He drops his car keys in the square mahogany bowl on the hall table and picks up the three new pieces of junk mail I set there earlier.
Intending to inject a little levity into the moment, I force a laugh. “How do you figure that was yesterday?” He’d emailed his story to Frannie not ten minutes after we got home the night before, which was well after midnight.
“It’s yesterday before you go to sleep. Once you wake up it’s today,” Bob declares. He tosses the junk mail into the wicker trash receptacle under the hall table. Like the bowl and half the other furnishings in our home, it is made of dark-hued, natural materials. Our kitchen counters and bathroom vanities are black granite; the flooring throughout the house is walnutstained bamboo; the rugs are wool woven in bold geometric, earth-toned designs.
I step behind him, slide my arms around his waist and hug him tight. “Mmm. Is that how that works?” He smells fantastic, a mix of laundry dried on the line, fresh-brewed coffee and love. I want to hold on to him this way forever.
“Frannie’s always been an early riser,” he reasons. “You know that. She probably got it five hours ago.”
“Yes, and they have a whole agenda planned for this trip, remember? So many things they wanted to do that they had no choice but to pass on some of them?” I hug him harder. When I relax, I feel him do the same. I kiss his shoulder. “Why don’t you go upstairs and try to write something new?”
“That’s a good idea.” He twists around to face me. We kiss, and he tastes even better than he smells. I move my hands to the sides of his face in an attempt to keep him where he is. Too soon, and despite my efforts, he wriggles free. “If we keep that up,” he chides, “I won’t get any writing done today.”
I arch a brow. “Would that be so bad?”
It’s his turn to laugh. “I can’t answer that!” He leans close again, this time pressing his forehead to mine. “You always make me feel better,” he says. “Thank you.”
I feel myself blush. “How about Mexican for lunch? Do tacos sound good? Or burritos?”
He screws up his lips as he considers it. “Enchiladas.”
“Beef or chicken?”
“Whatever.” He straightens up again, slips from my grasp and heads for the stairs.
“Promise,” I call after him, “you won’t check your email obsessively?”
SAVE THE LAST DANCE FOR ME
David Puterbaugh
We’re watching my boyfriend dance.
Gene and Ed are drinking scotch, and I’m nursing a vodka tonic. Matthew’s martini waits for him at his place at our table.
This is not a cruise that Matthew and I are on with Gene and Ed, but a transatlantic crossing. Seven days at sea from England to New York, just like the sailings of years past before jet travel, when the rich and famous crossed the Atlantic in glamorous black and white. “Fodor’s calls it the most regal ship to cross the Atlantic in this or any era,” Gene emailed us six months ago when we made our reservations. “We’ll be the Queens of the World!”
The dance floor is wide—“the largest dance floor at sea,” we learned on a ship tour after our departure from Southampton five days ago—and there are crystal chandeliers hanging above it from the ballroom’s high ceiling. At the front of the ballroom is the grand staircase, where Gene insisted we pose tonight for a photo after dinner. Gene never misses an opportunity for a camera. His impression of Shelley Winters in The Poseidon Adventure is spot-on. (“In the water I’m a very skinny lady!”)
This evening is our last formal night before our arrival in New York, and the ship’s daily program politely suggested black tie for tonight’s festivities. Many of the ladies in the room are wearing cocktail dresses and ball gowns. And like most of the men on board our foursome is wearing tuxedos. On the stage beside the grand staircase a band is playing Gershwin’s “The Man I Love,” and Ed is humming along.
My boyfriend and I are two of the youngest passengers on board. Matthew is thirty-nine, and I turned forty last month. If I had to guess I’d say the average age of the ship’s passengers is sixty-five. Gene and Ed are both seventy, but I never think of them as senior citizens. “Whatever you do, don’t stand behind an old person in line,” Gene instructed us one afternoon at the lunch buffet. “If they have a heart attack you could miss the desserts.”
Gene points to the dance floor as Matthew comes gliding by with one of our tablemates from dinner, a divorced real estate agent from Houston named Laurel. “Would you look at him out there,” Gene says. “That boy really should be on ‘Dancing with the Stars.’”
