Where the Boys Are

by William J. Mann

  I can see the impatience betraying itself on her face. She sets her papers down and again makes eye contact with me. “I’m not sure it’s any of your business, Jeff.” She’s still trying to sound pleasant, but it’s strained.

  “Look, Eva, I care about him. He lived with me for ten months. I know he’s going through a lot—”

  “He’s doing fine,” she assures me, smiling again.

  “What is this? Your fucking mission in life? To steal away every man who matters to me?”

  “So,” she says, “that’s what you think.”

  I close my eyes, trying to regroup. A strategy of confrontation hasn’t worked. Well, there’s more than one way of dealing with Eva Horner. Maybe I ought to try taking a page out of her own book.…

  “Oh, Eva,” I say, gripping the counter as if I need support to keep from falling. “It’s just that I—I’m so torn up about it all. I’m so—I feel so unfinished. I just need some closure. I just need to understand.”

  I raise my eyes to hers, trying to will them to glow with moisture. I’m not really lying. I am torn up about it. I do need closure. I’m just giving it the full dramatic effect the way she always has.

  “Haven’t you ever felt that?” I plead. “The need to understand? To feel … heard?”

  It’s working. I can see her soften. Her shoulders relax their posture a bit, her mouth curling sympathetically.

  “Jeff, I just can’t tell you where he is. He really needs some time to be alone. To think.”

  “But … I don’t understand.” I’m not acting anymore. I really do feel confused and upset. “How did he get here? How did you get involved?”

  She sighs. “He called me. Simple as that.”

  “From San Francisco?”

  She nods.

  “And you … paid for him to fly back here?”

  She nods again.

  “Why?”

  Eva looks at me as if it’s plain. “Because he was in pain. Because he had nowhere else to go.”

  “But why call you?”

  She smiles sadly. “We’d had some good talks, especially when he stayed here after Brent’s overdose.” Her face hardens again. “Don’t you remember how upset he was? Oh, maybe you don’t. You were too consumed with your own anger to offer him much support.”

  Okay, so she has a point there. Maybe I’m being crazy, bursting in here like this, demanding to know where Anthony is. Lloyd wanted no part of it. We had dinner earlier, and he remained defiantly noncommital in his support of my desire to see Anthony.

  “What are your feelings for him, Jeff?” he asked me. “What’s coming up for you in all this? And what does it mean for us?”

  I couldn’t answer him. Truth is, I don’t know. I just know I have to see Anthony again. I have too many questions, too many unresolved feelings.

  But I’m ready to give up. There’s not much more I can do. I can’t exactly reach across the counter and grip Eva by the throat and demand she spill the beans, the way Humphrey Bogart might do to Peter Lorre or something. I just let out a long sigh.

  Then I hear the door behind me.

  “You want to see Anthony?”

  It’s Candi. She stands there glaring at me, her hands folded across her small bosom. I look at her without replying.

  “I just talked with him,” she says. “He said he’ll see you.”

  “Candi,” Eva says. “Is he sure?”

  The other woman nods. “Come on,” she says to me, pushing back out the door.

  I follow her down Commercial Street. We don’t speak a word for the first five minutes.

  The fog is rolling in, heavy and damp. From Long Point I can hear the foghorn warning ships not to come too close.

  “Thanks for talking to him for me,” I finally say.

  Candi turns to look at me. “I didn’t do anything for you. In fact, I advised Anthony to tell you to fuck off. Like he should ever trust you again, with you going behind his back and all.”

  I don’t reply.

  “Okay,” she says, seeming to reconsider her quick judgment. “So maybe I don’t know the whole story. But I do know that you and your boyfriend Lloyd think you’re both pretty perfect, and that you owe no responsibility to the people you draw into your lives.”

  “Okay, hold on right there. You’re right, you don’t know the whole story. And you don’t know me from Adam. We’ve only just met.”

  “I know your type, pal. And I know how Lloyd lords over Eva, thinking their whole dysfunctional relationship has been only her fault. He can’t see how he contributed, how it takes two to tango.” She smolders. “I suspect it’s been the same for you and Anthony.”

