These Things Happen (11 page)

   " Really?" he says.

   "Go," I say.

   So he does, and I know I need to as well, to support local farmers who if they were any good wouldn't be local. I wouldn't mind a final moment with Kenny before we're shot into our days, but I hear him, down the hall, making a
Whither Gayness
statement and I don't want to interrupt that. I get my keys, collapse my shopping cart, and see that Wesley has left the
Times
on a chair. Part of his homework is to read three editorials (blogs don't count) before school each day; as I try to make sense of his yellow Hi-Lites I remember something I haven't thought of in years. I was on a train, with my dad; he taught me how to fold the paper into an oblong so as not to intrude on the space of other passengers. "If you can fold a paper on a moving train," he said, "you're more or less set for life." Well, I'm set, I guess, for something, as I'm still able to do it. I could show Wesley, I suppose, but what good would it do him? By the time he's ready to fold the
Times
on trains papers will be dead, it seems, replaced by bits of text on screens light as a Coward play and small as a stamp. And there'll be some new trick that will make you set for life, for fathers to teach sons.

   But that's for Kenny, to figure that out. What I can do for Wesley is tuck
ciambelline
into his backpack and take him to buy shoes, so Lola can live without shame and he can go back, properly shod, to East End Avenue after his wilderness adventure in the theater district. And we'll be here, with our corn pads and our Netflix queue, as we were before he came and will be when he's gone, taking care of people, theatergoers for me, suffering gay masses for Kenny, two groups that intersect with surprising ease. "
Caution
," I hear Kenny say. "
Careful
." If a fag landed on the moon, he wouldn't take a giant leap for mankind. He'd take baby steps, silent ones, so as not to startle any little green men.

   So I tiptoe out, with my Green Market wad of singles and Basque farm wife's bonnet. There's this hippy there, smelly but nice, who every few weeks descends from New Paltz with three perfect goat cheeses; if I hurry I might be able to bring one home and use it in something tonight. A salad, maybe? A pizza? Crumbled into
buca
tini
with a few chopped herbs? I'll think of something, by tonight. Something delicious. Because it's my job, and because I love it, and because I always do.

I
didn't plan it; in a way, it seems, it planned
me.
I won, and I was making my acceptance speech, and then the words were there, all excited, like kids going off to camp.
I. Am. Gay.
It might have been part of a phenomenon that Wesley and I have noticed sometimes, which is how you think
you're
living your life, but your life has ideas of its own. I should point out that I don't actually remember what I said up there, but Wesley will, for my biographers (ha). He remembers most smart or funny things a person says. I do, too. But it's different, with yourself. It just is. You need the other person.

     When I met my mom, dad, Fartemis, and grandma at City I was sort of forced to relive the whole day: winning, the speech, my own surprise at what came out of me.

     "It breaks my heart to think of the
torment
you must have undergone," my mom said.

     "Can I get a different marshmallow?" Fartemis asked. We were all having cocoa, which is excellent there. "This one's like all
hard
."

     "It wasn't that bad," I said.

     "The marshmallow?" said Fartemis.

"The torment. Or may be it was, and I didn't know it."

   My mom gave her some money, She went to the counter, skipping.

   "So you didn't know?" my dad said. "That's possible?"

   "No, I knew," I said. "But in the way you like know a person you've met a few times, over a few years, say. I knew the f
ace
, of the gayness. Just not well. But I'd be lying if I said gayness and I had never actually met, to round out my metaphor."

   For what seemed like a long time no one said anything. We sipped cocoa. Fartemis came back, and tore off half of her new marshmallow to give to me.

   Then my mom said, sort of sadly, "So there wasn't that much torment?"

   "It's a new world, Betsy," my grandma said. "Get with it! Right, darling?"

   "Right, Grandma," I said.

   "Well, this is quite a day," said my mom. "I think we—"

   "I'm gay, too, you know," Fartemis said.

   My mom looked to my dad. "I doubt that, sweetheart," she said. "And if you were, which you're not, Daddy and I would embrace it, and you."

