Now, George walks to the kitchen and stares into the fridge. “I’m gonna make a snack. Want some frogs’ legs?”
Robin grins and says, “Hold the formaldehyde.”
This joke goes back to high school, freshman year, when they were lab partners in biology. George had a knack for science, a natural aptitude and a lack of squeamishness when faced with the series of animal dissections—long worms, huge, crunchy grasshoppers, bulbous frogs—that made up the bulk of their lab work. Robin felt lucky to have George by his side at those scratched-up wooden lab tables, helping him cope with the sickly smell of preservatives that rose up from the puny, pickled organs. George could name the systems of the body, could explain what a recessive gene was, could tell a kingdom from a phylum. Robin did his best to keep up, though mostly he just cheated off George. But you don’t stay friends with someone for years simply because he lets you see his test answers.
In the middle of Robin’s freshman year, his younger brother, Jackson, was injured in a playground accident, and, after a couple months spent comatose, died in the hospital. For Robin, everything fell apart, and when he finally picked himself up and looked around at what seemed to be a changed world, the only one of his school friends he was drawn to was George Lincoln. It wasn’t that their friendship was especially deep; in fact, the opposite was true. He found that he and George had a lot to talk about, none of it in any way related to Jackson’s death. It started with the simple discovery that they each had subscriptions to Time magazine, and they would spend study hall in the library talking about the hostage crisis in Iran or the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, talks that for Robin were a great distraction from the sadness and tension that had taken over his family, from the earnest-eyed teachers treating him like someone delicate and broken.
At Greenlawn High School, it wasn’t common for a black kid and a white kid to become close friends, after-school friends, unless you played sports together, which neither of them did. To make friends across the color line, you had to work against all these unspoken rules, like who sat where and with whom on the school bus or in the cafeteria. They never talked about it. It seemed to Robin it would be rude to do so; his parents had raised him not to “see color.” Talking about race, they insisted, was a kind of racism, and so, for years, he never raised the subject. This summer, things have shifted. Like George’s remark about him not knowing much about black folks. Like everyone at work calling him Blanco. Like all the little ways George has made it clear that the two of them are different, and have all along been living essentially different lives. It’s only now, being a white guy in a largely black world, that Robin has begun to understand that silence around race is its own kind of racism. Working at Rosellen’s, living in this apartment, in this neighborhood, it’s like he’s decided to sit on the black side of the cafeteria, and everybody, maybe even George, maybe even Robin himself, keeps wondering what he’s doing here.
The summer after Jackson died, Robin’s parents announced their divorce. When Robin told George he’d be leaving New Jersey with his mother and his sister and moving into an apartment on West 71st Street, George said, “That’s on the same subway line as my grandma’s.” She lived in Harlem, and George visited her every few weeks. In a city full of bad neighborhoods, Harlem was supposed to be one of the worst, though Robin couldn’t imagine it was much worse than 72nd and Broadway, around the corner from his new apartment, an intersection frequented by so many junkies it was known as “Needle Park.” There was even a movie about it, though he was too young to see it.
The first time George took Robin on the A-train to his grandmother’s, it was the bright middle of the day, and Harlem seemed to Robin like a lot of places in New York in 1979: run-down but active; dirty, druggy, and menacing in the shadowy corners but also lively wherever people gathered in the light. The old brownstones on Grandma Lincoln’s block were stately in the slanting winter sun, and inside, amid the upholstered wooden furniture, the dust motes floated in beams that looked plucked from a Rembrandt. Grandma Lincoln was only fifty-five, but she seemed ancient and timeless. She was the first person Robin met after moving to the city who struck him as a genuine New Yorker. Dorothy’s college friends, dropping by to gossip and drink wine, didn’t count. They’d all come from somewhere else. More than that, Grandma Lincoln’s was the first black household in the city into which he’d been invited. She made them coffee, like they were grownups, and served them cake that she’d baked from scratch. Grandma Lincoln called her freezer “the icebox” and still had a black-and-white television in her living room, with aluminum foil wrapped around the V-shaped antenna. After cake and coffee, she put on the TV, let a soap opera run in the background, and kept up an intermittent conversation with the boys. When the image got staticky, she’d say, “Adjust the rabbit ears for me, George-honey.” When it was time to go, she told Robin, “You’re a good-looking boy, but too skinny. Come back here and I’ll feed you a proper meal, with or without Little Georgie.”
