Men Who Love Men

by William J. Mann

  “Lloyd said you were meeting Luke,” he says. There’s concern on his face. “Everything go okay?”

  “Just fine.” I smile at him. “It went far, far better than I could ever have imagined.”

  Jeff gets off his bike, pushing it as we walk the street. “So are you two friends again?”

  I smile. “Jeff, he and I were never friends.”

  He sighs, not really following my meaning. “You sure you’re okay?”

  “Actually, never better.” I zip up my jacket. “What great air, don’t you think? I love the first brisk winds of fall. People wish they could bottle the air here, you know. They want to take it back with them to wherever they call home. Do you know how lucky we are to live here, Jeff?”

  He smiles. “I’ve got a pretty good idea.”

  “I’m seeing Gale tonight,” I tell him. “I wasn’t sure I should go through with it, but now I think I should.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “I need to tell him I was wrong.”

  Jeff gives me a puzzled look. “Wrong about what?”

  “I was pushing him to go faster than he was ready for. And in truth, I wasn’t ready myself.” I laugh, spreading my arms wide as we walk down the street. “Do you know how wonderful it is to be single?”

  “Henry,” Jeff says, leaning in. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “I told you. Never better!”

  Jeff smirks. “So Henry Weiner is happy to be a single man?”

  “Ecstatic.” I turn to him. “If I had gotten into a relationship with any one of these guys—or, in the case of Evan and Curt, any two—well, it would have come undone just as fast as my relationships with Joey or Daniel or Shane did. Don’t you see, Jeff? I was caught in a vicious pattern, but now I have the luxury of getting to know myself on my own! To get myself ready for Mr. Right, whenever he might come along.”

  “Uh, excuse me,” Jeff says, crossing his arms over his chest and stopping in the road in front of me, “but isn’t this what Lloyd and I have been telling you all along?”

  I smile. “Yes, it is. But only now can I really see things clearly.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Jeff looks me up and down. “If that’s the case, then how come you’re still wearing those clothes?”

  My exuberance comes to a sudden stop. “What’s wrong with my clothes?”

  Jeff just grins and gestures to my outfit. I look down at myself. I’m wearing my number 9 T-shirt under a black jacket with ABERCROMBIE ATHLETIC DEPT stenciled on the back. I’m also wearing the new white belt I bought for myself this morning. I think I look pretty stylin’.

  “Henry,” Jeff says, putting his arm around me and pulling me close, “I’m all for you revamping yourself. But let me give you a bit of advice. The fastest way to looking old and tired is trying too hard to look young.”

  “What?”

  He smiles. “It hit me the other day when I was in Boston trying on a pair of sunglasses.” He looks around to make sure no one can overhear him. “I looked at the label. They were these huge goofy things I see a lot of the kids wearing—and they were from the Mary-Kate and Ashley line.”

  “You mean, the Olsen twins?”

  “Yes,” Jeff says, cringing. “Do you know how absurd I felt in that moment, that I actually was considering buying them? Worse, wearing them!”

  “Well, I’m not wearing anything by Mary-Kate and—”

  “Henry.” Jeff looks at me. “Buddy. The only people wearing Abercrombie anymore are guys in their thirties and forties trying to blend in with teenagers—which ain’t never gonna work, and not only because the kids aren’t wearing that stuff anymore.”

  “So you’re saying this jacket…this shirt…”

  “And the hair.” He tousles my faux-hawk. “Ten years from now, we’re going to look back on this do the way we look at the mullet today.”

  I catch a glimpse of myself in a shop window. Suddenly my haircut seems very silly indeed.

  “But who are you to talk, Jeff?” I’m suddenly annoyed that he’s spoiled my good feeling about myself. “Mr. Botox?”

  He deliberately lifts his eyebrows as high as he can, exposing the natural wrinkles of the skin.

  “I’m clean, buddy,” he says. “I’m off the stuff.”

  I can’t help but laugh.

  “It was the same day I had the revelation about the sunglasses,” Jeff tells me. “I was in Boston to get my regular forehead fix. I wanted to be smooth and tight for the wedding. And suddenly it all seemed so crazy. Who was I smoothing myself out for? Lloyd doesn’t love me any less for having a few wrinkles in my forehead.”

  “But see?” I poke Jeff gently in the chest with my finger. “You have someone. I don’t. Therein lies the difference. You don’t need to try to attract someone in quite the same way that I want to.”

  He takes my finger and brings it to his lips, kissing it. “You’re not going to attract them in that haircut. Trust me on this, Henry.”

  “Okay, okay.” I roll my eyes. “I get your point.”

  “I’m glad you’re in a better of frame of mind,” Jeff says, mounting his bike again. “And I tell you this stuff only because I love you.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m not sure what you and Luke talked about,” Jeff says, “but whatever it is, I like it. Don’t lose this new attitude.”

  “I won’t,” I promise. “But first I’ve got to get out of these clothes.”

