Best Gay Romance 2014

by R. D. Cochrane

  I shrugged and walked ahead of him to open the balcony doors.

  “You could go back down with me and help me lug up the pots and planters,” Matthew suggested.

  It all felt like a very couple thing to do, and I tried to decide if I liked that while Lionel nudged me for an ear rub and Archie followed Matthew outside.

  ***

  “I don’t think you owe anyone all the details about a new relationship,” Jennifer said, as she ran her hands over Archie’s hind legs. She happened to be a close friend as well as his vet.

  “Finally: someone sensible,” I said.

  “It doesn’t matter what you tell them anyway. Most people only see things through their own lenses. Cory’s a sex-crazed social climber. Sophia’s insecure about her profession. Or maybe her importance in your life.”

  She patted Archie on his rump and smiled at the mad wagging of his tail when she reached inside the treat jar.

  “I’m not even sure it is a relationship,” I said. “He’s just a man whose company I enjoy. Who happens to be a few years younger. Why does everyone have to analyze it?”

  “I know! Why do people do that?” She looked through Archie’s paperwork and said, “Archie’s doing great. We’ll see him again in six months. He’ll be due for his rabies booster then.”

  As she walked me toward the reception area, she gave a little laugh and said, “Anyone who really knows you and Archie gets it.”

  “Gets what?”

  “You’re attracted to a man who’s like your dog. You’re a serious man with a frisky dog. He and his dog are the reverse. I see it all the time: people trying to compensate for their perceived deficiencies when seeking a companion animal or a mate.”

  Not that you’re analyzing it, I thought.

  By the end of summer, we were as likely to spend nights at my loft as his apartment. At my place, the plants were thriving. At his place, the roommates were starting to drop hints that maybe they should start looking for someone to replace him.

  But neither of us seemed inclined to make changes beyond the ones that happened gradually. On weekends, we wandered through galleries and he helped me pick out a few paintings for my bare walls. We tossed tennis balls at the dog park for Archie and Lionel. If we went to a movie or a restaurant, we no longer worried about who paid for what.

  Although Matthew became less absorbed with his gadgets, and I spent less time at the firm, I occasionally liked to do my own research at the law library. Matthew enjoyed going with me, settling into a chair to read while I worked. One night I realized I’d been staring at a law review article for nearly half an hour without any idea what it said. I extended my leg to nudge Matt’s foot under the table. He glanced up and grinned, then looked back at his iPad.

  I love him. And chasing after that revelation: Nothing that’s expected to last can be this easy. Can it?

  I was chopping onions for my mother’s tomato sauce while I tried to express the jumble of emotions and anxieties about where Matthew and I were headed.

  She reached over, removed the knife from my hands, and said, “Nope.”

  “What?” I looked at the onion. “I’m cutting it the way I always have.”

  “I’m not talking onions. Neither are you. You’re forty-one.”

  “Your point is…”

  “He’s thirty-two. This sounds suspiciously like a midlife crisis. Next comes the overpriced sports car. This is your father’s department. He’s in the garage.” She saw my exasperated expression. “Staring helplessly under the hood of that stupid Dodge Challenger.”

  “Charger,” I corrected her.

  “See? It’s a man thing. You two can bond over it. Go.”

  I glanced back as I walked into the laundry room, but Archie refused to look away from the woman moving around the kitchen, the potential source of far more delights than anything the garage could offer.

  “Make sure he doesn’t get any of that onion,” I reminded her, but she only waved me out.

  My father had one of the bay doors up, but he wasn’t looking under the hood of the Charger, which wasn’t his car anyway. It had been a project of my younger brother’s, abandoned unfinished as so many were, and left to take up space in my parents’ garage. Like the workout equipment still in my brother’s bedroom, it had become a surface for the random detritus of the lives going on around it.

  My father had turned the garage into his version of a man cave, a place where he could smoke his skinny cigars, kick back in his decades-old recliner that had been banished from the house and read. Today it was a Rolling Stone with another barely legal, barely dressed singer on the cover. If my mother was right about my midlife crisis, was my father a warning that it could last a few more decades?

