screamed. I get out of bed and walk barefoot through the still apartment. The dry darkness sucks at me. I fumble for the switch and find it, but the harsh white light that descends frightens me more than the darkness. The walls seem so close. I shut my eyes and then open them. The walls seem even closer, inching inward toward me like some hideous torture conceived by Poe.

  “I’m sorry, Dad,” I whisper. I can’t do it anymore. I’m sorry.

  I suddenly feel very foolish, very alone, standing here in the middle of the living room in the dark, in my underwear, hugging myself with my eyes closed. I drag a metal folding chair into the kitchen and reach up, pulling the cord for the overhead bulb. As it comes to life, the glow burns into the blackness around the bulb, creating a shaky tension between light and dark. It shines directly over me, and I cast no shadow.

  I pull open a drawer. I take out notebook paper and a felt-tip pen. I sit down on the chair beneath the light and start to write. There should be a note. The great George Sanders left a note. “Dear World,” he had written. “I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool.”

  I write, “Dear Dad,” but after several minutes of indecision I crumble the notebook paper and toss it into the sink. They’ll call him eventually. A call to Mr. Brower’s office with the grim news from New York. He’ll take the call and listen silently, hanging up the phone without saying a word.

  I stand up and pull the cord, feeling rather than seeing the darkness settle back upon me, feeling the dry suck at my naked body. I sit in the dark and think about Fredric March’s walk into the sea at the end of A Star is Born . I think about Marilyn, her sweet sad eyes staring into eternity. I think about Lupe Vélez, her head stuck in the loo.

  For one moment, I rebel. My cowardice pushes me up, off the chair, over to the window where I press my hands to the glass and feel the cold night outside. It’s quiet out there now. They’ve taken the screaming man away, to where I don’t know. I watch as leaves dance down the street, swirling together, evoking strange, sad memories. A streetlight hunched in grief cries its light onto the asphalt. It’s quiet now. But for how long? How long before the cockroaches crawl up out of their cesspools and come scratching at my door?

  I feel for the chair in the dark. I sit, breathing heavily. I watch the wall over the stove, where shadows from the trees outside dance against the gray light of the moon. They begin to take shapes, images, flickering images of the silver screen. I will sit here and watch them, over and over, just sit here and watch my movies like I’ve always wanted to do.

  My headache pounds now, overpowering my eyes. I can’t recognize the movie. There’s no sound. A silent film. Like those funny, grainy movies Dad used to show in his den with the drapes pulled closed. The ones with the ladies with the big bosoms and the little boys on their laps.

  But this is my movie, I realize. I’m the star. At last, I’m the star, and I’m about to play the final, classic scene.

  I turn on the gas and sit facing the yawning mouth of the oven.

  I watch myself on the wall, sensuously descending a staircase.

  “You see, this is my life,” I hear a voice whisper from somewhere. “It always will be. Just me, and the cameras, and all you wonderful people out there in the dark.” I pause, hands imploring. “All right, Daddy, I’m ready for my close-up.”

  As the camera moves in, I’m sitting here alone in the dark, smelling the sweet fragrance of the gas.

  There’s more—another story—but I can’t read anymore. This has creeped me out. I don’t know what the hell to make of it.

  Is it any good? I can’t tell. It’s certainly over the top, but evocative nonetheless, giving me the goddamn chills. But I’m not so sure it’s really “Darryl’s Story,” the lover Luke said died of AIDS. Sure, there’s the hint that the narrator has AIDS—the night sweats—but his repeated references to the movies makes me wonder if the character is really based on Luke himself. And if he is Luke, there’s something pretty nasty in that boy’s background, with all those pervasive references to an overpowering father and the creepy suggestion of being made to watch porno films featuring naked women and little boys.

  I wish I hadn’t read the thing. It feels dirty. I push it off my bed, sending it sliding across the floor. I worry that Luke’s story will keep me awake, but my fears are unfounded. My mind and body just want to shut down, and thankfully I enjoy a deep, restful sleep.

  So deeply do I slumber, in fact, that I almost don’t hear my alarm. When I finally come to, I hurry out of bed and shower as fast as I can. No muffins this morning. The guests will have to make do with frozen bagels.

  We’re only half full, so it’s not a big problem. Everyone’s in a great mood, eager to get out and enjoy the morning. We’ve got another day of glorious weather predicted, with warm temperatures and plenty of sun. Luke bustles around, changing linens, uncharacteristically quiet. I don’t tell him, of course, that I read his story. But I find myself looking oddly at him, remembering his strange and disturbing words.

  After the breakfast rush is over, I head over to Jeff and Lloyd’s house. I haven’t really had the chance to talk with them in a couple of days, and it would be helpful to get their perspective on this whole thing with Gale. I find Jeff on his deck lying in a chaise lounge, soaking up the sun in a blue and white Speedo while talking on his cell.

  “Of course, Connie, you’ll have the best room at the guesthouse,” he’s saying. “It’s all taken care of. All we need you to do is sing.”

  I sit down beside him.

  “And of course you will totally have top billing over Kimberley. It would be absurd to think otherwise.”

  I shake my head. Is this a wedding he’s planning, or a concert?

  “Okay, sweetheart. We’ll see you in a couple of weeks.”

  He snaps his phone closed and looks over at me.

  “Henry, will you pick Connie Francis up at the Provincetown airp
ort the night before the wedding? And Kimberley Locke is arriving the morning of. Can I put you in charge of the divas?”

  I smile. “What makes you think I’m temperamentally suited to take care of divas?”

  He gives me one of his lopsided grins. “You take care of me.”

  I laugh. “Of course I’ll pick them up. How are the rest of the plans coming for the wedding? What else can I do to help?”

  “Ah!” Jeff’s blue eyes twinkle. “Does this mean you are now excited for us at last?”