He laughed softly. “Definitely, that’s me. I’ve been waiting for the call, considering how I like banking so much. But if life were fair, not only would I be some bigwig interviewed by CNN, you’d be president of Harvard.”
I snorted out a laugh despite myself. “Idiot.”
“You sure do like to call me names. I’m smart enough to know a man who’d be perfect as a university president when I meet him.”
“A few advanced degrees might help. Experience, knowledge, knowing the right people.”
“I bet you wouldn’t like all the schmoozing that a job like that involves, would you? Back-clapping and all that stuff.”
I shuddered, exaggerating it. “Especially since I’m such a social person and love crowds.”
“So, no university presidenting for you.”
“Presidenting? That’s not even a word.”
“So give me an F. Maybe you’d be a best-selling author of history biographies, like that guy who wrote the book about John Adams. What’s his name?”
“David McCullough, and you’re nuts.”
“Tsk, tsk, tsk. Sticks and stones may break my bones. I bet you’ve read that book.”
“I have, but I bet you have too.”
“Guilty as charged. But tell me what you think. If the good guys finished first, what would you be doing? Assuming of course that you consider yourself a good guy.”
I stopped to wipe more sweat from my face with my arm. Global warming was alive and well in Texas. If the weather kept up like this, the public pools would be open for swimming at Thanksgiving. “You ask annoying questions, has anybody ever told you that?” I said when we started walking again.
“Everybody. Constantly. But I usually get my answer, and questions are a great way to get to know somebody. So, tell me. What would you be doing?”
I took my time and thought about it, enjoying the fact that Kevin had asked. “I think I wouldn’t change,” I said finally. “I’d be doing exactly what I’m doing now.”
“You do love teaching. But you’d change one thing, right? You’d be able to be honest about yourself.”
Sure, while we were talking fantasy, why not? “And what would you be doing?”
He answered right away. “That’s easy. I’d be asking you to please come over to my house this weekend.”
“Kevin….”
“I can promise you my nice king-sized bed, where I’m way too lonely, and the best possible company. At least, I’m assuming you think I’m the best—”
Not one but three lizards went skittering across the path and paused right in front of us, going into the defensive if I don’t move you won’t be able to see me freeze that made no sense unless you were a dumb animal. I grabbed Kevin’s arm to stop him and he pulled up short, skipping a little to keep his balance and finishing up pressed against me, surely not by accident.
He stayed there, looking into my eyes as I looked into his.
“What do you say?” Kevin whispered.
I swallowed against the dry air. I’d told him about the letters to the editor over the phone the past week. Surely he understood what that meant for the two of us. “I….”
“Dear professor, please come to my house.”
“I… I don’t think so.”
Despite the disappointment that appeared instantly in those eyes that matched the sky, Kevin erased the distance between us and pressed his lips to mine. I closed my eyes and gave him that kiss, because even though I was desperately grateful for what we had—these meager hours together away from it all—in the best of all possible worlds I’d be knocking on his door every day. Did he understand that? I tried to tell him so without words.
He pulled away slowly so that our mouths clung to each other for a second or two, and when we parted, I daringly kissed him again. Quickly, but I wanted him to know that I liked his kisses too.
Kevin flicked his thumb against my cheek and went on as if we hadn’t done anything to interrupt our conversation. “I’d cook you breakfast on Sunday morning. Scrambled eggs with cheese, bacon, cinnamon buns from Sara Lee….”
The lizards were long gone. I resettled my Red Sox baseball cap and started walking again. “What do you want to do, smother me with cholesterol?”
He caught up with me easily. “I’ll serve it to you in bed. And afterward, we can make slow, sweet love. Or hot, quick love, whichever fires your jets. I’ll treat you good.”
I knew he would. “Kevin…. You know I can’t.”
“No, I don’t. I know you won’t. There’s a difference.”
A desert willow bush, big by the standards of the park, had grown in the middle of the hardly-there path we were following. I turned to go around the left side of it, but Kevin roughly grabbed my wrist and pulled me to the other side with him instead.
