Clayton froze. “OK,” he said. This, stopping sex once it had begun, was highly unusual. He wondered if Tim was about to ask him to go steady.
They sat next to each other on the bed and didn’t bother to cover themselves, even though the lights were on, because they were young. “You know how I took a business trip to London last week . . .” Tim began.
“Yes . . .” Clayton said. He had seen Tim the night before he left. Clayton had thought that was nice, making a point to see him for dinner and sex before leaving town.
“Well, while I was there, I had a threeway.”
Threeway, thought Clayton, that means two other people were involved. Were they both men? British men? Or other Americans on business trips? Were they a man and a woman? (Tim had let Fiona hold his penis!) Probably both men, he decided, but were they better-looking than himself? Because if they were better-looking—square-jawed, polo-playing Eton types—he would feel very insecure about his own looks—and naked body—right now. But if they were not as good-looking—malnourished, bald chain-smokers—he would be turned off by Tim because that would mean that Tim was the type of guy who had sex with ugly people, which would mean that Clayton was ugly because they had been having sex until just a minute ago!
Clayton decided that asking too many questions would not be playing it cool, so he said, “That’s cool.”
“You don’t care?” asked Tim.
“Why would I? We’re not going steady or anything.”
Tim cocked his head and furrowed his brow. “Do people say ‘going steady’ anymore?” he asked.
“You know what I mean. Being exclusive.”
Apparently relieved that his disclosure had been met with such nonchalance, Tim began to kiss Clayton on the neck. Clayton lay motionless, images of uncircumsized English wangs and crooked teeth flooding his brain. “I’m not in the mood anymore, so I’m gonna head home,” he said.
Clayton was hoping Tim would object to that notion, at least a bit. But he didn’t. “OK,” said Tim.
Clayton got up from the bed, picked up his clothes from the floor, and began to get dressed. His linen shirt was severely wrinkled and he didn’t need to look in a mirror to know that his hair was a mess. He hated so much that he looked disheveled precisely when he wanted to appear smooth. Tim got out of bed, removed a cigarette from its pack, and lit it. When Clayton had buttoned his last button, Tim, still naked and semierect, opened the door to the hallway.
“I’m really not sure why you decided to tell me that during sex,” Clayton said on his way out.
“I was just trying to be honest with you,” Tim said.
Clayton gave Tim a peck on the lips. “Well, you shouldn’t have,” he said and squeezed Tim’s penis, just slightly harder than might be comfortable.
* * *
The next morning Clayton awoke wondering whether Tim had gone out to a party, or, more likely, parties, after his exit, and if so, whether he and his friends shared a laugh over Clayton’s prudishness. He stormed out after I told him I had a threeway, he could imagine Tim saying. Oh, my God, what a girl, his friends would laugh, even Fiona if she were there. Clayton began to doubt whether he was cut out for the complexities of gay life in New York, a feeling exacerbated by the fact that he was still sharing a tiny one-bedroom apartment with his ex-boyfriend, Pete, whom he could hear making breakfast in the kitchen three feet away.
After their breakup, Pete had moved the queen-sized bed, which was his, into the living room, and Clayton moved the futon, the only piece of furniture he owned, into the bedroom. Ever since, a sepia-toned haze of disappointment filled the apartment. Their relationship had failed (disappointment in each other) but neither could afford to move out (disappointment in themselves).
Clayton had met Pete while attending grad school and waiting tables on weekends. Pete came to the restaurant occasionally with friends who were regulars. “Pete wants to ask you out on a date,” said Pete’s friend one night when he was sans Pete. “Then Pete should ask me out on a date,” Clayton answered. And the next night Pete stopped into the bar to have a drink.
“Your friend says you want to ask me out,” said Clayton while waiting for the bartender to mix the drinks for his four-top.
“Yeah, he’s been saying I should go out more.”
Pete was very handsome with sharp features and a toothy smile, and Clayton wondered why he was so bashful.
“If you asked me out, I’d say yes,” said Clayton.
