And the Next Thing You Know . . .

by Chase Taylor Hackett

  “Good. Thrilled to hear it. So why aren’t you eating?”

  “Don’t feel like it.”

  “Did you sleep last night?”

  “I need to get this song finished.”

  “How’s it going?”

  “Stop it! Just stop it!”

  I threw my hands up. His phone rang. He pulled it out of his jeans pocket, glanced at it as if eager to push it off—but then his face changed and he took the call.

  “Hullo?” Listening. “Yes.” Listening. “Oh wow, that’s great.” Listening listening. “Sure I can come in.” He scrambled for a pencil, snatched up a piece of crumpled manuscript paper from the floor, and he scribbled something. “That sounds great.” Listening. “No, thank you! I’m really looking forward to it.” Listening. “Yeah, me too. Bye.” He looked almost happy as he hit the disconnect.

  He finished whatever note he was writing on the paper, and looked up finally. He seemed—a little lost.

  “Want to tell me something?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah. That was the woman from Lincoln Center. They offered me the job. Great, huh?”

  “That’s fabulous, Theo! Really!” I gave him a quick hug. “Poor Victoria is going to be brokenhearted, of course.”

  “Victoria will get over it. They want me to start in a couple weeks. I’m going to be working for a real Broadway production company! Isn’t that amazing?”

  “You must be thrilled!”

  “I am!” he said. “I really am! I’m—ecstatic even. It’s everything I’ve ever—” The first thing I noticed was a little tension around one side of his mouth, and then high on the cheek and his upper lip started—and then his whole face was transformed, contorted, into one enormous, gasping sob.

  I pulled him to me, and let him bawl on my shoulder. Finally.

  “Do you want me to call Gilbert? Have him come out here and break Jeffrey over his knee?”

  He sobbed even harder—and he gave a very definite nod.

  Chapter 45

  And the Runner Is Out at Home

  Jeffrey

  It wasn’t just my hands that were shaking. I was shaking everywhere. I think my intestines were shaking. Felt like my balls had retreated to somewhere around my navel. I only hoped this dread didn’t show in my face. My mother could spot the smallest things. A fading black eye and a bandage on my head—smaller now, but a bandage nonetheless—were more than enough to send her into full-on mother-mode. Not to mention the fact that I’d invited myself to dinner with both of them, so obviously something was up. And now I sat on her couch in its plastic slipcover, with a mug of her truly vile herbal tea in my hands.

  I had decided to do this at home with them, just us. Of course it had occurred to me that if we’d gone to a restaurant, they wouldn’t be able to make a big scene. Then again, with my father, anything was possible.

  In the end, taking them out in public to duck a potential confrontation seemed sort of cowardly, and I was through with cowardly. And it wasn’t really fair to them. Whether I liked it or not, I figured I should give them their chance to have a big scene if that’s what they needed.

  It would be easy to see this conversation as being all about me, but I realized it was also about them.

  My God, listen to how grown-up and responsible I sound. Scary.

  I was also thinking I needed to be done with selfish for a while too. Selfish and cowardly had played way too big a part in my life up to now.

  So I had opted for this—dinner at home with the parents. I also figured I should get this over with early, if only to put me and my mother out of our misery. I didn’t dare eat first or I’d be hurling my mother’s podvarak all over her dining room parquet, which would be a terrible waste of some really good Serbian cooking.

  “So, Dad, Mom,” I said. “I have something I want to talk to you about first.”

  “I’m starving, you can talk while we eat.”

  “No, Dad, just this once. Please?”

  My mother had this expectant look she gets. I knew she wanted grandchildren more than anything, and for the first time in my life I was going to disappoint her.

  I can’t do it, I thought. I couldn’t possibly do what I’d come here to do. There was no way. But just when I decided to bail on the whole thing—

  “All right then, out with it.”

  —my father forced my hand.

  I should wait until after he’s eaten. The old man was always really crabby when he was hungry. You’re making excuses. The old man was always really crabby, period. Just do it. Stop being so spineless.

