Design for Loving

by Doug Sanford

  One problem he did have with girls after Leslie was finding ones who had their own place. Bart gave up his own apartment right after his parents left that first year, so often, even if he met a girl he liked, it was difficult to find a place to go. Most had roommates who were not as accommodating as Leslie’s had been.

  One evening as we were talking about this, I said it was fine with me if he wanted to bring a girl back to the house and use the guest room.

  He turned to look at me. “Are you crazy, Marc?”

  The tone of his voice and the way he said my name told me pretty quickly that I’d just stepped in some deep shit.

  “I just meant if it would help you out—”

  “Help me out? Do you know what you’re saying? You want me to use our home as some kind of motel? Introduce you as my roommate? Is that what you think we are? Roommates?”

  “I didn’t exactly mean—”

  “Would you bring some cheap trick you’d picked up in a bar back here?”

  “First, I don’t go to bars; second, I don’t pick up tricks; and, third, if I did, they wouldn’t be cheap—”

  “Don’t try to joke your way out of this.”

  “Okay, Bart. Calm down. You’re right, and I’m sorry.”

  “You know we agreed it would have to be the right one before I told her anything about us. I lost Leslie because I didn’t have the courage to tell her. You think I’d tell some one-night stand?”

  He’d caught me completely off guard. It was almost the only serious argument we’d ever had, and he was truly angry at me.

  I pulled him over, hugged him, and repeated, “I’m sorry, Bart. It was a stupid thing to suggest.”

  He calmed down almost immediately. “Sorry too, old man. That just got to me.”

  I never made that mistake again, but his outburst gave me a whole new insight into the seriousness of his commitment to our relationship.

  There was never any question in my mind that I was totally and completely in love with Bart, but I’m not sure that I’d ever really accepted that he felt the same way, no matter what he said. There was always that nagging suspicion in the back of my mind that I was some kind of phase he was going through and that eventually he’d move on.

  His outburst made me begin to reevaluate all that.

  But it also pointed up even more clearly the dilemma we faced: if his commitment to me was as strong as mine to him, how the hell did we reconcile that with his need for a wife and family?

  The question seemed to take on more importance when, in January of the following year, just as Robin had told Ada, Robin and Doug’s son, John Albert, was born.

  Robin took leave from work to become a full-time mother, but she kept her license up to date so that she was still able to help me out from home when I needed her. As my business increased and as Johnny grew and didn’t require every minute of his mother’s time, I would use her on a more regular basis to handle a lot of the paperwork and phone calls and so help her earn extra money while she was home.

  Bart and I were both made godparents, which resulted in a slew of fairy godfather jokes. Robin insisted on treating us as a normal gay couple and, although she knew perfectly well from me about Bart’s need for women, she ignored that most of the time. Bart occasionally objected, but we both knew it was a lost cause. Besides, we kept saying we’d moved on from labels, so what did it matter?

  Bart loved playing with Johnny, babysitting him, and even changing him—something I could never really get into. But his arrival triggered more discussions between the two of us. Bart definitely wanted children, and we both pretty much had accepted the idea that he would get married one day though neither of us had the slightest idea as to the way in which our relationship could continue if he were married and a father himself.

  That topic was never far from our minds and was always a source of confusion, questions, and on more than one occasion, humor.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Bart said one evening. “Lots of married men have mistresses. What’s the male equivalent of a mistress?”

  “A master?” I suggested.

  “That sounds too much like S&M.” Bart had learned a lot since Tom Lehrer.

  “I’m not sure there is a word for that. Maybe I’d be a kept man.”

  “You wish.”

  “And you’d sneak away from your wife and children to visit me in the sleazy room where you were keeping me. Sorry, Bart, but I won’t put up with sleazy. I’ll need something more elegant.”

  “You could be the long-lost older stepbrother I never knew I had who turns up out of the blue,” Bart suggested.

  “And you’d have me move in with you? Even if we got away with that, I don’t think you could spend much time with me away from your wife without her getting just a bit suspicious. And I’m pretty sure that sleeping with your stepbrother would blow your cover.”

  “You think?”

  A few others which came up from time to time were me as a live-in gardener, a nanny, or one of my favorites, me as an au-pair man.

  That kind of silliness was about as close as we ever got to any solution to our problem on our own. When the problem was solved, the answer came out of the blue from a totally unexpected source.

  Meanwhile, Bart grew personally in many ways during that period. I was conceited enough to think that perhaps because he had the stability of our relationship behind him, he was more confident and found it easier to make friends, male and female. Whatever it was, he was more outgoing than the kid I first met on the phone.

  Gay guys hit on him fairly often, especially in the theater department, but he’d developed friendly and positive ways of letting them know he wasn’t interested without hurting their feelings.

  The two of us grew much closer during those three years. My relationship with him, despite the woman problem, was much deeper certainly than the one I’d had with Marty in Chicago. We knew each other so well and could anticipate one another’s reactions so instinctively that there were few of even the minor arguments most couples have. It was frankly a wonder to me. Bart had never been in a relationship, and his parents bickered very little, so it all seemed normal to him.

