Under the Rainbow

by Celia Laskey

  I told him to go ahead.

  “Hi, Debbie, is everything okay? Oh, really? That’s crazy!” he said in the overly interested tone someone uses when they’re not very interested. He put his hand over the microphone and whispered to me, “She wanted to let me know there’s a picture of a dog in the paper who looks just like my dog.” A series of mm-hmms, yeses, and okays. “Oh, I’m just out with my new friend Gabe. I don’t know, let me ask him.” He turned to me and said, “Debbie would like to know if this is a date.”

  I coughed, then choked on my spit and coughed some more.

  “I’ll have to get back to you about that,” Brad said into the phone. “I think Gabe is trying to decide if I’m too gay for him.” He laughed at something she said. “Okay, I’ll talk to you soon. Loveyoubye!”

  I stared intently at the end cap we were walking by that had all the ingredients for nachos: corn chips, queso, refried beans, salsa, and pickled jalapenos. My stomach gurgled.

  “So, am I?” Brad asked.

  “What?” I said, pretending not to know what he was talking about.

  “Too gay for you,” he challenged, crossing his arms, though his blue eyes looked especially vulnerable. “Don’t pretend like you haven’t been thinking it.”

  “I don’t know, Brad,” I said. “I don’t really know anything.”

  “Well, there’s only one way to find out,” he said, leaning in and kissing me right there in front of the nacho display. It was a soft kiss that only lasted for about two seconds, but I felt something in my stomach rev, like an old car trying to start. I wanted to see what it would feel like for the engine to turn over.

  * * *

  • • •

  WE WENT ON five dates before it finally happened, and when it did I said, “Oh my god” so many times it was like I was praying. Being with Brad felt easy and natural in a way nothing ever had before. A deep calm spread throughout my body; even the nervous stomach I’d had since puberty disappeared. When I took him to my tree stand and he sat with me silently for a full hour and only afterward told me all the things he’d noticed—how the thick sheet of clouds had parted like someone pulled a zipper through them, how he’d heard the vibrating drum of a pileated woodpecker but hadn’t seen it, how the veins and ridges on the back of a leaf looked like a mountain range seen from a plane—I knew I was in love. Forty-three and in love for the first time in my life.

  The thing about falling in love is that it forces the issue of coming out; makes it urgent in a way it wasn’t before. I kept promising Brad I’d tell Jean and Billy, then kept not doing it. I started to wonder if maybe it wasn’t the fear of hurting Jean that kept me in the closet all those years, maybe it was just the fear. I wasn’t sure if Jean and Billy would accept me—I guessed Jean would likely be more sad than angry, and Billy would be aloof and unreadable—but their potential reactions weren’t what scared me the most. It was the simple fact that they’d know, that everyone would know. People would see me at Sportsman’s Corner or Dillons or Walmart and think, There’s Gabe and he’s gay. It wouldn’t be so bad if I could go somewhere different where no one knew me, but I didn’t want to go somewhere different. The ideal scenario would be if everyone in town had their memories of me replaced, so in their minds I was always gay and no one would look at me any differently.

  Brad, who had been out since he was a teenager and had a “Fuck ’em if they care who I fuck” motto—thus why he didn’t talk to his own family—didn’t understand. “But Jean left you almost three years ago,” he said. “Why wouldn’t you just tell her?”

  “Because it’ll set the wheels in motion. Then everyone in town will know.”

  “And?” He widened his eyes and clenched his hands in the air. “Wouldn’t that be a good thing?”

  I cut my eyes at him. “You know it was only a few years ago that we were labeled the most homophobic town in the nation.”

  “Yeah, but why do you care what homophobes think? Plus, the task force must have made things even a tiny bit better, right?”

  “It’s not that simple,” I said. After the task force left, things got worse for a while, like the recoil of a rubber band after it’s stretched. What was it Newton said? Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Some kids—or maybe adults, who knows—took a sledgehammer and a can of spray paint to the all-gender restroom at the high school. The governor proposed that state funding be taken away from HIV/AIDS research and instead used for conversion therapy. A young woman came home from college for Thanksgiving and, maybe emboldened by the task force’s recent presence, brought her girlfriend with her. One night as they waited at a stop sign, someone hurled a brick through the driver’s-side window and sent the young woman to the hospital for twenty stitches. But she healed, at least physically, the governor’s proposal went nowhere, and the bathroom was eventually repaired. After a few months, things died back down.

  They even got a little better, bit by bit. The high school hired a new principal, who implemented a zero-tolerance bullying policy and actually enforced it. I’m sure not all the teachers were happy about it, but they didn’t want to lose their jobs, so they went along. The businesses on Main Street signed a “Pledge to Serve Everyone.” The most surprising change was that Pastor Jim’s Baptist church tacked a rainbow flag up on the reader board above the message ALL ARE WELCOME UNDER GOD. I’d be shocked if any gay people saw that and suddenly decided to join the congregation, but it was a gesture, no matter if it was made in earnest or just for the sake of appearances.