  I looked at them.

  What do I say?

  I should have rehearsed this. I should have written it out or something. But it had been so awful to contemplate telling them, that I hadn’t thought about what I’d actually say. I’d been too busy thinking about what they’d say back—meaning what my father would be screaming at me, purple-faced.

  But now here I was, two blue eyes and two brown eyes were staring at me, waiting, and I had no idea what to do next. I mean, I knew what I needed to tell them, but what was I actually going to say? The words, I mean. Or more to the point—word. I’m—

  Gay—?

  Homosexual—?

  Queer—?

  Fudge-packer—?

  Peder—? That’s Serbian for pretty much all of the above.

  Mom, Dad, I like to do this thing with another guy’s hoo-ha—?

  Yeah, probably not that one.

  Man up, Jeffrey. You can stare down an on-coming taxi. You can do this. Take a breath.

  “Something big happened to me recently,” I started, “and you’re my parents. I want to be able to talk to you about it.”

  “You got the partnership?” asked Dad.

  “No, that won’t happen until the end of the year, if it happens, and it’s not likely it’ll happen.”

  “Why not likely? What did you do?”

  “You met someone?” said my mother. Oh, you sly girl, if only you knew.

  “Yeah,” I said, trying not to slip into panic. I could feel my face muscles tighten with fear. “I did.”

  “Hey, that’s great, son,” said my proud father, getting up, with an eye on the dining room. “When do we meet her? Or do we know her already?” He started to pat me on the back. “Of course if you tell me it’s the Caputo girl—”

  “No, Dad. Wait. It’s just—” Well, you know what’s coming, only I still couldn’t get it out. I stalled. “I don’t know. I may have screwed things up already. I doubt anything will come of it.”

  “Idiot!” said my father. It’s the same word in Serbian. “How could you mess it up?”

  “I did something dumb.”

  “Gloop!” he yelled. You might remember that means stupid.

  “What! So you never did anything gloop?” I yelled back. Both my parents were shocked. I was shocked. No one ever snapped at my father. I certainly hadn’t thought about it before it came out, because if I had, I’d have kept my yap shut. Or ducked. But out it had come.

  I guess my psyche was thinking—he’s going to disown you anyway, you might as well at least stick up for yourself for once. Go out with a bang.

  The bang would probably be upside my head.

  But he didn’t hit me—yet. And I was obviously stalling. It wasn’t just the elephant in the room, it was this weird invisible elephant that only I could see.

  “So yeah,” I continued. “I did something stupid.” Deep breath. “But that’s not the part you’re going to hate, believe me.”

  I have only a handful of words in Serbian, so I can’t translate what my father was grumbling to himself. Might have been about me—might have been the podvarak.

  “It’s that boy, isn’t it?” asked my mother, softly.

  !!!

  I couldn’t believe sh
e said that.

  I only thought I was scared before. Now, faced with my mother’s eerie, intuitive guess, I was gripped with an absolutely paralyzing terror.

  Wherever my balls were before, they had now packed their things and moved out.

  My first impulse was to deny everything. Yeah, I know, I had come here to ’fess up to exactly this, but now that I was presented with it, accused of it, I was totally ready to be my usual cowardly self and lie lie lie.

  “You know,” my mother went on quietly, “the assistant who isn’t your assistant, is he. The one with the hair?” She made a swirling gesture toward the top of her head. “What was his name?”

  “Theo,” I said, hardly more than a whisper. Her voice was so kind, and her eyes were so soft and so beautiful. I was completely in her power.

  “Your assistant screwed this thing up with the girl?” my father asked incredulously.

  I sat down on the couch next to my mom. And I nodded.

  “Yes, Mama. Theo, Mama,” I said. “His name is Theo.”

  “Who cares about your lousy assistant? I told you to fire that kid. If you had half a brain—”

  “He’s not my assistant, Dad. He’s my—I don’t know what he is.” I thought about him, and saw his face in my thoughts. “I have a terrible feeling—he’s the love of my life.”

