Jay hesitated, his hand on the door handle. A sudden feeling came over him—a feeling he would be making a huge mistake if he got out of that car. He looked at Wallace and desperately wanted to kiss him on those full lips, to see if they were as soft and warm as they appeared.
It’s impossible. You know that. Don’t lead him on, and don’t betray Doug.
“Nice to meet you too,” he responded, struggling to make his smile appear casual. “I hope I’ll see you again sometime.”
“Me too.”
“Thanks for the ride.” He got out of the car and closed the door. Then he watched as Wallace drove away.
Interlude
2000
WALLACE WAS pretty loopy on Valium by the time the doctor pried his eye open with a speculum. Otherwise he would have been screaming—if not from pain, at least from A Clockwork Orange flashbacks. Fortunately the nurse had given him some eye drops to numb everything, and they weren’t playing Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” over the PA.
“This will be a little uncomfortable,” Doctor Manning said, in one of the great understatements of Wallace’s life, as he adjusted the contraption that immobilized Wallace’s head. “But it will all be over soon.”
Was that supposed to be reassuring?
“We’re just going to immobilize your eye now.” The doctor slid a ring into place, and Wallace was happy to note he couldn’t feel anything when it touched his cornea. “I need you to look at that red dot.”
A small red dot appeared on the partition in front of him. It was extremely blurry, so it was difficult to focus on, but Wallace tried to keep it in the center of his field of vision.
“Stay very still.”
Something slid in front of his eye, then slid away. A moment later he heard something clicking. The clicking persisted as Doctor Manning manipulated the laser.
At one point Wallace smelled something unpleasant and remarked, “I think I can smell my eye burning.”
“Don’t talk. You need to stay as still as possible.”
THE DOCTOR brought Wallace out to the waiting room, his eyes protected by dark glasses. Adrastia had been waiting for him, and she stood to greet him and take his arm.
“Did they give you your eyes in a box so we can put them on the mantel?”
Adrastia was many things, but motherly was not one of them.
“Keep the glasses on for the rest of the day,” Doctor Manning admonished. “And don’t scratch. You should be able to use your eyes normally by tomorrow.”
“Thanks,” Wallace said.
He’d follow the doctor’s advice to the letter. He’d paid too much for the Lasik to fuck it up at this stage. But it was going to be excruciating to wait until tomorrow to finally see the world through his eyes directly, without the horrible thick glasses he’d worn since he was a boy.
And though he was embarrassed to admit it, he was desperate to see if a long-held, secret fantasy had come true—that removing the glasses had finally made him handsome.
Chapter Two
May 2001
DOUG WASN’T a very good liar, so it wasn’t exactly that Jay didn’t know he was hooking up with other men. He hadn’t wanted to believe it. But when Doug claimed he couldn’t meet Jay after work for dinner on Valentine’s Day because his boss and his wife had insisted he join them for dinner—on Valentine’s Day!—the lie was too blatant to ignore. Jay went home that evening, logged into the account he’d created for Doug, and did something he’d promised himself he’d never stoop to. He read Doug’s e-mail.
There it was, laid out in front of him and going back at least a couple of years—e-mails arranging meetings with old boyfriends and men Jay had thought of as mutual friends, whenever Jay was at work and Doug had a few hours to spare.
One exchange was particularly hurtful: I’d leave him, but he pays all the bills. Lol.
JAY STOPPED paying Doug’s bills and kicked him out of the apartment. Then he started going to the gay men’s group in Portsmouth again. He’d fallen out of the habit, once he’d settled down—or thought he’d settled down. But he wasn’t the type of person who enjoyed being alone. “Alone time,” sure. He’d never minded being at the apartment by himself for a few hours while Doug was at work. He’d play a computer game, watch a movie, go out to the coffee shop. But not all the time. He needed someone to care for, someone to come home to. It was in his nature.