  But even with these nods toward acceptance, I still couldn’t shake my fear. After Brad and I had been together for a year, he told me that if I didn’t tell Jean and Billy about us, he would leave. Tegan yelled at me at the top of her lungs over the phone; she even threatened to fly to Big Burr and drive me to Jean’s place herself, but it didn’t matter—I couldn’t do it. Brad gave me a month, and during that time we didn’t see each other. “So you have the space to think,” he said, but I knew he was just trying to give me a glimpse of how miserable my life would be without him. And it was miserable. My stomach went back to being a bubbling, queasy mess. I retreated to my tree stand, but no amount of nature could distract me from the decisions circling in my head. I thought maybe I should just let him leave; he’d surely be better off with someone more emotionally mature, someone who wasn’t a gay baby. I could go back to the hookup apps, keep it simple. Eventually—maybe in a few long years—there would be someone else. Maybe I might even love him, despite him not being Brad. But soon enough I’d be confronted with the same situation all over again. Love is a persistent force, like a stray cat you feed once—it’ll keep coming back around forever, mewling outside the door.

  Right before the month was up, I drove to Jean’s new house, which she and Jeff had bought not long after she left me, stopping once to throw up on the side of the road and almost getting into two accidents, before marching up the front steps and pounding on the door like a crazed bill collector.

  “Jesus, Gabe, what’s wrong?” asked Jean when she opened the door. “You look like death.”

  “I have to tell you something,” I said, swallowing down the bile rising in my throat.

  “Oh, god, do you have cancer?”

  I hunched over, then sank onto the doorstep, folding myself into a ball.

  Jean squatted next to me and put a hand on my back, trying to look at my face. “Gabe, you’re scaring me. What is it? Is it Billy?”

  “I’m . . .” I blinked, seeing the quivering sliver of life between present and future. “I’m gay,” I croaked.

  Jean’s hand fell from my back as she slid down next to me. She nodded slowly. “I always had my suspicions,” she said. Jeff was in the backyard blowing leaves, the constant mechanical bleating making the situation even more stressful and surreal. “Have you always known?” she asked, looking at her moccasin-slippered feet.

  “I gue
ss. But I thought I could suppress it enough that it wouldn’t be an issue.”

  Jean pushed air out from between her lips in a look-how-that-turned-out gesture. Her eyes flicked from left to right like she was reading a book, and I wondered what she was seeing: our first date at the movies when I spilled soda all over her lap, our wedding when the officiant kept accidentally calling her “Joan,” the days we spent in the hospital eating strawberry Jell-O cups after Billy was born five weeks early. Her face went somber. “Were you ever in love with me?”

  The leaf blower roared closer, followed by the sound of brittle leaves hitting the side of the house. I waited until the racket receded, then said, “I loved you, but now that I know what it really feels like, I don’t think I was ever in love with you.”

  She looked down again, picking a piece of leaf out of the welcome mat, then swiped a finger underneath her eye.

  “I’m sorry, was that too honest?”

  “No, it’s okay. It’s just . . .” She tsked her tongue. “So many years wasted.”

  When I told Billy later that week, all he said was, “Okay,” in a completely indiscernible tone, then told me he was running late to PT and hung up. Billy had signed up for the Army right after high school, a decision I wasn’t crazy about, but he seemed to like it, and was good at it. He was stationed at Fort Benning in Georgia, training to be a sniper—his childhood video-game dream come true. When he finally visited for the weekend, months after our very abbreviated conversation, I tried bringing it up again.

  “Are you upset?” I asked.

  “Not about you being gay,” he said.

  “But about something else?”

  He sighed and cracked the knuckle on his thumb. “My whole childhood, I thought it had to do with me. You seemed distracted all the time, like there was nothing I could do to get you to notice me. Sometimes I just wanted to run around banging pots and pans or blowing an air horn in your ear. I thought I just wasn’t interesting enough, or important enough. I thought there must have been something wrong with me.”

  Tears burned behind my eyes. “Oh, Billy. There’s nothing wrong with you. I’m sorry I made you think there was.”

  He shrugged. “It’s okay.”

  “No, it’s not, but hopefully now that you know the truth, we can move on. Really get to know each other.”

  He smiled weakly. “Sure.” It looked like there was something else he wanted to say, but instead he got up and went to the bathroom.

  * * *

  • • •

  I TOLD SOME friends and some people at work, and after that Brad and I started getting the look whenever we were out together. I’d been so terrified of how people would react, I was surprised to discover I didn’t really care at all. Sometimes I even looked them right in the eye and smiled. One day Christine Peterson came up to us in Walmart, hands on her hips, and said, “Now I understand why Jean had to steal my husband.”

  Before I realized that my mouth was moving, I said, “Jeff left you because you’re a miserable person, Christine.” Her eyes widened as red splotches crawled up her neck, then she turned on her heel and stormed away. Brad looked at me, his mouth hanging open. I shrugged and took his hand.