Matthew first learned to dance from his mother, who taught him how to waltz when he was five years old. Now, more than halfway to New York, my boyfriend has developed quite a following. This morning at breakfast two ladies old enough to be our grandmothers stopped Matthew on our way into the restaurant. “You’re the young man from the ballroom, aren’t you? We love watching you dance.”
Matt and I went up to the ship’s nightclub our second night on board. The crowd was younger—fiftysomethings—and a DJ was playing Eighties music. There were a couple of dozen people on the dance floor, and when Erasure’s “A Little Respect” came on, Matt pulled me up and I went. Dancing in a crowd in the nightclub, I felt we were safe enough.
Matthew keeps telling me to relax. Our cabin attendant, a woman from Peru named Faviola, calls us “mis favoritos” and leaves towel animals for us when she turns down our room. Last night we found two towel swans sitting on our bed. The swans were facing each other with their heads pointed down and their beaks and bodies touching. In the space between their long necks Faviola had created a perfect heart.
Of course some of the ship’s crew are gay. Gene giddily points it out whenever he sees a waiter or bartender give me or Matthew “the eye.” But many of the passengers don’t see us, like the two ladies who stopped us at breakfast. Their generation gave them few words for Matthew and me, for who we are and what we are to each other. One of the ladies asked us if Ed and Gene are our fathers.
I smile at Gene but the truth is I’ve stopped watching Matthew dance, and I’m now looking at a boy sitting across from us on the other side of the dance floor. He’s thirteen or fourteen years old I’m guessing, by far the youngest person on the ship. He is sitting with a man and woman I assume are his parents; they’re not much older than Matthew and me. I’m watching this boy as he watches Matthew dance, watching as he brushes his mother off when she appears to ask him to dance with her. I’m watching this boy’s eyes follow my boyfriend around the dance floor.
The song ends and we join in as the couples on the dance floor clap for the band. Matthew kisses Laurel’s hand and escorts her back to her table, where her friend Diane is drinking champagne. Diane is also from Houston, and like Laurel is divorced and in her midfifties. Our first night onboard, Gene and Diane became fast friends at dinner. Diane’s laugh is high and exaggerated like a cartoon character’s. Her laugh could be heard throughout the restaurant every time Gene opened his mouth.
Laurel takes her seat and Matthew starts back to our table just as the band begins playing Glenn Miller’s “Moonlight Serenade.” Diane stands and catches Matthew’s arm. It’s her turn to dance with my boyfriend.
“It’s like watching a dance marathon,” Ed says. “But with just one contestant.”
“He better not break a heel,” Gene says. “They shoot horses at sea, don’t they?”
Gene and Ed have both had long careers on Broadway, working behind the scenes with costumes and lighting on many famous productions. Their apartment in Greenwich Village resembles a small Broadway museum. I’ve known them for years, since the summer of 2003 when I turned thirty. I joined a gay bowling league in Chelsea, where Gene was our captain. Most seasons our team was tied for last place. We called ourselves the Toilet Bowlers.
Two years ago, Gene and Ed semiretired to Fort Lauderdale. Matthew and I spent last New Year’s with them at their new condo. As long as I’ve known Gene he’s always had
a tan, even in New York in February. If Gene is South Beach, then Ed is New England, specifically a small New England college town in autumn. He reminds me of my favorite English professor.
I turn back to the boy, who’s still watching Matthew dance. He’s looking at Matthew the way I looked at him the night we met three years ago, when I saw him dancing shoeless at my cousin Steven’s wedding. Matthew worked with my cousin’s new bride and was seated at a table with a group from their office. When the wedding DJ opened the dance floor I watched him join a bunch of girls from his table in kicking off their shoes. Matt is six-feet-two, but when he’s dancing his height never gets in the way. Matthew doesn’t move in time with the music but one step ahead, as if his body knows where the rhythm is going even before the lyrics. Like the boy, I couldn’t take my eyes off him that night. I never knew gold-toed black socks could be so sexy.