  My father looked at me. Disbelief battled with slow recognition.

  “What?” he said very sharp, and very quietly.

  When he was angry, his face would get really dark, but now—I’d never seen him so pale. The silence lasted a long, long time before I found enough backbone to speak again. And once it was there, I knew what I needed to say.

  “I’m gay, Dad.”

  “But—I don’t understand. You always—”

  “I’ve always been gay. Always.”

  “But all those girls you dated, the girls you…?”

  “They were for you, Papa. Never for me.” A tear ran down my mother’s cheek. “Mama, I’m so sorry.”

  She shook her head.

  “No, it’s—I always—wondered. Guessed maybe. But when I saw that boy, I thought—and when I saw you watching him leave—no one looks at an assistant like that.”

  I wanted to say something but there was such a huge lump in my throat I couldn’t possibly.

  “My son,” said my father. “You’re—peder?”

  I knew I’d hear that word before we were done.

  “Yup, Dad. I am. Always have been. I knew when I was fourteen but I was so scared. Still am. I’m gay. I’m queer. Peder. And whatever other terrible words you have for it, that’s me, your son.”

  “And you’ve…?”

  “Sure have. Lots.”

  I thought for sure, now, he would hit me. I almost wanted him to.

  He got up—but he didn’t hit me. He just walked off into the kitchen. I hugged my mother, while I listened to the clatter in the next room. My father was fixing himself a plate. Naturally.

  My dad. He had done so much for me. He’d paid for my education at one ridiculously expensive school after another, without a word of complaint. For which I was hugely grateful. And I had rewarded him by graduating top of my class at Princeton Law, something he accepted as though it were his due, as though anything else would have been a disappointment.

  For years—my entire life—I had tried to please this man, and now, because of this, I probably never would.

  And I had tried so hard to be like him. Why???

  My dad had taken a small contracting business and made it into a huge contracting business, and made us all rich. He was feared. He was hated. He was ruthless, maybe heartless, and occasionally violent.

  Why would I want to be like him? If I had a son, would I want our relationship to be like this? Full of anger, fear, resentment? And God knows whatever he felt for me, which at the moment was apparently contempt.

  No, I did not want to emulate this man.

  It was emulating my father that had brought me to betray my best friend. And had cost me Theo.

  I deserved to lose Theo. I’d been a complete bastard to get where I was. Believe me, the kid at the top of his class at Princeton Law is not a nice guy. I’d never been popular or well-liked. I’d bullied my way through too much of my life, or brown-nosed, or used money to solve problems instead of dealing with them, I’d ducked responsibility whenever I could, and taken credit for other people’s work. These were all things I’d learned from this man who now sat alone in the kitchen, eating bacon and sauerkraut (that’s podvarak—now you know), instead of dealing with his wife and son. His gay son.

  I’d taken a step. I’d told my parents. For once I’d taken the hard way instead of the easy way. No matter what happened, no matter if my father ever came to terms with it, I knew I wouldn’t regret this.

  I also knew I wasn’t done. I wasn’t at all sure I could ever fix all the things I’d screwed up, but this was a start.

  I meant it earlier. I was through with cowardly.

  And if maybe someday a pair of blue-green eyes could look at me again with a little less derision in them—that would be good, too.

  Chapter 46

  The One with the Waggly Tail

  Tommy

  I have done some crazy-ass shit in my time, just to sort of put myself in front of some cute guy or other. Anything to get his attention. I have listened to no end of music I couldn’t care less about. In London I once got up at the wisecrack of dawn to sit through a seventeen-hour Hindu drama, just so I could sit next to a boy with the dreamiest eyes. After seventeen hours of the Mahabharata (not a lot of laughs in the Mahabharata) and one amazeballs night in dreamy-eyes’ bedroom while his family slept down the hall, I was ready to convert. I made the mistake of mentioning this to dreamy-eyes, which unfortunately led to this incredibly tedious discussion of how that word was loaded with imperial history and how it wasn’t really a concept in Hinduism, and he didn’t even notice I was pulling my pants on and calling for one of those funky black London taxis while he talked.

