We Had No Rules

by Corinne Manning

  “Luke,” he said to me, and then pointed to someone who I understand now was probably his lover: “Aaron.”

  Luke had a hoop earring like my uncle did. A golden cross dangled from my uncle’s, and one time I made the mistake of trying to pull it out of his ear. Uncle Jim screamed and threw me down. I don’t think I hurt him that badly, but there might have been a drop of blood. He called for my mom and started to cry. My mom told him not to worry, that there was no way anything could have happened, but I could tell by the rough way she washed my hands that she felt otherwise.

  “Uncle Jim doesn’t feel well sometimes, so you shouldn’t pull on his earring,” she explained.

  Afterwards, my hands were raw, and my mom, rather than using lotion because all she had was her pretty-smelling stuff, coated them in Vaseline. I doubt she thought that she was preparing me to fist the world. When she wasn’t looking, I wiped the gook off on the side of the couch.

  Luke saw me staring at his earring and winked. “Your uncle gave it to me today. Told me I had to start trusting in the Lord,” he said, gently flicking the cross with his nail.

  I looked over at the hospital bed, and Uncle Jim, blind at this point, faced blankly in my direction. His ear was empty.

  “I can’t touch the earring,” I said.

  My mom shook my arm and looked like she wanted me to disappear. Or she wanted to disappear. I’m not sure. Luke looked like the kind of person who was always forgiving someone. It was like he’d spent his whole life doing this, as an obligation.

  “Young men have to listen to their mamas,” he said, and then walked over to my uncle and kissed his temple, the skin as thin as paper. He and Aaron left us alone.

  I didn’t want to stay long. Maybe it was because I knew my uncle was dying and the room had that strange rotting smell. Maybe it was because I knew my father didn’t want us to come and my grandmother had made a point of not going. What I feel now, and was maybe a part of what I felt then, is that I hated keeping those men—his real family—out of the room, away from my uncle.

  So maybe I lied. I had met old queens before. They just weren’t old when I met them.

  —

  Inside my apartment, I pull on a pair of Brian’s basketball shorts and Geraldine and I get on the bed to begin our photo shoot: moody looks directly into the camera, despondent looks out to the edges of the frame. There is a lovely one of us gazing into each other’s eyes, and a candid shot of her resting her head on my chest. I post them all online and text the last one to Brian. A few moments later, my phone buzzes.

  Put clothes on. We’re coming over.

  I’m dressed, I type back. My suit coat’s off.

  I jump up and wash under my armpits, under my balls, and my ass. I splash cold water on my face. By the time I hear footsteps on the stairs outside I am lacing my shoes. Brian knocks first before using the key.

  I kiss him on the cheek. His bald, shiny uncle steps in like he has been to my apartment dozens of times. Even though he’s totally in his fifties, he looks tightly put together. I notice that the green rim of his eyeglasses matches a strip along the edge of his dress shoes.

  “Rick.” He shakes my hand slowly as he gazes around the living room. “Well, aren’t you two an image of domesticity?”

  “I don’t live here,” Brian says quickly. He pats his leg and Geraldine jumps off the bed and runs to him.

  “We’re going to move in together next summer, once Brian finishes school,” I say.

  “Being monogamous so young is like dancing on the periphery of the world, don’t you think?”

  Neither of us answers.

  Rick kneels down to massage Geraldine’s neck. She sighs and steps towards him.

  “And you, sir,” he says, looking up at me. “Congratulations on your graduation. What’s next?”

  I look down at my outfit and notice a smudged fingerprint on my belt buckle. I’m afraid Rick will think it’s Brian’s. I rub at it with my jacket.

  “Navel-gazing, buckle-shining?” He winks at me, and my face feels hot and swollen. I can’t imagine my uncle Jim being this way.

  “Summer just started, so I’m going to see how it goes.”

  Rick is bored by this response. And with that, we decide not to like each other.

  “James may have work with a law firm in August, and he might work there for a year. They said they would be interested in putting him through law school if that was the direction he wanted to go,” Brian says.

  Rick laughs and wipes his shiny head like it is made of money and you can always use more. “If you’re going to be a rich one, I suppose he can hang on to you.”

