William J. Mann

by Men Who Love Men (lit)

  This is one pushy kid. I should just say no, end it right here. But instead I say, “Yeah, okay. Call me tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Awesome. Talk to you tomorrow, Henry.” And he hangs up.

  I smirk. By tomorrow Luke will have met someone else, probably some hot boy closer to his own age, either on the dance floor at the A House or on the steps of Spiritus Pizza, and he’ll have forgotten all about me.

  Unless, of course, he still wants to meet Jeff badly enough.

  “Henry!” Jeff hollers up the stairs. “Are you coming?”

  I head down. “I had a call,” I tell him as I enter the guesthouse’s common area. “This may be hard for you to accept, Jeff, but I do have a life of my own. Sometimes your beck and call has to wait.”

  Jeff just smirks. “Oh, Lloyd, our boy is feeling rebellious tonight.”

  “We do appreciate you coming down, Henry,” Lloyd says from the bar. He comes around from behind, carrying a bottle of champagne and three glasses.

  “Well,” I say, “I guess this really is a celebration. What’s the big news?”

  “Don’t rush things,” Jeff says, settling himself onto the couch and propping his feet up on the coffee table. “We need the proper mood.”

  Lloyd sets the bottle and the glasses down and softens the light. I sit in a chair opposite Jeff, wondering what this is all about. It’s more than just a book deal. It concerns Lloyd, too. I watch him move across the room to the front desk, where he turns off the ringer on the phone. Lloyd might not be as put together as Jeff, but he still looks damn good for his fourth decade as well. Buzzed head, a sexy soul patch of hair below his lower lip, a tattoo of a dragonfly on his well-rounded shoulder. He’s wearing a white ribbed tank top and low-rise jeans, and for a moment my mind flickers back to sex with him, as those green eyes hovered above me, those lips softly touching mine…

  “Okay,” Lloyd says, breaking my reverie as he plops down on the couch next to Jeff, putting his arm around his lover’s shoulders. “You want to tell him or should I?”

  “Tell me what?” I ask, sitting forward, finding myself getting anxious, despite the happy grins and the bottle of champagne waiting to be opened.

  Jeff holds my eyes. “We’re getting married,” he says.

  I look from him over to Lloyd.

  “The middle of next month,” Lloyd adds.

  “I know it’s not far away,” Jeff says, “but we want it to coincide with the anniversary of the day we met.”

  “So we can keep the same anniversary,” Lloyd says.

  “And Henry,” Jeff says. “We want you to be our best man.”

  The words haven’t fully penetrated my mind. “Married,” I say.

  “Yeah, one hundred percent legal,” Jeff exults. “After sixteen years I’m finally gonna make an honest man out of him.”

  They giggle like schoolgirls.

  “Married,” I say again.

  “Well, what do you think?” Lloyd asks.

  “Well,” I say, unsure of my thoughts, “I didn’t think marriage was something you’d be interested in.” Years of political pontificating from Jeff and Lloyd come flooding back to me, their endless rant against the status quo. “I mean, marriage is a failed heterosexual institution, isn’t it? You’ve both called it that.”

  “Sure it is,” Jeff says, “but maybe we homos can improve on the formula.” He’s beaming like a jack o’lantern.

  “But,” I say, feeling the need to somehow challenge them, “you both have always rejected the whole marriage thing. I mean, when have you guys ever been monogamous?”

  “Why does monogamy have to go part and parcel with marriage?” Lloyd asks. “That’s part of how we can improve on the formula. After all, haven’t Jeff and I shown, after sixteen years, that you can have a lasting commitment without being monogamous?”

  “Oh, come on,” I say, surprised at how antagonistic I’m feeling. But I can’t help myself. “You guys haven’t been together for sixteen years. Not really. You’ve had your share of ups and downs. There have been big chunks of time when you’ve been apart, when you haven’t known how to define yourselves. I know. I was there.”

  “That’s why we want you as our best man, Henry,” Lloyd says simply. “We’ve been through a lot together. You know us better than anyone.”

  The smile has faded from Jeff’s face. I can tell he’s annoyed that I’m not jumping for joy. Indeed, I’m surprised myself. Why am I being such a putz? Why am I not thrilled? Why am I not throwing my arms around the two of them, congratulating them? Jeff and Lloyd are my best friends!

  “Henry,” Jeff says, talking to me patiently, as if he were addressing a child, “what marriage offers Lloyd and me is a public acknowledgement of our relationship. After all, I had to show up for three—count ‘em—three of my brother’s weddings, even though each one of them was a disaster and everyone knew it from the start. Now he can show up for mine—which, by the way, has lasted longer than all three of his put together.”

  I make a face. “So that’s why you’re getting married? To get even with your family? To force some kind of acknowledgement from them?”

  Jeff holds my gaze. “That’s one reason, yes. That’s the reason anyone gets married. So that the world can see and recognize and affirm their relationship. Finally the state is giving gay people that same opportunity.”

  “Henry,” Lloyd asks, “are you not happy for us?”

  “Well, of course I’m happy for you,” I manage to say. “Don’t get me wrong.”

