by Anna Martin
Thus, Luisa.
She was a friend already and a good one, at that. I was pretty sure she latched onto me at the beginning because of my accent, but that was quickly forgiven as she proved herself a useful aide and good friend while showing me my awkward way around my new environment.
She chose Boston for college even though it was clear to me, at least, that her heart wasn’t in academia. Being a little social butterfly, though, well, she would undoubtedly outshine me in that respect.
I bungled through the first semester, throwing myself into my studies with an energy and enthusiasm that I’d not felt in nearly two years. Here I was challenged and my opinions probed, not just “What do you think?” but “Why do you think that?”
I wasn’t living the out-and-proud lifestyle that I’d been dreaming of but something close to it. I didn’t date females, I cautiously frequented the occasional gay bar, and I started taking the first steps to discovering myself.
That Christmas, when I returned home, I had decided not to flaunt anything in front of the two people who were funding my education. They were thrilled with the grades I was pulling in, and their utter refusal to discuss my sexuality seemed to cement my opinion that they considered it little more than a passing fancy, something that had undoubtedly been counseled out of me.
Two nights before Christmas, there was something of a high school reunion for those of us who had been away for the past three months. Lu wore a dark red dress made of some floaty material; it skimmed over her collarbones and flared at the knee, showing plenty of the pale golden skin that graced her body. Her hair, dark, shiny curls of it, bounced at her shoulders, and diamonds (or their false counterparts) glittered at her ears.
I was confused. After spending so many weeks trying to find my identity as a homosexual person, these strange, unfamiliar heterosexual longings made me feel something of a phony. A phony and a failure, since I clearly couldn’t even make a decision about something as natural and intrinsic as my sexual orientation.
I had never been much of a drinker, not like my father, who considered whiskey and water to be equally as important to his personal survival. Please don’t mistake me; he wasn’t a drunk or abusive with his liquor, although some of his behaviors could certainly be considered those of an alcoholic.
The respect I had for my father was the type that came with love and a healthy dose of fear. He never beat me, not once, not even when I deserved it, but as I grew, I started to understand his own personal brand of emotional blackmail that he used on Jilly more than me. She was the princess to his king of the castle.
And I became the disappointment, the only son who managed to drunkenly impregnate a girl who was a friend, a good friend, and a nice person. The last thing Luisa Robinson ever deserved was me. At least, that was the message that was repeatedly imposed on me over the following year.
The act of conception itself took place in the basement of my parents’ home. My mother claimed the reason she’d chosen our house was because it reminded her of Scotland in its architecture, and I could see why; it was one of the oldest houses in the town and built at least partially from stone rather than the more modern wooden erections that surrounded it. The stone and a buffer of a whole story of house between us and my sleeping family meant neither Lu nor I had any concerns about being heard or caught.
Clearly contraception was not at the forefront of either of our minds as we fumbled our way toward a mutually unsatisfactory conclusion.
Then there was her panicked voice on a telephone call about six weeks later—“No, Robert, I’m late.”—and the dawning realization of the possibility of fatherhood, at that time something I was not cut out for. I could barely take care of myself and clearly could not take care of my sexual partners on any level.
And from that one night, my singular, awkward, sexuality-confirming experience of making love to a woman, Chloe was created.
There was a lot of “We’re very disappointed in you, Robert”s and “We taught you better than this, Robert”s even though that wasn’t strictly true. The facts of life, the birds and the bees, if you will, was all information I’d gleaned from books, and mostly scientific books at that. My high school’s abstinence-only sex education course had reached its natural conclusion because even though I knew what contraception was and what it did, the message to use it had not been strong. The message had been not to do it at all, but a fat lot of good that had been for Luisa and me.
The only light in the entire knocking-up fiasco was that Lu was due in the last weeks of August, only a short time before she was due to start her second year of college, but those few weeks proved enough for the college admissions to allow her to enroll.
Since it was all naturally my fault, I was the one who moved to a new college and worked in a coffee shop by day, bar by night establishment that paid me peanuts but showed my parents that I was serious about taking care of my responsibilities and consequentially kept us secure under the roof they put over our heads.
The moment my daughter slipped her way into the world, ten days early, bloody and screaming but blessedly healthy, was one that defined my short life to that point. Lu changed in my eyes from amazing woman to goddess. I read, after, that the pain a woman experiences while giving birth is comparable to fracturing twenty bones in your body in one go. When I delivered this information to Luisa, she merely raised an eyebrow in what was a clear threat to my testicles.
She was placed in my arms first at Lu’s insistence with the words “Congratulations, Mr. McKinnon, it’s a girl,” and my world tilted on its axis. I’d spent the previous nine months going to every doctor’s appointment, every ultrasound scan and birthing class and parenting class, but nothing could prepare me for the moment when I became a man and a father.
Our little family was naturally dysfunctional, but even as Chloe grew up with a stepfather and weekends-only dad, she never stopped being perfect to me.
