by David Leite
“Well . . . ,” Bridget started. I could see she was going to be diplomatic, and this wasn’t a time for diplomacy.
“Everything,” I said, taking over. Angela listened to my increasingly drunken rant about the new class and teacher we were assigned to, while Bridget nodded every so often and pointed as if to say, Yup, what he said. It was the first time she’d ever gotten drunk, and the conversation was snaking away from her, much to her surprise.
“All right,” Angela said. She looked at both of us, then paused as if considering something. Finally: “I’m going to talk to Mel to see if I can get you two bumped into sophomore class.” Mel Shapiro was our department chair. “But if you breathe one word of this—to anyone—it’s over. Understand?” We both nodded, Bridget’s head jouncing like a bobblehead.
On the way back to campus, we weaved along the sidewalk, playing the Queen and Lady Di, our cheeks sucked in, noses properly cocked in the air. Our cupped hands swiveled on the ends of our wrists as we waved to pedestrians and passing traffic. Overcome with happiness, I unleashed my most jubilant, regal voice, and Bridget joined in—just as loud and unthrottled. The looks and bows and curtsies from strangers only egged on our triumphal march up Forbes Avenue.
Anointed by Angela, I felt an invincibility rearing up. Bridget, on the other hand, was thrilled but never let others see it. I began walking through campus singing “Me,” a song from the musical Rachinoff, which the upperclassmen were rehearsing that semester. The lyric loop that I belted, arms flung up into the air, working the sidewalk like a catwalk, went something like:
Me!
The only one I think about is me
The only one I dream about is me
Me, myself, and I.
Eggheads from the engineering and science colleges looked on, unfazed. They were used to dramats, the nickname for theater students. “You really shouldn’t be singing so loudly,” Bridget said, looking around.
“Why?”
Complete deadpan. “You’re kidding.”
“It’s in the show,” which to me was justification enough.
“People are starting to talk.”
“Because I’m singing?”
“Of course not. They think . . .”
“What?”
“That you’re a show-off.”
“They’re just jealous, that’s all.” She winced and cocked her head in a way that let me know that wasn’t exactly the case. “Do you think I’m a show-off?” She paused, too long. “Oh, for crissake,” I said, and walked away.
“David—”
I turned around, vicious. “What?” A veneta so disproportionate to the moment, so prepackaged and ready-to-serve, spiraled up my spine.
“Calm down.”
“Don’t tell me to calm down. What am I supposed to do? Hide? I didn’t work my ass off to get here just to be told by a bunch of fuckheads I’m being a show-off. And if I am, maybe it’s because I have something to show off. Ever think of that?”
She grabbed my arm and pulled me toward her. Those eyes, big like headlights, locked on me. Soft and measured: “Why not let them see how talented you are instead of telling them?”
How someone so young could be so aware, so circumspect, was beyond me. My family pathologically chased down attention, like dogs after the mailman. Paneen drove motorcycles through burning bonfires of packing crates to the screams of fans at Seekonk Speedway. When Uncle Tony and Uncle Joe opened Tex Barry’s Coney Island Hot Dogs, they proclaimed themselves to anyone who would listen that they were the Hot Dog Kings of Somerset. We were not a bashful or delicate people. Gifts like ours needed to be shared.
Something shifted that night. I’d loosed a hurricane, a swirling, vehement rage, and Bridget stood unfazed, rooted in place. She wasn’t afraid of my outburst; my anger just sluiced off her. And because of her steadfastness, I felt less combustible. In that moment, something inside me leaned imperceptibly into her. Not fully, but just enough to see if she could bear the weight of me.
For the rest of that autumn, we began a slow nautilus spiral into each other. In between classes, we had fierce discussions about the nature of the soul and creativity, went to the movies and argued their merits, huddled in a library carrel murmuring over history-of-theater homework. Because my meal plan didn’t include weekends, sometimes we’d meet in her room, and she’d do a little jiggy, ha-cha-cha soft shoe while pulling food wrapped in napkins from every coat pocket, like a vaudeville comic. We’d spread it out on the floor, little bundles of pilfered happiness, and have a dorm picnic.