Annoyed, I yanked away from him. “Damn it—”
Wordlessly, he turned and pointed. On the side of the path where I’d wanted to walk was a coiled rattlesnake, just raising up in warning, and now rattling in a way nobody ever forgot. Even though I’d killed my share of rattlers when I’d been growing up on the ranch, I’d just as soon avoid them when I could.
“Uh, thanks,” I said.
“Sure.”
We didn’t talk after that for a while. I was embarrassed, and maybe Kevin was pissed at me, I didn’t know. I sure couldn’t blame him if he was. After five minutes of silence I dropped back to where he was walking behind me. “This wouldn’t be the best day if that rattler had buried his fangs in my leg.”
Kevin cocked an eye at me. “The best day, huh?”
“Yeah.” What could compete with the time I spent with Kevin? Drinking beer in my yard? Finishing a book and not having anyone to talk to about it? Planning another desperate trip to Houston?
“Me too,” he said.
“Right. Beats old Star Trek reruns.”
“I like Star Trek. What’s your favorite episode?”
And as simply as that we were back together again.
The rest of the morning was great, a lot like the relaxing, natural weekend we’d spent in Fredericksburg. The sun got as high in the sky as it was going to get, and then it began its long slide down to the horizon before we stopped for lunch. I spread an old, lightweight blanket I’d packed under a lone, stunted mesquite tree. It’d grown on the edge of one of the slashes in the land, which must have been filled with rushing water in the spring. The tree was on its last legs, about as bad as the one in my backyard, but it was clinging to life, and there were clumps of leaves overhead that provided deep shade. I checked for snakes first and then made sure the blanket took in as much of that shade as possible. I knelt down on it and opened up my backpack to pull out lunch. That included a corkscrew and a bottle of pinot grigio in an insulating wrap. I looked up at Kevin, who was sitting across from me next to his own backpack with an odd expression on his face.
“I thought we might have some wine with lunch,” I said, aiming to sound off-handed. “You, ah, you like this, don’t you? White wine?”
“We’re going to regret drinking this much,” Kevin said, and he unwrapped a bottle of chardonnay, sweating in the hot air just like my bottle was. “Great minds think alike?”
We decided to drink the grigio and keep the chardonnay for dinner. I uncorked and poured it into red plastic glasses that Kevin held out. Kevin held up his glass for a toast. He waited until my cup met his, stared at me meaningfully, and then broke into a grin. “Cheers,” he said.
“Salud.”
Kevin drank, and then he rested his arm on his bent knee and held his cup in the air again. “May we get what we want,” he intoned, “may we get what we need, but may we never get what we deserve.” He took another sip, more slowly this time. “This isn’t bad wine. Okay, now it’s your turn.”
A pebble under my ass forced me to shift on the blanket while I thought. Clever toasts hadn’t ever been my specialty, but I’d heard a few, and I strained to remember one. “May you live to be a hundred yea
rs, with one extra year to repent.” Belatedly, I touched my wine to his, and we both drank.
“That’s a good one,” he said. “How about ‘Here’s to us. May we never drink worse.’”
“Six on a scale of ten. Maybe five. Yep, five.”
“You really are a hard marker. Don’t the kids ever complain?”
“Constantly.”
“I can see why. Okay, do you have another one?”
“Uh….” I made a show of scratching my head, loving this little game that had sprung up between us. “May we both be alive this time next year.”
Kevin made an elaborate face. “Yuck. Negative fifty-seven for that one.”
“Hey! You do better.”
“Thanks, don’t mind if I do.” Kevin got nimbly to his feet, though he looked down as he spilled some of the wine in the process. “I hate feeding the ants. Okay, here’s a good one I learned in college. My second week in Fayetteville, as a matter of fact.” He cleared his throat—not that it would have any effect. “Here’s to you and here’s to me, may we never disagree. But if we do, then fuck you, and here’s to me.” He chuckled and looked down at me. “It’s the ‘fucking you’ part I always liked, though I never let the other guys know it.” He flopped back down next to me and sat cross-legged, though carefully safeguarding the wine this time. “Score?”
