“And your sister? She’s okay with it? Well, she must have been or she wouldn’t have sent Mikhaila to visit you.” That was the year before Patrick met Dmitri, when his niece was sixteen.
“Was her Christmas present,” Dmitri said, smiling. “To come to America and see her uncle. Then the next year in school all she does is tell her friends.”
“Oh yes that reminds me, when I went to America,” Patrick guessed, grinning. Dmitri nodded. “All the same, it’s not an equal-rights situation, so there’s probably a little bit of, eh. They know I’m not going to be prancing around in a rainbow Speedo, right?”
Unfortunately, Dmitri thought, and said, “Yes.”
They were still in Odessa when Dmitri got the text from his student Vince: Hi boss, the packages have been delivered. Few weeks early and it was scary for a minute but Kelli is already feeling better and the twins are fine. We’ll introduce you when you get home. Abrazos. He showed the message to Patrick, who said, “What an ordeal that pregnancy was. God I’m glad Sharon didn’t have to go through that.”
“Mmm.”
“We probably won’t be seeing much of them for a while. Good thing you got Tomás.”
“Yes.” Dmitri texted back a message to Vince. Then, having been reminded, a message to Rory: We come home soon. All is well?
The reply rolled in at a very odd hour – the time difference was significant – and they read it the next morning. Tomas is catching up with all the people he knew here when we were roommates. Mateo has a crush on him, shocker. Elena hasn’t pinged you? She told me if T wasn’t a foot taller than she is she might try learning ArgTango herself
He replied: Height is irrelevant
Easy for you to say. Even Elena is taller than me. Keep having fun! OXO
July 2016
Mostly, what Patrick noticed about having Tomás in the house was the constant Argentine tango soundtrack from the practice room. He and Dmitri were in there all the time. Dmitri lured Patrick in there pretty often too. “The next time we go to Buenos Aires I’m going to be in demand,” he remarked after one such evening.
“You are already,” Dmitri said. There was something in his tone that said ‘haven’t you noticed,’ which made Patrick laugh because he was, at the moment, stretched out naked with his husband. Dmitri’s hand was wandering, and so was Patrick’s attention.
He did manage to pull himself together enough to fish for a compliment. “Not too bad for sixty-one, huh?”
Dmitri shook his head, then returned his mouth to Patrick’s chest. This beloved body had changed since they met, but inconsequentially. Skin no longer as smooth, body hair no longer completely black, waist perhaps not quite as narrow. Still fit, trim, delicious. “Still beautiful,” he murmured. And this body was still, always, hungry for his. There was nothing so arousing as being wanted, Dmitri decided. The feeling was apparently mutual.
They were both slightly heavy-eyed and lazy the next morning. Dmitri didn’t have an urgent reason to go to the studio, Patrick indulged himself by sending a working-from-home email to his assistant, and they took their time over breakfast in the kitchen. They were sitting close together at the breakfast bar, lingering over a second cup of coffee, when Patrick’s phone rang. He glanced at it with surprise; it wasn’t even ten, too early for his assistant to have given up on a problem. Then he saw his brother’s name and picked up the call. “George! What’s up?” He listened for a minute and Dmitri saw the gladness leave his face. “Oh. Of course. I’ll come right away. What should I wear?” Another, briefer pause. He wasn’t looking at Dmitri, but at the far side of the room, clearly seeing nothing. “Because if I’m going in to pray with our mother I’ll dress to impress. If I’m sitting out in the hall waiting, I’ll be comfortable.” His tone was sharp, but there was a tremor. Dmitri put his hand on Patrick’s back. He could guess what this call was about. Patrick’s mother was eighty-seven. She had been, they knew, declining. She hadn’t spoken to Patrick for forty years. He was speaking again. “All right. I’m sorry, George. Be there soon.” He disconnected, placed the phone on the counter, and dropped his head into his hands. “She still doesn’t want to see me.”
“May I go with you?”
“Would you?”