Robin started calling George by these sweetheart nicknames: George-honey, Little Georgie. George claimed to hate this, but Robin couldn’t resist.
During another of George’s visits, Robin decided to test him. As they walked through Central Park, George in a wool coat and canvas sneakers, Robin in the belted trench coat, silk scarf, and pointy-toed boots he’d taken to wearing after reading Oscar Wilde and deciding he wanted to be a dandy, Robin said, “I have a crush on someone,” and then revealed that someone was Alton Humphrey, a boy in his new high school. He hoped this wouldn’t end his friendship with George, but thought that it might; he figured it was a risk worth taking, if they were going to stay friends.
George nodded as he listened and then said it was probably a phase that Robin would outgrow. He said what he’d heard Dr. Ruth Westheimer say on her sex-advice radio show; in puberty, boys had “experimental” ideas, but they usually outgrew this “phase” as their hormones came into balance. Homosexual tendencies were nothing to worry about. Nothing permanent. He told Robin that his “androgynous wardrobe” was part of that, too, as if Robin himself hadn’t put it all together.
Robin didn’t tell George about the sexual experiences he’d already had, orgasms shared with boys from Greenlawn (the names would have shocked George: Scott Schatz, the quiet burnout who cut school all the time; Todd Spicer, the beautiful stoner who drove Robin to school in the morning) and, more recently, now and then, with a man he met in New York. This man, a piano teacher his mother had hired but could not afford to pay after a few lessons, invited Robin to his apartment on Lexington Avenue, where Robin would drink wine, disrobe, and then masturbate onto him. On the way out he’d slip a few bucks into Robin’s pocket. Giving George the full picture would have been pushing things too far, too fast. So Robin simply shrugged his shoulders, saying that the concept of a phase was “interesting,” and thus he let George talk his way into maintaining their friendship, which for some reason he seemed to want to do, despite Robin’s deviant confession.
Then there was the night when George came into the city to meet Robin, who had gotten the dates mixed up and was out at the theater with Dorothy. Ruby was out, too, so no one answered the buzzer at their apartment, and George wound up stranded at the diner on West End Avenue, killing time and contemplating whether or not he’d have to head up to his grandmother’s to sleep, probably waking her up because it was so late. After that, Dorothy decided George should have a key, so that he could come and go as he pleased, so that he wouldn’t have to take a late-night subway ride to Harlem if Robin messed up their plans. Robin remembers George taking the key and trying it in the lock, remembers the feeling that George was now part of their family. Robin was sixteen, George a half year older.
Another weekend, not long after that: George came into the city with a plan to stay overnight. “Let’s shoot for who sleeps on the floor,” George said. Scissors, paper, rock: Robin lost two out of three. In the middle of the night, having woken himself up with a stiff shoulder a
nd a nearly numb arm, he pulled himself groggily into the single bed and pressed up against George. Then he couldn’t fall back asleep. He hadn’t spent a full night in bed with a boy since Scott, back in freshman year, and he longed to wrap himself around George the way he had with Scott. Robin had thought of Scott as his first love, but he had no photos of him, and after four years, and so many new experiences, the memories had begun to fade. What he felt for George wasn’t what he’d felt for Scott, but there in bed, George’s warmth was magnetic, the smoothness of his legs against Robin’s a temptation, the chuff of his breath like a feather tickling Robin’s neck. Robin got hard. He let his hard-on push through the fly of his underwear and poke into George’s hip. He felt the pulse of his blood like a bass line beating inside the mattress. Something had to be done. He let a hand slide onto George’s rib cage. George’s breathing shifted, but he didn’t wake. I’ll just leave it at this, Robin thought, that’s all for now, as his thoughts raced with every possible thing he might do with George. The things he’d done with others, that he wanted to do with his crush, Alton. And in the midst of this cataloging his mind wandered and drifted and led him into sleep, and when he woke in the morning, George had relocated to the sleeping bag on the floor.
