He dropped my arm, but as I went to move away, he pulled me against him, his cheek against mine. “You’re fucked up, but I like you anyway,” he murmured in my ear.
I put my head on his shoulder, and for the first time in fifteen years, I started to cry.
“I SO fucking can’t believe you’re making me do this,” I said.
“Shut up and pick one out.”
“I don’t want a fucking stuffed animal, you idiot! I am not a girl!”
We were at Water Tower Place, or as I liked to call it, the Seventh Level of Hell, in, of all places, FAO Schwartz. To describe the place as a zoo would be to impugn the natural civility and dignity of wild animals. Psychotic little demons scampered everywhere, their brain-dead keepers wandering around with the thousand-mile stare of the zombie. The noise level was deafening, and while I would normally tend to temper my language around children, A, no one could hear me anyway, and B, there were no children here. Only demons.
“You need a stuffed animal,” Jerry said.
“Fine,” I said, and picked up a Beanie Baby cat and handed it to him.
“No, no,” he said, and put it back. “A big animal. Something you can grab hold of. Something you can sleep with when I’m not there.”
“You,” I replied, “are insane.”
He grinned. “And who’s standing right next to me?”
“I am not paying a hundred bucks for a stupid stuffed animal. Jesus, Jer!”
“I’m not saying it has to cost a hundred bucks. Just pick something substantial.”
“Why are we doing this again?”
“It’s therapy. Trust me.”
I glared at him, but I did—trust him, I mean. He’d said when he’d dragged me here that he had A Plan; I hoped it wasn’t a plan to get me to like Christmas, because hauling me into FAO Schwartz the Saturday before Christmas was not the way to do it. But he’d been so patient when I’d had my meltdown that I sort of felt I owed him.
What the fuck. What I really mean was that I wasn’t quite ready to let go of him, and as long as he wanted to hang around me, I’d do pretty much anything to keep him there. So I stood in the middle of the place no sane person wants to be and looked around the stuffed animal section, ignoring the screaming and crying and hollering and Christmas Muzak, and tried to be Zen and find my inner child, or some shit like that. Jerry hadn’t been that specific; he’d just said I needed to find a stuffed animal that “spoke” to me.
On my second turn around the department, I saw it: a four-foot-tall mountain gorilla with an amazingly realistic face and Jerry’s eyes. Seriously. Dark chocolate and solemn, like Jerry’s when he was working, and way too human-looking. The thing was ugly as hell, but those eyes were haunting. I walked toward it and ran my fingers through the thick black pelt.
“That is ugly,” Jerry commented. “Why’d you pick that one?”
“Reminds me of you,” I said absently; then, as soon as I realized what I’d said, I shot him a shit-ass grin.
He laughed and picked up the price tag. “Expensive tastes,” he said, and showed it to me. Seven hundred bucks. Ouch.
“People actually pay that kind of money for stuff like this?” he asked in amazement.
“You would be surprised what people pay money for,” I said dryly. “Okay, so this is the one I want, but I am not paying half a month’s rent for it. So now what?”
“Well,” Jerry said, “I guess it sort of makes sense.”
“What does?”
“Why you picked it. Come on, let’s get out of here. These people are starting to scare me.”
“Told you,” I said, and led the way out of the store, with a last glance at the gorilla. I don’t know why it appealed to me, but it did: I really wanted that damned stuffed animal.
WE FOUND a coffee shop on one of the lower levels that wasn’t too busy and ordered sandwiches and drinks. “Okay,” I said when we’d both been settled, “what’s the deal with the animals and stuff?”
“Well, let me tell you a story first. True story—happened to my older brother. He blew his knee out playing basketball when he was in high school. Tore all the ligaments. But being just a kid, he healed up pretty well and never had any problem with it once it was better. Went on about his life.
