Behind the Curtain

by Jerry Cole

  After rehearsal, he caught Damien in the lobby as the man was leaving.

  "Thank you again, for what you're doing for the theater," he smiled at the man gratefully, and a little warily. "You're sure you don't want anything in return?"

  "One thing," Damien said taking Nick's hand to pull him a little closer. "If things don't work out with him, that guy who has you so tangled up—If you ever give up on him, give me a second chance to try and help you forget."

  He pressed a kiss to Nick's cheek, then let him go and turned away, vanishing through the theater doors a moment later. Nicholas watched him go, hoping he was making the right decision.

  "Nick?"

  He stiffened as he heard Clay's voice and turned, already red. How much had Clay seen? The awkward, uncertain look on his face made it clear he'd seen more than Nick would have preferred.

  "I'm guessing that was your date last night?" he tried for a smile, but it died quickly.

  "Yeah, he was," Nick admitted, his heart pounding, waiting for Clay to mock him, to hate him.

  "You didn't..." Clay looked at his feet, face red. "You didn't do something like that...just to fund the play, did you?"

  "No," Nick replied, offended. "Do you really think I'd do that?"

  "No!" Clay abruptly colored beet red, hiding his face with his hand. "I didn't mean—No, Jesus, I'm sorry."

  Silence hung between them, heavy and awkward. Nicholas shifted, considered leaving.

  "So, you're, uh, like that?" Clay asked, unable to look him in the eye.

  "Yeah," Nick couldn't look at the other man either. "It's kind of a recent development."

  "Really?" Clay looked up, curious. "I didn't know that could happen. Like, uh, not knowing for this long."

  "I looked it up on the Internet," Nick shrugged. "Apparently it's not unusual. There's this whole 'compulsory heterosexuality' thing where society puts so much pressure on us to be straight, that we don't really give ourselves the chance to consider we might be something else. So we keep acting like we're 'supposed' to, until something happens we can't ignore or explain away and..."

  He put his hands in the air, helpless. Silence took over again.

  "Do you...hate me?" he asked after a long moment.

  "No, of course not," Clay was quick to dismiss it. "You're my friend. And there's nothing wrong with being like that, I mean, it's 2016. I wouldn't hate you for something like that."

  Nick released a breath he hadn't realized he was holding.

  "That's good," he said, relaxing a little. "That's really good. Do you maybe want to—?"

  "Actually, I gotta get home." Clay interrupted Nick's offer to get dinner and talk things out. "I have an assignment for bio chem I need to work on. But I'll see you at rehearsal tomorrow."

  "Right," Nick's hopes sank rapidly. "I'll see you then."

  Clay hurried out, leaving Nick behind to consider what to do next. So he was out, sort of, to the one person who really mattered, and that one person had immediately run away. It wasn't exactly encouraging. He lingered in the lobby, running his hands over the delicate chimes of the still earthbound chandelier. They'd get it up before opening night. Easier now with Damien Price's help. He thought about last night again and wondered if it would be easier to just try and forget and go back to how he'd been before when he just didn't know.

  "You're still here, Nicholas?"

  Walter was just putting on his scarf to leave, but he paused as he saw Nick lingering.

  "Yeah, sorry," Nick shook his head, dropping his hand from the chandelier. "I guess I kind of got caught up in my thoughts."

  "Is something the matter?" Walter asked, frowning and stepping closer. "Scratch that. I know something is wrong. You never hunch like that unless you're upset. What's happened?"

  Nicholas searched for the words for a long moment, trying to figure out how to explain. He looked at Walter, with his curled mustache and his charmingly anachronistic clothes, and wondered.

  "Walter?" he asked, somewhat worried he was about to offend the man. "Are you straight?"

  Walter scoffed.

  "What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it's curved like a road through mountains."

  "Whose quote is that?" Nicholas asked, smiling a little in relief.

  "Tennessee Williams," Walter replied. "And that is a man who would know."

