Men Who Love Men (5 page)

“Well?” Lloyd is asking.

I take a deep breath.

“Of course,” I say.

Lloyd is up off the couch in an instant, his arms encircling me. Jeff doesn’t move quite as fast, but he comes over, too, tousling my hair. “Thanks, buddy,” he says. “You’ll look grand in a tux.”

“Tux?” I look up at him as Lloyd moves off to uncork the champagne. “It’s going to be that formal?”

“Sure thing. All the trimmings. It’ll be the event of the season.”

I smirk. So that’s part of the motivation, too. Since Jeff’s become a success, he likes to put on a good show. I can only imagine
who
he’s getting for entertainment.

“We’re bringing in Connie Francis,” he tells me, as if reading my mind. “You know, ‘Where the Boys Are.’ I met her in New York a few weeks ago and we got to be friends. I’d like to get Kimberley Locke, too—you know, this year’s second runner-up on
Idol
. I met her at the Abbey in West Hollywood last month.”

“Cat,” Lloyd says, using Jeff’s nickname, “let’s not make this into a three-ring circus.” He’s pouring the bubbly into three glasses.

“Hey, it’s our wedding. A once-in-a-lifetime event. Let’s do it up!”

Lloyd hands me a glass of champagne. “I just can’t imagine the two of you, married,” I say. “Legally and everything. Until death do us part and all that traditional mumbo jumbo.”

“Happens to the best of us,” Jeff says.

The best of us.

But not the best man.

I figure I ought to offer a toast. “To the two of you,” I say, not sure where I’m going with this. “To…what moments lie ahead.” Not very romantic, I suppose, but the best I can muster.

We clink glasses. We drink.

The loneliest sip of champagne I’ve ever had.

E
ven though the sun has failed to make an appearance today, hiding stubbornly behind a dreary gray haze like a sulky child, Luke wears no shirt, just a backpack slung over one shoulder. A breeze is blowing in off the water, making me shiver, but the boy seems oblivious to it, striding ever closer to where I’m sitting, parading that flat little belly of his, the lines of his damn obliques running down into his loose-fitting cutoff cargo shorts.

Why the hell am I doing this? Why did I agree to meet him when he called? The kid only wants to meet Jeff. Why am I allowing myself to be suckered?

“Hey, handsome,” Luke says, sitting beside me on the bench.

Maybe because of the way his dark blond hair falls in his eyes. Maybe because of the way his lips curl at the corners. Maybe because he called me handsome.

“Hey,” I reply.

“Where’s the sun, dude? I can’t see hiking all the way out to the beach without any sun.” He rustles out a pack of cigarettes from his backpack and shakes out a cancer stick. “Want one?”

“No, thanks, I don’t want to die a gruesome death.”

“Yeah, I know I should quit,” Luke says, lighting up. “Picked up the habit at a young age, and it’s hard to get out of the mindset.”

“It’s called nicotine addiction.” I frown. “And just what is a ‘young age’ for you?
Twelve
?”

“Close to it.” Luke exhales smoke away from my face. “I was probably thirteen when I started.”

“So how old are you now?”

“Twenty-two.”

Well, what do you know? Seems I’d given him credit for an extra year that he’d never lived. Actually, to look at him, it’s pretty tough to guess his age. He’s definitely got a baby face, and in some ways twenty-two seems too old for him. But in other ways, he seems a bit overripe, a tomato left on the vine a little too long.

“You must have
some
bad habits,” Luke says, squinting those hazel eyes at me.

“Ice cream.” I pat my belly. “As this squishiness demonstrates.”

“Dude, you’re
not
that squishy. You need to get over your body hang-ups.”

“Thanks for the advice.”

In my head, I’m keeping a countdown. It’s been nearly two minutes since Luke sat down, and no mention yet of Jeff.

“So, Henry,” the kid says, “you want to get some food later? Maybe you can show me where to eat cheaply in this town.”

I lift my eyebrows. “Not too many cheap options here. At least not if you want to avoid clogged arteries and high blood pressure.”

Listen to me. I sound like my mother. When did I get so old?

“I’m thinking of becoming a vegetarian,” Luke says. “But I figure if I’m going to turn my body into a temple, I gotta quit these things first.” He takes one last, long drag on his cigarette and flicks the butt into the water below. “But that will take some effort.”

“Well, if I can quit the ice cream, you can quit the nicotine.”

“Is that a wager?”

“Oh, I didn’t mean—”

“It’s a deal.” Luke is smiling. “We can check in every day to make sure we’re not cheating.”

I let out a sigh. Overhead a seagull swoops down low, arcing over our heads. I decide to move the conversation away from addictive behaviors.

“Where did you say you were from, Luke?” I ask.

“I’ve lived all over the country.”

I look at him closely. “But in what particular part of it were you born?”

