by David Leite
Before dinner that night, Alan slipped two Fiesta plates from his collection of more than two hundred pieces onto the warped oak table, and tucked colorful napkins to their left. On top went a fork and steak knife. He poured wine, lit candles, and lowered the lights. He served me a thick slice of pork and a spoonful of roasted apples, all drenched in cider-butter sauce. He watched. I took a deep breath and cut into it. “Excellent!” I said, and it was. He nodded his appreciation, and only then did he turn his attention to his plate. I ate all of it, every last butter-laden bite, for him. Afterward, I cut him a generous piece of pie and sliced a sliver for myself. He ate it and then, holding out his empty plate, asked for more. I was deeply pleased that I had pleased him.
Throughout that autumn, pork and pie became our weekend dinner. And from the repetition and sanctity of that meal, even though our menus ultimately changed and grew, came our first tradition: Sunday supper.
28
THEREIN LIES THE LIE
Mrs. Young reminded me of a strand of antique pearls—luminescent skin over round, smooth cheeks—and even though she was well into her eighties, she carried herself with an elegance and class you don’t see much these days. When I spoke to her, she nodded and smiled, listening to everything I said in a way that made me feel I was the highlight of her day. Alan told me she had a remarkable ability to remember birthdays, favorite colors, and your latest infatuation. I had just met her, but I was smitten.
She and her two daughters, Susan and Emily, had invited Alan and me to their home on Shelter Island for Thanksgiving. It was momentous, because it was our first holiday together. Since Mrs. Young assured us she could wrestle with the turkey and attend to the various pots burbling on the stove—“I’ve been doing it for decades, after all”—the rest of us went for a walk along the water, at Alan’s suggestion.
“Really? It’s so cold,” I said, hoping Susan or Emily would back me up.
“Must like the beach in November.” He reminded me of the line from my ad in a way that sounded like it was time to pay up. I could feel irritation tightening around my neck. In the best of times, I was inadequately dressed. I didn’t see the point of spending money on a raincoat or boots—you use them maybe a dozen times a year—and I hadn’t worn gloves and a hat since my mother had dressed me. I’m genetically blessed with hot hands and a helmet of hair. The last thing I’d expected was a stroll by the bay on one of the coldest Thanksgivings on record, so I’d made no provisions. Alan, on the other hand, looked like a Macy’s balloon, wrapped in layers of clothes, a scarf, a hat, gloves, and boots.
As we walked along the beach, the wind pulled at our jackets and snapped my pants against my legs so hard, it felt like my shins were being caned. Eddies of sand swirled around us. Undaunted, Alan forged ahead over driftwood and along frothy lips of foam left behind from white-capped waves lapping the shore. Susan and Emily, easily twenty-five years my senior, were keeping up with him, talking and laughing as if they were in a General Mills International Coffee commercial. I lagged behind, unable to hear anything over the incessant howl. “Are you frigging kidding me?” I muttered. Finally, I had to say it: “Can we get the hell out of here? I’m freezing.” It came out harsh and bludgeoning. Alan looked back at me oddly, like he suddenly didn’t know who I was, and shame thundered through me. I tried to make a joke of it, bluffing that I was fine, really, we could go on, but Susan and Emily had picked up on the anger in my voice, and we all turned back.
On the way to the house, I understood something: Alan wasn’t built to withstand the gale force of someone like me. If he saw my temper, my veneta, he’d walk. So I would lie, I decided. I would hold in all the horrible, the untoward, the negative. I’d hug the horrendous to my chest like it was an unexploded bomb, and turn away to protect him from it. Who I am had to become invisible to him.
At dinner, which Mrs. Young had laid out while we were at the beach, I was wiped from the energy it took to keep the conversation tinkling and interesting. While passing mashed potatoes and talking about tide charts, I tried to drown my pique and rage. I knew well enough, after all these years, that this had little if anything to do with Alan, or going out in the cold. It wasn’t about control or loss of it, as David Lindsey often asked. These periods just descended, and all I could do was dig my nails into my palms and wait for them to pass. So I complimented. I smiled. I laughed, sometimes too hard. Through it all, Alan kept watching me, evaluating me. Every time someone said something, he glanced over to check my reaction. How could I become transparent if he wouldn’t stop staring?
