Where the Boys Are

by William J. Mann

“I’m sorry. I’ve been working late.”

  “At which job?”

  Henry makes a face at me. “I’m not telling you anything anymore about what I’m doing. Not a word. Because you just broadcast it to everybody.”

  I put my arm around his neck and lock his head in a choke hold. “Henry, how many times have you done this escort thing now? Tell me the truth.”

  “Let me go, Jeff.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Five. I’ve done it five times.”

  “Five times in three weeks!” I laugh. “What’s the matter? Can’t make it an even six?”

  “Thought I’d save something for this weekend.” He grimaces, looking around. “Though it looks like the same old pattern. Everybody’s too twisted to have sex except on the dance floor.”

  “There’s always Shane.”

  Henry gives me a look. “You know what I think it is, Jeff? Shane actually shed some light on this for me. He says two attractive guys sometimes don’t hook up with each other because each is waiting for the other to cruise him first.”

  “That’s fucked, Henry,” I say.

  “Well, it makes sense to me. I’m starting to think it’s true what they say about circuit boys. They’re all a bunch of narcissistic posers.”

  I scoff. “Are you, Henry? Am I?”

  “Sometimes, yes.” He shrugs. “I’m getting tired of the circuit. It’s the same old thing all the time.”

  “You’re the one who wanted to come here,” I remind him.

  “I know, I know.” He sighs. “But I’m sick of these boys twisted out of their minds. Like Brent. I mean, he didn’t come here to dance or have fun. He came to get fucked up. That’s all. You know, there was an article in some gay paper that said the circuit scene could be as damaging to gay men as the religious right—”

  “Henry! What the fuck has gotten into you?”

  He pouts. “I’m just tired of it all. I want something more.”

  “Look, Brent annoys the shit out of me, too,” I admit. “He’s the poster boy for all the critics of the club scene, exactly what they rail against: a self-absorbed substance abuser who masks his lack of self-esteem with chemicals, who mindlessly makes his donation to AIDS Action or GMAC and then gets so twisted he’s willing to do anything.” That was for sure: the night I brought him home he would’ve let me fuck him without a condom if I’d been into barebacking. “But to say he’s as bad as Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell,” I say, shaking my head. “That’s fucked, Henry.”

  “All I know is, I’m tired of bullshit. I think that’s why the escorting thing is such a rush for me. The guys are right there, no games. They put what they want right out on the table.”

  I lean in close again. “Look, I do worry about you, buddy. I know the escorting is a real trip for you, and it’s way hot and everything you’ve told me sounds cool, but there’s just so much that could happen. Your job, your reputation, not to mention getting ripped off by—”

  “Hey, it’s Celine,” Henry says, recognizing the mix. “Let’s dance.”

  I frown. “You’re doing exactly what you accuse me of doing. Avoiding the topic.”

  Henry smirks. “And I’ll say exactly what you always say. We’re here to dance.” He grabs my hands. “Come on, Jeff. It’s Celine.”

  “I want you to feeeeed me,” I sing, using our own special lyrics to the skinny diva’s song.

  Back in the middle of the crowd, we fall into a group of friends. We form a little huddle, Henry and Eliot and Oscar and Adam and Billy and Rudy and I, swaying to the music, pawing each other’s chests. I feel that surge of brotherhood, of connection. Narcissistic posers? Right now Eliot’s passing out bracelets he made for all of us, with our names spelled out in little beads. I picture him stringing them all on his kitchen table back in San Diego in advance of this weekend. At the White Party he gave us all customized visors, with our names and home cities stitched onto the front. I watch as Rudy tells Eliot he loves him, and they lock in an embrace.

  Okay, I’m not discounting the alphabet soup of G, K, T, or X that may be contributing to this happy little lovefest, but the connection is nonetheless real. Eliot slips my bracelet over my wrist and I kiss him. We might not be intimate friends, knowing all of our secrets and hopes and fears, but we’re family nonetheless: part of that big extended gay family that has sustained me over the last few years, with the sense of belonging that comes with it, a feeling of being part of something bigger than yourself. Community exists only where you make it. I think about how events like these transform the places where they’re held: the middle of the desert, the Olympic Stadium in Montreal, the streets of Philadelphia. The guy in the gym was right: we do take over a place. We turn them queer for a weekend: the restaurants, the subways, the gyms, the parks. I laugh when I read the phrase “gay community” to describe the gay population as a whole—a necessary fiction, I suppose, to empower a movement. But here’s where community is real: here in our little huddle, the seven of us exchanging bracelets and sloppy kisses.