  Abruptly Candi makes a turn down an alleyway between two art galleries. Stretching out on a pier onto the beach is a row of wind-beaten cottages. In only one does any light burn. Candi raps on the door.

  “I’ve brought him,” she announces.

  The door opens. Anthony stands behind the screen, looking out at me.

  “Thanks,” he says, pushing open the screen door so I can enter.

  “You want me to wait here?” Candi asks. “In case he gives you any trouble?”

  “No, that’ll be okay,” he says. She grunts and moves back toward the street. I step inside.

  It’s a single room, no bigger than a cell, really, probably twelve by eight. Room enough only for a bed and a chair, though there’s a nice view of the beach and the water.

  Anthony seems to notice my surprise at his squalor. “Eva’s looking into getting me a better place,” he says. “It’s all she could get at such short notice.”

  I stuff my hands down into my pockets. “She’s paying your rent?”

  He nods. “Just until I get a job.”

  My eyebrows raise themselves. “You want to live in Provincetown?”

  He smiles awkwardly. “Just until … well, just for a while.”

  We’re quiet. I look at him. How beautiful he is. He looks a little haggard, and his beard stubble seems heavier, more mature, than I remembered. But his eyes still have that same glow.

  “I’ve missed you,” I tell him.

  He looks away. “No, you haven’t.”

  I feel at a loss to express myself. “Would I have come down here to find you if I hadn’t?”

  He shrugs, still not looking at me. “You came to see Lloyd.”

  I walk up behind him and place my hands on his shoulders. “I came to see you.”

  He turns to face me. He’s crying.

  “Why did you come back?” I ask him. “Why not stay in San Francisco?”

  “I could’ve,” he says, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. “I met a guy who offered me a place to stay.”

  I’m sure he had. And probably within hours of running away from me. The next sugar daddy to give him a roof over his head, three meals a day …

  “But I didn’t want to,” Anthony’s saying. “I wanted to come home.”

  “Home?”

  He nods. “For the first time in my life, I felt like I had a home here. In Boston. In Provincetown. With all my friends here.”

  I sit down on his bed. The mattress is horribly thin and soft.

  “Come back to Boston with me,” I say, surprising myself. I hadn’t planned on suggesting such a thing. But seeing him again—seeing him here—I want him back.

  He just smiles. “You don’t really want that.”

  “I do,” I tell him. “We can leave right now.”

  “Why? So you can ask me more questions? Try to find out what you still want to know?”

  I’m silent. Could I promise not to ask any more questions?

  “And what about Lloyd?” Anthony is shaking his head. “No, Jeff, you don’t really want me to go back to Boston with you.”

  I look at him. “It’s just that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you since you left.”

  “About me? Or my so-called secret past?”

  “You, Anthony.”

  He stands over me.
“Jeff, you have no idea how important those ten months with you were to me. I never really had a home or a family before. You gave that to me.”

  I look up at him hard. “You don’t run out on family when they ask questions, Anthony. You don’t keep secrets from family.”

  He sits down beside me. “You’re also supposed to trust family. Not go behind their backs.”

  I have no answer for that.

  “Jeff, I want to tell you everything, but I can’t. I’m just not ready yet.”

  “Have you told Eva?”

  He shakes his head. “No. And she’s never asked.” He looks at me pointedly. “She doesn’t seem to require that in exchange for friendship.”

  I look away.

  “She’s been so awesome to me, Jeff. Paying my way back here from San Francisco, finding me a place to live, introducing me to all of her friends …”

  So he has found another sugar daddy. Except it’s a mommy. “Anthony, just a word of caution,” I tell him. “Eva doesn’t give anything freely. She expects a payback.”

  “No, Jeff. She’s said I needn’t ever repay her.”

  I laugh bitterly. “Oh, she doesn’t care about money. She’s got plenty of that. She expects your constant presence, your undying devotion. She’s made Lloyd’s life miserable. You know that. And if you don’t fulfill her needs, she turns on you, like she has Lloyd. She’s letting their whole business go down the tubes so she can play at being a lesbian.”

