by Xavier Mayne
Donnelly stiffened and turned to Sandler, who seemed to know exactly the objection he was about to make.
“If we wanted someone to dance with,” Sandler said emphatically, “just dancing, nothing else. That would be fine, wouldn’t it, Gabriel?”
Donnelly wasn’t at all sure it was fine, but he would feel a little silly bugging out of a social situation just because someone mentioned dancing. He nodded and took a drink.
“Though I think Dax and Stanley would be pleased to expand the definition of ‘gentleman host’ beyond the dance floor,” Emmet said discreetly, then turned to take another patron’s order.
Donnelly glared at Sandler. “I don’t know about this.”
Sandler took a deep breath. “I’m going to tell you something, and I need you to hear me out, okay? You’ve lived a very sheltered life. What we’re doing here—flirting innocently with our refined and honestly strikingly attractive bartender, is perfectly normal. It’s what our people do. Whether it leads to something more is entirely dependent on whether one is fully committed, heart and soul, to another”—he pointed to Donnelly—“or one is perhaps willing to entertain the possibility of entertaining the advances of a refined and strikingly attractive bartender.” He pointed to himself. “Or a sharply dressed hairstylist. For example. I speak in a purely hypothetical sense, of course.” His grin indicated that purity was not entirely his aim.
“I just don’t want to lead anyone on,” Donnelly said, his native modesty requiring this to be whispered.
“Gabriel, look around you,” Sandler whispered back. “Dax sent us to the ‘friendliest’ bar on the ship. The fucking duchess is conspicuously absent, and in her place is every confirmed bachelor this ship has to offer. And all of them have been looking at you the way Emmet does whenever he passes by. Most of them are discreet about it, though those two”—he tipped his head toward the windows—“look ready to drag you back to their cabin right now.”
Donnelly turned and glanced in the direction Sandler had indicated. The couple, dapper gentlemen in their early fifties, sat in deep leather club chairs near the window, and though Donnelly expected them to look away when he caught their eyes, they simply smiled and returned his gaze. He quickly turned back to Sandler.
“Well, that was awkward,” Donnelly muttered.
“Awkward? That’s what men do when they see a man who looks like you. You should probably be used to it by now.”
Donnelly shrugged nervously. “But Ethan’s always right next to me. He’s the one who attracts all the attention.”
Sandler shook his head. “I don’t believe that for a second. I’m sure he’s a specimen of manhood, but you keep selling yourself short. You just need to take a deep breath and accept the fact that you are a beautiful man, and other men are going to appreciate that. And even though you are getting married in a week, that doesn’t mean you have to stop appreciating beauty where you find it either. I mean, honestly, look at that.”
Donnelly looked back over to the appreciative couple, who were at that moment being served another round of drinks by a waiter in unreasonably form-fitting slacks.
“Now, I know you’re the most engaged man in the world, but tell me that perfect bubble butt doesn’t do anything for you. No, really get a good look. Take in the gentle curve that marks the lower border of his back. Follow the seam of his pants as it separates those two perfectly round globes. Now, that is a sight to raise the pulse of any red-blooded man.”
The waiter stood and turned toward them.
“Fuck me, the front is as fine as the back,” Sandler whispered. “Drink trays are not all he’s been lifting.”
“This is really embarrassing,” Donnelly muttered as he turned back to his drink.
“Why?” Sandler asked.
“Because you’re trying to turn me into some kind of dirty old man, ogling waiters in tight pants.”
“You’re not old. You’re certainly not dirty. And waiters wear tight pants in bars like this because oglers tip better. It doesn’t hurt anyone for you to look, Gabriel.”
Donnelly just shook his head, unable to explain his discomfort more fully.
“Can you honestly tell me you felt nothing when you looked at him bending over?”
Heat flashed across Donnelly’s face.
“Yeah, I thought so. Why does that freak you out so badly?”
“It’s just awkward, okay?”