I excused myself and went to the bathroom to escape. I sat on the closed toilet seat, feeling drained. With my head against the wall, I closed my eyes and breathed deeply. Everything grated: Susan’s impatience, Emily’s restraint, Mrs. Young’s generosity. And, especially, Alan’s incessant looks. I felt a bottomless sorrow open up, because I had believed that once you met that person, The One (my nickname for Alan), you’re not supposed to feel miserable anymore. But it was a lie—another lie. I felt as irritable, tired, and heavy as I ever had. More so, maybe, because I couldn’t blame being single or dating an ass for my wretchedness. No matter how much I tried not to catastrophize, I was convinced that when we left the next day, Alan would break up with me in the car. “You know,” I imagined him saying, “this isn’t going to work.” He had seen me—the broken, unsalvageable me—and there would be no second chance. No opportunity to gouge those images out of his brain with my thumbs, to blind him to the worst parts of me.
When what felt like a reasonable length of time for a good dump had passed, I flushed the toilet and ran the water, to make it sound like I was washing my hands. Looking at my reflection, I fixed a smile on my face—my mother’s Courtesy-Booth Girl smile—and whispered, “Please try harder.”
After we cleared the table, Emily, Alan, and I played Scrabble at the card table pushed up against the stairs. I couldn’t concentrate. It was as if my eyes were backward, looking in, searching for answers. No matter how many times I rearranged my tiles, no words emerged. But I was certain no one could pick up on it now. I had managed to become invisible, to arrange myself—my body, my face, the tilt of my head—in such a way that I resembled someone who was enjoying himself. I don’t recall what word Alan was trying to pass off as English, but Emily, who was wicked smart, wouldn’t let him off the hook. I jumped in, too. He knew he was on thin ice, but he kept trying to bluff. The more he bluffed, and the more Emily and I pushed back, the more he laughed.
I had never encountered this in my life, but Alan laughed so hard, he started crying. Huge tears rolled down his face, and the more he scrubbed at them with the cuff of his sleeve, the more they came. Emily and I began laughing, which only fueled his, causing more tears. I’d never fallen in love with someone’s laugh until then. Suddenly, something let go inside, and I was overcome with the desire to grab his face and kiss him all over. His laughter had short-circuited whatever was going on with me. No one had ever done that before, and it was salubrious. My appetite, which had absented itself all day, found me, and I asked Mrs. Young if I could make myself a sandwich. She was delighted, I can only assume at the change in me, and unwrapped leftovers and put together my sandwich. I took it back to the card table, and handily trounced Alan and his imaginary English, only to be bested by Emily.
On the way to Barryville the next morning, he said, “Can I ask you something?” My stomach pitched. Here it was, the brush-off.
“Okay.”
He didn’t take his eyes from the road, which was just as well. I didn’t want him to see me. I stared forward, too, waiting. “You’re really moody, aren’t you?” He had studied me all Thanksgiving afternoon, gathering proof I was unfit. I was stung by what he’d said. It didn’t jibe with how most people would characterize me, I was certain. Moody was someone who moped, was depressed, lifeless. I considered myself passionate, deeply emotional, exuberant, and opinionated. I was Portuguese; it was my cultural birthright. But moody? No. That
was the domain of the poet, the writer, and that kid in high school who was never the same after his father was murdered in New Orleans. He pressed into the lockers going down the halls and bled into the bleachers in gym. He was a ghost. That was moody.
Before I could say anything, he added, “The good thing is your moods don’t last.” He turned quickly and shot me a smile. I de-escalated. He wasn’t looking to break up after all. This wasn’t a car ride that would end with him dropping me off at the Greyhound station near Barryville, an apologetic, halfhearted smile on his face. His was an observation, nothing more.
That week in therapy, I mentioned what Alan had said. David Lindsey watched with that amused look of his. “What?” I said, “I’m sure you have some bitchy comment to make.”
“Do you remember in the first few months of therapy, I said to you, ‘I think you might be depressed?’”
