Best Gay Romance 2014

by R. D. Cochrane

  Victor’s expression changes suddenly as Robert and Edward come up together to greet him. Victor hasn’t seen Edward in months, not even in the hospital. Hospitals are depressing, he said then, during the pneumocystis; he didn’t know how to behave around sick people. I tried to tell him that you treat them the same way you should treat everyone else. The problem isn’t that we generally patronize the sick, but that we’re unkind to the healthy.

  “She’s really beautiful, Victor,” Edward says. “Such lovely hair. It’s Sarah, isn’t it? Hi, Sarah.” Edward reaches a bony hand forward to stroke Sarah’s curls.

  Victor flinches, abruptly clutching Sarah against him. She twists around and tries to pry his fingers away. I see then that his eyes are frozen wide—just for a second. He catches himself, and loosening his grip on Sarah, turns a sudden, embarrassed smile toward Edward, but it’s too late. Edward’s hand already hangs by his side. He, too, is smiling, both of them pretending that nothing has happened.

  The lobby lights flicker, summoning us back to the auditorium. Victor lifts Sarah off the railing and holds her hand. Her fingers are lost in his, only the edge of her thumb showing. “Time to visit the Sugar Plum Fairy,” he says.

  I let Victor and Sarah go ahead and stay behind to say good-bye to the others. Edward’s glancing down at the lobby, feigning indifference. I resist the urge to hug him, to apologize on Victor’s behalf.

  At least I can always count on Harlan. “Well, back to the kiddie show,” he says, rolling his eyes. “I don’t know why I let you people talk me into these things. It’s like ‘Pee-wee’s Playhouse’ on Valium.”

  Edward laughs, pats him on the back. “We’ll teach you yet,” he says.

  I leave them at the stairs to the balcony, amid promises of phone calls and dinner dates. By the time I get back to my seat, the lights are dim, Sarah and Victor staring at the still-lowered curtain. The second act, I recall, is even more boring than the first—no plot this time, just acrobatics. I settle back and turn my eyes to the ceiling, concentrating on the repeated patterns of the music.

  Victor tucks Sarah in and comes, yawning, into the living room. “She’s exhausted,” he says. “She’ll sleep like a log.”

  “It is way past her bedtime.” I’m sitting in the armchair, skimming through Newsweek. The Advocate has been removed to the study for the weekend.

  “Did you have a good time tonight?” He’s hovering in the center of the room, stretching his arms luxuriously above his head.

  “Truth?” I ask.

  He looks startled. “Of course.”

  “Right. I forgot. You always want the truth.” I toss the magazine onto the coffee table.

  He tries to laugh it off. “Maybe I should have asked for a white lie.”

  “Do you have any idea how rude you were to my friends tonight?”

  “Apparently not.” He drapes his jacket over the couch. “But if we’re going to fight, maybe we should do it in another room, so we don’t wake Sarah.” He walks past me and through the swinging door into the kitchen.

  He’s standing by the refrigerator when I enter, holding the door open with his back as he pours club soda into a glass. “Look,” he says, “if this is about Edward, I feel terrible. I just had a moment of panic.” He shuts the refrigerator door and leans against the counter, sipping his soda. “I know there’s no danger. I’m not that stupid. I just—”

  “What?”

  “If you had a child, you’d understand. It’s not rational. It’s instinct. You want to protect your child from everything, and sometimes that makes you do stupid things.”

  “I get it.” And suddenly I feel like the jealous stepmother. Suddenly I am the jealous stepmother. “But you can’t protect her from everything,” I tell him. “And there are things she doesn’t even need to be protected from.”

  “What do you mean?” He’s tapping a finger nervously against the countertop—an outlet for repressed energy. Victor hates arguments. “Oh god,” he says with a sigh. “Harlan?”

  “He’s my best friend, Victor, and you treat him like he isn’t even there.”

  His look of exasperation takes the air out of the room. “I don’t think Harlan is a particularly good influence on five-year-olds.” He’s whispering, which makes the words come out in a kind of hiss.

  “I hardly think Sarah has any idea what he’s talking about.”

