"Nice folks after all," Tam said. "We should invite them to the wedding."
"You're irrepressible," Quinn said as the couples moved to their table and he and Tam resumed their seats.
But Quinn wondered if even Tam's irrepressibility would be enough. Afterward, they strolled through The Mulia's own version of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, watched over by lotus-bearing caryatids that crowned a series of palm-studded marble terraces. As Quinn and Tam threaded their way down the marble staircases, an electrical storm arose, the lightning piercing the waves to a soundtrack of thunder as the light rain gave the steps a slippery, silvery sheen that was reflected in Quinn’s tears.
"What's the matter, my love?" Tam said. "Oh, Quinnie, don't you see? Even if we never find him, I will be your father, mother, brother, everything, and you will be mine." He took him in his arms.
"Don't, Tam, someone might see."
"Oh, who's going to see or know? And anyway, who cares? It's the twenty-first century, for God's sake."
But even in the twenty-first century, there were still people who cared, especially in this part of the world, Quinn thought as he kissed Tam lightly at first, then deeply, feverishly, hands roaming wildly, his whole body lit by lightning, still playing with fire like the young Prometheus who had been his touchstone. From the restaurant, he could hear Adele wailing Fire to the Rain—or was it merely the soundtrack that throbbed in his head?
They rode back to the Grand Hyatt wordlessly. Wordlessly, their mouths found each other the moment they shut the door of the suite behind them. Wordlessly, their bodies crashed on each other's shores, no barriers now just skin on skin in the cool air.
It wasn't until they were about to drift off—cradling each other—that Tam spoke. "I love you, fatherless child."
Thirty-one
"We're looking for a man," Tam said. "His name is Tjok. We think he can help us find Quinn's father."
They were back on the beach, explaining the situation, flashing rupiah or U.S. dollars when they thought it would help, getting nowhere. And time was running out.
"Let's just enjoy the rest of our vacation and forget this," Quinn said as they took a break from the beach with burgers and fries at the Hard Rock Café. "It was always a long shot anyway."
"No," Tam said, putting his burger down and wiping his mouth. "It's going to happen. I can feel it. We just have to have faith and keep up our hopes."
"What about love, or are we only interested in two of the three theological virtues?"
"We'll always have that," Tam said, smiling and patting Quinn's arm.
Back on the beach, the sun was setting, along with Quinn's patience. Tam was as indefatigable as a pollster, stopping people, mostly men of a certain age, left and right. Quinn became aware that they were being watched by a young man.
"Do you know a guy named Tjok?" Tam asked.
"Maybe," the young man said. He was slight, brown, smiling and cagey, with a thatch of dark hair and a side part so deep that it looked like a comb-over, not that he needed one.
"You," he motioned to Quinn, "look like someone I know. Come and see."
Tam shrugged. "What have we got to lose?"
Quinn thought it a wild goose chase at best. Maybe the guy was just stringing them along for cash. Worse, maybe it was a trap. But they got in a cab with him, Tjok—whether or not that was his real name was anybody's guess—excitedly directing the driver of the Blue Bird taxi in Balinese. Tam and Quinn observed from the back seat, holding on as they hurtled from one roundabout to another.
"Do you have any idea what he's saying?" Tam asked Quinn.
"I think he's directing him to a house not far from here."
It was about halfway between Kuta and Nusa Dua in a quiet area filled with orange canna lilies and red bromeliads. The modest house, which stood by the water at the end of a long dirt road, would not have been out of place in a coastal suburb in the American South. Tam paid the driver but instructed him to stay. He was taking no chances.
"Wait, please," Tjok said. He ran into the house and, soon, those outside heard raised voices. Not long after that, a woman emerged with Tjok—pretty, slender, and of that indeterminate age that many women in midlife, particularly dark-skinned women, are. Quinn figured she was, however, old enough to be his and Tam's mother and was indeed Tjok's mother. She smiled at Tam as any polite hostess might but gasped and burst into tears, a hand covering her trembling lips, when she looked at Quinn. She embraced him then and after a while, he, arms open, embraced her as well, not knowing what else to do and not wanting to be ungracious and cause her any more distress.