“Of course, my love.” Dmitri slid his hand up to Patrick’s hair, dug in, and gently tugged. Pulling his husband over and into his arms.
They were at the hospital in Glendale an hour later. She’d been admitted the night before. On one level Dmitri understood why George hadn’t called then. On another, he was furious. It was bad enough that his remaining parent still rejected Patrick. But he should have been given the option of worrying through the night, holding vigil, like the rest of the family. Maybe George thought it was better for him not to know until the oncoming end was confirmed. Only the knowledge that for George this was equally painful kept Dmitri from telling him he was wrong. George had done his best to intercede with the family over the years, bringing as many of them to acceptance as possible. He always invited Patrick to family gatherings, even though his attendance meant their mother refused to come. He’d been her sole emotional support since their father left. Would have been her sole financial support in her retirement, if Patrick weren’t the generous, forgiving man he was. Dmitri sat beside his husband in the corridor, holding his hand.
He remained nearly silent, more so than usual with this family of talkers, all day and into the evening as they waited. Watching others arrive, go into the room, and eventually depart. Accepting variously-stilted condolences from those who were allowed into the presence. No-one was cruel to Patrick. No-one except the dying woman.
They had never spoken much of this. It was almost as if Patrick equated the emotional distance between him and his mother to the geographic distance between Dmitri and his. Over the years, most of the family had grown used to the idea of Patrick, and then grown used to Dmitri. Now some of them sat down for a while, talking to him or to Patrick, patting a shoulder or a knee, as if they were simply another married couple who were part of the family. As if they weren’t out here while everyone else could go in. Do not be bitter, he told himself.
It was a very long day. There were walks up and down the hall, cups of coffee, a late lunch delivered by Ruzanna. Then, as the evening wore on, dinner delivered by her brother Suren. A quiet conversation about his residency at Shriners in Pasadena. Before he left, an apology. “I’m sorry she treated you this way.”
Patrick shrugged. “The only other choice I had wasn’t very good either.”
“Thank you for not giving up on the rest of us.” He leaned close for a hug. Dmitri could hear Patrick trying to control his breath, trying not to cry. Surely this would be over soon.
It wasn’t over till after midnight. They were both exhausted, chilled, stiff and sore from all those hours in the uncomfortable chairs. When George stepped out of the room again they knew. He crossed the hall and held out his hand. “Will you see her?”
Patrick, of course, took his hand, accepting his help to stand. Then he gave his other hand to Dmitri. “Come with me, honey?” Of course Dmitri did.
Patrick held it together until they left the hospital. His control was slipping as they walked to Dmitri’s car. Dmitri unlocked it, opened the passenger door, and then leaned against the vehicle with Patrick in his arms. Holding him while he cried for the mother he’d lost, today and forty years ago and every day in between.
They attended the funeral a few days later. No-one in the family objected. People who hadn’t spoken to Patrick for years, because they were loyal to his mother, spoke to him and to Dmitri now. Dmitri never stopped being furious about it. He was sure Patrick knew. They didn’t discuss it.
The following weekend, Dmitri was committed to participate in a photo shoot with Andy after his hours at Shall We Dance. He asked Patrick if he should come home instead. “I will, if you need me,” he said. Patrick hadn’t been back to the office since he got his brother’s call; Dmitri was getting concerned.
“No, honey, go ahead. You’ll have a good time, and I’ll get some great pictures of you. Tell Andy I expect that.” Patrick got out of bed and pulled on his robe. It was definitely time to stop being so self-indulgent and get on with life. “I have about six hundred emails I need to at least look at before I get back in the saddle on Monday.” That was an exaggeration. He’d been monitoring things, taking care of urgent business and answering essential questions. It was strange how hard this hit, though. No energy, little interest. He would make himself take an interest. Watching Dmitri get dressed for his day was definitely interesting, which was a relief. “Maybe when you get back we could dance a little.”
Dmitri leaned in for a kiss. “Dance?” He made it sound suggestive, because he was nearly certain Patrick employed the word as a euphemism. If so, that was a relief.
