Where Do I Start?

by Chase Taylor Hackett

  I wish I could like Toddy more and vice versa.

  So my family coped with the eldest child being a pansy, but other aspects of my life were harder for them to swallow. I loved music, which they thought was all very nice, but enough’s enough. My family has connections to Harvard that go back to its founding, which I believe is mentioned in the Old Testament, so it was blasphemous that I went to Oberlin College for four years. For music.

  I loved Oberlin. The music nerds ruled, or so it seemed to us. If there was a college outside the music department, those of us in the music department hardly knew about it. Other students, non–music majors, were only—and just barely—a step above townies. (Tommy went with me, and as an English major, he was my connection to the outside world.)

  My family tolerated my time at Oberlin, they indulged me for four years there, and they shoveled out all that money for tuition, for which I am truly grateful—and then it was time to get serious.

  They made it very clear. I had lots of options. If I didn’t want to go to Harvard Law School, that was perfectly all right. There was always Harvard Medical.

  I grumbled, I kicked and I—spelunked.

  And that’s how I got where I got.

  My dad may not understand being gay, but he’s trying. What he can’t begin to comprehend is not loving being a lawyer.

  I ended up at Goodkin Berdann & Dunkel largely because of Katrina—and against my father’s advice. GBD didn’t, and doesn’t, have the nicest reputation in town. Jeff’s firm, Parker O’Neill, is proud of their firm culture of collegiality and would probably have been a better fit for me, a firm where people are actually nice to each other. Ironically that’s where Jeff-the-barracuda ended up.

  Goodkin Berdann, by contrast, is famous for developing the killer instincts of their lawyers. But Katrina had one look at my résumé, found out I’d been concert master at Oberlin while still a junior—which was pretty unusual—and I think she’d have promised just about anything to get me at Goodkin. Of course she was a great attraction for me, too. How bloodthirsty could a law firm be, I asked myself, that was actually going to field a string quartet?

  So I landed at Goodkin Berdann & Dunkel. GBD. Even our e-mail addresses end @gbd.com. Say G-B-D to a musician, and what do we hear? A G-major chord. I thought it was a sign.

  Oops.

  But the quartet is really wonderful, and I wouldn’t trade it, even if I had some trouble making my way at the firm.

  I make jokes about not being very good at the whole lawyer thing, but it’s true. I’m aware how much better everyone around me is. I see Katrina plow through a bewildering pile of documents that represents an estate, and she knows immediately what to do with it, what the dangers are, and how best to keep the government from getting their hands on all that hardly earned money. Of course she’s got years of experience, and she’s a senior attorney, and that’s why she gets paid gazillions. But the thing I see is—she’s like my dad. She loves this whole problem-solving thing. She loves the analysis.

  Me, not so much. Truth is I just can’t care.

  I can’t say that to my father, though.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Prescott,” said Panjeet. Panjeet ran the dining room of the Harvard Club and had done so for years. He was getting a little grey now, but I always thought he was the most elegant man I had ever met.

  Now, here at Ye Olde Harvard Club, we weren’t just members; we were like royalty come to visit. We owned this place. There were members more senior than my maternal grandfather, but my grandfather had a dorm with his name on it.

  My father, who also went to Harvard and who married into this august family, considers it an almost royal obligation to use the club as often as possible. So the Paternal Lunch is always here. And it’s very close to my office.

  I greeted my father with a handshake—we don’t hug, we Prescott men—and we sat at the same table as always. We looked over the menu, and we ordered—the same thing as always.

  Turtle soup, whatever fish was fresh that day, a cheese course to follow, and to drink: Perrier. We had offices to go back to.

  You’ve heard of the puritan work ethic? My family invented it.

  “So Roger, how are you?”

  “Fine, sir.”

  “You look a little tense, if I may say so.”

  “I’ve had better weeks.”

  “Work stress?”

  “No more than usual.”

  “Well, I’m sure you’ll come through. Sometimes it’s just a matter of putting in that extra hour at the end of the day. When you’re getting ready to go, whether that’s six o’clock or nine o’clock or eleven o’clock—just sit back down and knock in another hour. I’ve found that can take a lot of pressure off the next day.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind, Dad.”

  “And who doesn’t love another billable hour? I know your firm has a reputation for being sort of—”

  “Cutthroat?”

  “I might have said competitive, but yes. Try not to let it bother you. Just do what you do, and you’ll do fine.”

  “I’ll try, sir.”

  We ate the turtle soup. I know it sounds disgusting, but it’s actually incredibly good.

  “Anything else on your mind?” he asked when the bowls were cleared and the two plates of fish had been laid down in front of us.

  “One or two little things,” I said ruefully, “but nothing you really want to hear about.”

  “Try me,” he said.

  I looked up at him. Was that really my father across the table?

  “Trouble with Jeff?”

  I practically choked on my scrod.

  “You could say that.”

  “He seemed nice enough when I met him. Sensible, good head on his shoulders, and I’ve heard good things about his future with his firm.”

  “You’ve checked up on him?” He just looked up at me for a second. Of course he had, How stupid of me.

