“Then I’m going to go, Jeff,” I tell him.
Jeff opens his eyes and smiles. “Okay.”
I glare at him. “I’ll see you later, then.”
“Yeah,” Jeff says. “Happy New Year, Lloyd.”
Our eyes hold a moment.
“Happy New Year, Jeff.”
I turn to leave. I look back once. Jeff’s looking at me. I see his struggle, but he’s not going to back down. I don’t fully understand why, but, as stubborn as I know he can be, I’m not going to stay here and try to find out. I just mouth the words: “I love you.”
He pretends he doesn’t see me.
Then I turn and force my way out, headfirst.
Jeff
I watch as Lloyd leaves the club. I can’t literally see him, of course, but I can imagine him clearly enough: putting his shirt back on, reclaiming his coat, tying his scarf, pulling on his gloves, heading outside, hailing a cab, ringing the doorbell at Eva’s—no, I figure, she gave him a key. She’ll greet him with a cup of hot cocoa, and they’ll curl up on her Upper West Side couch and talk the rest of the night. What kind of drapes they’ll buy for their new home. What kind of china. Whether they’ll replace the carpet. How soon in the spring they can plant geraniums in the window boxes.
“Sup.”
I turn. It’s the R. C. boy again, still barely dancing, still looking incredibly lickable.
I feel a smile stretch across my face despite myself. “Sup with you?”
“Not too much.”
Bad answer, I think. Guy’s not quick on his feet, literally or figuratively. A good answer would have been “Interest rates” or “The spaceship Mir, at least for now” or, best of all, “My dick.” But all R. C. manages is: “Not too much.”
Still, he has incredible abs. I reach out and slide my palm down his stomach. Yep, just like speed bumps. Hard and round. “What’s your name?” I ask.
“Anthony.”
“Anthony.” I’ve learned the key to remembering tricks’ names is to repeat them as soon as they’re first said. Even a couple of times for good measure. “Well, Anthony,” I say, “I’m Jeff.”
“Hey, Jeff.”
Anthony reaches out to shake my hand. Such a straight boy, I think. I take his hand and pump it heartily, like a straight boy’s supposed to do.
I spy Henry and Shane dancing nearby. “You know Henry and the Windex queen here?” I ask, elbowing toward them.
“Good to meet you,” Anthony says.
“It’s true,” Shane says. “You boys are drawn together like magnets. Like the swallows to Capristrano or something.” He stands back to appraise Anthony, feeling his shoulders. He looks back at me, shuddering dramatically.
I laugh. I skillfully bring Anthony back from Shane’s clutches, moving in close to him. “You from New York?” I ask.
“For the time being,” Anthony says. “I’m looking for a job.”
I eye him. “You rolling?”
“What’s that? A kind of dance?”
“Hoo boy,” I sigh. “I know. How about if you just kiss me and we can stop talking?”
Anthony beams. “Sure.”
He’s a little awkward with the tongue, but I can overlook that. Anthony tastes yummy, and his shoulders and his back and his butt are certainly worth exploring.
So let Lloyd have his cocoa and his guest house and his little past-life bride. It’s a new millennium. I can find my own way.
Henry
The night ends for all of us soon after that.
“Just for the hell of it,” I ask, as Shane hails a cab. It’s cold, very cold, and I zip my leather jacket all the way up to my throat, watching the steam escape from my mouth. “What would you have paid me?”
Shane laughs as the cab pulls up to us. “How much are you worth?”
“I’m not sure.”
We slide into the backseat of the cab. The warmth is enveloping. We push down close together into the hard naugahyde of the seat. Shane gives the driver the address of his hotel. I figure it’s safer to go back there; Jeff has disappeared with that hunky Anthony guy and I don’t want to walk in on them going at it.
“If you were really escorting, honey,” Shane’s telling me, “you could get two hundred fifty easily here in New York. In Boston maybe two hundred.”
“A night?”
“Sweetie, an hour!”
“Two hundred dollars an hour! How do you know?”