“Mm-hmm. I’ve missed you this week. Did you miss me?”
Painfully, Dmitri thought. There had been very few days, since their cohabitation began, when one or the other of them hadn’t made some kind of overture. It didn’t always proceed to sex by any means. But a skin-to-skin kiss, a caress, an embrace during which hands wandered: those were daily, twice-daily, in their ordinary way. Some demonstration of carnality. To do without more than a hug and a closed-mouth kiss had been, yes, painful. “I will show you how much.”
“Mmm.” Patrick smiled against his mouth. “Thank you for giving me some time. I love you. Go do your thing.”
“I love you. Encore, mon amour.” Another kiss, open-mouthed, a promise for the end of the day.
It was like a switch had flipped. Or, Patrick decided, like that wonderful moment at the end of a bout of food poisoning when you realize you no longer want to heave your guts out. He felt well. He got dressed, went downstairs and consulted the refrigerator, determined that some serious attention to groceries was overdue, and took care of that. Home again and with a plan for the evening, he attacked his mailbox. It was a good thing this happened during a slow period.
He did have this kind of interesting new-client situation, though. He’d been pulling all of that stuff to one side. Once he got all the usual business out of the way, he read through the Sacha Lebedev folder. There wasn’t much that he had to contribute at this point. The man had inherited a ton of money, didn’t know how to deal with it, and was being shepherded through the process by a former writer’s agent who was a longtime friend of the person who died. Patrick’s colleague Marisa, one of the CFPs, was working with Sacha and with the estate attorney Patrick hooked him up with. Patrick would come into play when they got around to doing the tax returns. For now, all he had to do was check in.
Business managed, he turned to his personal email. There was some overlap, of course; many of his business associates heard through the grapevine, i.e. Patrick’s assistant, that his mother had died. There were condolences. There was also, refreshingly, a wholly-inappropriate message from the one non-related person aside from Dmitri who knew about the whole coming-out disaster all those years ago. It was Patrick’s college boyfriend, the one who’d started it all. They remained friends, in a desultory sort of way. Stanford lived in Monterey now. He wrote:
DING DONG THE WITCH IS DEAD.
…
…
Too soon?
Patrick my man, I am actually sorry because I know that must have hurt. I know it hurt all along and I’ve been sorry for forty years that it was me who cost you your mom. It would have been somebody at some point, you couldn’t have stayed in the basement forever, but it was me and it was then. I’m not sorry we were together, only that she couldn’t take it, and that she took it out on you for the rest of her life. At least your dad was already gone. Jesus I am a horrible person. He’s still around though, right? You ever hear from him?
Anyway the usual bullshit message from your bullshit ex-boyfriend. Me and Randy are doing good up here. If you ever want to bring your dancer up our way again, I have to tell you, the wine is getting decent. I mean our wine. That crap we make? Not so crappy anymore. We might have won a medal last year.
Always on your side,
Ford
It was true. He was always on Patrick’s side, even when they broke up. That was a case of ‘it’s not the right time for us anymore’ rather than a case of ‘I don’t like you anymore.’ They were going different directions, they had different ideas about how to live. He was still a friend. Patrick wrote back.
Hi Ford,
Thanks for the note. I would be lying if I said I didn’t think the same exact thing a few times over the past week+. It might be too soon but I won’t tell anybody. Well, except Dmitri. I am positive he’s thought the same thing every hour on the hour. I haven’t been good for much this week.
But the sun is shining, my brother is still a mensch, I’ve got a busload of friends telling me I’m going to be okay, and one of them is you. I’m glad about that.
I haven’t heard from the old man for about five years. Kind of figured he must have died. If they divorced ten years earlier I might have been more traumatized about it, or maybe tried a little harder to hang onto him through the mail. It’s tough enough when both people want to stay in touch. He was always kind of ‘eh’ about it. Fortunately, he waited to bail out until I was in college and had you to take my mind off things. I regret to inform you that Dmitri is even better at that.
