Safety Net (8 page)

Another woman came in from the
hallway leading to the bedrooms. She was younger than Betsy, with black hair in
a wavy bob. She stopped short when she saw Lowell, and Betsy said, “This is
Dale’s friend... I’m sorry, your name was--?”

“Not that asshole,” said the other
woman, narrowing her eyes at Lowell.

“No, hon, that was Javier. This
is...?” Betsy looked at him expectantly.

“I’m Lowell,” Lowell said,
wondering who the hell Javier was. He didn’t remember any of their teammates
being named Javier, but he couldn’t remember the name of Dale’s roommate who
was on the soccer team.

The other woman regarded him warily
and went over to sit at the computer desk. Betsy introduced her, “This is Jule.”

“Nice to meet you,” Lowell said politely,
unable to read the situation clearly but positive there was a situation here to
be read. He petted John, who’d settled on the sofa alongside Lowell’s thigh and
was purring loudly. There was a lapse of conversation and Lowell scanned the
books on the coffee table, noticing a lot of literature titles.

Betsy took a drink of wine,
watching him over her glass, and said, “We just adore Dale, but he’s so quiet.”

Quiet? Dale?

Jule said more prosaically, “He’s
not a bad kid.”

“Yeah, um, he’s a good guy,” Lowell
said. He nodded toward the literature books. “So, are you both English majors?”

Jule raised an eyebrow at him and
Betsy smiled. “Majors? Oh, hon, that’s so sweet of you. No, I teach English at
the community college. Jule works for a start-up.” Betsy shifted forward in the
chair and set her wine glass down on the coffee table. “You can relax around
us, hon,” she said earnestly. “We know about Dale, and I guess he didn’t tell
you but we’re a couple.” She pointed at Jule and herself. “Jule’s my partner.”

Lowell glanced briefly at Jule.
Even as he asked himself if he was understanding Betsy’s meaning, he knew for
certain he understood her meaning.

“Oh,” he said, as more of her
meaning sunk in.
We know about Dale.
He concentrated on petting the cat,
ignoring the way Betsy was examining him. After a moment he said, smiling, “John
sure likes to be petted, doesn’t he? What a fluffy kitty. How old is he?”

“He’s five,” Jule said. “He was a
feral kitten. I found him on campus when he was a couple of weeks old. We think
his momma died.”

“Oh, poor kitty,” he said to John.

The front door opened and Dale
walked in, tossing a backpack into a coat closet. He saw Lowell on the sofa and
stopped abruptly. The uncertain panic in his eyes as he looked from Betsy to
Jule to Lowell was painful to watch. Lowell gave John a last pat and stood up,
saying easily, “I was a little early, sorry, bro. You ready to head out?”

Dale relaxed. “Yeah, yeah, let me
change my shoes.” He disappeared into a bedroom for a minute and returned wearing
sports shoes, carrying a football.

“Nice meeting you,” Lowell said to
Betsy and Jule. “And you,” he said to John before Dale hurried him outside.

They found a city park five minutes’
walk from Skelton Avenue but it was too small to get any good throws in. They
decided to try their luck on campus. All their favorite fields were filled with
kids from various camps, but after walking across the main campus toward the
medical school they found a nice, open, empty field.

They alternated passing and catching
in turn, varying the direction of play. After an hour or so, they decided to
break. Dale sat on the grass. Lowell came up and lightly tossed the ball to
him.

“Um, I think your roommates thought
I was your boyfriend,” Lowell said, sitting down next to Dale.

Dale flipped the ball in his hands,
staring at it. “Oh. Sorry about that.” When he didn’t say anything else, Lowell
asked, “Was that Javier?”

Dale frowned at the ball. “Yes.”

Lowell picked at some grass. “Oh.” He
paused. “Jule called him an asshole.”

“Yeah,” Dale sighed.

Lowell rolled plucked blades of
grass between his fingers. Dale looked at him and said, “You’re very calm about
this.”

Lowell raised his eyebrows,
thinking,
hey, after your high school girlfriend, the one you’ve been
banging for a year, tells you she’s a lesbian, that kind of blows the shock
quota you get for stuff like this
.

“Yeah, it’s okay. I mean, I’m
surprised, I guess.”

Dale’s look was sharp, angry. “Why?
Because queers can’t play football?”