  And the sympathetic communication we had with one another also deepened until it was sometimes almost telepathic.

  I remember one time in, I think, Bart’s sophomore year. Robin and Doug were at our place for our usual Friday dinner. Doug told us about a student at his school who’d been caught by his English teacher with some hardcore porn tucked inside his American literature anthology. The teacher took it away, and as Doug put it, with a laugh, “I’m sure Bob took it more for his own use, than to punish the kid.”

  “If that’s the Bob I met,” said Robin, “I bet you’re right. He’s a creep, and dirty books would be just his thing.”

  Bart turned to me and said, “Hey, have you ever—”

  “No,” I interrupted. “I don’t think so.”

  “Why don’t you—”

  “Okay.”

  I got up, pulled out the Tom Lehrer recording of That Was the Year That Was and Bart said, “You’ll have to hear this.” I played “Smut,” Lehrer’s marching song in defense of pornography, which has one of the funniest opening lines I’ve ever heard.

  Robin and Doug loved it and made me play it again because they were laughing so hard the first time that they missed some of the lines. “That sounds like Bob, all right.” Robin said, “But seriously, how do you two do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “Talk to each other without finishing sentences? You do it a lot.”

  “Dunno,” I said. “He knew that dirty books would remind me of that song. He just needed to know if I’d ever played it for you before. Pretty logical, really.”

  “I don’t know. Doug and I don’t do that. Half the time neither of us knows what the other is thinking. Sometimes, it’s like you two read each other’s minds.”

  Taking this as a compliment, Bart and I looked at one another and grinned.


  But it was finally on January 3, 1991, as we were celebrating our third third anniversary, that signs of a bigger change in our lives appeared.

  That’s not a typo. We celebrate three anniversaries each year. Bart thinks it’s a little silly—no, a lot silly and definitely anal, but he goes along with it. I’m sentimental enough to want to recognize them all since they’re so much a part of our history: our first anniversary is August 27: the date of the first phone call; our second anniversary is October 27: the date of our first in-person meeting; and our third anniversary is January 3: the date we first made love.

  We were at a fancier than usual restaurant for the occasion. Ada and Jack were back at the house. They didn’t have to leave until the following Saturday, but they absolutely refused to accompany us on what they thought should be a private celebration. That was typical of them.

  On Monday, Bart would be starting his last semester before graduation.

  “So where do you think we’ll we be next year this time?” he said.

  “I have a feeling you’re about to tell me.”

  “I have a feeling you already know; otherwise, why would there be a big thick envelope from the California Department of Real Estate on your desk?”

  “You sure are nosy. To be honest, there’s another one on its way from New York—just in case.”

  He laughed. “You do think ahead, don’t you?”

  “Got to be prepared, kid.”

  “You sure you’re ready to move?”

  “I moved out of Chicago to get away from a bad relationship. You can bet I’m willing to move out of Arizona to keep a good one.”

  “What if I don’t want you to come along?”

  “If you didn’t, I’d have known it long before now, and we wouldn’t be sitting here having this conversation.”

  “You’re awfully damned sure of yourself,” he said with a smile.

  “You know it.”

  “Good. I’m glad.”

  “I assume LA?”

  “That’s where things are happening if I’m going to be an actor.”

  “And there are plenty of properties out there to keep me busy.”

  “So, we’ve got a plan?” asked Bart. “This was easier than I thought it was going to be. I was afraid you were going to object.”

  “As you said the first time I asked you to sleep over and I thought I’d have trouble convincing you, ‘Why?’”

  “It’s your future,” I continued. “We do what we have to do. I can sell houses anywhere, and the only anywhere I’m interested in being is the one where you are. Sounds cheaply sentimental, but you know I mean it.”

  “Cheap sentiment will get you anywhere, old man. Keep talking.”

  “I’ll start researching places to live. Spring break we take the week and drive over to look at them. By then, I can probably be ready to take the California real estate exam, so we can kill two birds. And if you develop any contacts, you might be able to get some interviews in as well.”

  “You’ve really thought about this, haven’t you, Marc?”

  “I had a feeling it might come up tonight. We haven’t had much time to ourselves with Jack and Ada here. Besides, I’m not just a pretty face either,” I smiled.

  Chapter 23

  Of course, there was way too much to do in just a week: the real estate exam, the paperwork I still had to file, his appointments, the house hunting.

  We drove over in our car and rented a second one when we got there. That way Bart could make his rounds, and I could make mine. If we hadn’t been such a great team, we’d never have gotten it all done. We knew each other so well by then that I could eliminate properties even though Bart hadn’t seen them.

  By Thursday of that week, we had two possibilities: a house we were pretty sure would work but was more expensive and an apartment which was cheaper but which we could probably make work.

  “If you think we can do it, Marc, I vote for the house even though you know I won’t be making much money at first.”

