If You Knew Then What I Know Now

by Ryan Van Meter

  His eyes point to the ceiling and while he thinks, I study his marvelous chin. He’s ten years younger than me so he would have been in sixth grade. I squint, picturing his thirteen-year-old self—long limbs, giant feet and his face bare without his beard. This slouching imaginary kid isn’t very far in front of his first dates with men and then a bit later, his first real boyfriend—all of it adding up to more experience at twenty-three than I have now in my thirties because I dragged my feet for so many years, then lived with the same man for most of a decade.

  After my breakup, I hated seeing gay male couples, particularly if they looked happy, and especially in the wedding announcement portraits of the Sunday New York Times. I was jealous, of course, and angry, and I silently cursed them for having what I was missing. One of you will leave soon and the other one is too stupid to see it. I often wondered if I’d ever again believe any man’s promises. In my worst moments, I doubted it was possible for two men to ever successfully commit to each other, thinking the bad rap we get for being shallow and promiscuous was true. Naïve as it was, I felt like the solitary romantic, even if couples of all kinds have been messing around with tradition and commitment for decades. The best we could hope for, it seemed in those days, and sometimes still does, was sex every once in a while with mostly bearable periods of loneliness in between.

  My new guy scratches his whiskers. “Probably I was at one of my dad’s basketball games, so the high school gym.” He shrugs, and I smile because he’s just not old enough to be this sentimental. “You ready for the historic tour?” I ask, hopping off my stool. “Grab your beer. I’ll show you the actual spot.” How strange to share this place with a man as old now as I was then, and to realize I never thought about love until I was out of it.

  The boa constrictor needs the light on every minute of his life, and he curls around it to squeeze the heat with his scales. It’s two in the morning, and my boyfriend and I are in the basement bedroom of his nephew, the second of his older brother’s three sons; it’s the last night of our weekend visit to Ohio. I’m across the room from the boa constrictor’s aquarium, stretched out on a threadbare sofa that smells suspiciously like dogs. My boyfriend sleeps on a mattress between the desk holding the boa’s aquarium and a wall full of shelves with the other snake, a ball python, the lizard, and the scorpion.

  Of course at home in Chicago, we sleep together in the bed we’ve shared for years. I have rules about being touched when I’m trying to fall asleep, so we rest sort of shoved against each other with an extra pillow between us that we’ve named “Brown” for the color of the pillowcase, as in, “Stop hogging ‘Brown,’ and put him back in the middle, please.” Before I have the chance to think that it’s odd to sleep in a basement with three reptiles and a murderous insect—whatever scorpions are—I realize it probably can’t be any stranger than two men sleeping every night with a pillow that has a name.

  Under me, the sofa is lumpy but comfortable and covered in worn bed sheets. Despite the light, I’m turned toward the boa, watching him because I can’t sleep. The cylindrical bulb hangs over the tangled driftwood inside the aquarium. The snake unfurls his head and slender neck from the tighter mass of himself and pokes around the light, one way and then the other, as though he can’t find a good sleeping spot. My boyfriend does the same thing on his borrowed mattress. He shifts under his blanket, wiggles his butt, and by the pace of his breathing, I know he’s awake.

  “Hey,” I whisper across the darkness. He replies with more wiggling and a deep short groan—the sound he makes in the middle of the night when one of us rolls out of a dream and bumps the other or he wakes up freezing because I’ve stolen the quilt. It means he isn’t fully asleep but neither is he awake. As soon as I hear that little grunt in this basement, and away from the privacy of our bedroom, it feels wrong.

  I whisper, “No,” but now he’s gone, fallen into real sleep, simply and unnoticed, as usual. He needs to lie still for only about a minute in order to sleep soundly for eight hours. My slumber is more conditional and involves complete darkness and silence, and the following items: a glass of water, tissues, my cell phone, and ChapStick. Right now, it’s all balanced on a weight bench next to the sofa.

  My boyfriend’s brother knows about us. His wife also knows because he told her after my boyfriend came out to him. We don’t know if the boys know, and my boyfriend hasn’t found the right moment this weekend to ask. They’re all teenagers, so it seems that they probably figured it out on their own. Why else would their uncle keep bringing his roommate to family barbecues, graduations, and anniversary parties?

  One of the boys is watching a movie upstairs on the big TV next to the tank with the piranhas. It’s something loud about robots; mechanical voices and machine squeaks drift down the stairs. Tomorrow morning, we’re getting up early to drive the six hours of barns and trees back home. I shove my shoulder down into the cushion and knead the pillow with my cheek, still facing the snake light. I thought the sofa was keeping me awake, but hearing the soft, familiar snore across the room, I think I’m not used to sleeping like this—in the same room with him but not with him. Even if I usually can’t fall asleep with him touching me, there’s something so lonely about the room, this sofa, that snake.

  I could sleep with him. Just get up and in that bed and no one would ever know, and it could be as easy as tiptoeing across the carpet, sliding under the blanket and into my place on his left side. But what if his nephew needs something in the morning, tries to sneak in for a T-shirt, or to feed his zoo, and sees us, in his bed? Then I remember my boyfriend’s brother—the kid’s dad—never said we had to sleep separately. When he showed us his son’s room where we’d sleep for the weekend, he first demonstrated how to keep out the dogs by wedging a dumbbell against the door, and then he nodded to the far corner of the room, at the aquarium on the desk.

  “The only thing is,” he said. “You can’t turn off that light.”