  Narcissistic posers? My friends here have been called a lot worse, actually. Drug abusers. Misogynists. Immature children. Murderers, even, because of their supposed cavalier spread of the AIDS virus through unsafe sex. I watch Eliot’s face as he slips his little gift over the last wrist. I watch Henry embrace him, kiss him on the lips. I think about the time I slept with Eliot: how he labored to roll that condom over my cock, how I lost my erection in the process, and how we ended up just falling asleep in each other’s arms. “This is the best part anyway,” he said to me.

  The best part.

  Look, of course there are guys like Brent, who has been known to have crystal blown up his ass. Of course there’s unsafe sex and bad drugs and attitude queens, and probably even within this little huddle there have been moments of transgression. I remember once how Billy freaked out, having been fucked bareback at one party. Billy’s already got HIV, but he worried about new infection, and how much of a risk he’d been to the guy who topped him. He searched in vain for him the entire rest of the weekend, constantly on the lookout. “What are you going to say to him?” I wanted to know, but he had no clue. He just wanted to find him. The guilt Billy assumed, appropriate or not, eventually led him to leave early that weekend. He just couldn’t have fun after that. Even now I’ll occasionally see him glance around, scanning the crowd for the face of the man he still carries in his mind.

  There are consciences here. There are souls here. Like anywhere else, there is good and there is bad, but never is it as starkly delineated as some critics would describe. All I know is that these are the people—all of them, even the ones I don’t know—with whom I feel most at home.

  I listen to the soulful lyrics of Mary Griffin mixing into the trance we’ve been dancing to. “I wish I could keep you all of my life … this is my moment … this is my perfect moment with you …”

  Yes, yes indeed. This is my moment. I am part of this, part of the now, part of what’s happening and pulsing and marking our lives. It may be a celebration of the ephemeral, but at least I’m experiencing it. Jason, the activist back home in Boston, and the angry guy here in the gym: will they ever feel they missed out? I don’t know. I just know Javitz is gone, his dance stopped in midstep. This moment is mine, and I’m savoring it.

  Anthony spots us then and waves. He comes bearing gifts: a dozen bottles of water pressed up against his glistening chest. The boys dive upon him, and Anthony laughs heartily as he doles them out, a sexy young Santa Claus. I spot the gleam in his eyes. There’s no hiding how truly happy he is here among us all. As if he’s found a place at last. A home. Somewhere he finally belongs. I understand the sentiment, but not the longing behind it. I found a home here after Javitz’s death, after my world had been turned upside down and all its contents shaken out—but what brought Anthony here? What did all this replace?

  “Thank you, Jeff,” he whispers. “Thank you for bringing me here.”

  We kiss. I vow then and there
to find out the mystery behind Anthony Sabe.

  Meanwhile, at Nirvana

  Lloyd

  Eva’s a little tipsy. No, more than a little.

  “I useta be Snow White, but I drifted,” she purrs, standing up on a dining room chair, hand on hip, her other hand pushing at her hair. She’s a miniature Mae West in an oversized red-and-blue ski sweater.

  “It’s not the men in my life that count, it’s the life in my men. Ooooooooh!”

  Ty and I nearly slide under the table laughing. I actually can’t catch my breath. I’ve never seen her like this. She’s hysterical. Who knew?

  “Frankie and Johnnie were lovers,” she sings, going into a whole Westian routine. She’s dead-on. Uncanny, even. I wish Jeff could see this. Jeff loves Mae West.

  Ty leans in close to me. “She used to do this for all the queens who’d come visit Steven,” he whispers. I notice he lets his hand remain on my knee.

  I smile. Many times has Eva told me that she thought Ty, her late husband’s friend and lawyer, was in love with her. But when he arrived this morning in Provincetown, stepping out of his Lexus in his Prada suit and Versace sunglasses, I knew instantly that he was gay.