  —

  The drive is embarrassing because Rick insists on sitting in the back seat and I feel like I don’t deserve this space in the passenger seat, like I’ve overridden family. Rick is oblivious, gazing out the window with his sunglasses on. Brian touches my knee. Would I cover his hand with my own if Uncle Jim were in the back seat? Probably. Brian’s hand rests there, without mine, for the whole ride, pulling away instinctively when we reach the valet. I spot the attendant’s AIDS ribbon and realize I have forgotten mine.

  I pick a ribbon out of the bowl on the valet stand, but Rick plucks it out of my hand and insists on pinning it on me. I’ve never had another man, aside from Brian, this close to me, this attentive, working his fingers, smoothing the lapel of my jacket.

  “So when we leave tonight, we each need to give him a nice tip. Did you bring cash?”

  I nod, but Brian says nothing. Rick is still working on me and I’m enjoying looking up at his face, which is actually quite handsome.

  “The valet attendants and the servers are all clients of the alliance’s centre for the homeless, so it is an unspoken rule that we take care of them tonight.”

  I try to nod like I know, like this doesn’t faze me. I try to picture Uncle Jim as the attendant, and for a second, I see him at his healthiest, saying hello jovially, opening the door with a flourish, bowing, flipping the key in his hand like someone out of an eighties movie. I imagine him taking a Corvette for a joyride with Luke—cigarettes in their mouths, Uncle Jim’s hand crawling up Luke’s thigh.

  Inside, the men wear some of the nicest suits I’ve ever seen. Aside from the one gay bar in town, I’ve never been in a room with so many men.

  —

  When I first met Brian, we were excited to learn we both had gay uncles, who tested positive at the same time, even if their outcomes were different.

  “Rick was involved in ACT UP. He threw himself on the ground and got arrested and stuff,” Brian told me. It was one of our first afternoons together and we lay next to each other in our boxer shorts, Brian’s socks still on, the air conditioner humming.

  “Maybe our uncles knew each other,” he mused, ruffling the hair on my belly.

  “I don’t know—mine wasn’t really out.”

  “Oh,” Brian said. “Sometimes I forget that. It’s strange to think about that time ’cause people aren’t really dying from it anymore, not like before. You know,” he said as he rolled on top of me, “it’s amazing that we found each other so early in our lives. We don’t have to worry about AIDS or anything, because we’ll be together forever. We could even have unprotected sex.”

  I was still getting used to the feeling of someone else’s weight on me, and I had yet to get hard from being scared. He pulled off my boxers, and I placed a leg over his shoulder.

  “Probably worth keeping up the practice,” I said. “Just, you know, for now.”

  “Oh, sure,” he said. “For now.”

  —

  Uncle Jim was a failure—not a success, like Rick. Standing in this lobby with these men, I feel like a failure, too.

  I text my mom: Uncle Jim’s friend Luke. What was his last name?

  I walk over to the bar with Brian and Rick and wait for my phone to buzz. The air conditioning is too high and I’m shivering. The bartender hands me a glass of ice water and it is so cold that holding
it hurts my hand.

  “Give me a Red Label, neat,” Brian says.

  I’m surprised and try to catch his eye, but he doesn’t look at me. It hadn’t occurred to me that I could drink in front of his uncle. I reach into my wallet and put money in the tip jar. I receive a glittery smile from the bartender.

  If “people aren’t really dying from it anymore,” then why are we here? I sip at my water and check my phone while Brian meets Rick’s friends. No message yet, just the lock screen photo of me, Brian, and sweet, panting Geraldine on the beach together—Slide to unlock.

  I feel Brian’s lips at my ear. “He’s talking to you.” Brian nods to a man about Rick’s age with a full head of silver hair. He looks like an executive.

  “Sweetie, I was just trying to tell you that you’re wearing a beautiful tie.”

  His finger moves along it nonchalantly, and I feel like the fabric isn’t there and it is just his skin on my skin. I can’t help but look down at where his finger had been, and the man laughs, grabs Brian’s shoulder.

  “Oh, he’s cute. You locked onto a good one.”

