Where the Boys Are

by William J. Mann

  But still. I’ve heard from the grapevine that Jeff is in town. I should’ve suspected he’d be here. He doesn’t come to Provincetown all that often anymore, but this is Fourth of July, Ptown’s only real circuit party weekend. He wouldn’t miss this. I wonder where he’s staying, if he’s going to try to see Lloyd.

  I know he’ll think me a jerk for hanging out with Brent. But it’s been fun. I can’t deny that. It all started at Gay Pride, where I ran into Brent at the Block Party. He was calling me “best friend” and everything and we started hanging out. We did a little K and we danced our asses off. He did a bump of crystal, too, though I declined. “What are you afraid of, Henry? Tina is a good girl. She won’t hurt you.”

  But Jeff’s words still made me anxious: “I could have had a bad problem, Henry. I caught myself just in time. You stay away from crystal. It’s not worth the risk.”

  I don’t know what to think. I know lots of guys who’ve been able to manage a casual use of crystal meth, but I also know some spectacular fuckups. But Jeff’s rigid admonition to keep away from the stuff suddenly feels controlling to me. Like he always knows better, and I can’t find out anything on my own. I have to admit I’ve been enjoying hanging out with Brent. As dippy and druggy as he is, at least it’s just been him and me. Not the way it is with Jeff. There’s no Lloyd, no Anthony to obsess over. Just the two of us having fun.

  “Hey, Brent,” I say all at once. “I’ll race you to the water.”

  Brent makes a sound of disbelief. “Go in the water? You crazy? I just slogged all this lotion all over me.”

  I leer at him. “But think of how good your square cut will look all wet and clinging as you walk back up to the blanket.”

  His eyes dance. “Last one in pays the cover at the A House!” He leaps up and makes a mad dash across the sand.

  I hoot out loud and follow him in.

  Meanwhile, Only a Few Yards Away, at the Breakwater

  Jeff

  I look at my watch. It’s 4:40. Could Lloyd be standing me up?

  I’m dangling my feet in the water at the spot where we scattered Javitz’s ashes. Remembering that day isn’t something I do very often. I watch the little ripples my toes make in the water, and recall the way his ashes swirled around and around, a beautiful sparkling spiral, before they headed out with the tide. Touching the water gives me a surprising sense of comfort: it makes me feel connected to Javitz. His atoms are here. Simply breathing in the air brings Javitz inside me. I understand finally why this place has been so healing, so sacred, for Lloyd.

  “I’m sorry, Javitz,” I whisper, probably for the five-thousandth time in four years.

  Why didn’t I come down that night, the night he died?

  There was a hurricane, a voice inside me tries to rationalize. You would have been a fool to risk it.

  Yeah, that and the fact some hunky Russian flight attendant was in my bed.

  I think back to the morning we scattered the ashes. It was warm, warm like the mornings of our happiest memories, mornings when Javitz and Lloyd and I would get up early and walk through town, solving the world’s problems if not our own. The smell of fresh-baked Portuguese bread would be wafting through the air, braiding with the fragrances of fudge and a briny low tide. We’d stop for coffee and look out at the bay, laughing about something, anything, everything.

  We’d end up at Tips or Cafe Heaven for breakfast, where Javitz—the Jew—would always make an outsized point of ordering sausage and bacon, to the exaggerated horror of Lloyd, the vegetarian. Oh, yes, I smile to myself: those were the mornings I prefer to remember.

  But sitting here on the breakwater, I force myself to recall another morning, the morning we carried the urn containing Javitz’s ashes all the way down Commercial Street, past the shops and the cafés and all the pretty tourist boys, past the houses we had rented all those summers, past the dick dock and the Coast Guard station and all the way out here, one last walk for the three of us. That day there were no tears. We’d shed them all at the memorial service, and by now our eyes were dry. In fact, I’ve hardly cried at all since. It’s easier not to cry.