He’d put on a few pounds in the years he’d spent with Doug, but he wasn’t in bad shape. And he was surprised to find himself in demand when he returned to the group. Not that they all fell over themselves trying to ask him out. But once word got out he was single, he had more than his share of dates over the course of the summer.
Unfortunately he quickly discovered he didn’t mesh well with the guys who asked him out. It might have been due to his appearance. He dressed conservatively, had short hair…. In short, he looked like a businessman. But that wasn’t what he was. Not deep down. He wanted to talk music, art, favorite books. His dates would smile and say he was cute, but they’d rarely have much to contribute to the conversation. And though a couple had stayed the night—which had been nice, since things hadn’t been good sexually between him and Doug for ages—they hadn’t come back for seconds.
He did date one man for a couple of weeks, a nice guy in his forties who still hadn’t come out to his family or coworkers. Jay liked Ronnie, though it annoyed him that they couldn’t go to any restaurants near Portsmouth because Ronnie was afraid someone from work would see him kissing or holding hands with a man. And when Ronnie came to his apartment, he glanced at Jay’s shelf of books on Wicca and joked, “Wow! You’re sure into some weird shit.” He was echoing Doug’s sentiments about it, but Jay still found it annoying. It was something he believed in. Sure, it was unorthodox, but that was no reason to make fun of it.
A couple of days later, Ronnie broke up with him, saying, “We’re obviously very different people.”
Jay couldn’t deny that was true.
During all this, his thoughts kept traveling back to the afternoon he’d spent with a handsome man with thick glasses. Jay hadn’t felt that comfortable hanging out with anyone in… forever. Unfortunately it had been two years, and no matter how much he tried, he couldn’t recall the man’s name.
He thought about going back to the Portsmouth coffee chat again, but he had no idea when they met. Still on Sundays perhaps, but which Sundays? Two years ago they’d been renting space from the Unitarian Church in Portsmouth, so Jay called the church to ask about it.
“Oh, those guys,” the woman on the phone told him. “I remember them. But they stopped holding their meetings here over a year ago. I think the girl who ran it moved up north.”
And that was where the trail ended. Jay had been friends with Julie—the woman who’d run the coffee chats—when they were in college, but that had been seven years ago. He knew she’d married, but he had no idea where she and her husband might have moved to.
AT THE end of the summer, he ran into Steve again at Café on the Corner. He’d been wanting to find him, but they hadn’t exchanged contact info the last time they’d met, so it was just chance that Steve walked in one Thursday evening as Jay was relaxing after work.
“Jay!” Steve sat down without an invite. “How you been?”
“Okay, I guess.” Jay gave him the Reader’s Digest version of his breakup with Doug and the past few months of dating.
“That sucks. I broke up with Caroline a while ago, but it was kind of a mutual thing. I’m happy being single for a while.”
Jay sighed and took a sip of his café latte. “I wish I could say the same. But I really hate being alone. Does that sound pathetic?”
“Just a little,” Steve said with a laugh. Then, perhaps seeing the look of dismay on Jay’s face, he added more soberly, “I think some people are just cut out to be alone and others aren’t.”
“I’m not saying I’m going to shack up with anybody who will take me,” Jay said defensively.
&nbs
p; “No, of course not.”
Still, Jay felt a bit pathetic. He just hated coming home to an empty house.
“There was one guy I felt a connection with,” he said. “More than I ever did with Doug. Though we only hung out for an afternoon.”
Steve emptied the packets of sugar he’d picked up at the counter into his coffee. “He didn’t want to stick around?”
“I think he kind of did.” At least he wanted to believe that. “But this was back when I was still with Doug, so we kind of went our separate ways.”
Steve stirred the sugar in. “So call him up now.”
“We didn’t exchange numbers. I can’t even remember what his name was—it was a couple years ago.”
“That sucks.”
“Yeah.” Jay hesitated before blurting out, “Do you happen to know where Julie and her husband moved to?”
