Where the Boys Are

by William J. Mann

  He smiles. “I’ll go first.” He tears off the cellophane and opens the small cardboard box. He lifts out a chrome-framed photograph, taken a year ago in the snow: Jeff and I with our arms around each other’s shoulders. I can hear Eva’s voice: “Say, ‘If you please, pass the cheese!’” We look a little pained staring into her lens, but also infinitely younger—evidence of just how much you go through in the course of one year.

  “Open yours, Lloyd,” Jeff says.

  I brace myself. Will it be another expensive gift? An intimate item of Steven’s? But even as I peel the cellophane wrapping from the box, I know it won’t be. I let out a little sound when I recognize it. It’s the little wooden Buddha we found under the couch at Nirvana so long ago. How often I’d wondered where he went. He’s painstakingly painted, smiling serenely.

  “Oh, Jeff,” I say, sitting down on the couch, the Buddha staring up at me.

  He looks down at my gift. “Did she paint that? Do it herself?”

  I keep looking at the Buddha, and he keeps looking at me. “Yes,” I say. “I’m sure she did.”

  Jeff sits down beside me. “Call her, Lloyd,” he urges.

  I sigh. I reach over and pick up the phone, pressing in the numbers for Nirvana. I have no idea what I’ll say: Thanks? Merry Christmas? Let’s rethink everything?

  I get the machine. “Eva,” I say, “I just wanted to tell you that the Buddha is lovely. It’s—just wonderful. Thank you. It means—a great deal.” I realize I’m crying. I can’t even say Merry Christmas. I hang up the phone.

  Jeff takes me in his arms.

  Jeff

  “It’s okay,” I tell Lloyd. “Go ahead and cry.”

  “I think she finally gets it,” he says, wiping his nose. “And finally, I do, too.”

  I hope so, but I remain just a tiny bit suspicious. True, my heart has softened toward Eva. Her gift to me was symbolic, I think, recognizing—even honoring—the relationship between Lloyd and me. She would never have given such a gift a year ago. And I can’t deny that I remain grateful for the help she extended to Anthony. But at what cost, I still wonder? Is she now as entangled in Anthony’s life as she once was in Lloyd’s? Is that why she can talk of selling Nirvana? Has she found a new male host body off of which to leech?

  Okay, I know that sounds way hard. And I know Eva has been making a great show of her newfound lesbianism. I’m just cautious; that’s all. Maybe a little cynical. It’s in my nature to be cynical—as you’ve probably detected by now. It’s just hard for me to believe that Eva Horner can ever give without demanding more in exchange.

  “What’s been most difficult for me,” Lloyd is saying, “has been realizing just how unaware I was of my own part in all this. I always think I’m so self-aware, so conscious.”

  Now that much I agree with. It’s not just Eva who bears responsibility for their breakup. For breakup is what it was, just as the split between Anthony and me was a breakup. And I know damn well that I shoulder my share of the responsibility for that.

  Anthony. I just can’t bring myself to call him Brian. Brian Murphy remains seventeen years old in my mind, a villainous jock, the kind I myself knew in high school, the kind I was only too glad to see caught and punished, sent away for life. Anthony Sabe was another person: just turned thirty, a boy-man without a cruel thought in his head, a gentle soul who’d somehow survived living among wolves. Lloyd told me this morning that Anthony’s little cottage in Provincetown is now empty. Where has he gone?

  Just as I’m sure Eva has never been far from Lloyd’s thoughts these past few days, so too has Anthony always been close at hand for me. And just as Lloyd struggles with his own accountability, I’ve wrestled with my own. If I had trusted Anthony, allowed him to tell me the truth in his own time, might things have been different? Might he still be here?

  But if he were, would Lloyd and I have put up this Christmas tree together? Would we now be nestled together on this couch, Mr. Tompkins purring between us?

  And, in truth, Anthony’s question still resonates for me without a satisfactory answer: “Knowing what you know, do you still feel the same for me?”

  Do I really love so conditionally? I lean back into the cushions of the couch, suddenly overtaken by sadness. How had it been that Javitz had been able to love without conditions?