“No, because you didn’t.”
“Ohhhh, yes I did, sir. I have the session notes to prove it.”
“So what of it?”
“Do you remember your response?”
“Apparently not.”
“Let me refresh your memory. You took your fists and hammered down on my mission chair—Lord, I thought you were going to break it—and shouted, ‘I am not nor have I ever been depressed.’”
“I don’t remember that, and for the record I don’t think I’m depressed.”
“Then what do you think Alan was picking up on?”
I couldn’t come up with a good answer, so I stared at the spider plants dying in his window.
“Well, you can continue lying to yourself, David Leite. Denial works.” He took a look at the clock above my head. “Our time is up.” Sometimes I thought he planned his last words so that they would circle around me all week like vultures, waiting.
29
WHEN I FALL IN LOVE
Alan sat at dinner, pushing chicken around his plate, preoccupied and silent. It was early December, and he’d just returned from visiting his mother and sister Diane in Baltimore. I was beginning to log his patterns: Every time he returned, he was out of sorts for a while. “Remind me never to spend more than two days there,” he had asked me the last time he came home. He’d ignored my warning this trip and, again, wound up glum at the table. I fought my inclination to plunge my hand into the quiet and fish out whatever was bothering him. If something happened while he was down there, I reasoned, he’ll tell me.
Suddenly: “Do you think, if this thing is real,” he finally said, pointing his fork back and forth between us, “you can promise me forever?”
I set my bowl of Fiber One aside. Here we go, I thought. The Conversation. By that time, thanks to my Coterie of Penises, I’d spent the previous five years serial-dating and getting any romantic notions of forever kicked out of me. I also knew how Alan had been shunted from his mother to his grandmother to their pastor and back to his mother when he was growing up, and how much it had devastated him. The idea of permanence was paramount to his happiness. Yet I didn’t want to lie.
“No, mon cher, I can’t.”
Suddenly he looked like a five-year-old whose Big Wheel I’d accidentally backed over with my car. “I want to promise forever,” I rushed to say, trying to cheer him. “But neither of us has any idea who we’ll be in twenty years. We could grow apart.”
You’d have thought I’d run over his dog, too.
“Or—or—or, on the other hand, we could grow closer. Right? That’s a possibility. . . .”
He traffic-copped me, putting up his palm and cutting me off. “I get it. Don’t worry about it.”
I struggled to find a way to express my hopes for us. I tried journaling, to see if I could unearth something. I verbally wrestled with David Lindsey, blaming him for making me a romantic pragmatist—so realistic and clear-eyed about love that I couldn’t indulge in a little forever fantasy for the poor guy. I asked advice of friends who’d been together longer than us. All nonstarters.
Alan said nothing more about it, but his silence shouted: I can’t feel safe with you.
“You have a passport, right?” he asked a few nights later, while clearing the table.
“Yes . . . why?” I was intrigued.
“Oh, no reason.” It was his playful voice again, the one shaded with possibility and surprise.
“Let me guess: You’re an international jewel thief, and you need an extra orifice to stash the loot when you escape.”
He just smiled and continued washing the dishes.
“Tell me!” I demanded.
“There’s nothing to tell.” Nothing turned out to be a weeklong trip to Paris to celebrate New Year’s Eve with his friends Giles and Larry, who lived there.
Larry, an American, was plump, with mischievous eyes and a remarkably athletic laugh. It could soar to high titters and then plummet to thunderous tugboat blasts. He was all twittering fingers, elastic eyebrows, and hands cupped over his mouth after letting slip his newest morsel of gossip. It took all of a few minutes before he was pulling me into a corner and taking me into his confidences, which, I later learned, included everyone. It was hard not to be taken with him.
Giles, on the other hand, was trim and compact, with dark hair and eyes. From the moment he greeted me, he seemed constricted and dense, as folded in on himself as Larry was expansive. A black hole to a supernova. Giles was always shushing Larry or exploding over the slightest offense. And he had a terrible habit of pulling on his eyebrows when he talked to you, then opening his hand and looking at his quarry. Trichotillomania, I remembered from psych class. I didn’t like him, but I made an effort.