  In general, though, life went back to normal, or I guess what you’d call the new normal. My and Jean’s old house never sold, so Brad and I decided to move in and remodel it ourselves. It took almost two years, but when we were done, it looked like an after-shot of a house on HGTV: a subway-tiled backsplash in the kitchen, exposed reclaimed-wood ceiling beams in the living room, an “accent wall” with black-and-white herringbone wallpaper. Brad let me keep the deer mounted above the fireplace, and we tied a little bow tie around his neck. The first time we had Jean and Jeff over, Jean kept smacking my arm, saying she couldn’t believe it was really our old house. The Herald even sent a photographer and gave us a spread in the Home and Family section. In the lead photo, Brad and I are sitting next to each other on the couch, Brad leaning back, his feet resting on the ottoman, me leaning forward, my leg crossed toward Brad with my ankle over my knee. Brad’s hand is casually placed on my shoulder. Neither of us is smiling, exactly, but we look content, our faces open and relaxed.

  When Brad’s mother-in-law gave him a big chunk of money after her father passed away, Brad bought the empty storefront that used to be Barb’s Boutique and turned it into a coffee shop, Big Burr’s first LGBTQ-owned business. On Friday nights, he hosts an open mic for the high school students; a few have even felt brave enough to read poems with some pretty gay undertones. The coffee shop is now the number-one-rated place in town on TripAdvisor, and even people who don’t approve of us come for the coffee—including Christine Peterson, who always orders a Brazilian pour-over and then proceeds to complain about how long it takes and how much it costs. Ever since I confronted her in Walmart, we’ve come to a kind of truce. I like to think that she grudgingly respects me for calling her out.

  From the window, I can see our guests starting to file into the rows of white chairs facing the cottonwood tree that Karen draped in rainbow-colored ribbons. I never expected Karen to come back, but she said she had to see the first gay wedding in Big Burr. Avery, who writes for that TV show Feminazi that keeps racking up Emmys, is sitting next to Karen in her wheelchair and her boyfriend, a muscular movie producer, sits next to her. Karen told me that Zach lives in Los Angeles now, too. Avery persuaded him to move out there after college, and they’re back to being close friends. Sitting next to Avery and her boyfriend and Karen are David and Miguel, still happily swinging after all these years. David is the research director at an AIDS nonprofit, and Miguel is the principal of a high school in Brooklyn. And standing under the cottonwood, shuffling through her notes for the ceremony and rubbing her palms on her dress, is Tegan. She’s a licensed clinical social worker now, helping gay babies other than me. She and Shirin broke up a few years after moving back to New York, because Shirin wanted kids and Tegan didn’t. She’s been single since then, dating on and off but never settling down again.

  “Hey, New York City,” says Brad, walking into the bedroom in his black-and-white herringbone-printed suit, an homage to the accent wall in our house. He smiles his golden retriever smile at me. “Are you ready to do this?”

  “I can’t get my cuff links on,” I say, holding my wrists out to him.

  He gives me a you’re-so-helpless eye roll and crosses the room. When his warm, dry fingers gently touch my wrist, I blink back tears. He twists the T-bar on the back of the cuff link, securing it into place with a quiet click that echoes through my body. Sunlight slants through the curtains, falling on the bedside table where there’s a half-full cup of coffee in Brad’s YOU HAVE THE SAME AMOUNT OF HOURS IN A DAY AS BEYONCÉ mug, the most recent issue of Outdoor Life, and the antique jadeite honey pot where we keep our spare change. Outside, the ribbons on the cottonwood tree flutter in the breeze. All the people who love us wait in their chairs. Brad takes my hand, and we walk toward them.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you, firstly, to Ashley—for sniffing me out and thus starting my life, for giving me access to the emotions necessary to write, for being my most trusted reader, and for moving to New Mexico with me so I could write this book. None of it would have been possible without you. Thank you to Alexa Stark, my agent, for taking a chance on an unknown writer and supporting me along the way with your calm confidence. Thank you to Michelle Koufopoulos, my editor, for your fierce belief in this book and pushing me to make it better. Thank you to the whole team at Riverhead, my dream publisher, for making the dream a reality. Thank you to Marisa Clark, for being the first official reader of the book and for being a queer mentor when I so badly needed one. I’ll always remember the speech you gave about me at graduation, which allowed me to see myself in a whole new way. Thank you to Lori Ostlund, also for being a mentor, and for sharing your incredible knowledge of craft. Thank you to Dan Mueller for teaching
me how to write better sentences. Thank you to early readers Emily Rapp Black, Tim Johnston, Abigail Lloyd, Bell Kauffmann, Charles Theonia, and Erika Turner. Thank you to the literary magazines that published some of the stories from this book. Thank you to my parents for never discouraging me from being a writer, and for being open to all the ideas I rant about on the phone. Thank you to my chosen family—you know who you are—for inspiring a lot of this book, giving me such a sense of belonging, and bringing me frequent joy. Lastly, thank you to all the queer people who have come before, who have been visible and thus allowed us to see possibilities for the future, and who fought to get us to the point where a book like this could be published.

  About the Author

  Celia Laskey's work has appeared in Guernica, The Minnesota Review, and other places. She has an MFA from the University of New Mexico and was a finalist in Glimmer Train's Short Story Award for New Writers. She lives with her wife in Los Angeles, where she writes for ad agencies.

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