by Doug Sanford
“Sure doesn’t take much to please you, huh?” he said, grinning back.
“So?” I said. “You wanted time to think. What did you decide?”
Looking a little more serious, he said, “I was afraid for us to meet because I thought if you saw me, you’d become like all the others. But you’re right—what you said. Over the last two months, I guess we’ve become friends, and since you didn’t know what I looked like, I guess that means you were interested in the real me—whoever that is. And I guess that won’t change.”
“You guess?”
“Okay, we have become friends and you really were just interested in me and that won’t change.”
“Damn right!”
I must have said that a bit too forcefully because he sort of jumped a bit.
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to yell.”
“Somehow you do seem to understand me, but I don’t know how. My parents were never able to figure out what you got right away. I even tried to talk to my school counselor, and she didn’t see it either. But it was really hard to tell her that I was having problems because I was too handsome. It sounds conceited and stupid.”
I was impressed that he was able to admit that he knew he was good-looking but that he wasn’t bragging about it, just acknowledging it as a fact—as if he’d said he was left-handed or something.
“Not sure I know how either, but it was the first thing that popped into my head after my ugly theory was so obviously wrong.”
He smiled. “This is all pretty weird, you know?”
“As I said to you the last time you said that, good weird or bad weird?”
“Dunno. Just weird.”
“Yeah, I know. So, what about me? Disappointed?”
“Not sure what you mean by disappointed. You don’t look twenty-nine, and you’re not ugly or anything. You seem to be in pretty good shape for a guy your age.”
He was nothing if not brutally honest. Damn rule number two! I was a little disappointed by “a guy your age” but I blessed the YMCA for “pretty good shape.”
“Interesting to be assessed by a young straight guy.”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”
“You didn’t. Don’t worry. Shall I get tickets for the show?”
“I’d almost forgotten about that. I guess that’s the reason we’re doing this, huh?”
“One of them.”
“Sure. I’d like to go. How much are tickets?”
“Don’t worry. My treat. Show starts a week from Thursday and runs Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. You’ve got a late class Thursday and an early class on Friday, so how about Friday night, the sixth?”
“Fine.”
“It’s not white tie and tails or anything, but I assume you’ve got some other clothes to wear.” I smiled.
“Oh, these? You don’t like my oldest jeans and baggiest T-shirt? You know why I wore these?”
“To make yourself look less attractive?”
“Kind of. Silly, right?”
I smiled. “Right. Silly. It didn’t work. Nothing you could wear would make you look bad, so stop trying. Sorry to sound like your parents.”
“I think that’s a compliment, old man.”
“It was.”
“Thanks.”
“Bingo.”
“What?”
“You gave the right response.”
“What do you mean?”
“You just said, Thanks. You didn’t pull any of the false modesty shit.”
He accepted the compliment but blew off the advice. Jeans and T-shirts, though not as grungy as the ones he wore that night, were his normal dress for school and almost any other occasion. It still seemed to me he was dressing down and trying to make sure he didn’t stand out too much because, as good looking as he was in jeans, when he did dress up, he was a real stunner.
“So what now?” he said.
“We order if we can find a server.”
It was a good evening. Once the first few minutes were over, we were totally relaxed with one another, just as we were on the phone. It was remarkable. We ate and talked about the same stuff we always talked about: everything. Always the teacher, I got a bit carried away about Earnest.
“You know, there’s a video of an English film production. We could rent it and watch it if you want to before we see the show.”
“I think I’d rather see the show first. If I like it, we can watch the video afterward.”
More proof how relaxed and un-anal, if there is such a word, he was.
There was a small contretemps about the check which resulted in a new rule.
“You’re an impoverished student. I’m working and doing well. We’re not going to let money get in the way. If I have to worry about whether you can afford something or not, we’ll never do anything. And we met so we could do things together. So new rule—number three: no arguing about money. Okay?”
“I’m not impoverished. I have three scholarships, remember, and an allowance, but okay. And thanks. I’ll make it up to you some day when you’re old and gray.
“Yeah, you can come and wheel me around the nursing home.”
Outside, I asked him if he wanted to come over and see my place—I lived just a mile or so away.
“That’s okay. Another time. I’ve still got work to do for tomorrow, and I’m tired. The last couple of days have been pretty stressful.”
“Worth it?”
He paused a moment then smiled. “Yeah. You really were right, old man, about this meeting thing. It’s kind of like a load has been lifted.”
“Want to put the bike in the back and let me drive you?”
“No, the ride will do me good. It’s not far.”
“Do you even have a headlight?”
“Anal.”
“Give me a call when you get home? We don’t have to talk.”
He smiled but intentionally got busy unlocking his bike and didn’t answer.
“Bart,” I said, getting a bit serious, “How freaked out would you be if, remembering that rule number one is still in effect, I wanted to give you a hug?”
