Looking panicked, Kimberly shouted, “Nothing!” to Iris, who practically leapt out of her chair to see about what Buck was talking.
“Damn it, Kimberly!” Iris said. Then, after pushing Buck out of the way and looking out for only a split second, she spun around. “What did you do?!”
“Nothing!” Kimberly jumped up, waving her arms for everyone to get out of her way, then pushed her eye to the break in the curtains. And gasped. (See, I’m not the only one.) As she spun around to face us, I could see her reviewing the previous night’s events in her head. “I swear. J.J. picked me up, we went to dinner, he gave me a bottle of perfume, I smiled, I nodded, I waved, I did nothing that anyone could take offense to. I swear, Mom!”
As the only member of the family who had not seen whatever it was outside the window that was creating all of this commotion, I slipped over to take a look.
Holy shit. It was by far the largest congregation of people that had ever been there, blocking the street (which explained the cabs honking—more than usual, I mean), and basically creating an absolute logjam outside and a sickening feeling of dread inside. Why, this of all days, had I slept in, and hearing the others stirring, rushed downstairs to make breakfast without first checking my phone for warning texts from Duane?
As I turned around, it was as if we all got the idea at the same time. Our eyes simultaneously went to where Buck’s laptop lay under the coffee table. But before any of us could make a single move towards it, we were startled by a loud pounding on the front door. KNOCK-KNOCK-KNOCK!
Everyone froze.
And then everyone else’s eyes moved to me. “You get it,” Iris said, her tone filled with more pleading than authority. I nodded. I tried to take deep breaths to calm myself as I walked determinedly to the front door. Was it J.J.? A reporter who was ignoring the protocol of waiting for someone to exit? An assassin who would blessedly put me out of my misery?
No, it was Duane. “I sure as hell hope I’m designing the dress,” he said as he pushed his way into the house, the mass of reporters surging up behind him. Just before slamming the door on them, he stuck out a hand with his middle finger raised, yelling, “Ya’ll stepped on my clean shoes!”
Once safely inside with the door closed, he brushed off his clothes, more for dramatic effect than necessity, and raised an eyebrow as he looked at me with a dubious expression. “Well, aren’t you quite the secret keeper?”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, my eyes darting towards the door to the living room, hopefully communicating to him that curious ears were not far away.
“Don’t play dumb with me,” Duane said. “It ain’t cute.” As he said it, he pulled out from his armpit a copy of the New York Times, unfolding it to show me the front page. “WHEN WILL HE PROPOSE?!” was the caption beneath a photo of J.J. and me underneath the Bridal Registry sign in Macy’s.
Maybe it was just the shock making me thickheaded, but at that moment all I felt was panic that J.J. and I had been photographed together without our knowing it, and someone had figured out that we were a couple, and now the entire world knew, and—
“I think I’m going to throw up,” I said, turning and running for the downstairs bathroom. Even in my rush for the toilet bowl, I had the presence of mind to lock the door behind me, I guess my subconscious will to live knowing that once Kimberly and Iris found out the truth, a locked door would lengthen, by at least a few more seconds, my life.
I leaned over the toilet, trying to catch my breath, waiting for the nausea in my stomach to do whatever it was going to do, even though I, luckily, had not had time to finish making, let alone eat breakfast before the buzz from outside drew our attention. My entire body burned flush and I broke out in a sweat as I finally fully realized exactly to what my actions had led. Every minute of loving J.J. had felt like a fantasy, and now reality had come to collect.
That’s when I heard Kimberly and Iris begin to scream. Which is also when the burning I’d been feeling over my entire body instantly turned to ice. I can’t quite explain it, but almost without thinking, I reached out and turned the doorknob, determined to face them on my own terms, not to have them find me cowering in the corner of a hallway bathroom. It was like ripping a Band-Aid off; I just wanted to get the unavoidable over with. Each step through the hallway felt like walking through quicksand, but somehow that made me try to make it happen faster, so before I’d even thought of a single thing to say by way of explanation, I was standing in the doorway to the living room, and Kimberly and Iris were looking up from the newspaper and directly at me.
“How could you not tell us?” they screamed in unison.
But here’s the weird part. They were smiling.
Huh? Then I realized I hadn’t said it out loud.
“Huh?”
“I can’t believe this!” Kimberly said, jumping up and down, and then bouncing over to me and throwing her arms around me. “I’m so, so, so, so HAPPY!”
Suddenly Iris was feigning a swoon onto the couch, Buck getting out of her way just in time. “Oh my god, what a relief,” Iris said.
“You tricky little bastard,” Buck said.
All I could think was that this wasn’t really happening.
But it really was.
Just not in the way I thought.
Because that’s when Duane crossed his arms and said, “So when is he going to propose to her?”
“Who?” I asked, my mind obviously overwhelmed and not processing at top speed.
“Very funny,” Duane said. “If they time it right, the wedding dress could be my final project next semester.”
Kimberly let out another high-pitched scream as she looked down once more at the front-page photograph in her hands.
This time when a KNOCK-KNOCK-KNOCK came from the front door, I was the only one left in the living room, because everyone else ran out to see who it was.