  Anthony makes a face. “She is a lesbian. She just finally realized it and came out of the closet.”

  I scoff. “She’s as much of a lesbian as I am, Anthony. Eva is a black hole of emotion. She’ll do and say anything to feel intimacy in her life. These Provincetown dykes start paying her a little attention and suddenly she becomes one of them, just to fill up the aching void in her life.”

  Anthony stands and crosses over to his little sink, wedged into the corner of the room. He turns on me. I can see he’s angry.

  “You just don’t get it, Jeff,” he says. “And you know why? Because you’re Mr. Queer Activist. Mr. Professional Gay. You came out of the womb gay! Well, not everybody knows and accepts it that easily.”

  “Anthony, look—”

  “No, you listen to me for a change, Jeff. You had Javitz to teach you. He took you down to all those big marches and demonstrations in New York and Washington. You went all over the country learning how to be gay. Well, not all of us had that, Jeff. Just because you’ve been gay all your life doesn’t mean that everybody has had your same experience. You told me how you just stopped doing crystal. Just like that. You didn’t need detox, you didn’t need any help. You’re a strong person, Jeff, and good for you. But not everybody is you. Not everybody is as lucky as you!”

  “I understand that, Anthony, but—”

  “You know what, Jeff? You don’t have all the answers. I used to think you did. But you don’t.” He folds his arms across his chest. His eyes narrow as they stare at me, and a small smile shapes his lips. “You have it all wrong, you know,” he says quietly. “About me and Mrs. Riley. You think you’re so clever, Jeff. But you have it all wrong.”

  I look at him intently. “Then tell me where I’ve made a mistake.”

  He shakes his head. “You’re the reporter, Jeff. You’re the one who said you’d find out on your own. I’m sure your investigations of me haven’t stopped. Why don’t you just keep on going? You find out, then come back to me. I’ll tell you if you’re right.”

  I laugh a little. “Are you challenging me, Anthony? Daring me to find out the truth?”

  “Yes,” he says. “That’s exactly what I’m doing.”

  I stand up. “Then you’re on.”

  We shake hands.

  “But I want you to know something,” I tell him. “You may think I’m doing this because I’m some big fucking arrogant know-it-all who has to have all the answers. But that’s not why I’m taking your challenge.”

  He narrows his eyes. “Then why is it, Jeff?”

  “Because I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the guy who dropped into my life last New Year’s Eve, who taught me how to love again, who without even knowing it broke me out of my shell of grief and avoidance, who, despite all the odds, took the chance on loving me.” I reach over and touch his face. “I do love you, Anthony. No matter what, that will remain true.”

  There’s no reaction on his part. No embrace, no kiss, no further words. I just slip back out into the fog.

  The Next Day, the Breakwater

  Lloyd

  In November the air changes. There’s a snap, a bite, a tweak of your face that turns your checks red and hard even as the sun still shines overhead. How Javitz loved the air that moved in over the Cape during the late fall, with its chilly premonition of winter. It conjured up the promise of wool scarves and empty streets, of hot mugs of strong coffee sipped around a fire, the two of us discoursing on the state of our world.

  Jeff and I settle onto a rock, looking down at the last spot where Javitz’s atoms had all been in one place, where his ashes had spiraled around in his final journey out to sea. It was such a warm day when we’d scattered his ashes, and how the seagulls had chattered, as if unable to contain their sorrow, telling the world the news that Javitz was gone. Today the stones of the breakwater are cold, and the gulls overhead are silent. The day is, bright, the wind tricky. One minute, the air is still; the next, I’m chasing my baseball cap over the rocks.

  “Soon it will be too cold to sit here,” Jeff muses.

  “Oh, I’ll come out here even in the dead of winter,” I tell him. “Last year, I watched a blizzard roll in off the bay from this very spot. It was quite the scene.”

  Jeff smiles, flicking his eyes over at me. “I remember the last time we sat here, you and I.”

  I smile. I do, too.