“Then, in his late twenties, he started having back problems. I mean, major back problems. Some days he could barely walk. Had all kinds of tests—CTs, X-rays, MRIs, even blood tests to see if it was some kind of autoimmune disorder. Nothing. They couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Finally in desperation, he went to see a chiropractor. He sat there and described the symptoms, and the guy listened quietly, then when he was done asked, ‘So when did you hurt your knee?’ Ray’s jaw just about hit the floor. He hadn’t said anything about his knee being hurt, but the chiropractor knew it. He told Ray he’d been subconsciously favoring his leg for all those years, and it threw his back out of whack. He did some treatments to reduce the pain, then sent him to a physical therapist to teach him how to walk all over again. Ray hasn’t had a problem since. But my point is that if he’d known back when he went wrong, after his leg healed all those years ago, he wouldn’t have gotten to the point where he needed to start over again.” Jerry grinned. “I was so impressed I decided to become a physical therapist.”
“Okay. So that’s your backstory,” I said. “But what does that have to do with stuffed animals?”
“It’s not about being my backstory,” he said. “It’s to illustrate that people have to sometimes go backwards before they can go forwards. Sometimes you have to go back to where you went wrong and start over again.”
I thought about it, then said, “I’m gonna put it in terms I can understand so I make sure I’m getting my facts straight. So. It’s sort of like when I’m writing a story, and I bog down, and I have to go back maybe a few paragraphs, maybe a few pages, and cut everything I’d written after that, and go in a different direction to get the story told.”
“Sounds about right. Now, in regards to your meltdown this afternoon.”
I cupped my hands around my coffee, bracing myself. I wasn’t quite sure what for.
“It seems to me that you got sort of twisted just about the time you came out. What kind of relationship did you have with your parents before that?”
“Good. Really good. I mean, yeah, I had bouts of teenager-ness, but in general, I never doubted they loved me. Which was why it was such a shock when they shut me down afterwards.” I shook my head. “Jesus, listen to me whine. I have no room to complain, not when other guys have to deal with all kinds of crap when they come out—getting beat up, or kicked out of their house, or shit like that.” I shook my head again, harder, as if to dislodge the wad of self-pity in my brain. “This is so pointless.”
“It’s not pointless. Everyone’s experience is different, but really, in the end, you’re the one who has to deal with it, and it matters to you. Because it’s yours.” He reached across the table and closed his fingers around my wrist. “You felt betrayed by your parents, and so you shut them out just as thoroughly as you thought they’d shut you out. And they saw how you’d changed, and were probably as scared and hurt as you were, and just as incapable of dealing with it. I mean, think of it—they probably thought of you one way, and out of the blue you announced you weren’t the person they thought you were, and you were their kid, and they thought they knew you. And not only did they have to deal with this very big thing, but they were probably guilting themselves all over the place that they hadn’t figured it out, because surely if they were good parents, they’d have known, wouldn’t they?”
“Sounds like you know from experience,” I said to my coffee cup.
“Oh, hell, yeah,” he said. “It’s what happened with mine. The difference was, my parents got their heads out of their asses before I did and smacked me upside the head and said, ‘Why didn’t you tell us before?’ That was the sum total of their recriminations, and then it was done, and little Jerry Abruzzi was just li
ttle Jerry Abruzzi again. And considering the macho bullshit that goes on in most Italian families, I’m damn lucky I’m the third son and the baby.” He grinned. “Being the baby got me out of a lot of trouble when I was a kid. Worked then too.
“Okay. So one of the things we have to study in the PT program is psychology, because a lot of time repeated injuries are not only a matter of physical problems, but of emotional or mental issues as well. We need to recognize it and maybe get the person to think about getting additional help. Like my brother—there was no physical reason for him to favor his leg, since it had healed perfectly well, but he subconsciously still needed to compensate.”
“So you’re saying I threw my knee out again because I hate Christmas?”
He laughed and drew my hand up to his lips, kissing the knuckles. “No. But over the years I’ve gotten pretty good at reading people. And I know that even though you come across as cool and cynical and on top of things, you’re not really that way at all.”