"You," she said at last, "are my husband's son. You come in now, please."
Inside, the house was small, clean, and white—more beach house or cottage than a formal home, with comfortable wicker furnishings, lived-in cushions, and books, pictures, and mementoes strewn haphazardly if no less lovingly. Quinn thought about his own mother's palatial home with everything arranged at right angles for dynamism and the strangeness of a life in which a man could possibly make love—if you could call it that—to two such disparate women.
Of course, Quinn's father—if indeed the man who had yet to appear was his father—had not loved his mother. He had merely serviced a young woman who had too much to drink one night and took a dare from the friends who had always been more important to her than family, earning a souvenir she neither wanted nor thought she could get rid of.
Tjok's mother, Pina, disappeared into the kitchen, returning with oolong tea in a red, yellow and blue teapot with a dragon pattern and a bamboo handle and matching cups, along with a plateful of ginger cookies.
"My husband in back," she said. "He not well."
Her eyes pooled. "He dying. Please. You wait. I tell him, then you come."
Up until then, Quinn had been enjoying the house, the tea, the cookies, and the young, curious faces that peered at him and Tam and that belonged, he assumed, to Pina's younger children.
"I think we should go," he said to Tam. "We've obviously come at a bad time. I mean, what are we doing here? Even if this man is my father, and that's a big if, we've come too late."
"No, I don't think so," Tam said. "I think we've arrived just in time."
Pina returned to the living room then. "You come."
In a back bedroom, Quinn saw a thin man with a concave chest propped up in a white bed, gasping for air as he drowned in the sea of himself. Here is the other half of my soul, Quinn thought, as he looked at a face that was an older, ravaged version of his own.
He sat by the bed and took one of the man's—Artha's—offered hands.
"Hello," Quinn said softly. "I've come a long way—across a lifetime—to find you."
The man smiled faintly and turned slightly to gaze at Tam, who took his other hand as he sat on the opposite side of the bed.
"This is my friend," Quinn said. "No, this is my lover, my fiancé and soon my husband."
"Thank you for that," Tam said. "Sir, we're glad we found you and are happy to help you and your family in any way we can. We ask only one thing—your blessing on our marriage. You see, I love Quinn, but I don't think he can love me, love anyone really completely, until he's whole, until you give him your blessing as his father and let him go. Can you do that, sir?"
Tam turned to Pina. "Does he understand?" She was weeping now but composed herself to say something in Balinese.
Artha looked from Quinn to Tam, then upward at something they could not glimpse. He nodded and then closed his eyes, drifting off, but only for a short while.
They sat there a long time holding his hands, the three—father, son, and lover—connected by circumstances and their deepest desires. After a while, Artha drifted off again and Tam rose first, kissing him on the forehead and placing his hand on his groaning chest. Quinn followed suit.
"We'll be back tomorrow," Tam said to Pina, pressing some cash into her hands as he engulfed them with his own. He patted Tjok on the shoulder and tousled the yo
unger children's hair—his future brothers- and sisters-in-law.
"You realize that this could all be a scam," Quinn said back at their suite.
"You don't really believe that, do you?" Tam said.
No, he didn't. That night, Quinn dreamed that he and Tam were at a theater in New York. Artha, healthy and brimming with bonhomie, came in and sat down, smiling as he opened the program for the performance. But when Quinn rose to speak with him, he morphed into a mummy who slowly undid his wrappings to reveal—nothing but air.
Quinn woke with a start, went to the bathroom and settled back in bed, nestling in Tam's contented arms. The man could sleep through a nuclear attack, Quinn thought. Eventually, he, too, fell asleep and dreamt that he was back at Templars Stadium, only it wasn't a stadium at all but an office building afloat on the Jersey marshes, and Quinn had to work with others at a long bench in a hallway.
"But I can't concentrate," he told Smalley, a suit behind a big desk.