“Huh? No, no, I didn’t mean like
that.” Lowell tried to throw the balls of grass but they unraveled and
scattered over his legs. “I’m surprised your boyfriend was an asshole, that’s
all.” Dale didn’t say anything, and Lowell said, “You’re a good guy. Seems like
you’d have good boyfriends.”

Dale stared at him, utterly still
for a moment, then huffed a dry, sour laugh. “Yeah, you’d think.” He shook his
head and flipped the ball a few times before tossing it to Lowell. “Hey, I’m
glad you know. I’m glad you’re okay with it. I want people to know, but...just
not now, okay?”

Lowell turned the ball around in
his hands, looking at him. “Dude. Not my story to tell.”

“Thanks, homie.”

Lowell chewed on his lip,
remembering how close Erick and Dale had been. “Though, I gotta say, and I know
it’s none of my business, but... I think you should tell Erick.”

Dale smiled a little. “I did. He
knows.”

Lowell relaxed. “He cool with it?”

“He’s Erick, what do you think?” Dale
said, raising an eyebrow. Lowell laughed a little in relief. “He said as long
as I could run and catch, he didn’t care what I was.”

Lowell grinned at him and said, “Erick’s
very simple like that.”

“Well. He
is
from Texas.”

Lowell lay back in the grass,
tossing the ball in the air and catching it. “I hope he’s having fun in Europe.
I hope he’s...getting level again.” Dale lay back and clasped his hands behind
his head. Lowell glanced at him. “Right around spring training, I don’t know
what it was, but Erick seemed...” He trailed off, not sure of the right word,
and Dale supplied, “Half-there?”

“Yeah, something like that.” Lowell
held the ball tightly in his hands. He stood up and tossed the ball down to
Dale, who caught it before it could land on his stomach. “Okay, lazy cakes,” Lowell
said, “we got the rest of the afternoon.”

Dale pushed the ball back at him
and stood up. “Lowell, you know. I miss him, too.”

Lowell gave him a sidelong look. “I
didn’t say that.”

“I know.”

-----

Lowell started hanging out with
Dale a lot, meeting up at Phil’s Coffee when Dale got off work or going by the
apartment on the days he was tutoring. Since Dale took the bus to his tutoring
gig, he was often late, and Lowell hung out with Betsy and Jule and John the
cat.

One afternoon he was helping Jule
in the kitchen, slicing carrots and zucchini for a vegetable platter she was taking
to a party. Betsy sat on a barstool, working on her laptop.

“Hey, uh, I wanted to ask you
something,” he said tentatively. “Was it hard to tell people? That you’re gay,
I mean?” Lately he’d been thinking about April.

Jule smiled blandly at him and said,
“Trying to tell us something?” and from the barstool Betsy shushed her with, “Oh,
hon, don’t tease him.”

Lowell concentrated on slicing
zucchini strips. “No. I once knew this person who thought maybe they were bi,
and was dating and stuff, but then decided they were gay. And it was kind of
bad, because the person they were dating didn’t have any idea. It was like...”

“There is no bi,” Jule said
severely. “That’s just queers fooling themselves.”

Betsy cleared her throat
significantly. “I don’t agree with Jule about this. In fact, I think everyone
is a little bi, or has that potential.”

“What do you mean?” Lowell asked.

Jule’s look darkened but she worked
at arranging vegetables and visibly held her tongue while Betsy replied, “I
believe everyone has the potential to love someone romantically regardless of
gender. But because of our environmental and societal programming, few of us
open ourselves up to the possibility. In our culture we like binaries: male or
female, gay or straight, black or white. We dislike or shun or in some cases
actively seek to destroy the grey areas like transgender or bisexual.”

In the silence that ensued, where
it was obvious Jule was restraining herself from arguing, Lowell thought this
over. Betsy smiled absently and said, “Oh, but that doesn’t answer your first
question, does it? I don’t think there is one answer, but yes, it can be
extremely hard for people to come out.”

“But if you’d been dating
someone...a guy...but you were pretty sure you were a lesbian... I mean, why
would you stay with that guy?”

Jule, relaxing as the conversation
shifted, said, “That’s about accepting yourself, not coming out. That’s an
entirely different question. If she was sure she was a lesbian, she wouldn’t
have stayed with you. If she stayed with you, she wasn’t sure what she was. Yet.”