  He laughs. “I’ve got to run, buddy. We’re meeting the caterer to go over some last-minute stuff.”

  “Okay. I’ll see you back at the house.”

  He shakes a finger at me. “You better be writing a good speech, Mr. Best Man. I don’t want a dry eye on the beach.”

  I smile and pucker him a kiss. I watch him pedal off.

  Then I head over to the salon to have my hair evened out.

  Of course, if I had really liked the look, I would have kept it. But Jeff only spoke what I already knew to be true. This attempt to keep up with the kiddies was just my latest attempt to hide from who I really am. Henry Weiner is thirty-three years old. Mr. Right is just going to have to deal with it.

  Back in my apartment I stand in front of the full-length mirror and really look at myself. Without the silly disguise, I don’t look so bad. Pretty damn good, in fact. Why is it that I always see in this mirror someone old, out of shape, and unappealing? Why is it that I never see a good-looking, broad-shouldered, upstanding, decent guy? He hasn’t been hiding. He’s been right there all along.

  I think about Luke—or Frank or whoever he is. What did he see when he looked in the mirror? Did he see the cute body, the adorable face? Maybe that’s all he saw. Maybe he saw nothing else—no mind, no heart, no soul. Maybe that’s why he made up so much about himself, to fill in what he perceived as gaps. For whatever it was that his mirror reflected, he didn’t like it very much.

  I was being honest when I told him we really weren’t so different.

  What did all those terrifying, unsettling things I’d read in his manuscript conceal? Were the truths of that kid’s life even more painful? I suspect I’ll never know the answer to that question. At the end of The Boys of Summer, Jeff wrote that people sometimes come into your life and leave without ever revealing their truths. We’re left only with ambiguity. But it’s the peace we must eventually make with that ambiguity that finally sets us free. We come to accept that there are some things we’ll never understand, some people whose blanks will never be entirely filled in. In a way, it’s not so different from how I never knew what happened to my childhood friend Jack when he took off in pursuit of his dream. Did he find it? Did he make it? All that I carry of him now is his name—and what the memory of him has come to mean for me.

  But while so much about the boy I left sitting on the pier will remain a mystery to me, I do know this much: the bitter dissatisfaction he carries around about who he really is and where he really comes from is something I want no part of.

  I th
ink about my mother and my father. They weren’t perfect. But they loved me. Even on this last visit, they offered small gestures as proof of their love. My father shutting off the TV set when he thought I needed to talk. My mother kissing me on the forehead. It is true that, away from them, I have found a more sustaining family. But my parents loved me the best way they knew how. Though I needed to find my way out of West Springfield—a feat for which I perhaps do not give myself enough credit—my childhood and my family and my hometown experience remain vital parts of who I am: A pencil-necked kid who worked at Roy Rogers and snuck out of gym class and into gay bars. A soft-hearted romantic who fell in love too many times in his life. A guy who’s sometimes been selfish and sometimes been naïve. But for all that, Henry Weiner isn’t so bad.

  Getting dressed for my—what do I call it? Date? Farewell?—with Gale, I can’t help but think of the way I tried to compete with those boys surrounding him at Spiritus yesterday. Boys who weren’t even born when I had my first orgasm, humping my mattress while looking at pictures of a shirtless Tom Selleck in TV Guide. There I stood, in my Abercrombie jacket and ridiculous haircut, desperately trying to get Gale’s attention away from those children—an apple trying to compete with four very juicy, fresh-from-the-tree oranges. And throughout that sorry spectacle, Martin had sat there indifferent to the whole game, solid and real.

  This is what I need to tell Gale: that I was trying to be someone that I wasn’t—specifically, someone who was grounded enough and secure enough to be ready for a relationship. Quite unfairly, I was pushing him and making demands when I had no business doing so. He was right to resist.

  Yet even as I knock on Gale’s door there’s a pang of something that I can’t quite name. I remember coming here the first time, and the hope I felt that maybe, just maybe, he was the One for me. Of course, there had been warning signs all along that Gale was equally as unprepared as I was to enter into a relationship. Like Luke, he held back from ever revealing his true self—the soft, vulnerable, frightened part of him I sense lurks somewhere within. Yet unlike Luke, Gale never lied about who he is, never wove strange fictions about himself. He just erected a fortress around himself so high that it’s proven impossible for me to scale.

  Maybe, without even knowing it, that’s what I’ve been doing as well.

  “Hello, Henry,” Gale says as he opens the door.

  Something in his very manner is different: the way he holds the doorknob, the way he says my name. He’s softer, less forward. With a florid sweep of his hand, he invites me in.

  He’s wearing jeans and a long, loose-fitting white T-shirt. Even so, I can make out the hard definition of his pecs and the roundness of his shoulders. He smiles at me as he shuts the door.

  “Can I offer you some tea? A cup of coffee?”

  “No thanks,” I say. “I don’t think I’ll be staying that long.”