Steve paused in the act of taking a sip of coffee, then set the cup down. He looked thoughtful. “Not really. Somewhere way up north, I think. Mark got a job offer in the Berlin area he couldn’t pass up.”
“Oh.” Jay tried to hide his disappointment.
“But I have their number, if you’d like it.”
Chapter Three
THE LASIK had certainly improved Wallace’s love life. Not that he was sleeping around all over the place now, but he’d had his share of guys hitting on him at the pagan gatherings he attended that summer. And he hadn’t snubbed them. Well, apart from the guy who’d boasted about barebacking with strangers. If that was his thing, fine, but Wallace didn’t need to wake up with a case of syphilis or herpes or worse.
The doctor had warned him it was possible he’d need glasses again someday, as he got older. “We can do this procedure once more,” he’d said, “but after that, the lenses will be too thin to shape with the laser. Even then your eyes will likely change with age, so you could end up with glasses anyway.”
“Like the ones I had before?” Wallace cringed at the thought.
“No. Just the sort of reading glasses most people end up wearing. Or in your case, perhaps driving glasses.”
Wallace could live with that. He might even be able to find a pair that made him look sexy. Well… he didn’t want to get his hopes up too high. He’d settle for good.
The only thing he regretted about getting Lasik was he could no longer see extreme detail on objects right in front of his eyes. He’d been nearsighted, to the point where it was almost a superpower—though admittedly a rather lame one. He’d found that useful for knitting, which he’d picked up as a distraction during interminable business meetings. But he was happy with the trade-off.
WALLACE HAD it in his head for a long time to put together a study group for Old Norse and maybe to learn a bit about runes too. But though a lot of people seemed interested when he gave them a few words or phrases the Vikings would have said, the thought of studying it usually evoked their flight-or-fight response. Suddenly there was somebody across the room they’d been trying to track down all day, or they were desperate to get some more of that delicious mulled cider at the snack table, or they were convinced their appendix might have burst.
“Look at it this way,” Adrastia told him when they were at a camping event in Vermont. “Even surrounded by pagans, computer gamers, role-players, and people into Skyrim cosplay, you’ve managed to be the geekiest one at the gathering. You’ve won! You’re the Geek King!”
Wallace gave her a sour look. “Geeks are people who bite the heads off chickens in freak shows. I don’t know why everyone thinks it’s a compliment.”
“It is admittedly an acquired taste.”
Wallace ignored her. “I met one guy who seemed to find Old Norse interesting—actually interesting—but I can’t even remember his name.” The guy had also been in a relationship, but there was no point lamenting that. Wallace had hoped they’d run into each other at more coffee chats and at least become friends, but he’d never shown up again. Then the chats had shut down.
“I would offer to help,” Adrastia said, “but Norse isn’t really my thing.” Wallace knew that. She was a priestess of Aphrodite. “If you decide to take up Ancient Greek someday, let me know.”
Chapter Four
THE DRIVE from Dover, New Hampshire, to Groveton was almost three hours, but at least it was a straight shot up Route 16. Jay listened to Seamus Heaney reading his translation of Beowulf to make the trip pass more quickly, and the weather was beautiful. The farther north he drove, the higher the mountains loomed over him and the more untouched the landscape became. On either side of the road, ravines fell away to crystal clear brooks, and forests of ancient trees taller than any in the south climbed up into the hills.
He’d called Julie, and she’d been delighted to hear from him. Unfortunately she’d laughed when he asked, “I don’t suppose you remember a guy I spent a lot of time talking to when I went to the coffee chat? He had dark hair and kind of a baby face—cute, but he had really thick glasses.”
“Gods, Jay. That was years ago now.”
His hopes had fallen, though they hadn’t been very high to begin with. He knew he was on a wild goose chase.
But then Julie suggested, “Why don’t you come up and visit us? There’s a good diner down the road. We’d love to see you.”