“Long Island, New York.”

Now it’s me who makes a face. “Lung Gyland?” I ask, using the local vernacular. “You sure don’t sound like you’re from Lung Gyland.”

He smirks. “I told you. I’ve lived a lot of places. Besides, not everyone from Long Island sounds like Joey Buttafuoco.”

I can’t help but smile a little. “I guess.”

“My stepdad was a lawyer,” Luke tells me, “so I had a pretty upscale, middle-class childhood. At least for the later part. The beginning of my life is a whole other story.” He pulls his legs up onto the bench to sit cross-legged next to me. Our knees touch. It distracts me from asking a follow-up question and allows him to keep control of the conversation. “So how about you?” Luke asks. “Where were you born?”

I’m very conscious of his knee touching mine. “West Springfield,” I say. “Western Massachusetts.”

He cocks an eye at me. “You sure don’t sound like you come from Massachusetts.”

“Not everyone from Massachusetts sounds like Teddy Kennedy.”

Luke laughs. “And you used to be a hustler?”

I feel my face redden. “Look, it was for a very short period. Before my job at the guesthouse, I worked at an insurance company.”

“So after you punched out, you walked the streets of Boston?”

“No,” I say, surprised at how embarrassed I am remembering that part of my life. It’s never embarrassed me before; in fact, I’ve always been rather proud of it in an odd sort of way—that I’d actually been hot enough to get
paid
for sex. But now, for whatever reasons, I don’t want to talk about it with Luke. “I had a profile online,” I tell him, trying to find a quick way to end the discussion. “It wasn’t a big deal.” Even though it was.

“I’ve thought about hustling myself,” Luke says, looking down his smooth chest and fingering his navel. “But then I figured, if I’m gonna be a famous writer, I don’t want any skeletons in my past.”

Okay, here it is: the moment when the conversation begins to lead us inexorably to Jeff. I let out a long breath, bracing for it. “And that’s why you moved here,” I say. “To be a writer.”

“Yeah.” Luke’s so natural about it, so confident—as if his dreams will just inevitably come true. “I took a writing class at Nassau Community College and my teacher thought I was a natural-born writer.” He widens his eyes as he looks at me. “I’m not trying to brag, Henry. I’m just telling you the facts. I wrote this short story that not only my teacher but the entire class thought could become a novel.”

“So what’s it about?”

“I’ll tell you over a plate of fried clams.” Luke is standing all of a sudden, adjusting his backpack on his shoulder. “Okay?”

“I’m not really hungry—”

“I am. I haven’t had lunch. And I have a craving for a cigarette—so unless I get some food, I’m gonna smoke. And you agreed to help me quit.”

“I never—”

“Come on, Henry.”

He motions me up.

“Well,” I say, giving in, “we can go over to Mojo’s. It’s quick, it’s cheap, and the food is pretty good, considering it’s a take-out stand. We can sit at the tables in back.”

“Perfect.”

I follow Luke back down the pier. It’s mostly straight tourists out here, women with large butts encased in loud floral print shorts, dragging along husbands who look as if they’d rather be anywhere else. A horde of screaming kids suddenly runs toward us, diverting only at the last possible moment from a collision with my gut. This isn’t the Provincetown of the popular gay imagination. The pier is the flip side of town—where few queers ever venture, except to board the ferry back to Boston. Why I picked this place to meet Luke, I don’t know. It just seemed the best choice—far away from the center of gay P-town. Why that should be important I still haven’t figured out.

In truth, there is no part of Provincetown that is less than beautiful. Even here—even among the tacky T-shirt shops and seashell emporiums—there is a certain exquisiteness to the place. Here, at the end of the earth, even the most ordinary buildings are infused with Provincetown’s particular glow, a result of the sun reflecting off the water all around us. When I first started coming here years ago, Provincetown was just a playground, a place I came with Jeff to take Ecstasy and trick with sexy boys—or attempt to, anyway. I’d dance until two a.m. fuck until five (if I was lucky) and then sleep until noon.

But now Provincetown is home, and my rhythm here is different. I cast my eyes ahead of me, past the colorful kites and Himalayan blankets being hawked in the square. Not far beyond stands the large white nineteenth-century Town Hall, and up on the hill behind it looms the 252-foot Pilgrim Monument. I’m giving Luke a picture postcard view of Provincetown. It’s still sometimes hard to believe that this is my home.

We live here clinging to the last dangling finger of the outstretched arm of Cape Cod, making our lives on a sandy spit that spirals off into the cold Atlantic. No one just “passes through” Provincetown. Only one road leads here, and it ends here, in crumbling asphalt swept over by drifting sand dunes. Here, Thoreau said, you can put all America behind you. The whole world, in fact.