  “Well, I hate to disappoint you again—”

  “You haven’t disappointed me yet.”

  “—but I just dumped him.”

  “Well. I’m sure you had your reasons—and whether I liked him or not couldn’t be of less importance. I hope you know that.”

  “Thanks,” I said, a little embarrassed.

  After I’d finally gotten Jeff out of the apartment, I’d gone straight to bed, exhausted.

  If you ever find yourself deep in a messy emotional quandary, as I was, caught on the horns of a dilemma, and you’re having trouble seeing your way out of a particularly difficult turmoil, I can tell you this much: Wrapping yourself up in the sheets where your turmoil has just spent the night is not terribly helpful.

  My father and I forked our fish.

  “You remember my talking about Fletch? My—um—sort of ex? Couple years ago?”

  “Ye-es,” he said, sounding uncertain. Maybe my dad wasn’t sure he remembered—I hadn’t talked about Fletch that much—or maybe he just wasn’t sure where this was going. I wasn’t either. “Is he the one—you guys lived together for a while, didn’t you?”

  “Um, yeah. We did. Well, he’s turned up recently.” Was I crazy to confide in my father? Could he possibly understand? Everything was so clean and simple for him. He would never get himself in such a mess. Mayhem and my father had never been in the same room together. He was all about bringing order out of chaos. He could never understand why I would, or how I could, let such sloppiness happen in my life.

  “So. I never met Fletch.”

  “No. He’s not really the kind of—I guess I wasn’t quite ready for that at the time.”

  “But now he’s back. And you’re thinking you might want to try again?”

  “No!” Of course I was, who was I kidding? But not seriously. Yes, Sunday morning had been fantastic, being with Fletch could be wonderful and fun.
The problem with Fletch was what he was doing when he wasn’t with me. No. I wasn’t seriously considering Fletch as a possibility.

  “But Jeff had to go anyway? Nothing to do with the other guy?”

  “Not how you’d think. When I first met Jeff, I thought he was everything I was looking for. Reliable, steady, professional.”

  “All good qualities.”

  “And everything Fletch isn’t. But since Fletch resurfaced, I see everything the way Fletch sees it. Now I see Jeff through Fletch’s eyes. Jeff’s the same guy he was, but now all I can see is how dull he is, shallow, predictable. Not an original thought in his head.”

  “And overbearing,” said my father.

  I looked up at him again.

  “Sir?”

  “I have met the guy, you know.”

  “Well, yeah, he is kind of overbearing. And a bit of a bully.”

  “Everything that Fletch isn’t.”

  “Exactly!”

  “In Fletch’s eyes.”

  “Well yeah, now I see Jeffrey like that too.”

  “It seems to me fairly significant that you care what Fletch thinks, don’t you find?”

  “I—I guess.” Did I? Care what Fletch thought, I mean? Why hadn’t this question occurred to me before, and what was the answer? And, more important, if the answer was what I thought the answer was, what did the answer mean?

  And my father thinks I should be a lawyer???

  Dad looked at me for a few seconds while my head spun, and then he did the most amazing thing.

  He laid down his fork.

  In the Harvard Club, that’s the equivalent of a cry for help. If you jumped up and down on your chair and screamed fire, people would look away embarrassed and pretend not to have noticed. Set your fork down in the middle of the entrée, and waiters came running.

  “Is there something, Mr. Prescott?” Panjeet said discreetly at his shoulder, fearing the worst.

  “Everything’s fine, Panjeet, but, when you have a moment, could you bring us two double whiskies. Ice?” he asked me.

  I shook my head quickly, not because I’m really a big fan of warm booze in a glass, but because it seemed the thing to do, and frankly I was terrified of disappointing my father, not to mention Mr. Panjeet.

  “The special?”

  My father had a private stash of some ancient Scotch hidden away in a vault here.

  “Yes, Panjeet,” he said, handing over a small key, “the special whiskey.”

  I wasn’t at all sure what was going on. This was completely new territory for me. I had never had such a conversation with my father, and I’d never had a drink with him either.

  “I can’t possibly give you advice,” my father said. “I know these emotions can be complicated. Sometimes it’s easy to know when you’re in love with somebody and sometimes not. You think you’re in love and then two weeks later you’re thinking, ‘My God she has huge teeth. I could never spend the rest of my life looking at those enormous teeth.’”

  “Sir?”

  “I believe the expression is—I am just saying.” It’s a hoot when he tries to get hip and slangy with his perfect Old Saybrook diction. Imagine Katharine Hepburn saying, “I don’t mind telling you, B, this shit is actually quite marvelously dope. Yo.”

  I could only smile.

  Mr. Panjeet was back with a tray, two glasses of the sacred stuff and a small cut-glass pitcher of water. I looked down at the glass in my hand.

  “People will tell you things,” my dad said, “like ‘follow your heart.’ It’s completely asinine of course. If you knew what your heart really wanted, there would be no problem. It’s when you don’t know that gets you in so much trouble. And sometimes your heart wants two quite incompatible things at once, this one and that one. And it’s not always easy to sort out if you’re following your heart or your hormones.”

