Men Who Love Men (19 page)

“It was at that moment,” he tells us, “that I fell in love with Darryl.”

“Why then?” Lloyd asks. Silently I curse him for keeping Luke engaged, for not letting the story end there.

“Because I saw his
soul
,” Luke says earnestly. “Our spirits just met in that one moment.”

Lloyd makes a face in sympathy, but I want to barf. Around Jeff, Luke talks
his
language—all about the craft of writing and being dedicated to his novel. Around Lloyd, he uses words like
soul
and
spirit
because he knows Lloyd will respond to them. In both cases, he’s simply sucking up, trying to win his listener over—but I see through his games. I refuse to pay attention to Luke any longer. I return to the computer to see if Shane has written me back yet. He hasn’t, but I pretend to be reading something on the screen.

“We were only together a short while,” Luke is saying, with Lloyd still listening raptly. “Darryl got sick very soon thereafter. But in that short period of time I truly fell in love with him. He was such a young soul, Darryl was. He wasn’t ready to leave this life. He kept saying he would come back, that I’d meet him again, and since I was an old soul, I’d be able to recognize him.”

“Have you?” Lloyd asks.

“Sometimes. In the stars over Provincetown. In the way the water laps at the shore…”

I have to clamp a hand over my mouth to prevent a groan from escaping my lips, but from the look on Lloyd’s face, I can tell he buys the kid’s tale one-hundred percent.

“You had a loved one die of AIDS, too, didn’t you, Lloyd?” Luke asks. “So you know what I went through.”

Lloyd nods. “Yes, I do know.” Their eyes hold.

“You know, I’ve been wondering about something,” I say, delighted to shatter their little moment. “When I first met you, Luke, you said you were from Tucson. I’d forgotten it, but Ann Marie reminded me of it the other day. But later you claimed to be from Long Island.”

He looks over at me. For a second—no more than that—he considers me with some caution. Then he smiles.

“I never said I was
from
Tucson,” he says. “I just said that was my last stop before setting out on the road to come here.”

“I’m just having a hard time keeping your chronology straight.”

“I don’t see why. It’s very simple. After leaving my stepfamily, I found my real father. He was a trucker. I moved with him to Tucson for a while, where he ran a truckstop. Then I decided to head back East.”

I’m not letting him off easily. “Was that before or after meeting Darryl?”

“Henry,” Lloyd says, interrupting. “What’s with the third degree?”

“Just curious,” I say.

“
After
,” Luke replies simply. He sighs, and returns to his dusting. “I guess I’ve talked enough. Henry’s going to dock my pay if I don’t get this room all spiffed up.”

Lloyd and I both watch him scamper away with his dust mop.

“You’re not being fair to him,” Lloyd tells me when the kid is gone.

I frown. “You’re smitten with him.”

“I think he’s a lost soul who needs our compassion.”

I laugh. “It wasn’t his soul you were ogling earlier.”

Lloyd crosses his arms over his chest. “What do you have against him? Suspicion doesn’t become you, Henry. You’re better than that.”

“Better than what? Of being able to see things clearly?”

Lloyd just shakes his head. “Henry, your discontent about your love life is making you hard. You’re letting bitterness change your character, and I’ll be honest with you. I don’t like it. This is not the Henry Weiner I’ve called my friend.”

He turns and walks out of the room.

For one long moment, I stand there not thinking.

Lloyd’s words sting. There are precious few people whose opinions I value as highly as Lloyd Griffith’s. I don’t know if his words are accurate, but they hurt nonetheless. Have I really become a bitter old queen?

I need air. I need to get outside. I need to breathe the way Evan described it, breathe the pure air in, breathe the stress out. I put the computer to sleep and head out the front door.

The air is warm and fragrant. The screen door slams behind me, startling a couple of finches who are perched on the eaves. The birds flutter into the sky, resettling on the branch of an old elm tree. I move my eyes from them to the path that winds its way to the street, lined with butterfly bushes. Flitting around the purple branches are monarch butterflies, lively little specks of orange. I watch the butterflies as if mesmerized. My pace slows, and I inhale deeply, once, twice, three times. I take a seat on the bench and watch the world go by.