  “That’s not the point. All that sexual innuendo. Everything is sexual innuendo with Harlan. He has no life except between his legs.”

  “So it’s not as much about protecting Sarah as it is about protecting your sensibilities?” The plant above the sink is drooping. I check the soil, which comes up dry on my finger. “There’s a lot more to Harlan than you realize,” I tell him.

  “Harlan wears his sexual preference like a sandwich board.”

  “That’s a problem? Letting the world know you’re gay?” I place the plant beneath the faucet and let the water run in a thin stream.

  “Is it necessary?”

  I twist the faucet handle sharply to OFF. “In this world, yes, it is. Would you prefer he just slam the closet door and only come out at night, when all the kids have been put safely to bed?”

  He drains his glass and pulls open the dishwasher to place it in the rack. “Look, Greg, this isn’t getting us anywhere. Let’s just go to bed.”

  “Where?”

  “Oh, is that what you’re getting at?”

  “Would it be so awful if Sarah knew the truth about her father? Would it be so terrible to raise a child with the knowledge that it’s okay to be different? That gay doesn’t mean perverse, that it’s nothing to be ashamed of?”

  “Why should I have to raise my daughter according to your political expectations? She’s a child, not a social movement.”

  My heart is pounding. I give it a moment to rest. “You say I don’t know anything about raising children. Well, I do know about being one. I know what I got from my own father, Victor. The look of disgust on his face when gay pride marches turned up on the news, the jokes he made about ‘fags’ and ‘lesbos.’ Those remarks turned me into a self-hater and my brothers into bigots.”

  “What does that have to do with Sarah?”

  “How can she be proud of you if you’re ashamed?”

  “I’m not ashamed. I just don’t define myself by who I sleep with.”

  “Who you sleep with? That’s what it’s all about—who you fuck?”

  “Greg.” He’s gritting his teeth.

  “No, Victor. Don’t bother. If sex is the only thing that makes you gay, then you have nothing to worry about. You’re welcome to be as hetero as you want.” I push the door open. When I’m halfway across the living room, its squeaking stops abruptly in mid-swing.

  We’d been dating for a month before Victor told me about Sarah, or the fact that he’d only recently left his wife. As he related, over a long dinner in a North End trattoria, the details of his path out of the closet—the slowly dawning awareness that something wasn’t right, the secret pick-ups on business trips, the guilt when he turned away from Christina in bed and she thought it was her fault—I could reconcile none of it with the image I’d already constructed of him. I’d been drawn to Victor by his self-assurance, his masculine matter-of-factness. From the start, Victor represented pragmatism to me, rationality, fearlessness. Everything I was missing, he would supply.

  And there he was, suddenly just a man, just as fragile as anyone else. He was no longer my ideal, my knight in shining armor. And that was the moment—I remember it still, his dark eyes in the candlelight—when I fell in love.

  “Are you horrified?” he asked, his baritone voice suddenly so small, barely reaching me over the din of the restaurant.

  “By what?” I said, smiling. I wanted to reach a hand across the table and caress his cheek, feel the heft of his beard on my palm. But already I knew his discomfort with public affection. After years of opening my own heart too quickly, too wide, I respected his restrai
nt, his reticence. Victor taught me to slow down.

  “I’m not like you,” he said. “You’re so present.”

  “Me?” I replied with a laugh. “You have no idea of the depths of my insecurity.”

  “That’s just it,” he said. “You’re aware. You think about what you’re feeling. You can even put it into words. I can’t imagine that. I envy that.”

  “Then I guess I’ll just have to teach you,” I said.

  He smiled, lines crinkling around his eyes. “I’d like that.” And beneath the table, his knee pressed against mine, warm and strong.

  Alone in the study now, I can’t manage to read more than a page before my eyes begin to flutter. Sleep is my escape from the world, my drug of choice. It used to be booze. This is an improvement.

  And before I know it, I’m onstage, paralyzed in the bustle of dancers jumping and pirouetting around me. I’ve forgotten the choreography. Fear rises in my throat as the Nutcracker dances aside, clearing the way for my solo.