A chill arced down my spine, but I said, coolly and cynically, “I suppose I’m a big fluffy wuss of a puppy or something inside?”
“Hardly.” He released my hand and sat back, his face unreadable. The change from the grinning, affectionate Jerry of a moment ago sent that chill arcing again. “What I’m gonna say might just piss you off, so let me tell you now that I’m not being judgmental or critical, and that I’ve loved spending time with you, and would really like to keep seeing you because whether or not you do relationships, I really feel like we’ve got something here, and I’m probably hanging myself out to dry, but I want to keep seeing you.”
I wanted to say “I want that too,” but my voice wasn’t working right then. I took a bite of sandwich, but it might as well have been paper.
“You’re running.”
Two words. Simple. Not complex, not complicated, not harsh or pejorative. So the fact that they hit me with the force of a one-two punch made the pain seem all the more vicious. I caught my breath, nearly choking on the tasteless bite of sandwich, then swallowed. I was shaking, my skin went chilled and damp, and I felt the damn stupid tears pushing on the back of my eyeballs.
He went on, quiet, gentle, inexorable. “The stuffed animal you picked represented one that was big and strong, as if it could defend you—or defend itself against you. You only ever bottom, because that way you don’t have to be the one to take responsibility for another person’s pleasure or pain—not because you’re selfish, but because you don’t trust yourself. You picked a career where you didn’t have to stay in one spot or put down roots because you’re afraid that if someone gets to know you, they’ll realize how worthless you are. And you only do hookups for the same reason. You’re running from the failure of your relationship with your parents, the only people in the world who could be expected to love you unconditionally, and you’re doing it because you think it means that you aren’t worth being loved. And you’re running because you’re afraid to find out that it’s true.”
I was underwater, choking, unable to get a breath and blinded by tears. I put my hands over my ears to block him out, but he reached over the little round table and pulled them away.
“You’re wrong.”
Two words. Simple. I looked at the honey-gold fingers around my wrists, still blurry through the tears, then up at the solemn, sad, chocolate gorilla eyes of my lover. “Because I kind of love you,” he said quietly.
I swallowed, but my voice still wasn’t working, so I shook my head, not in denial, not in negation, but in confusion. I didn’t do this. I didn’t do relationships, and I sure as shit didn’t do love. Yeah, I had been in love with Zach, but that was…. I swallowed again as I realized that what it had been was safe. There hadn’t been any risk involved with being in love with Zach, because he had David, and there was no danger of him actually expecting anything back from me. It was okay to be in love with Zach, because I knew he’d never love me back, and that was okay.
But this… this was Jerry. And if I was honest with myself, I was already halfway in love with him, and if he was in love with me, then things would get messy and people would get hurt—I would get hurt. I started to push away from the table, but his hands tightened on my wrists, and he said in his physical therapist voice, “Sit down, Bri. We aren’t finished.”
I sat back down with a thump.
Now, look, I’m not a wuss. I don’t take orders; that’s one of the reasons that I do what I do, and even though I’m not writing anymore, but teaching, I’m still not so good at following orders. I’ve always been good at making my own way. I don’t need to be told what to do, either in bed or out of it. But right then, right there, sitting there because Jerry had told me to, I felt safe, like it was something I did because I wanted to. And I did want to.
It was terrifying. It was wonderful.
“Stop running,” he said, still in that quiet voice. “That’s our first step, okay?”
I nodded dumbly.
“God, you’re hurting, and I can’t stand to see you hurting.” A new note had slipped into his quiet voice, as if my pain were contagious. “And the only thing I can think of to make you stop hurting might actually make it worse.”
“What?” I sounded like an old man, creaky and weathered.
“To go back to the beginning. Where it went wrong.” He let go of my arms, his fingers dragging slowly over my skin as he did.
“With my parents, you mean,” I said.