  “Goodness, madam,” Ty’s saying now, feeding her lines, “what beautiful diamonds you’re wearing.”

  “Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie,” she shoots right back. She steps up onto the dining room table and sashays across it, swinging her hips left to right.

  “Ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom!” Ty shouts, keeping in time with her swings, just as I’m certain he’d done countless of times to the delight of her husband’s gay friends.

  She stops in front of me. “Ohhh. I always did like a man in uniform, and that one fits you just grand.”

  “This old thing?” I laugh, pulling on my UMass sweatshirt.

  “Why don’t you come up some time ’n’ see me? I’m home ev’ry evenin’. Ooooh.”

  “Ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom!” Ty shouts out again as she swings hard and fast back down the table. I howl.

  “I’m going to have to handcuff you,” Ty calls to her, another obviously well rehearsed line.

  “Mustcha really?” she answers, on the spot and ready. “You know, I wasn’t born with ’em.”

  Ty can hardly keep from laughing. “Many men would have been safer if you had,” he manages to say.

  “I dunno,” she says, considering. “Hands ain’t ev’rythin’.”

  Back to swinging the hips down the table. “Ba-boom, ba-boom, ba—”

  “Yaaaaaaaaaaa!!!”

  I’m not sure what happened. One second she’s up there parading down the table; the next she’s gone. Ty is leaping out of his chair.

  She’d walked right off the edge!

  “Are you all right?” Ty’s shouting.

  I run around to the other side of the table. Eva is sitting up, rubbing her ass.

  “Eva, are you hurt?” I ask.

  “Well, nobody can ever say I didn’t fall for ya,” she quips, still in character.

  We all break up laughing, rolling on the floor. Ty falls over me, and I think it might be deliberate. Eva is nearly under the sofa.

  “Hey!” she exclaims. “Look!”

  She pulls a small, crude wooden figure of the Buddha from under the couch. She hands it to me. Something about the face makes me smile.

  “It looks almost handmade,” I say, “as if somebody whittled it from a piece of wood.” I glance over at Eva. “It’s a good omen. A gift from the house.”

  “Let’s fill the house with Buddhas!” she says. “All kinds of Buddhas!”

  I hand the figure back to her. “Maybe we could paint this one. Bring it to life.”

  “Maybe it’s time for another bottle of wine,” Ty says, refilling my wineglass.

  That’s how the night goes. Empty bottles of wine stack up beside the trash. By the time the grandfather clock in the hallway chimes two, I’m on the floor shoulder to shoulder with Ty, leaning up against the couch. Eva is spread out above us, the Buddha on her chest. We’re passing around a joint. Good stuff. A perfect way to celebrate our first weekend in the house.

  I have a nice, solid buzz. Nothing that impairs my thought process, just a nice, relaxing, contented feeling—a relief after the weeks of frenzied packing and unpacking, anxious transfers of money, and seemingly endless documents to sign. In between, we made probably two dozen trips down to Orleans or Hyannis to buy those household necessities we couldn’t find in Provincetown: shower rings, silk sheets, plush towels, coffeemakers for every room. “If we’re going to do this,” I insisted, “we should do it right.”

  The days passed by in a blur, and I realized this morning I hadn’t called Jeff in nearly a week. But he hadn’t called me, either. It works both ways. He didn’t even send flowers on the day we closed.

  “I never dreamed I’d be starting over like this,” Eva says, mellow now, handing the joint down to Ty. “Did you?”

  He takes a hit. “Not like this, Eva,” he says after exhaling the smoke in a long, languid breath. “Not like this.”

  Her hand rests on top of my head. “Well, if it wasn’t for this young man here, I might still be a widow living all alone in New York.”

  “Well, you’re a still widow,” I say a bit dreamily, taking the joint from Ty. “There’s nothing I can do about that.”

  There’s a silence. I didn’t mean for it to sound snotty. I meant it funny, but no one laughs. Was it insensitive? I hope Eva didn’t take it that way. Maybe I’m just feeling paranoid from the pot. Jeff always says I have a tendency to get that way when I mix pot and wine.