  Lloyd’s looking at me. He can read my thoughts. But you know that by now.

  “We’ve made Javitz into a god,” he tells me, “when he was a man. Just like us.”

  I sigh. “Javitz wouldn’t have made a mess of things like we have. Anthony, Eva, Henry … and ourselves, Lloyd. We still don’t know what we are to each other.”

  “Of course we know, Jeff.” He smiles. “We know very well what we are to each other. We love each other. We are living our lives together—as crazy as those lives sometimes are.”

  I think of Anthony’s words: “What I want is what I’ve seen between you and Lloyd. Two people trying to work out a life together. Struggling and accommodating and making dreams actually happen.”

  Lloyd runs a hand through my hair. “I think we’ve been too hard on ourselves at times, Jeff. Look, we fuck up. We’re sometimes stubborn and insensitive. But generally we do the best we can. We want to do the right thing. When we mess up, we try to put things right.”

  I shrug. “Maybe you ought to ask Anthony if he feels I put things right.”

  “Jeff, you did what you needed to do.”

  “Be careful what you go searching for,” I say, shaking my head. “You never know what you’ll find.”

  Lloyd looks at me. He’s quiet. I can tell he’s thinking.

  “What?” I ask. “What’s going on in that head of yours?”

  “I think it’s time for you to see something.” He reaches down into his briefcase leaning against the side of the couch. He extracts a video.

  “What is … that?” I ask suspiciously.

  “Javitz,” he says.

  That’s what I thought. “Oh, Lloyd, I’m not sure …”

  He looks at me intently. “You need to see him, Jeff. Hear him. This tape has sustained me, given me strength.” He pauses. “But there’s something I discovered at the end—something I didn’t know was on there. That’s what I really want you to see.”

  He pops the video into the VCR and switches on the TV. And there’s Javitz, Lloyd and me, clowning around on the deck. Wonder of wonders, I don’t dissolve into a puddle or collapse in paroxyms of grief. I smile. I laugh. It’s so damn good seeing Javitz again. How young we all look. Was my face ever really that unlined? Did Lloyd ever really have that much hair?

  Then the image fades to black. “There’s more,” Lloyd assures me before I can say anything. “Javitz apparently recorded it after we went to bed.”

  Thirty seconds, then forty, pass. Finally, Javitz flickers back onto the screen, a huge closeup, from forehead to chin, looking directly into the camera. It’s so intimate that I instinctively gasp, pulling back a little. There he is, pores and all: the man who’d taught me, who’d loved me, on whom I’d tried to model my life. There he is: all big brown eyes and curly black hair, full lips and cigarette smoke.

  “Hello darlings,” he says, in the same voice that greeted us every morning for almost a decade. “I’m figuring out how to work this damn thing. Remember, in my day all we had was Super-8.” He laughs, that unforgettable rasp, like a fork caught in a garbage disposal.

  Lloyd reaches over and takes my hand.

  “The two of you have just toddled off to bed,” Javitz is saying. “We’re all a little stoned. I’m not sure when you’ll see this. Maybe tomorrow, if I even remember I’ve taped it.” He takes a drag on his cigarette. I swear I can smell the smoke. “We were talking tonight about process. God knows how we got onto that. But we do get onto these things, the three of us, don’t we? We’ll talk them to death or until one of you falls asleep. Tonight it was you, Lloyd.”

  He laughs once more.

  “Anyway, process. I said a lot
of things tonight about process, but let me just add one more. Something I want you to remember. Process means making mistakes. That’s the whole point. You make mistakes and you learn and you do your best to fix them, then you move on to make more mistakes.” His eyes twinkle. “Get where I’m going with this? Sure, you do. When I get sick—because it’s not an if but a when—you will make mistakes. That’s how it goes. That’s process. You make mistakes and you fix them and you move on.”

  He inhales again on his cigarette, his eyes looking off dreamily past the camera.

  “I don’t want you wasting time worrying over mistakes,” he says firmly. “Listen to me when I tell you this. There aren’t two other people in the whole entire world I’d ever trust to make mistakes around me. You two are my heart and my soul.”

  I feel the tears come.