  "How did you know?" Nick asked. "And...and how did you deal with it?"

  Walter looked at Nicholas with a solemn, thoughtful expression and then turned back toward the theater.

  "We had better sit down."

  He took his favorite seat in the front row and Nick perched uneasily on the edge of the stage like a bird ready to burst into flight at any moment.

  "I was luckier than some in many ways," Walter began. "And unlucky in others. I knew from the beginning there was something different about me. Wrong with me, I thought, at the time. Too interested in girlish things, but too shy around the girls themselves. I always thought it was a little absurd how upset the adults would get about me playing with the doll of a busty blond woman that they'd push dolls of half-naked muscular men on me instead thinking the former would somehow impact my sexuality while the latter would not. The way we relate to sex in this country was, and is, patently silly. As I grew older and still didn't develop the appetite for women the adults in my life thought I ought to have, I began to hear whispers of foul slurs and nasty suspicions. I wasn't really interested in men or women in those days. All I cared about were books. I wanted to fill all my thoughts with a kinder world, where love always won out over hate. And then I found Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass—'Give me the splendid, silent sun with all his beams full-dazzling!'—and well it was all a moot point from there. I was a young man still during the sexual revolution of the seventies, and all the things I had begun to glean about myself from secret pages suddenly burst out into the world all at once. Real and alive and on the streets and demanding my participation. You ask me how I dealt with it and the answer is badly. But also loudly, brashly, contemptuously even. I threw what I was into the faces of anyone who would listen like scalding water that might melt the gum from their eyes, but mostly I wanted it to burn them. I can't tell you how many times I was beaten near to death for it either. But what I felt was so enormous that the humble clay of me couldn't contain it. I couldn't help but be everywhere, be bright and loud as a firework. I couldn't help but be who I was, who I had been all along, who had been forced back like a spring for decades and was finally, finally loosed. I rampaged like a wildfire and thought I would save the world."

  Nicholas, listening, tried to imagine this round, silly old man as a red headed youth, running riotous through the streets and couldn't see it.

  "But how could you be sure?" he asked. "Did you ever try to just...ignore it?"

  "There is no such thing as being sure," Walter shrugged. "And the world will work hard to make sure you continue to doubt yourself, always. But in my experience, if the question is there, the answer is most often yes. People who are already comfortable in who they are don't feel that need we do to question themselves. And certainly, I tried to go pretending I was normal for a time, fearful of the consequences. But no consequence could ever be so dire as living, as I was, beyond the reach of all happiness, in constant denial of myself, faced with my own disgust and self-loathing any time my eyes met those of a handsome stranger. If I was to be damned to hell, then I shouldn't spend my life already in torment. I was not made for heaven."

  "That last one is a quote again, isn't it?" Nick guessed. "Wilde?"

  "Freddy Mercury," Walter chuckled, then sighed, looking distant for a moment. "The closest you ever come to complete certainty, I think, is the moment the question stops mattering to you at all. For me, that came when I met Francis. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him, and everything else ceased to matter in the face of that one, unassailable fact. I didn't have him long, sadly. Our relationship began where the revolution o
f the seventies crashed into the AIDS epidemic of the eighties. He succumbed to the disease after just a few beautiful years together, and he took my heart with him. I'll never feel that kind of love again."

  Nicholas allowed a moment of silence to fall between them, wishing he could imagine what it would be like to live in such a time. The history of a people he was now unexpectedly part of, tangled and full of tragedy, felt beyond his reach.

  "So," Walter said after a beat, "have you told Clayton yet?"

  Nicholas flushed red.

  "Was I really that obvious?" he muttered.

  "Oh, glaringly," Walter said with fond flippancy. "At least to me."

  "Sort of," Nick answered after a moment. "Not that I'm...you know, for him. But that I'm..."

  "Still having trouble saying the word?" Walter laughed. "Say it. Out loud. It'll make it easier, I promise."

  Nick groaned, scrubbing a hand over his face.

