The Men from the Boys (37 page)

“Whatever you want to do,” I answered.

“This is supposed to be
our
day, Cat. What do
you
want to do?”

“I really don't care, Lloyd. Anything is fine.”

Of course, that's when Naomi called, and told him about the sunrise service, and asked him what he thought about leaving today to get there in time. He held the phone to his chest and asked me what I thought. “Do whatever you want,” I said impassively. He just looked at me for several seconds, then lifted the receiver to his ear again and told Naomi he'd go.

“Go
on,”
I tell the man in front of me again.

He just winks at me. Oh, I get it now. Once the red lights stop flashing, he wants to resume his position on his knees. Hey, he has a right, I suppose. He paid for it. This is America, for God's sake.

His hand, in fact, is suddenly on my crotch again. When I first spotted the light, I'd pulled away and zipped up. The old man had just grinned, licking his lips.

“Don't worry, pretty boy,” he whispers now, his first words this evening. “They'll be gone soon.”

I miss Lloyd horribly. It started as soon as he left, as soon as the door closed behind him. What a shit I was. Eduardo was gone, out of my life. All he'd been was a summer fling. Why was I holding on so?

 
Sometimes I wish we had another gay male couple to talk with about all this stuff. “What's normal?” I'd ask. “What can we ex- 
pect?” But all the couples we knew—Sal and Donnie, Mike and Theo, Hector and Kitt—are dead. Our friends tended to be older —Javitz's friends. Now Javitz is the only one left, and the rest are women. There's so much I could ask. “Define ‘passion,' ” I'd request of one of them, any of them, if they were alive. “Tell me what I need to know.”

“You're going to be the first generation of out gay men to age in any real numbers,” Javitz observed not long ago. “Not that you thirtysomethings aren't dying even now, along with the rest of us. But proportionately, there will be larger numbers of you reaching old age than any other generation since Stonewall. More of you are out, and fewer of you will die young.”

“Great,” I said. “Going boldly where no man has gone before.”

“It's not easy navigating uncharted waters,” Javitz admitted. “Especially when we've created a standard where eventually we all have to fail.
People get old.
It's not just gay men, you know.
Nobody's
dealt with this well, at least not here in the West. Two summers in Provincetown, then it's over. I'm not sure adulation of the elders is a better system, but at least it's something we could grow into, rather than out of.”

Adulation of the elders. I met a boy at Mildred's this afternoon. I had gone there to sulk after Lloyd left. I was consumed by this gap between us, this ever-expanding gulf that I couldn't seem to fathom. Of course, I was looking—
hoping
—for a distraction, and I found it. His name was Claude. A dark boy, the way I prefer them, with the twist of a Quebecois accent, my downfall. He smiled first; that at least is some small consolation. I moved over two seats to sit beside him. “You have pretty eyes,” I told him. Whether he did or didn't is irrelevant now. It's a good line. Or at least it used to be.

“Thanks,” he said. “What's your name?”

We exchanged vitals. He had just moved to Boston from Montreal. He was looking for work. “What do
you
do?” he asked.

“I'm a writer,” I told him.

He didn't seem impressed. This child followed no script with which I was familiar. He did not even ask what it was that I wrote. Fact is, I haven't been writing much at all lately. Even the freelancing has been a bit scarce. Money's been tight; Lloyd had to pay both halves of the rent this month. But I'm expecting a big check in a few weeks, for a piece on gay artists in Provincetown. It's running in the
Globe's
Sunday magazine. I thought about telling Claude this fact, but decided against it.

“So why Boston?” I asked.

“I'm dating a guy who lives here in the South End,” he told me.

“Oh,” I said, crestfallen. His eyes seemed genuinely lovely at that point, lovelier than any I'd seen in weeks. “Who is he? Maybe I know him?”

“Yeah, maybe,” he said, brightening. “He's an older guy.”

Now what connection was there between those two statements? I arched my eyebrows, but he seemed oblivious to his remark. He told me the older man's name. It meant nothing to me.

“And how old is he?” I asked.

