by B. G. Thomas
“You’ve eaten?” Kent asked.
Wade nodded. “Yes.”
“Good. Want to go somewhere?”
Wade tilted his head. “Where?”
“Let’s go get a drink!” Kent’s face was full of joy.
“I’ve got some Southern Comfort here.”
Kent rolled his eyes. “I need to get away from here. The solitude is great and all, but I need to see people.”
“Ah….” Wade shook his head. Felt a little disappointed. He thought he and Kent might just sit here and talk. On the porch. Or the couch, listening to some music. He hadn’t considered leaving the cottage for a minute.
“Come on. I’ve already googled it. Found a nice little bar about an hour away. We’ll be there before you know it. It’ll be fun. And besides, you’ll keep me from drinking too much. I’ll be the designated driver.”
For some reason the idea made Wade uncomfortable. The cottage was known. Safe. But leaving? Gene had never allowed them to go out in public. “Look, I was just going to settle in. Do a little reading.”
“Please?” Kent said, his voice almost a whine.
“Oh, for goodness sake.” Wade sighed.
Kent gave him a piteous look.
And Wade realized he didn’t want to disappoint the man. “Oh, all right.”
“You don’t even need to change,” Kent said, waving at Wade’s polo shirt and jeans. “You look perfect.”
Perfect? Hardly. He looked like an old man, old before his time. The lines had grown deep around his eyes the last year or so. He was even beginning to see it around his mouth.
But the puppy look on Kent’s face could not be denied.
“Can I shave? Brush my teeth?”
Kent laughed. “If you have to!”
The ride was over before Wade knew it. To his surprise, Wade actually felt himself getting excited. Like he was on an adventure. The conversation had flowed easily. It helped that Kent didn’t ask about Gene. A little over an hour later, after a drive over the Seven Mile Bridge, they found the small Key West bar with no trouble at all. It was dark inside and almost empty. That was probably why it took Wade a while to realize what kind of bar he’d been brought to. Wade looked around the shadowy room. The patrons, only a few besides themselves, were men. All men. Some of them were leaning against each other, and then he spotted two kissing in a corner. His eyes widened. Oh!
Kent sat down across from him and pushed a cocktail over to his side of the table. Wade barely noticed. He could only look at Kent in surprise. “Did you bring me to a gay bar, Kent?” Wade asked in a hushed voice.
“You didn’t think I’d subject us to a straight bar if I could help it, did you?” Kent asked. “We are on vacation.”
“I….” A gay bar? They were in a gay bar!
“Wade? Are you okay?”
“I don’t know. I’ve just never….”
“Never what?”
Wade waved at the room, the men, all of it.
“You’ve never been to a gay bar?” Kent asked, a look of complete surprise on his face.
“No,” Wade all but whispered.
“Why on earth not?”
Wade shook his head. “Gene wouldn’t let us. Me.”
Kent’s mouth fell open. “Wouldn’t let…? Why not?”
“He….” Wade looked out the window. “He couldn’t take a chance he’d be seen.” And here I am, sitting right by a window where any passerby could see me!
When he looked back, Kent was studying him with those intense blue eyes of his.
“He was married, Kent,” he explained and turned away, face red with shame. “I was his secret.” Gene’s dirty little secret. “We never went anywhere.” He picked up his glass—there was something dark in it—and took a drink. Coke and something. Whiskey?
“Just what kind of life did you two have? I don’t understand.”
Wade looked at Kent over the rim of his glass. “For most of it, all we had was two weeks a year.”
“You can’t be serious!”
For a long time, Wade didn’t say anything. He hardly knew where to begin. He’d already shared more about Gene than he had with anyone in his life. But he hadn’t even scratched the surface of what he’d been holding inside for so very long. Things he’d wanted to talk about but couldn’t. But what was stopping him now? What? He took another drink. A big one. Half of his cocktail gone.