  He pointed his beer toward the garage refrigerator to let me know they were there if I wanted one.

  “Ma sent me out so you could help me navigate male menopause.” I opened my beer and unfolded a lawn chair, facing it toward the street rather than him.

  He grunted, put the magazine aside, and said, “If you’re looking for an impractical car, I’m sure your brother would sell you that one.”

  “No, thanks. Apparently my only symptom is that I’m seeing a younger man.”

  “Does this younger man have a name?”

  “Matthew. Matt.”

  “Details,” he said, giving me the fierce stare that had once made even the most seasoned prosecutors wish they could exit the courtroom.

  I gave him the rundown, including the opinions of everyone who’d offered them since I’d met Matthew.

  My father got us both another beer, settled into his chair and then said, “Let me see if I have this right. He’s a receptionist, but you don’t work in the same place. You’re not his boss.”

  “Right.”

  “So no sexual harassment. You make more money than he does. Has he stolen your credit cards? Hacked into your bank account? Hit you up for money?”

  “Of course not.”

  Another grunt. “You get along with each other’s dogs? They get along with each other?”

  “I’m not sure this is helping. Instead of giving me fatherly advice about Matthew, you’re making me question the wisdom of my friends, my assistant, and my vet.”

  “I don’t think the difference of a few years or a few dollars is a big deal,” he said.

  “Yeah, but what if—”

  “Here’s your fatherly advice. You can’t think like a lawyer in love.”

  “That magazine is doing you no good if your musical references are almost as old as me.”

  “Bring him for Thanksgiving.”

  Thanksgiving was the High Holy Day in our family. We could miss birthdays, anniversaries, even Christmas if we’d made other plans, but all children and grandchildren were expected to be in their appointed chairs at the table on the fourth Thursday of every November.

  “I appreciate the offer, but Thanksgiving is, like, three months from now,” I said. “Who knows whether—”

  “You should warn him that we don’t like any cranberry sauce except the kind with the can lines on it. Though I doubt anything so trivial could derail a relationship.”

  I sat back with my beer. After a minute, my father picked up his Rolling Stone and I felt a stupid grin settle on my face.

  THE INVINCIBLE THEATRE

  Felice Picano

  A theatrical troupe arrived unannounced in Covent Garden late one very breezy afternoon when all of us were going starkers chasing after our bonnets, hats, cash boxes and stray stalks of airborne gladiolus.

  The actors clangorously trundled into the square within two large, overblown, colorful, horse-drawn caravans and immediately camped at the far northeastern corner, where infrequent entertainment customarily set up stage.

  The latter had, during my time there so far, been constituted of: a wagon full of cheerless, flyblown marionettes in so-called dramatizations of old legends that even the youngest disdained as puerile. I also recall an ancient Punch and
Judy Show from somewhere in Essex, last costumed and painted up in the time of King George Second. Most recently, we’d been treated to a family dance company from Scotland purporting to be “Hebrides-bred and authentikal,” about which the less said, the better for any future intercourse with our northern neighbor.

  MONSIEUR GUILLAUME DARROT AND THE INVINCIBLE THEATRE read the man-sized placards of the new troupe, stood on either side of the little stage that was quickly erected between ends of two high-sided caravans parked six yards apart in the corner. Handbills distributed by myself, as a hired lad, named the individuals of the company, which besides M. Darrot, included Madame Suzette Darrot; Mademoiselle Antoinette Genre; M. De Sang Pur—doubtless the large, bearded, bald headed fellow I had noted moving large objects about so much—and a “Grande-Madame de St. Clement-En-Hors-de-Combat,” whom we were assured would play roles deemed “Domestic, Deistic and Outlandish.”

  I laughed as hard as the other flower vendors, fruiterers and marrow-sellers, reading aloud for them this piece of Frenchified gallimaufry. Even so, two nights later I joined an audience of several score, requiting my ha’pence for the troupe’s first performance: “The Most Despicable and Horrible Tragedy of the Tyrone Family of______ County, Ireland—after a tale written by that estimable Mr. Joseph Bodin de Sheridan Le Fanu.” And like the other threescore in the audience, I was terrified, frightened and moved. Moved so much, in fact, that four days later and after having seen every one of their performances, I resigned The Covent Garden, flower-selling, and the Hellenically-inclined Newholl family forever, and I joined the Invincible Theatre troupe.

