Gay Fiction, Volume 1

by Mel Bossa

  “It’s because of the past. Just as Amity wrote. Because we forged links in the past—before we even were, Karen.”

  “It’s not a dream with Chas, though,” she said, her voice becoming hard. “It’s real with him. I feel as though I’m touching ground, touching something solid, even though it is squalid. He’s real enough, Roger. He has faults. He’s stupid, he’s inconsiderate at times, selfish, so selfish and demanding and nasty sometimes. You’re not like that, Roger. You’re too good to be true. That’s the awful thing. I can’t believe you are real, Roger. I just can’t. And I can’t feel real with you.”

  “Karen, darling, I have faults too. I have eccentricities by the score.”

  “But you aren’t callous or brutal or… And life is brutal, Roger. People are callous. That is real. This, well, this has been lovely, this house like a huge playhouse,” she said, her voice beginning to quiver. “Roger, hold me, talk to me, talk to me about Amity and Calder again, persuade me, argue with me, hit me, lock me up, do something, anything. Please, darling, please!”

  Her sudden outburst after so much restraint shocked me. But I held her, as she asked, held her close to me, whispering into her ear I don’t know what nonsense, kissing her hair, holding on to her body as though for dear life, hoping, hoping. And all the while she cried softly, and the rain tore in sheets around the house.

  All of a sudden she jerked upright in my arms as though stung. One minute, all of her relaxed and frail; the next minute, all rigid and tense.

  Then I too heard the car horn honking. I tried to keep holding her, but she looked up now, and as close as she still was to me in my arms, she was no longer with me. I let her remove my arms from her waist and shoulder, let her push me aside and step to the other window, where she peered down through the rain. The car honked again, and she began to wave down, as though with exaggerated effort. I knew in that second that she was lost.

  She’d already turned to the table, found a handkerchief in her purse, and dried her eyes. The compact clicked open. She dabbed herself lightly. It clinked shut. She put it back into the purse and put on the raincoat, draped over the back of one chair. She slung the purse over her shoulder and stood there, biting her lower lip.

  “Good-bye, Roger. And thank you. It’s been a lovely dream. I’ll never forget it.”

  I followed her out of the room mechanically, down the stairs into the foyer, and took her arm. She didn’t shake me off.

  “Get a raincoat or umbrella or something if you’re coming out,” she said.

  “I’m all right,” I replied.

  We walked arm and arm out the front door and over to the retaining wall. Chas was waiting in the front seat of his car, the windshield wipers flashing off thin sheets of rain with every moment, like a cat shaking itself. Karen preceded me down the stone steps. I took her arm again at the bottom, and we walked to his car. Chas had gotten out and stood watching us approach—curious and even a little suspicious.

  “Where are your bags?” he shouted over the rain. He couldn’t hide the doubt in his voice.

  “I thought we’d take my car,” she said almost humbly—a tone of voice I’d never heard her use with me. “It’s a long trip. Didn’t you just overhaul it?”

  “The bags are in the trunk,” I said to him.

  Chas looked at me for the first time, as though only just seeing me with Karen. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

  “Hello, Roger,” he said, and when I didn’t reply, he turned to the backseat of the car and began to take out the two suitcases he had. “Will you let this stay here until someone comes to pick it up?” he asked, meaning the car. I didn’t answer but helped him with one of the bags, stuffing it behind the seat of the MG’s single seat.

  Karen reached up and touched my cheek. Rain was beginning to streak her hair. I opened the passenger side door, and she got in without a word.

  “I’ve never seen a rainstorm like this,” Chas was saying. “The roads are going to be flooded.”

  He got into the MG then, and I stood back against the doors of the old stable we’d transformed into a garage. Rain was slashing along the car windows, obscuring my last look at Karen. Chas was talking to her, and she seemed to be looking down at her lap, as though listening.

  I half raised my hand to wave as he revved the car up, but a sheet of rainwater tore across the top of the garage and nearly knocked me against the garage doors. When I’d recovered, the MG was gone, tearing around the bend of the road leading to Atwood Avenue, sending up long flashes of water from the gullies.

  I watched its path for some time, until I began to realize I was shivering: soaked through. Walking back up those steps to the Pritchard house was the longest walk I could remember. Back inside I stripped off my clothing, wrapped myself in a blanket, and lit a fire in the bedroom fireplace. Chill had already begun to set in. Even with a brandy, I felt cold. I got into the huge bed we’d shared and shook with cold until I fell asleep.

  Chapter 18

  Javanese bells tinkled through my dreams—silvery and almost immaterially sweet but insistent too.

  I started up, recognizing the front door chimes. From my bedroom window I couldn’t see anyone outside, but they would be sheltered by the doorway overhang anyway. It seemed already dark, although my dresser clock read only three o’clock.

  I dressed, listening to the chimes ring on, and rushed downstairs through the darkened house, throwing on light switches as I ran, vaguely hoping it was Karen returning to me.

  Two state police stood huddled in the overhang of the doorway, their raincoats black and shiny with the wetness. The rain had stopped, but the woods were still crackling and dripping with its fall.