  I suspect my mouth was hanging open. If not, it should have been. If my grandmother had been dancing on the bar with a lampshade on her head, I wouldn’t have been more astounded. My father was telling me that he understood and perhaps had even experienced emotional confusion? My father???

  My father had hormones???

  “In any case,” he said and picked up his glass, “welcome to adulthood.”

  I picked up my glass—to which I’d added some water.

  “My uncle George used to make a toast about moving from the infantry into the adultery. Or something like that.” He took a swallow.

  I sipped and tried hard not to choke on it. I had just been welcomed to adulthood. I didn’t want to spit up ridiculously expensive hooch like a fifteen-year-old, even if it tasted like charred lawnmower clippings and it burnt like hell going down.

  “It gets easier, the older you get,” he said. After a few seconds he added, “I mean the Scotch. The rest of it is still hella confounding and utterly—what is it?—mad whack.”

  He looked pretty chuffed with himself too.

  Chapter 36

  Westward, Ho!

  Fletch

  Sooner or later he’d call, right? He’d call when he was ready.

  I kinda had the idea he was going to give Jeff the boot that day, the morning after the emergency room, but maybe he hadn’t. Maybe he was giving the numb-nuts one more try. Roger needs to think about things. It was clearly inevitable, a total sooner-or-later thing, but Roger needed to be sure. And fair. That was just how he was. Or maybe he’d dumped the moron, and he just wanted a certain amount of time before he was ready to deal with me. I could understand that. He needed time, and I needed to be patient. Right?

  But it had already been like a week and a half!!!

  You see, the trouble was patience was never really my thing. I’ve always been more of a doer, you know what I mean? Act on impulse and think about it later, if ever. The opposite of Roger, which was why we were so good for each other, although I’m sure he would never admit that. The whole yin–yang thing. I challenged him to relax a bit, and I gave him a little more spontaneity. And he lent me a certain degree of circumspection. One of a billion words I’d learned from him.

  But the yin–yang thing isn’t always very comfortable, which is why he’d say I drive him buggy sometimes. And why this waiting while he thought about things was driving me buggy.

  Patience.

  In the meantime, with an evening off from my usual post in the mezzanine of the Gershwin Theatre, I thought I’d distract myself and kill some time with Marco. His family had carved out this fairly hip apartment for him from the old family house when his two older brothers moved out. It’s always nice to hang with Marco, and it would help me avoid sitting around the apartment staring at the walls, talking to Tybalt and thinking about a cute violin player. And of course there I was, still thinking about the violin player.

  We were sitting on Marco’s bed, backs against the headboard, watching TV. Just like old times.

  “So,” he said after a bit. “You want to fool around?”

  “What?” I said. “No.” Yeah, that was like old times too—except for the no. That was new.

  “C’mon,” he said and put his hand on my thigh. “We haven’t messed around in fuckin’ forever.”

  “True, and we’re not going to today either.”

  We watched TV. It was one of those stupid dance competition shows, and it mostly just reminded me of Jeff.

  Maybe I should set myself a deadline. If I haven’t heard from Roger by the end of the week or whatever. And then what? Call him? Say, “Roger, I have to see you”?

  Then he’d ask why, and I’d have to explain, and explanations would kill the whole thing.

  Forget about calling him.

  “So tell me what happened to your hand,” Marco said at the commercial.

  “Long-ish story, but Roger came out to my apartment in Brooklyn.”

 
“Seriously? That’s a good sign.”

  “I thought so too. But I hadn’t mentioned I was cat sitting, and he brought his dog with him.”

  “He brought his dog?”

  “He doesn’t like Brooklyn. Makes him nervous.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No. As Tommy described it, ‘he doesn’t do boroughs.’”

  “Ha! Tommy—I haven’t thought about him in ages. So Roger brought his dog…”

  “And the cat took umbrage.”

  “Umbrage?”

  “Umbrage.”

  “Funny name for a dog.”

  “There was a big fight, and I had to break them up.”

  “A cat did that?”

  “A cat did this,” and I showed him the pretty scab that ran down the inside of my right forearm, “while I was carrying him out of the room—one good swipe with his hind foot. It was the dog who did this,” and I held up the left hand in its bandage.

  “So you got bit saving Roger’s dog? Did he throw himself in your arms and say, ‘My hero!’?”

  “Next best thing. He took me to the emergency room, and then he took me back to his apartment because I was sort of out of my mind on the anesthetic.”

  “Really? I woulda kinda liked to have been there for that, son.”

  “You missed it, your one chance to see me fucked up.”

  “So you spent the night with Roger finally?”

  “Nothing happened. He slept on the couch, I think. I was in la-la-land.”

  “But he let you stay.”

  “Yep.”

  “That’s a good sign.”

  “I thought so too. And we spent a good part of Sunday together, which was really nice, and we didn’t fight.”

  “Also good.”

  “I thought so too.”

  A commercial on TV.

  I should give Roger another week. And then just show up at his apartment. And tell him everything.