  “But you know all that.” He sighs. “I suppose it’s just the pot talking. But there’s something else, darlings. Something maybe you don’t know.” He seems to hesitate before continuing. “Being with you, sharing my life with you, has given me great and abiding passion. Like tonight. Like so many nights.” His voice thickens. “But still, there are times, after such moments of passion, when it can be very difficult for me to watch the two of you stagger off to bed together, closing your door behind you, while I go back to my room, alone.”

  Lloyd squeezes my hand.

  “You see?” Javitz runs his hand through his long, thick hair. “As much as I treasure our friendship, as much as I celebrate the family we have created, as much as I believe in the worth and the unique value of what the three of us mean to each other, I have never found that one man in my life the way the two of you have found together. Sometimes I watch the two of you spin your wheels, caught up in this or that drama. I want to bop your heads together. It’s all so fleeting. Cherish what you have together. It is precious. So goddamn precious. It is what we all, each one of us, ultimately searches for in this life. You have been extraordinarily generous in allowing me into your lives. But has it ever kept you from going deeper between yourselves? I wonder.”

  He exhales smoke, momentarily obscuring his features.

  “And maybe I’m just stoned and a little horny.” He lets out one of his long, audacious sighs. “Guess I’ll be heading out to the dick dock now.” He cackles, leaning in toward the camera. “How do you shut this damn thing off?”

  Then blackness.

  He’s gone.

  We sit there in complete silence for several minutes. I wipe the tears off my face with the sleeve of my sweater.

  “He forgives me for not being there,” I finally manage to say. “He forgives me. He already knew we’d make mistakes.”

  “You were there, Jeff.” Lloyd puts his arm around me. “And you have continued to be there. We’ve both spent too much time imagining Javitz laughing at our attempts to carry on. But he hasn’t been laughing. We’ve made our mistakes and we’ve learned and we’ve gone on.” He smiles. “I venture to think Javitz has actually been pretty proud of us.”

  I think of Henry. “You’ve taught me so much,” he said. “Now let me use it.”

  “Maybe,” I say, “maybe you’re right. Maybe I have managed, somehow amid all the craziness, to pass on what Javitz taught. Maybe I haven’t been such a fraud after all.”

  “I think that’s right, Cat. I think you’ve done a pretty good job.”

  I look at him. “Then why has it been so hard for the two of us to come together?”

  Lloyd sighs. “I think we fell back into an old pattern. You and I never had much experience at just being a couple. There was always Javitz. He was right. As wonderful and enriching as our relationship with him was, Javitz was also our buffer. Our protection against our own intimacy ever getting too deep.”

  I look back at the darkened television screen. “He wanted so much what we had,” I say softly. “And he died without ever finding it.”

  Lloyd nods his head. “And I think once Javitz was gone, you and I didn’t know quite what to do with each other. How to be together. How to be, period. So we drifted apart.”

  I smile wanly. “It makes me think of parents who lose a child. You’d think it would draw them closer, but it often ends up driving them apart.”

  “Exactly,” Lloyd says. “And we never had any role models. There aren’t a lot of examples of relationships outside the heterosexual norm that we could follow. So, when we reconnected, without even thinking about it, we began setting up the old triangular structure, the only one we knew. I brought in Eva and you brought in Anthony. Because we somehow believed that we needed a third person from which to bounce—or deflect—our intimacy with each other.”

  I cover my face with my hands. He’s right. He’s dead-on right.

  “I don’t want to be afraid of making commitments anymore,” Lloyd says. “You and I—we have our work cut out for us.”

  “I’m willing to give it a shot,” I tell him.

  He takes my hands. “We make mistakes, we learn, and we move on to make more.”

  “Does there ever come a time when the mistakes stop?” I ask, looking at him. “Or at least, become fewer and fewer?”

  Lloyd smiles at me. “I think they already have.”

  My eyes find his. “I love you, Lloyd.”

  “I love you, Jeff. I never want to spend a Christmas without you.”

  We kiss.

  “Let’s watch the video again,” I say.

  Lloyd hits REWIND on the remote. We sit through it once more in each other’s arms.