He was a sensational cook, though, and the poster child for the French Paradox: Despite the prodigious amounts of food and wine he consumed, he never gained weight. Le bâtard! I watched him prepare New Year’s Eve dinner: foie gras he’d ordered fresh from the farmer; duck breasts cooked slowly in a pan with only their own fat to sear them to a deep, crusty brown; salad with a luscious vinaigrette that hugged the leaves; side dishes I can’t remember; cheeses; and gâteau au chocolat with ultrarich crème fraîche, which I thought was whipped cream and heaped onto my dessert in mounds. Champagne, wine, and Calvados flowed freely. Whatever Giles lacked in tact, he made up for in generosity.
Toward the middle of dinner, he leaned unsteadily in my direction. “Calvados ouvre votre trou Norman,” he said, a bit lasciviously.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Calvados opens your Norman hole,” he translated.
“Oh . . .” I wasn’t about to let this boozed-up Frenchman anywhere near my Norman hole, whatever that was. I later discovered he hadn’t been making a pass. He was referring to how knocking back a shot during a long meal makes room for even more food—which was his intention, because sometime around one in the morning the courses finally stopped.
I rang in 1994 with my first case of a wicked crise de foie. My normally parsimonious diet had done nothing to prepare me for Giles’s Napoleonic assault of rich French food, and I spent the day in bed, moaning, craving nothing but twigs and leaves—any roughage to get this stuff out of me.
Once I recovered, and my stomach and fat became reacquainted, Larry, Giles, Alan, and I never passed up an opportunity to dine out. We lingered long over brasserie tables splotched with the oceanic liquid of moules marinière and splattered with murderous-looking drops of blood from Alan’s steak frites, which made it look like a crime scene. Or in a clubby restaurant swathed in red leather, where children sat erect, reading menus almost as tall as them, and I had foie gras for the third time. Or, as a thank-you to our hosts, a dinner at Jacques Cagna, the most formal and expensive restaurant I had ever been to, where an appetizer of a tiny puff-pastry box of three scallops cost more than twenty-seven dollars. And we all had it. (For those who are bad at math, that’s $180 in today’s bucks—just for appetizers.)
Toward the end of our visit, while Larry went to French class and Giles was at work, we were alone in their huge, magnificent apartme
nt. I flipped on their five-figure sound system and stopped dead in the enormous living room. From the ceiling speakers wafted lyrics to a song—“When I Fall in Love”—that gave voice to what I hadn’t been able to all those weeks earlier.
We had yet to profess our love for the other, but this song syncopated two ways of loving, equal but different. “When I fall in love, it will be forever, or I’ll never fall in love” was all Alan. Those words would comfort him, make him feel safe. “When I give my heart, it will be completely, or I’ll never give my heart” spoke to me. I couldn’t promise him forever, but I could promise that I’d love him completely for as long as I could. It was my own personal forever.
“ALAN?” I shouted through the labyrinthine space.
“WHAT?” he shouted back from our room, the maid’s room, on the other side of the apartment behind the butler’s pantry.
“C’MERE!”
“FOR WHAT?”
“WOULD YOU JUST PLEASE COME HERE?”
I reset the song and waited. When he entered, I positioned him under a speaker as the opening strains embraced the room.
He began to speak. “Shh! Listen.”
As a man’s voice crooned the “forever” verse, I laid my hand on his chest. “This is you.” Then, as a woman glided through the “completely” stanza, I took his hand and placed it on my heart. “This is me.”
I waited. For that movie moment. For him to break down crying and hug me, because he understood how much he meant to me. For us to say “I love you.” For Olympian sex, the sounds of which would carry through that cavern of an apartment, and make Larry and Giles smirk at us during dinner and ask, “So what did you two boys do this afternoon?” We were halfway there: The song, I later learned, was from the freaking soundtrack to Sleepless in Seattle. Instead, he nodded and smiled. That was it. A nod and a smile, which made me rush in and proclaim, “This is our song!”—pointing to the speakers as Clive Griffin and Céline Dion kept singing. “Don’t you get it?”