  “It sure doesn’t seem that way,” Jeff says, clearly peeved. “Maybe we ought to skip the champagne.”

  “No, we’re not skipping the champagne,” Lloyd says. “I’m going to pop the cork as soon as Henry gives us his answer.”

  I frown. “My answer to what?”

  “Maybe you didn’t hear me.” Lloyd smiles kindly and finds my eyes. “We’re asking you to be our best man.”

  Once, years ago, during one of those in-between, questioning periods for Jeff and Lloyd, I had allowed myself to imagine Lloyd asking me a very different question. I had imagined him asking me to marry him, or at least to join him in a committed relationship. Of course, it was folly, and deep down, I knew it. Jeff was always the one Lloyd loved. But still I allowed myself, however briefly, to dream. And now, instead of asking me to marry him, Lloyd was asking me to be his best man.

  I gaze into his eyes, then look over at Jeff, who’s looking back at me.

  “You are hopelessly enmeshed with those two,” Joey once told me. “You want Lloyd and you want to be Jeff.”

  I shrugged him off, but an earlier boyfriend, Shane, had once made a very similar statement. “Henry,” Shane had said, handing me back my keys in a manner not so different from the way I’d later hand Joey his, “you won’t be able to really love anyone until you learn to love yourself.”

  I had sighed. “Please, Shane. Can we end this without psychoanalysis?”

  “No, we can’t,” Shane insisted, in the way only Shane could insist. “The problem is that you are always defining yourself against either Jeff or Lloyd, and in your estimation, you always come up short.”

  Shane was smart. Of all my boyfriends, he probably knew me best. He saw through everything. He’d met me, in fact, on the dance floor with Jeff, and saw up close and personal my early infatuation with him. That I once worshipped Jeff and everything about him was obvious. Just by asking me to dance one night, Jeff O’Brien had changed my life. I’d been a skinny computer geek in my early twenties who’d always watched Jeff from afar, and when one night he’d looked over and extended his hand to me, I couldn’t believe my luck. Jeff O’Brien—he of the blue eyes and six-pack and bubble butt—was asking me to dance.

  And though we never had sex, Jeff dubbed me his “sister” and took me under his wing. Henry Weiner only really came alive under Jeff O’Brien’s tutelage. Jeff got me to the gym. He taught me how to dress. He allowed me to tag along with him in the days when the gay party ci
rcuit was at its height. Off we’d fly to San Francisco and Palm Springs and Chicago and Atlanta and Montreal, and in Jeff’s afterglow, I was transformed. He became, in the words of Shane, my own personal deity. Despite the fact that my grandfather had been a rabbi, I’d never believed in God—until Jeff came along.

  It was a pretty heady time, I admit. How thrilling, how completely new, was the experience of being looked at, of being able to take off my shirt at Gay Pride and get barked at by hot boys. I got so buff, in fact, I discovered there were guys who were willing to pay good money just to touch—and maybe lick a little—so, for a time, I was an escort. Jeff called me the Happy Hooker. But I didn’t stay happy for long. Despite all the attention, I felt lonely. Instead of making me feel more special, hustling eventually made me feel pretty worthless. Enter Lloyd Griffith.

  It was, of course, inevitable that I’d meet Lloyd through Jeff, and in the gaze of those soft green eyes, a different sort of fascination emerged. Lloyd had spent many years as a psychologist, though when I met him he was transitioning to his new career running his Provincetown guesthouse. Still, Lloyd knew very well how to zero in on one’s core issues. He helped me to see that my whole life was ego—not just in my need to be physically admired, but in my constant search for external affirmation. By going within—which we did, in long, intimate meditation sessions at sunrise in the stillness of Beech Forest—I was able to find some internal peace and satisfaction. Then, after a sacred sex workshop, we had incredibly passionate sex, and that pushed me over the edge of bliss. In no time at all, I was head over heels in love with Dr. Lloyd Griffith.

  Of course, the feelings for Lloyd went exactly nowhere, and I was soon back to doing what I do best: being alone. I stopped going to the gym. Ice cream became a substitute for all the sex I’d been having. There were brief flickers of hope—named Daniel, named Joey—but always I ended up back in my little apartment above Nirvana watching Good Times on TV Land. When I started responding to ideas with shouts of “Dy-no-mite!” Jeff issued a moratorium on seventies TV shows for a month. I cheated. I was back to J.J. and Maude and Fred Sanford in a week and a half.

  And despite all I’d learned from Lloyd about ego, I can’t deny that I’ve come to miss some of that old external affirmation. Sure, I still try to meditate, and sometimes I still practice little rituals like saying, “I love you, you are good” to my reflection in the mirror. But there’s something about a guy coming up to you on the dance floor, running his finger down your torso, tasting your sweat and telling you, “You oughta bottle this stuff,” that just makes your day.

  Yes, I know all this dependence on my ego to feel good about myself once ensured my downfall. But here’s the thing: I spent too many years on the sidelines to go happily into retirement. My time at the ball just wasn’t long enough. I had, what? Three years? Four at the most. Jeff might be able to sit in on a Saturday night baking brownies and watching old Bette Davis movies with Lloyd and a bunch of lesbian friends—but he had a good fifteen years out there! I’m not ready to fade away like that.