Almost numb with shock and confusion, I sat heavily on the edge of the couch as I rubbed my temples. I heard a whispered argument between the others still at the front door, quickly followed by Iris, Buck, and Duane rushing on tip toe back into the living room, throwing themselves into seated positions, Iris in her chair, Buck on the couch, and Duane also on the couch between Buck and me. All three attempted attitudes of casual lethargy, as if they hadn’t stood up in hours. For Duane, this included casually draping his hand over Buck’s thigh. I reached over and slapped it away.
“Bitch,” Duane said.
Then we all listened. The door opened. The roar of noise from outside swelled, then quickly mellowed as the door shut. “Hi, J.J.” Kimberly said.
“Good morning,” J.J. responded. “Sorry about all that,” he added, meaning, we all knew, the circus in front of the house.
“It’s okay,” Kimberly said.
“Where is everybody?”
“In there.” And then they both appeared in the doorway. J.J. looked almost as nonplussed as I felt (and no doubt looked).
His eyes momentarily went to me before he smiled at Iris. “Good morning.”
“So lovely to see you, J.J.” she said. “How’s your mother?”
“She’s … fine. She sends her regards.”
“Have you seen the paper?” Buck said, thrusting it at J.J. with his usual aplomb.
“Buck!” Kimberly and Iris said.
“Jeez, you two, like he hasn’t seen it,” Buck said. “I say let no elephant in the room be ignored.”
J.J. gestured for Buck to keep the paper. “Yes, in fact, I did see it.” He turned to Kimberly, “I’d asked Chris to help me pick out that gift I gave you last night, and evidently we walked by the Bridal Registry sign. It’s crazy what the media will make up, isn’t it?”
Her cheek twitched slightly as she struggled to hide her disappointment.
Iris, however, was not as successful. A low sort of moan briefly escaped her throat, before she covered it by pretending to be racked by a coughing fit.
“I’ll run get some water,” I sai
d, jumping from my place on the couch and heading for the door. Even before I’d left the room, Kimberly slumped into the place on the sofa I’d just evacuated.
I looked behind me several times as I headed down the hallway to the kitchen, hoping that somehow J.J. would make some excuse to follow me, as he had done in the past, but to no avail. Even taking as much time in the kitchen as I could reasonably manage didn’t help. Reentering the living room, I could see that everyone was pretending to feel differently than they did. As J.J. pretended his spring term classes were all he wanted to talk about, and Iris, Kimberly, and Duane pretended they were interested and not extremely disappointed that there did not appear to be a wedding on the horizon, and Buck pretended he wasn’t wondering what was playing on ESPN at the moment, I pretended that I wasn’t the textbook definition of miserable.
As confused as I was by everything that was transpiring, one thing was becoming very clear: I couldn’t take much more of this. Something was going to have to change.
It was over a week before I could talk to J.J. alone. Part of me felt like he was purposefully making sure that there was always someone around specifically so that we couldn’t talk, but it’s possible that I was being paranoid. I was in a rather emotional state after all.
And there seemed to be no escaping it. Whereas the atmosphere at home had been so much better ever since Kimberly had met J.J. at the Autumnal Ball, ever since the gossip had started about a possible proposal, now that it was out there, there was the smell of possible failure thick in the air.
Things weren’t much better at school. Some of that was simply my own distraction and worry, but my classmates weren’t much help if school was where I was hoping to forget what was going on in the rest of my world. Besides the constant looks and inquiries about my sister and J.J., even Vibol wouldn’t let me escape. The first thing he’d said to me upon our return from winter break was, “If what the papers said was true, I want a Kennerly letter of recommendation for medical school.”
“You haven’t even received your acceptance letters for undergrad.”
“But those applications are finished. I’m just thinking ahead. You always say I’m the most prepared person you know.”
“I think obsessive is the word I used.”
He shrugged. “I’d do it for you.”
There he had me, because for all of the competition between us, Vibol always wanted an even playing field.
“Honestly, I don’t know anything more than you do. But should it happen, I’ll see what I can do.”
He held up a fist for a bump, which I hesitantly gave him.
The worst of it, of course, was my inability to turn on a TV or go onto the internet without seeing constant speculation as to when J.J. would propose. That one silly, inaccurate picture had taken on a life of its own, and one evening I stared unbelievingly at the surrealistic argument on a news program—a NEWS program, not even an entertainment or gossip one—where one talking head spouted statistics on divorces for people who married too young, the next one applauded J.J. and Kimberly’s clear endorsement of traditional family values by avoiding temptation out of wedlock (how that person knew they hadn’t already had sex, I’d definitely like to know), and a third one criticized J.J. for clearly pandering to the radical right in an attempt to begin building a centrist reputation for his future political campaigns.
To say that I wasn’t sleeping well during all of this would be putting it mildly. Most nights I’d fall asleep at a decent hour, exhausted by the thick tension in my head, but by four or four thirty in the morning I’d wake up from a dead sleep on the verge of a panic attack. It was like that feeling when you realize you almost got knocked off the platform and into an oncoming train. Or like the feeling when you see a picture of you and your sister’s boyfriend on the cover of the New York Times, and you think the world has discovered that you’re lovers. But at four in the morning. And waking from a dead sleep.