Sandler sat back a bit, looked Donnelly up and down. Something seemed to fall into place. “Ah, I get it now. You never had a candy store phase.”
“A what?”
“A candy store phase. It’s what just about every guy goes through when he comes out to himself. All of a sudden you give yourself permission to look at other guys after years of feeling ashamed and wishing that seeing a waiter bend over didn’t make your pants tight. It’s the freedom that comes from finally admitting that guys make you feel the way that you could never convince yourself to feel about women. You, though, went right from straight to Ethan, and you never candy-stored.”
“Well, what’s the point?” Donnelly asked, getting a little tired of being psychoanalyzed over whiskey sours. “I have Ethan. Why do I need candy?”
“It’s not about candy. It’s about liberation. Just because you skipped over this phase doesn’t mean it’s not important.”
“What I don’t get is why.”
Sandler sighed. “Here’s why. When you see an attractive guy, what do you do?”
“I don’t really notice attractive guys.”
“That’s my point. What you’re doing is acting as though you are still in the closet. Yes, you have the most amazing handsome, muscular man in the whole world, though if there’s any justice in the universe he’s hung like a canary—”
“No justice on that one,” Donnelly replied with a chuckle. “Sorry.”
“Dammit!” Sandler spat theatrically. “Anyway, just because you have Ethan doesn’t mean you have to never look at another man.”
“But I never looked at other men before Ethan.”
Sandler nodded. “That’s my point exactly. Now, I’m not going to advance any theories about whether you were in denial, or not self-aware, or simply waiting for the amazing Ethan to show you his red jockstrap and suddenly change your entire hormonal system. But you are a gay man, Gabriel, and for a gay man to pretend that waiter over there doesn’t have a fine ass, or that Emmet here doesn’t have dimples that just make you want to kiss him, well, that just goes against nature.”
“Amen to that, sir,” Emmet said, beaming with a dimply grin.
“Thank you for allowing me to use your dimples to make a point, Emmet.”
“Yeh can use them for more than that, sir,” Emmet said with a wink. “I put them at your disposal.”
“I shall remember you said that, barkeep,” Sandler replied with a subtle growl in his voice. Emmet smiled even more broadly and set down another round of whiskey sours before turning back to his work.
Donnelly rolled his eyes at the flirtation being performed in front of him and returned to their previous discussion. “Why is this so important to you? What does it matter whether I look at guys the same way you do?”
“Because it’s human nature, that’s why. If we don’t appreciate beauty, we aren’t fully human. Beauty is truth.”
“Thanks, Mr. Keats.”
Sandler smiled. “For a man with a poetic spirit, you fight awfully hard against the beauty of the human form.”
“Ethan’s beautiful, and I throw myself at him every night. Sometimes twice.”
“For which I congratulate you on both your good taste and your good fortune. But if you try to convince yourself that only Ethan is beautiful and no other man in the world will even draw your eye for a moment, then you are fighting a losing battle.”
“Again, what does it matter to me if the world is filled with godlike men?”
Sandler put his drink down on the bar with a thump. “It matters because if you deny that
you find men attractive, you are denying you’re a gay man.”
“Because finding men attractive is the only thing that defines us,” Donnelly replied sarcastically. “That sounds like a pretty limited view of what it means to be gay.”
“Okay, then, what does being gay mean to Gabriel Donnelly? Tell me.” Sandler folded his hands in his lap and looked attentively at Donnelly.
Donnelly cleared his throat. “Well,” he said, uncertainly, “I guess it means, first, that… well, that you’re a guy who falls in love with another guy.”
“Good start. What else?”
“That people have opinions on the fact that you fell in love with another guy. Sometimes they are happy for you, and sometimes they throw you out of the house and tell you never to come back. But everyone seems to have something to say about it.”
Sandler nodded, eyebrows up, clearly expecting more.
“And… that’s about it.” Donnelly picked up his drink because he didn’t know what else to do.