So that’s what he was doing—meeting Julie and her husband, Mark, at Lee’s Diner in Groveton.
He arrived at the diner just before one o’clock and found Mark waiting outside in his truck, the driver’s side door open so he could stretch his long legs while he read a book. He glanced up when Jay pulled up beside him and hopped down from the truck with a grin.
“Hey! Good to see you!” he said boisterously when Jay got out of his car.
“Is Julie here?”
“Sure. She’s inside getting us a table. I stayed out here to wait for you.”
Jay tried to shake his hand, but Mark pulled him into a bear hug instead. When he released him, Jay saw the book he still held in his hand—Brisingamen by Diana Paxson. The book had been a favorite among Jay’s friends in college. It was out of print, but Mark’s copy was dog-eared and obviously had been read many times.
He followed Mark into the diner, and Julie waved them over to the table she’d nabbed in the back.
“I think I figured out who your mysterious man with the glasses was,” she said the moment he sat down.
Jay felt his pulse skip a beat. It was ridiculous that he’d be so excited about tracking down someone he’d only met once, but it didn’t matter. He was. “Who is he?”
But Julie wasn’t to be rushed. She waved a hand in the air theatrically. “I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me before, but two years is a long time. And with all of the stuff going on with the move and everything—”
“Sweetheart,” Mark interrupted, “Jay’s about to wet his pants waiting for you to get to the point.”
Julie snorted. “Oh, fine. There was a guy who started showing up for a while—someone from over near Manchester or somewhere. He had really thick glasses, dark hair…. He supplied coffee for a while with this big industrial coffeemaker, until people bitched about it and we started bringing in the coffeemaker we had at home.”
“That was him!” Jay said excitedly. “I remember the coffee urn thing.” He paused. “I thought the coffee was pretty good.”
“It was fine,” Mark said, rolling his eyes. “People just have to have something to bitch about.”
“But what was his name?”
Julie shrugged. “I think it was Walter or… Wally. Something like that.”
“Wallace!” Jay exclaimed. “I remember now. He was adorable and interesting and really sweet….”
Mark laughed. “Jeez. You’ve got it bad.”
Jay ignored him. “How can I get in touch with him?”
“Sorry, hon,” Julie said, shaking her head sadly. “I don’t know for sure. I have a mailing list for the old coffee chats. His e-mail might be there, but I didn’t see anything that jumped ou
t at me as his.”
Jay’s spirits sank. Maybe he could go through the list himself, if Julie was willing to let him look at it, but would he be any more likely to recognize whatever esoteric e-mail address Wallace was using? And would it even still be a valid address?
“I was thinking,” Julie went on cautiously, “maybe if you wanted to start the chats up again….”
Jay stared at her in confusion. “Me?”
“Why not? I hated shutting the group down, but of course we can’t run it from here. The old gang is still around the seacoast area. You’d just have to send an e-mail to the mailing list to round them up again. You can get some of them to donate coffee and snacks, and the UU Church will rent you a room for cheap.”
Mark smirked at him. “She’s been trying to rope someone into doing this ever since we moved here.”
“There aren’t many pagan groups on the seacoast,” she said defensively. “Nobody wanted the group to shut down.” She looked pointedly at Jay. “You’d be doing everyone a favor.”
The waitress arrived to take their order, and that gave Jay a minute to think. He’d been out of the pagan community for seven years now. He seemed like the last person to be running a group like that. On the other hand, it was just a social group. He wouldn’t have to do much, would he?
“Do you think this will put me in touch with Wallace?” he asked when the waitress had gone. He felt a bit selfish dragging the conversation back to this topic, but that had been his primary reason for contacting Julie to begin with. He was certainly happy to visit with her and Mark on top of that. But taking on a new monthly responsibility had been the last thing he’d expected when he set out in the car that morning.
Julie shrugged. “For all we know, his e-mail is in the list. If not, someone from the group might know how to locate him.”
A More Perfect Union Page 17