  The two men almost didn’t have to speak to tell me what I knew already the instant I opened the front door and saw them. The MG had swerved to avoid another car coming the wrong way off the highway exit, they told me. The brakes must not have held, the policemen supposed. The MG had hit an abutment, then veered over the cross lane directly into an oncoming truck. Chas and Karen had died instantly. I was needed to identify what remained of them.

  Epilogue

  After the men from Scituate had repaired the well I put on a heavy jacket and went to inspect their work. A good job, very professional. They told me it would be a few days before the well filled up again, the water seeping upward from the springs in the ground. Perhaps a week, they said, wondering without saying it why anyone would want such an impractical, old-fashioned well repaired again. But by the time I went to look at it, less than an hour after they had gone, the water had begun to enter: I could see an inch or so of it covering the bottom layer of new bricking they had laid, creeping slowly upward—clear water, fresh spring water from the earth, from the rain we’ve had so much of this year. As though the well were a sensate thing and knew why I had to have it repaired, knew the part it would once again play in the eternal drama, even if they—the men from Scituate, the townspeople of Nansquett—do not know.

  My only consolation is that I didn’t do what I might have done out of anger and ignorance and frustration. I didn’t fight Chas and Karen’s being together—I simply tried to stop it, tried to stop them from going away. I didn’t allow the carriage bolts to remain unrepaired. I had the MG brakes fixed, unconscious of what I was doing. It was Chas himself who somehow failed to ensure that those brakes would hold. Not I. And that consoles me, telling me that some of the twists in the coil that Amity wrote of have been made straight, telling me that while the situation was the same and even the way in which they died appallingly similar, that details have changed.

  Because now, even without having Amity’s own words, her own explanation for it, I have come to understand why she went to her well for surcease. In those quiet autumn days after Chas and Karen were buried in the Nansquett cemetery (as close to Amity and Constance and Eugene Calder as I could place them), I still sought reasons for her act, still questioned my own acts before their deaths to discover if I could have done some
thing, if things could have been different.

  Less than a year later, I know: I no longer ask questions. The change was not a dramatic one—this sudden understanding—but a seeping one, as though the very rooms of this house, the shape of the furniture, the books, the trees outside hold the answer and are imparting it to me every instant of my life. As though every creaking of the wooden frame over the turret in a wind, every sweep of a breeze through the branches or tiny crackle of a twig as I roam the woods around the house are offering me the answer—quietly, uninsistently, yet with a growing definition and assurance I cannot deny.

  Of course I was alone by the time I made my discovery—quite alone. The house was restored—every detail in place—no more workmen to come and disturb me with their buzz saws and hammers, with their cursing and yells. Once Karen and Chas were buried and no one from town had any reason to call on me, I was blessedly able to concentrate on listening to what the house and its surroundings had to tell me. I was able to listen, to eventually hear and understand that what had happened before had happened now twice and that it would have to happen once more, whether twenty years or fifty years or five hundred years from now: three of us bound by spiritual love and sensual passion spinning toward consummation one more time. Subtly changed, as ours had been subtly changed from Amity’s situation; the explosiveness of our coming together defused even more than we three had defused from its original mold. Perhaps when it occurred again it would be shot through with understanding, not from only one of us—as this time—but by all of us. After all, we had acted it out almost as though we were marionettes, without great force. Karen and I—at least—had gone further: We had questioned it, stood back, and tried to observe it. We failed, but at least we didn’t add another twist to the coil through violence and stupidity but perhaps straightened out the coil, if only by the tiniest fraction.

  The next time it happens—and I now have no doubt that it will happen again—perhaps the twist will be so small as to hardly have an effect. We will be even more aloof from passion then, more understanding of each other, more evolved—Constance and Eugene and I, Karen and Chas and I—more ready to love as three, without rancor, without separation.

  I already feel the contact to that future has been made. A week before the men from Scituate came to repair the well, I thought I had established the link. Now I’m certain.

  The little girl was waiting at the entrance to the dirt road leading to the house. Just standing there, frightened but fascinated too, holding a square brown paper parcel in her hands, trying to gather up the courage to come in, standing there I don’t know how long, perhaps only a few minutes, perhaps an hour.

  She was startled when I stepped out of one of the side paths and waved to her. Then she caught herself and thrust the parcel forward, staring at me the way adolescent girls stare at movie stars and rock stars—with awe and fear and longing. She spoke quickly, quietly, yet breathing hard all the while, as though she had not been standing still when I came upon her but running. Her aunt, she said, had sent her on the errand. She had lovely blue-green eyes and straight auburn hair, very pretty, about twelve or thirteen years old, I guessed, with little buds of breasts just showing through the blouse she wore and was already outgrowing.

  I took the package from her and asked her name. Alice Packer, she said. Kitty Packer was her aunt—her grand-aunt, really. Kitty was the full-time librarian in Nansquett now, and I knew the package contained the few belongings Karen had not taken from the library when she had driven off that rainy day. I took the parcel and smiled, and suddenly I realized what Alice Packer was doing there on my property, where no one else dared to come—she was somehow the link to my future self, and without scaring or revolting her, I had to impress her.