“Any toast that has fucking in it has got to earn big numbers. Eighty-six.”
“Not sixty-nine?”
I choked on my wine. “You have the mind of an adolescent sometimes.”
“And the truth comes out. Will you still date me, you old graybeard?”
“Date?” I asked lightly. “Is that what we’re doing?”
“That’s right.” He tapped me on my knee. “You know what they say, don’t you?”
“No, what?”
“Here’s to those who wish us well, and those that don’t may go to hell.” Kevin pushed his legs out straight. “That’s an old toast. At least in my family it is. My father used to give it every New Year’s dinner. So, are you ready to eat?”
The wine had been my small attempt at offering something to him, and I thought that he’d done the same for me. We ate sandwiches—he’d brought leftover chicken, I had deli ham—and apples and chips, food made special by the company. Afterward we lay back, side-by-side in the small patch of shade, and watched some birds spiral up higher and higher into the sky. I reached over and took his hand in mine, but what I really wanted to do was roll on top of him and look into his eyes. Maybe find in them what I was looking for, or maybe just… look. For the pleasure of it. For the freedom of it.
We clutched at each other’s fingers while the birds climbed so high that even the black specks they’d become disappeared. How long and how high would they go?
“There’s been something I’ve been wondering about,” I said.
Kevin’s voice was low and drowsy-sounding, as if he were on the verge of a nap. “What’s that?”
“Nothing. Later.”
He struggled up onto his elbow and twisted around to see me, shaking his head as he did. “No, tell me. Or ask me. What?”
The hand he’d been holding made a good pillow for my head as I stared up at the insubstantial wisps of a cloud. “How is your family about you being gay? I mean, you say you want to live out, eventually, but have you even told them? Does your mother know?”
“Yeah, they do. Even my favorite grandmother did before she died.”
“And they’re okay with it?”
He gave me one of his quick grins. “I didn’t say that now, did I? My mom’s your liberal’s liberal, and she’s always acted like she’s delighted to have a gay son.” His expression turned contemplative. “But she’s brittle, you know? I’ve never believed her. She’s too forced, too jolly. But it’s better than being cut out of the will.”
“And everybody else?”
“My dad died a month after I married Julianne, so he never knew. My sister, she’s great. The year I divorced Julianne and told everybody why, that whole year afterward Bridget would call and have long conversations with me, asking all sorts of impertinent questions.” Kevin snorted. “I guess that part runs in the family. But she asked, and I answered, and by the end she knew more about me than I did, I think. She gets it. So, yeah, Bridget and her husband are great.” He sat up. “She’s always said that she wants to meet my partner. Except, of course, I don’t have one. And before you ask, yes, Julianne knows too.”
“That must have been difficult, telling her.”
Kevin rubbed the back of his neck. “It wasn’t easy. The hardest thing I ever did, I think. Except, you’ve got to know, the marriage was a mistake for all different reasons. Even if I’d been straight, it wouldn’t have lasted.” He looked down at me. “And how about you? I don’t suppose you’re out to your family.”
How to explain when I didn’t want to talk about this at all? But then why had I brought up the subject if I wanted to avoid explanations? But not with Kevin. Somewhere in the back of my mind, the thought had been there for a while, that I could tell him, at least some part of it.
“I am and I’m not.”
There was compassion in his voice, his face. “Tell me.”
Just a little bit. I could get that out. I never talked about this; who would I talk to? But for years all the parts of it had crashed through my mind like boulders tumbling down an endless mountain. Young men always think they’re invincible, the surgeon said. You’re not. You should have known this would happen. As if it had been my fault. As if he would only begrudgingly operate on my arm. Faggot, after all. I focused on a tree branch overhead.