There was a familiarity that spooked and bound us. I knew her, could anticipate her, and she me. We called it karma and fantasized about what past lives had led us inexorably to that precise moment. But what bonded me most to her—drew me closer every time we got together—was her belief in me. She saw what I had always hoped was there—a potential, a specialness I’d felt ever since sitting on those steps on Brownell Street—but, despite my bravado, was too unsure to believe in truly. With her, I felt limitless.
I told her that I was confused. That when I’d arrived at CMU, the last thing I expected to be captivated by was a girl. I explained how growing up I’d never felt like a normal, off-the-rack boy. I laid out, as discreetly as I could, my history with guys. I told her of the anxiety and panic, and how maybe they were related. She grabbed hold of my little finger—a way of connecting, but not too much—and just listened. I’d never been able to talk to anyone about this: certainly not my parents or Dr. Copley, or even the gay guys at RIT. They couldn’t tolerate any ambiguity or waffling. Their own sexuality was still too fresh and fragile. I broke down as I admitted the self-hatred and homophobia I couldn’t help feeling. If I was to be honest, I said, no matter how much I dressed it up and tossed glitter at it, I’d never quite lost the feeling that I was defective, but being around her made me feel less broken.
Holding her gaze for a long time, I said, “I don’t want to be gay anymore.”
She was hesitant, unsure of what that meant, unsure of me. But I needed her. Without her, I faded.
Just before the semester ended, we lay on our backs on her bunk, our legs dangling over the side. “I’m going to change for you, you know,” I said.
“Change into what? A duck?”
“Bridg—” I tried to get her to take this seriously.
She went on: “A man-duck? A duck-man? Oooh, Duckman. You could be a superhero!” She laughed at her own silliness.
“Bridg, you know what I mean.”
She nodded, finally asking the obvious question. “How?” She propped herself on her elbows, and her enormous eyes searched mine. It was impossible to wriggle out from the honesty and vulnerability of her gaze. It was one of the things I loved about her. That and the way she liked to burrow her hands in my coat pockets when it was cold, and how she sent me hand-illustrated cards chronicling our time together.
I thought of conversion therapy, and those Christian weekends where gay men turn straight and stop liking musicals—all in forty-eight hours! “I don’t know, but I’ll figure something out. I promise.”
She nuzzled her head into my chest, rubbing the tip of her nose back and forth on my shirt to scratch it, and she looked up at me. Our mouths just inches apart. Expectation hovered in the space between us. I suddenly wanted to be anywhere but there, in that bed, at that moment. Imagining a far-off future for us, one where these wrinkles of impossibility had been smoothed away by time, always made me feel better. So I changed the subject: “Kids or no kids?”
“What?!”
I said it slower this time. “Kids . . . or . . . no . . . kids. What are you, deaf?”
“What are you, crazy? David, I’m only eighteen!”
“Don’t you have that biological time bomb ticking inside?”
“Fine. Kids. You?”
“Uh-huh.” I propped myself up to a sitting position, farther away from her hope. “Two. Both boys. Joshua David and Benjamin Michael.”
“What
are you doing, creating your own tribe?”
“I’ve always liked Jewish names, what can I say,” doing my best Barbara Streisand. “And Amelia,” I added, “if it’s a girl.”
“That’s sweet. Where would we live?”
“New York,” I said, as if there were any other option for our careers. But, I added, I reserved the right to move all five of us to Los Angeles if the right film role came along and wasn’t snatched up by Timothy Hutton.
Darlene, Bridget’s roommate, who knew my past, clattered in and dumped her dance bag on the floor. She peered into the bottom bunk. “Oh, gross!” she said. “I just don’t get you two.”
Bridget and I looked at each other and laughed. “Us either,” she said.
Wet snow was falling so heavily, it created soft yellow aureoles around the streetlamps. Giant lemon Tootsie Pops lining Fifth Avenue, one block over from CMU. I was on my way home from class in January when someone called my name. I turned around. Andrew Matas, a classmate, told me to wait up. He lived on my way home, so we walked together, the snow shushing the night, making everything muffled and intimate.
