by B. G. Thomas
“Neil, it’s okay.”
“You’re my wife’s sister!” I protested aloud.
“That isn’t it, though, is it? Any man would at least sneak a peek. My brother would. That’s what men do. Hey, I’ve got a great rack!” She started to laugh.
“Amy,” I muttered. I was horrified.
“Look at me,” she said softly. There was… love in her voice.
Enough that I almost did look. But no! No, I couldn’t.
“Neil, look. It’s okay. They’re just breasts.”
I closed my eyes, a million years passed, and then I looked.
Amy’s breasts. I stared. They were bigger than Em’s. I supposed they were beautiful. Supposed she was right. Any man would have wanted to look. She was a beautiful woman. But, once again. Nothing. Nothing. Why did they do absolutely nothing for me?
“Nothing. Right?”
“You’re beautiful,” I said. But like a deer or a horse or a tiger swallowtail.
A tear slipped down my face. I shook my head.
Amy settled, allowing the bubbles to cover her again, and I felt a slight relief.
“You’re gay,” Amy said.
“No,” I whispered.
“Neil?”
I looked into her lovely eyes. Looked for the judgment. The recrimination. The disgust. There was nothing but love there. And why would there be anything else? I asked myself. Hadn’t she said it didn’t bother her that Cole was gay? In fact, she’d gotten pretty mad at me the other day—something she almost never did—when I was upset about Cole’s gayness. Hell, when had that been? A day ago? Two? A thousand years? She’d said she couldn’t believe I was upset and told me that Cole was “a very nice young man.”
But this was different! This was me, dammit, not some boy wrangler on a ranch in the middle of nowhere.
“You’re gay, Neil,” she said again, and I bristled at the idea.
I shook my head. No. Not gay. I could just appreciate the male form, that’s all. Like that horse or that butterfly. But not…. Not….
“Em knew,” Amy repeated. “It’s okay.”
I fell back, completely shocked. “What?”
“Em always knew. Way back. When you showed up at the house needing a place to stay. She knew something was up then.”
The surreal moment became even more dreamlike. What the hell had happened? One minute I was walking through a field of flowers and looking at butterflies, and the next thing I knew I was naked in a hot tub with my sister-in-law asking if I was gay. No, telling me I was gay. She knew I was gay. It was like I was in an episode of The Twilight Zone.
“It was the night the police showed up.”
I went numb.
That night.
“You showed up, and then Mom called the police, and that’s when you came to stay with us for a while.”
The numbness spread.
“Something about your mom, I never completely knew the story, which drove me crazy, because Em told me almost everything.”
“She really didn’t tell you?” I asked, surprised.
Amy shook her head. “Nope. But she did find out what happened with you and that track buddy of yours. He came around and said something to her after you and Em started to date seriously. He wasn’t happy about it at all. He accused Em of stealing you.”
Jack did what? “He said she stole me?”
Amy nodded. “He did, Neil.”
I went from numb to light-headed. This was all too much. Jack had gone to Em about me? And no one had ever told me?
“He kept coming to me at school,” I said. “He kept telling me he wanted to get together again. And all I could see was that girl jumping on him and licking his face, and it… it made me sick, Amy. I kept thinking that my mom was right. That gay sex made you evil.”
“You really thought that?”
I looked at her and nodded.
Yes. I had really thought that.
Then Amy nodded. “I guess that explains it. He told her that the two of you had started something very special and she had ruined it.”
I could only stare. “She knew that Jack and I…?”
She nodded again.
“All that time….” Em had always known I…? That I liked…? I thought I was going to faint.
The world wavered in and out; then Amy was next to me, arm around me, her left breast pressed against my chest. “Neil. Babe. It’s okay.”
“No. No, it’s not!” The world was coming to an end.
“Yes, it is.”
I shook my head. World—was—ending.
“Em thought he was lying at first, but then she started to notice little things.”
Little things?
“The way you would look at some guy, the fact you never tried anything sexual with her, never tried to… you know… feel her up the way guys had tried to do with her before. That you wanted to wait until the two of you got married before you had sex….”
“Em talked to you about shit like this?” I gasped.
Amy nodded. “Of course she did. We were sisters. You were an only child, so you probably don’t know about things like that. But sisters talk. We talk about boys. We talk about men. We talk about sex. Or we did. Emily and I were a lot closer than most sisters.”
Somewhere along the line, I had started crying, although I didn’t know when.
“Em thought I was gay?”
“It’s okay. She didn’t mind. You made love to her. Not often, but….”
Again, I thought I might faint. They talked about our sex life? I didn’t think about our sex life! They talked about it?
“It wasn’t that important to Em. She didn’t really care that you two didn’t make love very often. She liked sex, but she wasn’t the little horndog I am.” Amy laughed.
“This isn’t happening,” I whispered.
“Yes, it is. And I think it’s way, way past time it did. Em decided to talk to you and changed her mind a thousand times through the years. She wondered why you were with her.”
“I loved her,” I all but shouted.
Amy nodded. “Yes, I believe you did. So did Emily. But she could tell you weren’t fulfilled by her.”
