by David Leite
I heaved a sigh and tore into the envelope. The first letter I pulled out was written on light blue stationery lipped in royal blue. Inside, a picture of a man. A short intake of breath. He was beautiful. He was wearing a sapphire-blue sweater (obviously, blue was a favorite color) and white shorts, and was standing in front of a split-rail fence. Beyond were craggy cliffs and, farther, the ocean, bleeding into fog. He had his left arm slung over the top rail, his hands clasped, his legs crossed at the ankles. Casual, but not in that studied way I’d seen before. Decorous, even. No private parts practically pressed up against the lens. No possessions stuffed into the frame to clue me into his financial status. In fact, he took up so little of the picture, it was more a photograph of the ocean than anything. I flipped it over. On the back he had written, “Terrible picture, great beach!” I stood and held it under a lamp to get a better view. I was right; his eyes were closed. And his hair, dirty blond and receding, was ruffled by the wind, like a rooster’s comb. I was beguiled and relieved. Although this man was very handsome, there was no vanity in the picture.
He wrote that his name was Alan Dunkelberger, “a 35-year-old man who sells Manhattan real estate to make a living.” What an odd way to put that. Most men would have said, “I’m a real estate broker,” or “I sell real estate.” I wondered if perhaps he was foreign. As I read on, the photograph made sense. He wrote that it was taken on Martha’s Vineyard, one of his favorite places. He explained that the beach was his getaway, where he was most himself. He closed with, “You said to write a heartfelt letter. I feel as though I’ve written a book . . . so, why don’t you pick up the phone right now and call me. Don’t wait!”
Minutes later we were talking. His voice was deep, and I could hear the smile in it, curling up the ends of his sentences. The conversation veered from work to theater to the beach to books. It was peppered with all sorts of questions, always followed by “And what about you?” Unlike the guys who had answered my previous ad, he wasn’t halfhearted or preoccupied, dividing his time between me and Entertainment Tonight. Plus, the phone gave me distance to focus on what he was saying and not get caught up in his looks, or how I looked, or what we would look like on our Christmas cards.
We agreed to meet at Top of the Sixes at nine forty-five on October 4. I chose the times—after my group therapy with David Lindsey and seven other gay men finished. Alan picked the place—for the atmosphere. I’d never been to the restaurant, which was on the top of 666 Fifth Avenue, hence the name. He said he liked the view, and the understated elegance and quiet of the bar.
Walking down Fifth Avenue, I felt the frisson I always experienced on blind dates. The potential, the hope. Then I saw him, and my heart sank. Once again a man had misrepresented himself. He stood at the entrance to the building in a camel jacket, white dress shirt opened one too many buttons for my conservative tastes, spray-painted-on jeans, and cowboy boots. Fire Island queen, I thought, and I was drained of hope.
It was a polite date, the kind you smile through wanly, the whole time wondering if you can make it back in time to catch the end of Murphy Brown. The conversation didn’t exactly ping-pong like it had on the phone. On the other end of the line, safe within the fantasy of his being an unaffected guy—one who unselfconsciously admitted to loving McDonald’s, and who actually said things like “Holy go to war!”—I had been curious and interested. But seeing that he was one of the Beautiful People who, I was certain, did Beautiful Things in Beautiful Places, the kind who moved effortlessly from parties in Fire Island to East Hampton and who was, in all likelihood, fond of under-eye night-repair cream, nude sunbathing, and drinks with umbrellas in them, I just couldn’t muster the energy.
I was about to call it a night when he asked about my other experiences with personal ads. I told him about the seventy or so letters I’d gotten in response to my Village Voice ad, which I’d winnowed down to about a dozen dates with exhibitionists, fetishists, utterly nice but utterly boring suits. I mentioned that peculiar little man Gabe Newman, the Christmas-tree hugger.
“Wait,” he said. “Did you say ‘Gabe Newman’?”
“Is he a friend of yours?” I answered, glad that I hadn’t said anything insulting.
“Not really. I dated him, too. Through his ad.”
“Get . . . out . . . of . . . town. When?”