Shane scrunches up his face. “Don’t tell me you’ve never looked in that back section of Next before. No, wait. Of course you haven’t. Why would you, with that face and that body?”
“Shane, I have the same insecurities as anybody—”
But he’s not listening. “I admit it,” he’s saying. “I’ve hired escorts. I’ve paid two hundred dollars to lay beside an Adonis for an hour. You, however, are the first one who’s ever come willingly.”
Adonis. By implication, he just called me an Adonis. Such talk can still rattle my brain. I look up at Shane, realizing he’s totally serious.
He would’ve paid two hundred dollars just to suck my dick.
I think about my credit card balances. About my student loans. My car payments. That Prada suit in Neiman Marcus.
“Here we are,” Shane barks. The driver pulls over to the curb. I reach into my jacket to pull out some cash, but Shane holds up his hand. “Allow me, gorgeous. Believe me, it’s an honor.”
I open the door and push myself back out into the cold night. I feel a little numb, not quite able to imagine myself in this particular situation. I watch in silence as Shane slams the door of the cab and the cabby pulls off down the street.
“Now,” Shane says, staring down at me, “it’s just you and me.”
“Yeah,” I reply, and my voice sounds thick and unfamiliar to my ears. “Just you and me.”
Shane shivers dramatically. “You’re even more spectacular away from all that smoke and fog.”
All at once I kiss him. Just push myself up on my toes and kiss him hard, taking Shane by surprise. After a couple of seconds, he responds wholeheartedly, kissing me back with lots of tongue and moans and interjections of just how lucky he is to have found someone as stunning as me.
It turns out to be the very best sex I’ve ever had.
CHAPTER TWO
GRAN LOOKS UP when Lily bursts through the door. “Lily! What—”
“Beware’s sick!” Lily turns the pages of the phone book. She can’t remember the vet’s name. She can’t even remember the alphabet.
“Here.” Gran points to a phone number taped on the wall. Lily dials.
“Valley Vet Clinic,” a woman’s voice says.
“Is one of the vets there?”
“Dr. Shore is out on a call,” the woman says, “but I can reach him. Is this an emergency?”
“Yes!”
“What’s the nature of the problem?”
Suddenly Lily can hardly speak. “My horse—she can’t move. She’s way out in the pasture, and she can’t move her back legs—”
“Is she standing?” The woman’s voice sounds sharper. She sounds worried, too.
“Yes,” Lily says.
“I’ll get through to Dr. Shore and have him call you. Who is this?”
“Lily Griffin.”
“Woody’s granddaughter?” Now the woman sounds even more concerned. “Dr. Shore’s at a farm not too far from you. I’ll have him call right away. Don’t you worry, honey.” The woman hangs up without saying good-bye.
Gran is peeling potatoes. Peel after peel flops into the scrap bucket. She doesn’t need to look at the potatoes. She looks at Lily.
“Will she eat?”
“She ate an apple core.” Lily’s eyes want to cry, but she feels too cold inside, too scared. “Dr. Shore’s going to call.”
“I’ll talk to him. You go back to her. Take a handful of hay, Lily, and some water—not a big bucket!” Giran warns as Lily goes out the door. “Don’t you hurt your back!”
&
nbsp; It’s so cold. Lily shivers inside her sweatshirt. It takes a long time to climb back up the hill with the heavy pail of water. Beware looks tiny and far away.
The pony comes to see what’s in the pail. He doesn’t want water, but he steals a snatch of hay. He follows behind Lily, crunching, and he steals another mouthful.
Beware whinnies when Lily gets close. Her voice sounds loud and worried. She sniffs the water and takes a sip. Slowly she winds a wisp of hay into her mouth and chews.
If only Beware could speak! If only she could say what’s wrong!
Lily looks again for bumps or cuts. She runs her hands down Beware’s legs. If Beware had a broken leg, it would hurt when Lily touched it. But Beware doesn’t flinch.
Lily presses her fingers along Beware’s spine. She presses softly at first and then harder. That doesn’t seem to hurt either.