“Of course I was,” I protested. “She was all I had. All there was. She was my compass. The only damned reason my life had any direction. You saw! You saw I nearly died with her.”
“She worried one day you’d finally leave her.”
The tears were pouring down my face now. “Why are you telling me this?”
Amy sighed and leaned back. “Because it’s time you hear it. It’s been too long coming.”
I tried to look at her, but she was a blur. “What the hell are you talking about?”
She took a deep breath. “You know how you asked me why I wanted you to come with me for my vacation? You don’t understand why I’d want to be here, right? Because I came here so many years with Owen.”
I nodded. “You’re right. I don’t understand.”
“I wanted to lose myself in Owen before he’s gone.”
Before he’s gone? What was she talking about? Owen was buried—gone!
Maybe I was dreaming? None of this was making any sense. A bear would show up any moment.
And then I would wake up. Yes.
Wake up, I shouted in my head.
“Before all that’s left of Owen is a memory. Before I need pictures to remember what he looked like.” Now Amy was crying. “It’s already hard to remember. I keep seeing how he looked in the hospital at the end instead of the sweet young man he was when we met, the smile he used to get me to go on those first dates. God, I loved him so much.”
“Amy,” I said, reaching out and touching her shoulder.
“I know he’ll begin to fade, and before he does, I want to be around everything that reminds me of all the good times, so that’s the way I remember him instead of that… dried up mummy.” A sob escaped her.
My heart melted, and I started to cry again.
“Babe
,” Amy said, “you need to deal with your ghosts once and for all. And I don’t mean Em. I mean whatever it was that fucked you up before Em.”
“What do you mean?” I sighed.
“Have you ever made love with a man?” Amy asked.
“No!” This time I did shout.
“But you’ve been with men?”
“No! I… yes… no.”
“Which is it, Neil?”
I almost took off once again, but before I could, she reached out and took my wrist in her hand. “No. Don’t you dare run away again. You’ve been running all your life. You’ve gotta stop running sometime.”
I looked at her, and the tears got thick again, and she went out of focus.
“Tell me, Neil.”
“I… I can’t” was all I could say.
She sighed again. “All right.” She dropped her head back, and neither of us spoke for a long time. Then she said, “Look. Is that a hawk?”
I looked up and couldn’t see anything, so I wiped my eyes, then looked again. It was the lone bird I’d seen, what, twice now? Was that yesterday? The day before?
“It looks lonely, don’t you think?” Amy asked.
“Free,” I said. “I think it looks free.”
Neither of us spoke for a moment.
“Don’t you want to be free?” Amy said.
The world blurred out again, and Amy took me in her arms. This time our nudity didn’t bother me. We were just people, after all. Different body parts, but people. And it felt good to be held. I cried some more.
Then a thought began to rise. It rose with a shocking and crystal clarity I could not deny.
Just body parts? It feels good to be held?
Was that the reasoning that had allowed me to get involved with Emily in the first place? Just body parts? Did I convince myself it didn’t matter what kind of body she had? That love was love? Had I cast aside a lifetime of being held by a man by deluding myself that being held by someone who loved me was all that mattered?
I pulled back. “Oh damn, Amy.”
And I began to talk.
Finally.
CHAPTER 9: Retrospect
BUT FIRST we dressed and went into my cabin. I made coffee, not giving a shit that I wouldn’t be able to sleep. Hell, there was always the whiskey.
We sat on the front porch, and I remembered the morning with Cole…. Was that today? Yesterday? Yesterday, yes.
I asked Amy if she thought I had hobbit feet, and she laughed until she choked.
“I’ve always thought so,” she said. “Even before the movies.”
Somewhere around then we left behind carefree banter, and I began to talk.
I was eighteen before I truly realized I was attracted to men and the incident with George at church camp, the incidents, hadn’t just been some kind of experiment. Looking back, I don’t know how I couldn’t have known. All I had to do was see a man take off his shirt on TV and my attention was riveted to the screen. Locker rooms were both a nightmare and the fuel for wet dreams. Photographs of a nude South American man or an Aboriginal in National Geographic held far more promise or excitement to me than a Penthouse magazine, unless there was a special spread showing a woman and a man together. A glimpse of cock was all I needed and I was excited and masturbating, and like most red-blooded teenage boys, I masturbated a lot. How could I have not known I liked men? How had I convinced myself otherwise? How did I delude myself into believing that I liked women? I don’t know.
I suppose it was fear.
No. No supposing about it.
It was fear.
Attracted to men.
I was attracted to men.
And damn! There was that school counselor. The one who told me that it was perfectly normal for boys to fool around with boys. “Experimenting” was the word he used. Funny how I so suddenly remembered that. Experimenting.
“What was it exactly you two did?” he had asked me, sitting so close to me our thighs touched. And that hand on my shoulder.
Mr. Morcant. His name came to me then, hard and fast, and I felt nauseous. Like I might puke.