“I cried for weeks after returning from that vacation where I first met him.” With that sentence, the dam broke and the words began to spill out. “Those two weeks with him had been paradise, and returning to a world without him had been a cold and awful existence. It was horrible. The days and weeks and months crawled by. Then to my total shock, Gene contacted me and arranged for us to meet back on Pena Key. We stayed at the cottage I was in when we met. We kept it in my name, but he paid. In cash so his wife wouldn’t know. I didn’t care. All that mattered to me was that I was with Gene. And those two weeks were a pure and total joy. And after that, even though it might be months before I saw him again, or worse, sometimes only once a year, I knew all I had to do was wait and I’d see him again.”
“And that was the only time you ever saw him?”
Wade sighed. It came from his bones. “Until about five years ago. He finally let me move to Chicago. That’s where he lived. And once in a while, when his wife thought he was working late or she was visiting family, I would see him. He would sneak in, and we had to be quiet, and then he would sneak away.”
“And the rest of the time? When he wasn’t there?”
Wade shrugged. “I had my work.” He drank again.
“But what do you do for fun? Surely you have friends? Gay friends?”
“No,” he said.
“No, what?” Kent asked. He reached out and placed his hand on Wade’s arm. In the background, “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” by Ella Fitzgerald began to play on the jukebox. Gene had loved her.
“We didn’t know any gays,” Wade said. “No parties. No bars. Gene wouldn’t let us.”
“Wouldn’t let you? That’s crazy! How could he stop you from having gay friends? He was married, for fuck’s sake. What say did he have in what you did? Who your friends were? Why did you put up with it? Why didn’t you leave his ass? Find someone who wanted to be with you all the time?”
Wade’s mouth nearly fell open. He couldn’t believe what Kent was saying. Leave Gene? Why, Kent might as well ask him why he didn’t show up at one of his mother’s Red Hat Society meetings, dressed for the occasion. Or go to work naked. Jump in a pool with a shark. Drink Drano. “I loved him, Kent!”
“And I loved Seth. We lived together for ten years! But I would not have put up with that shit!”
“You don’t understand,” Wade said. He shook his head. How could this young man understand? “It was different when I met Gene. Times were different.”
“Wade, you aren’t that old. Yeah, it was different. Seth told me that. He was older than me. But gay liberation has been around since 1970. Gays couldn’t get married when you two met, but we weren’t hiding anymore either. There were Pride parades. People knew about Rock Hudson. You were living in Chicago?”
“Well, not when we first met. That took years and—”
“You could have lived in Boystown. Blocks and blocks of gay people, businesses, bars, hangouts. Churches even. You could have had a life.”
I had Gene.
But as he looked into Kent’s eyes, as Kent looked into his (and God, it felt like Kent was looking inside him as well), walls that had been built up around him for years began to crack. Images came to the front of his mind. Images he’d spent a lifetime keeping in the dark.
He trembled.
God.
Took another drink (it was almost gone now) and let the images come.
That gay couple that lived around the block from his apartment building. Walking their dog. Sometimes holding hands. And once, he’d actually seen them kiss, smiling, beneath an u
mbrella one rainy morning.
The two lesbians that ran the bakery where he got doughnuts for the office on Fridays. Nothing overt about those two women. But sometimes he’d catch the way they looked at each other. The love. Radiating love. Wade’s heart would seize up. To be looked at that way.
To join a world where he could hold hands with the love of his life and walk a dog and kiss under an umbrella. To look at him with love across a crowded room and not mind that anyone could see it. To be a part of that!
Wade looked into the man’s eyes.
“It was hard,” Wade admitted. And immediately began to feel guilty. As if he were betraying Gene. But there was something else too. A part of him he’d denied for so long. Then, before he knew he was even doing it, the words were bursting out. “Oh, Kent! It was so hard. Especially as gays came out more and more. Sometimes I would see two men together—know they were a couple—and the longing, the envy, would just about do me in. I asked him once. I said, ‘Don’t you ever wish we could be together always?’ You know what he did?”