She feels the tips of Beware’s ears. Sometimes if a horse has a fever, its ears will feel hot. Or if it is very sick, or dying, its ears will feel cold.
Beware’s ears feel normal, and she is eating slowly. Very sick horses usually don’t eat at all.
But there is something wrong! It doesn’t make sense!
Lily leans on Beware’s warm shoulder. She smells Beware’s rich horse smell. She reaches under Beware’s belly to scratch. Beware loves to have her tummy scratched.
As Lily’s hand slides down Beware’s side, she notices something. She steps back to look.
A ridge of muscle shows along Beware’s round side. Usually Lily can’t see that muscle. Now it’s hard and tight. Lily goes to Beware’s other side. The muscle shows there, too. What could that mean?
“Lily?”
A small figure is coming across the field. Gramp? The vet?
No, it is only Gran, wearing Gramp’s old coat over her dress and a pair of big black boots. She comes steadily up the hill.
“Dr. Shore is on his way,” Gran says. “He’ll be here in twenty minutes.” She waits a moment to get her breath. “Be about dark by then—don’t know how he can work on her when he can’t see.”
Lily has thought of that. “Could we drive the tractor up and shine the headlights on her?”
“That’s an idea,” says Gran. “Better to get her down, though. Will walking do her any harm, do you think?”
“I don’t know,” Lily says. “I don’t think she has anything broken.”
“Let’s try,” Gran says. She goes behind Beware, pushing the pony aside. “Out of my way, you foolish thing!” Gran puts her shoulder against Beware’s rump. Her cheek is close to Beware’s hip, and her glasses gleam as she nods to Lily. “Now pull,” she says.
Lily pulls on the halter rope. Gran pushes with her shoulder. Beware takes a wobbly step.
“Again!” says Gran. They push, and pull. Beware steps—two steps. She stops. “Again,” says Gran.
After seven steps like this Beware won’t go any farther. Her back legs wobble. “Let’s let her rest,” says Lily. If Beware falls down, how could they ever get her up?
Gran asks, “Are we doing her any harm?”
“She doesn’t seem any worse,” Lily says. They stand in the growing darkness.
“All right, let’s try again,” Gran says after a minute.
Ten steps this time. For three of the steps Beware really walks, without their pulling or pushing.
She stops. “That looked better,” Gran says. “Come on, girl, let’s go!”
Stop and start, push and pull, they go down the hill. By the time they reach the bottom Beware is walking better. She still goes slowly, and she looks unhappy, but her back legs work much better now. What can be wrong with her? Lily has never heard of a sickness like this.
She opens the gate and leads Beware into the barn. Gran snaps the switch, and the cozy yellow light comes on. The light makes the barn look warm, but it isn’t really.
New Year’s Morning, The Upper West Side
Lloyd
Eva greets me with a mug of hot cocoa. Its warmth feels good in my cold hands, even better down my throat. She sits beside me on her living room couch and watches me drink. “Happy New Year, Lloyd,” she says.
Thank God for her. I tell her about the experience with Jeff, and she listens, present and attentive. Unlike Jeff, she’s listening to me—not running her own agenda and issues in her head, just waiting for her chance to speak.
“Until that point, it had all been going so well,” I tell her. “But now it just feels like it did before. This game of pulling closer, then pulling back. I don’t want to play that game anymore with him.”
“I imagine it must make you terribly weary.”
I nod. “Jeff can be impossible at times.”
“Well, it must be a little hard for him to understand,” Eva offers.
I scoff. “Understand what? The guest house?”
She smiles. “Do you think, Lloyd, that maybe, just maybe, he was hoping you were going to move back to Boston?”
I take another sip of cocoa. I guess I’d already wondered that myself. I just shake my head. “I gave him no reason to think so,” I say defensively. And I hate feeling defensive.
Eva’s eyes well up. She’s a very empathetic person. That’s why I love her, and why I think you will, too. “That poor boy,” she says. “Oh, of course, I can understand how he’s feeling. If that’s what he’d been hoping for, and then here you are, moving in with me instead …” She looks as if the tears will come any second. “That poor, poor boy.”