   "I love lesbians," my grandma said. "They've always found me attractive. I could tell you stories!"

   My dad nudged me with his foot, under the table. He likes to do that, and mutter things. "It can be hot," he muttered. "Though not with her."

   "I want a wife," Fartemis said. "Ms. Penni has a wife." Ms. Penni is one of her teachers. "Her name is Mike. She came to our class and showed us how to install alarm systems."

   Then my grandma took my hand again. She had ketchup on her dress, which I tried not to stare at, as she's been widowed, twice. "And I say, bravo! In fact," she said, looking to my mom, "I told Ted Goulée about it. And don't make that face. Ted's
much
more a friend than a decorator. He and Javier want Theo to come to lunch. At their
apartment
."

   My grandma and mom sort of had a fight. It was like I wasn't there, in a way. I texted Wesley:
Help.

   "Mother," my mom said, "it
is
a new world, to quote you. And Ted is seventy. Somehow I don't see Theo schlepping around the Upper East Side with a bag of gimp and fabric swatches."

   "What's gimp?" Fartemis asked.

   "It's what can
make
a room," said my grandma.

   Then my dad stepped in. He's good at that, and on my side, always. If I'm gay, which I am, it's not because my dad was distant. He wasn't. And besides, that's just
psychology
, which Wesley and I feel is fine, if you're Jewish, depressed, and a woman, in Vienna long ago. But in New York, now? Look elsewhere for answers. And good luck finding them.

   So my dad said to me, or muttered, "Chinatown?" Which is both code and itself, too; it means, should we get away for a little while, the two of us? And it also means, let's go to Chinatown. He said something I couldn't hear to my mom, my mom got up and hugged me, I kissed my grandma good-bye, and my dad and I left together. We walked, even though there was a little rain. I'm actually, secretly, a little tired of Chinatown, and might have chosen somewhere else for us to hang out together, but I went because it seems my dad feels in control there, as he believes he knows how to order in Chinese. Once, after he'd rattled off this Chinese stuff, I saw our waiter go back to the kitchen, point at my dad, and say a few whispered Chinese things to some other waiters. They all laughed, and stopped when I stared them down. I never told my dad that, though; people need to believe what they believe about themselves, is how I see it, even in restaurants.

   So we went to the Excellent Dumpling House, which despite its name has an intrinsic modesty. My dad told me about this buddy of his, named Joe. I'd never heard him say
buddy
before, ever. Joe, my dad told me, was the first actual gay guy he ever knew. He got to know Joe in the service, and was proud to say that even though it was a different time most of the other guys in the platoon thought Joe was pretty great, too. Now, I don't think my dad was ever in the service, actually, but it was still nice of him to bring gay Joe into our evening, whether or not he was real.

   Then we discussed sex. He told me sex was beautiful, or it could be, and while he, personally, didn't know all that much about the gay aspects, he could never understand why most guys found it nauseating when who was it hurting, really? The food came, and we switched our focus from sex to scallion pancakes, duck with sour cabbage noodle soup, and Sizzling Beef Chow; I've taught myself to remember what I eat, as Wesley says he's learned from his time in the restaurant world that when people ask you how you've been, at least in New York, what they really want to know is what you've eaten recently.

   We were eating when my dad put down his chopsticks and told me I was his best friend, and I should always know that. After we ate we walked around Chinatown for a while, sometimes just walking, not talking, sometimes telling jokes we'd each recently heard. My dad's funny, although not as funny as he thinks. Most people, I find, think they're funnier than they are, for reasons which may lie deep in what the really famous psychologist Carl Jung called
the collective
unconscious
, even though I doubt there were comedy clubs there. But who knows? No one. We went home, where me and my mom and dad talked some more, where Fartemis came to kiss me good-night and give me some articles she'd printed out about Neil Patrick Harris and rates of HIV infection in Africa. I knew I was lucky, and appreciated it all. And still, I don't know why, but I wished they'd been, just maybe, just a little upset. I don't mean to the point where I'd have no choice but to run off and be a male prostitute in Seattle or anything, and not go to a good college, or any one, for that matter. But just a little, a
little
upset.