And Lowell, having his anonymized
situation exposed and personalized, blushed slightly. Betsy said gently, “I’m
sure she cared about you, too, and knew it would hurt you. The fear of hurting
other people can push us into the tightest and darkest of corners, until we’re
unaware of what we’re doing anymore.”

“Yeah,” Lowell said quietly, and
let go of some of his anger toward April. He finished the zucchini and helped
Jule arrange the platter. “I was going to ask you something else, but maybe I
shouldn’t.”

Betsy smiled expectantly at him and
Jule raised an eyebrow. Lowell said, “That guy Javier. Why was he an asshole?
What did he do, do you know?”

Betsy said, “You have to ask Dale,
hon,” and went back to her work, but Jule said, “From what Dale told us, he was
an arrogant, patronizing, controlling shithead who put Dale in a very
uncomfortable situation.”

“What situation?”

Jule pulled cling wrap over the
vegetable platter and Lowell helped her slide it into the refrigerator. “He
asked Dale to move in with him, and Dale thought he’d cleared it with his
housemates first, but he hadn’t. Dale never told us the details. He was just so
desperate to get out of there. He offered to pay us fifty dollars more a month
than we were asking if we’d let him move in immediately.”

Lowell leaned against the kitchen
counter and pressed his hands flat against his thighs to keep from clenching
them into fists.

Betsy glanced up from the laptop. “We
had no idea about all of that, of course. Not until after he moved in and we
could get him to calm down and tell us what was going on. We were taking a
chance, but there was something about him I trusted. Even though John didn’t
like him.”

Lowell cooled his temper enough to
smile at that. The fact that John loved Lowell but avoided Dale like the plague
was a constant source of annoyance to Dale.

Lowell sighed. “I just don’t get
it. Dale’s a solid guy, he’s funny, he’s good-looking, he’s built. How could he
have such a crappy boyfriend?”

Jule raised an eyebrow and smirked
at him. “Some would say ‘crappy boyfriend’ is simply a redundant phrase,” she
murmured.

“Oh, shush. Be nice to the straight
boy,” Betsy said easily to her. Betsy gave Lowell a conspiratorial smile and
said, “I’m working on Dale’s boyfriend problem. There’s an adorable boy in my
summer class I think would be just perfect, but I don’t know if he’s already
attached.” She raised a finger and tapped the air. “But give me some time, and
I think I can solve this.”

Jule walked off, shaking her head. “Trying
to play matchmaker is begging for trouble, Bets. We gotta get ready soon. I’m
going to take a shower.”

Betsy waved her off and typed
furiously on her laptop to finish her work. Lowell snagged a bottled water from
the fridge and leaned against the counter, wondering who the hell this “adorable
boy” was and why he would be “perfect” for Dale. He liked Betsy a lot, and he
supposed he could trust her judgment, but he was inclined to agree with Jule.

Besides, he seriously doubted that
Betsy would take football compatibility into consideration when finding a match
for Dale, and that was key, in Lowell’s opinion. He’d never met this Javier
creep -- and for Javier’s sake, hoped he never would -- but he was certain
Javier hadn’t been a football fan.

-----

Several times over the summer Dale
questioned whether going back to Dayton would truly have been worse than
staying here. He believed so, remembering how his mother had sounded on the
phone when he’d listed Dayton as one of his summer options, but it was a close
run thing.

Moving in with Javier should have
been the answer to his prayers: he could stay here, sign up for summer classes,
and at the same time work on deepening their relationship. Instead, it had been
a nightmare.

Not just for the reasons Dale had
told Betsy and Jule. There were the things he hadn’t mentioned, like the day
Mrs. Zhang, the housemate, had come across him doing his laundry and said
gently, “The blue towels in the hall closet are Sanjay’s. The red-and-white
ones are Javier’s.” Dale had almost melted from embarrassment. Or the time
Javier had interrupted Dale explaining American football to Sanjay and had
steered the conversation into an argument about the superiority of soccer. It
was something so stupid to argue about -- Dale didn’t think either game had “superiority”
-- and Dale felt like an idiot for falling for the bait.

And there’d been the sex, which he
couldn’t tell anyone about. Javier always had to be in control, always had to
be the one fucking. When Dale had worked up enough confidence to suggest they
switch places, Javier had said flatly, “I never take the passive role. I never
bottom,” like he was annoyed Dale had even thought of such a thing. It troubled
Dale, and the more he thought about it, the more it troubled him, and he
started finding excuses not to have sex.