Over breakfast there had been a bit of nervous joking about it. “You were going to get the bed no matter what,” George said.
“I couldn’t sleep on that hard floor,” Robin replied.
“Yeah, well I couldn’t sleep squished up with you under that little blanket, snoring like someone’s grandpa.”
“I don’t snore. You snore!”
That was all. There was no more sneaking into bed with George after that. George wasn’t going to be his boyfriend. Nor would George be scared away. He’s your friend, Robin told himself, just let it be. Don’t ruin it just because you want a boyfriend.
George came back from his freshman year at the University of Pennsylvania announcing that he had “big news.” As soon as he and Robin were alone, he spilled it: “I’m bisexual.” George had had sex with a guy he’d met in a political science class. He’d gone to bed with him, and a little while later, he’d gone to bed with this boy’s ex-boyfriend, too. Both of them were white, one of them a fellow biology major like George, the other a theater major, like Robin. Robin almost didn’t believe him. “Why didn’t you say anything before,” he wanted to know. “What took you so long?”
George had been as calm about this as he was about nearly everything else. “I didn’t feel anything until I met Michael,” he said. “And then I liked it, and I figured I should try it again, so Michael set me up with Neal, and I liked that, too, maybe even a little more.” Neal was the one George now had the crush on. George said Neal was “very sensual,” a phrase that made Robin laugh; it seemed so incongruous coming from George.
At the time George was also dating a girl named Jeanette, who wasn’t white, and who had no idea about these boys. George had visited her over winter break, met her family, had sex with her. Robin found himself getting angry about the whole thing. He called George a hypocrite. George protested, “You of all people should understand.” There were tears in his eyes. Robin knew he should have been supportive of his friend, but he couldn’t block the feeling of having been wronged.
“You’re devious,” he told George. “The truth is in your actions.”
George fought back: Robin was “irresponsible” about his own sex life, and probably “dishonest,” too. “You use your blue-eyed privilege to get what you want,” he accused.
They shouted “fuck you” back and forth a couple times. Then they retreated to their separate colleges on opposite sides of Pennsylvania, unable to quickly repair what they’d so suddenly damaged, and the silence lingered for weeks.
It was impossible, during that brief period of hurt, for Robin not to attach to George the images of other boys, boys he’d had sex with who turned around and went back to their girlfriends before the cum dried. Alton had turned out to be one of them: whispering about love while he put his cock roughly inside Robin’s ass. Alton was now engaged to a girl he met on vacation in the Hamptons. Engaged at twenty-one. There had never been a closet for Robin, not really, not since that first kiss with Scott in high school. Sure, he had been evasive at times, even sneaky when necessary, withholding information from acquaintances and strangers for the sake of safety or comfort, but he never lied to himself about the nature of his desire.
The faces of all these boys hovered in his mind when he thought about George dating a woman and sleeping with a guy. How could George be one of the liars, the users? But eventually he had to admit that George hadn’t lied to him.
“I’m going to come visit you this weekend,” Robin announced over the phone, six weeks after their estrangement began.
George responded: “It’s about time.”
In Philly, Robin discovered that George had given up his girlfriend. “I’ve come to the conclusion that my inclination is more homosexual than heterosexual” was how he put it. He also announced that he was going to stay celibate for a while because of all this disease spreading around. Not only the big one that was in the news all the time, the so-called “gay cancer,” but all the other venereal diseases, too. He got a case of crabs from one, or both, of the boys he’d had sex with, and rather than admit this to Jeanette, he made a bunch of excuses about why he couldn’t see her. “Eventually,” he said, “she dumped my ass.”