  At the announcement for us to go to our tables, the phone shakes in my hand: Luke Melville. Sorry, had 2 look it up. Love you, Mom.

  I place the awful water on the table and dry my hands on a napkin. “I should have gotten what you got,” I whisper to Brian.

  “Give me a dollar to tip him and I’ll go get you one. I want another one myself.”

  I hand him the money and realize Rick is watching the whole exchange, leaning back with his hand on his chin and a shitty smile.

  “Careful what habits you establish. You’re too young for roles yet.”

  I try not to look at him, and run my hands back and forth over my arms, which doesn’t create any heat worth talking about.

  “It’s freezing in here,” I say. “I almost feel like I need to step outside to warm up.”

  “It’s always freezing at these events, no matter what time of year. Everyone brings their ghosts with them.”

  I’m not sure it’s possible to understand a word this man says, but I lean in.

  “I wonder if you knew my uncle? Jim Fox? He died in eighty-nine.”

  Rick frowns and shakes his head. He is gazing across the room, looking for someone else to speak to.

  “His name sounds familiar, but it might just be a familiar-sounding name.”

  “What about Luke Melville?”

  Now he looks me in the eye. His are a very light blue.

  “Of course—we did a lot of organizing together.”

  “He was my uncle’s best friend,” I say shyly, uncertain whether I can claim him at all.

  “Maybe I remember meeting your uncle—Southern, like Luke but not nearly as charming. First-lovers-cum-best-friends.”

  A hot water with lemon is placed in front of Rick and I realize I want that much more than a Scotch. He blows on it before taking a sip.

  “Luke’s still around. He moved out to California. We’ve lost touch, but I think we’re Facebook friends.”

  He starts scrolling through his phone.

  “Here she is. I’ll suggest the two of you become friends. Do you have the same last name as your uncle?”

  “No—we’re related through my mother.”

  “Well, that’s even better. It gives me a reason to send him a message.”

  I’m tempted to ask what he’s writing as his pointer finger moves across the screen, but I resist. That’s not what adults do. I can smell Brian’s deodorant before he even sits down again. He places the drink in front of me, and it is filled to the top with ice. I thank him, but I don’t want to touch it—why can’t I get away from this ice? The glass sits there, sweating.

  “There’s this riddle my uncle told me,” I blurt out to the table.

  One or two men stop their conversations and look at me, the others keep talking, and the only way I know they are aware I exist is how their eyes dart over at me. I clear my throat.

  “I have a riddle,” I say, like I’m on the phone with a client who really needs to get the law firm his paperwork, and with that I have the table’s attention. Uncle Rick sighs with boredom and I scoot so that I’m angled away from him, even though this means my back is to Brian.

  “I don’t know if I’m remembering it right. Something like two men each drank a Scotch on the rocks. One was poisoned, the other wasn’t. How did he get poisoned?”

  “There must be more to the riddle than that,” Rick says.

  I close my eyes, trying to remember: the rec room on a Sunday, my uncle in front of the TV.

  “Well, they were both given the drink at the same time, I think.”

  “Oh, I know this one,” the silver-haired executive says. “They both ordered Scotch on the rocks. One man had to go to a business meeting, so he drank it really fast. The other one died of poisoning because he had nowhere to go, so he savoured his drink over the course of half an hour.”

  I remember my uncle laughing afterwards—it was “such a puritan riddle,” he said. “Protestants always out to scare us for taking pleasure in anything.” This idea was more complicated to me than the riddle, which back then made me picture turkeys and weird wide-barrelled guns and men in pilgrim garb drinking Scotch, and the dead one slipping his shoes off under the table as he drinks, and at the thought of those stockinged feet I got this tiny almost-erection, my first. I get it now, the Protestant part, not the erection, here in this cold room.

  “It’s a real puritan riddle,” I say, feeling powerful in their thoughtful silence.

  “Oh, I never thought of it that way but absolutely,” the executive says, and his eye contact is warm, and I briefly imagine myself in a bathroom stall with him, then out of the stall, in some rest area on I-40 and its 1985—my uncle would have been twenty-two then, like me. The executive has me all the way down his throat, everyone’s watching, and there’s a thrill—no, it’s total joy—I feel in my chest.