  How could I forget? It was the infamous day that Eva had locked me in my room. Her last-ditch attempt to prevent what was happening.

  Jeff’s looking at me. “That day, the last time we sat here, we made a pact to find out about these people we’d let into our lives. We thought we were embarking on the quest to resolve all our dilemmas, to find answers. But all it did was make the questions even more complicated.”

  It’s true. If that day we had hoped we were finding our way back together, the sheer complexity of the other relationships in our lives has made that goal seem as far away as ever. I’ve seen first-hand Jeff’s reaction to Anthony’s departure. Quite simply, he was devastated, and that told me a lot. I can’t pretend that it doesn’t hurt. I saw last night how filled Jeff had been with a desire to see Anthony again, so determined he was to put right whatever had gone wrong between them. I can’t help but wonder if he’s ever had the same passion for making it right with me.

  But I’m hardly a model on how to rebuild relationships. Indeed, my own passion has been reserved for Eva. I spent weeks being angry with her, feeling resentful of her, and now I’m wallowing in a strange kind of grief, a feeling of abandonment. That takes up enormous energy—energy I could have been channeling toward Jeff. Instead, while Jeff was out confronting Anthony, I was sitting on my floor, reading through Eva’s old notes and E-mails, the ones she’d sent me in those first few glorious weeks of our friendship, where our talks reminded me of what I missed most with Javitz.

  No matter what her diagnosis, no matter what her motivations may have been, she had come to occupy a special part in my life, and that’s what I miss. That’s what I grieve. How Eva had understood my words. How she seemed to share my dreams. How she listened, really listened to me. To an outside observer, I would have looked like a spurned lover going through a box of old love letters. And maybe that’s not so far off the mark.

  Then, of course, in the midst of all that drama, I allowed myself to seek solace in the arms of Henry. Jeff’s best friend. Or at least, his former best friend. I know Jeff still cares about him, and he misses Henry something fierce.

  He’s looki
ng at me as if he knows I want to tell him something. I sigh. Why is it always so complicated between us? Why can’t it ever just be easy?

  “Jeff,” I begin, “do you remember when Henry came down on Halloween for that workshop?”

  “Oh, God, Lloyd, don’t tell me you slept with him.”

  I just close my eyes.

  Jeff groans, covering his face with his hands. “What were you trying to do? Balance things out since I slept with Drake?”

  “Jeff, it wasn’t like that.”

  He sighs, looking over at me. “How did it happen, then? You got carried away at the workshop?”

  “No. It was a conscious choice.” I can’t lie to Jeff. “We came back to the guest house and it felt natural to make love.” I try to smile. “He’s really a very sweet guy. He’s going through a lot.”

  Jeff looks off across the waves. “I can’t pretend I haven’t felt a little jealous about your connection. I haven’t quite figured out exactly the nature of my jealousy, however. Whether it was because you were with him or that he was with you.”

  “Nothing’s ever simple with us, is it, Cat?”

  Jeff laughs. “Maybe you were good for Henry. Maybe you’re exactly what he needed.”

  “I do think I’ve helped him. He’s really gotten into exploring some spiritual issues. Maybe …” My voice rises in a hope I don’t quite believe. “Maybe it will help him work out his issues with you.”

  Jeff’s looking at me sternly. “Lloyd. Be honest with me. Henry’s fallen in love with you, hasn’t he?”

  I sigh. “I think so.” I run my hands over my head.

  “And what do you feel for him?”

  “I care for him a lot. I love him. But not in the way he …” I can’t finish the sentence for some reason. “I’m not in love with him.”

  Jeff just nods.

  “I tried to get him to see that he has this pattern of attaching to people, of remaking himself in their image.”

  Jeff laughs wryly. “Oh, that’s Henry, all right.”

  “I’m not sure he got what I was saying.”

  Jeff shakes his head in exasperation. “And you know why he didn’t get it? Because for all of your talk of rising above the ego, Lloyd, you forget that first one must have an ego to rise above.” He laughs sardonically. “Henry. Eva. Anthony. We’re surrounded by them.”