  Okay, so maybe it’s time. Maybe I ought to finally tell you what Javitz meant to me. Maybe you’ll understand all this better if tell you that I met Javitz when I was just twenty-two, a wide-eyed, eager young grad student. Javitz was the wry, caustic college professor more than a decade older than me. He was a big-time gay activist, too, who quickly embroiled me in a world of civil disobedience, direct actions, and ACT UP rallies. It was the Eighties; it was the way gay men lived back then. We were lovers for a time, Javitz and I. His HIV seemed merely a fact of existence, the thing that inspired us to fight, but somehow it wasn’t real. Though we might discourse endlessly on its ramifications, not once—at least not in the early days—did I ever imagine him actually dying.

  But he did. He died and I wasn’t there.

  I look at my watch. Where the fuck is Lloyd?

  See, what I’ve never been able to let go of is the idea that I failed Javitz. Let him down. Oh, sure, I helped take care of him when he got sick, sitting up all night outside his room on the really bad nights, in case he tried to get up and walk. He had no balance and no strength, and the dementia kept him from understanding those two salient facts. I did my part wiping his ass, feeding him cold chunks of watermelon, holding an unlit cigarette to his mouth so he could think he was smoking. The saddest thing was to watch him, out of ingrained habit, lift two empty, tremulous fingers to his mouth. As much as I’d cursed those damn cancer sticks when he was well, I’d have given anything to smell their tar and nicotine again.

  But despite all I did, in the end I failed him—when he had never once failed me. He had always been there, whenever I needed him, for almost the entirety of my adult life. And now I find myself playing Javitz to Henry and Anthony, pretending to be the man with the answers, the wise old sage. But I’m a fraud, and I’m certain Javitz knows it. He’s watching me. He’s keeping track.

  Javitz would be so disappointed in you.

  Chanel’s right. I knew it even before she articulated it. Javitz is disappointed in me. I wasn’t there at the end as I’d promised him I’d be, and now all of the lessons he taught me are proving pointless. Because I can’t pass them on. I bounce from party to party dispensing bad advice to boys whose lives are as fucked up as mine. Henry avoids me, and Anthony is impossible to reach. And look at the mess I’ve made of my relationship with Lloyd. To top it all off, I’ve stopped writing.

  Javitz is disappointed in me.

  The sun is lower in the sky. It’s now almost five o’clock. I lift my eyes toward shore. What could be keeping him?

  I spot someone approaching. No, two people, actually. I peer at them as they get closer, realizing it’s not Lloyd. It’s two twenty-something gay men in khaki shorts and Abercrombie T-shirts. I catch just a snippet of their conversation as they pass.

  “… tired drag queens.”

  “Yeah, I’m so over them.”

  “I hate gay culture. It’s so …”

  They pass out of earshot. I can only imagine the adjectives he was about to use. I want to yell after them, “So what are you doing here in Ptown? Why not vacation in Biloxi, Mississippi? Or Laramie, Wyoming?”

  I shake my head. No matter where you go, there’s always somebody ready to jump on us. Sometimes it’s even our own kind. Javitz’s words are in my head. “They’ve bought the line. They’ve actually bought the line that gay is bad.”

  I let out a long sigh. Where the fuck is Lloyd?

  So you’re no doubt wondering what prompted me to break down and call him, especially after he hasn’t answered my E-mails in so long. It’s simple. I miss him. I miss him something fierce.

  Especially these past few weeks, ever since Anthony and I returned from Disney World. You see, Anthony’s become a body without a name, a face without a history. I’ve pulled away from any kind of intimacy with him, stung by his lack of trust. Yet he seems almost
oblivious to my distancing; perhaps he’s just glad I’ve stopped asking questions. At our hotel in Orlando that next morning, he’d shown up with bags under his eyes and baby-fine stubble on his cheeks. I’d just returned from Drake’s, but neither of us asked what the other had done all night. He just came into the room, hung his face like a sad puppy, and we moved on from there.

  But it can’t go on like this—not with such a vast cavern of deceit gaping between us. Anthony wants us to be lovers. A month ago, when he started to share my bed, I maybe considered the same thing. I was melting, and his soft, innocent eyes had been so easy to fall into. Yet how can I look at him that way if he won’t share the most basic facts of his existence?