  He arches an eyebrow at me. “No? Just in and out?”

  I nod. “I just came to say…that I’m sorry.”

  Gale looks at me without fully comprehending. “Please,” he says, gesturing for me to sit at his small kitchen table. “Have a cup of tea at least.”

  I agree, taking a seat and watching as he pours two cups of steaming hot water into two cups. I marvel at the muscles in his back, the way they move underneath his shirt. He drops a tea bag into each cup and then carries them over to the table.

  “I’m not sure why you feel the need to apologize, Henry,” Gale says. “At least, if there are apologies to be made, they should come from both sides.”

  “All right,” I say. “Fair enough.” I remove the tea bag with a spoon, setting it down on the saucer under the cup.

  “You were right about something,” Gale says, sitting opposite me. “Far more important to me than finding a relationship—which, as you know, I consider my holy grail—was keeping control.” He smiles as he sips his tea. “Thank you for pointing that out to me.”

  “Maybe we aren’t so different,” I tell him. “My need to push you—make demands—that was my own way to control.”

  “It’s not easy, is it?” Gale asks. “Just letting things happen as they’re meant to?”

  “Not at all,” I agree. “But I’m getting better at it.”

  Gale smiles. “I’d like to say I am, too, but I’m not sure I’m quite ready to let down all my defenses.”

  “That’s your decision,” I tell him. “But I really think behind your very controlled exterior, we’re not so different. The secret parts of ourselves…I suspect they’re pretty similar.”

  He smiles mysteriously. “Oh, I doubt that very much.”

  I’m surprised by his comment. “Why would you doubt it?” I ask. “Look, we’ve both put up fronts to hide the real person underneath. A real person who’s strong enough and good enough to be let out into the open, if only we could learn to trust that.”

  Gale stands. He walks across the kitchen to the sink, then turns and faces me again. He seems anxious all of a sudden, as if this is the part of the conversation he’s been dreading.

  “This is where you’re wrong, Henry,” he tells me. “What you see out here in front is the real Gale.” He taps his chest. “The Gale inside—the person underneath—is the old Gale, who was weak and confused. The strong, resilient, manly Gale is quite new.”

  I frown. “Why do you dislike that other part of yourself so much? Why do you call that part of yourself weak and confused?”

  Gale shrugs. “Because that part of myself wasn’t a man.”

  “Gale,” I say, trying to sound as kind and compassionate as possible. “Just because you have some softness to you doesn’t make you less of a man.”

  He walks back to the table, picks up his teacup, and paces, holding the cup in his hands. “Would you like to hear about my last relationship?”

  “Yes,” I say. “The one with the woman?”

  “That’s right. We were together for six years.” Gale walks across the small kitchen floor, anxiously taking sips of his tea. “She was the strong one, you see. She made all the decisions. She told me when to sit, when to stand, when to go to bed. And I hated it. The relationship didn’t fit me. It was wrong. And as the years went on, it only felt more wrong.”

  He pauses before going on.

  “I’d met her when I was quite young,” he continues. “What did I know? I thought this was the way these kinds of relationships worked. But as each year passed, I felt more and more uncomfortable. I was living a lie.”

  I’m nodding. “That’s when you realized you were gay?”

  Galee smiles, walking over to me standing directly in front of me.

  “Silly boy, I was always gay.” He runs his fingers through my hair. “You just can’t see, can you?”

  He places his hand on my shoulder, urging me to stand. As I do, he sets down his teacup and wraps his arms around me. He pulls me into him for a kiss. My arms reach around the delicious hardness of his body. We’re locked that way for several minutes, kissing deeply. I breathe in Gale’s exquisite masculine scent, a fragrance quite unlike anything I’ve ever experienced with a man before. My cock rages in my jeans.

  Gale’s lips are on my ear. “And this is the part where I usually say stop,” he whispers. “Isn’t that right?”

  I kiss his neck. “Yeah. That’s usually how it goes.”

  “Not this time,” he purrs. “This time, you’ll be the one to end it.”

  I pull back and look into his eyes. “Why would I do that, Gale?”

  He gives me a rueful smile. “You really don’t know, do you, Henry?”

  I hold his gaze, his beautiful round brown eyes searing my soul. And then, in an instant, another psychic moment.

  I understand everything.

  I move my hand around from his butt to his crotch.

  There’s nothing there.

  At least, nothing that I expected.

  No erection.

  No penis, in fact, at all.

  “You understand my mo
desty a little better now, I think,” Gale says quietly.

  For several seconds I’m struck mute. The bulge in his pants I’d once admired…not real. All of this…all of what I’ve thought of Gale…is an illusion. His firm round pecs—so round and so full. But in fact they were the breasts of a small-bosomed woman, hardened by testosterone.

  “Why did you never tell me?” I finally ask, still close enough that I’m practically whispering in Gale’s ear.

  He smiles as if I’m being absurd. “Would you have come back? Honestly, Henry. Would you have come back?”