Above The Thunder

by Renee Manfredi

  The day of the relay Stuart spent most of the afternoon threading his way through the crowds looking for Jack. He finally spotted him when the group ended up in Golden Gate Park for a picnic. Stuart watched Jack from a distance, felt something like sickness rise up in him: a man like Jack would never, he thought, be interested in the likes of him—soft, doughy, the scent of a woman and a woman’s ways clinging to him. Looking at Jack—God, with his shirt off now—Stuart realized how much he’d let himself go. He’d always preferred libraries to gyms, theater to sports, but his body had never felt this lumpish and thick before. He looked around at the men at the picnic, admired some of them, was indifferent to others, but no one had the magnetic power Jack had. Stuart felt an ache when he looked at Jack, deep in his gut, like the emptiness of hunger. Stuart circled closer to him, stood in the group next to Jack—the men were three deep around him. Jack didn’t once look his way.

  Later, the crowd thinned to just a dozen men, Jack included, all of whom seemed to know each other. One of them suggested tequila shots at a bar around the corner and Stuart, though he promised Roberta he’d be home early, went along.

  At the bar—a working-class, blue-collar place where all the men looked like pipefitters or union electricians—Stuart sat between Jack and another man from the relay, a blond in his early thirties with pockmarked skin and a ’70s layered haircut, who gave Stuart dirty looks for getting the seat next to Jack.

  This close to Jack, Stuart felt light-headed. He was gorgeous, by anybody’s standards, his eyes not quite brown, not precisely green. When Stuart was a boy, he spent hours lying on his back under the birch tree in his backyard. The late autumn light on the underside of its leaves was what Jack’s eyes reminded him of.

  Stuart watched him for an hour before Jack spoke to him. Expressions moved across his face slowly, elegantly, like the passing shadows of clouds over mountains.

  Just as Stuart was about to give up and go home to Roberta, Jack turned to him. “I know we’ve met somewhere, but I can’t place you at the moment. I’m Jack.”

  Stuart took his hand, was so flustered that he could barely speak his name. Jack asked if he was new to the Bay Area; clearly he didn’t remember the night at Walgreen’s. “I came here four years ago. When I graduated from college, I moved here.”

  “Oh? Four years?” he said, and Stuart heard the reproach in his tone: So what the hell took you so long to find us?

  Jack looked him up and down. Stuart cursed himself for not being in better shape, for tucking his T-shirt into his jeans so that his love handles were clearly visible when he slouched on the stool. His stomach was none too flat, either. He caught his reflection in the mirror behind the bar. His skin and hair looked all right; he had gotten a bit of sun and his hair was going golden, the way it always did in the summer. Jack watched Stuart watching himself.

  “The answer is yes,” Jack said suddenly.

  “Pardon?” Stuart turned to him.

  “You were wondering if I found you attractive. The answer is yes.” He smiled.

  “How can you presume to know what I was wondering?”

  Jack laughed. “Sorry.” He laughed again. “No offense.”

  Stuart shrugged. “None taken.”

  That was the beginning of his new life. It was that simple. All his agonizing over how or if he should come out was answered that Saturday. They’d gone back to Jack’s place that night, and it was three days before he called Roberta. When he finally did go back to tell her and to collect his things, she wasn’t angry or hysterical or accusatory. When he said, “I met someone,” she guessed right away that it was a man. “How could you know that?” Stuart asked, incredulous.

  “You were the only one who didn’t know. I always knew it was just a matter of time.”

  In the end, they’d remained friends, though Jack became increasingly hostile when, in the beginning, Stuart met her for coffee or had her over to watch a video. She stopped coming over after a while. The last Stuart had heard, Roberta had gotten married and moved to Paris.