A home at the end of the earth. I remember wondering if it were possible—for anyone other than sea crabs and mussels, that is, or the witless piping plovers forever being chased by the surf. But humans? It’s
cold
here, and wet, with the bitter winds that blow through here every winter reminding us we sit on just a few square miles of sand in the middle of the sea.

Summers are bliss here. The living—as the song says—is easy. But the winter is a whole other story. New England winters are legendarily tough, but try it out here, with everything boarded up, with the most of the population having headed south to Fort Lauderdale or Miami. Luke has no idea what awaits him. I know I didn’t. Night comes quickly in December, and January, and seemingly even more so in February, despite every logic of the season. “No one passes through Provincetown,” I kept repeating to myself that first winter. The headlights of cars never sliced through my living room. Wayward travelers never stopped me at the gas station to ask where they’d made a wrong turn. Days would go by in my little apartment and I’d see not a single person, or a light in any neighboring window. In those first years, we closed the guesthouse in February and March. Jeff was off on a book tour; Lloyd in a spiritual retreat in upstate New York. I sat out blizzard after blizzard by myself.

At first, I was claustrophobic from the isolation, but that changed. I discovered there was something rather magical about the sea in winter. The way the waves crashed against the hard sand, fierce and brittle, the unrelenting pound of the surf that eats away, bit by bit, year by year, a little more of the land. Looking out at the ocean my first winter in Provincetown, I realized the locals had been right: to say one has lived in Provincetown without experiencing the winter is like saying one has lived in New England without ever once seeing an autumn.

“You’ll get used to it here,” one old timer told me, wearing shorts in a blizzard. “The rules are just a little different.”

Those who live in Provincetown do so purposely. Even without a plan, there is nonetheless purpose. “I just got fed up,” a woman told me last week at the post office, the single point of intersection for many of us. “One day I just quit my job, packed my car, and drove as far as the road went.”

Washashores,
the locals call them. I suppose that’s what I am, too, surrounded by writers and painters and people who make little carvings out of driftwood and shells.

But can it be home? Provincetown is a place people come
to,
not come
from.
No, that’s wrong: there are still families who’ve been here for generations, descendants of the fishermen of the last century, who cling defensively to their vanishing culture. But the summer population edges fifty thousand; year-round there’s barely three. The old fishing family homesteads are being bought up for exorbitant prices by affluent, mostly gay second-homers who envision Provincetown as the perfect place to retire. They will make it home then, these aging babyboomers, but for now, there’s still no fast food, no giant supermarket, no parking garage, no cinema multiplex, no Kinkos, no Staples, no Home Depot.

Ah, paradise
, one might think. And certainly I have no desire to see golden arches looming over Commercial Street. But Luke’s in for a rude awakening when he runs out of printer paper on a late Sunday afternoon. Or tries following a recipe that calls for bok choy in February.

But if home is just convenience, then any strip mall in suburbia could be home. And I suppose it is, to somebody. I’m just glad it’s not me. I’ve come to subversively enjoy the fact that shopkeepers in Provincetown open only when they want to, despite the hours posted on the door. I like that the women in the post office wear outrageous wigs, and that drag queens cash you out at the A&P. Home is a place where you can stand face to face with what’s real in the world, like at the top of a dune, or on a stretch of unspoiled beach.

That’s what comes with making a home at the end of the earth. The rules are different
.
You don’t meet people passing through because there aren’t any. This is the crossroads of nowhere. This is the end of the road. The people you meet are the people who are
here.
Some who have dropped out, who have fallen through the cracks. Some who have said the hell with it, and some who have found heaven in a half-mile stretch of sand.

Luke will have to find his own rhythm, discover the town’s secrets for himself. A clerk at the scrimshaw shop once showed me the little shady corner of the town cemetery where on particularly busy days in July he could retreat with his thoughts and his journal. A guy at the Provincetown AIDS Support Group invited me to experience the bleak beauty of Long Point in November. Now I have my own secrets, my own special places.

Working here, living here, I’m not always able to drop what I’m doing when old friends pop in and expect a weekend of revelry. It’s been a very long time since I’ve slept in until noon. I like the sunrise in Provincetown far too much, an event I experienced in the old days only when I staggered home from a trick’s house at dawn. I follow a different rhythm now, but I realize it is the multitude of dances that makes Provincetown so unique. I was once in the same place Luke is in now, wide-eyed as he discovers the magic. And it pleases me to no end that there are still crowds on the steps of Spiritus Pizza at two a.m., still boys sleeping in until noon before stumbling out to Herring Cove beach. I might grumble when the line at the post office extends out the door or when buying a quart of milk at the Grand Union takes an hour and a half, but I’m glad when the boys of summer return. I love the drag queens sashaying down the street, the circuit boys in their spandex, the leather dads and the bear cubs. Each to their own rhythm, their own magic. This is their town as much as mine.