  M. Darrot turned out to be an individual no more exotic than a Mr. William Darrow, or Billy-Boy Dee, as his sire, another member of the troupe, one Jonathan Darrow (i.e., Mr. Pure Blood, or De Sang-Pur) called him. For all his age and considerable airs, Darrow the Elder was no more wellborn than your humble servant, My Lord, and hailed from some inconsequential townlet in Surrey. And the purity of his blood, if it ever existed, must do daily battle with prodigious amounts of gin and whiskey to discover which liquid would prevail.

  Still, the old reprobate was docile and had been for many long moons an actor with other troupes, including what remained of The King’s Men during the realm of the last Regent, and so he had memorized his acting parts, or at any rate had gotten several resonantly long speeches by heart.

  It was those speeches that Darrow the Younger had pilfered, and around them had since begun to scribble his own plays, far more popular adaptations of our then-contemporary literature as found in various three-volume novels and periodicals, along with those foreign dramas he happened upon and then lifted wholesale. Add to those two or three expurgations of Mr. Shakespeare filled with blood, thunder, ghosts and revenge, and that was the troupe’s entire repertoire.

  The great female dramaturge of the company, Madame Suzette Darrot, was in fact Suzie Darrow, née Semple, wife to Billy-Boy. Mademoiselle Antoinette Genre was in truth her niece by blood, a Miss Amy Green. As for the fifth member of the company, it would be many months before I uncovered that remarkable personage’s complete identity and rather odd verity.

  Meanwhile, during their short engagement at the Covent Garden’s out of doors corner, I had progressed with The Invincibles from being a mere set-up helper, to a placard boy, and on to becoming a constant “stage-handy lad,” assisting Billy in setting up the changes of scenery. These commonly consisted of two parts: a painted background, or as they called it “rear scrim,” and a variety of deal or other lightweight wood (and thus quite mobile) furniture upon which the actors would perch and lean for verisimilitude, though few might actually hold the full weight of the somewhat rotund Darrow Elder for longish periods of time. I also drew the curtains to open and close the show as well as to register the so-called Entr’actes.

  An immediate fascination with their art attracted me into the circle of The Invincible Theatre. Growing knowledge and increasing appreciation of their craft and all it comprised, indeed required, drew me even more tightly into their tiny realm. Thence, a kind of juvenile passion with those two lovely—and one bizarre—women enmeshed me ever more approximate.

  It was my total fixation upon Billy Darrow that at last folded me into the troupe’s most intimate circle—for while I had before idolized members of the female sex, for the first time in my life, I found a male worthy of my uttermost infatuation.

  Was he handsome then, this leading actor, you will ask, My Lord? Of course he was; he was a leading man of an acting troupe, after all. But then again, feature by feature, he was not especially remarkable. He had learned through stage makeup to over-benefit the advantages of his better facial features: his fine glittering black eyes he emphasized by further application of dark paint to his eyebrows and by thickening to ebony his eyelashes. His nose I knew for a fact at close sight to be slightly bent to the left. No matter, he painted a straight line down to its tip despite the bone, and shaded it from either side, and it appeared ferrule-straight. He re-limned and then daubed into the new outline his upper lip so it might be as voluptuous as its mate. He oh so softly rouged his cheekbones so they shone not quite so high, to make himself more cherubic for younger roles. Even so, later on, when a play-described “brilliant beau” was required for a walk-on role, Billy was the first to toss my own self, clad in gilt velvet with silver frogging, onto that never-very-steady movable stage in lieu of himself for the audience to ooh and ahh over. True his figure was slim and long, but he believed it almost simian, with his somewhat apelike long arms and large hands. His posture was never quite Royal, unless it must be for a role. No, he was ever an indifferent King, preferring always that his elder or even the mysterious and multi-named fifth member take over those majestic roles when they were of a short duration.