  Stuart went back to the window to see where Jack was: still in the same place, talking to the unfamiliar young man. Who the hell was he? A boy, from what Stuart could see, a young man’s hips and shoulders. Lanky, with the loose-jointed posture of a runner. “Pathetic, Jack,” Stuart said aloud, and turned away. He no longer allowed himself to feel jealousy; Jack would always have men around him, would always be able to charm and enchant and seduce. At thirty-eight, Jack was still young enough to get the babies if he wanted; though many of the young ones were as unbearable and conservative as straight boys. This generation frowned on promiscuity and unsafe sex, was almost schoolmarmish in their dedication to healthy food, exercise, and monogamy. A good thing, in Stuart’s opinion. The option of being conventional didn’t exist when he was twenty-two. Back then, it was stay in the closet or come out in the margins.

  Stuart walked into the kitchen when he heard Jack’s heavy footsteps on the stairs, dumped the veal in the skillet to brown.

  “Saffron boy is back,” Jack said.

  “That’s a pretty big bag for such a little spice.”

  “Well, I bought some rhubarb and plantains, too.”

  “Super.”

  “I thought you could make rhubarb pie.”

  “Oh?”

  “Or, maybe not. Whatever. What time are the bush-bangers due?”

  Stuart looked over at him. He hated this side of Jack, hostility splashing like a leaky battery over everything and everyone he cared about. “Cool your jets,” Stuart said.

  Jack laughed, mocking. “Cool my jets? Really. Twenty-first century to Stuart, hello? Cool my jets?” He pulled the vegetable oil from the cabinet overhead, took down a skillet.

  Stuart looked over. “What are you going to do?”

  “Fry plantains. Did I ever tell you about the time I was in Malawi and ate so many fried plantains I shit yellow and green for four days?”

  In his early twenties, Jack spent two years in the Peace Corps, building bridges and teaching English. “Only about seventeen times,” Stuart said.

  “Cool your jest,” Jack said.

  “Anyway, plantains don’t fit in with what I’m making.”

  “So? Who says it’s for them? I want a snack. This is for me.”

  “You’ll ruin your appetite.”

  “Never. I am a man of considerable appetites. I thought you knew that about me.”

  Stuart ignored him. It was best to just let Jack work himself out of this kind of mood. It no doubt had something to do with the boy in front of the grocery. Jack probably wanted to sleep with him, Stuart suspected, and either the boy didn’t flirt back or Jack pulled back before it got to that point. Stuart was certain Jack had cheated on him twice since they’d been together: once back in San Francisco and once with someone here in Boston. He hadn’t ever asked directly, but Jack’s renewed attention and immersion in their lives together made him both want to know and not want to know at the same time. In his darkest moments, Stuart wondered about Jack’s business trips and drinks with business associates that sometimes lasted until late into the night. Stuart himself had cheated once with a man he picked up in a bar just after he and Jack got together. He was, he supposed, testing the depths of his feelings for Jack as much as testing Jack’s reaction—of course Stuart told him, and Jack was furious at him, not for the act itself, but for reporting it. “Who do you think I am, your little Japanese pussy? Why are you telling me this? If you lapse, that’s something you deal with unless you’re risking my safety in some way.” A few days later, though, Jack came home and presented Stuart with a baby parakeet and launched into a discussion about fidelity.

  Stuart cupped the tiny bird in his hands. “Am I supposed to cook or feed this?”

  The evening ended with Jack’s insistence on a monogamous, exclusive relationship. He made Stuart promise faithfulness and he pledged the same. Most of the time, Stuart believed that as an honorable man Jack could override his base
r instincts.

  “Try some,” Jack said, blotting the plantains on a paper towel. He speared three slices at once and ate them, his eyes watering from the heat. “God, that brings back memories.”

  Jack was baiting him, Stuart knew. When he was feeling particularly feisty or frustrated, Jack started talking about Africa, about Tutti, the boy “who was as glossy as mahogany, so polished I could see my face in his biceps.” Stuart thought maybe Tutti was an invention, like many of Jack’s stories, a boy, perhaps, who guided him on one of his treks up a mountain. Jack had turned it into a torrid love affair over the years, gradually embellishing the tale until the ubiquitous Tutti was the great tragic love of his life.

  “Wanna do something useful?” Stuart asked.

  “Not now, dear, I have a wicked headache.”