He was this beautiful Catalan with a narrow face; full, brooding lips; deep-set eyes; and a nose that had seen the scraped knuckles of a fist at least once. He was a production student, stage design. Andrew—whose real name was Andreu but who felt “Andrew” blunted his ethnicity (I could relate to that)—had a smooth, practiced way about him, as if he stood in front of the mirror and rehearsed his daily life. A lot of students, including me, made fun of him behind his back, but I could pick up a rumble of insecurity beneath his bluster.
When we reached his place, he asked if I wanted to go in. Pointing to the sky, he said, “You might want to warm up before going home.”
I was attracted to him—come on, it was hard not to be—but he was straight; we all knew his girlfriend, a junior acting student named Cheryl. Even though I sensed a slutty undertone to the invitation, I accepted.
His apartment was small—two rooms, really: a kitchen-dining-living room, and off of that a bedroom. The place had that sour-milk smell of damp gym clothes. He opened cabinets. “I have coffee . . . tea . . . or . . .” He looked at the bottle in his hand like he’d never seen it before. “Huh. Bailey’s.”
“Tea, thanks.”
I was standing in a corner of the kitchen, where the counters made an L behind me. Without asking me to move, he reached up and over me to grab something, his chest brushing against my face. He smelled of Drakkar Noir and sawdust. I smiled into his shirt; I didn’t think someone could be this obvious. As he filled the pot and hunted for mugs, he seemed to be making sure every move accented the sinuousness of his body. In movement class we had to act like all kinds of creatures so often that I’d begun categorizing people by their animality. Andrew was a panther: lithe, supple, with an economy of motion. He saw the effect he was having on me and seemed to take pleasure in it. That’s when he came up to me, a sly smile on his face, and put a hand on both sides of me and leaned in. “What would you do if I kissed you right now?”
I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t known something like this might happen when he’d invited me in, but I’m not lying when I say I had no idea why. He’d never expressed interest in me before. In fact, we’d hardly spoken. We shared no classes; we ran in different crowds.
I was a lousy flirt around people who were so sexual. There was no way I could compete, so I didn’t. “You’re just going to have to find out” was all I could muster.
He pressed against me and kissed me. I opened my eyes, and he was looking on expectantly, the same way you wait for that unbidden sigh after offering someone a sip of a stunning Port, or a bite of a sinfully runny Époisses. I must have reacted, because he slipped off his shirt and T-shirt and walked toward the bedroom. I froze. When he turned around and saw I wasn’t following, he asked, “You coming?”
“I don’t know . . . ,” I said, screwing up my face. He looked perplexed. And then he took both hands and ran them down in front of his chiseled, furred chest, as if he were the prize on a game show. His meaning: How could you possibly say no to this?
Sex with him was shockingly, unexpectedly mediocre. He lay draped across the bed, like some marble sculpture by Carpeaux whose sole purpose was to be worshipped. When he did join in, it was just a bunch of perfunctory twistings and crankings of my body parts, like I was a slot machine. Or an old-fashioned dial radio. I felt immense pity for Cheryl. When it was over, he hiked on his pants. “Well, that was a mistake,” he said with a grimace, as if he had just eaten questionable mayonnaise.
Small talk got even smaller as he waited for me to get dressed. Back in the living room, he stood holding open the door. I hurried to scuff on my sneakers.
“See you tomorrow.”
“Yup,” he said, chunking the door closed.
On my way home, trudging through even deeper snow, I tried to make sense of the night. Clearly, he hadn’t invited me into his apartment because he was a loser with women. He was dating Cheryl, for crissake, and women practically melted on him at parties. He had platinum access. Maybe he was one of those guys who, instead of watching football or cleaning sparkplugs, messed around with guys when he was bored. I’d heard of that. But this felt calculated. He’d chosen me, specifically—let’s face it, a less-than-cut specimen with the sex appeal of a Labrador retriever—to assuage lingering doubts. “Yup, see? I knew I wasn’t gay!” I wondered if he would’ve been so dismissive if he had bedded Darrin, that freshman who looked like a blond Rob Lowe, or that ripped senior who’d left school to star in a Broadway show.