Everyone seems to be in pairs. First a man and a woman, mid-forties, hand in hand. Then two women pushing a stroller, their wide-eyed toddler a symbol of their union. Then two young guys, their whole lives ahead of them, who stop to kiss not three feet away from me.

I understand that the desire to mate is instinctual. Cats and dogs, those finches in the tree—they suffer from it too. Yet if only it were that simple. What drives me is not just adrenaline or hormones. I am not merely hungry or horny. I am incomplete. Sitting here, I realize it’s the only description that truly explains my state of mind. I am
incomplete
. Not whole.

I feel as if I lack one arm and one leg, that I have only one eye, and I am impatient for the missing parts to be delivered. When I was a boy, my sister had a book of paper dolls that fascinated me. On the last page was the figure of a bald woman, clad only in a flesh-toned one-piece bathing suit; ahead of it were sheets of transparent plastic, complete with hair, clothes and shoes. Only by layering the plastic sheets onto the figure would the woman spring to life, become complete. This is what I am waiting for: for someone to layer the rest of my life onto these bare bones.

You should be complete by yourself.
Lloyd’s words. He’s said them many times.
You’ll never find someone if you aren’t truly happy with yourself first.

“Fuck that,” I whisper. I’ve heard it all before, and I don’t buy it. We are meant to be coupled. The human instinct to mate goes beyond a simple urge to reproduce. As gay people prove, it’s not just about procreation. We seek our own completion with another person. It’s a feeling far more intense than any hunger pang I’ve ever known, and as I get older, it only grows more acute. The sands in my own personal hourglass are running low. A glance out on the street confirms it: what I see now are not pairs of happy lovers, but a single man, maybe fifty-five, walking by himself. He moves slowly down the street, not looking at those who pass him by. His shoulders are hunched, his head lowered. His feet take tiny steps, his knees barely bending.

“Buddy.”

The word is whispered into my ear, so soft that it seems at first like the flutter of wings from those monarch butterflies. But then I realize Jeff has quietly sat down beside me. So lost in thought have I been that I didn’t even hear him approach.

“Hey,” I whisper back.

“You seemed very far away.”

I nod. “I was. Do you see that man there?”

“Which one?”

“That one. The one by himself. Does he seem sad to you?”

Jeff considers him. “Yes, I think he does seem rather sad.”

“That’s me, Jeff.”

“Henry, that man is approaching sixty.”

I shrug. “How many are like him? How many middle-aged men, single and alone, move into old age without ever finding Mr. Right?”

Jeff folds his arms across his chest. “Maybe he
did
find him, and maybe he died. Maybe
that’s
why he’s sad.”

I shake my head. “It’s a different kind of sadness. Look at him. It’s obvious. It’s not the grief of losing a loved one. It’s the sadness of never having had one in the first place.”

Jeff looks at me kindly. “Henry, why is this so hard for you?”

I feel the blood rush into my face. “Because I am so goddamned tired of being alone!” I sit back on the bench and close my eyes. “But I’ll tell you what I’m even more tired of, and it’s the goddamned dating game. It sucks, Jeff. It’s horrible. Heartless. Soul killing.”

“You know what Lloyd would say.”

I sigh. “Of course I know what Lloyd would say. I’ve been sitting here trying to convince myself that if only I could love
myself
more, maybe I’d be happier. But I’m not that strong, Jeff. I just can’t start loving myself so much that being alone will be okay. I’m just not that strong.”

“Sure you are, buddy.”

“I’m
not
.” I stand up, feeling too edgy to remain seated all of a sudden. I pace up and down along the walk. “And I think very few people are. In college, I remember reading this German philosopher. I can’t remember his name. But he said that humans are incomplete as individuals, and that we seek another person for completion in order to become a whole person. Together they bring to each other a kind of fullness. It’s mutual give and take, and this binds them together. This is what I’m craving!”

Jeff stands, placing his hands on my shoulders, stopping me in my tracks. “I’m aware of all that, buddy, and it’s quite real. For years, when Lloyd and I struggled with our own relationship, I wrestled with the very same feelings you’re having. I felt incomplete. Now, being with Lloyd, I feel whole. I can’t deny that.”