I waved over the waiter and ordered two more gimlets and another bowl of nuts. Flipping through our Filofaxes, we figured out that I’d dated Gabe first. I recounted Gabe’s need to rescue Christmas trees. Alan’s eyes grew big. I could see he was trying to reconcile someone he’d found to be a pretentious, onerous man with the self-proclaimed “Jewish rapscallion” I’d had drinks with.
“That little shit!” I said when Alan told me some of the things Gabe had said to him about dating, men, and relationships. “Don’t believe him for a minute,” I added. “Those are my lines. I said those things to Gabe.”
“And he made believe he came up with them.”
“I hope you were impressed.”
“I was.”
“Well, you’re looking at the real thing. I’m the original Broadway cast. He’s merely a bad bus-and-truck company.”
The rest of the room fell away as we laughed about Gabe and the many men we had met, the few we had dated. Although Alan looked like the guys who intimidated me, who stared right through me on the streets and ignored me at parties, he wasn’t one of them. He hated the pretension and the posturing of the gay scene as much as I did. When I relaxed, I found my way to that man in the picture. His easy charm, his honesty, even innocence. I knew at that moment he would never sunbathe in the nude.
Eventually, the waiter slipped the bill on the table between us. “Let me give this to you,” he said, pointing to the room. “We’re closing.” I swiveled in my seat. The restaurant, which had been packed when we’d arrived, was empty. Waiters were flipping chairs and sliding them on top of tables. I looked at my watch. We’d been there for hours.
Outside, Alan stood under a streetlamp that painted everything a ghastly orange. Through the liquid haze of several gimlets, he seemed on fire, the light burning through his hair and the edges of his jacket.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“Nothing.” I took in Alan, that horrid light, the street behind. I wanted to imprint it, a caramel-colored Kodachrome slide, so that, regardless of what would happen between us, I would always remember what a wonderful first date felt like.
We stood facing each other, suddenly silent and awkward. I tapped the point of his very Urban Cowboy boots with the toe of my penny loafer.
“Dimes, huh?” he said, pointing to my shoes. I suddenly felt silly, self-conscious. Then, “I had a great time.”
“Me, too.”
“I’d really like to get together again.”
Relieved, I answered, “Me, too.”
He didn’t try to kiss me, which I found endearing, and refreshing. Instead, we shook hands. As he headed up Fifth Avenue, I waited for a cab back to Brooklyn. I watched to see if he would turn around, and he did. Once, twice, three times. You could fall in love with a guy who turned around three times.
27
LOVE FOOD
Alan, I soon discovered, was a diner. He loved everything about the ceremony of the table. Whenever we were at his apartment on West Eighty-Fifth Street, he’d lay out placemats, those gold-rimmed plates from Macy’s, silverware, glasses. He slipped rolled napkins into shiny rings, like wedding bands, and lit candles and played music—Kenny G, of whom, for some reason, he was inordinately and unfortunately fond.
He especially enjoyed lingering after a meal. He’d push away from his plate, cross his legs, and fold his hands in his lap, like he was ready to be told a story. We were to talk, I came to understand. About our day, about a book one of us had read, about the news. Anything, really. Company and conversation were what was important. I figured it was something he’d picked up from his family. Not so, he told me. When he was a kid in B
altimore, dinner had been a hit-and-run. At suppertime, his stepfather rarely spoke to him. Instead he would glower across his plate at Virginia, Alan’s mother. Alan would sit in his chair, head down and silent, waiting for the first chance to slip away unnoticed.
I didn’t get this concept of lingering. My people are not lingerers. We’d sit down, platters passing in both directions, a raucousness rising from the table, even when it was just my parents and me. Ten minutes after finishing, regardless of how many of us there were, there was no evidence we’d ever shared a meal. Tables were stripped, dishes washed, food covered and put away. The women then gathered in the kitchen, getting ready for the next meal; the men sat outside on lawn chairs, waiting for the next meal; the kids played in the street, building up an appetite for the next meal. We were eaters, not diners.