“Do you want to go out with me?” asked Pete.
Clayton picked up his cocktail tray. “Not really.” Pete looked stricken. “I’m teasing. Of course I do. You’re adorable.”
Their relationship got serious quickly. When Clayton finished his course work, he applied for jobs locally but received no offers, and so he moved back home to Long Island with his parents and began to answer want ads in the New York Times, which eventually led to a job as an assistant editor at a small trade magazine reporting on the electronics industry. Pete said he was ready to move to New York, and the two found the apartment they now shared. The problem was that Clayton’s vision of Manhattan life involved a whirlwind of throbbing nightclubs, fancy restaurants, and designer clothes. Pete wanted to cook chicken and watch television, like they’d done back in grad school. But grad school is not having a real job. And it wasn’t long before Clayton cheated on Pete with a wealthy executive of a design firm. They remained civil after their breakup, however, friendly even. But they eventually lost touch.
Clayton went to work and sold some inline skates and protective gear. Saturdays were supposed to be busy ones in the home shopping world, but sales at the new channel were low. Nobody seemed to really care. “We’re finding our feet,” executives would say, and Clayton believed them. Around five that evening he reluctantly called Isabel and asked what she wanted to do. When she said she didn’t know, Clayton suggested they take a walk around Soho and find a bar. Isabel asked if Clayton would pick her up at her apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. He found the request an imposition, but she probably didn’t realize he lived on the Upper East Side. Anyone who has lived in Manhattan for more than five minutes knows that asking someone to travel crosstown for your own convenience is akin to requesting a loan, or a kidney.
After an excruciating ride on the bus, Clayton rang the buzzer to Isabel’s apartment and she came downstairs a few minutes later wearing a baggy shift dress and flat sandals. Because of its lack of shape and large yellow floral print, the dress seemed to him something a mother of three would wear to a daytime wedding near the beach. She must have noticed the look of consternation on his face because she announced quite loudly on Tenth Avenue, “I’ve gained so much weight that I’ve resorted to wearing frocks!”
Something about the way she said frocks struck him as vulgar—and to be speaking so loudly about one’s weight in public. Granted, she was about five feet tall and a size 8, a bit plumper than most women her age living in Manhattan in 1994. He wanted so much to go home, to go anywhere actually, to relieve himself of this obligation. But he had committed himself to showing her around town. He could feign a headache or emergency, but she would be able to detect the lie, wouldn’t she? Then she would go back to her apartment, feeling rejected and alone. He couldn’t do that to her.
As they walked and made small talk about her neighborhood (noisy!) and the weather (hot!), they found themselves at a subway entrance. Clayton suggested they take it downtown, but Isabel protested. “No!” she exclaimed. “I can’t ride the subway.”
Assuming she was afraid, he tried to assuage her fear. “It’s really not so bad,” he said, “especially at this time of day.”
“No. It just won’t do. We’ll take a taxi. I’ll pay.” He reluctantly obliged, though it would take twice as long, which meant he would have to engage in more conversation without the benefit of alcohol or the distraction of strangers.
Once in Soho, they settled on a large bar offering flights of wine: six small glasses per order, served
on paper placemats printed with boxes in which one could jot down notes like “citrusy” or “oaky” or “hints of quince.” They discussed their respective bosses. Hers was a family friend who’d needed an executive assistant, while his was a nouveau riche type he nicknamed The Gucc (pronounced “gooch”) because of her apparent uniform of Gucci loafers. Clayton decided after two flights of wine each that Isabel was not so terrible, but around eleven o’clock he suggested they call it a night; he didn’t know of any parties and wasn’t sure he wanted to bring her to one anyway. Then Isabel asked, “Do you have a girlfriend?”
He found the question absurd. “God, no,” he said with a nervous laugh.
“So . . . do you have a boyfriend?”
This chick is ballsy, he thought. “Not at the moment,” he said, “no.”
“So, you’re gay.”