“I know they know. Something….” I took a breath. “Something happened a while ago. A long time ago, so that there’s no way they couldn’t understand what I… the truth. They’ve got to. But since then, they’ve always just looked the other way and not talked about it. I mean, my father barely said two words to me for years after that, had barely started talking to me again before he died. My mother… fussed. She’s always fussing and nervous around me, but never asking me anything about my personal life. It’s like I don’t have a personal life, just… school.”
Kevin’s hand settled on my knee. I still didn’t look over to him, but the contact felt good and maybe gave me the little something I needed to keep going.
“My older sister is just like my mother. Her husband slaps me on the back too hard and talks about sports every second I’m around him, like it’s a defense against what I am. I give their kids gifts every birthday, but they don’t know me. My other sister doesn’t count. She lives in London and I hardly ever see her. She comes over every three or four years to join us for holidays at the ranch, and I’m a sexless bachelor uncle for her and her kids.”
The light was too bright, the sun too high. I pulled my hand out from under my head and shaded my eyes instead, shaded them really well, covering them completely and plunging me into darkness. “It… it would be one thing if they didn’t know. If they were just guessing. But they know. How could they pretend?”
In my head, I heard Kevin’s voice, what he didn’t say but surely must be thinking. And aren’t you pretending too? Have you ever forced them to get to know you the way you are?
He was rubbing my thigh with the flat of his hand, around and around against the stiff fabric of my jeans. “I don’t know, Tom,” he said, his voice low and thick. “It’s wrong.”
Nobody had ever comforted me like this, and I felt the deep rush of emotion threatening to come forward, clogging my throat. But I wasn’t going to break down in front of him. I had a little dignity left, didn’t I? “Not my brother,” I managed to get out. “He… well, at least sort of.”
“Grant, right? Who golfs with you.”
Without looking, I lifted my left arm. “Even with this. Yes.”
“Hey. You do all right with that arm.”
“Grant wouldn’t let me slack off. He made sure I did rehab, he pushed me when I didn’t want to
be pushed.” And invited me to the ranch when the rest of them didn’t want me there, when my father turned away from me. Let me get to know his kids from the days they were born.
“He sounds like a good guy. I’d… I’d like to meet him someday.”
And that was the crux of the matter, wasn’t it? What was I going to do about Kevin? Where did he fit in my life? Abruptly I sat up and put my arms around my knees. “I don’t know—”
“You don’t know that you can do it, I know.”
“You must be tired of hearing that.”
“Frankly, yes. But I keep telling myself that—”
“That it’s early days with us, and that I’ll change.”
Kevin scooted closer to me so that our thighs touched and he could grasp my shoulder. “Come to my house next weekend,” he said, not so softly this time. “We can’t keep meeting everywhere except where we live. What’s next, San Antonio? Going back to Houston? Flying to the moon?”
I quirked a sad, discouraged smile. “There aren’t any beds on the moon.”
“But there is one at my house.”
“Kevin, I want to. I really do. But my job, and now the play….”
He released me, not cruelly and not impatiently. “Think about it, okay? Don’t say no just yet.”
“All right. All right, I’ll think about it.”
“We can be careful for you. I’ve permanently cleaned out the second spot in my garage so you can park there right alongside my truck, and I won’t have to put that outside. Nobody needs to know you’re there. I want you there.”
He was really pushing now, in a way I suddenly realized that he hadn’t pushed when I’d been telling him about my family. He hadn’t asked about what I wouldn’t talk about, but the issue of spending time at Kevin’s house, maybe even staying overnight there, was a huge stumbling block between us, and it really mattered to him. If I couldn’t say yes….
“I’ve been wondering if you’d like to spend Thanksgiving together,” I said quickly, the words tumbling out of my mouth. “At Big Bend. You like that, don’t you? We could hike and maybe camp out. It should be warm enough. It’d be a long drive, but we could get there by midnight if we left right after work. All day Thursday and Friday and Saturday at the park, and then drive home on Sunday.”
Dreamspinner Press Year Three Greatest Hits Page 92