  Just what to do about it, however, remains the dilemma. For now, I just feel too inert to make any kind of a move. Except call Lloyd. That I found the strength to do.

  “Jeff!”

  I turn. It’s Lloyd—finally—bounding over the rocks of the breakwater. I look at my watch. It’s ten minutes past five.

  “Thank God you waited!” Lloyd exclaims, out of breath, face flushed, grabbing me by the shoulders and kissing me spontaneously.

  “I was just sitting here thinking about Javitz,” I say. “Guess I got lost in thought.”

  Lloyd sits down next to me. “Javitz kept you here until I arrived. I know he did.”

  I look at him suspiciously. “Why were you so late?”

  He scowls. “I was locked in my room.”

  “What?”

  He shakes his head. “Jeff, the door was locked form the outside. I’d just bought a door lock with a key, so that I could seal off my room when I wasn’t in there.” He removes his sneakers and slips his feet into the water beside mine. “The only way it could be locked was for someone to use the key.”

  “So who locked you in?”

  He shivers slightly. “There was only one other person in the house. Eva.”

  “Eva? You think Eva locked you in your room? On purpose?”

  He sighs. “All the guests were out. I had to bang and holler for over half an hour. I couldn’t go out a window because the drop is too steep. I didn’t have the phone in my room, so I couldn’t call for help. Finally, I spotted one of the guests coming back up the walk, and I shouted for him to get my keys on the kitchen counter. He was the one who let me out.”

  My jaw is nearly down on my chest. “But … Eva? Why would she lock you in your room?”

  He looks at me. “Because I was coming here to see you,” he says significantly.

  I blink at the directness of his statement. Lloyd … talking this way about Eva? To me?

  “Did you confront her?” I ask hesitantly.

  Lloyd hangs his head. “Yes. She pled total innocence.”

  “But you don’t believe her.”

  Lloyd turns to face me plaintively. “Oh, Jeff.”

  “Dog, this is serious.”

  He sighs deeply. “She insists she was sound asleep the whole time in her room. But a lock like that couldn’t just lock by itself, could it?”

  “Not likely.”

  “It made me think of the last time I was heading out to meet you. Last winter, when you first came down to see the house. Eva tried to stall me then with her tears. I think maybe she hoped you’d give up and not wait for me. Head back to Boston without ever seeing the place.”

  I consider it. “If I’d done that, things might have ended between us even sooner.” I run my hand through my hair. “And you think now she was hoping to prevent us getting together again?”

  Lloyd just lets out a long sigh. He doesn’t have to answer. We look into each other’s eyes.

  “This is serious,” I say again.

  “I know,” he says. “I’ve kept hoping against hope that it would get better, telling myself that she was simply having some kind adjustment disorder based on her grief.” He looks so sad, so lost. “But I have to finally admit that it’s a far more serious diagnosis than that.”

  I put my arm around him.

  “I’ve missed you,” he tells me, taking my hand.

  “I’ve missed you, too.” I try to smile. “So why haven’t you responded to any of my E-mails?”

  His eyes open wide. “Your E-mails? You haven’t responded to mine!”

  “I have. But the last one I got from you was well over a month ago.”

  He looks at me queerly. “I stopped writing because I wasn’t getting any answers.”

  I grip his hand. “Lloyd. Does Eva know your password?”

  He seems to not to want to admit it, but finally he nods. “Yeah. I gave it to her a long time ago. She needed to go online and she didn’t have an account yet.” He moves his eyes back to mine. “She was deleting your E-mails.”

  I just hold his gaze.

  “I trusted her, Jeff.”

  I touch his cheek. “You don’t want to talk behind her back, right?”

  “I think I have to,” he says plainly, looking at me again. “I need to, Jeff. It’s gotten very difficult. If I don’t give her what she needs, she twists her ankle or has a fainting spell. If I talk to her about it, she gets all weepy or runs out of the car away from me into the woods.”

  I squeeze his hand.

  He looks at me sheepishly. “Aren’t you going to say ‘I told you so’?”

  I laugh. “If I did, you could say the same thing to me.”

  Lloyd studies me. “What do you mean?”

  “Anthony.”