  “A Catholic riddle,” he says, still looking at me.

  “Protestant,” I say. “Real anti-pleasure.”

  “Oh, stop it. What do you know about pleasure?” Uncle Rick says.

  “The ice!” Brian exclaims.

  My whole body twitches at the sound of his voice. I look away from the executive. The bathroom disappears.

  “The poison was in the ice. The guy who died let his ice melt.”

  Someone gives a little golf clap and there’s some charmed laughter as Brian coyly lifts a shoulder to his ear.

  “Not exactly the most appropriate riddle for tonight. Don’t lawyers have a bit more tact? Oh wait,” Rick says.

  I turn my chair back towards him so fast I almost tip. “Did I, like, do something to you?” I ask. “Because I think I’ve been nice.” And the only thing that keeps me from feeling everyone’s discomfort is the relief of giving in to anger.

  “Excuse me?” He looks shocked and I know it’s bullshit, but I feel myself losing my argument, so I just put my hand around my drink, which has made a wet spot on the table.

  “Not the time or place,” he says.

  Brian’s hand squeezes the back of my neck, and I appreciate the attempt, though I don’t like how the men at the table are looking at us, like we are a joke. And we are, only having been with each other while, regardless, this ice melts in front of me.

  Across from my glass, the executive is still looking at me. He winks, very understated and stylish. Everyone around us communicates in a common language and I don’t know the rules. Brian and I fuck, but we aren’t gay yet. We tiptoe on the periphery of the world.

  The lights dim and men come onstage to give speeches. I hear Brian whisper something to his uncle. I know it’s about me, and I don’t care to see his uncle’s reaction. First-lovers-cum-bestfriends. Many of the men around us are crying because of what the speaker is saying. This is what it means to be in a room full of ghosts.

  My phone buzzes and I check it under the tablecloth, the blue glow radiating out from my l
ap. I approve Luke Melville’s friend request, and there’s a message from him: Your dog is so adorable!

  I reply, Thanks, but she’s not my dog.

  I put my phone away and don’t care to see if I’ve annoyed anyone. I join in on the applause. I sip from my drink.

  chewbacca

  and clyde

  Meredeth and I never got married. We never even declared that we were monogamous. For all intents and purposes there was nothing that distinguished the first night we got together (feigning obliviousness, drunken on our dorm room floor) from the ten years we spent together. But that didn’t make the infidelity hurt any less.

  In the beginning we didn’t get married because we didn’t think about it, it didn’t seem to be what queers did, but then when our friends started having commitment ceremonies we thought, Well, maybe we’ll do that next year. And with every cherries jubilee we made for commitment potluck after commitment potluck, we said, “Us too, next year.”

  Until we reached eight years, and one night in bed I leaned over and whispered to her, “Let’s not bother.”

  She turned to me with more enthusiasm than she had in quite a while and clutched my hand to her breast.

  “Oh, thank God. I don’t want to either.”

  —

  Have you ever gotten carried away? Or felt more in touch with yourself than you’ve felt for a long time, and it’s brought on not necessarily by the proximity of another person, or by longing, but by a day of bright, clear sun, or swimming in warm water and feeling the whateverness of your own body?

  I found a group on Meetup called Rainbow Rompers who were hosting a queer backpacking trip. I was dangling from the talons of a conversation with my agent earlier that week, who dropped me because my writing was getting “too gay” in a quirky, subversive way, not in a boring, predictable way, not in keeping with my formula.

  I’d once been hailed as the Philip Roth of gay and lesbian fiction and my formula was tight. If a gun appeared in the first act, it always went off in the next. A straight character got seduced, a mother came to understand, and a dazzling John Updike finish. Though no one compared me to John Updike, and the only place where I sold anything like Roth, where people bought my books because they felt they should or because I was someone they were supposed to like, was in Seattle and at Bluestockings bookstore in New York. But my agent tells me that neither of those venues are accurate or representative, and that when I talk like this I sound like someone who doesn’t quite understand the publishing game trying to critique it anyway.