I let out a long sigh. “I wouldn’t spend too much time feeling sorry for Jeff, Eva. I can assure you his mind is not on our guest house at the moment.”
“No matter what he’s doing to forget,” Eva says, “I’m sure somewhere he’s hurting inside, and I feel badly about that.”
Eva’s a good woman. Kind, compassionate, wise. She reminds me of Javitz, actually. Always there with a ready ear, solid insight, and unconditional support.
Let me give you an example. I knew Eva was somebody I wanted in my life—that I could enter into a partnership with—when I watched her with one of the guys she takes care of as a volunteer for an AIDS service agency. The miracle cures haven’t worked for this guy. Alex has about four T cells and weighs about ninety pounds—a stark reminder that the plague isn’t over—but so far he’s managed to still live on his own and make his own life. Except that he needs help getting groceries and things like that, for which Eva is only too glad to volunteer. I watched her with him, and she was perfect: warm, interested, nurturing, but never condescending. She fixed his meals, kidded with him about his hair, gently massaged lotion into his feet until he drifted off to sleep. “I admit I dote on him,” she told me. “When I look at Alex, I don’t see a wasted, dying man. I see the man he was and still is: handsome, witty, talented. If he wasn’t gay, I just might well fall in love with him, virus and all.”
Eva Horner is fifty years old. She’s a widow, still grieving her husband. In her youth, I imagine, she was very pretty. Even now she’s got large brown doe eyes, strawberry blond hair, and a scattering of freckles across her cheeks that belie her half-century of life. Yet she seems to do her best to conceal her attractiveness, pulling her hair back severely in a bun, keeping her large breasts shrouded in loose, heavy sweaters or smocks. Those oversized mammaries are an anomaly: everything else about her is tiny, petite, delicate. She stands just four feet ten, with hands as small and delicate as a girl’s. She smiles easily but shyly, always with a hint of embarrassment, as if she didn’t feel she deserved to be having such a good time.
I know that I make her smile. Until meeting me, she was as adrift as I was: unsure of her next move, still trapped in her own prison of grief. Her volunteer work was a bold leap back into the world for her, a move from which I took inspiration. She doesn’t have to work: she admits that she came from money, and then her husband left her fairly well off on top of that. She lives in opulent splendor—three bedrooms upstairs, a downstairs den, a parlor and full pantry—but it was a jail c
ell for her nonetheless. Before I met her, I’d never known anyone in New York who had an apartment bigger than my closet in Provincetown. But her wealth never bought her happiness or a respite from her grief.
“It’s only by living that you can really live,” she said to me one night—a simple, almost banal statement, but one that made me look over at her in wonder. We’ve had many such moments like that, moments of insight that have startled me and encouraged me back on my road to wellness. “It’s only through connection with another person that one understands why we’re here,” she said another time, a truth that might have been uttered by Javitz himself.
She’s struggled with finding connection all her life. Her mother died when she was very young, and she was raised by a series of nannies. She craved the love of her distant but adoring father, a diplomat in the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations who was forever flying around the world. Often months would go by before Eva would see him again. “He never failed to bring me home a beautiful doll from Japan or a dress from France,” she said. “How happy I would be to see him. As a little girl, I’d climb into his bed and stay there with him all night. The nannies always thought it wasn’t proper, but I was just so glad to see him, and he me.” His portrait hangs in her living room, a somber, gray-haired man I have a hard time imagining showing any warmth. “That’s how I picture Daddy when I think of him now,” she said. “In oils. I saw that portrait more often in my childhood than I ever saw the real man.”
Her greatest disappointment in life, she’s told me, is that she and Steven never had any children. “I guess in the old days they would have called me barren,” she said. But ultimately she thinks it was probably for the best, given the truth she discovered about the man she had married.
“You know, Eva,” I say, setting down my mug of cocoa, “I felt bad leaving you to go to the bar tonight when I realized you’d be alone. You told me you were having a gathering, that there would be other people, everybody doing past-life regressions. But it was just you and me.”
Where the Boys Are Page 4