Kent said nothing. Just shook his head.
“He laughed! He said, ‘For God’s sake, Wade! Where did you get such an insane fucking idea? Live together? Like a couple of queers?’ Then he laughed again. But oh, what he said next…. He actually suggested that I get married! ‘Why don’t you find yourself a wife?’ he said. ‘Then you won’t feel like this. You won’t be so lonely in between our vacations together.’”
“He actually wanted you to get married?”
Wade nodded.
Kent sighed. “Wade… do you know what an unhealthy relationship that was? Why did you let him treat you that way? You’re worth so much more.”
Wade shrugged. At that moment he didn’t feel like he was worth anything.
“You let Gene be the boss all those years, doling out the love when he felt like it.” Kent squeezed Wade’s hand. “There is no way I could’ve shared Seth with some woman. No way. Not with anyone.”
Wade looked down at their hands. Touching. In public. He didn’t know if he should run or… or take Kent’s hand in his own. Wouldn’t that be something? To hold a man’s hand? In public? Even if it was in a gay bar?
“I hated sharing him, Kent. I hated it. But Gene was what I lived for. I loved him so much! I needed him.” He turned away, looked back out the tinted window. The streetlights had come on. Cars drove by. People walked. Life was happening out there. The loneliness hit him again. God. “Kent! I need him.”
“Trust me, Wade. I understand. When Seth died, I thought I would too. I miss him every single day. But I have to go on living. You have to go on living. Life is waiting for you.”
What? Just like that? With a snap of his fingers? Wade shook his head. “Kent… it’s so hard. I don’t know if I can.”
“Of course you can, Wade. Life goes on. Who knows what could happen?”
There was a long silence then, broken only by the song that had replaced Ella’s quiet crooning. “Stormy Weather.” Lena Horne. Which made him think of Gene (he’d loved her as well), and God, the pain suddenly, startlingly, slammed through him once more. Like a freight train going through a tunnel. It was like he was dying. How could you hurt this much and be alive? He downed the last bit of his cocktail.
But through that pain came a different, a new, thought. Just as startling. His mouth opened, but no words came. Why…. God. Why, it was like this time, instead of just letting him sink into a miasma of aching hurt, the train had somehow plowed a path through the stink and refuse, uncovering a fresh series of ideas.
It began with….
Had he really let Gene dole out his love?
And being even only partly honest with himself, he knew that the answer was yes.
A part of him had always known it. He had let Gene treat him like a, well, a convenience. A call boy. He’d been so desperate, he not only allowed it, he’d all but welcomed it. Why?
Nearly everything in their lives—everything—had been on Gene’s terms. Nothing in their lives was the way Wade wanted it. Even when Gene had finally allowed Wade to move to Chicago, it was all on Gene’s terms. He’d even picked out the apartment, the neighborhood. Dictated where Wade could go, and where he couldn’t.
That was another part of their relationship he’d come to resent. He’d buried it. Pretended otherwise. But it had been there. And hidden there in the dark and damp, it had begun to rot.
He could have left.
He’d heard of Boystown. He wasn’t oblivious. He wasn’t stupid. Why, he fantasized about it. Living there. About him and Gene living there, of course. Getting an apartment right there in the gay community. Having gay friends. Getting together for dinner with other male couples. Weekend trips. Vacations.
But imaginings were all they would ever be. Gene laughed at the idea. Living like a couple of queers!
Wade had begun, in the back of his mind, to wonder why he stayed. He’d lied even to himself when he said he never thought about leaving Gene. That the idea was as crazy as jumping in a pool with a shark or drinking drain cleaner.
Sometimes he had wondered what life would be like without Gene. To start over. Find someone else. It was a scary idea, and if he focused on it too long, built up too much of an imaginary world of “what if,” he would panic. Gene was the only man (besides that one silly time in college) he’d ever been with—his constant—and the idea of a world without his lover would turn to dread.