He didn’t answer. He just moved in, put his arms around me and hugged me with his chin on my shoulder. It was a tight hug that said things were okay and lasted maybe a second or two longer than it should, but I knew that all it meant was, Thanks. Still, the feel of his curly hair against my cheek and his smell, both of which I was experiencing for the first time, gave me the beginnings of an erection.
I squeezed him back and said, “Night.”
“Night.”
Chapter 8
The phone rang about fifteen minutes after I got home. I picked it up.
“Hello.”
“Hey, Kevin, you feeling horny? “
“Fuck you!”
“No way. Rule number one, remember? Night, old man.”
“Night, kid.”
I went to bed with a big smile, feeling better than I had in days.
Chapter 9
I didn’t see him again until the night of the play. We still talked every day, but he had a couple of midterms, and I had a closing to get ready for and plenty of other work to keep me busy.
I called him Friday afternoon: “Want me to pick you up?”
“That would be cool,” he said and gave me his address.
I thought he’d be a bit more uptight about letting me know where he lived, but he didn’t hesitate at all. When I got there, he was outside waiting, wearing a nice-looking shirt, dress slacks, loafers, and no socks. I smiled to myself at that touch.
“This better?” he asked, holding his arms out and turning around like a model before he got in the car.
“You’ll do,” I lied, totally knocked out by his appearance.
We found our seats and were looking at the program when I noticed his brow furrow.
This is as good a place as any to finally describe that brow. It was a broad brow and very smooth and clear as it would be on an eighteen-year-old boy,
but when he was thoughtful or concentrating or upset or sometimes just laughing, four deep horizontal furrows appeared all the way across his brow from just below his hairline to about a half inch above his eyebrows. The top three dipped just slightly in the middle and the bottom one was straight across. When it disappeared, his brow would be perfectly smooth again. For me, it was one of his most endearing and expressive characteristics. When I finally asked him about it, he said he wasn’t even aware of it. It proved to be a definite asset later on.
“What?” I asked, responding to the furrow.
“I think they made a mistake in the program,” he said. They’ve got a man’s name next to this Lady Bracknell character.”
I smiled. “No, some productions cast a man in that role. You’ll see why.”
As it turned out, the actor playing Lady Bracknell was excellent. He didn’t camp it up, but played it straight, and as a result, he was really funny. Their Miss Prism was properly spinsterish, the lovers were excellent—the men had almost perfect timing in their conversations with one another and the women just the right amount of archness, especially in their tea scene. Bart laughed a lot. At several points during the evening, our knees rested against each other. It was comfortable and not sexual at all.
During intermission, I couldn’t keep my teacher side in check—as usual—and talked a bit about Wilde’s history and the tragic way things turned out for him. Bart was affected by it, of course, and it showed me once more how relaxed he was with the whole gay thing.
I kept my eye on him to see if he seemed uncomfortable being with a guy eleven years older, but he was apparently totally at ease. I learned, as I got to know him, that he’d always gotten along better with adults than with kids his own age. And if he noticed that several guys were cruising him and that one obviously gay couple nodded to us in a way that indicated that they thought we were a gay couple as well, he said nothing about it.
That evening I began to find out that being in public with someone so unusually good-looking was an interesting experience. As we walked around outside the theater, I was aware of people looking at him, smiling—and not just the guys who were cruising him. Women paid him a lot of attention as well.
After the play, we went out for dessert. In what I would come to recognize as a typical Bart gesture, he insisted on paying because I bought the tickets. I let him, with a simple, “Thanks.”
He smiled at me and said, “Bingo.”
As we got back in the car, I said, “It’s still early. Do you want to stop by?”
He grinned. “If I didn’t know you better, old man, I’d think you were trying to get me into bed.”
I’d have loved to, of course, but I wasn’t, and he knew I wasn’t.
He continued, “But now that we’ve seen the play, I do want to watch the video you’ve been raving about. I can see your place then.”
“Great. When?”
“I’m fine with tomorrow if you can get the video.”
“Not putting you off, but I’ve got houses to show in the afternoon and a dinner I can’t get out of tomorrow night. How about Sunday?”
“That works.”
“I’ll pick you up about eleven and we’ll eat first.”
I drove him home, and he squeezed my forearm as he got out of the car.
“Thanks, Marc. It was really a great evening. Night.”
“Night, kid.”
I replayed that squeeze in my mind several hundred times as I drove home.
Chapter 10
I was born Jewish but haven’t been observant, as they say, since high school. Still, some religious beliefs die hard no matter how far you drift from the fold. I bring this up only to explain my feeling on Sunday that something had to go wrong. It was too good. It had all been too easy. I was too happy, and the unwritten eleventh commandment of Judaism was that God doesn’t like it when we’re too happy.
As it turned out, God must have been busy with other, more important matters that day to bother about Bart and me.
As planned, I picked him up at eleven. We had brunch at the Willow and came back to my place.