  Is that the reason I’m being so resistant to the idea of Jeff and Lloyd getting married? Because the idea of settled domesticity unnerves me? Because I don’t want that to be me, curled up on a couch eating brownies, getting fatter, becoming more and more forgotten by the boys on the dance floor?

  No, that’s not it. I’d be only too happy to go that route if it was Lloyd next to me.

  Or anyone, for that matter.

  I’d give anything to have what they have, to not be alone.

  Marriage. What a strange concept. I grew up never thinking marriage was an option for me. For my sisters, yes. For other people around me. But not for little gay Henry Weiner. In some ways, never having to think about marriage made things easier. You didn’t have to worry about not finding the absolutely right person because, after all, there was nothing that legally kept you together. Now, as I watch all those happy faces on television—all those happy gay faces running down to apply for marriage licenses across the Commonwealth of Massachusetts—it just underscores how alone I really am. Am I for gay marriage? Maybe—if I could find someone who wanted to marry me.

  See, here’s the thing. When the state Supreme Court ruled that the state had to allow gay couples to marry, I just never thought Jeff and Lloyd would be among the throng who scampered down to Town Hall. They’ve never been the type for convention of any kind. They make great shows of rejecting old, failed paradigms—like monogamy, they say. But here they are, sitting across from me like two little high school lovebirds. Be happy for us, their faces are pleading.

  Be our best man.

  Best man.

  What a strange turn of a phrase.

  How can one feel best when one doesn’t even feel all that good?

  “Well?” Lloyd is asking.

  I take a deep breath.

  “Of course,” I say.

  Lloyd is up off the couch in an instant, his arms encircling me. Jeff doesn’t move quite as fast, but he comes over, too, tousling my hair. “Thanks, buddy,” he says. “You’ll look grand in a tux.”

  “Tux?” I look up at him as Lloyd moves off to uncork the champagne. “It’s going to be that formal?”

  “Sure thing. All the trimmings. It’ll be the event of the season.”

  I smirk. So that’s part of the motivation, too. Since Jeff’s become a success, he likes to put on a good show. I can only imagine who he’s getting for entertainment.

  “We’re bringing in Connie Francis,” he tells me, as if reading my mind. “You know, ‘Where the Boys Are.’ I met her in New York a few weeks ago and we got to be friends. I’d like to get Kimberley Locke, too—you know, this year’s second runner-up on Idol. I met her at the Abbey in West Hollywood last month.”

  “Cat,” Lloyd says, using Jeff’s nickname, “let’s not make this into a three-ring circus.” He’s pouring the bubbly into three glasses.

  “Hey, it’s our wedding. A once-in-a-lifetime event. Let’s do it up!”

  Lloyd hands me a glass of champagne. “I just can’t imagine the two of you, married,” I say. “Legally and everything. Until death do us part and all that traditional mumbo jumbo.”

  “Happens to the best of us,” Jeff says.

  The best of us.

  But not the best man.

  I figure I ought to offer a toast. “To the two of you,” I say, not sure where I’m going with this. “To…what moments lie ahead.” Not very romantic, I suppose, but the best I can muster.

  We clink glasses. We drink.

  The loneliest sip of champagne I’ve ever had.

  3

  ON THE PIER

  Even though the sun has failed to make an appearance today, hiding stubbornly behind a dreary gray haze like a sulky child, Luke wears no shirt, just a backpack slung over one shoulder. A breeze is blowing in off the water, making me shiver, but the boy seems oblivious to it, striding ever closer to where I’m sitting, parading that flat little belly of his, the lines of his damn obliques running down into his loose-fitting cutoff cargo shorts.

  Why the hell am I doing this? Why did I agree to meet him when he called? The kid only wants to meet Jeff. Why am I allowing myself to be suckered?

  “Hey, handsome,” Luke says, sitting beside me on the bench.

  Maybe because of the way his dark blond hair falls in his eyes. Maybe because of the way his lips curl at the corners. Maybe because he called me handsome.

  “Hey,” I reply.

  “Where’s the sun, dude? I can’t see hiking all the way out to the beach without any sun.” He rustles out a pack of cigarettes from his backpack and shakes out a cancer stick. “Want one?”

  “No, thanks, I don’t want to die a gruesome death.”

  “Yeah, I know I should quit,” Luke says, lighting up. “Picked up the habit at a young age, and it’s hard to get out of the mindset.”

  “It’s called nicotine addiction.” I frown. “And just what is a ‘young age’ for you? Twelve
?”

  “Close to it.” Luke exhales smoke away from my face. “I was probably thirteen when I started.”

  “So how old are you now?”

  “Twenty-two.”

  Well, what do you know? Seems I’d given him credit for an extra year that he’d never lived. Actually, to look at him, it’s pretty tough to guess his age. He’s definitely got a baby face, and in some ways twenty-two seems too old for him. But in other ways, he seems a bit overripe, a tomato left on the vine a little too long.

  “You must have some bad habits,” Luke says, squinting those hazel eyes at me.