“I thought that was pretty obvious.” Clayton signaled the bartender for the check.
“I’m not like most women,” she said.
“How so?” he asked.
“I can just have sex and not expect anything else.”
“Good for you.” Clayton was starting to get very uncomfortable. He reached into his pocket and pulled out eighty dollars. “I think that should cover it.”
“Do you want to have sex with me?” she asked.
He thought about it for a moment. “Not really.”
“Have you ever had sex with a woman before?”
“Sort of, almost, in high school,” he said. “But my parents interrupted—they came home from a party early—and I just figured, eh, it wasn’t meant to be.”
“But aren’t you curious?”
Clayton had been asked this question about one hundred times since coming out of the closet. He was curious about a lot of stuff, he would say, like whether drowning was a painless way to die or if he could outrun a raccoon should the need arise, but that didn’t mean he wanted to do any of those things. “Not really,” he told Isabel. “I have to work in the morning, so I think we should go.”
They left the bar, and Clayton hailed a cab. When it pulled up to the curb in front of them, he opened the door for Isabel and kissed her on the cheek, the way one would say good-bye to a new friend. “Aren’t you getting in?” she asked.
He explained that he would take the 6 train from Spring Street.
“Oh, come on, share a cab with me,” she said. “I’ll pay.”
She hadn’t even offered to split the bar tab, so he decided to take her up on the offer. He climbed into the taxi and closed the door behind him. “We’ll be making two stops,” he told the driver. “One on Sixty-First and First and then over on Fifty-Fifth and Tenth.”
Before they had even crossed Houston Street, though, Isabel had wriggled out of her panties, straddled him, and stuck her tongue in Clayton’s mouth. “Oh, fuck it,” he told the cab driver, “just make one stop on Fifty-Fifth and Tenth.” He couldn’t turn down such a direct offer of sex, from a woman no less! She must have sensed something in him, which he had not sensed in himself. Maybe some kind of pheromone.
As he followed the giant-flowered frock up three flights of stairs to its owner’s apartment, Clayton wondered at how he had gotten himself into this situation—and how he could get out of it. Was he really going to have sex with a member of the opposite sex, just because she was expecting it? Or was that what she was expecting at all? Maybe she just wanted to make out for a while, he told himself. He did that all the time in college. But why would she remove her panties?
“There’s a condom on the nightstand,” she said. “I’m going into the bathroom. Have it on when I come out.”
“Sure,” he said.
They had sex (the details of which will be left to the reader’s imagination) and when it was over, Clayton said, “I guess I’ll get going now.”
“No,” she said. “You have to stay over.”
“I do?” He was confused.
“That’s the way it goes.”
He supposed it was the gentlemanly thing to do. Plus, he didn’t want her to think he was running away like some completely flustered gay guy, which he absolutely was. So he got back into her bed and stared up at the ceiling for approximately six hours. He had barely fallen asleep when she initiated sex again (the details of which will be left to the reader’s imagination).
She got out of bed and put on a red kimono-style robe. “You have to take me to breakfast now. That’s the way it goes.”
They sat across from each other at a nearby diner. She ordered a spinach and feta omelet with a side of bacon, toast, and home fries, all of which she devoured as though she had spent the last month in a Turkish prison. He ordered pancakes, which he pushed away from him after two bites.
After breakfast, Clayton reminded Isabel that even though it was Sunday, he had to work, the glamorous life of a home-shopping host being what it was. She thanked him for breakfast—he had paid for that too—and said she hoped they could hang out again some time. He said sure.
Clayton walked east across Seventy-Second Street until he reached Central Park, where a steady stream of joggers and bicyclists were headed south in their great counterclockwise loop. He crossed through them when given the opportunity and into Sheep Meadow. Though it was empty now, later in the day this well-manicured lawn would be packed with people his age who couldn’t afford a vacation house in the Hamptons, Fire Island, or the Jersey Shore. He knew this because he was one of them. He was less than halfway across the lawn when he decided he couldn’t bear the thought of his polo shirt touching his body—perhaps it was the humidity of this August morning—so he took it off and held it limply by his side. He wanted so much to lie down on the grass but he knew he might fall asleep there, probably for too long. He considered the embarrassment of being discovered by an acquaintance who had come to the park to get some sun and be flirty with guys on other blankets and continued his trek.