Although I sell houses for a living, my own home isn’t very fancy. However, it’s been well cared for and has real estate’s prime advantage: location. It’s not far from the campus and although it’s about twenty-five years old, it’s solidly built and in an area which has been kept up and somewhat gentrified. The neighborhood was home to many university professors and young, upwardly mobile families and was considered very desirable. It had more room than I needed: living room, dining room, Arizona room, kitchen, separate laundry/utility room, and three bedrooms: master bedroom, guest bedroom, and an office.
The first thing he did after getting the general tour was to check out my books and records in the living room. Looking through them, he said, “You’ve got a bunch of the same records as my dad, but more shows and more opera. Your anality is showing though. Everything’s alphabetized and in groups—comedy, musicals, opera, classical music, and popular music.”
“Anality?”
“I just made that up, but I think it works.” He wandered back into my office. “What do you use the computer for?”
“I just wanted one. I love gadgets, but I rationalized buying it by saying I needed it for work. I am learning to use it for that, but mostly I play solitaire and use the word processor for letters.”
It was 1987. Just as I still had records, rather than CDs, I had no modem, and email had not yet become the de facto form of communication.
“I still use a typewriter, but my parents got me an IBM Selectric III with self-correcting tape for graduation. It’s great for papers.”
“If you’re good, I’ll show you how to use the word processor.”
“If I’m good? I thought you said I was safe,” he laughed.
“You don’t have to be that good, kid.”
We settled down on the couch. He sat closer than I’d have expected, but there was no way I was going to object.
The film of Earnest was made in 1952, and, except for the opening scene in the bathtub which makes no sense, it holds up fairly well. It’s actually a very good production with Edith Evans as Lady Bracknell and Margaret Rutherford as Miss Prism. Although Rutherford is excellent, I always pictured Prism as thin and kind of whiny. Rutherford was neither.
None of that bothered Bart. He enjoyed it as much as the play—in some ways a bit more because this time he knew what to expect. He’d nudge me with his elbow when things he liked came up—such as Algernon’s saying that women only call each other sister after they’ve called each other a lot of other things first and the cake versus bread-and-butter business in the second-act tea scene.
After the film, over our own tea, he talked a bit about the gay couple who were friends of his parents. He’d known them since he was a child and known they were gay since he was old enough to understand what that meant. His parents were very open about that. It was part of their intellectual approach to child-rearing. No coddling. No Santa Claus. The tooth fairy was out, but fairy friends were in—although his parents, who were liberal UUs, taught him respect for everyone at an early age and would never have allowed him to use the word fairy that way.
“Actually those two are more affectionate with each other than my mom and dad are. It’s kind of neat to see them together. It’s very clear how they feel about each other. I love my parents, and I know they love each other and me, but they’re not touchy-feely types. They don’t hug a lot.”
When I drove him home, he insisted that I come up to see his apartment. It was a typical second-floor furnished studio apartment in one of the scores of private student housing developments around the university. He had his bike in one corner near the door. The Selectric, with a fitted cover over it, was on the kitchen table that he probably used as a desk. The whole place was neat and clean throughout. Just what I would have expected.
“They’ve got a nice pool in the courtyard, but I don’t swim much. I burn real eas
ily and stay out of the sun—except when I’m riding my bike and then I use a lot of sunscreen.”
“There’s the infamous phone on which we’ve spent so many hours talking,” I said.
“The great thing is that it’s got a really long cord that can reach everywhere in the place from the front door to the bathroom. I never told you how many times I took a pee when we were talking. I didn’t want to get you started.”
We both laughed.
As we got to the door, I turned and we hugged. Again, a tight hug but not a romantic one. A butch hug—if there is such a thing. Since that was something he hadn’t gotten much from his parents, he was willing, maybe eager, to get it from me.
Okay. Friend, mentor, teacher, parent-substitute. None of them was exactly what I wanted, but I’d have to take what I got.
Chapter 11
Things changed significantly after that weekend, and God, God bless him, stayed busy elsewhere.
We saw each other a lot more. He’d stop by after classes if I was going to be home. We sometimes had tea in the afternoon—not as much fun as love in the afternoon would have been—or he studied, and we went out for dinner together. I’m not a cook. I failed cooking along with flower arranging in gay school.
He was good—not quite the way I wanted him to be good maybe—but good enough, so I did give him computer lessons and showed him how to use the word processor and the printer. He was a quick learner.
“Man, this is so cool. It’s much easier than the Selectric, even with the correcting ribbon. It’s so simple, and I can change things as many times as I want.”
One afternoon as he was sitting at the computer, I was standing behind him bending over to point to something on the screen, and I realized that without thinking I’d put my other hand on his shoulder.
I pulled it away and said, “Sorry.”
He turned and looked up at me, genuinely puzzled. “About what?”
“Touching you.”
“What?”
“I had my hand on your shoulder.”
“So?”
“I just—”
“Hey, old man, you touch me all the time.”