  “Rule three applies to things other than movies and plays, kid. Anyhow, I agree with you, as you knew I would. It makes more sense. And with the market the way it is now, we won’t lose money on it even if we have to sell it.”

  “You’re the mindermast in that area,” he joked, bringing up the term from one of our earliest telephone conversations.

  “I thought I was the mindermast in all areas.”

  “You wish. Anyhow, it’s got the space we need for an office; it’s got a guest room; and it’s in Sherman Oaks which is near enough to Hollywood and Burbank.”

  The fact that it was owned by a couple whose daughter was being married in mid-May and who didn’t want to have to move until after the wedding helped a lot since we wouldn’t be able to do anything until after Brad’s graduation in May. And we still had to sell our house—my house—oh, fuck, our house.

  Bart had some good interviews. He obviously makes a great first impression, and though there were no actual work offers, he got a lot of suggestions, the names of more contacts, and much helpful information. He got hit on twice and managed to escape gracefully both times without causing any resentment. One of the guys, an agent named Norm, told Bart to call when he got back to LA and got settled. He said he had some specific ideas. Whether he did or whether he was just hot for Bart, we’d have to find out when we returned.

  Once we were home, we had the inside of the house painted and the carpet cleaned. We got rid of a ton of junk we weren’t going to take with us, including, after checking with Jack and Ada, Bart’s Selectric which he no longer used since he’d become much more proficient on the computer.

  The house sold within three weeks of its listing, and we didn’t have to come down at all from our asking price which was a whole lot more than I’d paid for it eight years before. A new U. of A. professor and his family would be moving into the neighborhood in July.

  I got the notice that I’d passed the California real estate exam in the mail the day before Bart’s graduation which was a few weeks after his twenty-first birthday. Of course Jack and Ada came out, and it was a great day for celebrating.

  Their gift to him knocked us both off our feet. A check for a new car. When they gave it to him, he refused to take it until they told him they’d been planning on this for the last four years and had done it with the money he’d saved them with his scholarships.

  The closing was May 31, the movers showed up on the second, and less than a week later, we were sleeping in our new, though still very disorganized, home in California.

  Chapter 24

  Getting settled turned out to be easier than I thought it would be. I’d made some contacts when we were there in April, got back in touch with them after we sold the Tucson house, and had already lined up a firm that would let me carry on with what I’d been doing in Tucson—high end properties: quality, not quantity. A lot of my clients in Tucson were originally from California, and with their help, I’d developed a solid starting list of prospects.

  Before long I was pretty much back into the same routine I’d had in Tucson—buying and selling houses and doing well at it despite what the housing market had been through. I attributed it to what eventually became my niche market: wealthy lesbians and gay men.

  I was hardly the only gay real estate agent in the Valley—if anything, it was straight agents who were an endangered species there—but I worked hard to make sure my clients got what they wanted if they were buying or got as close to their asking price, considering the market, if they were selling. I had a record of satisfaction and needed to do little in the way of advertising since most of my business came from word-of-mouth referrals. I also invested back into my market: Bart and I were seen at a lot of gay-related charity benefits which my clients supported and at which I could also meet potential new clients.

  I’m sure that most of the people who knew us assumed we were a gay couple, and since few would have understood our relationship even if we told them our story,
we didn’t try to dissuade them of their idea.

  Meanwhile Bart’s life changed significantly as he moved from student to professional. His theater work back at the U of A had always been solid. He was dependable, was never jealous of the success of others, and had no ego problems. He looked on acting as a job to be done and saw a production as a team effort. He studied and prepared for roles as thoroughly as he studied for exams and wrote papers in his classes. He took direction well and was always looking to learn more. Being the analyst I was, I felt his drive came from his high school years when he had to fight the assumptions of other kids that he was too handsome to be smart and that he was coasting along on his looks. He was still fighting those same assumptions in LA.

  Norm, the agent he met during spring break, turned out to be the real thing. He was an enthusiastic supporter and a strong believer in Bart’s abilities and talent. Most importantly, he was a great agent who knew his stuff.

  Maybe because he had such a crush on Bart, Norm gave him a lot more attention than Bart’s lowly status on the show business ladder would justify. He got Bart auditions, lots of them, and was always on the lookout for anything he thought would be right for him. Bart’s combination of good looks, his smile, that amazingly expressive brow, and his open and friendly personality got him far, and in the first year and a half, he snared a multitude of non-memorable and semi-memorable appearances in both movies and television, including a small part in a minor full-length film and brief appearances in several major network sitcom episodes. They were one-shot deals, but they helped him meet people, make contacts, and learn a lot about how the business of TV and films worked.

  Bart was also good about not turning down any opportunity to act in live theater, and he had roles in a number of local productions. He felt he could benefit from any part, no matter how poor the script or the direction might be.

  We had no really close friends in LA, but that wasn’t a problem. We’d both been loners to some extent, and frankly we were too busy getting established in our respective fields to worry about it. We liked Norm and would have done more with him, but he confessed to Bart that he felt a bit like an outsider when he was with us without a date of his own.