You May Have Met Him

by Sebastian Carter

  “Yeah, and?”

  “I mean, we talked.” Elliot’s face flushed.

  “You had to talk about something. What’s he like?”

  “He’s nice. We had fun.”

  Brianna squinted at him. He expected that she would. It was no use with her. And he was a horrible liar. “You didn’t go out with him, did you?”

  Elliot wrung his hands, and he sighed. “I tried.”

  She swatted his shoulder. Not in a way to be mean, but a tap to express her disappointment. “You were looking forward to this,’ she said.

  “I know.”

  “So what happened?”

  Elliot’s heart beat against his chest, a thin sheen of sweat broke out on his forehead, and his palms were clammy. “I chickened out, I guess.”

  “What do you mean you chickened out?”

  “I mean I got ready. I showered, got dressed in nice clothes, and I sat down on my couch.”

  She waited for him to continue.

  “And that was it. Once I sat down, I kept thinking about all the things that could go wrong. What if he didn’t like me? What if he laughed at the way I was dressed? What if he called me names and left me all alone there in the coffee shop? I started feeling sick, then I couldn’t go any further, so I sat there until I finally decided to turn on the T.V.”

  “Elliot.” Now Brianna took one of his hands out from his lap, and she cradled it in her own. “Dammit, Ell, I wanted this to work out for you. You deserve it.”

  Elliot’s face grew warm again, and he turned his gaze downward. “I don’t know what to do, though. I get so nervous when it comes to meeting guys.” He lifted his face again to look at her. “I mean, it’s only been a month since I finally got the guts to tell anybody other than you that I’m gay. Can’t I just take it slow?”

  “You’re 27,” Brianna said. “Three years from thirty. You’re at that age where you need to get out there and explore. I mean, look at me. I have four dates lined up this next week, and that’s in addition to all the lunch invitations that are on my calendar.”

  “Yeah, but you’re Brianna LaFontaine, the daughter of a media mogul. Of course you have all kinds of invitations. Besides, you’re you.” Elliot sighed. “I’m nothing like you.”

  “But you can be.” She gave his hand a little squeeze. “You’re such a great guy, Elliot, I want you to be amazing in your own life.”

  Elliot smiled. “I think I do all right.”

  “If you only factor in smarts and computers, yeah, you’re a freaking movie star in those arenas.”

  “And Beasts of War.”

  Brianna rolled her eyes. “How many guys are you going to meet on that video game? Beasts of War is not real life.”

  “But I have friends on it. We talk and laugh. I know how to handle myself in that game.”

  “You need to translate some of that into the real world.”

  Elliot let out another long sigh. He loved Brianna. She was one of his best friends, but he hated when she got like this. She was always trying to fix him. “You remind me of my mom.”

  She slapped his arm, this time with more force. “You did not just say that.” She laughed.

  “Well, it’s true. She always tells me the same thing, that I need to put myself out there.”

  Brianna pouted a little with a thrust-out bottom lip. “Well, she sounds like a smart lady.” Then she shot Elliot a side-long glance. “Have you told your parents about you yet?”

  Elliot rolled his eyes. “I didn’t have to,” he said. “My mom has apparently known I was gay since I was a freshman in high school.”

  “And your dad?”

  “He’s a hippie. He works in engineering, but he’s always been a big supporter of civil rights. Way back when, before I even knew what to call peeking guys in the hallways at my high school, he said that, if I ever turned out gay, it was ‘cool, man.’” Elliot snickered. “I guess that means he knew back then too. I was pretty much the last one to know.”

  “You need to introduce me to your parents some time. It’s amazing that, even after our four years at the University of Chicago, I never got to meet them.”

  “You’d like them, I think. They’re outgoing and friendly with everyone.”

  Brianna poked his arm. “So what happened to you?”

  “Shut up.”

  “I mean it. Why didn’t some of that rub off on you?”

  Elliot shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess it was because they were always forcing me into social situations. It’s not spliced into my wiring like that. Maybe my mom smoked too much weed while I was in the womb or something.”

  “I doubt it. You can put everyone else to shame with your smarts.”

  Elliot blushed like he always did when he got compliments. “Maybe it’s a balancing act of some sort. My family is weird, so I balance it all out by being exceedingly normal. I’m boring. I think I remember that from a psychology class or something.”

  “You’re not boring.” Brianna put her arm around Elliot. “You’re the perfect catch, Ell. Brains and cute to boot. We’ll find you somebody.”

  Elliot let Briana pull him into a half hug. She was a lot like his mother. That wasn’t much of an exaggeration. But that wasn’t such a bad thing either. Brianna cared about him, and he knew it. Like with his mom, it was one thing he could always bank on.

  “So, do you actually have computer problems?” Elliot asked.

  Brianna clicked her tongue and let him go. “As if. I can fix my own damn computer. I wanted an update from you is all.”

  “I figured as much,” Elliot said. “You could have called.”

  She rolled her eyes. “That’s boring.” She leaned back in her chair, a finger touching her chin. “What do you want in a man?” Brianna asked him suddenly.

  Elliot smiled and blushed. “Why are you asking me like that?”