  I asked if she were tired from her walk, or thirsty. She hesitated, and I asked if she would like some milk or cookies. She still hesitated. She’d heard enough with her young ears about me and Chas and Karen to be wary. Yet she was fascinated; I could see that outweighing her fears. Would she like to see the Pritchard mansion, I asked. It was an exact restoration of the way the house looked over a hundred years ago. No one from town had ever seen it. Alice would be the first. And I, the proprietor, would give her a special guided tour.

  And it worked. Alice’s older brother had done some of the carpentry work, she said, and had said that it was the most beautiful house he had ever seen. He’d talked so much about the place, that she’d wanted to have him take her to see it, she told me. So I knew the link to my future was a real one: How many children in Nansquett, in the entire state, would want to see a restored Victorian mansion?

  And she was impressed. After the longish walk up to the house and the promised snack in the breakfast room, I guided her through the various rooms, watching her with as much intense interest as she showed in looking at the beds, the old furniture, the paintings, the curious decorations she’d never seen before. She was most taken with the collection of Amity’s dolls, most of which I’d had restored at some cost by an old man in Coventry who specialized in nineteenth-century dolls. It was while she was gingerly handling one of the porcelain dolls that I realized how I could make a lifelong impression on her: I decided to give her one of the dolls—the one she most admired, a rare and perfect object, played with by a little girl a hundred and fifteen years before, dressed like a pioneer woman in checkered gingham, with a frilled mob cap and little patent leather shoes. Alice was so thrilled, but she refused the doll, and I had to insist on her taking it.

  We shook hands once we reached Atwood Avenue again, as I had decided to walk her back out. She thanked me for her gift, clutched under one arm, and said she had had one of the loveliest afternoons of her life. She even reached up and planted a tiny kiss on my chin, saying she was going to tell everyone what a nice, polite man I was. Pretty Alice Packer, with a taste for the past: my link somehow to the future.

  There is only one remaining task for me, now that I have established that link: I must prepare for the future so that it comes again—the triad, the situation, the three of us, the twist in the coil.

  Amity understood that, understood after many readings and much speculation and deep thought that, with Constance and Eugene gone, her life had no meaning, that it had to be ended as soon as possible in order to set up the coil once more.

  Will my future self come upon these journals of mine someday here in the Pritchard Museum and suddenly realize how we are all linked together? I have to believe that. That is why the house shall be a museum. I’ve already arranged that through my lawyer. A restored mansion from the nineteenth century, with a few contemporary amenities. The upkeep will be paid by the foundation I have established through my estate. A curator will be maintained by the county and the foundation. Yes, I’m certain that my future self—he or she, for the gender will make no difference at all—will come to this turreted library and lift this little red notebook, bound in morocco, and read it and come to recognize himself or herself and understand…

  Understand why it was that on this date, I, Roger Lynch, aged thirty years old, of sound mind and body, threw myself into the newly repaired well and drowned until dead…

  And will understand that he or she and I and Amity Pritchard are one.

  About the Author

  Felice Picano is the author of nineteen books, including the literary memoirs Ambidextrous, Men Who Loved Me, and A House on the Ocean, a House on the Bay as well as the bestselling novels Like People in History, Looking Glass Lives, The Lure, and Eyes. He is the founder of Sea Horse Press, one of the first gay publishing houses, which later merged with two other publishing houses to become the Gay Presses of New York. With Andrew Holleran, Robert Ferro, Edmund White, and George Whitmore, he founded the Violet Quill Club to promote and increase the visibility of gay authors and their works. He has edited and written for The Advocate, Blueboy, Mandate, GaysWeek, Christopher Street, and Books Editor of The New York Native and has been a culture reviewer for The Los Angeles Examiner, San Fr
ancisco Examiner, New York Native, Harvard Lesbian & Gay Review, and the Lambda Book Report. He has won the Ferro-Grumley Award for best gay novel (Like People in History) and the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award for short-story. He was a finalist for the Ernest Hemingway Award and has been nominated for three Lambda Literary Awards. A native of New York, Felice Picano now lives in Los Angeles.

  The Jetsetters

  Justin Holt is a lonely barista living in Chicago. He spends his days in college and his evenings working at Clouds, a coffee shop owned by his lesbian boss and best friend, Starsky. When Diego Delgado, the hot Latin guitarist for the rock band The Jetsetters, wanders in for a cup of coffee, a spark is instantly ignited between the two young men. As The Jetsetters skyrocket from obscurity to superstardom, Justin fights with everything he has to make certain his new relationship survives, despite the chaos surrounding them. When the demands of instant fame and an unexpected tragedy take their toll on Diego and threaten his flourishing career, Justin is forced to make a difficult decision.

  The Jetsetters

  © 2012 By David-Matthew Barnes. All Rights Reserved.

  ISBN 13: 978-1-60282-796-7

  This Electronic Book is published by

  Bold Strokes Books, Inc.

  P.O. Box 249

  Valley Falls, New York 12185

  First Edition: September 2012

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.