  “The light for that snake has to stay on all night?” I asked, too loudly.

  “Yeah, you can’t turn off the snake light,” he said, shrugging.

  My boyfriend and I had separated ourselves automatically, without a word between us or for any good reason.

  So how do we learn to be in love? My friend Michael has no answer except to say that’s some heavy thinking. My friend Brian isn’t sure he wants to answer because he’s afraid of sounding like a cliché, or worse, an old, old man. But when he does, he remembers his first boyfriend, both of them eighteen, both of them stepping out of their closets and into each other’s lives. And he cringes at what he considered romantic back then—cheesy poems, piano serenades, feeding each other. But think about hetero kids, he says. They get to start dating when they’re twelve, so we shouldn’t feel bad about being corny because we were making up for lost time. Andrew says old movies. Jordan doesn’t think he ever learned how to be in love with a man. I treat my boyfriends like buddies, he says, because friendship with guys is the only model there is. And how does that usually work out? He laughs, and says one word: disappointing. Paul says watching his parents. He learned about commitment and fidelity from how his mom stuck with his dad no matter what. Kevin doesn’t have any idea but thinks it’s ironic that pretty much the only time we get to see two gay men doing anything together is in porn, and those construction crews and corrals of cowboys aren’t very affectionate. About my question, Landon just says that it’s interesting.

  My ex-boyfriend, the one who left me after eight years, who lives now with his new boyfriend says my question is hard. “I know,” I say, and I’m not sure if he means it’s a difficult one, or it’s difficult because I’m the one asking. “I think for me learning to fall in love with a man came from instinct,” he says. I don’t want him to think that I’m asking about us, so I make my voice sound like a newscaster’s—the steady tone, whether they’re delivering good or bad news. “What instinct?” “For completeness,” he says. “After coming out it was easier because the secrecy
was gone.” Before that, it could have been anyone, it didn’t matter who, it was always only fooling around. “Has that instinct been revised?” I ask before I think enough about it. I’m not sure I should hear his answer, and then I wonder if his new relationship is more likely to last because he learned from our failure. “Yes,” he says. “It’s less about emotions now,” and he smiles quietly. “And more about commitment.” Does that answer the question?

  After my ex moved in with his new boyfriend, and we were trying to be friends, my friend Margaret told me she didn’t understand. “All the gay men I know stay close with their exes.” She’s divorced and would be happy to never hear from that man again. “Isn’t that hard?” I’d just told her the latest thing my ex had mentioned during a phone conversation that I had taken personally. “I don’t know why you’d want to hear that,” she said. I wanted to say, but didn’t, that I was probably still in love with him. And I wanted to say, but didn’t, that strange as it was, there was something comforting in how our past loves collaborate with our present. And I wanted to say, but also didn’t, that spending so much time feeling ashamed of who we are must bear on the ways we love each other—it just has to. But I wasn’t sure, so I told her I didn’t want to let go because finding love with a man has been so rare and hard.

  I’m in bed with him, the new man, my face on his back, thinking about that conversation with her months before this night, and the only thing I know about love is that I don’t know anything. Whatever I’ve learned is lost when we’re like this, and I’m falling asleep against him in the spot where I’ll wake in the morning, when he’ll leave for another month of us away from each other. “What are we doing?” is the question always under everything, the one I can’t ask. One answer could be “reinventing love,” but that’s only one. Tonight, we’ve had dinner at the place where we always have dinner. We’ve eaten cookie dough Blizzards—he insisted we order the largest size as he always does. We’ve curled together on the sofa, easing into each other and sleep, before bed. What are we doing? Not one of us knows.

  I push my chest into his back, tuck my knees into the crook of his bent knees. My mouth only a few inches behind his neck so I can smell his shampoo. Lying on my side, I curl one arm over him and he squeezes my hand in his. My other arm slides under the pillow under his head, and shoves forward across the mattress. It’s the perfect way to sleep with a man, yet it still feels new every single time. But as soon as my body slides into place, fitting the way that only one key’s grooves are carved smooth for only one lock, a memory opens for the first time in ten years. Another bed, another man, another pillow, another back. That older guy I dated, the one who asked for the bites, he taught me this, word by patient word. Put your arm here, he said, tugging my wrist. Push this one under. Scoot closer. Closer. Now pull your knees into me. There. That’s it.

  RYAN VAN METER grew up in Missouri and studied English at the University of Missouri-Columbia. After graduating, he lived in Chicago for ten years and worked in advertising. He holds an MA in creative writing from DePaul University and an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa. His essays have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Indiana Review, Gulf Coast, Arts & Letters, and Fourth Genre, among others, and selected for anthologies including Best American Essays 2009. In the summer of 2009, he was awarded a residency at the MacDowell Colony. He currently lives in California where he is an assistant professor of creative nonfiction at the University of San Francisco.

  © 2011 by Ryan Van Meter

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Van Meter, Ryan, 1975-

  eISBN : 978-1-936-74740-5

  1. Van Meter, Ryan, 1975---Childhood and youth. 2. Authors, American--21st century--Biography. 3. Gay men--United States--Biography. I. Title.

  PS3622.A585495Z46 2011

  814’.6--dc22

  [B]

  2010025148

  Manufactured in Canada.

  This book is printed on acid-free paper.

  Sarabande Books is a nonprofit literary organization.

  The Kentucky Arts Council, the state arts agency, supports Sarabande Books with state tax dollars and funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.