“And now you’re getting married.” The words crack in my throat.

He nods. “Yes. Now we’re getting married. But we might never have gotten to this point. We might have fractured so badly during those difficult years that finding our way back into each other’s lives would have proven impossible. And do you know how we avoided that fate?”

He leans in so close to me that the tips of our noses touch.

“I’ll tell you.” He smiles, and his eyes, being so close to my own, seem to fuse together. “Since we’re talking philosophers, Henry, let’s consider Plato, because he’s the only one I’ve really read. Now, in his
Symposium
, quoting Socrates, Plato tells us that the only true path to love is to be the
lover
. That’s key. For years, my struggle with Lloyd was due to the fact that I wanted not to be the lover but instead the
beloved
—the one who was loved. I wanted to be the center, the object of desire. It was all about my needs, not Lloyd’s, a very selfish worldview. I wasn’t willing to love Lloyd just for who he was. I wanted him with me on my terms.” He smiles. “You remember that time?”

I nod. It was during the period when Lloyd needed to go off and find himself, a time of personal and career transition for him, and Jeff just couldn’t understand what was happening. He was left feeling anxious and angry, resenting Lloyd for buying the guesthouse and not moving back in with him in Boston. I remember that time all too well, for it was me to whom Jeff turned most often to share his unhappiness.

“But I changed,” he tells me now. “I’m not quite sure how I found the strength to do it, but your friendship certainly helped, Henry. You believed in me then the way I believe in you now.”

“I did?” I ask.

“Yes, you did. You were always there, boosting me up. And eventually I came around to understanding that Lloyd’s wander-lust—the very thing that I saw as tearing us apart—was actually part of the reason I loved him. I saw that our relationship wasn’t just about me, and that by giving up the need to be the beloved all the time and allowing myself sometimes to be the
lover
, loving Lloyd without expectation, I could find a fulfillment that had always eluded me in the past.”

“But at least you had someone to practice all this with,” I argue. “I have no one.”

“I wish you’d stop saying that,” he says. “You have us.”

“It’s not the same.”

“I know it isn’t. But damn it, Henry. You’re wrong when you say you have no one.”

I look into his eyes.

“I think you still see yourself only as the beloved,” Jeff says. “You are waiting for someone to love you on your terms. You have this picture in your head, and if a guy doesn’t fit it, you just go on waiting.”

I laugh bitterly. “I had that conversation with your sister yesterday, and I’m not settling for less than what makes me happy.”

“I’m not suggesting you do. This isn’t about lowering your standards. It’s about a mindset.” He smiles. “We’re not good at waiting for what we want anymore.”

“I’d wait as long as I needed to if I had a guarantee the waiting would be worth it.”

“Let me tell you a story,” Jeff says.

I sigh. “Is this going to be one of your writer’s treatises? The kind you try out on people before writing them down?”

“Maybe.” He grins. “What’s my favorite movie of all time?”

“
The Wizard of Oz
.”

His grin gets larger. “You do know me well, Henry. Okay. So you remember when we were kids how we’d have to wait a whole year for
The Wizard of Oz
to air on TV? It came just once a year, like Santa Claus.”

I shrug. “I never really watched it.”

Jeff gives me a look. “You are one strange duck, Henry. What gay kid didn’t live to see
The Wizard of Oz
? All year long I’d carry vivid memories of it—those flying monkeys and good witches in their silver balls. Come to think of it, they were like the rare porcelain figures my father had brought home from Japan, figures that fascinated me because of their odd and delicate beauty, and with which only on very special occasions would I be permitted to play.”

I roll my eyes. “Oh, this is
so
going to end up in some book.”

“Just listen. It was that rarity of exhibition that made
Oz
such a special experience. When its annual showing was over for yet another year, I was faced with the enormity of the interim ahead.
A whole year!
So much changes in the life of a child in the course of a year. A new grade, new friends, a whole new way of seeing the world. All of that—and I wouldn’t see
Oz
again until it was over. A
year’s
wait.” He smirks. “Which, of course, was plenty of time to make it seem brand new once again.”