  She looked down at her hands then back to him. “I just want to know.”

  He sat back in the chair and ran a hand through his hair. “I don’t know. I guess I want somebody who is nice, who treats me right. I want a guy who is gentle when he needs to be.” Then it really hit him. “I just want a guy who I like waking up next to in the morning, somebody I’m happy to see when I get up.”

  Brianna studied him. “Prince Charming, then.” She smiled. “Well, honey, I’m still searching for that guy too.”

  Brianna’s assistant brought their coffee, and Elliot relaxed a little more. Brianna went on about her upcoming dates, and Elliot listened. He should probably get back to work, but he did have the permission of his boss to be there. This was how it usually was, and he was good with that.

  Even if he was a little lonely.

  Chapter Two

  Theo

  Theo walked into the lobby of Chicago’s Streets and Sanitation Department, a door he passed through at a younger age hundreds of times on smaller feet and with a much different perspective. The tired security guard watched him with heavy eyes. She wasn’t someone he knew. There was a time he knew all their names, and they knew his, a time when they greeted him with a wave and questions, in the fall, about his lacrosse team, the Lincoln Park Lions, and if they finally stuck it to Taft that year, or in the spring, what his RBI was on the baseball field. Back then, Theo was a heavy hitter. Back then, he liked coming here and spending time with his dad. He used to spend long afternoons here to do his homework upstairs in one of the unused cubicles.

  But this time and on this visit, the security guard said nothing as he walked past the desk and over to the bank of elevators. She kept a red-tipped finger on the open book in front of her, and she only had a small, curt nod for him as he walked past her.

  His father’s office was on the seventh floor, and he stepped out onto the tiled floor to see the receptionist, Gladys, sitting at her desk on the phone as usual. She was someone who hadn’t changed. She was older now, well into her sixties with gray hair frosted with dyed blond, a hairstyle that hadn’t changed since Theo was in grade school
when she first began work at the department. She gave Theo a loose-fingered wave and a bright smile when she saw him.

  Theo mouthed to Gladys. “He in?”

  She nodded and never missed a beat on her phone call as she explained the procedure for filing a grievance about tree trimming on a city street.

  Theo walked through the large glass double doors framed in tarnished brass. The room inside was huge, the main office space lined with the cubicles that dominated the entire room, many of them with smaller break-off points that led to more desks and more workers. This main office room where his father worked too had changed little over the years. Except again, he used to know many of the faces here, but now they were mostly strangers. He didn’t have a lot of occasions to visit his father these days.

  When he reached his father’s closed office door, he stopped. His heart thudded in his chest. It had been at least two months since he’d even spoken to him, and the last time was a chilly five-minute conversation on the phone when his father asked about his health insurance. An all-business call.

  Just like this visit was all business.

  Theo didn’t move. He stood where he was with his hands in the pockets of his cargo shorts. He took a deep breath, and he shook his head. Nope. Skip it. He didn’t want to talk to his father. He couldn’t talk to his father. His father wouldn’t want to talk to him, not for this. He needed to do something about his present situation, but this wasn’t the answer. He was about to turn around and stride long and fast back toward the same brass-framed doors when the present door he stood in front of opened.

  His father spied him standing outside. The man who studied him a graying figure of his old man, a ghost of the solid embodiment he remembered from grade school and even into his high-school years. His father’s eyes squinted, deepening the lines of the crow’s feet that clawed out at the corners of his eyes. “Theo,” his father said. He looked down at his watch. “I wasn’t expecting you.”

  “Yeah, no,” Theo said. He shifted where he stood, his backpack on his shoulder. “I just dropped by.”

  His father’s mouth tightened. The moment stretched between them until his father took a deep breath. “Well, I was just going to hand these files off next door. Go on in and have a seat. I’ll be right back.”

  Fuck.

  Theo went inside his father’s office that seemed so much smaller than he remembered it. Like the outer cubicles, his father’s office was stuck in a time from Theo’s memory. The pictures on the wall, his father’s undergraduate diploma from the University of Iowa. Only as he looked closer, some of the pictures had been replaced with newer. There were graduation pictures, a picture of his sister, Hannah, crossing the stage in cap and gown, and another later of her college undergrad ceremony. One of her wearing the short white coat she had to wear while she was still in medical school. Then a final one of her in a full-length lab coat after she obtained her M.D. Michael’s pictures were there too, his brother on the day he graduated from Navy boot camp, another of him in his dress whites, one of him on deployment standing on the deck of a vessel at sea. There were also pictures were of his mother, pictures from vacations she and his father took, his father younger and with a broader smile than the man Theo met at the door of his office, and another picture of his mother holding some kind of award that Theo never remembered her receiving. But she beamed and grinned like it was an Oscar and she an actress. He guessed that, though she worked as a law professor, ‘actress’ was still an apt description for her.

  There was even the old picture of Theo and his dad, Theo dressed in his baseball uniform during, he believed, his sophomore year in high school and his dad grinning big enough to show the top row of his teeth. A proud dad when the Lincoln Park High School baseball team won their tournament. The pinnacle of his high-school baseball career in his father’s eyes. It made sense to Theo that his father would keep that picture up on the wall. But after that one, any other pictures of Theo stopped.