  "It's just all very recent." he muttered. "I don't really know anything yet."

  "Just say the words you plucked chicken," Walter laughed harder and Nick turned red.

  "Gay," Nicholas blurted it out to satisfy the other man. "I'm gay. Probably."

  "Probably," Walter chuckled.

  It was ridiculous, but Nick felt a weight leave his shoulders anyway. Somehow, he worried the ceiling would fall in immediately or his mother would appear from nowhere weeping about grandchildren.

  "You should tell him," Walter said, standing and putting on his scarf again.

  "He's straight," Nick reminded the other man.

  "Unimportant," Walter replied. "The point is not that he should return your feelings, but that you should be honest about them, both for yourself and for him. It is not good for either of you to pretend at friendship when you know you can't be satisfied with it. Besides, you cannot know how he feels until you ask him. There is every possibility he is struggling with the same new feelings as you. Or he merely requires the opportunity to discover them. Do not deny him that opportunity just for your own selfish fear."

  "I don't think I can," Nick looked away, shaking his head. "If he hated me, or worse made fun of me, I think I might die."

  "Tsk. Actors," Walter rolled his eyes. "So dramatic. Come along, I'll buy you dinner. We have much more to discuss."

  Chapter Fourteen

  Nicholas spent the evening discussing LGBT history with Walter in a nearby restaurant and wondered why he never asked Walter about this part of his life before. The man had seen incredible things, from Marsha P. Johnson and Stormé DeLarverie leading the Stonewall Uprising to the first display of the AIDS memorial quilt, at that time containing 2,000 panels and larger than a football field. Today it was more than 48,000 panels, among which there was a panel dedicated to the man Walter loved.

  Nick couldn't help but be affected. All this history, things he'd known of only vaguely or not at all, he was now a part of, and he wasn't certain how to process that. He kept thinking how easily that could have been him. If he'd only been born a couple of decades earlier, it might be his name sewn into that quilt now, or killed by police during the uprising, or lynched in an alley for daring to go out in public with someone he loved. He never appreciated how lucky he was to live when he did before.

  He went home that night with his head spinning like a galaxy, and Clay was the supermassive force at the center around which everything else rotated. As Walter assured him, life would go on whether Clay accepted him or not, but Nick couldn't shake the certainty that, whichever way things went, it was going to have a lasting effect on the rest of his life.

  One moment he was resigned never to tell, to hold that secret close to his heart forever and find other, easier loves, or else never love again at all. The next he was determined to reveal his love in the most dramatic way possible. With roses and song, in letters or lights on the side of the Empire State building. He would rewrite Cyrano and confess on stage! No, that would be absurd, and he couldn't risk the play's success that way. But maybe...

  The ideas spun around in his head all night, keeping him from sleep. In the morning, dry-eyed and yawning, he was exhausted, but he had made up his mind. He didn't want to endanger the play, so he would wait until opening night and tell Clay how he felt once the play was over. It was, he thought, a very sensible plan. After all, opening night was less than a week away.

  Rehearsals stepped up to every night as they did full run-throughs in costume, tweaking the blocking and the lights, watching the last of the sets come together in glorious fashion as always at the last minute, striving for perfection. With Damien's help, the final renovations on the theater happened almost overnight. The place had been transformed from the run-down heap it had been when Nick had found it. It glittered now, an art deco palace, shrine to a bygone memory of the glory days of theater. Nicholas watched them raise the chandelier, freshly polished with all its lights replaced, and felt a deep contentment in his soul. He wanted to go on acting in this theater for the rest of his life. This felt like home.