"If you can't concentrate, that's your affair," Smalley said before he, too, vanished.
Quinn woke with a start at five, fell back to sleep and didn't wake again until Tam, dressed and leaning over him, shook him gently, kissing him.
"Hey," Tam said softly, "Tjok called. Artha passed at two thirty. He waited for you, Quinnie. He waited for you."
Artha's body was cremated and his ashes cast into the sea after Pina and Tjok were rowed several yards from shore. Quinn watched with Tam and his half-siblings from the beach, having witnessed the burst of cremation fire from the temple as competing gamelans played and various relatives chatted, moved about and danced even, as if at a rock concert. Then they saw Pina, with Tjok at her side, holding the red urn, one hand on top, the other on the bottom as the two stepped carefully into the boat. Quinn thought back to Dave's funeral and how someone could be alive, however sickly one moment, and then reduced to a box no bigger than a tea caddy. He trembled slightly, Tam's arm steadying him as Pina released Artha's remains and his essence returned to the elements.
"Now we no see him," she later told Quinn. "But he watch us."
As the senior men in the family paddled Pina and Tjok back to shore, Quinn, Tam and the others there set lit paper lanterns adrift on the water, symbolizing the souls of the ancestors. Quinn and Tam crossed themselves, bowed their heads, and prayed.
At the house, they shared a meal with the family in the backyard, while dancers in red, green, and gold costumes performed. Quinn wandered alone along an overgrown stone path toward a wooded area.
"Tam," he called, "come look at this."
In the dusky wetlands, fireflies twinkled, like so many fallen stars.
Thirty-two
Tjok called early the next morning. "My mother would like to see the two of you," he said.
At the house, she spoke in Balinese to Tjok, punctuating her words with gestures to make sure he understood.
"My mother has a request," he said, half-embarrassed.
"Tjok, whatever you need, we're happy to help," Tam said.
"No, no, it's nothing like that," Tjok said, laughing, "only that she wishes to dance at your wedding."
"Well, how 'bout it?" Tam said to Quinn.
"How 'bout what?"
"Getting married."
"Here? Are you kidding? I can just imagine it now: The selfie seen 'round the world. Are you crazy?"
"Look, Quinn, I know gay marriage isn't legal here. But a ceremony of some sort would please Pina, and it would be a sign of our commitment to each other—a preview of the real thing. Besides, we owe it to our future children."
"Will there be future children? Will there be a future, is what I suppose I'm really asking."
"What's the matter, Quinnie?"
"I can't, Tam. I can't marry you."
"I know all this is sudden, but—"
"No, you don't understand. I can't marry you anytime, anywhere. I can't ever marry you."
Quinn walked out of the house then and wandered down the path to where he had seen the fireflies. He didn't have to turn around when he heard footsteps. He recognized Tam's footfall.
"That's it? We've come all this way—I don't mean in miles but in time—for it to end like this? Because I've got to tell you, I won't let it. I'm going to fight for us even if you won't."
"Don't you see? We can't do what we were meant to do—and I don't think I fully understood that until this moment—and be openly gay and married. I don't know. Perhaps I'm more Indonesian than I thought."
Tam was quiet for what seemed like a long while, taking it all in.
"So what you're saying is that the only way I can hold on to you is to let you go. I'm sorry, but that's not good enough."
"I get it, really I do. Let's shake hands then and part right now as friends."
"No, I mean I'm not willing to let you go. If a life, a commitment in secret is what it takes, then that's a price I'm willing to pay. Because wherever I am, it will be all right as long as I know that you're in the world, and I belong to you and you to me."
Tam's eyes appeared large and glassy, Quinn thought. Perhaps they merely reflected his own.
"All right," Quinn said, exhaling. "You do understand the conventions of having a commitment ceremony in the style of a Balinese wedding?"
"I'm sure I can get with the playbook," Tam said.
"OK, then, prepare to be kidnapped."
"Kidnapped?"
"Yes, the bride is kidnapped by the groom's relations and taken to his village."