He mentioned leaving Gene only once. It had been more a suggestion than any real threat. Gene knew it too. He’d thrown his head back and laughed. Laughed! And then told Wade that he wasn’t going anywhere. That Wade would be Gene’s boy until the day Gene was cold in the ground.
And that memory quite suddenly allowed him to let all the rest go…. Somehow the words came.
“I didn’t even know he was dead until she came to see me, Kent.”
“Who, Wade?” Kent’s voice sounded like it came from miles away. Wade was in a different place now. A different time.
“I was at my apartment. There was a knock, and I opened the door and there was this woman standing there. She said something like ‘Are you Wade Porter?’”
“Wait. What?”
“And then I knew who she was. She was Gene’s wife.”
“Oh shit,” Kent said.
“She didn’t even come in. She just told me I was not allowed at the funeral. That there would be people there watching for me. That they would keep me away. She said she had lived with Gene’s dirty little secret for far too many years, and she wouldn’t put up with it any longer. She wouldn’t even give me anything that belonged to him. Not even the sweater I gave him from years before. She told me she burned it.”
“Oh God, Wade.”
“I don’t know how I didn’t die right there. I had to find his obituary to know what happened. It was a heart attack.”
“God…. Wade, I am so sorry.”
Sorry. Kent was sorry.
But then: I’m the one who should be sorry. Another sudden realization. What’s wrong with me? Am I that messed up?
He looked around the room again. Two men were leaning against the jukebox, laughing, pointing, pressing buttons. A couple slow-danced to Billie Holiday’s “Come Rain or Come Shine,” kissed. Other men leaned against the bar, sat on stools, chatted, drank. Several were playing pool.
All were men. He was struck by it. Men. It was like he’d woken up in an episode of The Twilight Zone. An alternate world inhabited by people, but not by the kind of people he’d known all his life. These were gay men. And what was happening around him was complete normalcy instead of something strange. Which was what made it strange!
Part of him marveled. Wanted to join in. Place a quarter on the edge of the pool table so that he could play next. Another part wanted to do what he’d done merely contemplating living in such a world. Panic.
Wade turned back to Kent. “Can we go home? Please. Please, take me out of here. I can’t do this anymore.”
>
“Of course.” Kent squeezed his hand again. “I really am sorry. I had no idea. I’ll take you home.”
AFTER LETTING himself into his cottage, Wade didn’t know what to do. He and Kent had hardly spoken on the drive back, just a few words. When he got out of the car, turned to go to his own place, there was one minute when he thought (hoped) Kent was going to say something more, but then the moment passed. What had he wanted Kent to say?
A drink. I need a drink. The effect of the one cocktail he’d had at the bar had long since faded. He wanted to get drunk. So he went to the kitchen for his Southern Comfort.
That was when he saw his pills. He took the bottle, hefted it in his hand, listened to the pills rattle within.
So why not take them? Then the pain could stop. The world could stop.
He grabbed the Southern Comfort, unscrewed the bottle, sniffed the contents, and winced. Strong without some kind of mixer! But who cared? He reached for the mug in the kitchen strainer.
The mug.
Kent’s mug.
God.
How would Kent get it back?
How would that be? Retrieving your mug from the house of a man who had killed himself?
Return it. Then take the pills.
In more or less a daze at that point, he slipped the bottle into his shirt pocket and headed for his neighbor’s cottage.
“WADE!” THE look of relief on Kent’s face was obvious. “Come in. Please. I’ve been worried sick!”
“No,” Wade said quietly. “I just brought your mug back.”
“Mug?” Kent said it as if Wade had spoken a strange word in some ancient language. Like he didn’t even know what the word meant. Then: “Oh. My mug. Who gives a fuck about the mug?”
Fuck. There was that word again. Kent bandied it around as if it were the word “the.”
“For God’s sake,” Kent said. “Get in here.” He reached out, took Wade by the wrist, and pulled him in the door.
And that was when Wade saw the painting.
He froze.
Oh God….
It was breathtaking.