When Clayton arrived at his building, he put his shirt back on, feeling sufficiently like a degenerate. He unlocked his apartment door to find Pete, standing in the hallway wearing pajama bottoms and no shirt, sipping coffee from an oversized mug, which looked particularly large because of Pete’s small body. “Looks like someone had a fun night,” Pete said.
“I don’t know if I’d say that, but it was a night.”
Pete offered Clayton coffee, which he accepted, and while he was pouring it from the carafe, he asked, “What time do you go to work?”
“I have to be there at one,” Clayton said. “So I’ll leave around twelve thirty. Why?”
“I was wondering if you wanted to have sex.” Pete smiled. He had big, perfect teeth, which Clayton envied. “I’ve never even had braces,” he had told Clayton on their first date.
“Sure,” said Clayton. “Why the hell not.”
So Pete and Clayton had sex (the details of which will be left to the reader’s imagination). When it was over, Clayton ran the shower and when the temperature was to his liking, entered the tub and sat down, his head resting on the back wall. He stayed like that for more than half an hour, until Pete knocked on the bathroom door to remind him to go to work.
On Monday morning Clayton went to the office for meetings with buyers and executives. Around lunchtime while he was checking his sales figures on his computer, Isabel plopped onto his desk again. Her legs were crossed at the ankles and her hands clasped along the edge on either side of her knees, the way a schoolgirl might sit while waiting her turn in a spelling bee.
She looked around for witnesses and, seeing none, said at a conversational volume, “So that was fun.” When Clayton responded with an mmm hmmm and an obvious lack of eye contact, Isabel dropped her head closer to his. “I could have you fired, you know,” she said. Her tone seemed remarkably upbeat and flirty.
Clayton, too tired for games, looked Isabel in the eye and said, “Actually, I don’t think you could.” And he went back to his computer screen.
Some small part of Clayton wondered whether Isabel would tell
her boss the truth, a fiction, or anything at all. But as the days went by his concern diminished steadily. Soon the channel laid off almost half its employees, including Isabel.
* * *
Eight years later, Clayton was walking in the West Village one evening with his boyfriend, Alex, and someone—Isabel!—grabbed his arm. “How are you?” she asked warmly, as if addressing a best friend she hadn’t seen in years.
It took him a second to place her; to be honest he couldn’t remember her name immediately. “I’m good, thank you,” he said. “You?”
“I’m . . . great,” she said. “Yeah, I’m great.”
And that was it. They said good-bye. A few steps later, Alex asked, “Who was that?”
“Just some girl I used to work with,” Clayton said. “Do you want to go back to your place and have sex?”
“Sure,” said Alex.
(And the details of which—oh, you get the idea.)
* * *
* All names have been changed, including my own.
I’M WAITING
I haven’t waited a table since March 1993, but I still wake up in a cold sweat a couple of times a year because I forgot to bring a third whiskey sour to the naked old lady dining with Idi Amin. Or because the management has changed the computer system without telling me, so every time I type the code for a menu item it gets all garbled by the time it reaches the printer in the kitchen.
“Is this some kind of joke, you little prick?” The expediting chef screams at me as soon as I enter through the swinging doors.
I’m confused. “Is what a joke?” I ask.
“What did you order?” He looks like he wants to rip my head off.
“A turkey club, hold the mayonnaise.”
“Look at this!” He thrusts the ticket toward me. It’s got my name on the top, so it must be my order except, for the life of me, I don’t know why it doesn’t say TURK CLB, NO MAYO. “Read it out loud,” he says, “so these fine chefs don’t miss a single word.” A half-dozen surly types in white coats glare at me.
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