  As compensation, Billy was, however, most lithe, most flexible and most assuredly athletic. He could juggle, he could somersault, he could leap high enough to make audiences gasp, and he would then just barely alight, one shaky foot atop a single shivering beam, his entire body vibrating as though he would topple over, and yet hold his ground steady—to everyone’s amazed relief. In short, he could, with no trouble at all, incur every viewer’s eye by a score of differing means and hold it—just as long as he wished. If his voice was nothing especial, a fair tenor, still he could sing several airs of Mr. Handel and Herr Mozart with perfect tone and pitch and he would leave a tear in your eye and a throb in your breast. But for the grand dramatic speeches, he must drag in that old sot, his sire, whose resounding baritone was a natal gift. As the lad Billy-Boy had watched his pater to learn, so watched I him every moment onstage, whether in rehearsal or on show, to educate myself into what turned out to be an only middling grasp of the actor’s craft.

  And if Billy Darrow was admirable, he was even more so when he had someone to admire him. By this tenth year of The Invincible Theatre’s existence, that meant no one other than myself. His wife was by then quite inured; his father was, as always, uninterested; and who knew what the fifth member thought, as we only heard uttered speech onstage; even Billy’s niece by marriage, his last conquest before me, was looking about for someone other to engage her esteem.

  It was she, Miss Amy, who three months into my employment with the troupe, made the discovery that despite all my larking about London town, among some of its most unsavory haunts and disreputable gutters, I was still pure as the driven snow.

  We had left London some week past and only just set up stage in the large, second common green of Sheffield town, and I had just returned from depositing our placards about those shop fronts that would countenance our adverts in their windows, when she faced me down. Her arms were akimbo, her chestnut hair all flying about, her cheeks reddened from proximity to the boiling hot water: in short, quite notably natural for once, and if I must say so, quite lovely, too. The scene was the outdoor fire where she and her aunt were laundering the troupe’s clothing in preparation for the week to come. By this time I had come into a s
econd set of shirt and trousers and so had given in my originals for cleansing.

  “What’s this then?” she asked pointing to a stain no more remarkable to my eye than any other, except perhaps its location, slightly above the Y of my trouser legs. As I looked, she looked me in the eye and said, “Jizz, is what. Look Ess, how he does stain himself at night.”

  I was unaware of staining myself at night or any other time and said so, unawares they were japing with me, until Mrs. Darrow asked, “Have you then no dreams at all, a lad your age, of ladies fair?” Upon which I blushed to recall one such dream about herself.

  She laughed, but quickly enough the two of them calculated, and then asked, “Haven’t you ever? With a lass or lady?” And what was I to say. I turned and fled, murmuring of some work that must be attended to immediately.

  That night, my idol roused himself from his conjugal bed within Caravan Number One and came to where I had cobbled together my own more makeshift sleeping quarters on the street beneath Caravan Number Two.

  “Come, my love,” for that was how Billy spoke to all of us, my love, my darling, my sweetheart. “Come up to bed with Suzie and me.”

  I was to say the truth amazed, for the cobblestones were especially iron-hard with ice that night with autumn coming on, despite my many efforts to disguise them with slats and cloths; any softer lie-down would be preferable.

  No sooner had we crept into the caravan and I was at the edge of the bed, viewing by faint candlelight Mrs. Darrow herself, all pink skinned, wrapped in warm covers atop softer pillows, then from behind, I felt his hands upon me. Before I knew what he was about, he’d stripped off my trousers and shirt and pushed me atop her. From there, she took over, and any questions I may have uttered were stilled by first her and then him. Soon were we all three as Nature made us, and almost as quickly was I between her large soft breasts, myself being fondled and kissed, manipulated and managed from in front and in back by one and the other simultaneously, until having found a wet harbor below and pushed to it, I found a rhythm and soon began to gasp. What heaven! Twice more did I consort with the distaff, while the husband consorted with the lady from behind, and alternately encouraged me with many caresses and lewd remonstrations. Through it all, I encountered and experienced so many differing sensations and emotions that when it was all over, and the three of us were at last spent to our utmost, I lay between them both, and murmured my double adoration, before I collapsed into utter debilitation.