“That’s it?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
Sandler sighed. “You’ve left out the most important part.”
“Falling in love with a guy, everyone else in the world getting to tell you what they think about it. That’s pretty much it, from my experience.”
“Okay, look at it this way. When people want to get a crowd whipped up into a homophobic frenzy, what do they say all gay people are up to?”
Donnelly rolled his eyes. “The gay agenda.”
“Right. And when people are supportive of equal rights, how do they refer to us?”
“As the gay community?”
“Right again. Now, what do those two terms have in common?”
Donnelly squinted at Sandler. “They both have ‘gay’ in them?”
“Ooh, got it. Now for Double Jeopardy. What else do they have in common?”
Donnelly thought for a moment. “What?”
“They both refer to us as a group. Either the kind of group that gets together and forms a militant action plan—as if you could put five gay men in a room and get them to agree on the right shoes for an outfit, much less a plan for world domination—or a community of people who have things in common. But both the haters and the allies refer to us as a group. Now, do you feel like you’ve joined a group since you became aware that you’re gay?”
“No, I don’t. I mean, I’ve met some very nice people, but I don’t know that I would call them a community.”
“Then look around you. Would you call the men gathered here a community?”
Donnelly glanced around the room. The older couple by the windows smiled when his eyes met theirs again—he surprised himself by smiling back before continuing his sweep of the room—but he saw nothing other than a collection of people who seem to have ended up at the same bar at the same time.
“Not really. It’s like you said this morning about the bingo players—I wouldn’t presume to have much in common with these guys, as nice as they seem.”
“All right, so not much in common. Now, pretend I’m Ethan for a moment. I know you’ll have to squint pretty hard, but humor me.”
“Okay, you’re Ethan.” Donnelly pulled his arm back and landed a solid punch on Sandler’s shoulder.
“Ow! What was that for?” Sandler clutched his arm and rubbed it up and down.
“For missing the ship.” Donnelly smiled. “Thanks for letting me get that out of my system.”
“You’re welcome,” Sandler replied ruefully. “Now, assuming you don’t have any more hidden aggression to take out on me, let me ask you this: would you feel comfortable kissing me right now?”
Donnelly scowled. “What?”
“Pretending I’m Ethan. Would you feel comfortable leaning over right now and kissing me? Not a peck on the cheek that could pass as European, but a real kiss?”
“Ethan and I don’t normally do that kind of thing in public.”
“Kissing? You don’t kiss in public?”
Donnelly shook his head in frustration. “You make it sound like we’re ashamed. We’re not. We just don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable.”
Sandler nodded. “Point taken. So, let’s assume that you’re in a bar, later in the evening, aboard a romantic ocean liner. Would you kiss him then?”
“I don’t know. Not if it would—”
“Make anyone uncomfortable. I know. So let’s say another couple kisses—they’re celebrating their seventy-fifth wedding anniversary, and feel a little frisky. So now someone else has done it. Do you?”
Donnelly was out of answers.
“Right. You’ve made my point. You’ll only kiss your hubby-to-be when it’s appropriate. How will you know it’s appropriate? By what the other people in the room do. And what signs will they give you? Well, first and foremost, you can see whether that delicious waiter draws their eye. If he does, then you know you’re safe. You’re among friends. You’re part of a community. And it may strike you as superficial or outrageous or simply ridiculous that that sense of community is built around the appreciation of a young man’s buttocks, but you cannot deny that the effect is real. The community is real. And for previous generations who were rejected and jeered and beaten for who they were and whom they loved, that sense of community was a lifesaver in every sense of the word. It is their legacy to us. A lingering glance at a waiter’s ass, a casual reference to a Broadway show, any opinion at all about Barbra Streisand: these were the signs of safety, the secret signal that it was okay to be who you are. And to ignore them, or pretend they don’t matter, is to betray their legacy.”
“Wow.”
Sandler stared at him for a long moment. “Wow?”