As for my parents, they continued to ignore their gay son and only heap praise and love on their straight son, despite all the work Jilly and I did to try to make them understand the latter did not exist. After they were frankly abysmally rude to one of my exes, I stopped taking him to any family functions and swallowed the bitter realization that I would never be good enough for them and as long as I continued to follow my wicked and sinful path through the world, they would never accept me.
That was okay, though. My contact with them grew less and less, their interest in my bastard child waned, and our relationship became, although cool, still cordial.
Sometimes I resented them, and at others, when the news of another gay teen suicide came through the news, I felt blessedly relieved that they didn’t care enough to make my life that difficult. Things could have been so much worse, and I was well aware of it.
I’d learned a long time ago how differently my body responded when it was smooth, hard muscles under my hands rather than soft, squidgy curves and the unyielding hardness of another man’s sex rather than slick, wet heat. Chris reinforced my desires on every level, but the chances of me introducing him to my parents, even if we stayed together forever, were slim to none. They wouldn’t understand him, and to be fair, it would probably only upset them or convince them that I was suffering from a midlife crisis.
I’d stopped being sad at their reactions years ago. I had finally found someone special. And nothing they could say or do could spoil that.
Chapter 6
IT TOOK me a while to get used to the fact that Chris communicated almost exclusively in text messages. Not that I was complaining. It was nice to pick up my phone and find three messages from him. It fell under the category of “yet more things Robert needs to adjust to.”
I would normally keep my phone locked in my office during the day. This was partly so I knew where it was and partly so it wouldn’t go off during my lectures and annoy me. The only people who would regularly call or text me were Luisa and Chloe, anyway. And they knew to call the college if there was an emer
gency, not my phone.
My life was so sad.
Chris, however, sent me a text when he woke up in the morning. And sometime midmorning, asking me how I was. And again at lunchtime. If I sent a reply to one of his messages, I had a reply almost instantly. Although this was disconcerting at first, I began to anticipate his choice of breakfast cereal update, which was usually formatted in the style of The Fast Show: Today, I will mostly be eating Cheerios. It made me feel warm and fuzzy inside that he even knew what The Fast Show was.
Almost all communication regarding the place and time of our reuniting took place via text message.
Do you want to go to a bar tonight?
It was Friday. So: Sure. The Ship?
A pause.
No. I was thinking of checking out one of the more exclusive establishments catering to our sinful homosexual desires.
I laughed, out loud, in the quietness of my office.
A gay bar?
While he composed his reply, I couldn’t help but think of how much quicker and easier this conversation would be if we used the mobile telephones for their intended purpose and called each other. For heaven’s sake.
Yeah. I was trying out talking like you. I’ll come over about 8ish. We can get a cab.
For reasons that seemed obvious to me, I rarely frequented gay bars. There were plenty in Boston to choose from, ones that catered to the leather crowd, or the techno, flashy-lights-and-drugged-up-twinks crowd, or the drag queen crowd. I’d never really found my niche in the gay community. My earlier attempts at trying to fit in had failed dismally. When other men found out I had a daughter, I was met with one of two reactions—they either ran for the hills or wanted me to raise pretty babies with them.
Neither of these things were particularly conducive to a relationship.
I knew that if Chris didn’t get on well with Chloe, it would put a serious damper on things between us. I wouldn’t necessarily split us up—she was a teenager and appropriately stroppy due to the fact—but if things went terribly wrong, I would have to seriously consider which way forward things would go. At least he didn’t mind the fact that she existed. And that she had a part of my life that I wasn’t going to be able to give to him.
So, in practice, the activity of dressing for a night in a gay bar was not one I was especially good at.
When Chris knocked on my door at twenty past eight (I wasn’t surprised at his lateness), I was wearing my pair of dark jeans and nothing else. Not even socks.
“Oh, hello,” Chris drawled and wrapped a hand around the back of my neck, drawing me down into a kiss. “Very nice, Professor. Very nice.”
I returned his kiss with a smile on my lips and drew the smell of his cologne into my lungs. He was spicy sweet tonight, delicious in jeans and a blood red T-shirt that he would undoubtedly remove at the first opportunity. I knew his type. And, to be fair, I couldn’t resent the fact that his type like to strip off. If my chest and stomach had looked like his, I would undoubtedly have stripped my shirt off too.
“I don’t know what to wear,” I admitted, feeling like a teenage girl.
“Nothing,” he said emphatically. “Just this. You look hot.”
I shrugged awkwardly, probably blushing as well. “You don’t have to flatter me, Chris.” I caught his wrist and tugged him to my room and my dull-as-dishwater wardrobe.
“I’m not flattering you,” he protested as he followed obediently. “If you left your shirt off all night, they’d be beating off the men with a stick. A really, really big stick,” he added because it was Chris, and he couldn’t help but take advantage of any rude innuendo situation.
I found socks and sat on the edge of the bed to pull them on. Chris hummed tunelessly as he flicked through the contents of my wardrobe, wincing at most of it but occasionally making a sound of something like approval.