Last night, well past midnight, after Gene and Ed had gone to bed, Matthew and I climbed carpeted steps to the upper decks. Even in June the Atlantic can be too choppy for the heartiest sailor, and outside we had the promenade deck to ourselves. The air blowing up from the sea was cool but we still had our dinner jackets. Matt reached for my hand just as mine went for his.
Matthew walked up to the railing and looked out at the ocean, so dark and mysterious, reflecting stars I’ve never seen so bright. I stepped up behind him and wrapped my arms around his waist. I could feel the soft vibration beneath my shoes as the ship carried our love to America, steady and onward, like a future that couldn’t be stopped. My boyfriend’s scent mixed with the salt air as he turned his head back to me and we kissed. In that moment I cared about nothing else but him.
I look at the boy now and I know what he is thinking. I wish I were dancing with Matthew, too.
The song ends and we clap again, and the bandleader announces a short break. Matthew escorts Diane to her seat and returns to our table.
“You have an admirer,” Gene says as Matthew takes his seat beside me. I’m only mildly surprised that Gene, too, has noticed the boy.
“Oh, Charlie,” Matthew says, following Gene’s gaze.
“Charlie?” I say. “You’ve met him?”
Matthew nods after sipping his martini. “Out by the pool this afternoon, when you went back to the cabin for a nap.”
Ed peers across the dance floor. “Is he British?”
Matt nods again. “From London. I think he said his father works for a bank in New York, and his mother is teaching a course on British politics at Columbia this fall. Or is it the other way around? Anyway, he’s very sweet.”
“He hasn’t taken his eyes off you since we came down from dinner,” Gene says. “Little Charlie has a crush, I would say.”
“How on earth would you know that just by looking at him?” Ed says.
“Because I don’t wear trifocals like you, my love.”
“Perhaps the boy just likes to dance.”
“Perhaps he does, with other boys.”
“Really, I don’t know why you care.”
“I don’t! I’m simply pointing out that if the lovely Kate Winslet suddenly appeared on the dance floor topless, with the Heart of the Ocean bouncing between her voluptuous breasts, that boy wouldn’t notice.”
Matthew laughs. “I spoke to him first, actually. His parents left him at the pool to go to a wine tasting. Everyone else was swimming and sunning themselves and Charlie was just sitting on a lounge chair all by himself, drawing in an art book. I asked him what he was working on. He’s making a comic book.”
“Hear that, Dr. Kinsey?” Ed says to Gene. “Not every artistic boy is gay.”
“Oh, Charlie is gay,” Matthew says. “His main character is this blue alien guy named Cobalt. He has bulging muscles and wears a tiny red Speedo.”
“I bet that’s where he keeps his super power,” Gene says, then raises his hands to his chest when Ed shoots him a look. “What did I say?”
“Cobalt’s sidekick is a shirtless cowboy named Rodeo,” Matt says, “and in the story, Cobalt and Rodeo help to save a group of school kids who get trapped in a forest fire. At the end, once the kids are safely back on their school bus, Cobalt and Rodeo share a very passionate victory kiss.”
Gene nearly spits his scotch on Ed. “He showed you that?”
Matthew grins. “I skipped ahead a little. But Charlie wasn’t ashamed of his story, if that’s what you mean.”
“They didn’t have comic books like that when I was a kid,” Ed says.
“No, they did not,” Gene agrees. “Honestly, this world is changing so fast. Do you realize that by the time that boy is as old as me and Ed he might have legally married as many men as Elizabeth Taylor?”
“You and Ed can still get married you know,” Matthew says. “It’s not too late.”
“How about it Eddie?” Gene says. “Want to marry me once it’s legal in Florida?”
“Well I don’t know,” Ed says, considering the offer. “How do I know you’re not just marrying me for my body?”
“Don’t be silly, dear,” Gene says. “Everyone will know I’m marrying you for your money.”