“Yeah, just… wow. I had no idea there was this whole… culture? I guess?” He looked around, feeling as thought Sandler had given him x-ray specs that revealed what was really going on in the room. “I feel like you’ve just told me I joined a club two years ago, and I didn’t even know it.” He turned back after completing his survey. “I had no idea.”
Sandler smiled. “And that’s a sign of the progress we’ve made. You came out late, and aside from your mom being an asshole to you, you’ve had a pretty easy time of it, right?”
Donnelly nodded. “We definitely made some new friends—Bryce the Fabulous being one of them—but I never considered them to be a subculture or anything.”
“That’s because they don’t really have to be anymore, in major cities at least. The initiation ritual for this club you’ve joined used to be giving up your family, your religion, and often your job and friends. Now, because of the progress we’ve made as a society, you don’t have to give up most of that—again, asshole relatives excepted—and all you gain is a new group of friends and bars with better music.”
“Who knew so much depends on the peach-like curve of a waiter’s ass?”
Sandler smiled. “You effortlessly mashed up William Carlos Williams and T.S. Eliot in an offhand remark. Amazing.”
“That is a peach I shall not eat,” Donnelly said with a smirk, nodding at the waiter as he again leaned over a table to serve drinks.
Sandler looked appraisingly at the young man’s callipygian beauty, the way one might when walking behind Michelangelo’s David. “We must agree to disagree on that,” he mused.
“Well, this evening has been exhaustingly introspective,” Donnelly said as he stood. He tossed back the last of his drink and set the empty glass on the bar. “As heartbroken as I am to miss Dax and Stanley, I’m going to turn in. But please don’t let my departure keep you from your peach harvest.”
Sandler laughed. “You assume I’d be able to persuade him to share his peach with me.”
Donnelly leaned close. “You could have any man on this ship, and you know it.” He stood upright again. “Now, I’m going to brush my teeth and fall instantly into a sound slumber. You needn’t worry about disturbing me when you get in.” He winked to make his meaning clear.
“Now you’re just flattering me.�
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“And you’re just fishing for compliments. So I’ll simply say once again that you are welcome to the boisterous use of the cabin tonight and every night. Someone should be getting lucky in the honeymoon suite.” He clapped Sandler on the shoulder as he made his exit.
“Thank you, Gabriel,” Sandler called after him, even as his gaze turned to hail a waiter.
On the highway, a little farther west
WHEN BRYCE opened his eyes, the rig was already well down the freeway from the truck stop that had been the site of the altercation. He awakened with his head in Nestor’s lap.
“My hero, he wake,” murmured Nestor as he stroked Bryce’s forehead lovingly.
“You okay there, champ?” asked Virgil, taking his eyes off the dark road ahead for just a moment to check on his supine passenger.
“What happened?” Bryce asked. “All I remember is harsh lighting and some kind of tool.” He gasped. “Oh dear lord, please don’t tell me I did manual labor.”
“No, you coldcocked a guy who was beatin’ the shit outta me. For which I owe you big time.”
“Coldcocked, you say?” Bryce asked, sitting up. “Brrr. Sounds refreshing.”
“You never quit, do you? You just got into a fight at a fucking truck stop, and you completely owned that guy. And there you are, still making witty little sex jokes. Bryce, you are more man than any six truckers I know.”
“Goodness, you could turn a lady’s head with that kind of talk.”
“I intend to,” Virgil said with a smile. “I’m gonna give you boys a special treat.”
Bryce gasped. “I feel like Desirée Demornay, about to unleash the beast in Bolt’s tight leather pants.”
“I promise you won’t be disappointed,” Virgil said with a wink.
“Nestor!” Bryce barked. “Condoms! Stat!”
“Now hold on,” Virgil said. “You saved my ass back there, so I’m going to take my time showing you my gratitude. We’re going to stop in at a little motel I like and spend a few hours before we get back on the road. Does that sound good to you?”