   So I get to school, the day after my win, meeting Wesley a few blocks away, like always. We have our Facts, as usual, and by coincidence they're on the same subject, which is torture, which seems appropriate for the start of a fresh day of tenth grade. Wesley's fact is about this thing called flaying, where a guy, usually Japanese, slices off strips of your skin until you die a horrible death. My fact is about the ancient practice of Death by a Thousand Cuts, where a guy, also usually Japanese, cuts you a thousand (obviously) times until you die (again) a horrible death. It's not like we think these are good things; it's more that we're intrigued by Man's Inhumanity to Man, with a special focus on Asia.

   We go into school. Some people and a few teachers congratulate me on winning, although I notice no one's running up and down the hall saying, "I'm gay!" in emulation.

   "I have another one, too," Wesley says. "Too good to wait for. Also Asian, also torture, but more insidious. So in China if the Communists arrested you, and they arrested everyone, they sent you to a labor camp where you had to smile all the time.
Literally.
Have you ever tried to smile for more than a second?" He smiles, holds it. "Try it—"

   "So did you talk to your dad?"

"More to George, really."

   "So, what did he say?" George is Wesley's dad's partner. He's okay, mostly; when he talks to you he doesn't have that I'm Talking to a Young Person and Not Condescending to Them face. If you say something boring, he pays you the respect of actually looking bored. Wesley doesn't know if George and his dad are going to get married, even though his dad is always fighting for the right for Gays to do so and helped make it happen in New York. The Gays; that's one thing I'm a little nervous about, being part of a capitalized group all of a sudden, like the Hmong or Sioux or Abstract Expressionists, whom my mom's writing a book about.

   "Well, I asked both questions," Wesley says. "And George needed till tonight, so he could think about it."

   "What about your dad? What did he say?"

   It takes him a minute to answer. He looks at me as if he's forgotten what I asked or isn't sure who I am. "He wants to think, too," he says finally.

   "Well, that's a lot of thinking."

   "Dude, I'm just quoting."

   "You looked like you were about to say something," I say.

   "Oh. Right." He laughs. "Like you'd know that."

   What I want to say is:
I would. Because we know those things
about each other; we always have.
And up till yesterday I would have said it, but I wouldn't have needed to, either. But— Obvious Guy, here— yesterday was then. And I wonder how many people in this hallway, right now, are thinking that besides me. And I know the answer.

   Wesley looks down the hall, and I turn to see what he sees: Shannon Traube, looking at us, saying something to her campaign manager, Elspeth Grobman, who's looking at us, too. And I see Morgan Blatt looking, and Jake Breslow, who says something to Donatella Gould, and just as I see them looking they look away, like they know a secret about me, although that would be hard as now I don't have any. Maybe there's one I don't know about yet; maybe they've found out about it first.

   "Well, that's not a whole lot of help," I say.

   "Sorry," Wesley says.

   "Me, too," I tell him, and I don't know why.

   Then all of a sudden Jake Krantz punches him on the arm, and Jake Kuperman, and Jake Blau, and he punches back and they're all laughing (literal laughs, not like ours); I didn't know they were friends. Wesley says, "I'll text George. He'll have something." And then, just like that, the hallway's empty and I'm the last one left.

   So the day passes and I'm aware of all the minutes, fat and lazy as flies in a summerhouse. I see Wesley a couple of times, but he hasn't heard anything back from George. Nineteen years later we're on the bus to soccer practice, going to this field a lot of schools use in the park. When we get off the bus Wesley and I kick the ball around for a while, not saying anything, just doing it. I'm better at scoring and passing, he's better at dribbling and defense. All through the park, from different schools, boys and girls are doing just what we are; an alien, looking down from his space ship, would report to his leader that Earthlings chase white spheres, sometimes kicking them and sometimes bouncing them off pathetically small heads. They'd think this is how we fight our wars and decide not to conquer us, as it's well documented that aliens have no feet.