  My breath catches, and suddenly the dream breaks apart. A floorboard creaks somewhere in the darkness. I’m about to roll over when a weight settles beside me. Victor’s smell—bitter musk cut with something vaguely citrus—wafts toward me. Often, when I linger in bed after he’s left early for work, I bury my nose in his pillow to recapture that scent.

  He drapes an arm over me and draws himself closer, until my back is resting against the thick fur of his chest. He drops his head upon my shoulder and breathes deeply, his torso expanding behind me. His legs scissor into mine, heavy thighs squeezing me.

  Then he rolls me over onto my back and anchors himself above me. His face is a silhouette hovering. He’s looking at me—just looking, as if there’s anything to see in the dark. He kisses me—one gentle kiss, then another—and a hand runs down my neck to my chest to my belly to my inner thigh. He caresses me, and we kiss again—longer this time, deeper.

  We don’t say a word. To avoid waking Sarah, perhaps, but mostly because we don’t need to. I make my living with words, but Victor has taught me the poetry of silence.

  Victor’s usually the light sleeper—up with the sun. I’m the one who needs buzzing alarms to drag me out of bed. But the window in the study is small and betrays only the slightest hint of morning. I peer at the clock. It’s already past seven.

  His arm is a warm, dead weight on my back, but my shifting pulls him awake. He sighs, kisses the nape of my neck.

  “It’s late,” I tell him. “Sarah will be up any minute.” Another thing I learned a few months ago: how impossible it is to sleep in with a five-year-old in the house.

  “She wants pancakes,” he says.

  “How do you know that?” I ask with a laugh.

  He snuggles closer. “She told me last night. She wants pancakes.”

  “Okay, then you’d better start the batter.” I kick him playfully.

  “Five more minutes,” he pleads.

  “She’ll be looking for you.”

  I feel the words on my skin more than I hear them. “It’s okay.”

  I arch my back. “No, Victor, she shouldn’t just stumble upon us. You should tell her first.”

  Words again.

  “You’re right.” Slowly he pulls away, leaving a draft in his wake. I roll over, my back now on his side of the bed.

  He’s standing, pulling on his robe, closing it tight over his chest. “Good morning,” he says with a smile. He leans down and kisses me.

  I lie there for a while, listening to the sounds of breakfast. A few minutes later, I hear Sarah scuffle into the kitchen, their murmuring voices.

  It’s the smell of coffee that pulls me out of bed at last—that and a desperate need to pee. I dash into the bathroom. Sarah’s singing softly in the kitchen. Behind the closed door, it sounds oddly like Madonna, but the words are her own: Papa don’t peach, I’m in double dip.

  By the time I’m presentable, they’ve finished their pancakes and moved to the living room, Victor ensconced on the couch, the newspaper in piles around him, and Sarah at his feet, working on a coloring book. They’re planning a trip to the Children’s Museum, Victor tells me, and perhaps the Tea Party Ship along the way. “Interested?” he asks, peering over the editorial section.

  “Actually, I thought I’d just spend the day catching up on some work.” I brought a manuscript home from the office on Friday, something from the slush pile that looked vaguely interesting; alone, I might be able to make a dent in it.

  “Oh, Greg, come with us!” Sarah cries, looking up from her book. The crayons are spread before her on the carpet, spilling from the box, revealing their eccentric names. She’s colored the Dalmatians maize-yellow, their spots periwinkle-blue.

  “Sorry, sweetie, I can’t today.” I head for the kitchen to pour myself a thick dose of caffeine.

  I catch Victor’s eye on the way out of the room. His head tilted to one side, he seems to be pleading with me, too. Sarah isn’t the only one who wants my company.

  “Sorry,” I say again, to them both now. “I have a deadline tomorrow. You’ll have to try to have fun without me.”

  I’m pouring my second mug of coffee when Victor sidles quietly into the kitchen. He kisses the crown of my head.

  Once Sarah has brushed her teeth and dressed (no simple task), they’re out the door, and the place is all mine. Settled in my armchair, I cradle the heavy manuscript in my lap. After years in publishing, I’ve come to prefer manuscripts to bound books. There’s a greater sense of mystery—the same white pages, the same typeface, nothing to indicate what makes the story unique. You just have to plunge in.