He’d gotten me to tell him all about what George and I did—had pressed for details. He’d told me that what the two of us had done was perfectly normal. He’d told me all about my raging hormones and that boys my age couldn’t—shouldn’t—fool around with girls. He told me that would be wrong, and that I could get a girl pregnant—and that there was nothing wrong with us “helping each other out.”
“In fact,” he’d said, “it’s beautiful.”
And then he’d laid his hand on my leg and I saw the front of his dress slacks were all bulged out, and I knew just what that meant.
He was hard.
Mr. Morcant was excited.
Somehow I got out of there. Was it a phone call? His intercom?
I never went back. He’d only proved to me what I’d read in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask). That homosexuals were depraved. That all they did was search and search and search for the perfect penis—that’s why they were so promiscuous—and that they would never ever find the perfect penis because the perfect penis was their own penis and what they needed was a vagina.
“My God,” Amy said. “This happened when you were in junior high school?”
I nodded.
“Thank God you got away from him.”
As if God had anything to do with it one way or the other, I thought, fighting back a sneer. I didn’t want her to think I meant it for her.
After that day in Mr. Morcant’s office, I held desperately to the thought and hope that one day I would get married and would want her vagina, and I’d want to be sexual with a woman and I would think that beautiful.
But that didn’t happen.
As much as I loved Emily, as much as she was truly my compass, always pointing me north, I never felt for her what I had felt for George. Or Jack.
I was, am, a white male, and decent looking. The world should’ve been my oyster.
But I was different.
And dammit, I didn’t want to be different!
So I tried to forget things. Pretend they didn’t exist. That they never happened.
Like those issues of National Geographic.
Those issues of Penthouse.
Dirk Benedict.
I was only a kid when I saw this movie called Sssssss one night late on television when I thought my mother had gone to bed. There was this scene… I wish I could explain it. Terrible movie, I realize now, but for a kid, it was awesome. Young man gets turned into a giant snake by an evil scientist. What’s not for a boy to love?
The thing is, there was this scene where the hero, played by Dirk Benedict, was going skinny-dipping with this girl. And she had these thick glasses. The two undressed, and as he dropped his pants, she took off her glasses, and the movie went out of focus. I remembered crying out, hurt by it.
Then to my horror, I saw my mother standing there. She’d happened to be going through the room when it happened. We stared at each other for… forever. She turned off the TV. I was so upset. I didn’t understand what was going on inside me, but Mother did. She got down on her knees and made me pray for forgiveness. I didn’t even understand what I was asking forgiveness for.
Amy had been holding my hand through this part of the story and she was doing what she did best. Listening. Barely said a word. Not that she couldn’t talk the leg off a chair. But right then listening was what she was doing.
She stopped me only so she could go refill her mug.
Amy, who could easily drink a pot of coffee a day. Sometimes two.
WHEN SHE got back, I told her what had happened a year later when I was in fourth grade.
My friend Rod and I—“That really was his name,” I told her—snuck into an R-rated action flick at the local theater when we were supposed to be seeing a Disney movie (the only thing Mom would let me see). There was a scene where the hero somehow wound up tied down in his und
erwear and tortured. I don’t remember which actor he was or even the name of the movie. All I know is I couldn’t stop staring at his bare chest and the mound in the front of his underwear.
As it turned out, Rod was spending the night at my house, and we decided to reenact the scene. It turned out Rod liked it as much as I did. First, Rod played the hero, and I tied him to my twin bed with a jump rope and an extension cord. Like the hero, all he was wearing was his Fruit of the Looms, and I couldn’t keep my eyes off the small bulge in those undies. I wanted to touch him there, and I was so excited, but I didn’t know why.
Then it was my turn to get tied to the bed. Rod didn’t bother to get dressed. We were both hard as could be, tenting out the front of our underwear, when my mother—without knocking—walked into the room.
There was this frozen moment, and then she sort of went insane. She started screaming about sin and hell, and she was hitting me with this belt, and I couldn’t move. I was still tied to the bed. The buckle… she hit me with the buckle end. Rod ran for home. Not long after, there were police. They took me away for a while—the childhood memory isn’t clear. Was it a few days? A few weeks?
I sort of blotted it all out after I was allowed to go home. I never saw Rod again, and pictures of Jesus replaced the posters of Tarzan and Superman in my room.
How did I not know I was attracted to my own sex?
How did I not know?
IT WAS my turn for coffee then, and Amy used the opportunity to go ahead and top hers off. After I went to the bathroom to relieve myself. Coffee went right through me.
Then we settled at the kitchen table.
It was closer to the coffee.
Amy urged me to continue. She knew my story was far from over.
Years after my night with Rod, on my eighteenth birthday, my friend Jack, who I’d gotten buddy-buddy with in track, decided to make my birthday one I’d never forget.
He was right. It was a birthday I would never forget.
I wanted to be around Jack whenever I could. I always looked at him in the shower after track—his smooth chest, his round ass, his long penis—and here was another example! How did I not know I was attracted to my own sex? At first, Mom was okay with Jack. He was very masculine, and his parents were cornerstones of the church she went to at the time. She said he was the sort of influence I needed.