"Wait a minute, how come I'm the bride? I thought we were both the grooms."
"Perhaps then neither of us will be kidnapped."
Since Quinn was half-Indonesian and thus playing for "the home team," as Tam put it, the family decided that Tam would be kidnapped. The evening before the wedding, Quinn kissed Tam goodnight and went to stay with Pina and her family. The next day, Quinn's newfound senior male relations arrived at the hotel and "kidnapped" Tam, escorting him to the family home. Quinn grew solemn though when he saw his beloved, a mirror of himself in a light-gray suit with a gold sash and woven crown. Now it was Tam's turn to tremble and Quinn's to take his hand reassuringly as they exchanged scaly silver dragon rings with gold heads and flashing ruby eyes by John Hardy, whose verdant, terraced complex they had visited an hour away in Ubud.
The only thing missing was any photographic record of the event, everyone present understanding the importance of keeping it private. It saddened Quinn. In a selfie world it was as if the moment didn't exist without a camera to take note of it. But then that made it all the more necessary to live the moment and cherish it, didn't it?
"This will just have to remain in our minds and memory," he said after he and Tam exchanged their individually written vows.
At Pina's backyard party, she wept as she led some of the ladies in a graceful dance. A gamelan group offered traditional music, then accompanied Tam's iTunes selections most harmoniously, including the song the couple had chosen for their first dance, George Michael's Father Figure. The guests clapped rhythmically as Quinn and Tam took turns leading, whirling each other around.
As the song reached its plagal conclusion, with its Eastern flavor, Quinn and Tam kissed. It was, Quinn decided, however secret, the perfect marriage of East and West.
Thirty-three
"It's all for the best," Syd said—in a manner that was somewhat self-congratulatory, Quinn thought—when they returned to Jakarta and informed her and Chan that not only was the wedding off but the past—hers, Quinn's and whatever happened in Bali—would remain there.
"Well, I have to say that took real courage," Chan said, raising a glass to both of them at a farewell luncheon. "I salute you both."
Oh, yes, everyone will be perfectly happy—except perhaps us, Quinn thought. But no one likes a martyr. And no one has everything.
"So what will you two do now?" Chan wondered.
That was the question, wasn't it? There were NFL careers to consider, Quinn thought, a relationship to
navigate privately and to balance with those careers, people he would have to confront or, at the very least, contend with, like Mal and Smalley; people who needed him, like Kelly, Nero, his teammates, and the kids at the orphanage.
The kids: Quinn and Tam had vowed on the night of their commitment ceremony—after Quinn had presented Tam with an Indonesian canoe paddle, symbol of a warrior, and Tam had given Quinn a potted evergreen studded with stargazer lilies, like the Christmas trees of his childhood—that the orphanage would be their life's work, whatever it took. And in this, Quinn now understood, Syd and Chan would help them.
So what did it matter that he would probably never love her just as she had never loved him? Tam would love her. Tam would be the bridge, Quinn's gift to her. And she in turn would use her influence to complete the new orphanage. Quinn could see it all now, could see that it was meant to be and that it would be enough.
At the orphanage, he and Tam waited in a garden to take their leave of Adhi before flying home. It was a place that offered balm to Quinn's fears, where everything was as it was before. Soon Adhi appeared with Nir and Lan, their backpacks in tow.
"They've been waiting every day for your return," Adhi said, laughing. "They have some things they've made for you."
Nir nodded then and Lan came forward with a card made out of heavy, cream-colored construction paper, with the word "Thank You" scrawled in red and green crayons and decorated with stickers. Nir had a card, too. It showed four stick figures—two adults and two children with arrows pointing to Nir and Lan's names. He presented it gravely to Quinn, who knew who the two adults were meant to be.
"Thank you for our presents and for all you do for the children here," Nir said, reading what he had written.
Tam crouched down. "Come here, Nir," he said. "I want to ask you something, man-to-man, because you're the head of your family and very grownup. Would you and Lan give me and Quinn the honor of watching over you especially?"
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