While I could definitely say tiredness may have affected my mood when I finally managed to get some time alone with J.J., I can’t really blame lack of sleep for how our conversation ended. The weight of our secret had been building up. For a while, the absolute joy of having met a guy who made me realize that I wasn’t a freak, a deviant, an abomination, that I was as worthy of love as any other human being on the planet, had been enough to make me ignore my doubts and the inexcusableness of how we were misleading Kimberly and everyone else. The first time I kissed J.J., the first time we held each other, the first time we made love, each time was a confirmation that reverberated like a gong echoing through a never-ending cave that, for me, this was the only thing that was natural. Anything else would be a lie, an obscenity, a sin, despite what anyone of a different orientation tried to make me, or anyone else, believe. They were wrong. For me and millions of people like me, this was right.
Standing in front of the man who had made me feel okay about who I was, possibly for the first time in my life, certainly since beginning to realize that I was gay, and having to explain to him how being happy with him was making me miserable was easily the hardest thing I’d ever had to do in my life.
“But what does that mean?” J.J. asked.
Surrounded by the canned and dry goods in the kitchen pantry, where we’d hidden ourselves in our best attempt to make sure we weren’t overheard, I shrugged. “It means that I can’t keep doing this to Kimberly. I can’t take the worrying about being caught by her or by some stupid person with a camera phone.”
“That asshole.”
“J.J., when I first saw that newspaper and thought that we had been discovered, I felt more fear and self-hate than I ever thought possible.”
“Self-hate?”
“Because we’ve been lying to her, of course, but also … I don’t know. There’s something about hiding the way we feel that almost lets them win.”
“Win? Who?”
“The people who would say we’re wrong.”
“But they’re the people I probably wouldn’t be able to influence if … I told the truth about myself. About us.”
“That pisses me off, trust me, but it also pisses me off that I’m at least somewhat out, at least to my family, and yet I can’t even let them know I’m in love.”
J.J. smoothed down the loose label on a can of sweet peas. “I warned you about this from the start.”
“I know, I know, you think you can do more for the cause of gay rights if they think you’re straight. But, J.J., you’re not. And I don’t know how long you think you can keep that from tearing you up inside.”
He looked at me with such pain that it was almost as if he were considering me the source of it. “You don’t think this tears me up?”
“But then—”
“I don’t know if someone who wasn’t raised the way I was can understand this, but I was brought up to believe that with privilege comes responsibility, and sometimes that means sacrificing yourself in order to make other people’s lives better.”
“Yeah, I think it’s called being a martyr.”
“That’s not fair.”
I looked down at my hands. “Sorry. You’re right. But how can you hope to do any good in the world if you’re not at least a little bit happy?”
He leaned his back against the shelf, tilting his head up towards the light overhead, and I saw the bright glint of tears begin to sparkle in his eyes. “Do you really think most people in the world are happy? Do you think people who spend their lives trying to hurt other people, trying to tell other people they are bad, or evil, bound to go to hell, do you think those people are happy? No one who is happy makes it their life’s work to make other people miserable.”
“And you think the way to fight that is with your own misery?”
He sighed, long and deep, but almost silently. “What do you want me to do, Chris? You know that I love you. You have to know that. But you can’t ask me to give up everything I’ve ever wanted my life to be just because of it. I realize this takes balls to s
ay after how selfishly I’ve acted with your sister, but I just feel that putting myself before the good I know I can do would be more selfish than I can live with.”
“But you can live with this?”
“Is it that awful?”
I nodded. “For me, it has gotten that bad.”
He looked at me long and hard before swallowing, and in a voice, barely above a whisper said, “Worse than being apart?”
Up until that point, I thought I’d done a pretty good job of controlling my emotions. And even though some part of me had known that one of the possible outcomes of my ultimatum was what he had just said, hearing the words come from the lips which I so loved kissing was a shock, and suddenly tears began to course down my cheeks. “Aren’t all miseries basically the same?” I asked.
“Why do we have to decide this now?” J.J. asked. “Maybe with a little more time Kimberly will realize I’m not everything she hoped I would be, and she’ll want to break things off.”
If I hadn’t been feeling so miserably, I think I might have laughed at that idea. I wasn’t sure if it showed more of his cluelessness on the state of my family’s finances or what effect he had on people, especially single women, but either way, I could only shake my head in dismissal of the idea.
“Besides,” he said, slight hope being renewed by a new tactic, “do you realize what your life would be like if we did come out to the world?”
“Yeah, I’d be more hated than …” I grasped for the right example.
“Yoko Ono.”
“Who?”
“Yoko Ono. The woman people blamed for breaking up the Beatles. But it really wasn’t her fault. She’s actually very nice.”
“You know her?”
He shrugged. “She’s friends with my parents.”
“Well, I was going to say more hated than Hitler.”
“Oh, much better,” J.J. said, almost sounding lighter. “But do you see why maybe we should just let things rest for a little while longer?”
“But it’s never going to change, J.J. And I can’t keep living like this.”
My Fairy Godmother is a Drag Queen Page 19