  I have marched in marches (Protect the Whosits! Free What’s-His-Name!) and I once sat through an evening where Newt Gingrich was the keynote speaker. Lesson learned: Do not try holding hands with your date at a meeting of Young Republicans. That guy was also probably the worst sex I’ve ever had—draw your own conclusions.

  But I digress.

  My point is—to find myself standing in the middle of an animal shelter with a veritable host of barking dogs probably wasn’t even the craziest crazy-ass thing I’d ever done to get a guy’s attention. But it was right up there in the top five anyway.

  I had decided to tag along with Theo at the animal shelter. Why? You guessed it. Because a certain very cute young man with the ridiculously adorable name of Swithin also volunteered at the animal shelter—so now I volunteered at the animal shelter. And omfjesus, the noise.

  I have no idea how many dogs there were, but every single one of them was barking. Not quietly barking, not barking and then giving it a rest. No, they were just barking non-effing-stop, relentlessly and without pause. I know that’s redundantly redundant, but I can’t stress that enough—there was never the teensiest millisecond when they communally took a breath. Nope. Just barking.

  The other thing about this place—which I had not quite anticipated—the dogs were in kennels, and they had to be let out to pee and poop, and they were really stressed out, and sometimes things didn’t go according to plan, if you get my drift—and if you do, I’m sorry, just move upwind.

  And who takes care of all this? The volunteers! The happy, cheerful volunteers who rush to the rescue with happy mops and cheerful Lysol. That’s the part I hadn’t anticipated. I guess I thought I was volunteering to come in and play with the dogs, and I figured I could handle that. I’m no end of fun. And I would, of course, simultaneously, impress the cute guy. />
  I’d dressed for the day, too. For the impress-the-cute-guy part, I mean—not for the clean-up-dog-ooky part. I had a new pair of tight rocker-boy jeans, black, like the ones Swith wore. And sexy? Oh hells yes. And a pale blue v-neck sweater (nothing underneath) made of a cashmere/silk blend that just screamed to be touched. And the color made my eyes huge. I was scrumptious. At least that was the plan. Even my sneakers—from Italy and so expensive—were cute.

  “I’m on the adoption desk today,” said Theo, whose idea this was. “So you can help Swith in here with the dogs.”

  That was fairly subtle, pairing us up like that. Or maybe he just wanted to avoid us because he knew I’d ask him about his bust-up with Jeffrey.

  To be honest, I was a little worried about young Theo. He’d told me that he and Jeff weren’t happening after all.

  “Hey, Theo—you okay?”

  “Of course. Why shouldn’t I be?”

  “You know—”

  “It’s no big deal. Really.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously. People only get hurt when they have expectations. I always thought Jeff was an asshole. You told me Jeff was an asshole. Turns out—Jeff’s an asshole. No big let-down there.” Sound like denial to you? “Hey, Swith?”

  “Yeah?” said Swithin, coming back in from the exercise yard with a couple of puppies. OMG. Like he wasn’t cute enough!

  “Show Tommy what he needs to do.”

  “Sure thing. Hey, Tommy.”

  “Well Theo—if you need to talk about it…” I offered.

  “I definitely do not need to talk about it.”

  And Theo went off into adoptionland.

  “You think he’s okay?” I asked the cutie.

  “No, but there’s nothing you can do—unless you like having things thrown at your head, because that’s what you’ll get.”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  So. Swithin and I—alone at last. With thirty-seven barking dogs.

  “Hi,” I said, suddenly shy.

  Why do I put myself in these situations? I know I might come off as totally self-confident, completely comfortable with myself, and mostly I am, but sometimes, when the guy is a little too good-looking—like Swithin, alas—or probably straight—like Swithin, alas alack—all of a sudden I don’t know where to look.