  “There’s fresh basil and garlic in the fridge. Make the salad. I still need to cook the cappellini.”

  “All righty. I think I’ll slip into something more comfortable, though. I’ve had this monkey suit on long enough today.”

  “Okay. But can you step up the pace a bit? I’m feeling a bit harried. I still need to do the dessert and they’ll be here in half an hour.”

  “Cool your zest.” Jack picked up a handful of plantain slices, kissed Stuart on the cheek. “Back in a Gordon.”

  “What?” Stuart said.

  “Back in a flash.”

  “And while you’re at it, feed Loki. There’s a new bag of seed under the cage.”

  *

  They were halfway through the meal and into their second bottle of wine when Jane and Leila exchanged a conspiratorial look. Stuart and Jack both caught it, which made Leila color deeper.

  “Okay chicas, let me say I know this visit isn’t just for the pleasure of our company or for Stuart’s fine cooking, which, by the way, is beyond superb.” He raised his wineglass in Stuart’s direction. “I mean, really Jane, you see my ugly mug every day.”

  Jane and Leila both laughed. “Well, actually there is something we’d like to explore with you,” Jane said. She was a tall redhead, with long, Pre-Raphaelite curls that hung nearly to her back. In candlelight, Stuart found her beautiful, but in less forgiving light her skin had a strange uneven texture, scaly-looking, as though she were recovering from a bad sunburn. Jane usually wore loose, drapey clothes in jewel tones, Eileen Fisher-type things for stylish overweight women, though she was in fact on the thin side of average. Tonight she was dressed in a prim, petal-pink dress that made her look like somebody’s Sunday school teacher.

  Stuart liked Leila less, though his opinion might have been tainted by the stories Jane told of her. She was attractive, with strong, even features, though the military-short hair, combat boots, and multiple piercings seemed to Stuart more like a self-conscious statement of her sexuality than anything else. She was twenty-something, a domestic abuse counselor for some sort of women’s program. She had a confident, self-contained air about her, which is what Jane reportedly first found appealing. “She’s so poised for someone who isn’t even thirty yet,” Jane told Jack and Stuart the day she’d met Leila and claimed love at first sight. Jane, in her late thirties, had been through two troubled relationships in the year Jack and Stuart had known her. Katrina, the woman before Leila, had done a real number on her. Jack and Stuart both despised Katrina, a Croatian veterinarian who had lived all over the world, but mostly in Russia and Alaska, studying the seasonal feeding habits of reindeer and their possible links, through neuropeptide-y, to eating disorders in human beings—she talked about her research ad nauseum.

  Jane grew so thin and unhinged over Katrina that she had had to take a leave of absence from work. Jane was, by everyone’s assessment, brilliant. A summa cum laude Stanford grad, funny and generous, but with such bad taste in lovers Stuart wondered about her sense of self-worth. What he liked best about her was that she spilled over a lot, risked looking foolish in the way many truly generous and kind people did. She thought nothing of cooking meals for former lovers who had treated her badly, or moving them in with her when they lost their jobs.

  Jane had met Leila as a result of Katrina, who had begun to leave thinly veiled threats on Jane’s answering machine and notes on her car. Leila was the one who intervened andhelped Jane get a restraining order.

  One of Jane’s most curious traits was that though she had a hard time leaving relationships, she didn’t get involved quickly or fall in love very readily. She had pitch-perfect intuition when it came to people, including her own lovers, until she fell in love and her clear-eyed judgment turned fuzzy and myopic.

  Jack and Stuart had high hopes for Leila, trusting Jane’s assessment of her. They were expecting an Audrey Hepburn look-alike with the soul of an Earhart and the heart of Mother Teresa. What they saw was a woman—a girl, really—dark-haired and dour, whose face was so tight and immobile that it seemed to absorb all the light in the room without reflecting anything back. She was low-key to the point of no-key, answered their questions with shrugs and monosyllables. She was bossy and moody. There was nothing about her that gave a clue as to why Jane was so crazy about her. Even when Jane came over without Leila, she never really relaxed; she had become a clock-watcher, worried about getting home in time so as not to upset Leila, who would begin calling all their friends two minutes after Jane was due in. It surely wouldn’t last, Stuart thought—Jane was probably finishing something leftover from Katrina. From his experience, you expressed in a new relationship the part of yourself that was repressed in the last. Although Jane seemed just as submissive as she had with Katrina, Stuart suspected this time it was out of choice and not fear.