“Thirty-two.”

That's why I'm here. Poor pathetic Jeff. Reduced to selling himself to prove his own worth. Because some twenty-year-old didn't want to suck his dick, Jeff goes out and finds a sixty-year-old to do it instead. The money was merely icing: the man's eagerness was proof enough that I'm still a valuable commodity.

He had been sitting in his van in the parking lot. I was walking into the woods, and stopped to survey the scene. It was late afternoon; there should have been more cars. But this man was it, and he must have assumed only by flashing some green would he have a chance with me. Or—I could hear Javitz scolding—maybe it was simply a fetish of his. Maybe he would've paid a fat, balding seventy-year-old for the same thing.

I nodded at him and turned into the woods. I heard the slam of the van door behind me. He was panting by the time he found me, and he wiggled his tongue at me like a snake. He repulsed me; but that didn't matter. He dropped to his knees and began fumbling at my crotch. I said “Hey” and held out my hand. He didn't object. He just reached into his pocket and slapped the wrinkled, sweaty bill in my palm. It felt repulsive to the touch, and I shoved it into my jeans. It seemed to burn a hole there, singeing my thigh.

Now I'm scared shitless that I'll be arrested, hauled out from behind these bushes with this greasy, brown-toothed man, charged with impersonating a kid. But the lights are suddenly gone and we're swallowed up in darkness. “See?” the man rasps. “I told you.”

He gets back to work. I'm soft as putty and just as malleable. It takes a while for him to get me up and hard again, but he's diligent. One thing you can say about these old men out in the woods: they know how to suck cock.

But so did Eduardo, after I'd taught him. “I never knew how sexual I really was,” he once said. I miss him suddenly so much it hurts, and I think about him with another man, any man, and it kills me. I try to push it out of my mind, try to shoot my load down this man's throat, give him his twenty dollars' worth. But I can't, finally—even here I can't. I feel myself go soft in his mouth and he gums me, yanking my dick, stretching it obscenely. I finally pull out and zip up.

“Here,” I say, thrusting the twenty back at him.

He looks surprised. He just backs away, into the bushes. I don't know what to do with it, this dead butterfly in my hands. I drop it onto the ground, then realize he'd never find it, not here in the dark.

So I take it. Money's been tight, I tell myself. It'll at least buy a quart of milk and cat food.

Provincetown, April 1995

The snow melted, right on schedule. The sun is even pushing its way through the clouds, and there's a tentative warmth to the air. The streets are still mostly barren, but the buds on the trees survived. Some of them are even beginning to blossom, bright green on limbs still cold with the gray of winter.

Ernie's right about the rhythm of the off-season. It's very comforting, very enveloping. So unlike the rhythm I knew from summer. This rhythm has nothing to do with tea dances or dick docks. This is the tranquility of a small town, a fishing village, an artists' colony, a community just waking up from the cold. This is the tip of the hat the old man in front of Zeke's Art Gallery gives me every morning. This is the hot coffee and gossip at Cafe Express. This is the quiet discovery of new places: a secluded stretch of beach, the hodgepodge of surprising gardens in the east end. They bloom now into sudden and colorful life, crocuses and early jonquils dotting a patch of brown earth as I round a corner onto Washington Street. A pot of miniature daffodils sits proudly in the sun on the ledge of a second-floor porch. An old Portuguese woman dressed all in black sweeping her sidewalk bids me a fond good morning.

The narrow streets of the east end, with their white houses angled together in close and unusual kinship, are almost like a maze, and yet I do not care if I wander too far inside. Some passages are so tight I need to jump onto a stoop to let a car pass me. I think of the winding avenues of Mykorios in the Aegean Sea. The analogy is a bit farfetched, but I can't help the association. Javitz, Lloyd, and I spent a week in Mykonos four winters ago, and we got ridiculously lost in that labyrinth of whitewashed corridors. I feel some of the same giddy disorientation now, having stumbled into a part of town I'd never taken the time to explore before.