  It doesn’t take long to see that this one isn’t going anywhere. The author seems to think that the futuristic setting gives him license to play any tricks he wants. At the first sign of danger, the hero can flick a switch on his wristwatch and end up on a beach in Tahiti. After a few hours of this, I’m grateful to hear the doorbell.

  “Surprise!” a woman’s voice squeaks through the intercom. She’s certainly correct on that score.

  “Who is it?”

  “Christina. I’ve come to pick up Sarah.”

  “She’s not—” But it isn’t worth explaining through the box. I press the buzzer and wait for her to climb the stairs. It’s Victor’s job to pick Sarah up on Saturday and return her Sunday night. I’m sure that’s today’s arrangement, but Christina must have had a change of heart.

  Christina’s only previous appearance at the apartment, since I moved in, had more the air of an inspection than a friendly visit. Victor had invited her to dinner, to introduce me—to assure her of my qualifications as a guardian for her daughter. After all, she was entrusting Sarah to my care every other weekend; she had a right to know what she was getting herself into. Throughout dinner, though, I’d had the feeling it was less my parenting abilities that interested her than my wifely duties. I’d seen women use that look on each other—the head-to-toe analysis, the determined search for cellulite or dark roots. She wanted to know what Victor saw in me, what I had that she didn’t—as if a penis weren’t enough.

  Even now, bursting through the half-open door in a white flash—long ivory wool coat, cascading blonde hair, shopping bags dangling from each hand—she can’t resist the once-over. Her technique isn’t much different from my own now-rusty cruising strategy, albeit a bit more transparent.

  The Globe is still spread out on the sofa, Sarah’s coloring book open-faced on the carpet, crayons lying haphazardly around it. Christina catches me crouching down to clean up the mess, and smiles. Tapping the sections of the paper into a single pile, I rise to meet her. She’s looking expectantly around the room, the paper handles of the shopping bags pressing heavily into her palms. Finally, she sets the bags against the wall, Lord & Taylor roses sharply contrasting the white background, and shuts the door.

  “Hello, Greg.” She wraps the long strap of her purse around the bag and drops it onto the sofa. Her coat follows, and in a moment she’s planted herself in
my armchair. “How’s everything?”

  “Quiet,” I say, replacing Sarah’s crayons in their box. They leave a waxy film on my fingers, a thick odor; I’ll have to wash my hands.

  “I can see that. Where is everyone?”

  “They went to the museum. But I had work to do.” I gesture toward the manuscript on the floor beside her.

  She reaches down and picks up a page. “What is it?” she asks, reading a few lines.

  “Firewood.”

  “That bad, eh?”

  I shrug. “Trees have died for worse, I suppose. There are always bodice-rippers.”

  She lets the page flutter back to the stack. “I used to love those old romance novels. The men were always so dashing, so sure of themselves.”

  “The women so weak and powerless.” We sound like jacket copy. I’m still standing in the middle of the room, waiting for an explanation. She sits so placidly, one might think she’d been invited. “What are you doing in town?” I ask finally. “I thought Victor was going to drive Sarah back to Wellesley tonight.”

  “He was. But I had all this Christmas shopping to do, so I figured I’d save him the trouble.”

  “Well, I don’t know when they’ll be back.”

  “That’s okay; I’ll wait.” She glances down at the manuscript again. “Unless you’d rather—”

  “No.” I pick up the entire manuscript and rewrap it in its rubber band. I’ll have to lug the thing back to the office tomorrow so my assistant can return it to the author. The incinerator would be much more efficient.

  “Good,” she says, “then we can talk.”

  I can’t imagine what we have to talk about. Since that dinner six months ago, our interaction has been limited to brief telephone conversations, my end consisting of, “Hi, let me get Victor for you.” I prefer it that way, and I’ve always assumed she did, too.

  “Can I get you anything?” I ask.

  “You read my mind,” she says. “Just a glass of wine, if you have it. I do have to drive later. Or don’t you keep anything here?”