  “So, what?” Jack was saying now. “What exactly do you want to explore with us? Though I’d be willing to bet it’s anatomical.”

  Jane laughed. Leila looked stricken. “Just as I suspected,” Leila said. “Gay men, straight men, it makes no difference in the end. They all assume we’re interested in their penises.”

  “Have you ever been interested in that? It seems to me you wouldn’t recognize a penis if it jumped up in your soup,” Jack said.

  “Hey,” Stuart said, warning, “hey.”

  Jane draped her arm across the back of Leila’s chair.

  “Anyway, prove me wrong,” Jack said, and raised his eyebrows.

  Jane looked at Leila, took a deep breath. “Well, as you know, Leila and I are sure we’ll have a lifelong partnership.” She paused, took a sip of wine, then drained her glass. Stuart refilled it. They all looked at Jane nervously, even Leila, who was watching her partner as curiously as Jack and Stuart were.

  “We desperately want a child. I can think of nothing finer than raising a child with Leila.”

  Jack smirked at Stuart. Stuart looked away.

  “I’m getting toward the outer edge of my child-bearing years,” Jane said. “It’s now or never.”

  “You’d be the one to get knocked up?” Jack said. “Or, excuse me, impregnated?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wouldn’t it make more sense for Leila to be the biological mother?” Stuart asked.

  Leila looked at him suspiciously. “Of course we considered that,” she said.

  “My genetic profile is stronger,” Jane said. “Leila’s maternal line is marred by breast cancer and alcoholism. I come from Polish peasant stock. We live forever.”

  “This is a serious thing,” Jack said. “It wouldn’t be a simple donation. We’d want shared custody. It would be our child, too.” Stuart looked at Jack, confused, then shocked. He seemed to be genuinely entertaining the idea. “After all, Stuart and I are just as committed a couple as the two of you, not to mention the fact that we’ve been together ten times as long…. Bringing a baby into this messy mix would mean that the four of us are bound together for the rest of our lives. That’s what you need to think about. Not a scrap of DNA will leave my pants until there’s a custody arrangement on paper, probated, in advance.”

  They all stared at Jack. Clearly, the women hadn’t exp
ected this kind of response. Stuart was baffled, though thrilled with Jack’s ironclad assertion of their coupledom.

  No one spoke for several minutes.

  “Who’s ready for some dessert and a dram of Grand Marnier?” Stuart went into the kitchen and fixed the desserts and drinks on a tray.

  When he returned to the dining room, only Leila was sitting there. Jack and Jane were on the balcony outside, sharing a cigarette.

  “They’ll be back in a minute,” she said. “So, what do you think of the idea, Stuart?”

  He shrugged. “Jack and I need to talk about it.”

  “But, separate from Jack, how do you feel about the idea of children?”

  “Well, quite frankly, I can’t imagine not having them eventually. But I’m not convinced this is the right route. I can certainly see myself adopting a child someday.”

  Leila fell silent. They watched Jane and Jack passing the cigarette back and forth between them like a couple of high school delinquents. Stuart felt a pang of something—not jealousy or regret, but something about seeing Jack with a woman evoked the life he always assumed he would have. As a boy, his secret shame had been how much he desired the conventional life, how envious he was of the way girls could be so forthright about their longings for motherhood and marriage. More than anything, he wanted to be in a life-long partnership and to be a father. His was a rare family: his parents had been happily married, and his three siblings were all married now with children of their own. When Stuart left Roberta and moved in with Jack, his mother knew what that meant. Anyway, she told him, she’d always suspected. “I don’t have a problem with it. I think love of any kind makes the world just a little bit better, don’t you?” she said.