The bigger question, though: Why had I gone through with it? I wasn’t cheating, I reminded myself. Bridget and I had never officially started dating, and you can’t cheat on someone you’re not dating. And I’d said I “wanted to change,” “was going to change”; I hadn’t said I already had, right? Besides, some people see more than one person—even have sex with more than one person—and they don’t feel guilty. (Bad example. She and I hadn’t had sex, and I continued to skate figure eights around the topic.)
Dammit. There was no way out of this; I had to tell her. She had rearranged the molecules of my heart.
At first, she crossed her arms and shrugged her shoulders in a way that said, It’s your life. That was where I should have ended it, right there. But her lack of reaction hurt. Didn’t I mean anything to her? The previous night’s actions notwithstanding, I was willing to change for her. Her coolness made me press on to explain.
“It was a mistake.” I suddenly sounded like Andrew.
“Was it?” she said, eyes narrowing. “Or maybe it’s what you wanted. Maybe it’s who you really are.” Who the hell taught her to throw sucker punches like that? Then she leaned in, arms still folded: “Are you so self-centered you can’t see what you do affects other people?”
This was certainly not going the way I’d staged it in my head. She was way off-script. When I reached out, she batted my hand away and backed against the closet door, her enormous eyes blooming red. Incredible. Couldn’t she see I was the injured party here? Andrew had played me, taken advantage of me. She was making this all about her, when, if you think about it, this was actually good news.
“Good news?”
“Yes!”
“Tell me how this can possibly be good news, David.” She spat out the words.
“Because I wasn’t that interested in him,” I shouted. “I was bored. It’s what I’ve been praying for all my life. Don’t you see? It’s happening. And that means there’s hope for us.”
She paused, considering, but confusion won out, and she reached for her coat. “Bridg, wait,” I said, turning her around. She stood in the doorframe of the open closet with her head down. I lifted it to mine. Her face had softened, cracked. It was then I saw something I hadn’t before: the hurt, rejected little girl she had once been. The one ignored and let down by her father, she had said, over and over again. I put out my arms, and she reluctantly came to
me. “Don’t even think of wiping that snot on my shirt, Orloff.” She swatted me and gathered up a bouquet of Kleenex and honked.
That should have been enough. But I kept on talking, mostly for my sake, trying to convince myself that what had happened with Andrew, as callous and demeaning as it was, meant nothing, that I had felt nothing. And as I bolstered myself against the truth, Bridget became a victim of friendly fire.
16
I’VE BEEN TO THE MOUNTAINTOP
Sit,” she said, without turning from the stove.
“Clara, you don’t have to—”
She turned around. Two prongs of a large fork were pointed up at my chest: “Sit! You think I don’t, but I hear how late you come home,” she added. “It’s not healthy. It’d kill a horse.” Ever since starting CMU, I’d been stumbling in as late as two in the morning because of my class schedule, plus stage crew, where we worked for hours building sets, costumes, and props for the upperclassmen. I was used to long hours at RIT and NTID, but this, this was insane. No one at school seemed to mind. I was relieved someone besides me recognized it.
Clara was my elderly neighbor across the hall. She rented out two rooms: a bedroom like mine, and an adjoining bedroom our landlady, Mrs. Mattucci, had converted into a small kitchen. It smelled of grease, onions, and stale cigarette smoke. She wore a housecoat like the kind Vo Costa and Dina wore, except hers was so threadbare I could see through it when she opened the refrigerator. I looked away out of respect.
She put some mismatched tableware in front of me and folded a paper napkin into a triangle. “You don’t have to do this; I can eat at school.”
She took the fork and fished a few chunks of something out of a skillet and plunked them onto a plate, then forked pasta out of another pan. She slid the dish in front of me: several rolled pieces of stuffed meat held together with toothpicks, a tangle of spaghetti on the side. I looked up at a loss.
“Brah-jhole.” I must have appeared confused, because she added, “You never had brahjhole?” I shook my head in ignorance; she shook hers in disbelief. “I get me some nice beef,” she explained, “and I cover it with some pro-zhoot and cheese and bread crumbs and roll it all up like a jelly roll.” She shuffled over to the stove and came back with the small pot and spooned sauce over the meat and spaghetti.