  He heard his father come back into the office, and Theo turned just as his dad caught sight of him and the frown that followed. When his father closed the door, Theo’s heart slammed harder in his chest like he’d been cut off from the outside world.

  “Theo, it’s been a while,” his dad said. He stood with his hands firmly planted on his hips. His father, even in his early sixties, still cut an imposing figure, and even though Theo was two inches taller than his dad, he still felt small in front of him. His father had piercing blue eyes that could cut right through him and leave the wounds cauterized from cold.

  Theo said nothing. He only nodded.

  “Have a seat,” his father said. There was no hug, no shake of the hands. He’d seen his father hug his brother plenty of times.

  But his brother wasn’t the gay one. And that’s when all this started, when his father stopped putting pictures of him up on the wall of his office. The day that his father dismissed Theo’s coming-out announcement with, “you better grow out of that.” Ever since, it’s been times like this, tense moments and squaring off like two caged animals any time they met face-to-face.

  Theo sat down in the chair across from the one that his father slid into behind the desk. His father picked up stacks of papers and lined the corners of the pages with the corners of his desk, and then he positioned the pen that lay slightly askew. Theo waited for him to finish. A typical ritual.

  “So what brings you by?” his father asked. He folded his hands on top of his desk and leaned forward on his elbows.

  “Well, mom’s out of town.”

  His father nodded. His eyes squint.

  Theo took a breath. He worried that the sweat beading on his temples was visible, that his father would sense he was nervous like a prey animal. He always tried to present himself a figure in control when he was around his dad, but his dad always made him feel inadequate. A long silence passed between them as Theo tried to calm himself and figure out what to say. The way his father looked at him made him think he already knew what was coming, and it annoyed Theo that he wasn’t wrong. So, cut to the chase: “I need some money,” Theo said.

  His father’s eyes grew chilly, tinged with disappointment. It was a look that Theo had grown used to. “Well,” his father said. “I don’t have any money to give you.”

  “I need it,” Theo said. “I’m moving, and I need to pay the security deposit and first month’s rent, and I have books to buy still for school.” School was another bone of contention between them. While his brother and sister were well on the way to their careers, Theo muddled through by taking only a class or two a semester at DePaul. He’d been in college almost as long as his sister, but his sister had an M.D. license to show for it. Theo still had thirty-two credits until graduation for his undergraduate degree.

  His father leaned back in his chair, and he shrugged. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sure you are,” Theo said. He scratched a fingernail to furrow the wood of the chair arm where he sat.

  His dad sighed. “Why can’t you be more like your brother and sister?”

  “And what’s that, dad?” Theo glared.

  “At least they work and have steady jobs.”

  “And they’re straight?”

  His dad said nothing to that. He didn’t have to. It was the expression that stoked a fire in Theo’s belly. Then his dad said with a dismissive sigh. “You used to have discipline, Theodore. You need to go into the military like your brother. Maybe that will turn you into the man you were meant to be.”

  “The man I’m meant to be.” Theo shook his head, his mouth tight. “I guess we can’t all be trash men like you, can we?”

  A response formed on his dad’s face. It showed in his eyes, the way he glared at Theo. “If that will be all,” he said.

  There was nothing else he could say. He knew that just from looking at his father. Once his father declared a conversation over, it was over. Theo stood up, and the chair skittered back about a foot. “I guess that will be.”

  “Sh
ow yourself out.” Already his father was pulling a file from the drawer in his desk to continue working.

  Theo stared at him and shook his head. The impulse to reach across that desk and knock the glasses off his face was strong. But instead, he turned and kicked the chair he had been sitting in and slammed it into a filing cabinet where it leaned on one leg and clattered onto its side. When he turned back, his father was standing up behind his desk.

  “Get out,” his father said.

  “Fuck you. I’m going.”

  As Theo stomped toward the door, he heard his father mumble, “faggot.”

  That stopped Theo with his hand on the doorknob. He turned to stare over his shoulder at his father still standing behind his desk. Theo’s heart still pounded in his chest, but this time it wasn’t out of fear. This time it was pure anger. His fists balled at his side. “You’re a piece of shit,” Theo said.

  His dad laughed. “At least I have money,” he said.

  “I may be a ‘faggot,’ dad, but where do you think I got those genes? Huh?” He opened the door. “Is that why mom’s getting the divorce?” With that, he walked out of his father’s office and slammed the door behind him.

  The door opened, and his father called his name, but Theo kept walking.

  And he walked through this office for the last time.

  Almost an hour later, Theo walked into the lobby of the Drake Hotel into a world he only touched on through his friend. A luxurious contrast to where he had just come from. Royal blue carpeting accented with gold, rich mahogany furniture, vases arranged with fresh flowers splashed with the colors of a Chicago summer: reds and blues. The Cubs were up this season. Hotel guests occupied the lobby dressed in clothing usually reserved for New York runways. Even the concierge sitting at his desk seemed dressed in a suit that was more than Theo could ever hope to afford.