“Yeah.” He cocked his head. “What do you think you should do to start?”
“I don’t know. Talk to them? I don’t want to talk to them on the phone. I can’t tell what they’re thinking.” I was shaking, and it took me a minute to realize that it was fear.
“Probably better face-to-face,” he agreed neutrally.
I tried for a grin; I think I managed a twist of the lips. “Be hard to get airline tickets this close to Christmas.”
He nodded. “Maybe a webcam—does anyone in your family have that? Maybe we could set up a call?”
“My brother has Skype. He still lives at home. I get e-mails from him sometimes. I think I have his address.”
“Okay. When do you want to do this? Do you want to do this?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Yes. Soon.” I rubbed my forehead; I was getting a headache. “I want to go home now.”
“Okay,” he said again; then, softly, “Can I come with you?”
Another, different note in his voice; I looked up to see his eyes shining at me, something resembling hope in them. “Please,” I said.
I DIDN’T know what I expected when I closed the door to my apartment and watched Jerry shed his jacket, laying it over a chair along with the silly purple scarf. But I can pretty much guaran-damn-tee that it wasn’t the surge of happiness that flooded my chest, pushing out the fear and misery that had been eating at me just a little while before. Maybe it was the way he already looked like he belonged there; maybe it was the way he looked at me, not as if I were the be-all and end-all of his existence, which was how I’d always thought people in love looked at each other, but with the same sort of contentment and acceptance that I was feeling. It wasn’t that he was so wonderful. It was that he was home.
Making love is completely different from having sex. There wasn’t any of the fuss about who was going to fuck who; we didn’t even fuck, not like that. The exploration of last night had been about learning each other’s bodies; that of this afternoon was all about learning each other. What we liked, what we didn’t, what turned us on, and what drove us insane. We took our time. When we both came, his hand wrapped around both our cocks and mine buried in his crazy dark curls, it was slow and lazy and overwhelming, and it felt so good I didn’t ever want to come out of it again.
We eventually got up and went out, first to Jerry’s apartment, not too far from where we had decided to have dinner. Jerry needed the stop to change clothes, since he’d been wearing the same ones since yesterday afternoon. His apartment was like him, warm and com
plex and full of stuff that made it look lived-in: photographs of family on the walls, furniture that didn’t match but that went together, throw pillows on the couch (“You are gay,” I said to him. “Straight guys don’t have throw pillows.” “Well, duh,” he said back) and kids’ drawings magnetized to the fridge. He had a little Charlie Brown tree on a table in a corner and some other Christmas decorations around, but not to excess, and they went okay with the warm, lived-in look of the place. I wandered back into the kitchen.
“My nieces and nephews are prolific artists,” he said, coming back into the room in fresh jeans and a sweatshirt and seeing me studying the stuff on the fridge.
His sweatshirt had the logo of New York’s Museum of Modern Art on it; I glanced up from inspection of a tempera painting of what might have been a horse, noted the sweatshirt absently, and then my attention was caught by a painting, a New York street scene, hanging on the wall behind him in the sort of dining nook off the kitchen. The scene was familiar, but more than that, the style was familiar, tickling my brain, and I stared at it a long moment, trying to place it. The art and the sweatshirt logo. Somehow they were connected….
“Oh, shit,” Jerry said. He sounded sick.
I looked back at him, then back at the painting. “I’ve seen something like that before,” I said. “Where?”
He glanced down at his sweatshirt, then up, his eyes bleak. “God, I am so stupid. It never even occurred to me. Yeah, you probably have, if you went to any of David Evans’s gallery shows.”
David Evans. Zach’s lover. The artist, who interned at MoMA, in New York, where Jerry was from.
I don’t know how much fucking drama I can take, but it must be a hella lot. I looked at him, then said numbly, “You’re Davey’s ex. The guy he dumped to go back to Zach.”
“He didn’t dump me,” Jerry said. “We broke up before he even went back to Colorado.”
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