“Good,” Robin said, and after that, everything was okay again.
George encouraged Robin to slow down his own sex life. “This thing has killed thousands of men who have sex with men,” George said. “More than four thousand in 1984 alone.” George was spending a lot of time learning all he could about viruses, in particular this newly discovered immunodeficiency virus that was the likely cause of AIDS. He gave Robin a pamphlet, made by a gay organization who did a presentation on campus, called “How to Have Sex in an Epidemic,” which advised things like reducing the number of partners, not exchanging bodily fluids, using condoms for anal sex, for oral, too, if you want to be totally sure, and since then, Robin had followed the guidelines. But memories of certain nights, certain guys, came to him like flashes from half-remembered dreams, distressing reminders of what couldn’t be undone.
George leaves to meet the Danish guy, and Robin paces between the living room, kitchenette, and the narrow hallway at the back that leads to their bedrooms, the doors facing each other, mirror images. He’s freshly showered, buzzed on Old Latrobe, smoking cigarettes instead of eating a pint of Häagen-Dazs, which is what he really wants but won’t allow himself, even for the sake of self-indulgent comfort. He swings between moods: missing Peter, hating Peter, wanting to beg him for another chance, wanting to scratch his face. But without Peter here, without even a phone number where he can be reached, it’s all an abstraction, a mental carousel. He puts the dance tape, the one he took from Peter’s car, into the boom box. The music instantly conjures up the night, several weeks ago, when he sat here compiling and ordering the songs, timing out each one so they’d fit on two sides of the cassette and none would be cut off. All of it for Peter, to be close to Peter. Why didn’t you see this coming? It’s one thing when a relationship is fizzling and you both know it and can simply move on. But this is a true shock, and he can’t work his way around to any thought but this: It’s your own fault.
He stops the music and tries the TV instead, the portable set with the patchy reception and the rabbit-ear antenna wrapped in foil, just like Grandma Lincoln’s. He turns the dial between channels and finds only that unfunny comedy with Nell Carter and some post-Vietnam drama with Jan-Michael Vincent as a vet on a secret mission in a supersonic helicopter. He needs a better distraction. Aside from George, he only knows a couple of people in Philadelphia, one a transplant from New York, the other a friend of a friend from Pittsburgh, but when he calls them neither answers. Of course not, it’s Saturday night.
He could call Ruby now, he thinks. She’ll
listen to his tale of woe. But he remembers that she’s gone away for the weekend with her boyfriend, Calvin, down the shore. He thinks about calling his mother, but there’s the risk that she might say something infuriating in the name of good advice. Besides, they have a standing phone date on Sunday afternoons, on her dime, so he decides to just wait until tomorrow. Tomorrow is an important one: June 16, Jackson’s birthday. They’ll reminisce, and get a little weepy, and Robin will pull out the photo of himself with Jackson and Ruby that he had laminated and now keeps in his money clip, and he’ll give it a closer look, to mark the occasion. The picture was snapped on the first day of school the year Jackson died. The three of them stand in the driveway in Greenlawn: Robin and Ruby offering their best smiles, Jackson with an exaggerated toothy grin and scrunched-up eyes, the “monkey face” he always gave to the camera. He did it to annoy Dorothy, whose insistence on the first-day-of-school photo had been, like so many of her proprieties, something that Jackson saw as “dumb.” Now, years later, as pictures on photographic paper have largely replaced pictures in his mind, Robin sees Jackson’s obnoxious expression as a kind of eternal statement. Jackson would always be remembered as someone who didn’t stand still, didn’t flash pretty smiles to the camera, didn’t want to be sentimentalized. He was, at his core, a bratty boy. Robin won’t say this kind of thing to his parents, when he talks to them in separate calls tomorrow, though he and Ruby have often talked about it. Part of the sadness of losing their little brother is that he never got to be anyone else, never got to grow out of his brattiness and become someone they might have liked more.
Robin and Ruby Page 4