  “Oh, by the way, Eva,” Ty tells her, “Alex was in the hospital. A throat infection. He’s out now, doing better.”

  Alex. The guy with AIDS to whom she’d been so devoted. The one she saw every day, the one she said she loved.

  “I’m glad,” Eva says, looking away. “That he’s doing better, I mean.”

  A few weeks ago, I asked her if leaving Alex would be difficult, and she said of course it would, but that she’d stay in touch, that she’d travel down to New York often to see him. But apparently she hasn’t been in touch, not if she didn’t know he’d been in (and out of) the hospital. Curious.

  There are, in fact, lots of curious things about her.

  Ever since that night in my old apartment—the night something had woken me up and I’d discovered Eva awake and she’d kissed my hand—sometimes I feel a little weird around her. Oh, I love Eva; I really do. It’s not weird enough for me to back out of the deal. But I’m a trained psychologist, after all: I can’t help diagnosing people. It’s not fair, really; I don’t like doing this with friends. I don’t want to start assigning them pathologies or suggesting meds.

  But Jeff’s words have come to haunt me: She’s in love with you, Lloyd, and if you can’t see that, then I think it’s time for the doctor to heal himself.

  I insist to myself that she’s not in love with me. Maybe a little infatuated. That’s all it is. Infatuation. It isn’t love—not that kind of love, anyway—and she’ll see that, if she hasn’t already. It’s just a little crush, brought on by her grief over Steven and the sudden transformation we’ve made together. It’s nothing she won’t be able to work through. Maybe I ought to suggest a therapist she could see here in town. There are some really good ones in Provincetown, who know how to work with grief and depression.

  Because, in truth, I worry. Just a little. The intimacy Eva sometimes presumes with me can make me distinctly uncomfortable. There are times she does indeed talk as if we’re a couple. At Sears in Hyannis the other day, she giggled to the clerk in the appliance department, “We still have to decide which one of us will do the laundry”—a simple enough statement, perhaps, but the clerk looked over at us as if we were married, a fifty-year-old lady and a thirty-something husband. And just now: If it wasn’t for this young man, I’d still be a widow.

  Well, you still are! I suddenly want to shout. You
still are a widow!

  It’s just a manifestation of her grief. Grief can make even the most stable, the most insightful, the most introspective people behave in ways aberrant to their true selves.

  And there’s another thing, too: that sleeping with the father bit. She made it sound so sweet and innocent, but a grown man sharing a bed with a nine-, ten-, eleven-year-old girl? Yes, the more I think about it, the more I feel I ought to recommend that she see someone—

  “A half-dollar for your thoughts.” Ty’s hand is on my knee again. Our eyes meet.

  “Just buzzing,” I say softly.

  He smiles. Eva’s hand on my head and Ty’s on my knee. Okay, let’s make things even more awkward, shall we?

  So I admit I find Ty attractive. He’s very handsome, very debonair, very sure of himself. I’ve always been partial to men with a little silver in their hair. It’s hard to imagine Ty pining after Eva, as she’s insisted he’s been doing for years since Steven’s death. It’s hard to see him pining after any woman, in fact, with his three gold rings studded with emeralds, his turquoise silk scarf, his solid onyx cufflinks. Yet despite the trappings, he’s not effeminate, just sophisticated, cosmopolitan, in the ways guys used to be back in the forties and the fifties. His skin is a deep, shiny cocoa, his eyes a startling brown-gold. I can’t pretend I don’t want to see him naked.

  Maybe it’s because for the past several years before Jeff and I reconnected, I was celibate—part of my grief and healing process—and then suddenly there was a rush of sex with Jeff for a period of several months. But now there’s been nothing, not since Christmas. There’s a hunger to my horniness, the way I feel when I skip breakfast and lunch and then become ravenous by dinner. When Ty stands, walking in front of us out to the hallway to check his messages on his cell phone, I can’t resist checking out his butt. High and hard. My desire becomes a physical thing. I have to wrestle it down.

  I turn suddenly, locking eyes with Eva on the couch. She’s caught me looking.

  “Another hit, Lloyd?” she asks softly, holding out the joint.

  “No, thanks.” I feel my face flush.