  He was relieved to find the relationship between him and Clay had so far not collapsed. He'd been tense and stiff the first day after learning Nick was gay, but he loosened up after a few scenes. Nick hadn't dared invite the other man home to run lines again yet, too afraid he would be refused, but so far it seemed at least their professional relationship would be undamaged by any hidden homophobia Clay might possess. It was as it always was when they were on stage. They could look at nothing but each other. When they traded dialogue, the whole world fell away. Whatever else ever happened between them, Nicholas thought more than once, they were destined to act together. The thought swayed him temporarily back toward not wanting to confess. He wanted to keep acting with Clay, and the fear that being rejected might lose him that connection as well bothered him deeply. Which possibility was worse?

  "You did really well today," he told Clay after one of the last full dress rehearsals before opening night. "It seemed like you were enjoying yourself."

  "I was," Clay said with a laugh. "When I'm not scared out of my mind, this stuff is actually pretty great."

  "Think you might keep acting after this?" he asked, hoping.

  Clay looked down at his feet, scuffing his boots against the newly shined floors.

  "I don't know," he said. "I think I'd like to, so long as it was with y'all. But it's not really what I'm supposed to be doing here, and the rehearsals take a lot of time away from studying. I'm just worried..."

  He trailed off and Nick tilted his head, bending to meet Clay's averted gaze.

  "About what?" he prompted. "That you might have found something you enjoy more than dairy farming? Isn't that why you came out here in the first place?"

  "About my family," Clay answered, taking off Christian's hat and sitting down in one of the new, plush seats. Nicholas joined him and began picking at the edges of his prosthetic nose. He wanted to practice with it to make sure it wouldn't affect his voice or his vision, but it was a pain to get on and off. He need to get someone from makeup over here with solvent to dissolve the spirit gum.

  "They're coming to see the show," Clay explained. "But they're not, um—They're not the most liberal people. They weren't happy when I came out here, and they weren't happy when I told them about the play. If I told them I wanted to keep acting..."

  He took a deep breath and looked away, a hand on his face disrupting his false mustache. Nick scanned for the makeup artists, wondering what they were up to if not getting these things off so everyone could go home.

  "Would it really matter that much?" Nick asked. "If they didn't approve? I mean, sure they'll get mad, but you're an adult. What can they do, ground you? My parents didn't like me moving to the city to be an actor either, but they got over it eventually. I visit them on the holidays and there's usually some snide comments, but that's just family, right? For the most part it's fine."

  "You don't understand," Clay shook his head. "I'm the oldest son. My whole life has been about growing up and ta
king over the farm. If I said I didn't want to—Hell, if I even hinted there was something else I might like to do BEFORE I take over, it would be a betrayal as far as they were concerned. It would be like stabbing them in the back. They would never forgive me."

  Nick wrinkled his nose in dismay, making the prosthetic wiggle absurdly. Clay looked up in time to see it and burst into laughter as Nick began wiggling it on purpose, wondering if he could work that into the performance.

  "I forgot you had that ridiculous thing on," he chuckled.

  "Says the man with the sideways mustache," Nick laughed. "Let's go find the makeup artists and get these things off."

  They stood, but Nick put a hand on Clay's shoulder to make him stop for a moment.

  "Listen, I'm sorry about your folks," he said, "but if they can't be happy for you, that's their problem. You aren't to blame for being a human being with your own interests rather than a robot they can program. The way I've heard it you have enough brothers to choke a horse. At least one of them would probably love to run the farm. You shouldn't spend your whole life missing out on something you love just because they have stupid expectations. It isn't fair."

  "I know," Clay sighed, "but they're my family. I'd rather be unhappy than lose them."

  He headed off to find the makeup artists and Nick followed a moment behind, his heart sinking. It didn't give him a lot of hope for a positive outcome to his confession...

  ***

  Nick's own family arrived the day before the opening.

  "I don't see why we can't just stay at your apartment," his mother fussed as he helped them carry their things into a hotel room.

  "Because this room is bigger than my whole apartment," Nick answered, exasperated already. "There isn't enough room. The hotel is much nicer, and I want you guys to have a nice time here."

  "We'd have a nice time anyway, Sport," his dad said fondly. "We always have a great time at your shows. And this time it's at a theater you own!"