Weirdly, food factored in little in Alan’s dining ritual. It wasn’t so much what he ate but how it was presented that mattered. “You can serve shit on a shingle, but as long as that shingle is bone china, no one’ll notice,” he liked to say. As if to prove his point, we were walking up Broadway past Burger King on One-Dollar Whopper Night. Not one to pass up junk food, especially if it was a bargain, he peeled off into the restaurant. At home, he pulled two burgers from the sack and set them on a plate. He arranged fries around the rim and sat down to wait for me. I foraged in the kitchen cabinet for the box of Fiber One cereal I’d stashed there, and grabbed a matching china bowl, a spoon, and a quart of skim milk. “Yes, yes,” he said, motioning for me to eat, his falsetto quavering in his best Julia Child impression. “Bon appétit!” From the satisfied smile splitting his face into two, you would have thought he was eating at Buckingham Palace. Afterward, even though the couch, Roseanne, and my laptop were calling, I lingered. For him.
But I was screwed. Losing and keeping off all that weight for those five years had required Herculean discipline. Not lingering at the table was one of the ways I prevented myself from swallowing donuts and spiral hams whole. So was pattern eating. Every morning on my way to the ad agency, I grabbed a bagel and orange juice. Lunch was a tuna-salad sandwich and a Diet Coke at my desk. Dinner consisted of either a bowl of cereal or, occasionally, pasta with low-calorie sauce. That was it, for a long time.
Restricting what I ate wasn’t just about remaining thin, but also about how it made me feel: light, like I had been carved hollow. My senses snapped into high-definition—smell and taste especially. At the most unusual times—when I was walking to the subway, or sitting in a meeting at work—a euphoria would sweep through me, carbonating my insides. Alan didn’t understand why anyone who wasn’t overweight would want to limit consumption. All of his life he had tried to gain weight: gulping shakes and wolfing down high-fat foods, candy, and carbohydrates. Yet there we were: he on one side of the table, stuffing his face with burgers; I on the other, making do with three-quarters of a cup of sticks and twigs.
He undid me, meal by meal. Not because he was a great cook; he wasn’t. His mac and cheese came in a blue box. He had an unapologetic love for Velveeta and cakes with fruit cocktail baked inside. It was his act of cooking for me, along with his steadfast desire to make me happy, that released something inside—what I imagined the slow, seductive unlacing of a corset must feel like, and I could breathe again.
Love Food, we called it. The handful of dishes we made each other that autumn, as a way of nurturing ourselves and the affection we felt but didn’t want to jinx by naming. His weekend place, a sweet ranch house in Barryville, New York, was a stone’s throw from the Delaware River. On our way up, we’d pass patchworks of orchards and stop to pick apples and buy fresh-squeezed cider, apple butter, and, if I was feeling particularly svelte, cider doughnuts.
One Saturday afternoon I woke from a nap, the angled autumn light long gone, and walked down the hall. I heard the rhythmic toc-toc-toc chopping of a knife. Something was spitting in a pan. That damned Kenny G playing on the boom box. I leaned against the kitchen doorway, watching.
“Hello, mon cher!” He said it as if he hadn’t seen me in a week, and I liked that. I walked over to him, and he gave me a kiss, a wooden spoon cocked in his hand. I wrapped my arms around him as he stood at the stove. “What are you making?”
“Pork roast with sautéed apples.” It was a recipe he’d learned a few years earlier and made every autumn. I turned my head to the side and rested it on his shoulder. The movement of his arm as he stirred the skillet lulled me, and I closed my eyes. The sweetness of the apples and the sting of the onions tamed by heat and butter wafted through the kitchen. I was hungry. Not just for dinner, but for cooking, which I had forsaken for so long. For the primitive, intimate connection it forges. For the way it says, “You matter to me.” For the naked vulnerability of hoping you’ll please another. I’m convinced the reason I recall that moment, that room—when so many others have slipped from memory—is the food. It anchored me to that spot: head on his shoulder; white walls, cabinets the color of pumpernickel; the coils of the electric stove glowing red, like giant branding irons.
My contribution of a sour-cream apple pie would be, in my estimation, a far more monumental addition to the night than a skillet supper, because it required baking, the prissy and unforgiving sister of cooking. Earlier that day, I had heaved a bag of apples onto the counter. Alan watched me from the kitchen table.