I asked Javitz to come with me this morning, but he was too tired. “Come on,” I urged. “We'll just keep walking. Let's walk as far as we can go.”

The thought seemed almost to stagger him. He's been suffering from fatigue of late, a fact that worries me a little. He tries to hide it, but I can see it, there in his eyes when we're talking, a redness, a vacancy that vanishes as quickly as it appears.

“No,” he said. “You go, darling. Discover the town yourself. Make it your own.”

It was good advice. I need that grounding. I need to feel this is
my
town, too, that
I
have a place here—beyond Javitz, beyond Lloyd, beyond the boys of summer. Javitz's house is, after all,
his.
Unlike our summer places, which were furnished with the mismatched, discarded pieces of other people's lives, this is Javitz's
home.
His things surround us: his couch, his photographs, his books—the ones I remember seeing on his shelves in Cambridge my very first night there. I've suddenly dropped down into the middle of his life, and I've got to carve out my own little space somewhere in the midst of that.

Had this been one of our summer places, I could have been very comfortable indeed. It's the nicest house yet: a three-story condo, with a yard and a fireplace and two bathrooms and a deck—with morning sun, of course. From the top floor, Javitz's bedroom, one can actually see the ocean as well, between a valley in the dunes. The first night after the snowstorm we watched the sun set from up there.

“Do you know Provincetown is the one place on the East Coast where you can watch the sun set over the ocean?” Javitz asked. His voice was sincere in its love for the place. In that moment, he really didn't remember he'd told me that fact a dozen times.

I've crossed Commercial Street now and pad onto the beach. The harbor is much calmer since the storm, retreating bashfully into low tide. I follow the twisting high-water trail of blue sea grass. Along the way I greet a few who pass by: a woman with her dog, anxiously bounding ahead of her; a father with two little girls, fascinated by the sea birds scampering about on the sand; a teenaged boy, probably a local, sullen and withdrawn.

I walk for what must be at least half an hour. I must be nearing the border of North Truro by now: ahead of me, the little cottages of that seaside community decorate the horizon. I stand and breathe in the fragrance of the ocean. So clean, so alive, so real.

“Excuse me?”

The voice is distant, caught by a swoop of wind.

“Excuse me?
You
there.”

I turn. About ten yards away sits a man at an easel. From this distance I can't tell much about him, except that he appears to be quite old. He's gesturing to me.

“Do you see that piece of driftwood over there? Would you bring it in closer, please?”

I look to my right. There's a crooked arm of black wood in the sand. The painter is motioning for me to bring it towards him.

I obey. It's slimy and rather heavy. “Where do you want it?” I ask.

“Right about ... there.” He points with his chin.

I let it drop. It makes a dull thud in the sand.

“Thank you,” the painter says, his eyes moving back to his easel. I can see him better now. He's very tanned, with old, leathery skin, almost completely bald, except for some longish white hair around the sides. His white beard is close-cropped and neatly trimmed, which surprises me, given his unruly eyebrows, which look like little rows of unclipped wheat.

There's something about him that keeps me standing there. Might he be famous? Lots of well-known painters live down here in the east end. This is the heart of Provincetown's artistry: this is where Eugene O'Neill and John Dos Passos lived and wrote. Tennessee Williams rented a shack not far from here. I watch the man study his canvas intently. He lifts his paintbrush and glances over at the fallen driftwood. Then he raises his eyes to me.

“Yes?” he asks.

“Oh, I'm sorry. I was just—watching you paint.”

He grins. “Why don't you just stand there a few minutes? Maybe that's what this needs. A man standing in the distance.”

I'm honored. “Sure,” I say, shifting my weight into a comfortable standing position, flattening out my hair before I have a chance to even realize I'm doing it. “Hey, will this be exhibited somewhere?”

“Oh, I've long stopped painting for exhibition. I just give my work away now.”

There's several seconds of silence as he looks quickly at me, then back at the canvas. His eyebrow whiskers rise and fall in his appraisal of me. I'm not sure if I should say anything, if that might disturb his flow. But then he talks to me.

“You a tourist?”