Gene and Ed have been together for forty-six years, longer than my parents. This is their eighteenth transatlantic crossing. They took their first together before Matthew and I were even born.
Ed turns to Matt and me. “What about you two? Should we clear a date on our calendar any time soon?”
Before I can answer my boyfriend speaks for the both of us. “When the time comes I think we’ll probably elope. Dan doesn’t like a lot of people looking at him.”
“That’s not—it’s not that,” I say.
Matthew comes from a touchy-feely family; their love comes wrapped in a bear hug. Before the lights have gone down at the movies, Matthew’s hand is on my knee. It’s there, too, whenever we drive together in a car. On our flight from New York to London, Matt fell asleep with his head on my shoulder, but I didn’t sleep. I was too busy watching the faces of the passengers who passed us on the way to the bathroom. I try not to worry about what other people think. I’ve tried harder with Matthew than any other man I’ve ever been with.
Matthew reaches under the table now and puts his hand on my knee. “I meant our wedding will be private, just the two of us.” And with this simple expression of his affection, my boyfriend wins. How can I argue what he’s saying isn’t true when part of me is glad his hand is under the table where no one can see?
The first time I spent the night at Matthew’s place—the same night we got silly over a bottle of cabernet at an Italian restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen, where our waiter sent us home with biscotti and called us “gents”—I took his hand as we walked to the subway. Matthew has great hands. They’re strong, but not calloused or dry. Smooth, and always warm. Sometimes after a long day Matthew will offer to rub my back. I relax before his hands have even touched me. As we got to the subway entrance and started down the stairs, two guys in their twenties were coming up. One had the collar of his blazer popped up, and the other was wearing a fedora. On the surface they looked like two members of a hip boy band, the kind that makes It Gets Better videos for their young gay fans. I didn’t feel at all threatened by them as they passed us. But as we got to the bottom of the stairs and they reached the top, one of them said loud enough for Matthew and me to hear, “Two more faggots giving each other AIDS.”
“Why does it always have to be such a big deal?” I say quietly, my eyes on the table. “I’m forty years old and I can’t kiss my boyfriend on our vacation without worrying we’ll get our heads bashed in. Every time I touch him in public it feels like I’m coming out, over and over and over again. What’s the point in getting married if I can’t show my husband what he means to me? Why does it always have to be such a big deal?” I repeat.
I look up and see the three of them are staring at me. Our waiter approaches the table but Gene signals for him to wait. No one says anything for a long time, and I think I’ve ruined the evening. But then Ed
speaks.
“Because it is a big deal,” he says.
He gestures to the room around us. “Do you know in nineteen sixty-five Gene and I couldn’t share a cabin? It was too risky. We had to buy two single cabins and hope no one would notice us sneaking in and out of each other’s rooms.”
“We were sailing on a different ocean back then,” Gene says. “We had to be careful not to scare the fishes.”
“Then when we could share a cabin we had to explain why we wanted only one bed,” Ed says. “We would come back at night to find the cabin steward had pushed the beds apart.
“This,” he says, pointing to the four of us around the table, “is a very big deal.”
“You can’t let the haters get you down, Danny Boy,” Gene says. “If they can’t see how beautiful you boys are together, fuck ’em.”
I look at Matthew and I could cry. One afternoon last week when we were out shopping for our trip, Matthew took my hand a couple of blocks from our apartment. We turned a corner and I saw a group of guys coming toward us. I can’t even remember now how many there were or how old they were. They were a group of guys; that was enough. I pulled my hand away from Matthew’s.
The guys walked past and ignored us. None of them said or did anything. When I realized Matthew wasn’t next to me I turned around. He was just standing there on the sidewalk, looking at me like I’d physically attacked him. “Do you know how that makes me feel, when you pull away from me like that?” he said. “Like we’re nothing. Like you believe we’re nothing.”
The band returns and begins to play Frank Sinatra’s “All the Way.” I glance back across the dance floor and lock eyes with Charlie, who isn’t looking at Matthew now but at me.
What are you waiting for, Fred Astaire?
Best Gay Romance 2014 Page 19