“What are you making?” he asked.
“Never mind,” I answered. “Just go—leave me alone.” I shuffled him out of the kitchen.
“Is that for me?” he said, glancing over my shoulder at the apples, his eyes lighting up. I shot him my mother’s look, the one that levels people, the one that says, Don’t mess with me, fellas! He held up his palms in surrender and headed for the living room. Moments later, Kenny G’s saxophone began worming its way into my head.
At the counter, I stared at the ingredients for the piecrust—flour, butter, and salt—giving them the same withering look, but I wasn’t able to bully them as I had Alan. I mixed everything by hand in a big country bowl, drizzling in ice water, just enough, as the recipe said, to make a ball. From the moment I wet the flour, it wanted to wrestle. “Sonofabitch!” I muttered. When the dough came together, I wrapped the clump in plastic and tossed it in the fridge for an hour. Alan poked his head into the kitchen and saw the mess I’d made.
“You can use my grandmother’s rolling pin.” He placed it on the counter and slipped backward out of the room, leaving me in my dust storm of flour and indignation. After some pounding and slapping, I managed to fit the chilled dough into a pie plate and shove the whole thing back into the fridge while I made the filling.
The apples have to be easier, I figured. And they would have been, if it hadn’t been for the paring knife: a small wooden handle with a nicked, rusty blade sticking out of it.
“It’s all I have,” he said with a shrug.
“Let me guess—your grandmother’s.”
About an hour later, two pounds of apples had been peeled, cored, and sliced. I tossed them in the egg-and-sour-cream mixture, scraped the whole mess of it into the crust, and sprinkled it with a streusel topping. While baking, the apple slices jostled together in layers, interspersed with tangy cream. What had looked like an ugly-ass strewing of crumbs had baked to a handsome pebbly topping. I slid the pie onto a rack to cool and went to take that nap.
I was ashamed to be so clumsy in the kitchen. It was more than just being out of practice. While I made the pie, anxiety had idled, low and threatening, in my rib cage. For too long, cooking had acted as an antidote to feeling miserable. It was a simple prescription: Walk into a kitchen sad and despondent, whether at the Hollises or my first apartment in Brooklyn, and walk out feeling full and better. Cooking and eating did that; it blunted the pain. Now, after all this time, I discovered I was terrified to stand at the stove. Scared I would hurtle back and become that morose and desperate version of myself, as if within the action of stirring sauces, pounding cutlets, and chopping vegetables lived an em
otional memory that, like muscle memory, I could slip back into without ever noticing. And, of course, there was the fear I’d let go and pig out back to 240 pounds.
A normal person would just have gone to the gym more. Logical and appropriate. Here’s the thing: For several years before meeting Alan, I had availed myself of the facilities at my gym—namely the steam room, sauna, and whirlpool—after a workout. And when your gym is in the middle of the West Village, New York’s gayest mecca, those amenities take on a different purpose: sex. David Lindsey and I had spent endless uncomfortable hours parsing whether this was sexual compulsion, boredom, a death wish, or a way to relieve the incessant stress of work at the agency. That last one got both our votes, although I never told him I was drawn to the gym even when I wasn’t at the office. Still, he kept hammering away at the risk/reward ratio of it all: Were a few minutes of happy slapping worth flirting with AIDS, getting bashed and bloodied by a straight guy caught in queer crossfire, or having my butt hauled off for public indecency?
After Alan and I had been together for several weeks, a famous actor who was electrifying Broadway at the time parted his towel, much like the curtain on a stage, and though I was momentarily honored to be that day’s solo audience member, I flustered out of the steam room. Driven by guilt, I confessed.
“Did anything happen?” Alan asked.
I told him the truth: “No.”
“Then there’s nothing to worry about, is there?” That was it. With that one statement he closed the issue. The graciousness with which he extended his trust was so striking, so gentlemanly, I never abused it. But that meant not stepping foot in a gym again, even in a different part of town. Gay men, even famous ones, were everywhere. And as far as exercising on my own, well, that was never going to happen.