  “What about him?”

  I smile wryly. “Oh, well, he’s been known to run away, too, when I push a little too hard.”

  Lloyd looks at me with concern. “What has he told you about his past?”

  “That’s just it. Nothing.”

  “Jeff,” he says, “you don’t mean to tell me you still don’t know where he disappears to? Or anything about his background?”

  I sigh. “I know some, but not nearly enough, and what I know I found out on my own.” I fill him in briefly about Robert Riley. “Anthony was only a teenager then. I think the murder did a real number on him. Yet when I’ve tried to talk about it, he goes ballistic.” I shrug. “Now I feel trapped by this mysterious stranger in my house.”

  Lloyd pulls me close. “Oh, Cat. How did we ever get ourselves in such situations?”

  We watch the sunset, holding each other. Each without speaking it, we’re both remembering Javitz’s oft-repeated line about Provincetown being the only place on the East Coast where the sun sets over the ocean. It feels like a hundred years ago that Javitz was with us, and no time at all.

  I feel brave. “Tell me about how he died again, Lloyd,” I whisper.

  He looks at me. “You sure, Cat?”

  I nod. He told me the story once, on the morning I arrived only to find Javitz’s body cold, but never again after that. I couldn’t bear to hear it. I couldn’t bear to remember that I wasn’t there.

  But now I want him to tell me. I want to hear how the winds beat against the house, threatening to break it down, as if God Himself was as pissed as we were that such a man had to die. As if the only way Javitz could be torn from this life was through forces mightier than Him, and there were damn few of those, believe me. I want to hear how Lloyd described for him the power of the wind, and how he told Javitz he could become one with that wind and be free.

  I cry as he repeats it all to me. I sit there in Lloyd’s arms and sob, the tears running down my face and dripping off my chin.

  Finally, after four years, I’m grieving Javitz.

  “I told him that I loved him,” Lloyd’s saying, “and he mouthed the words back to me. He died saying those words, Jeff. He died saying, ‘I love you.’ I saw the life disappear, like a candle going out behind his eyes.”

  “And then the wind,” I say. “The wind again.”

  He nods. “Suddenly there came such a wind outside, so fierce that I thought the roof would be ripped off above us. Tables and chairs fell over. A vase in the living room flew from the mantel and shattered ag
ainst the floor. I thought the house was collapsing inwards, but it was only Javitz, finally released from this world.”

  My eyes are wide, remembering. “And then when I got there,” I say, “you and I went out onto the deck and shouted, ‘Javitz doesn’t have AIDS anymore! Javitz doesn’t have AIDS anymore!’ until our voices were hoarse.” I look at Lloyd. “Do you remember that? Do you remember?”

  He’s crying now, too. “I remember, Jeff. I thought you had forgotten.”

  I shake my head. “I’ve never forgotten.” I wipe my eyes. “It was just so hard, never having the chance to say good-bye.…”

  “None of us did, really, Jeff. The dementia came on so fast. He was here one day and then lost to us the next. That’s what was so cruel.”

  The tears come back, harder now. “But you at least got to tell him that you loved him. He heard you say that. He answered back that he loved you, too.” It’s too much for me to articulate. “I didn’t—even—”

  He pulls me close. “Don’t be feeling guilty, Jeff. We both thought you’d have time to get here. And the storm …”

  I can barely speak. “I should’ve come when you first called.”

  “Look, Jeff.” He straightens me up. “Things happen for a reason. I believe that.”

  I scoff. “What reason could there have been to keep me from Javitz as he died?”

  “I’m not sure, Jeff. But I know that you and I maybe needed to go our separate ways after his death. We each had our own paths to follow.”

  I look at him with confusion.

  “What I mean is, Jeff, you and I needed to find out who we were, apart from each other, and apart from Javitz. The three of us had been enmeshed so long. I’ve been thinking about this. When we reconnected last fall, it was because we wanted to. We saw the new people we each had become, and we liked each other. We were stronger, wiser. Our paths had diverged only to cross once more.”

  “So what happened to change that?” I ask. “Why have we been apart these last few months, so angry and embittered at each other?”