I reached for my shiny black shoes and found that they’d been put back in the shoe rack and replaced with a pair of shit kickers, as we used to call them back home. Sand-colored desert boots. Chris was clearly the fashion expert in our relationship (and just when had I started thinking of it as a relationship?), so I pulled them on and laced them tight without comment.
“This is hard,” Chris muttered.
“Really, really hard?”
“Shut up,” he said, but smirked. I could play the innuendo game too. “I don’t want you to feel not like you, but I don’t want you to wear what you usually wear to work or whatever.”
After a few moments, he threw a shirt at me. It was a white one, washed so many times that it was now thin and incredibly soft to touch. I could never bear to throw it away, even though really, it was only an inexpensive white cotton shirt. It was what I had been wearing the day Chloe was born.
It was slightly tighter now than it had been fourteen years ago but still fitting. I buttoned it, feeling smug with myself. Not all was yet lost.
“Aha,” he muttered and pulled one of my suit bags out, hanging it from the door and extracting a pinstriped, dark grey waistcoat. “This too.”
“Are you sure?” I asked dubiously. He nodded.
I pulled it on and let Chris do the buttons. His fingers then went to my throat and slipped the first three buttons on the shirt back through so it hung open at my throat. Then he leaned in and pressed his lips to the little hollow there.
My hair was yet to be styled, and he did that for me too, locating the gel that I so rarely used and playing with it until he was satisfied that it looked right. I was sat back down on the edge of the bed, Chris standing between my knees, when I smiled and told him, “Thank you.”
“You don’t see yourself in the same way other people see you,” Chris said. He was gently running his hand through the soft hair at the nape of my neck.
I frowned and shook my head silently.
“It’s true,” he insisted.
“There’s no need to flatter me,” I said, smiling. “I like you already.”
He huffed and pulled himself to his feet, taking my hand and hauling me up too. “Come here.”
We moved out to the hall, where I kept a mirror I never looked in. Chris took my chin, stood behind me, and forced me to look up. Unsurprisingly, I was blushing.
“You’re adorable,” he started. I went to interrupt him, and he pressed his fingers to my lips. “Shh. You have gorgeous eyes. And a very masculine jaw, for a queer.” He winked at me in the mirror. “It looks nice like this… all stubbled.”
I rarely looked at myself. Really looked, you understand. I saw my face every day, shaving, dressing, but I never took stock of myself the way Chris was doing.
“I think,” he continued, “that you are perfect. And I should know. I have great taste in men.”
“In which case,” I said, turning to him, “I definitely should not argue with you.”
“Come on,” he said. “We should get going.”
I surprised myself by not being nervous when we got to the club. There was a line, but not a particularly long one due to the early hour, and I didn’t mind waiting outside in the cold because Chris snuggled up close to me to share our body heat.
The doorman looked from Chris to me, then demanded, “ID.”
Even as a little warm ball of delight lodged itself beneath my ribs, I worried that I wouldn’t have any identification on me. I didn’t carry it routinely. Chris found his easily, but I fumbled for my wallet before thankfully locating my driver’s license. I handed it over to the rather burly bearded gentleman, who scrutinized it for a moment too long before handing both back.
“Mr. Ford,” he said. “Mr. McKinnon. Have a good evening.”
Chris wore a cheeky smirk as we checked our jackets at the door before finding our way to the almost half-full bar.
“You’re trouble,” I said without malice. “Beer and a whiskey, please.”
The music wasn’t too loud yet, and we stayed at the bar for a while, drinking and generally enjoying being in each other’s presence. As the night crept on
and the room filled to bursting point, Chris stripped off his T-shirt (as I’d known he would) and tucked it into his back pocket, kissed me deeply, and bounced off to join the throbbing pulse of people—men—on the dance floor. He’d asked me if I wanted to join him, but I was decidedly not drunk enough to dance, and I liked watching him. And I had no issues with staying at the bar and drinking.
When I was offered, “Can I get you a drink?” my initial response was a polite but distanced “No, thank you.”
Then I turned and was faced with an old friend.
“Elias!” I laughed, accepting his hug. “How are you?”
Elias and I had met at college. He was a languages student while I obviously took Literature. I hadn’t known that he was gay at the time, and even if I had, I would have considered him so far out of my league it wasn’t worth mentioning.
We were assigned to the same dorm building in our first year and bonded over being outsiders, immigrants in America, as it was. Elias had both the body and the looks of a privileged European upbringing. He was from Switzerland, a small town not far outside Zurich. We’d made promises that one summer I’d take him back to Edinburgh and act as his tour guide around the city and he’d do the same for me in his hometown. The trip had never happened. Chloe had arrived instead.
Now, close to six or seven years since I’d seen him last, time had treated my old friend well. He still wore his dark blond hair long, to his shoulders in impossibly shiny, thick waves. His eyes, piercing blue, now had a few laughter lines around them. He wore a grey shirt with plenty of buttons undone and dark leather pants, which cleared up my last few questions regarding his sexuality.
Maybe Chris had helped me refine my “gaydar”, or at least have some confidence in it.
“I thought you went back to Switzerland,” I said after accepting his offer of a drink, now I knew who he was.