We may have to revisit the central coast sometime soon. Last trip up-state was to Sonoma, and I know those winemakers up there are your mortal enemies, but damn they make some good stuff. Keep in touch and let me know when is the least awful time to drop in. Now that my husband’s done winning trophies we have a lot more time to go and do things.
Your friend,
Patrick
p.s. are you and Randy ever getting married? It’s really nice!
After sending that off, Patrick wrote a long and loving letter to his brother. By the time he finished that, it was time to start doing something about dinner. Dmitri got home just as Patrick was wondering how late he would be. “Hi sweetheart. I have been very productive. Did you have fun?”
Dmitri took a nanosecond to determine that Patrick was back to almost-normal, leaned in for a warm and lingering kiss, and said, “Yes. Tomás made a cabaret routine. The pictures will be good.”
“I don’t suppose there are any of you in the nude.”
Dmitri snorted, straightened up from the wine rack, and gave Patrick a look. A few of the men present at this photo shoot were excellent candidates for nude photos. Dmitri did not, at this point, put himself in that class. He knew his husband disagreed. “He will send a selection. Red or white?”
“Red. We’re having black-and-blue steak salads.”
Dmitri made an appreciative sound and reached for a bottle of cabernet.
A few days later, Tomás returned from dinner out to find his hosts still up, both reading in the den. “Rory and Dana say hi,” he said, smiling. Patrick smiled back at him. Dmitri looked up, over his reading glasses. “I must thank you again,” said Tomás.
“You have been welcome,” said Dmitri. “Vince told me he wished you could stay. He is tired.”
Patrick laughed. “Imagine how he’s going to feel after he gets into training with Michelle! Want to join us for a nightcap, Tomás?”
“I will, thank you. What can I get you?”
“Let’s live it up and have some of the Graham’s. All right with you, Dmitri?”
“Definitely.” They sat for a while over the port, talking idly, or as idly as Dmitri did anything. He and Patrick had been talking about the future of Shall We Dance. Having another strong male teacher over the summer – someone who was there all the time, unlike Mateo or Vince – produced an interesting change in the studio’s chemistry. Tomás was formal with his students, much like Dmitri. But he was also inventive, open-minded, gracious. If he chose to return to Los Angeles, he would be welcome again. “When do you go?” Dmitri said then.
Tomás set down his glass. “July
thirty-first. I must join up with the rest of the cast, to begin working out our routines for the next tour.”
“Good, we have a few more weeks,” Patrick said. “It’s been a pleasure having you here. Could you come back next summer?”
“Vince will be glad for a vacation,” said Dmitri, with a trace of a smile.
Tomás seemed to understand the subtext. His own smile broadened. “I would be very pleased and honored to return. I hope it will be possible.”
August 2016
As usual, Dmitri was on hand for the dress rehearsal of ‘The Great Wave.’ So much of the choreography and rehearsal had been done at Shall We Dance, he felt proprietary about it, even though he’d barely participated beyond providing space. Patrick was with him, also as usual. He was glaring at his phone, typing something, and completely ignoring the room when Vince fetched up beside him and Dmitri at the bar. “What’s up?”
“He has new client with tax situation,” Dmitri said. “Is good to see you here.”
“It’s great to be here. This show is bananas.” Dmitri almost laughed. “Kelli was asking me if I wanted to be in it, and I was like, that’s a solid No. You too?”
“I as well,” Dmitri agreed.
“Do you have a minute to talk about this whole smooth ballroom thing?”
“Of course.”
Vince dove right in. “I’m having this anticipatory anxiety about it. I talked to Michelle and it seems like she’s sure I can do it. Kelli and I have done all those dances before, so it’s not as if I’m starting from nothing. And we’ve been working with you for so long. I figured if you thought I would suck at it, you would have said something long ago.”
Dmitri nodded. “I would have. You should not worry.”
Change Partners (The L.A. Stories) Page 18