  “I don’t ever want to stop missing him,” I say when it’s all over.

  Lloyd smiles. “I don’t think that’s possible.”

  The doorbell rings. It’s Shane and Henry. They’re bearing gifts. Ahead of them trots Clara, all pop-eyed at the sight of Mr. Tompkins, who could easily make two of her. They study each other for a moment, then decide on bemused tolerance as the best strategy for coexistence.

  “We could take a lesson from them, huh, Jeff?” Shane asks quietly as Henry and Lloyd head into the kitchen.

  “Are you suggesting that you and I might be friends, too, Shane?”

  “Sure,” he says. “Want to shake on it?”

  I level my eyes at him. “If you have anything in your palm or up your sleeve, buddy boy, I’m sticking you ass-first on top of the tree in place of the star.”

  Shane grins broadly. “No more gimmicks from me, Jeffy-poo. Cross my heart.” He holds out his hands to show he’s clean. “Ah, the hell with a handshake.” He wraps his long arms around me. It’s a real hug. I hug him back.

  “You see what I was saying about the Christmas spirit, Henry?” Lloyd says as they come out of the kitchen. “You never know what miracles it may bring about.”

  They’ve made some hot cider spiked with rum. Shane lifts a glass to propose a toast. “God bless us, everyone!” he says. “Except Miss Izzy, who I still haven’t forgiven for Halloween.”

  All in all, it’s a very good night.

  New Year’s Eve, Provincetown

  Henry

  “Everybody had it wrong last New Year’s,” I’m insisting. “That wasn’t the real start to the twenty-first century. This year is.”

  Jeff’s zipping up his leather jacket to just under his chin. He gives me one of his looks, all eyes and attitude. “Okay, Henry, and the significance of that little factoid is …?”

  Shane pats my shoulder. “Henry just likes to keep the record straight.” He snorts. “So to speak.”

  “I suspect,” Lloyd says, pulling on his gloves, “that Henry actually has a point he wants to make here.”

  “Thank you,” I say, folding my arms over my chest. “The point seems obvious to me. We all thought we were starting new lives last year, just in time for the new millennium. Such perfect synchronicity—or so we thought. Then we went and fucked everything up.”

  I look around the room at the three of them. Nobody disagrees. How could they?

  “But this is the new millenni
um! Starting tonight! We can start all over and do things better this time. Think about it, you guys. How many second chances do we get in life?”

  There are nods all around. I feel pretty pleased with myself. Henry Weiner puts it all in perspective yet again.

  I button up my coat and wrap a scarf around my neck. It’s cold outside. One by one we head out into the icy wind that’s whipping in from the bay. Of course, we could be in Miami tonight—Shane had originally bought tickets and everything—but I’ve got a feeling that traipsing around the country isn’t going to be as easy as it once was. I’ve got some new responsibilities now, starting with a full house of guests at Nirvana, which means we have to get up very early to cook our special New Year’s breakfast for everybody. “Just until midnight,” Lloyd told us all. “That’s as late as we’re staying out.”

  Yes, you guessed it: I’m working with Lloyd now. Nirvana general manager and resident sex worker. That second part isn’t official, of course, but I’ve already begun planning a series of sacred-sex workshops that Lloyd will advertise on Nirvana’s Web site. I’m flying out to San Francisco next week to go through the training seminars; I’m thinking also of getting my license as a massage therapist. It’s a whole new life, a whole new career—one that I’m good at, one that I love—so much different from sitting in my cubicle shuffling papers.

  Of course, my parents freaked when I told them I’d quit my job, but I’m not living my life for them. Not anymore. The only person I’m living my life for now is me. Maybe the money won’t be as good, but I’ve learned over this past year that it’s not what you get in life that makes you happy, it’s what you give. I know that sounds hokey, a tired old bromide, but it’s true. I think most people, if asked to make a choice between being happy or being rich, would choose happy.

  And maybe—just maybe—I can have both. The happy and the rich. We’ll see. Hank just set up a brand-new Web site, and in one week it’s gotten almost a thousand hits. A thousand!

  So things look good. Check in with me in a couple of months. I’ll let you know.